First of all, it is obvious that modern science and Greek classical science are both explorations and studies of “nature,” that is, natural philosophy or natural science. But this is also where the most fundamental difference between them lies—modernity and ancient Greece understood the concept of “nature” in very different ways.
In ancient Greece, the word nature did not mean something like the modern “the totality of natural things”; rather, it meant “nature” in the sense of “essence,” which, according to Aristotle, is “the essence of a thing that has the source of its own motion within itself.” Yet “the discovery of nature” implies believing in an objectifiable world that is independent of the observer and “just as it is in itself”; in this respect, modernity and Greece are the same, and this is also one of the bases on which science can be established. Incidentally: the ancient Greek “discovery of nature” implicitly contains the distinction between natural things and artificial things, whereas from alchemy to chemistry this boundary was in turn broken.
Further, both modernity and ancient Greece believed that the world is governed by laws and order. The difference, however, is that the Greek world was organic and alive, whereas the modern world is mechanical and lifeless. The Greeks held that the cosmos was orderly because it had “mind,” and that because the various parts of the cosmos were like the different bodies of an organism, it was harmoniously unified yet heterogeneous and hierarchical; modern people, however, believe that precisely because the cosmos is mechanical, it is orderly, and that because all things in the cosmos follow mechanical (that is, physical) laws, it is coordinated and consistent, and homogeneous and non-hierarchical.
Next, both modernity and ancient Greece believed that the order of the world is knowable, graspable by reason, and expressible in speech. The difference, however, is that for modernity, saying that nature is comprehensible means that it can be “mathematized.” In a certain sense, modern science is even more “Platonic” than Greek classical science. Accompanying mathematization is “quantification”: modern science treats all qualitative differences as the result of structural differences, and structural differences are, in essence, also quantitative differences.
At the same time, both modernity and ancient Greece believed that the cosmos is “perfect.” But in ancient Greece, the perfection of the cosmos meant that it was a complete, finished organism, and therefore it must be finite; in modernity, the cosmos is the creation of an omnipotent God, and because of God’s infinite power, the cosmos must be infinite. Moreover, the ancient Greeks thought that the “circle” was the most perfect form, whereas modern people preferred mathematical “simplicity” more. Relatedly, both modernity and ancient Greece were filled with reverence for the most beautiful nature, but modern people revere the “book of nature” written by God for humankind, and thus nature is something to be conquered by human beings.
Incidentally, modern and ancient Greek science also differed in their understanding of concepts such as time, space, and origins. For example, in ancient Greece there was no concept corresponding to “space” (space) as an isotropic, independent absolute frame of reference outside of things; the Greek “topos” meant “place,” emphasizing the relations of reference between things. At the same time, along with the mathematization of nature (perhaps also related to the invention of clocks), “time” too was abstracted into an absolute frame of reference independent of things. Both modernity and ancient Greece would ask about the “origin,” but in ancient Greece the emphasis was more on asking how the “source” (the first thing) “grows” into all things, whereas modern science places more emphasis on asking how the “basic element” (the smallest thing) “constitutes” all things.
Both modern and ancient Greek science are devoted to explaining phenomena and tracing causes. The difference is that ancient Greece especially valued the “final cause,” and preferred to explain change through purposiveness; modern science (with German Naturphilosophie as an exception) recognizes only de-teleologized causal relations.
At the same time, both modern and ancient Greek science take a reductionist approach to explaining phenomena and tracing causes; this feature is especially evident when contrasted with Eastern modes of thought. But the difference is that Greek reductionism mainly refers to explaining things and change by means of more essential substances or forms, whereas modern reduction goes further and also includes the sense of explaining more complex phenomena with more basic and more general principles, or reducing more specific theories.
Further, we can see that a way of thinking that simplifies and idealizes nature is a hallmark of modern science. Modern scientists believe that theories derived through simplification and idealization are also applicable to reality; for example, Galileo’s law of inertia had already been mentioned by scholars in the Middle Ages, but no one before him had thought about whether these idealized situations would also apply to any actually observable motion.
In terms of ways of thinking and methods, modern and ancient Greek science of course both value “putting forward facts and speaking reason,” but comparatively speaking, modern science is more concerned with verifying theories through facts—especially experiments that can be repeated by others. The rise of experimentation and the inductive method is an important feature of modern science. At the same time, modern scientists began to become self-conscious about “scientific method,” and Descartes, Bacon, Huygens, Hooke, Boyle, and others all attempted to summarize method.
Accompanying this self-consciousness about scientific method is the formation and self-consciousness of a scientific “community.” Although the earliest modern scientists usually still regarded themselves as natural philosophers, as scientific institutions became increasingly mature, “science” increasingly became an independent common enterprise identified with by a particular group of people.
From within this common enterprise of science, on the one hand, “division of disciplines” is a common point between modern and ancient Greek science (this is especially evident when contrasted with Eastern scholarship); but on the other hand, the Greek division of disciplines refers to the distinction of themes (subjects), whereas the trend toward disciplinary division that took shape in modernity further manifested itself as the differentiation of specialized fields. Both modern and ancient Greek science have a “cumulative” character (for example, the scientific achievements of Euclid, Ptolemy, and others were all built on the foundations laid by their predecessors), but the “transmissibility” of modern science is more pronounced; the various branches of science gradually formed disciplines (discipline) with relatively standardized and inherited forms of training (discipline) and a common “discipline” (discipline).
As a human undertaking, science was regarded as incomparably noble both in modernity and in ancient Greece. But the reason ancient Greek science was considered noble was that it was disinterested, free, and pure inquiry for knowledge’s sake; the reason modern science is noble, however, is that it can improve human life. In modernity, the relationship between science and technology became increasingly close, and in turn gradually became directly related to “power.”
Finally, whether in modernity or in ancient Greece, science is a complex and diverse activity. It cannot simply be peeled away from religion, culture, or society, and it is even harder to define or summarize its characteristics in any precise and concise way. Therefore this article merely treats modern science and Greek classical philosophy as wholes and compares them in a broad manner, only roughly outlining some key points; this is far from sufficient to reflect the complexity of scientific activity.
November 30, 2006
Bifengtang
Latest comments
- Gu Chuo
2009-01-11 14:37:05
Good heavens, is anyone teaching a related course? I happened to see in the site statistics that the click-through rate on this article has surged these past few days, and many of them came in by searching keywords like “Greek natural philosophy” and so on……
If this article was useful to you, could you at least leave a sentence or two? Could you not? What am I sharing so many useful articles for, completely free of charge, anyway? - mist
2009-01-11 15:44:14 Anonymous 124.205.78.223
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Set the first sentence of every article to “Please reply to this post” or something like that; curses have always been very effective……
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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