Western Identity, Barbarians and the Inheritance of Greek Universalism1

1. I wish to express my gratitude to the participants of my workshop, Ancient Greeks’ Impact on Western Identity, in the ISSEI-Conference in Pamplona, 2004, for a constructive discussion of an earlier version of this paper. Moreover I have to thank A. Kettwich, G. Rudebusch, Chr. Kniest, Th. Reydon, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful suggestions.

Abstract

This paper argues that a particular philosophical and historical understanding of Ancient Greek thought is used to establish a superior Western identity of universal prevalence. Starting with the terminological differences between ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism, I then reconstruct the rise of Eurocentrism by examining the changing conceptualizations of Greeks and Barbarians in Ancient texts from Homer to Aristotle. The third section explores how Western historians of philosophy and culture have used this Greek self-understanding to legitimate the view of Western cultural superiority based on universalism. Finally, I discuss several possibilities to counter this form of Eurocentric Western identity-politics.

Notes

Notes

1. I wish to express my gratitude to the participants of my workshop, Ancient Greeks’ Impact on Western Identity, in the ISSEI-Conference in Pamplona, 2004, for a constructive discussion of an earlier version of this paper. Moreover I have to thank A. Kettwich, G. Rudebusch, Chr. Kniest, Th. Reydon, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful suggestions.

2. “Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations. Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures.” Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilisations?” Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993): 40.

3. The concept “West” obviously depends on the observer's point of view. With respect to the semantic history of “identity,” cf. the very helpful study of Philip Gleason, “Identifying Identity: A Semantic History,” The Journal of American History 4 (1983): 910–31.

4. Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1.

5. Ibid., 176.

6. Ibid., 119.

7. Ibid., 7.

8. James M. Blaut, The Colonizers Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 47.

9. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russel Moore (London: Zed Books, 1988), xii.

10. Cf. Enrique Dussel, “Europa, Moderne und Eurozentrismus. Semantische ‘Verfehlung’ des ‘Europa’-Begriffs,” trans. Matthias Tripp, in Das geistige Erbe Europas, ed. Manfred Buhr (Napoli: Vivarium, 1994), 855–67.

11. Regarding the different conceptions of Greeks and Barbarians in Antiquity as well as in contemporary interpretations, cf. John E. Coleman and Clark A. Walz, eds, Greeks and Barbarians. Essays on the Interactions between Greeks and Non-Greeks in Antiquity and the Consequences for Eurocentrism (Maryland: CDL Press, 1997), especially the contribution by Dirk T. D. Held (255–72); and Thomas Harrison, ed., Greeks and Barbarians (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), especially the contribution by Wilfried Nippel (278–310).

12. The Iliad Edition of Samuel Butler translates barbarophonoi as “men of a strange speech.”

13. Homer, Iliad, II, 867. Classical texts are quoted with the common abbreviations. Sources and translations are from Perseus Digital Library: www.perseus.tufts.edu.

14. Aeschylus Persians is “an early version of the specific form of derogatory stereotyping now known as ‘orientalism’” (Cartledge, The Greeks, 39). Cf. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978).

15. Aeschylus, Persians, 185–7.

16. With respect to Herodotus’ attitude towards foreign cultures, see James Redfield, “Herodotus the Tourist,” in Greeks and Barbarians, ed. Harrison, 24–49. Ann Ward presented a very instructive paper, “The Relation between Greeks and Barbarians in Herodotus's Histories,” at the ISSEI-Conference, Pamplona, 2004.

17. Herodotus, Histories, VIII, 144.2.

18. Cf. Herodotus, Histories, II, 52; II, 109; II, 4.

19. Cf. especially Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (London: Free Association Books, 1987), 100.

20. Herodotus, Histories, II, 38.

21. Herodotus, Histories, III, 38. This Pindar quote played an important role in the debate on the relation between custom (nomos) and nature (physis) in Antiquity. The classical explication of this problem is given in a fragment of Antiphon (DK 87 B 44). Cf. W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy. II. The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 353; or Kathryn A. Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 92, with bibliographical notes.

22. Cartledge, The Greeks, 60.

23. In this paper I need not distinguish between Thukydides’ and Pericles’ views. Since Thukydides apparently wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War more or less in a single effort, it is most likely that he made original notes of the rendered speeches, which he revised afterwards.

24. Thukydides, Peloponnesian War, II, 37. It is very instructive that the European Convention chooses parts of this quotation to serve the European Constitution, in spite of Pericles’ chauvinistic standpoint and his paternalistic understanding of democracy. On the concept of democracy in Pericles’ speech, see Richard Winton, “Thucydides 2, 37, 1: Pericles on Athenian Democracy,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 147(1) (2004): 26–34.

25. Thukydides, Peloponnesian War, II, 41.

26. Thukydides, Peloponnesian War, II, 41.

27. Bernal, Black Athena, 102.

28. Cartledge, The Greeks, 55.

29. Cf. Plato, Republic, 469b–71b.

30. “It was very much as if, in undertaking to divide the human race into two parts, one should make the division as most people in this country do; they separate the Hellenic race from all the rest as one, and to all the other races, which are countless in number and have no relation in blood or language to one another, they give the single name ‘barbarian’; then, because of this single name, they think it is a single species” (Plato, Statesman, 262cd).

31. Orphism pictured the impious souls as buried in mud in the world below; cf. Plato, Republic, 363d.

32. Plato, Republic, 533cd.

33. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980a.

34. On the inevitable importance of Aristotle as a source for our knowledge and our conception of early Greek thought, see Jaap Mansfeld, “Sources,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, ed. A. A. Long (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 22–44.

35. I learned a lot from Julia Wilker, who explored this Roman transformation in her ISSEI-Conference (Pamplona, 2004) paper, “The Greek Inheritance in Rome: The Impact of the Roman Empire on the Definitions of ‘Barbarianism’ and ‘Greekness.’”

36. On the specific Eurocentrism in Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy, see William H. Walsh, “Principle and Prejudice in Hegel's Philosophy of History,” in Hegel's Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Z. A. Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 181–98. Regarding the outstanding importance of the work of Eduard Zeller, the “first systematic modern historian of Greek philosophy” [Geoffrey S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (New York: Penguin, 1974), 285], cf.: Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, trans. Sarah Frances Alleyne and Evelyn Abbott, rev. Charles S. Taylor (New York: Dover, 1887; 1980); W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy. I. The Early Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), ix; and A. A. Long, “The Scope of Early Greek Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, 366.

37. H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 7.

38. Geoffrey S. Kirk, John E. Raven and Malcolm Schofield, eds, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 71.

39. Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1982), 3.

40. C. C. W. Taylor, “Introduction,” in Routledge History of Philosophy. Vol. 1. From the Beginning to Plato, ed. C. C. W. Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2.

41. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (New York: Harper, 1948), vii.

42. Karl R. Popper, “Back to the Presocratics” (1958), in Conjectures and Refutations: On the Growth of Scientific Knowledge, ed. Karl R. Popper (London: Routledge, 1998), 151.

43. Ernest H. Hutten, The Origins of Science: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Western Thought (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), 11.

44. Lewis Wolpert, “Foreword,” in Science and Mathematics in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. C. J. Tuplin and T. E. Rihll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xii.

45. Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy. I. From the Origins to Socrates, trans. John R. Catan (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 5.

46. Cf. Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (München: Piper, 1949). See also Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (New York: New York University Press, 1986).

47. Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

48. The extraordinary spreading of Bernal's ideas and the controversial and startling debate proves the current importance of these issues for our self-understanding. Cf., among others, Jacques Berlinerblau, Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).

49. Cf. Cheikh A. Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. Mercer Cook (Westport: Hill, 1955). See also Leonhard Harding, Brigitte Reinwald, Andreas Eckert et al., eds, Afrika—Mutter und Modell der europäischen Zivilisation? Die Rehabilitierung des schwarzen Kontinents durch Cheikh Anta Diop (Berlin: Reimer, 1990), especially the contribution by Moesch and Schuhmann on Egypt's impact on Europe (113–62).

50. Otto Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy (Berlin: Springer, 1975).

51. Amin, Eurocentrism, 90.

52. Ibid., 93f.

53. For a collection of some of these objections, see Richard Buxton, ed., From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999), or the excellent study of Kathryn A. Morgan, Myth and Philosophy.

54. Cf., for example, Dimitri Gutas, Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

55. Blaut, The Colonizers Model, 51.