The Agonistic Ethic and the Spirit of Inquiry: On the Greek Origins of Theorizing

Abstract

Reading the standard accounts of the origins of science, philosophy, and theorizing in ancient Greece might lead one to believe in the resilience of the idea of spontaneous generation — at least with respect to the question of the origins of forms of thought and inquiry. For example, traditional historians of philosophy appear to have a constitutive antipathy to the idea that the ‘world of thought and ideas’ — the realm of intellectual practices — is also a product of its time and place, shaped by wider socioeconomic, political, and cultural structures. It would seem that ‘the life of inquiry’ or ‘theorizing’ must be protected from all contamination with material and cultural mediations: thinking is an immanent faculty of the mind, with no connection to its social circumstances and historical contexts. Thus many traditional approaches to the origin of philosophy treat the practice of discursive reflection as an autonomous creation sprung fully formed, like Pallas Athena, from the brow of Zeus — but in this context ‘Zeus’ typically appears in the form of an appeal to ‘the Greek miracle’ or ‘the spirit of Greek genius’.