The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the gospel of hellas
homoiomeriae. The Nous of Anaxagoras was a world-consciousness of divine law
and dignity. With Democritus it became the unconscious law of nature, blind
necessity (ananke).
Democritus introduced materialism into the life of thinking. In his world
conception nature had neither soul nor spirit. His thoughts grew pale and
ended in a mere shadow picture of soulless nature. The world was no more
than a sum of atoms. Protagoras with his saying, “Man is the measure of all
things,” appeared when the intellect became self-confident and self-reliant, the
center of the world.
Now the danger of pride, conceit and error, concealed in the loneliness of
the mere intellect, was at hand. The crisis and test of Greek thought-life began
with Anaxagoras, Leukippos, Democritus, Parmenides, Zenon and Melissos. It
was inherent in the movement of Sophistry with Protagoras, Gorgias, Kritias,
Hippias, Trasymachus and Prodikus.
The soul now experienced thought as so completely emancipated and
independent of itself that the intellect became a mere instrument for dealing
with such subjects as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in
arithmetic. The Logos as the world-reason, approached by Heraclitus in
priestly meditation and conceived by Anaxagoras as Nous, was an objective
idea of the world-creating power which built the cosmos through the fiery
substance of all-moving wisdom. Now the thinkers turned from cosmos to
man. They discovered the wisdom of the world-creating Logos also at work
within the soul of the human being. The world-reason, the Nous, left a divine
spark of his fire within the intellect of man. The word of the world finds its
shadowy after-image within the word which lives between the I and the You.
Figuratively speaking, the Logos became dia-logos, dialogue. Dialogue worked
between human souls as dialectic, a word which is derived from the Greek verb
dialegomai and the noun dialogos.
Dialectic was spoken thought and thinking speech through which the
content of thought revealed itself as something in between (dia). Thus dialectic
was the second step in the development of Greek thinking when it was finally
estranged from nature. It became, therefore, a playball of contradictions,
versions, opinions and standpoints. With childish pride in his newly born
intellect, man began to think for the mere satisfaction of arguing. Dialectic