A review of When the Dog Speaks, the Philosopher Listens: A Guide to the Greatness of Pythagoras and his Curious Age by Nigel McGilchrist
When today we conjure up the name of Pythagoras (c.570-c.495BC), most of us suppose his fame to rest on the establishment of a mathematical theory about right-angled triangles which we remember being taught at school. Perhaps we also recall being told that he was the first person to make the connection between number and musical harmony. As with so much that one learned at school, neither of these statements is true. Both discoveries were known to the Babylonians many hundreds of years before Pythagoras. The Chinese may have demonstrated a proof of the first as long ago as the 8th century BC.
In his wise, wide-ranging and exceptionally well-produced book on Pythagoras When the Dog speaks, the Philosopher listens, Nigel McGilchrist readily acknowledges these facts, pointing out that those who originally created his reputation identified him as neither a mathematician nor a musician. But as with the Turin Shroud, the abandonment of a simplistic or ingenuous belief makes room for something more interesting and complex.
The book is set in the earliest phase of classical antiquity. Our understanding of this entire period is impeded by the lamentable fragmentariness of what has survived. It is an era nearly all of whose original productions have been reduced to dust. We cannot gauge the impact of the celebrated Aphrodite of Cnidos, since we have access only to mutilated copies of copies made centuries later. What is true generally applies acutely in the particular case of Pythagoras. The few words that survive of all that he said and taught would not even line the bottom of a small bucket, says McGilchrist, drawing a rueful comparison with the two hundred thousand words of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Nonetheless, the temporal and geographical context in which Pythagoras lived furnishes a good enough justification for our interest. He was a product of the extraordinary 6th century BC, an age whose Greek thinkers – Anaximander, Thales and Heraclitus – may have been partially eclipsed in the modern mind by Plato and Aristotle, but which also gave us Buddha, Confucius, the authors of the Tao, possibly Zoroaster. As for location, Pythagoras had the good fortune to be born on the island of Samos in Ionia, within touching distance of the (now Turkish) mainland. It is no coincidence that the eastern seaboard of the Aegean Sea was home not only to the Greek pre-Socratics already mentioned, but also to Homer, Sappho, Hippocrates, Herodotus, Aristarchus and dozens of other thinkers and writers. The fertility of its intellectual soil lay principally in the fact that it formed the “permeable diaphragm” between the Persian empire to the East and what was by this stage the reviving culture of the Hellenic world.
The reach of the Persian empire at its height is a permanent source of wonder. Extending to parts of Egypt, Libya and Thrace in the west, to the east it included the Indus valley and the western Himalaya. Like the Egyptian empire of even greater antiquity, it was monolithic and enduringly stable, whereas Greek culture in the period immediately before Pythagoras was fractured and volatile. Up until 1150BC, the civilisations which we know through Minoan Crete and the Mycenaean city states whose kings populate the Iliad had matched those to the east and south. But then, for reasons not fully understood, came a dark age which in this instance is properly so called. What eventually emerged from it, in McGilchrist’s phrase, was replete with “the energy of rebound”. Homer’s epic poetry, first committed to writing in about 700BC, constituted a last look back, a nostalgic and impassioned evocation of the values of a lost civilisation. The Greek mind which emerged from this fallow period, long restrained by poverty of opportunity, was radically different from what had come before. It was increasingly reflective and inquisitive. More importantly, it was unfettered by royal courts, priestly lore and the parameters of a state religion.
“To possess sacred texts”, says McGilchrist mordantly, “may be a marvellous thing: but the Greeks were blessed in having none.” By contrast, all the civilisations around them had produced books which informed their adherents where they came from and how they should behave. The Greeks’ freedom in these respects engendered the genius of their speculative thought, their vigorous moral self-examination, their philosophy and drama, the pursuit of beauty.
The especial elusiveness of Pythagoras for the historian derives from two facts: the uncertainty surrounding the events of his life, and the fact that he set down nothing in writing. McGilchrist even wonders whether, given the apparent differences between their teachings, the Samian Pythagoras and the later, South Italian Pythagoras (he moved to Croton in about 520BC) were the same person. The earliest surviving biographical treatment dates from as late as the first century BC; the two principal monographs were written 800 years after his death. But the task of making out the true Pythagoras is harder yet: McGilchrist distinguishes sharply between the man himself and his followers – the Pythagoreans – who in succeeding centuries created a quasi-religious cult around his name and attributed to him pronouncements which are often apocryphal or worse. Since among the rules of the Pythagorean community were silence and secrecy, the usual channels of oral transmission were at least partially blocked. Even a relatively short time after his death, Aristotle wrote an essay On the Pythagoreans, of which only fragments remain, but which acknowledges the existence of these legendary accretions (though seemingly without undertaking a critical assessment of their veracity). By the time, much later, when Ovid wrote the concluding book of his Metamorphoses, he felt free to put into Pythagoras’ mouth a summary of his conjectural thinking whose most exquisite passage, on the mutability of all things, reads more like Heraclitus – who in fact thought Pythagoras to be a charlatan. For all these reasons, the tone of When the Dog speaks is tentative and open-minded, the intimation of a possible truth, not the assertion of a certainty. It would be good if more books were written in such a spirit.
The historian is on firmer ground in assuming that Pythagoras travelled widely. The early biographers uniformly assert voyages to Egypt and Babylon. If, as seems likely, Pythagoras visited the latter, the cultural interpenetration facilitated by the Persian empire would have exposed him to the currents of Indian thought and the depths of Indian spiritual writings. For McGilchrist, this is crucial to an understanding of his importance: that he brought precepts and ideas from the profoundest of the eastern civilisations into the Mediterranean world at the dawn of the classical golden age, thus passing them into the mainstream of western culture. It was not so much that Pythagoras made discoveries of his own as that he transformed and synthesised the discoveries of others. He was “more than anything a philosopher of the whole and an explorer of the connections – often quite unexpected – that exist within that whole”. It was because of his ability to combine different disciplines and insights that Bertrand Russell said that no other man had been as influential as Pythagoras in the sphere of ideas.
Yet ideas are not guaranteed to survive. Many forces contribute to their corruption, among which the most destructive is (ironically) the zeal of those who purport to embrace, but only partially understand them. When an idea becomes tribalised or institutionalised, the core truth within it begins to decompose. McGilchrist encapsulates the difficulty created by the fact that Pythagoras (unlike Heraclitus) wrote not a word: “We are left to rely on a sort of centuries-long twitter-feed initiated by those who were actually outside the room when he spoke”. As far as we can tell, moreover, Pythagoras conveyed his insights by simply putting them before his followers as demonstrative of the laws and underlying harmony of nature – poems with no words. This ‘show, not tell’ method was the antithesis of the wordy exegeses and ingeniousness in logical argument that are normally associated with Greek philosophical thought (Plato’s par excellence), which represent a turning away from the more ancient manner of communicating truths, to be found for instance in the matchless Upanishads of which one finds traces in Pythagoras’ thought.
Confronted with all these difficulties, McGilchrist undertakes an original and rigorous distillation, separating the very little that he considers can safely be treated as authentic and discarding the far greater (though still small) volume of dubious material. All that remains from this sifting exercise are three words, an acoustic experiment, a precept about the value of silence (or more imaginatively, of receptivity), an anecdote about a dog, three comments from Heraclitus and a geometrical theorem. The story about Pythagoras telling a man to stop beating his dog, because in its cries he heard the voice of a deceased friend, derives from Xenophanes, who lived near him in both time and place, and is therefore a trustworthy source; Heraclitus was likewise only a generation younger. The acoustic experiment and geometrical theorem are universally linked with Pythagoras’ name. The heart of the book is the discernment of what may have been his philosophy from these exiguous but comparatively reliable shards.
McGilchrist’s treatment of three words especially associated with Pythagoras – kósmos, harmonía and philosophía – is a marvellous piece of writing, although it must be said that there is here an element of speculativeness in McGilchrist’s attributions which scarcely passes his own selection procedure (the earliest biographer mentions harmonía only tangentially). Once again, Pythagoras did not invent these words (Homer used harmonía to describe the fitting together of pieces of wood in Odysseus’s raft, and kósmos as denoting the arrangement of oarsmen on a ship); but he gave each of them the meaning by which we know them today. The words are also revealed by McGilchrist to constitute a mutually reinforcing triangle, for it is with the aid of philosophía that people were able for the first time to appreciate the harmoníaof the kósmos. Pythagoras’ most valuable gift to posterity is thus a fundamental change in human cognition – “the discovery of an unexpected beauty in the design of the universe we inhabit”, and by extension the precept that harmony should be at the heart of our lives. Pythagoras may or may not have conceived the idea of the cosmos as music, an idea later taken up with devotion by Kepler, but it is easy to see why the thought has been attributed to him.
The fact that order and beauty play an essential role in the very meaning of the universe and of our existence within it has often been used to argue for the existence of God; we are not all that far here from the territory of Paley’s watch. In McGilchrist’s view, however, Pythagoras helped with the process of shifting the gods to one side and relieving them of their role as the movers and causes of things. One of the many appeals of When the Dog speaks is the correspondence between the author’s subject-matter and his own gradually emergent, profoundly attractive Weltanschauung. Just as McGilchrist makes no secret of his distaste for the notion of a legalistic, judgemental deity – traces of whom (to put it no higher) are to be found in all the religions which exhibit what he calls the “curious spasm of monotheism” – so in the context of Pythagoras’ concept of the universe, McGilchrist invites us to consider the alternative possibility of “a life-giving plurality within divinity itself, above all one which might even include ourselves as creating participants”. For him, Pythagoras’ achievement was to de-anthropomorphise the deity, but far from thereby dispensing with the concept of the divine, he replaces a vision of the world as a passive receptacle, into which superior gods poured their will and judgement, with a reverberative world where all living elements tend upwards in their commonality towards the divine, which is encountered in everything around us and in the living beings that cross our path.
McGilchrist quotes Benedetto Croce’s saying that all history is contemporary history. In the case of biography, this means that the writer inevitably tends to create a portrait in his own image. As this book progresses, and we assess the clues bearing on the way in which the mind of Pythagoras worked, we gather insights into the author’s philosophy too. With some writers, this might be a distraction; but such is his undogmatic and winning style that we are as receptive to McGilchrist’s panentheistic religio intransitiva as we are to understand how it may be consistent with his subject’s teaching. When the Dog speaks is a twin star, providing illumination from two sources which in this instance are better than one.
Nowhere is this truer than in the chapters on the transmigration of the soul. This is no quaint metaphysical preoccupation on McGilchrist’s part with a remote or primitive idea: Hume wrote that “metempsychosis is the only system [relating to the immortality of the soul] that philosophy can hearken to”; Schopenhauer thought that it was the Abrahamic religions which constituted the aberrational exception in departing from an otherwise near-universal belief, rather than the other way round. For his part, Pythagoras preached a doctrine of reincarnation which has obvious correspondences with Buddhism; and many other Greek philosophers (most notably Plato) did something similar.
This belief forms the launchpad for McGilchrist’s own thought-provoking and poetic account. For him, “the evolution of a soul across many lives is like the careful bringing into being of a work of art. No work of art achieves perfection, but it does aim constantly towards it.” He nonetheless counsels against seeing this process through the prism of “the same linear and consequential logic that was taught to us originally by Aristotle and Plato”. If we ask how reincarnation works, we will end up with the model of an unconvincing game of snakes and ladders without end. If we instead consider what it might imply, we may conclude (consistent with the wisdom of many ancient civilisations) that our existence has a cyclical, not a linear character. Instead of facile notions of returning in our next incarnation as a cockroach, we come to see our successive lives as related in a similar way to leaves on a tree, linked through their participation within the greater organism. McGilchrist’s claim for Pythagoras is that he asks us to be aware of both the leaves and the tree.
This sort of writing transcends scholarship, and it is a strong point in its favour that it does. When the Dog speaks is a work based as much on imagination and intuition as on reason. In this respect as in others, the book marches in step with arguments about the value of the different paths to truth put forward in The Matter with Things, written by the author’s no less remarkable brother, Iain McGilchrist. Thus unbound by the limitations of academic conformism, the book is generous with its insights, whether directly related to its subject – the contrast between Heraclitus’ vision of the world as seething flux and Pythagoras’ more stately picture; the Babylonians as numerologists contrasted with the Greeks as geometers; how sensual beauty is underpinned by abstract number – or more remotely: there are meditations on music and dance; on Confucius and Lao Tzu; on modern man’s fractured relations with the planet he inhabits.
When the Dog speaks is also a physical pleasure to possess. As one would expect given the themes of the book, its photographs are beautiful and in excellent taste; like the text, they have on occasion an agreeably oblique relation to its subject. It is therefore a book that, contrary to received wisdom, one should judge from its cover and appearance. However, it is the modest yet far-reaching wisdom of its contents which will draw one back for successive readings. It concludes with the observation that Pythagoras “simply gave us better eyes with which to see and understand”. In its reticent way, the same is true of this book.