Reconsidering the Roots of Western Philosophy

Charlene Spretnak

Abstract

The Western mind is schooled in discontinuities. We are traditionally socialized to perceive a radical break between body and mind, humans and nature, and self and the world. The sexes are called “opposite.” Our academic disciplines are compartmentalized, and our understanding of history is structured into distinct eras with a progressivist bias, which regards every new era as a total advancement over what came before. In books on the history of Western philosophy, the preSocratic philosophers are routinely declared to be singular as a school for having had no predecessors.
No predecessors? There most certainly was a preceding body of collective philosophical thought, and its influence is apparent in the philosophy of each of the preSocratics (roughly 600-400 BCE). An unbroken cosmological, metaphysical, and ontological orientation stretched back to at least 6500 BCE, as evidenced by the symbol system on ritual artifacts unearthed in scores of Neolithic settlements of southeast Europe. These artifacts reflect a holistic perception of life, a sense of primary continuity.