I love anonymity

I love anonymity - Pythagoras is credited with bringing the notion of transmigration to Greece, from somewhere in the east: just how far he came or the idea went, is not well documented, but India is the most likely home of idea of Self he imported. Like all imports, it provided for a felt need and competed with domestic products.


While the rudiments of Pythagorean doctrines are easily and briefly spelled, their implications are less well understood. Pythagoras, in fact, contests the dominant ideals of the Greek heroic tradition with a novelty, whose spark slowly transforms thinking in the west: Immortality.

Mortality vs immortality

In the cults of the Greeks, mortality was a given that distinguished gods (immortals) from mortals. In the heroic world view, human mortality was a given. The only immortality that humans were offered was through progeny and glorious deeds (whose fame would keep their names alive through succeeding generations). The inevitability of death gave edge to life and losing it in defence of your city was regarded as the most beautiful of all deaths.

The heroic ideal of course encompassed more than simply killing and being killed: its virtues were the usual manly ones. Courage itself was andreia (belonging to the andros or man). Cleverness, success, magnanimity and the ability to both speak and act were prized, to live life feasting and to dread old age and death, which reduced men to shadows.


Reversal of values

The Pythagorean way, this is how the ancient thinkers thought of his contribution to Greek culture, was to reverse these values and to effect a transvaluation: valourising what was considered inconsequential and worthless, dismissing as unimportant what had been customarily extolled. So while the Greeks praised those who lived life to the full, the Pythagoreans looked ahead to future lives. Dismissing the celebration of beautiful bodies so celebrated in Greek art, they said that the soma or body is a sema or prison. While the heroic code was focused on killing, Pythagoras preached non-violence, even ridiculing animal sacrifice ('fools who wish to purify themselves of blood by blood').

He pointed out that eating meat was a form of cannabalism: for the soul moved between bodies from life to life. Indeed, all life was akin and had to be treated as such. As for the accumulation of wealth and the competitive nature of even acts of charity, the Pythagoreans practised community of ownership (all things are common between friends), and advocated dispossession, or giving rather than accumulation. And to counter the garrulousness of the Greek and their endless jabber in debate before action —a hallmark incidentally of their democratic institutions — the Pythagoreans withdrew from active politics and valued silence above speech. It is said that initiates had to keep silent for up to five years to join the sect.


Glorifying anonymity

As a result, Pythagoras reversed the cultural exemplars of his times, replacing them with icons that defined a completely new picture of the Self. Rejecting the very foundation of the personal, revealed in the way the Greeks regularly recorded and celebrated individual achievements, of athletes victorious in games, warriors killed in battle or poets carrying off prizes in dramatic competitions, all the ways in which the Greeks honoured the achievements of individuals, the Pythagoreans, inverting this, retreated into obscurity and anonymity: they insisted on a vow of secrecy; their doctrines and discoveries were exclusive to themselves. This meant that not only did their beliefs and teachings get no publicity, but also that all advances were attributed to the master, with no one seeking or being given personal credit.


Self as witness

This gave the Greek world a new notion of the Self, freed of the contingencies of circumstances and chance. Only by setting aside the more egoistic aspect of being in the world could a whole new set of values emerge. The traditional agonistic outlook was mellowed by one that looked inwards. Silence, in fact, was a form of meditation, while the doctrine of kinship led the Pythagoreans to see themselves as not simply belonging to a city, but to the universe.

The expansion of the idea of self hood would have profound influence on modes of thinking and consequently on politics; on the very idea of man and his place in the universe. The discovery of the laws of harmonics led Pythagoras to conceive of things as simply instances of the purity and immutability of number. The role he gave the Self was to witness, as a spectator, the beauty of the visible world ordered by the invisible laws of the cosmos. ( indiatimes.com )