The shadow of the Great Pyramid: A freshman’s awakening

In a quiet classroom, an introverted and somewhat shy freshman majoring in mathematics finds himself wrestling with irritation. His history of mathematics professor recounts a tale about Thales of Miletus, who is hailed as both the father of mathematics and philosophy. Thales was celebrated by the Egyptians during his visits for famously demonstrating how to measure the Great Pyramid of Giza’s height using a stick, its shadow, and the principles of similar triangles. This story, however, provokes the freshman to challenge the professor with a bold assertion: “But isn’t it common knowledge that the pyramids of Giza cast no shadow?”

After a brief pause, the professor responds with a calm and reasoned explanation: “It’s true that for most of the day, due to its wide base, the pyramid’s shadow is contained within its own footprint. However, as the sun sets closer to the horizon, a distinct shadow begins to emerge.” This moment triggers a profound shift for the freshman, much like the cinematic scenes where the protagonist’s reality blurs in the face of a revelation. His fascination with the supernatural and the allure of paranormal phenomena, strengthened by numerous readings, suddenly faces a stark confrontation with logic and reason. The professor’s arguments dispel the myths he once held unquestioned, leading him to discard his collection of books about “research” on ghosts, spirits, and astral projection, and especially “The Mysteries of the Great Pyramid,” a book claiming the Great Pyramid’s shadowless mystery as proof of its extraterrestrial construction. That freshman was me.

The Personal Shift from Mythos to Logos

This personal shift mirrors the ancient transition from Mythos to Logos, a leap from supernatural explanations to logical, reasoned understanding, embodied by the pre-Socratic philosophers, including Thales himself. The transition from Mythos to Logos, that remarkable period of intellectual awakening in ancient Greece, roughly between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, with groundbreaking advancements in art, philosophy, science, and politics, resonates deeply with my freshman self, who now sees his own journey reflected in this pivotal historical shift. This realization marks his intellectual rebirth, shedding the appeal of mythos for the clarity and rigor of logos, embracing logic, reason, and empirical evidence as the proper tools for understanding the world.

What happened to me was a personal paradigm shift analogous in magnitude to the paradigm shift that took place in human civilization and turned the Mesopotamian and the Ancient Egyptian Civilizations into the Greek Civilization. The most significant contribution to the human journey by the Ancient Greeks was the development of a system of thought. This system is apparent in Mathematics, using definitions, axioms, logic, critical thinking, and proving theorems, and it comes from the same womb that gave birth simultaneously to Philosophy, Science, Democracy, and Theatre, and also to Medicine, History, the Arts, and Literature. This system of thought is called Logos, and at the center of this abstract cosmos of ideas that the ancient Greeks created was the human being.

As an interesting side note here, from the word “logos,” derive the terms “analogy,” “logic,” and “syllogism,” and the word “logos” itself has a triple meaning in Greek, “ratio,” “reason,” and “speech.”

From Pre-Socratic philosophers to Aristotle.

Pre-Socratic philosophers, such as Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, began to look for natural principles underlying the cosmos, stepping away from the traditional mythological narratives that had dominated explanations of natural phenomena. This movement towards rationality and a quest for empirical understanding marked a significant pivot towards logos as the basis for understanding the cosmos.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle further advanced this transition, emphasizing dialectic methods of inquiry, ethical philosophy grounded in rational discourse, and systematic observation of the natural world and the social sphere. By the time of Aristotle, the foundations of empirical science had been laid, with his works attempting to comprehensively classify the natural world and explain phenomena based on observation and logic.

It is important to note that while Greece provides a dramatic and foundational narrative of this transition, we must recognize the broader mosaic of human intellectual evolution. Each civilization that came before, for example, Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, and the Phoenicians, and even further away geographically, like the Indus Valley Civilization and ancient China, each in its context, contributed pieces to the puzzle of understanding that eventually culminated in the diverse yet interconnected world of logos we navigate today. In this sense, even though Greece’s story is not the opening scene, it is pivotal in the play of the human journey.

The Modern Lyceum

The transition from Mythos to Logos will not only be a subject of study at the Modern Lyceum I now envision creating but also a guiding philosophy. It underscores a commitment to fostering a learning environment that encourages critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and the ethical pursuit of knowledge. By embracing this legacy, the students will be prepared not just to navigate the world of today but to innovate and lead in the world of tomorrow. In this light, the journey from Mythos to Logos is a fundamental aspect of the school’s educational ethos, ensuring that the spirit of inquiry that animated the ancient Greeks continues to inspire and inform the next generation of learners, thinkers, and leaders.