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Plutarch's Parallel Lives - Alexander the Great - early years: heroic destiny, superiority, true honour, temperance, art and war, learning and war, hidden philosophy, value of historical works
In my spare time, I like reading, though I don't tend to focus on one book. I'm reading several books in parallel now (at least 15 different books); and hope to write about each of them. I started writing about Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, for example, though I need to continue with that. I suffer from severe lack of consistency, I hope to resolve this as of now (New Year's is a perfect time to start), but I digress.
Today I will write about one of those aforementioned books I've been reading, Plutarch's Parallel Lives. This is a masterpiece, and one I would recommend to absolutely everybody, for a variety of reasons (some of which will be described below in the section on value of historical works). It is a huge compendium of biographies of some of the most important figures in both Ancient Greece and Rome, and each Greek person is paired with a "corresponding", similar Roman person to emphasize recurrences in history and the regularity of cause and effect in the world.
I've finished the extremely insightful section on Alexander the Great, and will share some ideas gleaned from that biography. I'll divide the biography into many parts, and write about each in a separate article, otherwise one huge article would be extremely long and time-consuming to write/publish.
Naturally, I'll start with Alexander's early years. The ideas in this article are based on the beginning of Plutarch's biography of Alexander, up until the point where his father Philip dies and Alexander becomes king.
Effectiveness of important figures; understanding history; value of a historical work
Alexander the Great is probably the most famous and pre-eminent of the rulers of ancient Greece, and perhaps all antiquity. If you scan over his list of conquests and achievements, you can see why. Moreover, reading Plutarch's biography, it becomes clear that Alexander's valour applies both on the macro-scale and the micro-scale; he is venerable both in achievements of grand ambition, and in smaller-scale events and interactions (more on this later).
One may wonder how Alexander was able to achieve all these things; how he was so great. I would say the answer lies mostly in his personality. It is interesting to analyze the components of his personality, and the effects they have on the external world (and on himself); and the tracing of macro-history (the realization of his conquests) can be thought of as emergent behavior arising from this dynamic system of Alexander's personality reacting to and affecting the world around him.
Of course, when investigating the reasons for the effectiveness of a leader, there are other aspects to consider than personality in a vacuum. Historians should also strive to understand the leader's applications of strategy in various contexts. In other words, know the context behind events, describe the leader's response in terms of an explicit strategy, their reasoning behind the strategy and decision, how good/bad the strategy was given the context of the event. Events never occur in a vacuum, but must be understood in relation to other co-occurring events, prior history and limited information available to the actors, the actors' true end goal and weighing of importance, etc.; so even if a leader "failed" in some aspect or event, perhaps this failure isn't important when judging the whole, and likewise for victories. These analyses are not done nearly enough, and are very prone to error. Even harder is trying to come up with better strategies than these great rulers, and think of better lives they could have lived. However, though such analysis is an extremely important endeavor, we must take them with a grain of salt, since the creator of such analysis (even/especially if the thinker is you) is prone to biased thinking, and cannot check their claims, and is usually in no position to actually try out their "better" strategy (after all, if they were that good at strategic thinking, they would probably be the leader being analyzed, and not a historian reliant on funds from a university). Despite this, it is always an extremely worthwhile endeavor in general, not just to remember the facts and sequencing of history, but analyze reasons, valuations, and counterfactuals. Such thinking can have great impact on life in general, beyond the confines of "reading a history book".
One must also take into account an important factor that may be underdiscussed: pure luck. History is full of "winners" and "losers". Sometimes, even posthumously, someone who was once thought to be a winner shifts to being perceived as "loser" (for example, Ptolemy, who was once thought of as a great scientist in the public consciousness, but ended up "being wrong" and so is now held up as a "silly naive person from the past, when people didn't know anything" and an upholder of a false theory, or any national hero who had the misfortune of fighting for a nation anathema to the current world superpower). It is tempting to assign "value" simply based on this criteria: those thought of as "winners" did something right and are worth emulating, and those thought of as "losers" are a waste of time to look into. In reality, luck plays an extreme influence in the movement of history; and many so-called "winners" only won due to pure luck or pre-existing conditions and power which had nothing to do with them specifically, or were directed to achievements by other people or factors. Likewise, those "losers" may have done almost everything right, and been people of great intelligence and valour, with a very strategic mind; but the world is cruel and unfair, and certain sides are far more powerful than others a priori; even the strongest man in the world cannot overturn a sequoia tree, and likewise, great individuals simply get screwed by historical setting. History favours the pre-eminent. A huge number of great people have been forgotten because they were not visible like the king, or because they randomly died to soon, or made enemies of the elites dangling the historians' paychecks. Some achievements attributed to kings can be better attributed to others, the king was just the one on the seat.
Grasping the value some figure brings to the table is thus more complicated than it seems. If one actually cares about "learning from history", they will have to untangle what is what, and why; this involves thorough investigation and distillations of cause and effect.
With this in mind, the serious study of history can be viewed as unveiling a tapestry of interconnected knowledge and causes and effects. It becomes a science and is comparable to studying a "large-scale system" with emergent behavior, such as physics, biology/life, or the universe itself. When studying a large-scale system, it is best to juggle all the components at once and in relation to each other. One can roughly divide the system into hierarchically layered levels for the sake of convenience; levels are demarcated by the ability to approximately abstract its behavior into its own compact and consistent ruleset, thus allowing for easier analysis at that level; for example, if chemistry is merely the working of physics, and biology can be viewed as workings of chemistry alongside other workings of physics, then we can attempt to think about, explain, and theorize about biology in terms of all the physical equations; but this is immensely unwieldy and unmanageable for humans with limited mathematical computational ability (not even computers could manage this). Instead it is easier to "abstract" the domain of biology as a clear level in the hierarchy rather than the raw tracing of physics (even though it really just is the tracing of physics). We develop some approximate rules for biology, that hold very well in the applications we want, and these rules and theories developed from them are cognitively easy to understand, manipulate, and tap into.
Thus human progression in science depends on this ability for abstraction, but this abstraction is a double edged sword. Since abstractions are approximate, and in fact are mostly completely dangling and separate from lower-level explanations (for example, many theories about neuroscience do not take quantum physics into account, many theories about psychology do not take neuroscience into account); and this inevitably leads to "propagation of error". Not to mention that many of these theories are just flat-out wrong, and theories developed on top of some shaky foundation obviously will not hold either. Not to mention many fields have several branches of competing theories. A good way to resolve these struggles is to peel back layers, and to think about the bases of these emergent concepts. For example, knowledge of quantum physics would definitely unlock and correct a lot of ideas in neuroscience. Knowledge of evolution can lead to paradigm shifts in psychology. I write about this in this article, where I mention that polymathy helps make these important connections.
History is such a complex system, so focusing on one level is insufficient. Taking a "strategy lens" is important and necessary, but incomplete: it is good to understand particularities in history, for example, a leader's behavior in some conflict, but to even understand this to the best of our ability, it is good to be general. A lot of explanatory power derives from the micro-scale. Now looping back to the beginning of this section, this is why I stated that investigating personality was essential to understanding Alexander's glory. We will see that Alexander's actions and effectiveness can be strongly linked with his personality; and that the effects of his personality chained all the way to his conquest of Asia. It is essential to study the micro-scale as intensely as the macro-scale, since these things are co-dependent and intricately linked.
Heroic destiny: a self-fulfilling prophecy
Having discussed the relatively unseen yet significant impact of micro-elements in the course of histories, a great example of this, and one which will probably resonate and be easily understood, is upbringing.
It should be no surprise at this point that the early years of someone's life are the "formative" ones. This is the time that influences seep in, routines and ways of thinking are firmly established, and lasting self-image sets in. These things tend to silently carve out one's life behind the scenes. The point is not that these things cannot be subverted or overriden, but their profound markings and impact cannot be denied. Chaotic, violent childhoods and lack of love and encouragement has a debilitating and festering impact; but the opposite is true, a good upbringing, balancing between providing a child with healthy encouragement, lessons, direction, and a sense of being loved and appreciated, as well as letting them learn and explore on their own, builds a foundation that veers towards success. I wouldn't say this is extremely correlated with the "moral goodness" of a person; only that it fosters good, successful outcomes in the traditional sense, and instills those necessary elements like a confident self-image, ability to deal with stress, knowledge about dealing with people, and a strong work ethic.
Think of five famous, inspirational, powerful and lauded people, and search them up on Wikipedia. In particular, browse through the "early years" or "childhood" sections. It is extremely likely that even those snippets on Wikipedia provide clues about some influential upbringing which fostered their passions.
Alexander the Great epitomizes this concept. Even before his birth, the gears of his molding into "the Great" were set into motion. Plutarch mentions that before he was born, his parents were already having "premonitions" of his future glory. Referring to Olympias, Alexander's mother, before she was married to Philip, his father:
"The night before the consummation of their marriage, she dreamed that a thunderbolt fell upon her body, which kindled a great fire, whose divided flames dispersed themselves all about, and then were extinguished."
No interpretation of this dream is offered in the text, but this was clearly undestood by Olympias as foretelling her son's widespread conquests and influence. As for Philip:
"And Philip some time after he was married, dreamt that he sealed up his wife's body with a seal, whose impression, as he fancied, was the figure of a lion. Some of the diviners interpreted this as a warning to Philip to look narrowly to his wife; but Aristander of Telmessus, considering how unusual it was to seal up anything that was empty, assured him the meaning of his dream was, that the queen was with child of a boy, who would one day prove as stout and courageous as a lion."
Philip clearly went with the second, more convenient opinion. Also mentioned:
"(Philip) was assured by the diviners that a son, whose birth was accompanied with three such successes, could not fail of being invincible."
Wishful thinking or not, both Philip and Olympias, Alexander's father and mother, were convinced of their son's future glory by these premonitions. This is important because these very high hopes and beliefs in this grand destiny were definitely communicated to their son from a young age. The text corroborates this:
"Olympias, when she attended Alexander on his way to the army in his first expedition, told him the secret of his birth, and bade him behave himself with courage suitable to his divine extraction."
If one is still wondering "what's the big deal", think of one of those fantasy movies or fiction books you've read. There tends to be this recurring plot theme in those stories where some hero is born with immense powers, but separated from his family or the source of his power by some injustice, only to rediscover it later and then save the world, pssionately motivated by his sense of destiny. The reader of these stories feels an affection for this concept of "innate higher abilities", and the resulting sense of destiny and meaning; innumerable children (and adults) daydream and fantasize about themselves being the ones with these powers, saving the world. The feeling of supernatural ability, or higher (superior) purpose, is significant enough that people without it fantasize about it. Now, imagine if you actually believed that you have been blessed by divinity, that it has been written in the stars that you will be the one to mark the world, and achieve greater victory than anyone else. Clearly, very few people have experienced this self-image (without being schizophrenic); in fact publicly stating this kind of thing would lead to widespread ridicule and loathing from everyone else. The only way something like this would sit well in society is when it is strategically hidden (psychopaths have an extremely inflated self-image, but obviously don't tell anyone about it) or when this "superior person" actually has a clear position of authority and credentials (Mike Tyson could say anything about fighting, and his speech would immediately be revered and heralded; Justin Bieber talking about fighting, not so much). Alexander had the great fortune of having this godly self-image combined with the clear authoritative potential (next-in-line for king) needed to work with society. But I digress. If one is convinced from a young age, the formative years, about a divine potential and destiny, their actions and self-image will match this.
If there's any doubt that this notion of divinity was deeply ingrained into Alexander, read this section about his mother Olympias:
"Once, moreover, a serpent was found lying by Olympias as she slept, which more than anything else, it is said, abated Philip's passion for her (...) Others say, that the women of this country having always been extremely addicted to the enthusiastic Orphic rites, and the wild worship of Bacchus, (upon which account they were called Clodones, and Mimallones,) imitated in many things the practices of the Edonian and Thracian women about Mount Haemus, from whom the word threskeuein, seems to have been derived, as a special term for superfluous and over-curious forms of adoration; and that Olympias, zealously affecting these fanatical and enthusiastic inspirations, to perform them with more barbaric dread, was wont in the dances proper to these ceremonies to have great tame serpents about her, which sometimes creeping out of the ivy and the mystic fans, sometimes winding themselves about the sacred spears, and the women's chaplets, made a spectacle which the men could not look upon without terror."
This is a pretty colorful psychological profile of Olympias here; she is a clear "drama queen", entranced with the exotic and the mysterious, going above and beyond with her displays of "spirituality" to the point of seeming insanity. Sleeping in a snake infested house truly is something. Olympias clearly has a passionate character, and puts great emphasis on aspects of mystery and egoism. Alexander is the perfect outlet for this. With Olympias' personality in mind, one can imagine that she went beyond telling Alexander about his destiny only a few times before he puts his head on the pillow after storytime; she probably drilled it into him. Her son will be the Great; it has been prophesied to her by the Gods. Beliefs of personal superiority, applied to something as meaningful and mysterious as religion, might be the most ego-gratifying thing of all, and you can bet someone like Olympias went all in with this.
So Alexander probably had a self-image modulated by divinity, superiority, and destined fulfillment of great ambition. Does it matter? One could say that if one is not divine, it doesn't matter how superior they think they are; reality will hit sooner or later. This is a bit reductive. Perhaps Alexander's concepts of divinity actually caused his greatness in the first place, independent of "innate talent" (innate talent is quite an unknowable and unexaminable concept, but I digress). If the formative years matter a lot, then a young boy, filled with ambition, energized by hope for something far beyond what the other boys have even considered at this point, and empowered by a feeling of divinity, this provides an incredibly huge head start. A boy who believes these things will probably act consistently to the king and demigod he believes he is, and through those actions learns the lessons important for actual leadership and strength, and has the energy to keep pursuing those actions and learning his lessons. In games, the other young boys have far less drive or care, so Alexander is more likely to win. He is more likely to be brave in certain situations, and learns to swallow his fear early, and experiences the feeling of glory and reaps the rewards of the noble conduct of the king and gallant warrior he thinks he is, making him more likely to repeat those behaviors. His initial seed of "superiority" becomes more and more realized; all of a sudden he finds himself with boundless real life experience of victories and dominance, invaluable repositories of early wisdom. These things accumulate and loop into themselves; his peers start seeing him as a leader, his teachers challenge him more, he acts upon his lessons. Alexander observes his accumulating rewards, which further solidifies his self-image, and he becomes more and more confident, and far more likely to step up to the plate, and actually succeed in his endeavors.
In that way, it doesn't matter whether or not Alexander's birth had any touch of divinity at all; the mere idea of his divinity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as him and his peers act according to that assumption, and that potential becomes more and more realized, to the point where Alexander actually is "the Great".
True honour, internal glory
Alexander had immense ambition ever since he was a child. As seen in the above section, a lot of this probably stemmed from early instillment of "divinely inspired" self-image and premonitions of glorious achievement. But there was more to this than mere expectations of future achievements and recognition. When one is directed only towards some list of recompenses and goals, valuing nothing else, they are no more than a control freak or psychopath. Alexander was clearly not like this; despite his grand ambitions and love of glory, his actions and mentality were preeminently composed of threads of goodness and honour.
Plutarch's Lives is an absolutely incredible book, one of the greatest works put to paper; and one of the reasons for this is in his emphasis of the character of his subjects (while masterfully avoiding strong bias, self-inserts, and overt analysis, leaving interpretations open-ended by supplying raw anecdotes; ironically this ancient historian is far less biased and agenda-pushing than today's "proper" historians). In his section on Alexander, there are tons of anecdotes revealing Alexander's focus on goodness and honourable action. It is clear that these actions were genuine and not planned and contrived in the way that many powerful people fake goodness to butter up the pathway to some other end. Alexander, on the other hand, placed strong value on honour and goodness as virtues in themselves.
This connects to the previous section about Alexander's heroic self-image. Thinking archetypally; the hero is one who fights for the right thing, and is willing to make sacrifices for the good, because honourable action is immensely meaningful to him (and not as a means to an end). This concept is materialized through an uncountable number of different stories and narratives; perhaps the most prominent being the Greek mythology contemporary to Alexander. Alexander was provided plenty of examples of great heroes and valiant warriors, and so could understand and consolidate his ideals of virtue (if he didn't his heroic self-image would be quite brittle). The easiest way to "be a hero", fulfill this heroic destiny, is to emulate the glorious traits of these warriors, and act analogously to them in certain situations.
A heroic self-image can also act as good scaffolding to support one's love of glory, and allows an individual's love of glory to frictionlessly manifest itself in society. People generally hate another's ambition, due to jealousy but also mistrust: there is a prevalent concept that the ambitious will eventually be corrupted, and kick down boulders and clouds of dust on their journey towards the top of the mountain. This concept ends up being true in the vast majority of cases: after all, trivially, when someone is very ambitious, it is the ambition that they love, and definitely not the villages they've left behind (the opposite direction, in their minds). The main, though rare, exception to this rule, is that of the hero. Even if they love glory, they love honorable glory. People of all walks of life feel the hero deserves their glory, and are willing to act on the hero's behalf even when fully conscious of the hero's ambitious mentality. People have no problem when a hero gratifies his ambition, because the hero tends to do so in an honourable manner, and since he is a hero, he always has an eye towards virtue, and acts accordingly.
This is what sets a hero apart from the standard ambitious lover of power and glory: the hero wants true honour; glory that is deserved in the eye of morality. Alexander was like this. He loved glory, but only the "true" kind. So he did not bother showing off, or acting haughtily and arrogantly, or doing the bare minimum to tell others that he "achieved something", or taking credit for another's actions in order to boost the public opinion of him. This is because the public opinion was not th most important thing for him, his glory was aligned internally rather than merely externally. The rewarding thing for him was being the hero.
In this regard, Alexander is contrasted with his father Philip: "and in his love of glory, and the pursuit of it, he showed a solidity of high spirit and magnanimity far above his age. For he neither sought nor valued it upon every occasion, as his father Philip did, (who affected to show his eloquence almost to a degree of pedantry, and took care to have the victories of his racing chariots at the Olympic games engraved on his coin,) but when he was asked by some about him, whether he would run a race in the Olympic games, as he was very swift-footed, he answered, he would, if he might have kings to run with him."
Philip would be an example of someone whose love of glory is externally focused. Philip values the opinions of others more than virtue in itself. A love of reputation is a double-edged sword, and one that is hard to balance: it makes an individual adore winning, and at the same time instills a ghastly fear of losing. So these individuals try to walk the line by harping up their past victories, accentuating good traits past the point of their fair due, and selecting easier, lower impact battles for themselves, while delegating other parties to deal with the more significant ones (that way they can alleviate their own shame by blaming someone else, making it more bearable to face both the public and their own fragile egos). This is similar to the hare in this article, and in the end is quite a suboptimal and restrictive lens to take.
On the other hand, Alexander, as described in the last part of that quote, would only take pride in meaningful achievement, and in surmounting difficult challenges. After all,there is nothing divine in performing the trivial and mundane, and nothing heroic in fighting easy battles.
Alexander's focus on "true glory", instead of manipulating the truth to delude the public and himself, is what led to his history-changing conquests. One who is directed towards "true glory" is one who can make a meaningful impact, while one focused only on the public opinion has by definition restricted his potential to make a big impact.
Temperance
One of Alexander's most conducive personality traits was his temperance:
"His temperance, as to the pleasures of the body, was apparent in him in his very childhood, as he was with much difficulty incited to them, and always used them with great moderation"
Pleasure and ambition are mostly at odds with each other. Pleasure is short-term gratification and impulsive, while ambition is a purposeful long-term process, often not immediately gratifying (at least in the same way that pleasure is). Pleasure is a sinister power, one that can consume an individual. It is not merely time-consuming and energy-consuming, it throws a wrench in one's entire way of life. Enraptured people become used to pleasure and wary of ambition and challenge, sometimes to the point where they question the value of dreams and ambitions that once sounded sweet. In a negative feedback loop, their discipline and strength to resist temptation also get sapped, and their skill at long-term planning (which mostly gets practiced when working ambitiously) and intrinsically motivating oneself (which comes automatically to ambitious people, and provides a huge advantage in that field) deteriorates and remains underdeveloped. The more underdeveloped these things are, the more likely the enraptured person is to quickly throw in the towel (if they start something at all) and return to pleasure, thus widening the gap. On the other hand, it goes without saying that discipline, strength, an ability to focus and think long-term, and to be internally motivated, are indispensable for any ambitious endeavor. These things are at odds with the side effects of looking towards pleasure.
One could argue that we could try to strike a balance; being ambitious while also indulging in pleasure when we feel like it; but this can be dangerous. Pleasure can be a slippery slope and a forceful sink. Humans are probably predisposed to indulge in pleasure as much as possible once they get the taste of it, such wiring would clearly have been beneficial in the age of early humans when resources were not in abundance and it was both a good idea and not excessive to make use of all the goods they stumbled upon. However, the human brain is powerful, to the point where human development has overlapped genetic evolution, so we end up with very similar genes to the early humans, while living in very different conditions. The power of pleasure has become more detrimental than before for most people since the dawn of civilization, since the environment afforded an abundance of resources, and the dangers of scarcity became mostly irrelevant; meaning that the "pleasure wiring" adapted to compensate for resource scarcity is now "misaligned". Humkans had a new, yet relatively "silent" problem: indulgence. In the old days the food would disappear quickly and humans would have to painstakingly hunt all over again in quick succession (limiting any "dark side" to the power of pleasure); but in civilizations where production is high, there is no such "sharp end" to the pleasure, and pleasure can become a destructive force as it wedges itself into the forefront of peoples' minds in the place of a desire for action.
Pleasure has huge potential to be detrimental due to human genetics, so attempts to balance ambition and pleasure generally end up lopsided to pleasure anyway. I don't want to argue that "you gotta be ambitious, bro", or that entrepreneus are superior beings to the rest of us smartphone browsing pleasure addicts (they really aren't); my point is merely that pleasure and ambition are misaligned with each other.
If one seeks ambition, they should also make a point to minimize pleasure. Perhaps not eschew it entirely, but to clearly structure life to render it as irrelevant as possible. If possible, one should try to frame things in a way such that a lot of these pleasurable actions are unnecessary, useless, and unattractive.
Bringing this back to Alexander, he ws bestowed with this ability from a young age. Pleasures of the flesh held no allure in his mind. He was probably aware that if he started indulging he might find himself trapped, and taken away from his glorious destiny of conquest, and his own great abilities. So he exercised temperance, and stayed away from unnecessary pleasures (think about it and you'll find that most pleasures are unnecessary and add nothing anyway).
Art and war
Plutarch mentions the following account about Alexander cherishing Homer's Iliad (emphasis in italics placed by me):
"He constantly laid Homer's Iliads, according to the copy corrected by Aristotle, called the casket copy, with his dagger under his pillow, declaring that he esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge".
Alexander "was naturally a great lover of all kinds of learning and reading" (more about the "learning" part later), and that love of reading was not pigeonholed to "practical" guides, but also enjoyed works of theatre and poetry. Other than the Iliad, Alexander read "a great many of the plays of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, and some dithyrambic odes, composed by Telestes and Philoxenus". People tend to have an image of the great conquerors as being "totally serious" types who would never waste their time dallying in poetry and these more "artistic" endeavors, yet Alexander, perhaps the most prominent conqueror of them all, clearly did place much value in these works of art. He put the Iliad under his pillow, not the "practical" works like the field guide on "how to act as prince", or the manual of war strategies. Why? Notice in the quote on the Iliad that I italicized the word "virtue".
Nowadays, reading is still considered to be a worthy endeavor, endlessly touted by people from the "higher" walks of life, and many entrepreneurs and leaders, and people who want to be successful at these things, are passionate about reading, but only the practical books. In these reading lists, the ratio is overwhelmingly skewed towards these "educational" books, autobiographies (meant to be educational as emulation of the success of the autobiography's subject), and perhaps some works of philosophy (seen as improving life in some way) sprinkled in. You won't see too many works of literature or poetry in the mix, perhaps because these books are seen to serve no "practical" purpose. I would argue, however, that these more "artistic" (or equivalently, "romantic") books do indeed serve an important purpose, even for the ends being sought by ambitious people (as Alexander would attest). These "romantic" works directly loop in a concept of virtue, of ideal. In other words, while they might not provide knowledge of means to achieve some goal, they provide something else that purely practical guides lack: motivation. One could even argue that artistic works are more effective with regards to one's ambitions than the practical guides; because reality is complex and changing, and tends to deviate from textbooks, which cannot possibly describe the entire essence of reality in the limits of their pages, and definitely not in a way that the reader would immediately absorb and be able to effectively apply this essence; so they cannot possibly lead to success in themselves, though they do provide a good jumping-off point. One can recall the adage of "hard work beats undisciplined intelligence". Indeed, someone can be intelligent, but never intelligent enough to grasp and master everything immediately (or even anything at all; "raw intelligence" will barely even scratch the surface of anything, especially in conjunction with festering false beliefs unchecked by experience). The same can be said for "untrained knowledge". If someone reads every book there is about something, they will still be must worse in practice than someone who is actually experienced at that thing. Practice involves important minutae that are not emphasized in the literature, and there are differences between generating and merely reading or absorbing; literature is very biased. One who has never boxed can read every book in the world about boxing, but do you think they stand a chance against a professional boxer? Or even an amateur boxer? Or even someone who's only been sparring for 2 months? Experience beats lack of experience, and not even knowledge or intelligence can bridge the gap fast enough. Hard work wins, indeed. This hard work must happen somehow; it does not just happen on its own, this is work, against inertia, so some force must be constantly applied to keep it going. As anyone who has been unmotivated knows, that force must be some form of motivation. Discipline and consistency don't arise from nothing; people need a reason to do something, and to commit to something, people need a strong reason that will overcome the pleasurable urges to not work. Motivation is not really a logical thing at the base level. Behind strong motivations (at least the ones that involve ambition rather than pure pleasure) are a romantic inclination (I mean romantic in the sense of "passionate affectation", like art, rather than Romeo and Juliet-type love, of course; the latter is a case of the former). It will be this romantic, artistic inclination that moves a person to work on their ambition, and will carry them far more than facts in a vacuum can (it won't take them far before the neurological nature kicks in and brings them back to pleasure or whatever behavioral patterns the pathways of the brain have predicted are "optimal" from prior experience).
So alignment between emotion and ambition are necessary to affect the ambition, or any long-term and weighty cause. There are three strongly interacting channels by which this "romantic emotion" is developed: archetypes, art, and experience. I want to talk about my ideas of archetypes in another article, but it seems to me that there are certain "abstract patterns" that humans naturally have a romantic penchant towards, due to the evolutionary benefits of being drawn to those experiences. These archetypes are like "boilerplates" or blueprints for several real-life examples of the romantic/artistic draw. "Art" exists as realizations of these archetypes. Paintings, music, literature; in many mediums, artists evoke concepts that fit into these romantic archetypes. The Iliad, for example, realizes a story involving heroism, fate, glory, craftiness, overcoming pain for a long- and hard-earned victory, etc., all expressed with poetic and emphasizing language. When one reads the Iliad, or some other mediums or works of art which they subjectively prefer, they feel the romantic power invoked by these concepts; art acts as the interface between those archetypally romantic concepts and the individual, allowing the individual to feel and express these things (though the artistic environment is not actually the real world). In fact, through art, one strongly develops a subjective romantic inclination. Children grow up watching movies, listening to music, playing games, reading stories, and hearing stories (even stories related by family members or friends can qualify as "art" in this regard, they provide a baseline and interface for romantic inclinations). They are affected by these artworks they consume, such as the heroism of the warrior in that story, the way he saved everybody, and they start daydreaming about these things, imagining themselves as the ones bringing these stories to life in some way. People are also affected by real-life experiences in this regard. Real-life experiences, especially the more impactful ones, tend to be consciously interpreted in terms of these artistic archetypes, and so a dynamic system in put into motion, where one's artistic sense and romantic inclination are affected and re-emphasized by their consumption of art, the course and development of their daydreams and fantasies, and by the feedback and interpretations of their real-life experiences; this is especially true during childhood which sets a strong "prior" for adulthood. One's life and values become framed by this sense, and the actions one's takes, and their interpretations of events, are strongly influenced by it; it forms a strong feedback loop, where the entire nature of their reality is conceptualized by an artistic sense (rationality is not entirely absent from the picture of course, but is far more limited than one would think, I'll write an article about this soon), and where reality's feedback (as perceived under this "prior theory") plays back into the artistic sense, tunes it, snd makes it more "subjective" to the individual, as personal experiences emphasize particular aspects.
Art is an essential component of this loop. It can direct individuals towards a romantic inclination, by bringing its powerful feelings into consciousness. "Glory" is a very strong concept; most ambitious people are directed towards this vague concept of "glory" (perhaps even without knowing what it will actually look like for them!) And "glory" is an artistic concept, not a purely logical one. "Virtue" is another. Alexander was so determined to conquer not because he had a field manual laid down in front of him, but because he loved glory and preeminence; and he loved the Iliad because it brought that glory and preeminence directly into view, it was a northern star for his direction.
Likewise, so many artworks, such as paintings, movies, and works of literature, depict some setting of war because of war's archetypal power. Glory, heroism, virtue, loss, rising above... war acts as the perfect setting for these romantic concepts, and art works by realizing these concepts. So art leads to war, and war leads to art. It's all about the concepts behind the scenes.
Learning and war
Let me reuse two quotes from the previous section, with different emphasis:
"He constantly laid Homer's Iliads, according to the copy corrected by Aristotle, called the casket copy, with his dagger under his pillow, declaring that he esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge."
"(Alexander) was naturally a great lover of all kinds of learning and reading"
The education systems of today's society suffer from two quirks: one occurring in the levels before high school, the other occurring in post-secondary education. Before high school, students suffer from useless variety. They are force-fed lessons from a wide variety of seemingly disparate topics, ranging from mathematics to languages to biology; but a motivation to learn all of these subjects is never actually fostered in students, nor are any links or deeper understanding of the topics ever included in the curriculum. The curriculum is set in stone, and meant to cater to the "average student". The stupidity of this is that the "average student" actually does not care about the course at all, and is wondering to himself why he's forced to take it, and "learning" is done to pass the exam. So at least 80% of the courses taken by any given student fall into this category of "dispassionate hurdle" that has to be jumped over for the sake of advancing to the next grade or getting into university. Not "learning", but mere work. On the other hand, university takes the opposite route and strongly focuses on one subject area. Gone are the days are being forced to take English literature when you only care about biology. Now your world centers around biology, and you make minimal contact with any other subject. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, I wonder what would result if the structure of post-secondary education was a bit different. The problem with high school education is not necessarily in the multitude of subjects, but in the lack of depth in the curriculum in any of them. Students have no idea why they're forced to take this multitude of "useless" courses, and that's not the students' fault; the only angle they've been given into these subjects are depersonalized, set-in-stone, boring curricula that seem completely detached from all the other subjects, and the real world, and exist in some vacuum, where the subject only matters from the point of view of passing the test for the course. Often these subjects have rich complexities and essences that actually match what the student is personally interested in, and can form strong links with the subjects that the student knows they like (or at the very least form good complements to it); but they'll never know, because high school planners are absolute professionals at sterilizing and sucking out the spirit of subjects. Given these sterilized annoyances of courses, students will naturally avoid those subjects for the rest of their lives, including university, and thus go unexposed to a wealth of knowledge that could end up helping them in their own endeavors and passions. If these curricula were more geared towards "breadth AND depth" (and hopefully some personalization to the student) instead of "sterilized mass breadth" (in that Western, consumerist way) then perhaps one could create an even better education system which allows these dormant yet potentially very useful links between subjects to be brought into view.
Such an education is geared less towards specialization, but more towards polymathy. I discuss polymathy a bit in this article, so I'll summarize here: polymathy can, perhaps unintuitively, surpass "single-minded focus" for many reasons. First, it allows the creation of those useful links that go completely uncovered when pursuing a single-threaded exploration. Second, it fosters out-of-the-box thinking, and general problem-solving skills, far better than any pigeonholed endeavor. Third, it unlocks more possibilities and opportunities by virtue of knowing about more (this can have chaining positive implications).
Polymathy clearly isn't just for nerds, since Alexander the Great was himself a lover of knowledge, and a polymath. It takes an intelligent and inquisitive mind to read the Iliad for the sake of its "military knowledge". He would read all kinds of books from histories to poetry to plays. He was also a student of the great philosopher Aristotle from a young age, and this apprenticeship clearly played a role in his pursuits and uses of knowledge. Plutarch has a long paragraph detailing Alexander's love of knowledge and reading.
Alexander's father, "considering (Alexander) to be of a temper easy to be led to his duty by reason, but by no means to be compelled, he always endeavored to persuade rather than to command or force him to anything". This is interesting because it reveals that Alexander had a rational spirit. One that was not content to blindly follow orders and teachings, but who strove to understand things and be able to think for himself using principles of reason. Obviously there's the undercurrent of superiority here (he doesn't want to be ordered around, which would imply pure dominance on the part of the others) but this rebelliousness does correspond to propensity for independent thought, which is the spirit of polymathy and the love of nature.
This love of learning, polymathy, wide field of interests, are not some mere romantic concept; they have a clear utility. As outlined above, knowledge of a wide variety of subjects increases one's ability to maneuver, plan, and think, and thus makes them more powerful. This applies to everything, including (and perhaps especially) the battlefield. Perhaps the greatest weapon of war is strategy. If one's strategy is much better than the opponent's, and takes any of the opponent's potential advantages into account and works around them, the war is essentially won. Strategy is a rational art. It is one where a deep understanding of reality is important; one must think about possible outcomes and cause and effect and be right most of the time, and consider and try to predict the opponent's strategy, but considering the opponent's different actions unveils different cause-effects and outcomes to ponder over. This can be a complicated dance, marred by an intrinsic lack of knowledge and certainty, so every edge is important. Ability to think outside the box, to think creatively, and to exploit lesser known concepts (to be ingenious) become immensely important. Notice here that outcome of war can be viewed as a battle of wits (and if both leaders are very intelligent, a battle of ingenuity) from the high-level perspective of the leaders, and in such battles there is nothing more important than rationality and wisdom, and the broader the applicability of the rationality and the breadth of wisdom, the stronger the edge.
Breadth and depth of learning are therefore absolutely essential and potent for any effective warfare. This polymathic mindset must have been a strong factor in Alexander's incredible sequence of victories.
Slight tangent: hidden philosophy
This section doesn't particularly relate to Alexander, but was interesting and notable when I read it in Parallel Lives. Recall that Aristotle, the great philosopher, was a teacher of Alexander:
"It would appear that Alexander received from him not only his doctrines of Morals, and of Politics, but also something of those more abstruse and profound theories which these philosophers, by the very names they gave them, professed to reserve for oral communication to the initiated, and did not allow many to become acquainted with. For when he was in Asia, and heard Aristotle had published some treatises of that kind, he wrote to him, using very plain language to him in behalf of philosophy, the following letter. "Alexander to Aristotle greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been particularly instructed in be laid open to all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell." And Aristotle, soothing this passion for preeminence, speaks, in his excuse for himself, of these doctrines, as in fact both published and not published: as indeed, to say the truth, his books on metaphysics are written in a style which makes
them useless for ordinary teaching, and instructive only, in the way of memoranda, for those who have been already conversant in that sort of learning."
This is a direct allusion that there are hidden teachings and deeper meanings hiding in plain sight in some classic works of philosophy. Aristotle reveals that though his written works (and thus teachings) are in the public domain, the public is not expected to glean much from it; however, the "initiated" would be able to understand allusions and make analogies between the written works to private teachings that have been withheld from the public.
Thing is, these private meanings and symbolisms don't seem to be explored much at all. (note: I must admit that I don't know much about philosophy or philosophical analysis and criticism, nor do I spend much time exploring others' thoughts on philosophical works, instead preferring to explore the works by myself, and sparsely comparing to what others think; so my observations here are based off of a very limited sample size) I've never taken a philosophy class, nor been exposed to the current academic functioning and careers in philosophy, but it seems to me that the current academic understanding and analysis of classic works of Plato and Aristotle is conducted on a "face value" basis. In other words, academic philosophers analyze exactly what is written and analyze in certain "straightforward" ways the rationality (sometimes implications) of the arguments, connections to other philosophers, the timelessness of the ideas, etc. However, in terms of "symbolic" analysis (of the sort: the argument, written in terms of these words, can be directly intrepreted as referring to some specific context, but perhaps the argument applies to something deeper, or overarching, and certain references symbolize other concepts?) - I doubt much effort gets sunk into this kind of thing. Indeed, any attempts at "finding allegorical meaning" are quite anathema to academia. People would get criticized left and right for "biased angles" and whatnot (though academics are extremely hypocritical in this regard, and there is nothing "unbiased"). On the other hand, there tends to be an academic consensus about the arguments presented in these works, people think they "get the point" and there are no more leaves to be turned over because they understand the argument; and these "interpretations at equilibrium" dissipate to the broader audiences of university students and blogs. The works then become understood by this "public interpretation" (which mostly doesn't vary much at all among the academics or the population), further analysis citing the work just make use of that public interpretation, and any actual reading of the work is done through the public interpretation, so the loop remains closed since people will read through the lens of understanding the work though the public interpretation.
But we have unveiled a potential goldmine. Here we have the great Aristotle outright admitting to something hidden in his works. This should be a field day for anyone curious about the "esoteric" or hidden symbolism (which is, in reality, all of us; everyone is thrilled at the prospect of deeper, and especially hidden, meaning; knowing a "deep meaning" of reality coupled with the fact that this meaning is hidden from the public masses is the most potent way to activate our ideals of self-importance). On top of that, the discipline of philosophy could be completely rejuvenated. Which works is Aristotle referring to? Did his teacher, Plato, also hide hidden messages? Have other famous philosophical circles of ancient times also hidden concepts in their written works? Our current, "straightforward" understanding of these works has been developed independently of the original philosophical circles from which they originated; after all, we do see the "clique mentality" of these circles, with both Alexander and Aristotle admitting that they care to preserve this "special knowledge" from the public. So our ideas, which have developed from straightforward analyses developed without even knowing of potential symbolism, let alone what the symbolism could be, and from there festered semi-unconsciously as professors tell students that "the book's argument is this", and students believe it and reconcile their own reads with what they were told... so the chance that the symbolism would have been uncovered by now is understandably quite low.
On a meta-level, I do believe that strong symbolism exists in quite a few of these ancient texts. I am not well-read at all, but from what I've read, I believe there are very convincing cases to be made that works by Confucius, Plato, and the Bible all contain strong and relatively unknown symbolism and hidden meanings. I will write articles about these works eventually.
And yes, I know that there is a fine line between being radical and an out-of-the-box theorist and paradigm-shifting, versus being a schizophrenic or a "conspiracy theorist"; and to the theorist it can be quite difficult to tell which is the case... the best way to "sanity check" (as best as one can) is to be able to make a rational case as to why this symbolism actually is present, in contrast with the thesis that the symbolism is not actually present, and why the "radical" case is more probable, given all the evidence and likelihoods in the writing. By definition of radical, all good science, in other words, paradigm-shifting, reality-unfolding science, will first be viewed as pseudoscientific daydream and schizophrenia. The challenge is in being wise enough to know which is which, no matter whether you are the theorist or the reviewer.