The SPAA Sequence

This is a sequence that some of my more attentive students may remember. For a few years now I've been having to teach some sort of compressed philosophy course ostensibly leading to a more epistemological ('why do we think of this as knowledge') focus. But it occurs to me that there are a few helpful sequences that make certain distant ideas more understandable.

One of them is the SPAA sequence. A lot of people know it, although few people realise its significance. SPAA stands for Socrates-Plato-Aristotle-Alexander. It's an 'academic DNA' sort of sequence, in which the teacher and the student are linked. So Alexander was the student of Aristotle and so on.

But what's interesting is the narrow window through which each of these people is seen, now that we are so distant in time that it's like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. It leaves us with a bare-bones framework which cannot adequately reflect the genius of each individual (since we really can't see it all anyway) but yet is of some use. So here it is.

• Socrates asked questions with the intention of not finding a specific answer. "There are no real answers!"
• Plato, traumatised by that, decided that there must be definite answers, and tried to work them out. "There are absolute answers!"
• Aristotle pointed out that there must be two answers to every question, and if they were extreme answers, it would be best to stay in the middle. "The truth is in there!"
  
• Alexander, rather edgy at all this philosophy, decided that the answer to any philosophical question should be tried out practically, and proceeded to conquer half the known world. "The truth is out there!"

I'm sure there's a lesson there, somewhere. At this point, I must confess a bias. I like the name 'Alexander'; it means 'defender of men' in Greek. He was one of the case studies my father fed me with when I was a wee bairn, and what I liked about him was that he tried to minimise his own casualties by using strategic and tactical intelligence, speed, skill and timing. Unlike many philosophers of war, he actually committed himself to courses of action based on his answers to philosophical questions.

When presented with a complex knot (now known as the Gordian knot) and told that he would have to unravel it to pass, he drew his sword and unravelled it with one blow. Brutally decisive, but also in compliance with the terms of the problem. Most philosophers would have spent much time thinking of reasons to untie it or leave it be; mathematical philosophers would have been all knotted up in the heuristics of the untying or even of the structure of the knot.

I don't condone all of Alexander's actions or his lifestyle. But I do admire his ability to use philosophy as a practical basis for solving problems on the battlefield. He was one of the first to employ a tactical retreat to confound his foes, thus routing a superior force. The Battle of Gaugamela is particularly instructive; outnumbered, he won by having better-disciplined troops and playing on the battlefield psychology of a large mob led by a tyrant. (That's probably a bit unfair to Darius the 'Great King' of Persia, but that's what his troops thought of him.)

Alexander retreated his flanks and let Darius half-encircle him by using elite forces all over the place. Darius pursued and his troops got a little frustrated when Alexander's forces, compressed by the manoeuvre, failed to collapse. Alexander then punched through the spread-out Persians, using elite cavalry to rout them from behind. He could have slaughtered the lot, but he hung back to rescue his friend Parmenion, who had got into a bit of trouble. He won anyway.

Alexander's Legacy

Yesterday it so happened that I ended up giving a tiny little linguistic lesson online. And one of the words involved was the Greek Alexander, which means 'Defender of Men'. Well, we all know how the historical Alexander turned out: conquered the world in his youth, overachieved handily, reached India, became old while still young, caught a disease and never went home again. But the interesting part, as always, was the legacy he left behind.

The age that lived on long after him was called the Hellenistic Age, a mad and wonderful fusion of Greek, Indo-Aryan and Middle Eastern cultures all thrown together into a brew and divvied up among people with vastly-different interests and ideas. As the tumult and the shouting died, as the generals carved up the body of Empire, the greater generals fought themselves into a synthesis that would one day bloom into the greater Roman Empire.

It is sometimes that way; a strong leader who leaves no obvious successor behind (or too many obvious successors) will have made possible the final exhaustion and collapse of his direct legacy. Like a phoenix, though, the fragments often kindle and come together again in some unexpected way.