How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking
By Aristotle
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About this ebook
What we can learn about fostering innovation and creative thinking from some of the most inventive people of all times—the ancient Greeks
When it comes to innovation and creative thinking, we are still catching up with the ancient Greeks. Between 800 and 300 BCE, they changed the world with astonishing inventions—democracy, the alphabet, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, mathematical proof, rational medicine, coins, architectural canons, drama, lifelike sculpture, and competitive athletics. None of this happened by accident. Recognizing the power of the new and trying to understand and promote the conditions that make it possible, the Greeks were the first to write about innovation and even the first to record a word for forging something new. In short, the Greeks “invented” innovation itself—and they still have a great deal to teach us about it.
How to Innovate is an engaging and entertaining introduction to key ideas about—and examples of—innovation and creative thinking from ancient Greece. Armand D’Angour provides lively new translations of selections from Aristotle, Diodorus, and Athenaeus, with the original Greek text on facing pages. These writings illuminate and illustrate timeless principles of creating something new—borrowing or adapting existing ideas or things, cross-fertilizing disparate elements, or criticizing and disrupting current conditions.
From the true story of Archimedes’s famous “Eureka!” moment, to Aristotle’s thoughts on physical change and political innovation, to accounts of how disruption and competition drove invention in Greek warfare and the visual arts, How to Innovate is filled with valuable insights about how change happens—and how to bring it about.
Aristotle
Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist whose works have profoundly influenced philosophical discourse and scientific investigation from the later Greek period through to modern times. A student of Plato, Aristotle’s writings cover such disparate topics as physics, zoology, logic, aesthetics, and politics, and as one of the earliest proponents of empiricism, Aristotle advanced the belief that people’s knowledge is based on their perceptions. In addition to his own research and writings, Aristotle served as tutor to Alexander the Great, and established a library at the Lyceum. Although it is believed that only a small fraction of his original writings have survived, works such as The Art of Rhetoric, Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics, and Metaphysics have preserved Aristotle’s legacy and influence through the ages.
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How to Innovate - Aristotle
PREFACE
It used to be said that the ancient Greeks were not keen on innovation. That view was based on a partial and insufficiently discerning interpretation of the evidence of ancient writings, and historians now recognize that the Greeks were never as disinclined to innovate as had been assumed. In fact, what requires explanation is the conspicuously innovative achievement that has always been recognized as a feature of ancient Greek society. Certain conditions, fertile for innovation, must have allowed for the range of inventions and discoveries that makes ancient Greek culture so influential for its inheritors in subsequent generations.
In addition to these conditions, various mechanisms can be seen to underlie their innovative practices: mechanisms such as the borrowing and adaptation of external ideas, the cross-fertilizing of disparate disciplines, and the posing of disruptive critiques to the ideas and practices of their predecessors.
These principles of innovation were not systematically formulated by the Greeks themselves. They emerge from various writings that address the notion of innovation in different ways. The format of this book therefore, while taking a single and overridingly influential author, Aristotle, to provide the central texts, adduces other less well known ancient sources to illustrate innovations that represent the key mechanisms of the Greeks’ innovative practices.
Note on the Texts
For ease of matching translation to the original, I have divided up the texts of Aristotle and Athenaeus into shorter paragraphs and provided a new alphabetic numeration for each section. The numbering and structure of the texts of Diodorus is that of the standard scholarly editions. I have aimed to create translations that are both accurate and readable, using the Greek texts (with a few minor variants) of the Loeb Classical Library editions.
INTRODUCTION
Innovation is the driving force of the modern world. In technology, politics, business, art, music, academia, the military, and countless other areas of life, change is constant, and the search for novelty is unremitting. Responses to change range from excitement to fear; change means loss, and when things are changing fast there can be little time to digest what has been lost and to embrace the new. While some may feel a pressure to be innovative, others are perplexed about the meaning of innovation and the value of the new. What is innovation, and how is one to think about creating change?
Athens in the archaic and classical period (around 800 to 300 BCE) was a fast-changing society in which the idea of innovation was, for the first time in the written record, explicitly raised and discussed. The earliest use of a word for forging something new (Greek kainotomia) is found in a comic play by the dramatist Aristophanes, dating from the late fifth century BCE. While it’s often said that the ancient Greeks were averse to novelty and reluctant to innovate, their writings show that in a range of disciplines they were well aware of the power and advantages of the new. I don’t sing the old songs, my new songs are better,
run the lines of some lyrics composed by the singer-songwriter Timotheus of Miletus in the late fifth century BCE. A similar promotion of novelty can be found in many other fields of activity and intellectual pursuits of the period.
Despite largely conducting their lives within the bounds of a traditional agrarian society, the classical Greeks were responsible for creating a series of world-changing innovations. Early in the period of their efflorescence they invented the alphabet, by borrowing and adapting letterforms used in the Near Eastern nation of Phoenicia; and the Greek alphabet, as further adapted by the Romans, has been central to communication ever since. They went on to invent philosophy, logic, rhetoric, and mathematical proof; to be the first practitioners of theatrical drama, rational medicine, monetary coinage, and lifelike sculpture; and to create competitive athletics, architectural canons, the self-governing city-state (polis), and democratic politics.
These transformative cultural changes, which took place over the five centuries from 800 to 300 BCE, cannot have happened by accident. None of the Greeks’ creations nor the products thereof, some of which have never been surpassed, could have come into being without the contributions of individuals who created and operated in conditions fertile for change, who were prepared and keen to innovate, and who understood how to exploit the means of doing so.
Some Greeks also sought to understand the conditions that made innovation possible; and descriptions of the creative procedures that led to many of the Greeks’ novel achievements are preserved in their writings. What surviving texts illustrate is that, while the processes of creativity are potentially endless, the creation of the new relies on a few basic principles: notably, the adaptation of existing elements, the cross-fertilization of disparate entities, and the disruption of previous conditions. On these principles and combinations of them, change was created in practice for centuries. It inspired the earliest Greek thinkers from the sixth century BCE to ask questions such as where does everything come from?
and what is change?
Toward the end of the classical period, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) sought to analyze the logic of change on different levels, natural, metaphysical, and political.
Aristotle’s theoretical analysis of change in Physics book 1 begins by refuting the counterintuitive notion proposed by predecessors such as Parmenides that change itself is impossible. He goes on to argue that all change requires a preexisting situation or substrate from which change can and must proceed. His argument may be generalized to affirm that the new depends on the old, a position summarized in Physics book 1. Aristotle was keen to understand change in practice as well as in theory. The key political unit of the Greek world of his time was the