| The West - largely because of Greek influence - invented two ideas that were never invented elsewhere: abstraction, and universality. Abstraction meant that instead of learning ad hoc practical recipes for art, science, culture, etc, the West has always had an interest in developing symbolic systems of representation that allow formal modelling, manipulation, and prediction. Universality meant that truth was external to society, and independent of social status. It's the theoretical basis of much Western politics ("All people are equal") but it's also the foundation of much science, which combines abstraction with universality to find reliable invariants. Asian cultures were very inventive in specifics - sometimes more so than Western culture. But they never aimed for abstraction and universality in the same way. The tendency was more to group knowledge into hierarchies of virtue, and to privilege subjective experiences over objective invariants. In your example, Western music is what you get when you get both abstraction and universality applied to sound. There's abstraction in that the music is written before it's played, which makes it possible to create complex abstract structures on paper that can be built slowly and expertly for maximum effect. And there's universality - less successfully, perhaps - in the sense that there's a belief in a primary set of invariant relationships between the elements of sound. Eastern musics have some different attempts at universality, but so far as I know there was never an interest in abstraction in the same way. E.g. Indian classical music has systems, but they're more like rules for improvisation, not rules for building structures out of notes without actually playing any sounds at all. The critical thing about abstraction is that it can be a huge amplifier of creativity, because you can prototype ideas, systems and experiences symbolically without having to build/generate/perform them in the real world first. And the interesting thing is that we're only just getting started with it. Science has mostly been a success, but there's a lot mileage in other areas. Computers are one step along the way, but there's a lot more about abstraction still to be discovered and enjoyed. |
From the 18th century "enlightenment" period, you mean? Before the 18th century, this idea was pretty much absent from actual western politics. The 18th century is parted from the ancient Greek golden period by more than two thousand years.
Yes, ancient Greek philosophy was influential, but as fsloth says above, you can't just ignore the in-between time and its thinkers. Don't forget either that many of the advances in the Enlightenment came from breaking with the teachings of classical Greece.