CHAPTER III

THE CLASSICAL PREJUDICE

We have already indicated what we mean by the "classical prejudice": it is specifically the bias of attributing the origin of all civilization to the Greeks and Romans. Basically, one can hardly find any other reason for it than this: Westerners, because their own civilization indeed barely dates back beyond the Greco-Roman era and derives almost entirely from it, are prone to imagining that it must have been the same everywhere; they find it difficult to conceive of the existence of civilizations that are very different and of much older origin. One could say that they are, intellectually, incapable of crossing the Mediterranean. Furthermore, the habit of speaking about "civilization" in an absolute way contributes to a large extent to maintaining this prejudice: "civilization," understood in this way and assumed to be unique, is something that has never existed; in reality, there have always been, and there still are, "civilizations."

Western civilization, with its special characteristics, is simply one civilization among others, and what is pompously called "the evolution of civilization" is nothing more than the development of this particular civilization since its relatively recent origins—a development which, moreover, is far from having always been regularly "progressive" in all respects. What we said above regarding the so-called Renaissance and its consequences could serve here as a very clear example of an intellectual regression The author uses this term to describe a decline in the ability to grasp metaphysical truths, despite progress in material or scientific fields., which has only continued to worsen until our own time.

For anyone who wishes to examine things with impartiality, it is manifest that the Greeks truly borrowed almost everything from Easterners, at least from an intellectual point of view, as they themselves frequently admitted. However much they may have been liars This may be an allusion to the ancient "Cretan paradox," where Greeks were stereotyped by contemporaries as being prone to embellishment or deception., they at least did not lie on this point; besides, they had no interest in doing so—quite the contrary. Their only originality, as we said previously, lies in the way they presented things, according to a faculty of adaptation that cannot be denied them, but which is necessarily limited to the extent of their understanding; this is, in short, an originality of a purely dialectical Dialectics here refers to the method of logical argumentation and the formal structure of language used to express ideas, rather than the core ideas themselves. order. Indeed, the