Pythagoras: More than Just a Math Guy

If you're anything like me, all you knew about Pythagoras before taking a philosophy class (and possibly even after that) was that he was responsible for the beginning of your high school geometry class nightmares. However, despite the fact that the Pythagorean theorem is what Pythagoras is most popularly known for, there's a lot more to him than he's given credit for nowadays. 

Pythagoras's greatest achievement can
be duplicated by a cat with a pizza box. 

Pythagoras wasn't just a great mathematician. He spawned an entire religion in which the fundamental agent of order within the universe was number. All in all, his conclusion doesn't seem completely ludicrous (unlike Thales' water nonsense). The Pythagoreans observed that the imposition of number can reveal harmony where previously only chaos could be perceived in sound, later generalizing this principle to all things. In other words, numbers organize the seemingly chaotic world into something that is rational and knowable, and thus must be the fundamental ordering agent. Worth mentioning, though, is the distinction between number as an ordering agent and the "fundamental principles" of the Milesian philosophers. While the Milesian philosophers sought to find the most basic stuff that the universe was formed from, Pythagoras proposed that number ordered the universe and made it knowable. In other words, where the Milesians proposed a material building block for the universe, Pythagoras proposed that all things within the universe (regardless of what they're made up of) are ordered by numbers.

"Big deal," you say, "he discovered the basis for geometry and part of chaos theory. That's hardly a basis for a religion." After proposing the fundamental ordering principle of the universe, Pythagoras decided to give this whole religion thing an encore that has been appropriately dubbed the "transmigration of souls." To me, this seems like a fun Greek twist on the concept of reincarnation. In a cycle that lasts a measly 3000 years, the immortal soul goes through a cycle of being "reborn" into a new animal every time its previous body dies; further, the newly transmigrated soul has no memory of its previous lives. Eventually you're reborn as a human, die, then have to wait another 3000 years to be a human being again (Curd 25). This doesn't make a lot of sense when you realize that Pythagoras claimed to have been a human in past lives several times within the span of 3000 years, but maybe (as a favorite of Hermes) he was given some special treatment.

Maybe pizza box cat is really Pythagoras reincarnated.