I am writing this morning from Ilknur and Thomas’s terrace in Kayalar, on the western coast of Türkiye. Below me I see the Aegean and across the water lies Lesbos. Only a few minutes away is the acropolis and the remains of the temple of Athena, that has stood here for two and a half thousand years.
I am writing from Assos. And I am writing about a single gesture that was made in this place. Plato dies in 347 BCE, and his best student does not become his successor. Aristotle leaves Athens and crosses to Asia Minor. Here, on this coast, he founds his first school. According to the story, something happens here that splits the history of thought. He stops thinking about the world and starts looking at it.
That is the whole gesture. Everything else I found on this rock tells you what it costs.
The Gesture
In the Academy it was about ideas. About the perfect behind the imperfect. About the shadows on the cave wall, an image I already leaned on in Ex Machina when I wrote about the simulation hypothesis. I was curious about Assos because something else begins here.
Aristotle dissects octopus. He records the gills of fish. He describes how an embryo forms in a hen’s egg, day by day. He tells his students to study even the lowliest creatures, because in everything alive there is something divine.
The question shifts. From Plato’s question about the idea to Aristotle’s question about the living thing, about ‘Lebendigkeit’.
This is the moment when natural science and philosophy have the same object for the first time. It is, if you like, the birth of what I today call Sci-Phi. And it does not happen in a library. It happens with wet hands on a beach.
We have forgotten this moment. We separated the disciplines, sorted them neatly, locked them into faculties. Today we stand in front of machines that think, cells we rewrite, systems we build and do not understand. And we notice: the separation was an administrative act, not an insight. So the question is not whether we should look again. The question is why we do it so rarely. I found four answers here.
First: looking is not free
I learn here that this school did not come out of nowhere. There was a man named Hermias. Hermias was a slave. He won his freedom, inherited the rule of Atarneus and extended it to the neighbouring cities, Assos among them. In his youth he had studied at Plato’s Academy. That is where he first met Aristotle. So a former slave builds a realm and uses it to fund philosophy. No monument. No statue. A collective of thinkers. Every time I go deeper into this cultural space, I find them, these treasures of inspiration.
A few years later the Persian king sends a mercenary commander. He lures Hermias into a trap under the pretext of a truce. Hermias is tortured. He does not name a single fellow conspirator. He dies, so the story goes.
Aristotle raises a monument to him at Delphi and writes him a hymn. Not to the man, but to Arete, to excellence itself. And decades later, back in Athens, that same hymn is held against him. A charge of impiety. A song of praise for a mortal. Aristotle leaves the city so that Athens would not sin against philosophy a second time.
I have been thinking for years about a simple equation: progress comes from talent and capital, multiplied by trust and friction. We talk about the left side constantly. Talent and capital are measurable, and therefore debatable. Here, on this rock, I see the right side in a single biography. Trust that turns a slave into a patron of reason. And friction that kills. Nobody looks closely unless somebody else is willing to carry the cost of it.
Second: looking is the first thing we give up
Two hundred years later a boy is born in the same city who becomes a boxer. His name is Cleanthes. He goes to Athens, hears Zeno, becomes a Stoic, carries water at night to afford his studies by day. After Zeno’s death he leads the Stoa for thirty-two years. From him comes the Hymn to Zeus, one of the great cosmic texts of antiquity. The universe as a living being, run through by a reason we take part in. ‘Lebendigkeit’ (Aliveness) in its purest form.
And from the same man comes, so it is handed down, the demand that Aristarchus of Samos be charged with impiety. Aristarchus’s is offence is that he had set the earth in motion. He had moved the hearth of the universe.
Eighteen hundred years before Copernicus, the answer was in the room. And the man who sang the universe most intimately wanted to prosecute the one who had looked at it.
Here I have to add a footnote, and the footnote matters more to me than the anecdote. The passage is disputed. In the manuscripts it may well be Aristarchus who accuses, not Cleanthes. The beautiful version rests on a conjecture, on a change made by later editors.
The best story this place has to offer may be false.
That is exactly why I am writing it this morning. We live in a time that has perfected ‘the art of being right’. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Reaction instead of reflection. What we lack is ‘the art of being wrong’. The willingness to take your own favourite story apart before somebody else does.
Dogmas are not other people’s convictions. Dogmas are the explanations we have stopped looking at.
Third: nobody looks alone
From the temple I can see Kaz Dağı, the Ida of antiquity. On that mountain, according to one of the traditions, lived the Idaean Dactyls. Mythical smiths and healers. They discovered iron. They taught people metallurgy, mathematics, the alphabet.
Originally there were three of them. Their names mean caster, hammer and anvil. Not one. Three. In this story technology does not come from a genius, but from the interplay of three forces, none of which achieves anything alone.
We are building the largest technology in our history while telling ourselves founding myths about single men in hoodies. The older myth hanging on this horizon is wiser. It knows that creation is a constellation. And that a single pair of eyes is not enough.
Fourth: in the end we look at ourselves
One last thing, and it stays with me even after the conversations here. Our word sarcophagus comes from this place. It was originally the epithet of a stone: sarkophagos lithos, flesh-eating stone. A limestone from Assos in which, as Pliny reports, the bodies of the dead were consumed within forty days, down to the teeth. The word for our last container comes from the ground I am sitting on this weekend.
We are working with great seriousness on abolishing ageing. We speak of cellular reprogramming, of longevity, of treating death as a solvable problem. I do not consider that hubris. I consider it the consistent continuation of what began here two thousand four hundred years ago, when someone started looking closely at living things. That is also my vision with tomorrowmensch.
But the question this stone asks does not get smaller. It gets bigger. If we can preserve the body: what exactly are we preserving?
‘Lebendigkeit’ is not the absence of death. A system that merely fails to stop is not alive. It is undead. What is alive is what keeps exposing itself, keeps correcting itself, keeps looking. That is the question we have to ask of every technology that promises us duration.
What remains
Aristotle went from here to Lesbos, to the lagoon of Pyrrha, and wrote the first pages of zoology there. Posterity later invented a death in the water for him. He is said, so the legend goes, to have despaired at the inexplicable tides of a strait and walked into it. Historically this does not hold. The story appears much later. But it says something about us. For the man who wanted to look at everything, we invented a death in the inexplicable.
Every year I write on the island of Værøy in Lofoten, surrounded by one of the strongest tidal currents in the world, the Maelstrom. Water that never stands still. I look out at the sea from there and at the same element here, three thousand kilometres further south, and the question has not changed. We are looking for equilibrium. The world is looking for dynamic equilibrium, for movement.
Assos is not a museum to me. That is not why I am here. The coastline, the villages, a visit to a large local cemetery. It is a reminder of a gesture that costs something, and that we cannot afford to spare ourselves.
Someone stopped thinking about the world and started looking at it.
We should do that again.