Philanthropy

It is generally agreed that the word was coined 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece by the playwright, Aeschylus, or whoever else wrote Prometheus Bound. There (line 11) the author told as a myth how the primitive creatures that were created to be human, at first had no knowledge, skills, or culture of any kind—so they lived in caves, in the dark, in constant fear for their lives. Zeus, the tyrannical king of the gods, decided to destroy them, but Prometheus, a Titan whose name meant “forethought,” out of his "philanthropos tropos" or “humanity-loving character” gave them two empowering, life-enhancing, gifts: fire, symbolizing all knowledge, skills, technology, arts, and science; and “blind hope” or optimism. The two went together—with fire, humans could be optimistic; with optimism, they would use fire constructively, to improve the human condition.

The new word, φιλάνθρωπος philanthropos, combined two words: φίλος philos, “loving” in the sense of benefitting, caring for, nourishing; and ἄνθρωπος anthropos, “human being” in the sense of “humanity”, or “human-ness”. At that mythical point in time, human individuality did not yet exist because there was no culture—including language, skills, and other differentiating attributes. What Prometheus evidently “loved”, therefore, was not individual humans or groups of individuals, but human potential—what these proto-humans could accomplish and become with “fire” and “blind hope”. The two gifts in effect completed the creation of humankind as a distinctly civilized being. 'Philanthropía'—loving what it is to be human—was thought to be the key to and essence of civilization.[1]

The Greeks adopted the “love of humanity” as an educational ideal, whose goal was excellence (arete)—the fullest self-development, of body, mind and spirit, which is the essence of liberal education. The Platonic Academy's philosophical dictionary defined Philanthropia as: “A state of well-educated habits stemming from love of humanity. A state of...