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  In terms of their politics, however, they could differ greatly: some were ruled by a single individual, a tyrannos, while others were considered to be democracies: to be ruled (kratos) by the people (demos). If we are looking for reasons why philosophy developed where and when it did, perhaps the existence of democracy (for Athens was, for some time, a democratic polis) could be put forward as one possible explanation since it forced its citizens to take responsibility for their community and to tackle such philosophical questions as: what is the best community to live in? and what does it mean to be human within it?

  Philosophy, in order to thrive, also needs wealth and the luxury that comes with this, allowing the people to engage in philosophical speculation; a poor and hungry nation has little inclination or time for philosophizing. At the time of these Presocratics, Miletus was one such wealthy polis, engaging in trade with other nations and consequently being confronted by foreign beliefs that resulted in the fertilization of new ideas. Three Milesians in particular – Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes – formulated a new set of questions: they rejected the supernatural, religious explanation for the universe in favour of a more naturalistic, scientific approach.

  What these Presocratics thought in detail will most likely remain a mystery. Our sources are poor. Consider what little we know about what medieval thinkers thought, and then double this for the Ancient Greeks, and triple that for the Presocratics! What we do have are scraps, called fragments, but even these are most likely to be the work of later authors, or copies of books made by later authors rather than originals and so, if we are lucky, they may have been copied word for word, but there is no guarantee of that. Most of what we know about these Presocratics are from works written by a later thinker telling us what an earlier thinker thought, and these paraphrased reports are called testimonies or doxographies. One of our richest sources for information here is Aristotle (384–322 BC), but we must be wary for he perhaps tried to fit the Presocratics into his own intellectual framework, rather than being entirely objective.

  Thales

  Given such paucity of source material it is not surprising that in the case of our very first Presocratic and, thus, the first philosopher of the western world, almost nothing about him can be said with any certainty. Born in Miletus, it is believed that Thales successfully predicted the eclipse of the sun, which has allowed astronomers to place him as living during the eclipse that occurred in that region in 585 BC. Accounts date Thales as born in about 625 BC, and dying around 545 BC. None of his writings, if indeed he wrote at all, have survived, and so our knowledge of his views depends entirely on later reports. There are, for example, a number of stories about him from the historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC), who was writing a hundred years later.

  One Thales story

  According to one story about Thales, after he had travelled the known world in his quest for knowledge, he returned to Miletus and his mother encouraged him to settle down and take a wife, but Thales was reluctant in this regard. When she was asked why he wouldn’t marry, he would answer: ‘It’s not yet time.’ This did not stop people asking him, until later in life he would reply with: ‘It’s too late.’

  According to Aristotle, Thales was the first natural philosopher; the first to give a logos to nature. The Greek word logos can be variously translated as ‘speech’, ‘word’, ‘discourse’, ‘account’ etc., and so what Aristotle means here is that Thales attempted to provide an account, a rational explanation, of nature.

  ‘…most of the early students of philosophy thought that first principles in the form of matter, and only these, are the sources of all things; for that of which all things consist, the antecedent from which they have sprung, and into which they are finally resolved (in so far as being underlies them and is changed with their changes), this they say is the element and first principle of things. As to the quantity and form of this first principle, there is a difference of opinion; but Thales, the founder of this sort of philosophy, says that it is water…’

  Aristotle, Metaphysics, i. 3; 983 b 6

  The quote above is an example of a doxography, in this case from Aristotle’s work Metaphysics. While a bit of a mouthful, if we were to unpack it there are a few key terms and phrases here that can tell us a lot about the philosophical quest.

  One word used in the quote above is ‘principle’, and the idea of there being a first principle. The Greek word here is arche, which can also be variously translated as ‘ruler’, ‘source’, ‘origin’, ‘beginning’ and so on – hence such English words as ‘archaic’ and ‘archaeology’. Thales, like so many of the philosophers to come after him, including Plato, believed that underneath the many things of which the universe consists, there is one ultimate thing: an ultimate building block – a foundation – from which all things derive. This idea is known as the law of parsimony or the rule of simplicity. Methodologically, parsimony serves us well in scientific investigations at least: for example, people from a variety of ages, races, gender, social background, etc. can all contract the same illness, so science looks for underlying causes and can help us to choose between competing theories. Here, philosophers (and scientists) can extrapolate further in postulating some one basic stuff for which all else can be explained.

  The Presocratics were as much scientists as they were philosophers, for they looked to nature and attempted to find naturalistic explanations for why things are as they are, and do what they do. Thales, typically of the philosophers, does not see his arche as a god or gods. For the Greeks there was no separation between the material and the spiritual. The gods lived among us, usually invisible, so investigating the inner workings of nature that governs mortals and gods was not considered offensive to the gods but, unlike Hesiod, the philosophers did not look to the gods as an explanation for the world. For Hesiod, his arche is chaos, nothingness, what is unintelligible: there is no explanation and our understanding of the world is essentially unreachable, for it is only for the gods to know. What Thales does, and what philosophers do, is place the responsibility for an explanation in the hands of human beings and human reason. In the case of Thales, he uses empirical method: he uses sense-experience in order to get information about the world (see also Chapter 4).

  Now, Thales’ explanation was wrong of course: read that quote by Aristotle again, and what does Thales’ arche consist of? Water! Water is the antecedent from which all things have sprung and into which they are finally resolved. It is the first principle of things. Thales presents us with a vision of the universe as a continuous process of Being and Becoming that is so central to our understanding of Plato’s philosophy, too. ‘Being’ is that which endures, while ‘Becoming’ is the process of coming into being and going out of being. When you open your eyes and look around you what you see is only ‘becoming’; things constantly in a process of change, of movement, of ageing, of transforming. In many cases this may be so slow to our eyes that it is not noticeable – a rock does not appear to us to be in a process of change – but in the grand scale of things and over millions of years, even solid rock is being worn down.

  Another Thales story

  Plato, in his dialogue Theaetetus (174a), gives us a picture of Thales that is typical of an absent-minded thinker with his head in the clouds. One day, while looking up at the stars, Thales fell into a well. He was teased by his slave-girl who said that ‘he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven that he could not see what was before his feet’. Plato states that this is typical of all philosophers who, although ‘searching into the essence of man’ are nonetheless ‘wholly unacquainted with his next-door neighbour’.

  The ontological superiority of ‘Being’

  Given that all we see with our senses suggest only ‘becoming’, the notion that there is something that does not change seems un-empirical. Yet Thales’ appeal to water does make empirical sense to some extent, as Aristotle himself noted. When you look at water through your senses, you note the following:

  �
� It is ‘plastic’ in that it can move rapidly between various states (liquid, solid, gas).

  • Steam seems very different from ice, which explains why things appear very different. Water at least has the ability to take on different forms.

  • Virtually all living things require water for life, and human beings are composed largely of water! Therefore something common to all living things is water.

  Therefore what Thales is doing here is observing how water operates in nature and then extrapolating from that to conclude that water is the underlying substance for all things. His conclusion is inevitably inductive, as scientific method is, and we now know this to be a wrong conclusion, but it must be stressed that so much of science today is inductive and has conclusions that inevitably take leaps from the observable to the speculative. The ‘Big Bang’ is still a theory because no one observed the ‘Big Bang’. The best science can do is to observe with the senses and to make what is considered the best explanation possible, given the current evidence, but it may prove to be wrong in the sense that it may be overridden by a newer theory in the future.

  I recall one well-respected scientist once telling me that most of what scientists do even today is basically ‘wrong’ or will, in time, be proven to be so, and I suspect most of the great scientists of today would be quite embarrassed by their own doctoral thesis, which they produced so proudly in their youth. But, to some extent, science isn't really about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, and is more about ‘good induction’: looking at the world as it is currently perceived and deriving the best explanation and the most coherent conclusions from it. Knowledge in this sense is not static, but is forever changing which, as we shall see, was of great concern for Plato.

  One might conclude that there is only ‘becoming’, and we will consider that below, but the philosophical implications for the non-existence of ‘Being’ are frightening to consider. There is an ‘ontological superiority’ to be had from ‘Being’. Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, and ‘Being’ – in the sense of something that is unchanging and the origin of all things – is considered superior because it is unchanging. Consider what the central goal of philosophy is: to search for truth. However, if all things are in a process of change, then how can we pin ‘truth’ on anything at all? Truth implies that something is always the case, regardless of time or place but, for that, we need ‘Being’. This idea, such a central concern for Plato, will be considered later.

  Anaximander and Anaximenes

  In the same way that Plato is the successor to Socrates, it was possible that Anaximander (c. 610–540 BC) was Thales’ pupil (and maybe even a relation), and hence continued to carry the torch of early philosophy. Like Thales, Anaximander liked to investigate natural phenomena, including eclipses and meteorological events, as well as zoology and cosmology. It is said that he was the first Greek to construct a map of the land and sea and he is also credited with inventing the sundial!

  Also, like Thales, this successor looked for an arche, for an explanation for everything, but he differs in one very important respect: for Anaximander the basic stuff of the universe cannot possibly be something we can observe, such as water. He postulated something more basic than the elements, because the elements are problematic: water is certainly malleable, but it is hard to conceive of it as forming fire! Also, water is too identifiable and ordinary and, therefore, too much like other things to be something ‘other than’ other things. Contingent (dependent for its existence on other things), everyday things are definite, visible, definable, have boundaries, and so on, but surely Being must be something other and different from the world of contingent things, something boundless, indefinable, with no properties (size, shape, etc.). A definite thing, by definition, is limited, and so the arche cannot be a definite thing. Instead, the arche for Anaximander is apeiron. As Aristotle in his work Physics points out:

  ‘But it is not possible that infinite matter is one and simple; either, as some say, that it is something different from the elements, from which they are generated, or that it is absolutely one. For there are some who make the infinite of this character, but they do not consider it to be air or water, in order that other things may not be blotted out by the infinite; for these are mutually antagonistic to one another, inasmuch as air is cold, water is moist, and fire hot; if one of these were infinite, the rest would be at once blotted out; but now they say that the infinite is something different from these things, namely, that from which they come.’

  Aristotle, Physics, iii. 5; 204 b 22

  Apeiron, then, is something different from all other things. It lacks any intrinsic features and so could be translated as ‘boundless’, ‘indefinite’ or ‘eternal’. Importantly, what Anaximander is demonstrating here is that Being, by its very nature, defies definition and this is something that Plato, too, was aware of when, through the character of Socrates, he was pressed to define what he meant by the Forms (see Chapter 4) and could only respond by using analogy. It also makes Anaximander more like Plato in that we are moving further away from what the senses reveal to us and relying upon our ability to reason in order to postulate something beyond our senses.

  Finally, a mention of the third of our three Milesians, for if Anaximander was sitting in the front of the class while Thales lectured on water, a younger Anaximenes was sitting a little further back, taking it all in so as to come up with his own theory. Anaximenes (c. 585–c. 528 BC) does agree with Anaximander that the arche, the ‘Being’, must be different from the things of the everyday world, the ‘Becoming’, but he found Anaximander’s notion of Being as ‘indefinite’ as unintelligible as saying it is ‘chaos’, for nothing can be said or conceived if, by definition, it is boundless. This, Anaximenes realized, is problematic for philosophers, given their task is to know. His solution, therefore, may seem something of a backwards step to Thales, for he replaces the Being of water with air. He did this because air, to some extent, gives us a synthesis of Thales and Anaximander, for air is determinate and empirically detectable, while also being less determinate and detectable than water. Hence we have another important early philosophical question here: is Being definite and ‘thing-like’ or is it an indefinite ‘no-thing’?

  Two philosophical extremes

  The Milesians give us a picture of the cosmos as a world of Being and Becoming, two separate ‘worlds’ that are nonetheless interrelated. The multiplicity, variety and change of the sensible world is derived from one source, which can be discovered, either through empirical observation (Thales and Anaximenes) or through abstract theorizing (Anaximander). In other words, it is the task of the philosopher to penetrate Being itself – the world as it really is, without recourse to gods or spirits of any kind. It raises interesting philosophical questions such as how can something that is unchanging (Being) have changing things (Becoming) that derive from it, given that this would change the nature of Being? Or how can something that is motionless ‘move’ the Earth by creating it? Or how can something that is timeless act in time? Such questions will be familiar to students of philosophy of religion for, in the monotheistic traditions, Being becomes God.

  One possible option of resolving these questions is simply to get rid of Being altogether (although religion cannot so readily get rid of God!), and this is what Heraclitus (c. 535–475 BC) did. Heraclitus was also from the Ionian coast – Ephesus – which is some 40 miles from Miletus. He was nicknamed ‘the Obscure’ for perhaps obvious reasons, as Socrates himself states when attempting to read his work On Nature: ‘The part I understand is excellent, and so, I dare say, is the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it.’ However, his key point is to argue that there are not two ‘worlds’ of Being and Becoming; there is only Becoming. His most famous quote is: ‘Into the same rivers we step in and we don’t step in, we are and we are not.’ What he is saying here is that though we may give a river a name, it is never the same river from one moment to the next and, mor
e than that, we are not the same person from one moment to the next. All is becoming, in a state of constant change. Material objects, which seem at first sight to be static, are actually in a state of flux. An iron bell is subject to rust, a cliff erodes, a tree grows, a man ages. The philosophical implications for this view are immense, especially in terms of identity and morality. If nothing remains stable then, again, nothing is ‘true’ in any universal sense. The things that really matter, ourselves, our families, our values, our political views, and so on, are constantly changing, which makes it difficult to ‘grasp’ anything.

  However, we also have another extreme philosophical position: there is no Becoming at all, there is only Being. This was proposed by Parmenides (c. 6th century BC). We won’t go into this complex argument here, but suffice to say this is a fascinating example of the use of reason to argue beyond what our senses seem to tell us, for Parmenides is saying that, although your senses may tell you that things are changing, you are getting older, objects and people are moving around you, and so on, this is in fact an illusion. If nothing else, Parmenides deserves to be given credit for taking this enormous leap from experience.

  Key terms

  Apeiron: Really indefinable, but could be translated as ‘boundless’, ‘indefinite’ or ‘eternal’.

  Arche: A Greek term that can variously be translated as ‘ruler’, ‘source’, ‘origin’, ‘beginning’.