Anaximander
Thales had a student, or at least a "younger associate" by the name of Anaximander (c. 610 - c. 546 BCE). Now this is my guy.Anaximander displayed an amazing and seemingly unprecedented state of abstraction by rejecting the conclusion of his master that everything is water. What makes him so remarkable is that he did not propose another "fundamental element" as his his phyis in its place, such as air, earth or fire. Nor did he concoct any sort of composite element or introduce a new and unknown element. If I understand him rightly - and this seems to be the opinion of Aristotle himself - Anaximander brought Thales’ concept of the arche or ultimate substance to be a purely conceptual principle!
Now, that’s philosophy!
Anaximander must have given Thales’ theory quite a bit of thought. And though he obviously saw some merit with the master’s overall approach, something about maintaining that everything was ultimately water just didn’t seem right. For one thing, if this were true, what power on heaven and earth is there to stop everything from returning to its primal state of water? Why would it change out of water to begin with? Anaximander probably could not fathom how something like motion, just by itself, could transform something as basic as water into something else that was, arguably, just as basic.
Actually, we don’t really know what any of Anaximander’s objections actually, but we can pretty well imagine what they might have been like. What we do know is that he radically upped the ante in conceptual philosophy by saying that the ultimate substance or principle was more basic than any element. The arche was, in fact, indeterminate, unlimited, eternal and boundless stuff. He called it the apeiron.
Now what the hell was the apeiron? The Greek word itself meant, basically, "infinite" or "limitless," So these were concepts that the people already had. But they were basically religious concepts, and they applied to the gods. The gods didn’t die - they were "immortal." Which meant they lived for an "infinite" amount of time. They had no "limits." There is nothing at all which prevents even very primitive human beings from thinking in these ultimate, abstract terms.
Ah, but it is another thing to take such abstractions and to speak of them as nouns and to proclaim they exist. That’s actually quite a jump, really.
I have no doubt that Anaximander had a bit of trouble explaining himself to some of the people around him, and no doubt he had to repeat himself a lot and talk very slowly so some could get the picture. But when we stop to think about it, Anaximander had some very good points, and not a few very good reasons to think about it like this.
The basic problem with the fact of change was that bugaboo, Unity in Diversity. If something could change from one thing into another thing, what was it that did the changing? As Anaximander saw it, it couldn’t be water or any of the other basic elements (fire, air or earth). There was no way to explain how something so basic could transform into something else without totally losing its identity. There had to be something even more basic than the basic elements themselves. And whatever it was, that was it. Apeiron. Everything was made out of apeiron. But you never actually see or feel apeiron in its essential primal form - you only saw it as it appeared as an element, which was apeiron in a specific expression of some kind of compound state. Apeiron itself was formless and invisible. You couldn’t see it, but it was always there - you had to reach it rationally.
Remarkably, as purely conceptual as this apeiron was, Anaximander didn’t imagine it as something magical or mystical. As far as we know, he considered it as purely material. Today (under the influence of Plato, along with the long line of philosophers that followed him), we might tend to think of the apeiron as a non-material, conceptual principle. But the Milesians never made that jump - even Anaximander never went to that abstract a level in his thought. The apeiron, in his mind was matter - it was just a simpler and more subtle matter. It didn’t have the qualities that the elements had. It was just more neutral. It was indefinite because we couldn’t define it exactly. It was eternal because it never went away. It was infinite because it was everywhere. It was still stuff. Even though Anaximander was thinking more abstractly, like a philosopher should, he ultimately returned to the basic position of a scientist.
And if you think he was crazy to postulate such an indeterminate substance that could literally take any form, just ask yourself this question: what is energy?
So maybe he wasn’t so nuts. But the fact remains he was no scientist, either, at least not in our modern sense. There was no way to prove whether the apeiron actually existed or not. The more you examine it, the more the idea seems to demand to be elevated just a bit into a pure abstraction that can only be apprehended by reason.
This brings us a little bit closer to being able to make a formal distinction between science and philosophy, I think. Science makes hypotheses about the natural of physical reality, which are, at least in principle, verifiable (or at least "falsifiable") by observation. Philosophy, on the other hand, asks questions or makes assertions that cannot even in principle be verified by sense observation. These are assertions that can only be nominally answered, if at all, by the use of pure conceptual reason.
How would one go about testing Anaximander’s theory for the existence of the apeiron? We really can’t imagine a way. It turns out, in the last analysis that Anaximander’s theory is probably too abstract and elusive to be considered a serious scientific question, at least at the stage and in the form that he presented it.
Does that mean that the theory is meaningless nonsense?
Not at all! At the time Anaximander developed his theory, there was no clear-cut distinction between science and philosophy. He was just groping for an answer to a very general question, and he came up with a brilliant solution. The reason that his theory was basically wrong is that it was ultimately a proto-scientific question that needed to be cleared up and modified by more empirical-type definition. As a philosophical statement on the other hand, his theory can still hold some value.
How? Well, we cannot accept the entire theory in its completeness because our physics has far surpassed his, which was never really adequate to begin with. But as a general philosophic statement, Anaximander’s proposal holds what we might call an "essence of truth." And what is that? I, for one, would say that it demonstrates the insight that reality cannot be reduced to merely one category of understanding. Now, it that sounds a big vague and disappointing, we shouldn’t be too distressed. Philosophy is not a simple or easy exercise, and different people are going to see it differently. The main point is that we’re going to have to do a lot of work to both expand upon and refine our questions before we can begin to try to answer them properly (if indeed that is possible).
Philosophy is a long journey, and properly speaking, it can ask questions about virtually anything that is possible. Can we answer every question about every possibility? Of course not. Can we answer some questions? Certainly. Well, what kind of questions can we answer, and what kind of questions must remain unanswerable? Well, that is what a study of the history of philosophy is basically attempting to discover. Unfortunately, it’s the very nature of the beast that we can’t just go in and ask the experts to sum up the latest results for us. And that just may be because a lot of philosophical questions are such that they cannot be simply answered yes or no. A lot of philosophy deals not with correct or incorrect, but how we look at things. And those kinds of questions can be answered many different ways, often, none of them definitively or absolutely.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any answers at all. It just means that we are going to have to learn and understand a great deal more before we can comfortably make philosophical statements that we can feel reasonably justified in asserting. And we have a long way to go - we’re still just at the beginning!
So why do I like Anaximander so much? Well, Thales may have been the West’s first philosopher, but it was his student that kicked it up a notch, demonstrating where it should ultimately be: an abstract and conceptual speculative sphere. We don’t wonder whether the world is made of water any more. But a lot of ideas like the "boundless," the "unlimited," the "eternal" and the "indeterminate" are still hanging around, setting our minds reeling in wonder and endless fascination. Some people think that science may ultimately have an end, a unified picture of physical reality. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I do know that philosophy will never even get close to an end. Every question begets thousands upon thousands more. Its only limit is the human imagination.
Anaximenes
While one might conclude that this was less of a creative notion than an "infinite boundless," we can probably conclude that Anaximenes was somewhat more "scientifically-minded" then his predecessor and less "philosophy-minded." Now, there is nothing wrong with this in itself, and Anaximenes certainly made a definite advance in scientific thinking.
Anaximenes took the concept of "cause" very seriously, and he seems to be the first Greek to actually adopt some degree of observational data into his calculations. Even if he went much too far with his speculations to be called an "empiricist," the spirit of his enquiries certainly pointed more in that direction than his predecessors.
The philosopher was not being arbitrary in choosing "aer" for his physis. On the contrary, he adopted the observation of the very scientific notions of condensation and rarefaction into his theory. Probably making the observation that air becomes visible when it condenses to become mist - and eventually rain, and likewise noting its opposite, that it condenses when it becomes cold, Anaximenes speculated that the process could continue in either direction. If aer were to condense enough, he reasoned, it might eventually become earth and eventually stones.
Now, what is the difference between this theory and Thales’ theory that everything was "water," other than it using a different element as the primary one? Well, most importantly, by providing a theoretical groundwork based on observation, Anaximenes had postulated an actual process by which things might actually happen. Furthermore, by using this hypothesis, Anaximenes was implicitly positing a general scientific law: that all material quality is somehow ultimately based upon the quantity, or the material conditions under which things find themselves. He may not have realized it, but Anaximenes was possibly the first Western philosopher to propose a radical materialist philosophy of reality.
Some might suggest that we are taking his theory too far. And it must be admitted that Anaximenes did not elevate this theory to a purely abstract conceptual level. But, logically speaking, is this not ultimately what his system of reality implies? (Actually, do not all the Milesians, to some degree, tentatively imply this? We’ll get to that in a minute.)
Ultimately, though, I tend to consider Anaximenes’ theory more of a scientific one than a philosophic one. It order for him to be correct, one would have to demonstrate, through experiment, that aer could actually be made to harden to solid rock. And since we know that it cannot, it is a failed theory. The philosophical implications of his theory would only come into play if his physical theory turned out to be correct.
Still, even though he was mistaken, the novelty of his entire theory and general line of reasoning is enough to make an argument that Anaximenes is the "true father of Western science." And that is pretty special.
Milesians, materialism and monism
I briefly posed the question whether Thales’ theory would not indeed make him, and by implication, therefore, each member of the Milesian school, a materialist. At first glance, it certainly seems that that is a likely conclusion. The Milesians looked for the "ultimate constituent of all reality," which is ultimately what each of their physis are. And in the case of each philosopher, that physis (or arche) was material. So, logically speaking, there could not be anything in the universe that was not material.Now before we go ahead and pronounce Miletus as a materialistic school, I think we had better back up and think about the context in which these thinkers were doing their philosophizing.
The 6th century BCE, while it represented a kind of culmination of several centuries of cultural development, really had no "philosophical" concepts or traditions to fall back on. The Milesian philosophers were pioneers. The very notion that Thales believed that "everything was full of gods" should tip us off immediately that we are standing at the very foreground of Western scientific/philosophic speculation, and I think that we should be a bit cautious when attributing any sort of modern didactic principles to them. I think that it is enough that they attempted to reason about the nature of the physical world without reference to mythology that they should be granted the title of "Europe’s first philosophers." We should not take it too far and put words in their mouth, for we really have no idea how they would have responded to such suggestions. There is no evidence that any of the Milesians actually rejected traditional Greek religion, let alone any "spiritual" principles at all. The fact remains that for the Greeks, "spiritual notions," such as we find in the contemporary movement of Orphism, were pretty novel for the Greeks at this time as well. (This phenomenon will be brought home pretty hard when we go on to look at the Pythagoreans, who were supposedly founded by another student of Anaximander’s.)
I think we should be equally careful when applying the term "monism" to the viewpoints of the Milesians. Yes, as we read about their various theories, it seems obvious to us that they all are implying the existence of a single, undifferentiated reality, and that that reality is material. But once again, none of them (as far as we know) ever made that position explicit. We simply do not know what they ultimately thought or how such a notion would have appeared to any of them.
But looking back, from an historical perspective, material monism seems to be the logical result of their thinking. But since no one accepts the physical theories of the Milesians today, are such considerations really applicable, let alone important?
Let’s put it this way: if we cannot say with any certainly that the doctrine of material monism was of any intention or concern for the Milesians, then it should only be of concern for us in an historical context. We recognize the implications of what their theories suggest, and we either agree with them in principle, or we argue that philosophy needed more time to develop and mature before it could begin to take on such complex and subtle questions.
But even if we can dismiss at least the idea of materialism as a hard-and-fast doctrine for the Milesians, can we really do the same thing when it comes to monism? Hmm . . . the Milesians may have been materialists by default. That is, even though their theories imply the doctrine of materialism, they never came out and asserted that only matter existed. But did they not make explicit the notion that everything was essentially one? I mean, if you assert that the universe - basically all of reality - is connected in a kind of unity, isn’t that basically what you are saying?
Well, I for one think that we should look at the concept of monism just a little more closely. Don’t you?
Okay, let's do that!
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