Philosophy: The Pre-Socratics - The Milesians (Part 1)

As I reflect back over some of the things I have said, I realize that perhaps I have not given these guys enough credit. Yes, it is true that they did not make a full and ineradicable break with the mythological traditions of their culture in order to create a radically new order of human thought - but who could have expected them to? And no, they did not invent philosophy - or science, for that matter - as Eastern speculators traveled in directions never imagined by them. But at the same time, these Westerners were fully original and unique.

Imagine that you are a Greek named Thales living in the remote but advanced city-state of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor in the 6th century BCE. The pagan religion that you have is quite rudimentary and rarely (if ever) questioned, and there are temples, festivals and sacrifices to the Olympian gods going on all around you. You live in Ionia, the land of Homer, the greatest poet in history, whose works are considered divinely inspired scripture by all of civilized Greece. You grew up with the immortal Theogony of another great poet, Hesiod, who described the creation of the world and human beings by the holy gods, and this went unquestioned in your society.

Yet some day, somehow, you reflected on the nature of things, and you (eventually or suddenly) came to the startling conclusion that everything - at least everything of this world or cosmos, was ultimately made out of . . . water! - a purely physical principle. And not only that, but that the world - and everything in it - came out of water itself?!!

That’s a pretty big jump, isn’t it?

Thales: The First Greek Philosopher

 

 

So you still believed that everything was "full of gods"? Well, perhaps it is. Mythology certainly isn’t incompatible with philosophy. We only have to look at the many schools of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain philosophy to realize that. And maybe you weren’t that scrupulous about the formal distinction between "empirical science" and "speculative philosophy." Can we really blame you, especially considering that you were the guy who more-or-less came up with the idea of both of them? We’re being a little picky, aren’t we, looking back from a perspective of more that 2500 years? Seems to me that you were quite the little pioneer!

 

Thales lived in Miletus from somewhere around 624 to 526 BCE. There are a lot of stories told about him (like him getting rich from olive oil), but we can pretty much ignore most of them. What makes him important for us is what makes him important for Aristotle: he was the first Greek philosopher. That is, he asked questions and attempted to answer them in such a way that no gods or heroes or monsters got down and got involved with the process. In other words - with no myths! (Which is a pretty radical thing to do, especially if you are a Greek!)

 

Thales may have been the first human to attempt to construct the world’s cosmology in purely physical terms. Now, that does not mean that he rejected the traditional stories or did not believe in the gods. Actually, we really don’t know what Thales believed, but we are left with that fragment of his that states, "all things are full of gods." Some people have interpreted this to mean that Thales was a "hylozoist" - meaning that he thought everything, including inorganic matter was somehow "alive." I think we should be a bit careful in pushing interpretations when we have as little information as we actually do.

 

What we do know about Thales, as well as the other Milesian philosophers, comes from Aristotle. That’s a pretty good source, I would think, although it’s certainly possible that the great philosopher/historian/scholar could have had some faulty information. But it’s still better to stick with what was actually said about what Thales thought than to speculate on what he might have thought.

 

Aristotle says that Thales was the first philosopher in that he was the first person to look into the ideas of a "cause." That is, he asked "why" something happened. Now, however the notion first took hold in his mind, Thales was struck by two basic facts. First, the world seemed to be made of many different things. There were mountains, trees, grass, people, the sea, rocks, etc. There were opposites: hot and cold, wet and dry, life and death, and so on. The other fact that simply could not be ignored in our experience was change - everything seemed to be constantly changing into something else. Summer changed to winter, water turned to ice, plants and creatures grew and became different and eventually died. What was difficult to figure out was how all these things were changing into other things. What happened to things as they changed? If a cow ate grass, did the grass turn into cow? What happened to the grass? What on earth was going on, anyway?

 

After pondering all this multiplicity and diversity in the world, along with the fact of change, Thales somehow made an intellectual leap. If all the things in the world could change into other things, then ultimately . . . they all must be made of the same thing!

 

Thales decided that was water. Everything was made of water.

 

Of course, he was wrong. Everything isn’t made of water. But it was a pretty good guess. After all, when water freezes it becomes ice, which is a solid. Maybe if it kept getting colder, it would eventually turn to earth, or even rocks. Likewise, if you heated water it became steam. Maybe it would turn to clouds (it does!), or perhaps it would become aether or the air itself.

 

Moreover, living things were moist. People and animals were made of blood, sweat and tears. Seeds were wet, and maybe that’s why they changed into plants and trees. The more he thought about it, the more Thales became convinced that water was the universal element out of which everything was composed.

 

Of course, there was no way for Thales to test this. It simply made sense to him: it was a scientific hypothesis based upon reason alone.

 

But it was more that just a scientific idea that could be proved or disproved. Whether he raised his argument to a formal level or not (which he didn’t), Thales had stumbled across some very fundamental principles that can only be called philosophic principles.

 

In essence, when Thales asserted that everything was made of water, he was going beyond the data of experience, and in the process of thinking this way, he reached some very fundamental and abstract ideas. First, we have multiplicity and change - we know that. But how could different things change into other things unless there was something that was more fundamental that ultimately didn’t change? The fact that Thales thought that thing was water didn’t really matter from a philosophical viewpoint. The main idea is that he thought it was anything at all! That made him a "philosopher."

 

He also thought that this thing was a physis - that is, "a physical substance." And that kind of made him a "scientist." (Or at least a proto-scientist.)

 

Now, Aristotle, who lived a bit later after a lot of thinking had been done by a lot of other people, went even further. He called it an arche.

 

What the hell is an arche? In Greek, the word means something like "nature" or "principle." The arche of all things was the ultimate physis that it was made of, the thing that it really was, the thing that allowed it to take different forms while ultimately remaining the same physis!

You see, Aristotle took this notion to a little more abstract plane. For him, Thales had discovered the principle of Unity in Diversity.

 

This was a big notion that would remain a fundamental problem for Greek philosophers long after Thales and the other Milesians. In many ways, we might see it as the fundamental problem for Greek philosophy. If things change, then something must stay the same - there must be a stable something - or physis that does the changing! And this so-called physis - when taken to a purely abstract level, was an arche - a principle of unity at work that "held everything together."

 

The idea of unity is, when you think about it, probably one of the most amazing, fundamental transcendental insights a human being can ever come up with. You have to have this idea if you are going to have science, for example. But it goes beyond science, it is deeper than science. In fact, you have to ultimately admit that the very possibility of science rests upon the intuitive recognition that there has to be some sort of ultimate unity in all things! (Or at least some sort of unity in the physical universe.)

 

This is something that, at least, we think we can we know, that we recognize and understand, without being able to observe it directly. We can only think it, and we recognize that it has to be, in some way, true.

 

Of course, that doesn’t mean we can understand it! Thales thought it was water, but he was wrong. Scientists today have all sorts of theories about what holds the universe together, how it ultimately works. Their ultimate goal, in fact, is to discover "theory of everything," an all-encompassing framework of physics that fully explains how all the forces of the universe work together.

 

But even science, at this high level, rests on a fundamental assumption that remains ultimately undemonstrable. The idea of unity is a basic philosophic principle upon which all science rests! (Along with basically every other system of human knowledge.)

 

But what is unity, ultimately? It’s not a thing you can see. It’s merely an idea, a concept in our minds. Yet somehow we think we know that it has to be there, or there couldn’t be any reality as we know it. That’s what the Greeks would continue to try to explain: how can there be a unity in all this difference?

 

Now, in India, for example, this recognition of the fundamental principle of unity had been in place for a long time, both as a physical and as a spiritual concept. The earliest Upanishads, or sacred writings, that date from around the same time as Thales (or even earlier), explicitly assert the notion of unity. As a matter of fact, they go even further, saying, in essence, "All Is One." From the perspective of many Indian religious traditions, there is only unity. All difference and change is merely an illusion (maya).

 

The Greeks wouldn’t go that far. They were men of action and were much too pragmatic to develop the deeper and more esoteric notions of the East. And these two traditions stand out to separate some very strong tendencies in both Occidental and Oriental culture up to this very day. The West, starting with the Greeks, would develop its philosophical notions in a much more worldly manner, just as its religion would be more externally focused and historical rather than inward and mystical.

 

Eventually, as a matter of fact, some Western philosophers would go all the way to the other side of the board and assert that something as non-empirical as unity was not real at all! It was just a concept in our minds and nothing more. But it’s pretty difficult to imagine how the principle of unity could actually not be present in actual things, isn’t it?

 

I’ve already given you my example about a dog, remember? No? Well, then I’ll repeat it.

 

We observe that that the so-called dog is made up of many parts: it has eyes, a nose (or snout), mouth, legs, tail, fur, etc. We can go even deeper, inside the dog, and see that it has a heart, lungs, kidneys, blood, etc. We can get a microscope and see that all of these things are made up of tiny cells (which we presume have some principle of unity in themselves). But we cannot actually see the unity that we call the dog itself. We have to make an intuitive intellectual jump to say that all these parts somehow work together to form the unity we call a dog. But if that principle of unity is all in our heads, how the hell does the dog walk around, bark, wag his tail and chase cats? Somehow, unity has to be real! Doesn’t it?

 

Well, as I’ve indicated before, this is a place where we’re all going to have to be a little bit careful about here. And that’s because an 18th century German philosopher named Immanuel Kant is going to have a whole lot to say on this subject (among others). And after we’ve listened to him, we’re all going to, basically, have to choose up sides.

 

But let’s not let Kant spoil the party for now - philosophy is just getting going! And for now, we’ve made the incredibly exciting discovery that in order for anything to exist, there has to be a principle of unity!

 

And the same goes for the entire universe! When we conceive of the universe, we imagine an enormously vast system that all functions together, following "laws" of behavior. The entire universe is, in short, a unity. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be a universe - it would simply be chaos - a bunch of unrelated stuff floating around out there. It wouldn’t make any sense!

 

This concept of the entire universe, or to be even more grandiose, the entire concept of Being itself as a unity would soon serve as some very rich speculations about reality in the very near future, even for the Greeks.

 

But for now, we can simply note that Thales’ discovery of the notion of unity, and more specifically, Unity in Diversity, was essentially the beginning of both European science and philosophy. It was science because it proposed something physical, that one could (conceivably) test. But it was philosophic because it rested on a transcendent principle that could only be grasped through the use of pure reason.

 

So way to go, Thales! So what if you were wrong as a scientist? You still might be right as a philosopher! (We’ll just have to wait and see . . .)

 

Coming: Part 2!

 

- petey