Nobody will ever be sure who started it. It could be that some poor genius invented philosophy and then fell into the abyss of unwritten history before he could announce himself to posterity. There is no reason to think that such a person, but then there wouldn’t be. Happily, there are at least records of one start to philosophy, even if one cannot be certain that it was not preceded by other false starts.
Nowadays they are soberly studied in libraries and universities, but many of the earliest known philosophers made their first reputations in what could be regarded as a branch of show business. They appeared in public, often in resplendent clothes, and held discourses or recited poems. Such performances attracted passing audiences, devoted followers and sometimes ridicule. Some of these men were more outgoing than others. At one extreme is an itinerant poet, Xenophanes, who – purporting to be ninety-two at the time – apparently claimed to have spent ‘seven and sixty years… tossing my cares up and down the land of Greece’. At the other is a contemptuous aristocrat, Heraclitus of Ephesus (variously known in antiquity as ‘the dark’, ‘the weeping’, and ‘the onscure’), who on his own proud admission loathed all sages and the mobs who listened to them, and presumably kept himself to himself. Most of the early philosophers fell somewhere between these two extremes. This was in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, in parts of what are now Greece, Turkey and Italy.
Today these people are generally called the ‘Presocratics’, which marks the fact that nearly all of them had what some historians in the nineteenth century regarded as the misfortune of being born before Socrates (469-399 BC). One might as well leave this label around their necks; but in fact they were far from being a mere overture to the Socratic opera. As Nietzsche said, they invented the archetypes of all later philosophy. They also invented science, which in those days came to much the same thing.
The first of these miracle-men did not suddenly drop from the sky. Sixth-century (BC) Greece was not the dawn of time, and perhaps a case can be made for beginning even earlier, with rudimentary Babylonian geometry or early Greek religion. It may be said that the Presocratics, although fine thinkers, did not invent thinking itself, and that looking at some earlier efforts will help to clarify their ideas. But we are discussing history of philosophy, not of everything, and we have to start somewhere.
The place to begin is Miletus, one of the Ionian city-states on the coast of Asia Minor (now in Turkey). In the sixth century BC, when Thales Anaximander and Anaximenes flourished there, it was a rich sea power with many colonies to the north in Thrace and around the Black Sea, and commercial links with the parts of southern Italy, the east and Egypt. It was a cultivated place, giving some people the leisure which Aristotle was later fond of claiming to be a prerequisite for philosophy. Writing two centuries afterwards, Aristotle discussed these three men from Miletus several times. He divided early Greek thinkers into theologi, who saw the world as controlled by impetuous supernatural beings, and physici (naturalists), who tried instead to explain an apparently disordered world in terms of simpler and impersonal principles. He said that the Milesians were the first physici.
Many of the Presocratics wrote down their thoughts as well as holding forth in public, but you would hardly know it from what is left today. Their writings have been shattered by time and survive, if at all, only in tiny fragments. For some 2,000 years scholars have been poring over passages of little more than a few sentences, picking at a few words here and there, and depending heavily on secondary sources. Some ancient commentaries on these shards can be relied on at least to attempt accuracy. But even the best of them were written generations, or even hundreds of years, after the Presocratics lived. Other second – and third – hand sources, such as the writings of the often unreliable but most enjoyable biographer, Diogenes Laertius (who lived in the third century AD), need to be read with at least one eyebrow raised. Diogenes was an undiscerning whale of a historian who swallowed every story that floated by.
With these caveats in mind, consider Thales of Miletus. He was famed in ancient Greece for many things, the most famous of which he did not in fact do, namely predict an eclipse of the sun in 585 BC. The eclipse came during a battle between the Milesians’ two neighbours to the east – the Lydians and the Medes – which added to its dramatic impact. It made Thales’ intellectual fortune. The combatants were so impressed by the fact that there was an eclipse while they were fighting that they laid down their weapons and made peace. The Greeks in general were so impressed by the fact that Thales seemed to have predicted it that they later attributed to him an implausible number of wise words, wise deeds and discoveries, from the proofs of various geometrical theorems to the ability to make vast amounts of money. More importantly, they developed a deep respect for his way of thinking.
But Thales did not make a genuine prediction, just a lucky informed guess. In all likelihood he was so far from understanding the true nature of solar eclipses that he would not even have known that the moon had anything to do with it. Fortunately for him he was a well-travelled man and this explains his guess. From the painstaking records of observant Babylonian star-gazers, he would have learned of a cycle that seemed to be characteristic of eclipses in the past. There were certain years in which eclipses might happen and other years in which they could not. The most that he could reasonably have inferred from this record is that there was a fair chance that an eclipse would be seen from somewhere at some time during 585 BC. If Thales claimed anything more precise than that, he was bluffing.
The eclipse was a lucky break for the naturalists’ view of the world. Clearly they were thinkers to be reckoned with. This may seem odd when one considers the surviving details of their views, because the theories most reliably attributed to Thales are that magnets are alive and that the world is made of water. He probably also said many other less speculative things, which earned him the respect of his peers as a man of practical knowledge. But even these two apparently outrageous ideas deserve some respect when seen in their proper contexts.
Take water first. One distinguishing feature of what we now call a scientific account of things is that it should aim to be as simple as possible. Thales rather overshot this mark and tried to reduce everything to just one thing, namely water. It seems that he did not actually manage to come up with any watery explanations; these were, after all, early days. But in seeking a natural substance to unify and thus simplify the phenomena of the observable world, instead of making things more complicated by invoking lots of gods, he was at least looking for knowledge in what we now regard as the right sort of place.
It is not clear whether he really meant to say that everything consisted of water in some sense, or merely that it originally came from water. He may well have meant to say both. It is anachronistic but not necessarily too misleading to interpret him, as Aristotle did, as holding that water was the arche, a term used by some slightly later thinkers to mean not only the origin of things but also the fundamental substance of which everything somehow consists and to which it will ultimately return.
Either way, water was not a bad candidate for Thales to choose. Unlike the other common elements, such as earth or fire, water cab easily be seen to take on different forms, such as that of ice or steam. It is thus versatile and apparently active. Aristotle, when suggesting reasons why Thales might have favoured water, also noted its intimate connection with life. Flood, blood and semen all contain water; plants and animals are nourished by water. Living things tend to be moist, to some extent, and they dry up when they die. Many mythological accounts of the universe also gave water a leading role. The Babylonians and Egyptians both had creation myths in which water played a pre-eminent part. This is hardly surprising since both cultures depended on the rivers around which their people settled. In Homer (eighth century BC), Okeanos, the personified body of water surrounding the circular surface of the earth, is the begetter of all life and possibly of all gods. According to Plutarch (AD 46-120), Egyptian priests liked to claim that both Homer and Thales got their ideas about water from Egypt.
The Greeks appreciated intellectual order and liked to establish it wherever it seemed to be lacking. That is one reason why people study them. One facet of this desire to lay things out neatly can be found in the way they wrote their own history; in the ancient sources which tell the story of early philosophy, we find a stately procession of teachers and pupils, each one passing the torch of knowledge to an appointed successor. Thus Anaximander (610-546 BC), a slightly younger fellow-citizen of Miletus, was commonly said to be the ‘pupil and successor’ of Thales, though he may not have studied under him at all. Like Thales, Anaximander was a polymath, and although only a part of one sentence of his On Nature survives, there is enough evidence left to say that he definitely wrote s book, with approximately that title (in Greek), and that it covered practically everything. He even drew the first recognised map of the known parts of the earth. What he did not know about nature – which was, of course, plenty – he made up.
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Note: The above excerpts are taken from Anthony Gottlieb’s book The Dream of Reason.
Kalampedia 