Series | History of Ancient Western Philosophy, Pt. 2
Early Greek Philosophy — From Thales to Heraclitus
The Physikoi
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Hi everyone.
This is Part 2 in the series. You can find other entries here:
This entry will be the first of two articles covering the Pre-Socratic philosophers that Aristotle called the “Physikoi” — those who studied nature.
As I mentioned in Part 1, the early Greek philosophers lived in a rapidly changing world, both politically and geographically. So, it’s worth noting that the Greek word for nature — physis — connotes an organic principle of growth, still echoed in English words like physics, physiology, and physique.
When Roman scholars copied Greek texts into Latin centuries later, they chose the word natura as a translation for Greek physis…
But, natura is problematic because it replaces connotations of growth with that of birth — as it derives from natus, a root still found in English words like NATivity or pre-NATal.
So, even for the early pagan Romans, nature was what had already been birthed, the result of “Mother” nature… and this terminology was subsequently handed down to Medieval Europe.
For obvious reasons, this picture of nature as a genesis principle — antecedent to the human realm — was later amplified by the dispersion of Christianity.
As we take a closer look at each of these Physikoi, try to keep in mind their more pagan understanding, which understood the natural world in organic, dynamic terms of growth.
But, first, a spoiler…
Many early Greek philosophers were not from modern-day Greece!
One of the first things you may notice about early Greek philosophy is that many of the figures whose ideas have survived didn’t actually hail from the Greek peninsula.
It’s not clear why this is the case. It stands to reason there must have been writers on the mainland working on similar ideas, but… if there were, their writings have been lost to history.
In fact, the knowledge we DO possess of early Greek thinkers is mainly a product of later writers mentioning them in their own works. Whereever that occurs, scholars call it a “testimony.” When a later writer actually QUOTES from the work of one of these early thinkers, historians call that a “fragment.”
And, in a VERY FEW cases, archeologists actually have recovered PHYSICAL fragments from scrolls containing their words. After all, the concept of the bounded-book hadn’t yet been invented, so there weren’t any dust jackets to protect these ancient works from the elements.
And, since scrolls were usually rolled-up for storage, if anything survived, it would be the innermost passages.
As you can see from the map below, the Greek colonies in Asia Minor and the southern part of the Italian peninsula are where most of these thinkers lived.
Take a moment to study the map. You might notice that a handful of port cities appear to be the locus of much of this philosophical thought. What do you think a historian of philosophy might conclude from this fact?
Does it seem plausible that they could have had greater exposure than those in mainland Greece to ideas coming out of north Africa and Asia?
We’ll be starting this tour in Asia Minor, at the town of Miletus, the home of Thales. Pay special attention to how the coastline has changed since his time.
Consider why this change occurred and how it may have influenced the philosophers who lived there…
Thales — Material Monist or Ancient Animist?
If Socrates was the father of Western philosophy, then Thales might be regarded as its grandfather. He’s mentioned multiple times by both Plato and Aristotle, as well as by the historian Diogenes Laertius, but there are no fragments of his writings that have survived.
Plato called him one of the “Seven Sages” of high antiquity and there are several anecdotes about his life.
One tells of how he used his understanding of weather patterns to predict a bumper crop of olives and made a fortune by buying up all the olive presses before demand increased.
Another, immortalized in Aesop’s fables, pokes fun at him by suggesting his study of astronomy once led to him falling into a well while gazing at the stars.
Both accounts are probably apocryphal, but each lends its own spin to the kind of study of nature in which Thales was engaged.
Aristotle offers the most detailed account of what Thales’ thought, though he is careful when he speculates WHY Thales held the beliefs that were attributed to him. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle associates Thales with a kind of philosophy that we now call material monism — the notion that everything in the physical world is reducible to one type of stuff.
For Thales, it seems, this most basic element was water. Aristotle reports that Thales believed the earth floated on water and that everything that existed sprang from water.
You can see why Aristotle might exercise caution in explaining WHY Thales would’ve believed such things, as they seem incredible… even by ancient standards.
But, if you think like a historian of philosophy, you might see that such a view is not so far-fetched.
As the above map indicates, Thales’ hometown now sits more than two miles inland from the modern coastline. As the river the ancients called the Meander slowly wound its way through the mountains, it deposited enough silt to completely fill the bay that Miletus overlooked. Small islands that once dotted the bay have since been connected to the mainland through this gradual process.
During his lifetime, Thales would have witnessed what must have looked like earth literally rising up out of the sea — as small islands became larger and the docks of his youth slowly receded from the waterline.
But there’s perhaps another reason Thales posited water as the ultimate cosmic principle…
In another testimony, Aristotle recounts how Thales connected his belief that soul was the cause of motion to a conclusion that everything was full of gods. Philosophers today call such a position animism.
So, if one takes Thales’ position on water more metaphorically… perhaps his views about motion and soul can be integrated with his material monism.
After all, the ultimate principle of a growing, fluidly dynamic physis like the one Thales witnessed might be said to resemble water.
Anaximander and Anaximenes — The Other Milesians
Besides Thales, there were some other prominent Physikoi living in Miletus — including Anaximander and Anaximenes.
We know almost as little about these thinkers as we do about Thales. The one fragment we have by Anaximander comes from Theophrastus, who also tells us that Anaximander agreed with Thales that the cosmos had a single ordering principle — or archē — but that he thought such a principle must be something infinite and not elemental.
Instead, he posited something he called the apeiron (boundless).
Aristotle explains a little of WHY Anaximander must have believed this:
For there are some who make this (i.e. a body distinct from the elements) the infinite, and not air or water,- in order that the other things may not be destroyed by their infinity. They are in opposition one to another-air is cold, water moist, and fire hot-and therefore, if any one of them were infinite, the rest would have ceased to be by this time. Accordingly they say that what is infinite is something other than the elements, and from it the elements arise. (Aristotle, Phys. 204b 22)
Using Aristotle’s testimony, and a little philosophical ingenuity, we might arrive at an argument similar to one Anaximander may have employed.
If the cosmic archē was elemental, and the all elements are in opposition to one another — fire’s hot, air’s cool, earth’s dry, and water’s moist — then… if they are all finite, they should have canceled each other out long ago.
If one of them is infinite, it should have overtaken all the others by now.
And, if all are infinite, then we should witness no change in the world around us, at all.
Since we DO witness change, and we don’t live on a fireball or water-world, and all the elements are still around, then they can be neither infinite nor can they be ordering first principles.
So, Anaximander concluded there must be some OTHER infinite principle which both generates and sustains the dynamic opposition and interplay of the elements.
“This theme of constant and dynamic opposition, which takes place against the background of an underlying unity, is one of the most enduring features of Pre-Socratic philosophy.” — p. 12
Anaximenes likewise provided Western thought with an enduring idea — namely, that the human body is itself a microcosm, or, in other words, a tiny cosmos.
Historians of late antiquity and the middle ages claimed Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes existed in a student-teacher sequence which mirrored the relationship between Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This is probably untrue since those historians also tend to place ANY three thinkers from the same region into similar “schools” — even when their established dates make such relationships impossible!
Whether or not there actually was a school of Milesian monism, Anaximenes does seem to have borrowed some ideas from Thales and Anaximander. He believed there was an ultimate cosmic principle, that it was infinite, and that it was an element — only, it wasn’t water, but air.
Like Thales, Anaximenes probably arrived at this conclusion by observing the world around him.
Foggy mornings in a coastal town can certainly feel as if water is being generated out of thin air. And, one way to snuff out fire, as well as the fire of human life, is to deprive it of oxygen.
These crucial qualities of air, along with its versatility, probably made it seem, to Anaximenes, a perfectly reasonable candidate for cosmic archē.
Xenophanes — Iconoclastic Monotheism
As a rhapsode who also wrote against the Epic poets, Xenophanes’ life is symbolic of how complex the transition from the Archaic period to Classical period must have been.
He sought to preserve only the sorts of poetry which offered either a true description of the universe or held some social utility.
Though he valued the mythic tradition, he was skeptical of humanity’s ability to garner knowledge from it and rebuked the Homeric and Hesiodic portrayals of the gods for demonstrating the worst features of human frailty.
In fragment 15 — which is probably his most famous — we find what may be the first instance of the sentiment that “god was made in the image of man.”
“If oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.” DK 15
But, Xenophanes was neither an atheist nor a relativist.
He didn’t just offer an alternative account of the mythological universe he inherited, but rather an account of a universe that was ALTOGETHER different.
In fragments 29 and 33, he claimed that everything is born of earth and water, the admixture of which are the two primary bodies in a cyclical cosmogonic process, whose impulse is the mental power of a singular, completely whole god.
Human action, it is implied, is an imperfect reflection of this process and a harmony can only be achieved if one is able to hear the “true words” of mythic poetry — i.e. those elements which maintain social decorum.
In this way, Xenophanes anticipated what some have called “the god of the philosophers” — that is, a purely abstract, motionless and unknowable entity.
He thus sets up the distinction between true opinion and knowledge that would later be employed heavily in Plato’s philosophy.
Pythagoras — The Cult of Personality and Abstraction
We know much more about the tradition inspired by Pythagoras than we do the man himself.
Because his followers honored him like a divinity, it’s been difficult for contemporary researchers to separate fact from fiction — to the point where there’s doubt about whether he existed at all.
Despite the claims of ancient authors, we know the famous hypotenuse theorem which bears his name was discovered by someone other than Pythagoras.
If he DID exist, he almost certainly did not have a GOLDEN THIGH, nor is it likely he drowned one of his acolytes for discovering irrational numbers. Likewise, he probably didn’t die because he refused to trample over a bean field (see Critchley, 2009).
But, it MAY be true that he inspired two different groups of followers: the religious acousmatikoi and the mathematikoi — a group with which the phrase “All is number” has been associated.
It’s this latter group that’s had the larger impact on the history of ideas — inspiring thinkers like Plato, Iamblichus, Hypatia, Galileo, Kepler, and Stephen Hawking — especially through the notion that the heavenly bodies moved through the sky in a mathematical ratio mirrored in the musical scale — which Pythagoras called “the harmony of the spheres.”
It appears the mathematikoi Pythagoreans extended that harmony to include the human soul, as well, so that ethical behavior may have been a way, for them, to mirror the mathematical order of the cosmos.
This might link up with the acousmatikoi’s claim that Pythagoras believed in reincarnation. Since number was seen as the ruler of all cosmic forms and the soul is a microcosm of that celestial order, then the soul should be considered immortal and its thoughts likewise ruled by mathematics.
If we read it this way, the influences on Plato become pretty obvious — especially if one takes seriously what he wrote about the immortality of the soul and its connection with eternal Ideas.
In other words, we may here have an early example of dualism. As Peter Adamson puts it,
“The soul postulated by the dualist has a great deal in common with numbers. Both are abstract, immaterial entities and look like they will always exist, assuming they exist at all. How are you going to kill an immaterial soul, or assassinate the number seven?” — p. 29
As Plato’s philosophy slowly morphed into neo-Platonism and subsequently became linked with Christian doctrine, these aspects of the Pythagorean philosophy were increasingly invoked.
On my first trip to the Greek island Samos — the alleged birthplace of Pythagoras — I was surprised to find a monument to him which situated his love of geometry within the context of Christian iconography.
It showed Pythagoras standing under (what locals claimed) was a leaning cross, pointing up to the angle it created.
All that anachronism aside, the religious interpretation of Pythagoras probably isn’t the best entry point for understanding his philosophy.
For my money, one of the best introductions to Pythagoras and his thought is still the 1959 Disney short “Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land.”
If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing it, I recommend you give it a watch.
Heraclitus — Breaking Tradition with Riddles
In my day-job as a professor of philosophy, I’m supposed to remain objective and not play favorites, but that’s REALLY tough when it comes to Heraclitus.
He was deliciously cantankerous and I think it’s safe to say he was THE most ICONOCLASTIC of the ancient iconoclasts. He called the epic poets fools and Pythagoras a fraud!
Even by the time of Aristotle, Heraclitus had already become known as “the Riddler” because of his strange, yet beautiful aphorisms — a style that would later inspire the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche.
You’ve probably heard Heraclitus associated with a philosophical concept known as “flux,” because of his statement, “you cannot step into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.”
Like the other Pre-Socratics, many interpret Heraclitus as a metaphysical monist — one who thought everything was reducible to fire, which best displayed his principle of constant change.
I’d offer a word of caution here, though. Heraclitus’ view of change is subtler than it appears. Aagin, according to Peter Adamson,
“the flux interpretation of Heraclitus is wrong, and it’s all Plato’s fault. It’s Plato, in his dialogue the Theaetetus, who sets up this neat opposition between the unity theory of Parmenides and the radical flux theory of Heraclitus.” — p. 33
One assertion that we CAN feel warranted in making is that the way Heraclitus has been used by many later thinkers enamored with the notion of change, is utterly facile.
The cartoon of Heraclitus’s view as simply a theory of “flux” either ignores or glosses over the evidence in many fragments suggestive of a much more complex view.
There’s one fragment in particular — which likens the cosmos to the bow or the lyre — where he presents an idea known as the “harmony of opposites,” that could be considered counterevidence to the simplistic “flux” interpretation.
The received version of this fragment, however, actually has a key word smudged out, so there’s some dispute about whether it should be read as “stretching back” or “turning back.”
“Men do not know how that which is drawn in different directions harmonizes with itself. The harmonious structure of the world depends upon harmony of opposites (back-stretching or back-turning) like that of the bow and the lyre.” (B51)
This is one of those disputes in Ancient philosophy that’s still unsettled, but I’ll spare you those details… suffice it to say, if one reads it as ‘back-stretching’ this statement sounds like its about a static tension of opposites, but if you read it as ‘back turning’ then it sounds more like a dynamic oscillation of ebb and flow.
As you might imagine, that’s a pretty significant difference! I’ll leave it up to you to decide for yourself which you prefer.
In any case, Heraclitus was most certainly a complex thinker, whose ideas ought to be wielded carefully, and there’s ample evidence of how this standard is not being met within contemporary philosophy.
That’s enough for this entry.
In Part 3 we’ll continue our whirlwind tour through Pre-Socratic thought — including a look at Parmenides, Zeno, and the Pluralists.
See you there!
