>Lecture 2<
THE MILETIAN PHILOSOPHERS Thales (585 B.C.)
Anaximander (549 B.C.)
Anaximenes (546 B.C.)
Thales was considered as the founder of the Western philosophy. Those three philosophers not only came from the same city which is located in Asia Minor, but also they shared a common characteristic of searching the principle of the universe in Nature (in a material substance, i.e., one be an important exception (although it is possible that the direction in which Anaximander started philosophizing anticipated the later Greek philosophy). Particularly the relationship of Anaximander with his teacher, Thales, had a deciding influence in molding the Western philosophy in distinction from myth and mythology. This problem will be discussed the relationship between the attitude of Logos and that of Mythos.
Thales (585 B.C.)
Thales was known in his days and thereafter as one of the seven wisest men (oi sophistai = men of wisdom) of his days together with Solon, the great Athenian politician, who drafted the Constitution of Athens.
According to Herodotus I 170 in Diels-Kranz, This philosopher from Miletus was a "Phoenecian by ultimate descent..., although Herodotus implied further that almost all Miletians are racial mixtures of Greek and Carian. Further to see the elaborated by Diogenes Laertius I, 22.
- Now Thales, as Herodotus and Douris and Democritus say, was the son of Examyes as father and Cleobuline as mother, from the descendans of Theleus, who are Phoenilcian nobles from the line of Cadmus and Agenor... And he[Agenor] was enrolled as a citizen in Miletus when he came with Neileos, when the latter was exiledd from Phenicia.
However, it was generally contended by European classic philologists that Thales was a pure Greek.
According to Kirk and Raven, the authors of the Presocratic Philosophers for example, being Eurocentric andthus rather skeptical about the greater Egyptian heritages, only acknowledges possibly Thales's visits to Egypt and do not see the undeniable significant cultural influences.- It was the custom to credit the sixth -cedntury sages (notably, for esample, Solon) with visits to Egypt, the tranditiohal fountain-head of Greek science.Thaleas the earliest known Greek geometer had a special reason for being assoicated with the home of land (gh-)- measurement (metria‹gewmetriaÿ ....however, that he spent a considerble time there is uique and not persuasive.
It is also interesting to note that of course, Homer's reference to the Okeanos, which also seems to trace back to the Egyptian's understanding of Nile. Plutarch de Ls. et Osir. 34, 364D states, "They think that Homer also, like Thales, made water principle and birth of all things through learning from the Egyptians." According to Herodotus II, 107, "It seems to me that geometry was discovered from this source (sc. Re-measurement of holdings after the Nile's flood) and so came to Greece." Thus, Thales' visit to Egypt, whehter once or many time, while his stay was longer or shorter, must be fact and to not acknowledge of the Persian and Egyptian influences is selfdeceptive. Astronomy, Geometry, technical knoweldge in civil engineering (e.g., Thales was supposed to divert a portion of a river such that the original flow became shallower for the military to cross it.) and even this thought about water as the principle and genesis of the universe.
Thus, perhaps not all of Thales' knowledge and learning were obviously of purely Greek origins although his "wisdom" in approach could very well be his own. In fact it is more natural and correct to consider that Thales' major portion of learning and profound knowledge must derive from Egypt, Persia, the Babylonian-Mesopotamian heritages, which had been of a much higher civilization.
In order to understand, we may have to remind ourselves of the regularity of historical development between two distinct cultures.
Culture always flows from the higher to the lower just like water. This can be easily comprehended if we ask ourselves why the historical development of the Greek civilization started with Asia Minor's Greek colonies rather than anywhere else. They are neighbors west to Persia whose cultural origins went back to the Babylonian Mesopotamian civilizations. The naive ethnocentric contention that everything important originates in the West is no more than a prejudice.
If, for example, we globally look at the history of the humankind, the height of civilization was in the Near, Middle East and North Africa (and Greece) in the Prehistoric and Ancient ages: It was in the Far East (=China and her sister civilizations like Korea and Japan) in the Middle ages, and it was clearly in the West in the contemporary periods since Renaissance.
In his Metaphysics, Aristotle chose Thales as the founder of the Western philosophy: It is perhaps due to the following reasons according to our interpretation:
- 1) Thales sought the arché of all things and of the universe. This arché was understood as the principle of all things with more emphasis rather than the origin of the universe (the mythos').
- 2) Thales discovered this arché or principle in Water among Nature and comprehended everything else as a metamorphosis of Water, i.e., a material substance.
- 3) Thales pursued knowledge for its own sake, not for something else such as benefits, fame or wealth.
- 4) Unlike his predecessors in Egypt, Persia, etc., Thales "wondered" in order to set out to philosophize and pursue scientific investigations.
- 5) Thales started a critical, scientific investigation in the sense that he explicitly took the position of Logos in stead of that of Mythos.
- 6) Thales, Anaximander and Anaximes formed a remarkably scientific teacher-student relationship which became the model for how the tradition of the Western philosophy was followed.
Apart from being well known for his knowledge in mathematics and astronomy, Thales "wondered" the nature of things and he had a tendency to be involved quite often in a profound meditation and seemed to forget worldly things. Thales was supposed to hold an evolutionary theory. It is also told that Thales was laughed at by an ignorant maid servant, as he fell in a ditch while pensively observing the motion of some celestial body.
As a philosopher, however, Thales was referred to by Aristotle in his Metaphysics, Book 1-3,983b ff. as a researcher of the principle of all beings in nature:...Of the first philosophers, then, most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter (hé hylé) were the only principles of all things. That of which all things that are consist, the first from which they come to be, the last into which they are resolved (the substance remaining, but changing in its modifications)....this they say is the element and this the principle of things, and there they think noting is either generated or destroyed, since this sort of entity is always conserved, as we say Socrates neither comes to bed absolutely when he comes to be beautiful or musical, nor ceases to be when he loses these characteristics, because the substratum (hé hypokeimenon) Socrates himself, remains. Just so they say nothing else comes to be or ceases to be; for there must be some entity--either one or more than one--from which all other things come to be, it being conserved.
Yet they do not all agree as to the number and the nature of these principles. Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, says the principle is water (for which reason he declared that the earth rests on water), getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the nutrient for all things is moist, and that heat itself is generated from the moist and kept alive by it (and that from which they come to be is the principle of all things). He got his notion from this fact, and from the fact that water is the origin of the nature of moist things.
When we talk about Thales as the founder of the Greek and the Western philosophy, we must refer to "wonder," which Thales was credited to use for the first time to start philosophical and scientific inquiry. It is said that Thales "wondered" about the universe, the heaven and the earth, and their principles. What is this wonder?
What happens to the human-being and his/her way of "being in the world," when she/he "wonders" (qaumazein)? "Wonder" enables us to liberate ourselves from the immersion in the everyday, practical concern about ourselves and our milieu. When we live for our everyday life, the experience reveals itself as self-evident, just us e.g., all our actions in driving are self-evident work almost "automatically" when we have mastered the driving. Thus, everything is taken for granted and no question is asked, unless some particular problem or an "abnormality" occurs.
The "wonder" will allow us to awaken ourselves from the slumber of everyday practical concern. This wonder is not concerned about a particular event or a particular activity. On the contrary, we wonder about a universal, general question. In this sense, Thales wondered about the principles of the universe. He wondered about how the universe works, how the celestial bodies move (Is there any law or regularity among them?), and he wondered about the ultimate reality despite and behind the apparent plurality and variations of the experienced phenomena (ta polla). The object of wonder was not a specific problem or question, but was universal beyond the objects of our everyday, practical concerns. Therefore, the episode, according to which, seeing Thales falling into the ditch, a maidservant laughed at him who contemplated the heaven and wondered the universe. For Thales was totally incapable, so he appeared to her, of taking care of practical matter of life, while he was considered one of the seven wisest men.
Thus the "wonder" served and still serves as the starting-point of our philosophical inquiry. There is a great similarity between this wonder and the Cartesian methodological doubt in liberating us from our everyday practical concern, although there were also definitely many differences. Therefore, we may say that wonder and doubt in the sense of "questioning" is the most basic prerequisite for philosophical investigation (and sometimes also for scientific inquiry of nature and its advancement).
If we follow Aristotle and accept his understanding of ontology (=the discipline studying the nature and the principles of reality), then Thales apparently attempted to comprehend nature or the natural world as reality. Further Thales asked if there is one and only one principle from which all beings come and into which they decay. This one and the only one principle of reality was disclosed by Thales as Water. In Miletian philosophers, what was sought as the principle of all things was a material substance (perhaps Anaximander is an exception). ("hé ousia" [substance] is "that which becomes the subject of a proposition and does not become the predicate"(Aristotle's definition of "substance"based on the structure of language = "the being which exists by itself and does not need anything else for its existence"‹the ontological, Cartesian definition.)
Thus, according to Thales (understood by Aristotle), that which really exists (Being=the genuine Reality as such) is water and water alone, and all the other things which exist on the earth as nature are metamorphoses of water. The apparent main criteria to choose Water among the tradtional four elements, Fire, Air, and Earth, consisted in its unchanging character, its atemporality, and its origin-ness (being the orginin from which everything else comes and the source in which everything else perishes.) For example, air is an altered state of water, as well as earth is another altered state (become solid) of water, etc. Thus all natural entities and phenomena (Many) are explained by water (One) and its alteration (generation and corruption).
It is also clear that Thales was the first one who pursued knowledge for its own sake. Although he was well aware of its usefulness for many things and was capable of using it in such a vein (the anecdote about the profit about the olives), Thales's attitude of pursuit of knowledge was not motivated by any other than the fascination and intrinsic value of knowledge.
In stead of searching for the (historical, temporal) origin (arché) of the natural world, Thales distinguished himself from his predecessors and contemporaries who were to be called "wise" in the fact that he inquired into the principle (arché) of reality which can be witnessed by any one if he/she wanted to. This will be discussed later a little more in detail.
Here we discover the beginning of the natural scientific thinking and its fundamental approach.
- 1. Being as reality is dikscovered exclusively in Nature. (Perhaps not divergence between nature and human-being became conscious.)
- 2. Trying to reduce a variety of multiple phenomena as mere appearances to as few principles as possible.
- 3. These principles are called the genuine reality are to be a-temporal.
- 4. The variety of multiple phenomena are called phenomena or appearances and are explained by these principles and their alterations (generation and corruption).
- 5. These alterations must be empirically observable by any one and at any time either directly through experience or indirectly on the basis of some experimental tool.
Let us come back to Thales' contention that water is the principle of the universe (nature=physis). It is rather problematic to assume that Thales was the very one who for the first time conceived of Water as the primary (material) substance or principle of all things. It must have been inherited from somewhere else or from some one else, say from Egypt , just as his enormous knowledge of mathematics and astronomy must have come from the Babylonians.
Even within the Greek civilization, Homer (circa 1,000 B.C.) narrates that the gods and goddesses were born from the River called Okeanos (the Ocean) or Tethys River. It may very well be possible that Thales could have been influenced by Homer's description of the origin of the Greek divinities in order to conceive water as the principle of all.
However, needless to say, to merely speculate and state that the origin and principle (hé arché) of the universe be water does not make anyone the founder and father of Western Philosophy.
Hesiod (circa 700 B.C.) mentions in his Theogonia (The genealogy of Gods and Goddesses),
At the beginning of all things there was chaos. Now the Greek word ho chaos etymologically means a sudden yearning, an opening up a big mouth. In itself chaos did not imply the orderlessness, as the English concept does. The concept of chaos turned out this way, because already in Greek the concept of chaos was set in opposition to that of "cosmos" (ho kosmos), which only and primarily in the classic Greek implied "an order". Thus "chaos" implied "orderless."
Now Hesiod said further:
....then after the chaos, the Geier was born and then Tartaros, the husband of Geier and the father of Typhoeus (Tartaros is the nether world).
According to Hesiod, the next born was Eros (Love).Mythos and Logos
The difference between Homer and Hesiod and Thales, the father of Western Philosophy, may consist in three aspects:
The one is the element of "questioning" in the questioning search. It was in the form of "wonder" in Thales' case.
The second aspect has something to do with the very famous distinction between myth (ho mythos) and reason (ho logos):
The third aspect pertains to the ambiguous uses of hé arché; on the one hand, Thales used it in the meaning of the (scientific) principle of all beings for hé arché, whereas on the other hand, Homer and Hesiod used hé arché in the meaning of the origin of all things, which is common among the mythologies of the world (including the use in the Old Testament).
Mythos or myth may be understood as a tale or narration of what has been orally and through memory transmitted for generations as the religious, political or moral foundation of an ancient civilization or for a civilization without its own written language. The epic was narrated by such a great poets as Homer and Hesiod and by their successors. The content of the "tale" can only be made known to us through the mouth of the narrator, i.e., the words of the poet, thus what was narrated is vicarious, although it is dramatically and vividly told. In other words, it is not possible for us to experience or to confirm what is told.
Ho logos is sometimes translated into "word" (e.g., remember the first line of the Gospel According to St. John in the New Testament? That Greek word for the "word" is ho logos). Sometimes in philosophy, ho logos has been translated into "reason." "Ho logos" as language stands between the "narrator" and the "listener." By its nature, "ho logos" presupposes "ho dialogos," i.e., "dialogue," between two minds for inquiry. It presupposes a critical, rational discussion on a certain subject matter. It is an approach to properly understand rather than to believe. In stead of faith, knowledge is in question in the viewpoint of logos.
Ho logos or the logos is quite remarkably different from the narration in the case of a myth in that the logos or that which is told can be ascertained through anyone's experience or immediately confirmed by the listener after hearing the "words."
In the case of ho logos(or hoi logoi in the plural), the listener not only passively listens to the narrator, but also can actively participate in a dialogue or a dialectic with the narrator.
Heracleitus' famous fragment purports:
(Do) not (listen) to me, but listen to the logos and agree that the universe is one.
To "listen to me" may be characterized as the standpoint of myth and mythology, and in consequence, the religious standpoint.
To "listen to the logos" is the philosophical attitude or point of view, i.e., to actively inquire and ascertain the truth of the narrated. This is the standpoint of questioning search and scientific inquiry.
In this aspect mentioned above lies the essential difference between the epic poets and Thales and his followers, namely the Greek and Western philosophers.
The words spoken by Thales can be by their nature and were indeed examined critically and dialectically rethought by his students such as Anaximander and Anaximenes.
The other essential distinction between those epic poets (Homer and Hesiod) and Thales and the other philosophers (lovers of wisdom) consists in the very fact that Homer and Hesiod were narrating and describing the chronological and historical origin of the universe from which all things came into being, while Thales was concerned with the primary principle from which all beings in the universe come into existence and into which they vanish, as Aristotle described in his metaphysics I-3, quoted before.
Besides the distinction between the chronological origin and the principle (or the basic substance) of the universe regarding the meaning of the arché, it may be of importance to add that Thales by introducing and construing the arché as the principle of the universe (water) presents the philosophical question of "one and many" as a perennial one in the History of Western Philosophy even to the 19th Century European Philosophy.