The last of the three famous Milesian philosophers was a student of Anaximander known as Anaximenes (circa 586-526 B.C.E.). He incorporates the oneness and infinity of his predecessors with a definite material principle, air, the elusive and the invisible. The constituents of the world differ in their nature by rarity and density; the finest is fire, the most dense is stone. He is the first thinker to recognize that qualitative differences reduce to differences in quantity; i.e. there is no separation. Change is due to eternal motion. Thus infinite air is God and the principle form which all things are becoming. Aetius summarizes his philosophy elegantly, “…air is the principle of existing things; for from it all things come-to-be and into it they are again dissolved. As our soul, he says, being air holds us together and controls us, so does the wind and air enclose the whole world.”2
What I find most fascinating about the Milesians is their attempt to define a fundamental explanation of reality based on only inchoate or primitive science. They astutely reflect on their experience of the world to extract and propose limited, but scientific explanations. They also are the first to Western thinkers to acknowledge the real world as the only world, while positing a primeval ‘substance’ or ‘principle’ as its origin. Their theory of God is a more sophisticated concept than we expect of their epoch – no longer taking human form, but a more abstract and expansive configuration. Thales appears to be the first recorded pantheist, and his thinking anticipates the idea of the universe as organism as developed by Alfred North Whitehead. Anaximander’s ‘indefinite’ seems remarkably similar to the modern concept of the quantum flux of modern physics. Anaximenes air seems to me to be the quantum void or perhaps space which sets up the intriguing possibility that his infinity might be time creating the earliest notion of Einstein’s space-time.
Next we will see how the later Greek atomists built on the thoughts of the Milesians to arrive at a prophetically modern view of ultimate reality. Join me then.
“Everything is full of gods.” – Attributed to Thales.
For Thales, water is the most fundamental element and the material principle of the physical world. Water instantiates the three phases of matter – solid, liquid, and gas – as ice, liquid water, and steam or vapor. Aristotle tells us that Thales probably drew on water as primary because he recognized its key connection to life. Metaphysically then, the universe is a growing, organic, structure penetrated by a divine will that moves all and all things contain a ‘soul’ which is the source of kinesis.
“Heraclitus somewhere says that all things are in process and nothing stays still, and likening existing things to the stream of a river he says that you would not step twice into the same river. – Plato, Cratylus (402a)1
This flux and logos is embodied in strife among opposites that ultimately form a unity. These opposites fall into four overlapping categories: (1) logical – for example the same road leads up and down or the place of a point at the beginning and end of a circle, (2) fundamental – sea water is sustaining to fish, but poisonous to humans, (3) perceptual – for example; health and disease or hunger and satiety, and (4) connective – as in a harmony of notes. A balance of the constituent opposites provides for the continuation of strife that underlies the flux and generates the world.
“Nay, by him that gave to our generation the tetractys, which contains the fount and root of eternal nature.” – Aetius, I, 3, 8 (Pythagorean oath)1
The Pythagoreans “saw simply the ultimate, single, nature (physis) of things in their mathematical structure.”3 One number of particular importance is 10, the very essence of number as it represents the sum of the tetrad – 1+2+3+4. In physical space 1 represents a point, 2 a line, 3 a triangle, and 4 a pyramid; thus encompassing the dimensions of space and the principles of all things.4
The last two chapters of Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture are almost wistful summaries of his personal philosophy and philosophical experience based on a physicalist perspective of the universe. The penultimate chapter, Listening to the World, lists his ‘Ten Considerations’ as alternatives to the Ten Commandments; 23
Carroll closes by noting that poetic naturalism is “a rich and rewarding way to apprehend the world, but it’s a philosophy that calls for a bit of fortitude.”25 However we can choose to not to drift in a ‘purposeless’ cosmos aware of our finitude. Like Camus’ Sisyphus, we can find meaning in the tasks we choose and ultimately find ways of “mattering for ourselves and those around us in the brief amount of time we have in the world.”26
The final section called Caring begins with a chapter titled Three Billion Heartbeats (an average human lifespan) where he reiterates our mortality and the limits of the purpose of our existence. The quest for the good life, for meaning, and for a framework of morality are not found in the realm of science, but in ourselves. Poetic naturalism rejects a teleological inclination built into the universe and views “meaning in the same way we view other concepts that human beings invent to talk about the universe.”21 While there is no standard by which we are guided; what can be said is that we evolved to care about the world, that consciousness emerged allowing learning and self-reflection, and that meaning comes from real life.
He concludes with the following: “Poetic naturalism doesn’t tell us how to behave, but it warns us away from the false complacency associated with the conviction that our morals are objectively the best. Our lives are changing in unpredictable ways; we need to be able to make judgements with clear eyes and an accurate picture of how the world operates. We don’t need an immovable place to stand; we need to make our peace with a universe that doesn’t care what we do and take pride in the fact that we care anyway.”22
