Category: THE MEANING OF LIFE

“Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears, and in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it. Will not that man reach reality?” – Plato, Phaedo (66a).

Last time we finished our analysis of the pre-Socratic concept of ultimate reality settling on the one existing intelligible world governed by logos and pervaded by energy, thought, and opposites. Today we move forward to classical Greece where we learn of a different sort of ultimate reality developed by Socrates and refined by his pupil, Plato, famously known as the Theory of Forms (or Ideas). Chronologically they are first presented in Symposium, argued in Phaedo, expounded in Republic, and defended in Timaeus and Philebus.¹

However, before we get ahead of ourselves, it is worth noting that three interlocking principles inform ultimate reality for Plato: “god,” “soul,” and the Forms. Plato’s deity is ill defined in Timaeus, simply designated as the ‘supremely Good’ responsible for bringing order out of chaos. Meanwhile soul is the incorporeal and immortal intelligence attendant to “god” and, in a lesser iteration, inhabiting the human body. For Socrates and Plato, this intelligence within us (or soul) cognizes directly the Forms which can be brought to consciousness by any of us as a ‘remembering’  through the process of contemplative thought. This human intelligence or soul likewise seeks to access virtue via knowledge or wisdom and, as such, is the locus within man which, Socrates teaches, requires particular care.

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¹Edwards, Paul (editor), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1972. Volume 6, page 320.

“Synthesis in general… is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious.” – Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

In the last 10 posts we have reviewed ultimate reality as conceived by the 10 most prominent thinkers from a key two-century epoch of the ancient Greek world. We are left now with the task to synthesize their varying thoughts into a coherent whole. Given we only have second-hand fragments of the lifetimes of the thinking of these immortals, I ask to be excused if I use a bit of imagination in this endeavor.

Our obvious starting point is their consistent belief that there is, in fact, a fundamental principle or group of principles underpinning reality. Reality, for the ancient Greek philosophers, is not at its foundation chaotic and opaque, but intelligible and scrutable – and specifically intelligible to human beings. This intelligibility emanates from a logos, reason, or thought, perhaps even a “mind.” The logos in turn manifests as universal order.

Reality is also solitary – a unit – instantiated in the real world, which is to say in corollary there are not multiple worlds. The great unifying quality is existence or being which conjoins the material with thought or soul. Ultimately the unit as unit is uncreated and indestructible. Whereas the material is constructed of fundamental elements such as atoms or four basic physical states that amalgamate into the unit, the non-material governs or pervades the unit and to some extent its elements.

Reality also expresses a prismatic force or energy at times manifest as attraction and repulsion, at others as mixing and unmixing, and still others as creation and destruction. Within this stew is a fundamental principle of balanced opposites – the limited and the limitless, Love and Strife, the perceivable and the imperceptible, the pure and the impure, the spatial and the non-spatial.

So in summary, the ancient Greek concept of ultimate reality can be restated thusly: there is one true, existential, intelligible world, governed by logos and consisting of matter and thought or soul, infused with energy, and pervaded by opposites. Nothing in modern science disproves or even challenges this cosmic view in spite of its formulation through reason alone by these science-naïve ancient sages.

“All things were together. Then thought came and arranged them.” – Anaxagoras (quoted by Digenes).¹

 

 

The last of the pre-Socratic theories of ultimate reality I wish to discuss is that of Anaxagoras (circa 500-428 B.C.E.). While he was born in Clazomenae on the coast of Asia Minor, he spent his productive years in Athens as a friend of Pericles and Euripides, but like Socrates and Aristotle was eventually spurned by the Athenians and exiled to Lampsacus where he died shortly thereafter. Like Parmenides and Empedocles, Anaxagoras denied that things could be newly generated or entirely destroyed. In his view however, motion is possible and change occurs, and our faculties are reliable if properly used. He denies there is a basic element underlying matter. Everything began as an infinite gaseous ball, and the cosmos came about as distinct entities separated out of that undifferentiated mass.

He brought two unique doctrines to the dialogue on ultimate reality. First as things separated none became completely segregated which is to say there is no pure stuff. Thus every bit of matter contains a portion, no matter how small, of every other kind of matter. For example, an ingot of seemingly solid gold is never 100% gold, but contains infinitesimal portions of every other kind of matter. Accordingly there is no ‘smallest’ piece of any element; all can be infinitely divided.

His second, and more salient, doctrine is his belief that the original cosmogenic force was mind or thought (Nous). Thought is alone, singularly pure, limitless (ungraspable?), and self-ruled, and pervades all things. Thought is not only the knowledge of everything, but also the greatest power. Anaxagoras tells us thought arranged the undifferentiated mass into the cosmos, though it is unclear whether by this he means there is an ‘intelligent design.’ Nous or mind caused a rotation of the undifferentiated mixture resulting in the separation of objects “in which now revolve the stars and the sun and the moon and the air and the ether…”²

Anaxagoras then is a dualist – ultimate reality consists in the intelligible and the perceivable.³ Durant explains thought is “akin to the source of life and motion in ourselves.”⁴ Nous implies a teleology or ordering of things initiated by thought and a cosmic intelligence which also explains our intelligence. The physical description of reality espoused by Anaxagoras aligns with modern field theory whereas other pre-Socratics, especially the Atomists, elicit a form of particle theory.⁵

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¹Barnes, Jonathan, Early Greek Philosophy. Penguin Books, London, England, 2001. Page 185.

²Ibid.,page 191,

³Ibid.,page 192.

⁴Durant, Will, The Life of Greece, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966. ISBN 0-671-41800-9, page 339.

⁵Honderich, Ted (editor), The Oxford Guide to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-534093-8, page 32-33.

Affixed to Empedocles’ material version of ultimate reality as four basic substances and two opposing forces are non-material elements. On the one hand he believes in a form of “radical panpsychism” whereby all matter is endowed with thought and sensation and as such thought, like matter, obeys the laws of combination, attraction, and repulsion.⁷ On the other hand he believes in the pre-existence of the soul, that is, the life principle which appeared ex nihio nihil ⁸ Mortal beings are occupied by errant souls⁹ who undergo reincarnation in many forms. This leads to a parallel of his religious and scientific teachings: the primeval sin of daimon (corporeal human) coming from strife versus the fellowship of purified spirits through love and affection. He proposes a process of purification via the ritual abstinence from meat and some other foods (such as beans) which in his view come from ensouled beings.¹⁰ In this way Empedocles envisions the process of nature and spirit as two aspects of a single whole.

Empedocles offers somewhat conflicting ideas of deity. In one sense, the primordial cosmic sphere is a “god.”¹¹ But in another sense his ultimate deity is the power of Love (Aphrodite). Alternatively a third possibility is that he is the first of the Greeks to form a “notion of an invisible, incorporeal, non-anthropomorphic deity characterized as ‘holy mind ‘alone darting through the whole cosmos with rapid thoughts.”¹² Will Durant concludes that for Empedocles, God is not approachable – “He is only mind”¹³

We can extract from our discussion a more contemporary scientific understanding of ultimate reality in the thinking of Empedolces. Earth, air, and water represent solid, gas, and liquid, the three states of matter understood by modern science. Fire represents energy proven to be interchangeable with matter by relativity theory. His concept of Love seems remarkably similar to our concept of gravity at the cosmic level and chemical bonds and the strong and weak nuclear forces at the microcosmic level. Strife is reborn as entropy in modern science, but may also be shorthand for the explosive force that arose from the big bang. Thought and the mind are his recognition of the ineffability and unique place of consciousness on the one hand and the intelligible order of the universe on the other; or perhaps he is suggesting the universe may have its own consciousness.

In another sense however, I think Empedocles may be using the word ‘love’ as a hint of the connection between the fundamental nature of reality and the key force humans have for each other and for the world at large. In this sense he may portend the teachings of the Stoics by more than a century and of Jesus by over four centuries.

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⁷Edwards, Paul (editor), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1972. Volume 2, page 497.

⁸Ibid., page 498.

⁹Barnes, Jonathan, Early Greek Philosophy. Penguin Books, London, England, 2001. Page xlii.

¹⁰ Edwards, Paul (editor), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1972. Volume 2, page 498.

¹¹Ibid.

¹²Ibid.

¹³Durant, Will, The Life of Greece, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966. ISBN 0-671-41800-9, page 357.

“He makes the material elements four in number, fire, air, water, and earth, all eternal, but changing in bulk and scarcity through mixture and separation; but his real first principles, which impart motion to these, are Love and Strife.” – Simplicius (speaking of Empedocles).¹ 

So far we have reviewed the pre-Socratic theories of ultimate reality as formulated by Pythagoras, Heraclitus, the Milesians, Democritus, and Parmenides – in brief, roughly as mathematics or number, change (fire), variations of theoretical or deductive physics, and Being as a whole. There remain two prominent thinkers who offer original concepts of ultimate reality from this period: Empedocles and Anaxagoras.

Empedocles (circa 494-434 B.C.E.) was from Acragas, a Greek city in Sicily. He was influenced by Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, but reconfigured the various systems of his time into a novel theory of reality. His surviving thoughts of about 470 verses include those from his more scientific treatise called On Nature and from a more theological work called Purifications. Empedocles originated the classical Greek principle that all material reality is composed of four primary elements – earth, air, fire, and water. In his system these four elements are subjected to two fundamental opposing forces – Love and Strife.

Like Parmenides, Empedocles does not believe that anything can arise from nothing nor that any existing entity can become entirely non-existent. In his words, “Fools…fancy that that which formerly was not can come into being or that anything can perish and be utterly destroyed.”² Instead there is a constant mixing, unmixing, and remixing of permanent materials. He labels Love (sometimes Aphrodite) as the force by which materials are attracted to each other in a comprehensive fashion to create a single primordial ball and in a partial fashion to create planets, land masses, and biological organisms including humans. Thus, regarding the cosmos, he tells us, “Equal [to itself] from every side and quite without end, [it] stays fast in the close covering of Harmony, a rounded sphere rejoicing in [its] circular strutcture,”³

He designates as Strife the counter-force that dissociates these combinations leading to the apparent disappearance of entities and the reappearance of elements that can be reconfigured by Love into new entities. Moreover there is a continuous cycle of the cosmos coming together into a single whole followed by a disintegration of all physical matter into the world of plurality we experience. The “life cycle of the universe thus oscillates between the poles of unity and diversity.”⁴ And the reconfigured parts adhere in random arrangements such that some are well-adapted to survival – an uncanny anticipation of Darwinian evolution.⁵ It turns out the microcosm of living beings mimics “the principles of elemental mixture, harmony, and separation at work.”⁶

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¹Allen, Reginald E., Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle. The Free Press, New York, NY, 1966. Page 51.

²Ibid., page 50.

³Ibid.

⁴Edwards, Paul (editor), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1972. Volume 2, page 496.

⁵Honderich, Ted (editor), The Oxford Guide to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-534093-8, page 242.

⁶Edwards, Paul (editor), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1972. Volume 2, page 497.

Heidegger also tells us that when Parmenides tells us that ‘Being and thinking are the same’ he refers to  the reciprocal relation or ‘being-together’ of noein – apprehension, or the decision for being against nothingness – and einai or Being. And logos [reason] is the ‘ground of human being’ and intimately bound with “krinen, cutting as de-ciding, in carrying out the gathering to the gatheredness of Being.”¹⁶

Having now seen how the idealist and the atheist interpret Parmenides, we turn to Paul Tillich for the theologian’s understanding of his metaphysic. In his Systematic Theology, Tillich tells us, “According to Parmenides, the basic ontological structure is not being but the unity of being and the word, the logos in which it is grasped. Subjectively is not only an epiphenomenon, a derived appearance. It is an original phenomenon although only and always in a polar relation with objectivity.”¹⁷And “Parmenides realized that in speaking of nonbeing one gives it some kind of being which contradicts its character as the negation of being. Therefore he excluded it from rational thought. But in doing so he rendered the realm of becoming unintelligible and evoked the atomistic solution which identifies nonbeing with empty space, thus giving it some kind of being.”¹⁸ But in any case, “being and logos of being cannot be separated.”¹⁹

Despite these learned interpretations I have struggled to fit Parmenides’ concept of Being as absolutely one and unchanging with the undeniable plurality and temporality we experience of the world. Some authors suggest the Way of Truth is the way an immortal looks at the world sub specie aeternitatis, whereas the Way of Seeming is the way mortals see the world in time.^20,21 For me this comes down to thinking of the universe and reality as analogous to a finished movie, static in its entirety but experienced dynamically within its individual frames, much as Brian Green conceives of space-time like a loaf of bread wherein each slice action takes place. Perhaps Parmenides considers existence not only a noun, but also an adjective – e.g. an existing bird versus a non-existent dinosaur. In that case, the characteristic of being (existing) is the fundamental unifying concept underpinning all constituents of reality and thus in that sense is ultimate. Alternatively I think Parmenides may be pre-empting any discussion of the possibility of other worlds since only the one that exists incorporates the critical feature of being. Consequently this ‘one-being’ is synonymous with ‘Truth’ in the sense of correspondence with reality.

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¹⁶Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Metaphysics. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000. ISBN 0-300-08328-9, page 178-185.

¹⁷Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1967. ISBN 0-226-80336-8. Volume 1 p. 173.

¹⁸Ibid., page 186-187.

¹⁹Ibid., page 251.

²⁰Edwards, Paul (editor), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1972. Volume 6, page 49.

²¹Space forces me to omit a discussion of the attack by some scholars on Parmenides’ use of the verb “to be” in its existential not copulative sense. See Edwards, Paul (editor), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1972. Volume 6, page 50.

But an interesting dilemma arises as well – speculative philosophy is theoretically complete as any thinking of something other than the truth of the ‘inseparably one’ is illusion.⁵ Parmenides, it turns out, is the original proponent of the theory of the two worlds,⁶ although some scholars believe Parmenides is not denying the existence of the ordinary world of plurality, only the possibility of any knowledge of it. In short Parmenides is arguing that sense experience is not the avenue to truth.⁷ What’s more, using reason alone, he seems to have created the first philosophical demonstration in history.⁸

The propositions of Parmenides are so puzzling that I would like to explore his thoughts further from the perspectives of three later philosophers starting with Plato. In his dialogue, Parmenides, the young Socrates meets the older Parmenides who instructs Socrates in the method of Elenchus, often called the ‘Socratic method’ of question and answer. Parmenides is seen as proving the truth of his belief not only by arguing for what is postulated but the impossibility of its opposite. Thus Socrates notes that Parmenides is saying “All is one,” while his disciple Zeno is saying “There is no many.”⁹ Plato summarizes Parmenides’ main point: the one can have no parts, thus no beginning, middle or end, and as such is unlimited, formless, without location, unmoving, unchanging, immeasurable (i.e. defying any kind of measurement), outside time, and unnamed or unnameable.¹⁰ However, when I attempt to follow Parmenides’ extended arguments in the dialogue, I find them hopelessly unfathomable.

In his masterpiece, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger pursues a different approach to the metaphysics of Parmenides using his  characteristic phenomenological argot, “Being is that which shows itself, in the pure perception which belongs to beholding, and only by such seeing does Being get discovered. Primordial and genuine truth lies in pure beholding.”¹¹ According to Heidegger, Parmenides was the first in the West to discover the “Being of entities” and the association of truth and Being.¹² “The goddess of Truth who guides Parmenides, puts two pathways before him, one of uncovering, one of hiding; but this signifies nothing else than Dasein [human being] is already both in the truth and in untruth. The way of uncovering is achieved only in… distinguishing between these understandingly, and making one’s decision for the one rather than the other.”¹³

Heidegger offers a second commentary on Parmenides in his Introduction to Metaphysics where Parmenides often seems like the main character. Parmenides’ three ways can be summarized as (1) the path to Being and un-concealment, which is unavoidable, (2) the path to not-Being, which is inaccessible, and (3) the way of seeming (or becoming), which is the erroneous concealment of being and which is accessible, but avoidable.¹⁴ Heidegger believes we must travel all three paths explaining, “The man who truly knows is not the one who blindly runs after a truth but only the one who constantly knows all three ways, that of Being, that of not-Being, and that of seeming. Superior knowing – and all knowing is superiority – is granted only to one who has experienced the sweeping storm of the way of Being, to whom the terror of the second way to the abyss of Nothing has not remained foreign, and who has still taken over the third way, the way of seeming, as a constant urgency.”¹⁵

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⁵Jaspers, Karl, The Great Philosophers, Volume II. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1966. , page 30.

⁶Ibid., page 33.

⁷Honderich, Ted (editor), The Oxford Guide to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-534093-8, page 682.

⁸Allen, Reginald E., Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle. The Free Press, New York, NY, 1966. Page 14

⁹Plato, Parmenides, Encyclopaedia Britanica, 1952. The Great Books, Volume 7, page 487.

¹⁰Ibid., pages 494-495.

¹¹Heidegger, Being and Time. Harper & Row Publishers, New York and Evanston, 1962. Page 215.

¹²Ibid., page 256.

¹³Ibid., page 265.

¹⁴Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Metaphysics. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000. ISBN 0-300-08328-9, page 117.

¹⁵Ibid., page120.

“It is necessary to say and to think that being is, for it is possible for it to be, but it is not possible for ‘nothing’ to be.” – Parmenides.

In our review of pre-Socratic theories of ultimate reality, we have examined the mathematical conception of Pythagoras, the almost mystical assertions of Heraclitus, and the theoretical physics of the Milesians and the atomists. Our next thinker, Parmenides (circa 540-480 B.C.E.) adopts an entirely novel approach which challenges the validity of the thinking of the others and deploys pure logic to arrive at the earliest existentialist view of reality.¹

Born in Elea, a Greek port city on the Italian peninsula, Parmenides left behind some 130 verses of a poem (On Nature) describing an imaginary encounter with a goddess in a celestial realm. She reveals two routes to knowledge: the ‘Way of Truth’ (or the ‘Path of Persuasion,’ aka aletheia) and the ‘Way of Seeming’ (or ‘Appearances” or mortal opinion, aka doxa).  Most of what remains of the poem concerns the former.

Using an ontological-like argument, Parmenides states Being either is or it is not, but since Nonbeing is unthinkable, Being must exist and Nonbeing cannot. We learn that the fundamental sustainer of the philosopher’s life is the actuality of being; it is his peace (hesychia). Being cannot be expressed in terms of anything else; it can only be contemplated. Thinking and being are in fact the same as Descartes is later to discover.²

But pure thought and logic impose other features on Being. It is unborn as existent things cannot arise from nothingness. Likewise it is imperishable: how can Being become nothingness? Being is also one, cohesive, continuous, and indivisible otherwise there would be nothingness dividing it into parts. It is also unique as nothing can exist outside of Being. It is whole on all sides, comparable to a sphere – equal in all dimensions from its center. Last it is changeless, or as Parmenides says “It is immovable in the limits of its mighty bonds without beginning or cessation…the same and abiding in the same [place], it is set by itself, and thus it abides there firm and unmoved.”³

The journey to it is thought itself, the yearning for truth. This is not thinking in the common sense, but an authentic thinking “in the nous” on being as a whole, not split or differentiated. It is a transcendental thinking, imageless, pre-categorical or trans-categorical. Thinking has become an absolute. So informed, we can readily identify the erroneous path of the Way of Appearance where illusion arises from the splitting of the one into the many by “name-giving” that leads to belief in the “half-being.” ⁴  For example, the seeming opposites, such as night and day or hot and cold, are deceptions.

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¹In the interest of brevity I will not discuss his followers, Zeno of Elea and Melissus, but note that the three together are often called the Eleatics. Parmenides is by far the most influential of the three, while Zeno comes across more as a sophist-logician, and Melissus offers little that is original.

²Jaspers, Karl, The Great Philosophers, Volume II. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1966. Page 25.

³Ibid., page 26.

⁴Ibid., page 27-28.

“Nothing happens at random, but everything from a rational principle and of necessity.” – Leucippus.¹

Continuing now with the views of ultimate reality of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, we leave behind the insights of the Milesians and move to the Atomists – Leucippus and Democritus. Little is known of Leucippus, not even his dates or birthplace, though he is thought to have lived in the fifth century B.C.E. His comprehensive account of the universe, Great World-System, is lost to history, but according to Aristotle he was the originator of atomism. Our knowledge of his theories survive mainly second hand and through fragments of his successor, Democritus (circa 460-370 B.C.E.), who wrote lost works on astronomy, other natural sciences, mathematics, epistemology, and ethics.²

Leucippus and Democritus can be seen as the earliest theoretical physicists who derived their theories from an uncanny deduction, rather than from scientific induction. In responding to Parmenides who denied the possibility of change and of non-being, the Atomists concluded, “Not-being exist as much as being.”³ Not-being for the atomists is space, also called the “void” or “nothing” or the “infinite,” while Being is atoms, also called the “compact.” Their argument is simple enough; if perceptible objects are continually divided into progressively smaller parts, there must be at last the smallest parts which can no longer be divided. This indivisible matter – a-tomon meaning “uncuttable”⁴ – is not perceptible and is continuously in motion. Differences in perceptible objects reflect differences in the shape, arrangement, and position of atoms of varying sizes. Logically, space or “what is not” is required for motion to be possible.

Some remarkable consequences of these simple deductions follow. First, matter and objects are generated by the joining of atoms and undone by the dissolution of the aggregates.⁵ Second, the motions of the atoms responsible for the material world are determined, that is the explanation of natural processes is mechanical, meaning physical laws, not intelligent design. Third, changes in the universe are quantitative rather than qualitative, that is, subject to mathematical reasoning. For example, Democritus is the first to realize that variation in weight may be due to differences in numbers of atoms.⁶ Fourth, color, sound, and taste are secondary qualities incident to the interaction of atoms with the sense organs;⁷ thus Democritus anticipates Kant’s theory that we cannot know the thing-in-itself. Last, again using only deduction, Democritus explains how the heavenly bodies come into existence: large groups of atoms become isolated in the void, conglomerate to form a whirl or vortex with finer atoms in the outer area and heavier ones in the center so that a spherical mass forms dragging still more atoms into it by the whirl.⁸

Therefore the atomists retain the general view of nature as a multitude of phenomena based on an underlying unity, seemingly building on much of the Milesians’ thought, and achieve the most “coherent and economical physical system” in the ancient world, and the one most like our modern view. We turn next time to less scientific models that attempt to address the more abstract or obscure nature of reality and its paradoxes.

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¹ Honderich, Ted, The Oxford Guide to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-534093-8, page 512.

²Ibid., page 198.

³Allen, Reginald E., Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle. The Free Press, New York, NY, 1966. Page 16.

⁴Honderich, Ted (editor), The Oxford Guide to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-534093-8, page 198.

⁵Ibid.

⁶Edwards, Paul (editor), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1972.   Volume 1, page 194.

⁷Allen, Reginald E., Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle. The Free Press, New York, NY, 1966. Page 16

⁸Edwards, Paul (editor), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1972.   Volume 4, page 448.

“Everything is full of gods.” – Attributed to Thales.

In our examination of the views of ultimate reality of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, we have seen that Pythagoras settled on numbers and mathematics while Heraclitus invoked, fire, flux, logos, strife, and the unity of opposites. Next we look at three of their near contemporaries, the Milesian philosophers of sequential generations – Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes- who took a more physicalist or naturalist approach to the question. These proto-scientists attempted to discover the fundamental nature of matter and the origin of the cosmos and its unfolding by a process of induction, that is, by positing universal laws based on generalizations and abstractions from the particulars of the world. They are often seen as the originators of the great Western philosophical dialectic because they rejected existing Greek mythology and religious beliefs especially the anthropomorphic gods. Experts speculate that Miletus became the site of origin of traditional philosophy by virtue of its location at the mixing of Greek and oriental cultures.

Thales (circa 624-545 B.C.E.), one of the seven Sages of ancient Greece and a gifted astronomer who reportedly predicted the eclipse of May 28, 585 B.C.E., asserts the cosmos arose from a unity of substance which he postulates is water. 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.

Thales’ student, Anaximander (circa 610-540 B.C.E.), accepts that the cosmos developed from a unity, but rejects as primary any of the material constituents of reality. Instead he proposes a primeval ‘principle’ which he calls the “Indefinite’ (or indefinite nature).¹ Prior to the perceptible bodies, according to this view, there must have been an ‘indefinite something’ with no incompatible qualities (noting for example that water quenches fire). Everything which exist in nature is perceptible, but ultimate reality must be imperceptible. His preferred term for this imperceptible principle is apeiron, which has no limits, is everlasting, infinite, and imperishable – his very definition of the divine. From it all things have separated out and the opposites have appeared.

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¹Alternate translations include the ‘Boundless’ or the ‘Unlimited.’