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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Provides an accessible introduction to ancient Greek philosophy, enhanced with new features and content
Retrieving the Ancients offers a clear and engaging narrative of one of the most fertile periods in the history of human thought, beginning with the Ionian Philosophers of the sixth century and concluding with the works of Aristotle. Organized chronologically, this student-friendly textbook approaches Greek philosophy as an illuminating conversation in which each key thinker—including Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Socrates, and Plato—engages with, responds to, and moves beyond his predecessor. Throughout the text, author David Roochnik highlights how this conversation remains as relevant and urgent to modern readers as ever.
Now in its second edition, Retrieving the Ancients features an entirely new epilogue that introduces Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, Cynicism, and various schools of thought that emerged after Aristotle, as well as a useful appendix designed to help students write philosophically. This edition offers expanded online teaching resources for instructors, including a downloadable web pack with sample syllabi.
- Offers a compelling, readable, and humorous introduction to ancient Greek philosophy
- Approaches the history of ancient Greek philosophy dialectically
- Illustrates how the works of the ancients are as valuable today as ever
- Includes an accessible, modern introduction to Hellenistic philosophers, new to this edition
Offering a sophisticated yet accessible account of the first philosophers of the West, Retrieving the Ancients: An Introduction to Greek Philosophy, Second Edition is an ideal textbook for introductory and intermediate undergraduate courses in Ancient Greek Philosophy, as well as general courses in Ancient Philosophy.
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Retrieving the Ancients
An Introduction to Greek Philosophy
Second Edition
David Roochnik
Boston University
This edition first published 2023
© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Edition History
First edition © 2004 by David Roochnik
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Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Prologue
Introduction
Two Reasons to Study Ancient Greek Philosophy
The Organization and Strategy of This Book
1 The Presocratics
Preliminaries
Before the Beginning: Hesiod
The Ionian Philosophers of the Sixth Century
a) The Beginning: Thales of Miletus
b) The First Debate: Anaximander v. Anaximenes
c) Sixth-Century Rationalism: Xenophanes and Pythagoras
d) The Crisis of Sixth-Century Philosophy
Heraclitus and Parmenides: Extreme Solutions
a) Heraclitus: Lover of Flux
b) Parmenides: Champion of Being
Fifth-Century Elementalism
a) Democritus: Atomic Theory
b) Empedocles: Evolution
c) Anaxagoras
2 The Sophists and Socrates
A New Beginning: The Sophists
Protagoras
Gorgias
Socrates
3 Plato
Preliminaries
Plato’s Critique of the Presocratics
Plato’s Critique of the Sophists
a) The “Self-Reference” Argument
b) The Reductio ad Absurdum
c) “What is it?”
d) “The Old Quarrel”: Philosophy v. Sophistry
Recollection
a) The Phaedo
b) The Meno
The Divided Line and the Form of the Good
a) The Divided Line
b) The Form of the Good
Eros
The Political Implications of the Forms
4 Aristotle
Preliminaries
Aristotle’s Conception of Nature
a) “By Nature”
b) Form and Matter
c) The Four Causes
Aristotle’s Psychology
Teleological Ethics
a) Moral Virtue
b) Intellectual Virtue
Natural Politics
a) The Political Animal
b) Best Life; Best City
Conclusion
Epilogue
Appendix
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
CHAPTER 01
Figure 1.1 Thales
Figure 1.2 Anaximander
Figure 1.3 Xenophanes
Figure 1.4 Pythagoras
Figure 1.5 Heraclitus
Figure 1.6 Parmenides
Figure 1.7 Parmenides’ Monism
Figure 1.8 Divisibility
CHAPTER 02
Figure 2.1 The Socratic Picture
Figure 2.2 The Sophistic Picture
CHAPTER 03
Figure 3.1 Plato’s Forms
Figure 3.2 The Meno
Figure 3.3 The Meno
Figure 3.4 The Meno
Figure 3.5 The Meno
Figure 3.6 Socrates’ divided line
CHAPTER 04
Figure 4.1 The Bell Curve
Figure 4.2 The Bell Curve
Figure 4.3 On the Soul
Figure 4.4 On the Soul
Figure 4.5 The “three souls”
Figure 4.6 The Bell Curve
Guide
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Prologue
Begin Reading
Epilogue
Appendix
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Prologue
One reason I accepted the invitation by the editors at Wiley-Blackwell to produce a second edition of Retrieving the Ancients can be found in its subtitle: An Introduction to Greek Philosophy. On the one hand, these words accurately expressed the book’s intention; to provide readers with a useful resource with which to begin their study of Ancient Greek Philosophy. On the other, they were misleading since the content of the book was in fact more limited than the subtitle suggested. Retrieving the Ancients charted a course that began in 585 BCE, the year in which Thales (reportedly) predicted an eclipse, and ended with the death of Aristotle in 322. Its purpose, as I made clear in the Introduction, was not to offer a comprehensive account of the history of Ancient Greek Philosophy, but to tell a certain kind of story about it. My goal was to show how earlier thinkers, such as the Ionian naturalists of the sixth century, the “elementalists” of the fifth, and Plato in the fourth, set into motion a train of thought that culminated in the work of Aristotle. As I wrote in the Conclusion to Chapter 4:
Aristotle is the hero of our story because he is the culmination of the dialectical development of Ancient Greek Philosophy sketched in this book. In a nutshell, he accomplishes this by combining the Presocratic study of nature with the Platonic commitment to human excellence and the Forms. He weaves together the strands of though bequeathed to him by his predecessors, patiently contributes his own remarkable thoughts, and the result is a massive tapestry, a comprehensive logos of both human being and the world.
While Aristotle was unquestionably a giant—“the Master of those who know,” as Dante called him—my discussion of his predecessors was undoubtedly, and self-consciously, colored by my conception of the book’s trajectory. A more accurate title would have been, “An Aristotelian Introduction to Ancient Greek Philosophy.”
Despite this worry, I have not changed the title of the second edition. I have, however, added an additional feature to the book, one that will bring it better in line with its subtitle. There is now an Epilogue in which I discuss Greek Philosophers whose work came after, and diverged significantly, from Aristotle’s. Thinkers such as Epicurus (341–270), Pyrrho (360–270), and Zeno (334–262) do not fit neatly into the story I told in the first edition, for they are thinkers who staked out philosophical terrain of their own. The schools they inspired—Epicureanism, Skepticism, and Stoicism—became hugely influential in shaping the intellectual landscape of subsequent centuries, notably in the Roman Empire, and are substantial enough to be studied in their own right today. The Epilogue is designed to invite readers to begin doing just that.
Another feature of the Second Edition is an Appendix titled “Writing about the Reading.” Based on the conviction that the best way to grapple with difficult philosophical texts is to write about them, it is composed of a series of questions about the material covered in this book which readers are invited to answer in a very short paper. The Appendix offers guidance on how to do so as well as sample essays that can serve as paradigms. I hope it will be useful.
Introduction
Two Reasons to Study Ancient Greek Philosophy
Ancient Greek philosophy began with Thales, who correctly predicted an eclipse that occurred in 585 BCE, and culminated in the monumental works of Aristotle, who died in 322.1 (Unless otherwise noted, all dates in this book are BCE.) The simple fact that these thinkers lived over 2,000 years ago should provoke a question: in the age of the microchip and the engineered gene, why bother with them?
One good answer immediately springs to mind: to become educated. The Greeks were the intellectual ancestors of western culture. They laid the foundations for all future developments in the natural sciences, medicine, mathematics, history, architecture, sculpture, tragic and comic drama, lyric and epic poetry, as well as philosophy. To the extent that one must know one’s heritage in order to know oneself, it is imperative to study the ancient Greeks.
This is particularly true in the field of philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead famously said, “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato” (Whitehead 1969, p. 63). Even if he exaggerated, it is undeniable that in his some 25 dialogues Plato (429–347) addressed an extraordinary range of questions that remain alive and well (and unanswered) even today. What is knowledge? What is courage? What is the best possible political regime and the best possible human life? Can one know that an action is wrong but nevertheless perform it? What makes language meaningful? Are values relative? Should one obey a law even if it is unjust? What does mathematics tell us about the world?
Even if he had influenced no one else, Plato’s impact on western culture would be huge simply because he taught Aristotle (384–322), who was a student in his school (the Academy) from 367 to 347. In turn, Aristotle became far and away the dominant thinker for at least the next 1,500 years. Thomas Aquinas, for example, and other medieval philosophers (Arab, Christian, and Jewish) simply had to say “The Philosopher,” and their readers knew Aristotle was being named. In the middle ages European universities first came into being, and their curricula were decisively shaped by the works of Aristotle.
Even if Plato and Aristotle were the unmatched giants of Ancient Greek Philosophy, they did not arise in a vacuum. In the sixth and fifth centuries thinkers powerful in their own right set the stage for their emergence. The “Presocratics,” who lived before or contemporaneously with Socrates (469–399), made remarkable leaps in what today we call natural science. Democritus (born ca. 460), for example, formulated a rudimentary version of atomic theory. Empedocles (493–433) planted the seeds of a theory of biological evolution. Pythagoras (living in the sixth century) arrived at the insight fundamental to the development of modern physics, namely that the universe has a mathematical structure. He understood that the “book of nature,” as Galileo said, “is written in mathematical characters.”
A curious feature of ancient Greek philosophy, which will be discussed at some length in chapter 1, is that in critical ways these Presocratics were more modern in their outlook than their successors, Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, to put the point anachronistically, and as chapter 4 will elaborate at length, Aristotle criticized the Presocratics precisely for being too modern in their thinking. In a parallel fashion, when the great proponents of the “scientific revolution” (such as Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Spinoza) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries began to develop their new vision of philosophy and science, they did so by attacking Aristotle, who had dominated European intellectual life for centuries. In doing so they were often turning back, both explicitly and implicitly, to the Presocratics.
Another group of innovative thinkers crucial to the emergence of Plato and Aristotle, and significant on their own, were the Sophists, especially Protagoras (born ca. 485) and Gorgias (483–376). As chapter 2 will show, their views are stunningly similar to many professed today. They believed, for example, that ethical values were relative, and that neither objective knowledge of the external world nor a definitive interpretation of a given text or event were possible. For the Sophists language was responsible for constructing our relationship to the world. As such, they prefigure the segment of twentieth-century thought that originated with Nietzsche and came to be known as “postmodernism.” Just as Aristotle argued against the Presocratics, much of Plato’s work is an attempt to overcome the Sophists. Strangely enough, even though he lived over 2,000 years ago, Plato was in a position to criticize Postmodernism.
In sum: a good reason to study ancient Greek philosophy is to become educated about thinkers who were enormously influential in shaping western culture. This book will help the reader begin this task.
There is, however, a second, and better, reason to study the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle: in order to retrieve and revitalize their views. In other words, one can, and should, turn back to the Greeks not only to become knowledgeable about the venerable past, but because the Ancients may still have much to teach us today. They may have come up with better answers to the urgent questions human beings, in every age, invariably face.
This reason may be especially appealing to those who, like myself, often find themselves deeply troubled by the very nature of the modern world in which we live. To many of us, something seems to have gone wrong. Often this feeling is sparked by witnessing the enormous level of destruction technological development has caused. Seeing pictures of the Amazon jungle going up in smoke, or the ice-cap melting in the Arctic, or learning the number of animal species becoming extinct by the day, often trigger a feeling of despair. Perhaps even more troubling is the thought of weapons of mass destruction, all of which were produced by the very scientific techniques of which we are so proud. The image of highly trained technicians, dressed in the clean white garb we associate with laboratories and hospitals, working together to produce “weapons-grade” bacteria is revolting. Something, we often feel, has gone wrong in a scientific culture capable of producing, but not knowing how to use or being able to control, the awesome tools of modern technology. We wonder if human cloning will in fact be attempted, and if the chemistry of the brain will become so well understood that a feeling of well-being will be easily attained by the taking of a pill.
A sentiment distantly but importantly related to this was expressed by Edmund Husserl in a lecture titled “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” written in 1935. Even if his prose was forbidding, Husserl’s message was clear. “The European nations,” he wrote, “are sick. Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis” (Husserl 1970, p. 270). Husserl was specific in identifying what had gone wrong: “The European crisis has its roots in a misguided rationalism” (p. 290).
A materialist, mechanistic conception of nature, studied by a mathematically based science, which in turn spawned the powerful technologies we now both take for granted and occasionally dread, has come to dominate not only all modes of human reasoning, but western culture itself. This is the crisis. Like a giant shadow, modern science and technology have blotted out all other forms of human knowledge and inquiry. Most important, the hegemony of modern science, based always on the paradigm of mathematical physics, has obliterated the possibility of gaining knowledge of the “meaning” of human life itself. For this “meaning” requires natural or ordinary language, and resists mathematical or scientific articulation.
Facing this crisis, Husserl refused to succumb to a common twentieth-century temptation, namely to abandon western rationalism altogether. In fact, his love of reason was steadfast, and he denied that “the European crisis … [means] that rationality as such is evil” (p. 290). Instead, the task he undertook was to reform reason, to expand it so that it could not only account for material bodies in motion, but also for the meaning of human life. He called his new science “phenomenology,” a word composed of two Greek words, phenomena, “the appearances,” and logos, “rational account.”
What Husserl said about Einstein typifies his critique of modern European rationality and gives some inkling of what he meant by phenomenology:
Einstein’s revolutionary innovations concern the formulae through which the idealized and naively objectified physics is dealt with. But how formulae in general, how mathematical objectification in general, receive meaning on the foundation of life and the intuitively given surrounding world – of this we learn nothing; and thus Einstein does not reform the space and time in which our vital life runs its course.(p. 295)
To make the same point, Husserl says this: “the scientist does not become a subject of investigation” (p. 295). In other words, modern science, always speaking the language of mathematics, “objectifies” the world. It understands how material things work and can predict and thereby manipulate their movements, but has nothing whatsoever to say about the unique “meaning” or “the vital life” human beings, including the scientists themselves, actually experience. “No objective science can do justice to the very subjectivity which accomplishes science” (p. 295). Modern science is in this very specific sense dehumanizing. It presents the technician with the opportunity to manipulate the natural world, but says and knows nothing about what it is like for a human being actually to live in it.
Consider the simplest possible example. Since Copernicus we have known that the earth revolves around the sun and so is not, as Aristotle thought, the center of the universe. On the one hand, this scientific fact forbids dissent. On the other, it also conceals a compelling truth: for human beings, the center of our daily lives will always be the earth. It is where we live. In order to see the stars we must look upwards, out and away from ourselves. To describe the dawn, we invariably say “the sun has risen,” even though, from an astronomical perspective, this is false. Ordinary life, as well as ordinary language, speak against the Copernican revolution.
By contrast, the purpose of Aristotle’s physics, as we will see in chapter 4, is precisely to speak for ordinary life; that is, to articulate the phenomena and explain how the natural world appears from a human perspective and to the naked eye. Therefore, when in his work On the Heavens he argues that the earth is the center of the universe around which the stars move eternally in fixed circular orbits, the reader should resist the temptation to dismiss him as a primitive or a quack. His argument is, from a phenomenological perspective, far more powerful than one may think. What Aristotle achieves is exactly what Husserl called for, namely a logos, a rational account, of how the world presents itself to earth-bound human beings. Unlike the modern scientist, Aristotle can explain what the world means to us. For him, the scientist, as well as the ordinary human being, is indeed “a subject of investigation.”
Recall a point made above: in crucial respects the Presocratics were far more modern in their philosophical views than Plato or Aristotle. Democritus, for example, intuited the possibility of a mathematically based science able to explain atomic motion. Just as contemporary neuroscientists try to explain consciousness by reducing it to the firings of neurons in the brain, Democritus thought that what was then called the “soul” was actually just the motion of tiny particles moving at the speed of fire. Therefore, when Plato and Aristotle criticize Democritus on this score, as we will see them do in chapters 3 and 4, they are also criticizing a broad and basic tenet of modern thought. And this criticism should be taken seriously, even today.
In his comments about Einstein, Husserl uses the word “meaning.” It is important to recall exactly what this word itself means. It has at least two different senses: (1) “to intend,” “to have a purpose,” as in “I meant to do it;” (2) “to signify,” as in “the word ‘table’ means a piece of furniture with a flat top placed horizontally on legs.”
If these two senses are combined, the statement, “human life has meaning,” implies that life has a purpose which can be signified or explained in ordinary language. To reiterate, this is precisely the possibility the modern scientific view rejects. It denies that the way ordinary human beings, speaking ordinary language, experience their daily lives is epistemically useful or informative, and so is, in this regard, dehumanizing.
A major thesis of this book, developed especially in chapters 3 and 4, will be that the philosophical views of Plato and Aristotle are worth retrieving today because of their profound appreciation and attempt to comprehend the meaning of human life. They think from within and remain faithful to the geocentric, naked-eye, perspective articulated by ordinary (as opposed to mathematical) language. They think from within the confines of human experience and so they can, even today, still teach us much about what it means to be a human being. Perhaps at no other time in the history of western culture has their tutelage been more needed. This is the second, and the better, reason to study ancient Greek philosophy.
The Organization and Strategy of This Book
This book will be organized in a straightforwardly chronological manner. Chapter 1 will cover the Presocratics, chapter 2 the Sophists and Socrates, chapter 3 Plato, and chapter 4 will focus on Aristotle.
There is an obvious problem in trying to cover this much material in a book as short as this: the subject is vast. Perhaps the most well-known work (in English) in this field is W. K. C. Guthrie’s A History of Greek Philosophy (1962–81), and it runs for six long volumes. The present book is, by contrast, quite modest. As a result, some sort of principle had to be invoked according to which a selection could be made of what portions of ancient Greek philosophy to discuss. This book will use what will be called the “dialectical principle.”
“Dialectical” comes from the Greek dialegesthai, “to converse.” To describe the history of Greek philosophy as “dialectical” is thus to say it is like a conversation. Each thinker we will study will be conceived as responding to, and in this sense as being shaped by, a previous one. These responses typically have both a positive and a negative side. In other words, when a thinker responds to a predecessor’s thought, he affirms what he takes to be positive and so worth preserving, but then also criticizes what he takes to be inadequate and in need of revision. So, for example, the early Presocratic philosopher Anaximander affirmed the most general belief of his predecessor Thales – namely that the world is rationally organized around a single, unifying source or origin – but he disagreed entirely as to what this origin actually was. His criticism moved the conversation forward. Soon, however, Anaximander faced a “dialectical negation” of his own. He was criticized by his follower, Anaximenes.
There is more than one sense to the word “dialectical.” It can, for example, refer to the kind of conversation that goes back and forth between the partners. It can also suggest a more linear discourse that develops over time. The latter is often associated with the German philosopher Hegel, and is the one adopted in this book. It implies, above all else, a sense of progress. Anaximander moved beyond Thales, and Anaximenes beyond Anaximander. Greek thinking gradually became more complex and comprehensive. For this reason, then, Aristotle is the “hero” of this book. He wove together the conceptual threads bequeathed to him by the two previous centuries of philosophical activity. He retained what was positive and rejected or revised what he thought negative. He tied up the loose ends, and finally put his own stamp on what became an immense conceptual project. (See Collobert 2002 for a good discussion of Aristotle’s relationship to his predecessors.)
The goal of this book is to tell the story of this dialectical development. In turn, this goal provided the principle used to select the texts to be discussed. Simply put, we will concentrate on those aspects of a philosopher’s work in which he is most directly responding to his predecessors and thus participating in the conversation. So, for example, chapter 3 will emphasize those dialogues in which Plato is most critical of the Sophists. The Sophists were ethical relativists; Plato was not. It will take a major portion of chapter 3 to explain exactly what this means. Doing so will obviously require us to ignore a huge chunk of Plato’s writings. As the quote from Whitehead suggests, the dialogues cover a vast terrain, only a small fraction of which can be covered in this short book.
In addition to giving this book an economical structure and a sense of narrative development, the “dialectical principle” of text selection will bring another benefit. By approaching the history of ancient Greek philosophy as a conversation, this book will invite its readers to participate. The conversation we are about to begin deals with basic philosophical questions. Not only have these questions inspired the entire tradition of western philosophy, but they are also ones that most readers, even if they have never officially studied a work of philosophy, have probably already asked themselves. Is the world orderly or chaotic? Is it a projection of our minds, or does it exist independently on its own? Can something come from nothing? Is anything stable, or is all in flux? In the face of death does human life have meaning, and how should we go about living it well?
As the conversation progresses, readers will not only learn much about the history of Greek philosophy, but they should increasingly be able to probe and progress in developing their own thoughts. In other words, and as mentioned above, studying Greek philosophy entails more than learning about the dusty past. It is a philosophical experience. For this reason, I will use the present tense as often as possible, even when I am discussing thinkers of the past. (This is often called “the historical present” by grammarians.) In addition, especially in the last two chapters, I will occasionally call upon the reader to perform “thought experiments,” to imagine certain situations that they might actually face and to use them as a way of reflecting on the works we are discussing.
The strategy of this book carries with it some risk. Because it is “An Introduction to Greek Philosophy,” and aims to be informative, one of its primary obligations is to be historically and textually accurate. What is said about any given philosopher must be “philologically sound”; it must be supported by an objective reading of the works written by that philosopher. On the other hand, since this is not a comprehensive treatment of Greek philosophy like Guthrie’s, it has a far more limited goal, namely to tell a “dialectical story” about the history of Greek philosophy. As just explained, this goal will determine the choice of texts to be discussed. Here is where the danger lies. Because only some aspects of a thinker’s work will be discussed, and a comprehensive (and therefore completely objective) analysis of his thought cannot be offered, the risk is that the version of Greek philosophy this book presents will be truncated in such a way as to reflect the prejudices of its author. More specifically, because the dialectical story about to unfold will culminate in Aristotle, the risk is that the views of his predecessors, especially the Presocratics, will be colored by his interpretation of them.
In this context the reader should be alert to the way in which the word “useful” will be employed in the chapters to follow. In chapter 1, for example, it will be stated that it is “useful” to think of Parmenides as a critic of Heraclitus. “Useful” in this context means “useful in organizing a historical narrative about the dialectical development of Greek philosophy.” It must be admitted, however, that it is impossible to prove that Parmenides actually was criticizing Heraclitus. Nonetheless, he will be treated as if he were doing so. This assumption is defensible for two reasons. First, even if it is not demonstrable, it is not philologically implausible; it does no violence to the texts. Second, this assumption will generate a fruitful conversation with an intrinsic philosophical value.
In a similar vein, the discussion of Empedocles will emphasize the extent to which he offered a theory of nature, specifically of evolution, for this is largely the way Aristotle read him. Recently such an interpretation has been passionately denounced. “There is no disputing the fact that Aristotle tortured Empedocles’ teaching, twisted his words, abused his meaning,” Peter Kingsley (2002, p. 356) has written. It is possible he is not wrong. Still, as part of the dialectical story developed in this book, the Empedocles who is presented will indeed be one much influenced by Aristotle. Because this book aims to be fair and faithful to the texts that it discusses, the reader will always be informed whenever comments are made that venture beyond what can be confidently secured by textual evidence. Throughout the chapters to follow, in either the body of the work or in the notes, alternative interpretations and suggestions for further reading will be given.
There are a great many English translations of the Greek philosophers. This book will use either my own or ones that I have found to be as readable and accurate as possible. The translations cited, as well as the original Greek texts used, will be indicated in the notes.
Note
1
The source of all dates and biographical information mentioned in this book is
The Oxford Classical Dictionary
(1970). The source of all lexical information is Liddel and Scott’s
Greek-English Lexicon
. A preliminary version of this book was produced in audio and video form for the Teaching Company in 2001.
1 The Presocratics
Preliminaries
The writings of the Presocratics are substantial – the standard edition of their works (by Hermann Diels, 1922, revised by Walther Kranz, 1961) contains three large volumes – and so we are immediately faced with the problem of text selection discussed in the Introduction. There is, in addition, another significant problem when it comes to the source material of Presocratic philosophy: it is fragmentary in nature. Furthermore, the fragments are of two kinds (at least according to Diels): some (the “A” fragments) are reports about the Presocratics given by other ancient thinkers, while others seem to be original to the thinkers themselves (“B”). Trying to defend a coherent interpretation of these fragments is a monumental challenge for a philological detective.
The “A” fragments pose a unique difficulty. For example, several of the most extensive of them come from Aristotle. But, as one scholar, echoing the complaint made by Kingsley cited in the Introduction, says, “Aristotle focuses narrowly on exactly that aspect of [his predecessors’] theories which is of relevance to his own intellectual concerns” (Inwood 2001, p. 73). In short, Aristotle may not give us an objective or accurate account of the Presocratics.
In this chapter, all my citations of the Presocratics will be from Diels and will be indicated by using his notation (for example, A12, B34). Unless mentioned otherwise in the notes, translations are my own. Before beginning, however, a small step backwards must be taken. The first author to be discussed in this book will not be a philosopher at all. Instead, he will be a poet, a myth-maker: Hesiod.
Before the Beginning: Hesiod
Thales of Miletus (a town on the far eastern or Ionian side of the Hellenized world, in what today is western Turkey) is generally regarded the first philosopher in the west. Very little is known about his life, but since many scholars believe that he correctly “predicted an eclipse which took place in 585” (Kirk, Raven, & Schofield [hereafter KRS] 1983, p. 76), this is a convenient, albeit contrived, date to pinpoint the beginning of western philosophy.1
Even if Thales was the first philosopher, he surely was not the first person to think in ancient Greece. Nor was he the first to write. (Indeed, it is possible that Thales himself did not actually write a book of his own. See KRS 1983, p. 88.) Homer composed his extraordinary epics, the Odyssey and the Iliad, around 700, and these are rich with profound reflections on war, courage, friendship, honor, fate, mortality, marriage, personal identity, and a host of other themes.2 Hesiod wrote the Theogony about the same time, and in it he told a story about the beginning and then the development of the world itself. During the seventh century the lyric poets Sappho, Alcaeus, and Anacreon gave exquisite voice to the human emotions. With all this intellectual and literary activity before 585, what makes scholars so sure that Thales was the first to philosophize?
The answer is simple: “Thales evidently abandoned mythic formulations; this alone justifies the claim that he was the first philosopher” (KRS 1983, p. 99). Thales occupies the throne because unlike his predecessors he did not make up stories, write poems, or retell myths. To use the Greek word that encapsulates all these creative activities, Thales did not engage in muthos (the ancestor of our word “myth”). Instead, he was a practitioner of logos, of rational thought or speech, which is, in turn, the lifeblood of philosophy.
But what exactly is logos and what differentiates it from muthos? To suggest an answer, this section will take a peek at passages from Hesiod’s Theogony. The hope here is that by identifying what philosophy is not – namely the work of a storyteller or myth-maker – we will be in a better position in the next section to discuss what it actually is, and thus why Thales, rather than any of the poets, is traditionally counted as the first philosopher. (See Hyland 1992, pp. 29–33 and 38–44 for a good discussion of this theme.)
Hesiod begins the Theogony by invoking the Muses:
From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon, and dance on soft feet about the deep-blue spring …
And one day they taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon, and this word first the goddesses said to me – the Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis:
“Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.”
So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvellous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime. (Theogony, 1–33)3
The Muses, daughters of Zeus and Memory, are the goddesses of inspiration. They “breathe into” (the literal meaning of “inspire”) the poet; they fill him up with creative energy and enable him to sing. Without them he would be mute.
On the one hand, invoking the Muse is merely a convention traditionally employed by ancient poets. On the other hand, it signifies something basic to the act of literary creation: it cannot be fully explained. By invoking the Muses the poet denies ultimate responsibility for, and therefore knowledge of, his own poem. He needed the Muses, and they came to him from outside of himself. He did not make his poem up entirely by himself, and so he cannot quite understand it.
Hesiod tells a story: one day he was shepherding his animals when, for no apparent reason, he was visited by the Muses on Mount Helicon. They began by insulting him. A “mere belly,” a thoughtless and voiceless blob of desires, is what they called him. Even worse was what they said next. They warned Hesiod that even though they are capable of speaking the truth, they could well be telling him “a false thing,” and if so, he would have no way of finding out. After all, these are the goddesses of creative activity, and so their lies seem “as though they were true.” They are, in other words, plausible and effective.
As a “mere belly” Hesiod is utterly dependent on the Muses. They “breathed into him a divine voice” without which he would not have been able to “sing.” The situation implied by the invocation is therefore quite grim. Hesiod is in the grip of confessed liars, and he does not have the rational power to determine the truth of what they say. His is a precarious enterprise for the story he tells can never be fully verified.
To anticipate the next section and the transition to logos: the philosophical project, unlike the poetic or mythic one, will demand verification. The philosopher, unlike the storyteller, must accept full responsibility for his logos and will not be allowed to invoke a Muse. He must offer an argument, a set of reasons he himself conceives and articulates, for the views he presents. He must defend what he says. If he fails to do so, he may be deemed a “mere” poet.
After the invocation, Hesiod begins his actual song:
At the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros [Love], fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day …(Theogony, 116–24)
In the beginning there was “Chaos.” The English is misleading. While it is phonetically identical to the word it translates, namely the Greek chaos, the latter has a different meaning. Our “chaos” is a confused mass of disordered parts, while the Greek means “the abyss,” or even better, the “gap.” It is the empty space in-between.
This is crucial. In the beginning there was an abyss from which, for no apparent reason, came Earth, Tartaros (the underground), and Eros (sexual desire). According to Hesiod’s Muse-inspired muthos, the beginning of the world is unintelligible. Unlike the creation story in the biblical Genesis there is no supreme being who brought the universe and all its inhabitants into existence. Unlike the big-bang theory, there is no explanation of the beginning. For Hesiod, the world just popped up.
The first generation of beings to emerge from the abyss included the Earth, on which most of the subsequent developments in the poem will take place, Tartarus, the place below the earth, and Eros. Note the descriptions of Eros. It “unnerves the limbs,” it masters minds, and it subdues wills. These phrases ring true: sexual desire can make us weak at the knees and drive us (and other animals) crazy. We fall madly in love and then, despite the fact that we know better, often act in stupid and self-destructive ways.
Eros plays an essential role in the poem because the Theogony, which literally means “the birth or generation of the gods,” is a kind of family history. In the beginning there was the empty abyss. Then came the first generation, which was composed of three members. Then came Night. And then Earth gave birth to Sky and Hills and the Sea. She then coupled with Sky and gave birth to all the gods and other beings that eventually populate the world with which Hesiod was familiar. In short, the Theogony is a genealogy, a family tree whose branches grow and are progressively occupied. Since the process by which this development takes place is sexual reproduction, Eros must be present at the outset to make all these future births possible.
These three features of the Theogony – Hesiod’s invocation of the Muses, the fact that no reason is given why Earth emerged from the primordial abyss, and the crucial role Eros plays in the subsequent sexual generation of the various inhabitants of the world – together express the poet’s basic conviction: the world in which we live is a shaky place. At its core it is not fully intelligible. It began in the abyss and this cannot be rationally comprehended. Chaos, after all, is some sort of empty space and so comes close to meaning “nothingness,” and no one can comprehend nothingness. (See Miller 2001 for an alternative interpretation of this passage.) This is because to understand or rationally grasp something requires that the something be determinate or distinct. It must be some thing, and not no-thing. To be intelligible is to be determinate, to be this rather than that. Because the abyss is indeterminate, nothing can be said or understood about it.
By contrast, the world, as Hesiod (and everybody else) actually experiences it, is essentially differentiated and intelligible. A tree is a tree and not a rock, and so we chop the former and not the latter. This tree is not that one. The door is not the wall, and so we walk through it rather than into the latter. This rabbit is not that bird and so we do not expect it to fly.
The trajectory of Hesiod’s Theogony is now clear. It moves from an incomprehensible one to an organized and thus comprehensible many; from a formless and indeterminate abyss to the determinations or differentiations of ordinary experience. Because “at first Chaos came to be,” the origin of our intelligible experience is itself unintelligible. This means that the intelligibility we take for granted is itself not entirely reliable. We are reminded of this every night when the bright light of day, in which distinctions between trees and rocks, rabbits and birds, can easily be seen, gives way to a darkness in which such clarity disappears. Night is a vestige of the abyss, from which it is directly descended. (“From Chaos came forth Erebus [another underworld] and black Night.”) Despite the trust we invest in the intelligibility of our daily lives – we are confident that we will walk through doors and not into walls – night often shakes us to the core.
To summarize: Hesiod’s muthos is a genealogy whose undifferentiated and hence unintelligible beginning gradually develops into a world occupied by all the many divine, natural, and human entities with which we are so familiar. However distinctly delineated and well formed these entities might seem to be, their origin is blank and formless. The world, as our dreams and nighttime agonies too often remind us, is not quite as clear-cut as it seems during the day.
In a similar vein, the fact that mind-mastering and “unnerving” Eros is the energy source powering the genealogical development, implies that this development is also not completely intelligible or rational. After all, Eros makes those it attacks do stupid things and no one can predict or control it. Indeed, because Hesiod’s story is a genealogy, contingency or chance is given a crucial role to play in the coming into being of the world and its inhabitants. All family histories are testimony to this. Why exactly did your grandparents get married and give birth to your parents?
Given Hesiod’s basic conviction that the intelligibility of the world is precarious, it makes perfectly good sense for him to appeal to the Muses. The genealogy he retells is not fully amenable to logos. The only reason Hesiod can, for example, report that “at first Chaos came to be,” when Chaos itself is not rationally comprehensible, is because the inexplicable and unreliable Muses decided, for no apparent reason, to help him. As a result, the invocation to the Muses with which he begins his poem fits together beautifully with what his story actually says. The way Hesiod expresses himself, the form of his story, namely Muse-inspired muthos, coheres with the content of the story, namely a world beginning in Chaos and fueled by Eros. In this important sense, Hesiod’s muthos has its own kind of internal coherence and integrity.
These three features of Hesiod’s Theogony – the invocation of the Muse, the world’s beginning in Chaos, and the centrality of Eros – are characteristic of muthos itself. In other words, muthos is a worldview, a conception of what it means to be a human being in the world. It is a powerful intellectual option, one which has never ceased to be attractive and compelling to human beings eager to express their own experience of life. It is not, however, philosophical. For this, we must turn to Thales.
The Ionian Philosophers of the Sixth Century
a) The Beginning: Thales of Miletus
Thales may well have been responsible for impressive breakthroughs in engineering, astronomy, and other areas. But far and away his most significant contribution to the history of western culture is revealed in the following statement by Aristotle, listed by Diels as an “A” fragment:
Of those who first philosophized, most believed that the first principles of all beings are only first principles in the form of matter. For that of which all beings are and that from which they originally come into being and that into which they finally perish, the Being persisting but changing in its attributes, this they state is the element and first principle of beings. And on account of this they believe that nothing comes to be nor is destroyed since this sort of nature is always preserved … Thales, the originator of this kind of philosophy, declares [the first principle] to be water … Perhaps he got this idea from seeing that the nourishment of all things is moist, and that the hot itself comes to be from this … and also because the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and water is the first principle of the nature of moist things.(A12)
This passage typifies the problem of Presocratic source material discussed above. No writings attributable to Thales himself survive, and, to reiterate the complaint, many scholars believe that “Aristotle was not necessarily conscientious in using original sources” (KRS, p. 87). In fact, it is possible that Aristotle has translated Thales’ logos into his own philosophical terminology. Even so, this passage is so rich and it is extremely useful to assume it does represent Thales’ position (an assumption that is not implausible and cannot be disproven), for doing so will help account for, and give shape to, the subsequent philosophical developments of the sixth century. For these reasons, and fully cognizant of the grain of salt with which it must be taken, we will treat the passage above as if it accurately reflected Thales’ views.
There are several critical terms in the passage that will appear repeatedly throughout the Presocratic period, and will establish a general conceptual framework or worldview, which will be called “The Milesian Picture.”
The phrase “philosophize” translates the Greek
philosophein
, which literally means “to love [
philein
] wisdom [
Sophia
].”
“First principle” translates the Greek
archê
, but it could also be rendered as “origin,” “source,” “beginning,” and, significantly, “ruler.” The
archê
is thus the origin that persists and continues to exert authority.
“Beings” translates
ta onta
, which derives from the verb “to be” (
einai
). The tree, rock, door, wall, rabbit, and bird are all “beings.” Together they constitute the world. “Things” can also be used to translate
ta onta
.
“Beings” are all the particular items in the world that “come into being.” This verb translates
gignesthai
, “to become.” After “beings” come into being, they change; they become different. And then they perish; they cease to be. This entire sequence of activities can be encapsulated by the single word “Becoming.”
Like
ta onta
,
ousia
is also derived from
einai
, “to be.” It is a noun that in ordinary usage means “that which is one’s own, one’s substance or property,” but for the philosophers it comes to signify “Being” understood as what is most real and enduring.
4
Why it is useful to capitalize “Being” in order to contrast it with “beings” will be explained shortly. Note that the Greek
to on
, which is the singular version of
ta onta
, can be used synonymously with
ousia
. Our word “ontology,” which means “the study of Being in general,” has its roots in
logos
and
to on
.
“Nature” translates
phusis
, the origin of our words “physics” and “physical.” In the passage above, it comes close to being a synonym of “Being.”
Why Thales’ logos was so extraordinarily influential, and why its departure from the prevailing worldview of the past centuries (from muthos) is genuinely revolutionary, can be explained by using these terms and by referring to figure 1.1, a diagram of “the Milesian Picture.”
Figure 1.1 Thales
Thales (and other Milesian philosophers) believed that there was an archê, a first principle that is the origin of, and so is responsible for, all beings. It itself persists: it does not come into being nor does it cease to be. It is not itself a being nor does it participate in Becoming. Instead, it is that which is most real and enduring: it is Being or Nature. It is the unifying principle of all reality.
The things of this world come into being, and then pass out of being. They are finite. Everything that comes into being eventually passes out of being. My pet rabbit, for example, was born, came into being, in 1996 and went out of being in 2001. Everything that comes into being changes while it is in being. My rabbit began life as a bunny and after a while became a mature adult. By contrast, the archê neither changes nor does it come into being and perish. It always just IS.
Thales drew a distinction between Being and beings, between the one enduring principle that is most real, and all the many little beings in the world that are here today and gone tomorrow. Despite these differences, Being and beings are inextricably related, precisely because the former is the archê, and thus the origin of the latter. To reformulate this point: Thales was an ontological dualist who divided reality into two categories, Being and Becoming. Again, the former is the origin of, and so more real than, the latter.
At this stage “the Milesian Picture,” the general worldview with which philosophy began in the west, may seem similar to Hesiod’s muthos. After all, in his poem Hesiod also identified what is first or at the beginning, namely Chaos, and this functions as a kind of archê. There are, however, radical differences between the philosopher’s beginning and the poet’s.
Thales’ archê is an ordinary, observable substance: water. Unlike the abyss it is determinate and so it can be recognized. It is intelligible and can be understood. Furthermore, Thales (at least as presented by Aristotle) arrived at his conception of the archê (his “archaeology”) through a thoroughly rational process. Without a Muse to assist him, he observed that all living beings need water, that the ocean on whose shore he lived seemed to stretch forever and that the earth seemed like a flat disk floating on its surface. He noticed that through the processes of evaporation and condensation water underwent various transformations. When it boils, it becomes more like air; when it cools, it returns to liquid form. During all these changes, however, it always remains what it is, namely water. (See KRS 1983, pp. 89–95 for a good discussion.)
These observable characteristics of water provided evidence that water is the basic and unifying element of all reality. In general, the Ancient Greeks conceived of the material world as composed of four basic elements – earth, air, fire, and water – and perhaps Thales thought that through evaporation and condensation each of the other three elements somehow came from water. This, plus its power to sustain life on earth and in the sea, and its apparently permanent supply, makes water an attractive and empirically plausible candidate for the archê.
At first blush, Thales’ identification of water may well seem primitive to our sophisticated eyes. After all, we know that water itself is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, and so cannot possibly be the first principle. Nonetheless, Thales’ rational articulation and empirical defense of his conception of the archê is such a stunning break with Hesiodic muthos that the year 585 is as significant as any other in the history of western culture. For the first time human beings attempted to penetrate reality with reason alone. No longer was a Muse needed to supply inspiration. No longer was the heart of reality indeterminate and mad Eros its driving force. Instead, human reason, unaided by external (and unreliable) assistance, could work hard and figure out what the archê, the grounding principle of all things, is, and then take responsibility for giving good reasons why it should be so. Philosophy has begun.
Two points need to be made before moving forward. First, in this early period there was no distinction between what we call “philosophy” and “natural science.” Second, the Milesian Picture betrays a fundamental conviction (which to some might seem a prejudice): that which is permanent and changeless, namely the archê, is ontologically superior to that which is temporary and changeable. Being is prior, is “more real,” and in some significant sense, better than Becoming, than those beings which come into being, change, and then perish.
b) The First Debate: Anaximander v. Anaximenes
Anaximander
It is possible that Anaximander of Miletus (ca. 610–540) was Thales’ student. Such, at least, was the view of the fourth-century philosopher Theophrastus, who described him as “the ‘successor and pupil’ of Thales” (KRS, p. 101). Even if this assertion cannot be proven, it will be useful nonetheless to think of the relationship between the first two Milesian thinkers in this manner. To be more specific, think of Anaximander as the very best of students, the one who exhibits the qualities every teacher seeks: he was a good and intelligent listener who understood and affirmed much of what his teacher had to say. But he was anything but a passive disciple. Instead, Anaximander was willing to criticize Thales. His doing so pushed western philosophy forward, into its first great debate.
Anaximander, who almost certainly wrote a book, was perhaps the first Greek to construct a map of land and sea. He probably did significant work in meteorology, zoology, and cosmology. But what makes him crucial in the history of philosophy, and what shows him to be just the kind of loyal yet critical student described above, is found in his one remaining fragment:
Anaximander … said that the indefinite [to apeiron] was the first principle and element of beings, and he was first to give this name to the first principle. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some other nature which is indefinite, out of which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them. It is that from which beings come to be, and into which they come to perish according to necessity. For they pay a penalty and reparation to each other for their injustice and according to the order of time.(A9)
Anaximander affirmed the general conceptual structure represented by “the Milesian Picture” he had inherited from Thales, but he also revised it critically. His worldview looks like figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2 Anaximander
Like his teacher, Anaximander conceived of the many beings constituting the world, those coming into being and passing away, as originating from and returning to a stable and unifying archê. Being underlies and organizes becoming. But Anaximander offered a fundamental criticism of Thales as well. The archê, he reasoned, cannot be a determinate substance like water. Instead, it is “the indefinite.” (The Greek word apeiron is composed of a
