By

Hudson Reynolds, Ph.D.

Model paper prepared for class presentation

HON 150 01 & 01 Classical World View

October 29, 1998

Copyright 1998

Thales is the first known true philosopher. He lived in Miletus, a thriving seaport on the Western shore of the Aegean Sea, and was active around the beginning of the 6^th century. We have few trustworthy accounts of him -- the two most notable being those of the fifth century historian Herodotus, who claims that he introduced the Egyptian science of geometry to the Greeks, and who credits him with having predicted an eclipse of the sun and having engineered the diversion of a mighty river, and the fourth century philosopher Aristotle, who identifies him as the first of the natural philosophers and attributes several important propositions to him: namely, (1) that the first-principle of nature is water, (2) that the earth rests on water, (3) that all things are full of gods, and (4) that magnetic objects have a soul because they can attract and repel otherwise immobile iron objects.

It is Thales' first proposition that supplies the most light on the body of his thought: namely, the assertion that "all things are water" (pan esti hydor). Aristotle gives this proposition a literal interpretation:

Most of those who first engaged in philosophy supposed that the only principles of things were to be found as material elements. That of which all things consist, that from which they first arise and into which they finally vanish away, that of which the "basic being" (ousia) persists although the perceptible characteristics are changed, -- this, they say, is the prime element and first-principle of things. Therein they hold that nothing either comes-to-be or is destroyed, since this kind of "basic nature" (physis) always persists.

Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, declared the first-principle to be water, and for that reason he also held that the earth rests upon water. Probably the idea was suggested to him by the fact that the nutriment of everything contains moisture, and that heat itself is generated out of moisture and is kept alive by it. for of course it is assumed that whatever something is generated out of must be its first-principle. He drew his notion also from the fact that the seeds of everything have a moist nature; and of course the first-principle of moist things is water. (Aristotle, Metaphysics 983b 7)

This literal equivalency of "all things = water" diminishes the greatness of Thales' thought. For it is my belief that Thales was not speaking literally, but metaphorically when he proclaimed that everything was water. He did not mean that everything was water, but that everything was "like" water.

Why would Thales speak metaphorically? For one thing, his audience, having been raised on epic poetry, was accustomed to instruction through metaphor. Homer's greatest insights are provided in the form of metaphors. Moreover, sixth century Greeks had no prior experience with the abstractness of purely philosophic thought. Thales cast his insight in a form of discourse that had the best chance of being understood by his audience. Many scholars have pointed to the fact that the pre-Socratic philosophers discarded the prevalent mythological-religious ordering of the universe, which divided the cosmos in a hierarchy between the divine and the human, and attributed the most important causes of action to intelligent, super-human beings. The revolution in thinking that Thales first started in motion was encumbered with mythological-religious patterns of thought and discourse (Vernant, pp. 119-129) It is not inconceivable, then, that Thales employed the metaphorical language of a dual universe to promote a unitary vision of the cosmos—to convey the startling notion that Being is one and undivided.

What would it mean for Thales to have said that everything is "like" water? In the first place, just as water appears to surround the land everywhere, it would mean that Being is everywhere. In depicting the Shield of Achilles, Homer depicts the outer most ring of the Shield as portraying Tethys, the grey ocean. As a sea-faring people who had to hug the shore in order to navigate, the Greeks experienced the boundary of the known world as a great expanse of water whose outer limits could not be reached and whose depth could not be fathomed. Even the first maps of the world, drawn by the Milesians who followed Thales, portrayed the earth as being entirely surrounded by water (Robinson, p. 32). It would make sense, then, to identify the concept of universality with water. Being is all pervasive.

In the second place, water in its liquid form has the same consistency throughout, wherever it is encountered. You cannot say about water that there is more water in this water than in that water. Water, unmixed with impurities, is the same everywhere and always. The metaphor of water, then, helps us to understand the identical nature of Being -- that there is neither less Being nor more Being here or there, in this or in that. Being is identical.

If Being is everywhere and is everywhere the same, then it has no parts and consequently undergoes no change. Having never undergone change, Being must have forever been the way it is now. Being is truly the first-principle. This raises an immense conceptual difficulty. Everything that we perceive through the senses -- sight, taste, smell, hearing, and touch -- must partake equally of Being, yet everything that we perceive through the senses appears to undergo change. How do we account for this?

The problem seems to be that we can perceive only a part, never the whole of Being. That is to say, everything that we perceive suggests the disunity, rather than the unity of Being. We perceive only discrete beings, not Being itself. But those discrete beings are really only various manifestations, evident only to the senses, of the same universal Being. The unchangeable nature of Being is never experienced through the senses. It can only be grasped through the intellect.

Again, water provides a fine example of this amorphous and elusive character of Being. Water has three perceptible forms: solid (ice), liquid (water), and gas (steam). We may easily observe the transitions between these forms, indicating that water may present itself variably to the senses, as hard and cold, soft and temperate, or invisible and hot. Yet it is water still! How very "like" Being.

It is said that Thales of Miletus, one of the seven sages, was the first to undertake the study of natural philosophy. He declared water to be the beginning and the end of all things. As the water solidifies, things acquire firmness; as it melts, their individual existence is threatened. Such changes are the causes of earthquakes, whirlwinds, and the movements of the stars. (Hippolytus Refutatio)

It is because we cannot experience Being through our senses that we believe things are created and destroyed, when nothing is really altered. We attribute existence only to what we perceive as discrete instances of Being. We might say that "This piece of paper exists!" Were we to tear it in half, would it still exist? Were we to continue tearing it into even smaller parts, until those parts themselves became invisible to the naked eye, would we deny that the piece of paper exists? What if we were to scatter those invisible pieces across the entire universe, would we then be able to say that the piece of paper does not exist? The fact is that the paper exists as much then as it did at the beginning; nothing really has changed from the perspective of Being. Being is that out of which perceptible things arise and into which perceptible things return. Diogenes Laertius, a collector of apocrypha about philosophers, tells the story that Thales held that there was no difference between life and death. "Why, then, don't you kill yourself?" someone once asked him. "Because there is no difference," Thales replied (Diogenes Laertius I. 22-38).

The "superficial modifications" or "phantom disturbances" of Being are what constitute the world of our experience--what is first for us, rather that what is first in nature. How, then, does Thales account for such modifications as we perceive them to occur in Being? Aristotle records that Thales supposed that gods are in everything.

Some say the soul is diffused throughout the universe; and perhaps that is what Thales meant in saying that all things are full of gods. (Aristotle, De Anima 411a 7)

Again, this saying must be treated metaphorically. What Thales suggests by saying that "all things are full of gods" is that there is no external cause of motion; rather the cause of motion must lie within Being itself. By treating this statement "all things are full of gods" as a metaphor we can eliminate the inconsistency of a dual universe -- one of Being and one of gods - that a literal interpretation of Thales’ two sayings would necessarily raise. Rather, our way of thinking projects multiple discrete identities upon Being as the cause of multiple discrete changes, when in fact no such multiple discrete entities exist. Being is the only thing that truly exists; and it, and not something other, is the cause of our mistaken interpretation of it.

Thales offers yet another proof of the unity of Being. When we think of the cause of motion, we incline to think of living things, because living things, for the most part, have local motion; they move by themselves and can move other things as well. But the ability to generate motion makes living things special, so that they appear to stand apart from the rest of the cosmos. But, according to Thales’ view of Being, non-living things have just as much Being as the living, so they too ought to possess this power to move things if Being and the source of motion are one and the same. That this is so can be seen the magnet's ability to attract and repel otherwise inert, non-living metal.

It would seem that Thales conceived of soul as somehow a motive power, since he said that the magnetic stone has soul in it because it sets a piece of iron in motion. (Aristotle, De Anima 405a 19)

Just as Thales’ discovery of the unity of Being could best be presented to his audience metaphorically by saying that everything is water, so his explanation of perceptible change could best be explained by proclaiming that there are gods in everything. Neither saying does justice to the true originality and comprehensiveness of his great discovery if literally understood. Taken together and understood metaphorically, they reveal his complete break with the mythological-religious understanding of the cosmos.

Thales’ powerful conception of the unity of Being was embraced and refined by the pre-Socratic philosophers. Yet, it was eventually eclipsed in Western Civilization by the work of Plato and others, only to re-emerge 2500 years later in Einstein’s proposition that matter and energy are one and interchangeable.

Bibliography

Robinson, John Mansley. An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre. The Origins of Greek Thought. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press, 1962.

Wheelwright, Philip, ed. The Presocratics. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1966.

 

Internet Links

http://www.forthnet.gr/presocratics/thaln.htm

Anonymous. A brief biography of Thales with a general description of his philosophy.

http://www.weber.u.washington.edu/~smcohen/thales.htm

Cohens, Mark. "Lecture Notes on Thales." Department of Philosophy, University of Washington, 1998.

http://www.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v001/1.3panchenko.htm

Panchenko, Demitri. "Thales & the Origin of Theoretical Reasoning." Configurations. Vol. 3. Washington, D.C.:John Hopkins University, 1993.