In 585, according to the historian Herodotus, a battle between the Medes and the Lydians had been brought to a sudden halt when the sky darkened with an eclipse of the sun. The combatants were so overawed that they made peace with each other. An equally remarkable fact, however, was that the eclipse was said to have been predicted by one Thales, a citizen of the Ionian city of Miletus. It is impossible to say now, from the fragmentary sources, whether Thales had genuinely predicted the eclipse or simply provided an explanation for it after it had happened. He may have been simply passing on material gathered by Babylonian astronomers, and his own picture of the cosmos, described below, would hardly have provided him with a means of prediction. However, the moment is often seen as the birth of Greek philosophy, with Thales, for Aristotle at least, its founding father. Arguably, of course, a prediction of an eclipse is not normally seen as philosophy but the word here is used in the more general sense of a love of wisdom, and hence of enquiry, for its own sake. These thinkers were embedded in their own social and cultural world and many retained underpinning concepts of the divine which are now difficult to recover. Those before the great Socrates (active 430-390 Bc) are known as the Preso-cratics. They were a varied bunch. Presocratic philosophy, writes Martin West, ‘was not a single vessel which a succession of pilots commanded and tried to steer towards an agreed destination, one tacking one way, the next altering course in the light of his own perceptions. It was more like a flotilla of small craft whose navigators did not all start from the same point or at the same time, nor all aim for the same goal; some went in groups, some were influenced by the movements of others, some travelled out of sight of each other.’
(See as introductions, Catherine Osborne, Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2004; A. A. Long (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, Cambridge and New York, 1999; and Robin Waterfield (ed.), The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists, Oxford and New York, 2009 (with translated texts).)
There is no one reason why Greek philosophy should have begun in the Ionian world. The cities of the Asian coast were the most prosperous of the sixth-century Greek world. Miletus was the richest of all and, like many of the others, had had a tyrant. After he had been overthrown a civil war had broken out. One of the factions in the war was known as ‘The Perpetual Sailors’, and this underlines the fact that many Milesians must have travelled abroad in search of trade—to Egypt, for instance, and equally to some of the opulent and sophisticated civilizations of the east. Hecataeus, author of the earliest known geography of the Mediterranean (c.500 Bc), was from Miletus. So the Milesians would have had the opportunity to observe different cultures and absorb the varying intellectual traditions of these surrounding peoples. This in itself may have shaken conventional assumptions and liberated fresh ways of thinking.
The scholar who has done most to illuminate the birth of ‘fresh ways of thinking’ within the polis itself is Geoffrey Lloyd. For Lloyd the polis acts as a cockpit for debate. In the assemblies and the law courts argument was intense, yet there seem to have been restraints on letting these degenerate into outright civil war. In order to formulate and win arguments without a breakdown of order there was every incentive to find first principles from which debate could begin. So in an argument over whether an accused man could be condemned one could be forced back into a discussion of what is meant by ‘justice’, how evidence is to be tested, and what is an appropriate punishment. Those who ‘won’ such arguments could earn status as a result and so there was an increasing premium on the facility of reasoning that could be transferred into other ‘philosophical’ contexts. Lloyd shows how a word such as ‘witness’ used in the law courts is the root of the word for ‘evidence’ in scientific discourse and how the term used for cross-examination of witnesses was adopted to describe the testing of an idea or hypothesis. (See, in particular, Lloyd’s Magic, Reason and Experience, Cambridge, 1979.)
What is crucial to the development of reasoning is that ideas can be debated without fear of inciting the wrath of the gods. Greek philosophy was remarkable in that it paid little attention to authority figures. As Lloyd points out in his The Revolutions of Wisdom (Berkeley, 1987), while in Egypt and the Near East it was unheard of to criticize earlier work, in Greece it was the norm. If, however, earlier ‘authorities’ were to be challenged then coherent means of doing so had to be elaborated. This placed an emphasis on ways of finding truth and certainty (and, equally important, an assessment of what ‘truth’ and ‘certainty’ actually were in specific philosophical contexts).
The early philosophers were concerned with understanding the nature of the cosmos. The names of three from Miletus survive: Thales and two followers, Anaximander and Anaximenes. All were recorded as practical men. Thales had been involved in politics and had some engineering skills. He is said to have measured the heights of the pyramids and the size of the sun and the moon. (Yet, to the gentle ridicule of a watching maidservant, he sets off the tradition of the absent-minded professor by falling into a hole while he was absorbed in scanning the stars.) Anaximander made a map of the known world. Anaximenes was remembered for his skills in the observation of everyday things, such as how an oar broke through water and scattered phosphorescence. In short, they were public men, involved in politics and so performing on a public stage. Philosophy, in fact, was probably only a secondary interest for them, one way of ‘performing’. Aristotle may simply have highlighted the aspects of their thinking that he felt prefigured his own, to the exclusion of their other activities.
What survives of these early philosophers’ thought is very fragmentary and subject to continuing debate. They appear to have shared a belief that the world system, the kosmos, was subject to a divine force that gave it an underlying and orderly background. Where they got this idea, which is a far cry from the Homeric world of gods, is unknown—possibly from eastern mythology. It proved fundamental to the speculations that followed.
Thales is known for his prediction of the eclipse, but he also seems to have been the first man to look for the origins of the kosmos. For Thales the basis of all things was water, on which the earth itself floated. There were Egyptian and Semitic creation stories in which the initial state was a waste of waters, but Thales may also have picked water because of its demonstrable importance to all human life. What Thales appears to have been suggesting is that everything stems from this one originating source. It is not clear, however, whether Thales thought that all existing things could be broken down back into water or whether they had changed irreversibly into their new forms. This attempt to give a single, rational account of the natural order can be seen as a key moment in the evolution of western culture with implications which still excite scientists and philosophers today.
Anaximander concentrated on a problem which arose directly from Thales’ speculation, the difficulty of understanding how a particular physical entity (fire is an example given) can possibly come from something which seems to be an opposite to it, water. The very fact that he spotted the problem and tried to find a reasoned solution to it is significant in itself. Anaximander’s proposal lay in imagining an indeterminate and timeless substance from which everything developed. He called it ‘the Boundless’. Anaximander saw ‘the Boundless’ not only as the origin of all material but with the separate function of surrounding the earth and keeping everything in balance. He seems to have believed that not only could water and fire never merge into each other but they, like other opposites such as ‘the dry’ and ‘the wet’, were actually in conflict with each other, with one or other dominant at any time with only an overriding force, ‘the Boundless’, to keep overall order. One might well see an analogy with political conflict in the polis, different factions in opposition to each other but with, ultimately, some overriding abstract ideal used to keep peace.
Anaximander’s other contribution was to propose how the earth existed as a stable and unmoving object in space. Thales had argued that the earth rested on water, but this left the problem of what the water rested on. Anaximander proposed that there is no reason why anything that exists at the centre should necessarily move from that position. It cannot move in opposite directions at the same time and will thus always remain suspended in the centre. If this is Anaximander’s argument (it is only recorded as such by Aristotle 200 years later), then it is the first instance in natural science of what is known as the principle of sufficient reason (the principle that for every fact there must be an explanation why the fact is as it is).
What Anaximander did not explain was the process by which one form of matter, ‘the Boundless’, became another. Was there a boundary between ‘the Boundless’ and the rest of the physical world or was ‘the Boundless’ in some form identical with the physical world? It was left to the third of the Milesian thinkers, Anaximenes, to suggest a solution. Anaximenes argued that the world consisted of one interchangeable matter, air, from which all physical objects derived. The air could become wind and then cloud or water vapour. The transition of steam into water and then into ice provided examples of further transitions. Harder substances, such as rock, consisted of air that had been condensed even further. For Anaximenes, air also had a spiritual quality. It was a substance that existed eternally whatever it might be temporarily transmuted into. Its special position could be seen from its importance in sustaining life, and here Anaximenes drew on a popular conception that death occurred because air had withdrawn from the human body.
If the universe did originate from one substance, the problem was how to reconcile this with the enormous diversity and sense of constant change that any observer of the physical world is confronted with. The question of diversity and disorder was posed by one of the most complex of the early philosophers, Heraclitus, who, like his forerunners, was an Ionian, from the city of Ephesus to the north of Miletus. Ephesus was culturally a Greek, Ionian, polis, nominally under Lydian and later Persian control, but still able to participate in the Greek world. Heraclitus was active about 500 Bc and saw himself as the pioneer of a new approach to philosophy. The task that absorbed him was to reconcile the observable flux of the natural world with underlying stable principles that governed its existence.
Heraclitus’ work survives in about a hundred fragments, as if he wrote not in continuous prose or verse as other philosophers did but in a series of short and penetrating observations. (The more recent example of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein comes to mind.) Many of the fragments are obscure and were seen as such by his contemporaries. They give the impression that Heraclitus was deliberately trying to disturb conventional views and show off his own brilliance. Certainly his contemporaries experienced him as an unsettling and unpopular figure. He explored the contradictions he perceived in the physical world. Salt water is drinkable for fish but undrinkable and deadly for men. Two very different properties exist in the same substance. The road that leads upwards also leads downwards. If one steps into a stream on successive days is it, with its changed water, still the same stream? In many cases, Heraclitus notes, a concept is intelligible only because there is an opposite to it. The concept of war is only meaningful if there is also one of peace or health if there is sickness. They are mutually dependent on each other, as also are night and day, winter and summer. Heraclitus gives a special place to Fire, which, at times in his words, seems to be the essential element that underlies others, even though it varies in intensity. He sees it as a transforming force that equates with gold as a means of achieving change (gold is transferable into bought goods) and as a universal system of value.
Fire appears to bring chaos but, as Heraclitus assures us, what appears to be diversity in nature is in fact part of a natural unity. Apparent conflict ultimately brings order so that, while opposites provide tensions, all are reconciled by a divine force, logos, that at time is equated with Fire itself. ‘Logos is day, night, winter, summer, war, peace, surfeit, famine.’ All things come into being in accordance with logos’. Heraclitus was the first to give an elevated meaning to a term, logos, that originally meant no more than a written or spoken word. He also argued that, despite the impossibility of defining the true reality of logos, there were some who could approach its meaning more closely than others (naturally he was one of them!). On the highest level, it represented a divine law, common to all, that stood above everything else, just, as he says, the laws of a city are greater than its individuals. When logos, ‘the Word’, was appropriated by John in the opening of his Gospel, Greek philosophy achieved one of its greatest coups.
Heraclitus was happy to derive his ideas from the world he could observe around him. ‘All that can be learnt by seeing and hearing, this I value highest,’ as he put it in one fragment. The approach taken by his contemporary and philosophical rival Parmenides could not have been more different. Parmenides was born about 515 in Elea, a city in southern Italy that had been founded by exiles from another Ionian city, Phocaea. He may have been consciously challenging Heraclitus when he discarded observation about the physical world in favour of taking a lonely path towards finding truths based only on reason. The physical world, Parmenides argues, in the earliest piece of sustained philosophical argument to have survived, is made up only of what can be conceived in the mind. That and that alone exists. (This is fine for something that does exist, like a piece of rock, but is less helpful for concepts which can be imagined but which do not actually exist, such as a unicorn. It is assumed that Parmenides did not intend to include them in his system.) What cannot be thought of has no existence whatsoever and nothing more can or need be said about it. Parmenides goes on from here to argue that what exists—a piece of rock, for instance—can only exist in that state. It cannot be conceived of in any pre-or post-rock state because then it would not have existed as it does now and what did not exist cannot be spoken of. Therefore the rock and by analogy all existing things are unchangeable, caught in a perpetual present. Parmenides goes further to argue that as ‘nothing’ cannot exist there cannot be empty space between objects— all things that exist are joined as one indivisible substance. The logical conclusion, therefore, is that the world is composed of one unchanging substance. This immediately contradicts what the senses have to say and opens up a chasm between the findings of reason and those of observation.
Parmenides’ pupil Zeno went on to explore the paradoxes exposed by Parmenides’ reasoning. One is that of the arrow in flight. To the senses the arrow appears to be moving. Yet logically, Zeno argued, it was not. The argument goes as follows. Everything is at rest when it is ‘at a place equal to itself’. At each moment of time the arrow is always at ‘a place equal to itself’. Therefore the arrow is always at rest. Equally a runner cannot run across a stadium until he has crossed half its length. He cannot reach half its length until he has covered a quarter and a quarter until he has covered an eighth and so on. Logically, he can never reach the end of the stadium.
Parmenides had shown that if a single incontrovertible starting point can be taken, then it is possible to proceed deductively to demonstrate some contingent truth. This was a crucial step in the development of philosophical argument. His conclusions were deeply unsettling in themselves and acted to stimulate further thought across the Greek world. Plato, for instance, acknowledged the influence of Parmenides when he argued that there are unchanging entities, the Forms, which can only be approached through reason (see p. 283).
One reaction to Parmenides was to enquire more closely into what it was that actually made up material objects. Empedocles, an extrovert aristocrat from Acra-gas in Sicily who combined personal austerity with a vanity so overweening that he suggested he might be divine, aimed to reinstate the senses as a valid source for knowledge. Objects, he suggested, were not unchanging as Parmenides had argued. They come into being in their different forms according to a different mix of four elements, earth, water, air, and fire. Trees, fish, birds, humans, even the gods, are composed of differing combinations of the elements. Forces of what he called Love and Strife caused the perpetual disintegration and reformation of different materials but the four elements remain constant. Empedocles went further. The continual mingling and remingling of the elements led at time to bizarre combinations but some survived in a form that could reproduce, although only through chance. Empedocles was ridiculed by Aristotle, who preferred an ordered process of evolution, but Empedocles was the one who eventually earned the accolade of Darwin for his insight. The question of whether there is an underlying order to evolution, represented by common features of different species such as eyes and feathers, continues to be debated.
An alternative explanation to the problem of material objects was to assume that they could be divided into tiny particles that were themselves indivisible. (The Greeks used the word atomos for such a particle, hence ‘atom’.) The concept originated with the mid-fifth-century Leucippus, a native of Abdera, a small town in the northern Aegean founded by settlers from Ionia. Leucippus broke completely with Parmenides to assert that ‘nothing’ could exist (a good statement then as now from which to start a philosophical argument) in the sense that there could be empty space between things. If this was accepted, matter did not have to be joined together in one undifferentiated mass and objects could move as there was empty space to move through. Leucippus and his younger contemporary Democritus, also from Abdera, went on to argue that the physical world was made up of atoms that were of the same substance but differed in shape and size. These atoms move at random (exploiting the empty spaces), but atoms of like size or shape tend to be attracted to each other and form material objects (Democritus even postulated that some were conveniently provided with hooks). So the world as it exists takes shape. Every object is made of the same substance arranged differently according to the form of its constituent atoms. Atoms would move downwards but on occasions there would be a ‘swerve’, atoms would collide and new objects emerge. Where the Atomists differed from earlier cosmologists was in their belief that the ‘swerves’ were random. There is no mention of a guiding force behind them. The only things that exist are atoms and the empty spaces between them. This was the first developed statement of materialism, the theory that nothing exists beyond the material world that can be directly grasped by the senses. It made the Atomists Marx’s favourite Greek philosophers (see further p. 426 on Lucretius).
A very different approach was provided by Pythagoras, another Ionian in origin, a native of the island of Samos. As noted above, Pythagoras was forced into exile in southern Italy, probably about 525 Bc. Very little is known about his life, although a mass of later legend attaches to it. He was clearly a charismatic figure and drew around him a band of devoted followers who continued in existence long after his death and who inspired other similar groups in the cities of southern Italy. It has proved virtually impossible to distinguish between what Pythagoras himself taught and what was added later by the Pythagoreans. ‘Pythagoras’ theorem’ of the rightangled triangle, for instance, seems to have had no direct connection with him (and was probably known, in essence, to the Babylonians many hundreds of years earlier).
The one teaching which is most likely to have been Pythagoras’ own is that of the transmigration of the soul. Pythagoras appears to have believed that the soul exists as an immortal entity separately from the body. The body is simply its temporary home, and on the death of one body it moves on to another. What kind of body it moves on to depends on its behaviour in each life, for the soul is not only immortal, it is rational and responsible for its own actions. It must never let itself be conquered by the desires of the body. If it does then it will suffer in the next. Likewise, through correct behaviour it can move on to a happier existence. The Pythagoreans were therefore ascetics, but unlike many with this leaning they never cut themselves off from the world. In fact, many Pythagoreans became deeply involved in politics, even though the austerity of their beliefs often aroused opposition. Although direct proof of any association of Pythagoras with mathematics is lacking, he is often linked with the theory that the structure of things rests on numbers. A single string spanning a sounding-box sounds a note when plucked. Halve the length of the string and pluck it again. The note is one octave higher. Metals mixed in certain proportions form new metals. The relationship between the parts of a ‘perfect’ human body can be calculated mathematically. Is it possible to argue from this that mathematical forms exist unseen behind all physical structures? The possibility that they do and can be grasped by a reasoning soul was to be taken up by Plato. The study of mathematics was to be the core of the education given to his aspiring philosophers. (See the excellent Kitty Ferguson, Pythagoras, London, 2010, for Pythagoras’ legacy in the west.)
The varied arguments of the early Greek thinkers were invigorating but deeply unsettling. Faced with the seeming absurdities of Parmenides’ deductions, philosophy could be dismissed as no more than an intellectual game. It could be argued that ‘truth’, if the concept could be said to exist at all, was something relative, dependent on the inadequate senses of individual observers or the ways in which they constructed their reasoned arguments. In the sixth century another Ionian, Xenophanes, had already made a similar point in a famous statement about the gods:
Immortal men imagine that gods are begotten and that they have human dress and speech and shape. . . If oxen or horses or lions had hands to draw with and to make works of art as men do, the horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, oxen like oxen, and they would make their gods’ bodies similar to the bodily shape they themselves each had. (Translation: E. Hussey)
If the gods, to take Xenophanes’ example, are the construction of human minds, it is a short step to argue that other concepts—goodness or justice, for instance— might also be. The fundamental question is then raised as to whether there could ever be any agreement over what the gods, or justice or goodness, might be. This was to be the central issue tackled by Socrates and Plato in the late fifth and early fourth centuries (see pp. 280-7).
The achievements of these early philosophers need to be placed in context. They had not invented rational thought, which is an intrinsic element of human society, found in every culture. The environment was being manipulated intelligently early in human history. In the Odyssey Odysseus fights his way through the waves after his shipwreck. He weighs up the alternative methods of getting safely to shore— going straight in and being smashed by rocks or swimming further along the shore and risking being swept off by a gust of wind. Faced with changing physical circumstances, human beings have always contemplated the alternatives for survival and made conscious decisions as to the best way forward.
The achievement of Greek philosophy was to go beyond these everyday decisions and recognize a distinct branch of reasoning that can be applied to abstract issues. The Egyptians and Babylonians had evolved a number of mathematical procedures to deal with the practical problems of building, calculating rations, and so on. These procedures had reached their final form in Babylon about 1600 Bc. What was missing was any ability to use numbers in an abstract way. This was the breakthrough achieved by the Greeks. Although a systematic outline of mathematical knowledge was not produced until Euclid’s Elements in about 300 bc, it is clear that Greeks were thinking as pure mathematicians by the fifth century, able to work with axioms, definitions, proofs, and theorems. In this way, general principles could be formulated which could then be used to explore a wider range of other issues. It was the ability to work in the abstract that inspired intellectual progress, not just in mathematics but in science, metaphysics, ethics, even in politics. The reforms of Cleisthenes in Athens in the late sixth century (see p. 181) depended on a plan of bringing together a set of communities into the artificial structure of the trittys, a plan he must have constructed in an abstract form.
The end result, and one which was fundamental, was that there were few inhibitions on enquiry. The success of Greek philosophy lay in its critical and argumentative approach to an extraordinary range of questions. As the philosopher Bernard Williams pointed out:
In philosophy the Greeks initiated almost all its major fields—metaphysics, logic, the philosophy of language, the theory of knowledge, ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of art. [Williams here is only referring to the concerns of modern philosophers—he might have added mathematics and science, included as ‘philosophy’ by the Greeks.] Not only did they start these areas of enquiry but they progressively distinguished what would still be recognised as many of the most basic questions in those areas.
It is worth noting that Williams concentrates on the Greeks as question askers. They did not always come up with very effective answers. There were good reasons for this. First, their speculations often ran far ahead of what their senses could cope with. It is sobering to realize that no Greek astronomer had any means of exploring the heavens other than his own eyes. (There were instruments developed for measuring angles, but they still depended on the naked eye for their use.) Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation, the idea that life could come from nowhere, which lingered on as a misconception until the seventeenth century, arose largely because he had no way of seeing small objects. (His colleague Theophrastus, in a textbook example of how no Greek philosopher was immune from criticism by his colleagues, made the point by noting tiny seeds which Aristotle had missed, thus casting doubt on the concept of spontaneous generation altogether.) Not the least of the Greeks’ philosophical achievements was, however, to recognize that even though the senses were inadequate they were still crucial. The fifth-century philosopher Democritus got to the core of the problem when he constructed a dialogue between a mind and the senses. ‘Wretched mind, taking your proofs from us (the senses), do you overthrow us? Our overthrow will be your fall.’
In short, the Greek world of the sixth century fostered an intellectual curiosity and creativity that took many forms. The Archaic age deserves to be seen as one where a particular attitude of mind took root, perhaps, as has been suggested, because of the intensity of life in the polis. It involved the search for an understanding of the physical world free of the restraints imposed by those cultures that still lived in the shadow of threatening gods. It remained a fragmented world, however, one in which cities survived precariously on the limited resources available. Its vulnerability was now to be tested by attack from the east by the largest empire the world had yet seen, that of Persia.
World History
