Understanding the Beginnings of Philosophy: Pre-Socratic Philosophers

Understanding the Beginnings of Philosophy: Pre-Socratic Philosophers G. Stephen Blakemore ©G. Stephen Blakemore (all rights reserved worldwide) When Plato appeared on the scene of Greek intellectual history, he was part of a long line of discussion about the nature of reality that had begun some 200 years before him. As a student of Socrates, he was addressing the intellectual culture of ancient Athens in a way that was in keeping with his mentor and continued the intellectual assault upon the predominant strains of thought at that time. The chief opponents against which Plato—following Socrates—contended were a group of intellectuals known as Sophists. These men tended to fall into one of two schools of thought: skepticism or cynicism. The skeptical sophists were those who acknowledged that there could well be an ultimate or absolute truth about the nature of reality and the demands that such a truth might impose upon human life morally, politically, culturally, etc.; this truth, however, was unknowable. Cynics were those who argued that there was no such thing as “Truth” and that the only ultimate guiding principle for human life was the will. They were like 4th century B.C. nihilists, contending that social conventions and all the claims of moral absolutes were impositions upon a thinking man’s freedom to make of himself what he wanted. In each school of thought we see the result of the failures of early Greek philosophy to make sense of the world and to come to any consensus about the foundational physical or metaphysical constituent of the world in which we live. The birth of Greek philosophy is traced by historians to sometime around the late sixth century B.C. on the western coast of modern-day Turkey in an area then called Miletus. All quotes are taken from Wallace Matson, A New History of Philosophy: Ancient and Medieval, [Harcourt Brace, 1987]. Thales is considered the father of Greek philosophical thought, which was also “scientific” thought in the sense that it was an endeavor to understand and describe the workings and the existence of the world in terms that did not rely upon myth and religion. From what we know of his thought, we see a theorist who sought to give explanations of things based upon observation, reflection, and rational analysis (given what he was able to experience). Like all the early non-mythological thinkers of the Ionian peninsula and of ancient Greece, he endeavored to describe the world in non-personal terms—terms that did not see all actions and explain all events as acts of the gods. Here was the major turning point represented in the project that Thales seemed to launch. Prior to him, so far as we know, the default perspective in explaining why things happen the way they do in the world was to attribute it to the actions of the gods directly or indirectly in the world. For example, when a tidal wave might hit the coastal area of Thales’ home area, the explanation was simply that Poseidon was shaking the earth with his trident, and if they sky thundered, Zeus was angrily rending the sky. Rather than look to such mythical explanations, Thales sought an explanation from the make-up of the world itself. The beginning of philosophy was also the beginning of science and was committed to establishing non-mythological, materialistic, or natural explanations, even though they did not stop believing in the divine. Divine things were just not the explanations of events in the view of these early Greek intellectual innovators. In that regard, Thales contended that Water was the foundational element upon which all other things and every other element depended for their specific and actual existence. Water (or the principle of liquidity) was the primal stuff. Why water, it might be asked; he was reasoning within the framework of Greek understanding of the material essence of all physical reality. In this ancient view, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water were the FOUR ELEMENTS constituting all things. Thales wanted simply to determine how the four elements might be related to one another. Therefore, he determined that Water was the most basic element from which all others came. Every particular physical entity, whether a rock (Earth) or the wind (Air) or a heat-producing blaze (Fire), was fundamentally constituted out of Water as its basic material elemental source. How this could be in his mind we do not know since we don’t have enough of his writings. When it came to the active existence and workings of things in the world, however, the material constituent—Water—could not explain everything. Hence, Thales contended that all things are in their actual concrete existence “full of gods.” What he seems to have meant by the first of these two concepts—Water is the primal element—is that liquidity is the primary principle of physical existence. Solid things come from liquid, air-like things as well and in some way even fire comes from the primal watery essence. Of course, from Thales’ perspective it would have been quite easy to assert that the liquid element was foundation for life since all things need water to be alive and the animal world depends upon blood (a liquid). Thales’ second contention that all things are “full of gods” was not an animistic claim about the spiritual nature of all things. Rather, it would appear, to me, to be in keeping with his belief that water is the primal elementary stuff of all of reality. To be “full of gods”, therefore, meant that all things have the source and mechanism of their workings in them immanently; there is no need of introducing person-like beings—gods—operating from “outside” the world. In that sense, Thales probably saw “life” as a feature of all things, hence all things were dependent upon water. Thales had a pupil named Anaximander who was, as well, a prominent citizen of Miletus. He was taken by Thales’ intellectual project of determining a non-mythological ultimate source of the workings of the universe and concrete existence of each individual entity, as well as the FOUR ELEMENTS themselves. However, he could not agree with his mentor that Water was primal. He did accept, as had Thales, that there had been a development of the world, that things had not been the same for all past time. (He and Thales probably accepted this idea from the mythology of their predecessors.) Where Thales still was influenced by the myth makers who themselves had stories of how a primordial watery chaos was involved in the origins of the world as it has become, Anaximander furthered his teacher’s initial and seminal movement away from the mythological explanations. So, he argued that something he called The Boundless was/is the ultimate and primal source from which all elements emerge and then—based on the four elements—particular material things exist. This Boundless was not, indeed in his view, could not be one of the four great divisions of nature—earth, air, fire, and water. In addition to moving further away from the mythological explanations, Anaximander observed that the FOUR ELEMENTS exist in opposition to one another and tend to cancel each other out. Air tends to be cold, fire is hot, just as water is moist/wet and earth is dry. Therefore, if any one of them were infinite and the origin of the others, the rest would have returned to the original. For instance, water would extinguish fire, as well as erode and moisten into non-existence earth and it would displace air. He reasoned that the origin of everything cannot be any one of those four elements, so Thales was wrong about the primal nature of water. Instead, indeterminate—unlike each of the FOUR ELEMENTS—and non-specific, i.e., neutral, in its existence and non-definable, The Boundless could give rise to distinct, individual particular things. This boundless primal reality was not, however, static, or inert, but was in eternal motion—a ‘whirling.’ Of course, he chose the motion of whirling because in everyday experience the motion of spinning produces separation as items are thrown outward, as in a whirlpool or a tornado’s vortex. Heavy objects can collect at the bottom and lighter ones are moved outwards. This observation led Anaximander to conclude that “something capable of begetting hot and cold out of the eternal gets separated off [from the Boundless’ non-specific oneness of being]” Of course, “the hot” was in Anaximander’s mind a actual entity/stuff (fire) and not just a principle of energy. In the same way, the “cold” was another stuff that contained the things that are not “the hot”—earth, air, and water. Within “the cold” the process of separation that is inherent in the Boundless continues and the three elements that are not fire form. But, because all the four elements come from the Boundless, not to mention the individual existing entities that have concrete reality as distinct expression of the four elements, everything is in a process of temporary existing as things tend to return to the Boundless. The three main things about Anaximander’s view are: 1) he grasped that whatever was behind the visible, measurable world of our experiences it could not be one of the divisions of that world—instead it had to be something sui generis, in and of itself different from all else and real; 2) the primary conditions upon which reality would be formed were a set of opposites that would create a distinction and a tension of existence, namely “HOT” and “COLD”; 3) since things do not generate themselves or sustain themselves, but are from the Boundless, all things are in a process of decay and all things tend to return to a chaos like state of the Boundless. The third of the original philosophers of Miletus was Anaximenes, who was a pupil of Anaximander. He was more amenable to the kind of thought that one sees in Thales (who he probably knew as an older teacher), because he attempted to define all of reality based upon the inherent qualities of ONE of the four basic elements. Anaximenes, however, thought AIR was a far better candidate than was WATER, for reasons we shall explain. It would seem to me that Anaximenes chose AIR to explain the UNITY of primary substance and the ONENESS of all of reality because he thought that Anaximander’s theory about The Boundless could not account for the unity since the Boundless was not any kind of elemental substance itself. Since the Boundless was indeterminate and nothing specific and not describable, it sounded a lot like nothing. This, it would seem, was a problem with Anaximander’s views for the basic cosmology that shaped Anaximenes’ worldview. Anaximenes considered that the differences between all things had to be quantitative. Anaximander had qualitative changes that were “just so” accounts—this is the way it happened (the whirling motion of the Boundless). Also, the principles of hot and cold out of the Boundless were, in essence, quite distinct from one another. Hence, how could reality be ONE thing, if the primary constituting principles of it—The HOT and The COLD—were so radically distinct from one another. Anaximenes must have tended to think that the only way to maintain the unity of primary substance and therefore the unity of the cosmos was to say that all diversities and distinctions between the concrete existing things and the FOUR ELEMENTS are due to the quantitative presence (the concentration) of a single primordial stuff. It was, therefore, no longer necessary to think of the primary foundational substance of reality as a distinct principle—undefinable—from the actual ELEMENTS of our experience of the world. In fact, Anaximenes clearly thought of reality as being produced by the quantity of AIR as present in and creating other things. He taught that the other elements—EARTH, FIRE, and WATER—were nothing but AIR “rarefied or condensed.” There was even an “experiment” he performed (the first recorded one we know of) a scientific experiment to demonstrate the basis of his theory. Blowing hard on the back of his hand with pursed or “compressed” lips, and telling others to do the same, he could illustrate how the “thick” air (it does feel more forceful and “thicker”, one must admit) was also cool (cold). With his mouth opened wide (uncompressed), he would exhibit how this “thin” (rarefied) air (since it feels less forceful) was warm. Hence, condensed air was cool and the more condensed the cooler it would be, just as rarefied or thinned out air was warm and increasingly so (by way of implication) the more rarefied or “thin” it became. Fire, then, was the most extreme form of air as rarefied, even as earth was the result of condensed or thickened air producing hard objects. Water was in between. Furthermore, one sentence that has survived from Anaximenes written works gives us a glimpse into the materialistic point of view that he held. “Just as our soul (life force), being air, keeps us together in order, so also wind [or breath] and air encompasses the whole cosmos.” By the whole cosmos Anaximenes meant even the gods, as Hippolytus recounts: “From [air], he said, the things that are, and have been, and shall be, the gods the things divine, took their rise, while other things come from its offspring [the other elements].” Anaximenes, just as much as Thales and I think even Anaximander, was seeking a purely material explanation for the status and nature of reality. He was seeking to overcome the mythical accounts of the early Greek thinkers and the limits of religion, as he saw it. The predominant contributions that he made to the intellectual dialogue of his day were to introduce the ideas; 1) that all things were essentially the same “stuff” [AIR] quantitatively different; 2) that our lives were a microcosm of the macrocosm (universe), so that the relations found in us have their counterparts on the universal scale; 3) to negate the concept of transcendence (of the gods) by describing even the divine realm as dependent upon the same primordial stuff—AIR—as the rest of reality. Two other men, born about the same time in cities near Miletus, were influential in spreading the Ionian (area around Miletus) philosophy to the Greeks of Sicily and southern Italy, respectively Pythagoras and Xenophanes. The later of these was quite close the general spirit of Miletus and sought for non-mythological, even completely material explanations of all of reality. In contrast, Pythagoras was a mystic and rigorous thinker about the basis of reality who was devoted to a mathematical solution to describing the nature of reality. Whereas he represents an approach to “science” that has great affinity with the work that theoretical physicists do with mathematical formulas (ex. ) who was focused, nonetheless, upon the “spiritual” question of the nature and destiny of the human soul, Xenophanes was a ridiculer of all things he considered “superstition” and was focused upon the empirical approach to discovering the essence of reality. Pythagoras was unlike the earliest Ionian philosophers in a very important way. Aristotle tells us that the Milesians pursued the investigation of nature for its own sake— “osut of wonder” as he puts it—but Pythagoras was a moral and spiritual activist. It would be quite wrong for us to assume that simply because the three thinkers associated with the birth of philosophy—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes—were essentially secular and naturalistic in their orientation that religious questions and impulses were somehow on the wane in ancient Greece and the Aegean areas. Far from it. In fact, during the lives of Pythagoras and Xenophanes, the Greek city-states in Asia Minor—become subject to the Persian empire, which was deeply religious. This of course led to a revival of particularly Greek religious practices and beliefs as a response to subjugation. Pythagoras was, therefore, an example of the religious response and Xenophanes represents the denigration of religious belief that had begun with the Milesian emphasis. Even the concept of “philosophy” took on a new meaning with the advent of Pythagoras’ influence. Prior to him, with the original thinkers, this term had meant something akin to “curiosity” and intellectual culture. However, because of Pythagoras’ particular interests the term came to focus upon actual “wisdom” (philosophy means love of wisdom). Philosophy in his sense was about purification of the soul through escape from the wheel of life and the whirl of changing experience in the sensible world. To align oneself with the nature of reality was to anchor one’s life with that which is unchanging. Pythagoras’ influence in this regard was quite significant, “as this way or regarding philosophy is henceforth characteristic of the best of Greek thought.” John Burnett, Early Greek Philosophy, [Meridian Books: Cleveland & New York], p 83. Pythagoras was not the first person to be interested in either geometry or mathematics, nor even the greatest of Greek mathematicians. However, he was the first Greek thinker to make mathematical reasoning central in the quest to comprehend the world. In fact, he is famous for his quite confounding claim that “things are numbers.” He seemed to mean that in some literal sense (although remember that numbers are not numerals, which are themselves signs or symbols of numbers/numeric values). It is recorded that Pythagoras came to this view as an insight gleaned from the nature of musical harmony. To understand this, think in terms of a guitar string. If one plucks the string it makes a sound, say D on the scale. When you press down on the string at the midpoint between the bridge anchoring it to the guitar body and the top of the neck the same sound is made in terms of the note that is played, but it is now one octave higher than the note made by the vibrations of the entire length of the string. These two notes’ sounds, if they could be played together, would make a harmonious sound, i.e., they would be in agreement. Consider, further, that if the place on the string at which one presses the string is two-thirds of the length of the string, rather than one-half the note that is struck with be a “fifth” higher than the full string. And if the string is three-fourths of an interval length, then the sound made will be a “fourth.” Interestingly, these are all harmonious with the original. Even further, take the note D and consider the other notes that will make up a harmonious sounding chord: D, F#, A. The last two notes are, respectively, a “third” higher than the D and a “fifth” higher. Of course, musicians in the ancient world knew this, but Pythagoras saw this as evidence that numerical relationships were highly important, not just for music but for the world generally. Numbers, or numerical ratios or relationships, create patterns, which is the reasons there are limits on the stuff of reality. Definiteness, as opposed to a boundless reality or a undefined something is imposed by numerical structure. This seems to be what Pythagoras saw. For Pythagoras, just like the Milesians, he assumed an initial existing chaos (whether it was watery, airy, or boundless is not important). Something happened that caused it to become orderly—to become a Cosmos. In his view, the first thing that came into being was what he called “The Unit.” This unit was a limiting factor, which breathed in a part of the surrounding Unlimited, making that which was breathed in something defined and definite now. The unit was, therefore, the concept of “oneness.” (To be clear, the Unlimited cannot be considered a singular one thing—it just simply is, but it is not definable or limitable, and hence is not really one thing.) Then the Unit produced Two as a conceptual and actual distinguisher in concrete reality, and this continued until the entire series of numbers was established and generated; this being the Cosmos. While this theory is very hard to find intelligible, it is important to see that for Pythagoras there was some non-material force at work to make the material world what it is (since numbers and numerical relations are not material things). This contention informed decidedly Plato’s concept of the Forms. Additionally, Pythagoras looked at the reality of life as having real significance. In fact, he seemed to think of the entire Cosmos as being alive. All things had kinship, he believed. And all things that “have soul in them” (meaning life) were joined in some way. When the soul (life force) of an animal or person dies, he taught, it did not descend to the underworld but migrated into another body. Hence, for Pythagoreans eating any meat was a form of cannibalism and was, therefore, prohibited. Even beans and a few other vegetables were to be treated as taboo re food. To shun these things and to practice philosophy in the form of mathematical contemplation and mastery of the harmonious nature of the Cosmos and understand the kinship of all things was the way to achieve purity. To understand the world was to be able to rise above it—to look at it with the discerning and analytical eye and, thereby, transcend the material world—and be purified. Xenophanes was quite different from Pythagoras. Xenophanes was well-aware of the teachings of the Milesian philosopher-scientists (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes), and sought to improve on them. While many of the details of his own ‘scientific’ views remain obscure, the range and interconnectedness of his interests make him an important figure in the development of Ionian scientific theory. He thought the latter’s view of the soul and the concept of transmigration souls was a laughable concept; one for which he ridiculed Pythagoras. Beyond that, he even castigated and condemned the official Olympian religion as lacking in moral seriousness and virtue, and for being anthropomorphic in its views of the divine. Both Homer and Hesiod, the most important sources for Greek mythology, were guilty of ascribing to the gods “all things that are a shame and disgrace among mortal men, stealing and adultery and deceiving of one another.” His main contention was, it seems, that human ideas about the gods are little more than the exercise of making them into our own image. Rather than accept the official conventional religion of his day, Xenophanes argued for the recognition on One God, which is “the greatest among gods and men.” Where traditional Greek religion was polytheistic, Pythagoras seems to have tended toward a type of animism (although he would not have denied the existence of the gods). In contradistinction, Xenophanes was a kind of pantheist. Aristotle seems to have interpreted him in this way. Metaphysics 896 b 24. If there were other gods, they were dependent upon this One god. For him, the One god is not like mortals in any way, so that “all of him sees, thinks, and hears,” even as this deity “stays forever in the same place, moving not at all” and “shakes all things by his intelligent willpower.” Quoted in Wallace Matson, A New History of Philosophy, Ancient and Medieval, [Harcourt, Brace: New York], p 22. Whether or not this was a move away from the fundamental materialism that seems to be inherent in the Milesians agenda is a matter of debate among historians of philosophy. I tend to think that he was adopting a kind of half-way posture, which wanted to move away from mythology, but wanted to acknowledge the need to ground the workings of the world in some rationality. Thus, he adopted a kind of pantheism. Because of his view that the world was intelligible because of the intelligent willpower of the One God, Xenophanes was able to offer a conceptual framework for human intellectual progress. “The gods indeed did not reveal everything to mortals from the beginning; but men search, and in time they find out better.” Ibid, 23. Human insight into reality was rooted in the fundamental rational structure and design of the cosmos—which the gods would have known but did not reveal all at once. Heraclitus of Ephesus was born toward the end of the century (503 B.C. approx.) in which Pythagoras and Xenophanes lived—the sixth B.C. From the few writings of his that are extant, we must create an understanding of his thought. Most central to his thought, it seems, was the conclusion he reached that in the world of our experience—the Cosmos—where we are presented with a dizzying display of many and seemingly independent entities, all of which seem to be not only distinct but in conflict with one another, the truth is that it is this very conflict between things that is the essence of reality. All things compete in some way he argued. (And he is right to this extent: no two things can occupy the same space at the same time, hence one must be displaced by the other and there are features of the world in which we have to acknowledge that the basic forces of the world—for Heraclitus this would have been the FOUR ELEMENTS—are at odds, even if we think of powers such as gravity and the forces of repulsion that keep things apart.) Hence, in his view, reality is really the “strife of opposites,” but this very strife is itself a kind of “attunement” in which things are held together by the drive of all states of affairs to persist and other states to replace them. Heraclitus believed that this “war” was best understood when the recognition of the way this creates an underlying unity was realized. This realization was wisdom. Where others might see change and decay and replacement of one thing by another as a sort of negative feature of reality, Heraclitus proclaimed that the world is at once “one and many” and that it is only in virtue of the tension of the opposition that constitutes the unity of the One reality of which we are all a part. Pythagoras had argued for limits in his theory of numbers and the theory of ratios that make concrete definite existence possible—and therefore that things exist in a harmonious state of number-induced limit relation to one another. He had, furthermore, drawn up a table of opposites: left-right; unlimited-limit; even—odd; many-one; female-male; moving-resting; crooked-straight; darkness-light; bad-good; and oblong/round-square/rectangular. Heraclitus saw that the tension imposed by the conflict between individual things and the oppositions that limits created was, itself, the source of the unity of reality. For this reason, he seized upon the element of FIRE as representative of all of reality. For, since conflict and the flux of change from one state to another is the basis of reality, the best “elemental” example of that was, of course, FIRE. Fire is nothing except a singular entity that is never the same from one moment to the next. In clear rejection of the attempts by the early philosophers to argue that opposing entities and elements in the world of our experience were, themselves, the result of a “separating out” of an original undifferentiated unity (whether WATER, THE BOUNDLESS, or AIR), Heraclitus wanted the opposition to be appreciated as the fundamental basis for reality—nothing need be separated out because the basic elemental condition is a Cosmos full of warring distinctions. Therefore, all of reality is an ever-flowing flux of change and the conclusions we form about permanence of existence or of things is an illusion we must move beyond. “Nothing ever is, everything is becoming,” is the way he puts it. He also famously said that a person could “never step into the same river twice,” because by the nature of things the make-up of the river was different from moment to moment: the water into which one stepped was passed by the time you stepped in a second time. Such flux (ever-changing becoming) is not chaotic, in his view. Rather, there was behind the Flux the guiding reality of LOGOS, by which he seems to have simply meant intelligible and structured reality that enables the ever-changing reality to be a no chaotic ONE. It is in the reality of The ONE that all the tensions are reconciled (not done away with). Heraclitus is seemingly another example of the tendency toward pantheism that we saw clearly in Xenophanes. When he speaks of god he means universal LOGOS—rational principle that makes orderly and comprehensible. This is a law immanent in all things. Our reason—when it is operating properly—is a moment in this universal Reason, which is limited (man’s reason) and contracted and perspectival. But we are able to recognize the LOGOS which is the reason that the war of opposites and the flux of “becoming”—which is represented in the element FIRE—is ultimately a rational and knowable unity of existence. True wisdom realizes this reality and aligns itself appropriately, coming to realize that all the oppositions which we see (and which are the only reality) are in themselves merely the way things are. Hence, those things we consider “bad” are just our evaluation and are not in themselves morally or existentially bad. They are just part of the flux. Without the opposition there could be no reality; and the appearance of stability and permanence—even in values—is an illusion. On the other end of the philosophical spectrum from Heraclitus was a contemporary of this named Parmenides. His contention was, contra Heraclitus, that being is absolutely unchanging and that our experience of change is the illusion, for the One reality does not allow for there to be either change or distinctions. He focused upon the way that we must speak about reality as the mechanism by which we would analyze its nature and essence. While Parmenides never uses the term “Being”, and he also eschews completely the term “god” (even though his main writing is written in the voice of a goddess), we can utilize the term “Being” for our purposes, so long as we think in entirely sensible and material terms. Aristotle tells us that Parmenides believed only in a sensible (material) reality. He conceived of the universe as a plenum, i.e., a fullness of all that is. The physical reality--“Being”—is, according to Parmenides, not only a fullness, but is also un-generated, imperishable, one, continuous, indivisible, motionless, beginningless, unstopping, the same everywhere, complete from every direction, and the same as thought. Notice the last phrase. For Parmenides Being could not be generated because Being is all there is. Either something is or it is not. If Being had come into existence (been generated), it would have had to come out of what there is not—out of nothing—which is absurd. Just as Being could not come from that which is not, since Being is all there is, in the nature of Being there can be no distinctions at all. Were we to allow distinctions we would be in essence saying that an object or entity (call it A) is NOT another object (call it B). To say, however, A is not B is tantamount to declaring that in the nature of Being there exists the negation of Being (namely that something existing is NOT existing) and therefore we would be introducing an essential logical contradiction into Being itself. How could one, for example, envision the negation in the statement A is not B. Such a formulation of thought would have to give the weight of “existence” to the very concept that some kind of being was NOT part of the being that we are discussing. A logical impossibility, according to Parmenides. In the same way, any kind of movement or change would imply that the condition of Being has gone from being to not being. If your car were described as being in front of your house in the realm of Being in the morning and then NOT in front but beside your house in the afternoon, then a negation in the nature of Being had to be affirmed, which is ruled out by Parmenides’ lights by the nature of Being—it means IS and cannot mean IS NOT. So all ideas of change or movement—even Time—are illusions. Why? The reason is logically simple: once you take the One seriously you are bound to deny everything else of reality. Of course, Parmenides’ conceptual framework created a kind of intellectual crisis for anyone who was drawn to it. He had said that Reality (Being) and Thought are one—that there is a direct correspondence between correct thought about reality and the nature of reality. Inherent in this claim, however, was the radical distinction between our perceptual knowledge through the mechanism of our sense and the conceptual knowledge that we achieve by pure logic and analytical philosophy. His claim that our experiences of distinctions and change are illusory and not part of Being as it is in itself meant two things. First, that we could not—to any degree—trust our senses, rather we must turn for them to pure intellectuality for right understanding of the nature of reality. Logic was preeminent. The second implication growing from this was that there could never be any science (true knowledge) of particulars. All of the endeavors up to this point by his predecessors were an attempt to understand the particulars which—to the greatest extent possible—make up the world of nature (as we experience it). With a single stoke, Parmenides was declaring this to be forever impossible. His philosophy was all at the same time a humbling critique to human knowledge and a philosophical foundation upon which skepticism and cynicism could arise and flourish with intellectual respectability. Parmenides built upon the conviction of all those who came before him in his belief that the human mind was amenable to structure of reality and to knowing it with his statement that Thought and Reality are one. (This was his way of saying that reality is intelligible). But, in the long run many would not be able to take him seriously, for both practical and philosophical reasons. In the generation following Parmenides, Empedocles was the first of the influential philosophers. His philosophy was strongly influenced by certain of Parmenides’ concepts—especially that things beginning to exist out of a previous state in which there was nothing that was in any way real (nothing) cannot happen and that what is truly real cannot ever perish. In other words, Empedocles saw reality as a continuing state of oneness, but not in such a way that denied the reality of movement and distinction within the plenum of being. He was not, therefore, subservient to Parmenides exaltation of logic and analytical reasoning about our statements regarding existence. Our senses, by Empedocles’ point of view, were not by their very essence deceitful and misleading. Rather, he taught that we should “not refuse trust to any other organ whereby there is an opening for intelligence but get understanding of each thing in the way appropriate for making that thing clear” (quoted in Matson, p 40). Here he seems to be indicating that there are different ways of knowing, of which logic and analytical insight are one (probably the highest), but logic does not apply strictly speaking to everything that can be known. It is not appropriate for making the particulars of the world clear; they are inherently better to be known by use of our senses, even if logic must help put together our experiences. So, Empedocles re affirmed the possibility of the science of nature. To grasp Empedocles’ view of the world, we need to understand that he is a kind of conventional thinker regarding the basis of the cosmos. He did not see the need to root all things in one basic stuff, as did Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. His view made room for Heraclitus’ embrace of the multitude of particulars, but with an important qualification. The world, he thought, was indeed comprised of FOUR ELEMENTS—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Entities that are changing and ceasing to be—particular entities—are but mixtures in various proportions of these four elements. The mixing and unmixing of these elements are made possible because there is another set of basic principles that are constituent influences in the concrete world: the forces “Affection” and “Strife.” By the former of these Empedocles was simply observing that there had to be some reality that would be able to bring the portions of the root elements together in mixtures and ratios. In the same way, there had to be some force at work to account for why things disintegrate and perish—a principle that tends to separate the elements once they are brought together. Here he seems to be echoing Anaximander’s view that there is a power in the universe that is responsible for decay and deterioration of things. (Anaximander thought of it as some injustice that was at work to separate off from the Boundless.) However, Empedocles thought that both Anaximander’s Boundless and Anaximenes’ theory that AIR rarefied (thinned) and condensed (thickened) was the ONE source of all things were inadequate. The first’s concept was too close to being nothing to account for the existence of everything (which Empedocles saw as an impossibility thanks to Parmenides). Also, Anaximander’s theory just asserted without explaining how the Boundless could have things separated out of it. Anaximenes’ doctrine was inadequate for a different reason. The material distinctions between fire and air, between a rock and water seem far too great to account for on the basis of a quantification of AIR in each of them. For this reason, Empedocles was driven back to the FOUR ELEMENTS understanding, since Parmenides had helped him see that existence has to be concrete and the idea of quantity of one element could not really account for the existence of all the elements and the particular things made out of them. So, his solution to the problem of understanding how all things could be part of one reality was to affirm that there are a limited number of fundamental elements (quality-giving stuffs) and that all the particular entities of the world—living and inanimate—could be explained in terms of mixing of the fundamentals in various degrees. (Here he seems to be echoing Pythagoras’ view of numeric ratios.) Within the world there is a tension (contest) between Affection and Strife (Heraclitus anyone?), so that when Affection is in ascendancy many things and animals are formed by the mixing of the elements. But there is no LOGOS at work to guide the process. It is random. A few survive because they achieve (in some unknow way) the ability to nourish and reproduce themselves. The reality of Strife means that some things will succumb to disintegration. (Here he is mirroring a bit of the evolutionary theory found in Anaximander, but with a little poetic flourish.) However, this random mixture and the influence of Affection to draw together and to help keep together means that human beings could come into existence and, because they are mixtures of the FOUR ELEMENTS, they could have sense organs that would correctly sense the make-up of the world. “By earth we see earth, by water water by air bright air, by fire destructive fire affection by affection and strife by dreadful strife.” He was trying to show how our ability to perceive and think had to have an explanation that went beyond our participation in the rationality of the universe. He did, however, believe in and contend for that transmigration of the soul (ala Pythagoras) and, so, he thought of the soul as being immortal. It is not a mixture like other things, so Empedocles had a dualistic worldview in which there was material and nonmaterial realities. An older contemporary of Empedocles was the person who first brought philosophy to the city of Athens, the city that is hereafter most associated with the idea of philosophy. Anaxagoras migrated to Athens when he was 20 years old, and with him he brought the thought of the Milesians. (He was a citizen there about the time of the defeat of Xerxes (of 300—the movie—fame). Just like Empedocles, Anaxagoras pursued his philosophical career in the effort to reconcile the doctrine of Parmenides—that corporeal substance is unchanging –with the sensory information presented to us of a world which everywhere offers evidence of distinct things and even time as coming into being and passing away (re. time think present and past). While he simply accepts Parmenides’ teaching that nothing can be added to reality and nothing can be taken away, Anaxagoras thought that Empedocles’ attempts to reconcile change with Parmenides’ doctrine of ONENESS were inadequate. Empedocles had argued that all of the FOUR ELEMENTS were real in and of themselves in the Parmenidean sense, and in their essence unchanging. Instead of this elemental formulation, Anaxagoras contended that things change, and that reality is still one because, “there is a portion of everything in everything.” He saw reality as ONE thing composed of infinite seeds all of which contain all the essence of everything else. He theorized that the world was a flat disk at the center of the cosmic whirl, only one of an infinite number of such whirls. The whirling nature of the cosmos (think Anaximander) means that a separation takes place. Anaxagoras contends: “But before they were separated, when all things were together, no color at all was clear, for the mixture of all things prevented it: of the wet and the dry, the hot and the cold, the bright and the dark; and because of much earth in it and seeds unlimited in multitude, no one like any other.” In other words, Anaxagoras was arguing that everything that exists is infinitely complex. How could human flesh come from what is not human flesh, for instance, if there is not in each and every thing that exists the seeds of all other things. We eat bread and if we eat enough of it we get larger. For Anaxagoras this meant that the bread had in it the seeds of human flesh. Furthermore, this same bread gives nourishment to our bodies and to the blood of our veins, but bread is dry and brown and each of its bits is exactly the same. But when eaten, this bread becomes the red and wet blood of our bodies. Not knowing about the process of digestion, Anaxagoras was attempting to explain a pretty significant mystery. The ONENESS of reality would seem to be the presence in the infinite seeds with their complex containment of all things in them. This never changes, although it is given temporary expression as things are separated and distinguished. Yet, that which is expressed it still and only an expression of the ONE reality of the infinite seeds, so that there are not many different things but many different ways that the ONENESS is expressed in existence. It was this theory of “infinite seeds (or principles)” that informed his thinking, as well, regarding how our sense perception works. Here he joins with Empedocles in being the first philosophers to attempt to give an explanation for our ability to perceive the world external to our minds. The explanation he offers is, however, different from his fellow philosopher. Whereas Empedocles contended that we can perceive the world because we have in us all of the elements in a mixture and like can perceive like (earth in us can be aware of earth, etc), Anaxagoras argued that it was the oppositional principles that could be acted upon, creating perception, by their counterparts. So, our eyes could perceive light (and therefore objects in light) because they are dark on the inside. Similarly, our skin can perceive what is colder and hotter than itself, but not that which is the same. All perception is a form of irritation, which as a matter of fact is correct in principle (Matson, p 46). Anaxagoras saw, however, that Mind was a non-material entity—it could not be mixed, therefore, with other things. “In each and every thing there is a portion of everything except Mind; but there are things with Mind in them also.” His acknowledgement of the radical difference between Mind and Matter (to put in simple terms) was based upon his observation that whereas material stuffs seemed to have a portion of everything else in them (otherwise how to explain how dirt can nourish plants that nourish cows that nourish human, who then die and decay and nourish the soil), Mind is qualitatively different. He declares that Mind is 1) boundless and self-ruled (no laws of mixture); 2) exists alone, itself by itself (is not the product of matter); 3) has knowledge in it, which material things do not; 4) influences and guides all other things that are material. And yet, as Socrates complains and Aristotle notes, Anaxagoras did not make Mind a truly causative and active principle in explaining the existence of the World. During this period of speculative philosophy and the dizzying array of competing descriptions of reality, a completely different kind of philosopher arose (or began to assert influence). These were called the Sophists. They were known for a kind of skepticism about the human capacity to achieve any sort of indubitable knowledge regarding the world as it is or its primal origins or its elemental forces that determine its actions. The earliest influential Sophists of note was a man named Protagoras. He was the first to promote Subjectivism as the only certain source of our ideas. Subjectivism means that all truth-claims are only the opinions or commitments of the person claiming them to be true—the “subject” of the claims. His famous dictum was: “Man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras was the first to teach relativistic philosophy in Greece through his position as a Sophist. All Sophists were teachers of rhetoric, politics, and logic who served as a private tutor to the youth of the upper classes and Protagoras was among the most popular and highly paid. The purpose of Sophism and in the view of the Sophists the purpose of logic was not to understand reality, but to learn how to argue persuasively in order to have influence in society, since ancient Athens (and other Greek city-states) were governed by a direct democracy of voting educated elites. The rationale of Sophism: since Reality as it is cannot be known and our own subjective perspectives are all we have, we need to learn how to persuade others to see things our way—not seek the Truth (that cannot be attained). It may be, however, that Protagoras was simply making use of ideas first espoused by the earlier Greek philosopher Xenophanes who emphasized the limitations of human knowledge. Xenophanes writes, "No man knows or ever will know the truth about the gods and about everything I speak of; for even if one chanced to say the complete truth, yet oneself knows it not but seeming is wrought over all things." Here he is saying that, owing to the subjective nature of human interpretation and understanding, even if an individual were to uncover the truth about the gods, one would not be able to realize that truth because `seeming', our subjective understanding, clouds and distorts such a possibility. Protagoras seems to be saying something much along the same lines when he writes:  About the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for the factors preventing knowledge are many: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life. The last of the “pre-Socratic” philosophers that we must consider is Democritus (and his teacher, Leucippus). His theory about the essential make-up of the world is quite elegant in its straightforward simplicity. All of reality can be analyzed down to two basic states of being: the empty and the full, which is synonymous with void and atoms. When he uses the term atom he does not mean exactly what we think of today as an incredibly small bit of matter made up of even small ones. Rather, he meant something that is “uncuttable,” which is to say irreducible to some lesser bodies. Any body divided up will finally be brought to its most finely cuttable state. These atoms are, as well, in constant motion through the void (empty space), which explained the way the universe functions. The philosopher believed that humans only created gods to make sense of incomprehensible things around them. The universe, in his view, is a very comprehensible machine made of atoms. He also maintained that every human’s soul is made of atoms. In other words, he had no concept of the non-material as having any reality. Anything that was “non-material” was just a phenomenon caused by the motion and impact of atoms. All our senses, for example, were reduced to the sense of touch in one way or another, because of his inherent materialism (ancient critics observed the inadequacy of this reduction of all senses down to one.) So, complete was his materialistic system of thought that and so thorough was his conviction that even mind was a material phenomenon that he had trouble accounting for the experience of intention as a part of the World. Every act of intent or will—human or otherwise—could be and should be explained solely on materialistic grounds. In fact, he believed that humans had created gods as a way to account for the things that we experience which to us are incomprehensible. These philosophers who launched the ancient quest for philosophical, rather than mythic or mystical, knowledge of the world and human existence left the early Greek philosophical world with a set of contradictory theories and claims about the nature of reality. Hence, following Democritus there arose a new school of Sophists who moved beyond Skepticism per se and insisted that there is no such thing as truth. And that all social conventions should be challenged, if not outright rejected. As a rule, the Cynics advocated life according to nature and an overturning of the prevailing structure of civilization. Rejecting political boundaries, they considered themselves citizens of the world with unlimited freedom to criticize political authorities. Their goal was to develop complete self-sufficiency. They spurned material possessions and trained themselves to endure pain and hardship. Though complete indifference was their goal in life, they did not deny themselves gross sensual indulgence and on occasion practiced sexual immorality in public. Such conduct notwithstanding, the individual Cynic became convinced that he was a preacher of morality to the common people and characterized his vocation as scout of God (ἐπισκόπος), as teacher (παιδαγωγός), and as doctor of souls (ἴατρος). It was in the context of this history and the immediate culture of Atomism, Sophism, and Cynicism that Socrates entered the scene in ancient Athens. He and his most famous pupil Plato were devoted to the idea that truth existed, but the attainment of it required attention to things other than what we simply think, what we merely experience, and how we would like things to be. Truth as introduced as a transcendent category. That development is the subject of another essay.