Thales
of Miletus (ca. 624-546 BC)
 Thales
is usually thought of as the "Father" of Western philosophy. For
reasons not known to us (until the time of Plato in the late 5th century
BC we have no actual writings of the earliest Greek philosophers; only
bits and pieces about them told by others--others not necessarily sympathetic
observers!) Thales was not content with the idea that things are the way
they are because of the doings of the gods.
Thales was well versed in the scientific
learning of the East--and probably travelled to Egypt to study the mathematics,
geometry and astronomy of the Egyptians. He put his learning to work
as a military engineer--and was fabled for his scientific genius.
He predicted a solar eclipse, measured the shadows of objects (from pyramids
to ships) to estimate their distances or locations. He even diverted
a river in order to better position the Milesian army against an enemy
city.
But it is in the area of philosphical
thought that Thales is best remembered. Thales was interested in
discovering, through the process of rational enquiry, the essence
or substance of all matter. He looked out on the world as
a by-product of some material substance--a single substance which
by its own makeup or inner mechanics could bring into being all other things.
For him that single substance was
water. Perhaps such a conclusion was inevitable for one who grew
up near the sea and who undoubtedly often watched the power of the clouds
above and the waves below during a tempest. But remember also that
the ancient world widely shared the view that creation emerged from a watery
void.
In any case, it is important to understand
how significant his probing into the essence of things was. He may
not have got the right answers (though he was not really so far off in
his view of water as the original substance)--but he was asking what modern
science even today considers the right questions.
Thus in ascribing the dynamics of
the universe to water as the formative substance, rather than to the gods
as the formative powers, he became our first known "materialist" or "secularist."
Anaximander
of Miletus (ca. 610 - 547 BC)
Thales's rational inquiry was taken up
by Anaximander, a fellow citizen of Miletus and reported by some to have
been a student of Thales. In many ways he continued the intellectual
tradition of Thales, becoming enlightened in a number of the sciences of
the day. He is reported to have written down his vast learning on
a wide range of subjects--though we have today only a small portion of
his work, Concerning Nature.
We know also however that Anaximander
objected to Thales' theory – on the basis that water could not be the formative
substance of life and yet at the same time one of its end products.
Anaximander speculated that the original
substance of the universe was some kind of primal, formless material which
is found infinitely throughout creation – the material source of all created
things (including water) and the material into which the universe will
eventually return.
He also speculated that the world
was the result of a process of moving forces, a process that holds
the universe steadily on its course – and leads it into the future.
He saw this process as one ultimately of moving all things to maintain
or restore a primal balance, one in which the multitude of forces in the
cosmos work in the long run to counterbalance each in order to produce
a basic harmony. Hot balances cold, dry balances wet, etc. to provide
a cosmic harmony.
But the actual dynamic of life involves
a separation of these opposites – a falling into their particulars (an act
of cosmic "injustice"), from which then a basic urge toward harmony (a
return toward "justice") moves them forward. This is the cause of
motion or action in the universe: the urge to reharmonize.
He also looked at his universe in
terms of its natural history: things as we know them today are a
result of this process – this movement forward of all things from one state
or condition to the next. Human beings evolved rather more recently
in the long natural history of the cosmos.
Anaximander really was raising the
"teleological" issue in philosophy. He looked at creation, at life,
from the point of view of where did things (material things) come from,
why were they here, and what was their destiny. He too rejected the
notion that this was all a matter of the doings of the gods on Olympus.
And he too, like Thales, surmised that the vital forces of life are somehow
contained within the "stuff" of life itself. He, like Thales, was
a materialist – but also an evolutionist!
Anaximenes
of Miletus (flourished in mid 500s BC?)
Anaximenes was reportedly a pupil of
Anaximander's and the third in the trio of great Milesian philosophers.
In a way, he stepped past the thinking of Anaximander and reached back
to the line of thinking of Thales--in his quest for an actual physical
source of all things.
Anaximenes concluded that the primal
substance of life was air or mist. It could be both the source of
all things, and yet one of the created things itself--because of its power
to change form. Here too, it was probably natural for Anaximenes
to accord air the honor of being the primal substance or underlying
material of all things. Greeks commonly understood air to be the
"breath" of life, the source of the soul, and so it was logical to think
that air might be the primal substance of all things, the soul of all life.
In any case, he argued that through
a process of becoming more or less dense, air could change form.
Thus fire was air in its most rarified form. The natural progress
from there as air thickened was: wind, clouds, water, earth, and
stone. Also, the soul quality of air (as the Greeks understood it)
could also explain movement, events, life itself.
All in all, Anaximines' theory of
the substance of life seems more complete than his Milesian predecessors.
It was truly a great intellectual accomplishment--though being founded
on a faulty premise, we find it interesting only for its methodology and
not for its conclusions.
Pythagoras
of Samos (ca. 580-500 BC)
 With
Pythagoras, we shift from the East of the Greek world all the way over
to the Western part of it--to Southern Italy. Actually Pythagoras
was born on the island of Samos, just offshore from Miletus and so he would
have been familiar with some of the philosophical doings in and around
Ionia. He may have even been a student of Anaximander's.
But Pythagoras was a very original
thinker and departed dramatically from the Ionian philosophers in his reflections
on life and the universe. Perhaps this was because (as it seems)
he traveled and studied extensively in the East, where he might have picked
up his more mystical outlook on life.
But in any case, he eventually left
Samos (he disliked the politics of his homeland) and made the southern
Italian port city of Croton his new home. There he founded a school--one
which was to have a deep influence on Greek culture.
Pythagoras is a hard figure to pin
down. He was a mystic and his work really was intended for only the
"initiates" of his school. It was secret stuff! Further, his
work was carried forward by his "devotees"--and probably much of their
developmental thinking got mixed in with his to give us "Pythagorean" philosophy.
Also, we can't tell whether he was
strongly influence by Orphism--or if Orphism was strongly influenced by
him! For it was through Pythagoras that Orphism seems to have gained
respectability among the more prominent Greeks--through whom then much
of what we know about Orphism was transmitted on to us today.
In any case, Pythagorism forms the
polar opposite of the materialistic philosophy of the Ionian philosophers
we just outlined above. While the Ionians were looking out
into the world around them to find the primal causes of life, Pythagoras
was looking beyond--to causes "higher" than merely the surrounding world
of material substance. Pythagoras was no materialist. He was no secularist.
He was a mystic.
He saw the grand order of the universe
not in terms of physical substance or matter--but in the beautiful proportions
and mathematical qualities that seemed to stand behind all physical
matter. He saw the "secrets" of the universe not in what he observed
"out there" but how what was "out there" struck him within. He was
interested in probing the mind's understanding, interpretation, or reasoning
in response to that physical world.
Here within human consciousness was
where true reality--higher reality--was encountered. Here is where,
according to Pythagoras, we truly met God. Here is where we in fact became
God. To look for these hidden harmonies, these mathematical qualities
inhering in life, these abstract formulations of the universe, was a divine
enterprise. It linked us up with the eternal power of the heavens.
Thus Pythagoras plunged into study
of the world around him--and came up with some of the most astute observations
about the structure of the universe. We remember him for discovering
the formulas for computing the sides of a right triangle; we remember him
for uncovering a number of basic rules that geometry rests on; we remember
him for discovering the mathematical rules for the musical harmonies or
scales; we remember him for arguing that the universe is a perfect sphere--as
well as the sun, moon and earth.
Obviously Pythagoras was not able
to reduce all dynamics in life to mathematical formulations. But he certainly
laid out the case that the universe could and should be studied on these
terms.
Western science would be impossible
without this understanding. True--he was pursuing a mystical agenda in
doing so. But soalso is science--though it pretends not to be doing so!
It is hard to appreciate fully the
impact of Pythagoras on Western thought. Mostly we look back to Plato and
Aristotle as the heavy-weights of Western philosophy. But these two
philosophers, coming over a century and a half later, were really only
building on--or reacting to--the intellectual edifice which Pythagoras
himself had laid out for Greek civilization. The West owes Pythagoras much--very
much.
Heraclitus
(ca. 535-475 BC)
An Ionian from Ephesus, Heraclitus continued
the quest for the material origins of life--yet holding all the while a
mystical view of life.
Heraclitus concluded that fire was
the primordial element of an eternal, uncreated earth (it has always existed!).
But he took up some of the logic
of Anaximander in his view of the essense and the dynamics of things.
To Heraclitus, all things come into existence by being separated from something
else. Yet all is structurally one--at least potentially so. This
structural unity he called the Logos. It is a higher order
of being than the world of separate things. The Logos is what draws
all things back to unity.
What we see in the world is perpetual
flux. Things are ever changing. Nothing is permanent.
They are constantly struggling to achieve a unity through the combination
of their opposites. They are drawn forward by the Logos. Yet
because things balance, the movement forward of one thing produces the
retreat of its opposite. This will always be--as it has always been since
the beginning.
It is this movement, this flux, that
constantly changes things, thus causing day to turn to night, winter to
turn to summer, fire to turn to water (as he understood it).
 Heraclitus'
major works or writings:
Periphuseos (On Nature)
Parmenides
of Elea (fl. early 5th cent BC)
A major shaper of the Eleatic (Graecia
Minor: Southern Italy) philosophy which contended that behind changing
appearances stands a pure, unified, permanent or unchanging Reality which
our thoughts and logic point to.
Parmenides held that the actual observable
world is merely a dim and broken reflection of this pure, holistic Reality.
This Reality is always present with us: the past is a merely present memory
only. The notion of of determining some distant origin of life is itself
absurd, because the material of life could not have come into being out
of nowhere; indeed, Reality always
is.
Parmenides'
major works or writings:
On Nature
Empedocles
(ca. 495-435 BC)
A philosopher-scientist or naturalist
living in Graecia-Minor: Sicily.
He posited the four-substance theory
of life's fundamental structuring: earth, air, fire and water--shaped into
various natural forms through the opposing forces of love and strife. He
combined his naturalistic observations with somewhat mystical observations
(perhaps under Pythagorean influence) to leave an impressive intellectual
legacy within Graecia-Minor.
Leucippus
(ca. 480-420 BC)
Not much is known directly about Leucippus
except that he lived in Thrace, in the town of Abdera, and was Democritus'
teacher and, with him, developed the the atomic theory of matter:
namely, that all material forms are the result of various combinations
of small, indivisible particles called atoms.
Democritus
(ca. 460-370 BC)
Democritus was undoubtedly the most
brilliant of the Greek natural philosophers. He was a contemporary
of Socrates--but chose to remain in his native Thrace where he grew up
and studied under Leucippus. Here he was closer to the older philosophical
environment of the materialists--of whom he was undoubtedly the greatest
of all. Indeed, even in his own time he was considered the equal
to Plato in intellectual stature and clarity of thought. Unfortunately
we have none of his own works today. But he was reported so widely
by others that we have a fairly clear understanding of his incredible thinking.
We know that he came from a very
respected (and wealthy) family from Abdera in Thrace. Democritus
was well traveled (certainly to Egypt and possibly Babylon) and well educated
in astronomy and mathematics.
His great importance lies in his
development (along with his teacher, Leucippus) of the atomist understanding
of the cosmos. According to Democritus' atomist theory, the world
is comprised of invisibly minute, solid, unchanging and eternal atomic
(atomon: indivisible) particles suspended in a airy void.
Those two things, atoms and the void, is all that truly "exists."
All else, particularly the things that we are able to actually see--visible
matter--is merely a result of various combinations of atoms as they move
mechanically through the void.
Atoms do not come into being or go
out of being. They are eternal in existence. What changes,
what comes into life and what eventually wears down and dies, producing
the vibrant or "lively" qualities that we recognize as the nature of all
living things, is simply the way these atoms are constantly rearranged
to produce the action or "motion" we observe about such life.
Also eternal are the principles undergirding
such motion or such rearrangement of these atoms. That is, the quality
of motion itself is also eternal. Thus the basic "stuff" of reality
is eternal: atoms and their motion. What changes is the resultant
visible structures that we observe about life.
Such a materialist vision of life
necessarily raised the question of the origins and characterof human consciousness--of
the existence of the soul (nous). Democritus' answer was that
the human soul too is made up of atoms, atoms of a certain variety that
are particularly lively and easily airborne--entering the body in our breathing.
Human death occurs--as we well know--when
a person draws his last breath. Thus to Democritus, breath or pneuma
was that special conveyance of life that gave a person a living spirit.
(the Greek for air, breath and spirit are all pneuma). At
death all of that breaks down, disintegrates. The vital qualities
of a human life simply cease when no more breathe is drawn into the body.
There is no eternal nous that lives on after death.
Nor was there in the theories of
Democritus the existence of an eternal
Nous that was Divine, that
constituted anything we might call God. His theories required no
such ingredient for them to function properly. What undergirded the
working of his hypothesis about life, about the cosmos, was simply the
eternal laws of nature which directed the atoms in their movement from
one structure or arrangement to the next.
In short, his theory was entirely
mechanistic.
He was also an embryologist, carefully
studying the growth and behavior of biological life. He was also an evolutionist--in
that he saw human form and life developing originally out of the structure
of water and mud--like worms! (the ancient presumption about worms was
that they grew out of the ground the way a plant does, drawing on the earth
to supply it with the building blocks of stalks, leaves, flowers, fruit.)
In so many ways he anticipated--by
thousands of years--the direction modern science would take in its development
within the West! | 
The
Early Poets (750-600 BC)
The
Thinkers of Ionia and Magna Graecia
Periclean
Athens (450-325 BC)
Socrates,
Plato and Aristotle
Ancient Greece: A Full History
