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Early Greek Philosophy and the Primary Substance
By: Mitchell

Before Thales, any explanation as to the nature and origins of the Cosmos and the Earth within it was solely from mythological accounts. Hesiod’s Theogony tells us,

(116ff) “At first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bossomed Earth…”

This account of the creation of the Earth, Gods and Solar system is a prime example of the mythological and literary tradition from which any explanation as to the origins of the World came from, a tradition including, as well, the Orphic Cosmogony which gives the creation of the world over to a giant egg.

Both cosmogonies attempt to put the creation of the world in understandable and comprehendible terms, those of nature and organic processes. The mythographers who composed these tales looked at the world around them and underlined fundamental substances, concepts and forces and explained, through myth, how these came to be. Thales, one of the first (if not the first) philosophers to try and explain the origins of the world was doing so because he came from such a tradition. The background of mythological accounts for the creation of the world underlines what he is attempting to do but Thales takes a different approach to the mythographers and it is this that separates his work from theirs.

Thales uses reason and deduction in the hope that through this philosophical form of enquiry he can deduce and explain the origins of the world. He is attempting to move beyond the mythological accounts and actually give a potentially verifiable but certainly logical and reasoned account of the origins of the world.

It is wrong to suggest that belief in mythological accounts and the accounts themselves are irrational, far from it in fact. The mythographers before Thales looked at the world around them and identified process such as birth, death and growth and extrapolated backwards from these in order to explain the universe. In Hesiod’s cosmogony this explanation goes back to a series of births starting with Chaos, in the case of the Orphic tradition the world is born from an egg. Both of these are quite natural processes and it is understandable that one might look at the processes occurring today and extrapolate backwards in the hope that it might explain what has come before. Thales, however used a more deductive analysis than this in order to explain the universe.

Thales, as with the Mythographers, looked at the processes occurring around him, but rather than look at the processes that were within organisms and species, such as birth or eggs, he looked at more fundamental processes. He saw that plants are the sustenance of animals; he concluded that in order for this to work as a mechanism there must be something in common between the matter of plants and that of animals. Moving down the chain, plants are sustained by water, which means that water must share some properties of matter with plants and also, with animals. As such all things, fundamentally are made of water as, when traced back, all things lead there.

“However, not all agree about the number and form of such a principle, but Thales, the founder of this kind of philosophy, declares it to be water… Maybe he got this idea from seeing that the nourishment of all things is moist…and water is the principle of the nature of moist things.”
Fr. 4.6 McKirahan from Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.3 983b18-27 = DK 11A12

This may seem a bizarre chain of reasoning but it does solve many of the flaws in both Orphic and Hesiodic mythology. By Thales’ account nothing is created ex nihilo it is in fact made of something that was already there. In Hesiod and Orpheus however things do appear from nothingness. It also solves the question of where things come from as essentially this becomes the question, what is it made of? The answer to this, of course, is water, or, its own matter more fundamentally!

The difficult question for Thales now is, if everything is made of water, how can a universe spring from it? Thales’ answer to this is change. For water to form a universe there must be a principle of change involved. Through observation one can see that water can change; it can evaporate, condense and freeze, all of which are a change of state. As such, change is a fundamental quality of water and so the possibility of it changing into something else over time, even if that thing is a universe, is quite within the realms of possibility. To extrapolate this conclusion we need only look at the things which are made of water. If water has a fundamental principle of water and all things are made of water then all things should, logically, have a principle of change in them. Animals are clearly capable of change and movement, plants are less obviously open to such a principle but it is still present; stones, however, are a more difficult concept. For Thales though this presents no problem. A stone can roll, fall and drop – all of these are expressions of change and movement and therefore a clear manifestation of the principle of change that is fundamental to water.

Textually, this idea is difficult to place. If, as he does, Thales believes the universe came from water then he must have issues with change and as such we may infer the above as a likely possibility of Thales’ reasoning. We can however, look at his ideas on soul to get more of a reinforcement of this possibility. Thales believed that all things possessed soul; Aristotle says the following in On the Soul;

“…Thales thought that all things were full of Gods.”
Fragment 4.9 McKirahan from Aristotle, On the Soul 1.5 411a7-8 = DK 11A22
The significance of this is not immediately obvious, but looking further in to Thales’ views on the soul we can see how movement and change are, possibly linked to the concept of soul. McKirahan writes in Philosophy before Socrates,

”Aristotle reports that Thales believed magnets possess souls because they move iron, and infers that he judged the soul to be a thing that causes motion.”
Aristotle, On the Soul 1.2 405a19 (= DK 11A22)

From this we can see that if Aristotle is correct then the principles of motion and soul are inextricably linked and as such all things contain soul/water hence motion and movement is a crucial principle of Thales’ philosophy.
There are, of course, difficulties with Thales’ views that are neither answerable from fragment sources nor from the writing of others. In particular is Aristotle’s objection,

“Some say that the earth rests on water…as if the same kind of account is not needed for the water which supports the earth as for the earth itself.”
Aristotle, On the Heavens 2.13, 294128-33

Here Aristotle is pointing out that it is all well and good to say that the earth floats on the water like a log and that is why it stays in one place but that does not answer the real question, it simply moves it down a layer because now we must ask what it is that this water rests upon. Of course we can understand Thales’ reasoning; looking about himself he sees water all around, he knows all things come from water by his reasoning and as such concludes that the land masses are simply floating upon a grand body of water. But Aristotle clearly feels this account is lacking and so takes issue with it. Quite what Thales’ response would have been we cannot and do not know. It may be that he believed there to exist some form of bubble within which the land formed, or that there was simply no issue, what was not water was only another form of water and so to ask what the water rested on made no sense, after all, everything is water.

Assuming we take these to be fair answers of Aristotle’s objections we can still take issue with the logic of Thales' theory. Crucially the idea of substances poses problems for Thales, after all, it is easy to see how air could come from water through evaporation and steam and perhaps even how earth is thick, heavy water, but how could fire come from water?

If all is water then the overwhelming majority of water would subsume any fire that was produced. But paradoxically we see both fire and water present in the world and as such we cannot but conclude that neither destroyed the other at creation. So how can water and fire co-exist?

Anaximander of Miletus, Thales' pupil and successor built upon Thales' ideas of a single underlying substance but adapted them to deal with such problems. For Anaximander everything came from the apeiron – and unknowable, indefinable, indefinite substance. All forces and matter were merely a manifestation of this cosmic substance. Due to this belief that no single force or substance dominated, all issues over the impossibility of one thing forming from another I.e. fire from water are annulled, and so this issue is simply settled. He in fact goes further than simply settling the difficulty of opposites but goes on to show how, from the apeiron, opposites are the way things come to be. He notes how things are often paired and therefore states that from the apeiron come hot and cold, light and dark, wet and dry etc. Crucially though he states that they come from the apeiron in equal measure. This is incredibly significant as it means that opposite forces can exist in the universe with neither destroying the other. We can see this element of his philosophy in the following fragment:

“For some make the infinite this [i.e., something aside from the elements], rather than air or water, to keep the others from being destroyed by the one of them that is infinite. For they contain oppositions with regard to one another, for example, air is cold, water wet, fire hot. If any one of them were infinite, the rest would already have been destroyed. But as it is they declare that the thing from which all come into being is different.”
Fragment 5.4 McKirahan Aristotle, Physics 3.3 204b22-29 = DK 12A16

We can see from this an improved version of Thales’ own reasoning, Thales concluded that if something can change in to something else then they must be made of the same substance. Anaximander saw the problems with this as described above in the case of fire from water, and suggests that rather than being made of the same stuff they in fact are made of something else entirely, something different. This is the apeiron. Consequently, as everything in the world can be made from everything else or, rather, can change into everything else, then all things in the world must be made of or come from this different substance. Because all things have such an enormous number of varying and even conflicting properties, this other substance must contain all of these properties and as such is entirely indeterminate in its nature and properties.
Thales reasoning here seems to be unsound but Anaximander has another trick of reasoning to support his argument yet, which is the Principle of sufficient reason (from G.W. Leibniz.) This states, simply, that if one thing has more reason to happen than another, it will happen in place of that other. If the reasons for two events occurring are equally likely, both or neither will happen. As such, the apeiron has no more reason to produce wet than dry or in fact any one of a pair of properties over the other. As such we can conclude that if it produces any qualities it must produce both in equal measure.
We can see this principle of sufficient reason at work in Anaximander when he states his reasons for believing that the earth is at rest due to it being central in the Cosmos.

“Some, like Anaximander, declare that the earth is at rest because of its similarity. For it is no more fitting for what is established at the centre and equally related to the extremes to move up rather than down or sideways. And it is impossible for it to make a move simultaneously in opposite directions. Therefore, it is at rest of necessity.”
Fragment 5.13 McKirahan from Aristotle On the Heaven 2.13 295b11-16 = DK 12A26

We can see then that all properties are produced equally and simultaneously from the apeiron in order to ensure that no force destroys the other. But if we have wet and dry, hot and cold, light and dark in equal measure, would that not lead to a damp, tepid, dusky universe rather than one with the extremes we are empirically aware of? For Anaximander that is not the case, he sees such forces as having an integrity and existence wholly of their own and rather than being properties, they are more akin to warring objects.

“The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time…”
Fragment 5.19 McKirahan from Simplicius Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 24.18-21 = DK 12B1 + A9

To give the properties we see about us a sense of coherence and internal integrity deals well with this issue of a tepid and grey universe where all the forces have become little more than a stagnant pond. It can also be used to explain the extremes we see about us, as well as cycles such in the order of night and day and the seasons. Here it is a course of light reclaiming what is taken by dark and then dark taking back from light and so on (and much the same for the seasons.) This means that there must be constant change and movement in the universe as the forces battle on another, which then takes care of the issues surrounding change and movement that were raised under Thales.

In response to Anaximander we have the works of the philosopher Anaximenes. Whilst Anaximander’s philosophy solved many of the issues surrounding Thales’ ideas, Anaximenes still felt that there were issues with the concept of a single underlying substance as the basis of creation. In yet another move to fix our knowledge of the world in reason and rationality, Anaximenes stated that Anaximander was needless in placing his philosophy in the apeiron, an empirically unknowable substance that was reached purely by reason alone.

Anaximenes takes, what may be seen as a backward step, by declaring that the underlying substance of the universe is air. The immediate reaction to this that we may expect would be to say, as we did for Thales, if the world is of a single substance, why does it not appear this way. Anaximenes, unlike Thales, came to his conclusion by very different means, although reason and logic, once more, played a major part.
For Anaximander, properties were the key considerations, hot and cold, wet and dry et cetera. Anaximenes however sees these as quite secondary, much in the fashion of the later philosopher John Locke who posited a theory of Primary and Secondary qualities. The quality of heat or coolness is given rise to by a change in the fundamental substance –air. Anaximenes, rather than saying the properties are born from substance and are things in themselves, says that they are characteristics of the substance and therefore places the focus not on the production of phenomena in themselves but rather the change in the substance which is, for him, density.

Anaximenes states that when air is at a neutral even state it is entirely undetectable but when it becomes rarefied or condensed it then takes on various other properties. When rarefied to an extreme it becomes fire, when condensed it becomes cloud, water, earth and stones.

“Becoming finer it comes to be fire, being condensed it comes to be wind, then cloud, and when still further condensed it becomes water then earth then stones and the rest come of these.”
Fragment 6.1 McKirahan from Theophrastus quoted by Simplicius, Commentay on Aristotle’s Physics 24.26-25.1 = DK 13A5

By placing the focus on the change in the substance rather than the substance itself we have none of the issues that arose with Thales placing water at the forefront but things not being wet. In fact air seems to take on no priority above being the neutral state, after all still air is undetectable.

Once again, like those before him, Anaximenes is confronted with the issue of how things come to be from this substance and so additional properties are added. These, as before, are divinity and movement.

“Anaximenes determined that air is a god and that it comes to be and is without measure, infinite and always in motion”
Fragment 6.5 McKirahan from Cicero On the Nature of the Gods 1.10.26 = DK 13A10

Significantly, we can see how all three philosopher’s theories of substance were then applied to the world around them. Thales to the stillness of the Earth as it sits atop the water, Anaximander to his cosmological theories concerning the heavenly bodies, which were fire drawn off from the Earth. Anaximenes too applied his concepts to the world about him.

“Anaximenes stated that clouds occur when the air is further thickened. When it is condensed still more rain is squeezed out.”
Fragment 6.13 McKirahan from Aetius 3.4.1 = DK 13A17

Although interestingly close to the actual physical phenomena the real point of this passage is that Anaximenes, like Thales and Anaximander was looking at the world about him and extending his theory to the phenomena he witnessed every day. Whilst Hesiod and Orpheus explain the origins of the world by backwards-extrapolation of natural phenomena they say nothing of how the beginnings affect the here and now.

All of the arguments put forward are, of course, flawed. But the significance of them comes in a move away from mythological explanations to a more “scientific” technique. A technique that begins with Thales and his use of reason and logic, looking at the world about him, looking at the theories of the mythographers and showing how one could conclude things about the world by deductive logic. Anaximander's expansion upon this, filling, where possible, the gaps left by Thales but still not finishing the picture and so leaving it open to Anaximenes to put forward his own ideas. Crucially the move from a literary account to a scientific account is what the theory of an underlying substance is all about. It is a method, in whatever form it takes, of explaining not only the origins of the world (formed from water, a separation of the apeiron or a felting of the air) but also, for the first time, extending that principle to the world that they inhabited, from the explaination of earthquakes as the drying out or soaking of the land (Fr. 6.14 McKirahan) to thunder and lightning (Fr. 5.14 McKirahan). It is this expansion of a reasoned philosophy from simply explaining the origins of the world to being able to comment upon the world as it is in all its operations that, most significantly of all, is at stake; the establishment of reason, deduction and logic in our knowledge of the world we live in.

Bibliography

Philosophy Before Socrates, Richard D McKirahan (Hackett 1994)
The First Philosophers, Robert Waterfield (Oxford World Classics 2000)

Article Source: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com

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