The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy
Page 9
It is illuminating to compare all this to the first philosophical cosmogony of which the outlines are more or less clear. It was devised by Anaximander a good century after Hesiod’s poem. Its outlines have to be reconstructed from various pieces of indirect evidence (in particular ps.-Plutarch and Hippolytus, DK 12 A10 and 11) and opinions differ about a number of the details of this reconstruction. However, the main features of the following account should be fairly uncontroversial.
According to Anaximander (DK 12 A10), the cosmos as we know it originated from an eternal, and eternally moving, qualitatively and quantitatively indefinite primary stuff, the “boundless” (apeiron), through a process of successive stages. At the first stage a finite germ (gonimon),7 is separated off from the boundless. It is said to “produce hot and cold,” presumably because in some sense these opposites are already contained in it. At the second stage, the hot (apparently flame) and the cold (apparently a kind of moisture or mist) are actually separated, and the flame grows as a kind of fiery bark around the moist centre, part of which dries up and becomes earth. At the third stage, the tension between the opposite “elements” becomes so strong that the whole structure explodes. The fiery bark bursts open and its parts are flung outwards to form fiery rings at various distances around the centre, which still consists of earth and mist (from now on we follow DK 12 A11). Some mist is flung along and envelops the fiery heavenly circles, leaving open only some holes through which fire shines out. The result is the basic structure of the familiar cosmos: earth, water, and air (three manfestations of the “cold”) at the centre, and “wheels” (Aetius II.20.1) of fire enveloped in mist around it at various distances. The fire which blazes through the holes are what we perceive as the heavenly bodies. In the rings of the heavenly bodies the battle between fire and mist continues to play its role: at times the holes are partly or fully closed by mist, at other times fire “regains” them, which accounts for various astronomical phenomena, such as the phases of the moon and eclipses of both sun and moon.
In the course of the process of the earth’s drying up, living creatures are generated spontaneously from slime or mud. As fish or fishlike creatures, they are born in the wet parts and surrounded by thorny barks. When they reach the dryer parts, the barks break off and the creatures now live on land for a while. Finally, there is a picturesque account of the generation of the first human beings. Human infants could not have sprung forth in the same way as other creatures, for they are notoriously helpless during the first years of their existence. Hence, we are told, they started out as fetuses in large fish, and only emerged from these when they were strong enough to nurture themselves (see the texts printed at DK 12 A30).
In comparison with Hesiod’s account much has changed. Instead of Hesiod’s whole range of independent cosmic factors, we now find a more reductive approach: various stages of the cosmogony, including the account of the generation of living beings (zoögony), as well as some phenomena in the world as it presently is, are explained by reference to the interaction of only two factors (the hot and the cold), which have separated off right at the beginning from the boundless origin of everything. Furthermore, these basic explanatory factors are no longer more or less anthropomorphic gods. Instead, the genesis of the cosmos is explained in terms of recognizable elements of nature – in other words, the approach is naturalistic. Moreover, we can now understand the way the various stages of the process are connected. We know how the cold (in the form of the watery) and the hot interact and tend to destroy each other. Also the introduction of analogy adds to the intelligibility of the story.8 The “germ” that the boundless produces at the beginning and from which the cosmos will grow is presented as a spermlike mass, and at the second stage fire is said to surround the wet kernel as a kind of bark. Indeed there is a striking similarity between the descriptions of the “birth” of the cosmos and those of the generation of living beings (and humans who are at first “enveloped” in fish). It is perhaps not too bold to speak of the application of a rudimentary biological model of generation.
There is a further difference between the mythical cosmogonies and their philosophical counterparts – a difference of context rather than content, which accordingly is often overlooked. Hesiod’s Theogony presents itself as a hymn.9 The contents of hymns were not usually original. They tended to articulate and embellish what was already given by tradition.10 Hence they were particularly fit to be recited at important social or ritual events.11 This also applied to theogonies, whose main function was to connect the existing pantheon to a supposed origin of the cosmos, and so they were often connected with ritual and cult.12 No such connections to tradition and ritual are attested (nor are they plausible) for the early Ionian cosmologists. They appear to have indulged in theoretical activity for its own sake, they felt free to speculate, and as we shall see, they had no scruples about devising theories that were in crucial respects radically different from those of their predecessors.
2. THALES AND THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK COSMOLOGY
The first of the three great cosmologists from Miletus was Thales. In antiquity he counted as the archetypical uomo universale: well versed in engineering as well as in mathematics and astronomy, and also involved in the politics of his time. For all that, he probably wrote nothing, and he was a shadowy figure already by the time of Plato and Aristotle. His geometrical activities appear to have been largely of a practical nature, and his astronomical work – most famously, his allegedly successful prediction of a solar eclipse13 – seems to have been primarily a matter of description and measurement, with no clear connection to his more general cosmological views.
The difficulty of determining what these views were becomes apparent when we examine our earliest and most important piece of evidence, a passage in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (I.3 983b6-984a4; DK 11 A12):
(1) Most of the first philosophers thought that principles in the form of matter (hylê) were the only principles of all things. For that from which all things are, and out of which all things come to be in the first place and into which they are destroyed in the end – while the substance persists, but the qualities change – this, they say, is the element and first principle of things. And this is why they say that nothing comes to be and nothing perishes, because such a nature is always preserved. […] For there has to be some natural substance, either one or more than one, from which the other things come to be, while it is preserved.
(2) However they do not all agree on the number of first principles and on their form, but Thales, the founding father of this kind of philosophy, claims that it is water – that is also why he declared that the earth rests on water – possibly deriving this view from seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist and that even heat comes to be from this and lives by this; and that from which they come to be is the principle of all things. So this is why he developed his view, and also because he saw that the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and that water is the natural principle of moist things.
(3) There are some who think that also the very early writers who, long before our present generation, were the first to write about the gods (theologêsantes), had this view of nature. For they made Okeanos and Tethys the parents of generation [cf. Homer, Iliad XIV.201, 246], and they claimed that that by which the gods swear is water [cf. Iliad 11.75 5, XIV.271], namely what the poets themselves call the river Styx. For what is oldest is the most honourable, and one swears by what is most honourable. But it may be considered uncertain whether this view about nature is old and time-honoured. However, Thales is said to have explicitly stated this opinion on the first cause.
This passage is part of a larger context in which Aristotle investigates whether and to what extent earlier thinkers anticipated his own theory about the factors (or “causes” as he labels them) that determine the nature of physical bodies and the way they change. Here he is dealing with “matter” (hylê or hypokeimenon), which he claims to be the only explanatory factor adduced by the earliest th
inkers. In (1) he ascribes to this category of philosophers the main features of his own conception of matter, according to which the material principle of a thing (x) is not just that “out of which” (x) has come to be, but also that which persists in the process of (x)’s changing and thus constitutes its “basic stuff.” In other words, the material principle is both that from which and that of which a particular thing is made.
If we were to map this general scheme onto the view ascribed to Thales in (2), namely that the material principle of all things is water, we would have to conclude that Thales claimed not only that all things come from water, but also that in some sense they really still are water. However, if we take a closer look at what exactly Aristotle ascribes to Thales in (2) and (3), that is, in the passages specifically devoted to him, we get a slightly different picture. Here there is no talk of water as a persisting basic stuff (nor, for that matter, of water as that into which all things will finally dissolve). Instead, the focus is on water as the origin of things. According to Aristotle, Thales may have drawn on the analogous cases of nutriment and seed, and these are both things from which something may be said to grow. Further, the explicit link between the idea that the earth rests on water and the claim that water is the principle (archê) of things makes good sense only when water is thought of as that out of which things such as the earth have arisen – the earth, having emerged from the water, is naturally represented as still resting on it. However, it does not make good sense if the assumption is that the earth still is water. In addition, we know that the comparison (alluded to in (3)) between Thales’ tenet and the mythical views to be found in some poets was in fact made by the sophist Hippias. He is probably Aristotle’s source here, in a work in which he grouped together opinions of both philosophers and poets on the basis of similarity (DK 86 B6).14 Now the particular examples from the poets that Aristotle here provides definitely speak of the origin of things: Okeanos and Tethys are described as parents, and the point of swearing by the Styx was presumably that it was the oldest, that is, the first, of all things.
It is therefore safest to assume that Thales merely claimed that water was the origin of all things, not that all things are water. That this was sufficient for Aristotle to include him among the class of earlier philosophers who anticipated his own theory of matter is not as odd as it may seem. Elsewhere Aristotle is ready to submit that the earlier thinkers conceived of the Aristotelian causes in a rather vague and unclear way,15 and after all, Thales is here said only to be the “founding father” of this kind of approach. So he may well have anticipated only one aspect of Aristotle’s conception of matter.16 His thesis about water, in that case, was cosmogonical rather than cosmological.
Two further observations on our text. First, the problem of the stability of the earth, which Thales is said to have solved by supposing that the earth rests on water, was to be a recurring problem in early Greek cosmology. However inadequate we may judge Thales’ solution to be (because it invites the question on what then does water rest), we may charitably claim that it does reveal a rudimentary degree of systematization insofar as it constitutes a link between his cosmology and his cosmogony. The reductive strategy of using one explanatory factor to account for different explananda may be regarded as prefiguring what we find in the more elaborate system of Anaximander.
Secondly, part (3) indicates that Aristotle was unwilling to go along with those, like Hippias, who had claimed that Thales and poets like Homer were basically talking about the same thing. He argues that it is unclear whether Thales’ view of nature is really as old as Homer and other poets. Whatever they may have meant, they did not say the same thing as Thales. They were talking about mythological entities (Okeanos, Tethys, and Styx), not about nature. In order to be juxtaposed to Thales, their words have to be interpreted. Thales however, is said to have explicitly stated (apophênasthai) his view about water as a first cause of nature. A similar view is expressed by Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus (ap. Simplicius In phys. 23, 29) who claims that Thales was really the first to “reveal the investigation of nature (physiologia) to the Greeks and that, though he had many predecessors, he was so much their superior as to outshine them all.” Accordingly, Theophrastus’ collection of Physical opinions, which is at the basis of much of our sources for early Greek thought, did not include the opinions of the poets. Eudemus, another pupil of Aristotle, treated the history of “theological” views of the early poets in a separate treatise, as a subject in its own right, distinct from the history of philosophy proper (Eudemus fr. 150 Wehrli).
So much for Thales’ cosmogony. The information preserved about his conception of the world in its present state, that is, his cosmology, is equally scanty, and here again our main evidence is furnished by Aristotle (De an. I 411a7; DK 11 A22):
Some say that it [i.e., soul] is intermingled in the universe. That, perhaps, was why Thales thought that all things are full of gods.
Aristotle’s source, probably Hippias again, told him that Thales had said that all things are full of gods, and he conjectures that this probably meant that everything is somehow ensouled. In another passage, he also conjectures what being ensouled must have meant according to Thales (De an. I 405a19; DK 11 A22):
From what people say about him, it seems that also Thales supposed that soul is some kind of moving principle – if, that is, he said that the [magnetic] stone has a soul because it moves iron.
Aristotle was apparently unsure about what exactly Thales had said or thought; but if the way he reconstructs his views in these two passages, on the basis of what he himself found in his source, is correct we may assume Thales claimed that there is some principle of motion in the whole of the physical world, even in apparently inanimate objects, and that we may call this “soul” and even “god” or “gods.” Some notion of the divine, then, was retained in Thales’ cosmology. The same holds true of the theory of Anaximander, who is said to have described the “boundless” as immortal and indestructible. These epithets were traditionally associated with the divine (cf. Aristotle Phys. III 203b13-15). Also Anaximenes, the third Milesian in line, called his basic stuff air, divine (cf. the texts printed as DK 13 A10). Even if this shows that the world picture of the early Milesians was not fully “secularized,” it should be stressed that instead of the more or less anthropomorphically conceived cosmic deities of Hesiod we now have a more depersonalized or “physicalized” conception of divinity that does not readily allow for a description in wholly theistic terms.17
From the fact that the Milesians considered their first principle – be it water, air, or the boundless – to be divine, we may infer that they thought of it as somehow alive. As we saw, the evidence suggests that they also considered the cosmos, as the offspring of this first principle, to be in some sense alive. Such a view of the cosmos has been labeled “hylozoïsm” (from hylê = matter, and zoê = life). The term as such is anachronistic: it was first devised by Ralph Cudworth in the seventeenth century,18 and strictly speaking, the Milesians had no conception of matter as such.19 Nevertheless, as a descriptive label it usefully captures a feature of Milesian physics that sets it apart from both Aristotelian physics (according to which matter without form was incapable of producing change), and the cosmologies of the post-Parmenidean generation of early Greek philosophers, that is, the atomists and pluralists. The atomists and pluralists took over the Eleatic thesis that Being (in their case transformed into the atoms of Democritus, the elements of Empedocles, and the seeds of Anaxagoras) is itself immutable, and they accordingly denied that matter contains an internal principle of change. Hence, Anaxagoras and Empedocles introduced what Aristotle called external “moving causes” (Mind, or Love and Strife), whereas Democritus reduced all substantial and qualitative change to the rearrangement of eternally moving (but not living) and intrinsically immutable atoms. Contrary to these later views, the Milesians indeed appear to have assumed that matter had an intrinsic principle of change.
For all that, hy
lozoïsm was probably a tacit presupposition rather than an explicitly defended thesis, and it may well be for this very reason that it appears in various guises.20 At any rate, it was not recognized as a position sui generis by Aristotle. As we noted, he did claim that Thales and his successors had only accepted material causes, but he was apparently unable to see matter as anything but inert.21 That is why he objected against the Milesians that “wood does not make a bed, nor bronze a statue, but something else is the cause of the change” (Metaph. I 984a23-26). In his view the early materialist theories easily revealed their own shortcomings in this respect, so that “the very circumstances of the case led people on and compelled them to seek further” (984a18-20) and to discover what Aristotle himself would call the moving cause.22 In other words, Aristotle had no patience with the idea that water, air, or the boundless can of its own accord change into a cosmos. Yet, this appears to have been precisely what the early Ionian philosophers believed. As an unreflective presupposition, this hylozoïsm was probably a remnant of the mythical world view that saw the elements of the cosmos as living and divine entities. After all, such a world picture was unlikely to be replaced overnight by a full-blown mechanistic materialism in which the cosmos was simply made up of blind and dead matter.