HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY docx

The theoretical life—and man’s double identity 395PART V: HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY PART VI: LATE ANTIQUITY ix... The present work spans the history of ancient philosophy from the earliest

A HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

A HISTORY OF ANCIENT

PHILOSOPHY

FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO

AUGUSTINE

Karsten Friis Johansen

Translated by Henrik Rosenmeier

London and New York

First published in English 1998

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of

thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 First published in Danish 1991

as Den Europæsiske Filosofis Historie : Antikken

by Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, Copenhagen

© 1991 Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck A/S English translation © 1998 Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck A/S

The right of Karsten Friis Johansen to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted

or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,

mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter

invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any

information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

Friis Johansen K (Karsten) [Den Europæsiske Filosofis Historie Antikken Danish]

A history of ancient philosophy: from the beginnings to Augustine

Karsten Friis Johansen Translated by Henrik Rosenmeier.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1 Philosophy: Ancient—History I Title B115.D36F7513 1998 F180–dc 21 97–45072 CIP ISBN 0-203-97980-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-12738-6 (Print Edition)

This book was awarded the Amalienborg Prize by Her Majesty

the Queen of Denmark and His Royal Highness the Prince Consort

No serious person will ever commit serious matters to writing.

(Plato)

PART I: PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY

PART III: PLATO

13 What is virtue? Can virtue be taught? 169

Logos and Erō s: the Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus and Cratylus 195

15 The good constitution of state and man 207

‘The state in heaven’ and the decline of the state: Books V–X 216

16 The late dialogues: knowledge and being 223

17 The late dialogues: nature, man and society 247

vii

The Philebus 256

PART IV: ARISTOTLE

The theoretical life—and man’s double identity 395

PART V: HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY

PART VI: LATE ANTIQUITY

ix

Early Byzantine theology and anthropology 598

God and man: creation, providence and freedom 623

x

The present work spans the history of ancient philosophy from the earliest Greek thinkers

to Augustine It was first published in Danish in 1991, and the English edition does notdiffer in any essential respect from the original version

The book addresses itself to readers who are principally interested in surveying the firstmillennium of Western thought as well as to those chiefly seeking direct access to theprimary sources To meet the requirements of the latter a detailed reference apparatus isintegrated in the text

The aim has been to link the respective parts of the book in such a manner that anoverall picture emerges in which there is emphasis on the many interrelationshipsbetween different trends The underlying supposition, that ‘ancient thought’ constitutes acoherent whole, albeit one with many variations, does of course have its limitations; itrepresents but one writer’s views and presuppositions

The book was inspired in equal measure by Anglo-Saxon and continental scholarship Inaddition, I have had the benefit of discussions with Danish colleagues and friends overmany years I beg them all to accept my sincere thanks

With admirable patience and engagement Henrik Rosenmeier, the translator, broughthis expertise and stylistic sensibility to bear on the work The book was a difficult one totranslate, and without Dr Rosenmeier’s great contribution it is unlikely that the plans fortranslation could have been realized We worked in close collaboration—one that I takepleasure in remembering Johnny Christensen, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Fritz SaabyPedersen most kindly read individual sections, mainly with an eye to terminology Majorportions of the book were reviewed by Eric Jacobsen from a stylistic and linguisticviewpoint The invaluable assistance of all these persons is gratefully acknowledged.The Danish edition was published by Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, and I ampleased to acknowledge my indebtedness to Søren Hansen for his unflagging support.Special thanks are extended to Malcolm Schofield of Cambridge University whorecommended the book to Routledge for publication of the English edition

I am also indebted to Routledge for undertaking to publish this book, to RichardStoneman, and to the two anonymous readers who provided useful comments on severalchapters Of course I alone remain responsible for any errors and shortcomings The translation was made possible by grants from the Carlsberg Foundation and theVelux Foundation, and I am most grateful for their generous support

Last but not least I should like to express my sincere and respectful gratitude to HerMajesty the Queen and His Royal Highness the Prince Consort who awarded theAmalienborg Prize to the original Danish version as a work in the humanities written inDanish and deserving of international dissemination.

Karsten Friis Johansen Copenhagen October 1997

xiii

xiv

Ancient philosophy, the basis of Western thought and science, evolved in the course ofalmost one thousand years In the sixth century BC that process was begun in which westill find ourselves: the attempt at a rational explanation of the world and of man’s place inthe world

The earliest period—until just past the middle of the fifth century BC—waseconomically, socially and politically a period of crises, but at the same time a periodwhich opened up for foreign influences provoking thinkers and poets to seek for someorder behind all changes, an order that could be grasped by human thought With thevictorious conclusion of the Persian wars, Athens became the political and cultural centre

of the Greek world Still, the owls of Minerva do not take flight until dusk Socrates’work was carried out during a period of decline, and Plato and Aristotle were not theideologists of democratic, imperialist Athens They brought earlier thought to aconclusion, created a conceptual apparatus that has left its impress on all subsequentWestern philosophy, and assigned man a place in society and the cosmos at the momentwhen the era of greatness had been lost irretrievably, and the city state was in decay Theold Greek world finally lay in ruins when Alexander the Great forged his world empire.From then on political decisions were made by distant monarchs, and individual man wasleft to find his own proper place Still, new philosophical systems were formulated—Epicureanism and Stoicism—and philosophy was still a universal explanation of theworld; but the emphasis was on ethics, and it was in this period that philosophy andscience began to pursue their own paths

By the second century BC the Romans had become the rulers of the entire Mediterraneanarea They adopted Hellenistic culture and with it Greek philosophy The oldphilosophical schools were continued in Roman times and culminated during the late Empire(from the third century AD) in Neoplatonism But times had changed Religiousmovements from the Orient appealed to a far wider circle than philosophy ever did, andwith the advent of Christianity a confrontation and cultural fusion took place, which areunparalleled in our history Antiquity was over, but its thought survived

There are breaks during this long evolution—but also continuity Each period had itsown features, but there was also recourse to the tradition, which in a sense never becamethe past The fundamental idea that originally made philosophy an especial mode ofinterpreting the world was never left behind: man can understand the world as a wholeand thereby know himself Ancient thought always aimed at an all-comprehending view—

even when moving to the limits of rationality The universal aim was never abandoned,not even as the several separate disciplines gradually evolved And confidence in thepossibilities of human thought was maintained, even when reflections began about thebasis of knowledge The world was considered a rational, orderly whole, and in manycases the cosmic order was taken to be moral order as well.

The strength of ancient philosophy is the formulation of basic fundamental positions—materialism, idealism and scepticism, rationalism, and empiricism, to use modern labels—and of basic fundamental problems, which may belong within the purview of a givenperiod, but which at the same time have constituted the underlying fabric of a thousand-year old tradition and have served until recently as paradigms But ancient thought wasalways speculative, and in a manner of speaking it lacked a counterpart Individualsciences, such as mathematics and medicine, achieved significant results; but from socialand ideological points of view one cannot in Antiquity—as in our times—speak of science

as an established authority that ties down philosophical reflection decisively In Antiquityone could choose one’s own philosophical position as one today chooses one’s outlook onlife or political party But in so doing, one had also chosen a certain view of the physical worldand of man’s moral obligations

Already in Plato there is awareness of the tradition Since his time, philosophy has beentied up with its own history This history has often served as a self-evident background; yetjust as often philosophers have deliberately sought to return to the ancients, and in everycase something new has been the outcome Until the end of the eighteenth century therelationship with the tradition was in a certain sense free of problems One could discusswith a colleague from Antiquity—more or less as Aristotle had debated with hisforerunners—which is to say not out of interest in a distant past, but out of interest in subjectmatters beyond differences in time A direct relation to Antiquity has not died out, as can

be seen for example in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, and not infrequentlyamong analytical or Marxist interpreters Still, towards 1800 AD emerged what has beencalled historical consciousness Primarily thanks to Herder, the view came to prevail thatman is a creature of history and that history accordingly has no meaning beyond itself Itfollows from Herder’s basic thought that every cultural phenomenon—hence alsophilosophy—exists only in a historical dimension and that every age must be judged on itsown presuppositions

But this causes the historian’s debate with the past to be far more reflected than it hadformerly been He is obliged to respect an alien mode of thought but is also tied to hisown presuppositions Furthermore, for the historian of philosophy the problem becomeseven more acute, because philosophy is both fixed in a certain time and seeks universalvalidity The history of philosophy is both philosophy and history and will always expressthe interpretation of a particular age of a particular past, and the historian of philosophy mustconsider both the atemporal and historical perspectives—not necessarily in such a mannerthat he incessantly recites his own hermeneutical credo, but so that in his mind’s eye heenvisages a timeless problem emerging in a historical context Strictly speaking, thisrequires superhuman abilities but also a certain craftsman’s understanding of what it isthat a given text does not say

2 INTRODUCTION

All these difficulties become especially clear in the history of ancient philosophy It is aperiod with relevance for us, because it is the basis for all subsequent Western thought.Yet, there is both in time and in culture such a great distance between us and Antiquitythat ancient ways of confronting problems are often not immediately understandable,even if the problems discussed may be today’s problems as well The philosophy of such aperiod does not become understandable by mere paraphrase To gain access to theconceptual world of the past with the conceptual apparatus of our own time requiresconsiderable balance—and that not least with respect to the philosophy of the earliestperiod.

THE EVIDENCE

It may be appropriate to begin with some comments on the philological background forthe interpretation of ancient texts, both with respect to the very nature of technical-philological work and to the kinds of surviving sources The latter is connected with thequestion of Antiquity’s understanding of itself

The literature of Antiquity is but a torso to us Major parts have been lost, and the firstprinted editions of ancient texts in the Renaissance were based on transcripts oftranscripts made throughout the long period since the originals were written Survivingmanuscripts are rarely older than the ninth century AD, and hence we must take intoaccount that in the long history of transmission, errors have crept into the texts, whichcan never be detected Thanks to the finding of papyri, none of which are older than c.350

BC, texts have been found, which are unknown in the manuscript transmission—forexample Aristotle’s treatise on the constitution of Athens and a number of Epicureanpapyri But a papyrus has usually been preserved only in fragments, and its age is not aguarantee of a better text than that which perhaps also has been indirectly transmitted inmedieval transcripts, and which perhaps has been derived from an authorized edition fromAntiquity Thus the few preserved Plato papyri have seldom occasioned corrections in themanuscript transmission

The philologist is confronted with considerable difficulties concerning transmission andtextual criticism The classical philologist’s ever more refined techniques make oureditions more reliable than the first to be printed, but we shall never have access to awholly authentic text By means of a systematic registration of obvious errors that recurand by the dating of manuscripts, etc., the mutual interdependence of survivingmanuscripts can be accounted for with greater or lesser probability, and in fortunate cases

it is thereby possible to reconstruct—perhaps also identify—the source of the surviving

manuscripts (the archetypus) Such a source can, for example, be a lost manuscript from

the early Middle Ages, but it can never be identified with the author’s text

Nor was it possible in Antiquity to be certain that one held an authentic text in one’shand that had been approved by the author No two manuscripts are identical, and at thattime there was often a significant difference between a reliable text and a ‘pirate edition’

(cf., e.g Plato Parm 128 D) A ‘sound’ text from earlier Greek Antiquity will—as it

presents itself to us—stem from philological editing in Hellenistic times (third-secondcentury BC) It is during this period—first and foremost in Alexandria—that the

INTRODUCTION 3

foundation of philological technique was laid down, not least with respect to establishing areliable Homeric text From marginal notes, which at some time have been absorbed inthe transmission and copied in extant manuscripts, one can surmise something of the

‘working methods’ of the Alexandrian philologists Measured by modern standards, theyworked in a rather arbitrary manner, and their methods of textual criticism were notalways exemplary Yet they accomplished a great task by preserving the existingtransmission and by finding their way to the soundest text, and they had so much respectfor the well-transmitted text that they followed the sensible philological principle oflisting proposed textual emendations as notes rather than incorporating them in the textitself

A standard of editorial technique was thereby introduced, which also influencedancient editions of renowned philosophical texts, although the Alexandrians did notprimarily concern themselves with this genre What and how much was transmitted variesgreatly from one philosophical writer to another All that Plato published with a greaterpublic in mind seems to have been preserved, and our Plato text can be assumed todepend on an authorized edition arranged for by the Academy (third century BC?) Whathas been preserved for us by Aristotle evidently goes back to an edition of lecture notesfrom the first century BC Epicurus’ letters have been preserved as quotations in anotherwriter (Diogenes Laertius) Our Plotinus goes back to a posthumous edition by Porphyry,but there are traces of an older and less sound Plotinus text

In other words, every philosophical or literary treatment of ancient texts is fundamentallydependent on comprehensive philological reconstruction, but the dependence is mutual

No ancient text can be interpreted without a basis of philology and textual criticism, and

no text can be determined without interpreting its contents

What has been lost over the course of time is owing not only to external circumstancesbut to changing tastes and interests as well Furthermore, the tendency in late Antiquity

to allow anthologies and compendia to take the place of the original texts has been fatal To

us Plato and Aristotle are the dominant figures in Greek thought But such a picture wasdetermined upon already during Antiquity It is not accidental that from pre-Hellenistictimes only complete texts by these two men have been preserved Therefore we mayeasily get a distorted understanding and overlook the fact that there are importantconnective lines that by-pass these two giants Several of the so-called Presocratics werepresumably lost already early on, soon after the age of Aristotle Subsequently onlyrandom quotations were known, and hence quotations from late Antiquity are oftenquotations of quotations The fundamental works of such major Hellenistic schools asEpicureanism and Stoicism are also known only fragmentarily, but entire, more readableworks from the later tradition have been preserved (Lucretius in the case ofEpicureanism; Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius in the case of Stoicism), and thedebate between the Hellenistic schools is amply reflected in Cicero But with respect tomajor parts of the philosophy of Antiquity, we only have recourse to quotations andaccounts in later authors, and, of course, this makes work with philologicalreconstructions even more difficult One is left with loose ends taken out of context, andone must take into account the bias of the author who is quoting someone else

4 INTRODUCTION

Plato’s and Aristotle’s attitude to the tradition to which they belonged is decisive forour knowledge of it They—and the students of Aristotle—have determined theunderstanding of the development of philosophy Both saw themselves as solvers ofproblems raised in earlier thought Yet they had different ways of confronting theproblems.

Plato does not wish to provide information about the Presocratics He makes use ofthem instead He is interested in rethinking the problems posed by his predecessors inorder to formulate principal philosophical positions—not in paraphrasing particulardoctrines Some of his interpretations—for example his view of Heraclitus andParmenides as counterparts, or his contrast of materialism with idealism—have remained

But certainly it would be a misunderstanding to read, for example, his Parmenides as a

source for what Parmenides did, in fact, mean

Unlike Plato’s, Aristotle’s historical view was systematic He considers earlierpositions as the raw material of philosophy on a par with empirical observation Almostall his treatises therefore commence with a survey in which he—often in great detail—summarizes, quotes, or criticizes his predecessors Thus the entire first book of the

Metaphysics is a historical examination with an aim to conceptual analysis, and it has

remained a normative ‘history of philosophy’ for times far later than Antiquity It followsfrom Aristotle’s procedure that he treats earlier thinkers in terms of his own conceptualapparatus He asks about the meaning that lies behind their—often stumbling—attempts

to arrive at those truths that it was possible for Aristotle himself to formulate, preciselybecause the attempts had been made This is not simply arrogance, for in his discussions ofthe development of problems Aristotle takes his predecessors seriously—far more so than

is the case with so many other great men of philosophy If one wishes to evaluate Aristotle

as a source, one must recollect that he had access to just about the entire earlierphilosophical tradition, that he carefully gathered and preserved a very voluminoushistorical material, but that he gathered and retold it in his own context

To a large extent, Epicureanism and Stoicism must be thought of as reactions toproblems stated and discussed by Plato and Aristotle But at the same time these schoolsseek a tie to Presocratic views, reinterpreted without much regard to a historicalperspective A Hellenistic philosopher makes use of the tradition, as Plato and Aristotledid But no Epicurean or Stoic had Plato’s or Aristotle’s interest in a debate with the past.Historical material encapsulated in Hellenistic philosophy is often so masked as to beunrecognizable Something of an exception, however, is the late Sceptic Sextus Empiricus(c.200 AD) who provides extensive and exact quotations especially with epistemologicalcontents The Platonist Plutarch (c.100 AD) and the physician Galen (second century AD)can also be significant philosophical sources

In late Antiquity the long philosophical tradition was viewed through Neoplatonicglasses or was attacked from a Christian point of view Several Church Fathers transmittedquotations, often these were second-hand But as a rule the Neoplatonists had profoundfamiliarity with the tradition Among the late Neoplatonists there is special reason tosingle out Simplicius, who lived as late as the sixth century AD and represents a specialgenre, that of the Aristotelian commentators He was dependent on the Aristoteliantradition, but at the same time had access to sources that were still available in his time

INTRODUCTION 5

Thanks to him, many Presocratic fragments have been preserved He quotes precisely,and his commentaries are often valuable—which is also true of other Aristoteliancommentators Simplicius is a good example showing that a late source is not necessarily abad source At a time when literature only existed in an often very limited number ofmanuscripts, a writer’s access to books, i.e where he lived, can be more decisive than hisdates.

A special genre is the so-called doxography On this genre as well, Aristotle hasindirectly left his mark Aristotle’s student, the philosopher and botanist Theophrastus,shared his teacher’s historical interest and wrote a comprehensive work on the history ofnatural philosophy Of this, the section on perception has survived In his ordering andevaluation of the material Theophrastus is dependent on Aristotle, and his work served asthe basis for many later compendia that included Aristotelianism and Hellenisticphilosophy Some of these have been preserved Theophrastus was still a historian ofproblems, although more rigid and dogmatic than Aristotle The doxographic traditionfollowed Theophrastus’ systematics and arranged the material according to philosophical

beliefs (doxai), not according to persons or schools—under such headings as matter,

space, time, causes are furnished the views of the different schools But no quotations areprovided, nor any commentaries and philosophical criticism A transition has taken place

to compendia-like surveys for the use of busy readers who value easily obtained readyinformation

A variant of this genre arranged the matter according to individuals within theparticular schools, apparently with greater interest in the external history of the schools

than in their doctrines The ordering principle is the concept of diadochō , the ‘line of

succession’—which is to say the succession of leaders within a school This genre alsofollowed Aristotelian impulses, but the method could—especially with respect to thePresocratics—lead to sterile systematization

Finally, philosophers—and other writers—were treated biographically But we shouldnot think of biographies in the modern sense Originally this genre probably bore the stamp

of Aristotle’s interest in typical modes of life, but from quite early on it seems to have

degenerated into anecdotes and chronique scandaleuse Biographical interest naturally goes

hand in hand with interest in chronology, and here—for better or worse—a work byApollodorus (second century BC) has been influential He cannot have had muchknowledge of the oldest philosophers’ exact dates but worked out a strict sequel in which

a teacher was succeeded by a forty-years-younger student who ‘had heard him’ Themethod does not inspire confidence

Most of the works in these genres have been lost, but they were the basis for the only

‘history of philosophy’ of Antiquity that did survive, written by Diogenes Laertius(presumably in the first half of the third century AD) Formally Diogenes writes in the

diadochō genre, but he also diligently uses doxographical and biographical matter, and hequotes energetically—sometimes charmingly, rarely carefully, and never profoundly To

us it can sometimes be an advantage that he serves up his material in its raw state Heshares his contemporaries’ interest in the well-turned unreliable anecdote, their reverencefor a grand past and the clever sayings of wise men It has been said that to him history isbroken down into stories He did not have philosophical insight But by a quirk of fate his

6 INTRODUCTION

work has been preserved, and down through the centuries it has probably been moreinfluential than any other history of philosophy He is a second-hand source, althoughoften primary in the current historical sense, which is to say primary in relation to otherpreserved sources.

Accordingly, the imperfect but varied source material can be divided into three groups:

1 Independently transmitted texts—where one must always take the special nature ofthe transmission into account

2 Quotations in other authors—where one must take the transmission of these authorsinto account and bear in mind that the quotations are out of context and areemployed for a specific purpose

3 Accounts in other authors (testimonia)—where one must likewise take the bias of

these authors into account

The delimitation between the two last groups is not always easy to establish, for it canoften be difficult to know what is quotation and what is paraphrase, and the matter is evenmore difficult in Antiquity where one is often quoted from memory With respect to theearliest thinking, it may be a help that some Presocratics wrote in verse, which is not soeasily distorted, and also that genuine textual fragments often can be identified by specialdialect features But it holds good for the fragmentarily transmitted philosophers—forexample the Presocratics and the older Stoics—that the distinction in modern standardeditions between fragment and testimony not infrequently must be viewed with somereservation The distinction often depends on the editor’s discretion

Warnings of this sort are the immediate consequence of general principles of textualcriticism and source criticism To these must be added the interpretative difficulties.Antiquity was itself able to furnish histories of problems—often of high standard—andcollections of material—sometimes on a most unambitious level—but hardly a history ofphilosophy in the modern sense The modern historian of philosophy must combine anAristotle’s preoccupation with problems with a Diogenes’ simple eagerness to collectfacts, and he must in addition bring to his task that sympathy and historical distance, which

at happy moments have been the hallmarks of humanistic scholarship

Until about 1800 AD ‘history of philosophy’ was by and large confined to doxography.Hegel’s history of philosophy was epochal in being the first treatment written from a

consistent philosophical position Zeller’s Die Philosophie der Griechen (1st ed., 1844–52)

is the first work to unite philosophical interpretation with philological method Thesubsequent years can boast of many examples of philosophical-systematic analysis and ofgenetic method–which is to say that special emphasis is placed on influences and historicalsequels To this must, of course, be added investigations from social or psychologicalpoints of view

The following pages have not been written with the view that philosophy follows anecessary and autonomous course or that the past must be judged in light of what couldand would endure The general cultural and social background will, to some extent, beconsidered—especially in the earliest period and at the transition from Antiquity to

INTRODUCTION 7

Christianity—but this book is primarily a presentation of the history of philosophy Itdoes not pretend to be a history of science or a general history of ideas

8 INTRODUCTION

PART I PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY

10

1 MYTH, POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY

Greek philosophy arose during the sixth century BC Like us, the Greeks askedthemselves how it all came about Aristotle ties this to the problem of the nature of

philosophy (Aristot Met 980 a 21 ff.) Philosophy builds on experience, though it is not

experience Experience deals with the particular, philosophy or science with theuniversal The practical man—for example, the artisan—knows what he has to do in agiven situation The theoretician or philosopher knows the causes, for he not only knows

that this or that is the case, he also knows why Practical discoveries, Aristotle continues,

are the first to appear in the development of mankind It is not until the material needshave been met that it becomes possible for someone to devote himself to speculation Thishappened in Egypt where the priesthood had enough time to study mathematics Aristotlefurther notes that theoretical speculation is at all times more highly regarded, because itsaim is not some practical application In fact, theoretical knowledge, just as the life of afree man, has its purpose in itself

These Aristotelian considerations about the philosophy of history and sociology ofknowledge are telling, even though they are not, strictly speaking, dependent on hisdefinition of the nature of philosophy To Aristotle, as to Plato, philosophy comes aboutbecause men wonder and without prejudice try to come up with rational explanations.What existed before philosophy was what Aristotle called theology, which is to say,mythology But mythological explanations are not rational (cf 1000 a 5 ff.) If thephilosopher abandons his belief in rationality and order, he must surrender to chaos andthe dark night of the ‘theologians’ (1071 b 26; 1072 a 18)

Philosophy originated only in few locations—in Greece, India and China—and it cameabout much later than religion Poetic and religious interpretations of life seem to beuniversal human endeavours Religion provides an explanation Just as is the case withphilosophy, it does not take the world to be what it pretends to be; yet it does not providesome distant explanation of ‘given’ phenomena that are reducible to universal causes Atthe same time as religion is an interpretation of life, it is a way of life By living in a societyand in relation to nature men live in a relationship with the divine, and this relationship isnot to be explained but to be experienced and confirmed This has been described as notbeing an objective relation to a ‘this’ but as a personal one to a Thou’

The relation of man to god is confirmed at the festival that ensures that the gods stillsustain natural order and that the world will not fall back into chaos and the power of the

demons At the festival gods and men meet each other, and the protodrama is presentedand repeated in which the gods—by annihilating the demonic powers—secured orcreated an orderly world This occurs by cultic and ritual acts, by sacrifice, and by means

of the language of the festival, the myth that relates the beginning of the world (Greek:

archō), ‘that time’, which is both primordial time and the present which in the feast recreatesthe first drama Cult, rite, and myth are the basic elements of primitive religion, in thereligions of the Mediterranean and thereby in Greek religion as well And these elementscontinued to live until the advent of Christianity In Athens, Delphi, and throughout theGreek world the festival drama endured, even though poets and philosophers by and byspoke about god, the world and man in quite a different language It was only slowly thatthe old, traditional religion came to be thought of as empty ceremony The fact that theold religion had so much vitality is connected with its dependence on institutionalizedpractice, on action, and on its not containing a systematized theology Greek religion isfree of dogma The myth is an account which early came to balance subtly on theborderline between faith and fable It is not an authorized, intellectual, religious verity.Therefore a Greek poet or thinker was able to have his own personal, sublime view of godand at the same time he could with the clearest conscience in the world participate in thecultic festival—the cult can continue to be the traditional expression of that which acommunity of men has in common and which thought cannot grasp But if religion is notrevealed theology, the cult is precisely a social affair: to omit sacrifices is therefore thesame as disavowal of the community of both god and state

Greek religion is polytheistic This does not mean that the mythological host of closelyrelated gods, each with his own official area of responsibility, provide an adequatepicture A god resides in a sanctuary, be it Zeus, Apollo, or Athena, but remains first andforemost ‘the god’, yet also a god who protects a special area of life and permits theworship of a related god—often in the same sanctuary But only a rationalizing mythologywill attempt to specify the tasks of the individual gods The god is—to use an awkwardmodern expression—a personification, which means that he is both a person and a power.Probably this is why proclaimed atheists are so rare in the Greek world To deny theexistence of Aphrodite, for example, would be absurd, for it would be tantamount todenying the existence of the erotic

The basic elements of Greek religion that have been sketched in the precedingcorrespond with what is known about other religions in the Mediterranean area But thecommon features allow for many possible variations, and there are many latent lines ofdevelopment The great exception is, of course, the development of the Jewish religion

To the Jews there is only one God, Jahve; He speaks to His people through the prophets;

as we are told in Genesis, He created heaven and earth out of nothing by an act of will,but He is Himself transcendent, beyond created nature

Otherwise in Egypt and Babylonia In Amenhotep IV’s (Achenaton’s) famous hymn tothe sun (fourteenth century BC) the sun and the god are one, and in the ritual Babylonian

poem of creation Enuma elish (second millennium BC) both the world and the gods are

created from the primordial waters, the male Apsu and the female Tiamat

In Egypt the king was the god’s representative, and in both Egypt and Babylonia thepriesthood had powerful social and political positions Under such circumstances it was

12 MYTH, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY

possible to develop and refine mythical thinking Yet major departures would hardly havebeen possible.

In the Greek world, on the other hand, no powerful priesthood evolved, nor did anofficial mythology This provided opportunities as probably nowhere else for adevelopment and change of the ancient mythical way of thinking Mythical thought ispoetical, and if the tie between myth and cult is loosened, poetry can arise in its own

right This happened with Homer The Iliad and the Odyssey are epic works of poetry in

which the well- and deliberately-composed story is the superior consideration—superior

to religion as well In Homer the gods live in the Olympic skies, are eternal, happy and

‘easy-living’, but also angry, cunning, in discord and with human virtues and vices on agrand scale In the universe of the epic it is first and foremost the task of the gods toparticipate in the action—the battles of Troy, the return of Ulysses They rarely showthemselves to men, but the poet allows his auditors to look over his shoulder so that wecan see what the gods are up to and why things happen as they do Thereby the gods geteach his own face, but undeniably become a little less divine This is not to say thatHomer is irreligious, but only that an epic poet does not write theology Nevertheless, theHomeric Pantheon was to occupy a significant place in the minds of the Greeks AllGreeks knew Homer, and the connection between the old festive religion and theHomeric Pantheon is a unique Greek phenomenon Through Homer other religious ideaswere transmitted as well: the ancient thought of water as the progenitor of everything—

in Homer the river Okeanos, which floats around the world (Hom Il XIV 200; 244; cf Enuma elish) and the thought of fate—moira or aisa—the lot that is accorded every man at birth (cf Il XX 127; Od VII 196) Yet, at the same time, it is not a named god, but the Divinity or the guardian genius (ho daimō n) who guides the steps of man (cf XI 61) The

epic poet communicates and reshapes the religion he lives in; but he does not systematizeit

But it is also possible to proceed from myth to mythology, to what might be called a rational interpretation of life An example has been mentioned from Babylonian culture ofmythological poetry that is still tied to the cult and thereby expresses an ‘official’ view

quasi-On Greek soil, Hesiod (probably c.700 BC) gave shape to his own personal mythology in

the poem the Theogony (the Origin of the Gods).

Of the genesis of the world he writes:

Verily first of all did Chaos come into being, and then broad-bosomed Gaia [earth],

a firm seat of all things for ever, and misty Tartaros in a recess of broad-wayedearth, and Eros, who is fairest among immortal gods, looser of limbs, and subdues

in their breasts the mind and thoughtful counsel of all gods and all men Out ofChaos, Erebos and black Night came into being; and from Night, again, came Aitherand Day, whom she conceived and bore after mingling in love with Erebos Andearth first of all brought forth starry Ouranos [sky], equal to herself, to cover hercompletely round about, to be a firm seat for the blessed gods for ever Then shebrought forth tall mountains, lovely haunts of the divine nymphs who dwell in thewoody mountains She also gave birth to the unharvested sea, seething with its

MYTH, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY 13

swell, Pontos, without delightful love; and then having lain with Ouranos she boredeep-eddying Okeanos.

(Hes Theog 116 ff.; trans G.S.Kirk)

Subsequently the gods enter the world, father and son, until the coming of Zeus and hisdescendants who defeated the Titans, the enemies of the gods

There are many rational elements in these lines The question posed is what came first

—Chaos, the chasm, which in its indefiniteness makes it impossible to ask what wasbefore ‘first’ Then appear the two principal regions of the world: earth (Gaia) and theunderworld (Tartaros) and Eros, the power that makes creation and procreation possible.Next the darkness of the underworld (Erebos) and Night are born, and they beget theircontrast, the day and pure air (Aither) Thereafter the world—as we know it—appearsgradually: heaven or the vault of heaven (Ouranos), the mountains, the sea (Pontos), andthe primordial river (Okeanos)

This is different from Genesis where God created the world There is no distinctionbetween gods, nature, and power; and earth, underworld, Eros, day and night are

‘concepts’ or rather ‘persons’ of the same order Yet things are orderly nevertheless.There is not only a rational before and after; there is also a causal explanation voiced bythe sexual language and cosmic procreation The world is explained through its beginningand birth (cosmogony), and the birth of the world explains the nature of the world

So much for the rational But there is an equally important non-rational aspect.Hesiod’s mythological explanation of the world is irrational in so far as he cannot becontradicted He is not disposed to argue for or against His words are their ownauthority, which finds its poetic expression in its not being Hesiod who speaks, but theMuses through Hesiod—just as the Muse speaks through Homer

It is never the case that one mode of thinking suddenly is succeeded by another Hesiodhad his successors in his role as mythological systematist, for example Pherecydes fromSyros (sixth century BC), a contemporary of the oldest philosophers But he wasinfluential considerably later than the sixth century Like Homer, Hesiod became anintegral part of Greek education—not only as a poet one could consider in aestheticterms, but as a teacher to whose message one had to respond

Hesiod also had long-lasting influence in another way His cosmogony and theogonywere continued by the mystical-religious movement, Orphism, but in a new context Ashas become clear, Greek religion had several faces, and the world of the Pantheon did notconsist exclusively of noble super-human figures spicing their blessed lives with Homericfamily fights Occupying a special position in the Pantheon was Demeter, the goddess offertility, whose cult in Eleusis became a mystery cult for the initiated And Dionysus hadhis own very special place among the gods He was the god of wine, but above all of theirrational in man, of chaotic feelings and uncontrolled instincts, the wish for death, andthe yearning for unification with the divine Dionysus also had his own secret cult for theinitiated—apparently an ecstatic cult without fixed rituals, unlike Demeter’s mysteries atEleusis The worship of Dionysus was a clear contrast to the typical cultic religion and tothe Homeric Pantheon, and it is no mere accidental stroke of genius when Nietzschespeaks of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as opposite poles in the Greek attitude to life

14 MYTH, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY

The Greeks themselves felt the contrast, and probably wise religious politics were behindthe introduction of the cult of Dionysus in Apollo’s shrine at Delphi.

Greek mysticism was no more of a private matter than was official religion, and themystic conduct of life was channelled into congregations, the mystery cults Yet thepurpose was the redemption of the individual It is difficult to distinguish between thevarious mystical-religious currents Worship of Dionysus was, for example, integrated inOrphism, so named after the mythical singer Orpheus who journeyed to the Underworld

in order to conquer Death But soon Orphism also became connected withPythagoreanism, which is why this particular movement has been especially importantwith respect to the history of philosophy Orphism probably arose in the sixth century andmust be considered as a manifestation of general religious protest There are but few early

—indirect—sources (the poet Pindar, for example), and the Orphic literature that hassurvived, which sought to systematize the movement’s world of thought, is late Because

of its ideas about the origin of the world and of the gods, it has ties back in time to

Hesiod; but among other things speculations about a ‘cosmic egg’ (cf Aristoph Av 693

ff.) suggest that there was a wish to amplify the analogy between cosmogony and the birth

of a living being More important, though, is the connection with the worship ofDionysus, for it is by its interpretation of man’s relation to the divine that Orphism isclearly opposed to traditional religious views Orphism is an individualistic and dualisticreligion of redemption for the initiated Man is an individual composed of good and evil.The human soul is not—as to the mind of the ordinary Greek—tied to his body and thisworld The soul, the real man, is a stranger visiting the body—Plato reports the Orphiccreed that the body is a prison, and Euripides asks—probably inspired by Orphism—

whether that which we call death is life and life death (Plat Crat 400 C; Eur frg 833

Nauck) Life is a punishment for misdeeds in a former existence, but man has a hope ofhappiness in the beyond By spiritual and bodily purification the soul may posthumouslyachieve salvation and be united with the godhead In an Orphic text from the fourthcentury we are told about him who has escaped the circuitous transmigration of the soul:

‘Happy and blessed You shall become a God instead of a mortal’ (Orph frg 32 C Kern).

From a philosophical point of view, it is the Orphic understanding of the soul and its lifeafter death that is of special interest Seen in its social context, Orphism is one amongmany religions of salvation with a special appeal to those who are unsuccessful in this life

In fact the new religious currents also reflect profound changes in the structure ofGreek society in the sixth century Already in the eighth century, Greek colonies werefounded as off-shoots from the mother states throughout the Mediterranean But in thesixth century these developments accelerated—economically, socially, and politically.Money economy replaced natural economy In a number of city states trade and crafts

became more important, but the typical city state—the polis—continued to be a city with

adjacent agrarian areas The increasing amount of trade did, however, result in newfarming practices: cultivation of grain crops was replaced by the planting of vineyards andolive trees, and thus a city state was no longer able to supply its own foodstuffs Thedeeply rooted Greek ideal of the city state as an autonomous unit had to be realized in anew way, and the lack of economic stability led to considerable social upheavals The needfor cheap labour led to an increase in the number of slaves, and in the classic Greek city

MYTH, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY 15

state the free (but rarely idle) citizen’s existence was dependent on slavery—often thenumber of slaves exceeded the number of citizens But the balance between the social

classes shifted in another way as well The owners of capital—the nouveaux riches—

outranked the old rural nobility and the smallholder Naturally all this had politicalconsequences Sparta, which continued to be an agrarian state, preserved its ancientaristocratic government—the oligarchy But the development in Athens was in manyrespects typical for the new city states First a political compromise was attempted inorder to correct social shortcomings (Solon) Next the social losers allied themselves with

a powerful family (the Pisistratides), and one-man rule—tyranny—was established.Towards the end of the century this led to another reaction whereby tyranny wassucceeded by democracy, the form of government in which the political and judicialpowers are invested in the male citizens There is some inner logic in the transition fromoligarchy to tyranny, from tyranny to democracy, and this sequence of events lies behindlater Greek theory of state, although it was considered in moral rather than socialcategories (Plato and Aristotle)

The social and political changes led, of course, not only to new religious movementsbut also to a new moral and intellectual focus and to reflection about norms that formerlymore or less had been taken for granted In the present chapter myth, poetry, andphilosophy are dealt with as separate modes of interpreting existence In the sixth centurynot only poetry, but philosophy as well, became emancipated without being severedsuddenly from religion In literature one poet after another comes forth and speaks in hisown name In lyrical poetry Sappho, for example, voices her own wholly personalfeelings; her own mental states, her experience of love and nature are worlds untothemselves But other poets—for example, Solon, Theognis, and Simonides—presentedproblems for debate In Homer’s idealized world the hero’s moral obligations andprivileges are consonant with his social status as a matter of course But Homer is also able

to distance himself from his ethics of nobility, and, for example, in the development ofAchilles’ character he reveals new norms And in a world in which the norms havechanged, justice or happiness are no longer concepts that are immediately given by thingsand society as they are They call for reflection and the question of a higher justice Herethere are, to be sure, also connective lines back—to Hesiod, for example But Solon andTheognis are typical of the sixth century They speak from personal experience, but they

do so with the authority of the wise man—Solon as the acknowledged sage and Theognis

as the worldly wise critic Their mode of expression depends on the gnome, which is to say

the general apophthegmatic rule of life couched in imperatives or categorically We knowsuch concise rules of life from the maxims that are attributed to the ‘Seven Wise’, amongwhom Solon belonged, and whom the Greeks considered the forerunners of philosophy—maxims such as ‘nothing to excess’, ‘know thyself, and ‘let not your tongue precede yourreason’ An example from Solon shows the combination of worldly wisdom and generalreflection First he prays to the gods for riches and honour and for his remaining a friend

to his friends and foe to his foes Then he proceeds:

I do indeed want to have money, but to come by it unlawfully I will not allow, forthe punishment for that will come afterwards in any case The wealth granted by

16 MYTH, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY

the Gods becomes man’s enduring possession from cornerstone to ridgepole Butthat which man strives for by hubris does not come in an orderly way It followsonly reluctantly, led by the deeds of injustice and mingled with ruinous infatuation.

(Solon frg 1, 7 ff Diehl)One can juxtapose this serene conservative confidence in justice as being what it was withTheognis’ protest:

How can it be just, King of the Gods, that the man who refrains from injustice andneither transgresses nor breaks his word, but is just, still does not reap the rewards

of justice?—How then can other mortals, looking towards him, have respect forthe Gods?

(Theogn 743 ff.)

If one goes forward in time, one finds argumentation and debate In a poem quoted by Plato

in the Protagoras, Simonides (who died in 468 BC) debates with the old sage Pittacus: Pittacus said that it is difficult to be truly noble, but I say that only the gods can have that

privilege

Such poems can be considered from many points of view They can, of course, be readpurely aesthetically—but that was not the intention They may be read as expressions ofsocial struggles of the time They may also be said to deal with moral philosophy It issuggestive that in older days the philosopher’s task was to speak of the nature of the world.But it was in the poet’s domain to speak of what is good and evil, justice and injustice, andhence it may seem somewhat arbitrary when current histories of philosophy ignore theolder poets

Next to the poetry in which the sage speaks as an individual stands another Greekpoetic tradition that in a remarkable way retains its affiliation with religion This is thechoral lyric and—subsequently—tragedy In the choral lyric, which we know from all theway back in the seventh century (Alcman), poetry is recited by a chorus to theaccompaniment of music and dance on the occasion of a religious festival Often there is

no question of cultic poetry or cultic act, but the religious tie vests the poem with specialloftiness, and the poet’s thought acquires a special dimension thanks to the chorus Thevery mode of presentation makes the poet’s I into a universal I The religious dimension isfurther emphasized by the special occasion to which the poem applies: it is placed in a sort

of eternal perspective by the narrative of a myth This is best known from the greatestpoet of choral lyrics, Pindar (c.518–438), who in his poems praises the victors at thegames tied to the religious festivals (the cult of Zeus at Olympia, for example) Pindarconnects a specific occasion with a mythical subject, which, so to speak, makes themoment eternal and thereby imparts to his thoughts on life, death, or justice an authoritythus transcending his own person This tradition survives in the choral songs in tragedy,but tragedy contains spoken verse as well, which is delivered by actors speaking asindividuals It has been said that in this way tragedy unites two aspects of early Greekpoetry As we know, tragedy prefers to take its matter from known myths and isperformed in connection with worship (the cult of Dionysus in Athens)

MYTH, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY 17

It will appear from this brief survey that old Greek poetry did not primarily aim at anaesthetic experience The poet is a sage and a teacher who speaks—or pretends to utter—

the truth It must have seemed all the more scandalous that the teacher par excellence, Homer,

in fact told of something far from truthful—of the gods, for example Already Hesiodseems to have protested against Homer, and in Pindar there is a brief passage about true

and false poetry (Pind 0l I 28 ff.): Many things are wondrous, and in legends among

mortals that transgress truth stories spiced with manifold lies may lead astray Thegracefulness of song can charm mortals with its sweetness and make that credible which isnot But the days to come are the best witnesses; and it is fitting for man to speak well ofthe gods.—The idea of the poet as the prophet of truth was decisive for Plato’s criticism

of the false poet

And then philosophy emerged as a genre in the sixth century The first philosopherswrote in prose, and thereby a good deal has been said Like Solon and Theognis they speak

on their own behalf; they do not disguise themselves as spokesmen of higher powers; theyspeak of a subject matter using reason as their criterion; and they can be contradicted Aspreviously mentioned, the oldest philosophers leave wisdom of life to the poets and speakabout the world But—to remember Aristotle—what makes them philosophers is thatthey do not confine themselves to asking what the world is; they ask why it is what it is.And they do not refer to some superterrestrial power or person; they do not speak of thegod but of the divine; and to them it is the world that is divine They abstract andgeneralize, and they draw conclusions from a general thesis But although their subject iseverything in nature—from thunder and lightning to the primary substance of the world—they speak as philosophers and not as men of science It is reasonable for us to say that(natural) science consists in the formulations of theories based on experience, which may

be confirmed or disproved experimentally, while philosophy concerns itself with thatwhich transcends experience or that which is a precondition for experience, and therefore

a philosophical theory can only be tested as theory or argument But the distinction between philosophy and science did not exist to the Presocratics The word philosophia

itself, love of wisdom, is used as the common designation as late as Hellenistic times ThePresocratics, of course, proceed from immediate observation, but on that basis they areable to generalize with amazing daring, which is at once both their strength and theirweakness Their theories are speculative, and they would never have been able to verifythem by experiment, even if they had wanted to do so Their subject is nature and their mode

of thought philosophical, which means that reason is their sole criterion of truth Thisconfident belief that the real is rational and the rational real is in itself precisely asirrational as a mythological account of the world And in the sixth century nobody couldknow whither it might lead Of course it is possible to see the Presocratics as theforerunners of science, but that would at best be a one-sided interpretation Is it more

correct to use the cliché that the Presocratics took the step from mythos to logos, from

myth to reason?

The early thinkers reacted against mythology, not against religion, and the transition

from mythos to logos was not a sudden one It was perhaps never completed Far down in

history religious concepts remain a part of the philosophers’ ideas Many Presocraticsapparently considered themselves as the seers and prophets of a new era, and it has been

18 MYTH, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY

maintained that the earliest thinking should be considered primarily as a new form of institutionalized religion Nor should one believe that philosophical argumentation cameinto existence fully fledged with the first philosopher Deliberate philosophical

non-argumentation was only developed gradually, and the gnome —i.e the unproved general

maxim—is characteristic of Heraclitus as well as Solon The birth of philosophy does notcoincide with the birth of the argument, but it is possible to speak of philosophy whenever

a thought process calls for argumentation and might be presented as an argument, whichcould be contradicted

It has also been maintained that the first philosophers basically ask about the same as dothe poets and mythologists They asked what the world is and how and why it has becomewhat it is But neither poets nor philosophers thought—as the Jews—that the world hadbeen created from nothing Many of the philosophers’ answers are variations on veryancient religious themes When the first ‘philosopher’, Thales, maintains that everything

is derived from water, there are undoubtedly lines back to Hesiod, to Homer (Okeanos)

and to many of the old Mediterranean religions (cf., e.g the Enuma elish), and many of

these lines have been identified in recent years But the dispute about whether the firstphilosophers were champions of reason or shamans and prophets is to little purpose,unless one distinguishes between the questions asked by the Presocratics and the answersthey provided The real problem is whether Thales had a different frame of reference thanHesiod’s and whether he thought in a different way

If it is correct to maintain that the Greek philosophers of the sixth and fifth centurybegan to think in a novel way, this implies an important thing: that the early phase ofGreek thought is the only period in the history of Western culture during whichphilosophy was free of tradition and special terminology Many of the Presocratics’problems may seem remote and strange to us But they ask their questions about theworld directly, daringly, and immediately, and—as in no other period—we are able tofollow the evolution of philosophical language and its emancipation from religiouslanguage, the language of poetry, and everyday speech

MYTH, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY 19

20

2 IONIAN NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

The birthplace of philosophy, Miletus, was from the beginning of historical times a Greeksettlement on the south-western coast of Asia Minor (Ionia) In about 600 BC it was one

of the most flourishing trading cities of the Greek world, the mother city of a number ofcolonies and with trade relations with the Near East, the Black Sea, Egypt, and southernItaly It was a wealthy and cosmopolitan city, politically independent and unencumbered

by rigid traditions Nevertheless, the city was forced in the middle of the sixth century toacknowledge the formal sovereignty of first the Lydians and later the Persians But untilthe revolt against the Persians and the destruction of Miletus in 494 (the beginning of thePersian wars), the city occupied a privileged position Prosperity and politicalindependence do not, of course, automatically lead to cultural flowering, but it is clearthat liberty and the close connections with other cultural spheres were necessarypreconditions It is no accident that Miletus was also the home of the first historians andgeographers A typical ‘scholar’ from Miletus wrote in prose, which means that heimparted information or presented theories without obligation to religious authorities orliterary conventions He was practical and engaged in politics, but he was above all curious

—without an aim to gather riches and without visions of mastering nature with technicalmeans His curiosity was directed at the world around him—from the minutest to thelargest He was naturalistically inclined, and other religions were only of ethnographicinterest to him—expressions of the strange customs of other peoples What was mostremarkable about a philosopher from Miletus was that he sought causal explanations

In the two major cultural regions with which Miletus had relations, Egypt andBabylonia, no philosophy ever arose, even though they had evolved a fairly advancedpractical mathematics—in both cases due to the requirements of their societies Egyptianmathematics came about owing to the need for technical rules for surveying, accounting,stock taking, etc., and accordingly Egyptian mathematics had a clearly empirical

character A famous mathematical document, Papyrus Rhind (c.1600 BC), is apparently a

sort of instruction book with concrete problems and presupposed procedures forsolutions After the middle of the second millennium, it does not seem as if Egyptianmathematics developed much further In contrast to the Egyptian, somewhatcumbersome, additive decimal system, the Babylonian system was a sexagesimalpositional system, which probably helped to advance Babylonian mathematics to a higherlevel The Babylonians employed equations of the second degree as well as arithmeticaland geometrical progressions, and their use of fractions was more refined than the

Egyptians’ As early as about 1700 BC they made tables with sets of integers that can beassigned to the sides of a ‘Pythagorean triangle’ In astronomy the Babylonians reached fargreater achievements than the Egyptians They were familiar, for example, with theretrograde movements of the planets, and without knowing the cause they were able topredict solar eclipses But astronomy was not pursued for its own sake In their originastronomy and astrology are inseparable—the purpose in both cases being the prediction

of future events It was—for example, for the sake of the making of a calendar—important to be able to predict the time of the new moon; it was important to be able topredict eclipses; and it was natural to imagine that all events on earth were dependent onevents in the heavens At the same time, the celestial bodies were thought to be divine,and hence the development of astronomy was far from being a process of secularization

It applies generally to Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics that advanced methods andadvanced practical techniques were developed Nevertheless, if one cannot speak of ascience in a strict sense, this is owing to the lack of logical proof and to the lack ofgenerally formulated problems and generally formulated theorems The demands of a realmathematical science were in Greece, for example, formulated by Plato in the beginning

of the Theaetetus, in which he calls for a general theory of incommensurables instead of

proofs that this or that magnitude is incommensurable It is also to Plato that the conscious claim is attributed that everything the Greeks have taken over from foreigners has

self-been brought to greater perfection (Epin 987 D).

Thales—the first philosopher (from the beginning of the sixth century)—learned fromboth Egyptian mathematics and Babylonian astronomy It is said of him—as of so manyearly Presocratics—that he visited Egypt In the history of science he won great fame bypredicting a solar eclipse in 585 BC, which he was able to do thanks to Babyloniancalculations—and he was indeed only able to predict the likelihood of an eclipse within acertain period He could measure the height of a pyramid by comparing the shadow of thepyramid with that of man, and he was able to measure a ship’s distance from the coast,which means that he must have known that two triangles with one side and adjacentangles of equal size are congruent (cf KRS 79–80) He is also credited with knowledge ofother theorems, for example, that the diameter divides a circle in two halves of equal size,

or, that an angle in a semi-circle is right Supposing this information to be correct, it can

be maintained that Thales was interested in solving practical problems based ontheoretical mathematical knowledge But what were his theoretical intentions? It isremarkable that the theorems attributed to Thales are quite elementary; they areintuitively evident, and they had been known in the Orient for centuries In other words,

he did not discover anything new, nor was he able to formulate any real proof Perhapsthe most likely explanation of his contribution is that he consciously wanted to offergeneralized formulation of intuitively valid sentences If this is so, then his originalityconsists of not being satisfied with rules of thumb, and his interest in general ‘theorems’can then be considered parallel with an interest—which goes beyond mathematics—todiscover general causal connections For example, he explained the floods of the Nile byclaiming that the strong northerly winds force the river waters backwards—an evidentattempt to provide a causal explanation by means of hypothesis instead of a mythologicalone Admittedly Thales did not verify his hypothesis, and he was, alas, wrong—even

22 IONIAN NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

though he did think scientifically Another example is Thales’ claim that the magnet has asoul Probably this is not some animalistic reminiscence, for his argument is clearlyrational: by its own force the magnet can move, just like beings that have souls.

As will have been seen, the transmission allows us only glimpses, and we do not evenknow whether Thales wrote anything In Antiquity a number of good anecdotes about himwere current, but they merely show that nothing was known, which allowed all the morespace for the invention of tales about this wonderful sage who was counted among the

‘Seven Wise’: sometimes he was the absent-minded thinker who fell into a well because

he was watching the stars and sometimes the brilliant engineer who altered the course ofthe River Halys so that the Lydian army could reach safety Still, not knowing anythingabout the man is not the same as saying that the opinions ascribed to him are merefabrication Aristotle did not know all that much, but he knew enough to single outThales as the first philosopher, because he thought rationally

Thales’ principal philosophical thesis is that water is the source of everything Aristotle

carefully considered what this might mean In the first book of the Metaphysics (983 b 6 ff.)

he says that the earliest philosophers only supposed material principles as causes for

everything A principle (archō ) is, in their view, that of which everything consists, from

which it comes-into-being, and wherein it also perishes It is the substance that remainseven though the properties change The substance in itself is, in other words, eternal; in

an absolute sense there is nothing that comesinto-being or perishes This corresponds withour (Aristotle’s) maintaining that Socrates continues to be Socrates, even though hechanges properties There must accordingly be one or several basic elements, from whichother things come-into-being

Aristotle continues that it was Thales who founded such a philosophy Thalesmaintained that water was the principle of everything and therefore he thought that theearth rests on water Aristotle goes on to imagine some reasons for supposing water to bethe principle of everything, for example that food contains water, or that the semen ofliving beings is moist And, finally, he points out that the old ‘theologians’ also thoughteverything came-into-being from water

From this one can immediately conclude that Thales extended his interest in causalexplanations to include the question of the cause of the world as a whole and that hethought naturalistically, not mythologically It is likewise evident that Aristotle did nothave a text to rely on, that he is only able to guess at Thales’ reason for choosing water as

‘principle’, and that he distinguishes between Thales’ rational explanation and the

‘theologians” explanation, even though water in both cases figures as the progenitor of theworld It can also be seen that Aristotle uses his own terminology in his account The

word ‘principle’ (archō ) may be a special Aristotelian term, but it is a common Greek

word, which in a religious context means the begin ning or the progenitor of everything,and quite early on—perhaps even as early as with Anaximander—it was used as a specialphilosophical term Yet it is clear that Aristotle’s use of the causal concept isanachronistic Aristotle himself distinguishes between four ‘causes’ or ways of describing agiven subject (the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final causes—cf pp 285 and

319) His thesis in the first book of the Metaphysics is that the oldest thinkers only ‘knew’

the material cause—and this is clearly unhistorical, if only because the concept of matter

IONIAN NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 23

itself presupposes concepts about something non-material with which it can becontrasted.

Aristotle illustrates Thales’ main thought with an example, which, although unhistorical,

is still to the purpose The example is the Aristotelian thought about the substance—Socrates, for example—that remains even though its properties change According toAristotle’s understanding, this is also the case with Thales’ basic stuff, water Partly, this

is the stuff of which all things in the world are really composed, even though things aredifferent at first sight The basic stuff is a constant or invariable behind seeming changes.Partly, water is in a temporal sense that from which everything came-into-being at somepoint in primordial times and that in which it will perish at some future point

It is implicit in this that Thales did not distinguish between the question of what theworld is (ontology or cosmology) and how it arose (cosmogony) If one peels Aristotle’sspecial terminology away, he is probably in all essentials correct in his interpretation Itplaces Thales in the context of the religious tradition, and philosophically it connects him

to his alleged successors, Anaximander and Anaximenes

A detail can perhaps allow us a glimpse into Thales’ way of thinking Earth floats onwater—and so the basic stuff is on this very day ‘the carrier’ of our world But, as

Aristotle remarks elsewhere (De caelo 294 a 28), whereupon does water rest? To this

Thales might suitably reply that the basic stuff is distinguished from all other stuffs bybeing infinite, and that Aristotle’s problem accordingly is a pseudo-problem This wouldcorrespond with Hesiod’s being explicitly on guard against the question of what wasbefore ‘first’, and such a reply would be in agreement with Anaximander

Both as a mathematician and natural philosopher Thales was clearly in search of rationalstatements and general explanations However, it is not otherwise possible to distinguishthe connecting lines between Thales, the mathematician, and Thales, the naturalphilosopher It is not until Anaximander that we are confronted with a cosmology withmathematical focus As a natural philosopher, Thales continued ancient religious ideas,but within a new frame of reference He has no use for gods in a drama of creation, butthere is, none the less, a religious dimension to his world It is suggestive that he is said tohave stated that everything is filled with gods

According to tradition, Anaximander (who died c.545 BC) was a student of Thales, and

it is in any case clear that they belong to the same intellectual milieu Like Thales,Anaximander was an active man, a politician with practical concerns—for example, heintroduced the solar clock from the Orient in the shape of a vertical stick placed in theearth (a gnomon)

In Anaximander we meet the voracious interest of the time in everything worthknowing about things in heaven and on earth He is a metaphysician, geographer, naturalhistorian, astronomer, and meteorologist all at once and also interested in mathematics.But in the end, what is most important is that all these ‘subjects’ seem to be incorporated

in one comprehensive view, and also that we can trace the contours of a certain line ofthinking

Anaximander may well have been the first writer of Greek prose Later on his work

was given the standard title On Nature, and it was certainly available to Aristotle and his

students One sentence—the oldest in the history of Western philosophy—has survived

24 IONIAN NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

All interpretations of Anaximander rely on the reading of this sentence, which hasoccasioned almost endless scholarly scrutiny In its entirety, the sentence goes like this:

‘And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too,happens according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other fortheir injustice according to the assessment of time’ (Anaximan DK B1; trans G.S.Kirk)

1

This passage does not argue—it postulates something First a universal law is couched

as a gnome Then follows a description of the transition of things into each other It isclear from other information about Anaximander that his ‘existing things’ probably referprimarily to contrasts such as hot/cold, dry/moist—although he does not distinguish, forexample, between the property of heat and that which is hot The cosmic processes areconsidered a contest between contraries, and it has been pointed out that this positionlater led to the classical Greek doctrine of the four elements Anaximander considers thiscontest from a legal or moral point of view; a thing takes form, or a thing becomes, forexample, hot This means that the thing realizes one potentiality at the expense ofanother; in a manner of speaking, it takes something away from another thing Yet thecosmic order is just In due time, the thing will be punished, for it will cease to be, or it willcease to be hot One might then imagine that what is constant behind the apparentlychaotic changes in the world—which the philosopher looks for—precisely is the justcourse of the world, and hence that the constant is inherent in the process

But this is not an interpretation without problems, for Anaximander also imagined a

basic stuff, which he called to apeiron, the infinite or the boundless This is that from which the heavens and the world come-into-being; it is the principle (archō ) for everything; it is

eternal; it surrounds everything; and it governs everything Thus it partly has functionstraditionally accorded the gods, and partly it seems to fulfil the same purpose as Thales’water: it is that from which the world came-into-being and that which the world really is.Still, it is different from Thales’ basic stuff Water is a known stuff occurring in nature

But what about the infinite, to apeiron? Aristotle offers several explanations One of the arguments he advances (Aristot Phys 204 b 28) goes to show that the basic stuff cannot be

identical with a natural stuff, for as it is infinite it would in the course of time haveswallowed up all stuffs that are finite There is a more theoretical formulation (203 b 4ff.): any natural stuff whatsoever must be finite—i.e limited and changeable But thelimited and the changeable logically presuppose a principle or a basic stuff, which isunlimited and infinite A known stuff is finite in time and space, but it is also qualitativelylimited by being x and not not-x Thus it has both quantitatively and qualitatively a limit,

peras Linguistically, Anaximander hence characterized his basic stuff negatively as that which has no limitation, to apeiron Put in modern terms, this means that the basic stuff is

infinite in time and space and is not conceptually delimited The reasoning points to anabstract metaphysical conceptualization and thereby to a new, revolutionizingphilosophical way of thinking But it is conceptual thinking encapsulated in object-

1 It has been debated whether the first part of the passage renders the very words of Anaximander—

as is here supposed (still, cf p 25).

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