By: A.C. Grayling
Thales was traditionally regarded as one of the Seven Sages of Greece. His floruit of 585 BCE suggested to later commentators that he was born in 625 BCE, on the assumption that men reach the midpoint of their lives about the age of forty. His birthplace of Miletus on the eastern shores of the Aegean was a wealthy and flourishing city. He was an astronomer, a mathematician and – despite a reputation for unworldly philosophizing – an engineer of note.
The imputation of unworldliness comes from a story recounted by Plato in the Theaetetus, that Thales fell into a well because he was gazing up at the stars so intently that he did not look where he was going. It is reinforced by a story Aristotle tells in his Politics that Thales’ neglect of worldly ambition meant that he was poor, and was reproached for being so by his contemporaries.
The story of the well might have its roots in the fact that if you descend to the bottom of a well you can see the stars even in daylight. The possibility that Thales was doing just that is suggested by other evidence of his practicality. When he was criticized for his poverty he said nothing, but studied the weather carefully until, one year, he was able to predict that there would be a glut of olives. Before this became obvious to anyone else he rented all the olive presses in Miletus, and rented them back at a premium to their anxious owners when the latter came begging for them. Aristotle says, ‘In this way he proved that philosophers can easily be wealthy if they wish, but that is not what they are interested in.’
A clincher regarding Thales’ practicality is the story that he was hired by the ruler of neighbouring Lydia, King Croesus, to find a way for his army to cross the River Halys without building a bridge. He did it by having the army camp on the bank, then digging a ditch round it and diverting part of the river’s flow to make it pass on both sides of the camp, so shallowly that it could easily be forded in either direction.
These credentials help us to evaluate the views Thales held and his reasons for holding them. Obviously he had a serious mind, and there was a good reason why his successors in the tale of philosophy regarded him as the first of their name.
Recall that one of the chief interests of the Presocratics was the question of the nature and source of the world (in the sense of ‘universe’: the term they used was kosmos): hence the label given to them of phusikoi, ‘physicists’. Their distinctive mark is their rejection of traditional mythological accounts of the cosmos. One such account is offered by Hesiod in his Theogony, written about 700 BCE, a work of great and even powerful poetic charm, but scarcely satisfying to an intelligent and genuinely interested enquirer into the nature of the world. Hesiod tells us that ‘First of all Chaos came into being … From Chaos were born Erebos and black Night; From Night, again, were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bore after mingling with Erebos …’
In desiring a more intellectually compelling account, Thales sought to identify the cosmos’s arche, a word which can be translated as ‘principle’ and which in the context denotes what the cosmos consists of, or from which it comes into existence, or both. As Aristotle put it in talking of the Presocratics and indeed of Thales specifically, the arche is ‘that of which all existing things are composed and that from which they originally come to be and that into which they finally perish … this they state is the element and principle of the things that are …’ Thales’ candidate for this principle was: water.
Why did Thales nominate water? One might reconstruct his thinking as follows. Water is ubiquitous – it is in the sea, it falls from the sky, it runs in your veins, if you cut a plant you see that it has liquid inside, if you rub a clod of earth in your hands it is damp, we and all animals and plants die without it and therefore it is essential for life. Moreover water could be said to produce the earth itself, for you need only look at the vast quantities of soil produced by the Nile as it floods every year (a reference to the silt thus washed down). And moreover again, as a kind of clincher, water is the only substance Thales knew that can occupy all three material states: solid (when it freezes), liquid (in its basic state) and gas (when it boils away into steam). You might indeed say that water – ubiquitous, essential, productive, metamorphic – is a rather brilliant choice of arche, if you lived in sixth century BCE Ionia.
But it is not so much what Thales chose to identify as the arche as how and why he did so. He did not rely on legends, myths, ancient scriptures, teachings or traditions. He relied instead on observation and reason. That is why he is the first philosopher. The contrast with accounts of the cosmos of the kind given by Hesiod is sharp. Hesiod himself no doubt regarded his account as figurative or symbolic, but there is a large difference between being content with figurative accounts and trying to offer a theory that can be supported by observation and reason.
Aristotle also tells us that he interpreted Thales as having held that ‘soul’ (anima) is what causes motion, for he is reported to have said that a magnet has a soul because it moves iron; and further, that ‘soul is mixed in with the whole universe, and perhaps this is why Thales supposed that all things are full of gods.’ Here one must recall that at the very beginning of philosophy, which is also the very beginning of science, the conceptual resources for explaining motion and change were few. The one thing available for an explanation of how things can move or change was an analogy with one’s own human experience of agency: I pick up a stone and throw it into a pool, making a splash; I made this sequence of events happen; so by analogy there must be some similar active principle that accounts for motion and change in the world. Indeed we speak of something animating something else, harking back to the idea that things other than animals (this word itself betokening ‘animated things’) have a power of agency, can move, change or act on other things. What Thales was therefore groping for was an account that would allow a generalization from such phenomena as my experience of agency and the magnet’s power to move iron, to an inclusive explanation for alterations of place and state. How else, without a vocabulary yet sufficient for the purpose, to talk of this than to say a magnet has a ‘soul’, thereby meaning an animating principle, a power of causation or of interaction with other things?
Thales is credited with the injunction ‘Know thyself.’ He is said to have died when old ‘of heat and thirst’ while watching a gymnastic contest on a hot day – in short, from dehydration. For one who held that water is the arche of the cosmos, this is an ironic end. Diogenes Laertius records a different account of his death, quoting a letter said to have been written by Anaximenes (whom we meet shortly) to Pythagoras. Here the story is that Thales went out one night with his serving woman to look at the stars, ‘and, forgetting where he was, stepped over the edge of a steep slope and fell’. Anaximenes then adds, in testament to Thales’ position at the fountainhead of philosophy, ‘Let us, who were his students, remember the man, and … continue to regale one another with his words. Let all our discussions begin with Thales.’
This piece is taken from History of Philosophy, Book by A.C. Grayling
