HoP 001 - Everything is Full of Gods - Thales

[Music] Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast. Online at www.historyofilosophy.net. Welcome to the first episode. Everything is full of gods. In which I'll introduce the podcast, and tell you about the first Greek philosopher, Thales. In this series of podcasts, I'll be telling the whole history of philosophy without any gaps. In time, I hope we'll cover pretty much every figure in ancient medieval and modern philosophy. Not only the greats, like parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Decat, and Kant, but also philosophers who may not be as famous, but who had their own part to play in the history of philosophy. Later on in this episode, I'll be turning to Thales of Miletus. He may not be a household name, but he was the very first ancient Greek philosopher. And in addition to being first, he had some rather attractive ideas, for instance, that magnets have souls. But, we philosophers like to define our terms before we begin, so that we start by explaining what I mean when I say telling the whole history of philosophy. Let's start with the word "whole". The episodes to come deal with philosophy in the classical Greek world, beginning with the pre-secratics, and then moving on, naturally enough to Socrates, then Plato and Aristotle. But, this series has a far wider scope than that. The ambition is really to tackle the whole history of philosophy. That includes not just philosophy in Europe, but also philosophy in the Islamic world, a subject dear to my own heart, since it is one of my main areas of research in my day job as a philosophy professor. All European philosophy reacts, however indirectly, to the philosophy of the Greeks, and that is true of philosophy in the Islamic world, too. But, there are cultures where philosophy has risen independently of any Hellenic heritage, notably India, China, and Africa, all of which I hope to cover in due course. To take account of those traditions, I'm releasing episodes on a separate feed, to find it, just search for the podcast series on the history of philosophy in India. Or, go to the podcast website where you'll find all the episodes in one place, along with suggestions for further reading, timelines with the dates of all the philosophers I discuss, and the opportunity to comment on the series. Again, the website is www.historyofilosophy.net And, by the way, if you would like to have a written version of the series, then you don't have to sit by your computer, typing away feverishly as you transcribe what I'm saying. Edited and updated versions of the scripts are appearing as a series of books, available from Oxford University Press, titled "A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps." That phrase "without any gaps" is the slogan of the podcast. It means "several things", starting with the attention I'll pay to philosophy beyond Europe. I will also be making a special effort to cover female philosophers who are often excluded from the history of philosophy. Another gap to be filled is the role of disciplines related to philosophy, but often ignored in university classes and books on the history of philosophy. For nearly all of that history, sciences like medicine and astronomy, and also developments in literature or the arts, related intimately to what philosophers were doing. In antiquity, there was no hard and fast distinction between the physical sciences and philosophy. So you'll find episodes in the series to come on topics like ancient mathematics and medicine, on astrology and alchemy, on optics and cosmology, and on poets like Rumi or Dante who drew on philosophical ideas and contributed ideas of their own. But, the phrase "without any gaps" means above all one last thing, that I will not be skipping from highlight to highlight the way a lot of university courses on history of philosophy have to do, where one jumps straight from, say, Aristotle to Descartes, leaving out a couple of thousand years in between. Rather, I want to tell a continuous story, so you can see how each thinker builds on those who came earlier, but also strikes out in new directions. That brings us to the word "history". Obviously, the history of philosophy isn't quite like other areas of history. This series isn't going to be mostly about events, when and why they happened, and which important people were involved. Nor is it the sort of history that paints a picture of another time, maybe by focusing on people who weren't so important, peasants instead of potentates. But, on the other hand, the historian of philosophy can't ignore these things. We're going to see that political, social, and religious forces had a lot to do with the way philosophy progressed, and even the fact that philosophy could happen at all. It's an obvious, but easily overlooked fact, philosophy only occurs in a society that can produce philosophers. Usually, this is meant that philosophy happens not too far away from wealth and power. It's naive to think that philosophy can happen without economic and political support, even if it's also cynical to think that philosophy is never anything more than an expression of political and economic power. And, of course, for the period we'll be studying, historical forces didn't only help to determine who the philosophers were and what they thought, they also determined whether and how their ideas reached us. For most of the time between the ancient Greeks and ourselves, it was extremely laborious and, therefore, expensive to transmit philosophical writings. They had to be copied by hand. We know about Greek and Latin ancient philosophy, only thanks to manuscripts written in the medieval period, a manuscript being, as the word literally says, a text that is handwritten. Many periods of philosophical activity were sparked by massive efforts to translate philosophical texts into a new language, as we'll be seeing. Philosophy in the Islamic world arose in large part because of the translation of Greek scientific texts into Arabic, and this all cost money. Just as much as at other times and places, this holds true of 6th century BC Greece, which is where our story begins. What was it that allowed philosophy to start there and then? Well, the first thing to realize is that Greek philosophy actually didn't start in Greece. It started in the territory called Ionia, on the western coast of present day Turkey. This is where you get to if you start in Greece and go around or across the Aegean sea towards the east, which is exactly what Greek-speaking peoples had done well before the 6th century BC. The ancient Greek historians tell us that in about 1100 BC, in response to an invasion of mainland Greece by a people they called the Dorians, many inhabitants of mainland Greece crossed over to Ionia. The very name Ionia comes from a legendary leader of the colonists, Ion. These migrants set up a number of colonies, some of which became extremely successful. One of the earliest colonies was Myletus, the city where philosophy would in due course be born. It was founded by a group who came from around Athens, the future home of Plato and Aristotle, and one of the few places in mainland Greece not to fall to the Dorians. At least that's what the ancient historians tell us, and the claim is supported by similarities between the Ionian dialect and the dialect they spoke near Athens, called Attic Greek, Attica being the area surrounding Athens. By the time of Thales and his successors, Myletus was a rich and successful city. Just like Australia in the 19th century, Myletus went from colony to independent economic power on the back of sheep. Their wool was exported across the Mediterranean. Myletus and other Ionian cities became wealthy enough to found colonies of their own, as far away as Italy, but also around the Black Sea, which was an area of strength for the Mylesians in particular. Myletus was fairly far south in Ionia, and their location and successes traders meant that someone living in Myletus could easily be exposed to ideas and people from further inland to the east and from Egypt. So it's always been tempting to say that Thales and the other Mylesian thinkers got some of their ideas from Eastern or Egyptian traditions. For instance, Thales was famous for having predicted a solar eclipse in 585 BC, and if he really did that, he may have been using Babylonian astronomical tables to pull off the trick. There's also some evidence that Thales went to Egypt in person. And by the way, in case you're worried that I've already left a gap by failing to discuss philosophy in ancient Egypt, you can stop worrying. The plan is to discuss this on future episodes devoted to philosophy in the cultures of Africa and the African diaspora. Myletus in any event was a good place to be in the early 6th century BC if you wanted to become the first ever philosopher. But even Myletus wasn't the sort of town where you could just relax and gaze at the stars trying to figure out when the next eclipse might be coming along. It would be a while before a Greek author would describe full-time contemplation as anything like an ideal or desirable life. And at this point, Aristotle makes particularly good reading for us philosophers. He explains that we are not contrary to appearances just leeching off society when we sit around reading books and having ideas. To the contrary, we are the highest achievers, the ones who realize human potential most fully. But a life of pure speculation was not Thales' style anyway, or so it would seem. He was no detached contemplator, more of an all-purpose wise man. In fact, he was named as one of the so-called Seven Sages of the early period of Greece. Another one of the seven whose name is still remembered nowadays is Solon, who set down many of the laws governing Athens. Thales' political engagement is best shown by a report that he urged a political union between all the Ionian cities so that they could resist their neighbors to the east, a policy which hadn't been adopted, might have enabled the cities to remain independent for longer than they did. In fact, only a few decades after the time of Thales, Miletus and other Ionian cities fell under the dominion of the Persians. More fun, and also showing a practical turn of mind, is the story about Thales and the Olive Presses. Supposedly, Thales' knowledge of weather conditions enabled him to predict a bumper crop of olives in the coming season. He went around and cornered the market on Olive Presses so that he could make a fortune when the predicted crop came in and everyone needed to turn their olives into oil. A less pragmatic Thales appears in a story told by Plato, which has Thales walking along looking at the sky and falling into a well because he isn't watching where he's going. Conveniently for the anecdote, there's a servant woman on hand to laugh at him, underscoring the point that philosophers don't notice the world at their feet because they're so busy looking at the sky. Since I myself have been known to smash my toe into a stone step while trying to go into a house and read a book at the same time, I have a lot of sympathy for the Thales who fell down a well. But the evidence we have suggests we should instead imagine Thales as a well-rounded fellow, engaged with the world around him, as well as with the nature of the world as a whole. What kind of evidence do we have about him then? Thales and the other earliest Greek thinkers are called the "pre-secratics", even though as we'll see, some of them actually lived at about the same time as Socrates. For all of these figures, our knowledge is really based on nothing more than tantalizing scraps. People who work in the field call these scraps "fragments", but even this makes the situation sound better than it usually is. What we've actually got is works by later ancient authors, or rather copies of copies of works by later ancient authors, who tell us something about, say, Thales or Heraclitus. Occasionally we're in luck, and they quote the early Greek thinkers verbatim, or even better, say they are going to quote them verbatim and then do so. Some of the pre-secratics wrote in poetic verse, which has meter, which of course makes it much easier to tell if it's a direct quote. But often, what we've got is a much later thinker telling us what an early thinker thought, and we have to decide for ourselves how close this might be to the original wording or idea. Technically, these paraphrase reports are called testimonies, rather than fragments, but it isn't always easy to tell the difference. Even if you are lucky enough to have an authentic fragment, it isn't necessarily obvious where the useful information starts and stops. One of our richest sources for the pre-secratics is Aristotle, and he has a tendency to mix reports of what they thought with educated guesses about what else they must have thought, and why they thought what they thought. Furthermore, he's almost always forcing the pre-secratics into the framework of his own theories, trying to make his predecessors look like they were groping toward the sublime insights of Aristotle himself. The problem is illustrated by that story about Thales falling into a well. It's a nice story, but maybe a little too nice. It sounds like an amusing anecdote that's been assigned to Thales because he's a famous philosopher, the way Whitty remarks get described to us for wild or Dorothy Parker, even though they didn't say them. In the case of Thales, the problem is particularly acute, and I should admit before we go any further that almost nothing can be said about him for sure, but we'll do the best with what we've got. Some of the things I've already mentioned give a flavor of one major dimension of his achievements. He was a scientist in something like the sense we would use the term. If we know anything about him for certain, is that he was interested in astronomy. The story about the olive presses also shows that Thales had expertise in what we would call the physical sciences, or at least had a reputation for having that expertise, and this is confirmed by other evidence. There's another story about him diverting a river into two branches so that it would be possible to cross it, because each of the two branches would be shallower than a single river. Clever, if not exactly proof that he was a deep thinker. Thales apparently didn't write whole treatises on what we would consider philosophical subjects. He may in fact have written nothing at all, though some sources tell us that he did write a book about navigation at sea. All of this is typical of early Greek philosophy, and in fact, a philosophy right up until the modern period. As I've already said, the tendency to separate philosophy from what we call science is a recent phenomenon, and certainly not one most Greek thinkers would have recognized. So whatever he may or may not have written, this is one reason to say Thales was the first philosopher. He was the first person to gain a reputation for the sort of independent analysis of nature we describe as scientific. Often Thales and the other Presacratics are described as being rational, a departure from the presumably irrational culture that went before them, but this is not a very useful way of looking at it. The main texts we have to illustrate Greek cultural beliefs before the time of Thales are the works of Homer and Hesiod. The Presacratics would have seen Homer's Iliad and Odyssey as the greatest touchdowns of Greek culture. In the ancient Greek world, they played the sort of role that the Bible did in medieval Europe, and that Shakespeare does for us, or used to when people knew their Shakespeare. Clearly, the Iliad and Odyssey aren't philosophical texts, but neither is Homer irrational. The Iliad is among other things a reflection on the sources and consequences of, as it says in the first line, the wrath of Achilles. Indeed, you could argue that Homer has a greater insight into cause and effect in the human sphere than most Presacratics have, into the cause and effect of the world around us. The fact that Homer often invokes the agency of a god or goddess to explain what is happening in the Trojan War or in Odysseus' long voyage home only counts as irrational, if you think that it's irrational to believe in the gods. Closer to the aim of Presacratic philosophy is Hesiod's Theogony, a poem setting out stories about the origins and natures of the gods, probably in part by collecting previous material. Some of this looks more or less explicitly cosmological, in a way that is not too distant from the kind of Presacratic theories we'll be talking about over the coming episodes. Hesiod even equates his gods and goddesses to his cosmological principles. To give just one example, the Greek word "udonos" means heaven, and is also the name of a god, and Hesiod. So again, it's hard to make a good case for Hesiod being irrational, he's laying out a theology and that theology is meant to be consistent and explain something, or even explain everything, as the whole universe is shown to be the production of fundamental divine forces. I think a better way of understanding what was distinctive about the Presacratics is that their views were at least implicitly grounded in arguments. This, to me, is the difference between early Greek philosophy and other early Greek cultural productions. We mostly have two little evidence about Thales to reconstruct the arguments that gave rise to his views, but Aristotle was probably right to try to reconstruct arguments of some sort or other. We can follow his example by turning finally to Thales' few attested philosophical claims. The best known is that he thought that water was really, really important. That's a little unclear, fortunately, in what way, exactly, he thought water was important. Aristotle tells us that Thales believed the world floats upon water, like a piece of wood. Here we seem to have a cosmological view that would be at home in a non-philosophical religious or theological tradition. The heaven, as even Homer says, is like a dome above us, and the world is a desk floating upon the sea under that dome. However, Aristotle tells us something else about Thales and water. He thought that water was a cosmic principle. Here, Thales may well have been anticipating arguments that would be made by his immediate successors. As we'll see in the coming episodes, various presacratic thought that the materials of the world were formed out of the condensation or rare affection of other ingredients. So perhaps Thales, observing the importance of water for life and plants, animals, and humans, or the earthy residue left after water evaporates into air, decided that in the first instance, everything comes from water. Now, probably you're not thinking, "My God, he's right! Everything does come from water." But if Thales got to his water principle in this kind of way, then at least it would show him giving a novel explanation of the cosmos and using a process of argument to get to that explanation. Whether as Aristotle implies, Thales also thought everything is literally made of water, seems more doubtful. To think this, he would have to have believed that even something like rock, which seems eminently dry and solid, in fact, consisted of water. And there's no reason to believe he thought that, even if an explanation like this would be given not much later by another philosopher from the same city, Annexemones. Another philosophical claim ascribed to Thales is that a magnet has a soul, and so does amber. Because when you rub amber, it attracts things just as a magnet does. this is in fact due to static electricity. What sense can we make of this? Well, Aristotle tells us about Thales and the magnet in the process of asserting that all philosophers associate soul with motion. Aristotle may be right to say that Thales was already onto this point. There must be soul in a magnet, otherwise it could not initiate the motion that pulls it and a piece of iron towards one another. Aristotle tells us also that according to Thales, all things are full of gods. This is a classic bit of pre-sacratic philosophy, philosophy in the form of a catchphrase. As we'll see, Heraclitus is the master at this style of philosophy. But let's take seriously the claim that all things are full of gods by putting it together with the other idea about magnets. What you get is a nice little argument which would go something like this. Everything is full of gods, and Thales will show you this using the example of the magnet. It seems to be lifeless, but it must have soul because it can initiate motion. So by extension, you should at least be open to the idea that everything has soul, which is divine. That's obviously doing a lot of Thales' work for him by combining two fragments and filling in the gaps. But that, as I hope you'll come to agree over the coming episodes, is what makes the pre-sacratic so much fun. We'll go on next time to discuss Thales' successors in myletus, though wonderfully named an "acsemander" and an "acsemonies". Then in the third episode, we'll have another chance to think about the rival claims of philosophy and Greek religion when we get to the provocative ideas of Xenophonies. So, if you like philosophers that have X's in their names, then you'll love the next two episodes of The History of Philosophy without any gaps. [Music]