‘When a Schoolman tells me Aristotle hath said it, all I conceive he means by it, is to dispose me to embrace his opinion with the deference and submission which custom has annexed to that name. And this effect may be so instantly produced in the minds of those who are accustomed to resign their judgement to the authority of that philosopher, as it is impossible any idea either of his person, writings or reputation should go before. So close and immediate a connexion may custom establish, betwixt the very word Aristotle and the motions of assent and reverence in the minds of some men.’
Chapter 6
When did it all begin? (and what is it anyway?)
Many people have turned expectantly to the beginnings of Greek philosophy, only to find that the first philosopher they meet, Thales in the sixth century BC, held, apparently, that ‘everything is water’. Anyone teaching ancient philosophy has to cope with the bafflement that this discovery tends to produce. It is an odd beginning to a philosophical tradition. Yet something happens in the sixth century, later to acquire the name philosophia or love of wisdom, which we can recognize as philosophical. What exactly is it?
It is in keeping with what we have seen of the varied and disputatious nature of ancient philosophy that this question is quite hard to answer. There is little that non-trivially unites philosophers from Thales to the end of antiquity. There is a tradition, but a mixed and contested one.
In view of the great cultural prestige of Greek philosophy, it has at times been resented, and sometimes groups that have felt themselves culturally marginalized by it have claimed that Greek philosophy is nothing new at all, but just a tradition taken over without acknowledgement – usually, it is claimed, from the group in question. The early Church fathers held that the pagan philosophers stole their ideas from the Jewish scriptures. Afrocentric writers in the twentieth century have made the same claim for Egyptian mystery religion. These claims, however, are historically non-starters.
Differing views on the Greeks’ originality
‘What provokes admiration is the mental vigour and independence with which these people sought after coherent systems and did not shrink from following their lines of thought to astonishing conclusions. It may well be that contact with oriental cosmology and theology helped to liberate their imagination; it certainly gave them many suggestive ideas. But they taught themselves to reason. Philosophy as we understand it is a Greek idea.’
‘What is Plato but Moses writing in Greek?’
‘We should not be surprised to say that the Greeks are capable of filching the beliefs of the Jews, given that they have not only plundered their other sciences from the Egyptians and Chaldaeans and other foreign nations, but even now can be caught robbing one another of their literary reputations . . .
It is reasonable to think that the Greeks, who contributed nothing of their own in wisdom (only verbal facility and fluency) and filched everything from foreigners, should also have been aware of the sayings of the Jews and laid hands on these in turn . . . Not just my words but their own establish them as thieves . . .
The Greeks themselves did not think that philosophy was original with them; they thought of it as coming from a variety of sources outside Greece, usually Eastern. But then, they did not value originality as such very highly, and they certainly did think that philosophy was something that they did distinctively and well. And indeed, when we read the fragments even of an author as elusive as Thales we can see an interesting and distinctive way of thinking emerging.
What makes it philosophical? Usually this is characterized as explicit appeal to reason and argument. Stated as generally as this, the claim is undoubtedly true. Philosophers are distinguished by arguing for their conclusions and against other philosophers’ conclusions, and by demanding reasons for others’ claims and giving reasons for their own. But while this may mark philosophy off from poetry and the like, it does not give us a very determinate way of proceeding, or of marking philosophy off from other intellectual endeavours. There are many kinds of reason and argument – which is to count? When we look at the different kinds of project that the Presocratics produced, we are hard put to find a single kind of reasoning at work, or a demand for a single kind of argument.
The first Presocratics, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes – from Miletus in Asia Minor – were concerned to provide cosmologies, reasoned accounts of the world we live in. As Aristotle acutely saw, they focused on what he called the material cause – the question of what our world is composed of. This is the question to which we find answers in terms of water, air and ‘the boundless’. These answers show a very striking degree of simplicity and economy, and bring with them explanations of a wide variety of puzzling physical phenomena. Because of this, these philosophers have at times been seen as precursors of science, with its explanatory hypotheses. It is clear, however, that there is little in these very speculative theories that can be usefully compared with any precise concept of scientific enquiry. A just account has to see these Presocratic figures as transitional, with an intellectual impulse to render our world explicable which has much in common with later philosophy and science.
7. A late representation of Anaximander with a sundial he is credited with inventing
Other Presocratics are anything but scientific. Heraclitus of Ephesus writes in aphorisms of notorious obscurity, uniting an account of the world as fire with concern for the individual’s self-knowledge. His account of both appeals to reason (logos), both your individual reason and the big Reason in the universe that your reason should try to conform to; yet there is little reason or argument to convince us of this. Xenophanes of Colophon uses reason and argument to undermine naive beliefs about the gods. In him we see clearly for the first time reason being used to fault and replace ordinary beliefs by something the philosopher argues to be more rationally adequate. Anthropomorphic views of God are shown to be defective in a convincing way: every people, Xenophanes says, makes gods in their own image (and so would animals, if they could). But his allegedly more rationally adequate conception of God is so peculiar – God seems to be a kind of sphere – that the issue is bound to arise of what the authority is of the reasoning that overthrows our beliefs and gets us to this point.
A new way of thinking?
‘My aim has been to show that a new thing came into the world with the early Ionian teachers – the thing we call science . . . It is quite wrong to look for the origins of Ionian science in mythological ideas of any kind . . . It is to these men we owe the conception of an exact science which should ultimately take in the whole world as its object.’