Who was Thales?

He was born, probably around 624-625 BCE., in Miletus which.still exists, but is now called Milet and is miles inland), on the west coast of what is now Turkey, which was known as Ionia. While at least one web site, dedicated to the heritage of Phoenicia, claims that Thales’ parents, Examyes and Cleobuline, were Phoenicians, almost all scholars believe they were native to Miletus. Although he is said to have traveled widely, including to Babylon and to Egypt, he died in Miletus around 547 BCE

During the 6th century there were seven individuals revered throughout all Greek culture (remember that this ranged from Asia Minor to Italy, Sicily, and Northern Africa) as “The Seven Sages”. And while there are variations of the list of these seven in ancient sources, Thales is listed in all of them. He was an astute politician, astronomer, mathematician, and “naturalist”. In fact, there are more web pages on Thales as a mathematician than there are for him as a philosopher. In addition, he is said to have written only two books, both on astonomy, and there are (at least) as many web cites citing his contributions to astonomy as there are for his contribution to philosophy. In addition, many history of physics courses taught in Universities start with discussing Thales.

While there are doubts about the reliability of (later) ancient testimonies about events in Thales’ life, both Xenophanes of Colophon (570 – 480 BCE ), who was born while Thales was still alive and Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 535–475 BCE) mention Thales’ works on astronomy.The ancient testimonies about Thales all cite the fact that he had predicted that a solar eclipse would occur. Atonomers today calculate that such an eclipse did occur and would have been visible in that area, on 8 May 585 BCE.

(To give a point of comparison, the Babylonian army destroyed the Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and took the upper classes of the Kingdom of Judah as hostages in 386 , just the year before. And remember that the creation story in Genesis, Chapter One was (most probably) written during the Babylonian Captivity, and hence had not been written at this time.)

What Did Thales Say?

Of the fragments and testimonies about Thales, from the works of Aristotle and his successor Theophrastus, there are four that are relevant to our interests.

1. Water is the archê of all.

2. All things are full of gods.

3. Magnets have souls.

4. The earth rests on water and the movement of that water explains earthquakes.

(Also of interest is that Thales hypothesized that the earth was a sphere.)

Now why are 1-4 of interest?

First #4. Even today, Turkey is an area in which frequent, sometimes devestating, earthquakes occur. Obviously the Ionians were interested, in fact concerned, about earthquakes and their causes. Usually, the explanations cited the activity of some god or other, be it Poseidon, Hades, or some other deity. Thales’ explanation is an attempts to give a naturalistic explanation for a disruptive event in nature, without any reference to gods. This is why Aristotle distinguishes the first philosophers from those he calls “myth makers”, and calls them “those who inquire into nature”, or “physicists”.

Now, #2. There are several things to understand about this statement. First, it is ambiguous. It could mean “Water is the source of all”. On this reading, everything that exists was, in some way, generated from water; water is the cause of all. (Reread Genesis 1:1-10). And while both of his successors, Anaximander and Anaximenes did develop cosmogonies, theories of the origins of the world, it is not clear that Thales is implying a creation story.

A second way of understanding this saying, the way Aristotle understood it, was that water is the underlying stuff, substance, matter (however you want to put it) of everything; water is the stuff of all. The difference between these two readings is that, on the first, water may have originally generated all things, but the things generated need not be “forms”, or permutations, of water. On the second reading, all things at their base are, in fact, water.

Why would Thales assert #3: “All things are filled with gods”? First, water did not have a beginning; it is uncreated and eternal. Second, whether water generated something that was not water, e.g., earth, air, and fire, or each of these other elements are, in fact, water in different form, water is the cause of all things. But water’s creative activity was not a function of something “other than” water, operating on it (e.g., again, Genesis 1:1-10); rather water contains the power to change or create within itself. In other words, water is alive! So, here we have a living, uncreated, eternal force that is the source of all things—it is divine!. And since this divine power and “stuff” is within all things, “all things are filled with gods.”

What about #3, magnets (and amber) having souls? Remember that for the Greeks (and, perhaps, for us as well), when something changes either that change was caused by something outside of the thing that changed or the thing changed itself. That which changes itself is alive, and the internal force responsible for such changes was named psuchê, soul. In addition souls can cause other things to change. Magnets cause iron filings to move, hence magnets contain a motivating force. Hence they are alive, have psuchê.

Why Is Thales Important? Reviewing features of Mytho-poetic consciousness
Mytho-poetic consciousness was very practically oriented. It was concerned with those things that happened in nature that affected the practical concerns of the culture. Mytho-poetic consciousness was not concerned with changes in nature upon which it could rely; it only wanted explanations when things did not go they way they had come to expect them to go.In asking “Why”, the question was usually “Why did this happen here and now?” and the answers that satisfied this way of looking at the world was given in terms of “Who caused it to happen?”

1. Although Thales did address the question about why earthquakes happen, he was more concerned the nature of change in general: why does any change occur? He is the first to raise what later became known as the “Problem of Change”, which became one major philosophical problem in the history of Western Metaphysics.

2. While for mytho-poetic consciousness, the answer to the question “Why did this happen?” was given in terms of “Who caused it to happen?”, not”, and the “Who?” was a god. Thales changed the question. For him, the question should be “What caused it to happen?” And answers to this kind of question were to be explained without reference to the activities of the gods. For him, answers “Why?” questions are transformed into “How?” questions. With Thales, the Western mind begins searching for the laws of nature. It is for this reason Thales is also considered to be the “father of physics”.

3. Monism. Thales’ claim that the archê of all things is water has several presuppositions.
3a. The first presupposition is monism. That there is only one source or foundation to reality. Ultimastely, then, “reality is one”.
3b. Changes that occur in nature are not the result of some force outside of nature operating on it, as in Genesis 1, but come from within nature itself. Thus, if we want to understand change, we need to understand the nature of water itself.
3c. Inplicit in 4b are two questions that Thales, as far as we know, did not address, but his successors did: (1) why does the archê transform itself into the various things that make up the world and (2) what is the process by which the archê does generate these things.

4. In addition to introducing to the Western Mind “the Problem of Change”, there are two addition philosophical problems that Thales introduced, problems that also dominate Western Philosophy tor over 2500 years.
4a. The Problem of “the One and the Many”. Nature is fundamentally “One”, Thales taught. But how then are we to understand the relation between this “One” and the many different things that exist in nature.
4b. The Problem of “Appearance and Reality”. While this problem will soon become separate from the problem of “The One and the Many”, for Thales it is the same problem, and it has two components.
4bi. If Reality is One, why does it appear to have so many different things in it?
4bii. If Reality, for all appearances consist of many different things, how do we come to know that reality is One? It would seem that perception, which gives to us the “Many” that are just “Appearances” is not a reliable source of knowledge. It is reason that shows us the One underlying the Appearances. Thales is the first Rationalist.

What Thales Was Not

1. Thales was not a materialist, although he, and his successors are sometimes said to be so. There are two reasons for asserting this.
1a. For Thales, the “stuff” out of which, or of which, all things are composed, is alive; it has psuchê. For this reason, some historias, since the 18th century, calls Thales’ metaphysics hylozoism (’hule’, or ‘hyle is Greek for “matter” or “stuff”; ’zoon’ = “life”) But the life force of this the archê is not something separate or separable from it, but is (part of) its nature. Thus, Thales does not view “soul” (psuchê.) as something non-material; he is not a dualist either.

1b. Another reason for saying that Thales was neither a materialist nor a dualist is that neither the concept of inanimate matter not the concept of a non-material soul did not exist in his culture yet. If was not until the philosophy of Democritus, a hundred years later, that the idea of inert, non-living matter was articulate, and it was not until even later that Plato introduced to Western thought the idea that the soul was not material, but was separate, separable, and immaterial.

2. Thales was not an atheist. While he thought that explanations of natural phenomea could be given without any reference to the gods, and he may well have not believed that there were such beings as gods (althought we do not know that the latter is true), he did believe that the one, living, archê was divine.

Afterword

One final word about the conceptual innovations Thales introduced to Western thought. Notice that he was not able to break completely from mytho-poetic consciousness” ”all things are filled with gods” and “magnet and amber have souls” sound very much like something a “myth-maker” would say. Thales struggled with breaking from mytho-poetic consciousness, but did not have the vocabulary that would enable him to makje a complete break. In the thought of his successors, we will follow the struggle to develop such a vocabulary.