Ancient Philosophy - Lecture 5 (Part One)
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
Lecture 5
The Pre-Socratics and the Birth of Philosophy
The Western philosophical tradition has its origins in Greek philosophical thought, and Greek philosophy itself is generally viewed as beginning in the sixth century BC with the intellectual activities of the first members of a loose group of thinkers known as the pre-Socratic philosophers. In looking at the activities of these thinkers, we are therefore looking at one of the moments in human history where the distinctive way of thought that goes by the name of ‘philosophy’ today begins to emerge from other ways of understanding and investigating the world. And given that philosophy has evolved since that time into an extremely puzzling and controversial intellectual phenomenon, we might hope that an examination of the processes that shape it in the early stages of its development would shed some light on its present-day problems and prospects.
We can appropriately begin with a brief resume of the standard account of the history of the pre-Socratic tradition. There are some serious grounds for being highly suspicious of the nicely packaged way in which this story unfolds, but it will suffice for now as a historical framework that we can use to impose some preliminary order on a remote and unfamiliar group of thinkers.
At the beginning stands Thales of Miletus, a Greek city on the coast of Asia Minor. He is notorious for putting forward the hypothesis that all the things in the universe or cosmos derive from water in some way. Initially this seems an utterly baffling supposition and one that has very little to do with any intellectually respectable mode of thought. However it seems possible to understand it as an attempt to discern some unifying explanation of the diverse range of phenomena we observe around us. Just as Descartes attempts to explain a host of seemingly disparate macrophysical phenomena by appealing to nothing more than portions of colourless and textureless matter pushing against each other, so too Thales is suggesting that the surface complexity of the world we see around us is best explained and understood in terms of the pervasive influence of a fluid element that manifests itself most saliently in our experience as ordinary water. Furthermore Thales does not appear to have put forward this hypothesis on the basis of some alleged mystical insight or divine revelation: instead the doxographical tradition represents him as basing it on observations about the role of moisture in sustaining life and an intermediate conclusion about the role of water in supporting the Earth.
It might be thought, however, that Thales is best regarded as an early scientist rather than an exponent of what we would regard as philosophy. What is it, then, that has led to his being bracketed in most history books as a philosopher rather than a scientist? Possibly the answer lies in the combination of the weaknesses of the observable evidence for his speculations about the primary role of water and the way in which his theory seems to lack any practical applications or even clear-cut testable implications. Thus there already seems to be something less than reassuring about the nature of early ‘philosophical’ thought: if Thales’ performance is anything to go by, it bears a disconcerting resemblance to bad science or, to put things more charitably, wildly over-ambitious science.
According to the standard story, Thales’ hypothesis then led to other thinkers putting forward rival accounts of the primary and most fundamental substance in the universe. Anaximander of Miletus, for example, invokes an indeterminate and infinite substance that contains within it all possible qualities, while his supposed pupil Anaximenes returns to a more straightforward physical substance – air - while retaining the idea that this underlying substance has no definite boundaries or limits. And later still Heraclitus, the man behind the aphorism about it being impossible for the same man to step into the same river twice, is supposed to have maintained that fire was the fundamental element in the universe. Each of these thinkers is thus presented as wanting to explain, in as plausible a way as possible, how that the world known to them and their contemporaries could have come into existence from a simpler, more homogenous starting point.
We then supposedly come to an intellectual crisis in this explanatory project precipitated at the beginning of the fifth century BB by Parmenides of Elea (a Greek city in southern Italy). Instead of constructing another explanatory hypothesis to challenge those of his (alleged) predecessors, Parmenides argues instead that all such hypotheses must be false because they require real changes to occur. According to Parmenides, we cannot speak of, think of, or know what is not the case; but any viable cosmology requires the existence of change and change in turn involves something becoming what it previously was not. So as it is impossible for us to speak of or think of what is not the case, we cannot speak of or think of change, and hence we cannot regard any cosmology as describing how things really stand.
The core line of thought behind Parmenides’ position seems to run roughly as follows:
1. We cannot think and think nothing (since thinking nothing is not thinking at all).
2. But what is not (the case) is nothing.
3. Hence we cannot think what is not
4. Knowing that p is the case and meaningfully talking about its being the case that p requires us to be thinking about p.
5. Therefore we can neither think of, speak of, or know what is not (the case).
An immediate problem with this argument is that it seems to trade on a conflation between an act of thought that purportedly has no internal object and an act of thought that has an internal/intentional object that lacks external reality. The supposition that there could be a thought that is not a thought about something in the former sense may well be incoherent, but that does nothing whatsoever to show that it is incoherent to suppose that a thought might be a thought about something that happens not to exist. However we need not concern ourselves with providing an exact diagnosis of where Parmenides is going astray. What is significant here is that Parmenides is drawing strong conclusions about how things really stand via a method that makes no appeal whatsoever to sensory experience. Whereas the earlier pre-Socratic thinkers can be seen as holding that their hypotheses about the fundamental nature of reality derive rational support from their ability to explain in an economical and plausible manner the nature of the sensory experiences actually vouchsafed to us, Parmenides pays no attention to what appears to us via the senses and builds his account of what really exists on pure a priori reasoning alone.
So far we have been concentrating on how Parmenides’ argument that we cannot intelligibly think of what is not (the case) leads to the conclusion that we are unable to conceive of how real change can occur. Parmenides, however, is not content, with this remarkably implausible conclusion. He is also happy to argue that nothing can have qualities that another thing lacks, as this would require us to say that this is not like that. So not only can there be no change, nothing can differ in any respect whatsoever from anything else. Reality, it seems, consists of just one undifferentiated unity that does nothing other than exist.
What, then, is the mechanism that persuades Parmenides to adopt this remarkable conclusion? The conclusion itself has no experiential support: indeed it seems to go flatly against what our senses seem to tell us about the world around us. However Parmenides is happy to disregard the testimony of the senses. Instead he puts all his trust in a formally valid deductive argument with premises that have the property of striking us, under some initial interpretation, as necessarily true. This off-handed disregard for sensory experience certainly seems to mark off Parmenides’ approach from science. This is so different from a scientific inquiry that we cannot view it as bad science: it isn’t any kind of science. So if the a priori approach espoused by Parmenides does yield true, justified beliefs about the nature of reality, then we have here a method of inquiry that can be seen as both fruitful and distinctively philosophical.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to repose our confidence in this alleged investigative method. Parmenides’ own argument seems to be vitiated by ambiguity. The sense that needs to be ascribed to the terms used in the premises if those premises are to be necessarily true is not the sense that they need to be ascribed at other stages in his argument if the relationship between premises and conclusion is genuinely to be one of logical entailment. And the quest of other philosophers to devise alternative a priori arguments that do support substantial and informative conclusions about matters of fact has been conspicuously unrewarding. If any such arguments have been constructed that do not relate to matters of quantity and shape, their conclusions do not seem particularly exciting or informative. Indeed many philosophers would be prepared to deny that any purely a priori argument can reveal anything other than the conventions that underpin human linguistic practices. Moreover Parmenides’ own confidence in his particular argument seems wholly irresponsible. Given the overwhelming clash between the conclusion reached by his argument and the way the world appears to be when we use our senses to investigate it, it surely seems that the most appropriate way to respond to his dialectical manoeuvrings would be to infer that one of its premises is false or that the argument contains some inferential fallacy or hidden ambiguity. After all, the discovery of hitherto unsuspected ambiguities in the way terms are being used in particular inferences is scarcely an unknown aspect of our intellectual activities. Parmenides, however, seems absurdly over-confident in the quality of his reasoning. It may purport to transform our understanding of the nature of reality in the space of a few short lines of prose, but Parmenides displays no reservations about its cogency. He may be unable to provide any plausible explanation whatsoever of how an unchanging, undifferentiated unity could be interpreted by us as the variegated and rapidly changing world that we seem to live in when we judge by sensory appearances. This doesn’t worry him in the slightest. He may be relying on a method of establishing the truth that clearly can and often does lead people astray: nevertheless he shows no awareness that he might be at risk of going similarly astray.
Perhaps, then, we have in Parmenides a thinker whose activities provide us with an early paradigm of a distinctively philosophical mode of inquiry. The sanguine lack of regard for how things appear to be, the contemptuous rejection of common opinion, and the reliance on a priori reasoning of a formally valid kind marks Parmenides out as a new kind of reasoner. Unfortunately it might also mark him out as someone who is conducting his investigations in a way that is wholly unsuited to their purported aim of arriving at rationally defensible truths. And insofar as philosophy is tied to a Parmenidean mode of inquiry, it might be thought that it is a form of intellectual activity best avoided rather than encouraged.
What kind of response, however, did Parmenides’ views elicit from his contemporaries? According to the traditional story they were initially thrown into confusion by the power of Parmenides’ arguments. However many of them regrouped and began to devise theories of the nature of the universe that accepted aspects of Parmenides’ conclusions but nevertheless allowed for some differentiation between the various components of the cosmos. These thinkers are generally referred to today as pluralists, and we can possibly summarise their views as attempts to concede to Parmenides that real and fundamental change in the cosmos cannot take place while denying that he is right to hold that just one undifferentiated thing exists. Basically, we have here views that suppose that the universe has always contained a mixture of things and always will contain those things. So nothing radically new ever comes into existence, and the fundamental components of things never go out of existence. All that happens is that these fundamental components temporarily assume one pattern and then assume some different pattern. Thus we arrive at the view associated with Empedocles that the universe consists of four basic and eternal elements – water, earth, air and fire, and the theory advanced by Democritus and Leucippus that the fundamental components of the universe are small indestructible and indivisible particles of matter (atoms) that are far too small for us to see.
The last story certainly seems to have been quite a fruitful one in comparison with the other cosmologies that we have been considering. However it still seems to have been part of a fundamentally misguided response to Parmenides. Too much weight is still being given to a set of arguments that need to be exposed as rooted in a failure to articulate correctly the conventions governing a particular pattern of discourse. Given a choice between supposing that Parmenides’ arguments inadvertently expose a seductive misunderstanding of our concepts and ways of talking about the world and supposing that they expose profound hidden truths about how the non-human world is really organized, the sensible default hypothesis would appear to be the former. Trying to accommodate substantial aspects of Parmenides’ conclusions in one’s own physical theories seems a far less appropriate kind of response.
So far then we seem to have been telling a rather pessimistic story about the nature of philosophy. A thinker like Thales doesn’t seem to suffer from the extreme methodological problems evinced by Parmenides. Unfortunately Thales looks instead like a rash scientist rushing to conclusions on the basis of insufficient evidence. Parmenides, in contrast, seems to be operating with a mode of inquiry that is distinctively non-scientific yet purports to offer reasons rather than mere mythologizing or appeals to authority. But if we embrace him as illustrative of what philosophy really amounts to, this seems tantamount to a confession that philosophy is not an intellectually respectable endeavour.
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