The Presocratic Philosophers c.600–450 BCE. (My History of Philosophy Part 2)

2nd in my series, which follows my journey through a History of Philosophy and puts my particular spin on what I have learned over the last 2 weeks.

Transcript

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Hello everyone, welcome to the second in my series of special podcasts that I'm going to be doing regularly as I do my history of philosophy course. Now, as these episodes are posted, they're following completely the structure of the book that we've been using in our study times and in our discussions, the history of philosophy by A. C. Grayling. Now I'm using it and following very closely the structure and the chronological order and the chapter order of that book because that's the route that we're taking through it. But I'm reapproaching each chapter, each person, each millennia of thought through up and putting my own particular spin on it. Now I hasten to add that I'm not a philosopher. I'm simply a Christian minister, a retired pastor, in fact, in the Baptist tradition, who's had a lifelong history in philosophy. Today is just the second step into this series, and we're looking at what are called the pre-Socratic philosophers. That's the era 600 to 450 BC, BCE, as it's called today. Now, from the point of view of the biblical era, this what's going on at this time is these people and these this thinking appears during the late monarchy periods in Israel and Judah. Also, during this time, we will see the nation of Israel carried off into Babylon, which occurs in 586 to 539, that they're held in in captivity in that way, followed by the early return under Cyrus in 539. So all of that's going on in the biblical background to these events that are appearing here. This is the world in which the earliest of these philosophers appear. So Jerusalem is falling to Babylon, and prophets like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel are speaking their prophecies. And at the same time, right at the same time, thinkers in Ionia, which is modern-day coastal Turkey and southern Italy, are starting to ask questions like, What is everything made of and how does the world work? So we're sort of standing at the edge of modern recorded history, the sort of beginning of that, and peering back into a world where people are trying to make sense of a life without the benefits of all the resources we have today. There's no Google, no Bible apps, there's not even a decent library. A world with the biggest questions like what is everything made of, why does everything exist, why is my cousin a bit weird like that? All these sorts of questions you've been asked for the very first time. These guys were the thinkers who came before Socrates, before Plato, and before Aristotle, before philosophy even had a syllabus, a textbook, or a nutty professor pacing at the front of the room saying, Now take you, pay attention, this will be in the exam. These are the early thinkers who experimented with ideas. The way we would see children experiment with paint, they approached them boldly, enthusiastically, and it has to be said occasionally in ways that make you wonder whether someone should have supervised them more. And yet, for all their wonder and all their strangeness, there was indeed something extraordinary going on. These people were trying to understand the world not by appealing to myths or legends, but by looking at nature itself and asking questions like what's really going on here? In a sense, they were the first people to say, let's actually stop and think about these things. The challenge, of course, is that most of what they wrote has vanished. We covered that in my introduction. What we have remaining are mainly fragments, quotes by others, summaries and the occasional my friend once said that his friend once said kind of thing. It's a bit like trying to reconstruct a whole novel from a handful of sticky notes from the novel that someone's posted on a fridge. But even in these scraps there is brilliance to be found, and there is creativity, and there's the spark of ideas which would later shape the entire Western world. And for me as a Christian there is something deeply valuable in watching human beings reach out for truth, perhaps for the first time, sometimes stumbling, sometimes soaring, but always searching. So in this episode I'm going to step into that ancient world. We'll meet the thinkers who tried to explain everything from the structure of the universe to the nature of the soul, and we'll approach it armed with nothing but a little curiosity, observation, and my occasional wild guess at what I think is going on here. And we'll explore how their questions and sometimes their answers can still resound with our own search for wisdom today. Now in a moment we'll begin where philosophy itself began with a handful of voices calling out from the distant past, asking questions we're still asking today. But first let's look at the pre-Socratic landscape. This is, remember, all taking years, a thousand years before Athens and the great classical era will even take the stage. Before Socrates wandered the streets of Athens and asked those awkward questions, there was an entire world of thinkers trying to make sense of reality. We call that era the pre-Socratic, not because they all lived before Socrates. Some in fact in the later stages were in fact his neighbours and his contemporaries, and a few probably bumped into him in the real world, perhaps at the market. But in civic life their interests, even if they were alive at the same time, were very different. Socrates cares about how we should live. The pre-Socratics cared more about what the world is made of, how it began, and why anything exists at all. In other words, they were the sort of original how does this whole world work type of group of people. Aristotle actually called them the physicoi, the natural philosophers because they were fascinated by the physical world. They weren't writing moral essays or debating things like virtue, they were staring at rivers, the stars above, the storms in the sky, and the stones on the ground trying to figure out what really lies beneath all of this. The first wave of them are sometimes called the Ionian thinkers. It's surprising really that the story doesn't begin in Athens, because many of course associate early philosophy with the Greek world. It actually begins at the edge of the Greek world in a bustling coastal city called Iona, which is in modern day Turkey. Places where trade, travel, and much, much cross cultural pollination took place, and it was probably that which sparked the big ideas. At the center of the movement was a city called Miletus, home to Tales, the man the Greek themselves called the father of philosophy. Now it's not as though no one before Thales ever wondered about the universe. Civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt had been building cities, studying the stars, and laying the grounds for mathematics for over a thousand years. But Thales is the first person we know by name who tried to explain the world in a way that wasn't mythological. He didn't say the gods were angry when there was a thunderstorm, and he didn't say that the earth floated on a giant turtle. He said we need to look and think about these things rationally. From Talays came two successors, Anaximander and Anaximenes, and together they formed what is called the Milesian school. Whether they were truly teacher student type relationships between people there or simply colleagues who admired each other's work, we can't really be sure, but the tradition of linking thinkers into schools actually begins here. While the Ionians were thinking on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, another philosophical hotspot was emerging on the far edge of the Western world, in the colonies of southern Italy. Here we meet Pythagoras, the man whose name still haunts school children everywhere to this day. He began in Ionia but moved to Croton, where he had founded a community that blended mathematics, mysticism, and a lifestyle that would probably have made modern wellness influencers feel that they were really underachieving. Not far away in Alia, another giant appeared. Parmenides, one of the most profound and puzzling thinkers in philosophy. His followers, especially Zeno, famous for his famous Zeno's paradoxes, took his ideas and ran with them, or at least tried to. In fact it was Zeno who convinced people that motion might not actually exist at all. Meanwhile, across the water in Sicily, Empedocles was offering his own cosmic vision, complete with the four elements and the two cosmic forces he called love and strife. He was a philosopher, a poet, and if later stories are to believe, a man who even tried to prove his own divinity by jumping into a volcano. Spoiler alert, it didn't go well. Then there is the lone wolf of Ionia, Heraclitus. Back in Ionia this other towering figure emerges. Heraclitus is the philosopher of fire and flux. He believed everything was constantly changing, famously saying you can't step into the same river twice. He had a reputation for being grumpy, which may explain why he preferred to write in sort of riddles. Heraclitus and Parmenides, the one who says everything changes and the other says nothing changes. They stand as two great supporting columns of pre-Socratic thought. Their ideas shaped everything that would follow. And then the center finally shifts to Athens. By the time Socrates was born in four seventy BCE, many of these early thinkers were still alive or had only recently died. Over the centuries Athens had gradually become the beating heart of philosophy. Here we find Protagoras and the Sophists, Lucidus and Democritus, the atomists, Socrates, then Plato, then Aristotle, and later, of course, the great schools of the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Cynics will follow. Eventually the center of gravity will shift again to Alexandrian Rome and the ancient world's finest great movement, that which is called Neoplatism, that which carried the philosophical torch right up into the early Christian era. So there, my friends, is a thousand years of thought in one sweep. But the pre-Socratics sit at the very beginning of this thousand year story, a story that runs from Tales in the 6th century BCE through to Plato and Aristotle, through those Stoics, Epicureans, and finally into the world where Christianity will rise and reshape totally the intellectual landscape. They are the voices in this long conversation that I'm going to have that we now call Western philosophy. Their ideas are sometimes strange, sometimes brilliant, sometimes they're wildly wrong, but always fascinating, and they set the stage for everything that will come after. But before we dive into the individual thinkers in the episode, we need to think about the big questions that the pre Socratic thinkers wrestled with. Look at what drove the pre Socratics, because long before philosophy had textbooks, lecture halls, or professors with elbow patches, it had questions, big ones, bold ones. Sometimes it has to be said slightly bewildering ones. These early thinkers weren't trying to solve puzzles, they were trying to understand pretty much everything. And they did it with a kind of fearless curiosity that can still feel quite refreshing today when you approach it. Questions like What is everything made of? That was their first great question. Is the world made of water? Or is it made of air or fire? Is it something invisible, something infinite, something that can't be seen, but is there something that holds everything together? The pre Socratic thinkers looked at the world and thought there must be some sort of basic ingredient, like a cosmic recipe, only at this point there's no cookbook. Then they thought, how does change happen? This is one that kept many of these guys up at night. If everything is constantly changing, growing, dying, moving and shifting in front of them, what actually stays the same underneath it all? Or is there anything in the universe that even stays the same? Some came up with the answer that everything changes all the time, and others said the polar opposite, nothing changes. And a few simply said, Well, it's kind of complicated, it's a mix of the two, and that debate shaped not only the language of their discussions but the whole future of philosophy as well. They also asked, where did the world come from? The pre-Socratics were the first people that we know of who tried to explain the origins of the universe without telling a myth or evoking a god with a bad temper. They wanted to try and find a rational explanation, a story that made sense of the world by looking at the world itself. Now that in itself was a radical shift, a turning point, the moment human beings said, actually let's try and think this through and observe what we see. But then of course that led them into areas like what is the soul? So even at this early stage, some pre-Socratic thinkers were wondering what makes us, what makes you you? Is there some kind of soul, a kind of breath that starts humanity or a spark? And is there a harmony in that or is it a divine fragment of something that started this process? Is this something that has been woven into the fabric of the whole universe across time? Now the answers they will come to, you will see, will be widely different, but the question itself shows how that human longing for meaning and what one might say the search for the idea of God begins right back here. A world that would allow very soon others to seek that God in a way through not only thought, but through community as well, as the word of the Old Testament emerges. They did indeed ask how might the world be ordered, they thought, not from a civic point of view, but from a universal point of view. Is the universe chaotic, they thought, or are there is there a pattern, a structure, a logic behind it all? Now some thought they saw mathematical harmony as that which ordered the world. Some saw it as a battle between conflict and struggle, and some saw things playing out over a series of cycles and rhythms, but some indeed saw a single unchanging reality sitting beneath the surface of everything. All of them were simply trying to make sense of a world that felt for them both beautiful and bewildering, no different to us today, I'm sure at times. Now, as I said, we're standing at the threshold of what is going to be the beginnings of one of the most fascinating chapters in human thoughts. These early philosophers, they didn't have libraries, they didn't have laboratories where they could test their theories or even centuries of scholarship behind them that they could refer to. They simply had the sky above and the earth beneath them, and a burning desire to understand both and what was really going on. Now in the next episode, we're going to begin this walkthrough the lives of all these great major figures from the pre-Socratic era, and we're going to do it one by one, and we're going to follow the structure and order of Grayling's book A History of Philosophy. It will be a remarkable cast of people. Some will surprise you, some will confuse you, and some may make you laugh out loud, but all of them will help us see how human beings have searched for truth and how I would suggest that search for truth began. So as I begin to wrap up today, I'd like to give you a quick overview of who we're going to look at in this in these opening episodes as we work through this pre-Socratic era. We're going to probably take about half a dozen episodes in which we're going to cover people like Tales, the first to ask what's really going on. Tales is the man the Greeks themselves called the father of philosophy. He looked at the word and said, Let's stop blaming gods for everything. Let's try and think about this. He believed the basic stuff of the universe he decided was actually water. Now that may sound odd to us today, but at least he was trying to explain things without using mythology. He also is said to have predicted an eclipse, which in the ancient world was the equivalent of winning Britain's Got Talent, but doing it with a maths trick. Anaximander, he's the one who thought even bigger than that. Now he was a student, or at least a younger colleague of Talleys, an Anaximander, he wasn't satisfied with water as an explanation of everything. He proposed something far more mysterious. The Eperion, he called it, the boundless or the infinite, we might translate it. He's the first person we know who suggested that the universe might be governed by laws rather than by whims, and he also is the first person to draw the earliest map of the whole world, which shows he had a liking of thinking in very big ideas and very big pictures. We'll also look at Anaximenes, the air enthusiast. He completes our opening Milesian trio. Anaximenes said the fundamental stuff of the universe was air, not the air we breathe, but a sort of cosmic breath, something that thickens and thins to form everything else. He is the first philosopher to look at the fog and say, Yes, it is this that explains everything. Then we will see and hear about Pythagoras, the great mystic mathematician. Pythagoras known to school children everywhere and feared by him for his triangle theorem. But Pythagoras was far more than a geometry teacher. He also founded a community that blended mathematics, music, along with a strict set of rules and a touch of mysticism. Numbers he believed were the key to the universe. He was the philosopher who would have felt perfectly at home in a modern wellness retreat if that retreat also required you to study algebra. Parmenides, the philosopher who said nothing changes. Parmenides is one of the most profound and puzzling figures we have in ancient thought. He actually argued that change is an illusion and that reality is one unchanging solid being. Eternal. It's the kind of idea that makes you stare at a wall and wonder whether the wall is staring back at you. His influence is enormous. Even his conclusions, they feel like a sort of philosophical equivalent of a plot twist. More will be revealed later. Then comes Xina of Alea, the man who tried to prove that you and I can't even walk across the room. Now he was a devoted follower of Permenides, and Zeno invented his famous paradoxes. Now initially he did that to defend his teacher's ideas. His most famous arguments, the paradoxes that they're called, tried to show that motion is impossible. Now, if you've ever felt stuck in your life, Zeno would say, exactly that is what proves my very point. Then there is Heraclitus, the philosopher of fire and flux. Heraclitus believed everything is constantly changing. Fires, rivers, people, the whole lot. You cannot step into the same river twice, he famously wrote. He kind of wrote in riddled and had a reputation for being a bit grumpy, but he actually saw conflict as the engine of the universe. If Parmenides is the philosopher of stillness, Heraclites is the philosopher of perpetual motion, nay chaos. Then comes Empedocles, the poet and the man behind the famous Greek four elements. Empedocles tried to bring peace to that Heraclitus versus Parmenides debate by saying the world is actually made up of four elements, that being earth, air, fire, and water, mixed and separated by two cosmic forces that he identified as love and strife. He was a poet, a healer, and according to legend, a man who may have tried to prove his divinity by jumping into a volcano. Philosophy has always attracted colourful characters. So over our half dozen or so opening episodes, I shall take these along with several others and present them in the same order as I've been studying in A. C. Grayling's book, His History of Philosophy. The next episode will unfold for us like the beginning of this guided tour through this list of characters I've just given you. Moving first from Ionia to Italy to Sicily and then back again. And I'll try and show how each thinker I think adds a new voice to the early conversation about everything that exists life, the universe, and everything, reality, change, order, and even the soul. Now the flow naturally builds towards that great tension between Heraclitus, who said everything changes, and Permenides, who said nothing changes. That will set the stage for the philosophical revolution that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle will later bring. So, come back next time for episode 3. Bring your curiosity, your questions, bring your sense of humor, and together you can keep exploring with me this long conversation that started more than 2,500 years ago and still shapes the way a great many people think today. I hope you find that interesting. The next episode should come along in a week or two, and if anything else strikes my mind, what's going on in other aspects of my life, I'll bring it to you here in the Living in Faith Everyday Podcast, the Life Podcast. Bye bye for now.