Thales and the Presocratics

First, some notes on reading the Greeks.

Thinking they lack vocabulary. Wheelwright, for example, thinks that what Thales means when he says that all things are filled with gods is that all things are filled with potential or dynamism, something for which we had to wait until Aristotle added the right hamburger helper into a meager pot of words. That we probably need to talk about what Thales said does not mean the vocabulary has to be fixed up but that it is provocative and worth thinking about. When Sartre says men are not papercutters, it is not that he did not have the right vocabulary that makes us have to explain.

Thinking that the problem of understanding them is a problem of translation. There may be places where words have to be leaned on before they will cave in and give up their lunch money, but it is more likely that particular problems are fixed by reading further and then again. If a reader new to the Greeks finds it hard to get past a feeling that it is all just too bizarre, try reading it like reading Tennyson or James Joyce--out loud, steadily, letting it wash over the ears til bits of sense start coming up like butter in the churn.

Thinking that they are speaking metaphorically (this is a fad in the current journal literature). On those occasions they offer analogies and similes and metaphors, it is easy to tell that is what they are doing. Metaphors make sense in contrast to literality, and if there are metaphors present we can almost always say what is being said literally.

Thinking they are primitive or loosey-goosey with their arguments or their thoughts. They certainly make mistakes, but it is just as hard to nail these guys as it is to nail Sartre or Heidegger or Quine or Derrida. If you think something is absurd or silly or a major slip, you are almost certainly deluded. Figure out what you would agree with first; the exercise of getting into the thought, which you and I both so easily neglect, may lead you to understand enough that you will find it opening up for you.

Reading as if one were reading a summary (Cliff's notes, or a paper doing exposition). The nearest modern equivalent to reading the Presocratics for me has been reading Locke's beginning chapters on words, Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations, James Joyce's later stuff, Shakespeare's later stuff, lyric poetry. It has to be unpacked as we go, and regarded as polished and cut till almost every reflection and association is there on purpose.

So what's Thales say? What's he do? I have to separate these.

Here's what he says: Water is the world's source. Earth is not at the bottom but rather rests on water. Everything is full of gods. Magnets show soul by moving iron.

He also probably said some other things: Existence or being is not varied as the appearances of things is varied but is rather one thing. Water displays or gives rise to or manifests existence.

He may have said still more: Death and life are one. The stars and sun and moon and their paths may be figured out, not by asking the priests but by looking and seeing. Knowing oneself is hard. Giving advice is easy. Geometry and trigonometry can demonstrate truths about things one cannot touch. Soul must move and cause movement. Individual things have come from water and must return to water. The moon is like the earth and moves and has a shadow and can be cast into shadow.

Here's what he does: He starts the business of teaching abstract matters by writing. He looks not to religion but to the world around him for explanations of many of the things previously handed over to religion and to myth. He asks about unity of reality in the midst of apparent diversity. He asks whether the gods are separate from the world (and answers no). He finds in water a way to think about how things can be separate, be individuals, be bounded, have properties of single entities, be many, and yet these things are in an important way not individuals or separate or many at all. Set up as many glasses of water as you like, they are all still water, or maybe capitalized Water. Water displays the nature of existence.

Now maybe there is something terminally woowoo about his answer, but the question seems a stroke of genius. What will you say is the nature of existence? Heidegger, here we come.

He does more: A chain of thought may reach beyond us into depths heretofore unplumbed. Wittgenstein a little later suggests that philosophy is the bumps on the head one gets from hitting the limits of sense. But still, the limits of sense seem open to exploration after Thales in a way they were not before. He gives us the idea that our thoughts can reach further, help us explore beyond where we are, as though we are sending out our thoughts as scouts, or building out of them bridges into the dark. We can try to understand mysteries by building with what we have, rather as though we can measure a pyramid's height by setting up a stick and waiting till its shadow equals its height and then measuring the shadow of the pyramid, so that the thing we cannot measure is measured.

Finally, and implied in that analogy, he gives us the idea that these things are not only the property of the person who sees them after working at them. Instead, she can show how she did it in such a way that the procedures convince us that she is right. Voila, philosophy is being invented in such a way that arguments and teaching are important to it.

Still more, and this one important and profound but maybe not entirely nice: Thales demonstrates that the little pieces out of which we build our bridges into the unknown may carry us into truly spooky places where we do not know our way. Existence is water. Welllll, okay, Big T., if you say so. But there is some way in which common sense is endangered by philosophy, and so Thales helps to raise that issue as well. I myself hope that it is Thales who told the story on himself about his falling into the cistern, to be rescued by the milkmaid (milkmaid??? probably a later embellishment) who told him he was a fine philosopher for wandering among the stars ignorant of what was under his feet.
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