The Pre-Socratics

Beginning with Thales

Humanity started out with simple strategies, great skill in working with their hands, and a lot of assumptions rather than information. People tied things together based on their experience, limited as it was, mixed with assumptions given them in the form of stories that they assumed were true and without need of analysis. For example, people had spirit. The difference between spirit and flesh was not analyzed, and they believed that when they ate flesh they were also ingesting spirit. They believed that water cleansed their spirit as well as their body. They believed that if they shaped an image a spirit would come to reside therein.

Hunter-gatherers used knowledge of their surrounding which they had gathered from experience, and connected the details of these experiences intuitively and tied it together with stories of the supernatural, which they assumed to be true. Philosophy began when people went beyond this and tried to analyze systematically. We don't know who tried this first, but the first person labeled as a philosopher by historians is Thales -- pronounced ThAH-lez.

Thales was born around 624 BCE, into a family of wealth. He had the leisure and energy to pursue learning and travel. He had the advantage of living in a time of literacy, trade and cultural diffusion. He traveled to Egypt and saw the use of simple and practical geometry in land surveying. He was interested in the nature of things and worked this geometry into a set of new mathematic principles. He became an engineer, and it is said that for king Croesus of Lydia he made the river Halyes passable by diverting its waters. Thales was also interested in heavenly bodies. In his travels he might have come into contact with the astronomical data that Babylonians had accumulated across the centuries, but he also made his own observations of the stars, and he predicted a solar eclipse.

Like others of his time, Thales was unconcerned with that ingredient of scientific proof called verification, and he believed in gods. But, as an engineer who manipulated material realities he thought the material world was understandable rather than just mystery and magic, and this led him to speculate about its basic nature. What we know about the philosophy of Thales comes from the writings of Plato and Aristotle more than a century after Thales. Aristotle writes of Thales assuming that matter contained the first principles of reality. Thales is said to have found water as primary. He believed with his contemporaries that the world was flat and rested on a great body of water. He saw that water was necessary to live and that it was everywhere. He theorized that the world is in essence water and that it had originally been in the form of water -- as if without moisture everything would become dust and nothingness. Or, as Aristotle speculated about Thales' view: "the nourishment of all beings is moist."

Thales was not necessarily separating spirit from water. People had believed that spirit was within "the waters," which made the tides rise and fall. Thales was, it seems, describing everything as part of a unity of nature.

His idea of water as the first principle of reality would be challenged by his student.

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