|
|
|
|
| Sages of Ancient Greece
As early as the 6th century BCE, three pioneers of Greek philosophy offered an explanation of the substrate from which all things material must arise. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes represent three generations of sagacity in which one communicated directly with the next. All three were nurtured in Miletus, an Ionian colony on the western coast of Asia Minor on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea. In this thriving seaport, the three Milesians each in turn offered a simple explanation, based upon a reasoned assessment of observable details, in which the apparent multiplicity of the world around us is seen to rest upon an underlying unity. Thales taught that all is born from water. Anaximander carried forth the teaching but displaced water with aperion (the boundless). Anaximenes continued the tradition with air alone as the source of all. |
 |
ThalesNumbered among the Seven Ancient Sages by later generations, Thales is on record in 585 BCE as the first person to predict a solar eclipse. Although he might not have named the hour exactly, he apparently figured from astronomical knowledge that the sun would briefly go dark during a lunation over western Asia Minor sometime in the near future. His surmise was most likely based on methods of calculation, as well as data on solar and lunar regularities, gained from Babylonian and/or Egyptian astronomers who may themselves have predicted eclipses prior to Thales' success (and yet their feat has been forgotten).
As the story goes, the sun was eclipsed during a battle between the Medes and Lydians, causing the soldiers to panic and flee the scene of carnage. Their leaders soon after negotiated peace. Such drama caused Thales' peers to immortalize his prediction. Thales is also noted for calculating the heights of towering objects and distances of ships at sea through clever employment of geometrical constructs, as well as his use of the stars to predict a successful olive harvest, important to the local economy. (As Aristotle tells it, Thales had been mocked for being poor in spite of his intelligence. So to demonstrate the power of his wisdom, Thales spent a winter leasing olive-presses for a pittance when his calculations of stellar phenomena foretold to him alone a large crop of olives was due in the next season. When harvest time created great demand for the olive-presses, Thales rented them out with great profit.) Although the great sage is said to have left at least two hundred written lines of wisdom, his words have long been lost. Writings about him over the subsequent generations, down through Aristotle, were likewise lost in the aeons after. So we only know of Thales' doctrine on material substance through a few brief passages written in later centuries by commentators who presumably had their facts straight.
The commentary begins with Aristotle some 200 years after Thales: "Of the first philosophers, ... most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter were the only principles of all things. That of which all things that are consist, the first from which they come to be, the last into which they are resolved (the substance remaining, but changing in its modifications), this they say is the element and this the principle of things ... Yet they do not all agree as to the number and the nature of these principles. Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, says the principle is water (for which reason he declared the earth rests upon water), getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist, and that heat itself is generated from the moist and kept alive by it (and that from which they come to be is a principle of all things). He got his notion from this fact, and from the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and that water is the origin of the nature of moist things."
For all we know, Thales may have spiced his theory with mythopoeic references as is the wont of many agile minds down through the centuries. Aristotle mentioned Thales' opinion that a magnetic stone has a soul because it moves iron and that all things are full of gods. Presumably, Thales "held soul to be a motive force" and considered soul as "intermingled with the whole universe". Only devout atheists and scientific materialists can hope to avoid the dreams of Higher Being which permeate their cultures. Yet the historical fact remains that Thales is the first of our species on record to claim a physical substance-- some tangible thing here and now available to anyone for study-- as the underlying factor which allows us to explain our material reality. While the nature of water might be a mysterious function of divine forces, everyone could at least experience water directly while the gods remained invisible. Thales might have pointed, for example, to the observable facts that rain brings the earth to life; that both plants and animals grow with water but perish without it; that when left in a vessel water turns into a vapor (air) and leaves behind a residue (earth); and that rainstorms produce lightening (fire). By somesuch reasoning, Thales argued that water is the universal substance from which all else is generated.
| Anaximander
Succeeding his mentor Thales in doctrine if not in fame, Anaximander was said to have produced the first sundial, the first map of the known world, and the first celestial globe (mapping the stars). He also wrote a treatise, On Nature, known by ancient commentators but since lost. His approach to the question of material substance focused on the dynamic of changing qualities which we observe in every material thing. That which is hot may become cold, moist things become dry, bright things become dark, and vice-versa. Separating the qualities from the things in his analysis, Anaximander argued that all qualities emerge by segregation from a common source which is itself unqualified. An emerging set of qualities present the particular thing (for example, a red hot lump of metal), then subside back to the source as they are replaced by other qualities to present the 'same' thing with altered qualities (in our example, a cool lump of copper). He called this source the unlimited (aperion). Supposing each thing a mixture of qualities, the unlimited source might thus explain a single thing in different appearances as well as the variety of things in the cosmos. |
Figure 1.5 |
The earliest extant description of Anaximander's doctrine is from Aristotle: "The Unlimited encompasses and governs all things. ... [I]f the Unlimited were something specific like air or water, the other elements would be annihilated by it. For the different elements have contrariety with one another: air is cold, water warm, and fire hot. If one of them were unlimited the others would have ceased to exist by now. Such thinkers [as Anaximander] conclude, therefore, that the Unlimited is distinct from specific things of all kinds and is their source."In the only direct statement attributed to Anaximander (quoted by Simplicius in the 6th century CE!), he implies that the dynamic of change is governed by divine justice: "The Unlimited is the first-principle of things that are. It is that from which the coming-to-be takes place, and it is that into which they return when they perish, by moral necessity, giving satisfaction to one another and making reparation for their injustice, according to the order of time." In this scheme, contrary qualities usurp each other and, for example, after cold is manifest in a thing by driving out warmth, the cold must perish as warmth gets its turn. Thus the change of seasons, as well as the life and death of organisms, is justly manifest in time.
Anaximenes
The third Milesian in succession to ponder the problem, Anaximenes held allegiance to Thales' notion of a single element and further recognized Anaximander's need to address the dynamic by which multiplicity arises from the one. According to later sources, Anaximenes argued that air is the source of all and is transformed along a quantitative spectrum of rarefaction and condensation. Thus fire is the most rarefied air, earth the most condensed, and water in between. All else is composed of these.
After Anaximenes, even if all the Milesians were considered wrong in their conclusions, three central questions of physics were clearly set for future generations: (1) What material element, if any, underlies all substance? (2) What dynamic, if any, accounts for the change from one into many? (3) Is there a quantitative explanation of apparent qualitative change, whether by some process of rarefaction and condensation or any other mechanism? Moreover, earth, air, fire, and water were specified as being of prime importance.
|
|