ODE TO CREATIVE IMAGINATION

Nietzsche, in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, §3, writes: “Greek philosophy seems to begin with an absurd notion, with the proposition that water is the primal origin and the womb of all things. Is it really necessary for us to take serious notice of this proposition? It is, and for three reasons. First, because it tells us something about the primal origin of all things; second, because it does so in a language devoid of image or fable, and finally because contained in it, if only embryonically, is the idea, all things are one…”

This paragraph introduces Thales, who is deservedly given a lot of attention by Nietzsche, and thus, by also giving him a lot of attention here, I find myself in good company. Nietzsche’s references to Thales are very extensive, but I have allotted this whole lengthy entry to them so that they would not be overwhelming in an entry of a more general nature.

From the paragraph above, Nietzsche proceeds with a specific evaluation of Thales’s significance. Observe him equating Thales with the “beginning of Greek philosophy.” This may be a reiteration of an already set cliché, but Nietzsche does it with a characteristic literary elegance and compelling intellectual persuasion.

“…The first mentioned reason leaves Thales still in the company of religious and superstitious people, the second, however, takes him out of this company and shows him to us as a natural philosopher, but by virtue of the third, Thales becomes the first Greek philosopher. Had he said: “Out of water earth is evolved,” we should only have a scientific hypothesis; a false one, though, nevertheless, difficult to refute. But he went beyond the scientific. In his presentation of this concept of unity through the hypothesis of water, Thales has not surmounted the low level of the physical discernments of his time, but he has actually leaped over them. The deficient and unorganized observations of an empiric nature, which Thales had made regarding the occurrence and transformations of water (or to be more exact of the Moist) would not in the least have made possible, or even suggested, such an immense generalization. What drove him to this generalization was a metaphysical thought, which had its origin in his mystic intuition and which, together with the ever renewed endeavors to express it better, we find in all philosophies, the proposition: ‘Everything is one.’”

It is remarkable how Nietzsche notices about Thales what even our modern commentators on the history of pre-Socratic philosophy (see my entry Re Thales Of Miletus, which I have presented in its compilatory form for a good reason, as it now turns out) have failed to mention, namely, that Thales stands out not as just an insightful curious observer, not even as a great man of science, but as a metaphysic and a bona fide mystic. It is the fact of his immense intuition, the irrational element, which primarily accounts for his genius. The reader knows already my opinion concerning reason and passion, and here receives another indication, via Thales, of why I regard my friend Nietzsche such a perfectly kindred spirit in all manifestations of his outrageous, contrarian soul.

The next portion of Nietzsche’s notes on Thales might be called “an ode to creative imagination.” Because this is not a Nietzsche entry per se, I am considerably shortening this excerpt, but even the remainder serves as the most flattering expounding of Thales’s value of all known to us.

"…How forcefully such a faith deals with all empiricism is worthy of note. With Thales, more than ever, we learn how philosophy has behaved at all times when she wanted to get beyond the hedges of experience to her magically attracting goal. On light supports, she leaps in advance; hope and divination wing her feet. The calculating reason, too, clumsily pants after her, and seeks better supports in its attempt to reach that alluring goal, at which its divine companion has already arrived... One imagines two wanderers by a wild forest-stream, which carries with it rolling stones; the one, light-footed, leaps over it, using the stones and swinging upon them ever further and further, although they precipitously sink into the depths behind. The other one stands helplessly there most of the time; he has first to build a pathway which will bear a heavy, weary step; sometimes it cannot be done, and then no god will help one across the stream. What, therefore, carries philosophical thinking so quickly to its goal? Does it distinguish itself from calculating, measuring thought only by its more rapid flight through large spaces? No, for a strange illogical power wings the foot of philosophical thinking; and this power is creative imagination."

Next, Nietzsche discusses the value of Thales’s scientific mind, and what it means. Interestingly, science to him is not restricted to the calculating reason, which he ridicules in the paragraph above, but it necessarily includes creative imagination, differing from creative artistry only in being unmythical and unallegorical:

"The thought of Thales has its value—even after the perception of its indemonstrableness—in the very fact, that it was meant unmythically and unallegorically. The Greeks, among whom Thales became so suddenly conspicuous, believed essentially only in the reality of mortals and gods, and they conceived of the whole of nature as if it were only a disguise, masquerade and metamorphosis of these god-humans. Humans were to them the truth and essence of things; everything else was mere phenomenon, and deceiving play. For that very reason they experienced incredible difficulty in conceiving of ideas as ideas. Whilst with the moderns the most personal item sublimates itself into abstraction, with the Greeks the most abstract notions became personified. Thales, however, said, Not man, but water is the reality of things; thus, he began to believe in nature, in so far that he at least believed in water. As a mathematician and astronomer, he had grown cold towards everything mythical and allegorical, and even if he did not succeed in becoming disillusioned as to the pure abstraction, Everything is one, and even if he left off at a physical expression, he was nevertheless among the Greeks of his time a surprising rarity."

And now, here is Nietzsche’s summary of Thales’s philosophical genius, which he finds in Thales’s rising above science and the demonstrable (“reason”) to the heights of supra-science and the indemonstrable, that is, his creative imagination, his instinct, his intuition, or, as I might put it, The Irrational:

"Thales’ are the works of a creative master who began to look into Nature’s depth without fantastic fabling. If, as it is true, he used science and the demonstrable, but soon outleapt them, then this likewise is a typical characteristic of the philosophical genius."

With this indispensable recourse to the brilliance of Nietzsche’s discernment we have come to the close of our seven (or maybe six and a fraction) entries on Thales, the first philosopher.