RE: THALES OF MILETUS

(Bear with me, but for the most part this is a purely unoriginal stock entry on Thales, compiled by me from various sources, but primarily for my personal consumption. How much of this material I will be later using for the purpose of my original comment remains to be seen. In its current form I request the reader to disregard it completely, unless the reader wishes to learn some general information about Thales from it, rather than by taking the unnecessary trouble of reaching for the standard sources of such reference material.

The main reason why I keep this material as a separate entry is my convenience and nothing else… except for one really good reason, which will become clear in my Thales And Nietzsche entry, soon to follow. Not to create too much unnecessary suspense, though, where no suspense is warranted, I am going to reveal it right away: More than showing what it has, this compilation shows what the standard sources seem to be lacking, and what Nietzsche sensed and noted right away, namely, that, far more than a secular natural scientist, Thales was an intuitive mystic!)

Thales of Miletus (ca. 635 BC-543 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, as well as the father of science. According to Herodotus, Thales was of Phoenician descent. It was said that he had no children of his own, but that he adopted his nephew as his son.

The well-traveled Ionians had many dealings with Egypt and Babylon, and Thales may have studied as a young man in Egypt. He almost certainly had exposure to Egyptian mythology, astronomy, mathematics, as well as to other traditions alien to the Homeric traditions of Greece. Perhaps because of this, his inquiry into the nature of things took him beyond traditional mythology.

Several anecdotes suggest that Thales was not solely a thinker, but that he was also involved in business and politics. One story recounts that he bought all the olive presses in Miletus, after predicting the weather and a good harvest for a particular year. Another version of this story states it simply that he bought the presses to demonstrate to his fellow Milesians that he could use his intelligence to enrich himself. However looking at his way of thinking, getting rich was not his intent; merely to show people that by being a philosopher it was easy to enrich himself without it, being the point of the exercise. Herodotus records that Thales advised the city-states of Ionia to form a federation.

He is said to have died in his seat, while watching an athletic contest.

Before Thales, the Greeks explained the origin and nature of the world through myths of anthropomorphic gods and heroes. Phenomena like lightning or earthquakes were attributed to actions of the gods.

By contrast, Thales found naturalistic explanations of the world, without supernatural references. Thus, he explained earthquakes by imagining that the Earth floats on water, and earthquakes occur when the Earth is rocked by waves. Herodotus cites him as having predicted an eclipse that put an end to fighting between the Lydians and the Medes.

Thales’s most renowned belief was the cosmological doctrine, which held that the world originated from water. Aristotle considered this belief roughly equivalent to the later ideas of Anaximenes, who held that everything in the world was composed of air. Thus it is often assumed that Thales considered everything to be made from water. According to Lloyd, however, it is likely that while Thales saw water as an origin, he never pondered whether water continued to be the substance of the world.

Thales had a profound influence on other Greek thinkers, and therefore, on Western history. Some believe Anaximander was a pupil of Thales. Early sources report that one of Anaximander’s more famous pupils, Pythagoras, visited Thales as a young man, and that Thales advised him to travel to Egypt, to further his philosophical and mathematical studies.

Many philosophers followed his lead, searching for explanations in nature, rather than in the supernatural; others returned to supernatural explanations, but couched them in the language of philosophy, rather than myth or religion.

When you specifically look at the influence, which Thales held in the pre-Socratic era, he was one of the first thinkers who thought more in the way of logos than mythos. The difference between these two more profound ways of seeing the world is that mythos is concentrated around the stories of holy origin, while logos is concentrated around the argumentation. When the mythical man wants to explain the world the way he sees it, he explains it referring to gods and powers. The mythical thought does not differ between things and persons, and furthermore, it does not differ between nature and culture. The way a logos thinker would present the view on the world is radically different than the mythical thinker. In its concrete form, logos is a way of thinking not only about individualism, but also the abstract. Furthermore, it focuses on sensible and continuous argumentation. This lays the foundation of philosophy, and its way of explaining the world in terms of abstract argumentation, and not in the way of gods and mythical stories.

Thales is credited as being the first to popularize geometry in ancient Greek culture, mainly that of spatial relationships. He is the first one who separated trigonometry as an independent branch of mathematics, to become one of the four basic “elements” of geometry. The other three elements of geometry are about the length, square, and cube of an object.

Now, what could be the reason why Thales named water as the primary substance of the world?

Simple metallurgy had been practiced long before Thales presented his hypotheses, so Thales knew that heat could return metals to a liquid state. Water exhibits sensible changes more obviously than any of the other so-called elements, and can readily be observed in the three states of liquid, vapor and, ice. Such an understanding that water could generate into earth is basic to Thales’s watery thesis. At Miletus it could readily be observed that water had the capacity to thicken into earth. Miletus stood on the Gulf of Lade, through which the Meander emptied its waters. Within living memory, older Milesians had witnessed the island of Lade increasing in size within the Gulf, and the river banks encroaching into the river to such an extent that at Priene, across the gulf from Miletus, the warehouses had to be rebuilt closer to the water’s edge. The ruins of the once prosperous city-port of Miletus are now ten kilometers distant from the coast, and the Island of Lade now forms part of a rich agricultural plain. There would have been opportunity to observe other areas where earth generated from water, for example, the deltas of the Halys, the Ister, about which Hesiod wrote (in Theogony), now called the Danube, the Tigris-Euphrates, and almost certainly the Nile. This coming-into-being of land would have provided substantiation of Thales’s doctrine. To Thales, water held the potentialities for the nourishment and generation of the entire cosmos. Aëtius attributed to Thales the concept that even the fire of the sun and the stars, and indeed, the cosmos itself, is nourished by evaporation of the waters.

Thales proposed answers to a number of questions about the earth: the question of its support; shape; size; and the cause of earthquakes; the dates of the solstices; the size of the sun and moon.

In De Caelo, Aristotle wrote: “This [opinion that the earth rests on water] is the most ancient explanation which has come down to us, and is attributed to Thales of Miletus. He explained his theory by adding the analogy that the earth is at rest because it is of the nature of wood and similar substances, which have the capacity to float on water, although not on air.” In Metaphysics Aristotle stated unequivocally that “Thales declared that the earth rests on water.” This concept does appear to be at odds with natural expectations, and Aristotle expressed his difficulty with Thales’s theory.

Perhaps, Thales anticipated some problems with acceptance, because he explained that it floated because of a particular quality, a quality of buoyancy similar to that of wood. At the busy city-port of Miletus, Thales had unlimited opportunities to observe the arrival and departure of ships with heavier-than-water cargoes, and recognized an analogy to floating logs. Thales may have envisaged some quality, common to ships and to earth, a quality of floatiness, or buoyancy. It seems that Thales’s hypothesis was substantiated by sound observation and reasoned considerations. Seneca reported that Thales saw land as supported by water and carried along like a boat. Aristotle’s lines in Metaphysics seem to indicate his understanding that he, Thales, believed that because water was the permanent entity, the earth floats on water.

Thales may have reasoned that as a modification of water, earth must be the lighter substance, and floating islands do exist. Herodotus was impressed when he saw Chemmis, a floating island, about thirty-eight km north-east of Naucratis, the Egyptian trading concession, which Thales probably visited. Seneca described floating islands in Lydia: “There are many light pumice-like stones of which islands are composed, namely those which float in Lydia.” Pliny the Younger described several floating islands, the most relevant of them being Reed Islands in Lydia, and he described a circular floating island, its buoyancy and the way it moved. Thales could have visited the nearby Reed Islands. He might have considered such visible examples to be models of his theory, and he could have claimed that the observation that certain islands had the capacity to float substantiated his hypothesis that water has the capacity to support earth.

Again it is understood that Thales did not mention any of the gods traditionally associated with the simple bodies; we do not hear of Oceanus or Gaia: we read of water and earth. The idea that Thales would have resurrected the gods is quite contrary to the bold, new, non-mythical theories which Thales proposed.

Aëtius recorded the different opinions of the shape of the earth, which were held by Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. Cicero attributed to Thales the earliest construction of a solid celestial globe. Thales’s immediate successors proposed theories about the shape of the earth which were quite different from each other, but that is no reason to reject the view that Thales hypothesized a spherical earth. It is not the only occasion on which Anaximander and Anaximenes failed to follow the theories of Thales. That they didn’t do so is the main argument in favor of accepting that the scientific method commenced in the Milesian School. There is testimony that Thales knew the earth to be spherical, but no evidence to suggest that he proposed any other shape.

Thales’s theory about the cause of earthquakes is consistent with his hypothesis of the earth floating upon water. It appears that he applied his floating on water simile to the natural phenomena of earthquakes. As recorded by Aëtius, Thales and Democritus found in water the cause of earthquakes, and Seneca attributed to Thales the theory that on the occasions when the earth is said to quake, it is fluctuating, because of the roughness of the oceans. Although the theory is wrong, Thales’s hypothesis is rational, because it provides an explanation which does not invoke hidden entities. It is an advance upon the traditional Homeric view that they resulted from an angry supernatural god, Poseidon, shaking the earth through his rapid striding.

Most of our sources of information on the Milesian philosophers (Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes) are the works of much later writers. The primary source for Thales’s philosophy is Aristotle, who credited him with the first inquiry into the causes of things.

Thales may or may not have written books. It is certain, however, that Aristotle did not have access to any work of Thales and was writing from secondary sources of his own. While Thales’ historical importance is unquestioned, this introduces a good deal of uncertainty into our understanding of him.

Before we get to Nietzsche’s discovery of Thales’s underlying mysticism (and what true philosopher can be called a philosopher without being a mystic at heart?!), a few more Thalean entries are about to follow. The next one, Thales And Aristotle, is another reference entry, which I am unselfishly posting for the benefit of the interested reader, although my original plan was to skip all such reference material altogether.