The Principle of Charity and Thales: Making Sense of Apparent Nonsense

When reading philosophical texts, the student will inevitably come across passages which seem odd, confused, or even simply wrong. Yet the student learns that these passages were written by some of the greatest minds of the ages. How does one understand this?

Wise readers will apply an approach called ‘the principle of charitable interpretation.’ This approach looks at a text, seeks and explores competing possible interpretations, and attributes the most rational intentions to the author, and attributes truest meaning to the text, or the meaning most likely to be true, or the meaning nearest the truth — sidestepping, for the moment, exactly what it means to be “true,” and working simply with a prima facie and intuitive sense of ‘true.’

Another related approach requires the reader not to reject an entire text or its author simply because a small part of that text seems to be in error. A number of major authors have repeated the notion that garlic juice neutralizes a magnetic field. These authors — including Johannes Eck, Georg Agricola, Paracelsus, Portaleone, Andreas Libavius, and Johann Baptist van Helmont, among others — wrote texts which were otherwise relatively rational and reliable.

So it is with Thales, the world’s first philosopher. Donald Palmer applies the “principle of charity” to Thales:

I regret to say that I must add three other ideas that Aristotle also attributes to Thales. My regret is due to the capacity of these ideas to undercut what has seemed so far to be a pretty neat foundation for future science. Aristotle says that, according to Thales,

(A) The earth floats on water the way a log floats on a pond.
(B) All things are full of gods.
(C) A magnet (loadstone) must have a soul, because it is able to produce motion.

The first of these ideas, (A), is puzzling because it seems gratuitous. If everything is water, then it is odd to say that some water floats on water. (B) shows us that the cut between Mythos and Logos is not as neat in Thales’ case as I have appeared to indicate. (C) seems somehow related to (B), but in conflicting ways. If according to (B) all things are full of gods, then why are the magnets mentioned in (C) any different from everything else in nature? No surprise that over the years scholars have spilled a lot of ink — and, because the debate still goes on, punched a lot of computer keys — trying to make sense of these ideas that Aristotle attributes to Thales.

Now, it is clear that the earth does not float on water. But the reader can charitably note the similarities between “floating” on water and “floating” in space. While the former depends on relative densities and the latter depends on gravitation and orbital physics, the affect of floating is similar in both cases.

More than 2,000 years after the fact, it is difficult to guess at what Thales had in mind when he wrote — or perhaps said — that “all things are full of gods.” Perhaps he thought that there were forces which kept objects in existence: otherwise, they might simply cease to exist. Or perhaps he noted that objects had the power to create certain sensations in the human mind: colors, textures, scents, sounds, and tastes. Modern readers will probably never know with certainty what Thales meant, but even these two quick examples show charity in speculating about what he might have meant.

Likewise, the notion that a magnet has a soul is clearly an acknowledgement of the mysterious power it has. Thales lacked the vocabulary and electromagnetic concepts which enabled Michael Faraday to describe, explain, and name magnetic fields. If Faraday didn’t have the advantages of using the concepts of modern physics, then perhaps he, too, would have attributed “souls” and “gods” to magnets and other physical objects.

In the case of Thales and other Presocratic thinkers, an additional factor obliges the reader to extend charity when reading them: the texts themselves are fragmentary and have been through a long and perilous process of transmission. If an author, centuries after his work, were known only by a few sentences, plucked from his various texts, which were perhaps garbled as they’d been copied and re-copied, and which lacked not only the larger context of the book from which they came, but also lacked a situational context which might show which concerns the author was addressing, then such an author might be easily misunderstood, and might easily appear as mistaken, confused, or ignorant — when in fact he might be none of those things.

The value of the “principle of charity” is that it causes the reader to explore the text further and more carefully instead of dismissing it: and the reader will find that further exploration rewarding.

Thales and Monism: Is There a Single Underlying Principle?

As one who sought to add philosophical conceptual explanations to the mythological explanations of the universe, Thales looked for a unifying thought or substance which would explain all objects.

This is a big question which has kept philosophers busy over the centuries. Can all of reality be reduced to one single principle? Some folks say so; they are called ‘monists.’ The question for them is, then, what is that one single principle.

Other philosophers argue that reality is too complex to be reduced to a single principle, and that there are actually two principles at work. These thinkers are called ‘dualists.’

The discussion of dualism and monism is a big one, and way too large for this blog post. It suffices to note, for present purposes, that Thales seems to have been a monist. One must quickly add that he probably would not have conceptualized it that way, and that there are lots of things that remain unknown about his metaphysical system, and which levels and types of reality he might have postulated, as Donald Palmer writes:

Thales was familiar with the four elements: air, fire, water, and earth. He assumed that all things must ultimately be reducible to one of these — but which one?

It is easy to laugh at the traditional framework of four elements, but it is a logical system. With Thales, the system remains in place, but is elevated by adding a conceptual level to the mythological framework.

In all the empirical experience that one could have in the year 600 B.C., water was ubiquitous. Water is necessary for life, and water surrounds all land masses. So water seems like a good choice if one is looking for a universal principle:

Of all the elements, water is the most obvious in its transformations: Rivers turn into deltas, water turns into ice and then back into water, which in turn can be changed into steam, which becomes air, and air, in the form of wind, fans fire.

Why would a twenty-first century philosopher spend time thinking about Thales, or taking his ideas seriously? Because Thales was trying to do what physicists are still doing: searching for a “grand unified theory” (GUT).

There is an innate drive in humans to seek foundational principles. Does this innate drive imply that such principles exist? The monists, in any case, continue to seek one central axiom to explain reality. Thales was perhaps the first one to do this, and led all the others in that direction.

It’s clear that Thales was looking for such a foundational concept, as Donald Palmer reports:

Thale’s actual words were: “The first principle and basic nature of all things is water.”

This obviously false conclusion is valued today not for its content but for its form (it is not a great leap between “All things are composed of water” and the claim “All things are composed of atoms”) and for the presupposition behind it (that there is an ultimate stuff behind appearances that explains change while remaining itself unchanged). Viewed this way, Thales can be seen as the first philosopher to introduce the project of reductionism. Reductionism is a method of explanation that takes an object that confronts us on the surface as being one kind of thing and shows that the object can be reduced to a more basic kind of thing at a deeper but less obvious level of analysis. This project is usually seen as a major function of modern science.

Thales is, then, the father of reductionism. Simply put, an observer might note the commonalities between trees, grass, marigolds, tomatoes, etc., and create a category called “green plants.” In this category, one finds photosynthesis, a need for water, a need for light, roots, leaves, etc.

Reductionism is, in its simplest form, the creation of categories.

The question is: How far can one take reductionism? Is it possible to take it too far? Is it possible to take it not far enough? This question will reappear over and over again, in various forms, in the history of philosophy. Not to take reductionism far enough is to create a “distinction without a difference.” To take reductionism too far is to overlook differences.

In any case, Thales seems to be, not only the father of philosophy, but also rather the father of monism and reductionism. Not bad work for a guy living around 600 B.C.!

Seeking a Systematic and Unified Ontology: Thales Looks for the Foundational Principle of Physical Reality

The first philosophers in the history of the world are grouped together as Presocratics. Among the Presocratics are several subgroups, the earliest of which is the Milesians. Among the Milesians, the initial individual was a man named Thales. He did his work around 600 B.C., give or take a decade. So he was the first of the first of the first.

As Donald Palmer writes:

Philosophy makes its first self-presentation in three consecutive generations of thinkers from the little colony of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor — today’s Turkey — in the sixth century.

The first recorded philosopher is Thales of Miletus.

Apparently, he did not write a book, or if he did, it is long lost.

So, this most fascinating fellow — potentially the world’s first philosophy — did not leave directly anything for modern readers. How does one know about him? What did he think?

Although there is no major text written by Thales left for us, there are a few dubious and sketchy quotes. Most of those are recorded in books written by Aristotle, who wrote about three hundred years after Thales. Donald Palmer reports:

If we can trust Aristotle and his commentators, Thales’s argument was was something like this:

If there is change, there must be some thing that changes, yet does not change. There must be a unity behind the apparent plurality of things, a Oneness disguised by the superficial plurality of the world. Otherwise the world would not be a world; rather, it would be a disjointed grouping of unrelated fragments.

So what is the nature of this unifying, ultimately unchanging substance that is disguised from us by the appearance of constant change?

Thales was looking for a unifying and systematic principle behind physical reality — behind the phenomena which people detect with their five senses. What is the basic and foundational stuff of the world? Of the universe?

The questions which Thales posed are not that much different than the questions of modern physics more than 2,000 years later. The search for a unifying principle behind all forms of matter is the essence of subatomic physics. Likewise, the search for a unity behind all forms of energy, and eventually, behind both matter and energy, is a common theme among the great physicists of the past, present, and foreseeable future.

The physicists of the modern age look to various and increasingly smaller subatomic particles, look to a continuum of electromagnetic energy, and look to equations like Einstein’s to encompass both matter and energy.

Thales looked to something rather common yet remarkably subtle. He wondered if the underlying principle of all physical reality might be water.

It’s easy to dismiss Thales as simple-minded, primitive, or naive. But the reader might consider his choice more patiently. Water is one of the few things which is readily experienced in all three states: solid, liquid, and gas. Water constitutes the majority of the earth’s surface: 75% by some accounts. Water is also essential to all known forms of life, and constitutes a majority of the bodies of all known plants and animals.

So Thales could have done worse.

In addition to seeking a unifying and systematic principle for the sensible world, Thales was also trying to develop a conceptual explanation of that world, an explanation that would add a layer of depth beyond the already-available mythological explanations.

Contrary to the current casual usage of the word, ‘myth’ does not refer exclusively to falsehood. There are true myths. A myth is an explanation by means of a narrative. True myths give an accurate explanation of some aspect of reality, but they often give an incomplete explanation. They are true but incomplete.

Thales, his fellow Milesians, and the Presocratics generally, sought to give conceptual explanations of the physical world around them. This is why their early philosophy is often so closely bound to physics. There was no sharp distinction between physics and philosophy in those days.

Thales thought that everything was water. Modern physicists think that everything is atoms or subatomic particles. The difference may not be so large.

The Unreliable Sources for Reliably Influential Inventiveness: The Obscure But Powerful Effect of Presocratic Thought

The good news about the Presocratic philosophers is that they are among the most thought-provoking, creative, and inventive thinkers in the history of philosophy. The bad news is that they are among the worst-documented authors ever.

That means that modern readers have very little information about them, and very little reliable information about exactly what they wrote or hypothesized. As Donald Palmer writes, “the problem is that in fact very little is known about the pre-Socratic philosophers. Most of the books that they wrote had already disappeared by the time that the philosopher Aristotle” summarized and explained their views.

Aristotle, who lived from 384 B.C. to 322 B.C., “tried to catalog and criticize their views.” Aristotle wrote about these Presocratic philosophers, and what they wrote and asserted. The problem is, modern readers can’t be sure of how accurate Aristotle was. Did Aristotle understand the Presocratics correctly? Did he report about them accurately?

Donald Palmer explains:

Today’s understanding of the pre-Socratics is based mostly on summaries of their ideas by Aristotle and by later Greek writers who had heard of their views only by word of mouth. Many of these accounts are surely inaccurate because of distortions caused by repetition over several generations by numerous individuals. (Have you ever played the game called Telephone, in which a complicated message is whispered to a player, who then whispers it to the next player, and so on, until the message — or what’s left of it — is announced to the whole group by the last player in the circle?) Also, these summaries often contained anachronistic ideas, that is, ideas from the later time projected back into the earlier views. Only fragments of the original works remain in most cases today, and even those few existing passages do not always agree with one another. Remember, these “books” were all written by hand on papyrus (a fragile early paper made from the crushed and dried pulp of an Egyptian water plant), and all editions of these books were copied manually by professional scribes. Furthermore, the meaning of many of the fragments is debatable, both because of the “fragmentary” nature of the scraps — key words are missing or illegible — and because of the obscure style and vocabulary in which many of these works were written. Nevertheless, a tradition concerning the meaning of the pre-Socratics had already developed by Aristotle’s time, and it is that version of their story that influenced later philosophers and scientists. Aristotle is not the only source of our information about the pre-Socratics, but unfortunately most of the additional information comes from post-Aristotelian commentators giving interpretations of Aristotle’s remarks. We do not know to what extent the material provided by these other sources is informed by extraneous sources. So Aristotle appears to be our real source, and we have no clear idea of his accuracy because he paraphrases the various pre-Socratics.

Donald Palmer summarizes the situation bluntly: “Therefore, the tradition” which he describes “is flawed and distorted in many ways.”

So, if this data is so garbled, if this information is so distorted, why should modern readers invest their time reading it?

It’s worth wading through these disjointed and obscure texts because the Presocratics started exploring so many questions which lie at the three-way intersection of mathematics, philosophy, and physics. They explored exponential calculations — algebra class before algebra had been discovered — as they investigated rapidly accumulating accelerations and asymptotic curves. They hinted at calculus 2,000 years before Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton discovered calculus.

Scholars continue to explore this tantalizing yet frustrating batch of quotes and snippets from the world’s first philosophers because they directly connect with the most modern, and post-modern, questions about the universe.

Revealing the Foundations of the Universe: The Presocratics Establish Modern Physics

Who were the Presocratics? They were a group of philosophers who did most of their work between 600 B.C. and 400 B.C., give or take a few decades. They did not all live in the same place; they were separated by hundreds of miles, at a time when travel and communication were much slower than they are now.

They did not all know each other, and they certainly did not all agree on many topics. They are divided into a number of different subgroups.

Yet they are all categorized together, and for good reasons. Yes, it’s true that they all — or most of them — did their work prior to the famous career of Socrates. But there is a better reason for lumping them all together. It’s the way they thought — the way they reasoned. Even when they came to different conclusions, they were using similar methods.

Donald Palmer explains that “the thinkers who were active in Greece between” 600 B.C. and 350 B.C. “are known today as the pre-Socratic philosophers, even though the last group so designated were actually contemporaries of Socrates.” Those dates are, of course, approximate, because these kinds of trends fade into, and out of, existence in a gradual way.

While the beginning and ending of a construct like the Presocratic era is fuzzy, the life of Socrates had definite beginning and ending points. Socrates was born in 469 B.C. and died in 399 B.C.

Donald Palmer explains some common threads among the diverse group: “What all the pre-Socratic philosophers have in common is their attempt to create general theories of the cosmos (kosmos is the Greek term for “world”) not simply by repeating the tales of” what happened, but rather explaining why and how it happened.

The Presocratics thought that myths — even when they are true — are not sufficient explanations. A myth is an explanation by means of narrative. A myth can be true or false. In slang and casual speech, ‘myth’ is sometimes used to refer to a falsehood, but that is not its meaning in philosophical discourse. The Presocratics pointed out that, if a conceptual explanation was given in addition to a myth, then the net amount of knowledge and understanding would be greater.

For example: a person might ask about how the first men arrived on the moon and walked around on it. A mythological answer would talk about Wernher von Braun and Neil Armstrong and the Apollo spacecraft, etc.. That myth would be true as far as it went, but it lacks some information.

A conceptual answer would talk about the forces of gravity, how much acceleration a spacecraft needs to reach a certain speed, what the escape velocity is for earth orbit, etc.

The Presocratics wanted to explain physical phenomena, not by giving a narrative, “but by using observation and reason to construct general theories that would explain to the” rational “and curious mind the secrets behind the appearances in the world.” A conceptual answer articulates principles which can be applied beyond the case in question. A mythological answer, even when it’s true, is usually limited to a concrete and specific instance.

Another commonality was that all the pre-Socratic philosophers stemmed from the outlying borders of the Greek world: islands in the Ionian Sea or Greek colonies in Italy or along the coast of Persia (in today’s Turkey).

Some scholars speculate that social life on the edges of the Greek Empire was more interesting than life back home on the Greek mainland, and that this circumstance occasioned the birth of philosophy. This is an interesting hypothesis, with plausible arguments both for and against it.

In any case, “knowledge of these thinkers is tremendously important not only for understanding the Greek world of their time, but” for gaining insights into modern physics, modern mathematics, and modern philosophy. Of course, one must also define when the modern era begins.

One of the reasons that the study of the Presocratics is good “for grasping the origins of” most subsequent “philosophy and science” is that they developed a concept of matter. One might look at different objects: a tree, an iceberg, a distant planet.

Those objects seem dissimilar to one another, but the Presocratics saw that they were all physical objects, and that there is some underlying commonality shared by all physical objects. They are all composed of matter. This is an abstraction. Abstraction is important in philosophy, in physics, and in all rational thought.

The Latin words from which the word ‘abstract’ arises mean to “pull away” or to “take off.” In abstraction, the thinker “pulls away” a concept or a principle from the specific instance in which she or he finds it. Having separated the concept from the context, she or he can then apply that concept elsewhere — or everywhere.

The Presocratics developed a way of understanding the universe which was systematic and unified. Their understanding revealed an underlying structure to reality which made modern physics possible. This understanding included that reality is intelligible, i.e., that it can be understood; that some laws of nature are universal, i.e., they apply everywhere and everywhen; and that certain elements of logic and mathematics are the foundations of the universe.

Topics in Early Greek Philosophy: The Presocratics Explore New Disciplines

Before Siddhartha formulated his thoughts in India, and before Confucius in China, the first philosophers lived and worked in Greek territories and colonies. Thales, who is reasonably cited as the world’s first philosopher, did his work around 600 B.C.

What constitutes philosophy? What was it that the Greeks did to qualify as the inventors of philosophy? Donald Palmer writes that “early Greek philosophers reframed the perennial puzzles about reality in such a way as to emphasize the workings of nature rather than the” dramatic explanatory power of a narrative. In other words, the Greek found a new way to explain things. In addition to myth, the Greeks began to formulate conceptual explanations.

Mythical explanations are narratives; in this sense of ‘myth,’ it’s important to remember that there are “true myths.” This is in contrast to the colloquial or informal use of ‘myth’ as a synonym for ‘falsehood.’

So the birth of philosophy among Greeks is, in part, about the “how” of explanations — aside from whether those explanations are true or accurate.

Not only did the Greeks arguably invent philosophy, they also created many of the various subtopics within philosophy. Donald Palmer identifies some of these specific subdisciplines:

This new direction represents the beginnings of a way of thinking that the Greeks would soon call “philosophy” — the love of wisdom. We can discern in these early efforts what we now take to be the main fields of the discipline that we too call philosophy: ontology (theory of being); epistemology (theory of knowledge); axiology (theory of value), which includes ethics, or moral philosophy (theory of right behavior), and aesthetics (theory of beauty, or theory of art); and logic (theory of correct inference).

One particular subtopic, cosmology, fascinated many of the earliest philosophers, including Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Cosmology asks about the foundational principles of the universe: What constitutes the universe? What keeps the universe in existence? What are the underlying essential components of the universe?

Donald Palmer remarks about these earliest philosophers:

They tended to demote cosmogony (theories about the origins of the world) and promote cosmology (theories about the nature of the world).

In addition to getting credit for inventing philosophy, the Greeks can plausibly get credit for inventing the natural sciences. To be sure, early Babylonians, Egyptians, and Persians made some interesting astronomical observations. In order to give the Greeks the honor of inventing the natural sciences, a clear boundary between the mere collection of observational data and scientific reasoning would be necessary.

“In fact, the theories put forth in ancient Greece could be called the origins of” modern science and mathematics “with as much justification as they can be called the origins of” philosophy “even though at that early period no such distinctions could be made.” Among ancient thinkers, there was no sharp separation between philosophy and the natural sciences.

Even today, there are ambiguous areas of overlap between mathematics, philosophy, and physics.

Among the Presocratics, thinkers like Zeno of Elea are still cited today in university departments of physics and mathematics. Zeno wrestled with concepts of time, space, and infinity — and wrestled with them in a way which kept his musings relevant for 2,000 years.

Other presocratics, primarily the Milesians, worked out a relationship between density, heat, and motion — anticipating the physicist Robert Brown by two millennia. The Milesians were the philosophers who lived in or near the city of Miletus: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes.

Roughly, I would say that science deals with problems that can be addressed experimentally by subsuming the observable events that puzzle us under the dominion of natural laws and by showing how these laws are related causally to those events. Philosophy, on the other hand, deals with problems that require a speculative rather than an experimental approach. Such problems often require conceptual analysis (the logical scrutiny of general ideas) rather than observation or data gathering.

Before the birth of Socrates, around 470 B.C., these earliest philosophers had invented philosophy, invented most of its subdisciplines, and laid the foundations of modern physics and modern mathematics.

Greek Beginnings: The Origin of the Word ‘Philosophy’

While debatable, it is convenient to take the Ionian philosophers on the west coast of Turkey, formerly known as Asia Minor or Anatolia, as the first philosophers. Certainly, the Greeks dominated philosophy for its first few centuries: There was little philosophical activity outside of the Greek lands, so philosophy was not only predominantly Greek during these years, but exclusively so.

So it was that the word ‘philosophy’ arose out of the Greek language. ‘Sophia’ is a Greek word for wisdom, and ‘Philo’ is a Greek word for love. Philosophy is etymologically the love of wisdom, as Donald Palmer writes:

The Greek word “Logos” is the source of the English word “logic” as well as all the “logies” in terms like “biology,” “sociology,” and “psychology,” where “logos” means the theory, or study, or rationalization of something. “Logos” also means “word” in Greek.

Reasoning is impossible without words. “Logos” can mean “word,” but it can also mean reasoning or any ongoing interactive linguistic activity, “so it involves the act of” writing, “or setting forth an idea in a clear manner.” Philosophy is impossible without language, and without writing, only simplistic reasoning is possible. Complex trains of thought require writing.

But there are complications to this simple story about how the word ‘philosophy’ came to be. The Greek language has at least four words that can be translated into English as ‘love.’ Why was ‘philo’ chosen, instead of another similar word? The Greek language reflected the awareness that there are different types of love. A person might love ice cream, and parents love their children. The same word ‘love’ is used to refer to two different relationships.

Likewise, the word ‘gnosis,’ from which the English word ‘cognition’ arises, could have been used instead of ‘sophia.’

So the simple story about the origins of the word ‘philosophy’ is not so simple after all.

“Logos,” therefore, designates a certain kind of thinking about the world, a kind of logical analysis that places things in the context of reason and explains them with the pure force of thought. Such an intellectual exercise was supposed to lead to wisdom (Sophia) and those who dedicated themselves to Logos were thought of as lovers of wisdom (love = philo), hence as philosophers.

Greek philosophy began around 600 B.C., plus or minus a decade, and Greek philosophers were active until sometime after 100 A.D. There were quiet periods during those centuries when philosophy was inactive, and other periods when it was prolific.

It was in this context that the word “Logos” was applied to Jesus, and to the Hebrew concept of God which Jesus made accessible to larger audiences.

“What was there before philosophy, before Logos? There was Mythos — a certain way of” explaining things by means of narrative, i.e., by telling a story. Used in this way, the word ‘myth’ doesn’t necessarily mean falsehood. Contrary to everyday usage of the word, in philosophy, one can speak of a true myth. Myths tell of “events that caused the world to be as it is now.”

It’s understandable that philosophers would like to get rid of false myths. People like to think that they’re correct, and that what they believe is true.

But if some myths are true, why would philosophers still want to investigate the matter and find another, Logos-based, explanation?

Philosophy was, in part, a drive to develop concept-based explanations, which not only explained why things are the way they are, but explained it in a way which used reason instead of narrative, which used abstractions instead of concrete details.

In some situations, it is possible for myth-based and logos-based explanations to coexist. A true myth can give a specific and historical narrative to explain a certain state of affairs, while philosophy can explain the same state of affairs conceptually.