And yet Thales endures, and clings to his title of “first” philosopher, despite the fact that we have only a few small textual fragments from him, and they reveal a cosmology which is naive and overly-simplistic. He retains his title of “first” for reasons best described in Friedrich Nietzsche’s defense of him - and thereby also set the trend for several centuries of pre-Socratic philosophy. As Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes,
Thales could, with some right, have claimed the ideas of matter, of physics, of science, and of philosophy as his inventions. However strange this may seem, all of these ideas had to be discovered. And to be discovered, mythology had to be abandoned. To state - as Thales did - that “all things are water” may seem an unpromising beginning for science and philosophy as we know them today; but, against the background of mythology from which it rose, it was revolutionary. The break was not complete; it could not have been. Thales still had no abstract idea of matter, as opposed to an imaginative picture of a fluid sea; the two were mixed together. And his idea of change was still based on a feeling that “all things are full of soul.” But he had asked a new kind of question. His question has given distinctive shape to Western thought.
The question posed by Thales, if perhaps tacitly, is the question of cosmology: what is the nature and structure of the universe? what is its origin and design? His answer, if laughably wrong, is understandable in the sense that water is 75% of the earth’s surface, is 75% of every human being and most other living creatures, is necessary for all forms of life, is the only substance commonly seen in all three states (solid, liquid, gas), and is found everywhere except in the vacuum of deep space between planets.
The rejection of mythology by Thales led to other pre-Socratic philosophers, but perhaps most of all to Xenophanes, who would reject anthropomorphic deities of polytheistic mythologies, and instead move forward to a rational conception of God: invisible, eternal, and monotheistic.
To seek to provide an answer to the question, What are all things?, required tremendous insight and imagination. For the question assumes that everything forms a part of some single world of being, and that all things have some common property. It raises the question of what being is, as opposed to less general questions about what these or those particular being are. And prior to answering the question, Thales had assumed that there is enough system among the infinite variety of things in the world to permit some sort of single answer. This assumption marks the beginning of philosophy.
In Thales, then, we see already the notion of system, the notion that the world is rational and understandable - that the universe is constructed with axioms and principles. This is the foundational assumption of physics and chemistry. Thales has indeed earned his title as “first” philosopher.
