The task of the reader is to compare both sets of ideas. This task will require thought about evenhanded and fair readings of the two competitors. A stalemate or a tie is a perfectly acceptable outcome — as is the production of a third alternative arising from the comparison. The task is more about the thinking process and less about the outcome of a final judgment.
Every disagreement also involves a certain amount of agreement. While no two philosophers agree on everything, it is also true that no two philosophers disagree on everything. In the case of Thales and his successors, Donald Palmer points out that:
Several generations of Thales’s followers agreed with his primary insight — that the plurality of kinds of things in the world must be reducible to one category — but none of them seems to have accepted his formula that everything is water.
The second philosopher has two tasks: First, he must first produce reasons or evidence which support his disagreement with the first philosopher. Second, he must produce reasons or evidence which support his innovation, his new idea which is proposed as a replacement for the first philosopher’s idea.
So who was the world’s second philosopher?
Thales taught his philosophy, whether in a formal academic setting, or merely by example, we do not know. “His student Anaximander” lived from around 610 B.C. to around 546 B.C., and was “also from the city of Miletus, said that if all things were water, then long ago everything would have returned to water.”
Anaximander was in some sense a “student” of Thales, whether through formal education or through merely being exposed, firsthand or secondhand, to the ideas of Thales. It is not certain whether or not the two men ever met in person, although it is very likely, given that they lived in the same city at roughly the same time.
In any case, Anaximander argues against Thales — in the philosophical sense of ‘argumentation’ which means a calm presentation of a line of reasoning, not an emotional quarrel — by a technique which amounts to saying, “If what you say is true … ”
This technique is called reductio ad absurdum or simply reductio for short. The writer grants his opponent’s view, and then shows that this view entails something clearly illogical or false.
Anaximander’s first argument amounts to this: If it were true that everything is essentially water, then by now, everything would have returned to the simple state of water, and there would be nothing in the universe besides water.
In a slightly different argument, Anaximander points out that fire is the opposite of water, and asks how it would be possible for water to produce fire. He asks it as a rhetorical question, i.e., he expects no answer, because he thinks that the answer is obvious to everyone — water can’t possibly produce fire.
The reader will recall that the “principle of charity” is necessary here. One could quickly retort that, from the viewpoint of modern chemistry, water is hydrogen and oxygen, and can easily give rise to fire. But such a retort would miss the point.
Donald Palmer gives a more detailed account of Anaximander’s line of reasoning:
Anaximander asked how water could become its deadly enemy, fire — how a quality could give rise to its opposite. That is, if observable objects were really just water in various states of agitation — as are ice and steam — then eventually all things would have settled back into their primordial liquid state. Aristotle paraphrases him this way: If ultimate reality “were something specific like water, the other elements would be annihilated by it. For the different elements have contrariety with one another … If one of them were unlimited the others would have ceased to exist by now.” (Notice that if this view can be accurately attributed to Anaximander, then he subscribed to an early view of the principle of entropy, according to which all things have a tendency to seek a state of equilibrium.)
The modern reader might be tempted to agree with half of what Anaximander asserts here, and disagree with the other half.
One the one hand, the tendency of physical systems to move toward a state of equilibrium, which can be variously characterized as chaos or homogeneity, is a valuable insight. Anaximander might be credited with anticipating the famous second law of thermodynamics, and is a forerunner of thinkers like Rudolf Clausius, Max Planck, and Ludwig Boltzmann.
On the other hand, he blithely assumes that something can’t become its opposite, or that a quality can’t give rise to its opposite. After Anaximander, some later philosophers — among them, G.W.F. Hegel — will assert the view that a thing or a quality will always give rise to its opposite.
In any case, the world’s first philosophical revolution — Anaximander’s opposition to Thales — is groundbreaking and worth studying.
