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.
