Reductionism and the Milesian Philosophers

Sorting through the ideas of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, the modern reader can be forgiven for finding some of what they thought to be odd. But with sympathetic reading, their proposals can be understood in ways which do, after all, make some sense.

The common thread connecting these three philosophers from Miletus is a project now called ‘reductionism.’

Looking at the variety in the world around them, these men asked whether there was some unifying reality which produced all of it, constituted all of it, and made it all intelligible. For these three thinkers, this was primarily on the level of physical objects.

What do a flower, a rock, a cloud, and the planet Jupiter all have in common? They are all composed of matter. But matter manifests itself in these divergent — very divergent — ways. What makes all these different things fall into the same category?

Phrasing the questions in a twenty-first century way, one might ask, what properties does all matter share? Certainly, a flower growing in a garden and the planet Jupiter seem to have very little in common. If they are both made of matter, then it is necessary to more closely understand what matter is.

The three Milesian philosophers were looking for a universal and ubiquitous principle — the basis of all matter — which would be the source and substance for everything. In this way, they are not so different from modern physicists.

The modern answer to the Milesian question might be: “Everything is made of protons, electrons, and neutrons.”

Seen in this way, the suggestion that everything is foundationally composed of water, or air, or some indeterminate stuff which has the capability of becoming water or air or fire or dirt, is not so odd. Interpreted with charity, these suggestions make sense, even if they’re not quite correct.

Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen is the most common element in the earth’s crust, and hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. These two substances are everywhere in the environments which human beings inhabit. The rocks, plants, animals, and other objects encountered in daily life on earth are full of these two substances.

The choice of air as a potential primordial source for everything likewise has some reasonable aspects. The air on Earth is approximately 21% oxygen, and as noted above, oxygen is ubiquitous. Earth’s air is often laden with water, whether as clouds or as invisible vapor, which therefore includes hydrogen. Additionally, air is often filled with dust, which could be fine particulates of silicon, iron, or anything else.

The hypothesis of some primary substance called the ‘indeterminate’ — the ‘boundless’ or the ‘unlimited’ in various attempts to translate Anaximander’s Greek into English — resembles the concept of an undifferentiated stem cell, which can become any of many different types of cell, and resembles the concept of basic particles in physics, which can form atoms of any type.

The reductionist project of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes is, then, not as odd as it seems, and has a significant similarity to aspects of modern physics.

Anaximander: Order Out of Chaos

The career of Anaximander was both destructive and constructive. He formulated objects to the views of Thales, and then assembled lines of reasoning to support his own views.

Against Thales, he argued that finding the systemic principle of the universe in any one element was too limited, too specific. For one particular element to be the source and foundational principle for the universe seemed impossible to Anaximander, because that one element would be locked into the narrowness of not being any of the other elements.

So Anaximander proposes a view that there is some indeterminate stuff that is not any one element, but contains the potential to give rise to each and all of them, as Donald Palmer writes:

For Anaximander, the ultimate stuff behind the four elements could not itself be one of the elements. It would have to be an unobservable, unspecific, indeterminate something-or-other, which he called the Boundless, or the Unlimited (apeiron in Greek). It would have to be boundless, unlimited, and unspecific because anything specific is opposed to all the other specific things in existence. (Water is not fire, which in turn is not air, and air is not earth [not dirt and rock]). Yet the Boundless is opposed to nothing, because everything is in it.

Anaximander’s language is vague, but the modern reader can consider concrete examples from the twenty-first century. In complex organisms, a stem cell is indeterminate, or undetermined — it can eventually become one of a long list of different and mutually exclusive types of cells.

Likewise, in the plasmatic chaos in the center of the star, subatomic particles are freely existing which will later constitute definite, but distinct, types of atoms: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, etc.

So Anaximander’s proposal for a limitless boundless something as a foundational principle for the universe isn’t too bad, as Donald Palmer explains:

Anaximander seems to have imagined the Boundless as originally moving effortlessly in a great cosmic vortex that was interrupted by some disaster (a Big Bang?), and that disaster caused opposites — dry and wet, cold and hot — to separate off from the vortex and to appear to us not only as qualities but as the four basic elements: earth, water, air, and fire.

In his analysis of Thales, Anaximander presented an early version of the concept of entropy: the idea that, without some force to the contrary, the universe tended toward some homogeneous equilibrium.

It is also possible to read into Anaximander an early version of the hypothesis that life is the principle which opposes entropy: action which moves the universe away from entropy is life. The biological process might be the one force in the universe which moves things toward more order, and which makes more complex structures.

Rebellion among Philosophers: Anaximander Questions Thales

Given that Thales is widely considered to be the world’s first philosopher, it was left to the world’s second philosopher to be the world’s first intellectual rebel. It was a historical inevitability that, Thales having expressed some views, someone else would later express different views.

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.

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.