unreasonable.

The Presocratics

Cicero famously said that Socrates brought Philosophy down from the heavens and settled it in our cities and homes [1]. Although such distinctions are never wholly accurate, it is useful to consider the philosophers that came before Socrates as a group, and to recognise in these disparate thinkers certain shared concerns.

The first of the Presocratics, Thales of Miletus, was born into a world defined by the myths and gods of Homer and Hesiod. Thales and his followers began to describe the universe differently, replacing myths with scientific explanations. The petty, squabbling gods of Homer became, in the hands of the philosophers, natural forces or principles. This led to systematic claims about the nature of reality and the world of appearances, and metaphysical distinctions that would receive their fullest expression in the works of Plato and Aristotle. In a real sense, the Presocratics are the first philosophers of the Western tradition, and although most of their ideas have survived only in poetic fragments or the testimony of others, we can recognise themes that are still of interest to philosophers today.

Although not sceptical in the modern sense, the Presocratics approached the claims of religion with a new freedom. They recruited a wide number of disciplines to support their ideas, from science and astronomy to psychology and philosophy. Instead of the capricious actions of the Homeric gods, events were considered as part of a natural system with discoverable and consistent laws. The motive forces were sometimes described as divine (“All things are full of gods”, said Thales) but, importantly, they did not behave like the gods of the poets: these ‘gods’ were observable, natural forces that provided rather than required explanation (what Aristotle would later call formal and efficient causes). For example, Pythagoras believed that the universe was ordered by mathematics; Heraclitus by the fiery ‘logos’; Anaxagoras by the animating power of mind. The Homeric gods began to lose their hold on the imagination, and as early as the sixth century Xenophanes was openly mocking the childish anthropomorphism of the poets:

If cows and horses or lions had hands and could draw... then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, cows like cows.

This new method of enquiry was scientific in nature. Many of the presocratic philosophers were credited with technological and scientific advances that were the fruits of this enquiry. Thales reportedly predicted a solar eclipse and brought the Egyptians’ knowledge of geometry to the Greeks; Anaximander drew the first map of the world, and invented the gnomon (the projecting indicator on a sundial); Xenophanes speculated about the fossil record after observing impressions of sea-creatures and bay leaves in rocks; Anaxagoras anticipated the theory of the Big Bang and the expanding universe. In the second half of the fifth century, Democritus and the atomists were describing the world in terms that sound eerily modern:

By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: in reality atoms and void.

These enquiries led to one of the most enduring questions in philosophy – the distinction between appearance and reality. From the beginning, the Presocratics were concerned with establishing the true nature of things. Thales argued that water was the fundamental substance of the universe; Anaximenes favoured air; Heraclitus thought fire was a better description; Xenophanes believed that everything was made of clouds (properly, earth and water). Empedocles adopted a more pluralist position, insisting that all four elements of earth, air, fire and water were affected by the motive forces of Love and Strife; Anaximander favoured an original, indefinite substance that was different again from the four elements; Democritus insisted that everything was composed of atoms in a void. Although the world appeared more or less the same to each of them, the Presocratics looked beneath the surface of appearances to discover what Aristotle would call the material cause of things.

Heraclitus and Democritus
Democritus and Heraclitus by Moreelse

This tension between appearance and reality is most fully explored by Heraclitus and Parmenides. Heraclitus was fond of pointing out contradictions in the world of appearances. Things (like fire) are continually in a state of change or flux:

... you cannot step twice into the same river, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.

And things often become their opposites:

... the way up and the way down is one and the same... good and ill are one... couples are things whole and things not whole...

Although the universe is ordered by the unifying ‘logos’, its most salient characteristic is change. This would become a common theme in later philosophy right up to Hegel, but the cryptic aphorisms of Heraclitus were challenged in his own time by Parmenides and his followers.

Parmenides insisted that the observable, changing world of Heraclitus was just an illusion. In reality, there is only Being: a perfect sphere, indivisible, without beginning or end and not subject to temporal change. One of Parmenides’ followers, Zeno of Elea, constructed paradoxes to illustrate the idea that all things are one. For example, he demonstrated that for an arrow to reach a distant point, it must first travel halfway. But before reaching halfway, it must travel a quarter of the way; before that an eighth of the way; and so on ad infinitum. In other words the arrow can never start its journey since, as all things are one, motion is impossible. Parmenides himself argued that since we can speak of the same thing at different times, the things of which we speak must remain the same. The only true reality is unchanging, but it takes a philosopher to realise it.

This opposition between the changing world of perception and the unchanging world of reason would lead directly to the metaphysical systems of Plato and Aristotle. The Presocratics also introduced other enduring questions into the philosophical tradition. Pythagoras, for example, believed in the immortality of the soul and the mystical possibility of the transmigration of souls (some sources claim he was killed by an angry mob when his escape was blocked by a field of beans which he refused to trample). Empedocles proposed an early theory of evolution through the survival of the fittest; he himself died when he leapt into Mount Etna to prove he was a god. This intimate connection between philosophy and life (and death) would, of course, be most famously illustrated by Socrates.

In Socrates’ own time, the popular perception of philosophers owed much to the Sophists, a group of intinerant teachers who charged money to teach ‘excellence’ (arete) to young aristocrats. In practice, this meant the skills of rhetoric and persuasion: taking their cue from Protagoras, the Sophists were known for ‘making the worse argument appear the better’ and represented a form of relativism best summed up in Protagoras’ famous aphorism:

Man is the measure of all things: of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.

In the Clouds, Aristophanes attributes to Socrates the worst excesses of the Sophists. In fact, such relativism was strongly opposed by Plato who believed in objective, transcendental truths. Although the term ‘sophist’ quickly developed negative connotations, the Sophists’ concern with language and the ambiguity of arguments would be revisited later by the Hellenistic Sceptics.

  1. Socrates autem primus philosophiam devocavit e caelo et in urbibus conlocavit et in domus etiam introduxit et coegit de vita et moribus rebusque bonis et malis quaerere. (Tusculan Disputations V.10). [∧]

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