The Presocratics

 

The early philosophers of Greece, whose writings have survived only in the form of fragments, which later Greek writers fortunately considered worth quoting are of unique value for anyone interested in the intellectual history of mankind. The period of less than two hundred years between Thales and Democritus shows a development in the art of philosophical inquiry that is quite unparalleled in history. No where else, not even in ancient India, is there shown so striking a combination of conceptual imagination, attempted linguistic precision, and concern for intellectual consistency. Although the dialogues of Plato and the vast explorations of Aristotle speak more comprehensively and pursue lines of thought more adequately, neither of those achievements would have been possible without the two centuries of analysis and speculation that had gone before.

Since Hegel it has been customary in histories of ancient philosophy to conceive the course of early Greek metaphysics as falling into four main stages, represented by the Milesians, Heraclitus, the Eleatics, and the pluralist naturalists. There is, to be sure, a fairly plain logical development in this arrangement, so far as it goes. We can apply it profitably but not without a critical awareness of two limitations: in the first place, the classification applies not to the ethical but only to the metaphysical side of Presocratic philosophy, having primary reference to three fundamental and interrelated questions: the ontological, What is basically most real and why; the cosmological, How and in what sense, and perhaps by what agency, can change occur; and the epistemological, How can we validate our knowledge of anything. In the second place, even within these limits, the traditional structure ignores, as every structure must do, the rich varieties of interests, inquires, and opinions, and the individual tone which mark each philosopher when he has studied and responded to without insisting upon the structure. With these two qualifications the main direction of Presocratic metaphysical thought may be said to fall into the following four-fold schema.

It is customary to call the philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. "Presocratics." Although, in fact, four of them were roughly contemporary with Socrates.

 

Phases of Presocratic Philosophy

 

The First Stage

Represented by the Milesians

(1) The three philosophers of Miletus (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) sought a principle by which the nature of the world could be explained, and gradually they became more and more conscious of the question of becoming—of how the initial substance, whether water or air or an unlimited reservoir of potential qualities, could transform itself into existing things and qualities so numerous and various.

The Second Stage

(2) Heraclitus carried the idea of becoming to the ultimate extreme, denying the existence of any unchanging substance, and declaring that everything without exception is subject to change—faster or slower, but in any case unremitting and inevitable.

 

The Third Stage

Represented by the Eleatic school.

(3) Parmenides (followed by Zeno and Melissus, the other principle members of the Eleatic School) opposed the doctrine of universal flux by going to the opposite extreme and dismissing all change as necessarily unreal and illusory, holding it to be rationally inconceivable that what was not should begin to be or that what was should cease to be. What truly is, he argued, must be what it is independently of time; hence only Being can exist and all becoming is illusory. The other two Eleatics differ from Parmenides only in approach and details.

 

The Fourth Stage

(4) The metaphysical reconstructionists who followed Parmenides are Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the atomist Leucippus and Democritus. Despite the large differences among them, they share the same general attempt to reconcile Parmenides’ principle, that reality must be one and changeless, with the obvious fact of plurality and ongoing change. This they do by postulating a plurality of unchanging basic entities, and hence explaining the changes that we see going on around us as change relations among those primal entities.

Independent of the schema, and not assimilable to it without gross distortion, are the philosophical views and approaches represented by early Greek religious thought, Pythagoreanism, the Sophistic revolt against metaphysics and medical philosophy. These four non-conformist types of philosophical expression raise somewhat different questions; establish different perspectives of inquiry, from those represented by the central group. All such perspectives find a place, in one way or another, amid the wide-ranging inquiries and discussions of Plato’s dialogues, the study of which is the natural sequence of the study of the Presocratics.

 

For the purpose of this introduction we need only be concerned with the Sophistic revolt against metaphysics. This is the point we will begin our study of Greek Ethics.