Hallo, I am Bin Song, a philosophy and religion professor from Washington College. In this episode, I will use examples of Pre-Socratic natural philosophers to explain what is ancient Greek Philosophy.

Let’s start from the topic of language. Language is a wonderful gift for human beings. That is what distinguishes us from other species, and also distinguishes each human individual. Coming to teach in this eldest American liberal arts college, I find one most evident change students undergo in their studies is that they can speak and write very differently when they are sophomores or juniors from when they are freshmen. And I am very happy to witness these changes.

In general, we expect that a student of liberal arts can achieve the following excellences regarding their linguistic skills:

Firstly, you can express yourself clearly, in both oral and written forms.

Secondly, you can talk to different people. This means people of different careers, different cultures/countries, different genders, different ages, etc.

Thirdly, you know how to argue. This means on the one hand, you can convincingly argue for your own case; but on the other hand, if you hear disagreement from your peers, you listen to it, know how to deal with it, and eventually, are good at learning from disagreement.

Fourthly, based upon all the above skills, you can work together within a group or community to resolve problems.

Among all these skills, the most crucial and difficult one, in my view, is the third one, that is, how to learn from disagreement. Normally, people’s attitude towards disagreement tends to be ill-tempered. You may easily get angered when you hear someone disagrees with your view, and you’ll see it as a personal attack. Then, you will try to attack back so that you see other people either as friends who share exactly the same view with you or as enemies who, in some extreme cases, are even treated as below humanity. However, there is another better attitude towards disagreement, which is more noble, more decent, and thus, more human. That is, you try your best to argue for your case. However, you are also open to different ideas. You know you can be wrong, and others may be right. Therefore, even if you hear disagreement from your peers, you listen to it, and prepare to change or revise you own pre-established views so that you can find a better solution to concerned problems. Most importantly, you will feel happy about the advancement of knowledge you get from the process, and you are ready to work with anyone who shares the same mentality to learn from disagreement. You also feel quite confident about your role in the process, because your confidence does not derive from your command of absolute knowledge, or absolute authority, which is impossible, but your confidence will be built upon your willingness and skills to learn, change, and make progress towards the goal you and your peers collectively set. Nowadays, we call this sort of collective human activity as “rational, open inquiry,” and described people who have this mentality as having some “scientific spirit.”

Confucius once said that a noble person can harmonize without uniformity; but a petty person can only strive for uniformity without harmony (Analects: 13.23). The former means that one can learn from disagreement, but the latter implies a failure to do so.

But in the west, where does “scientific spirit” come from? If we look at the entire history of western liberal arts education and scientific inquiry, can we find a point when humans started to be fond of or look at highly this sort of activities? The answer is ancient Greek philosophy in around 6 or 5th century B.C.E

In the following, I will tell a story of pre-Socratic philosophy to explain why the scientific spirit of rational and open inquiry starts from ancient Greek philosophy, and therefore, why any student of liberal arts today still needs to study it.

The first philosopher in the West is called Thales, who came from a coastline city of ancient Greece called Miletus. He had a wonderful proposition to declare to the entire world, which also turns out the first philosophical proposition in the history of western thought. He says, the world originates from water. In other words, water is the origin, the primal matter, from which everything else in the world is generated.

Since Thales thought so, he must have asked a question which, according to my view, is more important than the answer he gave us. The question is that: what is the world all about? Yes, we can imagine that at a certain point of human history, a man called Thales started to be confused about the so many things he observed about this existing world. The sun, the water, the tree, different people, who are traveling everywhere and see vastly different types of cultures and human lives. Some of these culture still existed, but some of them already disappeared. They have vastly different ideas about the world and values of human life. So, at a certain moment , all these manifold, colorful world phenomena did not look that real to Thales, or should we say, did not look equally real to Thales. He was trying to figure out whether there is a simple principle, a short-hand formula, a deeper and in a certain sense, more convenient way to perceive the colorful and multifold world phenomena. Yes, this is the origin of western philosophy: a deep curiosity of essence vs appearance, unchanging vs changing aspects, and what lies behind vs what lies at the front of the world. Arguably, this is also the origin of any “theoretical” attitude of humanity towards the world. Further, this sort of question “what is X, Y, Z all about” can be asked to any other more concrete world phenomena: such as, what is liberal arts education, what is language, what is ancient Greek philosophy, to name a few pertaining to our lecture. But, after all, when you get to ponder the entire history of philosophy derives from this simple question “what is it,” would you not feel amazed by the power of questioning?

So, in order to answer this question what the world is all about, Thales thinks the world originated from water. And he has his good reasons to think so: humans need water, animals need water, and every life needs water. And look at the geography of ancient Greece, it is water everywhere. More importantly, since water originates the world, it can explain natural phenomena in a more sensible manner such as earthquake. In Greek mythology, the earthquake is thought of being caused by the anger of a deity called, Po’seidon. In order to appease this irritable God, humans need to pay sacrifices to Him and maintain a great relationship just as with a willful dictator. However, we can imagine Thales responded differently to the natural phenomenon of earthquake in such a scenario: he will put several splinters of wood in a cup of water, and says that, earthquake is like the shake of the water causing the movement of these floating materials. In this way, in order to explain the natural phenomenon of earthquake, Thales uses both an evidence (that is the setting-up of the cup of water) and a logic (that is the water-shake causes the movement of floating material and we can think of earthquake in a similar manner since they are both nature). In this way, Thales made his theory accessible to other human beings, and wildly open to further debate and inquiry. This inquiry is very different from the mentioned mythological or magical way of thinking, because in the latter case, no one ever sees Poseidon and thus, no mythological account of earthquake can either be confirmed or refuted. You can either believe it or not, but in no way to argue for it or advance your knowledge about it. Evidently, this situation of human knowledge drastically changed after Thales proposed his first philosophical proposition, and decided to use debatable evidence and logic to study the world.

Once having this seed of rational inquiry sowed, the story of ancient Greek philosophy just follows in suite.

However, there are problems to use water to explain everything in the world, because the world is so colorful and diverse. How can you use water to explain some matter that has the direct opposite attribute, say, fire? This drives Thales’s follower in the same city, called Anaximander, to propose a different answer to the question asked by Thales. Anaximander says the primal matter is not water, but something called “boundless” (a’peiron), and his reason is that only something that is not bounded by any definite attribute can be the origin of the diverse and colorful world phenomena. Nevertheless, Anaximander’s answer still engenders new issues: first, we do not know the concrete process of how the boundless forms the world; second, if the boundless is the primal matter, how can something without any attribute generate things with attributes? This would be to assert nothing can generate something, which is really hard for human reason to grasp. To resolve these two issues, Anaximander’s follower Anaximenes, still from the same city of Miletus, proposes another answer: the primal matter is air, but through the rarefaction and condensation of air, all sorts of things are generated. For instance, the condensation of air forms stone, while rarefaction of it forms water.

All these proposed answers by theses earliest philosophers in ancient Greece seem to be quite outdated from today’s perspective. But what is at stake here is the earliest form of rational and open inquiry we have witnessed. The relationship between Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes is similar to teachers and students, or different generations of scholars to tackle the same issue. Each of them advanced their contribution based upon the learning of their predecessors, while they were always trying to use evidence and logic to argue for their own cases which are furthermore vulnerable to critique and debate. In time, their answers accumulated human knowledge and made it progress towards something that makes more and more sense.

This spirit of rational and open inquiry continues to be played out in the thought of philosophers that lived outside the city of Miletus in the period of pre-Socratic ancient Greek philosophy. In the following, I will briefly summarize three related philosophers’ thought to let you get a handle on the rich possibilities that ancient Greek philosophy has offered to the treasure of human thought.

For Empedocles in the city of Sicily, using one single primal matter to explain so many things in the world is a too far-fetched approach. Instead of one element, Empedocles proposes four: fire, air, earth and water. Here, we already have the original form of modern molecular chemistry. But for Heraclitus, from the city of Ephesus, all these previous approaches have a fundamental flaw so that he must radically change the direction of thought to address the issue of the origin of the world. The flaw is that these previous philosophers divide the world reality into what is essential and what is on the surface, and take one or many fixed elements as essential to explaining the appearing natural phenomena. However, how can something fixed and unchanged explain the continually changing and self-diversifying world? In other words, In order to account for the perpetually becoming world, Heraclitus thinks if there is any essential element of the world, the element itself must change as well, and this element can only be “fire.” Heraclitus says, in a very beautiful language, that:

“This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always was and will be: an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out.” (Clement, Miscellanies, 5.103.3)

Remember, this fire of Heraclitus is very different from the one among four elements in Empedocles’ thought. For Heraclitus, this foundational part of world phenomena is not separated from the latter, and it always changes, becomes and metamorphose without cease. Heraclitus also famously said that no man can step into the same river twice, to indicate the emphasis upon change, rather than non-change or stasis, in his philosophy.

However, an even more radical approach to answer the origin of the world was initiated by Pythagorus, the well-known mathematician who discovered the so-called Pythagorean theorem which we still use his name to designate today. The most salient feature of Pythagorus’s thought is that he thought none of the answers given by previous natural philosophers is right because they always wanted to use matter to explain matter, whether these elemental matters are one, many or intrinsically changing. For Pythagorus, the material world becomes, changes, vulnerable to corruption and decay, and thus, cannot be the real world for human beings to live in. So what is the real world? Pythagorus thinks that is the world of numbers, geometrical figures, and all objects that a mathematician addresses in their mind. These objects are eternal, unchanging, not succumbing to decay, and thus, they are the genuinely existing realities, and everything else are just copies, imitations or casts of shadow of this ideal world.

Therefore, Pythagorus’s basic insight derives from the practice of mathematicians: once we draw three lines and make them connect each other, many new attributes will be discovered from this figure no matter whether there is a real triangle that exists in the material world. So, rather than asking what is the foundation of the world, Pythagorus cares about what is the ideal of the world, what is the prototypical ideal state of the world that the existing material world tries to imitate. In the history of western philosophy, this idealist conception of an intelligible world vis-a-vis a less ideal material world is developed by Plato, and generated a huge influence upon the development of western civilization in general.

Ok, let’s summarize what is at stake in all the thoughts we mentioned in the pre-Socratic ancient Greek philosophy. There are two essential characters of ancient Greek philosophy in its earliest development:

First, we can call it “the birth of nature.” In other words, “nature” is demarcated as an independent realm of world phenomena, which obeys its own law, and can be studied objectively.

Second, we can call it “the birth of the spirit of rational criticism.” This means that while studying the nature, ancient Greek philosophers utilized evidence and logic to rationally argue for their own case, and the contributed knowledge succumbs to further debate and critique, so that human understanding about the concerned issues can accumulate and progress.

Quite evidently, all these two characters pertain to the origination of the modern scientific spirit of rational and open inquiry that we mentioned at the beginning of this episode. It is also highly relevant to our understanding of the spirit of liberal arts education regarding the expected skills of clearly expressing, broadly communicating, and mostly importantly, nicely debating and happily learning from disagreement.

But why did the ancient Greece acquire these characters? Why could the ancient Greek civilization accomplish so much that even today we still need to learn quite a deal from it on virtually all concerned issues in modern society? Here, I will enumerate four brief reasons for you to understand the causes of these two characters of pre-Socratic ancient Greek thought. A caveat needs to be stated in advance that these following reasons can by no means replace the genuine creativity of ancient Greek philosophers which is unique to their intelligence and personality. However, seen from a historical perspective, these reasons would help understand traits of ancient Greek philosophy as a whole.

First, ancient Greek is an alphabetic language. There is no natural connection between words and things they refer to, and thus, the syntax of Greek sentences will highly rely upon a grammar, which represents a logic of human mind, to communicate meanings. This feature of ancient Greek language is not universally shared by all other human languages in that time, such as ancient Chinese, and in this sense, the alphabetic and logical feature of the language must speak to the distinctively argumentative nature of ancient Greek thought.

Second, Greece lies rightly at the intersection of several major different types of civilizations: the ancient Egyptian and Hebrew world in the south, the ancient Babylonian world in the East, and the nomadic ancient European world in the north. And ancient Greece is a civilization based upon trade and seafare. So, the clash and exchange of ideas from all these diverse cultures and regions drove the best minds in ancient Greece to ask questions that went beyond the perceived world. While traveling around the Mediterranean region and conversing with different people, they asked what lies behind, what goes unchanged, and what is universal underneath changing particularities. Evidently, without such a diverse and vibrant environment, we cannot imagine how such a brilliant form of human intelligence, philosophy, can take place.

Third, ancient Greece, as represented by the city of Athens, enjoyed its democratic polity for quite a time. Democracy is built upon public debate and collective deliberation, and during the process, philosophical argumentation would definitely be flourished.

Fourth, the flourishing of trade brings in a surplus of products and wealth. Together with the subsisting institution of slavery, this economy created an abundance of leisure time for intellectual minds to ask transcendent and abstract questions about the world, and thus, contribute to the flourishing of philosophical human life.

Since this is the case, my question to you is that: in order to sustain the same spirit of rational and open inquiry in today’s society, do we need to create a similar set of “causes” so that the spirit can continue to flourish? What do you feel short of this spirit in today’s society? And what’s your goal in your learning of liberal arts to continue this rich legacy of ancient Greek thought?

Recommended Reading: G.E.R. Lloyd, Early Greek Science Thales to Aristotle (W.W. Norton & Company, 1974). pp. 1-23.