Socrates’ Predecessors : Philosophy and the Natural Order

Philosophy began when humans’ curiosity and wonder caused them to ask the questions “What are things really like?” and “How can we explain the process of change in things?” What prompted these questions was the gradual recognition that things are not exactly what they seem to be, that “appearance” often differs from “reality”. The facts of birth, death, growth, and decay – coming into being and passing away – raised not only the question about personal destiny but also the larger questions of how things and persons come into existence, can be different at different times, and pass out of existence only to be follow by other things and persons. Many of the answer given to these questions by the earliest philosophers are not as important as the fact that they focused upon just these questions and that they approached them with a fresh and new frame of mind that was in contrast to that of the great poets.

The birthplace of philosophy was the seaport town of Miletus, located across the Aegean Sea from Athens, on the western shores of Ionia in Asia Minor, and for this reason, the first philosophers are called either Milesians or Ionians. By the time the Milesians philosophers began their systematic work, roughly around 585 B.C., Miletus had been a crossroads for both seaborne commerce and for cosmopolitan ideas. Its wealth made possible the leisure without which the life of art and philosophy could hardly develop, and the broad-mindedness and inquisitiveness of its people created a congenial atmosphere for intellectual activity that was to become philosophy. Earlier, Ionia had produced the genius Homer, whose Epic poetry projected upon the cosmic scene Mount Olympus, where the gods pursued lives not to different from their human counterparts on earth. This poetic view of the world also related the life of the gods to the life of humans, by describing various ways in which the gods intruded into or interfered with people’s affairs. In particular, the Homeric gods would punish people for their lack of moderation and especially for their pride or insubordination, which the Greeks called hubris. It is not that Homer’s gods are moral and require goodness; they are merely stronger than human beings and exact obedience. Moreover, when Homer suggests that there is a power that he calls “fate,” a power to which even the gods are subject, he appears to be reaching for a way of describing a rigorous order in nature to which everyone and everything must be subordinate. But his poetic imagination is dominated so thoroughly by his thinking in human terms that his world is peopled everywhere with human types, and his conception of nature is that of capricious wills at work instead of the reign physical natural laws. It was Hesiod, writing sometime in the eight century B.C., who altered this concept of the gods and “fate” by removing the gods all capriciousness, ascribing to them instead a moral consistency. Although Hesiod retains the notion that the gods control nature, he balances this personal element in the nature of things with an emphasis upon the impersonal operation of the moral law of the universe. The moral order, in Hesiod’s view, is still the product of Zeus’ commands, but to these commands are neither capricious nor calculated, as Homer thought, to gratify the gods, but are rather fashioned for the food of mankind. For Hesiod the universe is a moral order, and from this idea it is a short step to say, without any reference to the gods, that there is an impersonal force controlling the structure of the universe and regulating its process of changes.

It was this short step that Milesians Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes took. Whereas Hesiod still thought in terms of traditional mythology with a peopled universe, philosophy among the Milesians began as an act of independent thought. To ask, as they did, “What are things really like?” and “How can we explain the process of change in things?” indicates a substantial departure from the poetry of Homer and Hesiod and a movement toward what we should call the temperament of science. Although the Milesians can rightly be called primitive scientists, it is a fact of the history of thought that science and philosophy were the same thing in the beginning and only later did various disciplines separate themselves from the field of philosophy, medicine being the first to do so. From the very beginning, however, Greek philosophy was an intellectual activity, for it was not only of seeing or believing but of thinking, and philosophy meant thinking about basic questions in a mood of genuine and free inquiry.