Everything is Made of Water
Welcome to the Philosophy Carpark, the sort of space where you can loiter uninterrupted with the engine running for a few minutes and no-one will notice or care — but try to avoid making eye-contact with the parking attendant, because he has opinions about stuff, and no-one wants that sort of thing these days.
Since it’s the grand opening of the Philosophy Carpark, we are going to talk about origins. Which is precisely the sort of self-referential indulgence that philosophers love, and probably one of the reasons why you came here in the first place. This week in particular, we are going to talk about the origins of western philosophy. And that’s actually pretty difficult, since no-one is really sure when it all began; but if we are to blame anyone, then Thales of Miletus (fl. 585 BC) is probably a good culprit.
We know very little about Thales. He probably didn’t exist. All we have are second-hand reports recounted by later philosophers, where he enjoys the usual semi-mythical origin story we find scattered across Antiquity. He predicted eclipses, foreswore political appointment, and travelled to Egypt to be initiated into the esoteric mysteries of geometry (which at the time, was pretty much like Bruce Wayne going to ninja-school in the Himalayas). Apparently, he once made an absolute killing short-selling on the olive oil market just to bankrupt someone who mocked the value of philosophy. All of which is fair enough. But perhaps more importantly, Thales also invented western philosophy — and by extension a few thousand years later, modern science — when he claimed that everything was made of water.
Granted, this may not seem like a particular auspicious start. Fortunately however, it was was extremely unclear what Thales intended by “everything”, what he had in mind by “water”, or indeed what he meant for one thing to be “made of” something else. Which is probably why it caught on so quickly amongst the philosophically inclined. New theories quickly proliferated — that everything is made of air, that everything is made of fire — although the most sophisticated development came from Thales’ student Anaximander, who declared that while everything is indeed made of the same substance, we cannot actually know anything about it. 2,500 years later and western philosophy is still going strong. Some of us may even have spent a great deal of time and money studying philosophy at university, assuming all of that higher-education would secure a well-paid career; some us may still be a little bitter about this.
Nevermind. The reason why Thales is important has less to do with the content of what he said, but the methodology behind it — the idea that we can explain the world around us in its own terms (whatever that might be), rather than appealing to something lying beyond it (like the actions of a vengeful god). If “everything is made of water”, then perhaps there is some internal structure common to the different objects we encounter that explains their behaviour. Or maybe there is some general, abstract principal that unifies the different phenomena in which we are interested. Either way, what Thales proposed is that we can look at the objects themselves in order to understand how they work. It is in short the idea that the world is an intelligible and self-contained system, and that scientific investigation as we know it is possible as a distinct form of enquiry.
That might not seem like much of an innovation. But to say that we can understand the world by looking at its internal structure is to reject the view that all explanations ultimately involve tracing an event back to its origins. And this was an assumption that permeated almost every aspect of Thales’ intellectual context, from literature and politics, to religion and history. It is not merely for narrative purposes that when the heavily armed psychopaths of Homer’s Iliad meet one another on the beaches of Troy, every mortal combat is preceded by a precis of the individual’s family tree:
The noble son of Hippolochus answered staunchly, “High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask about my birth? Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away. But about my birth, if you’d like to learn it well, first to last — though many people know it — here is my story”.
What follows is a lengthy tale of a mythical ancestor, deceived by a jealous queen and exiled to fight a fearsome monster, who wins fame and fortune in distant lands before being brought low by pride and the resentment of the gods, who begets a son who begets a son … all recounted apparently in the midst of lethal hand-to-hand combat (this might explain why the Trojan War lasted 10 years).
Like the interminable dialogue in a cheap martial arts movie — you have offended the Shaolin Temple — or the part of a Jean-Claude van Damme movie where his character explains his incongruously francophone accent, these genealogies literally explain why such events have come to pass. The sons of Hippolochus and Tydeus are at Troy because at some point in their distant past some idiot swore an oath to someone else. It is an explanation that focuses upon the origins of these two men, rather than any individual calculation or personal motivation.
As with so much in philosophy, this traditional emphasis upon origins was closely tied up with issues of politics. Like many early societies, one’s position in ancient Greece was largely determined by one’s tribal or familial relationships, which is to say, in terms of one’s genealogical origins. It followed then that the truly virtuous man did not act out of abstract ethical principles, but rather out of respect for the ties of kinship and blood; he was expected to put his family before all others and would have found the modern idea of treating all equally bordering on the incomprehensible (the reader is invited to draw their own comparisons here with the intolerant tribalism of today’s identity politics, because I can’t be bothered).
And just as the search for origins reflected a particular social order, so too did the shift towards internal structure and general principles evolve alongside a changing political climate. At the time Thales was writing, political power in ancient Greece was shifting from the palaces of the aristocratic warlords found in Homer, to the forums and marketplaces of the relatively self-contained city-state. As the social horizon extended and life became dominated by the intercourse of trade and commerce, the traditional framework of personal vendettas and historic grudges became increasingly disruptive to the functioning of the community (the reader is invited to draw … well, you get the idea).
And it is precisely in this context that later philosophers like Plato and Aristotle would attempt to rethink the basis of ethics by abstracting to more general principles, and looking inwards to the psyche of their moral agents. Thus we find Plato — speaking through the character of Socrates — interrogating random passers-by as to what it means to be virtuous king or a virtuous father (or even a virtuous slave), and concluding that there must be something they all have in common. In his later work, Plato would come to call this abstract property justice, which he identified as something like maintaining an appropriate balance between the competing passions of the mind — an ethical framework no longer based upon genealogical origins, but the sort of internal structure appropriate for those living in a well-functioning society, and one ultimately derived from Thales’ insistence that everything is made of water.
Ironically then, the reason why Thales of Miletus has a claim to have been the ultimate origin of western philosophy is precisely because he showed that searching for the ultimate origins of anything — exactly what we have just been doing — was not in fact a worthwhile exercise. Welcome to the Philosophy Carpark.