Paste your essay in here…In this essay, I will discuss several key Presocratic thinkers (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus) and their views regarding the fundamental material principle (or arche) of the universe. I will discuss the issues with this approach in order to demonstrate that all things are not reducible to an arche.
Thales, considered to be the first philosopher, attempted to provide an alternative to the established mythical beliefs of his society by providing a logos (a rational account) of nature through observation- ‘the Greeks began a systematic rational study of the natural order…they abandoned mythology to ask a new question, about the nature (phusis) of things’ (T. Irwin, Classical Thought 1987: 20).
This approach led to naturalism, the view that only natural forces (i.e., not spiritual or supernatural, as in myths) operate in the world. The naturalists believed that the arche (the fundamental, underlying, governing principle) must be something natural or physical (materialism) and as such, they believed that one of the four natural elements of matter (fire, air, water, earth) must be the arche.
Thales propounds water to be the arche. In order to demonstrate that this isn’t plausible, I will first outline Thales’ view. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, provides Thales’ potential reasoning for this belief: ‘He may have gotten this idea from seeing that the nourishment of all things is moist, and that even the hot itself comes to be from this and lives on this…the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and water is the principle of the nature of moist things’ (Arist. Metaph. 1.3 983b 25-28). This excerpt suggests how Thales may have come to believe that water is the arche, in that it can explain ‘Becoming’, i.e., the way in which everything that exists comes into, and goes out of, being. (And subsequently, being is the one thing which everything that exists comes from and returns to.)
Another reasoning for Thales’ belief is as follows: ‘Thales supposed that all things are full of gods…Thales too held that the soul is something productive of motion’ (Aristotle, De An. 1.2 405a 19-21). From this, we can infer that as water moves, i.e., is in motion, Thales believed water to have a soul (hylozoism: the belief that matter can have life or soul), and therefore life. As a living material, water can be considered a plausible arche.
Diogenes Laertius’ in his Lives of the Philosophers writes that Thales may have considered water to be divine. Laertius quotes Thales; ‘what [is] divine, “What has neither beginning nor end.”’ Thus, since water has apparently no ‘beggining nor end’ (cited in Barnes, J. Early Greek Philosophy 2001: 16) Thales may consider it divine (godly, or immortal), lending plausibility to his view that water is the arche.
Overall, we can see that Thales’ argument is as follows: water nourishes life, and is the principle of life; water is in motion, and therefore has soul and life; water is divine. From this, we can see a contradiction; if water is that which nourishes life, and yet has life itself, what was it that nourished life in water? It seems that water cannot be the ultimate underlying force. Anaximander, a younger contemporary of Thales, provides a compelling argument against water (and any other material) as the arche by positing a non-material arche; I will first outline his argument against Thales, and then return in more depth to Anaximander’s non-material arche at a later point.
Anaximander provides his view that the principle arche is ‘apeiron’ (meaning ‘unlimited’ or ‘boundless’) as a response to Thales. He denies that one of the four main elements could be the arche, as each one is the opposite of another and as such they are capable of cancelling one another out; as it is, they exist in harmony, in a balance of power. He asserts that if one were the ruling arche, the others would cease to exist. The fundamental ruling principle of the universe cannot be something that is ruled itself, or something which is constrained by another material, because if it were, then the thing ruling or constraining the supposed arche would be of greater power, and itself be the arche, and so on, and so on. Simplicius, in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (24.13-21) outlines this succinctly; ‘It is clear that he observed the change of the four elements into one another and resolved not to make any one of them the underlying stuff but rather something else apart from them.’ (Cited in Curd, Patricia (ed.), Cohen, S. Marc (ed.), Reeve, C. D. C. (ed.) Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle. 2016: 2.2.)
Therefore, if we believe Anaximander’s argument against a limited material ‘arche’, then water cannot possibly be the underlying fundamental principle of the universe as Thales states.
Anaximenes, a student of Anaximander, follows on from criticisms of both Thales and Anaximander, and proposes the arche to be ‘aer’ (or air; a mist or fog). I shall again outline this theory in order to demonstrate that all things are not reducible to this material.
Aer is ‘indefinite enough to give rise to other things in the cosmos, but it is not as vague as Anaximander’s aperion’ (Curd, Patricia (ed.), Cohen, S. Marc (ed.), Reeve, C. D. C. (ed.) Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle. 2016: 2.3). Anaximenes’ reasons are as follows: aer can be observed to change form, i.e., it can become ‘finer’ and can also condense. Simplicius quotes Theophrastus on Anaximenes in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (24.26-25.1): ‘It differs in rarity and density according to the substances [it becomes]. Becoming finer, it comes to be fire; being condensed, it comes to be wind, then cloud; and when still further condensed, it becomes water, then earth, then stones’. (Cited in Curd, Patricia (ed.), Cohen, S. Marc (ed.), Reeve, C. D. C. (ed.) Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle. 2016: 2.3) As such, is seems that Anaximenes considered aer to be an rational explanation for the underlying substance of the universe, as it is a living and changing thing which can account for the other elements.
Similarly, Cicero, in his On the Nature of the Gods (1.10.26), tells us that ‘Anaximenes determined that air is a god and that it comes to be and is without measure, infinite, and always in motion’. (Cited in Curd, Patricia (ed.), Cohen, S. Marc (ed.), Reeve, C. D. C. (ed.) Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle. 2016: 2.3) Thus, like Thales, Anaximenes considers his arche to be immortal and god-like, which may, for Anaximenes, lend plausbility to aer as the fundamental principle.
Anaximenes’ belief is then as follows: aer is the arche, as it is able to produce, or ‘give rise to’ the other elements, and it is intelligible (unlike Anaxiamander’s aperion); aer can be observed to change form and therefore can explain becoming (the way in which things that exist come into and go out of being, or our experience); aer is immortal, and therefore can explain being (the thing from which all things come from and return to). However, Aristotle provides compelling criticism for Anaximenes’ assertions (along with those of the other Presocratic naturalists, and their suggestion of a matieral arche).
In his Metaphysics, Aristotle writes ‘even if…all coming to be and destruction are from some simple thing or from several, why does this happen and what is the cause? For indeed it cannot be that the substrate itself forces itself to change’ (Arist. Metaph.1.3 984a 22-25). This is a strong argument against the reduction of the universe to a single arche as it raises an issue of causality; even if we could confirm that there is a material arche, this doesn’t explain how change occurs, as nothing can produce change in and of itself. Again, this means that there must be something which controls the arche, a higher power, which therefore undermines the arche as a cosmology (a rational account, or logos, of everything, or the cosmos).
A further issue is that the idea of a material arche is far too simplistic. Aristotle says of a monistic (i.e., seeking to describe the world in terms of a single substance) account that ‘to seek for this it to seek for the second kind of principle, as we would say, that from which comes the beginning of the change’ (Arist. Metaph. 1.3 984a 28-29), and by this he seems to suggest that at least two material principles are needed- one to explain being, and another to explain becoming. By indentifying these two principles, the issue of matter and the cause of change to said matter being one and the same is eliminated. From these arguments, it is clear that no single material principle can explain all things.
Guthrie, W.K.C., in The Greek Philosophers (2012: 24), adds to this point by claiming that a material arche ‘is not the only possible answer. It may equally be supposed that the material components of the world are in a constant flux of decay and renewal, are manifold and incomprehensible, but that the permanent and comprehensible element lies in its structure or form. If new matter as it comes along fits itself always to the same structure, it is the structure that we must try to understand.’ This implies an argument for the idea that we need at least two underlying principles of everything, and perhaps that a material substance is only second to underlying structures of everything. The idea of the single underlying principle therefore seems to lack support, perhaps indicating that it is not a comprehensible and rational account (logos) of everything.
The third Presocratic naturalist I will discuss is Heraclitus. Heraclitus too seems to suggest that all things are reducible to an arche, however his postulations are far less clear. In same cases Heraclitus seems to suggest a material principle (such as fire), and in others he suggests an immaterial concept, such as logos itself, war, or childs-play. Therefore before even identifying his arguments, Heraclitus cannot present us with a sound argument for a material arche; his contradictions within his own work suggests a lack of conviction.
To begin with, I will outline Heraclitus as a monistic naturalist, and his presentation of fire as the arche, and then explore the issues with Heraclitus as a monistic naturalist. In fragment 30, he writes, ‘This kosmos, the same for all, none of gods nor humans made, but it was always and is and shall be: an ever-living fire, kindled in measures and extinguished in measures.’ (Clement, Miscellanies, 5.103.3. Cited in Curd, Patricia (ed.), Cohen, S. Marc (ed.), Reeve, C. D. C. (ed.) Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle. 2016: 5).
From this we can infer that Heraclitus believes in fire as the underlying material principle of the universe. However, Heraclitus himself undermines the power of fire in fragment B36, in which he writes: ‘For souls to become water is to die; for water to become earth is to die, but from earth, water comes to be; from water, soul.’ This excerpt of Heraclitus lends a power to water which ultimately eliminates the possibilty of fire as the underlying principle of everything, and is reminiscent of the issues posed by Anaximander that one of the four elements cannot possibly be the arche. Here, Heraclitus seems to admit that his arche, fire, is less important than the life-giving water, and logically it is evident that water extinguishes fire. Heraclitus in his Fragments mentions the powerful effect of water in several other fragments, for example 36, in which Heraclitus claims that water comes from earth, and the soul comes from water, and 117, in which he claims that a drunken man’s soul is ‘moist’, in order to explain his lack of coordination.
The main argument against Heraclitus’ presentation of fire as the arche is that he too seems to have reservations about the plausibility of suggesting a fundamental material principle. Aside from suggesting fire as the arche, he also suggests logos (50), consciousness (89), divine law (114), strife (80), warfare (53), and childs-play (52) (Heraclitus, Fragments) as potential underlying forces of the universe. As, by definition, there cannot be more than one arche, these assertions by Heraclitus are contradictory, and his Fragments lack any kind of explanatory power.
Overall, it seems clear that Heraclitus lacks conviction in suggesting a material arche, and once again it seems implausible that everything can be reduced to one fundamental material principle. As a comparison, I will now outline Anaximander’s non-material arche, and look into the ways in which this provides a more satisfying cosmology than does a material arche.
As mentioned previously, Anaximander suggests apeiron as the arche. ‘He says that the arche is neither water nor any of the other things called elements, but some nature which is apeiron, out of which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them. This is eternal and ageless and surrounds all the worlds…In addition he said that motion is eternal, in which it occurs that the heavens come to be.’ (Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 1.6.1-2 Cited in Curd, Patricia (ed.), Cohen, S. Marc (ed.), Reeve, C. D. C. (ed.) Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle. 2016: 2.2). By denying the possibility of having a material element as the arche, Anaximander cannot be criticised for positing a limited power as the underlying principle of everything.
Anaximander therefore avoids the issues associated with Thales’, Anaximenes’, and Heraclitus’ theories. All things in our experience are limited, and therefore an arche that is outside of our realm of experience cannot be criticised as being ‘overpowered’ by some other aspect of experience. A non-elemental arche is also more consistent with our everyday experience; an elemental arche would logically overpower the other elements. In the case of aperion, which has power over all four elements of our experience, this issue is eliminated.
Despite the benefits of Anaximander’s arche, some issues remain: the problem of needing at least two principle causes, as raised by Aristotle, remains, and another issue is brought to the forefront: none of the cosmologies so far identified are able to be either proved or falsified. We cannot know whether they are true and as such they have no explanatory power. A non-material arche seems to be a better theory than a material one, but it still doesn’t provide a satisfying explanation.
In summary, I believe that all things are not reducible to one fundamental, material principle. The philosophies of the Presocratic naturalists do not provide convincing arguments for a monistic, reductionist account of everything, and it seems that a far less simplistic explanation is needed for so complicated a phenomena.