Despite the fact that no one is even reading it, and that it’s become more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to getting through the book, I feel obligated to finish what I started with this post. In a sense at least

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I’ve been really lazy lately and one result of this is that I read almost nothing for a couple months, but fairly recently I finally decided to pick up that Oxford World Classics book about the Pre-Socratics that I mentioned buying a copy of in the last philosophy/ reading related entry I uploaded. I’ve been having quite a lot of difficulty with this one though, I have to admit it. The issue is not actually that what’s being talked about is too complex for me, which is what I was expecting would be my first “wall” on this journey. No, instead the real issue is that there’s so little to really engage with in many cases. Some of the thinkers in this book have no surviving writings whatsoever, instead their sections in the book are comprised of simply an introduction to the thinker from the translator as in every section and some translated “testimonia” from various ancient doxographers or historians.

These testimonia are pretty similar in appearance to the fragments I’ve seen so far (I’ve only just finished the third section in the book, after the general introduction, on Heraclitus) in that they are relatively short quotes taken from longer works, some of which also no longer survive in full. A lot of the actual fragments are in fact also taken from these same works, in most cases I don’t believe they’re from literal papyrus fragments, but it is well established these other ancient writers were quoting directly. A few of the chosen testimonia are a little more substantial, but so far the longest of the surviving fragments has been no more than a few sentences cut off from any greater context.

Almost every single translated fragment or testimonia in this book is taken from a collection referred to as Dielz/ Kranz, which from what I understand is an anthology put together by two german professors in the early 1900s collecting every existing fragment of writing that survives from the thinkers generally referred to as the Pre-Socratics and any writings directly relating to what they believed or taught from other ancient authors. Dielz/ Kranz is pretty much the definitive collection and the numbering used in that collection is the academic standard, often rather than quoting a particular fragment or testimonia academic papers will simply cite it’s Dielz/ Kranz number. I imagine it’s assumed that any serious academics can both read ancient Greek (which is pretty close to modern day Greek believe it or not) and have a copy of this collection on hand.

This book I have doesn’t translate the entire Dielz/ Kranz though, only “all the most important fragments” and “the most informative testimonia” were included in this collection. Now I knew this before buying the book, but I chose to go with this rather than another book I found which translates every single fragment into English (but none of the testimonia I believe) because this one includes introductions and explanatory writing which I thought I might really need. There’s not a whole lot, in the introduction the translator even states that he had to resist the temptation to put a book together that is much longer but where his own writings prevent the reader from making their own mind up, but there’s enough to put together some kind of narrative.

Even with what little he does say there is still the risk that his interpretation is going to colour my first impressions of these fragments though, and given the fact that he only translated what he thought was necessary there is additional concern. It was only during this third chapter that a lot of these concerns really made themselves clear to me, because Heraclitus is a notoriously enigmatic writer. Apparently even in antiquity, when native speakers of ancient greek had access to his full body of work, he was known as “the obscure”. The translator says that in the case of Heraclitus he translated every fragment that was philosophical in nature, but honestly if I hadn’t been told that then I wouldn’t have interpreted some of the ones that were translated as philosophical comments, and I’ve read a couple online that weren’t included in this which to me seemed like they should have been.

Sure this translator (and scholar) has a much better understanding than me and so I am willing to defer to him, but I’m still a little concerned about relying on someone else to decide for me which fragments are and aren’t philosophically relevant and therefore perhaps getting a distorted view of what Heraclitus believed by not seeing some crucial statement or proclamation of his. Again, because he’s so notoriously divisive and his statements have been interpreted in all sorts of ways. In fact it’s not just what is chosen that might have an effect on my reading of him, even the order in which the fragments are presented might have influenced my initial thoughts. The translator admitted that he deliberately orders the fragments in this book so as to best help you understand each writer’s ideas, but again that really means what he believes are the writer’s ideas.

I think I was right about needing that extra scholarly advice though, without the introductory writing I would have had a far harder time getting anything at all out of these fragments. Indeed for Heraclitus even with the introduction from the translator, which did a great deal to try and put together some coherent set of ideas from these surviving fragments, I still had a lot of difficulty seeing anything in these disjointed sentences. There’s so little, a few pages of quotes really, I actually read through his section completely a second time trying to understand him better. I’ve also skimmed through that section a few more times since, trying to think about what to say in this post. Which hopefully has diminished any possible interpretive influence from the specific ordering given in this book, as I read it in reverse the second time and then just a few parts at random.

Ultimately though, all of these concerns pale in comparison to the real realisation I had while reading this same third chapter. That being the question of translation, and whether you can ever truly translate anything. It came up in this section because Heraclitus famously used the very language and structure of his writing to further reinforce his point, or perhaps according to other people to express a deeper or esoteric hidden meaning through his writing. A lot of this could be completely missed had I instead picked up that unannotated collection mentioned before, but even here I can only be told about it. Either in the introductory portion of the chapter, or in the endnotes at the back of the book which I have been checking.

By reading Heraclitus in any language other than what he wrote you’ll never actually experience the phonetic wordplay that he, and perhaps other thinkers in this book, considered a crucial part of their message. We don’t even know exactly what format the original works that these fragments are from looked like, it’s possible that Heraclitus only published a collection of aphorisms and shorter statements designed to be deliberately packed with as much meaning as possible or longer proto-essay like writings. Even the figurative tone of voice with which he “speaks” is something about which scholars have debated, he takes a deliberately authoritative one as if perhaps to encourage disagreement.

He definitely wrote in prose at least, unlike some of the thinkers in this book who preferred the verse form for communicating their message. I’m interested to see how those sections go actually because the way I see it the closer to the original you try to get when translating poetry, the further away you usually end up. I could elaborate on this, but I’ll save it for an upcoming post in my Books series rather than veering of topic here. Generally speaking though, I think that poetry in particular is basically impossible to translate because more value is placed on peculiarities of the specific language the poem is written in. However for a prose writer, Heraclitus still used a lot of wordplay and interesting writing techniques to further make his point.

In a way his work was still kind of poetic, like he hadn’t fully made the transition away from poetry. After all, poetry is older than prose believe it or not. I think that most people nowadays are surprised to learn this because the way we think is prose-like almost, we assume that matter of fact writing and verbal communication is the norm. In fact it seems to be the almost universal consensus that verse communication actually came first. Somewhere along the way we transition from this poetic mode of thinking to a prosaic one, and Heraclitus and many of the other thinkers in this book existed at a kind of inbetween stage.

For example he supposedly thought that words that sounded similar to one another had a sort of kinship, and that there was always some significance there. Now in reality it might be the case that the similarity in how two words sound is completely coincidental etymologically speaking, but that doesn’t matter because he did see significance there and that might tell us something about his thought. Maybe in his mind there was no such thing as coincidence, we really can’t say what his thoughts on language were because there doesn’t seem to be any surviving account of them. Far greater minds than mine, versed in the actual language in which he spoke and wrote, have tried their very best to gleam everything they can from what little remains from him.

In a way you could say the Pre-Socratics existed in a transitional state (and time) between the pre-scientific world of Mythos which in a way is represented by the verse form, and the new world of Logos which is represented by the more straightforward and analytic prose form. That’s the narrative that you might get from reading this book anyway, in fact it’s what the subject of the general introduction is about. In it I was first introduced to this idea of “Logos”, which is of course a word I’ve heard mention of many times but always held as this ancient idea which is probably really complex and mysterious and so stayed away from. The definition given in this introduction however doesn’t seem so intimidating after all. In fact it reminds me of some ideas which I myself have talked about before in previous posts on this very blog.

Logos is a word which doesn’t have a direct equivalent in English, but there are many words which derive from it that give us an idea of what it meant. Logic of course being the most similar I suppose, in how it sounds that is. As for the actual meaning, it’s really hard to say. In some uses it could simply mean “word” or “voice”, and in other contexts it’s used to mean “discourse/ discussion”. Heraclitus uses the word in a very particular way, to describe some kind of underlying principle or unifying truth which underlies the world around us. It’s also sometimes used to mean “reason”, as in to reason with someone or an explanation. In the original Koine Greek version of the New Testament, Jesus is sometimes referred to as a kind of manifestation or avatar of Logos. Aristotle used it to describe one of three techniques in argumentation, the others being Pathos and Ethos.

The introduction to this book describes it as “a nest of what we might call logical or rational faculties and activities”. It’s clearly one of those words about which there is no total consensus, to explain let’s take another word about which similar debate exists, Art. People debate the meaning of art constantly, if you ask 100 people to tell you what Art means you will receive 100 differing answers. How many thousands of essays have been written about “What art means” or “Is X art?”, and so on. Yet we all have a pretty good idea of what this fundamental essence we expect the word Art to describe is. Logos is a little like that, you can kind of intuit what is meant by it depending on the context and a general understanding of this essence-meaning it has.

It is said that Logos brought about the death of myth, that it is what took us away from the gods. Indeed in this introduction that is pretty much the narrative that is presented. Waterfield presents an excerpt from a poem (ironically, translated from German into English) by Friedrich Von Schiller, a figure from the German Romantic movement and contemporary of Goethe, called The Gods of Greece. The poem laments how the de-souled Word (das entseelte Wort) is all that remains now the gods have fled to the mountains and taken with them all things colourful and beautiful. All sense of wonder, it reminds me of another line of poetry from Keats (a Romantic poet born here in England) who famously said that “philosophy will clip an angel’s wings”.

Indeed like I said, poetry is kind of representative of this older more wonderous and mysterious ancient past, and prose writing is kind of a representative for the more rigorous search for knowledge. Also presented in this introduction is a quote from Plato (from The Republic, though I don’t remember it) where he talks about the age old conflict between poetry and philosophy in fact. So the implication here is the Pre-Socratics were the harbingers of this revolution, of the decline of Mythos and the beginning of the reign of Logos. These individuals are characterised as the earliest proto-scientists, and their proclamations as purely material and to be taken at face value, but I’m just not sure if they can be.

First of all clearly this is a fight that continued long after the men in this book has passed from memory for most people, I mean the very Romantic movement that inspired the poem in this introduction goes to show that the battle lasted millennia. Perhaps such movements were the last gasp, but still the gods held out a lot longer than we’re giving them credit for if so. Certainly nowadays the idea of reason, logic, empiricism is held up as something inherently respectable, while mysticism and tradition is derided and mocked as nothing more than superstition. Did this fight really start with these thinkers though?

Clearly given that Plato quote, even in ancient Greece there was some understanding of this conflict between religious wisdom and scientific study, but I don’t think that most of these particular thinkers in this book personally saw themselves as fighting for one side against the other. In fact it’s very likely that a lot of them thought they were working in service of Mythos if anything, even though some may have had some radical ideas for their time. I’m not even sure that all of them were being literal when they wrote about the nature of things. Heraclitus talks about fire quite a bit for instance, but it’s hard to tell whether he’s talking about it in a literal sense or if he is using it as a metaphor. Or perhaps he wouldn’t have even made such a distinction at all.

The translator even somewhat seems to agree, ending the introduction by saying that perhaps this narrative is not so simple. He does ultimately believe that the Pre-Socratics did revolutionise the way we thought, but he cautions against the idea that there was any kind of clean break. Generally this idea that they were in some sense a transitionary force is something I’ve gotten from this introduction. The difference is I’m not sure yet if I necessarily agree that they even played this role, I think they might be much closer to mysticism and Mythos than some think. I’m going to need to read the whole book and think about it some more, I just wanted to share my thoughts now because reading what I have so far has inspired me.

I could go on, and there is more I think I want to say but I will have a chance to get to it later, because I’m going to be trying something new with this entry. See as well as all that I’ve already talked about, I also realised during this third section that these thinkers are so disparate that I’m not going to be able to write one coherent response to the book like I did with the one from Xenophon. However, neither am I going to be capable of writing an entire full length (in comparison to my average) entry for each of the chapters in this book. I may surprise myself, but I think for some of them I will have very little to say. However I will have something to say, because they are all quite unique and they all had interesting ideas of their own.

Sure, there are some things which tie all (or at least the ones I’ve read about so far) these thinkers together, and maybe I’ll talk about that too, but I want to give each of them some room to breathe. This collection might have a smaller wordcount than the book from Xenophon, but in a few pages it touches on more than the entirety of that one. In much less depth of course, much like how if you had a few quotes taken from over Xenophon’s entire writing career you’d touch upon more than in any one specific work of his. This is just for one thinker as well, this book translates the ideas of over 20 different men. Some so closely related in thought they share a chapter admittedly, but still it’s impossible to write one post that really says anything meaningful about all of these people.

Here’s my plan. I am going to upload what I’ve written so far tonight, but I will keep this as an open/ rolling entry and eventually over the next few weeks or months I’ll try to add a small subsection to this post for each chapter in this book. Responding what I can to each one individually. Again, there is a chapter for each man, or in some cases a few closely related ones. I’m currently reading a different book, but I will re-read the first few chapters I’ve already read soon and post the responses to those. After that, I will go back to my usual schedule posting normal entries and whenever I add an update to this one I will let you know in those so you don’t have to keep checking back yourself. I think I’m going to leave it without a header image until I decide to stop adding to this post as well. Let’s hope this doesn’t drag on for a year like my Books series.

The Milesians

This first chapter covers three different men from the city of Miletus, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. All contemporaries who had ideas of their own but clearly heavily influenced one another’s thought. The grouping of them together is not something that starts with this book, but even in antiquity they seem to have been considered to all be part of one school of thought. The thing is though, they don’t seem to be particularly philosophical at first glance, and reading about them you get the feeling that they actually were much closer to the Logos side of the dialectic described in my introductory section to this entry. The problem though, is that not one of these men is allowed to speak for himself for no writing from any of them survives. The translated section of this chapter is all testimonia, there are no fragments at all.

Some of the testimonia claim to be quoting specific things that these men said or perhaps wrote, but most of them are more like a paraphrasing of what these men supposedly believed. Mostly from Aristotle and Theophrastus (a student of Aristotle’s), and it’s even perhaps the case that the later Roman chroniclers were reading from the Aristotelian accounts rather than any original works. So there are those and there are a fair few historical accounts, that simply describe who these men were and what they were known for in their own time. We can figure out a fair amount from these historical testimonia, particularly the ones about Thales who is the oldest of the three and so perhaps was some kind of mentor figure to the other two.

In fact the first few testimonia about Thales are from Herodotus, so thankfully I had a full copy of the book to return to in order to actually get the full context on the passages used. It seems that Thales was from the aristocracy, the more leisured class in the city of Miletus, which was a major centre of trade in what is today the south-western coast of Turkey. Which means there were a lot of new ideas coming from the east, Persia and Babylon and Egypt and perhaps even India. According to Herodotus Thales was himself originally of Phoenician origin, as in he was descended in part from presumably some rich Phoenician trader who for some reason married a Greek woman and settled in a Greek city. Although of course the Greeks and Phoenicians have always been somewhat connected, the Phoenicians gave them their alphabet in fact which we still use a derivate of today.

Thales is presented as some kind of court engineer or magician figure, or at least if you take that fantasy trope/ archetype you can see how he comes across in the more historical accounts in this book. He supposedly ordered a river divided in two to help an army at some point, he is credited with predicting a solar eclipse (which is how historians have been able to date when he would have lived), and inventing a device called the gnomon. He supposedly played a pioneering role in the development of geometry. And according to Aristotle he was the man who developed the kind of thinking, that the other two men in this section propagated, that the material world at least could be reduced to certain fundamental elements.

The problem is, it’s hard to tell whether this is what he really was doing or if this was an Aristotelian imposition. Going back to this whole Logos/ Mythos thing, it really does seem like Aristotle was motivated entirely by Logos. I have read very little from him directly, really only his quotes in this book actually, but I have read and watched a fair bit about the man and he really does seem to have been someone who saw the world in purely material terms. Everything can be explained through examination and experimentation basically, and Theophrastus seems to have been of a similar mindset. So how do we know that Thales was being entirely literal when he spoke of the earth as floating on some kind of eternal sea, and everything coming from water.

So we know he was an aristocrat, presumably from a trading family of some kind, most people who make it into history books do tend to be. I personally think it’s very likely that he went travelling east and south, perhaps in his youth, on some kind of ancient world Grand Tour, or maybe later in life along with the other two men this chapter talks about. It’s just as possible that he was responding to various flood myths which are very common in middle eastern mythology (the flood from the Old Testament being one these), or the creations myths of Egypt and Babylon which suggested that the world originally arose from a watery swamp. There’s plenty of evidence that he did visit these places, take that invention, the gnomon.

Now the invention of it has been attributed to both Thales and Anaximander, but they were associates so it doesn’t matter much. The gnomon is the part of a sundial that sticks out to cast the shadow, and they had these in Babylon before the time of Thales, so it’s much more likely one or both of them simply brought one back from there. We also know that they had figured out how to accurately predict an eclipse in Babylon, so he very possibly learned that from them as well. He must have still been an intelligent and interesting figure with ideas of his own, after all he clearly played an important role in the development of mathematics and engineering, but it seems like he was very much influenced by the myths and ideas he heard on his travels, which I think are hard to deny took place.

I think that this idea that he was the first to look for purely material explanations for the world might be entirely false in fact, the last quote about him actually states that he “thought that all things were full of gods”. That’s another quote from Aristotle, and one that seems kind of dismissive, as if he thinks less of Thales for not being of the same purely Logos minded worldview as himself. I think it’s very possible that Aristotle is giving a distorted picture of what Thales believed, although to be fair he makes very few claims about that. Still, even his presentation of him as this foundational figure in the sciences seems misleading to me.

Unlike Thales, the other two men in this section’s ideas about the nature of the material world (assuming they were being literal, there is still doubt) have been written about in much more depth. They didn’t leave any writings behind either, or at least none of it survives, but a second hand explanation is better than a few vague sentences and nothing more as we get with Thales. The testimonia for these two are about what they believed for the most part, rather than about the lives of the men themselves. There are a couple, Anaximander supposedly drew one of the first maps of the world. A map which Herodotus complains about quite a bit actually, I didn’t even need to pick the book back up for context because I remembered that section fairly well. Mostly though, we finally start to get something interesting once we come to these two.

According to Anaximander the first principle or element was not water or fire, earth or air, but something he called “the boundless”. Some kind of eternal substance, a void I suppose. There’s very little information about what he meant by this, and what we do get even is somewhat contradictory as it seems that people writing about this idea were giving their own interpretation, which to me suggests Anaximander himself never really elaborated much on it. It must be significant though, because the idea that the living world we inhabit was preceded by a void or chaos was already pretty established in the greek world at the time from what I understand, so perhaps the significance was that Anaximander sought to explain or somehow map it out.

Or maybe that is entirely an imposition by Aristotle again, maybe the reason Anaximander didn’t write very much about it was because he wasn’t suggesting anything new in this regard and simply mentioned this void or boundless that everyone already kind of took for granted whether it be in a literal sense or a kind of figurative sense or somewhere in between. Sort of how I mentioned before with Heraclitus, perhaps the distinction wasn’t there. Perhaps there was belief that the primordial chaos can be read into to mean something about how we should live and what/ who we are, but also was literal. There wasn’t this distinction between Mythos and Logos, there was a unity. There was a harmony to all things, if that makes sense.

Indeed as Aristotle himself points out, some of the ancient poets “made Ocean and Tethys the parents of creation”. Ocean (or Oceanus) and Tethys were two gods who in some cases were credited with creating the world, although in other cases like Hesiod’s Theogeny Uranus/ Ouranos and Gaia are responsible and Oceanus and Tethys are their children. As I’ve talked about, these traditions were rather fluid and though there were some attempt to canonise things (like Hesiod did) they don’t seem to have been very effective. My point here though, is that this also may have influenced Thales. Indeed Aristotle suggests that the poets were somehow getting at a similar fact about how the world originated from water.

It seems to me like Thales was simply merging this mythic conception of the origin of things which perhaps was held in the region he was born in and at that time, with what he learned from interacting with Egyptian and Babylonian priests while on his travels in the east. Perhaps rather than trying to build a material foundation for the study of natural science or whatever role Aristotle is trying to place him in, he was really just trying to somehow reconcile these disparate but similar mythological explanations for the origin of things. Like I said the mythic tradition was fluid, it changed with time and as new peoples and themes interacted with it.

Unfortunately as I’ve said several times, we don’t actually have any writings from him on this subject and what little we have about them is possibly a distortion and certainly not enough to analyse. I think it’s possible that because of his image as an engineer/ mathematician Aristotle seems to think he was somehow different from the other men in history who simply contributed to this fluidity of the ancient mythic tradition that I’ve been talking about. There doesn’t seem to be much actual reason to believe that he represented some drastic turning point in the way we thought. In fact a lot of what he says seems to kind of rhyme with a lot of ideas in the various mythological traditions he would have encountered. Not just him, all three of the Milesians.

Anaximander’s section later goes on to describe his conception of the heavens, in fact most of the testimonia about him talk about this. It seems that primarily he was a sort of proto-astronomer, although he also had some things to say about the nature of matter and reality too like Anaximenes did and Thales. And it’s noted by the translator in the introduction to these thinkers at the start of the chapter that his suggestion that the stars are small holes in a ring nine times the size of earth (and the moon is a hole in a greater ring 18 times the size, and the sun a hole in the furthest ring which is 27 times the size) which allow a glimpse into an eternal fire actually mirrors a line from Hesiod which talks about a bronze anvil taking nine days to fall to earth from the heavens.

Anaximenes rejected Anaximander’s idea of the boundless as some entirely unique substance and instead seems to suggest that air is the fundamental element of creation. According to later sources he believed that the other traditional “elements” of fire, water, and earth were just the result of air being exposed to heat or cold. There doesn’t seem to be any exploration of where these changing temperatures arise, but that the boundless was air alone before these forces. Now Uranus was the god of the sky, so was there some connection there as he was another god credited with a role in creation, I don’t know. It’s interesting though, and even if these men were not mythmakers then at the very least I think it’s undeniable that the myths of their time heavily influenced their conception of the world and in that sense they were agents of Mythos.

This section ended up being quite a bit longer than I expected, I thought it’d be a few paragraphs only but here we are. I hope this was interesting, although admittedly there was not a lot I said that was especially new or insightful. I’m sure anyone who read what I have of the book, would probably have similar thoughts to me. I’m really enjoying reading this stuff though, it’s a lot of fun. I find this stuff to be fascinating, and I hope to simply keep learning. The next section is about a man called Xenophanes, and I will try to have that part finished relatively soon. I don’t think I’ll have too much to say about that either, but just like with this entry it may end up growing into something more than I expect.

Xenophanes of Colophon

Now funnily enough given a lot of what I’ve been talking about lately, particularly in the first section of this post, the next thinker I’m going to be talking about was actually a poet. He was a man with some very interesting ideas, groundbreaking ideas for his time perhaps, but first and foremost he was known for his poetry. A travelling bard, who wandered at the very least throughout the Greek world and perhaps even beyond. Somewhere around 100 lines of his poetry survive to this day apparently, and I believe that all that survives from him is in verse actually. Certainly all the fragments collected in this book are, thought they are far fewer than one hundred in number.

All that is collected here, as in the other sections so far, are those fragments which are considered by the translator to be philosophical in nature. Well, those and a couple which are autobiographical also. I’m starting to notice a pattern actually. That rather than this supposed claim justifying only a select few of the fragments being chosen, what’s really happening is the fragments selected are actually being used as supplementary material to the “introduction” section for each individual chapter. And that these introductions, not the sections which contain the fragments themselves, are the focus of this book. As I was saying in my initial response at the start of this post, I can’t help but feel like I’m getting a rather distorted view of what these men thought.

Every one of these introductory sections goes through what we know about the man, then follows up with some kind of explanation of a worldview they are supposed to have held. There’s always an attempt to present some kind of coherent path that was travelled to reach this worldview, and I’m just kind of sceptical. Again, I even said before that I feel like I can’t trust the ordering of these fragments. I’m not implying that the translator is trying to deliberately mislead, but I’m aware that this is a mass market book primarily aimed at enthusiasts and laymen, not academics. Part of me wonders if most of the fragments that didn’t get translated for this were left out simply because they were inconvenient or even merely unnecessary in order to present the narrative that most people who would buy this book are looking for.

I could have gone for the dry academic textbook which translates everything, and maybe read online articles or secondary sources (many of which are mentioned in this book to give credit where it is due, there is an extensive bibliography) for help understanding the historical, religious, and social context which these guys were part of, and everything else that I thought I needed and led me to picking this book over that one. If I had done that though, it would have taken me a lot longer and been more expensive and I’d probably have needed to write many posts rather than just having this one. And really all just so I can read Plato, that’s really what I’m most interest in getting to. In fact the primary reason I’m reading this book is to give me the philosophical and social context for when I do get to read Plato. Although if I never do get there I think I still will be happy to have read this book for it’s own sake, it is giving me a lot to think about.

So I’ll try and do my best and give my own take where possible as I did in the last section for every chapter in this book, but there is this slight feeling of doubt that I can’t shake. Maybe one day I’ll go back and buy that full textbook, maybe one day I’ll learn ancient greek and won’t even need a translation at all (unlikely), for now I’m just going to try and get on with this post. I’ve already talked about this enough, I won’t keep coming back to it but I just had to mention it again one last time because it is really present in my mind every time I read through a chapter and take notes. And I have been taking notes, for the two sections so far anyway. Once I finish this I’ll do the same for the Heraclitus chapter and so on.

Now I think the best way to do these sections is to focus on one aspect of each thinkers’ thought that I think is particularly interesting and add my own ideas to it, or talk about how it reminds me of ideas of my own, or about how this way of thinking is new to me. I don’t just want to simply regurgitate what the book says about these men, you can look up the Wikipedia article on them yourself (or read this book) if you’re interested. Both are going to be far more well cited and well written than this blog is, but what those other places can’t give you is my personal thoughts on the ideas of these men. So that is what I will try to provide. And Xenophanes does not disappoint, after reading through his chapter a second time in fact I’ve been brought back to an idea I talked about very briefly a while ago and have been forced to examine it in much more depth.

See what’s most interesting to me about Xenophanes is that he was a sort of early monotheist, which might surprise you (it surprised me) given the culture he lived in. I’ve talked before and even in this post about the fluidity of the Greek belief system, which I’m not sure how to refer to precisely, I guess I like a term which I’ve heard a few times, the Homeric religion. Well Xenophanes grew up in a world where this was what people believed, and he railed against it. Particularly the anthropomorphic depictions of the gods, there are a several fragments of him mocking or attacking the belief that many of the people of Greater Greece would have had, that being in literal human-like gods such as Apollo, Athena, Ares, etc. The kind depicted in The Iliad, or the many other famous myths, real relatable characters with flaws and vices and emotion.

Xenophanes attacked this, he points out how human cultures always happen to depict Gods that look like themselves. The Ethiopians (not modern day Ethiopians, in antiquity the term generally meant people from further south than Egypt) all have black skinned and flat nosed gods, and the Thracians all have red haired and blue eyed gods, he notes. Read into that, and the depictions of most of the greek gods we’re all familiar with like Apollo or Athena, what you will. There’s another fragment where he says that if Horses or Lions had hands, they would carve statues of Lion or Horse like gods. I talked before about how there were plenty of people I believe who didn’t literally believe in the gods as presented in many of the myths, but who had a more complex understanding of these figures, but it does seem that most of the normal people didn’t give it much thought.

I suppose it makes sense that only more scholarly types would have, just like how most people today kind of take the world around them for granted. That’s not to say that he didn’t believe in the gods, he wasn’t an atheist. I mean if people believe in a god, this will influence their actions. They are doing things in the name of a certain deity, and in a way this makes that god real. This is why so many religious traditions believe in sacrifice, and prayer, gods are like memes (as in Richard Dawkins’ idea of meme, which is similar to but not exactly the same as the way the word is used on 4chan and other sites) in a way. They survive and prosper thanks to human belief, and in a way they kind of do become like a real being. Something born from man, which in turn influences him and changes him.

Well anyway Xenophanes was clearly one of these men who didn’t just take the myths at face value, and it clearly bothered him that so many others did. Hence the mocking of them and the things they believed, although he mocked people he clearly had respect for or was influenced by as well. In the very last fragment presented for him, he mocks Pythagoras. I’m sure you’ll recognise the name, we all learned about his theorem in maths lessons, but as well as being a major early mathematician he was also a philosopher or perhaps even a kind of pagan theologian. I actually don’t like the idea that there is a hard distinction between the two, if it’s not obvious to anyone reading already. In eastern traditions like Persia, India, or China there doesn’t seem to have been this same hard line drawn between philosophy and theology. That’s one thing I learned from that book about comparative philosophy I talked about briefly about half a year ago.

In fact a lot of words for philosophy in the languages of these distant places are rather recent, post contact with the modern west. What we modern westerners tend to think of when we hear the term philosophy is something cut off from other disciplines, in part I suppose thanks to the nature of the educational systems we have which by necessity break things apart. Throughout most of history in the west all study was a form of philosophy almost. Isaac Newton wouldn’t have called himself a scientist, he was a natural philosopher. An Aristotelian term for the study of the natural world, the world of phenomena. Nowadays we have Science, a word which derives from the latin word for knowledge and yet roughly corresponds to what in the past would have been seen as merely a branch of it.

Philosophy might have been a term coined by Pythagoras in fact, or a very similar word in ancient Greek (Philosophia), and it meant the love of wonder/ wisdom or something like that. Yet Pythagoras wasn’t interested in merely speculating about petty abstractions as quite a few prominent advocates of Science™ have said. Not at all, in fact today he’s mostly remembered as a mathematician. Now I’m going to talk about him more when I’ve read his chapter, because honestly I don’t know a lot about him yet. I know he is another of these figures who supposedly travelled beyond the Greek world, and he believed in reincarnation and was also a kind of monist like Xenophanes. I don’t know if Pythagoras took this One idea (which to me seems very Indian) and actually presented it as a divine being like Xenophanes, but I guess I’ll find out.

Aristotle described Xenophanes as an informal monist, in contrast to Parmenides who he may have influenced and who I’ll be talking about soon and some others, because his idea was not very well fleshed out or rigorous. Which makes sense, he was a poet and therefore he would have expressed his thought as much through technique and imagery as through simple explanation. See he talks about this God of his as being entirely omnipotent, in fact the translator notes in the introduction that he’s almost like if Anaximander’s boundless were personified. In fact maybe that is exactly what he was trying to do, maybe that is what the poet’s role in tradition is. And as I’ve explained I’m not so sure that the Milesians were doing anything other than taking part in the evolution of tradition.

I’ve already talked about them though, this section is about Xenophanes. Now he describes this god as being entirely motionless, and yes he refers to him as a “he”, he talks about him as a male being that can hear and see and think. Yet not at all like any living creature either, as I said he doesn’t even move “but effortlessly he shakes all things by thinking with his mind”. My interpretation of this fragment is that any reference to a body is just for the sake of making him comprehensible, but in fact this “god” is very similar to my conception of god which I’ve talked about before a little bit. He literally is everything, and this means that he can’t be something, because all somethings are mere aspects of everything. And perhaps this is what people are talking about when they say they believe there to be a kind of “one-ness” to everything, a unifying principle.

I’m not as convinced of that, I feel like perhaps there are other forces at work. I’m actually kind of drawn to dualistic thinking generally, but I’m really still trying to collect my thoughts on these subjects so for now I won’t go into much more detail about my own ideas on this particular issue. My point here is that I was immediately reminded of my own ideas on this that I talked about in that linked post, and a couple other times in even less detail, which is interesting. Either Xenophanes’ influence is very grand in scope, or he in turn has influenced many others who’s ideas have in turn somehow got to me through the culture or traditions.

So I could be wrong, but my current interpretation of the fragments relating to this super/ over god figure is that there is a kind of esoteric reading in which the god is somewhat figurative or at the very least any description of his form is. Another way of putting it is that the descriptions of his body and action are actually there to illustrate his nature and power in an indirect way. The poet is being poetic, with his references to thought and movement and so on. Or perhaps I’m entirely wrong, in another fragment Xenophanes goes on to say that no one will ever understand the nature of the gods or of the other matters about which he wrote and talked about. Those being similar ideas in the same cosmogonical vein as those about which the Milesians talked about, and which I would love to explore more but only a few lines survive. There’s just nothing to really analyse in that regard, it’s a shame.

Anyway, there may have been more I wanted to say but I’m struggling to think of anything else right now and this second update to this post has taken much longer than I expected. I’ve been working a bit more than I expected this week, so I’ve had less free time, but I’m pretty sure I’ve covered the main things I wanted to regarding Xenophanes so I’m happy to just upload what I’ve written now. Heraclitus is next, and also I’ve got a separate full length post planned which I intend to start writing in the next couple days, so stay tuned. I hope that people are finding this stuff interesting, it’s certainly very interesting to me and I want to keep writing more about philosophy going forward even if I might be a brainlet.

Heraclitus of Ephesus

It’s funny, when I first read this section of the book it brought out all that doubt and concern that I talked about in the first part of this post. This is because after reading through it all, I felt like I had really learned nothing. I went back a second time though as I said, and then I started to see. Now every time I open that chapter and just look at one of the fragments, it sends me down a whole new line of thought every time. There is a lot to mine here, but how much is by design and how much is simply a result of Heraclitus’ legendary reputation and my own tendency to overanalyse everything I am not entirely sure. I guess it doesn’t matter though, I do personally believe that a piece of writing takes on a certain life of it’s own and so can present things that weren’t necessarily intended by the initial writer.

I want to try and keep this section somewhat cohesive though, and so I won’t be able to say everything about my thoughts on the ideas of this man in this specific post. It’s very possible I will talk about him again though, or at least that there will be other posts that are in part inspired by my reflections on what he wrote. That is for another time however, for now I intend to try and give my current interpretation of what the philosophy that underlies all these disparate fragments presented in this book is. As always I may be entirely misreading the man, but at least I am reading him. So I’m going to start off by talking about the 21st fragment presented in this chapter (Dielz Kranz 22B51) which is translated as so in this particular book.

They are ignorant of how while tending away it agrees with itself — a back-turning harmony, like a bow or lyre.

I like this one a lot and I remember it sticking out to me on the first reading because it seemed completely impenetrable, after all it is exceedingly vague and seems to be missing some crucial context. The question is on everybody’s mind I’m sure, what is this “it” he is referring to? Well, it is the Logos. Or what I will mostly be calling it going forward, the Heraclitean Logos, which is related to but distinct from the other uses I talked about in that first section of this post. In fact in the translations for this book, the word Logos isn’t used in any of the fragments even though that is the word Heraclitus himself used, and there was a focus on it in the introduction to this book weirdly. Instead Waterfield translates it as “principle”, which works better than other translations I checked online where it was changed to “word”, but nevertheless is still a choice which I don’t like.

Clearly there’s no word which works exactly right or there wouldn’t be different choices for which English substitute to use, so why even translate it at all. Logos is a loanword that we still use in the English language, though of course it’s not exactly one that comes up in conversation frequently, so it seems to me that it would have made sense just to leave it as is. Principle does work though, but actually I think if I really had to translate it I’d have either chosen the word logic or law. See the way Heraclitus uses the word is to describe something which he thinks underlies the material world which is in a permanent state of change or movement. Flux is the word used, and if you look up videos or lectures on youtube, or read articles online, this idea of flux is often presented as one of his few primary ideas.

Now I don’t disagree but I think that this idea of flux, and his other ideas about fire and war, are all closely related and unified by one overarching personal philosophy. Heraclitus saw the entire physical world as something which was in eternal motion, always moving. Most famously he expressed this with his analogy of the river where, to paraphrase, he compares the world we inhabit to a river. For you can never step into the same river twice, it’s constantly moving. You cross a river and by the time you cross back, the water you stepped in earlier has long flowed downstream. That’s not to miss the forest for the trees though, he uses the word “river” and in doing so clearly acknowledges it, but stresses that we should also have this understanding that while we may be limited by our human faculties to perceive a world of stationary items permanence in any sense is illusory.

This is the heraclitean logos, this force of pure movement, or perhaps we could refer to it as energy. The irony being that the only thing that we can rely on to always be the same, is that things never remain the same, the principle of eternal change. And is it so crazy to attribute some kind of divinity to this factor? I don’t think so. In fact Heraclitus himself describes something which he refers to as “the one and only wise thing”, which I assume has to be this logos, and he says that it both is and is not willing to be called by the name of Zeus. Zeus of course being the head of the Olympian pantheon, the “father” god of the Greeks. Which reminds me a lot of what Xenophanes was talking about, how the accepted gods of the Greeks were a way of giving a human face to the real divinity. In the same sense perhaps Heraclitus is saying that the logos is the real divinity that is behind the traditional gods.

Anyone who understood history would understand that the nature of the gods changed over time, like I’ve spoken about several times before, and Heraclitus being a member of the aristocracy (In fact some accounts suggest he was a member of the ruling family of Ephesus, and rejected the position of kingship when it was offered to him) would have been educated in the history of his clan and city at least if not the entire Greek people. He certainly would have known of the poetry of Homer, which presented a slightly different ordering of the pantheon to that of his own day as I’ve talked about before. The outward face of spirituality was not stagnant or unmoving, it was fluid and constantly evolving to fit the world around it which was constantly moving as well. The underlying essence of divinity however, which underlies practical religion/ tradition, is eternal. Seeing the parallels here?

It’s not just in relation to spirituality that this idea of a changing or evolving world applies though, it is everywhere. Really, once I began to appreciate this idea I started to notice it in all areas of life. Take something about which Heraclitus couldn’t possibly have known, the cellular structure of all living things. We know now that every single day cells in your body are dying and being replaced, by the time you are an old man every cell in your body right now will have died and been replaced. Unless you are already an old man. Of course it’s not like we shed our skin like a snake, it happens in a very disjointed manner. Fat cells can last for years for example, while other cells in the human body die and are replaced after a few days, but the human body is like the famous ship of Theseus in that eventually every material component is destroyed and replaced.

Yet we recognise a person, even though now modern biology has taught us this about ourselves we don’t feel like it’s true. We feel like there are people, we perceive a world of things that exist and then don’t. Heraclitus points out that in fact what we see is like a flowing river, everything in the world from the largest star to a grain of sand. We as people are limited, or constrained perhaps, so as to be incapable of really understanding this truly. We can maybe acknowledge it intellectually, but our very senses seem to tell us otherwise. Similar to how you can tell someone that the best way to not get eaten by a bear is to make yourself as big as possible by holding out your arms wide, but even someone who knows this when actually faced with a bear will instead act on instinct and run in most cases.

We think we inhabit a world of tables and chairs, of rules and laws, of traditions, but the truth is god didn’t create the world in seven days and place the creatures as they are here on earth. Evolution is god, it is the only thing which is and always will be. Evolution as applied to humans and the species more generally was such a big deal culturally because it goes against this instinctual feeling that we inhabit an ordered universe. Not to say there isn’t a sort of order, but not in the way we might tend to think. However everything is evolving constantly, not just species of animals, you the person reading this will evolve with new information or experience until you die. Products in the market evolve to maximise profits, and in turn demand is changing every day. The planet itself is changing shape, tectonic plates shifting and so on. I could go on and on ad nauseum, indeed hypothetically I could describe everything observable.

I want to go back to that quote right from the start though, there was more I wanted to say about it. See I think it’s so interesting because it gives us a crucial explanation as to the nature of this flux which all things are subject to according to Heraclitus, this divine logos which I think is at the core of his philosophy. He describes it as like a bow (as in bow and arrow) or lyre, a musical instrument which is a bit like a small harp you can hold in one hand. Apollo is actually frequently depicted with a lyre, not sure if there is anything to this or if it’s just a coincidence but I feel like it’s worth noting. Him being a god oft associated with  So the thing that both of these items have in common is that a string is held taut at all times, being pulled tight from both directions, which creates a permanent tension or energy ready to be released and grant death or make music respectively.

You look at a bow which has been strung, or a lyre or other string instrument, and you see what looks like an inanimate object, but just like the river ever flowing there is in fact movement. At all times it is being pulled apart, it couldn’t be any less stationary, it is at war with itself. And speaking of war, which it seems Heraclitus saw as a kind of example of this logos on the grand human scale, there are a fair few fragments which make mention of it in this collection. He actually anthropomorphises war, yet doesn’t ever make any mention of the god Ares interestingly, describing it as the father and king of all. He raises men to the greatest heights and yet drags others down to the lowliest positions in life. He grants the greatest freedom men will experience, and yet makes slaves of many as well.

It is reasonable to assume that Heraclitus himself would have fought in battle I think, being from a clan of such prestige in the warrior culture of classical Greece I find it hard to see how he couldn’t have. So this wasn’t just a sheltered idealist talking about a realm which he didn’t understand, no he lived in a time of constant war and so these are no idle words. When he glorifies war though, I don’t think that it’s meant to be taken entirely at face value. There’s more depth to these statements in my opinion, which I think the bow analogy helps to illuminate for us. War is the truest expression of something which he sees everywhere, that being of course the logos. It is movement, it is dynamism, and yes it is conflict.

Think about it, there are so many major inventions that changed the world and were first and foremost a product of war. What is the primary driver of major changes in culture, language, religion, even the genetic make-up of a population? War. What Heraclitus’ idea of the logos is to everything, war is at the civilizational level. More than a metaphor, an actual example of the very thing it analogises. It makes a lot of sense to me as well, to go back to the example of the bow. Like a generator, you need to build up energy and motion before you do anything. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, that’s the first law of thermodynamics, which you could say kind of vindicates some of what Heraclitus was saying all those millennia ago.

Think about your own life though, how much easier it can be to launch yourself into something when you’re already in motion. In fact I’m reminded of the times my dad has left me here to go on holiday. I have to do far more than usual, cooking for myself every day, washing up and cleaning, while still going in to work, going out to buy the food I’ll need, etc. I’m not saying this to complain, it’s far from a hard life I lead but I’m just saying that comparatively I am forced to be more active even if only to accomplish rather plebeian tasks. Yet I get more writing done every time he leaves than I do in a similar period of time that passes while he lives here. Last time in fact I wrote about this phenomenon and was worried that I would somehow ruin the effect, but I didn’t. There is definitely something to the idea that lethargy is a sort of self perpetuating thing, and that the inverse can be said for movement and action.

Another thing which is something of a focus point for Heraclitus is fire, I’m sure you can probably guess why. Fire as a metaphor for change is far older than Heraclitus, think of the legendary phoenix which burns up in order to be rejuvenated and live again. In fact fire is a hugely important symbol in Zoroastrianism which was the religion of the Persians. A religion which influenced all the Abrahamic faiths to some degree by the way, both in how it’s influence on Judaism will have carried through into the others, and of course because Zoroastrian ideas directly influenced Christianity and Islam as they did Judaism, later in history.

Now Ephesus was part of the Persian empire while Heraclitus was alive, of course the Ionian city states that it was one of were granted a great deal of autonomy (after all we know Ephesus at least still had kings of it’s own, even if they were ultimately subject to the authority of the satrap for that province), but nevertheless it’s almost impossible for Heraclitus not to have encountered the Zoroastrian faith and tradition. Even if the Ionian city states mostly kept to themselves, they still had to operate within this larger imperial structure and would have fought alongside Persians and other conquered peoples in wartime. When they weren’t rebelling that is. Unfortunately I know very little about what Zoroastrians believed, but I just felt like there must be some connection there and that I should note it. I’m trying to cover all my main thoughts on each thinker in this post so I’m making sure to include things like that, even if I’m not able to elaborate much on them right now.

Much like how the Milesians had their own ideas about what the elements of the material world were, and what came first, Heraclitus seems to be saying that fire is this originating substance. Now of course we can’t be sure if those other thinkers were being figurative, or only partially literal, or if they really were being purely literal only. In Heraclitus’ case I think it’s undeniable that even if he also really believed that fire literally birthed all things, he was also trying to say something about the current state of the world in so doing. Fire is a kind of pure form of change, of dynamism and energy, so I completely understand the focus on it. When you watch a flame, you can feel life in it, I remember thinking this on camping trips when I was young. And of course fire also has the ability to cause change in almost anything it touches.

It’s just really interesting stuff, and I could honestly probably write twice as much as I have here so far but I think this is a good place to stop. I’ve covered my most crucial thoughts on the man and his ideas, if I am reminded of something else I will come back and add a paragraph or two but I’m pretty sure I’m happy with what I’ve written. The next section will probably take a little longer because I haven’t even read the next chapter in the book yet. I will read it when I have some time, and then I will probably want some time to reflect and re-read parts, before finally returning to this post to add my thoughts. I hope what I’m writing here is interesting to you, and I encourage you to read this stuff yourself if you haven’t. A translation into your own language if English or Greek isn’t your native one.

Parmenides of Elea

A lot more time has passed since I wrote the last section for this thing than I would have liked, of course if you read my other entries on this blog you’ll understand partly why. I also took the time recently to read another book, which I have now finished, and so I put the one this entry is responding to aside for a while. We have now entered a whole new decade though, and I’ve decided it’s time to pick it back up. So I read the next chapter I was up to, regarding Parmenides, twice over the last two nights and I’m going to try and talk about it now. I will say though, this part might be a little shorter than the others because I’m not sure if I have much to say. I’ll be honest, I really struggled to understand Parmenides’ philosophy from what little we have of it. I think I have a grasp if it now, but even after reading through this section of the book twice I still feel like there’s something I’m missing or failing to make sense of.

All that we have from Parmenides is one poem titled On Nature, of which only certain sections survive. Of course, everything I said about the issues with translation, especially of poetry, in the introduction to this post, still stands. This means that a lot of meaning presented through very careful word choice is lost, and also that literal chunks of the poem itself are as well. The poem is divided into three sections, though if this is a division made later by scholars or not I’m not exactly sure. An introduction, the Way of Truth, and the Way of Appearance (sometimes translated as the Way of Opinion), the last of which very little survives of unfortunately. So because I myself am still trying to understand Parmenides, for this section what I will do is go through the fragments, which are presented in what scholars believe is chronological order, and try and understand him better.

Luckily this isn’t the last time I will be encountering the line of thinking presented by Parmenides, so there will be more time to come to terms with his philosophy. No, Parmenides is possibly the most influential and important of the thinkers presented in this book, at least that’s what both the translator and plenty of other reputable scholars and writers seem to be saying. Indeed all the thinkers in this first half of the book (the book is divided into two parts, the second which covers the Sophists which I might write a separate post about) who come after Parmenides chronologically are either responding to Parmenides or are in agreement with him and are further expanding upon his propositions. Plato was apparently deeply influenced by him, and in fact one of his most famously complex dialogues features Parmenides and his follower Zeno (who has his own section in this book) and a young Socrates.

Ok, so on to the actual poem itself now. The introduction which seemingly still survives in full sets the scene, Parmenides (in a way which reminds me a little of Dante’s Divine Comedy, though the “descent into the underworld” trope is a very widespread one in mythology from all over the world) describes how he is taken to the underworld one night on a chariot drawn by mares and guided by mysterious veiled maidens. At the gates he is greeted by a Goddess who goes unnamed, who tells Parmenides that it isn’t death that brought him here as one would expect, but because she has some crucial knowledge to share with him.

At this point the introduction ends, and then through the voice of this Goddess Parmenides goes on to share his philosophy with the reader. Now is this a dream he had, or even a waking hallucinatory experience? Perhaps, or perhaps it’s just the natural impulse to explain ideas through story/ myth. Or maybe he literally went the gates of Hades, who knows. Whatever the reason, this sets up the narrative framework within which Parmenides goes on to present his ideas.

So the goddess goes on to give the premising argument upon which all of Parmenides’ conclusions rely, and she does so by presenting it as a choice. The premise itself is that the very idea of “nothingness” is impossible, he actually goes on to say quite emphatically that there is no such thing as nothing a few lines later. The specific wording of the two choices or “ways”, because it is important to know, are as follows. There is the way “that it is and it cannot not be” (the “it” in question being both any specific “it” you might imagine and also everything you can imagine, at least that seems to be the consensus but he doesn’t really specify himself), which he tells us through the mouthpiece of the goddess is the correct view on things, and in opposition there is the way “that it is not and that it must not be” which in turn he describes as an altogether misguided route.

A pretty unassuming starting point you might be thinking, “things are real” is what he seems to be saying, except that in fact he’s going to lead things to a point where he argues the exact opposite. That all sense experience is illusory, and the very idea of seperateness is in fact an impossibility. Indeed Parmenides seemed to have very little faith in the value of the senses, in one fragment taken from a little later in the poem arguing in a rather fanciful way that we should disregard what our senses tell us and instead attempt the pursuit of wisdom through reason (or logos I suppose) alone. Of course I find this belief in the power of human rationality to be incredibly arrogant and misguided, but that is what he believed. It’s undeniably odd I think, however, that someone with such a distrust in the senses (again I personally don’t even see our ability to reason or think logically as somehow distinct from other basic functions, but he did) would reason themselves into the position that the world we see and hear and smell is false.

So after the goddess presents the two choices, and kindly informs us which one is correct, she goes on to explain that if we do accept this then it naturally follows that whatever can be thought of in some sense “is”. There is no such thing as “what is not”. Of course you must be thinking that there are plenty of things you can think of which don’t exist, in fact in the introduction to this chapter when this particular point is being covered the translator even gives some examples himself. You can think about the king of Australia and unicorns all day long, that doesn’t make them manifest. This isn’t just a glaring hole in his logic though, in fact I think this line may have been included in part to specifically encourage this thinking because it helps to actually explain better what he means when he uses the expression “what is”.

We can only imagine things which don’t exist currently in terms of things that do. There may not be a king of Australia, but there are definitely kings and there is definitely an Australia. A little like how when we dream we enter a world which makes no sense, but is populated by things which do and are familiar. We can’t think in terms outside of “what is”, and in this sense I do agree with Parmenides. What I don’t agree with, or at least what I’m as of yet unconvinced by, is this idea that because we as constrained beings are incapable of truly comprehending nothingness therefore we must reject it entirely. It’s the most intuitive thing in the world to believe that before there was something, there was nothing. Everything has a beginning and an end, as the idiom goes.

If there is no such thing as “what is not”, then the very idea of a beginning is impossible. Of course you must have heard the question asked “How can something come from nothing?”, it seems to be something everyone asks themselves at some point actually, well Parmenides just discards the question entirely. And this is the point in the poem where some pretty wild conclusions are drawn based on the original premise, some of which I can follow along with and in fact find rather impossible to argue against if we accept the foundational argument that there is only “what is” as correct, but others which I don’t quite understand how he reached. That the idea of birth and death, or creation and destruction, are impossible I can make sense of. If you reject the idea of nothing, then you must accept that there always was and will be something.

There is no way for there to be some kind of spontaneous eruption of substance from a nothing which never was, but rather you must accept that “what is” is therefore self propagating in some way, and that the very idea of a beginning is impossible as well. On the other end, things can’t possibly cease to be either and so in some sense what we perceive as death or any kind of disintegration or ending of things must in fact just be a transferring of some aspect of “what is” into itself. Which in a way kind of mirrors the Logos that Heraclitus wrote about, this force of change which underlies everything. With Heraclitus we also see this rejection of what our senses might imply about the world around us, where instead of the world as a series of independent processes we should see that all is just one eternal process of transformation.

At least that is how I interpreted him, and this interpretation has greatly affected my worldview. Of all the philosophers who I have so far encountered, Heraclitus is the one who has most profoundly affected my way of seeing the world. I just find his view of things to be fascinating, and to make so much sense, I hope that came across in the section I dedicated to him before this one. Now Parmenides was in fact responding to Heraclitus in part, and ultimately his philosophy does run counter to that which Heraclitus espoused, but I also think that in some ways (as briefly shown above) the ideas of the two men actually seem to rhyme or run along similar lines at least. It might sound paradoxical, but in some sense I think these two thinkers are both getting at the same truth despite also seeming impossible to reconcile with one another. Although from what I’ve heard, that is exactly what Plato attempts to do later in history.

So if “what is” cannot possibly have been born from “what is not”, and yet we see around us a multitude of things, then it does follow that they are all in some sense the same thing. The leap that Parmenides seems to take here, that I don’t quite see the logic in, is that therefore if all things are “one” in this way then there is no possible differentiation. The world of things we think we inhabit is apparently impossible, and therefore an illusion of some kind. So he presents us with what he thinks is the only possible way things can truly be, beneath the glamour of distinction. He argues that “what is” can be visualised as one coherent item which stretches out infinitely in all directions, and anything you can think of is contained within it. It has always been here, and it will always be here, for it is timeless.

So in this sense he is entirely opposed to Heraclitus, in the most crucial sense. According to Parmenides change isn’t the underlying truth of things, but rather change is an illusion and the underlying reality is in fact changeless. Which is what I don’t quite get, because if there is no change or morphing even within “what is”, then how does he deal with the reality we face that so clearly tells us otherwise. Well he doesn’t really, he just dismisses it as illusory which is kind of a cop out in my opinion. He does go on to describe the illusory world he thinks that we only think we inhabit (indeed the idea that we even exist at all must be also seen as in fact false if you accept his arguments completely) in some detail in the third part of the poem, the Way of Appearance/ Opinion. The problem is that so much of that is lost, unlike the first part which survives in full and the Way of Truth which almost does as well, the final section is almost completely lost.

There are a decent number of testimonia which talk about what was written in this last part though, and it seems that instead of explaining why we experience this illusion of a universe of things he just follows in the footsteps of the Milesians and men like that who tried to present a cosmogony. He talks about the same classical elements, like fire and earth etc. and he talks a bit about the planets and all that stuff. It’s clearly kind of mythical in influence, there’s this motif of the earth being surrounded by rings of various kinds which he talks about that I noticed was also something Anaximander said. Almost as if they are getting this somehow from some religious tale or story of some kind which I am unfamiliar with. Anyway I will leave Parmenides here for now, but I’m far from done with him I think. In fact the very next section of this book deals with a man who was a staunch follower of his from what I understand.

Zeno of Elea

This will very possibly be the shortest section in this entire entry, certainly the shortest so far, but that’s fine. I’ve actually written quite a bit more than I thought I would when I first decided to split this post up the way I did, the section on Heraclitus for example being almost long enough to have been a standalone upload. The whole point of combining this into one big thing was so I would definitely respond to every section of this book, rather than perhaps choosing not to write anything when I didn’t think I could finish a substantial post on any particular thinker. So really this section, and any others like it I may go on to write, are what this format was chosen with in mind. As I’ve said on this blog many times, I’m just a layman when it comes to talking and writing about philosophy and I’m not particularly clever. Sometimes I just don’t have that much to say, or I do but it’s nothing interesting or insightful. With that being said, here are my brief thoughts.

Zeno was a Parmenidean, and so all his writings on philosophy are in service of the ideas laid out by Parmenides. They were contemporaries as well, I read somewhere that Parmenides was very fond of Zeno and it seems they had a sort of mentor/ protégé relationship. I already mentioned this as well in the last part I think, but Zeno is a character in Plato’s “Parmenides” dialogue which is one where he supposedly tries to tackle the philosophy of the titular figure using the Socrates character as usual. Well the first of the “testimonia” in this chapter is an excerpt from that dialogue, and in it Socrates briefly questions Zeno on the first hypothesis of the first argument of his treatise. This one treatise is the only work of philosophy of his, and it was quite different from the poem On Nature that it sought to defend.

It was a list, a list of so called “paradoxes”, which he believed presented various contradictions or flaws behind the idea of plurality. Parmenides’ grand conclusion of course being that there can’t possibly be a plurality of things, that all is one, and so the world of individual things we think we see must be illusory. I already talked about that though, and it’s definitely a fascinating idea and not one that can be dismissed easily. Zeno’s writing, of which very little survives intact (basically no more than a few brief quotations, but luckily Aristotle went into great detail arguing against many of the propositions of Zeno which is how we know what quite a few of the paradoxes were), is annoying in that it focuses on what him and Parmenides would have described as the illusion in order to explain the unified real world which exists beyond it.

All of the paradoxes that are covered in this book (there were supposedly around 40, but less than ten remain) are very similar to one another. I won’t go through all of them again here, but I’ll talk about one and in so doing will be talking about all of them in a sense. This one paradox is called the Dichotomy and it is recounted by Aristotle, indeed almost all of the testimonia in this chapter are from Aristotle’s Physics or Simplicius’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. Zeno starts with a reasonable point, for any moving object to reach Point B (starting at Point A) it must first reach a halfway point. How can anyone disagree, for in order to get anywhere you must first get halfway there. However, once you reach this halfway marker it must be said that there is another point halfway between the current point and the end, and so on ad infinitum.

Zeno is saying, essentially, that there will always be another half way point in any journey. Naturally there must be an infinite amount of halfway points if you follow this logic, which makes the idea that you can actually reach one destination from another physically impossible. Aristotle’s response was lacking in my opinion, he uses the paradox as a jumping off point to explain that the idea of infinity has more than one meaning (infinite in extent/ size, or infinitely divisible, any traversable distance being in the second category) but doesn’t actually address the fundamental point being raised. The point is to show that the world around us doesn’t make sense, that the illusion breaks down when you examine it.

Now mathematicians have dealt with the paradoxes of Zeno by now, Carl Boyer (a mathematics Ph.D who Wikipedia tells me also wrote a great deal about the history of mathematics in the mid 20th century) famously saying that the paradoxes were dealt with by calculus. Because they all deal with motion in some sense, all of course trying to show that motion is in fact impossible logically. Any STEMfag reading this will hate me for talking about something I clearly have no understanding of, I’m aware how out of my depth I am here don’t worry. I did briefly learn about calculus when doing my A-levels but the way they taught us was just rote memorisation and I never really understood it truly and have now forgotten everything they made me memorise. I do get very intimidated by anything mathematical now, almost like I’ve been shaken by that A-Level experience and how humiliating the entire year was.

I don’t know where I would start if I wanted to re-learn what I once knew and go further, or if there is any reason to do so. I still think mathematics is in some sense the purest kind of knowledge, and that philosophy and mathematics are tied up with one another in a way that cannot ever be truly undone. Zeno being a perfect example of this, even though what he covers is very rudimentary even for his own time as geometry and arithmetic were already well established, he was talking about the idea of infinity which is a complicated idea. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the study of mathematics is philosophy, philosophy means the love of wisdom (a portmanteau of the words philo and sophia) and was a term coined by Pythagoras, who is remembered today mostly for his mathematical work fittingly.

Today we think of philosophy as one discipline within academia, populated by annoying French Marxists or stuffy old men quibbling over ever more insignificant linguistic quirks, but this is new. All of study was considered to be working towards the goal of philosophy, or wisdom, for most of the history of it. What we roughly refer to as science today was still going by the Aristotelian term Natural Philosophy even as recently as Isaac Newton’s day. Isaac Newton being the man who developed Calculus and discovered gravity, but also spent a great deal of his life performing alchemical experiments and writing about religion and theology and even serving as a member of parliament.

Philosophy today has become a category within itself, and one that is kind of dismissed or seen as masturbatory and silly. It’s Aristotle that this can be traced back to it seems, though of course he himself would have been shocked at the result. He seems to have been the originator of this splitting of the disciplines, a lot of his time seems to have been dedicated towards proper categorisation and the way he organised study was followed pretty strictly until recently and even today his influence on academia is apparent. And in a way that is Zeno’s legacy as well, because Aristotle essentially used his paradoxes as an excuse to talk about infinity and the other similar ideas that are brought up in some of the others.

The error Zeno thought he was pointing out in the Dichotomy, and in his other paradoxes, was that the physical laws of the world (which he of course believed to be illusory, and may in fact be though not in the way he tried to explain it) didn’t make sense. So Aristotle rejected the conclusion that the physical world was illusory (I believe, though maybe I’m wrong) and instead concluded from Zeno’s paradoxes that all this meant was that the scientific and mathematical understandings of the time were just flawed. I suppose you don’t even have to reject the idea of the world as an illusion to accept this, there’s no reason the illusion wouldn’t be watertight and in fact properly understanding the world around us might help in getting beyond it if anything.

So I haven’t really talked about Zeno himself and what he wrote much in this post, but it’s not really his ideas that are important I don’t think. This post is just for me to give my thoughts upon reading each chapter in this book, and these have been them. So in conclusion I guess Zeno is historically very important, but for reasons that he didn’t intend at all. I have to be honest though, this was by far the least interesting chapter so far, so hopefully the next one is more engaging. From what I understand the thinker who’s writings it covers, a man called Melissus, was another Parmenidean but hopefully he will take a different approach.

Melissus of Samos

Melissus was a naval commander from the island city-state of Samos, he actually played a somewhat prominent role in a conflict with Athens that Thucydides mentions early in his account of the Peloponnesian War in the first section when he talks about the build up to the war. He even bested Pericles in one particular encounter apparently. He doesn’t mention Melissus by name, I went back to check because I didn’t remember, but apparently other classical era historians did when writing about the war. So following on from explaining this Waterfield (the translator, compiler of this collection) makes a statement which I find thoroughly absurd. Here’s the quote.

One cannot help thinking that he must have temporarily shelved the changelessness of the Parmenidean “what-is” in order to engage in politics and warfare, and so that by his very life he demonstrates that Parmenidean monism was epistemological — a state of mind, rather than an ontological statement about the world.

Now my understanding of either of those these terms is not brilliant but I’m pretty certain that the definition for epistemology he is giving is completely false. And sure I’ve talked about the fluidity of words and definitions before – language like all things is subject to the Heraclitean logos – but for the purpose of seeking understanding we still need consensus on terms for the sake of precision. We can’t just give way entirely to the forces of change, it is through the friction created in pushing back (tradition) that the most fruitful outcomes are reached.

Anyway in this case Waterfield isn’t engaged in an organic evolution of terms he’s just thinking of a different word. He says epistemology but really given the brief description he gives he meant to say something else. I’m not sure exactly what word works best, maybe “attitude” or “personal”, but certainly not “epistemological”. At least if that quote was simply a spoken statement you could make the case for him that it was simply a case of misspeaking. Given that this was something written down, deliberated over, and then published however, I’m not sure how you can justify the mistake.

At least I’m pretty certain it’s a mistake, my understanding of the terms “epistemology”/ “epistemological” are very different from “a state of mind”. Now I almost never get comments so I’m not expecting anything but for the sake of explaining myself better I’ll briefly lay out what I understand the terms to mean (and “ontology”/ “ontological” also, while I’m at it) and if I’m completely wrong someone can correct me in a comment. In this post you’re reading I’m trying to learn, not to explain anything other than my current understanding which I know is flawed, and so I fully expect to have said and say things that are incorrect. So that I might get a little closer to the truth and right understanding in time.

Ok, so epistemology and ontology are two separate branches within philosophy. There has been an abundance of epistemological inquiry over the millennia – though the term is relatively new, what it describes is very old – which I’m sure has led to all kinds of fascinating places but at it’s base it is about something rather simple, defining and exploring what knowledge and understanding are truly. Those dealing with questions such as what can we know, how reliable are our senses and rational faculties, that sort of thing. It does not refer to something that is merely an attitude or half serious abstraction, it isn’t a way of seeing things, it is just a word used to describe one kind of philosophy.

So you could say that the Eleatic doctrine raises epistemological questions – though rather frustratingly leaves them without even an attempt at an answer – but it is concerned with ontology primarily. Which leads me to what may be possibly an even more egregious mistake in that same quoted statement from the start. Which is that Parmenides’ monism in not ontological. It is almost purely an ontological position, for god’s sake if you go on the Wikipedia article for the term “ontology” the first thing you see is a photograph of a bust of Parmenides. It’s even said that ontology really begins with him, because unlike the other Pre-Socratics before him he laid out his reasoning rather than simply sharing his conclusions.

Ontology refers to any attempt to explain and explore the nature of reality, to understand the world of things, of what is. Though there’s a particular focus on metaphysics, because modern science (and natural philosophy, which that developed from) is what deals with describing the physical world. You’ve probably asked yourself “why is there something rather than nothing?”, that is an ontological question. As opposed to something like “Is your red the same as my red?”, which is an example of an epistemological question. The many ways in which people have answered those first sort of question, that is the history of ontology. I think.

It might seem unnecessary to focus so much on a simple remark, but it’s something that really stuck out to me. I am sure these terms will become important ones to understand as I continue to read more about these kinds of things as well, so trying to define them and understand them correctly is important. Anyway there’s very little to actually respond to from Melissus, he doesn’t really add anything new. He was another Parmenidean like Zeno, but whereas Zeno had a rather unique way of contributing to that school of thought Melissus seemed intent only to codify what was already established by people that way inclined.

The only surviving writing of his is from a treatise which basically just lays out the arguments and conclusions from On Nature (Parmenides’ original poem) in very simple and concise prose. I presume the only reason he was as well known as he was in the ancient world, given how derivative his work was, is because his work was a much more accessible introduction to Eleaticism. Melissus does seem to have had one small contribution though, which reminds me that I need to make a correction to something I said in the section I wrote regarding Parmenides. I said that he described the One (what-is) as infinite, but in fact he did not and I was wrong to say so.

There’s a specific line in On Nature in fact, which I didn’t really take note of properly on first reading, where he describes it as being “changeless within great bonds”. This seems to contradict everything he says, which is probably why I didn’t really see it at first, because if there is no such thing as nothingness and there is no such thing as plurality then what is must be infinite. Melissus makes the same leap I did however, and states definitively that the One is infinite. Which makes much more sense to me, in fact I think the Eleatic doctrine falls apart completely if you don’t follow it through to that conclusion.

So there’s nothing else new in this chapter (it’s very short) to respond to, it was basically a re-hash of what I read in the Parmenides chapter. Which came in useful, given that it has been a few months. It’s possible I’m going to have a lot more free time over the next few months though, so maybe I’ll be able to pick up the speed a bit and get this post finished soon. I’ll find out soon. Given that Melissus’ role was essentially to provide an overview of the ideas of the Eleatic school, I will take the opportunity now to briefly give some quick further thoughts I’ve had on it now I’ve had enough time to really think about it more. That initial response I wrote to the Parmenides chapter was made almost immediately after first reading it, which is maybe why it wasn’t so great and I made that error.

What I will say is that it is totally compatible with this idea I’ve talked about before, which I think I’ve come to independently but seems to be far from unique, which is that what we might call God or divinity is everything. I linked to the first post I made talking about this in the section on Xenophanes, because he seemed to be describing something very similar to my way of seeing things. Well if you were to accept the Eleatic position, which I’m still not sure I do because there are some leaps of logic as I mentioned that I find hard to follow, that would fit in very well with this conception of ultimate divinity. As Aristotle defined it, Eleaticism is a kind of monism, and it’s only a small step further to define this unifying One as divine in some sense.

I think that’s what Xenophanes was doing, there is some good reason to suggest he was somehow associated to or responding to the Eleatics, the timeline seems to fit. As a poet, as someone more mythically minded like myself, I think that what he was trying to do was take the conclusions of the Eleatics and make it palatable to the normies of the day by putting it in more symbolic or religious terms. In a sense I do see things pretty similarly to Parmenides, I mean if divinity is everything then we must be a part of it. And the issues he raises about plurality are very interesting and important. I think the conclusion is weak, to simply dismiss our experienced reality as illusion is not satisfying, but it’s a good starting point.

I also think that he can be compatible with Heraclitus, because Heraclitus is describing the world we experience. The world which Parmenides considers a mere façade. They are describing different planes of existence you could say. The logos Heraclitus talks about, that is what is responsible for the very plurality of things Parmenides is so perplexed by, my guess is that any attempt later to reconcile the two thinkers would be by explaining how the One gives rise to this logos or force of change within itself. I guess I really do need to get to Plato, and soon.

Pythagoras and fifth-century Pythagoreanism

This chapter is in one sense the most substantial so far, yet in another the least. I’m not sure I’m going to have much to say for this section at all, but I feel obliged to cover my thoughts after every chapter and to really get through this book quickly because it has taken me so long. This post was a bit of a mistake I’m beginning to realise, it has really handicapped me and slowed my progress a great deal. I would have finished this book in a matter of weeks, or less even, if I wasn’t prevented from moving onto another chapter every time I finish one by first having to sit down and write about it. Which for some of the chapters was easy, but for others not so much, as you can probably tell when reading through this post. I’ve been reading a novel of similar length for less than a week and I’m probably going to be finished with it tonight or tomorrow at the latest.

Heraclitus and Parmenides both had fascinating visions of the world, and Xenophanes as well immediately inspired much thought and desire to share it within me, but the others in here (so far) did not. I had to force myself to stay focused and write some kind of coherent response to what I read, but in a couple of cases I ended up procrastinating for weeks beforehand. It’s a similar situation I’m in now, but with far more free time than I’ve had at any other point since starting this blog, I really feel it necessary to push through so I can use the rest of the time to read what I should have been getting started with months ago. Plato. The reason I read this book being that it would provide necessary background knowledge and the intellectual context within which he was writing and living.

It’s a shame because the format was useful, it prevented me from simply rushing through the book once and going on to forget it all within a matter of months. If I didn’t have to write a response, I probably wouldn’t have gone back to re-read the Heraclitus chapter. It was in the re-reading that I really understood his ontological position, on first reading it went over my head, I’ve already gone over this in that chapter’s response. I don’t want to miss anything because of my own idiocy, and in so doing have wasted my time reading something; having this responsibility to myself to make sure I understand what I’m reading is important. Yet sometimes I really just don’t have anything interesting to say, even after going through a text (or collection of textual fragments) and making sure I’ve understood what’s written.

In this specific case, this chapter I’m meant to be responding to now, the issue is that despite there being a wealth of actual writing (this was the longest chapter so far), there was very little of what I would call philosophy. So this chapter goes backwards in time a little — so far we have been roughly moving forward chronologically from Thales’ time — back to around the same period that Xenophanes lived in. It does this I think because the intention is to now go down a separate strand of thought from the one that you can kind of see if you look back over who the book has covered so far. Heraclitus inspired Parmenides in a sense, Xenophanes also may have, and of course the later Eleatics were directly following on from Parmenides.

Pythagoras was the first person to call himself a philosopher apparently, I think I might have already written about this in an early segment of whatever this thing you’re reading should be called. Lover of Sophia, the sometimes feminine personification of knowledge, sometimes mere transliteration of the word in English. These things are complicated, things change over time. If nothing else that should be the one thing you take away from this post. Ugh, how presumptuous of me. I honestly don’t know why I’m writing this, my heart’s not in it any more. I haven’t lost my interest in philosophy, or even in sharing my own thoughts on it, but talking about the philosophy of others in this rigid way.

If you’re interested in understanding these thinkers, then you should be somewhere else, I’m losing sight of whatever value I thought this post might produce. I like the idea that other people like myself who haven’t yet read much philosophy might be inspired to learn more, but I want it to be clear that I also don’t know much. You’re not learning about what these people I’m responding to thought or wrote in much depth here. I’m incapable of — and therefore not attempting with this post to — explain what these people thought. I’m just responding to it, and also trying to briefly summarise only those areas of their thought which I at first found difficult to grasp or found particularly insightful/ interesting. For my own sake, but of course I publish this online because I hope people find it interesting or enjoyable to read.

Pythagoras was a man, he started what is essentially a cult. A mathematical cult, and therein lies the only real philosophical idea presented in this chapter. Oh, the Pythagorean cult had all kinds of interesting doctrines, a fascinating mish mash of Egyptian and Greek theological and proto-scientific ideas, but almost none of it is explored in this chapter. It’s really more historical, it read like Herodotus (perhaps because several of the testimonia are taken from The Histories) more than Heraclitus. This chapter is almost entirely testimonia, primarily from Aristotle as in other chapters, with only a few direct fragments from a man called Philolaus. Pythagoras himself never wrote anything, or at least none of what he wrote survives.

You probably know the name Pythagoras from his geometrical theorem which we were all taught in school, and they probably told you as well that in fact what the theorem explains (the square of the hypotenuse on a right angle triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two lines) was discovered independently in other parts of the world. In Babylon almost a thousand years before Pythagoras’ time, in India around the same period of time, and in China probably a couple of centuries later. What probably wasn’t told to you, as it wasn’t to me and I found out only in this book, is that Pythagoras himself probably wasn’t the Greek who developed the theorem. Rather, it is much more likely to have been one of his followers, of which there were quite a few.

See, the Pythagorean cult seems to have completely rejected the idea of individuality. The members didn’t keep personal property but instead had a system of common ownership; and more interestingly would never take credit for any mathematical or other intellectual accomplishments, instead every development by a Pythagorean was attributed to “the master”, who perhaps they believed as existing within all of them in some sense. This is why Pythagoras has a list of attributed accomplishments which he couldn’t possibly have lived up to. Even in the fifth century, so during and immediately after his lifetime, I believe there were around 200 members of the Pythagorean cult. Among them several brilliant mathematical minds. Mathematics being crucial to the entire theology of the group, mathematicians were one of the highest ranks within the hierarchy.

I think this is the important legacy of the Pythagoreans, this focus on mathematics as the means by which Truth should be sought. Pure mathematics as a discipline is the legacy of the Pythagorean cult, the emphasis in academia on the importance of proofs, of all scientific theories needing to be explained mathematically, and this is of incredible importance. I actually think that what distinguishes the western tradition from eastern ones is this legacy. Even if perhaps some concepts in eastern philosophy might have gotten closer to some aspect of the Truth earlier, the metaphors and lack of rigour make them flimsy and at risk of being lost or forgotten. Any fool can talk about their idea of what Divinity or God is, I’ve done that on this blog.

I honestly believe that mathematical ability and interest is a better indicator of the intelligence and worth of a person than IQ, though I don’t doubt the things correlate quite positively anyway. I of course floundered and failed in following that path, at the very earliest stages, and while I haven’t ever had my IQ tested I don’t expect it would be impressive at all, so you can be sure this belief isn’t motivated by my own ego. There’s this weird cope by self described mystics and “metaphysicians” of attempting to denigrate the best minds in modern physics and science, because of the purely materialist worldview that is so prevalent among people in those fields.

And yes that is a concerning thing that I hope changes — a reconciliation of philosophy and science — but I just think it’s worth noting that all the brilliant minds are trending towards the S and M in STEM (unfortunate phrasing?) rather than the mystic/ quasi-religious subjects I find myself interested in lately. If there is going to be a change it would be because of a change in this culture, which would encourage the scientists to once again take up an interest in philosophy and theology rather than the world’s schizos (gnostics, neoplatonists, occultists, hermeticists, etc etc etc.) taking up a genuine interest in mathematics. They already play around with numbers and letters for the aesthetic prestige of course, but it is a LARP.

There’s a really good passage in The Book of Disquiet where Pessoa, who himself had a period of great interest in these subjects, explains the same thing I’m trying to get at very succinctly.

What really shocks me is how these wizards and masters of the invisible, when they write to communicate or intimate their mysteries, all write abominably. It offends my intelligence that a man can master the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language. Why should dealing with demons be easier than dealing with grammar?

It’s just an unfortunate fact that a lot of really stupid people are attracted to this sort of thing, because they failed to succeed in academia, like myself but at least I’m self aware. Most people I think are attracted to this stuff because they think they will one day be well regarded for their own contributions, I have no such delusion keeping me going. I’m just looking to learn, because while there are plenty of fools and egotists who should be avoided, there is clearly some importance to what we might broadly call esotericism, as well as standard accepted philosophy which this post is about. Many of the geniuses of history took an interest in these subjects, and even today a lot of very important and powerful people are influenced by this stuff, though that isn’t something they might wish to make known.

This is why I don’t like the attribution of the term genius to artists. Geniuses make breakthroughs in the quest for truth and understanding, artists — while some may be highly intelligent — have a different role from that one. Does anyone seriously think any oft described artistic genius is in the same category as Aristotle, Descartes, or Einstein? Actually if you want an example of who I would describe as an almost archetypal/ platonic genius, I would say Niels Bohr fits that description best. Which isn’t to say artists or bardic types aren’t both necessary and highly impressive figures (the best of them that is), they’re just not “geniuses”. It’s in fact quite detrimental for the art they create, and in turn everyone who might experience their works, to feed their ego so. To put my point in crude terms, there is no such thing as a genius who isn’t good at maths.

I think this is Pythagoras’ legacy, or at least the legacy of the Pythagorean cult and it’s doctrines, this idea that you can essentially simplify and understand the world in purely mathematical terms. Which still exists today in this search for the “theory of everything” that Physics is meant to be pursuing, I remember reading one of Steven Hawking’s books for normies (the same year I failed in my education actually) on science once and he really stressed the point that in his mind the goal of science is to eventually develop a single theory that can explain everything about the physical world. The Pythagoreans went one step further, they saw a kind of metaphysical importance in numbers also.

Aristotle writes that they attributed numbers to everything, including abstract concepts. That is, they believed that certain numbers literally were a kind of pure form of things like “justice”, “hopefulness”, “reason”, which I can only assume directly influenced Plato’s idea of the forms. The number one to the Pythagoreans represented, among other things, Unity and the Monad. Yes, the Pythagoreans were monists too, though not monotheistic because they did still believe in the in-world pantheon of Greek gods. They also associated the various Greek gods with certain numbers, of course, Athena for example was linked to the number seven. Unfortunately there is very little (almost none at all) of the reasoning behind these associations that has been preserved in writing.

They had all kinds of interesting beliefs which were quite remarkable for their time and place, they believed in: reincarnation/ metempsychosis, a heliocentric model of the cosmos, that music could be understood in mathematical terms. There’s no point in me just explaining what the book says though, and anyway it’s a very minimal introduction to the topic. There is so much you could read on Pythagoreanism, in the fifth century alone, that isn’t included in this small chapter. I don’t think I will be doing that any time soon myself, but who knows how things will pan out. I just want to finish this book.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae

It seems I was incorrect when I said in the last part that the book seemed to be returning to an earlier point in history — it had been going roughly chronologically until that point — in order to now follow a different strand of philosophical thought in the classical Greek world than what we had been sticking with so far. Instead it seems that going back to look at Pythagoreanism was just a detour, with Anaxagoras we’re back following the same trajectory of thought that the book has been following so far. Obviously Pythagoreanism is connected to this general trend of thought I’m not saying it’s entirely distinct, in fact the monistic aspect of that tradition may have played a crucial role in the trend towards that kind of thinking that — as this book seems to exist to document — began to proliferate among the intellectuals and thinkers of the early classical Greek world.

Anaxagoras seemed to have had a lot of ideas, kind of like Thales he was apparently famed in his day as a sort of “wise man” figure (various scientific discoveries attributed to him), but one of his primary influences was Parmenides. He wrote on various subjects apparently, but as with basically all of the men in this book most of what he wrote is lost, only fragments remain. Of course it’s a shame, it always is, but in Anaxagoras’ case I don’t think it’s a total tragedy. He was quite a boring figure, at least if what writing of his does survive is representative of his thinking overall. And maybe I’m just failing to or misunderstanding him, but I find that his ideas don’t make much sense. He accepts some of Parmenides’ assertions, but rejects his conclusions, and annoyingly never explains why. He never says where along the line of reasoning that Parmenides’ goes through in On Nature that he stops agreeing with him, nor does he explain why.

He’s in the same category as the Milesians, and a few others in this book, in that a lot of his surviving writing at least is dedicated to this idea that the world is reducible to some initial elementary substance or small number of substances. Water for Thales, the boundless for Anaximander, air for Anaximenes, and some say fire for Heraclitus — though I think in Heraclitus’ case people are misinterpreting his point by taking him so literally. As for Anaxagoras, it’s hard to tell exactly how many, but he believed that there are several fundamental substances, which later philosophers like Aristotle refer to as homoeomeries. Everything that exists, or at least everything physical/ tangible, is in his view some composite of these homoeomeries. Or seeds, as he metaphorically refers to them, because within them they contain the blueprints for everything that exists.

So Anaxagoras accepts Parmenides’ assertion that there can be no such thing as nothingness, or non-being, but he rejects the total monism. This is where I take issue with him because he makes a lot of assertions without really explaining why, or perhaps the explanatory portion of his work on this subject is lost, we just don’t know. Parmenides said, as I’ve already gone over, that the idea of plurality is impossible because if there is no nothingness, there cannot be space between things. There can’t be change either, because that would require the impossible plurality of things to cross a nothingness. A nothingness which of course Parmenides rejected the very idea of.

When I was reading Parmenides for the first time my thought was, couldn’t it be said that whatever we see as just the space between objects is a something. Couldn’t it be the case that there is a plurality, but everything observable is touched by something else at every possible part of it’s surface area? The illusion therefore, is only that there is space between things, rather than that there are multiple things at all. It would also get around the issue of death or disintegration/ dissolution, and this I did give my thoughts on already in the section on Parmenides. He says that there can be no end to things, no change in something’s state, because if that happened it would leave behind empty space/ nothingess, which again is impossible according to him. Within this framework though, it’s not impossible that the changing form or end of something is actually just the loss of some of it’s parts and the moving in of others.

Parmenides’ vision of the universe is often represented as a sphere, one solid block of substance which never changes or moves, something completely static. To visualise the point I’m trying to make, think of the inside of the sphere as looking kind of like a lava lamp. Anyway, I kind of went on a tangent but my point is that the only way that I can make sense of Anaxagoras’ cosmogony is if he was also viewing things in a similar way as that. Which he very well could have been, there is a short fragment which I think implies he does (I’ll quote it below this paragraph), but it’s not completely clear if that is his meaning. How else do you reconcile your belief in multiple things and the rejection of non-being though? I don’t know, I can’t think of any other way, though I am a brainlet admittedly.

The items of the universe, which is one, are not separate from one another nor cut off from one another with an axe, neither the warm from the cold nor the cold from the warm.

After this there’s a fair bit of writing, as always fragmentary, dedicated to explaining how all things have some mixture of these seeds/ homoeomeries, of course each thing being defined by the ratio which makes it. Different mixtures lead to different kinds of things, it all follows fairly simply from his initial premise, if you accept it. I’m not going to really talk about that stuff much, it’s interesting sure — there’s one fragment in particular which seems to imply Anaxagoras thought there were multiple worlds with different kinds of people on them, which is interesting but not written about in much detail — but kind of dull for me to just repeat here. As I’m sure is becoming boring to see repeated, this post isn’t just a recounting of what I’ve read. I’m trying to give my, in some case very brief, responding thoughts.

There’s one more little thing that I found quite interesting in Anaxagoras’ philosophy that I had some thoughts of my own about however, before I finish writing and update this post, and that is this idea he has of Mind. Mind is the force which essentially governs the dispersal and spread of the seeds, you might say that it is the order that can be found within the seeming chaos of reality, or you might say it is the ultimate principle behind the chaos of plurality and change which disobeys the order exemplified by Parmenides’ One or “Being”. Hmm, sounds a little bit familiar doesn’t it? At least, it does to me, I really can’t see any substantive difference between what Anaxagoras refers to as “Mind” and Heraclitus’ Logos. Well, other than one rather crucial difference, by referring to this thing as Mind there is an important implication.

By giving the Logos the name Mind, it grants it a kind of intelligence, consciousness even. It is no longer some kind of soulless force, the wild wind, it is something with agency. In fact, as a determinist I’d say it’s possibly the only thing with agency, it’s therefore not just another thing in the world but the most important thing. The ultimate governing force of the universe, the expression of divine will if you accept the idea of divinity. Anaxagoras, despite having a seemingly very similar response to Parmenides as myself, explicitly doesn’t grant this Mind divinity. I am not so sure, I’m not sure if I believe in divinity at all, but if I did then Logos would be it’s expression in the material world. It’s worth noting as well I think, that Anaxagoras must have at least known that contemporaries of his certainly did talk about similar ideas and were willing to consider them divine in some sense. Something to think about.

Empedocles of Acragas

Empedocles is a little like Anaxagoras in that he also believes in several original or primary substances. He thought there were four, and as I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone, the idea of the “four elements” is something which had a huge influence on western thought and imagination. Even today, with our much more nuanced scientific understanding of matter — the idea of the four “””elements”””, this kind of loose colloquial concept and yet also literary/ poetic imagery — we still hold on to it. And that’s what I’m realising as I go through this book, perhaps also influenced by my recent explorations of poetry. I’m finally at the beginning of understanding what it is that so many love, and have loved, about this thing called verse. That’s not what I’m here to write about today though. I have an actual point to make, I think, part of one at least.

See, you take these very intelligent, wise, old men, and place them in a dark room. They’ll scramble about, scratch at the walls; and in their fumbling they will stumble upon truths.. half truths at least. Truths not quite understood though, and therein lies the problem. Along with this, many and more equally well understood falsities will they have to present when their time spent seeking is over. I suppose, arguably, they never stop, but for the sake of a metaphor humour me. I’m reading this book now, not so much as philosophy but as cultural exploration. Not that the ideas themselves aren’t interesting (Heraclitus especially, in fact he’s something of an exception here because his rather holistic philosophical outlook is truly valuable and still worth considering today in my opinion), but most of them are most useful when viewed as part of the western cultural backdrop more so than for what they are in and of themselves.

These are the ideas which stuck, because for whatever reason they resonated with those inclined to thought and artistic expression. There’s this idea as well, in the study of population genetics, of the founder effect; which is where a small group or even just an individual has a huge genetic impact just thanks to being in a new place early on. His genes spread widely throughout a population even if he wasn’t necessarily particularly reproductively successful in his own lifetime. Kind of. Logos in action again, as if it’s ever in any other state of being (than being) haha. These early thinkers are similar in a sense, they are relevant today because of a kind of intellectual founder effect, their thinking heavily directed the trajectory of western thought. Which is where the value in reading them lies, ultimately, you’re going to the source. At the very least getting much closer, to a source, they in turn have influences and so on of course. Human thought is a super memeplex.

So there’s that, and of course there is no doubt much which didn’t stick — and was lost — but here we are today with what remains, with what did. So, we should concern ourselves with that, as this stupid blog post which only halted my intellectual progress in the end serves to do. Ah, but lately I have been reading a lot, again not what I should be talking about here, heh. I’m thinking maybe I should stop, with this post actually, I just don’t have a lot to say about the ideas themselves in many cases. It’s clear I presume in reading, which few thinkers collected in this book actually inspired great thinking in me, and which I felt forced to cover despite having little to say. I want to finish this book, I want to pick it up, and just read the damn thing, because sometimes I don’t have anything to say. And sometimes I do, perhaps I will add to this post (will sticky if I do as always) but it’s very likely I won’t. Of course, what ever does inspire me you can expect to see the influence of in my other writing.