Concerning Milesian
“Science” in the Context of Archaic Literature Generally
(1988)
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{Added
As to the transition to
electronic presentation, since many viewers will lack the software needed to
read certain diacritical marks, the transliterations of Sanskrit, Avestan, and
Hebrew words below simply ignore the dots normally placed under or over some
letters, except in the case of “s,” where I write “sh.” The Avestan symbol that
looks somewhat like the Greek delta is simply denoted “e.”}
I. INTRODUCTION: BACKGROUND, PURPOSE,
METHOD.
I recall that, at
some point during a typical physicist’s education, I learned that “the first
scientist was Thales of
Some
examples. In discussing the “themata” of
modern science, a leading historian of science, Holton, assigns paradigmatic
status to the putative theory of Thales that the world’s fundamental principle
is in some sense water. He says this
inaugurated a “materialist—mechanist, anti-metaphysical” strain, as one of two
poles which have characterized science ever since.[1] The dominant philosopher of science of our
century, Popper, goes so far as to claim that the Milesians were the key link
in a long process leading “from the amoeba to Einstein.”[2] As for actual classicists, the historian of
ancient philosophy Guthrie, among others, allows that science was not strictly
invented by the Greeks, but insists that, beginning with the Milesians, they
“lifted it on to an entirely different plane” with respect to their
predecessors.[3] The most prominent reasons given for such
assertions by him and by others proceed from certain ancient attestations that
the Milesians articulated cosmologies/cosmogonies with certain details,[4]
to claim they conceived of a “natural” universe in the abstract and, in doing
so, criticized the “mythical” views of reality which had allegedly been
entertained by their predecessors, principally Hesiod in Greece and Babylonian
cosmology in “the Orient.” As for the avant garde, the eminent philologist
Vernant does polemicize against the view that the Greek “miracle” was due to
inherent (i.e., cultural or perhaps racial) characteristics, and allows that certain
structures of the attested thought of Hesiod and of Anaximander are
similar. However, he also follows his
predecessor in this, Cornford, to insist on the alleged fundamental break
between these two figures, and on the “rationalism” generally of the earliest
Presocratics. Proceeding from a belief
which has sometimes been expressed, that the Milesians were empiricists as well
as rationalist, a leading “post-positivist” historian/philosopher of science,
Kuhn, has referred Western cosmological theories back to Anaximander insofar as
they derive from observation.[5] In this situation, it is little wonder that
the allegation of the Milesians’ importance has penetrated other areas of
inquiry as well, so that at least one “anti-positivist” literary scholar has
even used Thales essentially as negative example during the course of his
attack.[6] Or, at the semi-popular level, in statements
lettered on the wall at the entrance to the “Archaic period” room of a recent
exhibition of early Greek art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C., Thales in particular was touted as having allegedly effected numerous
achievements of an empirical nature, including predicting a solar eclipse.
I suppose the
reader has already surmised that I look askance at all this. In any case I do so, and not only because
many attributions of empiricist practice or outlook in particular to the
Milesians are controversial within moderately respected philology,[7]
nor only because one can even find here and there in the literature some
questioning of traditional attestations of their advance in thought in other
areas.[8] To me, the most suspicious aspect of the
presented picture is its blatant Greek-centered orientation. As one particularly revealing example among
others to be pointed out below, a passage in the Upanishads tells us that a
female(!) Indian sage named Gārgī Vācaknavī had said, “all
this (i.e., the observable world) is woven on (or in?) water, warp and woof.”[9]
Whoever actually first articulated this thought quite probably antedated
Thales.[10] As for him, our sole independent source
for his “water theory,” Aristotle, simply states that he had said water was the
“basic principle,” in the sense of “the substrate (which is such as) to
persist” (archē, hupomenein to hupokeimenon, both probably
paraphrased from an oral tradition), “perhaps” (isōs) because he
had noted various manifestations of moisture in the world. Thus he and others “touched on” (hēpsanto)
a material cause concept.[11] Possibly one can accept the result in Mansfeld’s
recent contribution to a long controversy over Aristotle as historian of
philosophy, to the effect that the later thinker here accurately attributes a
germ of an idea to the earlier one, and no more.[12] If so, it is not Aristotle (essentially
an authority on
I believe said
right is unproven. Thus my purpose in
this article is to subject some of what can plausibly be attributed to the
Milesians to critical comparison with what is attested elsewhere in the early
texts of the international “axial” age, mostly in purely intellectual terms,
albeit with some mention of the respective social/cultural contexts. I do not pretend to be exhaustive, but hope
to stimulate discussion of possible cogent alternatives to the traditional
view. To this end, the remainder of this
introduction indicates an overview of some issues related to how “history of
science” is construed with the given subject matter, and notes some points of
my method.
Of course, some
will immediately object to discussing “Oriental” intellectual developments in
a “Western” context, on grounds of relevance.
As our century’s leading historian of science, Sarton, put it when he
decided to deviate from his previous practice, to delete Indian and Chinese
contributions from a book purporting to be a general history of science, such
contributions “lack signification for us Western readers.”[13] Some might not go that far, but will
insist that, while Eastern developments are “no doubt of interest in their own
right,” it is still the “Western intellectual tradition” with which we are concerned,
even if the former admittedly may have made ideas available to be used
by the latter. It will be said that my
proposal to compare the Milesian with other “archaic” ideas is like comparing
apples with oranges.
However, this notion
of a “Western intellectual tradition” in fact has a considerable
meta-historical component. It involves so basic an imposition of concepts upon
reality as to insist that it was still a “European” tradition which was
“transmitted” by Islam during the Middle Ages, for example, in the work of
Averroës on Aristotle. In short, we
are to think of a river which is at best fed by tributaries here and there,
even though the river “flows into” such a tributary at one point before it
“re-emerges” downstream. But as
Moreover, the
possibility of actual transmission of ideas imputed to the early Presocratics
down to us has not been the stress of the philosophers and historians of
science who are impressed by them.
Rather, one finds a sense that such ideas were typologically
exemplary with respect to (some aspects of) modern science. This is implicit in Holton’s discussion
mentioned earlier. In discussing the
Milesians and their successors Heraclitus and Parmenides, Popper explicitly
calls the question of their actual influence on modern thinkers
“superficial.” Rather, he stresses such
things as symmetry in their alleged theories of the natural world and their
alleged deductive means of arriving at these.[16] The historian of Greek science Lloyd,
following Farrington, is impressed that the Milesians allegedly “left the gods
out” of their discussions of their subject matter.[17] Clearly, the notion such scholars have at the
back of their minds is one of an Ionian “enlightenment” as a dress rehearsal
for modern science’s overthrow of Scholastic philosophy’s theistic approach to
the world. In practice, the construal of
what is important from the ancient world to (anticipating modern) science (in
its strict sense) is not whether one can show historical connections of ideas
down through the ages; rather, what is important is that the activity concern
itself with a posited “natural universe,” or that it not employ deities. Some might add that the theories should be
imaginative.[18] But in that case we should examine ancient
It is true that
studies of “Oriental influences upon” the “Western tradition” have appeared in
recent decades. In particular, as I will
note below, Asian ideas are sometimes thought to have been adapted by the early
Presocratics, including the Milesians.
Nonetheless, it remains implicit in such studies that it is the Greeks
who are the endpoint. I suggest that the
structure of the underlying method, not to mention that of studies which ignore
the Orient entirely, recalls Hegel’s assertion that “Oriental thought”
constitutes a previous stage, and thus in his view as well as in any view
whereby ideas advance with time, a lower stage, to that represented by “Greek
thought.”[19] That view in fact was at least originally
conditioned by simple European chauvinism,[20]
apart from Hegel’s methodology in explicitly discussing the Milesians while
entirely ignoring texts stemming from pre-classical
Hegel’s justification for the latter
procedure, no less than the tendency of Popper and others to project a modern
model of Galileo versus the Church back onto archaic Greece, can serve to
introduce another issue, one which is hermeneutical in
character. Namely, what interpretative values should we give to
texts composed under psychological conditions differing from our own in one way
or another? For his part, Hegel says
that anything earlier than classical Indian “philosophy” can only constitute
“religion,”[21]
and thus deletes the Upanishads, among other material. But can we be sure that we are not distorting
the latter by calling them religious, as well as the early Presocratics by
calling them philosophical, in implicitly modern senses of these terms?
Actually, that
poses the problem too simply. One sometimes finds philologists
arguing against certain criticisms of the historiography of Aristotle or of his
student Theophrastus, who indeed called the Presocratics back to the Milesians philosophoi
(and who constitute our primary sources for the “metaphysical” opinions of the
Milesians in particular),[22]
that the former were much “closer” to the latter than are we, and thus were
in a better position to judge them.[23] This assertion has rhetorical effect since
the Milesians were “only” some two centuries earlier than the Peripatetics. However, it presupposes a belief that
Aristotle and/or Theophrastus were sensitive to the issue of different
construals of categories in different periods, and took it into account in
their descriptions. I know of no
evidence for this,[24]
and, moreover, anyone who has studied archaic
In general, the
common view that the thought systems of ancient
There is also an
issue concerning the “component” of the mental representations of archaic
Another factor
which in practice acts particularly relentlessly to shore up the traditional
view of the Milesians is that, while tradition in any area of study is
entrenched almost by definition, in this case our actual data renders an effective
challenge especially difficult. Our
primary data on any of the Presocratics is sparse, but we have exactly nothing
in Thales’s own words, a single sentence purporting to be in those of
Anaximander, and one or two for Anaximenes, while the ancient secondary sources
for their opinions are at least subject to difficulties associated with the
hermeneutical considerations noted earlier.
Anyone trained in modern historical method would say that there can be
no question of discussing the alleged achievements of the Milesians at the
level of confidence one has in the case of a Kepler or an Einstein, where our
data are far more extensive (even if one agrees with the general principle
that, given the very nature of the subject, “every generation must rewrite
history”). To be sure, the philosophers
and philologists of the last century who have rendered the view in question
hoary did not overly concern themselves with the niceties of modern historical
method. Popper appears to forget this
when he says that we are not allowed to challenge the traditional view of the
early Presocratics, unless the evidence against it is “extremely strong”
(emphasis in the original).[29] In short, one is in the position of someone
whose eyesight is impaired and can only see the emperor dimly, but who is asked
to believe that he wears new clothes because everyone says he does.
Moreover,
academic specialization itself (virtually a categorical imperative for our
age) tends to act against taking work on non-Greek ancient contributions to
science seriously. That is to say, in practice history of science
insofar as it concerns the ancient world is currently considered to be the
province of specialists on Greece, and it is to them that authors of
general histories of science, as well as arbiters of publication in the field,
defer. This puts anyone wishing to argue
that, say, archaic
To be
sure, one can acknowledge injustice here, but still observe that serious
logistical difficulties will accompany any attempt to multiply the scope of
ancient history of science so as to include more than
But in that case
it is a question of finding the social energy required to overcome the
difficulties. A start has been made in
the organization of conferences where specialists in the various ancient
societies come together and, as it were, compare notes. However, as I believe the example of this
procedure reported in Daedalus 104.2 (1975) in particular shows, such occasional
activity by specialists does not in itself solve the problem of integrating
their contributions into a cogent overall view. Ideally, there ought to be an institute with
a scholar specializing in each of all relevant aspects of the matter, plus an
appropriate generalist or two, where all such persons work together on a full
time basis (whether specifically on history of science or that of philosophy
or whatever). To be sure, at least in
the
Now, I must
insist to anyone who might wish it were otherwise that it is simply not possible
to settle all the issues just discussed in one fell swoop, instantly to bring
in the millennium which finally will establish the role of archaic Greece in
the history of science. Yet, neither can one believe it is useless to say
anything at all until the millennium arrives. The present work is
for the simple purpose of involving the concerned scholar in a moderately
detailed discussion of how the Milesians in particular might compare with
others, within Greece and without, whose intellectual/emotional states there is
reason to believe entered the general stream of world history and might be
presumed to have had effects on it, and who lived in comparable times or
perhaps during comparable stages of social development (not distinguishing
carefully between these two alternatives for present purposes). The following rough methodological
principles are followed herein, in the hope that the reader will understand
them to be heuristic, not The Method Of Study for archaic society.
First, as is
consistent with the statement just made, I do not follow the procedure of
beginning by defining every term to be used with razor-sharp precision, as if I
were a philosopher who had suddenly decided to try my hand at writing history,
and presumed that it could be fit into such a mold. Rather, given that the problem of
establishing the role of archaic society in the history of science in a cogent
fashion appears to be an essentially new one, I approach it the way scientists
themselves often approach a new problem, i.e., by first investigating the gross
properties of the object under consideration.
It proved fruitful to study the general properties of the element
hydrogen, for example, prior to concern over the fact that its atomic nucleus
sometimes occurs in isotopic forms, so that one has deuterium or tritium rather
than hydrogen proper. I see no a priori reason to begin with
intricate issues here either.
Second,
concerning what “science” constitutes, for present purposes I will concede on
the one hand to the currently dominant trend in philosophy of science, to the
effect that empiricist epistemology or practice is a secondary consideration in
defining science, and on the other, to that in studies of the Presocratics, to
the effect that the presence or absence of empiricism in them is also
secondary.[32] We will only be concerned below with the
quality of the mental representations, apart from their agreement with any
posited objective world, and will merely consider how those attributed to the
Milesians compare with others which purport to give some reasonably unified
notion of the world.
Third, rather
than use terms deriving from concepts like “philosophy,” “religion,” or “myth”
as the logically primitive units of discussion, I will examine the texts in literary
terms. I do not speak of the “ontology”
of a certain Upanishad passage which says that “being” was alone at the
beginning but consciously decided to bifurcate; rather, I compare this as a
literary motif or theme (without undue concern over the difference between
these concepts) of an original entity which in one way or another gives rise
to other entities, to other examples of such employment. In doing so, I am aware that the notions of
literary motif and theme are also post-archaic concepts, but I believe that
using them is less likely to create the impression that the Upanishad author
was consciously a literary theorist, than speaking of the passage’s ontology
might lead one to believe that he or she was consciously an analytic
philosopher solely because of my own usage.
In methodological discussions among so-called historians proper, it is de
rigueur these days to inveigh against “presentism,” where what is meant is,
roughly, the imposition of modern categories on the past.[33] As noted above, the problem of archaic
society is actually even more complex.
Yet for all that, we must employ language in discussing the past, and
can only hope to keep distortion to a minimum.
It immediately
follows from this that one eschews taking whether or not a given archaic thinker
employed anthropomorphic deities in his or her description to be itself
definitive in evaluating same. The archaics can hardly have been
aware of anticipating modern thought, be it religious or philosophical; they
were concerned with grasping their world in some sense, not ours in our
sense. It might be presumed legitimate
that they used such words and concepts as were available to them. The interesting issue is how they
employed their terms.
Fourth, a related
point is that we are not concerned here with how or whether archaic thinkers
anticipated modern geographically-defined intellectual systems, be these
“Eastern” or “Western.” The problem of
tracing out how ideas interacted with social and other realities in the land
mass incorporating Asia, Europe, and
Fifth, I am
sorry, but I cannot accept the revealed truth of the emperor wearing new
clothes solely because I cannot prove he is naked. Rather
than insisting on the definite truth or definite falsehood of statements in
cases where the data are marginal, I shall attempt to remember to use words
connoting variable probability of truth or falsehood.
Sixth, I attempt
to “muddle through” (as the English are said to put it) the contradiction
between generalism and specialization, as follows. As an individual who happens to be working on
the problem under essentially solitary conditions, I have been able to
concentrate my studies on the texts of the archaic periods of Greece,
India, Israel, and Iran, by paying attention to their respective classical
periods only insofar as needed to understand the archaic periods, for
all that the classical literature of any given one constitutes the backbone of
the standard training of an actual specialist in it. For present purposes, such “archaic
literature” essentially constitutes the following texts.[34] In Greece, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, the
fragments of the Presocratics down to Parmenides, and the lyric and iambic
poets of the 7th and 6th Centuries, B.C.E. In India, the arguably most important four of
the earliest Upanishads (Aitareya, Taittirīya, Brhadāranyaka,
Chāndogya), the mythological material incorporated into the texts
of the Brāhmanas as we now have them, and the fragmentary remains
of the heterodox sects prior to Buddha.
In
II. IMAGINATIVE UNIFICATION IN
MYTH/COSMOGONY-COSMOLOGY.
In 1905, the universally acknowledged
supreme “scientific genius” of our century, Einstein, introduced a theory
called special relativity which is arguably memorable for reasons other than
how well it satisfied formal criteria, e.g., was more rational than earlier
theories, or explained the empirical data in ways that they had not. One could make a case that it is revered
because it boldly dispensed both with common sense (invariance of simultaneity)
and with esoteric concepts (the “ether”), to give a vision of the world which
was both comprehensive and strikingly new.
To be sure, all this was in the context of then-perceived
problems. Indeed, I think it appropriate
in the following to sample the early Iron Age literature with an eye to
indications of global and original conceptions, albeit stressing where the
thematic structure suggests concerns broadly similar to those attributed to the
Milesians. Then I briefly consider its context(s), as opposed
to that of modern science.
The first attempt at a world view
that one can recognize as advancing beyond “tribal thought,” and that has some
explanatory aspect, appears to have been what is preserved in the Zoroastrian Gāthās. These
may have been composed in the latter part of the second Millennium, in the
northeast of
A passage in the same Upanishad as
the proto-materialist cosmology attributed to Gārgī mentioned in the
Introduction is much more concerned than Zoroaster with describing origins.[41] The first section begins by stating that
originally only ātman (usually construed as “self”) existed. “He”[42]
said “I am.” After some further
preliminaries, he divided into two parts, giving rise to husband and wife, who
united to yield human beings. The female
principle objected to the male uniting with her after he had produced her from
himself, and hid by transforming herself into various animals; however, in each
case he followed suit, to unite with her and produce the corresponding
species. He also produced fire, semen,
and a number of other entities.[43] Thus differentiation by name and form
occurred, all due to ātman, which is to be meditated on as
precious. The second section says that brahman
(a principle nominally distinct from ātman, but here apparently
equated with it) was one only in the beginning, but did not prosper, and
generated essences corresponding to the three social groups other than the brāmana
priesthood, plus some gods, concluding with the śūdra
laborers. He still did not prosper, and
created “order” (dharma) to be the “power” (kshatra) of the kshatriya
governing group. A coda of sorts then
says that ātman becomes the world of the gods by making sacrifices,
the world of the animals by feeding them, etc., and gives some miscellaneous
thoughts. There are explanatory comments
scattered parenthetically throughout the passage, from an assertion at its
beginning that the name of “I” exists because ātman said “I am,” to
a sentiment near its end that dharma is the highest principle because it
is the power of the highest social group.
One may grant that
the purpose of this passage is not explanation as such, but (as is consistent
with the remainder of this Upanishad) to extol ātman as a basic
principle. The narrative structure is in fact so loose that there is no
explicit indication that the social origins of the second section occurred in
time “after” the biological ones of the first. Yet its appeal is more cerebral than, say,
Zoroaster’s, and there is a good deal of “aetiology” of the sort which fulfills
a function of some of the myth of tribal society.[44] There is, to be sure, a certain technical
advance. One is struck in particular by
the tour de force character of having the biological origins occur in a natural
manner for an “immanent” principle (the “self”), i.e., via organic rather than
craft metaphors.[45] Also, while some Bronze Age myth had
accounted for the origin of man-in-labor by saying that he was created to
relieve the “lower gods” of drudgery,[46]
here a principle (dharma) is added to maintain the system which relieves
the governors (and their priests) from labor, more or less openly touted as
such.[47]
A remarkably parallel passage, if
perhaps superior at least in literary terms, is the familiar Biblical story of
the Creation and Fall, Genesis 2:4b-3:24.[48] Indeed, it is the locus classicus for
any thematic combination of the origin of nature as byproduct of cosmic
male/female drama and of that of man-in-labor.
The Upanishad says ātman conquered his fear of loneliness
and then divided because he had no pleasure.
Meanwhile, Genesis has it that, after the supreme deity “formed”[49]
the creature ’ādhām out of the dust of the “ground” (’adhāmā),
he did not think it should be alone, and thus also formed the animals, in
(failed) attempts to provide it with a suitable companion. If Trible’s conclusion is correct, this ’ādhām
was not yet a gender-differentiated “man,” but became that after “woman” (’iššā)
was called such by virtue of being differentiated from “man” (’iš),
in the wake of surgery on the ’ādhām.[50] In any case, as we know, the serpent beguiled
the woman, she and the man ate the forbidden fruit to obtain “knowledge of
good and evil,” and all three were punished, in particular with childbirth pain
and lust for/subordination to the man allotted to the woman, and toil to the ’ādhām
until he returns to the ’adhāmā.
Let us be clear that,
while this narrative constitutes a development from tribal society mythical
archetypes at least in part (whatever it may also owe to the Bronze Age), it is
nonetheless rather advanced. True, a
relatively primitive heritage is betrayed when we read that the deity anthropomorphically
walks back and forth in a garden, and also that snakes eat dust (because of the
original serpent’s punishment).
Moreover, the serpent is in part a clear development of the
theri-morphic “trickster” archetype exemplified by the North American “Coyote”
or West African “Ananse” the spider.[51]
Such a trickster is often in
conflict with a “high god” figure over power,[52]
and here he acts as catalyst to bring man and woman into conflict with
the deity over the “knowledge” which, in part, means power over all things.[53] While the woman was probably a goddess at
some point in the literary pre-history of the narrative,[54]
and while she may be an intelligent spokesperson for the human couple in
discussing theology with the serpent,[55]
her actual decision shows her ancestry in the First Woman who brings on
calamity by some act of foolishness, found in tribal myth the world over.[56] However, the story is part of an extended
narrative of considerable scope and sophistication, if we accept the majority
opinion which upholds the Documentary Hypothesis in a more or less classic
form. This has it that there was
originally a “Yahwist” tract incorporating material appearing in the extant Old
Testament extending from our story in Genesis 2-3 down to passages in Numbers or
perhaps Joshua, giving one elaborated account of the history of man down to the
Israelite conquest of Canaan, probably composed in the late 10th or
early 9th Century, B.C.E. in the context of the David-Solomon United
Kingdom.[57] Even if we reject this framework,[58]
our particular narrative still appears to be an attempt at explanation of the
world in an overtly historical mode, notwithstanding the fact that it
considers divinity to be involved in such history. From a literary-critical standpoint, if we
eschew a certain tendency to interpret each aspect in an either/or fashion, we
must be impressed with the richness of the narrative’s symbolism. As examples, “knowledge of good and evil” is
also (sexual) power of procreation, and punishment of the serpent also
symbolizes suppression of the Canaanite fertility cult.[59]
This is in addition to a certain
stylistic competence.[60]
We may introduce the Greeks by way
of a narrative, or two narratives, which have been seen as comparable to Gen
2:4b—3:24 since ancient times. In
both of Hesiod’s authentic poems, the first of which is thematically more or
less contiguous with the concerns attributed to the Milesians who would come
roughly a century later, we hear of a neo-trickster named
Prometheus. This time he is not theri-morphic, nor are animals
mentioned. He tricked, not the only
relevant god, but the most important one (Zeus), obtaining for men, not
“knowledge of good and evil,” but fire (presumably symbolizing technology). This
led to punishment, not with woman bringing it on and sharing in it, but
actually constituting it, when Zeus created her as a “sheer inescapable snare”
for men.[61] As probably in the Genesis case, certainly
the Theogony narrative in particular is part of a longer one. That is, it is an episode in a work which in
part constitutes an explanation, and in part a paean to Zeus, as follows. After a long introductory hymn to the Muses,
the theogony proper begins with the assertion that first Chaos (“Chasm”)
came to be, and then Earth, then Tartaros (a sort of underworld), then Eros. A number of other entities were then
generated, some parthenogenetically, some sexually from union of those already
existing, thus giving us light, Day, Space, etc., as well as Sea and Sky and
some more obscure principles. Earth and
Sky mated to produce the generation of gods the Greeks knew as “Titans,” but
most were trapped in their mother’s womb because Sky would not cease sexual
intercourse. Thus their king Kronos
severed his genitals, from which drops of blood produced the Furies and some
other entities upon striking earth, while the genitals themselves eventually
produced Aphrodite from the aphros (“foam”) generated when they struck
the sea. After some more births of
various principles, eventually some of the Olympians were sired by Kronos with
his sister Rhea, but he swallowed them to avoid being
overthrown. She gave him a stone to swallow instead of Zeus, so
that the latter came to maturity. He
eventually overthrew the Titans, as part of a series of struggles, including
that with Prometheus, which finally resulted in his emergence as absolute ruler
of the world. He himself sired some
principles to assist in this, of the sort we would recognize as “social,”
although there is a question as to where the authentic series ends and later
additions by persons other than Hesiod begin, to close the poem.[62]
The Theogony does have some
striking features, even though the Prometheus narrative itself is arguably
inferior to the Genesis story discussed above,[63]
and though no one would consider the poem as a whole a profound achievement in
comparison with Homer poetically or Aristotle philosophically. On poetry,[64]
for example, while working from a conception of the separation of earth
and sky which is indeed attested both in tribal myth and in the ancient Near
East,[65]
Hesiod has the genitals thrown into the sea by Kronos, whereupon after a
long chronon (“time” in the sense of duration), foam emerged from the chroos
(“flesh,” said here to be immortal), to generate Aphrodite. The wordplay is not just quaint, but assists
in portraying the resulting sex goddess as a presence both permanent and
divine. Concerning the early part of the theogony, Earth is explicitly stated
to be the “firm foundation” (hedos asphalos) of (even) the Olympian
gods,[66]
surely indicating a proto-materialist aspect.
Chaos is likely to symbolize a principle of differentiation,
whereas Eros is a principle of unification.[67] This original triad (excluding Tartaros)
is arguably to be read as atemporal, even if the subsequent generations occur
in narrative time.[68] The set Chaos and Earth, plus other
entities, has been thought antecedent to air and earth, plus corresponding
objects, in Anaximander and Anaximenes.[69] In any case, the Theogony is not
simply “myth” at the level of tribal society.
Here it is appropriate to consider
two Indian texts which seem to parallel the Milesians more than does
Hesiod. First, there is an Upanishad
passage which purports to record the teaching of one “Uddālaka” to his son
“Śvetateku.”[70] It includes the following items, among
others: an analogy whereby one can “hear the unhearable,” “see the unseeable,”
etc., just as one can know that an artifact of clay is really clay per
se; a proto-metaphysics whereby existing things are grouped in threes; an
experiment whereby Śvetateku learns the material basis of thought by
fasting and forgetting his catechisms; and a series of analogies whereby there
is something which survives death just as, for example, rivers disappear when
they meet the sea but their essence remains.
Thus the text attests a comprehensive world view. It is artistically integrated, especially in
that the latter portion is frequently punctuated by a famous, haunting line
which I translate, “such (is) reality; thus the self (acts); that (is what) you
are, Śvetateku.”[71] One particular section has Uddālaka say
that the original principle was alone, and was “being,”[72]
and that (un-named) others are wrong to say that it was “non-being” since
nothing can arise from that. This
principle then “thought”[73]
it should become diverse, and “begat” fire.[74] Fire thought the same thing and begat
water; and water, earth (or literally, “food”). This is why we
perspire after becoming heated, and why there is abundant food after it rains. Perhaps
contemporaneously with the codification of this passage, Anaximander wrote his
own (now lost) book. According to the ancient commentators called
“doxographers,”[75]
it held that opposites like hot and cold (Simplicius), or principles to
produce hot and cold (pseudo-Plutarch), separated out of an original principle
which was “boundless” (apeiron),[76]
and called divine by Aristotle because the book made it “immortal and
indestructible” (athanaton kai anōlethron, I take it a
paraphrase). It also discussed the formation of heavenly bodies in
terms of fire and earth, and their dimensions and geometric relations to each
other, as well as the genesis of living creatures including man. Traditionalist commentators assume that
Anaximander derived all this from logical debate, say, with Thales (as with
“Uddālaka” against non-being).
Indeed, Aristotle possibly, and Simplicius definitely, assign specific
reasons for his rejection of any of the four “elements” as “archē.”[77]
The second text is from an extended
passage whose result is to extol the ātman principle, by means of
one “Yājñavalkya” refuting the opinions of several experts in
“knowledge of brahman.”[78] The text of interest asserts that,
while admittedly air is the “thread” (sūtra) by which “this
world, the higher world, and all beings” are held together, it is the “inner
controller” (antaryāmina), i.e., ātman, which
“controls” (yamayati) the same generalities. I.e., it dwells in, is within, is unknown by,
and has other properties with respect to, the earth and a widely varied set of
other specific entities. This parallels an attribution to
Anaximenes, the third Milesian.[79] In the form in which we have it, this is that
“our soul (psuchē), being air, holds-together-and-controls[80]
us, while[81]
breath and air (which are synonyms) enclose[82]
the entire kosmos.” The context
according to the doxography is a derivation of other elements from air, via its
rarefaction (for fire) or condensation (for water, earth, stone), and an
assertion that this air is divine.[83] The statement employs some late terms so that
it cannot entirely be in Anaximenes’s own words, and some even argue against
attributing the basic sense to him,[84]
but it is reasonably clear that any distortion due to the transmission process
will have been in a “materialist” direction, thus at most increasing its difference
with the Indian saying.
Concerning the significance of the
foregoing literary survey, I wish to stress that, at least if we eschew the
“philosophy versus religion” hermeneutics, these Indian examples, among others,
do bear comparison with what is attributed to the early Presocratics.[85] I do not only mean that they are possible
literary-historical antecedents, but that they are intellectually comparable in
their own right.[86] “Uddālaka,” or whoever actually
formulated “his” thought, and Anaximander alike go beyond typical tribal myth,
at least in that they derive something like what we now call physical elements
from some single original principle. To be sure, of these,
the former’s seems more anthropomorphic (it thinks), but the latter’s, less
immanent in the world (“immortal and indestructible”). It is true
that the first text proceeds via analogical reasoning to argue its case from
cosmogony to quotidian processes, while it is generally assumed (if not
necessarily proven) that Anaximander wrote in terms of natural evolution in
chronological time. However, concerning
Anaximenes and whoever is to be credited with “Yājñavalkya’s”
saying, their texts almost read as if we had two academics operating within the
same “paradigm” in attempting to explain the world, while disagreeing on the
relative stress to be put on its various aspects. “Soul/breath”[87]
and “air,” or what we now call the psychical and material factors,
respectively, are each involved in both “holding together” and “controlling,”
in more than one sphere of interest, although there is an issue as to which is
primary, or perhaps determinative of the other. Some other archaic Indian theories, in
particular those attributed to the dissident sects, also seem to compare with
those assigned to the Milesians, although interpreters sometimes go
considerably beyond the texts themselves in claiming abstract metaphysics
existed (as with the Greeks).[88]
One might conceivably object that
such comparisons speak only in rather general terms, and that merely to note a
literary parallel is not to take adequate account of the differences between
the theories underlying the literature under consideration. However, from the present hermeneutical
standpoint we are not to use such an objection as an excuse for any discussion
which implicitly or explicitly views the theories in terms of how they solve
later problems. Perhaps, indeed,
“Uddālaka’s” failure to consider deductive inference as something
inherently more significant than analogical reasoning, which arguably would
carry over into some of later Indian philosophy,[89]
was relevant to the failure of an Asian Aristotle to develop.[90] Somewhat differently, already Hegel’s
predecessor in these matters, Herder, while giving a generally cosmopolitan
account of the thought of the ancient world, nonetheless complains that the
doctrines of Zoroaster eventually led to an oppressive dogmatism.[91]
However, while I personally
believe that materialism is preferable to idealism for the conduct of life in
modern times, I also believe that I am able to think this (or that the two
categories are meaningful), because a proper (material) social basis for it now
exists. The historical evaluation we
make (and, all rhetoric aside, cannot help making at some level) of, for
example, whether or not soul as well as air was a legitimate candidate for
first principle in the archaic period, must at least in part be with respect to
the context of that period.