Significance of Early Greek Thought in Philosophy
Plato and Aristotle influenced all of Western philosophy, but who influenced them? The Pre-Socratics.
Age of Reason
Pre-Socratic philosophy was the first rational enterprise away from mythology. These thinkers mostly lived in Ionia and Elea. They had a strong insistence on logic, coherence and reason. The rise and existence of their thought is a response to a demand — the coming about of this demand might have been in response to rising dissatisfaction with the mythological or theological explanations of the nature of reality which were not grounded in reason.
The ‘pre-Socratic’ nomenclature is problematic as some of the pre-Socratics were contemporaries of Socrates. (Nietzsche called them pre-Platonic). This nomenclature was popularized by Hermann Alexander Diels through his work The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics (1903). In Early Greek Philosophy by Glenn Most and Andre Laks, they are called early Greek philosophers.
They have been grouped together because of their common quest for the search for the ‘archae’ or for ‘oneness’ to make sense of and to unify the world. Their philosophy is called ‘natural’ philosophy (phusike) as they (not without exceptions) focused on explaining the nature of reality with the aid of what was available to them in the physical world, without invoking God. (Aristotle called them ‘physiologoi’ or natural philosophers; Up until the 19th century, science was synonymous to natural philosophy. Issac Newton was a professor of natural philosophy). But it is important to note that the pre-Socratic enquiry is not to be confused with a displacement of God. They were, largely, theists. They just tried to not use God to support their arguments.
The two main problems that the pre-Socratic ontology was concerned with are — 1) that we exist, and 2) that we change. Their quest was to discover the origin — the substance underlying the origin — the archae — of existence, and how things are. The archae is that ‘first principle’ that is retained when a thing S changes from S to S1 to S2. They were concerned with change because of the implications of change — what change could lead to and the uncertainty it entails.
Most of the first philosophers thought that the only principle of all things was material, even though they disagreed greatly about nature of this material principle. They believed that nothing comes to be or perishes without qualification — as there must be some nature that persists while everything else comes to be from it. This is what we get from most scholarly work on them — that most Milesians were material monists. What makes their thinking philosophical and not primitively scientific is that they went beyond their senses and employed thought and abstraction to explain their material monism. This element of speculative reasoning is key to the birth of philosophy.
For Thales, the archae was water. For Anaximenes and Diogenes, it was air. For Hippasus and Heraclitus, it was fire.
It was realized by some of these philosophers that the material cause couldn’t be the only sort of cause and that the subject cannot change itself. Thus, they began their search for a second principle — the source of principle of motion (as they equated change with motion). Principle like logos (reason/balance) and dike (justice) were invoked by them to make sense of their cosmogonies. For the Greeks, especially, the concept of justice/balance was very important, and this is why they invoked this ‘cardinal virtue’ in their thought.
Justice — (leads to )— Stability —(leads to) — Balance — (is equivalent with) — Order
Most of the pre-Socratics did not want to be para-doxa (doxa means what is commonly accepted, and para-doxa means conflicting with doxa). Even thought most of them (the most popular exception is Parmenides) had faith in the senses, this faith was not blind faith. They recognized the importance of wisdom and ‘insight’ in interpreting experience to gain knowledge and to realize the truth.
Problem of Sources/Interpretation
Some important sources of the pre-Socratic thought are the works of Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Theophrastus, Simplicius, Diogenes Laërtius and the Sophists.
The task of understanding the pre-Socratic thought is a tricky one because most of their original works have not survived. We have, majorly, what the later Greek (and much later Western) authors are telling us, in their own version, what the pre-Socratics said. And they are using their own language and vocabulary to do so. These multiple stages of reconstruction and reinterpretation might distort or completely misrepresent what the thinker actually meant to convey. Thus, we should be cautious while approaching these texts.
Significance
The natural world was the philosophical project of the pre-Socratics. Even though they were wrong in most of their conclusions, we should focus on how they thought, and not on the what. They are precursors to what philosophical thinking actually is — cultivating and investigating curiosity and the curious.
An understanding of the pre-Socratic thought is essential for understanding Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian thought (and probably the whole of Western philosophy) and what they were responding to. It helps us appreciate especially Platonic thought — Plato’s ability to distill what is important and what is not — and weave it together into coherent parts. We need to realize how he carried forward the pre-Socratic heritage instead of viewing all his ideas as being novel.
A lot of modern philosophical problems are responses to Greek philosophical problems (for example — the concept of being and non-being, introduced by Parmenides and explicated/reworked by Heidegger).
Endnote
One might ask why philosophy arose — and among the many plausible responses is one of the development of trading towns/ports which increased interaction amongst people and aided thought; and other is that people became dissatisfied with the unfounded ‘explanations’ for existence in theology and mythology given by (often corrupt) oracles.
Philosophy has come to be the art of abstraction. With the first philosophers, it began as a less abstract and more material enterprise but now it has come to be more and more abstract. The pre-Socratics were more commonsensical, unlike a lot of later philosophers who bracketed the world. They did not invoke any neologisms in their arguments. Reason was their key tool of persuasion.
In most scholarship in philosophy, the pre-Socratic thought is unjustly dismissed, or its significance is downplayed. Some analyze it through their partial lenses, and some completely misinterpret it (like reducing Heraclitus’ contributions to three words — all is flux). It is important to recognize the meaning behind their writings and to not merely analyze them through 21st century lenses (equipped with scientific tools and knowledge).
