Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

Humans must have thought about the world and our role in it for a long time. For most of history, their curiosity about the objects they saw on earth, in the sky, about the natural events, about birth and death, and about the afterlife were answered by stories or myths. When one’s life is consumed with staying alive, searching for food, and saving your clan from predators, there is not much time left to ruminate on the universe. One satisfies oneself with the answers one finds in the rituals or in the mythology. One such is offered by Hesiod, a poet and myth-creator, in Theogony written in 700 BC. According to him, it was Muses, the goddess of inspiration, who inspired him to outline the creation of the universe. There was chaos first and from it came the night, and the day and the earth, and so on. Hesiod, a rationalist, thought the human mind was too weak to understand the world.

Thales was the first Western philosopher. He gave an answer, which is not based on a myth, to the question of being and becoming. He claimed that the world can be perceived through our senses and the single arche (substance) that the world is made out of is water. He reasoned that water can be in solid (ice), liquid (water), and gas (steam) states and it is this transformative property of water that gives rise to various lives and objects we see in nature.

Anaximander, a pupil of Thales, looked around and couldn’t believe that water alone could be the arche of the whole world. How is a stone made out of water? He said the world is made out of an infinite number of eternal substances, as many objects as we see in nature. He also floated the idea of evolution and claimed that humans evolved from the fishes.

Anaximenes, a student of Anaximander, stated that there can not be an infinite number of elements. The number has to be finite. Per his account, the arche is air and the motion of air is responsible for becoming or changing (of matter). The soul is air, the fire (Sun and stars) is a rarefied air, the water a condensed air, and it is further condensed, it takes the form of the earth.

Xenophanes, a theologian rather than a philosopher, claimed that everything is made from God. The God is one, omnipresent, and permanent. It doesn’t move but makes everything move. God and the world are the same thing.

Pythagoras delved into form and relations. He too believed in Thales and Anaximenes in that the arche is finite. For him, it’s the number. Numbers can be applied to anything. It can be applied to any object — dot is 1, line 2, figure 3, solid 4, and so on. The numbers are finite and determinate and are the candidates of the primordial substance. He believed that thought or intuition is superior to sense or observation. “Thought is nobler than sense…Objects of thought more real than those of sense-perception…Mathematics is… the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth”.

The subsequent philosophers started to doubt whether both being and becoming are possible. For Heraclitus, there is no being, but only becoming. The objects we observe in nature are an illusion. There is no single arche as Thales or Pythagoras has suggested. Everything around us is changing constantly. He wrote in short aphorisms. To him, the only permanent is the law that defines the movements, changes, and opposition.

Parmenides opposed Heraclitus’s idea and eliminated the concept of becoming. A rationalist, he reasoned that in the process of becoming, something must arise either from being or non-being. A non-being can’t become a being. If it’s a being, then it is not possible for that being to change into something else. We can not think of nothing. Non-beings are not possible to think of. The being and the thought are the same thing. What is not present, can’t be thought and what can’t be thought, doesn’t exist. The change we observe in nature suggests that something must change to another or something must come from nothing, but our reason doesn’t support that. The change we see in the world, hence, is an illusion; everything is permanent, and fixed.

The next philosophers tried to reconcile the ideas of Heraclitus and Parmenides, the riddle of permanence and change, and the question of static and dynamic. According to those philosophers, there are no absolute changes, but only relative changes. Empedocles claimed that the universe is made of earth, water, air, and fire, and love (attraction) and hate (repulsion) are the causes of change. He talks about the transmigration of souls. Anaxagoras came up with the idea of seeds. He looked at his own body and thought about how the same element could be blood, nails, hair, skin. There are as many seeds as objects. The mind outside of the element plays the role of change. The atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, declared that everything is made of atoms and they are indivisible, impenetrable, and invisible different only in form, weight, and size. The empty space is the non-being. All bodies are composed of atoms and empty spaces. The origin of any object is through union and the destruction through separation.

Athens was a prosperous city and its citizens enjoyed the free-speech and the democratic society it offered. The sophists, the traveling teachers, came to the city and taught Athenian citizens how to win arguments and become successful in politics. They were humanists and for them, “Human being is the measure of all things”. They didn’t think about the world or its nature. They thought it was beyond them to understand. They were relativists and they put their efforts into teaching rhetorics, the art of speaking well.