Thales of Miletus and the Maxim Philosophers Forgot

Thales of Miletus, for his work in the 6th century BCE, is today widely regarded as the first philosopher in the ‘Western’ tradition. History records him as a pioneering thinker and perhaps the most revered of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. He is credited with introducing the idea of natural philosophy, an approach that attempts to understand and explain the world not through myth or miraculous narrative, but by identifying the underlying principles of nature.

The most famous proposition of Thales may be that all things are ultimately composed of water. At first glance this might seem a naive idea, but even so it represents a radical shift in thinking from stories of gods to hypotheses about the nature of matter. It seems unlikely that Thales was thinking about what we usually call water, however, an idea that really would have been naïve, but was speculating about a substance with many of the properties of water. He would have recognised that for a fundamental theory or ‘theory of everything’ we need a substratum, an origin, a source or first axiom that has many of the properties of water. Hence his idea did not make Thales a materialist or naïve realist. In the literature of mysticism the metaphor of water is regularly used to convey something of the nature of the Ultimate, and that it has these properties can be shown to be a matter of logic.

Traditionally, Thales is also credited with the Delphic maxim ‘Know thyself’, although the origins of this aphorism are a little murky. One legend has it that the Seven Sages convened at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and in collaboration wrote a series of maxims, of which this is the centrepiece. If it was either written or approved by Thales then it reveals his concern not only with what the world is made of, but with the nature of the self who wants to know.

There is some debate as to the exact membership of the Seven Sages, but some lists include Pythagoras. The great mathematician goes further and tells us, ‘Know thyself, and thou shalt know the universe and the gods’. This suggest that Thales and Pythagoras shared the belief or knowledge that the nature of matter cannot be known except by self-enquiry, and that the methods of contemplation and meditation encouraged by the pre-Socratics would be crucial to an understanding of not just ourselves but also our ‘natural’ or empirical sensory world.

Yet, ironically, the history of Western philosophy unfolded in almost the opposite direction. The early Greek search for the archê, or fundamental principle, gave rise to metaphysics, logic, and science. But the inward arrow of attention, the demand to understand the knower, was ignored or marginalized. Socrates helped to keep it alive, but his successors quickly returned to abstraction and external theorizing. By the time of Aristotle, self-knowledge had become a subordinate concern. In modern times the self may be invoked as a starting point for epistemology, but not as a subject of transformation or source of metaphysical knowledge. It is telling that since the time of Thales and Pythagoras the ‘natural’ tradition of philosophy has been unable to make an inch of progress in metaphysics. Even in mainstream modern consciousness studies, where one might expect consciousness to be studied, it is as if Thales and Pythagoras had never existed.

The metaphysical significance of the maxim ‘Know thyself’ lies in the recognition that the true nature of reality cannot be comprehended independently of a comprehension of the true nature of consciousness. The mystics tell us reality IS consciousness, and that to understand the world one would have to understand the principles from which it arises and by which we interpret and experience it.

Western philosophy, by ignoring the advice of Thales and Pythagoras, cut itself off from a depth of understanding only available in traditions that retained this insight, and effectively ‘sent to Coventry’ mysticism and what we know today as the Perennial philosophy. It has been the elephant in the room ever since. The history of Western philosophy since Thales might be seen not as the unfolding of a rational inquiry but as the systematic rejection of his most rational advice.

Sometime later Heidegger accuses Western metaphysics not of making a mistake in this regard, but of carefully and deliberately turning a blind eye to the issue. It chose to ignore questions regarding Being, for such questions are only answerable by self-enquiry, and instead focus entirely on the multiplicity of beings. The result is an incomprehensible metaphysics that cannot unify the One and the Many or explain anything at all, and that sees consciousness as an eternal mystery.

“Metaphysics … speaks continually and in the most various ways of Being. Metaphysics gives, and seems to confirm, the appearance that it asks and answers the question concerning Being. In fact, metaphysics never answers the question concerning the truth of Being, for it never asks this question. Metaphysics does not ask this question because it thinks of Being only by representing beings as beings. It means all beings as a whole, although it speaks of Being. It refers to Being and means beings as beings. From its beginning to its completion, the propositions of metaphysics have been strangely involved in a persistent confusion of beings and Being. This confusion, to be sure, must be considered an event and not a mere mistake. It cannot by any means be charged to a mere negligence of thought or a carelessness of expression. Owing to this persistent confusion, the claim that metaphysics poses the question of Being lands us in utter error. Due to the manner in which it thinks of beings, metaphysics almost seems to be, without knowing it, the barrier which keeps man from the original involvement of Being in human nature.

What if the absence of this involvement and the oblivion of this absence determined the entire modern age? What if the absence of Being abandoned man more and more exclusively to beings, leaving him forsaken and far from any involvement of Being in his nature, while this forsakenness itself remained veiled? What if this were the case and had been the case for a long time now? What if there were signs that this oblivion will become still more decisive in the future?

Martin Heidegger - Existence and Being (1949)

Western philosophy may have begun with Thales but he cannot be blamed for its failures. Had this tradition genuinely followed the lead of Thales and Pythagoras it would not now be necessary, or perhaps even possible, to draw a distinction between the pre- and post-Socratics, or between Western philosophy and the Perennial philosophy. The former is commonly labelled ‘Rational’, but it could be argued that with the post-Socratics it became irrational and has remained so to this day.

The good news for philosophers is that we are free to adopt any approach we like. If we can see the futility of investigating philosophy while ignoring the advice of Thales and Pythagoras then we can largely skip over Western philosophy and move straight on to the philosophy of those who take it seriously. Then metaphysics becomes a more straightforward affair, for now there are no ancient and intractable metaphysical problems to cause confusion. The literature of the Perennial philosophy is written by people who know not just who they are but who everybody is, and it makes no mention of intractable problems. Russell’s ‘problems of philosophy’ and Kant’s antinomies are artefacts of dualism, and they are addressed and resolved in the Perennial tradition.

When we hear scholastic ‘Rational’ philosophers claiming that philosophy is interminable, inconclusive or incomprehensible, therefore, as we often do, we should regard this as their personal problem, a consequence of their approach, and not as a criticism of philosophy.