“. . . Going Further on down the Road . . .”: The Origin and Foundations of Milesian Thought

Then they turned to political matters and invented laws and all the things that bring cities together, and such thought, in turn, they called wisdom. For of such a sort were the seven wise men, who discovered certain political virtues. Then, going further on down the road, they proceeded also to the bodies themselves and the nature of their production, and this is more properly called natural inquiry, and we say these sorts are wise with respect to the things concerning nature. (1) I According to the traditional view, philosophy dawned on the West in a city in present-day Turkey called Miletus and in the thought of a man of legend named Thales. (2) There for the first time in our tradition, human beings dared to give accounts rather than tell stories about the origin and foundations of the world, to engage in cosmology and cosmogony. (3) However crude their accounts may have been, however much they may have adopted their predecessor's mythology and superstition, beneath this fumbling and residue was a shift seismic and enduring. For with these Milesian thinkers, man relied no longer on the traditional stories told of our beginnings and of the structure of the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]--on the tales told by Hesiod, in particular--but on what was accessible to human reason alone. (4) Cosmogony replaced theogony; cosmology, the rule of Zeus. (5) But this is not the core of Hesiod's thought. Hesiod singles himself out by name as the bearer of a poetic, distinctly human wisdom that contrasts in its weakness with the powerful, divine wisdom of Zeus. (6) Hesiod's distinction between human and divine wisdom is a crucial premise of his worldview, a premise not conditioned on the myths he relates, but rather they on it. So even if the myths--myths Hesiod himself likely did not believe (7)--were not empirically grounded, nevertheless this core premise of the weakness of human wisdom may very well have been and still be so grounded. Given the basic contours of Hesiod's thought, the first question philosophy would have to face is that of the limits of human wisdom, of whether man can overcome the ambiguities that pervade his experience and bridge thereby the divide with divine wisdom. Only a thinker who confronted this question would properly have faced the challenge the prephilosophic worldview levels against the budding philosopher. In this article I will examine philosophy's first steps into its proper domain by turning to the origins of the Milesian school in the figures of Thales and Anaximander. Our guiding question will be whether their thought as it is available to us sufficiently addresses the worldview it seeks to replace. I argue that these two thinkers' attempt to bridge the divide between divine and human wisdom inadequately addresses the ambiguities characteristic of human wisdom. Through an examination of the tension between Thales' political wisdom and natural philosophy and, later, between Anaximander's cosmology and cosmogony, we will see that their attempt to gain access to the ground of human experience will ignore a fundamental problem, namely, that the very nature of that ground is to be entirely other than, and so inexplicable in terms of, our experience. As I will argue, these thinkers understand experience to be a variety of determinations of a more fundamentally indeterminate ground, while problematically attempting to give this indeterminate ground discursive determination. (8) After treating Thales and Anaximander in sections II and III respectively, I will conclude with some comment on how Hesiod represents this philosophical problem poetically and how Heraclitus appears to be the first thinker to confront the problem philosophically, inasmuch as his attempt to bridge the divide between divine and human wisdom always keeps one eye on the ambiguities that pervade human experience. The thesis of the paper is that the prephilosophic worldview cannot be dismissed as mere superstition or mythology, for prephilosophic thinkers like Hesiod make substantive claims about the character and limits of human wisdom, claims that deserve attention if the origins of philosophy are to be philosophic--rational rather than simply willful. …