The Wellspring
Years ago, even before I went to college, I stumbled upon the notion of cultural “hearths.” The term refers to the places where a particular idea – such as a religion, or idea, or type of art, or some sort of technology – originated. From that “hearth,” the religion or idea or art or whatever spread to other areas, adopted more or less successfully by people who learned of it. How successfully it spread depended on the contribution it made to quality of life.
Not every idea or technology has a single hearth. For instance, in stone age cultures where people had limited engineering knowledge, the only way to create a really tall, impressive structure required a bunch of people to work together to stack blocks of cut stone on top of one another, in pyramid shapes. The limitations of knowledge and materials meant that stone-age or bronze-age cultures in (for instance) Egypt and Mesoamerica, developed pyramids independently of one another.
The Egyptians used them as tombs for great pharaohs, and in Mesoamerican cultures they formed the centers of religious life, but the basic shape and construction methodology differed very little. There are only so many ways people with lots of rocks and laborers, but no concept of arches or buttresses, can build things.
Since I had already embarked upon life as a nerd by the time I learned about cultural hearths, I took a great deal of delight in learning about the origin points of different ideas and technologies. I enjoyed learning about who discovered what stuff, how those ideas and technologies spread, what impacts they had on human societies, and how sets of ideas from different hearths interacted with one another when they began to overlap.
Somewhere along the way, I discovered references to a guy named Thales of Miletus, who lived in the 6th Century BC, well before the rise of the Roman Empire, or even the apex of Athens. He seemed to have been the first to discover a bunch of different ideas, so I decided to learn more about him.
Located at the mouth of the Maeander River on the west coast of the Anatolian Peninsula, in what is today mainland Turkey, Miletus had been an agricultural and trade center since Neolithic times. When the Greeks started to spread out from Crete and the arid Peloponnesian Peninsula in search of better lands to colonize, a fair number of them wound up in Miletus. They displaced the native people, renamed the city after one on Crete, and made it into the sort of city-state with which the Greeks were most comfortable.
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, who lived and wrote only about 60 years after Thales death, the man was supposedly born on or about 624 BCE, to parents of Phoenician origin. Thales’ parents were involved in money-lending but apparently were not terribly wealthy. Thales changed his own fortunes when, as a bright young man, he grew frustrated with comments about his relative poverty made by various landowners who lived in the city.
Herodotus, Aristotle and several others reported that the productive olive groves in the area around Miletus looked to have a bumper-crop one year, and Thales noticed the potential. So, the young man scraped up as much money (Greek coins were called drachm) as he could, early in the year, and went around to all the owners of all the olive presses in and around the city. From them, he offered to purchase the right to use as many olive presses as he could, come harvest time.
Not being fools, many of the press owners made the deal and took the man’s money, reasoning that real drachmae in hand now beat notional drachmae in a future that might never come.
Once Thales secured the contracts, he kicked back and chilled out while the owners tended their olive groves. When the time came, the orchard-keepers harvested the olives, packed them in wagons and took them to town to press them into olive oil – a valuable trade commodity throughout the Mediterranean region.
However, once the farm carts started to roll in, Thales exercised his options and declared that anybody who wanted to use the olive presses had to go through him. They couldn’t deal directly with the press owners, since the owners had sold him the rights to use their presses during the harvest season.
The grove owners pitched a fit, but the contracts were apparently valid under Milesian law. That meant Thales could, and promptly did, charge a premium for the use of the presses. He made a killing on the harvest, and silenced the snide comments.
(This also marks the first recorded episode of options trading in history, and every financier active in options markets knows the story. The name crops up pretty frequently in the financial community, which includes firms such as the Thales Group, or Thales Trading Solutions, LLC.)
Anyway, through this sort of activity and other investments, Thales made himself a rather wealthy man before too long, and agreed to take on a few responsibilities on behalf of the government of Miletus. The city had trading interests throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and at one point Thales purchased a trading concession in the Egyptian town of Naucratis, near the mouth of the Nile. That required him to travel to Egypt frequently and, during that time he learned how the Egyptians used knotted strings and applied geography to resurvey grain fields after the Nile flooded, each year.
Thales discovered he apparently had knack for geometry and wound up making a few breakthroughs, one of which still bears his name (Thales’ theorem about how to properly inscribe a right triangle in a circle). While in Egypt, he achieved insight into the utility of ratios when he successfully measured the height of the Great Pyramid. He figured that, if he measured the shadow of the pyramid at the time of day when his own shadow equaled his own height, then the length of pyramid’s shadow would also equal its height, because the ratios would be exactly the same.
(That sort of thing seems pretty obvious to us, now, but somebody had to discover it and prove it. Thales was that guy.)
After he got good at geometry, Thales’ interest turned to astronomy as a means of improving navigation by sea – an obvious area of concern for someone who had such extensive trading interests. This apparently allowed Thales to successfully predict a solar eclipse that took place on May 28, 585 BCE, which darkened a battle between the Medes and the Lydians and scared them so much they decided to negotiate a peace treaty. More pragmatically, it also allowed him to improve celestial navigation, and accurately measure seasons by identifying the exact dates of solstices and equinoxes.
Amusingly, several ancient writers reported that at one point, Thales was so intent at looking at the stars he face-planted in an open well or ditch. This was supposedly witnessed by a rather snarky servant girl, who asked Thales how he expected to understand the stars in the sky when he failed to pay attention to the ground at his own feet?
Later in life, Thales started to wonder about the basic nature of the world (its “physis,” from which we get the word, “physics”), and thought that water must comprise the most fundamental form of matter. He knew that water evaporated (became air), and had seen the islands of the Nile delta, from which he (mistakenly) concluded that water also transformed into earth (nobody knew anything about sedimentation and river hydraulics, back then…).
Clearly, Thales’ view of water as the basic substance of matter isn’t correct, and some of his successors came up with better ideas, fairly quickly. However, the most interesting part of Thales’ path of inquiry was not his postulates about water, but why he felt it important to try to determine the fundamental nature of reality, its “physis,” in the first place.
Somewhere along the way, as Thales sailed around the eastern Mediterranean in pursuit of his business deals and more esoteric personal interests, an idea began to form. The more Thales investigated the physical world, the more orderly it seemed; the more it apparently followed discernible patterns that mathematics could accurately describe. The more it seemed amenable to rational analysis, with a means of proper understanding through the application of reason.
Eventually, Thales concluded that while all things seem to have some sort of motivational force or energy, which he termed a “soul,” that energy had absolutely nothing – zip, zilch, zero – to do with any god or spirit that existed in the myths, legends, stories or scriptures of any culture he had encountered. The wind blew and the lightning flashed not because Zeus so willed it, but because the atmosphere followed natural laws that governed those phenomena. The tides rose and fell not because Poseidon declared it must be so, but because they were somehow tied to the passage of the moon. Plants and animals grew and reproduced not because of the actions of goddesses and spirits, but because it was part of their nature, their “physis” to do so.
Moreover, since the phenomena of the natural world had nothing whatsoever to do with any god in any scripture, Thales concluded that the most effective way to understand reality required that one apply reason, and the discipline of logic, to its analysis, and use mathematics where possible to describe and quantify those discoveries.
In so doing, Thales severed the natural world from the supernatural, and laid the foundation of science as a discipline wholly distinct from religion or faith. He then declared it the way best suited to investigate the natural universe, and set about doing just that. According to Aristotle, Thales supposedly stated that the most important thing about knowledge is not what we know, but how we know it, and that only the application of reason allowed anyone to identify that which was true.
Every Greek thinker who lived after Thales acknowledged him as the first philosopher, and the Milesian school he founded with his students and followers was deemed the first school of Greek philosophy. Aristotle and others found his rationalistic methodology profoundly compelling, and Aristotle forthrightly called him the first “natural philosopher,” by which he meant, “the first scientist.”
It’s tough to overstate Thales’ influence over the Greek philosophers who followed him. The basic idea of Greek philosophy is to fearlessly subject everything, without exception – including faith and cultural traditions — to rational analysis and the discipline of reason. Thales was the first to advocate that approach to understanding the natural universe.
The primacy of reason is one of the hallmarks of Western Civilization, and in all my years of searching, I have never found any other culture that independently developed Thales’ idea that the “natural” existed independent of — and apart from — the “supernatural,” and that gods and spirits played no part in natural phenomena.
In fact, an examination of many cultures seems to indicate that the idea has yet to take hold, in a lot of places, and that the conflation of science and magical mysticism continues in surprising ways. For instance, Chinese traditional medicine is comprised of a weird mixture of astute observations, pragmatic applications of resources available in the local environments, and bizarre notions about spirits and sympathetic magic. (Rhino horn as universal cure-all? Elephant tusks to treat epilepsy? Seriously, people?)
Not that such irrational weirdness is confined to Old World traditions. Right here in the United States, any number of people still believe in homeopathic remedies that, according to basic chemistry, contain substances so diluted they do nothing at all.
Quackery notwithstanding, the emphasis on reason and science seems to have begun with the Greeks more than 2,600 years ago, and it has profoundly impacted the development of Western Civilization in ways that render it unique in all the world. Moreover, no other culture seems to have developed it independently, and the understanding of the primacy of rational analysis in examination of the natural world seems to have only ever been learned by exposure to Western thought.
For that reason, I consider Thales of Miletus one of the single most important men to have ever lived. Somehow, he managed to step away from the god-ridden superstitions of his time and circumstances, and develop a way of thinking about the world unprecedented in his day.
To my mind, Thales is the very wellspring of rationalism, and his contribution not only profoundly influenced Western civilization, it has served all of mankind better than any other mode of thought.
Those who wish to read more about Thales of Miletus can do so at:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/thales/
http://www.ancient.eu/Thales_of_Miletus/
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Herodotus