The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

In the pre-Socratic philosophers from Thales up to Pythagoras, the questions related to metaphysics have concluded that the world comes out of a single substance. For instance, Thales believed that the world comes out of water. Anaximander understood that it wasn’t water; it was something boundless. Anaximenes believed in the diversity of things, and air is the ultimate stuff in all things. Empedocles decided that the components that comprised the world were earth, air, fire, and water and that these were the ingredients of all other creations. Unlike others who believed in some physical material as the basic concept, Pythagoreans derived everything from numbers. The pluralists, atomists, sophists, and Socrates and Plato rejected the idea of monism that one single thing made all things. The latter philosophical studies offered an understanding of the universe, reality, and life. In this essay, we compare and contrast these philosophical viewpoints. 

To begin with, pluralists ask questions about how X might become Y, where the child is, and where an adult comes from. How water, air, earth, and fire become lions, or how wet becomes dry. Change is indisputably real to pluralists. They looked at their surroundings and understood that the force of transformation was present everywhere. They observed the change where night turns into day and winter leads to summer. These observations led them to criticize the premises of the monist. Pluralists contend that a single entity cannot explain reality. One element or a mathematical formula can not adequately account for the universe. Pluralists see the world as having some kind of disconnectedness as an essential feature, without which motion, change, and free will, for example, would not be possible. Anaxagoras argued that an endless number of elements termed “seeds" generated all other things and that the proportion of the elements present determines the properties of anything. One exception is the mind, which is pure and free of all other substances.

Atomism radically differs from both monism and pluralism. According to Democritus, change happens through changes in atoms. These atoms are homogeneous and indivisible and move through space mechanically, interact with one another, and create diversity. Atomists held to the determinism hypothesis that earlier causes predetermined all occurrences. Leucippus said, “Nothing happens by chance, but everything happens for a reason.”  Atoms, which make up this world, have qualitative and quantitative characteristics. Qualitatively, they are sensory traits such as colors and sound; quantitatively, they are mathematically measurable as size, shape, and number. Nothing occurs randomly on the earth; everything happens in conjunction with the physical world. This reasoning gave birth to materialism, which believes everything is matter. Human beings are nothing but bodies. Atomism promotes reason as a reliable source of knowledge.

The term sophist (sophistēs) derives from the Greek words for wisdom (sophia) and wise (sophos). They are contemporaries of Socrates. They attacked traditional thinking, from God to morality. They are more interested in how we gain knowledge. For Sophists, there is no God and no moral injunctions. According to Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things, that which is and that which is not.” It means that knowledge relates to the human mind. The mind is the object of reality. While Socrates looked for objective and eternal truths, the Sophists promoted relativism and subjectivism, wherein a person can decide what is good, true, and beautiful.

Socrates stood for moral relativism and defined the key terms. He laid the foundation of moral philosophy. He pursued rational inquiry to discover the truth about ethical matters.

Plato was a friend and student of Socrates. Plato saw the world as ever-changing and there is a deeper, more stable, and permanent reality. For example, cats have different sizes and are different from each other, but what it means to be a cat doesn’t change. Cattiness is what it means to be a cat.  Catness is universal and unchanging; it is true for all cats. Knowledge can’t begin from the observable world; it is innate in human beings. Like the catness is central to all cats, learning comes from the transcendent world. According to Plato, knowledge requires identity and permanent unity or oneness. Therefore, there must be another world that is ideal and unchangeable.

The physical world is changing particulars, and the transcendent world is a world of unchangeable ideas.  Sensory organs can only understand the material world, whereas intellect can comprehend the transcendent universe. Being a political philosopher, he proposed an ideal political state where a philosopher king rules a state. Philosopher-kings study the transcendent world; they love wisdom and justice. They are wise and just.   

To cap it all, from monism to Plato, philosophers have tried to understand the world from diverse perspectives. In monism, one single entity was considered the architect of the world. Pluralists rejected oneness and believed in diversity and that an infinite number of things made the world. Atomism believes unchangeable and indivisible atoms made the world. For Sophists, the reality is relative; it changes from one person to another. Finally, Socrates and Plato derived dualism and put everything in this world as an eternal connection with a world out there.