Meditation 58: The Second Wave of Philosophers

After a couple hundred years of philosophy, in the 5^th Century B.C.E., the second wave of philosophers looked out on a bewildering array of different theories about what the universe is made of, how it came into being, and how it works to produce the variety we see around us. Reason, it seems, can speak with many voices. Thales said that everything is made of water. The Pythagoreans thought that number is at the basis of reality. Parmenides reasoned that only Being is. His opposite, Heraclitus, thought that only change and the law of change are lasting. Democritus explains every phenomenon as a mere collision of differently shaped atoms, and for him there are only atoms and the void. Anaximander thought that the stuff of the universe was >boundless.' There is a little bit of everything in everything. Empedocles advocated the lastingly popular theory that earth, air, fire and water make up everything that is, and that Love and Strife preside over and motivate an ever transforming universe. With Anaxagoras, we find Mind as first principle of the universe.

This last view appealed to the second wave of philosophers, and here we come to Socrates and Plato.  AKnow Thyself@ is their maxim. They looked within rather than without.  There is so much dispute between philosophers about the world >out there' that it behooves the seeker of wisdom to examine the one who seeks to know.  This is harder than one might imagine. Now the soul becomes the center of philosophic attention, and the question is the right way for a human being to live, not the constitution of external objects.

Philosophy was at a cross roads, and the road it took led away from a purely materialistic understanding of the universe as allowed, for example, in atomism. The inward turn of philosophy led Plato right back out again, but this time not into the spatio-temporal world of sense, but the eternal world of the Forms. The universe is ultimately the result of a divine mind, and is designed for the best, whether we see it or not.

Aristotle moves out again and focuses his attention on the changeable world around him. He is interested in the same questions as the earlier Pre-Socratics, and deigns to write a physics, as well as metaphysics. Though critical of Plato in many ways, he, nevertheless, comes to much the same conclusion as his teacher in the end. Aristotle's first principle is the Unmoved Mover, cause of all that moves, and, in fact, the First Cause of all things. Like a giant magnet, the Unmoved Movers draws primordial matter into shapes and give them substance.

Reflecting on a recognizable tradition of philosophical inquiry that goes back to the 7^th Century B.C.E., I see the ripples of these waves recurring in different forms. At the moment, outside the analytic tradition, I would say that the second wave is ascendant. There is much uncritical skepticism about the possibility of objective (scientific) knowledge in the forms of cultural relativity, subjectivism, and post-structuralism/modernism. We are very much left to our own limited resources.

Philosophy is Janus-faced, facing without and within. This gives philosophy a tension and pathos. The philosopher is a juggler. Going within leads back out again, and going out leads back in. Philosophy juggles the ideal and real, right and wrong, knowledge and opinion, free will and determinism, being and non-Being, reason and feeling. Everything tries to turn into its opposite.  Sometimes the philosopher will go with the flow, and at others try to arrest it. There is an effort in loving knowledge and truth, as philosophers are supposed to do. The pursuit of philosophy indicates a restlessness of spirit and a perturbation of the soul. Yet there are moments in the life of a philosopher of either wave when the work of philosophy does yield insights, intuitions and understandings that make the whole effort worthwhile.