Presocratics: Ancient Antecedents

The term "Presocratic" is a modern creation. The earliest attestation discovered so far is found in a manual of the universal history of philosophy published in 1788 by J.-A. Eberhard (the addressee of a famous letter by Kant): one section is entitled "Presocratic Philosophy" ("vorsokratische Philosophie"). But the idea that there is a major caesura between Socrates and what preceded him goes back to Antiquity. In order to understand the modern debates that have developed around the Presocratics, it is indispensable to go back to these ancient Presocratics, whom by convention I propose to designate "pre-Socratics" (in lowercase, and with a hyphen), in order to distinguish them from the "Presocratics," the historiographical category to whose creation they contributed but under which they cannot be entirely subsumed. Even if undeniable similarities make the ancient "pre-Socratics" the natural ancestors of our modern Presocratics, the differences between the two groups are in fact not less significant, in particular with regard to the stakes involved in both of them.

Antiquity knew of two ways to conceive of the dividing line between what preceded Socrates and what followed him: either Socrates abandoned a philosophy of nature for the sake of a philosophy of man (this is the perspective that I shall call Socratic-Ciceronian, which also includes Xenophon), or he passed from a philosophy of things to a philosophy of the concept (this is the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition). Although a bridge was constructed between these two traditions, notably by Plato in the Phaedo (a text that is both complex and decisive for the posterity of the Presocratics), they diverge not only in their tenor but also, and even more, in their effects: while the former only thematizes a certain rupture, the latter by contrast brings to light the thread of a deeper continuity beyond it. This dissymmetry, which can be, and indeed has been, specified in different ways, is essential for understanding the modern fate of the Presocratics. It is worth examining precisely its presuppositions and its consequences.

At its origin, the Socratic-Ciceronian tradition is closely connected with Socrates's trial (399 BCE), in which, in order to respond to the accusation of impiety with which (among other things) he was charged, he needed to distinguish himself from an enterprise that had been known at least since the 430s under the name of "inquiry into nature" (peri phuseôs historia).

The Phaedo strongly suggests that the phrase "inquiry into nature" was still perceived as a technical expression at the dramatic date of the conversation it portrays (which is supposed to have occurred on the very day of Socrates's death), and we cannot exclude the possibility that this was still the case at the date of the composition of the dialogue, about fifteen years later. For the Socrates of the Phaedo says that when he was young he "was incredibly eager for the kind of wisdom that is called the inquiry into nature," which he expected would give him the knowledge of "the causes of each thing, why each thing comes into being and why it perishes and why it exists." The specification "that is called" points to the novelty of the expression, if not to that of the enterprise itself.

In fact, none of the surviving texts that refer to such an "inquiry into nature" is older than the last third of the fifth century BCE. It is also around this time — and evidently not by chance — that the title "On Nature" comes into circulation, and that it is applied, in certain cases anachronistically, to older works that fell (or were thought to fall) within this genre.

In chapter 20 of the Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine (which also happens to present the first-known occurrence of the abstract term philosophia), its author, a medical writer who advocates traditional methods, distances himself from writings "on nature" that he judges to be too speculative because of the presuppositions (or "hypotheses") they are led to adopt, and contrasts them with medical inquiry as the sole legitimate source of knowledge about the nature of man:

But what they are talking about belongs to philosophy, like Empedocles or others who have written about nature: what a human being is from the beginning, how he first appeared and out of what things he is constituted. But as for me, I think that whatever has been said or written by some expert [sophistês] or doctor about nature belongs less to the art of medicine than to that of painting, and I think that there is no other source than medicine for having some clear knowledge about nature. ... I say that this field of inquiry [tautên tên historiên] knows exactly what a human being is, through what causes he comes about, and everything else.

The second passage is a fragment of Euripides that scholars tend to attribute to a lost tragedy, Antiope, which is known to have contained a debate, famous in Antiquity, between the two brothers Amphion and Zethus regarding the utility and the value of music, and by extension that of intellectual studies:

[Chorus:] Happy the man who, having attained
The knowledge deriving from inquiry [tês historias ... mathêsin],
Aspires neither to trouble for his fellow citizens
Nor to unjust deeds,
But observes immortal nature's
Unaging order, where it was formed,
In what way, and how.
Never to men like this does the practice of shameful actions come near.

The third passage comes from an anonymous dialectical set of arguments known under the title of Dissoi Logoi (Pairs of arguments):

I think that it belongs to the same man and to the same art to be able to discuss briefly, to know the truth of things, to judge a legal case correctly, to be able to make speeches to the people, to know the arts of speeches, and to teach about the nature of all things, both their present condition and their origins.

On the basis of these three texts, which echo the passage from the Phaedo and each other, we can see that "the inquiry into nature" involved two principal characteristics. On the one hand, it is directed toward a totality (it bears upon "all things" or upon "the whole"). On the other hand, it adopts a resolutely genetic perspective (it explains the existing condition of things by tracing the history of its development from the origins).

One can identify fairly well the stages that, after a process of rapid crystallization, ended up transforming the authors of treatises on "the nature of all things" into "natural philosophers," those thinkers whom Aristotle called simply "naturalists" (phusikoi). In a passage of the Memorabilia that echoes the one in the Phaedo, Xenophon still has recourse to a comprehensive expression when, in the context of a defense of Socrates to which we shall return in a moment, he maintains that "he never discoursed, like most of the others, about the nature of all things [peri tês tôn pantôn phuseôs], investigating the condition of what the experts call 'the world order' [hopôs ho kaloumenos hupo tôn sophistôn kosmos ekhei] and by what necessities each of the heavenly phenomena occurs." Plato's Lysis mentions the "totality" (named by the other term, holon, which Greek can use to designate a totality of things), but dissociates it from "nature": the sages, who, together with Homer, maintain "that like must always be friend to like," are presented as "speaking and writing on nature and on the whole" (hoi peri phuseôs te kai tou holou dialegomenoi kai graphontes). But after the Phaedo, the term "nature" can come to stand in for whole expression. Thus Socrates asks in the Philebus, "And if someone supposes that he is conducting research on nature [peri phuseôs ... zêtein], do you know that he does research for his whole life on what has to do with this world, how it has come about, how it is affected, and how it acts [ta peri ton kosmon tonde, hopê te gegonen kai hopê paskhei kai hopê poiei]?" This substitution of the term "nature" for the more detailed expression leads to the threshold of the substantivizations of Aristotle, who employs very frequently, and as synonyms, "the authors (of treatises) on nature" (hoi peri phuseôs), "the naturalists" (hoi phusikoi), or sometimes "the physiologues" (hoi phusiologoi).

In fact, there is a lineage of works among the Presocratic thinkers that corresponds to this description, of which the basic scheme very probably goes back to Anaximander. What is involved is a general history of the universe and of its constitutive parts, from its beginnings until a limit that seems most often to have gone beyond the current condition of the world and to have been constituted by the moment of its destruction (thus it would be more exact to speak of "cosmo-gono-phthorias" than of simple cosmogonies). The narrative comprised a certain number of elements that were more or less obligatory. From Anaximander to Philolaus and Democritus, by way of Anaximenes, Parmenides (in the second part of his poem), Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia, and others of lesser importance, the grand narratives "on nature" include an explanation of the way in which the universe, the heavenly bodies, and the earth were formed, with, already very early, discussion of more technical or specialized problems like the delimitation of the celestial and terrestrial zones, the inclination of the poles, the distance and size of the heavenly bodies, the luminosity of the moon, meteorological and terrestrial phenomena, rain and hail, earthquakes and tides, the origin of living beings and their reproduction, the sexual differentiation of embryos, the mechanism of physiological life, sleep and death, sensation and thought, and in some cases the development of life in society. In short: a cosmogony and a cosmology, a zoogony and a zoology, an anthropology and a physiology (in the modern sense of the term), which under certain circumstances could also be continued as a history of human civilization.

Out of this complex whole, certain ancient texts retain essentially the cosmological aspect, and speak of "meteorology" and of "meteorologists": for before the Aristotelian distinction between a supralunary region and an infralunary one, which tends to limit meteôra to the domain of "meteorological" phenomena alone, the term meteôra designated any phenomena occurring "on high," and represented by synecdoche the whole of the inquiry into nature. In the opening scene of the Protagoras, the audience asks the sophist Hippias "a number of astronomical questions about nature and celestial phenomena [meteôra]." And it is only by contrast with "celestialphenomena" that the author of the Hippocratic treatise Fleshes (who is opposed on this point to the author of On Ancient Medicine) delimited the field of medicine from the naturalists' research:

I need say nothing about celestial phenomena [peri tôn meteôrôn] except insofar as I shall indicate their relevance to humans and the other animals — how they are born by nature and came to exist, what the soul is, what it is to be healthy, what it is to be sick, what is bad and good in the human, and whence it comes that he dies.

But it is clear that the series of questions that Socrates enumerates in the Phaedo as having attracted the passion of his younger years also derives from the subjects the naturalists discussed within the framework of a totalizing program:

Are living creatures nourished when heat and cold undergo a kind of putrefaction, as some people say? Is it rather blood by which we think, or air, or fire? Or is it none of these, but rather the brain that supplies the sensations of hearing, sight, and smell, and from these latter that memory and opinion arise, and, when memory and opinion achieve a state of stability, does knowledge come about in accordance with these? And again, investigating the perishing of these processes, I also investigated what happens in the heavens and on earth.

It is significant that the subjects mentioned by Socrates concern especially the physiology of knowledge, as though from the beginning Socrates had been more interested in questions that had, at least virtually, an epistemological scope than in accounts of the structure of the universe. Naturalism, born in Ionia, and in particular in Miletus, in the sixth century BCE, had been introduced into Athens by Anaxagoras, whom Pericles invited in 456/55 to become part of his entourage. There it rapidly became an object of suspicion. The general tone is indicated by another fragment of Euripides, from an unknown play, that takes a position opposed to the praise for the life of study pronounced by Amphion in the Antiope:

Who when he sees these things does not begin by teaching
His soul to conceive of god,
And casts far away the crooked deceptions of those who study the heavens,
Whose audacious tongue guesses at random about invisible matters
without having any share in judgment?

The debate regarding the harmlessness or harmfulness of meteorology was not at all merely theoretical. The decree of Diopeithes, which permitted those who busied themselves with matters "on high" to be prosecuted under the charge of impiety, dates from 438/37. In the following year, its first victim was Anaxagoras (through whom Pericles was the intended target), for having maintained that the heavenly bodies were nothing but burning stones. Diogenes of Apollonia may also have been formally accused, several years after Anaxagoras, although this is disputed. Strange as it might seem, given that this tallies so badly with the image we have of Socrates on the basis of Plato's Apology of Socrates and Xenophon's Memorabilia, Socrates was suspected of sharing the naturalists' curiosity about the mechanisms of the universe and consequently their impiety. The key document in this connection is constituted by Aristophanes's Clouds, staged in 423 BCE, which the Apology of Socrates denounces explicitly as the first real attack on Socrates, about twenty-five years before his trial in 399.

In fact, the Clouds, in anticipating the two accusations to which Socrates had to reply — corrupting the youth and introducing gods unknown to the city — displayed a Socrates who is indissociably both a "sophist," someone capable of making "the weaker" argument "the stronger" one, and at the same time a "natural philosopher," suspended in a basket and propagating scraps extracted parodistically from the doctrine of Diogenes of Apollonia, who maintained that the air on high was endowed with an intelligence that was greater because it was drier.

The Apology denounces this amalgam as the product of a pure calumny: no one has ever heard Socrates discussing "what is below the earth and in the sky." Xenophon's Memorabilia repeats this: "No one ever saw Socrates doing, or heard him saying, anything impious or irreligious. For he never discoursed, like most of the others, about the nature of all things, investigating the condition of what the sophists call 'the world order' [kosmos] and by what necessities each of the heavenly phenomena occurs." So far from meddling with "divine things," like the naturalists, Socrates directed his interest resolutely toward "human things" (ta anthrôpina), the good of man and the practice of virtue. Both in Xenophon and in Plato's Apology, Socrates becomes the figure of the first "humanist" — a humanism that is distinguished by its resolute rejection of all physical speculation. This is what is also meant, in a way that is at the same time more traditional and less transparent, by the well-attested formula according to which Socrates occupied himself not with physics but with ethics.

The simple and rhetorically effective opposition between pre-Socratic "naturalism" and Socratic "humanism" was intended in the first instance to mark a typological difference between two kinds of intellectual orientation. But it also opened the way for a historiographical interpretation, in virtue of which one orientation follows the other. The Phaedo, which also develops a more complex image of the relation between Socrates and ancient physics than the one presented in the Apology or the Memorabilia, indisputably favored such an interpretation by recalling what the Apology and the Memorabilia, for understandable reasons, had taken great care not to mention: namely, that Socrates himself had gone through a naturalist phase in his earlier years. We have already encountered this passage: "When I myself was young, I was incredibly eager for the kind of wisdom that they call the investigation of nature. For it seemed to me splendid to know the causes of each thing, why each thing comes into being and why it perishes and why it exists." The doxographic tradition provides more precise outlines for this statement when it makes Socrates the disciple of Archelaus, himself a natural philosopher located within Anaxagoras's sphere of influence but one who is said to have dealt with ethics too (this last feature was perhaps intended to facilitate the transition).