Philosophers

How did the early Philosophers view of the world differ from that of Homer? Specifically, how was the philosophers’ method of trying to understand the world around them different?

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That looks like a straightforward question. And a reasonable person might expect some clear statement of the criterion that separates Homeric poetry (or any other poetry for that matter) from philosophical theory. So it’s interesting to realize, at the start, that even in antiquity it took some time for a consensus to emerge on the relationship between the two kinds of discourse.

One of the first ancient Greeks to compile an intellectual history was Hippias the sophist, whom we know today from Plato’s rather unflattering portrayals of him in the Hippias Major and the Hippias Minor (titles that merely indicate, by the way, that the former dialogue is the longer of the two and the latter shorter). Socrates makes short work of Hippias in the dialogues, but in real life he was intellectually ambitious and enterprising. His history of thought is lost today, but it came before any history by Plato or Aristotle, and apparently contained philosophers and poets in comparable numbers.

Plato, for his part, was no historian; but there are some sections of two dialogues, the Theaetetus and Sophist, that sketch the general outlines of a history of philosophy. In the Theaetetus that sketch pits Parmenides and sympathetic Eleatic thinkers on one side, denying the reality of natural change, against a long tradition of theorists of nature according to whom change is the essence of nature. Socrates puts Protagoras in that tradition along with Heraclitus; and then surprisingly he says the tradition began with Homer, and a line in the Iliad about Ocean being the father of all. So Plato seems comfortable thinking of his intellectual forebears as an undifferentiated group containing both “official” philosophers and poets.

Aristotle returns to the very same quote from Homer in Book I of his Metaphysics, during his own review of the philosophical tradition. The line in Homer does not impress Aristotle, though. He is pruning the philosophical tradition so that such storytellers remain outside the mainstream. We, looking back, surely understand his motives. We have inherited Aristotle’s way of sorting writers into philosophers and non-philosophers.

But how to articulate that distinction?

According to one influential distinction, the mythic versions of doctrines given in Homer and other poets are treated as things that took place impossibly long ago. The laws of nature in Homer are different from those in operation in philosophical theories, if only because they describe a world, its objects, and the processes by which it changes that no longer exist. The world of myth operated according to principles that do not operate today. Homer said “All was water,” or as much as said so, when he spoke of Ocean and his consort Tethys as origins of all; Thales, as the emblematic philosopher, said nearly the same thing but also something entirely different when he announced “All is water.” For Thales water was still, is now, the nature of matter; for Homer water had been the originating principle when the world behaved according to laws now disappeared.

The distinction is not sustainable in those terms. It is attractively described like that, but not quite true. Something mythic clings to the thought of Thales, as we see in his statement that “all things are full of gods.” There is truth in detecting steps toward philosophical metaphysics and science in the sayings attributed to Thales; but the difference between him and Homer is not as clear-cut as simple formulations would have us believe.

My own belief, though other scholars may disagree, is that Plato and Aristotle labored to distinguish philosophy from Homeric mythic poetry. In his later dialogue Sophist, for instance, Plato has the Stranger from Elea complain that earlier philosophers spoke in stories, as if their students were still children. He seems to want the task of philosophy to be a movement out of mythic discourse into something more logical, perhaps less anthropomorphic. And yet there is still something Homeric in what that character the Stranger says in the Sophist, for all his efforts to the contrary.

If you absolutely need a simple formulation of the change from Homer to Thales, you could do worse than to say: Philosophers seek explanations and descriptions of the world that apply everywhere, at all times; Homer and his poetic colleagues imagine that some accounts were true once and no longer are. But I suggest that you use this formulation sparingly, and only as I said if you absolutely need some simple way of stating the difference.

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