Fragments

Overview

This is not a book. It is a collection of everything that survives from about two centuries of Greek thought, gathered from the writers who quoted it: Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Simplicius, Diogenes Laertius. Some of these men had the original books in front of them. Most did not.

The standard scholarly arrangement comes from Hermann Diels, revised by Walther Kranz, and it distinguishes two kinds of evidence. The A texts are testimonia: later reports about what a thinker said. The B texts are fragments: actual words, or what a later author presented as actual words. The numbering, as in Heraclitus B12, is universal, and every edition uses it.

What that means practically is that you are reading with a double filter. Aristotle reports his predecessors as stages leading to his own position, which shapes what he thought worth recording. The Christian writers quoted pagans to refute them. Simplicius, writing in the sixth century CE and knowing he was at the end of the tradition, copied out long stretches of Parmenides precisely because he could see the books were being lost, and we owe him most of what we have.

Two hundred and fifty pages in the Barnes selection, including the testimonia. The fragments alone would be a fraction of that.

The argument

The Milesians. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, in Miletus, in the sixth century. The question they invented: what is everything made of, and what stays the same while things change?

Thales said water, and said the earth floats on it, and that all things are full of gods. Nothing of his writing survives, if he wrote. He is credited with predicting an eclipse in 585 BCE, which if true means he had access to Babylonian records.

Anaximander is the more impressive figure. His principle is the apeiron, the boundless, an indefinite stuff that is not any of the ordinary elements, because if the principle were one of the opposites it would have overwhelmed the others long ago. He held that the earth is a drum-shaped body hanging unsupported at the centre of things, staying where it is because it has no more reason to move in one direction than another, which is a genuine argument and the first one of its kind. He also proposed that living things came from moisture and that humans developed inside fish-like creatures, because an infant could not have survived alone.

Anaximenes said air, and added the mechanism the others lacked: rarefaction and condensation. Air thinned becomes fire; thickened it becomes wind, cloud, water, earth, stone. One substance, one process, the entire range of things.

Pythagoras. No writings, a secretive community, dietary rules, and a doctrine of reincarnation. What matters philosophically is the claim that things are numbers, or imitate numbers, derived from the discovery that the concordant musical intervals correspond to simple ratios of string length. That observation, that an audible quality is a numerical relation, is the ancestor of mathematical physics.

Heraclitus. Ephesus, around 500 BCE, writing in deliberate riddles. About a hundred and thirty fragments survive, the largest body from anyone in the period.

His claims: everything is in flux, and the river fragments say it. Opposites are identical, the road up and down is one and the same, and strife is justice rather than a defect. Fire is the primary substance, and the cosmos is an ever-living fire kindling in measures and going out in measures, which makes fire a symbol of the process itself rather than a stuff like water. And there is a logos, an account or measure or ratio, which holds always and which people fail to understand both before and after they hear it.

Parmenides. Elea, in southern Italy, early fifth century. He wrote a poem in hexameters in which a goddess instructs him, and it is the hinge of Greek philosophy.

The argument: there are two paths, that it is and that it is not. The second cannot be taken, because what is not cannot be thought or spoken of. From this he deduces that what is must be ungenerated, since it could only come from what is not; imperishable; indivisible, since a division would need what is not to separate the parts; unmoving; and complete. Change and plurality are therefore impossible, and the world the senses report is not real.

A second part of the poem, the Way of Opinion, gives a cosmology anyway, and why it is there has never been settled.

Zeno of Elea defended him with paradoxes against motion and plurality: Achilles never catches the tortoise, the arrow at each instant occupies a space equal to itself and so does not move, and half the distance must be crossed before the whole. Aristotle called Zeno the inventor of dialectic.

The pluralists. After Parmenides, anyone who wanted to save the appearances had to concede that nothing comes from nothing and build a physics on unchanging elements rearranged.

Empedocles: four roots, earth, water, air and fire, eternal and unchanging, combined and separated by Love and Strife in an endless cycle. Nothing is born and nothing dies; there is only mixing. He also gave an evolutionary account in which limbs wandered separately and joined at random, and the viable combinations survived. He claimed to be a god, and one tradition says he proved it by jumping into Etna.

Anaxagoras: everything contains a portion of everything, and things differ by what predominates, so that hair and flesh can come from bread because they were already in it. The cosmos was set spinning by Mind, nous, which is unmixed and knows all things. Plato’s Socrates says in the Phaedo that he was thrilled to hear of Mind and then bitterly disappointed to find Anaxagoras used it only to start the process and then explained everything mechanically.

The atomists. Leucippus and Democritus, late fifth century. Atoms, meaning uncuttables, infinite in number, differing only in shape, arrangement and position, moving eternally in the void. Void is what is not, which Parmenides forbade, and admitting it is the price of the theory.

Everything else follows mechanically. There are innumerable worlds forming and dissolving. The qualities we perceive, sweetness, colour, heat, exist by convention; in reality there are only atoms and void. Democritus also wrote on ethics, and a large number of moral sayings attributed to him survive, recommending cheerfulness and moderation.

Xenophanes and the sophists. Xenophanes attacked Homer and Hesiod for giving the gods theft and adultery, observed that each people makes gods in its own image, and proposed one god unlike mortals in body or thought, who moves everything by the thought of his mind. He also inferred from fossils of sea creatures inland that land had once been sea.

The sophists close most collections. Protagoras: man is the measure of all things, and concerning the gods he could not say whether they exist. Gorgias: nothing exists; if it did it could not be known; if known it could not be communicated. Antiphon and others on the distinction between nature and convention, which became the century’s central political question.

How to read it

Read a selection with commentary rather than a bare text. Barnes’ Penguin is the best single volume for a first reading. Kirk, Raven and Schofield gives the Greek with translation and scholarly discussion. Robin Waterfield’s Oxford collection is also good.

Read by thinker, not straight through. Each section is short. Read the fragments first without the testimonia, then the reports, then whatever the editor says, and notice how much of the standard picture comes from the reports rather than the words.

Heraclitus and Parmenides deserve most of your time. They are the two who are read as philosophers rather than as history, and between them they set the problem, flux against changelessness, that Plato inherited and that the atomists were trying to solve.

Read Parmenides’ argument as an argument and try to break it. The premise that you cannot think about what is not looks weak now, but stating clearly why it is weak took until Plato’s Sophist, and the attempt is instructive.

Be suspicious of Aristotle. He is the main source and he reports his predecessors as people groping toward his own four causes. Where you can compare his summary with a surviving fragment, do.

Accept how little there is. A reader used to complete works will find this frustrating. The compensation is that almost every sentence is doing something, because the only reason it survived is that someone thought it worth copying.

Questions it raises

• What made explanation by impersonal principles look better than explanation by gods, to people who had only ever had the gods?
• Anaximander’s earth stays put for lack of a reason to move. Is that a good argument or a lucky one?
• Can Parmenides’ deduction be refuted without simply refusing its premise?
• Democritus says colour and sweetness exist only by convention. Does modern physics say anything different?
• Heraclitus and Parmenides are read as opposites. Are they answering the same question?
• We have these thinkers only through people who disagreed with them. How much of what we call Presocratic philosophy is Aristotle’s arrangement of it?