Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your two complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

The Art of Living

How to Make the World Intelligible

Massimo Pigliucci on a couple of ancient ways of doing so.

Thales of Miletus, from seventh century BCE, is often referred to as the first philosopher. Very different tales about him have reached us. Plato, for instance, in his dialogue Theaetetus, tells of a servant girl laughing as Thales falls into a well while stargazing – the epitome of the absent minded philosopher. Aristotle, however, in the first book of his Politics, intriguingly tells us how Thales once forecasted a good olive harvest, then proceeded to buy up all the available olive presses, eventually making a killing by renting them out. This is philosophy’s practical aspect at work!

The joke and the counternarrative both tell us something about how the ancient Greeks thought that understanding the cosmos and living well are not rival activities but, in a sense, different aspects of the same project. Indeed, the revolution initiated by two groups of Presocratic philosophers, the Ionians (in a Greek colony in what’s now western Turkey, where Miletus was) and the Eleatics (based around Elea in Italy, south of modern Naples), gave us not just modern science but the very notion of a rational art of living.

First let’s see what inspired the two Presocratic schools that eventually resulted in science as we understand it. The Ionians, including Thales and his successors Anaximander and Anaximenes, were keen on seeking the arch ē, or fundamental principle of nature. Note however that this was a principle internal to nature, rather than a god behind it. This was a radical move: out went the Homeric gods and heroes, in came nature itself as the locus of explanation of the world. Thales thought everything was ultimately made of water, while Anaximenes regarded air as the basic principle. Anaximander suggested something more sophisticated: the apeiron (the unlimited, or undefined) – an abstraction beyond any observable stuff – as well as the concept that the earth rests unsupported in the cosmos and the guess that life began in water. What matters is not the answers being suggested, but the entirely novel questions being posed. The Ionians didn’t just replace one myth with another; they changed what counts as an answer in the first place. With them, the cosmos suddenly became explicable by its own principles.

The Eleatics, for their part, did something just as dramatic and momentous. Parmenides (late sixth century BCE) distinguished between ‘the way of truth’ and ‘the way of opinion’, thus beginning to separate scientific from personal understanding. From the simple principle that ‘what is, is’ he went on to deduce that being is ungenerated, indivisible, changeless, and one. If the senses report plurality and change in the world, so much the worse for the senses. His student, Zeno, became famous for articulating a number of logical paradoxes. Consider for instance the one referred to as ‘the dichotomy’: in order to cross any distance, you must first cover half of it, then half of that, and so ad infinitum – so motion requires completing an infinite number of tasks, making movement impossible. Thus Zeno found a way to prove through reason alone the completely counterintuitive doctrines advanced by his teacher. This was nothing less than the birth of the unsettling idea that reality might be counterintuitive – or, that logos (reason) can correct what the eye mistakenly reports.

The Ionians and the Eleatics should not be thought of as rival schools. Science needs both disciplined attention to the world and reasoning that transcends immediate appearance. Some of its greatest results in more recent times (such as atoms, heliocentrism, spacetime) are cases where reason overrides naive perception yet stays anchored to observation.

What does any of this have to do with living well? To see that, we need yet another Presocratic: Democritus (c. 460 - c. 370 BC) from Abdera, at the boundary between modern Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria. Democritus connected his understanding of science to his practice of ethics: he believed in material causality (everything is atoms falling in the void), and therefore emphasized that a wise person wouldn’t blame fate or gods for misfortune, but instead would learn how to live with the accidents of life. This led him to articulate the concept of euthymia, a stable condition of mind maintained through rational self-governance – in contrast to just being tossed about emotionally by external circumstances. Democritus taught that pursuing pleasures moderately, rather than either abstaining completely or indulging excessively, was essential for euthymia, arguing that chasing luxury and ambition typically leads to dissatisfaction. Interestingly, he strongly influenced two of the major Hellenistic schools of philosophy: the Stoics (who were also materialists) and the Epicureans (who were also atomists), both of which regarded moderation as essential to the good life. The Stoics further argued that we ought to live ‘according to nature’ – meaning, understand and respect both the nature of the cosmos at large and the nature of humanity in particular. There are certain things that are good or bad for human flourishing, just as there are things that are good or bad for our bodies. Ethics, then, becomes an empirical discipline. This is the forerunner of modern positive psychology and the scientific study of wellbeing.

The lesson is just as valid for us as it was for the ancient Greeks: living well demands understanding the world (science) and reasoning about it honestly (logic) – the double discipline introduced by the Ionians and the Eleatics, and still our best defense against superstition and self-deception. The art of living began the moment a handful of Greeks decided the world could be understood rather than merely feared.

Massimo Pigliucci’s books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic (Penguin). More by him at figsinwintertime.substack.com.