The Presocratic Philosophers

"I think people interested in early Greek philosophy will want an erudite tome which is the result of proper scholarship but is not so dauntingly forbidding that you can’t get into it. My choice is Kirk, Raven, and Schofield’s The Presocratic Philosophers ; the second edition, published in 1983, in which Kirk and Raven’s original work was heavily revised by Malcolm Schofield. It doesn’t include the sophists, but we’ve got Kerferd for them. This is a wonderful book, and it’s got the fragments there in translation and also in the Greek which is really helpful: it gives you the tools to check what the various scholars say. And it includes a number of interesting interpretations. They do give their own views, but they’re fair: they also allude to opposing views. So, it’s a very open-minded and balanced book, and it gives somebody new to the subject a lot of materials to go further. Obviously scholarship continues to move on, so if you want a more up- to-date work, James Warren’s book on the Presocratics is also very good. For anyone approaching the Presocratics for the first time, then, I would say start with Barnes’s Early Greek Philosophy — and then go on to the Kirk, Raven, and Schofield for a more detailed discussion of the Presocratics and Kerferd for the sophists. To see how these thinkers inspired later philosophers, read Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, and then, when you’re really feeling up to it, tackle Burnyeat’s edition of the Theaetetus — particularly the opening and middle sections in which he discusses Heraclitus and Protagoras and the connections between them. So, in the order of difficulty and getting deeper into it, that’s how I would do it. People might also want to look at Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being in which one of the leitmotifs of the book is a bowler hat, and those who know the film or the book will know that it’s a rather erotically charged bowler hat and has a big role to play throughout the work. Kundera writes that the meanings of Tomáš’s and Tereza’s lives and relationship flow through the bowler hat as water flows through Heraclitus’s riverbed. Parmenides also figures in The Unbearable Lightness of Being . And modern physicists and mathematicians are still writing papers about Zeno! Their line is: ‘Ok, these paradoxes must be solvable. Of course there must be motion.’ But they’re still disagreeing about exactly how to solve the paradoxes. And we haven’t really talked enough about Parmenides. He wrestles with: What is being? What is not being? Does nothing exist? I would suggest that you approach Parmenides by thinking about the sentences ‘nothing exists’ and ‘nothing does not exist’. What do they mean for you? What happens if you put inverted commas around the word ‘nothing’ in each case? How does that change the meaning in the sentences? Can you think nothing, without inverted commas? He says you can’t think nothing. There will be something in your head, even if it’s only an image of blackness. Nothing comes from nothing — that’s where that famous line comes from and it ends up in The Sound of Music : “Nothing comes from nothing / Nothing ever could / So somewhere in my youth or childhood /I must have done something good”. ‘Nothing comes from nothing’ comes from Parmenides — I do hope Hammerstein knew that. So these are wonderful thinkers who sparked western philosophy into life and are still sparking it. They’ve also fed into maths, into physics, into literary works, and Hollywood. It’s extraordinary that people don’t study them more. I’ve taught them for nearly thirty years and in my experience, people in their late teens and early twenties (and older, of course) absolutely love the Presocratics. They just seem so modern, so fresh, so radical, so willing to explode received wisdoms and to challenge authority figures. I always tell my students they don’t need to bother with taking a psychedelic drug ever again and risk burning their brains: you can have a psychedelic experience just studying the Presocratic philosophers without damaging your health. So take a copy of these in your pocket on a Friday or Saturday night when you go clubbing. You don’t need to bother with silly pills!"

"I started reading this book, which I have to admit is not at all easy and you have to go slowly, because one of its authors was my father-in-law John Raven, who sadly died before I could meet him but who I know loved this bay and often encouraged his children to come looking for marvels here. But as I slowly dug my way into the descriptions of the first Greek philosophers, making their obscure and opaque statements in the eastern Aegean 2,500 years ago, I came to see how Heraclitus could be imagined as the presiding genius of a tidal shore. You can’t step into the same river twice because a river flows. If it didn’t flow, it would not be a river. And for Heraclitus everything shares that condition. Everything flows. Nothing is constant. The identity of anything consists not of its static being but of its passage through the world and time. If the tidal realm is defined by flux, Heraclitus is here on the shore. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter More powerful than that, though, is Heraclitus’s conception of the identity of things consisting of the union of opposites. The road upwards is the same as the road downwards. You cannot conceive of a high tide unless you also conceive of a low tide. They are the same thing seen in different lights. And this relationship of opposites is tensed like the body and string of a bow, or the frame and strings of a lyre. Unless frame and string are pulled against each other, the bow or lyre would not be a bow or lyre. If the frame won that battle and the string broke, or the string won and the frame collapsed, the bow or lyre would no longer exist. Coherence is the tension of opposite forces in balance or as Heraclitus expressed it ‘Strife is justice’. If the strife does not persist, one element prevails and the result is tyranny. This is exactly what modern biology has discovered about the workings of ecological webs. Nature is not in balance but in tension. Competing forces interact to create a rich ecology. A rockpool is tense with that competitiveness, through which a flux of micro-catastrophes and micro-triumphs is constantly churning. Look at a rockpool and you are seeing Heraclitean theory in action."