Presocratic Quotes

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.

The man who has never desired or experienced anything base and bad is not a man of restraint, because he has never had to master anything to compose himself.

[O]ther thinkers have philosophised since the time of Plato, but that does not destroy the interest and beauty of his philosophy

THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM [all snap flags] Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.

The most accurate criterion by which to judge if a man has good sense is to see whether he resists his heart’s immediate impulses towards pleasure and has proved capable of self-control and self-mastery. But the man who tends to gratify his heart’s impulses is the man who tends towards the worse, not the better, course of action.

Although it is uncomfortable to admit it, and many scientists especially try to brush it under the carpet, each of us is a bundle of rational and irrational impulses, and the attempt to divorce the two is doomed to failure...In this sense the Presocratic combination of vision and logic is a precise model for two strands of future development in human intellectual endeavor, which should not perhaps have been allowed to separate from each other as far as they sometimes have. Or rather, the attempt to separate them is ultimately unreal, a violation which leads to abominations such as the rape of the planet and the dehumanizing loss of imagination...As Homer well knew, the gods in some disguise or other never die.

Pre-Socratic philosophy begins ... with the discovery of Nature; Socratic philosophy begins with the discovery of man's soul."3

Under the comb the tangle and the straight path are the same.

How come you write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Don replied, “Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does.” Asked another, smiling but serious, “How can we become better writers than we are?” “Well," DB advised, “for starters, read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help.” “But Coach Barth has already advised us to read all of literature, from Gilgamesh up through last semester...” “That, too,” Donald affirmed, and twinkled that shrewd Amish-farmer-from-West-11th-Street twinkle of his. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.

The living, though they yearn for consummation of their fate, need rest, and in their turn leave children to fulfil their doom.

It is a mistake to suppose that he rejected poetry for aesthetic reasons. What is overlooked in all of this is that Plato came between an older tradition of philosophy and Christianity. He saw the danger of violence much more clearly because of his proximity to the pre-Socratics. The understanding of the danger is essential, vital in Plato.

To fight with desire is hard: whatever it wishes it buys at the price of a soul.

Nobility passes through by blood, not by law

DICK: I think philosophically I fit in with some of the very late pre-Socratic people around the time of Zeno and Diogenes—the Cynics, in the Greek sense. I am inevitably persuaded by every argument that is brought to bear.

The pre-Socratic aphorism—ethos is the daemon—can be translated as “character is fate.” In drama, character is action. Shakespeare, too capacious for any formula, leads me to a rival aphorism: Pathos also is the daemon, which could be rendered as “personality is our destiny.” In Shakespearean theatricalism, personality is suffering. Action, Wordsworth wrote, is momentary, while suffering is permanent, obscure, dark, and shares the nature of infinity.

Pre-Socratic philosophy begins … with the discovery of Nature; Socratic philosophy begins with the discovery of man’s soul.”3

Gustavo Solivellas dice: "El hombre es la medida de todas las cosas" (Protágoras)

The pre-Socratics frequently wrote their treatises in verse; the ancient Peruvian language had a single word-hamavec-for poet and inventor.

They were aware that the symbols of mythology and the the symbols of mathematical science were different aspects of the same, indivisible Reality. They did not live in a 'divided house of faith and reason'; the two were interlocking, like ground-plan and elevation on an architect's drawing. It is a state of mind very difficult for twentieth-century man to imagine- or even to believe that it could ever have existed. It may help to remember though, that some of the greatest pre-Socratic sages formulated their philosophies in verse; the unitary source of inspiration of prophet, poet, and philosopher was still taken for granted.

The great scientists from Thales to Democritus and Anaxagoras have usually been described in history or philosophy books as “Presocratics,” as if their main function was to hold the philosophical fort until the advent of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and perhaps influence them a little. Instead, the old Ionians represent a different and largely contradictory tradition, one in much better accord with modern science. That their influence was felt powerfully for only two or three centuries is an irreparable loss for all those human beings who

The great scientists from Thales to Democritus and Anaxagoras have usually been described in history or philosophy books as “Presocratics,” as if their main function was to hold the philosophical fort until the advent of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and perhaps influence them a little. Instead, the old Ionians represent a different and largely contradictory tradition, one in much better accord with modern science. That their influence was felt powerfully for only two or three centuries is an irreparable loss for all those human beings who lived between the Ionian Awakening and the Italian Renaissance.

The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level — call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material.

[A] people needs to understand what freedom is. We Americans are fortunate that the Founders and their generation possessed that understanding. They knew that freedom, per se, is not enough. They knew that freedom must be limited to be preserved. This paradox is difficult for many students to grasp. Young people generally think freedom means authority figures leaving them alone so they can "do their own thing." That's part of what it means to be free, but true freedom involves much, much more. As understood by our Founders and by the best minds of the young republic, true freedom is always conditioned by morality. John Adams wrote, "I would define liberty as a power to do as we would be done by." In other words, freedom is not the power to do what one can, but what one ought. Duty always accompanies liberty. Tocqueville similarly observed, "No free communities ever existed without morals." The best minds concur: there must be borders: freedom must be limited to be preserved. What kinds of limits are we talking about? * The moral limits of right and wrong, which we did not invent but owe largely to our Judeo-Christian heritage. * Intellectual limits imposed by sound reasoning. Again, we did not invent these but are in debt largely to Greco-Roman civilization, from the pre-Socratic philosophers forward. * Political limits such as the rule of law, inalienable rights, and representative institutions, which we inherited primarily from the British. * Legal limits of the natural and common law, which we also owe to our Western heritage. * Certain social limits, which are extremely important to the survival of freedom. These are the habits of our hearts--good manners, kindness, decency, and willingness to put others first, among other things--which are learned in our homes and places of worship, at school and in team sports, and in other social settings. All these limits complement each other and make a good society possible. But they cannot be taken for granted. It takes intellectual and moral leadership to make the case that such limits are important. Our Founders did that. To an exceptional degree, their words tutored succeeding generations in the ways of liberty. It is to America's everlasting credit that our Founders got freedom right.

the Alexandrian Library was a tragedy of some moment, for it was believed to contain the complete published works of Æschylus, Sophocles, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, and a hundred others, who have come down to us in mangled form; full texts of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who survive only in snatches; and thousands of volumes of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman history, science, literature, and philosophy.

Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise,

Look at a strung bow lying on the ground or leaning against a wall. No movement is visible. To the eyes, it appears a static object, completely at rest. But in fact, a continuous tug-of-war is going on within it, as will become evident if the string is not strong enough, or is allowed to perish. The bow will immediately take advantage, snap it and leap to straighten itself, thus showing that each had been putting forth effort all the time. The harmonia was a dynamic one of vigorous and contrary motions neutralized by equilibrium and so unapparent.

I looked up at the moon and meant to ask about my life. But her answer came far sooner than I was able to formulate the question. For twenty years you’ve lived a dead man’s life. Everyone knows. Even your wife and your children and your wife’s friend, and the couple you met at a conference on the Jewish expatriates from the Third Reich can read it on your face. Erica and Paul know it, and those scholars who study Greek fire and Greek triremes, even the Pre-Socratics themselves, dead two thousand years ago, can tell. The only one who doesn’t know is you. But now even you know. You’ve been disloyal. To what, to whom? To yourself. I

Parmenides was offering a rational deduction. He starts from a basic principle—that you can have “is,” but you can’t have “is not”—and then proceeds to explore the consequences, whatever they might be. Whatever we make of his argument, this is a real quantum leap in the history of philosophy. Parmenides is not just offering explanations of what he can see around him, though he goes on to do that in the way of opinion. Rather, he puts all his trust in reason itself, and trusts the power of argument more than he trusts the evidence of his own eyes and ears. This is not to say that Parmenides is the first Pre-Socratic to offer arguments. Already with Thales, I suggested that he may have had implicit arguments for his views on water and the claim that everything is full of gods. Nonetheless Parmenides does represent something new. He tries to settle an abstract philosophical issue—the nature of being itself—with an explicit and complex deductive argument.

The purely philosophical influences on Plato were also such as to pre-dispose him in favour of Sparta. These influences, speaking broadly, were: Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Socrates. From Pythagoras (whether by way of Socrates or not) Plato derived the Orphic elements in his philosophy: the religious trend, the belief in immortality, the other-worldliness, the priestly tone, and all that is involved in the simile of the cave; also his respect for mathematics, and his intimate intermingling of intellect and mysticism. From Parmenides he derived the belief that reality is eternal and timeless, and that, on logical grounds, all change must be illusory. From Heraclitus he derived the negative doctrine that there is nothing permanent in the sensible world. This, combined with the doctrine of Parmenides, led to the conclusion that knowledge is not to be derived from the senses, but is only to be achieved by the intellect. This, in turn, fitted in well with Pythagoreanism. From Socrates he probably learnt his preoccupation with ethical problems, and his tendency to seek teleological rather than mechanical explanations of the world. 'The Good' dominated his thought more than that of the pre-Socratics, and it is difficult not to attribute this fact to the influence of Socrates.

But Parmenides and Heraclitus do agree about one thing: everyone else apart from them is completely confused, unaware of the nature of reality. Pre-Socratics were rarely short on self-confidence.

In all its variations, universalistic ethics is therefore characterised by an effacement of the difference between Is and Ought (polemics against this difference between Is and Ought in recent years has not by chance become all the more fierce) as well as by the detachment from empirical anthropology and history. Compared with the classical ethical tradition - from the pre-Socratics up to the Enlightenment via Plato, Aristotle and Christianity - a loss in the content of reality and the sense of reality is to be noted in so far as that tradition started from the fact and from the necessity of the unremitting struggle of Reason against the escalating yearning of ineradicable drives and passions, and directly or indirectly placed this struggle at the center of its considerations.

The first three “pre-Socratic” philosophers were Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes.

The word translated “word” in almost all English versions of John 1 is the Greek logos, a term with a rich and diverse philosophical heritage. The term is common to a number of pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. For Heraclitus (535–475 BC), whose thought only remains known to us in small fragments and is therefore very difficult to reconstruct, it appears that the logos is a principle of transformation that orders the cosmos. Its symbol is ever-changing fire, flickering and consuming ever more material, although, in so far as it never does anything other than change, it remains constant. The term also appears in the fragments that remain from the writing of Parmenides (sixth-fifth century BC), who uses it to mean something like thinking, in opposition to habit and sense experience. Whatever the differences between these uses of the term and its other occurrences in ancient Greek thought, one feature marks each of them as distinct from the Johannine account: in every case but John’s, the logos is impersonal. To

In its stable state air is invisible, but when it is moved and condensed it becomes first wind and then cloud and then water, and finally water condensed becomes mud and stone. Rarefied air became fire, thus completing the gamut of the elements. In this way rarefaction and condensation can conjure everything out of the underlying air. In support of this claim Anaximenes appealed to experience, and indeed to experiment — an experiment that the reader can easily carry out for herself. Blow on your hand, First with the lips pursed, and then from an open mouth: the First time the air will feel cold, and the second time hot. This, argued Anaximenes, shows the connection between density and temperature.

The pre-Socratic Xenophanes famously commented, “Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians gods with gray eyes and red hair,” and remarked, “But if oxen (and horses) and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies [of their gods] in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.

A youth of such promise, especially if his body be on a par with his mind, will be at once foremost among all his fellows. His relatives and fellow-citizens, eager to make use of him for their own purposes, and anxious to appropriate to themselves his growing force, will besiege him betimes with solicitations and flatteries. Under these influences, if we assume him to be rich, well born, and in a powerful city, he will naturally become intoxicated with unlimited hopes and ambition; fancying himself competent to manage the affairs of all governments, and giving himself the empty airs of a lofty potentate. If there be any one to give him a quiet hint that he has not yet acquired intelligence, nor can acquire it without labour — he will turn a deaf ear. But suppose that such advice should by chance prevail, in one out of many cases, so that the youth alters his tendencies and devotes himself to philosophy — what will be the conduct of those who see, that they will thereby be deprived of his usefulness and party-service, towards their own views? They will leave no means untried to prevent him from following the advice, and even to ruin the adviser, by private conspiracy and judicial prosecution.

Since Pulchrum is the opposite of Turpe, they must be two, and each of them must be One: the same about Just and Unjust, Good and Evil; each of these is a distinct Form or Idea, existing as One and Unchangeable by itself,

You may recall the day we were over at Special Collections Library at Cal State Fullerton, and I revealed my mystic vision which came over me around March of this year, in which I saw the world—make that universe—entirely differently. Finally, in doing my homework on this, I found someone who had that worldview before me, and oddly it is a Greek philosopher who someone who flew here from France to interview me mentioned, around April. I had never read anything about Empedocles before. This French guy, who was doing his doctoral thesis on UBIK, wondered if my reading of Empedocles had influenced me, or had any other pre-Socratic Greek. I had to admit no. Evidently this French dude had correctly seen that UBIK expressed the worldview of Empedocles and to a lesser extent other Ionian Greeks or the Eleatic School. It was all meaningless to me, what he was saying, back then; how strange that my vision of the universe would conform in strict and exact detail to that of specific early Greek philosophers, views (as Lem pointed out in his article) long ago discarded. Also, from what I read about Empedocles, he had certain what we'd have to call religious or mystical experiences which he discussed only with his friends; from the evidence I'm convinced these experiences resemble mine—were in fact identical. Empedocles was smart enough not to talk about them openly, and I'm trying to do the same. Whatever hit me in March hit him back in 400 or so B.C. Reading about his interpretation of them I can much better understand them for my own purposes. Also, I might add, Empedocles was certain that some day, through transmigration, he would return.

Ancient philosophy is traditionally held to begin in the sixth century BC, in the Greek cities of coastal Asia Minor. A large number of philosophers are generally grouped as ‘Presocratics’; their activities cover the sixth and fifth centuries. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes are early cosmologists, giving ambitious accounts of the world as a whole. Pythagoras began a tradition emphasizing mysticism and authority. Heraclitus produced notoriously obscure aphorisms. Xenophanes begins a long concern with knowledge and its grounds.

Some of these people are not strictly Presocratics, since their lives overlapped with that of Socrates, but Socrates is generally held to mark a turning-point in ancient philosophy. He wrote nothing, but greatly influenced a number of followers, including Aristippus, a founder of hedonism, the idea that our aim should be pleasure, and Antisthenes, a founder of Cynicism, the idea that our needs should be as minimal as possible. Socrates’ emphasis on questioning and argument made him the key symbolic figure of the Philosopher to the ancient world.

Meantime, it is relevant to note that Cicero, the encyclopedic synthesizer of the Roman world, when surveying the Greek world, reproves Socrates for having been the first to make a split between mind and heart. The pre-Socratics were still mainly in a non-literate culture. Socrates stood on the border between that oral world and the visual and literate culture.

All things are full of gods.

Suzuki also liked to compare Zen to Western philosophy, to Zen's advantage: "The philosopher according to whom cogito ergo sum is generally weak-minded. The Zen master has nothing to do with such quibbles" (Suzuki 1970, 408). We may also question the accuracy of his understanding of Western philosophy. If Meister Eckhart, despite (or because of) his undeniable spirituality, cannot be said to represent the entire Christian tradition, neither can the intellectualist strain emphasized by Suzuki be said to represent the entire Western philosophical tradition. From the pre-Socratics, Socrates and the Stoics, all the way to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophy was a path of self-transformation, not merely the intellectual pastime that Suzuki describes.

That passage makes, clearly and for the first time, the crucial distinction between rejecting an argument for a conclusion and rejecting the conclusion itself. The art of criticism cannot thrive unless that distinction is grasped. (pp51)

analogies may be scientifically important; they may serve, psychologically, to illuminate a dry exposition or to dispel a puzzlement; and they may be useful, methodologically, in suggesting a synthesis or provoking a generalization. But they have no inferential status: argument 'from analogy' is one of the numerous species of bad argument. (pp 56)

The past of authentic history indeed was, but it is by no means over and done with. It is not done with because it is not done with us. And because we are the historical beings that we are, we are not done with it.

A far more practical approach to the pursuit of meaning is to focus on the cultivation of our character. “What does your conscience say? ‘You shall become the person you are’” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science). Or as the Presocratic Heraclitus put it: “Character is fate” (Heraclitus). If we focus on becoming a more integrated and complete individual we greatly increase our chance of finding meaning for two main reasons. Firstly, this approach is an antidote to the stagnation and passivity which guarantees a meaningless existence. And secondly, by striving to cultivate our strengths we will likely discover the ‘why’ or purpose to our existence which is key to a subjectively meaningful life. To assist on this path we need to discuss the role that goals play in this process.

Questing for knowledge is valuable for its own sake. “Knowledge is the food of the soul” (Protagoras), Plato has Socrates say. When asked whether it is better to be born or not to be born, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras replied that being born is better because it grants one the opportunity to “study the heavens and the whole universe.” (Anaxagoras) But devoting our life to a quest for knowledge, while valuable for its own sake, is made more valuable by the secondary benefits it confers, one of which is that it helps us escape mediocrity and to become a better human being.

Going back to the pre-Socratics (and still much alive in the dialogues of Plato), there has been an ongoing debate among the lovers of wisdom as to whether wisdom is best transmitted in the form of mythos, stories and poems, or in the form of logos, explanations and reason.

We might be tempted to think that knowledge of unchanging classes or kinds or species could simply take the place of knowledge of the unchanging causes. But this would be to ignore the manifest dependence of classes of beings on the existence of those (individual) beings. Xenophon’s Socrates never speaks of separately existing “ideas”: the classes or kinds are not separate from their members; the characters are always characters of the things possessing them. It is true that the characters are causes of those things, setting limits to them. They share this responsibility, however, with something other than them, something for which they are not responsible and whose existence and nature are guaranteed neither by them nor by anything else we know of. (Socrates may point to this shared responsibility when he calls attention to the dissimilar behavior of things possessing the same perceptible character.) As a result, we cannot know, though we may suspect, that some classes are permanent. The deepest implication of Socrates’ criticism of his philosophic predecessors becomes clear only when we consider more precisely what it was the pre-Socratics were trying to do. They had attempted to discover not merely the state of the cosmos but “the necessities” by which each of the heavenly things comes into being or “the way the god contrives each of the heavenly things” understood as the way he must contrive them. Needless to say, they understood the reign of necessity to extend to earthly matters as well. Human prudence and folly, as well as chance, derive from the fundamental necessity and are limited by it. Their most basic contention, the inspiration of the doctrines by which they sought to elaborate and vindicate that contention, was that not just anything can come into being or come to pass but only what accords with or is permitted by the nature of the fundamental cause or causes. But if the fundamental causes are undiscoverable, must one not regard this contention as merely plausible? Yet could Socrates, either as a philosopher or as a human being, leave it an open question whether “just anything” can come to pass?

Laks, A., and C. Louguet, eds. 2002. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie présocratique? / What Is Presocratic Philosophy? Lille: Presses Universitaires de Septentrion.

Within the lifetime of the classical Athenian democracy, however, it came to acquire a second meaning, referring to someone whose beliefs or practices suggest a lack of commitment to belief in the gods. “I certainly do believe in gods—I am not an out-and-out atheos,” said Socrates at his trial in 399 BC (according to Plato). From the 430s onward we hear of atheos being used as a surname or nickname attached to various individuals. The pre-Socratic Hippo of Samos, active in Athens in the mid-430s, was said to be “surnamed the atheos”; so were Diagoras of Melos (mid-420s onward) and Theodorus of Cyrene (late fourth century). In other words, if you said “Hippo the atheist,” everyone knew who you meant.3