Western philosophy is traditionally held to have begun with Thales of Miletus, which was a city on the Ionian coast of what is today western Turkey. According to Aristotle, who is our main source for the little we know of Thales, he held that all things were basically water. Not exactly promising as the first philosophical utterance. But, as Aristotle points out in Metaphysics I.3, pregnant all the same, for Thales is at least trying to find a single principle behind the impossibly varied material of experience. Just why he settled on water is perplexing even to Aristotle, who speculates that it was perhaps because seed and nutriment in general, the two things that begin and maintain life, are moist.
Kirk and Raven point out that none of the ancient discussions of Thales’ views enables us to decide whether water is an immanent principle of things, that which they somehow really are, or merely their source and destiny in the sense that they come from water and resolve back into it, without being water themselves.[1] Aristotle himself, to be sure, holds the former; but Kirk and Raven point out (loc. cit.) that the few actual quotes we have from Thales do not say this—and Aristotle’s whole project here, as he makes abundantly clear, is to read his own doctrine of material causes into his predecessor.
Either way, most things don’t look or act like water, and we see that Thales agrees with his fellow Ionian Heracleitus that “nature loves to hide” (Diels-Kranz, “Heracleitus” B123): since nature is not obviously water or from water, nature’s true nature is hidden from us. Indeed, we do not even know the true nature of water itself, because we do not experience it as what it really is: the underlying principle of everything else. The true unity must be wrested from the manifold of experienced facts; the true nature of the nature of nature, we might say, is hidden in them.
Once, we saw, such wresting-of-unity was done by poetic similes. We don’t know how Thales does it, for Aristotle’s account by way of seeds and moisture is, we saw, speculative. At the very least, however, it requires, like similes, an act of what we would call the mind, which turns different things into one thing.
It wouldn’t take much to read Thales as formulating a simile: when Aristotle says Thales claimed the underlying nature of everything to be water, ὕδωρ εἴναι, all we have to do is prefix ὡς, “as:” then Thales is claiming that all things are as water, or like water, or watery. This reading has zero textual support and I am not advocating it; but thinking about it shows us some things about similes.
If he had included ὡς in his formulation, Thales would be presenting, not an identity but a resemblance. The aspect in which water and other things resemble each other would not lie in the things themselves, however, but in how we are to take them. Its justification would then be pragmatic: Thales would be suggesting that we would do well to treat all things as water, even though they do not seem to be water. The suggestion would not be a predication, which tell us how something is, but a case of what Heidegger, much later, will call “apophansis:” an utterance which bids us to treat something as something.
But what does it mean to “treat” something as something? Answering that would take us deep into the Teutonic thickets of Heidegger’s Being and Time (and eventually we may come to that); for the moment we can say, minimalistically, that we “treat” things when we try to do something with them. A treatment thus has a future, the goal we are seeking to realize with our doing, and a past, which produced the thing we are presently treating.
When we read Thales’ utterance, not as a simile but as a predication, pasts and futures drop away. What we want to do is irrelevant to the fact that Thales asserts, and what brought us to the assertion is as well. ”We” too, without past or future to define us, drop away. The utterance loses its pragmatic dimension and is viewed as something spoken and understood by people who are not “treating” anything, people who, as far as the utterance is concerned, do not act at all. An emphasis on predication is thus part of the appropriation of thought by what Aristotle calls the “leisured” class (Metaphysics 981b20-23).
Aristotle holds that philosophy resulted from that appropriation, and so was that way from the start; I will be claiming, off and on, that philosophy was almost never that way. Philosophy has, from the start, been a way of “treating” things, working them over, making them amenable to a certain set of projects.
The above tells us, I hope, some things about similes as a mode of thought. As a reading of Thales, it does have one thing to recommend it: Thales’ silence on the “location” of water with respect to other things. If things are not necessarily water, but are to be taken as water, we don’t need to worry about whether they really are water or merely come from it: our treatment of things should resemble our treatment of water, and that’s the end of it. Philosophy is not an absolutist set of identities, but traffics critically in the resemblances our language deems important enough to have names.
But Thales didn’t say this. Philosophy sets off on an anti-Homeric track very different from the pragmatic/apophantic one I have just indicated. Just who put it on that track remains a mystery: Thales or Aristotle’s account of him?
Or Plato?
[1] G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven The Presocratic Philosophers Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 pp. 89-90