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6 Between heavens and abysses

On a night when the face of the heavens seemed brighter than ever, an astronomer who ventured out to watch the stars each night ended up falling into a well. Such was the story as Aesop told it in one of his Fables (65). But there are also other versions of this anecdote. The most famous is that offered by Plato, who has Thales of Miletus instead of the astronomer.

The doxography has only scant knowledge of Thales. The founder of the Ionian school and a citizen of Miletus, ‘after politics’ – Diogenes Laërtius writes – he dedicated himself to the study of natural phenomena (I, 23-A1). He discovered new constellations, inspected the movements of the stars, calculated solstices and equinoxes; he must have been a talented geometrist, indeed, if he really managed to measure the height of a pyramid on the basis of the shadow it cast. He was perhaps the first to consider the soul immortal. Obscure – and controversial – is his connection with the hylozoistic doctrines that saw ‘life’, zoé, in all ‘matter’, húle. It seems that, when he observed a piece of amber or a magnet, Thales recognised a certain ‘soul’ even in what seemed to be inert. And he thus came to say that ‘everything is full of gods’ (B 22). His name is also attached to water qua first principle – indeed, he identified water as the source and the wellspring of all things.

But it was Plato who granted Thales everlasting fame thanks to the anecdote narrated in his Theaetetus. While Thales was ‘watching the stars’, astronomoûnta, and ‘looking up high’, áno bléponta, he ‘fell in a well’, phréar. Plato says nothing about the context for this incident. It is not known whether it happened in the middle of the countryside, if this learned man had ventured there, heedless, in order to contemplate these astral bodies in their regular orbits, or if it instead took place next to some orchard, already almost at the edges of the city, or even in some run-down street of Miletus itself. What is certain is that if Thales had stayed at home and studied the sky from his window, he would have avoided this pratfall. The origin of this inauspicious event lay in the fact that he left his home, went out – the horizontal movement punished, so to speak, by a vertical plunge. This punishment would stand as a warning for future philosophers who too unscrupulously dare to venture into a kinetics of external latitude. For there are wells, precipices and ravines lying in ambush.

The story has other surprises in store. The spotlight is snatched from the wise man by a woman, no less – chronologically, she appears as the second protagonist but she is, perhaps, the decisive one. She is the legendary ‘Thracian slave girl’, the spectator to this tragicomic tumble. Could anyone not share in her mirth? Even Plato seems to do so, as he comes close to taking sides with this ‘neat, witty’ young woman. Indeed, he writes that she makes fun of Thales, telling him that ‘he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet’.¹

This clashes somewhat with the version provided by Diogenes Laërtius. He tells the story after underlining an ugly, distasteful aspect of Thales, who – according to this malign tradition – was thankful for his lot in life on three counts: ‘to be a man and not a beast, male and not female, Greek and not barbarian’ (I, 34-A1). If this is what he thought of women, then it must be admitted that fate gave him his just deserts. As Thales groans in a ditch, he is reproached by ‘an old woman’ who had accompanied him; her words are similar to the young slave girl’s, just the other way around: ‘Do you, O Thales, who cannot see what is under your feet, think you shall understand what is in heaven?’ From this version more clearly emerges the intention and resolution to observe – it is said that Thales went ‘out of the house to study the stars’. Was it perhaps because of this eagerness, itself almost fussy and methodical, that he ended up falling? Or was it all unforeseeable? It is, after all, possible that as Thales went along his way he was suddenly enraptured by the beauty and the perfection of the cosmos at night, and thereby plunged into the hole. In short, it is uncertain if the object of scorn, here, is Thales’ obstinate focus on his research – so absolute that it leads him to neglect the immediacy of what he has right in front of him – or precisely his capacity for wonderment, that enviable passion, so intense that it drags him along even at the risk to his own safety.

Hans Blumenberg reconstructed the immense success of this anecdote; it was destined to become the scene of the very dawn of philosophy, given the influence it had over its history.² Indeed, it was in many ways prophetic. The conflict between the philosopher and the city is prefigured within the latent tension. The mocking reproach, of which the ‘slave girl’ here becomes the spokeswoman, is the same one which common sense would incessantly level against the philosopher: that he claims to know that which is distant, but is unable to acknowledge that which is close at hand; that he looks up high and ends up plunging down into a pit. What use are stars if you do not even know how to walk down on earth? How can such an unbalanced and foolish type – anything but a sage or a wise man – have anything to teach to others?

Seized by wonderment, the philosopher sees what the others do not see and – vice versa – does not see what everyone sees. This striking distraction from the common sense would come at a hefty price; for the prosaic laugh would give way to much more hostile and violent forms. In a tragicomedy which passed also through farcical settings, dark, baleful, cruel tones came to prevail, leading up to the final drama. Scorn, ridicule and sarcasm would harshen to become accusation, reproach, condemnation. If the philosopher – that strange type who goes around watching the stars and falling into wells – had once already taken deserved punishment for his irritating lack of good sense, in the future the city itself would take care of punishing him. There are different ways of losing your head – by wonderment or on the scaffold.

The dynamic of conflict sharpened when the philosopher left the countryside, orchards and alleyways behind and arrived in the main square. Not least since his intention was not just to teach knowledge, but rather to show others that they simply did not know. The comedy before the well transformed into the tragedy before the tribunal, the half-innocent spectator into an assembly of legal hangmen, the unfortunate incident into execution for a capital crime. In brief: Plato turned the innocuous Aesopian fable into the pre-history of the drama lived by Socrates, by projecting the tension that cut through Athens onto this Ionian landscape. Already in this auroral scene, one can sense the effects that theory provokes.

Fascinated by the sublime aspect of the cosmos, Thales did not stumble. He could have put a foot wrong or tripped on a stone. But more simply, he plunged, fell down, to the bottom. The ground was no longer there for him and he experienced the void that opened up instead. This was a sort of contrapasso – but not so much for he who neglected the ground because he was watching the sky, as for those who imagine that thinking is just calm, peaceful contemplation, as persistent and regular as the orbiting of the stars, and presumed their own sovereignty over it.

But it is thought that comes and goes, through leaps and intuitions, that strikes like an unexpected idea, and likewise rapidly dissipates. In his account, Plato uses the verb lantháno to say that Thales did not realise, almost forgot, what he had under his feet. Thought is that which comes out of oblivion, that which endures. The reference is to the abyssal depth which only the philosopher hazards to survey, even if only fleetingly, for a second. Even if that means risking his own life. Perhaps for this reason, the concave space – the mirror of the convex face of the stars – would, in later versions of the anecdote, become a hole or a ditch, in order to avoid jeopardising the philosopher’s very survival.

But it is impossible to identify all the countless meanings that skies and abysses would take on across philosophy’s centuries-long history. We need only mention Kant’s frozen ‘starry firmament’ covering the ‘moral law’, Heidegger’s troubling Abgrund, the abyssal depths upon which existence stands. Surprising though it may seem, philosophers would feel more protected in this kinetics of verticality, up high or down low, according to an admirably variegated symbology. But a horizontal kinetics would prove much more adventurous and full of the unforeseen.

The gaze toward the sky betrays an aspiration which must have been widespread right from the outset: that of divining the future. Thales, too, was tempted by this, though at least it can be said that he was an expert in astronomy. According to the doxography, he managed to predict the solar eclipse in 585 BC (A 17). An indirect confirmation comes from another famous tale, this time narrated by Aristotle, in his Politics. Again, the theme is disdain toward theory, but this time it is vaunted not by a single Thracian slave girl but by the entire community of Miletus. For the first time, an explicit accusation was pronounced – one destined to have a far-reaching and protracted success.

Aristotle writes that ‘since he was so poor’, dià tèn penían, his fellow citizens damned Thales for the ‘uselessness of philosophy’, hos anopheloûs tès philosophías. But then, thanks to his astronomical calculations, he managed to foresee an abundant olive harvest; having a small amount of money available, he bought up the olive presses of not just Miletus but also Chios, even in the heart of winter when there was no demand. The ‘time’, the kairós, of the harvest arrived. Everyone was urgently looking for olive presses. Thales rented them out at a hefty price and earned a lot of money. So, the happenings in the sky served to orient him down on earth.

Such was the riposte from the philosopher who temporarily donned the vest of the wheeler-dealer, who abandoned his reflection and speculation to try his hand as … a speculator. And he succeeded, because he saw earlier and further than others. But his ambition was not monetary gain. Aristotle comments that Thales ‘prov[ed] that it is easy for philosophers to be rich if they choose, but this is not what they care about’.³ So here, after the surprise of the well, came Thales’ redemption. Able to predict even what was supposedly unpredictable – phenomena both celestial and earthly, the eclipse of the sun and the olive harvest – he temporarily entered into the logic of the economy using his calculations, only to prove that this is not the logic proper to philosophy. This did not mean that the tension with his fellow citizens went away – indeed, it could only become sharper, if their values were so opposed. Even if philosophy really was ‘useless’, it was proving to be a subversive threat to the city.

Notes

1 1. Theaetetus, 174a, trans. Harold Fowler.

2 2. Hans Blumenberg, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman, London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

3 3. Politics, 1259a 5–8, trans. H. Rackham.