Today I really enjoyed our discussion. All evening I keep going back to the question, are we more likely to respect something if it is part of our daily life, or if it's a rare commodity? We were talking about where ethics fit in to Thales' idea that everything is made of water. If people were made of water, how would that impact the way we treat them?
Someone supposed that because water is so essential to our everyday lives, we may have more respect for other people, if Thales' assertion was true. I was perplexed though, because those in Miletus probably have become very used to the sight of water. They are not in a drought; they are not praying for water to come save them. They see snow, they are surrounded by sea-- water is everywhere and is not all that special. So maybe if we saw it all the time, we wouldn't be too impressed by the fact that we were all made of water, and wouldn't treat each other any better. Maybe we would treat each other even worse because we think of water as a something that we have in excess. We could be wasteful of it. If we lived in an area where we were in drought, and people were made of water, I think it would be a much different story. Life would be much more precious or "special." Just like the desensitization we are experiencing here to gun violence. The first mass shooting was tragic, and had the country in shock for months. The shootings are now happening on fairly regular basis, and unless you are near by, you tend to continue along with your day normally-- as opposed to dropping everything and bursting into tears. If you lived in a very peaceful nation in Europe with very low gun violence rates, you would be horrified and extremely saddened at a mass shooting in your nation-- it would completely disrupt your daily life, at least for a while. I'm not saying that they are not tragedies every time they happen here, but at this point they happen so frequently that they are no longer shocking. We almost expect them-- which is horrible but true. When you see something over and over again, the shock and awe of it dulls each time. If Thales' assertion was true and everything really was made of water-- ethics would drastically differ based on climate more than any other factor. In the desert, life and creation would be much more precious than in an area with heavy rainfall & plentiful water sources. That is fascinating to me. This first reading is considered the Introduction and is the first reading of this course. I'll try to summarize and respond to what I think Thales was saying. He claims that the world we live in is ultimately derived from water. This makes sense to me because water can take on different identities; steam, liquid and solid.
In Thales' words, "As the water solidifies, things acquire firmness, as it melts their individual existence in threatened." In mythology, there are also instances where cosmology is described by water forms, and when you mix those ancient suppositions about the universe with certain phenomena in science and nature, this conclusion seems pretty reasonable to me. He also claims that the world we live in is resting or floating on a body of water. This belief was also commonly held in mythology and throughout history, so I don't know if we can claim that this is Thales' original thought. I don't know if he was just on the bandwagon or if he really was the originator of this idea in his time or if he derived it from others. Thales also made a few other claims about the spirituality of the world. He believed that all things in this world were filled with gods, and that motion was produced by souls. These two beliefs seem to be extremly intertwined to me. I think by saying things were filled with gods, he is trying to say that all things have souls. And, if movement was produced by souls, the growth and motion of nature would make complete sense. Everything in nature is in a contant state of flux-- nothing every remains the same. Before we had physics to explain atoms and forces, we explained this by "wants" in inanimate objects. Why does the apple fall to the ground? Because it wants to go there. Why does your skin heat when near a fire? Because a fire wants to give you heat. Giving objects souls as an attempt to understand the movements of the world was pretty common and Thales was definitely a believer of this. I would love to know the extent of his study of mythology. It seems a lot of these theories could have been thought up while sitting in the forest, but I'd love to know whether a lot of his thoughts came from those studies in mythology or from observation of nature or from discussions with other scholars. |
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