Pre-Socratic philosophy and nous
Explanation
The pre-Socratic philosophers (7th-5th centuries BCE in ancient Greece) were the first Western thinkers to seek to explain the world without resorting exclusively to myth. Figures such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and especially Anaxagoras, established the foundations of rational thought. In their effort to explain the cosmos, the first concepts about mind, soul (psyche) and intellect (nous) appear.
Anaxagoras (c. 500-428 BCE) was particularly important for the concept of nous. To explain the appearance of cosmic order from a primordial mixture of all things, he posited the existence of nous: a cosmic mind, pure, that does not mix with anything, that puts order in the cosmos and organises it. "All things were together; then nous came and ordered them". This is one of the first philosophical proposals of a mental principle as the ordering cause of the universe.
Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 540-480 BCE), with his famous thesis of permanent flow ("you do not bathe twice in the same river"), articulated a vision of reality as a dynamic process governed by the logos: reason, measure, universal law. Human beings could partake of the logos through thought. His philosophy anticipates intuitions about the mind as the principle that grasps the changing order of the world, and has had enormous influence up to Hegel and beyond.
Parmenides (c. 515 BCE-), with his poem on nature, established a fundamental distinction between what is (being, eternal, single, immobile) and what appears to be (the world of the senses, multiple and changing). The path of truth requires pure thought, not deceiving senses. This distinction between intelligible reality and sensible appearance will shape Platonism and much of subsequent Western philosophy, with resonances up to Kant.
For the theory of consciousness, the pre-Socratics established foundational intuitions: that there is an intelligible order in the cosmos, that the human mind can grasp it, that thought is distinct from sensory perception, that there is a continuity between individual mind and cosmic mind (nous in Anaxagoras, logos in Heraclitus). These intuitions formed the ground in which Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and all Western philosophy of mind would germinate.
The fortune of the concept of nous was vast. Plato linked it with the contemplation of the Forms. Aristotle developed a theory of active and passive nous that was later central in Islamic philosophers (Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes) and in scholastics (Thomas Aquinas). In Christianity, it was sometimes identified with the divine Logos. In the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the secularised nous was transformed into modern reason. To study the pre-Socratics is to return to the conceptual roots of Western thought on mind and find, in seed form, many of the ideas that would later develop over two and a half thousand years.
Strengths
- Foundations of Western philosophy on consciousness.
- Integral cosmic vision, not individualist.
- Resonance with Eastern traditions and panpsychisms.
- Conceptual framework for intercultural dialogue.
Main critiques
- Fragmentariness of available texts.
- Mythical-cosmological framework hard to integrate with modern science.
- Speculative generalisations without empirical method.