What questions do you ask yourself?
Do you have any questions that you have tried to answer for most of your life?
I have always tried to find the answer to the question,“What is everything?”
It is hard to maintain focus on that question, though. It is easy to get diverted to other, smaller questions, such as, what is the nature of a rock? Or of a star? Or a starfish? These smaller questions often yield much more interesting, abundant, and more practical results. They are attractive. They so easily attract attention away from a larger, more frustrating question such as, “What is everything?” But that is the question I try to answer.
As I began taking philosophy classes in school, I stumbled onto the early Ionian philosophers – usually identified as “the Pre-Socratic” philosophers for their location on the timeline. I had to stumble onto them because beginning philosophy classes usually do not begin at the beginning of philosophy. They start elsewhere and find their ways around after entering somewhere in the middle. By the time I stumbled onto the Ionians, I had already read from and struggled with the works of many other philosophers before finding Thales’ (the first of the Ionians) single pronouncement: “All is water.”
All is water.
That sounds kooky, of course.
I had to read the commentaries for some insight into why he is considered to be an important figure. They credit Thales with giving the first, non-animated observation of how the world works. (An animated observation would give as an explanation for the sun’s rising and setting that someone drives a chariot carrying the sun across the sky every day. In Thales’ time, that was in fact the commonly accepted explanation for the daily movement of the sun across the sky.)
Thales proposed a single, non-animated principle that could explain all observable phenomena, that could account for all our experiences in the world: the three states of water. In our ordinary experience of water it is a liquid. When very cold it becomes a solid, when very hot, a gas. The three states of matter, summed up, illustrated, epitomized in: water. The one principle that explains (to some degree, anyway) everything. Everything Thales observed was either a solid, a liquid, or a gas. Therefore water was the key element that explained all else. Brilliant!
His explanation covers a great deal of our experience with the world. Matter generally does sort itself out into one of those three states. However, most of us do not feel satisfied with an explanation of everything that addresses only the three states of matter.
Ultimately, Thales failed. Over the centuries since his time we have been failing valiantly as well, looking to find the one explanation for all. That is the history of philosophy.
That is our history. We fail repeatedly, but never give up. This, then, is my effort at a valiant failure, my attempt to explain:
What is everything?
What is good?
And how should we live?
Dramatic sky image!
A deep red filter (25A) brings out the details in this mid-afternoon sky over Gulf Shores State Park, Alabama this past March, just before the world shut down. Probably my favorite deep red filter black and white sky picture I’ve ever taken!
Gulf Shores State Park is a very cool place. You should consider going there sometime. Off season (March is definitely off season) it is beautiful and not crowded. You do pay the price of it being chilly, maybe overcast (see photo above) and windy. I hear that during the normal vacation season it gets very crowded – not to mention hot. We would rather be alone on a cold, windy beach than in crowds on a hot day I guess.