From Myth to Reason 從神話到理性

🔊Philosophy, as the Greeks later told it, began about a century after Hesiod in Miletus, a wealthy trading city on the coast of Ionia, in what is now western Turkey. Miletus had ships in Egypt and colonies around the Black Sea, and it lived next door to the Lydian kingdom and within reach of Babylon. Its merchants met people with other gods and other stories, and saw that the stories did not agree. They also had access to Egyptian methods of measuring land and to centuries of Babylonian records of the stars. A city like this had leisure, money, and a reason to wonder which account of the world, if any, was true.

照希臘人後來的說法，哲學大約在赫西俄德之後一個世紀，開始於米利都：愛奧尼亞海岸（今天土耳其西部）一座富裕的貿易城市。米利都的船隊到過埃及，它在黑海周圍有殖民地；它緊鄰呂底亞王國，也能接觸到巴比倫。它的商人遇見信奉別的神、說著別的故事的人，並且看到這些故事彼此不一致。他們也接觸得到埃及丈量土地的方法，以及巴比倫幾百年來的星象紀錄。這樣一座城市有閒暇、有財富，也有理由去好奇：關於世界的哪一套說法是真的（如果有的話）。

🔊Thales of Miletus left no writings, and everything we know about him comes from authors who lived long after him. The most important is Aristotle, writing about two and a half centuries later. In W. D. Ross’s translation of the Metaphysics: “Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, says the principle is water (for which reason he declared that the earth rests on water).” Aristotle then guesses at his reasons, “getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist,” and that “the seeds of all things have a moist nature.” Notice the word “perhaps.” Even Aristotle was reconstructing. But the shape of the claim is clear. Behind the variety of things there is one basic stuff, and the world is explained by what that stuff does, not by what a god wants.

米利都的泰利斯沒有留下任何著作；我們所知道關於他的一切，都來自比他晚很久的作者。最重要的是亞里斯多德，他寫作的時間大約晚了兩個半世紀。W. D. Ross 所譯的《形上學》說：「泰利斯，這一類哲學的創始者，說本原是水（因此他宣稱大地浮在水上）。」亞里斯多德接著猜測他的理由：「或許是因為看到萬物的養分都是濕的」，以及「萬物的種子都有濕的性質」。注意那個「或許」。連亞里斯多德也是在重建。但這個主張的形狀是清楚的：在事物的多樣性背後，有一種基本的質料；世界是由這種質料做了什麼來解釋的，而不是由某位神想要什麼來解釋的。

🔊Three stories about Thales show how the Greeks remembered him. Herodotus reports that during a battle between the Lydians and the Medes “suddenly the day became night,” and that Thales “had foretold” this change. Modern astronomers date a solar eclipse visible there to 585 BCE, though historians doubt he could have predicted it so precisely. Aristotle tells that when people mocked Thales’ poverty as proof that philosophy is useless, he foresaw a large olive harvest and rented all the olive presses in advance, to show “that philosophers can easily be rich if they like, but that their ambition is of another sort.” And Plato tells the opposite story, of a “clever witty Thracian handmaid” who laughed when Thales “fell into a well as he was looking up at the stars.” The absent-minded professor and the shrewd investor are both born here.

三個關於泰利斯的故事，顯示希臘人怎麼記得他。希羅多德記載，在呂底亞人與米底人的一場戰役中，「白晝突然變成了黑夜」，而泰利斯「曾經預言過」這個變化。現代天文學家把一次在那裡看得到的日蝕，定在西元前 585 年；不過歷史學家懷疑他能預測得那麼精確。亞里斯多德說，當人們嘲笑泰利斯貧窮、說這證明哲學沒有用時，他預見了一次橄欖大豐收，事先租下了所有的榨油坊，以顯示「哲學家只要願意，很容易致富，但他們的志向是另一種」。柏拉圖則講了相反的故事：一位「聰明而機智的色雷斯女僕」，在泰利斯「仰望星星時掉進井裡」的時候笑了他。心不在焉的教授與精明的投資人，兩種形象都是從這裡誕生的。

🔊What made Miletus a beginning was not Thales alone but the people after him. Anaximander, said to be his student, rejected water. The basic stuff, he argued, could not be any one of the familiar elements, since each is the opposite of another and would have overwhelmed the rest. He called it the apeiron, the boundless. One sentence of his survives, in John Burnet’s translation: things pass away into that from which they arose, “as is ordained; for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the appointed time.” Anaximenes, the next generation, proposed air, which becomes fire when thinned and wind, cloud, water, and stone when condensed. Here, for the first time, a teacher’s view was openly corrected by his students, with reasons, and the correction was treated as progress.

使米利都成為一個開端的，不只是泰利斯一個人，而是他之後的那些人。據說是他學生的阿那克西曼德，否定了水。他論證說：基本的質料不可能是任何一種熟悉的元素，因為每一種元素都是另一種的對立面，會壓倒其餘的。他稱它為 apeiron，「無限定者」。他有一句話留存了下來，John Burnet 的英譯是：事物消逝，回到它們所由生起的那裡，「如同所命定的；因為它們依照指定的時間，為彼此的不義作出賠償與補償」。再下一代的阿那克西米尼提出了空氣：稀薄時變成火，凝聚時變成風、雲、水與石頭。在這裡，老師的觀點第一次被他的學生帶著理由公開地修正；而這種修正被當作進步。

🔊The poet-philosopher Xenophanes, from another Ionian city, turned the new habit of criticism on the gods themselves. In Burnet’s translation: “if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen.” “The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed,” he added, and the Thracians give theirs blue eyes and red hair. The old phrase for all this is “from myth to reason,” and it needs care. Thales himself is reported to have said that “all things are full of gods,” the Milesians borrowed from Babylonian and Egyptian learning, and myth went on living beside philosophy for a thousand years. What changed was not that people stopped believing in gods. It was that a new kind of explanation appeared, one that could be argued with.

另一座愛奧尼亞城市的詩人哲學家色諾芬尼，把這種新的批評習慣轉向了神本身。Burnet 的英譯是：「如果牛、馬或獅子有手，能用手作畫，能像人一樣創作藝術品，馬會把神畫成馬的樣子，牛會把神畫成牛的樣子。」他又說：「衣索比亞人把他們的神畫成黑皮膚、塌鼻子」，色雷斯人則給他們的神藍眼睛、紅頭髮。對這一切的老說法是「從神話到理性」；而這個說法需要小心。據說泰利斯自己就說過「萬物充滿了神」；米利都人向巴比倫與埃及的學問借了很多；神話也在哲學旁邊繼續活了一千年。改變的不是人們不再相信神，而是出現了一種新的解釋：一種可以跟它爭論的解釋。