Philosophy’s foundational emotion, φιλία (philia), meant for the Greeks an intimate engagement with things—one that reveals their deepest root, their inner meaning and constitution.
That disposition introduced a mode of knowledge that, in its full reality, reaches the ultimate nature of things.
The Greeks called it σοφία (sophía, “wisdom”).
Though the Greeks always believed that sophía was ultimately attained in solitude, they never conceived it as an individual achievement. Rather, it was something cosmic and metahistorical.
Sophía is solitarily found, yet it is something encountered, not possessed.
This is why the Greeks never claimed σοφία as a personal attribute. They ascribed it to the gods—either directly or through the lineage of their ancestors. At its highest level, σοφία is not merely knowledge but science in the most demanding sense. In Metaphysics, Aristotle defines it as a threefold unity:
A science that considers Being as such.
A divine science — both the science that God possesses and the science that has God as its object.
Wisdom, then, is both contemplative and demonstrative: the profound connection between philia and sophía—which comes together in the act of philo-sophizing—is made possible through the faculty of noûs (νοῦς, “intellect” or “mind”).
Through noûs, we become most akin to the divine. This marvelous faculty makes human beings the most similar to the gods, allowing for a true friendship (philía) between them and us. That’s how philia with the gods provides a divine wisdom.
Partaking in it, the philosopher attains a fundamental mode of human fulfillment—what the Greeks called eudaimonía (εὐδαιμονία), literally “having a good daimōn,” good spirits that bring the flourishing of life at its highest level. We’d call it happiness.
Of the enjoyment (hēdonē) that comes from the spectacle of reality,
none can partake more fully than the philosopher.
Plato, Republic 582 c 5
The Greeks always felt that this mode of sophía was something radically new. It was not acquired by the force of tradition nor imposed by law or custom. It was discovered through direct engagement with things themselves. Its divine nature was not dictated from above but inscribed within the personal reality of every human being.
This awareness of sophía as a radical novelty set it apart from the common praise that linked wisdom to the exaltation of force (rhymē). Against that view, Xenophanes of Colophon boldly proclaimed the superiority of this new sophía over public opinion, social triumph, and the power of command:
“Even if a man were victorious… (here, Xenophanes lists all the great social achievements of his time) …even then, despite all his honors, he would not be as noble and worthy as I. For greater than the strength of men and horses is, above all, our wisdom. For it is an indecent custom, and an injustice, to prefer force over true wisdom. […] Not for this would the city be better governed”.
— Xenophanes, Fragment DK 21 B 2
Born from the deepest and most silent solitude—these men neither founded schools nor enjoyed great renown in their lifetime—sophía would, in many ways, unveil the secret of things and change the very face of the universe.
According to Cicero, when someone asked Pythagoras why he called himself a philosopher, he replied:
“Human life resembles the festival of the Olympic Games: some train their bodies, striving for glory and the distinction of a crown; others are drawn by the profit of buying and selling; while others attend simply to watch, carefully observing what is done and how. Likewise, we, as if arriving from another city, come into this life from another existence and nature: some to serve glory, others to pursue wealth. But a few, disregarding all else, devote themselves to the careful examination of the nature of things—these are called lovers of wisdom, philosophers.”
By identifying water as the absolute essence of all things, Thales of Miletus inaugurated philosophical thought, paving the way for its conceptual dimension by abstracting nature into a simple, tangible substance.
Various Presocratics posited one element or another as the foundation of the Whole, but the real novelty lay in introducing the very notion of “origin” or “principle” (ἀρχή, arché). Anaximander then stripped it of particularities, postulating to ápeiron (ἄπειρον) as infinite matter—“the indeterminate”, with the privative α- opposed to péras, “limit”.
The principle (arché) of all things is the indefinite (ápeiron).
And it is from where things take their origin that they also pass away, according to necessity;
for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice,
according to the ordering of time.
Anaximander, in Simplicius, Physics 24.13
This metaphysical intuition would mature into the concept of Being, which Parmenides coined by establishing an unlimited One, identifying it with thought itself, and excluding Non-Being from the path of truth (alétheia).
Being touches being,
The same remains in the same,
Resting within itself,
And thus it endures,
Unchanging in the same place,
For mighty Necessity
Holds it in the bonds of the limit
That encloses its form.
Pure incompleteness is not permitted,
For lacking something,
It would lack everything.
Parmenides, On Nature (Peri Physeos)
This absolute and fixed conception of Being obstructed the understanding of movement, until Heraclitus recognized the contradiction between Being and Non-Being as the motor of perpetual change.
What is opposed brings together;
from what differs comes the most beautiful harmony,
and all things happen through discord (πόλεμος, pólemos).
Heraclitus, Fragment 8 (DK 22B8)
By positing reason (λόγος, logos) as the unity of opposites and Becoming as the ceaseless resolution of their dialectical tension, the universe came to be understood as a process in which everything flows—“It rests by changing” (DK 84a).
As nothing stays still, one cannot step into the same waters twice. Yet, the fact that the river remains one and the same suggests that behind every thing there is an immanent end, so that Becoming is restless but not arbitrary.
Anaxagoras culminated Presocatic reflection by recognizing intelligence (noûs) as this self-constituting foundation that animates and defines the cosmos, allowing reason to encounter itself. Socrates would then internalize this set of principles and begin to spread them by challenging the understanding of whoever he encountered—thus completing the scope of philosophy by bringing ethics into its domain.
All other things partake in a portion of everything, while Noûs is infinite and self-ruled,
and is mixed with nothing, but is alone itself by itself.
For it is the thinnest of all things and the purest,
and it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest strength;
and Noûs has power over all things, both greater and smaller, that have life.
Anaxagoras, Fragment 12
Presocratics’ common object of study was φύσις (physis): nature conceived as a self-constituting work of art. To the Greeks, ‘divine’ meant something immortal and inexhaustible, something that had a life of its own. Yet, what interests these philosophers is not the divinity of nature but what is natural in the divine. Thus, Jupiter is divine, but so is φύσις (physis).
The arrogance of reducing the gods' powers to mere physics pointed to the dangers inherent in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, “for speculation of this kind began with a view to recreation and pastime, at a time when practically all the necessities of life were already supplied” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 982b). This renders the φιλόσοφος (philósophos) incorruptible, unyielding to bribery:
“Clearly then it is for no extrinsic advantage that we seek this knowledge; for just as we call a man independent who exists for himself and not for another, so we call this the only independent science, since it alone exists for itself.
For this reason, it would not be unreasonable to think that possessing the science of first principles is beyond human reach, for in many ways human nature is servile. As Simonides says—'Only a god can have this privilege'—it would not be fitting for man to seek knowledge that is not proper to him. If the poet is right, and envy is part of the divine nature, then under such circumstances, divine envy would surely be aroused, and all those who excelled in this knowledge would be unfortunate.
But it is impossible that divinity should be envious; rather, as the proverb says, poets lie much. And one must not think that there exists any science more noble than this. It is the most divine and the most noble, and the only one that is so in two ways: it would be divine both in the sense of being possessed by the gods in the highest degree and in the sense of dealing with divine matters. And only this science fulfills both conditions. Indeed, divinity appears to be one of the causes of all things and a first principle, and such a science may belong to the gods either exclusively or to the highest degree.
Thus, while all sciences are more necessary than this one, none is superior”.
The lines between philosophy, science, religion, and art had yet to be drawn, and Greece—encountering prosperity after staking its precarious wager on self-government—experienced a vertigo that tempered the expansion of free thought.
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake subverted authority itself, and civil powers did more than merely raise an eyebrow.
Fran Santiago
