The question arises, why would two philosophers go to the island of Samos? Samos was the birthplace of Pythagoras about 570 BC. Yet Pythagoras was long gone by then, for he’d left to build his religious society in Croton (modern Crotone) in Italy. But there was yet one famous philosopher still on the island: Melissus.
Melissus was a follower of Parmenides. The philosophers after Parmenides seem to have focused on his empirical advances and to have viewed his chemical and cosmological theories as models to be improved upon. In his cosmological theory, Parmenides had posited two elements, Light and Night. From there, Anaxagoras went on to posit an unlimited number of stuffs as elements; Empedocles posited just four bodies: earth, water, air, and fire, the most common masses visible in the cosmos, as elements; Leucippus posited an infinite number of tiny solid particles in void space, thus inventing the atomic theory that was to prove itself as a scientific theory a millennium and a half later.[39]
Melissus, however, focused on the first half of Parmenides’ poem, which seemed to suggest that there was only one reality, what-is. Now “if there were many things,” Melissus says, “they would have to be just like I say the one is. For if there are earth, water, air, iron, gold, and fire; the living and the dead, black and white, and other things which men say are real — if then these things really exist, and we see and hear rightly, each thing must be such as it first seemed to us, and must not change or be different, but each thing must always be such as it is.”[40] Melissus goes through a list of allegedly real things, including the four elements of Empedocles, some of the elements of Anaxagoras, some realities recognized by Heraclitus (the living and the dead), and argues that if they are real they must be changeless. Yet we say that we observe them to change. So “these things are not consistent.”[41] Reason and logic tell us that we must reject the existence of plural kinds of material being and qualities. The only thing that exists is what-is itself, pure being. Since there is nothing else but being, that being must fill all of space and time as a changeless, perfect whole. Reason and logic refute experience, rendering vain all attempts to explain that experience.
Melissus reasserted Parmenides’ austere account of reality, stating the implications more starkly than had his master: that the objects and qualities we perceive do not exist, period. The cosmologies developed by philosophers are impossible. His own cosmology consists in just one, changeless being, which renders all other accounts false.
Archelaus and Socrates presumably traveled to see this disciple of Parmenides to confront his theory from the standpoint of a constructive cosmology. Archelaus believed in a plurality of real beings that interact to produce the cosmos we live in. Melissus believed in a changeless universe in which all distinctions were illusory. Cosmology met anti-cosmology. There are no records of the meeting. What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Archelaus appealed to experience. Melissus denied the testimony of experience as being inconsistent with reason. According to the latter’s view, moreover, Archelaus did not exist—nor did Melissus himself, for that matter. They were mere illusions. It is hard to argue with an apparition, especially if you yourself are also a mere apparition.
What Socrates learned from this meeting we do not know. But perhaps it’s significant that Socrates did not pursue the path of cosmological speculation. From all that we know of the mature Socrates, he had no interest in cosmology, astronomy, geology, oceanography, chemistry, meteorology, and all the physical theories that concerned the natural philosophers from Thales to Archelaus.[42] Perhaps he perceived cosmological speculation as leading to a kind of futile debate that no one could win, and whose results did not matter much anyway.
Socrates may have sailed away from Samos with a recognition that cosmological speculation was a dead end. Perhaps philosophy should focus on practical questions people could answer and on matters that could make their lives better. Perhaps Socrates could do for morality what Anaxagoras had tried to do for cosmology, and in the process make the world a better place.
[39].See Graham 1999.
[40].Melissus DK 30B8.2.
[41].Melissus B8.4.
[42].A few scholars have held that Socrates was originally a natural philosopher and turned to moral philosophy only after Chaerephon’s visit to the oracle at Delphi (see ch. 11*). Thus Chiapelli 1891; Ferguson 1964. But there are problems with this view, as we shall see.