What is really real?  According to Thales, it was Water.  According to Anaximander, it was the Boundless.  According to Anaximenes, it was Air.  There was a fourth early figure, Xenophanes, who may have held that what was really real was Earth.  (Aristotle, one of our main sources for reports of early thinkers, doesn’t think much of Xenophanes, so he tends to get left of the the story.  But he has a good claim to be a serious contributor to early thought.) 

So which stuff deserves to win the prize as the ultimate reality?  And what claim does each stuff have to be the ultimate reality anyway?  Here we have to go beyond the obvious.  At the most basic level, the each thinker seems to be identifying what the original stuff was.  Suppose there was only one stuff originally.  What was that stuff?  

Here there is a complication: maybe the original stuff was not a single entity, but a cosmic soup, a mixture of everything.  There are indications that this may be Anaximander’s view: the Boundless may not be a simple stuff, but rather a mixture of all stuffs before they separated into distinct materials such as water, air, and earth.  But they reports we get are less than clear about such things, and they are filtered through the thought of later thinkers, who have their own axes to grind. 

If we are going to explore how everything arose out of some simple stuff, then we want to find something that is ubiquitous, found (almost) everywhere.  And we want something that is changeable, so that it can turn into other things with relative ease.  We may also want something that can account not only for the physical characteristics of things, but that can account for their mental abilities.  Most of the early thinkers seem to have the idea that that ultimately real stuff not only turns into everything, but can organize itself.  It needs to be intelligent. It is something that can “steer all things,” bringing order out of disorder.  Air is closely associated with breath and with life; if an animal stops breathing, it soon dies.  Perhaps air is the source of intelligence and thought as well as being everywhere present and capable of changing into other things.  Water, too, is very changeable: it can exist as liquid water, solid ice, and water vapor.  Living things seem to emerge out of water.  

Thinking about how everything might come to be out of some one thing also suggests that all the stuffs, the basic materials of the world, are connected.  The thinker who seems to have grasped this point most clearly is Anaximenes.  Here is an early report of his thought:

Anaximenes … was an associate of Anaximander, who says, like him, that the underlying nature is single and boundless, but not indeterminate as [Anaximander] says, calling it Air.  It differs in essence in accordance with its rarity and density.  When it is thinned it becomes fire, while when it is condensed it becomes wind, then cloud, when still more condensed water, then earth, then stones.  Everything else comes from these.  And he too makes motion everlasting, as a result of which change occurs. (Simplicius Physics 24.26-25.1 = Theophrastus fr. 226A Fortenbaugh = A5) 

Air seems to be the original stuff.  But by being rarified, it turns into fire; by being condensed it becomes wind; when more condensed, cloud; when still more condensed, water; then earth; then stones.  And he seems to hold that the process works both ways: stones can become earth by being rarified, then water, and so on.

At this point it emerges that other alleged ultimate stuffs, such as water and earth, are part of this ongoing process that goes from more rare to more dense, and back again to more rare.  Thales’ Water and Xenophanes’ Earth are alleged waystations on the tour of different kinds of being. 

So, has Anaximenes won the debate by making every other alleged original stuff a stage in a cosmic cycle from rare to dense and vice versa?  But why did he not start with something that was an extreme, instead of a stuff in the middle of the series?  He may have preferred air because it was more adaptable and more connected with intelligence; but then, why not prefer fire for those same reasons? 

It is time to meet Heraclitus, who is famous both for the depth of his thought and for his paradoxical statements.  Writing at the end of the sixth century BCE, he seems, at first glance, to be a member of the same movement as his predecessors, the early Ionians.  He seems to hold that the basic stuff is fire.  One of his most famous statements is this:

This world-order (kosmos), the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures.  (fr. 30)

A few things stand out in this statement.  Heraclitus is the earliest author we know of to use the word kosmos (Latinized spelling: cosmos) to mean something like the world.  He is the first to identify the original stuff as Fire.  He is also the first to say that the world did not come-to-be and will not perish, but always exists.  But he also seems to hold that portions of the world are alternately coming-to-be fire and ceasing-to-be fire. 

So what’s the big deal?  In the first place, Heraclitus gives us a story that is not an origin story.  The world had no beginning; it will have no end.  It just is.  Secondly, he says something striking about the work of fire. 

The turnings of fire: first sea, and of sea, half is earth, half fireburst. (fr. 31a)

<Earth> is liquified as sea and measured into the same proportion it had before it became earth. (fr. 31b)

For souls it is death to become water, for water death to become earth, but from earth water is born, and from water soul.  (fr. 36, compare fr. 76)

Heraclitus recognizes three basic kinds of stuff: fire (soul is composed of fire), water, and earth.  These, we might notice, are a subset of the seven kinds of stuff Anaximenes recognizes.  What is crucial here is that we have three kinds of stuff, symbolically A, B, and C.  B comes from A, C comes from B, but the death of the former produces the birth of the latter; and C likewise turns back into B and B into A.  If so, A, B, and C are not identical, but different kinds of stuff.  According to fr. 31 there is a fixed proportion such that x amount of A is equivalent to y amount of B and z amount of C.  And according to fr. 36 the process is reversible.  Something like this may have been in Anaximenes’ mind, but he did not spell out the relationship clearly.  And crucially, he did not say the birth of one stuff is the death of its predecessor.  Though, in fact, he does seem to have implied that by saying that one thing comes-to-be (ginesthai) its successor. 

But Heraclitus goes one step further.  He tells us something surprising about the coming-to-be.

            Potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin

            hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei.

            On those stepping into rivers staying the same

            other and other waters flow.  (fr. 12)

This statement has often (indeed, almost always) been construed as saying that you can’t step twice into the same river.  But that is not what the passage says.  Heraclitus is a wizard with language and what he says, in the first place is that rivers stay the same while different waters flow in them.  Same rivers, different waters.  You can hear the bubbling of the water in the first line, with rhyming words, and feel the waters speed up and hurry off with the alliterations of the second line.  This is paradoxical (in the weak sense of ‘puzzling,’ not the strong sense of ‘contradictory’).  After all, if the waters were not constantly changing, there would be no river, but only a dry streambed or a stagnant pond. 

But there is another wordplay in the first line: the phrase toisin autoisin ‘the same’ can modify either the first word (potamoisi ‘rivers’) or the fourth word (embainousin ‘those stepping in’).  In other words, not only are the rivers represented as staying the same, but the people who ford them also stay the same.  (Notice that the English translation is syntactically ambiguous like the Greek.)  Again, this is paradoxical, but it makes sense: to ford the river (in a time, it might be recalled, in which there were few bridges in the Greek world), you have to assert yourself against the current of the river so as not to become mere flotsam. 

What is the point?  In a world of constant change, some things emerge as permanent.  A river itself is unity that supervenes on a process.  A human being is a unity that supervenes on a series of biological processes and asserts itself against a series of environmental resistances. 

Now, let’s go back to the cosmos.  It is made up of a process in which fire is turning into water, which is turning into earth, which is turning back into water, which is turning back into fire.  Yet is everlasting—presumably because the proportions of fire, water, and earth remain constant however much the specific portions of each are changing. 

And now go back to the arche, the original stuff.  If Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and perhaps Xenophanes all want to say their arche is what is really real, Heraclitus has a killer objection.  In your world, no one stuff remains constant: every stuff is changing into every other stuff and back again.  So what is really real?  Not water, not the Boundless, not air, not earth, not even fire.  What is real (if anything is) is the constant interchange of A, B, and C (or however many stuffs you recognize).  There is a Law of Conservation: xA ↔ yB ↔ zC that maintains the cosmos in perfect balance.  The components of the cosmos are changeable and constantly changing.  Even fire.  Indeed, fire is the perfect symbol of the inconstancy of matter.  It is a stuff that is a process.

What is real?  Not the changeable components.  They are ephemeral—even your alleged original stuff, whatever it is.  Only the all-encompassing process itself persists, survives, is real.  It is not, however, a random process, but an orderly, directed process that maintains overall balance.  Ours is a world of Becoming, a world in which Being emerges, arises, amazingly, out of Becoming.

The opening lines of Heraclitus’ book anticipated his message:

Of this Word’s being forever do men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it.  For although all things happen according to this Word, they are like the inexperienced experiencing words and deeds such as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its nature and show how it is. (fr. 1)

Heraclitus sees himself as the bearer of a great Word or Message (Logos) that he will patiently expound to us—or rather display for us to decipher—and we will misunderstand.  In his introduction he insults his readers—all too aptly, it turns out.  In fact, his message remained misunderstood until the twentieth century, while the great philosophers including Plato and Aristotle missed the point completely.  The world is a great conundrum that Heraclitus reveals to us in a series of puzzles to be solved rather than a series of doctrines to be memorized.

Heraclitus presents us with the first revolutionary philosophical insight.  If you think the world grows out of a primeval stuff, you will be forced to recognize that the stuff is part of cosmic cycle in which contrary features and forces unite in a balanced whole.