QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

The idea of a single fundamental substance behind all being was conceived by Thales. He
postulated water as the unchanging foundation, with all perceivable creatures in the world being
formed as variations. This apparently simple explanation could not have been proposed if Thales
had not realised that a rational answer based on material causes could be given to the question
concerning the nature of Being. A similar search to find natural and basic invariances and
fundamentals has directed the whole scientific thinking of later times. 31 Anaximenes proposed
air as the primary substance. In depicting its alteration into other physical states (so-called
‘aggregate’ states), he introduced quite clearly the idea of an original cause or principle that
preserves its own essence while undergoing manifold alteration. The same idea appears in the
conservation laws of modern physics. 32
Anaximander portrays the primary substance as the unlimitable and undifferentiable apeiron.
According to him, the fundamental substance could not be any concretely-perceivable matter,
because in the creative processes of reality, all separated elements come into being as opposite
pairs out of one undifferentiable primary substance. 33 The same theme was already handled by
Hesoidos around 700 B.C. In his epic moral poems, he pictured the apeiron as a chaos or a void
that contains all opposite qualities: out of this apeiron worlds rose and into it they subsequently
collapsed. One can find connections between this idea and the modern concept of vacuum, a
state which is energy-rich and out of which particle-antiparticle pairs arise together.
Although the Ionians searched for a natural cause to explain the world, they did not abandon the
words of the gods. When Thales said that “everything is water and that the world is full of gods,”
he obviously distinguished gods from the primitive matter that made up the world. Thales’
followers replaced his transcendental god with an immanent god embodied in the world. The
primary substance was, at one and the same time, matter as well as living and divine. As well as
being capable of achieving the motion and changes it desired, it created in itself all the
differentiations which can be observed in the world. 34
The Ionian way of understanding reality was apparently influenced by the language employed. In
fact, language has been viewed as having determined both the way of asking questions and the
31 Stenius 1953, 20.
32 Tarnas 1998, 471-472.
33 Collingwood 1969, 34. Stenius 1953, 24.
34 Stenius 1953, 34. Collingwood 1969, 40. Tarnas 1998, 19.
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