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This essay is about a thousand years of Greco-Roman thought, roughly spanning a period starting in ca. 600 BC and ending around 400 CE. Antiquity’s spirit survived even in the Dark Ages, but only in regional pockets, outside which were bears and Huns, and people had miserable short lives. Were you transported through time and space to ancient Athens or Sparta, you would find those you met there as strange as if you were among aliens on a different planet. We like to smooth the edges of our collective past, using our imagination to envision bygone members of our kind and culture as having been more like us – which is a mistake; people then were not like us, and their world was not like ours at all. And it goes both ways: given a time machine, Socrates and those gathered around him would be just as puzzled by how we think and behave could they have looked into our species’ distant future. The buildings, figuratively speaking, of Western thought have been torn down many times since then, but the structure onto which they were constructed is still there, and that is part of the argument here. All that constitutes us as Westerners is built onto a system of old foundations that are resilient to change. This is an essay, and even were it posing as a scholarly article, it would still be personal; the personal would just be concealed behind jargon. Knowing the structure of your thoughts and excavating what makes you specific and why unfolds to you a map you would not have without the exercise. If you know why you think what you think, you are like a London Black Cab driver: advantaged over the common pedestrian by having memorised 25,000 streets and 320 routes: the Knowledge. Seneca advised, as consolation and as a method of training yourself to brace for impact, i.e., death, that we ought to see our personal past, and he meant by that past the span of each one’s life lived until the present moment, as being already in Death’s hands. Does this deceased past hurt or worry us? The concluding answer we are to draw from this mind game is 'no, obviously not' or not a lot. Shouldn't the present and future accordingly then lose some of their sting? After all, the present and future will slip away, bit by bit, to where, and into what, the past has already disappeared; if we imagine death to be a transition to a place and time to be a substance, leaving one vessel to be funnelled into some other. This is also a long letter. A letter, in its face-to-face privacy, sometimes gives to both the writer and the one written to a kind of added intimacy built into the dialogue as such – sometimes. If truth is revealed at all, and if there is any such thing, it gets revealed in this way. How nice and honest in its quest, the tone of Cicero’s letters and in those of others back then, nice in an exotic way. Tune in to an elusive frequency, and then you hit the right wavelength, and the onrushing storm sound, as you turn the knob of an old radio, is gone, and you have clarity. So it was with bygone letter-writing at its best. This is also written in the spirit of Seneca: you don’t regurgitate the thoughts of others; you formulate your own. And yet: how are you to go about doing this without knowing what others have thought before you? The quintessential requirement for being free, therefore, is an education thorough and tailored in such a way that, once ingested, you may, by its instalment, move on to self-education, and from that point on, be an autodidact. Be the Guardian type Plato envisioned in his Politeia; Guardians are essentially sceptics; they know traditions, recommend them to others, but do not hold any ideas themselves, least of all those they recommend, detaching themselves by withholding opinion. This is the spirit of scepticism, of the enigmatic Pyrrho of Elis. It comes at a cost because beliefs secure you, but staying in the game by not subscribing to any promises is good solo. Let’s begin! The primary source for all there is, according to Thales, who was a young man in his mid-twenties in 600 BC, is water. This is what you are taught to connect with that name: the theory that the origin of all is water, if getting told that happens at all. Some teachers have a set of acting routines to make you believe they “know” things; one trick is saying a name and adding a detail (Thales, water). Others are paid for their lectures and will therefore tread no path they fear will endanger their income. Learning is mostly karaoke, or seeing pupils as chicks getting half-digested worms puked into their beaks by a parent or parent surrogate adult bird. The water statement makes Thales, if you like the interpretation, the father of modern science. His role is that of a first mover, setting into motion an idea that, by its momentum, generates another, as in dominoes. Turn-taking commences, and a game of assert, prove, test, contradict, and amend is instantiated by that procedure, which then spins out into the present in a grand way. In order to get to water as a root cause, you need to treat the world as an equation that has to be broken down to a shared oneness – you simplify, step back, and take an abstract view. This all seems trivial, but if it’s so trivial, why did the thought take so long to arrive? The long stretches of time under the thumb of belief in supernatural causation which never end when a Thales type comes along. The implication is: if it hadn’t been for Thales, we’d still in the North of Europe be chipping flint. Stepping back itself, abstract thought itself, as a mental act, as a consciously applicable ability, this is the claim: it hinges on one single mind that put it out there into the world as an option. We would otherwise today harbour different thoughts and not have penicillin. Then there are the anecdotes: the one about Thales falling into a well is one, and of him betting on the olive market to corner it, is another. Many of us come across these stories at school, if at all, never to hear them again, and if we remember them, again: if at all, memory of this information comes prefabricated with a notion of how to interpret a biography in order to titillate the conceitedness instilled into us also of appearing learnt. You fall into a well because of your practical ineptitude; you engage in the trade market – is that inept? – in order to prove that, in the end, wealth means nothing to you. An indifference that makes so little sense in the era talked about here that we don’t need to debunk it in any detail. Mostly the task of what to make of this is like having a well-thumbed religious tract. The interpretive work has been done for you. If Thales falls into a well, it’s because he can afford to fall; if he likes to scoff at abundance and uses a successful investment just to prove his remoteness, he’s had the money all along. How is his buy and sell tactic going to work without it? Maybe, if some Thracian girl laughs at him, it’s a comment and her only recourse, while whatever is practical and menial is her job. Such are anecdotal accounts: Anything can be told in any way. Abstraction, which is what Thales does, holds the promise of insights one otherwise overlooks, and even if not, the perspective change has charm in and of itself. And, as an overlooked side effect, it changes involvement: the medium of emotion. It really does make a difference whether one sits on the stony steps in front of a house or whether one looks down onto the ground plan of the same edifice drawn out on paper. See not your home, but the shape of it; not the individual termite, but a hierarchy of insects within a mound against which larger animals scratch themselves; see the human structures we live in also as insect buildings to more easily leave them behind. [...]