presocratic monism · presocratic fragments
Presocratic philosophy occupies a distinctive and contested position within the depth-psychology corpus. Scholars engage the Presocratics not as antiquarian curiosity but as the foundational stratum of Western psychological and cosmological thought — the moment when Greek thinkers first articulated systematic accounts of soul, cosmos, and their interpenetration. Sullivan’s meticulous philological survey traces how figures from Anaximander to Democritus developed concepts of psyche, noos, and justice that anticipate, and in several cases directly enable, later Platonic and Aristotelian formulations. Seaford advances a more provocative materialist thesis: that Presocratic monism — the drive to reduce cosmic multiplicity to a single abstract principle — is structurally homologous with, and likely historically conditioned by, the advent of coinage and monetary abstraction in archaic Greece. Claus probes the doxographical record for the earliest semantic uses of psyche among the Milesians, Heracliteans, and atomists, insisting that material soul-doctrines are indispensable antecedents to the Socratic revolution. Aristotle’s De Anima provides the canonical critical framework against which all Presocratic psychology is measured, while Havelock situates Presocratic syntax and abstraction within the broader transition from oral to literate cognition. The central tension across these voices is whether Presocratic thought is best understood as protoscientific cosmology, as theological displacement, or as unconscious projection of emerging social institutions onto the structure of nature.
there is indeed, if our argument is correct, an explanation of the sixth-century adoption of monism – in the monetisation that Stokes fails to see at the heart of the economic change
Seaford argues that the Presocratic adoption of material monism is causally explained by archaic monetisation, not by abstract philosophical deduction or mere cosmological observation.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004thesis
The presocratics, then, tend to project the mind onto the macrocosm, and it seems that Philolaus projects (mental) limiting of the unlimited
Seaford identifies a structural pattern in Presocratic thought whereby mental operations — limiting, unifying, measuring — are projected cosmologically, with money providing the unconscious template.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004thesis
Parmenides, like the presocratics generally, is concerned with ontology: uppermost in his sublimation of money is its being rather than its value.
Seaford contends that Parmenidean ontology represents a sublimation of monetary abstraction, where the impersonal unity of exchange-value is transposed into the metaphysical unity of Being.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004thesis
it can be suggested that Parmenides’ being is a notion invented with a view to overcoming the difficulty faced by material monism: Being is the unifi
Seaford argues that Parmenidean abstract monism arose as a logical solution to the contradictions inherent in earlier Milesian material monism, itself shaped by monetary abstraction.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004thesis
The Presocratics are more concerned about the role of human beings in the cosmos and the nature of that cosmos than about their role in society.
Sullivan distinguishes Presocratic philosophy from later Socratic ethics by its emphasis on cosmological rather than social questions, marking a transitional phase in Greek psychological thought.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis
As in other Presocratics, we encounter here a microcosm/macrocosm view of the universe. The microcosm acts as a pattern for a principle assumed to be operative as well in the macrocosm.
Sullivan identifies the microcosm/macrocosm homology as a defining structural feature of Presocratic thought, with justice operating simultaneously in human society and in cosmic order.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis
Heraclitus assumes that justice is ever operative, keeping the components of the universe perfectly poised. Parmenides rejects the notion of justice as a balance of opposites.
Sullivan maps the divergent positions on cosmic justice among the Presocratics, showing how each thinker’s cosmology entails a distinct theory of psychic and natural order.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
by using prose, they may have wished to show how and to what degree human beings could come to understand that very divinity by using innate instead of inspired abilities.
Sullivan interprets the Presocratics’ choice of prose as a deliberate epistemological statement, privileging rational human cognition over inspired poetic authority.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
as the soul, consisting of air, governs and controls men, so pneuma and air surround the cosmos.
Claus examines the earliest Presocratic use of psyche in Anaximenes, where the soul’s governance of the individual body is structurally mirrored in air’s governance of the cosmos.
, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato, 1981supporting
the most glaring case of unwarranted assimilation is the treatment of the great atomist thinker Democritus of Abdera, who is effectively classed by Aristotle as holding the view that the soul is made of fire.
Aristotle’s critical engagement with Presocratic soul-theories is shown to involve systematic misassimilation, indicating the difficulty of recovering authentic Presocratic psychology from later doxographical tradition.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting
in the whole of surviving presocratic philosophy the idea of a cosmological or physical law (i.e. something similar to our scientific law) does not to my knowledge occur.
Seaford distinguishes Presocratic cosmological regularity from scientific law, arguing that the ordering principle in Presocratic thought operates more like internalised convention than explicit legislation.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
the doxographical materials collected in the A fragments are all but useless for semantic purposes; for the most part they are concerned only with the material composition of soul and with general theories of cognition and animation.
Claus raises a methodological warning about doxographical sources for Presocratic psychology, arguing that they obscure semantic nuance in favour of material and causal generalisations.
, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato, 1981supporting
The universe (‘all things’) is guided by a divine principle called the ‘Infinite’ (Apeiron). The universe is made up of opposites in conflict. These opposites are regulated by Justice that imposes balance between each opposing pair.
Sullivan’s reference appendix provides a concise doctrinal summary of the Milesian Presocratics, foregrounding the Apeiron and cosmic justice as central organising concepts.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
for Empedocles the occult self that survives physical death, acquires knowledge through metempsychosis, and eventually seeks to withdraw from the cycle of birth and death is not the psyche common to all men but something described by paraphrase or as a theos or daimon.
Claus argues that the eschatological self in Empedocles is not coextensive with psyche as ordinarily conceived, complicating any straightforward alignment of Presocratic cosmology with soul-doctrine.
, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato, 1981supporting
money provides a central object of thought and action, a single-mindedness… money reduces the need for reciprocal personal relations and so tends to delimit the individual unitary mind from all else
Seaford develops the structural parallel between money, mind, and cosmos that underlies his broader argument about the monetary preconditions of Presocratic monism.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
Xenoph. B 23, 24, 26; Heracl. B 10, 30, 32, 41, 50, 57, 89; Parm. B 2, 4, 8 passim… the language used by his colleagues is equally committed to an assertion of identity, continuity and unity.
Havelock identifies a pervasive Presocratic linguistic commitment to identity and unity across the fragmentary texts, connecting this to the broader transition from Homeric to abstract philosophical discourse.
, Preface to Plato, 1963supporting
Xenophanes… unum esse omnia neque id esse mutabile, et id esse deum… Parmenides ignem qui moveat terram… Heraclitus ignem; Melissus hoc quod esset infinitum et immutabile
Cicero’s doxographical survey catalogues the competing Presocratic first-principle doctrines, providing the classical Latin transmission through which these positions entered later philosophical and theological tradition.
, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45supporting
G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge, Eng., 1957)
Vernant’s bibliographic citation of Kirk and Raven signals the standard scholarly infrastructure underpinning all serious engagement with Presocratic texts within the depth-psychology corpus.
, The Origins of Greek Thought, 1982aside
The Pythagoreans also maintained the idea of palingenesia, reincarnation. Pythagoras himself was supposed to have remembered many of his reincarnations.
Edinger translates Pythagorean metempsychosis into a depth-psychological idiom, reading reincarnation as symbolic experience of the collective unconscious rather than literal doctrine.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy aside
for the Presocratics, see Jaeger (1947). The word first occurs in Plat. Resp. 379 a; but ‘speaking about gods’ already in Xenophanes B 34, Empedocles B 131
Burkert locates the Presocratics within a history of Greek philosophical theology, noting their role in developing a critical discourse about divinity that anticipates Platonic theologia.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977aside