In 2011, Lady Gaga made her entrance onto the red carpet of the Grammys…in a giant egg. The egg was carried by various shirtless models on a palanquin. She stayed in the egg up until her performance of her new single, “Born this Way,” off her upcoming eponymous album, which was the first chart-topping pop song to include the word “transgender.”

As a kid, I loved “Born this Way,” but, as I entered college, I became skeptical of the usefulness of its message (not just the song but the slogan more broadly). I’m not the only one. In fact, trans people in particular are vulnerable to targeted hate through language of birth, and “born this way” has since become associated (with good reason!) with gender essentialism and the assimilationist goals of the liberal gay rights movement as opposed to more revolutionary projects of gender and sexual liberation. Such movements have turned to more performative or even material and practical explanations of gender and sexual embodiment.

But let’s put a pin in that. This is a post about my orals readings, after all. This week, I read Presocratic philosophers: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, and the Stoics.

Thales of the Milesian school of Ionia is sometimes considered the “first philosopher.” That’s not just a title gifted by us in the modern. Those just a couple generations later celebrated him and his successors as committing a movement from muthos to logos—that is, from primitive, mythological, and anthropomorphic explanations of the universe to logical, comprehensive, and abstract theories. 

Thales speculated that the earth, a flat disk that floats upon water “and rides like a ship” (Seneca), was birthed out of primeval waters.Thales was specifically known for looking to the sky: he is most famous for having apparently predicted the solar eclipse of 585 B.C. and for measuring the coordinates of Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper, for naval navigation.  He apparently also argued that the soul “was something kinetic” (Aristotle) and could be found even in “inanimate objects” (Diogenes). The editors of The Presocratic Philosophers interpret such accounts as implying that “the world as a whole manifests a power of change and motion which is certainly not even predominantly human,” which, because of its permanence and immanence, is to “be regarded divine” (Kirk et.al. 97).

These three simply assertions—one, that the earth can be described in a cosmological model; two, that elements of the world can be measured in accordance with an understanding of that model; and three, that traditionally anthropomorphized divine explanations of life may be reformulated as abstract elements of a material theory—are what allow historians of philosophy from Aristotle to Kirk to ascribe Thales the title of the “first philosopher” who “abandoned mythic formulations” (99).

What were these mythic formulations? Well, once you read them, the division drawn at Thales starts to seem a bit arbitrary. If one were to logically invert the assertions of the previous paragraph, one may indirectly define the mythic explanations of the cosmos as: one, the earth is described outside of a consistent model of the universe; two, that empirical measurement will not reflect the nature of the cosmos; and three, the forces that created and constitute the world are reflected in the human form. Yet all these traits can, to some extent, continue to be found in Presocratic and even Post-Socratic Greek philosophy. 

Take, for instance, Ricardo Salles’ assertion in God and Cosmos in Stoicism that Stoics conceived of god as “corporeal” and therein espoused a “mixed” theology requiring some extent of anthropomorphized divinity so long as “personhood does not necessarily require a human shape” (Salles 19). 

Similarly, take Xenophanes himself, whose “dynamic cosmos” is acted upon by a God who “completely without toil…shakes all things by the thought of his mind” (Mourelatos 156). According to Mourelatos, one of Xenophanes’ key contributions to philosophy is the formulation “X is really Y” (or, in other word, he was the first “well actually”-type replyguy). Even his grounded anti-theological project, one in which he explicitly refutes the anthropomorphic image of a god, could not fully escape the pull of the personifying metaphor.

Instead of going through the other very fascinating Presocratics (I’m forever happier knowing that Anaximander argued that the earth is a cylinder…how delightful!), I’m going to follow my thoughts on the personifying metaphor. Particularly, I’m curious about the ways the shape of the universe, its origin, and its continued vital state are conceptualized. In doing so, I challenge the division between myth and philosophy insofar that both rely to some extent on anthropomorphism. Whether they do so in a literal sense (God has a human form, the earth is a tree with roots) or a strictly metaphorical one (God exists in physical things like the soul exists in the body, the earth stretches down a Y-axis like roots of a tree) is a tension I will hold for now. 

Particularly, I’m interested in the metaphors of the origin of the universe. How is the universe born?

Let’s see what some philosophers have to say.

• Thales: from primeval waters (water is the originary material substance, after all!)
• Anaximander: from “apeiron” or the indefinite (he’s unusual because he then formulates the cosmos as made of fiery rings moving like chariot wheels around the—again, cylindrical—earth); Aetius and Censorius, though, ascribe to Anaximander the belief that living creatures arose from moisture or “slime,” either “enclosed in thorny barks” (Aetius) or growing inside ancestors of fish (Censorius).
• Anaximenes: from primal air or vapor (he’s most like the Stoics and Epicurus in his association with this primal substance and the four elements; he sees the gods as originating out of the primal substance; he is also like the Stoics in analogizing primal air to the soul)
• Xenophanes: from the intermixture of earth and water (all cosmic phenomena are what Mourelatos translates as “incandescent clouds” at various levels of ratification, while the earth extends below indefinitely; near the plane separating the heaven and earth one finds liquid water. note that this is, ironically, quite similar to the Xaos of mythological cosmic explanations, which Kirk et.al. interpret as the “gap between heaven and the sky” (46).)
• Stoics: very broadly, from the two corporeal physical principles of god and matter (in which god is active and matter is passive or acted upon, in a cycle destruction and regeneration, and with benevolent teleological ends)

How is the universe born? The question is itself a bit of a trick. We moderns, when reading these ancient ideas, must detach ourselves from the notion that “origin” is necessarily tied to the temporal. Anaximander seemed to believe time was important for understanding the development of the cosmos; the Stoics, on the other hand, as argued in Chapter 3 of God and Cosmos in Stoicism, understood causality as simultaneous “production by a body A of a certain effect on body B” (Salles 8). For Anaximenes, interpreting his cosmology hinges on whether one reads “from” as a generative (originated out of) or constitutive (is made of) principle. A similar issue appears in Xenophanes, whose “effulgent” heavenly bodies are interpreted by Mourelatos as similar to “coals in a brazier” (146), embers that never fully extinguish rather than being re-ignited every morning from an external source. Overall, the universe being “born,” at least in philosophy, is not always clearly its creation ex nihilo.

How is the universe born in myth? Well, here’s where it gets interesting! 

The cult of Orphics believed in several versions of a multilayered genealogy borrowing heavily from Egyptian, Semitic, and other Near Eastern myths. Here are two versions of that genealogy:

Chronos → Aither / Chaos → egg (sometimes “wind-egg”), shining tunic, or cloud → Phanes → Night → Gaia and Ouranos

matter → water / earth / Chronos / a winged, multiheaded, bisexual snake → Aither / Chaos / Erebos → egg → incorporeal god

And here’s a quote from an Orphic poem by a Derveni commentator: 

Ouranos son of Euphronē [Night], who reigned first
after him Kronos next, and then counsellor Zeus…
Zeus, having heard oracles from his father
swallowed down the phallus [of him] who first leapt up to the upper air
of the phallus of the first-born king; and from him [it?] grew all the immortal blessed gods and goddesses, and rivers and lovely springs and everything else that was then in being…
(Kirk et.al. 31, 30.1-7).

Okay, we’ve finally gotten back to some trans stuff. 

First, let’s note the presumptive editorial intervention in correcting “him” to “[it?]” when discussing the birth of the gods from Zeus, attempting to ascribe that birth instead to the disembodied phallus now inside him. Who is to say that it, now swallowed, is discernible from him, the god Zeus? A kind reading may simply ascribe such a note to the possibility of the phallus as a centrally generative mechanism, while a more paranoid reading may conclude the editors are uncomfortable with the implication of Zeus’ mpregnancy. He did just perform the erotic act of swallowing the penis of the god of the sky, after all. It’s a bit much for them.

But isn’t the interplay of, even enmeshing of, phallic and yonic images the unifying factor of these Orphic explanations? Gods are out here laying eggs and fucking multiheaded bisexual snakes with wings. Bodys are acting in ways we deem too weird for logic and are therein relegated to myth.

But if we are categorizing such mythic explanations as riddled with the anthropomorphic, may we admit that the anthropomorph is itself a multisexual, multigender corpus? The metaphor of birth is not fully anthropomorphic, but perhaps multimorphic or metamorphic. Or, is the anthropomorphic itself a metaphor for an already-sexed-and-gendered—and therein rendered human—body? At that point, how physically distinct is such a corpus different from the corporeal Stoic god, who, again, has a “personhood” that must not take a necessarily recognizable (and therein sexable) human shape?

When we say the universe—that I, you, nature, and everything else—was “born this way,” what else might we mean?