Quotation
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“He held there was no difference between life and death. 'Why then,' someone asked, 'do you not die?' 'Because,' he answered, 'there is no difference.'”
Thales of Miletus · Milesian · Ancient · anecdote written centuries later about a 6th-century figure
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the reply as a piece of wit: if life and death do not differ, the question why one does not die has already been answered, because there is nothing to gain by the change. A competing reading treats the whole exchange as a Hellenistic joke hung on the earliest name in the catalogue, centuries after Miletus. Diogenes Laertius writes in the third century CE. The locus is Lives 1.35. It is not a doctrine of the soul, and it is not the magnet report. The badge stays Questionable because the words are a biographer's scene. What it shows is how later antiquity filled a silence.
Did Thales of Miletus really say this?
The library’s label is Questionable. One of the sayings Diogenes Laertius lists in the life of Thales, Lives 1.35, inside the dossier later numbered Diels-Kranz 11 A1. It is a late anecdote, not a fragment of a book.
Where it comes from
Diogenes Laertius, Lives 1.35 (Diels-Kranz 11 A1)
Approximate date: anecdote written centuries later about a 6th-century figure.
How to use it
A clever line in a documentary about the first philosopher is often a story from a Roman-period biographer. If the line is good, it can still be enjoyed as a story. Citing it as Thales's settled view of death asks the biography to be a book he did not write.
A mindset reading
Wit is not a fragment. The habit is to ask how many centuries sit between the speaker and the person who wrote the sentence down. Here the gap is large enough that the badge is the point.
Understand the philosophy
Lives of the Philosophers 1.35 collects remarks attributed to Thales, including this exchange. Diels-Kranz files the life as 11 A1, testimony rather than a B fragment of his own words. There are no B fragments, because no book survives. The Aristotelian reports are a different kind of evidence. This card is the anecdotal kind.
- death
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the reply as a piece of wit: if life and death do not differ, the question why one does not die has already been answered, because there is nothing to gain by the change. A competing reading treats the whole exchange as a Hellenistic joke hung on the earliest name in the catalogue, centuries after Miletus. Diogenes Laertius writes in the third century CE. The locus is Lives 1.35. It is not a doctrine of the soul, and it is not the magnet report. The badge stays Questionable because the words are a biographer's scene. What it shows is how later antiquity filled a silence.
Did Thales of Miletus really say this?
Questionable. One of the sayings Diogenes Laertius lists in the life of Thales, Lives 1.35, inside the dossier later numbered Diels-Kranz 11 A1. It is a late anecdote, not a fragment of a book.
Which work is it in?
Diogenes Laertius, Lives 1.35 (Diels-Kranz 11 A1) Approximate date: anecdote written centuries later about a 6th-century figure.