Archē

The word

Archē (ἀρχή) carries two senses that the Greeks heard as one. It means a beginning, origin, or starting-point — the source from which something comes — and at the same time rule, command, or authority, the governing principle that holds sway. The verb archein means both 'to begin' and 'to rule', for to be first is to lead. The word survives everywhere in English: in arch- (archetype, the original pattern; architect, the master-builder) and in the suffix -archy (monarchy, the rule of one; anarchy, the absence of rule).

The Presocratic search

The earliest Greek philosophers, the thinkers of Miletus and Ionia, are defined by their search for the archē: the single underlying principle or stuff from which all things arise, of which they are made, and into which they pass away. Aristotle, looking back on them in his Metaphysics, framed the whole early enterprise this way. Thales named water; Anaximander, the boundless apeiron; Anaximenes, air; Heraclitus, ever-living fire; the Pythagoreans, number and limit. In asking what the archē is, philosophy first separated itself from myth, seeking a rational ground of things rather than a story of the gods.

Its later life

Aristotle refined the notion, distinguishing several senses of archē — the point from which a thing begins, the source of its motion or knowledge, the underlying material — and made first principles the foundation of all demonstration, since the chain of explanation must end somewhere. The Neoplatonists pressed the search to its limit, finding the ultimate archē of all things in the One beyond being. The word even opens the Gospel of John — 'in the beginning (en archē) was the Word' — joining Greek philosophy to a new theology.