Heraclitus
Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535-475 BCE), is sometimes known as the 'Father of Dialectics'. Many principles of interconnection and dialectics have some of their earliest known origin in his thought.
"You cannot step into the same river twice."
He's talking about the constant state of flux everything is in. Nothing is ever being, only a constant state of becoming. You cannot enter the same river twice, not because something happens to the river, but because the exact configuration of simpler elements which make up the river no longer exist. Instead, the river is now composed of a slightly different configuration of those simpler elements. Maybe a few drops less, but maybe a few different drops added in the meantime.
He saw the world as structured by logos, which served as a universalizing principle. It sees everything as existing in tension with its opposite, and these opposites inherently define each other: day and night, hot and cold, war and peace. You can't understand or conceptualize one without the other.
"Cold things warm up, the hot cools off, wet becomes dry, dry becomes wet"
This constant tension and opposition is actually what creates harmony and structure in our universe, rather than chaos. When plucking a string on a Lyre, or pulling back the string on a bow, the opposing forces, such as between the string and the bending bow string produce something both functional and beautiful.
From this, the conclusion is that everything in our universe is interconnected through constant transformation and mutual definition. Nothing can exist in isolation. Change is the only constant.
Seneca the Younger
Seneca believed that all humans are fundamentally connected as members of a shared "world-city". He said that we humans function like the "limbs of a great body", together making up a greater organism. He inspired an English poet centuries later named John Donne, who was inspired to proclaim "no man is an island". Just as a hand cannot flourish severed from the body, a person cannot truly thrive in isolation from the rest of humanity.
"We are members of one great body, planted by nature... We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole."
Seneca saw the cosmos as a single, living, material entity, which he called a "great animal" permeated by divine reason (Logos). He specifically emphasized sympatheia, the stoic concept that all parts of the universe are bound together in mutual influence. The stars, the seasons, human affairs-everything participates in a single rational order, the logos that permeates everything. What happens in one part of the whole ripples throughout the rest.
"We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden."
In addition to the philosophical conclusions of his physical monism, the social conclusions extended from his philosophy were quite cosmopolitan, and he saw national boundaries and social hierarchies as, in the richest sense, artificial. Our true citizenship is in the the world-city of all rational beings. We exist within a living network of inherent mutual dependence and influence.
