What connects ancient sages with modern questions of existence? The names of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Democritus did not just build hypotheses - they offered a way to look at the world with wonder and awe. And although their ideas may seem naive, it is these philosophers who laid the foundations of the worldview we still use today. A world without the logic of Aristotle, the systems of Plato, and the categories of Kant - is a field of pure intuition. The pre-Socratic philosophers intuitively sought the essence of being in the elements, in chaos, in movement. For them, there was no division between science, religion, and art - all of this was a unified form of experiencing the world. And in this, their true closeness to our time, when the boundaries between disciplines are blurred. We know what to see in St. Petersburg.