Anaximandro

Anaximander (c.610–after 546 bc)

The Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletus followed Thales in his philosophical and scientific interests. He wrote a book, of which one fragment survives, and is the first Presocratic philosopher about whom we have enough information to reconstruct his theories in any detail. He was principally concerned with the origin, structure and workings of the world, and attempted to account for them consistently, through a small number of principles and mechanisms. Like other thinkers of his tradition, he gave the Olympian gods no role in creating the world or controlling events. Instead, he held that the world originated from a vast, eternal, moving material of no definite nature, which he called apeiron (’boundless’ or ‘unlimited’). From this, through obscure processes including one called ’separation off’, arose the world as we know it. Anaximander described the kosmos (world) and stated the distances of the celestial bodies from the earth. He accounted for the origin of animal life and explained how humans first emerged. He pictured the world as a battleground in which opposite natures, such as hot and cold, constantly encroach upon one another, and described this process as taking place with order and regularity.

 

 

1 Life and work

Very little is known of Anaximander’s life. His dates (c.610 bc–shortly after 546 bc) are not certain, but make him a generation younger than Thales, whose pupil, successor and associate he is variously called. Like Thales he was a Milesian. He is said to have travelled to Sparta, where he predicted an earthquake and set up a gnōmōn (a Babylonian invention for marking the length of the sun’s shadow, which he is credited with discovering) on the sundials there to mark solstices, equinoxes and the hours of the day. He is also said to have led a Milesian colony to Apollonia on the Black Sea and, it is reported, made the first map and the first ’sphere’ or celestial globe. He wrote at least one work, known as On Nature (the title the Alexandrian scholars later gave to the works of most of the Presocratics; it is not Anaximander’s title) in which he presented his views on the kosmos. (We hear of several other works – Circuit of the Earth, On the Fixed Stars, Celestial Globe – but these are dubious.)

As with other reported discoveries of the Presocratics, this evidence demands cautious treatment. The map is possible, although it will have been extremely crude and founded more on principles of symmetry than on measurement. (See Herodotus, IV 36 for a critical assessment of early maps.) And, since Anaximander had views about the size and shape of the kosmos, he may have constructed a model of it. If he foretold an earthquake however, it was just a lucky guess. Alternatively, later authors could have invented the prediction to give Anaximander something comparable to Thales’ prediction of an eclipse. The report about the gnōmōn is usually accepted as likely, as it agrees with Anaximander’s undoubted interest in astronomy.

 

2 The apeiron

Anaximander is best known for his physical theory, which described the original material of the universe as apeiron: ’boundless’ or ’unlimited’ or, possibly, ’indefinite’ (the word later acquired the more technical meaning of ’infinite’). What this material is like, how it is related to the kosmos around us, and how Anaximander justified his view are basic and controversial issues in understanding his thought. To begin with, what kinds of bounds or limits does it lack? The description ’eternal and unageing’ indicates that it is unlimited in time, and since it ’surrounds all the kosmoi [plural of kosmos]’ (Hippolytus, Refutation I 6.1, A11) it is vast in extent, and if not infinite, at least unlimited in that there is nothing outside it that limits or determines its size. Furthermore, since it is ’neither water nor any other of the things called elements, but some different apeiron nature’ (Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 24.16, A9), it is without any definite character or qualities. Hence some argue that it was called unlimited because it lacks internal boundaries or distinctions. It is not clear that the word apeiron can bear this meaning, but Anaximander’s original substance is nevertheless indefinite in this way too. The original substance was also the originative substance ’out of which came to be all the heavens and the kosmoi in them’ (On Aristotle’s Physics 24.17, A9). Anaximander presented a cosmogony in which the kosmos arose from the apeiron in a series of developmental stages. Thus, the apeiron is the ancestor of all that exists.

Aristotle and his followers present another view: the apeiron is the element or substance out of which everything is composed, an Aristotelian material cause (see Aristotle §9 ). Thus, everything is made of apeiron in the way coal and diamonds are made of carbon. Aristotle occasionally identifies the apeiron instead as a mixture of the four elements that he recognized, and also as a substance intermediate between fire and air or between air and water. These ’mixture’ and ’intermediate’ interpretations must be discarded as guesswork, and the idea that it is a material cause must be rejected as Aristotelian invention too, since it does not fit the rest of the evidence on the role of the apeiron in Anaximander’s system.

Not only is the apeiron our ancestor, it is divine. Anything that is ’eternal and ageless’ and also ’in motion’ (On Aristotle’s Physics 24.13, A9), which is ’immortal and imperishable’ and which ’surrounds all and steers all’ counts, for the Greeks, as a divine being (Aristotle, Physics 203b11–13, A15). It is disputed how many of these words were Anaximander’s, but the ideas they represent seem authentic. Just what ‘divine’ means in this context is of critical importance. In some sense the apeiron is the Creator, but it is remote from the Greeks’ anthropomorphic conception of the Olympian gods, who demand worship, intervene in human affairs and are motivated by pride, anger and favouritism. Like Xenophanes’ god, the apeiron is ’not similar to mortals in form or thought’ (Xenophanes, fr. 23) (see Xenophanes §3 ). Unlike Xenophanes’ god, the apeiron lacks perceptive and cognitive capacities (Xenophanes, fr. 24). It seems to have generated the kosmos not through any conscious purpose, but somehow as the result of its eternal motion, and the sense in which it ’steers all’ seems to be simply that the way the kosmos was generated guarantees that the events that take place in it are governed by an immutable, impersonal, universal law.

Why make the originative substance apeiron? The sources attribute two arguments for this thesis to Anaximander (although other ancient arguments are sometimes thought to go back to him as well). The first, which argues that it must be apeiron in the sense of ’unlimited in extent’, goes as follows: ’it must be unlimited lest generation fail’ (Aristotle, Physics 208a8, A14; Aëtius, I 3.3, A14). Aristotle criticizes the argument on the grounds that ’the destruction of one thing can be the origin of another, the total being limited’. If Anaximander is assumed to be referring either to our own finite kosmos or to a succession of finite kosmoi, one after another (see §3), it is indeed a bad argument. But if he held that there are an unlimited number of kosmoi at the same time, as Aëtius’ text suggests, the argument succeeds as far as the vagueness of the term ’unlimited’ permits.

The second argument concludes that the apeiron is qualitatively indefinite: ’The elements have opposite qualities. Air is cold, water wet, fire hot. If any of them were infinite, the others would have been destroyed. Therefore, the elements arise from something different’ (Aristotle, Physics 204b26, A16). As it stands, the argument is laden with Aristotelian terminology, and does not prove that the apeiron is qualitatively indefinite, only that it is different from the four Aristotelian elements. Its authenticity has been questioned, but it probably has an Anaximandrian kernel, attacking Thales’ conception of water as the basic material of the universe using the argument: ’If everything were made of, or originated from, water, then everything would be wet; but some things are wet, others dry (the opposite of wet); therefore, the basic substance cannot be wet, or dry either’ (see Thales §2 ). The argument can be generalized to show that the basic substance is unlike any definite substance and lacks all perceptible qualities.

 

3 The kosmos

The point of having an indeterminate originative substance is to allow to arise the wide variety of things (including opposites) that we find in the world around us. Anaximander’s account of the origin of the kosmos confirms this interpretation. From the eternal apeiron, ’something capable of producing hot and cold’ separated off. This gave rise to hot in the form of a sphere of flame, which surrounded cold, in the form of dark mist, ’like bark around a tree’. The sphere of flame subsequently broke up to form the sun, moon and stars, while the mist afterwards became earth and sea.

This is not a creation myth where a divinity creates or acts on matter separate from itself, but an essentially biological account of generation or development which takes place because of the nature of the material that generates the kosmos. On this account, the apeiron plays no active role after the obscure initial process, which is described as ’separation off’. Once started, the world goes its own way. Anaximander speaks of other events that involve ’separation off’, and to judge by them the process does not require purposeful activity or the intervention of an agent. It need not involve any more than some part or amount of an existing thing coming together and being isolated from the rest in such a way as to take on a distinct identity from the rest and behave differently.

Several details of Anaximander’s astronomy deserve mention. The heavenly bodies are rings of fire enclosed in tubes of mist pierced with holes for the fire to shine through. Eclipses and the phases of the moon are caused when the holes are blocked. The sun is the same size as the earth. The sun is farthest from the earth, followed by the moon, with the stars nearest. The earth is a cylinder, ’like a column drum’, whose depth is one-third its breadth. Anaximander gave the distances of the heavenly bodies from the earth, and although the evidence is untidy, most scholars agree that he made the distances of the stars, moon and sun respectively nine, eighteen and twenty-seven times the size (?breadth) of the earth. The earth is in the centre of the kosmos and remains there without support.

The absence of the apeiron and of the Olympian gods is notable, as is the boldness of Anaximander’s ideas. His figures for the size of the kosmos are fanciful, but his conviction that the kosmos is symmetrical and based on proportion, and the tenet that important facts about the physical world can be expressed numerically, are a priori principles worthy of a scientist. The odd picture of the celestial bodies as rings rather than points of fire is doubtless the answer to the question where all the fire in the cosmogonic sphere of flame went to. Anaximander may (although this is speculation) have located the stars nearest the earth through the following reasoning: their light is dimmest and they give the least heat because the fire they are made of is less pure than that of the sun; celestial fire is purer the less affected it is – and therefore the more remote it is – from the cool region of the earth; therefore the stars are nearest the earth and the sun farthest.

Anaximander believed the earth stays in the centre without support ’because it stays put on account of its similar distance from all things’ (Hippolytus, Refutation I 6.3, A11). Also, ’it is no more appropriate for what is located in the middle and similarly related to the extremes to move up, down or sideways; and it is impossible to move in opposite directions simultaneously; and so by necessity it is at rest’ (Aristotle, On the Heaven 295b12, A26). Although not all scholars accept this reasoning as Anaximander’s, there is no reason why he could not have said something similar to the former of these reports. Aristotle could then have supplied the missing steps in the argument, which amounts to the first recorded use of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The picture of the earth hanging free in the middle of the kosmos contrasts with Greek mythology and with Thales’ belief that the earth rests on water, as well as with that of Anaximander’s successor, Anaximenes (§2) , who believed that it is supported by a column of air. It is based on our experience that the earth does not seem to move, along with Anaximander’s theory of the origin and structure of the kosmos, which leaves no room for a prop.

Like other Presocratics, Anaximander gave accounts of meteorological phenomena agreeing with his cosmogony and cosmology. Fire and dark mist are again prominent, as is ’separation off’, this time caused by the sun’s heat, which accounts for wind, clouds and (if ’separation off’ of dry from wet involves ’exhalation’ and ’drying’) rain, as well as other effects, including the eventual desiccation of the earth. Wind in turn is the cause of thunder, lightning, thunderbolts, waterspouts and hurricanes.

Anaximander took the same approach to the problem of the origin of life. ’The first animals were born in moisture, surrounded by thorny barks, and when they grew older they went forth onto drier regions, and when the bark broke off they lived a different life for a brief time’ (Aëtius, V 19.4, A30). Animals have a similar origin to the kosmos (the repetition of the image of a tree’s bark is hardly coincidental) and one linked to the progressive drying out of the sea. Regarding the beginning of human life, ’from water and earth that had been heated arose fishes or animals very similar to fishes; humans grew in these and remained inside until puberty; then at last they burst and men and women came forth already able to feed themselves’ (Censorinus, 4.7, A30). Although this is not an anticipation of the theory of evolution (as some have thought), it gives a typically bold solution to the problem of how the first generation of humans could have survived until they could take care of themselves and reproduce.

Two other issues are whether our kosmos will last forever and whether it is unique. Regarding the first, Anaximander’s fragment can be taken to imply that the inconclusive war between opposites will continue forever, so that our kosmos has a beginning but no end. However, there is no trace of such a view in the sources and, since later Greek philosophers strongly rejected such asymmetries, the silence indicates that Anaximander did not maintain the view explicitly. On the other hand, since it is unclear how the kosmos would come to an end, it is likely that he did not discuss the matter in any detail.

Regarding the second issue, most scholars hold either that Anaximander considered the kosmos unique or that he posited an infinite succession of kosmoi, one after another. However, several sources mention a limitless number of coexistent kosmoi. The evidence is not unanimous and can be taken in different ways, but it would arguably be consistent with Anaximander’s system and with his use of the Principle of Sufficient Reason for him to maintain that the process which formed our world need not occur only at one time or in one place.

 

4 Anaximander’s fragment

Aside from a few words in the doxography which may be original, we possess one fragment less than a sentence long. Even here it is disputed which words are original and which are paraphrase. The passage reads as follows (the material in italics is widely thought to be genuine): ’Things that are perish into the things from which they arise, according to necessity. For they pay penalty and retribution to one another for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time’. Simplicius, who quotes the fragment in his text On Aristotle’s Physics (24.18, fr.1), says it describes the relation between things in the world and the apeiron, but on grammatical as well as systematic grounds most scholars think it gives Anaximander’s view of events in the world without reference to the apeiron. Day and night, summer and winter, and many other phenomena involve the regular alternation of the preponderance of one opposite over another. The opposites here are hot and cold, wet and dry, light and dark, etc, conceived not as properties of substances but as ’powers’ (dynameis) which are capable of affecting things and are embodied or contained in the substances characterized by them. The kosmos, then, is a battleground in a war between opposites, a dynamic equilibrium in which one invades the other’s territory but is repulsed and loses some of its own ground in turn. On this interpretation the fragment accords with the view favoured above, that the apeiron plays no part in the ongoing functioning of the kosmos; it was needed at the beginning of the kosmos, but, because of the way the kosmos was generated, things go on without further need of it.

Noteworthy is the legal language, which Anaximander probably meant literally, since he and other Presocratics did not contemplate any radical difference between humans and the rest of the kosmos that would make certain concepts and vocabulary appropriate to one but not the other. Also significant is the idea that events in the world are governed by necessity and occur in an inevitable sequence – a revision of traditional beliefs about the powers of the Olympian gods.

Anaximander brilliantly extended Thales’ approach to the understanding of the world to explain a wide range of phenomena. He saw the kosmos as a place of order, balance and symmetry; also of change and conflict, subordinated to larger-scale patterns of stability. The testimonia reveal him as a pioneer in several fields of science, but at least as important is his unprecedented use of abstract and general considerations in his reasoning, together with his observations of the world, to articulate a largely unified and coherent understanding of it. His most striking theories were too bold for his immediate successors, but his goal of constructing an intelligible account of the history and workings of the kosmos remained as his legacy to philosophy and science.