Abstract

Contents Updated: Monday, January 24, 2000

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae went to Athens about 480 BC. He claimed “the sun and stars are flaming stones which are carried round by the revolution of the ether”. He claimed the sun is larger than the Peloponnesus, the moon shines with the light of the sun, and he explained a large meteorite which fell on Aegospotamoi as a result of a landslide on one of the heavenly bodies. He was charged with impiety and narrowly escaped being exiled from Athens.

The desire to avoid such a fate is why many of the pre-Socratic philosophers spoke of gods that they had no place for in their systems—they tipped a nod to popular prejudice. Thus even Euripides said Empedocles had reduced “the all seeing Helios, who traversed the sky every day in his flashing chariot and was the awful witness of men’s most sacred oaths, to the status of a lifeless lump of glowing stone”.

Anaxagoras also maintained the existence of an ordering principle as well as a material substance, and while regarding the latter as an infinite multitude of imperishable primary elements, qualitatively distinguished, he conceived divine reason or Mind (nous) as ordering them, substituting Mind for Ormuzd. He thus invented the argument from design for the existence of God. He referred all generation and disappearance to mixture and resolution respectively. To him belongs the credit of first establishing philosophy at Athens, in which city it continued to have its home for one thousand years, without intermission, until the Christians stopped it.

The first explicitly materialistic system was formed by Leucippus (fifth century BC.) and his pupil Democritus of Abdera (born about 460 BC). This was the doctrine of atoms—small primary bodies infinite in number, indivisible and imperishable, qualitatively similar, but distinguished by their shapes. Falling eternally through the infinite void, they collide and unite, thus generating existence, and forming objects which differ in accordance with the varieties, in number, size, shape, and arrangement, of the atoms which compose them.

The system of Anaxagoras, like that of Empedocles, aimed at reconciling the Eleatic doctrine that corporeal substance is unchangeable with the existence of a world which everywhere presents the appearance of coming into being and passing away. The conclusions of Parmenides are frankly accepted and restated. Nothing can be added to all things for there cannot be more than all, and all is always equal. Nor can anything pass away. What men commonly call coming into being and passing away is really mixture and separation.

Anaxagoras probably derived his theory of mixture from his younger contemporary, whose poem may have been published before his own treatise. The opinions of the latter were known at Athens before the middle of the fifth century. Empedocles sought to save the world of appearance by maintaining that the opposites—hot and cold, moist and dry—were things, each one of which was real in the Parmenidean sense. Anaxagoras regarded this as inadequate. Everything changes into everything else, the things of which the world is made are not “cut off with a hatchet” in this way. On the contrary, the true formula must be:

There is a portion of everything in everything.

A part of the argument by which Anaxagoras sought to prove this point has been preserved in a corrupt form by Aetius:

We use a simple nourishment when we eat the fruit of Demeter or drink water. But how can hair be made of what is not hair, or flesh of what is not flesh?

That is just the sort of question the early Milesians must have asked, only the physiological interest has now definitely replaced the meteorological. A similar train of reasoning is in Diogenes of Apollonia.

The statement that there is a portion of everything in everything, is not to be understood as referring simply to the original mixture of things before the formation of the worlds. On the contrary, even now “all things are together”, and everything, however small and however great, has an equal number of “portions”. A smaller particle of matter could only contain a smaller number of portions, if one of those portions ceased to be, but if anything is, in the full Parmenidean sense, it is impossible that mere division should make it cease to be. Matter is infinitely divisible, for there is no least thing, any more than there is a greatest. But however great or small a body may be, it contains just the same number of “portions”, that is, a portion of everything.

What are these “things” of which everything contains a portion? It once was usual to show the theory of Anaxagoras as if he had said that wheat contained small particles of flesh, blood, bones, and the like, but matter is infinitely divisible, and there are as many “portions” in the smallest particle as in the greatest. That is fatal to the old view. However far we carry division, we can never reach anything “unmixed”, so no such thing as a particle of simple nature, however minute, can exist.

It is of opposites, not of the different forms of matter, that everything contains a portion. Every particle, however large or however small, contains every one of those opposite qualities. That which is hot is also to a certain extent cold. Even snow, Anaxagoras affirmed, was black, that is, even the white contains a certain portion of the opposite quality. It indicates the connexion of this with Heraclitus.

The difference, then, between the theory of Anaxagoras and that of Empedocles is this. Empedocles had taught that, if you divide the various things which make up this world, and in particular the parts of the body, such as flesh, bones, and the like, far enough, you come to the four “roots” or elements, which are, accordingly, the ultimate reality.

Anaxagoras held that, however far you may divide any of these things—and they are infinitely divisible—you never come to a part so small that it does not contain portions of all the opposites. Everything can pass into everything else just because the “seeds”, as he called them, of each form of matter contain a portion of everything, that is, of all the opposites, though in different proportions. If we are to use the word “element” at all, it is these seeds that are the elements in the system of Anaxagoras.

Aristotle expresses this by saying that Anaxagoras regards the homoiomere as stoicheia. We have seen that the term stoicheion is of later date than Anaxagoras, and it is natural to suppose that the word homoiomere is also only Aristotle’s name for the “seeds”. In his own system, the homoiomere are intermediate between the elements (stoicheia), of which they are composed, and the organs (organa), which are composed of them. The heart cannot be divided into hearts, but the parts of flesh are flesh. That being so, Aristotle’s statement is quite intelligible from his own point of view, but there is no reason for supposing that Anaxagoras expressed himself in that particular way. All we are entitled to infer is that he said the “seeds”, which he substituted for the “roots” of Empedocles, were not the opposites in a state of separation, but each contained a portion of them all. If Anaxagoras had used the term “homoeomeries” himself, it would be strange that Simplicius should quote no fragment containing it.

From another point of view, Anaxagoras was not obliged by his theory to regard the elements of Empedocles as primary, a view to which there were obvious objections, especially in the case of earth. He explained them in quite another way. Though everything has a portion of everything in it, things appear to be that of which there is most in them. Air is that in which there is most cold, Fire that in which there is most heat, yet there is a portion of cold in the fire and a portion of heat in the air. The great masses which Empedocles had taken for elements are really vast collections of all manner of “seeds”. Each of them is, in fact, a panspermia.

When “all things were together”, and when the different seeds of things were mixed together in infinitely small particles, the appearance presented would be that of one of what had hitherto been regarded as the primary substances. They did present the appearance of “air and aether” for the qualities (things) which belong to these—the hot and the cold—prevail in quantity over all other things in the universe, and everything is most obviously that of which it has most in it. Here, then, Anaxagoras attaches himself to Anaximenes. The primary condition of things, before the formation of the worlds, is much the same in both, only, with Anaxagoras, the original mass is no longer the primary substance, but a mixture of innumerable seeds divided into infinitely small parts.

This mass is infinite, like the air of Anaximenes, and it supports itself, since there is nothing surrounding it. Further, the “seeds” of all things which it contains are infinite in number. But, as the innumerable seeds may be divided into those in which the portions of cold, moist, dense, and dark prevail, and those which have most of the warm, dry, rare, and light in them, we may say that the original mass was a mixture of infinite Air and of infinite Fire. The seeds of Air, of course, contain portions of the “things” that predominate in Fire, and vice versa, but everything is that of which it has most in it. Lastly, this mixture has no void in it, an addition to the theory made necessary by the arguments of Parmenides. Anaxagoras added an experimental proof of this to the purely dialectical one of the Eleatics. He used the klepsydra experiment as Empedocles had done, and also showed the corporeal nature of air by means of inflated skins.

Like Empedocles, Anaxagoras required some external cause to produce motion in the mixture. Body, Parmenides had shown, would never move itself, as the Milesians had assumed. Anaxagoras called the cause of motion by the name of Nous. It was this which made Aristotle say that he “stood out like a sober man from the random talkers that had preceded him”, and he has often been credited with the introduction of the spiritual into philosophy.

However, Plato makes Socrates say:

I once heard a man reading a book, as he said, of Anaxagoras, and saying it was Mind that ordered the world and was the cause of all things. I was delighted to hear of this cause, and I thought he really was right… But my extravagant expectations were all dashed to the ground when I went on and found that the man made no use of Mind at all. He ascribed no causal power whatever to if in the ordering of things, but to airs, and aethers, and waters, and a host of other strange things.

Aristotle, with this passage in mind, says:

Anaxagoras uses Mind as a deus ex machine to account for the formation of the world; and whenever he is at a loss to explain why anything necessarily is, he drags it in. But in other cases he makes anything rather than Mind the cause.

These utterances may well suggest that the nous of Anaxagoras was something on the same level as the Love and Strife of Empedocles, and it was.

In the first place, nous is unmixed, and does not, like other things, contain a portion of everything. This would hardly be worth saying of an immaterial mind, no one would suppose that to be hot or cold. The result of its being unmixed is that it “has power over” everything, that is to say, in the language of Anaxagoras, it causes things to move. Heraclitus had said as much of Fire, and Empedocles of Strife.

Further, it is the “thinnest” of all things, so that it can penetrate everywhere, and it would be meaningless to say that the immaterial is “thinner” than the material. nous also “knows all things” but so, perhaps, did the Fire of Heraclitus, and certainly the Air of Diogenes. Zeller holds that Anaxagoras meant to speak of something incorporeal, but he admits that he did not succeed in doing so, and that is historically the important point. nous is certainly imagined as occupying space, for we hear of greater and smaller parts of it.

The truth probably is that Anaxagoras substituted nous for the Love and Strife of Empedocles, because he wished to retain the old Ionic doctrine of a substance that “knows” all things, and, to identify that with the new theory of a substance that “moves” all things. Perhaps, too, it was his increased interest in physiological as distinguished from purely cosmological matters that led him to speak of Mind rather than Soul. The former word certainly suggests to the Greek an intimate connexion with the living body which the latter does not. But the originality of Anaxagoras lies far more in the theory of substance than in that of Nous.

The formation of a world starts with a rotatory motion which nous imparts to a portion of the mixed mass in which “all things are together”, and this rotatory motion gradually extends over a wider and wider space. Its rapidity produced a separation of the rare and the dense, the cold and the hot, the dark and the light, the moist and the dry. This separation produces two great masses, the one consisting mostly of the rare, hot, light, and dry, called the “ether”, the other, in which the opposite qualities predominate, called “air”. Of these the Ether or Fire took the outside while the Air occupied the center.

The next stage is the separation of the air into clouds, water, earth, and stones. In this Anaxagoras follows Anaximenes closely. In his account of the origin of the heavenly bodies, he showed himself more original. Stones “rush outwards more than water”, and the heavenly bodies were explained as stones torn from the earth by the rapidity of its rotation and made red-hot by the speed of their own motion. Perhaps the fall of the meteoric stone at Aegospotami had something to do with the origin of this theory. It implies the rotation of the flat earth along with the “eddy” (dinê).

Anaxagoras adopted the ordinary Ionian theory of innumerable worlds. The words “that it was not only with us that things were separated off, but elsewhere too” can only mean that nous has caused a rotatory movement in more parts of the boundless mixture than one. Aetius certainly includes Anaxagoras among those who held there was only one world, but this testimony cannot be considered of the same weight as that of the fragments.

The cosmology of Anaxagoras is clearly based upon that of Anaximenes, as will be seen from the following passage of Hippolytus:

3. The earth is flat in shape, and remains suspended because of its size and because there is no vacuum. For this reason the air is strong, and supports the earth which is borne up by it.
4. Of the moisture on the surface of the earth, the sea arose from the waters in the earth (for when these were evaporated the remainder turned salt), and from the rivers which flow into it.
5. Rivers take their being both from the rains and from the waters in the earth, for the earth is hollow and has waters in its cavities. And the Nile rises in summer owing to the water that comes down from the snows in Ethiopia.
6. The sun and the moon and all the stars are fiery stones carried round by the rotation of the ether. Under the stars are the sun and moon, and also certain bodies which revolve with them, but are invisible to us.
7. We do not feel the heat of the stars because of the greatness of their distance from the earth and, further, they are not so warm as the sun, because they occupy a colder region. The moon is below the sun, and nearer us.
8. The sun surpasses the Peloponnesus in size. The moon has not a light of her own, but gets it from the sun. The course of the stars goes under the earth.
9. The moon is eclipsed by the earth screening the sun’s light from it, and sometimes, too, by the bodies below the moon coming before it. The sun is eclipsed at the new moon, when the moon screens it from us. Both the sun and the moon turn back in their courses owing to the repulsion of the air. The moon turns back frequently, because it cannot prevail over the cold.
10. Anaxagoras was the first to determine what concerns the eclipses and the illumination of the sun and moon. And he said the moon was of earth, and had plains and ravines in it. The Milky Way was the reflection of the light of the stars that were not illuminated by the sun. Shooting stars were sparks, as it were, which leapt out owing to the motion of the heavenly vault.
11. Winds arose when the air was rarefied by the sun, and when things were burned and made their way to the vault of heaven and were carried off. Thunder and lightning were produced by heat striking upon clouds.
12. Earthquakes were caused by the air above striking on that beneath the earth, for the movement of the latter caused the earth which floats on it to rock.

All this confirms the statement of Theophrastus, that Anaxagoras had belonged to the school of Anaximenes. The flat earth floating on the air, the dark bodies below the moon, the explanation of the solstices and the “turnings back” of the moon by the resistance of air, the explanations of wind and of thunder and lightning, are all derived from the Milesian. As to the moon’s light and the cause of eclipses, it was natural that Anaxagoras should be credited at Athens with these discoveries. It seems unlikely that they were made by a believer in a flat earth, and there is sufficient evidence that they are really Pythagorean.

“There is a portion of everything in everything except nous, and there are some things in which there is nous also”. In these words Anaxagoras laid down the distinction between animate and inanimate things. It is the same nous that “has power over”, that is, sets in motion, all things that have life, both the greater and the smaller. The nous in living creatures is the same in all, and from this it followed that the different grades of intelligence we observe in the animal and vegetable worlds depend entirely on the structure of the body. The nous was the same, but it had more opportunities in one body than another. Man was the wisest of animals, not because he had a better sort of Nous, but because he had hands. This is in accordance with the previous development of thought upon the subject. Parmenides, in his Second Part, had already made the thought of men depend on the constitution of their limbs.

As all nous is the same, plants were regarded as living creatures. If we may trust the pseudo-Aristotelian Treatise on Plants so far, Anaxagoras argued that they must feel pleasure and pain in connexion with their growth and with the fall of their leaves. Plutarch says that he called plants “animals fixed in the earth”.

Both plants and animals originated in the first instance from the panspermia. Plants arose when the seeds of them which the air contained were brought down by the rain-water, and animals originated in a similar way. Like Anaximander, Anaxagoras held that animals first arose in the moist elements.

In these scanty notices we seem to see traces of a polemical attitude towards Empedocles, and the same may be observed in what we are told of the theory of perception adopted by Anaxagoras, especially in the view that perception is of contraries. The account which Theophrastus gives of this is as follows:

But Anaxagoras says that perception is produced by opposites, for like things cannot be effected by like. He attempts to give, a detailed enumeration of the particular senses. We see by means of the image in the pupil, but no image is cast upon what is of the same color, but only on what is different. With most living creatures things are of a different color to the pupil by day, though with some this is so by night, and these are accordingly keen-sighted at that time. Speaking generally, however, night is more of the same color with the eyes than day. And an image is cast on the pupil by day, because light is a concomitant cause of the image, and because the prevailing color casts an image more readily upon its opposite.

It is in the same way that touch and taste discern their objects. That which is just as warm or just as cold as we are neither warms us nor cools us by its contact, and, we do not apprehend the sweet and the sour by means of themselves. We know cold by warm, fresh by salt, and sweet by sour, in virtue of our deficiency in each, for all these are in us to begin with. And we smell and hear in the same manner, the former by means of the accompanying respiration, the latter by the sound penetrating to the brain, for the bone which surrounds this is hollow, and it is upon it that the sound falls.

And all sensation implies pain, a view which would seem to be the consequence of the first assumption, for all unlike things produce pain by their contact. And this pain is made perceptible by the long continuance or by the excess of a sensation. Brilliant colors and excessive noises produce pain, and we cannot dwell long on the same things. The larger animals are the more sensitive, and, generally, sensation is proportionate to the size of the organs of sense. Those animals which have large, pure, and bright eyes, see large objects and from a great distance, and contrariwise.

And it is the same with hearing. Large animals can hear great and distant sounds, while less sounds pass unperceived. Small animals perceive small sounds and those near at hand. It is the same too with smell. Rarefied air has more smell, for, when air is heated and rarefied, it smells. A large animal when it breathes draws in the condensed air along with the rarefied, while a small one draws in the rarefied by itself. So the large one perceives more. For smell is better perceived when it is near than when it is far by reason of its being more condensed, while when dispersed it is weak. But, roughly speaking, large animals do not perceive a rarefied smell, nor small animals a condensed one.

This theory marks in some respects an advance on that of Empedocles. It was a happy thought of Anaxagoras to make sensation depend upon irritation by opposites, and to connect it with pain. Many modern theories are based upon a similar idea.

Anaxagoras regarded the senses as incapable of reaching the truth of things. But we must not turn him into a sceptic. The saying preserved by Aristotle that “things are as we suppose them to be”, has no value at all as evidence. It does not come from the treatise of Anaxagoras himself, and it might have had a moral application. He did say that “the weakness of our senses prevents our discerning the truth”, but this meant simply that we do not see the “portions” of everything which are in everything. For instance, the portions of black which are in the white. Our senses simply show us the portions that prevail. He also said that the things which are seen give us the power of seeing the invisible, which is the opposite of scepticism.

Protagoras in 411 BC was less fortunate. He was accused of denying the gods and illegally teaching about the heavens. He was brought to trial for impiety and exiled from Athens. Copies of his books were collected and burned in the marketplace. He died in the following year when the ship was wrecked during departure.

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