Judaism
Anaximander
Abstract
Contents Updated: Monday, January 24, 2000
Anaximander. (c 610-540 BC)
Thales was mentor to a younger generation of aristocratic thinkers, and among his disciples was Anaximander, also of Miletus, who was the first writer on philosophy. According to Apollodorus, Anaximander was sixty-four years old in 546 BC) and this is confirmed by Hippolytus, who says he was born in 610 BC, and by Pliny. 546 BC is the year before the fall of Sardis to Cyrus, and Anaximander must have related his age to this event.
Xenophanes says people would often ask, “How old were you when the Mede appeared?”. By this, of course, he meant “appeared with armies, conquering” but the Medes and Persians had already appeared in history. Martin West in The Oxford History of the Classical World is certain that Anaximander is ofteninspired by Iranian cosmology rather than observation of nature.
Anaximander’s system is known from Theophrastus, who had read his book. He seems sometimes to have quoted Anaximander’s own words, and he criticized his style. Theophrastus described him as an “associate” of Thales, but apparently he was a generation younger. Here are the remains of what he said of him in the First Book:
Anaximander of Miletus, son of Praxiades, a fellow-citizen and associate of Thales, said that the material cause and first element of things was the Infinite, he being the first to introduce this name of the material cause. He says it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a substance different from them which is infinite, from which arise all the heavens and the worlds within them.
He says that this is “eternal and ageless,” and that it “encompasses all the worlds”.
And into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, “as is meet; for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time,” as he says in these somewhat poetical terms.
And besides this, there was an eternal motion, in which was brought about the origin of the worlds… He did not ascribe the origin of things to any alteration in matter, but said that the oppositions in the substratum, which was a boundless body, were separated out.
Like Thales, Anaximander distinguished himself by certain practical inventions. Anaximander dabbled in mathematics and made contributions to geometry. Some writers incorrectly credited him with inventing the sundial, the gnomon. But Herodotus says this instrument came from Babylon, and Thales must have used it to determine the solstices and equinoxes. Anaximander himself conducted a colony to Apollonia, and his fellow-citizens erected a statue to him.
Anaximander’s interest in the world led him to travel, and his travels led him to make a contribution to geography. Anaximander was the first to draw a map, and Eratosthenes said this was the map elaborated by Hecataeus. No doubt it was intended to be of service to Milesian enterprise in the Black Sea. In an effort to see the heavens clearly and rationally, Anaximander tried to map the celestial bodies. He theorized that the earth was at rest in the center of space.
Anaximander surmised that change came from inanimate forces interacting with each other rather than by the whims of gods performing magic. There was an eternal, indestructible something without qualities (to apeiron, the Boundless), out of which everything arises, and into which everything returns, a boundless stock from which the waste of existence is continually made good. It is related to Thales’ thought, and quite distinctly with the Beginningless Lights that are where Ahura Mazda lived, for the Persians, limitless time being Zurvan.
Thales had regarded water as the most likely thing to be that of which all others are forms. Anaximander asked how the primary substance could be something known on earth. If any one substance, such as water, was basic, he thought, it would long since have overcome the other substances, creating a uniformity that obviously did not exist. Possibly influenced by Zoroastrian dualism, Anaximander thought of forces being in opposition to each other, such as heat against cold and wetness against dryness. His argument seems to be preserved by Aristotle, who has the following passage in his discussion of the Infinite:
There are some who make this (a body distinct from the elements) the infinite, and not air or water, in order that the other things may not be destroyed by their infinity. They are in opposition one to another—air is cold, water moist, and fire hot—and therefore, if any one of them were infinite, the rest would have ceased to be by this time. Accordingly they say that what is infinite is something other than the elements, and from it the elements arise.
If Thales had been right in saying that water was the fundamental reality, how could anything else ever have existed? One side of the opposition, the cold and moist, would have had its way unchecked, and the warm and dry would have been driven from the field long ago. Something must exist not itself one of the warring opposites, something more primitive, out of which they arise, and into which they once more pass away. Anaximander called this something phusis. The term arche is used by Aristotle in discussing Thales to mean the “material cause”.
So, Anaximander rejected Thales’ belief in a world derived from one substance such as water, but thought that, early in its history, the earth was covered with water, as indicated by signs of marine fossils across plains and mountains. And he theorized that if the first creatures on earth were of the sea, humanity must have evolved from such creatures.
Scholars consider Aristotle’s reference to “elements” here as an anachronism, impossible to conceive of before Parmenides and not actually introduced until Empedocles, yet the four elements seem to have been intrinsic to Zoroastrian ideas. Anaximander started from the strife between the opposites which go to make up the world, the warm was opposed to the cold, the dry to the wet. These were at war, and any predominance of one over the other was an “injustice” for which they must make reparation to one another at the appointed time, an idea apparently derived from eschatology.
Also, Anaximander adopted the Egyptian belief in endlessness, though the Persians also had Endless Time or Zurvan. Infinity and eternity are difficult if not impossible to visualize or conceptualize, but Anaximander at least grasped it as an idea, an idea that rivalled that which he rejected: that something could be created out of nothing. He thought instead that the universe was boundless and everlasting, and that there were countless other worlds beyond the world known to humanity, a surprisingly modern view but perhaps an extension of the notion of levels of existence, as in the seven heavens.
Anaximander’s view of the world suggested a boundless stock of matter. The “opposites” are at war with one another, and their strife is marked by “unjust” encroachments on either side. The warm commits “injustice” in summer, the cold in winter, and this would lead in the long run to the destruction of everything but the Boundless itself, if there were not an inexhaustible supply of it from which opposites might continually be separated out afresh. Picture an endless mass, not one of the opposites, stretching out without limit on every side of the world we live in. This mass is a body, out of which the world once emerged, and into which it will one day be absorbed again.
Anaximander believed there were “innumerable worlds in the Boundless,” but, though all the worlds are perishable, are there an unlimited number of them in existence at the same time, or does a new world never comes into existence only when the old one has passed away, so that there is never more than one world at a time? This is fundamental.
Theophrastus discussed the views of all the early philosophers as to whether there was one world or an infinite number, and when he ascribed “innumerable worlds” to the Atomists, he meant coexistent and not successive worlds. Anaximander, Anaximenes, Archelaus, Xenophanes, Diogenes, Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus are all mentioned together as holding the doctrine of “innumerable worlds” on every side of this one, and the only distinction is that, while Epicurus made the distances between these worlds unequal, Anaximander said all the worlds were equidistant. They came into being and passed away ad infinitum, some always coming into being and others passing away. Cicero writes:
Anaximander’s opinion was that there were gods who came into being, rising and passing away at long intervals, and that these were the innumerable worlds.
Aetius says that, according to Anaximander, the “innumerable heavens” were gods. Finally, Petron, one of the earliest Pythagoreans, settles the matter by his precision, saying there were just one hundred and eighty-three worlds arranged in a triangle, so the doctrine of a plurality of worlds was much older than the Atomists.
It was “endless sifting” that brought into being all the heavens and all the worlds within them. The true nature of this motion implied by the term “separating off” must remain a conjecture in the absence of express testimony, but Plato’s Timaeus gives it as the Pythagorean doctrine, and the Pythagoreans followed Anaximander pretty closely in their cosmology. The school of Abdera, as will be shown, attributed a motion of the same kind to their atoms, and they too were mainly dependent on the Milesians for the details of their system.
Regarding the motion of the world once it has been “separated off,” one of the chief features of early cosmology is the part played in it by the analogy of an eddy in water or in wind, and this must be the doctrine of Anaximander and Anaximenes. It is a natural thought if water as the primary substance and then “air,” and would account for the position of earth and water in the center and fire at the circumference, with “air” between them. Heavy things tend to the center of a vortex and light things are forced out to the periphery. There is no question of a sphere in revolution at this date. The picture is of rotary motion in a plane or planes more or less inclined to the earth’s surface. The Atomists held precisely this view of its origin.
Regarding how the different parts of the world arose from the Boundless. Theophrastus said:
Something capable of begetting hot and cold out of the eternal was separated off at the origin of this world. From this arose a sphere of flame which fitted close round the air surrounding the earth as the bark round a tree. When this had been torn off and shut up in certain rings, the sun, moon and stars came into existence.
When a portion of the Boundless was separated off from the rest to form a world, it first differentiated itself into the two opposites, hot and cold. The hot appears as flame surrounding the cold, the cold, as earth with air surrounding it. We are not told here how the cold was differentiated into earth, water and air, but there is a passage in Aristotle’s Meteorology which throws some light on the question. After discussing the views of the “theologians” regarding the sea, he says:
But those who are wiser in the wisdom of men give an origin for the sea. At first, they say, all the terrestrial region was moist, and, as it was dried up by the sun, the portion of it that evaporated produced the winds and the turnings back of the sun and moon while the portion left behind was the sea. So they think the sea is becoming smaller by being dried up, and that at last it will all be dry.
And the same absurdity arises for those who say the earth too was at first moist, and that, when the region of the world about the earth was heated by the sun, air was produced and the whole heavens were increased, and that it (the air) produced winds and caused its (the sun’s) turnings back.
After the first separation of the hot and the cold by the eddy, the heat of the flame turned part of the moist, cold interior of the world into air or vapor—it is all one at this date—and that the expansion of this mist broke up the flame itself into rings.
The origin of earth and sea from the moist, cold matter which was “separated off” in the beginning is thus described:
The sea is what is left of the original moisture. The fire has dried up most of it and turned the rest salt by scorching it.
He says that the earth is cylindrical in form, and that its depth is as a third part of its breadth.
The earth swings free, held in its place by nothing. It stays where it is because of its equal distance from everything. Its shape is hollow and round, and like a stone pillar. We are on one of the surfaces, and the other is on the opposite side.
Adopting for a moment the idea of “elements,” Anaximander put fire on one side as the hot and dry, and all the rest on the other as the cold, which is also moist. This may explain how Aristotle came to speak of the Boundless as intermediate between fire and water. And the moist element was partly turned into “air” or vapor by the fire, which explains how Aristotle could say the Boundless was something between fire and air, or between air and water.
The moist, cold interior of the world is not, in fact, water. It is always called “the moist” or “the moist state.” That is because it has to be still further differentiated under the influence of heat into earth, water, and vapor. The gradual drying up of the water by the fire is a good example of what Anaximander meant by “injustice”.
Thales had said that the earth floated on the water, but Anaximander realized that it was freely suspended in space (meteoros) and did not require any support. Aristotle has preserved the argument he used. The earth is equally distant from the circumference of the vortex in every direction, and there is no reason for it to move up or down or sideways. The doctrine of innumerable worlds was inconsistent with the existence of an absolute up and down in the universe, so the argument is quite sound. The central position of the earth is due to the eddy, for the greater masses tend to the center of an eddy. Anaximander probably realised the earth shared the rotary movement, but it is not a sphere. It is a solid ring in the middle of the vortex.
The flame which had been forced to the circumference of the vortex was broken up into rings by the pressure of expanding vapor produced by its own heat. Hippolytus and Aetius relate the formation of the heavenly bodies from these rings.
The heavenly bodies are a wheel of fire, separated off from the fire of the world, and surrounded by air. And there are breathing-holes, certain pipe-like passages, at which the heavenly bodies show themselves. That is why, when the breathing-holes are stopped, eclipses take place. And the moon appears now to wax and now to wane because of the stopping and opening of the passages. The wheel of the sun is 27 times the size of (the earth, while that of) the moon is 18 times as large. The sun is the highest of all, and lowest are the wheels of the stars.
The sun was a wheel 28 times the size of the earth, like a chariot-wheel with the felloe hollow, full of fire, showing the fire at a certain point through an orifice, as through the nozzle of a pair of beflows… The sun was equal to the earth, but the wheel from which it breathes out and by which it is carried round was 27 times the size of the earth… The sun was eclipsed when the orifice of the fire’s breathing-hole was stopped.
The moon was a wheel 19 times the size of the earth, like a chariot-wheel with its felloe hollow and full of fire like that of the sun, lying oblique also like it, with one breathing-hole like the nozzle of a pair of bellows… The moon was eclipsed when the orifice of the wheel was stopped.
Thunder and lightning were all caused by the blast of the wind. When it is shut up in a thick cloud and bursts forth with violence, then the tearing of the cloud makes the noise, and the rift gives the appearance of a flash in contrast with the blackness of the cloud.
Wind was a current of air (vapor), which arose when its finest and moistest particles were stirred or melted by the sun.
The interesting point about this sequence, with the earth first then the stars, the moon and the sun furthest away is that it is Persian, as Martin West will confirm.
Of the variation in the figures given for the size of the wheels of the heavenly bodies, 18 and 27 refer perhaps to their inner, while 19 and 28 refer to their outer circumference. The wheels of the “stars” were nine times the size of the earth; for the numbers 9, 18, 27 play a considerable part in primitive cosmogonies. These “stars” are probably the morning and evening stars, not yet recognised as the same, because Anaximander knew that the fixed stars turned in their own different vortices and only appeared to move together because the earth itself was turning in a vortex.
The wheels of fire are not observed as complete circles for the vapor or mist which formed them encloses the fire, and forms an outer ring except at one point of their circumference, through which the fire escapes, and that is the heavenly body. The theory of “wheels” might have been suggested by the Milky Way. The wheels of air make the fire invisible just as clothing a Homeric hero in “air,” made him invisible, the hero’s property of visibility being sheilded by the invisibility of the air. Lightning is explained in much the same way as the heavenly bodies. It, too, was fire breaking through condensed air, in this case storm clouds. This was probably the origin of the theory, and Anaximander then explained the heavenly bodies on the analogy of lightning, not vice versa. Meteorology and astronomy were undifferentiated, and the theory of “wheels” or rings is a natural inference from the idea of the vortex.
Anaximander has been called a precursor of Darwin. His speculations about the animal world were daring. He had an idea of what is meant by adaptation to environment and survival of the fittest, and he saw the higher mammals could not represent the original type of animal. For this he looked to the sea, and he naturally fixed upon those fishes which present the closest analogy to mammals. Theophrastus preserves his theory of the origin of living creatures:
Living creatures arose from the moist element as it was evaporated by the sun. Man was like another animal, namely, a fish, in the beginning… At first human beings arose in the inside of fishes, and after having been reared like sharks, and become capable of protecting themselves, they were finally cast ashore and took to land… Originally man was born from animals of another species. While other animals quickly find food by themselves, man alone requires a lengthy period of suckling. Hence, had he been originally as he is now, he would never have survived.
The statements of Aristotle about the galeus levis were shown by Johannes Müller to be more accurate than those of later naturalists, and we now see that these observations were already made by Anaximander.
Anaximenes (c 550-480 BC) was the third of the great Milesian philosophers, of interest scientifically because he tried to explain his cosmology from what he observed, without using mystical concepts like To Apeiron. His is a materialistic philosophy in which even the soul is part of nature, being made of air, but it lacks the imaginative scale of Anaximander.
He substituted air for the Boundless, suggesting interesting links with the Hebrew scripture, Genesis, in which life is breathed into clay figures by God, and also with the Upanishads where the universal wind or breath is the unchanging life-soul of everything. He said the stars were fixed on the surface of a crystal hemisphere which made a daily rotation around the flat earth, yet had invisible dark bodies in the heavens causing eclipses and the whole heavens themselves revolved round a huge mountain in the far north—Persian ideas.
