Summary

Klazomenai Anaxagoras (Greek: Αναξαγόρας), (500 BC

The year of Anaxagoras' birth and death can only be approximated. Diogenes, in his major work Laertius, quoting the Chronicles of Apollodorus, claimed that Anaxagoras was born in the 70th Olympiad (500-497 BC) and died in the first year of the 88th Olympiad (428-427 BC). 480 BC

A. E. Tylor, in his essay On the Date of the Trial of Anaxagoras, puts the life of Anaxagoras between 500-428 BC and the trial against him in 450 BC. His claim is supported by several different arguments.

The third theory was put forward by Georg Fridrich Unger. Anaxagoras was born in 533 BC, arrived in Athens in 494 (after the fall of Miletus) and lived there for the next 30 years. His best known disciples were Themistocles, Pericles and Euripides. After the meteorite impact of Aigospotamoi (467

We know from Diogenes Laertius that Anaxagoras was the son of Hegebisulos or Eubolos and came from a noble family in Klazomenai (a small Ionian town near Smyrna). However, he renounced his inheritance and devoted his life to natural science. According to Theophras, Anaxagoras was the son of Hegebisulos and was born shortly before Empedocles.

He was mainly an astronomer and used his astronomical knowledge to predict many natural phenomena. He is said to have predicted the impact of a meteor and also predicted earthquakes.

He was about twenty when he arrived in Athens, where he later founded a school of philosophy. The time and circumstances of his arrival in Athens are also disputed: some records say that Pericles' father invited him to Athens to be his son's tutor. Others say that he arrived in Greece with Xerxes' troops. This hypothesis would justify the charge of 'mediumism' that Pericles' enemies accused him of thirty years later.

According to the doxographers, he was a disciple of Anaximenes. This is doubtful, however, because when Anaxagoras was born, Anaximenes was already dead. It cannot be ruled out that he indirectly heard the teachings of Anaximenes from one of his disciples, for Theophras said of him: 'He thought like Anaximenes.'

Works by

Diogenes Laertius Laertius lists Anaxagoras as the author of the only work, but the whole book has not survived. Fragments of Anaxagoras can be found in Symplikios. From Symplikios' claim that the book of Anaxagoras could be bought for only one drachma, philosophical historians conclude that it could not have been very long. The text of Symplikius (in. phys. p. 34) also suggests that Anaxagoras' work consisted of several parts.

According to the record of Diogenes Laertius, the first line of Anaxagoras' book was, "All things were together; then reason consented and ordered them."

Pere

There are conflicting records of Anaxagoras' trial. If we accept the chronology of Demetrius of Phaleron, the trial of Anaxagoras predates the political career of Pericles. According to Satyrus' account, the accuser was Thucydides, and the charge was blasphemy and sympathy with the Persians. According to Plutarch, in 433 BC, a man named Diopeithês put a proposal (which was later adopted) to the assembly of the people to summon to tribunal those who denied God and those who theorised about the heavens. In contrast, Satyrus places the trial at the beginning of Pericles' political career (450 BC).

Diogenes, quoting Laertius Sotion Diadokhai, claimed that Anaxagoras was condemned by Cleon. The accusation was a denial of God, since Anaxagoras claimed that the Sun was a glowing substance. Anaxagoras' lawyer was Pericles, and his punishment was a fine of five talents and exile. Also Diogenes quotes Satyrus' Biographies, where it is said that Thucydides was accused by him as an opponent of Pericles: not only of blasphemy, but also of having had contact with the Medes ('mediumship'). In his absence he was sentenced to death.

According to other records, he was sentenced to death by the judges. However, he was saved from death by Pericles, the most powerful man in Athens at the time, who was his disciple and friend: he bribed the prison guards and freed him. Anaxagoras was then forced into exile.

Anaxagoras's reaction to early monism was rather extreme: like Empedocles, he objected to the Parmenidesan One, but he thought that Empedocles's pluralism did not go far enough: the ancestral mixture hypothesized by Anaxagoras was not enough to contain only the traditional pairs of opposites, or only the four roots of Empedocles, but included the part (moira) and the seed (spermata) of an infinite multiplicity, which were nothing alike. According to John Burnet, if we were to call these seeds 'elements', we might say that the seeds are the elements of Anaxagoras' system, for the things of the world are built up on their basis and also differ according to them.

It is in the writings of Anaxagoras that the juxtaposition of matter without reason and the Self with reason first appears. He was one of the forerunners of dualism, and although his doctrine was not as elaborate as that of Plato, his theory was revolutionary in his day. The world of Anaxagoras essentially consisted of two distinct and separable entities, matter and Self. Matter is a passive thing without consciousness, but the active Self is capable of knowing it and arranging it as it pleases. The existence of these two things is completely independent of each other, but they need each other in order for the present world to come into being: matter needs Mind to order it and Mind needs matter to accomplish what it wants.

Cosmological teachings

According to the fragments of Anaxagoras, things from the One can be divided into three different categories according to their present state. We can distinguish:

The elements of the first category are those things whose condition has not changed since the separation. The elements of the second category are the result of further disintegration of the elements of the previous category. The category of the mixed can include anything that is either a mixture of the elements of the separated, or a mixture of the elements of the separated, or both: a mixture of elements from the categories of the separated and the separated.

But the One contained one more thing: the seeds of all things (see B 4, 1). However, Anaxagoras revealed very little about these seeds. But let us see what we can know about them: first, we learn that they are contained in all things that are composed (B 4.1), that they can have different shapes, colours and tastes (ibid.), that there are infinitely many of them, and that each seed is unique, i.e. it is not like any other seed (B 4.8). The variety of colours and tastes of seeds informs us that opposites are present in them, that they must be complex things.

According to the philosopher and historian of philosophy Gregory Vlastos, Anaxagoras should be taken literally, because unlike Empedocles, he did not use poetic similes, he wrote prose, not poetry. That is why, says Vlastos, when Anaxagoras wrote seeds, he also meant seeds, as he knew the seed in the biological sense. To better understand what Anaxagoras might have meant by seeds, Vlastos suggests looking at the views of his contemporaries on the subject. Anaxagoras's contemporaries, whether philosophers or physicians, agreed that seeds are the basic elements that come from a parent body and from which a new individual can develop. It grows and develops according to the principle of similarity. This means that each constituent (part) of the mixture takes in similar things from its environment. This may have been Anaxagoras' view of seeds, Vlastos writes, and is supported by fragment B 10: "How can hair be made of what is not hair, and flesh of what is not flesh?"

Anaxagoras, like Empedocles, attempted to describe a perfectly disembodied entity by introducing the Self. However, for him, as for his predecessors, the only ultimate criterion of reality was extension, so he described the Esthmus as that which is the purest and purest of all things. Exactly what he imagined it to be is not known for sure, most likely material, but still something of a different nature from the constituents of the One. For while each of the constituents of the One is mixed with the others, the Self is made up of something much finer, and is able to be purely itself because of its fineness. So, at the beginning of cosmogony, in the world, there were two different things: the One and the Self. And of these two primordial types, the Self is the higher, because it is able to dominate and form the One. One could say that Self is the active principle, and the One and its parts are the passive, receptive ones.

Like Parmenides and Empedocles, Anaxagoras believed that movement should not be taken as a given, but explained. Like Empedocles, he considered an external cause, some abstract principle, to be the cause of motion, but instead of the pair of Desire and Love, he assumed a single force: the Estonian. However, he did not give any explanation as to how and why the Self initiated the movement, leaving the question entirely open. For lack of an explanation of these causes, among others, both Plato and Aristotle sharply criticized his doctrine, because, the two philosophers argued, after Empedocles had identified the cause of the world order and its processes in the Aesis, he later explained the order and processes by lower causes - air, aether, water and other nonsense. Aristotle likewise reproaches Anaxagoras for having named the Estonian as the cause of the order in the world, yet later on he applied the Estonian as some deus ex machina, which he invoked when he was at a loss to explain the cause of the way things are. In all other cases, he named all sorts of things other than the Estonian as the cause of what was produced.

The criticisms of Plato and Aristotle are accepted among philosophical historians today: it is generally accepted that Anaxagoras, in naming Estonia as a principle, was a big and bold step forward for his predecessors, but they are also puzzled as to why he later names all sorts of other things in his explanation of causes. This "Essence" was, one might say, the god of Anaxagoras. And although Anaxagoras could not yet get beyond the idea that ultimate reality must have a spatial extension, he was perhaps the pre-Socratic thinker who came closest to the monotheistic view of God that is still accepted today.

In the cosmos of Anaxagoras there are neither the smallest nor the largest parts, for each thing can be both large and small in its relation to itself. Thus, a thing cannot be said to have a smallest part, but there is always a part smaller than it, but at the same time a part larger than it. This statement also satisfies the Eleanic notion of non-existence, since if we were to accept that there is a 'smallest part', then anything smaller than that would be non-existent, and Anaxagoras would contradict his earlier statements about the existent.

According to some analysts, such as G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, Anaxagoras was responding to Zeno of Elea in fragment B 5. According to this version, Anaxagoras was trying to point out that just because there are exactly as many things as there are, it does not follow that their number is finite. Infinite divisibility will therefore no longer be a paradox: however small the parts into which something is divided, these parts will always have a real extension. But we need no longer fear that if the division has no final member, then the sum of the members will be infinitely large, since, as we read in fragment B 3, everything can be written as large as well as small.

Having stated that the cosmos is made up of many beings, Anaxagoras also had to answer the question of how the initial unity became a multiplicity. This answer, however, must not lose sight of the Parmenidean theorem, which Anaxagoras also accepted as a fundamental theorem, that what is, is eternal and never perishes. Anaxagoras's solution to this problem was to declare that the original One was in fact a mixture that already contained all the building blocks (parts) and cores of the present world. However, since, like Parmenides, he denied the existence of emptiness, he could not say that the things that arose from this primordial mass were completely separable in space, and so he concluded that, just as at the beginning of the cosmogony, things must be together now.

After eliminating the existence of emptiness, however, Anaxagoras had to grapple with a new problem: if everything is together in the beginning and everything is together now, how does the initial state of the universe differ from the present state. As a solution, he argued the following: all things are in all things (B 6), and in some things there is Mind. Although nowhere did Anaxagoras write that by things having Self he meant living things, it is generally accepted among analysts that this is all he could have meant. Anaxagoras' explanation of the reason for the difference between human and animal intellect is interesting - if what Aristotle says about it in his On the Parts of the Animal Body is true. For he says that Anaxagoras did not consider man wiser than animals because he might have had more intellect, but because he had become erect, standing on two legs, and thus began to use his forelimbs as hands.

In the world of Anaxagoras, all change is due to the activity of the Self. In the beginning, from the primordial mixture, things began to detach themselves as a result of the activity of the Self. This is one of the separating activities of the Self: the initiation of movement, or more precisely of circular motion, which made it possible to separate things to a certain extent from the multitude. According to Plato and Aristotle, the Self initiated only the first movement, all other subsequent processes being the result of mechanical factors. Once the Aesir had started the cycle, the matter that had been moved, now in a whirlpool, was subjected to the laws of physics and probably decomposed into further parts under the increasing influence of centrifugal force:

According to another theory, the Self separates things from the primordial mixture by knowing them, by distinguishing them from the others. The intellectual-separation theory has its origins in the philosophy of Parmenides. According to him, people did not recognise things, but decided, made it their habit, to distinguish between two forms. They did not recognise that they were different, but distinguished them and then attributed characteristics to them.

Thus, the beginning of Anaxagoras' cosmogony can be interpreted as an addition to the above Parmenides fragment. For Parmenides says only that humans, by their own determination, arrived at the concept of multiple beings, but says nothing about how this distinction was made. The cosmogony of Anaxagoras takes this theory further: the world in its original, initial state forms a homogeneous unity, and later, through the work of some intelligence, the multiplicity is carved out of the One, but this happens without the continuity of the One being broken down. According to this theory, then, the Anaxagorean Mind also distinguishes rather than physically separates things.

Philosophical historian Jonathan Barnes has explained why things were not recognizable in Anaxagoras' prehistoric mixture: in the original mixture, the particles of gold or meat were so tiny that they could not be observed, just as a glass of wine poured into the sea does not cause any observable change in the seawater. (This is precisely the reason why the original mass has no colour (201): the colourless air and aithers, which outnumbered the other things mixed with them, absorbed the colours of the other things mixed with them. A glass of Burgundy will not turn green into red.)

Anaxagorasian cosmology begins with the idea that air and aether held everything in check, because the primordial mixture contained most of them. Thus, the primordial mass appeared to be whatever it contained the most of: air and aether. This was the reason why nothing else was distinguishable or recognisable in it, because everything in the primordial mass appeared to be air and aitherm. The same thing happens with things in the present world, all things appear to be what they are most of. So the air and the aether and all the other things are real things, unlike Parmenides where they are just a figment of the human mind.

Anaxagoras subscribed to the Ionian notion that there are many worlds like our own. Lines 3 - 6 of fragment B 4 of Anaxagoras read as follows:

Based on the above fragment, many scholars have argued that Anaxagoras believed in the existence of several simultaneous worlds, while others have denied it. Symplikius, who preserved the above quotation, was at a loss as to what exactly Anaxagoras could have meant. He thought it more likely, however, that there was more than one world, otherwise Anaxagoras would not have used the phrase 'as we do' twice in his text. And by different worlds, Anaxagoras could not have been referring to worlds that follow one another in time, Simlikios continues, because he is not speaking in the past tense when he says that people carry the most useful things into their houses and use them. He does not say that they used them, but that they use them.

According to the historian of philosophy Edward Zeller, the meaning of the above fragment of Anaxagoras is unclear. He thinks it is more likely that the philosopher was thinking of a distant region of our earth, or the moon, but certainly not of several co-existing worlds. Burnet considers Zeller's insights unlikely and says that, despite the fact that Aetius, Anaxagoras, included him among the thinkers who assumed a single world, the content of fragment B 4 is evidence that this is not the case. According to him, the phrase "it could have taken place not only here but elsewhere" means that the Self, in boundless matter, created vortices in several different places. In any case, we can conclude that Aetius was not quite clear about what Anaxagoras meant on this point, for in one place (A 65) he includes the philosopher among those who believed that the world was ephemeral and therefore claimed the existence of successive worlds; in another place (A 63) he reports that Anaxagoras believed in the existence of one world. According to the historian of philosophy Francis Macdonald Cornford, Anaxagoras is not speaking of worlds other than our own, but of distant landscapes in our world, as Plato (Phaedo 109 A skk.) does in his myth of the 'abysses of the earth'. Another interesting solution to the Anaxagoras' problem of the myriad worlds can be found in P. Leon's (1927) The Homoiomeries of Anazagoras. To explain the theory of homoiomereia, Leon used his insight into the theory of the numberless worlds: there are countless worlds like ours, but only at the subconscious level. This means that the reflection of the cosmos is in every single part of it, i.e. in every drop of water, breadcrumb, air, there is a miniature of our world.

Epistemology

After Anaxagoras postulated the presence of multiple beings in our world in his philosophy of nature, he was able to explain not only movement and change, but also the validity of perception. He believed that perception itself was possible, but he had doubts about its reliability, because he believed that our senses were too weak to recognise truth.

Sextus Empiricus tells us that Anaxagoras illustrates the unreliability of the senses by the small changes in colour: if we take two colours, black and white, and then gradually pour small doses of one into the other, we will find that our vision will be unable to distinguish between the small changes, although some change is bound to occur. This means that we cannot really say that we know any one thing, because in each thing there are many components which, because of their smallness, our senses are unable to detect. Therefore, we do not perceive things, but only phenomena. Thus, by saying that 'everything has a part of everything', Anaxagoras could have been referring to the fact that the things of our world, although separated from the primordial mass, are not completely separated from each other. Rather, it could be said that similar particles were attracted to each other, and thus things were made to appear to be what there are more of. This "appearing to be" cannot, however, be identical with the nature of the thing, since we can never see the thing in its pure reality, it is unrecognisable to us, we only see its images: the phenomena (see Anax. B 21 a).

Theophras, who collected and commented on the teachings of his predecessors in On the Senses, also gives a detailed account of Anaxagoras. From him we learn that he consciously opposed Empedocles, who claimed that only the like perceives the unlike, because, according to him, things happen the other way round: perception is effected by the opposite, since the like is not affected by the unlike:

Accordingly, we perceive something when we come into contact with something that is contrary to either our physical or our spiritual self, and since, as Anaxagoras has already stated, in everything, there is a part of everything (B 6, 2), it follows that in our body there is a part of everything, and that is why we are able to perceive diversity.

Theophrastos also tells us that Anaxagoras explained the function of each of the senses: he explained vision by the reflection in the pupil. Smell was explained by inhalation, and hearing by the sound entering the 'hollow' skull. The strength of perception depended on the size of the organ: the larger the eye, the sharper the vision. The size or smallness of the eye also determines the quality of distance vision: the larger the eye, the farther it can see. The same applies to hearing and smell. And perception is a kind of pain, which is why the longer we are in contact with the opposite, the more unbearable the pain becomes.

In addition to describing Anaxagoras' theory of perception, Theophras also pointed out its shortcomings. In his view, Anaxagoras was starting from a correct insight when he countered Empedocles by claiming that perception occurs through opposites. For change does not occur as a result of the like but as a result of the opposite. But he did not agree at all that all perception was painful. Probably following Aristotle's model of natural and unnatural motion, he distinguished between two types of perception: a natural perception with a pleasant sensation and a painful unnatural, forced perception. As an explanation for his criticism, he invoked experience, arguing that Anaxagoras' theory simply did not fit with experience.

Sources

1. Anaxagoras
2. Klazomenai Anaxagorasz