ANAXAGORAS
Anaxagoras
(500 - 428 BCE), who is neither Anaximander nor Anaximenes, no matter
how frustratingly close their names are to each other, was born in
Clazomenae, another of the ancient Ionian city states in what is today
Turkey that rebelled against Persia together with the help of Athens.
Anaxagoras may have fought on the side of the Persians, against the
independence of Ionia. Many Greeks did, both those loyal and connected
to the Persian empire and those who were merely paid as mercenaries.
After Anaxagoras’ considerable property was destroyed, sources say he
gave up on possessions and turned to seeking knowledge and wisdom.
Anaxagoras is said to have been the first to bring philosophy to
Athens, where he arrived in 465 BCE. Athens was becoming the wealthy
center of Greek culture, which is how they were able to support the
rebellion of Ionia at the time. It would have been in Athen’s interests
to dominate Greek trade and not give a cut to Persia. Anaxagoras
taught Pericles, the famed Athenian general, and was admired by
Euripides, the Athenian poet and playwright. Anaxagoras stayed in
Athens for thirty years before returning to Ionia.
Many
scholars today note the similarities between Anaximenes and Anaxagoras,
suggesting that Anaxagoras, like other Anaxa-whoevers we have studied,
is continuing in the Ionian tradition. Agreeing with Anaximenes but
disagreeing, Anaxagoras thought the earth was flat and a strong current
of air supports it, and disturbances in the air under the earth cause
earthquakes. Like Thales, Anaxagoras believed that plants have
minds/souls and purpose.
Like
Pythagoras and Parmenides, Anaxagoras believed that male children are
born from the right side of the uterus, and females from the left. He
also theorized further that male children come from the sperm of the
right testicle, and females from the left, which is why they attach to
either side of the uterus. Thus, “I would give my right testicle”,
would mean, “I would give my unborn sons”.
Anaxagoras
did cosmology, explaining meteorites and eclipses. Plutarch says that
Anaxagoras predicted the fall of a meteorite in 467 BCE, by ancient
standards proof of his cosmological views but by modern standards
impossible. He argued that the sun was a mass of heated metal, like
that worked by a blacksmith. He said the Moon reflects the light of the
sun (correct). He said the moon has mountains (correct) and they were
inhabited (incorrect as far as we know). The sun and stars are masses
of stone kicked off from the earth, ablaze by rapid rotation, in line
with the Pythagorean account of the cosmos for the stars but not for the
Sun.
Strangely, Anaxagoras also argued that egg whites are bird’s milk.
Like
Socrates, he was charged with impiety, with irreverence to the gods for
these explanations (of the Sun and Moon, not bird’s milk). Athens was
not as accepting of a place as Ionia for cosmological speculation, as
Anaxagoras discovered. Saying that the Sun was a rock on fire was
apparently acceptable in Ionia but heresy in Athens.
In
Plato’s Apology, Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial which we will study
soon, Socrates is asked by the prosecution whether or not he thinks the
Sun is stone and Moon is earth, and Socrates responds by wondering if
he is being confused with Anaxagoras. Socrates says that neither the
jury nor his young students are stupid enough to believe that he would
hold such absurd views. Clearly, the Athenian assembly has Anaxagoras’
impiety in mind as they prosecute Socrates for the same crime, and
Socrates is aware of this and distances himself from Anaxagoras.
Socrates was not concerned with cosmology, arguing instead about ethics
and our ability to acquire knowledge and wisdom.
Anaxagoras
was put on trial in Athens. According to some sources, Pericles spoke
in his defense, but Anaxagoras was still sentenced to death, after which
Pericles helped him to flee to Lampsacus in Northern Ionia. According
to others, Pericles sent Anaxagoras to Lampsacus before he could be put
on trial as Pericles was himself losing favor in Athens. Either way,
Anaxagoras left Athens with the help of Pericles for Lampsacus to
continue his work until his death there less than ten years later.
Only
fragments of his philosophical work survive (sound familiar?).
Diogenes Laertius, who we hear from constantly, said that Anaxagoras
composed one short work which could be purchased for one drachma.
Socrates in Plato’s Apology says that the youth would not come to him
for answers if he held the foolish views of Anaxagoras, as they could
purchase these ideas for a single drachma at the market.
According
to Anaxagoras, the cosmos has always existed, but originally it
consisted of tiny fragments of elements mixed up. Even as everything
separated, each thing contained traces of everything else, which is how
transformation is possible. Anaxagoras wrote that “All things are in
everything”. Originally, everything was a homogenous mass, and out of
this things developed into what they are while still containing traces
of every other thing. Anaxagoras noted that if food becomes various
parts of animals and humans, becomes skin and bone and hair and muscle,
food (as well as matter in general) must already be these other things.
There were seeds of things (spermata, a strange yet familiar term), of
humans, animals, and plants, but these were undeveloped, intermixed into
everything before they separated and developed.
This
is Anaxagoras’ response to the Eleatic challenge. Being always was, as
Parmenides argues, but the differentiation of things is not an illusion
but a slow transformation that does not categorically or entirely
remove any particular thing from any other thing. Anaxagoras would
agree with Parmenides that fire is one and the same as everything that
is not fire, and that fire as a component of being always was and always
will be, but Anaxagoras argues that fire is relatively distinct from
everything that is not fire. Fire became more distinguished, but all
things contain fire and fire contains the seeds and components of all
things. Through the process, fire became much more fiery than
everything else, which remained far less fiery.
Anaxagoras
here seems like Melissus in negotiating with Parmenides’ Eleatic
challenge. While Anaxagoras disagrees that distinction is an absolute
illusion, distinction is a relative illusion insofar as we perceive fire
as simply not water and water as simply not fire. Fire is water, but
much more so fire, and water is fire, but much more so water. Being is
one and the same thing without a particular character in that it has all
character, just as Melissus argues to make sense of Parmenides, but
particular beings are relatively what they are and relatively not what
they are opposed to. Difference is an illusion, but only relatively, as
all things are relatively different, not completely different.
Anaxagoras
said that the cosmos is ordered by mind, ‘nous’ in the Greek. It is
mind that separated the like from the unlike, the similar from the
different. Mind was pure and independent, strikingly like God above the
chaotic waters in the book of Genesis. Anaxagoras noted that mind
clearly rules animals and humans, the higher and more developed forms of
life. Mind is in some things, such as plants and bears and humans, but
not in others while it still directs the process of all things,
including rocks and sand. Anaxagoras uses the metaphor of human beings,
who carry inanimate objects such as honey and milk, and lead the lower
animals such as cows in the direction we wish them to go. Likewise, the
cosmic mind moves the inanimate and leads the animate through the
cycles of things. Mind is alone, by itself, ‘self-ruled’. Like
Xenophanes, it does not seem to be affected by things but knows all
things and moves all things.
Plato
was influenced by both Heraclitus’ Logos and Anaxagoras’ Nous. While
Heraclitus already implied that the cosmic fire was a great mind that
speaks order downwards, Anaxagoras explicitly refers to the highest
ruling component of the cosmos as the element ‘mind’. This is identical
to the Indian philosopher and logician Kanada of the orthodox Hindu
Vaisheshika school, who considered both mind and void to be basic
elements of the universe.
Mind
rotated the chaotic mixture, just as the sun and celestial bodies move
in circles and the processes of life and the elements work in cycles on
earth. Things gradually were separated out into what they are today,
not sharply or immediately divided. This follows Anaximenes in
condensation and dissipation as basic dynamic of the elements.
First
were separated the cold mist from the warm aether, a primal cold
mixture of water and earth from a hot mixture of air and fire. The cold
further separated into water, earth and stone, and the hot and seeds of
things mixed into the earth, producing warm clay, in which spawned
first plants, and then animals and humans. While Anaxagoras was not an
atomist, his theory paved the way for later atomists’ theories and the
passage of philosophy from Ionia to Athens.
Anaxagoras
criticised Empedocles for saying there were four root substances of
fire, water, earth and air. Anaxagoras argued that skin and hair are
just as real and basic as fire and water, and there are no root
substances other than matter itself. While skin and hair do have fire
and water in them, or at least the seeds and components of fire and
water, so also do fire and water have the root components of skin and
hair within themselves. Anaxagoras says that things are not “split
apart with an axe”, are not categorically and totally separate from each
other. He specifically states that hot is not split from cold with an
axe, like Heraclitus saying that even opposing elements are one and the
same and only relatively, not categorically, distinct. Against
Empedocles, Anaxagoras argued that there are no primary and secondary
substances, as being is the only primary thing and all other substances
are equally secondary to it.
Some
scholars today dispute how different the two are, as Anaxagoras in some
ways seems to posit relatively primary substances that emerged earlier
in the slow separation of many beings out of the whole. Anaxagoras says
that air and aether dominated at first, the largest elements in size,
became relatively distinct first as part of the process, but he is not
saying that aether is the primary element. Rather, it is the first
element that emerged from the whole to be what it is now.
Anaxagoras,
unlike Parmenides but somewhat like Zeno, says that things are
infinitely divisible. He considers a grain of rice, which he believes
has the components of hair and muscle within it. There is no limit to
cutting the grain into pieces, just as there is no limit to matter
separating out into various substances. While Zeno found this to be a
paradox, Anaxagoras states the infinite regress as a matter of fact.
The atomists we will study soon disagree with Anaxagoras, and argue
that atoms are indivisible and there is no infinite regress of
divisibility in answer to Zeno.
There
remains, however, a problem for Anaxagoras’ view. How can uniform
being separate into many substances that are more so themselves? What
is the motor or motive of the differentiation if being is originally
uniform? Anaxagoras adds mind as an additional force guiding the
process, designing the differences between things and their
relationships to each other.
We
still today use the expression ‘deus ex machina’, the god/spirit in the
machine/design. The expression is usually used as a criticism of
adding in additional elements as an afterthought to close holes in an
argument or plot holes in a story. While Anaxagoras makes mind the
highest thing, it is separated from the physical processes, which the
Athenians found to be impious. The gods are involved with things, not
simply the detached highest characterless thing.
The
Roman Horace brings us the Latin phrase, saying that Greek actors
portraying gods in the tragedies were lowered onto the stage when
required. Today, in argument, ‘God did it’ or ‘People know that’ or
‘Science says’, any mental presence that simply enters the picture to
explain all too simply (Pyramids? Aliens!) can be criticized as
employing a ‘deus ex machina’.
Aristotle
argued against Anaxagoras, saying he put mind in as a final thought to
start the whole thing, just as the French philosopher Descartes did to
give consciousness and freedom to human beings. Descartes, like
Anaxagoras, said that mind/soul determines the physical but is separate
and above, which is why humans have free will. This creates a duality
of mind and body for which both Anaxagoras and Descartes were
criticized. This is still an issue for philosophy today. What is the
relationship of mind to body? The American (Berkeley) philosopher John
Searle believes saying “there is no problem” solves the problem, but
this is hardly satisfying. The British philosopher and early computer
scientist Alan Turing argued that machines can be said to understand
things (with the famous example that a light switch understands only
‘on’ and ‘off’), so if a robot can behave like a person we may treat it
like a person, but this seems equally problematic. While Searle and
Turing attempted to get rid of the hard dualism of Anaxagoras and
Descartes, the opposite attempt at simple identity of mind and body
leaves problems we are still dealing with.
Fans
of Japanese animation know that Ghost in the Shell is one of the
original two great Anime classics, concerned with the existence of mind
as all becomes cybernetic and genetically modified. Anaxagoras and
Turing remain the two poles we are faced with as we encounter more
complex forms of bioengineering and artificial intelligence.
Euripides,
great admirer and possible student of Anaxagoras, was ridiculed by his
critics for often employing the device of god-lowering crane,
particularly to end a play with a quick resolution. Characters, often
women who tragically accept their fate, are taken away by a god to
safety. Aristophanes, another famed playwright, mocked Euripides by
making Euripides himself a character in one of Aristophanes’ plays and
lowering him into scene on a crane.
Aristotle
criticized Euripides for overusing the device, and said that plots
should resolve due to their internal elements and not by an external
element in the end. This parallels his criticism of Anaxagoras, who
Aristotle says places a pure mind atop the whole to explain it without
giving an account in terms of the elements themselves. Aristotle
believes in a living and teleological universe, but mind and purpose are
physically involved in the process, not separate above. Aristotle
criticized Anaxagoras for bringing mind into the picture as the driving
force, but then failing to adequately describe what purposes are driving
to what ends. In a sense, Anaxagoras is saying that things developed
because, “Mind has a plan”, and Aristotle replies, “Yes, but what is the
plan, man?”. Aristotle’s work in physics is primarily an attempt to
work out the teleological forces and purposes at work in the cosmos, as
things work towards their final ends.
Anaxagoras’
work drove both materialism and teleology forward, paradoxically. He
accounted for the world in largely elemental processes, like the earlier
Ionians, but also left a mind in charge without filling in the details,
which Plato, Aristotle and other thinkers were happy to supply. In
Plato’s dialogue The Phaedo,
Socrates says that he was joyful on hearing Anaxagoras at first, but
then found that Anaxagoras did not make much use of mind in his system
at all.
EMPEDOCLES
Empedocles
(490 - 430 BCE) was from Agrigentum, a Greek colony in what is today
the Italian Island of Sicily. As Italy looks like a boot, Sicily looks
like a triangular rock being kicked into the Mediterranean by the toe of
the boot. Both Empedocles’ father and Empedocles worked to overthrow
the government of Agrigentum, which had grown abusive. Empedocles was
said to have been a champion of the poor and an enemy of the oligarchs,
the powerful who dominated politics. Like Heraclitus, he is said to
have been offered the throne, and refused.
He
was said to have visited Athens, as well as Babylon and Persia seeking
knowledge. His oratory skill was said to be unsurpassed. Aristotle
called him the father of rhetoric. He had Pythagorean friends, and
believed in reincarnation. He was also said to be able to cure
diseases, as well as control storms like a wizard.
Empedocles
had a fantastic death. While some sources say he ascended into the
heavens, others say he threw himself into a volcano, specifically Mount
Etna in Sicily, to demonstrate that he had become godlike. Perhaps
Empedocles was trying to out deus-ex-machina Anaxagoras. Diogenes
Laertius says that Empedocles wanted to prove to the people of
Agrigentum that he was a god or would be reborn a god, but the volcano
spit back up one of his bronze sandals (I’d like to think with a burp)
to show that Empedocles had been mortal and now was no more. Diogenes
Laertius was clearly not a fan of Empedocles or his philosophy.
A
contemporary of Anaxagoras, Empedocles responds both to him and the
Eleatic challenge of Parmenides. More of his work survives than any
other pre-Socratic philosopher. He was the last Greek philosopher to
record his philosophy in verse, as poetry rather than prose, although
Plato would continue to make art, namely theater, the medium of his own
work. Empedocles seems familiar with the philosophical verses of both
Xenophanes and Parmenides.
Empedocles wrote a poem, On Nature
an overused title by this point. (If I had a dollar for every ancient
Greek Philosopher who wrote a work called either ‘Nature’ or ‘On
Nature’, I’d have at least six bucks by now). Today we only have some
of the first part of the work, called Purifications.
In the very beginning, Empedocles says that he is no longer mortal but
now immortal and walks among mortals as a god, praised and decked with
flower garlands wherever he goes, curing diseases and raising the dead.
Empedocles
is said to have believed that the souls of all things (before
inhabiting all things, as Thales originally said) were in a state of
bliss before committing an unnamed crime and falling from grace into the
mortal bodies of plants, animals and humans. Through morality and
living a good life, we can become gods again, as Empedocles may have
believed he had achieved. This sounds strangely like Scientology today.
Perhaps Empedocles threw himself into the volcano searching for his
fellow Thetans.
Empedocles
argues that the four elements fire, air, earth and water are the roots
of all matter. They are unborn and undying. Empedocles identified fire
with Zeus, air with Hera (wife and sister of Zeus, goddess of women,
marriage and getting pissed at Zeus for cheating on her repeatedly),
water with Persephone (who Empedocles calls Nestis, daughter of Zeus,
queen of the underworld and goddess of vegetation and springtime), and
earth with Hades (who Empedocles calls Aidoneus, king of the
underworld). This would be quite orthodox along Homeric lines, except
that for Hesiod it was Poseidon who was king of the water, and Zeus was
king of the air, not fire. Hesiod does hold that Hades is lord of
earth. According to Hesiod, the three joined forces to defeat the
titans and take over the cosmos.
Empedocles,
in a Pythagorean gendering that departs from Hesiod, has fire upper
male, air upper female, earth lower male, and water lower female, an
opposed pair of kings and queens. Empedocles, unlike Anaxagoras,
identifies the elements with traditional gods even as he departs from
the tradition. Also, like earlier philosophers but unlike Hesiod, the
gods are unborn as well as undying. Like Heraclitus, Empedocles places
fire as king on top.
Other
than they are four, they are the one infinite of Parmenides, mixed
together in various proportions to become particular beings we see.
This, like Anaxagoras, is on the way towards atomism while still
conceiving of the elements as continuous wholes rather than particles.
Anaxagoras, as mentioned, criticised Empedocles, saying that hair and
skin are just as basic and real as water and fire, as all substances are
equally derivative of being.
Fire,
air, earth and water are called the ‘four classical substances’ today,
accepted by Plato and Aristotle, and with them the physics of European
Christians and Middle Eastern Muslims. While the earlier Ionians were
debating about these four, Empedocles is the first to say that all four
are equally primary, even as fire is on top. For thousands of years,
much of the world followed this formula. It was only in 1772 when the
Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was attempting to experimentally
prove Empedocles right that he accidentally isolated and discovered
oxygen, which he called ‘fire air’.
For
Empedocles, love and strife are the two forces that order the cosmos,
the love and strife of the gods who are the elements. Heraclitus has
already said that war and strife are the “father of all things”, but he
also believes that opposites are one and the same, so Empedocles is not
far from Heraclitus’ position. Heraclitus also, like Anaximander, sees
emotion and injustice in the process of the elements.
Like
Pythagoras, Empedocles argued that the universe was a sphere of
spheres. Like Anaxagoras, he also said that in the beginning the
elements were unmixed and the cosmos was a uniform sphere. Love and
strife were in balance, with love holding the sphere together at the
center and strife holding the boundaries apart from the nothing or chaos
that was outside. Then strife gained in influence, not enough to
disintegrate the sphere but enough to cause the initial separation of
the four elements and then the mixture and stratification of the
elements that became the many levels of mortal beings. As the cosmos
works in cycles, love will again gain the upper hand and unite all
things back into the original pure unmixed state, which will then again
be mixed into a diverse universe by strife in the next round of the
cosmic cycle. This is quite similar to the previously mentioned kalpa
system of ancient Indian thought.
As
the world mixed and stratified, Empedocles said that there were cases
of human arms and heads unjoined to bodies, and monsters of various
sorts, part animal and part human. Like Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, and
like Plato who borrows from both as well as Empedocles, the form of the
human is pre-designed and latent, waiting for the cosmos to figure
itself out such that it can emerge. The historian Herodotus believed
that there were dog-headed people and cyclops living in parts of India,
explaining the various monsters encountered by Odysseus on his odyssey.
Empedocles’ physics explains the homeric monsters of the traditional
mythology.
Empedocles
argues that human beings were formed from pre-human dual beings of both
genders, much as the gods and goddesses were undifferentiated in the
pure unmixed sphere. In Plato’s dialogue The Symposium,
we will read that Aristophanes, the playwright as a character of
Plato’s play, the same who lowered his own Euripides as a character into
scene to mock the overuse of deus ex machina, argues that love feels
like completion because early in the cosmos human beings were joined in
pairs before being separated by Zeus, which is why heterosexual men and
women find completion in each other and gay and lesbian people find
completion in each other. This follows Empedocles’ theory, as love is
integration of what was originally united but later separated, while
further attempting to explain homosexuality.
Buddhist
thought also endorses the idea that all binding together in union is
love, and all separation into division is hate, as our minds are the
cosmos. To this day, psychology is still puzzling over the relationship
between emotion and the basic cognitive acts of association and
disassociation. It may seem odd to say that emotion may be at the root
of doing all thinking and conceptualization, even supposedly ‘objective’
hard mathematics and physics, but consider that association (cuddling
up to the familiar) and disassociation (Ahhh! Get it away from me!)
dominate the animal mind and emotions were basic to the mammalian mind
long before humanity evolved our complex problem solving minds.
For
Empedocles, like the Pythagoreans, souls reincarnate, and plants,
animals and humans are linked in chains of life. For this reason,
Empedocles promoted vegetarianism. Wicked people become animals (so,
maybe we SHOULD eat them?) and good people become divine, much as
Empedocles believed he had before hurling himself into the volcano.
According to sources, Empedocles said that he had once been a daimon, a
divine spirit, much like the daimon that Socrates told others he spoke
to when philosophizing. As Christianity spread into ancient Greece, the
traditional spirits were seen as evil, and so ‘daimon’ became the root
of ‘demon’.
Empedocles
said that because he had eaten meat for decades in a previous life, he
had been banished to the animal kingdom, but as Empedocles he was about
to become immortal in the next life, having made up for his sins. If
so, he believed that he would be reborn a god after emerging from the
volcano. One Roman source says that Empedocles was reborn from the
volcano, was shot into the heavens and now lives on the moon, subsisting
on dew. If true, this would confirm the theory of Anaxagoras that the
moon is inhabited.
Similarly,
Empedocles was a critic of animal sacrifice to the gods, which he
believed was human sacrifice. He argued that in the glorious past,
before the strife of his own day, people were wiser and gave the gods
offerings of honey and grain, knowing well that reincarnation would
bring terrible rebirths on those ignorant of reincarnation.
Empedocles
argued that a warm uterus produces a male child, and a cool uterus
produces a female. This explains why males are larger, darker in skin
and harrier. The connections here remain unclear.
Empedocles
argued that light emerges from our eyes, presumably from the fire of
the mind by which we imagine and conceptualize, and that this touches
things and allows us to see them. For thousands of years, many bought
this until Avicenna, the Islamic philosopher and doctor, demonstrated
that light comes into the eye but not out of the eye around 1000 BCE.
Avicenna questioned Empedocles’ theory, speculating that if it were
correct, then we should be able to see things in the dark.
Empedocles
argued that we can learn about things through perception, but we can
only see one side of things at a time. With thought, we can put
together the various sides of things to ‘see’ them as they fully are.
Much as Heraclitus says about wisdom, which sees beyond the divisions
of things by experts, Empedocles says it is the job of philosophy to
integrate things into wholes, rather than merely carve them into parts.
This corresponds to his cosmology, as everyone can see the differences
between the four elements but only the philosopher can speculate about
their origin and union.
Recently,
the French philosopher Badiou has argued a similar position, that the
task of philosophy is to metacritique systems of thought and culture by
integrating what is often disassociated. For example, seeing science as
political, asking where the money comes from or who in our society
benefits from the funding, is the job of a philosopher of science, not a
scientist. This is because the philosopher sees beyond the merely
scientific and the merely political to ask questions about how the two
are interrelated. While philosophy in medieval Europe was called the
“queen of the sciences”, the most important science for understanding
the others, most science majors today graduate without ever taking a
history of science class or a philosophy of science class in addition to
their science classes. This is good insofar as the biologist should
concentrate on frog DNA rather than worrying about politics or finding
new donors, but bad insofar as the members of the system are cogs in a
machine that does not ask much critical oversight from them.
Richard
Dawkins, the scientist, author and prominent New Atheist, has argued
recently that because science is quite accomplished today, we no longer
need philosophy. I side very much with Badiou, noting that for decades
far more has been spent on weapons than on hunger. Consider that
Einstein and Oppenheimer created nuclear weapons for the American
military, believing them to be so horrible that they would never be
used. After America used them on Japan, Einstein and Oppenheimer became
two of the most prominent critics of nuclear weapons. While science is
excellent at supplying us with knowledge and technology, Heraclitus
says that wisdom is the act of the mind that unifies all things, just as
Empedocles says it is philosophy, the love of wisdom, which gives us
the greater conceptions, the farthest views, the greater similarities
and unities of things beyond their differences and distinctions.
