On Anaxagoras
Substance Pluralism Process Philosophy
A Post-Parmenidesian Pre-Socratic, that dealt with a set of problems, like Empedocles, that involves the Heraclitus/Parmenides dichotomy imbued in. Back then, one had to ‘Abide by the Laws of Parmenides’ and could do so by the path of Heraclitus:
No philosophies about the universe can exist by invoking the notion of things:
Coming-to-be
Passing away
Similarly, nothing can arise from what they are not
Anaxagoras carved the Substance Pluralism Pre-Socratic path, one that Leibniz re-found in the Enlightenment. Anaxagoras gives us theories of matter where he makes distinctions in mind/matter but also analyzes matter itself. Anaxagoras Philosophy develops both the Mechanistic and Teleological views in curious ways.
Anaxagoras was around 500 BCE, born into a wealthy aristocratic family but shunned wealth and lived a life devoted to Philosophy. When asked if it is better to be born or to not be born, Anaxagoras replied that being alive is better than not being alive because it enables one to study the heavens and cosmos. Anaxagoras was an Ionian Greek but he did not take pride in being a Greek (unlike his contemporary Greeks who held a great pride in themselves being Greek). Anaxagoras prided himself instead in being a citizen of the universe and honored the universe as well as was deeply concerned for it.
Nature of Matter
Anaxagoras addresses Empedocles Theory of Matter (Earth, Water, Fire, Earth), Empedocles claims that for instance Bone is composed of constituent elements such as:
Four parts fire
Two parts water
Two parts earth
Empedocles believed himself to be abiding by the Laws of Parmenides against Becoming (something can’t arise from what it is not, one thing can not morph into another thing). Anaxagoras however claims that Empedocles violates the Law - if bone comes into existence when fire/water/earth come together, then he is asserting that bone emerges from what it is not (bone is not fire/water/earth) so how can it arise from these elements?
“How can hair come out of not hair, and flesh out of not flesh?” Anaxagoras
To solve this dilemma, Anaxagoras adds his own flair by claiming that:
“EVERYTHING IS IN EVERYTHING” Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras truly meant this, because by saying this he sidesteps the issue he sees in Empedocles. He uses digestion to explain what he means: when we eat an apple, the contents of the apple are assimilated into our body and literally become a part of us. However, according to Parmenides it would make no sense that the apple is transformed into blood or bone, for that would mean that blood and bone arose from what they are not - that being an apple. Anaxagoras had to abide by the Laws of Parmenides so instead he makes the claim that the blood and bone already pre-exist in the apple to begin with (along with everything else in the world). That is to say that everything is in everything, kind of like in DNA.
This begs the question though, if everything exists in everything, how are things different in the world? If everything exists in gold, but everything also exists in bone, then why are some things gold and why are some things bone, that is to say qualitatively? In order to explain this, Anaxagoras invokes the Principle of Predominance. In this principle, Anaxagoras finds his solace – each thing obtains its unique characteristics from the substance which exists in it in the highest concentration. So while there is everything in everything, that is to say, blood, bone, and gold in gold - what makes it gold is that gold is the predominant thing in it. Again think of DNA here, in our DNA lies many latent abilities that we would or wouldn’t have depending on if these things were ‘turned on’ or ‘turned off’ (Genetic Engineering leverages this). Due to perception reigning supreme, the everything in everything in gold is indiscernible because of the low amounts within it whereas what is discernible are the high concentration of ‘DNA molecules’ of gold within it.
“Nothing is like anything else, but those things are and were most plainly each thing, of which there are most in it.” Anaxagoras
Nature of Mind
Anaxagoras’s heralded contribution to Philosophy was his division of universe into mind and matter. Early pre-socratic philosophers were Hylozoists, in that they thought that matter was imbued with life and intelligence - therefore being capable of its own movement. However this notion was inherited from earlier mythological beliefs and slowly discarded by the later pre-socratics. We have the hindsight of modernity and Calculus to help guide us through the Great Mysteries of Motion, Change, and Curves - but the early presocratics were not so lucky. They were stuck giving proofs for the causes that moves matter (thanks Parmenides) and slowly grew more and more untenable. It soon became obviously necessary to postulate some other cause for movement - the external cause became a fan favorite. This external cause that moves matter, Anaxagoras claimed that it was Nous or Greek for mind. Anaxagoras made mind a substance separate from matter, standing over and above matter so to speak. Mind is an intelligent force that governs the movement of the dumb material universe. Matter is simply the pawns in the great game of chess of the Minds.
“It is the finest and purest of all things, and has judgment of everything and greatest power; and everything that has life, both greater and smaller, all these Mind controls.” Anaxagoras
Our own mind is a reflection of the universal mind (world Mind or God’s Mind) operating through the material bodies. Mind is the life force of everything (Élan vital), without it the universe would be inert, static, and wholly devoid. The universe needs Mind to bring dynamic life to it therefore intelligence. Mind is the birth of the cosmos according to Anaxagoras. Before Mind, matter was motionless, it wasn’t until Mind sprang into action therefore ‘pushing’ inert matter into motion and creating the cosmos.
Competing Myths of the Universe (Teleological versus Mechanistic)
Anaxagoras is a unique philosopher due to his combining of the two Myths, or ways of viewing the universe:
Teleological View: Telos in Greek meaning ‘end’ or ‘purpose’, meaning there is some end or purpose to existence. This purpose exerts a causal influence on things impelling them forward.
Mechanistic View: Mechanical universe, there is no purpose or end to existence, the universe and everything in it is solely a product of past causes (therefore can be calculated)
Anaxagoras combined both of these views saying that in the beginning, Mind set Matter into motion for a purpose (to produce an ordered cosmos) - but after this beginning, Mind leaves Matter to unfold and evolve without Mind and solely according to physical/mechanical laws. This type of Eutaxiological View (Teleological + Mechanistic) is found and picked up in the Vitalism of Bergson as he finds himself criticizing both of those views. But to the contemporary Greeks in Anaxagoras’s time, it was received with mixed reviews. Plato espoused the Teleological views Anaxagoras held but did not agree with Anaxagoras’s split-view away from Teleology. He was not a fan of the Mind, leaving its creation to run for itself so to say (we can see that in Socrates’s primacy to the immediacy of the speaker, as opposed to writing ala postmodernism).
“Anaxagoras stood out like a single sober man by comparison with the wild assertions of his predecessors.” Aristotle
“Anaxagoras uses Mind…to account for the formation of the world; and whenever he is at a loss to explain why anything necessary is, he drags it in. But in other cases he makes anything rather than Mind the cause.” Aristotle
The Legacy of Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras is known for introducing some very important philosophical concepts. The concept of a teleological principle (Mind, nous) that is responsible for the birth and initial orderings of the universe was no small feat. Likewise for his ability to divide mind and matter, thus being a sort of predecessor to Leibniz as well as Bergson and many others.
Notes for Nomads (“We Call Them Pirates Out Here”)
The idea of everything is in everything is a concept found in Tibet. The Tibetans speak of us as collections of contacts (read as Spinozan affects), well what is a contact (Affect)? The Tibetans look at the Himalayas as a beautiful analogy tool. Him means snow, alaya means receptacle - Himalayas - receptacles for snow. This receptacle is something that holds something else so to say, like when we are meditating and we get to a point where we gain an awareness of our stream of consciousness, and can ask what this stream contains? The flow of the stream is a type of flow of thoughts - or of receptacles. You can do a myriad of things with each individual thought, a thought can come into experience and be taken very seriously or trivialized. Taking a thought very seriously could look like rumination, or allowing it to simply pass you by. The act of meditation can allow for an awareness of a certain thought’s sting and the feeling that this sting can have on you, and an awareness of the lack of sting of other thoughts. This awareness allows for a certain detachment it could be described, but the awareness is not an act of judgment nor an act of pushing away - no clinging. The essence at the heart of every thought is a sort of receptacle of Affects, the thought can range in magnitude of Affect depending on the affects contained or lack thereof. Be careful here to not project a being that can exist, a grasper - it’s tempting to ask, “What is the experiencer?” – there is no substratum, there is no thing or entity that thinks or feels, but only thinking and feeling. When thinking we bring these thoughts alive or make them dead, when we stop thinking these thoughts stop existing, perfectly encapsulated in this quote from the original ‘Blade Runner’:
“Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
We are the thing that can change who we are right now, but simultaneously possesses these memories (Affects, Contacts, perceptions). We are thinking these thoughts but these thoughts do not exist objectively out in the world, but there is no self that is doing the thinking. Try this head trip on for size, the goal of meditation could be to gain an awareness of this stream of consciousness, outside the stream of consciousness, but what if you were to turn this ‘focus of perception’ around on itself - only to see there is nobody in the seat behind the mask (ego), Ram Dass likes to say “but who is minding the store?”.
Nietzsche’s Myth of Anaxagoras
The nous has figured out a type of motion that is a spiraling movement in order to accomplish its end, demonstrating its marvelous efficiency – for by it the task is nearer completion with each passing moment. The nous began at some random point of the chaotic mixture, in the form of a small turn, and in ever greater orbits this circular movement spans all available being - by its centrifugal force pulling out all likes to join their likes:
First, the rolling gyrations cause a pulling out of their likes from:
Dense to the Non-dense
Rare to the Common
Dark to the Light
Light to the Heavy
Moist to the Dry
Warm to the Non-Warm
Cold to the Non-Cold
Aethereal Masses
Warm
Light
Rare
Thin
Dry
Aerial Masses
Dark
Cold
Heavy
Solid
Moist
After separation of the Aethereal masses from the Aerial ones, the next effect of the wheel that is rolling in ever larger circles is something like the eddy created by someone standing in a non-moving body of water – the heavy components are forced into the center and are compressed. In the same way, the traveling water-spout in chaos forms along its outside a concentration of its ethereal, thin light components, along its inside the cloudy, heavy moist ones.
Then continuing this process, the aerial mass within separates out:
First its Water
Then its Earthy components out of the Water
Then out of the Earthy (with the help of terrible cold pervading it) the minerals
But sometimes, some of the mineral masses are wrenched sideways off the earth by the momentum of the revolutions and cast into the realm of hot bright aether. There the fiery element brings them to a red-hot glow, and then swings them along with its own circular movement (itself being its own process) thus causing them to radiate light.
As the sun and stars, they now illuminate and warm the dark and cold earth.
Anaxagoras’ myth has a marvelously bold simplicity, a type of grandeur of its proud accomplishment in the fact that it derives its entire cosmos of “Becoming” from the moving circle. Where Parmenides looked upon true existence as though it were a motionless dead globe, Anaxagoras’ nous started its revolutions - all order, all conformity to law and all beauty of the world are the natural consequences of that first impulse to move. His nous however was no Deus ex machina, it was Eutaxiological – a type of oscillation which, once having begun, is necessary and predictable in its course and attains effects which are the equal of the wisest calculations of reasoned thought and of the utmost planning of purposiveness - but without being them.
“I am enjoying the pleasure of seeing a well-ordered totality creating itself, without the aid of arbitrary fictions, only by the impulse of ordered laws of motion, which is so similar that world system which is our own, that I cannot keep from taking it to be the same. It seems to me that one might say at this point, without presumption, ‘Give me materiality and I shall build a world from it!’”
Anaxagoras is our archetypal spirit of Substance Pluralist of Process Philosophy that was around the fifth century BC, Leibniz is the continuation of this spirit in the 17th century and Deleuze in the 20th century with ‘The Fold’. Anaxagoras navigated around the muddy traps of Parmenides using the trails of Heraclitus before him but not only that, also navigating around the murky traps of falling too far into Mechanistic Myths or Teleological Myths - which Bergson and Whitehead takes notes on. Process Philosophy takes on a large component of Poetry, found in the likes of Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Bergson, to overcome murky hurdles of logic from time to time - but no poetry is without a mythological universe as a backdrop. Anaxagoras gives us the origins for this Poetic Universe with his Philosophical Becoming Myth and should not be forgotten.
Sources:
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks - Nietzsche