An Account of Unity, Change and Difference, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae
Most scholars contend that Anaxagoras of Clazomenae lived during the time period of 500 to 428 BCE. He was born in Ionia and later travelled to Athens, where he spent thirty years teaching and writing. Unfortunately, Anaxagoras suffered a similar fate to that of Socrates. On the charges of impiety, the Athenian government sentenced Anaxagoras to death. Fortunately, Anaxagoras decided to forego this penalty, dissimilar to Socrates, and he moved to Lampsacus, where he lived until his death. It seems as though Anaxagoras violated the religious beliefs of the Athenians; however, his ideas were directly consistent with the other Pre-Socratic natural philosophers that preceded him. In any event, he set himself apart from his tradition when he authored a very unique and innovative philosophy of first principles.
Although we have no surviving complete works of Anaxagoras, enough secondary sources and fragments exist to provide scholars with sufficient material from which they can piece together his philosophical agenda. His metaphysics, by and large, respond to the works and teachings of Parmenides, though he likely responded to the teachings of Empedocles, a student of Parmenides, as well.
As we saw in the last blog post, Parmenides contended that the plurality of being was impossible. To summarize Parmenides’ argument, there are two ontological options: being and nonbeing. Nonbeing, or something that cannot be, is insensible because that something would cease to be something and become nothing. Since nonbeing is an impossibility, all things must be. For change to occur, something must pass from nonbeing into being. Again, since nonbeing is an impossibility, change too becomes impossible. As a result, all being is completely unified and immutable. In other words, Parmenides argued for a metaphysical monism.
Anaxagoras saw eye-to-eye with Parmenides on the impossibility of nonbeing. On the other hand, he could not concede that being was static and non-changing. To counter Parmenides’ argument, Anaxagoras said that all beings contained in varying amounts all other types of being. In other words, any particular thing contained within itself different amounts of all other possible substances. Anaxagoras explained his metaphysical account as “a portion of everything in everything.”
He backed this theory up by describing the diets of animals. Food, for instance, must be made up of hair, flesh, etc., because animals must get their hair from hair and their flesh from flesh. As a result, all food and all other beings must contain greater or less proportions of all the possible substances in the world, an infinite number. Thus, beings become differentiated because they have a higher amount of particular substances versus lower amounts of other substances. The higher portions give beings their distinctive essence(s).
However, Anaxagoras also believed that being began as a uniform substance. How did he incorporate change into this system? He added the possibility of change when he introduced the concept of the Nous, the Greek for “Mind.” The Mind, according to Anaxagoras, ordered, structured, and moved being from a static, “immutable” state into a metaphysics of plurality. Like the earlier Ionians, he begins with a unified cosmos that undergoes change by means of opposites. The Nous initiated a vortex of motion that first created the opposite pair of air and ether. He also refers to these as “mixture and seeds.”
As mixture and seeds differentiate Being, the Mind begins to order reality with an infinite possible number of beings. It is only through mixture and seeds that a plurality of being is possible while staying within the Pre-Socratic and Ionian traditions of unified Being. Although the Nous accounted for an efficient cause of Being and beings, or how Being became beings, his theories still lack any ultimate cause, or why Being became beings. Socrates, in fact, criticizes Anaxagoras for proposing such an innovative and full-of-potential metaphysics without providing any account of why.
Though some of Anaxagoras’ theories lay in interpretive gray areas, he certainly introduced an original system of metaphysics and first principles that revived the possibility of change after Parmenides seemingly annihilated it. In any event, we should rightly remember Anaxagoras’ philosophy for its influence and relevancy to later thinkers such as Gottfried Leibniz (the universe being contained in all things) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (being versus becoming, being versus nonbeing).
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