A golden age started; the city became rich
and prospered under the wise leadership of
Pericles, who governed, by the free choice
of its citizens, for about thirty years until
his fall in 430 BC. "Pericles fell in,
it seems with Anaxagoras, who was a scientific
man; and satiating himself with the theory
of things on high, and having attained to
a knowledge of the true nature of intellect
and folly, which were just what the discourses
of Anaxagoras were mainly about, he drew
from that source whatever was of a nature
to further him in the art of speech."
(Plato about Anaxagoras).
With his fall of Pericles' government, Anaxagoras
was urged to leave Athens. He fled to Lampsacus
in the Troad where he died, an honoured guest,
in 428 BC. Anaxagoras is said to have written
only one book. As a follower of the old Milesian
school he tried to revive the thoughts of
Anaximenses in the post-Parmenidean period.
Anaxagoras agreed with Empedocles that all
coming into and going out of being is merely
the composition and decomposition of existing
substances, but he rejected Empedocles' Love
and Strife theory, probably because there
was no scientific reason that spoke for it.
He held that everything is infinitely divisible
and that even the smallest portion of matter
contains some of each element. This is in
some sense the antithesis to the later atomistic
theory of Leucippus and Democritus. Anaxagoras
held that snow contains the opposites of
black and white and is called white only
because white predominates in it. In a sense,
then, each part contains the whole of reality,
each thing containing a specific share of
all other things. The differences in form
result from different portions of the elements.
The variety of substances and forms we perceive
is thus explained by the complexity of seemingly
endless numbers of possible combinations.
Although these thoughts contradicted the
dominant Pythagorean and Eleatic schools,
they were not entirely new. Yet, Anaxagoras
went a step further. The process by which
matter is formed, he argued, is separation.
The material world, which springs from the
all-containing "One" creates itself
through continuous dichotomization. It produces
forms of multiplicity with increasing complexity.
According to Anaxagoras, this process is
originated and controlled by "mind"
(nous).
The idea of mind as the supreme ordering
principle is the most captivating aspect
of his philosophy. Anaxagoras says that "mind
is something infinite and self-controlling,
and that is has been mixed with no thing,
but is alone itself by itself." (Simplicius).
Unfortunately this is nearly all he has to
say about mind. Neither does he go into detailing
the nature of mind, nor does he present a
theory that explains the unfolding of reality
on basis of mind. Anaxagoras' concept of
mind stands like an overture without a symphony.
"Together were all things, infinite
both in quantity and smallness - for the
small too was infinite. And when all things
were together, none was patent by reason
of smallness; for air and ether covered all
things, being both infinite - for in all
things these are the greatest both in quantity
and size. [59 B1] For the small there is
no smallest, but there is always a smaller.
[B 3] In everything there is a share of everything
- except mind - and in some things mind is
present, too. [B 11] Other things possess
a share of everything, but mind is something
infinite and self-controlling, and it has
been mixed with no thing. It is the finest
of all things and the purest, and it possesses
all knowledge about everything, and it has
the greatest strength. And mind controls
all those things, both great and small, which
possess soul. [B 12]" (Simplicius, Commentary
on the Physics, 300.27 - 301.10)
Aristotle, who was also a resident of Athens,
said a hundred years later about Anaxagoras:
"I once heard someone reading from a
book of Anaxagoras and saying that it is
mind which arranges and is responsible for
everything. This explanation delighted me
and it seemed to me somehow to be a good
thing that mind was responsible for everything
- I thought that in this case mind, in arranging
things, would arrange them all, and place
each, in the best way possible. So if anyone
wanted to discover the explanation of anything
- why it comes into being or perishes or
exists, he would have to discover how it
is best for it to be or to be acted upon
or to act... Now, my friend, this splendid
hope was dashed; for as I continued reading
I saw that the man didn't use his mind at
all, he didn't ascribe to it any explanations
for the arranging of things but found explanations
in air and ether and water and many other
absurdities."
Aristotle's judgment may sound overly harsh.
At any event we can give Anaxagoras credit
for producing an interesting synthesis from
the ideas of his influential predecessors
Parmenides who said "All is One",
and Empedocles who held that two opposite
forces govern the universe. In the cosmology
of Anaxagoras, these different forces are
distinct manifestations of the same "nous".
Although Anaxagoras did not explain it in
detail, this idea provided the seed for later
metaphysical speculation.
Anaxagoras was also an astronomer and a man
of science. He observed vortexes and spiral
phenomena in nature, which fascinated him.
He believed the world was created through
the rotary motion of a spiral, where initially
all mass was united in the center and then,
by centrifugal force driven by "mind",
things came into being through the separation
of mass into an increasing number of bodies
and substances. It is unlikely that Anaxagoras
derived this idea from the observation of
spiral galaxies in space, because their structure
cannot be observed by the naked eye and the
Greeks did not have telescopes.
However, it is conceivable that he had concluded
this from looking at the Milky Way, our own
galaxy, which appears to us as a band on
the firmament. With some imagination he might
have envisioned the band as a disk-shaped
spiral of stars with our own planet being
located somewhere along its plane (in fact
our solar system is located in the outer
region of one of its arms). Whether Anaxagoras
had a conception of galaxies at all is questionable.
There are no records of such observations
and it would take considerable visualization
power to deduce the shape of a spiral galaxy.
The successors of Anaxagoras did not think
very highly of his vortex theory, and so
the idea was dropped soon.
Today, we know that if the mass of a galaxy
was concentrated at its center, it would
have created a black hole and the gravitation
would have been too strong to allow anything
to emerge from it, at least not through rotary
motion, and most likely not through mind.
In spite of this, the concept of mind as
the force and the idea that it drives things
was highly original and had a significant
impact on later philosophers.
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