Anaxagoras of Clazomenae: How Unity and Difference Can Coexist

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae: How Unity and Difference Can Coexist

Born in a small town of Ionia, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae lived, taught, and wrote from 500 to 428 BCE. At some point during this time period, he moved to Athens where he lived for approximately 30 years. Like Socrates, the Athenian government sentenced him to death on the charges of impiety. Unlike Socrates, however, Anaxagoras escaped to Lampsacus, where he finished out the rest of his life. Although the Athenians accused him of violating the theological orthodoxy of the time, Anaxagoras proposed an innovative metaphysical account of the world, that was yet very consistent with the Pre-Socratic natural philosophers before him.

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 agreed partly with Parmenides, namely on the fact that nonbeing is an impossibility. However, he wanted to provide a way in which plurality was still possible so that being was not static and unchanging. As a result, Anaxagoras claimed that all things contained everything, or all of reality, in themselves with varying consistency. For example, any particular thing may contain in itself all of the possible substances of which reality may be with greater and lesser proportions of substances. He described this 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.”

With the first pair of opposites, the Mind allows for beings to become new beings, ad infinitum. It is only from “mixture and seeds” that plurality is a possible metaphysical account, but he still remains true to the Pre-Socratic tradition of unified reality. The Nous provides an efficient cause of the world, or how the world came to be, but fails to provide any final or ultimate cause, or why the world came to be. In fact, Socrates grumbles at Anaxagoras’ philosophy because his innovative first principles lack any explanation, other than its mechanical purpose.

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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