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previous: Chapter 8 This webpage reproduces a chapter of A History of Philosophy by Frederick Copleston, S. J. as reprinted by Image Books — Doubleday New York • London • Toronto • Sydney • Auckland 1993 The text, and illustrations except as noted, are in the public domain. next: Chapter 10

Part I: Pre‑Socratic Philosophy

 p66  Chapter IX
The Advance of Anaxagoras

Anaxagoras was born at Clazomenae in Asia Minor about 500 B.C., and, although a Greek, he was doubtless a Persian citizen, for Clazomenae had been reduced after the suppression of the Ionian Revolt; and it may even be said that he came to Athens in the Persian Army. If this is so, it would certainly explain why he came to Athens in the year of Salamis, 480/79 B.C. He was the first philosopher to settle in the city, which was later to become such a flourishing centre of philosophic study.1

From Plato​2 we learn that the young Pericles was a pupil of Anaxagoras, an association which afterwards got the philosopher into trouble, for after he had resided about thirty years in the city, Anaxagoras was brought to trial by the political opponents of Pericles, i.e. about 450 B.C. Diogenes tells us that the charges were those of impiety (he refers to Sotion) and Medism (referring to Satyros). As to the first charge, Plato relays, it was based on the fact that Anaxagoras taught that the sun is a red‑hot stone and the moon is made of earth.​3 These charges were doubtless trumped up, mainly in order to get a hit at Pericles through Anaxagoras. (Pericles' other teacher, Damon, was ostracised.) Anaxagoras was condemned, but was got out of prison, probably by Pericles himself, and he retired to Ionia where he settled at Lampsacus, a colony of Miletus. Heere he probably founded a school. The citizens erected a monument to his memory in the market-place (an altar dedicated to Mind and Truth), and the anniversary of his death was long observed as a holiday for school children, at his own request, it is said.

Anaxagoras expressed his philosophy in a book, but only fragments of this remain, and these appear to be confined to the first part of the work. We owe the preservation of the fragments we possess to Simplicius (A.D. sixth century).

Anaxagoras, like Empedocles, accepted the theory of Parmenides that Being neither comes into being nor passes away,  p67 but is unchangeable. "The Hellenes do not understand rightly coming into being and passing away, for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is a mingling and a separation of things which are" (i.e. persist).​4 Both thinkers, then, are in agreement as to the indestructibility of matter, and both reconcile this theory with the evident fact of change by positing indestructible material particles, the mingling of which forms objects. But Anaxagoras will not agree with Empedocles that the ultimate units are particles corresponding to the four elements — earth, air, fire and water. He teaches that everything which has parts qualitatively the same as the whole is ultimate and underived. Aristotle calls these wholes, which have qualitatively similar parts, τὰ ὁμοιομερῆ; τὸ ὁμοιομερές being opposed to τὸ ἀνομοιομερές. This distinction is not difficult to grasp if one takes an example. If we suppose that a piece of gold is cut in half, the halves are themselves gold. The parts are thus qualitatively the same as the whole, and the whole can be said to be ὁμοιομερές. If, however, a dog, a living organism, be cut in half, the halves are not themselves two dogs. The whole is in this case therefore ἀνομοιομερές. The general notion is thus clear, and it is unnecessary to confuse the issue by introducing considerations from modern scientific experiment. Some things have qualitatively similar parts, and such things are ultimate and underived (as regards kind, that is to say, for no given conglomeration of particles is ultimate and underived). "How can hair come from what is not hair, or flesh from what is not flesh?" asks Anaxagoras.​5 But it does not follow that everything which seems to be ὁμοιομερές is really so. Thus it is related by Aristotle that Anaxagoras did not hold Empedocles's elements — earth, air, fire and water — to be really ultimate; on the contrary, they are mixtures composed of many qualitatively different particles.6

In the beginning, particles — there is no indivisible particle, according to Anaxagoras — of all kinds were mingled together. "All things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness; for the small too was infinite. And, when all things were together, none of them could be distinguished for their smallness."​7 "All things are in the whole." The objects of experience arise, when ultimate particles have been so brought together that  p68 in the resulting object particles of a certain kind predominate. Thus in the original mixture particles of gold were scattered about and mixed with all sorts of other particles; but when particles of gold have been so brought together — with other particles — that the resultant visible object consists predominantly of gold particles, we have the gold of our experience. Why do we say "with other particles"? Because in concrete objects of experience there are, according to Anaxagoras, particles of all things; yet they are combined in such a way that one kind of particle predominates and from this fact the whole object gets its denomination. Anaxagoras held the doctrine that "in everything there is a portion of everything,"​8 apparently because he did not see how he could otherwise explain the fact of change. For instance, if grass becomes flesh, there must have been particles of flesh in the grass (for how can "flesh" come "from what is not flesh"?), while on the other hand in the grass the grass-particles must predominate. Grass, therefore, consists predominantly of grass, but it also contains other kinds of particles, for "in everything there is a portion of everything," and "the things that are in one world are not divided nor cut off from one another with a hatchet, neither the warm from the cold nor the cold from the warm."​9 In this way Anaxagoras sought to maintain the Parmenidean doctrine concerning being, while at the same time adopting a realist attitude towards change, not dismissing it as an illusion of the senses but accepting it as a fact, and then trying to reconcile it with the Eleatic theory of being. Later on Aristotle would attempt to solve the difficulties raised by the doctrine of Parmenides in regard to change by means of his distinction between potency and act.

Burnet does not think that Anaxagoras considered, as the Epicureans supposed him to, "that there must be minute particles in bread and water which were like the particles of blood, flesh and bones."​10 In his opinion it was of the opposites, the warm and the cold, the dry and the moist, that everything contained a portion according to Anaxagoras. Burnet's view has certainly much to support it. We have already seen the fragment in which Anaxagoras declares that "the things that are in one world are not cut off from one another with a hatchet, neither the warm from the cold, nor the cold from the warm." Moreover, since according to Anaxagoras, there are no indivisible particles, there  p69 cannot be any ultimate particles in the sense of what cannot be further divided. But it would not seem to follow necessarily from the indivisibility of the particles that, in the philosopher's opinion, there were no ultimate kinds which could not be qualitatively resolved. And does not Anaxagoras explicitly ask how hair can come from what is not hair? In addition to this we read in fragment 4 of the mixture of all things — "of the moist and the dry, and the warm and the cold, and the bright and the dark, and of much earth that was in it, and a multitude of innumerable seeds in no way like each other. For none of the other things either is like any other. And these things being so, we must hold that all things are in the whole." This fragment scarcely gives the impression that the "opposites" stand in any peculiar position of privilege. While admitting, therefore, that Burnet's view has much to be said for it, we prefer the interpretation already given in the text.11

So far Anaxagoras's philosophy is a variant from Empedocles' interpretation and adaptation of Parmenides, and offers no particularly valuable features. But when we come to the question of the power or force that is responsible for the forming of things out of the first mass, we arrive at the peculiar contribution of Anaxagoras to philosophy. Empedocles had attributed motion in the universe to the two physical forces of Love and Strife, but Anaxagoras introduces instead the principle of Nous or Mind. "With Anaxagoras a light, if still a weak one, begins to dawn, because the understanding is now recognised as the principle."​12 "Nous," says Anaxagoras, "has power over all things that have life, both greater and smaller. And Nous had power over the whole revolution, so that it began to revolve at the start. . . . And Nous set in order all things that were to be, and all things that were and are now and that will be, and this revolution in which now revolve the stars and the sun and the moon and the air and the aether which are separated off. And the revolution itself caused the separating off, and the dense is separated off from the rare, the warm from the cold, the bright from the dark, and the dry from the moist. And there are many portions in many things. But no thing is altogether separated off from anything else except Nous. And all Nous is alike, both the greater and the smaller; but nothing else is like anything else, but each  p70 single thing is and was most manifestly those things of which there are most in it."13

Nous "is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone, itself by itself."​14 How then did Anaxagoras conceive of Nous? He calls it "the finest of all things and the purest, and it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest power . . ." He also speaks of Nous being "there where everything else is, in the surrounding mass."​15 The philosopher thus speaks of Nous or Mind in material terms as being "the thinnest of all things," and as occupying space. On the strength of this Burnet declares that Anaxagoras never rose above the conception of a corporeal principle. He made Nous purer than other material things, but never reached the idea of an immaterial or incorporeal thing. Zeller will not allow this, and Stace points out how "all philosophy labours under the difficulty of having to express non‑sensuous thought in language which has been evolved for the purpose of expressing sensuous ideas."​16 If we speak of a mind as "clear" or as someone's mind as being "greater" than that of another, we are not on that account to be called materialists. That Anaxagoras conceived of Nous as occupying space is not sufficient proof that he would have declared Nous to be corporeal, had he ever considered the notion of a sharp distinction between mind and matter. The non‑spatiality of the mind is a later conception. Probably the most satisfactory interpretation is that Anaxagoras in his concept of the spiritual, did not succeed in grasping clearly the radical difference between the spiritual and the corporeal. But that is not the same as saying that he was a dogmatic materialist. On the contrary, he first introduces a spiritual and intellectual principle, though he fails to understand fully the essential difference between that principle and the matter which it forms or sets in motion.

Nous is present in all living things, men, animals and plants, and is the same in all. Differences between these objects are due, then, not to essential differences between their souls, but to differences between their bodies, which facilitate or handicap the fuller working of Nous. (Anaxagoras, however, does not explain the human consciousness of independent selfhood.)

Nous is not to be thought of as creating matter. Matter is eternal, and the function of Nous seems to be to set the rotatory movement or vortex going in part of the mixed mass, the action  p71 of the vortex itself, as it spreads, accounting for the subsequent motion. Thus Aristotle, who says in Metaphysics that Anaxagoras "stood out like a sober man from the random talkers that had preceded him,"​17 also says that "Anaxagoras sees Mind as a deus ex machina to account for the formation of the world; and whenever he is at a loss to explain why anything necessarily is, he drags it in. But in other cases he makes anything rather than Mind the cause."​18 We can easily understand, then, the disappointment of Socrates who, thinking that he had come upon an entirely new approach when he discovered Anaxagoras, found "my extravagant expectations were all dashed to the ground when I went on and found that the man made no use of Mind at all. He ascribed no causal power whatever to it in the ordering of things, but to airs, and aethers, and waters, and a host of other strange things."​19 Nevertheless, though he failed to make full use of the principle, Anaxagoras must be credited with the introduction into Greek philosophy of a principle possessed of the greatest importance, that was to bear splendid fruit in the future.

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The Author's Notes:

1 Anax. is said to have had property at Claz. which he neglected in order to follow the theoretic life. Cf. Plato, Hipp. M., 283A.

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2 Phaedrus, 270A.

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3 Apol., 26D.

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4 Frag. 17.

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5 Frag. 10.

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6 De Gen. et corr., Γ, i, 314a24. De Caelo, Γ, 3, 302a28.

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7 Frag. 1.

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8 Frag. 11.

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9 Frag. 8.

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10 G. P., I, pp77‑8.

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11 Cf. Zeller, Outlines, p62; Stace, Crit. Hist., pp95 ff.; Covotti, I Presocratici, ch. 21.

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12 Hegel, Hist. Phil., I, p319.

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13 Frag. 12.

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14 Frag. 12.

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15 Frag. 14.

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16 Crit. Hist., p99.

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17 Metaph., Α 3, 984b15‑18.

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18 Metaph., Α 4, 985a18‑21.

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19 Phaedo, 97b8.

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