ANASSAGORA. — Greek philosopher, b. at Clazomenae ca. 499 B.C. He lived in Athens for 30 years and enjoyed the friendship of Pericles. In 432 he was accused of impiety by Pericles’ opponents for having taught that the sun was a glowing stone. Condemned to a fine, he withdrew to Lampsacus, where he d. in 428. He expounded his doctrines in a prose work, of which we have 24 fragments.
A. shared with Empedocles and Leucippus the problem of reconciling becoming with the immutability of being proclaimed by Parmenides (B 17). Like Empedocles,
he solved it by affirming the quantitative and qualitative multiplicity of being and explaining birth and destruction through the union and separation of parts. He nevertheless made multiplicity infinite, elevating to the rank of original substance everything that, when divided, remains qualitatively identical. He called these substances “seeds”: later writers, using a term derived from an adjective proper to the terminology of Aristotle, called them “homoeomeries” (first attested in Lucretius, I, 830). Infinitely divisible (B 1; 3), they are all intermixed and present in everything (B 6; 11-12), but since each possesses the properties of Parmenidean being, they are in themselves immobile. Hence arose the necessity, common also to Empedocles, of making the moving cause external, whereas until then it had been conceived as inherent in matter. Empedocles had recourse to two mythical forces, Love and Strife; A. made Mind (Νοῦς) the principle of motion, understanding it as a “most subtle” substance, which alone remains free from every mixture and possesses, in addition to motion, knowledge as its own property (B 13). Dispersed during the precosmic period here and there throughout the infinite and intermixed mass of the “seeds” (B 11), Mind becomes localized, once the worlds have been constituted, in living beings (ψυχή): plants, animals, and man (B 12; A 100-102); but it is only in man that it reaches the full development of its powers, through a process of gradual elevation (the theory of progress) which, accumulating experience in memory, leads to wisdom and, through the use of the organs with which he is endowed (A 102), to the arts (B 21b). Since, therefore, unlike the “divine” (τὸ θεῖον) of earlier philosophy—which “contains within itself” (περιέχει) the whole and “governs it” according to a law of necessity that is at once providence and “fate” (εὐμαρμένη: cf. Diels, Vorsokratiker, Ind.)—it is a substance among others and is itself “contained,” rather than containing them (B 14), Mind, as a cosmogonic principle, can exercise no action other than an accidental and mechanical one. In fact, it merely gives, once and “at an indeterminate point,” the beginning of the rotary motion which, being taken up by the neighboring substances and propagated by them to the others, produces, according to the qualities of each, the separations and groupings from which the worlds were mechanically constituted and continue to be constituted (B 12; 4). In perfect consistency with all this and with full awareness of its implications, A. denied heimarmene (A 66); this, given the technical significance the word had in the usage of the theologians and philosophers of the sixth century, amounted to a deliberate rejection of providence and, with it, of Divinity. Together with that of Leucippus, it was the first atheistic explanation of the universe, and it caused a scandal. The theory of progress, which, developed by Democritus, later passed to Epicurus, is regarded as impious by Sophocles (Antigone, 332 ff.) and Euripides (Supplices, 195 ff.), who are the first to expound it; nor does Plato judge it differently (Leges, 889 d). Thus Euripides has one of his characters condemn the “impious tongue” of the man who “teaches us to regard one’s own soul as god” (fr. 913; cf. 1018). The philosophical reaction came in Diogenes of Apollonia, who, going beyond Parmenides back to the hylozoism of the early physicists, attributed “thought” to the air of Anaximenes, proclaiming it the God who embraces and governs all things.
A.’s influence on the Attic culture of the fifth century was enormous. It remained for Socrates, through the discovery of the universal, to lay the foundations that enabled Plato and Aristotle to rediscover the nature of the soul and of God.