Anaxagoras

ANAXAGORAS. - 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 by the latter's opponents of impiety for having taught that the sun was an incandescent stone. Condemned to a fine, he withdrew to Lampsacus, where he d. in 428. He set out 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 by explaining birth and death as the union and separation of parts. He made multiplicity, however, infinite, raising to the rank of original substance everything that, when divided, remains qualitatively the same. These substances he called "seeds": later writers, on the basis of an adjective proper to Aristotle's terminology, called them "homeomeries" (first attestation in Lucretius, I, 830). Infinitely divisible (B 1; 3), they are all commingled and present in everything (B 6; 11-12), but each, having the properties of Parmenidean being, is in itself immobile. Hence the necessity, common also to Empedocles, of making the motive cause external, which until then had been conceived as immanent in matter. Empedocles had recourse to two mythical forces, Love and Hate; A. made Mind (Νοῦς) the principle of motion, which he understood as a "most subtle" substance, which alone remains immune from all mixture and has as its own, besides motion, knowledge (B 13). Scattered, in the pre-cosmic period, here and there throughout the infinite and commingled mass of the "seeds" (B 11), Mind localizes itself, once the worlds are constituted, in the beings that have life (ψυχή): plants, animals, 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 (theory of progress), which, accumulating experience in memory, leads to wisdom and, with the use of the organs with which he is endowed (A 102), to the arts (B 21b). As that whose knowledge presupposes, together with the form, the order of things and does not create it (a principle common to all Greek thought), and, unlike the "divine" (τὸ θεῖον) of previous philosophy, which "comprehends in itself" (περιέχει) the whole and "governs it," according to a law of necessity, which is at once providence and "fate" (εὐμαρμένη: cf. Diels, Vorsokratiker, Ind.), it is a substance among others and is "comprehended" by them, it does not comprehend them (B 14), Mind cannot, as a cosmogonic principle, exercise any action other than an accidental and mechanical one. In fact it limits itself to giving, once and for all and "at an indeterminate point," the beginning of rotary motion, which, received by the neighboring substances and by them propagated to the others, provokes, according to the qualities of each, the separations and groupings from which the worlds mechanically were constituted and continue to be constituted (B 12; 4). In perfect coherence with all this and with full knowledge of the matter, A. denied heimarmene (A 66), which, given the technical value the word had in the usage of the theologians and philosophers of the 6th century, was equivalent to deliberately rejecting providence and with it the Divinity. It was, along with that of Leucippus, the first atheistic explanation of the universe, and it caused scandal. The theory of progress, which, developed by Democritus, later passed to Epicurus, is regarded as impious by Sophocles (Antigone, 332 ff.) and by Euripides (Supplices, 195 ff.), who were the first to set it forth, nor does Plato judge differently (Leges, 889 d). Thus Euripides has one of his characters condemn "the impious tongue" of him who "teaches men to consider their own soul a god" (fr. 913; cf. 1018). The philosophical reaction came in Diogenes of Apollonia, who, going back beyond Parmenides to the hylozoism of the first physicists, gave to the air of Anaximenes "thought" as an attribute, proclaiming it God who embraces all and governs all.

The influence of A. on the Attic culture of the 5th century was enormous. It fell to Socrates, with the discovery of the universal, to lay the foundations that allowed Plato and Aristotle to rediscover the nature of the soul and of God.

Carlo Diano