Anaxagoras (500? - 428 B.C.

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A Greek philosopher of the Ionian school, Anaxagoras was born in Clazomenae, Ionia. He went to Athens in 464 B.C., burning with scientific zeal, and attracted the attention and friendship of the great statesman Pericles (490-429 B.C.) and of the great poet Euripides (480-406 B.C.), both of whom he inspired with his own love of science. The ethical philosophy of the Athenian sage, Socrates, differed profoundly from the natural philosophy of Anaxagoras, and this difference was great enough to be considered a branching-point or schism. Indeed, much of the course of human thought in later ages may be traced to this philosophical divergence, for Plato was the philosophic heir of Socrates while Aristotle leaned more toward the philosophy of Anaxagoras. While Socrates concerned himself almost exclusively with what is right and what is wrong, Anaxagoras developed rational theories concerning many celestial phenomena, and his theory that heavenly bodies were incandescent stones so offended religious dogma that he, like Socrates, was prosecuted for impiety by the political opponents of Pericles. Although he was defended by Pericles, and acquitted, he nevertheless found it prudent to withdraw to his native Asia Minor. Thus it can be seen that even at the birth of science, those who were imprudent enough to develop new scientific theories were persecuted by defenders of orthodoxy (although this was the exception, not the rule in Greek society in all of the history of the ancient Greeks, there were only two or three instances where free-thinkers were punished for attacking religious dogma.) Anaxagoras chief contribution to philosophy was his doctrine as to the origin of things. He held that all matter existed originally in the form of atoms or molecules; that these atoms, infinitely numerous and infinitesimally small, had existed from all eternity, and that order was first produced out of this infinite chaos of minute particles through the influence and operation of an eternal intelligence called nous. He maintained also that all bodies are simply aggregations of these atoms, and that a bar of gold, or iron, or copper, is composed of inconceivably minute particles of the same material. Anaxagoras marks a great turning point in the history of Greek philosophy. On the one hand, his doctrine of the Nous was adopted by Aristotle; on the other hand, his doctrine of atoms prepared the way for the atomic theory of the Greek philosopher, Democritus. Anaxagoras lived at roughly the same time as Empedocles, although Aristotle says that he was older than Empedocles, but later in his philosophical activity, and we see evidence of the influence of Empedocles in the work of Anaxagoras. Both of these philosophers were mindful of the difficulties raised by Parmenides for any natural philosophy, and both seemed to accept the conclusions of Parmenides as their starting point. The most momentous of these was Parmenides law of conservation of existence: that nothing can come to being

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out of nothing, and nothing that exists can ever truly cease to exist. Like Empedocles, Anaxagoras accepted this as axiomatic:
The Greeks are accustomed to speak of coming into being and passing away but mistakenly; for nothing comes to be or passes away. There is only a mingling and separation of what is. It would be more correct, therefore, to call coming into being mingling and passing away separation. Anaxagoras, cited by Simplicius (Physics)

Anaxagoras and Empedocles held opposing views regarding the elements, however. Empedocles held that every body was made up of the four elements under the action of attraction and repulsion, while Anaxagoras held that every type of matter is made up of a vast number of similar minute particles, and that these particles are eternal when the particles come together, the material body made up of them appears to come to be, and when the particles separate, the material body made up of them appears to pass away. According to Empedocles, gold is made up of earth, air, fire, and water, blended in a certain proportion. If this were true, then it should be possible to break gold down into these elements. The only problem that this presents is that, if such a decomposition could be made to occur, then the gold would cease to be (at least in the form of gold), and according to Parmenides, this is impossible. Anaxagoras sought to avoid this difficulty by insisting that gold is homoiomerous, i.e., made up of parts each of which has the same nature as the whole. No matter how far gold is broken down, gold remains gold. Zeno had argued that if there are a many, they must be both small and great; so small as to have no size, and so large as to be infinite. For suppose we cut one of the many in half, and this half again, and so on. One of two things must happen: either we must reach a point at which there is nothing left to cut (in which case the whole will have no size at all, since it is composed of parts having no size), or else we can go on dividing forever (in which case, according to Zeno, the whole will be infinitely large since it is made up of an infinite number of parts each of which has some size). After considering this dilemma, Anaxagoras concluded that it is impossible to suppose that we can ever reach a point where nothing is left as the result of the repeated divisions; after all, that would contradict Parmenides contention that it is not possible for what is not to be. The process of division must, therefore, in principle, be able to be continued forever. As Anaxagoras put it, of the small, there is no smallest, but there is always a smaller. As these repeated divisions continue, the number of particles will double at each fission, but the size of each resulting particle will be only half as great, so that the total mass will remain the same no matter how many times we subdivide it. According to Anaxagoras, every existent thing is a microcosm of the whole, and this principle, that there is a portion of everything in everything is clearly central to Anaxagoras thought. Nevertheless, there is an important exception to this principle: mind. According to Anaxagoras, Other things have a share of everything, but mind is infinite and self-ruled and not mixed with anything else. Empedocles postulated the existence of two opposing

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forces (Love or attraction, and Strife or repulsion) to set his cosmos in motion and to make order appear out of the chaos. Anaxagoras preferred only a single force to accomplish these: Nous, or mind. The mind rules that mantra of the Vulcans was not invented by Mr. Spock, but by Anaxagoras, and the mind referred to by the ancient genius was a cosmic intelligence which pervades the Universe, bringing beautiful order out of the chaos. Empedocles, to judge by what Aristotle says of him, did not attribute the formation of the first animals to intelligence or design, but to chance. Anaxagoras, in making mind the active agent in the formation of the world-order, seemed to set himself squarely against any such aleatory view of Nature, and Socrates, in Platos Phaedo, tells how, as a young man, disappointed by merely mechanical explanations of natural phenomena which he heard from his teachers, his hopes were raised by his discovery of the writings of Anaxagoras:
Then one day I heard someone reading from a book which he said was by Anaxagoras, saying that mind is the disposer of all things and the cause of them. I was delighted at this; it seemed somehow right that mind should be the cause of all things, and I thought that if this were the case then mind, in arranging all things, would arrange each in the way that was best for it. So if anyone wished to discover the cause of the generation or destruction or existence of each thing, the question to ask was: how is it best for it to be, or to be acted on, or to act. On this reasoning all that a man need consider, whether in regard to himself or anything else, is what is best ... Considering this, I was delighted to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the causes of existing things that was to my mind, and I thought that he would tell me first whether the Earth is flat or round, and then go on to explain the cause and the necessity for it in terms of the better showing how it is better for it to be as it is. If he said it was in the center [of the cosmos], he would go on to say why it was better for it to be in the center; and if he could make these things clear to me I would ask for no other cause ... I never supposed that, having said these things were arranged by mind, he would bring in any other cause for them than that it was best for them to be as they are ... In great haste I secured the book and read it as quickly as I could, so as to know, as soon as possible the better and the worse. My ... hopes ... were quickly dashed. As I went on with my reading I found that the man made no use of his mind (nous), and that he did not credit it with any real responsibility for the arrangement of things, but mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other absurdities. Socrates, in Platos Phaedo

Although, as we have seen, Socrates did not think highly of Anaxagoras, we must bear in mind that Socrates saw importance only in ethical philosophy, not in Natural Philosophy (i.e., Science.) If the world had discarded the absurd, merely mechanical explanations of the workings of the cosmos, as Socrates advocated, science could never have advanced, and would have died in its infancy. While Anaxagoras concept of nous (a cosmic intelligence pervading the Universe) might have offered those opposed to the impersonal and mechanical explanations of science a satisfyingly simplistic explanation of everything, Anaxagoras was a scientist at heart, and so he did not resort to explaining everything with the blanket statement, It is so because the cosmic mind made it so, for it is best for it to be so. In consequence, as Aristotle put it, Anaxagoras uses reason as a fairy-godmother to produce the world-order, but thereafter Anaxagoras cosmology

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made very little use of mind as the originator of all things. The nous (or intelligence) that controls the rotation of the cosmos and arranges all things in Anaxagoras system is the same mind that steers all things in that of Anaximander, although in the doctrine of both of these philosophers this principle remains shadowy and indefinite, and it is not resorted to in explaining physical phenomena. Instead, Anaxagoras uses vortex motion theory to explain why the world-order is arranged like it is with the elements massed in concentric circles. Anaximenes had used this theory to account for the orbiting of the heavenly bodies, born like leaves in a swirling cosmic eddy. Empedocles had extended it further, claiming that it was the vortex motion which sends like to like, sending up first the fire from the earth, and giving rise to the first living creatures. In the philosophy of Anaxagoras, vortex motion has come to dominate the whole world-process; for the whole process is essentially one of separation, and the rotation caused them to separate off, the same way that bits of loose tea leaves in a recently-stirred, still-swirling teacup separate from the heavier sugar at the bottom as they swirl about (while the sugar particles seem to congregate near the center of the vortex.) By this means, Anaxagoras assures us, the opposites are separated out from the primordial mixture, and the worldorder we know is brought into being with the earth at the center, surrounded by the concentric masses of increasingly lighter elements. Socrates assumed that the nous (mind) always acts for the best. But in men, too, there is mind, and certainly men do not always act for the best. What reason have we to assume that the mind which had set the vortex into rotation will act any more uniformly than the mind of man? This question lies at the precise branching-point where Ethical Philosophy and Natural Philosophy (Science) part company. Indeed, here lay the superiority of Natural philosophy, in general, as well as the superiority of the vortex motion, in specific, as an explanatory principle: since the forces which the vortex brought into play were purely mechanical, they could be counted on to be absolutely uniform. The same could never be said for any ethical matters. Even though the mind of man is too fickle and unpredictable to be entrusted with running the cosmos, still, Anaxagoras thought man to be the most intelligent of earths creatures, and for this, he gives a reason:
Anaxagoras asserts that men are the wisest of the animals because they have hands. Aristotle

In his views on the nature of the heavenly bodies, Anaxagoras was greatly influenced by Anaximenes at least initially. Anaximenes had imagined these bodies to be flat, leaflike structures, composed of some fiery substance and hence capable of being supported by the rotating upper air like leaves in a whirlwind. Anaxagoras was led to abandon this view by the fall of a large meteorite at the Hellespont in 467 B.C. Here was a heavenly body come to earth, and anyone could see and feel that it was not leaf-like or made up of some ethereal fiery substance. This meteor-fall forced Anaxagoras to elaborate a different theory of the nature and origin of the heavenly bodies one which was in accordance with the new facts which had presented themselves: Anaxagoras theorized

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that the heavenly bodies are in fact glowing masses of white-hot stone, held aloft by the force of rotation the same way a stone tied to a string can remain aloft as long as it is twirled vigorously overhead. It is the centrifugal effect, then, that overcomes their natural tendency to travel to the center of rotation. Moreover, Anaxagoras postulated that the friction created by their passage through the upper air ignites them, and they glow with incandescent heat. (Note that this part of Anaxagoras theory is still used today, twenty-five centuries later, to explain meteors, although he made the further assertion, no longer accepted, that by the vigor of the rotation of the fiery ether, stones are snatched up from the earth, and are set on fire, only to become heavenly bodies. It is uncertain whether any ancient Greek ever saw a tornado, whose vortex motion snatches earthbound objects up into the heavens, but they almost certainly saw dust-devils accomplish this same feat to a lesser degree, so this may have been the observation which led to the cosmic vortex theory.) Anaxagoras maintained that we do not feel the warmth of the stars because of their great distance from the earth, just as a campfire which is hot when we stand next to it offers us no warmth when we see it in the distance. Anaxagoras lavished upon the heavenly bodies the same attention that Empedocles had given to biological phenomena:
[Anaxagoras] was the first to set forth the facts concerning eclipses and illuminations. Hippolytus [Anaxagoras] maintained that the Sun is a molten mass of red-hot stone ... according to him it is many times larger than the Peloponnesus. Aetius [According to Anaxagoras] the Moon is of an earthy nature, and has in it plains and ravines ... It has a light which is not its own, but comes from the Sun. Hippolytus It is the Sun that gives the Moon its brilliance. Anaxagoras

[According to Anaxagoras] the Moon is eclipsed when the Earth comes between [it and the Sun]. Hippolytus

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In addition to these essentially modern astronomical views, Anaxagoras also correctly held that the Moon is closer to Earth than the Sun. We see here that Anaxagoras was essentially an astronomer in fact one of the most important astronomers in history yet he is almost always numbered among the ancient Greek philosophers. This only highlights the fact that Natural Philosophy was, until quite recently, a synonym for Science, and natural philosophers like Anaxagoras or Hypatia would today be regarded more as scientists, although they were scientists who did not specialize to such a high degree that they might lose sight of the philosophical implications of their work. Because many of the astronomical theories of Anaxagoras correspond precisely with our own astronomical doctrines, it is difficult for us to see how revolutionary (pardon the pun) they were in Anaxagoras day. In Athens, where the Sun was regarded as divine and eclipses of the Moon were taken to be portents of things to come, these heretical views of Anaxagoras were not well received. Indeed, Anaxagoras almost lost his life for saying that the Sun was not a god, but a mere ball of fire. In 450 B.C. Anaxagoras astronomical theories led to his arrest and trial for impiety. It must be remembered, though, that this intolerance for free-thinking was exceptional in the history of the ancient Greeks it was in this case politically motivated, and it really only occurred because Anaxagoras was the teacher of the great statesman, Pericles, and it was hoped that the charges of impiety against the teacher would destroy the high standing of the pupil in the public eye. Pericles successfully defended his teacher, although this prosecution for impiety had a chilling effect on the minds of those to follow and raised suspicions in the minds of men regarding the whole field of Natural Philosophy growing suspicions which were to lead, some fifty years later, to the trial and execution of Socrates. Although Pythagoras had correctly recognized the sphericity of the Earth before his birth, Anaxagoras reverted to Anaximenes view that the Earth was flat in shape a circular disc and that it remained suspended in the air the way a lid remains suspended upon a layer of steam above a pot of boiling water. Anaxagoras further maintained that the Earth was at first barren, for it was composed of the dense and the cold and the moist and the dark, but when the Sun warmed it, life-forms arose from it, and among these, Man was pre-eminent. Although Man is inferior to the other animals in strength and swiftness, his intelligence, inventiveness, and adaptability make him the master of the Earth, able to outwit any foe except death. Yet Anaxagoras does not suppose that when a man dies he ceases to be; for, as Parmenides had persuasively argued, Nothing comes to be or passes away. There is only a mingling and separation of what is. The body, being a mixture of many things, is subject to dissolution, and in that sense it passes away. But mind is not mixed with anything, and for this reason into cannot suffer dissolution into any component elements. In Anaxagoras view, death is merely the separation of the soul from the body, and the good life lies in the detached contemplation of the underlying order of things, in which the minds own nature is reflected in the order of the cosmos:

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They say that when Anaxagoras was asked why anyone should wish to be born rather than not, he answered, In order to contemplate the heaven, and the structure of the world-order as a whole. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics

It is in this philosophic activity that happiness is to be found, and not in those activities which are conventionally thought to bring happiness:
When [Anaxagoras] was asked who he thought was the happiest of men, he replied, Not the person you think ... He answered in this way because he saw that the man who asked the question assumed that it was impossible to call a man happy who was not either great or handsome or rich, while Anaxagoras himself thought, perhaps, that the man who lived a life without offense to others and conforming to justice or participating in some form of divine contemplation was, humanly speaking, happy. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics

By Anaxagoras own definition of the term, he must have been happy, then, for he threw himself into probing the workings of Nature, and fell into poverty while his book On Nature was acclaimed by the intelligentsia of Athens as the greatest scientific work of the century. The ideal of the contemplative life goes back at least to Pythagoras, who maintained that we all come to this life from another; some of us are slaves to glory, others to money; but there is a handful of men who give themselves to the examination of the nature of things and count everything else as worthless; these men call themselves lovers of wisdom, for that is what philosopher means. Indeed, the tradition of the contemplative life of the philosopher may go back even farther than this, judging from a story which Plato tells of Thales of Miletus:
It seems that while Thales was engaged in studying the stars and gazing upwards he fell into a cistern; whereupon he was jeered at, they say, by a witty and attractive serving-wench from Thrace for being so eager to know what was happening in the sky that he did not see what was under his nose. Plato, Theaetetus

Those who are familiar with German childrens stories, may recognize in this account of Thales the basis of the Hans Guck in die Luft tale. Although it is possible that Platos account is apocryphal, the ideal of the abstracted philosophic life portrayed in this story clearly has it roots deep in the Ionian tradition. In the philosophy of Anaxagoras, we see a continuation of the traditions and speculations of the Ionian school; however, in resolving the problems posed by Parmenides, Anaxagoras fared no better than Empedocles. Like Parmenides, Anaxagoras rejected the senses as an independent source of knowledge, and held that the principle of the Primacy of Reason made it necessary to discount the testimony of the senses. But, unlike

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Parmenides, he did not assume that this means that the senses play no part in the pursuit of truth. In Anaxagoras view, the rle of the senses is to provide the starting point of reasoning. Like any other human being, Anaxagoras was not infallible. He believed, for instance, that there were only four elements*, that the heavenly bodies were torn away from the Earth by the whirling fiery ether, where friction with the air kindled them into stars, and when their revolving motion wanes they fall to the Earth as meteors. He also believed that thunder is caused by the collision of clouds. These ideas have, of course, fallen from favor since Anaxagoras walked the Earth. But he also taught that the Sun is a white-hot mass many times larger than the Peloponnesus, that the Moon is a ball of rock having on its surface plains, mountains, and ravines; that it receives its light from the Sun, and that, of all heavenly bodies, it is the nearest to the Earth. He further maintained that the Moon is eclipsed by the interposition of the Earth between it and the Sun, and the Sun is eclipsed through the interposition of the Moon between it and the Earth. These doctrines of his are still held to be true today. He also believed that winds are due to rarefactions of the atmosphere, produced by the heat of the Sun, and that lightning is caused by friction between the clouds, like the sparks which can be seen at night while stroking a cats fur (i.e., triboelectricity.) He also taught a doctrine known today as the Law of the Conservation of Matter, namely, that the quantity of matter in the cosmos never changes only its rearrangement changes, causing forms to appear to come into being and pass away. He further believed that all organisms were originally generated out of earth, moisture, and heat, and thereafter from one another; that Man has developed beyond the other animals because his erect posture freed his hands for grasping things; and that the celestial bodies are places, not gods, and that these are in all likelihood inhabited, like the Earth, since the same processes which caused life to arise on Earth are still in operation, everywhere throughout the cosmos. These achievements the foundation of meteorology, the correct explanation of eclipses, a rational hypothesis of planetary formation, the discovery of the borrowed light of the Moon, and the conception of life arising by itself, without divine intervention, followed by evolution made Anaxagoras at once the Copernicus and Darwin of his age. It is one of the great paradoxes of history that the study of astronomy was forbidden by Athenian law at the height of the Periclean age, precisely the age when free-thinking genius flowered as never before, or as never since, but the trial of Anaxagoras and the execution of Socrates, both for impiety, attest to this fact. These attempts to suppress free-thinking in the name of religious dogma were really politically-motivated, as both Socrates and Anaxagoras were friends of Pericles, the politically-embattled ruler of the Athenian Empire, but this does not mean that the issue is not one of Religion versus Reason. On the contrary. Religion is by its very nature a political and economic institution that seeks to control not only peoples actions, but even seeks to control what people may think, so it is not surprising to see Religion used time and time again as a

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political weapon a tool used by unscrupulous power-hungry men to control the gullible masses. The trials of Anaxagoras and Socrates had a chilling effect on the free inquiry of Natural Philosophy in Athens, and indeed, Natural Philosophy eventually fell from favor, to be supplanted by Metaphysical Philosophy and Ethical Philosophy, and by the time of Hypatia even these forms of philosophical inquiry were merged with Theology, so that religious Faith alone may rule the world. Despite Pericles brave defense of him against his own political rivals, Anaxagoras was eventually convicted of impiety. Having no taste for hemlock, he fled to Lampascus on the Hellespont, where he kept himself alive by teaching philosophy. When news was brought to him that the Athenians had condemned him to death in absentia, he said, [To this,] Nature has long since condemned both them and me. The great celestial sage died a few years later, at the age of seventy-three.

* The ancient view that everything in the cosmos is composed of only four elements may seem puzzling to us today, now that we know that there are well over a hundred of them, but the four elements of the ancients really corresponded not to our own chemical elements, but rather to the four states of matter which we still recognize today: Solid (called earth by the ancients), Liquid (called water by them), Gas (which they called air), and Plasma (of which fire was in ancient times the only known example). Sometimes a fifth substance (literally, quintessence) beyond the four elements was cited as forming heavenly bodies and pervading all things. This quintessence of all existing things was called ether (not as in the anesthetic carbon compound, but as in the ether which was first assumed, then disproved, by the Michelson-Morely experiment as the imperceptible medium of transmission for light, as well as the source of our word ethereal.) The ancient notion of this purest, most perfect form ether was more or less the equivalent of our idea of space.

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