Anaximander

Introduction

Anaximander of Miletus is the second figure of the Milesian school of natural philosophy and the most original of the early Pre-Socratics. His doctrine of the apeiron (the boundless or indefinite) replaced Thales's material principle (water) with an abstract metaphysical principle, introducing into the Western tradition the kind of conceptual abstraction that subsequent philosophy would develop. His cosmology proposed novel ideas about the structure of the universe (a cylindrical earth suspended freely in space without support), about the origin of living things (an evolutionary account in which the first humans developed from fish-like creatures), and about the cycle of generation and destruction that organizes the cosmos.

Anaximander is the first Greek philosopher from whom a direct textual fragment survives — the famously enigmatic statement reported by Simplicius (sixth century CE) and traditionally attributed to Anaximander's lost work On Nature: The source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of time.

Life and biography

Anaximander was born around 610 BCE in Miletus. He was probably a pupil or close associate of Thales; the doxographical tradition treats them as the first two figures of the Milesian school. Anaximander composed what is conventionally regarded as the first Greek prose work — the lost treatise generally called On Nature (Peri Physeos), of which only the single fragment reported by Simplicius survives directly, though doxographical reports give the broad structure of the work.

The biographical reports credit Anaximander with practical contributions: he is reported to have introduced the gnomon (the sundial) to the Greeks, to have produced the first map of the world (the pinax), to have made a celestial globe, and to have led a Milesian colonial expedition to Apollonia on the Black Sea. He died around 546 BCE.

The apeiron

The doctrine of the apeiron (literally the unbounded or the indefinite) is Anaximander's principal innovation. Where Thales had identified the source of all things with water (a material substance present in the world), Anaximander identified the source with the apeiron — a principle that is itself not any of the elements of the world, that is unbounded in extent and indefinite in character, and that is the source from which the opposites (hot and cold, wet and dry) emerge through separation.

The reason for the move was probably the recognition that no specific element can be the source of all things, since each specific element is opposed to other specific elements; the source of all things must be something more general from which the opposites can emerge through differentiation. The apeiron is this more general source, characterized negatively (it is not any of the specific elements) rather than positively (it is not a material substance that can be identified by sensory observation).

The abstraction was unprecedented in the Greek tradition. The move from the material principle to the abstract metaphysical principle established the framework within which subsequent Greek philosophy would operate: the inquiry into principles that are not themselves accessible to ordinary observation but that can be identified through reasoning about what observation requires.

Cosmology

Anaximander's cosmological proposals were novel and influential. The earth, on his account, is a cylinder whose proportions (three times as wide as it is deep) the doxographical tradition preserves. The earth is suspended freely in the center of the cosmos without support; it remains in place because it is equidistant from all points on the spherical boundary of the cosmos and therefore has no reason to move in any direction rather than another.

The freedom of the earth from any supporting element was a major conceptual innovation. Thales had proposed that the earth floats on water; Anaximander's proposal that the earth is supported by nothing was more radical and conceptually closer to the modern view of the earth as a body in space without material support. Karl Popper called Anaximander's proposal one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thought.

The structure of the heavenly bodies, on Anaximander's account, consists of rings or wheels of fire surrounded by mist; we see the heavenly bodies through holes in the mist, and the proportions of the rings (the sun's ring is 27 or 28 times the diameter of the earth; the moon's is 18 or 19 times) the doxographical tradition preserves.

The origin of living things

Anaximander proposed a evolutionary account of the origin of living things. The first animals, on his account, developed in the moisture as fish-like creatures; as the earth dried, some of these creatures developed adaptations that allowed them to live on land; humans developed from fish-like ancestors that gave birth to their young within their bodies (a proposal that addressed the obvious difficulty that human infants cannot survive without parental care for years after birth and so could not have developed directly from independent fish-like ancestors).

The proposal is the earliest known articulation of an evolutionary account of the origin of human beings. The insight — that living things have a developmental history that can be reconstructed through inference from observed features — was novel and influential through its preservation in the doxographical tradition.

The fragment

The single direct fragment attributed to Anaximander is one of the most-discussed single passages in early Greek philosophy. The translation: The source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of time.

The interpretation has been continuously contested. The reading offered by most contemporary scholars treats the fragment as describing the cyclical process by which the opposites (hot/cold, wet/dry) emerge from and return to the apeiron through reciprocal balance: each opposite, in its seasonal or cyclical dominance over the other, commits an injustice against the other; the reciprocal balance — by which each opposite eventually yields to its other — is the penalty and retribution the cosmic order requires.

The cosmological-ethical framework that the fragment compresses is one of the most distinctive features of Anaximander's thought. The cosmos is structured by a kind of cosmic justice that operates through the regular cyclical balance of opposites; the human ethical framework (the concepts of justice, retribution, penalty) finds its cosmological grounding in the structure of the natural world. The framework anticipates themes in the subsequent Greek philosophical tradition through Heraclitus, the Stoics, and the Pythagorean tradition.

Reception

The ancient reception of Anaximander was substantive; he was treated as one of the major early Pre-Socratics throughout the doxographical tradition. The modern reception has been shaped by the twentieth-century recovery of Pre-Socratic philosophy and the recognition of the radical character of his cosmological proposals.

Major recent scholarly work includes Charles Kahn's Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (1960, revised 1994), the treatment in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield's The Presocratic Philosophers (1983), the new Loeb edition by Laks and Most (2016), and Dirk Couprie's Heaven and Earth in Ancient Greek Cosmology (2011). Active scholarly debates concern the interpretation of the apeiron, the reading of the fragment, and the cosmological proposals.

Further reading

• Thales — the Milesian predecessor whose material principle Anaximander replaced with an abstract metaphysical principle
• Pre-Socratic — the tradition Anaximander helped shape
• Heraclitus — the major Ionian successor whose concept of logos developed the cosmological-ethical framework Anaximander's fragment articulated
• Parmenides — the Eleatic philosopher whose denial of change responded to the Milesian cosmological framework

The second Milesian philosopher, whose doctrine of the apeiron introduced abstract metaphysical thinking into the Western tradition and whose cosmology proposed novel ideas about the universe.