Truth and Becoming in Anaxagoras

The spirit of Anaxagoras marks a violent transition from a society securing its coherence by means of traditional theological convictions to a society that was in a limbo: it employed reason for its political structures, but hardly was it prepared to allow the authority of reason form its metaphysical ideas. It might be assumed that Socrates was a victim of this cultural transience. Likewise, Aristotle escaped death only by decamping to Chalkis, ‘so that the Athenians should not have the chance to commit a second crime against philosophy’. Anaxagoras introduced the novel (and outrageous to the establishment) idea that the sun is not a divine being but only a fiery stone. Galen wrote that he was a blasphemer against the sun which offers people the different seasons of the year and brings fruits to maturity. Consequently, he lumped Anaxagoras together with such notorious atheists as Epicurus and Diagoras of Melos. 

The anonymous author who used Galen’s name wrote that the three most notorious atheists of Antiquity were Diagoras of Melos, Theodore of Cyrene, and Euemerus of Tegea. He added though that, to them, also Euripides, although he expressed his atheistic views in disguise and clandestinely, as he normally did, out of fear of the jury of Areopagus. Euripides remained in history as the devout pupil who embraced his Anaxagoras’ views and instilled them in poetical form into his own plays. He called the sun ‘a gold clod of earth’, for which he was mentioned jointly with his inspirer.

Anaxagoras’ views were a violent break with the official religious outlook; to posit the sun as a red-hot mass of stone was outrageous even to such admirers of his as Origen, who saw this as putting God’s creatures to shame. Considering that, more than eight centuries later, Emperor Constantine did not abolish the cult of the sun even after he made Christianity the favoured religion of the empire. no wonder that Anaxagoras escaped death only at the very last moment.

This teaching appeared amidst a tension between three cardinal manifestations of human society: one, science; two, religion; three, social ideas, which were on the making following the Persian wars. Were it for the traditional religious premisses to be overturned, the looming danger was that radical changes would be brought about to fundamental ideas about social philosophy, therefore, to the social system, and eventually to the political system itself. In other words, collapse of ‘traditional scientific’ ideas would bring down also the religious, cultural, and political foundations of society. However, that would be too much for any society to endure, considering that the Athenian state strove to take a step beyond the legacy of such law-makers as Solon, nearly a hundred years after his death, and to follow the ideas of more recent ones, such as Cleisthenes and Ephialtes.

This is why the ideas of Anaxagoras were bound to be rejected, and why Athens was eager to get rid of him. As powerful as he was, Pericles was able to save his friend’s life, but not to secure his living at Athens. Lampsacus received Anaxagoras with honour, but that city was far enough for the tribute paid to the philosopher to have any effect on Athens. Consequently, once the menace was hurdled and the blasphemy was exorcized, Athenians were delighted at any philosophical account belittling, even ridiculing, Anaxagoras’ ideas. This was the ‘brave’ way for both Plato and Aristotle to tread on: both of them, especially Aristotle, disparaged Anaxagoras, while plundering his ideas.

Aristotle knew that Anaxagoras’ philosophy could not be interpreted within the corset of the empirical premisses posited by Aristotle himself; but he chose to consider them out of their real connotations because he wanted to degrade this philosophy. The reason why he sought to do so was that Anaxagoras had preceded him in many respects, and he had the merit of being based on fewer and simpler scientific principles that made it better science. Quite simply, resentment got the better of Aristotle. One should read carefully the beginning of the Metaphysics. Anaxagoras is mentioned in passing as the one who posited ‘the infinity of homoiomeries’ and he was honoured along with Empedocles as the one who treated the question of ‘the source of motion’. However, Aristotle draws a line demarcating his own superiority: “As for what essence and real being is, no one has expounded it clearly”.

Why should Anaxagoras, and indeed any Presocratic physicist, have spoken about ‘essence proper’ which was alien and hardly necessary to that mindset, and whether introduction of this notion was really progress or detriment to philosophy is a question that one should consider carefully. It is certainly not mere chance that, although fascinated by the notion of ‘essence’, Aristotle never made up his mind as to what the essence of a thing is: he wavered between this being either formless matter or form or both ofnthem, but eventually he left the question moot.

Aristotle thought (or pretended to think) that Anaxagoras (like all Physicists, in his view) posited as ‘reality’ only whatever is sensible and is contained by the so-called heavens’. In any event, Aristotle was attracted to such a conception of reality. However, Anaxagoras never said so, and Aristotle knew this: for how the Nous, which, to Anaxagoras, is ‘being’ par excellence, could be possibly considered ‘as sensible and contained by the so-called heavens’? Hence, Aristotle strove to devalue Anaxagoras right from the start of that work, sometimes under the paternalistic pretext that he wanted ‘to help’ him to make himself clear (and commentators made too much of Aristotle’s ‘helping’ his predecessor). Although Anaxagoras ‘did not actually articulate this’, ‘if one pursued what he wanted to say, while one also contributes to the articulation of what he meant to say, it would appear that he says something more up-to-date’. Aristotle’s implication was that, if there was something ‘up-to-date’ in Anaxagoras’ allegedly inconsistent formulations, the credit for enunciating them clearly and consistently should go to Aristotle himself, who ‘helped’ Anaxagoras to express his otherwise primitive formulations.

Aristotle rightly pointed out that Anaxagoras was a Physicist. The problem is that he did not care to report this ‘physics’ accurately, but only to use it at his own liking in order to expound his own philosophy and represent it as an original one. His representation of the Presocratics generally implies that their thought was too a primitive one and the world had to wait for Aristotle himself to expound truth in its fullness. He was then acknowledged as ‘one who was able predict’ (prognostikos), which modern terminology would have it ‘true scientist’.

Up until the sixth century, philosophers claimed that they were only mere commentators of the Classical lore bequeathed by Plato and Aristotle: they did not claim originality for that matter; they only cared to denounce such earlier ‘heretics’ as the Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, and Sceptics, who had dared to dissent from those giants. The truth is, of course, that Plotinus, despite the respects he always cared to pay Plato, was neither a mere commentator, nor exactly a Platonist, since his Chaldean liabilities were too heavy to be branded ‘Platonism’, not to mention his heavy liabilities to Aristotle and the Stoics, which Porphyry pointed out, but he should have added Anaxagoras to them, too. In the history of philosophy, there is neither universal methodology, nor do philosophers have the same object of investigation, nor indeed is there any linear evolution from forbears to subsequent philosophers: on the contrary, there are varieties of method, of priorities concerning of the prime object of concern, of fundamental principles and premisses set forth; above all, almost every philosopher felt that he should start building their own system ab ovo. Hence, during and after the Renaissance, it was deemed that every system was a new beginning for philosophy, and philosophers were satisfied that their system was the true philosophy.

In Physics, things were different: scientists felt that they should see a little further as ‘dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants (nani gigantum humeris insidentes)’. Whereas Anaxagoras’ universe was one of unity, where ‘everything is in everything’, Aristotle introduced another conception of it, which actually lasted until the end of the nineteenth century, to be overturned only upon the middle of that century. His world was one of distinct objects entirely separate from one another, where each and every object was determined by means of space, time, and its own mass. To Anaxagoras, there was a universal relevance of incorporeal principles, therefore, of individual things and phenomena.

Jonathan Barnes made use of pompous semi-mathematical symbols (evidently, in order to give it a touch of semiology and a flavour of analytical philosophy); but, on closer look, this flamboyant symbolism indicates only platitudes and hardly any familiarity with modern science. To the point, Barnes merely paraphrased Aristotle and decided that “Anaxagoras’ things are stuffs”, but these ‘stuffs are not particulate’ (!), and the folly of this oxymoron was laid at the door of Anaxagoras instead at that of his modern interpreter, who went on defiantly: “Anaxagoras’ theory is self-stultifying: it is a theory about stuffs; but its main tenet is inconsistent with the existence of stuffs.” However, to grasp ancient philosophy takes more than complacent extravagant exhibitionism of one’s native language and anemophilous reproduction of old claims, notably, those of Aristotle. For instance, whether logos in Heraclitus is a technical term indicating a ‘principle’ (styling this ‘metaphysical’ is only a detriment to the Presocratic thought) has been a point of dispute. J. Barnes argued with M.L. West, and against W.K.C. Guthrie, U. Holscher, and M. Marcovich, that striving to find a metaphysical sense in this logos is ‘vain’, since it only means ‘what a man legei or says’ (Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, London, 1982, p. 59). Then, he set out to prove that Heraclitus had a ‘Logos doctrine’ and indeed ‘a metaphysical theory to propound’! But this is the fate of the Presocratic philosophers being studied by means of pedantically cited numbered ‘fragments’ and ‘testimonies’, whereas the wider context afforded by ancient witnesses (that which I have styled ‘triple context’ and discussed in Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Anaxagoras, Origen and Neoplatonism – The Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity, De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 42-55) is entirely ignored, or it is deemed either hard or impossible to do so.

Anaxagoras posited that his ‘principles’ cannot be severed from each other as if by means of an axe, since ‘the things in the one cosmos have not been separated from one another, nor hacked apart with an axe’ and ‘there is neither a minimum nor a maximum among the principles,’ since ‘there is always something smaller than the minimum and something bigger than the maximum’. Moreover, (Anaxagoras apud Simplicius, commPhys, p. 164), ‘The shares of the large and the small are equal in number; therefore, everything is in everything; it is not possible that anything be separate, but all things have a share in everything; it would not be possible for anything to exist by itself, but, just as in the beginning, now too all things are together. In all things, there are many things present, equal in number, both in the greater and in the lesser of the things which are separated off. Accordingly, ‘nothing is entirely separated off or dissociated from one another except the Nous’.

What else should he have said in order to adumbrate the principles as incorporeal ones at a time when not only the term and notion of ‘incorporeal’ but also others (such as ousia of something) were no explicit part of philosophical locution? And yet, Aristotle decided that Anaxagoras’ principles are material stuffs, a presumption from which he concocted a flood of ensuing ridiculous conclusions. This gave rise to the notion of minima naturalia, which is a product of Arabic and medieval Aristotelianism (e.g. Averroes, 1126-98). This became fashionable also the Renaissance, and continues to mislead the students of modern scholars who are taken as authorities. For example, Jonathan Barnes cheerfully set out to ‘teach’ a theory which was only a rude echo of Aristotle’s claims: “Thus I propose that we read Anaxagorean ‘things’ as ‘stuffs’”, and “like his Ionian predecessors he has an ontology of stuffs” (J. Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 322). But then (p. 325): “I conclude that we have no binding reason for ascribing to Anaxagoras a particulate theory of matter.” Nevertheless, he decided that these ‘stuffs are not particulate’ (!), and the folly of this oxymoron was laid at the door of Anaxagoras instead at that of his modern ‘interpreter’, who went on defiantly: “Anaxagoras’ theory is self-stultifying: it is a theory about stuffs; but its main tenet is inconsistent with the existence of stuffs.”

But this is only a decayed caricature of Aristotle’s claims, which appeared pompously and bombastically as ‘discovery’ and new ‘contribution’.

If Anaxagoras’ theory is studied through distorted Aristotelian ‘fragments’ being seen through the lenses of interpretation by some modern local heroes of scholarship, this theory appears ‘self-stultifying’, i.e. stupid, inconsistent, and indeed ridiculous. However, this is not contribution to understanding Anaxagoras: it is only a harsh reduplication of Aristotle’s argument (Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysica, 1007b; Physica, 188a4-9. Themistius, paraphrPhys, p. 17. John Philoponus, commPhys, p. 396; likewise, cf. commAnim, p. 85; 101; 106. Asclepius of Tralles, commMetaph, pp. 26; 61; 101; 267-8; 292), but Aristotle’s analysis was far more skilled, no matter how distortive. Consequently, it depends on the mental capacities of any modern interpreter either to rest content with the ‘stupid-Anaxagoras’-resolution or to strive to find out if something different was going on there. If this is not possible at all, no swaggering propositions or swollen-headed oracles by those who narcissistically are far too fond of the sound of their own voices will save the phenomena.

Aristotle maintained that, unless something is endowed with matter, it does not really exist on its own right. There is not such reality as intelligible substance per se. What is material cannot be produced from the intelligible alone, since matter is indispensable to this effect. This is why, to him, matter proper is one of the three definitions of what ‘essence’ (or, real ‘substance’) of a certain thing is. In order to argue for real existence of any thing, this thing has to be perceptible, as it happened with the Empiricism of John Lock in the seventeenth century and with David Hume in the eighteenth. Really existing things are only those which fall under the domain of empirical observation and they can be measured, although the question is what kind of ‘perception’ of ‘measurement’ would apply to such things as the ‘fifth body’ or aether. Even time itself (abstruse a notion as it is) can be measured by means of clocks and diaries, and Aristotle made this familiar by defining it by means of such notions as ‘motion’, ‘measure’, and ‘number’. All of these were recognizable by common experience, in contrast to Anaxagoras’ principles which were not so, and they continue to appear weird to modern scholars only because they stick to Aristotle’s conflicting accounts about it. No wonder that Aristotle, striving to obscure his heavy liabilities to Anaxagoras, associated those principles with matter and measure, in order to ridicule the entire theory about them, and a modern scholar (mentioned in the Introduction of Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Anaxagoras, Origen and Neoplatonism – The Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity, De Gruyter, 2016) styled Anaxagoras’ philosophy self-stultifying’ (i.e. stupid, inconsistent, indeed ridiculous) being under the impression that he said something new while reproducing Aristotle’s views in just a more rude manner.

It was this Aristotelian (and ispo facto, anti-Anaxagorean) conception of reality that determined what is assumed common sense, namely, such distinctions as here / there, left / right, up / down, yesterday / today / tomorrow, or past / present / future, one / many, nothing / less / more. However, we know today that the existence of Time is radically different, so that concepts of common sense such as past / present / future make no scientific sense any longer, as indeed such notions as here / there, and others, make no sense either. Within the universe of today’s scientific reality, here is everywhere and now is identified with yesterday and tomorrow.

Simplicius attributed these ideas to Anaxagoras, but several modern scholars were all too quick to dismiss it as ‘Neoplatonic’ interpretation, only because they had no inkling of the fact that a real comprehension of Anaxagoras’ physics comes from the future, not from the past, and that it was Neoplatonism that owed Anaxagoras a great deal, not the other way around.

Today, a fundamental scientific assumption is that whatever falls into the grasp of human senses is not reality, actually, it is a false impression: this is only a matrix created by the human physiology. This means a made-up representation of reality created by the human senses and brain. The answer to the question, ‘are the data provided by the human senses the objective reality itself, or is this only an illusion?’ determines the significance of the notions space, time, matter, which, in turn, circumscribe not only our conception of what reality is, but also the values (and, eventually, the quality) of a certain civilization.

Democritus used to say that external impressions have not the same impact upon different individuals; hence, it is uncertain which of these impressions are either true or false, since any kind of them is no truer than another, but they are all equally true. Consequently, either there is no truth or we cannot discover it. On that account, appearances should be identified with truth, yet Democritus and Anaxagoras held that sense perception does no supply us with absolute truth, which should be sought through reasonable investigation, so as ‘to save the phenomena’.

Whereas Heraclitus argued that everything ‘both exists and does not exist’, Anaxagoras said this in different terms by rejecting the principle of contradiction, since he allowed that there is an intermediate state between two logically opposite propositions. Consequently, he did not care for any absolute objective truth, but he was prepared to allow that human beings are bound to see as reality whatever comes from the data of sense perception. Stobaeus reported a catalogue of philosophers who argued that sense perception is false: Pythagoras, Empedocles, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Melissus, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Metrodorus of Chios, Protagoras, Plato. Syrianus reported that Empedocles and Parmenides identified phenomena (that is, appearances) with truth, and, significantly, he distinguished Protagoras from Anaxagoras. For whereas Protagoras argued that truth is any subjective personal impression, Anaxagoras maintained that how phenomena appear to us is dependent on ourselves, that is, on our physiology. Porphyry, as well as Zeno before him, explained this at the point where he commented on Anaxagoras’ proposition ‘everything is in everything’. The incorporeal Anaxagorean principles exist differently in either the mind, or in the soul, or in plants, or in inanimate bodies, and differently still in their most pure incorporeal existence. The term he used for the existence of the (constitutive, cohesive and dissolving) principles in things and in phenomena is characteristic, namely, eidōlikōs (‘an an idol’). This adverb means an object being seen ‘through its reflection by a mirror’, which is why perception of it is bound to be vague.

 Once involved with perceptible things, the Anaxagorean principles / logoi are grasped indirectly, that is, from their action and generative or dissolving results. Using modern language, I would translate eidōlikōs as ‘virtual reality’. What we see as ‘reality’ is in fact a matrix dependent on our perceptible abilities. This is like a television-set: the images on screen are only the product of the electronic machinery of the device which is located behind the screen. Anaxagoras said that our knowledge is simply what our senses allow to reconstruct as reflection of reality within ourselves. Simplicius (or, whoever the author of that commentary) remarked that, if the soul is taken to be a cognizant agent, it follows that what is known is not the object itself, but what appears as a representation of things in accordance with the specific cognitive capacities of man qua man (Simplicius, commAnim, p. 67).

Beside these testimonies, once again we have Damascius, the noble sixth-century teacher of Simplicius, who mentioned Parmenides, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras as being those who believed that the senses provide us with the truth, against Protagoras and Epicurus who dismissed sensible impression as false, while Damascius placed Plato in between.

These testimonies are not contradictory, as one might assume on the face of it; actually, both of them expound the same idea, which is this: how a certain human being perceives reality depends on one’s physiological constitution. Anaxagoras received this idea from his teacher Parmenides, and this is what Empedocles (Anaxagoras’ pupil) believed, too. In respect of this, Aristotle’s testimony is of some value: Democritus said that either there is no truth or we cannot discover it. In general, the idea was that thought is sense perception, and sense perception is physical alteration, therefore, the impression given through sense perception is necessarily true. It was on those grounds that both Empedocles and Democritus, and in effect all the others, were obsessed by such opinions as these, as Aristotle put it. Empedocles said that those who change their bodily condition change their thought: “For according to that which is present to men do thoughts emerge in them.” Besides, in another passage, Empedocles says: “And as they change into a different nature, so it ever comes to them to think differently.” Parmenides thought likewise:

“For as each one at any time has the temperament of his many-jointed limbs, so thought comes to men. For in each and every man the substance of his limbs is that very thing which thinks; for thought is that which preponderates.”

This means that knowledge is dependent on the constitution of human body: the nature of things corresponds to the nature of human organs through which man perceives reality. Then, Aristotle goes on, a saying of Anaxagoras to some of his disciples is also recorded, which urged that, to them, things would be as they judged them to be. It was believed that Homer appeared to hold this view, because he made Hector, when he was stunned by the blow, lie with thoughts deranged, thus implying that even those who are ‘out of their mind’ still have an understanding of reality, although not the same grasp of it as other people. Clearly then, if these are different kinds of thought, reality also should be ‘both so and not so.’ It is along this path that the consequences are most difficult; for if those who have the clearest vision of such truth as it is possible (and these are all those who seek and love truth most) hold such opinions and make these pronouncements about truth, surely those who are trying to be philosophers may well despair: for the pursuit of truth will be ‘chasing birds in the air’.

Thus, Anaxagoras is represented as believing, along with Homer and Parmenides, that ‘having an understanding of reality and feeling of it, is as real as any other grasp of things.’ The wounded Hector’s perception of reality was not less real than those who were nearby or opposite him.

Why is that so, Aristotle could not grasp, but a man fairly educated in the science of the second half of the twentieth century could, as much as Parmenides was able to see what that was all about. Any observer comprehends reality while thinking that he himself stands opposite reality, indeed as if the whole scenery were that, on the one hand there is the observer, and, on the other, the phenomena which are observed. However, this is an illusion as old as Aristotle and as modern as Isaac Newton. The observer and the observed phenomenon are one reality, and Parmenides and Anaxagoras would have added that all reality is one thing. The point is that any manifestation of reality is simply a specific concurrence of principles, while all of the principles stand in universal unity, and the specific character of a certain phenomenon (or thing) is determined by the preponderant principles acting upon it.

We should recall Philo’s reference to the ‘active cause’, which Sextus made ‘active principle’, with reference to two principles (an active and a passive one), speaking not of the Stoics, but of Anaxagoras, whom he regarded as ‘the leader of this doctrine’, indeed a leader that was second only to Homer. I have shown that the notion of two principles in this respect is not an accurate report, since the principles / logoi are inherent in the objects which they generate, whereas ‘they are there as if they were detached from them.’ The Anaxagorean principles are both here and everywhere, as much as are they themselves nowhere specifically, and matter is simply a product of circumstantially concurring principles, as indeed any perceptible thing or phenomenon is. And yet, there are always certain principles which preponderate and make something to be what it is. These principles, as a whole, are the principle of a thing, or its logos, or its own ‘essence’, as philosophers posterior to Anaxagoras would have had it. These principles make their mark not only in the object itself, but also in the entire reality (since an object is as much a universe as the universe itself is), and certainly they do so also in the reality that surrounds the specific object or phenomenon. Aristotle erroneously believed that the reality of a thing is exhausted in the thing itself, which he called quid (tode ti). He took no account of the reality surrounding this thing; consequently, all chances of seeing the truth of this thing in relation to its surrounding reality was missed. To Anaxagoras, the surrounding reality of a thing is indeed the entire universe, and what happens to this thing affects the entire universe in turn. No matter how we limit our remarks to the surrounding reality which is close to a specific thing that is observed, it can be said that the principles that make this reality up are not the same, and yet this is one and the selfsame reality. Once Hector is wounded, certain principles are there, causing the imbalance of his physiological and mental functions. These principles also make up the specific reality (or, the scenery which Homer described), but it is only Hector alone who feels them, and they shape Hector’s own perception of reality. This grasp was not less real whatsoever than that by others who were present at that circumstance, but their comprehension of reality was determined by certain other principles acting therein.

Therefore, we have two different perceptions of reality, neither of which can be said to be superior to the other: both of them are equally real, and the reality of each of them stems from different activities by different logoi. In the case of Hector, the preponderant principles are different, owing to the condition of his wounded body. This would have appeared strange to Aristotle and to his readers of old, but this is what Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976) described as the correct approach to reality: while performing an experiment, one can no longer consider the observer who carries this out as being independent from the experiment itself. The scientist who does this work is as much part of the experiment as the ingredients of it, and the scientist’s presence itself affects the results of the experiment. What would be possibly the difference between this idea and the statements of Parmenides and Anaxagoras?

Therefore, Anaxagoras was once again the victim of Aristotle’s distorted representation, which gave rise to conflicting subsequent accounts. However, we can conclude from them that Anaxagoras was modest enough as to place very little store by the sense perception and not delude himself with the impression that this can provide any assumed objective truth. Unlike Protagoras, who sanctioned every personal perception as ‘truth’, Anaxagoras dismissed it as untrue and conceded no absolute authority to it, although ‘truth’ still it was. Modern scientific discoveries reveal that the simulacrum which we create by means of our senses, and the organs we use to reinforce these senses, is not a true representation of the real universe: it is only a false semblance created by the human brain, through the extremely imperfect and fallible human perceptible abilities.

If our human grasp of the universe stems from our physiology and it is limited thereby, we are unable to create a representation of an assumed ‘true’ objective reality, not even argue in a scientific manner that such a ‘true reality’ really exists. Therefore, this grasp is like a dream, to which Prospero’s words fit perfectly:

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

Somehow, our perception is an illusion and a dream. Life is but a dream, and we are the ‘stuff’ dreams are ‘made on’ (built of). When Anaxagoras was asked what death is like, he replied that one could find the answer by thinking ‘of either the time before one’s birth, or of sleep’. ‘Our little life’ is like a brief dream in some divine mind, ‘rounded with a sleep’, that is, either ‘surrounded’ by sleep or ‘rounded off’ (completed) by sleep.

The real nature of the four-dimension non-Euclidean universe is non-perceptible: it can be described only by means of mathematical relations. This great modern scientific revolution has occurred amid social, intellectual, and religious circumstances. The relevant institutions are yet unprepared to accommodate them, and scholars of ancient thought are unequipped to consider them. Consequently, once they hear about ‘non-perceptible reality’, they react spontaneously speaking of ‘Platonism’; once they hear about Anaxagoras having said the same things about human sense, they immediately open the chapter ‘Protagoras’ in histories of philosophy; and once they are advised that the Anaxagorean principles are both one and many, as well as here and there, they brand this ‘Neoplatonic’ extrapolation by Simplicius. But if what Simplicius explained as Anaxagorean philosophy were ‘Neoplatonism’, then the vanguard of modern science would be ‘Neoplatonism’, too. But of course this is not the case: quite simply, Anaxagoras anticipated ideas that modern science now maintains as a result of mathematical proof, of observation of phenomena, and of natural experiments. In reality, things happened the other way around: Neoplatonism was to a certain extent influenced by the ideas of Anaxagoras, as indeed Aristotle himself was, and so were the Stoics and such insightful intellectuals as Origen, whom the vast majority of modern theologians are unable to understand and distort his thought promiscuously, but fortunately some modern classicists and historians are faring much better because they are not beset by religious dogmatism. The fact remains that, when scholars study Simplicius’ analysis of Anaxagoras, they have recourse to the easy shibboleth of branding this ‘Neoplatonism’. However, Modern Physics has exactly the same things to say about what reality is –and this product of knowledge, which has been produced by means of both experiment and reasoning, no one is able to brand ‘Neoplatonism’.

This modern revolution does not pose any threat to philosophy whatsoever: on the contrary, it may help towards a new understanding of the past in light of the stunning achievements of the present, as well as of the forthcoming ones. Revisiting Anaxagoras is then a good start, since this study reveals a prophet who anticipated some of the most stunning ideas of the twenty-first century.

Matter is a fundamental notion of Aristotle’s philosophy, which sometimes he identified with the essence of a certain object. We saw that he forced this notion into Anaxagoras’ thought, even though Anaxagoras himself reflected on sheer different terms. Since it was Aristotle, not Anaxagoras, that made an indelible impact on Western civilization, matter became also important for modern scientific, as well as social, shape. Matter has been understood as an objective reality, and, nowadays, often enough matter and its products are deified by Western societies: in the altar of it, all human values, such as freedom, justice, human dignity, even human life, can be sacrificed. However, all current conception of what matter actually is now yesterday’s knowledge. Both experimental and theoretical proof has revealed that any manifestation of material reality is only a casual manifestation of an imperceptible reality. The universe is only a ‘soup’ of boiling energy, and what we see as ‘material objects’ is only a tiny part of this space, in which there is slightly more density of energy. Everything within the universe belongs to a unified reality, in which there is neither division nor individuality. Everything is one: any action at any point of space affects the entirety of space, as indeed any action definitely effects re-action.

Anaxagoras set forth this idea twenty-five centuries ago: Stobaeus reported that to Anaxagoras and Democritus human senses are only a source of falsehood, and the highly critical Sextus Empiricus, who regarded Anaxagoras as ‘the most erudite Physicist’, also wrote that the Clazomenian ‘despised human senses as too feeble’ to grasp reality. Sextus saved a celebrated maxim by the same philosopher, which became proverbial, even though some of those who quoted it forgot its source:

“Phenomena are only the external manifestation of what is not manifest”.

In this proposition, there is nothing different from the testimonies that the Anaxagorean principles come to light by unconcealment out of concealment, which I have discussed in my aforementioned book. In both cases, this means that appearances are only a visual representation of the invisible reality, since our senses are inadequate to determine truth: perception is dependent on, and proportional to, the kind of an animal and its sense organs. Oddly enough, Christian authors cherished this proverbial phrase, whereas Greeks did not pay attention to it. Nevertheless, Anaxagoras did not maintain that any natural observation is as authoritative as any other. Sextus explains in admiration that Anaxagoras saw the inability to see the real nature of things because he recognized the wanting ability of human senses, but, like modern science, he introduced the criterion of reason. His difference from the Pythagoreans was that he meant sound reason in all if its functions, whereas the Pythagoreans meant only the mathematical logic, and they maintained that God made everything in accordance with mathematics, therefore, like should be known by the like, according to the old maxim.

Consequently, when Aristotle represented Anaxagoras as a predecessor of Protagoras, he was unfair to him once again: what Anaxagoras actually meant was not introduction of any unrestrained subjectivism; he only argued that phenomena are not the objective truth, they are only what we make of them. Use of experiment in Physics had to wait for several centuries, but when it was employed, it only confirmed Anaxagoras’ intuition, who had used such experiments himself as a method to confirm that air is a body. Whereas air was definitely a body, and Anaxagoras’ natural experiments proving this remained proverbial, aether was distinguished from the air, the implications of which I have discuss in chapter 11 of my book.

Once the principles were created, nothing became everything, and the increasing cosmic rotation (maintained by Anaxagoras and Modern Physics alike) and continuing expansion of the universe was the cause for separate things such as the stars and the sun and moon to appear. This accelerating rotation (confirmed by Modern Physics, too) involves endless appearance and disappearance of material objects and of all phenomena. In fact, Anaxagoras described the first moments of the universe following the Big Bang, which is now knowledge available to any layman. Modern science speaks of Big Bang of an infinitely small ‘thing’ which theoretically had infinite energy; Anaxagoras spoke of explosion, sudden rotation, and accelerating expansion of a ‘sperm’ which contained all the sperms / principles / logoi, according to which the universe started to take shape, so it does now, and so it will do in the future. This is what Anaxagoras meant when he claimed that nothing comes from nothing, and nothing perishes into nothing: the principles ‘are neither generated nor destroyed, but they persist eternally’.

“Consequently, they were revolving and separated off from each other by force and velocity (since velocity produces force). And their velocity is unlike the amount of velocity noticed in current human circumstances, but is utterly many times as fast. … And the Nous ruled over the entire revolution and made it start in the beginning. First, it was a small thing that began to revolve, but it is revolving yet more, and it will revolve more still. And the Nous knew them all, namely, the things that are mixed together and those which are separated off, and those which are dissociated from one another. … The Nous also ordered this revolution, which is now performed by the stars and the sun and the moon, as well as the air, and the aether, which are distinct from one another. This revolution caused them to appear as distinct ones. … separation is produced from motion, and the cause of motion is the Nous. … Once the Nous gave rise to motion, separation off took place upon everything that moved; and what ever the Nous moved, all this was made distinct. Thus, as things were being moved and made distinct from one another, rotation caused them to dissociated from each other even more.” (Anaxagoras apud Simplicius).

In Modern Physics, ‘velocity produces force’ means of course angular velocity, as well as that centripetal force on an object of mass m moving at tangential speed v along a path with radius of curvature r is commensurate to the square of velocity multiplied by the amount of mass: F = mv²/r. Anaxagoras is modern on this, too. To him, ‘distinction’ effected by the Nous means that the primeval confusum became a ‘single body’ which contains all of potentialities. Everything appears out of that ‘body’. The testimony by al-Shahrastani reported by Porphyry about Anaxagoras being the first who advanced the theory of hiding-and-appearing insofar as he supposed that all things are hidden in the first body said exactly this. What is that which appears out of that body? Porphyry was clear: this is ‘a species, a genus, a mass, a shape, and a denseness or a rareness, just as the ear of corn emerges into appearance out of a single grain, a man perfectly shaped out of a paltry drop of sperm, and a bird out of an egg. All these are instances of the emergence of appearance out of hiding, of actuality out of potentiality, of form out of the disposition of matter. However, creation (al-ibdd’) is only of one thing and it applies to no other thing except to that first body’. Is a ‘genus’ or a ‘shape’ or ‘denseness or a rareness’ a material body? Or the case is that this statement informs that everything, whether matter proper or individual things or phenomena or persons, or indeed universals themselves, are produced out of that order of potentialities?

This is why Anaxagoras saw the universe as revelation. Even the most petite function in the cosmos is manifestation of a mystical and forceful reality of powers which reveal themselves in the momentous macrocosm as much as do they so in the miracle of a little growing flower or in the marvel of a developing foetus. Revelation means that Anaxagoras granted that a human being is able to grasp genuinely this endless miracle. This is why he did not despise the ability of human senses to get the picture of this, while paying little attention to either consideration or pursuit of any visionary or chimerical ‘objective’ reality. Of all intellectuals of antiquity, it was only Origen who developed his own theory of creation in exactly the same terms, following Anaxagoras suit, thus reviving a long forgotten theory (the Theory of Logoi discussed in my Anaxagoras, Origen and Neoplatonism – The Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity), which was the only way to hurdle both Platonic and Peripatetic impasses.

Despite this ‘distinction’, the things which have become (and they still become, and will become even more) distinct from one another are not radically separated off: for the existence of the principles, which are universally present throughout all space guarantee the unity of the universe and interrelation of everything in it. Hence, despite the accelerating rotation of everything, ‘nothing is completely separated off or dissociated from the other, except the Nous,” since all these principles are ‘all in all’.

Aristotle accused Anaxagoras of misusing the term ‘alteration’ (or, ‘mutation’, alloiōsis), but he was wrong: alloiōsis was the proper word to describe the mutation of a certain material object to another, or to pure energy. The principles are ‘impassible’, since their action takes place only by their concurrence or disjunction, and by their interaction with each other, which is why everything comes from everything. This is what makes ‘generation’, ‘mutation’ and ‘emanation’ one and the same process, even though Aristotle criticized it only because he did not grasp (or intentionally overlooked) the immaterial and indestructible character of those principles. For Anaxagoras held that the principles, all of which are everywhere, produce material things (and matter itself) by being conjugated together in sundry combinations; they are also those that cause things to perish by being separated out from each other. Whether ‘concurrence’ or ‘disjunction’, the result of this interaction between the principles is always alteration (or mutation) of a thing, no matter whether it comes to be or it perishes. Therefore, ‘concurrence’ and ‘disjunction’ is not a name alternative to mutation: ‘conjunction’ or ‘disjunction’ is mutation. This Aristotle did not understand, hence he castigated the idea as self-defeating.

By contrast, the author of a Hippocratic text was perfectly aware of the notion, and expounded his thought in what it was probably the most faithful Anaxagorean account, as well as language, after Anaxagoras. Moreover, Galen argued that separation-off and mixing-together was identified with ‘mutation’ (alloiōsis) by the followers of Epicurus and Democritus; he added that ‘both Anaxagoras and Empedocles maintained the same theory, although differently from one another, since the former introduced the homoiomeries, whereas the latter believed that the four elements are unchangeable.’ Anaxagoras did not care to make the four elements primary ones: instead, he was the one who determined that whether earth or fire or water or air, all the elements are products of both ‘the principles and everything that exists in the universe’.

Aristotle objected to the theory of ‘Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus’, according to which any generation and passing away is in fact coming-together and separation-off. He argued so because he thought (or pretended to believe) that Anaxagoras’ incorporeal principles were the same as the material elements of Democritus and Leucippus. Anaxagoras held that any generation is ‘mutation’ (alloiōsis), which is the same as coming-together and separation-off. This is why ‘everything is produced from everything’, since everything is produced not from ‘elements’, but from certain principles. Aristotle urged that coming-together and separation-off could be understood only as a kind of forcing together, sēnōsis) and pushing asunder (diōsis). ‘A kind of’ means that sēnōsis and diōsis are genera whereas conjunction and disjunction (syncresis and diacresis) are particular manifestations, or species, of these genera. Simplicius reports that this is how Alexander of Aphrodisias interpreted Aristotle’s statements on this (this is a part of Aristotle’s Physics which is far from being clear), but he disagreed, arguing that sēnōsis (forcing together) and diōsis (pushing asunder) are not a kind of coming-together and separation-off, but they are terms describing both coming-together and separation-off themselves.

Therefore, it was not the case that ‘Anaxagoras misunderstood his own statement’, (as Aristotle alleged complacently and sarcastically, as usual) by saying that generation and perishing is mutation, ‘since, like others, he says that the elements are many’. For, in fact, Anaxagoras knew what he was talking about: generation and perishing is mutation because the principles (not ‘elements’) are many, and they act ceaselessly in order to secure the process of endless alteration by means of ‘concurrence’ and ‘disjunction’. It is because many operating principles are there that alteration (alloiōsis) takes place, the more sublime manifestation of which is the development of potentialities into actualities by means of concurring principles which effect alteration in its numerous manifestations.

Ancient authors argued that Aristotle did not father the notion of potentiality, but this was earlier and he only took this up and made it a paragon of his philosophy. But none of them realized that the real source of it was Anaxagoras, which I have discussed in chapter 6 of my aforementioned book, in the context of Anaxagoras’ impact of Classical and Late Antiquity. The intellectual who definitely knew this was Aristotle himself and this was one of the main reasons for him to concoct a caricature of that philosopher as part of his wider agenda aiming at belittling all of his predecessors, both Presocratics and Plato, and represent himself as the messiah of philosophy, of whose teaching all his predecessors had seen the truth only ‘through a glass darkly’ and had spoken by means of inarticulate formulations obscurely through vague illustrations ‘in figures and shadows’. Fpor he was obsessed by the idea that History had to wait for Aristotle himself to appear, so that the fullness of the light of truth should be cast –and scientific thought should be stalled for many centuries because the Middle Ages, especially once western prelature made him a sacred authority and hallowed prophet.

To Anaxagoras, any ‘perceptible’ thing comes to pass because of density of matter / energy (today we know that matter and energy is the salefsame thing, ostensibly appearing as different only because of different density of energy). ‘Imperceptible’ occurs because of thinness which results in things escaping the human capabilities to notice them.

This eternal motion is the fundamental characteristic of alteration, which does not come from outside: this is the outcome of acting and reacting principles, which are both one and many, both here and everywhere, both united and distinct from each other, both here and everywhere, both now and ever; they are incorruptible, always the same, and there can be no notion of either ‘less’ or ‘more’ that can be applied to them; it is impossible to determine anything as being either the biggest or the smallest; everything is in everything, and everything participates in everything. This is why all principles are mixed with each other.

The Whole becomes Parts, and Parts become Whole anew, because of the unity of the Whole. This was known to Anaxagoras, but it was destroyed by Aristotle only to be restored by modern science. This is the unity of Anaxagoras’ universe, in which perceptible things are not severed from their causes / principles, nor is there any distinction between Here and Beyond.

This unity was fragmented by Plato’s dualism, which sharply severed perceptible things from their causes and introduced a mythological Beyond. This unity was destroyed also by Aristotle, who saw the universe as a sum total of material objects entirely distinct and separate from each other. This delusive idea was his legacy to the Western civilization, which pushed this conception to its most extreme limits, and made the distinct and self-existent material Subject identical with the political Individual, which should be venerated as an idol, along with its concomitant material substratum and its individual material needs, which, in turn, resulted in matter becoming an idol, too.

Consequently, the question which is called for is this: what are the ‘phenomena to be saved’ out of the perceptible reality? Anaxagoras saw this as neither matter, nor elements, not atoms, nor spirit, nor soul, nor Ideas, nor forms. He saw only immaterial principles, which can either generate or dissolve anything, matter included. In this way, he explained how and why does this alteration take place: this happens because principles either converge with or diverge from one another, and all of this takes place under the supervision of a cosmic personal Nous, which uses the principles as his instruments.

During an era when the winds were assumed to come from Zeus, Anaxagoras said that winds arise when the air is rarefied by the sun’s heat, thus impiously belying Homer. He also argued that thunder is a clashing together of the clouds, lighting is their violent friction, and he cared to explain how snow and hail are produced from freezing clouds, indeed why hailstones are spherical. Furthermore, he ‘was the first who set out to interpret the phenomenon of eclipses’, on which ‘Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and mathematicians’ followed him. Moreover, he determined that the moon is made of the same material as the earth, and it likewise has mountains and chasms. Also, the moon’s light is no other than the one it receives from the sun, and the sun and moon were formed simultaneously, since it was the same cause which produced them –in modern terms, the same causes apply to the formation of our solar system. Proclus (commenting on Timaeus, 38d) acknowledged that, on this, Anaxagoras preceded Plato. Certainly, the earth is not flat, as Anaxagoras had it. Likewise, it is not the centre of the universe either, but this idea persisted for at least another thousand years after Anaxagoras, since Aristotle had sanctioned it.

It is instructive to study some more criticism levelled against Anaxagoras, since this shows how close to modern science that man stood. Xenophon argued that Anaxagoras ‘was mentally deranged’, since he was so ‘presumptuous’ as to dare to ‘come up with his own exegeses on questions which touch upon the activity of gods.’ For when he said that ‘the sun is fire’, he did not take into account the fact that men can see any fire easily, but they are unable to stare at the sun. Likewise, Anaxagoras dared to say that those men who are exposed to the sun get a darker complexion, but he neglected the fact that no such effect takes place upon those who stand before a fire. Moreover, Anaxagoras was not aware of the fact that the plants cannot grow unless they receive the light of the sun, but they are destroyed when they are placed near a fire. Furthermore, when Anaxagoras said that the sun is a fiery stone, he did not know that when fire is set on a stone, this stone does not become bright, nor does such a fire last for long; on the contrary, the sun is the brightest of all things and it remains so all over the entire time. Conclusion: the sun cannot be a stone of fire. Quod erat demonstrandum!

By the same quality of dialectics, Aristotle argued about how rain comes to pass: “The process is just the opposite of what Anaxagoras says it is. He says that it takes place when a cloud descends into the warm air and is most violent when the cloud descends farthest.” Today, we know that one of the three main causes for rain to be produced is air being cooled, which results in its inability to maintain moisture in the form of air or small liquid drops. Likewise, we know that life was produced out of the water, and then by evolution from each other; also, that the presence of the moon is associated with the sun, and the moon owes its light to the light cast upon it by the sun.

To dare produce natural explanations of different phenomena once the Nous was established as the supreme principle appeared absurd to some, who thought that, by this, Anaxagoras made the function of the world an automaton. The distortion came from Aristotle’s pupil Eudemus of Rhodes (c. 370 BC - c. 300 BC), who urged that Anaxagoras ‘abandoned the Nous and introduced the idea that all other things function without external agency’, that is, as automata, although Aristotle himself granted that Anaxagoras did not make the cause of becoming either ‘the automaton or mere chance’, and Aristotle’s commentators explicitly endorsed this, saying that it is the Nous that stands behind the function of Nature.

History of philosophy did some justice to Anaxagoras, reporting that, to him, certain things occur out of necessity, others according to Heimarmene (the orderly succession of cause and effect, or, the fate of the universe as a whole), others by chance, and others according to automatous process, that is, a set of self-regulating laws operating in Nature. This came to be also the theory of the Stoics. One should be alert to the proposition about things taking place ‘by chance’: this does not suggest random or casual blind things taking place haphazardly; instead, it means occurrences of which men do not know the causes, events that appear not to have an assignable cause, but they have a cause still. No wonder that the idea was taken up by the Stoics, who, like Anaxagoras, maintained the notion of universal ‘sympathy’, that is interrelation of all things and phenomena: thus, ‘chance’ (tyche) means unknown causes, not absence of causes.

In view of the fact that Plato posited heavenly bodies as animate, and this remained a moot question to such minds as Origen, Jerome, and Augustine (Gennadius Scholarius, Epitome Primae Partis Summae Theologicae Thomae Aquinae), it is remarkable that Anaxagoras confidently averred that they are simply made of earthly material and denied that they are animate. Little wonder then that, as late as the fourth century, the rhetor Libanius (c. 314 - c. 394), who always remained a pagan and saw himself as a Hellene on religious matters, wrote that ‘Anaxagoras was justly put to jail, because he held impious theories about the sun and the moon’.

It comes as no surprise that the writer of the lemma ‘Nous’ in the Suda wrote what after Proclus was perceived as the Anaxagorean gist of his theories, notwithstanding Proclus’ struggle to interpolate everything in Plato: human mind contains all the logoi in itself; however, it contains in the form of images those logoi which are prior to it, whereas it contains those logoi that human mind gives rise to as exemplars which produce other things. In short, Nous is the receptacle of logoi, which are grasped differently, depending on the point of viewing them.

There is an interesting notion which was entertained by only a couple of authors: this is ‘idle matter’ (arge hyle). Doxography reports that, according to Empedocles, the entire material universe that we see is not in fact the whole of matter in it. We can see only the visible matter, which is only a tiny fragment of all matter existing in the universe. The rest of it is ‘idle matter’. We should bear in mind that Empedocles was a pupil of Anaxagoras, and they shared several ideas, which was the case with all Presocratics, anyway. The notion of ‘idle matter’ remained idle itself, since it was not used by authors and it never became an established technical term. However, we have a unique reference by an unexpected side, namely Epiphanius of Salamis: in his exposition, he plainly envisages that the end of the world will be a sort of ‘conflagration’ (akflogosin), but he insists that this does not mean total destruction of it. Here is his argument then: the universe will never return to the state it was before ‘the universal decoration’ of it by God, so that it should be ‘re-decorated anew’. What was the state of the world before it was made? Christian imperial orthodoxy would promptly urge that it was absolute nothingness, but this is not what Epiphanius said: the state (katastasin) before ‘decoration’ was not nothingness, it was ‘idle matter’.

Epiphanius was not an erudite scientist, although he had a remarkable library available to him: he was a fanatic monk seeing himself as a great inquisitor of all theological aberration, and an active obloquial lobbyist in the corridors of powerful quarters at Constantinople. He did use the expression ‘from those which did not exist’ (ex ouk ontōn) at a few points, but the idea he implied was that God did not make use of any pre-existing material (ek me hypokeimenōn), and yet, the divine act was a ‘decoration’, which is, of course, flagrant inconsistency. Otherwise, the idea he implied was that the divine creative act was a decorative one. The important point is that he enunciated what he really believed at the specific point cited above: ‘before creation’ (pro tēs diakosmēseōs) the ‘state’ of things (katastasin) was ‘idle matter’ (hyle arge), and his assertion that the world will never be annihilated by God is explained as meaning that the world will never return to that state before creation. It would appear then that Epiphanius had in mind ‘formless matter’, as perhaps the author of the biblical Genesis did. Nevertheless, the notion that Eusebius ascribed to Empedocles is more than that: it refers to the created world, not to the state prior to that, and it is now that ‘idle matter’ exists in overwhelmingly dominating quantity throughout the universe. What this really means, I would not like to press further; but it seems as though Empedocles could not have meant any primeval confusum, but the invisible matter which is not dense enough so as to be visible. Incidentally, modern physics insist that the visible material universe occupies less than four per cent of the matter actually existing: the rest it calls ‘dark matter’. What the difference between ‘idle matter’ and ‘dark matter’ could possible be, is a question that I leave moot in the absence of more evidence.

If then matter is an illusion of the human senses, which cannot perceive physically the real causes that make it visible to us, it could be said that what we see as death is a transition from what does not exist but it is perceptible, to that which is not perceptible but does exist (namely, the indestructible incorporeal Anaxagorean principles / logoi). This is only a change of condition, not abolition of the real setting itself. This was a view shared by Anaxagoras and Empedocles alike, and Philo quotes from them both:

“Nothing from what is can come to be, nor was it ever heard or happened that what exists should entirely perish.”

Then, he turns once again to Euripides, the credible witness to Anaxagoras.

“None of the things that come to be dies, but they appear in different form by being separated off from one another.”

Doxographic tradition cherished these references by Euripides, rightly regarding them as a faithful exposition of the Anaxagorean philosophy. “The Epicureans believe that animals are generated by alteration of one into another; for these, too, are part of the world, as Anaxagoras and Euripides say”; and then doxographers quoted the foregoing passage of Euripides. Anaxagoras declared that animals were produced from moisture, heat, and an earthly substance; later, the species were propagated by generation from one another. Not surprisingly, this was a view of Origen, too.

We should be grateful to Simplicius who preserved Anaxagoras’ own words for us, so that we can confirm his real philosophy:

“Anaxagoras says clearly in the first book of his Physics that generation and passing away are [in fact] convergence and divergence [of the principles]; for he writes this: ‘The Greeks have the wrong conception of what generation and passing away is; for no thing either comes to be or perishes, but is mixed together and dissociated from the things that already exist. Consequently, they would be right to call generation mixing-together and passing-away dissociating.’”

He adds that ‘these words, along with other propositions, such as all things were together and that generation is convergence and divergence [of the principles], or (which is the same) mutation, [were written by Anaxagoras] in order to confirm that nothing comes from what does not exist; instead, whatever is generated it comes to be from that which exists [already], and mutation is simply something which happens to Being (peri to on), whereas concurrence and disjunction is something that happens to particular beings (peri ta onta).

This is a vivid exposition of the concept of the unity of the universe, that is, of the idea that everything is one, and any change at any point of the universe actually affects the whole of it, as Modern Physics has confirmed. Thus, concurrence and disjunction refers to interaction between specific principles (it is about ‘particular beings’, peri ta onta), whereas mutation, which springs from concurrence and disjunction of specific principles, results in appearance or disappearance of specific (animate or inanimate) things, and this Anaxagoras saw as affecting not simply these things (peri ta onta), but the entire universe; in other words, this is about the whole of Being (peri to on).

Simplicius calls this interaction of principles also ‘perceptible concurrence’, noting that all things are generated out of their collaboration, and perishing of things is no other than ‘dissolution’ into those principles.

The principles / logoi were created once and for all, and this was the really ‘new’ that happened. Any subsequent generation or passing away is only about different manifestations of the sundry ways of these principles converging with, or diverging from, each other. There is nothing ‘new’ that comes to be and there is nothing that really passes away. Only the principles exist really, which neither come to be nor do they perish. Their occasional reaction, which either gives rise to things or causes other to perish, is neither real generation nor real death. This was the ingenious legacy of Anaxagoras that both Plato and Aristotle struggled to destroy, while selectively plundering it along with other cardinal ideas of Anaxagoras, taking them as spoils and making them part of their systems. Plato introduced a proposition ‘every living being is born from the dead’, which is a rendering of Anaxagoras’ natural philosophy in Plato’s favourite mythological terms (Phaedo, 70c-d; 71d; 72a-d; 77c). However, the theory was untenable outside Anaxagoras’ premisses. Although Proclus endorsed it without questioning its rationale, later Neoplatonists such as Damascius took exception to it: following reference to Plato’s theory, he argued against it, and finally stated that this theory had been rebutted by Syrianus, who argued that Plato’s theory is untenable: to say that all men are born from the dead runs contrary to the fact that the first men were alive and they did not come from any prior dead ones.

However, the legacy of Anaxagoras did survive throughout Antiquity, especially the Late one, when it became evident that Plato’s theory of Ideas actually resulted in bankruptcy and Aristotle’s alternative propositions were unable to explain both the ‘way to creation’ (as Porphyry put it) and the process of Becoming. What stood firm from Aristotle’s philosophy was the notion of the Supreme Principle, which though was a genuine copy of Anaxagoras’ Nous (and Alexander of aphrodisias was the first to render Aristotle’s exposition through the term Prōtos Nous, in reference to Aristotle’s First Immovable Mover).

Whether surreptitiously entertained or unconsciously availed of, the Anaxagorean tradition made its way well into the Late Antiquity. I will then give two examples that relate to the present point.

No matter who he was, the author of a Hippocratic text appears as the sole writer who had read Anaxagoras’ physics first-hand, well before Simplicius saved part of this for posterity. His usage of identical terminology is impressive indeed (but to confirm this, one should read the original Greek Hippocratic text along with that of Anaxagoras). He considers the attributes of warmness, dryness, coolness, and wetness, in order to recommend to his readers a healthy diet. However, all of a sudden, he set out to consider those notions in themselves, and his text turns out an Anaxagorean exposition, evidently because Anaxagoras had considered the same attributes as examples of the ‘things’ which were distinguished by the Nous: He argues that, since things have many and different forms, they are distinguished from each other, whether seeds or animals, which are all different from each other concerning either their form or function. For they never remain the same, and since they always mutate to sundry forms, those which are produced from them of necessity become also unlike each other. Certainly, none of all things perishes, nor does it ever become what previously it was not. Besides, things mutate by being either mixed together or dissociated from each other. Now, he goes on, people think that generation means something that has been grown and has come to light out of the Hades, and that passing away means to be reduced and finally extinguished into the Hades. However, these people believe in their eyes rather than in reason, because they are unable to judge rightly even what they see. Therefore (he adds), I explain this as follows: certainly both that situation and the present one are life; and it is not possible for a living being to die, unless everything in the universe dies. For where is it that one would go once one dies? It is not possible for non-being to become being. For whence could non-being possibly receive its existence? Instead, everything increases and decreases between two possible limits, a maximum and a minimum. Therefore (he goes on), whenever I make reference to either coming-to-be or passing-away, I use such terms only for the sake of the multitude for what I actually mean is mixing-together and dissociating from each other. Here is then (he concludes) how things really are: whether coming-to-be or passing-away, this is the same thing; mixing-together and dissociating from each other is the same thing, too; to increase and to decrease is the same thing; coming-to-be and mixing-together is the same thing; to perish means to decrease, and this is the same as dissociating from each other. Each one is the same as all are, and all are the same as each one is; and none of them is the same as the other, which is an established law concerning their nature.

The essence of any thing is a specific concurrence of logoi, which is why the logos of a thing is both one and many: everything is in everything’, and ‘everything participates in everything’, and ‘the smallest is equal with the entire multitude’, and this is why ‘it is impossible to determine anything as being either the biggest or the smallest’. The principles are both one and many, both united and distinct from each other, both here and everywhere, both now and ever; they are incorruptible, since they do not come to be nor do they perish. There is no notion of either ‘less’ or ‘more’ that could be applied to them; for it is impossible for any of them to be more than all, since they are all equal, and yet they are all unlike each other.

The second example comes from Apollonius of Tyana, or perhaps one of his pupils.

Apollonius’ biographer Philostratus of Lemnos mentioned Anaxagoras with manifest respect for his wisdom, while insinuating that this Presocratic did not receive the credit he deserved: as it was widely known that Anaxagoras abandoned all his paternal property in Clazomenae in order to dedicate himself to philosophy, Philostratus wrote that, according to Apollonius, the sheep which found food in the abandoned fields of Clazomenae received more benefit than those who heard Anaxagoras –evidently because he was one more philosopher whom his contemporaries were unable to understand and appreciate. As it happened with the foregoing Hippocratic text, the following one is also attributed to a celebrity such as Apollonius, yet we cannot be sure whether the attribution is genuine. Whatever the case, this was written definitely by a follower.

The author considers what death is, in order to argue that ‘there is no death for anything, except only ostensibly’, ‘in like a manner that there is neither generation of anything, except only ostensibly’. ‘For what appears as generation is only transformation of Essence into Nature’; ‘by the same token, death is transformation of Nature into Essence’. ‘There is not anything which is really generated, nor does anything ever really perish’: in reality, ‘what is perceptible, subsequently it becomes imperceptible. The former (i.e. the perceptible object) is so ‘because of the density of its matter’; the latter (i.e. the perceptible object) is so ‘because of the thinness of its stuff’, ‘which is always the same and it differs only in terms of either motion or motionlessness’. Although such ‘different manifestations of things happen of necessity’, this kind of ‘change does not take place as if it were introduced from the outside’. What really happens is that ‘owing to the unity of the universe, the Whole changes into Parts, and Parts change into the Whole’. In view of this, one might ask, ‘what is that which is intermittently either perceptible or imperceptible, and it appears in either this or the other form?’. To this question, the answer is that visibleness has to do with the things that pertain to the genera perceived by the human condition: a certain genus becomes visible only because it is filled with a dense condition of solid matter; likewise, it is invisible once it turns void of such matter, which becomes thin. This happens only because the form of visible matter undergoes ‘a violent embracement’ by circumstances which cause ‘the eternal measure, which determines its state, to fall away’. However, no matter what ‘the measure’, any thing (whether perceptible or imperceptible) ‘is in no way either generated or perishable’.

What is this ‘measure’? The author of this Hippocratic text put it in terms of everything either increasing or decreasing between two possible limits, a maximum and a minimum one. Modern science couches the same notion in similar terms: ‘matter’ is simply a region of the space in which curvature towards time (the fourth dimension) stands between certain limits. Therefore, matter is in fact only a ‘ditch’ within the three-dimensional space, and the depth of this ditch if the fourth dimension (time) so long as the amount of this depth stands within certain limits.

Following this, it is quite evident that how the universe operates is explained by means of the Anaxagorean principles: whether a certain reality will be visible or invisible is determined by the different ways of mutual concurrence or divergence of certain principles. In this context, the Hippocratic author argues that, since the cosmic principles determine what ostensibly appears as generation, it can be said that a child is born not from its parents, but by means of (or, through) his parents. It is impressive but not surprising that Origen fully endorsed this notion: although parents provide the material for offspring to be formed, and thus ‘we have parents as far as our bodies are concerned’, otherwise ‘there is neither mother nor father of any soul, since the latter was created by God alone.” This is what God means by saying ‘all souls are mine’, since ‘every soul has an existence of its own’, and none of them is produced from one another. Apollonius, or whoever the author, goes on arguing along the same line, that it is not the earth that gives birth to plants: the soil is only the medium upon which the cosmic principles act and make a plant grow.

All these phenomena are not isolated and independent from each other: the author emphasized that all particular manifestations which we perceive as either generation or death, and, in general, as ‘mutation’, do not really pertain to the particular things involved in such phenomena, but it is something which happens to Being. Likewise, in remarkably similar terms, the present author writes, that the phenomena that he described do not actually pertain to those phenomena themselves; rather, each particular occurrence or phenomenon actually ‘refers to one’.

What is this ‘one’? ‘What else could it possibly be other than the primary substance, if one were to use the proper terms?’ For it is this primary substance (that is, the cosmic principles) alone that either creates or undergoes changes. This ‘primary substance’ the author of the Hippocratic text called ‘Being’ (to on). In the final analysis, this ‘primary substance’ suggests the whole concept of the Nous acting by means of the principles, which serve to it as tools. These are the logoi, according to which the universe is eternally fashioned, sustained, and re-fashioned. This ‘substance’ the author calls ‘the eternal God who permeates everything and becomes everything to everything’, a God ‘that has received sundry names and persons, which are a detriment’ to his own real identity.

The conclusion is the selfsame as that of the Hippocratic writer: Apollonius urges that ‘in no way does Being perish, which is why this is called Being: it is so called because it will be for ever’. Likewise, non-Being cannot come to be: for in order for non-Being to take over, Being should perish, which is impossible to happen.

In essence, this is the same analysis as that by the author of the Hippocratic text, who argued that none of things perishes nor does it ever become what it was not previously; it is not possible for a living being to die, unless everything in the universe dies. For where is it that one would go once one dies? It is not possible for non-being to become being. For whence is it that non-being would receive existence? This view was not too a peripheral one, anyway: a work of the Corpus Hermeticum, entitled ‘None of the things that exist does ever perish’ argued that ‘it is only those who are misled that call passing-away and deaths what are only alterations’. The argument goes that everything in the world is part of it, man is so par excellence, and no part of the world does ever perish.

Therefore, if the principles are essence and their product is nature, ‘generation’ is transformation of Essence to Nature, whereas ‘death’ is transformation of Nature to Essence.

There are only the incorporeal principles which concur in order to give rise to material things, and to sustain them, and they also depart from one another, which results in things perishing, while others come to pass endlessly. This continuous alteration does not affect the principles as such: it affects only the temporary products of their convergence with each other or divergence from one another.

Conclusion: That which our human senses perceive as ‘matter’ is only the coupling of two human illusions, namely, of Space and Time. These, along with Matter, are the three constituents of a dream, which lasts as long as that which we call ‘duration of our life’. Our senses are only the organs that maintain and preserve continuance of our dream. Matter gradually fades, like all dreamy mental images. Along with matter, our senses, which keep up these dreamy images, fade, too. Then the dream is over and a new day dawns -a day which is in fact infinite, within the bosom of the real and infinite universe, the universe of the principles of Anaxagoras.