Ancient Philosophy
Athens had become an empire at the time of Anaxagoras life. The athenians forced others to install their political aparatus on their islands, and to obey the rule of the athenians. One person was the main player of this political dominance: Pericles. After the Persian wars, Pericles begins a building program, like Phidias, the builder of Parthenon, in order to make Athens the splendour of the world. Pericles also attracted intellectuals to his circle, as a Strategos. Among whom is Anaxagoras.
In Athens there is opposition to Pericles’ politicis. The adversaries start to accuse people in the circle of Pericles for misdemeanors. Anaxagaroras was accused of atheism. He thought the stars were fiery stones. And then he left Athens never to return.
Anaxagoras sides with Parmenides in most things. There is no other choic in this matter. Like Empedocles and Parmenides he thinks there is no coming into being or perishing. At the level of general existence of things the number stays constant.
Coming into being is composition and perishing is dissolution.
You must therefore trust your senses but in a qualified way. He says that from the weakness of our senses we cannot fully judge the truth. It is the only way to get to truth but senses do not give us the truth. Appearances are a glimpse of the obscure.
Anaxagoras’ system is in a sense more intuitive than Empedocles. Empedocles is reductive, he thinks that we can reduce everything to four elementary roots that constitute the whole. If you see wood, there is no wood but a combination of other things.
For Anaxagoras, if we see wood, the element of wood is the predominant thing in what appears. Every quality is an element, or a spermata or seed. The world which we perceive tells us that there is some principles in and by itself. The amounts of seeds are unlimited. We are talking purely about qualities. Anything you can find in the world that has a certain quality is inherently an element. Anything we see is an emanation of an infinitesimally small elementary thing. This is because we are talking about qualities and not qualities. In a world that knows no void. If there is air between you and me, this air is of a qualified nature to the seed of air. Everything is in everything but not in the same proportion. If I add more salt to salt-water the qualitative proportion in it will make it more salty. We would say it’s because of the atomic structure of the water, whilst Anaxagoras thinks that water as such is not changed, only the combination. In a sense this is mathematics, but the amount is the amount of quality, rather than the quantiative elements in themselves. This is a conception of nature in which nothing is empty. The world is full of elementary things which define the qualitative nature of this part of the universe I am describing.
Implicitly he is acting against the reductive nature of Empedocles’ system. Once you are at the level of the seeds themselves however you can only find more of the same. The seed of hair is hair all the way down. And the amount of qualities present is always going to be the same. But both the great and the small contain in lesser or greater amount a bit of everything.
He is almost going to a platonic argument: if we call something by some name, then there must be a reality to the use of that name, however, here all qualities exist together in everything, rather than existing in some seperate world of forms. So everything still exists here in a corporeal world.
Aristotle’s complaint about Anaxagoras and Plato is that they just double the world, rather than give an explanation as to why something is as it is. He thinks that if you ask what is underneath each thing, the answer is just that what it is. What is underneath water? Water. Differently from Plato he puts everything as immanent to itself rather than to ideas.
He discovers the cause of motion to be the intellect (the nous). This is about an acitivity, the activity of thinking. Not just a mind, but an active mind. Here, at first glance, there is only one principle compared to Empedocles. The intellect works by initating motion, by causing a whirl in the whole range of the seeds that were there before. So by this activity of the intellect, a circular motion is caused which causes each seed to come together in different quantities. Otherwise the proportion of all elements would be identical at every place in the universe. Rather they must have been set into motion that makes them come together and dissipate. This moving principle is actually the cause of the world that comes to be as it appears to us.
Leucippus and Democritus
Florovits, fl. 450.,
We have few fragments of Leucippus and Democritus. The big part of what we have from Democritus however is moral philosophy. There is a greater world order and a lesser world order between the two. It is unclear who wrote which. It seems to be the case that Democritus just agrees with Leucippus. But we don’t know.
Marx wrote his PHD on Democritus.
In themselves they are very interesting, but if you look at them in their historical place, they are not doing anything that special. They raise very similar questions and give fairly similar answers. They have a pluralistic doctrine, with some qualifications. They agree that there is no genuine coming to be or perishing. The material constituence of what exists never changes. Everything is a combination of more fundamental constituents. What they introduced now, is the theory of atoms. Being tomon means being divided, whilst a-tomon means not divissible. Democritus is referring to the idea that the primary constituents of the universe are magnitudes, which cannot themselves be subdivided into smaller portions. This is a speculative theory. It is not like the scientific theory we have now. But rather it is speculative in the sense that they are saying this must be the case given how the world appears to us. It is a quantiative approach. The elements, as Empedocles and Anaxagoras describes them are now reduced to a level of atomary structures which in themselves lack any quality. The quality is the result of the combination of these elements. For this system to work there has to be a void in which there is a zero-magnitude.