Platonismo

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====== Cornford (1957:7-10) – Cosmologia de Anaximandro ======

Anaximander was the second and greatest of the three Milesians who presided in succession over the first school of Greek philosophers. The chief object of speculation for all of them was, not man or human society, but ‘Nature ‘(physis). Philosophical writings of the sixth and fifth centuries were commonly entitled Concerning Nature (Περί Φύσεως).

‘Nature’—the nature of things—was the name they gave to the one ultimate stuff, from which, as they held, the world of things we see has arisen and into which it will perish again. It is at once apparent that we have no satisfactory rendering for physis, ‘Primary substance’ is charged with Aristotelian and scholastic associations; ‘matter’ suggests something contrasted with mind or life, whereas the primary meaning of physis is ‘growth,’ and its first associations are of life and motion, not of stillness and death. The mere use of this term already implies the famous doctrine which has earned for the Milesian school the designation ‘Hylozoist’— the doctrine that ‘the All is alive.’ The universe ‘has soul in it,’ in the same sense (whatever that may be) that there is a ‘soul’ in the animal body. We must not forget that the meaning of physis, at this stage, is nearer to ‘life ‘than to ‘matter’; it is quite as much ‘moving’ as ‘material’—self-moving, because alive.

Into the earlier, pre-scientific history of this living source of all things we must inquire later. For the present we shall be more concerned with the forms or limits imposed upon its spontaneous activity—the twin conceptions of Destiny and Law.

Thales, the first of the school, identified the living and selfchanging world-stuff with water. Anaximenes, the third, held that it was ‘air’ or mist. Anaximander called it the ‘indefinite ‘or ‘limitless thing’ (τό άπειρον). Anaximander it was who first stated a systematic theory of the Nature of the world— not only of the stuff it is made of, hut also of the process of its growth out of the ‘limitless thing’ into the manifold of definite things. We are not concerned with the details, but only with the most general conception of this process of growth, as it is described in what is almost the sole surviving fragment of Anaximander’s writings:

‘Things perish into those things out of which they have their birth, according to that which is ordained; for they give reparation to one another and pay the penalty of their injustice according to the disposition of time.’

Otto Gilbert has explained this utterance as follows. We have to do with three grades of existence.

First, there are ‘things’ (οντα)—the multiplicity of individual things we see around us. These are declared to perish into those things out of which they came into existence. What, then, are these secondary things, out of which natural objects came into being ?

They are the primitive elements of which all bodies are composed—earth, air, water, fire. These elements were recognised long before philosophy began. The visible world groups itself into masses of comparatively homogeneous stuffs, each occupying a region of its own. There is first the great lump of earth ; above it, and perhaps beneath it also, the waters ; then the space of wind and mist and cloud; and beyond that, the blazing fire of heaven, the aether. These elements are the secondary stuffs out of which individual things were born and into which they are resolved again.

But the elements themselves are not everlasting; nor is the separation of them into distinct regions more than a transient arrangement. They themselves are destined to return into that from which they came—the third and ultimate stage of existence, the ‘limitless thing,’ which alone is called by Anaximander ‘incorruptible and undying.’

To sum up the process of growth : the formless indefinite stuff separates first into the elemental forms, distributed in their appointed regions; and then these again give birth to things, and, when they die, receive them back again.

The first important fact about the elements is that they are limited ; the second is that they are grouped in pairs of opposites or ‘contraries’: air is cold, fire hot, water moist, earth dry. These contraries are at perpetual war with one another, each seeking to encroach upon the domain of its antagonist. This fact itself seems to have been used by Anaximander as a proof that the elements must each be limited, for (if any one of them were infinite, the rest would have ceased to be by this time,’ for they would have been eaten up and destroyed.

The separation of the elements into their several regions was caused by the ‘eternal motion’—which perhaps we should conceive as a ‘whirling’ motion (δίνε) of the whole universe, which sifts out the opposites from the primary, indiscriminate or ‘limitless’ mixture, in which they will again be all merged and confused when they perish into that from which they arose.

This cosmology thus contains three main factors or representations : (1) a primary stuff (physis); (2) an order, disposition, or structure into which this stuff is distributed ; (3) the process by which this order arose. In the present chapter we shall be chiefly concerned with the second of these representations—the scheme of order, which includes all the universe in a simple primary classification. The point we hope to bring out is that this scheme was not invented by Anaximander, but taken over by him from pre-scientific representation, and that this fact explains those of its characteristics which seem most obscure and gratuitous.