Presocratics – Milesian physics (2) – Anaximander

The originality of the Milesians seems to have been the choice of images by which they represented the sky and the meteors; these images retain nothing fantastic from the myths; they are borrowed either from the arts or from direct observation: there is in all the analogies that constitute their science, with an extreme imaginative precision that does not admit, like the myth, any mysterious background:, a great desire to understand inaccessible phenomena by their relationships with the most familiar facts.

One of these common observations, for a Milesian, particularly preoccupied with navigation, was that of storms and tempests; one sees forming, in the calm, thick and black clouds, which are suddenly torn apart by a flash of lightning, announcing the storm of wind that will follow. Anaximander, seeking to explain them, taught that the wind, enclosed in the cloud, broke it by its violence, and that lightning and thunder accompany this sudden rupture. (6) Now, it is by analogy with the storm that he conceives the nature and formation of the stars: it is enough, to obtain the conception that Anaximander had of the sky, to replace the sheath of thick clouds by an opaque sheath of condensed air (the “air” designating for him nothing other than vapors), the internal wind by fire, the tears in the sheath by kinds of vents or bellows pipes through which the fire bursts. If we assume that these sheaths are circular in shape and arranged around the earth like the rims of wheels around the hub of a chariot, the stars will be for us only the part of the internal fire which comes out through these vents: by the momentary closing of these vents the eclipses and the phases of the moon will be explained. Anaximander admitted that there were three of these circular sheaths, animated by a rotary movement; at the furthest from the earth, those of the sun and the moon, which have only one vent; at the lowest, those of the fixed stars (probably the Milky Way) which has a large number of vents. (7)

Assimilations of this kind allow us to formulate the cosmogonic problem in a new way; the formation of the sky is not fundamentally different from that of a storm; The question is how the fire that originally encircled the earth, like bark does a tree, was broken and distributed within the three circular rings. Now, the cause in play, for Anaximander, seems to be the one that is at the origin of rain, storms and winds. It is the vapors that, produced on the sea, by evaporation, break this sphere of fire and sheath it in rings (8).

The fundamental phenomenon in this Milesian physics is the evaporation of sea water under the influence of heat. The products of this evaporation (vapors, winds, clouds, etc.), are traditionally considered in Greece as having vital properties (9). Anaximander is therefore only following a very old opinion, when he admits that living beings are born in the hot humidity evaporated by the sun. He also insists on the anteriority of forms of marine life, of fish, of beings enclosed in a thorny bark, which had to modify their way of life when, the bark bursting, they were placed on land. (10)

These views of Anaximander perhaps allow us to clarify the meaning of the affirmations on the primitive substance that Aristotle considers as the center of their doctrine. These affirmations seem to bear, not on the matter of beings, but on the thing from which the world came. Thales, in teaching that it is water, is only reproducing an extremely widespread cosmogonic theme; but, according to the development of Milesian thought, we must doubtless understand by this water something like the marine expanse with all the life that emerges from it. He also taught that the earth is like a flat disk carried on the primitive water like a ship on the sea. What led Anaximander to replace Thales’ water with what he calls the Infinite? There is very little agreement on the meaning of this expression. Is it a Milesian form of the Hesiodic myth of Chaos, prior to the gods, the earth and the sky, as Thales’ thesis referred to an ancient cosmogony? The Infinite would then be the qualitatively indeterminate thing from which determined things are born, fire, water, etc., or at least the mixture in which all things are merged which then separate to form the world. It seems that Anaximander’s Infinity is rather the unlimited in magnitude, that which is without limits, as opposed to the world which is contained within the limits of the sky, since this infinity contains the worlds (11).

(6) Aetïus, Placita, III, 6, 1.
(7) Aetius, Placita, II, 13, 7 ; 15, 6 ; 20, 1 ; Hippolyte, Réfutations des Hérésies, I, 6,4-6.
(8) Aetius, III, 6,1 (origine du vent), compared to Aristotle, Météorologiques, II, 1, 353 b 5. Cf. Burnet, L’Aurore de la philosophie grecque, trad. Reymond, 1919, p. 67.
(9) Plutarch, Défaut des oracles, 18 ; Aristotle, De l’âme, A, 5, 410 b, 27.
(10) Aetius, V, 19, 1.
(11) Theophrastus, quoted by Simplicius (Diels, Doxographi graeci, 376, 3-6). Cf. Burnet, Aurore de la philosophie grecque, p. 61-66.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2024 Nicolae Sfetcu