Anaxagoras · Philosophy
Anaxagoras solved the puzzle of how things change - how bread becomes flesh, how the many arise - with a radical thesis: there is a portion of <em>everything</em> in <em>everything</em>, infinitely divisible, and a thing is simply whatever predominates in it.
Anaxagoras faced a puzzle that Parmenides had made unavoidable: how is change possible at all? Parmenides had argued that nothing can come from nothing - that what is cannot arise from what is not - and concluded that all change is impossible, mere illusion. But change is everywhere. Consider a simple, vivid case: you eat bread, and it becomes flesh, blood, bone, hair, sinew. How? Bread is not flesh; yet from bread, flesh comes to be. If nothing comes from nothing, where does the flesh come from? It cannot simply pop into existence. So it must, in some sense, have been already there, in the bread, all along.
This is the reasoning that drove Anaxagoras to his most startling doctrine. If flesh comes from bread, and nothing comes from nothing, then there must be flesh already in the bread - and bone, and blood, and hair too, since all of these are nourished by it. And if you ask where the bread itself came from - from earth, water, sun - then all these must be in them. Push the reasoning to its limit and you reach a breathtaking conclusion: there is a portion of everything in everything. Every thing contains some of every other thing; nothing is purely and only itself. The bread looks like bread because bread predominates in it - but it contains, in smaller portions, the flesh and bone and blood it will become, and indeed a share of every quality there is.
The key to Anaxagoras’ system is the principle of predominance. If everything contains a portion of everything, then no thing is purely one quality - so what makes a thing the thing it is? Anaxagoras’ answer: a thing is named after, and appears as, whatever predominates in its mixture. Gold is gold because the gold-portion predominates in it, though it also contains tiny portions of every other quality. Water is water because water predominates, snow is white because the white predominates in it (though, Anaxagoras provocatively noted, snow is in a sense also black, since it contains a portion of the black, water being dark). The character of a thing is set by the majority ingredient, while a minority of every other ingredient is always present, hidden.
This elegantly explains transformation. To change one thing into another, you do not create new ingredients or destroy old ones - an impossibility, since nothing comes from nothing or passes into nothing. You merely shift the proportions, so that what was a minority ingredient becomes the majority. As the body processes bread, the flesh-portions latent in it are separated out and concentrated, until in the body the flesh predominates and what was bread has become flesh. Nothing came to be from nothing; the flesh was there all along, and change is the rearranging of an ever-present mixture so that a different ingredient comes to rule. Coming-to-be and passing-away, Anaxagoras says, are misnomers: there is really only mixing and separating of things that always were.
Anaxagoras’ ‘everything in everything’ matters above all as a brilliant rescue of the changing world from Parmenides’ devastating logic. Parmenides had argued, with terrifying rigour, that change is impossible: for a thing to change, something new must come to be, but nothing can come from what-is-not; therefore nothing ever truly comes to be or passes away, and the world of change our senses report is an illusion. This was a crisis for natural philosophy: how can you study a changing nature if change is impossible? Anaxagoras (like the atomists, and Empedocles) belongs to the great generation of pluralists who answered Parmenides by finding a way to keep change real while honouring his principle that nothing comes from nothing.
His solution is to relocate change. He grants Parmenides that no ingredient ever comes into being or perishes - the basic stuffs are eternal and uncreated, exactly as Parmenidean ‘being’ should be. But he denies that this makes change illusory, because change was never really the creation of new stuff in the first place; it is only the rearrangement - the mixing and separating - of stuffs that always were. The flesh does not come from nothing; it is uncovered, concentrated, separated out from a mixture in which it eternally pre-existed. Thus change is saved and Parmenides is honoured: nothing comes from nothing, yet things genuinely become other than they were. This move - accept the eternal, uncreated, unchanging elements, and explain all apparent change as their recombination - is one of the most important and durable in the history of science. It is, at bottom, the strategy of all of chemistry and physics: the conservation of fundamental stuff (matter, energy) combined with the endless rearrangement of it. Anaxagoras, answering Parmenides, helped invent the very form of explanation by which we still understand a changing world.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Anaxagoras’ thesis that there is a portion of everything in everything: all things are infinitely divisible mixtures containing some of every quality, and a thing is whatever predominates in it. Explain how this lets bread turn into flesh and solves how change is possible.
Leads to Democritus.
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