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 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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