Anaxagoras · Philosophy
Anaxagoras was the first to set <em>Nous</em> - Mind - at the origin of the world: an intelligent ordering principle that set the primordial chaos spinning and arranged all things. With it, reason itself enters the explanation of nature.
The Milesians sought the stuff of the world - water, air, the boundless. But a stuff, however fundamental, cannot explain why the world is ordered: why the cosmos is an arrangement rather than a chaos, why things are sorted and structured rather than randomly mixed. Around 460 BC, a thinker from Clazomenae named Anaxagoras, who brought philosophy from Ionia to Athens, supplied a startling new answer. The principle that orders the world, he said, is not a kind of matter at all but Nous - Mind, Intelligence. An intelligent ordering power set the universe in motion and arranged it.
This was a profound innovation. Before Anaxagoras, the causes invoked in natural philosophy were all material and mechanical: stuff transforming, condensing, separating. Anaxagoras introduced, for the first time, a cause of a completely different kind - an intelligent cause, something that knows and orders, set over against mere matter. Mind, he taught, is ‘the finest and purest of all things,’ mixed with nothing, ruling itself, and it ‘has all knowledge about everything and the greatest power.’ With Anaxagoras, reason and intelligence enter the explanation of nature - and the question is raised that has never left philosophy since: is the order of the world the product of mind and purpose, or only of blind matter and chance?
To understand Nous’ role, we must start where Anaxagoras starts: with the original state of the world. ‘In the beginning,’ he wrote, ‘all things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness.’ Imagine not a void, not a single pure element, but a total, uniform mixture - everything blended with everything, so thoroughly intermingled that no distinct thing could be made out. There was no separate air, no separate earth, no distinct colours or qualities, because all were present everywhere at once, lost in one another. The world began as an undifferentiated, motionless blend.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Anaxagoras introduced Nous (Mind) as the ordering cause of the cosmos: an intelligent, unmixed principle that set the primordial mixture spinning and arranged all things. Explain what Nous is and why making Mind a cause of the world order was revolutionary.
Leads to Plato.
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