From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 193
of Pericles) to escape prosecution. He is said to have died at the age of 72,
probably in the early 420s.
He appears to have written, as did Anaximander, a single comprehensive prose
treatise, referred to by later writers, such as Simplicius, by the traditional title On
Nature. In the Apology (26d, DK 59 A 35) Socrates states that it was on sale for
a drachma, about half a day’s wage for a skilled craftsman, which indicates that
it could be copied in well under a day. The surviving quotations from it (almost
all preserved by Simplicius), totalling about 1,000 words, therefore probably
represent quite a substantial proportion of it. In what follows I shall be concerned
with two central topics of this work, the nature of the physical world and the
nature and cosmic role of mind.
The Physical World
For all post-Parmenidean thinkers the central challenge was to show how natural
objects, including the world order itself, could come to be, change and cease to
be without violating the Eleatic axiom that what is not cannot be. Parmenides
had argued that that axiom excluded coming to be (for what comes to be comes
from what is not), change (for what changes changes into what it is not) and
ceasing to be (for what has ceased to be is not). Anaxagoras’ contemporary
Empedocles met this challenge by redescribing change (including coming and
ceasing to be) as reorganization of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water.
Those elements satisfy the Parmenidean requirement in its full rigour, since they
are eternal and changeless. What we observe and call change, coming to be and
destruction is in reality nothing but reorganization of these elemental
components; hence neither organic substances, such as animals and plants, nor
their components, bones, hair, blood, leaf tissue, etc., strictly speaking ever come
into being or cease to be. Put anachronistically, coming into being reduces to
elemental rearrangement, and what is reduced is thereby eliminated from a strict
or scientific account of the world.
Anaxagoras agreed with Empedocles that what is conventionally regarded as
coming to be and destruction is in fact reorganization of basic items. He asserts
this fundamental thesis in fragment 17:
The Greeks are not correct in their opinions about coming to be and
destruction; for nothing comes to be or is destroyed, but they are mixed
together and separated out from things which are in being. And so they
would be correct to call coming to be mixing together and destruction
separation.
The language is strikingly reminiscent of Empedocles’ fragment 9:
Now when they [i.e. the elements] are mixed and come to light in a man or
a wild animal or a plant or a bird, then they say it has come to be, and