From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 199
principal component’s having precisely that character, which is in turn
‘explained’ by its principal component’s having precisely that character, and so
on ad infinitum. A central element in explanation, the simplification of a wide
range of diverse phenomena via laws connecting those phenomena with a small
range of basic properties, is absent. Nor is this an oversight, since the effect of
the principle ‘What is F cannot come from what is not F’ is precisely to exclude
the possibility that the ‘explanation’ of something’s having a property should not
contain that very property in the explanans. The slogan ‘Appearances are the
sight of what is non-apparent’ (fr. 21a) thus proves to state a central, and quite
startling, Anaxagorean doctrine. At first sight it appears to state the empiricist
axiom that theories about what is unobserved must be based on observation, and
it was presumably in that sense that Democritus is said by Simplicius to have
approved it. But in fact Anaxagoras’ claim is much stronger; he is asserting that
the observable phenomena literally do give us sight of what is unobserved, in
that the very properties which we observe characterize the world through and
through. (This was presumably the point of the remark of Anaxagoras to his
associates recorded by Aristotle (Metaphysics 1009b26–8, DK 59 A 28), that
they would find that things are just as they supposed.) This does not contradict
fragment 21, where Anaxagoras is reported by Sextus as declaring that the
weakness of the senses prevents us from judging the truth, and as supporting this
claim by citing the imperceptibility of the change produced by pouring a
pigment drop by drop into a pigment of a different colour. Rather, the two
fragments complement one another. The senses are unable to discern the infinite
variety of components in any observable thing, and hence to detect in them the
microscopic rearrangements whose accumulation eventually produces an
observable change (fr. 21); yet the nature of those components has to be what is
revealed by observation at the macroscopic level (fr. 21a).
Just as there are in Anaxagoras’ theory no elements, i.e. basic stuffs, so there are
no basic properties. It cannot, therefore, be the task of theory to devise an account
of the world sufficient to explain the phenomena, since the phenomena must
ultimately be self-explanatory. Theory has, however, the more limited task of
explaining how the observed world has come to be in the state in which it is; this
brings us to another central Anaxagorean concept, that of Mind.
Mind
In the famous passage of the Phaedo cited above, in which Socrates describes his
intellectual progress, he states that he was dissatisfied by the absence of
teleleogical explanation from the theories of the early philosophers. Anaxagoras
promised to make good this deficiency, since he claimed that the world is
organized by Mind. Socrates, assuming that this organization by a cosmic
intelligence must aim at the best possible state of things, eagerly perused
Anaxagoras’ book for an account of that state and how it was attained, and was
all the more disappointed to discover that in his cosmology Anaxagoras made no