From the Beginning to Plato

54 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
that speculation’s negotiations with experience have always been a tricky and
often an embarrassing matter for science.
The biggest disputed and unanswered questions in Anaximander’s system are
those to do with his identification of the apeiron as first principle and its
relationship with the world. His silences here do him rather more credit. Caution
about the big bang and what preceded it seems a thoroughly rational stance. I
guess that Anaximander conceives the apeiron as the beyond: what necessarily
lies outside our experience of space and time, pictured as stretching away
boundlessly outside the limits of the cosmos which it encloses. 31 If that cosmos
came into being, the natural supposition would be that it did so from the apeiron.
How and why are another matter, on which—as also on the essential nature of
the apeiron itself—it would inevitably be more difficult to find reasonable things
to say.
None the less it is clear that Anaximander did say something on these issues.
On one of the rare occasions when Aristotle mentions Anaximander by name he
attributes to him the thesis that the apeiron is immortal and indestructible. These
were traditionally the attributes of divinity, and in fact the same passage strongly
implies that the apeiron not only encloses but also governs (literally ‘steers’) all
things:
The infinite is thought to be principle of the rest, and to enclose all things
and steer all, as all those say who do not postulate other causes over and
above the infinite, such as mind or love. This is the divine. For it is
immortal and indestructible, as Anaximander says and most of the physicists.
(Aristotle Physics 203b7ff. [KRS 108])
Presumably Anaximander relies on the inference: no cosmic order without an
ordering intelligence. On how it exercises its directive role he seems to have
made no guesses.
From Theophrastan sources we learn further that there is eternal motion in or
of the apeiron, which is what causes the separation from it of opposite physical
forces (namely those forces that are invoked in the astronomy, meteorology,
etc.). Again we may detect an inference to the best explanation: no creation
without activity before creation. Aristotle finds here a clue to the nature of the
apeiron. If opposites are separated from it, then it must itself be something
intermediate in character, and indeed on that account a suitable choice of first
principle. This is a conclusion dictated by Aristotle’s enthusiasm for pigeonholing
his predecessors’ opinions. It is not attested as Anaximander’s view by
the more careful Theophrastus. 32
The thesis about eternal motion is sometimes formulated in the sources as the
proposition that it causes the separation off of the world, or rather of worlds in
the plural; in Theophrastus’ words, probably reproducing Anaximander’s own
language: ‘the worlds (ouranoi) and the orderings (kosmoi) within them’. The
doxographers assimilate his view to the atomist theory of an infinity of worlds