From the Beginning to Plato

THE IONIANS 57
original state of the earth with Anaximander’s conjectures about the beginnings
of animal life in general and human life in particular:
Anaximander of Miletus gave it as his view that, when water and earth had
been heated, there arose from them fish or animals very like fish. In these
men were formed and kept within as embryos until puberty. Then at last
the creatures burst open, and out came men and women who were already
able to feed themselves.
(Censorinus On the Day of Birth 4.7 [KRS 135])
As in the science of our day, the hypotheses of geology and evolutionary biology
seem to reinforce each other. Indeed like Xenophanes after him, Anaximander
may have based his geological inferences in part on the fossil record. What
matters for present purposes, however, is that the whole geological process
envisaged by Anaximander constitutes an ‘injustice’ committed by one
elemental force upon another, and as such will presumably, ‘according to the
ordinance of time’, win compensation by ‘retribution’ in the form of a new
inundation of the earth, again as explicitly attested for Xenophanes
(unfortunately no similar prediction by Anaximander survives). We can only
speculate on whether the language of justice the fragment uses to describe this
kind of process is trying to capture the directive operation of the apeiron, or
whether it is a metaphor for an entirely physical self-regulatory process, or
whether Anaximander would have thought that a false dichotomy.
Anaximander’s all-embracing vision of the natural world is the first and for
many readers the most unforgettable of the pre-Socratic physical systems.
Despite its individuality, it established the framework of a common world
picture, shared (although sometimes transformed) by them all. This is above all
due to its very invention of the idea of a cosmos, a world ordered by law, which
was then worked out along lines that guided both the substance and the method of
future enquiry. The cosmos and its major features, including life on earth, are
conceived as the outcome of evolving interactions between two fundamental but
opposed physical forces. It emerges somehow from something infinite and
eternal which surrounds and controls it. Despite the welter of specific detail about
this world supplied by Anaximander, he sets a high premium on general
explanatory patterns, which he couches exclusively in mathematical and
naturalistic terms—except for the overarching conception of cosmic justice.
Subsequent pre-Socratics will vary or challenge the recipe in one way or another.
But his is the theme, theirs the variations.
ANAXIMENES
Anaximander’s theoretical silences evidently grated on Anaximenes’ ear. 36 His
inability to say what sort of thing the apeiron is, and his failure to explain how or
why opposite forces emerge from it, contrast with Anaximenes’ explicitness on