Born in a small town of Ionia, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae lived, taught, and wrote from 500 to 428 BCE. At some point during this time period, he moved to Athens where he lived for approximately 30 years. Like Socrates, the Athenian government sentenced him to death on the charges of impiety. Unlike Socrates, however, Anaxagoras escaped to Lampsacus, where he finished out the rest of his life. Although the Athenians accused him of violating the theological orthodoxy of the time, Anaxagoras proposed an innovative metaphysical account of the world, that was yet very consistent with the Pre-Socratic natural philosophers before him.

Unfortunately for us, we no longer have any existing works of Anaxagoras. Scholars, however, have been able to construct a general idea of his philosophy by studying secondary sources and the fragments we still have today. Anaxagoras particularly challenged the thought of Parmenides who preceded him, but some also claim he wished to discredit Parmenides’ student, Empedocles, as well.

Parmenides, a brilliantly innovative thinker himself, denied that change and plurality were even possible. To him, we stand at a metaphysical fork, where we must choose being or nonbeing. Nonbeing was an impossibility, he thought, because if something ceased to exist it would be insensible and no longer be anything at all. Therefore, nonbeing was a ridiculous metaphysical account. Furthermore, for change to occur, something would first start as nonbeing and become being. This, again, is an impossibility because the conclusions is based on premises that are impossible (i.e., nonbeing). Therefore, Parmenides believed that being must be unified and immutable. Scholars would call this a metaphysical monism.

Anaxagoras agreed partly with Parmenides, namely on the fact that nonbeing is an impossibility. However, he wanted to provide a way in which plurality was still possible so that being was not static and unchanging. As a result, Anaxagoras claimed that all things contained everything, or all of reality, in themselves with varying consistency. For example, any particular thing may contain in itself all of the possible substances of which reality may be with greater and lesser proportions of substances. He described this as “a portion of everything in everything.”

He backed this theory up by describing the diets of animals. Food, for instance, must be made up of hair, flesh, etc., because animals must get their hair from hair and their flesh from flesh. As a result, all food and all other beings must contain greater or less proportions of all the possible substances in the world, an infinite number. Thus, beings become differentiated because they have a higher amount of particular substances versus lower amounts of other substances. The higher portions give beings their distinctive essence(s).

It is odd, though, that Anaxagoras did maintain that Being began as a unified substance. How could this be? Well, he asserted that change can only occur when the Nous, translated from Greek as the “Mind,” initiated movement in Being. The Nous, which acts as a ordering, structuring, and moving agent, causes the unified substance of being to change. Like the Ionians before him, he agreed that beings must derive from a set or sets of opposites. Anaxagoras maintained that after the Nous initiated change in the unified being, the opposite pair of “air and ether” came to be. This juxtaposition, which he also called “mixture and seeds,” initiated the conditions for change and, hence, a metaphysics of plurality.

With the first pair of opposites, the Mind allows for beings to become new beings, ad infinitum. It is only from “mixture and seeds” that plurality is a possible metaphysical account, but he still remains true to the Pre-Socratic tradition of unified reality. The Nous provides an efficient cause of the world, or how the world came to be, but fails to provide any final or ultimate cause, or why the world came to be. In fact, Socrates grumbles at Anaxagoras’ philosophy because his innovative first principles lack any explanation, other than its mechanical purpose.

It is true that many scholars disagree on some more particular issues in Anaxagoras’ thought, but they all agree that he set forth the most original set of first principles within his traditions. Furthermore, he allowed for the possibility of change and difference, while Parmenides paid no attention to this possibility and, thus, cut out any chance for a reasonable empirical theory. We should admire Anaxagoras’ work because it bears great light on future thinkers such as Gottfried Leibniz and his idea that the universe is contained in all pieces of reality and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his juxtaposition of being and nonbeing and being and becoming.

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