Seldom in history do we find the same transparent unity of ideas and social struggles that we find in fifth-century Greece. Indeed, thought always is consciously or unconsciously a reflection of social forces, but in the Greek world the connection is particu-/27 / larly vivid. In the fifth century, the struggle between oligarchs and democrats found its reflection in the mental and artistic argument between the conservative, theological, idealistic tradition, and its naturalistic, relativistic and skeptical critics. Of the one tendency Sophocles will provide an apt example; of the other, Euripides.
Corresponding exactly to the ambiguous position of Pericles in the struggles of Athenian politics in the last two decades before the Peloponnesian War was the theoretical system of Anaxagoras, the philosopher of the Periclean age. Only by seeing the relation of the thinking of Socrates to that of Anaxagoras, can the mind of Socrates be understood.
The political world at Athens convinced Anaxagoras that change was ruthlessly real and that the security of any institution or class, perhaps even the Periclean democracy, was only relative to the tides of human progress and might be swept away in the inevitable process of things. The democracy had vanquished the oligarchy, but how long could the democracy of Pericles itself endure? It was just as frail and temporary as any other institution, and institutions like plants and animals were art of the great cycle of creation and destruction. Had man's social life no other security than an endless series of transformations? As Anaxagoras contemplated the political world of democratic Athens he must have been struck by an arresting phenomenon; how the cool, aloof, Olympian mind of Pericles dominated the chaos and the confusion, just as the city of the maiden Athena, Athena type of the divine wisdom, born in full panoply and complete maturity from the very mind of Zeus, could order the chaos of Aegean politics. And just as the political position of Pericles was ambiguous and paradoxical, a blend of the progressive and the static, so two opposite movements manifest themselves in the thinking of his friend Anaxagoras. On the one hand there is the consciousness of change and process, of mixture and separation. "The Hellenes," he says, "follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away but there is mingling / 28 / and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being, mixture and passing away, separation." 26
"Things revolve and are separated out by force and swiftness. And the swiftness makes the force. Their swiftness is not like the swiftness of any of the things that are now among men, but in every way many times as swift."
This aspect of his thinking manifests itself in a curiosity about physical phenomena, research into mechanical, biological and physiological change. "How can hair come from what is not hair or flesh from not flesh?" 27
"We must suppose that there are contained many things and all sorts in the things that are uniting, seeds of all things, with all sorts of shapes and colors and savors, and that men have been formed in them and the other animals that have life, and that these men have inhabited cities and cultivated fields as with us, and that there are the sun and the moon and the rest, as with us." 28
"But before they were separated off, when all things were together not even was any color distinguishable, for the mixture of all things prevented it; of the moist and the dry, and the warm and the cold and the light and the dark and of much earth that was in it and of a multitude of innumerable seeds in no other way like each other. For none of the other things either is like any other; and these things being so we must hold that all things are in the whole." 29
"The things that are in the world are not divided nor cut off from one another with a hatchet, neither the warm from the cold, nor the cold from the warm." 30
"With the rise of the dog star men begin the harvest; with its setting they begin to till the fields. It is hidden for forty days and nights." 31
These quotations make clear the interest of Anaxagoras in physical process. He is acutely aware of the Heraclitean doctrine of the flux. They reveal, too, that he is fully conscious of the Heraclitean view of the "tension of opposites." In Anaxagoras and Heraclitus: we have a kind of naive foreshadowing of the Hegelian / 29 / doctrine of the "interpenetration of opposites." For these thinkers, as for Hegel, creation and destruction were the result of the strife of opposites and their interpenetration. This is the significance of Anaxagoras' metaphor of the hatchet. "It is of those opposites," writes Burnet of Anaxagoras, and not of the different forms of matter that everything contains a portion. Every particle, however large or however small, contains every one of those opposite qualities; that which is hot is also to a certain extent cold. Even snow Anaxagoras affirmed was black, that is even the white contains a certain portion of the opposite quality. It is enough to indicate the connection of this with the views of Heraclitus."32 In support of this position, it will be sufficient to quote just one fragment from Heraclitus -- "We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being and pass away through strife." 33
One side of Anaxagoras, therefore, expressed the most vigorous radical skepticism. It embodied the scientific curiosity of the materialists who carried into philosophy the enquiring spirit of the new democracy. Unhesitatingly it sought for rational explanations of all physical phenomena in terms of structure and causality. As far as science was concerned, Anaxagoras carried on the tradition of the Ionic school whose researches and speculations dealt largely with tangible reality and natural causes.
The other side of his thinking, however, presents a sharp contrast to the materialist cosmology and in fact clearly represents a retreat from materialism and science. A world composed of bodily existence and process was not, for the reason we have indicated, enough to satisfy Anaxagoras. At this point he departed completely from previous physical philosophies by introducing the agency of Nous, or mind, as the center of integration and order in the universe and as one stable principle which is unaffected by the laws of change.
"All other things partake in a portion of everything, while Nous is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone, itself by itself. For if it were not by itself, but were mixed with anything else, it would partake in all things if it were mixed with / 30 / any; for in everything there is a portion of everything, as has been said by me in what goes before, and the things mixed with it would hinder it, so that it would have power over nothing in the same way that it has now being alone by itself. For it is the thinnest of all things and the purest, and it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest strength; and Nous has power over all things, both greater and smaller, that have life. And Nous had power over the whole revolution, so that it began to revolve in the beginning. And it began to revolve first from a small beginning; but the revolution now extends over a larger space, and will extend over a larger still. And all the things that are mingled together and separated off and distinguished are all known by Nous. And Nous set in order all things that were to be, and all things that were and are not now and that arc, and this revolution in which now revolve the stars and the sun and the moon, and the air and the aether that are separated off. And this revolution caused the separating off, and the rare is separated off from the dense, the warm from the cold, the light from the dark, and the dry from the moist. And there are many portions in many things. But nothing is altogether separated off nor distinguished from anything else except Nous. And all Nous is alike, both the greater and the smaller; while nothing else is like anything else, but each single thing is and was most manifestly those things of which it has most in it." 34
"And when Nous began to move things, separating off took place from all that was moved, and so far as Nous set in motion all was separated. And as things were set in motion and separated, the revolution caused them to be separated much more." 35
"And Nous, which ever is, is certainly there, where everything else is, in the surrounding mass and in what has been united with it and separated off from it." 36
Despite the fact that Anaxagoras introduced Nous as a first principle he was by no means setting up a real antithesis between matter and spirit. This is quite clear from the passage in the Phaedo, discussed more fully below, in which Socrates expresses /31 / his disappointment with the account which Anaxagoras gives of the function of Nous in the universe.
For Anaxagoras the problem was to reconcile the struggle that went on in his own mind, the contradiction between his knowledge of a purely physical universe and his feeling that a permanent reality must lie behind the world to order and control it. Anaxagoras never succeeded in fully harmonizing these two discordant aspects of his own thinking. There is on the one hand the world of flux; there is on the other Nous, arranging and ordering. His solution is in the last analysis a juxtaposition rather than a synthesis. For synthesis was impossible to a man caught, as was any member of Pericles' circle, in the ambiguities of Pericles' social and political position. He could not disregard the fact of change, for that would have been absurd. But change loomed large and terrifying. The men around Pericles were vaguely conscious of forces beyond their own limited control and from this terrifying prospect they recoiled in horror; they felt an unconscious urge to find some principle of permanence that would give meaning to the transitory and the evanescent The psychology implied in this search for the permanent the unchanging, the authoritative has never been better displayed than in Browning's poem, Abt Vogler.
Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;
Gone! and the good tears start the praises that come too slow;
For one is assured at first one scarce can say that he feared,
That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.
Never to be again! but many more of the kind
As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?
To me who must be saved because I cling with my mind
To the same, same self, same love, same God: aye, what was shall be.
Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands!
What have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same?
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?
/ 32 /
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.