Anaximander Quotes

What opens our minds and shows the limits of our ideas is an encounter with other people, other cultures, other ideas.

For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other—Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time.

Anaximander, a friend and possibly a student of Thales, argued that since human infants are helpless at birth, if the first human had somehow appeared on earth as an infant, it would not have survived. In what may have been humanity's first inkling of evolution, people, Anaximander reasoned, must therefore have evolved from other animals whose young are hardier.

The Earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as it is deep, and only the upper part is inhabited. But this Earth is isolated in space, and the sky is a complete sphere in the center of which is located, unsupported, our cylinder, the Earth, situated at an equal distance from all the points of the sky.

Like Anaximander, [Anaxagoras] believed that everything emerged from something indeterminate and confused; but he added that what caused the emergence from that state was the organizing intelligence, the Mind, just as in man, it is the intelligence which draws thought from cerebral undulations, and forms a clear idea out of a confused idea.

The second set assert that the contrarieties are contained in the one and emerge from it by segregation, (20) for example Anaximander and also all those who assert that ‘what is’ is one and many, like Empedocles and Anaxagoras; for they too produce other things from their mixture by segregation. These differ, however, from each other in that the former imagines a cycle of such changes, the latter a single series.

Human beings often cling to their certainties for fear that their opinions will be proven false. But a certainty that cannot be called into question is not a certainty. Solid certainties are those that survive questioning. In order to accept questioning as the foundation for our voyage toward knowledge, we must be humble enough to accept that today’s truth may become tomorrow’s falsehood.

Being aware that we may be wrong is different from claiming that it is senseless to speak of right and wrong. Recognizing diversity and taking seriously ideas that diverge from our own is different from claiming that all ideas are equally worthy. Knowing that a given judgment is born within a complex cultural context and is related to many others does not necessarily imply that we are unable to recognize it is wrong.

Anaximander (ca. 610 BC–ca. 546 BC), a friend and possibly a student of Thales, argued that since human infants are helpless at birth, if the first human had somehow appeared on earth as an infant, it would not have survived. In what may have been humanity’s first inkling of evolution,

Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider

Time brought its revenges, and for the wrong-doing of existence all things paid the penalty of death.

For no obvious reason, I began to look closely at the women on the stradone. Suddenly it seemed to me that I had lived with a sort of limited gaze: as if my focus had been only on us girls, Ada, Gigliola, Carmela, Marisa, Pinuccia, Lila, me, my schoolmates, and I had never really paid attention to Melina’s body, Giuseppina Pelusi’s, Nunzia Cerullo’s, Maria Carracci’s. The only woman’s body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? Would Lila be misshapen like Nunzia? Would Fernando leap from her delicate face, would her elegant walk become Rino’s, legs wide, arms pushed out by his chest? And would my body, too, one day be ruined by the emergence of not only my mother’s body but my father’s? And would all that I was learning at school dissolve, would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as, over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself? I

But this does not imply that we cannot or must not trust our own thinking. To the contrary: our own thinking is the best tool we have for finding our way in this world. Recognizing its limitations does not imply that it is not something to rely upon. If instead we trust in “tradition” more than in our own thinking, for instance, we are only relying on something even more primitive and uncertain than our own thinking. “Tradition” is nothing else than the codified thinking of human beings who lived at times when ignorance was even greater than ours.

Science is the human adventure of accepting uncertainty, exploring ways of thinking about the world, and being ready to overturn any and all certainties we have possessed to this point. This is among the most beautiful of human adventures.

He argued that we are so helpless at birth that, if the first human infants had been put into the world on their own, they would immediately have died. From this Anaximander concluded that human beings arose from other animals with more self-reliant newborns: He proposed the spontaneous origin of life in mud, the first animals being fish covered with spines. Some descendants of these fishes eventually abandoned the water and moved to dry land, where they evolved into other animals by the transmutation of one form into another.

What counts is not the pen used for writing but the poetry that is written. The reason we take interest in an automobile engine is not because it makes wheels turn; it is because it takes us places that we could not reach by foot. The turning wheels are just the mechanism of an instrument that allows us to journey.

The last quarter of –6C saw the opening of a two-century burst of philosophic work across the Eurasian land mass, dating roughly from –520 to –320, in which human beings thought through some large proportion of all the great philosophic issues—not in primitive forms that were later discarded, but as profound philosophic systems. Both of India’s dominating traditions were founded at the outset of this two-century seminal period—Hinduism with the assembly of the Upanishads sometime in –6C, and Buddhism with Buddha a century later. In some of the same decades when Buddha was teaching his disciples, so was Confucius in China. In Greece, the earliest thinkers to take up philosophic topics, Thales and Anaximander, were at work in the early part of –6C, followed by Pythagoras at its close.

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth. Darwin's theory had two parts. On the one hand, there was the doctrine of evolution, which maintained that the different forms of life had developed gradually from a common ancestry. This doctrine, which is now generally accepted, was not new. It had been maintained by Lamarck and by Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, not to mention Anaximander. Darwin supplied an immense mass of evidence for the doctrine, and in the second part of his theory believed himself to have discovered the cause of evolution. He thus gave to the doctrine a popularity and a scientific force which it had not previously possessed, but he by no means originated it. The second part of Darwin's theory was the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. All animals and plants multiply faster than nature can provide for them; therefore in each generation many perish before the age for reproducing themselves. What determines which will survive? To some extent, no doubt, sheer luck, but there is another cause of more importance. Animals and plants are, as a rule, not exactly like their parents, but differ slightly by excess or defect in every measurable characteristic. In a given environment, members of the same species compete for survival, and those best adapted to the environment have the best chance. Therefore among chance variations those that are favourable will preponderate among adults in each generation. Thus from age to age deer run more swiftly, cats stalk their prey more silently, and giraffes' necks become longer. Given enough time, this mechanism, so Darwin contended, could account for the whole long development from the protozoa to homo sapiens.

The first three “pre-Socratic” philosophers were Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes.

The world is not comprehensible. It is only that we have been asleep so long its incomprehensibility has become familiar. - Excerpts from The Metaphysical Sutras of Lord Anaximander

Lord Mriga, we may be living in the last days of galactic civilisation. You can posture all you like and call the bivnik models wrong, or claim Anaximander will save us, or whatever suits you, but we won’t stand for it. The mark of a society’s stupidity is the degree to which it believes its own myths. But I’ll tell you what’s better than myths, better than narratives, better than turning ourselves into animals and walking through fourspace just to stave off the knowledge that we’ll still all go to ashes one day. Metaphysical maturity. The recognition that this is our galaxy, these are our stars, these are our citizens, and our children. The price of having these things is taking responsibility for them. If we keep peddling propaganda about our divine right to exploit resources in the name of some Great Above despite the obvious drawbacks of such behaviour, then all the suns will burn out long before we achieve even a scrap

a step forward is the realization that the problem must be posed differently in order to be resolved. Students writing their doctoral dissertations under my supervision are often surprised that after three years of work, the content of their thesis is not the solution to the problem posed at the outset. If the problem had been well posed, it wouldn’t have taken three years to solve it.

Then, at Miletus, at the beginning of the fifth century before our era, Thales, his pupil Anaximander, Hecataeus and their school find a different way of looking for answers. This immense revolution in thought inaugurates a new mode of knowledge and understanding, and signals the first dawn of scientific thought. The Milesians understand that by shrewdly using observation and reason, rather than searching for answers in fantasy, ancient myths or religion – and, above all, by using critical thought in a discriminating way – it is possible to repeatedly correct our world view, and to discover new aspects of reality which are hidden to the common view. It is possible to discover the new. Perhaps the decisive discovery is that of a different style of thinking, where the disciple is no longer obliged to respect and share the ideas of the master but is free to build on those ideas without being afraid to discard or criticize the part that can be improved. This is a novel middle way, placed between full adherence to a school and generic deprecation of ideas. It is the key to the subsequent development of philosophical and scientific thinking: from this moment onwards, knowledge begins to grow at a vertiginous pace, nourished by past knowledge but at the same time by the possibility of criticism, and therefore of improving knowledge and understanding. The dazzling incipit of Hecataeus’s book of history goes to the heart of this critical thinking, including as it does the awareness of our own fallibility: ‘I wrote things which seem true to me, because the accounts of the Greeks seem to be full of contradictory and ridiculous things.’ According to legend, Heracles descended to Hades from Cape Tenaro. Hecataeus visits Cape Tenaro, and determines that there is in fact no subterranean passage or other access to Hades there – and therefore judges the legend to be false. This marks the dawn of a new era. This new approach to knowledge works quickly and impressively. Within a matter of a few years, Anaximander understands that the Earth floats in the sky and the sky continues beneath the Earth; that rainwater comes from the evaporation of water on Earth; that the variety of substances in the world must be susceptible to being understood in terms of a single, unitary and simple constituent, which he calls apeiron, the indistinct; that the animals and plants evolve and adapt to changes in the environment, and that man must have evolved from other animals. Thus, gradually, was founded the basis of a grammar for understanding the world which is substantially still our own today.

Six centuries before the Common Era, the philosopher Anaximander (c. 610–545 B.C.E.) speculated that the world began as a watery soup with human beings as fish-like creatures slowly developing the necessary traits to become land-dwellers.

For Milesian philosophers Thales (c. 626/623—c. 548/545 BC), Anaximander (c. 610—c. 546 BC), and Anaximenes (c. 586/585—c. 526/525 BC) there was an ultimate principle they called arche. For Thales, this ultimate principle from which everything originated was water; for Anaximenes, it was air; and for Anaximander, it was Apeiron (limitless), whereas, for the Pythagoreans, the number was the ultimate principle. For Heraclitus (c. 540—c. 480), arche was fire from which everything originated, but Logos was the ultimate principle uniting everything and connecting opposites. For Anaxagora (c. 500—c. 428 BC), a hundred years after the Milesians, the ultimate principle was the mind (nous), which is limitless because it is not material.

When we seek a sure foundation on which to base decisions about our actions and thoughts, we find that a sure foundation does not exist. We do not even know whether we actually need such a foundation. We continue to make use of vague, uncertain ideas, precisely in those areas that most deeply concern us. What we call “irrational” is the code name for what we don’t understand well about ourselves given the limits of our own intelligence.

Here, as probably in Anaximander, “Time” is a name for God, with an etymological suggestion of his eternity. The infinitely old divinity is a child playing a board game as he moves the cosmic pieces in combat according to rule.’ Jesus Christ, what are we dealing with, here? Where are we and when are we and who are we? How many people in how many places at how many times? Pieces on a board, moved by the ‘infinitely old divinity’ who is a ‘child’!

Let us begin with some of the earliest discoveries and correct hypotheses. Anaximander thought that the earth floats freely, and is not supported on anything. Aristotle,2 who often rejected the best hypotheses of his time, objected to the theory of Anaximander, that the earth, being at the centre, remained immovable because there was no reason for moving in one direction rather than another. If this were valid, he said, a man placed at the centre of a circle with food at various points of the circumference would starve to death for lack of reason to choose one portion of food rather than another. This argument reappears in scholastic philosophy, not in connection with astronomy, but with free will. It reappears in the form of 'Buridan's ass', which was unable to choose between two bundles of hay placed at equal distances to right and left, and therefore died of hunger.

A youth of such promise, especially if his body be on a par with his mind, will be at once foremost among all his fellows. His relatives and fellow-citizens, eager to make use of him for their own purposes, and anxious to appropriate to themselves his growing force, will besiege him betimes with solicitations and flatteries. Under these influences, if we assume him to be rich, well born, and in a powerful city, he will naturally become intoxicated with unlimited hopes and ambition; fancying himself competent to manage the affairs of all governments, and giving himself the empty airs of a lofty potentate. If there be any one to give him a quiet hint that he has not yet acquired intelligence, nor can acquire it without labour — he will turn a deaf ear. But suppose that such advice should by chance prevail, in one out of many cases, so that the youth alters his tendencies and devotes himself to philosophy — what will be the conduct of those who see, that they will thereby be deprived of his usefulness and party-service, towards their own views? They will leave no means untried to prevent him from following the advice, and even to ruin the adviser, by private conspiracy and judicial prosecution.

Since Pulchrum is the opposite of Turpe, they must be two, and each of them must be One: the same about Just and Unjust, Good and Evil; each of these is a distinct Form or Idea, existing as One and Unchangeable by itself,

Though he was Thales' student, Anaximander disagreed with his teacher. Anaximander contended that the original substance of the universe was not matter like water, but must be immaterial . He thought the fundamental, ultimate stuff of the universe must be the infinite. The Greek word is apeiron , meaning something that is “without limit” or “boundless.” His thinking was that prior to all perceptible material bodies there must have been an indefinite, immaterial something.

The struggle of history is not to determine more efficiently which of our stories are fiction, and which are correct interpretations of reality, but to cease telling stories entirely. - Excerpts from The Metaphysical Sutras of Lord Anaximander

Aus der Gewöhnung an unbedingte Autoritäten ist zuletzt ein tiefes Bedürfnis nach unbedingten Autoritäten entstanden: — so stark, daß es selbst in einem kritischen Zeitalter, wie dem Kants, dem Bedürfnis nach Kritik sich als überlegen bewies und, in einem gewissen Sinne, die ganze Arbeit des kritischen Verstandes sich untertänig und zunutze zu machen wußte. — Es bewies in der darauffolgenden Generation, welche durch ihre historischen Instinkte notwendig auf das Relative jeder Autorität hingelenkt wurde, noch einmal seine Überlegenheit, als es auch die Hegelsche Entwicklungs-Philosophie, die in Philosophie umgetaufte Historie, selbst sich dienstbar machte und die Geschichte als die fortschreitende Selbstoffenbarung, Selbstüberbietung der moralischen Ideen hinstellte. Seit Plato ist die Philosophie unter der Herrschaft der Moral. Auch bei seinen Vorgängern spielen moralische Interpretationen entscheidend hinein (bei Anaximander das Zugrunde-gehn aller Dinge als Strafe für ihre Emanzipation vom reinen Sein; bei Heraklit die Regelmäßigkeit der Erscheinungen als Zeugnis für den sittlich-rechtlichen Charakter des gesamten Werdens).

Ancient philosophy is traditionally held to begin in the sixth century BC, in the Greek cities of coastal Asia Minor. A large number of philosophers are generally grouped as ‘Presocratics’; their activities cover the sixth and fifth centuries. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes are early cosmologists, giving ambitious accounts of the world as a whole. Pythagoras began a tradition emphasizing mysticism and authority. Heraclitus produced notoriously obscure aphorisms. Xenophanes begins a long concern with knowledge and its grounds.

There is no secure, unquestionable basis upon which we can find knowledge. Each time we have deluded ourselves into believing we have discovered the definitive theory of the world, we have played fools. Similarly, each time we have thought we have found the final secret to certainty, the secure point of departure for knowledge, we have later been forced to realize we were wrong.

The words of Anaximander quoted in the first chapter of this book invited us to think of the world “according to the order of time.” If we do not assume a priori that we know what the order of time is—if we do not, that is, presuppose that it is the linear and universal order that we are accustomed to—Anaximander’s exhortation remains valid: we understand the world by studying change, not by studying things. Those who have neglected this good advice have paid a heavy price for it. Two of the greats who fell into this error were Plato and Kepler, both curiously seduced by the same mathematics.

... ogni volta che come nazione, come gruppo, come continente, o come religione, ripieghiamo in noi stessi nella celebrazione della nostra specifica identità, non stiamo facendo altro che celebrare i nostri limiti e cantare la nostra stupidità. Ogni volta che si apriamo alla diversità e ascoltiamo ciò che è diverso da noi, stiamo contribuendo all'arricchimento e all'intelligenza della razza umana. ...

The essence of scientific knowledge is the capacity to avoid clinging to certainties and received worldviews, and instead be prepared to change these, repeatedly if need be, in light of our knowledge, observations, discussions, different ideas, and criticisms. The nature of scientific thought is critical and rebellious. It does not suffer a priori conclusions, reverence, or untouchable truths.

Science, I believe, is a passionate search for always newer ways to conceive the world. Its strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in a radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance.

If you want to truly advance the path of knowledge, you must not just revere your master, study, and build on his teachings. You must seek out his mistakes.

Hecataeus the historian was once at Thebes, in Egypt, where he boasted that he descended directly from a god, in sixteen generations. But the priests reacted with him precisely as they also did with me (though I myself did not boast my own lineage): they brought me into the great inner court of the temple and showed me colossal wooden figures. They counted these statues, showing me that they were precisely the number they had previously told me. Custom was that every high priest set up a statue of himself there during his lifetime. Pointing to these and counting, the priests showed me that each high priest succeeded his father. They went through the whole line of figures, from the statue of the man who had most recently died, back to the earliest. Hecataeus had traced his descent and claimed that his sixteenth forefather was a god, but the priests traced a line of descent by counting the statues, and these were three hundred and forty-five. The priests refused to believe that a man could be descended from a god in only sixteen generations; they refused to believe that a man could be born before a god. And all those men whose statues stood there had been good men, but not gods.

Each time that we—as a nation, a group, a continent, or a religion—look inward in celebration of our specific identity, we do nothing but lionize our own limits and sing of our own stupidity. Each time that we open ourselves to diversity and ponder that which is different from us, we enlarge the richness and intelligence of the human race. A Ministry of National Identity, like those established of late in some Western countries, is nothing more than a ministry of national obtuseness.

Therefore the scientific quest for knowledge is not nourished by certainty, it is nourished by a radical lack of certainty. Its way is fluid, capable of continuous evolution, has immense strength and a subtle magic. It is able to overthrow the order of things and reconceive the world time and again.

The notion of depth is more complex in Nietzsche’s mature thought than in his early work. Indeed, he develops two parallel concepts; the first is the chthonic roots of becoming that is distinctly ontological, and the second is the herd existence that is the antithesis of the noble (the herd depth is juxtaposed to the noble height and exists on a lower rung of the social hierarchy to the noble). When this is considered at an ontological level, the herd position is an intermediary position of impotence in between height and chthonic depth that lacks the drive or the desire for a connection to either. In Heraclitean language, the herd gaze is cast downward because it is comfortable and easy, but this lamentable preoccupation with decay ultimately leads to the moralization that is characteristic of Anaximander because, as Heraclitus had established, 'Souls take pleasure in becoming moist' and seek explanation for their own decay. The herd’s preference for dampness and decay serves as an internal counter position. This movement can be appreciated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, specifically 'Tree on the Mountainside'. The tree reaches its peak in its journey to height and finds lightening; it reveals not ‘enlightenment’ in the fire (dissolution), but stands at a point of the limitation of its growth that reveals the clarity and awareness of the connection between the two polarities of height and depth (the tree spans both); what Nietzsche will call Heraclitean wisdom.

They fail to see that what changes in scientific revolutions is not what could reasonably be expected to change, but instead what no one expected.

Anaximander thought that humans originally came from fish... In any case he said we should not eat fish, on the grounds that they are our kin.

His tears had wrecked the text, but he knew the spoiled words from memory. Little Leo, We’re going to live on two sides of things now, I in the dark and you, my love, I hope, in the forever light. There are a thousand things I’d like to tell you, but two are far more important than the rest. First, don’t shy away from taking the stage, however bright the lights. The people of Gearheart will channel all their hopes for the future into you. They are tired of the ever-turning wheel of power. They are tired of the Devan Union’s apathy, tired of Anaximander’s promises that never materialised. And, I should imagine, they are already especially tired of Hisarya. They will embrace you as a kind dean, and you will be a kind dean. And, I believe, truly I do, that you will be the one to stop bivnik. Also: Never buy cheap socks. Dance when you can. You’ll know when you’re in love. If you have to check, you’re not. Well then, that’s the secret to ruling well. You’ll work the rest out as you go. To the second matter. If I had dominion over all the atoms of all the worlds, I wouldn’t go back and change the course of one, not by the slightest deviation, because you might not have been my son. And better all history’s indignities stay unchanged and you remain my son than the other way around. There will be years ahead now when you’ll think you’re lost and nothing can possibly recover you. You’ll want for your mother and you’ll know you can never talk to her again. You might rule ten thousand worlds by then, but I bet you’d trade it all for one more hug with me. And I’d give anything, anything in the galaxy, to live a little longer and watch you turn into the man you’re about to. But that is not how things have gone. Each life contains a few days of unimaginable fear and despair. You will think nothing can pull you out and back onto solid land. You’ll be wrong though. You can, all by yourself. You have everything you need, right there in your clever head and bottomless heart. And even though we’ll go separate ways now, and I’m afraid my hugs are off-limits, I will be right there at your side. For as long as you remember me, I’ll attend your dark nights when your heart is broken and cheer from the cheap seats as your make your great ascendances. Then later, when your great-grandchildren have settled on distant worlds to raise their own little ones, and when those little ones have grown old, when the stars have all winked out, when the whole galaxy has gone cold and everything has been snuffed to dust, there will still be two facts left behind in dead eternity: that I was your mother, and I loved you more than you can ever possibly understand. I’m with you always and always, Mama