This
is my third and last Anaximandrian entry, devoted to Nietzsche’s analysis of
him. Not surprisingly, it is on my part not only an entry on Anaximander, but
on Nietzsche as well. I believe that in discussing the pre-Socratics Nietzsche
reveals his natural mysticism and a penchant for looking for the mystical in
others. In fact, mysticism for him is an essential ingredient of true philosophy
and of the authentic philosophical mind. On a general note, in my future radical
revision of this entry, I must explore much deeper into the mystical element,
which Nietzsche now finds in Anaximander, and earlier, in Thales. (“Seek and
ye shall find…”)
Nietzsche,
in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, claimed that Anaximander
was a pessimist. Anaximander stated that the primal being of the world was a
state of indefiniteness. Accordingly, anything definite has to eventually pass
back into indefiniteness. In other words, Anaximander viewed “all coming-to-be as though it were an illegitimate
emancipation from eternal being, a wrong, for which destruction is the only
penance.” The world of individual objects in this way of thinking has no
worth and should perish. Here is essential pessimism for you!
Yes,
we are now discussing Anaximander in Nietzsche’s interpretation, and, to put
this entry in full swing, we need to get back where we left off in the previous
Anaximander And Russell entry.
Scientific
and rationalistic are two Russellian
compliments to Anaximander, which would not be much to Nietzsche’s heart, as
they are not to mine. Yet, he, apparently, admires Anaximander, so, he and
Russell are looking at the great Greek somewhat differently, and their
assessments are interesting to compare. Here is a lengthy quotation from Nietzsche,
which shall include, without doubt, his interpretation of Anaximander’s famous
fragment.
Whilst the general type of the philosopher in the picture of Thales
is set off rather hazily, the picture of his great successor already speaks
much more distinctly to us…
Now,
let us understand that there must be a reason why Thales’s picture is hazy,
whereas Anaximander’s is much more distinct. This difference cannot be
attributed to either chronology (these two were less than one generation apart,
and as some say, were even relatives!) or locus (they both lived in Miletus and
were close neighbors). Thus we cannot really ascribe this difference to
different circumstances of transmission of their works to the posterity.
Apparently, Thales was a more practical man, and his general theories appeared
less exciting to the subsequent generations than those of Anaximander the
fanciful dreamer, who after all left us with an actual model of the Universe,
no matter how wrong and silly it may seem to us, armed with several millennia
of scientific progress. At least, Anaximander raised the big question about the
Universe, and also contemplated on the unknown,
naming it as the primary substance of matter...
Anaximander of
Miletus, the first philosophical author of the ancients, writes in the way that
typical philosophers will always write, as long as they are not alienated from
ingenuousness and naiveté by odd claims: in the grand lapidarian style of
writing, sentence for sentence, a witness of new inspiration, and an expression
of the sojourning in sublime contemplations. The thought and its form are
milestones on the path towards the highest wisdom. With such a lapidarian
emphasis, Anaximander once said: “Whence things originated, thither
according to necessity, they must return and perish; for they must pay penalty
and be judged for their injustices, according to the order of time.”
Enigmatical utterance of a veritable pessimist, oracular inscription on the
boundary stone of Greek philosophy, how shall we explain thee?...
Bravo,
Anaximander is a pessimist! Nietzsche’s invocation now of Schopenhauer’s name
(here is another great pessimist close to Nietzsche’s heart) is supremely
predictable.---
The only serious moralist of our century, in the Parerga (Volume
ii chapter 12, Additional Remarks on the Doctrine about the Suffering in the
World, Appendix of Corresponding Passages), urges upon us a similar
contemplation.--- The right standard by which to judge all human beings is
that they really are beings who ought not to exist at all, but who are
expiating their existence by manifold forms of suffering and death:—What can
one expect from such beings? Are we not all sinners condemned to death? We
expiate our birth firstly by our life, and secondly by our death. He who in
the physiognomy of our universal human lot reads this doctrine and already
recognizes the fundamental bad quality of every human life, in the fact that
none can stand a close and careful contemplation, although our time, accustomed
to the biographical epidemic, seems to think otherwise and loftier about
people’s dignity, one who, like Schopenhauer, on the heights of the Indian
breezes has heard the sacred word about the moral value of existence, will
be with a difficulty kept from making an extremely anthropomorphic metaphor,
and generalizing that melancholy doctrine at first only limited to human life—
and applying it by transmission to the general character of all existence. It
may not be very logical, it is, however, at any rate, very human, and,
moreover, quite in harmony with the philosophical leaping described above, now
with Anaximander to consider all Becoming as a punishable emancipation
from eternal Being, as a wrong that is to be atoned for by destruction.
Everything that has once come into existence also perishes, whether we think of
human life, or of water, or of heat and cold; everywhere where definite qualities
are to be noticed, we are allowed to prophesy the extinction of these
qualities— according to the all-embracing proof of experience.
A
most excellent interpretation of Anaximander’s doctrine! But what else can we
expect from Nietzsche?
Thus, a being, possessing definite qualities, and consisting of
them, can never be the origin and principle of things; the veritable ens,
the “Existent,” Anaximander concluded, cannot possess qualities, for,
otherwise, like all other things, it would necessarily have originated and
perished. Therefore, in order that Becoming may not cease, the Primordial-being
must be indefinite. Its immortality and eternity lies not in an infiniteness
and inexhaustibility, as the expounders of Anaximander usually presuppose, but
in this that it lacks the definite qualities which lead to destruction, for
which reason it bears also its name: The Indefinite. The thus labeled
Primordial-being is superior to all Becoming and for this very reason it
guarantees the eternity and unimpeded course of Becoming. This last unity in
that Indefinite, the mother-womb of all things, can, it is true, be designated
only negatively by us, as something, to which no predicate out of the existing
world of Becoming can be allotted, and/or might be considered a peer to the
Kantian thing-in-itself. Of course, he who is able to wrangle
persistently with the others as to what kind of thing that primordial substance
really was, whether maybe an intermediate thing between air and water, or,
perhaps, between air and fire, has not understood our philosopher at all; this
is, likewise, to be said about those, who seriously ask themselves, whether
Anaximander had thought of his primordial substance as a mixture of all
existing substances. Rather, we must direct our gaze to the place where we can
learn that Anaximander no longer treated the question of the origin of the
world as purely physical; we must direct our gaze towards that first stated
lapidarian proposition. When, on the contrary, he saw a sum of wrongs to be
expiated in the plurality of things that have become, then he, as the first
Greek, with a daring grasp caught up the tangle of the most profound ethical
problem. How can anything perish which has the right to exist?! Whence that
restless Becoming and giving-birth, whence that expression of painful
distortion on the face of Nature, whence the never-ending dirge in all realms
of existence? Out of this world of injustice, of audacious apostasy from the
primordial-unity of things, Anaximander flees into a metaphysical castle,
leaning out of which he turns his gaze far and wide, in order, at last, after a
pensive silence, to address to all beings this question: “What is your
existence worth? And-- if it is worth nothing-- why are you there? It is by
your guilt, I observe, you sojourn in this world. You will have to expiate it
by death. Look how your earth fades; the seas decrease and dry up, the
marine-shell on the mountain shows you how much already they have dried up;
fire destroys your world even now, finally, it will end in smoke and ashes. But
again and again such a world of transitoriness will ever build itself up; who
shall redeem you from the curse of Becoming?”
Not every kind of life may have been welcome to a man who put such
questions, whose upward-soaring thinking continually broke the empiric ropes,
in order to take at once to the highest, superlunary flight. And willingly we
believe tradition, that he walked along in especially dignified attire and
showed a truly tragic hauteur in his gestures and his habits of life. He lived
as he wrote; he spoke as solemnly as he dressed, he raised his hand and placed
his foot as if this existence was a tragedy, and as if he had been born in
order to cooperate in that tragedy by playing the role of hero. In all that he
was the great model of Empedocles. His fellow citizens elected him the leader
of an emigrating colony, perhaps, they were pleased at being able to honor him
and at the same time to get rid of him. (How insightful!)
His thought also emigrated and founded colonies; in Ephesus and in Elea they
could not get rid of him; and if they could not resolve upon staying at the
spot where he stood, they nevertheless knew that they had been led there by
him, whence they now prepared to proceed without him…
Now
here comes Nietzsche’s definitive comparison of Thales and Anaximander, which
may serve us as the clue to their difference. Mind you, I am totally opposed to
asserting some kind of mental superiority of the pupil over his teacher. It is
imperative to appreciate that Thales came first, and that Anaximander, granted,
brilliantly, still only capitalized on Thales’s “principal.” Indeed there must have been an abundance of very wise
men preexistent to Thales, but Thales was the one to become known as “the first,” and consequently it seems
only logical to consider Thales as the cause of Anaximander, and Anaximander as
the effect of none other than Thales. Logically, the effect needs to be more
significant than the cause, since it incorporates the cause, and moves on from
there. Thus Anaximander is a move forward from Thales, but this objective fact
takes nothing away from Thales. There can be no reaching for the stars without a
stepping stone, and Thales happened to be that stepping stone.
Thales shows the need of simplifying the empire of plurality, and
of reducing it to the mere expansion, or disguise of the one single
existing quality, water. Anaximander goes beyond him with two steps. Firstly,
he puts the question to himself: How, if there exists an eternal Unity at all,
is that Plurality possible? He takes the answer out of the contradictory,
self-devouring, and denying character of this Plurality. The existence of this
Plurality becomes a moral phenomenon to him; it is not justified, but it
expiates itself continually through destruction. Then the questions occur to
him, Why has not everything, that has become, perished long ago, since, indeed,
quite an eternity of time has already gone by? Whence the ceaseless current of
the River of Becoming? He can save himself from these questions only by the
mystic possibilities: the eternal Becoming can have its origin only in the
eternal Being, the conditions for that apostasy from that eternal “Being” to a
Becoming in injustice are ever the same, the constellation of things cannot
help itself being thus fashioned, that no end is to be seen of that stepping
forth of the individual being out of the lap of the Indefinite. At this
Anaximander stayed; that is, he remained within the deep shadows, which like
gigantic specters were lying on the mountain range of such a world-perception.
The more one wanted to approach the problem of solving how out of the
Indefinite the Definite--- out of the Eternal the Temporal--- out of the Just,
the Unjust, could by secession ever originate,--- the darker the night became.
We
will return to Nietzsche’s inspired and inspirational interpretation of
Anaximander in a later revision of this entry, when I shall concentrate my
attention on my own comments on Nietzsche’s comment, and in this way I will,
hopefully, lift this entry out of its present derivative condition into the
rarefied air of originality. This is however the task for the next round of my
work, which means that for now this entry stays the way it is. I have just a
few last things to add, though. One of them is the following passage from
Nietzsche. It is taken from a later analysis of Heraclitus, who, according to
Nietzsche, had subordinated himself to the importance of Anaximander as a
physicist and had been a follower of Anaximander in some matters, while in
opposition to him in several others. These matters will be properly discussed
in our Heraclitean subsection, but here is this excerpt pertaining to
Anaximander in particular.---
In order to elucidate the introduction of fire as a world-shaping
force, Anaximander further developed the theory of water as the origin of
things. Placing confidence in the essential portion of Thales’s theory, and
strengthening and adding to the latter’s observations, Anaximander, however,
was not to be convinced that before the water and, as it were, after the water,
there was no further stage of quality: no,-- to him out of the Warm and the
Cold the Moist seemed to form itself, and the Warm and the Cold, therefore,
were supposed to be the preliminary stages, the still more original qualities.
With their issuing forth from the primordial existence of the
“Indefinite,” Becoming begins.
Whereas Heraclitus is a follower of Anaximander in the most
important conceptions, e.g. that the fire is kept up by the evaporations or
herein that out of the water is dissolved partly earth, partly fire; he is, on
the other hand, independent and in opposition to Anaximander in excluding the Cold
from the physical process, while Anaximander had put it side by side with
the Warm as having the same rights, so as to let the Moist emerge
out of both. More important than this deviation from Anaximander’s doctrine is
the further agreement; he, like the latter, believes in an end of the world
periodically repeating itself and in an ever-renewed emerging of another world
out of the all-destroying world-fire. The period, during which the world
hastens towards that world-fire and the dissolution into pure fire, is
characterized by him most strikingly as a demand and a need; the state of being
completely swallowed up by the fire as satiety; and now remains the question,
how he understood and named the newly awakening impulse for world-creation, the
pouring-out-of-itself into the forms of plurality. The Greek proverb comes to
our assistance: Satiety gives birth to crime (the hybris), and
one may indeed ask oneself, for a minute, whether perhaps Heraclitus has
derived that return to plurality out of hybris. Let us just take this thought
seriously: in its light, the face of Heraclitus changes before our eyes, the
proud gleam of his eyes dies out, a wrinkled expression of painful resignation,
of impotence, becomes distinct, it seems that we know why later antiquity
called him the “weeping philosopher.” Is not the whole world process now an act
of punishment of the hybris? Is not the plurality the result of a crime? Is not
the transformation of the pure into the impure, the consequence of injustice?
Is not the guilt now shifted into the essence of things, and, indeed, the world
of Becoming, and of individuals, accordingly exonerated from guilt; yet, at the
same time, are they not condemned forever to bear the consequences of guilt?
And
with this added interpretation of Anaximander via Heraclitus we come to
the end of this entry and of the Anaximandrian subsection.
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