POSTSCRIPT TO THE MILESIAN TRIAD

Summarizing the greatest achievement of the Milesian Triad, all three of them, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes were monists, that is, proponents of e uno plures (paraphrasing the familiar American phrase e pluribus unum in reverse). In several places elsewhere, I have been extolling the genius of Greek monism, directly connected in the philosophical consciousness with an espousal of monotheism, despite its seeming conflict with the preponderant polytheistic religion of Ancient Greece. It is therefore a significant personal accomplishment of each of the three that they have been such outspoken champions of monism, and it is to their individual credits, each one of them, regardless of their comparative value.

It is also to their credit that each of them was an original thinker. Thales apparently paved the way for all of them. Anaximander was not intimidated by the towering genius of his older contemporary and probably his teacher, but came up with an original system of his own. Anaximenes rejected his older contemporary and probably his teacher, and substantially returned to Thales, but he also rejected Thales’s specifics and came up with specifics of his own. All three of them deserve much credit for treading their own unique paths.

Academic profiles of the Milesians represent Thales and Anaximenes as physical monists, because of their respective choices of water and air, specific substances, as the original sources of everything. Apparently, Anaximander’s boundless does not qualify as a specific substance, although I categorically refuse to see it as something abstract. For me, in so far as the significance of the boundless is concerned, Thales’s water is clearly “boundless,” as earth itself floats on water, and, apparently, water has no end. Anaximenes’ air, too, is boundless by his own admission (“Air is the nearest to an immaterial thing; for since we are generated in the flow of air, it is necessary that it should be infinite and abundant, because it is never exhausted.”). So, if these two “specific” substances are both infinite and inexhaustible, what makes them so different in their physical principle from Anaximander’s unnamed substance, which, I believe, can be treated exactly as the algebraic x, the latter as we know, can stand for pretty much anything specific except for being concrete in its identification. That’s why Anaximander said that his boundless was nothing in particular. I hope that my good analogy with the algebraic x clears up this issue enough, so that the reader has by now figured out my point, and any further explanation on my part should be either pointless or a waste of time.

With this in mind, I find a curious misconception of the idea of the boundless in Professor W T. Jones’s A History of Western Philosophy (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952). Not that I am using this particular work as an authority on the subject, but Professor Jones was an established academic and author of an important academic work, for which good reason his apparent misconception deserves to be pointed out, and analyzed.

Here is the paragraph titled Criticism of Anaximander (on page 36 of his History):

Anaximenes actually had good grounds for rejecting Anaximander’s boundless. Consider: the boundless is an indefinite: it is everything, but nothing in particular. But what sort of thing is something that is nothing-in-particular? It has temperature, but no particular temperature; it has color, but no particular color; and so on for all other specific qualities. We have seen why Anaximander thought he had to say that boundless is nothing in particular: if it is a particular thing it is impossible to understand how it becomes its opposite. But we now see that this solution is itself open to criticism. When we examine it closely we see that the term boundless really conveys no meaning; there is nothing corresponding to it in our experience. So, instead of solving a problem, it merely hides the fact that a problem exists, the problem, that is, of understanding how one can become many. Either the boundless is simply a grab-bag collection of the specific stuffs (in which case, it is not really one at all, and monism is abandoned), or it is an indefinite something, which, being nothing in particular, is not anything at all.

Much of this criticism is already rebuffed by my algebraic x analogy: Dr. Jones asks us, What sort of thing is something, which is nothing-in-particular?, and answers it this way: Being nothing in particular, is not anything at all. The secret of x is of course that it cannot be pinpointed as one of the particulars, but being able to be any one of them, it cannot possibly be nothing at all.

My next objection to Dr. Jones’s analysis is that according to him the word boundless conveys no meaning because there is nothing corresponding to it in our experience. I wish he could be reminded that induction, which he has in mind, is not the only game in town, but there is also deduction, which does not depend on experience, and then, of course, there is such a thing as intuition…

Returning to our Milesian triad proper, the final thing to discuss is whether all three of them were mystics in the Nietzschean sense. Whereas it is fairly obvious with Thales and Anaximander, the case is not quite clear with Anaximenes, as I cannot quite figure out the thinking underlying his claim that the soul is like air in its nature. Taken literally, this demystifies the soul, but there is no ground to transfer the mystique of the soul onto his conception of air. Other instances of his reasoning are even less conclusive in this regard, and one may suspect that Nietzsche’s total omission of Anaximenes from the list of his pre-Socratics throughout all his works may be an indication that he failed to uncover a fellow mystic in him as well. But in my own appreciation for Anaximenes I find undoubted respect for this great man, and I am willing to extend to him the broadest benefit of the doubt, meaning that since I haven’t found anything in him which denies him the mantle of a philosopher mystic, he has surely earned it honoris et antiquitatis causa.