ANAXAGORAS AND PERICLES

(See also my already posted [January 19^th, 2013] entry Archon Of The Thirty-Year Empire, devoted to Pericles, and mentioning Anaxagoras, albeit tangentially.)

Here, as promised, is Nietzsche’s discussion of Pericles as a disciple of Anaxagoras in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of The Greeks. Nietzsche calls Pericles “the greatest of all Anaxagoreans,” and considering that Anaxagoras was the undisputed intellectual leader in Athens during her “Golden Age,” such a distinction is definitely worth something better than, say, my very excellent Bertrand Russell is willing to acknowledge, and to yield to the great Greek.---

“The greatest of all Anaxagoreans, however, is Pericles, the mightiest and worthiest man of the world; and Plato bears witness that the philosophy of Anaxagoras alone had given that sublime flight to the genius of Pericles. When as a public orator he stood before his people, in the beautiful rigidity and immobility of a marble Olympian, and now, calm, wrapped in his mantle, with unruffled drapery, without any change of facial expression, without smile, with a voice the strong tone of which remained ever the same, and when he now spoke in an absolutely un-Demosthenic but merely Periclean fashion, when he thundered, struck with lightnings, annihilated and redeemed,-- then he was the epitome of the Anaxagorean Cosmos, the image of the Nous, who has built for Itself the most beautiful and dignified receptacle, then Pericles was as it were the visible human incarnation of the building, moving, eliminating, ordering, reviewing, artistically-undetermined force of the Mind. Anaxagoras himself said man was the most rational being or he must necessarily shelter the Nous within himself in greater fullness than all other beings, because he had such admirable organs as his hands; Anaxagoras concluded therefore, that that Nous, according to the extent to which It made Itself master of a material body, was always forming for Itself out of this material the tools corresponding to Its degree of power, consequently, the Nous made the most beautiful and appropriate tools, when It was appearing in his greatest fullness. And as the most wondrous and appropriate action of the Nous was that circular primal-motion, since at that time the Mind was still together, undivided, in Itself, thus to the listening Anaxagoras the effect of the Periclean speech often appeared perhaps as a simile of that circular primal-motion; for here too he perceived a whirl of thoughts moving itself at first with awful force but in an orderly manner, which in concentric circles gradually caught and carried away the nearest and farthest and which, when it reached its end, had reshaped — organizing and segregating — the whole nation.”

Surely, I say, a man of Anaxagorean stature, exerting such a profound influence on the genius of the great Pericles himself and around Athens in her glorious heyday, could not be a second-rate philosopher even on the mere strength of this connection! So, let us stay with this subject in our next entry.