Cosmic Justice in Anaximander

Abstract

In what may be our oldest surviving fragment of Greek literary prose,1 Anaximander refers to the redress of injustice among parties alternately injured and injuring. Since the parties in question are impersonal entities, and the redress is a cosmic process, Simplicius, probably repeating a remark of Theophrastus, comments on Anaximander's mode of expression as 'rather poetical'. What in plain terms was the meaning of the metaphor? In this paper I wish to look again at what Viastos has described as the most controversial text in Presocratic philosophy.2 The preceding clause in Simplicius indicates that the process of redress is one of perishing or passing away, phthora: not absolute phthora, but phthora 'into' something. Two main views have been taken of this process. It has often been thought that that into which perishing took place was the infinite, and that that which perished was what Simplicius referred to as ta Note on translation: - Kahn (Appendix II) has shown that the derivation (e.g.in Liddell and Scott) of 6nfLQog from the nouns nEtQae or nkQag, 'limit', is to be discarded in favour of a derivation from the root occurring in the verbs nd'Qw, 'try, prove', nerdw, 'traverse', nEDatv', 'complete'. Etymologically speaking, therefore, lo 6JEELQOV means not 'the infinite', 'the boundless', 'the unlimited', but 'the inexhaustible', 'the untraversable', etc. The structurally correct English renderings all suffer from two disadvantages: they are clumsy, and, more seriously, the verbal stems they contain are too precise to afford an equivalent to 6?1EtLDq. 'Inexhaustible', for example, suggests material supply, 'untraversable' suggests motion. Each of these suggestions is included in CMrELqog, but not to the exclusion of the other. Since 'the infinite' is devoid of specific (because of any) verbal suggestions, it is convenient to use it or one of its synonyms as a translation of l6 &6ELQOV; and since in the context of Anaximander's cosmology there is little or no effectual difference between the negation of the verbal idea and that of the nominal idea - in either case the a5nELQOV is incompassably vast - in practice this does not set up unwanted associations.