Hermotimus of Clazomenae as Anaxagoras’s predecessor

Abstract

The article analyzes Aristotle’s testimony of a possible continuity between the teachings of Hermotimus of Clazomenae and his compatriot Anaxagoras. This testimony will remain the only one among the later ancient reports concerning Hermotimus, representing him more as a wizard and a seer than a philosopher. In this way, his image is presented until the 19th century; Hegel, Zeller, Windelband and others showed undisguised skepticism towards this figure. The state of affairs began to change at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th centuries, when the irrational aspects of ancient thought started to attract researchers. Rohde draws attention to the profound transformation of ideas about the soul in the 7th – 6th centuries BC, when the soul started to be perceived as existing separately from the body, as a special substance not reducible to the latter. E. Dodds discovers the origins of this new concept in the northern countries that opened up to the Greek world due to the colonization of the Black Sea coast and enriched the culture of Hellas with elements of «shamanism». The ability to experience the separation of soul and body was a hallmark of magicians and seers of a special kind that appeared in the 7th – 6th centuries BC — Abaris, Aristaes, Epimenides, and others. Rohde considers Hermotimus to be the most notable example of such a magician. It was from his personal experience that Hermotimus could draw a conclusion about the irreducibility of matter and spirit to each other, and, as a consequence, of the separateness of Mind as a universal principle. The distinction between spirit (soul) and matter (body) will become the fundamental principle of Greek philosophy; the concept of Mind (Nous) will serve as the foundation for the system of Anaxagoras, the first Athenian philosopher, from whom, in fact, the history of classical Greek philosophy begins.