The Theory of the Opposites and an Ordered Universe: Physics and Metaphysics in Anaximander

Abstract

In a bold and suggestive paper published in 1947, Professor Gregory Vlastos has given an incisive and intriguing account of Anaximander's cosmogony and cosmology. The hard core of Vlastos' reconstruction amounts to the statement that Anaximander held, indeed invented, a philosophical concept of nature as a self-regulative equilibrium, whose order was strictly immanent, guaranteed through the fixed proportions of its main constituents.' This thesis, I will argue, is false. Regrettably so, because, as Vlastos justly notes, such a view of nature is of greater significance and import than Anaximander's strictly physical hypotheses. Much is at stake here: our analysis will suggest that Anaximander's physical theorythe theory of the opposites which (in a modified form) was to be embraced by Aristotle and the Peripatetic school, could not found the notion of a selfregulative, immanent, natural order. Consequently, in Anaximander as well as in Aristotelian philosophy of nature, natural order had to be sustained and upheld by external factors: in particular, what was to become the sublunary world was not a closed system. As long as the theory of the opposites prevailed, physics could not do without metaphysics. The theory of the opposites will be at the center of our study, but we will have occasion to reflect also on other issues in Anaximander's doctrines. In particular, scholars have long been puzzled by the following apparent contradiction: Anaximander, we know, held that the opposite constituents of the world are in a state of permanent equality; yet, it seems, he also maintained that the world is gradually drying up and that it will ultimately be reabsorbed into the Boundless from which it issued. How can these two ideas be reconciled? Our inquiry into Anaximander's theory of the op-