Anaximenes: Is the Universe a Machine?

Philosophers and scientists have long wrestled with notion of a mechanistic universe: it is attractive, to the extent that it reflects both the formalized assumptions and intuitive concepts of physics and chemistry, both of which can be modeled mathematically. On the other hand, it fails to correspond to our ideas of imagination, creativity, and chance. We can see clearly that some aspects of the cosmos are mechanistic - gravitational forces can be calculated and reliably predicted. But is there a decision process which would have allowed us to predict, after Beethoven finished his eighth symphony, which form and content would comprise his ninth symphony?

Anaximenes was perhaps the first to advance a strictly mechanistic cosmology. Even though Thales and Anaximander had rejected mythological “psyche” into their systems of physics, attributing something like a capability for arbitrary decisions to objects. Modern physics would like to tell us that even in a situation like the flipping of a coin, the results are, if not actually calculable, still in principle calculable. Anaximenes would agree. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes that Anaximenes

discovered that nature can be explained mechanically. Anaximenes thought that all changes were the result of changes in density brought about by the condensation and rarefaction of one underlying form of matter.

And this, in fact, is not far from current twenty-first century natural observational science. The vast majority of what is around us consists of three rather generic forms: electron, proton, neutron.

The great virtue of this new idea was that it gave the scientist experiments, models, and clear-cut physical explanations of changes and their causes. This is still our own way of thinking.

If we review the first three philosophers in succession - Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes - then we can see their cumulative progress:

To recognize the magnitude and importance of the Milesian achievement, with its three progressive insights into the materiality, uniformity, and mechanical causality of nature, the modern reader must realize that here we have the ancestors of contemporary physics and astronomy.

These first three philosophers lived in the town of Miletus, and are thus called Milesian; their lifespans overlapped and so they almost certainly knew each other. Anaximenes additionally proposed the notion of rotation as central to the universe, and so it is: planets rotate on their axes, orbit their stars, and a grouped into larger galaxies which also rotate and orbit. This notion of rotation fits well with his primary notion of density:

Modern astrophysics can trace the life histories of starts in terms of alternate increases and decreases in their density.

And so, Anaximenes has made a persuasive case for a mechanistic universe. Yet the counterexamples remain: artistic creativity among humans, the uncertainty principle in physics, and the question of the origin of the universe. Anaximenes is persuasive, but not conclusive.

Anaximander

It’s frustrating to come in second - most Americans know that George Washington was the first president, but far fewer can name the second president; John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, but the name of second American to orbit the earth is not so well known; Charles Lindbergh was the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic, but who was the second? Edmund Hillary was the first man to climb Mount Everest, but who was the second?

So it is with Anaximander: Thales was the first philosopher, and many textbooks begin with his name. But less often do philosophy classes dwell on the work of his successor.

Anaximander began where Thales left off: the quest for a grand unified theory, to borrow a phrase from modern physics, or, in older phrasing, cosmology. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:

Leaping beyond the brilliant yet simple notion that all things are made of the same stuff, Anaximander showed how deep an objective analysis of the real world must penetrate. He made four distinct and significant contributions to human understanding:

1. He realized that neither water nor, indeed, any such ordinary material could be the fundamental form of matter. He saw the basic stuff as a more sophisticated though somewhat obscure boundless something. This theory was to serve science well for twenty-five centuries.

2. He extended the concept of law from human society to the physical world - a clean break with the older view of a capricious, anarchic nature.

3. He invented the use of models to make complex natural phenomena easier to understand.

4. He deduced, in a rudimentary way, that the earth had changed over the ages.

Quite a list of intellectual accomplishments! His understanding of matter is a direct ancestor of both modern chemistry and modern atomic physics. His understanding of the laws of nature - which amounts to saying that the universe is rationally constructed using algebra and geometry - is the necessary precondition for the development of chemistry and physics. The skill of modeling, which follows from the fact that the universe is assembled using the laws of algebra, is the basis for the understanding of natural processes: they can be mathematically modeled, which allows us to predict where the planet Neptune will be at this time next year, or describe how continental drift has slowed from miles to per to inches per year. A fossil hunter himself, Anaximander reasoned that even the highest mountains must have at one time been covered by water, a massive world-wide flood.

Agreeing with Thales that there must be one common principle underlying all matter, he disagreed with Thales on what it was. Rejecting the first philosopher’s hypothesis of water, Anaximander noted that this proto-material must be able to manifest itself in nearly endless qualities and properties we see in different objects:

If everything real is a matter with definite qualities, it must be possible for this matter to be hot in some cases, cold in others, sometimes wet and sometimes dry. Anaximander thought of qualities as always being contrary pairs. If one identifies matter with one quality of such a pair, as in Thales’ “all things are water,” how can one explain the existence of the contrary quality? If “to be is to be material,” and “matter is water,” then it would seem to follow that “to be is to be moist.” All right: what happens when things become dry? If the matter they are made of its always wet, drying would destroy the matter of things: they would become immaterial and cease to be. In the same way, matter cannot be identified with any one quality to the exclusion of its opposite. From this, the concept of matter as the boundless, a neutral and indeterminate something, follows. From this reservoir, the opposite qualities “separate out”: from the boundless all specific things arise, and to it they return when they cease to be.

Although we don’t think of neutrons, protons, and electrons as “boundless”, they are in some sense “neutral” and, until they are placed into atoms and molecules, indeterminate. Anaximander was realizing that, in order to express all possible qualities and properties, the basic building blocks of matter would have none of those qualities or properties, and would be capable of being configured in many, perhaps infinitely many, different patterns to yield the different properties we experience in actual bits of matter.

Thales - the First!

It is widely-known, of course, that nearly every book on the history of philosophy lists Thales as the first philosopher. It is even more widely-known that this statement can be contested. Aren’t there other people who could claim the title of first philosopher? For example, the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, which probably pre-dates Thales by several centuries?

And yet Thales endures, and clings to his title of “first” philosopher, despite the fact that we have only a few small textual fragments from him, and they reveal a cosmology which is naive and overly-simplistic. He retains his title of “first” for reasons best described in Friedrich Nietzsche’s defense of him - and thereby also set the trend for several centuries of pre-Socratic philosophy. As Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes,

Thales could, with some right, have claimed the ideas of matter, of physics, of science, and of philosophy as his inventions. However strange this may seem, all of these ideas had to be discovered. And to be discovered, mythology had to be abandoned. To state - as Thales did - that “all things are water” may seem an unpromising beginning for science and philosophy as we know them today; but, against the background of mythology from which it rose, it was revolutionary. The break was not complete; it could not have been. Thales still had no abstract idea of matter, as opposed to an imaginative picture of a fluid sea; the two were mixed together. And his idea of change was still based on a feeling that “all things are full of soul.” But he had asked a new kind of question. His question has given distinctive shape to Western thought.

The question posed by Thales, if perhaps tacitly, is the question of cosmology: what is the nature and structure of the universe? what is its origin and design? His answer, if laughably wrong, is understandable in the sense that water is 75% of the earth’s surface, is 75% of every human being and most other living creatures, is necessary for all forms of life, is the only substance commonly seen in all three states (solid, liquid, gas), and is found everywhere except in the vacuum of deep space between planets.

The rejection of mythology by Thales led to other pre-Socratic philosophers, but perhaps most of all to Xenophanes, who would reject anthropomorphic deities of polytheistic mythologies, and instead move forward to a rational conception of God: invisible, eternal, and monotheistic.

To seek to provide an answer to the question, What are all things?, required tremendous insight and imagination. For the question assumes that everything forms a part of some single world of being, and that all things have some common property. It raises the question of what being is, as opposed to less general questions about what these or those particular being are. And prior to answering the question, Thales had assumed that there is enough system among the infinite variety of things in the world to permit some sort of single answer. This assumption marks the beginning of philosophy.

In Thales, then, we see already the notion of system, the notion that the world is rational and understandable - that the universe is constructed with axioms and principles. This is the foundational assumption of physics and chemistry. Thales has indeed earned his title as “first” philosopher.