Against Thales, he argued that finding the systemic principle of the universe in any one element was too limited, too specific. For one particular element to be the source and foundational principle for the universe seemed impossible to Anaximander, because that one element would be locked into the narrowness of not being any of the other elements.
So Anaximander proposes a view that there is some indeterminate stuff that is not any one element, but contains the potential to give rise to each and all of them, as Donald Palmer writes:
For Anaximander, the ultimate stuff behind the four elements could not itself be one of the elements. It would have to be an unobservable, unspecific, indeterminate something-or-other, which he called the Boundless, or the Unlimited (apeiron in Greek). It would have to be boundless, unlimited, and unspecific because anything specific is opposed to all the other specific things in existence. (Water is not fire, which in turn is not air, and air is not earth [not dirt and rock]). Yet the Boundless is opposed to nothing, because everything is in it.
Anaximander’s language is vague, but the modern reader can consider concrete examples from the twenty-first century. In complex organisms, a stem cell is indeterminate, or undetermined — it can eventually become one of a long list of different and mutually exclusive types of cells.
Likewise, in the plasmatic chaos in the center of the star, subatomic particles are freely existing which will later constitute definite, but distinct, types of atoms: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, etc.
So Anaximander’s proposal for a limitless boundless something as a foundational principle for the universe isn’t too bad, as Donald Palmer explains:
Anaximander seems to have imagined the Boundless as originally moving effortlessly in a great cosmic vortex that was interrupted by some disaster (a Big Bang?), and that disaster caused opposites — dry and wet, cold and hot — to separate off from the vortex and to appear to us not only as qualities but as the four basic elements: earth, water, air, and fire.
In his analysis of Thales, Anaximander presented an early version of the concept of entropy: the idea that, without some force to the contrary, the universe tended toward some homogeneous equilibrium.
It is also possible to read into Anaximander an early version of the hypothesis that life is the principle which opposes entropy: action which moves the universe away from entropy is life. The biological process might be the one force in the universe which moves things toward more order, and which makes more complex structures.
