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From Myth to Mind
November 9, 1998
Presocratic Hermeneutics:
The Science of Interpreting Texts
The Anaxagoras Quotation in Simplicius
[from J.Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy, pp. 26 - 31]
" In the first book of the PHYSICS Anaxagoras says that uniform stuffs, infinite in quantity, separate off from a single mixture, all things being present in all and each being characterized by what predominates. He makes this clear in the first book of the PHYSICS at the beginning of which he says: Together were all things, infinite both in quantity and in smallness. . ." ---(Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics, 155. 23 - 27)
1. Our first question concerns the author who is quoting Anaxagoras. Who was Simplicius?
[A Neoplatonic philosopher from the 6th Century A.D. He is therefore quoting from an author who lived more than a millennium earlier].
2. Our distance from Anaxagoras (via Simplicius) is further complicated by the fact that we no longer have Simplicius's original ms. There are 60 extant copies. The earliest is from the 12th Century A.D. --six hundred years removed from the original. Our copies are "copies of copies of copies" (Barnes, 26).
3. Each copy of a ms. [in this case, each of the 60 separate copies] has its own idiosyncratic errors. No two mss. are alike. Each scribe introduces new problems.
4. FIRST TASK: "to determine on the evidence of these late and conflicting manuscripts, which words Simplicius himself actually wrote" (Barnes, 27). In some mss., "single mixture" is replaced by "some mixture". Procedures and techniques are employed for producing the best text: closest to what the author wrote. Occasionally it becomes clear that none of the various mss. are correct: hence the need for "conjectural emendation" (Barnes, 27). "Quite often we are obliged to confess that we do not really know what Simplicius wrote down" (Barnes, 27).
5. SECOND TASK: Once the authenticity of the Simplicius passage has been established, we must then investigate the Anaxagoras material in the passage. Is Simplicius quoting Anaxagoras? When the author quoted writes in prose rather than verse, it becomes much more difficult to distinguish quote from paraphrase. An introductory phrase like 'X says that...' can often introduce paraphrase.
6. THIRD TASK: Even when we have successfully determined that our genuine Simplicius passage contains a purported quote from Anaxagoras, we must realize that not all purported quotations faithfully represent the author quoted. There are great possibilities for error. Cited works written over a millennium earlier can often turn out to be forgeries. Many texts have been counterfeited. Pseudepigrapha is always a problem. Some critics have called Simplicius's source for Anaxagoras into question.
7. FOURTH TASK: Once we have established the authenticity of the Anaxagoras quotation, we must now evaluate its content. What were Anaxagoras's actual words? Was Simplicius quoting from memory or did he have a text before him, and did he miscopy it? "Just as we read copies of copies of Anaxagoras's autograph, so Simplicius will have read copies of copies of Anaxagoras's autograph. The probability that Simplicius read a pure text of Anaxagoras is zero" (Barnes, 29).
8. FIFTH TASK: Now that we finally have the best text of Simplicius, and have determined that the Anaxagoras quote is genuine, we have to try to understand this quote: to understand the sense of the words in the quote, for many quotes out of context can be extremely obscure. "We need, in other words, to ask what sense the fragment had in its original context, what contribution it made to the general economy of the philosopher's work, how it fitted into his argument or into the exposition of his views" (Barnes, 30).
9. SIXTH TASK: "THIS IS THE POINT AT WHICH SERIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION BEGINS." There are some external aids:
a. The context in which the quote is cited. "At the very least, the context of citation will give us an idea of how a fragment could have functioned its original home" (Barnes, 31).
b. Comparison of one fragment with another, and comparison of the fragment to the doxographical tradition (i.e., to works like Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.).
II. Aristotle on the Ionian Philosophers
[Metaphysics: Bk. A]
"We must clearly acquire knowledge of factors that are primary. For we claim to know a thing only when we believe that we have discovered what primarily accounts for its being. These primary factors are fourfold. First, we say "what it meant to be that thing"; for the question "why" leads us back at last to definitions, and the reason "why" is the primary factor in explanation. Secondly, we mean the material or what persists in change. Thirdly, "that whereby the movement is started". Fourthly, the very opposite factor, that is the "wherefor", or the "good"; for this the "end" of any generation or change. We have sufficiently inquired into these factors in the writings on nature. Let us, nevertheless, here appeal for confirmation to our predecessors in this inquiry into being and in philosophizing about what is true concerning them. For, clearly they, too, speak of principles and ultimate factors. To go over what they say will therefore be profitable for the present exploration: for either we shall discover some other kind of factor and explanation, or we shall rely all the more confidently on those we have just enumerated.
Most of those who first philosophized thought that in the materials of things would be found their only beginnings or principles. That from which all beings come, that from they first arise and into which they at last go, the primary being persisting though its many transformations, this it is, they say, that is elemental and primary in things. Hence they think that nothing is either originated or destroyed, since such a nature is always conserved; just as we say that Socrates neither is originated absolutely when he becomes beautiful or educated, nor is he destroyed when he loses those traits, because the Socrates in whom these changes occur remains. So, too, nothing else is originated or destroyed without qualification; for there must be a nature, whether one or more than one, out of which things are generated, but which itself endures.
Yet these men do not all give the same account either of the number of such primordial beings or of what kind of being they have. Thales, the pioneer in this kind of philosophy, declares that the primordial being is water ( and therefore proclaimed the earth to be on water), probably having this idea suggested to him by the fact that the nutriment of everything is moist and that heat itself is born out of the moist and is kept alive by it. To be sure, that "wherefrom" anything comes to be is its source or beginning. So he made this observation and acquired this way of explaining things. He also noted that the seeds of everything have a moist nature and that water is the beginning of the growth of moist things. Some think that the ancients who, long before the present generation, were the first to theologize, had a similar idea of nature; because they presented Ocean and Tethys as the parents of becoming and water as that by which the gods swore, which these people styled the "Styx." For what is oldest is most honorable, and what anyone swears by is the most honorable. Although it may not be clear whether this opinion about nature is primitive and ancient, Thales at any rate is said thus to have explained the principles and origins of things. Hippo no one would regard as worthy of a place in the company of these men, because of his intellectual limitations. Anaximenes and Diogenes, however, rank air before water as the chief primordial being of bodies; Hippasus of Metapontium and Heraclitus of Ephesus said it is fire; and Empedocles used all four, adding earth to those mentioned as a fourth. These remain always and do not come into being, except that they come to be many or few as they come to be combined into one or separated out of one. Then Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who was older than Empedocles, but whose philosophic activities came later, declares that the beginnings are innumerable: for, he says, nearly all things whose parts are like themselves, such as water or fire, are thus generated and destroyed by combination and separation only; otherwise they are generated or destroyed, but remain forever.
By these considerations, then one might be led to regard as the only basic factor the one which we have described as of a material kind. But, as men progressed along these lines, the very state of affairs paved the way for them and coactively forced upon them continued search. For, if every disintegrative and originative process is from some one or more elements, then, in view of this very circumstance, whereby does this come about, and what is here the crucial factor? Assuredly, the thing spoken of does not itself effect its own transformation: I mean, for example, that neither wood nor bronze is the efficient agent transforming either of them and that the wood does not make the bed nor the bronze the statue, but that something else is the transforming factor. To search for this is therefore to search for another source or for what we are accustomed to call "that whereby the movement begins."
---trans.Richard Hope, Ann Arbor, Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 1952, pp. 9 - 11.
III. Aristotle on the Pythagoreans
[Metaphysics: Bk. A]
Contemporaneously, and even before them, the so-called Pythagoreans, the first to be absorbed in mathematics, not only advanced this particular science, but, having been brought up on it, they believed that its principles are the principles of all things . Now, of these principles, numbers are naturally the first. As a result, they seemed to see in numbers, rather than in fire, earth, and water, many similarities to things as they are and as they come to be: for one sort of modification of numbers, so to speak, is justice; another, soul and mind; still another, opportunity; and so forth. Musical modes and relations, too, they saw in terms of numbers. And all other matters appeared to be ultimately of the nature of numbers; and numbers were for them the primary natures. In view of all this, they took the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be harmony and number. They were adept at finding numbers and harmonies, both in patterns of change and in the structure of parts. And they organized and unified the whole arrangement of the heavens to exhibit its harmony. And if they discovered defects anywhere, they invented the necessary additions in order to make their whole system hang together perfectly. I mean, for example, that since ten is thought to be complete, comprising every nature of numbers, they declare that the number of moving celestial bodies must be ten; and since only nine are visible, they invent a tenth, the "counter-earth." We have discussed these matters more precisely elsewhere. But the purpose of going over them now is that we may learn from these men what principles they posit and how these fall under the basic kinds of explanation we have named. Evidently, then, these men regard number as a principle, both as the material of things and as the measure of their stabilities and instabilities . They say that the elements of number are the even and the odd, the latter limited, the former unlimited , and that unity is made up of both even and odd, that numbers come from unity and, to repeat, that the whole heaven is numbers. Others among them say that the principles are ten, which they arrange in columns: limited and unlimited, odd and even, one and plurality , right and left, male and female, rest and movement, straight and curved, light and darkness, good and evil, square and oblong. Alcmaeon of Croton seems to have believed this, and either he got this account from them or they from him; for Alcmaeon was in the prime of life when Pythagoras was old, and he expressed himself similarly to these men. For he says that many human affairs go in pairs, meaning not the particular contrasts which these men distinguished, but any at random: white and black, sweet and bitter, good and evil, small and great. Thus, he made indefinite suggestions concerning the other contrasts; whereas the Pythagoreans proclaimed the number and names of the contrasts.
From both of these groups, then, we may learn this much, that contraries are the principles of things; and from the Pythagoreans we learn also how many and what principles there are. But how these may be brought into relation to our factors of explanation they have not made clear. However, they seem to regard their elements as material, for they declare that whatever exists is composed and fashioned of them as if it were constituted by them.
These considerations give us an adequate idea of what the ancients intended when they said that the elements of nature are more than one. However, there were some who maintained that all things have a single nature. These men varied considerably in the clarity of expositions and in their fidelity to facts. We can ignore them in connection with our present inquiry into types of explanation, since, unlike the other philosophers who try to explain natural processes as one unified being which is generated out of unity as if unity were the world's material, these men have a different theory of unity. For them how being is generated is no problem, since they declare the world to be immovable. Nevertheless, this much is intimately related to the present inquiry: Parmenides seems to grasp unity as it exists in speech, while Melissus grasps a material unity. hence, Parmenides declares that the world is limited; whereas Melissus declares it is unlimited. Xenophanes, however, who first expounded the theory of unity (Parmenides is said to have been his disciple), made no clear statement and seems not to have understood either material or formal explanation; but gazing at the whole sky, he says: "Unity is God." These men, then, as we have said, are to be dismissed for the purposes of the present search: two of them, Xenophanes and Melissus, should be dismissed entirely, being a little too naïve. Parmenides, however, seems to reason here and there more critically; for when he insists that there is no nonbeing in competition with being, he must believe that there is only being, and nothing else. (We have examined this more clearly in our writings on nature.**) But when he is forced by factual evidence to interpret his doctrine of unity as applying to discourse and his doctrine of plurality as applying to sense he, too, assumes two kinds of factors and two beginnings, which he calls the hot and the cold, such as fire and earth; and of these he ranges the hot with being, and the cold with nonbeing.
From what has been said, then, and from the sages who have sat in council with us during this discussion, we have acquired this much. On the one hand, the earliest sages assume that the beginning is bodily (for water, fire, and so forth are bodies), some assuming that the bodily beginnings are one, others that they are more than one; but all agree that they are of a material kind. On the other hand, certain sages assume in addition to this material factor that there is an active or moving principle; some say one, others, two.
Down to the Italians, then, and apart from them, other inquirers have spoken too restrictedly concerning these matters; except that, as we have said, they happen to make use of two basic factors, and one of these (the agent or mover) some present as one and others as two. The Pythagoreans, too, have said that there are two beginnings, but they have added this, which is peculiar to them: they believed that the limited and unlimited are not different natural beings (fire, earth, etc.), but that the unlimited-itself and one-itself constitute the fundamental being of natural beings, of which they are predicated; and therefore that number is also the fundamental being of all things. In speaking thus of principles, they began to define the question of what is, but conceived this project much too simply. For they defined it too superficially and held the first number to which a given definition applied to be "what" the thing defined is; just as if one regarded "double" and "two" as identical, because it is first to the number two that "double" belongs. But, surely, "to be double" and "to be two" are not identical; if they were, one thing could be many, as, indeed, they concluded. This, then, is what we have learned from the ancients and their successors."
---trans. Richard Hope, Ann Arbor, Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 1952, pp. 15 - 19.