The Philosophical Therapy of Anaxagoras

I’m currently researching the philosophy of the Presocratic philosopher Anaxagoras for a book I’m writing about Socrates. I’m very interested in the therapeutic dimension of Greek philosophy, particularly Stoicism. So I’ve been wondering if Anaxagoras’ philosophy can potentially be read from that perspective. I’m not suggesting that Anaxagoras was a psychotherapist, or that his philosophy can be reduced to therapeutic techniques, or even that this is necessarily how he intended parts of his philosophy to be received. I’m simply interested in whether ancient followers of his philosophy would have potentially derived psychological benefits from it, and whether some of his ideas could perhaps benefit modern readers in a similar way.

Our evidence for the life and thought of Anaxagoras is fragmentary, obscure at times, and even, prima facie, contradictory — it’s notoriously problematic for modern scholarship. With that caveat in place, I’ll excuse myself for adopting a particular reading of the extant fragments, which I won’t attempt to justify in this article, because my goal here is to focus on exploring possible psychological benefits of the teachings, as they’re handed down to us in the surviving fragments. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether the resulting account of his life and thought is accurate or not, although, of course, I’ve attempted to base it on a reasonable interpretation of the available evidence.

The Life of Anaxagoras

I’ll begin by saying a little about Anaxagoras’ life, for historical context. He was a philosopher from Klazomenai in Ionia, on the Aegean coast of modern-day Turkey. He was probably born around 500 BCE and died around 428 BCE, although these dates are somewhat uncertain. As a young man, aged around 20, he arrived in Athens, and was, it’s claimed, the first there to actually be called a “philosopher”. He was, indeed, the earliest representative at Athens of the so-called Ionian school. Klazomenai had formerly been controlled by Athens but in 387 BCE it became part of the Persian empire, hence Anaxagoras may have been viewed by some as a Persian subject, or at least a potential sympathizer. As a foreign thinker residing in Athens, he naturally aroused curiosity and suspicion.

Anaxagoras famously stated that the universe was caused by something called Nous, a cosmic intellect which organized matter into the distinct objects of our experience. He placed so much importance on this concept that he earned himself the nickname Nous, which would perhaps be a bit like the public dubbing a well-known intellectual today “Brains” or “The Thinker”, although it was possibly meant in a disparaging sense like “Egghead” or maybe even someone who thinks too much for his own good.

He was, in a sense, a typical intellectual. He was known for being lofty and high-minded in general. The only book written by him seems to have been concise, and expressed in a pleasant, lucid style. His life was wholly dedicated to the quest for truth, causing him to seem aloof from everyday materialistic concerns. Anaxagoras came from a wealthy and noble family, yet was content to give away his fortune. When his relatives accused him of neglecting his inheritance, he simply replied “Why don’t you look after it then?”, and handed it over to them.

He said “I care greatly for my native land,” as he gazed upwards.

Having migrated to Athens, where he lived as a foreign resident or metic, he focused entirely on his philosophical studies, and therefore remained uninvolved in public life, something many Greeks viewed with suspicion. He was once asked why he believed he had been born, replying “To study the sun, the moon, and the heavens.” Perhaps he viewed the goal of life in general as the pursuit of such knowledge. Someone scolded him saying “Do you care nothing for your native land?” He simply pointed at the stars, telling them to hush, and saying “I care greatly for my native land,” as he gazed upwards. If he meant to imply that he considered himself a citizen of the cosmos, he may be seen as foreshadowing the cosmopolitanism of later thinkers, such as Diogenes the Cynic, and the Stoics.

Anaxagoras, like other Ionian philosophers, emphasized naturalistic interpretations of phenomena that Greeks often viewed as supernatural, or of divine origin. He reputedly predicted the fall to earth, in 467 BCE, at Aegospotami on the Hellespont, of a large meteorite, which may have coincided with, and was perhaps derived from, the passing of Halley’s comet. The meteor was described as a lump of stone around the size of a “wagonload”. His association with this event may have bolstered his fame. Whether or not he really predicted the date of the meteorite’s impact, he could point to the find as evidence for his controversial claim that celestial bodies were made of something akin to burning stone or metal.

In particular, he became known for teaching his followers that the sun was a blazing lump of iron. He was implying, of course, that the sun was not a divine being, riding a horse-drawn chariot across the sky. At best, such myths were metaphors for natural phenomena. Naturalistic explanations, though, still caused some controversy. Many Athenians were not yet used to, and perhaps not entirely ready for, such radical ideas.

Although Anaxagoras’ whole philosophical method must have ruffled some feathers, it seems his claims about the sun may have been the final straw for his critics. He found himself dangerously at odds with conservative religious elements in Athenian society. The conflict was perhaps especially with regard to the official worship of Helios, the sun god. Helios was a minor deity, in the state religion, primarily associated with harvest festivals, and the cult of Demeter at Eleusis. That said, the sun becomes a “great god”, portrayed as much more important, in the writings of Greek poets and certain philosophers, including Plato. (The god Apollo later became identified with the sun, or Helios, but it is doubtful that he typically was during the 5th century.)

The Trial and Exile

Anaxagoras is believed to have served as a tutor to Pericles, who later became the leading statesman in the Athenian democracy. They must have been good friends. Pericles retained Anaxagoras as an advisor until the philosopher was placed on trial at Athens, around 450 BCE. Anaxagoras was charged with impiety, for claiming the sun is a red-hot lump of iron, and possibly also conspiring with Greece’s enemies, the Persians. If the teacher could be condemned, it would subsequently be easy to argue that his famous student had been corrupted. So it is often assumed that the trial was really an indirect attack on Pericles by his political opponents, either Cleon or Thucydides, son of Melesias (not the famous historian).

Anaxagoras was found guilty and, according to one account, sentenced to death. Pericles, however, stood before the the court, placing his own reputation on the line, to defend his friend and tutor. He courageously asked the people whether they could find a single thing to criticize in his own conduct. They could not. He said, “Well, I am this man’s student. Do not be carried away by slander, and put him to death, but listen to me and release him.”

Some say, Anaxagoras was brought into court so frail from disease, that the jury took pity upon him. The sentence was reduced to exile, and a fine of five talents, a small fortune. One talent was enough silver to pay the crew of a trireme for a month. Pericles may have paid the fine on Anaxagoras’ behalf, if it’s true he’d given away his own inheritance

Anaxagoras spent his remaining years exiled in Lampsacus, a Greek city on the eastern side of the Hellespont. It happens to face the very spot, at Aegospotami, where the meteorite had fallen seventeen years earlier. The people of Lampsacus held him in very high regard, although the public indignity of his trial and banishment reputedly left him a broken man. His friend Pericles would eventually die of the plague at Athens. Anaxagoras passed away the following year, around 428 BCE, by suicide according to some. Diogenes Laertius, seven centuries later, would therefore write:

Socrates and Anaxagoras

Curiously, Socrates, who was known for seeking out the greatest intellectuals of his era, seems never to have met Anaxagoras, the man who, only a generation earlier, had founded the study of philosophy at Athens. Socrates must have been around twenty years old when Anaxagoras, aged around fifty, stood trial. He may already have been dabbling in the study of philosophy for up to five years.

It’s natural for us to imagine that Socrates would have loved nothing more than to have spoken with Anaxagoras and yet for some reason was unable to do so. The most obvious explanation would be that, in his youth, Socrates lacked the social connections who may have introduced him to Pericles’ intellectual circle. (Perhaps Anaxagoras charged hefty fees, which Socrates could not afford, although this assumption would clash with the former’s portrayal as a man indifferent to wealth.) In a sense, though, Socrates spent the rest of his life making up for this missed opportunity, by mingling with most of the other great minds of Athens, including the famous tragedian Euripides, who had, like Pericles, been a student of Anaxagoras.

Ironically, then, it may have been the very attempt to censor Anaxagoras that finally placed his teachings in the hands of Socrates and countless other young Athenians.

After the trial, Socrates became a student of Anaxagoras’ successor at Athens, Archelaus, who was probably the first Athenian citizen to teach natural philosophy at Athens. He seems to have read to Socrates from a copy of the only book written by Anaxagoras. The little book of Anaxagoras later became widely available, and we’re told it could be purchased, in the Agora, for only a single drachma. Clearly, those who sought to “cancel” Anaxagoras, for impiety, had completely failed to suppress his writings. One possibility is that Anaxagoras had circulated this text privately among his friends and students at first but after his exile, once he was gone and could no longer be held responsible or control the publication of his writings, cheap copies gradually became more freely available. Ironically, then, it may have been the very attempt to censor Anaxagoras that finally placed his teachings in the hands of Socrates and countless other young Athenians.

Socrates was, as a young man, fascinated by natural philosophy. However, he eventually became frustrated with the explanations it offered of natural phenomena. When he learned that Anaxagoras had made Nous, or Intellect, the cause of the universe, Socrates was exhilarated because it seemed to promise a more profound level of philosophical analysis. Minds have intentions, which Socrates hoped to study and understand. Socrates therefore wanted to know more about what this cosmic Nous actually was. However, his joy soon turned to disappointed, when he discovered that Anaxagoras made quite superficial use of this concept, and offered little explanation of its meaning. Nous, which explains everything for Anaxagoras, is itself explained by nothing. This initial frustration perhaps fuelled Socrates’ later insistence on the most important concepts in an argument being clearly defined from the outset.

Socrates, it seems, assumed that, being goal-directed or “teleological” in nature, cosmic Nous must have some plan for the world. In order to understand nature, therefore, we would have to understand what Nous considered the best arrangement of things. Anaxagoras was little help in this regard and Socrates realized that trying to analyze the real nature of things in terms of Nous would simply end in speculation. As a result of this dead end, he gradually abandoned the study of natural philosophy in favour of a new approach, which focused primarily on studying human nature, ethics, and what is best for man, i.e., the virtues.

Socrates was therefore critical of Anaxagoras’ philosophy, and sought to distance himself from his teachings, which he was accused, in his own trial for impiety, of repeating. Nevertheless, he also seems to have admired Anaxagoras, and to have been influenced by him in certain ways. There are such obvious parallels between the two philosophers’ lives that it’s difficult to imagine that Socrates did not feel as though he was walking, at times, in the footsteps of his ill-fated predecessor.

For instance, in Aristophanes’ satire The Clouds, first performed in 423 BCE, five years after the death of Anaxagoras, Socrates is pilloried as a natural philosopher, running a school called the Phrontisterion, “Thinkery” or “Thinking Shop”, and in the Symposium of Xenophon, an angry man is therefore shown disparaging Socrates as the Phrontistes, “The Thinker”. These inevitably remind us of Anaxagoras’ nickname of Nous, the archetypal intellectual or thinker, in the eyes of contemporary Athenians. Socrates took Anaxagoras’ place as Athens’ foremost philosopher, but he was a very different sort of thinker, who placed more importance on asking the right question than speculating about the answers, who didn’t present himself as an “expert”, and who was more interested in human nature than the nature of celestial phenomena.

The Thought of Anaxagoras

We have to imagine that Socrates was affected by the trial of Anaxagoras. He heard about, and perhaps even witnessed the persecution and public humiliation of Anaxagoras, but nevertheless chose to become a philosopher at Athens himself. Socrates had nearly fifty years, therefore, to mentally prepare himself for his own trial on charges of impiety. Despite the similar charges they faced, they responded in contrasting ways. Most obviously, whereas Anaxagoras was defended by Pericles, Socrates insisted on defending himself in court. The jury reputedly had mercy on Anaxagoras, because of his frailty and illness, but Socrates openly scorned the notion of appealing to the pity of jurors. Whereas Anaxagoras accepted exile to death, Socrates preferred to face the death sentence, and dismissed exile as, at least in his eyes, a fate worse than death.

Later, while in prison awaiting execution, according to Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates recounted the story of his early disillusionment with natural philosophy. He says that Anaxagoras’ physical theories might explain how his bones and sinews worked, and how they may have carried him to court, and prison. However, Socrates realized long ago that such explanations were too reductionist to explain the true reasons for his sitting in prison.

Socrates’ bones and sinews would have carried him far away if, like Anaxagoras, his intellect had judged it best to go into exile and evade the death sentence.

In other words, Socrates implies that Anaxagoras’ philosophy failed him in the sense that he could not comprehend the social and psychological causes leading to his trial, or discern how it was best to respond, morally, in the face of such adversity. That may be why Anaxagoras was said to have been left a broken man following his sentence. Nevertheless, he was known as a man of dignity and nobility (eugenia), renowned for his greatness of thought or magnanimity (megalophrosune). Socrates could have learned something about coping with adversity from the following aspects of Anaxagoras’ natural philosophy.

Appearance and Reality

Arguably, the overarching message of Anaxagoras’ philosophical method, and perhaps natural philosophy in general, was that appearances can be deceptive. “From the weakness of our senses”, he says, “we are not able to judge the truth.” We should, therefore, learn to distinguish more carefully between appearance and reality. For instance, the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus had said the sun is roughly the size of a human foot, which I suppose is how it might look to someone lying on his back and casually positioning one of his feet in front of the sun. Anaxagoras disagreed. He said the sun only appears small because it is far away, whereas in reality it is very large. Even he underestimated its size, though, and could only imagine it was bigger than the Peloponnese, an area of around 8,000 square miles. Nevertheless, Anaxagoras had the basic insight that the sun was bigger than it looks.

Furthermore, he believed that the sun was made of burning metal (mydros, literally a lump of molten iron in a forge). This is not entirely accurate, although the sun is believed to have quite a lot of iron at its core. He understood, though, that the celestial bodies might be of a natural rather than supernatural constitution, a theory bolstered by the discovery of the Aegospotami meteorite. He realized that there are hills and ravines on the moon, although he also believed there were dwellings of some kind there, and hence presumably intelligent life on the moon. He also inferred that the moon is, basically, a large clod of earth, and closer to us than the sun, from which, he realized, it borrows its light, and he understood how solar and lunar eclipses function.

According to Cicero, during the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian soldiers became alarmed when they witnessed a solar eclipse. Pericles, however, was able to restore their nerve by explaining it as a natural phenomenon, caused by the moon passing before the sun, using the very arguments he had learned from Anaxagoras. Plutarch would therefore, later, note that Pericles not only became a more effective orator because of studying natural philosophy under Anaxagoras but also that he was liberated from the tyranny of superstition.

Socrates and other thinkers, influenced by Anaxagoras, were therefore inspired to question the natural world more deeply. In doing so, they often provoked opposition from conservative religious elements, who saw them as threatening supernatural views, and accused them of impiety. They had a political motive for doing so as the authority invested in priests rested upon widespread belief in the supernatural, which was often used to shape the outcome of events in Greek society.

Socrates had initially evaded prosecution by shifting his focus from natural philosophy, and speculations about the heavens, onto the human domain of ethics. Doing so, nevertheless, soon brought him into conflict with powerful figures in Athenian society. He would question whether, for instance, those who claimed to be wise, the Sophists or “wise men”, were wise in reality or merely wanted to appear so, and whether famous politicians really understood the concept of “justice”, or merely wanted a reputation for being just. Socrates later become known for teaching that we should be as we wish to appear. In other words, the psychological or epistemic distinction between appearance and reality remained fundamental to Greek philosophy, and was even extended into the domain of personal ethics.

We can clearly see the therapeutic potential of this distinction from the way it was used by the later Stoic philosophers. Over five centuries later, we find Epictetus teaching his students to respond to troubling appearances (phantasiai), such as those evoking feelings of fear or anger, by saying to them: “You are just an impression and not at all the thing you claim to represent” — an appearance, that is, and not the underlying reality.

Although I can’t find an explicit reference to this in the fragments attributed to Anaxagoras, the Stoics also clearly believed that describing troubling events in “physical” language, like natural philosophers, by suspending value-judgments and emotive rhetoric, was a powerful therapeutic method for mastering our unruly passions. Pierre Hadot calls the technique, as employed by Marcus Aurelius, that of giving “physical descriptions” of external events.

Everything in Everything

Anaxagoras also taught his Athenian students that “a portion of everything in everything”. This theory seems to have originated in his observations about the diet and nutrition of animals. For instance, sheep eat grass and turn it into wool, through a process which appeared mysterious to the Greeks. Anaxagoras speculated that there must be minute quantities of wool inside the grass, which the sheep, through digestion, are able to extract, in order to grow their own wool. “How”, he asked, “can hair come from what is not hair, or flesh from what is not flesh?” This may seem odd to us today but to early natural philosophers it was a logical, albeit speculative, argument.

Anaxagoras believed that, for example, something looks gold if it predominantly consists of portions of gold, although it must contain a mixture of everything else, albeit in lesser quantities. He said that each individual thing is “most plainly those things of which it contains most.” Something may appear like water while, in reality, also containing a drop of poison. Moreover, if we contemplate the notion that all things are interrelated in this way, it may lead us to question the sharp distinctions made between good and bad, clean and dirty, self and other, and so on. Whatever their scientific merits, such ideas did encourage people to question appearances, and to be wary of certain types of selective thinking.

A century later, Diogenes, or another early Cynic, in his tragedy Thyestes, employed a version of the same argument, which was apparently used to raise ethical questions concerning the taboo against cannibalism. The play concerns a mythological king who is tricked into unwittingly eating the cooked flesh of his murdered sons, cruelly served to him at a banquet by his twin brother. Like Anaxagoras, Diogenes argues that particles of everything are contained in everything else, presumably including particles of human flesh in all the rest of our food.

Similar reasoning may perhaps have been used to support ethical cosmopolitanism. For instance, a Greek might view a barbarian, such as a Persian, quite differently, if he imagines that every Greek is at least a little bit Persian and every Persian is at least a little bit Greek.

The Illusion of Becoming

Anaxagoras taught another radical idea at Athens. “The Greeks”, he said, “are wrong to accept coming to be and perishing, for no thing comes to be, nor does it perish.” Like other Ionian thinkers, he believed that the creation and destruction of things is an illusion, an unnatural human construct imposed on natural events. Different substances are combined into the form of objects, or living creatures, and separated again, but nothing in nature is ever really created or destroyed — substances just shift and are rearranged in different ways.

Again, we find this theme’s therapeutic value emphasized in the writings of Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius. We should not fear the loss of whatever we love, but rather view it as a natural process, the conversion of one state of matter into another.

Even our own death, from this perspective, is not destruction, but the transformation of our body from one physical state into another. We are, as the Stoics put it, merely returning to Nature.

On Facing Death

Anaxagoras seems to have been tortured by a lasting sense of injustice over his treatment by the Athenian court. There are, nevertheless, indications that his philosophy could and did help him to accept his own mortality with greater equanimity. Perhaps, we could say that Anaxagoras knew how to face death yet struggled to accept the injustice of others.

We’re told, for instance, of Anaxagoras receiving news of two disasters at once: the death of his sons, and that the Athenian court had condemned him to death. This sounds like more than most men could bear. When advised of his own fate, he replied, “Nature, long ago, condemned both my accusers and myself to death.” Regarding the loss of his sons, he added, “I knew that my children were mortal.” The former saying has also been attributed to Socrates, and the latter both to Solon and Xenophon. Whether or not Anaxagoras came up with these sayings, or even said them, the attribution to him seemed very plausible in the eyes of ancient historians. We can find a similar teaching in both the Discourses and Enchiridion of Epictetus.

The commitment of early philosophers, including Anaxagoras, to the study of nature was believed to help them maintain a more detached or matter-of-fact attitude toward life and death. Indeed, later, when Anaxagoras was in exile, someone scolded him saying “You are dying in a foreign land”, to which he replied “From whatever point it starts, the road to Hades is the same.” It seems unlikely that Anaxagoras would have believed in the literal existence of Hades, so perhaps he was speaking figuratively. The point of this remark, in any case, is that a wise man should be relatively indifferent to the location of his death.

The Cosmic Mind

Anaxagoras said, “All things were together; then came Nous and set them in order.” In other words, once different substances were in a state of primal chaos, mingling together, then a cosmic intellect, of some kind, set them in motion, separating them into distinct objects, and forming the universe as we know it today. Anaxagoras does not appear to equate this cosmic Nous or Mind with God, however, although it does have some godlike characteristics. It’s more of an impersonal force, or fine substance, seemingly of a material rather than divine or supernatural nature.

You’ll recall that Anaxagoras, a famed intellectual at Athens, was nicknamed Nous. Timon of Phlius (320–230 BCE), the satirist, makes fun of Anaxagoras in a poem, which clearly equates his intellect with the cosmic intellect of his theory.

Socrates felt Anaxagoras had failed to pursue the primacy of Nous by examining the teleological reasons for things that happen, such as his own trial and condemnation. Saying that matter is organized by a Cosmic Mind implies that it has a goal (telos), which explains the way things are organized. Socrates realized that we can only speculate about the purpose of Cosmic Nous, which may be ultimately unknowable. However, we can more easily apply the teleological principle to human behaviour by examining what people believe is in their interests, in any given situation. Anaxagoras should, for instance, have asked what appeared best to the jury, and what would, in reality, have been best for him to say and do in court, or when facing his sentence. What, in other words, would have been the wisest and most virtuous way to respond?

Conclusion

Even from what little we know of Anaxagoras, there are indications that his philosophy may have offered some of the therapeutic benefits, or ways of coping with adversity, that we find centuries later in the Stoics. We can potentially read Anaxagoras and other early philosophers as mindful of the distinction between appearances and reality, viewing physical creation and destruction as illusions, questioning the apparent separation between different objects, describing troubling events using more objective or naturalistic language ,and introducing the teleological analysis of human behaviour. These are all good reasons for viewing natural philosophy as having therapeutic aspects, not just being a theoretical discipline, and, in some ways, as anticipating the Socratic and Stoic concept of philosophy as a way of life.

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This post was previously published on Stoicism — Philosophy as a Way of Life.

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