The Philosophy of ANAXAGORAS MAN I BUS ADOLFI STOEHR The Philosophy of ANAXAGORAS AN ATTEMPT AT RECONSTRUCTION By FELIX M. CLEVE All Has Been Arranged by Mind ANAXAGORAS Kings Crown Press, Columbia University NEW YORK, 1949 FOREWORD PHILOSOPMIA FIAT, QUAE PHILOLOGIA FUIT IT is A TRUE CALAMITY that we have so little left of those earlier philosophic masters and that we have been deprived of anything complete. Because of that loss we unintentionally measure them in wrong proportions and allow ourselves to be influenced against them by the mere accident that Plato and Aristotle have never been in want of praisers and copyists. . . . Probably the grandest part of Greek thought and of its expression in words has been lost to us. Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote these sentences in 1873, is quite right save that he takes for an accident what certainly was not one. Plato, our great Plato, is really but an imposing synthesis, the admirable architect of a grand building, practically none of the stones of which come from himself. And Aristotle, the polyhistor, as far as his philosophy is concerned, is apparently little else but a Plato deprived of his poetical make-up, notwithstanding those ostensible differences which Aristotle himself is given to emphasizing. The truly great ones, the giants, the really original thinkers, the pure philosopher types, these are to be found in the time before Plato. Again Nietzsche is right. But his plaint is not quite justified. Those grand constructions are not hopelessly lost. We have been deprived of anything complete but there have been left to us large numbers of fragments. It is doubtless true that works complete in a literary sense cannot be joined together from these remains. On the basis of the extant fragments, at any rate, Die Philosophic im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen Es 1st em wahres Ungliick, dass wir so wenig von jencn alteren philosophischen Meistern iibrighaben und dass uns alles Vollstandige entzogcn 1st. Unwillkiirlich rnessen wir sic, jenes Verlustes wegen, nach falschen Maassen und lasscn uns durch die rein zufallige Tatsache, dass es Plato und Aristoteles nie an Schatzern und Abschreibern gefehlt hat, zuungunsten der Friiheren einnehmen. . . . Wahrscheinlich ist uns der grossartigste Teil des griechischen Denkens und seines Ausdruckes in Worten verloren gegangen. viii FOREWORD a philological reconstruction is not really feasible. However, we might attempt something rather different, reconstruction in a philosophical sense. This should not be a total impossibility. I am well aware of the official dogma concerning the pre-Socratic philosophers Versuche, ihre Systeme auf abstrakt begriffiichem Wege zu rekonstruieren, sind aussichtslos. And likewise The early Greek period is more a field for fancy than for fact. But we are hardly compelled to agree. In principle a philosophic reconstruction is not impossible. It is im possible only to the old-fashioned nothing-but-philologist, just as it would be impossible to the mere philologist to reconstruct a whole from fragments of an ancient mathematicians work. Cognition of the like by the like it is here, if anywhere, that that old rule applies. Command of the Greek language, though indispensable for this task, is not enough for grasping, let alone for judging, Greek philo sophy. In those olden times all people in Greece spoke Greek, after all. . . What is to be accomplished by philosophic reconstruction is not to fit together, like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, stray fragments into a literary whole but to construct a philosophic building in such a way that all the authentic material handed down can be fitted in. For some thirty years I have been attempting to reconstruct the genuine system, in all its foundations, branches, and ramifications, of one of the most gigantic of those pre-Platonic giants the system of Anaxagoras. This fundamental condition, that all the authentic material must fit into the reconstruction, has been fulfilled...