Anaxagoras on the Mind: Unlimited, Self-Ruling, and Separate

Orientation #

He opens with “page eight now of the fragments” and “the great fragment on the mind,” which he had announced (prev. lecture); he says “we’ve already touched upon” the argument from order in animals and plants to a greater mind, and “we’re going to come back to” the role of contradiction later on. Verified sources place the reading in the handout “On the Natural Fragments,” p. 42, and “The Royal Fragment,” p. 18 (his own page references are 8 and 9). The previous class treated Anaxagoras on quantity, mixture and the circular motion set going by Mind, closing with a preview of the Mind fragment.

The class, in order #

1. Mind is unlimited (“mind is unlimited. Let’s stop there”) #

The point: “unlimited” is said of mind in its ability to know, not quantitatively.

• A stray remark before the prayer: what is “with respect to one end” is not so with respect to another, “because the end is always what measures” what is for the sake of the end.
• Not unlimited as an infinite multitude, nor as a body going on forever in length, width and depth (he will later call mind “the thinnest of all things”). Unlimited in its ability to know. He notes Heraclitus anticipated this.
• Student: because things to be known are unlimited? His reply: that would not show our mind unlimited unless it can know all of them. The basic reason is from “large discourse” (the first explanation of “large”): reason knows the universal, which covers many things, e.g. “odd number” covers unlimited numbers; we even understand “you can’t get something from nothing,” and “something” covers everything. So mind is open to everything.
• Outward signs: man always inventing something new or doing an old thing a new way; always able to learn more; language rather than natural sounds (screams, groans, grunts) shows an infinity of things we are open to expressing.
• Aside: his “little plug for liberal education” — highly specialised education does not respect the unlimited character of the mind.

2. Mind is self-ruling: looking before and after (“Logic is the art by which reason directs itself”) #

The point: the one statement “mind is self-ruling” can organise the whole of philosophy if one looks at it, before it and after it (using “Shakespeare’s definition of reason,” looking before and after).

• The statement itself: logic is a sign of its truth (“the existence of logic is a sign of the truth of the statement. But the truth of the statement is the reason why logic is possible”).
• Before: could mind rule itself if it did not know itself? So [mind is self-knowing] — bracketed because not explicit. Connection with “unlimited”: if unlimited, it can know not only other things but itself; the eye knows only colour and, not being a colour, does not know what an eye is; mind knows things more universal than odd and even — being and non-being, something and nothing. Self-knowing corresponds to philosophy of nature and the soul (“what’s taking place now as we read this fragment? … the mind is knowing itself”).
• More precisely: mind alone is self-knowing — the hand does not ask what a hand is, nor the eye or ear; only mind asks “what am I?” Hence mind alone is self-ruling.
• After: one not fit to rule oneself is not fit to rule others. Commanding officer who cannot control his fear; father who cannot control his anger might whack the children; his friend, a page boy in the state legislature, saw legislators vote drunk on the laws you live by. So mind alone is fit to rule the other parts of man: the beginning of ethics, later domestic and political philosophy. Anger cannot rule itself — it does not know what anger is or whether it is too much or too little; whether being bumped in the hall was accident, carelessness or a high-school kid’s malice is for reason to weigh.
• Socrates and the Phaedo: after Simmias and Cebes object to his three arguments for immortality, Socrates says “don’t blame arguments; blame yourself” who cannot tell good from bad arguments, and among good ones necessary from probable; we need a techne peri logous, an art about arguments. That is what Aristotle does: Prior and Posterior Analytics (good and necessary), Topics (good but probable), Sophistical Refutations (arguments you cannot trust at all) — like men you trust completely, up to a point, not at all. Self-ruling leads into logic; ruling self to rule others leads into ethics, Socrates’ concern in the dialogues.
• Student: is the divine mind self-ruling? His answer: to rule is to direct to an end; God is not moving toward his end, so “self-ruling” of God’s mind only negatively — not ruled by another.

3. Mind is not mixed: the ruler must be separated from the ruled (“it would rule over nothing like it does being alone by itself”) #

The point: Anaxagoras reasons from mind’s ruling things (seen from their order) to its not being mixed with them.

• Recalled: the greater mind was guessed from order in the parts of animals and plants, like the order in artificial things whose cause is a human mind — like effects, like causes.
• Fragment read: if mind were mixed with something other it would share in all things (there is a part of everything in everything), and the things mixed with it would hinder it “so that it would rule over nothing like it does being alone by itself.”
• Examples of the reason: the impartial judge — “im-partial” = not a part of the disputants; a judge with interest in a company or judging between his brother and a stranger is disqualified. The military — those who command and those who obey are marked off (saluting first, insignia, commissioned officers’ club); mixing socially breaks down the chain of command; his son, a West Point captain, and his wife meeting a superior’s couple — the wives talk freely, the officers stand apart. After the Bolshevik Revolution everybody was “comrade,” and the army would not work that way. Minnesota Mining: the promoted man must associate with his new echelon (tennis and poker below, golf and bridge above); degree of separation marks rank — partition around the desk, separate room, outer office with a secretary. A priest made bishop must become impartial toward his former friends. James and John (their mother seeking places near Christ) — Christ chooses the man best for the Pope. His chair: he can steer it from outside, not sitting in it.

4. The apparent contradiction (“I’ve had one student in all my 20, 30 years”) #

The point: two of the four things said so far do not seem to fit — mind is self-ruling, yet the ruler must be separated from the ruled.

• Student tries “unlimited vs. not mixed”; he redirects: not quantity — the trouble is self-ruling vs. separation. Student: “the mind is not separated from itself. So how can the mind rule itself?”
• Student suggestions: mind can see itself objectively (he: still not separated from itself); mind is not physical, the other things are (he: “probably a quick equivocation”).
• Deeper form: if something moves itself it is mover and moved, before itself and after itself — “Can something be before and after itself? No.”
• A Heraclitean contradiction with reason on both sides: logic shows mind self-ruling; the judge and officer show ruler separate from ruled. “It’s very important because it’s necessary to solve this to see how, in fact, the mind rules itself.” Aside: colleges’ lip service to “we taught them to think for themselves,” though the students do not know what that stage requires.

5. Untying it: what is known rules what is unknown (“So the mind is ruled in what it does not know by what it does know”) #

The point: self-rule never means ruler and ruled are identical; in the mind the separation is between known and unknown.

• Method from Republic: at the start of Book II they ask Socrates whether he wants to seem or really to have convinced them; he “blows up the soul” by comparing its parts to the parts of the city, so civil war shows what disorder in the soul is.
• Colony vs. independent nation: self-rule means one part (the government) rules the other parts. Self-control: reason rules anger, sexual desire, hunger, thirst — “reason, more than anything else, is man”; when reason is mixed up with emotion people speak from emotion and need someone uninvolved to tell them what to do.
• Mind itself has no parts (it is “the thinnest of all things”), so it cannot be one part ruling another. The key is Socrates’ life (Apology): those he examined had mixed up what they did not know with what they knew (student first offers “the universals” — no). Separate what you really know from what you do not; then the known leads by discourse to the unknown. Example: knowing the table’s length and width but never having multiplied, the area is unknown; what he says of the area is ruled by knowledge of length, width and multiplication.
• Aristotle’s further distinction (as in the beginning of the readings): more known vs. less known, and ultimately the most known; the less certain is ruled by the more certain. Syllogising and calculating are cases.
• Misrule: being ruled by the unknown thought known, or by the less known thought more known. Charles De Koninck: the whole of modern philosophy can be done as denial of the more known from the less known — “that’s chaos.”
• Aside: the valedictorian’s “we’re taught to think for ourselves”; most men, not having separated known from unknown, are ruled by the unknown, custom, passion. Monsignor Dion’s greatest compliment would be “I’m able to rule myself” — “I thought everyone could do that.”
• “This is a beautiful example now of the role of contradiction”: great discoveries result from untying contradictions — Heisenberg on quantum theory born of contradicting experiments; Einstein on relativity beginning from contradictions.
• Most known, with help from Parmenides: something cannot both be and not be, must either be or not be; statements known of themselves judge those not so known, and those known to all enter into those known to the wise (no odd number is even — because it cannot both be and not be divisible into two equal parts). Aristotle in “the fourth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IV] calls it the natural beginning of all the axioms; Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

6. Mind is the thinnest of all things (“The mind is a great separator”) #

The point: a mover-cause and immaterial, yet spoken of with a likeness to matter (as “unlimited” was said of both).

• We call a good mind sharp, penetrating, having insight — all from being thin. Nothing divides and separates as much as mind: in mathematics it separates cube from ice, wood, plastic; it separates what cannot be separated in reality — your body from its health (you are sometimes healthy, sometimes sick, so not the same), concave from convex, “all they’re one thing.” Distinguishing, dividing, defining: so it must be thinnest.

7. Mind is the purest of all things (“not itself a mixture of things”) #

The point: “purest” is not a repetition of “not mixed.”

• He once took it as the same; on second thought, “not mixed” = not mixed with other things (from self-ruling → fit to rule → separated), while “purest” = not itself a mixture of things, which follows from “thinnest”: if it were a mixture, its ingredients would be thinner — “it follows as the night to the day, even more so.”
• Aside: purity applied to God when explaining “holy”; the divine mind is purest, altogether simple.

8. All knowledge, all power (“Knowledge and power are what inseparable”) #

The point: sixth, mind has all knowledge (fits the greater mind, and follows from thinnest — it gets inside everything); seventh, all power.

• Bacon at the start of modern thinking: knowledge and power inseparable. Man dominates animals not by swiftness or strength (his fingernails vs. a cat’s; naked man vs. gorilla or tiger — bet on the tiger) but by knowledge; Europeans in the colonial period; the English longbow in the Hundred Years’ War (trained from youth, whole weight into the shot; Agincourt, Crécy — Churchill’s history explains what Shakespeare’s play does not); the atomic bomb — had the Nazis got it first, “we’d all be Nazis today”; plots to assassinate or kidnap Heisenberg, and his removal to England at war’s end so the Russians would not get him.

9. Mind rules all things that have life (“a body composed of what tools”) #

The point: why he singles out living things (not that rule is limited to them).

• Student: living things have some self-governance? He: that would be a share in mind; rather, a diversity of parts well ordered (stone lacks it, water has no diversity of parts) and evident purpose. “Organic body”: organon is Greek for tool; eye a tool for seeing, front teeth for biting, back teeth for chewing, heart for pumping blood. Purpose hardly shows in the nonliving except relative to life (water necessary for life). Mind acts with an end in mind and orders before and after.

10. Separating by circular motion; ordering; every mind similar (“order presupposes what? Distinction”) #

• Ninth: the greater mind separates things by circular motion, as our mind uses circular motion to separate (cyclotron; rock on a string).
• Tenth, what most characterises mind: it set all things in order — perhaps what first suggested a greater mind. Order presupposes distinction (nothing is before or after itself), so mind sees distinction before order.
• For Anaxagoras nothing is ever completely cut off from anything else, except mind. “Every mind is similar, both the greater and the lesser”: the likeness of our mind lets us know the greater mind, mutatis mutandis.

11. The Anaxagorean way of naming (“we name something by what it has most of”) #

The point (top of page nine): things are mixtures of everything and are named from what they have most of, absolutely or by comparison.

• “Market economy” vs. Russia’s “planned” (really misplanned), later “command,” economy: Russia had a black market, but Gosplan’s thousand engineers and economists dominated; America has government in the economy too. The Inca [ASR: “income”] economy: regulated issue of shoes and trousers, with trading at the bottom (the sitter wears out trousers, the walker shoes) — not a market economy. Psalms called prayers though containing prophecy; prophetic books contain prayers.
• Exception: food named by what it lacks — fat-free dressing, no salt; “non-alcoholic” wine has a little alcohol, named by comparison.

His words #

• unlimited (of mind): in ability to know, not in quantity; from knowing the universal.
• self-ruling: mind directs itself; logic its sign.
• self-knowing [bracketed]: implied before self-ruling.
• techne peri logous: “an art about arguments” (Phaedo).
• impartial: “not a part of”; the judge not part of the disputants.
• self-rule / self-control: one part ruling another; ruler and ruled not identical.
• misrule: being ruled by the unknown taken as known, or the less known taken as more known.
• most known: something cannot both be and not be; must either be or not be.
• thinnest: sharp, penetrating, separating.
• purest: not itself a mixture (vs. not mixed with others).
• organic body: from organon, tool; a body composed of tools.
• Anaxagorean way of naming: from what a thing has most of.
• “fourth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IV].
• mutatis mutandis: our mind’s likeness to the greater mind.

Texts #

Read in class

• Anaxagoras, fragment on Mind (handout “On the Natural Fragments” p. 42; his pp. 8–9; DK 12 (inferred)): unlimited, self-ruling, not mixed (with reason), thinnest, purest, all knowledge, all power, rules all things with life, separates by circular motion, sets all in order, every mind similar; page 9 top: things named from what they have most of.

Mentioned

• Plato, Phaedo (Socrates on Anaxagoras; techne peri logous after Simmias and Cebes).
• Aristotle, Prior and Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations.
• Plato, Republic, end of Book I / start of Book II (soul and city).
• Plato, Apology (Socrates examining men).
• Aristotle, “fourth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IV] on the first axiom.
• Heraclitus (anticipation; contradictions); Parmenides.
• Bacon on knowledge and power; Heisenberg and Einstein on contradictions; Churchill, History of the English-Speaking Peoples; Shakespeare (Hamlet, Henry V (inferred)); Charles De Koninck; Monsignor Dion.

His questions #

• In what sense is the mind unlimited? In its ability to know, because it knows the universal.
• What part of philosophy is a sign that the mind is self-ruling? Logic.
• Could the mind rule itself if it did not know itself? No; so mind is self-knowing (philosophy of nature and the soul).
• Are you fit to rule others if you cannot rule yourself? No; mind alone is fit to rule the other parts of man — ethics, politics.
• Is the divine mind self-ruling? Only negatively: not ruled by another, since it has no end to move toward.
• Is there an apparent contradiction among the things said so far? Yes: mind rules itself, yet the ruler must be separated from the ruled.
• What did Socrates find in the minds of those he examined? They mixed what they did not know with what they knew.
• Why did they call a living body an organic body? A body composed of tools (organon = tool), showing purpose.
• Was there no market at all in Russia? There was, at the bottom; things are named from what they have most of.