Everything in Everything: Anaxagoras's Metaphysics

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Anna
Marmodoro

Anna Marmodoro's Anaxagoras is a power ontologist with a theory of extreme mixture that makes his world
gunky rather than atomic. The fundamental elements of his physical system -- the hot and the cold, the moist
and the dry, and so on -- are tropes that are physical but not material: they are instances of opposite physical
properties that are not borne by any material substratum. They are also instances of causal powers that are
constantly active and exercising their constitutional causal role, though they are manifest only at higher
concentrations within the bundles constituting stuffs and organisms. Because Marmodoro's Anaxagoras rejects
the possibility of creation from, or destruction into, nothing, and also the possibility that anything might come to
be from what it is not, he allows for unrestricted derivation, such that anything may come from anything. This is
possible because of his still more basic tenet that everything is in everything. As Anaxagoras himself says, "all
things possess a portion of every thing" (panta pantos moiran metechei, ANAXAG. D25 Laks-Most = 59B6 Diels-
Kranz). The explication of this startling claim is the central focus of Marmodoro's monograph.

After an introductory chapter on the fundamental items in Anaxagoras's ontology, the book's central chapters
explicate the metaphysical underpinnings of his physical system by first providing an overview of its fundamental
principles (Chapter 2), presenting and defending Marmodoro's novel interpretation of the everything in everything
principle (Chapter 3), and defending her reading via a critique of other interpretations (Chapter 4). There follows
a discussion of the principles Anaxagoras calls "seeds" and "nous" as the intelligent powers that provide,
respectively, structures for the growth of living things and a cosmic plan for the universe (Chapter 5). A final
chapter is devoted to Stoic physical theory insofar as it shares with Anaxagoras the core metaphysical
assumption of a gunky reality (Chapter 6).

Anaxagoras's claim that all things possess a portion of every thing is a principle of composition that is grounded
in more fundamental principles of physical structure. These are the principles that there is no least magnitude,
that there is no greatest magnitude, and a principle of the isometry of small and large, according to which any
portion of stuff has as many portions smaller than it as portions larger than it. He also introduces -- as additional
principles of composition -- the principle of inseparability, according to which no stuff can be discrete, separate,
and isolated from other stuffs once it has been mixed with other stuffs, and a principle of preponderance,
according to which a thing's phenomenal characteristics are a function of the preponderance within it of stuffs
with the corresponding characters. It is important to distinguish the principles of physical structure from the
principles of composition, since Anaxagoras intends the former to ground the latter (see ANAXAG. D25 Laks-
Most = 59B6 Diels-Kranz). Marmodoro's articulation and discussion of the principles serves as preparation for
her central contention that Anaxagorean mixture is to be understood in terms of the necessary compresence of
everything with everything rather than in terms of the constitutional containment of everything in everything. "For
Anaxagoras there is a share of everything with everything," she explains, "rather than a share of everything
contained in everything" (pp. 75-6).

What does Marmodoro's central contention amount to? On her admittedly speculative reconstruction of how
Anaxagoras can derive the Inseparability principle from what she calls the No-Least principle, properties such as
hot and cold, like large and small, exist on a scale of intensity with no upper or lower limit such that "there are no
extremes to the degree of intensity of an opposite" (p. 79). Inseparability follows, in that any given instance of a
property that has an opposite will also be an instance of its opposite since, for example, anything that is hot is
also cold relative to things farther along the scale of intensity. Thus "every instance of one of a pair of opposites
is also an instance of the other opposite" (p. 80).

While this line of argument yields only the inseparability of any pair of opposites, Marmodoro suggests that the
more general inseparability of all opposites is secured by another line of reasoning depending on the No-Least
principle, since it commits Anaxagoras to the fundamental elements being unlimited in both number and
smallness, so that the elements are continuum dense. This reconstruction yields her understanding of how

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everything is in everything: "All opposites are unlimited in smallness, unlimited in numerical and total amounts,
inseparable from one another, and compresent with one another -- and it is in this sense they are all together in
everything" (p. 83). It is somewhat unclear how much this ultimately differs from the alternative Marmodoro
wants to reject, for the compresence of opposites is only physically possible because every portion of stuff
contains a portion of all the opposites.

Marmodoro is right to emphasize that opposites exist on a continuum of degrees. But it remains to be explained
how Anaxagoras conceives, for example, of something very hot not being absolutely hot. He apparently thinks
that the heat of anything hot is accounted for, according to the principle of preponderance, by its having within it
a preponderance of the hot over the cold; yet the preponderance is never so great as to absolutely exclude the
simultaneous presence of the cold within it, although to a lesser degree. If degrees of intensity are to be
accounted for in terms of the preponderance of the opposites, then Anaxagoras's principle of everything in
everything needs to be understood both in terms of necessary compresence and in terms of constitutional
containment. Containment is the more fundamental conception, because it explains how compresence is
possible. Marmodoro's emphasis on the compresence aspect of the everything in everything principle is a useful
contribution to its understanding, but she goes too far in rejecting the containment aspect. Anaxagoras does say,
after all, that "all things are in every thing" (en panti panta), that "all things possess a portion of every thing"
(panta pantos moiran metechei), and again that "in every thing there is a portion of every thing" (ANAXAG. D25
and D26 Laks-Most = 59B6 and B11 Diels-Kranz).

Although she explicitly rejects attempts to understand Anaxagoras's everything in everything principle in terms of
constitutional containment, Marmodoro nonetheless recognizes that the opposites "each divide into unlimitedly
many, unlimitedly small parts or instances" (p. 75). The previous interpretations of the everything in everything
principle she criticizes in Chapter 4 all attempt to provide a coherent articulation of the theory of physical or
material structure based on the fundamental no least magnitude principle, so as to make the everything in
everything principle intelligible. The suggestion to understand that principle in terms of the compresence rather
than the containment of opposites does not obviate the need for an account of Anaxagoras's theory of physical or
material structure. Thus, after presenting her compresence interpretation of the everything in everything
principle, she turns in Chapter 3 to articulating the view that Anaxagorean reality is made of atomless gunk,
meaning that it is endlessly divided into ever smaller parts. Anaxagorean gunk is power gunk, on Marmodoro's
interpretation, because his physical principles, the opposites, are not strictly material, but tropes that do not
qualify any material substratum (pp. 17-22, 85).

Despite her rejection of containment interpretations of the everything in everything principle, Marmodoro has her
own view of how Anaxagoras's physical theory makes it possible for everything to be in everything: "the fact that
opposites for Anaxagoras are actually gunky does facilitate the extreme mixture and inseparability of the shares
that Anaxagoras wants, because of the numerosity of the shares that exist in nature" (p. 86). The latter half of
Chapter 3, one of the most original and stimulating stretches of the book, explores the ramifications of modelling
Anaxagorean reality as gunky in this way. What emerges is that because the parts of each opposite approach
zero extension, the shares of the opposites can overlap with every other space; and because each kind of
opposite is unlimited and their shares can overlap in this way, "each kind of opposite can be everywhere, and
thus there is no region of space that will lack any kind of being in it" (p. 187).

Marmodoro understands Anaxagoras's ingenious physical theory as attempting to abide by Parmenidean

constraints on change in positing that there is no creation ex nihilo, no emergence of substances or qualities,
and no qualitative alteration of the opposites over time (p. 27). However, the common view that the Presocratic
pluralists including Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and the early atomists were all reacting to a Parmenidean
challenge to the reality of plurality and change typically has it that their various responses all involved positing a
plurality of principles possessing the attributes Parmenides had ascribed to his one being: "What Is is
ungenerated and deathless, | whole and uniform, and still and perfect" (PARM. D6.3-4 Laks-Most = 28B8.3-4
Diels Kranz). While the Anaxagorean opposites are certainly meant to be ungenerated and deathless or
imperishable, because they are thoroughly mixed with all the other opposites and undergoing continual
rearrangement, no Anaxagorean opposite can be regarded as whole and uniform or as still (i.e. unmoving) and
perfect in the way Parmenides envisages.

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Once one recognizes that Anaxagoras's opposites cannot have been meant to be a plurality of Parmenidean
entities, then one might well question whether Anaxagoras intended to abide by specifically Parmenidean
prohibitions against change. Setting aside the fact that there are serious problems with the common view that
Parmenides prohibits all change and becoming, Anaxagoras's declaration that the Greeks misconceive coming
to be and being destroyed, since no thing in fact comes to be or is destroyed; rather there is only mixing and
separation out of the things that are (ANAXAG. D15 Laks-Most = 59B17 Diels-Kranz), is best understood as a
formulation of the principles nihil ex nihilo fit and its corollary regarding destruction into nothingness that Aristotle
repeatedly and correctly indicates were endorsed by all the earlier natural philosophers (e.g. Arist. Ph. I 4
187a27-9, 34-5, Metaph. Κ 6 1062b24-6).

A purported paraphrase by a scholiast commenting on the 4 th c. Archbishop of Constantinople Gregory of

Nazianzus is the primary evidence for supposing that Anaxagoras intended to abide by the more restrictive
principle that nothing comes to be from what it is not:

How could it be possible, he says, that out of non-hair hair could ever come to be, and flesh out of non-flesh? He
made these assertions not only about bodies but also about colors. For he said that in black there is present
white, and white in black. He posited the same thing about weights, supposing that the light is mixed with the
heavy and inversely the latter with the former (Greg. Naz. Orat. 9, vol. 36, p. 911B-C Migne = ANAXAG. D21
Laks-Most = 59B10 Diels-Kranz).

Some non-arbitrary restriction on this principle is necessary on pain of absurdity, for it would otherwise
apparently require Anaxagoras to include in his primordial soup homunculi of all individual organisms that will
ever exist. Marmodoro attempts to respond to this problem without succumbing to it (pp. 24-31), though with less
than total success. She wants to say that Anaxagoras's principle of preponderance entails that there is
"phenomenological emergence" of stuffs, objects, and organisms, while they all remain fully reducible to the
opposites from which they are composed.

She would do better to allow for genuine emergence within Anaxagoras's system -- and also to allow that the
opposites themselves may change when they causally interact. Allowing for these possibilities would make for a
better fit with her interpretation of Anaxagorean reality as gunky. Instead, she feels that if the opposites were to
change when they interact, "there would be a passage from nonbeing to being, which would defy Anaxagoras's
explicit endorsement of Parmenidean principles" (37-8). But there is no such endorsement, and it is an
unnecessary and ahistorical restriction on the reconstruction of his physical theory to disallow qualitative
alteration at the level of the opposites or the generation of new types of entity from them. Both restrictions are
problematic: the latter because his theory would otherwise seem designed to explain the generation of complex
entities from pre-existing entities in a non-reductive manner, and the former because it tends to push the theory
in the direction of atomism, which Marmodoro rightly wants to avoid.

Any attempt to provide a coherent account of Anaxagoras's physical theory consistent with the extant evidence
is perhaps bound to encounter difficulties, since the theory itself was in all probability less than fully coherent.
Although Marmodoro's account has its difficulties, the refreshing originality of its conception and its vision of
Anaxagoras through the lens of contemporary metaphysical concerns should inspire philosophers who have only
a vague idea of Anaxagoras's achievement to take up the texts for themselves. Her arguments and readings
should also inspire those who are well versed in this evidence to see it in new ways. Anyone tempted to think
there is little philosophy among the Presocratics will find in Marmodoro's monograph a provocative case to the
contrary.

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