Anaximander

One can read Jung’s passage as a psychological paraphrase of Anaximander’s text which says that things that pass away return to that infinite stuff out of which they came and pay reparation for their injustice.

Edinger explicitly aligns Jung’s psychology of ego-individuation with Anaximander’s cosmological fragment, reading the philosopher’s ‘reparation for injustice’ as a mythic expression of the psychological burden of separate existence.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis

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In monetised exchange, as in the cosmology of Anaximander, opposites originate in, and embody, a single substance into which they are reabsorbed.

Seaford argues for a structural homology between Anaximander’s apeiron and coined money: both are abstract, unitary substances from which differentiated opposites emerge and into which they are ultimately reabsorbed.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004thesis

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Not only are the terms ‘centrality,’ ‘similarity,’ and ‘absence of domination’ found in Anaximander’s cosmology, but they are also clearly linked together there in the same way as they were in political thought.

Vernant demonstrates that the geometric structure of Anaximander’s cosmos—earth equidistant, undominated—directly mirrors the egalitarian political vocabulary of the Greek polis.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis

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Anaximander, in contrast, declares that there was nothing that was arche with respect to the apeiron (since that had always existed), but that the apeiron was arche for all the rest—that it encompassed (periechein) and governed (kybernan) everything.

Vernant presents Anaximander’s apeiron as a revolutionary cosmological principle: itself without origin, it is the governing arche of all else, displacing the mythological hierarchy of divine powers.

Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, 1982thesis

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The opposites ‘pay a penalty and reparation to one another for their injustice according to the assessment of time’. The opposites, it appears, are guilty of injustice in the way they relate to one another.

Sullivan provides close analysis of Anaximander’s fragment, establishing that the cosmic regulation of opposites is framed in juridical language—dike, adikia, tisis—projecting a legal model of justice onto cosmological process.

Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis

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Using its presence in human society, Anaximander postulates its working on a cosmic scale. As in other Presocratics, we encounter here a microcosm/macrocosm view of the universe.

Sullivan frames Anaximander’s cosmic justice as a microcosm/macrocosm projection, in which the social institution of the law court becomes the model for a universal ordering principle.

Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting

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From other sources we learn that he thought that the source of the universe was a divine principle which he called the Apeiron, the ‘Infinite’ or the ‘Boundless’… Anaximander describes it as a ‘divine thing’ (theion), as ‘surrounding’ the universe, and as ‘guiding’ it.

Sullivan supplies a systematic exposition of Anaximander’s cosmological system, identifying the apeiron as an unlimited, divine, governing principle from which all opposites are differentiated.

Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting

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A primitive stuff must be, so to speak, a neutral in these hostilities, and must therefore have no definite characteristics of its own. It must hold, inactive in the first place and suspended as it were in solution, the characteristics of all the future opposites.

Seaford, citing Guthrie, explains why Anaximander’s arche must be indeterminate: to be the neutral ground of all opposites, it cannot privilege any one of them.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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Anaximander placed a motionless earth at the center of the universe. He explained that if the earth stayed at rest in that place, with no need for support, it was because it was equidistant from all points on the celestial circumference.

Vernant identifies Anaximander’s geometric argument for the earth’s immobility as a landmark in rational cosmology, grounding stability in mathematical symmetry rather than mythological support.

Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, 1982supporting

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Anaximander accepts the existence of the antipodes… what appears to be up to us is down to the inhabitants of the antipodes, while what is right to us is left to them. In other words, absolute value is no longer attached to the directions of space.

Vernant shows how Anaximander’s acceptance of antipodes marks the transformation from mythically oriented, qualitatively differentiated space to homogeneous, mathematically symmetrical space.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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Like the mind, the apeiron is an abstract imperceptible entity exercising unifying control over the concrete multiplicity of which it in a sense consists.

Seaford argues that the apeiron shares with mind (nous) the property of being an abstract, imperceptible unity that controls and constitutes the concrete many, implicating early psychological concepts in Anaximander’s cosmology.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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There is no arche to the apeiron, for that would be its limit…. That is why it has no arche, but is the arche of other things; it envelops and governs everything.

Vernant, citing Aristotle on Anaximander, articulates the logical structure of the apeiron’s primacy: that which truly governs must itself be unlimited and therefore cannot be governed by any prior principle.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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What ‘surrounds’ the earth in Anaximander is not the apeiron but the air… The apeiron envelops the cosmos as a whole, as a totality composed of all the various elements.

Vernant, citing Stokes, clarifies Anaximander’s cosmological structure: the apeiron does not immediately envelop the earth but encompasses the entire cosmos from without, distinguishing it from later elemental cosmologies.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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The multiplicity of things as reverting to the original apeiron when they die, rather than to the four elements.

Edinger, interpreting the Presocratic tradition through Jungian categories, treats the return of differentiated things to the apeiron as structurally analogous to the psychological dissolution of the ego back into the unconscious totality.

Edinger, Edward F, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy supporting

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Although Anaximander is largely inaccessible behind later interpretation, this will not seriously impede us, for our focus is on almost the only text.

Seaford acknowledges the hermeneutic difficulty posed by Anaximander’s fragmentary survival while asserting methodological confidence in focusing on the single extant text as the basis for his economic reading.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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Chief points: The universe (‘all things’) is guided by a divine principle called the ‘Infinite’ (Apeiron). The universe is made up of opposites in conflict. These opposites are regulated by Justice that imposes balance between each opposing pair.

Sullivan’s handbook summary crystallizes Anaximander’s three core doctrines: the apeiron as divine arche, cosmic opposites in perpetual conflict, and justice as the regulative principle of that conflict.

Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting

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Anaximander had already developed the theory of (cold) water by stating that it originated from ‘warmth’ and ‘dampness’ as its primary stage, and the ‘physicist’ Heraclitus then reinterpreted this Anaximandrian ‘warmth’ as the respiration, the warm breath, the dry vapours.

Rank traces an embryological and physiological lineage from Anaximander through Heraclitus, embedding the philosopher within a speculative tradition concerning moisture, warmth, and the origins of life.

Rank, Otto, The Trauma of Birth, 1924supporting

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It was at the beginning of the sixth century, in Ionian Miletus, that such men as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes ushered in a new way of thinking about nature.

Vernant situates Anaximander within the Milesian triad as co-founder of systematic natural inquiry, marking the institutional and geographical origins of Greek rational thought.

Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, 1982supporting

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The other fundamental concept of the Milesians is the term arche. It means beginning; principle; original substance; in German, urstoff, ruling element. In alchemy the term arche was translated as prima materia or first matter.

Edinger contextualizes the Milesian concept of arche—central to Anaximander’s system—within a psycho-alchemical genealogy, linking it to the Jungian prima materia and the archetype.

Edinger, Edward F, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy aside

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The earth is not without limit (apeiron). Being thus limited by something other than itself that both supports and envelops it (in space and in time), the earth cannot be said to be autokrates like the nous of Anaxagoras.

Vernant, in comparing Anaximenes and Anaxagoras, illuminates Anaximander’s position by contrast: unlike the self-ruling nous, Anaximander’s cosmos is bounded and governed by the encompassing apeiron.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside

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