Unlimited

The term ‘apeiron’ signifies that which is ‘apeiras’, ‘without limit’ or ‘without bounds’. This Apeiron apparently lacked all the ‘bounds’ or ‘limits’ that other things were subject to. It was, it seems, unlimited in time and space; it was unlimited in quality in that it displayed no qualities.

This passage provides the foundational classical definition of ‘unlimited’ as Anaximander’s apeiron — a divine, boundless substrate unlimited in time, space, and qualitative determination, from which all differentiated things originate.

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

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The creation of order, of the human domain of culture out of nature, be it washing the hands or building a temple, generally involves the imposition of (internal or external) limit on the apparently unlimited. But the making of money is, as Solon and Aristotle pointed out, unlimited.

Seaford argues that culture is constituted by the imposition of limit upon the unlimited, and that money’s structurally unlimited accumulation makes it a uniquely anti-cultural and socially disruptive force.

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

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There is in fact a multiple analogy between money and everything that we know (as set out at the end of 10a) of Anaximander’s ‘unlimited’ (apeiron). (a) Each is unlike all other things and separate from them. (b) Despite (a), each in some sense contains all things.

Seaford draws a structural homology between Anaximander’s cosmological apeiron and monetary value, arguing that both are abstract, self-contained, and yet capable of containing and generating all other things.

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

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spatially unlimited, or at least immense or indefinite in extent, or that which is without internal limits, i.e undifferentiated. Both senses are appropriate: immense in that it surrounds and is the source of everything, and undifferentiated in that, given the hostilities between the opposites, for one of them to be privileged as the immense surrounding source would have meant the non-existence of the others.

Seaford explicates the double sense of the apeiron as simultaneously spatially unlimited and internally undifferentiated, a neutral substrate required precisely because it must not privilege any of the opposites it contains.

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

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To the unlimited accumulation that is devastating his polis Solon finds resistance within the mind, although ‘holds the limits of all things’ seems to connect mind with cosmos, implying a cosmic role for the mind as agent of the limitation that belongs, we have noted, to the human imposition of order on (unlimited) nature, and that is antithetical also to the new unlimit of money.

Seaford shows that for Solon and the Presocratics the mind’s limiting function opposes the unlimited — whether of nature or of money — thereby giving mental activity a cosmological as well as ethical significance.

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

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Money is uniquely desirable, and the desire is unique also in being unlimited: to the unlimited accumulation and apparently unlimited power of money there belongs the unlimited desire for it that finds frequent expression.

Seaford identifies unlimited desire as the psychological correlate of money’s structural unlimitedness, arguing that the abstract and homogeneous nature of monetary value uniquely generates insatiable desire.

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

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the price belongs, in a sense, to the abstract unlimited continuum of monetary value — an unlimited continuum in that it is homogeneous and infinitely accumulatable in unending circulation.

This passage identifies monetary value as constituting an abstract unlimited continuum, defined by its homogeneity and infinite accumulatability, against which particular prices are momentary delimitations.

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

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The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities.

Jung frames the psychological relation to the infinite — the unlimited — as the existential criterion distinguishing meaningful life from the futility of ego-bounded, finite aims.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis

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The Unlimited ‘does not surround the earth in close proximity to it, but surrounds the whole universe — and the other universes if there are any. It is outside our cosmos, and does not persist as an entity within it.’

Vernant, following Stokes, clarifies the cosmological status of the Unlimited in Anaximander: it envelops the totality of all worlds from without, remaining transcendent to the differentiated cosmos it encompasses.

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

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The (potentially alarming and relatively novel) man-made inexhaustibility of money is envisaged in terms of the natural inexhaustibility of the sea — whether through reticence or anxiety or the need for a concrete analogue for a difficult abstraction.

Seaford argues that archaic Greek thought coded the novel and alarming unlimited quality of money through the concrete natural image of the sea, whose homogeneity and inexhaustibility served as an available analogue.

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

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It is a First Principle, measureless, not bounded within determined size — such measurement belongs to another order — and therefore it is all-power, nowhere under limit.

Plotinus attributes to the First Principle an unlimited status that is not deficiency but superabundance — measurelessness as the condition of omnipotence rather than as lack of form.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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This cycle of action and reaction, or saṃsāra, is potentially eternal and unlimited since not only does any one single act breed a reaction, but the actor must then react to this reaction, causing a rereaction.

Bryant invokes the unlimited in the context of karmic causality, where the cycle of action and reaction in saṃsāra is structurally unlimited — a condition of bondage requiring the intervention of yoga to arrest.

Bryant, Edwin F., The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009supporting

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The whole idea of unlimited progress rests on the prospect of unlimited resources. We are seeing that prospect dry up today… But everything is limited, and we are gobbling the earth as if it were ours, all ours, to gobble.

Easwaran critiques the modern ideology of unlimited progress as an ecological and spiritual delusion, contending that the fantasy of unlimited resources contradicts the finite character of the natural world.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting

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how is Number consistent with infinity? Objects of sense are not unlimited and therefore the Number applying to them cannot be so… though we double, multiply over and over again, we still end with a finite number.

Plotinus argues against the coherence of unlimited number as applied to sensible objects, maintaining that while intellectual beings are determinate, the apparent expansion of enumeration always resolves into finitude.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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For the persistence in Pythagoreanism of the fundamentality of the pair limit–unlimited see e.g. Guthrie 1962, 207, 242–6, 278, 340.

This note signals the sustained Pythagorean preoccupation with limit and unlimited as fundamental cosmological opposites, providing bibliographic grounding for that tradition’s influence on subsequent discussions.

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

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