Anaximenes of Miletus

Anaximenes is the third of the great Milesian natural philosophers, after Thales and Anaximander. His contribution to the Seba lineage is the identification of the arche — the first principle of all things — with aēr, air or breath. Where Thales named water and Anaximander the unbounded apeiron, Anaximenes named the living breath as the substrate from which, by rarefaction and condensation, all things arise and to which they return.

The doctrine matters for the tradition because it is the earliest Greek formulation of the soul-as-breath that Homer already assumes and that the Hebrew nephesh and ruach parallel — psyche as breath. The surviving fragment reads: “As our soul, being air, holds us together and controls us, so do breath and air surround the whole cosmos.” The psyche is the breath that gathers and governs; the cosmos is held by the same breath, at its scale. Here the macro-micro parallel that organizes later alchemy is already present in pre-philosophical form.

Relationships

• heraclitus
• pneuma
• psyche-breath-soul