The dictum of Anaximander of Miletus [11-13]
chance presence at hand merely the “presence {Anwesenheit}” of a thing and from there alone the domain expands. Not to be sought in the abstract, arid, and sparse field of a so-called chemistry and physics!
b) The inadequacy of the juridical-moral meanings of δίκη, τίσις, and ἀδικία
To the way beings are extant, i.e., to Being, Anaximander now provides the already cited grounding. He says: beings bestow on one another compliance and correspondence in consideration of the noncompliance.
This translation already shows that I reject the long-customary and facile interpretation of the statement. The terms justice (δίκη), retribution (τίσις), and injustice (ἀδικία) refer to juridical-moral, human relations. As a rule, the words of the text are taken in an even more emphatic sense by speaking of penalty, recompense, atonement, wickedness, guilt. And it will have to be admitted that, with this statement, according to which “beings pay penalty and retribution for their guilt,” Anaximander is giving things a juridical-moral construction and evaluation.
If, in addition, we note what was said earlier, namely, that Anaximander’s is taken as a doctrine about the basic matter of nature, then it is very easy to see here an intertwining of primitive natural science with the projection of human experiences into things—as indeed is usual among primitives. This interpretation is as old as the sources handing down the statement to us; it goes back to Theophrastus, the student of Aristotle, and indeed it can be traced to the latter himself—4th century BC. To be sure, Theophrastus directly says of the statement: ποιητικωτέροις ὀνόμασιν αὐτὰ λέγων—Anaximander is speaking here in poetical words. But these words are “poetical” only if one gives them an emphatically juridical-moral meaning and in addition holds fast to the unfounded presupposition that at issue here is the knowledge of nature. Actually, the words are poetical in the genuine sense of the poetry of Being—a poetizing of Being; but that is precisely the abandonment of “anthropomorphism” and therefore shows the impossibility of such a way of thinking!
If, however, right from the start we do not accept this presupposition, since at issue here are beings as a whole, then at least initially it is impossible to insert a wedge between the knowledge of nature and the moral evaluation of things. Certainly—yet then it precisely still remains: the whole of beings is interpreted in a juridical-moral sense. But only as long as we uncritically impute to these words concepts of justice and morality deriving from a subsequent ethics or even from that of late antiquity and ultimately from Christian ethics. Not only