§ 13. The Causal Concept of Archē
The concept ἀρχή is probably not an 'archaic' concept, but one subsequently read back into the beginnings of Greek philosophy by Aristotle and later by the 'doxographers'.
"On the Being and Conception of Phusis"8
Anaximander is said to have taught that "the origin [ἀρχή] and element of things is the boundless" (or the indeterminate, or the infinite).9 Identifying the origin with the ἄπειρον, he would have reformulated the debate about what is primordial in nature. With this innovation, the Aristotelians opposed Anaximander, it seems, to the other Milesian and Pythagorian 'philosophers of nature'10: these others are said to have held that the primordial element composing all things is water, fire, air, or earth, whereas Anaximander would have claimed that it is the boundless. The philological issue is: did the Aristotelians present Anaximander as the first thinker of the ἀρχή or rather as the first thinker of the ἄπειρον? Did Theophrastus wish to say that Anaximander "was the first to call 'ἀρχή' the substrate of the opposites,"11 or rather that he was "the first to name the substratum of the opposites as the material cause"?12 If the second reading is correct, it is not certain that Anaximander used the word ἀρχή at all. It then would belong properly to the Aristotelian vocabulary. If ἀρχή is therefore the metaphysical concept of a beginning that simultaneously 'commands' , what then do the Aristotelians have Anaximander say? First of all, they make him a philosopher. Indeed, according to Aristotle the task of the philosopher is to investigate the ἀρχαί καὶ αἰτία,13 commonly translated as "the principles and causes. " Then they attribute to him claims about the genesis and corruption of things, that is, about becoming. They read him as a philosopher of nature . His concept of archē would be physicalist. Things come to be, they say, out of one constitutive element that Anaximander calls the boundless. This element is an archē because it is the permanent, irreducible substrate of things: they emerge from it, and they remain ruled by it. For a mind schooled by Aristotle, archē means both that out of which becoming develops and that which rules it.14 All of this teaches us a great deal about the classical idea of ἀρχή but may render Anaximander nearly inaccessible.15
What now is the guiding meaning of ἀρχή in the three domains-being, becoming, knowing-in which, according to Aristotle, it is operative? In being, it is substance that begins and commands everything 'adventitious' to it. Aristotle explicitly establishes the equivalence between οὐσία and archē.16 In becoming, the αρχαί are the causes.17 Finally, in knowledge they are the premises on which cognition depends. If first philosophy is to be possible it has to proceed from a prescience of the universal conditions from which syllogisms draw science . All knowledge supposes a more originary
8. Wm 317/Phy 228. beyng.com: {Pathmarks, p. 189}
9. H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (DK), 8th ed. (Berlin, 1956), Fragm. 12 A 9; "ἀρχὴν τε καὶ στοιχεῖον εἴρηκε τῶν ὄντων τὸ ἄπειρον" Cf. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1971), p. 105.
10. We owe this Aristotelian reading of Anaximander to the Neoplatonist Simplicius summarizing the Peripatetic Theophrastus. Heidegger mentions this filiation in Hw 299 / EGT 15f.
11. "Πρῶτος αὐτὸς ἀρχὴν ὀνομάσας τὸ ὑποκείμενον," quoted in Kirk and Raven, op. cit., p. 107. Their translation: "being the first to call the substratum of the opposites archē."
12. This is John Burnet's translation, cited in Kirk and Raven. Burnet takes ἀρχή in the most limited Aristotelian sense of 'material cause'. In any case, the point seems established that Theophrastus wanted to attract attention to the idea of ἄπειρον in Anaximander, and that he speaks of ἀρχή as an Aristotelian. Burnet writes: 'The current statement that the term arche was introduced by [Anaximander] appears to be due to a misunderstanding," Early Greek Philosophy (London, 1930), p. 54. All this concurs with Heidegger, Wm 317/Phy 228, and conflicts with Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes (4th ed. , Göttingen, 1975). p. 222 (chapter XIII, "Das Symbol des Weges," in which Snell treats the concept of arche, is not contained in the English translation by T. G. Rosenmeyer, The Discovery of the Mind, Cambridge, Mass., 1953).
13. Metaphysics I, 2; 982 a 6 f. Philosophy is an ἐπιστήμη, a science, because it poses the question of the (ἀρχαὶ καὶ αἴτια, ibid. VI, 1.; 1025 b 6.
14. "First philosophy" would then be the knowledge of the πρώτη ἀρχή, Metaphysics, VI, i; 1026 a 2 1-30, that is, of "being as ground" (IuD 57/IaD 59 f.).
15. "The tacit standard for the interpretation and appreciation of the early thinkers is the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. ... But simply to disregard subsequent representations comes to nothing if we do not first of all examine how it stands with the matter [itself]" (Hw 297/EGT 14).