The Evil Genius of Anaxagoras

Could we be dreaming we are butterfly brains in vats, hooked up to a simulation while under the spell of an evil, deceiving genius? Such preposterous doubts begin to seem almost reasonable when we ponder the grander self-delusions of philosophers past, who offered themselves up as solutions to external-world skepticism. Perhaps meaning isn’t just in the famous hand-waving gestures of G. E. Moore. But neither is it likely to be rescued by ever-refined, ever-specific accounts of how referents in language, or justifications in epistemic logic, are supposed to behave. (After all, these peculiarities of behavior seem perhaps even more doubtful than the movements of a tiger—and they are almost certainly within the power of an evil demon to deceive us about.) If we may “properly ignore” skeptical worries, we might also do well to properly ignore most of the history of fanciful errors those worries have generated.1placeholder

René Descartes, for his part, famously deigned in his Meditations to conceive his way out of radical doubt through contemplation of the perfect perfection: the idea of a being instantiating all perfections—and it would have to be a being, since Descartes counts existence itself as a kind of perfection. That being, Descartes calls God, and because God is perfect, He is perfectly unwilling to let Descartes be radically deceived by an evil demon.

Perhaps Descartes’ solipsism lies not so much in his radical doubt as in his minority-of-one conviction that worldly knowledge can be securely grounded—redeemed, even—by contemplation of God, an otherworldly existence who nonetheless embodies this-worldly understandings of benevolence and moral good. On Gaunilo’s perfect island, one encounters an entire ecosystem filled with the creatures of critical thought opposed to Descartes’s ontological argument. Here, one can walk among a menagerie of existing lions and non-predicates—and yet, strangely absent from the island’s flora and fauna is the most damning, most decisive refutation of the entire Cartesian metaphysical project. This creature was no mere figure of thought, either, but the (once) living, breathing Anaxagoras—the Pre-Socratic who held that all things exist in all things. On reflection, the mere possibility of intermixture pulls at the threads of conceptual and metaphysical purity and perfection—throughlines without which Descartes’s Meditations lose much of their coherence and power over the mind.

In many ways, Anaxagoras is everything Descartes was not: a shadowy yet very real presence in the history of philosophy whose ideas both Plato and Aristotle admired for their remarkable profundity.

Descartes’ critics found him overly ambitious, verging on heretical in his philosophical designs. His works eventually found their way into the Index of Prohibited Books—and understandably so. Descartes’s novel metaphysics, secured by something called God but known to us not through Scripture, but by way of the finer points of modal logic, can easily be mistaken (if indeed it is a mistake) for an attempt to supplant the foundational authority of the Bible and revelation.

Ironically, Anaxagoras, too, had been charged with impiety by the city of Athens—though for the decidedly less grandiose offense of demoting our godly sun to a hot stone. Indeed, if anything, Plato and Aristotle wished Anaxagoras had shown more ambition, not less. In the Phaedo, Socrates wistfully recalls hearing of a man who could explain the causes of all things, only to scour Anaxagoras’ writings and find no account of Nous’ intentional, thoughtful, and active power as a force in the world.2placeholder

Much of Anaxagoras’ own writings have been lost to history. Beyond a few direct fragments, his ideas live on primarily in the works of thinkers who found them worthy of commentary: Plato, Aristotle, and later writers like Simplicius. Thus, Anaxagoreanism—perhaps most fittingly, given the man’s thinking—can only be glimpsed by sensing and bringing together a little bit of everything from everything. Rather than distilling a pure, distinct philosophy from extant treatises, we must exercise our animal Nous (unlike Descartes, Anaxagoras did not denigrate nonhuman intelligence) to discern the traces Anaxagoras left behind in our world, a theatre of chaos ordered only by a world-suffusing Nous.

Once we appreciate the full force of Anaxagoras’ contributions to philosophy, we may better understand Descartes’ impulse to doubt history—and, indeed, the whole human drama. For these rich, worldly inheritances have nurtured the seed (as Anaxagoras might have called it) of destruction for the entire Cartesian enterprise, and now the time has come to behold its blossom amid the wreckage.

If a metaphysics of intermixture is even possible, what clear and distinct possibility remains for perfection—the very notion the mind must presuppose (clearly and distinctly, without contradiction) in order to conjure for itself a perfectly perfect God? Even now, an evil demon may be amusing me with the self-deception that I have in mind a clear and distinct refutation of perfection’s possibility. Nonetheless, I must press forward with these meditations against Descartes’ Meditations.

Let us suppose, as Descartes had, that whatever we can conceive in the mind clearly and distinctly, without contradiction, is metaphysically possible in the sense that it could be real. I fancy myself having the conception of a man by the name of Anaxagoras, who believed everything was in everything. If he could be correct about that, then perfection cannot be clearly and distinctly conceived without contradiction because, all things being in all things, there can be no purity or perfection to be found in the world. Without any pure perfections in the world, the pure idea of perfection can never overcome its imperfections. (Indeed, the very possibility of Anaxagoras’ metaphysics would show the idea of a perfect existence to be a contradiction in terms, akin to a four-sided triangle.)

One of the following, then, must be impossible: either Anaxagoras and his very idea of a philosophy of intermixture, or perfection itself. If perfection is possible, however, it must also be possible to conceive of a perfect refutation. As it happens, one has forcefully impressed himself on my mind: Anaxagoras. Either I can clearly and distinctly, and without contradiction, conceive of Anaxagoras—the man whose ideas refute the possibility of perfection—or I must be deceiving myself. Yet, as Descartes himself maintained, the very idea of a mistaken conception is a category error: even if chimeras do not exist in nature, the conception of them is neither true nor false, but simply an idea that subsists alongside conceptions of she-goats and other fantastical beasts. If perfection itself entails the possibility of Anaxagoras, then by the force of our own reasoning, perfection must be impossible—for the mere conceivability of a metaphysics of intermixture makes perfection clearly and distinctly inconceivable.

If the God of the Cartesian cogito is dead, perhaps we can do him no greater honor than to recognize him as a hot stone. Descartes, I believe, longed for his God to shine down from the heavens, his light radiating upon us and dispelling every shadow of deception. The marvel is not so much that he wanted this light, but that our perfectly ordinary sun should offer us all the illumination we could reasonably desire. To be sure, the sun will not furnish the metaphysical certainties Descartes craved—but perhaps those are impious demands to make of a thoroughly uncertain world that, for all that, remains a gift to all existence.

Who knew that the very idea of a Pre-Socratic—whose existence and ideas are known to history primarily through second-hand accounts—could so thoroughly haunt the solipsistic universe of the Cartesian doubter? Rather like an evil genius, whose real menace (if indeed it is a menace) lies not in his capacity for deception but in his mere possibility.

If God cannot rescue us from radical doubt, though, who can? Perhaps the shadows of our friend, Anaxagoras, might offer an assuring gesture toward a way out of Descartes’ study and into the terra firma of our world, with the sun and moon watching over us.

In Against the Mathematicians, Sextus Empiricus notes in passing that Anaxagoras was the first to distinguish appearance from reality. Yet, while his ideas provide fertile ground for the seeds of skeptical doubts, interspersed among them also are the seeds of their refutation. Sextus ascribes to Anaxagoras the view that “appearances are a sight of the unseen.”3placeholder If reality leaves indelible traces in appearances and even deceptions on the grandest scale, then the seeds for rescuing ourselves from seemingly incorrigible doubt need only our attention and cultivation to truly blossom.

Had Anaxagoras never existed, it would be necessary—yes, even now—for us to imagine him.