Infinitely Contrast & Conserve
Anaximander’s Apeiron & the Infinite Space of Possibility
Most of the Ionian Greek philosophers were monists — they believed the world is ultimately one thing, composed of a single substance. Thales (c. 600 BC), for example, believed everything comes from water.
There are of course some immediate problems with this conjecture, like the problem of creating fire from water. But Thales’ student Anaximander (c. 546 BC) quickly recognized this problem, and then expanded it to try and figure out how all opposites can exist together — wet and dry, hot and cold, light and dark.
If opposites are to exist, Anaximander thought, the original substance, the substance from which all things are created and into which all things perish, must be entirely neutral. It must be indefinite, lacking any particular qualities of its own. It can’t be composed of any thing.
Anaximander therefore postulated a metaphysical non-thing called the apeiron — or the unbounded; something akin to the conservation of the whole, something akin to the equal sign in mathematics, akin to ‘emptiness’ in Buddhist philosophy, akin to the Dao in Taoism.
In short, Anaximander’s apeiron is the ultimate reality, free from time, free from space, free from growth and decay, free from birth and death…
