tendencies within Democritus' thought. Although our information on him
is extremely sketchy, he is a pivotal figure connecting the atomism of
Democritus to the skepticism of Pyrrho, if ancient philosophical
genealogies can be trusted. He allegedly abolished the criterion of
truth by likening our experiences to those of dreamers and madmen.
Renowned for his contentment, he earned the title "the happiness man"
(ho eudaimonikos). Like Pyrrho, this contentment was based on an
indifference to the value of things around him. But unlike Pyrrho,
this indifference did not manifest itself in a detachment from worldly
affairs. Instead, he was an advisor to Alexander the Great and
actively pursued the objects of his desires, often spurning
conventional values.
1. Life and Sources
Anaxarchus was a close companion of Alexander the Great, and he
reportedly accompanied Pyrrho on Alexander's expedition to India.
Apparently, Indian philosophers rebuked Anaxarchus for "fawning on
kings," and it was this rebuke that led Pyrrho to withdraw from
worldly affairs. Also, unlike Pyrrho, Anaxarchus was fond of luxury.
Nevertheless, he was famed for his impassivity and ability to be happy
under any circumstances. This impassivity is the subject of many of
the anecdotes about him, most dramatically in the widely-circulated
story of his death: he was able to pay no attention to his torment as
he was being pounded to death in a mortar at the orders of a tyrant he
had insulted. (Zeno of Elea, however, is also said to have died in
this manner, so the story is somewhat suspect.)
No philosophical works of Anaxarchus survived. We have only two
"fragments" (that is, direct quotations) from his oeuvre, and few
reports concerning his philosophical positions or the arguments for
them. Most of our information on Anaxarchus comes in the form of
colorful anecdotes, contained in much later sources, concerning his
interactions with Alexander and Pyrrho. These stories are often false,
being composed to make some (supposedly) humorous or edifying point.
Relying on dubious anecdotes in order to reconstruct someone's
philosophy is obviously less than ideal, but it is not hopeless,
because these bogus tales were often composed in order to provide
fitting and amusing illustrations of a philosophical point or position
of the figure in question, and so they can be used as evidence for a
person's philosophy. For example, Plutarch reports that Anaxarchus
told Alexander that there are an infinite number of worlds, causing
Alexander to despair that he had not yet conquered even one (Plutarch,
Tranq. 466D). This conversation almost certainly never took place.
Instead, it was invented to make a neat little point about the
insatiability of ambition. That is to say, even Alexander, the most
powerful man in the world, could not attain all that he desired, and
if this is so, wouldn't you be better off in adapting your desires to
the world, rather than engaging in vain striving in order to bend the
world to your boundless desires? Nonetheless, that there is an
infinite number of worlds is a thesis characteristic only of the
atomists in antiquity, and so this anecdote gives us evidence that
Anaxarchus was regarded as an atomist, since putting this remark in
the mouth of e.g., an Aristotelian, who believes that only one world
exists, would make no sense. Still, because of our sources, any
conclusions concerning Anaxarchus' philosophy will of necessity be
sketchy and tentative.
2. Epistemology
Anaxarchus was accused of abolishing the criterion of truth because he
likened things to painted scenery and said they resemble the
experiences of dreamers and madmen (Sextus Empiricus, Against the
Professors 7 87-8). This suggests that the things that we take
ourselves to be acquainted with in ordinary experience, such as trees
and rocks, are merely representations, like painted scenery, not the
objects themselves at all. Furthermore, these experiences cannot be
relied upon to get us at the truth: we are in no better position than
are dreamers and madmen, people whose experiences are paradigmatically
false (or at least untrustworthy).
The above points are only Anaxarchus' epistemological conclusions, not
the grounds for them. At least two different reconstructions of
Anaxarchus' reasoning can be given. In the first (in Hankinson (1995)
54-5), Anaxarchus is offering an argument from skeptical hypothesis.
Such arguments from skeptical hypotheses proceed in the following way:
you start by proposing some skeptical hypothesis—for instance, that
you are a brain in a vat or that the world was created exactly five
minutes ago. You then argue that you do not know whether or not this
skeptical hypothesis holds—typically, because your situation under the
skeptical hypothesis would be indistinguishable, as far as you can
tell, from the situation you ordinarily think obtains. Then various
skeptical inferences are drawn from this—since you do not know that
the skeptical hypothesis does not hold, you are unjustified, for
instance, in trusting the evidence of the senses or of your memory. On
this reconstruction, Anaxarchus' analogies operate as skeptical
hypotheses. The two-dimensional surfaces of painted scenery delusively
convey just the same sort of impression of a three-dimensional world
as do our regular sense-impressions. But because we cannot distinguish
between the delusive impressions produced by stage-paintings and the
(supposedly) veridical impressions our senses normally convey, we
cannot know whether the skeptical hypothesis holds, and so we should
not trust the evidence of the senses. Likewise, the impressions we
receive in sleep, or that madmen receive, are indistinguishable from
ordinary sense-impressions—but if so, we cannot trust the senses. If
this is right, Anaxarchus' argument is an exciting anticipation of the
most famous argument from skeptical hypothesis, Descartes' dreaming
argument in the Meditations against the trustworthiness of the senses.
In the second reconstruction, the analogies are vivid illustrations of
our epistemic predicament, but are not themselves the basis for
Anaxarchus' skeptical conclusions. Instead, he draws from his
Democritean heritage. Democritus says that we know nothing genuine
about objects in the external world, only about the effects that they
have on our bodies (Against the Professors 7 136, DK 68 B 7). For
instance, we are not really acquainted with some portion of honey in
itself, we are familiar only with the way this honey makes us have
certain visual sensations as atoms streaming off of it impinge upon
our eyes, gustatory sensations as the soothing round atoms of the
honey pleasingly and sweetly roll around on our tongues, etc.
Furthermore, the information conveyed by our senses about these
objects is systematically misleading. The same object may appear
yellow to one person, and grey to a person with color blindness: but
both sensory reports are false, since qualities like yellowness,
grayness, and sweetness are not really present in the objects
themselves at all. As Democritus famously puts it: "by convention
sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by
convention color: in reality atoms and the void" (Against the
Professors 7 135, DK 68 B 9, trans. Hankinson).
As a result, the senses give only "bastard" knowledge (Against the
Professors 7 138, DK 68 B 11). And this makes Democritus conclude that
attaining knowledge of the world is very difficult, perhaps
impossible. Although its exact extent is controversial, there is
doubtless a heavy skeptical strain in Democritus. This strain is
developed further by some of his followers, such as Metrodorus, who
was allegedly Anaxarchus' teacher. Apparently he thinks that Socrates
was being too optimistic when he said that the one thing he knows is
that he knows nothing; Metrodorus asserts that we know nothing, not
even that we know nothing (Against the Professors 7 88). Anaxarchus is
another member of this group: because of the unreliability of the
senses, we are no better off than dreamers and madmen when it comes to
our access to truths about the world, and so, there is no criterion
whereby we can distinguish what is the case from what is not.
3. Ethics
According to Anaxarchus, the key to contentment and happiness is being
indifferent concerning the value of things. This claim is also central
to the ethics of Anaxarchus' traveling companion Pyrrho, and the much
later skeptics who named their movement after Pyrrho. This immediately
raises the question: If one is indifferent concerning the value of
things, on what basis does one act? Anaxarchus gives his own
distinctive answer to this question, one reminiscent of the sophists.
We cannot be sure in exactly what sense Anaxarchus is "indifferent"
concerning things' value, and why, but his Democriteanism allows us a
plausible reconstruction. It is easy to extend Democritus' reasoning
concerning sensible qualities to ethical qualities, although
Democritus himself did not do so. For Democritus, honey is no more
sweet than bitter, because in truth it is neither sweet nor bitter—in
truth, it is just a conglomeration of atoms buzzing about in the void.
And a sign of this is the relativity of perception, that the same
honey can taste sweet to one person, but bitter to somebody with a
disease. Properties like sweetness and bitterness are not really part
of the nature of the objects themselves.
Others give similar arguments concerning value, moving from the
relativity of value to its elimination from nature. Wealth may be
esteemed by one person and disdained by another, or the same sort of
action regarded as honorable in one city and base in another. But when
we think about the objects or actions themselves, none of them are
really good or bad, base or honorable, by nature, but are simply
regarded as such by convention. And so, any statement, such as "this
action is by nature base," which assigns a value to something in
itself, would simply be false. Anaxarchus' ethical eliminativism has
been compared to J. L. Mackie's error theory of morality (in Warren
2002).
The Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus would call this position a
form of dogmatism, since it is a substantial metaphysical thesis about
values not being part of the furniture of the world. The true skeptic,
according to Sextus Empiricus, is indifferent concerning the value of
things insofar as he refrains from making judgments one way or the
other about whether things are good, or bad, or neither, and this
indifference is based upon the equal weight of conflicting appearance
and arguments that leave him in a state of suspending judgment.
Sextus Empiricus claims that suspending judgment about value helps one
attain contentment in the following way: the skeptic will unavoidably
sometimes suffer from cold or thirst, since he is human after all, but
he does not have accompanying this discomfort the further disturbing
thought "I am suffering something that is bad by nature" (Outlines of
Pyrrhonism I 12), and so he is unperturbed. This same basic sort of
reasoning would also be available to both Anaxarchus and Pyrrho.
Pyrrho is unopinionated, and ipso facto he would have no opinions that
he is suffering something bad by nature. Not caring much about things
like pain and danger that most people regard as naturally bad helps
him remain tranquil. (See Bett (2000) chapter 2 for more on this
issue.) Anaxarchus, by contrast, does not suspend judgment about
questions of value, but his eliminativism means he would never believe
that he is suffering something bad by nature. Furthermore, his
indifference allows him to remain content and moderate in his
passions, since he never believes he is lacking in anything good by
nature. If things like luxury, power, and social status, which are
conventionally regarded as good, are really indifferent, and one has
no beliefs about other things being by nature good or bad, on what
basis does one act? Pyrrho's life indicates one possible answer: he
shows his disregard for such conventional values by withdrawing from
the world and living in solitude. He pays no attention to things that
are indifferent, and he is willing to do actions regarded by
convention as demeaning, such as washing a pig (DL 9 66). Anaxarchus
behaves quite differently. As noted above, Anaxarchus was rebuked by
Indian philosophers for "fawning on kings," and many of the anecdotes
about Anaxarchus concern his pursuit of luxury: for instance, his
wrapping himself up in three rugs when a cloak would have done, and
his asking for a huge sum of money from Alexander when Alexander tells
him to ask for as much as he wants.
Pyrrho's disciple Timon condemned Anaxarchus for this behavior, and
apparently thought of it as inconsistent with the indifference
advocated by both Pyrrho and Anaxarchus. But actively engaging with
the world, and pursuing what presently attracts you, is consistent
with believing that the objects of one's pursuit are by nature neither
good nor bad, as long as one pursues them realizing that these objects
have no value in themselves, and are pursued merely because of the
value that one gives them. Realizing that they have no value in
themselves, you will not be terribly distraught if you fail to attain
them, and you will be able to adapt yourself to circumstances
effectively. This adaptability to circumstances might be why
Anaxarchus says that the ability to seize the "opportune moment"
(kairos) is the boundary marker of wisdom. Anaxarchus displays this
virtue in his request of great wealth from Alexander. Pyrrho would
have spurned such an offer. But Anaxarchus, even though he says that
it is hard to collect money, and even harder to keep it safely, seizes
the opportunity and correctly guesses that Alexander would be amused
and flattered by the chutzpah of his request.
And in any case, Anaxarchus does display his own sort of contempt for
convention. He thinks that standards of what is right and wrong are
merely conventional, and as such, one should feel free to disregard
them when they get in the way of pursuing what one wants. This
attitude is strikingly displayed in an anecdote concerning Anaxarchus
and Alexander (Plutarch, Life of Alexander 50-52). Alexander and his
friend Cleitus get into a drunken quarrel. They exchange insults, and
in a rage, Alexander picks up a spear and kills Cleitus. His anger
then immediately departs, and he would have killed himself if his
guards had not prevented him. Over the next several days, Alexander is
in a bad way, staying in his room and loudly lamenting what he has
done. Anaxarchus successfully relieves Alexander's suffering with the
following remark:
Here is Alexander, to whom the whole world is now looking, but he
lies on the floor weeping like a slave, in fear of the law and censure
of men. He should be their law and measure of justice, if indeed he
has conquered the right to rule and mastery, instead of enslaving
himself to the mastery of empty opinion. Don't you know that Zeus has
Justice and Law seated beside him, so that everything that is done by
the master of the world may be lawful and just?
Asserting that moral norms are merely conventional, and that one
should as a result feel free to flout them if need be, is reminiscent
of Callicles in Plato's dialogue the Gorgias, and the sophist
Antiphon. And indeed, Anaxarchus was sometimes called a sophist.
However, unlike Callicles and Antiphon, Anaxarchus has no notion of
there being things that are "by nature" just, right, or good, in
contrast to those merely conventional standards.
4. References and Further Reading
* Bett, Richard. Pyrrho, His Antecedents, and his Legacy. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
o The best consideration of Pyrrho's "indifference"
regarding things (chapter 1), its practical implications, and its
supposed benefits (chapter 2). Bett also briefly talks about the
relationship between Anaxarchus and Pyrrho (160-163); he is
pessimistic about our ability to reconstruct Anaxarchus' philosophy.
* Brunschwig, J. 1993. "The Anaxarchus Case: An Essay on
Survival," in Proceedings of the British Academy 82: 59-88.
o An interesting discussion of Anaxarchus' supposedly
fawning attitude towards kings. Brunschwig argues that the anecdotes
paint a much more ambivalent and complicated picture than that of a
simple flatterer. Also worth looking at for its extended consideration
of what Anaxarchus says concerning Alexander's deification, which
Anaxarchus supported.
* Hankinson, R. J. The Sceptics. London: Routledge, 1995.
o Contains a brief discussion of Anaxarchus' epistemology
(54-55); also worth looking at for introductions to Democritus'
skepticism and Sextus Empiricus' claims concerning the psychological
benefits of indifference.
* Warren, James. Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology
of Ataraxia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
o Chapter 3 is the longest treatment of Anaxarchus' ethics
in English, examining our fragmentary evidence in great detail. Warren
also gives a revisionary reading of the "dreamers and madmen" report
in Sextus Empiricus, arguing that it has only ethical, and not
epistemological, significance.
