ABSTRACT
In order to appreciate how this conceptual attening was achieved, it is necessary to recall the famous Anaximander Fragment, from about a millennium after Hammurabi, at the beginning of the period in which ‘cosmos’ attains conceptual status. This arises within the Ionian speculations on physis, which already with Anaximander attracts geometrical and mathematical motifs. Here ‘origin’ is meant ontologically (not historically) and is endowed with a ‘where’, anticipating the Heideggerian interpretation of Dasein, ‘there-being’:
One way to ‘translate’ this dense passage is as follows: the Being of beings exhibits a necessity manifest in the temporal reciprocity of justice and injustice.15 The two phrases prefaced by ‘according to’ establish temporal necessity as an order which is enacted as a paying of recompense (justice) between coming-into-being and passing-away. The fragment preserves no mention of a deity, rather order itself is characterised according to the temporal measure of justice. However, the temporal character of justice may reect Hesiod’s Theogony, from a century and a half earlier, in which the goddess Dikē (human justice) appears among the Horai (hours), alongside Eunomia (good law) and Irene (peace), who were the daughters of Zeus and Themis (divine justice/custom and prophecy).16 A struggle between two female gures labelled ‘dikē’ and ‘adikia’ (the latter tattooed like a barbarian), appears on both the Chest of Kypselos17 and a red-gured amphora in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, dated to a few decades after the Anaximander Fragment. The two women are obviously personications, or types;18 and an agon of opposites is not only preliminary to full conceptual determination but also fundamental to the order of the still-emerging polis. It is as if Anaximander had characterised reality in terms of a (just) polis. At about the same date, Solon’s poem conventionally called, ‘Eunomia’ says of Dikē:
In other words, within the evolving democracy of the polis, the practico-symbolic style of understanding persists alongside, or underneath, alternative styles of analogy and concept (indeed, it still does, although usually under the conceptual rubric of ‘the’ sacred). In the few examples we have considered, justice retains an aliation with the order of reality as a whole (cosmos), but is no longer channelled through the institutions of palace and temple.20 More signicantly, the polisculture represents an emancipation from the tensional network of analogies,21 the referential continuum of nature, gods and humans characteristic of the BronzeAge kingdoms. For Sophocles, ‘… language and winged thought and the city’s instituting passions were self-taught … ’.22 The assumption of responsibility by the body of citizens for its own order – executed across a spectrum that includes political reason, religion/myth as a framework for concepts, and tragic drama – seems to correlate historically with the experience of reality as a reciprocity between the claims of the parts (open to discovery) and the nature of the whole (also open to discovery), which in turn requires nding a voice, or way of speaking, with respect to the reciprocity, rather than only from concrete circumstances. When Parmenides asserts the proximity of being and thinking, he also expects the former to protect the latter from delusion.23
