APEIRON
by
Guardians of Darkness
Comrade August
Apeiron is the Attic Greek word having the same meaning as Asat-Sat, or "the voidness" or - THATNESS
The logical origin of Wholeness Absolute is this: The Greek philosophers noted that all things in this world are bounded, or defined. (Greek: pera, borders). Therefore the universal determinant of all being, all things is peiron. The world can be defined as the set of all bounded things. Now it was discovered that by the very act of thinking the peiron, the opposite was also possible. The negation operator "a" (which the Greek language shares with Sanskrit) easily allows to form the concept of a-peiron, or the un-bounded.
This discovery is attributed to Anaximandros (Anaximander). The only surviving fragments of his discovery are these:
archaen ... eiraeke ton onton to apeiron
The Beginning and The Origin of all Being Things (of the all-there-is) is the Apeiron.
ex on de he genesis esti tois ousi
and therefrom is the emergence (waxing) of the being things
kai taen phthoran
eis tauta ginesthai kata to chreon
thereinto is also their waning (destruction, annihilation) according to their
fate (chreon).
didonai gar auta
dikaen kai tisin allaelois taes adikias kata
taen tou chronou taxin
and they pay each other their justified debt and penance for their injustice
(adikia) according to the law of the Time (chronos).
AND: From "The Pre-Socratic Philosophers" GS Kirk and JE Raven, Cambridge.
The Nature of Anaximander's Originative Substance: THE APEIRON.
Part of Theophrastus' account of Anaximander's originative material is preserved by Simplicius. It's disputed whether Simplicius derived this and similar doxographical extracts direct from a version of Theophrastus, or by the medium of Alexander's lost commentary on The Physics. Some extracts came from this source. A more important question is whether Simplicius or Alexander was using the full edition of Theophrastus, or the 2-volume summary, or an even shorter compendious account. Hippolytus and the author of the pseudo-Plutarchean "Stromanteis" also have doxographical summaries of Anaximander; they follow Theophrastus less closely than does Simplicius, but provide confirmation and expansion at certain points. Briefer and less accurate versions appear in Aetius. Passages are versions of Theophrastus' view of Anaximander.
Note: basically, the entire doctrine is explained quite well in the Dark Tradition, including the doctrine of Necessity which the book also continues to go into, referring to fragments and quoting Anaximander. What I make of this is that the Greeks HAD this doctrine. Pythagoras outright said where it came from and where he got it. (It's cited in Roots One). Note that this Greek that it's written in is not the same as Bible Greek - I do not have font letters for these letters; they wouldn't show up in an email or post if I did have them and used them, and the marks over the letters makes it impossible for me to know how to transliterate the letters into English phonetic spellings. So, here goes:
Simplicius telling us what Anaximander said: "Of those who say that it is one, moving and infinite, Anaximander, son of Praxiades, a Milesian, the successor and pupil of Thales, said that the principle and element of existing things was the APEIRON (indefinite or infinite), being the first to introduce this name of the material principle. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some other APEIRON nature, from which come into being all the heavens and the worlds in them. And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens 'according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time,' as he describes it in these rather poetical terms."
Hippolytus telling us what Anaximander said: "Now Anaximander was the disciple of Thales. Anaximander, son of Praxides, of Melitus: he said that the principle and element of existing things was the APEIRON, being the first to use this name of the material principle. In addition to this he said that motion was eternal, in which it results that the heavens come into being. He said that the material principle of existing things was some nature coming under the heading of the APEIRON, from which come into being the heavens and the world in them. This nature is eternal and unageing, and it also surrounds all the worlds. He talks of Time as though coming-to-be and existence and destruction were limited. He talks of time."
Pseudo Plutarch Strom. on Anaximander: "...Anaximander, who was the companion of Thales, said that the APEIRON contained the whole cause of the coming-to-be and destruction of the world, from which he says that the heavens are separated off, and in general all the worlds, being APEIROUS (unnumerable). He declared that destruction, and much earlier coming-to-be, happen from infinite ages, since they are all occurring in cycles."
On the substance ARCHE or ARCHEI
Most modern critics think that Theophrastus named Anaximander as the first to have used ARCHE, literally meaning "beginning" or "source" as a special term for the originative substance. They infer this from (I'll try this transliteration)... protos touto tounoma kouibas tos arches. its equivalent and one further context in Simplicius where Anaximander is described as protos autos archen onomabas to upokeimenon (??) Burnet (a scholar) says that Theophratus was simply saying that Anaximander was the first to call the material principle (arche in its normal Peripatetic sense) by the name TO APEIRON without further qualification. It does seem that no technical use of the word ARCHE by Anaximander was implied by Theophrastus. The use he referred to was TO APEIRON.
What did he mean by TO APEIRON (well, we KNOW from our own doctrines but...)
It is uncertain that Anaximander himself intended TO APEIRON to mean "the spacially infinite." APEIRON means "without boundary, limit, definition" and this indefiniteness is spacial in early usages as in the apeirona ponton of Homer. Anaximander's APEIRON is presumably from APEIROS of which APEIR'O'N (another kind of "o" in that word, an omega "o") is a more poetical equivalent and as in Xenophanes who said that the earth went down es apeiron, indefinitely, i.e., beyond the imagination or the concern of men. TO APEIRON meant "that which is internally unbounded, without internal distinctions," i.e., that which is indistinct, indefinite in kind. To Anaximander, the original "stuff" that made worlds did not resemble any one kind of matter that we can see now, in the developed world. (Oh, how right he was!)
Aristotle was puzzled about the nature of APEIRON since he obviously could not conceive of something that was NOT an element or some kind of intermediary. By "element" they means air, earth, fire, water. They did not mean helium, hydrogen, etc. But true, the APEIRON is NOT any kind of element or combination of them we know of! "That which existed prior to a Unified Field of THINGS" including space/time" is the APEIRON!
Both groups, all of the these people (philosophers) knew of TO EN (The One).
Commentary from Aristotle on this: "Nor in order that generation may not fail, is it necessary for perceptible body to be actually infinite: for it is possible for the destruction of one living thing to be the generation of the other, the sum of things being limited. Of the infinite, there is no beginning, but this seems to be the beginning of the other things, and to surround all things and steer all, as all those say who do not postulate other causes, such as mind or love, above and beyond the infinite. And this is the divine; for it is immortal and indestructible, as Anaximander says and most of the physical speculators. For some posit one substance only, and this some posit as water, some as air, some as fire, some as finer than water and thicker than air; which they say surrounds all the heavens, being infinite."
The assertion that the primary substance "enfolds all and steers all" is assigned to those ancient physicists who postulated an infinite primary stuff but no separate cause of motion, certainly there, to the Milesians, Heraclitus and Diogenes of Apollonia. (Obviously, this is what we are calling the Dark Force in Nature and we DO give you a formula for it "Dark Force, Entropy - an end to the Argument.")
Furthermore, the "steering" is not necessarily due to the "enfolding" - both properties independently are natural ones for something conceived of as divine. Though it might imply it. The metaphor of steering does NOT entail a conscious and intelligent agent (which puts this completely at odds with monotheistic concepts). Methods of control (steering) that are implied are 1. by means of surrounding or enfolding either by preventing the further expansion of the differentiated world (all things) or by making good the waste involved in change in the world; 2. by being immanent in all things, or some things and providing either motive power or life-force or principle or rule of law of change; 3. by having initiated the world in such a way as to provide a continuing rule or law of change. (This is That which can be measured as Entropy, btw.) It is so named because it was NOT identical with anything in nature. Somehow, this governs change in the world.