(esoteric / exoteric 3)

             If, historically, the first recognition of cogency or the One is also the first formal recognition of boundary or limit, with the concomitant realization of measure and measureless, finite and infinite, the emergence of the correlated principles is not inappropriate. Undoubtedly, number itself was in existence before the pre-Socratics ‘discovered’ the principle or principles of the One. But no other culture entered the nature of cogency as the original condition of abstraction. And the consequent isolation of abstraction and causality is unique to the traditions that emerged from this classical Greek heritage. Post-Renaissance philosophy, of course, has consistently evaded the context in which this recognition arises. Even historians of philosophy tend to assume that the ‘elemental description’ is simply an anomalous parallel and not the necessary context. But Thales’ apparent insistence on the ambivalent potencies and necessary pervasiveness of water is the necessary pre-condition for the Milesian thread in which Anaximander and Anaximenes can produce their understanding of ‘aer’ and the One.
             Looking back, of course, we can say that water embodies both the principle of flux and the principle of reflection. But Thales could see that water is also subterranean; and he believed that it permeated the ‘spheres’ in a ‘celestial’ or super-refined form, recognizing, tacitly, that water is transferred from earth to the heavens. His equation of the principle with the forces in magnetite and amber suggests that he assimilates it to causality, which he thus begins to isolate, an isolation more or less first ‘completed’ by Heraclitus. It is against this pervasiveness and tacitly causal and reflective nature that Anaximander and Anaximenes can posit their understanding of limit, the One and aer.
             Aer, of course, is ‘contained’ between heaven and earth, an issue which might seem of little force, unless we compare it to the classical Chinese understanding of the Tao of heaven and earth, one of the few traditions sufficiently distanced by time and place to be considered fully prior to the Greek influence, at least in its origins. In the Chinese tradition, the apparent opposition is in fact a comprehensive integral. The apparent separation is, in fact, an all-producing mutuality. Thales ‘tangential’ assertion of a singular principle sets the stage for an actual or radical separation, something essentially impossible in the Chinese tradition. And it is out of this separation that the western tradition emerges. In other words, when Anaximenes suggests that ‘the principle’ is ‘the One’, which he defines as ‘without limit’, he is the first thinker to isolate the pure concept of limit or boundary. He stands, of course, on the other side of our common understanding of the One, since we see integer precisely in terms of the primary abstract definition of boundary or limit. But his understanding is not inappropriate, as Anaximenes’ equation of the One with aer shows. The first One is the All, the coherence of the whole. Thales tries to establish a principle that defines all, but in the process obviously and necessarily establishes something which is other than all, namely, a unifying principle.
             We have to realize that in these figures we are at precisely these primitive moments in the origination of principle and abstraction.
             When Anaximenes associates this principle of apeiron or ‘not bounded’ with aer, he expresses this inherent ambivalence. Aer is the all-encompassing, all-embracing atmosphere in which we ‘move and breathe’, and yet it is bounded by heaven and earth. The boundary itself is thus separated out. Heaven and earth are no longer the all-producing mutuality, nor necessarily the residual spheres of the gods. The One, while defined by a boundary, is necessarily also the boundary, and thus stands beyond itself, as well as being contained. The fact that we would consider this expression as not only ‘symbolic’, but actually ‘allegorical’, involves an ahistorical imposition. Our present sense of both allegory and symbol necessarily emerge from this first principled expression of abstraction.
             And we could say that the inherent ambivalence expressed by Anaximander’s and Anaximenes’ understanding of the One is the dilemma which has haunted western philosophy to this day, since in the last century and a half, western philosophy has fallen backward into the unbounded nature of the One, its empirical subsumption of its own bounding condition, the mortal flaw in the perfection of the One that no linear thinker can handle.