How To Be Humancontinues with Socrates reading another pre-Socratic natural
philosopher, Anaxagoras.
Anaxagoras followed an atomic theory of matter, similar to
that of Democritus. However, he realised that although atomic
processes might more or less explain how matter can appear in
so many forms in the inanimate world, its weakness becomes
increasingly pronounced when it comes to living things. His
point is that living things do not behave like dead matter.
Plants, for example, grow. Animals show intention. And when
it comes to humans, physical causes are almost neither here nor
there when it comes to explaining what we do and why we do
it. With people, desires and instincts – conscious and uncon-
scious – are the causes that count. That clearly has something
to do with our biology. But actually, and given certain obvious
constraints, far less so than you might fi rst think.
Put it this way: human beings want not just to exist, but to
live and live well. So even when doing ‘animal’ things, we loathe
living like animals: we prefer, say, to eat tasty food, not just muck;
to sleep in a comfortable bed, not just on the fl oor; and to make
love, not merely copulate. This is what bothered Anaxagoras
too, and so he postulated an all-controlling force that he called
Mind – ‘the fi nest of all things and the purest, and it possesses
all knowledge about everything, and it has the greatest strength.’
Mind, he thought, is what lies behind the world, and that we
see particularly in living things that demonstrate purposes and
desires. It might seem a superstitious, unscientifi c belief to us. But
it had the advantage, Socrates at fi rst thought, of implying that
the world was ordered in the best possible way – a principle of
economy, simplicity and beauty that, if in a disenchanted form,
is in fact still compelling to scientists today.
The problem Socrates had with it, though, was that for all
its aesthetic appeal it actually explains less than it appears to
and, therefore, leads to little practical advice. Take an obvious
situation, Socrates asks himself, again in Plato’s dialogue: why he
is sitting in the prison with his friends awaiting death. Following
Anaxagoras, he might say it is due to his mind and the way it