Philosographia: Anaximander's Boundless Origins of Reality

“The Universe is infinite. The mind is finite. The universe and the mind are mutually exclusive. But the mind cannot accept this exclusiveness. It cannot accept its own finitude. It is forever trying to bridge the gap, to unite the universe and the mind. It is forever trying to find a way out of time, into the boundless.”

So says the character Shevek in the 1974 novel “The Dispossessed” by Ursula Le Guin.

It’s unclear whether Le Guin was purposefully drawing from Anaximander’s concept of ‘the Boundless” here, since she never spoke about it publicly, but its safe to assume that she may have been inspired by the pre-Socratic philosopher’s ideas on the origins of reality.

In “The Dispossessed” she uses it as a metaphor for the infinite possibilities of the universe, and to explore the idea that there are always new worlds to discover and new ways to understand ourselves.

She wasn’t the only author to be inspired by Anaximander either, consciously or not. In Isabel Allende’s 1991 science fiction novel “The Infinite Plan”, the author explores the idea of ‘the boundless’ as a metaphor for the infinite possibilities of human experience.

The eternal source of everything

What makes Anaximander stand out from a lot of his contemporaries and the philosophers that preceded him was that he was one of the first to move away from mythological explanations for the natural world, and to use naturalistic and rational explanations.

Anaximander’s ‘Boundless’ is neither deity nor mythological entity. It is an impersonal and eternal substance that he thought of as the foundation of all existence; an essence which gave birth to all things and to which all things eventually returned. Anaximander believed the Boundless was limitless and unchanging. He conceived of it as not only giving rise to physical objects, but to time, space and all the elements, and as being responsible for continuous change and the emergence of new forms of life.

And while he wasn’t the only one conceiving of infinite sources of reality – for example Hesiod’s concept of Chaos – he was one of the first to imagine this without requiring a mythological explanation. He also introduced a concept of time that was infinite and eternal, a new idea for his time.

Fragments of reality

Only fragments remain of Anaximander’s work, and we can only guess at what he meant by the Boundless, or what other remarkable things he may have conceived of. But we know that he was one of the first to develop a theory of evolution that proposed humans had evolved from fish and that different species of animals arose from a common ancestor. His concept of ‘the Boundless’ also has interesting thematic connections to the modern scientific theory of ‘the Big Bang’.

For now, I leave you with a fragment that we do have and invite you to explore the idea of ‘the Boundless’ in your own writings - either metaphorically or literally.

The fictional possibilities are literally endless.

“The principle from which all things come into being is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some other boundless thing, which is infinite and eternal, from which all things come into being.”

Creative prompts:

Write a short story exploring the concept of ‘the Boundless’ or use it as a starting point.

In your own fictional world, who were the earliest thinkers? What did they believe about the origins of reality?