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the quote seems to me more about first principles--the starting points for types of arguments concerning the nature of the physical world--the positions being juxtaposed are (1) the physical world can be understood as combinations of the four basic elements and (2) that there is apeiron, or "the indefinite" that precedes these elements and which has to be considered as a first principle or starting point for arguments.
what seems at stake in this is two basically different ways of thinking about physical reality--one that see in the physical world different combinations of fundamental variables which are in themselves stable--so you have a version of the notion of forms--the physical world is epiphenomenon--meanings or forms shape the phenomenal world.
the other view leads you to consider history or transience as fundamental--phenomena come into being from within the apeiron and pass away into it again.
this opposition is still with us. there are folk who imagine philosophy as having to do with stable and/or eternal relations/meanings---and others who see in this idea litle more than institutional ideology or wishful thinking. the counter is usually that to think all there is is history (the social-historical) throw out all possibility of philosophical activity--which is ridiculous--but it does speak to something of what is at issue in the distincton between startingpoints in anaximander and aristotle.
the last clauses--about penalty and retribution--are curious. i looked up the author last week and read about anaximander, but i cant remember where i looked this morning--if you imagine the physical world as a small, closed system within which phenomena emerge, it kind of follows (as a function of the smallness and closedness of the system itself) that phenomena A impinges on other possible phenomena, and on other already existing phenomena, simply because it comes into being. i am not wholly sure what "impinging on" would entail, and this image of a small closed system is the best metaphor i have at the moment for it. say phenomena A takes up resources that could potentially have been distributed otherwise had A not come into being. or that A impinges on other phenomena within the system by reconfiguring relations within that system and altering the overall meaning of the system. something like that. anaximander seems to argue (in the very short fragment that survives) that this impinging-on carries a kind of penalty with it, and that penalty is passing away, dissolution.
this all feels kinda wobbly, but there we are.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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