In Search of M.C. Escher’s Metaphysical Unconscious

Abstract

Over the last few years I have grown more and more deeply convinced that currently held views on nature, whether they emanate from philosophy or from science, are essentially variations on the themes addressed in the above quoted excerpt from what is now known as “Anaximander’s Fragment,” one of the earliest traces of Western philosophical thought. As Bertrand Russell points out, commenting on his translation of Anaximander’s Fragment, “injustice” seems to have meant, to Anaximander’s contemporaries, something quite different from what it means today: It meant something like departure from the necessary order of things [5, p. 27]. But this necessary order of things includes the equally necessary passage of time, whereby “justice” is granted, whereby what-must-be progressively becomes what-is. So “things” pass, in cycles of death (“they pass away ... “) and rebirth (“ ... once more”), forms succeeding to forms, mere stepping stones along pathways leading, beyond the “injustice” of current limits, ever closer to this absolute truth, this absolute “justice” which Anaximander named the “απεϱоν”: the “limit-less.”

M.C. Escher, Eye, 1946. Mezzotint

Into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, as is ordained, for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time. — Anaximander