Roots
In the mythical Greek cosmogony of Hesiod (8th-7th century BC) the beginning (arche) of the universe is Chaos, the void considered as a divine primordial condition. This is described as a large gap where there are the sources and ends of the earth, sky, sea and Tartarus. One can name it also abyss (having no bottom). Thales believed that the origin or first principle was water. Pherecydes of Syros (6th century BC) probably called the water also Chaos and this is not placed at the very beginning.
In the creation stories of Near East the primordial world is described formless and empty. The only existing thing prior to creation was the water abyss. The Babylonian cosmology Enuma Elish describes the earliest stage of the universe as one of watery chaos and something similar is described in Genesis. In the Hindu cosmogony which is similar to the Vedic (Hiranyagarbha) the initial state of the universe was an absolute darkness.
Hesiod made an abstraction, because his original chaos is a void, something completely indefinite. In his opinion the origin should be indefinite and indeterminate. The indefiniteness is spatial in early usages as in Homer (indefinite sea). A fragment from Xenophanes (6th century BC) shows the transition from chaos to apeiron: "The upper limit of earth borders on air. The lower limit reaches down to the unlimited. (i.e. the Apeiron)". Either apeiron meant the 'spatial indefinite' and was implied to be indefinite in kind, or Anaximander intended it primarily 'that which is indefinite in kind' but assumed it also to be of unlimited extent and duration.
Greek philosophy entered a high level of abstraction making apeiron the principle of all things and some scholars saw a gap between the existing mythical and the new rational way of thought (rationalism). But if we follow the course, we will see that there is not such an abrupt break with the previous thought. The basic elements of nature, water, air, fire, earth, which the first Greek philosophers believed that composed the world, represent in fact the mythical primordial forces. The collision of these forces produced the cosmic harmony according to the Greek cosmogony (Hesiod). Anaximander noticed the mutual changes between these elements, therefore he chose something else (indefinite in kind) which could generate the others without experiencing any decay.
There is also a fragment attributed to his teacher Thales: "What is divine? What has no origin, nor end."This probably led his student to his final decision for apeiron, because the divinity applied to it implies that it always existed. The notion of the temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the religious conception of immortality and Anaximander's description was in terms appropriate to this conception. This arche is called "eternal and ageless" (Hippolitus I,6,I;DK B2).
Read more about this topic: Apeiron (cosmology)
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