The fragment (DK B1): genuine philosophical doctrine of cosmic law, or mytho-poetic adaptation of Hesiodic dike?

Anaximander, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The fragment articulates a doctrine of cosmic regularity governed by dike and assessed by Chronos. The justice-and-reparation language is not poetic decoration borrowed from Hesiod and applied to natural processes as metaphor; it is the philosophical claim that the structure of the cosmos is a structure of lawful balance between opposed forces, in which each force's encroachment on another is corrected by an equal counter-encroachment, and the whole process is governed by an arbiter (Time) that assesses the balance.

The opposites — hot and cold, wet and dry, summer and winter, day and night — do not exist in stable equilibrium; they encroach on each other through cycles. The encroachment is adikia (injustice); the counter-encroachment is tisis (reparation); the cycle that governs the alternation is Chronos (Time) acting as judge and assessor. This is the first articulation of natural law in Greek thought.

The vocabulary is religious-legal because that is the available vocabulary for a doctrine of lawful order; the substance of the doctrine is philosophical-rational.¹²

Sources

1. Ἀναξίμανδρος [... = P5] ἀρχήν τε καὶ στοιχεῖον εἴρηκε τῶν ὄντων τὸ ἄπειρον, πρῶτος τοῦτο τοὔνομα κομίσας τῆς ἀρχῆς. λέγει δ' αὐτὴν μήτε ὕδωρ μήτε ἄλλο τι τῶν καλουμένων εἶναι στοιχείων, ἀλλ' ἑτέραν τινὰ φύσιν ἄπειρον, ἐξ ἧς ἅπαντας γίνεσθαι τοὺς οὐρανοὺς καὶ τοὺς ἐν αὐτοῖς κόσμους· ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς αὐτὸ coni.

   Early Greek Philosophy Vol II, Anaximander chapter, pp. 13–14

2. Diels suggests that this sentence is lacunose and supplemented, "The wheel of the sun is twenty-seven times that of <the earth, nineteen times that of> the moon; and the sun occupies the highest position, <and after it the moon,> and the circles of the fixed stars <and of the planets> the lowest one" (cf. D22, D24). D8 (< A10) Ps.-Plut. Strom. 2 (= Eus. PE 1.8.2) μεθ ̓ ὃν Ἀναξίμανδρον [..

   Early Greek Philosophy Vol II, Anaximander chapter, pp. 18–19

Where the argument is made

• The single verbatim fragment (DK 12 B1), preserved by Simplicius in his commentary on Aristotle's Physics (24.18 ff., Diels-Kranz B1): 'from those things from which there is generation for the things that exist, into these again does their destruction take place, according to what must needs be
• for they give justice and reparation to one another for their injustice, according to the assessment of Time' (Kahn's translation). The textual question of where Theophrastus's paraphrase ends and Anaximander's verbatim quotation begins. The use of kata to chreon ('according to what must needs be'), dike (justice), adikia (injustice), tisis (reparation), chronos (time)

How the argument was received

The interpretation of the fragment is the second most contested question in Anaximander scholarship after the apeiron, and the two questions are closely linked. Cornford's Principium Sapientiae (1952) defended the mytho-poetic-adaptation reading most fully; he treated the fragment as continuous with the Hesiodic dike of the Theogony and Works and Days, with the philosophical innovation consisting in the abstraction from individual mortal cases to cosmic process. Vlastos in 'Equality and Justice in Early Greek Cosmologies' (CP 1947) argued for the legal-political character of the dike doctrine. Reinhardt earlier (1916) had given a similar reading. Jaeger emphasized the religious-cosmic dimension as compatible with the philosophical claim. Kahn's Chapter III (1960) made the modern definitive case for the doctrine of cosmic law: the fragment expresses a positive philosophical claim about the structure of natural regularity, and the religious-legal vocabulary is the available conceptual apparatus rather than the substance. The KRS (1957) handling is broadly compatible with Kahn. The mytho-poetic-adaptation reading and the philosophical-doctrine reading both have textual support; the debate turns on how much weight to give the religious-legal vocabulary versus the systematic cosmological context in which the fragment is embedded.