Perfume and the Pre-Socratics 2: Anaximander, Anaximenes, and the Importance of Contrariness

The heavy rain faded away leaving a thick curtain of humidity hanging in the air. It suddenly dawned on me: could water [or eau de toilette] alone explain this steamy effect? Would it not be more accurate to say that the hot and the dry gave way to the cool and the wet, and then as the heat returned, it transformed the wet into this muggy blanket of moisture now tinging the world rather gray and making me feel as though I were in a permanently decaffeinated state?

My thoughts are running slow; my speech is slightly slurred, but this much I believe, albeit foggily, that I know: Does not reality, my exquisitely scented friends, ultimately comprise pairs of contrary things: the hot and the cold, the wet and the dry, the black and the white, the scented and the unscented?

As a matter of fact, there was a pre-Socratic philosopher, Anaximander, who appears to have believed precisely that. This theory is ascribed to Anaximander by historians, all of whom write about other historians' writings, leading back to the sole extant phrase said to have been authored by this man:

They give justice and reparation to one another 

for their injustice

in accordance with the arrangement of time.

Now, the historians who interpret this cryptic phrase pregnant with possibility understand it to mean anything but an assertion of the profound philosophical importance of perfume, and I am confident that no one has ever before ended the list of contraries ascribed to Anaximander with the all-important pair “the scented and the unscented.” Yet it seems obvious that such an exclusion cannot be rationally justified, given the abundance of smells found naturally in the world and of which Anaximander was undoubtedly aware.

Could Anaximander really have been anosmic? I think not. Instead, what has happened is that historians over more than two thousand years have dogmatically re-penned the same old interpretations over and over again, the very interpretations in which they were steeped as students. All too eager to please their mentors, these thinkers have never really made any progress at all. Trapped in what they have been told by equally ignorant others was the worldview of the ancient Greeks, scholars continue to this day to neglect the central role played by perfume in the history of Western philosophy. Let's look now more closely at what Anaximander, clearly an avid perfumista—whether closet or not—really thought.

Anaximander is said to have believed that all of these contraries emerge from an enormous “Indefinite-Infinite,” what he termed the apeiron. The existence of the apeiron would seem to be the only possible explanation, too, for the fact that perfumers still today, more than two millennia after Anaximander reflected upon the nature of reality, continue to make radically disparate, even antithetical perfumes. Translating the terms of the question and its answer to a modern context, how would Anaximander have aligned the opposites in perfumery?

We perfumistas all know that sharp, soapy floral aldehydes such as Hermès Calèche and Amouage Dia bear next to no resemblance to a sweet floral oriental such as Tom Ford Black Orchid Voile de Fleur or Bond no 9 Chinatown. 

But all of these perfumes are closer to one another than any of them is to a flowerless fragrance such as Prada Infusion de Vétiver or Annick Goutal Mandragore.

How to explain the seemingly endless ability of perfumers to continue to come up with new creations, using a finite palette of scents in the world?

It is through the interaction and exchange of opposite qualities emerging out of the indefinite-infinite apeiron, the wise Anaximander explained, and we may rest assured that he would have wholeheartedly concurred with the application of his theory to perfume. 

Indeed, perfume would seem to offer the clearest illustration of what are said to be Anaximander's own views. This philosopher's metaphysical theory has the added virtue of having prophetically predicted what would happen in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the world of perfume.

Anaximenes, Air and the Accordion Effect

Anaximander's thought has been admired by many, but another pre-Socratic philosopher, Anaximenes, refined the theory of the indefinite-infinite apeiron, whose generation of opposites was left unexplained by Anaximander himself. In a brilliant anticipation of modern theories of physical chemistry, Anaximenes reasoned that the qualitative differences observed in nature were brought about by quantitative changes.

To give a simple example: think of water at very different temperatures. Water which is frozen has the properties of a solid thing. Water which is heated up acquires the properties of a gaseous thing. On analogy to this case, throughout nature, Anaximenes reasoned, it is through quantitative changes that qualititative differences emerge.

However, Anaximenes did not embrace water as the ultimate substrate, as Thales had. Instead, Anaximenes hypothesized that pneuma or air was the most basic substance, the underlying foundation of the universe. He reasoned that air becomes denser and denser as it undergoes condensation, to produce all of the other apparently disparate types of matter in a series looking something like this:

air → fire → wind → cloud → water → earth → stone

In tandem, dense matter becomes lighter through the reverse process, of rarefaction:

stone → earth → water → cloud → wind → fire → air

In other words, air is the beginning and the end of all things. It goes perhaps without saying, then, that given his explicit focus on air, Anaximenes would have been very, very conversant with the perfumes of his time, and with only a bit of interpolation, we can derive important implications of his theory for the modern world of perfume.

How did Dior Poison and Giorgio of Beverly Hills Giorgio 
give rise to the house of Clean?

In some ways, what Anaximenes was suggesting held sway was the proverbial “pendulum” or “accordion” effect, which obviously applies directly to perfume. Among other phenomena, the 1980s excesses of super-potent or scent-ful perfumes which filled entire public spaces could only have been followed by the pendulum—or, if you prefer, the accordion—effect of the apeiron. If asked to explain what transpired, Anaximenes would surely have replied that an expansion to the upper limits of scentedness had to be followed by a contraction back to unscentedness.

So there you have it my fragrant friends: the ultimate explanation of the anti-perfume backlash and the mass of perfumes being marketed today which offer no more and no less than the scent which should be expected upon one's emergence from the shower or bath.

Hair conditioner and shampoo florals, sweet laundry scents, and “not a perfume” perfumes all emerged from the inexorable oscillatory expansion and contraction of the apeiron. The “not a perfume” perfumes such as Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 and Juliette has a gun Not a Perfume may represent the limit to which the contraction of the apeiron can still be capitalized upon in persuading consumers to pay for less complexly scented liquids. Or are people also prepared to pay niche perfumery prices for a completely unscented liquid? Only time will tell.

For now, we have Anaximander and Anaximenes to thank for providing us with the explanation so many of us have been grasping for in attempting to make sense of recent developments in the world of perfume, a microcosm of the vast universe which these wise philosophers undertook to explain. Clearly these thinkers, like Heraclitus and Thales, were inspired and enlightened by their experiences of perfume.

A House of Mirrors

What is it, then, which unites all of these pre-Socratic philosophers? No, my fragrant friends, it was not just that they preceded Socrates, nor that they indulged in metaphysical speculation. Nor that they had far too much free time on their hands, as non-philosophers may be tempted to jest. In reality, although their views have been rendered scent-free by olfactorily challenged historians throughout many centuries, all of these monistic thinkers recognized that, far from being a mere cosmetic item, perfume holds within it the key to the deepest mysteries of the universe.

Our memories elicited by scent reflect an infinite kaleidoscope of experiences unique to individuals yet still binding them together as one. When we disagree about perfumes, proving yet again that “One perfumista's treasure is another's trash,” we reveal that each one of us, like Thales, Heraclitus, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, have grasped different facets of Reality. We may lose sight of this truth, under sway of lists of fictitious and metaphorical names given in the note hierarchies for perfumes.

Cotton Candy: Aquolina Pink Sugar and MOR Marshmallow MOR

Popcorn: Dior Miss Dior [Chérie] and Memo SIWA

Vodka: Bvlgari BLV Notte Pour Femme and Parfum d'Empire Ambre Russe

Earth: Tokyomilk Crushed and Tauer Perfumes Pentachords Verdant

Seawater: Comptoir Sud Pacifique Aqua Motu and L'Artisan Parfumeur Fleur de Liane

Suede: Keiko Mecheri Cuir Cordoba and Tangeri; Serge Lutens Daim Blond

Ozone: Bond no 9 Fire Island and Linari Vista sul Mare

In reality, cotton candy, popcorn, vodka, earth, seawater, suede and ozone are found in no perfume. These are names given to the intended evocations of the perfumes in which they are said to figure. People with no prior experience of cotton candy, popcorn, vodka, or suede will not be reminded of those objects when they smell a perfume which its creator intended to call to mind those things. But even less obviously metaphorical notes, such as rose, jasmine, ambergris, and many other naturally occurring things, are also, in truth, metaphorical. There is no rose in a rose perfume. A rose perfume is intended to evoke the effect of a rose on the person who smells the perfume. What is the effect of a rose on a person who comes in contact with it? Depends on the person!

This is why, in the end, perfumes make up an infinite house of mirrors, into which we glimpse each time we take a sniff as our memories and associations rise to consciousness. This is also why perfume reviews reveal much more about the author than about the ostensible object of his or her critique.