The early philosophers of Greece, whose writings have survived only in the form of fragments, which later Greek writers fortunately considered worth quoting, are of unique value for anyone interested in the intellectual history of mankind. The period of less than two hundred years between Thales and Democritus shows a development in the art of philosophical inquiry that is quite unparalleled in history. No where else, not even in ancient India, is there shown so striking a combination of conceptual imagination, attempted linguistic precision and concern for intellectual consistency. Although the dialogues of Plato and the vast intellectual explorations of Aristotle speak more comprehensively and pursue lines of thought more adequately, neither of those achievements would have been possible without the two centuries of analysis and speculation that had gone on before.
It is customary to call the philosophers
of the Sixth and Fifth Centuries B.C.E. "Presocratics."
Although in fact four of them were roughly contemporary with Socrates.
Phases of Presocratic Philosophy
According to Philip Wheelwright histories of ancient philosophy conceive the course of early Greek metaphysics as falling into four main stages. The main direction of Presocratic thought may be said to fall into the following fourfold schema.
The First Stage
Represented by the Milesians
(1) The three philosophers of Miletus (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) sought a principle by which the nature of the world could be explained, and gradually they became more and more conscious of the question of becoming—of how the initial substance, whether water or air or an unlimited reservoir of potential qualities, could transform itself into existing things and qualities so numerous and various.
The Second Stage
(2) Heraclitus carried the idea of becoming to the ultimate extreme, denying the existence of any unchanging substance, and declaring that everything without exception is subject to change—faster or slower, but in any case unremitting and inevitable.
The Third Stage
Represented by the Eleatic school.
(3) Parmenides (followed by Zeno and Melissus, the other principle members of the Eleatic school) opposed the doctrine of universal flux by going to the opposite extreme and dismissing all change as necessarily unreal and illusory, holding it to be rationally inconceivable that what was not should begin to be or that what was should cease to be. What truly is, he argued, must be what it is independently of time; hence only Being can exist and all becoming is illusory. The other two Eleatics differ from Parmenides only in approach and details.
The Fourth Stage
(4) The metaphysical reconstructionists who followed Parmenides are Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the atomist Leucippus and Democritus. Despite the large differences among them they share the same general attempt to reconcile Parmenides’ principle, that reality must be one and changeless, with the obvious fact of plurality and ongoing change. This they do by postulating a plurality of unchanging basic entities, and hence explaining the changes that we see going on around us as change relations among those primal entities.
For the purpose of this introduction we need only be concerned with The First Stage, The Milesians or The Ionian science of Nature. This is the point we will begin our study of the Idea of Nature.
The Concept of Nature
What do we mean by nature? To answer this question we have to discuss the philosophy of natural science. Natural science is the science of nature. But what is nature?
Nature is what we observe in perception through the senses. In sense-perception we are aware of something which is not thought. This idea of being self-contained for thought is the base of natural science. It means that nature can be thought of as a closed system, and thus, in a sense nature is independent of thought. If sense perception is an awareness of something which is not thought, then nature is not thought.
The study of nature brings with it a world view which is dominant in the culture/community. Those world views always suggest cosmologies, and each age has its dominant concerns. Cosmologies treat the universe as an orderly system. These concerns are not always explicit and one of the functions of philosophy is the critic of cosmologies. Philosophy can attempt to harmonize, refashion, and justify the different intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to scrutinize the ultimate ideas, and view the whole evidence in attempting to express a cosmological scheme. It is the task of philosophy to render explicit the process which is unconsciously developed without rational thought.
Greek Cosmology
So it is to Greece that we must look in order to find the origin of our modern ideas. The Ionian philosophers were interested in theories concerning nature. Greek thought was preoccupied with the quest for simple substances in terms of which the course of events could be expressed. The question was what is nature made of? The answers which the Greeks gave to this question and the concepts which underlay the terms in which they framed their answers, have determined the unquestioned presuppositions as to time, space, and matter which have been the key concepts in science ever since.
When the Ionian Pre-Socratic philosophers asked, "What is Nature?" they assumed that the question demanded an answer in terms of primitive substance or substances out of which the world is constructed.
Thales
What is Permanent in Existence?
In his speculations Thales asserted that the world originated in water and was sustained by water and that the earth floated on water. Because there is natural change everywhere, he went on to claim, the world is animated and possess psyche, the principle of self-motion. Thales thought the world was understandable through the idea of water, an element essential to the life and thus to motion, versatile, common, and powerful enough to account for every physical phenomenon. The statement that everything is made of water is to be regarded as a scientific hypothesis. According to Russell, the Ionians were rash in their hypotheses, but were prepared to test them empirically.
Thales inquiry concerned the nature of things. What is everything made of, or what kind of stuff goes into the things of the world? What Thales was trying to do with his questions was to account for the fact that there are many different kinds of things and that some of these things change into something else and they resemble either other. Thales’ unique contribution to thought was his notion that in spite of differences between various things there is a basic similarity between them all, and that "the many" are related to each other by "the One". He assumed that some single element which contained its own principle of action or change is at the foundation of all physical reality. To him this One was water. Because there is no record of how Thales came to this conclusion that water is the cause of all things, Aristotle wrote that Thales could have derived it from observation. Thales’ analysis of the composition of things is far less important that the fact that he raised the question concerning the nature of the world. His question set the stage for a new kind of inquiry, one which could be debated on its merits and could be confirmed or refuted by further analysis. Thales shifted the basis of thought from a mythological base to one of scientific inquiry. And from this time others were to follow him with other answers, but always with his problem and questions in mind.
Anaximander
Anaximander was younger contemporary and a pupil of Thales. He agreed with Thales that there is some single basic stuff out of which everything comes. Unlike Thales, however, Anaximander said that this basic stuff is neither water nor any other specific of determinate element, arguing that water and all other definite things are only specific variations of something which is more primary. . It may very well be that water or moisture is found in various forms everywhere, but water is only one specific thing among many other elements, and all these specific things require that there be some more elementary stuff to account for their origin. The primary substance out of which all these specific things come, said Anaximander, is an "indefinite or boundless realm." Thus, Anaximander differentiates specific and determinate things from their origin by calling the primary substance the indeterminate boundless. But actual things are specific, their source is indeterminate, and whereas things are finite, the original stuff is infinite or boundless.
Besides offering a new idea about the original substance of things, Anaximander advanced the enterprise of philosophy by attempting some explanation for his new idea. Thales had not dealt with the problem of explaining how the primary stuff became the many different things we see in the world, but Anximander addressed himself precisely to this question. Although his explanation may seem strange, it represents an advance in knowledge in the sense that it is an attempt to deal with known facts from which hypotheses can be formulated instead of explaining natural phenomena in mythical and nondebatable terms. What Anximander has to say about the origin of things he speaks of this unoriginated and indestructible primary substance as also having eternal motion. As a consequence of this motion, the various specific elements come into being as a "separating off" from the original substance, and thus, "there was an eternal motion in which the heavens came to be." But first warm and cold were separated off, and from these two came moist; then from these came earth and air. Anaximander then tried to account for the heavenly bodies and air currents around the earth in what appears to be a mechanical explanation of the orderly movement of the stars. He thought the earth was cylindrical in shape in contrast to Thales, who thought it was flat as a disk and floated on the water.
Returning again to the vast cosmic scene, Anaximander thought that there were many worlds and many systems of universes existing all at the same time, all of them perishable, there being the constant alternation between their creation and destruction. This cyclical process was for him a rigorous necessity as the conflict of opposite forces in nature caused what he called poetically an "injustice" as the requiring their ultimate destruction.
Anaximenes
The third and last of the Milesian philosophers was Anaximenes, was the young associate of Anaximander. Anaximenes returned to the flat earth theory of Thales, but no longer thought of this body as floating on the surface of anything. It floated in the surrounding medium supported by that medium’s density. Like all Ionians, he believed that the medium in which it floated was also the stuff of which it is made. Like Anaximander, he conceived this stuff as a three-dimensional volume extending infinitely in every direction round the world, but in spite of Anaximander example, he did not see the logical necessity of conceiving it as indeterminate in quality. He went back to Thales and identified it with one specific natural substance, differing from Thales only in calling it, not water, but air or vapor. As the boundless, air is everywhere, but unlike the boundless, it is a specific and tangible material substance that can be identified. Also, the air’s motion is a far more specific process than Anaximander’s "separating off," for Anaximenes came upon the concepts of "rarefaction" and "condensation" as the specific forms of motion which lead to describable changes in the air. Although air is invisible, we live only so long as we can breathe, and "just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breathe and air encompass the whole world." But to explain how air is the origin of all things, Anaximenes introduced the important new idea that differences in "quality" are caused by differences in "quantity." The expansion and contraction of air represent quantitative changes, and these changes occurring in a single substance account for the multitude of different things. As Anaximenes says, "air that is condensed forms winds … if this process goes further, it gives water, still further earth, and the greatest condensation of all is found in stones."
Thus, from the point of view of the Ionian School, to which Anaximenes is conventionally assigned, Anaximenes is an example of decadence. From another point of view, he is an example of progress; and from this point of view he does not belong to the Ionian School, he is the link between it and the Pythagorean School. That he was not a clean Ionian is clear from two fact according to Collingwood: first, that he went back on the quite conclusive demonstration which Anaximander had shown that a really primitive universal substance must be indeterminate in quality and could therefore no more be identified with air than it could with water; secondly, that his main interest seems to have swung away from the oneness of the primitive substance to the manyness of the various natural substances, each with its own proper mode of behavior. Anaximenes, if Collingwood interpreted him correctly, had lost interest in the question: "What is the one thing out of which all things are made?" This, according to Aristotle, was the central question of Thales and his school. In so far as Anaximenes had lost interest in it he had ceased to be a member of that school.
That Anaximenes was a Pythagorean is clear from his insistence on the concept of condensation and refraction. His question was: "Why do different kinds of things behave differently?" That is not the question of Ionian physics; it is the question of Pythagorean physics. His answer was: "Because the thing, out of which they are made, no matter what that thing is, undergoes different arrangements in space." That is the Pythagorean answer. As put forward by Anaximenes it was only a bare rudiment of Pythagoreanism. The only difference of arrangement of which Anaximenes spoke was the difference between a denser and a looser packing of matter in space. Pythagoreanism was to go much further than this. That is why Anaximenes ought to be called not so much a member of the Ionian School as a link between that and the School of Pythagoras.
Although these Milesian philosophers appear to have proceeded with scientific concerns and temperaments, they did not form their hypotheses the way modern scientists would, nor did they devise experiments to test their theories. But it must be remembered that the critical questions concerning the nature and limits of human knowledge had not yet been raised. The real significance of the Milesians is that they for the first time raised the question about the ultimate nature of things and made the first direct inquiry into what that nature really consists of.
Pythagoras
The Mathematical Basis of All Things
Across a span of water from Miletus, located in the Aegean Sea, was a small island of Samos, which was the birthplace of a truly extraordinary and wise man, Pythagoras. From the scrapes of information we have about him and those who were his followers, an incomplete but still fascinating picture of his new philosophical reflections emerges. Pythagoras migrated to Southern Italy and settled there in the prosperous Greek city of Crotone, where is active philosophic life is usually dated from about 525 to 500
B.C.E. We are told by Aristotle that "the Pythagoreans … devoted themselves to mathematics, they were the first to advance the study, and having been brought up in it they thought its principles were the principles of all things …" In contrast to the Milesians, the Pythagoreans said that things consist of numbers. Although it is quite strange to say that everything consists of numbers, the strangeness, as well as the difficulty, of this doctrine is greatly overcome when we consider why Pythagoras became interested in numbers and what his conception of numbers was.
Pythagoras became interested in mathematics for what appear to be religious reasons. His originality could be said to consist in his conviction that the study of mathematics is the best purifier of the soul. He is, therefore, referred to as the founder of both a religious sect and at the same time a school of mathematics. What gave rise to the Pythagorean sect was people’s yearning for a deeply spiritual religion that could provide the means for purifying the soul and for guaranteeing its immortality. The Homeric gods were not gods in the theological sense, since they were as immortal as human beings and as such could be neither the objects of worship nor the source of any spiritual power to overcome the pervading sense of moral uncleanliness and the anxiety that people had over the shortness of life and the finality of death.
The Pythagoreans were clearly concerned with the mystical problems of purification and immortality, and it was for this reason that they turned to science and mathematics, the study of which they considered the best purge for the soul. Thought and reflection represent a clear contrast to the life of trade and competition for various honors. It was Pythagoras who first distinguished three different kinds of lives, and by implication the three divisions of the soul, by saying that there are three different kinds of people who go to the Olympian Games. The lowest class is made up of those who go there to buy and sell, to make a profit. Next are those who go there to compete, to gain honors. Best of all, he thought, are those who come as spectators who reflect upon and analyze what is happening. Of these three, the spectators illustrate the thinkers, whose activity as philosophers liberates them from the involvements of daily life and its imperfections. To "look on" is one of the meanings of the Greek word "theory." Theoretical thinking, or pure science and pure mathematics, was considered by the Pythagoreans as a purifier of the soul, particularly as mathematical thought could liberate people from thinking about particular things and lead their thought, instead, to the permanent and ordered world of numbers. The final mystical triumph of the Pythagorean is liberation from "the wheel of birth," from the migration of the soul to animal and other forms in the constant process of death and birth, for thus the spectator achieves a unity with god and shares his immortality.
We are here concerned only with the cosmological element in this body of doctrine and Collingwood suggests a way in which Pythagoras himself may have dealt with the problem of nature. The Pythagorean cosmography, or picture of the world, suggests that Pythagoras in this respect remained a true disciple of the Ionian School. Like Anaximenes, he pictured the world as suspended in a boundless three-dimensional ocean of vapor and inhaling nourishment from it. Like both Anaximenes and Anaximander, he thought of it as a rotating nucleus in this vapor, having the earth at its center; the rotary movement serving to generate and segregate opposites. A new discovery of his own seems to have been that the earth is spherical in shape. In his cosmology or theoretical commentary on this picture, Pythagoras broke new ground, with momentous consequences, according to Collingwood. So definite was the break on this point between Pythagoras and his predecessors that we can guess how his thought actually moved.
Pythagoras suggested that the qualitative differences of nature were based on differences of geometrical structure. The point of the new theory is that we need not bother to ask what the primitive matter is like; that makes no difference; we need not ascribe to it any character differing from that of space itself: all we must ascribe to it is the power of being shaped geometrically. The nature of things, that by virtue of which they severally and collectively are what they are, is geometrical structure or form. What must have facilitated the development of the doctrine that all things are numbers was the Pythagorean practice in counting and their way of writing numbers. Apparently they built numbers out of individual units, using pebbles to count. The number "one" was therefore a single pebble and all other numbers were created by the addition of pebbles, somewhat like the practice of representing numbers on dice by the use of dots. But the significant point is that the Pythagoreans discovered a relation between arithmetic and geometry. A single pebble, as a point is "one," but "two" is made up of two pebbles or two points, and these two points make a line. Three points, as in the corners of a triangle, create a plane or area and four points can represent a solid. This suggested to the Pythagoreans a close relationship between number and magnitude, and Pythagoras is credited with discovering that the square of the hypotenuse is equal the squares of the other two sides of a right-angled triangle. This correlation between numbers and magnitude provided immense consolation to those who were seeking evidence of a principle of structure and order in the universe.
The importance of the relation between number and magnitude was that numbers, for the Pythagoreans, meant certain "figures" such as a triangle, square, rectangle and so forth. The individual points were "boundary stones" which marked out "fields." Moreover, these "triangular numbers," "square numbers," and "triangular numbers," "spherical numbers," were differentiated by the Pythagoreans as being "odd" and "even," thereby giving them a new way of treating the phenomena of the conflict of opposites. In all these "forms," numbers were, therefore, far more than abstractions – they were specific kinds of entities. To say, then, as the Pythagoreans did, that all things are numbers meant for them that there is a numerical basis for all things which possess shape and size; thus they moved from arithmetic to geometry and then to the structure of reality. All things had numbers, and their odd and even values explained such opposites in things as one and many, square and oblong, straight and curved, rest and motion. Even light and dark are numerical opposites as are male and female, good and evil.
This way of understanding numbers lead the Pythagoreans to formulate their most important philosophical notion, their most significant contribution to philosophy; namely, the concept of "forms." The Ionians had conceived the idea of a primary "matter" or stuff out of which everything was constituted, but they had no coherent concept of how specific things are differentiated from this single matter. They all spoke of an unlimited stuff, whether it be water, air, or the indeterminate boundless, by which they all meant some primary "matter." It was the Pythagoreans who now came forth with the conception of "form." For them form meant limit, and limit is understandable especially in numeric terms. It is no wonder that the two arts in which the Pythagoreans saw the concept of limit best exemplified were music and medicine, for in both of these arts the central fact is harmony, and harmony is achieved by taking into account proportions and limits. In music there is a numeric ratio by which different notes must be separated in order to achieve concordant intervals. Harmony is the form that the limiting structure of numerical ratio imposes upon the unlimited possibilities for sound possessed by the strings of the musical instrument. In medicine, the Pythagoreans saw the same principle at work, health being the harmony or balance or proper ratio of certain opposites such as hot and cold, wet and dry, and the volumetric balance of various specific elements later known as biochemicals. The Pythagoreans looked upon the body as they would a musical instrument, saying that health is achieved when the body is "in tune" and that disease is a consequence of undue tensions or the loss of proper tuning of the strings. The concept of number was frequently used when translated to mean "figure," in connection with health and disease in the literature of early medicine especially pertaining to the constitution of the human body. The "true" number, or figure, therefore, refers to the proper balance of all the elements and functions of the body. Number, then, represents the application of "limit" (form) to the "unlimited" (matter), and the Pythagoreans referred to music and medicine only as vivid illustrations of their larger concept, namely, that all things are numbers.
What the problem of physics needed for its solution was to be approached from the standpoint of mathematics. The principle of which physics stood in need, identified with something unintelligible, namely matter, was now identified with something supremely intelligible, namely mathematical truth. Once people had learned to think mathematically (and the Greeks had learned from the Ionians) it was obvious that mathematics provided a field in which the human mind was completely at home; a field in which clear and certain knowledge was attainable than in any other: far more than in the astronomical predictions or cosmological speculations of Ionia. This peculiarly clear and certain kind of knowledge was put by the Pythagoreans in quite a new but instantaneously convincing position on the map, as knowledge of the essence of things: not only of shapes which things may assume but of what gives them their peculiar properties and their difference from one another. Incidentally this gave a most powerful stimulus to mathematical studies; but its philosophical importance was still greater, as a declaration that the essence of things, what makes them what they are, is supremely intelligible.
Hence, when Socrates claimed that ethical concepts were even more intelligible than mathematical, and when he or his pupil, Plato, identified the ultimate nature of things with the concept of the good, the new movement of thought, though to some extent it diverted attention from mathematics, was philosophically no change at all, and that is why Aristotle looking back over the history of Greek thought, could describe Plato as a Pythagorean. For if form is essentially something that differentiates itself into a hierarchy of forms, it is not necessary to suppose that mathematical forms, infinite though they are in their own diversity, exhausts the whole of this hierarchy: there may be non-mathematical forms as well.
The brilliance of Pythagoras and his followers is measured to some extent by the enormous influence they had upon later philosophers and particularly upon Plato. There is much in Plato that first came to life in the teachings of Pythagoras, including the importance of the soul and its threefold division and the importance of mathematics as related to the concept of form and the Forms.
Plato
The Platonic Doctrine of Forms or Ideas
Plato’s theory of the "Forms" or "Ideas" represents his most significant philosophic contribution. However obscure and unsatisfactory that his theory may be to us, it gathers around itself the novel insights that lead Plato’s philosophy beyond anything that had been thought before him. Basically, the "Forms" or "Ideas" are those changeless, eternal and non-material essences or patterns of which the actual visible objects we see are only poor copies. There is the Form of the Triangle and all the triangles we see are mere copies of that Form. This tentative description of the Forms as non-material realities already indicates what was so novel about this Platonic doctrine. Whereas the Pre-Socratic philosophers thought of reality as material stuff of some sort, Plato now designated the non-material Ideas or Forms as the true reality. Similarly whereas the Sophists thought that all knowledge is relative because the material order, which is all they knew, is constantly sifting and changing, Plato argued that knowledge is absolute because the true object of thought is not the material order but the changeless and eternal order of the Ideas or Forms. Although Socrates anticipated this view by holding that there is an absolute Good, which makes possible our judgments of particular goods, Plato when beyond Socrates’ ethical concern by adding to the concept of Good a theory of metaphysics, an explanation of the whole structure of reality and the place of morality in it. Moreover, Plato had fashioned with this theory of Forms a novel explanation of the relation between the One and the Many, avoiding Parmenides’ conclusion that everything is One and Heraclitus’ conclusion that everything is in flux. He was aided by the Pythagorean concept of form as it derived from mathematics. In the end, however, Plato’s doctrine of Ideas was something new and became the central concept in all his philosophy.
The doctrine of Forms represents a serious attempt to explain the nature of existence. We had certain kinds of experiences that raise the question about existence for us. For example, we make judgments about things and behavior, saying about a thing that it is beautiful and about an act that it is good. This suggests that there is somewhere a standard of beauty, which is different from the thing we are judging, and that there is a standard of good, which is somehow separate from the person or his act that we judge. Moreover, visible things change – they come and go, generate and perish. Their existence is brief. Compared to things, Ideas such Good and Beautiful seem timeless. They have more "being" than things. Plato concluded, therefore, that the real world is not the visible world but rather the intelligible world. The intelligible world is most real said Plato because it consists of the eternal Forms. There are at least five questions that one might want to ask about the Forms. Although they cannot be answered with precision, the replies to them that are found in his various writings will provide us with Plato’s general theory of the Forms.
What are the Forms?
We have already suggested Plato’s answer to this question by saying that the Forms are eternal patterns of which the objects that we see are only copies. A beautiful person is a copy of Beauty. We can say about a person that she is beautiful because we know the Idea of Beauty and recognize that person shares more or less in this Idea. In his Symposium, Plato suggests that we normally apprehend beauty first of all in a particular object or person but having discovered beauty in this limited form, we soon "perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to another," and so we move from the beauty of a particular body to the recognition that beauty "in every form in one and the same." The effect of this discovery that all modes of beauty have some similarity is to loosen one’s attachment to the beautiful object and to move from the beautiful physical object to the concept of Beauty. When a person discovers this general quality of Beauty, says Plato, "he will abate his violent love of the one which he will … deem a small thing and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honorable than the beauty of outward form." Then, "drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions and boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere." Plato appears to be saying that beautiful things in their multiplicity point toward a Beauty from which everything else derives its beauty. But this Beauty is not merely a concept: Beauty has objective reality. Beauty is a Form or Idea. Things become beautiful: but Beauty always is. Accordingly, Beauty has a separate existence from those changing things which move in and out of Beauty.
In the Republic, Plato shows that the true philosopher is concerned to know the essential nature of things. When we ask what is justice or beauty, he does not want examples of just and beautiful things. He wants to know what makes these things just and beautiful. The difference between opinion and knowledge is just this, that those who are at the level of opinion can recognize a just act but cannot tell you why it is just. They do not know the essence of Justice, which the particular act shares. Knowledge is now concerned simply with passing facts and appearances, with the realm of becoming. Knowledge seeks what truly is; its concern is with Being. What really is, what has Being, is the essential nature of things; these essences, such as Beauty and Goodness, which make it possible for us to judge things as good or beautiful, these are eternal Forms or Ideas.
It would seem that besides the Forms of Beauty and Goodness, there would be many other Forms. Plato speaks of the Ideal Bed of which the beds we see are mere copies. But this raises the question whether there are as many Forms as there are essences or essential natures. Although Plato is not sure that there are Ideas or Forms of dog, water, and other things, he indicates in the Parmenides that there are "certainly not" Ideas of mud and dirt. Clearly, if there were Forms behind all classification of things, there would have to be a duplicate world. These difficulties increase as one tries to specify how many and which Forms there are. Nevertheless, what Plato means by the Forms is clear enough, for he considers them to be the essential archetypes of things, having an eternal existence, apprehended by the mind and not the senses, for it is the mind that beholds "real existence, colorless, formless and intangible, visible only to the intelligence."
Where Do the Forms Exist?
If the Forms are truly real, if they embody Being, it would seem that they must be someplace. But how can the Forms, which are immaterial, have location? It could hardly be said that they are spatially located. Plato’s clearest suggestion on this problem is that the Forms are "separate" from concrete things, they exist "apart from" the things we see. To be "separate" or "apart from" must mean simply that the Forms have an independent existence; they persist even though particular things perish. Forms have no dimension, but the question of their location comes up as a consequence of our language, which implies that Forms, being something, must be someplace in space. It may be that nothing more can be said about their location than the fact that the Forms have an independent existence. But there are two additional ways in which this is emphasized by Plato. For one thing, in connection with his theory of the preexistence of the soul, he says that the human soul was acquainted with the Forms before it was united with the body. Secondly, in the process of creation, the Demiurge or god used the Forms in fashioning particular things, suggesting that the Forms had an existence prior to their embodiment in things. Furthermore, these Forms seem to have originally existed in the "mind of God" or in the supreme principle of rationality, the One. Aristotle says in his Metaphysics that "the Forms are the cause of the essence of all other things, and the one is the cause of the Forms." Just as the sun in the allegory of the Cave was once the source of light and life, so also, said Plato, the Idea of the Good is "the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this world, and the source of truth and reason in the other." Whether the Forms truly exist in the mind of God is a question, but that the Forms are the agency through which the principle of reason operates in the universe seems to be just what Plato means.
What is the Relation of Forms to Things?
A Form can be related to a thing in three ways, which may be three ways of saying the same thing. First, the Form is the cause of the essence of a thing. Next, a thing may be said to participate in a Form. And, finally, a thing may be said to imitate or copy a Form. In each case, Plato implies that although the Form is separate from the thing, that the Idea of Man is different from Socrates, still, every concrete or actual thing in some way owes its existence to a Form, in some degree participates in the perfect model of the class of which it is a member, and is in some measure an imitation or copy of the Form. Later on, Aristotle was to argue that form and matter are inseparable and that the only real good or beautiful was found in actual things. But Plato would only allow participation and imitation as the explanation of the relation between things and their Forms. He accentuated this view by saying that it was the Forms through which order was brought into the chaos, indicating the separate reality of form and matter. Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s view seems formidable, since there seems to be no coherent way of accounting for the existence of the Forms apart from actual things. Still, Plato would ask him what makes it possible to form a judgment about the imperfection of something if the mind does not have access to anything more than the imperfect thing.
What is the Relation of Forms to Each Other?
Plato says that "we can have discourse only through the weaving together of Forms." Thinking and discussion proceed for the most part on a level above particular things. We speak in terms of the essences or universals that things illustrate, so we speak of queens, dog s, and carpenters. These are definitions of things and as such are universals or Forms. To be sure, we also refer to specific things in our experiences, such as dark and beautiful and person, but our language reveals our practice of connecting Forms with Forms. There is the Form Animal and such subclasses of Forms as Man and Horse. Forms are, therefore, related to each other as genus and species. In this way Forms tend to interlock even when retaining their own unity. The Form Animal seems to be present also in the Form Horse, so that one Form partakes of the other. There is therefore a hierarchy of Forms representing the structure of reality, of which the visible world is only a reflection. The "lower" one comes in this hierarchy of Forms, the closer one comes to visible things and therefore the less universal is one’s knowledge, as when one speaks of "red apples." Conversely, the higher one goes, or the more abstract the Form, as when one speaks of Apple in general, the broader one’s knowledge. The discourse of science is the most abstract, but for that very reason, because it has achieved such independence from particular cases and particular things, it possesses the highest form of knowledge. The botanist who has proceeded in knowledge from this rose to Rose and to Flower has achieved the kind of abstraction or independence from particulars of which Plato was here thinking. This does not mean, however, that Plato thought that all Forms could be related to each other; he only meant to say that every significant statement involves the use of some Forms and that knowledge consists of understanding the relations of the appropriate Forms to each other.
How Do We Know the Forms?
Plato indicates at least three different ways in which the mind discovers the Forms. First, there is recollection: before it was united with the body, the soul was acquainted with the Forms. People now recollect what their souls knew in their prior state of existence. Visible things remind them of the essences previously known. Education is actually a process of reminiscence. Second, people arrive at the knowledge of the Forms through the activity of dialectic, which is the power of abstracting the essence of things and discovering the relations of all divisions of knowledge to each other. And third, there is the power of desire, love (eros), which leads people step by step, as Plato described in the Symposium, from the beautiful object to the beautiful thought and then to the very essence of Beauty itself.
The doctrine of Forms leaves many questions as well as problems. Plato’s language gives the impression that there are two distinct worlds, but the relationship of these worlds is not easily conceived. Nor is the relation between Forms and their corresponding objects as clear as one would wish. Still, his argument is highly suggestive, particularly as he seeks to account for our ability to make judgments of value. To say a thing is better or worse implies some standard, which obviously is not there as such in the thing being evaluated. The doctrine of the Forms also makes possible scientific knowledge, for clearly the scientist has let go of actual visible particulars and deals with essences or universals, that is, with "laws." The scientist formulates "laws" and these laws tell us something about all things, not only the immediate and particular things. Although this whole doctrine of the Forms rests upon Plato’s metaphysical views, that ultimate reality is non-material, it goes a long way toward explaining the more simple fact of how it is possible for us to have ordinary conversation. Any discourse between human beings, it would seem, illustrates our independence from particular things. Conversation, Plato would say, is the clue that leads us to the Forms, for conversation involves more than seeing. The eye can see only the particular thing, but the thinking that animates conversation departs from specific things as thought "sees" the universal, the Form. There is in the end a stubborn lure in Plato’s theory, even though it ends inconclusively.
Plato’s View of the Cosmos
Although Plato’s most consistent thought is centered around moral and political philosophy, he also turned his attention to science. His theory of nature, or physics, is found mainly in the Timaeus, a dialogue that he wrote when he was about seventy years old. Plato had not deliberately postponed this subject, nor had he chosen to deal with moral matters instead of promoting the advancement of science. On the contrary the science of his day had reached a blind alley, and there seemed to be no fruitful direction to take in this field. Earlier, according to Plato, Socrates had had "a prodigious desire to know that department of philosophy which is called the investigation of nature; to know the causes of things …" but he was disillusioned by the conflicting answers and theories put forward by Anaximander, Anaximenes, Leucippus and Democritus, and others. Plato shared this same disappointment. Moreover, as his own philosophy took shape, some of his theories about reality cast doubt upon the possibility of a strictly accurate scientific knowledge. Physics, he thought, could never be more than "a likely story." It was particularly his theory of the Forms that rendered science as an exact mode of knowledge impossible. The real world, he said, is the world of Forms, whereas the visible world is full of change and imperfection. Yet, it is about the visible world of things that science seeks to build its theories. How can one formulate accurate, reliable, and permanent knowledge about a subject matter which is itself imperfect and full of change? At the same time, Plato clearly felt that his theory of Forms or Ideas as well as his notions of morality, evil, and truth required that he provide some view of the cosmos in which all these elements of his thought could be brought together in a coherent way. Recognizing, then, that his account of the real world was only "a likely story," or at best probable knowledge, he nevertheless was convinced that what he had to say about the world was as accurate as the subject matter would allow.
Plato’s first thought about the world is that, though it is full of change and imperfection, it nevertheless exhibits order and purpose. He rejected the explanation given by Democritus, who had argued that all things came into being through the accidental collision of atoms. When Plato considered the orbits of the planets he observed that they were arranged according to a precise series of geometrical intervals, which, when appropriately calculated, produced the basis for the harmonic scale. Plato made much of the Pythagorean use of mathematics in describing the world, though instead of saying, as the Pythagoreans did, that things are numbers, he said that things participate in numbers, that they are capable of a mathematical explanation. This mathematical characteristic of things suggested to Plato that behind things there must be not merely chance and subsequent mechanism but rather thought and purpose. The cosmos must therefore be the work of "intelligence," since it is the mind that orders all things. Humanity and the world bear a likeness to each other, for both contained first an intelligible and eternal element, and second, a sensible and perishing element. This dualism is expressed by the union of soul and body. Similarly, the world is a soul in which things as we know them are arranged.
Although Plato said that "mind" orders everything, he did not develop a doctrine of creation. The doctrine of creation holds that things are created ex nihilo, out of nothing. But Plato’s explanation of the origin of the visible world bypasses this doctrine of creation. Although Plato does say that "that which becomes must necessarily become through the agency of some cause," this agent, which he calls the divine Craftsman or Demiurge, does not bring new things into being but rather confronts and orders what already exists in chaotic form. We have, then, a picture of the Craftsman with the material upon which he would work. Thus, in explaining the generation of things as we know them in the visible world, Plato assumes the existence of all the ingredients of things, namely, that out of which things are made, the Demiurge who is the Craftsman, and the Ideas or Forms or "patterns" after which things are made.
Plato departed from the materialists who thought that all things derived from some original kind of matter, whether in the form of earth, air, fire, or water. Plato did not accept the notion that matter was the basic reality; matter itself, said Plato, must be explained in more refined terms as the composition not of some finer forms of matter but of something other than matter. What we call matter, whether in the form of earth or water, is a reflection of an Idea or Form, and these Forms are expressed through a medium. Things are generated out of what Plato calls the "receptacle," which he considered the "nurse of all becoming." The receptacle is a "matrix" or a medium that has no structure but that is capable of receiving the imposition of structure by the Demiurge. Another word Plato uses for the "receptacle" is "space," which he says, "is everlasting, not admitting destruction; providing a situation for all things that come into being, but itself apprehended without the senses by a sort of bastard reasoning, and hardly an object of belief." There is no explanation of the origin of the receptacle, for in Plato’s thought it is underived, as are the Forms and the Demiurge. The receptacle is where things appear and perish.
To an unreflective person, earth and water may appear as solid and permanent modes of matter. But Plato said that they are constantly changing and that therefore do not hold still long enough "to be described as this or that or by any phrase that exhibits them as having permanent being." What the senses consider "matter" or "substance" when they apprehend the elements of earth and water are only qualities, which appear through the medium of the receptacle, "in which all of them are always coming to be, making their appearance and vanishing out of it." Material objects are composed of non-material compounds. Here Plato is again influenced by the Pythagorean perspective when he argues that solid objects of matter are described and defined in geometrical terms according to their surfaces. Any surface, he said, can be resolved by triangles, and, in turn, any triangle can be divided into right triangles. These shapes, these triangular surfaces, are irreducible and must therefore be the ingredients of the compound known as matter. The simplest solid, for example, would be a pyramid that consists of four triangular surfaces. Similarly, a cube could be made of six square surfaces, where each square surface is composed of two half squares, that is, two triangles. What we normally call "solid" never contains anything more than "surfaces," so that one can say that "body" or "molecules" are geometric figures. Indeed, the whole universe could be thought of in terms of its geometrical diagram – and could be defined simply as what is happening in space or as space reflecting various forms. What Plato wanted particularly to establish was the notion that matter is only the appearance of something more basic.
If various kinds of triangles represent the basic constituents of all things, how can one account for the variations in things as well as their stability? What, in short, makes it possible to have the kind of world and universe that we know? Here again Plato was forced to assume that all things must be ordered by the mind, and the cosmos is the activity of the World Soul in the receptacle. The world of things is the world of phenomena which is the Greek word for appearances. What is presented to our perceptions is the multitude of appearances, which, when analyzed, are found to consist of geometric surfaces. These surfaces, again, are primary and irreducible and are found as "raw material" in the receptacle and require some organizing agency to arrange them into triangles and then into phenomena. All this activity is achieved by the World Soul. The World Soul is eternal, though at times Plato appears to say that it is the creation of the Demiurge. Although the World Soul is eternal, the world of appearance is full of change, just as in humans the soul represents the eternal element whereas the body contains the principle of change. The world of matter and body changes because it is composite and always tends to return to its basic constituents, "going into" and "going out of" space. But insofar as the World Soul is eternal, there is, in spite of all the change in the world of our experience, an element of stability and permanence, a structure, a discernible universe. Space, in the Timaeus, corresponds to no feature of the intelligible world. Space is simply that out of which the copy is made; it is like the sculptor’s clay. The argument of the Timaeus contains no attempt at a deduction of space. Just as the Ionians started their cosmogony from the assertion of matter as a given fact, or rather the assertion of matter and space as two given facts, insofar as they held matter to be capable of condensation and rarefaction, so the Timaeus begins its cosmogony with space or with matter, for matter and space are not at this stage differentiated. The Timaeus does not eliminate matter, it identifies it with space as the receptacle of forms, and presupposes it. When we say that space is presupposed and not deduced what we mean can be stated in the language of the Timaeus by saying that no attempt is made in the dialogue to show that God "made" space.
Finally, there is the question about "time." According to Plato, time comes to be only after phenomena are produced. Not until there are things as we know them, as imperfect and changing, can there be time. Until then, by definition, whatever is, is eternal. The very meaning of time is change, and therefore in the absence of change there could be no time. Whereas the Forms are timeless, the various copies of them in the receptacle constantly "go in" and "go out," and this going in and out is the process of change, which is the cause of time. Still, time represents the double presence in the cosmos of time and eternity; since the cosmos is ordered by mind, it contains the element of eternity, and since the cosmos consists of temporary combinations of surfaces, it contains the element of change and time. And since change is not capricious but regular, the very process of change exhibits the presence of eternal mind. This regularity of change, as exhibited, for example, by the regular change or motion of the stars or planets, makes possible the measurement of change and makes it possible to "tell time."
Plato’s "likely story" about the cosmos consisted, then, of an account of how the Demiurge fashioned things out of the receptacle, using the Forms as patterns. The World Soul is produced by the Demiurge and is the energizing activity in the receptacle, producing what to us appears to be substance or solid matter though in reality is only qualities caused by the arrangement of geometric surfaces. Evil and time are, in this account, the product of imperfection and change. The world as we know it depends upon an agency and "raw material" that are not found in the physical world as we know it, this agency being mind, and the raw material being explained chiefly in terms of mathematics.
At this point one would wish to engage in a sustained and critical appraisal of Plato’s system of philosophy. But in a sense, the history of philosophy represents just such a large scale dialogue, where thinkers arise to agree and disagree with what he taught. So powerful were his ideas that for centuries to come his views dominated the enterprise of philosophy. Indeed, Whitehead once remarked that "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Many of these footnotes were written by Plato’s successor, Aristotle, to whom we now turn.
Aristotle
Metaphysics
In his work called Metaphysics Aristotle develops what is called the science of first philosophy. Throughout his Metaphysics he is concerned with a type of knowledge that he thought could be most rightly called wisdom. This work begins with the statement that "All men by nature desire to know." This innate desire, says Aristotle, is not only a desire to know in order to do or make something. In addition to these pragmatic motives, there is in a person a desire to know certain kinds of things simply for the sake of knowing. An indication of this, says Aristotle, is "the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves" because as our seeing "makes us know and brings to light many differences between things."
There are different levels of knowledge. Some people know only what they experience through their senses, as, for example, when they know that fire is hot. But, says Aristotle, we do not regard that we know through the senses as wisdom. To be sure, our most authoritative knowledge of particular things is acquired through our senses. Still, this kind of knowledge tells us only the "that" of anything and not the "why"; it tells us, for example, that fire is hot but not why. Similarly, in medicine, some men know only that medicine heals certain illnesses. This knowledge, based upon specific experiences, is, according to Aristotle, on a lower level than the knowledge of the medical scientist who knows not only "that" a medicine will heal but also know the reason "why." In the various crafts, the master craftsmen "know in a truer sense and are wiser than the manual workers, because they know the causes of the things that are done."
Wisdom is, therefore, more than that kind of knowledge obtained from sensing objects and their qualities. It is even more than knowledge acquired from repeated experiences of the same kinds of things. Wisdom is similar to the knowledge possessed by the scientists who begin by looking at something, then repeat these sense experiences, and finally go beyond sense experience by thinking about the causes of the objects of their experiences. There are as many sciences as there are definable areas of investigation, and Aristotle deals with many of them including physics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. In each case, the respective science is concerned with discovering the causes or reasons or principles underlying the activity of its special subject matter; thus, for example, in physics one asks what causes material bodies to move, in ethics what causes the good life, in politics what causes the good state, and in aesthetics what causes a good poem. Sciences differ not only in their subject matter but also in their relation to each other. Some sciences depend upon others, as when the physicist must rely upon the science of mathematics. In the hierarchy of sciences, Aristotle says that "the science which knows to what end each thing must be done is the most authoritative of the sciences, and more authoritative than any ancillary science." In addition to the specific sciences, then, there is another science, first philosophy, or what we now call metaphysics, which goes beyond the subject matter of the other sciences and is concerned with "first principles and causes." These "first principles and causes" are the true foundation of wisdom, for they give us knowledge not of any particular object or activity, but rather knowledge of true reality.
Metaphysics deals with knowledge at the highest level of abstraction. This knowledge is abstract because it is about what is universal instead of what is particular. Every science has its own level of abstraction inasmuch as it deals with the first principles and causes of its subject matter, as when the physicist talks about the principles of motion in general as distinguished from describing the motion of this planet or that pendulum. Wisdom has to do, then, with the abstract levels of knowledge and not with the levels of visible things, for, as Aristotle says, "sense-perception" is common to all, and therefore easy and no mark of "Wisdom." True wisdom, first philosophy, or metaphysics is the most abstract and also the most exact of all the sciences because it tries to discover the truly first principles from which even the first principles of the various sciences are derived. True knowledge is therefore found in what is most knowable, and, says Aristotle, "the first principles and the causes are most knowable … and from these, all other things come to be known …" We are lead, then, to consider more specifically the subject matter of metaphysics.
The Problem of Metaphysics Defined
The various sciences seek to find the first principles and causes of specific kinds of things, such as material bodies, the human body, the state, a poem, and so on. Unlike these sciences, which ask "what is such and such a thing like and why?" metaphysics asks a far more general question, a question which each science must ultimately take into account, namely, "what does it mean to be anything whatsoever?" What, in short, does it mean to be? It was precisely this question that concerned Aristotle in his Metaphysics, making metaphysics for him "the science of any existent, as existent" (in other words, being as being). The problem of metaphysics as he saw it was therefore the study of Being and its "principles" and "causes."
Aristotle’s metaphysics was to a considerable extent an outgrowth of his views on logic and his interest in biology. From the viewpoint of his logic, "to be" meant for him to be something that could be accurately defined and that could therefore become the subject of discourse. From the point of view of his interests in biology, he was disposed to think of "to be" as something implicated in a dynamic process. "To be," as Aristotle saw the matter, always meant to be something. Hence, all existence is individual and has a determinate nature. All the categories Aristotle dealt with in his logical works, categories (or predicates) such as quality, relation, posture, and place, and so on, presuppose some subject to which these predicates can apply. This subject to which all the categories apply Aristotle called substance (ousia). "To be," then, is to be a particular kind of substance. Also, "to be" means to be a substance as the product of a dynamic process. In this way, metaphysics is concerned with "Being" (that is, existing substances) and its "causes" (that is, the processes by which substances come into being.)
Substance as the Primary Essence of Things
A major clue to what Aristotle means by substance is discovered, he thought, in the way we know a thing. Having in mind again the categories or predicates, Aristotle says that we know a thing better when we know what it is than when we know the color, size, or posture it has. The mind separates a thing from all its qualities and focuses upon what a thing really is, upon its "essential nature." We recognize that all humans are human in spite of their different sizes, colors, or ages. Something about each concretely different person makes him or her a person in spite of the unique characteristics that make him or her this particular person. At this point, Aristotle would readily agree that these special characteristics (categories, predicates) also exists, have some kind of being. But the being of these characteristics is not the central object of metaphysical inquiry (that is the subject of empirical science.) The central concern of metaphysics is the study of substance, the essential nature of a thing. In this view, substance means "that which is not asserted of a subject but of which everything else is asserted." Substance, that is, is what we know as basic about something, after which we can say other things about it. Whenever we define something, we get at its essence before we can say anything about it, as when we speak of a large table or a healthy person. Here table and person are understood in their "essence," in what makes them a table or a person, before they are understood as large or healthy. To be sure, we can know only specific and determinate things, actual individual persons or tables. At the same time, the essence, or substance of a table or a person has its existence peculiarly separate from its categories or its qualities. This does not mean that a substance is ever in fact found existing separately from its qualities. Still, if we can know the essence of a thing, "tableness" let us say, as "separable" from these particular qualities, round, small, and brown, there must be some universal essence that is found whenever one sees a table; and this essence or substance must be independent of its particular qualities inasmuch as the essence is the same even though in the case of each actual table the qualities are different. What Aristotle seems to be saying is that a thing is more than the sum of its particular qualities. There is something "beneath" (sub stance) all the qualities; thus, any specific thing is a combination of qualities, on the one hand, and a substratum to which the qualities apply on the other. With these distinctions in mind, Aristotle was lead, as was Plato before him, to consider just how this essence, or universal, was related to the particular thing. What, in short, makes a substance a substance; is it "matter" as a substratum or is it "form?"
Matter and Form
Although Aristotle distinguished between "matter" and "form," he nevertheless said that we never find matter without form or form without matter in nature. Everything that exists is some concrete individual thing, and every "thing" is a unity of matter and form. Substance, therefore, is a composite of form and matter. Plato, it will be recalled, argued that Ideas or Forms, such as Man or Table, had a separate existence. Similarly, he treated "space" as the material substratum, or the stuff out of which individual things were made. For Plato, then, this primary stuff of space was molded by the eternally existing forms into individual shapes. This was Plato’s way of explaining how there could be many individual things that all have one and the same, that is, universal, nature or essence while still being individual. This universal, Plato said, is the Form, which exists eternally and is separate from any particular thing and is found in each thing only because the thing (this table) participates in the Form (tableness, or Ideal Table.) Aristotle rejected Plato’s explanation of the universal Forms, rejecting specifically the notion that the Forms existed separately from individual things. Of course, Aristotle did agree that there are universals, that universals such as Man and Table are more than merely subjective notions. Indeed, Aristotle recognized that without the theory of universals, there could be no scientific knowledge, for then there would be no way of saying something about all members of a particular class. What makes scientific knowledge effective is that it discovers classes of objects (for example, a certain form of human disease), so that whenever an individual falls into this class, other facts can be assumed also to be relevant. These classes, then, are not merely mental fictions but do in fact have objective reality. But, said Aristotle, their reality is to be found not anywhere else than in the individual things themselves. What purpose, he asked, could be served by assuming that the universal Forms existed separately? If anything, this would complicate matters, inasmuch as everything, that is, not only individual things but also their relationships, would have to be reduplicated in the world of Forms. Moreover, Aristotle was not convinced that Plato’s theory of Forms could help us know things any better, saying that "they help in no wise towards the knowledge of other things …" Since presumably the Forms are motionless, Aristotle concluded that they could not help us understand things as we know them which are full of motion, nor could they, being immaterial, explain objects of which we have sense impressions. Again, how could the immaterial Forms be related to any particular thing? That things participate in the Forms was not a satisfactory explanation for Aristotle, leading him to conclude that "to say that they are patterns and that other things share in them, is to use empty words and poetical metaphors."
When we use the words "matter" and "form" to describe any specific thing, we seem to have in mind the distinction between what something is made of and what it is made into. This, again, disposes our minds to assume that what things are made of, matter, exists in some primary and unformed state until it is made into a thing. But, again, that we shall not find anywhere such a thing as "primary matter," that is, matter without form. Consider the sculptor who is about to make a statue of Venus out of marble. He or she will never find marble without some form; it will always be this marble or that, a square piece or an irregular one, that he or she will always work with a piece in which form and matter are already combined. That the sculptor will give it a different form is another question. The question here is, how does one thing become another thing? What, in short, is the nature of "change?"
The Process of Change; The Four Causes
In the world around us we see things constantly changing. Change is one of the basic facts of our experience. For Aristotle, the word "change" means many things, including motion, growth, decay, generation, and corruption. Some of these changes are natural, whereas others are to be products of human art. Things are always taking on new forms; new life is born and statues are made. Because change always involves taking on new form, several questions can be asked concerning the process of change. Of anything, says Aristotle, we can ask four questions, namely (1) what is it? (2) what is it made of ? (3) by what is it made? (4) for what end is it made? The four responses to these questions represent Aristotle’s four "causes." Although the word cause refers in modern use primarily to an event prior to an effect for Aristotle it meant an explanation. His four causes represent therefore a broad pattern or framework for the total explanation of anything or everything. Taking an object of art, for example, the four causes might be (1) a statue (2) of marble (3) by a sculptor (4) for a decoration. Distinguished from objects produced by human art, there are those things which are produced "by nature." Although nature does not, according to Aristotle, have "purposes" in the sense of "the reason for," it does always and everywhere have "ends" in the sense of having built in ways of behaving. For this reason, seeds sprout and roots go down (not up) and plants grow and, in this process of change, move towards their "end," that is, their distinctive function or way of being. In nature, then, change will involve these same four elements. Aristotle’s four causes are therefore (1) the formal cause, which determines what a thing is, (2) the material cause, or that out of which it is made, (3) the efficient cause, by what a thing is made, and (4) the final cause, the "end" for which it was made.
Aristotle looked at life through the eyes of a biologist. For him, nature is life. All things are in motion, in the process of becoming and dying away. The process of reproduction was for Aristotle a clear example of the power inherent in all living things to initiate change and to reproduce their kind. Summarizing his causes, Aristotle said that "all things that come to be come to be by some agency and from something, and come to be something." From this biological viewpoint, Aristotle was able to elaborate the notion that form and matter never exist separately. In nature, generation of new life involves, according to Aristotle, first of all an individual who already possesses the specific form which the offspring will have (the male parent); there must then be the matter capable of being the vehicle for this form (this matter being contributed by the female parent); from this comes a new individual with the same specific form. In this example, Aristotle indicates that change does not involve bringing together formless matter with matterless form. On the contrary, change occurs always in and to something that is already a combination of form and matter and that is on its way to becoming something new or different.
Potentiality and Actuality
All things, said Aristotle, are involved in processes of change. Each thing possesses a power to become what its form has set as its end. There is in all things a dynamic power of striving toward their "end." Some of this striving is toward external objects as when a person builds a house. But there is also the striving to achieve ends that pertain to one’s internal nature, as when one fulfills one’s nature as a human being by the act of thinking. This self contained end of anything Aristotle called its entelechy. All things have their own entelechy.
That things have ends lead Aristotle to consider the distinction between potentiality and actuality. This distinction is used by Aristotle to explain the processes of change and development. If the "end" of an acorn is to be a tree, in some way the acorn is only potentially a tree but not actually so at this time. A fundamental mode of change, then, is the change from potentiality to actuality. But the chief significance of this distinction is that Aristotle argues for the priority of actuality over potentiality. That is, although something actual emerges from the potential, there could be no movement from potential to actual if there were not first of all something actual. A child is potentially an adult, but before there could be a child with that potentiality there had to be an actual adult. All things in nature are similar to the relation of child to adult, or an acorn to a tree, Aristotle was lead to see in nature different levels of being. If everything were involved in change, in generation and corruption, everything would partake of potentiality. But, as we have seen, for there to be something potential, there must be already something actual. To explain the existence of the world of potential things, Aristotle thought it was necessary to presuppose the existence of some actuality at a level above potential or perishing things. This lead to the notion of a Being that is pure actuality without any potentiality, at the highest level of being. Since change is a kind of motion, Aristotle saw the visible world as one composed of things in motion. But motion, a mode of change, involves potentiality. Things are potentially in motion but must be moved by something that is actually in motion. Again, to explain motion ultimately led Aristotle to speak of the Unmoved Mover.
Unmoved Mover
For Aristotle the Unmoved Mover does not mean the same thing as a first mover, as though motion could be traced back to a time when motion began. Nor was the Unmoved Mover considered by him a creator in the sense of later theology. From his previous distinction between potentiality and actuality, Aristotle concluded that the only way to explain how motion or change can occur is to assume that something actual is logically prior to whatever is potential. The fact of change must imply the existence of something actual, something purely actual without any mixture of potentiality. This "Mover" is not, according to Aristotle, an efficient cause in the sense of exerting a power of force, or as expressing will. Such acts would imply potentiality as when one says that God "willed" to create the world. This would mean that before God created the world, he was potentially capable or intended to create it.
Aristotle did not think of the Unmoved Mover as a Being that thinks or prescribes purposes for the world. In a sense, the Unmoved Mover does not know anything precisely because it is not a kind of being as much as it is a way of explaining the fact of motion. All of nature is full of striving toward fulfilling all of its particular entelechies. Each thing is aiming at perfecting its possibilities and its end, that is, at becoming the perfect tree, the perfectly good person, and so on. The aggregate of all these strivings constitutes the large-scale processes of the world order so that it can be said that all of reality is in the process of change, moving from its potentialities and possibilities to the ultimate perfection of these potentialities. To explain this comprehensive or general motion, to make it intelligible, Aristotle referred to the Unmoved Mover as the "reason for" or the "principle of" motion. For this reason, the Unmoved Mover stood for the actual, and because there is here no potentiality, the eternal principle of motion. Since this explanation of motion implies an eternal activity, then, there was never a "time" when there was not a world of things in process. For this reason, too, Aristotle denied that there was a "creation" in time. Although there are passages in Aristotle that have a distinctly religious and theistic flavor, the dominant mood of his thought on this matter is less religious than it is scientific. Still, to speak of an Unmoved Mover involved Aristotle in certain metaphorical language. In explaining how an Unmoved Mover can "cause" motion, he compared it to a beloved who "moves" the lover just by being the object of love, by the power of attraction and not by force. In a more technical way, Aristotle considered the Unmoved Mover as the form and the world as the substance. From the point of view of his four causes, Aristotle considered the Mover as the final cause, in the way that the form of the adult is in the child, directing the motion of change toward a final, that is, fixed or appropriate, natural end. By being a final cause, the Unmoved Mover, thereby, in relation to the world becomes also an efficient cause, through the power of attraction, by being desired and loved, by inspiring the striving toward natural ends, a process that goes on eternally. Hence, Aristotle says that whatever is pure actuality contains no matter. Thus, anything situated somewhere in space is material, because it might be somewhere else and still remain itself; but there is nothing that God might be and is not, for the things which he is not, for example, a stone, are things which he could not be without ceasing to be God; and hence, God is pure actuality and contains no matter. What in Aristotle’s thought was the unconscious principle of motion and immanent form of the world, the Unmoved Mover, became, especially at the hands of Aquinas in the Thirteenth Century the philosophical description of the God of Christianity. Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover could be said to be pure nous, and since it must think the best, it "thinks itself … and its thinking is a thinking of thinking … throughout all eternity." Such a "God" is not the religious God who becomes involved in the affairs of man. Aristotle’s "God" is immanent in the world, making the world an intelligible order.
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |