Did Aristotle Fail in Physics? Part 3

Premise A: Does an "organismic" world view cause a failure in physics?

Now I’ll finish Premise A. In Part 2, I covered the definitions for “physics” and “world view.” Again, here’s the argument from Part 1:

Premise A—>An organismic world view causes a failure in physics.
Premise B—>Aristotle held an organismic world view.
Therefore, Aristotle failed in physics.

Why Organismic?

According to Fr. Jaki, no world view should be imposed on physics. Let the numbers speak for themselves. What is at question here is specifically how an “organismic” world view thwarts physics. In my mind, this aims at getting underneath the relationship between science, philosophy, and theology, which is why I became interested in Jaki’s work in the first place. If we don’t impose a world view from theology or philosophy onto science, then how do those disciplines intersect? I’ll share my opinion at the end of this study, but first I need to finish reviewing Jaki’s teaching. The organismic question needs context.

Three World Views

In Relevance of Physics, Jaki names “three principal explanations of the universe” (4). These are 1) organismic, 2) mechanical, and 3) mathematical, also known as Aristotelian, Newtonian or classical, and quantum physics, respectively. In the first chapter, “The World as an Organism,” Jaki makes the case for Premise A, that an organismic world view specifically causes a failure in physics. He covers the mechanical and mathematical in the next two chapters.

An organismic world view is one in which the universe is viewed as a huge organism or explained in terms of organismic processes. This view of the world was not unreasonable for ancient man. Humans live surrounded by living plants and animals, so ancient thinkers would have conceived of the universe in a personalized way. Mythological accounts of nature are seen in Homer’s poetry and the Greek pantheon of gods responsible for various process in nature.

Ancient Mechanical and Mathematical World Views

Ancient Greece had its mechanical and mathematical world views too, just as we have them today. The Ionian pre-Socratic school of philosophy and the atomists, namely Leucippus who was the teacher of Democritus, could be called the precursors to Newtonian and quantum physics. Aristotle reviews his predecessors in Book I, Chapters 3-6 of Metaphysics because he was after an explanation of being that could both account for substance and changes to the substance that did not require it to be corrupted and regenerated with each change. (Think of how a baby grows and changes but remains the same person.)

The Ionian philosophers, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes sought natural explanations instead of the mythological descriptions of their predecessors. They attributed the source of all things to material causes. For them, everything comes into and out of being from matter. We would call this materialism today.

Thales said that water was the underlying element of all things since it is the source of fluids and life depends on water. Thales was building on the belief of ancient thinkers who held that the ocean was a god, the parent of what comes into being, but he wanted to avoid invoking gods and was in favor of natural explanations. Anaximenes and Diogenes thought air was the origin of other elements. Hippasus of Metapontum and Heracleitus of Ephesus thought it was fire. Empedocles thought earth was the primary substance. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae thought the sources of origin were everlasting, with the other elements coming into and out of being. This inquiry into material causes, Aristotle maintains in Metaphysics, led to an inquiry into causes beyond material. He wanted to know why being comes into and out of existence among the elements. So, now we are beyond materialism.

Aristotle credits Hesiod and Parmenides for first addressing the bigger question of being. Hesiod thought love or desire is the source of being, of moving the elements and drawing them together. Empedocles hinted at the idea that both bad and good are sources of being and that the Good itself is the cause of all good things. Empedocles used concepts like friendship and strife to explain how the elements gave rise to being and disassemble back out of being. Aristotle acknowledges that Empedocles is among the first to notice the difference in material causes and formal and final causes.

Leucippus and Democritus are, of course, known for their ideas about atomism. High school and college students still read about them today in their chemistry textbooks. The atomists identified the fundamental elements as the full and the void, i.e., being and non-being respectively. Although they thought beings are aggregates of atoms, and atoms the only true substances, they nevertheless spoke of design and structure, which points beyond material causes to form.

The Pythagoreans were the first to posit that mathematical things are the source of all other things, going even further beyond matter. They attributed numbers to the elements fire, earth, and water and attributed numbers to soul, intellect, and harmony in nature and in heaven. Plato thought forms were completely separate from matter. Whereas the Pythagoreans saw being as an imitation of numbers, Plato described how sensible things participate in being through forms. But this took the philosophy of nature too far beyond matter. Aristotle sought a balance.

Aristotle’s Four Causes

Aristotle found each these views incomplete because none of them explain how beings come into and out of existence or how things change while remaining the same (again, growing child). He searched for a better understanding of the cause of change. In his previous work, Physics, Book II, Chapters 1-3, Aristotle names four causes: material, efficient, formal, and final. (Note: he also reviews the opinions of predecessors in Physics, but I prefer his summary in Metaphysics.)

Material things that exist in the world are known to us as matter and form composites. Everything we study in nature has a form and is made of matter, and these are said to be the formal and material causes.

The matter-form composite is in potency to change or generate something else, either an accident or a new substance. The coming to be is “act.” Something cannot cause itself to exist before it exists; therefore, for Aristotle, a substance cannot generate itself. His primary meaning of “potency” is that it is a source of motion or change. Since a thing cannot generate itself, an agent is necessary for the form to pass from potency to act. This agent is the efficient cause.

In generating artifacts (artificial things), such as a bronze statue, a human intends the form bestowed on the matter that can receive the form. In generating natural beings, Aristotle says nature intends the form, which is to say in Aristotelian terms that natural beings tend toward their naturally determined ends. This is the final cause. Not all things need to intend their end, just as a dog does not need to exercise an intellect to think about barking; the dog’s nature is to bark. Natural agents, therefore, have determined actions even in the absence of choice.

To put the causes all together, the final cause is the reason the efficient cause acts on the material cause to move it to its form. Aristotle thought that to really understand a thing, you must know its four causes. What is it made of? What made it? What is its form? What is its end or purpose?

The world views of Aristotle’s predecessors were incomplete because they did not include a consideration of all four causes. The Ionians and atomists considered material and efficient cause to the exclusion of formal and final cause. The Pythagoreans and Platonists considered formal and final cause to the exclusion of material and efficient cause. There are nuances, but that is the basic division.

But Aristotle Went Too Far?

Yes, that is Jaki’s contention. In Relevance of Physics, Jaki deals with the “organismic physics” of ancient Greece, crediting Aristotle predominantly for depicting the world as a huge organism (13-35). In trying to compensate for the errors of his predecessors, Aristotle took final causality as the main cause from which to understand nature, and in doing so he cast nature as a living thing. This was more intuitive than mythical, mechanical, or mathematical views.

Aristotle was Plato’s student. Jaki says that for all the student’s criticism of his master, Aristotle “remained a faithful disciple concerning the primacy of final causes in the art of explanation” (Science & Creation, 104). The final end, or purpose, for living things is apparent. Seeds become trees. Animals seek food. Humans seek what is good. However, the primacy of final causes meant interpreting the motion of inanimate object (physics) in biological terms as well, such that Aristotle tried to reduce physics to biology.

Jaki quotes the Timaeus, one of Plato’s dialogues, about the nature of the physical world (30c): “In the likeness of what animal did the creator make the world?” Plato clearly saw the world as an organism, and it seems Aristotle did too.

One objection that I hear from Thomists today is that Aristotle did not think the world is a huge organism, that he knew living things have souls (vegetative, sensate, and rational) while non-living things do not, but a response to that objection will need to wait until Premise B.

For now, I want to focus on Premise A, why an organismic world view causes a failure in physics. The main goal of organismic physics is to find out the volitions of both living things and inanimate objects alike. Such a world view treats everything in nature, from plants and animals to elements, weather, stones, and stars, as undergoing the same kinds of processes and change. In an organismic world view, every kind of process is described in biological terms.

The overlay of this world view onto the physical world led to generalizations that were not based on observation or experiment. The imposed world view was a priori. Where the bedrock of intelligibility for other incomplete views is various gods, matter, or math, the hallmark of intelligibility in an organismic world view is the organism, a living thing with a body whose parts all work together as a whole. Aristotle found Ionian, atomistic, and Platonic view incomplete because they did not treat wholes, instead viewing being as aggregates of elements. However, Aristotle seems to have violated his own principle to begin an inquiry into the nature of something with what can be observed, a posteriori. Aristotle was critical of the Ionians, atomists, Pythagoreans, and Platonists for claiming world views without demonstration of truth, but Aristotle seems unaware that he did it too. They all imposed a world view onto physics.

Explanations about natural processes were considered true if they matched what was known about living things. Extrapolations were made from the microcosmos of life on Earth to the macrocosmos of the universe, without data, “steadily moving away from reality” to a “subjective penetration of nature” in a world view that had “no place for measurements” or quantification of motion (Relevance, 31). Even though they had the intellectual capacity and the mathematical skills to apply infinitesimal calculus to natural motion and quantify it (see Part 2), Aristotle considered nature through a world view that led him to biological explanations rather than the quantitative ones of the statics and dynamics required for exact physics. Jaki gives specific examples in Aristotle’s writings, and those will be covered for Premise B in Part 4. This suffices to show that Premise A is true.

An organismic world view causes a failure in physics.

Sources

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. Joe Sachs (2019). Green Lion Press.

Aristotle. Physics. Trans. Joe Sachs (2004). Rutger’s University Press.

Jaki, S. L. (1966). Relevance of Physics. University of Chicago Press.

Jaki, S. L. (1986). Science and Creation: From eternal cycles to an oscillating universe. Scottish Academic Press.

Plato, Timaeus. In Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9. (1925). Trans. W.R.M. Lamb. Harvard University Press. 1925. I prefer this translation to the Hamilton-Cairns translation Jaki used. It reads: “In the semblance of which of the living Creatures did the Constructor of the cosmos construct it?”