Did Aristotle Fail in Physics? Part 8

Wrapping up. Was Jaki wrong about him? And WHY DO I CARE?

Here we are at the end of this little project-question-argument. I don’t know how normal philosophers conduct research, but for me diving into these questions is like scientific research. Pose a question that seems unanswered in the background literature. Decide how to answer it. Run tests (read and look up references), get data (things people write), and analyze what it means. My last seven posts were that. Was Fr. Jaki right to say Aristotle failed in physics? No one seems to have addressed the question in the same context Jaki asked it. I worked through Jaki’s writing, looked up all his reference, and read their contexts. While walking, cooking, or lying awake in bed I work on analysis, asking if I agree with Jaki, if he overstated something, if I would change anything, and if his points should affect how we understand Thomistic metaphysics today.

Review of the Argument and Context

Here’s the argument again from Part 1:

Premise A—>An organismic world view causes a failure in physics. (Parts 2, 3)
Premise B—>Aristotle held an organismic world view. (Parts 4, 5, 6, 7)
Therefore, Aristotle failed in physics. (Part 8)

Here is the full quote from Jaki’s Science and Creation:

A gain is hardly ever without some loss. The extraordinary feats of Aristotle in biology were in a sense responsible for his failure in physics. The cultivation of the study of many aspects of the living organism invited a methodology which took its start from the purposiveness of biological systems. The emphasis on goals and purposes served biology only too well throughout its long history, and is staunchly defended by prominent biologists even in the present age of molecular biology and operational method. But in the days of Aristotle the espousal of final causes was far more than a methodological expedience. The realm of final causes stood then for the bedrock of intelligibility. The result was that investigation of any realm, living or not, was not considered satisfactory without attributing, rightly or wrongly, purposes to processes and phenomena of every kind, ranging from the fall of stones to the motion of stars. (Jaki 1974, p. 104)

In this part of Science and Creation, Jaki explains that modern biology could have been born in ancient Greece to an extent. Since it turns out that biology is dependent on an understanding of chemistry and physics, biology would not have gotten far back then. Jaki’s point is that in Aristotle’s vast and successful observations of the natures of plants and animals, Aristotle erroneously extrapolated from the microcosmos of individual living things to the macrocosmos of the universe. He assumed the universe is organismic because organisms are systems. His descriptions of the physical world, both on Earth and in the heavens, were apriorisms, and almost all of them were scientifically wrong.

What perplexes me about Jaki’s statement is that in my philosophy studies there is great respect shown to Aristotle’s Physics, among other of his works, so much so that I had to learn all of the language about act and potency, substance, natural vs. artificial, form and matter. However, I still have not found a good account of how these metaphysical principles that fit the organismic view so well fit the data of modern science. Of course, Thomas Aquinas himself does not accept everything Aristotle posited, namely that the universe is eternally cycling. This is rejected because a beginning in time was divinely revealed in Scripture. But what about the idea that the universe is organismic in nature, acting like one big system of life? It seems Aquinas accepted that much. Should we?

My assessment after working through Jaki’s work is that viewing the universe as one big system is not contrary to either science or Catholic theology as long as we are thinking analogously and do not go so far as to call the universe an actual living, breathing organism. This conclusion, however, takes us to the threshold of the debate about whether the universe is a substance, since organisms are most properly substances in Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s view. I will pick up here later.

For now, the lesson is that we should not do what Aristotle did in conjuring up apriorisms without data. You could argue that Aristotle did think he had observational data. He repeatedly said that knowledge of nature begins with observation; that’s how he begins Physics. We start with what we can observe and is most obvious to us and work toward understanding what is more abstract, the path modern science indeed took and still takes. Aristotle did not mind his own rule, though. He clearly went beyond what can be observed to posit the four elements plus the fifth, aether, as making up the universe with only circular and rectilinear motion. And THAT is Jaki’s contention. Don’t do that. Okay.

Ultimately, Jaki’s advice and main teaching is that the Christian world view of creation is the only sane one. Viewing the world as God’s creation necessarily means that we study nature to understand what’s there. We do not impose a priori explanations sans data. Jaki does not just take issue with Aristotle. The entire program of Science and Creation is to criticize each ancient culture for various degrees of pantheism that in turn led them all to posit an eternally cycling cosmos. In the Relevance of Physics, Jaki’s overall point is to refute materialism and scientism so rampant today by showing historical instances where world views were overlaid onto scientific data and led to flawed conclusions without data, which is to say, they hindered progress in physics.

Worthless and Misleading?

But let me turn back to Aristotle before finishing this series and explain why I am interested in understanding his contributions. Recall from previous posts that almost all of Aristotle’s assessments of the physical world are found in On the Heavens, for the celestial, and Meteorologica, for the terrestrial.

In Relevance, Jaki quotes Sir Edmund Whittaker that Aristotle’s “natural philosophy was worthless and misleading from beginning to end” (1949, p. 46). Ouch! This accusation is common in modern science textbooks. I have come across it many times in my teaching and always address it. Whittaker laments that Aquinas rejected the “sound doctrines” of Aristotle’s materialist predecessors and framed a system of medieval thought on Aristotle instead. This (flawed) perception that Aristotle thwarted the rise of science is another reason for the divide between science and religion after the Middle Ages.

Whittaker’s book was the subject of the Tarner Lectures at Cambridge in 1947, and his purpose then was to give a philosophical history of the controversies in physics. His book was reviewed in scholarly journals, including Science journal, and no doubt influenced attitudes towards Aristotle. However, there is a modern revival of Thomistic thought in modern metaphysics as philosophers encounter all the weirdness of quantum mechanics. The general consensus is that we do not need to throw out Aristotle’s metaphysics even if he was so wrong about almost all of his physics — don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, as Jaki put it.

Jaki says in his 2002 autobiography, A Mind’s Matter, that like Aristotle he was trying to stake out a middle position between extremes of materialism and idealism. Jaki’s first three chapters in Relevance deal with world views, first the organismic, then the mechanical (materialism), then the mathematical (idealism). Jaki also saw Aristotle’s middle position as an extreme to avoid as well. He rejects all of three world views, leaving his reader to wonder what his world view is then.

He says in his autobiography that he was asked that very question after publishing Relevance in the 1960s. His answer is that he, himself, failed.

I’ll let Jaki say so in his own words.

I quoted with full approval E. T. Whittaker's dictum that almost all of Aristotle's assertions relating to terrestrial and celestial physics (mostly contained in his On the Heavens and Meteorologica) are hopelessly wrong. Like Whittaker, I failed to point out in the next breath that this did not vitiate some basic points in Aristotle's philosophy. My failure to do so could in part be justified by the specific purpose of The Relevance. Still a failure it was. (Jaki 2002, p. 162)

His middle ground was realism, against the organismic, mechanical, and mathematical world views. He wants to know what is really there, and that is why he insists (as I have been repeating in this series) that we should not impose an incomplete world view onto the interpretation of physical data. Since our understanding will always be incomplete, our world view will be incomplete also. Therefore, we should always refrain from imposing a world view. Instead, we should think about what science tells us about what is really there, just data.

That may sound ridiculously simple, but I find it liberating. I worked as a research chemist in both the academic and industrial settings, and I was not religious during either time. I loved science because it was the one place in my life that I was a realist, no emotion, no spin, no bias, just data and math. As a Catholic now who has done her homework in theology and philosophy, a realist view is still most reasonable. Look at the world and figure out what’s there. You might say that my love of science was a search for God all along. Our ‘looking’ has gone to cosmic and subatomic depths, but we mere humans still do not know the full picture. It is an intellectual virtue to hold yourself to such honesty that you require yourself to let go of whatever world view you might impose.

Do I think some Catholic philosophers break this rule? Yes, I think they do as much as some secular philosophers do. But I have to make sure I get this right before I can worry about anyone else. My program will not be to evaluate quantum physics. I think some philosophers got ahead of themselves there, perhaps because anything with the word “quantum” seems sexy. I think a lot more work needs to be done on atoms, elements, and atomic theory first.

Thomists and Aristotle’s “Failure”

I want to end this project with another long quote from Jaki’s autobiography that perplexes me. I find it relevant to the element project upon which I am embarking.

Thomists must take seriously the fact that there is hardly a page that can be salvaged from Aristotle's physical, astronomical, and chemical science, apart from what is purely geometrical there. Commonsense perception of reality is, of course, as fundamentally mentally valid today as it was in Aristotle's time. But no less valid in his time than it is today is the fact that whatever is quantitative in our registering of reality, it can be verified or disproved only by the quantitative method, however primitive. Now commonsense observation amply reveals that various kinds of matter move in various ways. It is, therefore, not inherently mistaken to put bodies into two classes, some (indeed most of them) that move downward and others (such as fire and air) that move upward. Of course, this classification may be vitiated by other, especially quantitative considerations. Such considerations refute Aristotle's claim that the greater is the mass of a body, the greater is its readiness, or propensity to move along the direction appropriate to its class. According to Aristotle's own example (On the Heavens, I, 6) a body with twice the weight of another would fall twice as fast as the other. One only need step on a chair and drop simultaneously a hammer and a coin in order to see that although the two masses vastly differ, they hit the ground at the same time. Clearly, there has to be something very wrong with the reasoning underlying Aristotle's statement. (Jaki 2002, p. 170)

I want to figure out how to avoid that “something very wrong,” and I think it will be important in the discussion about whether the universe itself is a substance. In my thesis project on elements, I had to break my materialistic mold to conceive of beings top-down instead of bottom-up and to think of elements (the ones on the periodic table) as losing their substantial form in bonding while retaining their active powers. But that leaves open the question: if everything is a system, all interconnected, and if a universe means an interacting totality, then is the universe one big being, i.e., one big substance. And if we land on that conclusion, aren’t we adopting an organismic world view? I know people are working on this, but I will have to end here and get into that later.

This is the epistemological diagram in my mind thus far:

Human knowledge is limited. Theology and philosophy are their own independent disciplines, and they inform each other. Theology is also informed by divine revelation, that which human reason alone would never discover but that God revealed to us. Angelic knowledge is beyond human and less than God’s. Physical sciences can inform philosophy and, thereby, also theology. But I am not sure about how philosophy should inform the physical sciences, if at all. Jaki warns us not to impose philosophy, in the form of a world view, onto the physical sciences, but does that mean philosophy has no say whatsoever?

I don’t think so. When I reoriented my thinking of beings as top-down, that is philosophy informing my understanding of chemistry. Still…it wasn’t my understanding of the atoms and bonds that changed, but more a development in my philosophical insight regarding those atomic details. So, maybe the physical science domain indeed remains untouched by philosophy. I’m not quite ready to make that claim, however. Might philosophy guide scientific experimentation and progress? If so, how far should it go? Jaki had some harsh criticism of how philosophy was grafted onto quantum mechanics and evolution.

Next…

I am reading Gaven Kerr’s Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Creation. Kerr is my doctoral advisor at St. Patrick’s Pontifical University, and I greatly appreciate his clarity of thought in synthesizing Aquinas’s metaphysics. Creation is key to understanding the unity of St. Thomas’s works. Indeed, that is what led other great philosophers to call him St. Thomas of the Creator, as Josef Pieper, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and G. K. Chesterton called him. I want to see next if I can tie in my work on elements to Dr. Kerr’s language of creation.

But thus ends this project. Did Aristotle fail in physics? He did insofar as Jaki’s terminology applies, and the lesson for us today is to be careful to avoid imposing incomplete world views onto scientific data, which is a critical rule for me to remember as I set out to understand elements in the context of creation.

Sources

Jaki, S. L. (2002). A Mind’s Matter: An Intellectual Autobiography. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

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

Jaki, S. L. (1974). Science and Creation: From eternal cycles to an oscillating universe. Scottish Academic Press.