Did Aristotle Fail in Physics? Part 5

Premise B: Jaki criticizes Aristotle's "On the Heavens."

I want to get to the bottom of Jaki’s contention that Aristotelian physics “failed” because it concentrates on the wholeness of substances. I wrote about how much I struggled with this idea while writing my thesis on the elements and again in this post, “Are You Infected with Materialism?” Just when I get my head around the top-down view of nature instead of my chemistry-brained bottom-up view, I go back, read Jaki, and realize he thought the top-down view was one of the reasons Aristotle failed in physics. Aaarghh! This Stacy is back.

In case you’re just now joining, here’s the argument again from Part 1:

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

This post continues examination of Premise B with respect to Jaki’s commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens (De Caelo). Jaki gives a detailed analysis of Aristotle in Relevance of Physics (1966) pages 14-22. I focus on that book, as well as Aristotle’s own texts. I also compare what Jaki says then to his later-in-life book on philosophy, Means to a Message: A Treatise on Truth (1999) chapters 1 and 5.

Lowering the Dividing Wall

Aristotle names form as a cause in multiple works, such as Physics, Metaphysics, and On the Parts of Animals; he does so anywhere he reviews the four causes (formal, material, efficient, and final). From a statement in On the Parts of Animals, Jaki concludes that Aristotle stresses formal nature over material nature (Jaki 1966, 14). “For the formal nature is of greater importance than material nature” (Book I, Part 1, 640b). Formal nature deals with the coordination of the parts in the whole as a principle of the organism. If animate and inanimate things are wholes with coordinated parts, then Jaki says that “Aristotle lowered the dividing wall between the two domains to such as extent that comparisons between the living and non-living became the most naturally used device in his writings on natural science,” implying teleology for both (Jaki 1966, 14-15).

Aristotle recognizes inanimate things as wholes with parts in his definition of substance. Elements are substances (earth, water, air, fire) as well as mixed bodies. In Categories, Aristotle makes a distinction between living and non-living. “Substance, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject; for instance, the individual man and horse” (Section 1, Part 5). A living thing is most properly called a substance. Jaki’s point is that Aristotle also sees inanimate things as having form, and thus via the formal cause, also sees them as substances. Much more could be said about “substance,” but I don’t want to get off track. I’ll use Wuellner’s Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy definition: a substance is a being whose essence natural requires it to exist in itself (p. 119). A substance is not only a living thing but also an independently existing thing, a being.

Modern chemistry and physics do not consider inanimate things as beings or substances in the same sense. Substance refers to a material that is homogenous, such as gold, water, or sucrose. Even in biology, we would not call a dog a substance, but we would consider the wholeness of the dog. On the other hand, we consider atoms and compounds as wholes, so I’m not sure if I follow Jaki here, but let’s see what he has to say about heavenly bodies.

On the Heavens Commentary

Jaki considers Aristotle’s On the Heavens because the work, in its entirety, is an example of how an organismic world view leads physics astray. His goal is to prove what causes the motion of celestial bodies. He thinks of the universe as a whole and, as he did with his predecessors in Physics and Metaphysics, he criticizes those who speak of parts instead of wholes, such as Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. This work is consistent with his Physics and On the Parts of Animals, where Aristotle describes nature as a source of motion toward an end.

His critiques are connected with the rest of Aristotle’s corpus, directed against the notions of atoms randomly moving until the present configuration took shape (Jaki 1966, p. 16). Aristotle instead affirms that the universe is a whole, huge nature with all its parts moving and striving towards its end and purpose. Natural motion is caused by the First Mover (300b11). Simple bodies, such as the elements (earth, water, air, fire) have a principle of movement in their own nature, and these motions are combined in blended bodies (268b26).

Aristotle recognizes only linear and circular motion as fundamentally natural with other motions being a combination of those two. The universe, for Aristotle, whirls around a center. Of the four elements, earth is the heaviest and moves in straight lines downward toward that center. In On the Heavens, Aristotle names a fifth and infinite element, the aether, which moves in perfect circles in the celestial realm (the heavens) beyond and separate from the terrestrial realm. Fire is the lightest element and moves upward toward the aether. The other two elements, water and air, impart the qualities of wet and dry.

All things, therefore, yearn for their place of rest in the world. Compounds with more fire are lighter because they rise to the aether. Compounds with more earth are heavier because they seek to find rest toward the center. Aristotle uses this to explain why Earth, the planet, must exist. He says the heavens must also exist because there must be the contraries of upward and downward (286a12). From this, Aristotle worked out a system that depicts the universe, in Jaki’s opinion, as an organism, with all parts coordinated toward the perfect end and nothing happening by chance or randomness (287b24).

And what’s so wrong about that?

The idea that the universe is whole and ordered toward a perfect end, or toward the Good, is a philosophical idea that is perfectly consistent with Catholic theology and the revelation of a One and Triune God. That Aquinas would find much in Aristotle’s work that would be a precursor to, or consistent with, Christian tenets is beside the point that Jaki is making about world view and physics. Perhaps it is here that readers find it hard to follow Jaki. We, me included, want to defend Aristotle as Aquinas does.

Jaki’s focus is singular. He wants to know what caused modern physics, and thus modern science, to emerge in the history of humanity. Although he praised the ancient Greeks, mostly Aristotle, for coming closer to a birth of science than any other culture, he wants to know why it did not. They had the leisure and peace. They had culture and society. They had education and centers of learning. They had mathematics and animal dissection. What hindered them? Jaki in convinced that it was their organismic world view that led them astray.

Aristotle’s depiction of the universe became the geocentric model that prevailed up to the time of Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton. This was not a fleeting fancy.

But how is ‘whole and ordered’ necessarily organismic?

In On the Heavens, Aristotle deals with the difficulty of the observed motion of the stars that do not seem to move in perfect circles in the aether. He says (emphasis mine), “We may object that we have been thinking of the stars as mere bodies, and as units with a serial order indeed but entirely inanimate; but should rather conceive them as enjoying life and action” (292a18). He says that upon thinking of elements as having purpose and desires, the observed facts cease to be surprising.

Note the a priori imposition of an organismic world view.

Aristotle continues to explain that the lower stars are closer to the terrestrial realm. Their less-than-perfect motion is as a weakness, “just as men’s bodies one is in good condition without exercise at all, another after a short walk, while another requires running and wrestling and hard training” (292a27). The stars, as parts of the universe, seek the good but variably. “Thus,” he continues, “taking health as the end, there will be one thing that always possess health, others that attain it…” (292b10). It certainly seems that Aristotle thinks of the universe as an organism and that he takes his predecessors to task for not doing so as well.

Then Aristotle criticizes Empedocles’s “absurd” conclusions for not perceiving that “while the whirling movement may have been responsible for the original coming together of the art of earth at the center, the question remains, why now do heavy bodies move to the earth” (295a32). For background, Empedocles thought that the elements were moved by friendship and strife (see Part 3). The reason according to Aristotle is because the whirl at the center is not near us on the terrestrial surface. This is why fire can still move upward. The whirl does not determine heavy and light because they existed in the natures and strivings of the elements before the earth formed. Jaki says he detects a triumphant tone in Aristotle here, even as Aristotle is stating an equally absurd conclusion.

A Huge Error

For Aristotle, keep in mind, all natural bodies have an innate source of natural motion, echoing back to Physics. Weight and lightness are due to the mixing of the elements in the composite. Bodies can move each other by “constraint” (sometimes called violent motion) against their nature. This is why a human can throw a ball, and it will move horizontally due to the constrained motion and simultaneously move vertically towards its rest.

Resulting from his organismic world view, Aristotle makes one of the biggest errors in physics in On the Heavens. In thinking about the world as a whole body striving for its perfect end with all the parts coordinated, i.e., as an organism, Aristotle uses his system to explain how things fall to the earth. To review the system: the Earth (the planet) is at the center of the world because everything whirls around the center and earth (the element) is heavy. The fifth element, the aether, is in the heavens moving in perfect circles. The element earth moves downward toward the center where it wishes to find rest. The element fire moves upward toward the aether where it wishes to find rest. Mixed bodies (i.e., all other bodies made of elements) are mixtures of these powers. (For more on elements and mixed bodies, see my thesis project on elements, particularly Day 6.)

This conception of the world led Aristotle to posit the following:

A given weight moves a given distance in a given time; a weight which is as great and more moves the same distance in a less time, the times being in inverse proportion to the weights. For instance, if one weight is twice another, it will take half as long over a given movement. (273b30-274a2)

One has but to hold two stones of different weights out at arm’s length and drop them to see that the heavier one hits the ground at the same time as the lighter one. As a side note, I have done this demonstration for students many times and, to be fair, there are still students who assume that the bigger rock will land first.

Jaki does not catch this error in Relevance, but he does later in his 1999 book, A Means to a Message: A Treatise on Truth (Chapter 5 “Purpose”). In this book, Jaki puts forth his own philosophical system (a topic for another time) and addresses Aristotle’s natural philosophy. He again emphasizes that Aristotle’s views stemmed from his master’s and the Socratic attribution of purpose and end to all things (see Part 3). Jaki rightly wonders at how such an error went undetected for two thousand years by those who followed Aristotle’s work. Today we call it gravity and use the acceleration due to gravity on planet Earth, on average 9.8 m/s². We calculate projectile motion as components of horizontal motion and vertical motion. The success of physics is owed to Galileo and Newton who eliminated an organismic world view from their thinking.

So, did Jaki reject Aristotle’s teaching on purpose?

No, he did not. He just did not count is as a conclusion for physics to make. Jaki also understood why Aristotle thought the way he did — to keep man’s place in nature against the mechanical view. Man has purpose and strives toward the Good, so why not the whole universe? A lot of Aristotle’s views were not only reasonable but so important that much of Western culture is owed to them. Jaki was explicit, even back in 1966 when he wrote Relevance of Physics that he had an “appreciation for what was lasting in Aristotle’s thought” (Jaki 1966, p. 31).

In closing and because I am heading toward a discussion on hylomorphism at some point related to all of this re-consideration of Jaki’s teaching, Jaki thought Aristotle was right to posit matter and form. In the beginning of Means to a Message he wrote (again, emphasis mine):

Thus it happened [in the history following Aristotle] that Aristotelians all too often got bogged down in secondary tasks such as the clarifications needed about the relation of substantial form and prime matter. Both were indispensable postulates to assure rational understanding of change as different from an incoherent succession of events across time. But once those postulates were taken for objects of empirical knowledge, a process started that sparked skepticism about the Aristotelian doctrine of substance. (Chapter 1 “Objects”)

I find it reassuring that Jaki was consistent over a three-decade span of his career. He insists that we ought not impose a world view onto physics. That is where Aristotle, and all those who followed him, went wrong; they took conclusions as empirical facts when they were really a priori lore. The consequence was that once the errors were proven to be false using quantification and data, too many people decided that everything Aristotle taught was also wrong.

The work today is to turn around and figure out how to maintain Aristotle’s indispensable postulates of matter and form in the assessment of the data from modern science. Since it exploded in the last two hundred years, there is a lot of work to be done. I’ll do my part in chemistry.

Just a few more parts to go (I hope). My trip to Madrid is in two days.

Sources

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

Aquinas, T. Commentary on the Physics. Trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye. Edited by The Aquinas Institute. (2004). At aquinas.cc/la/en/~Phys.

Wuellner, B. (2012). Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy. Loreto Publications.

Jaki, S. L. (1999). A Means to a Message: A Treatise on Truth. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

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