Did Aristotle Fail in Physics? Part 6

Premise B: Jaki critiques Aristotle's "Meteorologica."

I have two more posts after this: one on Jaki’s comments about an eternally cycling universe as a result of an organismic world view and the last on the conclusion with more about what Jaki thought about Aristotle and what I think about Jaki’s work means for us today.

Once again, 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, 6, 7)
Therefore, Aristotle failed in physics. (Part 8)

This post continues examination of Premise B with respect to Jaki’s commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorologica. Jaki gives a detailed analysis of Aristotle in Relevance of Physics (1966) pages 22-30. I focus on that book, as well as Aristotle’s texts.

Meteorologica Commentary

After On the Heavens in Relevance, Jaki turns from the celestial realm to the terrestrial sublunary world of Aristotle’s Meteorologica. Aristotle’s ideas of atmospheric physics and geophysics show that he remained faithful to an organismic conception of nature to explain observable phenomena.

Strivings

Aristotle is concerned with natural events in the region nearest the stars, such as the milky way, comets, and meteors (338a26). He is out to study the “affections” common to the elements (earth, water, air, fire) and of the Earth’s parts (338b24-25). The word “affections” comes from the Webster translation to English. In his commentary, Aquinas uses the Latin word passiones. Per Scholastic philosophy, affections can refer to accidents or modifications as well as to a reaction of the appetite to a stimulus (Wuellner, p. 5). Passions, likewise, refer to any kind of reception of a perfection or privation where one being is acted upon by another, a passive power that is moved to act by another agent (Wuellner, p. 88).

As I covered in my thesis on elements, Aristotle and Aquinas thought of the elements mixing by losing their substantial form and blending their active powers. In doing so, they act on one another, or as Aristotle put it in On the Heavens, some bodies constrain other bodies. Aristotle’s use of the word “affections” is not necessarily organismic. Jaki, obviously, thought otherwise and took Aristotle’s use of the word as an indication that he thought elements and mixed bodies experience “strivings” or volition toward their end. “Judiciousness,” Jaki said, “is hardly the forte of those students of physics who conceive of the inanimate universe as a living organism” (Jaki 1966, p. 23).

This was not Jaki’s strongest point, so let’s move on.

Exhalations

Aristotle begins with elements. Earth, water, air, and fire originate from each other so that each of them exists potentially in each of the other three, all resolvable to form and prime matter (339a36). The element earth is what the planet Earth is made of. The element air surrounds the earth. Water is seated about the earth. The aether is in the heavens, as was covered in De Caelo. Aristotle points out that there is a difficult in identifying where fire exists as an element. What fills the spaces between the earth and the center (what we would now call the core of the earth)? And what fills the spaces above air near the stars? “So it is clear that neither air nor fire alone fills the intermediate space” (340a17).

To explain how the elements are ordered, Aristotle introduces the concept of the exhalation. At the center (of the universe) where everything whirls around that center are found the elements earth and water because they are heavy and cold. Contiguous with them and around them are air and fire, the light and hot elements. But, Aristotle explains, the fire is not pure fire but a sort of bubbling of fire, an ebullition, fervor, or boiling heat, mixing with air and water and moving up and being drawn back down. Here the air is “moist and warm, because it contains both vapor and a dry exhalation from the earth” (340b19). Above that, the air is warm and dry, and this is where clouds form (340b32).

Exhalations were considered the material cause of natural events throughout Meteorologica, as if the earth in the center were breathing out into a cycle that accounts for geophysical processes. Shooting stars are scattered exhalations that ignite on the edges as they are carried around the earth by the motion of the circular revolution of the aether above (341b24). Comets form when the upper motion of air gathers the fire from the shooting stars (344a16). The milky way forms because exhalations accumulate in a certain region of the heaven (346b1).

Rain, dew, and frost form closer to earth in a circular process that follows the sun’s motion (346b32). Vapor is the exhalation of water. Air condenses into water in clouds. Mist is what remains when a cloud condenses to water. Vapor flows upward when the sun is near the earth and downward when the sun is away, like a river flowing vertically (346b35). Frost forms when vapor freezes (347a16).

This circular pattern is why the sea is salty. Residue from the earth remains in the dry exhalations, gets in the clouds, and redescends to earth. Aristotle summarizes: “We must suppose that just as in the cases we have described, so in the world as a whole, everything that grows and is naturally generated always leaves an undigested residue, like that of things burnt, consisting of this sort of earth” (358a14). Furthering the theory, Aristotle explains that winds are also caused by dry exhalations that set the air in motion (360a33).

When the exhalations build up in the earth, they can cause earthquakes. “We must suppose the action of the wind in the earth to be analogous to the tremors and throbbings caused in us by the force of the wind contained in our bodies” (366b14). [Note to self: at the academic conference, do NOT make a joke.] Aristotle is certain of his conclusions. “Our theory has been verified by actual observation in many places” (366b30).

I just want to point out before moving on that Aristotle is certainly not alone in thinking of planet Earth as breathing. I made the same comparison in my chemistry graduate work to develop alternative energy sources by simulating photosynthesis. The “greenhouse gases” (water vapor, carbon dioxide, and ozone) retain heat the atmosphere, and the “greenhouse effect” is related to the cycling of the seasons. Plants take in carbon dioxide during the spring and summer and, via photosynthesis, convert the sunlight into chemical energy, which synthesizes the carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates (which store the energy) and oxygen (which we breathe). When the leaves wither and fall to the ground or become food, the carbohydrates decompose back into water and carbon dioxide, so the plants give back some of the carbon they took from the air. We called respiration and still today think of the planet as inhaling and exhaling carbon dioxide throughout the processes of photosynthesis and respiration.

Cool Stars

Although for Aristotle, fire moves upward, he did not think the heavens are hot. In Meteorologica, he wants to explain how clouds form in warm and dry air. As the exhalations from earth lose fire, which flows upward, it collects in a region that becomes hot. He proves that the heavens are cool in two ways.

First, he points out that the shooting stars, comets, and milky way form in the lower regions of the heavens contiguous with air around the earth. They squeeze out the fire as they are moved in a circular path on encountering the aether. Above shooting stars, comets and the milky way, however, the heavens must be cool because otherwise there would be even more stars (i.e., dry exhalations ignited) due to the speedier circular motion (341a31).

Second, he points out that the sun only seems to be hot due to collections of fire from dry exhalations. But because it “is really white and not fiery in color” the heavens are cool (341a31). He proves coolness with the color white.

Jaki recalls the remarks of Theophrastus, one of Aristotle’s colleagues who succeeded him as head of the Lyceum. It had long been observed by men of his day that objects that glow white are hotter than those that glow red (Jaki 1966, p. 28). Theophrastus questioned Aristotle’s conclusion. Jaki says that so beholden was Aristotle to the organismic view that the world functions as a breathing animal, he forgot what observation had already disclosed; it would not have fit into his meteorological and geophysical system. This is the same kind of error Aristotle made with respect to falling stones of different weights.

What’s Next?

In Part 7, I want to briefly review what Jaki says in Science and Creation about how an organismic world view also led Aristotle and the Greeks to think of the cosmos as eternally cycling and, therefore, also interfered with physics. I have already written extensively on this in my book Science Was Born of Christianity.

Last, in Part 8 I want to review the conclusion and say something about what Jaki called his own “failure” to be more explicit in Relevance that he greatly appreciated Aristotle’s philosophy.

My trip to Madrid is tomorrow. I am going to meet a lot of people working to further Jaki’s work. For my part, I am going to discuss all that I think Jaki meant by Aristotle’s failure in physics. He did not think Aristotle failed or was irrelevant, but rather he wanted to find the right way to incorporate Aristotle’s work into modern physics. He left us much to work through.

Now I have to figure out what I’m going to wear and pack!

Sources

Aristotle. Meteorologica. Trans. E. W. Webster. Edited by The Aquinas Institute. At aquinas.cc/la/en/~Meteor.

Aquinas, T. Commentary on Meteorologica. Trans. Pierre Conway and Fabian R. Larcher. Edited by The Aquinas Institute. (1964). At aquinas.cc/la/en/~Meteor.

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

Whittaker, E. T. (1949). From Euclid to Eddington: A Study of Conceptions of the External World. Cambridge University Press.

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