Modern Philosophy of Nature

Leclerc On Nature and Existence

I am reading two books by Ivor Leclerc, The Nature of Physical Existence (1972) and The Philosophy of Nature (1986). The next series of posts will dive into his thesis that the philosophy of nature was abandoned with the emergence of modern science and needs to be revisited. The reason I am interested in his conclusion is because this has direct bearing on what “elements” are understood to be. Are they bodies like we now think of atoms of the elements on the periodic table? Or are what we call atoms more properly elements as Aristotle and Aquinas understood them, as first material constituents of mixed bodies with matter and form? What I want to know is whether the term “atom” has been misapplied. {Shudder}

Why Care About Atoms?

The reason to care is because our modern, collective understanding of what-is-elemental-to-all-physical-existence dictates our view of the whole of nature and even our own place in the world. I did not appreciate the importance of philosophy, for that is what we are talking about here, until I pressed myself to ask deeper questions and challenge my assumptions. It’s kind of crazy, really.

As you know, I love chemistry. It is difficult for a chemist to think of atoms and the elementary particles (little parts) that make them up in any other way than as little building blocks. This is how I have thought of and taught chemistry for decades. Heck, that is how I viewed my own children, as highly complex composites of atoms, until I realized how utterly ridiculous and damaging that world view is to relationships. Both words (“atoms” and “particle”) convey to a beginning student as well as a seasoned researcher that these are merely building blocks, bits of matter that snap together to make physical things. The problem that no one talks about in the professional world is that how we think of atoms and particles affects how we think of other important things, such as:

• the universe.

• the human person.

• our purpose in life.

• nature and existence.

It’s like the elephant in the lab. When a chemist gets into thermodynamics, kinetics, surface chemistry, polymers, biochemistry, or any more advanced discipline that requires thinking of atoms as systems, then it becomes clear that atoms and elementary particles are more like energy fields than hard little spheres. In my education, the work of a chemist was to memorize properties so as to be able to manipulate the building blocks. This approach works pretty well if your goal is to get a job, but, for me anyway, there was always a discomfort in trying to think too hard about what those little parts actually are. Shut up and calculate, as they say. I did, but now I want a better answer.

Who was Ivor Leclerc?

Ivor Leclerc (1915–1999) was born in South Africa and served in the South African army during World War II. He continued his education in philosophy and earned a PhD from King's College London in 1949. He held academic positions at the University of Glasgow and the University of Bonn before joining Emory University in the United States, where he worked for 21 years.

Leclerc was particularly noted for his work on Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics and process philosophy. The Nature of Physical Existence and The Philosophy of Nature both highlight the success of Whitehead’s ideas. Whitehead, by the way, promoted the idea that the rise of modern science was largely due to the Christian world view of Creation, and thus Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, whom I also study and write about a lot, was also an admirer of Whitehead’s work. Leclerc tackles the urgent need of our time “to heal the breach between philosophy and science which has existed since the eighteenth century” (1972, p. 350). He finds that Whitehead “outstrips others in an understanding of the issues in their depth and interconnected complexity,” the others being Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Kant, and Aristotle (1972, p. 349-50). As I will explain shortly, each had a different conception of fundamental ideas such as matter, space, substance, and body. Honestly, I have known those names for a long time, but I never knew they contributed to our modern (lack of) philosophy of nature.

The basic storyline is that as modern science delivered mechanical and mathematical descriptions of moving particles, motion came to be understood only as locomotion (change of place) and not change more broadly understood by Aristotle in terms of potential and actualization. Likewise, matter came to be seen as a substance unto itself, as did space. With the focus on the motion of matter in space, the consideration of form in the Aristotelian sense as the essential nature or defining characteristics of a thing, that which makes a thing what it is, ceased to be part of modern science. Form, and the requisite metaphysics, was relegated to the realm of philosophy of nature, which is to say, relegated to antiquity and obscurity. For the past two centuries, the philosophy of nature withered like a tree branch starved of nutrients. There has not been a reunification of the philosophy of nature with modern science, though it is an active area of research now, at least among Thomists. That’s a bit of the story and reason behind why I am interested in Ivor Leclerc and what he has to say about Whitehead (1861–1947) and his predecessors.

Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Kant, and Aristotle

Leclerc begins The Philosophy of Nature describing how Aristotelian ideas of nature were shunned as mechanical (Newtonian) and mathematical (Einsteinian) descriptions became more popular. (I cover some of this in this series, “Did Aristotle Fail in Physics?”) Leclerc says that the understanding of a physical object in the sense of an acting thing, or as a substance, was lost. One needs a grounding in Aristotelian metaphysics to grasp these implications but suffice it to say that Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) thought of living things as “primary substances” in the most proper sense, individual things, beings who have existence by virtue of themselves. A dog, a cat, or a human is a primary substance, a subject in which properties and qualities are attributed. Substances are matter and form; the study of substances is hylomorphism.

For Aristotle, then, matter is not itself a substance but an underlying substrate disposed to the form that appropriates the matter. I think of it akin to when I want to make lasagna. I have the idea of the final product in my mind, including lasagna as a universal as well as the specific ingredients I will use to make this particular dish my own. Then I select my ingredients that are disposed to the form I envision. I do not, on the contrary, just stick a bunch of stuff in a pan, throw it in the oven, and presto, there is an agglomeration I want to call lasagna. I start with the end in mind. Aristotle thought nature determines the form. Aquinas later tied Aristotle’s view of nature to the doctrine of Creation. God grants all individual acts of existence as well as all forms and particulars. He’s the Master Chef, analogically speaking.

This top-down view was lost as modern science came onto the scene. Here is a quote from the beginning of Leclerc’s The Philosophy of Nature (1986, p. 8).

In the philosophy of Newton…there was only one substance, matter. In Einstein's theory, on the contrary, space has become substance, and not only one substance among others, but the true physical substance, from which matter is derivative.

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) thought of matter through a mechanical philosophy. He thought that matter was composed of small, indivisible particles (corpuscles) that interact with each other, which led to Boyle’s atomic theory. Newton defined matter in terms of mass and inertia (resistance to acceleration) and emphasized the role of forces (like gravity) acting on matter even from a distance. Notice how even these commonly used terms today are hard to define. (I encounter this struggle all the time with college students.) “Mass” is a fundamental property of all matter, the amount of matter present in any object or body. Mass is also a quantitative measure of inertia, the quantity of inertia possessed by an object, which Newton defined as the proportion between force and acceleration in his Second Law of Motion (F=ma). The greater the mass of a body, the smaller the change produced by an applied force. As you can see, Newton was focused on how matter behaves and less concerned about the nature of matter.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), according to Leclerc, opposed such an assumption about matter and developed his own theory of bodies as both material and nonmaterial. However, despite his objections, the presuppositions of modern science “ruled down to the present day” (1986, p. 10).

Leclerc explains that Albert Einstein (1879–1955) later arrived at his conclusion about space being the ultimate substance for several philosophical reasons owed to his predecessors. (I focus on dates because it helps me to piece the story together if I know when people lived.) Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) rejected the idea of space as an independently existing entity because he thought space is a framework and not something “out there” in the physical world. He saw space as a framework our minds overlay on nature to make sense of our sensory experiences (see Critique of Pure Reason). Leclerc says that after Kant, philosophy of nature was no longer recognized as a discipline. There was, therefore, no formal method to analyze claims about substance. Hence, when Einstein conceived of space as the ultimate true physical substance, following in the two century-long idea of matter as substance, no one asked whether Einstein meant “space” in the same way Aristotle had understood it. He did not!

Just consider your own presuppositions about space as a function of modernity. Any physically existing thing carries with it the connotation of extension. If we imagine a ball, we expect the ball to occupy three dimensions in space. If we imagine atoms or particles as little balls, we expect them to likewise occupy three dimensions, albeit very tiny ones, in space. Space indeed seems like a kind of container or framework in which we think about things that physically exist.

This idea was also consistent with the res extensa described by René Descartes (1596–1650), a predecessor of Newton. For Descartes, res extensa is a fundamental concept in his dualistic philosophy. It refers to extension as a substance; things that have spatial dimensions (like balls and particles) exist in the physical world. Descartes contrasted res extensa with res cogitans, the latter meaning the immaterial realm of thought, consciousness, and mind.

Einstein’s “space” and “matter” goes a step further than Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, or Kant. Einsteinian space both affects and is affected by matter. To quickly review, the theory of special relativity holds that mass and energy, by the famous equation E = mc², are interchangeable. As an object approaches the speed of light, its relativistic mass increases. The theory of general relativity holds that matter interacts with the space-time fabric, causing it to curve in what we perceive as gravity. Matter in strong gravitational fields experiences time more slowly, and these phenomena have been confirmed with atomic clock experiments. Einstein’s theories reshaped physics and provided a framework to think about and study such phenomena as black holes, the Big Bang, and the movement of particles at high speeds. All of these ideas are very important! They work. They seem true. Yet, they also challenge our assumptions about nature.

This whole story, according to Leclerc, represents a departure from the philosophy of nature and concurrently a departure from a conception of matter as in potency to what is actualized by form. Macroscopic bodies today are seen as composites of matter and energy with particles that follow laws of motion, little bodies making up larger bodies. Aristotle dealt with these ideas in his time and rejected them. To put it briefly, he did not see how large bodies, i.e., substances, can be made of small substances, as if they are aggregates. This undermines the idea of form with matter disposed to it and renders all of nature as if it were piles of stuff, or piles of, what would later be known as, atoms. Is it any wonder that people today call unborn children “clumps of cells”? See what I mean?

What Next?

So, there is a lot to unpack here, and I hope I have convinced you to care about this topic. I have said that I am a defender of atoms; it’s one of the reasons I named this Substack GOD & ELEMENTS. I may need to rethink that and, as I did in my master’s thesis, defend elements instead of atoms. What I’m saying is that my philosophical journey may lead me to conclude that the name “atoms” is and always was a misnomer. Terrifying, I know! But if this is true, then there should also be a call for science education to change from an “atoms-first” (proof—>McGraw Hill) perspective to one that better prepares students to appreciate nature as a whole. As you may have surmised, this approach to science will not be popular and will require more clearly articulating the Christian world view that “nature” is “Creation” and Creation the handiwork of God—or as I always say, to teach “Science as the study of the handiwork of God.”

Thank God I didn’t name the Substack GOD & ATOMS. Anyway, onward.

Until next time…