Abstract
There are many ‘idealist’ critiques of materialism, including as a natural philosophy. Early modern critiques often invoke a notion of ‘soul’ or ‘life’ as a feature which the materialist either eliminates, or at least cannot account for. Here I examine an early and powerful critique of materialism in Aristotle, which brings out both his subtlety with regard to the nature of biological entities and, perhaps, his desire to find a ‘third way’ between the pure idealism of Platonic forms and the equally pure chance-and-necessity of the atomists, who he calls the phusiologoi.
We must embark on the investigation of each animal without aversion, since there is in all of them something natural and beautiful. For the non-random, the for-the-sake-of-something, is present in the works or functions of nature most of all, and the end for the sake of which they are constituted or have come to be has the status of the beautiful (PA I 5, 645a21-26).
Title abbreviations used: DA: De Anima; GA: Generation of Animals; GC: On Generation and Corruption; MA: Movement of Animals; Met.: Metaphysics; PA: Parts of Animals; Phys.: Physics; PoA: Posterior Analytics. Translations used include those of Barnes (Aristotle 1984), Ackrill (Aristotle 1987) and Apostle (Aristotle 1979), with modifications.
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Notes
- 1.
Eneka or to hou eneka.
- 2.
Met. A 1, 981a30; A 3, 983a25-26; Phys. I 1, 184a13 and II 3, 194b19-21. On the four causes in general, Met. A 3 refers to the canonical discussion in Phys. II 3, which is in turn partially duplicated in Met. Δ 2.
- 3.
Aristotle provides an account of the ‘for the sake of’ as an explanation of natural processes in Phys. II 8 and PA I 1 (both of which I discuss in part II).
- 4.
Met. A 3, 984b19, b23, b26-27, and Phys. II 8, passim.
- 5.
Phys. II 1, 193a13-b9.
- 6.
Phys. II 7, 198a30; Met. E 1, 1026a29-31.
- 7.
Graham (1990), 125.
- 8.
Loux (1991), 234.
- 9.
Cf. Berti (1996), 128–129.
- 10.
Kosman (1987), 370, referring to Phys. II 1, 193a12-15.
- 11.
Met. A 7 (984b11-15). Barnes: “spontaneity and luck”; Apostle: “chance or luck” (‘spontaneity’ is the same as the more literal ‘automatic’); at Phys. II 6, 197b51, Aristotle notes that ‘spontaneity’ is a wider notion than chance.
- 12.
When Aristotle criticizes materialist theories of chance outcomes, the language and examples he uses, such as arriving earlier or later than planned, and thus being able to settle a debt, or save someone from the situation they are in, are quite close to his definition of accident (Met. Δ 30, 1025a15f.).
- 13.
Respectively, Phys. II 6, 198a5, a10-13; Met. K 8, 1065b4; Phys. II 4, 196a24-b5, II 5, 197a5-9, Met. A 4, 984b14-18.
- 14.
Grene (1963) defends this as a valid ‘Aristotelian’ understanding of ‘the job of the biologist’, as opposed to a reductionist program (134, 140, 255). An interesting rebuttal of this view is to be found in Graham (1986). For my criticisms of some forms of holism/organicism in biological theory, see Wolfe (2014a).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
PA II 1, 646a12-b10 (building on I 1, 640b20); GA I 1, 715a9-11; GC I 5, 321b16-22.
- 18.
A further, comparative issue would be: when early modern natural philosophers oppose vitality to dead matter, are they extending this ‘compositional’ point? Except perhaps for Leibniz’s reflections on machines of nature, it seems not. In addition, the passion in the eighteenth century for the image of the bee-swarm as a model for organism, including in materialist authors such as Diderot (see Wolfe 2014b), rather disturbs the purity of this opposition!
- 19.
Thus Aristotle differentiates between Democritus’ atoms as far too abstract (and thus not explaining the world as we experience it) and Empedocles’ significant improvement, defining, e.g., organic tissue as “the logos of the mixture” or “ratio of the combination” of these elements, an actual formula rather than a random iteration of elements (PA I 1, 642a15; GC I 1–2, 315a4-b5: Democritus and Leucippus were the first to truly inquire into the ‘formulas’ of living beings, a26f.; see also GA V 8, 789b3). The translations are respectively from Preus (1975), 29, referring to Peck, and from Barnes’ edition.
- 20.
Preus (1975), 95.
- 21.
Furth (1988), III, § 9, i.
- 22.
Cooper (1987), 273.
- 23.
One might at first want to say ‘proto-evolutionism’; but if one recalls that Darwin’s theory is a theory of natural selection, it seems fair to allow other theories such as Empedocles’ and Lucretius’ to be called “evolutionistic,” since they describe the change of species over time. Then the question becomes: is this evolution at all ‘teleological’, that is, does it include an element of perfectibility? At a more precise level, though, one should take note of David Depew’s remark: “Darwin’s explanation of adaptedness does not rely on … chance and coincidence in the same way Empedocles and Democritus do … On the contrary, natural selection, by systematically amplifying initially happen-stance variations through populations across many generations in strict accord with environmental utility, excludes the coincidental from playing the role in the coming to be of organic traits assigned to it by Democritus and Empedocles” (Depew 1997, 226).
- 24.
PA II, 658a9; GA II 6; DA III 12, 434a31.
- 25.
DA III 9, 432b21.
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Wolfe, C.T. (2016). To Be Is to Be for the Sake of Something: Aristotle’s Arguments with Materialism. In: Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24820-2_2
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