Ontological Naturalism of Presocratic Philosophy

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with with permission permission of the of copyright the copyright owner. owner.Further reproduction Further reproduction prohibited without prohibited permission. without permission. THE ONTOLOGICAL NATURALISM OF PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY:

SUBSTANCE AS THE FOUNDATION FOR THE EXPLANATION OF THE WORLD

Gary Sisto

submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of The American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

Philosophy

Signatures of Committee:

Cham

DeaA of the College y/«? * / fo" Date

Spring 1995 1 1 The American University Washington, D.C. 20016

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This paper is dedicated to The American University’s Department of Philosophy and

Religion for being the enlightenment of my life for the last eleven years.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE ONTOLOGICAL NATURALISM OF PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY:

SUBSTANCE AS THE FOUNDATION FOR THE EXPLANATION OF THE WORLD

Gary Sisto

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the development of Presocratic ontological naturalism. The

naturalistic ontologies that are developed during the period of 600-400 B.C., from Thales to

Democritus, are all attempts to account for the nature of existence in the natural world. They

accomplish this by postulating substance (one or many) as the foundation for an explanation

of the world as a single system. An adequate account would be one that links the permanence,

unity, change, and diversity of the world with the postulated substance or substances. The

Presocratic dialogue is a series of attempts to develop such a notion of substance. Each

ontological strategy is a response to the preceding ontologies, and thus, from its retrospective

vantage point, is better organized and more complete. The ontologies develop from notions

of a single kind of complex substance to notions of plural substances that are simpler. What

was merely assumed at a prior phase subsequently is made explicit and is accounted for by

the postulation of substances that are ultimately basic.

All of the Presocratics are in agreement about the basic requirement for substance

regarding the nature of its existentia: substance must be self-subsistent and eternal.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Additionally, as ontological naturalists, the Presocratics discover the properties of substance

that are required to account for the world. The essential properties ( essentia) of substance are

those aspects of its structure that do not change over time. The contingent or accidental

properties of substance are changeable. Changes in them are explained by efficient causes.

Nevertheless, the efficient causes, along with the accidental properties themselves, must be

reducible to the essential properties of substance, if change is to be explained. In ontological

naturalism, substances are what exist in the world, and thus, permanence, unity, change, and

diversity must be reducible to those substances. Substances are the ontological causes of these

aspects of the world; by their very existence, the substances are ultimately responsible for all

things.

As this paper traces how the Presocratics correct one another's account of the nature

of these basic aspects of the world, special attention is paid to the development of the basic

ontological distinctions. Among these distinctions are oppositions between the animistic and

the mechanistic, the qualitative and the quantitative, change as the transformation of

observable qualities and change as motion of matter, the monistic and the pluralistic, and the

material and the immaterial.

At the culmination of the Presocratic movement, the spatio-materialism of Leucippus

and Democritus solves the problem substance in a simple, economical way. By successfully

iii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sorting through the important ontological distinctions, they are able to give an explanation of

the world's permanence, unity, change, and diversity.

The Epilogue explains the method of ontological naturalism and compares it to the

epistemological method. In the end, this paper suggests that ontological naturalism may be

the only way to give a coherent account of all things.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to extend my sheerest appreciation to the following people: Dr.

Raymond Wilmotte for his financial support; Melissa Mertl for her patience, encouragement,

feedback, proofreading, and formatting assistance; Dr. Charley Hardwick for his persistent

guidance in building my grammatical and scholarship skills; and to Dr. Phillip Scribner for his

friendship and inspiration.

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ABSTRACT...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

PART ONE: THE ARCHE OF THE MILESIAN MONISTS ...... 12

CHAPTER 1: THALES...... 14

CHAPTER 2: ANAXIMANDER ...... 20

CHAPTER 3: ANAXIMENES ...... 32

PART TWO: THE EXTREME MONISTS...... 38

CHAPTER 4: HERACLITUS...... 41

CHAPTER 5: PARMENIDES AND ELEATICISM...... 48

PART THREE: THE ARCHAI OF THE PLENUM PLURALISTS...... 54

CHAPTER 6: EMPEDOCLES ...... 57

CHAPTER 7: ANAXAGORAS...... 64

PART FOUR: CONCLUSION: THE SPATIO-MATERIALISM OF THE ATOMISTS

CHAPTER 8: LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS ...... 74

PART FIVE: EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 9: A RESURRECTION OF ONTOLOGICAL NATURALISM? . . 89

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION

This paper examines Presocratic philosophy and gives an interpretation of the

development of Ancient naturalism. This interpretation is based on evidence gathered from

the scant surviving fragments of the Presocratics, from Ancient and Medieval textual

references and doxographies (histories) of Presocratic thought, and from other interpretations

of this data by more recent authors.

Upon reading the available evidence, one sees clearly that the conversation among the

philosophers of this era (roughly 600-400 B.C.) is preoccupied by the naturalistic ontologies

that each one proclaims. From the modest philosophical beginnings of Thales to the full

blown system of Democritus, a naturalistic explanation of the world based on ontology, an

ontological naturalism, is the common thread of the dialogue that spans these two-hundred

years.

The ontological naturalism that emerges over the course of this dialogue develops the

concept of substance as the foundation for the explanation of the world. Throughout the

dialogue, the criteria, or adequacy conditions, for substance are formed. The movement as

a whole indicates that an adequate naturalistic ontology in general must be able to define the

nature of one or more substances in order to explain the change, permanence, diversity, and

unity of the world.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. All of the nature philosophers, except the extreme monists Heraclitus and Parmenides,

agree that substance must provide this general kind of order to the world. The philosophers

dispute the specific nature of substance, such as its form and number. As the dialogue

advances over time, the criteria for adequacy concerning the specific nature of substance

become deeper and more complete and the issues surrounding these disputes are brought to

their logical conclusions. As each additional condition concerning the nature of substance is

explored, the constraints resulting from these conditions determine the emergence of different

and, for the most part, better-organized naturalistic-ontologies.

Aristotle gives a straight-forward synopsis of Presocratic nature philosophy:

Most of the first philosophers thought that principles in the form of matter were the only principles of things. For they say that the element and first principle of the things that exist is that from which they all are and from which they first come into being and into which they are finally destroyed, its substance remaining and its properties changing . . . There must be some nature—either one or more than one—from which the other things come into being, it being preserved. But as to the number and form of this sort of principle they do not all agree.1

What Aristotle is getting at in this passage is that most of the Presocratic philosophers

postulated substance as their foundation for an explanation of everything. Substance is “the

element and first principle of the things that exist.” By this is meant that substance is the

underlying stuff “from which all [things] are and from which they first come into being and

into which they are finally destroyed.” All things are substance: “There must be some

nature—either one or more than one—from which the other things come into being, it being

1 Aristotle, Metaphysics 983b6-l 1, 17-27; from Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 63.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. preserved.” It is substance that persists through all change and makes things connected from

moment to moment.

There are at least two prime reasons that this preservation is necessary for a

naturalistic explanation. The first and most obvious is that things that come into being once

did not exist, and since something cannot come from nothing, there must be something that

has existed from eternity, something that is forever preserved, from which all things are

derived. But could not existence just be a chain of things, each coming from what existed

before back infinitely in time? Why does something have to exist always? In order to explain

change ontologically, a second reason for preservation is necessary. Without preservation

there could be no naturalistic causation, because the history of what exists at each moment

in time would not have any relation to the history of what exists at any other moment in time

(except that they are in time), and there would be no consistent nature of the world from

moment to moment. Without a permanent nature to the world, each moment in time would

turn out to be a new, independent world. Naturalistic causation depends on a consistency

about the world which makes regularity and order possible. That consistency is provided by

substance.

In order to explain change and diversity, substance must have an existential nature and

essential properties which do not alter, and non-essential (contingent, accidental) properties

which do alter and which are explained by being reduced to the unchanging natures of the

substance. Substance's existential nature (itsexistentid) is its self-subsistence. Substance exists

independently and eternally. Substance as substance (being qua being) exists at every moment

in time as it is present, because it exists continuously over time. Substance also has essential

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. properties ( essentia) that do not and cannot change over time. For instance, each particle

(“atom”) of the atomists has the essential properties of materiality, minuteness, indivisibility,

qualitative neutrality, and geometric form. The non-essential properties of substance are

changeable. If change is to be accounted for and not merely assumed, non-essential or

contingent properties must be reduced to the substance and its essential properties.

Contingency has to do with conditions that are variable; the contingent depends on something

that might be or might not be. “Contingent” refers to the kind of causes on which effects

depend, or what might be called “efficient” or “occurrent causes,” because they are

themselves changeable and cause by way of some regular connection to their effects.

Substances, by contrast, are “ontological causes,” which cause by their very existence as

substances. Ultimately, the regular connections between events that are presupposed by talk

about efficient causes must be explained by ontological causes, if they are to be explained

completely. All the various things of the world that have ever been created, ever existed for

any amount of time, are just substances, at different locations, with different non-essential

properties. The common denominator to every moment of everything’s existence is the

unchanging aspects of substance, which persist through time as the nature of substance.

Substance thus connects the world from moment to moment. Because existence is in time,

substance exists in the present moment. The unchanging nature of substance allows a

continuous ontological relationship between what existed in the past, what exists in the

present, and what will exist in the future.

It should be noted that although most of the Presocratic nature philosophers thought

that the foundation of everything was matter-like, not all did. The main exceptions to this

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. were Leucippus and Democritus, who believed that in addition to the material atoms there

was an immaterial principle called “the void,” and Heraclitus, whose notion of change as the

foundation of everything implicitly rejects the permanence that a substance (material or non

material) must have.

In summary, the task of the Presocratics is to explain the existence of the diverse

things of the cosmos, the change that these things go through, and the nature of the unity of

the world that a certain kind of permanence, or preservation, entails. They try to do this by

showing the difference between the essential and non-essential properties of substance. All

of the nature philosophers, except Heraclitus and the Eleatics, seem to agree on all of these

points about the ontological role of substance.

Nevertheless, intertwined with explaining these properties of substance is the task of

giving an account of “the number and form of this sort of principle.” On this the philosophers

do not all agree. By “number” is meant the number of different kinds of substance that is

needed in order to account for both essential and non-essential properties. For instance: how

many substances are there? Is there only one kind of substance (monism) or is there more than

one (pluralism)? If there is more than one, how many? Two? Four? More? By “form” is meant

the nature of the substance, that is, its essential properties. For instance, is the substance

material or immaterial? Is the substance quality-less (e.g., just extended stuff) or is it quality-

full (e.g., qualities are an aspect of the substance’s unchanging nature)? What is the structure

of the substance? For instance, is the substance one infinitely large mass, or does it consists

of little bits that are everywhere, or does it merely consist of infinite spatial locations? The

essential, permanent nature of the substance or substances will determine how change,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. diversity, and unity are accounted for. In addition, pluralists must define the essential

relationship among the substances that they postulate.

Implicitly, the nature philosophers for the most part agree on the general purpose (i.e.,

ontological role) of substance as the explanation of the world. Explicitly, it is what the

philosophers do not agree upon which gets developed. The content of the specific nature of

substance, its number and form (and for pluralists, the essential relation between substances),

is what gets worked out along the course of the Presocratic dialogue. By specific nature of

substance we mean its essential properties. The essential properties are the nature of the

substance or substances that are postulated as existing. The ultimate goal of natural

philosophy is to define properly the essential properties of simple substances so as to provide

a foundation for an explanation of change, diversity, and unity that is ontologically basic.

The most difficult issues for naturalistic philosophy concern the problem of change

and diversity. Change and diversity, both quantitative and qualitative, in order to be explained

ontologically, must be reducible to the essential properties of substance as changeable states

or conditions that particular substances can get into because of their essential natures. These

problems of accounting for change and diversity make it possible to trace a development of

the Presocratic movement.

The Milesians (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) all postulate single substances.

They see substance and change as both qualitative and physical. Because the qualitative and

the physical are not distinguished by the Milesians, physico-qualitative properties are essential

to Milesian substance. Thus, physical things and qualitative things are designated as

interchangeable nouns. For instance, “water” and “the moist” are the same thing, and so are

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “fire” and “the hot.” The Milesians see the world as consisting of a single substance which

somehow has the power to transform itself, both physically and qualitatively. The ability to

change, a kind of aliveness or animation, is built right into the nature of Milesian substance.

Ultimately, the Milesians fail to reduce the contingent properties to the essential properties

of their substances and thus do not explain change. The contingent properties of their

substances are merely assumed to exist, but are not themselves accounted for.

There are two reactions to this Milesian view. Heraclitus, on the one hand, capitalizes

on the notion of physico-qualitative transformation. If substance, as the Milesians

demonstrate, ultimately does not explain change, then who needs it? Heraclitus denies

essential natures altogether and thus denies the existence of substance. For him, all that exists

is contingent properties. Change does not occur to substances; change is the nature of the

world. All is mutable and flux. At its most basic level, the world is alive and animated. On the

other hand, Parmenides takes the notion of monistic substance to its logical conclusion. If

what exists is a single substance, then contingent properties are impossible. Parmenides and

his followers, collectively known as the Eleatics, ontologically deduce what the essential

nature of a material substance, which they call “being,” must be. They conclude that if what

is assumed to exist is a single material substance, then change cannot occur; qualitative

transformation and physical motion, which they isolate for the first time, are impossible. Only

the essential, unchanging nature of substance can exist. The world is static and dead.

After Eleaticism, nature philosophy tries to reduce contingent properties to substance

while still adhering to the Eleatic analysis of being. Both Empedocles and Anaxagoras attempt

to overcome the Eleatic aporia by postulating more than one substance. These pluralists see

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the quantitative and the qualitative as distinguishable essential properties of the substances.

On the one hand, their substances are material particles; geometrical extension is one aspect

of their essential nature. Each kind of substance consists of an infinite number of particles that

make up everything. On the other hand, each kind of particle is associated with a quality;

qualitative properties are also an aspect of their essential nature. Thus, particles have an

unchanging nature that is both quantitative and qualitative. Whereas the Milesians did not

distinguish between the physical and the qualitative, Empedocles and Anaxagoras see them

as dual aspects of the same thing. Complex objects are just conglomerates of particles. The

geometrical structures of things are explained by the quantitative composition of particles.

Qualitative change is explained by the mixture and separation of this or that kind of particle.

Therefore, change and diversity are explained by relative motion of substances. Empedocles

postulated four kinds of particles. But if substance has, in addition to an unchanging

quantitative nature, a qualitative nature, then there is an obvious limitation in how much can

be explained by only four kinds of particles. Thus Anaxagoras postulates infinite kinds of

particles in order to explain the infinite varieties of qualities in the world. Nevertheless, for

both Anaxagoras and Empedocles, accounting for the order of the world in an infinitely

complex world—a plenum mixture of physico-qualitative particles, infinite in number—proves

to be an ungainly task. Not only is motion difficult to account for in such an absolutely-full

world, but in such a world, granted motion, the displacement of one particle necessitates the

displacement of all particles; how is organization achieved in such a muddle? In order to

harmonize local with global change, additional entities, irreducible to the substances, are

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. postulated, such as vortices and other mysterious forces (Empedocles has “Love” and

“Strife;” Anaxagoras has “Mind”).

Finally, the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, at the end of the movement, solves

the problem of the natures of the substances that exist in a simple, economical way. In order

to overcome the Eleatic aporia, the atomists bring two issues to the forefront. First, the

atomists give up the attempt to explain change as if it were basically change in qualitative

properties of observable objects. What the other Presocratics assume about substance, such

as motion and quality, the atomists reduce to a more basic ontology. For the atomists, change

can be explained by accounting for motion ontologically; it is reduced to the essential

properties of substances. They explain real change as purely quantitative. Second, in order

to explain motion quantitatively, two kinds of substances having opposite natures must be

postulated—one material, the other immaterial. Before the atomists, substance was

understood as material and qualitative. For Leucippus and Democritus, real change is reduced

to the movement of atoms in the void; the empty space of the void gives the atoms places to

move into. The world of atoms and void is quality-less. This being the case, qualitative change

is relegated to the subjective realm; qualities are in the mind of the beholder. Diversity is

explained solely upon the conglomeration of minute atoms having different geometrical

shapes and sizes. The void gives the universe its wholeness; the independent atoms contained

by the void give the universe its plurality. The recognition of the existence of space (the void),

in addition to matter (atoms), makes possible an explanation of the world as a single system

of ontologically basic substances.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 10

After completing this interpretation of the naturalistic movement by following the

Presocratic ontological dialogue from philosopher to philosopher, this paper will show that

the movement ended prematurely with Democritus. This suggests that natural philosophy still

may have important relevance to the present. There is much work yet to be done in

naturalistic ontology. The Presocratic dialogue expresses a method of doing metaphysics that

has not yet been fully explored: ontological naturalism. Ontological naturalism is a

foundational system based on substance. All metaphysical accounts must be able to be

completely reduced to the naturalistic ontology. Even arguments made about the moral realm

must be fundamentally linked with the ontology. Ontology is the foundation for all arguments

that arise out of this style of philosophy. In the end, this paper suggests that once the natures

of the substances of the world are properly articulated, there is potential in this method to

overcome the dilemmas of philosophy, particularly the problems of subjectivity caused by

Modem epistemological preoccupations which continue to stifle the philosophical dialogue

even now in the late Twentieth Century. In ontological naturalism, all aspects of the world,

even subjectivity, are just manifestations of substance.

Of additional interest to any student of Presocratic ontology is the problem of textual

sources. Most of the original works written by the Presocratics have been lost. What are

considered primary sources are really second-hand accounts written down several generations

later, at the earliest, and hundreds of years later, during the Middle Ages, at the latest. Since

no standard documentation procedures for citations had been developed, it is often very

difficult to distinguish between quote and paraphrase in these texts. Some authors may have

had access to the original Presocratic texts. For the most part, the authors are reporting from

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. other second-hand accounts or merely documenting oral traditions that have been passed

down. The problem here lies in being able to distinguish between the intentions of the

Presocratic philosopher and the interpretations of the reporters. One has to be careful to avoid

anachronistic accounts. In order to convey the spirit of the Presocratic movement, one must

take great pains to separate the reporters’s biases from the kernels of truth present in each

account. Students of Presocratic philosophy should not trust uncritically any Ancient or

Medieval account of the Presocratics. Doing so can cause the student to misinterpret the

Presocratic movement along several fronts. (Even Aristotle is guilty of imposing anachronistic

concepts on the Presocratics!) To weed out the anachronistic from the actual, it is important

to see the development of the Presocratics as a progressive movement from ontologies

comprised of complex substances to ontologies comprised of substances which are

ontologically more basic. To get at the real Presocratics, one must track the development of

the interplay of basic ontological distinctions; it is important to determine the differences and

the connections between the contingent and essential properties of substance, the qualitative

and quantitative natures of substance, change as transformation of observable qualities and

change as motion of matter, and material and immaterial substance. By keeping track of these

distinctions along the way, the Presocratic movement can be seen as progressing at each

phase of its development by reducing to more basic ontological concepts what was merely

assumed at a prior phase.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PART ONE: THE ARCHE OF THE MILESIAN MONISTS

Chapters 1 through 3 concentrate on the first philosophers, the first thinkers known

to give formally a rational argument as a method of explaining the world. Thales (625-545

B.C.), Anaximander (610-540 B.C.), and Anaximenes (588-524 B.C.) rejected mythologico-

religjous explanations of things and attempted to replace the traditional, supernatural stories

with ontologies founded upon the notion of substance. Besides being the first naturalists, they

all have several other things in common. In order to justify the title above, it will be helpful

to begin with the three commonalities implied by that title. The Milesians all: (1) flourished

in the port city of Miletus, a Greek city-state in Ionia of Asia Minor; (2) postulated a first

principle, or arche, which was immortal and was intended to act as a foundation for a

naturalistic explanation of the world (their arche was the source of four basic aspects of the

world order: its permanence, unity, change, and diversity); (3) were monists, i.e., their

principle was a single kind of substance.

It is important to point out how the Milesians viewed substance. They all saw

substance as material. In doing so, they did not distinguish between the material substrate and

the qualities associated with matter. For them, the material and the qualitative are both

essential to substance. For instance, there is no difference between “water” and “the moist”

or “fire” and “the hot.” In addition, Milesian substance is animated. An innate aliveness

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 13

characterizes the arche of this first phase of Presocratic philosophy. Change, therefore, is not

explained; it is merely assumed as an essential ability of substance.

Finally, the Milesians are all cosmogonists; they all propose a theory for the beginning

of the world of change and diversity. For them, the world as we know it was bom from a

single, primordial source. As such, their ontologies are mostly aimed at explaining the large-

scale order of the cosmos, such as the differences and the transformations among the earth,

the sea, and the heavens, and the underlying relationship of these cosmic regions to one

another.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 1

THALES

Thales held that everything was made from water. Aristotle tells us that

Thales, the founder of [natural] philosophy, says that [the first principle] is water (that is why he declares that the earth rests on water). He perhaps came to acquire this belief from seeing that the nourishment of everything is moist and that heat itself comes from this [e.g., humidity] and lives by this (for that from which anything comes into being is its first principle)—he came to his belief both for this reason and because the seeds of everything have a moist nature, and water is the natural principle of moist things.2

Others suggest that there was an additional reason that water was chosen as the one primal

kind of existence or first principle: “everything else in the universe is merely a modification

of water”3; “[t]he differences of things trace back in some way to the transformations of

water, from fluid to fiery or gaseous or solid state.”4 This can be translated into the ancient

Greek notion that there are four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and the observation

that the four elements change into one another both physically and qualitatively. Thales tried

to explain these material and qualitative transformations by postulating one of the elements,

water or “the moist,” as the fundamental element (substance). As water evaporates it becomes

2Metaphysics 983b6-l 1, 17-27; from Barnes 63.

3 W.T. Stace, A Critical History o f Greek Philosophy (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1934), 21.

4 Robert S. Brumbaugh, The Philosophers o f Greece (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1981), 14.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 15

mist or air, which is less moist and more dry. As water freezes it becomes ice; ice is less moist

and more cold. If the process were carried further in either direction, air could become a fiery

aither and, thus, hot, and ice could become earth, which is less cold and less moist.5

Therefore, because of water’s universal, life-giving power, its noticeable ability to take

on the different material forms of gas, liquid, and solid, and the apparent ability of “the moist”

to be a common characteristic of other qualities (such as the moist-heat of humidity or

evaporation, or the cold-moist of snow), the element water is an obvious choice as a

candidate for the first attempt at postulating substance as the explanation of the world.

The idea that all change originates by modifications of substance (in this case water)

becomes even clearer by an analysis of the ancient Greek word for water, hydor. “Hydor was

a word that was not confined to H20 but was used for any sort of matter in a fluid state.”6 All

change derives from the transformations of matter in a fluid state; matter in a fluid state can

become matter in non-fluid states, the matter being preserved the entire time.

Nevertheless, this notion of matter changing from one primal state (fluid/the moist)

to other states does pose a problem for Thales’s ontology. Although seeing water change to

other states is probably the most common and accessible observation of elemental

transformation, one could still ask why water (fluid/the moist) should be the root or

originative state rather than say air (vapor) or earth (solid); why could not the originative

state be “the hot,” “the dry,” or “the cold?” The only reasonable explanation in support of the

5 Frederick Copleston, S. J., A History o fPhilosophy, vol. 1 (New York: Image/Doubleday, 1993), 23.

6 Brumbaugh 13.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 16

water principle seems to be that, since Thales offers no mechanism for change, water offers

a perceptually available explanation for change that is easily understood in an intuitive way

because of its frequency in experience. It is a common experience to see a frozen pond in the

winter, to watch rain-puddles evaporate dry in the sun’s heat, and to feel the sticky, sweaty

humidity of the summer; “the moist,” does seem able to become “the cold,” “the dry,” and

“the hot.” If either earth, air, or even fire were postulated as a principle, without a mechanism

for change it is not obvious to perception how, for instance, air could become earth or fire

could become water.

Although Thales does not explain by what process water comes to be changed into

other things, he “earns his place as the First Greek philosopher from the fact that he first

conceives the notion of Unity in Difference (even if he does not isolate the notion on to the

logical plane), and, while holding fast to the idea of unity, endeavours to account for the

evident diversity of the many.”7 In short, the fundamental idea uncovered by him is “that

under the multiplicity of the world there must be a single ultimate principle.”8 Therefore

Thales is a monist, believing that everything is derived from one substance, this one substance

bringing unity to the various things of the world. For Thales, reality is conceived as a material

unity, “the idea of matter [being] his own invention.”9

Aristotle attributes still another ontological idea to Thales. It concerns the role of soul

in ontology: “Some say that soul is mixed in the whole universe. Perhaps that is why Thales

7 Copleston 23.

8 Stace 22.

9 Brumbaugh 14.

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thought that everything was full of gods.”10 Concerning the statement that all things are “full

of gods,” light is cast by a passage from Diogenes Laertius according to which Thales had

said that “God is most ancient because ungenerated.”11 If Thales had said this, “there is no

doubt that he was referring to his water-principle . . . because all things are derived from

water as principle.”12 In ancient Greece, what was divine was immortal. The first principle as

the source, sustainer, and font of all things is immortal and therefore divine. If all things are

water, then all things are “full of gods.”

Aristotle offers another explanation: “Thales, judging by what they report, seems to

have believed that the soul was something which produces motion, inasmuch as he said that

the magnet has a soul because it moves iron.”13 To Thales, a soul or psyche, as it is

interchangeably translated, as a source of motion, “may have meant nothing more than .. .

an inner power.”14 This suggests that Thales’s naturalistic principle “was still, in some d Jgree,

alive; and change and action in nature were partially explained by this aliveness.”15 Thus, as

the first attempt at a naturalistic explanation, Thales’s ontology never fully escapes the

animism from which it tries to break away. It is important to note that by soul or psyche he

10 Aristotle, On the Soul 41 la7-8; from Barnes 64.

11 Diogenes Laertius,Lives of the Philosophers 135; from Barnes 68.

12 Giovanni Reale, From the Origins to Socrates, vol. 1 of A History o fAncient Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987), 37.

13 Aristotle, On the Soul 405al9-21; from Barnes 64.

14 Brumbaugh 14.

15Ibid 15.

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does not mean a conscious self, but the innate ability of things to cause their own movement

and thus have a way of interacting with the other things of the world, like the movements of

magnets to and from metallic things and of metallic things to and from magnets.

Although some believe that these statements concerning soul “cannot be interpreted

with certainty,”16 a reasonable interpretation can be drawn by combining the two explanations

cited above in a particular way. Everything is full of gods because everything is made from

the first principle, water, which is immortal, and is thus divine. Another god-like quality is the

ability to cause change. Traditionally gods were responsible for the course of events; they had

an inner power to initiate action, to cause birth, growth, decay, and destruction. Since all

things have a soul or an inner power to cause movement or change, they have the power of

a god. All things are full of gods and therefore can behave like gods. If water is “that from

which and into which [all things] go, it is clear that all things must participate in the being and

the life of this principle and therefore all must be alive and animated.”17

In any case, the importance of Thales “lies in the fact that he raised the question, what

is the ultimate nature of the world; and not in the [specific] answer that he actually gave to

that question or in his reasons.”18 This question concerning the problematic of the whole of

reality (the totality of things)19 in turn raises two issues, the problem of the one and the many,

and the problem of permanence and change. Thales’s water principle implicitly offers

16 Copleston 23.

17 Reale 37.

18 Copleston 23.

19 Reale xix, 17.

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responses to these issues. How are the diverse things of the world related as part of a single

world or universe? Everything is one and unified because everything is the same: water. What

is the source of diversity? The diversity of the world comes from the transformations of

water. Why does the world exist and what is to prevent it from ceasing to exist? The first

principle is eternal, never created or destroyed; immortal water is the sustainer of the world.

What causes change? As an immortal, water is like a god. Gods have the power to cause

change in the world; therefore water is the source of change. All things are water, therefore

all things have an inner power which provides the ability to cause change in the world.

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ANAXIMANDER

Anaximander has been identified by writers as a student, associate, and successor of

Thales. Hippolytus says that “Anaximander said that the infinite is principle and element of

the things that exist, being the first to call it by the name of principle.”20 Although Chapter 1

referred to Thales’s water as a principle, note that Thales himself would not have referred to

water by that word. Nevertheless, for all intents and purposes, Thales’s element serves the

function of a principle, or as the Greeks called it, arche. A principle is “a) the source or origin

[root] of all things, b) the focus and final goal of all things . . . [and] c) the permanent

sustainer of all things.”21 Thales’s hydor serves all three functions. Anaximander is credited

with the first actual usage of the term principle (arche).

Anaximander’s principle, “the infinite,” called apeiron in Greek, also may be translated

as “the unlimited”22 or the “indefinite,”23 or even an indeterminate “boundless something.”24

Reale gives a good definition of apeiron which he says is imperfectly translated as two words

20 Hippolytus, Refutation o f All Heresies I iv 1-7; from Barnes 71-72.

21 Reale 35.

22 Ibid 39.

23 G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 111.

24 Brumbaugh 20.

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(such as the infinite or the boundless) because it involves something more than two words can

render: “ A-peiron means that which is lacking aperas, that is, not only external but internal

limits or determinations as well. In the first meaning, apeiron indicates unlimited space,

unlimited quantity, that is, a quantitative unlimited. In a second meaning, instead, the

unlimited is according to quality, that is, the qualitative unlimited.”25

Anaximander’s principle is material, but it is not any particular kind of matter like Thales’s

water. According to Stace,

it is rather a formless, indefinite, and absolutely featureless matter in general. Matter, as we know it, is always some particular kind of matter. It must be iron, brass, water, air, or other such. The difference between the different kinds of matter is qualitative, that is to say, we know that air is air because it has the qualities of air and differs from iron because iron has the qualities of iron, and so on. The primeval matter of Anaximander is just matter not yet sundered into the different kinds of matter. It is therefore formless and characterless. And as it is thus indeterminate in quality, so it is illimitable in quantity.26

Why Anaximander chose apeiron as principle over his mentor’s hydor is explored by

Simplicius: “It is clear that he observed the change of the four elements into one another and

was unwilling to make any one of them the underlying stuff but rather chose something else

apart from them.”27

This is where Anaximander first advances beyond Thales. He agrees with Thales in

thinking that all things are made of some common stuff, but he thinks this could not be one

of the elements, but rather must be a limitless thing that has no definite, specific characteristics

25 Reale 39.

26 Stace 24-25.

27 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 24.13-25; from Barnes 74-75.

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of its own. If primary substance were, according to Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, “identified

with a specific world-constituent, [then it] would swamp the other world-constituents and

never allow them to develop.”28 Brumbaugh suggests that Anaximander’s reasoning went as

follows:

If everything real is matter with definite qualities, it must be possible for this matter to be hot in some cases, cold in others, sometimes wet and sometimes dry. Anaximander thought of qualities as always being contrary pairs. If one identifies matter with one quality of such a pair, as in Thales’s “all things are water,” how can one explain the existence of the contrary quality? If “to be is to be material,” and “matter is water,” then it would seem to follow that “to be is to be moist.” All right; what happens when things become dry? If the matter they are made of is always wet (and this is Anaximander’s definition of hydor), drying would destroy the matter of things; they would become immaterial and cease to be. In the same way, matter cannot be identified with any one quality to the exclusion of its opposite. From this, the concept of matter as the boundless, a neutral indeterminate something, follows.29

With Anaximander, the notion of monistic substance advances from the more concrete idea

of Thales that water, or “the moist,” is substance, to a more abstract idea that a neutral

substance is something that is the source of all quantitative and qualitative specificity, but

itself has no specificity.

In addition to Anaximander’s principle being qualitatively unlimited, there are several

reasons why it must also be quantitatively unlimited. According to Stace, “if there were a

limited amount of matter it would long ago have been used up in the creation and destruction

of the ‘innumerable worlds’.”30 Aristotle adds, “generation and destruction [would] not fail,

28 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 113.

29 Brumbaugh 20.

30 Stace 25.

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if there were an infinite source from which that which is coming-to-be is derived.”31 If the raw

material for creation were finite, then it would be possible that this raw material could all be

used up and thus creation would no longer occur; therefore, in order to be inexhaustible, the

amount of stuff must be infinite in quantity.32 Because it is infinite in quantity, it must be

infinite in magnitude and thus the principle must also occupy every spatial area.Apeiron is

a mass stretching away endlessly in every direction. The different parts of the whole substance

occupy different locations. Matter stretches out to infinity through space. Place and body are

here combined in a single idea. In addition, if all things derive from the principle, then the

principle must be everywhere. Substance cannot have spatial boundaries. If the principle is

fundamentally everything that exists, what would exist beyond the principle if it were spatially

bounded?33 Therefore it must be infinite materially and spatially.34

31 Aristotle, Physics 4, 203bI5; from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 113.

32 Nevertheless, Aristotle points out a fallacy in this assertion as related to Anaximander. In Physics 8, 208a8, Aristotle says: “Nor, in order that generation may not fail, is it necessary for perceptible body to be actually infinite: for it is possible for the destruction of one thing to be the generation of the other, the sum of things being limited.” (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 114.) As we shall see, Anaximander postulates a kind of cosmic balance which ensures that opposites make retribution to each other for their encroachments. Thus all change in the developed world takes place between the same original quantity of separate, opposed substances.

33 See the Eleatics (Part Two), especially Melissus (Chapter 5).

34 A passage in Aristotle’s Physics alludes to Anaximander and lists some reasons for belief in infinitude: it is possible that one or more of those reasons originally came from Anaximander: ...[Everything is either a principle or derived from a principle. But the infinite has no principle—for then it would have a limit. Belief in the existence of something infinite comes mainly from five considerations: from time (since this is infinite), from the division of magnitudes (mathematicians actually use the infinite); again, because generation and

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From apeiron, opposite qualities arise. They are created somehow out of the neutral

substance. Anaximander does not say how the specific opposites arise from apeiron. All one

can safely assume is that a kind of spontaneous generation occurs; out of the neutral matter

specificity is bom. The generation of something essentially new, such as, the emergence of

qualitative differences from something which has no qualities, is merely assumed to be

possible by Anaximander. Many writers, including Aristotle, Theophrastus, Hippolytus, and

Simplicius, report that an eternal motion is responsible for separating the qualities out from

apeiron, as if the substance were a mixture. The notion of an eternal motion is an

anachronistic one. What the reporters probably had in mind was a mechanical kind of motion

like that of the much later atomists, with whom Theophrastus (Aristotle’s pupil whose work

was the source of many later interpretations) may well have grouped Anaximander.35

Additionally, one often reads of a vortex motion or vortices in Anaximander. There is no

destruction will give out unless there is something infinite from which what comes into being is subtracted; again, because what is finite is always limited by something, so that there cannot be an ultimate limit if one thing must always be limited by another; last and most importantly, there is something which raises a puzzle for everyone alike: because they do not give out in thought, numbers seem to be infinite, and so do mathematical magnitudes and the region outside the heavens. But if the region outside is infinite, then body and worlds also seem to be infinite—for why should they be here rather than there in the void? Hence if body is anywhere, it is everywhere. Again, if void and space are infinite, body too must be infinite—for with eternal things there is no difference between being possible and being actual. (Aristotle, Physics 203b6-ll, 13-30; from Barnes 75-76.)

35 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 127.

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evidence for this apart from Aristotle.36 Again, this is anachronistic. Vortices are not

associated with anyone before Empedocles. It is highly improbable that Anaximander himself

ever isolated the question of motion;37 change for him is qualitative. Like Thales’s water,

apeiron was divine, and naturally possessed the power to cause change to what and where

it willed.38 Motion is merely assumed.

It is important not to view Anaximander’s substance as a mixture, an infinite

conglomeration of all possible qualities of being. This is yet another anachronism. Following

the accounts given by Aristotle39 and Simplicius,40 one can be misled to suppose that

Anaximander intended that specific forms and qualities must be present in their source before

generation. Owens says that Aristotle interpreted apeiron as a mixture comparable to the

original mixtures of the later philosophers Anaxagoras and Empedocles. Aristotle was reading

their particle theory back into Anaximander41 According to Kirk, Raven, and Schofield,

Aristotle “perverted Anaximander by substituting separating ‘out’ for separating ‘off from

the Indefinite, thus making this into a mixture of opposites.”42 Kahn concurs: “from the

36 See Aristotle, On The Heavens B13, 295a7; from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 126- 127.

37 Parmenides is really the first philosopher to explicitly discuss motion.

38 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 128.

39 See Aristotle, Physics A4,187a20; from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 128-129.

40 See Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 24, 21; from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 128-129.

41 Joseph Owens, A History of Ancient Western Philosophy (New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts, Inc., 1959), 16.

42 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 129.

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Aristotelian viewpoint, the opposites were of course potentially present in their source. But

for a Milesian they were no more pre-existent in the apeiron than children pre-exist in the

body of their parents before conception.”43 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield add that “what was

separated ‘off’ was not opposite substances but something that produced them,”44 such as a

kind of seed or egg like a sperm or embryo. It might be simpler to say that apeiron itself is

the ovule; it simply conceives, or gives birth to, the opposites. Kahn concludes that

Anaximander “accepted as an unquestioned fact that one thing could arise out of another and

he expressed this fact in the most significant way he or any man of his time could imagine, by

analogy with the generation of living things.”45 Thus theapeiron produces opposite qualities.

Anaximander needs the production of the opposites in order to account for change and

diversity.

Change is seen by Anaximander as the transformation of qualities into their negations:

the heat and drought of the summer are replaced by the cold and the rain of the winter, night

becomes day, living things die. According to Seligman, “Anaximander did not try to deny the

problem of opposition; on the contrary, he seems to have accepted it as an intrinsic feature

of all existence.”46 The basic idea is that observable opposites, such as fire and water, are in

conflict. It is the natural tendency of opposite things to swallow one another up. When, for

43 Charles H. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins o f Greek Cosmology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 236.

44 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 130.

45 Kahn 237.

46 Paul Seligman,The Apeiron o fAnaximander (London: The University of London’s The Athlone Press, 1962), 62.

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instance, fire and water meet, they struggle until one or the other prevails, and either the fire

is put out and nothing but the water remains, or else the water is dried up and fire remains in

sole possession of the field. In order to explain this, Anaximander points to an intermediate

stage, clearly visible to observation, of the conversion of water into vapor.47 Kirk, Raven, and

Schofield say that the main opposites in Anaximander’s ontology “were the hot substance and

the cold substance—flame or fire and mist or air. These, with which are associated dryness

and moisture, are also the main cosmological opposites, most notably involved in the large-

scale changes in the natural world.”48 Just as the two main opposites, fire and water, are

interchangeable, Anaximander must have thought that all change is governed in such a way.

Aristotle devised a schema to explain Anaximander’s theory. Although the system of

Anaximander was probably not as neat,49 Aristotle’s schema is an elaboration which is implicit

in the basic idea. Four primary opposites are bom out of apeiron: “the hot,” “the cold,” “the

wet,” and “the dry.” These qualities are grouped together as the two couples of hot-cold and

dry-wet. The simple elements are derivative of these couples and are formed by the linking

together of one member from each pair: fire is constituted by the hot and the dry; air by the

hot and the wet; water, the cold and the wet; earth, the cold and the dry. In this way each

element has one quality in common with and one quality opposed to its neighbor on either

47 W.K.C. Guthrie,A History o f Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 81.

48 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 120.

49 Kahn 126-127.

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side, e.g., fire (hot/dry) can become earth (cold/dry) or air (hot/wet), and water (cold/wet)

can become air (hot/wet) or earth (cold/dry). In this way the opposites are interchangeable.

Aristotle’s schema conveys the spirit of Anaximander’s concept. Nevertheless,

Anaximander would not have had the language to explain it so precisely:

The Peripatetics substituted their own more abstract formulations, the hot and the cold and so on, for more concrete expressions used by Anaximander himself. For him, the world may have been made up of substances which, while they each possessed individual tendencies contrary to those of some of the others, need not have been formally described as opposites, that is, for example, as the hard and the soft; but simply as fire, wind, iron, water, man, woman and so on.S0

Furthermore, in following Aristotle’s schema, it is important not to think that Anaximander

intended that certain basic forms are compounded into all other things. This would incorrectly

imply that Anaximander pioneered a theory of elements—an idea first formally worked out

by Empedocles.

According to Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, “there is no evidence that anyone before

Empedocles tried to give a detailed account of any but the main cosmic substances.” The

Milesians were mainly interested in the actual formation of the cosmos (cosmogony) and its

large-scale order thereafter (cosmology). Nevertheless, Anaximander does propose an

explanation for the transformation of opposites which could be applied to observable,

qualitative change that occurs around us everyday. Although, on the one hand,apeiron can

spontaneously produce the cosmological qualities, on the other hand, Anaximander’s

explanation for the interchange of opposites is law governed and can be seen as an intimation

of a mechanistic device: “the things from which existing things come into being are also the

50 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 120.

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things into which they are destroyed, in accordance with what must be . . . [For] ‘they give

justice and reparation to one another for their injustice in accordance with the arrangement

of time’ (he speaks of them in this way in somewhat poetical words).”51 Coming into being

and passing away are identified with a fault or injustice and with the necessity for an expiation

or reparation of this fault. Reale offers an explanation of this somewhat “poetical” language:

“Probably Anaximander referred in this passage to the contraries that tend precisely to

overwhelm each other. The injustice is the injustice proper to this overwhelming, and time is

seen as the judge, insofar as it assigns limits to each of the contraries, putting an end to the

predominance of one over the other and vice versa.”S2 Brumbaugh adds that Anaximander’s

poetical language is taken directly from a court of law, where an injury which one person

commits against another is compensated for by a penalty. The model for natural periodicity

is the pendulum or the scale:

All things that alternate in trespass and penalty are the contrary qualities that “separate out” from the boundless . .. [T]he pattern of Anaximander’s “laws of nature” [are that] one contrary tends to develop to excess, crowding out its opposite; so “justice” sets it back, penalizing it for its encroachment. But then, as time passes, the opposite that had been losing out grows stronger and oversteps in its turn, and must “according to the measure of time” be set back within its own proper bounds.53

Balance is a “necessary” condition of Anaximander’s world. The injustice of domination

committed by one quality must be rectified because an imbalance must always be

compensated for—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; for every action there is an equal

51 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 24.13-25; from Barnes 74-75.

52 Reale 41-42.

53 Brumbaugh 23-24.

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and opposite reaction. That quality which commits the injustice of domination must pay by

being usurped in the same measure by its opposite—the other end of the pendulum or scale.

In this way all qualities are conserved over time, none ever generally outweighing any of the

others. If, for instance, the dominance of “the moist” were not expiated, then “the dry” would

never be able to exist. In order that opposite qualities continue to come into being, each

expiation becomes a new injustice to become expiated, ad infinitum. Expiation or reparation

is the mechanism that enables an eternal well-spring of possible qualities never to diminish so

that all potentialities of the principle may become actual in things. Expiation prevents the total

extinction of any one possible quality and thus preserves diversity.

But why must opposite qualities dominate one another in the first place? Domination

is Anaximander’s way of explaining why there is water here and earth over there, why in a

particular location a thing is this thing rather than something else. Expiation, a changing of

the dominance guard, ensures that diversity in the world is maintained.

Although Anaximander’s processes for qualitative change are explained in terms of

legal conceptions, his intentions as a naturalist are to give mechanisms that are immanent in

the world process. Nevertheless, he has not completely lost all notions of animistic thought.

Brumbaugh concurs: “The advance over Thales’s world in which individualpsyches of things

are responsible for change and motion is remarkable, though the tendency toward

personification and mythology has not entirely lost its hold.”54 With the use of notions such

as the hatred of opposites for one another, injustice, and expiation by usurping dominance,

Anaximander’s world is not quite one of non-anthropomorphic mechanism. Nevertheless,

54 Brumbaugh 24.

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Anaximander’s attempt at giving an explanation of the processes responsible for change and

diversity makes his ontology superior to Thales’s, since Thales had no device for explaining

the transformations of the substance.

In summary, unity is provided to Anaximander’s world by apeiron. The substance is

everywhere and all things are fundamentally constituted of it. Although the world of change

and diversity was created, apeiron—the substance from which the world was issued— is

eternal. Apeiron spontaneously generates the primary opposites, the hot and the cold. Once

these opposites are distinguished from the apeiron, the opposites struggle to dominate one

another. Their determination to encroach upon each other’s existence is the source of

qualitative change. In this way, diversity is created, and through the guaranteed expiation of

dominance, diversity is maintained. Change is inherent to the qualities; qualities must either

gobble up their opposites or be gobbled up by their opposites. A cosmic justice governs the

rules of qualitative transformation, thus permitting change and diversity to continue eternally.

The essential properties of apeiron are the aspects of its unlimited and indefinite nature. The

contingent properties of Anaximander’s ontology are not reduced to the essential properties.

The objects of Anaximander’s ontology are animated and are capable of participating in

change by their own means.

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ANAXIMENES

Anaximenes was a younger contemporary and associate of Anaximander.

Anaximenes’s ontology was considered to be the epitome of Milesian monism: “The Milesian

doctrines as a whole came to be known as the philosophy of Anaximenes, as though in the

eyes of the ancients he was the most important representative of the School.”ss

Of the various accounts of his views, the fullest is the one given by the doxographer

Hippolytus:

[Anaximenes] said that the first principle is infinite air, from which what is coming into being and what has come into being and what will exist. .. come into being, while everything else comes into being from its offspring. The form of the air is this: when it is most uniform it is invisible, but it is made apparent by the hot and the cold and the moist and the moving . . . For as it is condensed and rarefied it appears different: when it dissolves into a more rarefied condition it becomes fire; and winds, again, are condensed air, and cloud is produced from air by compression. Again, when it is more condensed it is water, when still further condensed it is earth, and when it is as dense as possible it is stones. Thus the most important factors in coming into being are opposites—hot and cold.56

55 Copleston 27.

56 Hippolytus,Refutation o fAll Heresies I vii 1-9; from Barnes 77.

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Anaximenes’s principle is air or aer51 in Greek. In the Milesian tradition of Thales and

Anaximander, Anaximenes is a monist. Like Thales, he too thinks that one of the cosmic

elements, in this case air, is the principle.

At this point one might think that by postulating just another element as the principle,

Anaximenes is merely a throwback to the days of Thales. Would not air as principle suffer the

same weakness as water? How could “the wet,” for instance, exist if everything is air? Is not

this just Thales turned on his head? In order to answer these questions it is necessary to

explore further the nature of Anaximenes’s air.

Air has somewhat the same nature as Anaximander’s apeiron. Like apeiron, air is a

substance that is unlimited quantitatively; its wholeness is infinitely vast. It surrounds all

things and thus provides the unity to the world. Also, air is invisible. Invisibility implies a

qualitative indefiniteness and an incorporeality that is formless. Air, nevertheless, is a better

foundation than apeiron in several ways. Whereasapeiron is very abstract, air is an

observable substance—its wind can be felt. Additionally, air can be used to explain change

in a more mechanistic way than apeiron can (via rarefaction and condensation). Furthermore,

if apeiron can spontaneously generate the opposite qualities, it would be simpler just to

postulate the competing qualities as already existing and do away with apeiron', the

spontaneous generation of the qualities from apeiron is a seemingly superfluous act. But to

say that all that exists is changing qualities without a substance likeapeiron behind them is

57 Brumbaugh 26.

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to deny the reality of substance.58 Doing that would be neither monistic nor cosmogonical,

and very un-Milesian. The postulation of uncreated, changing qualities makes cosmogony

unnecessary; cosmogonists need a beginning to the world of change and diversity. Monists

need a single substance that underlies everything. Air offers the permanence of a substance,

yet it offers a plausible, non-anthropomorphic mechanism for explaining cosmological change

and diversity that does not destroy the substance.

Anaximenes accounts for change “without personality.”59 Thales’shydor has soul or

psyche; everything in his ontology is animated. In contrast, Anaximander’s apeiron gives birth

to the opposites and then a kind of cosmic vengeance expiates the injustice they commit

towards one another. In contrast to such basically anthropomorphic processes, change in

Anaximenes’s ontology is explained by the processes of rarefaction and condensation: “the

different qualities and states observed in matter are simply the result of shifting pressure,

creating different degrees of density.”60 Air alters its appearance according to how much there

is of it in a particular place. Air in its primal state appears incorporeal61 because it is

58 This is a foreshadowing of Heraclitus. Many accounts of Heraclitus’s ontology interpret it as if it were just another Milesian theory. They portray Heraclitus as postulating the element fire as a substance which undergoes change. As we shall see in Part Two, this is a misguided view of Heraclitus. Heraclitus postulates changing qualities for his foundation. This denies the existence of substance, and thus is a very un-Milesian view.

59 Brumbaugh 26.

60 Ibid 26.

61 Brumbaugh suggests that Anaximenes thought air to be incorporeal. (28.) This is disputable. All Anaximenes seems to be saying is that air appears incorporeal in its primal state: “The air is close to the incorporeal.” (Olympiodorus, On the Divine and Sacred Art o f the Philosopher’s 25;Stone from Reale 46.) Air is material because “it

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“uniform;”62 this uniformity causes the matter to be “invisible.”63 As air is rarified and

becomes more and more “slack,”64 the matter “expanding and loosening,”65 it becomes “the

hot.” As air is more and more “concentrated and condensed”66 than its uniform state, it

becomes wind, cloud, water, ice, earth, and stones, which are different degrees of “the cold.”

Again, as in Anaximander, “the hot” and “the cold” are the cosmological opposites. It is

supposed that Anaximenes suggested the following observation in order to demonstrate his

mechanism for change: “it is not unreasonably said that men release both hot and cold from

their mouths; for the breath is cooled when it is compressed and condensed by the lips, but

when the mouth is relaxed and it is exhaled it becomes hot by reason if its rareness.”67 As

opposed to Anaximander’s apeiron, air does not have to generate spontaneously the

opposites in order to account for the objects of qualitative transformation. For Anaximenes,

transformation is accounted for by a device; the opposites are not created, they are just the

result of a change in the substance’s volume.

Nevertheless, although air is not anthropomorphic, it is still animistic in the Milesian

tradition. The substance has a kind of inner power to cause its own transformation. Although

becomes visible when cold, when hot, when moist and in movement.” (Simplicius, Refutation o f all Heresies', from Reale 46.)

62 Plutarch, The Primary Cold 947f; from Barnes 79.

63 Ibid.

64Ibid.

65Ibid, from Reale 46.

66Ibid.

67Ibid 947f; from Barnes 79.

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rarefaction and condensation explain qualitative change, there is no account given of the cause

responsible for the expansion and contraction of air. As is the case with Anaximander, some

reporters attribute an eternal motion as the cause of rarefaction and condensation. This is due,

again, to Theophrastus’s anachronistic account of the Milesians: “Theophrastus, as usual,

reduced these assumptions to the formula o f‘eternal motion’, adding that all change would

depend on this motion.”68 The Milesians do not confront the issue of change as motion; not

until Parmenides is motion seriously introduced as an aporia. Like all the Milesian

philosophers, Anaximenes merely takes motion for granted. Perhaps the concept of eternal

motion is just “Theophrastus’s way of expressing the capacity of the divine originative stuff

to initiate change and motion where it willed.”69

How is Anaximenes’s air any better than Thales’s water? Why not just make water

the arche and rarefy or condense it instead of air? As previously mentioned, air shares many

of the indefinite characteristics of apeiron. According to Kirk, Raven, and Schofield,

Anaximenes’s air is undifferentiated.70 Whereas water is differentiated as “the moist,” the

negation of which would entail the destruction of the underlying substance, air, being

undifferentiated, takes on qualities as it is expanded or contracted. Since air is seen as non-

qualitative, as the substance transforms and takes on other qualities, its being is not negated.

Air, as substrate, seemingly can remain permanent behind all changes in its qualities.

68 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 147.

69Ibid 152.

70 Ibid.

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The unity of the world is provided by air because it is the permanent sustainer; air is

everywhere underlying everything. Air does not separate from air; it always remains one.

Anaximenes implicitly understands that if you are a monist, the unity of the principle cannot

be disturbed.71 Qualitative differences are accounted for by the change in air’s volume. The

contingent properties of physico-qualitative transformation are reduced to the quantitative

nature of air. Nevertheless, although the processes of rarefaction and condensation are

themselves efficient causes, the motion required for the quantitative changes of expansion and

contraction is simply not confronted by Anaximenes. In addition to this problem of motion

that the Milesians do not address, they also overlook their inherent problem of being able to

generate many things from a principle that is singular and whole. Their ontologies are

simultaneously monistic and pluralistic.

The dialectic of Milesian ontology from Thales to Anaximenes is, negatively stated,

one of decreasing levels of animism and anthropomorphism. Positively stated, it is one of

increasing levels of mechanism. Thales’s matter is fully animistic; water is simply able to

change itself at will. Anaximander’s apeiron is a crude combination of animism and

mechanism. On the one hand, in animistic style, apeiron simply gives birth to the opposites;

on the other hand, the mechanism of cosmic justice or balance, albeit somewhat

anthropomorphic in character, governs the transformations of qualities. Anaximenes’s air is

able to change due to its non-anthropomorphic, mechanistic ability to rarefy and condense

71 This idea is an intimation of Parmenides (Chapter 5). Parmenides shows that even the condensation and rarefaction of a single substance requires a kind of separation of substance from itself, and thus disturbs the unity of the principle.

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itself. Nevertheless, like all Milesian substances, air retains a level of divine, animistic

characteristics, such as being able to move where and when it wills.

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Chapters 4 and 5 explore the second phase of naturalistic philosophy. Its main figures

are Heraclitus (535-475 B.C.) and Parmenides (514-450 B.C.). The action shifts away from

Miletus, when in 494 B.C. the city is sacked, burned, and razed by the Persians in retaliation

for its role in an Ionian revolt which resulted in the burning of Sardis, the Persian capital of

Asia Minor. Heraclitus was from Ephesus, a Greek city-state in Asia Minor some twenty-five

miles north of Miletus. Parmenides was from the Italian port city of Elea, a Greek city-state

some sixty miles south-east of Naples (Neopolis). Where a series of defenders of

Parmenides’s arguments arose, their brand of philosophy came to be known as Eleaticism.

The most famous were Zeno from Elea (489-? B.C.) and Melissus from the island of Samos

(dates unknown, but flourished in the third quarter of the 5th Century B.C.). Zeno was

famous for his paradoxes which supported the conclusions of Parmenides’s arguments, while

the systematic Melissus modified and codified Parmenides’s system, taking it to its logical

conclusions.

Both Heraclitus and the Eleatics were monists, but their kind of monism led them to

extreme conclusions about the world. These conclusions were to differentiate them from the

Milesians. On one extreme, Heraclitus separates observable qualities out of substance. If

change, as the Milesians formulate it, is qualitative transformation, then the postulation of

substance as underlying change is superfluous. If the opposites ultimately have the power to

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transform themselves, then there is no need for unchanging, essential properties. Heraclitus

denies any permanence to the world. All that exists are contingent properties with no

permanent sustainer of which they are predicated. Heraclitus’s principle is change itself, a

unity of opposites. Heraclitus may be seen as an example of what someone attempting to be

a naturalist has to believe about the world if substance is rejected. By rejecting substance, the

physico-temporal unity that is so integral to naturalistic causation is undermined. In the

Heraclitean ontology, change does not happen to substances. Change is merely assumed as

foundational to the nature of existence; change is existence. On the other extreme, Parmenides

concentrates on the ontology of monistic substance. If, as the Milesians say, a single

substance underlies the world, then there is no possibility of change. Monism cannot account

for either qualitative transformation or physical motion. In Parmenides, for the first time, the

different kinds of change, qualitative transformation and motion, are isolated. Parmenides’s

principle, “being” or “the One,” denies the possibility of both forms of change and the

diversity that may arise out of them; everything is permanent and static. All that exists is

substance and its essential properties. Parmenides, along with the modifications to his system

provided by Melissus, may be seen as the ultimate monist. The Eleatics thus take monism to

its logical conclusion. Although the Eleatics show that it is possible for monists to provide

permanence and unity to the world, they definitively demonstrate that it is impossible to

account for change and diversity naturalistically if you postulate only one substance. Thus the

Milesians were wrong: a single substance cannot be an arche.

Neither first principle of the extreme monists qualifies as an arche in the classic,

Milesian sense because in each case a component of the function of an arche is rejected.

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Remember, an arche is postulated in order to explain permanence, unity, change, and

diversity together as part of a single system. Ultimately, substance is supposed to be a

foundation for giving an account of both the apparent and unapparent natures of the world.

Heraclitus’s principle has no permanence to which contingent properties are reduced, and that

is to reject substance as a foundation. Parmenides’s principle allows no change or diversity,

and thus the dynamism of our everyday world cannot be accounted for.

Additionally, with the extreme monists, cosmogony is abandoned. Their worlds were

not produced out of a primordial substance. For Heraclitus, all that exists is an eternal

succession of qualities. The One of Parmenides is immortal; nothing produced it and from it

nothing is produced. For the extreme monists, what exists now has the same nature as it did

an infinite number of moments ago. There is no beginning to the world. Heraclitus’s principle

is eternally changing. Parmenides’s principle is eternally static. The nature of what exists has

always been the same.

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HERACLITUS

The ontology of Heraclitus of Ephesus is an outgrowth of the Milesian concept of

change. For the Milesians, change is qualitative transformation. They postulate qualitative

substances that are able to transform themselves so as to become different qualities. For

naturalists, the point of postulating substance is to provide a foundation for a theory of

change. But none of the Milesian substances is able to account for change. Ultimately, the

opposites are responsible for their own change without any essential connection to the primal

substrate. The Milesians fail to reduce their contingent properties to their substances. That

is, they do not explain contingent properties by the essential nature of substance, but simply

assume that the nature of substance somehow essentially involves changes in contingent

properties. Heraclitus agrees with the Milesians in the sense that change is qualitative

transformation. Nevertheless, he must have thought, since substance does not account for the

change that is all around us, it must not be necessary (apply Occam’s Razor). Heraclitus thus

represents the next logical step that can be made if one agrees with the Milesian concept of

change. If the opposites are animated, substance is superfluous. For Heraclitus, all that exists

are contingent properties. His principle is change itself.

Although Heraclitus’s principle is not a substance, it is a monistic principle because

what exists is seen as a whole, i.e., the unity of the dynamic opposites. In contrast, Milesian

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ontologies are unified by their single substance; the substance exists everywhere and makes

up everything. In rejecting substance, Heraclitus uses a different strategy in trying to

comprehend the underlying coherence of things: “all things happen according to Logos .”72

Logos is a law of nature: “the unifying formula or proportionate method of arrangement of

things, what might almost be termed their structural plan both individual and in sum.”73 The

Logos is an efficient cause. Nevertheless, since Heraclitus does not isolate motion on the

logical plane, Logos should not be considered the ultimate cause of motion; it only directs

change. The Logos, like Anaximander’s cosmic justice, ensures that change between

opposites is proportional and balanced overall. Just as Anaximander’s opposites are kept in

overall equilibrium through domination and expiation, Heraclitus’s Logos, the divine order

of things, arranges the world so that “justice is strife.”74 If the action and reaction between

opposites were to cease, then the victor in every contest of extremes would establish a

permanent domination, and the world as it is, in all of its diversity, would be destroyed. The

Logos provides “a backward-turning connection, like that of a bow and a lyre.”75 Through

opposite tensions, as the tension in the strings of a bow or a lyre is exactly balanced by the

outward tensions exerted by the arms of the instrument, the Logos maintains the coherence

of the world order.

72 Sextus Empiricus,Against the Mathematicians VII, 132; from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 186.

73 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 187.

74 Origen,Against Celsus VI xlii; from Barnes 114.

75 Hippolytus,Refutation o f All Heresies IX ix 1-x 9; from Barnes 104.

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The Logos also is the common connecting aspect of all the opposites: “The effect of

arrangement according to a common plan or measure is that all things, although apparently

plural and totally discrete, are really united in a coherent complex.”76 The world has been

arranged so that opposites are essentially connected because they succeed and are succeeded

by each other and nothing else. The world is a unity of qualities which change in succession.

There is never any real division between the opposites. The opposites, such as “the hot” and

“the cold,” form a hot-cold continuum. The opposites, the objects of reality, are a single

entity; they are whole. Conversely, the objects of experience are not wholes; they are each

seen as single components; from the unity there can be separated the superficial, discrete,

plural aspect of things. Thus, “things taken together are wholes and not wholes, something

which is being brought together and brought apart, which is in tune and out of tune; out of

all things there comes a unity, and out of a unity all things.”77 At this juncture one might ask

how the different pairs of opposites, such as hot-cold and night-day are related. According

to Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, “while each separate pair of contraries forms a single

continuum, the several continua, also, are connected with each other, though in a different

manner. Thus the total plurality of things forms a single, coherent, determinable

complex—what Heraclitus called ‘unity’.”78 TheLogos ensures a coherent, unified, stable and

efficient complex.

76 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 187.

77 Pseudo-Aristotle, On the World 5, 396b20; from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 190.

78 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 191.

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For Heraclitus, what exists are qualitative events, which are irreducible contingent

properties. To describe the nature of the transforming opposites, Heraclitus uses elemental

metaphors in order to exemplify the nature of his changing world. He compares the world

order to “an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.”79

Transformations of the opposites are like “an equal exchange for fire and fire for all things,

as goods are for gold and gold for goods.”80 Heraclitus also compares the nature of his

principle to the water in a river: “it is not possible to step twice into the same river . .. nor

to touch mortal substance twice in any condition: by the swiftness and speed of its change,

it scatters and collects itself again—or rather, it is not again and later but simultaneously that

it comes together and departs, approaches and retires.”81 Just as the water in a river is

constantly being replaced by new water, what exists in one moment gets replaced in the next

moment by something else. Like an eternal flame that is perpetually replenished, existence

needs to be continually rekindled in order to continue to exist. Each moment of existence is

like flame and fuel; measures are being extinguished while corresponding measures are being

rekindled. What exists consumes what exists in order to fuel its own existence. Not all of the

opposites are being consumed at the same time; a measure of consumption is met with an

equal measure of replenishment. The Logos maintains this balance. Each moment has a dual

nature—an event of both creation and destruction. Each moment we live, we die; we live in

79 Clement,Miscellanies V, 104,1; from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 198.

80 Plutarch,On the E at Delphi 8, 388D; from Kirk, Raven, Schofield 198.

81 Ibid 92B; from Barnes 117.

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order to die, die in order to live. “We are and we are not.”82 “Immortals are mortals, mortal

immortals: living their death, dying their life.”83 “What exists at any moment is dissolved and

measured into the same proportion that existed at first.”84 The nature of existence is like a

circle, “beginning and end are common.”83 In this way the opposites are conserved, never

diminishing or increasing in total quantity, and thus they retain their unity and wholeness.

Such is the meaning of Heraclitus’s paradoxes.

It is important not to view Heraclitus as postulating fire as an elemental substance; fire

in itself is an extreme, not a potential mediator like the Milesians’s water, apeiron, or air. If

that were the case, then all would not be flux. Substances have essential properties;

substances presuppose an unchanging nature to the world. For Heraclitus, fire is seen as just

one of the four elemental qualities of the cosmic order. This order is a continuum with the

two extremes, “the hot” and “the cold” on opposing levels. The uppermost level of the

cosmos is composed of fire, “the hot,” a fiery aither. Coming down further, fire can transform

into air or mist. Further down, the air becomes sea. All the way down, sea becomes earth,

“the cold.” All of the cosmic regions are interchangeable. Thus “the path up and down is one

and the same.”86 The qualitative changes between the cosmic regions balance each other; they

82 Heraclitus,Homeric Questions 24.3-5; from Barnes 117.

83 Hippolytus, Refutation o fAll Heresies IX ix 1-x 9; from Barnes 104.

84 Clement, Miscellanies V xiv 104.1-5; from Barnes 122.

85 Porphyry,Notes on Homer, on Uliad IV 4; from Barnes 115.

86 Hippolytus,Refutation o f All Heresies I ix 1-x 9; from Barnes 103.

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occur simultaneously in such a way that the total of each always remains the same. TheLogos

ensures this.

Although Heraclitus’s change is a first principle, if one takes into account the

Milesians’s original definition and function of arche, then Heraclitus’s principle is not an

arche in the classic, Milesian sense. According to Reale:

The term “principle” \arche\ . . . better than any other points to the notion that [substance] is the origin of all things... It is, as Aristotle says, “that from which all things have their origin and that into which all things are dissolved.” It is “a reality that remains identically the same throughout the changes in its characteristics,” that is, a reality “that continues to exist unchanged” throughout the process of the generation of everything. Hence it is a) the source or origin of all things, b) the focus and final goal of all things, c) the permanent sustainer (substrate, we can say with a term of later usage) of all things. In short, the “principle” is that from which all things come, that through which they exist, that into which they are resolved.87

Heraclitus rejects this notion of substance as substrate. His principle does not remain

“identically the same throughout the changes in its characteristics” and it is no “permanent

sustainer.” His principle is change itself. Heraclitus’s change is a first principle in the sense

that it always has been and always will be; the dynamic character of the world is eternal.88

Nevertheless, it is questionable that Heraclitus’s principle could be called a true arche at all.

An arche is supposed to explain change. The essential properties of substance—those

necessary aspects of its existence that never come into existence nor go out of

existence—ought to explain change as the coming and going of contingent properties which

are reducible to the essential properties. In this way a permanent nature to the world can

87 Reale 35.

88 Cosmogony in the Milesian sense is therefore not found in Heraclitus. His principle cannot be an originative stuff in the way that water or air is for the Milesians.

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explain change. By denying a permanent nature to the world, Heraclitus denies substance and,

therefore, does not explain change. He merely postulates change as the fundamental nature

of the world. Although Heraclitus's rejection of substance is an implicit criticism of Milesian

ontology, it also is a rejection of the naturalistic explanation for change invented by the

Milesians, who attempt, albeit unsuccessfully, to derive all things from substance. In contrast,

Heraclitus’s principle “alternately creates the world from itself and again itself from the

world.”89 The world is “always and continuously new.”90 Paradoxically, the only essential

property of Heraclitus’s principle is change itself; only change is permanent.

Although Heraclitus's strategy of rejecting substance points to the failure of Milesian

substance to account for change and diversity, by rejecting the traditional naturalistic

explanation for change and thus the original notion of naturalistic substance itself, Heraclitus’s

ontology suffers all of the other problems associated with rejecting substance. For naturalists,

the substrate that undergoes change makes all events part of the same world simultaneously

because of the unity and identity that a material connectedness provides. Because the

substrate is identical over time and is located everywhere, the world has a physico-temporal

unity. Although existence is in time, substance, by having a nature that remains identical over

time, connects moments as part of a single system. Although what is exists in the present,

substance provides the world with a temporal wholeness. The world of Heraclitus has no such

continuity. The parts of his world are different at each location; nothing underlies them. Each

moment in his ontology is a new and different world. Moments are not part of the same

89 Plutarch,On the E at Delphi 388DE; from Barnes 123.

90 Aristotle, Meteorology 355al3-15; from Barnes 123.

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world; there is no uni-verse, no naturalistic oneness to his multi-verse. Heraclitus’s only

recourse for coherence is the divine abilities of the Logos, which mysteriously unifies the

opposites, thus bringing order to an otherwise incoherent ontology.

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PARMENIDES AND ELEATICISM

Parmenides is known to have written only one short work, a tri-part poem in

hexameter verse. A substantial portion of the poem survives. Fragments have been passed

down by Plato, Sextus Empiricus, Simplicius, Proclus, Plotinus, and several other writers.

The poem opens with a prologue, after which the main body of the work is divided into two

parts, The Way o f Truth and The Way o f Opinion. The first part, The Way o f Truth, gives

Parmenides’s own ontology.

Whereas Heraclitus followed one thread of Milesian thought, that change is

qualitative, Parmenides follows the other thread, that what exists is one substance. His

ontology takes the notion of monism and follows this premise to its logical outcome (with

some help, later, from Melissus).

In the first place, it is possible to have a true account of what exists because reason,

through argument, can understand the difference between ontological coherence and

ontological impossibility. The most fundamental element of logic, the way by which reason

can give an account of the world with substance as its foundation, is via the concept of

existence. “What is” must be a substance. If the world exists, it must be a substance with an

unchanging essential nature. Ontologically speaking, reason cannot understand anything but

this. For if eternal change was the nature of the world, like Heraclitus’s principle, there would

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be no ontological consistency about the world for reason to identify. If the world were not

a substance it would not exist and we could not know about it:

The only roads of enquiry there are to be thought of: one, that it is and cannot not be, is the path of persuasion (for truth accompanies it); another, that it is not and must not be—this I say to you is a trail devoid of all knowledge. For you could not recognize that which is not (for it is not to be done), nor could you mention it.91

Reason can have a theory of existence because substance's identity over time, the most basic

and foundational ontological concept, enables reason to see the difference between a true and

a false account. Improper thinking leads to ontologies, such as Heraclitus’s, that are based

on a principle which could not and thus does not exist. Heraclitus’s ontology, for example,

is based on contingent properties which come into existence and go out of existence all the

time. Parmenides shows that if what we are referring to by the nature of existence is

substance, then substances that do not already exist cannot come into existence, and

substances that do exist cannot go out of existence. What exists must not either come into

existence or go out of existence; what exists cannot not exist. The existence of substance

must be self-subsistent and eternal. Improper thinkers “are borne along alike deaf and blind,

amazed, undisceming crowds, for whom to be and not to be are deemed the same and not the

same; and the path of all turns back on itself.”92 Proper thinking, i.e., articulating a correct

notion of basic existence, can only lead to the truth about being, “[f]or the same things can

91 Proclus, Commentary on the Timaeus 1345.11-27; from Barnes 132.

92 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 117.2-13; from Barnes 133. “The path of all turning back on itself’ recalls Heraclitus’s “backward-turning connection, as in the bow and the lyre.”

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be thought of and can be.”93 What is true is made possible by the essential nature of

substance. What does not exist is false and cannot come into existence. If what exists is

substance, and substance is everything, then reason too is defined and shaped by the structure

of existence, since reason is something that exists within that structure. Existence itself is an

ontological cause of what is true to reason. The constraints of existence determine truth; “fate

has fettered” being the way it is.94 Thus, “What is for being and for thinking must be; for it

can be, and nothing can not.”95 If anything exists, it must be what it is, a substance with an

unchanging existence.

Following this strategy, “only one story, one road now is left: that it is.”96 Whatever

it is that exists—Parmenides calls it “being”—necessarily is. Being is immortal; its essential

nature is that it is

ungenerated and indestructible . . . Nor was it, nor will it be . . . For what generation will you seek for it? How, whence, did it grow? That it came from what is not I shall not allow you to say or think—for it is not sayable or thinkable that it is not. And what need would have impelled it, later or earlier, to grow—if it began from nothing? . .. How might what is then perish? How might it come into being? For if it came into being it is not, nor is it if it is ever going to be. Thus generation is quenched and perishing unheard of97

93 Plotinus, Enneads V i 8; from Barnes 132.

94 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 144.25-146.27; from Barnes 134-135.

95Ibid 86.25-30; from Barnes 132.

96 Ibid 144.25-146.27; from Barnes 134.

91 Ibid.

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What exists cannot come from nothing; thus being “must either altogether be or not be.”98 If

something exists, then it is what it is and could not be anything else. If it is, then it altogether

is. Therefore the Milesian notion of a transformation of elements, i.e., qualitative change, is

impossible.

If there is only one substance, then being is “whole, of one kind and unwavering, and

complete... all together, one, continuous . . . Nor is it divided, since it all alike is—neither

more here (which would prevent it from cohering) nor less; but it is all full of what is . . .

Hence it is all continuous; for what is approaches what is.”99 Since all is being, i.e., a single

material substance, then being could never be separated from being. Parmenides, for the first

time, isolates the concept of motion. In order to separate being from being, there needs to be

a void within which movement is possible. But emptiness is not; only being is. Space, devoid

of being, cannot be if only a single substance exists. Being must be a maximally compacted

mass. Even Anaximenes’s process of rarefaction and condensation, changes in the volume of

being, cannot occur. Expansion and contraction also assume the existence of a void. Being

must be continuous and full of itself; otherwise being would be mixed with non-being. In a

monistic world only permanence and unity are possible, change and diversity are impossible:

“The same and remaining in the same state, [being] lies by itself, and thus remains fixed there

. .. whole and unmoving.”100

98Ibid.

99Ibid ; from Barnes 134-135.

100 Ibid; from Barnes 135.

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It would seem that since being is everything and everywhere, that it ought to be

infinite. Parmenides thought otherwise. Believing somehow that infinitude is imperfect,101

Parmenides thought of being as a spherical glob:

For powerful necessity holds [being] enchained in a limit which hems it around, because it is right that what is should be not incomplete. For it is not lacking—if it were it would lack everything ... And since there is a last limit, it is completed on all sides, like the bulk of a well-rounded ball, equal in every way from the middle. For it must not be at all greater or smaller here or there. For neither is there anything which is not, which might stop it from reaching its like, nor anything which is in such a way that it might be more here or less there than what is, since it all is, inviolate [intact]. Therefore, equal to itself on all sides, it lies uniformly in its limits.102

Melissus rightly rejects Parmenides’s proposition that being is finite:103 “But just as

[being] exists always [and thus is temporally infinite], so in magnitude too it must always be

infinite.”104 If being is finite, then beyond being there must be nothing; and nothing cannot be.

101 Most likely, this is a leftover notion from Parmenides’s Pythagorean influences.

102 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 144.25-146.27; from Barnes 135.

103 Melissus is also usually credited with the notion that being is incorporeal: “Now if it exists, it must be one; but being one, it must fail to possess a body. But if it had bulk it would have parts and would no longer be one.” (Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 109.19-110.6 and 87.4-7; from Barnes 146-148.) Nevertheless, Aristotle says that Melissus conceived of being as material. (Metaphysics 39.) Copleston offers an explanation for this discrepancy based on an examination of Simplicius’ quote: The explanation seems to be indicated by the fact that Melissus is speaking of an hypothetical case (notice the appearance of i f twice). Burnet, following Zeller, points out the similarity of the fragment to an argument of Zeno, in which Zeno is saying that if the ultimate units of the Pythagoreans existed, then each would have parts and would not be one. We may suppose, therefore, that Melissus, too, in speaking of the doctrine of the Pythagoreans, is trying to disprove the existence of their ultimate units, and is not talking of the Parmenidean One at all. (53.)

104 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 109.19-110.6; from Barnes 146.

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But being must not be bounded or limited. If being is not limited by anything, then it must be

infinite. If what is taken to exist is a single material substance, then there cannot be a void

outside being: “nothing that exists is empty; for what is empty is nothing, and what is nothing

cannot exist.”105

Thus the Eleatics derive the logical conclusions of monism. If all that exists is one

substance, then the world must be a static, infinite whole. Change and diversity cannot be

derived from one substance. As opposed to the ontology of Heraclitus which postulates the

existence of only contingent properties, the Eleatics conclude that if what is postulated as

existing is a single substance, then only essential properties exist.

One substance cannot be the arche. Remember, an arche must be able to explain

change and diversity. By not paying attention to the logic of monism, the monists that came

before the Eleatics were inconsistent and “deceitful,”106 deeming “to be and not to be . . . the

same and not the same.”107 The Milesians falsely purported to be able to explain change and

diversity, thinking that one substance could transform into other things and thus become what

it is not. A single principle cannot account for change and diversity because a monistic world

must be full of its substance. If change and diversity are real, then perhaps more than one

substance must be postulated in order to account for them.

105Ibid 103.13-104.15; from Barnes 145.

106 Ibid 146.27; from Barnes 135.

107 Ibid 117.2-13; from Barnes 133.

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The Eleatics demonstrate that monism and change are incompatible. Since the logic

of monism leads to the conclusion that change is impossible, the explanation of phenomena

is irrelevant. There are no phenomena to explain. No occurrences exist to be perceived by the

senses. Perception is the way of error and illusion; it leads to the belief that a single substance

can be transformed from what it is, to something that it is not, namely other things. Perception

also leads to the belief that a single substance can move. In a monistic world, qualitative

transformation and physical motion are inconceivable. The only proper conception of a world

comprised of a single material substance is that of a static plenum.

Nevertheless, certainly not many people would be willing to adopt the Eleatic

conclusions about change, which are that no change actually occurs and that perception is

entirely an illusion. Any logical thinker would notice that perception itself is a form of change.

The Eleatics have no way of explaining this illusion. Because of their argument, the Eleatics

cannot say merely that the ideas of perception do not match up to reality (non

correspondence). It follows from their position that perceiving (and even thinking, the source

of argument itself) is impossible. But how can this illusion of perception actually seem to

occur if it really is not occurring at all? For naturalists, who believe that we too are part of

nature, logically it should follow from the premises of monism that the actions of thinking and

perceiving, as well as the things that think and perceive, cannot exist. Multiple, dynamic

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things cannot exist because all that exists is a single, changeless mass. In fact, if this is true,

then it would be impossible that certain thinkers, namely the Eleatics, actually existed to even

come up with this argument, things and actions both being impossibilities. The Eleatic

argument invalidates its own existence! The appearances, the objects of thinking and

perceiving, just will not go away. Eleaticism invokes too great an antagonism between

appearance and reality. It denies the appearances and so does not explain the illusory

appearance of them. In order for naturalism to make good on its claim to account for all

things, including change and diversity, monism must be abandoned; the appearances must

somehow be reclaimed and the arche saved. The belief that what exists is a single material

substance is the foundation of all the naturalistic ontologies up to this point.108 Perhaps

material substance has to be defined otherwise. The next logical step is to postulate the

existence of more than one material substance. Chapters 6 and 7 explore this post-Eleatic

pluralism.

The main figures of this first strain of pluralism are Empedocles from Acragas, Sicily

(495-435 B.C.) and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Asia Minor (50CM-28 B.C.).109 Like their

naturalistic predecessors, both were materialists, in the sense that what exists is matter only.

In addition, they both accepted the Eleatic analysis of being. Matter must be what it is and full

of itself. All existence is material; therefore empty space, “the void,” cannot be. Thus, like it

is for the Eleatics, the world is a plenum, absolutely full of being. In the case of the pluralists,

108 Except for Heraclitus who does not postulate a substance.

109 Although Anaxagoras was bom five years before Empedocles, it is said that Anaxagoras worked out his ontology much later in life.

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however, their plenum consists of more than one substance. Empedocles and Anaxagoras

postulate that these multiple substances exist as immortal particles which have spatial relations

that change constantly over time. Empedocles and Anaxagoras really make explicit what the

Milesians merely assume about their single principle—that each kind of quality-substance is

able to move independently as multiple, individual units. The particles of the plenum pluralists

each are given both an indestructible geometrical structure that is its physical nature, and an

indestructible qualitative nature. All the units together absolutely fill up the world. But how

are change and diversity possible in an absolutely full world? The Eleatic analysis of being

demonstrates that transformation is impossible. But there is a way to account for change and

diversity that is not available to monists. Change and diversity can occur in a voidless world

by the displacement of particles. Displacement enables the appearances to be saved and the

function of the arche to be reclaimed. Change and diversity are reducible to the interaction

(mixing and separating, touching and not-touching) of archai. Nevertheless, although motion

is implicit in the mixing and separating of particles, the plenum pluralists do not reduce change

to motion. They are primarily interested in explaining qualitative change, and thus, simply take

motion for granted.

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EMPEDOCLES

Empedocles recognizes and attempts to remain true to the Eleatic analysis of being:

“from what does not exist nothing can come into being, and for what exists to be destroyed

is impossible and unaccomplishable—for it will always remain wherever anyone may fix it.”110

To overcome these restrictions, Empedocles devises a system that attempts to derive coming-

into-being and dissolution, from unchangeable substance. He tries to reduce all change and

diversity to a particle theory of being. Empedocles postulates four substances. They are the

elements of earth, air, fire, and water, the substances of the four distinct cosmic regions.111

These elemental bits are the “roots”112 from which all things are compounded. Each particle

has a qualitative nature that is what it is and cannot be transformed into any other quality. The

particles also have magnitude, albeit invisibly minute. The physico-qualitative particles are

indestructible; they are immortal and cannot be created or destroyed. The diverse things of

110 Pseudo-Aristotle, On Melissus, Xenophanes, Gorgias 975a36-b6; from Barnes 173.

111 In poetical fashion, Empedocles identifies each of the elements by several names, including those of gods: Earth is things firm and solid, Aidoneus, Hades; air is ether, heaven, brightness, Hera; fire is sun, flame, Zeus, Hephaestus; and water is rain, sea, Nestia, Nestis. According to Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, “their initial characterization as gods is presumably designed both to indicate what is sound in traditional conceptions of divinity and to claim for them powers and properties which make them worthy of awe.” (286.)

112 Sextus Empiricus,Against the Mathematicians X 315; from Barnes 173-174.

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the world are constructed by the mingling of the elements. Things as we know them are

composites formed by the adding together of the particles: “there is no birth for any mortal

thing . . . there is only mixing and interchange of what is mixed.”113 Each kind of element

consists of many particles of its kind: “earth increases her own form, ether [increases by]

ether.”114 The particles are “every sort of shape.”115 They are indivisible, geometric units that

can be added and fitted together. Their nature is such that they cannot be either infinitely

divided or divided until nothing remains; at some point their singularity is permanent. By

“blending” these units, the things of the world that we recognize are “moulded.”116 Thus, the

different combinations of particles that come together determine the thing that comes to be.

Different things, with different geometrical structures and different qualities, are compounded

of different proportions of different kinds of particles. Thus a thing, for example, made up of

more fire than water particles, will be more hot than wet.

Mixture and separation requires motion. But Empedocles, like the Eleatics, believes

that “[n]o part of the universe is empty.”117 How is motion possible in a voidless world?

Unfortunately, like Heraclitus and the Milesians, Empedocles just takes motion for granted

113 Plutarch, Against Colotes 111 IF; from Barnes 171.

114 Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption 333a35-b3; from Barnes 174.

115 Simplicius,Commentary on the Physics 31.31-34.8; from Barnes 170.

116 Ibid 157.25-161.20; from Barnes 168.

117 Pseudo-Aristotle, On Melissus, Xenophanes, Gorgias 976b23-30; from Barnes 173.

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as what can be used in explaining other things. But in a plural plenum, independent bits,

assuming that they can move, are able to displace one another, mixing and separating.

But how can the mixture of only four substances, with static qualitative natures,

explain the immense variety of the world? To defend his theory, Empedocles makes an

analogy to the painter’s creation of a great diversity of imaginary worlds by the mixing of very

few root pigments: “painters . . . take the many-coloured pigments in their hands, and,

harmoniously mixing them, some more some less, make from them shapes resembling all

things.”118 Just as the simple pigments are many-colored in their potentialities, so are the

simple roots infinitely diverse in their potentialities. Empedocles does not argue any further

on this point. Although the analogy is insightful, it still avoids the issue. How can four

unchangeable substances mix to produce a seemingly infinite variety of qualities? How could,

for instance, only “the hot,” “the cold,” “the dry,” and “the wet” combine to produce “white”

or “flesh?” Is not this the creation of something essentially new? Later, Anaxagoras expounds

on this problem and tries to solve it.

In order to provide global stability to the continual, local change of the particles,

Empedocles postulates two governing forces, in addition to the four elements, that explain

the kind of movement that the particles have over time. There are two kinds of global

movement. This movement is part of a cosmic cycle of birth and death that explains both the

unity and plurality of the universe. The attractive force, Love, brings the elements together.

118 Ibid.; from Barnes 167-168.

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The repulsive force, Strife, pulls them apart.119 Love and Strife are invisible, and thus are not

bodies: “no-one has seen [them] whirling among [the elements] . . . [Y]ou must regard

[them] with your mind: do not sit staring with your eyes.”120 The dual forces whirl about to

create a single cosmic “vortex.”121 There is an eternally-recurring cycle of alternating force-

dominance which determines the kind of interactions that occur. Love and Strife alternately

displace one another from the ruling position: “In turn [each force] come[s] to power as [the

circle of] time revolves,”122 “and they decline into one another and increase in their allotted

turn.”123 The seat of domination is the center of the vortex. When it is Love’s turn to

dominate, Love occupies this seat, “com[ing] to be in the middle of the whirl”124 and pushing

Strife to the “furthest limits of the circle.”125 This causes “deeds of union.”126 The separate

elements are caused to “congregate,”127 to be brought together and heaped into a composite

sphere at the vortex’s eye. The elements “gr[o]w to be one alone from being many.”128 In

119 Love is also known as Aphrodite, Joy, and Harmony. Strife is also called Hate, Anger, and Discord.

120 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 157.25-161.20; from Barnes 166.

121 Ibid 529.21-530.11; from Barnes 175.

122 Ibid 157.25-161.20; from Barnes 166.

123 Ibid, from Barnes 168.

124 M 529.21-530.ll; from Barnes 175.

125 Ibid 31.31-34.8; from Barnes 170.

126 Ibid 157.25-161.20; from Barnes 166.

i21Ibid.

128 Ibid, from Barnes 169.

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time, Strife overcomes the central position of the vortex, pushing Love to the fringes. This

causes the components of the sphere to “fly apart,”129 away from the central position. The

“hatred of Strife” causes the elements to “gr[o]w apart again to be many from being one.”130

Unity and diversity are but phases of a cycle. The cycle of unity and diversity continues

eternally. The forces “never cease their continual change, to that extent they exist forever,

unmoving in a circle.”131

This transformation from the Love phase of the cycle to the Strife phase, and vice

versa, is a relatively slow process. It is in between stages (when the order is in the midst of

becoming Love-dominating or Strife-dominating) that regular change and diversity as we

experience it occurs. It is in these periods of neither total unity nor total separation that the

normal world of diversity comes to be. When Love and Strife are somewhat evenly

distributed, some particles come together and others are driven apart; thus some things come-

into-being and others are destroyed, the particles being preserved the entire time. Occurring

at these points in the cycle is the formation of the cosmic regions of earth, water, air, and fire.

The vortex somewhat separates the particles by weight, like a centrifuge, bringing earth

together with earth, water with water, etc. As the cosmic cycle shifts, innumerable, successive

worlds are created and destroyed.132

129 Ibid, from Barnes 166.

130 Ibid 31.31-34.8; from Barnes 166.

131 Ibid 157.25-161.20; from Barnes 168.

132 This is reminiscent of Anaximander, whose cosmic law expiates the initial injustice caused by the separating off of the opposites from the unity of apeiron. As the recurring dominance of unity and separation is balanced out, innumerable, successive worlds are

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There is no doubt that the core idea of Love and Strife goes back to Anaximander’s

cosmic law of dominance and expiation and Heraclitus’s Logos. Like the Logos, Love and

Strife organize and direct change. But whereas Logos acts like a law of nature, Love and

Strife are forces or efficient causes, since they have substances to move (whereasLogos does

not). Their mechanisms ensure both the continuance and the unity of diversity by ensuring that

no one quality ever permanently dominates. But in a particle theory, things are neither created

nor destroyed. The same particles exist no matter what. Therefore in order to have a balance

of diversity, Empedocles must have the same amount of each kind of particle in existence.

Additionally, Love and Strife must have equal power, neither one ever dominating any longer

than the other. In these ways, equilibrium is maintained.

Empedocles also combines the insights of the extreme monists, Heraclitus and the

Eleatics. The universe has both an eternal changing nature and an eternal permanent nature.

On the one hand, change is constant because Love and Strife are always trying to force their

way into dominance, alternately coming to power and causing the attraction and repulsion of

the already moving particles. This is the cause of diversity. Coming-into-being is just the

mixture of particles, Love causing them to come together and act as one composite.

Destruction is just the separation of particles, Strife causing the disintegration of composite

things. The contingent nature of the elements is their movement throughout the universe.

Although Empedocles does not explain why they move (he assumes that they can move

themselves), how they move is caused by the effects of the dual forces. Like Heraclitus’s

Logos, Love and Strife are the ordering mechanism for global change. On the other hand,

created and destroyed.

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permanence is constant because the particles always remain exactly what they are. Each

substance has a static character, an essential nature that never comes into existence or goes

out of existence. These are its geometrical and qualitative properties. Like bits of Eleatic

being, particles never change their form or quality. Only their location relative to one another

is able to change.

In Empedocles’s pluralistic ontology there is an essential relationship of substances

to one another. The particles are constantly in contact with one another throughout the entire

universe. Change is by motion. Motion causes a difference in the order of contact between

elemental particles. The kind of relative motion is caused by the kind of force that is in contact

with the particles. When Love is dominant, the particles are brought together. When Strife

dominates, the particles are driven apart. Love and Strife cause the unity of the plurality and

the plurality of the unity. The particles themselves have a permanent geometrical and

qualitative nature. It is their mixture and separation which causes coming-into-being and

dissolution, and thus, the diversity of the world. Empedocles’s pluralism seems to allow

philosophy once again to account for permanence, change, diversity, and unity. Through

Empedocles’s particle theory, the ontological role of substance that was undermined by

Heraclitus and the Eleatics is reclaimed. Empedocles’s substances are archai. Nevertheless,

Empedocles does not think about mixture and separation in terms of the quantitative aspects

about location, motion, and how volumes add up; he takes these aspects of the world for

granted. Because he is concerned mainly with the problem of qualitative change, he does not

bother to explain how the properties of ordinary geometrical objects can change by the

mixture and separation of elements.

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ANAXAGORAS

Anaxagoras seems to have felt that Empedocles’s ontology had not gone far enough.

If everything consisted solely of four roots, how in putting only those four substances

together in different proportions could such things as “the white” or “flesh” be formed? How

does the mere combination of “the hot,” “the cold,” “the dry,” and “the wet” produce colors

or human tissue? To Anaxagoras, Empedocles’s four roots could not account for all of the

qualitative variety in the world. If, for instance, a piece of flesh is divided until a minimum

piece of flesh is arrived at, after that you will end up with four particles that are eternally

distinct and immutable. These are not flesh until put together into the required proportions.

Thus flesh comes into being out of not-flesh. Empedocles had not succeeded in eliminating

the coming-into-being of something new. The only way for physico-qualitative particles to

account for such variety is to posit that there is a kind of particle for every naturally

underivable quality. According to Comford, “Every natural substance must itself be simple

and elementary; for it cannot arise out of anything that is not itself.”133 Anaxagoras’s mixture

contains an infinite variety of particles, which he calls “seeds,” “the seeds of all things having

133 F.M. Comford, “Anaxagoras’ Theory of Matter” in Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, vol. 2. Ed. R. E. Allen and David J. Furley (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1975), 278.

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all kinds of shapes and colours and savours.”134 The concept of infinity is applied to the seeds

in several ways. They are infinite in kind (shape and quality) and infinite in the amount of each

kind. To maintain equilibrium, the quantity of seeds of each kind, although innumerable, is

equal. The totality of things, qualitatively and quantitatively, is always equal, and

inexhaustible, it neither grows nor diminishes.135 Also, the seeds are infinitely small.

This idea responds to the Eleatics, particularly to Zeno. In defending monism, Zeno

says that “if there is a plurality, things must be both small and great; so small as to have no

magnitude at all, so great as to be infinite.”136 Zeno points out that if particles have

magnitude, then if they are divided, at some point you will arrive at nothing. If that is the case,

then from nothing comes nothing. Therefore, particles must be infinitely divisible. Infinite

divisibility paradoxically implies infinite magnitude. A particle with infinite magnitude is no

different than a monistic one. Therefore, pluralism is impossible. Empedocles avoids this issue

by making his particles indivisible (and subsequently, so do the atomists). Anaxagoras, on the

other hand, probably did not accept the notion of indivisibility. If something has magnitude,

it ought to be divisible. His strategy is to try to beat Zeno at his own game. Anaxagoras

makes his particles infinitely divisible. However small the particles are divided they have

magnitude. Furthermore, the particles are not infinitely large, but have a maximum size which

is imperceptible. According to Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, “there is no reason to fear that,

134 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 155.21-157.24; from Barnes 227.

135 Reale 113.

136 Zeno fragment I; from Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 141, 6; from Kirk, Raven, Schofield 361.

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from the fact that the division has no last term, it follows that the sum of its terms is infinitely

large.”137 Thus, there is no “smallest part of what is small, but there is always a smaller (for

it is impossible that what is should cease to be).”138 Therefore, Anaxagoras’s pluralism is

preserved; it is possible to have extended particles. Nevertheless, infinite divisibility is not

compatible with geometric shape. How can an infinitely small substance have shape?

In being infinitely small, and thus physically continuous, the seeds are commonly called

homoiomeries,139 This means that when they are sub-divided they always yield parts or things

which are qualitatively identical. No matter how much a seed is divided it always retains its

qualitative identity. This is important because if after division the seed did not retain its

identity, then the basic quality that was divided would come from something that it is not. For

Anaxagoras, quality, like matter, is also continuous.

Anaxagoras reintroduces cosmogony into naturalism; the world of change has a

beginning. From eternity until a particular moment in the distant past, change did not exist and

the universe as we know it was not formed. The seeds, infinite in number, equal in amount

of each kind, were infinitely mixed into an indistinguishable unity at the first stage of the

universe when there was no change. During this static epoch, Anaxagoras’s matter was

somewhat like a combination of Anaximander’s apeiron and the Eleatic One,140 but composed

137 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 362.

138 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 164, 17; from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 360.

139 Reale 112.

140 Simplicius adds that “this totality [was] the one existing thing of Parmenides.” (Commentary on the Physics 34.18-35.21; from Barnes 231.) The “one of Parmenides”

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of particles. The many were unified into an indefinite whole. The substances were infinitely

mixed into an indistinguishable, primordial unity: “Together were all things, infinite . . . in

quantity... not even any colour was patent; for this was prevented by the commixture of all

things.”141 All things were combined into an immobile, static whole. Stace says that “the mass

stretches infinitely throughout space” and that “the different kinds of matter wholly

intermingle and interpenetrate each other.” Barnes calls Anaxagoras’s One “an infinite

gaseous tohu-bohu, wherein everything was [equally] present and nothing was clear.”142

At this stage of existence, the world is unchanging. Therefore a force is introduced,

which Anaxagoras callsNous or Mind. Whereas Empedocles, Heraclitus, and the Milesians

simply assumed that matter can move, only postulating forces that govern change,

Anaxagoras recognizes that something must be responsible for the initial action. Complying

with the Parmenidean demand that motion should not be simply taken for granted but

explained, Anaxagoras makes Nous an efficient cause; it is the source of motion. Without this

additional cause, it would be impossible to account for change in a plenum, the world being

absolutely full with matter.Nous is “mixed with no thing but is alone itself by itself.”143 Mind

must be unmixed with matter in order to be free from its static constraints, so that it is able

to cause change. It has an incorporeal nature. Thus as Brumbaugh says, “The unmixed

should not be interpreted here as the sphere, but as the infinite being of Melissus. Thus by Parmenides here Simplicius probably means the Eleatics.

141 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 34.18-35.21; from Barnes 231.

142 Barnes 45.

143 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 155.21-157.24; from Barnes 227.

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character of mind does involve a sort of mind-matter dualism.”144 Nevertheless, Nous is not

a substance; it is an efficient cause—a motive force. Furthermore,Nous still begs the question

of motion. Anaximander just delays the question. What causes Nous to have the power to

allow substances to move? Although, unlike his predecessors, Anaxagoras attempts to

account for the source of motion, ultimately, like his predecessors, he simply assumes that

motion is possible. Nous is divine; it is “self-controlling”145 and has an inner power to cause

motion.

Nous caused a grand vortex motion: “And mind controlled the whole revolution, so

that it revolved in the first place.”146 The speed of the vortex produced a force which caused

the infinite mixture to break up: “these things thus revolve and are separating off by force and

speed (the speed produces the force).”147 The vortex agitates the one and breaks it up into the

seeds. The one becomes many. Thus began the world as we know it, the world of change.

Since being is infinite, Nous causes a progressive separation. Each moment, the rotation takes

in a new area and separates off the seeds. Whereas Anaximander and Empedocles see a cycle

of birth and death which creates and destroys innumerable successive worlds, Anaxagoras’s

theory implies a unidirectional change. Only one world is created. There is no return to static

unity.

144 Brumbaugh 106.

145 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 155.21-157.24; from Barnes 227.

146 Ibid; from Barnes 228.

147 Ibid 34.18-35.21; from Barnes 232.

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Since being is now plural, the movement of one seed would have to cause the

movement of all seeds. Since there is no empty space to move into, every seed would get

displaced. One could say that the world has a kind of fluidity. Slapping the water in a pool

causes ripples to propagate throughout the pool which, in turn, cause movement of every part

of the body of water. Reality is like a cosmic whirlpool. In this way, thinking of change as

mixture and separation can be misleading. In the unity, everything is already infinitely mixed.

Movement just causes a remixing of seeds; the seeds are merely redistributed to different

locations and thus have different relative positions to one another, as water molecules come

to have in a whirlpool. Seeds in contact with one another associate. Association is generation.

When movement causes remixing, these seeds may lose contact with one another and

dissociate; this is destruction. Anaxagoras says that “no things are generated or destroyed,

but they are commingled and dissociated from things that exist.”148 Because of this fluidity,

“the things in the one world-order are not separated one from the other nor cut off with an

axe, neither the hot from the cold nor the cold from the hot.”149 Thus, a plural unity is

maintained.

The whirlpool caused by Nous is the source of order in the world. Thus, ultimately,

“Mind arranged everything—what was to be and what was and what now is and what will

be.”150 Thus, in addition to being the original cause of motion, Mind is the ordering principle,

like the Logos or Love and Strife. Nous sorts out the particles jumbled in the original

148 Ibid 163.18-26; from Barnes 232-233.

149 Ibid 175, 12 & 176, 29; from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 371.

150Ibid 155.21-157.24; from Barnes 228.

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confusion. For cosmological reasons, the particles obey two laws: there is a tendency for like

particles to come together, and particles tend to be separated by weight; the heavy or dense

congregate to the center of the vortex while the light or rare occupy its circumference. In this

way the main divisions of the current cosmic order are formed; the elements take their proper

place in the universe. For Anaxagoras, Empedocles’s elements are not basic, but composite.

In the nascent world, the first visible distinctions are between air and fire/aither. Both consist

of seeds of all sorts. Air comes to be towards the center of the vortex and fire towards its

circumference. Although the infinite mixture can never be completely sorted out—that would

take an infinite amount of time—the air and fire differ in that there is a larger proportion of

hotter, drier, rarer, and brighter seeds in fire, and of colder, moister, denser, and darker seeds

in air. From air, clouds are separated. Water is separated off from the clouds, and earth from

the water. Being composed of the densest seeds, Earth now comes to be at the center of the

vortex. All of the elements (and all other composite objects) contain seeds of all sorts:151 “In

everything there is a portion of everything . .. [A]s things were originally, so they must be

now too, all together.”152 Because the same particles that were in the original mixture are

redistributed, “each single thing is and was most patently those things of which it contains

most.”153 Whichever quality-particles dominate a particular region determine the quality of

the thing located there: “The mixture is qualitatively determined by the prevalence of this or

151 Comford; from Allen and Furley 288.

152 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 164, 23-26; from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 365-366.

153 Ibid 164.14-165.5; from Bames 230.

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that quality.”154 Thus, “as stuffs [, i.e., visible conglomerates,] separate out, none is ever en

tirely segregated, no pure stuff ever comes into being. Indeed, every piece of stuff always

contains a portion of every other stuff. What we call gold is not wholly golden. Rather, gold

is the name we give to lumps of stuff which are predominantly gold.”155 Copleston agrees:

“The objects of experience arise, when ultimate particles have been so brought together that

in the resulting object particles of a certain kind predominate.”156 Reale adds that the reason

for this interpretation is that it makes possible coming-into-being, development, and growth:

“because the all is in all. . . it is possible that all can arise from all.”157 In that way, for

instance, hair and flesh can come from the food that nourishes us without the coming-into-

being of something new.

Although the effects of the vortex are mechanical in nature, it is difficult to envision

Nous, the ultimate cause of the vortex, as a purely mechanical cause, for “Mind recognizes

all things” and “possesses all knowledge about everything”158 and it “controls all those things

. . . which possess soul.”159 The teleology implicit in an all-knowing, all-controlling, all-

powerful substance reintroduces anthropomorphism to naturalism. Additionally, Nous is the

motive force of animated things, and the knowing force of subjective things. It controls

154 Reale 112.

155 Barnes 45-46.

156 Copleston 68.

157 Ibid 113.

158Ibid.

159 Ibid.

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everything that has life. Thus, although Mind is “unmixed with matter,” nevertheless “there

are some things in which there is Mind as well.”160 Mind is presumably to be imagined as

discontinuously distributed throughout the world. Most of the time it is separate from matter,

but in the case of living things it is also in them.

Anaxagoras attempts to bring Empedocles’s strategy to its logical conclusions. From

the infinite varieties of physico-qualitative particles come the seemingly infinite varieties of

things in the world. The result is an infinitely complex ontology. Although Anaxagoras is

aware of the problem of efficient causation and tries to address it with Nous, ultimately he still

assumes motion. Accounting for motion naturalistically in a void-less world is a difficult, if

not an impossible, task—the plenum being absolutely full. But even if motion were possible

in a plenum, Anaxagoras does not explain it ontologically. The possibility of change by

motion is simply assumed. Ontology must explain motion and the spatial relations that bits

of matter have, rather than merely assume them. It is equally difficult to give an account of

the order in an infinitely complex world. The plenum pluralists postulate additional forces,

such as vortices and other mysterious forces, in order to account for this order. These

mysterious forces (Empedocles’s Love and Strife, and Anaxagoras’s Nous) are not reducible

to the postulated substances; thus, a kind of unreconciled dualism is the result. These semi-

mythological forces act as deus ex machina or “artificial device[s] for producing order [that

are] drag[ged] in whenever [there is] a loss to explain some necessary result.”161

160 Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 164, 23; from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 366.

161 Aristotle 29.

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At this juncture, natural philosophy begins to ask some very introspective questions.

Is it possible to have a less complex ontology? How could ontology be more basic? Is

plenumism the wrong strategy? Must substance only be material? Do qualitative properties

need to be essential properties of substance? In their attempt to postulate a more basic way

of reducing motion and diversity to substances, the atomists, Leucippus and Democritus,

boldly confront these issues.

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CHAPTER 8

LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS

Leucippus of Miletus (dates unknown, but believed to be a contemporary of

Anaxagoras and Empedocles) is the founder of the atomist school. But it was Democritus of

Abdera in Thrace (4657-375? B.C., a contemporary of Socrates162), the pupil and successor

of Leucippus, who elaborated the theory in far greater detail and made it famous. Democritus

is said to have extended the atomist theory to many areas of inquiry. At least fifty volumes

are ascribed to him, none of which have survived intact.

The atomists successfully formulate an ontology that accounts for change and

diversity while adhering to the Eleatic analysis of being. By isolating all of the issues that are

implicit in the ontologies of their predecessors, the atomists are able to account for the unity,

permanence, change, and diversity of the world. What is merely assumed by their

predecessors, the atomists sort out and reduce to a more basic ontology. In their attempt to

distinguish clearly the contingent from the essential properties of substances, the atomists

isolate, define, and contrast several important ontological concepts; they distinguish between

quantitative and qualitative properties, change as motion and change as qualitative

162 Although Democritus was a contemporary of Socrates, he is grouped with the Presocratics because of his ontological naturalism.

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transformation, material and immaterial substances, limit and unlimited, substance and form,

mechanistic necessity and teleology.

According to Guthrie,

atomism is the final, and most successful, attempt to rescue the reality of the physical world from the fatal effects of Eleatic logic by means of a pluralistic theory. To its proponents, the infinite divisibility and qualitative differences of Anaxagoras’s “seeds” seemed an evasion of the question, and they found the solution rather in a reformed and corrected version of Pythagoreanism.163

In their enthusiasm over Pythagoras’s discovery of the numerical, i.e., proportional, basis of

the recognized musical intervals, the Pythagoreans tried to make numbers the essential basis

of everything. For the Pythagoreans spatial extension was the matter of geometrical figures,

and the form of things could only be expressed in terms of numbers. Space belonged to the

realm of “the unlimited,” and “limit” was imposed on it when it was marked out according

to a geometrical, i.e., numerical, pattern. Aristotle complained that the Pythagoreans confused

formal and material causes. This is precisely what the atomists sort out.164 If the objects of the

world are constructed out of units, like the Pythagoreans say, then following the Eleatic

criteria for matter, they must be units of solid physical substance. These units, the material

cause, are “limited,” extended things. To be extended is to be spatial. Space makes possible

the geometrical structure of the world; it is the formal cause. Thus there are two kinds of

substances, material units (“the limited”) and space (“the unlimited”). Because the units are

located in space, they can be added together and combined to make up composite objects

representing all the geometrical forms.

163 Guthrie 389.

164 Ibid 257-258.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. But how are the atomists able to postulate the existence of space when the Eleatics

demonstrate that “not-being” or “the void” cannot exist? The atomists noticed an unnecessary

constraint in the Eleatic argument that was preventing the possibility of an adequate theory

of change, and thus were able to postulate the existence of space. The Eleatic analysis

assumes that substance can be corporeal only; their analysis is strictly of matter. Change is not

possible in Eleaticism because there cannot be a void; only matter (being) exists. Implicitly,

this assumes that change is only possible in a void; if not-being could also be a substance, then

change would be possible. If the role of substance in ontology is that which endures through

change so as to be able to account for the possibility of change by the reduction of change to

it, then whatever ultimately exhibits these attributes is a substance. If space retains its nature

while change is occurring and is also an integral component in explaining change, then it too

must be a substance. If this turns out to be the case, then Leucippus and Democritus will have

shown that substance does not have to be just material. How then does the atomic theoiy

account for change and diversity? We must begin our explanation with the nature of the

postulated substances. In order to do this, we must first backtrack and quickly retrace the

evolution of substance since Eleaticism.

The Eleatics argue that matter must be one, whole and absolutely full of itself,

indestructible, indivisible, homogeneous, and immobile. In a world consisting of only one kind

of matter, change is impossible. The plenum pluralists try to reconcile the fact of change with

this analysis. Empedocles postulates four kinds of matter. His world is filled to the brim with

immortal particles. Each kind of particle is one, whole and absolutely full of itself; each bit is

an imperceptibly minute geometrical solid—hard, bulky, and indestructible. Each kind of

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particle is also homogeneous; the qualitative nature of each kind of particle is exactly the

same. Whereas the Eleatic world is composed entirely of one solid, Empedocles’s world is

composed of an infinite number of solid bits. Through displacement, relative motion is

possible. Although the source of this motion is not explained, the particles are able to move

themselves about. In this way Empedocles’s particles are not immobile. Nevertheless, they

are immobile in the sense that their internal nature cannot be altered. Neither their formal nor

qualitative nature can become otherwise. Change is just the association and dissociation of

individual particles. The bulk of the many particles together gives composite objects their

form. The overall qualitative nature of the composite is determined by the prevalence of this

or that kind of particle. Anaxagoras doubts that only four kinds of particles could account for

the infinite variety of geometrical forms and irreducible qualities in the world. Therefore, he

postulates that the particles must be infinite in kind, both qualitatively and geometrically.

Furthermore, in order to overcome Zeno’s particle-magnitude paradox, Anaxagoras makes

his particles infinitely small, yet denying that infinite divisibility implies infinitely large

magnitude. As indivisible particles, these “seeds” are homoionieries\ each kind of seed is

qualitatively homogeneous through and through. Accounting for order in such infinitely

complex worlds like those of the plenum pluralists proves to be infinitely difficult. Thus,

mysterious forces, irreducible to the substances, are introduced. Empedocles postulates Love

and Strife and a vortex. Anaxagoras postulates Nous and a vortex. Because Anaxagoras's

theory assumes that the world of change had a starting point, the fact of motion becomes

highlighted. He isolates the issue of motion and thus makes Nous also the ultimate efficient

cause of the vortex. Nevertheless, without these additional, semi-mythological forces, motion

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would be impossible in a plenum world. If every possible location is absolutely full with

particles, how could displacement occur? Without any empty space for the particles to shift

into, the world would be as static as the Eleatic One. The particles would be stuck in place,

just as marbles would be stuck in an overfull, capped jar; there is no way that the particles

could exchange locations with one another.

Leucippus and Democritus economize these particle theories. One major problem of

plenum pluralism is its emphasis on qualities; quality is assumed to be an essential property

of the substances. Therefore, infinite varieties of qualitative substances must be assumed in

order to account for the infinite varieties of naturally existing qualities, eachsui generis. The

atomists strip matter of its qualities, leaving it only with geometrical extension. Qualities, such

as color and taste, are not essential properties of matter. The strategy here is to avoid the

perplexities of having to give an account of qualitative change. They reduce all change simply

to matter in motion. “Atoms” are their particles. The atoms are infinite in number, but infinite

in kind only in a geometrical sense, as infinitely discrete forms. Atoms are qualitatively neutral

and thus qualitatively homogeneous; all the atoms are exactly similar in substance. Thus,

qualities and qualitative change will be explained subjectively, as appearances to subjects.

Each atom is a Parmenidean One writ small, a shard of the One. Each atom is an absolute

corporeal plenum, sheer matter and nothing else, absolutely hard and indivisible, entirely

immobile inside itself, unchangeable, and eternal.165 The atomists agree with Empedocles that

there is a limit to division. The atomists seem to have claimed that indivisibility could be

165 Cyril Bailey,The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 71.

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deduced from experience: “They abandoned division to infinity on the ground that we cannot

divide to infinity and by this means guarantee the perpetual continuity of division, and said

that bodies consisted of indivisible particles.”166 Thus the atoms form the ultimate basis for

the calculation of size; the stopping-point for destruction and the starting-point for creation.

In order to account for geometrical diversity and “because there is no more reason for them

to be thus than thus,”167 the atoms were given every possible shape:168 “the substances are so

small that they escape our senses, and . . . they possess all sorts of forms and all sorts of

shapes and differences in magnitude.”169 The atoms move about and collide. Some are

compounded together and form visible perceptible bodies: “as they are carried about they

collide and are bound together in a binding which makes them touch and be continuous with

one another but which does not genuinely produce any other single nature whatever from

them.”170 Because of their various shapes, “the bodies entangle with and grasp hold of one

another; for some of them are uneven, some hooked, some concave, some convex, and others

have innumerable other differences.”171 Visible objects act as composite wholes until their

166 Simplicius in Aristotle, Physics Z. I. 231 a; from Bailey 73.

167 Simplicius,Commentary on the Physics 28.4-15; from Barnes 242.

168 According to Bailey, “it may be objected that this supposition is really contradictory of the fundamental economy of Atomism, for by mere change of order and position it would be possible to suppose a world created of atoms homogeneous in shape as well as substance.” (81.)

169 Aristotle, On Democritus fir. 208; from Simplicius, Commentary on On the Heavens 294.30-295.22; from Barnes 247-248.

m Ibid.

171 Ibid.

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constituent particles are forced apart: “[the atoms] hold on to one another and remain

together up to the time when some stronger force reaches them from their environment and

shakes them and scatters them apart.”172 Thus, by the geometrical differences of the atoms,

together with those of position and arrangement, the atoms can form an infinite variety of

compound bodies.

But if the atoms are discreet, there must be something to separate them. Otherwise

the theory will be no better at explaining the motion necessary for change than plenum

pluralism. Without motion the atoms cannot combine to form things or shift their position so

as to change things. If they are to move, there must be something external to them for them

to move in, such as a void. But how can a void exist? Bailey traces the evolution of the

concept of the void:

The Pythagoreans, who with their doctrine of the infinitely divisible had been confronted with this problem, had thought of air as lying between the particles of matter, but since the theory of Empedocles had shown that air was an element, as corporeal in substance as earth or fire or water, this answer was no longer possible. Parmenides had seen that the only answer could be “empty space,” but, profoundly convinced as he was that the only existence was that of body, he had denied the existence of empty space altogether.173

The atomists saw that the postulation of the void was necessary to explaining motion. In

order to explain change naturalistically, the void must be postulated as a substance in addition

to matter. But how is the void a substance? There are two approaches to understanding the

void. Each approach implies that it has a different kind of nature.

172 Ibid.

173 Bailey 74.

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Bailey and Kirk, Raven, and Schofield represent the atomists as understanding the

void as “unoccupied space separating the particles of matter”174 and “the negation of

substance.”175 This interpretation says that the Eleatic prohibition of not-being is overcome

by making space “not real”: “the only fully real existence is matter, ‘the completely full’.”176

Nonetheless, both matter and space exist. Space is not real because it is the opposite of

matter; it cannot touch or be touched. “Its sole function is to be where the fuller reality is

not.”177 Bailey thinks that in this way the atomists had protected themselves against a possible

charge of dualism:

if they were taxed with having, like the materialistic pluralists, destroyed the fundamental unity of the universe by the admission of two “existences,” matter and space, they could reply that they still held that there was but one full reality: the other “existence” was, as it were, but the negation of this reality, but it did nevertheless exist.178

Ultimately, it is difficult to see how this interpretation overcomes dualism. Regardless

of whether matter is labeled “the real” and space “the not real,” both are being postulated as

substances; there are two kinds of substances. Furthermore, it is also difficult to see how

space is a substance when postulated in this manner, i.e., as the separation or emptiness

174 Ibid 75.

175 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 415. They owe this interpretation to D. N. Sedley, “Two Conceptions of Vacuum” in Phronesis 27 (1982), 179-83, who says that void is not absolute Newtonian space, but the empty space which exists only where atoms are not, thus forming gaps between them.

176 Bailey 75.

177Ibid.

178Ibid.

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between atoms. Substances must have a nature that persists through change. If space is just

the intervals between moving atoms, then part of the essential nature of space would change

every time the atoms moved to a new location. For instance, if two atoms were to come

together, then on this view, the space that once existed between them when they were distant

now no longer exists. Additionally, there would be no unity to this kind of world. The world

would consist of discreet atoms and discreet, yet alterable, islands of spatiality.179

This brings us to the second interpretation of space as a substance. In order for the

atomist ontology to work, space must be a single entity.180 According to Simplicius, Aristotle

says that Democritus “posits a place [for the atoms], distinct from them and infinite in

extent.”181 In answering the Pythagoreans, space must be whole, continuous, and infinite in

extent. If there is no space where the atoms are, then there is a “limit” to space. The

wholeness and extension of space makes all of its parts have a unique relationship to every

other part; this relationship is described by geometry. Space is an infinite matrix of locations,

continuously connected as a single thing. Each location is stationary. Space as a whole is

absolute, immortal, and indestructible. It allows for change by providing the places into which

matter can move and occupy. Space also mediates the interactions of the atoms. Atoms must

travel continuously through the void in order to get from one place to another; atoms cannot

179 Perhaps, on this view, space flows around to where the atoms once were, like a liquid.

180 Bailey does point out this second possibility, but believes that it was not recognized until Epicurus. (294-299.)

181 Aristotle, On Democritus ff. 208; from Simplicius, Commentary on On the Heavens 294.30-295.22; from Barnes 247-248.

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flit about in space, disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Not only does space

constrain how matter can move, it also constrains how matter can be, i.e., its form; the three-

dimensional structure of space constrains the forms of all things in it to those three

dimensions. Space is preserved unalterated as the atoms change locations in it and thus partly

explains change; change can be reduced to space and the matter that space contains. Space

is therefore a substance. Furthermore, being whole, it provides the unity to the world. Space

connects the discreet atoms as part of the same system; it is the container of matter. Given

this relationship between matter and space, for change to be possible, atoms, infinite in

number, cannot be combined infinitely in extent. If that were the case, then, although space

would exist behind matter, the atomistic world would not be any less full of matter than the

world of plenum pluralism. The atoms must add up in extent to at least slightly less than the

extent of space. Otherwise there would be no empty space for the atoms to move into.

Finally, with this interpretation, dualism is not seen as an ontological fault. Bailey, as

well as Stace, seem to think that unity can only be provided by a single principle. Stace says

that

all philosophy, which is worthy of the name, seeks, in some sense, a monistic explanation of the universe, and when we find that a system of philosophy breaks down and fails, then we may nearly always be sure its defect will reveal itself as an unreconciled dualism . .. [, i.e.,] two equally ultimate existences, neither of which can be derived from the other.182

It is amazing how both Bailey and Stace overlook their own analysis of the Eleatics! The

Eleatics show that a single principle cannot account for change or diversity. Atomism is not

an unreconciled dualism. Because space, construed as a single entity, is the container of the

182 Stace 63.

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atoms, unity is provided. Nevertheless, in order to account for change and diversity, there

must be two substances. Matter is in space; this is the essential relationship between the kinds

of substances. Thus, dualism is not necessarily an ontological faux pas. The theory of

Leucippus and Democritus is a “reconciled dualism.” Both matter and space play an equally

important role in ontology. Therefore, calling the ontology of Leucippus and Democritus

“atomism” puts an inordinate amount of emphasis on matter, making their theory appear as

if it is just another form of plenum pluralism. “Atomism” should be referred to as “spatio-

materialism.”

If change is the motion of atoms in space, what is the nature of this motion and what

is its origin? The two questions are closely linked together. The evidence seems to indicate

that the motion is eternal. According to Bailey, “the atoms are never in the accounts which

are extant said to ‘be’ or to ‘rest’ in the void, but always to be moving.”183 Since the theory

of Leucippus and Democritus requires no cosmogony, i.e., the creation of a changing world

from a static state, no extraneous force is required to break up the original matter in order to

set the particles in motion. The atoms have always been in motion. Although the existence of

space makes motion of atoms possible, to say that they are always in motion does not explain

why they move. The Milesian monists implicitly assumed the same about the motion of their

substances. We are back to the old difficulty of the efficient cause. According to Bailey, there

is an overabundance of incongruent interpretations on this issue concerning Leucippus and

Democritus.184

183 Bailey 82.

184 Ibid 84.

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The most famous account is given by Epicurus, a fourth-century B.C. atomist, who

thought that the efficient cause was the weight of the atoms which made them fall infinitely

down through space. He ascribed different kinds of atoms with different weights. The heavier

ones fell faster than the lighter ones; in this way collisions occurred as faster atoms bumped

into slower ones. Whether Leucippus and Democritus attributed weight to the atoms is

disputable. Nevertheless, they supposed that “the eternal motion of the atoms was always in

all directions,”185 not just down. Aristotle attributes to Democritus a comparison between the

motions of atoms and the motes in a sunbeam, which dart “hither and thither in all

directions.”186 Just as there is no reason why the atoms, with regard to their shape, should be

“thus than thus,” there is no reason why motion should be in one direction more than in

another. Anyway, if space is absolute, then there is no absolute down or up; Cicero declares

that according to Democritus there was no “top” or “bottom” or “middle” in the void.187

If the spatio-materialists gave any answer to this at all, it must have been that the

cause of motion was necessity, for “everything happens in accordance with necessity.”188 By

necessity they meant “not the arbitrary external force, which his predecessors had called in

to produce any effect which was otherwise unaccountable, but rather that the atoms in

moving obeyed the law of their own being.”189 Thus all is determined: “the whole course of

185 Bailey 83.

186 Aristotle, O fMovement A, 2, 403 b 28 ff; from Copleston 73.

187 Cicero, De Fato 20, 46 and De Fin., i, 6, 17; Copleston 73.

188 Stobaeus,Anthology I iv 7c; from Barnes 243.

189 Bailey 85.

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things is foreordained from all eternity; the whole history of the universe is but the inevitable

outcome, step by step, of its original and eternal constitution.”190 According to Bailey, the

eternal atomic motion

is beyond all causes. It is itself the cause of all change: for, if the conception of the eternal being of the universe be not merely of atoms in the void, but of atoms moving in the void, then we have no more right to ask for the cause of movement than we have for the cause of the existence of the atoms and the void themselves. We could only demand the cause of motion, if it were something that supervened on a previous state of rest.191

By postulating matter in space, the spatio-materialists solve the problem of motion. Space

enables the atoms to move. The substances are ontological causes of change: “the very

existence of atoms and void carrie[s] with it atomic motion.”192

The interaction of atoms in the void is purely mechanical. Mechanism replaces

teleology. The universe is not ruled by design. For instance, Anaxagoras'sNous “knows” all

things and “directs” change in accordance to its “plan.” Leucippus and Democritus replace

the idea of a “final cause” solely by “efficient causation:” matter in motion in the void

becomes complexly organized over time as an undesigned result of inevitable natural

processes. Mechanical necessity determines the fate of all things. All events in the cosmos

must be the outcome of the interactions of atoms, entirely undetermined either by purpose or

design; the shapes, sizes, motions, and collisions of the atoms being the only causes of the

events that occur in space. The world of the spatio-materialist is determined only by extended

190 Ibid 121.

191 Ibid 133-134.

192 Ibid 134.

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bits of matter moving in space. In this way contingent properties are reduced to substances,

contingent properties are the spatial relations of atoms. Motion is the change in these

contingent properties of the atoms. Motion of atoms in space enables the atoms to combine

diversely.

If the substances are devoid of qualities, then qualitative properties are not essential

properties of substances. Only quantitative properties are essential to matter and space.

Therefore, the spatio-materialists conclude that the only place left for qualities to exist is in

the mind of the perceiver. Qualities are subjective. For instance, part of the experience of

looking at the sky on a clear day is the appearance of blue. But in itself the sky is just atoms

and void. Blueness is a property of experience; it is relative to us: “by convention colour, by

convention bitter, by convention sweet: in reality atoms and void.”193 The impinging of atoms

of different sorts on our sense-perceptors is what causes sense perception. The qualities and

qualitative changes that appear to the subject are just what it is like to be that subject as

different kinds of atoms impinge on the sense receptors. In this way, Democritus attempts to

account for each of the senses. For instance, sight occurs by reflection of atoms. Things at a

distance give off effluences which make impressions on the pupil in the form of compressed

air.194 Flavors are sharp if the shapes of the constituent atoms are “angular and crinkled and

small and fine . . . Sour flavour is constituted by large shapes -with many angles and as little

193 Galen, The Elements according to Hippocrates 1417-418K; from Barnes 255.

194 See Theophrastus, On the Senses 49-50 (from Barnes 258), for a complete description.

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roundness as possible.”195 Democritus thus tries to account for all phenomena by extending

his ontology to all things.196 In a strictly mechanical world, Democritus rightly places qualities

in the only place that they can be, in the mind of the beholder.197

By postulating space and matter, two substances, one material the other immaterial,

Leucippus and Democritus are able to fulfill what nature philosophy set out to do nearly two

centuries prior. By sorting out many of the ontological issues that were muddled in the

theories of their predecessors, the spatio-materialists adequately provide the permanence,

unity, change, and diversity that is necessary in explaining all things. Ultimately, the ontology

of Leucippus and Democritus provides the foundation for natural science. Every conclusion

reached by natural science implicitly assumes atoms in the void as the coherence underlying

every naturalistic explanation.

195Ibid 65-67; from Barnes 258-259.

196 Nevertheless, Democritus does not seem to extend his atomism to moral theory.

197 Nevertheless, reducing blueness, coldness, or C-sharp to atoms in motion in the mind of the observer does not explain the appearance of these phenomena. Where in the mind is the blueness or the bitterness if all that really exists are atoms and void? The location of these “raw-feels” or “qualia” still remains a problem for naturalists today. In following the strategy that qualia are subjective, perhaps matter is epiphenomenal to qualia, rather than qualia being epiphenomenal to matter. If this is the case, then matter has an intrinsic nature, i.e., what it is in itself, as opposed to its extrinsic nature, i.e., what it is for other particulars—extended stuff. On this interpretation, qualia would simply be what it is like “to be” the matter where perception is realized.

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CHAPTER 9

A RESURRECTION OF ONTOLOGICAL NATURALISM?

In a simple, coherent way, the spatio-materialism of Leucippus and Democritus

provides a naturalistic schema for explaining the world. Nevertheless, ontological naturalism

was, for the most part, abandoned after Democritus because it was not satisfactorily extended

to the realm of the good. The seeming inability of naturalism to account for the moral realm

caused the abandonment of ontological naturalism in favor of other approaches. Naturalism

is traditionally associated with hedonism. The standard view is that if the world consists

merely of blind mechanical causes, then there is no objective goodness. Therefore we ought

to pursue our desires. This is where the Sophists and Socrates pick up the philosophical

dialogue. On the one hand, the Sophists pick up on this and profess that if this is the case,

then morality is relative. Man is the measure of all things. On the other hand, Socrates and his

successors, Plato and Aristotle, wanted to know what made the good good. Reducing

goodness to desire does not explain why something is good. They believed that something

should be desired because it is good, not that desiring something makes it good. The

philosophical pursuit of human affairs, begun by the Sophists and Socrates, led to a different

way of doing philosophy that has been pursued, for the most part, ever since.

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This different way is non-ontological in origin. As such, it is epistemological in

foundation. Epistemological philosophy is “inside-out.” That is, it begins from a subjective

stance that is primarily concerned with giving a theory of knowledge about the world. From

the point of view of a subject, it asks how thinking beings can come to know the nature of the

world. Once the epistemological theory is given, it proceeds to explain the rest of the world

based on the epistemology. For epistemological philosophy, epistemology is first philosophy.

Everything is a function of what a reflective subject can know. Everything, including

ontology, is derived from the subjectivistic conclusions that arise when reason reflects on

reflection itself.

In contrast, ontological naturalism is ontological through and through. It is an

“outside-in” philosophy. It postulates substance and then proceeds to explain all other aspects

of the world as a deduction from the ontology. It assumes a realism about the world and as

a foundation it formulates a theory about the nature of the world-in-itself; ontology is first

philosophy. From this primary naturalistic ontology, the logic is that it ought to be possible

to derive all things—including the minds of subjective beings and the knowledge that those

minds have. If all things are just manifestations of substance, then it must be possible to track

both the analysis of the complex into the simple elements of which it is composed, and the

evolution of the complex from the simple over time. For ontological naturalism, everything

is a function of the simple substances that are postulated as existing; everything, including

regularities (local and global) and change overtime, is derived from the conclusions that arise

when reason reflects on the nature of substance as the foundation for the world.

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In order to talk about the rest of the world, ontological naturalism first deals with the

issues of unity, permanence, change, and diversity. Epistemological philosophy falls into

trouble regarding these issues because formulating a coherent ontology is not its primary

motive. Because of its starting point, epistemological philosophy always leads to ontologies

that are fragmented. The result is usually some form of unreconciled dualism; this method

leads to principles that are not related as parts of a single, unified system,198 or worse yet, it

leads to the denial of the possibility of ontology entirely.

Plato ends up with an unreconciled dualism between the world of forms and the world

of appearances. Copleston points out that Plato’s view results in “an impassable gulf between

true knowledge on the one hand and the real world on the other.”199 Plato is primarily

concerned with universal definitions: What is it about objects of knowledge that makes them

true? If two objects of knowledge are true, how can they both participate in truth? If truth is

an object of knowledge, how can other objects of knowledge participate in that object? Plato

says that particular objects of knowledge are true if they participate in the form of the thing

that is being contemplated. On the one hand, knowledge of universals is knowledge of the

abstract and unreal. But, as Copleston points out, for Plato “the universal concept is not an

abstract form devoid of objective content or references, but that to each true universal

198 The exception here is idealism, where monism is the result. For idealists, the unity of mind is the world. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that change cannot be explained by a single simple substance. Nevertheless, in most idealist ontologies, mind is a complex substance.

199 Copleston 151.

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concept there corresponds an objective reality.”200 Thus there is a gulf between the particular

objects of experience and the world of the forms. Plato makes his forms the sources or causes

of the being of the world of the appearances. If this is the case, how is an interaction possible

between the diametrically opposed worlds of the static, perfect forms and the particular,

dynamic objects of appearances? Thus, beginning with an epistemological point of view, Plato

has formulated an ontology of two kinds of substances which are ontologically separate. This

epistemological bent flavors the rest of Plato’s system. It is difficult to separate his

epistemology from his ontology. Copleston says that “he is inclined to assume that we can

have knowledge and to be primarily interested in the question what is the true object of

knowledge. This means that ontological and epistemological themes are frequently

intermingled or treated pari passu”201

Even the naturalism of Aristotle is epistemological at heart. Like Plato, his teacher,

Aristotle is preoccupied with knowledge of universals. Thus his ontology is derived from his

epistemological concerns. As a naturalist he postulates, in effect, the existence of three kinds

of substances: matter, form, and the Unmoved First Mover. Aristotle’s matter is not a general

kind of matter. For him, each thing is made out of a different kind of matter. Tables are made

of wood. Forks are made of silver. Beards are made of hair. In addition, matter is not the

source of all causation; it is only one of four separate causes. Unlike Plato, instead of forms

having their own world, separate from the things of experience, Aristotle puts form into the

things of experience. Form is an element of particular things, along with matter. Concrete

200 Ibid.

201 Ibid 142-143.

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sensible objects are individual beings composed of matter and form. Matter gives things their

individuation; things are different in virtue of the different matter that makes up the thing.

Form makes the thing a member of a kind or species, so that individual things can have the

same nature. Essential forms have an unchanging nature and are thus also a kind of substance,

although their existence is inextricably intertwined with the existence of matter. Forms are

dependent on matter for their existence; they exist only in particular material things. Matter

is what endures through change of essential forms, and thus, is the ultimate substrate of

change. Matter never exists without some form or other—there is no unformed matter. Every

particular thing has at least a material cause and a formal cause.

Now experience tells us that things with matter and form are not static. Some things

move or are moved about. Additionally, other things change their form, i.e., things develop:

an acorn becomes an oak tree, a boy becomes a man, etc. Given that matter is the cause of

a thing’s being and form is the cause of a thing’s essence, then a third substance, the

Unmoved First Mover, must be postulated in order to account for both the ultimate motion

of things (their efficient cause) and the natural change required by their form (change for the

sake of an end, i.e., their final cause). The Unmoved First Mover causes change without itself

being changed. It is the first cause of motion, the first efficient cause, because “the original

cause of any motion cannot be something that is being moved by another, it has to be a self

movent.”202 As the ultimate final cause, it is the reason why potentiality is actualized. An

acorn is potentially a tree in regard to its full development. The end itself (becoming an oak

tree) is the essential form as actualized. What needs explaining is the change by which what

202 Owens 316.

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is potential becomes actual. But potency seems to be something between not-being and

actuality. In order for potency to be real, Aristotle reduces it to actuality, to ultimate

existence. Actuality is prior to potency. The actual is temporally prior to the potential: “The

actual is always produced from the potential, the potential is always reduced to act by the

actual, that which is already in act.”203 The actual is also logically prior to the potential: “The

actuality is the end, that for the sake of which the potency exists or is acquired.”204 In order

to explain potency from act, Aristotle is led to his Unmoved First Mover which is pure

actuality and incorporeal. Although Aristotle postulates three kinds of substance, there is an

unreconciled dualism between things with potential, i.e., things made up of matter and form,

and the Unmoved First Mover, which is immaterial and pure act. Whereas Plato’s ultimate

world of the forms is static, Aristotle’s ultimate world of the Unmoved First Mover is

dynamic. Without the Unmoved First Mover, the world of experience would be static. Like

Plato, in being primarily interested in solving epistemological problems, Aristotle’s ontology

is fettered to his subjectivistic solutions to those problems.

The epistemological method shows its true colors with Modem Philosophy. Descartes

wanted to build philosophy on certainty. By his method of radical doubt, a gulf between mind

and extension resulted. Descartes’s unreconciled dualism has defined the philosophical

dilemma ever since: How are mind and body related? The British Empiricists fare no better.

They too wanted to build philosophy upon a foundation of certainty. But in making their

foundation the facts of experience, the only certainty possible is the observation of constant

203 Ibid 310.

™ Ibid.

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conjunctions. Thus one can never be certain of anything beyond regularities, such as the

existence of substance. Substance ultimately just disappears and becomes simply a name for

these regularities. Ontology and strict empiricism are thus incompatible.205

Even contemporary physicists are epistemologists at heart. Based on the regularities

described by their mathematical equations, contemporary physicists derive fantastical

ontologies that completely ignore the lessons of the Presocratics. They talk of a beginning to

the universe, a big bang from which time, space, and matter were created, as if something

could be created from nothing. They talk of an expanding universe, as if the universe was not

already infinite (what would exist outside the universe?). They talk about a four-dimensional

space-time manifold, as if time were just another spatial dimension where all events past,

present, and future, exist simultaneously. We even hear of worm-holes in space, as if objects

could just flit about in space, reappearing great distances away without actually having to

travel through space. Because of its epistemological urges, both philosophy and science have

lost their coherence. By not being concerned primarily with ontological issues, philosophers

and scientists believe in the reality of things that are ontologically impossible!

Ontological naturalism was abandoned prematurely after Democritus. Philosophers

and scientists alike ought to shift their energies to formulating the most coherent ontology of

the natural world. Theoretically, the problems of mind—including the problem of qualia, and

the problem of accounting for the nature of goodness, could all be solved by reducing them

to the nature of substances. Western culture ought to resurrect the philosophy of its founders

205 Contemporary philosophy and science, for the most part, are just variations or modifications of Continental Rationalism or British Empiricism.

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and take to heart the ontological foundations of philosophy and science both. By ignoring the

important lessons of their forefathers, contemporary philosophy and science suffer ultimately

from the incoherence that results when the study of substance as the foundation for the

explanation of the world is not pursued.

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PRIMARY SOURCES Barnes, Jonathan. Early Greek Philosophy. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.

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McKirahan, Jr., Richard D. Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994.

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McKirahan, Jr., Richard D. Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994.

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Sedley, D.N. “Two Conceptions of Vacuum” in Phronesis 27 (1982): 179-183.

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