The Lagoon

by Armand Marie Leroi

  Aristotle’s claim that organisms are related to each other as members of an army or a household is, as I read it, a frank anomaly. It invokes a higher, inter-species level of organization, a common cosmic purpose or a global teleology. In the Politics Aristotle makes clear that a properly functioning household is not just an assemblage of self-interested individuals. Rather, it is a collective of co-operating members, directed by the household’s master, whose collective purpose is procreation and protection. Yet, when speaking of animals, he hardly ever describes the kind of co-operative, even altruistic, inter-specific behaviour that we might hope to find in an army or a household. True, he claims that the karidon (or pinnophylax), a little symbiotic shrimp or crab, benefits the pinna, the giant fan mussel, in which it lives, but he makes nothing of it. And when he explains some animal’s features in functional terms he almost invariably speaks of its benefit to that particular kind of animal. If all the species in the world share some organizing principle or common purpose beyond a desire for their individual survival, his zoology does not tell us what it is or how they accomplish it. Aristotle’s forms are selfish forms.

  Moreover, there is one kind of global teleology that he explicitly rejects. The strongest form of global teleology would be one that postulates that the world, perhaps even the whole cosmos, is a single super-organism. Such a world would be one over which Gaia reigns with a power far beyond James Lovelock’s wildest imaginings. It would be a world like James Cameron’s Pandora, one whose inhabitants are all connected by a vast signal transduction network, whose predators are not so much the ecological equivalent of jackals and hawks as phagocytes coursing through the planetary circulation, and whose animals rise as one in response to the planetary spirit’s anguished call to arms. Or, since we are not in the twenty-second century AD but in the fourth century BC, it would be a world like the one that Plato describes in The Timaeus. Plato’s perceptible cosmos is a copy of a single form, the Intelligible Living Creature. The name says it all. The cosmos has a ‘soul’. Designed by the Dēmiourgos it is also designed for the Dēmiourgos. Even our bowels are arranged so that we can think about Him. But Aristotle is clear: the cosmos does not have a soul. (Though, as will become apparent, the celestial realm is not devoid of life either.)

  It is for these, and other, reasons that most recent interpreters of Metaphysics λ, 10 have read the household analogy in a very weak sense. They argue that when Aristotle says that living things are ‘jointly ordered with respect to one thing’ he is just saying what he has so often said: that they all aspire to eternity. And I would agree but for three reasons. The first is that this reading renders the analogy otiose. Why even bother giving it? The second is that Aristotle does describe some altruistic species. Oddly, they include sharks.

  He is explaining why sharks (and dolphins) have the faces they do. They have narrow snouts and their mouths are slung under their heads. These features, he thinks, make them inefficient predators since they cannot open their mouths very wide and, while seizing their prey, have to turn belly up which lets the little fish escape. He explains these awkwardnesses in two ways. One is that it prevents sharks from gorging themselves. That’s quite consistent with Aristotle’s usual style of explanation. He often argues that animals have built-in limits to the amount of food that they can eat, or the number of eggs that they can lay, or the quantities of semen that they can produce; and such limits, he invariably goes on to explain, are the consequence of some other feature that benefits the animal. They are, as we would say, functional trade-offs. It’s his other explanation that is startling. For he also says that sharks have narrow gapes and under-slung mouths so that they don’t devour all their prey (‘nature appears to do this for the sake of the preservation of other animals’). Shark faces, it seems, are designed for the sake not only of sharks but of sardines too.*

  The story of the shark’s face is so strange that it’s tempting to dismiss it as an un-Aristotelian interpolation. That seems unlikely since it appears in both Historia animalium and The Parts of Animals. So defenders of individual teleology sometimes say that Aristotle is just relating a popular notion – the sort of thing a fisherman might say. Or else, more subtly, that a good-for-sardines face is just an incidental benefit of its true, good-for-sharks design. I am less sure. A shark face that helps sardines to survive is just the sort of feature that we would expect if, as Metaphysics λ, 10 says, the world were like a household. In fact I believe that this passage solves a deep and hidden problem in Aristotle’s ecology.

  That is my third reason for taking Aristotle’s household analogy seriously. Most scholars agree that Aristotle believes that: (i) organisms are designed to survive and reproduce; (ii) animal kinds are eternal. They have, however, failed to note that these two beliefs are, in general, incompatible. That is because, in a world in which organisms interact with each other, in which they compete and prey upon one another, there is no reason to suppose that all will persist for ever. Animals and plants often extirpate their competitors; predators eat up all of some prey species and then turn to eating something else. At least so it is in our world. In Aristotle’s world, however, extinction is not an option; his metaphysics demands a balance of nature. Aristotle, I propose, grasps that such a balance does not emerge automatically from any self-interested assemblage of organisms, but must be designed by nature.

  The evidence for thinking this is admittedly indirect. To begin with the evidence closest to the subject, he must have had – if I am right – some grasp of the fragility of ecological communities. In Historia animalium, speaking of fish, he says that if ‘all their eggs were preserved they’d be infinite in number’. He’s also impressed by the extraordinary fecundity of mice and speaks of how sometimes they multiply so rapidly that their predators cannot make a dent in their numbers, that they devastate entire crops, and that they then, suddenly, disappear again, but no one knows why.* His description suggests that he’s relating an unusual phenomenon. That is indeed so. In the Nicomachean Ethics, discussing ‘incontinent appetites’ in humans – he’s pretty severe on them – he asks whether animals can have them too. His genial reply is that since animals can’t reason we don’t generally speak of them as being ‘temperate’ or ‘self-indulgent’ except in a metaphorical way. Yet, he continues, some kinds of animals exceed others in ‘wantonness, destructiveness, and omnivorous greed’ – he’s surely thinking of those pernicious mice – and that they are a departure from ‘what’s natural, as, among men, madmen are’.

  Such passing comments certainly do not amount to an ecological theory. Yet they do tell us that he has a sense of the normal relationship of animal populations to their food and that, sometimes, this relationship goes awry. More generally, introducing his soothsayer-derived account of animal conflict in Historia animalium, he says: ‘A state of war exists between animals which occupy the same place and get their livelihood [zōē] from the same sources.’ It is one of his few explicit ecological principles – but it is a deep one.* He never says that animals might go extinct for want of food. On the other hand he sees that an adequate supply of food is not automatically guaranteed for any given species and that, faced with limited resources, individuals and species compete.

  Passages that speak of ecological instability are, however, rare in Aristotle’s works. He seems to believe that nature usually ensures that there’s enough food for everyone. In the Politics, discussing the various ways in which men and animals make a living, he says that:

  Nature seems to provide a basic livelihood to all when first born and when fully mature [italics mine]. Some animals (e.g. larva-bearing and egg-laying animals) bring forth alongside their offspring enough food to last until they can provide for themselves. For a limited period live-bearing animals have food for the young inside them called milk. We should similarly infer that after birth plants exist for the sake of animals and other animals for the sake of human beings, the tame for service and food, and most wild ones for food, clothing and other uses.
If nature makes nothing without purpose or in vain she must have made all animals for the sake of human beings.

  Some have read this passage as implying that Aristotle’s teleology is purely anthropocentric; that, like Xenophon before and the Stoics after, he sees the whole world, and all the animals in it, as existing just for the sake of man. He really can’t mean that since the rest of his teleology is, as I’ve said, overwhelmingly directed at the survival of individual animals. But at the very least this passage does point out that plants, animals and men are connected to each other by a chain of trophic relationships; that they depend on each other, and that this isn’t just an accident, but that nature has arranged matters this way. There is, then, a sense in which more perfect creatures typically use less perfect creatures as instruments of their survival since they eat them. But whose nature is at work here? When Aristotle says that ‘nature’ does this or that, he nearly always means the formal or material nature of some particular animal. Here, however, nature appears to refer to a higher level of organization. It appears to be the nature of the cosmos itself to ensure an adequate supply of food for all the animals in it.

  The cosmos is a holon, a whole. As such it is like a soul, a household, a state or even a tragedy – Aristotle applies the term to them all. By a ‘whole’ he means a complex object that is something more than the sum of its parts, a system. But Aristotle is acutely aware of the fragility of wholes. His theory of the nutritive soul is, ultimately, an account of the material flows and regulatory devices that keep animals alive; his account of death is an account of how they fail. Much of his political theory is about the conditions that ensure the stability of the state. It would be strange indeed if he did not see that what is true of these wholes is also true of the greatest, most complex whole that he knows: the cosmos itself.

  This, I believe, is the force of his household analogy. It is a statement that, if the components of the sublunary world – all its plants and animals forms – are to survive for ever, then their relationships must be arranged just so. Sharks must control their appetites for if they did not sardines would go extinct, and if sardines went extinct that would be bad for sharks. In the Nicomachean Ethics he reinforces this. He’s speaking of the difference between true wisdom and mere political ability or ‘prudence’, by which he means the ability to manage a household or a state. He says that prudence for humans and prudence for fishes are quite different. That’s unarguable, but raises the question: how can a fish be prudent at all? None of his fishes are ‘political’ by any definition. I suggest that he means that a fish – a shark – is prudent as a man is, by managing its income, by eschewing unnatural gluttony, by preserving its oikos – its home – and so itself. He even suggests that they have foresight. Animals are indeed designed to promote their own interests, but not so much that they jeopardize the existence of other kinds, for that would jeopardize their own.

  The hierarchical dimension of the household analogy is very unclear, but I believe Aristotle to be claiming that humans and animals have more diverse ways to realize their goals than, say, plants whose only function is to reproduce. Whether or not this is so, his household clearly invokes a far weaker form of global teleology than Plato’s cosmic super-organism in which all interests are subordinate to those of the Dēmiourgos. It is more – to appeal to another organizational analogy – like the kind of mutual self-interest that exists among industrial corporations and the myriad companies that supply the components they need, all of which seek one thing – ‘the most excellent thing there is’ – in their case, profit.*

  This vision of a cosmic teleology has one further benefit. It suggests a solution – albeit a frankly speculative one, for which there is no direct textual evidence – to the mystery of why spontaneous generators exist. Aristotle would deny Macbeth’s dismal claim that a man’s life is mere sound and fury signifying nothing. Speaking as a biologist (rather than a political scientist), he would say that the reason that he is born, grows to maturity and battles the vicissitudes of the world is so that he can reproduce his form. Not so the oyster. Its life, by his account, really does seem to be devoid of purpose for it perpetuates nothing. But perhaps this view is too narrow. For the oyster, and all its fellow spontaneous generators, do have this in common: they are eaten by other things. Most of them are at the bottom of the food chain. Perhaps, then, the purpose of spontaneous generators is to ensure the survival of the creatures that feed on them. They exist, as all living things do, to keep their world intact.

  I should love Aristotle’s teleology to be entirely aimed at the survival of individuals. That would make him seem quite modern – Darwinian, if not Neo-Darwinian. But if the picture that I have given of Aristotle’s world is accurate, then it is a very different one from ours. In our world natural selection maximizes short-term reproductive success and is indifferent to eternity: ‘[Natural selection] does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, and no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.’* Just so. In our world, therefore, species drive each other extinct. Around AD 1280 the Maori brought the Polynesian rat to New Zealand. It ate up five species of native birds and three frogs as well as a variety of lizard, insect and land-snail species. The Maori themselves ate up nine species of Moa. Now imported European predators – Norwegian rats, black rats, stoats, weasels and cats – are working their way through what is left of the native fauna. If, in our world, there is a ‘balance of nature’, it is only the temporary truce of evenly matched opponents who, having battled in the theatre of ecological war, stand exhausted among the corpses of the less fortunate and well equipped. Aristotle’s world is not a kinder one, for in it there are no truces, just battles that go on, without respite, for ever.

  AKANTHIAS GALEOS – SPINY DOGFISH – SQUALUS ACANTHIAS

  CII

  Experts all agree that the world had a beginning, but some [Orpheus, Hesiod and Plato] claim that, once begun, it is everlasting; others [Democritus] that, like any other natural artefact, it is subject to decay; and others [Empedocles, Heraclitus] that it alternates, being one moment as it is now, another moment changing and subject to decay, and that it is this process which continues without ceasing . . . Well, the idea that it has a beginning but is everlasting is quite impossible . . .

  SO ARISTOTLE IN HIS cosmological treatise, The Heavens. He says that he wants to give the various theories a fair trial, but he’s out to argue for his own. This rests on the claim, a novel one, that the universe is eternal, that it had no beginning and that it will never end. Since the forms of living things are eternal he needs, of course, an eternal cosmos to house them in. Even so, he gives a series of independent arguments for one.

  Some of his arguments for the eternity of the cosmos are purely semantic; most are tortuous. The most lucid of them appears in the Physics. It focuses on the necessary existence not of cosmic matter but of cosmic change. Change is the object of his science and, since all natural entities have an internal principle of change – a physis – to prove the eternity of change is to prove the eternity of the objects of change as well.

  Aristotle’s proof rests on the necessary existence of prior causes. The argument is abstract, but a concrete example, Aeschylus’ fate, will make it clear. For Aeschylus to be killed by a falling tortoise – so Aristotle would argue – both playwright and the immediate cause of his death, a tortoise travelling at speed, must first exist. That seems obvious enough. For the tortoise to fall, some existing thing must have changed: an eagle that opened its talons. For the eagle to have opened its talons, some existing thing must have changed: the eagle’s sensitive soul – the cognitive-motor system that perceived Aeschylus’ head, considered its goals and desires, fired its pneuma and sprang its talons wide. For the eagle’s soul . . . but the point is clear: no matter how far back you go, any observed change necessarily implies the existence of a previous change and the existence of objects and subjects of change – ergo change is e
ternal.

  Aristotle’s argument is a generalization of the argument for the eternity of forms/kinds – organismal generation being a special kind of change. It’s a good one if your physics are fully deterministic. Given a deterministic cosmos filled with change, change must have existed for as long as time has existed; and Aristotle has another argument to show that time has neither a beginning nor an end. We might expect that this would be the end of the matter, but it isn’t. ‘Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?’ said Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz; Aristotle, by contrast, worries that it might.

  He worries that the causal chain might break. That’s because his physics is based on the common-sense idea that an object in motion will eventually, naturally, come to rest. Before it does so, the object may contact another object and so set it in motion, but eventually the force will dissipate as, when you throw a stone in a pond, the ripples eventually fade to nothing.* So to keep the world in motion Aristotle needs a continuous source of change, a cosmic engine. To find one he looks to the heavens. The Egyptians and the Babylonians, Aristotle says, have been watching the heavens for generation upon generation, and their movements never vary.* If anything can guarantee eternal movement on Earth, then the stars can.