The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy
Page 24
On this reading, a pluralist cosmology is not a desperate alternative to Parmenides’ cosmic monism, but an intelligent development of the programme laid down by Parmenides himself. No critical reply to Parmenides is necessary, for the pluralist cosmologist is not a rival to Parmenides but a follower of his theory and a practitioner of his method. Parmenides concludes the introduction to his poem with the words:
… You must learn all things,
both the unshaken heart of persuasive [or: well-rounded] truth
and the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true reliability.
But nevertheless you will learn these things too, how appearances
must be acceptably, all of them pervading everything. (B1.28-32)
In accordance with a constructive reading of the second half of the poem, we might construe his remarks as follows: you must learn both the changeless principles of nature, and the ways in which their interaction produces the changing phenomena of nature. Although the latter study does not yield certainty, it can yield understanding of the appropriate sort. We must formally distinguish (for the first time) between metaphysics and physics. In the second half of his poem, Parmenides allows phenomena that come to be (gignesthai) as explananda (B11), and, following his principles, so can his would-be followers.
Now in fact, the elements of Empedocles and Anaxagoras conform to the principles one can extract from Parmenides. They are (1) everlasting, (2) of a single nature, (3) unchanging in their natures, (4) complete in the sense of not requiring something to realize them. They constitute not (5) a dualism (which Parmenides may be taken to be criticizing) but (5a) a pluralism, (6) which does, however, incorporate (but does not consist of) contrarieties. Furthermore, the elements are (7) independent of one another and (8) equal to one another. Thus it does appear that the theories of Empedocles and Anaxagoras can be seen as embodying constructive suggestions of Parmenides.
The dominant model of explanation of Empedocles and Anaxagoras is mixture. The elements mix together to produce phenomenal objects. The ingredients of the mixture preexist and will continue to exist after the mixture itself ceases, while the mixture produced is a temporary state of interaction of everlasting constituents. At the ultimate level of description, the mixture does not exist, but only the changeless elements themselves. Yet at another level their interaction does produce changing events. We can distinguish between a changeless Eleatic world of elements and a changing world of events. Those events are derivative and hence in some sense not real – that is, not ultimate principles of explanation. But neither are they mere illusions. They are derivative states of the ultimate principles. The model provides a distinction between the ultimate and the derivative, the real and the phenomenal. For Empedocles and Anaxagoras, deception would consist not in inventing an illusory world but in thinking that the properties of phenomenal objects are the ultimate properties of things. For instance, it would be a mistake to think that the ultimate realities come into being and perish because plants and animals, tables and chairs, come to be and perish.
Between the early Ionians and the pluralists, a major shift has taken place. The early Ionian model envisages a single stuff as being transformed into many different substances. Anaximenes’ air becomes fire when rarefied, or wind, cloud, water, earth, and stones when condensed to the appropriate degree.31 There seems to be a genuine sense in which Anaximenes’ air and Heraclitus’ fire come into being and perish and in which other substances become complete by turning into air or fire. By virtue of the fact that their original substance becomes all things, it cannot be anything permanently. The pluralist takes a stand against the early Ionian world-view by insisting that there are certain Eleatic laws, as it were, which govern the real. These laws rule out the possibility that the ultimate principles are themselves subject to change, that they come to be and perish, or that they can turn into other substances or develop into a completed state.
Moreover, by identifying the ultimate stuffs as changeless beings, the pluralists have taken a major step in the direction of distinguishing between agent and patient, mind and matter, soul and body. Whereas the earlier Ionians had tended to attribute agency and power to their ultimate substance, the pluralists isolate agency from substances. Empedocles posits Love and Strife, Anaxagoras a cosmic Mind. Empedocles also recognizes an everlasting soul apart from the material elements. Although neither Empedocles nor Anaxagoras can be credited with (or blamed for) producing a full-blown agent-patient or mind-body dualism (Anaxagoras’ Mind still has physical properties such as homogeneity and spatial location), they move in the direction of those distinctions. There is still no strict distinction between substance and properties, as we can see by the way Anaxagoras seems to conflate stuffs and qualities. But he and Empedocles do show a growing awareness of the difference between material and mental entities and between movers and moveds. The distinction between a thing and its affections will not appear in philosophical literature until Plato, and the categorial distinction between substance and property until Aristotle.32 Aristotle will finally co-opt a word originally meaning “wood” or “building material,” hylê, for matter – a concept the early Greek philosophers deal with constantly without being able to refer to abstractly.33
IV. ELEATIC OBJECTIONS
The conceptual advances Empedocles and Anaxagoras have made are inspired by Parmenidean considerations. Their realities are more substantial than those of the early Ionians: they are everlasting beings with fixed natures and properties. Though they do not change in themselves, they change in their relationships to other things, namely other basic substances. It is here that the early pluralists are most vulnerable to Eleatic objections: how can there be any change in the relationships of basic substances to each other? For to change in their relationships, they will have to change in their configurations in some way or another. Minimally, they will have to change in their spatial location so that they can mix in different proportions, which in turn will result in the appearance of different phenomenal properties. But if one rules out the possibility of motion in place, then one will block the pluralist solution to the problem of change. Furthermore, one can object to the status of a new relationship, a new configuration of substances as presupposing the appearance of some new situation where one did not exist before – thus violating the principle of No Becoming recognized by both Empedocles and Anaxagoras.
Both of these problems appear in the second generation of Eleatic objections. Zeno of Elea has a series of arguments that seem to focus on the impossibility of motion. And Melissus explicitly objects that the appearance of a new configuration violates Parmenides’ strictures against something coming to be from what is not.34 It is not clear what the chronological relationships are between the two pluralists and the new generation of Eleatics. But we can reasonably ask how vulnerable the theories of Empedocles and Anaxagoras are to the new Eleatic objections, whether or not they were confronted with them historically. It appears that neither has much to say in reply to objections about the impossibility of motion. Objections against motion, indeed, seem to appear in the second argument of Parmenides’ fragment B8, so they are not new, however new Zeno’s paradoxes may be. One can perhaps see in Empedocles and Anaxagoras a tendency to stress not locomotion but the omnipresence of the elements: Empedocles portrays the elements as roots and maintains that they “run through all things”35 as though the compound is a cord made of twisted strands. Anaxagoras stresses the fact that everything is in everything, that is, that no substance is devoid of every element. These remarks divert attention from the problem of locomotion, but they do not solve it because both philosophers presuppose that the concentration of a given element in a mixture is subject to change. This in turn presupposes that portions of the elements change place.36
As to the appearance of new configurations, Empedocles clearly must admit them: when new proportions of elements come about, new compounds are created. Empedocles seems to discount the importance of this situation by
stressing the fact that what is real is not the compounds which come and go, but the elements themselves, which are everlasting. While he does not want to say that compounds are merely illusions, he does want to make it clear that they do not qualify as real constituents of the world. Empedocles settles for an Eleatic ontology that results in a non-Eleatic world of phenomena.
Anaxagoras allows for changing ratios of elements, but he does not admit the appearance of any new substances: the phenomenal substance we experience is just the set of elements (of which there is an indefinitely large number). But there is no emergence of new properties, no supervenience of a new property on a configuration of substances. Every phenomenal property we experience is already there in the set of ultimate realities, as a complete survey of them would show. Phenomenal properties do not really emerge, they become manifest when their bearers come to predominate in the mixture. Thus Anaxagoras minimizes the scope of novelty in the world. He does so at the price of having an indefinitely large number of elements. But in return he gains a solid defence against the charge that new configurations come into being. Melissus would no doubt object that even the becoming manifest of an already existent feature involves a change that reason must rule out. Anaxagoras, however, could point out that he has posited the absolute minimum change necessary to support a world of experience. In any case, it is not clear that the coming to be manifest of a property is a case of coming to be in the sense Parmenides has ruled out. For no thing has come to be. Anaxagoras has made the primeval chaos to be a reservoir containing in a latent state all substances that can appear.37 The only novelty to be found in the world is not the creation of something new but the becoming manifest of something latent, the “separation off” of something in the mixture. Moreover, each change in the cosmos is in principle the same kind of change: some substance latent in a mixture becomes manifest; for example, when water evaporates, air that was latent in the water separates off. In this world there is change, but no change of substances, not even that of elements producing a compound (as in Empedocles): there is only the separation – which for Anaxagoras is always a partial separation – of one element from the others. Thus the relative concentrations of the elements change, which presupposes some spatial translation, but there is no other kind of change at the basic level of ontological description.
Are Empedocles and Anaxagoras successful? Both provide ingenious and powerful constructions along the lines suggested by Parmenides: they posit everlasting entities with fixed natures which, in accordance with the Way of Opinion, embody diverse qualities. Empedocles’ chemistry is economical and elegant, capable of accounting for countless substances by appealing to variable configurations of just four building blocks. Anaxagoras’ chemistry is uneconomical but stolidly Eleatic, listing among its outputs precisely those substances that are its inputs. There is no explanatory simplification, but there are also no supervenient properties to explain away.
Do these theories stand up to criticisms by Zeno and Melissus? Against Zeno’s problems concerning the divisibility of matter, Anax-agoras adopts a defensible alternative: matter is divisible through and through. Neither Empedocles nor Anaxagoras seems to have a reply to Zeno’s problems about motion in place. They downplay such motion, but since they ultimately presuppose it, they cannot escape the problems. Against Melissus’ objection that a new configuration cannot come to be, Empedocles has no reply, but Anaxagoras can at least point out that he has no new substances, but all phenomenal properties are already latent in the mixture. New configurations are merely phenomenal changes with phenomenal results. That answer does not ultimately solve the problem, but it comes as close as a natural philosopher can come without his appealing to a logical or metaphysical framework – that is, without his ceasing to be a natural philosopher.
There is perhaps an irony in the situation of philosophy in the mid-fifth century. If the pluralist reads Parmenides as laying out metaphysical conditions for the possibility of a natural philosophy, he can be a natural philosopher without doing metaphysics. If he reads Parmenides as providing a new natural philosophy with Being at its heart, he will have to reply by becoming a metaphysician to criticize that view. In fact, Parmenides37 arguments brought natural philosophy to the brink of logic and metaphysics by pushing the limits of natural substance. But if it was possible to read him as providing a manual for constructing a responsible natural philosophy, as I have argued it was, then one could build on his foundations rather than searching for new foundations. Their own approach suggests that Empedocles and Anaxagoras were doing the former.
If that is right, then the history of the mid-fifth century is not a tale of desperate pluralists fighting a rear-guard action against aggressive attacks of Eleatics. It is rather of two schools fighting for control of the tradition: the neo-Ionians attempting to build an adequate natural philosophy on the foundations sketched by Parmenides, and the neo-Eleatics attempting to show that Parmenides had removed those foundations. The struggle was not so much about whether natural philosophy could be saved as about how to read Parmenides. It was a struggle about who were the real heirs of Elea. Ultimately the neo-Eleatics won that struggle so completely that the evidence of the struggle almost disappeared. But the absence of any hostility by Empedocles and Anaxagoras to Parmenides reveals where they stood. These first neo-Ionians, far from being opponents of Parmenides, should be seen as they saw themselves: as Eleatic pluralists.38
APPENDIX
Anaximenes is sometimes still interpreted in light of Aristotle’s and Theophrastus’ reading of him: air remains as a substratum or underlying substance for other substances (see for example, Barnes [14] ch. 3). But this is to apply Aristotle’s theory of substratum and form to a philosopher innocent of such distinctions. Anaximenes does make air the first principle (archê), but for him this means not that it is always present as an Aristotelian material cause, but that at one time everything in the universe was air, that every other substance arises out of air, that somehow air controls all things. In contrast to what a post-Parmenidean would say, he holds that “boundless air is the principle, from which all things that come to be and that have come to be and will be and gods and things divine come to be” (Hippolytus, Ref. 1.7.1). Theophrastus explains that air “when it is rarefied comes to be fire, when it is condensed wind, then cloud…” (Simplicius In phys. 24, 29–30). No pluralist would say that one of his primary realities came to be anything. Aristotle and his colleague Theophrastus are not particularly bothered by this locution because Aristotle has turned the four elements back into substances that come to be and perish (GC II). But it may well be just this sort of account in which one thing comes to be many other things that roused Parmenides to argue against change (see Graham [242]).
Still, how could Aristotle and Theophrastus get Anaximenes and the Ionians so wrong? In part because Aristotle was eager to cast them in the role of predecessors to himself (Metaph. I.3-4 et passim), first discovering the material cause (matter as a substratum for change), then others of his four causes. Now while it is undeniably true that the Ionians were concerned with identifying the material substance from which the world came to be, it does not at all follow that they conceived of their original stuff as a material cause in Aristotle’s sense: that is, as a continuing subject of change in which forms come to be instantiated. In a similar vein, Aristotle declares that all his predecessors were asking, “What is substance?” (Metaph. VII.1). In one sense that is quite true: namely, if we take “substance” as a term designating the ultimate reality, whatever that is. In another sense it is false and pernicious: his predecessors were not searching blindly for Aristotle’s conception of substance. What these cases show is that in trying to fit his predecessors into his pigeonholes Aristotle sometimes blurs the distinction between what concerns they can reasonably be said to have had and concerns that only an Aristotelian or post-Aristotelian philosopher could reasonably be said to have had.
In general I hold that it is false that Anaximenes or an
y other early Ionian was a “material monist,” that is, that his single principle was a material cause in the strict Aristotelian sense of enduring through all changes as a subject of those changes. That he was a materialist in some sense is true, and that he was a monist in some sense is true – in the sense that there is a single principle from which all other substances come to be and which is in some sense more perfect than they and which also controls them – but that he was a material monist in Aristotle’s sense is not true. The theory of material monism that Aristotle projects onto the early Ionians presupposes metaphysical principles of subject and predicate, form and matter, potentiality and actuality that are simply not part of Ionian ontology and are arguably too sophisticated ever to have been conceived of by early Ionian theorists.
NOTES
1 The term is from Barnes [14] ch. 15, who stresses the continuity of their project with that of early Ionian philosophers. The term aptly allows us to class philosophers of Italy and Sicily, such as Philolaus and Empedocles, with later philosophers from Ionia such as Anaxagoras.
2 These two philosophers seem to have been active about a generation earlier than Philolaus, Archelaus, Diogenes of Apollonia, and Leucippus, and perhaps a couple of generations earlier than Democritus.
3 On the most straightforward reading of Aristotle Metaph. I.3 984a11, Anaxagoras was older than Empedocles but later in publishing his work; however, the term for “later” could mean “inferior” or even “more modern.” It is controversial which published first, though similarities seem to indicate that one of them was reacting to the other (O’Brien [375]). See also the detailed reconstruction of Anaxagoras’ chronology in Mansfeld [395]. In any case, the two are near contemporaries and are both reacting to Parmenides.