The Eleatics and Aristotle On Some Problems of Change

The Eleatics and Aristotle on Some Problems of Change Author(s): A. R. Lacey Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.
26, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1965), pp. 451-468 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708493 . Accessed: 10/04/2014 10:05
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THE ELEATICS AND ARISTOTLE ON SOME PROBLEMS OF CHANGE

BY A. R. LACEY
The fountainheadof Greekphilosophyis Parmenides.Other people before him had asked new questions, or treated old questions in a new way. They had looked at the universe rationally rather than mythopoeically; they had inquiredinto the causes of significantphenomena around them, of earthquakes,thunderstorms,and the universe itself; and they had given answers from which later readers could extract a philosophicalbasis, or which revealed their invention or use of certain concepts. But no one before Parmenides had explicitly discussed what would now be regarded as a philosophical question.With him, however,philosophyis usheredin uncompromisingly: "It is," we are told (B8.2),1 "for it will never be shown that things that are not are" (B7.1). We have not yet been told what the "it" in question is, but it seems clear already that the foundation of the whole doctrine is the law of contradiction.At this early stage certainly there is no formulationof such a law, either with regardto the truth-value of propositionsor to the applicability of predicates; but what we do have is an explicit refusal to allow a subject which has been given the description"are not" to bear also the description position "are,"and this would seem to justify saying that Parmenides' in fact rests on this law. But the subject of his discourse,which starts off by being quite indefinite and unstated, ends up by being quite clearly the universe as a whole, and the question is, how does this transition occur? Parmenidesevidently thinks in fact that anything that exists must exist at all times and in all places, and of course only one thing could satisfy this condition.But why does Parmenides think this? When he tells us that "it is" he adds that "nothing is not" (or perhapsthe translationshouldbe "it is not possiblefor nothing to be" B6.2). The reasonhe gives for this is that "you could not think of or utter that which does not exist" (B2.7); one might object that I can think of a unicorn,but the word I have translated "thinkof" (yvows) could equally well mean "be acquaintedwith," and we certainly are not acquainted with any unicorns. This may strike us as a purely epistemologicalpoint. Obviouslywe cannot be acquaintedwith something that does not exist, but surely a thing could exist without our being acquaintedwith it, and therefore, for all we have said so far, nothing (i.e. a "thing"called "nothing"-in particularthe void) may exist. But Parmenidesevidently thinks of his principleas metaphysi1 Referencesto the Presocraticsare to H. Diels, Die Fragmenteder Vorsokrati1954), hereafterDK. ker, 7th ed. edited by W. Kranz (Berlin-Charlottenburg,
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cal and not merely epistemological;it is inconceivable,i.e. it cannot be the case, that nothing exists. For what would this strange thing be that we are endowingwith existence? It would be "that which is not" (r pt COv), and if it is not, then, by the law of contradiction,we cannot say that it is; and we cannot say anything else about it either, because there simply is no "it" there for us to say it about. To try and talk about it thereforeis not simply to say things which are false, but to fail to say anything coherent at all; we must say that "it is" whenever we talk about anything at all. Now empty space is simply for Parmenidesthe absenceof objects. It is that which is not a cow or a tree or a table or anything else, and that which is not anything clearly cannot exist. Therefore there is no void. Parmenidesprobably did not distinguish this position, that the non-existent does not exist, from the position I mentioned just above, that we cannot talk about anything that does not exist, and so cannot talk about unicorns. The position, that the non-existent does not exist, is obviouslythe weaker,for we can talk about unicorns as existing while ignoringthat in fact they do not, while if we talk of the non-existent as such as existing we are preventedin the very act of naming it from ignoringthat it does not. Perhaps Parmenideswas led to hold the strongerposition through confusionwith the weaker. However,even the weakerposition may be objected to in so far as it equates empty space with nothing. We may object that empty space is indeed something,namely space, or distance, and this may be what Leucippusand his followershad in mind when they blandly asserted that space did exist after all. So far as our sources tell us, they no more defend this view than Parmenidesdefendedthe view that space is mere nothingness,2though they could have said that if Mars and Venus are separated by empty space, and empty space is nothing, then Mars and Venus are separated by nothing and so must be in contact. (Zeno thought he detected an inconsistencyin the very notion of space, but that is another story.) Returning to Parmenides'thesis we find that his first argumentis that "it" cannot have come into being, because where could it have come into being from except from that which is not, which as we have seen is a chimera?One might well ask why it could not have come into being as we all do, from somethingelse which is. The only further enlightenmentwe are offeredis the remarkthat "if it came into being it is not, not even if it is about to be in the future" (B8.20). Presumably this means that there would be a time (namely, before it came into being) at which it would be true that "it is not." Evidently "it"
is being treated as the "being thing" or "that which is" (To ov) in the
sense of "all that is," or "the existent as such." The implied missing
2 See, however,D. McGibbon,"The Atomists and Melissus,"Mnemosyne,XVII (1964), 245-255.
ELEATICS AND ARISTOTLE ON CHANGE
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step may perhapsbe supplied from Gorgias'parodyof the Eleatics in his own work "OnNature or That which is not." In ? 71 of the version preservedfor us by Sextus Empiricus (Adv. Math. 7.65ff.), Gorgias argues as follows: "And what is more what is cannot be generated. For if it has come into being it must have done so either out of what is or out of what is not. But it has not come from what is; for if it is a
oO being thing it has not come into being but already is (el yap ov r'wv, "If in it (our This can be taken three )." ways: (1) yy'ovEv aXA',Wv
original subject) is a being thing it cannot have come into being but already exists." But this would be a direct argumenton its own and would render the twofold alternative as to the source of the thing otiose, though Gorgiasin fact goes on to develop the second alternative (that it comes from what is not, which Gorgiastreats just as Parmenides does); (2) "If it (the supposed source) is a being thing, it (our original subject) cannot have come into being but already exists." The abrupt change of subject is hardly tolerableif any alternative remains; (3) "If it (our original subject) is a being thing (and we introducedit as 'whatis') it cannot (on the presenthypothesis,that what it might have come from is also 'what is') have come into being but alreadyexists." The Greekof coursehas no indefinite article correspondingto "a"in "is a being thing," so that we could translate "is what is," or "is being" (though this last is ambiguousin English because "-ing"can denote the infinitive as well as the participle). Gorgias evidently means then that what is cannot come from what is, because this would be tantamount to its coming from itself.3 Parmenides does not do at this stage (though he does a few lines later). But that Parmenides is thinking along these lines becomes plausible in the light of a further argument,where he says that it is not divisible, since all of it equally exists.4Whetherthis refersto temporal or spatial divisibility does not matter, because in either case the argumentis that if that which is is divided from that which is it must be divided by that which is not, which is absurd.Therefore"it," i.e. what we are talking about, is indivisible. But if there were two things they would form a set, or for that matter an object, which we could talk about, and so this set would have to satisfy whatever conditions must be satisfiedby anything we are to talk about, and so the set must be indivisible, i.e. not a set after all. This then may serve as an argumentfor monism, and whatever validity it has can be apthere is a similar argument at b28: el yap
Gorgias explicitly calls his subject the being thing (rso v), which
3 In the versionof pseudo-Aristotle, De Melisso,Xenophane,Gorgia (979b27-33) OVK iV elvaIL TO OV.If a T7 8v ETaCreCoot, oS to have would it undergo a change, i.e. being thing were to give rise to something cease being itself, and so it would have to perish, which is impossible. 4 B8.22; the translationis controversialbut I am followingG.E.L. Owen, "Eleatic Questions,"ClassicalQuarterly,N.S. X (1960), 84-102.
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plied to prove the unity of what is, equally in space and in time. Our "it" thereforehas now turnedinto the universeas such, and it follows that it is unique and cannot move (because where to?) and cannot perish. The peculiar thing about this argument is the supposition that what is can only be separatedfrom what is by what is not. Of course, if the things which are are describableonly in terms of this property of being, then no doubt this would hold, because where all is pure being there is only non-being left to effect any differentiation.This in fact seems to have lain behind the conception of atomism. The atomists,as we have alreadyseen, refusedto equate empty space with mere non-being, but insisted that their atoms could not be divided by any processwhatever.In an argumentwhich he attributesvaguely to "someearly thinkers"but which smacksof Zeno, Aristotle5 states a defense of monism which says that even a plurality of touchingobjects involves divisibility, and if divisibility can occur at every point there will be no unity and, therefore,no plurality and the whole will be empty, while to limit divisibility to some placeswouldbe a mere arbitrary device; for where would the limits come, and why should one part of the worldbe "full"and anotherpart divided?At least part of the answer to this is implicit in the atomists' view (cf. their use of ,rXipes)that there is no void inside the atoms.6This fact by itself can explain how the atoms can be indivisible,if we presupposethat division can only take place along lines alreadymarkedout, as when we pull a jigsaw to pieces. And indeed this is only to take further the commonsense idea that a pencil which has been brokenbut carefully fitted together will come apart more easily than a pencil which has not been broken. But why should that which is be describableonly in these terms? This question, or one which comes to the same thing, is explicitly raised by Eudemus, a contemporaryof Aristotle, who says (DK 28A28) that Parmenides thought of "being" as having only one izes that Parmenidesdid not hold this as an explicit doctrine, but simply assumedit, because the whole question of differentsenses of "being"had not yet arisen; but he adds that even so it would not follow that being is one, merely because everything that is is, any more than it would follow, if everything were beautiful, that some things should not be beautiful colors and others beautiful actions;
5 De Generatione et Corruptione(hereaftercalled GC) 325a2ff. GC 325b3; DK 67A7 attributes division to the void for Leucippus.It seems best to follow Joachim in excising 8vo rpo'rot &vEle at b31, since both void and contact are required,and they are not alternatives. Joachim, however, seems to make the excisionon purely grammaticalgrounds, and suggests as an alternative a colon after Saxcplacmand a yap after ev--which indeed seems to have been adopted or read by the Latin text in Averroes,which has "quidemenim."
Eudemus realsense, or being predicated univocally (,ovaXs X,'yerTa).
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even if all the things that are are in the sense of being existent things, still some of them could be fire and others water. This last point is evidently the one which struck Empedocles, who was the first to attempt to reconcileParmenides'logic and the evidenceof the senses. Empedocles, who denied the void as vigorously as Parmenidesdid, evidently saw no difficultyin the suppositionthat two parts of what is should be qualitatively distinguishable without being separated by a third entity. Why Parmenidesdid not accept such a position, or whetherhe even thought of it, we do not know. It is quite possible that having once seen what he took to be an inconsistencybetween logic and the evidence of the senses he thereafterignored the senses altogether,without botheringto find out whether something of what they said might after all be acceptable.A similar position to that of Empedocles was taken by Anaxagoras,though in a much more sophisticatedform, resulting from Zenoniancriticismsof the type mentioned above. This argument that things could be of differentkinds while still all being existent, adopted tacitly by Empedocles and explicitly a century or more later by Eudemus, does not seem to have been rejected at either time except by Zeno and Melissus (who, however, were probably unaware of it as an explicit argument if Empedocles had not explicitly stated it as such but had silently assumedit). There was, however, a time between when it may not have been accepted in certain circles, notably that of Antisthenes, or at any rate should not have been on the premises then current therein. The time in question was round about the turn of the Vth century, when predication first becamea philosophicalissue, and underEleatic inspiration people such as Antisthenes denied that anything other than itself could be predicatedof a subject, underpain of saying that the subject was something other than itself. On this view that which had been introducedas that which is, or that which has being, could not then be describedas fire or water etc., since the propertyof fierinessis not identical with the property of being. Whether this argument was used in just this form I am not sure. Theophrastusis reported (DK 28A28) to have attributed to Parmenidesthe argument that "anything other than what is is not, and what is not is nothing, so that o" T7 OV o' what is is one (o irapa TO oVK O1v. v. (v apa To ov)." This aras Eudemus gument clearly assumes, points out, that if all things that are have in commonthat they are, then they are one and cannot be distinguishedfrom each other in any way. The implied premiseseems to be the Antisthenean one that any further attributes they had would be "things"with which it was claimed that they (or some of them) were identical, and since these "things"are further attributes they would be "other than what is," and so nothing. The treatment of attributes as "things"would be by no means out of place for the Parmenideanera, but this argumentdoes not seem to appear in the
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surviving fragments,and it does not seem to have arousedany reaction in Empedoclesor anyone else, which suggests, though not conclusively, that Parmenidesdid not use it. It is not implausible that Theophrastusshould have read it into him through familiarity with the argumentsover predicationthat arose out of Eleatic philosophy at a later date. Plato, in fact, uses in the Sophist (244bc) an argument from which a late Eleatic could easily have constructedthis one. The purportof Plato's argumentis controversial,but it need not concern us because what Plato did do elsewherein the Sophist was establish once and for all the possibility of non-identicalpredication(Eudemus in the passage quoted above refers to his having done so). This criticism therefore of the Empedocles-Eudemusargument may be regardedsimply as part of the growingpains of metaphysics. Parmenides'ultimate position as demanding EarlierI summarized that whateveris must be at all places and at all times. The formerof these demands appealed to few of his successors,and its acceptance by those few, notably Zeno and Melissus,is the main reasonfor classifying them as Eleatics. No attempt was made to reconcile such a demand with the evidence of the senses, and those who did accept it do not seem to have had any desire for such a reconciliation.But the other demand had a very different history, and for a time at any rate seems to have been universally accepted. To us the second demand might seem no more necessary than the first, but time and space were never treated symmetrically by the Greeks. Aristotle, for instance, held that there could not be an actually existing infinite thing, though he had no objection to, and indeed demanded,an actually existing eternal thing. It seems to have been felt that an infinite thing could not exist "all at once," where "all at once" means "all at one time," while there was no similar objection to an eternal thing existing "all at one place" (if it happened, like the earth in Aristotle'ssystem, not to move throughoutits history). Melissus (B8) uses what he describesas a subordinateargumentagainst the pluralists 7 by saying that if they use the evidence of the senses to reject monism they ought, out of consistency, to allow also that things change,that the hot becomescold and the hard soft, that animalsdie, and come to be out of what is not an animal, and that all these things are subject to alteration, and what is does not resemble what was, since this is what the senses tell us. Melissus assumes that the pluralists would find this an unwelcome consequence,and indeed they did, and took careto explainthat such changesare only apparent.Now in doing this the pluralists were indeed retreating from full reliance on the senses, though what Melissus does not give them credit for is that they tried to show that the respectsin which the senses were not reliable could be systematically explained in such a way as to allow
71 use this term to cover Empedocles,Anaxagoras,and the atomists.
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enough of their evidence to be accepted to make it unnecessaryto reject them completely.8 So far then we have the position that reality can be plural in space; but with regardto its plurality in time the position is far more complex. The task before the pluralists was to explain the world as we see it without contravening certain premises laid down by the Eleatics. What these premiseswere must be divined partly from what they explicitly tell us about them and partly from what they in fact say, or refuse to say, in their accountsof the world.Empedoclestells
us that there is no growth (u'als) or perishing of any mortal thing, but
only mixing and dissolution,which men call growth (B8), and indeed he speaksin this way himself even though it is inaccurate(B9). Elsewhere (Bll-2), however, as Plutarch points out in quoting the first passage,what he denies is any coming to be of that which previously was not, or any coming to be out of that which in no way exists. From this it would seem that what is being denied is absolute coming into being and perishing.Now if this were all, he would be adoptinga relatively weak position, common to all the Greekswe know of, and consistent with saying that the population of the universe at one time may have nothing in common with its population at another time. But in fact all these pluralists insist that the universe consists of a plurality of elements or atoms which exist unchanged (except in spatial position) throughout the history of the universe, a point made more clearly by Anaxagoraswho says (B17) that "no object comes to be or perishes,but they are combinedand separatedout of things which are." Melissus in fact makes an even more stringent demand, denying the possibility even of reordering,on the grounds that an ordering (Koawos) cannot perish or come to be (B7 ? 3); this was probably written after Empedocles and Anaxagoras,and seems to have been ignored by the atomists (whom I take to come after Melissus, since otherwise he would surely have given some special treatment to their admissionof the void). The question that naturally arises next is on what basis these things which were to serve as a permanent substratumwere selected. Empedocles seems in various ways to be the least subtle and most primitive of the pluralists. His selection of four elements is probably based on nothing more substantial than tradition, and he seems to have been interested only in having an original plurality, since plurality could never arise from an initial unitary state. Em8Later a counterattackwas to be mounted against Melissus by Protagoras, whose doctrine that man is the measure of all things can be interpretedas a demand to know, if what the senses tell us is an illusion, where the illusion comes from. Be it noted in passing that it was left to the much-maligned sophists, who are often regardedas having contributednothing of note to Greek philosophy,to produce this rather telling argument against the Eleatics. 9 This it should be noted holds independentlyof the question of what sort of
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pedocles never explains just what fire, air, earth, and water are, or just what properties they are supposed to have in themselves. At least some qualitiesmust superveneupon the mixtureof the elements, such as, for instance, all the colors except at most four. Anaxagoras attacksthe problemmorewholeheartedly."Howcouldhair come from what is not hair, or flesh from what is not flesh?"he asks (B10), and, as the scholiastwho quotes this passageremarks,he says the same not only about bodies and stuffs but also about qualities, for his original mixture contained "the moist and the dry and the hot and the cold and the bright and the dark and much earth and an endless number of seeds in no way resemblingeach other" (B4). Elsewhere (B12, 15) the rare and the dense are treated as on a level with these other things, and the scholiast mentions the light and the heavy. In fact this heterogeneouscollection of things seems to be treated as entirely on a level (cf. Aristotle's criticism at GC 327b20-3), and no distinction seems to be made among different kinds of property or between properties and substances (compare the way Sextus in expounding Anaxagoras (B21) says "For if we take two colors, black
and white, and pour one into the other drop by drop . . ."). One is
tempted to think that Anaxagorasbased himself on a few amenable qualities like color and temperature, and supposed that when an object changes from being, say, black to white, or hot to cold, some black stuff is replacedby some white stuff, or some hot stuff by some cold stuff. Naturally, this does not work so well with propertiesthat seem to be derivative, such as rare and dense (it is hard to see how the analysis could be applied to the rarefactionof something by expanding it), but Anaxagorasseems in fact to have assumed that though an object can gain or lose a quality it can only do so by gaining or losing something that has the quality, the quality itself never comingto be nor disappearing.It is even more difficultto know what Anaxagoraswould have said about a property such as squareness. An object can hardly cease to be square because something which is square goes out of it! Anaxagorasapparently never discussed such properties,and may not have realizedtheir relevancein this context. In case anyone thinks this is unduly remissof him we must remember that it is at least possible, though this is admittedly controversial, that Plato at one stage of his life held that Equality must be equal and Similarity similar; surely that Justice must be just (Prot. 330c).
things there can be a genesis,becauseof the principleof sufficientreason,which had alreadybeen used by Parmenideswhen he asked why a universe which came into being should do so at one time rather than another (B8.9-10). As it was, the beginning of change had itself to be accountedfor in a somewhatarbitraryway by until the atomists realizedthat it need not have had Empedoclesand Anaxagoras, any beginning.
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The atomists, on the other hand, far from saying that all qualities were equally real said that most of them were unreal: "Sweet,bitter,
hot, cold, color are subjective (vow'); in reality there are atoms and
void" (DK 68B9). This, of course, would enable them to say that a hot object becomes cold without the physical departureof something hot, but if this was their motive then they too would come on the rocks in the case of squareness,since however much it may be the case that an object which loses its heat without the departureof anything hot was never "really"hot in the first place, it cannot be said that an object which loses its squarenesswithout the departureof anything square was never "really"square in the first place. It may be of coursethat the atomists,who do not mention the case of squareness but do explicitly say that their atoms have shape, would have allowed quite happily that objects can be "really" square; but in this case why the objection to the reality of heat and color, and the insistence that one cannot have a hot or a red atom? It is not merely that the atoms are too small, because Democritus, at any rate, allows atoms of all sizes (DK 68A43); we do not know what he thought they felt or looked like, but he could have said that they would give no positive sensations of either heat or cold to the touch (the Greeks had no thermometers), and visually would have acted as perfect mirrors. On the present view the atomists argue that if an object can cease to have a quality without losing some physical part that is the bearerof the quality, then the quality is not objective and could not belong to atoms. But objects cease to be squarewithout losing a square part, and yet squarenesscan belong to atoms. If the atomists agree that squarenessis objective in spite of not existing in objects by having a physical bearer, then why are not heat and rednessobjective? This, however,is not conclusive.The "secondary" qualities which the atomists dismissedas subjective are those which are peculiar to one sense, so that if people disagree about whether an object is, say, bitter we cannot resort to the sort of standardproceduresthat we resort to in a disagreementabout squareness;it may well be this that made such qualities seem non-objective. The position we arriveat, then, as a result of this discussionis as follows: All the pluralists agreed that whatever is real must be at all times, but they disagreedabout what is real. Empedocles made a rather arbitraryselection but without apparently consideringvery far just what was involved in explaining the phenomenaby a selection in this way. Anaxagoras,more consistently, treated all qualities as on a level, but without distinguishingbetween qualities and qualified things, and apparently overlookingsuch qualities as squareness. The atomiststhought that secondaryqualities were epiphenomenalor derivative and could therefore only belong to complex objects, but
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they expressedthis by saying that they were subjective,with the implication that they do not really belong even to the things to which they appear to belong. Whether they thought that qualities as such (whether primary or secondary) were unreal in the sense of being different from substances is hard to say without knowing whether they would have accepted, as not needing further explanation, that a complex object could be square and then cease to be square. If they would, then they were not singling out qualities as such, since squarenesswould be consideredas unaffectedby whatever difficulties made them castigate certain qualities as "unreal,"and so the difficulties would not be thought of as applying to qualities as such. Perhaps both Anaxagorasand the atomists thought that squareness, like a square, was complex, and so could be dissolved. The atomists may have been so impressedby disagreementover the applicationof secondaryqualities that they made them subjective, while ignoring primary qualities because of their complex nature, and so by-passed the question of the reality of qualities as such. Let us now return for a moment to Parmenidesand ask why a universe, even a universe consisting of a single homogeneousobject, could not be in one state at one time and in another state at a later time. Grantingthat an object cannot come into being from nothing, why should it not come into being from something? Why should there not first be fire and then water? And why should not an object first be hot and then cold? We can now see that, before the atomists at any rate, these two questions came to much the same thing. A hot object could only become cold if the hot (stuff) in it departedand was replacedby some cold (stuff), and this could only happen if there was somewherefor the hot to go to and the cold to come from. But in a universe consisting of a single hot object this conditionwould obviouslynot be satisfied,and similarlythe fire could not turn into water unless there was somewherefor the fire to go to and the water to come from. On Parmenideanterms, then, given monism, changelessnessfollows. The legacy of the Presocraticsthen is that nothing real can come into being or perish, unless it is an aggregate, which can be synthesized from or dissolvedinto its parts. It follows that any apparent must either be aggregatesof this sort, or else must counter-instances revelation and concealmentrather than genesis and perbe cases of ishing (Anaxagoras),or must be cases of things not real (atomists). What did the inheritorsof this legacy do with it? Plato and Aristotle both made plentiful use of the term "genesis,"and though this in itself of course means little (remember Empedocles' confession of his linguistic conventionalism) there is no doubt that between them they effectedat least somethingof what Solmsen10calls "the rehabilitation of genesis."Solmsen in fact ascribesthis to Plato, saying that "Thereis no evidence that Plato ever sharedtheir [the Presocratics']
lo Aristotle'sSystem of the Physical World (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960), 21.
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prejudice against this concept" (p. 20), and that the rehabilitation "seems to have been achieved accidentally rather than deliberately" (p. 21). In fact, however, I shall concentrate on Aristotle. The main piece of equipment which Aristotle had and the Presocratics lacked (though the atomists were perhaps moving towards it), and which even Plato did not have in an explicit form, was a doctrine of categories. In Aristotle's mind substances and qualities were clearly different things, and the question whether qualities were "real" could be answered tolerably easily. They were not, just because and in so far as they were not substances, though of course it did not follow that they were not "really" possessed by their possessors. They were real qualities but not real "things," because qualities were not "things." The term "things" in fact here just means "members of the first category." The becoming cold of something hot therefore presented no problems to Aristotle, at least in this context. It did not require that something should perish, or should depart in veils, as for Anaxagoras, but simply that an object, describable and identifiable independently of its temperature, should first have the quality hot and then the quality cold. This type of change, qualitative change, seems to have caused Aristotle little overt difficulty, and to have formed the foundation for his theory of change in general. In change something comes to be from what is not; heat comes to be in an object where there had been no heat previously, and it does not come in from outside. But if heat is only a quality in the object and not a substance this causes no difficulty. We can call this genesis if we like, and Aristotle sometimes does so, but his main problem lies elsewhere, in the genesis of substances. Both Aristotle and the Presocratics had to account for such obvious phenomena as the birth and death of animals, and we have seen how the Presocratics did so, but Aristotle differed specifically from them in allowing the transformation of the four elements, fire, air, earth and water, which he borrowed as elements from Empedocles, and it seems not unreasonable to treat this transformation as the most fundamental form of genesis. Aristotle's treatment of the question is well known. He applies to it his normal analysis of change in terms of form, privation, and substrate, which fits so obviously in the case of qualitative change, and arrives at the concept of prime matter to play the role of substrate." This at any rate is what one would have said before the appearance of H. R. King's challenging article "Aristotle without Prima Materia." 12 King maintains that the whole tradition of prime matter,
11An analysis of the four elements as in some way compounds of the four qualities (hot, cold, moist, dry) appears in the Hippocratic treatises [de Reg. I chap. 4, de Cam. chap. 2; see G.E.R. Lloyd, "Who is attacked in On Ancient Medicine?" Phronesis, VIII 2 (1963), 108-126, which led me to these references], which probably belong to a period before Aristotle, but I am assuming that these authors did not have a proper doctrine of categories. 12 This Journal, XVII (1956), 370-389.
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A. R. LACEY
together with the separationist attitude to form that goes with it, stems from the Platonizinginterpretationof commentatorslike Simplicius and has no appearancewhatever in Aristotle himself. King's argument,as I understandit, is at least in part as follows: Commentators have realized that Aristotle does not treat prime matter as an identifiableand separablesort of "stuff,"and so have had to insist that analysis in terms of it is logical rather than physical. But the only analysis Aristotle ever presents seems to be plainly in physical terms, and to result in identifiablestuffs such as fire or air, or proximate matter such as the bronze of a statue. FurthermoreAristotle insists that the elements (fire, etc.) are simple, not composite, and key chapterssuch as GC 2.1 become incoherentin detail on the traditional interpretation. I think King has shown that Aristotle does not give any lengthy or explicit treatment of prime matter as a separate topic, and that
we must be wary of translating 7rpur7 Sxvas "prime matter." Aristotle's
discussions are normally simply of matter as such, without distinguishing prime matter as a special case. Should one say that it was very remissof him to leave his readersto infer what was an important feature of his doctrine?This dependson whetherAristotle saw things with the same emphasisthat we do. What he is concernedto criticize in people like Anaximander and Plato is that they tried to derive the world from a single stuff which was "corporealand separate" (329a 10), and his insistence on this point may be enough to explain why he fails to draw an analogy (as King notes) between this single stuff and his own prime matter. Two points that need rememberingare 1) he consideredthat in the distinction between the potential and the actual he had a conceptualtool for distinguishinghis own theory and 2) he interpretedthe Timaeus as givfrom all its predecessors, of the creationof the world, which would a account ing chronological imply the prior and separate existence of the Receptacle. Furthermore,one might suppose that if Aristotle was trying to oppose his own doctrineto a Platonic prime matter doctrine (instead of to a doctrineof separableprime matter) he was rather asking for trouble in saying (329a24ff.): "For our part we say that there is a matter for perceptiblebodies,but this is not separablebut always has a contrariety,from which arise the so-called elements."13 If Aristotle did not believe in prime matter, we are naturally led to ask, then what did he believe in? In particular,how are the basic qualities (hot, cold, moist, dry) related to the four elements? King
13King may be right in referring"which"to "contrariety"rather than to the grammaticallyslightly more difficult "matter," but the sentence need mean no more than that contrarietyis needed if the elements,or anything else, are actually to exist. If "from which" were supposed to give a fully adequate account of the (plural)-which origin of the elementsone would in any case need "contrarieties" King rather cheerfullywrites, though the Greek is singular.
463
says that these qualities "arenot some anachronistic secondaryqualities or even mere 'attributes'of matter, but that they are, as [Aristotle] insists, causes and forces, indeed, the very 'stuff and guts' of the elementsthemselves.In fact, it is simply by virtue of the coupling, mingling, and recouplingof the contrarietiesthat the elements are reciprocally generated" (p. 378). It is "just because the elements must be simple, with no composite structure of form and matter to interfere with their receptivity of any and all form" that Aristotle distinguishes his ideal elements from the ordinary ones or those of Empedocles (pp. 378-9). The elements are generatedout of contrarieties, but even the first bodies, including the so-called elements, "must come from the underlyingmatter from which all things come. Of courseit will turn out that this genericunderlyingmatter is really differentiatedinto the ideal elements themselves," which are "the substratumin effect of the contrarieties"(p. 383). Now it is true that the basic qualities are not secondaryqualities in the sense of perceptual qualities, despite their perceptual origin (329b6ff.); they are more like active and passive causes or powers. But this is not somethingspecificand peculiarto the four basic qualities. In the Parts of Animals14 (648bllff.) various senses of "hot" are distinguished,causative as well as perceptual,but there is no indication that the ideal or basic heat is being distinguishedfrom "ordinary"heat. On the other hand in his doctrineof categoriesAristotle does not limit what he says about qualities to perceptual or "secondary"qualities. Fire has somehowto involve hot and dry, but it is not at all clear how these are to be the "stuff and guts" of fire, nor just what is meant by the "coupling,mingling, and recoupling"to which King refers (cf. 330a30ff). If Aristotle says surprisinglylittle about prime matter as a separatetopic, would it not be equally surprising that he should abruptly introduce an apparent breach of his own doctrine of categories?He does indeed say (PA 646a12-7) that moist, etc., are the matter of compositebodies, but in the same context he calls moist, etc. 8&acopal which weight and similar raOrof bodies
Also 324b19 says that fire contains the "follow on" (aKoXovOovcv).15 hot in matter (ro pv ohv rp "'xei v vXi TO oep'Ov; the possible alternative
translation, "has the hot in, i.e. as a part of, its matter," is I think ruled out by the following clause contrastingthis with a "separable hot"). What then are we to make of Aristotle's doctrine?Whatever his
14 Hereafter called PA.
15The differentia, it is true, has an uncertainstatus in the doctrineof categories,
erty, since otherwise each element would have only one differentia,e.g. hot-dry, instead of each of the four qualitiesbeing itself referredto as a differentia.In any in the case it is by no means certainthat he did not intend to classifythe differentia technical sense as a quality.
but it is unlikely that 8taoopa here means anything more than distinguishing prop-
464
A. R. LACEY
view it seems that he has not expressedit at all clearly. The word
aToLXia
is clearly used of the four qualities at 330a30, but of the four elements at 331a15 (cf. PA 648b9). avvsvaJeac0a is used of the coupling
of pairs of the qualities at 330a31, but at PA 649a15 apparently in a rather different sense, since it is comparedto the coupling of hot with water or iron; cf. b21ff. aKoXov0i appearsto mean somethinglike "belong to" at 330b2 (cf. 319b2), but at PA 646a18 (see above) it seems to mean rather "be analyzablein terms of," "be a development of." King refers to de Caelo 312a30ff.,saying that the matters (vXaL)
must be four,
ETEpov. OVT() 8 TeTTapa
oWs ltav
V KOLVrV . . . aX Lev araoVTWVTV
TeO vat
Here he criticizes the Oxford translation,ls "there must be a
commonmatter of all" (similarly the Loeb),l7and suggests, "and the four [elements] are as one, the commonmatter of all things" (p. 384). The Oxfordand Loeb translationsare probablywrong in taking the
Mtav clause
existentially, but there is no reason why
'TV
KOLtVV
should
not be the subject ratherthan in apposition: "... the commonmatter of all (the four?) is one," and this resemblesthe passageat the end of GC 1.3 where Aristotle explicitly asks whether the matter of the elements is the same, and answersthat in one way it is and in anotherit
is not, ;0 LEv yap
r0orECv
o'evat VrOKELCTa TO avrTO TO

TO
ov TO aVuo.
One should per-
haps compare320b14, where matter is inseparablein all things and

one in number but not one
Xiyy. 324b7 compares the matter of op-
posites with a genus, but does not equate this matter with the genus; otherwise,the precedingcontrast between cases where form is and is not embodied would fall. These passages are perhaps the nearest Aristotle comes to a discussionof the prime matter issue, and they are not easy to interpret, though the "move"of saying that two or more things are the same but differentin dvat is common enough in Aristotle.The sense seems to be that they are looked at from different points of view, or performdifferentroles, like the point which belongs to two lines or the mind which comparesthings in differentcategories (de An. 3.2.426b8ff.).Aristotle seems to want to say both that there is a commonmatter of the elements and yet that there is not because there is of course no separable "stuff" that could be called such. Matter can only exist as qualifiedin one of the four ways, or in ways derived therefrom.Could it be that this is the nearest that Aristotle can get to the "logical"analysis that the Tradition finds and that King fails to find here?18 King insists that the analysis is always physical, but as he himself remindsus even the four elements never occur in their purity, though Aristotle does not make clear whether this is a necessaryor a contingent fact.
1Aristotle: De Caelo, by J. L. Stocks (Oxford, 1922). 17 Aristotle, On the Heavens, with an English translationby W. K. C. Guthrie (London; Cambridge,Mass., 1939).
18
Met. 1032a20 says that
V idcarTo viX-
is its ability to be or not to be.
465
The situation is complicatedby Aristotle's somewhat ambivalent

use of the term
V7'OKe(EvOV.
Basically this seems to be the substrate
of an attribute, where change is not in question. But when change is in question it seems sometimes to take on the role of o7roivov, or
that which persists through the change. At 319b8
o7rOKEItEov
clearly
refers to the object which has an attribute, and not to any abstract substrate,because we are told that there can be change either of the attribute or of it, the change being qualitative or substantial respectively (cf. Phys. 225a3ff.). But at 320a2ff. the substrate which receives comingto be and perishingis said to be matter in the main and propersense. Taken by itself this latter sentence is indecisivebecause the substrate could be simply the object as it is before the change (it is after all "the water"that changesinto air etc.). But the following clause adds that in a way the substrate for the other changes is also matter, since all substrates are receptive of contrarieties.Now here we have the notion of a substrate of change (as opposed to a followsubstrateof a form or attribute, on which see Met. 1049a26ff., the that in as to such a and it is introduced suggest way ing King),
meaning of substrate in the case of change is ;wolvov, as though a thereof. substrate of substantial change must itself be the {'rouEvov Aristotle has of course just told us that there is no nropEvovin this case
-or rather,he has said that nothing perceptibleremainsas a constant substrate.This rather suggests that somethingimperceptibledoes rewould only be identifiable main, but as we have seen, such a v{roj.Evov TW and the reference to Ao'y, perceptibility seems to be because
Aristotle, as so often, is starting from popular usage, which distinguishestypes of changein this way (cf. the remarka few lines later that air is ErtLLKjcS vatArqrov [tolerably imperceptible]-hardly a strict view of Aristotle himself). The point of all this is to suggest that Aristotle's very use of terminologyis such as to suggest, to us and perhaps to himself, a closer analogy, in terms of the existence of a
V;rouvov,between qualitative and substantial change than he really
wants to hold.
TOV
avrov
Before leaving 319b15 it may be noted that King takes &3 7roKepeLvov with atccr0,Tov rather than, as I have done, with {ropvovroS, and
comments, "Note that Aristotle does not say that no thing persists change, but rather, that nothing through the generation-corruption
perceptible in its identity as a substratum persists" (p. 376). This
way of taking the Greek seems to me less natural, though perhaps not definitely excludable,but on King's view what thing does persist? In the case of non-elemental substantial change, as when a sword turns into ploughshare,the answeris clear enough: the iron. But in the case of elemental change the answerdoes not seem at all so clear. I have already said that for Aristotle qualitative change, which finds an easy accommodationin his doctrine of categories,provides the pattern for change in general; but it is a pattern whose applica-
466
A. R. LACEY
tion leads to obvious difficulties.The substance which served as an unchanging basis for changing attributes in the Categorieswas intended as a concrete object, a man or a horse. But prime matter is of coursevery different.So long as the substratewas itself identifiable as an existing stuff the differencebetween it and the concreteobject was not so important; as a man can be culturedor uncultured,so can iron be hot or cold, and as a man must be culturedor uncultured,so iron must be hot or cold (i.e. must have some temperature). But prime matter is a potentiality not for a determinateform of a determinablebut for the determinable itself, and this is wherethe extension of the doctrine comes in. A number of passages in fact seem to suggest Aristotle'shesitancy on this topic. He wants to say that coming to be occurssimply from that which was there before, but yet at the same time he wants it to have a persistent substrate, as is shown by Phys. 192a25ff. (where the definition of matter at a31 may indeed refer to proximate rather than ultimate matter, as King suggests against Zeller,but if there is any matter at all of the elements, proximate and ultimate matter would coincidein this case). Cf. also 226a 10, saying that there can be no genesis of genesis, where the objection seems to be that there would be no substrate, not that there would be nothing to become the new genesis (in which case the possibility of an old genesis doing so would at least need to be mentioned). A furtherpossibleuncertaintyon Aristotle'spart seems discerniblein his insistencein GC 2.4 that prime matter cannot changetwo qualities at
once, but that the change from, say, fire to water is
XpOVLovtpa(331b12)
and elemental change in general cyclical (331b2; cf. 332a31-3). He allows that the persistent quality at each step does not act as the substrate,because the new quality is not a quality of it, but why the limitation if not to provide prime matter with a sort of half-hearted reality? Matter then, whetherprime or otherwise,is that which is opposed to form, and which takes on different'forms while itself persisting underneath.We have seen how it is intended originally to be that which changes,but how it is then extended,in the doctrineof genesis, so as to become too insubstantial to play this role, for to say that prime matter is "that which," having been water, is now fire would be to treat prime matter altogethertoo much like iron which, having been a sword, is now a ploughshare (though even this, following usage, Aristotle refuses to say: Phys. 194a22-31,Met. 1033a5-23), or a man who, having been uncultured,is now cultured. But it is still the change.Let us see now what happenswhen that which "underlies" we come to another of the fundamentaltypes of change which Aristotle recognizes,namely changein the categoryof quantity, or growth and shrinking.Aristotle discusses at least two kinds of growth and shrinking, and strangely enough the kind which fits in most hap-
467
pily with his generalview of change is the one which he only brings in rather incidentally while discussingthe existence or non-existence of the void (Phys. 4.9.217a31-bll). This is the growth of an element when this occurswithout any other change and without any addition from outside (e.g. the expansionof air when heated). Aristotle is concerned to insist that this does not involve void, but simply that the same matter can occupy differentvolumes of space. This idea, which perhaps seems rather strange to us,19goes back to Anaximenesand indeed further,though Anaximenes,living beforeParmenides,was not in conscious confrontationwith the question of the void; a similar expansion also occurs for Aristotle in the elemental change of water into air. This growth of an element remainingotherwise constant is amenableto Aristotle'sgeneral analysis, so far as the question of the substrategoes, because the substrateis simply the element itself, and the case resemblesthat where iron becomes hotter. But the kind of growth that Aristotle is more specifically concernedwith, and treats as the kind to be explainedunderthis title, is organicgrowth,wherea given form (say, a man or a hand) is exemplified first in a smaller amount of matter and then in a larger.This he treats in GC 1.5.20The trouble here, from the point of view of Aristotle's general analysis, arises because one of the defining conditions of this sort of growth is that it involves the addition of matter from outside. But in this case can we say that the original matter is the substrateof the change?It is true that in the case of growth (though not in that of shrinking)this originalmatter is still there in the result, but it is no longer the matter, i.e. the whole matter, of the object. In fact, if we ask what is preservedthrough the change, it is rather the form than the matter, since growth in this case just is a preservation of form combinedwith change of matter, though of coursewe can only say this if size is excludedfrom the form; strictly therefore it is only part of the form which is constant. In fact, if an object merely changes its matter it is very doubtful whether we should say that it has changedat all (we might say it was renewed,but this presupposesthat the matter removeddifferedqualitatively in some way, such as being fatigued, from that added). When Aristotle asks the question,what is it that grows?(321a30) he replies,naturallyenough, that it is the object. But we have now seen that this change cannot be explainedsimply by the persistenceof a materialsubstrateundera shifting form. Where Parmenidesdemands that anything real must be eternal, Aristotle substitutes the demand that anything which changes must
19Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (London, 1929), 206-7. 20 Organicgrowth normally involves other changes as well, as, e.g., an adult's head is smallerin proportionto his body than a baby's; but this we can ignore.
468
A. R. LACEY
have an unchangingfactor, which, however, turns out to be purely notional in one type of change (genesis) and rather hard to identify in another (growth). To this extent I think the hand of Parmenides can still be felt on Aristotle's shoulder. I have already agreed with King that prime matter is not as prominentand explicit in Aristotle as has usually been thought, and it is probablethat here as elsewhere Aristotle was making heroic efforts to free himself from his Platonic and Parmenideanheritage while only partly succeeding.Further evidence of these effortscan be seen in anotherfeature of Aristotle'sdoctrine of change,his insistencethat changemust be between contraries, which are in the same genus (324a2, 188a35). This is not entirely adequate. An object can becomeblack from being white or gray, but also from being red or transparent.Aristotle allows for change from intermediatepoints on the scale, but sometimesonly "intermediate" points are available (his attempt to say that the contrariesin the case of size to which the object growthare the originalsize and the "proper" is growing [201a7] seems rather factitious); and sometimes, as with red and transparent,the scale itself is not very obvious. The important point is that the terms of a change must be inconsistent (hence a sweet object can only become black incidentally, not qua sweet). But this, though necessary,is not sufficient.Nothing can be at the same time both black and prime (in the sense in which numberscan be prime), but an object cannot change from being black to being prime. I cannot here go into the problemsthat are now arising, beyond pointing out that though identificationas such presumablyrequires some constancy, this need not be specific. Robinson21 argues that if things were in qualitative and locomotive flux simultaneously we could not identify them. But suppose we were at the centre of a colored sphere which at a given moment consisted of a small green circularpatch on a red ground.Then the patch could change its hue, brightness,saturation, size, shape, and location, and the background which behave as it will providedonly that that part of the background in from it was adjacent to our patch remaineddifferent hue, brightness, or saturation,and the patch could still be identified. Of course, as Plato points out in the passage Robinson is commenting on (Theaet. 182), it couldnot turn into a sound,but genericor categorial constancy (not specific) seems all that is required. In conclusion I will say only that Aristotle would surely have done better to have inquired not for some constant feature in the world during change, for princes can turn into frogs in fairy tales, but for the criteria which we use in referringto and identifying objects. Bedford College, London.
21"Formsand Error in Plato's Theaetetus,"PhilosophicalReview, LIX (1950), 3-30.

The Eleatics and Aristotle On Some Problems of Change - Lacey (1965)

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The Eleatics and Aristotle On Some Problems of Change - Lacey (1965)

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The Eleatics and Aristotle on Some Problems of Change Author(s): A. R. Lacey Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.

ELEATICS AND ARISTOTLE ON CHANGE

Eudemus realsense, or being predicated univocally (,ovaXs X,'yerTa).

ELEATICS AND ARISTOTLE ON CHANGE

ELEATICS AND ARISTOTLE ON CHANGE

ELEATICS AND ARISTOTLE ON CHANGE

ELEATICS AND ARISTOTLE ON CHANGE

ELEATICS AND ARISTOTLE ON CHANGE

15The differentia, it is true, has an uncertainstatus in the doctrineof categories,

V KOLVrV . . . aX Lev araoVTWVTV

Here he criticizes the Oxford translation,ls "there must be a

existentially, but there is no reason why

o'evat VrOKELCTa TO avrTO TO

One should per-

haps compare320b14, where matter is inseparablein all things and

Met. 1032a20 says that

is its ability to be or not to be.

ELEATICS AND ARISTOTLE ON CHANGE

The situation is complicatedby Aristotle's somewhat ambivalent

Basically this seems to be the substrate

ELEATICS AND ARISTOTLE ON CHANGE

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