Cynthia A. Freeland, University of Houston
March 1996 (College Station)
I will direct my comments to what I take to be two primary issues in this paper. Michael White's first concern is whether the natural places of up and down have a distinct causal power that can make the elements (fire and earth) move toward them. Aristotle seems to need to say this to make his theory work, but he denies it: topos is not an aitia, so place is neither a formal nor final cause of elemental motion (cf. Simplicius¹ commentary). Keimpe Algra also emphasizes Aristotle¹s denial that place is a cause. So how can Aristotle's account be coherent? Why do elements move up and down, if not caused to by place? Algra's "relativist" answer is that elements are arranged in the cosmos so that some act as the form, place, or container of others. (Here Algra relies on both Physics D5 and De Caelo D3.) But White points out that this interpretation is too relative, as shown by the inverted cosmos problem.
Another issue Algra raises concerns the inadequacy of Aristotle's account of the causes of elemental motion. He criticizes Aristotle for offering a "dormitive virtues" type of account, according to which fire rises just because it is "such as" to go to the place where fire naturally goes, which place is "such as" to be up. Michael White defends Aristotle here with a comparison to modern physics, which also holds that at a certain point we just arrive at "basic" explanations in terms of things' natures. We must refer to posited principles about necessary properties or behaviors of these basic natures.
I will make three points about all this, concerning (1) absolute place in Aristotle, (2) our phainomena about place, and (3) "basic" explanations.
It seems odd to me that both Algra (by report) and White neglect an aspect of Aristotle's theory of place that is clearly absolutist, not relativist, namely, his view of the spherical cosmos. A sphere has very definite fixed places, the center and the circumference or boundary. So long as there is such an external boundary, then Aristotle's theory of place can work to position the elements successively nearer or farther from it, positioned within the "ball" of the cosmos. The "shell" is the place, if we remember that place is the innermost motionless boundary of the container. [Aside: Actually Aristotle's definitions of place are inconsistent. It is first at 212a5-6a described as "boundary of the containing body at which it is in contact with the contained body" and then at 212a20-21 as the "innermost motionless boundary of what contains it." On the first definition, the place of a boat in a river is more or less the outside of it, where it meets air and water. On the second definition, as Aristotle himself says, the boat's place is the whole river that it is in (212a19-20). [See Hussey and Mendell on this inconsistency.1]
There is an outside edge to this sphere or shell of the cosmos, and we know this because Aristotle makes the stunningly bizarre claim that that is where God is or hangs out (Phys. VIII.10, 267b6-9, en kuklo). This raises numerous issues discussed by Lindsay Judson1. Is the place of God the whole of the circumference, or a point on it? How can an immaterial being have any place? Not to mention that the circumference of the sphere is not a place, strictly speaking, for Aristotle, because it is not contained within anything else.
Theology aside, Aristotle pretty clearly associates places of the elements, and up/down, with positions in the sphere, center or extremity. He says for instance that the earth's center is the center of the whole (296b7-12); that phenomena of astronomy are accounted for by the fact that the earth is at the center (297a4-6); and that the center is a fixed point (311b29-31). The most important passage like this for our purposes now is within his discussion of the definition of place in Physics D4, 212a21-28, which asserts:
This explains why the middle of the world and the surface which faces us of the rotating system are held to be up and down in the strict and fullest sense for all men: for the one is always at rest, while the inner side of the rotating body remains always coincident with itself. Hence since the light is what is naturally carried up, and the heavy what is carried down, the boundary which contains in the direction of the middle of the universe, and the middle itself, are down, and that which contains in the direction of the extremity, and the extremity itself, are up.
[Plato too has a spherical cosmos (Timaeus 33b-34a) and says some equally bizarre things about how the World-Soul is placed at the center of the sphere but also extends to the outside and throughout; cf. Timaeus 34b3-9).]
There is another answer Aristotle gives to Michael White's question, one which is so obvious it might strike us as silly, but which I think has some methodological interest: this is that we know which way is up, which is down, in the universe according to our own perceptions because we ourselves are oriented up- down: head at the top, feet at the bottom (ordinarily, that is, of course). Thus, we begin our study of place from sense-perceptions that have value and can be relied upon. Re-reading these chapters in Aristotle, I was struck by claims like these: "We see that earthy things sink" (311b20-21); "we observe fire to move upward even through air" (311b22-23).
Compare these passags with Aristotle's biological discussions of how various animals are oriented, and you will notice his claims that humans are nobler, so that we stand upright, not on all fours:
Man is the only one of the animals known to us who has something of the divine in him, or if there are others, he has most....in man and man alone do the natural parts appear in their natural situation: the upper part of man is placed towards the upper part of the universe. In other words, man is the only animal that stands upright. (P.A. 656a7-13).3
In other words, getting the head further away from the ground, and up toward the lofty stars and spheres, is part of nature's design for Aristotle, almost no less than for Plato's Demi-Urge, who realized he had to put human heads on trunks and limbs in order to keep them from rolling in the valleys (Timaeus 44d-45b). (And remember in the Timaeus Plato also says we have been given eyes so as to see the stars and be inspired to philosophize; 47a-c.)
Interestingly, Aristotle did worry some about relativism of up and down. He felt it important to respond to doubters of the spherical earth who worried about people on the other side of the globe, say in China. being upside down since they hang from the bottom of it all (of course he didn¹t mention China; cf. De Caelo D1). There is an actual relativity in subjective up and down acknowledged in De Anima II,4 416a3, where he notes that "up and down for all things are not what they are for the whole world." We humans, unlike plants, have our up and down corresponding to that of the whole world.
I concur with Michael White's discussion of the value of Aristotle's use of place as an explanatory notion. That is, somehow the real causal power of place amounts to facts about the elements' basic natures (cf. 310a31-5: movement of each body to its place is motion toward its own form).
What else might Aristotle have said? We should remember that Aristotle is not naively providing this form of explanation, he is choosing it deliberately, in conscious opposition to at least one other model. This was an attempt to explain powers or features of elements, such as their motions, by reducing them to aspects of something allegedly more basic, structural, quantitative primitives ‹either the Platonic solid bodies or Democritean atoms. In De Caelo IV (chapters 2 and 6) Aristotle rejects this attempted reduction as inadequately explanatory. You cannot explain how more fire rises more quickly by positing more triangles, he says. Or, if the earth is said to be made of cubical bodies because it rests naturally and cubes are stable, what can we say about earth's behavior when not in its natural place?
The claim Aristotle seems to be making here is that trying to explain elemental motion in other terms fails because we cannot see any "connection": it is arbitrary and perhaps unpredictable. Even moreso in III.8, he says similar things about the failure of the Platonic/Democritean reductive accounts to explain other features of elements' powers or behaviors, such as why fire burns things. It is absurd, he says, to suppose that when fire sets something else on fire there are small bodies cutting up the other thing into other similar small bodies (triangles or tetrahedra). And again, how can shaped bodies or atoms explain the presence in elements of powers in contrary pairs, such as hot and cold? In short, Aristotle is looking for a kind of explanation we might call "strong and evident" explanation and he will just not be satisfied with anything different, or less.
Footnotes
1. See Henry Mendell, "Topoi on topos: the development of Aristotle's Concept of Place," Phronesis 32 (1987): 206-31; Edward Hussey Aristotle's Physics Books III and IV, Translated with Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
2. "Heavenly Motion," in Self-Motion from Aristotle to Newton, edited by Mary Louise Gill and James Lennox (Princeton, 1994), pp. 155-71.
3. See numerous references to man's upright posture in the Loeb index to Parts of Animals. Reference is given by Peck to De Sensu 438b25ff: Nature, location, and composition of sensory organs are correlated with natures and places of the elements.