Aristotle Defines Nature: Five Parts, Nature vs. Art, and Experimental Science

Orientation #

He does not say anything explicit about last time, but refers back to “those three kinds of examples in the first chapter” (the ordered examples of the sensible composed whole) and to “the first kind of mistake outside of speech” (as-such vs. by-happening) as already discussed, and to “the introduction here, why is the first road the natural road” (the handout “An Introduction to the First Road in Our Knowledge”, per verified sources). Verified sources also list Aquinas’s commentary on Physics I, lectio 1 and the Book One handout as matched; the transcript itself says the class is on “the first reading from the second book of Natural Hearing”, so follow the transcript. The previous class traced the etymology of “nature” and set up Physics II.1; the next continues the close commentary on “nature,” “having a nature,” and “being by nature.”

The class, in order #

1. “Of the things that are, some are by nature” (“some are by nature, while some are by other causes”) #

Point: Aristotle begins from the sensible things all of us know, and divides them by cause, nature vs. art.

• “The things that are” at this point in philosophy means the things around us in the sensible world.
• “Other causes”: the only other cause named in this reading is human art; luck, chance, God, choice are hinted at but not treated here.
• Example: looking round the classroom, almost everything is by art, “only your nose and your head and your hands” are by nature; in the woods almost everything is by nature “except for some beer cans.” So for the most part the world divides into natural and artificial things, and he will separate the things by separating the cause called nature from the cause called art.

2. The order of the examples (“notice the order in which he gives those examples”) #

Point: animals and their parts, then plants, then the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water, what the Greeks thought simple) are given in a deliberate order.

• Student’s answer: animals are living and sensitive, most different from artificial things; then the living generally against the non-living. He accepts: the word nature, though applied to non-living things, comes from living things and especially animals.
• Aside: “If I was being a modern Thomist” he would not ask about the order of examples; but with Aristotle and Thomas there is very often a reason, as with the three ordered examples in the first chapter (most known to us first, ending with what is closest to what he wanted to see).
• “We say that these are by nature”: which “we”? The class answers men in general, not the editorial we or the Greek natural philosophers; a child on the street would call animals, plants, stones natural and cars and houses artificial.

3. A cause of motion and rest within (“has in itself a cause of motion and rest”) #

Point: what natural things have in common is an inner cause of their change and of its ceasing.

• Kinesis translated “motion” but broader than English motion (not only change of place). Aristotle’s three kinds here: according to place (a released stone falls, hot air rises); according to growth and wasting away (animals and plants grow, and we shrink after a certain age, “the pious old ladies at the church”); according to alteration (freezing, melting). The cause within may be active or passive, “as we’ll see later on.”
• Rest too is from within: trees grow to a certain height and stop; different kinds to different heights (the trees here vs. redwoods and sequoias); we grow until about thirty, then stop “at least in the right direction.”
• Artificial things (“bed and clothing and any other such genus”) as such have no inborn source of change. Stone bench and wooden chair in the same fire: the chair burns, the bench resists, not as chair and bench but from the natural material.
• The harassed mother: “Mummy, why did the wood burn and not the stone?” “It’s the nature of wood to burn and not of stone.” Not a complete answer, but not empty: the same flames lick both, so the difference is due to something within. Likewise rock and tree in the yard under the same sun, rain and soil: the tree grows, the stone stays; growth depends on sun, water, soil, but also on something within the tree, and something within the stone whereby it rests. “That inward cause we call nature.” “We’re kind of drawing a circle around nature without really knowing what it is.”
• Antiphon’s example (Aristotle refers to him): bury a wooden bed, it sprouts a twig, not a little bed, so the wood is from within and the bedness imposed from outside. His own “more real” example: de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America describes Americans’ abandoned log cabins overtaken by nature; a fallen log sprouts a tree-like twig, never the start of another log cabin, so the cabin-character is from outside, the tree-character from within.
• Wine: “natural” (table) wine vs. “fortified” wine (sherry, port). Natural wine ferments to about 11–13.5% alcohol and of itself stops there, “when everything is used up”; fortified wine reaches 18–20% only because brandy is added. The ordinary name “natural wine,” though art helps it along, reflects Aristotle’s point: something within causes the change and also the stopping.
• Aside: he saw a log cabin going up down the road.

4. The five parts of the definition, put on the board (“five different parts to the definition here”) #

Point: the second paragraph spells out an encircling definition of nature in five parts, taken one at a time.

1. Beginning and cause — also true of human art.
2. Of motion (change) and rest — also true of art: the bricklayer’s art makes the wall taller and stops it at the planned height.
3. In that in which it is — this “begins to separate nature from art, and for the most part is sufficient.” The cause of the tree’s growing and stopping is in the tree; the cause of the wall’s growing and stopping is not in the wall or bricks but in the bricklayer’s art. Steak on the grill: he is the cause of its change and of its stopping (must take it off while still pink); it does not “jump off” of itself, and if he is distracted he is “in for criticism and penance.” Change here means every kind (place, quality, growth), studied one by one later; here change in general. “You understand nothing of nature if you don’t see that”; it is why Heraclitus said “nature loves to hide.”

5. “First”: the fourth part (“nature is what is first in a thing”) #

Point: Aristotle gives no explicit explanation of “first” here, so he offers two things one might see.

• From the introduction handout: the first road is the natural road because the nature of a thing, what it is, is what is first in it; a thing must be what it is before it can be anything else.
• Thomas’s explanation, exemplified: step out a second-floor window and you go down, not because you are man or animal (a sack of the same chemicals would fall too) but by your nature as heavier than air. Going up the stairs to his third-floor office is by his nature as animal, using muscles against gravity (“that’s why I’m huffing and puffing”); slip and you go down by gravity. So there is a contrariety of natures in one thing, and nature names what is first responsible for a given effect. If he were made of helium he would go up, and parents would tie their children down.
• “First” also separates nature from custom, which internalizes and is called “second nature.” My Fair Lady: Higgins sings that Miss Doolittle is “second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in”; breathing is nature in the first sense (you would be dead if you had to think to breathe), custom only resembles it. Custom is acquired, hence second, not first, though it seems natural once customary.
• Native language example: English seems natural to him, French forced; his children’s Latin joke (“the greatest accomplishment of the Romans? They spoke Latin”); the high-school classmate bursting out “How do the French kids ever learn this?” — you pick up your native language “with your mother’s milk,” so it feels natural, but it is custom.

6. “As such, and not by happening”: the fifth part (“the doctor who cures himself”) #

Point: the fifth part is needed to separate nature from an unusual case where art is within the thing changed.

• Aristotle, son of the court physician of Macedon (hence known to the court and chosen as Alexander’s teacher), thinks of a doctor who falls ill with the disease he treats in others and cures himself by his art. The change from sickness to health is then by art, yet the cause is within the thing changed, “very much like nature,” but not nature.
• Since the first thing required of a definition is that it separate the thing defined from everything else, he adds “as such and not by happening” (by accident, from the Latin for happening). It happens that the man with the disease has the art, or that the man with the art has the disease; usually they are not the same (doctors treating anthrax patients do not have anthrax).
• Contrast: our natural powers of recuperation are ours as such: a cut or a shaving nick stops bleeding of itself; his male cats come home from fights scratched and would “drip, drip, drip” like a gas tank with a hole if animals had no way to stop bleeding.
• If the art of building could be put into the lumber so it built itself into a house, it would be like nature. Aristotle hints that nature is something of an art, not human art but “the art of some mind that has put something of its art into things”; man tries to imitate this with the computer.
• He recalls having spoken before of the importance of the as-such / by-happening distinction (“the first kind of mistake outside of speech”); here it is “absolutely essential to completing the definition of nature.”

7. Digression: the same distinction defends “the good is what all want” (“the bad as such is not desired”) #

Point: an objection from the introduction students shows the as-such distinction also completes the definition of the good.

• Objection: bad things are sometimes wanted, so how does “what all want” separate good from bad (as Socrates faulted Meno’s definition for not separating virtue from vice)?
• Reply: the bad as such is not desired; it is desired either because it appears good or for the good in it. Bank robber: not because it is unjust but because “that’s where the money is.” Delicious poison: drunk for its taste, not to be poisoned. The last drink at the party: wanted as a way of continuing the good time, though it ends it. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: the young man murders to show he is above the law, i.e. above everyone — a false appearance of superiority pursued out of pride, which only a proud man could deceive himself with; he is broken down and repents.

8. Which parts separate nature from art; confused to distinct (“the third and the fifth parts”) #

Point: his exam question: which parts of the definition separate nature from art?

• Not “beginning and cause,” not “of motion and rest” (art has both); “in that in which it is” almost suffices; the odd example forces “as such and not by happening.” So the third and fifth parts do the separating.
• We move from confused to distinct knowledge of nature while staying at the same level of generality: name and definition are convertible (“every square is an equilateral and right-angled quadrilateral, and vice versa”). This is definition in the encircling sense, drawing the line around nature that separates it from art, not definition in the perfect sense.

9. Footnote: natural things, wisdom, and experimental science (“a union of natural science and technical science”) #

Point: why wisdom was seen as knowledge of natural rather than artificial things, and why modern experimental science is a mixture.

• Argument: (1) wisdom is knowledge of the first causes of all things; (2) all things known at first are the things around us, natural or artificial; (3) artificial things depend on natural ones (the chair’s wood and the maker’s hands are by nature); so (4) the causes of natural things would be the first causes of all things, assuming all things are these material things.
• When immaterial things were found, wisdom came “meta ta physika,” after the eight books of Natural Hearing and the three on the soul; Thomas says “trans physica,” after or across the natural things; he notes people say nobody knows what “metaphysics” means, though the Greek is three words.
• Modern experimental science, as Heisenberg says in the Gifford Lectures, is a union (17th–18th c.) of natural science and technical science, better put that way than “science and technology.” An experiment is itself something artificial, so a mixture is there from the start. Thermometer: “61” is not the number of a natural thing (like five fingers, two legs, four heart chambers) but a number on an artificial instrument that “shadows” the changes in the air. Hence physicists like Eddington say we shadow the natural world without containing its substance. Left there.

His words #

• Natural Hearing: his title for the work [ed.: Physics].
• by nature / by art: the two causes dividing the things around us; other causes (luck, chance, God, choice) only hinted.
• motion: for Greek kinesis, broader than English motion, so “change”; kinds here: place, growth and wasting away, alteration.
• nature (encircling sense): “that inward cause” of a thing’s change and rest.
• beginning and cause: first part of the definition [ed.: principle and cause].
• in that in which it is: third part; the cause is inside the very thing changing.
• first: fourth part; what is first in a thing, and what is first responsible for an effect (Thomas).
• second nature: custom; internalized and acquired, so not nature.
• as such / by happening: fifth part; “through itself” vs. “through happening,” “by accident” from the Latin for happening [ed.: per se / per accidens].
• encircling definition vs. definition in the perfect sense.
• convertible: name and definition not said of more than each other.
• meta ta physika / trans physica: after or across the natural things.
• natural science and technical science: Heisenberg’s description of modern experimental science.
• shadow: physicists’ (Eddington’s) word for what instruments give of the natural world.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Natural Hearing (Physics) II.1, first, second and third paragraphs (his own translation).
• Handout, “An Introduction to the First Road in Our Knowledge,” p. 2 (the minor premise that the nature of a thing is what is first in it) (verified source). Mentioned
• Handout, “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I,” p. 10 (verified source; not explicitly named in transcript).
• Aquinas, commentary on the Physics, on “first” and on trans physica (locus inferred).
• Antiphon (via Aristotle), the buried bed.
• Heraclitus, “nature loves to hide.”
• De Tocqueville, Democracy in America (log cabins).
• My Fair Lady, Higgins’s song (“second nature to me now”).
• Plato, Meno (Socrates on Meno’s definition of virtue).
• Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.
• Heisenberg, Gifford Lectures; Eddington (no work named).

His questions #

• Is there any reason why he gives the examples in that order? Living and sensitive first, then living, then non-living: the word nature comes from living things, especially animals.
• When Aristotle says “we,” is it the editorial we, the Greek natural philosophers, or men in general? Men in general; even a child divides animals, plants, stones from cars and houses.
• Does the wooden chair burn because it’s a chair, and the stone bench resist because it’s a bench? No; due to the natural material they are made of.
• Is the mother really answering the little boy’s question with “it’s the nature of wood to burn”? Not completely, but she means something: something within accounts for the difference.
• Do I go down from the window because I’m a man or an animal? No; by my nature as heavier than air; going upstairs is by my nature as animal.
• Is it by happening that I have the power to stop the bleeding? No; it belongs to us and animals as such.
• What parts of the definition separate nature from art? The third (in that in which it is) and the fifth (as such, not by happening).
• Aren’t bad things sometimes wanted? How does “what all want” separate good from bad? The bad as such is not desired; it is desired as apparent good or for the good in it.
• Is an experiment something natural or something artificial? Artificial; so experimental science is a mixture from the start.