Change by Contraries: Aristotle Becomes Strong in the Common Basis

Orientation #

He opens “at this point” where Aristotle “has found what is common to all the Greek philosophers”, and refers back to Heraclitus’s fragments on change between contraries, to Empedocles (one pair of contraries causing another), to the beginning of the book (the general is more known to us) and to Claude Bernard (“I mentioned before, didn’t I?”) as things already seen (prev. lecture). He does not announce next time. Verified source: Aquinas’s commentary, Physics I lectio 10, read from his handout “Natural Hearing, First Book, Reading Ten”, pages 2–3.

The class, in order #

1. The common basis, wider than Aristotle knew (“East is east, and west is west”) #

Point: Aristotle’s discovery — every Greek natural philosopher explains change by contraries — is shared by the civilization furthest from Greece.

• Four major civilizations of the “Eurasian cultural balance” (middle period of world history): Greece, Rome, the old Middle East, India, China; none dominates as the Middle East did before c. 500 BC or the West since the Renaissance. Furthest from Greece, with little or no known contact: China (Alexander reached north India, never knew of China).
• Unbeknownst to Aristotle, the I Ching (Book of Changes; Confucius would give ten more years of life to study it) is taking form — change based on contraries yin and yang, male and female, represented by unbroken and broken lines; “not as scientific as the Greeks”.
• Kipling, “never the twain shall meet”: largely true, “but here they meet”: change is by contraries, between contraries.

2. The moderns come up with contraries too (“matter is condensed energy”) #

Point: ancient or modern, anyone who thinks about change arrives at some pair of contraries.

• Helmholtz (quoted by Einstein, passage given earlier): reduce everything to attraction and repulsion.
• Earth neither falling into the sun nor shooting off: balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces (fleeing the center, seeking the center).
• Newton’s third law: to every action an equal and [opposite] reaction.
• Einstein: matter is condensed energy, energy rarefied matter — “sounds familiar” (rare and dense).
• The atom: protons of like charge repel, held by contrary short-range nuclear forces; existence of matter, like the solar system, depends on a balance of contraries. Matter and antimatter, “whatever that means”.
• Notice: they agree about the general (all use contraries) and disagree about which particular pair is the key one — a confirmation of the beginning of the book: the general is more known to us, and men agree more about the more known. Example: we agree more that we are drinking dry red wine than that it is Cabernet Sauvignon, still less Napa Valley 1971.

3. First step of becoming strong: a reason for what all say without reason (“neither from each other nor from other things”) #

Point: Aristotle gives, “and this reasonably”, a first-figure syllogism showing the first pair of contraries are the first beginnings of all things, without yet saying which pair that is.

1. He needs a middle term uniting “first pair of contraries” with “first beginnings”; he takes as middle simply the definition of what all mean by first beginnings, so middle–major is obvious and only middle–minor remains to be shown.
2. The definition, three conditions: (a) not from anything else (otherwise not first); (b) if more than one, one not reduced to the other (otherwise that other would alone be first); (c) everything else is from them.
3. Handout, second paragraph: “it is necessary that the beginnings be neither from each other nor from other things, and all things from them; and these belong to the first contraries.” The rest of page 2 and top of page 3 show this; “a little easier to follow from the text of Aristotle”.

4. Condition (c), everything from them: three ways (“someone who’s healthy who becomes sick”) #

Point: that all things are from the contraries is shown by induction, anticipated by Plato/Socrates in the Phaedo (Aristotle’s twenty years in the Academy) and before them by Heraclitus; he adds two ways of his own.

• Induction (argument from many particulars to the general): who becomes sick? not the sick (he becomes sicker) but the healthy; who becomes healthy? the sick. What dries out? the wet; what is moistened? the dry (“you don’t moisten the ocean”). Hardened: the soft; softened: the hard. Heated: the cold; cooled: the hot. Enlightened: the dark; darkened: the light. Student objection: some changes start from an intermediate like lukewarm — reply: the intermediary seems a mixture of hot and cold, so it goes back to the contraries. We even say one contrary becomes the other: the dry becomes wet, the healthy becomes sick.
• His second way, imitating Aristotle’s showing that time is perceived only with motion: we don’t perceive change without perceiving opposites. “Detective work”: told only that X is cold at ten and soft at eleven, can Sherlock Holmes say a change took place? No — the same thing can be cold and soft (ice cream). Hard at ten, hot at eleven? No (a hot stone). Cold at ten, hot at eleven — yes; hard then soft — yes. Why? contraries: one cannot be the other, so one at one time and the other later means a change.
• Third way, the loose definition of change: is change staying the same or becoming different? Becoming different, becoming other; but difference or otherness implies some opposition or contrariety.

5. Conditions (b) and (a): why the first pair (“if sugar was the beginning of all things”) #

Point: contrariety itself secures irreducibility, and firstness requires the fundamental pair.

• (b) One not reduced to the other: the earlier problem — a definite quality as the matter of all things: if sugar, everything would be sweet, whence the bitter? if fire, whence the cold and wet? So contraries, being contraries, cannot simply be reduced one to the other.
• (a) Not from anything else: from Empedocles we learned one pair of contraries causes another — hot and cold cause black and white, and hard and soft; wet and dry make a sponge hard or soft. So not any pair but the most fundamental pair satisfies the condition; if you take the most fundamental, all three conditions are satisfied. (Which pair is fundamental “some of the students might” ask — not settled here.)

6. Second step: “forced by the truth itself” (“as if being forced by the truth itself”) #

Point: reading page 3, second paragraph (“almost all the others then have followed as far as up to this… laying it down without a reason… as if being forced by the truth itself”), Aristotle sees what kind of beginning this is: not an hypothesis.

• Contrast with Einstein’s phrase: the hypothesis “is freely imagined”, “no logical act”. Einstein’s 1905: three papers each now judged worthy of the Nobel (Brownian movement; photoelectric effect, for which he got it; special relativity — which “took them so long to absorb”, a student notes). One man, three in a year, unprecedented — a sign he has some awareness of how these things take place.
• Aristotle knows hypotheses: in the “book on the universe” (book three, “I think”) [ed.: De Caelo], criticizing the Pythagoreans who sought geometry’s kind of principles in what we call experimental science: in geometry the principles justify the conclusion; here the conclusion must justify the principles — because a freely imagined hypothesis has to be tested by whether its conclusions agree with experiment or observation.
• The only other one he has seen aware of this distinction: Huygens, treatise on light (near contemporary of Newton; the particle/wave dichotomy — 19th century sided with Huygens, then Einstein’s photoelectric effect showed light sometimes behaves like particles — “how do you reconcile the wave and the particle?”). Huygens contrasts with geometry without citing Aristotle: in geometry the principle justifies the conclusion, here the reverse.
• Setting “free” beside “forced”: opposites alongside each other are more clear.

7. Why “forced” fits change-by-contraries (“six colors of toilet paper”) #

Point: universal agreement is the sign of a beginning forced on the mind, not freely imagined.

• Student: because it fits our natural inclination. He: even more — anyone who thinks about change, East or West, ancient or modern, comes up with a pair of contraries.
• Imagination gives rise to diversity (you and he imagine my unseen house differently); freedom gives rise to diversity. Aside: the American diplomat boasting of consumer variety, the Russian: “we don’t have six colors of toilet paper… we have other priorities.” So if hypotheses are freely imagined you would not expect everyone to imagine the same; but everyone “can’t avoid” contraries.
• Like “a whole is more than a part”: deny you know it and we’ll give you part of your salary, part of the car you bought — he really knows it, he’s “being a jerk”.
• Summary of the two steps: give a reason for what all say without reason; realize the kind of beginning it is — “without speaking too precisely”, forced rather than freely imagined. This shows the solidity of following Heraclitus’s advice (seek the common).

8. Custom and the three kinds of beginning (“forced on the mind by truth itself”) #

Point: Pythagoreans erred by custom carrying geometry’s beginning into experimental science; moderns make the reverse mistake, treating every beginning — in geometry, in these first parts of philosophy — as freely imagined. “An extremely serious thing.”

• Claude Bernard (father of modern physiology, mentioned before for determinism), on philosophy and theology “ridiculous”: theologian has an idea and deduces nothing; philosopher deduces but never checks; scientist has the complete method — hypothesis, deduction, examination. Remove the last, the philosopher; remove deduction, the theologian.
• His reply: three different beginnings. Experimental science: freely imagined. Philosophy: forced on the mind by truth itself, which therefore tends to justify what is deduced from it. Theology: known by faith — Augustine, no one believes unless he wills to believe — free, hence meritorious, but not free to imagine: free assent to the word of God, so it resembles science in freedom and philosophy in (greater) certitude. In theology, belief seeking understanding: understanding is not a test of belief but a kind of consolation. For Bernard there is only one kind of beginning, so philosopher and a fortiori theologian seem deficient.
• “To me, that’s an extremely important thing to see”: three different kinds of beginning; accustomed to one, you seek it everywhere.

9. Aside: Albert the Great above custom (“no book which is to philosophy”) #

Point: medieval custom imitated theology’s method, seeking an author to other disciplines as the Bible is to theology.

• Albert, logical works (on Porphyry, “I think”): objection that a certain part of logic cannot exist because Aristotle wrote no book on it; Albert dismisses it — a work may be lost, or he may not have got around to it. Medicine followed Galen “even though the corpse doesn’t seem to be the way Galen described it”; in logic Aristotle was “the Bible”. “There is no book which is to philosophy as the Bible is to theology.” Albert rises above custom; “we got different customs, so we make different mistakes.”

10. Review of the three beginnings; the axiom of contradiction (“nothing is before or after itself”) #

Point: quick review, then why the hypothetical method itself presupposes a non-hypothetical beginning.

• Forced beginning: a foundation to build on. Freely imagined: not a foundation but something to test and hold while consequences agree with observation — “you never get certitude there.” Theology: free assent sharing in the certitude of God’s word; God does not force the mind, so belief can be doubted (tempted) and is meritorious; reason cannot doubt that the whole is more than a part — his favorite example: “nothing is before or after itself; I can’t think otherwise.”
• Bernard’s description fits modern philosophy (freely imagining, then deducing) but not the Greeks.
• Testing an hypothesis: deduce consequences, reject or modify if contradicted by experiment. But “something cannot be and not be” is presupposed; you cannot test it as an hypothesis — “we’ll reject it because we accept it” — absurd. So the method presupposes a beginning that is not an hypothesis: the axiom of contradiction, which Aristotle calls the natural beginning of all the axioms. Denying that the whole is more than a part is a contradiction: the whole with parts has no parts, is no more than one of its parts.

11. Custom is stronger than argument (“we never convince the older generation of physicists”) #

Point: leading a man like Bernard out is hard because custom is, for the most part, stronger than argument.

• Apology: Socrates is more concerned with his anonymous accusers — custom on the jury’s minds, accustomed to hear he is bad — than with the prosecutors’ proofs. His question to students: which is stronger, custom or argument? Custom. Sign: people of one age share a common thinking explained by custom, not reason.
• Paston letters (14th century): daughter beaten daily until she agrees to marry the rich old money-bags rather than the young man; the historian: not cruel parents, anyone would.
• Max Planck: the older physicists are never convinced despite experimental evidence; they die out and the young, taught the new ideas from the start, accept them. If scientists, then what of the rest of us?
• Augustine: our whole way of living — marriage, banquet, clothing — might seem shameful among other peoples at other times.
• Aside: Hudson Shakespeare editions for high schools omitting lines “too bawdy” — no reason to censor Shakespeare now, given what students are exposed to. The recording ends here.

His words #

• “Eurasian cultural balance”: the world historian’s name for the middle period, four civilizations, none dominant.
• “becoming strong” (in the common basis): Aristotle’s two steps — giving a reason, and recognizing the kind of beginning.
• “first beginnings” / “first causes”: not from anything else; not reducible to one another; everything else from them [ed.: principles].
• “induction”: argument from many particulars towards the general.
• “forced by the truth itself” (handout rendering) vs. Einstein’s “freely imagined”: the two kinds of beginning.
• “book on the universe” [ed.: De Caelo].
• “hypothesis”: beginning freely imagined, tested by its conclusions, never yielding certitude.
• “belief seeking understanding”: theology’s beginning; understanding as consolation, not test.
• “axiom about contradiction”: something cannot be and not be; natural beginning of all the axioms.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics I, Reading Ten (handout, pp. 2–3, Aquinas lectio 10): “it is necessary that the beginnings be neither from each other nor from other things, and all things from them”; “almost all the others then have followed… as if being forced by the truth itself”.
• Einstein’s phrase: the hypothesis “is freely imagined, is no logical act”.
• Claude Bernard’s description of theologian, philosopher, scientist (paraphrased).
• Max Planck on the older generation of physicists (paraphrased).
• Augustine on customs of marriage, banquet, clothing (paraphrased).

Mentioned

• I Ching; Confucius on ten more years; Kipling’s “East is east”.
• Einstein quoting Helmholtz (passage given earlier); Newton’s three laws; Einstein’s 1905 papers.
• Plato, Phaedo (induction of change between contraries); Heraclitus fragments.
• Aristotle, book on the universe, book three (“I think”), on the Pythagoreans.
• Huygens, treatise on light.
• Augustine: no one believes unless he wills.
• Albert the Great, logical works (on Porphyry, “I think”).
• Plato, Apology; Paston letters; Hudson Shakespeare editions.

His questions #

• Which civilization was furthest removed from the Greeks, with little or no contact? China — yet the I Ching, too, explains change by contraries.
• Can you say a change took place if X is cold at ten and soft at eleven? No; the same thing (ice cream) can be both. Only contraries (cold then hot) prove a change.
• Is change staying the same or becoming different? Becoming different — and otherness implies contrariety.
• Why not take just any pair of contraries as first beginnings? Because one pair causes another (hot/cold causing black/white); only the fundamental pair is “not from anything else”.
• Why say change-by-contraries is forced on the mind rather than freely imagined? Freedom and imagination breed diversity; but East and West, ancient and modern, all arrive at contraries.
• Which is stronger in our thinking, for the most part, custom or argument? Custom — as the Apology, the Pastons and Planck show.
• Can the principle of contradiction be tested as an hypothesis? No; testing presupposes it — “we’ll reject it because we accept it” is absurd.
• Which is the first, fundamental pair of contraries? left open (Aristotle “without saying now what in fact is the first pair”).