The Four Causes and the First Philosophers: Thales and Anaximander

Orientation #

He begins from where Book One of Wisdom now goes: after the proemium, Aristotle recalls what his predecessors said about the causes and why, then criticises its sufficiency (prev. lecture). Before reading the fragments he wants the four kinds of cause recalled. The next class continues with the Milesians and moves on to Pythagoras and Heraclitus.

The class, in order #

1. Opening: a tenth grandchild named Sophia (“which is appropriate for us after wisdom”) #

Personal aside: a tenth grandchild, born about the 15th, to be named Sophia — fitting for men pursuing wisdom. He and his wife will travel out there.

2. Why the causes must be recalled (“did they touch upon any kind of cause other than these four?”) #

Aristotle’s review of predecessors has two purposes: (a) to prepare the critique of their sufficiency, (b) to see whether they touched any kind of cause beyond the four distinguished in natural philosophy. The conclusion is that they did not — which is a confirmation that this is all there is.

3. What a cause is (“what is responsible for the being or the becoming of another”) #

• A student offers: “a decisive factor in bringing something to be.”
• Greek aitia, tied to the Greek word for responsible. Hence: a cause is what is responsible for the being or becoming of another; that other is the effect.
• Latin: the word shows in “I accuse you” — I hold you responsible, as for a murder.

4. The four kinds of cause (“that from which something comes to be, existing within it”) #

1. Matter — that from which something comes to be, existing within it. The second part is essential and does the dividing work:
   • chair from wood, and the wood is in it; the carpenter is not in it, so he is a cause otherwise (maker), not matter;
   • day comes to be from night, hard from soft, knowledge from ignorance — but night is not in day, ignorance not in knowledge: so the second clause separates matter from the opposite as well as from the mover.
   • Easiest to see in artificial things; but also you and I come from flesh, blood and bone — and perhaps those from something more fundamental.
2. Form — “the definition of what was to be”; what was to be here was a chair, and the definition is completed by its shape, which makes it a chair. Attached to form: the model or exemplar, a kind of extrinsic form that is copied.
3. Mover or maker — whence first there is a beginning of motion (motion broadly, not merely change of place). Later we add creator. Aristotle’s examples: the father (maker by nature) and the adviser (by reason) — because nature and reason are the two makers of daily experience; things are made either by art or out in the woods by nature.
4. End — that for the sake of which (something is or is done); already met in ethics.

5. Three corollaries (“there can be many causes as such of the very same thing”) #

1. Many causes of the same thing, because they are of different kinds: the chair’s wood, its shape, the carpenter, and sitting — the carpenter gave it that shape rather than another for the sake of sitting. So we must not try to choose between the causes.
   • But not everything has all four: in geometry perhaps only form. Aristotle will later ask how many causes to look for in natural things.
2. Two things can be causes of each other, by different kinds of cause.
   • Exercise and health: exercise is maker of health, health is end of exercise.
   • “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee”: her fullness of grace is a disposition making her suitable — disposition reduced to matter in the broad sense, on the side of the subject; the Lord’s being with her is cause as mover/maker.
   • Premises and conclusion: putting premises together produces the conclusion; the conclusion is that for the sake of which they are put together.
   • Multiplying 10 × 50¢ = $5: the multiplying produces the knowledge; knowing the cost is why I multiplied.
3. The same thing is held responsible for contraries by presence and absence: the captain for the ship’s safety or destruction by attention or inattention; the student for his knowledge or ignorance by applying himself or not. (This third one, he notes, is not as closely tied to the kinds of cause.)

6. Which causes to look for (“you have to see what kind of cause is relevant”) #

• Geometry: form perhaps alone. Marriage defined by all four: “a stable union of a man and woman by mutual choice for the sake of children.”
• God: a student says “two, two and a half” — He is the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega; and the extrinsic form/model (“be ye perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect”), since we are made in His image. Not matter at all, and not intrinsic form.

7. Thales and the reasonable guess (“our reason guesses before it knows”) #

• Thales: first philosopher, one of the seven wise men, contributor to geometry and political philosophy (he proposed a federal form of government for the Greek cities of Asia Minor), and the real beginner of natural philosophy. Attributed: water is the beginning of all things.
• Reason guesses before it knows; what matters is a reasonable guess. Heraclitus: “let us not guess at random about the greatest things” — if he meant “don’t guess” simply, “at random” would be superfluous. Dialectic is the art of making reasonable guesses; better still to get beyond guessing, but a reasonable guess is likelier to contain part of the truth.
• The first philosophers left no books, only fragments preserved in later writers; “DK” is the number in Diels–Kranz (Diels first, Kranz the continuator); the numbers carry no significance beyond reference, and arrangements differ. Thales gets no DK number.
• Two senses of “reasonable guess”, on two senses of reason: (a) there is a reason — not a necessary one, which would be knowledge, but a good one making it probable; (b) our reason, the ability “Hamlet is defining for us,” is naturally inclined that way, even without a reason. A guess may be reasonable in both senses.

8. The descent from general to particular (“is it reasonable to look for the beginning of things?”) #

Step by step, each step justified:

1. A beginning. Reasonable in both senses. Aristotle in the Politics: the man who considers a thing from its beginning best understands it. Examples: a biography of Churchill or of Shakespeare goes back to Warwickshire, Stratford, family; the history of a country — why English here and French in Quebec: go back to New France and New England; children fighting — you work back to who started it; the Palestinians and the Israelis — back to the events it started from.
2. One beginning. No reason ready to hand for one rather than two or three; but absent any reason, the mind inclines to one. Why: reason looks for order (hence every scientist speaks of laws; “law and order”; Shakespeare’s “reason looks before and after”), and order is based on something one — one leader for an army, one supreme government against chaos. Even chronological order: dates are arranged before and after one event, the birth of Christ; if he ordered events by the birth of Duane Berquist and you by your mother’s, the numbers could not be connected without translation — as the Mohammedans date from the flight from Mecca to Medina, about 622 in our calendar. The great modern scientists — Einstein, Max Planck, Heisenberg, de Broglie — are all looking for unity. And in theology we find one God: in harmony with the mind’s natural inclination.
3. One simple beginning. What is composed has something before it that is its beginning: if “cat” were the beginning of all things, one would ask what “cat” comes from — C, A, T. Water appears to sense as all of the same sort. One and simple are also two attributes of God.
4. Matter before maker. Contrast the Bible: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth” — one maker. Water is a beginning as matter. Is it reasonable to look for one matter first? Yes, because dependence on matter is more known to us than dependence on a maker: someone entering after he leaves sees the word “one” on the board but not the writer; even if the word had always been there unwritten, it would still depend on the letters O, N, E. We call on experience to say there was a carpenter for this chair, but that it depends on wood is more undeniable. The Bible is the word of God, who as one maker can speak of that at once; philosophy is the word of man using reason from his senses, so it must begin from what is more known to us. He is not saying it is reasonable to stop with matter — only to begin there. “I was interested in the contrast there between philosophy and the Bible.”
5. One formless matter — formless meaning not only shapeless but without any definite quality. If the one matter had a definite quality, its contrary would be excluded from the universe: if red wine were the beginning, everything would be red and other colours excluded; if sugar, everything sweet and nothing bitter or sour. That contradicts experience of hot and cold, sweet and sour, hard and soft.
6. Water. Aristotle reports that Thales was moved by living things: seeds do not germinate, grass does not grow, without water. And in the non-living world, water is the only thing in ordinary experience that becomes gas, liquid and solid — steam, water, ice; whatever is the beginning must be able to become all three. “Not a bad beginning, is it?”

9. Scientific and theological footnotes (“a little scientific and theological footnote”) #

• The modern scientist says water is H₂O, more hydrogen than oxygen — and hydrogen is the first of the atoms: so Thales is not too far off.
• The theologian says God, not water, is the beginning; but Scripture speaks metaphorically, and God is spoken of as water (“my soul thirsts for you like the earth parched, life without water”). Augustine in his commentary on the last psalm suggests dividing the Psalms into three fifties, and Thomas adopts it in his own commentary; in each fifty there is a psalm of thirst (“as the hind longs for running water,” around 40/41). Metaphor rests on likeness: a student says, “a need between the creature and God”; he adds, following Aristotle on Thales, that water is a source of life, so God is a fountain of life, and the soul’s thirst for God’s life is called thirst for water.
• Water is the matter of baptism — usually explained by washing the body and cleansing original and actual sin; but also because baptism is the beginning of a new life, the life of grace, and water is the beginning of life.

10. Geography and dates (“philosophy didn’t begin in what today we call Greece”) #

The Dorian tribes came down and conquered what we call Greece; the land being poor, they colonised east (the coast of Asia Minor, today Turkey, and the islands) and west (Sicily, southern Italy). The first philosophers were in these once-colonial, now independent cities. The Greek temples in Sicily are better preserved than those in Greece; cf. the Athenian disaster at Syracuse in the Peloponnesian War. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes were citizens of Miletus — hence “the Milesians.” The cities were picked off by the advancing Persians; Thales’ proposed federation would have resisted them, but they preferred independence and did not listen. Dates, “with the fictitious sharpness of historical dates”: Thales predicted an eclipse of 585 B.C., so his mind was active around 600 B.C.; Socrates dies about 399; Aristotle 384–322; Plato 427–347. So about 200 years of Greek philosophy before Socrates’ death.

11. Anaximander I: the deduction about life, and the Unlimited (“the unlimited is the beginning of existing things”) #

• Anaximander knew Thales’ thought if he was not his student, and drew a consequence: if water is the beginning especially of living things, life should be found in water before land. He confirmed it by the frog, which begins as a fish-like thing (“a newt, I guess”) and becomes semi-land. Modern biology says the same. Water is essential to life: a dishcloth on the line dries out — you would too, without means of preserving moisture better than a dishcloth. Aside: a student’s paper at Assumption said “desiccation is a greater problem with land animals than with water animals” — the big word makes obvious drying-out sound scientific.
• The puzzle: apeiron, the unlimited, is negative in meaning and not sensible at all, whereas water is eminently sensible.
• Two ways of being unlimited: in quantity or in quality.
  • In quality: Thales was thinking of a first matter along the lines of water, unlimited as to shape, colour, taste — but real water in the lake is wet and cool. So Thales did not go all the way. If the beginning were wet and cool, how would there ever be hot and dry things? Water thrown on fire puts it out; damp logs will not burn. Anaximander goes all the way, removing cold and wet as well; and once all quality is removed, it can only be described negatively — positively described it would have a definite quality and exclude its contrary.
  • In quantity: every spring new things spring up, things keep coming to be forever, so the source must in some quantitative sense be unlimited — you keep getting things out of it forever.
  • So there is reason for it in both senses. A student (Darren) asks whether it could be applied to both; he says yes — “we will.”
• He is still a natural philosopher: he reasons from what can be sensed to what cannot. Compare the cloud chamber: you do not see the elementary particle, only the water droplets it leaves.
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles I.43, “God is unlimited,” refers back to the Greeks thinking of the beginning as unlimited, as it were coerced by the truth — their minds naturally tending that way, though not understanding the sense in which God is unlimited. (I.42 is God one; I.18 God simple.) Modern science shows the same: an equation is unlimited in that an infinity of things can be deduced from it — F = ma, with endless forces, masses, accelerations to plug in.

12. Anaximander II: the beginning is also the end (“into which they are corrupted by necessity”) #

• The fragment: that from which existing things come to be, and which is in them (as Aristotle would say), is also that into which they are destroyed of necessity.
• Why reasonable: the bag of wooden blocks — build towers and ships, knock them down, and you get back wooden blocks, not a Lego set; build with Lego and you do not end up with wooden blocks; likewise an Erector set. Otherwise something would go out of existence into nothing, and something else (the Lego) would come from nothing. So reality is a circle: the beginning of things is also their end.
• This anticipates theology: God is the beginning and end of things — but as maker and as purpose, not as matter. “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return” (Ash Wednesday) speaks of matter, where “end” means destruction; better to be beginning and end as God is, where end means that for the sake of which you are.
• Hence the division of theology: God in Himself, God as maker, God as end — clear in the Summa Contra Gentiles (Books I, II, III); really followed in the Summa Theologiae too, though harder to see, the second and third parts being devoted to man’s return to God.
• Modern physics repeats it in the conservation laws.

13. Everlasting and not growing old (“four of the five already”) #

• The next two fragments say much the same and follow from the second sentence of DK 1: if you begin with the unlimited and still have it when things break down, its nature is everlasting, does not grow old, is immortal and indestructible. In modern science, a conservation law; in theology, God unchanging and therefore eternal — already here in a different meaning, by anticipation.
• Thomas treats the substance of God in five parts in both Summas: one, simple, unlimited, unchanging, eternal (eternal attached to unchanging) — and the extra one, perfect. Four of the five are anticipated by these guesses: one, simple, unchanging, unlimited. Only perfect is missing, and it does not really fit matter. The other things treated of God’s substance attach to one of these: goodness to perfection, eternity to unchangeableness, being everywhere to being unlimited. “It’s kind of beautiful to see the way the mind is working there.”
  • [ASR: he says “with Parmenides we talked about something one and simple”; from the context this must be Thales/Anaximander — flagged, not corrected.]

14. Borrowing words from the human world (“by a kind of likeness”) #

Prompted by the fragment’s word justice (things paying the penalty by necessity), before the break:

• Man is by nature a political animal, and language is a sign of it: names arise for things in the city. When the first philosophers began studying the natural world there were no names for those things, so they borrowed from human things — not with exactly the same meaning, but by likeness.
• Law: originally human (“lawyer,” “the legal profession” — we do not call a chemist a lawyer though he speaks of laws of chemistry). The law to drive on the right produces a regularity in behaviour; finding regularity in nature, we call it a law of nature. We even borrow obey: the electron in free space obeys Newtonian physics, inside the atom quantum physics. It sounds anthropomorphic, but the words do not mean the same thing.
• Debt: oxygen debt from running, sleep debt from too little sleep — “I owe myself some sleep.” So too Anaximander’s justice.
• He announces a break, then the third and last of the great Milesians.

His words #

• Wisdom — his name for Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
• Natural Hearing — his name for the Physics; “the so-called Physics.”
• aitia — Greek for cause, tied to the word for responsible.
• Cause — what is responsible for the being or becoming of another.
• Matter — that from which something comes to be, existing within it.
• Form — “the definition of what was to be”; with the model or exemplar as extrinsic form.
• Mover or maker — whence first there is a beginning of motion (motion broadly).
• End — that for the sake of which.
• Reasonable guess — either having a good (probable, not necessary) reason, or being the natural inclination of our reason.
• DK — Diels–Kranz numbering of the Greek fragments; a reference only, no significance in the number.
• apeiron — the unlimited; negative prefix, “not limited,” in quality or in quantity.
• Formless — not only shapeless but without any definite quality.
• Milesians — Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, citizens of Miletus.
• “As it were coerced by the truth” — his rendering of Thomas on the Greeks’ reaching toward the unlimited.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thales, attributed saying: “water is the beginning of all things” (no DK number given).
• Anaximander, DK 1: the unlimited is the beginning of existing things; that from which they come to be is that into which they are destroyed of necessity; the justice-clause at the end.
• Anaximander, the next two fragments: the nature of the unlimited is everlasting, does not grow old, immortal and indestructible.
• Heraclitus: “let us not guess at random about the greatest things.”

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics I (review of predecessors); Metaphysics V (on “cause”); Physics II; Politics (beginning best understood from its origin).
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles I.18 (simple), I.42 (one), I.43 (unlimited); division into Books I–III as God in Himself, as maker, as end; Summa Theologiae, same division.
• Augustine on the Psalms in three fifties; Thomas’ commentary on the Psalms; the psalms of thirst (c. 40/41 named).
• Genesis 1:1; Matthew, “Be ye perfect”; Apocalypse, “Alpha and Omega”; Ash Wednesday, “Dust thou art.”
• Thucydides, Peloponnesian War (Syracuse); Shakespeare (“reason looks before and after”), Hamlet.

His questions #

• What do you mean by a cause? — What is responsible for the being or becoming of another.
• Why is “existing within it” essential to the definition of matter? — It separates matter from the mover/maker (the carpenter is not in the chair) and from the opposite (night is not in day).
• Is exercise the cause of health, or health of exercise? — Both, by different kinds of cause: exercise as maker, health as end.
• Is Mary full of grace because the Lord is with her, or the reverse? — Both: fullness of grace as disposition (reduced to matter), the Lord’s presence as mover/maker.
• How many of the four kinds of cause is God? — Maker, end, and extrinsic form (model); not matter, not intrinsic form.
• Is it reasonable to look for a beginning of things, and for one beginning? — Yes in both senses: there is reason for it, and reason naturally inclines that way, since reason seeks order and order rests on something one.
• Is it reasonable to look for one matter before one maker? — Yes: dependence on matter is more known to us, and philosophy, unlike the Bible, must begin from what is more known to us.
• If the one matter had a definite quality, what follows? — Its contrary would be excluded from the universe, contradicting experience.
• Why did Anaximander replace water with the unlimited? — Water is still wet and cool; going all the way, one must remove every quality, and what has no quality can only be named negatively.
• If you knock down what was built from wooden blocks, do you expect a Lego set? — No; hence the beginning of things is also that into which they are destroyed, else something becomes nothing and something comes from nothing.