The Natural

What does logos have to do with nature?

“Nature loves to hide itself,” says Heraclitus in fragment 123. When we are bitten by a dog, when an earthquake destroys houses and crushes thou-sands of lives, when we are struck by a virus, when we imagine a meteor hitting the Earth, it seems like all this happens on the background of the terrifying and yet essential ambient silence of the forces of nature. We may well speak about nature, translate, interpret, or represent it, voice its claims and defend or subjugate it. But it seems that, however much we try, we will always be the ones who lend voice to it, who discuss our own interpretation 63

and understanding of it, who defend or reject one another’s claim about that demand. Aristotle himself most famously proclaims: “Of animals, only the human being possesses logos” (Pol. I, 1, 1253a10– 11). So, this seems to be the dilemma of human alienation from nature: either we dominate nature and control a servant indifferent to our command, the blind force of nature, or else we are subjected to a deaf master that does not and even cannot ask for our obedience. How can we ever approach nature neither as the compliant or resistant, but in any case blind, material of human undertakings, nor as the merciless and yet irrational avenger of the hubris of us mortals? How can we ever approach nature beyond categories of subjugation and use, neither as master nor as our servant? This is our first question.

Logos is said in many ways. But if there is anything common to these vari-ous meanings, it may be that all may denote something “unnatural.” We are not unfamiliar with thinking that nature is fundamentally alogos unless we find a certain logic to it, unless we understand it, unless we give some form, voice, and meaning to it. In fact, the specifically human vocation may well be thought to be this imposition of meaning on the meaningless. Hence our second question: how are we to make sense of Aristotle’s definition of nature precisely in terms of logos?

This chapter of the book proposes to offer a solution to both of the ques-tions above. In this chapter, we shall work out two major occurrences of logos in Aristotle’s philosophy of nature: first, logos in Aristotle’s definition of nature as “form according to logos” in Physics II, 1, 193a31 and 193b3, and secondly logos in his understanding of organic nature, that is, living beings, as a logos of growth, in On the Soul II, 4, 416a10ff.¹ We shall show how and why nature is defined in terms of logos for Aristotle, and argue that, according to him, natural beings stretch out to put up their own show and to express their

“logic.”²

In laws, legislators unduly forbid children from stretching and crying, for these are useful for growth since in this way a bodily exercise happens; because holding breath produces strength against hardships, which is what happens to children when they stretch themselves. (Pol. VII, 15, 1336a34– 39)

According to Aristotle, natural beings are essentially “spectacular” before being the dull and malleable material of human impositions or our sublime but silent retaliator. Accordingly, Aristotle’s natural scientist is neither a voy-eur watching nature through a keyhole, nor a colonizer in search of natural resources, nor a crafty experimenter settled in a laboratory registering results.

He is rather a theoretical person— more precisely, a theôros, an envoy sent out of his city to consult an oracle, to ask for a logos and to watch rituals, games, or tragedies.³ Overall, we wish to awaken a sense of the natural scientist as a

“theorist” and a listener attentive and responsive to the “spectacular” charac-ter of vociferating natural beings.⁴

Nature

In order to do this, we must try to momentarily bracket dualities that set up nature against something else such as “human beings,” “history,” “cul-ture,” or “nur“cul-ture,” simply because we do not find such dualities in Aristotle.⁵ For, according to him, nature itself is not a section of beings as opposed to another. Nature is not a pragma, it is not even a being (on) or a “substance”

(ousia) in the sense of an individual thing (tode ti).⁶ To put it in terms foreign to Aristotle, nature is much less a being than the being of beings.⁷ Nature is not even a general name for the totality of natural beings. If nature appears at all, there is something “else” that appears “besides” nature. Perhaps this is the sense in which it “loves to hide itself ” according to Heraclitus. “Every thing that has a nature is a being, since it is something that underlies, and nature is always in an underlying being” (Ph. II, 1, 192b33– 34).⁸ Then nature is never clear and distinct in the sense of being separated, isolated, or even isolatable. Nature is never over against, but under. Or rather, it is always in something (en hypokeimenôi), is essentially responsible for something (aition) or the source of something (arkhê).

These emphatic “in,”“for,” and “of” all appear in the major Aristotelian definition of nature: “Nature is a source of and cause for being moved and coming to rest in that to which it belongs primarily” (Ph. II, 1, 192b21– 23;

emphasis is ours). Nature is the source of and cause for motion in moving beings. Natural beings, instead of constituting the realm of nature, are by nature and according to nature:

According to nature [kata physin] are both these things [an underly-ing thunderly-ing and a beunderly-ing] and as many thunderly-ings as belong to these in virtue of themselves, just as being carried up belongs to fire. For this is not a nature, nor does it have a nature, but is by nature [phy-sei] and according to nature [kata physin]. (Ph. II, 1, 192b35– 193a2;

emphases are ours)⁹

Aristotle systematically and emphatically distinguishes nature itself from natural beings or naturally oriented processes, without suggesting that nature is apart and away from them. Whatever the true meaning of this distinction

between nature and natural beings, his examples for natural beings are “ani-mals and their parts, plants, and the simple bodies (like earth, fire, air, and water)” (Ph. II, 1, 192b9– 11).

Aristotle defines nature not in terms of life and soul, but in terms of motion and rest. If it is possible at all to talk about logos in nature, we then must get a hold of Aristotle’s understanding of motion. Motion is not only among the few central concepts in Aristotle’s philosophy, it is the Aristotelian concept that has been fundamentally modified, if not altogether rejected and aban-doned, by early modern science. However counterintuitive it might seem, in order to grasp Aristotle’s concept of motion, we must first clarify and undo both post- Aristotelian and anti- Aristotelian conceptions of motion.¹⁰ But we cannot simply do away with them, we must understand how they are post- Aristotelian and anti- Aristotelian. More exactly, we must be able to have a sense of the historical sedimentation of the concept of motion in order to work our way through the early modern rejection of Aristotelian cosmology towards that which they rejected. Since this is a task we cannot even claim to attempt in the context of this book, what follows is a very rough attempt to undo four interconnected reductions made in the early modern era pre-cisely against the Aristotelianism of that time: (a) the reduction of causality to material causation, (b) the reduction of hylê to matter, (c) the reduction of motion to locomotion, and (d) the reduction of kosmos to infinite space.¹¹ Thus, we shall be able to recover Aristotle’s concept of motion, grasp his defi-nition of nature, and understand the function of logos therein.

Undoing Physics

A. The Reduction of Causality to Material Causation. To begin with, Aristo-tle’s word for “cause,” aition, comes from aitia, which means “responsibility”:

it means “guilt, blame, charge, fault” in a bad sense, and in a good sense

“credit” or even “reputation.”¹² Pretty much like the term pragma mentioned in the previous chapters, aitia is also used in the sense of “case in dispute,”

and in the dative it means “for the sake of something.” The word aitia itself comes from the verb aitiaomai, which again highlights the pejorative: “to accuse.” In light of this partial semantic field, all our mechanical cause- effect relationships appear faceless, impersonal, and irresponsible. Aition in Ancient Greek has clear ethical- political connotations and brings to mind the idea of a definite agent who has committed a certain act, an agent who had an inten-tion and who now has a certain face and a name.

The reason why aition in Ancient Greek appears much more human, ethi-cal, legal, conscious, or responsible than what we understand by the word

“cause” is that early modern philosophy has precisely criticized, reduced, and

finally rejected this anthropomorphism. It is precisely by making the concept of “cause” less personal, less idiosyncratic, less capricious, less singular, and less interested, and more impersonal, more “objective,” formal, universal, and quantitative, that early modern philosophers hoped to make causality a realm of better prediction and higher precision. Schematically speaking, there are four kinds of causes in Aristotle: firstly “matter” (hylê), secondly “the first beginning of motion” (protê arkhê kinêseôs), thirdly “form” (eidos), and fourthly the “end” (telos) (Ph. II, 3; Metaph. V, 2). Again schematically speaking, mod-ern science seems to have rejected the latter two. Thus, by reducing causality to a relationship of matter in motion, early modern physics deprived causality of the face it had, of the name it bore, and of the intention that subtended it.