4.4 THE HISTORICAL CHARACTER OF EXPLANATION
The archaic man, Mircea Eliade tells us, gives meaning to things which are present-at-hand, as well as to his actions involving them, in terms of the people of origin who lived in those times, “in illo tempore”:
If we observe the general behavior of archaic man, we are struck by the following fact: neither the objects of the external world nor human acts, properly speaking, have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in so doing become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them. Among countless stones, one stone becomes sacred—and hence instantly becomes saturated with being—because it constitutes a hierophany, or possesses a mana, or again because it commemorates a mythical act, and so on. The object appears as the receptacle of an exterior force that differentiates it from its milieu and gives it meaning and value. Take the commonest of stones; it will be raised to the rank of ‘precious’, that is, impregnated with a magical or religious power by virtue of its symbolic shape or its origin: thunderstone, held to have fallen from the sky; pearl, because it comes from the depth of the sea. Other stones will be sacred because they are the dwelling place of the souls of ancestors, or because they were once the scene of a theophany (as the bethel that served Jacob for a bed) or because a sacrifice or an oath has consecrated it.
Now let us turn to human acts. Their meaning, their value, are not connected with their crude physical datum but with their property of reproducing a primordial act, of repeating a mythical example. Nutrition is not a simple physiological operation; it renews a communion. Marriage and the collective orgy echo mythical prototypes; they are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning by gods, ancestors, or heroes. The archaic man acknowledges no act which has not been previously posited and lived by someone else, some other being who was not a man.
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954)
Therefore, in archaic times, the explanatory paradigm rests entirely upon mythical creatures and events. The present-at-hand is taken as a receptacle for such mythical events; the reason why man does what he does is likewise attributed to the same mythical events; and presumably things get involved with each other the way they do because those creatures wanted them to. The ‘why’ explanation dominates.
In Hellenic times, the mythical content is largely lost but the quest for identifying the reasons why objects behave the way they do continues. The Ionians transform the question: what is nature?, where the nature of a thing is that in it which makes it behave the way it does, into another related questions: what are things made of? To that question they answer that all natural things, that is not those which are the result of human skill, are made of a single substance or material. Thales held that the universal substance was water. Anaximander modified Thales' teaching by conceiving of the universal medium as something of indeterminate quality called the Boundless and which he identifies with God. Anaximenes went back to Thales and identified the stuff of which everything is made as air. These explanatory constructs all failed because they could not consistently indicate why, if the various kinds of natural substances are all made of the same original matter, did they behave in different ways.
Pythagoras made revolutionary progress when he suggested that the qualitative differences observed in nature were based instead on differences of geometrical structure.
We do not henceforward bother to ask what the primitive matter is like; that makes no difference; we need not ascribe to it any character differing from that of space itself: all we must ascribe to it is the power of being shaped geometrically. The nature of things, that by virtue of which they severally and collectively are what they are, is geometrical structure or form. The nature of a thing—that in it which makes it behave the way it does—is not what is made of but its structure, as that structure can be described in mathematical terms. This is philosophically of importance as a declaration that the essence of things, what makes them what they are, is supremely intelligible.
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (1945)
Pythagoras’ conception of form was later taken up by Plato. However, while Pythagoras held that forms participate in things as for instance the mathematical relationships between the lengths of a vibrating string participate in the consonant sounds created by it, according to Plato’s mature writings, things imitate form much like a round plate imitates a true circle. Form is now conceived as having its being not in the perceptible world of material things at all, but by itself in a separate world, the intelligible world of pure form.
Aristotle follows his teacher Plato in that he also believes that the nature of things is form, but takes a step beyond him.
For Plato, the mere crude force which works in the growth of a seed is one thing and form as the controlling influence which directs that force into the production of a plant is another. Aristotle, on the contrary, conceives the notion of a final cause which not only directs but also excites or awakens the energy which it controls, by arousing in the appropriate thing a nisus—an effort—towards its own realization in bodily form. Development implies nisus, that is, a movement or process not merely orientated towards the realization in bodily form of something not yet realized, but actually motivated by the tendency toward such realization. The seed only grows at all because it is working at becoming plant; hence the form of a plant is the cause not only of its growing in that way but of its growing at all. The seed grows only because it wants to become a plant. It desires to embody in itself, in material shape, the form of a plant which otherwise has merely ideal or immaterial existence. The form is the object of these desires: in Aristotle’s own words, form is not itself motion but it causes motion in other things by being an object of desire.
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature
Material inherently yearns for and stretches out towards form. Form, in turn, is some definite way of being-at-work. Every being consists of material and form, that is, of an inner striving spilling over into an outward activity.
Joe Sachs, Introduction to Aristotle’s Physics (2005)
Therefore, according to Aristotle, the cause of alteration is in the things which alter. What Aristotle says about motion in general, that is, about alteration, also applies to motion as when a body is transferred from one place to another. In this motion there is a definite relation to the place and that relationship must consequently be conceived in accordance with the nature of the thing which moves:
The purely earthy body moves downward, the purely fiery body—as every blazing flame demonstrates—moves upward. Why? Because the earthy has its place below, the fiery, above. Each body has its place according to its kind, and it strives toward that place. The where determines the how of a body’s being. When a body moves in its place, this motion accords with its nature. A rock falls down to the earth. However, if a rock is thrown upwards by a sling, this motion is essentially against the nature of the rock.
Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing
During the Middle Ages, philosophy stood under the domination of theology and of whatever survived from Aristotle’s writings; under that domination, it gradually degenerated into a mere analysis of concepts and elucidations of traditional opinions and propositions. The Renaissance view of nature which emerged after the Middle Ages had passed, was a reaction to this scholastic tradition. The Renaissance view thus began as antithetical to the Greek view in which the world was alive:
The central point of this antithesis was the denial that the world of nature is an organism and the assertion that it is devoid both of intelligence and of life. It is therefore incapable of ordering its own movements in a rational manner, and indeed incapable of moving itself at all. The movements which it exhibits, and which the physicist investigates, are imposed upon it from without, and their regularity is due to laws of nature likewise imposed from without. Instead of being an organism, the natural world is a machine; an arrangement of bodily parts designed and put together and set going for a definite purpose by an intelligent mind outside itself: the divine creator and ruler of nature.
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature
The construction of this view was accomplished by Rene Descartes. In his Rules for the Direction of the Mind Descartes says that method is necessary for discovering the truth of nature and that the method should start, like geometry does, with axioms we can clearly and insightfully intuit:
They must be absolutely first, intuitively evident in and of themselves, i.e., absolutely certain. The highest axioms must establish in advance what is in being and what being means. Traditionally, this happens along the guidelines of the proposition. But up till now, the proposition had been taken only as what offered itself, as it were, of itself. The simple proposition about simply present things contains and retains what things are. However, there can be no pre-given things for a basically axiomatic position. One must therefore find a proposition in which that about which it says something, the subject, is not taken from somewhere else. That underlying subject must as such first emerge for itself in this original proposition and be established. If anything is given at all, it is only the proposition in general as such, i.e., the positing, the position, in the sense of a thinking that asserts. Only where thinking thinks itself it is taking cognizance of that which we already have. Insofar as thinking and positing directs itself towards itself, it finds the following: whatever, and in whatever sense, anything may be asserted, this asserting and thinking is always an “I think”, ego cogito. Therein lies: I am, ego sum—this is the highest certainty lying immediately in the proposition as such. In “I posit” the “I” as the positer is co- and pre-posited as that which is already present, as what is.
Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing
Until Descartes, every thing present-at-hand was a subject; but now the “I” becomes the special subject, that with regard to which all the remaining things first determine themselves as such. Because they first receive their thingness only through the founding relation to the highest principle and its “subject”, the “I”, they are essentially such as stand as something else in relation to the “subject”, which lie over against it as objectum. The things themselves become “objects”.
Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing
Before Descartes took his stand, things were allowed to tell us from themselves what and how they were. Thereafter, the ‘thinking I’ was to decide in advance what and how things are; this scientific comportment does not interrogate things, it simply jumps over them to create a horizon within which things appear to us as objects. Until Descartes thus jumped over things and transformed them into objects, the ‘why’ component of explanation got preferential play; whatever happened was the responsibility of the people of origin, of God, or even of the inner nature of things. Subsequently, and to this day, the ‘how’ component prevailed because the world of objects came to contain no will in it, either that of God or that of Man, nor did it allow its objects to possess the intrinsic natures which might tell us ‘why’ they behaved the way they did. The things of our experience were thus hollowed out and became material points located in a space in which all places were alike and in a time in which all moments were the same; under the circumstances, the only question outstanding was how that location changed with time:
As axiomatic, the scientific project is the anticipation of the essence of things, of bodies; thus the basic blueprint of the structure of everything and its relation to every other thing is sketched in advance. Nature is now the realm of the uniform space-time context of motion, which is outlined in the axiomatic project and in which alone bodies can be bodies as a part of it and anchored in it. The mode of questioning and the cognitive determination of nature are no longer ruled by traditional opinions and concepts. Bodies have no concealed qualities, powers, and capacities. Natural bodies are now only what they show themselves only in relation of places and time points and in the measures of mass and working forces. How they show themselves is pre-figured in the project. Therefore, the project also determines the mode of taking in and studying of what shows itself, experience.
Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?
Galileo encapsulates this new position at the beginning of the Fourth Day of his Discorsi e Dimonstrazioni Matematiche Intorno a Due Nuove Science, which appeared in 1638, a mere ten years after Descartes’ Rules:
I think in my mind (mente concipio) of a body thrown on a horizontal plane and every obstacle excluded. This results in what has been given a detailed account in another place, that the motion of the body over this plane would be uniform and perpetual if this plane were extended infinitely.
This “to think in my mind” is a determination of things which Galileo, just like Descartes, must be giving to himself because there is no such thing in human experience as excluding all obstacles and extending a plane to infinity. It is a procedure of going ahead in advance of the thing and grasping together, not what that thing freely tells us about itself, but rather what the 'thinking I' decides should be uniformly determinative of each body as such: that all bodies are alike, that every place is like every other place, that every moment is like any other, and that the motion of every body—this motion being understood as a change of place—is uniform and rectilinear when every obstacle is removed. Motion conceived in this way can now be described quantitatively by measuring the body’s location at successive moments in time because, all bodies and all locations being alike, we can compare the body to a yardstick and, likewise, all moments being the same, we can compare the moment when that location is attained with the ticking of a clock. Galileo finds in this way that the motion of a freely falling body is uniformly accelerated and that therefore the distance it travels results proportional to the square of the time it takes to clear that distance.