One
of the most fascinating aspects of humanity is Man's desire to know
his origin. By knowing the answer of 'When do we come from?',
humanity escapes the fate of a rootless existence. Though not
everyone takes an academic obligation or interest in history,
everyone loves to hear about stories of the past, as if we want to
place ourselves in the long story of human civilizations. Through
scientific methods as much as speculation, we work together to piece
together the complex puzzle of history itself. These questions were
also engaged by all the key thinkers of the Classical Greece. The
Presocratic philosophers worked hard to discover the 'physis of
things'.
The
word physis means nature in Greek, as defined in my previous article.
As I have maintained the meaning of 'physis' is rather broad, and it
is not limited to natural and empirical science. The Presocratic
philosophers wished to discover 'arche', the source or origin of
things. Indeed most of them were more ambitious than merely finding
out the origin of everything : they also wanted to find out how the
arche could evolve to become the things that humans experienced
around them. Ever since the first Ionian philosophers from Miletus,
various types of arche have been proposed as the origin of the
universe, from water to air to something known as Apeiron, meaning
boundless in Greek. Soon philosophers started to speculate about
'Being' - the ontological origin of things, which was the first cause
of the universe. Most of these ideas concerned cosmogenesis – when
the first cause went through some mechanisms to become things in the
world. Because the process involved development, therefore the
thinkers believed that 'arche' also included the extension. In terms
of metaphysics, extension can be defined as the property of taking up
space, and it is often associated with material and corporeal
substances.
A
rather contentious point about the difference of the Presocratic
philosophy and Platonic philosophy concerns the concept of
'extension'. While the ontological proposal of all the Presocratic
philosophers varied drastically, they include the properties of
'extension' in their discussion of 'physis'. For anyone who is
acquainted with Plato's metaphysics and Descartes's metaphysics, that
may sound counter-intuitive. Because in these dualistic systems, the
mind-matter distinction rests on the important principle that mind is
non-extended and matter (material in modern terms) is extended. The
reason for this is because most Presocratic philosophers had a
limited appreciation of the concept of 'material', and with the
exception of Democritus, these thinkers tended to give vague and
muddled definitions on terms like 'extension' and 'material'. Plato
attempted to clarify this issue by completely omitting the sensible
extension out of the realm of 'physis', which only the Eternal Forms
remain. For the Presocratic thinkers, only Parmenides and his
followers had a similar notion. Aristotle, more sympathetic to and in
an attempt to rescue the most relevant parts of Presocratic
Philosophy, an alternative approach of metaphysics. Besides the
inherent nature that should count as part of 'physis', Aristotle also
proposed 'kinesis' – broadly translated as 'change or movement', as
an attribute of physis. Furthermore, Aristotle's philosophy was
notorious for his detractors due to two further properties : the
change was continuous (hence he refuted Democritean atomism); and it
was teleological, meaning that it moved towards a final point of
perfection.
I
feel that the most important issue regarding 'physis' is to
appreciate that the concept includes anything that is not originated
from human and non man-made. The apparent inconsistencies of the
definition by the Greek philosophers originated from the limitations
that appeared in their world. By concentrating on the big picture,
one can easily see that their proposals are still informative for the
nomos-physis distinction.
by Ed Law
Conatus Classics
