Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
Lecture 13: The Milesians, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus: Matter, Form, and Change

Transcript
================================================================================

to guess that the first matter is air rather than water. Well, if you recall, with the word unlimited, we mentioned how that could mean in quantity or in what? Quality. There was a reason why you could say that the first matter is not limited in quantity and not limited in quality. We saw how our friend Thales was looking for a kind of quality-less matter. It was not limited, a matter was not limited to any definite quality, but could take on all qualities. And water seemed like a good guess in that respect. But you also might think of the beginning of all things as unlimited in some kind of quantitative way, because things keep on coming to be, it seems, every spring without end. So if things come to be without end, then the origin of must be endless or unlimited. And so he, as you saw last time in Acts of Mander, he guessed that the beginning of things is the unlimited. But, in a sense, carried Thales' thought further by trying to go to something even more without quality than water. Because water, at least in the natural environment out there, there are water, seems to be wet and cool. So it has some qualities. You know, a drop of water seems just in shape, in fact, to kind of a globular shape. So he went all the way and removed all qualities. Now maybe that's a little bit too abstract or too remote from the senses, the unlimited. Maybe in Acts of Mander's wanted something a little more concrete, a little more sensible, then a little more affirmative than just this negative unlimited. But he could be influenced by this great thinking of an Acts of Mander to guess air rather than water. Because which is more unlimited in a quantitative sense? Water or air? Does there seem to be more of water or of air? Yeah. Air seems to be everywhere. And water not everywhere. The lakes and so on everywhere. And the air seems to go up and up and up, as he says, on all sides of us. So if you're looking for something unlimited in a quantitative sense, air would be a better guess than water. So that's one reason why we could say that air is a better guess than water. It's more unlimited in a quantitative sense. Now how about in a qualitative sense? Well, which is more invisible, water or air? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Air is more transparent than water. And as air is definitely wet or dry, like water is definitely wet or definitely cool, well, if you're down in the desert there, you wouldn't be saying that. So, see, the water, even in the desert, you'd think of water as being something kind of cool just about anywhere. So, there might be two reasons why he would say air instead of water, and two of those reasons would be influenced by, what, an axiom and air. But yet, it's a little more maybe satisfactory to have something more concrete, like air, you'd call it air concrete, than to have, what, the unlimited, it just had this negative notion. Okay? So, you see that, those two reasons? Now, a third reason we could give why air seems to be a better guess is, didn't get a sight now, and just comparing the guess of the poets with Mother Earth as the beginning of all things. And incidentally, notice, when the poet speaks of Mother Earth, they think of Mother Earth as kind of infinite, don't they? I was giving them a reference there in Shakespeare's play there, Tim and the Hathons, with Tim and the Hathons digging in the ground there. for roots and so on and he says common mother thou whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast teams and feeds all so even there the mother earth is spoken of as being infinite but air seems to be much more infinite than than mother earth does okay if you look at mother earth water and air you notice a certain order here in these three reasonable guesses there's a couple things to note about the order there mother earth to water to air so mother earth would be more immediate yeah more sensible yeah more material yeah yeah water is less sensible and air is the least sensible wasn't it it's interesting that uh if you took everything out let's say of this room in here all the furniture huh and somebody looked in there's nothing in that room even though it's filled with air and do you want to join the lecture here okay um it's distracting me here sorry yeah yeah you took all the furniture out of the room in there and there's nobody in that room with no furniture and someone looked in there they said there's nothing in there so what do you mean there's nothing in there there's air in there but no normally would say there's nothing in there that kind of shows that air is less known and and less sensible and for less known than water and the fourth series mother earth so you're going from the more known the more sensible to the less sensible now uh that's not a reason to say one of these is a better guess but that explains why whether earth should come as a guess before water and air but in terms of what is the first matter notice something else about this you're going from the thick to the what oh more rarefying yeah to the thin so when one of the characters is fed up with life in shakespeare you know straight flat the thick rotundity of the earth but you think of the earth as being thick but then like in those words i was quoting and these are tractors as i told you were all spirits and i melted into air into thin air so you're going from the thick to the thin that's why you can say that you know people sometimes get water in the basement but mother earth doesn't usually come through the walls and air seems to come through the roof or even in the house but hopefully not water thing now does it make sense is the first matter out of which all things are made is that the thickest of things or is that the thinnest of things what do you mean the first matter the first matter the matter before all other matters the matter which all things are made thin because you can take all those thin layers and make a thick layer yeah yeah matter is that out of which you make something and don't you make the thick out of the thin so i used to take an example of one of my fat books on my shelf and i say the thick here is put together from these thin pages but if you put thick things together you wouldn't get a thin thing would you know so it's the the thick is made out of the what yeah so the thing that has the thinnest and the finest pieces would be the best guess wouldn't it as the first matter you know what would it do yeah sit my dog and say yeah the thick you have more to take from that's true but is that like matter is that like taking apart from the hole You have a thick book, you can rip pages out for a long time. But then taking parts out of a whole. And is matter like the whole or like the parts? Well, when we define matter as a cause, eventually, it will be defined as that from which something comes to be and is in it. So, which is made out of which, which comes from which, and is in the thing that comes to be from it. Well, the whole comes to be from the parts. They're inside it. Well, the whole is more like the form, the wholeness of the object. So, you know, if you said the molecule, to use a modern example, is the beginning of all things, and I said the atom is the beginning of all things, and you said the elementary particle is the beginning of all things, whose guess would be the best? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Because the elementary particles would make up the atom, and the atoms make up the molecule. What's the first matter of a paragraph? Well, you say the sentence, and I say it's words, and you say it's letters, which is better. Are the letters made out of words? You can get letters from a word, but it's not that the letters are made out of. That's what you mean by matter, out of which something is made. So the smallest thing in those three would be the best guess. So the poets guessed Mother Earth, and the Thales water, and now an axiomone as air. So it's a better guess, even though air is less known to us, because it seems to be thinner and finer. Now, if there's something smaller and fine and thinner than elementary particles, like some people talk about quarks, but there's some question about quarks, but there would be even a better guess if there's something actually smaller. Do you see that? The Greek word, incidentally, for element, and the Greek word for letters of the alphabet is the same. It's toikeia. In Latin, you'd find the same word use for the letters. But the letters of the alphabet are like the elements in nature. So you first make things out of the letters, maybe the words, and then out of the words you make sentences, and out of the sentences you make paragraphs, or paragraphs, chapters, and so on. But the first out of which everything is made, in this case, would be the letters. When you study Greek for the first time, the first thing you make you do is learn the alphabet. Did I tell you about this cynical professor in English at the University of Minnesota? A friend of mine went there, and the freshman English college, and the English course for freshman at the University of Minnesota. First day of class, he said, everybody took out a piece of paper. And I said, write the alphabet. Some people can't write the alphabet. As I say, it's a cynical thing. I mean, you realize how badly educated you. He said, we wanted to show you how dumb you are, really, you don't even know the alphabet. So, as I always say to my students, this is one of my favorite questions in an exam. Why is the guess of Anaximenes, that air is the beginning of all things, a better guess than that of Thales, that water is the beginning of all things? And there'd be two reasons here, right, that are suggested by the thinking of Anaximander. It's more unlimited in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense. And then a different reason here that arises when you compare these three, that it's the thinnest of things, and the thick is composed and put together from the thin, and not vice versa. Kylo Dole was a real thin Dole, and then they'd make layers and layers of it to make these extremes and so on. So you make the thick out of the thin. So the thinnest of all things, whatever that is, would seem to be the best guess as to what is the first matter. Okay, so much for the Belisians, the three citizens. Thank you. of Miletus, the three philosophers of Miletus. Now, Pythagoras started on the coast of Asia Minor, on the island of Samos, but then he migrated to southern Italy, and the Greek cities, you know, southern Italy and then Sicily. In fact, the Greek temples there are in better shape than the ones that are left in Greece, they say. And that's why you have all these Greek names, Greco for one of the grapes, Aleonico, which is a change of Hellenical. So you have all these Greek grapes, the land of wine, the Greeks called it. So Empedocles will meet later on, he'll be in Sicily, but Pythagoras went to southern Italy. And when Plato got disgusted with Athens after they put Socrates to death, he left Athens for a while and he traveled and studied with various people. but he went to Italy and studied with the Pythagoreans over there. Now, Pythagoras, as you know, is primarily a, what, mathematician. And everybody has heard of the famous Pythagorean, what, theorem. So Pythagoras is coming in to the study of natural things from mathematics. Now, in mathematics, there's no matter. And so he's accustomed to mathematics and therefore not to looking for the cause called matter, but what is a kind of cause you look for in geometry? Well, we could call this kind of cause-form, huh? Meaning by form, not just the shape of things, but the order of them or the ratio in which they are. I'll give you a simple example of that. When straight lines intersect, these opposite angles will be equal. Now, if you say, why are they equal? Well, the basic reason why they are equal is that the lines are straight rather than bent or curved. It's the form of the lines. Now, it's not too hard to see, if you know earlier in geometry, what you mean by right angle, that when a straight line meets a straight line and makes equal angles, we call these right angles, huh? And we, you know, show in earlier theorems how to construct the right angle and so on. Now, it's not too hard to see that if a straight line meets a straight line, it's going to either make two right angles or angles, what? Equal to right angles. So, these two angles are going to equal, what? These two right angles, huh? And it's actually dividing these up, if you want to do it that way. These two right angles are equal to this and these two right. And this angle is equal to these two and these. So they're both equal to those three, so they're equal to each other, right? So, because these are straight lines intersecting, because this is a straight line, in other words, meaning a straight line, necessarily, x plus b here will have to be equal to what? Two right angles, huh? And because this is a straight line, meaning a straight line, necessarily, x plus a will have to equal what? Right. Two right angles. And the rest is just the axioms, huh? Quantities equal to the same are what? Equal to each other. Yeah. So, x plus b must equal x plus a because the fact that equals, results are equal. But it all follows from the fact that the lines are straight, huh? If one of them had been bent, or curved, then they would not have been, what? Equal, huh? Okay? So, the kind of cause that you have in mathematics is a different kind of cause than Thales and Aximander and Aximenes have been talking about. And we'll see later on that this kind of cause is called form. But form, not just in the sense of shape, but order, ratio, as opposed to the matter itself. So in Pythagoras, custom has a great influence upon the way we think and how we think and so on. So Pythagoras coming into the study of natural things is looking for the kind of cause that he's accustomed to look for. And so he's really quite different from the first three men. Now the most famous discovery of Pythagoras in the sensible world is the one right here. He discovered that the harmonious sounds, like for example if you, in our scale where we call it the octave because it's eight notes, if you go do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do, and you sound the do above and the do below, they'll sound well together in the ear. But they are produced by objects in the ratio of two to one. Now there's different ways you could do this. You could do it with drums. Let's say they thought you might have done the drums. You'd do it with glasses, I suppose, with different things. When I was at St. Mary's, we would use these musical strings and they would, they're raised above a wooden board and you've got a little device that you can tighten or loosen the string. And you'd pluck this string and then you'd pluck this one and then you'd tighten or loosen this one until you pluck this one and pluck that one and they sounded exactly the same. And then you'd take a little wooden wedge and you'd go down exactly halfway and you'd force up the string. And then you'd pluck the whole string and the, what, half string to get the harmony of the octave. So it's produced by objects in the ratio of two to one. Now the other harmonious sounds also have a similar record ratio, but this is enough to get the basic idea. It's the most famous one. Now, the Pythagoreans got carried away when they saw this. And they thought that under everything in the sensible world there'd be simple numerical ratios, simple numerical things. Now if you looked at these things of unity, finis, and simplicity, you can see that they are very much in the tradition of what? Pythagoras, as Heisenberg says. Bertrand Russell, who's into that sort of stuff, you know, mathematical science and so on, he says, Pythagoras, perhaps the most influential man I know. But certainly in terms of the mathematical science of nature, he is. And if you look at the famous, you know, school of Athens, you've seen that painting by Raphael, you know? In the center there you have kind of an arch and so on, and in the very center are Plato and Aristotle, who is the chief philosopher, as he said. And they're walking and talking, and Aristotle's carrying, and you can see if you look closely, he's carrying the Nicomachean Ethics. But Plato is carrying the Timaeus. And the Timaeus is a mathematical view of the, what, natural world. And it's put in the mouth of Timaeus, who may be a fictional character, but he's represented as a Pythagorean. Socrates is present, but he listens. And Pythagoras, not Pythagoras, but Timaeus gives this long discourse on the, what, universe, huh? And he's giving a mathematical theory of the four elements that in Pedocles they don't want to talk about. But it's all in terms of geometrical figures, there's no matter there. Now Heisenberg, now, says there's a young man there, he was reading the Timaeus, and it was inspiring him to look for mathematical symmetry in atomic physics. And Schrodinger, who's responsible for a lot of things, but the Schrodinger equation, obviously, in modern physics. But Schrodinger was the Austrian physicist there who perfected the mathematics of wave mechanics, which goes back to Louis de Bruyne. But when Schrodinger perfected the mathematics of wave mechanics and published it, the same year Heisenberg published his quantum mechanics. and the physical world, the physicists, as I say, were amazed to see two different mathematical formalisms that both worked. It's a common herd of thing. And then subsequently, Schrodinger did a study comparing his with Heisenberg and showing there are certain equivalents between the two, but it's more convenient sometimes to use one or sometimes use the other, right? I mention all this because here's a man that's obviously deep into the mathematics of the atom because he perfected the mathematics of wave mechanics which is used in talking about the atom and then showed the mathematical equivalence of that in Heisenberg's quantum mechanics. But he says that the modern atom consists of no stuff at all. There's no matter there. It's kind of an amazing thing. And here's a man who could speak of the authority of these things. There's no matter there. And it's kind of funny that when the communists were still in power in Moscow and the party line was being, you know, religiously defended, they got upset because modern science seemed to have no matter. And of course, communist philosophy is called dialectical materialism. It's at the beginning of all things. And so they were, you know, starting to raise some questions even though they'd often use science as kind of a backup for them or misuse science as a backup for them. But it's kind of funny to see that, huh? But there's no matter there. And in that same place where Schrodinger says that, he says, he compares it to what Plato did in the Timaeus, where it's all a geometrical thing, but there's no matter there. So, but notice now, we're being introduced to a second kind of cause, what you could call form as distinct from matter. And later on, we'll see Heraclitus starting to introduce a third kind of cause, which could be called the mover or the maker. And then later on, we'll see Empedocles, he has a position on the matter of which things are made, and he starts to use the formal cause, and he has the, what? Mover, huh? And then eventually, Socrates and Plato introduced a fourth kind of cause. Okay? And later on, we'll see Heraclitus starting to bring it all together. Okay? But this is the second kind of cause now. Form is distinguished from the matter. Now, the Thaegorians, as I say, got kind of carried away a little bit, and even in ethics, they would look for numbers to explain the virtues. And they try to see it as an unlikeness. Let me just give you a simple example of that. Would justice be an even number or an odd number, do you think? An even. Yeah. It's just a question of getting even with somebody, right? And we say it in daily life. Are we even now when we make a little financial deal? Are we even now, you know, I'm settling with you? And we use the word equality there and so on. And when Aristotle was giving the opinions of his predecessors about what the soul is in the first book about the soul, he had this one strange opinion that the soul is a self-moving number. I'm sure that's the Thaegorian origin. And this expression that we have, I got your number. If there was a number that was your number, then you'd be a lot more understandable than you are. So I always had a certain, you know, attraction to the number five. So since likeness is a cause of love, maybe that's my number, I'd say. So see if we can find out what your number is, and then we'll be able to explain everything about you. You'll make quite understandable. But Plato, as I said, was very much influenced by the Pythagoreans, and he wrote that great work to Timaeus. And I assume that the reason why Rachel put that in there was that people were getting interested in the mathematical science of nature very much at that time of the Renaissance. And therefore Plato stood out as very important. It's a kind of model, as you can see in Galileo. In fact, Galileo presents his ideas in the form of a dialogue. It takes that aspect of Plato, too. Now we come to Heraclitus, and you'll notice we have more fragments from some of these later thinkers, at least from Heraclitus and from Anaxagoras and Empedocles, you have more fragments. Heraclitus takes, we're back down the coast of Asia Minor, and Heraclitus, up the coast, I think it is a little bit, he's from the city of Ephesus. Now we know about Ephesus because of St. Paul's, what? His epistle to the Ephesians, and we also, I guess St. John is supposed to have gone there with the Blessed Mother, huh? And I see an internal word there. I like this thing, sometimes they have a little thing about the holy sites there, in Ephesus, huh? So it's a famous thing. But of course, Heraclitus is there many hundreds of years before. You know, it was 500 years maybe before St. Paul would come there, huh? Yeah. And didn't the Ephesians give St. Paul kind of a rough time there, some of them? Yeah, they had the Artemis, all the makers of the idols are getting mad because he's going to ruin their economy. I was thinking something about that, and even because of Corinthians, he's referring to the struggles they had in Ephesus. But in the political fragments of Heraclitus, there's a kind of interesting one, where he's kind of down on the Ephesians. They cast out some men because he was too smart, huh? And we don't have anybody, you know, superior to us. But Heraclitus said, well, they ought to cast themselves out and turn the city over to beardless lads. It was a beautiful proportion, isn't it? And so they cast out Hermodorus because he's better than them, well, then they ought to cast themselves out because they're better than the boys. Maybe the boys are the beasts. You know, it shows the irrationality of the Ephesians there at casting out a man because they dislike his superiority. It's like with the ostracism there in Athens there, where some guy was known as Aristotis, the just, and somebody was casting a vote to him going on the city. And he was there, and he didn't know who he was, and he said, why are you voting to have him cast out? I'm just tired of hearing them called the just. He sets his superiority, you know, to get them out, huh? Now Heraclitus is perhaps the central thinker in human thought, that's what I call him. And the more you study Heraclitus, the more you realize how he's the central thinker. And again, I call him the central thinker by analogy to the center of a circle. As you know, you can, in a circle there, you have many radii, and they all go off in different directions, and their endpoints are quite different, but they all meet there at the, what, center. So, I mean, Hegel goes all the way back to Heraclitus. Plato was a student of a student of Heraclitus. Plato was a student of Cratchelus, and Cratchelus was a student of Heraclitus. And Aristotle, in the metaphysics, he says how even in old age, Plato was still holding on to certain things he had learned from the Heraclitus, huh, like Cratchelus. And there's, in fact, a dialogue of Plato called the Cratchelus, where he has Cratchelus and Socrates taught. Undoubtedly, he puts Socrates above Cratchelus, but there's a commemoration of Cratchelus in that dialogue. So, he was influential, influenced Plato, and through Plato, of course, he influenced Aristotle. We'll see that when we go back again to Aristotle. So Heraclitus is a very, very simple thinker. I noticed the statement of Heraclitus, nature loves to hide. I like to quote that to my colleagues, and I say it. Why does nature love to hide? Because it's a wonderful way he says it, and people tend to agree with him when they see it, but what's the first reason for saying that nature loves to hide? It's within. Yes, and what's within is hidden. Now, the thing that Heraclius is first of all very much known for is his insistence upon change in the world around us. And the things in the world around us are always changing. Now, he's emphasizing, in this respect, what, in a way, is the beginning of our thinking, because the natural road that we all follow is the road from the senses into reason. Now, as Shakespeare says in Troilus and Cressida, things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs. Is that true? And so if you get off the airplane, and you don't see me and I'm picking you up, we wave to get attention. And when they want to keep the police or the fire or the ambulance, they have a light that's changing all the time. Blink, blink, blink, and maybe a siren's going. Blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, you see? Because things that are changing are going to catch the attention of people, and that's the idea. And these crazy performers on the stage have to do it to jump around. You know? What holds your attention? And even a professor walks around a little bit to get a little bit of the attention of the people. Why, vice versa, if you don't want to be seen, if you're hiding in the tree like in the bushes or something, don't move. Because you might give away yourself. So in emphasizing change in the world around us, he's focusing our mind on what really comes first in our knowledge. And if you don't understand change, I sometimes say to the students, you don't understand anything. I give them a very simple way of saying this. They say, if you don't understand change, you don't understand changing things. That seems to make sense, right? If you don't understand changing things, you don't understand unchanging things. Because as the word unchanging suggests, we know unchanging things by the negation of change. And if you don't know or understand changing things or unchanging things, you don't understand anything. So from first to last, if you don't understand change, you don't understand anything. So you're very fortunate to be in this course, I tell them. Before this course, you understood nothing. Now, Heraclitus emphasized not only the reality of change, but the fact that these things are always changing, and that nothing quite remains the same. And so he took the image of the river, which is flowing. And this is the famous fragment. It is not possible to step twice into the same river. But we also have a statement we attribute to Heraclitus, that all things flow, nothing remains. He takes that image of the river because the waters are always different. And so if I step into the Mississippi River today, and then tomorrow I step into it, are we stepping into the same river? Well, if the river is water, it's not the same water, I can't really step twice into the same river. And we often borrow that image when we're talking about, say, if a situation is changing as we talk about it. We say the situation is fluid, people will say, you've heard that expression. It's changing even as you talk about it. Well, this Cratchulous here is supposed to have taken this, one step further and say, it's not possible to step once into this. river. Because as my foot breaks the surface of the water and starts to go down, the water at the surface there is different before my foot hits the bottom of it. So you can't really stiff once into the same river. Now this had a great influence upon Plato, but in a kind of negative way, you might say. Because if this is true, and he kind of accepted it from his teachers, if the world around us is always changing, how can you really have any knowledge of it? How can you really understand it? As the word understand suggests, something has to stand still in order to be understood. So how can you understand the changing? You can't, it seems. And especially if you've answered to the central question, that the way we know must be the way things are, otherwise you don't have truth. So how can I understand what doesn't stand still? And the Herakiteans sometimes say, would go so far as to say, you can't say anything about the world, because before you finish your sentence, it will have changed. And there's some truth about that. Usually I'll say, you know, where is the purpose, huh? Well, he's in front of that chair. Well, no, he's in front of that chair. See, before I can finish my sentence, he's no longer there. So some of them said, all you can do is, what? Point. You can't say anything about it. Now, we'll be looking later on at a quote from the great Max Born on page 2. Well, it's not the point I'm interested in right now. Do you know who Max Born is? He's one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. And he's especially known for his work with waves. Of course, he got the Nobel Prize. And he's the man who finally explained what the wave means in wave mechanics. Okay? But he stands at the very center of modern physics because he worked with Einstein in Berlin. And they were so close that you can buy now the Einstein-Born correspondence, because he had these letters back and forth about the development of quantum theory that Einstein wasn't too happy about. And Born was going along with the Copenhagen interpretation. So he's very central there. At the same time, he's associated with Niels Bohr and Heisenberg in the development of quantum theory and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. In fact, as Born put Heisenberg on to the matrix mathematics, as, you know, Heisenberg was starting to get something of it, but then Born said, that reminds me of this kind of mathematics they've been developing over here in Göttingen and so on. So he's a man who got the Nobel Prize, a very great physicist himself, but he's associated with all the other great men. But notice this particular book, notice the title there, The Restless Universe. And in that book, he says that, it's strange we have a name for what doesn't exist, namely rest. It's very, very, very, like Heraklitus, huh? Strange we have a name for what doesn't exist, rest. There is no such thing. But you know, for the physicist, even, all these molecules, there's always constant, what, motion on and down these things, these vibrations of some sort. So we can see how central to even the thinking of the modern physicists, in this case, at the very center of modern physics, Bank of Lorne, is the thought of Heraklitus, that all things are, what, changing, huh? He's saying the same thing, The Restless Universe. That's Heraklitus' universe, you see? Now, the second thing, apart from emphasizing now the reality of change and the fact that things are never the same when they change, the second thing that Heraklitus is very famous for, and it's very important, is he loved to point out what seems to be contradictions in change, that something both is and, what, is not, huh? And this next group of fragments, which we'll look at individually, but take a look at it,