Take a mountain: is it a thing or a place? It is an elemental thing-place. The mountain looms before us as a massive place for things and as itself a thing. It looms as a Thing of things [i.e., a compound body], just as stones and lichen on stones are in turn things of this Thing. Furthermore, just as such
EDWARD S. CASEY, Getting Back into Place.
determinate things as rocks have and make their own determinate places, so a monumental mountain-Thing is a place of its own, albeit a nondeterminate place: where exactly does a mountain begin or end?
I shall dedicate the final article on Ivor Leclerc’s work to the main arguments contained in the book The Philosophy of Nature, published in 1986; moreover, in the final part of the article, I will also introduce a brief paper on the relation between metaphysics and contemporary physics, written by Leclerc in the same year. In part, The Philosophy of Nature is a collection of previously published essays which cover the basic arguments Leclerc dealt with in The Nature of Physical Existence. In addition to such previously published essays, some new sections investigate ‘issues and problems in the philosophy of nature which have come increasingly to the fore in our time.’[1] In those new sections, Leclerc’s own metaphysical and scientific understanding of nature is further developed, along the lines we have seen in The Nature of Physical Existence (see Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence and Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature).
Image 1: Leclerc, Ivor. The Philosophy of Nature. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986.
What Leclerc proposes, on the basis of fundamental philosophical issues and important scientific discoveries of the past century (special relativity, general relativity, and quantum physics, to begin with), is a systemic, organic and antireductionist conception of nature, which is the conception I am also pursuing at RSaP, and which also entails a different understanding of traditional fundamental concepts such as matter, place, space, and time. The explanation of the new senses of those concepts, the reasons behind those changes, and, above all, their connection with the development of a new conception of nature are the main factors that brought me to create this website. On these grounds, the elucidation of spatial concepts is critical for my discipline — architecture — as well as for other disciplines.
Because of the specific interest of my research, I will focus more in detail on a few essays of The Philosophy of Nature, especially those dedicated to questions of space and place. My aim is to show how such concepts are directly connected with the new conception of nature which is under development since the beginning of the XX century, following important scientific discoveries. Nonetheless, if you have already read the previous articles I dedicated to Leclerc’s work — Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence and Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature — it should be clear that questions of space and/or place are intimately bound up with questions of matter, motion and time. All those concepts are inherently based on the human understanding of nature in a specific epoch.
The question concerning the interconnection of place, space, matter, and time was an aspect I instinctively took account of since the beginning of my research, when, without having particular metaphysical or scientific superstructures, and by recurring to my own logic, I introduced my argumentation for rethinking the concepts of space and place in articles such as ‘Places Everywhere’, or ‘The Place of a Thing’ (some personal metaphysical argumentation can also be found in the article Place, Space and the Fabric of Reality). There, I figured out the impossibility of dividing matter from place and time (i.e., duration), if not at the cost of some sort of extreme mental abstraction. In nature, where there is matter there is place, and, in turn, where there is place there are processes that entail some sort of change or motion, and, therefore, the duration of such processes. This is the sense of my frequent motto ‘things are places’ behind the more general proposition ‘places everywhere’. Even if, by abstract reasoning, we can potentially distinguish between a thing, its place, and the processes contained in it (or that constitute it), they are not to be separated, actually;[2] their separation would be a mode of abstract knowledge, rather than the mode of being of the natural existents. To put it differently, that division — the division of place and matter, to begin with — is an abstraction, not to be mistaken for the separate presence of two different, definite or concrete entities. It is from this apparent contrast between the abstract and the concrete that emerges the two-fold possibility to understand place both as an abstract dimension — thereby, divisible from concrete matter — and as a natural fact, or concrete occurrence — thereby, indivisible from matter.
Concerning the book, Leclerc’s The Philosophy of Nature is divided into three parts: PART I — INTRODUCTORY, where the author presents the meaning and historical relevance of the philosophy of nature, offering an overview of the argumentation contained in the remaining parts of the book; PART II — HISTORICAL, where the conception of nature is analyzed, starting from the original Greek concept ‘physis’. Here, the connection between physis and the concept of matter, the division between physical and spiritual matter (whence the dualism between body and mind or soul originated), the concepts of material atomism and body (i.e., a compound), and the connection between matter, motion and the concepts of place and/or space is under investigation (this part can also be considered a resume of the most important historical arguments that Leclerc dealt with in The Nature of Physical Existence). Finally, in PART III — ISSUES, on the basis of current scientific evidence that is in agreement with some philosophical clues from Aristotle, Leibniz, pre-critical Kant and Whitehead, Leclerc presents his metaphysical argumentation for a new conception of nature, i.e., the physical existent (physis), and, therefore, the necessity to rethinking concepts of matter (whether we are speaking of simple constituents or compound bodies), place, space, and motion. With a view to the present and future situation, Leclerc believes the convergence of scientific and philosophical thinking has to be pursued through the recovery of the philosophy of nature: thanks to the joint forces and contributions of science and philosophy a new conception of nature, physis, the physical, emerges — a conception which is able to recompose into a unitary framework the dualisms that are haunting the human understanding of nature since the modern era.[3]
PART I – Introductory
1. The Philosophy of Nature
The book opens with a chapter having the same title as the one concluding Leclerc’s The Nature of Physical Existence: The Philosophy of Nature. The intent of the author is clear: to take back into the fore a field of inquiry which is necessary to run out of the shallows into which human knowledge fell in the modern epoch especially after dualism became a tacitly assumed mode of knowledge and understanding. Here, Leclerc traces back the history of the inquiry into nature developed by Aristotle, down to Descartes and Newton. Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy (1644) — Leclerc says — was ‘largely devoted’ to the philosophy of nature; while Newton explicitly referred to it in the title of his groundbreaking work: Philosphiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). Until the XVII century and part of the XVIII the inquiry into nature has been a conjoint scientific and philosophical enterprise; then, it ‘abruptly ceased being pursued’, and Leclerc shows ‘how and why this happened.’ [4] Most of all he explains the passages that took to a different conception of nature starting from the first decades of the XVII century, after the works of authors like Sebastian Basso, Pierre Gassendi, Renè Descartes, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Given that this was an issue diffusely dealt with by Leclerc in The Nature of Physical Existence, here, I will sketch the basic traits of Leclerc’s essay to recap and refresh some important information (at least important to understand the appropriate ground of a research based on the reformulation of spatial concepts, which is the kind of research I am pursuing at RSaP).
The question of the conception of nature is directly related to the conception of matter, whose meaning, to be fully elucidated, necessitates the recovery of the ancient Greek notion of the physical — ‘physis’, i.e., nature. The importance of the concept of matter, Leclerc says, was already clearly understood by Sebastian Basso in his Philosophia Naturalis, 1621: in the new view, ‘matter had come to be conceived as itself substance, in contrast to the previous conception in which matter was only the correlative of form in a substance.’[5] The new conception of matter, which was eventually formalized as material atomism, was systematically adopted by almost any thinker of that epoch: the result was a metaphysical dualism, according to which ‘the universe was divided into two, one part consisting of matter, and the other consisting of mind or spirit. The fields of inquiry were divided accordingly: natural science ruled in the realm of nature, and philosophy in the realm of mind… In this division, there was no place for the philosophy of nature.’[6]
… the universe was divided into two, one part consisting of matter, and the other consisting of mind or spirit. The fields of inquiry were divided accordingly: natural science ruled in the realm of nature, and philosophy in the realm of mind… In this division, there was no place for the philosophy of nature.
Leclerc’s main thesis — which is the same thesis he has maintained in PART IV of The Nature of Physical Existence — is that in the present epoch, following the developments of science, ‘the conception of nature which originated in the seventeenth century and thenceforward constituted the foundation for science down into this century has now been entirely destroyed [and] no other conception of nature has replaced it.’[7] As Leclerc explicitly affirms, this means that we stand ‘in need of a new conception of nature’, and, consequently, we also stand in need of a reformulation of the concepts necessary to take possession of such new conception, that is, a reformulation of the concepts of matter, place, space, time, and motion.[8] Fundamentally, Leclerc’s insight is that we are now living a situation similar to the one we already lived in the XVII century, which led to the affirmation of a radical new model of nature — the modern model —, different from the previous one. Analogously, we are now in front of a new systematization of knowledge that will take us to the affirmation of a new conception of nature and of the concepts necessary to take hold of it. This ‘insight’ is in complete agreement with what we already observed presenting the historico-scientific and the historico-philosophical work of Julian Barbour and Edward Casey (see Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part One, and Place and Space: A Philosophical History): the two authors spoke respectively of a ‘caravan already on the move’ and of ‘a third peripeteia’ towards a new model of nature which inevitably implies a reformulation of fundamental concepts such as matter, place, space, time and motion. This is exactly what already happened after Aristotle and Newton, and what is happening after Einstein and quantum mechanics: where is the next stop? This is where we are, now.
Central and basic to the development of the new conception of nature in the XVII century, was the concept of matter: matter was understood as fully actual and with no ‘internal change’, that is, it was understood as fully ‘being’, without ‘becoming’. That ‘external’ conception was grounded on the concept of motion, or locomotion, properly: all changes in nature were considered the result of a change of place of the basic constituents of matter, contrarily to the previous Aristotelian conception of the physical existent (physis, i.e., nature), according to which change in nature was basically of three kinds: qualitative (regarding kind, or sort), quantitative (regarding size, shape, etc.) and regarding place (locomotion). In that conception, ‘internal change’ was as important as ‘external change’, or locomotion; furthermore, as we already have seen, in the Aristotelian model, ‘becoming’ and ‘potentiality’ were important aspects of the conception of the physical. Another fundamental metaphysical difference between the old and the modern model was that in the modern conception of nature there was a sharp separation between matter, place or space, and motion, which, together with time, became equally independent fundamentals (concerning the ambiguity between space and place, in the philosophy of Newton, and before him as well, I repeat what has already been argued for in the past articles: ‘place’ was the basic concept since ‘space’ was merely the term, a name, indicating the sum of all places. However, with later interpreters, that meaningful metaphysical difference was overshadowed, and only space remained, while place became a secondary notion, which means that there was a complete overturning of their respective metaphysical roles).
The modern conception of nature, of the physical, was conceived as ‘a mechanism’ in virtue of the fact that matter was considered ‘atomical’ (made of fully actual, inert, extended, and simple constituents) and the behaviour of atomical elements was merely subjected to the laws of motion (that is, locomotion, change of place); similarly, compound bodies, that is bodies made of simple constituents, were considered subject to the same laws (of motion), being composed bodies reducible to the simple aggregation of their atomic constituents. So, complex bodies were just ‘mechanisms’ reducible to the laws of motion: literally, physics — the study of the physical, i.e., the study of nature — was a ‘mechanics’, or, according to the intentions of Gassendi and Descartes, a ‘kinetics’ or a ‘phoronomy’ (literally the law of the change of place, that is the law of motion). Here, in this conception of nature, of the physical, there was almost an identification between the concepts of matter, substance, and body (this is why we currently understand matter as ‘physical’, and we understand ‘substance’ as physical/material).
However, it became soon evident that some revision of such merely ‘external’ and ‘mechanical’ understanding of the physical was necessary; consequently, some revision of that framework concerning matter, space or place, time and motion, was also necessary. Both Leibniz and Newton understood that the reduction of nature to just movement or mechanism was untenable; as Leclerc explicitly says, in the XVIII century they both introduced the concept of force to take account of all the changes of nature (therefore, both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ changes concerning matter) so that physics also became a ‘dynamics’ (from the Greek ‘dynamis’, force, or power). The introduction of the new concept of force required a reconsideration of the relation between simple elements and (their ‘association’ into) compound bodies, that is, it required a reconsideration of the old notion of matter. As a consequence of the development of the concept of force and the reconsideration of the concept of matter, the field concept was introduced in the XIX century. This new concept eventually tried to overcome the dualism of body and force; and if we consider General Relativity as an emergence from field theory — Leclerc continues proposing some passages from C.F. von Weizsacker’s Die Einheit der Nature (The Unity of Nature) — we can also understand Einstein’s attempt as the necessity to overcoming another old dualism: the dualism between matter and space (or place).
So, because of the developments of science in the last century, very little remains of the former (modern) scheme of nature. And very little remains as well of the old notions of matter, space (or place), time, and motion, even if we keep on using them without considering that they are imbued with modern (old, outdated) presuppositions; this generates confusion.
At first, Leclerc exemplifies this confusing situation concerning fundamental concepts by taking into consideration the concept of space: in the general theory of relativity, space has become a physical object ‘in the full sense of exercising action and suffering effects’ (or, at least, this is the traditional interpretation of GR), a conception very different from Newton’s space, which is the common way we understand the notion of space — the fruit of a debate that lasted centuries. Given the very different conceptualization between the two entities, Leclerc asks: ‘how appropriate is to continue to use the term “space” in the contemporary theory, and can it be done without danger of confusion?’[9] Indeed, even if space has been substituted by the spacetime notion, much confusion has ensued, Leclerc concludes; let me tell you that I completely agree with Leclerc, as the articles at RSaP clearly shows, from many different perspectives (linguistic, scientific, philosophical, psychological, social, anthropological, architectural, artistic…).
How appropriate is to continue to use the term “space” in the contemporary theory, and can it be done without danger of confusion?
The same can be argued with respect to the concept of matter. The modern, traditional view conceived matter as ‘a full being, in itself unchangeable’, that is fully actual and inert;[10] conversely, the concept of matter that results from special and general relativity, and, in general, from contemporary physics, ‘is something which, by contrast, is “in becoming”, an existent which is active producing effects and itself suffering effects, these effects being internal changes in the entities affected’, Leclerc says.[11] This takes us to an analogous consideration we made with respect to the concept of space: nothing remains in contemporary physics of the old concept of matter; to keep on speaking of matter with respect to particles the same way we did in the past can have ‘serious consequences’, Leclerc warns. For example, in the old conception of matter, there was no difference between matter and body, that is, there was no difference between the smallest atomic particles and the compound bodies made of those particles; therefore, the laws of motion, it was held, equally applied to microscopic and macroscopic bodies, which meant that, as a matter of principle, the motion of macroscopic bodies was exactly determinable the same way of individual atoms and their constituents. Since the beginning of the last century, not only it has been established that atoms are not ‘literally’ atoms, but also atoms are compound bodies themselves; and, most of all, it has been established that the laws of motion pertaining to microscopic elements are not the same of those pertaining to macroscopic bodies: in the former case, we speak of statistical probabilities, since particles show variations in motion and their paths can only be determinable by way of statistical probabilities.
This final example taken from contemporary physics uncovers an important philosophical question concerning the conception of matter in regard to the relation between particles and bodies. To put it with Leclerc: ‘the question has to be raised whether the constituents of a composite body necessarily have to be conceived as being bodies. Stated generally, is it necessary that the constituents be “parts”, i.e., of the same kind, having the same character or property, as that of the composite?’[12] In antiquity, Aristotle, and, more recently, Leibniz and Whitehead showed that it is not a necessity; nonetheless, that presupposition continues to hold, as well as the presupposition that ‘the motion of subatomic particles is essentially locomotion, change of place’ this fact being also evident in the fact that — Leclerc says — ‘subatomic physics is dominantly a quantum mechanics.’[13] What is the conclusion? What Leclerc just concluded for ‘space’ and ‘matter’, holds for ‘motion’ as well: ‘it is necessary that the whole concept of motion be entirely rethought’ in the light of the new evidence from physics, Leclerc affirms.[14] But, most of all, this takes us back to the question of matter, as Leclerc acutely observes: ‘it becomes of the highest significance to know what kinds of entities we are concerned with, for the inquiry into the kind of change is not possible in dissociation from the question of the kinds of entities.’[15] And, Leclerc says concluding the paragraph, this cannot be done without the conjoint contribute of science and philosophy, for those fundamental questions transcend the realm of science. This means a return to the philosophy of nature if we want to seriously question what nature is, that is, what the physical — physis — is.
The recovery of the philosophy of nature, Leclerc explains, is a difficult task at present, since there are at least two adverse conditions: first, the loss of focus concerning the core arguments and issues of nature, given that in the past two hundred years nature has not been a direct object of inquiry; second, the fact that, in the last two centuries philosophy has been almost interpreted as ‘a philosophy of mind or spirit’ influenced by Kant’s diktat that a thing in itself (Ding an sich) is not accessible being ‘on the other side of the great metaphysical divide.’[16] So, Leclerc asks, how can we get out of this apparent situation of impasse if the object of the philosophy of nature is ‘the physical Ding an sich’, precisely? Leclerc offers some possible directions: the first is trying to get into philosophical questions as they arise from scientific inquiry. Regarding this possibility, as a mere exemplification, Leclerc says this was the approach followed by authors like A. N. Whitehead, in a series of books, by M. Čapek, in The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics, or C. F. von Weizsäcker, in Die Einheit der Natur (The Unity of Nature). With specific reference to Whitehead, who, more than any other author in the last two centuries, was committed to the investigation of the nature of the physical existent, it is especially worthwhile noting that he also extensively referred to old doctrines (Greek and XVII century models of nature). This ‘historical approach’, Leclerc says, is a second possible line of direction towards a philosophy of nature; his specific reference is to the philosophy of Aristotle and the philosophies of nature elaborated in the XVI and XVII centuries (this is exactly the approach followed by Leclerc himself).
Leclerc closes this introductory part of The Philosophy of Nature by focusing on an important issue: the relation of the physical to the mathematical — an argument we extendedly dealt with in the past two articles. Very briefly, that issue was central to the philosophies of Cusanus, Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi, Leibniz and Newton. Cusanus, Galileo and Descartes believed in the identification of the physical and the mathematical: for them, the universe had a mathematical structure. Descartes conceived the physical existent as ‘res extensa’, and the other existent, the mental counterpart of the physical extensiveness, as ‘res cogitans’. As Leclerc says, cogitatio, for Descartes, ‘in its purest form was mathematical. That is, it was the conceiving, the metal grasping, of what in the other “res” was the extended mathematical’.[17] The perfect correlation of the two, ‘res extensa’ and ‘res cogitans’, was a possibility to surpass their apparent metaphysical division or dualism; so, the real problem with the philosophy of Descartes was not metaphysical, but physical, Leclerc argues: the ‘identification of the physical and the mathematical made material atomism impossible’ (continuity which is an aspect intrinsic of the mathematical contradicts atomicity).[18] Gassendi and Newton realized that ‘the only way to save material atomism was to separate the mathematical entirely from the physical. But that made acute the problem of how there can be mathematical knowledge of the physical if the physical be entirely devoid of mathematical features.’ [19] While Gassendi did not see this problem very clearly, Newton and Leibniz did — Leclerc observes; so, they elaborated complicated solutions (which were ultimately grounded on the activity of God) to bridge the gulf between the physical and the ideal, or mathematical, that is, the gap between body and mind.
Kant offered an alternative solution concerning the nature of the mathematical, considering it as a purely mental construct (the ground for the mathematical is the mind), but, overall, his theory only reinforced that gulf: ‘the physical existent remains on the other side of the metaphysical gulf, unknowable’, Leclerc concluded.[20] At the beginning of the past century, Whitehead offered a solution to the problem of the connection of the ideal and the physical, of mind and body (we have extendedly considered the argument in the last article, Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature): that solution was fully elaborated in Process and Reality, which is fundamentally the most recent theorization that has clearly seen the necessity for a return to the philosophy of nature in order to close the gap between dualisms. That pioneering work, Leclerc says, must be taken as a reference for any future attempt to envision a philosophy of nature in our present time.
PART II – Historical
PART II of The Philosophy of Nature contains a selection of previously published essays which constituted the basic historical framework on which Leclerc structured his previous book, The Nature of Physical Existence. I will focus, more in detail, on issues regarding the spatial question, and on an evergreen issue such as the mind-body problem; the other chapters are just a recap of considerations already dealt with in the past two articles on Leclerc’s work — Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence and Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature.
2. The Modern Concept of Nature
Leclerc’s thesis is that basic to the development of modern science in the early seventeenth century, there was a new conception of nature. Everything turns around the meaning of ‘nature’, and Leclerc’s plan is to elucidate that meaning, starting from the Greek concept ‘physis’ (which was later translated into Latin as ‘natura’), and, specifically, from what Aristotle meant by ‘physis’. Then, the relation between the conception of nature and the conception of matter immediately comes to the fore, and with it the question of what a ‘physical body’ is: are merely elemental particles to be considered ‘bodies’ or are compound entities (that is entities composed of simple /elemental particles) also bodies, and not merely ‘appearances’, or ‘phenomenal’ entities? The modern bias towards ‘material atomism’ rejected compound bodies as the true physical existents: only simple elements (atoms) are truly ‘physical’. This understanding of matter as fully inert, actual, and changeless in itself (this is fundamentally the description of ‘material atomism’) will take to understand nature and its phenomena on the basis of locomotion, especially: according to the modern vision, all the natural phenomena are reducible to the movement of its basic parts or components (i.e., the change of place of atoms, particles, or simple elements). The physical existent (matter) and motion are considered ‘ultimates’ or ‘fundamentals’ in the same way as ‘time’, and ‘space’ (or place). Yet, the ‘status’ of such fundamentals is everything but clear and established: the work of Descartes, Newton and Leibniz aimed at the elucidation of such questions, which are, at the same time, scientific and philosophical questions. With those thinkers and their theories, we were still in the domain of the philosophy of nature.
3. The Physical as Matter
In this essay, the argument of the previous chapter is taken up again and some parts of it are further developed. If during the Greek epoch, and even later, ‘the physical’ — i.e., ‘physis’, the physical existent, the natural, or nature — was a correlative conception containing notions of matter (hylē) and form (eidos), on the one hand, and principles of change or motion, on the other hand (this is fundamentally the Aristotelian model of the physical existent or physis) with the modern epoch things completely changed: only matter was understood as the true physical existent. Matter was corporeal, and atoms, as such, were considered corporeal. The question of corporeal atomism involved the important question of the extensivity of matter, therefore the relation between extensivity and discreteness, which implies the scrutiny of the relation between the physical and the mathematical. From the perspective of that relation, Descartes’ position (matter as an extension) and Leibniz’s doctrine (matter is not an extension but a relation) are considered, and Whitehead’s theory of extensive connection is also mentioned. The important question of the meaning of ‘relation’ and how ‘relations’ are involved with the conception of matter (implying a return to the conception of ‘internal change’) comes to the fore again, and, with it, the possibility to pass from a mechanical to an organic conception of nature. In this regard, the theories of Leibniz and Whitehead will be especially valuable, in particular, the recovery of the notion of ‘possibility’ or ‘potentiality’ intrinsic to their doctrines. In this way, the old Greek Aristotelian understanding of ‘physis’, the physical, is also recovered and, with it, notions such as ‘internal change’, ‘becoming’, and ‘potentiality’ come back to be part of a different — i.e., contemporary — conception of matter and nature.
4. Matter and Mind
Here, Leclerc traces back the origins of the modern mind-body problem to the more general question regarding the conceptions of matter, mind and nature. He traces back the origins of that problem to the Renaissance period, and specifically to the resuscitation of Neoplatonism against the previously accepted Aristotelianism of the antecedent Scholastic epoch. It is to establish what kind of entities we have here: both ‘mind’ and ‘body’ are entities, but what is their ‘status’? ‘Are we dealing here with two self-subsistent entities?’[21] Aristotle, before others, understood the subtleties of a question which, Leclerc says, is not to be considered separately from a number of more ultimate philosophical issues, as I’ve just said introducing the argument: ‘the mind-body question is not satisfactorily to be dealt with in separation from the wider problem of how the physical or nature in general is to be conceived’.[22]
Leclerc introduces this question with an example that we have to consider according to an Aristotelian perspective: when we say that ‘the bird is red’, we are contemporarily saying that ‘the bird is’, and also that ‘red is’, that is, with that proposition, we are also saying that both the bird and the red exist. Yet, Aristotle insisted, there is a different determinacy between the ‘is’ of the bird and the ‘is’ of the colour red: while the bird is a self-subsistent individual, the red is not; the red ‘is’ or ‘exists’ as a property, or a quality of a self-subsistent individual. As such ‘red’ is an attribute, a property of a self-subsistent individual, and it is not a self-subsistent existent on its own.
Image 2: ‘The bird is red’. That means that both the bird and the red ‘are’ or ‘exist’, that is, both ‘bird’ and ‘red’ are entities; but, Leclerc, asks: are we dealing here with two self-subsistent entities? While the bird is a self-subsistent individual, the red is not: the red ‘is’ or ‘exists’ as a property or quality of a self-subsistent individual (Photography by Timothy Dykes).
Fundamentally, Leclerc says, those Aristotelian considerations had a deep impact on the development of the mind-body problem. Let’s see the various historical passages of that development, following Leclerc.
With the Christian tradition and theology, mind, or soul, was considered a self-subsistent existent ‘on the main ground that this was necessitated by the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul’;[23] yet, Leclerc says, the philosophical conception of mind, or soul, as a self-subsistent existent goes down to Neoplatonism and, ultimately, to Plato. Decisive, here, is the concept of ‘psyche’, a Greek concept of the archaic period which, in connection with Homer’s usage, meant the ‘breath of life’, that is ‘the vital principle, the source of life’ — that which the Latin called ‘anima’, i.e., soul, precisely.[24] Later, Leclerc continues, psyche, as the source of life, came to include other notions, such as emotion (from thymos), sensation and thought (from nous), or even appetitive drives. Plato, Leclerc says, unified all these different human functions into psyche (e.g., in the Republic), which came to be identified as one entity in contrast to soma, the body. To recap: what in the beginning denoted a human function — the breath of life —, because of its vital meaning (principle of life, source of life), came to be thought of as an entity in itself, this is psyche, or soul, precisely. Moreover, with Plato, other different human functions such as emotion, sensation, thought, and appetite were unified into psyche, losing their original functional connotations and reinforcing the understanding of psyche as a self-substantial existent (i.e., reification). Eventually, psyche acquired an ontological status of its own (a self-subsistent existent) in separation from the body, soma, which also acquired the status of a self-subsistent existent, in contraposition to psyche.
Eventually, psyche acquired an ontological status of its own in separation from the body, soma, which also acquired the status of a self-subsistent existent, in contraposition to psyche.
This was Plato’s response to the problem of body and soul (also, here, we find the origin of the contiguity or even identification between soul and mind, given that ‘thought’ was taken into the domain of psyche by Plato). Plato, Leclerc argues, did not realize the difficulties involved in that ontological division; only in later thought those difficulties became evident, and we are still entangled in them. One of the consequences, Leclerc says, was that all faculties such as sensation, feeling, and emotion came to be conceived as ‘psychic and not somatic’.[25] So, the devaluation of the body with respect to mind had a distant origin.
This Platonic view was determinative of later Neoplatonic thinking. The basic position of Neoplatonism, Leclerc reminds us, was due to the Alexandrian Jewish theologian and philosopher Philo who maintained the ‘doctrine of a One single, transcendent principle or source and origin [archē] of all plurality of existence.’[26] Plotinus developed this scheme identifying the transcendent One with the Divine, and nous — mind, intelligence, thinking — with the first being derivative from the One (this is another clear indication of the origin of the privileged, philosophical and theological position of the mind against the body). According to Plotinus, ‘thinking is the enaction (energeia) of being, and therefore “noema”, “thought”, that which is known, the object of thinking (namely the plurality of Platonic Forms) is identified with being. Thus, “nous” is the primary being manifesting a plurality of beings, the Forms. From “nous” proceeds “psyche”, “soul” — a universal soul which is pluralized into individual souls. The function of soul is not thinking, knowing; the function of soul is governing and ordering’.[27] As a characteristic feature of Neoplatonism, Leclerc says, being and form, psyche and acting are correlative principles. Here, in this Neoplatonic scheme, matter ‘stands at the opposite pole to being, a not-being’,[28] correlated with the body, which, per se, is devoid of any principle of activity: the body receives its acting features from form. In conclusion, Neoplatonism reinforced the devaluation of the body in favour of the mind or soul, as a result of the Platonic doctrine.
In the Scholastic period, there was a turn: with the rediscovery of Aristotle, the mind-body problem came back into prominence, and the independence of mind and body, that is, their relationship, was brought into question again. Thomas Aquinas was especially receptive to this problem and, in his Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (1268?), showed how unsatisfactory the Platonic and Neoplatonic ‘conception of soul and body as two ontologically distinct entities, two self-subsistent individuals’ was.[29] In brief, the Aristotelian doctrine, accepted by Aquinas and other thinkers of the period, considered body and soul deeply interrelated, one necessary to the other: there is no functioning of the soul without the body, and vice versa. So, we have here one integral organism ‘which is the ontologically distinct and self-subsisting existent. Such existent is alive and active and, in the higher types, sentient; in man there is also intelligence. In respect of such a being, when “body” is spoken of, this refers to one aspect of the total being; and likewise, when “soul” is spoken of, this refers to the being in another aspect’.[30] To put it differently: the physical existent is one, albeit composed of two ontologically different, yet correlate entities, body and soul (i.e., matter and mind, to use modern terminology). So, against Plato’s vision, Aristotle moved the focus from body and soul, as separate entities, to the total being (the one integral organism, this is the natural being or physis) comprehensive of both body and soul. This also allowed Aristotle to formulate his doctrine of the physical existent (physis) as one integral organic unit (concerning this important question, which is taken up in the new conception of nature, I redirect the reader to the analysis carried on in the previous article, Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature). In its fundamentals, this Aristotelian theory was embraced in the Scholastic period and remained accepted throughout the Renaissance and the XVI century, in spite of the controversy regarding the difficult reconciliation with the conception of the immortality of the soul (hence, its privileged metaphysical position) maintained by the Christian doctrine.
With Renaissance Neoplatonism, there was a renewal of emphasis and focus on the conception of the soul, especially after Nicolaus of Cusa’s doctrine of the universe as explicatio Dei, according to which, in the universe, as a contraction of the infinite God, was also contracted the spiritus mundi, the world soul, which, by further contractions resulted into individual ensouled existents (for a detailed account of this doctrine and historical period, see the article Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence). From here derived the conception that every physical existent had a soul, it was ensouled — the soul being the ultimate cause or principle of the activity of things (change, motion, etc.). Again, being ultimately derivative from God, soul re-acquired prominence in its relation with the body, and a distinct ontological status; the ontological dualism of soul and body (or matter) was reinforced in spite of the fact that ‘in the realm of nature bodies existed only as ensoluled’.[31]
With the growing ascendancy of Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism was under attack from many different points. Especially relevant for these questions concerning matter or body and mind, was the definite rejection of the Aristotelian theory of the physical existent as a total organism. As we have seen more in detail in the previous articles, it was the work of the medical men in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, that took to the complete abandonment of Aristotelian theories: according to these thinkers a true body (a true existent) was not a whole, like in the doctrine of Aristotle, but that of which a whole (organism) was composed of, that is the plurality of its minute constituents. Most relevant, according to them, it was the different forms of aggregation and disposition of such basic elements that could give account to any change in nature, contrary to what Aristotle believed. There was no necessity that coming into being, perishing, or qualitative change of existing things required ‘internal change’: more straightforwardly, the different disposition and motions of the basic elements of bodies could account for every type of change. This meant that fully inert simple elements, or changeless elements (that is, basic elements having no internal change), were the true physical existent (this was the origin of modern corporeal or material atomism, properly). According to Leclerc, it was the French medical man Sebastian Basso who, before others, understood the implications of this new line of thinking (after him, thinkers such as Daniel Sennert, Francis Bacon and David Gorlaeus). Fundamentally, involved in that new conception there was ‘an entirely new conception of physical existence. In this conception, the physical was body, and body alone. This meant that body was conceived as shed of soul, and thus of form, and was constituted only of matter. Matter, that is to say, was now for the first time in history given fully the status of a self-subsistent existent, it alone, separated from soul, being the physical. Thus, Renaissance Neoplatonism, with its ontological dualism of body and soul, was carried to its furthest consequence of the complete separation of body and soul, which is to say, into the complete bifurcation of the universe.’[32] If until that moment it had been held that there was one physical existent, composed of body and soul (two ontologically distinct entities), which meant that ‘the physical or nature included both body and soul, [now] the physical [i.e., nature] was constituted of body, i.e., matter, alone; soul belonged to an entirely distinct and different realm.’[33]
… an entirely new conception of physical existence. In this conception, the physical was body, and body alone. This meant that body was conceived as shed of soul, and thus of form, and was constituted only of matter. Matter was now for the first time in history given fully status of a self-subsistent existent… Thus, Renaissance Neoplatonism, with its ontological dualism of body and soul was carried to its furthest consequence of the complete separation of body and soul, which is to say, into the complete bifurcation of the universe… in the new position the physical was constituted of body, i.e., matter, alone; soul belonged to an entirely distinct and different realm.
It was in the Paris circles where those discussions initially aired and developed that Descartes’s philosophy of nature rapidly flowered, Leclerc says. The well-known fruits of Descartes’s physical and metaphysical system were res extensa and res cogitans — the universe bifurcated into the physical, on the one side, and the mental (mind, soul, or spirit), on the other side. This, Leclerc says, was a philosophical position determinative of all modern thinking, down into the present. If Descartes’s thinking was determinative of all philosophical thinking from then onward, the new conception of the physical had a deep impact on all scientific thinking as well: it was Newton’s work that brought to the extreme consequences the intuitions of the thinkers of the XVII century, eventually delivering a fully-fledged theory of material atomism, where physical matter was considered a self-subsistent existent, extended, in itself changeless but movable (locomotion, that is physics as mechanics is the hallmark of modern science), and fully actual.
In conclusion, Leclerc says, the modern view of science is fundamentally Neoplatonist: its ontological dualism was maintained and carried through to ‘a dichotomy of the universe into two reals or existents’ — mind and body, or matter.[34] Correspondingly, the conception of mind (which has haunted modern philosophical thinking and keep on haunting it) is also Neoplatonic: mind or soul is properly active, while matter, as we have seen, is fundamentally passive (movable…). So, for instance, Leclerc says, in the case of the colour of things, pain, emotions, and perceptions, they are believed to originate in the mind, in its activity, not in the body or the entities beyond. Here, the point Leclerc wishes to raise attention to is that the Neoplatonic inheritance, i.e., the ontological dualism of mind and body, ‘in our day most urgently requires critical scrutiny’, since such important philosophical questions inevitably affect our approach to scientific questions.[35]
5. Atomism, Substance, Concept of Body
If in the previous essay, Leclerc has spoken about the physical, i.e., nature, in terms of body (and soul), in this essay Leclerc focuses on the concept of body expressed through different terms, such as atom, substance, compound body, or, eventually, matter, each one having a particular scientific or philosophical connotation (but sometimes similar or even identical meanings), according to the specific author or epoch.
Here, I will merely sketch Leclerc’s argumentation given that the argument can be retrieved in The Nature of Physical Existence and the two articles about it (Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence, and Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature).
The (linguistic) passage from ‘body’ to ‘matter’ (according to the modern connotation of matter) originates in the XVI century: the new scientific theory of elements (understood as ‘changeless’ — against Aristotle’s belief), and the new conception of matter (understood as self-subsistent stuff, no more correlate to form — against Aristotle’s and Plato’s beliefs) will result in the theory of material atomism, where the elements — atoms — are considered ‘one ultimate kind’.[36] This fact, Leclerc says, also led to ‘the identification, implicit or explicit of matter with body’, having important philosophical and scientific consequences on the conception of nature, i.e., the physical.[37] Any property of nature, whether qualitative or quantitative, was reduced to the motion and relative disposition of simple elements, or atoms, which had a ‘material’ character; therefore, compound bodies (including living organisms) were reduced to the summation of such ultimate elements — a mere aggregation of elements; hence, the theory of ‘corporeal atomism’, which considered ultimate elements as the true physical existent, and attributed compound bodies (that is, bodies composed of simple elements) a phenomenal status. Regarding these questions, the positions of Galileo, Bruno, Gassendi, Descartes, and, finally, Leibniz are analyzed by Leclerc. I redirect the interested readers to the two aforementioned articles to look into the considerations of those thinkers on the subject, but I close by quoting Leclerc, who resumes the entire question in a few passages: ‘We have seen that according to the physical theory of elements… body is conceived as a compound and not as a single ultimate entity […]. That means that what really exists are the elementary constituents or atoms; a body is not really one single entity but only appears to be so. Now, Leibniz points out, body appears to be one single entity by virtue of its features such as extension, impenetrability, etc. […]. This means that these features must be admitted to be appearances and not features of what really exists […]. In other words, body must be seen to be phenomenal, and matter must be seen to be phenomenal. Thus, Leibniz was the one seventeenth-century thinker who consistently developed and accepted the philosophical implications of the physical theory of the elements according to which body is a compound.’ [38]
6. Leibniz and the Analysis of Matter and Motion
As Leclerc anticipated in the introductory section, the advancement of physical science in the early XX century necessitated important changes in the classical concepts of space, time and matter. In this essay, Leclerc considers the concept of ‘motion’— a notion which cannot be left untouched by those changes since ‘the concept of motion is intimately bound up with the modern concept of matter [and] the change in the latter inevitably involves the former also.’[29] Given the intimate bound between matter and motion, Leclerc begins with articulating the development of the concept of matter ‘in salient points’, from its understanding as a correlative entity of form (e.g., in Aristotle: matter as ‘hylē’, a correlative of ‘eidos’, form) to its understanding as a self-existing entity, after the developments of the theory of elements by medical men especially, in the first part of the XVII century. Eventually, matter came to be considered fully actual, atomic, unchangeable/fully inert, and movable. This change in the conception of matter entailed the necessity to confront with complicate physical and metaphysical questions such as the status of matter with respect to actuality and potentiality, the physical and the mathematical. If the triumphant conception of material atomism reduced ‘nature’ — the physical existent — to an ultimate ‘really’ existing corporeal/material substance, whose locomotion could describe any quantitative and qualitative change (in nature), the important question of the origin of motion was almost left unanswered. Mayor thinkers such as Newton and Leibniz, agreed on the relevance of the problem ‘insisting on the insufficiency for physics of a purely passive matter’ and that ‘some “active force” had to be acknowledged as necessary’ to explain motion.[40] Eventually, Leibniz’s concept of ‘dynamics’ (i.e., force or power, in Greeks) was accepted by XVIII-century physics, but not in the philosophical sense called for by Leibniz: force was merely seen as an external agent for motion, an ‘acting on’ matter from the outside, rather than an acting ‘within matter’, as Leibniz insisted. Therefore, at a fundamental, philosophical and explicatory level, nothing changed in the known schema matter-locomotion. Ultimately, that schema was unsatisfactory for contemporary physics. In the final paragraphs of the essay, Leclerc’s aim is to show how Leibniz’s analysis of matter and motion can be highly pertinent to the present situation, thereby extending the argumentation he already presented in The Nature of Physical Existence (chapter 21 – see the article Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature). Concerning that analysis, Leclerc especially focuses on two main points considered by Leibniz: 1) matter or body is derivative of the true physical existence or substance (i.e., the monads); as such, it is relational and phenomenal, as well as relational and phenomenal must be considered locomotion; 2) locomotion, as ‘change of place’, necessitates the elucidation of ‘the very important problem of the meaning and ontological status of “place”.’ [41]
Connected to those two points is the important consideration that the transition from one place to another — that is, locomotion — is not merely external, or phenomenal, that is, pertaining to matter or bodies; most importantly, locomotion, according to Leibniz, is derivative from an active force, acting at the level of the monads: this active force is responsible for ‘kinesis’ — change —, at the fundamental level of existence. This basic kinesis, or change, regards the activity of the monads (that is, this is a force which acts ‘within matter’, given that matter is an emergence from the primordial acting of monads). With internal kinesis, also comes locomotion, as ‘the resultant change of locus of monads relatively to each other.’[42] To put it straightforwardly, the active force responsible for changes in nature acts at an ‘inner’ or fundamental level of existence to appear, or actualize, as traditional matter and motion at an ‘outer’, i.e., phenomenal, level of existence (the ‘outer’ level being a resultant — an emergence — of the inner, more fundamental, level of existence; the sense of this passage is also the sense of a passage in a previous article, where I said that ‘locomotion — change of place — cannot be merely understood as an external change of the body… detached from other aspects of change, e.g., generation, perishing, etc., but it is also connected with a more profound internal change…’ — see chapter 21. Matter, Motion, and Substance in the article Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature). This is the interesting conclusion drawn by Leclerc on the basis of the analysis of matter and motion in Leibniz, which can be of the greatest significance with respect to contemporary physics:[43]
… physical science in this century has entered a new stage with the discovery of “micro-entities” [i.e., the elementary particles of the Standard Model]. But they continue to be called and treated as “particles”. That is, thought about them proceeds on the presupposition that they are not different in kind but only smaller than the particles of matter, the atoms, which were the subject matter of the physics of the previous centuries. But these entities are different in basic respects: the laws of motion of the so-called classical physics do not hold for them; they exhibit “quantum” characteristics, and a new mechanics has had to be developed. However, they continue to be thought of as “material bodies” in motion. But might it not be that these categories are inappropriate in this realm? Might it not be that in this realm we are concerned with a different order of entities, a primary order, and their “acts”, and not with a derivative order of entities and their locomotion? A significantly different interpretation of data becomes possible if the presupposition be abandoned that the only “activity” of elementary particles is “locomotion.”
The following two chapters, which conclude PART II of The Philosophy of Nature, are focused on one of the fundamental points, mentioned above and considered by Leclerc, in Leibniz’s analysis of matter and motion: the fundamental role of spatial concepts (i.e., space and place) for the determination of matter and motion, precisely. Therefore, the elucidation of the meaning of spatial concepts is the subject of the two following inquiries. Many of the following points have also been touched on or partially discussed in PART III of The Nature of Physical Existence, especially; so, I also invite the interested reader to take a look at that PART III, which is included in the article Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence.
7. Concepts of Space
The starting point is the acknowledgement of the changed meaning of space in the period between the XVI and XVIII centuries, as the outcome of a long development, Leclerc says.
I immediately want to point out that, as I showed in many different articles at RSaP, such a ‘long development’ is not limited to those two centuries: the debate concerning the meaning of spatial concepts is even more radical since it goes back to Aristotle’s definition of the concept of place, topos. In those two centuries, Leclerc refers to, we have some of the most important doctrines that will lead to the formalization of a new definition of space and place, culminating in Newton’s spatial concepts, or, better, as Leclerc is going to show, culminating in the (mistaken) interpretation of Newton’s spatial concepts.
Now, Leclerc offers a linguistic analysis of the word ‘space’. The ordinary meaning of space in vogue until the XVI century, i.e., the Latin spatium, Leclerc says, was that of 1) an ‘extent’ in the temporal sense — i.e., an extent or lapse or interval of time; 2) a linear distance — i.e., an extent or interval between two or more points; 3) a superficial extent or area.[44] Those meanings, Leclerc continues, are traceable to the ‘Indo-European stem giving “spaein” in Greek, “to draw, stretch out”, from which specifically “a certain stretch, extent, area of ground, and expanse”, especially such an extent used for running races – whence “spadion” in Doric Greek and “stadion” in Attic Greek. From this general meaning of “spatium” as an “extent, stretch, interval” various derivative meanings arose, in Latin and other languages… The older general meaning of “space” as “extent, stretch, expanse, interval” still continues… It is a meaning distinct from and not derivative from the new meaning [i.e., space as a three-dimensional vacuous extent], as is too often supposed.’[45]
Before continuing, I would like to credit Leclerc for having given, in a concise manner, one of the most precise and synthetic linguistic accounts of the meaning of space I can remember: it is not that frequent to find scholars that deal with spatial questions going back to Indo-European sources to establish the ultimate source of meaning for the term ‘space’. Usually, in the most accurate linguistic reconstructions of the term ‘space’, the Greek ‘stadion’ is the ultimate source taken into consideration (the Attic form ‘stadion’ is quoted more frequently than the older Greek Doric form ‘spadion’, which is more directly connected to ‘space’ through the originary PIE roots starting with ‘sp-’ — see the article Back to the Origins of Space and Place). I was particularly glad to find that my reconstruction going back to Indo-European sources was confirmed by Leclerc’s study, which I did not know at the time I started to work on my article. Yet, with respect to Leclerc’s synthetic but exhaustive reconstruction, with my study, I have tried to go even further back in time arguing for a connection between that Indo-European source, certain archaic agricultural practices and ancient systems of measurement.[46] I redirect readers interested to such historical and linguistic questions, concerning the concept of space, to the articles Back to the Origins of Space and Place, Concepts of Space in Vitruvius, and Anachronistic Interpretations of Space.
It was only when a new conception of nature began to emerge in the early XVII century — Leclerc continues — and, in parallel, a new conception of matter also appeared, that the necessity for a revision of the meaning of traditional spatial concepts (place, to begin) was urgently felt. As a consequence of the inquiry into the concept of place a new concept of space, understood as a vacuous extent in the three-dimensional sense, emerged: this was the modern concept of space that we all know, understand and use in common parlance today. Let’s see, following Leclerc, the various passages of this development which unveil how the conceptions of place and space are intimately bound up with matter and motion, and, therefore, with the conception of nature.
As we have seen in the past articles, a new conception of nature — i.e., ‘physis’, the physical existent, or that which exists — emerged in the early XVII century: such ‘physical existent’ was identified with corporeal matter (which means that ‘matter’ is that which exists, the ultimate existent, hence, the notion of ‘physical matter’) having certain characteristics: it was considered fully actual, self-sustaining (that is, no more correlate with another principle, e.g., form, as in older models), impenetrable/solid, inert, atomic (that is, no more divisible into parts), having a certain size, form, etc. Matter was devoid of any qualitative character (colours, sounds, etc. were attributed to the perceiving subject): just quantitative features could be attributed to matter. And, most of all, matter was movable. Being changeless in itself (that is, inert, internally changeless), it was precisely the motion of matter — the motion of its ultimate components, or atoms — that could account for any change in nature, it was thought. This means that change of place was the only change attributable to matter; change of place is locomotion, precisely; motion from one place (locus, in Latin) to another place. As Leclerc says: ‘Nature was investigated and understood in terms of a mathematical analysis of the locomotion of matter. The fundamental laws of nature were laws of motion.’[47] The hallmark of this new conception of nature was Newton’s Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687); the knowledge of nature — i.e., physical science, literally — was a mechanics. Thus, the inextricable relationship between nature, matter, place and motion has been unveiled. Where is ‘space’ in this picture?
The inextricable relationship between nature, matter, place and motion has been unveiled. Where is ‘space’ in this picture?
In this picture, it soon became clear that the scientific measurement of the translation of a body from one place to another required the elucidation of the traditional (Aristotelian) concept of place, which did not fit with the new conceptions of matter and motion. Aristotle’s definition of place — ‘the innermost limit of the enclosing body’, Leclerc says (omitting a part of the Aristotelian definition) —[48] was put under scrutiny again. The definition of place given by Aristotle was dimensional and intimately related to the body: ‘neither larger nor smaller than the dimension of the body in it’.[49] The dimension of the place had to coincide with the dimension of the body but, in the intention of Aristotle, it could not be identified with the (dimension of the) body itself because if the body moved that would mean that the place moved to, and that would be absurd. Without even saying that measurement is impossible if places move… But, even before specific scientific questions of measurement were raised, Aristotle’s definition was under attack because it was bidimensional, while it was thought that, in order to explain motion, place had to be identified with the entire inner volume of the body. That was especially a matter of debate since the XVI century, with pre-modern thinkers such as Scaliger, Telesio, Bruno, etc. (for details I redirect you to the chapters ‘Matter, Motion, and the Concept of Place’ and ‘Place, the Void, and Space’ of ‘The Nature of Physical Existence: PART III – The Modern Concept of Nature’, which is the extended subject of the article Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence). It was properly to define that ‘entire volume of the body’ that the word spatium was brought into use, Leclerc shows. So, what in the beginning was taken to be a reformed concept of place with respect to Aristotle’s definition (an extension from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional notion, and, above all, an attempt to break the intimate bound between the body and the volume occupied by it), and was called ‘spatium vel locus internus’ — ‘space or internal place’ (space, here, was merely another name for place, indicating the ‘internal place’ of the body) —, eventually became spatium alone, that is ‘space’, a self-subsistent physical entity, with no subsidiary reference to place (place became a subsidiary entity of space; therefore, that was a complete reversal of the meanings of space and place — a world turned upside down, I would say).
So, now, Leclerc continues, the problem was to understand the ontological status of this ‘spatium vel locus internus’. There is a subtle question, here, as old as the reason why the definition of place given by Aristotle eventually triumphed: that extent — spatium vel locus internus — had to be distinguished from the body and, most of all, it had to be without any physical connection with it because, if the body moved, the extent before occupied by the body had to be left behind, remaining ‘empty’, otherwise no motion was possible. Yet, to maintain that, like e.g., Gassendi and others did, meant to admit the existence of a ‘void extent’; that is, it meant admitting the existence of the void. The void, that is an ‘extent of nothing’ (or ‘empty space’), is evidently an absurd notion: a contradiction since there cannot be an ‘extension of nothing’; ‘nothing’ cannot be extended (this inconsistency is seldom understood by contemporary observers who grown up with the conviction that ‘extension’ is a physical something). Therefore, that vacant extent (that ‘spatium vel locus internus’) ‘had to be filled with something, for extent had to be the extent of something.’[50]
Descartes was conscious of the problem and offered a solution: the universe had to be taken as a plenum (as Aristotle and almost any thinkers in antiquity believed), a physical as well as a dimensional plenum: that is ‘res extensa’. Descartes understood that there is not a ‘void place’ and that the difference between space, internal place, and corporeal substance was merely conceptual: ‘space or internal place and corporeal substance contained in it, are not different otherwise than in the mode in which they are conceived by us’, Descartes maintained.[51] A fundamental truth never adequately understood — I add. That Cartesian solution had an important consequence: it entailed ‘a complete relativity of motion and place’.[52] A fatal imprecision, according to many; that conception was not enough to identify the motion of bodies with absolute certainty: if bodies move and places be relative, and there is not a fixed reference, how can we establish the exact nature of the motion of bodies? Regarding Descartes’s system, Leclerc speaks of an ‘ontological imprecision in the concept of motion’, and observed that Newton started from that consideration to devise his system, proposing a concept of place ‘exempt from relativity’.[53]
For the motion of a body to be measured with scientific accuracy, Newton believed it was fundamental that the primary places of things be immovable, and it was properly these absolute, immovable places that Newton called ‘immovable space’, in the first Scholium of the Principia. Places, the totality of immovable places, are thus called ‘space’ by Newton; ultimately, that means that place is the object under investigation for Newton (as well as for those who came before him). Not space. We should always keep this in mind. Newton understood the importance of answering the question regarding the ontological status of this place, or space as the totality of places (we read from Leclerc: Newton started to use ‘the term “space” for the “totality of places”, a usage which thereafter became common, for example being accepted by Leibniz and by Kant’).[54] He held a specific position on that, a position which will often be misunderstood by later interpreters, Leclerc observes. Newton understood that the concept of space (i.e., the totality of immovable places), was ‘untenable’ as a self-subsistent entity; therefore, ‘the supposition of space as a physical something had to be entirely rejected and an entirely different analysis and conception of space produced.’ [55] Newton’s solution to this highly difficult metaphysical issue was ‘ingenious’, Leclerc says: accepting the theological view that God was the ‘agent creator of the universe’ entailed that ‘God, as creating agent, was active, acting, i.e., creating beings, “everywhere”, and “everywhen”. “Where” God acts, creating a body, is the “place” of that body. That is, “where” or “place” neither pertains to nor is derivative from body; on the contrary, the “where”, the “place” pertains to God’s acting as being “there” and “then”.’ [56] This means that, for Newton, space (as the totality of places) was not some kind of substantial or actual existent containing all that exists — including God — such as a container can be (to put it bluntly: Newton believed space was not concrete and actual; that was an abstraction: space — as the totality of places — had a ‘spiritual’ character, such is the character of a derivation from God). Therefore, Leclerc is saying, to believe that space or place is a ‘physical’ container — an absolute, actual entity — is a misconception of Newton’s spatial concepts. Leibniz too was guilty of such a misapprehension, as the correspondence with Samuel Clarke clearly shows (on these questions, I redirect you to the paragraph ‘Newton: The Physical Existent and the Mathematical Existent’ in Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence). Newton’s theological or philosophical position was completely forgotten (as well as the leading metaphysical role of place was forgotten — I add) and from the XVIII century onward ‘the doctrine of space and time as some kind of absolute, self-subsistent beings or existents was [improperly] ascribed to Newton.’ [57]
Therefore, the rejection of the Newtonian doctrine as fallacious, (that is, the rejection of physical space) by philosophers such as Berkeley and Hume, in Britain, or Leibniz and pre-critical Kant, in Germany, is actually the rejection of a doctrine which was erroneously ascribed to Newton (it was not Newton’s concepts but the interpretation of Newton’s concepts). In particular, Leclerc’s concluding section of the present essay examines the position held by Kant.
Kant passed through different phases in which he understood the concept of space differently. First, he followed the position held by Leibniz, that is, he thought of ‘space as essentially a relation.’ [58] He believed space was the result of the ‘acts of relating’ between monads. Yet, Leclerc says, by 1768, Kant came to realize that such actings already presupposed that the thing acting (i.e., the monad) was already ‘there’, which meant that ‘being there’ was not dependent or caused by acting. This, Leclerc continues, implied that ‘the “thereness”, i.e., places, of things had to be absolute and not relative.’[59] Yet, absolute, not in the ‘physical’ sense attributed by interpreters to Newton; absolute in an ideal or mental sense, as the a-priori condition for knowledge, which is the spatial doctrine Kant eventually exposed in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
Leclerc will go into a more detailed exposition of the meaning of space in Kant, in the next essay, which I will consider in detail.
Before that, I would like to return to the conceptual fallacy of physical space, i.e., space understood as the container or arena of all possible existents. In this regard, Kant eventually rejected that concept of space as ‘Unding’, i.e., a ‘non-entity’ (to me, speaking about a ‘non-entity’ in physical terms, like we are used to doing when we use the term space in many colloquial expressions or situations, is a conceptual absurdity — what, in philosophical terms, is termed ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’; on this specific question see also my article The Treachery of Space); also, Kant referred to that ‘non-entity’ as a pertinence to ‘the world of fable’, maybe, influenced by Hobbes’ definition of space as ‘a phantasm of the existent’ (see Image 1 and note [12] in Place, Space, and a New Conception of Nature).[60] I guess, more recently, the notorious American psychologist James J. Gibson, author of pioneering experiments in the field of perception, indirectly referred to Hobbes and Kant when he described space as‘a myth, a ghost, a fiction for geometers’ (see James J. Gibson on the Concept of Space).[61]
Those who defend the reality of space, either conceive it as an absolute and boundless receptacle of possible things… or hold that it is itself a relation of existent things, vanishing therefore if things be annihilated… The former is an empty figment of reason… pertains to the world of fable.
IMMANUEL KANT, De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis.
8. Concepts of Space in Kant
Again, this is a previously published essay. Many points have already been discussed or touched on by Leclerc in The Nature of Physical Existence (which is the extended subject of the articles Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence, and Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature), as well as in the previous Chapter 7, above. Therefore, here, to follow the logical thread of Leclerc’s essay, I will briefly recap what has already been said focusing more in detail on new arguments.
Leclerc’s aim, here, is ‘to get at the meaning of the word [space] as Kant understood it.’[62] This implies the extreme prudence of avoiding the attribution of a generic or traditionally modern conception of space to Kant, a concept which we have passively inherited by traditional linguistic usage, as a consequence of ‘the virtually complete dominance of the Newtonian inheritance from the early nineteenth century onward’.[63] We are thus immediately facing the problem of anachronistic interpretations or attributions regarding the concept of space, which is a problem that haunts our current knowledge of spatial concepts, and on which I often come back to in my articles, as a kind of constant warning (among those articles, see Anachronistic Interpretations of Space and The Treachery of Space). Therefore, the best way to approach spatial issues in Kant, avoiding anachronisms and erroneous attributions, is not to forget the historical path that the concept of space followed, in different periods; therefore, again, an historical excursus is necessary, which is obviously similar to the one we already seen in the previous articles or pages. That is the plan followed by Leclerc.
There is a temporal divide in our understanding of the concept of space, Leclerc says: in our time, the noun ‘space’ carries ‘the connotation of some sort of entity’, while that was not the case with the original meaning of the word space/spatium — which persisted throughout the XVII century: the original meaning of ‘interval, stretch or extent, between things’ was merely an abstract noun, and certainly there was no concrete entity attached to it. Then, from an abstract noun, space changed its ‘nature’ and became a concrete noun connoting a physical entity (‘reification’ or ‘hypostatization’ is the philosophical term to express the transformation of something abstract into concrete). Concerning this change of meaning, and the modern presupposition behind ‘space’ Leclerc says:[64]
This change in the meaning of the word was beginning to take place in the eighteenth century and became general in the nineteenth. The original abstract sense nevertheless persisted, though much subordinately, and has done so to the present time. Today the prevailing presupposition is that the term has one fundamental basic meaning which is constant […]; there is extraordinarily little appreciation of the shifts in sense of the various occurrences of its usage, even in the same writer, and often in the same sentence or paragraph. This variation in sense is further confounded by the use of “space” […] as synonymous with “place”.
To appreciate the vicissitudes that took us to understand space according to the modern presuppositions — i.e., space as an actual, self-subsistent, three-dimensional container of all possible events — we must start from the moment in which the debate on the meaning of spatial concepts became acute as a consequence of the development of a new conception of matter, in the XVI and XVII centuries. Above all, we must keep firmly in mind that what was in controversy at that time was not space, which did not exist as a three-dimensional entity, but was ‘place’ — Leclerc reminds us.
So, as usual, Leclerc begins a historical survey, which I briefly recall here. After the change in the conception of matter, which, from a correlative notion (with form – and having characters inherent to it such as change/becoming and potentiality), became a fully actual, changeless, self-subsistent, atomic, impenetrable/solid entity, and having motion as the only type of change attributable to, it became necessary to elucidate the concept of place. For the following reason: since ‘change of place’ was the only change attributable to matter, and since through the change of place or the different disposition of matter (i.e., simple elements, existents or atoms) was possible the explanation of all changes and phenomena in nature, it was necessary to establish with certainty the status of place. That was a cogent necessity since the old concept of place (whose meaning was fixed by Aristotle), was not amenable to modern interpretations of matter and motion. In the old Aristotelian vision, the concept of place was too tied to the concept of body or matter, and most of all since a body moving was three-dimensional and the Aristotelian conception of place was two-dimensional, a change was necessary in the conception of place: so, the place of a body came to define the (three-dimensional) extent left vacant by the body, when it moved — that was the so-called ‘locus internus’. Yet, an old logical problem resurfaced, concerning the notion of an ‘empty place’: an empty place or a void extent was just another name for the void — an illogical notion since there cannot be an extension of ‘nothing’. Initially, to bypass this old problem thinkers like Giordano Bruno began to speak about that ‘locus internus’, left vacant by moving bodies, in physical terms of aether, aer, or spiritus (the world soul) and referred ‘to this extent purely as such, in an abstract sense, and not in respect of its content (in which case it would be called “aether”, etc.) [using] the Latin word for extent or interval, namely, “spatium”,’ i.e., vacuum spatium’.[65]
Before continuing, allow me a brief but important consideration: on this latter respect mentioned by Leclerc concerning Bruno’s ‘treatment’ of the term space, I never found a modern/contemporary thinker, or an interlocutor on spatial questions having such a deep understanding of the problem, which is inextricably related to language and the choice of the appropriate spatial terminology to use in order to avoid the reification of an abstract term, when we are speaking of physical circumstances. Bruno had certainly well settled in his mind the difference between a physical entity — aether, aer, etc. — and an ideal or abstract entity — spatium, vacuum, etc.
Fundamentally, Leclerc says, in the seventeenth century the term ‘spatium’ meant ‘locus’, place. This is especially evident in Descartes, for whom space, internal place, and matter were not different except ‘in the mode in which they are conceived by us’; specifically, Descartes said, ‘place(“locus”) indicates situation (“situs”) more explicitly than magnitude or figure; while, on the contrary, we more often think of the latter when we speak of space (“spatium”).’[66] The connotation of spatium with reference to magnitude, and conserving the ultimate sense of ‘locus internus’, that is, of place, was the meaning accepted by Leibniz, pre-critical Kant, Raphson, and even Newton, Leclerc says.
When in the latter part of the XVII century, that conception of space became current, the necessity to include the specification ‘locus internus’ next to space (in the known proposition ‘spatium vel locus internus’) was less and less necessary. Moreover, the widespread diffusion of Newton’s understanding of space as the totality of places, after the publication of the Principia in 1687, contributed to the usage of space as a self-subsistent term, freed from the presence of place.
At this point, Leclerc comes back to his thesis concerning the mistaken interpretation of Newton’s spatial concepts, which was the ultimate step to complete the transformation of a self-subsistent term or name, still metaphysically subordinated to place, that is space as the totality of places, into a self-subsistent concept: three-dimensional, actual space, which assumed the primary metaphysical role that place had in the past, while place became a subsidiary existent, a part of space. The overturn of the meanings of space and place was thus complete in the XVIII century. This final passage happened since Newton’s metaphysical solution to the spatial question (the grounding of place in God’s activity and the subordination of space to place, as the total sum of places — which entailed spatial concepts to be a derivation of God’s activity, therefore ‘spiritual’ entities, not properly physical entities) was completely obscured by his interpreters, in favour of a mistaken interpretation of spatial concepts in purely physical terms: an interpretation that freed the concept of place and attributed material substance to space, which, in the original Newtonian conception, it did not possess.
As Leclerc already noted, Leibniz too was committed to the misapprehension of the metaphysical meaning of Newtonian spatial concepts, even if both Newton and Leibniz agreed on the primary fact that the subject of this contention, the subject of the spatial question, was place and not space, Leclerc notes, which was only a name to define the totality of places. Place, according to Leibniz, ‘had to be defined and determined by reference to a plurality of monads’ that is, according to the reciprocal situation (situs) of each monad, which meant that place was conceived of as a relational entity: ‘place is “where” one entity is situated with reference to where other entities are […] The total abstract order of places, Leibniz explained, is what is meant by the term “space”.’ [67]
This long historical premise was necessary to Leclerc to present the big picture with which Kant had to confront himself — i.e., the conception and meaning of space which he inherited —, without incurring the risk of attributing Kant or those before him anachronistic conceptions of space (I believe it is a special merit of Leclerc to show an uncommon caution in dealing with the spatial question in order to avoid the projection of modern presuppositions behind space into the thinkers of the past).
Finally, we are back to where we started — the specific subject of this essay: the concepts of space in Kant.
Kant’s initial position is presented in his first published writing, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces, 1747. Even if there were certain differences between Kant’s and Leibniz’s theories of the monads (differently from Leibniz, who only believed in the existence of monads as one kind of fundamental entity, Kant maintained a dualism concerning the nature of the monads: he believed there were spiritual as well as physical monads; moreover, Kant’s monads were not ‘windowless’, they did not exist in isolation but acted on each other, therefore they exerted a kind of ‘internal action’, which was not possible in Leibniz’s merely external order of relations, due to windowless monads),[68] the main metaphysical position concerning spatial notions and their understanding was similar: ‘there can be no place without external connections, situations and relations… Place is where an entity is in relation to other entities… the totality of order of situation in reference to each other, which is called “space” is dependent upon the acting of the monads. Indeed, there is no extension either without the activity’s effecting relations and connections...’.[69] Place as the where of relations; extension (that is, space) as an attribute of relation and not an attribute of substance (!); space as the totality of the order of places. Those are the fundamental metaphysical conceptions that Kant inherited from Leibniz.
Kant’s metaphysical conviction concerning place, space, and extension is still in the same line as Leibniz’s thought when Kant published his Monadologia Physica (1756), Leclerc says. Again, here, it is the activity of the monads, that is their connections and relations, which is foundational for the derivation of the conceptions of extension (‘which is constituted by their [i.e., the monads] sphere of activity’), of place (which is the where, that is, the situation of the monads’ acting), and of space (i.e., ‘the totality of order of situation’).’[70]
However, a decade later, Kant run into difficulties with that position, Leclerc explains; then, Kant almost completely changed his mind on the subject, passing from a relational to an absolutist position (that is, ‘absolute’ in a sense that it is not dependent from the physical but comes before it, therefore a sense which is different from the ‘absolute’ sense that has been attributed to the supposedly Newtonian physical space): he came to realize that the actings of monads presupposed monads were already ‘there’, which meant that ‘being there’ was not dependent or caused by their actings but that “thereness”, i.e., places, had to be an absolute factor, independent of the physical existent. This new metaphysical position was maintained by Kant in the short treatise On the first Ground of the distinction of regions in Space (1768): by taking the example of ‘incongruent counterparts’ (see Image 2 in the article Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature) he sustained that their explanation was unintelligible ‘if the order of relations of situations be determinable solely by reference to the physical substances [and that] the order of places relatively to each other cannot be dependent upon, and thus follow from, physical existents and their activity of relating each other. That order must be somehow ontologically distinct and separate, and presupposed by the activities of the existents- presupposed because unless this be so the activities will be without a sense of direction, i.e., they would have no basis upon which to act, or move, in one direction rather than another.’[71] The break with the Leibnizian doctrine, Leclerc notes, did not consist in the fact that Kant did not believe anymore in the relational structure of space or place (i.e., space as the totality of the order of places relatively to each other); rather it consisted in ‘maintaining that order to be independent of the physical existents, and not determinable by reference to them.’[72] That is the spatial order is not derivable from the relations of physical existents, but must be presupposed, in ideal or mental terms, as an a-priory form of knowledge.
This position was eventually elaborated in the Critique of Pure Reason (1770), according to which the relational structure of the existents — i.e., the place, space and time of that which exists — is the product of an a priori condition of knowledge (that is, it is determined ‘by reference to the perceiving activity of the observing mind’) and not the result of the activity (i.e., relations) of the physical existents.
PART III – Issues
9. The Problem of the Physical Existent
The present and the following previously published essays constitute the core argumentation around which PART IV of The Nature of the Physical Existence was structured; there, Leclerc presented his metaphysical vision of the meaning of the physical existent, i.e., nature, based on some amendments to well-known philosophical doctrines (Leibniz and Whitehead, to begin with) and new scientific discoveries.
As usual for Leclerc, the essay begins with historical considerations, whose details we have already considered elsewhere: specifically, he considered the historical path that led to the affirmation of the modern conception of nature, superseding the old Aristotelian vision; that vision entailed the passage from a correlative understanding of the physical existent — i.e., matter and form, in which internal change, becoming and possibility were an integral part of the existent — to the modern understanding of matter, as a self-subsistent existent, fully actual, changeless, atomic, and definable in quantitative terms only (size, shape, weight, etc.). That new mode of understanding matter also entailed the affirmation of a different understanding of the phenomena of nature, from an organic (in the Aristotelian sense) to a mechanical conception, characterized by ‘locomotion’: it was thought that all changes in nature could be simply explained by the different disposition of the ultimate material constituents, by their motions, that is by change of place, ultimately.
So, Leclerc’s point is to establish the nature and status of such ultimate physical existents or substance, confronting Aristotle’s view to that of Descartes, Newton, Leibniz and Whitehead. Is body (a composite of elementary constituents) an entity ontologically distinct from elementary substances, i.e., having a different ontological level? Are these ultimate existents, or atomic elements, the only entities that have the right to be called ‘ultimate or true physical existents’, as the modern conception of nature, i.e., material atomism, holds? Or are also bodies, true existents? The answer implies different conceptions of nature: one mechanical, reductionist and deterministic, which is the modern view of matter and nature. The other, organic — or even systemic, I add —, anti-reductionistic and probabilistic, which is an alternative (contemporary) conception, and which considers body or compound entities irreducible to their simple constituents, irreducible to mere locomotion, and reintroduces the concept of becoming and possibility, or probability, as characteristic instances of physical existence (i.e., of the physical existent). A conception which, from a metaphysical point of view, is partially indebted to the visions of Aristotle, Leibniz and Whitehead, especially — this is what Leclerc’s work is showing. From a scientific perspective, this new vision is indebted to the doctrines developed since the beginning of the past century, relativity and quantum physics, especially. Concerning the closeness between the metaphysical, organic position held by Aristotle and modern physics, Leclerc reports a statement by Heisenberg: ‘… in modern physics the concept of potentiality, which had played such a decisive role in the philosophy of Aristotle has again been forced into a central position. One can interpret the mathematical laws of quantum theory as a quantitative formulation of this Aristotelian concept of “dynamis” or “potentia”.’[73] Concerning the inadequacy of the mechanical vision of nature intrinsic to material atomism in opposition to an organic, systemic conception of nature and its relevance for a new mode of understanding physical entities, an astonishing declaration by Whitehead, taken from Science and the Modern World, is reported here by Leclerc: ‘The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plane of the “whole” influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it. In the case of an animal, the mental states enter into plans of the successive subordinate organisms until the ultimate smallest organisms, such as electrons, are reached. Thus, an electron within a living body is different from an electron outside it, by reason of the plan of the body… and this plan includes the mental state.’[74] Fundamentally, Whitehead is saying that there is a difference between an electron when it is the constituent of a compound and when it is not. This is a totally different conception of matter and nature, with respect to the modern conception (concerning the meaning of ‘organism’ in the extended sense used by Whitehead — which recovers the original sense of the Greek term ‘organon’, i.e., an ‘instrument functioning with reference to the whole’, and which is also a conception very close to that of a ‘system’, where the ‘whole’ is more than an aggregation of the constituent parts — I redirect you to the article: Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature – 24. The Physical Existent, Simple and Compound).
However, even if Leclerc considers the decisive contributions of Aristotle, Leibniz and Whitehead for a new conception of nature to be developed in the organic sense (and/or systemic sense, I would add, given the originary closeness between the two conceptions), he believes some amendment to their doctrines is necessary (especially concerning those of Leibniz and Whitehead): ‘my conclusion is that Whitehead theory is not able to adequately account for the organic and to provide a basis for the conception of compounds which have a unity… The only way to have a unity and a character of their own… is for compounds to be admitted the status of actual entities or real beings. And this entails the abandonment of the fundamental metaphysical theory which was adopted in the seventeenth century… that the real or actual entities, the ultimate physical existents, must be conceived as restricted to the final constituents of compounds. We are thus faced with the necessity of finding an alternative metaphysical theory of the nature of the ultimate existent’, Leclerc says.[75]
Science and philosophy converge towards the necessity of a new vision of matter, Leclerc observes: among the most important scientific reasons for the rejection of the modern conception of matter (and, therefore, of nature), Leclerc continues, the recognition of the untenability of the conception that the ultimate existents are changeless. In fact, Leclerc says, twentieth-century physical concepts, such as energy or the field concept, ‘have replaced the notion of inertial matter, which means that thought is now in terms of active entities in interrelationship and not of changeless entities which merely move from one location to another. Moreover, in recent physics it is maintained on definite empirical evidence that there occurs a transmutation of the so-called elementary particles into each other… a complete controversion of the seventeenth-century concept of changeless entities’.[76] Concerning that transmutation, a few pages later, we read from Heisenberg: ‘All the elementary particles can, at sufficient high energies, be transmuted into other particles, or they can simply be created from kinetic energy and can be annihilated into energy, for instance into radiation’, which means, Leclerc concludes, that ‘antecedently to such a transmutation that transmutation must have been a potentiality, which then subsequently was actualized.’[77]
Leclerc’s main point concerning the new conception of matter is that to understand compounds (such as atoms, cells, molecules, and more complex bodies) ‘having a unity qua compounds’, that is, compounds understood as the true physical existents and not merely as the aggregation of basic constituents, understood as the only true physical existents, the distinction between potentiality and actuality and the relation between the constituents and the compound is fundamental. According to Leclerc, the actualization of the new unity, i.e., the compound qua compound, ‘must necessarily transcend [the constituents] so that from the standpoint of the actual unity the constituents are potential.’[78] Put in this way, I believe Whitehead’s aforementioned astonishing declaration concerning the change of nature in the mode of existence of an entity when it comes to being part of a compound, is more comprehensible. Leclerc believes that the acknowledgement of unity (and therefore the acknowledgement of a compound as a true physical existent) can only occur if there is a unification of the constituents into a new whole, that is if there is a unifying act, or an agent responsible for the composition of the new unity (‘an agent affecting this unity’, Leclerc explicitly says).[79] This unifying agent, Leclerc explains, cannot be at the same level (of existence) of the constituents, but must transcend them, and this can only be so if the actuality of the unifying agent is emergent in the unifying act. Such an emergent character of the new unity implies a transition from potentiality to actuality (so, we come back to Aristotle’s theory). Leclerc continues by showing how this integrating agency must be understood and where it comes from: ‘it arises from the agency of the constituents, by each of the constituents contributing its agency to constitute an integral combined agency. That is, the agency of each is taken up into, as constitutive of, an integrated agency. Each is thereby part of a new whole which, as an integrated agency, is more than the mere sum of the parts.’ [80]
Leclerc’s final proposition, I observe, is nothing other than the definition of what a ‘system’ is. A definition which is closely related to the understanding of matter in an organic sense — as I mentioned in a passage above, and as Leclerc showed in Chapter 24 of The Nature of Physical Existence, to which I redirect you via the article Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature. Eventually, Leclerc openly came to the adoption of a fully-fledged systemic vocabulary and, therefore, of a systemic or organic vision of nature, i.e., the physical existent. Fundamental to this new vision of nature is the understanding of compounds as true existents, or real beings (and not as ‘phenomenal’ entities, as in Leibniz and, according to Leclerc, Whitehead), and, therefore, the different understanding of the relation that constituents have with the compound they are part of: a relation of potentiality with respect to the actuality of the compound. Leclerc concludes the essay: [81]
Only on such a theory of compound actual or real beings is the concept of organism properly intelligible. And this theory, I suggest, is also able to give a more adequate and coherent conception of the human person than is possible in terms of the current presupposition of actual beings as restricted to ultimate simples [i.e., material atomism].
Ultimately, this is the systemic, organic, processual and place-based conception of nature I am arguing for at RSaP (On the Structure of Reality; What Is Place? What Is Space?; From Space to Place). Again, I completely agree with Leclerc: it is properly in virtue of this new conception of nature (which entails a new conception of matter, place, space and time) that human phenomena can be more adequately understood — and among those phenomena, I want to point out the phenomenon of architecture, which has a very special place, given that, willing or not, the life of human beings, since the beginnings of the first cultures and dwellings, has been constantly exposed to and shaped by different forms of architecture.
10. The Physical Existent as a Compound Actuality
This essay is the resume of the main argument already dealt with in The Nature of Physical Existence Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence, and Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature) and in Chapter 9, above, of The Philosophy of Nature. The central question is thus remarked on by Leclerc, who says that, in consequence of the empirical evidence of contemporary science, ‘we stand in urgent need of a new theory of the physical existent [i.e., a new conception of nature].’[82] Contrarily to the modern presupposition behind material atomism, which reduces nature, i.e., physis, to ultimate existents only, science has now demonstrated that we have to think in terms of compounds and constituents, both as true physical existents. From a metaphysical point of view, it means that we have to (re-) establish the conception of ‘what is’, ‘ousía’, ‘substance’, ‘ens reale’, ‘monad’, ‘primary existent’, ‘actual existent’, etc. (or ‘call it what you will’ Leclerc says) in terms of ‘unity’.[83] Evidence of this structured unitary whole, as a true existent and ‘which is determinative of the role and function of the constituents’ come from biology, biochemistry, micro-physics, (and the same can be said concerning the human realm, as it has been said in the previous chapter). The question pertaining to the relation of the constituents to the whole, with their nature suspended between potentiality and actuality, is the specific subject of the next Chapter, which I will deal with more in detail, given its relevance for our modern understanding of nature.
11. The Problem of Relations
In this essay, the focus concerning the new conception of nature (i.e., the physical existent) is on the concept of relation. If in the modern conception of nature, matter, space (or place), time and motion were considered as four fundamentals, unrelated to each other, with the contemporary physical theory that framework completely changed: special relativity linked space to time; general relativity ‘brought matter and motion into intrinsic relation to space-time… all conceived relatively to each other’.[84] While, I add, quantum physics defined an even more strict relation between all those concepts in terms of physical fields – the ultimate existent according to present-day physicists (see the article Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part Two). Ultimately, the current vision of matter is so different from that of the modern tradition that the very current use of the term matter is highly questionable, Leclerc observes. What is worst, Leclerc continues, is that the continuative use of the term ‘matter’ completely obscures the changes that occurred to the physical existent (i.e., the changes brought about by contemporary physics) as well as to the meaning of the concept of relation, which is necessary to understand the metaphysical changes needed to sustain the new conception of the physical existent envisioned by contemporary science. I add that the same relevant observations made with respect to matter can also be made with respect to concepts of place and space.
Again, here, the core question is our understanding of what should be regarded as the true ‘physical existent’, i.e., what the ancient Greeks called ‘physis’: should the conception of the true physical existent be reserved to ultimate elements only (as in the modern doctrine of material atomism), or should it include compound bodies as well (as in the organic/systemic conception of nature suggested by Aristotle, in part Leibniz, and Whitehead, and as also contemporary scientific findings seem to suggest)? The first kind of vision argues sciences such as chemistry and biology being ‘in the end subdivisions of the fundamental science of physics.’[85] Yet, Leclerc says, there are new theoretical instances in disciplines like chemistry or biology that show the inadequacy of the traditional materialist theory. Concerning chemical substances and the class of molecules, that is, concerning the study of ‘matter’, we read about the necessity for ‘certain levels of organization to be recognized’, which means ‘the rejection of the conception of chemical entities as mere aggregates of constituent atoms’, and that ‘chemical substances and molecules are… to be conceived as the constituents “related in a certain way”.’[86] As an example regarding this new ‘perception’ of matter, Leclerc reports a quotation by the chemist D.W. Theobald of the Manchester University, who argues that ‘the formula “H2O” refers to that class of molecules every member of which is composed of H and O atoms “related in a certain way”, whereas the term “water” refers to that class of substances each member of which has “H2O” molecules as members “related in a certain way”.’[87] This means that ‘water’ is not reducible to the aggregation of its material constituents — H and O atoms — but is a new, actual unity, or substance.
In the realm of biology, the concept of relation, is also fundamental ‘for this science investigates living entities which have the characteristic of being “organism”.’[88] This is the occasion for Leclerc to come back to the meaning of ‘organism’, and even if we already faced that argument, I will come back to it with Leclerc, since it is a decisive notion for the new organic and systemic conception of nature, in contraposition to the modern materialistic conception, which entailed a mechanical and reductionist vision (of matter and nature):
An organism in the biological sense is a kind of whole in which the parts are “organs”, each functioning in relation to the whole. The relation of the parts of an organism to each other and to the organic whole is quite different from the relation of the parts of a mechanism to each other and to the whole mechanism.
Fundamentally, the difference between the two conceptions regards how relations are to be understood: in one case, relations are seen as fully external (this entails a mechanical conception, inheritance of material atomism, which reduces changes in nature to ‘locomotion’ – i.e., the motion or change of place of elemental particles); in the other case relations are ‘internal’ that is, the parts of the organism are ‘intrinsically related to each other’ so that a new emerging unity — i.e., the organism — is formed transcending the actual status and function of the parts/constituents. This is an organic, or systemic conception of nature.
From a historical point of view, the first analytical study of the meaning of ‘relation’ is due to Aristotle, Leclerc says. That study refers to the Categories, ‘a systematic inquiry into how we think about existing things… Aristotle distinguished several kinds of attributes or predicates’ which determine the nature of a thing, that is, things are signified by their ‘substance’, ‘quantity’, ‘quality’, ‘relation’, ‘place’, ‘time’, ‘position or attitude’, ‘state or condition’, ‘acting’, or ‘being acted’.[89]
Concerning the category of relation, that category is specified by Leclerc using the original Greek expression “in reference to”; the correspondent Latin translation for that is relatio, the word literally meaning “a carrying or bringing back” (from ‘relatum’, past participle of the verb ‘rĕfĕro, referre’, re+fero – that is a ‘bringing back’ which presuppose a prior ‘bringing to’, the two actions being reciprocally connected and signifying the link or bond — i.e., the relation — between at least two entities – I add). [90]
If Aristotle ascribed no preference or priority to any of those categories, and considered the categories of ‘quality’, ‘quantity’ and ‘relation’ (which he used more frequently than the others, Leclerc notes), ‘not reducible or derivable from each other’, in later periods things changed: so, with Christian Neoplatonism, being everything reducible to One, perfect thing (i.e., God), the category of ‘quality’, that is the category specifying ‘of what kind or sort’ a thing is, was accorded ‘a status superior to that of the other categories, for it specified the very essence of the thing, what it “is”.’[91] Eventually, quality came to incorporate other categories (such as the categories of ‘quantity’ and ‘relation’), and ‘the term “quality” came to be used as a synonymous with “attribute” and it became common to speak of a thing or substance and its qualities.’[92] This opened up to the possibility of creating a distinction between primary and secondary qualities of matter: for instance, in the seventeenth century, Locke developed a theory of primary and secondary qualities attributable to matter, where ‘primary qualities’ were defined by figure, bulk, number or extension which were all terms defining the old Aristotelian category of ‘quantity’.
Among those quantities, ‘extension’ came to acquire a particular relevance for the philosophy and physics of the modern conception of matter. The reference to Descartes ‘res-extensa’ is immediate. In reaction to that, Leibniz’s analysis of matter and motion (which we have already considered above and in the other two articles on Leclerc’s work) had the important merit of bringing back into the forefront the category of ‘relation’, which is fundamental and decisive for the affirmation of a new conception of the physical existent, i.e., nature, in the organic and systemic sense we are considering. As we have seen, the problem of relations is fundamental to the possibility of considering bodies and not just elementary constitutes as the true physical existent. This implies the necessity of considering the relations between ultimate constituents ‘real’ and not ‘phenomenal’ as in the doctrines of Leibniz or, more recently – Leclerc also maintains — Whitehead. ‘Real’ means ‘acting on’ other primary entities, and, in turn, ‘acting on’ means exercising a certain ‘power’ or ‘force’, capable of changing the internal relationships of the fundamental entities acted on, so that a new superior unity can be constituted as the result of the physical entities in relation to each other. This organic or systemic vision of matter (and, consequently, of nature) as a function of internal relations ‘holds equally for biological entities, chemical entities, and physical entities. This is the philosophical conception of relations necessitated by twentieth-century scientific development’, Leclerc says.[93]
Leclerc concludes the present essay by elucidating this organic or systemic view of life:
‘The vast complexity of nature is not constituted, as conceived in the theory of material atomism, by ever larger aggregations of atoms, but by the structural interrelationship of comparatively simple wholes constituting larger and more complex wholes, which as such wholes enter into structural relationship with holes of a like kind to constitute still more complex wholes, and so on to a great deal of complexity and variety. Philosophically, I would want to argue that […] the various wholes (atoms, molecules, cells, and so forth) in ascending complexity of kinds, have each to be accorded the status of actual existents, each with its determinate character as that entity, its character being constituted by the definiteness of the conjoint acting of its constituents’.[94]
This is the same place-based, organic or systemic vision of nature that I am arguing for at RSaP: a system (or a ‘whole,’ as in the description of Leclerc) is nothing other than the place of processes which may actualize into an elemental-thing place (a concrete fact, an event, or happening), or stays in a potential state for successive actualization. As in the description by Leclerc, there is a hierarchically organized chain of processes (or a place of processes) of increasing size and complexity behind this new conception of nature – see the slideshow, below; see also the articles On the Structure of Reality, Places Everywhere, Image 16 in Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part Two (The Limitation of Being), From Space to Place, particularly Table 1, and the paragraph Place as System).
Slideshow (Images 3, 4, 5, 6): Nature as a system of processes (i.e., a place of processes) of increasing complexity: Physicochemical Systems (MATTER), Biological Systems (LIFE), Social Systems (SOCIETY), Symbolic/Intellectual Systems (THOUGHT). These systems or organic wholes are true physical existents: as systems, they are irreducible to their components. This is a new conception of nature which contrasts the old mechanical, reductionist and determinist conception inherited from material atomism; it is a systemic or organic, antireductionist, and probabilistic conception of nature, which is the one I’m also arguing for at RSaP, and which requires a reformulation of the traditional concepts of place and space, among other fundamental concepts such as matter, time and change (Image 3 by Alessio Soggetti; Image 4 by Fabrice Villard; Image 5, source, by Thomas Bonometti; Image 6 by Tomas Saraceno).
12. Physical Existence, Matter, Activity
The present chapter resumes arguments concerning the difference between the modern conception of nature and matter, developed since the early XVII century, and a new conception which is still under development. Against the old Aristotelian understanding of the physical existent (physis) — the result of the correlative action of matter and form (hylē and eidos) — the modern doctrine understands the physical existent as ‘matter’ only, that is, ‘material substance’, fully actual, self-subsistent, solid, inert or changeless, yet movable. Against this vision, a new conception of physical existence emerged from the beginning of the twentieth century, following important scientific discoveries: contrarily to the old modern vision, the physical existent is now understood as ‘active’, because of the forces acting in it, and potentiality has been re-instated into it. Not merely the ultimate constituents of compounds (i.e., fundamental particles) have the right to be called ‘true physical existents’: also, compounds themselves are real beings, or true existents; they are not merely ‘phenomenal’ entities; this is in virtue of the forces acting at fundamental level ‘within’ matter — forces which are intrinsically determinative of the behaviour (i.e., the relation) of the parts with respect to the emerging whole they are parts of. Besides the concept of acting as relating, the concept of emergence is also a key concept in the new conception of nature, i.e., the physical existent or physical existence. These forces acting (active forces) within the physical existent explain its quantitative and qualitative character.
13. Compounds, Body, Change
Here, the new conception of the physical existent, i.e., nature, is especially considered from the perspective of ‘relations’, which Leclerc also analysed in a previous essay (11. The Problem of Relations).
Again, the presupposition that only ultimate constituents of compounds are identifiable as the physical existent is put under scrutiny. Whitehead also adhered to that presupposition; yet, we have already seen, an amendment of Whitehead’s theory (this is what Leclerc argues for) allows that presupposition to be reverted, and a new philosophical theory of compounds, that is, of ‘matter’, envisioned; that amendment consists in considering ‘actual entities’, or ‘actual occasions’ as Whitehead also termed the physical existents, as compounds on the basis of a different view of ‘physical acting’.[95] Here, the key concept is that of physical acting as relating: if ‘relation’ be understood as ‘fully reciprocal’ (in the same sense as we find in Plato’s Theaetetus, Leclerc says), that is, relation as ‘acting on’ and ‘reacting to’, a bond between entities can be acknowledged by virtue of their reciprocal acting and reacting, so that their physical connection can be said to constitute a new composite whole made by the two (or more) entities in relation (that bond or connection between entities, Leclerc says, is what is usually acknowledged as ‘force’).
This conception of physical acting as a fully reciprocal kind of relation is intrinsic to the very term ‘relation’, in Latin relatio, which, as we have said above — 11. The Problem of Relations — literally means “a carrying or bringing back” (from the Latin ‘relatum’, past participle of the verb ‘rĕfĕro, referre’, composed of re+fero) that is ‘a carrying or bringing back’ which presupposes a prior ‘carrying or bringing to’, the two actions being reciprocally connected, as I observed above (this ‘relatio’, I believe, can be expressed by the symbol: ⇆). Leclerc explains:[96]
By reason of the mutual actings and reacting [of two entities/constituents, at least], compound wholes are constituted which have a unity and thereby also a determinate character, which is definitely more than those of a mere aggregate. This means that the actings of the constituents combine to constitute the whole a new physical existent. Since the combined acting of the constituents affects a unity which transcends the constituents per se, the combined acting must have the “whole” entity as its subject- for the combined acting is not reducible to the constituents severally as its subject. Thus, from the combined acting and reacting of the constituents there emerges a new integral entity, a physical existent in the full sense of itself per se capable of acting. By such a compound entity’s entering into interaction with other such entities, still more complex existents emerge.
Fundamentally, that is a new conception of the physical existent or nature, considered in organic and/or systemic terms.
… that is a new conception of the physical existent, or nature, considered in organic and/or systemic terms.
Here, Leclerc comes back to the notion of ‘organism’, and, in parallel, again, I would like to remark on the contiguity between the notion of ‘organism’ and that of ‘system’: Leclerc defines those emergent integral compound entities as ‘organisms’, properly, since ‘the concept of an “organism” is that of an entity in which parts function with reference to the whole; that is, the parts or constituents are “organs” (in the original Greek meaning of the term as “instruments”) of the whole. An organism — Leclerc concludes — in other words is an entity in which the whole determines the functioning, i.e., acting, of the parts or constituents’, whose combined acting is not reducible to their simple aggregation, as constituents.[97]
I observe that the term ‘system’, is a derivation of the Latin ‘systema’, which, in turn, is a translation for the Greek ‘sustema’, σύστημα, which means ‘a whole compounded of several parts or members, a system’, derived from the combination of the prefix ‘sun-’, or ‘syn-’ (meaning ‘with’, ‘together’, ‘in company with’) and the verb ‘hístēmi’, ἵστημι, which means ‘to stand, make to stand, set, place…’ (the Indo European root ‘ste-‘ or ‘sta-’ is the basic root on which notions of place, localization, or position, are constructed — see the article Back to the Origins of Space and Place) hence the meaning ‘to set together, combine, associate, unite,put together, bring together as friends, etc.’[98] It is now evident the origin of the contiguity between the term ‘organism’ and the term ‘system’, for which, analogously to an organism, the whole is ‘greater’ than its constituent parts.
Coming back to the new definition of matter and nature in the organic (or systemic) sense, which entails compound entities to be true physical existents, Leclerc takes as an instance of this new vision the studies on dissipative structures made by the Nobel Prize physical chemist Ilya Prigogine; such structures are described as ‘compound individuals to be accorded a status which is not ontologically different from that of the “integral compound entities” which I have conceived as physical existents in the full sense as themselves per se acting’, Leclerc says, on the base of a consideration of the chemist Joseph Earley.[99] The work of Prigogine certainly supports the thesis and the scientific foundations of a new conception of matter (and, therefore, of nature), which incorporates notions of change, process, becoming and potentiality, as Leclerc is showing. Prigogine’s From Being to Becoming and Order out of Chaos are exemplary texts that are consistent with this new vision of nature Leclerc is arguing for and I am proposing at RSaP, for its direct relevance to our comprehension of the concepts of space and place.
The new conception of nature which is emerging is no more compatible with our understanding of the physical (i.e., physis, the physical existent) considered in a strict ‘material’ sense, as a fully actual, atomic and changeless existent, that is, without internal change, becoming, potentiality, etc. The old conception is mute concerning ‘body’ (in the sense of compound), and ‘mind’, which was ‘extruded from the physical and had to be accorded a quite independent ontological status’.[100] The merely physical perspective of nature, which identifies the physical with the material i.e., (matter), has to be rejected since it causes a bifurcation of nature into two unbridgeable levels of existence, the physical and the mental, without possible reconciliation.
Alfred N. Whitehead was one of the few thinkers of the twentieth century who understood the negative impact of a bifurcated nature on men’s relation with nature; therefore, he tried to overcome that fundamental dualism attributing a physical and a metal pole to actual entities through their activity of prehension. Whitehead’s doctrine had also the explicit merit of reintroducing as a fundamental character of nature the notion of process, that is, of change, becoming and potentiality, which is what the modern conception of nature lacked since it only acknowledged locomotion as the kind of change attributable to matter.
So, Leclerc observes, a philosophical theory which is able to provide a foundation for what contemporary physics has observed — the physical existent conceived as active — is necessary; such a theory will help to take account of a widened conception of change, in the Aristotelian sense, where external change (locomotion) is associated with all other qualitative and quantitative changes pertaining to the physical existent. This, Leclerc observes, ‘brings up the problem of the nature of life’, which is directly related to the problem of ‘change’, and therefore, brings back to the fore ‘the issue of the relation of the biological sciences to physics and chemistry.’[101] To overcome these difficulties and find the opportune connections between these different instances, it is critical to surpass the metaphysical dualism between matter (i.e., body) and mind, as Whitehead showed in the recent past. ‘Mental functioning can be, and needs to be, readmitted as integral to physical existence as essentially involved in physical acting’, Leclerc concludes.[102] This ‘mental functioning’ entailed in physical acting, according to Leclerc, entails a teleological factor, which is requisite for an organism to be regarded as ‘living’ and, consequently, free from determination. The origination of a teleological factor in the mental or conceptual pole of the physical existent, Whitehead argued, was probably a mode of survival of the physical existent a response to the environment changing, or even an adjustment, i.e., a change of the physical existent itself, to the environment changing — a mode of response that characterizes the physical existent as ‘living’.[103]
These final considerations, on the basis of Whiteheadian intuitions, allow Leclerc to extend this understanding of the physical existent in intrinsic relation to the environment. Considerations which — I say — extend the systemic understanding of the physical existent in an ecological sense, that is, they include the environment as a part of the physical existent. If in the past essays we have seen the impact of the conception of relation on the ‘internal’ nature of the physical existent (allowing its extension to include compound bodies), now compound bodies, or ‘organisms’ and ‘living organisms’ in relation to the environment, constitute even more complex unities. To express what I have called ‘the systemic understanding of the physical existent in an ecological sense’ through Leclerc’s terms:[104]
The complexity of an organism is not only in itself, however; its internal complexity is matched by the complexity of its relations with the environment – these two complexities are interdependent. The complexity of interrelations with the environment is not merely a complexity of “responses to” other existents, but consists also in a complexity of “interweaving with” its environmental constituents… organisms are not adequately understandable and analyzable when conceived only in terms of the interrelatedness of their parts or constituents to the organic whole; it is necessary to take equally into account the interrelatedness of the organic wholes to each other, this holds evidently for “living” organisms, but not exclusively for them. In other words, this interrelatedness is of great importance also to nonbiological sciences.
Again, this is the same organic or systems view of nature that I am arguing for at RSaP, on the basis of a new conception of place, considered as a system of processes: if such localized processes actualize, elemental things-place (what we usually call ‘matter’) emerge.
14. Motion, Action, and Physical Being
The main focus of this essay is on the conception of matter (i.e., the physical existent) according to contemporary physics: how did we arrive at developing a new conception of matter? In which terms is still possible to speak about ‘matter’ if the conceptualization behind it completely changed in the passage from the modern to the contemporary epoch?
Developments in physics, in the 20th century, modified our perception of the concepts of space and time. Conversely, the concept of motion, which is entailed in those concepts, was not subject to the same scientific and philosophical attention or scrutiny, Leclerc observes. However, motion is a critical notion, since there is a deep connection between the physical existent (i.e., what we usually understand as and call ‘matter’), motion, space (or place), and time. XVII century changes in the conception of matter obscured that connection, which in the Aristotelian doctrine was decisive: according to Aristotle, matter (hylē) was correlative of form (eidos) and their correlation entailed change, which was inclusive of, generation, decaying, qualitative and quantitative change, other than change of place (the term kinesis was especially used by Aristotle, and also by Plato, in connection with the last three types of change — Leclerc observes; to render that philosophical meaning in the Scholastic period was used the word ‘motus’, hence the English ‘motion’; it is evident that our modern understanding of ‘motion’ is very far from the original Greek concept ‘kinesis’).[105] This was the quite complex conception of the physical existent, physis, according to Aristotle: an integrative concept, including ‘matter’ (hylē), ‘form’ (eidos), and different types of change (genesis, phthora, and kinesis, which included locomotion, phora); therefore, physis, also entailed becoming and, as such, a process of change from potentiality (dynamis) to actuality (energeia) driven by purpose (entelecheia and telos) — see The Nature of Physical Existence: PART II – The Concept of the Physical, in the article Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence.
In the new doctrine of the physical being as ‘matter’, devised since the early XVII century, few traces were left of that original concept: all internal relations (between those different conceptualizations belonging to the Aristotelian physis) were disrupted, and we were left with matter understood as the physical being, fully actual, and devoid of any internal change, that is, changeless or inert; only external locomotion was attributable to matter. Therefore, in the end, motion was something external to matter, different from it. That was at the origin of the modern division of matter, motion, space (or place) and time which were ‘neither mutually entailed in, required by, nor derivable from each other.’[106]
Given that matter was considered an irreducible, fully actual, homogeneous and changeless entity, ‘the new seventeenth-century science of the physical or nature was the inquiry, not into matter per se […] but into the motion, or more specifically the locomotion, of matter. In other words, the new physical science was a mechanics, i.e., an applied mathematics of motion’, Leclerc says. [107] But if motion is ‘external’ and not derivable from matter, what is the origin of motion? To answer that philosophically founding question, which could also explain the origin of all change in nature (given that all change was reducible to locomotion), the notion of ‘force’ was introduced as the cause of motion or change of motion, therefore turning the science of mechanics into dynamics — from the Greek dynamis, ‘force’. Newton, in his Principia, from the very beginning, introduced the concept of force to explain the laws of motion — see also Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part One. That opened the question of the metaphysical status of ‘force’ since force couldn’t be identified with motion (the force is the cause of motion), or with matter (being the cause of motion, force entails a power or a potency to act, which is incompatible with matter, given that matter was considered ‘changeless’, devoid of any principle of change). No adequate philosophical explanation was given to the concept of force which, indeed, was an indispensable factor for scientific schemes, Leclerc observes. In the nineteenth century, Leclerc continues, another fundamental scientific concept was introduced: the concept of ‘energy’, which did not replace the concept of force, but extended its meaning, as the capacity or power of doing work (a derivation of the Aristotelian concept ‘energeia’, ‘ἐνέργεια, compounded from the prefix ἐν, “in”, and ἔργον, “work, action”.’)[108] Again, Leclerc says, the question of the metaphysical status of ‘energy’ raised. And since energy ‘was not able to be ascribed to matter, implicitly it was accorded the status of an independent physical ultimate,’ with the consequence that physics had to deal with two ultimate substances — matter and energy — whose unclear relation soon turned into a physical dualism.[109] A dualism which has been overcome by the trend of 20th-century physics, as Leclerc explains: while relativity theory considers ‘matter (mass) and energy as relativistically equivalent’, in microphysics ‘energy has come to be conceived as fundamental, it being capable of transformation into matter.’[110] This is Werner Heisenberg’s statement on the metaphysical implication of this new understanding of matter:[111]
The elementary particles in modern physics carry a mass… Since mass and energy are, according to the theory of relativity, essentially the same concepts, we may say that all elementary particles consist of energy. This could be interpreted as defining energy as the primary substance of the world.
If in the XVII century substance was identified with physical matter, and if in the XX century substance was identified with energy, given that the two conceptions have a completely different understanding of change, actuality, and potentiality, and being the physical existent (substance) ‘not material at all in any previous sense of that word’, how can we keep on using the term ‘matter’ to identify the physical existent?
Here we are right at the core of Leclerc’s essay. The implications of this new understanding of the physical being, which is unconceivable as ‘matter’, should affect not only the domain of physics but also that of chemistry and the biological sciences, Leclerc notes. Concerning contemporary physics, the most relevant point is that ‘energy’ — as ‘the power to effect’— is not to be regarded as an external source of change, for example causing the motion of other entities, but should be considered as intrinsically acting in respect of the physical entity itself, which means that the entity is ‘self-moving’; to put it differently, contrarily to the old conception of matter, which was considered changeless, here, change is ‘internal’ to the physical existent (i.e., matter), intrinsic to it. From a metaphysical point of view, that means that ‘energy’ (‘force’ or ‘power’) is not an ultimate existent, but belongs to the ultimate existent, that is, energy presupposes some subject, which is the ultimate subject of philosophical analysis. Then, ‘force’ or ‘power’ is constitutive of the subject, distinguishable but not separable from it; ‘force’ or ‘power’, Leclerc continues, must issue in action to cause some effect (such as motion, or change): ‘force’ or ‘power’, ‘per se is potential and can affect only by “actualizing” its potentiality in an action’, Leclerc says, concluding that what is implicated in a ‘force’ or ‘power’, through action, is a process, which involves some kind of change;[112] in the case of motion change is in respect of place; more generally, the change involved in action, or acting, is the change from a state of potentiality to the state of actuality — ‘this state being that in which the end of the force or power is achieved or realized.’ [113]
The main point of this inquiry into the new conception of ‘matter’ (provided there is still a sense in calling the physical existent ‘matter’) is that change is now admitted as an intrinsic (internal) characteristic of the physical existent. The old materialist doctrine of the physical existent considered as ‘physical matter’, atomic, actual and changeless has to be rejected since the two conceptions, ‘actuality’ and ‘changelessness’, are reciprocally contradictive: ‘actuality’ is that which is ‘in act’ and that which is in act, being ‘in action’, is the opposite of that which is in itself changeless as the old concept of matter wants. The ‘action’, or process of change, intrinsic to the new physical existent, Leclerc says, does not merely involve a change of place; it must involve ‘change’ both in respect of quality and quantity — these species having a connection, that is: ‘the physical being is not conceived as having three distinct and different kinds of “action”, i.e., three separate and simultaneous “acts” not involved in each other. Rather, the physical being as subject is to be conceived as involving one process of acting having three aspects. This means — Leclerc continues — that the “agency”, the “process of acting” is analyzable as involving three distinct — but not separate or separable — outcomes or results.’[114] One of these distinct aspects regards change of place, locomotion, which as distinct, is capable of being analyzed in abstraction from the other two, and indeed the science of mechanics was based on that, even if from a philosophical point of view, Leclerc observes, ‘it is to be recognized as an “abstraction”, and not to be mistaken for a separate, concrete process.’ [115]
I’ve also spoken about this important question, with respect to my understanding of the relation between place and matter, in the article Place, Space and a New Conception of Nature, section 21. Matter, Motion, and Substance.
Action, Leclerc says continuing his philosophical analysis of how science in the twentieth century considers the physical existent, is not only an internal or immanent process of the physical being; a physical being is also in action or active in respect to other physical beings, or to put it differently, a physical being is also interactive o in interaction with other physical beings.[116] According to Leclerc, the interaction between two entities has to be considered as ‘both [entities] simultaneously mutually affect each other by “acting on” each other’, and not as in the old materialist, atomic conception, where matter had a passive character.[117]
In conclusion, this view of the physical being or existent contrasts with the modern conception of matter, which was considered passive and inert. This new view has a significant implication for the science of nature, Leclerc says: ‘locomotive change must be seen as ‘but “one aspect” of the change involved in the process of acting of physical entities, and not the most fundamental one at that. Primacy must be accorded to the process of acting as relational and to the internal change involved in the “process” of acting.’ [118] This consideration concerning the relational aspect of acting should have a considerable impact on chemistry and biology, especially, but also in micro-physics, Leclerc observes. To conclude, concerning the new conception of the physical being, the locomotive aspect cannot be separated from the relational and the internal process of acting, the latter aspect being fundamental. The role of metaphysics will be decisive to take account of these aspects in the inquiry into nature.
15. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Modern Science
In this final essay, Leclerc analyses the influence that various branches of philosophical thought or doctrines had on the development of the conception of nature.
Introducing the argument, Leclerc observes that science was determinative of philosophical thought in the modern epoch, as well as religion and theology were determinative during the medieval period. Leclerc considers the period from the early XVII century until the late XVIII century one in which ‘philosophy was close to science’.[119] The following period, is marked by their disconnection, heritage of a different conception of matter culminating in the formalization of the dualism between the physical (matter) and the ideal (mind) in the philosophy of Descartes. That division eventually resulted in two main philosophical movements, positivism and idealism, which had different attitudes toward science. ‘Positivism — Leclerc says —, withdrawing philosophy from any positive contribution to the knowledge of the nature of things, eschewed metaphysics, while idealism asserted metaphysics as the only route to a true understanding.’[120] Both streams of thought soon run into the shallows, losing their initial drive: one readmitting certain metaphysical or ontological instances, the other, which gave way to phenomenology, without being able ‘to free itself from the inheritance grounded in the seventeenth-century dualism and its consequent separation from science.’[121] Therefore, Leclerc maintains we are in the present time at a turning point, in which it is necessary to reconsider these presuppositions, taking ‘a careful look at our philosophical inheritance’ to run out the shallows.
So, Leclerc, as usual, makes use of a historical perspective to analyze the influence that Platonism, Aristotelianism, and, especially, Neoplatonism had on the positions developed from the early XVI century onwards by thinkers such as Cusanus, Bruno, Paracelsus, Basso, and, later, by Descartes, Leibniz, and especially Kant, whose critical philosophy, in accordance with the metaphysical dualism, was a watershed concerning the division of philosophy from science (for a detailed analysis of all these historical passages, I redirect you to the article Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence). Kant’s critical position gave rise to subjectivistic and idealistic positions which ‘fundamentally changed the stance of philosophy with regard to nature… denying the knowability of physical things in themselves’, given that the knowledgeable had to be ‘grounded in the mind not in things.’ [122]
In the early twentieth century, as a reaction to subjectivistic positions and epistemologies, realist doctrines emerged, even if, Leclerc says, ‘these realist reactions have been primarily epistemological’ because of the long-lasting revulsion against metaphysics. One notable exception was Alfred N. Whitehead who, more clearly than others, understood that a metaphysical theory was necessary for physical things in themselves to be the subjects of propositions.
Here, the question is how to connect mind and matter — the ideal or mathematical and the physical; specifically, concerning our understanding of nature as matter, which was based on the presupposition that any change is understandable in terms of material locomotion, the question is how there can be scientific knowledge of physical entities (matter) in motion. This means questioning the role and status of place (‘the problem concerning place is intrinsically bound with the issue of the physical existent’)[123] and geometry (‘the problem concerning geometry is intrinsically bound up with the issue of the relation of the mind to the physical’).[124] Before all, these are fundamental metaphysical questions. Whitehead’s main works were dedicated to those questions, and, in the attempt to answer them, he devised an essentially Aristotelian metaphysical theory according to which ‘the object is a thing received [the reference is to Whiteheads’ theory of the physical prehension of the datum, precisely] and not […] either a mode of reception or a thing generated in the perception.’[125] In this position, which implies the rejection of the modern ontological dualism — i.e., the rejection of the separation of the physical and the mental — ‘it is the physical in itself which is essentially knowable and know’, Leclerc observes.[126]
According to Leclerc, Whitehead’s metaphysics is one possibility to run out of the shallows. However, here, Leclerc’s main point is to show that, now, science is confronted with fundamental problems, ‘which involve more than essentially scientific issues, which involve philosophical issues of the utmost difficulty and complexity […] and which will involve the abandonment of modern Neoplatonism subjectivism, and the turn to an essential Aristotelianism.’[127] We stand in the need of a new metaphysics, and of a union of physics and metaphysics in terms of a new philosophy of nature. This is Leclerc’s fundamental thesis.
Before leaving the conclusion to Leclerc, allow me a personal statement. As far as I know, no one better than Leclerc has been able to express with such clarity of intent the importance of the concepts of place and space in their connection with men’s new understanding of nature. This new understanding required and still requires (the process is still in the act) the reformulation of fundamental philosophical and scientific concepts, such as the concepts of matter, place, space and time, which are also the core concepts of my discipline architecture, which, as any other human domain or realm, will not be left untouched by those changes. Since almost one or two decades, at least, the changes caused by the impact of this new understanding of nature on the discipline of architecture are evidence for all architects; what is still missing is the reformulation of the old concepts of matter, place, space, and time in terms of such a new understanding of nature: this is the focus of my research at RSaP–rethinkingspaceandplace.com. This effort for rethinking fundamental concepts is a cogent necessity since concepts drive our acting; the reformulation of old concepts, in parallel with the new conception of nature, is decisive for the progress, internal clarity and coherence of the architectural discipline, which is a discipline suspended in-between the abstract and the concrete, the mental and the physical, which are all issues that have a metaphysical foundation. Architecture, just like any other discipline, cannot help but be grounded on the metaphysical elucidation of concepts such as space, place, matter, and time, which are fundamental concepts on which it is theoretically structured.
Philosophy is being faced in our time with the necessity for a more thoroughgoing rethinking of the fundamental philosophical problems, concepts, and categories throughout its entire range, than philosophy has undertaken since the time of Plato and Aristotle. This rethinking will affect science no less deeply than it will philosophy itself. And the consequences for human life will be no less great than those of the new science and philosophy of the seventeenth century. [128]
The Relation Between Natural Science and Metaphysics
I close this series of articles dedicated to the work of Leclerc introducing a brief paper titled ‘The Relation Between Natural Science and Metaphysics’, which the author presented at a conference held at Colorado State University on the theme ‘The World View of Contemporary Physics: Does it Need a New Metaphysics?’, in 1986.[129] We could see this paper as the continuation of the argument concerning the important connection of scientific and metaphysical issues dealt with in the last chapters of The Philosophy of Nature: specifically, the metaphysical inconsistencies of the new conception of nature brought about by contemporary physics are analyzed starting from a historical perspective. This, according to Leclerc, results in the need for a new metaphysics, a field of knowledge that contemporary physics cannot do without elucidating the nature of fundamental concepts. This also entails the recovery of the philosophy of nature, which is the common ground for physics and metaphysics.
Leclerc’s starting point is the conception of Philosophia Naturalis, which, in the XVII century, was grounded on the mutually inclusive contribution of physics and philosophy: the application of mathematics to motion and a set of philosophical/metaphysical issues (the analysis of the basic concepts of nature, the concept of motion, and the prime mover) were some basic issues. When, in the early XVII century, a new conception of nature as matter was introduced, those basic modes of scientific and philosophical integrated knowledge were subject to criticism: Descartes, at first, (in his Principles of Philosophy), and, then, Newton (in his Principia) formalized a new framework for the Philosophia Naturalis. In Newton’s doctrine, which was based on a metaphysics of corporeal atomism, mechanics (the mathematical study of motion) and philosophy (most notably his Definitions, Axioms, and the Scholia on the one hand, and the agency of God, as the prime mover, on the other hand) were not separated; as Leclerc says, Newton’s conception of philosophia naturalis was ‘an integration of mechanics and metaphysics.’[130] That was still a philosophy of nature, as the very title of Newton’s work clearly asserted — Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
Newton’s system triumphed over the Cartesian alternative; however, the tremendous success of the science of mechanics in describing the universe as a mechanical structure, by means of Newton’s laws of motion, completely obscured the philosophical/metaphysical part of the Principia, in particular, the role of God was completely rejected, Leclerc says. The consequence was that ‘the science of mechanics was beginning to be regarded as an autonomous science’ — a program which was specially developed in France, in the late XVIII and the early XIX centuries, by a group of mathematicians and philosophers: Maupertius, d’Alambert, Lagrange and Laplace. Laplace, especially — Leclerc observes —, was convinced that ‘the science of mechanics was the complete understanding of nature as a mechanistic system [and] this rendered the hypothesis of God entirely otiose.’[131]
What was crucial for Laplace was that fundamental concepts such as ‘force’, ‘mass’, ‘motion’, cause’, or ‘laws’ were legitimate in mechanics only as quantities — e.g., as ‘ratios, which could be formalized in the equations of a calculus’; [132] what each of them really was, had to be eliminated from consideration. The increasing success of mechanics, Leclerc notes, was extended to the analysis of any other phenomenon of physical origin: heat, light, electricity, magnetics, etc. Any remnant of metaphysical presuppositions had to be eliminated from physics: that was ‘the program carried out by Mach, Kirchhoff, Herts, and Poincaré.’[133] Therefore, during the XIX century, the fully autonomous science of mechanics completely replaced the old ‘philosophia naturalis’: that was a completely new conception of the inquiry into nature. And when in the early XX century quantum phenomena were discovered, that mechanical mindset was extended to a new field: quantum mechanics; as Leclerc says, ‘the entire enquiry into the subatomic or microentities is being pursued as a mechanics-the mathematical analysis of entities in motion.’[134]
Concerning this change in the conception of the enquiry into nature (the passage from the philosophy of nature to mechanics, with the apparent exclusion of any philosophical issue), Leclerc observes that ‘the science of mechanics had become identified with the science of nature. Since science means “knowledge” – Leclerc continues – what is entailed is that mechanics is the true knowledge of nature; in other words, mechanics, the mathematical investigation of motion, “is” science. This new doctrine respecting “science” is what, in the nineteenth century, came to be known as “positivism”, the doctrine that “science” is the “positive” (the term derived from Auguste Comte), that is, the true, genuine, and certain knowledge of nature.’’[135]
The consequence of this ‘positivist doctrine’, Leclerc notes, is that the metaphysical presuppositions and basis that the science of mechanics inherited from the XVII century (e.g., ‘(1) the conception of nature as matter, wholly inert and itself changeless, with locomotion… the only change nature is capable of; (2) the conception of this matter as being inherently mathematical… essentially quantitative, not qualitative; and (3)… being exhaustively understandable in terms of mechanics, that is, the applied mathematics of motion’)[136] were completely removed. Yet the inconsistencies behind this positivistic approach were unveiled when non-Euclidean geometries were discovered and when Kant put into question the status of mathematics, completely reverting the position of the object with respect to the subject: ‘objects must conform to knowledge; our faculties of knowledge determine the truth respecting physical things.’ [137] This entailed mathematics was a pure creation of the human mind, as also Einstein maintained, speaking about ‘the fictitious character of the fundamental principles’ with reference to his own theory of relativity and the Newtonian theory, and qualifying ‘fundamental concepts’, ‘postulates’ and ‘fundamental principles’ as ‘hypotheses arrived at by the “free creation of the human mind”.’[138] Fundamentally, Einstein raised a crucial epistemological issue (which he was not able to answer, Leclerc says) based on the presupposition of the metaphysical dualism inherited by the old conception of nature as matter: how can freely created mathematical ideas, concepts, or hypothesis provide true knowledge about physical reality if the two — ideas and physical objects — are ‘completely separate and ontologically different’ realities?[139] Once rejected as untenable the answers offered by Descartes and Newton, which were grounded on the hypothesis of God’s activity, what are we left with? There is ‘no way out of this epistemological difficulty except in terms of a new metaphysics’ is Leclerc’s answer.[140]
After having elucidated the meaning of the term ‘metaphysics’ (in Aristotelian terms: ‘the science that studies the first principles and highest causes of things’; or, more generally stated by Leclerc ‘metaphysics seeks the greatest or highest generalities or universalities… that are involved in the enquiry into nature whose theories and concepts presuppose, usually tacitly, these ultimate generalities’), and after having elucidated its procedure or methodology (metaphysics ‘involves the critical examination and evaluation of … antecedent metaphysical theories and systems and those tacitly accepted without explicit recognition in systems and schemes of thought… and in practical human activity’ — which is what Leclerc calls the critical side of the metaphysical procedure, so that there is also a ‘constructive side’, according to which metaphysical hypotheses or ‘generalizations — which traditionally originate from particular spheres of experience — necessarily will have to transcend these fields to ensure their fully general application’), Leclerc focuses on the necessity of a new metaphysics freed from old presuppositions — one specific metaphysical issue being that of the developments of natural science too predominantly concerned with the question of locomotion, as the fundamental kind of change in the universe.[141]
… metaphysics seeks the greatest or highest generalities or universalities… [metaphysical] generalizations necessarily will have to transcend these [particular] fields to ensure their fully general application; it is in this respect that their validity as truly metaphysical generalities is apt to be found wanting.
Before considering the final part of Leclerc’s intervention focused on the main metaphysical issues of contemporaneity, I would like to return to the meaning of metaphysics in connection with its basic intent of transcending particular fields of applications: this is a basic issue for me, especially in reference to the meaning of spatial concepts, which are metaphysical concepts before being the subject of specific disciplines. Since the presentation of this website, I urged for the necessity to find a convergence between different conceptions of space and place among different disciplines: I do not believe we will make a good service to human knowledge and progress if we admit a space and place for physicists, one for philosophers, one for architects, one for psychologists, one for social scientists, one for artists, and so forth. There must be one space and one place (and one matter, one time, etc.) that transcend all particular meanings; this can only be obtained if we find a metaphysical convergence, as Leclerc is hypothesizing, and as I also maintained in my articles. This entails we need to find a common territory to offer concepts a proper ground and this proper ground can only be offered by metaphysics. Without metaphysical investigations or considerations, there can be no unity between the different concepts of space, place, matter, and time of different disciplines. This is what I meant when, on different occasions, I said that we should ‘find a convergence between different interpretations’ concerning fundamental concepts such as space and place (and, therefore, matter and time, given that these are all connected concepts) going beyond sectorial or disciplinary divisions. For instance, see paragraph 2. Uncertainty of Interpretation in Preliminary Notes, or when I also spoke in terms of ‘convergence’ in different passages of Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part Two, Place, Space, and the Fabric of Reality, or when I also spoke in terms of ‘convergence’ between the concept of place and the field-concept in From Space to Place: it was on the base of that hypothesis (a fundamental convergence between physical and philosophical concepts) that I envisioned my definition of ‘place as system’, which extends the traditional meaning of place to include any dominion of human knowledge, from philosophy to physics, from architecture to art or, with a single expression, from scientific to humanistic territories (concerning my reformed understanding of place see Places Everywhere, and What Is Place? What Is Space? especially).
Leclerc concludes his paper briefly examining some metaphysical issues that, according to him, seem ‘especially pertinent to physics at the present time.’[142]
The first metaphysical issue concerns the presuppositions behind material atomism, which continue today in contemporary physics: we have found that atoms are not properly atoms, but we keep on calling them atoms and, this is the point, we keep on considering ‘particles’ as physical matter, even if the conceptions behind traditional matter (matter is solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable…) are completely different from those behind the model of the physical existent that contemporary physics is showing us. ‘Particle’ Leclerc says, means ‘little part’; ‘little part of what? The answer evidently is little part of matter’, Leclerc observes.[143] So, the issue, here, is to understand what is meant by matter, given that ‘particles’ do not behave in accord to classical motion and a new mechanics (quantum mechanics) has had to be developed. Moreover, ‘particles’ exhibit a wave-like character, which has nothing to do with the solid and massy entity of the traditional model of matter. Further, these new entities also behave differently from traditional matter (that is they are not ‘inert’), given that in particular circumstances they ‘cease altogether to have a particulate character, abruptly changing into electromagnetic radiation.’[144]
These circumstances immediately take Leclerc to analyze other two highly relevant related metaphysical issues for physics. The first regards the question of continuity/discontinuity or discreteness: if we consider Descartes’s res-extensa, its atomization into atomic matter operated by Newton (atoms are per se continuous), Maxwell’s electromagnetic field and Einstein’s’ spacetime, these physical entities are all continuous, fundamentally; conversely, quantum physics raised the question of discontinuity or discreteness with respect to the behaviours of particles (the term ‘quantum’ is itself the connotation of a fundamental discontinuity of matter). How to reconcile such opposite visions of the physical existent? Here, Leclerc observes, we are confronting with a domain of knowledge that goes back in time to the different ontological models of Parmenides and Aristotle: one, concerning ‘being’ considered ‘continuous, unchanging in itself, and immutable’ (a conception that was taken over by Plato and then by Neoplatonism and later thinkers, becoming a dominant position at present), the other necessarily involving ‘becoming’ (in correlation to being), a model which had ‘scant adherence’, Leclerc observes. This difference takes us to the other relevant metaphysical issue for the contemporary vision of the physical existent: the one regarding the nature of microparticles ‘as being “active” and as “interacting” with each other’ which is a contradiction in terms if we keep on speaking in terms of matter, which, by definition, is inert and changeless. An ‘acting entity’, Leclerc observes, entails discontinuity for ‘acting is not a continuous process; an act occurs now and as that act, it is over; it can only be superseded by other similar acts. “Acting” involves quantization’, Leclerc says quoting Whitehead and returning to the difference between matter, which entails continuity, and particles, which entail discontinuity.[145]
The only way to clarify these issues, Leclerc continues, is by appealing to metaphysics: a new partnership between theoretical physics, experimental physics and metaphysics is now required, Leclerc concludes.
From my specific position, as an architect, I’d say that the time is also ripe for a new partnership between architecture and metaphysics: this is necessary to understand the profound implications that the new conception of nature caused on the concepts of space and place.
Notes
[1] Ivor Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), x.
[2] I think it is properly in virtue of mental abstraction — a typical mode of human experience and knowledge — that Aristotle denied the identification of place and matter.
[3] All dualisms — being and becoming, actuality and potentiality, body and mind, the physical and the mathematical, the concrete and the abstract, etc. — directly stem from a certain conception of nature, i.e., physis, the physical existent, of a particular epoch.
[4] Ibid., 3.
[5] Ibid., 4.
[6] Ibid., 4.
[7] Ibid., 4.
[8] Ibid., 5.
[9] Ibid., 8.
[10] Ibid., 9.
[11] Ibid., 9.
[12] Ibid., 10.
[13] Ibid., 10.
[14] Ibid., 11.
[15] Ibid., 11.
[16] Ibid., 12.
[17] Ibid., 14.
[18] Ibid., 15.
[19] Ibid., 15.
[20] Ibid., 15.
[21] Ibid., 45.
[22] Ibid., 44.
[23] Ibid., 46.
[24] Ibid., 46.
[25] Ibid., 47.
[26] Ibid., 47.
[27] Ibid., 47-48.
[28] Ibid., 48.
[29] Ibid., 49.
[30] Ibid., 49.
[31] Ibid., 52.
[32] Ibid., 53-54.
[33] Ibid., 54.
[34] Ibid., 55.
[35] Ibid., 56.
[36] Ibid., 57.
[37] Ibid., 59.
[38] Ibid., 74.
[39] Ibid., 75.
[40] Ibid., 84.
[41] Ibid., 87.
[42] Ibid., 90.
[43] Ibid., 90.
[44] Ibid., 91.
[45] Ibid., 91.
[46] My hypothesis is based on a couple of definitions I found in The Oxford Classical Dictionary and in a rare book A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities – see notes [36] and [37] in Back to the Origins of Space and Place
[47] Ibid., 92.
[48] The omission regards the attribute ‘akinēton’ (which has been variously translated as ‘unchangeable’, ‘motionless’, ‘unmoved’, etc.) referred to the limit of the surrounding body — see Aristotle on the Concept of Place (Topos); without that attribute, the definition has almost no physical sense, certainly not the sense Aristotle was looking for. In The Nature of Physical Existence: PART III – The Modern Concept of Nature, the definition reported by Leclerc is complete and correct: ‘the innermost motionless limit of the container, that is place’ – see note [49] in Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence.
In these years, during my research on spatial concepts, I frequently noted that omission regarding Aristotle’s definition of place. Even in the excellent book by Julian Barbour, The Discovery of Dynamics, we find the same omission, see Space and Place: A Scientific History, Part One, notes [30] and [34].
However, concerning the Aristotelian definition, it is even more critical and widely diffused the mistake of translating ‘topos’ for ‘space’. The theory of Aristotle is a theory of place, not space. Place and space are very different conceptualizations, with different histories that entail different relationships with matter and time (and, to put it bluntly, the conception of place is older and more fundamental than space, as I have discussed in Back to the Origins of Space and Place): we cannot use the two terms indifferently, as synonyms, and without considering temporal contingencies, which means that we can incur into anachronistic interpretations, adding error to error.
[49] Ibid., 92.
[50] Ibid., 93.
[51] Ibid., 93.
[52] Ivor Leclerc, The Nature of Physical Existence (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1972), 193.
[53] Ibid., 193.
[54] Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature, 94.
[55] Ibid., 94.
[56] Ibid., 94.
[57] Ibid., 94.
[58] Ibid., 95.
[59] Ibid., 95.
[60] For Kant’s attribution of space as a ‘non-entity’, ‘Unding’, see pages 8 and 96. For Kant’s attribution of space as a pertinence to the world of fable, see page 95.
[61] James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press Classic Editions, 2015), xv-xvi.
[62] Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature, 97.
[63] Ibid., 97.
[64] Ibid., 97.
[65] Ibid., 99.
[66] Ibid., 100.
[67] Ibid., 101.
[68] Ibid., 102.
[69] Ibid., 102.
[70] Ibid., 103.
[71] Ibid., 103.
[72] Ibid., 103.
[73] Ibid., 126-127.
[74] Ibid., 124.
[75] Ibid., 124.
[76] Ibid., 125-126.
[77] Ibid., 135.
[78] Ibid., 127.
[79] Ibid., 127.
[80] Ibid., 128.
[81] Ibid., 129.
[82] Ibid., 132.
[83] Ibid., 133.
[84] Ibid., 141.
[85] Ibid., 142.
[86] Ibid., 142.
[87] Ibid., 142.
[88] Ibid., 143.
[89] Ibid., 144. Concerning Aristotle’s Categories, this is the list and the terminology reported by Leclerc: ‘(1) how large, (2) of what kind or sort, (3) with reference to what, (4) where, (5) when, (6) in what position or attitude, (7) in what state, (8) how active, (9) how acted on.’ Confront it with the translation by the English philosopher and classicist J.L. Ackrill: ‘each [thing] signifies either substance [1. Substance] or quantity [2. Quantity] or qualification [3. Quality] or a relative [4. Relation] or where [5. Place] or when [6. Time] or being-in-a-position [7. Position] or having [8. State or Condition] or doing [9. Acting] or being-affected [10. Being Acted]. To give a rough idea, examples of [1]substance are man, horse; of [2] quantity: four-foot, five-foot; of [3] qualification: white, grammatical; of [4] a relative: double, half, larger; of [5] where: in the Lyceum, in the market-place; of [6] when: yesterday, last-year; of [7] being-in-a-position: is-lying, is-sitting; of [8] having: has-shoes-on, has-armour-on; of [9] doing: cutting, burning; of [10] being-affected: being-cut, being-burned.’ In: Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle – The Revised Oxford Translation, Volume One and Two, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 27. See note [143] in the article Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part Two (The Limitation of Being)
[90] Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature, 144.
[91] Ibid., 145.
[92] Ibid., 145.
[93] Ibid., 148.
[94] Ibid., 150.
[95] Ibid., 166.
[96] Ibid., 167.
[97] Ibid., 167.
[98] Concerning the noun ‘sustema’, σύστημα, see
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=su/sthma
Concerning the verb hístēmi’, ἵστημι, see
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=i(/sthmi
Concerning the verb ‘sunístēmi’, συνίστημι, see
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=suni/sthmi
[99] Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature, 168.
[100] Ibid., 169.
[101] Ibid., 178.
[102] Ibid., 178.
[103] Ibid., 178-179.
[104] Ibid., 179.
[105] Ibid., 182.
[106] Ibid., 183.
[107] Ibid., 183.
[108] Ibid., 183.
[109] Ibid., 184.
[110] Ibid., 184.
[111] Ibid., 184.
[112] Ibid., 187.
[113] Ibid., 187.
[114] Ibid., 191.
[115] Ibid., 191.
[116] Ibid., 191.
[117] Ibid., 191.
[118] Ibid., 193.
[119] Ibid., 194.
[120] Ibid., 195.
[121] Ibid., 195.
[122] Ibid., 204.
[123] Ibid., 206.
[124] Ibid., 206.
[125] Ibid., 206-207.
[126] Ibid., 207.
[127] Ibid., 208.
[128] Ibid., 208.
[129] Richard F. Kitchener, ed., The World View of Contemporary Physics: Does it Need a New Metaphysics? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 1.
[130] Ibid., 27.
[131] Ibid., 27.
[132] Ibid., 28.
[133] Ibid., 28.
[134] Ibid., 29.
[135] Ibid., 29.
[136] Ibid., 30.
[137] Ibid., 30.
[138] Ibid., 31.
[139] Ibid., 32.
[140] Ibid., 32.
[141] Ibid., 33.
[142] Ibid., 34.
[143] Ibid., 34.
[144] Ibid., 34.
[145] Ibid., 36.
Works Cited
Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Psychology Press Classic Editions, 2015
Leclerc, Ivor. The Nature of Physical Existence. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1972.
—. The Philosophy of Nature. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986.
—, ‘The Relation Between Natural Science and Metaphysics’, in The World View of Contemporary Physics: Does It Need a New Metaphysics? edited by Kitchener, Richard F. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.
Prigogine, Ilya. From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences. New York: Freeman and company, 1980.
Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1985.
Image Credits
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2 Comments
D.Heir
Thank you for giving a spot on Ivor Leclerc’s work
Alessandro Calvi Rollino
He certainly deserved it.