Pre-Modern Approaches to change

How to explain change is a longstanding fascination.

Prior to the emergence of Modern science in the 17th Century, so-called teloeological explanations had played a key role . There is no uncontentious way to define 'teleological' rigorously, but you look in right direction if I say that teleological explanations treat as fundamental such notions as purpose, function, aim, or end.

If I offer to explain why the car won't start by reporting my seeing someone removing a spark plug, the owner will have been given what we would call today a 'causal' explanation of his frustration. If a spark is missing, the mixture in one cylinder at least will not explode. This is the notion of 'efficient causation', in a terminology introduced by Aristotle. It doesn't explain why the spark plug was removed. If I suggest that it was removed because he thought he could light her cigarette with it, I will be advancing an explanation which it would be defensible to describe as 'teleological'. It makes central an aim, the aim that informed his action.

It is not obvious what the relation is between these two apparently different types of explanation, but If we see them as fundamentally different and in rivalry of some important kind, we will want to know which of the two types physicists need to provide if they are to succeed in explaining change. It is sometimes suggested that the great revolution wrought by science was to reveal the uselessness of teleological explanations and the need to replace them with accounts which invoke 'efficient' causality: "the Mechanisation of the World Picture" (E.J. Dijksterhuis, book of that title, Eng. trans. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1961).

This is the issue I try to clarify and explore now by inviting you to review medieval cosmology. There we find teleological explanations at work in the pre-Modern world, providing the key understanding of the ultimate origin of change.

Sometimes I use these pages for oral presentations. Here is the AGENDA FOR PRESENTATION 1A

There are excellent resources for studying the medieval world on the Web. Many primary texts are available, as well as some good commentary literature and first rate pics! The best guide to it all I think is the Online reference book for medieval studies. The web at its best, I would say. Following this link will open a new window. Close it (click top left hand box) to come back here.

THE SPHERES

The universe was held to have the following structure, articulated by Ptolemy in the 2nd Century AD: (Egyptian mathematician, astronomer and geographer, working in Alexandria. His system of astronomy was presented in a work known as Almagest. Here from the Vatican are some pages from an early translation)

At the centre is the earth, thought of as spherical. Around the earth a series of concentric spherical transparent shells, the 'spheres', or the 'heavens'. Each of the first seven spheres carries fixed onto it a single luminous body:

• the moon
• Mercury
• Venus
• the Sun
• Mars
• Jupiter
• Saturn

These were 'the seven planets'.

An eighth sphere, the Stellatum, carried a number of luminous bodies, the fixed stars - 'fixed' reflecting the fact that they appeared not to change position relative to each other.

Beyond the Stellatum was a sphere called the Primum Mobile, the 'First Movable'. It carried no luminous bodies and was invisible to the human eye.

In Christian thought, the answer to the question of what lay 'beyond' the Primum Mobile was: God. It was the heaven 'beyond' all the other heavens, or 'the very heaven', cælum ipsum - and the scare quotes are there because it was thought of as beyond space itself, a non-spatial order.

A brief outline of the early history of Astronomy in the West is provided by Nick Strobel, who includes excellent animations of the movements of a planet as seen form the earth. The link takes you to a department page and you need to select the astronomy notes textbook. Following this link will open a new window. Close it (click top left hand box) to come back here.

(Aristotle had made the essential point without making the same reference to God: 'outside' the spatio-temporal order there could be neither time nor space: 'Outside the heaven there is neither place nor void nor time. Hence whatever is there is of such a kind as not to occupy space, nor does time affect it.' Aristotle, De Caelo, 279. (Quoted by Lewis, The Discarded Image, Cambridge, 1994, CUP, p. 97.))

The spheres revolved, at speeds that increased with distance from the earth.

Diagram of the Universe according to Ptolemy, courtesy R.C.Pine.

Aristotle & Medieval Thought On The Source Of Change In The Universe

Moderns ask: what keeps the spheres in motion? and what started them off?

Medieval thought had an answer. It is an interesting answer on account of the fact that it appears to be 'teleological'. It appears to explain the motion not mechanically but in terms of a kind of 'aim' ...

Let us leave aside exactly how the first eight spheres were brought into motion and kept there. The account seems to be that each of them was moved as a result of the influence of the sphere next outside it. This can if necessary be understood mechanically.

But let us concentrate on the outermost sphere, the ninth or Primum Mobile. If movement of this sphere produced movement in all the rest, what the origin of its movement? The claim was that it was sustained in motion by the influence of God.

What sort of relationship was it between the motion of the Primum Mobile and God? We should not assume that it was one of 'efficient' causality - we should not assume that God caused it to spin in the same way that a flick of the wrist imparts motion to a frisbee. We shouldn't assume this because if we did - if we did explain the motion by saying that God did something like spinning a frisbee - we would be implying that God Himself moved, and God is supposed within this framework to be seriously unchanging.

Medieval theorists got half of their inspiration from Christianity, but half from Aristotle. In De Caelo Aristotle appears to argue that change in one thing is, with one exception, brought about by change in others.

(Unless you believe that the Universe has existed forever of course there has to be one exception to this general rule: it can't in that case be true that in a finite set of changes every change is caused by one of the others - one change, at least, has to be caused by something other than a change within the set.)

The change that is the exception, according to De Caelo, is a change that is informed by an end.

It is 'spontaneous', in the sense that it is not brought about by any change in the finite set. But, according to De Caelo, it is not random either.

When a lover wraps the beloved in an embrace, that is not random act. It is an act that is informed by the thought of the beloved, that is, informed by an end.

This appears to be how the first change is thought of in De Caelo: the Primum Mobile changes out of love - love for that which is beyond it, the 'Unmoved Mover'.

What brings about the original change can thus be thought to be the Unmoved Mover. But it is achieved not by any change in the latter: it comes about as result of the love of the Primum Mobile for the Unmoved Mover.

The Unmoved Mover thus initiates change by inspiring spontaneous, intentional, change on the part of something within the universe - i.e. it inspires action. The Unmoved Mover thus 'initiates change as an object of love' (see Barnes, Aristotle, p. 64). As C.S. Lewis puts it: 'He moves other things, that is, as an object of desire moves those who desire it.' (C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, p.113) Once that is done, as it were, once one change in the finite set of changes that is the universe has been prompted, every other change can be understood by changing themselves.'

The rotation of the Primum Mobile on this account is thus an action on the part of the Primum Mobile. It rotates out of desire, just as a lover enfolds the loved one in embrace.

This gives us our example of a 'teleological' explanation. If we can think of a desire as a kind of 'aim' then the rotation is being explained in terms of an 'aim'.

The ninth sphere revolves out of love of God

In the developed medieval view, which was based on Aristotle but elaborated a complex and detailed system out of his much more weakly articulated suggestions, it is clear that each of the spheres had associated with it an 'Intelligence', and it was the Intelligence of each sphere that was responsible for its motion. One account, closer to Platonic thought, had it that the spheres were 'animals', bodies animated with a soul. Others, for example Albertus Magnus, resisted the suggestion that the relationship of Intelligence to sphere was exactly that between human soul and body, but agreed that a parallel of a kind was certainly there. Aquinas concurred.

Lewis speaks of these Intelligences as 'conscious' beings, and as 'minds'. This sounds like anachronism to me, and I wonder if one point Albert was contesting was the notion that the Intelligence had to be 'aware' in the manner in which a human being was aware. A key issue for those interested in seeing mind-like qualities throughout nature (I am thinking of Plumwood especially) is of course the possibility of the spheres possessing agency but not (Cartesian) minds.

(The earth itself, since it had no movement, had no need, as it were, of an Intelligence. It was Dante who suggested it had one nevertheless, and that it was Fortune (C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, p.139).)

Detailed and beautifully illustrated account of early Greek thinking about cosmology by Ellen N. Brundige. Following this link will open a new window. Close it (click top left hand box) to come back here.

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What do you think? What do you think of this explanation of how change got inaugurated? Do you think the occurrence of change needs an explanation at all? Do you think we have an explanation of it today? Whose expertise is relevant to providing such an explanation? Discussion site Or Chat 10 pm Thursday (BST)

THE CENTRALITY OF PURPOSE IN MEDIEVAL THOUGHT

	The conception of things which saw them as moving or, in general, changing, in fulfilment of their 'nature' places the notion of purpose at the centre of medieval thinking.

A major interest to us today, worrying about how we think of nature and natural things, is the way in which medieval thinkers seem to attribute striving and perhaps other sorts of purposeful-seeming behaviour to things that are not at least obviously sentient. Let's now pursue this a little further.

As C.S. Lewis says, to Modern thought the question that at once arises is

'whether medieval thinkers really believed that what we now call inanimate objects were sentient and purposive'. (C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Cambridge, 1994, CUP, p.93.)

He also supplies an authoritative answer: in general, no. (The exception he makes is for the stars, which he says were regarded as possessing life and even intelligence.)

Anthony Kenny, an authority and gloriously lucid guide to medieval academic thought, agrees: 'It would be wrong to think that when Aquinas attributes ends or aims to inanimate objects, he is being anthropomorphic, or even zoomorphic. He is not attributing to stocks [sic - presumably 'rocks'] and stones ghostly half-conscious purposes; he insists that inanimate objects have no consciousness.' (Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, pb ed. London, 1994, Routledge, p.61.)

Modern commentators on the environmental crisis or crises often yearn after a world view in which natural objects can be seen as having purposes, or something equivalent, of their own. Paul Taylor for example argues that what qualifies a thing as belonging to the moral universe is the possession by a thing of an 'end of its own' (Paul Taylor, Respect for Nature, Princeton, NJ, 1986, Princeton University Press). And Plumwood speaks of the need, in the face of our environmental predicament,

'to find cultural ways to recognise and celebrate the play of intentionality and agency in the world ...' (Plumwood, Feminism and The Mastery Of Nature, as cited, p.136.)

Reference to 'the play of intentionality and agency' is another way of referring to what I have just called, less adequately, 'purpose or something equivalent'.

If only we saw landscapes and plants as well as animals as having purposes, or ends, or aims, the ground would at least be laid for us to show respect for these things. In our dealings with the things around us we would at least have something else to consider besides our own interests. These would still be there, but if a forest, say, had an aim, or a purpose, or an end which had nothing to do with human purposes, it could be argued at least that this was something that should in a moral world be taken into the reckoning.

So the attribution of ends to things in nature that we find in medieval thought attracts our attention. Is there a way of thinking here that would help enrich what many writers on environmental matters see as the impoverished conceptual framework engineered for us by Modern science?

And it is particularly attractive because it seems to avoid the disgrace that Prince Charles fell into by appearing to suggest that to take natural objects such as plants seriously was necessarily to regard them as conscious beings in this vital respect like ourselves. The promise is that medieval thought appears to attribute purpose, or purpose-equivalents, or 'intentionality' or 'agency', to natural objects without thinking of them as possessing 'minds' or being 'conscious'. Is there something here that would be applicable today?

Is this a worthwhile line of thought?

I think the essential difference between medieval and modern thought in this respect lies in contrasting locations of the power to initiate change. The picture presented by the 'corpuscularianism' or 'atomism' that had emerged as the consensual view by the close of the 17th Century was of everything in the physical universe as made up exclusively of small particles which were inert. Newton's cosmology was nothing if not opaque, but the idea I am trying to convey is announced clearly in the first Laws of Motion: everything continues in a state of rest, or in a state of constant motion in a straight line, unless acted upon by a body external to it. As far as any particular body is concerned, any change comes about by influence from without. This was the ground of Leibniz dissatisfaction with 'atomism' and his insistence that the fundamental elements of the Universe -whatever else they had- must have 'souls' : the fujndamenta could not be thought of as inert - they must have the power to originate directional change. It was much later that the concept of 'energy' was ready to be invoked for the same purpose.

There was much controversy in the 18th Century over what kind of forces could impinge upon a body - over whether, for example, there were forces which acted at a distance, or whether the only way in which one body could influence another was by contact. That is not my focus here. The point I am wishing to insist on is that according to the corpuscularian philosophy a body just carried on as it was unless influenced from outside. The contrast with medieval physics was this: the medievals thought that bodies could initiate change.

We are no longer corpuscularians of the late 17th Century kind. But the medieval conception is still something I think, as a matter of principle, we resist. We are no longer determinists. We have thrown over the icy rigour of the 18th Century vision of Laplace, envisaging the exact and fully detailed prediction of future events. But the uncertainties we have admitted, those of quantum physics, we categorise as grounded in nothing - they are emphatically random. We do not see in them the basis for thinking that change could be initiated, in any strong sense, by natural objects themselves.

I mean by this that electrons, when they jump spontaneously from one orbit to another, are not regarded as actors or agents. The change, though not the result of any force to which the particle is subject, nevertheless is conceptualised as 'inflicted', as something that simply happens. The electron in such cases is the object not of an external force but of chance. There is in its random shift no initiation in the sense invoked by medieval thought.

 

For reflection: In what sense might we say that the earth has a purpose, or the human being? In what sense can we say that the whole of creation, the whole of what there is, might have a purpose? Can the universe have a purpose if there is nothing outside of itself, if there is no transcendent God? The medievals had a clear sense that the human being, and creation, had a purpose. Can we have? Even if we don't believe in God? Some things have purposes and some don't. What allows us to attribute purpose to some things and not to others? List the things that have to be true before you can legitimately ascribe a purpose to a thing.

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