What is Nature?

Any assertion that this or that is, or is not, “right by nature” must remain void of meaning unless we know what nature is. In this matter we are not too well off. The texts we have consulted so far lead us to believe that Aristotle lived in a tradition going back beyond Plato and the tragedians to the older philosophers, and that he counted on being understood when speaking of nature.

The contexts in which this term is used indicate that “nature” refers to constant structures in the movement of being, comprising gods and men, organic and inorganic matter — in other words, to something like a constitution of being. That, however, is all that can be inferred. Where can we learn with a higher degree of accuracy what is meant by nature?

Whoever is looking for an answer to this question will first of all think of the philosophical dictionary in Metaphysics Delta, which offers precise definitions of nature and related concepts. This source, however, is a disappointment. It develops the concept of nature in its three meanings of (a) matter, (b) form or shape (eidos kai morphe), and (c) the unity of form and matter in a thing (Met. 1014b16-1015a5), by means of the experiential models of organism and artifact.

Now if, after reading the dictionary, anyone should feel pride in possessing exact metaphysical knowledge that animals and statues consist of form and matter, we do not want to spoil his fun; we must nevertheless ask ourselves: What can one do with this knowledge in the sphere of man and society, where the question is one of right order? When we recall the texts about what is “right by nature,” we recognize immediately that the meanings of the term nature in that context do not fit the definitions of Metaphysics Delta.

And when Aristotle himself attempts to apply his schema of form and matter to society, he gets involved in insoluble difficulties: In Politics 3 he posits, faithful to his definitions, the constitution as form and the citizens as matter of the polis; he then concludes with incisive logic that every revolutionary change of the constitution must bring about a new polis not identical to the previous one (i.e., the thing compounded of form and matter in the sense of nature under c).

This brings up the problem that every time the democrats of Athens overthrow a tyrant, or the oligarchies oust the democrats from power, there arises a new Athens that has nothing in common with the old one except the name; Aristotle even realizes that, alas, politicians with a talent for metaphysics follow his idea or if not anticipate it when they refuse on the argument of a lack of continuity, to honor the public debts of the previous regime; finally, since he is, as much as we are, interested in the Athens that has maintained its identity throughout the changes of its constitutions, he can only leave the problem (aporia) unresolved.

Similar difficulties result from the attempt to apply the schema outlined in the Metaphysics to man by having the soul, as anima rationalis or intellectiva, function as form and the body as matter. At first glance it may appear as if this attempt would have better chances of succeeding; unlike society, which frequently changes its constitutional form, man has for the duration of his life only one form that informs him. (I assume that man has only one and not several souls — which is in keeping with the philosophers and the saints; this means I am bracketing both the ancient Egyptians who believed they have several souls as well as the modern psychologists who, showing remarkable toughness of spirit, assert that they have no soul whatsoever.)

But even if man has only one soul, and therefore is not caught in the specific impasse arising in the case of society from the change of its forms in the course of time, he is still faced with analogous difficulties. These have their origin in the mysterious life of its own that the soul leads, thanks to its special relationship to divine eternity. Since we are human beings living in time, we might not be able to survey this problem comprehensively; and yet what we know of it by experience might well make us wonder whether the term form adequately characterizes the metaphysical status of the soul. Let us take a look at the experiences of the philosophers and the saints.

Philosophers’ Prison or Saints’ Joy

The Hellenic philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato have shared the saddening experience that the body is the prison, nay even the grave of the soul, and that we owe an offering of thanks to the god of healing when death liberates the soul from the sickness of temporal life. However the processes culminating in such experiences may unfold concretely, it is obvious that the soul may convey to man the desire that it would rather not be linked to the body. This kind of aloofness one would hardly expect of a form that is firmly impressed on its matter and rules it pervasively.

The kind of linkage that such occasions reveal points not so much to the soul as form, but instead to the body as endowed with a vexing solidity of form with which it embraces and holds fast the soul against her will. In order to interpret this curious relationship, the philosophers do not make any use of the form-matter pattern; on the contrary, they have recourse to myths of a prehistorical fall that had doomed the soul to the prison of the body for the duration of its temporal existence, or to the myths of the Last Judgment and metempsychosis, of the reincarnation of the soul and its ultimate release to true existence in eternity. When it is a matter of the soul’s relationship to eternity, myths impose themselves as symbols that lend an adequate voice to the expression of the soul’s fate.

The same image that expresses the philosophers’ gloom is used by the saints to express their joy. The saint’s soul, too, has its sights set on eternity, but if it, like the philosopher’s soul, also disparages time, body, and world, in the reality envisioned by the Gospels there is nevertheless the certainty that everything will work out for the best for people of good will. And further, the changes effected in human nature by God’s grace through Christ elicit a language that is appropriate to them and akin to myth.

St. Augustine and St. Thomas

We hear talk of changes, conversions, renewals, and rebirths, of a new creature, and of the great transformation that replaces with a new man the old one who has died. The shape, the morphe, is subject to metamorphosis, and the forma to the re-formatio. The rhetorical exuberance of Saint Augustine never tires of amassing ever-new linguistic terms expressing the experience of a being that is transformed, turning away from the temporal dimension and toward eternity: de forma in formam mutamur . . . de forma obscura in formam lucidam . . . a deformi forma in formam formosam [changing from form into form . . . from obscure form into lucid form . . . from a deformed form into a beautiful form] and, finally, de forma fidei in formam speciei [from the form of faith into the form of vision] (De Trinitate 15.8, 14).

The problem of symbolic expression becomes eminently clear in Thomas, as he subjects the relationship of soul and body strictly to the form-matter schema (Summa Theologiae 1.76.1) and thus finds himself compelled to a radically anti-mythical formulation when addressing the changes effected in the soul by grace (ST 1a-2ae, 110, a.2, resp. 3): The habitus of grace is not a mutation of the soul but a new creation; men are created anew out of nothingness — in novo esse constituuntur ex nihilo.

In the myth things can change, they can exchange forms, without losing their identity. In the strict language of Thomas, in which the truths of revelation are thought through in a metaphysical-rational manner, a thing cannot mutate, but a new thing must take the place of the old one, the new originating just like the old one, as a creatio ex nihilo; nor can the form mutate, as in Augustine, but the forma supernaturalis must rather be added to the forma naturalis.

A Preliminary Formulation of “Nature”

Let us formulate the result of these preliminary reflections on the question of what is nature: If we mean by nature the constants of the order of being, the nature of man and society obviously comprises much more than a complex determined by the form-matter schema. If, however, we pattern our concept of metaphysics on the classical model of Aristotle, a tradition valid to this day, then only the form and not the constants of movement can be conceived metaphysically as the nature of being. Thus a broader philosophical concept of nature is brought face to face with a narrower metaphysical concept, or, stated more precisely, a comprehensive conception of what nature is has been narrowed down by the development of metaphysics.

This problem was both clear and acute for Aristotle, for he was a philosopher and not a systematizer, and he did not allow his own definitions to obstruct his view of reality. In the section on physei dikaion he speaks of a nature that is not form in the sense of the Metaphysics; in the same way, in Politics I, he deals with a nature of the polis that has no affinity with the form-matter problem of Book 3; when he actually employs his metaphysical definitions in Book 3 of the Politics, he allows the conflict between definition and reality to come to light and leaves it unresolved, unconcerned about possible charges of inconsistency.

Essentially this curious problem endures to this day. If one wishes to get to the root of the matter and, if possible, to solve it, one must answer the question that has obtruded itself in the course of our reflections: Why in the history of Hellenic thinking did the comprehensive philosophical conception of nature become narrowed down to the metaphysical concept of form?

The Hellenic thinkers knew that their philosophizing about the nature of things (peri tes physeos) was one configuration among several others that may articulate the question of the ground of being. In his historical survey in Metaphysics Alpha, Aristotle reports that Thales of Miletus, having been the first among the Ionian philosophers to have raised the question of physis, answered it by declaring water to be the origin (arche) of all things; he goes on to assert that even before his time the poets had given the same answer in the guise of the myth of Okeanos and Tethys as the ancestors of all becoming (tes geneseos pateres); finally, using the term introduced by Plato, he calls the myth’s older form a theologizing approach, in order to distinguish it from the younger one, termed philosophizing.

The Ionian Formulation of the Problem

There are thus at least two configurations of the question about the ground of being that we would distinguish in today’s language as mythical and philosophical. Following Aristotle’s suggestion, we shall first identify the features of the Ionian formulation of the question by comparing it with the cosmogonic myths of Egyptian provenance, which are its close kin.

In the numerous cult centers of Egypt, different gods were worshiped as the creators of the cosmos: In Heliopolis, it was Re or Atum, the energy of the sun; in Elephantine, Khnum, a god who creates all things on a potter’s wheel; in Thebes, Amon, the hidden god of the wind; in Memphis, Ptah, the earth’s energy. If we place the list of Egyptian gods side by side with the list of the elements, i.e., water, air, fire, and earth, which the Ionians took to be the arche, the two reveal similar attempts to find the origin of the cosmos in elemental forces.

The same type of speculation about the origin or beginning of being may proceed as well in the one as in the other of the symbolic media that Aristotle called “theologizing” and “philosophizing.” The first of his variants, the cosmogonic speculation, employs the language of the myth that arose from the primary experience of the cosmos, including the gods who govern it. The second variant uses philosophical language that arises as the expression of an experience of which at this point we shall only say, following the implication of Aristotle’s terminology, that the gods of polytheism are excluded from this experience.

Thus at the birth of philosophical inquiry there occurs a dissociation of a cosmos full-of-gods into a dedivinized order of things and the divine order whose relationship to the newly discovered character of the All is still unclear. The Hellenic thinkers named “being” that which revealed itself to their differentiating experience; ever since, being has been for philosophers the subject matter of all propositions about order and nature.

The thorny problems of formulating the constitution of being that were raised by the act of differentiation could not be mastered on the first try. The Ionian attempt to identify the nature of being by a material arche was no more than the beginning of a process of thought, which has not found closure to this day.

The Hellenic Development Up to Aristotle

We shall briefly characterize its Hellenic development up to Aristotle, in terms of the three main complexes of problems. They have to do with (1) the connection of philosophy with the myth and its separation from it, (2) the relationship of the divine to being, and (3) the relationship of man and his cognition to being.

Under the first heading we note that the Ionic attempt depended upon the form of cosmogonic speculation; in doing so, it borrowed from it the form of the myth in the sense of a story or narration about events in the cosmos. Although the arche is for the Ionians no longer a member of the society of gods, its stance at the beginning is that of a god from whose impetus-giving hands issues a chain of events, passing all the way down to the being experienced in the here and now. The form of the mythic story imposes on the being of the Ionians the character of becoming, of a mythical genesis.

However, once the investigation of its independent structure is under way, since being is experienced not only as a flow but also reveals enduring and recurring forms that abide in the midst of its flux, the nature of being as becoming must necessarily be supplemented by its characterization as abiding and recurrent form. Experiences of this kind set off speculation about being as eternally immutable. When they are reinforced by the experience of transcendence, they can raise the character of a permanence of being to the level of the truth of being in the face of which “coming-into-being is extinguished” (Parmenides B 8, 21).

This truth, if not logically compelling but compelled by the force of the vision, indeed inclines philosophizing toward form as the true being. Since the original insight into the nature of being as a coming-to-be goes back to the primary experience of the cosmos and its expression in the myth, one can define metaphysics, inasmuch as it narrows the insight to the form-matter pattern, as the extreme anti-mythical form of philosophizing.

Under the second heading, when the order of being no longer includes the polytheistic gods, the relation of the divine to being is left in a certain indeterminacy that can still be sensed in the fragments of Anaximenes. On the one hand, this Ionian thinker says: “As our soul, being air, holds us together as a ruling principle, so do breath and air [pneuma] embrace the whole universe” (B 2); thus he seems also to posit an element as the nature that governs being and possibly even produces the gods (A 10); on the other hand, with characteristic vacillation, the tradition has him say that the air is god (A 10).

In retrospect, the hyletic [material] speculation of Anaximenes still runs very close to the Cosmological speculation of the Egyptian type; however, when we look ahead, there seems to loom the possibility of an unmythical god (for air is not one of the gods, but God) as the origin of being, which would relieve the elements of the responsibility of playing the role of arche. If we also consider the equation God-Air-Governor of Souls, we can sense already something of the experience of transcendence in which the soul stands before God, and with the experience of itself as the locus of the openness toward God in being, will also gain a new, philosophical relationship to the myth, exactly of the kind we find in Plato.

The state of suspension is broken only through the experiences of transcendence, especially those of Parmenides; only these experiences facilitate the recognition of the divine as the Beyond in relation to a world which in turn, through this insight, becomes immanent, i.e., this-side-of-God. Only after this separation is there no more need for the divine to release being mythically and genetically into its becoming; instead the divine can then move into a relation to the world as its transcendent-creative demiurge. Experience of being and experience of transcendence thus are closely linked with each other, insofar as the implications of the still-compact experience of being of the Ionian variety fully unfold through the experience of transcendence.

Only in the light of the experience of transcendence, do God, as well as the things of the world, gain that relative autonomy that makes it possible to bring them to the common denominator of being. When the gods, too, having become homeless through the dissociation of the cosmos, relocate themselves in the truth of God, and thereby the relation of the divine to the world has become clear, this clarity leads in turn to new problems, as soon as the relationship is interpreted in the language of the experience of being.

The difficulties are caused by an only slowly dissipating obscurity concerning a number of points. In order to avoid lengthy historical investigations, we prefer to formulate them as theses:

(1) The being of philosophical experience is not a newly discovered entity to be added to the things that are already given in the primary experience of the cosmos.

(2) The experience of being differentiates the order of things (a) in their autonomy, (b) in their relation to one another, and (c) in their relation to their origin. This experience discovers the order of the cosmos.

(3) The divine ground of being is not an existent thing of the type of the existent things in the world.

(4) Things existing in this world have, in addition to the order of their autonomous existence and of their relations to one another, also a dimension of order in relation to the divine, nonworldly ground of being. There are no things that are merely immanent.

(5) The world cannot be adequately understood as the sum total of relations of autonomously existing things. That is not possible even when the directly experienced relations are extrapolated into infinity, for the indefinite progression is itself a world-immanent event. The mystery of a cosmos penetrated throughout by gods is not overcome and left behind by the experience of transcendence that dissociates the cosmos into God and world. The impossibility of construing the world as a purely immanent complex of experiences is even today a central theme of theoretical physics.

The historically concrete problems will be understood more clearly in the light of these theses.

The cosmos is dissociated by the experience of being, but all that it formerly comprised in a compact way, which also included the gods, must now be reinterpreted in the language of the order of being. In other words, the now-world-transcendent God must henceforth come to be philosophically included in the order of being. This undertaking is a philosophical necessity — for where and what would be the world’s order of being if it did not issue from the creative presence of a divine being?

Yet here we run into the difficulty that the divine and the worldly being are not things that lie on this side or that side of a spatial dividing line. Instead, transcendence and immanence are no more than indices attached to being, once the cosmos is definitively dissociated by the experience of transcendence. Now being is nothing but a network of ordered relationships among the “things” given in the primary experience of the cosmos (not in the world), the network being what we are interested in understanding correctly.

Hence as we speculate about being, which itself is not a thing (Thesis 1), the pre-philosophical, cosmic things have a tendency to insinuate themselves as the model of being. When, as in Parmenides, God becomes the model of being, then the being of the world sinks, in comparison with the being that has found its ground in Truth, to the status of a doxa; when the nondivine things provide the model for being, then the predicates, derived as they are from the world-being, including even the predicate, being, can apply to God only analogically.

In the Experience of Being, Cosmos is Retained

Impasses of this type cannot be resolved on the level of an objectifying speculation about being. In order to solve them, the philosopher must acknowledge that the forms of the primary cosmic experience are still present in his speculation about being, and he must include in his philosophy the truth of the primary experience of a compact divine-worldly cosmos. For the cosmos may very well be dissociated by the experience of Being into a divine and a worldly being, but that differentiating knowledge does not dissolve the bond of being between God and world, which we call cosmos.

If the consciousness of the cosmic bond of being that lies in the background of all philosophical thinking fades out, then there emerge the well-known dangers of an ungodded world and of an unworlded god, of a world reduced to nothing but a nexus of relationships among existent things, so that it is no longer a world, and of a god reduced to mere existence so that it is no longer god.

The agony of modernity induced by this reduction when it becomes a fact of life, and the resultant tension between a full God [Vollgott] and a God of being [Seinsgott], rings out in the appeal of Pascal’s Memorial: “Dieu d’Abraham, Dieu d’lsaac, Dieu de Jacob, non des philosophes et des savants” [O, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and sages].

Plato was aware of this cosmic background of philosophic speculation and therefore separated carefully speculation about being from myth: The problems of the transcendent idea belong to the dialectic of speculation about being; the problems of the destiny and judgment of the soul (Gorgias, Republic), the cycles of order and disorder (Statesman), and the creation by the demiurge (Timaeus) are expressed through myths.

Under the third and final heading, the act of the experience of being confronts us with the problem of the relation between the order of being and the man who is cognizant of it. Contrary to the possibilities that the order of being might be unintelligible to man or that, conversely, man with his capacity for recognizing an ordering principle might confront a being without order, the actual situation demonstrates a remarkable conformity between order of the mind and order of being.

Today that conformity may appear as a curiosity, if it is even noticed in the first place; this is reflected in Einstein’s dictum: “The only thing unintelligible about the universe is its intelligibility.” Or, as an alternative, it might appear as a basic problem of philosophy, a truth to be regained by means of a laborious confrontation with modern objectivist thought, to which one must clearly commit oneself — as Heidegger did in his Satz vom Grund.

The Man Who is Awake

The Hellenic thinker simply had the experience, and needed only to interpret it. Heraclitus (B 1) makes a play on the two meanings of the term logos, i.e., as the order according to which things come into being and as the didactic discourse that explains things (hekasta) according to their nature (kata physin); and Parmenides (B 3) states bluntly: “For it is the same thing to think [noein] and to be [einai].”

The experience of being rouses man to the reality of order in himself and in the cosmos; only he who lives in this movement is a man awake, who holds in common with others who are awake the one and only world (kosmos), in contrast to the sleepers, each one of whom lives in his own private world (Heraclitus B 89).

In the background of the experience of being, the primary experience of the cosmos, in which man is consubstantial with the things of his environment, asserts itself. This is a partnership which in a man engaged in philosophical speculation is raised to the level of a waking consciousness of the community of order that unites thought and being. The knowledge of these relations of being remained alive in Greek thinking to Plato’s and Aristotle’s day.

For Plato, as for Heraclitus, the philosopher is a man awake, who communicates to his society the knowledge of its right order, while the tyrant is the sleepwalker who gratifies his lusts in public and commits crimes that come from the dreamworld of fantasies. For Aristotle the spoudaios is the full man who is in the highest degree permeable to the cosmic-divine movement of being and who, by virtue of this quality, is a creator of ethics, passing down to society the knowledge about what is right by nature.

Once the cosmic background lying behind the thinking on being is lost, this classical conception of the full man faces the same dangers as the conception of the full god: Man, reduced to a being, turns into an existent thing in a world understood only as immanent; and in his relation to the world of being he is no longer a partner, but is reduced to that of a cognizing subject.

Once more we must ask the question why, in the history of Hellenic thought, the philosophical concept of nature was narrowed down to the metaphysical conception of nature as form. Our survey has revealed the cause: The problems of the new thinking about being could obviously be mastered only one step at a time. The philosophical conception of the nature of being admitted, or retained, a becoming that was already represented in the primary experience of the cosmos; whereas the metaphysical conception inclined toward identifying the nature of things as the aspect of being that is ordered by form.

Between these two tendencies tensions build up that can be detected in a remarkable passage of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Delta, which deals with the interpretation of a statement by Empedocles. In the version passed down to us by Aristotle (the text B 8 in Diels-Kranz’s edition is different), Empedocles is quoted as saying: “None of the things that exist has nature [physis]; there is only a mixing and separating of things mixed, and ‘nature’ is but a name men give to the mixtures.”

Why Set Aside Becoming in Favor of Form?

He seems here to want to say that the reality of the being of things is found in the coming together and coming apart of their elements, rather than in the configurations they assume in their ephemeral existence. Aristotle then adds the astonishing anti-mythical commentary that, even if a thing which is or becomes by nature already has on the one hand the elemental content of its being, we attribute a nature to it only if it has its idea or shape (eidos kai morphe).

The problem of becoming, which was dominant for Empedocles, is set aside in favor of form. In view of the rivalry of these dominances, we have to ask ourselves why the two concepts of nature got into mutual tension. Why could one not supplement the other without conflict?

The tension has been caused not so much by the technical difficulties of thinking through the problems or of developing a suitable terminology — although these are weighty enough in themselves and have not been mastered to this day. The real reason is an emotional blockage created by the fact that the experience of Being is at the same time an experience of God.

This survey has shown that the dissociation of the cosmos began with the Ionian experience of being, but was brought to completion only through the experience of transcendence on the part of later thinkers. The partners sharing the cosmos separate into a world of relatively autonomous things this side of God, and a divine ground of being beyond the world.

Between the two stands man as the being in whom the dissociation takes place, in whom, nevertheless, God and world encounter each other again in the manifold of experiences that elicit the rich vocabulary of philia, pistis, elpis, eros, periagoge, epistrophe [love, faith, hope, eros, conversion, turning-toward], and so on, as a manifold of expressions corresponding to them.

When the autonomous nature of existing things in the world comes up, the question of the nature of God also arises, without whom understood as transcending the world, there could not be any world of things this side of God, endowed with autonomous natures. And wherever God and world are separated by the experience of being, the problem of man in turn comes up, as who experiences the order of being, and therewith experiences himself to be who experiences it: the problem of man, who with the experience of himself as being the experiencer of order comes upon the knowing truth of his own order, and therefore of his nature. This ontological complex makes sense only as a whole. Philosophizing becomes senseless if it isolates one of its components without regard for the others.

When the experience of being differentiates itself from the primary experience of the cosmos, it presses forward toward a new image of God as the former of the order of being, toward the image of the demiurge. We can measure the fascination with this newly grasped formative power by the fact that Aeschylus’s Prometheus could give expression to a human derailment corresponding to the demiurgic image of God even before Plato created the myth of the demiurge. This new experience of God becomes a source of disturbances in which the form of being gains dominance over the becoming of being.

The following examples might illustrate the intensity of the illumination radiating from the experience of a demiurgic image of god. In the myth of the Timaeus, the demiurge is the master builder who fashions the cosmos by imposing form on matter. In the Statesman, the statesman is seen as a kosmokrator [ruler of the universe] who imposes form on the human soul-stuff of society. In the Sophist (265E) Plato draws a parallel between human activity and the divine: “I posit, that things that are said to be made by nature are the work of divine art, and that things which are made by man out of these are the work of human art. And so there are two kinds of production [poietike], the one human, and the other divine.”

In Metaphysics Alpha, Aristotle pursues this idea further [“And so there are two kinds of production (poietike), the one human, and the other divine.”]. Following his report on the Ionian speculation, he asks himself how matter could be the cause of change, since wood does not make the bed, nor bronze the statue. How could fire, earth, or any other element cause things to be good and beautiful? Since these qualities of things cannot be attributed to automatism or chance, one must look to other causes (aitia) besides matter, above all, for an arche of the movement.

In the midst of the confused ideas of his predecessors came a moment of sobriety (Met. 984b15) when a certain thinker (Anaxagoras) declared that nous is present (eneinai) not only in animate beings but also in nature, and that it is the cause (aition) of order (kosmos) and all arrangement (taxis). It now becomes clear why Aristotle patterned his concept of nature on the model of an artifact, even though he was aware of the philosophical inadequacy of this procedure. This otherwise shocking feature now becomes understandable in light of the experience of a demiurgic God.

Under the pressure of this experience the image of God and the image of man are mutually coordinated. I emphasize the mutuality, since the correspondences would be grossly misunderstood if one, using the cliché of anthropomorphism, wanted to maintain that the forming God had been inferred from the image of a forming man. This assumption would presuppose that there exists an autonomous and exclusively immanent experience of man, according to which one could derivatively shape a secondary image of God; but this presupposition would violate our previously established principle of the indivisibility of the ontological complex.

The differentiating achievement of the experience of being rests precisely on gaining clarity about the attunement of the reality of the order of being with the truth of knowledge, of einai with noein, of the divine creation of the order of being with human participation in it through a knowing ordering of man’s own being. The ordering of man and society through right action is a part of the ordering that governs the cosmos throughout.

As we recall, for Aristotle the spoudaios is a man who is in the highest degree permeable to the movement of being that proceeds from the unmoved mover; and ethics acquires its dignity as a human creation in which the ordering movement of being is articulated for the human realm. Thus the accord of the image of God with the image of man is to be understood as a symbol expressing the human experience of attunement with the divine ground of being.

Even though the demiurgic experience of God forces an emphasis on nature as form and figure, the broader philosophical horizon that also encompasses being as becoming still remains open for Aristotle. Of special interest in this context are the remarks regarding aetiology, the question of cause and becoming, in Metaphysics Alpha, because they deal directly with the Ionian experience of being and analyze its meaning.

The text begins (994a1 ff.) with the statement that there must be a definite beginning (arche), and the reasons (aitia) for things are not infinite in number. There can be no infinite regress (ienai eis apeiron) in the production of things from their materials (hyle), as flesh would come from earth, earth from air, air from fire, and so ad infinitum. Conversely, one cannot follow the chain of causes in descending order infinitely so that, beginning with the higher term (e.g., from fire, water; from water, earth; and so on, forever), some other kind of being is generated, without coming to an end product. In particular, however, an infinite regress is impossible in the area of human action and its purpose (Met. 994b9 ff.):

The wherefore is an end [telos], i.e., an end of the sort that is not for the sake of something else, but for the sake of which other things are. Hence, if there is a last term of this sort [eschaton], the process will not be infinite [apeiron]; and if there is not, there will be no wherefore. But those who argue for an infinite regress fail to notice that they thereby destroy the nature of the good [ten tou agathou physin]. For nobody would try to do anything if he were not going to arrive at a limit. Also, there would then be no intellect [nous] in the world; for man, who has intellect [noun echon] always acts for the sake of some end: for the goal [telos] is an end [peras].

The Three Meaning of Causation

The passage stands in need of a discursive loosening-up to be fully comprehended. The crux of the matter is the concept of aition and of the finiteness or infinity of the series of causes ascending to the origin, arche. The difficulties of understanding the text stem from the fact that the compact term aition stands for three different complexes of meaning.

Cause in the Usual Sense: Temporal Progression

In the first place, it has the meaning that we use today when we speak of “cause and effect,” i.e., causality as a temporal progression of immanent phenomena. This first meaning of aition brings into discussion the nature of existent things in the world this side of God; the nature of things both in their autonomy and in their relation to each other, among which relations is included the possibility of an indefinite regression from any point in the present, temporal or spatial, state such as in a causal series. In the Physics, Aristotle explicitly upholds the infinity of the temporal dimension of the cosmos. Thomas follows Aristotle’s lead in that he invokes revelation in support of his conviction that the world was created, since there exists no philosophical argument against the infinity of the world in time.

Cause Related to Organisms

The second meaning of aitia is superimposed on the first. It signifies the four causes (causa materialis, efficiens, formalis, and finalis), which pertain less to existent things at large than to things that primarily belong to the class of organisms. The experience of organism figures in Aristotelian metaphysics as an independent factor that, by becoming operative in the definition of nature, colors also the conception of human nature, insofar as the forma of organism is suited to support the definition of nature as form, dependent upon the demiurgic experience. The idea of man as an innerworldly formed thing that achieves fulfillment in an innerworldly eudaimonia is principally influenced by the model of organism.

It is only with the third meaning of aition, when the discussion turns to the causa finalis of human action, that we run into the question of the order of human existence that came through nous, and only in this realm does Aristotle reject the infinite regress in the chain of causes as inadmissible. With respect to action, he insists on imposing a limit (peras) on the series as an indispensable requisite, since otherwise the nous, the highest good, and the meaning of action would be destroyed. The various meanings of the term aition must not be dismissed as equivocations; in fact, they must be acknowledged as a phase in the unfolding of the thinking about being. In this phase the problems of the order of being are already differentiated but have not yet become entirely separated from their background of Cosmological thought.

In the light of our analysis of the ontological complex one could say about the first meaning of aition that it refers to that being which, as a consequence of the experience of transcendence, was given the index “immanent.” In this being of the “this-side-of-Godness,” which we call “world,” the problem of arche does not arise (except in the sense of what transcends the world), but only the concern with indefinite regression. If we ask whether the “world” has a beginning in time or not, a hypostatization of the order of being into an existing thing has slipped itself into the question, since we have forgotten that there is no “being” and “world,” but that being and world are ordering relationships pertaining to the cosmos in which we are living, now as before.

The question concerning the arche, the origin or beginning, does not arise from the experience of being but belongs to the pre-philosophic primary experience of the cosmos. It can only appear in a variety of forms limited by their various degrees of symbolic differentiation, up until the point of philosophical differentiation of being, at which point it expresses itself as such: In the sphere of myth it takes on the form of cosmogonic speculation; in the symbolism of revelation it figures as the divine creation out of nothing; in philosophy, as the question of the ground of being of the world.

Cause as the Meaning of Human Action

What is newly differentiated in philosophizing is the concomitant experience of man as the entity who experiences the order of being and his own order as something in attunement with it. This is the experience whose problems come to the fore in the third meaning of aition, as the question of the meaning of human action obtrudes itself, which in turn makes urgent the reformulation of the question of the arche, of the origin.

The question of the arche is reformulated in the sense that it no longer inquires about the beginning of the world but is concerned with the integration of man into the order of being through the attunement of the human with the divine nous. In order to grasp this integration in its uniqueness, the following misunderstandings must be avoided: The nous must neither be confused with the Israelite ruach of God, nor with the Hellenistic, Christian, or gnostic pneuma, nor with the ratio of the Enlightenment, nor with Hegel’s Geist.

It is to be understood strictly in the sense of the Hellenic thinkers as the locus where the human ground of order is in attunement with the ground of being. However, since Aristotle raises the question of this locus by linking the limit of human action with the nous, he goes behind the demiurgic image of God and man to the ground itself, which gives the congruity of the images its legitimacy.

As he leaves the images behind, his inquiry about the peras of action explodes the definition of human nature as form, for when the question is raised about the limit of action set by the nous, this does not involve form, but form is realized only through action. Hence at its core human nature is the openness of questioning knowing and knowing questioning about the ground. Through this openness, beyond any contents, images, and models whatsoever, order flows from the ground of being into the being of man.

I have spoken of questioning knowing and knowing questioning in order to characterize the experience that I have called noetic, for it is not the experience of a “something” but of a questioning arising from the knowledge that human being does not have its ground within itself. The knowledge that human being is not grounded on itself implies the question of its origin, and in this question human being is revealed as a becoming toward what is, albeit not as a becoming in the time of existing things, but a becoming from within the ground of being.

In the experience of enduring and recurring figures [Gestalten] within being as temporal becoming, we encounter being as form; in the noetic experience that delves into the background of being as form and of the demiurgic images, we encounter becoming from within the ground of being—becoming expressed pre-philosophically in the mythical tales of the genesis of things. The myth expresses, through its Time of the Tale, which is not the time of the becoming-in-the-world, the becoming from the ground of being. The great questions of a philosophy of myth that result cannot be treated here. The problem has been mentioned here in passing, only because it resonates within Aristotle’s aetiology.

Becoming from the Ground: Not Causality in World Time

The passages cited from Metaphysics Alpha are noteworthy because the elements that function in the Ionian speculation about being as the arche emerge there as links in the causal chain, for which a limit is required. Thus the postulate of a limit for the causalities really has nothing to do with chains of causation comprising phenomena in world time, but instead involves the becoming that issues from the ground of being, which does have its limit in that ground.

Hence the limit postulated by Aristotle is already inherent in the premise in which the elements figure as entities of the ground of being. However when the becoming that issues from the ground of being, which is expressed in terms of the cosmogonic and Ionian speculation about being, is subsumed—granted for valid historical reasons—under the concept of the aition, the concept also serves to designate causalities in world time. As this becoming is represented by a chain of causes, it provides all the prerequisites we need for the whole class of derailments called proofs for the existence of God.

For statements like “The great Mighty one is Ptah who gave life to all gods,” or “The origin of existing things is the apeiron,” or “In the beginning God created heaven and earth” are not propositions about events in world time, but myths that tell, in the Time of the Tale, the story of the becoming that issues from the ground of being. The ”existence” of the divine beings who appear in these myths as actors cannot be “proved” by world-immanent means. This type of existence does not stand in need of any such proof, for the truth of the myth is constituted in its adequacy as a symbol of the directly given experience of being as a being that is not grounded on itself.

This experience always implies also the question of the origin of being; the question of the origin in turn implies knowledge about the ground of being addressed by that question; the knowledge about the ground of being implies knowledge of its character as a being that is grounded on itself. Proofs of the existence of God cannot add anything to this complex of experiences.

These proofs, by the way, which have their beginnings in Aristotle, remain an unexplained phenomenon to this day, for Kant’s demonstration that they are based on fallacies does not explain why they were conceived in the first place. One would likely come closer to the solution of this problem if one recognized it as a sui generis form of myth that arises only when nous is demoted to a world-immanent ratio, and that ratio is at the same time hypostatized as an autonomous source of truth.

We have come to the end of our exploration of the question “what is nature?” Let us recapitulate its principal phases.

In the first part we had to examine the definition of nature as the form of things, and found it to be inadequate. The second part addressed the question of why, in the history of Hellenic thought, the broader philosophical concept of nature, which marks the beginning of the experience of being, has been narrowed down to the metaphysical concept of nature as form. The third part explained this narrowing down as motivated by the demiurgic experience of God. The fourth and last part dealt with Aristotle’s noetic experience that delved into the background of the demiurgic experience of God, and it showed that the core of man’s nature is the openness of his being for questioning and knowing about the ground of being.

This excerpt is from Anamnesis:On the Theory of History and Politics (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 6) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002)

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