Spontaneous generation and creationism in Pre-Socratic monism in light of Aristotle's analysis in the Physics

Abstract

In Physics II.3, Aristotle outlines his famous theory of the four causes (aitiai) — the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final, which are the ways in which something can be said to be “responsible for” something else.  It behooves the natural philosopher (physikos), he argues, to know all four principles (archai) or causes (aitiai) in order to answer the “how and why” of all natural change (Physics II.7; see also Metaphysics V.2).  Aristotle is convinced that it is these causes that his predecessors, ancient and modern, were searching for, but he was the first to consciously find a solution to the quest. In his illuminating analysis of the notion of physis in Physics II.1, which proceeds his doctrine of the four causes in II. 3, the Stagirite contends that the first philosophers identified physis or nature with the primary “material” or “substance” (ousia), out of which everything in the cosmos is composed (193a10-28; cf. 203a2). After reiterating at the beginning of the Metaphysics (I.3. 983a24ff) that there are four recognizable types of principles (archai) or causes (aitiai), Aristotle then discusses the position of the earliest philosophers (tôn protôn philosophêsantôn). He again claims that they only recognized the “material” cause (en hulên eidei) of things (983b7-14; at 987a3-7, using the term sômatikê or “corporeal”). More to the point, they argued that everything in the cosmos arises from one basic substance, principle or cause, and perishes back into it, such that nothing is ever created or destroyed since any physical difference is only a difference of state or phase of the original material (Metaphysics I.3, 983b7-14). In sum, Aristotle insists that the first philosophers were material monists who were unaware of the three other kinds of causes. This interpretation is embraced by the vast majority of scholars and interpreters of ancient philosophy.

What would almost naturally follow from this, is that the first philosophers could be considered atheistic materialists. But Aristotle and many of his modern interpreters were well aware that the monism of the early Ionian philosophers was not so simplistic as to exclude any reference to the other causes in the Aristotelian quartet. In both the Physics and the Metaphysics, the original substance is invariably characterized as “alive” and/or as having within itself the principle of movement and change (archê kinêseôs kai metabolês, Physics II.1, 193a 29-30; Metaphysics I. 3, 983b7-27; On the Soul I.2, 405a19-20; I.5, 411aff). And, in Physics III. 4, 203b7ff, Aristotle states that the material monists claim that the primordial substance or archê is not only divine (to theion), but that it also steers, guides or governs everything (panta kubernan). From this perspective, the early Ionian archê seems to grasp what Aristotle understands by the material, efficient and final causes. He reproaches them for not “consciously” separating the three. But the philosophical and metaphysical problem with which we are confronted and which deserves our closest attention in light of Aristotle's testimonia is the following: what is the relation between “consciousness” and  “spontaneous generation” in the all-embracing research on nature (historia peri physeôs) put forward by the first philosophers? Or, to put it in more modern terms: what is the relation between “creationism” and “evolutionism” in early Greek philosophy? In this paper, I hope to shed new light on this relation, an area most scholars and historians of ancient philosophy have either skirted or failed to address in a comprehensive manner.