This part of Aristotle's work challenges us to understand and look into the processes by which nature remains ordered. He also tries to determine a cycle with which nature is formed and more often than not followed. Things come to be and the purpose of this being is to meet an end.
One of Aristotle's main arguments in Chapter 8 is that nature always does something for "the sake of which" or in other words because it is necessary. But what is necessary and what determines what is necessary and what is not? Many have tried to attribute the current state of nature to chance "wherever everything happened to come together just as if it had been for the sake of something" , these things were "preserved" because they were " put together advantageously by chance" (66). But this claim complicates things and suggests that nature then, was put together by chance. But, that these "chances" then became the "for the sake of which." However, if we intermingle things that happen by chance and things that happen for a purpose ("the for sake for which" ), the idea of both gets lost.
More importantly it is obvious that nature was put together in a certain way, for a certain purpose. It is a cyclical, structured thing. Nothing as formulaic as nature could be accredited to coincidence. The idea of everything originating by chance is quickly noted by Aristotle as impossible. Everything that exists by nature is "being-for the-sake-of something" (66), which implies that everything comes together in a certain order to meet an end. What then is the end? The chick, or the mature chicken? As we discussed in class, it is necessary to characterize these as two separate things with two separate purposes. The chick exists for the sake of becoming a chicken. The chicken then is the end that the chick seeks to become. The mature chicken, on the other hand, is "being for the sake" of becoming food.
Aristotle's proposals seem cyclical and intertwined. Nature is just that: a cycle. In order to understand all of its parts you have to constantly overlap ideas and return to previous notions in order to understand new ones. The ultimate question I would pose is what determines what is necessary, as I mentioned before, and what is not. And will humans disrupt this cycle enough to where what once was necessary is no longer, disrupting the underlying root of nature's cycles,"the form and material." Or are humans simply a part of nature and its natural cycle.
Hey Laura,
ReplyDeleteYou're final thought is a good one to end on. I definitely think we need to think about how we fit into nature and whether or not we are disrupting the cycle or a natural part of the cycle. This theme has been talked about over and over in class and its difficult to answer because we clearly came from nature, but we cannot know how natural it is for us to destroy other nature.
If it is natural for nature to destroy herself and we came from nature, how is our destruction of nature any different? Perhaps one could say that the 'end' or goal of nature is not her own destruction, whereas it could be a human goal. However I would venture to guess that most of the time it is not a human being's goal to destroy nature. He or she usually destroying nature on accident.
ReplyDeleteRegarding chance:
ReplyDeleteI would like to throw a stick in the spokes (not that this idea is particularly constructive, or the best way to represent my own belief on the matter)... I do feel that if we want to get nitty-gritty about what makes things happen, dismissing chance is not as simple as it first appears.
Everything that happens in this Universe is, to borrow a bit of language from Douglas Adams, infinitely improbable. If one were to draw a ratio of things that actually occur at a given moment (1) to possible other things that could have occurred (infinite), we see a ratio of 1/infinity...
It's infinitely more probable that *anything* else, besides what actually happens, will happen.
And despite our belief that nature is formulaic, individual occurrences can be predicted with no more certainty than a statistical estimate based on the past course of things (i.e. the weather). Perhaps if we knew all the innumerable factors that were in play we could know with certainty? ...Not to get quantum, but... quantum mechanics shows that a particle's very existence (location in space and time and physical properties) is, at best, very probable. Translated into a macro scale, the things happening in our daily lives are a compounding of probabilities arranged in probable ways; but they cannot be pinned down in any perfectly precise manner.
Whew!
This is a lot of thought fluff, but all to say:
Chance is a very real part of the way things happen, and can't be tossed away nonchalantly! If I had to take a position on the matter, it seems that chance and necessity are inextricably intertwined. Nature is indeed cyclical, revealing general patterns that generally yield balance-- but not in a rigid way. Not only does it deviate from a concrete pattern, it seems to be defined by a *lack of* true definition on an individual basis. It adheres only loosely to basic structural "laws," with seemingly infinite room for 'chance' to abound in between~