Mediterranean
Ionian ideas about nature
The Ionian philosophers
ignored the supernatural and supposed, instead, that the affairs of
the universe followed a fixed and unalterable pattern. They assumed
the existence of causality; that is, every event had a cause, and
that a particular cause inevitably produced a particular effect,
with no danger of change by a capricious will. A further assumption
was that the 'natural law' that governed the universe was of such a
kind that the mind of man could encompass it and could deduce it
from first principles or from observation.
This point of view dignified the study of the
universe. It maintained that man could understand the universe and
gave the assurance that the understanding, once gained, would be
permanent. If one could work out a knowledge of the laws governing
the motion of the sun, for instance, one would not need to fear
that the knowledge would suddenly become useless when some Phaethon
decided to seize the reins of the sun chariot and lead it across
the sky along an arbitrary course.
Little is known of these early Ionian
philosophers; their works are lost. But their names survive and the
central core of their teachings as well. Moreover, the philosophy
of rationalism (the belief that the workings of the universe could
be understood through reason rather than revelation), which began
with them, has never died. It had a stormy youth and flickered
nearly to extinction after the fall of the Roman Empire, but it
never quite died.
Rationalism entered biology when the mechanisms
of the animal body came to be studied for their own sake, rather
than as transmitting devices for divine messages. By tradition, the
first man to dissect animals merely to describe what he saw was
Alcmaeon (flourished, sixth century B.C.). About 500 B.C., Alcmaeon
described the nerves of the eye and studied the structure of the
growing chick within the egg. He might thus be considered the first
student of anatomy (the study of the structure of living
organisms) and of embryology (the study of the development
of organisms). Alcmaeon even described the narrow tube that
connects the middle ear with the throat. This was lost sight of by
later anatomists and was only rediscovered two thousand years
later.
The most important name to be associated with the
rationalistic beginnings of biology, however, is that of
Hippocrates (460?~377? B.C.). Virtually nothing is known about the
man himself except that he was born and lived on the island of Cos
just off the Ionian coast. On Cos was a temple to Asclepius, the
Greek god of medicine. The temple was the nearest equivalent to
today's medical school, and to be accepted as a priest there as the
equivalent of obtaining a modern medical degree.
Hippocrates' great service to biology was that of
reducing Asclepius to a purely honorary position. No god influenced
medicine in the Hippocratic view. To Hippocrates, the healthy body
was one in which the component parts worked well and harmoniously,
whereas a diseased body was one in which they did not. It was the
task of the physician to observe closely in order to see where the
flaws in the working were, and then to take the proper action to
correct those flaws. The proper action did not consist of prayer or
sacrifice, of driving out demons or of propitiating gods. It
consisted chiefly of allowing the patient to rest, seeing that he
was kept clean, had fresh air, and simple wholesome food. Any form
of excess was bound to overbalance the body's workings in one
respect or another, so there was to be moderation in all
things.
In short, the physician's role, in the
Hippocratic view, was to let natural law itself effect the cure.
The body had self-corrective devices which should be given every
opportunity to work. In view of the limited knowledge of medicine,
this was an excellent point of view.
Hippocrates founded a medical tradition that
persisted for centuries after his time. The physicians of this
tradition placed his honoured name on their writings so that it is
impossible to tell which of the books are actually those of
Hippocrates himself. The 'Hippocratic oath,' for instance, which is
still recited by medical graduates at the moment of receiving their
degrees, was most certainly not written by him and was, in fact,
probably not composed until some six centuries after his time. On
the other hand, one of the oldest of the Hippocratic writings deals
with the disease epilepsy, and this may very well have been written
by Hippocrates himself. If so, it is an excellent example of the
arrival of rationalism in biology.
Epilepsy is a disorder of the brain function
(still not entirely understood) in which the brain's normal control
over the body is disrupted. In milder forms, the victim may
misinterpret sense impressions and therefore suffer hallucinations.
In the more spectacular forms, the muscles go out of control
suddenly; the epileptic falls to the ground and cries out, jerking
spasmodically and sometimes doing severe damage to himself.
The epileptic fit does not last long but it is a
fearful sight to behold. Onlookers who do not understand the
intricacies of the nervous system find it all too easy to believe
that if a person moves not of his own volition and in such a way as
to harm himself, it must be because some supernatural power has
seized control of his body. The epileptic is 'possessed'; and the
disease is the 'sacred disease' because supernatural beings are
involved.
In the book On the Sacred Disease, written
about 400 B.C., possibly by Hippocrates himself, this view is
strongly countered. Hippocrates maintained that it was useless,
generally, to attribute divine causes to diseases, and that there
was no reason to consider epilepsy an exception. Epilepsy, like all
other diseases, had a natural cause and a rational treatment. If
the cause was not known and the treatment uncertain, that did not
change the principle.
All of modern science cannot improve on this view
and if one were to insist on seeking for one date, one man, and one
book as the beginning of the science of biology, one could do worse
than point to the date 400 B.C., the man Hippocrates, and the book
On the Sacred Disease.
Athenian ideas about nature
Biology and, indeed,
ancient science in general, reached a kind of climax in Aristotle
(384-322 B.C.). He was a native of northern Greece and a teacher of
Alexander the Great in the latter's youth. Aristotle's great days,
however, came in his middle years, when he founded and taught at
the famous Lyceum in Athens. Aristotle was the most versatile and
thorough of the Greek philosophers. He wrote on almost all
subjects, from physics to literature, from politics to biology. In
later times, his writings on physics, dealing mainly with the
structure and workings of the inanimate universe, were most famous;
yet these, as events proved, were almost entirely wrong.
On the other hand, it was biology and,
particularly, the study of sea creatures, that was his first and
dearest intellectual love. Moreover, it was Aristotle's biological
books that proved the best of his scientific writings and yet they
were, in later times, the least regarded.
Aristotle carefully and accurately noted the
appearance and habits of creatures (this being the study of
natural history). In the process, he listed about five
hundred kinds or 'species' of animals, and differentiated among
them. The list in itself would be trivial, but Aristotle went
further. He recognised that different animals could be grouped into
categories and that the grouping was not necessarily done simply
and easily. For instance, it is easy to divide land animals into
four-footed creatures (beasts), flying, feathered creatures
(birds), and a remaining miscellany ('vermin,' from the Latin word
vermisfor 'worms'). Sea creatures might be all lumped under
the heading of 'fish.' Having done so, however, it is not always
easy to tell under which category a particular creature might
fit.
Aristotle's careful observations of the dolphin,
for instance, made it quite plain that although it was a fishlike
creature in superficial appearance and in habitat, it was quite
unfishlike in many important respects. The dolphin had lungs and
breathed air; unlike fish, it would drown if kept submerged. The
dolphin was warm-blooded, not cold- blooded as ordinary fish were.
Most important, it gave birth to living young which were nourished
before birth by a placenta. In all these respects, the dolphin was
similar to hairy warm-blooded animals of the land. These
similarities, it seemed to Aristotle, were sufficient to make it
necessary to group the cetaceans (the whales, dolphins, and
porpoises) with the beasts of the field rather than with the fish
of the sea. In this, Aristotle was two thousand years ahead of his
time, for cetaceans continued to be grouped with fish throughout
ancient and medieval times. Aristotle was quite modern, again, in
his division of the scaly fish into two groups, those with bony
skeletons and those (like the sharks) with cartilaginous skeletons.
This again fits the modern view.
In grouping his animals, and in comparing them
with the rest of the universe, Aristotle's neat mind could not
resist arranging matters in order of increasing complexity. He saw
nature progressing through gradual stages to man, who stands (as it
is natural for man to think) at the peak of creation. Thus, one
might divide the universe into four kingdoms: the inanimate world
of the soil, sea, and air; the world of the plants above that; the
world of the animals higher still; and the world of man at the
peak. The inanimate world exists; the plant world not only exists,
it reproduces, too; the animal world not only exists and
reproduces, it moves, too; and man not only exists, reproduces, and
moves, but he can reason, too.
Furthermore, within each world there are further
subdivisions. Plants can be divided into the simpler and the more
complex. Animals can be divided into those without red blood and
those with. The animals without red blood include, in ascending
order of complexity, sponges, molluscs, insects, crustaceans, and
octopi (according to Aristotle). The animals with red blood are
higher on the scale and include fish, reptiles, birds, and
beasts.
Aristotle recognised that in this ladder of life
there were no sharp boundaries and that it was impossible to tell
exactly into which group each individual species might fall. Thus
very simple plants might scarcely seem to possess any attribute of
life. Very simple animals (sponges, for instance) were plantlike,
and so on.
Aristotle nowhere showed any traces of belief
that one form of life might slowly be converted into another; that
a creature high on the ladder might be descended from one lower on
the ladder. It is this concept which is the key to modern theories
of evolution and Aristotle was not an evolutionist. However, the
preparation of a ladder of life inevitably set up a train of
thought that was bound, eventually, to lead to the evolutionary
concept.
Aristotle is the founder of zoology (the
study of animals), but as nearly as we can tell from his surviving
writings, he rather neglected plants. However, after Aristotle's
death, the leadership of his school passed on to his student,
Theophrastus (380?- 28y B.C.), who filled in this deficiency of his
master. Theophrastus founded botany (the study of plants)
and in his writings carefully described some five hundred species
of plants.
Alexandrian ideas about nature
After the time of
Alexander the Great and his conquest of the Persian Empire, Greek
culture spread rapidly across the Mediterranean world. Egypt fell
under the rule of the Ptolemies (descendants of one of the generals
of Alexander) and Greeks flocked into the newly founded capital
city of Alexandria. There the first Ptolemies founded and
maintained the Museum, which was the nearest ancient equivalent to
a modern university. Alexandrian scholars are famous for their
researches into mathematics, astronomy, geography, and physics.
Less important is Alexandrian biology, yet at least two names of
the first rank are to be found there. These are Herophilus
(flourished
c. 300 B.C.) and his pupil, Erasistratus
(flourished
c. 250 B.C.).
In Christian times, they were accused of having
dissected the human body publicly as a method of teaching anatomy.
It is probable they did not do so; more's the pity. Herophilus was
the first to pay adequate attention to the brain, which he
considered the seat of intelligence. Alcmaeon and Hippocrates had
also believed this, but Aristotle had not. He had felt the brain to
be no more than an organ designed to cool the blood. Herophilus was
able to distinguish between sensory nerves (those which receive
sensation) and motor nerves (those which induce muscular movement).
He also distinguished between arteries and veins, noting that the
former pulsated and the latter did not. He described the liver and
spleen, the retina of the eye, and the first section of the small
intestine, which is now called the duodenum. He also described
ovaries and related organs in the female and the prostate gland in
the male. Erasistratus added to the study of the brain, pointing
out the division of the organ into the larger cerebrum and the
smaller cerebellum. He particularly noted the wrinkled appearance
(convolutions) of the brain and saw that these were more pronounced
in man than in other animals. He therefore connected the
convolutions with intelligence.
After such a promising beginning, it seems a pity
that the Alexandrian school of biology bogged down, as indeed it
did. In fact, all Greek science began to peter out after about 200
B.C. It had flourished for four centuries, but by continuous
warfare among themselves, the Greeks had recklessly expended their
energies and prosperity. They fell under first Macedonian and then
Roman dominion. More and more, their scholarly interests turned
toward the study of rhetoric, of ethics, of moral philosophy. They
turned away from natural philosophy—from the rational study
of nature that had begun with the lonians.
Biology, in particular, suffered, for life was
naturally considered more sacred than the inanimate universe and
therefore less a proper subject for rationalistic study. Dissection
of the human body seemed absolutely wrong to many and it either did
not take place at all or, if it did, it was soon stopped, first by
public opinion, and then by law. In some cases, the objections to
dissection lay in the religious belief (by the Egyptians, for
instance) that the integrity of the physical body was required for
the proper enjoyment of an afterlife. To others, such as the Jews
and, later, the Christians, dissection was sacrilegious because the
human body was created in the likeness of God, and was therefor
holy. It came about, therefore, that the centuries during which
Rome dominated the Mediterranean world represented one long
suspension of biological advance. Scholars seemed content to
collect and preserve the discoveries of the past, and to popularize
them for Roman audiences.
The Far East
Taoism
According to tradition, Taoism (pronounced
Dowism) originated in ancient China with a man named Lao Tzu, said
to have been born about 604 B.C. Some scholars date his life as
much as three centuries later than this; some doubt that he ever
lived. If he did we know almost nothing about him. We don't even
know his name, Lao Tzu—which can be translated "the Old Boy,"
"the Old Fellow," or "the Grand Old Master"—being obviously a
title of endearment and respect.
On opening Taoism's bible, the Tao Te
Ching, we sense at once that everything revolves around the
pivotal concept of Tao itself. Literally this word means "path" or
"way." There are three senses, however, in which this "way" can be
understood.
First, Tao is the way of ultimate reality. This Tao cannot be
perceived for it exceeds the reach of the senses. If it were to
reveal itself in all its sharpness, fullness, and glory, mortal man
would not be able to bear the vision. Not only does it exceed the
senses, however; it exceeds all thoughts and imaginings as well.
Hence words cannot describe nor define it. The Tao Te Ching opens
by stating this point categorically: "The Tao which can be
conceived is not the real Tao." Ineffable and transcendent, this
ultimate Tao is the ground of all existence. It is behind all and
beneath all, the womb from which all life springs and to which it
again returns. Overawed by the very thought of it, the author of
the Tao Te Ching bursts recurrently into hymns of praise, for he is
face to face with life's "basic mystery, the mystery of mysteries,
the entrance into the mystery of all life." "How clear and quiet it
is! It must be something eternally existing!" "Of all great things,
surely Tao is the greatest." Tao in the first and basic sense can
be known, but only through mystical insight which cannot be
translated into words—hence Taoism's teasing epigram, "Those
who know don't say, and those who say don't know."
Though Tao ultimately is transcendent, it is also immanent. In this
secondary sense it is the way of the universe; the norm, the
rhythm, the driving power in all nature, the ordering principle
behind all life. Behind, but likewise in the midst of, for when Tao
enters this second form it "assumes flesh" and informs all things.
It "adapts its vivid essence, clarifies its manifold fullness,
subdues its resplendent lustre, and assumes the likeness of dust."
Basically spirit rather than matter it cannot be exhausted; the
more it is drawn upon the richer the fountain will gush. There are
about it the marks of inevitability; when autumn comes "no leaf is
spared because of its beauty, no flower because of its fragrance."
Yet ultimately it is benign. Graceful instead of abrupt, flowing
rather than hesitant, it is infinitely generous. Giving as it does
without stint to nature and man, "it may be called the Mother of
the World." As nature's agent, Tao bears a resemblance to Bergson's
elan vital; as her orderer, it parallels to some extent the lex
aeterna of the Classical West, the eternal law of nature in accord
with which the universe operates. Darwin's colleague Roames could
have been speaking of it when he referred to "the integrating
principle of the whole—the Spirit, as it were, of the
universe—instinct with contrivance, which flows with
purpose."
Regarding its rational view of nature Tao refers to the way man
should order his life to gear in with the way the universe operates
and Taoism suggests this way of life should be. The power of Tao is
the power that enters a life that has reflectively and intuitively
geared itself in with the Way of the Universe. More a perspective
than an organised movement, a point of view, philosophical Taoism
has had a profound influence on Chinese life, and is beginning to
influence ideas about sustainable development in the West.
Creative quietude
The basic quality of life in tune
with the universe is
wu wet. This concept is often translated
as a do-nothingness or inaction, but this (suggesting as it does a
vacant attitude of passive abstention) misses the point. A better
rendering is "creative quietude."
Creative quietude combines within a single
individual two seemingly incompatible conditions—supreme
activity and supreme relaxation. These seeming incompatibles can
coexist because man is not a self- enclosed entity. He rides on an
unbounded sea of Tao which feeds him, as we would say, through his
subliminal mind. One way to create is through following the
calculated directives of the conscious mind. The results of this
mode of action, however, are seldom impressive; they tend to smack
more of sorting and arranging than of genuine creation. Genuine
creation, as every artist has discovered, comes when the more
abundant resources of the subliminal self are somehow released. But
for this to happen a certain dissociation from the surface self is
needed. The conscious mind must relax, stop standing in its own
light, let go. Only so is it possible to break through the law of
reversed effort in which the more we try the more our efforts
boomerang.
Wu wei is the supreme action, the precious
suppleness, simplicity, and freedom that flows from us, or rather
through us, when our private egos and conscious efforts yield to a
power not their own. In a way it is virtue approached from a
direction diametrically opposite to that of Confucius. With
Confucius every effort was turned to building up a complete pattern
of ideal responses which might thereafter be consciously imitated.
Taoism's approach is the opposite—to get the foundations of
the self in tune with Tao and let behaviour flow spontaneously.
Action follows being; new action, wiser action, stronger action
will follow new being, wiser being, stronger being. The Tao Te
Ching puts this point without wasting a single word. "The way to
do," it says simply, "is to be."
How are we to describe the action that flows from
a life that is grounded directly in Tao? Nurtured by a force that
is infinitely subtle, infinitely intricate, it is a consummate
gracefulness born from an abundant vitality that has no need for
abruptness or violence. One simply lets Tao flow in and flow out
again until all life becomes an even dance in which there is
neither imbalance nor feverishness. Wu wei is life lived above
tension. Far from inaction, however, it is the pure embodiment of
"suppleness, simplicity, and freedom—a kind of pure
effectiveness in which no motion is wasted on outward show.
Effectiveness of this order obviously requires an
extraordinary skill, a point conveyed in the Taoist story of the
fisherman who was able to land enormous fish with a thread because
it was so delicately made that it had no weakest point at which to
break. But Taoist skill is seldom noticed, for viewed externally wu
wei—never forcing, never under strain—seems quite
without effort. The secret here lies in the way it seeks out the
empty spaces in life and nature and moves through these. Chuang
Tzu, the greatest popularizer of Philosophical Taoism, makes this
point with his story of a butcher whose cleaver did not get dull
for twenty years. Pressed for his secret the butcher replied,
"Between the bones of every joint there is always some space,
otherwise there could be no movement. By seeking out this space and
passing through it my cleaver lays wide the bones without touching
them."
Attitudes towards nature
Taoism says that man should
avoid being strident and aggressive not only toward other men but
also toward nature. How should man relate himself to nature? On the
whole the modern " Western attitude has been to regard nature as an
antagonist, something to be squared off against, dominated,
controlled, conquered. Taoism's attitude toward nature tends to be
the precise opposite of this. There is a profound naturalism in
Taoist thought, but it is the naturalism of Rousseau, Wordsworth,
Thoreau rather than that of Galileo or Bacon.
Nature is to be befriended. When Mount Everest
was scaled the phrase commonly used in the West to describe the
feat was "the conquest of Everest." An Oriental whose writings have
been deeply influenced by Taoism remarked, "We would put the matter
differently. We would speak of 'the befriending of Everest.'"
Taoism seeks to be in tune with nature. Its approach is basically
ecological, a characteristic that has led Joseph Needham to point
out that despite China's backwardness in scientific theory she
early developed "an organic philosophy of nature . . . closely
resembling that which modern science has been forced to adopt after
three centuries of mechanical materialism." This ecological
approach of Taoism has made it one of the inspirations of Frank
Lloyd Wright. Taoist temples do not stand out from the landscape.
They are nestled against the hills, back under the trees, blending
in with the environment. At best man too blends in with nature. His
highest achievement is to identify himself with the Tao and let it
work through him.
This Taoist approach to nature has made a deep
impression on Chinese art. It is no accident that the
seventeenth-century "Great Period" of Chinese art coincided with a
great surge of Taoist influence on the Chinese sentiment and
imagination. Painters took nature as their subject, and before
assuming brush and silk would go out to nature, lose themselves in
it, and become one with it. They would sit for half a day or
fourteen years before making a stroke. The Chinese word for
landscape painting is composed of the radicals for mountain and
water, one of which suggests vastness and solitude, the other
pliability, endurance, and continuous movement. Man's part in that
vastness is small, so we have to look closely for him in the
paintings if we find him at all. Usually he is climbing with his
bundle, riding a buffalo, or poling a boat—man with his
journey to make, his burden to carry, his hill to climb, his
glimpse of beauty through the parting mists. He is not as
formidable as a mountain; he does not live as long as a pine; yet
he too belongs in the scheme of things as surely as the birds and
the clouds. And through him as through the rest of the world flows
the rhythmic movement of Tao.
Taoist naturalism was combined with a propensity
for naturalness as well. Pomp and extravagance were regarded as
pointless accretions. This drive toward simplicity most separated
the Taoists from the Confucians. The basic values of the two
schools did not differ widely, but the Taoists had small patience
with the Confucian approach to securing them. All formalism, show,
and ceremony left them cold. What could be hoped from
punctiliousness or the meticulous observance of propriety? The
whole approach was artificial, a lacquered surface which was bound
to prove brittle and repressive. Confucianism here was but one
instance of man's general tendency to approach life in the wrong
mode.
Another feature of Taoism is its notion of the
relativity of all values and, as the correlate of this principle,
the identity of contraries. Here Taoism tied in with the
traditional Chinese symbolism of yang and yin, pictured as
follows:
This polarity sums up all life's
basic oppositions: good-evil, active- passive, positive-
negative, light-dark, summer-winter, male-female, etc. But
though its principles are in tension, they are not flatly opposed.
They complement and counterbalance each other. Each invades the
other's hemisphere and establishes itself in the very centre of its
opposite's territory. In the end both are resolved in an
all-embracing circle, symbol of the final unity of
Tao.
