The Great Chain of Being
The Great Chain of Being
Vast chain of being!
Which from God began,Nature's aethereal, human,
angel, man,Beast, bird, fish, insect,
what no eye can see,No glass can reach
from Infinite to thee,From thee to nothing.
- On superior pow'rsWere we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,Where, one step broken,
the great scale's destroy'd;From nature's chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth, or ten thousanth, breaks the chain alike.- Alexander Pope, 1773 (Yoerg, 34)
The "Great Chain of Being"
Most of the concepts about the nature of living things derive from the writings of Aristotle (a Greek philosopher of the Fourth Century, B.C.).
From Aristotle we derive the concept of distinct types of organisms which could each be distinguished from all the rest. Aristotle was interested in much more than the biological world, and attempted to build a theory of the world as a whole. As part of this theory, he believed that all of nature could be seen as a continuum of organization from lifeless matter (e.g., water, Earth, fire and air) to the most complex forms of life.
He thought of humans as different from the rest of animals because of their capacity for reason or thought.
In fact reason is the capacity which differentiates man from animals, but Aristotle proposed a rank ordering of all living things, from the least to the highest (humans).
This idea developed, during the later centuries, into the concept of the "Great Chain of Being". The idea had become rigidly codified by the 14th century (preceeding the Renaissance). All living things were seen as members of unchanging types, called species, which could be ordered from the least to the highest.
The metaphor of the "chain" of being suggested that these species were linked to each other by a logical progression. This concept, in the Western tradition, is the result of the attempt to combine the Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology.
This concept of reality was modified by the Renaissance, which broke with the medieval tradition of reliance on authority (for example, on Aristotle), and emphasized the importance of reliance on direct observation (science) or pure reason (philosophy).
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/biologycentury/pages/evolution1.html
To Aristotle we can attribute the basis for an idea often called "The Great Chain of Being." Other names for the same idea are "Ladder of Life" and "Scala Naturae." This was a try at the development of a kind of classification, or taxonomy. Aristotle was attempting to make sense of the relationships among living things.
His idea was that all species could be placed in order, from the "lowest" to the "highest," with worms on the bottom and you-know-who on the top. In Aristotle's view, the universe was ultimately perfect, and that meant that the Great Chain was also perfect. That meant that there were no empty links in the chain, and no link was represented by more than one species.
This basic concept highly influenced the thinking of centuries of Western civilization. In fact, it still holds a powerful influence over our thinking today. The Great Chain idea places some significant restraints upon the ways we think about species. For instance, if every link is occupied, and none are occupied twice, no species can ever move from one position to another, since to do so would leave one level empty and put two species on another. Thus, in Aristotle's perfect universe, species couldn't ever change. This idea - which today we call the Doctrine of Fixed Species - permeated the western view of species for centuries. In fact, it was the prevailing perspective at the beginning of the 19th century. One of the great cultural changes over that century was the movement away from this restriction in thinking toward a more dynamic view of the natural world. Without this adjustment in thought, it is probable that Darwin (and Wallace) would either never have conceived of evolutionary thought, or would have made no impression when they published their ideas.
Another interesting misconception that arises from Aristotle's notions is that two species must always hold a "higher vs. lower" relationship to each other. This causes us no concern if the two species in question are, for instance, earthworms and human beings. It creates no obvious logical conflict to consider ourselves to be more advanced than Night Crawlers. However, if we consider domestic dogs and cats, the issue is very different. Which is "higher," a dog or a cat? The answer to this question is highly dependent upon the personal perspective of the person you ask. Discuss the issue in a crowded room to demonstrate this to yourself. A piece of advice, though - consider the advantages of body armor before you bring up the question.
This second incorrect notion carries over into our thinking about species and evolution. The problem isn't helped by the fact that biologists often discuss certain features as being "lower" or "higher," or "primitive" or "advanced." The correct uses of these terms should imply nothing further than "older" and "younger" - i. e., earlier vs. later evolutionary appearance. There is no proper implication of "better" vs. "worse," or "more adapted" vs. "less adapted," or "simple" vs. "complex." They certainly don't mean "successful" vs. "unsuccessful." Bacteria are arguably the most successful form of life on Earth.
Our very best evidence indicates that, in reality, all species on this world have equal lengths of evolutionary history. The differences are the result chance differences in the pathways evolutionary movement takes. Evolution is ultimately about diversity, not about progress.
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From M.H. Abrams' Glossary of Literary Terms, 4th. Edition (New York: Holt,
1981. pp. 73-74):
http://dragon.zoo.utoronto.ca/~x19919/gcb.htm
From Arvo Krikmann, Estonia Literary Museum
The concept is grounded in ideas about the nature of God, or the first cause, found in Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, and was developed by later thinkers into an inclusive world view. This view was already prevalent in the Renaissance, but was given further philosophical refinement by Leibniz early in the eighteenth century, and was adopted by many thinkers of the Enlightenment. In its comprehensive eighteenth-century form it held that the essential "excellence" of God consists in His illimitable creativity, an unstinting overflow into the fullest possible variety of beings. From this premise were deduced three consequences:
(1) Plenitude. The universe is absolutely full of every possible kind and variety of life; no conceivable species of being can remain unrealized.
(2) Continuity. Each species differs from the next by the least possible degree, and so merges all but imperceptibly into its nearest related kinds.
(3) Gradation. The existing species exhibit a hierarchy of status and so compose a great chain, or ladder, of being, extending from the lowliest condition of the merest existence up to God Himself. In this chain man occupies the middle position between the animal kinds and the angels, or purely spiritual beings.
From E.M.W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto, 1960. pp. 23, 25-26) :
This metaphor (of 'the vast chain of being') served to express the unimaginable plenitude of God's creation, its unfaltering order, and its ultimate unity. The chain stretched from the foot of God's throne to the meanest of inanimate objects. Every speck of creation was a link in the chain, and every link except those at the two extremities was simultaneously bigger and smaller than another: there could be no gap. The precise magnitude of the chain raised metaphysical difficulties; but the safest opinion made it short of infinity though of a finitude quite outside man's imagination . . . . The account of the chain of being found here (in Raymond de Sebonde's Natural Theology) must have been the common property of western Europe in the sixteenth century. First there is mere existence, the inanimate class: the elements, liquids, and metals. But in spite of this common lack of life there is a vast difference of virtue; water is nobler than earth, the ruby than the topaz, gold than brass: the links in the chain are there. Next there is existence and life, the vegetative class, where again the oak is nobler than the bramble. Next there is existence life and feeling, the sensitive class. In it there are three grades. First the creatures having touch but not hearing memory or movement. Such are shellfish and parasites on the base of trees. Then there are animals having touch memory and movement but not hearing, for instance ants. And finally there are the higher animals, horses dogs, etc., that have all these faculties. The three classes lead up to man, who has not only existence life and feeling, but understanding: he sums up in himself the total faculties of earthly phenomena. (For this reason he was called the little world or microcosm). But as there had been an inanimate class, so to balance it there must be a purely rational or spiritual. These are the angels, linked to man by community of the understanding, but freed from simultaneous attachment to the lower faculties. There are vast numbers of angels and they are as precisely ordered along the chain of being as the elements or the metals. Now, although the creatures are assigned their precise place in the chain of being, there is at the same time the possibility of change. The chain is also a ladder. The elements are alimental. There is a progression in the way the elements nourish plants, the fruits of plants beasts, and the flesh of beasts men. And this is all one with the tendency of man upwards toward God. http://www.ajdrake.com/e28a/studyguides/chain_of_being.htm
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Aristotle was an important man in his own time -- as a teacher and perhaps as part of the program that the Macedonian Conqueror Alexander the Great had to "Hellenize" (make Greek) the entire world. ...
For psychology, Aristotle is important not as an influential "dead Greek" but because he set an intellectual agenda, revived in the late Middle Ages, that is perhaps even now unfinished. What follows is a description of Aristotelian taxonomy with some promissory notes on why you will need to know about it at several points later in the course.
Aristotle sought to classify all things, not merely in a way that would
make it convenient to store and retrieve information, but in the correct
way -- the very system that is built into the universe. His taxonomy is
usually called The Great Chain of Being, sometimes, The Ladder
of Creation. The part of it that refers to biological species, especially
animals, came in the 19th and 20th centuries to be called the Phylogenetic
Scale.
"Universal" taxonomy is one of those persistent problems (Hergenhahn's term) that recurs throughout intellectual history. For the moment, please note these characteristics of Aristotle's system:
1. It's one-dimensional -- everything can be arranged on one line. (The example from Lamarck, in the picture, hints that at least two dimensions are necessary, a brand-new idea in about 1800. In addition to being "higher" and "lower," Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's animals sometimes move "sideways.")
2. It's not quite clear how we should label the dimension. (Birds are "higher" than fish -- does that mean "morally superior," "closer to perfection," "more recently evolved," "having bigger brains," "more intelligent"? Are all of these the same thing? Are some people "higher" than others, too? Hugely debated in the 19th and 20th centuries.)
3. Calling the system "a chain" suggests that every link is necessary to support every other link. That might be reading too much into Aristotle, who apparently made a distinction between logical necessity and and what we might call ecological necessity. (I think this means that the world could be different but given the way it is, losing a species to extinction is very dangerous. What "necessary" means was hotly contested by several professors in the new universities of the 13th and 14th centuries -- William of Occam, for example, added the idea of "psychologically necessary.")
4. Because Aristotle's system is the system, forever fixed, calling it a "ladder" might also be misleading. You can climb up and down a ladder but an insect can't be promoted to a reptile any more than zebras can sneak up through the alphabet to become aardvarks. There's no evolution. Aristotle was not a fan of Heraclitus-the-Flux. Even though an acorn, say, can't evolve into an aardvark, it can fulfill its destiny -- its role in the universe -- its arete [Greek for excellence] -- by becoming the most glorious oak tree that ever was. You will never become -- oh, an angel, I suppose -- but you can fulfill your arete or human potential. (Aristotle thought that the golden life for human beings was rational, moderate, urban, cosmopolitan, civilized and intellectual -- you might have a different idea, of course.)
5. Like Charles Bonnet, Aristotle put no special dividing line between Humans and other animals. (That would bother a lot of people who think that Humans have unique spiritual or psychological qualities. Descartes, in about 1630, would claim that only people have souls -- but that might have been just a trick to keep the Church happy.)
6. Bonnet's version stops at worms (his idea of the lowest form of animal life) but it wouldn't have bothered him to add plants underneath. Aristotle's version goes right down to Stones without any particular dividing line between living and non-living things. Stones are admittedly slow thinkers but in a way, they have instincts or motives not different in principle from ours. Let go of a stone and it seems determined to move quickly toward the center of the Earth. (Watch out for your toes). We will examine "the psychology of stones" with Raymond Lull circa 1300, and the rejection of this "unscientific" idea by Galileo in the 17th century.
ARISTOLE'S VERSION OF THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING
"GOD" what Aristotle calls
is fully actualized
Aristotle's "GOD"
Aristotle's Unmoved Mover -- Self-Actualized One --
However, the Self-Actualized Being
Hence, Aristotle's Unmoved Mover is a part of his total
system -- more like a principle of the universe than a God as Jews and Christians
and Muslims think of God. >More like a principle of physics and mind
and whatever .Not to be prayed to. Doesn't intervene.