POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, Book II Beta, chapter 19, 99b15-100b17
TOPOS: PLACE
SECTION 3
?Self? in Heidegger might be considered as a ?place? to be filled. But
Hume, on the other hand, has raised serious objections as to whether a
?self? can be any sort of ?invariable and uninterrupted? container. In
fact, Hume has severely restricted the ?my self? to ?his own present
ideas? giving ?past ideas? an aspect as being questionably ?his? and thus
how the self is at all ?conceived in the imagination? as any sort of
reality.
Aristotle conceives of something like an ?invariable and uninterrupted?
identity of sots with topos or ?place? which acts as a boundary within
which experience can happen, identities can be made, and movement and
change accounted or measured. The SAME ?place? can be filled and emptied
with water, comparisons of experience can produce likenesses as well as
inconsistencies and changes thereof, and also follow some course of
movement comparing this moment and place with the next moment and place.
But is this sufficient for ?identity?? Does the ?person? or ?personal?
really exist as ?identity? or is it really the body viewed as ?mine??
What would ?mine-ness? mean here? Would it solve Hume?s problem of being
able to say ?his own present ideas? are truly identifiable as ?his?, but
?why certain past ideas, to which ?someone? has immediate access, count
as ?his,? and, correlatively, he finds it problematic to determine what
the ?he,? who has immediate access, actually is and how this individual
can be conceived in the imagination?, Don Garrett, ibid, page 185.
Aristotle says at PHYSICS, Bk IV, 1, 208a27- :
3. ?A natural scientist must inform himself not only on the infinite but
also on place (GCM: the unbounded versus what binds: ?What is infinite is
unknowable insofar as it is infinite,? [187b7]. ?Nature? here is not
Romantic ?nature?, but ?definition? per se. It is not describing
?natural beings? but ?things? as such. Animals are primarily moving
objects. Nothing ?has the source of its own production within itself;
rather this source is in an agent external to the product or, when the
thing happens incidentally to act upon itself, the source is in some
distinct aspect of the product itself.? {GCM: A physician can heal
himself.} [193a29-32]) . . . the kinds of ?movement? involved in all the
types of change and most strictly so called in change of place . . . The
question, What is place? presents many difficulties. An examination of
all the relevant facts seems to lead to different conclusions. Moreover,
we have inherited nothing from previous thinkers.? [208a27-208a37]
4. ?Nevertheless, it clearly seems to be a fact that place ?is?. First,
there is displacement. (GCM: One would not know there is a place unless
there was ?displacement? or change.) Place seems to be different from all
the bodies which successively displace one another. That ?in? which the
air is now, is that ?in? which the water was before. Consequently, the
place was clearly something, that is the location was clearly different
from the bodies . . . (GCM: Change is also within the context of
viewpoint, position of body, up, down, left, right, etc.) Not only is
place something, but also it exerts a functional significance . . . These
are regions or kinds of place . . . To us they are not always the same
but change in the direction in which we are turned [as we change our
position]: that is why the same thing is both right and left, up and
down, before and behind. But in nature each is distinct, independently of
our own position [GCM: as definition or ?nature? per se] . . . This is
also clarified by mathematical representations: though they do not have
their being in a place, they nevertheless have distinctions of position
(like ?right? and ?left?) relative to us; they have their ?position?
therefore in concept only, but they do not have any position in their own
nature. Again, the theory that the void exists involves the existence of
place; for one would define void as place bereft of body.? [208b1-208b27]
5. ?For these reasons, then, we may regard place as something distinct
from bodies . . . (GCM: Would ?personal? then be distinct from the
changeable body?) Everything is somewhere, that is, in a place. If such
is the status of place, it must have a functional significance surpassing
that of the most astounding phenomenon. If nothing else can continue in
being without it whereas it remains when everything else vacates it,
place must indeed rank first; for place does not perish with the
perishing things in it.? (GCM: my italics). [208b28-209a2]
6. ?. . . The fact that we cannot distinguish between a point and its
place implies that a place that cannot differ from a point, cannot differ
from a line or a plane or a body either; therefore, a place cannot be
anything different from any limit of the body. What, then, could we
possibly deem place to be?? [209a11-16]
7. ?. . . Then there is this difficulty: if place is itself a being among
beings, then place, too, must be somewhere . . .? [209a24-5]
8. ?It would seem very difficult to find out what place is if it is
either matter or form, for these are hard to tell apart . . .(GCM: It is
impossible to fully perceived, as one could another body, one?s personal
body) Place cannot be either form or mater. Form and mater cannot be
disassociated from that to which they belong, as place can . . . Place
seems to be like a receptacle, which is a movable part (GCM: It can be
?carried?. See in ?Time? next letter) but which is not itself a part of
its contents. Thus, as distinct from the body whose place it is, place is
not the body?s form, or . . . from the body?s material. What is somewhere
is one thing; what surrounds it, is quite another.? [209b19-34]
9. ?. . . Place must be . . . the limit of the surrounding body (at which
this body is in contact with the body it surrounds), provided that the
surrounded body is capable of local motion.? [212a4-6]
10. ?Now, place is regarded as something important but hard to grasp
because matter and form appear with it . . . As a receptacle is a place
that can be transported, so place is a receptacle that cannot be
transported. When a body moves and changes its place within something in
motion (for example, a boat in a river), the immediately surrounding
body functions as a receptacle rather than as a place; whereas place
tends to be motionless (so that it is a whole river which, being
motionless as a whole [GCM: my italics], functions as a place). Thus, the
place of anything is the first unmoved boundary of what surrounds it.
(Richard Hope?s italics). [212a8-21] (GCM: The ?unmoved mover? called
?God in the PHYSICS and the METAPHYSICS is a concept of physics relating
to the ?origin? of physical, especially cosmological, motion. There is no
reason to consider this concept ?theological? as Aristotle does the gods
in TOPICS, Bk I, 11, 105a3-7: ?For people who are puzzled to know whether
one ought to honor the gods and love one?s parents or not need
punishment, while those who are puzzled to know whether snow is white or
not need perception.?
11. ?This is the reason why the center of the cosmos and the inner
surface of the rotating celestial system are conceived as functionally
down and up for all men . . . For this reason, too, place seems to be a
sort of surface as if it were a receptacle or container. Furthermore,
place is in some sense coincident with the thing whose place it is, for
boundaries are coincident with what they bound.? (Remember the start?
?infinity??) [212a22-31]
12. ?. . . Some things are only incidentally in a place, for example, the
soul and the cosmos. All the parts of the cosmos are somehow in a place,
since one contains another on the circle. Hence the celestial sphere
moves in a circle, yet the All [Hardie & Gaye: ?the universe or the
Whole?] is not anywhere: what is somewhere both is something and must
have something else encompassing it; but beyond the All there is nothing
outside the All. Thus, all things are in the cosmos, since the cosmos is
the All . . .? [212b11-18]
13. ?Place is somewhere, though not in the sense of being in a place but
in the sense in which there is a limit in what is limited; for not
everything is in a place, but only a movable body.? [212b27-9]
14. ?So much for the fact that place is and for an account of what place
is.? {213a10] trans. Richard Hope, U. of Nebraska Press, 1961
Leaving out the accounts of things in relative place and particular, and
concentrating on the nature of ?place? itself, Aristotle is abrupt and
vague, but suggestive. Here, in the PHYSICS, as the two ?things? ?only
incidentally in a place?, there is, on the one hand, ?All things are in
the cosmos, since the cosmos is the all?, and on the other hand, ?The
soul is in a way all existing things? (or ?Man?s soul is, in a certain
way, entities? [M&R SuZ 14 {34}] or ?the soul is in a way all the things
that exist?, DE ANIMA, 3, 8, 431b21; cf. ibid. 3, 5, 430a14ff. Heidegger
adds in paraphrase, ?The ?soul? which makes up the being of man has
aesthesis and noesis among its ways of Being, and in these it discovers
all entities, both in the fact that they are, and in their Being as they
are ? that is, always in their Being.?).
The ?soul?, then, as one extreme of that pair, is unmoved, unchanging,
and just as Whole as the ?All?. As such, it is ?comprehension? or
?intuition? [nous] which ?grasps?, as in hexein, ?unchanging things? or
?immutable nature? through making boundaries for the changeable. But, of
course, as a fundamentally changing being, human being can only know what
is ?unchanging? and ?immutable? purely analogically as something to
define the thing that is changing. This is primarily derived from topos,
?place?, which would be, to twist the term, ?the nature of nature? or
?the definition of definition? or ?the laying out of the facts of the
matter?. ?All teaching and all learning of an intellectual kind proceed
from pre-existent knowledge.? [71a1]
15. ?Before you are led to the conclusion, i.e., before you are given a
deduction, you should perhaps be said to understand it in one way ? but
in another way not. If you did not know whether there was such-and-such a
thing simpliciter, how could you have known that it had two right angles
simpliciter? Yet it is plain that you do understand it in this sense: you
understand it universally ? but you do not understand it simpliciter (in
or by itself, simply, of its own nature, unqualifiedly,
unconditionally).? [71a25-31]
The only simple, unconditional knowledge is perception. ?Understanding?
can have an ?equivocal? meaning here. ?If you did not know there was
such-and-such a thing, how could you have known it had two right angles??
You know something is when you?ve seen it. ?You understand it in this
sense ? simply as ?seen?, as simpliciter.? But ?understanding? is of
principles, i.e., ?that it had two right angles.? ?What is absurd is . .
. that you should know it in this way (as if pointing wordlessly because
no word is appropriate), i.e., in the way and in the sense in which you
are learning it, that is, confusing the unique ?seen? with the
comparisons of other perception, that is, ?learning?.?
Therefore perception always immediately precedes and grounds
?understanding? of principles as learned, as a specific, remembered,
perceived image. ??Thinking and understanding are regarded as akin to a
form of perceiving.? [427a20] ?Actual knowledge is identical with its
object?. [431a1] ?The soul never thinks without an image.? [431a17]
Principles come from demonstrations. [100b9-10] Understanding has nothing
to do with understanding principles per se! [100b11] Since of ?always
true? ?intellectual states? [100b6-8] there is only ?comprehension or
nous besides ?understanding?, then ?there is comprehension (not
understanding) of the principles? [100b14] ?If we have no other ?always
true? kind apart of learning from understanding, comprehension will be
the principle of understanding. And comprehension as principle of
demonstration [100b9] will relate to the principle of understanding as
understanding as a whole is related to its object as a whole.?
[100b14-17]
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