Substance of Reality - Essay Example

Substance of Reality Since antiquity, the seminal philosophers have grappled with many questions regarding nearly everything in the universe, beginning with the world itself and everything in it; from Thales in the 6th century onwards, philosophers have been preoccupied with the search for scientific explanations to the world (Solomon, Martin & Higgins p.46). These philosophers were opposed to all the mythological accounts given by poets such as Homer and Hesiod, which accounted for events by attributing them to the gods and goddesses of Greek polytheism. What all these philosophers had in common was that they all sought to establish the overriding and independently existing entity that was the foundation of all that is perceived as reality. In that respect, the early philosophers believed that there was a common universal substance underlying all reality, only that they all differed as to what that specific substance really was. Each of the early philosophers tried to come up with their own explanations for what they believed was the substance of all reality; for Thales, water was the substance of all reality. Thales was convinced that water was the substance of all reality because when cooled sufficiently, it changes from liquid to solid state and when heated adequately, it changes into the gaseous state. Unlike Thales, Pythagoras founded a society of individuals that were fascinated with mathematics and argued that math was indeed the substance of all reality (Solomon, Martin & Higgins p.53). The Pythagorean Theorem, which is still in application in geometry today, was proposed as the basis for cosmological speculation. According to the Pythagorean thinking, there are two irreducible types of reality, specifically the physical and the spiritual. Similarly, what Pythagorean thought espoused was that the human nature had two basic components, that is, the soul and the body. As a spiritual substance that is the subject of conscious thought, the soul is the essential principle of life in all living things; Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of souls and argued for practical moderation. Another early philosopher of repute that grappled with the scientific explanation of what the substance of reality really was is Heraclitus who argued that all reality is involved in an ever-shifting flux (Solomon, Martin & Higgins 51). Precisely, Heraclitus argued that no one could ever step into the same river twice. Democritus, on his part, reduced all reality to an inestimable number of imperceptible and inseparable particles known as atoms, which are always moving in the emptiness and bumping into each other as if to combine but then separate. Just like the cosmological speculators, the Sophists also sought alternatives to thinking that was enshrined in authority, tradition and mythology; this established the foundation for two of the greatest ancient Greek philosophers ever known to this day, Plato and Aristotle. While Plato was Socrates’ greatest brainchild and student, Aristotle was Plato’s most famous student. Aristotle also mentored the greatest and most successful conqueror and ruler ever known, the one and only Alexander the Great. Plato had political links both to the oligarchy and democracy and like Socrates, who participated in a discursive practice with his contemporaries challenging them to critically examine their ideas and beliefs, he believed in the prominence of virtue. Socrates taught all his students including Plato that every man was obligated to discuss virtue daily especially because a life that is not examined is not worth living at all. Socrates was largely opposed to the Sophist’s relativism and skepticism. Nevertheless, Socrates also emphasized values rather than physical science like Sophists, unlike other philosophers that came before him. Aristotle points out that Socrates emphasized questions of morality and specific definitions. Granted that Plato was thoroughly enchanted by Socrates’ teachings, it is often felt that his philosophy is a synthesis of the system of critical inquiry he inherited from his teacher, the Socratic thought he adopted as well as the system he developed through practice. Plato proposed a two-tiered theory of ultimate reality (metaphysics) that attempts to resolve what has been recognized as one of the greatest issues of philosophy to date, the case of One and the Many (Solomon, Martin & Higgins 69). Precisely, Plato’s theory essentially grapples with the question of whether the ultimate reality is one or many things. As seen before, pre-Socratic cosmological speculators viewed reality in both ways. For instance, while Heraclitus viewed reality as a multiplicity of ever-shifting temporal things, Parmenides viewed reality as a single and immutable entity. Plato’s theory sought to synthesize the two views by perceiving reality in terms of two separate realms; Plato argued that individual humans must surely have some common quality or qualities that account for their universal humanity. Similarly, Plato argued that different things can also be classified together as well, based on some principle of commonality. Significantly, whereas there is a world of particular things, there is also a world of universal ideas or forms and both of them are essentially independent of humans; Plato argues that we experience the world of forms through bodily senses because it is corporeal. Contrariwise, the world of ideas can only be experienced through intellectual reason specifically because it is timeless and spiritual. Plato proposes that the world of ideas supersedes that of forms. According to Plato, that which is not only eternal but also immutable and self-sufficient operates in a higher order of reality than anything else that is time-bound, constantly shifting and reliant on its own being. Aristotle’s thinking of the substance of reality was also anti-Sophist like Plato’s because he attempts to develop a philosophy of the good life based on the conceptualization of reality as a stable entity. Unlike the rational and idealist Plato, Aristotle was an empiricist and a realist; that is to say that Plato perceived intuitive reason to be the source of all knowledge of reality and the eternal, immutable world of ideas to be the basis of ultimate reality (Solomon, Martin & Higgins 83). Contrariwise, Aristotle anchored all knowledge of reality in perceptual experience and identified reality with the concrete spatial-temporal objects in the physical environment. Aristotle was opposed to Plato’s two-tiered theory of reality arguing that everything that is perceived as real belongs to one world; Aristotle understands reality in terms of causal explanations namely, the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the end or the where-for of a thing. Aristotle’s theory of reality is more convincing than the rest because it is simpler and straight forward, and does adequately account for everything that other more complex theories cover after all. This is precisely why Aristotle’s substance-based metaphysics was deeply-seated in western civilization and philosophy until the beginning of the 19th century, when Hegel propounded process thought. I am a materialist because I strongly believe that matter supersedes the mind and spirit; in that respect, reality is found, not in the realm of ideas but in the essence of a thing, which is inseparable from the physical thing itself. As argued by Aristotle, it is easier for us to comprehend the manner in which things we experience might indeed have internal forms instead of us trying to relate them to forms in some other external world. Someone opposing my view might argue that Aristotle’s common-sense conception of causality is subject to the sort of critique that Hume and Kant developed in Enlightenment age of modern science. To counter that opposition, I would argue that Aristotle’s four principles of causal explanation have indeed stood the test of time to date, which explains why Aristotle’s substance-based metaphysics informs the very structure of language with the qualities and actions predicated of substances reflecting Aristotle’s substance-based metaphysics. Overall, early philosophers offered different explanations of what they believed to be the common universal substance underlying all reality; Aristotle’s conceptualization of the substance of reality stands out because it is simple and straight forward while at the same time remaining adequately convincing. I agree with Aristotle’s view that everything that is perceivable as reality is part of the same world and all reality can be explained in terms of causal explanations. Work Cited Solomon, Robert C., Martin Clancy, & Higgins, Kathleen M. Introducing Philosophy: A Text with Integrated Readings, 10th edition. USA: OUP, 2012. Print. Read More