II
The history of early Greek cosmology is largely the
history of the
interpretation of the cosmos in terms
of various ideas derived from the
three fields of politics,
biology, and technology. Aristotle, especially,
criticized
many such ideas, as for example the belief that such
substances as air or fire are alive. Yet these three types
of images
continued to be influential long after him.
The Stoics, in particular, not
only represented the
cosmos as a living creature and believed in the pur-
poseful, craftsmanlike activity of Nature,
but also
described the world as a state governed by divine law,
and
similar ideas had a long history in the Middle Ages
and in the Renaissance.
Moreover while Greek cosmology owed many ideas
to politics and biology,
Greek biological theories and
political thought were similarly colored by
the use of
images drawn from one another. For example, the twin
ideas
that health depends on the equality of rights
(ἰσονομία)
of opposed powers in the body, and that
disease results from the supreme
rule
(μοναρχία)
of one
such power, go back to Alcmaeon and thereafter be-
come commonplaces of Greek pathology and thera-
peutics. Aristotle, too, compares the
living creature
with a well-governed city, describing the heart as the
central seat of authority in the body (e.g., De motu
animalium 703a 29ff.).
Conversely Greek political theorists sometimes
compare the state with a
living organism, and the
influence of other biological and technological
analo-
gies on Greek ethics is marked.
Here Plato provides
the best examples. First he constructed an
elaborate
analogy between the state and the individual in the
Republic, suggesting, for instance, that both may be
divided into three parts, one of which—the Guardians
in the
state and reason in the soul—should be in overall
control. A
second important analogy in Plato is that
between justice and health. This
provides the main
grounds for the two theses, (1) that the just man is
happier than the unjust, and (2) that once having done
wrong, it is better
to suffer than to escape punish-
ment—for punishment is the “cure” for
injustice. And
a third recurrent analogy is that between the
politician
and the artist or craftsman, where Plato suggests that
the
statesman must be an expert in politics in a way
comparable with that in
which a pilot is expert in
navigation or a doctor in medicine. We find
similar
types of analogies in Aristotle, too. In the Politics (1295a
40f.) he describes the constitution as the life,
as it were,
of the state, and in the Nicomachean
Ethics (1113a
25ff.) he draws a comparison between the good man
and the healthy: just as a sick person may be mistaken
about what is hot or
cold or sweet or bitter, and the
judge of these things is the normal,
healthy man, so,
he argues, the good man (ὁ
σπουδαῖος)
is the judge of
what is right and wrong.
Greek ideas on nature and art, on the state, the living
organism, and the
world as a whole, are linked by a
series of interlocking analogies. Most of
the major fifth-
and fourth-century
philosophers put forward analogies
of one or other of the types we have
considered. Yet
the particular forms that their analogies take are
very
varied, and no single version of any of them dominates
the
period. Had any such orthodoxy existed, these
analogies might have impeded
the development of
certain inquiries far more than they did. As it was,
although some Hippocratic writers produced elaborate
versions
of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, this did
not prevent other theorists
from making considerable
progress in both the study of anatomy and in astron-
omy, during the fourth century. Again,
both Plato and
Aristotle held that the stars are alive and divine, al-
though this had been denied by such thinkers
as
Anaxagoras; yet this belief did not prevent Aristotle
from
attempting a detailed mechanical account of the
movements of the heavenly
bodies, based on Eudoxus'
theory of concentric spheres.
