Part II: Man the Maker

Not everything that results from human behavior is a “work of art,” nor can we even necessarily call it man-made. It would be normal to say that a man made a house, or that he made a fire. Of course he made the house, but did he really make the fire? Perhaps he started it, but that only means that he caused it to happen at a certain time in a certain place. Aristotle draws a threefold division of occurrences:

1. a natural event (ex: a wildfire),
2. an artificial happening (ex: a “man-made” fire), and
3. an artificial product.

You might notice that it is called a product, and not a creation. Simply put, men aren’t conjurers – they cannot create something from nothing; they make one thing from another.

Aristotle drew inspiration from his predecessors, but he also sought to avoid their mistakes, as he saw them. Avoiding the extreme positions of “everything always changes” and “everything is constant,” Aristotle noted the more logical middle ground – that in any change, something must remain constant. If I hand you an apple, it will change positions and ownership, but it remains the same apple.

With that in mind, Aristotle classified the kinds of change that can occur to a body:

1. local motion (change in place),
2. alteration (change in quality),
3. growth/shrinking (change in quantity or size), and
4. coming to be and passing away (becoming or ceasing to be what it is).

Obviously, #4 is special – Aristotle separated it from the others, as it is a more fundamental change. It applies to things as well as people – just as a corpse of a man is not the man, a demolished building is not the building (you might say it has lost its building-ness). While he acknowledged that something remained (the corpse, or the rubble), he did not have a name for the phenomenon we call the conservation of matter. Here, he felt that an investigation into reuse of building materials in artificial products would be instructive for understanding the transformations involved in coming to be and passing away.

(Aside: I thought it was interesting that Aristotle did not call local motion caused by man “artificial motion.” Rather, he called it “violent motion,” because it violated the natural tendency of the object to remain at rest.)