Page - 63 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

sublunary sphere that is not caused by some superlunary source of change. Accordingly, the priority claim would not hold for any of these changes. One might conclude that the aforementioned problem exists, since in the discussion of the third eternity-objection it was pointed out that one of the changes that is always occurring in animals—even when they do not per- form locomotion and are in a state of rest in this respect—is growth.66 But if growth is indeed occurring constantly in animals, it would be a much bet- ter candidate for the primary kind of change in living beings than locomo- tion, which only occurs from time to time. Growth occurs throughout the process by which every living thing comes to be, and as we have seen it is explicitly stated in Phys. VIII 6 that it even occurs when animals seem to be in a state of rest. If this is true, then Aristotle indeed needs an argument which shows that not growth, but locomotion is primary in living beings that are self-movers, which then would be the reason why Aristotle restricts the first argument to cases of organic change in magnitude; for, again, this argument shows that any occurrence of such a change in living beings pre- supposes that some locomotion has taken place beforehand. But upon deeper reflection it becomes clear that this, too, may not be Aristotle’s motivation for presenting the first argument. First of all it seems that growth cannot occur constantly, for then anything that grows, one might think, would do so ad infinitum, which strikes not only Aristotle as absurd. But in Aristotle’s discussion of growth in GC I 5 it seems that he nonetheless thinks that growth in some sense occurs all the time, yet with- out the growing subject, a man for instance, ending up being a giant. As we have seen in my reconstruction of the first half of the first argument, growth takes place in virtue of something being added to that which is growing, something which needs to be transformed in order to become a part of the body. As stated in GC I 5, Aristotle seems to think that in living beings there is a persistent cycle of new material being incorporated into the body, and of older material leaving it, or as Aristotle puts it with respect to the process in which a portion of flesh is incorporated into the body, “some flows away and some comes in”.67 This assumption is also very plau- 66 See p.61, n.63. 67 ἀλλὰ τὸ μὲν ὑπερκεῖ τὸ δὲ προσέρχεται, GC I 5, 321a27, Transl. by Williams (1982) with mod. That this is the idea underlying this statement is pointed out by Williams (1982), 110, who in his commentary states that “the living eye will be subject to a constant renewal of its matter” and in this sense changes persistently by something flowing away and something else coming in new. This view is shared by Buchheim (2010), 356–8, who points out that Aristotle in this passage is referring to the idea of an equilibrium of acceding and departing material in living bodies, or, to be more precise, of a “Fließgleichgewicht ständig werdender und vergehender Stoffe, aus denen ein lebendiger Organismus sich zusammen- setzt” (357). The reason for the restriction of the argument’s scope 63 ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen