Of Ex and Why? (Part II)

Foundation 1: Hylozoism

 Strap yourself in folks, I'm going to spend some time on ancient Greek philosophy. Amazingly enough, the table lay-out for all discussion regarding “What is?” and “Why is it that way?” was laid out some 2600 years ago by the pre and post-Socratic philosophers. Without further ado; Hylozoism...

Chaos and cosmos are probably the simplest philosophical observations of diametric opposites one can make about the universe. Who can't help but notice that some things reduce from states of complex order to total disorder, like a log on a fire, to notice on the converse that order seems to emerge out of disorder., such as the emergence of a tree from the jungle bed.

Chaos and Cosmos are two modern words whose etymological roots are fitted in the philosophical, mythological, and cultural landscape of ancient Greece. These terms as simply defined are antithetical identities for disorder and order (respectively). The concepts qua concepts surely out-date ancient Greece in as much as they geographically transcend it, but are foundational when considering western thought. Thus, here we start.

Out of Hellenic Orphic Cosmogony and religions of the ancient near east, Chaos was the shapeless void through which the known universe was created. This means the concept of chaos was not simply something considered to be just disorder, but the absence of order, the void, nothingness. [Whether nothingness simply meant some kind of primal inertial state or a true absence of a thing to the ancient Greek can't be absolutely known, but the absence principle, if one existed, was never considered in the writings by the pre-Socratic philosophers.]

Surely in things considered chaotic (under the modern connotation as disorder) there is still some semblance of order/structure, just lack of specificity, meaning and form. I don't believe it to be a far fetched speculation to say that when the ancient Greek observed a substance devolving into a finer but distinct and differentiated substance—to the point of escaping the scope of typical observation—it descended into a primordial substance, or chaos. On the flip-side, expecting symmetry all the way down, or up depending upon your consideration, a force is moving this primordial substance into the ordered and complex forms we all know and love, i.e. cosmos.

Therefore, when speaking of chaos or cosmos, we are really just speaking about two sides of the same coin. Our consideration is truly what lies in the point of tension between these two concepts (that is the coin itself, so to speak), namely, this hylozoic, primordial substance.

I've mentioned the term hylozoic, what does hylozoic or hylozoism mean? Hyle in Greek simply refers to matter, while Zoe refers to life. Hylozoism is the now outmoded principle that all matter is, to a certain extent, alive. Hence all movement observed in the universe can be explained in terms of the same substance that makes up the universe. This means that the early Greek philosophers were proto-evolutionists, of a sort, in that they advocated that all matter has the potential for life, and that all known forms could be reduced to a simple substance with all its movement being substantially sui generis. (To say they were evolutionists in the Darwinist sense of the word would be an anachronism, hence proto-evolutionists would be more accurate.)

However, why would something need to be the source of its own movement? Why not advocate for something beyond the the primordial substance to be the prime mover, whatever that may be? For an answer to these questions and more, more foundational principles must first be explored, namely: stasis, change and enduring forms.