ANALOGY IN

EARLY GREEK THOUGHT

I

Analogy, in its broadest sense, comprehends any mode

of reasoning that depends on the suggestion or recog-

nition of a relationship of similarity between two ob-

jects or sets of objects. It includes not only four-term

proportional relationships of the type A:B::C:D (for

which the Greek term is ἀναλογία), but also both

explicit and implicit comparisons, for example the use

of models (παραδείγματα) and of images (εἰκόνεσ). In

early Greek thought analogies played a fundamental

role in the expression of cosmological doctrines, in the

development of natural science, and in ethical and

political arguments.

The three most important types of images used in

cosmological theories are (1) political and social, (2)

vitalist, and (3) technological, in which, roughly speak-

ing, the cosmos is conceived as a state, as a living being,

and as an artifact respectively.

1. Political and Social Images. The use of political

and social concepts is widespread in pre-Socratic

cosmology. The idea of cosmic order as a balance of

power between equal opposed forces goes back to

Anaximander, who describes the relation between cer-

tain cosmic factors in legal terms: “They pay the pen-

alty and recompense to one another for their injustice

according to the assessment of time.” Heraclitus, on

the other hand, stresses the constant war and strife

between opposites: “One must realize that war is com-

mon and justice is strife and everything happens

through strife and necessity” (frag. 80). But both

Parmenides in the Way of Seeming and Empedocles

in his poem On Nature revert to the idea of a cosmic

balance of power. In Empedocles, for example, Love

and Strife are equals: they gain the upper hand in the

world in turn, and these alternations are governed by

a “broad oath,” that is, by some sort of contract be-

tween them.

Anaxagoras and Diogenes of Apollonia use a third

type of political model, ascribing supreme power to

a single cosmic principle, and Plato similarly attributes

supreme power to Reason which governs and arranges

all things for the best. Superficially this last group of

images resembles the traditional descriptions of Zeus

as supreme god; but there is this fundamental differ-

ence, that the philosophers ascribe supreme power not

to a capricious deity, but to the principle of order and

rationality itself, to Mind or Reason or, in the case of

Diogenes, to Air, thought of as the seat of intelligence.

These authoritarian images too, like the egalitarian

ones of Anaximander and Empedocles, serve to express

the idea of cosmic order, although they do so from



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a different point of view and with different associations.

All these philosophers describe the cosmos in terms

of a concrete political or social situation, whether of

a balance of power and equality of rights, or of constant

war and aggression, or of benevolent, authoritarian

rule. Plato's antidemocratic, authoritarian political

inclinations are echoed in his descriptions of Reason

as a supreme, benevolent cosmic ruler, but the evi-

dence concerning earlier philosophers is too scanty to

allow us to determine how closely their cosmological

images tallied with their particular political ideologies.

However, there are two ways in which their images

may be related to their historical and social back-

ground.

First, the development of the Greek city-state from

about the seventh century B.C. was accompanied by

an increasing political awareness and a new conception

of political rights. In particular the framing of consti-

tutions and the codification of laws led to a much less

arbitrary administration of justice than had been the

case in earlier periods. These changes had their coun-

terparts in the political images used by the cosmolo-

gists; varied as those images are, they have in common

the notion that cosmological changes are governed by

rules that are independent of the caprice of individuals.

The development in the attitude towards justice in the

city-state is reflected in the development of Greek

cosmology itself, since it was largely by means of the

ideas of law and justice that the pre-Socratic thinkers

expressed the notion that the changes affecting the

primary substances in the world are orderly and regu-

lated by immutable principles.

Secondly, the very variety of images and of the

cosmological doctrines themselves is significant. As in

the political sphere the rise of the city-state is accom-

panied by a proliferation of constitutional forms rang-

ing from extreme democracy to tyranny, the merits

of each of which were much debated, so similarly in

the field of speculative thought the philosophers felt

free to reject earlier ideas and to attempt to resolve

each problem for themselves, and each new theory as

it was advanced was discussed and criticized openly.

It is difficult to decide how far any of the pre-

Socratics recognized an element of transference in

applying political and social conceptions to the cosmos.

No philosopher before Plato explicitly refers to his

cosmological images as images (εἰκόνεσ), and yet it is

unlikely that any of them simply failed to differentiate

at all between the realm of society and that of nature,

the relations between which had become, by the end

of the fifth century at least, the subject of heated

controversy. Heraclitus, for instance, tacitly distin-

guishes between human laws and the divine law, while

saying that the former depend on the latter, in frag.

114. Evidently he did not simply confuse human soci-

ety and cosmic order. Yet law and justice applied to

the cosmos were no mere figures of speech, for order

in the human sphere was regularly conceived as part

of the wider cosmic order and as somehow derived

from it.

2. Vitalist Images. Most of the earlier pre-Socratic

philosophers imagined that the primary stuff out of

which things are made or from which they originate

is not merely like something that is alive, but is indeed

instinct with life. This is true of all three Milesian

philosophers and of Heraclitus; when he describes the

world-order as an “ever-living” fire in frag. 30, “ever-

living” is not simply a poetical equivalent for “ever-

lasting,” for he held that fire is indeed the substance

of which our own souls consist. Later the Atomists too

seem to have believed that the mass of atoms from

which worlds originate is instinct with life in the sense

that it is permeated by soul-atoms. Although Aristotle

ridiculed the belief that soul is intermingled in the

whole universe, he himself held that the heavenly

bodies are alive, and indeed some of his general physi-

cal theories, for example the doctrine of potentiality

and actuality, are much influenced by ideas which

apply primarily to the sphere of living things.

These and other vitalist beliefs affected the develop-

ment of Greek cosmology in three main ways. First,

the earliest philosophers were “hylozoists”; they as-

sumed that the primary substance, being alive, is in

motion. The question of the origin or cause of move-

ment only came to be recognized as a problem after

Parmenides had denied the possibility of change.

Secondly, vitalist notions are naturally very impor-

tant in accounts of how the world developed from an

original, undifferentiated state. Anaximander, for ex-

ample, pictured the world evolving from a seed that

separated off from the Boundless, and some of the

Pythagoreans too thought that the One from which

the cosmos developed was composed of seed.

Thirdly, the structure of the cosmos was sometimes

compared with that of man and vice versa. The idea

that the world is a living creature may underlie the

comparison that Anaximenes drew between the role

of air in the world and that of breath in man. But two

of the Hippocratic treatises put forward much more

elaborate analogies between the microcosm and the

macrocosm. In De victu man's body is said to be a

copy of the world-whole, the stomach being compared

with the sea and so on. And De hebdomadibus suggests

detailed correspondences both between the substances

in the body and those in the universe—where the bones

correspond to the stony core of the earth, for example—

and between the various parts of the body and different

geographical areas—where the Thracian Bosphorus is



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said to correspond to the feet, the Peloponnese to thehead, and so on. While Plato proposed no detailedanalogy between the anatomy of man and the structureof the universe, he stated unequivocally his convictionthat “this world is in truth a living creature, endowedwith soul and reason” (30b), and accordingto the(29b ff.) both our body and our soulare derived from the body and the soul of the world-whole respectively.

3. Technological Images. Several of the pre-

Socratics use the metaphor of steering in their cos-

mologies, but the first to employ a wide range of

technological images is Empedocles, and then both

Plato and Aristotle use them extensively in two con-

texts, especially, (1) to describe the role of a moving

or efficient cause, and (2) to express the idea of intelli-

gent design in the cosmos.

In Empedocles' system everything is composed of

the four “roots,” earth, water, air, and fire, together

with Love and Strife, and in describing how complex

substances and the organs in the body come to be he

assigns to Love the role of craftsman, the four elements

being the material on which it works. It would be

anachronistic to attribute a clear distinction between

“material” and “efficient” causes to Empedocles; but

it is in the descriptions of the craftsmanlike activity

of Love that he comes closest to treating it as a purely

efficient cause. Plato's Timaeus is the first Greek text

to describe the formation of the world as a whole as

the work of a Craftsman. In Plato the Demiurge takes

over already existing matter and imposes order on its

disorderly movements, and his account of the details

of creation is full of images drawn from carpentry,

weaving, modelling, metallurgy, and agricultural tech-

nology. Aristotle's unmoved mover, unlike Plato's

Craftsman, is only a final, not an efficient cause; but

Aristotle too believes that final causes are at work in

natural processes, and he uses comparisons drawn from

the arts and crafts extensively to illustrate this. Despite

their unconcealed contempt for the life led by merely

human artisans, both Plato and Aristotle found techno-

logical imagery indispensable for expressing their belief

in the rational design of the universe.

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,



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III

although some Hippocratic writers produced elaborateversions of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, this didnot prevent other theorists from making considerableprogress in both the study of anatomy and in astron-omy, during the fourth century. Again, both Plato andAristotle held that the stars are alive and divine, al-though this had been denied by such thinkers asAnaxagoras; yet this belief did not prevent Aristotlefrom attempting a detailed mechanical account of themovements of the heavenly bodies, based on Eudoxus'theory of concentric spheres.

Two other features of the role of analogy in early

Greek thought that are especially notable are (1) their

use as a method of suggesting or supporting explana-

tions of particular natural phenomena, and (2) the

gradual exploration of the logic of analogy. The begin-

nings of the first use go back to the Milesians, who

based many of their accounts of obscure astronomical,

meteorological, and geological phenomena on simple

analogies with familiar objects. Thus Anaximenes

compared lightning with the flash made by an oar in

water, believing both phenomena to be the result of

a cleaving process. His predecessor Anaximander sug-

gested a more elaborate and artificial analogy in which

he pictured the heavenly bodies as wheels of fire

enclosed in mist; the stars themselves are seen through

openings in the mist, and he described eclipses of the

sun and moon as being due to the temporary blocking

of their apertures. Primitive though this theory is, it

ranks as the first known attempt to construct a me-

chanical model of the heavenly bodies.

The use of such comparisons grows as the range of

problems investigated is extended. Empedocles and

some of the Hippocratic writers, especially, propose

ingenious analogies to explain processes that take place

within the body. Thus Empedocles compares the proc-

ess of respiration with the action of a clepsydra (water

clock). De natura pueri compares the formation of a

membrane round the seed in the womb with that of

a crust on bread as it is baked, and De morbis IV

compares the formation of stones in the bladder with

the smelting of iron ore. The same writer also illustrates

how the humors travel between different parts of the

body by referring to the way in which a system of

three or more intercommunicating vessels may be filled

with a liquid or emptied by filling or emptying one

of them, and on other occasions, too, Greek scientists

refer to simple tests carried out on substances outside

the body in their search for analogies for biological

processes.

These writers rarely examine explicitly the question

of how the analogies they propose apply to the phe-

nomena they were supposed to explain, and many of

their ideas seem farfetched. Even so, analogy provided

an important, indeed in some cases the only, means

of bringing empirical evidence to bear on obscure or

intractable problems, especially in such fields as as-

tronomy and meteorology, embryology and pathology,

where direct experimentation was generally out of the

question.

Various writers, beginning with Anaxagoras at the

end of the fifth century, refer to this use of analogy

under the general heading of making “phenomena the

vision of things that are obscure” (ὄψισ τω̑ν ἀδήλων τὰ

φαινόμενα), and awareness of most of the different

modes of analogy grows rapidly in the fourth century.

Plato, himself one of the chief exponents of reasoning

from analogy, was the first to point out how deceptive

similarities may be, and to draw attention to the differ-

ence between merely probable arguments, including

emotive images and myths, and demonstrations. Then

Aristotle analyzed analogical argument as such in the

form of the paradigm, explaining its relation to induc-

tion and showing that it is not formally demonstrative.

Nevertheless he granted its usefulness as a persuasive

argument in the field of rhetoric, and he even described

how a dialectician may exploit similarities in order to

deceive an opponent. Plato and Aristotle made decisive

advances in exploring the logic of arguments from

analogy: yet the effect of their work was not, of course,

to preclude the use of such arguments, but rather to

show that they are not formally valid. Moreover while

Aristotle successfully analyzed analogy as a method of

inference, neither he nor any later Greek logician made

much progress towards elucidating the other important

function of analogy, namely as a method of discovery

in natural science.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The principal texts are discussed in G. E. R. Lloyd,

Polarity and Analogy: two types of argumentation in early

Greek thought (Cambridge, 1966), which includes an exten-

sive bibliography. See also especially H. Diller, “ὄψισ τω̑ν ἀδήλων τὰ φαινόμενα ,” Hermes, 67 (1932), 14-42; H.

Gomperz, “Problems and Methods of Early Greek Science,”

Journal of the History of Ideas, 4 (1943), 161-76; W. K. C.

Guthrie, “Man's Role in the Cosmos,” The Living Heritage

of Greek Antiquity (The Hague, 1967), pp. 56-73; C. W.

Müller, Gleiches zu Gleichem: ein Prinzip frühgriechischen

Denkens (Wiesbaden, 1965); O. Regenbogen, Eine For-

schungsmethode antiker Naturwissenschaft, Quell. u. Stud.

zur Gesch. der Mathematik, Astronomie u. Physik, B I, 2

(Berlin, 1930); F. Solmsen, “Nature as Craftsman in Greek

Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 24 (1963), 473-96.

G. E. R. LLOYD

Atomism;

Cosmology;

Nature;

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[See alsoBalance of Power;Creation;Pythagorean Doctrines to 300 B.C.; Stoicism.]