Aristotle
Introduction
Last week we talked about Socrates and Plato. I emphasized the
importance of the world of questions in Socrates and Plato’s
understanding of the soul as foundational to the understanding of
these two philosophers. What they have in common is that both
were seeking a way to find a truth that was not merely subjective
opinion and relative. Through the Socratic method of questioning
and the study of certain subjects, especially math and astronomy,
Plato believed he had found a way to discovering absolute truth, a
truth that could be depended on. And he found that the mind was a
more certain ally then the senses, which could give false
information. His ultimate conclusion seems to be that there is a
more real world that surrounds and supports this physical world.
This more real world is entirely spiritual and transcends this world.
With Aristotle, however, we will come back to earth and our
senses.
It is as important to understand Aristotle, as it is to understand
Socrates and Plato. He had a very important role to play in the
history of Western culture and we are really the beneficiaries of
two different streams of thought, both of which are still influencing
us today and both still offer us much to ponder. If there is any
“new truth” to emerge in modern philosophy one thing will be
certain: It will need to embrace both these ways of approaching
reality, the Platonic and the Aristotelian.
Aristotle was born in 384 in Thrace. This is 15 years after the death
of Socrates. Aristotle’s father was a physician. Perhaps this
influenced his life long love of biology and science. Aristotle came
to Athens to study at Plato’s academy when he was 17 years old.
He studied with Plato for 20 years until Plato’s death in 348. After
Plato’s passing Aristotle traveled, married, and did some teaching
before he was invited to the Macedonian court to become the tutor
of Alexander the Great who was then 13 years old. He continued in
this position for 7 years until Alexander became king. Aristotle
then returned to Athens to start his own school, the Lyceum. He
spent most of the rest of his life there. He died when he was 62
after leaving under duress after Alexander died and he was
criticized for his relationship with the king. He did not want to see
Athens “sin against philosophy a second time.”
There are probably few people as brilliant as Aristotle who had
such widespread interests. “He investigated such diverse fields as
biology (his minute observations include the life cycle of the gnat),
mathematics, astronomy, physics, literary criticism (the concept of
catharsis---art as release of emotion), rhetoric, logic (deductive and
inductive), politics (he analyzed 158 Greek and foreign
constitutions), ethics, and metaphysics. His knowledge was so
encyclopedic that there is hardly a college course today that does
not take note of what Aristotle had to say on the subject. Although
his works on natural science are now little more than curiosities,
they held a place of undisputed authority until the scientific
revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But in no
important sense are his humanistic studies, such as the Ethics and
the Politics, out of date” (Civilization, pp. 109-110).
We encounter an interesting problem when trying to understand
Aristotle. Unlike Plato, we have none of Aristotle’s published
writings. All we really have is his unpublished lecture notes and
texts for his students that were brought together and organized
centuries later. Scholars would have loved to have had a look at
Plato’s lectures. Part of the reason for this is that it is believed that
both of their lectures were more private and specialized, while
their published writings were for the more general public. So with
Plato we would love to know what he had to say to his students in
the privacy of the Academy and with Aristotle we would love to
know what he wanted the general population to understand about
his philosophy. But we do have what we have and that is enough to
come to a general understanding of Aristotle’s philosophy.
What Is Real?
Aristotle studied for twenty years at Plato’s academy. From at first
fully embracing Plato’s ideas Aristotle would eventually break
away with a quite distinct philosophy of his own. But we must not
make too much of this in terms of a break. While there was a
difference and a development of thought, Aristotle never lost
respect and admiration for his teacher. As Plato would forever be
grateful to Socrates, so Aristotle would forever be grateful to Plato.
Aristotle wrote about Plato:
Of that unique man
Whose name is not to come from the lips of the wicked.
Theirs is not the right to praise him--Him who first revealed clearly
By word and deed
That he who is virtuous is happy.
Alas, not one of us can equal him” (Copleston, p. 287)
But differences there were. Plato is the great speculative
philosopher. He takes us to the heights of mystical intuition about
the true nature of reality. But how do we ground what he is saying
in the real world of our everyday life? How do we live with these
ideas? Now there is the rub! Is Plato’s description of the soul
accurate? How do we know? How do we verify and experience
this? If these are some of your questions then Aristotle may be
your philosopher for he shared these same questions.
Plato found truth in the mind. Remember? The nous is related to
the logos. That is our source of truth. The senses can deceive us.
Just think of optical illusions. How can we trust what we see? In
spite of this, Aristotle did not share Plato’s distrust of the world of
the senses. For Aristotle this world of daily experience and
empirical evidence was the real world. How could there be a more
real world than this one, a world that we could not see or touch?
Aristotle recognized that we experience Plato’s abstract world of
the mind; we can sense the true, the good, and the beautiful, but we
did so only in concrete form. That is we see beautiful things and
beautiful people, we don’t see “beauty” itself separate from
anything. To talk about this Aristotle came up with his teaching
about “substances.”
Aristotle’s category of substances tries to explain the same
experiential phenomena as Plato, but in a more empirical and
understandable way. And substance is primary. For example,
Socrates is a person. He is real. He was alive physically and
present. That historical Socrates was the primary substance.
Anything you want to say about him, his courage or wisdom is not
a thing in itself such as with the Ideas. They are derivative of his
basic being, his substance. Plato’s mistake, according to Aristotle,
was to make the qualities that are derivative (such as courage and
wisdom) real in themselves. This was confusing because there is
no evidence (a key word) that they have independent existence in
themselves. Aristotle makes an important distinction between
substances and qualities. A substance is a chair. The chair’s size
and color are qualities.
This was reversal of what Plato had thought. What were most real
for Plato were the Ideas and specific things were derivative from
the Ideas. A specific horse is derivative of “horseness.” Things
received their meaning from the Ideas. For Aristotle what was
most real were things and what seemed like universals were only a
way of speaking, for they gained their reality from things; they did
not give reality to things.
And yet Aristotle moved back toward Plato with his teaching about
“forms.” A substance is not simply a thing that exists but it is
matter (material stuff) combined with “form” which he describes
as “an intelligible structure” (Tarnas, p 57). A person then was a
combination of matter and form. This is what allows matter to
come together as a person in one place and a horse in another. In
many ways this seems just like Plato’s Ideas. Is there a difference?
Yes. The forms were not self-existent in a transcendent world.
They were not separate from matter. It is like the design for an
engine does not exist in some other world. The design is in fact a
part of the engine. All the parts that go into an engine could, in
fact, make something else with a different design. So matter is
matter, design gives it a form, and the way you would describe that
engine, for example, big, powerful, etc. are qualities of the
substance, the engine. But neither the qualities nor the design are
real in themselves. That is the main point.
But the form is more than a static design. It is a potential, a force
moving something from one state into another. This is how
Aristotle explained change and growth. And in this sense it is
interesting to note that where Plato was inspired by abstract
mathematics, Aristotle was inspired by biology. For example, the
form of a tree is in the seed. The form actualizes itself over time. It
is not static but moves in a forward direction. Matter can take the
form of one seed or another but part of that form needs to come
into being over time. It is almost as if matter itself is inert, but
when matter combines with form, then movement and growth are
possible, at it becomes a substance, something that can have
qualities.
The Structure of Thought
If all of this sounds very structured that is because it is! Aristotle
was a great organizer and categorizer. He did this with plants and
he did it with language. It is a key to understanding both him and
his philosophy. One of the ideas of logic is to be clear and precise
and Aristotle tried to make each intellectual task he undertook as
clear and precise as possible. An interesting aspect of Aristotle’s
ideas about substance and form is that it made the process of
becoming, of growth a real and good thing of itself. With Plato, the
world of becoming is the world of imitation. The world of the
Ideas is the world of Being. Being is the goal and becoming is a
process. But with Aristotle, being and becoming are both an
inherent part of form and matter. They both have equal status. For
example, you can think about this in terms of child development.
For Plato, a child would be the shadow of the adult. But for
Aristotle, the child is just as important as the adult. The different
philosophies end up giving a different value system for things of
this world.
This understanding had a direct effect on how Aristotle saw
empirical studies, especially regarding sensory experience. While
it is true that our senses can deceive us, (remember the railroad
tracks converging in the distance), it is also true that our senses are
what gives us our first and most basic knowledge of the world.
While it is true we have to apply our ability to reason to what
information our senses bring us, we still need and can use that
information. And while our senses are more doubtful than Plato’s
direct apprehension of the Ideas, they are also much more
accessible for the average person!
But Aristotle recognized that the mind had to work on the sense
perceptions to arrive at truth and understanding and so he turned
his fine mind toward defining how it is we think and how we can
learn to think more clearly and precisely. We have already seen
examples of this in how he showed that substance should not be
confused with the qualities of substance and how substance itself
could be understood as a combination of matter and form.
On the Soul and the Divine
We don’t know if Aristotle believed the soul was immortal, as did
Plato and Socrates. For Aristotle, the soul was the form of the
body and the body was the matter of soul. Remember that when
matter and form come together, you have a substance, in this case a
specific human being. But we do know that Aristotle placed a
great deal of emphasis on Nous, that is, the mind, the active
intellect that separated people from other living beings. The active
intellect in a human being was the “only thing that came in from
the outside.” It seems to be not only the part of us that can
recognize truth but that it can somehow participate in the Divine
intellect that seems to give order to the universe. And, in fact, the
development and use of our active intellect in pursuing
philosophical truth is our greatest happiness for it is reaching our
highest potential. You can still feel Plato’s influence here.
For this reason, Aristotle felt that the mind could be used to
understand the natural world. He was aware that the senses could
be tricked, but he also realized that there seemed to be an
underlying order to the universe that was knowable if studied
carefully. Nature would reveal her secrets to the persistent seeker.
Because the world was intelligent, it could be understood by the
intelligence of the active intellect. He shared this with Plato while
insisting that the forms we could know and learn about did not
have an independent, more real existence than the substances in
which they showed up. What had been transcendent in Plato was
now immanent in Aristotle. The birth of modern science can
probably be found in the pre-Socratic philosophers who started to
ask the right questions. But it is really with Aristotle that the
scientific quest gains real momentum as it becomes systematic and
more precise and gains in stature as a way to seek truth and to try
to understand what is really real.
If the pre-Socratic followers tried to find the source of life in the
objective world while Socrates and Plato turned to the inner world,
Aristotle was the one who tried to bridge those two ways together.
The universe had intelligence, intention, and form, but these were
to be studied in nature rather than outside of it. One of the things
Aristotle noticed was that form was teleological, that is, all form
seems to have an end in mind. The seed had the mature plant or
tree, and the child had the adult. Form came to matter and made a
substance, but this substance was not static but changing and
growing or, in other words, moving. Aristotle also noticed that
everything that was moving had to have a cause, something that
started it moving. Seeds had to come from a fully-grown plant,
babies had to have parents. In many ways Aristotle was noticing
the old chicken and the egg question: Which came first?
Well, you could keep proposing causes but eventually you have to
get to the first cause. But for the first cause to be uncaused itself, it
would have had to be eternal and with no need to be set in motion.
It would have to already be fully perfect with no need to realize its
potential. Without motion (becoming), it had to cause motion, and
thus Aristotle felt the logical necessity to propose his famous
Unmoved Mover, that first principle and perfect and immaterial
form. This form was the only form not united with matter, but
instead standing outside matter to start it all off. This was the
closest Aristotle came to saying there was a God. But this is not the
personal and loving God of the Bible and religion, rather this is an
impersonal mysterious force, perhaps more like the Chinese Tao.
Aristotle also came from a perspective where the Earth was the
center of the universe. In his understanding, the Unmoved Mover
set the heavens in motion. Each of the spheres set the one below it
in motion all the way down to Earth and all its motion (not to be
confused with rotation which was not understood, but with growth
and change). Thinking this all the way to its conclusion one can
see that all the changes on Earth are being caused by the heavenly
spheres, which in turn are caused by the Unmoved Mover. In this
sense, Aristotle showed us what he saw as the role of the
philosopher: “to move from the material causes of things, as in
natural philosophy, to the formal and final causes, as in divine
philosophy, and thus to discover the intelligible essence of the
universe and the purpose behind all change” (Tarnas, p.66).
Suddenly, despite Aristotle’s very different methodology, science
rather than dialectic, he comes very close to Plato’s idea of the
philosopher being the one who unites with the world of Ideas.
What Is the Good?
Another area where we can see Plato and Aristotle’s differences is
in the important area of ethics. Plato felt that we had to have
knowledge of the transcendent Idea of the Good to in fact be good
and know what the good in any particular situation is. But
Aristotle did not feel that we could know this. As we saw, he did
not believe in separate, transcendent Ideas, and therefore, they
could not be known. All you could know were specific examples
of good actions by specific good people. From looking at all these
various examples, you could develop some general rules, but they
would not share the absolute status that Plato sought to find.
Aristotle agreed with Plato that virtue was necessary for a happy
life. But that virtue was to be found in concrete situations. It
would also never be definite, but always a work in progress. From
studying various rules of conduct and from looking at the
experience of others, Aristotle arrived at his definition of good.
Unlike Plato’s absolute good, Aristotle defined the good as the
middle of two extremes. The idea was to seek a balance. Courage,
for example, was found somewhere in between giving into fear on
the one hand, and false bravado on the other hand. But the
important difference is that ethics can only be discovered in
concrete situations, and your only “absolute” is past experience
reflected upon by the mind’s power of reason.
And thus, we can see in Plato and Aristotle the birth of two streams
of thought, two ways of approaching the world that will continue
to wind their way, sometimes close together, and sometimes
further apart, all through Western history. Aristotle founded his
own school in Athens – the Lyceum. This school was much more
a scientific research center and collecting museum. It had an
entirely different feel than the mystical and fervent atmosphere at
Plato’s Academy. And yet, both schools existed in Athens
together, and what is most important for us to remember today,
both schools were seeking for the truth, each in their own way.
Summary
Most of us could put ourselves down as either Platonic or
Aristotelian thinkers. That is, the rationalist tends to believe that
truth can be found with the mind, while the empiricists believe that
truth can be found through the senses. In reality we are probably a
little of both, but we have a tendency to lean in one direction or
another. And in this sense Western thought can often be divided up
in the same way, transcendent or immanent, the Cartesians and the
Romantics, the ideal and the practical. Of course the integral way
would be to include more rather than less, and to think in terms of
both/and rather than either/or.
So, what can we conclude from not only this brief look at Aristotle,
but looking at this whole unit starting with Socrates and including
Plato? Is there a Greek legacy that has forever influenced our
Western heritage? Absolutely!
“The Greeks were perhaps the first to see the world as a question
to be answered. They were peculiarly gripped by the passion to
understand, to penetrate the uncertain flux of phenomena and grasp
a deeper truth. And they established a dynamic tradition of critical
thought to pursue that quest. With the birth of that tradition and
that quest came the birth of the Western mind” (Tarnas, p. 69).
1. The universe is lawful and intelligent and humans have a
share in that intelligence. Because of this, it is possible to
learn about the nature of reality.
2. This truth can be discovered through the use of critical
thinking, both by following the laws of logic, and through the
dialectical method. But the use of the mind must be checked
by close observation and empirical research.
3. On the one hand, the pursuit of philosophy reveals a reality
that transcends ordinary reality of change and flux. This is
the world of absolutes. On the other hand, the study of
nature reveals a world of observable phenomena that must
not be mixed up with a mythological conception of gods
made in the image of men.
4. Any comprehensive intellectual model of human and cosmic
reality must be grounded in verifiable facts and evidence,
rather than a belief system. Our understanding must be open
to reevaluation and criticism.
5. The very process of seeking the meaning of this world, our
reality, brings not only intellectual answers, but also spiritual
fulfillment.
Philosophy is the love of wisdom. That is the Greek heritage. To
reach our potential we need to love the world of ideas. If we are an
acorn, what is our oak tree? What is our happiness? Aristotle
defined happiness as “an activity of the soul in accordance with
virtue.” And what is this activity of the soul? It is a life of wonder
and contemplation. Happiness is being a philosopher! I wish you
all a Socratic day!