Aristotle
Introduction
Aristotle brings us out of the lofty world of the Platonic Ideas back to earth
and our senses. There are probably few people as brilliant as Aristotle who
had such widespread interests. He studied and lectured on biology,
mathematics, astronomy, physics, literary criticism, rhetoric, logic, politics,
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.
What Is Real?
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. Aristotle’s category of substances tries to explain the same
experiential phenomena as Plato, but in a more empirical and understandable
way. For Aristotle what was most real were concrete things, and what
seemed like Plato’s Ideas were only a way of speaking, for they gained their
reality from real, concrete things; they did not give reality to material things.
A substance is matter (material stuff) combined with “form” which he
describes as “an intelligible structure.” A person then was a combination of
matter and form. The forms were not self-existent in a transcendent world.
They were not separate from matter. But the form is more than a static
design. It is a potential, a force moving something from one state into
another.
The Structure of Thought
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. 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.
On the Soul and the Divine
For Aristotle, the soul was the form of the body and the body was the matter
of soul. The development and use of our active intellect (nous) in pursuing
philosophical truth is our greatest happiness for it is reaching our highest
potential. 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 matter in which they showed up. What had been
transcendent in Plato was now immanent in Aristotle.
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
potentially in it, and the child has the potential to be an adult. 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.
What Is the Good?
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. Aristotle defined the good as the
middle of two extremes. The idea was to seek a balance. Your only
“absolute” is past experience reflected upon by the mind’s power of reason.
Summary
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 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. 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.