Aristotle
Aristotle took care of our need for stable concepts. Yes, we must think on the edge, like
Socrates. We need to think beyond any concepts and beyond the usual phrases. But we
also need concepts and theory.
Concepts let us rearrange our situations. They let us build airplanes and calculate exactly
how much weight a given wing at a given airspeed can carry, and still stay up. Concepts
let us improve our practices. Concepts build the world!
Aristotle kept the best concepts he could create or find in every field. Where there was
no existing field, he created one. He is the originator of many of our current sciences and
disciplines. After 2500 years we are still using some concepts that are not so different
from the ones he made.
Then, separately, Aristotle wrote a book consisting of strategies by which he said one
could undermine every possible definition of anything. He knew what Socrates and Plato
had shown, that truth does not lie in definitions, that all definitions can be overthrown.
But in what way is there truth, there without the activity of measuring and thinking?
Instead, he said that our understanding, and all understandable relationships, are part of
the active ordering of nature and the cosmos.
The Sophist Protagoras had made the famous statement: "Humans are the measure of all
things." Aristotle gave this a completely different meaning. Protagoras meant that
everything is arbitrary and we can construct it any way we like. Aristotle said:
"Protagoras seems to have said a big thing, but really what he said is obvious.” A tree
doesn't measure itself, but if you do measure it, then it is true that it is taller than that
other tree, and not as high as the moon. If you compare it, then it is true that it differs
from many other things in just certain ways. The animals are already "measures of all
things" because they perceive. The tree doesn't perceive that it is green and not blue. It
doesn't "measure" its own color. Only the animals perceive and thereby "measure." And
humans do that and, on top of it, we compare by thinking. To perceive and think is to
do what Aristotle calls "measuring." Then we always get something orderly, and
some statement that is true or false. In this way Aristotle upheld the order of nature
and the cosmos, but he assumed neither that it is only what we construct, nor that it is
just there without the activity of measuring and thinking. Instead, he understood us and
our thinking as an inherent active "measuring" and ordering activity of nature and the
cosmos.
So it is also with perception. If you hit a bronze gong, you will get the true sound of
bronze, not the sound of lead or wood. But the bronze and wood don't have this sound
unless something hits it and some animal listens. In the bronze alone there is no sound.
If you measure or compare it some other way you will get something still different, but
always something orderly.
Aristotle didn't think of nature as "obeying" laws. He thought that nature includes its
own organizing activities such as living, perceiving, and thinking. What makes truth
is not this or that measure or way of defining. It is rather the activity. Nature
includes us and our measuring activity, our thinking, perceiving and living and
action. Concepts and proportions are only products of our activity in nature.
Aristotle therefore made a big point of saying that our thinking activity always
remains superior to any of the concepts that it makes (De Anima, III-4-8).