1.
The Best Sort of Student
We should think of Aristotle as the very best sort
of student who regards his teacher Plato with respect and affection but has a
still higher regard for the truth.
This is certainly how Aristotle saw himself.
It is, therefore, ironic that it was the reverence
for Aristotle himself, upheld by the Church, that impeded progress in the
sciences for almost two thousand years.
When the sciences made progress again, it returned to Plato and Plato’s
Pythagorean mathematics. It is
interesting in this regard that the Copernican ideas that the earth was in
motion and not at the center of the universe were already to be found in
Plato. Aristotle had wrongly held
that the earth was motionless and at the center of the universe.
Again, Plato and many others before him knew that
the brain was the seat of thought while Aristotle and his followers believed
that the seat of thought was the heart.
In other areas, Aristotle’s ideas also proved retrograde. For instance,
Aristotle believed that a woman’s body demonstrated arrested development and
that her soul reflected this imperfection, particularly with regard to the
exercise of her rational faculty. Plato believed that soul was sexless and
though he was hardly a feminist he at least did not see the deficit in woman as
a flaw of her soul.
2.
Are you an Aristotelian or a
Platonist?
It is customary to think of Aristotle as a scientist
and a man of common sense and of Plato as someone with his head in the
clouds.
Aristotle was certainly a great observer of the
natural world whose descriptions and conjectures concerning the natural world
are approvingly cited by Darwin and by naturalists today but he was not a
scientist in the modern sense of one who tests hypotheses through
experimentation while controlling for variables nor did he use mathematics as
you do in your physics and chemistry classes to understand the underlying
organization of the natural world.
Aristotle’s reputation for common sense derives
partly from his well-known curiosity about the natural world, partly from his
judicious method of sifting through the conflicting opinions of others, but
mainly this reputation derives from his dismissal of Plato’s forms as empty
names.
Plato’s conception of forms had lead to the notion
of two worlds. Plato believed, or
so the story goes, that things like chairs are chairs not because of any
inherent organization in the material of the chair but because they participate
somehow in the form or essence of a chair, a form conceived as something that
stands somehow outside the physical world and is considered more real than any
particular chair.
The same is true of qualities like beauty, whose
form is responsible for the beauty of individual things but itself stands apart
from these things.
For Aristotle, an ardent observer of nature, there are no forms but in the things themselves. While the
form of the thing and its material can be separated in thought, the form has no
actual existence apart from the material in which it expresses itself. What does remain problematic for Aristotle is the status of the form of a thing as it exists in the mind of the human observer. Does Aristotle's philosophy like Plato's result in two worlds, one in nature and another in the human soul?
3. Matter and Form
Consider any completely developed thing whether it
be a product of human manufacture like a copper pot or a product of
reproduction like an oak tree.
Copper is the material out of which the pot is made
and we easily see that the copper could have been formed otherwise into a bowl
or cup or candleholder. What makes
the pot a pot is not the material but the form of the material.
In the
case of an oak, the organic material of the tree is basically the same as the
organic material from which an ash or laurel tree is made. What makes the oak
an oak is the form or organization that the constituent materials take on.
We can, as an exercise of thought, reason back to
some prime matter, what Aristotle calls hyle, the common undifferentiated stuff
or gunk or simple atom that is the common material out of which the copper pot
and the oak tree and all things are formed. This prime matter is never itself
to be found. Whenever something is produced by manufacture or by nature, the
material out which of which the new thing comes about was already matter
differentiated by some form. Thus
the cooper of the pot is not original matter but is itself already an
expression of form and matter.
To the idea that matter is never found without form
in nature, Aristotle adds the idea that there never was a moment of creation in
which matter for the first time took on form. The kosmos, which means in Greek
the arrangement of the world, is for Aristotle eternal. Without beginning or
end.
4. Potential
and Actual
The relation of matter and form can also be view
dynamically as the relation of potential to actual.
Thus,
copper may be said to have the potential to be a bowl or cup or pot. And the germ or seed of an oak is only
potentially an adult, parent oak.
Thus, the form of an oak exists first as the tendency to become an
actual oak.
Aristotle further observes that in nature each
living thing has some final stage of development that is the aim or telos of
the organism and in the case of man this final stage is under his rational,
conscious direction.
5. The Four Causes
Aristotle’s notions of matter and form, potentiality
and actuality find their fullest expression in his doctrine of the four causes
or aitia.
Aitia is he word in Greek for causes and refers to
the attribution of responsibility in a court of law. The notion of a mechanical cause or of some uniform event
causing another event which in turns causes another event is foreign to
Aristotle. Rather, for Aristotle the four causes provide common sense
explanations for how the world is the way it is. To avoid confusion about this
you may want to use the Greek terms: aition for a singular cause and aitia for
the plural.
First there must be some material out of which
something is made: that is the material cause or aition; second, there must be
some form or organizational principle that expresses itself in that material
and makes the material some actual thing, that is the formal aition; 3rd
there must be an agent that is responsible for bringing about the presence of
form in the material – that is the efficient cause; and finally, there must be
some final stage of completion toward which the whole process aims: that is the
final cause or aition.
In the case of an oak, the seed or germ is the
material cause, the formal cause is its principle of organization and growth,
the parent oak is the efficient cause, and the final cause is the fully formed
oak tree capable of now engendering its form in matter.
In the case of a copper bowl, the copper is the
material cause, the formal cause is the shape of the bowl, the efficient cause
is the craftsman, and the final cause is the conception of the completed bowl
in the mind of the craftsman.
It would be wrong to think of these four causes as
natural forces, rather they are simply four different ways of understanding why
any particular thing in the world is the way it is.
Nor are these causes to be seen as rigid or
absolute: We will see in the case
of man that his soul functions as the efficient, formal and final cause of his
being. The causes are distinctions of emphasis or perspective.
6. Theos or God
Let’s take a brief look at the kosmos itself in
terms of these four causes and ask what is the efficient cause of the universe:
the answer is God or the unmoved mover.
God is an individual being that stands outside of time, space and is complete
unto itself, it is without motion, is imperishable, immaterial etc., etc. etc.
It is pure form, pure actuality.
Here we have an obvious violation of Aristotle own
dictum there are to be no forms except in things.
The activity of God is thought and the object of its
thought is thought alone. Its
activity is pleasant and brings continuous happiness to itself. The world as we know it is of no
concern to God. Rather, God moves the universe by being the
object of the world’s desire. Form in the universe is the response of
matter to the presence of this unmoved mover. God and matter stand as the indispensable conditions of the
kosmos. This conception of God is
very far from the God who cares for the fall of the sparrow or the God who so
loved the world that he gave his only son for our salvation.
Here we find Aristotle out Platonizing Plato in his
conception of God as pure cold form. Plato’s conception of God at least has the
virtue of being more friendly to man, as Plato’s God cares for man and makes
the world as best he can given the limitations of the material with which he
was forced to work.
7. Psyche or Soul
The soul (psyche) for Aristotle is the formal cause
of any living thing. The soul is the very life of any body that is so
internally organized as to have an inbuilt aim. Aristotle tells us that if the
eye were animal, its soul would be sight.
The soul then is not something separate from the
body or something that interacts with the body.
Aristotle is quite prepared to say that plants as
well as animals and human beings have souls, though the internal organization
of each, or formal cause, is different.
Plants are so organized that they can grow and reproduce, animals can
sense, move and have emotions, and humans, in addition to these things, can
think, plan, and choose.
8. Eudaimonia
The well being of organisms
depends upon the integrated exercise of their respective capacities. This state
of well-being is their telos or inbuilt aim. and is referred to by Aristotle as
eudaimonia, which has been translated variously as happiness or a fulfilled
life. Thus, according to Aristotle, we do not decide for ourselves what a
fulfilled life is, rather that is determined by the nature and capacities of
our souls.
9. Arete or human excellence
The good for man is what is good for his soul and
what is good for man’s soul is the efficient exercise of reason.
Our rational capacity is what makes each of us a
human being; it is the distinguishing form of our being. Its proper and
efficient exercise is man’s arête or excellence.
10. Practical wisdom and theoria
As it turns out, there are two applications of our
rational capacity: one practical and the other theoretical. By the practical exercise of reason we
attain wisdom by directing our lives in accordance with a principle or rule of
conduct, what Aristotle calls the mean, and thereby achieve a fulfilled and
virtuous life; by the theoretical exercise we seek understanding of the
kosmos and achieve perhaps divine thought.
It has always been a question in the study of
Aristotle whether the theoretical exercise of reason is required for a
fulfilled life. I think it is safe
to say that for Aristotle and perhaps for any man that a complete life, a truly
happy life, requires sustained reflection on the ultimate nature of things
whether or not such reflection culminates in knowledge.
Question for Aristotle: Is there really a defining
function of man?
