A reading guide to the following excerpts from Aristotle: Physics Book II §1-3, On the Soul Book II §1-4, On the Soul Book III §4-5, Physics Book VIII §6 (additional notes on §1-5 and §7-9), Metaphysics Book XII, §6-10. This was written as a reference document for a class I’m teaching this spring, so it’s long and works through the material I covered with my class very slowly. Dm me (@gruidae_james) if you’d like PDF copies of the excerpts. All of them are in Barnes’ Complete Works of Aristotle VI-II.
Physics vs Metaphysics
Continuity and Discontinuity with Plato
At a first glance, Aristotle’s philosophy seems to be continuous with Plato’s given Aristotle’s constant preoccupation with the concept of form (morphe) even if he does not have a theory of ‘the forms’ in the sense Plato did. However, we will set that aside for now to discuss Aristotle’s continuity and discontinuity with Plato’s method, since both Plato and Aristotle practice a version of the method of division, or dialectic.
Plato as Ethicist, Aristotle as Naturalist
In some way, we can anticipate the distinction between physics and metaphysics in Aristotle by recalling Plato’s theory of the forms. Just as Plato pushed us to move from conflicting opinions (doxa) of, for example, justice to the form or truth (episteme) of justice itself, Aristotle says that physics asks about particular kinds of motion or matter or causes but does not go far enough to establish what ‘motion’ and ‘matter’ and ‘cause’ actually mean. If a physicist asks why objects in motion stay in motion? or why planets move in orbits around the sun?, the metaphysician asks what do we mean by motion? or what is motion? Unlike Plato, however, Aristotle claims to focus not on claims to ethical truth like ‘I know justice’ or ‘I know virtue,’ which we can disagree about (and discover the meaning of) solely through conversation with one another, but on claims to natural truth like ‘I know what motion is.’ In other words, Aristotle is a philosophical naturalist and he thinks that in order to arrive at the truth of reality we have to investigate the natural world and not just dispute one another.
Plato’s elenctic method
Plato’s method is called the elenctic method, where elenchus means refutation. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates (typically) (1) asks someone to define a concept, (2) shows how this concept is not adequate or, as a criteria, produces bad/inaccurate divisions (this is the moment of refutation or elenchus), and then (3) either (a) prepares the interlocutor to search for the truth of the topic another time (by forcing them to confront the fact that they don’t know what they thought they knew, in which case the dialogue ends in aporia or irresolution/perplexity) or (b) continues to search for the truth of the topic together with his interlocutor (as we saw in the Republic). (Plato’s method is not entirely negative, or critical, however. As we saw in the Republic and Phaedrus, this apparently negative approach requires a positive supplement: we already have implicit desire for the Good, have implicit knowledge of the forms as ultimate Reality [recollection or anamnesis], and/or are committed to discovering/cultivating the truth of Justice of the soul/city that enables ourselves and others to live the examined life and search for wisdom.)
Aristotle’s endoxic method
Aristotle’s method is called the endoxic method. As he explains in the Nicomachean Ethics, he (1) begins by appealing to endoxa (common opinions, reputable or important views) on the topic of investigation, (2) tests these opinions or doxa with criticism (either by evaluating the strength of the criticisms proponents of one popular view have of another and vice versa or by developing his own criticisms), and (3) concludes by analyzing what is left of the original endoxa that ‘survived’ or withstood criticism. This procedure of appealing, testing, and analyzing endoxa is supposed to function as a sufficient proof that whatever remains in the end of the endoxa we began with is the truth. Just as Plato’s elenctic method assumed a positive supplement, Aristotle’s endoxic method has two premises:
Naturalist methodology: the idea that inquiry into anything requires that we collect many different phenomena and classify or evaluate them in the process as the naturalist who observes nature gathers observations of natural phenomena and subsequently classifies them.
Truth is a product of social/collective effort: As Aristotle says in the Metaphysics, seeking the truth is in some sense easy and in some sense hard–hard because no one investigator has an adequate hold on the whole or complete truth; easy because no one fails entirely and every investigator grasps at least a part of it. This means we can arrive at the truth more effectively when we amass many different theories that are already widely accepted to be true (by either non-specialists or specialists). Even the failure to reach the truth is in a sense productive. If we fail to discover the truth ourselves, someone might use our thinking as an example of how not to proceed or develop or recontextualize the true insights we did have. Therefore, Aristotle says we should relate to our predecessors with gratitude, since we inherit a tradition of thought they produced, and we should be grateful to be a part of such a tradition, since someday someone might find your work useful and advance the field through your contributions or your mistakes.
Physics
In class, we discussed how natural scientists attempt to explain the natural world first by collecting observations of some phenomena. Second, they propose hypotheses to explain this phenomena–significantly, they posit forces or laws or processes or causes to explain phenomena that we cannot observe in the same way we observe the phenomena we seek to explain. Third, they test these theories against phenomena. This testing takes place through experiments in which the natural scientists create artificial conditions in order to both observe whether their hypothesis is true–that is, whether they have good reason based on the measurable/observable results of the experiment to think that the force/law/process/cause they proposed to explain the phenomena is itself real (or, at least, a good explanation for the time being). Natural scientists, then, ask and answer questions about the physical world–both about phenomena we can observe and about the forces/laws/processes/causes we cannot observe in the same way but have good reason to think are at work in the physical world. This is what Aristotle calls physics.
Metaphysics
By contrast, metaphysics is the kind of inquiry that asks questions about the questions we ask in physics. For example, instead of asking why fire does/does not burn certain materials or why a species of birds flies south for the winter, someone practicing metaphysics asks: what do we mean when we say certain materials are ‘destroyed’? And: what do we mean by ‘species’? The difference between physics and metaphysics is the difference between asking what the cause of some phenomena is and what we mean when we say ‘cause’ in the first place. Aristotle therefore calls metaphysics first philosophy, since it asks us about what we take for granted before we even begin to ask questions about the physical world–for example, that we know the true definition of cause.
Experience, Art, Science
In the beginning of the Metaphysics (I, §1), Aristotle distinguishes between knowing as a matter of experience and knowing as a matter of art. When knowledge is a matter of experience, it is the description of particulars (or particular things, events) that we sense or experience. For example, I experience many individuals who are sick with X disease and are cured by Y remedy. When knowledge is a matter of art, it is because we have made an inference from many particulars to a universal (or generalization). For example, I reason or infer from seeing many individuals who are sick with X disease being cured by Y remedy that any individual who is sick with X disease can be cured by Y remedy. Those who know as a matter of experience know that something is the way it is, or describe the facts. Those who know as a matter of art know why something is the way it is, or offer an explanation (usually a causal one). Physics is, in part, knowing through art. It is also, however, ‘science’ in a technical sense–which is the theoretical knowledge of first causes and principles. What is the object of metaphysics? What does it study? In other words, what do we mean by ‘first things’?
First things–Original Causes
First or original causes are the kind of explanations given for the order of the cosmos in ancient Greek natural philosophy (primarily before Socrates) in which the natural philosopher would claim to be able to derive all natural phenomena from a single, primordial cause that accounted for the formation and change of the universe. In some cases this primordial cause, or arche, was supposed to be some kind of matter (as in Thales’ claim that ‘all is water’ or Anaximenes’ claim to derive everything from air) while in others it was not necessarily material at all (as in the way ‘love and strife’ formed the physical cosmos in Empedocles) but nevertheless explained material bodies and movements. In short, an original cause is an answer to the question: what is responsible for the origin of the physical universe?
First things–First Principles
First principles are, in Aristotle’s words, ideas which enable us to possess knowledge of all things to the extent that is possible: universal knowledge, the knowledge of universal truths, the truths which explain or account for other truths. One of the questions Aristotle pursues in the course of the Metaphysics is whether these fundamental concepts–the concepts that make anything intelligible at all, that help us make sense of the world at all, that help us understand our other concepts–are the same as original causes or different from original causes given that some philosophers or philosophical schools denied that the first principles were material or only knowable through their effect on the material universe. So, for example, in Book I §6, Aristotle says that the Pythagoreans held mathematical truths, geometrical truths, or ideal numbers (all of which you can know without referring to material bodies and their motions) to be first principles, and consequently that anything real or observable was so only to the extent it ‘imitated’ these ultimate realities. The relationship of ‘imitation’ is not necessarily a causal one.
→ Digression: Critique of Plato. For an example of the kind of inquiry Aristotle calls metaphysics, we can look briefly at his criticism of Plato in Book I §6. (Whether he is correct about Plato, it is a helpful demonstration of the ‘scientific’ aspect of metaphysics.) There, he criticizes Plato for seemingly focusing on only two kinds of causes–the formal cause, and each form is supposed to be changeless/one, and the material cause, which is somehow shaped by the formal cause. For Aristotle, Plato cannot explain how a form–e.g., Beauty–can generate its many cases or instantiations–e.g., beautiful things–since the form is supposed to be unchangeable and eternal and always the same as itself. Why would Beauty generate many different beautiful things, things which are more or less beautiful, and not always generate the same kind of thing that is a faithful reflection or Beauty itself? This leads to another series of objections to Plato in §9: if there are no forms of perishable things, because forms are imperishable, how to the imperishable forms relate to perishable things at all? If forms are unmoving and do not cause movement, but are somehow imitated by moving things, how could moving things imitate them at all? Is there a form that exists for every common quality shared by at least two things? How could a form be the substance (true nature, essence) of a material thing if the form exists independently of the material thing and, as transcendent to matter, cannot interact with the material thing? If the forms are separated from all different kinds of matter, all change, all movement, and all perceptible qualities, and these are the features we use to tell material things apart, how are we supposed to tell the forms apart from each other? As we can see, Aristotle’s criticism is that Plato’s philosophy attempts to explain the order of the world with two first things–the forms on one side and matter on the other–that cannot, in fact, account for the world because Plato denies any real relationship between the forms and matter except for what he calls ‘participation’ of matter in the forms (which, as Aristotle notes, is the same thing Pythagoreans meant when they said the material world ‘imitated’ the true, mathematical world). For Aristotle, Plato’s explanation of the world fails to account for movement especially, as Plato denies that the forms move or cause movement and assumes that matter just moves (despite the problems that causes for his theory of the physical world) and, somehow, participates in or imitates the forms in the course of its uncaused movement.
From Physical Questions to Metaphysical Questions
So Aristotle concludes book I of the Metaphysics (§10) by claiming that we learn something from the fact that all of the thinkers whose theories he reviews on the question of physical causality, for example, not only because some of them were right in answering the questions they posed about specific physical causes but, more importantly, because all of them teach us more about what it means to ask about physical causes in the first place. The form of the metaphysical question is: what do we mean when we say X, why do we call some things X and not other things, etc.? So Aristotle poses a series of metaphysical questions in Book V, §1-30, asking ‘what do we call’ or ‘what we mean when we say’: origin, cause, element, nature, necessary, one, being, substances, the same, opposites, prior/posterior, capacity, quantity, quality, relative, complete, limit, ‘that in virtue of which,’ disposition, having (activity), affection, privation, to have (state), ‘to come from something,’ part, whole, mutilation (destruction), kind, false, accident. As we can see, a metaphysical question is one that asks what is true about the categories of thought (like ‘cause’) that other sciences take for granted. In that sense, Aristotle practices metaphysics by investigating physics, the sense and the limits of its categories. ‘Wisdom’ as a science (metaphysics) is, properly speaking, a science of science–that is, a science that justifies itself by examining what remains taken for granted or assumed by other sciences. (cf. Book XI §1)
Introduction to Aristotle’s theories of Causality, Soul, Active Intellect, and Unmoved Mover
Whether we are discussing Aristotle’s theory of causality or theory of the soul, his concept of the active intellect or his concept of the unmoved mover, there is one question that informs all of Aristotle’s writing. We can call it the cosmological question: how does everything in the universe hang or fit together despite the real differences between different kinds of things? When Aristotle criticizes his predecessors (we will address this briefly by covering his critiques of ‘materialist’ theories of the universe and Plato’s theory of Forms), it is because they cannot answer this question adequately. The general pattern of Aristotle’s criticism is as follows:
The thinker begins by seeking to explain how all the different kinds of things in the universe fit together as parts of one universe.
The thinker introduces the idea of a ‘first’ cause or principle to which all things can be traced back and which accounts for the unity of all things.
The thinker realizes that they made their first cause/principle too strong and can no longer explain why things are different from each other instead of being totally unified, identical, or indistinguishable (given their common origin).
The thinker has to either weaken their first principle to allow for the matter/stuff of the cosmos to vary enough to make room for difference (e.g., Plato’s absolute separation of the Forms as first principle from the inexplicable, constant motion of matter) or invent a second ‘first principle’ that opposes the unifying power of the first to bring about difference (e.g., Empedocles having to introduce a second cosmic force, ‘Strife,’ to counteract the unifying power of his first cosmic force, ‘Love’).
Therefore, the thinker either separates their first principle from the physical world it was supposed to explain (e.g., Plato’s Forms are not in motion, are not causes, but somehow material things ‘participate’ in them or imitate them) or strips their first principle of its status as first principle by making it just another causal power in the universe (e.g., Empedocles cannot consistently maintain the priority of Love to Strife if Love requires the opposition of Strife not to destroy the universe by collapsing it into a single homogeneous mass).
In conclusion, the thinker proves incapable of introducing a first principle that accounts for the unity or identity of all things in the universe without eliminating the real differences between different kinds of things in the universe. In a final analysis, the thinker has to undermine the status of their first principle (e.g., Plato – making it too weak to eliminate difference; Empedocles – opposing it with another principle that resists the elimination of difference) to the point it can no longer serve as a first principle at all.
Causality–Physics Book II §1-3
§1 We can break the first section down into a series of distinctions.
Distinction 1: Things that exist by nature, things that exist by other causes
Distinction 2: Internal principle of motion (intrinsic/necessary motion), external principle of motion (extrinsic/accidental motion)
Distinction 3: Natural beings have an internal principle of motion (e.g., fire propagates itself), artificial products have an external principle of motion (e.g., houses must be built)
Distinction 4: the nature (substance) of natural beings (reproduces natural beings) vs the nature (substance) of artifacts (reproduces itself but not the artifact) (e.g., planting a seed, another plant of the same species grows from the seed; planting a bed, a bed does not grow)
There is no one substance that is the nature of all things (confuses a particular substance–e.g., fire–for substance itself). Definition of nature: the ‘underlying matter of things which have in themselves a principle of motion or change.’
Distinction 5: ‘Potential’ nature (false–there is no potential nature, since the elements that compose flesh are not flesh until they compose it) vs ‘actual’ nature (which is what all nature is).
Distinction 6 (implied by 5): Matter (potential, dynamis) vs Form (actuality, energeia). Nature is the actualization of potential, or the coming to be of the actual (form) from the potential (matter) – movement as actualization of potential. So he says ‘The form is indeed the nature rather than the matter; for a thing is more properly said to be what it is when it exists in actuality than when it exists potentially (...) [N]ature in the sense of coming-to-be proceeds towards nature.’
§2 Here, Aristotle criticizes Plato’s theory of Forms, since the Forms are separate from matter and all motion but are somehow supposed to shape matter, and Empedocles’ theory of matter, in which matter is supposed to acquire determinate shape without any cause or law or Form outside of its own indeterminate being. Anticipating the next section, Aristotle defines the final cause as ‘that for the sake of which’ an effect happens. He clarifies that the final cause is not the final state of a thing, but is the best or most perfect state of a thing. For example, we don’t explain the formation of an embryo by reference to the fact that it will eventually die and decompose, but by reference to the adult organism we expect it to grow into. Nature, in short, has its own excellences or perfections, which are not reducible to the values humans find in nature only so far as it is useful for them or suited to their purposes.
§3 Here, Aristotle introduces the four causes.
Material cause: the stuff or matter from which a new thing, as an effect, comes to be (for ex., the bronze that will be shaped into a statue OR the sperm and egg that will, through fertilization, become an embryo that grows into an adult living being). The material cause is the answer to the question: from what stuff did this effect arise?
Formal cause: the kind of thing the effect is depends on the kind of thing the cause is (for ex., a bed has a certain shape because the bed-maker had an idea of what this shape would be before making it OR the structure of a newborn bird is conditioned by the structure of its parent). The formal cause is the answer to the question: why is this effect structured or shaped like it is?
Efficient cause: the primary source of change or rest (for ex., the carpenter causes the bed OR the parent causes the child). The efficient cause is the answer to the question: what source of motion produced this effect?
Final cause: the end/goal 'for the sake of which' the effect is produced (for ex., someone walks for the sake of being healthy OR the bird has wings for the sake of flying). The final cause is the answer to the question: why was this effect produced at all?
In a final distinction in this section, Aristotle distinguishes between a proper cause–or one we take to be relevant to explaining the effect we’re interested in–and an accidental cause–or something that is undoubtedly part of the causal process but we consider irrelevant to explaining the effect we are focused on.
→ Digression 1: Aristotle’s Formal Cause and Evolution. For Aristotle, the formal cause is a rule according to which matter transforms. Consequently, he criticizes ‘materialist’ cosmological theories of his day that held matter formed itself spontaneously without the intervention of any form. Even in contemporary speculative physics, physicists need to assume that the initial state of the physical universe–whether we call what filled or populated or moved in that state ‘matter’ at all–was subject to certain laws of physics even if not all of the physical laws we observe today were in effect yet. (Physicists also assume that the ‘cosmological principle’ is true, or in other words that not only was the earliest matter or ‘stuff’ of the universe governed by certain physical laws, but that these laws also affected this matter or stuff in the same way. If we do not assume the cosmological principle, we could not account for the uniform effect the laws of physics appear to have on matter throughout the universe today.) Aristotle is often criticized for rejecting early versions of ‘evolutionary’ theory, or of the transformation of one species into another. While we know he was wrong to do so now, his reason for rejecting it makes sense when you consider the theories of evolution being advanced by his contemporaries. They held, for example, that there was no reason an embryo gestating inside of a cat couldn’t develop into another kind of organism–so a pregnant cat could give birth at any time to a squid or a walrus–apart from the fact that the womb of the mother contracted in certain ways to shape the embryonic material, like a sculptor shaping clay with her hands. For Aristotle, even if the womb of the mother was the cause of the shape of the offspring, we need to account for why cats give birth to cats and not to walruses. When Aristotle claims that a form is responsible for shaping the embryonic material into a cat as opposed to a walrus, what he means is that cats reproduce themselves according to a rule. There is a rule at work–whether this rule dictates the shaping of embryonic material by the motions of the womb or this rule is programmed into the genetic code of cats–that circumscribes, with some range of variation or divergence from the norm, the possible form(s) an embryo can take given the species it is a member of. Where Aristotle erred was assuming that the rules that govern the reproduction of a species, like those responsible for the generation of cats from cats, were themselves eternal or unchanging. In this way, though Aristotle rejected early versions of evolutionary theory, we might begin to reconcile his concept of form to evolutionary theory if we include the idea that the form or rule that governs reproduction can change. Regardless, when Aristotle says that form as actuality is prior to matter as potentiality, he means that the embryonic material of a cat is conditioned or governed in its formation by the actuality of the shape or form of its parent.
→ Digression 2: Aristotle’s Formal Cause vs Plato’s Forms: Aristotle draws an analogy between, on the one hand, the way a carpenter’s concept of the chair governs their activity to the extent that they produce something we can recognize as a chair and, on the other hand, the way a rule governs the process of formation in which embryonic material develops into one kind of organism and not another. However, and this is crucial, Aristotle’s entire criticism of Plato’s theory of Forms has to do with the fact that Plato, Aristotle argues, reduces the rules or forms that govern natural processes of formation to the concepts humans have in their heads that inform their activities. A natural form is a rule that does not need to be thought in someone’s head in order to govern a process of material formation. This is why Aristotle criticizes Plato’s theory of the Forms as universals for being concerned exclusively with ethical universals. Aristotle doesn’t think Plato was wrong to say that we had to separate “the” form of friendship from actual cases of friendship, since we could always be wrong about what true friendship is. If we realize we were wrong about what we thought it meant to be a true friend in a disagreement with one of our friends, it makes sense to claim, as Plato does, that we are both committed to the form or truth of friendship and ought to search for it together. But for Aristotle, Plato’s ethical universals were only universals for the kind of thing that humans are–that is, it makes less sense to try to debate what the form of justice is with my dog because I don’t think her soul has the appropriate pattern of justice given the fact that she can’t control herself when she wants to eat dirt even if it’s bad for her. For Aristotle, human ethical universals can only be true universals if they are forms in the natural sense, or rules according to which the activity of human beings is governed for the sake of an end or telos that is not merely human but is also universal (the telos of nature, or perfect self-movement, as we’ll discuss below). In this way, Aristotle naturalizes the idea of the universal, even the idea of universal value, by insisting that a universal must literally be a rule of the physical universe. Because Plato’s Forms are not natural forms, Aristotle argues they can’t explain the shape of reality. Since “the” form of friendship necessarily transcends all actual cases of friendship, and itself does not move or change, how does it relate at all to actual cases of friendship, which are subject to movement and change? We can see that Aristotle returns to his criticism of Plato’s theory of the Forms again and again, even when he doesn’t mention Plato by name. This also returns us to Aristotle’s distinction between natural forms as actuality and matter as potentiality: if the forms are only rules we can potentially know and potentially use to inform or govern our activity (e.g., the fact that I do not know the form of friendship yet means it is always possible for me to become a better friend), they are not actually rules at all. To put the question to Plato: why should I constantly search for the form of friendship when I’m not having problems with my friend in a way that threatens our friendship? In what sense is this a rule that governs the way I relate to my friend at all?
The Soul: On the Soul Book II §1-4
§1
Soul as Organization for a Purpose
The soul is the actuality of a living body. It is not reducible to the body (as matter) but gives the body shape (as form). The body so described is organized.
→ Already, we see the argument for the final cause in the question: how do we explain the plant? To explain a plant as ensouled or organized is to offer the following explanation: the leaf performs the function of photosynthesis, the roots perform the function of nutrient absorption, etc.
In some sense, we do say that the parts of living beings have a purpose even if they were not designed with intention–which means only that for an eye to function as an eye it has to meet certain conditions, and if it cannot meet them it no longer functions in the way we think an eye does normally. Things function better or poorer, and they have their own standards–for ex., one way I can tell my dog’s stomach isn’t functioning well is the fact that she tries to fix it herself by eating grass; or, when my body is damaged somehow and cannot perform the same functions, it tries to repair itself without my having to tell it to. Later, Aristotle will clarify the difference between (1) purpose understood as intention (our immediate association), which explains why a human artifact exists in the form it exists (e.g., why a bed exists at all; why a bed always involves some kind of cushion or mat to sleep on), and (2) purpose understood as striving toward a ‘best’ state and striving to maintain a ‘best’ state (e.g., why a living thing behaves the way it does; why a fertilized egg begins to articulate certain shapes and not others and why this fertilized egg has the potential to develop into certain shapes but not others).
Soul as Essence
Here, Aristotle argues that the soul (or organization) of something is its essence–that is, we define certain things on the basis of their souls, on the basis of their organization and the functions or activity that being so organized allows.
An artifact/tool: We can use his example of an ax. The way we define an ax is different from the way we define things with a soul. We define an ax by its form (blade head for cutting + handle for gripping) and function. However, the ax is only organized by an external cause (the person who creates an ax) not self-organizing (it does not repair itself or give birth to other axes).
A living being/part of a living being: The way we define a living being or even one of its parts/organs suggests that its essence is ‘soul.’ Like an ax, we define an eye by its form (rods, cones, cornea, optic nerve, vitreous body, lens, etc.) and its function (sight). In some way, the purpose of an ax is to cut and the purpose of an eye is to see, and each has a form that is suited for that function. However, the eye is not a tool and the ax is not an organ. The living being (or part/organ) is not only organized in a certain form for the purpose of performing a certain function. It is self-organizing: the living being produces and reproduces its own form (i.e., the living being does certain things in order to survive and reproduce), and the organ is a part of this process through which a living being produces and reproduces its own form (e.g., the eye has a function that helps the living being survive and reproduce).
Matter with the Potential for Life, Matter without this Potential
Towards the end of section 1, Aristotle says something significant: though in some way the matter of a dead plant and the matter of a plant’s fruit/seed are, in some sense, the same, the former (dead plant) is not something we say is potentially living while the latter (fruit/seed) is something we say is potentially living. A clearer example might be the difference between a fertilized Ostrich egg that is intact and a fertilized Ostrich egg that has been cracked–we only treat the former as matter that is potentially a living thing, not the latter. So some matter has the potential to become a living thing and some does not. (This is what’s so interesting about stories we tell to kids about how when they leave the room their toys come to life, since even though toys are organized we do not treat them like material that has the potential to come to life.)
Inseparability of Soul from Body
Aristotle concludes that the soul is inseparable from the body–the soul is not, as in some religious traditions, something that can exist independently of a material body. Rather, the soul is a form of some bodies that enables them to function in a way that reproduces their form. The form or organization of an animal gives it certain powers–the power to eat (nutrition), the power to sense pain/pleasure and the power to seek pleasure and avoid pain (sensation/motion), and the power to produce other animals of its kind or species (reproduction).
Irreducibility of Soul to Body
He introduces a problem at the end of §1: if the soul is not separable from the body, is it reducible to the body? We can understand this through an example. If the soul of a bird is reducible to its body, that means that the soul is identical to the current organization of its parts. If a bird loses or damages some of its parts–let’s say, the bird loses enough feathers that it can’t fly anymore–does this affect the soul of the bird overall? Or do we say that this bird is still ensouled (organized and self-organizing) like other birds of its kind, or like it used to be ensouled before its body was damaged? Aristotle answers his question with a question: can we compare the soul’s relation to the body with the sailor’s relationship to a ship? It’s not clear what Aristotle means. He could mean several things by this. First, he could mean that the soul steers and maintains the body as the sailor steers and maintains the ship. This would be a reasonable metaphor given what we’ve already discussed. But he could also mean that the soul can leave the body in the way a sailor can leave the ship–that for the ship to function, it needs sailors, but for the sailors to function, they don’t need the ship. This would make less sense given Aristotle’s argument so far.
§2
What is life?
Having established that what has a soul can be distinguished from what does not have a soul given the fact that only the former is alive, we have to ask: what is life? As we discussed when talking about Aristotle’s theory of causality in the Physics, living things are not the only natural things that move themselves or have a tendency toward certain states. Fire, for example, exhibits a tendency to propagate itself if there is more oxidizer (e.g., oxygen) or fuel (e.g., gas) for it to consume. Living things move themselves in different ways than non-living things. According to Aristotle, the basic distinction between the self-movement of non-living things and the self-movement of living things is that only the latter have a kind of originative power. In a different philosophical vocabulary, we can say that living things are both cause and effect of themselves. He takes self-nutrition as an example: the form of a plant enables it to perform the function of absorbing nutrients that cause the plant to grow. In this way, the plant is cause and effect of itself. The nutrients aren’t the only cause of the plant’s growth (even if, as a material cause, they are a condition of the plant’s growth). The plant’s form causes it to perform an function/activity that causes the plant’s form. The difference between self-moving inanimate bodies and self-moving animate/living bodies is as follows: to the extent that living things are capable, they create the conditions that enable them to survive and flourish.
Three psychic powers
Aristotle distinguishes three different kinds of soul–nutritive, sensitive-moving, intelligent–based on three different kinds of originative/psychic power–the power of self-nutrition, the power of sensation/movement, the power of thought (‘reason’ broken down into calculation and reflection/deliberation). Taking up the second power, Aristotle has an important insight into the relationship between sensation and movement. It is possible for a living thing to sense without being able to move its body (sleep paralysis, for example, or a coma). But sensation itself is a kind of movement, a kind of response the body has to certain stimuli. This is why sensation and movement distinguish animal souls, for Aristotle. Even when an animal cannot move its body, it responds to stimuli that it senses in a different way than plants do. That is, animals respond to stimuli because they experience pleasure and pain. Aristotle argues that we cannot separate the power to sense pleasure and pain from the power/drive to seek pleasure and the power/drive to avoid pain. (As he’ll say in section 3, any order of living things that has sensation has appetite, or desire.) As for the third power, the power of thinking or “reflection” as he says here, he claims that it can, in some sense, be separated or exercised independently from the other powers (you can think without having to eat some specific thing, sense some specific thing, or move in a specific way at the same time). He suggests something more, however, which he will not explain in this reading: that the power of thinking makes the soul eternal in some sense. We will return to this later.
The soul is an account/explanation of certain bodies
The soul, as form, is actual. It is the actualization of the potential of a certain kind of matter. But where does the matter come from that is potentially living? We can call this organic material. The answer is that organic material is produced by living beings. We can approach this from another angle: what is the recipe for a human being? Let’s say that the essential ingredients are certain amounts of water, carbon, ammonia, lime, saltpeter, phosphorous, salt, sulfur, sodium bicarbonate, etc. If I collect all of these ingredients and put them in a cauldron and mix them together–have I produced a human? Aristotle’s insight is that there is a difference between material capable of growing into a human–sperm and egg, fertilized egg, zygote–and the toxic chemical soup that I produced. One of these kinds of matter is potentially living in a way that the other is not. We can also think about Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Having robbed enough graves to collect all of the body parts he needed to sew them together into the form of a human body, he is not satisfied with his product. He has not yet created life. What is it about Frankenstein’s monster after it gets struck by lightning that prompts the Dr to yell ‘it’s aliiiiiiiive’? For Aristotle, the difference is that some matter is ‘ensouled,’ or is governed and transformed by the activity of a psyche.
§3
Problem 1: Combination of Psychic Powers
Here, we see Aristotle struggle with the problem of how the powers of the psyche are combined. He says that each term in the series of psyches seems to contain the potential for the successive terms in the series. Plant or nutritive souls only seem to have the nutritive power, whereas animal souls seem to have the nutritive power and the powers of sensation and appetite/desire. However, as living beings, plants still seem to have the potential to exercise powers of sensation and appetite/desire (e.g., the way a plant senses and moves towards the sun to feed itself through photosynthesis). This is the first problem: do we think about the combination of powers of the soul as simple addition or subtraction of powers? For example: we can imagine adding the power of sensation or appetite to a plant (sometimes, Aristotle argues, we already speak as if they did sense and were driven by appetites); or, we can ‘reverse’ engineer a plant by subtracting the powers of sensation and appetite from an animal (again, we already seem to speak like this when we say certain animals are plant-like in that they seem only to eat and grow). There is even a range in animals: though even the simplest or least complex have the powers of sensation and appetite, not all animals are capable of moving themselves (as in locomotion or ‘local motion’) from one place to another (e.g., coral). We can put this problem in a different way by noting that we seem to distinguish types of soul both in quantitative and qualitative terms. For example, we say that an animal has more powers or capacities than a plant (and, perhaps, a greater range of behaviors). This would be understanding the difference between plants and animals as quantitative. At the same time, however, we know this is insufficient because we also tend to think plants and animals are different kinds of things. Even if we occasionally talk and think about living things as if the difference between them was between those that are more simple (‘fewer powers’) and those that are more complex (‘more powers’), we are also suspicious of this because it judges all living beings by the same standard–e.g., we can only judge plants as ‘simple’ relative to the complexity of animals if we use animals as a standard for judging plants. But this doesn’t help us explain plants or understand their kind as a specific kind of living thing. (Today, Aristotle’s suspicion comes up in the form of criticisms of ‘anthropocentrism,’ or judging other life-forms based on how similar or different they are from human beings as a standard for complexity.)
Problem 2: The Identity of and Difference between Living Beings
In this section, Aristotle remarks that we already identify all living things with each other and distinguish living things from each other (into ‘kinds’ or taxonomic divisions–in contemporary taxonomy, life → domain → kingdom → phylum → class → order → family → genus → species). In what sense are all of these living or ‘ensouled’ things living? In what sense do they differ? Aristotle wants to understand why we divide living beings into categories like this while still grouping them together. This is the second problem. Rather than attempting to give a general definition of life or soul or ‘psyche,’ however, he says we can only discover what unites living things with one another and distinguishes living things from one another by determining the proper definition or concept of each kind of living thing. This is why, in §4, he turns to plant or nutritive souls.
§4
Method of Defining Souls
In the beginning of this section, Aristotle says we cannot begin by analyzing the human soul, which actually exercises the powers of nutrition and sensation and appetite and thinking, and then claim to understand the plant soul which we regard as that which could potentially exercise psychic powers beyond nutrition. In other words, Aristotle begins with plant or nutritive souls because he wants to answer two questions: (1) why do we treat plants as if they are potentially capable of exercising psychic powers beyond nutrition; (2) given the way in which plants, specifically, are alive or ensouled, what do they share with other living or ensouled beings and what do they not?
Nutrition and Reproduction
As we have already noted, for Aristotle the psychic powers of sensation and appetite are two different sides of the same kind of soul–the animal soul. He argues that a living thing does not have sensation without appetite and vice versa: living beings sense certain things based on their appetites, and their appetites are conditioned by the range of what they can sense. (As noted above: for Aristotle, sensation is also an activity and not purely passive, since to receive an impression of a stimuli means experiencing pleasure/pain for animals even if those animals cannot ‘move’ to avoid the pain or pursue the pleasure beyond this first contact.) In a similar move, Aristotle argues that the psychic powers of nutrition and reproduction are not separable from each other either. Nutrition and reproduction are, for Aristotle, the most fundamental self-movements of living things. As he says at the end of this section, nutrition is not just the addition of more matter to a living being. For matter to be food, it has to both be capable of being digested–e.g., we distinguish between poison and food, or between things that are edible in the broad sense (we can eat them without causing too much harm to ourselves) and things that are nutritious. But this doesn’t mean that one kind of matter (e.g., dirt or grass or meat) is intrinsically ‘food.’ What is food for one kind of living being is not food for another. As a result, Aristotle says that ‘food’ isn’t an intrinsic property to certain kinds of matter, but depends on the kind of soul that takes certain matter as food and does not take other matter as food. Here, we can explain the difference between what is and is not food to a certain kind of soul based on what occurs in the process of digestion. Digestion, Aristotle argues, is not just the addition of matter–even of certain kinds of matter–to the matter that composes the living being’s body. Digestion transforms the matter that is ingested. Aristotle compares the way our bodies prepare the ‘raw’ matter we consume into the ‘finished’ product that nourishes us to the way a carpenter prepares the raw material of wood in order to use it to make a table or chair. The digestive system or metabolic process converts certain kinds of material into energy. To do this, our bodies break down the food we consume into its constituent parts, filtering some out as waste products and incorporating the rest into our body in order to keep it functioning. In this way, even in digestion is a way in which the living being is a cause and effect of itself. Eating is not a quantitative addition of matter previously outside of the body into/onto the body. It is, rather, a qualitative transformation of external matter into matter or energy that the body can use to grow, maintain itself, or heal itself. In this sense, we eat to reproduce ourselves as individuals. This is why Aristotle claims that nutrition and reproduction are inseparable: to call a thing living means that it reproduces itself as an individual (nutritive power or digestion) and as a species (reproductive power).
Self-movement in Living Beings VS Non-living Matter
Already, we have benefitted from beginning with the plant or nutritive soul as opposed to starting with either the animal (sensory-appetitive) or the human (rational-thinking) soul. The case of the plant, so far as we regard it as ‘simpler’ or less complex in some sense than the animal or human soul, forces us to distinguish between what is living or ensouled at all and matter that is not living or ensouled. In other words, even if we think plants are simpler than animals and humans, they are still more different from inanimate matter than they are from other living things. In the sections of the Physics and De Anima we are reading, Aristotle’s contrast case is fire, since fire also ‘moves itself’ in some way. Though fire does have an internal principle of motion in that its movement is directional or tendential, it is dependent for its activity on external conditions–i.e., it can only propagate itself to the extent it is exposed to more oxidizer (e.g., oxygen) and fuel (e.g., gas). Like fire, living beings do depend for their reproduction (of themselves as individuals; of their species) on external conditions, such as the availability of food. However, Aristotle is interested in the way we distinguish between a fire consuming oxidizer and fuel and a living being consuming food. One way of thinking about this difference is asking in what sense ‘feeding’ a fire is different from ‘feeding’ a living being. More to the point, however, is the way that living beings feed themselves. Living beings are dependent on external conditions for their survival, but they also exhibit a remarkable power to transform the conditions in which they find themselves (or seek new environments) in order to reproduce themselves. We might compare the qualitative transformation of matter in the process of digestion to the conversion of oxygen into carbon dioxide in combustion. Aristotle’s question is whether we think that fire is capable of creating and re-creating the conditions that allow the process of combustion to begin in the first place in the same way a living being is capable of creating and re-creating the conditions that allow the process of digestion to occur.
Nutrition, Reproduction, and Eternity
In the most difficult passage of §4, Aristotle claims that in the psychic powers of nutrition and reproduction, we can already see that living things in the course of their normal development strive towards the goal of partaking in the eternal or divine. He doesn’t explain what he means here, though we will attempt to answer this question with our readings from the Physics and the Metaphysics on the ‘unmoved mover’ as we proceed. For now, we can try to make sense of his claim by looking at the end of that paragraph. There, he says that though nutrition and reproduction are both activities through which living beings reproduce themselves, these are not the same type of self-reproduction. As we noted earlier, nutrition is the activity through which the individual reproduces itself (‘numerically one’) while reproduction is the activity through which an individual reproduces itself as a species (‘specifically one’). In more modern language, we can distinguish between what a living being does to survive as an individual and what a living being does to survive as a species. Each kind of survival requires different behavior.
Survival of the Individual and the Species
Though, given the standard of ‘Darwinian Fitness,’ a living being must survive by feeding itself (and avoiding danger) in order to reproduce, the fact that a living being survives to the age of sexual maturity or beyond it does not necessarily mean they reproduce (asexually or sexually). Not only are nutrition and reproduction not reducible to each other as powers or activities, but we also recognize that they can conflict with one another. For example, we now know that reaching sexual maturity marks the beginning of the degeneration of the individual living being as it ages: e.g., flowering in certain plants; certain insects cannot feed themselves once they reach sexual maturity and have a brief window of time in which they reproduce before dying; sexual maturity in many animals marks the end of ‘youth’ or ‘adolescence’ and the beginning of a phase in which the animal does not grow or change as dramatically and cannot heal itself or be as active as it once was. In a more vivid example, we have cases of sexual cannibalism: the female praying mantis occasionally eats her male mate after fertilization is complete, or even during the process! In short, reproduction (particularly sexual reproduction) always comes with an element of risk or danger to the survival of the individual who is involved in the process. We can see in many animals–humans included–a tendency for individuals living things to participate in sexual reproduction regardless of the risk or consequences for their survival. This is what Aristotle means when he says that living beings compensate for being unable to reproduce themselves as individuals, which they still attempt to do even when they put themselves in danger (e.g., the male praying mantis trying to escape the female before he is decapitated), by reproducing themselves as a species. This doesn’t mean that non-human living things decide to become parents because they want to leave behind their children as their legacy. It means that though every individual living being fails to reproduce itself as an individual eventually, it also succeeds to reproduce itself as a member of a species if it manages to (asexually or sexually) reproduce. In this way, Aristotle doesn’t see the conflict between self-reproduction as an individual (from nutrition in plants to sensing/desiring/moving in response to pain or pleasure in animals) and self-reproduction as a species (in reproduction) as an absolute conflict between irreconcilable impulses. Rather, the activity of reproduction is a continuation of the activity of nutrition at a different level. To bring this insight back to the way we explain the activity of living beings, we can say that an individual living being consumes food both ‘for the sake of’ reproducing itself or surviving as an individual and ‘for the sake of’ reproducing its species. This is implied in our definition of Darwinian fitness: a living being is fit insofar as it survives and reproduces, or survives long enough to reproduce. However, as we will discuss further, the criteria of ‘Darwinian fitness’ loses some power as an explanation when we use it to try to explain why living beings still struggle to survive as individuals for as long as possible, even if they have already successfully reproduced or are incapable of further reproduction. Modern evolutionary science attempts to explain this by reference to the ‘selfish gene,’ for example, so that we can explain the fact that living beings struggle to survive after successfully reproducing once because they maximize their ‘Darwinian fitness’ by following the imperative to reproduce themselves as much as possible, an imperative encoded into their genetic instructions. In this kind of explanation, we reduce the behavior of living beings not only to the two criteria of ‘Darwinian fitness’ but go further and reduce these criteria (survival, reproduction) to more fundamental criteria at the level of genes and their self-replication. Modern evolutionary theory also attempts to explain the fact that living beings struggle to survive as individuals after they can no longer reproduce by reference to ‘Darwinian fitness’ or the ‘selfish gene’ imperative, so that living beings who can no longer reproduce still have a role to play in the reproduction of their species (e.g., matriphagy in the desert spider: the mother stores nutritional resources for her young and regurgitates them in small amounts for the first week or so of their life, after which the offspring have grown enough to consume their mother directly to exhaust this nutritional resource; caretaking in more ‘complex’ or social living beings, such as the role elders have in elephant or primate communities in helping raise younger offspring).
Why Does Life Bother Struggling to Survive?
For Aristotle, ‘Darwinian fitness’ and ‘selfish genes’ cannot sufficiently explain why living beings act the way they do, however. This is what he means when he says the soul is the final cause of the living being–that is, the soul isn’t just what we call the cause of movement in a body (i.e., saying that a living body moves because it is alive and not dead, since living bodies move in significantly different ways than dead ones). Rather, the soul, or the life-activity or process of self-organization of the living being, attempts to reproduce itself using the body as its own organ. The whole of the living being’s body, which we are accustomed to calling the ‘organism,’ is itself an ‘organ’ for the soul. What does this mean? For Aristotle, it means that living beings do not just struggle or strive to reproduce the present state of their body. If they did, we might as well claim that the end goal of all living beings is to be cryogenically frozen indefinitely, perfectly preserved in their present bodily condition. It is in this sense that the body is an organ of the soul—living beings will involuntary and voluntarily undergo bodily transformation to continue living (e.g., the gecko losing its tail; the wolf caught in a trap that gnaws its own paw off to escape). But this is accounted for by the first criterion of Darwinian fitness: survive. How does Aristotle’s concept of life differ? By adopting his standpoint, we become capable of asking a question that does not necessarily come up in contemporary evolutionary theory: why do living beings bother struggling to survive at all?Why do living beings seem to want to survive regardless of how that changes their bodily condition, and despite having successfully reproduced or having become incapable of reproduction?
The Criticism of Anthropocentrism
It could be objected that this is a bad question, one we shouldn’t ask or can’t answer. Many modern readers of Aristotle do have this objection. They take it to be an expression of the human need to ask and answer why-questions because humans seek meaning, more meaning than we actually find in nature. In that way, Aristotle’s theory is supposedly anthropocentric.
→ Digression: The Weaker Criticism. Many of Aristotle’s modern critics either miss or disregard his distinction between human telos (intention, purpose) and nonhuman telos (“the best” as an end-state that living beings strive towards given the perfections specific to their kind). They link Aristotle’s concept of natural telos to Aristotle’s discussion of the divine, specifically his concept of the unmoved mover, and accuse him of being a monotheist among polytheists, committed to a belief in a creator-deity who intentionally designs nature to achieve certain purposes or human purposes. For example, treating horses as if they existed for humans to ride and cork-trees as if they existed to become stoppers for our wine bottles. This interpretation of Aristotle is typically justified by reference to Aristotle’s inheritors in medieval religious philosophy–Muslim, Jewish, and Christian–who in some ways identified Aristotle’s unmoved mover or active intellect with the ideas of divinity in the doctrine or popular beliefs of their religious traditions. Not only does this interpretation fail to account for the difference between human and natural telos in Aristotle, or how alien the unmoved mover is to many religious ideas of divinity, but it also caricatures the philosophy it claims to correct against.
From the Aristotelian standpoint, how might we respond to the charge of anthropocentrism?
The distinction between human and natural telos: For Aristotle, we need to distinguish between the natural telos or end that serves as a final cause in the initial formation and life-activity of living beings and the human relationship to ends. As we discussed in class, animals desire certain ends given their possession and exercise of the psychic powers of sensation and appetite, but for Aristotle humans have the psychic power of thinking. In passages from On the Soul that we have not read together (as well as Aristotle’s short treatise on animal movement, De Motu Animalium), Aristotle distinguishes between the way non-human life pursues the good as it appears while humans can deliberate or reflect on whether or not what appears to them as good is truly good. In other words, humans can question and revise their own ends by distinguishing between the apparent good and the true good. Clearly, this cannot be what Aristotle means when he refers to the telos of a natural being. This telos cannot be an intention or purpose, an end we have deliberated or reflected on and chosen for ourselves as the best as opposed to what appears to be good. As we discussed, this is a soft distinction for Aristotle, since he is not saying no living beings besides humans have the power of thought. This is true of all his divisions between the different kinds of soul, and he constantly admits that his goal is to make sense of the reason why we already think of and interact with, for example, humans differently than we do other animals, even if we are not capable of finding some feature or power that is so unique to humans that it cannot be found anywhere else in any degree or form in the animal kingdom. Aristotle’s task is the same one we have today: we need to specify the sense in which humans are identical to other living things and the sense in which they differ. If you aren’t satisfied with Aristotle’s answers, the task has fallen to you!
Problems with Darwin: Though Darwin listed Aristotle as one of his greatest influences, he also criticized teleology, or the theory of final causes, in explanations of life. Despite himself, however, Darwin could not avoid using teleological language in the Origin of Species. The concept ‘natural selection’ is introduced by a comparison Darwin makes between the way humans intentionally select for certain heritable traits when they breed animals or plants they have domesticated and the way nature ‘selects’ for certain traits to be inherited in a species by killing off members of that species that do not share those traits. In Origin, Darwin criticizes his own teleological language without being able to abandon it. It is also worth noting that if there is an ‘end’ or telos in Darwinian selection, it is a combination of survival and reproduction, the two criteria for Darwinian fitness. Darwin also speaks about organisms struggling for their existence, struggling to survive and reproduce, in a competition over scarce resources and mates. As a result, there are critics of Darwin who object to his unconsidered use of metaphors drawn from economic competition and the social evaluations of what constitutes success and failure in a competitive marketplace in 19th century England. (Social Darwinism, or the idea that ‘survival of the fittest’ should govern human society like it governs nature, involves both understanding nature using the metaphor of economic competition and then using that image of nature as competitive as a model for how human society should function.) We might also say, however, that Aristotle’s claim that perfection is the telos of all natural beings is also a projection of historical social values onto nature, in this case of the Ancient Greek aristocratic value of virtue instead of the modern businessman’s value of competitiveness. This is an excellent objection because it helps us ask how we might understand nature without projecting historically specific social values onto it at all!
Defending Perfection: But even if Aristotle was projecting a kind of aristocratic social value of virtue onto nature, was he wrong? For Aristotle, as we’ll see in our discussion of the unmoved mover, all things strive towards the same telos, which is perfected self-movement. Without explaining his argument here, however, it is also the case for Aristotle that each kind of natural being–plant, animal, human–strives to partake in this telos by perfecting itself according to the standards of its own kind. For plants, for example, this would mean untrammeled growth and infinite self-propagation. In this way, we could argue that Aristotle’s theory of natural telos allows us to let living beings define their own ends as the perfection or ‘best’ proper to their kind or class as opposed to reducing the activity of all life to the end of mere survival. We might ask, as the philosopher Nietzsche did in his criticism of Darwinism, do living things merely react to danger or pain, or do they seek power and pleasure regardless of whether or not the natural scientist observing them can explain their behavior by calculating how it factors into their ability to survive and reproduce? What if it is as strange to reduce the behavior of an animal to a cost-benefit analysis for the same reason it would be strange to explain your own daily behavior by how it figures into your odds for surviving long enough to reproduce? From the Aristotelian standpoint, someone who attempts to explain the activity of living beings–not just at the level of individual behavior, but even factoring in how individual aberrations might be useful for the species–mistakes the fact that living beings must survive and reproduce in order to flourish as the telos of living beings, despite the fact that living beings do not seem only to strive to survive and reproduce but also to flourish. Aristotle’s thesis is that though humans like other living things in that all life strives for perfection and unlike other living things in that different kinds of life strive for the perfection appropriate to their species. In that sense, Aristotle is suggesting that objecting to reductive explanations of human behavior–for example, attempting to explain all human behavior in terms of Darwinian fitness–can tell us something about the inappropriateness of these reductive explanations for the behavior non-human life-forms as well. What if it’s as strange to explain the reason lion clubs wrestle with one another by how we expect it to improve their odds of survival and reproduction as it is to explain why human children wrestle with one another with reference to the same criteria? What if lion cubs wrestle because it feels good, because it is perfect to feel powerful and free while at play? You don’t just want to live, you want to flourish. For Aristotle, we see this in non-human life-forms with stunning regularity, even according to him at the level of plants. We have to ask ourselves which is more anthropocentric: claiming to explain life best as a series of calculations at the level of individual or species to the end of survival or claiming that life tells us to explain it best as striving for its own kind-specific perfections to the end of flourishing? The strangeness of Aristotle’s thought is thrown into relief when we come to understand that eudaimonia, or happiness as flourishing, is not only the telos of human social life, but a properly cosmic telos. We might call this cosmic eudaimonism.
An Aristotelian Critique of Anthropocentrism?
Though Aristotle is often accused of projecting human purpose or intention onto nature, we have seen that his argument is the exact reverse: when humans appear to choose their own ends or purposes, they are in reality striving to achieve the universal telos of nature or perfection. Humans strive for this universal telos, Aristotle argues, according to the powers of their own kind, and the psychic power that distinguishes humans from other living things is the power of thought. Aristotle is often misread because of the analogies he uses to introduce the concept of natural telos in his Physics–e.g., the organism eats ‘for the sake of’ its health like the student attends college ‘for the sake of’ a degree. But to read this as an argument that natural beings are somehow governed by intention in the way human beings govern themselves through their intentions, or the ends they set for themselves, fails to account for Aristotle’s distinction between the way animals desire their ends on the basis of what appears to be good while humans pursue and revise their ends on the basis of what they know is truly good. Aristotle’s account begins with the question: in what sense is human activity identical to the activity of other life-forms, and in what sense is it different? (Again, we see that he poses the cosmological question of how everything is identical on one level and different on another in every domain of nature he investigates.) For Aristotle, human beings are identical to other life-forms in that both kinds strive for the one universal telos of perfection. They are different, however, because they strive for this universal telos of nature according to the powers of their kind. In the case of human beings, the distinctive power is the power of thinking–both theoretical or scientific thought (or “getting it right” by knowing the true essence of some material thing) and practical wisdom (or “getting it right” by knowing the best or right thing to do in each situation). To condense: human beings strive for the same telos that other living beings do, but pursue it according to the powers and perfections specific to their kind in distinction from the way other beings pursue it according to the powers and perfections specific to their kinds. Non-human nature pursues its own perfections according to its own powers. This might provide the basis for an Aristotelian criticism of anthropocentrism.
Introducing the Unmoved Mover
But this has a strange consequence, since it means that humans strive for a perfection that is not exclusively human. As we will discuss, the unmoved mover is the universal telos of nature, and of all beings in nature. As universally perfect and universally striven for, the unmoved mover is not perfect insofar as it is identifiable as or reducible to human ideas of human perfection. Aristotle defines the perfection of the unmoved mover as perfected self-movement. As a universal telos of nature, the unmoved mover is the implicit end of human activity in the same way it is for the activity of plants and animals. The difference is that humans, because of the power of thought, can explicitly or consciously understand the implicit end of all natural activity, including their own. As a result, this telos is something humans are both implicitly aware of but struggle to think explicitly. We can see this in Aristotle’s brief discussion of Ancient Greek mythology in Metaphysics XIII, §8. There he says that the the universal telos of nature, or the divine, was not adequately captured in the myths (e.g., Homer’s Iliad or Hesiod’s Theogony) that represented the divine in anthropomorphic figures with human personalities, desires, and flaws. For Aristotle, the closest the authors of myths came to representing the true nature of the divine were those who deified the planets, or called the heavenly bodies gods, because of their continuous, endless, and circular motion. In one sense, then, the universal telos of nature is exhibited better by the movements of stars and planets than by you. In another sense, however, humans have a unique capacity to exhibit the unmoved mover, or partake in its perfect self-movement, because of their power of thought. The most perfect exercise of the power of thought, as we will investigate in detail below, is what Aristotle calls divine thought, or thought thinking itself. Humans are both capable of divine thought, since they can reflect on or criticize their own thoughts and even learn about the essence of thought itself, and incapable of maintaining this activity, since humans are finite and material beings. As we will see when we discuss the unmoved mover and the active intellect, the unmoved mover must “think” or “think thought” since thinking thought is the most perfect self-movement of human beings and the unmoved mover is the perfection or consummation of all self-movement. However, because the unmoved mover only thinks thought, or thinks perfectly, it has neither purposes or intentions like human beings do. Recall that human beings have ‘purposes’ or ‘intentions’ because they deliberate or reflect on the difference between the apparent good (what is pleasurable) and the true good (what is conducive to flourishing or becoming more perfect). As we’ll learn in our discussion of Aristotle’s theory of the human or thinking soul, thought is only perfect when it successfully ‘disengages’ or extracts the essence or truth of things from their material composition (which includes plenty of details that are irrelevant to the truth or essence of the thing) and the sensory images we have of them (in imagination or experience) that induce pleasure or pain. Because the unmoved mover, insofar as it is thought thinking itself perfectly, does not need to make the distinction between apparent good and true good, or between appearance and essence, it does not set purposes or ends for itself. This has a marvelous consequence: if human beings could think perfectly, they would no longer be intentional. Just as Aristotle argues that any theory of the universe that introduces a first principle/cause must account for both the identity of everything in the universe and the real differences between the different kinds of things in the universe, he argues that the first cause itself must be both identical to and different from the universe it causes or moves. (We will develop this second argument below, as we read through passages from the Physics and Metaphysics.) In this sense, the telos of human life seems both incredibly alien to or removed from us, insofar as it is the universal telos of nature, and incredibly familiar to or intimate with us, insofar as it is more perfectly human than we are.
The Active Intellect: On the Soul Book III §4-5
§4
Much like Aristotle theorizes the psychic power of sensation, we might think of thought as both passive and active as well, or as potential thought and actual thought. Interestingly, Aristotle adds that the thinking part of the soul must be both potentially identical in character to its object–what else could thought be but this kind of identity between thinker and what is thought?–and irreducible to its object. This can be made more intuitive if we rephrase it: to think an object means the soul/mind is in one sense identical with the object that is thought, but is in another sense non-identical with that object, since if it was simply identical it the mind would no longer think the object but simply be the object. This is what Aristotle means by ‘impassivity’ of thought, which must be true of the power of sensation as well: sense receives an impression from sensible objects but does not become totally identical to them; thought receives the form of a thinkable object but does not become totally identical to it. Aristotle claims there is a difference between the impassivity of the power of sensation and that of the power of thought, however, since after a strong stimulation of sense we are less able to sense (e.g., seeing a bright light impedes sight) but after a strong stimulation of thought we are more capable of thought than before! Aristotle doesn’t give an example, but we can think of how we sometimes struggle to think up a solution to a problem, and when we’ve arrived at the answer all of a sudden we are capable of thinking things we weren’t capable of before. For Aristotle, this means that sensation is dependent on the body and thought is separable from the body. Notice that he does not say that thought can exist independently of the body here. Instead, his argument is only that we already distinguish between how capable someone’s body is of sensing and acting and how capable their mind is of understanding. (This should remind you of Plato’s ‘proofs’ of the immortality of the soul from the Phaedrus and Republic where he argues that we distinguish between the quality of someone’s body in reference to health and the quality of someone’s soul in reference to whether they have a good or bad character.)
Here, Aristotle follows the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who held that thought or nous was the cause of the cosmos, but to make a much less dramatic point that sounds just as dramatic: everything is a possible object of thought, and thought is potentially everything. We might defend Aristotle’s claim by asking: what kind of thing would be unthinkable? If it is truly unthinkable, or outside of thought, how could we think it as unthinkable in the first place? If an object was absolutely unthinkable, and recall that for Aristotle sensation is a psychic power (or a kind of thinking in the broad sense, along with nutrition and reproduction and etc.), it would not even appear to us as an object. In other words, the idea of an ‘unthinkable object’ is nonsense.
In his first definition of the psychic power of thinking, Aristotle focuses on this potential identity between thought and all (thinkable) things. His claim is that Plato called the soul ‘the place of Forms’ for this reason, to refer to this pure potential identity with all thinkable things. But a capacity or power that is not exercised, or that does not become actual in activity, is not a real power. Why would we believe someone who said they had a capacity or talent or skill–like being able to shoot a three-pointer from half court or being able to bake the perfect loaf of bread–if they never exercised it and always had another excuse for not being able to demonstrate their power? Another way of thinking about how potential is less real than actuality might be reflecting on how we talk about possibility–e.g., saying “it’s possible” or “that could have happened” doesn’t mean we think the possibility is real, or actual, somewhere.
Immediately, Aristotle clarifies that he does not think a finite human being can actually think everything, even if it can potentially think everything. So what do we mean when we say that someone is ‘knowledgeable’? For Aristotle, we mean that the person who is knowledgeable knows about knowledge–that is, they think about their power of thought or understand that their soul has potential identity with every (thinkable) thing. So he claims that the person ‘who knows’ is someone whose soul is not only potentially identical with every (thinkable) thing, but knows that their soul has this potential for identity with the universe.
This leads to two problems:
Question: if thought is passive affection, or the receptivity of the soul to the essences or forms of existing and material things, then how is it also impassive?
Answer: Thought is passive, or merely receptive, insofar as it is only potentially identical with everything. However, to the extent thought is merely potential, it is not real. For thinking to be real thinking, this potential must be actualized in the activity of thought. This means that thought is also only potentially impassive at first. Only the activity of thinking compels thought to actualize its own potential, developing from mere passivity to impassivity.
Question: Can thought think itself like it thinks any other object? If so, wouldn’t that mean that thought itself is too identical with other things, and so therefore not impassive?
Answer: The short answer is yes thought can take itself as an object for thought, and no thought is not material. For Aristotle, when we think of a material thing, we do not think it insofar as it is material. This is a strange way of speaking, but what he means is that our concept of a material thing distills what is essential about it rather than copying it detail for detail. Some of our thoughts are not yet pure concepts, since they do copy material things detail for detail, as if our soul/mind was taking pictures (or, more likely, painting them). This is image-thinking, and Aristotle associates it with the imagination. (In the Aristotle secondary literature, there is an ongoing debate about the role of these images or phantasia in cognition. Without getting sidetracked, we can say that for Aristotle, as long as our thought remains at the level of these images left over from sensation and we are not capable of ‘extracting’ an essence from them, we will confuse what appears good to us because it is pleasurable to sense with what is good for us, which may not be as pleasurable to sense but is nonetheless what we must learn to desire. We can only live well to the extent that we recognize what is really good by distinguishing essence from appearance, knowledge of what is good for us from pleasurable impressions left on us.) For Aristotle, these images are not yet knowledge of objects, since knowledge requires us to make distinctions between what is and is not essential when we define something according to its kind. (For example, we try not to include contingent or irrelevant differences between individual rabbits–e.g., this one has a white spot on its nose and this one has a black spot on its ear–when we define ‘rabbit.’) What Aristotle suggests at the end of §4 is that we have the experience of thinking about our own thoughts all the time, as we reflect on what we have sensed (or remember it) in the form of images, but we also pick out or focus on what seems most essential from these images (e.g., given my experience of rabbits, how would I define ‘rabbit’?).
§5
The section where Aristotle introduces the active intellect is infamously short, a half page of text consisting of four short paragraphs. He presents his argument for the necessity of the active intellect as follows:
In every class of thing we find in nature, as well as in nature as a whole, we find a relationship between a matter which is potentially all of the particulars in the class and a cause that compels this matter to actualize its potential to become the particulars of that class (e.g., there is a cause or rule or law that accounts for why the matter that is potentially water or snake actually becomes water or snake and not something else). If the soul is a part of nature, Aristotle argues we will and do find these two elements (matter/potentiality and cause/actuality) in such a relationship (of actualization) in the soul.
As already established, thought is passive insofar as it is potentially identical with all things, active insofar as it thinks or becomes identical with things, and actual insofar as it is active. In the process of thinking, or of the intellect becoming identical with more things and actualizing its potential, the intellect also becomes impassive. In other words, the more material things the intellect becomes identical to by ‘disengaging’ their essences from their matter, the more different it becomes from the material world at the same time. Aristotle says that this means intellect, in a sense, makes all things. He compares the intellect to light (reminiscent of Plato’s claim that the Good is the source and measure of all knowledge), since light makes potential colors into actual colors and intellect makes potentially thinkable objects into objects that have actually been thought.
To the extent that thought is impassive or actual, then, it is separable from matter and material things, since matter is only ever potential. We have established that the actuality of a material thing, for thought, is its essence, not its material composition or the impression this material composite leaves on us in the form of images.
As a consequence, thought insofar as it is actual or impassive is also properly speaking eternal. This means that when we have actual knowledge, which happens when we have disengaged the essence of the object from its material composition, the identity established between our thought and the object (through its essence) is not subject to time or change in the way material objects come-to-be and perish. This is a difficult thought, but we can make it more intuitive by noting that when we say someone ‘gets/got it right,’ we don’t just mean that they got close to the truth. We mean that they got it, that they grasped the truth of the matter. For example, when we say that a historical figure was ‘on the right side of history,’ we mean both that they took the right position in their own time and, that because they were right about this issue in their own time, they are in a sense still right today even if we don’t have the exact same issue anymore. When Aristotle says that actual knowledge, in its identity with the object, is eternal or immortal, he means that someone can be right about a phenomena (natural, historical, whatever) that perishes and the fact this phenomena perishes doesn’t change the fact this person got it right. For Aristotle, this is also why we seek knowledge in the first place. We already think there are some people who ‘got it right’ or are getting it right today, and this is the sense in which he says that although potential knowledge seems to be prior in time to actual knowledge, it isn’t. It is because we already think some people have had actual knowledge that we actualize our potential for knowledge. Aristotle denies that there was ever a time that human beings as a species just had pure potential knowledge. Human children, for example, are raised and socialized in a world in which they think some people, parents or teachers or even older siblings and other peers, have gotten something right, or know something that they don’t know yet, and this drives them to learn. No human is born into a world in which everything is potentially thinkable but nothing has actually been thought. We are born into a world surrounded by examples or models of what it looks like when people know, when people ‘get it right.’ As we’ve said, when a person ‘gets it right,’ when they see what’s essential behind what isn’t and their thought becomes identical to the object, the fact they got it right outlives them as a finite individual. It is this–not only the possibility of ‘getting it right’ but the wealth of examples and models we have for what it looks like to ‘get it right’–that Aristotle calls the active intellect. Without this, he concludes, nothing thinks. If we didn’t think people could really get things right, why would we bother putting effort into learning at all?
Unmoved Mover 1: Physics VIII §6 (additional notes on §1-5 and §7-9)
§1-5
Does time have a beginning? When did time begin?
Does space have a limit? Where did space begin?
In each case we face two problems: (1) infinite regress, or the inability to discover or conceive of a limit to time or space, and (2) the paradox of attempting to solve this regress by explaining time and space from another moment in time ‘before’ time or another place in space ‘outside’ space. Though Aristotle is sometimes read as a thinker who denies that we can explain the origin or development of the universe (cosmogenesis), he criticizes the atomists for having precisely this position. They assume that nature was ‘always’ the way it is now, but do not defend this ‘always.’
For Aristotle, motion is different from time and space in that we do have experience and knowledge of motion causing itself (while we lack either of time and space generating themselves) in the form of self-moving beings, living beings and human beings. Aristotle notes that even if our causal explanations never truly end, since when explaining an effect by referring to its cause we can always refer to the cause of that cause and so on, we are nevertheless satisfied by some causal explanations that fall short of exhausting this infinite causal chain–namely, when we can trace an effect back to a self-moving being, a living or human being who initiated a causal sequence through their activity. If the infinite regress of the causal chain can end, Aristotle argues, it must end in something that moves but is self-moving. But it would also have to be unmoved, or else it would just be another cause in the infinite causal chain of movers and things moved. In summary, the first cause or principle of all motion must be self-moving, a mover, and unmoved. Given the unique ability of motion to generate itself in contrast to space and time, Aristotle will derive the origin of space and time from the self-moving and unmoved mover.
§6
Why must there always be motion without intermission? Because rest cannot explain motion, but motion explains both itself and rest. Rest, for instance, can be explained as the product of opposing or conflicting motions. But how does motion explain itself? We have at our disposal the concept of self-movement from our knowledge of natural beings with an internal principle of motion, but especially those beings that are ensouled or living. In this section, he also explains that living beings are not always self-moving. What is important is that they make the concept of self-movement thinkable and exhibit an actual activity of self-movement regularly.
When Aristotle says that the ultimate or first or original mover must be unmoved, what he means then is that the source of all movement as becoming–both coming-to-be and perishing–must itself not ‘become’ as it imparts motion. Put differently, if our goal is to explain how things come-to-be and perish at all, we cannot explain the causal sequence of things coming-to-be and perishing (movers that impart motion and are moved) with a motion that is just another in the sequence. This raises an interesting problem: how could the cause of becoming or change be exempt from it? On the one hand, we would have to assume that the cause of all motion as a mover is, somehow, related or connected to what it moves. On the other hand, we cannot reduce the cause of all motion to a mover that is moved, or a thing that came-to-be and will perish, since it would no longer be the first or original cause. Aristotle’s ingenious solution, as we will see, will be to combine the concept of changelessness with the concept of infinite movement! The solution to the problem, in other words, can only be to discover a mover that is unmoved. Only a mover in motion that imparts motion without being moved can serve as the first cause of motion. Yet, Aristotle’s searing criticism of other philosophers and naturalists for just assuming motion as a given prevents him from doing the same with the unmoved mover. Therefore, the unmoved mover must not only explain all motion that it causes. It must also explain, or move or be the cause of, its own motion.
§7
Which motion is primary? Three kinds of motion: in respect of magnitude (increase or decrease); in respect of affection (combination and separation); in respect of place (locomotion)
Locomotion must be primary: both changes of magnitude and affection are kinds of motion in respect to place. When we look at the series of psyches–from plant to animal to human–we see that locomotion comes after the powers of nutrition and reproduction, even after the power of sensation (even if sensation is accompanied by appetite). There is a parallel in the series of life stages any individual living being passes through in its development: nutrition, sensation, and appetite are in some sense prior in time to the power of locomotion (or the full exercise of the power of locomotion). Here, Aristotle is anticipating something like ‘recapitulation’ theory, which is the idea that living beings we consider to be ‘more complex’ repeat or pass through stages in their life cycle that correspond to the ‘simpler’ stages life itself has passed through as it developed into the living being we are analyzing. (We sometimes talk about humans having a ‘lizard brain,’ for example, on top of which humans have a mammalian brain and a part of the brain–like the prefrontal cortex–which is what makes them distinctively human.) For Aristotle, then, we treat both a ‘simpler’ form of life than humans–for example, the therapsid order of reptilians that mammals are hypothesized to have evolved from in the Triassic period or even the hypothetical ‘first eukaryote’ from which all multicellular life evolved–and a ‘simpler’ phase of human life–specifically, a human child or infant–as potentially what adult humans are actually. If we consider life itself as potentially human, or capable of developing into human beings, we also extend this potential for human existence into the structure of the cosmos itself. Given the actuality of human beings, the universe must have been capable of producing them! This is what Aristotle means when he says that ‘becoming appears as something imperfect and proceeding according to a principle; and so what is posterior in the order of becoming is prior in the order of nature.’ In other words, if our concepts or theories or explanatory paradigms–whether philosophical or natural-scientific–of nature cannot account for the actuality of living beings or human beings, they are not properly speaking adequate to the complexity of nature as a whole, or nature that includes the activities of humans as well as the formation of galaxies. Therefore, human beings have to be prior in our order of explanation–in that we are required to judge a theory of nature to the extent it succeeds in taking humans into account or fails to–and prior in the order of nature itself–in that nature must have had the potential for the development of human beings before any human beings existed. To return to the topic of locomotion: the universe must have had the potential to develop into living beings and human beings, or beings that move themselves with respect to place. Here, however, Aristotle goes further. As established, we begin from the actuality of self-moving (non-human and human living) beings that strive insofar as they are capable to not only extend their activity of self-movement but perfect their activity of self-movement, a striving we see (admittedly, in different ways) both in the series of souls (plant → animal → human) and the phases in the life-cycles of animals and human beings (infant → adolescent → adult). Aristotle’s daring thesis is that, beyond having to account for the actuality of (living) beings with the power of self-movement in our explanations of nature as a potential result of nature, self-movement is also the cause of all motion we see in nature. In other words, nature itself has a telos, which is indicated to us by the way that living beings strive to extend and perfect their self-movement. We can present this series in two ways: (1) non-living matter is potentially living beings, (non-human) living beings are potentially human beings, human beings are potentially something else; (2) living beings actualize the potential of non-living matter, human beings actualize the potential of (non-human) living beings, something else actualizes the potential of human beings. This ‘something else’ is what Aristotle calls the unmoved mover, or the perfection of the power and activity of self-movement.
§8
As perfect, this motion must be eternal, or infinite, and continuous. Aristotle says we do, in fact, know of one kind of motion that could serve as the telos of nature itself: rotatory movement, as in the rotation of a planetary body on its axis. In contrast to the perfection of Plato’s forms, which transcend all movement and are totally static, the unmoved mover moves in rotatory motion because only rotatory motion is a kind of infinite or continuous change of place.
§9
In a circular motion, as in the orbits of planets or other interstellar bodies and masses, there is no beginning or end. This extends to rotatory motion as well–we cannot distinguish between the end and the beginning. It is both eternal change and eternal rest; rest not as an end to change or outside of motion but precisely through the perfection of motion in self-motion. For Aristotle, the idea of the unmoved mover is implicit in every theory he knows advanced by others before him about the ‘first cause/principle’ of the development of the cosmos. What Aristotle suggests is that we can answer “when did time begin” and “where did space originate” if we understand both time and space as generated by motion. Unlike time and space, Aristotle argues, we do experience motion generating itself in self-moving beings (non-human and human life). Furthermore, we can conceptualize the perfection of self-movement given the way living beings and human beings strive to perfect their own self-movement. This concept of perfected self-movement combines (a) the striving of living and human beings to move themselves infinitely and (b) the continuous and infinite change-of-place (rest-in-movement) in rotary and circular movements of astronomical objects. The unmoved mover is Aristotle’s solution to the question: what is the first or original cause of motion? But in the end, it leaves us with more questions than answers. How does non-living matter ‘strive’ to be living matter? If the unmoved mover is the final cause of all motion, or the actuality of all potential, how can all matter strive towards the unmoved mover if matter is just potential for Aristotle? Does all matter eventually become life, all life human or intelligent life, and all human or intelligent life the eternal life of the unmoved mover? If not, why not, and if so, why? In other words, can/will all potential be actualized?
Unmoved Mover 2: Metaphysics XII, §6-10
§6
We see the concept of substance here, which Aristotle criticizes in others and proposes his own, more consistent, concept of in the preceding books of the Metaphysics. Rather than focusing on that for now, we can simply ask: what kind of thing is eternal, and how can we reconcile the idea of an eternal thing with the concept of eternal movement? As in the Physics, Aristotle’s solution is a thing in eternal movement in place, like the circular or rotatory movements of heavenly bodies. For a thing to be eternal–to neither come-to-be nor perish–it must neither be separated from movement (since we have already seen how Plato’s Forms have no intelligible connection to the world of moving things) nor moved. It must, therefore, be in motion and unmoved. The only solution is the concept of the unmoved mover. (We see a familiar pattern of reasoning here, arrived at from the starting point of substance rather than motion.) Given that we have already established that activity is the result of the actualization of potential, the unmoved mover must, as a substance, be actuality itself in order to cause the activity of all other things in the cosmos that have unactualized potentiality.
Here, Aristotle makes a strange move, but one that necessarily follows from his previous definition of matter as potential and only potential: ‘Matter will surely not move itself.’ If only actuality can compel potential to act (or enter into the process of actualization), and matter is pure potential, we may conceptualize material things (things with bodies, different elements, etc.) acting but cannot attribute this movement to matter itself. This is why he criticizes those who write myths and other natural philosophy who hold that matter–or the collection of all material things together–was the original state of the cosmos. For Aristotle, an account like Hesiod’s, according to which chaos or night originates all, is a way of avoiding the explanation. Hesiod is faced with the challenge: how did chaos or night, the absolute disorder of matter, ever give rise to the ordered cosmos we experience? To connect this back to Aristotle’s discussion of final causality: why would we think that pure undifferentiated matter could explain the order we experience in the cosmos without any reference to a telos of the process of cosmogenesis? Even the relatively undifferentiated organic material of a newly fertilized egg, for Aristotle, can’t explain the order it will develop as it matures without referring to the telos of the process of embryogenesis. We can make this point a little more intuitive when we think of explanations we currently offer for the origin of the universe on the model of ‘the Big Bang,’ since we still have to assume that the initial state of the universe (infinitely hot and infinitely dense) followed certain physical laws that help us explain its development. So not even contemporary theoretical physics or speculative cosmology holds that the universe is born from mere matter, or indeterminate ‘stuff.’ Whatever ‘it’ was, even if we don’t call it matter or stable matter, that our physical universe developed out of, it was already determinate in some way and subject to laws or rules that gave the development of the universe a direction or telos.
§7
Given that an eternal thing can only be real (or actual) to the extent it is in motion (since a non-moving thing would not be a thing at all) and must also not be moved from the outside (since that would mean it was subject to perishing), Aristotle has established that it has to be unmoved in its motion or self-moving. Since all things in motion are related to one another in the causal sequence where movers impart motion and are moved in return, the eternal thing–both unmoved and self-moving–must also be a mover, but one that imparts motion without being moved. We already saw Aristotle use the rotatory and circular motions of the heavenly bodies (or planets) as an image of the unmoved mover in the physics, and here he says that the ‘heavens,’ or these bodies and their motions, are the first effect of the unmoved mover and mediate the relationship between the unmoved mover as the perfect self-mover at one extreme and things that are movers but also moved (including living and human beings that are imperfect self-movers) at the other extreme. All of a sudden, however, Aristotle appears to change subjects and begins to talk about thought and desire: the object of thought and the object of desire move without being moved, he says. He sounds a bit like Plato, claiming that ‘the real good’ moves those things that desire it without being moved itself. Though we won’t be discussing it together, in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle criticizes Plato’s idea of the form of the Good because no one just wants the Good, but wants a good or a determinate good based on the kind of person they are. This is why when Aristotle introduces the concept of the unmoved mover as the telos towards which all things strive (since it is self-movement perfected, all actuality and no potential), he has to insist that all things strive for it differently, given what is good or ‘best’ for the kind of thing they are (e.g., the closest plants come to perfect self-movement is untrammeled growth and reproduction, whereas the closest humans come to perfect self-movement is thinking thought itself). This is why, in a curious sentence, Aristotle claims that the unmoved mover produces motion by being loved, and it moves the other moving things. Aristotle adds that the principle of the unmoved mover is necessary both in the sense that, as unmoved, it is not capable of becoming other than what it already and always is, and as perfect, it binds all moving things to it necessarily as they strive in ways appropriate to their kinds to partake in it. This is why Aristotle calls those lives dedicated to the perfection of self-movement according to your kind the best lives, even if, as finite beings, we can only enjoy partaking in the perfect self-movement of the unmoved mover for a short time and cannot be eternally in the state of pleasure it generates for itself and shares with us so far as we partake in it. Here, Aristotle connects the concept of the unmoved mover to the concept of the active intellect. Given that thought is potentially identical to all things in its passivity but actually identical to things to the extent it thinks them in its activity, the activity of thinking is godlike. Through it we strive for the ultimate activity or perfect self-movement of the one ‘first principle,’ which Aristotle here calls ‘God.’
§8
Interestingly, this is what Aristotle says is the truth (‘inspired utterance’) of pantheistic Greek myths that took the heavenly bodies to be divinities because those who wrote the myths had recognized, even if not explicitly or consciously, that the rotatory/circular movement of the planets in their orbits was both an image and an effect of “the divine [that] encloses the whole of nature.”
§9
Divine thought doesn’t ‘think’ by first sensing, then receiving impressions from sense as images, then disengaging the essences of things from images of them. Why? Because this is the activity of finite thought as it develops from potential (its potential to be identical to everything) to actuality (or its impassivity, as knowledge of essences beyond material existence). So divine thought, or thought that is totally actual and active and impassive, must be the activity of thought thinking about itself. If this sounds like divine thought is circular thinking, that’s because it is! In the same way that Aristotle developed the concept of the unmoved mover in the Physics on the model of rotatory or circular locomotion of the heavenly bodies, since only this kind of movement is movement without change (beginning and end), he will develop the concept of the unmoved mover in the Metaphysics as a kind of circular thinking in which thought turns into itself, revolving around itself as its center, without beginning or end. Perhaps realizing that this is a difficult idea, Aristotle immediately turns to different kinds of thinking we already do in the different disciplines, distinguishing thinking of objects (collecting data, making observations, etc) from thinking of thought (reflecting on our own methods, our concepts, and our theories). In this way, we see that what Aristotle calls divine thought is what we do, at least temporarily, when we reflect on our own methods, concepts, and/or theories critically. Though this happens in all the sciences occasionally, Aristotle defines philosophy as the discipline in which we critically reflect on our thoughts in this way.
—> Digression: The Contemplative Life. As a side note, this is why you will see Aristotle praising philosophy as the highest kind of life we can live, or what he calls the contemplative life. In secondary literature on the Nicomachean Ethics, however, Aristotle scholars have debated for a long time whether the contemplative or the political life is a higher or more excellent kind of life for Aristotle. Without trying to solve this problem once and for all, we can recall that in Plato’s Republic, there was the following circle between the contemplative and political life: (i) to ascend to the Good through philosophical education, your soul already has to have a pattern of justice; (ii) for your soul to have a pattern of justice your city must have achieved the same pattern in its politics to an extent, however minimal; (iii) for your city to have some pattern of justice some soul must have already ascended to the Good and discovered the importance of Justice and just rule. Given Plato’s implicit argument that the contemplative life requires political excellence and the political life requires philosophical excellence, we might not need to decide between the two lives as if only one or the other could be the highest or most excellent kind of life. If the goal of philosophy is to partake in divine thought, or self-moving thought, to the extent that a human being is capable, the kind of self-sufficiency or autonomy that serves as the telos of the contemplative life must require a certain kind of political order in your city that, at the very least, does not interfere with your ability to live the contemplative life to the fullest. In other words, no auto-nomos (self-ruling, self-sufficient) thinkers without a certain kind of nomos (law, custom) in their city.
§10
Returning to the theme of §7, on the problem of how all things in the universe can strive for the good but strive for it differently, Aristotle opens §10 by answering that the universe contains the good in two ways: both (1) as separate from the rest of the universe and by itself and (2) expressed in the order of the parts of the universe. He compares the two ways in which the nature of the universe contains the good to the way in which a good army has goodness both in its leader or general and in its ranks of soldiers. This metaphor is especially appropriate for Aristotle because the goodness of the ranks of soldiers depends on the goodness of the military leader. Once again, we see Aristotle balancing the two apparently conflicting demands that any theory of nature as a whole, or of the universe, must adequately meet: (1) explain the way in which everything in the universe is the same (or else they would not even be in the same universe); (2) explain the way in which things in the universe are nonetheless different from each other (or else the unity of the universe would be a simple, empty one). His solution: “all are ordered together to one end.” Everyone and everything has a function to perform for the sake of the good of the whole. Aristotle ends with a defense of his theory in contrast to those of other thinkers for whom the same kind of ultimate principle or cause, the good, is necessary. Aristotle contrasts his own theory of the good as the unmoved mover with
theories in which the good is still the ultimate principle/cause but is opposed by a contrary that deprives it of its power–as in Empedocles, who holds Love is the ultimate cause or telos but claims it is in eternal conflict Strife)
and
theories in which the good is taken to be perfect or eternal because it doesn’t move and isn’t connected to moving things–as in Plato, who separates the Forms from the world of becoming and cannot explain how they relate to it.
For Aristotle, neither of these theories produces a concept of a true first principle or cause. In the former case, the first principle is in some sense moved or constrained by its contrary. In the latter case, the first principle is too distant from the world it is supposed to explain to actually explain it. But Aristotle recognizes why thinkers before him have had to introduce first principles that are all-powerful, since they have to be in order to be first principles at all, and then weaken them with a principle that opposes them or by removing them from contact with the world. These thinkers were concerned that tracing the physical world or nature as a whole or the universe back to one principle/cause was necessary, since only that could account for how the world remains one world despite the differences we find in it between things, but also impossible, since they could not think of a way to account for the identity/unity of all things without erasing the real differences that provoked us to look for identity/unity in the first place. The unmoved mover is an ingenious solution: it is perfect, but not static, moving, but not changing, eternal, but only since it keeps time, original, but only because it was final, immaterial, but only because it is more actual than matter, active, but impassive. In all these ways, the unmoved mover is, Aristotle argues, the only ‘first principle’ that can explain the identity of everything in the universe without erasing the real differences between all kinds of things in nature. This is why he says knowledge of the unmoved mover is Wisdom, or the highest knowledge. We call people wise when they can bring many different things–people, artifacts, animals, plants, matters–into one order, assigning each a different place or function for the sake of a single end–the good.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells Phaedrus that he never leaves the city because he can only become more wise by learning from other people and nature has nothing to teach him. Aristotle’s theory of the unmoved mover is meant, in part, to show how foolish that assumption really is.