Untimely

We aiming-to-be rational animals are all deeply conditioned by our development in particular social and cultural circumstances. A truly great philosopher like Aristotle perhaps comes closest to becoming “untimely” in something like a Nietzchean sense.

Though I know of no explicit textual evidence for it, I wonder if Hegel resolved the material incompatibility between his mature patronizing attribution of naive realism about norms to the ancient world as a whole on the one hand, and all the insights he attributes to Plato and Aristotle on the other, by implicitly exempting them from the generalization about the ancient world. That generalization is sound at a broad sociological level, but we should not assume without specific evidence that sociological generalizations about a philosopher’s time and place apply to the philosopher.

“Said of”

Aristotle seems to have enjoyed using expressions in a polymorphic way. For example, he very commonly writes that B “is said of” A. This never just refers to an empirical report of linguistic practice. It always should be understood to refer to a judgment that B is properly said of A. This in turn means all of the following:

It is apparently a fact that A is B.
It is properly judged that A is B.
It is good usage to say that A is B.

He is using one abstract expression to make multiple isomorphic assertions (in respective registers of objective reality, normative judgment, and linguistic usage) all at the same time. Too often, people assume these are all mutually exclusive topics, when they are not. By actually doing it in a simple way, Aristotle offers hope that we can talk about reality, and be Critical, and follow the linguistic turn all at once.

Brandom refers to Frege to begin to explain Hegel’s notion of conceptual content. Frege said “A fact is a thought that is true.” As Brandom points out, this is a nonpsychological approach. Hegel, Frege, and Brandom have recovered ways of speaking that include at least the first two of the three senses above, and I imagine Brandom at least would be sympathetic to the third as well.

We might consider the “it is apparently a fact” form to be materially implied by the “it is properly judged” form. I think Plato and Aristotle considered the “it is properly judged” form to be materially implied by the “it is good usage to say” form, as well as accepting the first implication. Good language use should be consistent with good judgment, which should be consistent with reality. So, by transitivity, “said of” (understood as shorthand for “properly said of”) would also materially imply both the others.

All three forms are inherently normative. This is most obvious with the second form, which is expressly concerned with judgment. But the form concerned with language use is about good usage, not any and all randomly occurring usage; and the form concerned with fact is really about normatively valid judgments of apparent fact. (See also Aristotelian Semantics.)

Translations influenced by the Latin commentary tradition render “said of” in terms of predication, which misleadingly suggests the purely syntactic way in which a grammatical predicate is “said of” its grammatical subject, and obscures Aristotle’s focus on normative logical assertion.

Postscript

Some time after writing this post, I came to the realization — reflected in Aristotelian Propositions — that “said of” may also be taken to directly express a material-inferential relation. Based on an analysis of implicit propositions like the one developed there — and recalling that A and B are canonically universals or higher-order terms — I now think the root meaning of “B is said of A”, is that if we have x: A, then it is a good material inference that we also have x: B. Goodness of material inference is what stands behind and justifies the initial formulation that B is properly said of A, and the other polymorphic meanings.

Rational/Talking Animal

Sometimes I think zoon logon echon should be translated more literally as “talking animal” rather than the classic “rational animal”. (Perhaps “animal” should be “living being”, but here I am not worried about discrimination against plants.) Logos was a highly overdetermined word that could also mean word, ratio, measure, or principle, as well as language or reason, but the linguistic meanings seem to be more primary. Within the Aristotelian corpus there are several longer alternate phrasings, of which some stress the linguistic aspect and others the rational aspect. (The human being is said to be a “political” animal as well.)

I don’t think Aristotle imagined human reason to be separable from some articulation in language. Thus I disagree with those who want to interpret nous (classically , “intellect”) as some kind of originary intuition. This seems to me very alien to Aristotle’s whole way of approaching things. (Plotinus did explicitly treat nous as something like intellectual intuition, and had major influence on later readers of Aristotle. I do think there is such a thing as intuition, but it is not a kind of knowledge and it is not originary.)

Echon is literally “having”, which applies better to the linguistic interpretations of logos, whereas philosophically speaking we don’t strictly have reason as a full possession, but rather a potential for it.

That said, “rational animal” accurately conveys our two-sided nature. We are animals, and because we have language, we can potentially participate in reason.

But regardless of how well we do or do not take care of things, this has the effect of making us ethical beings. Who we are will turn out to be more than anything a matter of the commitments we make. This is transforming.

Incidentally, nothing about this says anything that singles out our particular kind of ape. It just happens that we only know of one biological species that meets this very abstract definition, but this is a merely contingent truth. So, all the talking species in science fiction would be human to Aristotle if they were real, and if we could prove that dolphins had a comparable linguistic ability, they would be human, too. (See also What Is “I”?; Psyche, Subjectivity; Individuation; Happiness; Second Nature.)

Happiness

The translation of Aristotle’s ethical goal of eudaimonia as “happiness” is misleading. Eudaimonia refers not to an immediate feeling or attitude, but to a state of affairs that is judged to have been the case by an observer. Properly speaking, it can only be the subject of a retrospective judgment that what it was to have lived that whole life was good. The goal of living beings is to live a life that is good for the kind of beings they are. (See also Commitment; Ends.)

Unconscious Intellect?

If intellect in a broadly Aristotelian sense is at least partly nonpsychological and has a significant linguistic/cultural/social/historical aspect, how does the nonpsychological aspect relate to the psychological aspect?

Many 20th century authors, from Frege and Husserl to Lacan, sharply rejected the idea that thought should be approached primarily in psychological terms. Also, we should not consider the individual psyche to be like an island with unambiguous boundaries. Aristotle uses the single word ethos (the main subject matter of “ethics” in his view) both for individual acquired character and for culture. Character is a sort of micro-culture. Plato already famously compared the soul to a city.

Beatrice Longuenesse, who previously wrote a marvelous book on the Kantian transcendental deduction, recently suggested an unexpected connection between Kantian transcendental considerations and Freudian metapsychology. Meanwhile, at the end of the day, Kant ends up relatively closer to Aristotelian ethics than it would first appear. (Many scholars have debated the fine points of this, and Nancy Sherman wrote a whole book on it.) So what about an Aristotelian metapsychology?

Actually, it seems to me that Aristotle is more interested in metapsychology than in what we call psychology, and that his views on thought are better considered in this light. Frege and Husserl might part company with us here, but logically oriented criticisms of psychologism do not rule out all uses of metapsychology (or even psychology, for that matter).

Owl

Hegel’s famous phrase “the owl of Minerva flies at dusk” refers to his Aristotelian view that ends are more important than origins. Since Minerva (Athena) is the goddess of wisdom, he is also emphasizing that wisdom is the product of a lengthy development, and implying that it is in a sense backward-looking.

Euclid is reputed to have quipped that “there is no royal road” to geometry. This applies to many other things as well. Understanding comes gradually, through practical engagement.

Intelligence from Outside

I very much like Aristotle’s cryptic remark in De Anima about intellect coming to us “from outside”. Intellect is very far from purely belonging to the individual psyche. On other grounds, I think our very notions of self only emerge through social interaction, and not any sort of originary intuition.

In a certain sense, then, specifically human as distinct from animal intelligence is already artificial in the sense that its basis is not purely organic. It cannot be separated from our acquisition of language and culture.

Where there is still a difference between human intelligence and anything in a computational domain is in the normative, practical dimension of human reason, which does not seem to be susceptible to formalization. Practical judgment (phronesis) cannot be programmed. (See also What Is “I”?)

Passive Synthesis, Active Sense

Husserl suggested an intriguing notion of passive synthesis, which I believe in his view would be the source of what Hegel calls mediated immediacy. Something like this could help round out the Kantian account of synthesis, which is strongly tilted toward active synthesis associated with deliberate conscious acts. Language is straining here; passive synthesis is just short of paradox. I think the idea here is that “passive” synthesis is synthesis that comes to us more or less ready-made, based on previous syntheses we have formed or socially assimilated.

Something related to this is also involved in the Aristotelian notion of a “common” sense, which in effect synthesizes our experience of sensible things into a unified whole. Aristotle’s remarks are in a very minimalist style, but were developed in a little more detail by the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias. Kant and Aristotle both generally treat sense perception in passive terms, but Aristotle’s common sense clearly cannot be entirely passive. Many medieval authors working in the broadly Aristotelian tradition developed more detailed accounts of sense perception in general as also involving an active component.

These various efforts to describe such processes in terms that are neither purely active nor purely passive seem very important to me as laying the ground for a reasonable account of human agency, free of both voluntarism and simplistic determinism.

Aristotelian Matter

Aristotelian “matter” and “material cause” mainly capture notions of circumstance, contingent fact, mediation, and what some 20th century writers called sedimentation.

Early Greek mathematics was not sufficiently advanced to be of much help in understanding natural processes, so Aristotle instead pioneered a logical/semantic approach to our experience of sensible nature. In accordance with this, “matter” for Aristotle is what Brandom would call an expressive metaconcept, rather than being a theory-laden empirical concept like the modern notion. We need to be careful moving between the two.

For Aristotle, matter is not a subsisting thing but a relative concept that has an expressive role. “Matter” and “form” are correlatives, only analytically distinguishable, though the relation is not quite symmetrical (form seems to be more primary). All physical things are conventionally referred to as “composites” of the two, but this should not be taken to mean that either has independent existence. (See also Hylomorphism.)

The relation between matter and form is loosely but definitely not strictly analogous to that between potentiality and actuality. Matter gives concrete embodiment to particulars, whereas potentiality is what provides the space for construction of universals.

Unlike Descartes, Aristotle does not associate matter in any direct way with mathematically analyzable extension. One of his usages for “matter” is as the inferred substrate for sensible properties. But alongside this, a different account is actually more prominent. Some “form” or way of being and doing makes the composite the particular kind of thing it is. In this context, “matter” ends up comprising the concrete circumstances of the actual functioning of a way of being and doing.

Modern people are used to thinking of form as a predicate of some matter. Some in the ancient world thought this way, too, but Aristotle prefers to speak in the opposite way, and to predicate the matter of the form.

Aristotelian matter refers to circumstance, to a body of what is the case about some particular actualized form, more primarily than to a body of stuff. What is of interest with matter is particular matters, or “a” matter, or “the” matter of some particular form — the circumstances of its actualization.

The Greek commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias postulated an ultimate “prime matter” that was distinguished by having no properties at all, which by implication would put all properties whatsoever on the side of form. At the other end of the spectrum, some later commentators spoke of a “proximate matter” (i.e., the matter closest to the form) as highly structured, and as including things like the body of an animal.

Aristotle’s various usages, if reified, would result in a layering of form/matter distinctions. (In the middle ages, there was heated debate over the so-called “unity or plurality of substantial forms”. Theologians were much concerned over the relation of soul to body. Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and others took seriously Aristotle’s description of soul as the “form of the body”. Augustinians wanted a dualistic separation of soul and body, more like the pilot in the ship that Aristotle rejected. They therefore argued that the body already had a form of its own, and that the form of the soul is superimposed on it (a “plurality of substantial forms”). The notion of “substantial form” was a late refinement intended to be strictly univocal, where Aristotle’s general usage of “form” had instead been self-consciously overdetermined, overflowing any such conditions in the course of its dialectical development.)

Aristotelian matter is implicitly not just immediate circumstance, but always a result of a sort of layering or accumulation of circumstances over time, including some feedback loops. This is important for the kind of generalization we should expect from Aristotelian science.

Cartesian extensionality is perfectly homogeneous. Aristotelian matter is anything but that. It is a site of differences (as form is also, in a complementary way). The virtual layering or accumulation I have spoken of is a very weak kind of unity. Aristotle’s notions of necessity and universality are also both deliberately weak notions. Something is said to be “necessary” just if there is no known counter-instance. “Universal” means “said of many things”, not “said unconditionally”.

Aristotelian “science” does not aim to codify laws in the modern, univocal sense. It is an open hermeneutic that seeks to understand processes in terms of patterns, while recognizing inherent contingency in matters of fact. Particularly in the biological works, there is a genealogical intertwining of form and accident that makes it impossible to strictly separate the two. Aristotelian natural teleology is not only purely immanent, but also never univocal, as this intertwining makes clear. It gives us tendencies only, never strict predetermination.

Intellectual Virtue, Love

In his discussions of ethics, alongside friendship or love and the things that go with those, Aristotle places the highest value on what he calls intellectual virtues. This is often misconstrued as a bias in favor of theory over practice. Such a misconstrual does not take a long enough view of things. Aristotle did value intellectual over manual labor, but took great interest in the kinds of things Kant called “practical”, as the ethical treatises demonstrate.

Aristotle had the idea that the keener our discernment of things in general, the keener our practical judgment will be. I may study the stars or the habits of animals or political constitutions or the nature of intellect or of virtue — and these are all worthy in their own right — but I also improve my discernment of things in general in order to be a better being, which means applying it in a broad way in my whole life, as well as in my particular deliberations and choices.

This all assumes that I already want to be good, and am relatively able to actually be so. That will not be true, according to Aristotle, unless I am fortunate enough to have had the kind of upbringing and life experiences that are conducive to the development of the kind of character in which emotion is already inclined to give reason a fair hearing. For those whose emotions will not listen to reason, the best path forward is to follow others who are more reasonable, but that may not occur without some institution of authority. Insofar as we are or aim to be magnanimous ethical beings who have nothing to prove, rather than needing to celebrate this conditional legitimation of authority over others (and implicitly of the use of force in society to gain compliance with elementary justice and civility), we should be guided by a spirit of friendship and love.

We should use our intellectual virtues in a spirit of friendship to best apply something like Leibnizian wise charity in our lives, especially with those we love, and more especially in generously understanding the particular predicament of the loved one in front of us whose emotions will not listen to reason in such and such a case, so we can more effectively help them. (See also Honesty, Kindness; Interpretive Charity; Affirmation; Genealogy.)