Ethics, Hermeneutics, Historiography
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.
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”?)
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” 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.
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.)
Aristotle thought we should be ethically committed to the idea that becoming or process is in principle intelligible. An often misunderstood part of his program for showing this was to emphasize that our very talk about change presupposes that we can pick out relative stability or persistence somewhere in the context.
This is a careful, minimalist assertion of moments of weak unity or stable points of attraction within the flux, intended only to deny Plato’s strong pessimistic denial of the knowability of any such points of attraction. It has nothing to do with some direct incarnation of metaphysically given essences. (See Aristotelian Identity; Identity, Isomorphism; Equivocal Determination.)
Plato recommends an ethic of quasi-skeptical honesty about the epistemic difficulties involved in any practical judgment or view of the world. Aristotle deeply respects the intellectual honesty promoted by Plato about what we do not know in life, while putting a higher value on things subject to becoming.
Ousia (traditionally “substance”, or more accurately “what it was to have been” a thing) is Aristotle’s preferred alternative to talking about Being (either as utterly general or as utterly unique). It redirects our attention away from these sterile extremes toward a fertile middle ground where conceptual articulation is possible. In the Metaphysics, it undergoes a major dialectical development through many senses, including a division into actuality and potentiality. (See also Abstract and Concrete; Being, Existence; Aristotelian Dialectic; Free Will and Determinism.)
Later authors developed increasingly rigidified reinterpretations of Aristotelian substance, such as the Latin medieval notion of substantial form. This laid the basis for early modern redefinitions of substance in terms of some kind of logical identity.
In De Motu Animalium, Aristotle says there is an unmoved mover in the animal’s leg joint, and proceeds to a geometrical description of the axis of rotation of the joint. More famously, he says there are unmoved movers in the apparent motion of the fixed stars and planets, and there too associates them with geometrical axes of circular motions. What is going on here? This is a good illustration of several points.
First, Aristotle is perfectly happy to use mathematics in natural science. (He just correctly judged that early Greek arithmetic and geometry generally had little to contribute to the intelligibility of becoming, and wisely objected to the Pythagorean numerology that found a place in the Platonic Academy.)
Second, there is nothing mysterious about what he calls an unmoved mover. In the best-known cases, it refers to something that is in fact not only observable but mathematically describable. (This is not the only way a concept can have value, but that is not the point here.)
Third, he calls the unmoved mover a “mover” in the sense that it is the descriptive law or form of the physical motion in question, not a driving impulse or force. In a similar move, Leibniz famously said God is the law of the series.
First principles are the hardest thing of all to know. We only come to them at the end, if at all. Aristotle recommends that we reason toward first principles not from them, beginning instead from what is closer at hand. This seems very sane.
It was no sophomoric error when Friedrich Engels described Aristotle — not Plato or some neoplatonist — as the greatest dialectician of the ancient world. Aristotelian “dialectic” is just cumulative, exploratory discursive reasoning about concrete meanings in the absence of initial certainty.
Broad usage of the term “dialectic” includes meanings of both dialogue and logic. For Plato, dialogue aimed directly at truth (though not necessarily reaching it). Aristotle considered a many-sided logical/semantic analysis to be the single most important tool of science, and to be more rigorous than the dialogue that was Plato’s favorite literary device.
For Aristotle, unlike Plato, dialectic is not a direct quest for truth. Plato had already emphasized that dialectic is a matter of an ethically motivated quest for truth rather than a claim to mastery or simple possession of it. Aristotle opened things up further by preferring an indirect, semantically oriented approach to the quest. Dialectic ends up being his main critical tool.
Aristotelian dialectic is a semantic and pragmatic inferential examination of opinion or what is merely said (or analogously, I would argue, of appearance). It uses the same logical forms as the rational knowledge Aristotle called episteme; but unlike the latter, yields results that Aristotle calls only “probable”, because they depend on premises that are merely “said” rather than rationally known. (This is a qualitative assessment having nothing to do with statistical probability.)
This has often been taken as a denigration of dialectic. I take it instead as Aristotle’s affirmation of the importance of semantics and pragmatics.
Because dialectic for Aristotle makes no assumptions about what is really true, it is perfectly suited for the examination of arguments for their purely inferential structure. Because it examines concrete arguments with concrete terms, the role of material as well as formal inference can be considered. (See also Inferential Semantics.)
Aristotle also says (Topics Book 1) that dialectic in just this sense is the best means we have for getting clarity about first principles. This is a good example of Aristotle’s inferentialism. Aristotle’s own approach to what later came to be called “metaphysics” is (“merely”) dialectical in this specific sense. In being so, it is essentially semantic and normative. I don’t think Aristotle regarded metaphysics as episteme (“science”) any more than he regarded ethics or phronesis (“practical judgment”) as episteme, and in neither case is it a denigration. (Aristotle is far more honest than most later writers about the relatively less certain nature of so-called first principles, compared with many other apparently more derivative results. He is the original antifoundationalist. See also Dialectic Bootstraps Itself; Demonstrative “Science”?; Abstract and Concrete.)
Hegel actually said the greatest example of ancient dialectic was the commentary on Plato’s Parmenides by neoplatonist Proclus (412 – 485 CE). (He did not know the work of the other great late Neoplatonist, Damascius (458 – 538), which included an even more sophisticated development along similar lines.) The Parmenides explicitly examines a series of antithetical propositions, which does resemble the common image of Hegelian dialectic. (See The One?) In any case, I think this is misleading.
While at least the common image of Hegelian dialectic as concerned with antitheses does not apply well to Aristotle, very fruitful clarifications of Hegel can be obtained by looking out for his use of Aristotelian-style dialectic, despite that fact he — general enthusiasm for Aristotle notwithstanding — did not much mention Aristotle when expounding his own version. Underlying the occasional emphasis on antitheses in Hegel is a broader concern for actually many-sided inferential/semantic examination of opinion or appearance, which is just what Aristotle’s dialectic does. (See also Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic; Three Logical Moments; Contradiction vs Polarity.)
My own candidate for the greatest example of ancient dialectic is the development of the concepts of ousia (“what it was to have been” a thing) and energeia (“at-work-ness”) in the central books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. As in the biological works, merely binary distinction is not the main point there.
The stereotype of a binary schematism at work in Hegel is not without basis, but more careful commentary has limited its scope. Aristotelian dialectic actually pervades Hegel’s works.
In a dialectical development (Aristotelian or Hegelian), it is common to begin with one presumed meaning for a term, and end up with a different one. The classic discussion in the Metaphysics mentioned above begins with the idea of a simple substrate that remains constant through a change, and goes through multiple transformations to progressively richer concepts. (See also Form, Substance; Aristotelian Demonstration.)
When Aristotle talks about ways in which a word “is said” — which is one of the main things he does — it is not inappropriate to reconstruct this as a semantic concern. I would say the same about both Plato and Aristotle’s concern with definition and classification of terms. This is taking “semantics” in the broad sense of having to do with meaning.
For Aristotle and Plato, meanings are developed principally in terms of other meanings. Aristotle also pays a lot of attention to use. For neither of them is there any thought of reducing meaning to extensional criteria, as in modern model-theoretic semantics. Plato famously contrasted definition of “what” something is with enumeration of examples. Aristotle was interested in both, but respected the contrast.
Aristotle agrees with Frege that the minimal unit of truth or falsity is a complete proposition. (Medieval logicians working in a broadly Aristotelian tradition extended this to an elaborate theory of what they called “supposition” (see de Rijk, Logica Modernorum), which concerned meanings in the context of concretely uttered sentences. Various kinds of “supposition” — or ways in which a referential meaning can be logically intended — were analyzed, in a now forgotten technical vocabulary largely shared by realist and nominalist logicians.)
Aristotelian practical judgment (phronesis) is a kind of interpretation or hermeneutics of the implications of situations. Ultimately, I think Kantian judgment moves into the same territory. Judgment in general involves far more than mere assertion or belief. “Judgment” should refer first and foremost to a process, an investigation, and only very secondarily to a conclusion. All such processes are in principle open. The final word is never said.
For both Plato and Aristotle, implications and presuppositions uncovered in dialogue or many-sided monologue are more important in getting at meaning and truth than any referential pointing. Even medieval scholastics arguing for or against a proposition did this largely in terms of analyzing its implications and presuppositions.
I don’t think it’s possible to cleanly separate considerations of truth from considerations of meaning. Truth can only be apprehended in terms of some meaning. Much more interesting than the abstract question whether some proposition is true is insight into what is really being said. (See also Dialectic, Semantics; “Said of”; Aristotelian Propositions; Univocity; Agency; Inferential Semantics; Edifying Semantics.)
The Postmodern Peripatetic 