Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  By replacing Plato’s Ideas with universals, common qualities that the mind could grasp in the empirical world but that did not exist independently of that world, Aristotle turned Plato’s ontology upside down. For Plato, the particular was, less real, a derivative of the universal; for Aristotle, the universal was less real, a derivative of the particular. Universals were necessary for knowledge, but they did not exist as self-subsistent entities in a transcendent realm. Plato’s Ideas were for Aristotle an unnecessary idealist duplication of the real world of everyday experience, and a logical error.

  But further analysis of the world, specifically of change and motion, suggested to Aristotle the need to introduce a more complex account of things—an account that paradoxically made his philosophy closer in spirit to Plato’s yet also more distinctly his own. A substance, Aristotle concluded, is not simply a unit of matter, but is an intelligible structure or form (eidos) embodied in matter. Although the form is entirely immanent, and does not exist independently of its material embodiment, it is the form that gives to the substance its distinctive essence. Thus a substance is not only “this man” or “this horse” in simple contrast to its qualities and other categories, for what makes these substances what they are is their specific composition of matter and form—i.e., the fact that their material substrate has been structured by the form of a man or a horse. Yet form for Aristotle was not static, and it was especially here that Aristotle both sustained certain elements of Plato’s philosophy and added a fundamentally new dimension.

  For in Aristotle’s view, form gives to a substance not only its essential structure but also its developmental dynamic. Organic biology, rather than abstract mathematics, was Aristotle’s characteristic science, and in lieu of Plato’s static ideal reality Aristotle brought a more pronounced recognition of nature’s processes of growth and development, with each organism striving to move from imperfection to perfection: from a state of potentiality to a state of actuality, or realization of its form. While Plato emphasized the imperfection of all natural things compared with the Forms they imitated, Aristotle taught that an organism moves from an imperfect or immature condition in a teleological development toward achievement of a full maturity in which its inherent form is actualized: the seed is transformed into a plant, the embryo becomes the child, the child becomes the adult, and so on. The form is an intrinsic principle of operation that is implicit in the organism from the latter’s inception, as the form of the oak is implicit in the acorn. The organism is drawn forward by the form from potentiality to actuality. After this formal realization is achieved, decay sets in as the form gradually “loses its hold.” The Aristotelian form bestows an indwelling impulse in each organism which orders and motivates its development.

  The essence of something is the form into which it has grown. The nature of something is to actualize its inherent form. Yet for Aristotle, “form” and “matter” are relative terms, for the actualization of a form can in turn lead to its being the matter out of which a higher form can grow. Thus the adult is the form of which the child was matter, the child the form of which the embryo was matter, the embryo the form of which the ovum was matter. Every substance is composed of that which is changed (the matter) and that into which it is changed (the form). “Matter” here does not simply mean a physical body, which in fact always possesses some degree of form. Matter is, rather, an indeterminate openness in things to structural and dynamic formation. Matter is the unqualified substrate of being, the possibility of form, that which form molds, impels, brings from potentiality to actuality. Matter becomes realized only because of its composition with form. Form is matter’s actuality, its purposefully completed figuration. All of nature is in the process—is itself the process—of this conquest of matter by form.

  Though a form is not itself a substance, as in Plato’s view, every substance has a form, an intelligible structure, that which makes the substance what it is. Moreover, every substance not only possesses a form; one could say it is also possessed by a form, for it naturally strives to realize its inherent form. It strives to become a perfect specimen of its kind. Every substance seeks to actualize what it already is potentially.

  In Aristotle’s conception, the being-becoming distinction that had been developed by Plato from the differing views of reality given by Parmenides and Heraclitus has now been placed entirely in the context of the natural world, where it is seen as actuality and potentiality. Plato’s distinction, with “being” the object of true knowledge and “becoming” the object of sense-perceived opinion, had reflected his elevation of real Forms above relatively unreal concrete particulars. Aristotle, by contrast, gave to the process of becoming its own reality, asserting that the governing form itself is realized in that process. Change and movement are not signs of a shadowy unreality but are expressive of a teleological striving for fulfillment.

  This understanding was achieved through the Aristotelian idea of “potentiality,” an idea uniquely capable of providing a conceptual basis for both change and continuity. Parmenides had not allowed the rational possibility of real change, because something that “is” cannot change into something that it is not, for what “is not” cannot exist, by definition. Plato, mindful too of Heraclitus’s teaching that the natural world is in constant flux, had therefore located reality in the changeless Forms transcending the empirical world. He also, however, pointed out a verbal distinction that shed light on Parmenides’s problem. Parmenides was not distinguishing between two significantly different meanings of the term “is,” for on the one hand one could say that something “is” in the sense that it exists, while on the other hand one could say that something “is hot” or “is a man” in the sense of a predicable. Building upon this important distinction, Aristotle asserted that something can change into something else if there is a continuing substance that undergoes change from a potential to an actual state as determined by the substance’s inherent form. Thus Aristotle moved toward reconciling the Platonic Forms with the empirical facts of dynamic natural processes, and more deeply stressed the human intellect’s capacity to recognize these formal patterns in the sensible world.

  While Plato distrusted knowledge gained by sense perception, Aristotle took such information seriously, contending that knowledge of the natural world derives first from the perception of concrete particulars in which regular patterns can be recognized and general principles formulated. All living things require powers of nutrition to survive and grow (plants, animals, man), while some also require powers of sensation to be aware of objects and distinguish between them (animals, man). In the case of man, who is further endowed with reason, these powers enable him to store up his experience, to make comparisons and contrasts, to calculate and reflect and draw conclusions, all of which make possible knowledge of the world. Human understanding of the world thus begins with sense perception. Before any sensory experience, the human mind is like a clean tablet on which nothing is written. It is in a state of potentiality with regard to intelligible things. And man requires sensory experience to bring his mind, ‘with the help of mental images, from potential knowledge to actual knowledge. Empiricism, if perhaps humbler than Plato’s direct intuition of absolute Ideas, is dependably tangible.

  Yet it is man’s reason that allows sense experience to be the basis for useful knowledge, and Aristotle was above all that philosopher who articulated the structure of rational discourse so the human mind might apprehend the world with the greatest degree of conceptual precision and effectiveness. Establishing systematic rules for the proper employment of logic and language, Aristotle built on principles already worked out by Socrates and Plato, but brought new clarity, coherence, and innovations of his own. Deduction and induction, the syllogism, the analysis of causation into material, efficient, formal, and final causes, basic distinctions such as subject-predicate, essential-accidental, matter-form, potential-actual, universal-particular, genus-species-individual, the ten categories of substance, quantity, qualit
y, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection: all were defined by Aristotle and established thereafter as indispensable instruments of analysis for the Western mind. Where Plato had placed direct intuition of the transcendent Ideas as the foundation of knowledge, Aristotle now placed empiricism and logic.

  Yet Aristotle believed that the mind’s greatest power of cognition derived from something beyond empiricism and the rational elaboration of sensory experience. Although it is difficult to discern his precise meaning from the brief and somewhat obscure statements he made concerning the issue, it would seem that Aristotle regarded the mind not only as that which is activated by sensory experience, but also as something that is eternally active, and indeed divine and immortal. This aspect of mind, the active intellect (nous), alone gave man the intuitive capacity to grasp final and universal truths. Empiricism renders particular data from which generalizations and theories can be derived, but these are fallible. Man can attain necessary and universal knowledge only through the presence of another cognitive faculty, the active intellect. Just as light makes potential colors into actual colors, so does the active intellect actualize the mind’s potential knowledge of forms and provide man with the fundamental principles that make possible certain rational knowledge. It illuminates the processes of human cognition while it yet remains beyond them, eternal and complete. Only because man shares in the divine nous can he apprehend infallible truth, and the nous constitutes the only part of man that “comes in from outside.” In Aristotle’s view, the individual human soul might cease to exist with death, since the soul is vitally joined to the physical body it animates. The soul is the form of the body, just as the body is the matter of the soul. But the divine intellect, of which each man has a potential share and which distinguishes man from other animals, is immortal and transcendent. Indeed, man’s highest happiness consists in the philosophical contemplation of eternal truth.

  As Aristotle agreed finally with Plato’s evaluation of the human intellect as divine despite his new regard for sense perception, so also, despite his diminishing the ontological status of the Forms, Aristotle still maintained their objective existence and their crucial role in the economy of nature and the processes of human knowledge. Like Plato, he believed that a philosophy such as Democritus’s atomism, based solely on material particles and lacking a decisive concept of form, was unable to account for the fact that nature, despite constant change, contains a visible order with distinct and lasting formal qualities. Also like Plato, Aristotle believed the deepest cause for things must be sought not in the beginning of things but in their end—their telos, their purpose and final actuality, that to which they aspire. Although the Aristotelian forms (with one exception) are wholly immanent in nature and not transcendent, they are essentially changeless and are thus recognizable by the human intellect amidst the flux of organic development and decay. Cognition takes place when the mind receives the form of a substance into itself, even though ir the world that form never exists apart from its particular material embodiment. The mind conceptually separates, or abstracts, what is not separated in reality. Yet because reality possesses inherent structure, cognition is possible. An empirical approach to nature is meaningful because of nature’s intrinsic openness to rational description, by which it can be cognitively organized according to forms, categories, causes, genera, species, and the like. Thus Aristotle continued and brought new definition to the Platonic conception of an ordered and humanly knowable cosmos.

  In essence, Aristotle realigned Plato’s archetypal perspective from a transcendent focus to an immanent one, so it was fully directed to the physical world with its empirically observable patterns and processes. By emphasizing the Forms’ transcendence, Plato had found it difficult to explain how particulars participated in Forms, a difficulty rooted in his ontological dualism, which in its more extreme formulations entailed a virtual severance of Forms from matter. Aristotle, by contrast, pointed to a vital composite entity produced by the uniting of form with matter in a substance. Unless a form is incorporated in a substance—as the form of a man is found in the individual person Socrates—that form cannot be said to exist. Forms are not beings, for they possess no independent existence. Rather, beings exist through forms. Aristotle’s form thereby took on several roles—as intrinsic pattern, as intelligible structure, as governing dynamic, and as end or purpose. He eliminated the numinosity and independence of Plato’s Forms, yet gave them new functions to make possible a rational analysis of the world and enhance the power of scientific explanation.

  The early foundations of science had already been established by, on the one side, the Ionian and atomistic philosophies of matter, and, on the other, the Pythagorean and Platonic philosophies of form and mathematics. But by directing his Platonically educated attention to the empirical world, Aristotle placed a new and fruitful stress on the value of observation and classification within a Platonic framework of form and purpose. More emphatically than Plato, Aristotle considered both the Ionians’ focus on material causes and the Pythagoreans’ focus on formal causes necessary for a full understanding of nature. It was this unique comprehensiveness that distinguished much of Aristotle’s achievement. The Greek sense of confidence in the power of human thought to comprehend the world rationally, a confidence begun with Thales, now found in Aristotle its fullest expression and climax.

  Aristotle’s universe possessed a remarkable logical consistency throughout its complex and multifaceted structure. All motion and process in the world was explicable by his formal teleology: Every being is moved from potentiality to actuality according to an inner dynamic dictated by a specific form. No potentiality is brought into actuality unless there exists an already actual being, a being that has already realized its form: a seed must have been produced by a mature plant, as a child must have a parent. Hence the dynamism and structured development of any entity requires an external cause—a being that serves simultaneously as efficient cause (initiating the motion), formal cause (giving the entity form), and final cause (serving as goal of the entity’s development). To account for the entire universe’s order and movement, therefore, especially for the great movement of the heavens (and here he faulted Democritus and the atomists for not dealing adequately with the first cause of motion), Aristotle posited a supreme Form—an already existing actuality, absolute in its perfection, the only form existing entirely separate from matter. Since the greatest universal motion is that of the heavens, and since that circular motion is eternal, this prime mover must also be eternal.

  Aristotle’s logic could be represented in the following way: (a) All motion is the result of the dynamism impelling potentiality to formal realization, (b) Since the universe as a whole is involved in motion, and since nothing moves without an impulse toward form, the universe must be moved by a supreme, universal form, (c) Since the highest form must already be perfectly realized—i.e., not in a potential state—and since matter is by definition the state of potentiality, the highest form is both entirely immaterial and without motion: hence the Unmoved Mover, the supreme perfect Being that is pure form, God.

  This absolute Being, here posited by logical necessity rather than religious conviction, is the first cause of the universe. Yet this Being is wholly self-absorbed, since for it to take any heed of physical nature would diminish its perfect undisturbed character and immerse it in the flux of potentialities. As perfect actuality, the Unmoved Mover is characterized by a state of eternal unhindered activity—not the struggling process (kinesis) of moving from potential to actual, but the forever enjoyable activity (energeia) made possible only in a state of complete formal realization. For the supreme Form, that activity is thought: eternal contemplation of its own being, unqualified by the change and imperfection of the physical world it ultimately motivates. Aristotle’s God is thus pure Mind, with no material component. Its activity and pleasure is simply that of eternal consciousness of itself.

  In its absolute perfection, the primary F
orm moves the physical universe by drawing nature toward itself. God is the goal of the universe’s aspirations and movement—a more conscious goal for man, a less conscious instinctual dynamism for other forms of nature. Every individual being in the universe is striving to imitate, each in its specific limited way, the perfection of the supreme Being. Each seeks to fulfill its purpose, to grow and mature, to achieve its realized form. God “moves as the object of desire.” But of all living things, man alone shares in God’s nature, by virtue of his possessing intelligence, the nous. Because the supreme Form is so removed from the world, there is considerable distance between man and God. Yet because man’s highest faculty, his intellect, is divine, he can by cultivating that intellect—that is, by imitating the supreme Form in the way most appropriate to man—bring himself into a kind of communion with God. The Prime Mover is not the creator of the world (which Aristotle considered eternal and coeval with God). Rather nature, in its movement toward imitating this supreme immaterial Form, is involved in an eternal process of creating itself. Although there is no beginning or end to this striving, Aristotle suggested the existence of regular cycles that depended on the movements of the heavens, which, like Plato, he considered divine.