Dr Greg Bahnsen - Ancient & Medieval Philosophy: Aristotle (Part 11)

All right, we come to Aristotle. Now. It is the second major systematic philosophy of the ancient world. I believe this will be Roman numeral 10. Your outline and what I'd like to do to present Aristotle to you. I know that you've done some reading on your own so you have some general idea of what his philosophy is like. I'd like to go over my own annotations on WT Jones discussion of Aristotle which I find very helpful. And then after I've done that go back and give. I have what is basically a one page summary of his philosophy. So we can kind of encapsulate everything. But let me meander for a while here using Jones as our structuring device. First, some details about his life. He was born in the year 384 B.C. at that point Plato was 43 years old. So he's already in mid age when Aristotle was born. Aristotle doesn't immediately become a student of Plato. So I want you to see that he would have been. Well, Plato would have been deep into his career as an academician, the leader of the academy. By the time Aristotle was on the scene. Aristotle never knew Socrates. Socrates had died 15 years prior to Aristotle's birth. And Aristotle was not born in Athens. He was not a native of Athens. He was born in Stagira, S T A G I R A in Thrace. And his father was a physician, interestingly and a position to the King of Macedonia. When Aristotle was 17 years old, his father tried to complete his education at a distinguished institution. So he sent him to college Athens to study at Plato's academy. Aristotle was greatly impressed by the insights and creativity of Plato. And yet apparently Plato's approach to the nature of reality, his dualism never settled in for Aristotle. He early in his career tried to think that way. But he found it increasingly inadequate as an explanation that nature of reality, especially of nature itself, the world in which we live. And so he does not completely reject Plato. It's not as though he falls back on Democritus the materialist after all. But he does want to reformulate what he thinks are the good insights of Plato and make it a more relevant philosophy for the natural world in which we live. For Aristotle as for Plato, there is a public, objective and knowable reality. And yet we can also answer the question what is the good life for man? We are not left with the relativism of the sophisticated. According to Aristotle, we can give an account of the natural world that affirms the public, objective, knowable reality that is there without giving up a Moral perspective for man, the good life for man. Aristotle, in a way similar to Plato, wanted to reformulate the traditional beliefs of the Greeks. He didn't want to be a revolutionary. He wasn't trying to introduce new values, you know, like some kind of hotshot that's come up with a kind of a faddish way of living that throws off the wisdom of the elders. He wanted to reformulate the traditional beliefs of the Greeks by putting them within a comprehensive metaphysical system where they would not seem arbitrary, where they could be harmonized with the nature of reality or the world of nature and change round about man. So Plato had provided his metaphysical scheme in which he could answer the atomist and the sophist and the traditionalist simultaneously. And likewise, Aristotle offers a comprehensive metaphysical scheme where he can explain the nature of the world round about us, save reason as a means to finding objective reality and maintain that there is an ethical perspective and dimension to man. Aristotle states at Plato's academy until Plato's death, which was in 347 B.C. and apparently he, coming from an aristocratic family, was able to spend some years traveling about, getting to know the world, having lots of experience. And I mean that in the noble sense, not in the partying sense. That is, he was able to learn a lot about the world and see different cultures at work and so forth. And then in the year 343, or perhaps 342 BC he became a paid tutor to a young man named Alexander. Alexander was the son of King Philip of Macedonia. You know him from history as Alexander the Great. It's pretty fascinating when you think about it. Three of the men, Socrates, who is a great and wise philosopher, who caused enough trouble that they executed him. Socrates best student is perhaps the most important philosopher in western history, Plato. Plato has plenty of students. His best student turns out to be the great rival in the history of philosophy to his own outlook, and that is Aristotle. Aristotle's best known student is Alexander the Great. This all ties together a chain. However, it should be pretty obvious that Alexander did not adopt the outlook of Aristotle. Aristotle taught him for two years, maybe three years. But if we look at Aristotle's views about political values and his views of the Greeks over against other men and so forth, it was very clear that Alexander did not agree with Aristotle. He had a political regime quite opposite of what his mentor had taught. And he had attitudes toward the superiority of the Greeks that did not fit into Aristotle's cosmopolitan perspective at all well. So he taught this great potential ruler, Alexander, and that lasted for only two or three years in the year 335 BC he went back to Athens, this time to set up a school of his own. And the name of his school was the Light City. So Plato had his academy, which was still in operation, by the way. Aristotle had his lyceum, and while he was running that school, he wrote treatises on a large number of subjects. He wrote treatises on physics and biology and logic and ethics, and on and on. It is suggested by W.T. jones that these treatises that we have by Aristotle are probably notes that he wrote for his students to give lectures. And then later they collected these notes together and put them in topics under topical headings, and then would publish them as Aristotle on physics, Aristotle on ethics, or what have you. And the reason Jones suggests that, and other scholars with him, is that what we find in these treatises is sometimes fairly sketchy, at other times very systematically worked out. Sometimes they end abruptly, and it has all the marks of a collected work. Now, that means you have to be very careful when you are interpreting, say, a work that's labeled politics, because under the rubric politics, whoever did this editing work will put all of Aristotle's notes to himself, to his students, whatever, together. And that could include, over the wide number of years of his career, changes in his outlook. He could have seen things as a young man one way and. And altered it later. If you take a look at my lecture notes and so forth, you can't always be sure how this ties in. Is this meant as a critical remark, is a descriptive remark, things like that. So we have some interpretation difficulties with him as well. In the year 323, Alexander the Great died. And following upon that, there was a great public hue and cry against the Macedonian party. And that meant that Aristotle was somewhat threatened. And he decided in his old age that it would be the better part of valor to withdraw from Athens to the protection of a Macedonian garrison where he would not be threatened. And it may be that it's an apocryphal story, but it's often told that Aristotle, upon departing from Athens, said he did not want the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy. What was the first sin against philosophy committed by the Athenians exactly? They murdered Socrates. And so if he didn't say it, it still is a fairly clever thing to have been said. Anyway, he left, but it only gained him about a year of life because he died of other causes about a year later. Okay, so enough about the life of Aristotle. Aristocratic young man, intelligent enough to take on his own teacher one of the greatest philosophers in western history. Tutor to the emperor Alexander eventually, and a man who founded his own school of thought, his own school for training people in philosophy in Athens. What did Aristotle want to do? The Milesians wanted to find out what the material universe was made of. What's the stuff of reality? The optimists wanted to find out what's this material made of. And so they offered their answers. But as we have seen already in this class, the materialistic answers offered by the Milesians and the atomists not only had particular problems explaining the natural world of change, but they all the more were unable to give an adequate account of man as a moral creature. They could not account for that which we might call the religious side of man. They just had to reject religion and is not intellectually respectable. Aristotle was not willing to dismiss man's human as a opposed to natural side. He wanted the values and the ethics that were important to traditional Greek society to be reaffirmed. On the other hand, Plato tried to give an account of reality that was immaterial. We have the Milesians and the atomist being materialist on the one side and Plato on the other side, Being an immaterialist. Plato gave a systematic account of reality, but it was in terms of another realm, a realm of forms or ideals that is apart from the physical world. And Plato was never able to give a satisfactory account of the relationship between the values that are found in the realm of ideals and the world of sense perception, that is our daily experience. It could be said, then that Aristotle took it upon himself to establish a theory of reality that accounted for the sense objects of daily experience and as well as the transcendent values of ethics. That is, he wanted to account for the natural world around us without giving up the ethical dimension of man. And so if he had to disagree with Plato about the transcendence or separation of the forms and ideas, and on the other hand, he had to disagree with the Milesians and the Atomist about the exclusion of ethical values. When we study nature, this is a big task. He's going to try to give us an account of the natural world. He's going to try to solve the problem of change. And in giving an account of nature, also established ethics and man as what we would today call a religious being. The major problem that Aristotle felt needed to be resolved by philosophers Was the problem of change. Change seems to be irrational. If we say A changes into B, then if it's A that changes into B, B is A as well as b. But if A changes into B so totally that it's not A at all, then it's no longer A. So why do we say it was A in the first place? How do you have A changing into B without it turning out to be a contrary, contradictory account of what is taking place? The atomist reduced all qualitative changes to motion, atoms falling through space. Plato, in essence, just denied change. It's not that important. It's the shadowy world of sense perception, and that's not the intelligible world of forms or formulas. Anyway. Now Aristotle figured, if human reason cannot explain change, which is the most pervasive part of our daily experience, if human reason can't explain change, then maybe human reason is not an adequate tool for understanding at all. So the rationality of our worldview or of his worldview was going to be staked on the ability to explain change in the natural world. So again, he wants to account for the world of nature, especially the problem of change. And he wants to do so in a way that does not exclude human values, moral values. And so how did he do this? Plato had taught that what is intelligible is form or formula, that which is common to all the particulars in a certain class. That's what makes them intelligible. The idea of duckness, or ideal of triangularity, or even better, the ideal of goodness. That's where what is intelligible to man. Aristotle agrees with that. Aristotle was won over to the idea that what makes the world intelligible is the universality of characteristics, not the particularity of them. And so Aristotle does speak of the form of things, even as Plato would speak of the form of things. But this is a good point to make a little homily for you as budding philosophers. It should be obvious enough that though Plato and Aristotle both used the word form, they did not use it in the same way. Because for Plato, form is something that exists apart from the world of time and space. But Aristotle does not use the word form that way. He uses it for that which is intelligible within the realm of time and space. There are no ideals outside of this world. For Aristotle, all ideals, all forms and ideas must be embodied in particulars that we find in the realm of time and space. And my little homily has to do with recognizing what you learned in logic about theoretical definitions. You remember in our course on logic that discussion of different kinds of definitions, we have stipulative and we have lexical, and we have precising. Well, another kind of definition is a theoretical definition given a particular Theory on a subject, a word will be used in a way that accords or reflects that theory. And so you may have modern scientist Einstein speaking of act atoms and Democritus speaking of atoms, but they didn't mean the same thing by the word atom because the word functioned within a theoretical framework. And likewise, Plato and Aristotle both had comprehensive metaphysical systems. And so they might use certain words, identical words like form, but because of the philosophy in terms of which they use the term, the term is being defined differently. It's been given a different theoretical account, okay? As I've said, in Plato's philosophy, you find the forms or ideas as separate from the world, apart from the world of time and space. They are universals of which the particular cows and ducks and triangles that we encounter in this world in some strange way mystically participate, okay? And so you have Huey doing Louie out on the pond, and they participate in the form of duckness. So the form is not something you can count in your natural experience. You don't count the ducks on the pond. You go 1, 2, 3, and then you add a fourth thing, that is duckness. For Plato, duckness is in a different realm altogether. For Aristotle, on the other hand, the form of things is always, always embedded in. Aristotle was temperamentally as well as intellectually disposed against a dualistic metaphysic like Plato's. Aristotle thought that Plato's forms were kind of ghostly entities that were otherworldly and lacked relevance for explaining the world of day to day existence. And so Aristotle would say, we can distinguish form from matter, but we cannot separate form from matter. Do we understand this difference between distinction and separation? If I have a cup, as I do right now in my hand, that has a particular shape, texture, size, weight, color, what have you. The fact that I cannot separate the color from the texture or the weight from the shape of the cup, does not mean that the color and the shape and the weight are all the same. They can't be separated. I can't pull the color over here and have the shape here, okay? But they are distinguishable. We still will speak of the color rather than the shape or the weight rather than the size or whatever it may be. Likewise, Aristotle said, you can distinguish the form, but you cannot separate it from matter. Now, you may want to put a little asterisk in your notes because he insists that that's the case. But later in his account of the way reason works upon the world, he really says the opposite. He says, you can separate form from matter. That's what the mind does by means of abstraction. But in terms of this metaphysic, universals or forms are embedded in particulars. And so darkness doesn't exist in another realm. Darkness exists in Huey, it exists in Louis and in Dewey. So according to Aristotle, reality consists of individual things, particular things that exist in rocks and trees and animals and human beings. And each particular rock or tree or human being is a substance. According to Aristotle, each is a substance. It's crucial that you have in your notes that reality is made up of particular things, particular substances. Reality is not the universal abstraction which is Plato's view. Reality is the particular it's really doing, really out on the pond. They are particular substances. Now, every substance can be analyzed into two aspects. According to Aristotle, every particular substance is made up of its whatness and it's this ness. If I look at some particular object, I ask, what is that? Let's say it's Felix the cat that we're looking at. Of course, by giving that name, I've already given the answer what it is. But we're looking at this object that we call Felix the cat. That particular substance is a combination of two things. First, what it is and that it is, or its this ness, if you will. What is Felix? What is Felix? Now, in answering that question, to understand this object, we have to see that it has the things in common. It has properties in common with other objects like it, and that's what gives the whatness to it. That's what gives its form and intelligibility. And the answer, as you know, is it's a cat. What is it? A cat. But it's not enough to say what Felix is, that we want to capture the full reality of Felix. If someone were doing an analysis of what you are, they would be telling the truth if they said you are a human being. But is that a full analysis of you? It's not just that you're a human being. You're this human being, this particular human being. And so, by speaking of the classes into which an object will fall, by saying that you fall into the class of human being, you fall into the class of house builder, you fall into the class, the class of book reader, you fall into the class of baseball player, whatever it may be. After you said all of the what that a human being is, you still have not gotten to the individuality of the object that you're talking about. We like to think of ourselves as having a combination of what's about us than makes us totally unique. But even if we were in fact totally unique, in theory, if you Enumerate all the things that I am. Okay, A lover of Beatles music. Okay, A person who writes philosophical analysis, person who prefers barbecued swordfish to just about anything else we could eat on the planet. Okay? On and on and on. It is still possible that after that full description of all the classes that I fall into, all the properties that I have that are common to other objects, you still would not have caught the individuality. Because there might be another person who similarly loves beetle music, barbecued swordfish, and all along. So if we're going to get to the individuality of something, we have to mention not just what it is, but that it is, or the this ness, the particularity of it. Now, where do we get the particularity? Let's imagine there was somebody who loved Beatles music, wrote philosophical analysis and loved barbecued swordfish. Another one, another strange creature like that in the world. If there really were, what would differentiate us? Since we hold everything else in common, we have humanity in common. Maybe identical looks, identical desires, on and on and on. Even if this person were a physical twin of Dr. Bonson, we would still be disturbed, distinguished. Because my body is made up of different matter than that person's body, right? That person exists at a certain time and space, and I occupy a certain time and space which is different from that. And so Aristotle said that what makes things like other things is their form. This is the whatness. And what gives them differentiation or individuality is their matter. So to put it very simply, for Aristotle, every particular thing, every particular substance that exists is formed matter. Formed matter. Now you have to ask why any particular thing has the form that it does? Why does a hand have this form that I pulled up and demonstrated to you? Why does the hand have this form? Why does a knife have a form different from a spoon? Somebody give me the answer to that. Take the knife and screw illustration. Why does the knife have the form that it does and a spoon have the form that it does? Why can we just reverse it and say, okay, we're going to use spoons for knives and knives for spoons. There's nothing, nothing really deep and sophisticated about this. The spoons make very good knives. Knives make very good spoons, Are made for different purposes. Yes, exactly. The knife is for cutting, the spoon is for scooping. And so when you try to scoop with a knife or cut with a spoon, you're going contrary to the very nature of form of something. Now use that illustration of the hand as well. Why does the hand have this form? Because the hand serves a certain purpose. Or function, to pick things up or to write with, on and on. The form that a thing has serves its function or its purpose. Indeed, the purpose, the aim or use to which we put something is what gives a unity to the whole object itself. We talk about the knife having the purpose of cutting, and that determines its form, its shape. But we can talk about more complicated things and see that what brings unity to a complicated object, like the unity of a hand, what unifies the hand? Well, it's the purpose to which the hand is put, that is, the aim or use of to which the hand is put that makes the hand what it is. And so, on the board here, where I've written down whatness and form, we can now add the general idea of purpose or aim. The Greek word was telos, T, E L O, S. The telos is the end result, the aim or the purpose of something. Now, if form serves the purpose, then matter becomes whatever opens the door to the opportunity of that purpose being served. Matter stands for the opportunity to develop in that direction. Now, W.T. jones uses, I think, a helpful metaphor or illustration, I should call it, when he talks about a brick. Now, let's say clay is. What is the matter of the brick? That clay presents the opportunity, it opens the door to the possibility of a brick being made. And when we make the brick, how do we make it? Well, we make it with flat side sides, usually rectangular. And we do it because that will serve the purpose of the brick. What's the purpose of a brick? For building a wall. Okay, so instead of having just, you know, just globs of clay that you bake into, just any, you know, size and configuration, configuration out of which you could not make a wall, not very easily. You make the bricks uniform, flat, rectangular, and so forth. But if there were no clay, there'd be no opportunity for the thing to be a brick to serve that purpose. And the brick's particular form is with a view to it going into a wall. And so everything, every particular, particular substance that we find in this world, if you're going to understand it, you have to understand its opportunity level, its potentiality, what it could do and what it's on the road to doing. You have to understand not only its potentiality, but also its actuality. But its actuality is always in the process. It's always looking forward to the use that's going to be given to it, its purpose. And thus, for Aristotle, all the world forms a hierarchy of purposes. Clay has the potential for brickness. Bricks are made in the form they Are with the going into a wall. Walls are built for a purpose as well. So you see how we move from clay to brick to wall to what should we just say? Security, family security is one purpose for a wall. All these things are related to each other in a hierarchy of purposes. Every particular thing that we analyzed, then this is not exactly accurate, But I think it will get the point across. Everything has its history and its future, Everything. To be analyzed properly, you have to look back at its matter, that is its potentiality. And you must look forward to the purpose that it's going to serve. And so this is why Aristotle called the form of any particular thing its actuality. And the matter from which it is made its potentiality. So by differentiating between potentiality and actuality in every particular thing we find in the world, Aristotle felt he could give an account of how things endure through change, how they endure through change. What is it when we say A has changed into B? How can A still be A and yet not A? That is B? And if it's not A any longer, why do we say it was A in the first place that changed? Aristotle felt he had given an account of this because there's something that endures the matter and there's something that changes the form. Okay, so we look at your baby picture and we look at your high school graduation picture, and we say, boy, the form sure has changed, but the matter hasn't. It's the same body that has developed into a new form. So you have the possibility of identity through time. Identity enduring the process of change. The form changes, but the mattress stays the same. Same. So if we look at an acorn, we have to realize that its form or its purpose, that which the acorn is going to serve is an oak tree. Acorns grow into an oak tree. And so the acorn has. Has the potentiality in it already to be an oak tree, but it doesn't have the form of oak tree just yet. So the matter is the same. It's potentiality. What changes is the outward form. We're looking at it now in the form of an acorn. Given time and development, it will take the form of an oak tree. And that's why you have potentiality that stays the same and actuality that does the changing. The forms are altered through time. And every individual, according to Aristotle, is in a process of development where what a thing is not yet becomes its potential. It becomes itself by realizing the form that was at first only its potential. In fact, the form of oak tree ness is acting upon the matter of the acorn, shaping and molding it to come along into the form of an oak tree. His definition of matter is not the same as a modern day scientific definition of matter. Very good. I hope that you will notice here that though our illustrations are easier when we talk about clay bricks and a physical thing like an acorn growing into an oak tree, matter is not to be identified with mature in the sense that the atomist did. All right, you know, the physical stuff of reality. Matter is literally the potential for form. The matter of the acorn is what is. Well, it's its potential for becoming an oak tree. And this understanding of form, which is not at all like Plato, form is a kind of driving force that works its way to fulfillment. You have the form arising out of the matter. Now, a moment ago, Jay made a good remark about matter as it were, like dough being impressed by the demiurge with the forms. So the forms inform the matter. Not for Aristotle. For Aristotle, the form arises out of the matter. And when we think of a form as a driving force, an inherent driving force working its way to fulfillment in anything, Aristotle used the term entelechy for it. E, M, T, E L, E C, H, y. There is this drive toward telos. The entelechy of a thing is its form making a unity out of the process of development in that particular individual. The form guides the matter toward its fulfillment, its purpose. Now, when I gave you an example of change where the acorn changes into the oak tree, I really was in a sense over simple. Because, you know, the acorn doesn't go directly into oak treeness. It goes to a number of individual changes. Right? And Aristotle would have said that this succession of smaller changes is all controlled by the entelechy that's within that matter. The entelechy brings it at last to be an oak tree. But the acorn goes through a series of lesser stages and developmental stages before it finally comes out at the other end, this complicated object, the oak tree. When things grow, what gives them their unity, what gives them their pattern of development? The end product, the entelechy, the form that is inherent within it, drives it toward that end. Now that would be true of a natural object. Tadpoles change into frogs, acorns change into oak trees, etc. Etc. Little babies grow up to be high school graduates. There is an entelechy, a form that is guiding and unifying the development, the change over time. But now, what if there are other sorts of things in this world besides natural objects? Though, what about a table? I have a table in my room where I'm staying. Did that table grow into being a table? Come on, you all know this much, right? Tables don't grow naturally. I got you so bamboozled in terms of these philosophical things. I give you an easy question and you hesitate. It's like, hmm, we're not sure. No, tables don't grow as tables. Now, do they come into existence at the carpenter shop? Just boom, like that. The carpenter goes over there, you know, maybe hits something with his hammer and kaplooey, there's a table. No, he's got to shape, he's got to measure, he's got to bring pieces together and so forth and along the line. It doesn't always look like a table, but eventually it is a table. Now, what guides the development from pieces of wood, you know, nails and saws and hammers and all this kind of stuff? What guides the development from the pieces of wood to the completed table? Well, that's the intelligence of the carpenter, right? At least, if you have a good carpenter, we would say the intelligence of the carpenter. And so in an artifact, Plato distinguished between a natural object, something in the world of nature, and that which man introduced into the world, like a sculptor or a table, a sculpture or a table, TV set, whatever. The unity is given by the intelligent design and purpose of the inventor or the maker. But everything has its form and its matter. And all of the steps of development, all the stages along the line, are unified according to the purpose for which this object is going to exist, the purpose it's going to serve. The acorn serves the purpose of an oak tree, and so that guides its change and development. The pieces of wood serve the purpose of a table, and that's what guides their change in development. Although one is natural, is spontaneous because of the entelechy within the acorn. In the case of an artifact, it's the intelligence, the external causation of the carpenter that turns the wood into a table. And so Aristotle held that in order for us to understand any individual thing in the world, and that's all that exists, are individual things. In order to understand any individual things, there are four aspects of it we must be aware of, because these four things determine the nature of that object. Now, Aristotle called these four aspects causes of the things, and that always confuses my students. 20th century English doesn't use the word cause in that way. Or actually it uses the word cause only in one of the four ways that Aristotle picked out. We think of cause as that which efficiently brings about something. The carpenter causes the table because he builds it, he nails it to get, screws it together, whatever. But Aristotle said that there were three other kinds of causes. Don't think of it now in our traditional way of cause. What he meant is three other aspects necessary to understanding what gives an account of this thing. Well, now, if we're thinking of a table, we haven't given an account of it. If we say this table is the result of that carpenter's work, that's inadequate, isn't it, to say somebody says, well, what is this object? And you're looking at what we call a table. And if you say, oh, well, that's the result of the efficient causality of this carpenter, you have said something important for understanding it, but you've certainly not said enough. What else do you have to say about the table? Well, you would have to give an account of its material, that out of which it is composed. So there you have the material cause, and we would call that wood. No, not substance. For Aristotle, substance is formed matter. So the material causes wood. But even if we know that it's wood and it's a result of that carpenter over there, by the way, the carpenter is the efficient cause. Is the efficient cause. That's just a way of saying he's the one who brought it about. He's the one who put the motion or the effort or the activity into making it what it is. So we know it's made out of wood, we know it's made by a carpenter. But thirdly, we have to know what its purpose is going to be. That's why we call it a table. It's going to serve the purpose of being a table. So we say that is a wood table made by this carpenter. And then we have to give its form as well, according to Aristotle, the form that it actualizes and which will enable it to fulfill its purpose. In the case of the table that we're talking about now, the form we also call table, as a matter of fact. But we could say it's going to have the form of a rectangular low to the ground table, a coffee table. Maybe I should have come up with a better illustration, because in the case of an artifact, form and telos final cause often turn out to be identical. The form of tableness is its purpose. Everything in the world then has four causes. Aristotle doesn't do so well when he applies this four cause analysis to events in the natural world. How do we account for, say, the falling of rocks? Well, the atomists had a Pretty good idea there. They said, well, atoms fall through space. Everything tends downward. Aristotle had to resort to a kind of strange idea that there was an entelechy within rocks that moved them downward. It's part of their tendency, or if you will, part of their final purpose, to fall down. That seems very arbitrary to us to suggest that a rock falling off a cliff is part of its entelechy, its tendency or final cause. There is some value in this idea that to understand something fully, you have to know all four aspects of it. Especially when we're trying to give an account of human behavior. Human life is a continuum. The later stages of life are connected in one way or another to the earlier stages of life. And if we were to look at a particular individual and try to understand him at, say, 1. One specific time in his life, we would obviously be able to understand him better if we knew what gave rise to that particular moment in his life. If we knew something about his background. But, you know, if the person has lived his life and we know what the outcome has been from, say we took a particular moment, 1812, for some individual, and then we know the rest of his life, then 1812 becomes a little more understandable, too, because now we see what was going to develop out of that. So Aristotle has been helpful, I think, in showing us that everything's connected. And to give a full account and to really understand a particular object at a particular time is to know its history and its future, its matter as well as its telos, its form, and what it's going to develop into. W.T. jones observes an interesting parallel between Plato and Aristotle. The one that also helps us to see the real difference between their philosophies. The parallel is this, that both Plato and Aristotle said that the individual cannot be understood without transcending the individual. If you have an individual duck out on the pond, or an individual triangle that's drawn on a board, or you consider an individual human being at the year 1812, whatever it may be, both would say, you have to go beyond that individual in order to make sense of the individual. You must know something of the form that that individual is instantiating. You have to understand the universal of which that particular is an illustration or a particular instance. But now, how did Plato transcend the individual to find its form? He looked outside of this world to a realm that is apart from time and space for a universal. And remember what we said about the divided line. Plato not only looked outside this world to the form of darkness, but he also looked beyond the form of darkness to the form of the good. So everything is connected, right? You have this particular duck. Actually, you have a picture, a painting of this particular duck that helps you understand that duck a little bit. But to understand it fully, you have to understand the form of duckness. But in the transcendent realm, you go beyond the form of duckness and realize it is really just an analysis of the form of the good, which is being in general. So, excuse me. Plato transcends the individual by going outside of time and space. Aristotle also wants to transcend the individual, but he doesn't want to be a dualist like Plato. For him, the transcendence of the individual is going back to the potentiality, the history of the individual, if you will, and also looking at the purpose or the future, what it's developing into. So you can't understand the individual just as kind of like a slice of time, and think that you've correctly analyzed that individual. The individual's got to be connected to its matter, its efficient cause, its form, and its final cause, its telos or purpose. You have to go out. But you notice all of these things are horizontal. They're this worldly, or I'm going to add a term now here. They are eminent. They are part of man's experience. Aristotle wants to transcend the individual, but the transcendence is an eminent transcendence, or if you will, a horizontal transcendence, putting the individual within a context of other particulars and in the course of nature, how it develops. Whereas for Plato, the transcendence is a transcendent transcendence. Well, I want you to remember it. I mean, it's meant to be memorable. Transcendence. Transcendent transcendence means you transcend the individual by getting beyond the realm of time and space. So both of them would have said that to know an isolated particular is not to have any knowledge at all. You just have this sense experience of a particular. You haven't come to knowledge at all. You have to know things in context. For Plato, the context is the transcendent form beyond time and space. You have to understand that the forms were informed into matter, and our souls are recollecting the universals, recollecting the formulas or ideals. So it's that kind of context that makes the particular isolated individual understandable and knowable. Whereas for Aristotle, the knowledge that is necessary is here and now. It's part of our present experience. You do have to know the context, but it's a natural context rather than a supernatural context. Can I put it that way, without misleading you about the religiosity of Plato's view. Plato requires a supernatural context to understand any particular. Aristotle also requires a context, but for him, it's a natural here and now part of this world context. And yet, as WT Jones goes on to say, for both of them, complete knowledge is impossible. We can't know everything about the context of a particular. Aristotle cannot relate any particular thing in this world to every other particular thing and thus give the full story about its development and how its purpose fits into the purpose of other things in nature. Just think about the food chain. You're understanding some little fish that's part of the food chain. You can say, well, I understand that fish. That fish serves the purpose of being food for this bigger fish, and that fish is eaten by pelicans, and pelicans are eaten by. Or go on and on. But you see, no one can know everything about the natural world, and you would have to know everything to give the full context of that particular little fish. Likewise, Plato says, you have to know more than the particular. You have to know its form. But Plato realizes that we only have a vague recollection of form, and all forms are related to each other within the form of the good. And when it comes down to understanding the form of the good, what did I tell you? Plato said rational language is not going to do it. Eventually, you have to have a flash of insight. I don't know if you've been paying attention to where we're going, but what I am saying then is that both of these men have tried to give a rational scheme for reality. And yet in the nature of the case, what they say leaves them with irrationality. Aristotle cannot give the complete context of the particular and so cannot know it completely, cannot fully give an account of it. And thus he has an irrational feature in his philosophy. And on the other hand, Plato had that irrational feature, and he tried to cover that by the mystical flash of insight that everyone needs to really understand form and especially the good. Going back to Eric Aristotle. Now let's kind of complete his picture of the natural world. I said, for Aristotle, everything that exists is a particular substance made up of its form and its matter. And then we add to that for further definition the efficient cause as well as the final cause of things. The natural world is the total sum of sensible objects, and this next part is important, which are capable of spontaneous change. Nature is the total sum of sensible objects capable of spontaneous change. Change chairs are not part of nature, right? Chairs require an external, efficient cause. They require A carpenter to make them, or a factory line to mold them, whatever. Tulips and ducks, pine trees, cancer cells, on and on, however, are part of nature because they have an internal principle of change, spontaneous change. It isn't change brought about from outside, but change that's brought about from inside. Do you have any questions about Aristotle's view of nature? Then this is what he gives to counter the atomist as well as to counter Plato. He's not a dualist, but he's not a materialist either, because he believes, in addition to the matter, there is this active form and principle of change and spontaneity within things. Now, let's move on. We're going to see what kind of inclusion we can draw from this view of the natural world and this view of change. Can motion can change be eternal? Some people would say, no, you can't go back, back, back, back, back. One thing changes another, which itself was changed previously, and on and on and on. So there are people who would argue there was once a time when the world wasn't changing and in motion the way it is now. And Aristotle considered that an absurd opinion. And it isn't hard to understand how you could argue against it. Aristotle says if there was a time when nothing was changing, nothing was in motion, and then at some particular point things started changing and moving, then there must have been something that was hindering those things from changing or moving. Up until that point, there must have been something hindering the beginning of change. Well, then, since things started changing at that particular moment, then whatever was hindering it from starting itself changed. If it didn't change, then the hindrance would still be applicable and we wouldn't be seeing any changes. But now, what have we just found ourselves saying? We're saying something changed so that change would begin. Well, but if something had to change before change began, then there was already change before there was change. And that's absurd. And so for Aristotle, change and motion are eternal. He does not believe that this natural world had way, way, way, way, way, way, way back. At some point, some efficient cause that kind of pushed everything into the process of change in motion. You know, if you think of, like, one billiard ball hitting another billiard ball, which itself hits a third billiard ball as the idea of, you know, change going way, way back. Aristotle does not believe there was a first billiard ball that finally started the whole chain reaction that we now call the world world of nature today. And so change, motion is eternal. However, according to Aristotle, there does need to be some kind of explanation or force that moves the physical world of nature without itself being moved. There must be some way in which motion is transmitted into the physical world. Well, into is a little misleading. But there must be some transmission of motion. Motion by something which itself is not moved, that has no external mover for it. And that's why we come to this notion of the unmoved mover. The unmoved mover. That is, there's got to be some principle or force that moves the world, that causes motion in it, yet is itself unmoved. And we have to remember change is eternal. So this has been going on for all eternity. What is the external mover to this world. Which is itself unmoved. And which has been moving the world for all eternity? Aristotle conceived that the universe is a series of concentric circles. We have the earth here, which is constantly changing. And that's accounting for all the motion and so forth that we see in our experience. There's nevertheless, a series of astronomical belts around the world. I think I may have the figure wrong here. But I think it comes down to 53 or 55 different levels. And you have the fixed stars and the moving stars. And the ether and the atmosphere and all these sorts of things. And so what happens is that this outward band is moving in a circular direction. And that's causing friction on this inward band. So that means it's moving. But if it's moving, then that's causing friction on this inward, lower, inward band. And that in itself causes that one to move. And. And eventually the earth moves. Okay, so you have opposite directions every time. I think if it's caused by. Well, maybe not. Anyway, they're all moving the direction. I don't care about right now. Now we get to the outer band. Why does it move in a circular direct. And if you say, well, there's another mover outside of it that touches it and causes it to move, Then you just push the question back another stage. Right. Eventually you have to have something that causes this to move. Which itself is not moved or moving. This is really fascinating. Aristotle comes up with an argument for what he calls God the unmoved mover. And yet God has nothing to do with the concept of God that we find in the scriptures. What is this God, this unmoved mover that causes the eternal circular motion. That's the basis for the movement and change we see in all complex natural objects? Well, it must be eternal and it must be perfect. And yet it must not itself be moving. Well, if something outside the universe doesn't move the outer band, what kind of. What kind of motion could it be? Aristotle says there's also emotion that arises from desire and love. Okay, you see something that you desire, you move toward it, or you emulate it. You try to be like it. And so Aristotle said, there must be something which is perfect and eternal itself, unmoving, which the outer ring of the universe tries to emulate out of love unmoving. Now, what would be the most perfect thing of all? Thought. That is the most intelligible and therefore the most good thing available. Thought. But now thought has to have an object, right? And if this is going to be the best thought of all, then its object is going to be the best thing to think about. So what will thought be thinking about? Itself. Thought will think about thought. Or if you will, we shorten that to thought thinking itself. Thought, thinking thought. There's a kind of circularity in that, isn't it? It's thought, but it's thought that comes back upon itself, circles back upon itself. Moreover, according to the Greeks, and this is somewhat arbitrary, but it is the case that they thought of the most perfect regular kind of motion as being circ. The reason why it's most perfect linear motion is always imperfect. Because linear motion, if it's regular and eternal, can only be out, out, out this direction. So it's never done, just keeps going, going, going, or if it doesn't, it's going this way, then back upon itself and back and back and back. And so for the Greeks, regular and perfect motion would be circular motion comes back upon itself this way. Now, I'm not persuaded by this kind of thing. It's the best I can do for you. That's the sort of discussion you get in the ancient Greeks and in Aristotle. But the fact is that's for him, the most perfect kind of motion. And if the universe is trying to emulate the best thing of all, thought thinking itself, then what happens is out of its desire, it moves in a circular direction. So thought, thinking thought, Thinking. Thought is the cause of the universe moving, but not because it touches it, not because it's an externally efficient force, but because it's the object of desire, The nearest approximation to the perfection of thought thinking. It's thought is the circular movement of the heavens, the unmoved mover. Thought thinking itself has nothing which restricts its activity. There is no obstacle to it. And so it is pure and complete. It attains the level of pure actuality. Now, I had told you that everything in the natural world is a formed matter. Is a substance made up of form and matter which looks in the direction backward, potentiality and forward. It's telos. Okay? Aristotle did say, however, that there was one thing that was pure form and not formed matter, and that's thought thinking itself. But it can be called God. But that's misleading, because in the first place, if thought thinks about the world, it's no longer perfect thought. It's not perfect because you can't understand the world instantaneously because the world's developing. And so if thought is thinking about that which is developing, the thought is developing, and it's not purely actualized. So thought thinking itself knows nothing of the world, in fact, cares nothing about the world. It's not even aware of the world. It's only aware of itself. Well, you know, you can't go on forever letting him say these sorts of things without eventually saying, come on, what? Thought thinking itself is such an abstraction that it really makes no sense at all. But I want you to get the point that this God, thought thinking itself, doesn't have any desire about the world. There's no compassion or love for the world. It's not even aware of the world. It's just aware of itself. It's in a world all to itself, thought thinking itself eternally. But because the universe strives for perfection, it emulates this in circular motion, and that causes motion here on earth. Does Aristotle's God create the world? No, the world's eternal. This has been going on, this circular stuff going on for all eternity. It never started. It's always been. And what makes it do what it does is this strange notion of. Yeah, it comes down to this. Love makes the world go round because the natural world loves thought thinking itself. Then it goes round and round and round. You can write that in your notes. I found it easier to remember Aristotle because of that Love makes the world go round. But God doesn't love the world. God doesn't know about the world. God didn't make the world. And God is not personal. God is nothing more but a necessity. To finish Aristotle's philosophical system out, kind of like he's put everything together. Oh, yeah, we've got one. One final detail. How do we get the world going round now? And so, as thought thinking itself, which the world desires, and so it moves in that way, thought thinking itself is not intended as an object of worship. It is remote. It is completely transcendent. And it's unconcerned with this world, unaware of this world. And one more thing I want to point out here it also is the case that Aristotle wrote at times as though there was an unmoved mover for each of the 53 or 55 levels of the heavens. Okay, why have I. Well, you need to know. This is Aristotle's view. The unmoved mover is a famous part of his philosophy. You need to know that it's there only as a system demand. It has nothing to do with religiosity or even superstition. It's just a way to finish out the philosophical picture. But more importantly, you need to see that when Christian apologists tried to argue for God's existence relying upon Aristotle's arguments, please remember what he proved. Not a creator, not a providential God, not a God with personality, compassion, or even awareness of this world, and not even a single God, that the possibility exists of 5,355 gods that are unmoved movers in his system. It just appalls me that I see evangelical and even reformed defenders of the faith relying upon, well, first of all, Thomas Aquinas. We'll get to him in a few days. Who himself relied upon Aristotle for his cosmological argument of God's existence from motion, from change. We know there must be a God, which we call the unmoved mover, the first cause. This comes from Aristotle. And all I want you to see is if anything is proven, and I don't think it is, I think it's totally arbitrary. But if anything is proven, it's certainly nothing like Jehovah, the creator of heaven and earth. Earth. And it's just downright embarrassing to see Christians struggling to use this as a tool of defending the faith. If we just want to take the cosmological argument as it's popularly used, you know everything has to have a cause, right? But you can't have the series of causes go back forever. Therefore, there must be a first cause. That is the more popular version of the cosmological argument. Something causes A, causes B, causes C, and so forth. We have to have an A, a first cause for any of the chain of causes to begin. Well, if you accept that, you still haven't proven that there's one first cause, have you? Because there might be a cause all the way back, all the way back for grass, a cause all the way back for dolphins, a cause all the way back for human beings, so forth and so on. Even if you do need a first cause, you don't prove that there's only one first cause. There may be many. Remember, aristotle had possibly 55 unmoved movers possibly every part of the universe has its own thought, thinking itself as the source of motion or change. Moreover, you do not prove anything about God being the creator of heaven and earth, if you follow Aristotle, because for him, the world is eternal. And finally, you don't have a God who knows about this world and is involved in it. It's a God who's totally unconscious, aware of this world. Okay, probably a good time to take a break. When we come back, we want to look at Aristotle's account of how we learn about form, the intelligible part of nature, given the fact that we're just natural objects ourselves. Let's take a break.