Aristotle o the Meaning of Everything

266 Pages·2016·1.96 MB·English

by  Peter Jackson

Does Aristotle’s Philosophy Offer Us a Viable
Architectonic Account of the World?

By Peter Jackson

A thesis presented to UCL for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
Declaration:

I, Peter Jackson confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where
information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated
in the thesis.

Peter Jackson

Abstract:

This thesis seeks to show the consistency and quality of Aristotle’s ontology in its
treatment of worldly being(s) by examining how Aristotle treats a range of worldly
phenomena.

It does so by following Aristotle and considering (a) the structuring of worldly being in
general by establishing that we exist as objects in a world of objects and that it is as
determinate beings that we exhibit states and characteristics, (b) the structuring of our
“physical” human engagement with the world through our exhibition of desire, choice,
pleasure, and natural human biological development, (c) the structuring of our “mental”
human engagement with the world through our human faculties for imagination,
memory, and reason, (d) the structuring of organic being in accordance with the
underlying concepts of limit (determinateness), priority (temporality), symmetry
(duality), the “mean” (centredness), and proportion (dynamic wholeness), (e) the
structuring of organic being as soul and matter, and (f) the meaning of “God” as the
keystone of this system.

It ultimately seeks to defend the value of Aristotle’s ontological or architectonic
approach to the world and does so, implicitly and to some extent explicitly, vis-à-vis
other philosophical approaches to the world.

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Table of Contents:

Abbreviations Used p 4

Preface p 5

1 Aristotle on Objective Reality p 12

2 Aristotle on Passion and Action p 38

3 Aristotle on Desire p 54

4 Aristotle on Choice p 63

5 Aristotle on the Activity of Pleasure p 73

6 Aristotle on Human Development p 82

7 Aristotle on Imagination p 88

8 Aristotle on Memory p 98

9 Aristotle on Rationality p 104

10 Aristotle on Limits, Boundedness, and Determinateness p 114

11 Aristotle on Priority and Posteriority p 130

12 Aristotle on Symmetry p 140

13 Aristotle on the “Mean” p 147

14 Aristotle on Proportion p 161

15 Aristotle on the Soul p 167

16 Aristotle on Matter p 190

17 Aristotle on Noetic Matter p 204

18 Aristotle on God p 230

Glossary of Greek Terms: p 242

Bibliography of Classical Resources p 247

Bibliography of Modern Resources p 258

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Abbreviations Used:

Names of Grouping Names of Aristotelian Texts Abbr. Used
Nicomachean Ethics / Ethica Nicomachea N.E.
Eudemian Ethics / Ethica Eudemia E.E.
Politics / Politica Pol.
Rhetoric / Rhetorica Rhet.
Poetics / Poetica Poet.
Physics / Physica Phys.
Metaphysics / Metaphysica Met.
On Coming-to-Be and Passing Away /
On Generation and Corruption / GC.
De Generatione et Corruptione
On the Soul /
De An.
De Anima
On Sense and Sensibles /
On Sense and Sensibilia / Sens.
De Sensu et Sensibilibus
On Memory and Recollection /
Mem.
De Memoria et Reniniscentia
On Sleep and Waking /
Somn.
De Somno et Reminiscentia
Parva Naturalia On Dreams / De Insomniis Insomn.
On Divination by Dreams /
Div.
De Divinatione per Somnum
On Longness and Shortness of Life /
Long.
De Longitudine et Brevitate Vitae
On Youth and Old Age [On Life and Death] /
Juv.
De Juventute et Senectute
On Respiration / De Respiratione Resp.
History of Animals / Historia Animalium HA
On the Parts of Animals /
PA
De Partibus Animalium
On the Motion of Animals /
MA
De Motu Animalium
On the Generation of Animals /
GA
De Generatione Animalium
On the Progression of Animals /
IA
De Incessu Animalum
Categories / Categoriae Cat.
On Interpretation /
De Int.
De Interpretatione
Organon Prior Analytics Pr. An.
Posterior Analytics Post. An.
Topics Top.
On Sophistical Refutations Soph. El.
Meteorology /
Mete.
Meteorologica
On the Heavens /
De Cael.
De Caelo
On Breath / De Spiritu Spir.
Magna Moralia MM

Aristotelian Texts Used:

Quotations from Aristotle are generally from the Oxford or Loeb translations with a few
exceptional translations taken from specialist works.

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Preface

The objective of this work is to present Aristotle’s philosophical worldview and
show the reader that it is valid, valuable, and even indispensable for a full and true
understanding of the world. Despite the intuitive clarity of Aristotle’s “common sense”
realism, however, we find that it is even difficult to get into a position in which we can
properly engage with Aristotle since his pre-modern viewpoint is based upon the
“metaphysics” and “ontology” which Leslie Jaye Kavanaugh explains as that:

“Metaphysics… always implies an architectonic – an ontological structure that positions
beings and Being within a complex composition1”

and which Immanuel Kant explains as that: “By the term Architectonic I mean the art of
‘constructing a system. Without systematic unity, our knowledge cannot become
science; it will be an aggregate, and not a system2”. Moving back to Aristotle we find
that he insists upon the need for a philosophical architectonic on the basis that:

“There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to
this in virtue of its own nature (ἔστιν ἐπιστήμη τις ἣ θεωρεῖ τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν καὶ τὰ τούτῳ
ὑπάρχοντα καθ᾽ αὑτό). Now this is not the same as any of the other so-called special
sciences; for none of these others treat universally of being as being. They cut off a part
of being and investigate the attribute of this part; this is what the mathematical sciences
for instance do (Met. Γ 1003a21-26)”

and that: “It is evident…that it belongs to one science [i.e. philosophy] to be able to
give an account of these concepts [i.e. opposites, plurality, unity, negation, privation
etc.] as well as of substance (οὐσία)…and that it is the function of the philosopher to be
able to investigate all things (Met. Γ 1004a32-1004b1)”. In short, then, we see that
Aristotle insists that we need philosophy in order to represent the ontology of the world

1 Kavanaugh, Leslie Jaye The Architectonic of Philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz
(Amsterdam, 2007) p 2.

2 Kant, Immanuel Critique of Pure Reason (London, [orig. 1781]1934) p 471

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around us and this position assumes that the world is, indeed, a system which can be
represented systematically3.
As regards why we have to defend and discuss such a basic precept of
“traditional” philosophy as that the world can and should be understood philosophically
– this being held by such various thinkers as Aristotle and Kant – I suggest that we need
to do so because there are sceptical philosophers who do not (strangely enough) believe
in philosophy and they are people who have a popularity which requires us to defend
the very existence of philosophy from their prejudices if we wish to take (Aristotle’s)
philosophy seriously. As regards the basic principles of this “antiphilosophy” we find
that David Hume asserts such things as that:

“…upon the whole, there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of
connexion which is conceivable by us. All events seem entirely loose and separate.
One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem
conjoined but never connected…the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no
idea of connexion or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without any
meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life4”

and that: “Our idea…of necessity and causation arises entirely from the uniformity
observable in the operations of nature, where similar objects are constantly conjoined
together, and the mind is determined by custom to infer the one from the appearance of
the other. These two circumstances form the whole of that necessity, which we ascribe
to matter. Beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects, and the consequent
inference from one to the other, we have no notion of any necessity or connexion5”. I
add that an updated version of Hume’s antiphilosophy is the antiphilosophy of Richard

3 I note that Leslie Jaye Kavanaugh observes regarding Kant’s architectonic that: “...the method
of the architectonic of pure reason constitutes the construction of a schema wherein the parts are
arranged as to first principles. This schema, originating from an idea, is an architectonic unity
rather than a technical unity (The Architectonic of Philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz
(Amsterdam, 2007) p 5)” and I suggest that the critical distinction between Kant and Aristotle
here is that Kant’s philosophy centres upon our thought seeking to discern the supposed a priori
and formal laws of nature whereas Aristotle’s philosophy is concerned with being (which
encompasses our thought) and seeks to carve nature at its joints.

4 Hume, David An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1757) §58

5 Hume, David Ibid. §64

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Rorty who argues regarding “…the idea that we have ontological intuitions which make
the notion of “mind” more than just a blur6” that:

“We no more know “the nature of mind” by introspecting mental events than we know
“the nature of matter” by perceiving tables. To know the nature of something is not a
matter of having it before the mind, of intuiting it, but of being able to utter a large
number of true propositions about it7”

and that: “…we do not start with visual images. We do not “start” with anything. We
are just trained to make reports – some perceptual, some introspective – as part of our
general training in uttering true sentences, our learning of the language8” and with Rorty
concluding that: “Functionalism comes down to saying that anything you want to say
about persons will have an analogue in something you can say about computers, and
that if you know as much about a person as a team consisting of the ideal design
engineer and the ideal programmer know about a computer, then you know all there is
to know about the person9”.
Now, I suggest that if the idea that we can possibly see “man” as a “bundle” of
events or as a “computer” (or even as a “machine”) seems to be ludicrously bad then
this is probably because it actually is ludicrously bad but I add that this also a highly
respectable ludicrous badness which has proved itself to be highly convenient in the
sense that it justifies technocracy by elevating “science”10 and by subjectivising and
relativizing man and making him “plastic”11. In other words, although I will show the

6 Rorty, Richard “Mind as Ineffable” in Richard Q. Elvee (ed.) Mind in Nature; Nobel
Conference XVII (San Francisco, 1982) p 65-66

7 Rorty, Richard Ibid. p 69

8 Rorty, Richard Ibid. p 71

9 Rorty, Richard Ibid. p 74 (cf. “What we’ve got is not a mind but a program, that is, a way of
being wired up. When one puts it in those terms, it comes to seem misleading to speak of the
mind as a control organ which does what the too-complex hardware can’t do. Because it is
simply the complexity of the hardware. This is my brief little defence of computers (Ibid. p
114)”).

10 Rorty argues that “…we can content ourselves with saying that the nature of a mental state is
to be the sort of state of the human organism which psychologists study (Ibid. p 76)”

11 Rorty’s “pragmatism” both subjectivises man, as follows: “The question “What is the place of
man in nature?” is a good one if it is constructed to mean something like: “What self-image
should we humans have of ourselves?” For then it is shorthand for Kant’s classic questions
“What do we know? What should we do? What may we hope?” (Ibid. p 62)” and relativises
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ludicrousness of this antiphilosophy both by explicitly arguing against it and also by
subjecting it to implicit comparison with Aristotle’s real philosophy, I add that we
should also recognise that our situation is that our technocratic position is to some
degree above criticism in the sense that it simply is the “solution” that “the system” (and
its elites) clearly desire to have in place. This is, then, our general situation but let us
also consider another direction of antiphilosophy and briefly examine it. I suggest that
Alain Badiou explains well that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophy is an emotional
stance rather than a philosophical position by explaining his assertion that:

“Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false
but nonsensical (TLP 4.003)”

as follows: “It is typical of antiphilosophy that its purpose is never to discuss any
philosophical theses…since to do so it would have to share its norms (for instance,
those of the true and false). What the antiphilosopher wants to do is to situate the
philosophical desire in its entirety in the register of the erroneous and the harmful. The
metaphor of sickness is never absent from this plan, and it certainly comes through
when Wittgenstein speaks of the “nonsensical”12” which highlights the basic problem of
engagement we have considered above, i.e. that it is difficult even to make (modern)
antiphilosophy engage with our (Aristotelian) philosophy.
I add that Wittgenstein seems to follow Hume in his assertion that: “There is no
compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened (TLP 6.37)” and
Rorty in his assertion of subjectivism that: “Outside logic everything is accidental (TLP
6.3)” and that philosophy should be restricted to: “the clarification of propositions (TLP
4.112)” and yet we also find that Wittgenstein’s objective is not “pragmatism” but
“mysticism” and hence that he asserts that: “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put
into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical (TLP 6.522)”
and that:

“The sense of the world must lie outside the world.

the world, as follows: “The nominalist…construes “finding the nature of X” as just finding the
most useful way to talk about the things which have traditionally been called “X” – a way which
need not employ any term coreferential with “X” (Ibid. p 79).”

12 Badiou, Alain Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy (London, 2011) p 77

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In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no
value exists – and if it did exist, it would have no value.
If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what
happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself
be accidental.
It must lie outside the world (TLP 6.41)”

which does, I suggest, provide us with such insights into our modern “antiphilosophy”
as (a) that we encounter an immense egotism in respect to all of these thinkers (b) that
they all refuse to engage with philosophical tradition and with the world itself (c) that
their conclusions may appear to be elegant or useful but that they are inevitably partial
and shallow and (d) that the combination of ego with shallowness and lack of system
inevitably leads to the intellectual confusion, deceit, and wishful thinking that we
undoubtably encounter in a large part of modern philosophy13.
As regards “real” philosophy and the peculiar quality of Aristotle’s philosophy
within this tradition let us consider Georg W.F. Hegel’s wonderfully perceptive
assessment of Aristotle’s system that:

“He [i.e. Aristotle] gets the sensuous phenomenon before him in its entire completeness,
and omits nothing, be it ever so common. All sides of knowing enter his mind, all
interest him; all are handled by him with depth and exhaustiveness…[and]
Aristotle…abandons a determination only when he has traced it to another sphere
wherein it retains no longer its former shape…[and] sometimes Aristotle does not aim

13 I suggest that shallow or ungrounded philosophy often leads to confusion and politicisation
and that it is hence that we find that the (supposed) implications of such philosophies often run
contrary to the philosopher’s apparent basic intention. We see an example of the muddled
opportunism of mainstream modern thinking, i.e. that its disconnection from reality allows it to
be interpreted in many different ways, by observing that whereas Alain Badiou comments that:
“…Anglo-American grammarian philosophy – that twentieth-century form of scholasticism…is
contrary to everything that Wittgenstein the mystic, the aesthete, the Stalinist of spirituality,
could have desired (Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy (London, 2011) p 70-1)” we find that Karl
Popper contrarily argues that this very approach to philosophy: “…really all goes back to
Wittgenstein, who said that the meaning of a sentence is the method of its verification, and who
says in his Tractatus that science can say all that can be said, and that after that there can be no
unanswerable questions left (“World 3 and Emergent Evolution” in Knowledge and the Body-
Mind Problem: In defence of interaction (London, [orig. 1969] 1994) p 76)” (and I suggest that
we encounter a similar confusion regarding the philosophy and intent of René Descartes and the
use made of his philosophy).

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to reduce all to unity, or at least to a unity of antithetic elements; but, on the contrary, to
hold fast each one in its determinateness, and thus to preserve it14”

and also Martin Heidegger’s equally perceptive assessment of Aristotle’s philosophical
intent, as follows:

“…did we not assert, during the first enumeration of the four meanings of being in the
Aristotelian sense, that the unity of these four meanings remains obscure in Aristotle?
We did. However, this does not rule out but, for a philosopher of Aristotle’s stature,
precisely entails that this unity be troubling in view of its multiplicity. We need only
observe how Aristotle explains the πολλαχῶς [i.e. the manifold]. Thus he says on one
occasion (Met. K 1060b32f): τὸ δ᾽ ὂν πολλαχῶς καὶ οὐ καθ᾽ ἕνα λέγεται τρόπον.
“Beings are manifold and so not articulated according to one way.” But he also sees
immediately and clearly the result that this view, when taken out of context, could
generate, namely the dispersion of ὂν into many τρόποι, a dissolution of the ἕν. In
contrast, Aristotle states: παντὸς τοῦ ὄντος πρὸς ἕν τι καὶ κοινὸν ἡ ἀναγωγὴ γίγνεται
(1061a10f). “For each being, for all beings in whatever sense, there is a leading up and
back to a certain one and common”; and at 1060b35: κατά τι κοινόν: “to some sort of
common.” We are always encountering this cautious and (as to what the encompassing
one may be) open-ended τι (of some sort). Aristotle speaks of the final and highest
unity of being in this fashion; see 1003a27 in Met. Γ 1003a27 (and many other
passages): τὸ ὂν ᾖ ὂν, τὸ εἴναι as φύσις τις – a sort of governing from out of and in
itself15”

and as regards how Aristotle stands within the tradition (according to these thinkers) we
see (A) that Hegel concludes (a) that the great benefit of Aristotle’s approach is that his
“…Final Cause is true and concrete, as opposed to the abstract Platonic Idea16” and (b)
that its great deficit is that although: “Aristotle always moves in the speculative…he
seems always to be philosophising only on the individual, the special, and not to arrive
at what is absolute, universal or God…the one Absolute, the Idea of God, appears in

14 Hegel, G.W.F. “The Philosophy of Aristotle” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy ([orig.
1825-6] 1871) p 73-75

15 Heidegger, Martin Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force
(Indiana, [orig. 1931] 1995) p 23

16 Hegel, G.W.F. “The Philosophy of Aristotle” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy ([orig.
1825-6] 1871) p 76

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