Third Post

Aristotle: An Analysis and Evaluation

Like Plato, Aristotle both reflects and transcends his time. His great aim in life, his all-consuming passion, was to understand. J.H. Randall, to whose interpretation I owe a great deal, thinks that Aristotle’s mind may have been the most intense in history—as Randall puts it, ”his was a passionate search for a passionless truth.” Although Aristotle’s ethical system was a model of the Greek celebration of “moderation,” for him the way to intellectual excellence was not the life of quiet contemplation, serene and unemotional, but a life burning with intelligence, without bounds or limits. Dante called him “the master of them that know.”

While Aristotle was once seen as a conscientious, plodding fellow incapable of understanding Plato’s imaginative power, more recent scholarship has suggested that he took what Plato had to offer and thirsted for more—he “stood on Plato’s shoulders.”  It is almost taken for granted in our world that “knowledge is power,” but Aristotle did not seek knowledge in order to control or change things—he sought intelligibility, not power. And what he sought to understand was the world—his world.

For him, Randall suggests, that meant three things: life, knowing, and language. Life meant particularly human life, since this is who we are—the central fact we encounter. Like Socrates, the maxim “know thyself,” is central to his vision of a world understood.

The other two matters are connected: it was not just the biological and functional aspects of life, but the abilities of knowing and speaking that attracted him. Knowing meant reason, intelligence, mind.  And to understand means being able to use language. The world can be talked about and we can “reason” from one statement to another. We know a thing when we can state in precise language what it is and why it is as it is.

This is in fact the heart of his method: it is what he means by “science.” Plato had no idea of separate sciences. It is Aristotle who formulated the idea of a whole series of special and distinct “sciences,” each of which deals with a certain kind of thing, and investigates the properties of that thing in order to understand and demonstrate what sets it apart from all other things. It is this “what-sets-it-apart” that Aristotle is interested in and he calls it the arche—its basic principle.

He outlined a step-by-step method of inquiry, familiar to us all, which still informs the popular notion of “scientific method:”

• determine the object of investigation;
• examine previous opinions (hypotheses);
• subject those hypotheses to careful scrutiny, draw out their implications, see to what problems and difficulties they lead;
• examine the relevant facts by rigorous, unprejudiced observation;
• and, finally, demonstrate/explain your conclusions—show the “intelligible structure” in the facts.

What could be plainer or more obvious? Ah, but there is a “hook.” It is the most significant element in Aristotle’s view of knowing, and it involves a circularity from which contemporary science still has not entirely escaped.

Most of us are familiar with this as well: that which lies at the end of the inquiry—the demonstration of intelligible structure, the “principle,” that which makes one thing distinct from another—is the very criterion by which one chooses the object of investigation in the first place. Thus, the conclusion of the inquiry must somehow be “known” before the subject of the inquiry can be determined.

How, for example, is one to define “life?” Quite obviously, by studying living things, determining the characteristics they have in common, and stating your conclusions in an intelligible manner. But one must already have at least some those conclusions before one can choose the “living things” that constitute the subjects of inquiry.

That conundrum aside for now, since it has continued to dog us well past Aristotle’s time, we must ask him how we are to arrive at the “principles” he seeks through the method of inquiry he has proposed and how we know they are true. And his answer is, “when the observation of instances is often repeated, the universal that is there becomes plain” (Posterior Analysis II, emphasis mine).

He posits that every individual thing is a combination of “matter” and “form.”

• It’s matter is the basis of its individuality (this kumquat);
• It’s form is what is has in common with all other things of the same kind (kumquats in general, or what my friend, Jim Lenburg, called “kumquatnicity”).

Thus, in every perception of a particular thing, we perceive the universal (the “principle of kumquatness”), but it is only by repetition that the “principle” stands out from what is irrelevant and incidental (his term is “accidental”). This is what we call “inductive reasoning”—drawing a general conclusion from many particular instances.

As we know, while inductive conclusions are highly probable, they are not absolute, “so-help-me-God” truth. Aristotle, however, doesn’t regard the “principles” drawn from this process as mere probabilities, but as the pinnacle of knowledge, the intelligible structure of reality. How, then, are we supposed to confirm their truth? His answer is that we “recognize” their truth by nous, the Greek word usually translated mind, by which Aristotle meant, not a thing, but a capacity. It is an “intellectual vision” which “sees” the truth of the “principles.”

Randall points out that this is an exact “echo” of Plato’s metaphor that knowledge is like remembering something we have known all along. Our observation of repeated “instances” are only the occasion of our “seeing” the truth of the universal within the particular.

And at this point, there is a strange omission in Aristotle’s writings. The knowledge that is gained through this intellectual vision from the process he has provided can only be conveyed in language, which he uses with great precision. And yet he has no formal treatment of language and communication in connection with knowing.  We will return to this mystery later.

It’s also the case that Aristotle never wrote a piece on teaching per se, but he  founded the Lyceum, a school of learning, where his students studied natural sciences, politics, metaphysics, and ethics, demonstrating his belief, much like Plato’s, that education should be general versus specialized.  And he did value teachers and said that “those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.”

I’ll return to this issue in the next post, and will try to draw a reasonable synthesis from the views of these two icons on teaching and learning.