Aristotle - Metaphysics

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???????????While Aristotle is famously difficult, his towering concepts don’t only challenge everyday readers, they are formidable to the most advanced thinkers. This point comes across in a striking way in a Wall Street Journal review (10/20/23) by Maxwell Carter of The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment, by S. Frederick Starr (Oxford University Press, 2023). Arab culture translated and embraced the works of Aristotle which they inherited from the Greek culture around Constantinople and western Asia, where the eastern Roman Empire survived until 1453 AD. Carter positions the lofty intellects of the two subjects of Starr’s biography: “The 11th-century scholar Ibn Sina—known in the West as Avicenna—was practicing medicine and law in his teens and sought, through hundreds of works, to create, as Mr. Starr writes, an “intellectual framework that encompassed philosophy, science, medicine, and religion.” His contemporary Biruni has meanwhile been celebrated as “an eleventh-century da Vinci,” “a universal genius” and “The Master.” He goes on explain their highly educated backgrounds: “They were versed from an early age in the Quran, the hadith—the sayings and actions of the prophet Muhammad—and related textual criticisms. And the pair was exposed in translation to Aristotle— “The Philosopher” to medieval Muslim admirers.” But the specific line modern readers can take as comfort and consolation when struggling to understand Aristotle is this one: “In his autobiography, Ibn Sina claimed to have read the “Metaphysics” 40 times with limited success, grasping it only after coming across an analysis by the philosopher al-Farabi.”

??????????? The following sections rely on the Random House 1941 edition of The Basic Works of Aristotle, where we find the Metaphysica, the Metaphysics translated by W.D. Ross, a Scottish philosopher who lived from 1877 to 1971, and who the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes as “one of the most influential Aristotelians of the twentieth century.” Ross’ translation includes rich front matter, including a helpfully expanded Table of Contents and Philosophical Lexicon.

??????????? Aristotle opens Book A (I) of the Metaphysics, Bekker number 980a, with this bracing line: “All men by nature desire to know.” At 981a, we come upon Aristotle’s decisive certainty in describing his understanding, a style which is now familiar if we have read the Ethics or Politics.

With a view to action experience seems in no respect inferior to art, and men of experience succeed even better than those who have theory without experience. The reason is that experience is knowledge of individuals, art of universals, and actions and productions are all concerned with the individual; for the physician does not cure “man,” except in an incidental way, but Callias or Socrates or some other called by some such individual name, who happens to be a man.

??????????? As we find with Plato’s work on philosophy and Demosthenes’ splendid examples of rhetoric, history shines through in all the classics, in this case the history of philosophy. In 984b, Aristotle is discussing the concepts of primary causes, citing Parmenides and Hesiod as ancient sources. He states that “For it is not likely either that fire or earth or any such element should be the reason why things manifest goodness and beauty … nor again could it be right to entrust so great a matter to spontaneity and chance.” Aristotle refers to the profound pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides who was active in the early fifth century BC, to whom Plato devoted one his longest dialogues, and Aristotle also refers to the ancient poet Hesiod, who wrote his Works and Days and Theogony around 700 BC.

One might suspect that Hesiod was the first to look for such a thing – or some one else who put love or desire among existing things as a principle, as Parmenides, too, does; for he, in constructing the genesis of the universe, says: --

“Love first of all the Gods she planned.”

And Hesiod says: --

“First of all things was chaos made, and then

Broad-breasted earth,…

And love, ‘mid all the gods pre-eminent,”

Which implies that among existing things there must be from the first a cause which move things and bring them together.

??????????? Aristotle then goes on to briefly review many of the most famous ancient philosophers, and of course he had access to much more of their then-surviving works and teachings than the tiny fraction that has come down to us. He mentions the theories of Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus, great minds whose theories are only partially preserved in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosphers which we cover in a later chapter. Aristotle’s commentary on all these philosophers is deeply thought-provoking, as he moves on to broader observations in 985b.

Contemporaneously with these philosophers and before them, the so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this study, but also having been brought up in it they thought its principles were principles of all things. Since of these principles numbers are by nature the first, and in numbers they seemed to see many resemblances in the things that exist and come into being … they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.

??????????? At 987b, this discussion of Aristotle’s examination of the heart of philsophy arrives at profound commentary on Socrates and Plato, how they were similar and how they differed.

Socrates, however, was busying himself about ethical matters and neglecting the world of nature as a whole but seeking the universal in these ethical matters, and, fixed thought for the first time on definitions; Plato accepted his teaching, but held that the problem applied not to sensible things but to entities of another kind – for this reason, that the common definition could not be a definition of any sensible thing, as they were always changing. Things of this other sort, then, he called Ideas, and sensible things, he said, were all named after these, and in virtue of a relation to these; for the many existed by participation in the Ideas that have the same name as they. Only the name ‘participation’ was new; for the Pythagoreans say that things exist by ‘imitation’ of numbers, and Plato says they exist by participation, changing the name. But what the participation or the imitation of the Forms could be they left an open question.