Lectures On Aristotle's Philosophy

1.0 Aristotle's Beginning Point: Ideas are Universal. Reality is Individual.

Plato had argued that IDEAS are the excellences of things and that is what makes things real so
that the ideas are MORE REAL than what is merely given as the individuals of our immediate
experience

 The rule Plato followed is that "what rules is greater and more real than what is ruled"
o By that he meant the image in the mirror is "ruled" by the original reflecting itself
into it and thus less real than the original; the physical universe is ruled by
mathematically statable laws and thus less real than the system of laws
themselves; the building is ruled in its construction by the blueprints or the design
and thus less real than the design; and therefore human life is ruled by its own
excellences like self-control, courage, justice, and practical wisdom and thus...
o It does not fit well with our common sense to say for example that the design of a
building is more real than the building. This seems to contradict our common
sense idea of what is real.
 This position came under more and more criticism as Plato propounded it because it
seemed not to account for the kind of knowledge that was developing in the early forms
of Greek science.
o Scientific knowledge seemed to be in line with the practical knowledge of
common sense and not necessarily opposed to technical skills. The knowledge of
the day was coming more and more to arise out of practical applications of
intelligence to everyday life.
o Common sense knowledge is one of the bases for scientific knowledge in the
sense that science in part arises out of a common sense application of intelligence.
Plato was not prepared to distinguish common sense knowledge as quite different
from common sense as a way of life. This is precisely what Aristotle was not only
prepared to do but was determined to make as his philosophical starting point.

1.1 Aristotle's concession to Common Sense: Individuals are more Real

 The individuals, though ruled by the ideas, still seemed more real than ideas to common
sense.
o In one sense individuals are more real than ideas and in another sense they are
not. They are not in the sense that without ideas the individuals are not only
meaningless but because they are meaningless, from the Greek philosophical
point of view, they are and must be nothing.
o To sacrifice ideas to individuals is to give up the hard won central issue of
philosophy: the superiority of the intellectual life over the life of mere sensation
or immediate perception and the superiority of the ethical life over the life
devoted to unthinking work or gross carnal pleasure.
o Nevertheless the individual is also the human individual and the universal ideas
are referenced in the individuals.
  Ideas are from another point of view "for the sake of illuminating the individuals."
o Scientific knowledge must be verified in and applied to the observed individuals;
philosophical and ethical knowledge must be verified in and applied to the
experience of individual human beings.
o So Aristotle concluded that he would never be able to free himself from the
Platonic impasse of doing justice to the individual as real and the idea as essential
as long as he remained with Plato's starting point: the question of the good,
excellence, or arete, the idea as ideal.
o Aristotle thought the question of the good life had to come at the end of
philosophical inquiry and the thematization of the intellectual life from the
individual's experience had to become the new starting point.

1.2 For Aristotle the Real Problem was Reconciling Plato's System with Scientific
Knowledge as Founded on the Experience of Individuals

 Aristotle argued that as long as Plato began with the universal idea as an excellence, he
could not get back to the concrete individual as existing; as long as he began with the
good of human life, he could not derive the objective criteria for such good life from the
conditions of life itself.
 From Aristotle's viewpoint Plato's system as constructed on values could not account for
the objective criteria of the sciences which were beginning to organize our experience in
new and unavoidable ways. If Plato could not derive the individuals from the universals
that governed them, then Aristotle thought he could derive the universals that illuminate
the individuals from the individuals themselves.

1.3 The General Outline of Aristotle's Reconciliation: NOUS

 But this is no easy task. How does one get from the concrete individual predicated of
nothing but itself to the universal predicable of an unlimited number of things? How does
one get from behavior in all its myriad varieties to what is normative about behavior?
How does one get from facts to values?
 The question anticipates the answer, Aristotle thought; for if we could find an individual
that is already a universal, a kind of behavior that contains its own normativity, a fact
that is already a value, the problem would be solved.
o His name for the solution is NOUS. But a name is not an answer unless it is
backed up with understanding. And understanding is precisely what is at issue
here.
o For Aristotle NOUS or INTELLIGENCE is the concrete universal, the
INDIVIDUAL that is at the same time the UNIVERSAL. Intelligence (NOUS) is
both individual and universal because as an intelligent life, the life of
understanding, is lived by individuals who at the same time express the universal
in their exchanges with one another.
o To speak, to be rational, is to grasp the universal in the particular individuals that
display it for those who can understand. The intelligent person, we would say, is
the individual who is the universal, the one capable of expressing the normativity
 of behavior within its own intelligent and reasonable operations, and the fact who
is a value, in fact an origin of value. Aristotle thought that he, like his student,
Alexander the Great, had cut the Gordian Knot and inherited the whole
philosophical enterprise from his teacher, Plato. In some sense he had.

1.4 Difficulties and Complementarities

If Plato's philosophy moves from what is above downward and has difficulty getting all the way
down to the individual and the empirical, then Aristotle's philosophy moves from below upward
and has difficulty getting all the way up to the Universal, to the Mind, to the Sublime, to the
Good. Aristotle thought he solved that problem by arguing that in a way we are already there by
virtue of our intelligent natures. But it is no solution to the human moral dilemma to say that
even the most depraved have a capacity for human excellence. The truth is these two ways are
complementary and Aristotle never rejected the Platonic system so much as tried to mediate it
and move it forward. In this sense Aristotle remained a Platonist all his life.

2.0 The First Principles of Aristotle's System of Philosophy: Kinesis

The very first principle of Aristotle's philosophy is, as we have seen, NOUS or as we would call
it, intelligence or mind. Neither translation is really any good because both build into the
meaning of the word oppositions or alienations which did not exist for the Greeks. For us Mind
is opposed to Body and Intelligence is opposed to Practice, but not for Aristotle. For him NOUS
is opposed to chaos, the lack of order, meaninglessness, stupidity, emptiness, or even
nothingness. Still this first principle is not first in our experience, according to Aristotle, but
rather first in the order of reality itself. He distinguishes what is first in reality, among things, and
what is first for us, in terms of how we approach the issues. The most obvious thing about the
Universe for Aristotle is that everything is changing, everything is, as he would say, in motion.
The word he used was KINESIS in Greek. Kinesis is what is first for us; it is the primary
characteristic in our experience of the world or the COSMOS, the ordered totality of things.

2.1 The Physical World of our Experience: Primary Substances in Motion

(KINESIS)

For Aristotle the Universe or Cosmos is a plurality of individual beings related to one another
through kinesis. Let us examine each element of this definition of the world of our everyday
experience according to Aristotle. The Cosmos is a PLURALITY; that is it is not a simple unity;
it is made up of MANY things that do not easily reduce to ONE. It is a plurality of
INDIVIDUAL THINGS; the individuals are REAL in the primary sense of the word; their reality
is not derived from something else. Aristotle called these Concrete Individual Things PRIMARY
SUBSTANCES. A PRIMARY SUBSTANCE is something that is predicable only of itself
properly. That means that an individual thing cannot function as a predicate in a statement about
something else. I cannot say this pencil is anything but itself. Primary Substance is contrasted
with SECONDARY SUBSTANCES which are predicable of nothing but themselves and
Primary Substances. What Aristotle is talking about is what we would call the nature of
something, the type of thing it is. I cannot predicate, for example, MAN (Secondary Substance)
of anything except individuals who are human beings. "Related to one another": this is the
hidden function of NOUS in all of this because intelligence is what relates one thing to another
and everything to us. The relations are based on KINESIS which Aristotle defines as the act of a
thing in potency insofar as it is in potency. KINESIS, then, is defined in terms of the two most
fundamental principles of reality in Aristotle's system: ACT (ENERGEIA) and POTENCY
(DUNAMIS). To understand what he means by Kinesis requires us to sketch out the most basic
principles of reality in his system.

2.2 Act and Potency / Energeia and Dunamis

In one sense we already have a descriptive understanding of Kinesis insofar as we all know what
physical change and motion are from our experience, but we have no systematic understanding
of what it is. To have a theoretical grasp of this most fundamental aspect of our world we must
have some even more basic principles from which to start. Moreover you must consider that
change as such is not something that is directly intelligible; for what is intelligible directly is the
thing itself or characteristic that undergoes the change or the thing or characteristic that results
from it. These most basic principles are the principles of Energeia (Act) and Dunamis (Potency).
Since they are the most basic principles, they cannot be defined in terms of anything more basic;
moreover they define all other elements in the system. We can only describe these principles and
through the description we either understand what is meant or we do not. By Energeia what
Aristotle means is an activity or an act or a perfection or a coming to fulfillment of something.
Whatever is real is real insofar as it is in ACT / ENERGEIA. But how are we to conceive this
ACT or ACTIVITY? Here is where Aristotle remains true to his master, Plato; for Aristotle the
primary analogue of Energeia is the ACT OF UNDERSTANDING. Whatever is real is real
insofar as it is or is related to the ACT OF UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING ITSELF,
an act of understanding everything about everything (NOESIS NOESEOS). Dunamis / Potency
on the other hand is mere potential, the ability to be something, pure capacity.

2.3 Aristotle's Hierarchical Universe

For Aristotle and the Greek philosophical tradition generally the notion that there was something
Divine and Ultimate in the universe beyond the human forms of excellence was obvious and
taken for granted. The question was not whether there was something divine but what it was and
what its excellence was like. For Aristotle as for Plato it was NOUS, an ACT of Being (Pure
Energeia) whose Being is Understanding: that is an act of Self-Understanding that has
Understanding itself as an object. In that Self-Understanding such a Being could understand all
there is to understand by understanding itself. All the ENERGEIA in the Universe would have its
source in this PURE ENERGEIA, NOESIS NOESEOS. But do not think this means that the
PURE ACT is the agent that produces the ACTS which allow things to be themselves because
this is not the case. This PURE DIVINE INTELLIGENCE effects the things in the world, allows
them to be themselves by drawing them towards itself; by making it possible for the rest of the
universe to be intelligible, it acts like the good acts towards appetites: it is their end, their
finality. It ACTS like the blueprints ACT on the actual design of the building, not like the mason
acts in laying the bricks. ENERGEIA, then, is not what we think it is in the English equivalent:
energy. The word itself is from the roots en=within and ergon=work: the work within is a good
etymological rendering. All that is, is by virtue of the work within: the energeia. But no thing in
the universe but pure Energeia is all Act or fully in act, perfect, complete, or Absolutely All it
could be. Pure Energeia literally CAN NOT BE any better or greater or richer or more
meaningful or truer than it already is by definition. Pure Energeia, therefore, contains no
Dunamis, no Potentiality, no CAPACITY for improvement. All other beings in the universe
according to Aristotle are some combination, some mixture, or some ratio of Energeia (act) /
Dunamis (potentiality). Each species of thing in the universe represents some definite ratio of
Act/Potency until one reaches the Highest Being which is pure ACT. Remember what ACT
primarily means to Aristotle; the primary analogue is the ACT OF UNDERSTANDING IN US,
what we experience as Insight at whatever depth we understand. This yields a four tiered
universe on Aristotle's most general principles:

1. Pure Energeia: Understands Everything by Understanding Itself. 2. Intelligences (Active

Energeia) that understand what they understand by understanding themselves but nonetheless are
Potential Understanders. If such were to exist they would be Bodiless Thinkers. Aristotle thought
some of them on the lower levels were ultimately responsible for the orderly movement of the
heavens. 3. Human Intelligence (Potential with regard even to its Activity) this type of
intelligence does understand but only from a position of questioning its own immediate
environment. It is embodied intelligence. It cannot understand by virtue of self-understanding but
rather understands itself in relation to the material things it understands. 4. Finally there are the
things in the world that are not intelligent at all but are Intelligible = can be understood by
intelligence and as such considered to be in energeia in-formed.

Summarizing, then, Aristotle's Universe contains: I. A Highest Being who is Pure Energeia or
INTELLIGENCE; II. beings who are fully Intelligent in that they understand by the our being,
by self-understanding but their understanding is still limited by their own self-limits; III. Human
Intelligence that does not know or understand by understanding itself but by understanding the
physical world around it: the world dominated by kinesis; finally, IV. Things in the world that
are Intelligible. There is nothing else.

3.1 The Four Causes: Matter, Form, Agent, End.

According to Aristotle the physical world is knowable and actually known by human intelligence
insofar as it is a plurality of individuals (primary substances) RELATED to one another by
kinesis (motion-change). But how are the things that change which are familiar to us in our
everyday experience related by motion? The question must be reformulated in terms of the
intellectual conditions for the possibility of change. In other words the question is: what must be
the case if we are to be able to speak meaningfully of change as we experience it? Notice that the
question is not about things in the world but about the conditions for there being things in the
world as we experience them. The answer to this question is the four causes: Matter, (Hule)
Form (Eidos- Morphe), Agent (Kinoun), End (Telos). To answer this question as asked we must
examine an example of change in our experience.

3.2 Types of Change: Substantial (Radical) and Accidental (Non-Radical).

There are two types of change from which we could choose our example: Substantial that is the
change of One Thing into Another Thing or Accidental that is the change of one characteristic of
a thing into another characteristic of the same thing. I believe that Aristotle as a man who studied
medicine thought of the change of life into death as the primary analogue of substantial change
and the growth and development of a living thing through all the stages of its life as the primary
analogue of accidental change. Surely the former is a dramatic example of radical, substantial
change and the latter a clear example of less dramatic changes. Nonetheless the transformation of
hydrogen and oxygen into water is also an example of substantial change because the result
behaves qualitatively differently from the components taken singly; while locomotion is a clear
example of accidental change. Moreover these types of change are to be understood in terms of
the Act / Potency relationship: Substantial Change: Act :: Form Potency Matter Accidental
Change: Act :: Accident Potency Substance

3.21 The Questions Behind the Answer (4 Causes): Conditions for Change?

Let us take a simple example of a substantial change: a piece of paper is consumed by fire and
yields ashes and gases. The issue is not whether there are things like fire and its effects nor is the
issue whether we know about these things; for surely we do from our experience. The question
for Aristotle is: What is required for there to be such happenings and at the same time will allow
us say in a meaningful way that there are? Can my experience of such changes be made sense of
in such a way as to allow me to say the cosmos of my experience is coherent. How does it make
sense to say one thing has changed into some thing else? The answer to that question is the four
causes. It is not the answer to any other question not meaningfully identical with this one nor is it
an answer without a question.

3.3 Analysis of A Substantial Change Yields 4 Causes.

What, then, is necessary for us to be able to say meaningfully that the paper becomes ashes and
gases? First there must be a Principle of DIFFERENCE or we could not say that the ashes and
gases are different from the paper. The Principle of Difference Aristotle called the Form (eidos
or morphe). Secondly there must be a Principle of Continuity or else during the change there
would be no continuity of process: some dimension of reality had to be the same throughout the
change and to allow for a transition from what something is to becoming something else. The
alternative to this principle of similarity would be that there would be no process enduring in
time at all; there would be instantaneous changes. This Principle of CONTINUITY Aristotle
called Matter (Hule). These are both internal to the thing itself undergoing the change.

Besides the internal causes, Matter and Form, Aristotle recognized there had to be external
causes: Something has to initiate the change because nothing brings itself to Eregeia-Act without
being brought to Act by something that is or by being in Act itself: Nothing can give itself what
it does not have. Therefore there is a need for an Agent Cause. If there were no agent cause, then
we could not legitimately ask: Who or what brought about the change. There can be a whole
chain of Agent Causes each acting Instrumentally (Instrumental Causes) in consort with the
others, but there has to be an agent cause in each order of reality or existence otherwise nothing
in that line could be accounted for. In our example of setting the paper on fire: the fire is the
Agent Cause in its order of change but there is the match that lit it and the people who made the
matches which are all instrumental agent causes. The person who lit the fire is not merely an
instrumental cause, but belongs to a different question and order of external causality as we are
about to see.
3.31 Meaning of End/Purpose in Aristotle's System

Beyond even the Agent Causes there is another external requirement that links up with one of the
internal causes. In fact it is this link we should like to explore first. Aristotle recognized that the
fact is nothing in our universe just changes. That is things change in patterns and have
DETERMINATE RESULTS. Fire always results in something being burned, drenching rain
always results in things getting wet etc.. We do not strike matches and expect to get rabbits. Even
though our match might fail, we know it will not fail in that way. This comforting or not so
comforting fact that changes RESULT IN DETERMINATE OUTCOMES is what Aristotle
called the Final Cause or TELOS. If someone understood final causes by this definition only a
complete idiot could deny there were final causes; so most interpreters and/or disparagers of
Aristotle do not understand what he was getting at by final causes. The final cause is the
resulting form in the thing that changes in relation to the process of change as bringing about this
determined result regularly. There is an added dimension to the final cause when we realize that
these determined results can be recognized by Intelligence as determined and, therefore can be
both anticipated by Intelligence and used by it for its own understood ends. When this happens
the final cause becomes and functions as a PURPOSE. Thus purpose is the final cause in the
thing as recognized by an intelligence beyond the thing.

3.32 Physical Condition, Four Causes, and Three Questions

Finally besides the four causes (Matter-Form Agent-End) a necessary condition is required to be
met: Privation; that is, the thing that is to change needs to be capable of being deprived of its
form. Moreover these causes are not things as such but the principles of things; that is there is
nowhere existent just the form or just the matter of a thing. Form is what is understood when we
understand a material thing. Matter is what we universally ignore when we understand a thing:
its brute facticity, its irreducible individuality, mere continuity in time or place. Matter is not
stuff because any stuff is Some Thing and therefore informed. Matter can be called an empirical
residue because it is what is left behind when we understand anything. These causes are
principles known by intelligence; they are not known by taking a "look at the reality that is out
there." This means you cannot know a cause by looking at a thing; you come to know a cause by
understanding something, weighing evidence in reflection and judging on the basis of reflective
evidence. The agent cause is what responds to the question: "What made it happen?" The final
cause responds to the question: What is the result of a process and/or Why did I initiate it, if I
did? The formal cause responds to the question: What is happening to this thing? The material
cause is that from which all these questions abstract: the brute individuality and continuity. The
material cause is the result of the fact that we must ask these questions about our immediate
experience on some level: questions are always about something we experience. For Aristotle the
fact that the universe is causally structured means it responds to these questions. Why does the
universe correspond to these questions? The reason is that the real is intelligible: structured by
NOUS. For Aristotle as for Plato the real is isomorphic (has the same form as) to Nous or
Intelligence. This is another way of saying that the real is intrinsically intelligible and
intelligibility is intrinsically related to the real. The structure of the real corresponds to the
structure of intelligence and vice versa. Moreover Aristotle recognized that no one can deny this
correspondence of intelligence and reality without performatively contradicting themselves. That
means you cannot denying being able to know the real without contradicting yourself because to
deny your ability to know the real must be based on the hidden assertion that you know the
reality of your own incapacity t know which obviously is absurd. This is called a performative
self-contradiction.

3.4 Intelligence (NOUS) Means Life and a Way of Life

In some ways the central treatise in the entire Aristotelian Corpus is the work called the Treatise
on the Soul (Peri Psuches / De Anima). For in that work Aristotle gives us what amounts to his
fundamental assumptions about the life of the mind as we experience it in ourselves and in the
world. For him first and foremost intelligence represents a quality of LIFE: for him the first
meaning of LIFE is INTELLECTUAL LIFE. All life, to the extent that it is life, is a participation
in some form of intelligence. Besides the distinction between motion (kinesis) and act (energeia)
Aristotle distinguishes between transient act (process) and immanent act (life activity). A
transient act is an act that begins with an agent ends and is completed in the patient and perfects
the patient. Example: I throw a ball. I am the agent. The ball is the patient which changes place;
so the act is completed in the ball and the ball is in a new place. An immanent act is an act that
begins with the agent, ends in the agent, is completed in the agent as patient, and perfects the
agent. Example I go for a walk. I am the agent; I am the patient; I bring myself from one place to
another. Finally, I am the one who is moved from here to there. These examples are simple,
trivial, and obvious and those are their virtues. They are illustrations of the theory.

3.41 Aristotle's Theory of Life in the PERI PSUCHES: Process and Continuity

According to Aristotle reality is in a constant process of complexification and interiorization

insofar as reality is drawn towards the ordering power of NOUS. All living things are things that
have been taken up into this process in a vortex of intelligibility moving towards intelligence. To
be alive is first of all to be capable of immanent acts and the most primitive forms of immanent
acts are nutrition and reproduction. Nutrition is necessary for the growth and preservation of the
individual while reproduction is necessary for the species. In PLANTS it is difficult to
distinguish between the two because it is difficult to distinguish between the individual as such
and the species. Asexual plants are fundamentally undifferentiated on this level: their
reproductive and growth faculties are for all practical purposes one and the same. By faculty
Aristotle means the active ability a living thing has of being both the agent and patient in a
process of inner development. Inner development requires what Aristotle called active potencies
or faculties.

In ANIMALS there is more complexification and interiorization, for in them inner development
begins to take on a life of its own. Animals are capable of living their lives in moving from place
to place. To have their life in movement requires more and more development of their sensitivity
to the point where the animal organism develops differentiated sense faculties. The faculties of
sense in the animal are for the sake of getting around: living its life by moving through its
environment. However when the sense faculties are highly developed, new possibilities open up.
The higher animals are higher precisely because their sense faculties are highly developed.
Nevertheless that capacity to sense in more differentiated ways is still bound to the service of the
animal's life in movement. Animals do not understand anything because they cannot question
anything. Since they do not understand anything, they cannot express what they do not
understand in a universal.

In MAN all is different insofar as man is the animal who understands because he asks questions
and questions because he wonders and expresses what he under- stands in universals. In Man the
sense faculties are no longer just for the organic life of movement; they are now for the sake of
Intelligence, for Nous. An animal sees a sunset and takes no notice and continues eating; a man
on beholding the grandeur of a sunset, could stop eating and begin to wonder at it and be awe-
struck by it. The life of sensitivity in man is ordered to the intellectual inner life. Man not only
remembers what he has experienced, he also wonders about it, imagines new possibilities in it,
and questions it to understand it. Imagination is the highest sense faculty and it seems to be
unique to human beings.

There is operative, then, a principle of continuity ranging from the most primitive organically
based living things up to man. Each level represents more complexification and interiorization
until we reach the possibility of human imagination and intelligence and each higher level
contains the powers of the lower levels virtually:

Life Genus/Species Operations / Faculties Virtualities Plants: Nutrition Organism Reproduction

Animals: Reproduction Plant Nutrition Sensation Movement Animal Man: Reproduction Plant
Nutrition Movement Sensation Memory Animal Imagination (Phantasia) Nous Intelligence Man

So Aristotle's universe is one dominated by differentiated life. The principle of differentiation is

what subordinates the lower less complex, less interior operations to the higher more interior and
complex. The principle (Nous) of differentiation is not itself complex nor is it just interior or
merely subjective. The material conditions of existence requires this complexification for the
sake of interiority and understanding. Aristotle's universe is teleological in the sense that reality
is not only oriented to intelligence but it is ordered by it. What, then, is human intelligence?
Aristotle devotes all of Book Three of his treatise On the Soul (Peri Psuches), one of his most
careful reflective essays, to very topic.

4.0 Aristotle's Theory of Abstraction: A Theory of Understanding as the Life of

Nous.

For Aristotle to retain the Platonic Project of Philosophy he had to derive the universal (the idea)
from the individual (primary substance) as you recall. This is precisely what the theory of
abstraction is supposed to do. Abstraction is Aristotle's way of talking about the life of the Mind
as a life lived in the universal, in the idea. But first Aristotle must show how human life moves
towards and attains the universal, the idea, the form (the latter is Aristotle's word for it.).

4.1 Active and Passive Potencies: Conditions for Life-Activities

Out of his idea of an immanent act Aristotle developed the notion of a faculty or ACTIVE
POTENCY, to use his word, to account for the origin of life activities and for the difference
between these activities and the passive activities of the purely kenetic world of inorganic
processes. An Active Potency or Faculty is the capacity of a living thing to initiate an activity
within itself in relation to some other capacity within itself (PASSIVE POTENCY) to be
actualized as a life activity. In other words every activity I initiate within myself corresponds to
some active potency I have for that activity. However, since nothing is in act and in potency in
the same way at the same time (Nothing can give itself what it does not have.); it follows that if a
living thing has a capacity to act (Active Potency), then the living thing brings itself to act
insofar as it activates some other capacity to be activated by it. Thus if I can nourish myself, I
have a capacity for self nourishment (active potency) but I must also have the passive potency to
receive the act of being nourished . This is what Aristotle means by a faculty and its
corresponding passive potency. A faculty is like an inner agent cause. Every faculty has its organ
or set of organs. An organ is the physical organization of an organism, the material conditions for
the performance of the faculty. Faculties, therefore, are the roots of life-activities in what
Aristotle called the Psuche, the Soul. But do not think about the SOUL as you would in the
common sense context of the post-modern, post-Christian world. By Psuche Aristotle meant the
PRINCIPLE OF LIFE IN ANY LIVING THING. For Aristotle if something is alive, it is
besouled. The souls of material things are conditioned by the material conditions of their lives;
when those conditions no longer hold, then the life principle is destroyed. If there were anything
whose life activities would be independent of material conditions, then something of that life
would be immortal, because indestructible. Whether there is such a thing in the human world for
Aristotle remains to be seen.

4.2 Conscious Acts: The Highest Kind of Immanent Act.

The higher kinds of immanent act for Aristotle are those that reach a higher kind of
interiorization and complexification. If you recall, in man these life-activities are the activities
beginning with sense reaching up to intelligence.

Pre-Conscious/Organic Man: Reproduction Plant Nutrition Movement Consciousness Sensation

Memory Animal Imagination (Phantasia) Self-Consciousness Nous Intelligence Man
Knowledge-Episteme

Now we must ask how does Consciousness become Self-consciousness and Self-Consciousness
become Human Knowing? Or How does Aristotle derive the Excellence, the Idea, the Form, the
Universal, the Definition, the Theory, the Essence from the perceived individual within
consciousness?

4.3 The First Principle of Aristotle's Cognitional Inquiry: Acts are Specified By
their Objects.

Aristotle distinguished different kinds of immanent, conscious acts by the objects they attained.
The principle is: a life activity is specified by its object, that is, by the result it achieves.
Remember those results are more and more interior as we go up the chain of being. This means
they are more and more produced within the living subject. As they are produced within they
also correspond more and more to the world beyond the living thing. Those activities that
represent the world and the things in it are called cognitional acts.
4.31 To understand the movement from consciousness to knowledge Aristotle used the
principle that Objects specify Acts, Acts specify Active Potencies or Faculties, and Faculties
specify the Nature of the living, and/or conscious, and/or knowing thing. This is on the level of
discernment or the level of our trying to find out what a thing is. On the level of reality the
relation is reversed:

---------------------> Order of Reality --------------------> Nature-----Active Potency/Faculty----

Activity-------Object of the Living Thing <---------------------- Order Of Knowing
<---------------------- In things as they are first in themselves (the order of reality), the nature of a
thing is the ground of (accounts for) the potency/faculty, the faculty is the ground of the activity,
and the activity is the ground of the object. In things as they are first for us (order of knowing)
the order is reversed: first we distinguish and identify significantly different objects (results),
then because we can identify significantly different objects, we can argue that there is a
significant difference in the activity that produces them, from there we can make a case for a
significant difference in the faculty that is actuated, and finally we can argue for asserting the
existence of a significantly different kind of thing (nature) which could ultimately account for
such objects/results.

4.32 For Aristotle it was obvious to anyone who would pay attention to human knowing
activities that there are two significantly different kinds of objects in human knowledge:

a Perceptible Object which is singular, contingent, changeable, individual, subject to the

limitations of space and time and an Intelligible Object which is common to many things,
necessary, unchangeable, universal, and completely escapes the limitations of space and time.
The intelligible object was the result of an act of understanding that grasps what is
essential/formal in the reality experienced. The questions are: Is this an adequate description of
our conscious experience or not? And if so, what is the relationship between these two types of
object in our cognitional experience?

5.0 The Difference Between Perception and Understanding.

That we experience perceptible objects I doubt anyone could or would want to deny. Aristotle
thought that sensation is fundamentally a passive activity. Strange as that sounds and though it
seems almost to be a contradiction, Aristotle was really making good sense here. For all
conscious acts including sensation are acts of a subject; however those acts that go by the name
of sensations are clearly conditioned by outside circumstances: if there is no light (an outer
condition) in the room, you cannot see. Understanding requires outer conditions, but no specific
ones, not even specific senses. (This is why Helen Keller could eventually live like a human
being.) We need to experience things in the world to understand; but our understanding is far
more a result of inner conditions. However, before we even talk about understanding Aristotle
thought we had a lot more to say about sensation and its complexification in the processes of our
conscious life. Aristotle's principle is continuity within differences. Furthermore we should not
argue to the generic differences until we have established the prior continuities.

5.1 Sensation/Perception: Differentiation and Integration

Pure sensation for Aristotle is more passive than active in that in sensation the organism receives
within itself an impression that comes fundamentally from beyond itself. Aristotle thought about
the senses then, as being more or less complicated receptors. Still he recognized that our
experience of the world was commonly more that mere sensation, more than a pile of unrelated
impress- ions. In fact we can be said to perceive the things in the world more properly than we
can be said to sense them. Pure sensations are rare in ordinary experience. For example, if I were
unconscious and suddenly awakened, I might experience a burst of light as a pure sensation.
Usually my experience of sense is integrated in the broader gestalt of the percept or what
amounts to the same thing the perceived unity we call perceptible object.

Aristotle's way of putting this is to say that man is endowed with a common sense that organizes
the data of sense so that we can perceive not just the objects of each individual sense: colors,
sounds, etc. but we also immediately perceive immediately the unity of these in the perceptible
thing. In other words it is one and the same thing, for example, one and the same apple perceived
to be red, spheroid, sweet, and hard. The faculty of common sense functions in us in a similar
way that instinct functions in animals. The difference is in animals instinct represents pre-
packaged solutions to problems of a species life; while common sense is a set of habits we learn,
a set of solutions we can take up or put down as the situation demands. Though it is hard, it is not
impossible to teach an "old dog" new tricks, if the old dog is really a human being.

5.2 Memory/Imagination: Absence and Presence, Recall and Creativity

In addition to sense and its integration in perception by the common sense there is the faculty of
sensitive memory. Sensitive memory is the capacity to recall the immediate experience of
sensations and perceptions when their stimuli are absent. Memory represents a higher integration
of the operations of sense insofar as to recall the perceptible object in its absence is a conscious
act of considerable inwardness when it is in the control of the organism performing it. Moreover
inner memory is necessary for the development of imagination, a sense faculty Aristotle thought
was proper to man. Sensitive memory mediates between the external senses and the imagination.
Memory is not actively constructive, but without memory nothing could be creatively arranged
by the imagination.

If sense memory is the pivot between immediate sensation in the external senses and the
imagination, the most internal of the internal senses; then imagination mediates between the
senses and intelligence; it is the pivot between the world of immediacy and the worlds mediated
by meaning, between the concrete and the abstract, between the individuals and the ideas or the
universals, between the sense-perceived and the intellectually conceived. Memory and
imagination work together but when they do, imagination is clearly in control.

5.3 Imagination/Active Intelligence: Models and Inquiry

Still imagination does not do its creative work by itself. There is probably an organic function of
imagination in which the images that begin as memories are put together in ways that are playful
or arbitrary which amount to no more than daydreaming. There is the common use of
imagination in our everyday life by which we organize our daily projects. But there is the far
more liberating exercise of imagination by intelligence in the arts and sciences which occurs
when we are spurred on by questions, when we wonder by constructing now this and now that
possibility, enter into now this and now that supposition, try now this and now that hypothesis.
Whether in science or art, whether in literature or politics, the imagination in conjunction with
creative intelligence under the impetus of inquiry constructs new possibilities for human thought
and life. This is what Aristotle means when he says that insight is into phantasms: understanding
occurs in conjunction with the images we make under the guidance of intelligence. This is
especially important for the question of how to derive the universal from the individual. Beyond
sense and perception, beyond the common sense and memory, and beyond the undisciplined
imagination there is the Spirit of Inquiry, the wonder that is the beginning of all science, art, and
philosophy, the desire to understand and to know: what Aristotle called the NOUS POETICOS,
the AGENT or ACTIVE INTELLIGENCE. The Agent Intelligence or NOUS POETICOS ASKS
QUESTIONS, it is the source of all our questions. To ask a question means that the one asking
does not know the answer; but it also means the one asking the question can anticipate what a
satisfactory answer might be. Questions bring our imagination under the control of our
intelligence. Together our active intelligence and our imagination allow us to "illuminate" our
images or construct models relevant to our questions, catch on to what is significant or essential
in them and leave out of account what is not.

For Aristotle the Active Intelligence was both a datum of introspection and a postulate of his
theory of reality as applied to intellectual life. In other words his theory of abstraction is both
cognitional theory and metaphysics. As a postulate of reality it is necessary to explain how our
knowing pivots from a concrete and contingent individual in the world to an abstract and
necessary universal that can exist only in the mind. At the same time the theory of abstraction is
a theory of learning.

To say that Aristotle's theory of abstraction is a theory of learning is to say that Aristotle thought
about his cognitional theory in terms of how we as human beings come to understand and
ultimately to know and value anything. When we say that Aristotle thought of his cognitional
theory in metaphysical terms we mean that he thought about these questions in terms of the order
of being. For example, he thought it was obvious that the universal law or theoretical definition
was something radically different, something different in the order of being, from the concrete
individuals from which the laws themselves were derived by intelligence. This is a subtle issue
for Aristotle: It is not that the form of the material thing is not completely dependent upon the
conditions of its materiality; nor is it that we sense, perceive, remember, and imagine in such a
way as to escape these same material conditions since we grasp the things through these sense
presentations under the conditions of their materiality (imagination produces images which are
fully material.); but rather that when active intelligence controls imagination by its inquiry, then
the abstracted essence, the law or theoretical definition, that results does indeed present us with
what the material thing is freed from its material conditions. This is what impressed both Plato
and Aristotle: the radical difference between the concrete, contingent, space-time bound material
perceived / remembered / imagined individual thing and the abstract, space-time free non-
material inquired into / understood / conceived universal definition that can function in an
aesthetic or theoretical context of meaning.

5.31 Carts, Wheels, Roundness, and Circularity: Insight is into the Image.

Let us take a simple, static example: the meaning of roundness in a wheel. Of course we already
know the meaning is circularity: a wheel is round because it is or approximates a circle.
However, this is to get the cart before the proverbial horse as it were, because until we reflect on
what makes a wheel round we have no idea of what we mean by circular or circles. Returning to
the wheel then, let's take a primitive wheel with spokes, say a wagon or the proverbial cart
wheel. We recognize that the wheel has some key features: an axle hole and the spokes. If we
catch on to the fact that the axle hole along with the spokes determines what constitutes the
roundness insofar as the axle hole is determined to be where it is by virtue of the fact that the
spokes are all relatively the same size and that this constitutes the center of the wheel. Vary the
size of the spokes and you will distort the "roundness" of the wheel. Let the spokes approximate
perfect equality and let them be defined by their equality of length alone. Let the axle contract
indefinitely so that it becomes the point with location but no magnitude, a location that is defined
as the fixed point from which the spokes now become radii can sweep around in 360 degrees. Let
these things happen in your imagination under the guidance of your questioning intelligence and
what we now have is the definition of the circle and the explanation for the roundness of the
wheel.

5.32 Wheels are not Circles and Circles are not Wheels: Universals and
Individuals

"The locus of all points in a plane equidistant from a point within called the center." The
definition of a circle is the result of the systematic application of understanding to the question
about roundness. The definition abstracts from all material conditions and presents itself as
something (ideal) independent of the material conditions of round things. Circles are objects of
understanding which are grasped in the individuals but expressed in concepts that apply to all
similar individuals, transcend space and time, and as such are not subject to the conditions of
material existence. Wheels are material objects whose roundness is always a result of material
conditions, and whose characteristics are always subject to the conditions of space and time, and
can change if those conditions change. The geometric definition is a universal: it applies to every
circle and everything round. It exists in the mind independently of the material conditions of
space and time. How is it possible to grasp an essence immaterially in a material thing? The
answer to that question in a word is abstraction.

5.40 Potential Intelligence, Poetic Intelligence, and Abstraction: A theory of

Learning and the Structure of Understanding.

For Aristotle, then there are two very different kinds of object in human knowing: sense objects
perceived by the senses (wheels as perceived) and intellectual objects understood by the intellect
(circles as understood). If his implied description fits our experience of human consciousness, we
can conclude by the principle that a knowing activity is specified by its object that there are two
distinct, radically different, and irreducible knowing activities in human consciousness:
perceiving and understanding by virtue of which human nature differs essentially from all other
organically based life forms in our experience. Human beings can understand and express their
understanding in the universal linguistic definition; they can attain intelligible objects. Human
knowing faculties are, therefore, composite: the contain a sensitive as well as an intellectual
component. The question becomes how precisely do these two divergent components work
together to produce human knowledge?
To use Aristotle's metaphysical object-oriented language, the question is how can the intelligible
be brought to act (universal definition) in the context of a knower whose experience is originally
sense-bound (we always begin with perceptions and imagination and return to them with
examples and applications). Secondly, if all human knowledge is a result of learning as Socrates
and Plato had shown, then the human mind or intelligence must be in potency with respect to all
universal definitions. That would amount to being in potency to knowing everything about
everything. Corresponding to such a potency (Nous Patheticos) there has to be an act or activity
that can create, through its continual spontaneity, the activity of understanding (Nous Poeticos),
the Agent Intelligence which Aristotle found to be the cause of wonder and from which comes
all human questions. The Nous Poeticos is the "divine spark" in mankind according to Aristotle.
We share it with the rest of the individuals in our species. This is what Aristotle held to be
immortal in us, our ability to wonder, question, and understand. He held this to be a collaborative
quality because we hold the poetic mind in common with all others who can wonder, question,
and understand. He believed that we are successful as a species only when we are ourselves
attuned to our intelligence and act together in this way. Personal immortality may not be quite
the same as individual immortality.

How is the universal grasped in the particular? How does the Active Intelligence, the Poetic
Mind, illuminate the essence in the individual sensitive data? And Aristotle is adamant about the
fact that we grasp the universal in the concrete, perceptible, material reality. Aristotle wanted to
show the community and continuity of the sensible with the intelligible world. If that is what it
means to be a naturalist, then Aristotle was one.

According to Aristotle the structure of Human Intelligence in the act of understanding as best we
can reconstruct it from his Book III of the Peri Psuches is as follows: We begin with wonder.
Wonder in conjunction with our experience and perceptions of the world gives birth to questions.
Questions yield under- standing; our understanding is about what we experience and perceive;
under- standing issues in concepts which are universal. This conscious process is called
abstraction.

The sense faculty (perception) is fundamentally passive in Aristotle's terms because it cannot
usually act upon the sensed in a conscious way. The exception is the imagination (Phantasia)
which in conjunction with the Active Intelligence varies the possibilities in the light of the
questions and suppositions. Model construction is the result of the cooperation of Imagination
and Nous Poeticos. In his Meno Plato's Socrates was quite impressed by the difference between
the product of the slave boy's perceptions and the product of his understanding in the case of
solving a mathematical problem; but Aristotle was far more impressed with the strategic
questions (Active Intelligence) of the intelligent Socrates and with the consequent ability to hit
upon the correct geometrical construction (insight into phantasm--guidance of imagination by
active intelligence) to solve the puzzle. "The intellect is inspired by the Idea through the images
of the imagination." Peri Psuches, III, 7.

Thus human intelligence is twofold: it is active intellect because we bridge the world of
immediacy (sense) into the intelligible world by wondering and asking questions; it is potential
intellect because we begin by knowing nothing and everything we know we come to know by
learning.
This yields the following Structure of Human Understanding in outline:

Possible Intelligence (NOUS PATHETICOS) -------> Act of Conception Universal Definition

Intelligible Object Intelligible in Act Active Intelligence (NOUS POETICOS) Wonder
LINGUISTIC WORLDS Questions___________Intelligible World__________ Image--Model
PRE-LINGUISTIC WORLD A Intelligible in Potency I Imagination Data of All Senses Memory
Absent Sense Experience Re-Presented Common Sense Integrated Sense Experience Perception
Percept Sensation <---------Impression <---------Physical World Material Thing

For Aristotle, then, in human life there is a trajectory that runs from the barely conscious sense
impressions of the infant to the highly self-conscious, self-directed inquiry, understanding, and
conception of the theoretician and philosopher: from the merely animal, through the clearly
human to the nearly "divine".

6.0 Aristotle's theory of the Good Human Life: The Ethics.

The life of intelligence is certainly central to Aristotle's notion of the good human life. Since
human life is defined in terms of intelligence and its specific act, understanding, it should not be
surprising that this is the case. It is, however, quite different from our present way of thinking
about morality. Ever since Kant morality for us has been basically a matter of feelings and not
intelligence. This situation has not been an altogether happy state of affairs for us in the post-
modern world insofar as it removes the basis for any objective foundation for judgments of value
and the consequent moral decisions that flow from them. It should therefore be noted that there is
a massive horizon shift from the world of classical antiquity until now in the domain of moral
discourse. The truth is there is no possibility for moral discourse in the post-modern world as
long as we subscribe to the assumption that value is non-objective. The recovery of Aristotle's
Ethical theory, then, is an important therapy for our post-modern eclipse of ethical discourse.

6.1 The Question of the Ethics: What does it mean to live human life well?

Aristotle speaks in the Ethics in the name of a political achievement and way of life that is
historical; and he would argue transcultural because human. He seeks to be the spokesman of the
best citizens of the hither to for best city- state; and he holds that the polis is the unique form of
human life in which alone the virtues or excellences of human life can be achieved in their full
sense. The theory itself is presupposed by the concrete practices of Athenians as historically,
communally, and antecedently operative.

Aristotle opens his Ethics with the statement, "Every activity, every inquiry, every practice aims
at some good; for by "the good" or "a good" we mean that at which human beings
characteristically aim." This is not a naturalistic fallacy. For Aristotle human beings have a
specific nature such that they have certain objective goals or ends and they move by nature
towards these specifiable ends or teloi. Aristotle's Ethics is at once particular and universal, local
and cosmic, of the Greek polis and cosmopolitan. What does it mean to live life well? After
dismissing the common sense notion that well-being consists in having a lot of money, in being
honored by men, or in the pursuit of pleasure; Aristotle gives the name, eudaimonia, (happiness,
blessedness), the term Plato coined in conjunction with the Socratic life. In the Apology Socrates
speaks of his good demi-god or daimon as an inner voice telling him what not to do, except in
the case of dying to defend the philosophical life. We would call eudaimonia conscience, and
strange as this might sound, until Socrates identified it and gave it a name; there was no such an
identifiable thing in the West. Aristotle expanded the meaning to include all human well-being or
well-doing. For Aristotle the virtues (ARETE) or human "excellences" are precisely those
qualities the possession of which will enable the person to achieve human well- being. Still the
exercise of the virtues are not a means to an end as though the end were outside or beyond their
exercise. The practice of the virtues are constitutive of the well-being itself. The life of virtue is
not a means to an end in the sense that there are other equally good means. For Aristotle what
constitutes the good for man is a complete human life lived at its best. The practice of the virtues
as the strictly human excellences is central to that life.

6.2 Human Excellence is Objective.

For Aristotle there is a set of facts about human life that lies at the base of any theory of value or
morality. We like to think there are no such thing; that human life somehow escapes the
conditions of existence in the world; that to be human is somehow to be able to construct values
out of nothing. Values are facts about the world as they relate to a human self/person in the
context of living a fully human life. Finally what that means, "To live a fully human life," can be
described and explained in the context of reasonable argument. That argument is what Aristotle's
Nicomachean Ethics is all about.

6.21 Character-Training, the Core of Ethical Instruction.

For Aristotle the core of ethical training is character building. A character is a set of behavioral
traits to be ingrained by learning how to act in specific ways. Character training is central to an
ethics of the whole person as incarnate spirit. Virtues are inner dispositions not only to act in
particular ways conducive to achieving an objective set of values, but they are also dispositions
to feel in certain ways, to be inclined by our emotions and affections to act in those virtuous
ways. To act virtuously is not what Kant later thought; namely, to act against inclination. This
betrays the modern and post-modern tendency to eliminate the need for character training. If one
could eliminate character training from the moral life, admittedly it would be a whole lot easier
to produce morally excellent men and women; but that would be to overlook the fact that we are
not only thinking but feeling human beings. Our affectivity is as important as our intelligence in
the practice of the virtues. To act virtuously is to act from an inclination formed by the
cultivation of the moral excellences.

6.3 Ethics and Practical Wisdom: The Educated Moral Agent, Right Reason.

Still the Socratic principle holds: "The unexamined life is not worth living." The educated moral
agent must know what he is doing when he acts in accordance with virtue; this is what
distinguishes human excellence as moral virtue from its imitation. The truly moral agent acts on
the basis of a truly reasonable judgment, kata ton orthon logon. There is a crucial distinction
between what any individual thinks is good for him and what is really good for him as a human
being. It is for the sake of achieving what is really good that we practice the virtues by making
choices about means to achieve the end of eudaimonia. These choices require good practical
judgment which allows us to do the right thing in the right place at the right time in the right
way. The exercise of such practical good judgment can never be the mechanical or automatic
application of rules; in fact there is not any significant mention of any rules in the Ethics for this
reason. Moreover what Aristotle counts as laws that are part of morality are only those laws that
the city-state (Polis) enacts if and only if it enacts laws that a man of practical wisdom would
obey anyway. These prescriptions are absolute insofar as the virtuous man would do or refrain
from doing them on objective grounds. Aristotle is no situationist or consequentialist. Finally the
individual is never to be taken out of the context of the political community in the moral domain:
to be ethical is an aspect of being a political animal: politicon zoon.

6.31 Just Laws, Reason, and the Man of Practical Wisdom.

For Aristotle the morality of laws would be determined by the project that individuals entered
into to form communities. Political communities are formed for the sake of human development.
The laws represent those values or excellences essential for the community's survival and
achievements. The community needs to recognize a certain set of qualities as virtues and a
correlative set as corresponding vices. They must also recognize those qualities the production of
which would yield such harm that the order of the society would be destroyed and the bonds of
the community broken in such a way as to render the community incapable of achieving its end
or its good. Such crimes as taking innocent life, blatant theft, perjury, or treachery. The practice
of the virtues would gain the individual honor, while the commission of crimes would guarantee
real and swift punishment. The breaking of the bonds of the community by the offender would
create an objective justification for punishment which would ultimately be morally self-inflicted
with the community only bearing witness to and carrying out its execution. This would be true
for cases of imprisonment, exile, or death. There are two ways for a member of a political
community to fail: by failing to achieve the excellences required by the community or by
offending against the good of the community. Sometimes these things will coincide. But it is
possible to obey the laws out of cowardice because one is afraid of punishment or to tell the truth
out of vanity because it is in one's immediate interest, or to champion ideals as mere projections
of one's neglected ego. Then the good of the community is preserved but the achievement of the
members for the sake of which the community exists is lost. To do positive wrong is not the
same as being defective in doing or being good. An offense against the laws destroys the
relationships which make the common pursuit of the good of the community impossible.
Defective character not only renders someone more liable to commit offenses, but also makes
one unable to contribute to the achievement of the good without which the community's common
life has no meaning or purpose.

The crucial link between the moral virtues and the law is the principle that knowing how to apply
the law properly is itself possible only for someone who possesses the virtue of justice. Justice
implies giving to each person in the polis precisely what they deserve. This requires two
conditions to be met: that there are reasonable criteria for what people deserve AND that a
particular social community has come to an agreement as to what these are. Aristotle is very
unmodern in this regard: Law and Morality are not two independent domains of intellectual life
and intellectual life is not independent of human life in everyday existence. According to
Aristotle no law can be mechanically or deductively applied: justice demands equity; equity
demands each case be adjudicated "KATA TON ORTHON LOGON," according to right reason.
(NE 1138b25) Aristotle is not proposing any kind of rule-dominated ethics, to the contrary, for
Aristotle the rules are always derived, secondary, and abstract in the sense that they need to be
justly, equitably, and reasonably applied.

6.4 The Golden Mean: Not What Most Interpreters Think It Is.

Most folks who read the Nicomachean Ethics think that Aristotle's principle that "Virtue lies
between two extremes" is some kind of a rule. It is not. In fact it is recommended precisely
because there can be no automatic deductivist rule-controlled approach to adjudicating moral
issues, the issues concerning how to live life well. According to Aristotle good judgment has an
indispensable role in the life of the virtuous man, for the virtuous man is more than the merely
law-abiding citizen. The virtue of courage lies between rashness and timidity, but what lies
between the two can be grasped only by good judgment. Sophrosune or self-control lies between
being dominated by your passions and being so removed from them that you become inhuman,
but what lies between the two can be grasped only by good judgment. Justice lies between doing
injustice and suffering injustice, but what lies between the two can be grasped only by good
judgment. Finally good practical judgment depends upon Practical Wisdom or Phronesis. What
lies between is no compromise on the same level of practice, rather it is achieved from a higher
viewpoint. Phronesis like all the practical or we would say moral virtues is acquired only through
habitual exercise. But since Phronesis is also an intellectual virtue, it requires a teacher or
incarnate paradigm. As we transform our initially natural good dispositions into virtues of
character and eliminate our natural defective dispositions from our character, we do so by
gradually coming to exercise those dispositions kata ton orthon logon, according to a reasonable
standard. The exercise of practical wisdom, phronesis, is what makes the essential difference
between what is merely a natural disposition and a moral or practical virtue. Conversely, the
exercise of practical intelligence requires the presence of the virtues of character otherwise it
degenerates into a merely cunning capacity for finding any means to any end whether the end is
a genuine good for human life or not.

6.5 The Really Intelligent Thing to Do is the Good Thing to Do.

Like Plato and Socrates before him for Aristotle Excellence of character and Excellence of
intelligence cannot be divorced. There is no way to be really intelligent and really vicious. But it
is just as true to say that there is no way to be really good and really foolish. Even stupidity of a
certain kind precludes genuine human goodness. Unlike for us for Aristotle it is impossible for
an expert to match means and ends in a neutral way. It is not possible in an Aristotelian world to
envision a monolithic "value-free" bureaucratic culture of modern experts because in Aristotle's
view the connection between practical intelligence and the moral virtues is firmly established.
From this interconnection of practical intelligence and the moral virtues Aristotle draws the
conclusion that there is no way to possess any of the virtues of character in a developed form
without possessing them all. (NE 1145a)

Not only are the central virtues intimately related to one another, all the virtues are related to one
another as the good life has a unity and integrity. Justice precludes the vice of accumulating
material things for their own sakes, but then so does self-control (sophrosune). It is the same way
with the interconnection with other virtues. For Aristotle the moral agreement about what is and
what is not a really good human life established in a community is what makes possible the kind
of bond between citizens which constitutes a polis. On these terms there is no modern polis on
principle in that sense. The moral-political bond is the bond of friendship which is itself a virtue.
For Aristotle the kind of friendship he meant was one in which the friends recognize and pursue
together what is really worth while. This sharing is essential to the constitution of any form of
human community. Legislators seem "to make friendship a more important aim than justice."
(NE 1155a 24) Aristotle probably had in mind the discourse of Plato in the Sophist on the
Community of the Friends of the Forms as one of his central models.

6.6 The Necessity for Friendship Based on Virtue in the Polis.

How can a whole polis be friends with one another when even Aristotle admits that we could
have only a few such good friends? The bond of friendship is what counts. Networks of small
groups of friends sharing everything in the creation and preservation of the polis. The polis is
made possible because of this bonding which tends to embrace the project of the political
community as a whole. We would say these people stand out as leaders of the political
community and we would add that Aristotle intended this participation to spread throughout the
polis and make all citizens capable of being such leaders. Could this be the same result intended
by Plato's Republic in which the rule of the philosopher tends to imply the rule of all citizens
who strive for and possess Socratic wisdom? I think so.

We have lost this notion of the political community as a common project among friends in our
liberal, individualist, technological, bureaucratized, post- modern state. The Greek Polis is
concerned with the whole of human life the way friends are concerned with the whole of one
another's lives without being totalitarian about it. What causes the emergence of totalitarianism
in all its ugly post-modern forms is a tendency to take over the whole of the lives of the citizens
of a post-modern state outside of the context of friendship in the polis. In fact from Aristotle's
point of view it is impossible to have friends independently of the political community they are
so interconnected in their essence. We cannot even conceive of this impossibility because for us
friendship belongs in the private-subjective world alone and politics in the public-objective
world alone. From Aristotle's viewpoint a post-modern, liberal, political community can be only
a "collection of citizens" from nowhere or anywhere who have banded together for their common
protection; and sometimes that even means a protection from the very state to which they look
for protection. They possess the lesser form of friendship founded upon mutual advantage or, as
the medievals called it, the bonum utile. (Contrasted with Bonum Honestum) Neither the good
man nor the good polis can contain real conflict in principle. If there is no harmony or even
imperfect harmony, then there is lacking something of the moral excellence they believed to be
necessary for human life. This was the conclusion of both Plato and Aristotle. Civil war is the
worst social evil. This does not mean that both Plato and Aristotle believed that all tensions
would be eliminated in the man of practical wisdom or the just state. There is tension in overall
harmony and because there is there is no conflict and its resultant disorder. Conflict is simply the
result of flaws in character in individuals or of unintelligent political arrangements in societies.

6.7 The Place of Dialectics in Aristotle's Understanding of the Good Life.

Although it is not quite true in Plato's dialogues, certainly in Aristotle's treatises the human
conflict, Agon, has been decentered from the role it played in understanding the human condition
in the poetic tradition of Homer and the tragedians. On Aristotle's view the tragic hero fails
because of a flaw in his character, not because of an essentially flawed human condition.
Dialectics becomes preparatory for philosophy but not integral with philosophy in Aristotle.
Herein lies a certain superiority of the Platonic method over Aristotle's mediation and
appropriation of it in theory. The danger of the Platonic dialectic is that it tends to remain
undifferentiated and rhetorical; the danger of the Aristotelian method is that it fails to recognize
the fundamental, dialectical character of the human condition and the consequences for
philosophy. Systematic philosophies tend to forget that their foundations presuppose a set of
conversions or protrepses. Whether Aristotle completely succumbed to this tendency or not is for
each reader to determine for themselves. In the end Aristotle returns to the Platonic Vision of the
Good in contemplation in the final arguments of the Ethics when he returns to the question about
the deepest meaning of human happiness or eudaimonia, well-being.

There is a tension between Aristotle's view of human life as ultimately political or contemplative.
I believe that tension is intentional. I believe that anyone who believes they have to choose
between the active or contemplative life in real life or in the interpreting Aristotle does not really
understand Aristotle or the real human situation. For Aristotle as for Plato the two can not be
separated. Aristotle's criteria in the Ethics is the criterion of autonomy: The practice of
contemplation requires less in the way of external conditions for its excellent exercise.
Remember that exercise is put in the context of the man of practical wisdom. Recall Plato's
Republic in which Socrates argues that even when a people can be convinced that philosophers
should rule them, it is even more difficult to persuade and impossible to convince them to
assume the responsibilities of rule which will necessitate a turning from the contemplation of the
Good. The rule of the philosopher is from his point of view the next best thing. The best thing
would be for him to contemplate the Good and let others rule using philosophers as their guides.
I think it is in this spirit that Aristotle says, praising the contemplative life as the happiest
philosophical life,

". . .the activity of our intelligence constitutes the complete well-being of mankind, provided it
encompasses a complete life-span because human happiness requires completeness. However,
such a life would be more than human. A man who would live it would do so not insofar as he is
human, but because there is a divine element within him. This divine element is as far above our
composite nature as its activity is above the active exercise of practical virtues. So if it is true
that intelligence is divine in comparison with ordinary human life, then a life guided by
intelligence is divine in comparison with human life. We must not follow those who advise us to
have merely human thoughts since we are only human, and mortal thoughts as mere mortals
should; on the contrary we should try to become immortals as far as that is possible and do our
utmost to live in accordance with what is highest in us. For though this is a tiny portion of our
nature, it far surpasses everything else in value. We might even regard it as man's true self, since
it is the controlling and better part. It would therefore be strange if a man chose not to live his
own life but someone else's." (From the Book X chapter 7 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics).

Not to live according to your own intelligence is not to live your own life, but someone else's.
This is a statement similar to the famous Socratic one to the effect that the unexamined life is not
worth living. Only those who believe that Aristotle forsook Plato's vision of the Good would
have difficulty interpreting this passage or taking it seriously. Since I do not believe any such
thing, I think this represents the culmination of the Aristotelian system.

Aristotle like Plato before him connects the life of contemplation with friend- ship and the
political community. There are three kinds of human friendship: business friends based upon
mutual utility, social friends based upon the shared mutual pleasures of human life, and a
friendship of intimacy based upon the goods of both in the context of the pursuit of the excellent
life. The last kind is the most profound kind of friendship and provides Aristotle with the
paradigm for the friendship of husband and wife in the family or household and for the
friendship between citizens in the Polis. The excellent human life requires the material prosperity
to exercise the intellectual and practical excellences of human life together with friends and for
the sake of the contemplation of the Truth and Goodness itself. Finally like Plato's city Aristotle's
city founded upon justice and friendship is the best kind of city because it enables, indeed
encourages, its citizens to enjoy the life of divine contemplation.

The intellectual and moral virtues are unavailable to people who do not live in political
communities like the Polis described by Aristotle. Therefore the human good is not fully
available to slaves, barbarians, or for that matter us in our post-modern monolithic, bureaucratic
states according to Aristotle's criteria in the Nicomachean Ethics. Human freedom requires a
polis. Whoever lacks a polis is incapable of political relationships which are the relationships
between free men who both rule and are ruled as political subject and political sovereign.
Political life implies being free from any position that is mere subjection. Freedom is, therefore,
the necessary condition for the exercise of the virtues or human excellences and the achievement
of the human good.

6.8 Aristotle's Understanding of Human Nature and its Destiny.

What should we think about Aristotle's position that slaves and non-Greeks are incapable of
political relationships? Certainly the Greek ideal of freedom is sublime, one which we have
inherited along with its prophetic counter-part in the West. This is an Ideal that the Greeks
themselves failed to live up to fully. From Aristotle's point of view at the time it probably
seemed highly improbable that other peoples would achieve what his Greek way of life
represented. He himself was a non-Athenian, a Stagirite who probably became impressed with
the Athenian cultural-philosophical achievement. The Greeks had no understanding of history as
part of human destiny. This is the prophetic and Hebraic part of our inheritance. In Aristotle's
view as members of a living species human individuals have a destiny, a telos; but as a
community, the political community is in no way determined by or moving towards an historic
telos or destiny. Historical knowledge was, therefore, below poetic knowledge in the hierarchy of
enlightenment because unlike poetry it did not deal with intelligible types that occurred exactly
in the same way over and over again. It was therefore unphilosophical. For Aristotle scientific
knowledge or Episteme is knowledge of the essential natures of things grasped through universal
and necessary truths derived logically from first principles. Human affairs or the practical issues
of human life do not admit of such a treatment. Aristotle knew that the knowledge proper to the
study of man (human sciences) allowed generalizations that were probably true (epi to polu), true
for the most part. As a man of classical antiquity, he was characteristically not interested in
pursuing what yielded less than a fully systematic knowledge beyond, of course, what we find in
his ethics and politics. Finally Aristotle allowed himself to be allied with the Macedonian royal
power in the persons of Philip and Alexander who ultimately destroyed the Greek Polis as a Free
City and brought to an historical end the historic instance of the polis as normative for essential
human nature. The ultimate irony would not have been lost on a Hebrew prophet.

The problem often cited against Aristotle concerning his position that some people are slaves by
nature is refutable without de-legitimating Aristotle's fundamental arguments in the Ethics and
the Politics because these positions are marginal to his arguments and a result of his agreement
with the common sense of his own time and culture. What about the argument to the effect that
the aristocratic virtues of magnanimity and munificence are more honorable than the virtues of
the working class and craftsmen? Is this elitism? Once again I think we must return to Plato to
understand its basis. In the Republic Socrates argues for a different set of higher virtues for each
higher class. The hierarchy is based upon higher function in the community. In this light the
argument is not only innocuous, it is true. Our rejection of elitism cannot imply a rejection of all
differentiations of value; for if it does then the human project is demeaned, dehumanized, and is
made just as inauthentic as it is by the elitist who demeans the achievements and contributions of
others simply because they are different from his own or performed by someone from a different
social class from his own.