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Aristotle’s contribution to establishing a philosophical method was extensive and profound. Philosophy up to and including Plato included the discovery of elenchus and dialectic methods both of which were essentially designed for a face to face debating approach that often took place in the presence of an audience expecting areté (excellence) in the context of a symbolic and mythological understanding of Language.
Aristotle, in contrast to most of his predecessors, viewed the historical development of Philosophy more systematically, perhaps exactly because of the methods he had discovered. Where Plato in his central work, “The Republic” resorted to allegory and myth at crucial moments in his theorising, Aristotle used Categories of existence and logical argumentation. This resulted in the replacement of the dialectical interaction of different thinkers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides by a more theoretical panoramic view of all the thinkers of the Greek age, including the so-called “natural philosophers”. The result of this historical-methodological approach was of course firstly, the “invention” or “discovery” of logic and, secondly, the emergence of hylomorphic theory from the metaphysical investigations into being qua being (the first principles of Philosophy). With these developments a panoramic view of the landscape of thought was made possible. Given that metaphysics begins with the asking of aporetic questions the definition of which refers to the phenomenon of there being apparently equally powerful arguments for both the thesis and the antithesis of the issue, there appears to be a need for an overarching theoretical framework in which elements of both answers can be accommodated without contradiction. Indeed one is given the impression that the canvas Aristotle was using was considerably larger than that used by previous philosophers. In Raphael’s painting “The School of Athens”, Plato is pointing upwards toward the ethereal heavens and Aristotle is pointing straight ahead, perhaps at future audiences and the demand for more systematic systems of representation. He was of course hoping that his works influence, including as it did the practice of incorporating the insights of previous systems of thought into present ones, would not diminish over time as has been the case.
Descartes and Hobbes were both anti-Aristotelian theorists and the result of their works was to return us to a dialectically inspired resurrection of materialism and dualism (The stuff of the later Romantic movement). These modern philosophers and many others philosophising in their spirit failed to understand that Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory transcended these alternatives with a systematic panoramic world view.
Aristotle embraces Heraclitus to a much greater extent than Plato did in his work and as a consequence we will find in Aristotle a more satisfactory explanation of the material aspect of reality, partly because matter is a part of the medium of change in Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory. Matter was conceived as infinite by the materialists of the Greek age which included the early Socrates in their number. Aristotle conceived of matter as infinite because it appeared to him that the number of forms matter could take was unlimited. One arrived at the fundamental elements of reality, i.e. an ontological understanding of what there was, by dividing the infinite continuum up either into abstract “atoms” or more concrete elements such as earth, water, air and fire. In Aristotle’s view, early materialism did not provide a sufficiently complex explanation for the desire to understand the world which he claimed all human beings possess. At best we are given a view of what might exist, e.g. atoms, elements etc, without any principle for their existence. This Aristotelian form of principled existence or explanation of existence refers to the question “Why?”, and this question in turn transports us very quickly into the realm of the aporetical which Descartes and Hobbes were so keen to abandon in favour of a methodology of investigation. For Descartes his method was purely rational and was based on the givenness of thought or consciousness in the activity of thinking: his method was purely rational. Hobbes on the other hand was intellectually skeptical of the world of thought and its wild and wonderful ontological structures. For him observation as part of a method of resolution and composition eliminated the wild flying creations of the intellectual imagination and allowed the philosopher like the scientist to slow the pace of investigation down to a pedestrian earthly speed. Freud embraced the Aristotelian mode of materialism and methodology in his dismissal of the Cartesian method and its view of consciousness.
In the empirical science of the era extending from Descartes and Hobbes, wholes were carefully resolved into their parts and these parts were re-composed into wholes. This method when applied to the human sciences then also gave birth to the resolution of holistic human activities into two kinds of events which were logically independent of one another—cause and effect. Given that human activities are logical composites of the actions of agents and the objects they produce, this of course places an enormous obstacle in the path of the task of explaining human activities. When the above method reigns, the domain of explanation, the question “Why?” tends to focus on the cause of the activity in accordance with a principle of causation which states that “every event has a cause.” This principle literally means that one cannot rest in ones explanatory task with another event because that in turn must have a cause and it says nothing about resting ones explanation on a foundation which is not of the event-kind. With this principle we are literally on the path to an infinite regress that will logically prevent the kind of explanation needed, if for no other reason than the fact that the direction of the explanation is archeological, proceeding backwards in time. Aristotle was one of the first to point out that explanation of human activity which aims at the good is teleological, aiming in the opposite direction, namely forwards in time (at the future). This kind of explanation starts with the aim of bringing something, (a holistic state of affairs), about, and will only be resolved into its sub-goal parts if there is a logical relation between these sub activities and the overall aim of the holistic activity. There cannot be a cause-effect relation as envisaged by analytical philosophy of the kind practised by Hobbes and Hume simply because a cause is logically independent of its effect and Aristotle’s explanations had a logical structure that demanded logical dependence of its elements. From a modern perspective, Sciences like Physics and non-organic chemistry have great use for the above method of resolution –composition without too much distortion of the phenomena being studied. It is, to take an example, more easy to see how dead rabbits decompose into particles but, on the other hand, staying at the level of particles it is much more difficult to use them to account for how these particles help to teleologically keep live rabbits alive. These particles, at the very least, need to be composed into organs, or the dandelions the rabbit eats. This example illustrates that decomposition into parts actively discourages teleological thinking. Aristotle’s starting points for the rabbit were its teleological ends of growth, survival, and reproduction, and these “ends” are used to conceive of the parts of the rabbit, namely, its organs and limbs. The same modus operandi is used for conceiving of the why’s and wherefores relating to the ends of human beings. For Aristotle, a particular form of life requires a particular constellation of organs and limbs functioning teleologically to keep the animal growing, alive and reproducing. Aristotle also recognises the principle of rabbit-hood in his comparisons of the form of the life the rabbit leads, with the form of life the human being leads. The rabbit, Aristotle notes, moves itself in accordance with this principle of rabbit-hood which rests not inside the rabbit but “in” the rabbit’s activity. For Aristotle all life-forms are, to use Ricoeur’s terminology “desiring, striving, and working to be, to survive”.
Organisms are, in a sense, causa sui, the (logical) cause of their (continued)) existence. This causa sui-principle is not in any sense the terminal point of the explanation Aristotle requires. He believes we also need to provide a categorical framework other than material and efficient causation in order to “describe” the forms of life we encounter in the world. Aristotle’s “forms of life” are defined by the characteristic features of the activities engaged in by these “forms of life”. Plants, for example, are characterised (described and explained) by their growth and reproduction: animals by growth, reproduction, perception and purposeful movement, and human beings by all these characteristics, plus talking, remembering, imagining, understanding, judgement, and reasoning. One sees very clearly in this account, how life forms are defined by, not just their organ systems, but also by characteristic powers, each building upon the other teleologically until the form of life the animal is destined for is actualised in accordance with an actualising process determined by its telos or end. This life-form is determined by factors internal to the organism and not caused to come into existence by some outside agent as a table is caused to come into existence by the craft of the table maker. The parents of the organism pass the art of living on to their offspring by the creation of an internal principle, which in turn will from the inside create the form of life typical of the organism. Matter does not drop out of the account completely. It is potential and it actualises its potential by being formed by some principle, e.g. the matter of living beings is formed into flesh, bone, and organs. This system of matter produces a system of powers that in turn generates the form of life typical of the organism. These two systems together suffice to place living beings in a particular categorical framework. It is important to note here, however, that the telos or end of the actualisation process is the key to describing and explaining the function of the “parts” or the “elements” of the living being. This telos, before it is actualised, is potentially present as part of the principle of the organism. What the organism is, and what it strives and works to become, define the nature of the being that it is. For Aristotle, this essence or form can be captured by an essence or form-specifying definition. The categorical framework outlined above supersedes but does not eliminate the earlier division of the material world into earth, water, air, and fire, each of which, according to Aristotle, also possesses an essence or a form partly defined by what it can become or its telos, which in the case of these 4 elements is determined by the final resting place (cf. T S Eliot, the death of earth, water, air and fire?)1 . The earth is at the centre of the system of elements, and is the source of all life, which also requires water and air and the sun to thrive in accordance with the form of life determined by the system of organs and the powers generated thereby. When the organism dies, its parts are returned to the earth, its resting place. Death, on this account is defined in terms of the lack of a principle of change in the organism: the organism now “possesses” in an empty sense, organs and limbs that lack the power of movement or change. Life, in relation to the long-term tendency of the physical elements to return to their source and place of rest, is paradoxical because it is composed both of “that for the sake of which” the process of growth occurs, and the principle or form determining this process. Thus, forms or principles are, for Aristotle, the constituents of the universe: constituents which allow us to understand the truths of materialism, and the truths of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Plato. When the principle or form is imposed externally upon matter as is the case with Art by the craftsman painting a painting or building a building it appears as if form and matter can be separated.
If the art concerned is the art of building it almost seems as if the material of the bricks and wood is waiting around at the building site for the builder to shape into the form of a house. Several weeks later the material is standing high above the earth in the form of a house. In cases of living forms, however, the principle and the matter are, so speak, “intertwined” and inseparable and give rise to powers which the whole organism manifests. Matter, in itself, is therefore, only understood in terms of its principle of organisation. The organs and limbs of flesh and bone are not the pure or prime matter of a human form. The organs and limbs themselves dwell in a hierarchy that rest on the elemental matter of earth, water and heat. The powers of the organism in their turn rest on the formed matter of the organs and limbs.
Jonathan Lear in his work: “Aristotle: the desire to understand”(2) has the following to say on the topic of the actual presence of powers in the living being:
“However, if this power is not a functional state of material structure, how can its presence be observed? Are natural powers beyond the realm of empirical inquiry? No, they are not: but it takes some care to spell out the conditions under which they can be observed. Obviously, powers are not immediate items of sensory perception. Nor can they be seen under a microscope. If an intelligent scientist were permitted to observe only one immature natural organism in his life, having been kept in ignorance of the general facts of generation and destruction, then there would be no way he could detect the presence of a power in the organism. The first dawning of the idea that a power is present could only occur in retrospect. From the perspective of the fully developed organism we realise that there was a force present in the immature organism which directed its growth and activity toward this mature state. However, although the original idea of the presence of power is necessarily backward looking, this does not imply that powers are unobservable.”(P.22)
Aristotelian teleological explanation has often been misinterpreted by the modern inductive scientist who embraces the methodology of resolution and composition. Such scientists set about dividing the whole into its parts and then attempt, on the basis of the observation of the actions and reactions of the parts (and their relations), to re-compose the whole. A power could never emerge with this inductive method especially if this method is accompanied by a resolution of the whole into two logically independent events of the cause and effect kind.
Sometimes we hear from the scientist the complaint that teleological final causes are using an impossible mechanism of “backward causation” and that this violates the logic of causal explanation.The way to short circuit such objections is to situate teleology in its holistic context of form, potentiality, power, and reason.
The power which differentiates man from other organisms, according to Jonathan Lear, is the power of asking the question Why? in the search for understanding of the world and oneself. This obviously builds upon other powers of talking, remembering, imagining, judging, and thinking and the question is rewarded with answers provided by a naturally ordered and regulated world.
This is the question that, for Aristotle, reaches into the cave of our ignorance, like the sunlight. The world in its turn provides an explanation in terms of the form, principle, or primary cause of whatever it was that provoked the question. In our desire to be, and effort to exist, (to use Ricoeur’s terminology) we are all engaged on this search for understanding, argues Aristotle. This “Why” question can be answered in 4 different ways, Aristotle claims, and the suggestion is that all 4 kinds of answer are required if our explanation is to be adequate or complete: i.e. all 4 kinds of answer are needed for the explanation to meet the conditions required by the principle of sufficient reason as understood by Kant. Three of the types of non materialistic explanation, the efficient, formal and final causes (aitiai) are different ways of giving the same answer: they are, that is, in Aristotle’s terms, different aspects of the formal component of hylomorphic theory. These three types of explanation do not, however, meet the conditions of the principle of sufficient reason. An explanation of nature incorporating the truths of materialism is also required for a complete explanation. Many later philosophers such as Hobbes and Hume were interpreting the central idea of “cause” physically and materially and they were convinced that the other explanations were either fictional creatures of the imagination or alternatively could be reduced to a physical idea of linear causation.
In such accounts there is a remarkable absence of theorising about the relation of matter to our understanding of it as well as an absence of theorising about the media in which we encounter objects, namely space and time.
Lear’s otherwise excellent work on Aristotle is somewhat incomplete in terms of the simplicity of the account of Aristotelian thought in relation to place and space, i.e it is not clear that Aristotle did not make the assumption that reality could be characterised mathematically, in terms for example of the finite and the infinite. A mathematical point, after all is not anything actual: it is something potential. It only appears in reality or becomes actual if something concrete or abstract happens at that point, e.g. one begins at that point to perhaps represent motion in a straight line until that motion or represented motion comes to rest at another resting point which is actualised, as the motion or represented motion comes to an end.
Space is also represented in the above example. Matter may be represented if one imagines a physical body or particle in motion. Space, Time and Matter were, for Aristotle, essential media for the experience or representation of reality and these media for change played a very important role in his conceiving of reality as an infinite continuum. Turning to the example of the line defined as the shortest distance between two points, we know that there are potentially an infinite number of stopping points between the starting and stopping points on the line. We can clearly see the role of the concept of potentiality in this context. Indeed, one might even wish to argue that the Aristotelian matrix was far more complex than our modern space-time causation matrix given that it can embrace human reality in the form of a builder building a house starting from the point at which a pile of bricks and wood is located at one space and ending in another place with a completed house occupied by a family living a flourishing life. Dividing this reality up by using our modern matrix of space-time-causation and the resolution-composition method of modern science where we end up with two events such as the building activity of the builder and the product of a house rather than one Aristotelian event of change, is a recipe for confusion, according to hylomorphic theory. Hume, as we know, was a victim of this mode of observational thought and apart from the above mistakes, he arrived at the paradoxical result of cause being a conventional idea—simply on the grounds of his claim that causation could not be observed. He did not believe, that is, that we can observe a builder building a house. Aristotle’s view is that his causation-space-time matrix of reality is part of of a larger matrix of kinds of change and principles provided by his metaphysical presentation of “First Philosophy”. First philosophy is here understood as the first principles of any kind of change in the universe. We mentioned above that the power or capacity of a rational animal capable of discourse—a human being—begins in awe in the face of the existence of the world and its ever changing nature. We see and conceive of what is there and we spontaneously seek to understand the why.
This desire to understand ”the why” entails all of the following components:4 kinds of change, three principles of change and four causes/explanations (aitiai) being provided to the searcher for understanding of the changing reality.
There has been much ado about the latter component of the above account, namely the 4 aitiai or kinds of “explanations”. The Scientific matrix and method, for example, conceives of matter, not as potential to be formed, but rather as “events observed” in accordance with the cause-effect rule, and the resolution-composition method. This conception insists that teleological explanation is incoherent: it cannot be observable when the builder is in the process of building the house. Science, in other words, cannot conceive of potentiality because potentiality is not actual and real—because, that is, it has resolved the one event of change into the two events of cause and effect which are, according to Hume connected because of the regularity of the world and the “conventional” way in which we characterise the world. Science sees these events in terms of observation and any reasoning about unobservables (such as the thought of the house “in” the mind of the builder cannot be observed), therefore does not exist. What is being imagined here is that the metaphorical “in” is a spatial characterisation. There is nothing consciously “in” the mind of the builder: rather there is a principle related to the builders powers operating in the movement of the materials from one location to another. The scientist who is committed to denying the Aristotelian account just does not know how to characterise this holistic event of “the builder building a house”.
Descartes, Hobbes, and Hume managed to turn our Aristotelian ideas of the world upside down in the name of a matrix of dogmatism and skepticism directed at common sense and its judgments about reality. Christopher Shields in his work”Aristotle”3 illustrated excellently how down to earth Aristotle’s “explanatory framework” is:
“Suppose that we are walking deep in the woods in the high mountains one day and come to notice an object gleaming in the distance. When it catches our eye our curiosity is piqued: indeed Aristotle thinks so much is almost involuntary. When we come across an unexplained phenomenon or a novel state of affairs, it is natural—it is due to our nature as human beings—that we wonder and fall immediately into explanation seeking mode. What we see glistens as we approach it, and we wish to now what it is. Why do we wish to know this? We simply do: so much is unreflective, even automatic. As we come closer, we ascertain that what is shining is something metal. Upon somewhat closer inspection, from a short distance, we can see that it is bronze. So now we have our explanation: what we have before us is polished bronze. Still, if we find a bit of bronze in the high mountains we are apt to wonder further about it, beyond being so much bronze. We will want to know in addition what it is that is made of bronze…..as we approach closer we ascertain that it has a definite shape, the shape of a human being: it is a statue..We also know further, if we know anything about statues at all that the bronze was at some point in its past deliberately shaped or cast by a sculptor. We infer, that is, though we have not witnessed the event that the shape was put into the bronze by the conscious agency of a human being. We know this because we know that bronze does not spontaneously collect itself into statues… So now we know what it is: a statue, a lump of bronze moulded into human shape by the activity of a sculptor. Still we may be perplexed. Why is there a statue here high in the mountains where it is unlikely to be seen? Upon closer inspection we see that it is a statue of a man wearing fire fighting gear: and we read, finally a plaque at its base: “Placed in honour of the fire-fighters who lost their lives in the service of their fellows on this spot, in the Red Ridge Blaze of 23 August 1937”. So now we know what it is: a statue, a lump of bronze moulded into human shape by the actions of a sculptor placed to honour the fallen fire fighters who died in service.”(P.42- 43)
There would seem to be little to object to in the above description of the natural investigation into the identity of a temporarily concealed object. The above is clearly located in the context of discovery with respect to the phenomena of nature. There is, however, nothing aporetic about this investigation or this object. This is nevertheless one form of aletheia, a simple form, but a form of the search that nevertheless aims to uncover the truth. Were the questions to concern objects or events or actions which do not carry their meanings on their surfaces: for example, an investigation into ones own being, which in Heidegger’s own words should result in the characterisation of us as beings for whom our very being is in question, the question would most certainly fall into the category of aporetic questions, and the answers we uncover would not be as obvious as they were in the above investigation. In the case of an investigation into our human nature the search for aletheia would be difficult and filled with philosophical debate and dispute, but it would remain the case, however, that the Aristotelian hylomorphic theory of change would be the best guide to lead us out of the cave of our own ignorance. This philosophical respect for the being of the human form of life was no doubt a part of Freud’s psychoanalytical theorising which raised aporetic questions requiring a complex methodology and theory to answer.
The answers produced in response to questions concerning the being of human beings via the use of the scientific method of resolution-composition and its space-time linear causation method has now had several hundred years to produce a theory to rival Aristotle’s. The best it has achieved, according to many Analytic Philosophers, is either a kind of Quinean dualism of observation sentences and theoretical sentences based on a crude behaviouristic account of stimulus meanings, or alternatively, the more sophisticated dualism of Wilfred Sellars in which he, in the spirit of Platonic dualism, distinguishes between the Scientific image of the world and the Manifest Image of the world which he attributes to Aristotle.
If the world as the totality of facts is a position the scientist and analytical philosopher could take, we may legitimately ask for the Aristotelian response to this position. For Aristotle his response is his entire hylomorphic theory but one key element of his response would contain the claim that the world is constituted of potentially evolving forms which use three “mechanisms” of transmission.
Jonathan Lear characterises these mechanisms as the actualisation of sexual reproduction, the actualisation of artefacts such as houses and the communication of ideas by teaching. There is in the actualisation of these three kinds of forms, the foundational activities and principles of our civilisations.
Here we see the appearance of levels beginning with biological necessity, continuing with the instrumental/hypothetical necessities that we see all around us in our cities, and ending with the educational system in which we engage in activities that are categorically valuable in themselves. Levels that stretch from the level of the animal to the level of the divine.
The above account for Wilfred Sellars’ terms would be an account of the Manifest Image of the world(4) . A world view in which potentiality requires a forward looking future-oriented teleological perspective as opposed to a naturalistic archeological antecedent event perspective. If the Manifest view of the world looks backward in time, it looks for an agent possessing powers and capacities. The teacher teaching in his classroom, for example, is expressing the power or form of teaching which was sometime in the past transmitted to him via an organisation of forms that were passed to his teachers. In his teaching he passes on the forms of geometry and number on to his pupils until these forms dwell in their souls to such an extent that we can call his pupils geometers and mathematicians. A scientific observer who claims that causation must be actually observable might have great difficulty in attributing the names of “geometer and mathematician” to these students talking about mathematics in the agora. It might only become obvious if one of these students begins to teach a slave boy the intricacies of the Pythagorean theorem. The form of geometry would then be actualised in this activity of a teacher teaching. In these processes of acquiring knowledge, building houses, or reproducing, there is a striving or aiming for an end or telos which is a primary structure of the Aristotelian world. Attempting to investigate such phenomena by trying to observe actual material or functional structures (a brain, for example) of the agent or his actions or by trying to see how one structure “moves” another as a bone moves a muscle, will never allow us to explain how striving is determined by the end it is striving toward. The method of resolution-composition requires a movement backward in time to search for causes. But even if one lands at the brain as a cause, this starting point for Aristotle would be a material form which is a result of a teleological biological process (Aristotle did not in fact understand the actual function of the brain but this would not have affected his point).
Brain matter, organs, bone and flesh were for him already “formed matter” which themselves require the kind of explanation he is providing. There is no infinite regress in Aristotle’s theory although there is reflection upon the nature of the infinite and its place in his space-time, matter-causation matrix. Matter, for example, is infinitely continuous, argues Aristotle:
“The infinite presents itself first in the continuous” (Physics 3, 1, 200b 17-18)
Space, time and matter are all continuous. Aristotle’s notion of the infinite is however, complex. Space, for example is not infinite in extent but it is infinitely divisible. The same is true for matter. Time, on the other hand, has no beginning and no end, as well as being infinitely divisible. The infinite is formless and is a pure un-actualised potentiality. Pure form and potentiality for Aristotle is God, a form that is not actually anything but pure potential to be anything that has happened, is happening, and will happen. Aristotle’s thought is difficult interpret here but he appears to regard God as the ultimate principle or law of all change. God operates in the realm of thought which for Aristotle is also a power or a potential we possess (but not in divine form). Our thought, however is located in time and God’s thought on the other hand, is atemporal, eternal, and not at all similar to the temporality of human consciousness. Thought in a great-souled being like God, will differ considerably when compared to human thought. God’s relation to reality as we conceive it is also problematical. It sometimes seems as if he is reality and this reality is for him included in the realm of thought. If this is correct then Gods thinking about himself is what produces change in the world but this thinking is infinitely continuous, without beginning and without end and not part of what we experience to be actualising processes. If God has a relation to time it must be as a condition for the existence of time. Divine thinking is not in “nows” as is the case with human beings, but rather is a condition of the existence of the minds measuring time, and a condition of the eternal movement of the heavenly bodies which we choose as a standard of measurement by which to measure time.
Newton’s distinction between absolute time which flows on continuously and of itself, and the relative time created by human mind’s measuring the eternal flow may well have its roots in Aristotelian reflections. We cannot, however, on Aristotelian grounds, make absolute time intelligible because it is at the end of the Aristotelian spectrum extending from pure matter at one end to pure form on the other.
Time, in this Manifest Image of the world is, for Aristotle necessarily related to the mind in that the mind is partly constitutive of temporality. Number and Time have an intimate relation to each other. Both are involved in organising the Heraclitean world of change, quantitatively. It is possible that Aristotle would have been skeptical of Einsteins theory of relativity in which a stop watch is arbitrarily attached to a three dimensional system of coordinates in order to solve the problem of the temporality of events in relation to different systems of motion. For Aristotle, there is a deeper aporetic problem to be solved in the disentangling of the respective roles of the mind and the world in the generation of Time. The process is begun in the mind, for Aristotle, when the mind demarcates one now– a before, from another– an after. This activity of mind, argues Aristotle is used to then categorise an external phenomenon such as the passing of one day and the coming to be of the next day, a phenomenon related to the motion of the heavens. Here Aristotle is in agreement with Anaxagoras that ”All is mind”, but not in agreement with his claim that the infinite is identical with the whole of reality. For Aristotle the Greek word “apeiron” is a better guide to the meaning of the infinite which highlights the incompleteness that can never be given as a whole but only as a part of a whole. This is not quite what Sellars might have imagined to be part of the Manifest image of the world and more in line with a non-naturalistic Philosophical view of the world. The number system is so constructed as to accommodate the incompleteness of the infinite, as well providing a framework for the quantitative conceptualisation of the past, present, and future change. Aristotle is, however, very clear in his position that were there no minds to pronounce these periodic ”Nows”, there would be nothing to measure by means of this mental activity, there would, that is, be no time. Change and the regularity of nature assists in this process of understanding time but it is the former of these two and how to characterise it, that is the aporetic question par excellence.
Time raises many metaphysical questions relating to both the physical world and the role of the soul (psuché) in that world. This realm of the human form of being-in-the-world, requires a modification of what the modern Philosopher characterises as “Philosophical Psychology”. Such a modification can be found in Kant but also in Freud’s “Kantian Psychology” which sought to distance itself from the dialectical debates raging between followers of Descartes and his materialistically minded opponents. Aristotelian “Metaphysics” is concerned with “logical” first principles such as the principle of noncontradiction and the principle of sufficient reason which are principles of thinking that connect our thought to reality.
Aristotle’s response to dialectical reasoning and the dialectical interaction between the positions of materialism and dualism was hylomorphic theory and its method of metaphysical logic. This method builds upon a correct understanding of the Principle of non-contradiction (PNC) which he characterises as follows in Book 4, 3-6 of his work Metaphysics:
“It is not possible for one and the same thing both to have and not to have one and the same property.”
There is also a slightly different formulation of the same principle at 1006b 33-34:
“it is impossible that it should at the same time be true to say of the same thing both that it is human and that it is not human.”
The first formulation clearly refers to reality directly and the second formulation appears to take a more circuitous route and refer to what can be “Truly said” of reality thus indicating that the PNC is not merely a logical principle regulating relationships between propositions and statements. For Aristotle, the Principle refers directly to reality via our truthful claims about reality. If this is so, and this position is argued by Vasilis Politis in Chapter 5 of his work “Aristotle and the Metaphysics”1 , then it would appear to follow that logic is subservient to metaphysics and PNC then becomes a principle of what we would call “Metaphysical logic”. PNC on this kind of account is a source of demonstrative proofs or explanations which itself is not subject to demonstrative proof or explanation. As a corollary of his position in this debate, Politis argues that PNC is not a so-called “Transcendental Principle”, i.e. a claim to the effect that something is true of reality because it is true of thought or language. Politis has this to say on p 135:
“Aristotle argues (in Chapter 4,4) that if PNC were not true of things then we could not use thoughts and words to signify things, and in general we could not think and speak about things. He concludes that if PNC were not true of things, then thought and language about things would be impossible. PNC is true of things because it is a necessary condition for the possibility of thought and language about things.”
This has the logical consequence that there can be no demonstration or explanation of PNC. On our account, we wish to maintain, therefore, that PNC is a principle of metaphysical logic and only as a consequence a principle about thought and language about things. Aristotelian metaphysics is about the form, essence or primary principle of things. PNC requires that everything in the world has explainable essences or principles. Denying that things have essences or forms or primary principles is a condition of denying PNC. If things are indeterminate (have no essence) then PNC cannot be an applicable principle. However, since PNC is true of all things, all things are determinate and must, therefore, have essences. Socrates has an essence, namely his humanity, and therefore we can make true noncontradictory statements about him, i.e. access his “primary being” to use the expression used by Politis.
Returning to our second formulation of PNC, can we then not say that Socrates’ humanity is the primary principle or form or essence of the primary being of Socrates and is this not that which explains what Socrates ontologically is? Aristotle believed that all living things possessed souls of different kinds or in his technical language from De Anima, a soul is “the actuality of a body that has life”. But living things take different forms and Aristotle, therefore, constructed a matrix of life forms that defined a living things form or essence partly in terms of the physical organ system it possessed and partly in terms of the powers the thing as a whole possessed.
He begins with simple plants, their simple physical structures, and their powers of growth and reproduction. The matrix seems to be organised in terms of a continuum of a possible infinite number of forms only some of which are actualised because of the physical conditions of the elements of the world (earth, water, air, fire) and their accompanying processes of wet and cold, hot, and dry. The next stage of the continuum manifests itself in animal forms possessing animal organ-systems and the powers of perception and locomotion (in addition to the previous plant-like power). The penultimate stage of the matrix is that of humanity or the human being which possesses a more complex organ system and also more complex powers of discourse, memory and reasoning(in addition to all the lower powers previously mentioned). This matrix was an attempt to transcend the dialectical discussions of dualists and materialists and present a hylomorphic theory of the soul which would not fall foul of the PNC. This matrix is a matrix of agents and powers which in its turn is of course embedded in an environmental matrix of space, time and causation (discussed earlier). In a sense, Metaphysical Logic was metaphorically placing a curse on both the houses of dualism and materialism in order to stem the reproduction of theories from these sources. However, as we know Platonic dualism defied the metaphorical curse and was one of the motivating assumptions of Old and New Testament Religions and we also know that materialism was one of the motivating assumptions of the rise of modern science which Descartes, Hobbes, and Hume were embracing in their anti-Aristotelian theorising. As a direct consequence metaphysical logic dwindled in importance as the drama of dialectical interaction between Religion and Science played itself out at the beginning of our modern era. PNC was demoted from a Metaphysical principle to a transcendental principle of logic governing thought and language. Dualism was of course as old as the hills and Orphic, pre-Judaic, Judaic and Christian theories of the soul characterised it as a special kind of substance that breathes life into a material body embedded in a space-time-causation matrix. Materialism saved its breath for several centuries before finally claiming in the spirit of dialectical interaction that a non-physical, nonextended entity cannot have a causal effect in the physical matrix of the material world-i.e. that this substance can move nothing in the material world because it shares none of its properties. The soul cannot be causa sui, materialists argued, by definition, because it cannot be observed either by itself or by others in its putative causing itself to do things.
With PNC, Metaphysical logic and hylomorphic theory marginalised by a “transcendental” conception of logic, the resultant chaos was inevitable.
Metaphysics became identical with dualistic assumptions and Aristotle’s metaphysical logic was categorised as dualistic, and it was not long before PNC’s metaphysical implications were entirely forgotten except for those die-hard Aristotelians working in a University system, itself in the process of being transformed into institutions for the representation of the houses of dualism and materialism. Kant, thankfully, temporarily halted this process of “modernisation” for a short period of time, until Hegel and Marx in true dialectical fashion ensured that both Kant and Aristotle were consigned to the footnotes of Dialectical Philosophy. Both Aristotle and Kant emerged as relevant Philosophical figures once again when the process of “modernisation” was again halted in Vienna by Freudian psychoanalytical theorising and in England by the later Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Modernisation and the scientification of our everyday existence continue but for every halting of the process the followers of the opposition increase in number and help to construct what is now beginning to look like a philosophical tradition composed of the philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, and the later Wittgenstein and their followers.
The problem of the relation of the soul to the body must surely fall into the category of what Aristotle referred to as aporetic questions. It is also one of the key problems that need to be addressed in the arena of Philosophical Psychology. Aristotle regarded the relation of the soul and the body as a holistic unity similar to that of the relation between form and matter. Jonathan Lear, a commentator on the writings of both Aristotle and Freud characterizes this issue in the following way:
“Yet it is precisely because soul and body must form a unity in a living organism that it is difficult to distinguish them. Artifacts provided the original model for the form-matter distinction: and there is a clear sense in which a craftsman imposes form on a distinct matter. With living organisms, by contrast, matter and form are intimately bound up with each other: consequently, there is no distinctly existing and persisting matter on which soul can, from time to time, be imposed. Indeed the matter of a living organism seems to depend on being ensouled to be the matter that it is. And a given type of soul, say, human soul seems to require a particular type of matter. The living organism is such a unity but the real challenge for Aristotle is to show how that unity can legitimately be conceived as having two aspects, soul and body.”(P.98)
The soul is an actuality of matter (there can be levels of actuality,) and living beings can be regarded as “substance” par excellence by Aristotle. His matrix of different life-forms are established in terms of the kind of power that belongs to a particular form. In De Anima 15b 8-14, Aristotle maintains unsurprisingly that the soul is the moving, formal and final cause of the body. He also maintains that a particular constellation of organs are what give rise to particular forms of life. He does not claim that these organs “cause” in any modern sense, the form of life—it is rather the case that these forms of life “spontaneously” cause themselves to do what they do, i.e. exercise the powers typical of their particular life form. Aristotle, as we pointed out earlier referred to a matrix of life-forms which form a hierarchy from the simplest to the most complex form: from the simplest form of vegetation to the most complex life form of God. This matrix is constituted by the differentiation of powers, but the most interesting observation Aristotle makes is that the more complex life-forms incorporate the simpler forms and presumably, in so doing, transforms their functions so that more complex activities become possible . At the level of the human being, the next most complex form of life, Aristotle provides us with three different characterisations:
1. The first characterisation is in terms of an essence specifying definition: a rational animal capable of discourse. This is clearly a kind of summary of the most important powers a human possesses. .
2. The second characterisation is in terms of a careful account of how we acquire knowledge through the uses of the powers of perception, memory and reasoning which also appear to be related to powers of language and imagination.
3. The third characterisation is in terms of mans ability to reason both theoretically and practically.
There does not appear to be any conflict between these three characterisations. Hughlings Jackson, a theorist, who influenced Freudian theory, claimed that areas of the brain have a hylomorphic hierarchical structure. Freud used these hylomorphic ideas when he suggested his three principles of “psychic” functioning:–the energy regulation principle, the pleasure-pain principle, and the reality principle. Each of the higher principles “colonises” some of the territory of the lower principles thus transforming the human activities associated with them. Eating a meal, for example, primarily an energy regulation activity, is transformed into a civilised activity aiming at the pleasures of sitting down for a period of time with ones family. This is a clear example of the transformation of an instinctive/biological activity into a social event which may involve other powers of the mind, such as engaging in and reasoning at the dinner table.
Freud claims that one function of language and discourse is to bring “psychic” material into the field of consciousness (where all our powers appear to be integrated). Indeed, his later therapeutic techniques appear to be presupposing the hylomorphic principle of powers building upon powers with the intent of integrating all powers in the mind. Freud is ambivalent on the question of whether consciousness itself is a power or an inherent function of the brain probably partly because of the fact that he was fighting for hylomorphism against the predominating Cartesian model of consciousness. Freud obviously also benefitted from the work of Kant. He is reputed to have said that his was the Psychology that Kant would have written had he concerned himself with this subject which had broken its moorings from Philosophy in 1870. Kant’s work previously recreated the space for reflection upon the hylomorphic soul and the power of thinking that Aristotle had established earlier. The Dualism-materialism dialectical interaction continued however with the appearance of the Hegelian criticism of Kantian philosophy which it must be admitted was not straightforwardly hylomorphic. Freuds work began in materialistic mode but soon rejected its own assumptions and attempted to restore the Aristotelian principle based approach in the arena of what today we would call Philosophical Psychology. Even during the later phases it must also be admitted that Freud’s work is also not straightforwardly hylomorphic. There is clearly a dualistic tendency in Freud’s work which manifested itself when, in his last phase of theorising, he turned towards the theories of Plato for some of his key concepts (Eros, Thanatos, Ananke). In spite of these reservations however, it is clear that Freud’s theory is a theory of agency, principles, and powers set in a practical context of the search for a flourishing life. The Aristotelian notion of substance implies agents that can do things, and act upon things. Powers, for Aristotle, are potentialities to bring about changes in reality and this idea is clearly at work in the Freudian Reality Principle. A power is actualised as part of a cure, and then belongs to the agent. Hume would probably have objected that just as we cannot observe the cause of building a house, we cannot observe powers and that therefore they are highly dubious entities. This is a logical consequence of his position that whatever happens is the only thing that can happen. P.M.S. Hacker in his work “Human Nature: The Categorical Framework”2 argues that this Humean position is absurd, because it entails that if something can in fact only do what it does then the potentialities of possessing a skill or the learning of a skill become to say the very least problematic. Hacker is of course one of the foremost commentators and interpreters of the work of Wittgenstein who, he claims, restored hylomorphic theory in the seminar and lecture rooms of our dialectical Universities. Consciousness in its non-Cartesian form enters into modern post-Wittgensteinian discourse in terms of the reflective nature of the human being that possesses an awareness of their powers (unlike a magnet or snake which possess powers unreflectively). This reflectiveness, in its turn, according to Hacker, gives rise to powers that can be willfully used, i.e. powers that we can choose to exercise or not. It was this mental space that appeared to be absent in the mental constitution of many of Freud’s patients and it was this lack that drove Freud to postulate that the principles driving much of their activity was unconscious.
Hacker calls “volitional powers”, in which choice is involved, “two-way powers”. Included among such powers were the powers to perceive, remember, think and reason. He further argues that both Descartes and Hume conflate empirical and conceptual issues and thereby provided assumptions for an emerging neuroscience which were incoherent and confused. As we pointed out earlier Kant attempted to correct the influence of Descartes and Hume by claiming as an axiom of his philosophical psychology (Anthropology) that human beings know a priori the difference between what they are doing and what is being done to them. Kantian accounts as we now know unintentionally gave rise in the process of modernisation, to volitional theories which in attempting to classify our actions in terms of the modernist matrix of space-time-linear causation resolved a holistic activity into a causal relation between two occurrences which the empirical process of composition could not logically unify.
Schopenhauer, a contemporary of Hegel, was already experiencing the pull of modern volitionism back into a non-Aristotelian matrix of space-time-linear causation when he claimed that:
“we certainly do not recognise the real immediate act of will as something different from the action of the body and the two are connected by a kind of causality: but both are one and indivisible….thus actual willing is inseparable from doing, and, in the narrowest sense, that alone is an act of will which is stamped as such by the deed.”(World as Will and Representation)(3).
It is not difficult to see how volitionist theories are connected to the dualism-materialism dialectic (especially Cartesianism and its pernicious form of dualism that paradoxically ends up in the brain). Platonic dualism is not pernicious in this way. It distinguishes between a world of forms and a physical world—a world of representations and the world of that which the representations are of—which Schopenhauer addresses with his distinction between the world of will and the world as representation, where the former world is connected to a priori knowledge that is non-observational. Hylomorphic theory with its levels of actuality seems to be the only theory capable of “saving the phenomenon” of willing, without reduction or reification. Freudian theory, we should remember, maintained that one can act involuntarily. Hacker connects teleology to voluntary action and two-way powers in the following passage:
“Human beings, like other sentient animals with wants, have the power to move, to act, at will. “To act” in this context does not signify causing a movement, but making one. We acknowledge a special role for such so-called basic actions not because they are a causing of a movement that may be the first link in a causal chain, but because they are the first act. The first thing for which a purposive or intentionalist explanation may be apt. To say that a human being moved his limb is to subsume behaviour under the category of action. It earmarks behaviour as being of a kind, that is under voluntary control, as something of a kind which is a sentient agent can choose to do or not do, and hence indicates the propriety of asking whether there is an intentionalist explanation of the deed. The attribution of the movement to the agent is not causal. But it is an action, and therefore is of a kind that falls within the ambit of the variety of teleological explanation appropriate for human action. The agent may have moved his hand in order to… or because he wanted to…..or because he thought that….or out of fear, and so forth. Aristotle’s movement is to be understood to be liable to the range of explanations of the exercise of two-way powers by a rational agent.”(P.158)
This, of course, calls into question the observationalist use of the method of resolution and composition (the method of the behaviourist psychologist). Saying on the basis of observation, something about another agents movement, namely, that “His arm moved”, is a description which leaves it open whether this was something he did (raise his arm to call a taxi) or whether this was rather something that happened to him ( his arm raising in a fit of cramp). If the phenomenon was of the latter kind there are absolutely no grounds for calling what happened, “action”.
Modernisation of Aristotelian theory resulted in scientific reasoning in the spirit of Hobbes and Hume This then became part of the process of the dismantling of hylomorphic theory, a process that, in turn, resulted in the claim that teleological explanation is not a form of explanation at all. Two reasons are given for this claim. Firstly, the telos cannot be observed, and secondly, telos disappears in the methodical resolution of a holistic activity into linear cause-effect events. Events can then be comfortably described a-teleologically. That scientists should have spent so much effort and time in this composition and subsequent destruction of this “straw man of teleology” or “ghost of teleology”, is indeed thought provoking. What is even more thought provoking is the success of their “mythologizing of teleology” and the fact that this process could prove so devastating for the continued discussion of Psychological theories such as Freud’s and Piaget’s. Because this process was so successful it might prove useful to remind ourselves of what teleological explanation is via Hacker’s characterisation:
“Our discourse about the living world around us, about ourselves, our bodies and activities, and about the things we make is run through with description and explanation in terms of goals, purposes and functions. We characterise things such as organs and artefacts, and also social institutions in terms of their essential functions and their efficacy in fulfilling them. We explain animal morphology in terms of the purposes served by their shapes, limbs and features. This is not a causal explanation (although it is perfectly consistent with, and indeed calls out for one), since we explain what the organ or feature is for and not how it came about and not how (by what causal processes) it fulfils its function. We describe what it enables the animal to do and how it affects the good of the animal or its offspring. We commonly explain why certain substances animate and inanimate (artefactual) or constituent parts of substances (organs of living things or components of artefacts) do what they do by describing what they do it for…We explain and justify human action, including our own, by specifying the rationale of the prospective or antecedently performed action, and we often account for the behaviour of social institutions likewise. These kinds of description are called “teleological descriptions” and these kinds of answers to the question why, teleological explanations— explanations by reference to an end or purpose (telos).”(P163-4)
Hacker goes onto add that teleological explanation is a form of explanation that cannot be characterised in terms of the ideal of efficient causation that the scientist values so much, but should rather be characterised by an understanding which focuses upon reasons, goals and motives.
Hacker also agrees that teleology is linked to the idea of the good on the grounds of “psuche” being a biological/psychological substance whose essence it is to come into being, flourish, and eventually die and decay. Living beings on his and Aristotle’s account postulates that absolute needs are tied to health and mortality. These needs extend from life-maintaining activities, to activities producing the quality of life necessary for a flourishing existence. These latter activities require a considerable amount of learning and the acquisition of many complex skills. We can clearly see a hierarchy of needs emerging from this account. Abrahams Maslow’s theory(4) is a hierarchical theory in which satisfying a need “causes” another higher level need to emerge. There is, in this theory, an “incorporation of the lower level need in the higher-level. Proceeding up the hierarchy eventually results in a flourishing life for the individual concerned. Maslows account includes reference to cognitive and aesthetic needs.
,A large part of the task of society and its social institutions is that of striving toward the telos of the good: that is, for a society to be flourishing, large numbers of the members of that society must experience that the conditions provided allow them to have their needs systematically met. The telos of the society, as “the literary” Socrates suspected, must be connected to the telos of the individual. If an individual flourishes in a flourishing society he achieves what Aristotle refers to as the summum bonum of life, namely eudaimonia, or happiness. This can only occur, argue Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, if the society concerned is Rational. This moves us onto the question of the realm of the essence or formal “cause” of society and individual. One of the needs of the animal and the human being, is to reproduce, and if the latter is done rationally, a level of consciousness of the telos of sexuality, is a requisite condition. Plants and animals do not possess this requisite condition. In Freud’s theory, it is the principles of energy regulation and pleasure-pain that regulate reproductive activity. In the human being we are capable of regulating this activity by using the powers of discourse and reasoning. We can, that is, discuss the reasons for our reproductive and sexual behaviour. The essence of the individual is tied to reproductive activity for Freud, but his claims only make sense in the context of hylomorphic theory. The family is obviously the social institution most closely connected to sexual activity, and the bringing up of children which appears to so many to be an important part of the flourishing life. The family is also the basic social unit which forms the basis for the construction of the polis, and is therefore an important element of the flourishing polis (the Callipolis). Aristotle’s teleological explanations seem therefore to have clear application in the realm of the human world, but is the case for their application to the natural world equally obvious? Particles and matter for example are not naturally thought of in terms of being “for” anything and the reason why particles and matter do what they do is also not directly relatable to their internal potential to move but rather to some propensity to move when caused to do so by external factors. In a low pressure system, for example where the air is cooled the matter in the system will descend in the form of rain after having ascended in warmer circumstances to form clouds. This might suffice for some to attribute a telos to the evaporated water that was ascending and then descended back to earth in the cooling process. Some kind of resolution-composition method sufficed for Aristotle to pick out the elements of earth, water, air, and fire and their
associated processes of wet-cold, hot-dry and for him there did seem to be a place for teleological explanation in weather systems, organ systems and perhaps also economic systems. Basically energy regulation systems such as weather systems are set to a teleological standard of homeostasis. Viewed from the vantage point of energy regulation, Aristotelian teleological physics appears harmless enough. It is, however, when God is brought into the picture as a designer of systems that problems begin to emerge. Aquinas, a commentator and interpreter of the works of Aristotle from a religious point of view, attempts to argue that in the inorganic world, “material” which lacks awareness could only have a goal, i.e. act “for the sake of” some end, if God directed the process in much the same way as an archer intentionally directs an arrow at a target. This of course, cannot fail to remind us of the passage in the Nichomachean Ethics where Aristotle claims:
“If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this)…clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall one not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should do? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.”(I,2, 19-25)
Aristotle claims that this end is Eudaimonia, often translated as happiness, but not always happily so. Perhaps a better translation, in some contexts, would be “a flourishing life”. It is the function of man, Aristotle argues, to lead a flourishing life, which, for him, amounts to living in accordance with areté or virtue, which in its turn means doing the right thing at the right time in the right way: all these elements will be involved in the reasons a man gives for doing any particular act. This, in the Freudian scheme of things, would entail that the Reality Principle (Ananke) is the organising principle of one’s life. Aquinas conceives of God as a Supreme Agent, the Supreme Archer, but there is very little in Aristotle to support this thesis. Aristotle claims that an arrow falls downward for the same reason that rain falls downward in the weather system, namely earth falls downward because its situational-being is beneath the water and air, and this is its natural place. Fire and heat and light (not heavy) and warm matter moves upwards because the source of heat is its place, namely, the sun. All these elements are, we should be careful to note, already formed material (in accordance with the matter-form principle), and it is their form that decides their position, and changes of position in the universe. That is, an arrow will fall to earth after having been fired into the air because of the forms that compose it: the wood and the iron are returning to their source—the earth. Now Aristotle in claiming the above was not making the mistake of other early philosophers/poets and claiming that the arrow “wanted” to return to earth. After all, was it not Aristotle who claimed that a tree has a visual form to present to the human eye, but that a tree, because of its nature cannot itself be aware of visual forms? Did he not maintain that powers build upon powers and that in accordance with this idea only substances that can be perceptually aware of visible forms can “want” and desire something, and therefore strive to fulfil these wants and desires? Only animals and humans can fire the arrows of desire at their targets. Now, on Aristotle’s account, God is pure form but his function is pure thinking which does not desire or aim at objects, since all objects are immediately possessed by a pure thinker. God, therefore, cannot in any way be similar to a super-human craftsman creating and shaping the substance of the world over a period of time. The Biblical creation myth is allegorical and meant merely to establish the hierarchy or “Place” of animals in relation to earth and God in relation to man, and man in relation to the animals and the rest of the universe. In short God, whilst in some sense being alive, does not perceive or desire and his thought has no relation to these powers. There is, it should be noted, a significant difference between the philosophical God of Aristotle and the Biblical Mythical God who appears amorphously through the mists of mythological allegory. Aristotle’s God is not a craftsman caring for his creation, and he is not therefore the Supreme agent or Supreme archer directing the elements to their natural places. He is rather, pure actuality, pure form, pure thinking. He thinks in a way which is not the realisation of a potential but rather thinks of himself in a timeless infinite “moment” of contemplation. Perhaps Thales shared this conception and perhaps this is what he meant when he said “things are full of gods”, as a response to those atheists who believed that the planets were just cold feelingless stone. If God is not thinking as we do about Reality, how then should we characterise this thinking. Aristotle brilliantly chose the description/explanation that God thinks about thinking. He therefore cannot be a super-agent or a super-archer. When we are thinking, Aristotle points out, we partake however primitively, in the divinity of contemplation. When we are contemplating, it is during these moments that we are closest to God, and the extent to which this occupies a large proportion of our life is the extent to which we lead a flourishing life or the “good spirited (Eudaimonia) life. One cannot but be amazed at the ease with which Aristotle makes his transitions from Metaphysical aporia to Ethical and Political aporia. These almost seamless transitions were the reason why he was referred to as “The Philosopher” for several hundred years and “the teacher of our teachers”. Dante referred to Aristotle as “The master of those that know”. This is also the reason why we need to take his definition of Philosophy seriously—the systematic understanding of the world as a systematic whole– in a way that has been done only sporadically by Modern Philosophy since the time of Descartes and Hobbes. The world as a systematic whole, viewed hylomorphically, contains Psuché–a form of life which in itself contains a hierarchy of powers that are systematically related: powers, the explanation of which require an understanding of the difficulties associated with answering the Delphic oracles challenge to “Know thyself”. Freud answered this challenge and attempted to provide us with a map of the mind whose powers are disturbed, and this map required understanding of the “parts” of human pusché and their relation to the whole of the self-sufficient good spirited, flourishing mind.
Action and agency are central concerns for Aristotle, Kant, and Freud and we need therefore to see how the original account of these concerns given by Aristotle remains the core of Kantian and Freudian accounts.
Action and Agency are form-creators for Aristotle because they issue from a form of life which can build a world around itself. As a rational animal capable of discourse, I go forth in a world of physical events such as a storm at sea. After throwing the cargo overboard, I can but sit and wait for the consequences to play themselves out on this watery stage. As a rational animal capable of discourse I am of course a form of life that can act, but one whose actions have consequences I cannot control. The sun was shining and the weather was fine when I embarked on this sea voyage. The possibility of a storm at sea was a piece of knowledge I had but it was not active at the time of the choice. I am now trapped in this situation and if I was an ancient Greek, the “action” of praying to the gods might follow the action of throwing the cargo overboard. Is it irrational to begin to pray, or can one defend prayer as an assertion of agency as such when natural events play with our lives? For Aristotle, the world-creating forms occur in the media of change (space, time, and matter), and they find their explanation in a theoretical matrix of 4 kinds of change, three principles, and 4 causes. The material and efficient causes of the storm are forms situated in the infinite continuum of the media of change: the forms of water (the high seas) the forms of air (high winds) the forms of fire (the lightning
issuing from the heavens) and the wooden earth-like form of the ship being tossed about and being prepared to rest finally in peace on the earth at the bottom of the sea. In such a situation, can we talk about praying in terms of rationality? Well, I had the knowledge that this fateful outcome was a possibility and did not use this knowledge(1) For Aristotle, not using ones knowledge is a failure of deliberation and therefore of rationality. So all that is left of the definition of such a being is his animality expressed in his fear and apprehension and his attempt to communicate via the discourse of prayer with the “agency” expressed in the storm. For those who found themselves in such situations and prayed and survived to tell their story, it might seem as if some divine agent had now a reason to save the souls on the ship. Aristotle would not have sanctioned such an explanation. He would have pointed to all those skeletons lying on the floor of the sea-bed, resting: the remains of those who undoubtedly prayed and who lost their souls in storms at sea. Aristotle’s theory of action, agency, and powers would not permit the world of the human to become confused with the physical forms of the infinite continuum. That is, one can rationally say that I should have considered the possibility of the ruin of my hopes in a storm at sea and ought not to have decided to board the ship, but one cannot rationally say that the Storm ought not to have sunk the ship and extinguished the life of all the souls on board. For Aristotle, there is a categorical distinction to be observed here, a logical boundary that one only crosses on pain of the loss of one’s rationality. This does not necessarily mean that Aristotle would have thought that it was irrational to pray as the ship’s mast was broken by the tempestuous winds. Indeed he would have thought that we are active world-creating forms and a structured form of discourse was, of course, preferable to quivering and weeping or rushing around like the ship’s dog howling at the wind. We are forms of life embedded in a world of physical forms, and some forms of action are appropriate whereas some forms of behaviour are not as appropriate: or in other words, when we are dealing with free voluntary choices, there are actions which ought to be chosen and actions which ought not to be chosen. The oughts here are rational and can be formulated in value-laden premises and conclusions with logical relations to
each other, thus forming rational valid arguments for action. We are clearly exploring the foothills of ethics and morality, or as Jonathan Lear so clearly put it in his work “Aristotle: the desire to understand”, we are exploring the “Mind in action”. Lear believes that understanding Aristotle’s philosophical theories of Psychology are a necessary pre-requisite to understanding both his ethics and his politics. So the man on board the ship is acting and the ship’s dog is just behaving. Why the difference? The difference lies, Aristotle argues in our ability to think and create higher level desires which as a consequence creates a region of the soul which is rational and a region which is irrational. But we need to consider how the human higher form of desire is integrated with our knowledge(epistemé) if we are to fully understand the complexity of the human form of life. The desiring part of the human soul is the acting part because man is capable of acting rationally and behaving irrationally, i.e. he is capable of both reasoning that he ought not to drink water which might be poisoned, but he is also capable of drinking the same water. It is perhaps the existence of these parts of the soul which generates all those desires which we express in value-laden ought statements. The dog’s soul is perhaps a seamless unity but he too is an animal possessing some of our powers. One can, however, wonder whether dogs have minds in the sense of a mental space in which Aristotelian deliberations can take place. Deliberations are rationally structured but are also value or desire laden. Lear believes that Aristotelian deliberation transmits this desire. My wish to drink the water will be conscious, Lear argues, and will set in motion a deliberation until a decision is reached and an action commenced. This reference to consciousness is very modern and this, of course, is a term Aristotle never used: he preferred to use the term awareness instead, and many modern commentators build a notion of reflexivity into this awareness, that is, they claim there is a self-awareness implied in Aristotle’s usage of this term. What this in turn implies, is that there is a self that is aware of itself. Does this imply the presence of two selves? Not necessarily. There are in the actualising process of the human organism striving to be rational, earlier and later stages of development. There is no logical contradiction in the self at a later stage
confronting in discourse oneself at an earlier stage during the process of moving from one stage to the other. But this is a different kind of deliberation to that involved in performing an action. The process of reasoning involved is characterised by Aristotle in the “Metaphysics” as follows:
“…health is the logos and knowledge in the soul. The healthy subject, then, is produced as the result of the following train of thought: since this is health, if the subject is to be healthy, this must first be present, e.g. a universal state of the body, and if this is to be present, there must be heat: and the physician goes on thinking thus until he brings the matter to a final step which he himself can take. Then the process from this point onward, i.e. the process towards health, is called a “making” “(Metaphysics VII, 7, 1032B5-10).
This process of reasoning is then compared by Aristotle to the reasoning one finds in the activity of geometers. In geometry, synthesis is the name of a process of construction by iteration of elements and construction of relations between elements: a straight line is thus synthesised or constructed by the placing of a second point at a distance from the first and the connecting of these two points by a straight line. The analysis of this straight line would then break the process down in a set of orderly steps until one arrives at the stage at which one begins the synthesis again. The analysis reverses the process. In the example of the doctor planning to act in the above quote, the initial desired goal has been synthesised and the deliberation “analyses” or “deconstructs” the goal to that point at which the doctor/agent fetches some warm blankets from the cupboard to warm the patient who ”has a cold”. The forming of the desire to warm the patient is of course not deliberative reasoning it is more like the effect of Eros on the mind, more like a learning or succumbing process issuing from an attitude of mind of awe, love for the world, or desire to understand the world. Of course, one is aware of this desire and to that extent one is certain about it in the same way as one is certain of any other manifestation in the consciousness of any mental event. It is the self-reflexive act of contemplating the desire which allows freedom into the Aristotelian process of deliberation. The agent decides whether and/or how to satisfy his desire and once this process is completed the desire to
keep one’s patients healthy is transformed into a reason for acting. We are of course ignorant of the workings of this freedom to choose and to this extent, we are ignorant of part of the essence of what it is to be human. Kant would later dub this region of the mind , the region of noumenal being, the region of the noumenal self.
Reason, action, and consequence are concepts in complex relations with each other. Insofar as in Aristotle, forms constitute the world, the forms interacting in the matrix of space-time-material in accordance with a principle of causation must contribute to the creation or “forming” of this world. In a previous essay we pointed to the three different kinds of forms that constitute this world: firstly, the forms produced by and in relation to sexual reproduction, secondly, the forms produced by work of man in the building and construction of his artefacts, homes and cities, and, thirdly, the forms produced by teachers in the process of communicating knowledge.
Reason, action, and consequence are of course related to human activities insofar as they are knowledge-driven and also contribute to the ”forming” of the world. Such activities aim at the good they desire, and analyse what is needed in order to bring about the changes in the world they desire. Human agents have reasons for their actions in the same way as the archer has a reason for his action. The archer who hits the centre of the bulls-eye is like the geometer arriving at the point at which the reconstruction of his proof is presented. We, the audience, are in awe of his performance: the object of the action and the intention are in such cases in full, almost divine, congruence. The consequence is a logical consequence as is the recovery of the patient with the cold after the doctor restores the homeostasis of the body with the warm blankets. Many of our actions, however, do not achieve the desired result on the part of the agent, but this is no reason to doubt the logical relation in thought between the object and the intention. Human desire is generated in the human body. The desire to understand or to contemplate may be an activity that involves no bodily activity, although it is difficult even here to conceive of this activity taking place without correlative brain activity. It seems that only God, the divine, can think without a correlative underlying physical activity generating the thought. The mind-body problem obviously surfaces at this point in Aristotle’s philosophical psychology.
Sir David Ross in his work on “Aristotle”defines Psychology in terms of its objective “to discover the nature and essence of the soul and its attributes” So on this characterisation Psychology will cover vegetative and animal behaviour as well as human action. There is sufficient resemblance between the forms of life these different forms of soul lead to, sufficient to enable us to call soul “the principle” organising nutritive and reproductive activity, perceptive and motor activity, and human reasoning activity respectively. We mentioned earlier the relation between these forms of soul. David Ross puts the matter thus:
“Geometrical figures may be arranged in an order beginning with the triangle and proceeding to more and more complex forms, each of which contains potentially all that precedes. So too, the forms of soul form a series with a definite order, such that each kind of soul presupposes all that come before it in this order, without being implied by them.” (D.Ross, “Aristotle”, P.135)2
The physical substrate or matter underlying the above is obviously a simple physical organisation of parts of a plant to a more complex organisation of the organ systems of different species of animals enabling them to “sense” their environment or, alternatively, in the case of the rational animal, reason about their environment. It is also important to know about this material substrate which is inseparable from its mental aspect in the same way in which the shape of the ax is inseparable from its function of “chopping”. The soul and the body for Aristotle are in the human inseparable aspects. Ross has this to say on this topic:
“Most mental phenomena are attended by some bodily affection….Mental phenomena, therefore, are “formulae involving matter. The true definition of them will omit neither their form or end (their rational causation) nor their matter (their physiological conditions”(Ross, P.137)
The soul has its rational and irrational parts and also its various faculties which Ross explains in the following way:
“He is simply taking account of the fact that the soul does exhibit a variety of operations and that behind each of these intermittent operations we must suppose a permanent power of so operating. But these faculties do not exist like stones in a heap. They have a definite order, an order of worth, and a reverse order of development in the individual. Further, they have a characteristic which we may roughly call interpenetration. Thus, for instance, intellect and desire are distinct faculties, but the highest species of desire is of a kind which can only occur in beings which have intellect and is itself intellectual. Choice or will may equally well be called desiring reason and reasoning desire, and in it, the whole of man is involved.”(Ross, P.139)
The language of potentiality and actuality is particularly important in the Psychology of Aristotle because of his insistence upon categorical distinction between the operations of the soul: Firstly, there are feeling operations and secondly, operations which actualise the possession of capacities, and thirdly operations which actualise the possession of dispositions. Dispositions are higher level capacities; they are rationally regulated capacities. The virtues are examples of dispositions, and language is an example of a capacity. Reason is a faculty, and its relation to the other faculties is regarded by many commentators as a mystery. With reason we approach the contemplative life of God, the divine life, but this contemplative life does not appear to have any links with the body, according to Aristotle. Philosophical Psychology also deals with Perception. Given what has been said previously about the nature of the physical body being defined by its system of organs, we can draw the conclusion that the senses are obviously materially connected with organs. One of the accusations traditionally directed at Aristotle is that he confuses the purely physiological with the psychological. The physical eye, of course, is connected to the organ of the brain, and Aristotle states that perception takes place in the head as a result of the eye taking on the sensible form of whatever it is perceiving. The eye somehow identifies itself with the brown and green colours of the tree as well as the shape of the tree and the outcome, probably involving the brain, is an awareness of seeing the tree (which in itself does not have to be brown and green and possess a shape of a tree). The language of actuality and potentiality are important here in order to establish the relation of the object to its perception. The tree, in its turn, has the potentiality to be seen, that is, has the potentiality as a second level and higher actuality, to affect the faculty of sight (which would include the relation of the eye to the brain) in this way. It is not the tree that is present in the soul but its form.
A by-product of perception or the faculty of sight, is the imagination or the faculty of the imagination, rendered by the Greek term Phantasia. Ross characterizes this faculty in the following manner:
“Usually Phantasia (which has the meaning of “to appear”) is described as operating only after the sensible object has gone. The “movement of the soul through the body” which perception sets up causes a repercussion both in the body and in the soul—though as regards the soul the effect, until recollection takes place, is potential, i.e. not a conscious state of mind but an unconscious modification of the mind. At some later time, owing, for instance to the suppression of sensation in sleep, the movement becomes actual: i.e. an image similar to but less lively than the sensation, and less trustworthy as a guide to objective fact, is formed and attended to: and this is the act of imagination”
Phantasia has two main functions, according to Ross. The first function is the pure formation of after images, and the second function is related to memory, which involves both images and time, and an object in the past: it is the memory image relates to something in the past.
Freud obviously based his analysis of the condition of “shell shock” on the above theory. For Freud, bringing something into consciousness via the process of recollection and persuading the patient to talk about the cause of the images recollected, in the therapeutic situation, suffices to turn the phantasy of the traumatic event into a memory which would fade over time. We should remember in this context that, for Freud, language was a secondary sensory surface related more to thought than to perception. For both Aristotle and Freud, Thought was more reliably related to reality than imagination because it followed what Freud called the reality principle.
The Reality Principle, for Freud, is very much connected to the work of the ego which has the responsibility of coordinating the agencies of the id and superego in relation to the beliefs it has about the external world and the actions it is deliberating upon. The coordination with the superego of course takes on special significance when it comes to the Greek idea of virtue, which has many meanings, but the primary meaning in relation to action-contexts, is that of doing the right thing in the right way at the right time. Freud’s concept of the agency of the superego according to O Shaughnessy is connected to Consciousness of other human beings which forms our reflexive type of self-consciousness so important in the criticism of self and others. In an earlier work, “The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action(Vol 4) I claimed the following:
“The way in which the Other Consciousness is introduced into the Psychological Theory of Freud is via the agency of the Superego: a critical social agency internalised as a judging function. Maxims, intentions, desires, and actions are submitted to critical standards embodying principles that have helped to build our civilisations and create our cultures. O’Shaughnessy argues that it is the concept of another person that is responsible for forming the vicissitude of Consciousness we refer to as Self-Consciousness. He claims this concept is innate but the empirical existence of others is required if this form of Consciousness is to be actualised. Language is obviously an important power that also requires this innate concept and its empirical conditions that are to be found in the community of language users. Language for Freud was Janus- faced with one aspect turned toward the sensory world which it names and describes, and the other toward the world of thought which it expresses. There is the I that speaks, and the I that thinks, and the soundest approach to describing and explaining this state of affairs is to refuse to atomise the self into compartments, but rather regard the expressive self as logically identical with the thinking self that expresses thoughts in a public realm of discourse–thus realising the social and political intentions of a rational animal capable of discourse. O’Shaughnessy’s view is that Self Consciousness is a secondary phenomenon, the primary phenomenon being a vital expressive animal interacting with a demanding environment.”(P.166-7)
For Freud the superego is a metapsychological concept perhaps only second in importance to that other metapsychological concept of the ego. We know the Freudian aim for the individual in his effort to exist and desire to be is a strong independent ego that is not dependent upon the external world, the id or the superego. “Strong” in this context is not meant to depict dominance, but “weak” is meant to depict submission. The best term, perhaps to characterise what Freud meant by “strong” is the word “integration”: the ego is well integrated with the external world, the id and the superego, and to that extent is leading a healthy good spirited flourishing life. Freud in fact gives us a perfect picture of the submissive anxiety filled ego in his discussion of the ego ideal and idealisation which, it is claimed is connected to forming the superego the narcissistic way. He speaks here of delusions of observation in paranoia which may be connected to the death instinct that reigns in the absence of the strong egos effort to exist and desire to be. Such a dependent ego, subject to the critical gaze of the superego intent upon measuring the actions initiated by the ego uses defence mechanisms regularly to cope with the demands of life e.g. identification, repression, denial, displacement, splitting etc. The strong ego, on the other hand, is an ego that works virtuously in the realm of the moral rules and laws that regulate our relations to one another. The question to raise here is whether this is a form of the Reality Principle or whether this latter principle is a principle that only regulates the consequences of action rather than the maxims, intentions and reasons which are constitutive of the identity of moral action. This touches upon an old theme of Plato’s Republic where Socrates is eager to draw attention to the distinction between the good-in-itself and the “good-in-its-consequences, insisting in this connection that the idea of justice must be good in both senses. The question this reflection raises is whether the reality principle also governs the logic of the reasoning connected to deliberation upon the ought and is premises that lead us to moral action, e.g.
Promises ought to be kept
Jack promised Jill he would pay the money back that he was borrowing
Jack ought to pay the money back
In the world of real consequences this ideal form of reasoning is subject to qualification. What if Jack cannot pay the money back because he loses his job? It is up to Jill to decide whether to be disappointed in Jacks inability to keep his promise. She may well understand that Jack would have paid the money back if he could but losing his job was not something he counted on in the moment of promising in which of course he had every intention to keep his promise. She may also insist that he nevertheless pay the money back to her somehow. Here we can perhaps see something of the relation between the good-in-itself and the good.in-its-consequences. Now Freud, we maintain, must have been aware of the way in which the moral law moves from an “ought” premise relating to promising, to an “is” premise relating to the action of actually paying the money back or “returning a deposit”. He claimed he was a Kantian Psychologist and Kantian reflections on morality certainly argue for “The truth” of the premise “Promises ought to be kept” in virtue of this being the ultimate reason or justification for doing what one morally ought to do. If however, Freud intends the reality principle to be purely consequential then we must detach the moral principle from the reality principle but it is also important to note that the premises and conclusion in a moral argument are logically valid, making the action concerned both good -in-itself and good- in-its-consequences. There is no reason to embrace relativism in the domain of metapsychology just because of the difficulty in defining the exact scope of the moral principle. Kantian psychology has strong ties to Kantian morality and the moral law and those that wish to argue that Kantian morality is normative on the grounds of it only “recommending” what one ought to do, need to be confronted with two arguments, firstly, Kant’s ethics is a duty based ethics and describing this in terms of ” recommendation” can take us down the garden path of relativism. Secondly, Logic is normative in exactly the same way as morality which describes how people ought to act. Logic, that is, describes how people ought to think. We all know there are people who do not do what they ought to do just as there are people who contradict themselves. Jettisoning both ethics and logic because of these “facts” is indeed a dramatic and dangerous response but it has been the response of those followers of the “Tractatus”(Wittgenstein) who believed that “The world is the totality of facts and not things”. For Aristotle, Kant and Freud the world was better conceived in terms of a totality of conditions and principles. The superego, then, for Freud, must refer to the conditions and principles of moral action if he is to remain true to his claim that he is providing us with the (Meta) Psychology Kant would have produced if he was writing during the Freudian period. The superego can also however be narcissistically formed and this state of affairs is best represented in terms, not of the agent deliberating and rationally choosing not to do what he ought to do, but rather in terms of something happening to a mind where the ego is not strong enough to see what is both good in itself and good in its consequences, where the ego submits to non rational causes that either originate in the external world , the id or the superego.
There is not much discussion about the Kantian idea of freedom in Freud’s theorising but this may be due to the fact that much of Freud’s task was to defend medically and theoretically a technical therapeutic activity which in itself was a revolutionary “moral treatment”. To some extent this development of the method of the “talking cure” presupposed the value of the freedom of mental patients, suggesting clinical treatment instead of the prospect of being locked up in an institutions.
The philosophical thread extending from Socrates, through Plato, and Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Wittgenstein and all their lesser known followers working in universities manifested both the many meanings of Being and the many meanings of Good and the cultural influence of the thought flowing from the thread has sometimes been monopolised by an obsessive compulsive desire to focus on one meaning of Being(the world is the totality of facts) or one meaning of Good( the subjective feeling based emotive meaning of the positivists). The consequences of obsession are never wholly good and rarely defined as obsessive. The effect of the category of action seems to have become detached from the pathological cause and is identified in terms of a more neutral category, e.g. “The new men” of Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism”. The combination of Descartes dualism and obsession with consciousness and the scientists obsession with method and the underlying presupposition of materialism have been large contributors to what I termed in Vol 4 of my work: “The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition,Emotion, Consciousness and Action”, “The Age of Discontentment”. The question which remains to be answered is whether the philosophical thread referred to earlier can help turn a post-discontentment age into something more positive and less pathological.
Jonathan Lear in his work “Aristotle: the desire to understand” claims that Freedom is the value that defines the constitution of our human nature to such an extent that lacking an understanding of our freedom is tantamount to not understanding ourselves. Now we could be forgiven for believing that the above remarks are about the ethics of Kant, but they are rather meant to articulate what Lear thinks is an important implication of Aristotle’s ethics. Lear does however throughout his work on Aristotle articulate support for the claim that Aristotelian ethics is an ethics of freedom. In the course of this “comparison”, however, a surprise is in store. Lear claims in the context of this discussion that the moral agent somehow detaches itself (frees itself?) from its desires and he thereby sides with Hegel’s criticism of Kantian ethics. Hegel claimed that he would stand the philosophy of Kant on its head and in attempting to do so may well have turned the worlds of Aristotle, Kant, and the common man upside down. Hegel’s dialectical logic replaced the Metaphysical Logic of Aristotle, and the Transcendental Logic of Kant. Hegel’s inversion of bottom and top via his dialectical logic remind one of the psychological subjects of Stratton(1), wearing glasses which invert their retinal images and seeing the landscape upside down on the first day. On the second day, these subjects felt that their bodies were upside down until finally after a number of days of acting under these strange circumstances everything returned to normal again. Wearing the glasses of Hegel to view the Philosophy of Kant can indeed make the world of Kant seem a strange world itself in need of conversion. It is, to say the very least, rather surprising to find Lear subscribing to this Hegelian position, succumbing to this Hegelian deconstruction. We need in such a context, to remind ourselves of the texts of Kant which disprove the detachment thesis. Firstly, in the Critique of Judgment(2) Kant clearly claims the existence of an
intimate relation between practical reason and desire:
“In the same way reason which contains constitutive, a priori principles solely in respect of the faculty of desire gets its holding assigned to it by the critique of Practical Reason.”(Preface)
Lear in his Hegelian criticism, is apparently failing to register Kant’s claim that there are two kinds of concepts, theoretical and practical, which generate separate and different principles of the possibility of their objects. Concepts of nature and concepts of freedom have a reflectively different structure. The application of concepts of nature to an acting will generates what Kant calls technically-practical principles in which it is legitimate to conceive of a kind of separation or detachment of the subject and his/her action. Such technically practical principles regulate an agents skills in accordance with the law of cause and effect, and this places such concepts and principles clearly in the realm of theoretical philosophy far from the realm of desire. Kant defines desire in the following terms:
“a faculty which by means of its representations is the cause of the actuality of the objects of those representations.”(P.16)
This clearly relates desire to practical reason and to the bringing about of states of affairs by means of principles in the practical world. Kant, in this discussion, is careful to distinguish between empirical cases in which ones desire for a particular object precedes the practical principle, and transcendental cases in which the determining ground of choice is the practical principle. An example of the latter would be in the case where the principle “Promises ought to be kept” determines my choice of what I must do and transmits my desire down a chain of action-related reflections. There is no space for any detachment or separation of the agent from his action in such circumstances. In cases of a desire for a material object which is not being directed by a principle, the desire could arise and be abandoned in favour of another desire, and in such circumstances, one might say that the agent had a detachable relation to the object of the desire and the desire itself . This latter possibility, on Kant’s view, is a result of what he refers to as a lower faculty of desire activity which he contrasts with a higher faculty activity. According to Kant, “promises ought to be kept” is a principle that one cannot abandon as a practical agent. The former lower faculty of desire activity argues Kant is concerned with pleasure related to the object desired and its agreeableness. The latter is concerned with what Aristotle would call the good in itself which in its turn is a concern with our well being and worthiness to be happy. For Kant, this is a key condition for an ethical position and this may indicate a key difference between his position and the finality of the happiness condition which Aristotle proposes.
It is, therefore, puzzling to find Lear asking how a self-conscious being on the Kantian account could make decisions at all as if the Kantian self-consciousness resembled the Cartesian self-consciousness reflecting theoretically upon its own desires. Hegel, we know, did not appreciate the relation of Kantian ethical theory to the ethical theory of Aristotle’s in which we see both Philosophers adopting the vantage point of reflecting upon the relation of practical reason to its object rather than reflecting theoretically on the relation of a state of mind to its object.
One may wish to contradict this account by insisting that Aristotle’s theory of virtue in the Nichomachean Ethics, specifically argues that virtue is a state (lexis) rather than a capacity (dunamis) or a feeling (pathos). The question,however, is, how would Aristotle wish to characterise the state of the soul in question. He would not for example countenance this state as a state of consciousness and he would not want to countenance this state being characterised as many modern philosophy-of-mind-theorists do, as something “private” (feelings are private and particular). Rather, the “state” Aristotle is referring to here is a state of the soul which for him is differentiated in terms of different principles, defining different kinds or essences. Indeed, the word “disposition” might be a more appropriate term (a disposition, we recall, is a higher level capacity). For these purposes, a practical disposition would be construed in terms of a law-like principle that has been sculpted by the processes of training, education and habituation in accordance with social and cultural processes such as that of the “Golden Mean”.
Practical dispositions are given their initial characterisation in the opening remarks of the Nichomachean Ethics:
“Every art and every enquiry, every action, and choice seems to aim at some good: whence the good has rightly been defined as that at which all things aim.”
For Aristotle, we should recall, the good has many meanings depending upon whether it is aiming in discourse at peoples character, their actions, the place or time they live in etc. But all have in common the essence of the good for man or eudaimonia, which, for Kant, was a part of his ethical religious idea of the summum bonum. It is especially difficult, given this rather strong resemblance in their positions to imagine the ethical Kantian agent being detached from his own happiness or flourishing life. There is, moreover, a hylomorphic element to Kant’s theorising which is unmistakeable. In much of his reasoning, there is a specific reference to matter and form and if we analyse the two formulations of the categorical imperative, it would be difficult not to see the formal aspect of the ethical law in the first formulation and the material aspect in the second formulation. Were there to be only one formulation of the law, namely, the first, one, we might be able to argue more forcefully for, (if not the detachment thesis Lear proposes), an accusation of formalism or “emptiness”. The first formulation asks us to “will” that the maxim of one’s action be regarded as a universal law, and if there is no such universal law then the logical consequence is surely at the very least “emptiness”, and more seriously perhaps the impossibility of ethical action. The second formulation, however, fills the first formulation with content by insisting that we should act so that we treat everyone including ourselves as ends in themselves. This latter formulation is moreover, reminiscent of the kind of respect embedded in the Aristotelian account of friendship in the Nichomachean Ethics. Aristotle speaks here of a kind of fellowship existing between individuals or citizens of a polis which is similar to the affection that siblings have for one another. In Aristotle, the good is in man’s character from the beginning in the form of a capacity, to be developed into a disposition (by nurturing and education). Just as we learn to be builders by building, and teachers by teaching, and doctors by doctoring, we learn to be brave by doing brave acts in encouraging circumstances and we learn to be virtuous by performing virtuous acts. This is the route by which states of character are formed. In this process of forming a good disposition, pleasures and pains need to be organised because, as Aristotle claims, “the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain” are the main sources of vicious action.
Feelings are originally also capacities (low level capacities) and are part of the material that needs to be changed and formed by the nurturing of a virtuous disposition so that one feels the right feeling in the right circumstances at the right time. It is obvious from the above account that virtue cannot itself be merely a feeling
because as Aristotle rightly argues we do not praise or blame men for the feelings they are having, (because this is something passive- something that is happening to them, within the privacy of their own bodies). The Aristotelian-Kantian ethical attitude is an active attitude inextricably tied up with human activity, with action, and with choice. Such activity is formed by a method shaped by an aim to hit a target or achieve an end. The difference between the generous man, the spendthrift, and the miser, is one of an active attitude towards men and money. We can only choose to act, Aristotle argues if the action is of the kind, voluntary. Actions caused by external factors (compulsions) or ignorance are for him involuntary actions and cannot be freely chosen: such actions can therefore neither be praised nor blamed, i.e the agent cannot be held fully responsible for them. The notion of choice, isolated from other powers, is not related to the end of the flourishing life because this latter is a rational wish of Eros and is not itself chosen, but rather succumbed to, in the manner an educational process is succumbed to. Deliberation chooses the means to accomplish the flourishing life. For a holistic view of the process of deliberation stretching from the moment of succumbing, to the moment of making the good occur see Sir David Ross’s account in “Aristotle”: Ross situates choice in the matrix of desire, deliberation, perception and Art:
“Desire: I desire A Deliberation: B is the means to A C is the means to B N is the means to M Perception: N is something I can do here and now Choice: I choose N Art: I do N “(P.207)
Ross does not do this but one can describe this process of deliberation in terms of areté which is a term Aristotle uses for both one’s moral character and ones skill in thinking and acting. Translating this term as virtue becomes clearer when it is used in the context of “the virtuous life” that, when coupled to the term eudaimonia, or the good spirited flourishing life, embraces both the intellectual virtues and the moral/ethical virtues which include phronesis, courage, and temperance. The character of a virtuous man is, then, a set of dispositions (formed capacities), that organise one’s desires and feelings in relation to the final end of eudaimonia or the flourishing life which in its turn is also the actualization of the potential of the rational animal capable of discourse. The Phronimos, the great-souled man possessing practical wisdom which he demonstrates with his correct reasoning, (reasoning in the right way, or orthos logos), is the man whose psuché, or soul, best integrates the rational and the irrational parts of the soul. Aristotle indicates the consequences of falling short in the aim of fulfilling one’s potential, namely forms of life which are neither excellent (areté) nor flourishing (eudaimonia). He illustrates this claim by pointing to the life of pleasure pursued by firstly, non rational animals, secondly, the life of honour pursued by men of ambition and
thirdly, the life of the Phronimos who, one assumes, fulfils his potential most
completely because of the Platonic argument that he is the being who has experienced all the three forms of pleasure associated with these different life forms and as a consequence knows which pleasure is the best.Plato would have argued that the pleasure experienced by the Phronimos is pure(more intellectual) and unrelated to pain which by definition is a condition caused by a body striving for homeostasis (manifesting a relation between the pleasure-pain principle and the energy regulation principle). The lives of the hedonist, the wealthy man, and the ambitious man, are all pain avoidance related and therefore dependent on either external or internal causal factors. None of these forms of life meet the criteria of the self-sufficient flourishing life. The great-souled, Phronimos, on the other hand, is self-sufficient because he reasons in the right way about the world of conduct and feelings (the feelings of pleasure and pain, fear and anger). It is also important not to lose sight of the systematic connections of the above account with Aristotle’s claims about psuché and human nature. Because humans are animals and organisms they necessarily possess an ergon (inbuilt function) as well as a telos which is dependent upon material and efficient causes. The human, however, distinguishes itself from other forms of life through unique capacities and their potential to be formed into rational dispositions. Rationality is a term we attribute to humankind for its disposition to reason well and excellently.
One can wonder, as G E Moore did, whether including the natural, biological, material and efficient causes of being a human in the definition of “moral value” condemns Aristotle’s account to commit the naturalistic fallacy, i.e. the fallacy of defining moral value in terms of natural capacities. We have argued above that moral virtue is dispositional and dispositions are formal and developed capacities. If this distinction is observed, there is no fallacy, no contradiction because capacities, we have argued, are actualised into dispositions given the appropriate conditions for the actualisation process to occur. That is to say, there is no logical equivalence between the natural capacities of a human organism and its moral dispositions which are, as has been argued, constituted by the excellent exercise of natural capacities. Aristotle characterises all forms of activity and art as striving for the good and areté, so it is important to point out that even if one possesses the capacity to build a house, and do it well, this activity of an artisan is not a form of moral excellence, but rather a form of pragmatic/technological excellence.There is a further major difference between moral and technological(techné) excellence which is connected to the distinction Aristotle recognises between acting (praxis) and producing (poesis). This is noted by G J Hughes in his Routledge guidebook: “Aristotle on Ethics”3:
“Health is indeed the product of the art of medicine just as a house is the product of architecture or a statue of sculpture. But eudaimonia is not the product of the actions of a good person. Fulfillment in life is not something over and above someone’s actions which those actions produce. Fulfillment consists in doing what one does just because one sees those actions as noble and worthwhile…. living is not a process one undertakes for the sake of something else which is produced as a result. The point of the good life just is the living of it.”(P.89)
Hughes continues by pointing out that this puts Aristotle in the deontological camp in our modern ethical debates. He cannot be a consequentialist, argues Hughes, because:
“Aristotle has nothing comparable to Bentham’s definition of action as a “mere bodily movement” from which it would indeed follow that the value of an action must depend on the consequences that action produces, as Bentham says. Instead, Aristotle defines an action in terms of how the agent describes or sees their behaviour at the time and draws no particular line between action and its consequences”(p.90)
The implications of this argument are devastating for the utilitarian position which finds itself at odds with two of the most important ethical positions. For Aristotle, the agent must adopt a first-person perspective to what they are doing, and not a third person observationalist perspective which, in the absence of the declaration of intention by the agent of the action, might well seem “mere bodily movement”. Confusion is endemic in this area of debate. We can see one kind of confusion in the utilitarian camp where the theoretical obsession with a reductive-compositive method, together with an observationalist/experimental interpretation of that method, postulates “atoms” of pure movement which can then be inserted into a theoretical framework of linear causes and effects. The movement “causes” a state of affairs that is logically different from its cause, thus dividing what was a unitary action into two elements which can only be composed into a unity at the expense of the holistic account of deliberative practical reasoning we find in Aristotelian ethics.Confusions between praxis and poesis may even assist in this attempt to subject this domain to the theoretical framework of scientific reasoning. It is, of course, easier to dissolve a skill (needed for the production of an object) into the event of movement and the product produced at the end of the activity, because here quite clearly the observer can, for example, see the builder building and the “consequence”, the completed, produced house. Aristotle would immediately criticise this theoretical attempt for failing to appreciate the role of intention in identifying the activity (correctly describing the activity). This, for him, could only occur from the first person point of view. The builder sees what he is doing from the point of view of the idea or form of the house he has in mind, and this, for him, logically determines how one can describe such building activity. All art aims at the good, Aristotle declared, but there is a difference between the good house being built, which is largely a pragmatic matter, and leading a good flourishing life which is a broader, ethical/political good. We need also to recall that we are in the realm of forms for Aristotle, forms which are subject to his metaphysical theory of change. Forms for Aristotle were hierarchically structured with sexual reproduction at the lower end of the scale being followed by the production of artifacts, and finally by the learning and teaching of the forms. The production of artifacts as we pointed out involves practical knowledge, but not a choice made by a stable character. Here it seems, in the instrumental case, we are clearly dealing with an activity or work, but not fully fledged action (Arendt distinguished in her work between labour, work, and action)(4) An organised soul is required to perform the actions which aim at a flourishing life: only work activity is required to produce the objects of techné. So, knowledge is involved in firstly, the action as a result of practical reasoning, and secondly, in the deliberative calculation of the work activity behind the creation of objects of techné. We need to enquire into the different kinds of knowledge in the different kinds of science involved in leading the flourishing life. Aristotle distinguishes between three different kinds of science: the theoretical, practical and productive sciences. In relation to theoretical science, he claims, (in the light of knowledge being defined as justified true belief), that essence specifying definitions or principles are the justifications we find in the theoretical sphere of scientific activity. These both provide a form of logical necessity not to be found in the other two sciences, which are both aiming at something for which, as yet, there are no essence specifying definitions. What we find instead here are principles. Theoretical sciences aim at the truth and use logical demonstration that moves from first principles or essence-specifying definitions to logically related conclusions. Practical sciences may be related to the truth and logic or “analytics” (as Aristotle called logic), but the primary aim of these sciences is the good. Because of areas of commonality, we find in this area that particular conclusive judgments follow from universal and particular premises. Similarly, in the practical sciences “justification” will also involve the elements of Aristotle’s metaphysical theory of change in which reference will be made to 4 kinds of change, three principles and 4 “causes” but here, agents, powers and actions will be the focus of attention. In the “Posterior Analytics” Aristotle gives us an account of the acquisition of knowledge which is common for all the sciences.
The above is a fine account of how the desire to understand involves powers building upon powers and integrating into the unified disposition of mind that we believe generates knowledge. This process, surely, is common to all the sciences. It accounts for how we differentiate animals from each other, of how we differentiate men from each other, and also, finally, how we differentiate objects and actions from each other. The above account does not mention the powers of language and reason, but these will certainly be involved in the generation of knowledge. The 4 causes or explanations of the theory of change will also be involved in our judgments of the good man striving to actualise his potential to live the flourishing life. They will also be involved in scientific judgments in relation to the good action, which, as we have been told, plays an important role in the above actualisation process. The desire to understand oneself and know oneself will also probably be a part of this journey of awe and wonder. Aristotle’s idea of the flourishing life is one where both the moral and intellectual virtues form a unity in which knowledge, whilst not being perhaps a seamless robe, is at least one unified coat of many colours. The idea of the goodwill, in this account, includes both knowledge and understanding of oneself and the world one lives in.
Aristotle did engage in the discussion of one aporetic issue which directly highlights the ways in which theoretical and practical knowledge are integrated with ethical action. Socrates argued that if a man knows the good, i.e. really knows and understands the universal idea of the good, then he will necessarily always do the good in his actions. On the face of it, the opening sentences of the Nichomachean Ethics, claiming as they do that all art, activity, and inquiry aim at the good, suggests that Aristotle too must accept this Socratic analysis. Awareness of the phenomenon of the man claiming to know the good and then not doing it, however, pushed Aristotle into giving a more nuanced account of this so-called phenomenon of akrasia or incontinence. For Aristotle, it was necessary for him to acknowledge this phenomenon, and give it an acceptable explanation. Now, if it was the case that all men as agents aim at the good, it is difficult to understand how an agent can perform an incontinent action where that is defined as an action that is intentional and performed against a background of the knowledge that a preferable alternative action is available to the agent. If we are imagining a rational agent wholly constituted of their beliefs, desires, values, and actions, then we have to bear in mind that the relation between intentions beliefs and desires is a complex one and difficulties abound as soon as one evokes the terminology of Analytical Philosophy.
Socrates was criticized by Lear because he wanted to characterise akrasia in terms of states of the soul, but the above characterisation in terms of beliefs, desires and intentions, seems to be a similar attempt, using states of mind and the terminology of Analytical Philosophy. Aristotle’s account of akrasia is actually better characterised in terms of his own terminology of the powers of perception, memory, language, knowledge, and reason in an organised soul. On this account, akrasia is not possible. If there is an alternative action for which there are good reasons, it must be the case in an organised soul that all things considered and understood, this must be the action one chooses to perform (not being aware of what one is doing and being drunk with passion are excluded as possibilities). This suggests that the phenomenon of incontinence must be explained by there either being a lack of knowledge or ignorance of how to act. The power of judgment will also necessarily play a part in the deliberative process which leads to action. Aristotle’s practical syllogism differentiates the reasons why any one of the premises could be blocked. The power of judgment can also of course be shut down by strong passions and a different principle of action would in such cases be operating. The virtuous soul, of course, is a well-organised soul and will not allow its powers to be compromised in the above ways. The soul on its way to virtuous organisation may, however, be like an actor on a stage going through the motions of knowing, i.e. exercising deficient powers of knowledge by believing that he ought to be doing some alternative better action but because of the confusion in his soul is not able to settle on the completely articulated reason for what ought to be done. We should also remember, considering the fact that we are dealing with practical reasoning and rationality, that the soul will not acquire what he calls the ”logos”, by merely hearing something and assenting to it: language is not a sufficient power to install the kind of knowledge being referred to (it is a capacity not a fully fledged disposition). The apprentice knower, that is, must imitate his betters in an environment of ethical guidance, and the journey from being an apprentice to being a virtuous man is one in which one is learning about oneself and the world. The possibility, of course, exists in such circumstances that someone may be right in one’s judgments about the world but wrong in one’s judgments about oneself, i.e. incontinence will be on display in such a case.
corollary of his position in this debate, Politis argues that PNC is not a so-called “Transcendental Principle”, i.e. a claim to the effect that something is true of reality because it is true of thought or language. Politis has this to say on p 135:
“Aristotle argues (in Chapter 4,4) that if PNC were not true of things then we could not use thoughts and words to signify things, and in general we could not think and speak about things. He concludes that if PNC were not true of things, then thought and language about things would be impossible. PNC is true of things because it is a necessary condition for the possibility of thought and language about things.”
This has the logical consequence that there can be no demonstration or explanation of PNC. On our account, we wish to maintain, therefore, that PNC is a principle of metaphysical logic and only as a consequence a principle about thought and language about things. Aristotelian metaphysics is about the form, essence or primary principle of things. PNC requires that everything in the world has explainable essences or principles. Denying that things have essences or forms or primary principles is a condition of denying PNC. If things are indeterminate (have no essence) then PNC cannot be an applicable principle. However, since PNC is true of all things, all things are determinate and must, therefore, have essences. Socrates has an essence, namely his humanity, and therefore we can make true noncontradictory statements about him, i.e. access his “primary being” to use the expression used by Politis.
Returning to our second formulation of PNC, can we then not say that Socrates’ humanity is the primary principle or form or essence of the primary being of Socrates and is this not that which explains what Socrates ontologically is? Aristotle believed that all living things possessed souls of different kinds or in his technical language from De Anima, a soul is “the actuality of a body that has life”. But living things take different forms and Aristotle, therefore, constructed a matrix of life forms that defined a living things form or essence partly in terms of the physical organ system it possessed and partly in terms of the powers the thing as a whole possessed.
He begins with simple plants, their simple physical structures, and their powers of growth and reproduction. The matrix seems to be organised in terms of a continuum of a possible infinite number of forms only some of which are actualised because of the physical conditions of the elements of the world (earth, water, air, fire) and their accompanying processes of wet and cold, hot, and dry. The next stage of the continuum manifests itself in animal forms possessing animal organ-systems and the powers of perception and locomotion (in addition to the previous plant-like power). The penultimate stage of the matrix is that of humanity or the human being which possesses a more complex organ system and also more complex powers of discourse, memory and reasoning(in addition to all the lower powers previously mentioned). This matrix was an attempt to transcend the dialectical discussions of dualists and materialists and present a hylomorphic theory of the soul which would not fall foul of the PNC. This matrix is a matrix of agents and powers which in its turn is of course embedded in an environmental matrix of space, time and causation (discussed earlier). In a sense, Metaphysical Logic was metaphorically placing a curse on both the houses of dualism and materialism in order to stem the reproduction of theories from these sources. However, as we know Platonic dualism defied the metaphorical curse and was one of the motivating assumptions of Old and New Testament Religions and we also know that materialism was one of the motivating assumptions of the rise of modern science which Descartes, Hobbes, and Hume were embracing in their anti-Aristotelian theorising. As a direct consequence metaphysical logic dwindled in importance as the drama of dialectical interaction between Religion and Science played itself out at the beginning of our modern era. PNC was demoted from a Metaphysical principle to a transcendental principle of logic governing thought and language. Dualism was of course as old as the hills and Orphic, pre-Judaic, Judaic and Christian theories of the soul characterised it as a special kind of substance that breathes life into a material body embedded in a space-time-causation matrix. Materialism saved its breath for several centuries before finally claiming in the spirit of dialectical interaction that a non-physical, non-extended entity cannot have a causal effect in the physical matrix of the material world-i.e. that this substance can move nothing in the material world because it shares none of its properties. The soul cannot be causa sui, materialists argued, by definition, because it cannot be observed either by itself or by others in its putative causing itself to do things.
With PNC, Metaphysical logic and hylomorphic theory marginalised by a “transcendental” conception of logic, the resultant chaos was inevitable.
Metaphysics became identical with dualistic assumptions and Aristotle’s metaphysical logic was categorised as dualistic, and it was not long before PNC’s metaphysical implications were entirely forgotten except for those die-hard Aristotelians working in a University system, itself in the process of being transformed into institutions for the representation of the houses of dualism and materialism. Kant, thankfully, temporarily halted this process of “modernisation” for a short period of time, until Hegel and Marx in true dialectical fashion ensured that both Kant and Aristotle were consigned to the footnotes of Dialectical Philosophy. Both Aristotle and Kant emerged as relevant Philosophical figures once again when the process of “modernisation” was again halted in Vienna by Freudian psychoanalytical theorising and in England by the later Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Modernisation and the scientification of our everyday existence continue but for every halting of the process the followers of the opposition increase in number and help to construct what is now beginning to look like a philosophical tradition composed of the philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, and the later Wittgenstein and their followers.
The problem of the relation of the soul to the body must surely fall into the category of what Aristotle referred to as aporetic questions. It is also one of the key problems that need to be addressed in the arena of Philosophical Psychology. Aristotle regarded the relation of the soul and the body as a holistic unity similar to that of the relation between form and matter. Jonathan Lear, a commentator on the writings of both Aristotle and Freud characterises this issue in the following way:
“Yet it is precisely because soul and body must form a unity in a living organism that it is difficult to distinguish them. Artifacts provided the original model for the form-matter distinction: and there is a clear sense in which a craftsman imposes form on a distinct matter. With living organisms, by contrast, matter and form are intimately bound up with each other: consequently, there is no distinctly existing and persisting matter on which soul can, from time to time, be imposed. Indeed the matter of a living organism seems to depend on being ensouled to be the matter that it is. And a given type of soul, say, human soul seems to require a particular type of matter. The living organism is such a unity but the real challenge for Aristotle is to show how that unity can legitimately be conceived as having two aspects, soul and body.”(P.98)
The soul is an actuality of matter (there can be levels of actuality,) and living beings can be regarded as “substance” par excellence by Aristotle. His matrix of different life-forms are established in terms of the kind of power that belongs to a particular form. In De Anima 15b 8-14, Aristotle maintains unsurprisingly that the soul is the moving, formal and final cause of the body. He also maintains that a particular constellation of organs are what give rise to particular forms of life. He does not claim that these organs “cause” in any modern sense, the form of life—it is rather the case that these forms of life “spontaneously” cause themselves to do what they do, i.e. exercise the powers typical of their particular life form. Aristotle, as we pointed out earlier referred to a matrix of life-forms which form a hierarchy from the simplest to the most complex form: from the simplest form of vegetation to the most complex life form of God. This matrix is constituted by the differentiation of powers, but the most interesting observation Aristotle makes is that the more complex life-forms incorporate the simpler forms and presumably, in so doing, transforms their functions so that more complex activities become possible . At the level of the human being, the next most complex form of life, Aristotle provides us with three different characterisations:
1. The first characterisation is in terms of an essence specifying definition: a rational animal capable of discourse. This is clearly a kind of summary of the most important powers a human possesses. .
2. The second characterisation is in terms of a careful account of how we acquire knowledge through the uses of the powers of perception, memory and reasoning which also appear to be related to powers of language and imagination.
3. The third characterisation is in terms of mans ability to reason both theoretically and practically.
There does not appear to be any conflict between these three characterisations. Hughlings Jackson, a theorist, who influenced Freudian theory, claimed that areas of the brain have a hylomorphic hierarchical structure. Freud used these hylomorphic ideas when he suggested his three principles of “psychic” functioning:–the energy regulation principle, the pleasure-pain principle, and the reality principle. Each of the higher principles “colonises” some of the territory of the lower principles thus transforming the human activities associated with them. Eating a meal, for example, primarily an energy regulation activity, is transformed into a civilised activity aiming at the pleasures of sitting down for a period of time with ones family. This is a clear example of the transformation of an instinctive/biological activity into a social event which may involve other powers of the mind, such as engaging in and reasoning at the dinner table.
Freud claims that one function of language and discourse is to bring “psychic” material into the field of consciousness (where all our powers appear to be integrated). Indeed, his later therapeutic techniques appear to be presupposing the hylomorphic principle of powers building upon powers with the intent of integrating all powers in the mind. Freud is ambivalent on the question of whether consciousness itself is a power or an inherent function of the brain probably partly because of the fact that he was fighting for hylomorphism against the predominating Cartesian model of consciousness. Freud obviously also benefitted from the work of Kant. He is reputed to have said that his was the Psychology that Kant would have written had he concerned himself with this subject which had broken its moorings from Philosophy in 1870. Kant’s work previously recreated the space for reflection upon the hylomorphic soul and the power of thinking that Aristotle had established earlier. The Dualism-materialism dialectical interaction continued however with the appearance of the Hegelian criticism of Kantian philosophy which it must be admitted was not straightforwardly hylomorphic. Freuds work began in materialistic mode but soon rejected its own assumptions and attempted to restore the Aristotelian principle based approach in the arena of what today we would call Philosophical Psychology. Even during the later phases it must also be admitted that Freud’s work is also not straightforwardly hylomorphic. There is clearly a dualistic tendency in Freud’s work which manifested itself when, in his last phase of theorising, he turned towards the theories of Plato for some of his key concepts (Eros, Thanatos, Ananke). In spite of these reservations however, it is clear that Freud’s theory is a theory of agency, principles, and powers set in a practical context of the search for a flourishing life. The Aristotelian notion of substance implies agents that can do things, and act upon things. Powers, for Aristotle, are potentialities to bring about changes in reality and this idea is clearly at work in the Freudian Reality Principle. A power is actualised as part of a cure, and then belongs to the agent. Hume would probably have objected that just as we cannot observe the cause of building a house, we cannot observe powers and that therefore they are highly dubious entities. This is a logical consequence of his position that whatever happens is the only thing that can happen. P.M.S. Hacker in his work “Human Nature: The Categorical Framework”2 argues that this Humean position is absurd, because it entails that if something can in fact only do what it does then the potentialities of possessing a skill or the learning of a skill become to say the very least problematic. Hacker is of course one of the foremost commentators and interpreters of the work of Wittgenstein who, he claims, restored hylomorphic theory in the seminar and lecture rooms of our dialectical Universities. Consciousness in its non-Cartesian form enters into modern post-Wittgensteinian discourse in terms of the reflective nature of the human being that possesses an awareness of their powers (unlike a magnet or snake which possess powers unreflectively). This reflectiveness, in its turn, according to Hacker, gives rise to powers that can be willfully used, i.e. powers that we can choose to exercise or not. It was this mental space that appeared to be absent in the mental constitution of many of Freud’s patients and it was this lack that drove Freud to postulate that the principles driving much of their activity was unconscious.
Hacker calls “volitional powers”, in which choice is involved, “two-way powers”. Included among such powers were the powers to perceive, remember, think and reason. He further argues that both Descartes and Hume conflate empirical and conceptual issues and thereby provided assumptions for an emerging neuroscience which were incoherent and confused. As we pointed out earlier Kant attempted to correct the influence of Descartes and Hume by claiming as an axiom of his philosophical psychology (Anthropology) that human beings know a priori the difference between what they are doing and what is being done to them. Kantian accounts as we now know unintentionally gave rise in the process of modernisation, to volitional theories which in attempting to classify our actions in terms of the modernist matrix of space-time-linear causation resolved a holistic activity into a causal relation between two occurrences which the empirical process of composition could not logically unify.
Schopenhauer, a contemporary of Hegel, was already experiencing the pull of modern volitionism back into a non-Aristotelian matrix of space-time-linear causation when he claimed that:
“we certainly do not recognise the real immediate act of will as something different from the action of the body and the two are connected by a kind of causality: but both are one and indivisible….thus actual willing is inseparable from doing, and, in the narrowest sense, that alone is an act of will which is stamped as such by the deed.”(World as Will and Representation)(3).
It is not difficult to see how volitionist theories are connected to the dualism-materialism dialectic (especially Cartesianism and its pernicious form of dualism that paradoxically ends up in the brain). Platonic dualism is not pernicious in this way. It distinguishes between a world of forms and a physical world—a world of representations and the world of that which the representations are of—which Schopenhauer addresses with his distinction between the world of will and the world as representation, where the former world is connected to a priori knowledge that is non-observational. Hylomorphic theory with its levels of actuality seems to be the only theory capable of “saving the phenomenon” of willing, without reduction or reification. Freudian theory, we should remember, maintained that one can act involuntarily. Hacker connects teleology to voluntary action and two-way powers in the following passage:
“Human beings, like other sentient animals with wants, have the power to move, to act, at will. “To act” in this context does not signify causing a movement, but making one. We acknowledge a special role for such so-called basic actions not because they are a causing of a movement that may be the first link in a causal chain, but because they are the first act. The first thing for which a purposive or intentionalist explanation may be apt. To say that a human being moved his limb is to subsume behaviour under the category of action. It earmarks behaviour as being of a kind, that is under voluntary control, as something of a kind which is a sentient agent can choose to do or not do, and hence indicates the propriety of asking whether there is an intentionalist explanation of the deed. The attribution of the movement to the agent is not causal. But it is an action, and therefore is of a kind that falls within the ambit of the variety of teleological explanation appropriate for human action. The agent may have moved his hand in order to… or because he wanted to…..or because he thought that….or out of fear, and so forth. Aristotle’s movement is to be understood to be liable to the range of explanations of the exercise of two-way powers by a rational agent.”(P.158)
This, of course, calls into question the observationalist use of the method of resolution and composition (the method of the behaviourist psychologist). Saying on the basis of observation, something about another agents movement, namely, that “His arm moved”, is a description which leaves it open whether this was something he did (raise his arm to call a taxi) or whether this was rather something that happened to him ( his arm raising in a fit of cramp). If the phenomenon was of the latter kind there are absolutely no grounds for calling what happened, “action”.
Modernisation of Aristotelian theory resulted in scientific reasoning in the spirit of Hobbes and Hume This then became part of the process of the dismantling of hylomorphic theory, a process that, in turn, resulted in the claim that teleological explanation is not a form of explanation at all. Two reasons are given for this claim. Firstly, the telos cannot be observed, and secondly, telos disappears in the methodical resolution of a holistic activity into linear cause-effect events. Events can then be comfortably described a-teleologically. That scientists should have spent so much effort and time in this composition and subsequent destruction of this “straw man of teleology” or “ghost of teleology”, is indeed thought provoking. What is even more thought provoking is the success of their “mythologizing of teleology” and the fact that this process could prove so devastating for the continued discussion of Psychological theories such as Freud’s and Piaget’s. Because this process was so successful it might prove useful to remind ourselves of what teleological explanation is via Hacker’s characterisation:
“Our discourse about the living world around us, about ourselves, our bodies and activities, and about the things we make is run through with description and explanation in terms of goals, purposes and functions. We characterise things such as organs and artefacts, and also social institutions in terms of their essential functions and their efficacy in fulfilling them. We explain animal morphology in terms of the purposes served by their shapes, limbs and features. This is not a causal explanation (although it is perfectly consistent with, and indeed calls out for one), since we explain what the organ or feature is for and not how it came about and not how (by what causal processes) it fulfils its function. We describe what it enables the animal to do and how it affects the good of the animal or its offspring. We commonly explain why certain substances animate and inanimate (artifactual) or constituent parts of substances (organs of living things or components of artefacts) do what they do by describing what they do it for…We explain and justify human action, including our own, by specifying the rationale of the prospective or antecedently performed action, and we often account for the behaviour of social institutions likewise. These kinds of description are called “teleological descriptions” and these kinds of answers to the question why, teleological explanations— explanations by reference to an end or purpose (telos).”(P163-4)
Hacker goes onto add that teleological explanation is a form of explanation that cannot be characterised in terms of the ideal of efficient causation that the scientist values so much, but should rather be characterised by an understanding which focuses upon reasons, goals and motives.
Hacker also agrees that teleology is linked to the idea of the good on the grounds of “psuche” being a biological/psychological substance whose essence it is to come into being, flourish, and eventually die and decay. Living beings on his and Aristotle’s account postulates that absolute needs are tied to health and mortality. These needs extend from life-maintaining activities, to activities producing the quality of life necessary for a flourishing existence. These latter activities require a considerable amount of learning and the acquisition of many complex skills. We can clearly see a hierarchy of needs emerging from this account. Abrahams Maslow’s theory(4) is a hierarchical theory in which satisfying a need “causes” another higher level need to emerge. There is, in this theory, an “incorporation of the lower level need in the higher-level. Proceeding up the hierarchy eventually results in a flourishing life for the individual concerned. Maslows account includes reference to cognitive and aesthetic needs.
A large part of the task of society and its social institutions is that of striving toward the telos of the good: that is, for a society to be flourishing, large numbers of the members of that society must experience that the conditions provided allow them to have their needs systematically met. The telos of the society, as “the literary” Socrates suspected, must be connected to the telos of the individual. If an individual flourishes in a flourishing society he achieves what Aristotle refers to as the summum bonum of life, namely eudaimonia, or happiness. This can only occur, argue Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, if the society concerned is Rational. This moves us onto the question of the realm of the essence or formal “cause” of society and individual. One of the needs of the animal and the human being, is to reproduce, and if the latter is done rationally, a level of consciousness of the telos of sexuality, is a requisite condition. Plants and animals do not possess this requisite condition. In Freud’s theory, it is the principles of energy regulation and pleasure-pain that regulate reproductive activity. In the human being we are capable of regulating this activity by using the powers of discourse and reasoning. We can, that is, discuss the reasons for our reproductive and sexual behaviour. The essence of the individual is tied to reproductive activity for Freud, but his claims only make sense in the context of hylomorphic theory. The family is obviously the social institution most closely connected to sexual activity, and the bringing up of children which appears to so many to be an important part of the flourishing life. The family is also the basic social unit which forms the basis for the construction of the polis, and is therefore an important element of the flourishing polis (the Callipolis). Aristotle’s teleological explanations seem therefore to have clear application in the realm of the human world, but is the case for their application to the natural world equally obvious? Particles and matter for example are not naturally thought of in terms of being “for” anything and the reason why particles and matter do what they do is also not directly relatable to their internal potential to move but rather to some propensity to move when caused to do so by external factors. In a low pressure system, for example where the air is cooled the matter in the system will descend in the form of rain after having ascended in warmer circumstances to form clouds. This might suffice for some to attribute a telos to the evaporated water that was ascending and then descended back to earth in the cooling process. Some kind of resolution-composition method sufficed for Aristotle to pick out the elements of earth, water, air, and fire and their associated processes of wet-cold, hot-dry and for him there did seem to be a place for teleological explanation in weather systems, organ systems and perhaps also economic systems. Basically energy regulation systems such as weather systems are set to a teleological standard of homeostasis. Viewed from the vantage point of energy regulation, Aristotelian teleological physics appears harmless enough. It is, however, when God is brought into the picture as a designer of systems that problems begin to emerge. Aquinas, a commentator and interpreter of the works of Aristotle from a religious point of view, attempts to argue that in the inorganic world, “material” which lacks awareness could only have a goal, i.e. act “for the sake of” some end, if God directed the process in much the same way as an archer intentionally directs an arrow at a target. This of course, cannot fail to remind us of the passage in the Nichomachean Ethics where Aristotle claims:
“If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this)…clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall one not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should do? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.”(I,2, 19-25)
Aristotle claims that this end is Eudaimonia, often translated as happiness, but not always happily so. Perhaps a better translation, in some contexts, would be “a flourishing life”. It is the function of man, Aristotle argues, to lead a flourishing life, which, for him, amounts to living in accordance with areté or virtue, which in its turn means doing the right thing at the right time in the right way: all these elements will be involved in the reasons a man gives for doing any particular act. This, in the Freudian scheme of things, would entail that the Reality Principle (Ananke) is the organising principle of one’s life. Aquinas conceives of God as a Supreme Agent, the Supreme Archer, but there is very little in Aristotle to support this thesis. Aristotle claims that an arrow falls downward for the same reason that rain falls downward in the weather system, namely earth falls downward because its situational-being is beneath the water and air, and this is its natural place. Fire and heat and light (not heavy) and warm matter moves upwards because the source of heat is its place, namely, the sun. All these elements are, we should be careful to note, already formed material (in accordance with the matter-form principle), and it is their form that decides their position, and changes of position in the universe. That is, an arrow will fall to earth after having been fired into the air because of the forms that compose it: the wood and the iron are returning to their source—the earth. Now Aristotle in claiming the above was not making the mistake of other early philosophers/poets and claiming that the arrow “wanted” to return to earth. After all, was it not Aristotle who claimed that a tree has a visual form to present to the human eye, but that a tree, because of its nature cannot itself be aware of visual forms? Did he not maintain that powers build upon powers and that in accordance with this idea only substances that can be perceptually aware of visible forms can “want” and desire something, and therefore strive to fulfil these wants and desires? Only animals and humans can fire the arrows of desire at their targets. Now, on Aristotle’s account, God is pure form but his function is pure thinking which does not desire or aim at objects, since all objects are immediately possessed by a pure thinker. God, therefore, cannot in any way be similar to a super-human craftsman creating and shaping the substance of the world over a period of time. The Biblical creation myth is allegorical and meant merely to establish the hierarchy or “Place” of animals in relation to earth and God in relation to man, and man in relation to the animals and the rest of the universe. In short God, whilst in some sense being alive, does not perceive or desire and his thought has no relation to these powers. There is, it should be noted, a significant difference between the philosophical God of Aristotle and the Biblical Mythical God who appears amorphously through the mists of mythological allegory. Aristotle’s God is not a craftsman caring for his creation, and he is not therefore the Supreme agent or Supreme archer directing the elements to their natural places. He is rather, pure actuality, pure form, pure thinking. He thinks in a way which is not the realisation of a potential but rather thinks of himself in a timeless infinite “moment” of contemplation. Perhaps Thales shared this conception and perhaps this is what he meant when he said “things are full of gods”, as a response to those atheists who believed that the planets were just cold feelingless stone. If God is not thinking as we do about Reality, how then should we characterise this thinking. Aristotle brilliantly chose the description/explanation that God thinks about thinking. He therefore cannot be a super-agent or a super-archer. When we are thinking Aristotle points out, we partake however primitively, in the divinity of contemplation. When we are contemplating, it is during these moments that we are closest to God, and the extent to which this occupies a large proportion of our life is the extent to which we lead a flourishing life or the “good spirited (Eudaimonia) life. One cannot but be amazed at the ease with which Aristotle makes his transitions from Metaphysical aporia to Ethical and Political aporia. These almost seamless transitions were the reason why he was referred to as “The Philosopher” for several hundred years and “the teacher of our teachers”. Dante referred to Aristotle as “The master of those that know”. This is also the reason why we need to take his definition of Philosophy seriously—the systematic understanding of the world as a systematic whole– in a way that has been done only sporadically by Modern Philosophy since the time of Descartes and Hobbes. The world as a systematic whole, viewed hylomorphically, contains Psuché–a form of life which in itself contains a hierarchy of powers that are systematically related: powers, the explanation of which require an understanding of the difficulties associated with answering the Delphic oracles challenge to “Know thyself”. Freud answered this challenge and attempted to provide us with a map of the mind whose powers are disturbed, and this map required understanding of the “parts” of human pusché and their relation to the whole of the self-sufficient good spirited, flourishing mind.
Action and agency are central concerns for Aristotle, Kant, and Freud and we need therefore to see how the original account of these concerns given by Aristotle remains the core of Kantian and Freudian accounts.
Action and Agency are form-creators for Aristotle because they issue from a< of life which can build a world around itself. As a rational animal capable of discourse, I go forth in a world of physical events such as a storm at sea. After throwing the cargo overboard, I can but sit and wait for the consequences to play themselves out on this watery stage. As a rational animal capable of discourse I am of course a form of life that can act, but one whose actions have consequences I cannot control. The sun was shining and the weather was fine when I embarked on this sea voyage. The possibility of a storm at sea was a piece of knowledge I had but it was not active at the time of the choice. I am now trapped in this situation and if I was an ancient Greek, the “action” of praying to the gods might follow the action of throwing the cargo overboard. Is it irrational to begin to pray, or can one defend prayer as an assertion of agency as such when natural events play with our lives? For Aristotle, the world-creating forms occur in the media of change (space, time, and matter), and they find their explanation in a theoretical matrix of 4 kinds of change, three principles, and 4 causes. The material and efficient causes of the storm are forms situated in the infinite continuum of the media of change: the forms of water (the high seas) the forms of air (high winds) the forms of fire (the lightning issuing from the heavens) and the wooden earth-like form of the ship being tossed about and being prepared to rest finally in peace on the earth at the bottom of the sea. In such a situation, can we talk about praying in terms of rationality? Well, I had the knowledge that this fateful outcome was a possibility and did not use this knowledge(1) For Aristotle, not using ones knowledge is a failure of deliberation and therefore of rationality. So all that is left of the definition of such a being is his animality expressed in his fear and apprehension and his attempt to communicate via the discourse of prayer with the “agency” expressed in the storm. For those who found themselves in such situations and prayed and survived to tell their story, it might seem as if some divine agent had now a reason to save the souls on the ship. Aristotle would not have sanctioned such an explanation. He would have pointed to all those skeletons lying on the floor of the sea-bed, resting: the remains of those who undoubtedly prayed and who lost their souls in storms at sea. Aristotle’s theory of action, agency, and powers would not permit the world of the human to become confused with the physical forms of the infinite continuum. That is, one can rationally say that I should have considered the possibility of the ruin of my hopes in a storm at sea and ought not to have decided to board the ship, but one cannot rationally say that the Storm ought not to have sunk the ship and extinguished the life of all the souls on board. For Aristotle, there is a categorical distinction to be observed here, a logical boundary that one only crosses on pain of the loss of one’s rationality. This does not necessarily mean that Aristotle would have thought that it was irrational to pray as the ship’s mast was broken by the tempestuous winds. Indeed he would have thought that we are active world-creating forms and a structured form of discourse was, of course, preferable to quivering and weeping or rushing around like the ship’s dog howling at the wind. We are forms of life embedded in a world of physical forms, and some forms of action are appropriate whereas some forms of behaviour are not as appropriate: or in other words, when we are dealing with free voluntary choices, there are actions which ought to be chosen and actions which ought not to be chosen. The oughts here are rational and can be formulated in value-laden premises and conclusions with logical relations to each other, thus forming rational valid arguments for action. We are clearly exploring the foothills of ethics and morality, or as Jonathan Lear so clearly put it in his work “Aristotle: the desire to understand”, we are exploring the “Mind in action”. . Lear believes that understanding Aristotle’s philosophical theories of Psychology are a necessary pre-requisite to understanding both his ethics and hispolitics. So the man on board the ship is acting and the ship’s dog is justbehaving. Why the difference? The difference lies, Aristotle argues in our ability to think and create higher level desires which as a consequence creates a region of the soul which is rational and a region which is irrational. But we need to consider how the human higher form of desire is integrated with our knowledge(epistemé) if we are to fully understand the complexity of the human form of life. The desiring part of the human soul is the acting part because man is capable of acting rationally and behaving irrationally, i.e. he is capable of both reasoning that he ought not to drink water which might be poisoned, but he is also capable of drinking the same water. It is perhaps the existence of these parts of the soul which generates all those desires which we express in value-laden ought statements. The dog’s soul is perhaps a seamless unity but he too is an animal possessing some of our powers. One can, however, wonder whether dogs have minds in the sense of a mental space in which Aristotelian deliberations can take place. Deliberations are rationally structured but are also value or desire-laden. Lear believes that Aristotelian deliberation transmits this desire. My wish to drink the water will be conscious, Lear argues, and will set in motion a deliberation until a decision is reached and an action commenced. This reference to consciousness is very modern and this, of course, is a term Aristotle never used: he preferred to use the term awareness instead, and many modern commentators build a notion of reflexivity into this awareness, that is, they claim there is a self-awareness implied in Aristotle’s usage of this term.What this in turn implies, is that there is a self that is aware of itself. Does this
imply the presence of two selves? Not necessarily. There are in the actualising process of the human organism striving to be rational, earlier and later stages of development. There is no logical contradiction in the self at a later stage confronting in discourse oneself at an earlier stage during the process of moving from one stage to the other. But this is a different kind of deliberation to that involved in performing an action. The process of reasoning involved is characterised by Aristotle in the “Metaphysics” as follows:
“…health is the logos and knowledge in the soul. The healthy subject, then, is produced as the result of the following train of thought: since this is health, if the subject is to be healthy, this must first be present, e.g. a universal state of the body, and if this is to be present, there must be heat: and the physician goes on thinking thus until he brings the matter to a final step which he himself can take. Then the process from this point onward, i.e. the process towards health, is called a “making” “(Metaphysics VII, 7, 1032B5-10).
This process of reasoning is then compared by Aristotle to the reasoning one finds in the activity of geometers. In geometry, synthesis is the name of a process of construction by iteration of elements and construction of relations between elements: a straight line is thus synthesised or constructed by the placing of a second point at a distance from the first and the connecting of these two points by a straight line. The analysis of this straight line would then break the process down in a set of orderly steps until one arrives at the stage at which one begins the synthesis again. The analysis reverses the process. In the example of the doctor planning to act in the above quote, the initial desired goal has been synthesised and the deliberation “analyses” or “deconstructs” the goal to that point at which the doctor/agent fetches some warm blankets from the cupboard to warm the patient who ”has a cold”. The forming of the desire to warm the patient is of course not deliberative reasoning it is more like the effect of Eros on the mind, more like a learning or succumbing process issuing from an attitude of mind of awe, love for the world, or desire to understand the world. Of course, one is aware of this desire and to that extent one is certain about it in the same way as one is certain of any other manifestation in the consciousness of any mental event. It is the self-reflexive act of contemplating the desire which allows freedom into the Aristotelian process of deliberation. The agent decides whether and/or how to satisfy his desire and once this process is completed the desire to keep one’s patients healthy is transformed into a reason for acting. We are of course ignorant of the workings of this freedom to choose and to this extent, we are ignorant of part of the essence of what it is to be human. Kant would later dub this region of the mind , the region of noumenal being, the region of the noumenal self.
Reason, action, and consequence are concepts in complex relations with each other. Insofar as in Aristotle, forms constitute the world, the forms interacting in the matrix of space-time-material in accordance with a principle of causation must contribute to the creation or “forming” of this world. In a previous essay we pointed to the three different kinds of forms that constitute this world: firstly, the forms produced by and in relation to sexual reproduction, secondly, the forms produced by work of man in the building and construction of his artefacts, homes and cities, and, thirdly, the forms produced by teachers in the process of communicating knowledge.
Reason, action, and consequence are of course related to human activities insofar as they are knowledge-driven and also contribute to the ”forming” of the world. Such activities aim at the good they desire, and analyse what is needed in order to bring about the changes in the world they desire. Human agents have reasons for their actions in the same way as the archer has a reason for his action. The archer who hits the centre of the bulls-eye is like the geometer arriving at the point at which the reconstruction of his proof is presented. We, the audience, are in awe of his performance: the object of the action and the intention are in such cases in full, almost divine, congruence. The consequence is a logical consequence as is the recovery of the patient with the cold after the doctor restores the homeostasis of the body with the warm blankets. Many of our actions, however, do not achieve the desired result on the part of the agent, but this is no reason to doubt the logical relation in thought between the object and the intention. Human desire is generated in the human body. The desire to understand or to contemplate may be an activity that involves no bodily activity, although it is difficult even here to conceive of this activity taking place without correlative brain activity. It seems that only God, the divine, can think without a correlative underlying physical activity generating the thought. The mind-body problem obviously surfaces at this point in Aristotle’s philosophical psychology.
Sir David Ross in his work on “Aristotle”defines Psychology in terms of its objective “to discover the nature and essence of the soul and its attributes” So on this characterisation Psychology will cover vegetative and animal behaviour as well as human action. There is sufficient resemblance between the forms of life these different forms of soul lead to, sufficient to enable us to call soul “the principle” organising nutritive and reproductive activity, perceptive and motor activity, and human reasoning activity respectively. We mentioned earlier the relation between these forms of soul. David Ross puts the matter thus:
“Geometrical figures may be arranged in an order beginning with the triangle and proceeding to more and more complex forms, each of which contains potentially all that precedes. So too, the forms of soul form a series with a definite order, such that each kind of soul presupposes all that come before it in this order, without being implied by them.” (D.Ross, “Aristotle”, P.135)2
The physical substrate or matter underlying the above is obviously a simple physical organisation of parts of a plant to a more complex organisation of the organ systems of different species of animals enabling them to “sense” their environment or, alternatively, in the case of the rational animal, reason about their environment. It is also important to know about this material substrate which is inseparable from its mental aspect in the same way in which the shape of the ax is inseparable from its function of “chopping”. The soul and the body for Aristotle are in the human inseparable aspects. Ross has this to say on this topic:
“Most mental phenomena are attended by some bodily affection….Mental phenomena, therefore, are “formulae involving matter. The true definition of them will omit neither their form or end (their rational causation) nor their matter (their physiological conditions”(Ross, P.137)
The soul has its rational and irrational parts and also its various faculties which Ross explains in the following way:
“He is simply taking account of the fact that the soul does exhibit a variety of operations and that behind each of these intermittent operations we must suppose a permanent power of so operating. But these faculties do not exist like stones in a heap. They have a definite order, an order of worth, and a reverse order of development in the individual. Further, they have a characteristic which we may roughly call interpenetration. Thus, for instance, intellect and desire are distinct faculties, but the highest species of desire is of a kind which can only occur in beings which have intellect and is itself intellectual. Choice or will may equally well be called desiring reason and reasoning desire, and in it, the whole of man is involved.”(Ross, P.139)
The language of potentiality and actuality is particularly important in the Psychology of Aristotle because of his insistence upon categorical distinctions
between the operations of the soul: Firstly, there are feeling operations and secondly, operations which actualise the possession of capacities, and thirdly operations which actualise the possession of dispositions. Dispositions are higher level capacities; they are rationally regulated capacities. The virtues are examples of dispositions, and language is an example of a capacity. Reason is a faculty, and its relation to the other faculties is regarded by many commentators as a mystery. With reason we approach the contemplative life of God, the divine life, but this contemplative life does not appear to have any links with the body, according to Aristotle. Philosophical Psychology also deals with Perception. Given what has been said previously about the nature of the physical body being defined by its system of organs, we can draw the conclusion that the senses are obviously materially connected with organs. One of the accusations traditionally directed at Aristotle is that he confuses the purely physiological with the psychological. The physical eye, of course, is connected to the organ of the brain, and Aristotle states that perception takes place in the head as a result of the eye taking on the sensible form of whatever it is perceiving. The eye somehow identifies itself with the brown and green colours of the tree as well as the shape of the tree and the outcome, probably involving the brain, is an awareness of seeing the tree (which in itself does not have to be brown and green and possess a shape of a tree). The language of actuality and potentiality are important here in order to establish the relation of the object to its perception. The tree, in its turn, has the potentiality to be seen, that is, has the potentiality as a second level and higher actuality, to affect the faculty of sight (which would include the relation of the eye to the brain) in this way. It is not the tree that is present in the soul but its form
A by-product of perception or the faculty of sight, is the imagination or the faculty of the imagination, rendered by the Greek term Phantasia. Ross characterises this faculty in the following manner:
“Usually Phantasia (which has the meaning of “to appear”) is described as operating only after the sensible object has gone. The “movement of the soul through the body” which perception sets up causes a repercussion both in the body and in the soul—though as regards the soul the effect, until recollection takes place, is potential, i.e. not a conscious state of mind but an unconscious modification of the mind. At some later time, owing, for instance to the suppression of sensation in sleep, the movement becomes actual: i.e. an image similar to but less lively than the sensation, and less trustworthy as a guide to objective fact, is formed and attended to: and this is the act of imagination”
Phantasia has two main functions, according to Ross. The first function is the pure formation of after images, and the second function is related to memory, which involves both images and time, and an object in the past: it is the memory image relates to something in the past.
Freud obviously based his analysis of the condition of “shell shock” on the above theory. For Freud, bringing something into consciousness via the process of recollection and persuading the patient to talk about the cause of the images recollected, in the therapeutic situation, suffices to turn the phantasy of the traumatic event into a memory which would fade over time. We should remember in this context that, for Freud, language was a secondary sensory surface related more to thought than to perception. For both Aristotle and Freud, Thought was more reliably related to reality than imagination because it followed what Freud called the reality principle.
The Reality Principle, for Freud, is very much connected to the work of the ego which has the responsibility of coordinating the agencies of the id and superego in relation to the beliefs it has about the external world and the actions it is deliberating upon. The coordination with the superego of course takes on special significance when it comes to the Greek idea of virtue, which has many meanings, but the primary meaning in relation to action-contexts, is that of doing the right thing in the right way at the right time. Freud’s concept of the agency of the superego according to O Shaughnessy is connected to Consciousness of other human beings which forms our reflexive type of self-consciousness so important in the criticism of self and others. In an earlier work, “The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action(Vol 4) I claimed the following:
“The way in which the Other Consciousness is introduced into the Psychological Theory of Freud is via the agency of the Superego: a critical social agency internalised as a judging function. Maxims, intentions, desires, and actions are submitted to critical standards embodying principles that have helped to build our civilisations and create our cultures. O’Shaughnessy argues that it is the concept of another person that is responsible for forming the vicissitude of Consciousness we refer to as Self-Consciousness. He claims this concept is innate but the empirical existence of others is required if this form of Consciousness is to be actualised. Language is obviously an important power that also requires this innate concept and its empirical conditions that are to be found in the community of language users. Language for Freud was Janus- faced with one aspect turned toward the sensory world which it names and describes, and the other toward the world of thought which it expresses. There is the I that speaks, and the I that thinks, and the soundest approach to describing and explaining this state of affairs is to refuse to atomise the self into compartments, but rather regard the expressive self as logically identical with the thinking self that expresses thoughts in a public realm of discourse–thus realising the social and political intentions of a rational animal capable of discourse. O’Shaughnessy’s view is that Self Consciousness is a secondary phenomenon, the primary phenomenon being a vital expressive animal interacting with a demanding environment.”(P.166-7)
For Freud the superego is a metapsychological concept perhaps only second in importance to that other metapsychological concept of the ego. We know the Freudian aim for the individual in his effort to exist and desire to be is a strong independent ego that is not dependent upon the external world, the id or the superego. “Strong” in this context is not meant to depict dominance, but “weak” is meant to depict submission. The best term, perhaps to characterise what Freud meant by “strong” is the word “integration”: the ego is well integrated with the external world, the id and the superego, and to that extent is leading a healthy good spirited flourishing life. Freud in fact gives us a perfect picture of the submissive anxiety filled ego in his discussion of the ego ideal and idealisation which, it is claimed is connected to forming the superego the narcissistic way. He speaks here of delusions of observation in paranoia which may be connected to the death instinct that reigns in the absence of the strong egos effort to exist and desire to be. Such a dependent ego, subject to the critical gaze of the superego intent upon measuring the actions initiated by the ego uses defence mechanisms regularly to cope with the demands of life e.g. identification, repression, denial, displacement, splitting etc. The strong ego, on the other hand, is an ego that works virtuously in the realm of the moral rules and laws that regulate our relations to one another. The question to raise here is whether this is a form of the Reality Principle or whether this latter principle is a principle that only regulates the consequences of action rather than the maxims, intentions and reasons which are constitutive of the identity of moral action. This touches upon an old theme of Plato’s Republic where Socrates is eager to draw attention to the distinction between the good-in-itself and the “good-in-its-consequences, insisting in this connection that the idea of justice must be good in both senses. The question this reflection raises is whether the reality principle also governs the logic of the reasoning connected to deliberation upon the ought and is premises that lead us to moral action, e.g.
Promises ought to be kept
Jack promised Jill he would pay the money back that he was borrowing
Jack ought to pay the money back
In the world of real consequences this ideal form of reasoning is subject to qualification. What if Jack cannot pay the money back because he loses his job? It is up to Jill to decide whether to be disappointed in Jacks inability to keep his promise. She may well understand that Jack would have paid the money back if he could but losing his job was not something he counted on in the moment of promising in which of course he had every intention to keep his promise. She may also insist that he nevertheless pay the money back to her somehow. Here we can perhaps see something of the relation between the good-in-itself and the good.in-its-consequences. Now Freud, we maintain, must have been aware of the way in which the moral law moves from an “ought” premise relating to promising, to an “is” premise relating to the action of actually paying the money back or “returning a deposit”. He claimed he was a Kantian Psychologist and Kantian reflections on morality certainly argue for “The truth” of the premise “Promises ought to be kept” in virtue of this being the ultimate reason or justification for doing what one morally ought to do. If however, Freud intends the reality principle to be purely consequential then we must detach the moral principle from the reality principle but it is also important to note that the premises and conclusion in a moral argument are logically valid, making the action concerned both good -in-itself and good- in-its-consequences. There is no reason to embrace relativism in the domain of metapsychology just because of the difficulty in defining the exact scope of the moral principle. Kantian psychology has strong ties to Kantian morality and the moral law and those that wish to argue that Kantian morality is normative on the grounds of it only “recommending” what one ought to do, need to be confronted with two arguments, firstly, Kant’s ethics is a duty based ethics and describing this in terms of ” recommendation” can take us down the garden path of relativism. Secondly, Logic is normative in exactly the same way as morality which describes how people ought to act. Logic, that is, describes how people ought to think. We all know there are people who do not do what they ought to do just as there are people who contradict themselves. Jettisoning both ethics and logic because of these “facts” is indeed a dramatic and dangerous response but it has been the response of those followers of the “Tractatus”(Wittgenstein) who believed that “The world is the totality of facts and not things”. For Aristotle, Kant and Freud the world was better conceived in terms of a totality of conditions and principles. The superego, then, for Freud, must refer to the conditions and principles of moral action if he is to remain true to his claim that he is providing us with the (Meta) Psychology Kant would have produced if he was writing during the Freudian period. The superego can also however be narcissistically formed and this state of affairs is best represented in terms, not of the agent deliberating and rationally choosing not to do what he ought to do, but rather in terms of something happening to a mind where the ego is not strong enough to see what is both good in itself and good in its consequences, where the ego submits to non rational causes that either originate in the external world , the id or the superego.
There is not much discussion about the Kantian idea of freedom in Freud’s theorising but this may be due to the fact that much of Freud’s task was to defend medically and theoretically a technical therapeutic activity which in itself was a revolutionary “moral treatment”. To some extent this development of the method of the “talking cure” presupposed the value of the freedom of mental patients, suggesting clinical treatment instead of the prospect of being locked up in an institutions.
The philosophical thread extending from Socrates, through Plato, and Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Wittgenstein and all their lesser known followers working in universities manifested both the many meanings of Being and the many meanings of Good and the cultural influence of the thought flowing from the thread has sometimes been monopolised by an obsessive compulsive desire to focus on one meaning of Being(the world is the totality of facts) or one meaning of Good( the subjective feeling based emotive meaning of the positivists). The consequences of obsession are never wholly good and rarely defined as obsessive. The effect of the category of action seems to have become detached from the pathological cause and is identified in terms of a more neutral category, e.g. “The new men” of Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism”. The combination of Descartes dualism and obsession with consciousness and the scientists obsession with method and the underlying presupposition of materialism have been large contributors to what I termed in Vol 4 of my work: “The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition,Emotion, Consciousness and Action”, “The Age of Discontentment”. The question which remains to be answered is whether the philosophical thread referred to earlier can help turn a post-discontentment age into something more positive and less pathological.
Jonathan Lear in his work “Aristotle: the desire to understand” claims that Freedom is the value that defines the constitution of our human nature to such an extent that lacking an understanding of our freedom is tantamount to not understanding ourselves. Now we could be forgiven for believing that the above remarks are about the ethics of Kant, but they are rather meant to articulate what Lear thinks is an important implication of Aristotle’s ethics. Lear does however throughout his work on Aristotle articulate support for the claim that Aristotelian ethics is an ethics of freedom. In the course of this “comparison”, however, a surprise is in store. Lear claims in the context of this discussion that the moral agent somehow detaches itself (frees itself?) from its desires and he thereby sides with Hegel’s criticism of Kantian ethics. Hegel claimed that he would stand the philosophy of Kant on its head and in attempting to do so may well have turned the worlds of Aristotle, Kant, and the common man upside down. Hegel’s dialectical logic replaced the Metaphysical Logic of Aristotle, and the Transcendental Logic of Kant. Hegel’s inversion of bottom and top via his dialectical logic remind one of the psychological subjects of Stratton(1), wearing glasses which invert their retinal images and seeing the landscape upside down on the first day. On the second day, these subjects felt that their bodies were upside down until finally after a number of days of acting under these strange circumstances everything returned to normal again. Wearing the glasses of Hegel to view the Philosophy of Kant can indeed make the world of Kant seem a strange world itself in need of conversion. It is, to say the very least, rather surprising to find Lear subscribing to this Hegelian position succumbing to this Hegelian deconstruction. We need in such a context, to remind ourselves of the texts of Kant which disprove the detachment thesis. Firstly, in the Critique of Judgment(2) Kant clearly claims the existence of an intimate relation between practical reason and desire:
“In the same way reason which contains constitutive, a priori principles solely in respect of the faculty of desire gets its holding assigned to it by the critique of Practical Reason.”(Preface)
Lear in his Hegelian criticism, is apparently failing to register Kant’s claim that there are two kinds of concepts, theoretical and practical, which generate separate and different principles of the possibility of their objects. Concepts of nature and concepts of freedom have a reflectively different structure. The application of concepts of nature to an acting will generates what Kant calls technically-practical principles in which it is legitimate to conceive of a kind of separation or detachment of the subject and his/her action. Such technically practical principles regulate an agents skills in accordance with the law of cause and effect, and this places such concepts and principles clearly in the realm of theoretical philosophy far from the realm of desire. Kant defines desire in the following terms:
“a faculty which by means of its representations is the cause of the actuality of the objects of those representations.”(P.16)
This clearly relates desire to practical reason and to the bringing about of states of affairs by means of principles in the practical world. Kant, in this discussion, is careful to distinguish between empirical cases in which ones desire for a
partic object precedes the practical principle, and transcendental cases in which the determining ground of choice is the practical principle. An example of the latter would be in the case where the principle “Promises ought to be kept” determines my choice of what I must do and transmits my desire down a chain of action-related reflections. There is no space for any detachment or separation of the agent from his action in such circumstances. In cases of a desire for a material object which is not being directed by a principle, the desire could arise and be abandoned in favour of another desire, and in such circumstances, one might say that the agent had a detachable relation to the object of the desire and the desire itself . This latter possibility, on Kant’s view, is a result of what he refers to as a lower faculty of desire activity which he contrasts with a higher faculty activity. According to Kant, “promises ought to be kept” is a principle that one cannot abandon as a practical agent. The former lower faculty of desire activity argues Kant is concerned with pleasure related to the object desired and its agreeableness. The latter is concerned with what Aristotle would call the good in itself which in its turn is a concern with our well being and worthiness to be happy. For Kant, this is a key condition for an ethical position and this may indicate a key difference between his position and the finality of the happiness condition which Aristotle proposes.
It is, therefore, puzzling to find Lear asking how a self-conscious being on the Kantian account could make decisions at all as if the Kantian self-consciousness resembled the Cartesian self-consciousness reflecting theoretically upon its own desires. Hegel, we know, did not appreciate the relation of Kantian ethical theory to the ethical theory of Aristotle’s in which we see both Philosophers adopting the vantage point of reflecting upon the relation of practical reason to its object rather than reflecting theoretically on the relation of a state of mind to
its object.
One may wish to contradict this account by insisting that Aristotle’s theory of virtue in the Nichomachean Ethics, specifically argues that virtue is a state (lexis) rather than a capacity (dunamis) or a feeling (pathos). The question, however, is, how would Aristotle wish to characterise the state of the soul in question. He would not for example countenance this state as a state of consciousness and he would not want to countenance this state being characterised as many modern philosophy-of-mind-theorists do, as something “private” (feelings are private and particular). Rather, the “state” Aristotle is referring to here is a state of the soul which for him is differentiated in terms of different principles, defining different kinds or essences. Indeed, the word “disposition” might be a more appropriate term (a disposition, we recall, is a higher level capacity). For these purposes, a practical disposition would be construed in terms of a law-like principle that has been sculpted by the processes of training, education and habituation in accordance with social and cultural processes such as that of the “Golden Mean”.
Practical dispositions are given their initial characterization in the opening remarks of the Nichomachean Ethics:
“Every art and every enquiry, every action, and choice seems to aim at some good: whence the good has rightly been defined as that at which all things aim.”
For Aristotle, we should recall, the good has many meanings depending upon whether it is aiming in discourse at peoples character, their actions, the place or time they live in etc. But all have in common the essence of the good for man or eudaimonia, which, for Kant, was a part of his ethical religious idea of the summum bonum. It is especially difficult, given this rather strong resemblance in their positions to imagine the ethical Kantian agent being detached from his own happiness or flourishing life. There is, moreover, a hylomorphic element to Kant’s theorising which is unmistakeable. In much of his reasoning, there is a specific reference to matter and form and if we analyse the two formulations of the categorical imperative, it would be difficult not to see the formal aspect of the ethical law in the first formulation and the material aspect in the second formulation. Were there to be only one formulation of the law, namely, the first, one, we might be able to argue more forcefully for, (if not the detachment thesis Lear proposes), an accusation of formalism or “emptiness”. The first formulation asks us to “will” that the maxim of one’s action be regarded as a universal law, and if there is no such universal law then the logical consequence is surely at the very least “emptiness”, and more seriously perhaps the impossibility of ethical action. The second formulation, however, fills the first formulation with content by insisting that we should act so that we treat everyone including ourselves as ends in themselves. This latter formulation is moreover, reminiscent of the kind of respect embedded in the Aristotelian account of friendship in the Nichomachean Ethics. Aristotle speaks here of a kind of fellowship existing between individuals or citizens of a polis which is similar to the affection that siblings have for one another. In Aristotle, the good is in man’s character from the beginning in the form of a capacity, to be developed into a disposition (by nurturing and education). Just as we learn to be builders by building, and teachers by teaching, and doctors by doctoring, we learn to be brave by doing brave acts in encouraging circumstances and we learn to be virtuous by performing virtuous acts. This is the route by which states of character are formed. In this process of forming a good disposition, pleasures and pains need to be organised because, as Aristotle claims, “the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain” are the main sources of vicious action.
Feelings are originally also capacities (low level capacities) and are part of the material that needs to be changed and formed by the nurturing of a virtuous disposition so that one feels the right feeling in the right circumstances at the right time. It is obvious from the above account that virtue cannot itself be merely a feeling because as Aristotle rightly argues we do not praise or blame men for the feelings they are having, (because this is something passive- something that is happening to them, within the privacy of their own bodies). The Aristotelian-Kantian ethical attitude is an active attitude inextricably tied up with human activity, with action, and with choice. Such activity is formed by a method shaped by an aim to hit a target or achieve an end. The difference between the generous man, the spendthrift, and the miser, is one of an active attitude towards men and money. We can only choose to act, Aristotle argues if the action is of the kind, voluntary. Actions caused by external factors (compulsions) or ignorance are for him involuntary actions and cannot be freely chosen: such actions can therefore neither be praised nor blamed, i.e the agent cannot be held fully responsible for them. The notion of choice, isolated from other powers, is not related to the end of the flourishing life because this latter is a rational wish of Eros and is not itself chosen, but rather succumbed to, in the manner an educational process is succumbed to. Deliberation chooses the means to accomplish the flourishing life. For a holistic view of the process of deliberation stretching from the moment of succumbing, to the moment of making the good occur see Sir David Ross’s account in “Aristotle”: Ross situates choice in the matrix of desire, deliberation, perception and Art:
“Desire: I desire A Deliberation: B is the means to A C is the means to B N is the means to M Perception: N is something I can do here and now
Choice: I choose N Art: I do N “(P.
Ross does not do this but one can describe this process of deliberation in terms of areté which is a term Aristotle uses for both one’s moral character and ones skill in thinking and acting. Translating this term as virtue becomes clearer when it is used in the context of “the virtuous life” that, when coupled to the term eudaimonia, or the good spirited flourishing life, embraces both the intellectual virtues and the moral/ethical virtues which include phronesis, courage, and temperance. The character of a virtuous man is, then, a set of dispositions (formed capacities), that organise one’s desires and feelings in relation to the final end of eudaimonia or the flourishing life which in its turn is also the actualisation of the potential of the rational animal capable of discourse. The Phronimos, the great-souled man possessing practical wisdom which he demonstrates with his correct reasoning, (reasoning in the right way, or orthos logos), is the man whose psuché, or soul, best integrates the rational and the irrational parts of the soul. Aristotle indicates the consequences of falling short in the aim of fulfilling one’s potential, namely forms of life which are neither excellent (areté) nor flourishing (eudaimonia). He illustrates this claim by pointing to the life of pleasure pursued by firstly, non rational animals, secondly, the life of honour pursued by men of ambition and thirdly, the life of the Phronimos who, one assumes, fulfils his potential most completely because of the Platonic argument that he is the being who has experienced all the three forms of pleasure associated with these different life forms and as a consequence knows which pleasure is the best.Plato would have argued that the pleasure experienced by the Phronimos is pure(more intellectual) and unrelated to pain which by definition is a condition caused by a body striving for homeostasis (manifesting a relation between the pleasure-pain principle and the energy regulation principle). The lives of the hedonist, the wealthy man, and the ambitious man, are all pain avoidance related and therefore dependent on either external or internal causal factors. None of these forms of life meet the criteria of the self-sufficient flourishing life. The great-souled, Phronimos, on the other hand, is self-sufficient because he reasons in the right way about the world of conduct and feelings (the feelings of pleasure and pain, fear and anger). It is also important not to lose sight of the systematic connections of the above
account with Aristotle’s claims about psuché and human nature. Because humans are animals and organisms they necessarily possess an ergon (inbuilt function) as well as a telos which is dependent upon material and efficient causes. The human, however, distinguishes itself from other forms of life through unique capacities and their potential to be formed into rational dispositions. Rationality is a term we attribute to humankind for its disposition to reason well and excellently.
One can wonder, as G E Moore did, whether including the natural, biological, material and efficient causes of being a human in the definition of “moral value” condemns Aristotle’s account to commit the naturalistic fallacy, i.e. the fallacy of defining moral value in terms of natural capacities. We have argued above that moral virtue is dispositional and dispositions are formal and developed capacities. If this distinction is observed, there is no fallacy, no contradiction because capacities, we have argued, are actualised into dispositions given the appropriate conditions for the actualisation process to occur. That is to say, there is no local equivalence between the natural capacities of a human organism and its moral dispositions which are, as has been argued, constituted by the excellent exercise of natural capacities. Aristotle characterises all forms of activity and art as striving for the good and areté, so it is important to point out that even if one possesses the capacity to build a house, and do it well, this activity of an artisan is not a form of moral excellence, but rather a form of pragmatic/technological excellence. There is a further major difference between moral and technological(techné) excellenc which is connected to the distinction Aristotle recognises between acting (praxis) and producing (poesis). This is noted by G J Hughes in his Routledge guidebook: “Aristotle on Ethics”3:
“Health is indeed the product of the art of medicine just as a house is the product of architecture or a statue of sculpture. But eudaimonia is not the product of the actions of a good person. Fulfilment in life is not something over and above someone’s actions which those actions produce. Fulfilment consists in doing what one does just because one sees those actions as noble and worthwhile…. living is not a process one undertakes for the sake of something else which is produced as a result. The point of the good life just is the living of it.”(P.89)
Hughes continues by pointing out that this puts Aristotle in the deontological camp in our modern ethical debates. He cannot be a consequentialist, argues Hughes, because:
“Aristotle has nothing comparable to Bentham’s definition of action as a “mere bodily movement” from which it would indeed follow that the value of an action must depend on the consequences that action produces, as Bentham says. Instead, Aristotle defines an action in terms of how the agent describes or sees their behaviour at the time and draws no particular line between action and its consequences”(p.90)
The implications of this argument are devastating for the utilitarian position which finds itself at odds with two of the most important ethical positions. For Aristotle, the agent must adopt a first-person perspective to what they are doing, and not a third person observationalist perspective which, in the absence of the declaration of intention by the agent of the action, might well seem “mere bodily movement”. Confusion is endemic in this area of debate. We can see one kind of confusion in the utilitarian camp where the theoretical obsession with a reductive-compositive method, together with an observationalist/experimental interpretation of that method, postulates “atoms” of pure movement which can then be inserted into a theoretical framework of linear causes and effects. The movement “causes” a state of affairs that is logically different from its cause, thus dividing what was a unitary action into two elements which can only be composed into a unity at the expense of the holistic account of deliberative practical reasoning we find in Aristotelian ethics. Confusions between praxis and poesis may even assist in this attempt to subject this domain to the theoretical framework of scientific reasoning. It is, of course, easier to dissolve a skill (needed for the production of an object) into the event of movement and the product produced at the end of the activity, because here quite clearly the observer can, for example, see the builder building and the “consequence”, the completed, produced house. Aristotle would immediately criticise this theoretical attempt for failing to appreciate the role of intention in identifying the activity (correctly describing the activity). This, for him, could only occur from the first person point of view. The builder sees what he is doing from the point of view of the idea or form of the house he has in mind, and this, for him, logically determines how one can describe such building activity. All art aims at the good, Aristotle declared, but there is a difference between the good house being built, which is largely a pragmatic matter, and leading a good flourishing life which is a broader, ethical/political good. We need also to recall that we are in the realm of forms for Aristotle, forms which are subject to his metaphysical theory of change. Forms for Aristotle were hierarchically structured with sexual reproduction at the lower end of the scale being followed by the production of artifacts, and finally by the learning and teaching of the forms. The production of artifacts as we pointed out involves practical knowledge, but not a choice made by a stable character. Here it seems, in the instrumental case, we are clearly dealing with an activity or work, but not fully fledged action (Arendt distinguished in her work between labour, work, and action)(4) An organised soul is required to perform the actions which aim at a flourishing life: only work activity
is required to produce the objects of techné. So, knowledge is involved in firstly, the action as a result of practical reasoning, and secondly, in the deliberative calculation of the work activity behind the creation of objects of techné. We need to enquire into the different kinds of knowledge in the different kinds of science involved in leading the flourishing life. Aristotle distinguishes between three different kinds of science: the theoretical, practical and productive sciences. In relation to theoretical science, he claims, (in the light of knowledge being defined as justified true belief), that essence specifying definitions or principles are the justifications we find in the theoretical sphere of scientific activity. These both provide a form of logical necessity not to be found in the other two sciences, which are both aiming at something for which, as yet, there are no essence specifying definitions. What we find instead here are principles. Theoretical sciences aim at the truth and use logical demonstration that moves from first principles or essence-specifying definitions to logically related conclusions. Practical sciences may be related to the truth and logic or “analytics” (as Aristotle called logic), but the primary aim of these sciences is the good. Because of areas of commonality, we find in this area that particular conclusive judgments follow from universal and particular premises. Similarly, in the practical sciences “justification” will also involve the elements of Aristotle’s metaphysical theory of change in which reference will be made to 4 kinds of change, three principles and 4 “causes” but here, agents, powers and actions will be the focus of attention. In the “Posterior Analytics” Aristotle gives us an account of the acquisition of knowledge which is common for all the sciences.
The above is a fine account of how the desire to understand involves powers building upon powers and integrating into the unified disposition of mind that we believe generates knowledge. This process, surely, is common to all the sciences. It accounts for how we differentiate animals from each other, of how we differentiate men from each other, and also, finally, how we differentiate objects and actions from each other. The above account does not mention the powers of language and reason, but these will certainly be involved in the generation of knowledge. The 4 causes or explanations of the theory of change will also be involved in our judgments of the good man striving to actualise his potential to live the flourishing life. They will also be involved in scientific judgments in relation to the good action, which, as we have been told, plays an important role in the above actualisation process. The desire to understand oneself and know oneself will also probably be a part of this journey of awe and wonder. Aristotle’s idea of the flourishing life is one where both the moral and intellectual virtues form a unity in which knowledge, whilst not being perhaps a seamless robe, is at least one unified coat of many colours. The idea of the goodwill, in this account, includes both knowledge and understanding of oneself and the world one lives in.
Aristotle did engage in the discussion of one aporetic issue which directly highlights the ways in which theoretical and practical knowledge are integrated with ethical action. Socrates argued that if a man knows the good, i.e. really knows and understands the universal idea of the good, then he will necessarily always do the good in his actions. On the face of it, the opening sentences of the Nichomachean Ethics, claiming as they do that all art, activity, and inquiry aim at the good, suggests that Aristotle too must accept this Socratic analysis. Awareness of the phenomenon of the man claiming to know the good
and then not doing it, however, pushed Aristotle into giving a more nuanced account of this so-called phenomenon of akrasia or incontinence. For Aristotle, it was necessary for him to acknowledge this phenomenon, and give it an acceptable explanation. Now, if it was the case that all men as agents aim at the good, it is difficult to understand how an agent can perform an incontinent action where that is defined as an action that is intentional and performed against a background of the knowledge that a preferable alternative action is available to the agent. If we are imagining a rational agent wholly constituted of their beliefs, desires, values, and actions, then we have to bear in mind that the relation between intentions beliefs and desires is a complex one and difficulties abound as soon as one evokes the terminology of Analytical Philosophy.
Socrates was criticised by Lear because he wanted to characterise akrasia in terms of states of the soul, but the above characterisation in terms of beliefs, desires and intentions, seems to be a similar attempt, using states of mind and the terminology of Analytical Philosophy. Aristotle’s account of akrasia is actually better characterised in terms of his own terminology of the powers of perception, memory, language, knowledge, and reason in an organised soul. On this account, akrasia is not possible. If there is an alternative action for which there are good reasons, it must be the case in an organised soul that all things considered and understood, this must be the action one chooses to perform (not being aware of what one is doing and being drunk with passion are excluded as possibilities). This suggests that the phenomenon of incontinence must be explained by there either being a lack of knowledge or ignorance of how to act. The power of judgment will also necessarily play a part in the deliberative process which leads to action. Aristotle’s practical syllogism differentiates the reasons why any one of the premises could be blocked. The power of judgment also of course may be shut down by strong passions and a different principle of action would in such cases be operating. The virtuous soul, of course, is a well-organised soul and will not allow its powers to be compromised in the above ways. The soul on its way to virtuous organisation may, however, be like an actor on a stage going through the motions of knowing, i.e. exercising deficient powers of knowledge by believing that he ought to be doing some alternative better action but because of the confusion in his soul is not able to settle on the completely articulated reason for what ought to be done. We should also remember, considering the fact that we are dealing with practical reasoning and rationality, that the soul will not acquire what he calls the ”logos”, by merely hearing something and assenting to it: language is not a sufficient power to install the kind of knowledge being referred to (it is a capacity not a fully fledged disposition). The apprentice knower, that is, must imitate his betters in an environment of ethical guidance, and the journey from being an apprentice to being a virtuous man is one in which one is learning about oneself and the world. The possibility, of course, exists in such circumstances that someone may be right in one’s judgments about the world but wrong in one’s judgments about oneself, i.e. incontinence will be on display in such a case.
Notes
1 Eliot, T.S., Four Quartets ,(New York, Harcourt Publishing Co, 1943)
2 Lear, J., Aristotle: the desire to understand ,(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1988)
3 Shields, C., Aristotle , (London, Routledge, 2007)
4 Sellars, W., Science, Perception, and Reality , (Atascadero, California, 1963)
5. Politis, V., Aristotle and the Metaphysics, (London, Routledge, 2004)
6. Hacker, P.M.S., Human Nature: the Categorical Framework, (Oxford, Blackwell, 2007)
7. Schopenhauer, A., The World as Will and Representation, translated by Payne, E.F.J., (New York, Dover Publications, 1958)
8. Maslow, A., Motivation and Personality, (New York, Harper and Row, 1970)
9. For the purposes of this example we should assume that a violent storm has
been reliably predicted by metereologists and the ships are Aristotelian, that is,
old fashioned sailing ships.
10. Ross, D.W., Aristotle, (London, Routledge, 1923
11.Stratton, Some Preliminary Experiments on Vision without inversion of the
retinal image, Psychological Review, 1986.
12. Kant, I., Kant’s Critique of Judgment, translated by Meredith, J.C., (Oxford,
Clarendon Press,1952)
13. Hughes, G.J., Aristotle on Ethics,(Oxford, Routledge,2001)
14Arendt, H., The Human Condition, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
1958.