The Art of Actualizing Your Highest Potentials
Aristotle was, quite simply, the most influential thinker in all of human history. Not only did he know everything that could be known in his day, but he knew things that it would take the rest of the world many many centuries to figure out. His reasoning was so impeccable that he has never been shown to be wrong about any of his major conclusions. And even when, in one age or another, some have suspected him of being in error, it has most often turned out to be the case that he was right after all, and it was his detractors who were wrong.[i]
Aristotle was a student of Plato at his Academy for some 20 years, and certainly his best student. Though Aristotle was always challenging and critical of Plato, he followed his thinking in all but a very few ways. When Plato died, and the directorship of the Academy went to someone of lessor skills, Aristotle left and started his own school called the Lyceum, which rivaled the Academy for students ever after, making Plato and Aristotle seem more opposed to one another than they ever were in life. Aristotle is typically taken to oppose 'Platonic doctrine' on many levels, but this is more apparently than actually the case. Rather, Aristotle's "affection for Plato takes second place only to his love of truth." "'Both are dear to us'," Aristotle said, "'but truth must be preferred.'.”(Bambrough, p.17) Socrates (who never knew Aristotle, of course, given that he died 14 years before the latter was born) would almost certainly have agreed, given that he said, "You can't argue with the truth. Any fool can argue with Socrates".(Sym 201d)
Aristotle’s philosophy built on Plato’s Socratic teachings, but unlike Socrates and Plato (whose intention it was to distinguish the stable truth from that which is in flux, unchanging knowledge from that which is too loosely called 'knowledge'), Aristotle's purpose was to explore the nature of the changing world,[iii] and he did so with a sensitivity to telos, or purposeful development, natural associations, and proper functions. If you see the proper function of the whole, he argued, you can see there is a function for every part. So, if you want to understand something, simply ask, What it is good for? And another way to ask what a thing is good for is to ask, What is its proper function? If you want to improve something, compare its actual existing state (its real) to its best potential state (its ideal). Compare its current function to its ideal or healthy function.
Aristotle was a physician, a biologist, concerned with bio and logos, which is literally the ‘logic of life’. Anything that has a beginning, he argued, must have an ending, and therefore, a life-span. The things of the world are always changing, and to understand them, we must understand the nature of how they change. All change comes either from nature (outside of human agency) or from artifice (inside of human agency, that is, mind, art, creativity.) While inanimate objects are changed from outside of themselves (physic), plants, animals, humans, human institutions, and anything with a life-span, changes from within (psyche, soul, mind).
Living things have an indwelling potentiality, a unique ‘form’ which is the highest potential present within it, as an acorn has within it the potentiality of an oak. Aristotle, like Socrates, views the soul as a harmony of contraries, i.e. the patterned cause and motivating force behind the purposes of individuals, who are the actualization of what is only potential in matter.(Psy, Book IV) And every living thing is always changing, always either getting better (toward health or proper function) or getting worse (away from this health), moving closer to or further away from its ideal, its best self, its highest potential.
What’s more, while humanity as a universal may be understood to have a highest potential, so too every individual has its own unique potential, its own virtue, or form, its proper function and best self. Individuals are the compound of form and matter, and it is largely by choice that their potentialities are actualized, and ideals are realized. This is the sense in which Aristotle is willing to allow that individuals have forms of their own, i.e. their own unique highest potentials. The idea of our potentials may be perfect, eternal and unchanging, but humans and other living things are not.(Parm 129b-c) Ours is to navigate toward the form of our own best self, our own mind causing our own development by our own choice.
To 'know', Aristotle said, is to grasp primary cause of that which changes against a background of that which lasts (Phy, Book II 3 194b15; Meta Book I/Chap 1&2; Meta Book II/Chap 2; Meta Book VII/Chap 17). Thus, living things are difficult, but not impossible to ‘know’ – for to know them, especially as individuals, we must understand them from the inside looking out. We cannot know them absolutely, he admitted, but we can know more than mere shadows - we can know such living things relatively well, albeit in a ‘weaker’ sense than would satisfy Socrates.[iv]
And so to know something, to understand it, we must ask the right questions, beginning with what is its cause? Causality is complex – to get at it, we need to ask four related questions. What is its formal cause (What is it good for?) What is its material cause (What is it made of?) What is its efficient cause (How was it made?). And what is its final cause (why was it made?) When you know these, then you know its telos, its purpose, its proper function.
While one of Aristotle's main philosophical motives was to understand nature, equally strong was his desire to understand man and his place in nature. Aristotle utilized all this to emphasize the importance for humans of intelligent and deliberate navigation through wise choice of action. While human beings are never perfect, once and for all, they do, individually and collectively, have highest potentials, which can be hit or missed, like targets. Humans can be self perfecting, one step at a time.
It is mind inside nature that we must understand if we want to understand the cause of human beings. Mind is both rational and irrational. The rational part we call reason, which is both theoretical (intellectual, in search of formal truth) and practical (moral, ethical, to achieve intelligent conduct). For humans, practical reason is the highest human art and its proper function is deliberation, both interpersonal and intrapersonal, both of which are necessary for happiness. If we understand the multiplicity of subjective perspectives involved in the unity of objective reality, then we see the value of taking multiple perspectives on any given subject, and thus, of dialogue, deliberation, and (as Socrates would say) of tethering our knowledge, for:
"… the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit, [and] in this respect it must be easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not [just] the particular part we aim at shows the difficulty of it....[N]o one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed."(Meta Book II/Chapter I)
"… we should be grateful then, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought. It is true that if there had been no Timotheus we should have been without much of our lyric poetry; but if there had been no Phrynis there would have been no Timotheus. The same holds good of those who have expressed views about the truth; for from some thinkers we have inherited certain opinions, while the others have been responsible for the appearance of the former."(Meta Book II/Chapter I)
It is the proper function of human beings to conform action to the rational principle in accordance with the excellence of the soul, which is virtue. Virtue is highest potential in all humans, and life is the opportunity to actualize it. Those potentials, which we call human virtues (temperance, courage, justice & wisdom, among others) are the proper functions and the highest potentials of the human animal.
In a properly functioning human being, these virtues are working together to make a person a good judge of the right thing to do in any given circumstance. We call these the unity of the virtues, in that they are a quality of character that will cause a virtuous person to act with courage in circumstances of danger, with temperance in situations of temptation, with justice in situations of injustice, and with wisdom in circumstances of ignorance. Moral strength (phronesis) and weakness (akrasia) relate to the ability or lack thereof of a virtuous person to follow the dictates of reason over appetite. With the ideal of moral virtue being right action for the right reason at the right time. Virtue is the mean between the extremes of deficiency and excess.
For the important thing for humans to understand is that they are responsible for that which is in their power – including what could be. Since we live in this world characterized by change, nothing, save perhaps the ideal of best self which guides every living thing toward its own good, stays the same. It once stood to reason that all which is human-made can be human-changed -- unlike nature's actions, which humans must learn to live within. Therefore, all that is made by art of human action (as both individual character and collective institutions are) is subject to betterment by appeal to its ideal, i.e. by view to its highest potential. We cannot be responsible for that which we cannot change (which was true of nature then, at least), but we are responsible for that which we can change (by creativity), and that which we could do. For this reason, humans can and should be self-critical, self-directing, and in this way self-improve what is (actuality) by comparison with what could be (potentiality).
Happiness (eudaimonia) is, according to Aristotle, activity of the soul in conformance with virtue. To be happy, humans must accept the leadership of reason and choose to act as it dictates. Happiness depends on the ends we choose, that is, how we define "the Good." To achieve this good, however we define it, is the reason that we act - that which is chosen as an end unto itself and never as a means to something else. Since it is pleasure that makes us do wrong things, and pain that keeps us from doing right things, “People whose constitution is good find those things wholesome which really are so."
Healthy relationships are those in which both parties bring out the best in the other…But when we take the view that people are naturally bad, we give up on that purpose at the outset. *
How do we live a good life? There are no shortcuts. The fact is, moral self-evaluation is sufficiently complex that there can be no once-and-for-all set of rules or decision procedures, no code or commandments to follow. Moral qualities are acquired by choosing to balance action between the alternatives of excess and deficiency, that is by finding the mean, which is the highest point of excellence, and then by habituating the our action to our ideal. In other words, the only way to become a good person is to become a good person.
Happiness is acquired only by making virtuous (excellent) action a habit. One must cultivate the virtues for oneself and rely on one’s experience to learn to be a good judge of such things for oneself.
There is in our times a new school of thought that draws on this aspect of Aristotle’s ethics. It is called Virtue Ethics, and refers to a whole family of moral theories in which virtue plays a primary role. These would include the philosophies of Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Hobbes, Rousseau and Mill. According to this view, the choices that we make reveal our priorities and conception of the good life, what Aristotle called Eudaimonia. The best life is the one that lives up to the highest potentials proper to the individual, the fullest development of the human intellectual, emotional, intuitional and sensual capacities -- that which it could do and which is unique to its possessor, as well as something that is done for its own sake, an end in itself, a final good.
As we've said, the Greeks considered the most excellent state of the human faculties to be practical reason, which helps us to choose always the mean between the acceptable extremes, the virtues of justice, courage, temperance, and wisdom. In that these involved the proper development of the most excellent of human faculties, they were valuable ends in themselves. It is the activities that come from these, Aristotle argued, that produce happiness. And we cultivate them only by doing them, by following role models, after which repetition and habituation shows us that and why these virtues lead to happiness. Only a virtuous person will be able to see, bring out and explain the salient features of a situation, to understand why some action is morally acceptable, and to know why one should do this instead of that action. A virtuous person, in considering all relevant factors, is thus able to judge each thing rightly, for things appear to him as they really are. He or she is simply, in Socrates’ terms, a good judge. The person Aristotle speaks of when he says that “the pleasure of a just man (person?) cannot possibly be felt by someone who is not just.”
And so it follows that the only way to understand what is right is to become a just person oneself. There are no short cuts, no ways to fake or copy virtue – no set of rules that an unjust person can follow to pretend to be just, or for that matter, happy. Eudaimonia comes only for those who discover for themselves that the same actions that some consider to be painful and do only to avoid punishment or to obtain advantage, will be the source of the greatest happiness for those who know from experience their value.
As John Stuart Mill put is, ”no wise person ever acquired his or her wisdom in any other way than this, nor is it in the nature of the human mind to become wise in any other way.” Active virtue, i.e. living right, allows us to see the truth in each thing, and is in fact the measure of truth and pleasure.
As Confucius held to be true of the superior man, an act is not right because the gods approve it and it makes us happy, they approve it and it makes us happy because it is right. Therefore, we need only seek what is right, and know the gods will approve, and we will be happy.
It is precisely, as many of our theorists argue, this exercise of our deliberative skills, of reflective equilibrium, by which practical reason figures out what is real, true, good, and right, in the development by which human virtue is fully actualized and happiness is fully realized for human beings. True happiness requires complete virtue for a complete lifetime, during which fortunes may revolve many times, but nobility shines through. The noble cannot be dislodged from happiness.
For this reason, as they all argue, children’s development is all important. Children's education should be such that they learn by habituation to feel pain and pleasure at the proper things.
And about the process of learning, Aristotle says that a good person will enjoy his or her own company most of all, and contemplation for such a person will be enjoy for its own sake. We must begin with what we ourselves understand from our own point of view, and build (keeping in mind that we much achieve a balance of contemplation and action, for we need both theoretical and practical wisdom to be happy):
“For it is an advantage to advance to that which is more knowable. For learning proceeds for all in this way - through that which is less knowable by nature to that which is more knowable; and just as in conduct our task is to start from what is good for each and make what is without qualification good for each, so it is our task to start from what is more knowable to oneself and make what is knowable by nature knowable to oneself. Now what is knowable and primary for particular sets of people is often knowable to a very small extent, and has little or nothing of reality. But yet one must start from that which is barely knowable but knowable to one self, and try to know what is knowable without qualification, passing, as has been said, by way of those very things which one does know."(Meta Book VII/Chapter 3)
Aristotle’s philosophy of education involves undertaking a search for the essential meaning of words by examination of different senses in which we use given terms.
"[S]ince there are many senses in which a thing is said to be one, these terms also will have many senses, but yet it belongs to one science to know them all."(Meta Book IV/Chapter 2)
Aristotle would have us put aside, for the time being the question of which way of speaking about any given object of knowledge is correct or proper (Meta 1030b3), until we have taken full view of the various perspectives involved in our complex use of language about it. By Aristotle's method, the question of which is the 'correct' way of using a given word is set aside until all competing views are taken into account, which is to say, until the relationship between the various different senses we use is seen in its full complexity.
Aristotle took great pains to explore the diverse senses in which terms are used to show how these various substances are indeed 'real' in as much as they do exist, but they do so in different senses. In other words, primary, objective reality precedes (not determines) the ways in which we think and talk about it. Categories of thought are certainly 'real' too, in a sense, but they are secondarily so. Secondary substance is extremely interesting, but nonetheless secondary to that which is primarily real, which is to say, causal.
As for Aristotle’s politics, it is inextricably bound up with his metaphysics. He considers humans to be fundamentally political animals, in the best sense of the word - the ability to communicate giving them the power to grow healthy political institutions. His fundamental concern is with justice by way of deliberation. It doesn’t matter how many rule, he says, what matters is how just the are. Many rulers (democracy) can become as unjust as one ruler (tyranny) without the proper deliberation between participants. A mixed constitution is necessary, Aristotle argues, so that all can participate in a deliberation of all voices according to their natural associations, by which justice can be achieved.
As in his Ethics, we must distinguish between the proper and the perverted function of any state, no matter how many rule, and no matter how ideal the original conception looks, because change necessitates intelligent navigation, and this is only accomplished by full deliberation of all relevant voices. Plato's guardian state, static as it seems to some, is vulnerable to Aristotle's worry that justice is a process, and failure to properly steer can change a just into an unjust and thus unhappy state by the effects of even a single unwise choice. So too with human character, we see in the Ethics, where the 'golden mean' is seen to be the way of wise choice toward the proper and virtuous function of human character toward happiness.(Nico Ethic, Book II) And so one error can cause a person to miss the ultimate mark of a good person entirely, like taking an exit from which one can never return to the main highway.
So to understand how to make character or politics more perfect, we must first have an understanding of how change effects our progress toward that ideal, by moral choice, sometimes moving us closer toward our ideal and proper function, and sometimes away, by a perversion of the process.(Nico Ethics) This is the reason that Aristotle's ethics then views change in the soul, like the state, as a matter of deliberate individual choice by which the potentialities of the individual are actualized.(Nico Ethics, Book II)
Keeping in mind then Aristotle's ethical and psychological philosophy, it is easier to remember that his politics needs to relate myriad different perspectives and voices to one another. No matter how perfectly formed an 'ideal of politics' may look at the outset, to become fair and just in its proper function, it must respect and respond to every perspective and voice, most especially those who express where the shoe pinches. His politics of the mixed constitution must involve a unified plurality of perspectives on ‘being’ for the sake of individuals who must be integrated into a community by deliberative education (Pol, Book II Chapter 5).
In order for Aristotle's political philosophy of the mixed constitution to be well grounded (metaphysically) he has to accomplish the formidable task of explicating diversity in unity, thereby providing a basis for respect and intelligent deliberation among the plethora of interdependent perspectives that interact organically in the natural associations of a healthy political community. In other words, for Aristotle's politics to work, he has to take seriously and provide a metaphysical basis of respect for a diversity of perspectives, and therefore different senses of terms. For as long as we don't recognize the significance of the complementary and comprehensive relationships between the different senses in which we speak about the same and different objects with the same and different terms, Aristotle worries, we fail to notice and thus to fully understand the complex unity of relationships between the primary/objective world and that secondary reality which arises in language as we communicate about the primary.
Aiming at a fuller analysis of reality, Aristotle's metaphysics requires an understanding of the interplay between 'substance' in all its various senses. If Aristotle can help us to understand full and complex 'being' in such a way as to illuminate the complementary nature of different ways of talking about what 'is', (that is, to recognize, as Aristotle did, that "is belongs to all things" (Meta Z7.4 1030a20)) is to be forced to consider the different senses in which we use related terms. In this way, much of the conflict and misunderstanding which otherwise arises in our sloppy use of language -- and which is poisonous to healthy deliberation and healthy politics -- might be resolved.[v]
This is a formidable task. But in terms of the 'whole truth', which both Socrates and Aristotle took to be the ideal of understanding, everything has 'being', and thus, everything is said to be 'real' in some sense. So Aristotle must proceed toward a more inclusive and more accurate account of such terms as 'being', 'substance', 'matter', 'form', 'essence', and 'universal', to name only a few of the terms that we sometimes unwittingly equivocate on. These are all important and necessary parts of how we talk about what is primarily real, and ultimately, nameless.
Aristotle’s analysis could provide a critical insight which today's academic climate might benefit from, as 'objectivists' have polarized with 'subjectivists' or 'relativists' or 'postmoderns' or 'multiculturalists' -- to the point of mis- if not complete non-communication. And where this conflict is manifest throughout social policy making, deliberation is hopelessly thwarted by the ubiquitous error that the relativity of subjective perspectives somehow obliterates the objective truth of the matter, rather than to define and deepen it, and as two eyes add depth to what is seen with only one.
Which takes us back to dialectic thinking…and the importance of rediscovering it, if peace is ever to be attained in our word…
Greek philosophy was held in high esteem for many centuries as the Roman Empire overtook and absorbed Greek culture. And gradually the Romans became to the Greeks something not unlike what the Americans are to the English. However, as Christian culture grew, the Greeks were called ‘pagans’, their philosophy defamed and censured, and their works were destroyed (or hidden to keep from being destroyed). Indeed, were it not for the efforts of the Arab peoples who preserved the great texts of antiquity, we would not have or perhaps know of the works of Plato and Aristotle at all.
Thankfully, when in the thirteenth century the crusades turned up numerous works of classical antiquity, Christians decided that perhaps these were not as Satanic as previously thought, and St. Thomas Aquinas took it as his life’s work to reconcile Catholic thought with the entire works of Aristotle. What he accomplished – called Scholasticism by ages since – was quite a good thing for Christianity (though it would have made Aristotle roll over in his grave). Essentially, he shows that Aristotle’s teleological thinking is not unlike what today might be called ‘intelligent design’ -- in other words, that science applied to nature will reveal the mind of God.[ii] This may or may not be the case, but it is clear that this conclusion was used by Christians to reinforce an authoritarian power structure of which Aristotle would never have approved. Rather, Aristotle was as egalitarian as they come, and his philosophy gave us a recipe for human perfectibility that has never been, nor perhaps could it ever be improved upon.
[i] There remains to this day one controversy to be resolved – for Aristotle seemed to be claiming that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the motion of the planets was perfectly circular, niether of which of course, is the case. However, a closer look at what Aristotle actually said will one day (I believe) prove him to have been right, for in nearly twenty five centuries, his claims were never properly studied or understood. All he really said is that it is the tendency of motion to be perfectly circular (and a glance at chaos theory suggests that this is true), and that it would seem to be the case then that the earth is at the center. But if there was one thing the Greeks understood, it was that appearances can be deceiving, and there is always more to be learned to find truth.
[ii] Teleological Order is such that everything has a Purpose within the grand Hierarchy of Nature; everything functions by Natural Association with everything else; Self-Organization;
[iii] Aristotle feels it necessary to remind some of what they were neglecting in their understanding of Socrates' views. For instance, Aristotle's main concern about Plato’s ‘forms’ seems to be then that, as popularly interpreted, (then and now) they could not explain change.[iii] This concern shows the difference in his and Socrates' purposes -- Socrates having the purpose of affirming something lasting beneath change, and Aristotle affirming the importance of understanding change. While Socrates and Plato lament human ignorance of the forms (even as we pretend to 'know' so much about them) Aristotle in turn laments our chronic misunderstanding of the term, misunderstanding which comes in part from Socrates overemphasis on the forms as unchanging, separate and nameless.
Another example is in his political philosophy, Aristotle takes a look at Plato's ideal state as it was understood by many in his time (if not Plato himself) and says, in effect, 'Look, that's a nice ideal, but you seem to be forgetting, or at any rate under-emphasizing, the importance of change. Everything living changes, whether by nature or by art,(Timaeus) and so everything is always either moving toward or moving away from its own best self.(Politics)
[iv] This is not as unlike Socrates view as it might seem. Socrates simply argued that we cannot know changing things absolutely, that is in a strong sense. Aristotle did pretty well though, considering that he gave us the classification system of all natural systems that we still use today, and this just to start with.
NOTES:
Aristotle is typically taken to oppose 'Platonic doctrine' on many levels, but this is more apparently than actually the case. Rather, Aristotle's "affection for Plato takes second place only to his love of truth." "'Both are dear to us'," Aristotle said, "'but truth must be preferred'.”(Bambrough, p.17) Socrates must have agreed, given that he said, "You can't argue with the truth. Any fool can argue with Socrates."(Sym 201d)
“It is true that if there had been no Timotheus we should have been without much of our lyric poetry; but if there had been no Phrynis there would have been no Timotheus. The same holds good of those who have expressed views about the truth; for from some thinkers we have inherited certain opinions, while the others have been responsible for the appearance of the former."(Meta Book II/Chapter I) 'substance' in all its various senses.
If Aristotle can help us to understand full and complex 'being' in such a way as to illuminate the complementary nature of different ways of talking about what 'is', (that is, to recognize, as Aristotle did, that "is belongs to all things" (Meta Z7.4 1030a20)) is to be forced to consider the different senses in which we use related terms. In this way, much of the conflict and misunderstanding which otherwise arises in our sloppy use of language -- and which is poisonous to healthy deliberation and healthy politics -- might be resolved.
Bio-logic and Learning from Nature*: Because anything living is always changing, they knew, always either getting better or getting worse. Everything living changes, whether by nature or by art,(Timaeus) and so everything is always either moving toward or moving away from its own best self.(Politics) Aristotle feels it necessary to remind some of what they were neglecting in their understanding of Socrates' views. For instance, Aristotle's main concern about Plato’s ‘forms’ seems to be then that, as popularly interpreted, (then and now) they could not explain change.[1] This concern shows the difference in his and Socrates' purposes - Socrates having the purpose of affirming something lasting beneath change, and Aristotle affirming the importance of understanding change itself.
Aristotle was, quite simply, the most influential thinker in all of human history. Not only did he know everything that could be known in his day, but he knew things that it would take the rest of the world many many centuries to figure out. His reasoning was so impeccable that he has never been shown to be wrong about any of his major conclusions. And even when, in one age or another, some have suspected him of being in error, it has most often turned out to be the case that he was right after all, and it was his detractors who were wrong.[i]
Aristotle was a student of Plato at his Academy for some 20 years, and certainly his best student. Though Aristotle was always challenging and critical of Plato, he followed his thinking in all but a very few ways. When Plato died, and the directorship of the Academy went to someone of lessor skills, Aristotle left and started his own school called the Lyceum, which rivaled the Academy for students ever after, making Plato and Aristotle seem more opposed to one another than they ever were in life. Aristotle is typically taken to oppose 'Platonic doctrine' on many levels, but this is more apparently than actually the case. Rather, Aristotle's "affection for Plato takes second place only to his love of truth." "'Both are dear to us'," Aristotle said, "'but truth must be preferred.'.”(Bambrough, p.17) Socrates (who never knew Aristotle, of course, given that he died 14 years before the latter was born) would almost certainly have agreed, given that he said, "You can't argue with the truth. Any fool can argue with Socrates".(Sym 201d)
Aristotle’s philosophy built on Plato’s Socratic teachings, but unlike Socrates and Plato (whose intention it was to distinguish the stable truth from that which is in flux, unchanging knowledge from that which is too loosely called 'knowledge'), Aristotle's purpose was to explore the nature of the changing world,[iii] and he did so with a sensitivity to telos, or purposeful development, natural associations, and proper functions. If you see the proper function of the whole, he argued, you can see there is a function for every part. So, if you want to understand something, simply ask, What it is good for? And another way to ask what a thing is good for is to ask, What is its proper function? If you want to improve something, compare its actual existing state (its real) to its best potential state (its ideal). Compare its current function to its ideal or healthy function.
Aristotle was a physician, a biologist, concerned with bio and logos, which is literally the ‘logic of life’. Anything that has a beginning, he argued, must have an ending, and therefore, a life-span. The things of the world are always changing, and to understand them, we must understand the nature of how they change. All change comes either from nature (outside of human agency) or from artifice (inside of human agency, that is, mind, art, creativity.) While inanimate objects are changed from outside of themselves (physic), plants, animals, humans, human institutions, and anything with a life-span, changes from within (psyche, soul, mind).
Living things have an indwelling potentiality, a unique ‘form’ which is the highest potential present within it, as an acorn has within it the potentiality of an oak. Aristotle, like Socrates, views the soul as a harmony of contraries, i.e. the patterned cause and motivating force behind the purposes of individuals, who are the actualization of what is only potential in matter.(Psy, Book IV) And every living thing is always changing, always either getting better (toward health or proper function) or getting worse (away from this health), moving closer to or further away from its ideal, its best self, its highest potential.
What’s more, while humanity as a universal may be understood to have a highest potential, so too every individual has its own unique potential, its own virtue, or form, its proper function and best self. Individuals are the compound of form and matter, and it is largely by choice that their potentialities are actualized, and ideals are realized. This is the sense in which Aristotle is willing to allow that individuals have forms of their own, i.e. their own unique highest potentials. The idea of our potentials may be perfect, eternal and unchanging, but humans and other living things are not.(Parm 129b-c) Ours is to navigate toward the form of our own best self, our own mind causing our own development by our own choice.
To 'know', Aristotle said, is to grasp primary cause of that which changes against a background of that which lasts (Phy, Book II 3 194b15; Meta Book I/Chap 1&2; Meta Book II/Chap 2; Meta Book VII/Chap 17). Thus, living things are difficult, but not impossible to ‘know’ – for to know them, especially as individuals, we must understand them from the inside looking out. We cannot know them absolutely, he admitted, but we can know more than mere shadows - we can know such living things relatively well, albeit in a ‘weaker’ sense than would satisfy Socrates.[iv]
And so to know something, to understand it, we must ask the right questions, beginning with what is its cause? Causality is complex – to get at it, we need to ask four related questions. What is its formal cause (What is it good for?) What is its material cause (What is it made of?) What is its efficient cause (How was it made?). And what is its final cause (why was it made?) When you know these, then you know its telos, its purpose, its proper function.
While one of Aristotle's main philosophical motives was to understand nature, equally strong was his desire to understand man and his place in nature. Aristotle utilized all this to emphasize the importance for humans of intelligent and deliberate navigation through wise choice of action. While human beings are never perfect, once and for all, they do, individually and collectively, have highest potentials, which can be hit or missed, like targets. Humans can be self perfecting, one step at a time.
It is mind inside nature that we must understand if we want to understand the cause of human beings. Mind is both rational and irrational. The rational part we call reason, which is both theoretical (intellectual, in search of formal truth) and practical (moral, ethical, to achieve intelligent conduct). For humans, practical reason is the highest human art and its proper function is deliberation, both interpersonal and intrapersonal, both of which are necessary for happiness. If we understand the multiplicity of subjective perspectives involved in the unity of objective reality, then we see the value of taking multiple perspectives on any given subject, and thus, of dialogue, deliberation, and (as Socrates would say) of tethering our knowledge, for:
"… the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit, [and] in this respect it must be easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not [just] the particular part we aim at shows the difficulty of it....[N]o one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed."(Meta Book II/Chapter I)
"… we should be grateful then, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought. It is true that if there had been no Timotheus we should have been without much of our lyric poetry; but if there had been no Phrynis there would have been no Timotheus. The same holds good of those who have expressed views about the truth; for from some thinkers we have inherited certain opinions, while the others have been responsible for the appearance of the former."(Meta Book II/Chapter I)
It is the proper function of human beings to conform action to the rational principle in accordance with the excellence of the soul, which is virtue. Virtue is highest potential in all humans, and life is the opportunity to actualize it. Those potentials, which we call human virtues (temperance, courage, justice & wisdom, among others) are the proper functions and the highest potentials of the human animal.
In a properly functioning human being, these virtues are working together to make a person a good judge of the right thing to do in any given circumstance. We call these the unity of the virtues, in that they are a quality of character that will cause a virtuous person to act with courage in circumstances of danger, with temperance in situations of temptation, with justice in situations of injustice, and with wisdom in circumstances of ignorance. Moral strength (phronesis) and weakness (akrasia) relate to the ability or lack thereof of a virtuous person to follow the dictates of reason over appetite. With the ideal of moral virtue being right action for the right reason at the right time. Virtue is the mean between the extremes of deficiency and excess.
For the important thing for humans to understand is that they are responsible for that which is in their power – including what could be. Since we live in this world characterized by change, nothing, save perhaps the ideal of best self which guides every living thing toward its own good, stays the same. It once stood to reason that all which is human-made can be human-changed -- unlike nature's actions, which humans must learn to live within. Therefore, all that is made by art of human action (as both individual character and collective institutions are) is subject to betterment by appeal to its ideal, i.e. by view to its highest potential. We cannot be responsible for that which we cannot change (which was true of nature then, at least), but we are responsible for that which we can change (by creativity), and that which we could do. For this reason, humans can and should be self-critical, self-directing, and in this way self-improve what is (actuality) by comparison with what could be (potentiality).
Happiness (eudaimonia) is, according to Aristotle, activity of the soul in conformance with virtue. To be happy, humans must accept the leadership of reason and choose to act as it dictates. Happiness depends on the ends we choose, that is, how we define "the Good." To achieve this good, however we define it, is the reason that we act - that which is chosen as an end unto itself and never as a means to something else. Since it is pleasure that makes us do wrong things, and pain that keeps us from doing right things, “People whose constitution is good find those things wholesome which really are so."
Healthy relationships are those in which both parties bring out the best in the other…But when we take the view that people are naturally bad, we give up on that purpose at the outset. *
How do we live a good life? There are no shortcuts. The fact is, moral self-evaluation is sufficiently complex that there can be no once-and-for-all set of rules or decision procedures, no code or commandments to follow. Moral qualities are acquired by choosing to balance action between the alternatives of excess and deficiency, that is by finding the mean, which is the highest point of excellence, and then by habituating the our action to our ideal. In other words, the only way to become a good person is to become a good person.
Happiness is acquired only by making virtuous (excellent) action a habit. One must cultivate the virtues for oneself and rely on one’s experience to learn to be a good judge of such things for oneself.
There is in our times a new school of thought that draws on this aspect of Aristotle’s ethics. It is called Virtue Ethics, and refers to a whole family of moral theories in which virtue plays a primary role. These would include the philosophies of Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Hobbes, Rousseau and Mill. According to this view, the choices that we make reveal our priorities and conception of the good life, what Aristotle called Eudaimonia. The best life is the one that lives up to the highest potentials proper to the individual, the fullest development of the human intellectual, emotional, intuitional and sensual capacities -- that which it could do and which is unique to its possessor, as well as something that is done for its own sake, an end in itself, a final good.
As we've said, the Greeks considered the most excellent state of the human faculties to be practical reason, which helps us to choose always the mean between the acceptable extremes, the virtues of justice, courage, temperance, and wisdom. In that these involved the proper development of the most excellent of human faculties, they were valuable ends in themselves. It is the activities that come from these, Aristotle argued, that produce happiness. And we cultivate them only by doing them, by following role models, after which repetition and habituation shows us that and why these virtues lead to happiness. Only a virtuous person will be able to see, bring out and explain the salient features of a situation, to understand why some action is morally acceptable, and to know why one should do this instead of that action. A virtuous person, in considering all relevant factors, is thus able to judge each thing rightly, for things appear to him as they really are. He or she is simply, in Socrates’ terms, a good judge. The person Aristotle speaks of when he says that “the pleasure of a just man (person?) cannot possibly be felt by someone who is not just.”
And so it follows that the only way to understand what is right is to become a just person oneself. There are no short cuts, no ways to fake or copy virtue – no set of rules that an unjust person can follow to pretend to be just, or for that matter, happy. Eudaimonia comes only for those who discover for themselves that the same actions that some consider to be painful and do only to avoid punishment or to obtain advantage, will be the source of the greatest happiness for those who know from experience their value.
As John Stuart Mill put is, ”no wise person ever acquired his or her wisdom in any other way than this, nor is it in the nature of the human mind to become wise in any other way.” Active virtue, i.e. living right, allows us to see the truth in each thing, and is in fact the measure of truth and pleasure.
As Confucius held to be true of the superior man, an act is not right because the gods approve it and it makes us happy, they approve it and it makes us happy because it is right. Therefore, we need only seek what is right, and know the gods will approve, and we will be happy.
It is precisely, as many of our theorists argue, this exercise of our deliberative skills, of reflective equilibrium, by which practical reason figures out what is real, true, good, and right, in the development by which human virtue is fully actualized and happiness is fully realized for human beings. True happiness requires complete virtue for a complete lifetime, during which fortunes may revolve many times, but nobility shines through. The noble cannot be dislodged from happiness.
For this reason, as they all argue, children’s development is all important. Children's education should be such that they learn by habituation to feel pain and pleasure at the proper things.
And about the process of learning, Aristotle says that a good person will enjoy his or her own company most of all, and contemplation for such a person will be enjoy for its own sake. We must begin with what we ourselves understand from our own point of view, and build (keeping in mind that we much achieve a balance of contemplation and action, for we need both theoretical and practical wisdom to be happy):
“For it is an advantage to advance to that which is more knowable. For learning proceeds for all in this way - through that which is less knowable by nature to that which is more knowable; and just as in conduct our task is to start from what is good for each and make what is without qualification good for each, so it is our task to start from what is more knowable to oneself and make what is knowable by nature knowable to oneself. Now what is knowable and primary for particular sets of people is often knowable to a very small extent, and has little or nothing of reality. But yet one must start from that which is barely knowable but knowable to one self, and try to know what is knowable without qualification, passing, as has been said, by way of those very things which one does know."(Meta Book VII/Chapter 3)
Aristotle’s philosophy of education involves undertaking a search for the essential meaning of words by examination of different senses in which we use given terms.
"[S]ince there are many senses in which a thing is said to be one, these terms also will have many senses, but yet it belongs to one science to know them all."(Meta Book IV/Chapter 2)
Aristotle would have us put aside, for the time being the question of which way of speaking about any given object of knowledge is correct or proper (Meta 1030b3), until we have taken full view of the various perspectives involved in our complex use of language about it. By Aristotle's method, the question of which is the 'correct' way of using a given word is set aside until all competing views are taken into account, which is to say, until the relationship between the various different senses we use is seen in its full complexity.
Aristotle took great pains to explore the diverse senses in which terms are used to show how these various substances are indeed 'real' in as much as they do exist, but they do so in different senses. In other words, primary, objective reality precedes (not determines) the ways in which we think and talk about it. Categories of thought are certainly 'real' too, in a sense, but they are secondarily so. Secondary substance is extremely interesting, but nonetheless secondary to that which is primarily real, which is to say, causal.
As for Aristotle’s politics, it is inextricably bound up with his metaphysics. He considers humans to be fundamentally political animals, in the best sense of the word - the ability to communicate giving them the power to grow healthy political institutions. His fundamental concern is with justice by way of deliberation. It doesn’t matter how many rule, he says, what matters is how just the are. Many rulers (democracy) can become as unjust as one ruler (tyranny) without the proper deliberation between participants. A mixed constitution is necessary, Aristotle argues, so that all can participate in a deliberation of all voices according to their natural associations, by which justice can be achieved.
As in his Ethics, we must distinguish between the proper and the perverted function of any state, no matter how many rule, and no matter how ideal the original conception looks, because change necessitates intelligent navigation, and this is only accomplished by full deliberation of all relevant voices. Plato's guardian state, static as it seems to some, is vulnerable to Aristotle's worry that justice is a process, and failure to properly steer can change a just into an unjust and thus unhappy state by the effects of even a single unwise choice. So too with human character, we see in the Ethics, where the 'golden mean' is seen to be the way of wise choice toward the proper and virtuous function of human character toward happiness.(Nico Ethic, Book II) And so one error can cause a person to miss the ultimate mark of a good person entirely, like taking an exit from which one can never return to the main highway.
So to understand how to make character or politics more perfect, we must first have an understanding of how change effects our progress toward that ideal, by moral choice, sometimes moving us closer toward our ideal and proper function, and sometimes away, by a perversion of the process.(Nico Ethics) This is the reason that Aristotle's ethics then views change in the soul, like the state, as a matter of deliberate individual choice by which the potentialities of the individual are actualized.(Nico Ethics, Book II)
Keeping in mind then Aristotle's ethical and psychological philosophy, it is easier to remember that his politics needs to relate myriad different perspectives and voices to one another. No matter how perfectly formed an 'ideal of politics' may look at the outset, to become fair and just in its proper function, it must respect and respond to every perspective and voice, most especially those who express where the shoe pinches. His politics of the mixed constitution must involve a unified plurality of perspectives on ‘being’ for the sake of individuals who must be integrated into a community by deliberative education (Pol, Book II Chapter 5).
In order for Aristotle's political philosophy of the mixed constitution to be well grounded (metaphysically) he has to accomplish the formidable task of explicating diversity in unity, thereby providing a basis for respect and intelligent deliberation among the plethora of interdependent perspectives that interact organically in the natural associations of a healthy political community. In other words, for Aristotle's politics to work, he has to take seriously and provide a metaphysical basis of respect for a diversity of perspectives, and therefore different senses of terms. For as long as we don't recognize the significance of the complementary and comprehensive relationships between the different senses in which we speak about the same and different objects with the same and different terms, Aristotle worries, we fail to notice and thus to fully understand the complex unity of relationships between the primary/objective world and that secondary reality which arises in language as we communicate about the primary.
Aiming at a fuller analysis of reality, Aristotle's metaphysics requires an understanding of the interplay between 'substance' in all its various senses. If Aristotle can help us to understand full and complex 'being' in such a way as to illuminate the complementary nature of different ways of talking about what 'is', (that is, to recognize, as Aristotle did, that "is belongs to all things" (Meta Z7.4 1030a20)) is to be forced to consider the different senses in which we use related terms. In this way, much of the conflict and misunderstanding which otherwise arises in our sloppy use of language -- and which is poisonous to healthy deliberation and healthy politics -- might be resolved.[v]
This is a formidable task. But in terms of the 'whole truth', which both Socrates and Aristotle took to be the ideal of understanding, everything has 'being', and thus, everything is said to be 'real' in some sense. So Aristotle must proceed toward a more inclusive and more accurate account of such terms as 'being', 'substance', 'matter', 'form', 'essence', and 'universal', to name only a few of the terms that we sometimes unwittingly equivocate on. These are all important and necessary parts of how we talk about what is primarily real, and ultimately, nameless.
Aristotle’s analysis could provide a critical insight which today's academic climate might benefit from, as 'objectivists' have polarized with 'subjectivists' or 'relativists' or 'postmoderns' or 'multiculturalists' -- to the point of mis- if not complete non-communication. And where this conflict is manifest throughout social policy making, deliberation is hopelessly thwarted by the ubiquitous error that the relativity of subjective perspectives somehow obliterates the objective truth of the matter, rather than to define and deepen it, and as two eyes add depth to what is seen with only one.
Which takes us back to dialectic thinking…and the importance of rediscovering it, if peace is ever to be attained in our word…
Greek philosophy was held in high esteem for many centuries as the Roman Empire overtook and absorbed Greek culture. And gradually the Romans became to the Greeks something not unlike what the Americans are to the English. However, as Christian culture grew, the Greeks were called ‘pagans’, their philosophy defamed and censured, and their works were destroyed (or hidden to keep from being destroyed). Indeed, were it not for the efforts of the Arab peoples who preserved the great texts of antiquity, we would not have or perhaps know of the works of Plato and Aristotle at all.
Thankfully, when in the thirteenth century the crusades turned up numerous works of classical antiquity, Christians decided that perhaps these were not as Satanic as previously thought, and St. Thomas Aquinas took it as his life’s work to reconcile Catholic thought with the entire works of Aristotle. What he accomplished – called Scholasticism by ages since – was quite a good thing for Christianity (though it would have made Aristotle roll over in his grave). Essentially, he shows that Aristotle’s teleological thinking is not unlike what today might be called ‘intelligent design’ -- in other words, that science applied to nature will reveal the mind of God.[ii] This may or may not be the case, but it is clear that this conclusion was used by Christians to reinforce an authoritarian power structure of which Aristotle would never have approved. Rather, Aristotle was as egalitarian as they come, and his philosophy gave us a recipe for human perfectibility that has never been, nor perhaps could it ever be improved upon.
[i] There remains to this day one controversy to be resolved – for Aristotle seemed to be claiming that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the motion of the planets was perfectly circular, niether of which of course, is the case. However, a closer look at what Aristotle actually said will one day (I believe) prove him to have been right, for in nearly twenty five centuries, his claims were never properly studied or understood. All he really said is that it is the tendency of motion to be perfectly circular (and a glance at chaos theory suggests that this is true), and that it would seem to be the case then that the earth is at the center. But if there was one thing the Greeks understood, it was that appearances can be deceiving, and there is always more to be learned to find truth.
[ii] Teleological Order is such that everything has a Purpose within the grand Hierarchy of Nature; everything functions by Natural Association with everything else; Self-Organization;
[iii] Aristotle feels it necessary to remind some of what they were neglecting in their understanding of Socrates' views. For instance, Aristotle's main concern about Plato’s ‘forms’ seems to be then that, as popularly interpreted, (then and now) they could not explain change.[iii] This concern shows the difference in his and Socrates' purposes -- Socrates having the purpose of affirming something lasting beneath change, and Aristotle affirming the importance of understanding change. While Socrates and Plato lament human ignorance of the forms (even as we pretend to 'know' so much about them) Aristotle in turn laments our chronic misunderstanding of the term, misunderstanding which comes in part from Socrates overemphasis on the forms as unchanging, separate and nameless.
Another example is in his political philosophy, Aristotle takes a look at Plato's ideal state as it was understood by many in his time (if not Plato himself) and says, in effect, 'Look, that's a nice ideal, but you seem to be forgetting, or at any rate under-emphasizing, the importance of change. Everything living changes, whether by nature or by art,(Timaeus) and so everything is always either moving toward or moving away from its own best self.(Politics)
[iv] This is not as unlike Socrates view as it might seem. Socrates simply argued that we cannot know changing things absolutely, that is in a strong sense. Aristotle did pretty well though, considering that he gave us the classification system of all natural systems that we still use today, and this just to start with.
NOTES:
Aristotle is typically taken to oppose 'Platonic doctrine' on many levels, but this is more apparently than actually the case. Rather, Aristotle's "affection for Plato takes second place only to his love of truth." "'Both are dear to us'," Aristotle said, "'but truth must be preferred'.”(Bambrough, p.17) Socrates must have agreed, given that he said, "You can't argue with the truth. Any fool can argue with Socrates."(Sym 201d)
“It is true that if there had been no Timotheus we should have been without much of our lyric poetry; but if there had been no Phrynis there would have been no Timotheus. The same holds good of those who have expressed views about the truth; for from some thinkers we have inherited certain opinions, while the others have been responsible for the appearance of the former."(Meta Book II/Chapter I) 'substance' in all its various senses.
If Aristotle can help us to understand full and complex 'being' in such a way as to illuminate the complementary nature of different ways of talking about what 'is', (that is, to recognize, as Aristotle did, that "is belongs to all things" (Meta Z7.4 1030a20)) is to be forced to consider the different senses in which we use related terms. In this way, much of the conflict and misunderstanding which otherwise arises in our sloppy use of language -- and which is poisonous to healthy deliberation and healthy politics -- might be resolved.
Bio-logic and Learning from Nature*: Because anything living is always changing, they knew, always either getting better or getting worse. Everything living changes, whether by nature or by art,(Timaeus) and so everything is always either moving toward or moving away from its own best self.(Politics) Aristotle feels it necessary to remind some of what they were neglecting in their understanding of Socrates' views. For instance, Aristotle's main concern about Plato’s ‘forms’ seems to be then that, as popularly interpreted, (then and now) they could not explain change.[1] This concern shows the difference in his and Socrates' purposes - Socrates having the purpose of affirming something lasting beneath change, and Aristotle affirming the importance of understanding change itself.