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What Might We Learn from Alfarabi about Plato and Aristotle?
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 24, 1999, by Charles E. Butterworth as part of the Formal Lecture Series.
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Butterworth, Charles E.
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Annapolis, MD
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1999-09-24
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Fārābī
Plato
Aristotle
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LEC_Butterworth_Charles_1999-09-24_ac
Friday night lecture
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Philosophy and the Cave Wall
Plato and Kant on the form of the given
Would the mind’s escape from the body be a good thing? This question might arise for
anyone who sees a distinction in our human nature between thought and sense. Why might one
wish for such an escape? And what might warn one against such a wish? Compare these two
different ways of approaching the question, each formulated by Kant:
The inclinations themselves, as sources of need, are so far from having an absolute
worth, that to be altogether free of them must be the general wish of every rational
being.
(Kant, Groundwork, 428) 1
Here, sensible appetites and aversions are a regrettable encumbrance. Of course, the
annihilation of bodily needs is just a “wish”-- these impositions of nature are truly inescapable for
us as long as we live in this body. But who hasn’t felt this wish, in moments of frustration,
struggle, or frailty? Just as the addict can see his own addiction as something to regret, as
something worth being free from, we may all sometimes see the demands our own bodies seem
to make on us as regrettable, and as unfortunate. Socrates spoke of this kind of wish in the
Phaedo, when he explained to his friends that a philosopher looks forward to death– the soul
leaving the body– as the greatest of blessings.
But here is another take on the question:
The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine
that its flight would be still easier in empty space. 2 It was thus that Plato left the world of
the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it
on the wings of the ideas, in the empty zone of pure understanding. He did not observe
that with all his efforts he made no advance– meeting no resistance that might, as it
were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his
powers, and so set his understanding in motion.
Kant is more subtle in other works. “The inclinations, in themselves, are good” (Religion within the Limits
of Reason Alone). Nevertheless, they do not enable our cognition of the Good itself.
2 Is there such a thing as empty space? The dove thinks so. Kant will argue that mind is absent from no
place in the world (“the sum of possible experience”): it is an ideal plenum, so to speak.
1
1
�(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A5/B8)
Here sensibility could be thought of as a resource, a help that makes knowledge possible for the
mind. The wish of the thinker to be released from sense is mistaken, because it fails to see how,
if realized, this would mean the withdrawal of that resource, the abandonment of that crucial gift.
Notice how Kant relates his own thinking to Plato explicitly in the second passage, and implicitly
in the first.
Kant seems to be divided. In the practical sphere, where action is concerned, sense can
be an obstacle, or at least an encumbrance. But in the theoretical sphere, where knowledge is
concerned, Kant is in fact a champion of sensibility. Ultimately, according to Kant, it is only when
we understand the epistemic resource provided by sensibility that we can see how necessary,
universal knowledge of the world around us is possible. Kant aims to carry out a previously
unattempted task for philosophy: to unfold the principles of sensibility. Philosophy, Kant claims,
must not sprint ahead to the realm of pure reason, to what seems to it maximally intelligible.
Rather, it can and must make intelligible what is not intelligible on its own– the senses. When
explicated, this would be a kind of wisdom unavailable to the mere mathematician or scientist,
and unheard of by the metaphysician: a philosophical apology of sense, what Kant calls a
‘transcendental aesthetic.’
Getting to read Plato and Kant every few years in an alternating cycle, it has come to
seem to me that perhaps Plato, for one, did contemplate such an account. To see this thread in
Plato, I will consider tonight passages from two great dialogues: the Republic, and its sibling,
the Timaeus.
Kant himself turns our attention in this direction by identifying Plato as the beginning of
his own philosophical tradition, one that asks first and foremost: how is knowledge possible?
The example of mathematics, Kant claims, convinced Plato that we have access universal,
necessary truths not derived from sense experience—what Kant calls a priori knowledge.
Socrates is often occupied with this sort of knowledge, as in the slave-boy’s recollection of true
geometrical judgments he was never taught. To explain this sort of knowing, Socrates
sometimes invokes purely intellectual, so-called forms of what is known. The pure forms
somehow come to have sensible images of themselves, in our minds and in the world. That is,
they are somehow participated in, or received, and it is by means of their reception that the
world can be known for what it is. But how is this reception into the sensible realm possible?
The problem of human knowledge, of how the given can be known, is therefore always also the
problem of sensible receptivity.
2
�The lecture has four parts. We will trace a path of inquiry into receptivity through Book VI
of the Republic (section 1), and then into the Timaeus (section 2), where I hope to show how
Plato’s thinking reaches a kind of culmination in the account of the so-called ‘receptacle’. In the
third section of the lecture, we’ll compare the Platonic approach to the problem with Kant’s
account of space in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason. We might
then be in a position to judge whether Plato and Kant are really philosophical brothers-in-arms,
as Kant suggests (section 4). We will not discover that Plato and Kant held the same doctrines.
Plato’s dialogic writings protect us from ascribing “doctrines” to his writings at all. Nevertheless,
philosophers—even philosophers who disagree with each other-- might be colleagues in so far
as they are moved by the same questions, and the same problems. It is this comradery under a
question I hope to examine in Kant and Plato tonight.
The Path Upward is not the Path Downward
In Book VI of Plato’s Republic, Socrates asks his conversation partners to imagine a line
divided into two unequal sections, each of which is divided again into two subsections (509d7
ff). Then both faculties of the soul and the objects of these faculties are mapped onto the line:
the two main sections correspond to sense and understanding; the realm of sense, of what
seems to be, is divided into bodily things, and their images; while the realm of the
understanding, of what is, is divided into what Socrates calls the “mathematicals,” or the
learnable things, and what he calls the “ideas,” or the forms. The philosopher’s authentic activity
is knowing the forms, which he or she achieves by what Socrates calls “dialectic.” The category
of the mathematicals, by the way, might be much broader than what we would mean by
‘mathematics,’ embracing anything that can be universally known or demonstrated: not only
music and mechanics, but perhaps also several natural sciences, and even language arts like
grammar and general logic-- the mathematicals, taken together, sserve as the topics of our
tutorials and labs.
The realm of the sensible is known by experience. Enough familiarity with the solid
structures we use as houses lets a carpenter repair and construct. His or her colleague within
the sensible realm is the artist who expertly paints images of the same houses that the
carpenter constructs. But many aspects of housebuilding follow from geometry, which grasps
universal principles about figures. The knowledge of these belongs to the understanding. Here
we can see laid out three personages, three psychic activities, and three sorts of object: the
3
�painter, making images of houses by artistic imitation; the carpenter, putting his or her body into
motion to bring those same houses into being as solid structures; the geometrician,
demonstrating the necessary, universal figurative principles governing the house’s structure.
The painting is an image of the roof’s eaves, which in turn can be thought of as images of
angles. These angles can be seen “only by thought,” and raising ourselves to the level of the
mathematicals reveals that human beings can have contact with universal, necessary truths
beyond convention and passing opinion. They give us purchase on the truth beyond experience.
But Socrates follows his construction of the divided line by posing two “reservations” to
his interlocutors about mathematical knowledge. The first is that its objects are taken as
“assumptions” by the thought that knows them. Geometry, for example, like all other particular
sciences, must simply assume that mathematical figures exist, and are therefore available for
study. It has no account of what sort of existence they have, and whether this existence has a
cause or source. Second, geometry will always be at least partially immersed in sensibility,
since it must always make use of sensible images in its demonstrations. In Socrates’ account,
philosophy will emerge as a possible kind of knowing that could transcend these two
“reservations.”
Let us consider the reservations in turn. Socrates complains that the mathematicals are
not truly “first principles” or beginnings, but “assumptions” But how does he know this? True,
geometry does not explain how its angle exists, but could this not be a consequence of the
figure’s ultimate priority? It can’t be explained by geometry, because it can't be explained at all:
it is a first principle. This is a tempting defense of mathematical supremacy. (when
mathematicians call themselves ‘platonists’,sometimes I think this is what they mean.) But
consider carefully the difference between self-evidence and assumption: an assumed premise is
not self-evident, because it leaves unsettled what sort of being on its own the object may have
apart from me, who assumes it. As long as it remains an assumption, a geometrical angle,
though it seemed to be real to us, might turn out to be a sort of illusion. Perhaps the reality of
things is that spaciousness is not real at all, that nothing is linearly extended, and no two lines
are spread out from each other in an angle. While this is perhaps disturbing to contemplate, it is
not a possibility the geometer can rule out. There is nothing about the angle that renders its
non-existence self-contradictory, and by hypothesis, geometry does not understand the figure’s
reality to be guaranteed by some higher source. Geometricians like Euclid and Lobachevski do
a great service for knowledge by identifying certain principles as unproved “postulates” or
“assumptions.” But even they leave unarticulated, and therefore unexamined, the whole host of
presuppositions that underlie their objects. The question, ‘how do angles exist?’ is not
4
�nonsensical, and remains. The geometer, while he or she might ask this question from time to
time, cannot answer it from within his or her own science.
The second reservation is, I think, more subtle. Just as geometry couldn’t “extricate”
itself from its own assuming, it also can’t pull itself out of the very sensibility it is so proud of
rising above. Socrates’ speech, with all its talk of higher and lower, here might sound like it is
assuming a kind of low-class uncleanliness about sensibility. Or maybe he is exploiting the
thumotic character of his interlocutor Glaucon, who will be pleased to look down on the uppity
mathematicians who are still enmeshed in the dingy senses. But if we are not so hastily
thumotic, we might wonder what is so damning about mathematics’ return to the senses. Is
Socrates’ second reservation not itself an unreasoning prejudice against embodiment?
In fact I think Socrates is onto something very important here. Mathematics begins by
seeking an object more knowable than what presents itself to the senses. But when it
demonstrates necessary truths about these objects, it finds it must turn back to sensibility to
construct images of what it wants to know. 3 We all know this from our study of Euclid and his
sucessors (even Lobachevski): no board or no paper, or no imaginary field in one’s mind, then
no demonstration of the proposition. We think the universal we desire to prove on our own, but
we turn to the board to manifest what we think about this universal, and the board helps us
along, making room for the instantiation of the figure, keeping things apart from each other,
letting them abide next to each other, sorting the different directions– left, right, back and forth. It
is as if the board, or rather, space itself, were a partner in the demonstration. This means that
geometry’s very scientific character is dependent upon sensible conditions. But these sensible
conditions are not understood by geometry, and indeed, are never brought into examination by
it. We might not find this situation humiliating, but we should find it intellectually unsatisfying.
The point is not so much that sensibility contaminates, but that for all its crucial contribution to
knowing, it remains unintelligible, a silent partner in the sciences.
Socrates proposes that philosophy can rise above mathematics’ limits. “Reason may
take hold” of mathematicals, he says, not as “assumptions”, but as “stepping stones,” examining
from what higher principles they might proceed, by means of “dialectic.” This philosophical kind
of knowing, as an extension of geometrical inquiry, would answer the question ‘how do angles
exist?’ by discovering genuinely self-evident truths upon which angles depend. In this sense, its
objects would not be assumptions, and it would escape the first reservation about
mathematicals. The second reservation would also be escaped, because the dialectical ascent
[It is not only geometry that turns back to sensibility, but arithmetic as well. Counting needs an extended
field in which successive moments can be distinguished. For Kant, this is time.]
3
5
�upon the grounds of mathematical knowing would move towards fully intelligible objects of
reason. Its accounts would move from reason to reason, with nothing but reason in between. In
other words, it would never descend back into sensibility’s manifestations to demonstrate, but
would [‘hypothetically’] infer the conditions it was after. Philosophy, like seminar, will not need to
use the board.
As wonderful as these philosophical successes might be if realized, Socrates’ proposal
raises some crucial questions not addressed explicitly in the Republic. Remember the concern
involved in the second reservation, that mathematics requires the use of sensible images. If this
“use” involves epistemic contributions from sensibility not understood by mathematics, these
contributions will not be any better recognized by a purely eidetic, dialectical philosophy. Rather,
they will be transcended, as the mere circumstances of a lower form of knowing, perhaps not
worth the attention of reason unencumbered. In this presentation of philosophy, we are
encouraged to assume that sensibility is not, in fact, an epistemic resource. If the contributions
to knowledge come wholly from ‘above’, so to speak, from reason alone, then this is perhaps a
safe assumption. But a lover of wisdom would rather not beg this question.
The image of the divided line is followed by the image of a cave, in which we are born
chained to our sensible experience, which plays before us like shadows cast by models of real
things outside of the cave. In this allegory, knowledge indeed comes ‘from above’: the naturally
true is imitated in the figures manipulated in the cave, and these are imitated in the shadows
they cast. But throughout the allegory is an unexplicated factor: each sort of knowable
generates an image in some receiver– the forms of the true objects are received into the
materials used to construct their likenesses, and the likenesses themselves on the cave wall
that receives their shadows. Without these receivers, no chain of imitation is possible. Following
the allegory, without the cave wall, no sensible experience is possible. But of what is the wall
itself a depiction? Whatever it is, is it of a nature to contribute to the kind of knowing we have in
our experience of the world? Socrates’ allegory might distract some readers from such a
question with its narrative of “turning-around.” By pointing the aspiring philosopher ‘upwards’
towards reason’s resources, rather than ‘downwards’ towards the nature of sensibility, he is
leaving at least one big question on the table.
If the path upwards were pursued, what would the Socratic philosopher discover about
the first principles of geometric “assumptions”? A first step still within mathematics might be the
discovery that figures can be taken as images of ratios– for examples, the pentagon as a spatial
flowering of the uncalculable mean and extreme ratio, and the circle, of the transcendent ratio
called ‘pi.’ But these so-called “irrational” or “mute” ratios themselves might turn out to be
6
�approximations of rational, speakable– that is, arithmetic– ratios. The very first mathematical
principles from which figures are derived would then be numbers, whose first still-mathematical
principle might be the unit, or that by which we call something one. Now, a dialectical inquiry
into the possibility of numbers-- and indeed the possibility of the unit-- might lead to purely
intelligible forms such as the Same itself, the Other itself, and the One itself. This ascent leaves
space behind as a sort of encumbrance. Of course, space itself is not accounted for in such a
philosophical ascent. The givenness of figures, that they are outside of us, and the receptivity of
both the world around us and our own imaginations to the spatial images of ultimately rational
principles, is not itself given an explanation. The silent partnership of the cave wall has been left
silent.
The Turn to Bastard Reasoning
Eric Salem once proposed in a lecture on Socrates’ allegory that the account of the cave
wall is not given in the Republic, but rather might be sought in part in the Timaeus’ account of
the receptacle. I want to follow his suggestion here, and so we now turn to the Timaeus.
In the dialogue’s introductory section, Socrates asks to hear about his idea of a beautiful
city, which had been elaborated in speech the day before, but this time set in motion, at war. His
request might already indicate an interest in just what was left unexplored above: in motion, in
the realm of becoming, the beautiful city will need to come down off its seat in intellectual
heaven, and show how it might be given in the world of change. But it will not be Socrates who
takes this path downward. Rather, the title character Timaeus speaks for the remainder of the
dialogue. Before the city in motion can be discussed, however, Socrates and his interlocutors
decide they want an account of the nature of the humans who will make up the city. Moreover,
they want an account of the whole, moving cosmos in which these humans emerge. The
remainder of the dialogue is accordingly cosmological, and then anthropological (the political
question is postponed). Timaeus’ very first step in pursuing his cosmology is to offer a
fundamental distinction familiar to Plato’s readers: the sensible world, he says, must be
distinguished from the purely intelligible model of which it is an image. The intelligible admits of
no motion, is eternal, and can never have come to be at all– it simply is. The sensible comes to
be, and Timaeus pictures this coming to be as the result of a divine constructive “craftsman” (ho
demiourgos) or “framer” (ho synistas). He narrates how this power might have constructed a
7
�harmonious image in imitation of the perfect model, making use of mathematical figures and
ratios familiar to the sciences of astronomy and music. 4
Timaeus’ cosmos, at this point, is like a mathematician’s diagram. Compare Ptolemy’s
mathematical astronomy. Its theories do not speak of where or in what the motions of the stars
occur, but rather only of the stars’ motions’ knowable ratios, demonstrable in diagrams. In this
way, the question of the nature of the space that receives the world-image might not arise for
the merely mathematical cosmologist. 5 But several steps into the narration, Timaeus points out
a problem. The divine maker constructed these mathematical models as somehow imitations of
what is best—that is, as imitations of the intelligible original. But it doesn’t seem that this
procedure—imitation of the best—is sufficient to account for the whole cosmos. On the contrary,
Timaeus claims that the world as it is comes to be not simply from the intellect’s grasp of the
good, as his story had been assuming, but also from what he now calls “necessity”: by what, if it
exists, has to be the way it is. Where does this necessity come from? Despite the fact that the
mathematical arts and sciences (like Ptolemy’s) are filled with insights into what is necessarily
and universally true about corporeal nature, none of them can give a deduction of this
necessity’s origin. For example, none of the cosmologists, Timaeus points out, have given an
account of how the medium of natural change—the elements of bodies-- have come to be in the
matter in which they are. 6 To theorize a changing cosmos, mathematical diagrams alone,
unhindered by necessity, will not be sufficient.
What is needed, Timaeus proposes, is a “new beginning,” a “retreat” to a new principle,
a “third kind” of being, making sense of the world’s receptivity as such for the knowable forms.
Timaeus calls this principle “the receptacle”, a co-eternal origin alongside the intellect’s model of
the cosmos. Not the model itself, nor its constructed image, it is precisely that into which the
model is received.
With the introduction of his “third” principle, Timaeus is in fact clarifying a fundamental
dualism about knowledge. The relation of original to image so dear to Socrates leaves out of
account a second origin for the image, in receptivity itself. The world as it appears is different
from its origin– this is the Socratic proposal. But that its origins are two is Timaeus’ thesis– by
Geometry and arithmetic provide a science of ratio in general; but astronomy and music turn to
appearances to discover which particular ratios and figures form a harmonious whole, either of heavenly
motions, or of musical scales. Timaeus borrows the particular ratios and figures of the latter two sciences.
5 At this stage, time is given as “a moving image of eternity.” It is the outcome of ratio-metric mathematical
principles, not a container in which they have being. This approach is unlike Timaeus’ conception of
space.
6 If successful, an account of necessity would perhaps stave off the allegation that corporeal becoming is
nothing but an unintelligible flux.
4
8
�adding his “third kind”, he uncovers that second origin, and reveals the apparent world as what
he calls a “syntasis”: a combination of heterogenous sources. The multifarious shifting from
stability to instability and back again that constitutes the mortal world will take place in the
receptacle; but the discovery of this principle reveals that it must have been there all along,
providing space even for the relatively unchanging motions of astronomy. 7 With the receptacle,
astronomy can be taken as no longer merely mathematical, for its objects are not merely
diagrammable ratios. Rather, they are now natural bodies with a place in the cosmos. Their
astronomy belongs to physics. 8
Timaeus warns his audience that an account of the receptacle will be “strange and
unusual,” because the object of study is “difficult and obscure.” His warnings indicate to us that
an entirely new sort of theorizing will be taking place: for unlike the eidetic model, the receptacle
is not itself intelligible. And unlike the visible world, it does not appear to the senses. If we have
only intellect and sense at our disposal, with what will we know that which is in itself unavailable
to either? In one of the strangest passages in Plato (the 4th passage on the handout), Timaeus
tells us that the receptacle not only “shares in the intelligible in a most perplexing and hard-to
capture manner”— but is “graspable by a bastard sort of reasoning, with the aid of insensibility”
(52a8).
The claim seems to be that the principle unavailable to our two faculties, sense and
thought, will be revealed through a perverse deployment of those very same faculties. Why
“bastard”? Wherefore base? This term suggests that in pursuing this account, reason will not be
occupied within reason’s own, high territory of the purely intelligible, but with the supposedly
baser realm of the sensible. The account to be developed takes the forms to have been mired in
the sensible realm, and attempts to understand precisely their adulterated existence. Reasoning
will be trying to make sense of what is not its own.
And why “insensibility”? How could that help? The idea here could be that the inquiring
subject has to somehow scrutinize the nature of his or her own sensible experience, while
shutting out the material influence of the sensible object. Insensibility here is a sort of deep
abstraction. Regard the curtains behind me, but become insensible to their color, their solidity,
their texture, perhaps even their particular magnitude [imagining FSK here]. What emerges for
us then is “seen dimly” as if in a “dream,” Timaeus says.
Timaeus implies that the heavenly motions of astronomy are not eternal, but rather only an “image” of
eternity. The demiurge remarks that “all that is bound together can be dissolved” (41b1).
8 The receptacle belongs to “the account of the whole” 48d5, and “is…before the birth of Heaven.” 52d4
7
9
�As he proceeds, Timaeus’ retreat reasons backwards towards the “nature” or “eidos” of
the receptacle. That is, he infers what it would have to be like, in order to fulfill its role as the
field in which the visible manifests. It can have no sensible qualities, since it must be able to
take any of them on. Similarly, it cannot be pictured or diagramed, since it is the ground of all
possible diagrams. It can’t be drawn on the board, since it is what makes the board available in
the first place. This is what it is not, but what can be said positively about it? Timaeus calls it the
“chora,” the space or room in which the world appears. He also calls it a neutral “molding stuff”
for the world, and even a “wet-nurse”, and “mother.” This sequence of metaphors draws out a
sense of the formal and causal power of the receptacle. The receptacle thus somehow
nourishes, or pours life into things, sustaining them. These metaphors indicate how far from
“empty” the receptacle is, even in itself. We might often think of space as sheer void, waiting
indifferently to be filled by perceptible items. 9 But Timaeus’ space is teeming with potential life,
waiting, not indifferently, but expectantly, to give birth. It is perhaps neither full, nor empty, but
according to its eternal priority, the source of either of these spatial dispositions. When it gets
filled by forms, it gives them the room to manifest themselves. When it gets filled by void, it
holds open the room in which no forms are. Compare the blackboard: where the diagram is not
drawn, indeed, in the crucial zones between the parts of the diagram, the board is not merely
empty of inscription, but spread out in its blankness.
The receptacle’s radical priority to experience further suggests that is matter only in a
metaphorical sense. 10 For it is not literally “stuff” in the sense we know from experience– after
all, it is “molded” both into our solid, present objects and into the absent spaces between them.
It is thus not a source of nourishment for the world in a material sense, but perhaps rather in a
formal sense. That is, it “nourishes”, so to speak, the sensible givenenness of things by
sustaining them as spatial.
Timaeus offers one more, especially puzzling metaphor: he calls the receptacle a
“winnowing basket.” Change in sensible things, he points out, comes to be through contact
between differences. The hot next to the cold, the dry next to the moist– we might add: negative
charge around positive charge, north magnetic poles across from south, or ‘masses’ in a
gravitational field. These different “powers”, whatever they may be, “jostle” each other, and
thereby produce change. Over time, these changes generate the apparently structured world
which we observe. These change-inducing juxtapositions, these jostlings, do not happen
through tools of arrangement, as if parts were separated and pushed together with a hoe and a
9
Lucretius’ void. Interesting that Lucretius is such an unmathematical thinker.
Aristotle and Plotinus both take the Receptacle to be “matter.”
10
10
�rake. Rather, the parts themselves act on each other, like grains in a winnowing basket. 11 The
basket merely provides the venue in which this jostling can transpire– it is a passive sort of tool
that does nothing more than make the reciprocal influences of the worked-upon matter possible,
by providing them the room for juxtaposition. The six directions of space– left, right, back,
forward, up and down– act like the grid of a basket, sorting the tendencies of material things into
different directions, giving them a stage on which they can come upon their brethren.
Does Timaeus’ story of the receptacle serve as the ’missing’ account of receptivity–
missing, that is, from the picture of Socratic philosophy in the Republic? Recall that part [of] the
vocation of philosophy described there, to ascend to the intellectual first principles of the
mathematical sciences’ own starting places, would leave unexamined the non-intellectual first
principles of sensibility, that is, of the receptivity in which the knowable images come to be. On
the other hand, Timaeus’ oddly named “receptacle”, which has resonances in Greek of
“reservoir” or “harbor,” represents receptivity as a cognitive resource. The name indicates the
epistemic purposiveness of the “third kind”: the receptacle provides a welcoming cosmic
hospitality for the forms, so that they may be known by us in their images. Timaeus follows his
account of the receptacle with an extended speculation about the solid geometry of the
elements. Certain propositions about the elements– how many there could be, how they would
act upon each other, and how they could change into each other– are derivable a priori, since
they arise from the demonstrably necessary geometrical character of the solids. These
speculations have hypothetical—perhaps fanciful—beginnings. But the necessity involved in the
geometry of his hypotheses generates an a priori, synthetic natural science. 12 Timaeus’
procedure suggests that any mathematical natural science of matter will ultimately rest upon a
story about the receptacle as an ultimate condition of the possibility of extended, sensible being.
Is this foundational story satisfactory as a philosophical account?
But doesn’t the “sieve” itself move? I can only make sense of this in an extremely analogical way. We
might be reminded here of a passage from Plato’s Parmenides, in which the elder philosopher
proposes that the One– the very highest principle of all being– is both at rest, and in motion
(146a). It is at rest, so to speak, Parmenides claims, because it doesn’t ever depart from being
fully in itself. But it also is in motion, so to speak, because it always is in other things, making
each of them one thing. The metaphysical participation of things in the One can be thought of as
a kind of flowing motion of it outwards, into them. Could this conception help us interpret
Timaeus’ winnowing basket? The receptacle’s motion is not a locomotion, but a “change” in
which it takes on a form it doesn’t have in itself. In so far as the spatialization of these forms has
consequences for how they evolve, it is as if the ‘change’ of the receptacle imparts further
changes to the things in it.
11
Cf thinkers like Kepler, Maxwell, Rutherford—anyone who imagines a model, derives necessary
conclusions from it, and compares these with the appearances.
12
11
�Timaeus warned his audience at the start that any cosmology of a becoming world
would not be knowledge, but only a “likely story,” in so far as what becomes is not what is, but
only its likeness. Philosophy seeks to rise to what is, and discover knowledge of the eternal
there. Accordingly, Timaeus’ mathematical chemistry of the elements is not wisdom about the
highest things. Socrates of the Republic would agree. Now, the receptacle, as the neutral field
of change, can itself neither change nor come to be. However, Timaeus seems to suggest that
as the eternal mother of becoming, the receptacle is itself approachable only under the guise of
[a] likely story. This in part justifies his copious use of metaphor in its account. Metaphor
becomes the handmaiden of ‘bastard reasoning’, with which we can articulate in speech what is
not in itself intelligible. The conjunction of several metaphors– space, mother, nurse, matter,
basket– raises the problem of thinking the thing coherently, since its metaphorical predicates
are not simultaneously compatible. But beneath this interpretive problem is a deeper paradox:
the account treats the receptacle as an eternal, self-subsistent thing, even though it is not, by
hypothesis, a being. This double-speak renders the account of that which underlies all
becoming even more mythic– “not less, but more likely” (48d3) -- than the playful speculations
about shapes and growths that make up the rest of Timaeus’ physics. This paradox, that the
receptacle is both beyond becoming and other than being, runs through Plato’s adventure along
the path downward. Accordingly, the hoped-for account of the cave wall turns out to be, in
Plato’s treatment, deeply enigmatic.
The Form of Outer Sense
Kant’s life’s work, it seems to me, was an attempt to demythologize philosophical
enigmas. Where receptivity is concerned, he’s on the case. He begins in the Critique of Pure
Reason with a distinction in kind between thought and sense. In the dialogues, thought was
understood as the faculty that grasps the universal, which is, while sense grasps the particular,
which merely seems or becomes. One of Kant’s innovations is to add to these correlations the
proposal that while thought in us is active, sense is receptive. Kant names the study of the
principles of knowledge belonging to thought a ‘Logic’ – the study of logos. He names the study
of the principles of knowledge belonging to sensibility an ‘Aesthetic’-- the study of aesthesis.
(Note that Kant’s ‘aesthetic’ has nothing directly to do with the beautiful.) An empirical aesthetic
would investigate the particular senses we happen to have, and what features of the world they
give us access to: color, odor and taste, sound, temperature, as well as shape, size, and
duration. Perhaps what we read in Book II of Aristotle’s De Anima could be considered an
12
�empirical aesthetic. A transcendental aesthetic, on the other hand, would investigate sensibility
as such, rising past or transcending the particularities our equipment for sensation.
This new science’s object comes into view in two stages (described in the 5th passage
on the handout): first, Kant claims that we must “isolate sensibility by taking away everything
from it which the understanding thinks through its concepts.” In the second step, we “separate
off from sensibility everything belonging to its impressions.” The first move resists the claim of
monist thinkers like Leibniz, for whom the distinction between sensibility and understanding is a
difference in degree– that is, sense is merely the obscure end of the spectrum of human
representation, whose clear and distinct end is called understanding. For Leibniz, there is
accordingly only one path for philosophy: towards the higher principles of the intellect, for there
is properly speaking no heterogenous epistemic contribution from sensibility itself. Taken as an
interpretation of the divided line, we can see that Leibniz’s Socratic conception must hold that
there is no philosophical theory of the cave wall.
Kant’s interest, on the other hand, is not unlike the dualist Timaeus’, for whom givenness
must be traced back to a second principle. Timaeus proposed his receptacle as the ultimate
ground of the givenness of things, as the reason why things can be given to the senses at all.
This question reappears in a new guise in Kant’s account of “sensibility,” defined as
receptivity— not, to begin with, the receptivity of the world for intelligible forms, but the
receptivity of our own mode of knowing; the openness, one could say, of our minds for things as
given.
In its second step, the transcendental aesthetic clears out from intuition what Kant calls
the “matter” of sense, leaving nothing but the “form.” Kant claims there are two sorts of sense
for us: space, the form of “outer sense”, and time, the form of “inner sense.” Kant’s space, in this
respect, like the receptacle, is invisible, inaudible, and impalpable. Taken together, these two
steps reveal an object not properly available to either the understanding or to sensation. Rather,
the philosopher must abstract from the matter of things sensed outside of us to the form of their
being “outer” at all. The underlying precondition for juxtaposition, extension, and orientation is
not any spatial thing, but space itself– or perhaps better, spatiality. This spatiality is not thought
up by us, and is not derived from experience. It is the form or ultimate pre-intuition of whatever
could be given as ‘outside.’ This form itself is a “pure manifold”– not merely many, like the
spatial stuff of outer sense, but the ordered, stuff-less multiplicity of orientations in which
sensations are always given, and to which they cannot themselves contribute. Recalling the
warnings of the difficulty of the inquiry voiced by Timaeus, Kant tells us in the introduction of his
13
�book that “it may be that we are not in a position to distinguish [the form of knowledge] from the
raw material, until with long practice of attention we have become skilled in separating it” (B1-2).
This ultimate priority of space ahead of all outer things means that, like the receptacle, it
cannot have come to be. And on precisely the grounds of this priority does space make
necessary knowledge of the outer world possible. Our geometrical demonstrations draw their
necessity from the way the pre-intuited field in which they are inscribed or imagined determines
those inscriptions and images. Thanks be to the board, where we may draw our figures. But
greater thanks be to space, which opens out to make room for the board, and opens out for our
imaginations to spread and discover what must follow from what among our figures. It is
essentially one, embracing all particular spaces. It is both given, in that we do not
spontaneously think it at all, and infinite, in that no bounds can be set for its magnitude. It is
empty, in that it is the container or receptacle for all sensible content, and unremovable, in that
we cannot imagine it away.
Timaeus introduced the receptacle, not as an aspect of particular material things, but as
a single underlying whole which pre-exists them, so that it may receive them. This seems to be
what Aristotle, for one, was most at pains to resist about Plato’s Timaean conception– for the
later thinker, the places of things, along with their shape and their magnitude, are accidents of
their individual existences: a thing is in a place as the contact boundary of what surrounds it.
There is no whole receiver, only a nested series of surrounding containers. Hume’s argument
reaches a similar conclusion: no impression comes to us without some spatial magnitude, he
claims, and so space itself is only a subsequent abstraction made possible by the accumulation
of spatial particulars. Kant, filling in argumentation absent from his ancient comrade Timaeus’
account, argues that the nature of spatiality requires independent singularity and wholeness.
For, each particular place is bounded only in so far as these boundaries are between spatial
regions. That is, bounded spaces are always “limitations” of the same one space. Just as what
recieves limitation must be priori to the result of its limitation, so divisions into particular places
presuppose the field which they limit. Accordingly, larger spaces cannot be assembled originally
out of smaller ones, and so space is not an aggregate; it is rather, Kant claims, a “totum”
(B466), preceding the particular parts we may carve out of it.
Recall also how Timaeus brought in the receptacle as an additional “kind” to ground his
mathematical science of material nature. Kant seems to have agreed that the nature of
geometrical knowledge of things required a heterogenous, spatial source of knowing; indeed, he
thought the necessity of mathematical sciences was the strongest evidence for his
sense/thought dualism. He points out that geometrical demonstration, for example, reveals that
14
�necessary predicates about figures cannot be derived out of their concepts by analysis, but
must rather be synthesized or constructed out of the intuited figures. That the third side of a
triangle is shorter than the sum of the other two does not fall out of the concept of what a
triangle is, but only from the determination of the sensible field in which we inscribe triangles.
The blackboard must play its role. Kant here is taking Socrates’ second reservation about
mathematics– that it could not extricate itself from sensible conditions– as decisive evidence
that sensibility is, after all, an epistemic resource, and that human knowledge is dual.
Idealism
Taking up the torch of ‘bastard reasoning,’ Kant finally explains the unacknowledged
source of scientific knowledge of sense objects, by reasoning back to the invisible, nonintellectual condition of sensibility. This condition, however, is– unlike Timaeus’ receptacle– not
a self-subsisting, eternal being, but a mere form of our own sensibility. It is in us, not in a
psychological sense, as if it were a figment of each thinker’s mind, but in a metaphysical sense,
as a feature of our knowledge of things, and not of the things as they are in themselves. Space
is not ‘in our heads’-- indeed, our heads are in space. But space is ‘in’ our own, human knowing
of things, such as our knowledge of the heads in this room.
The radically blank ‘non-thing’ that is space, therefore, does not exist in itself. Kant
writes (this is on the handout) that those who “maintain the absolute reality of space” as
“subsistent...(which is generally the view taken by the mathematical students of nature),... have
to admit [an] eternal and infinite self-subsistent non-entity, which is there, yet without being
anything real, only in order to contain in itself all that is real” (A39/B56). He was probably
thinking of Newton here, but the description fits the deep cosmology of the Timaeus, as well. 13
As we saw, Timaeus’ chora made knowledge possible, but only by way of an existence which is
neither being nor becoming. Like Timaeus, Kant infers that there is a determining source of
knowledge in receptivity. But to elude the paradox, Kant makes clear that this source, space, is
nothing but an epistemic condition. The receptivity, and thus the receptacle– the form of outer
sense–, is ours. This position of sensibility– both subjective and essentially sharable– may be
more familiar to us from the realm of thought. That is, when we think a concept together, each
The receptacle is eternal, but Timaeus never calls it infinite. This is perhaps because qua unformed, it
has no quanitity. What did Newton mean by calling space “empty” in the Principia? In the Optics, Newton
writes that space is “the sensorium of God.”
13
15
�one of us shares the same universal in our thought. The mind’s concept is not a psychological
event, but a form or standard. According to Kant’s account, mind is present in sensibility, as
well. The space of things is not a psychological feature of their images in our minds, but rather a
necessary feature of how they can known by beings like us. This is what Kant means by “the
transcendental ideality of space.”
Kant does declare his form of outer sense to be “empty,” which might make us think it is
pure, void extension. Where is the living, expectant energy of Timaeus’ receptacle? We might
say that its energy has been idealized. The expectancy, the power to hold the shape of what will
come to be in it-– that is, the maternal power of space– this is in Kant’s space as well. But we
can now see this power as life-like, precisely because it is a power of the mind. Space as the
form of intuition is not a null void, but a manifold field ready for knowledge to be generated in.
The pure manifold, the cave wall, is alive, because it is sensibility.
Kant’s journey down into sensibility has none of the metaphorical images of Timaeus’.
On the contrary, it strikes a scientific pose, where Timaeus’ story was only “likely.” Kant speaks
in his own voice as philosophical inquirer, rather than through a fictional character whose own
relation to philosophy is obscure. Kant’s account appears first in his book, as the starting place
for a looming system, where Timaeus’ appears as a “revision” or “retreat” part-way through a
narrative. The highly metaphorical, fictive frame of the receptacle might suggest that the
receptacle as described is a poetic manifestation of knowable principles, according to which
what is transcendentally ideal (space) is depicted as if it were real, in itself, but in a likeness, in
a mythos. This would certainly not be the only time Plato has characters speak in a
metaphorical mode, rendering as material what cannot properly speaking exist in that way. Such
a depiction generates paradox, as we have seen, and this paradox raises questions about
subjectivity and the knowability of the world that Plato was content to leave as questions. By
demythologizing the receptacle, showing that it is not an alien, quasi-divine being outside of us,
but rather a constitutive principle within us all, pulling the depiction out of the poetic sphere of
the ‘likely’, Kant gives himself the opportunity to answer these questions. Whether his answers
are satisfactory, is a question for us.
16
�
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Philosophy and the Cave Wall: Plato and Kant on the Form of the Given
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on March 31, 2023, by Matthew Caswell as part of the Formal Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Caswell describes his lecture: "<span>The lecture will compare inquiries into the nature of sensibility offered by Plato, and by Kant. That </span><i>space</i><span> might be the ultimate ground of a certain kind of sensible givenness is a possibility investigated by both thinkers. What can our love of wisdom gain from pointing itself downward, into the senses?</span>"
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Annapolis, MD
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2023-03-31
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Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804
Plato
Philosophy
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LEC_Caswell_Matthew_2023-03-31
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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PDF Text
Text
Joe Sachs, draft of introduction to his translation of Aristotle's Physics
Delivered as a lecture for the Graduate Institute, August 6, 1983
1
INfRODUCTION
Philosophic writing
The activity known as philosophy did not originate among the ancient
Greeks. It is a permanent human possibility, that must have arisen in all
places and times when anyone paused in the business of life to wonder
about the way things are. But it was among the Greeks that it was named
and described, and began to be reflected in written texts. It was two
thinkers who wrote during the fourth centucy B.C., Plato and Aristotle, who
showed the world for all time the clearest examples of philosophic
thinking.
Plato's dialogues display the inescapable beginnings of
philosophy in all questions that touch on how a human being should
live~
and show that such questions must open up for examination all the
comfortable assumptions we make about the world. Aristotle's writings
trace an immense labor of the intellect, striving to push the power of
thinking to its limits.
Reading Aristotle, to be sure, is not at all like reading Plato. The
dialogues are beautiful in style, sensitive in the depiction of living and
breathing people, and altogether polished works meant for the widest
public. The writings of Aristotle that we possess as wholes are school texts
that, with the possible exception of the Nicomachean Ethics, were never
meant for publication. The title that we have with the Physics describes it
as a "course of listening." The likeliest conjecture is that these works
_-. . originated as oral discourses by Aristotle, written down by students,
.
corrected by Aristotle, and eventually assembled into longer connected
. arguments.
They presuppose acquaintance with arguments that are
referred to without being made (such as the "third
m~"),
and with
�2
examples that are never spelled out (such as the incommensurability of
.•
i"
the diagonal). They 'are demanding texts to follow, and are less interested
in beauty of composition than in exactness of statement. But in the most
important respect, the writings of Plato and Aristotle are more like each
other than either is like anything else. Both authors knew how to breathe
philosophic life into dead words on a page.
In Plato's dialogues, it is the figure of Socrates, always questioning,
always disclaiming knowledge, always pointing to what is not yet
understood, who keeps the tension of live thinking present. Despite the
efforts of misguided commentators, one need only read any dialogue to see
that there is no dogma there to be carried off, but only work to be done,
work of thinking into which Plato draws us. It may appear that Aristotle
rejects this Platonic path, giving his thought the closure of answers and
doctrine, turning philosophy into "science,"
but this is a distortion
produced by transmission through a long tradition and by bad translations.
The tradition speaks of physics, metaphysics, ethics, and so on as sciences
in the sense of conclusions deduced from first principles, but the books
written by Aristotle that bear those names contain no such "sciences."
What they all contain is dialectical reasoning, argument that does not start
with the highest knowledge in hand, but goes in quest 'of it, beginning with
whatever opinions seem worth examining. Exactly like Plato's dialogues,
Aristotle's writings lead the reader on from untested opinions toward more
reliable ones. Unlike the author of the dialogues, Aristotle records his best
~·, efforts to get beyond trial
and error to trustworthy ·conclusions. What
keeps those conclusions from becoming items of dogma? The available
translations hide the fact, but Aristotle devises a philosophic vocabulary
that is incapable of dogmatic ·use.
�3
This claim will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the lore of
substances and accidents, categories, essences, per se individuals, and so
forth, but if Aristotle were somehow to reappear among us he would be
even more surprised to find such a thicket of impenetrable verbiage
attributed to him. Aristotle made his students work hard, but he gave
them materials they could work with, words and phrases taken from the
simplest contents of everyday speech, the kind of language that is richest
in meaning and most firmly embedded in experience and imagination. The
only trouble with ordinary speech, for the purposes of philosophy, is that it
carries too much meaning; we are so accustomed to its use that it
automatically carries along all sorts of assumptions about things, that we
make without being aware of them. Aristotle's genius consists in putting
together the most ordinary words in unaccustomed combinations. Since
the combinations are jarring, our thinking always has to be at work, right
now, afresh as we are reading, but since the words combined are so readily
understood by everyone, our thinking always has something to work with.
The meanings of the words in Aristotle's philosophic vocabulary are so
straightforward and inescapable that two results are assured: we will be
thinking about something, and not stringing together empty formulas, and
we will be reliably in communication with Aristotle; ·thinking about the
· very things he intended.
. We need to illustrate both the sort of thing that Aristotle wrote, and the
way the translations we have destroy its effect.
Consider the word
essence. This is an English word, and we all know more or less how to use
it. Perfumes have essences, beef stock can be boiled down to its essence,
and the most important part of anything can be called its essenceo It
seems to have some connection with necessity, since we occasionally
�4
dismiss something as not essential. By the testimony of usage, that is
about it. Essence is a relatively vague English word. If we know Latin, the
word begins to have some resonance, but none of the:it has crossed over
into English. So what do we do when we find a translation of Aristotle full
of the word essence?
We have to turn to expert help.
Ordinary
dictionaries will probably not be sufficient, but we will need philosophic
dictionaries, commentaries on Aristotle, textbooks on philosophy, or
trained lecturers who possess the appropriate degrees. In short, we need
to be initiated into a special dub; it may make us feel superior to the
ordinary run of human beings, and it will at least make us think that
philosophy is not for people in general, but only for specialists. Medical
doctors, for example, seek just those effects for their area of expert
knowledge by never using an ordinary, understandable name for anything,
but only a Latin derivative with many syllables. But did Aristotle want
such a result? If not, writing in such a style can hardly be presented as a
translation of Aristotle.
What did Aristotle write where the translators put the word essence?
In some places he wrote "the what" something is, or "the being" of it. In
most places he wrote "what something keeps on being in order to be at all,"
or "what it is for something to be." These phrases brlng us to a stop, not
because we cannot attach meaning to them, but because it takes some
·work to get hold of what they mean. Since Aristotle chose to write that
way, is it not reasonable to assume that he wanted us to do just that?
When the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes the line "Though worlds of
· · wanwood leafmeal lie," everything in his words is readily accessible,
though the pieces are combined in unusual ways. We recognize this sort of
word-play as a standard device of poetry, that works on .us through the
�5
ear, the visual imagination, and our feelings.
The poet makes us
experience a fresh act of imagining and feeling, at his direction. (Think of
all that would be lost if he had written "Notwithstanding the fact that an
immeasurable acreage of deciduous forest manifests the state of affairs
characteristic of its incipiently dormant condition.") Aristotle's phrases in
the present example do something that is exactly analogous to the poet's
word-play, but is directed only at the intellect and understanding. Other
words and phrases of his do carry imaginative content, but subordinated to
the intellect and understanding. Aristotle is not a poet, but a philosophic
writer, one who, like a poet, loosened and recombined the most vivid parts
· · of ordinary speech to make the reader ·see and think afresh.
Many
philosophers have written books, but few have worked as carefully and
deliberately to make the word be suited to the philosophic deed
Tra.nslati.on and tradition
A long stretch of centuries stands between Aristotle and us. The usual
translations of his writings stand as the end-product of all the history that
befell them in those centuries. For about five centuries up to 1600 they
were the source of the dominant teachings of the European universities; for
about four centuries since then they have been reviled as the source of a
rigid and empty dogmatism that stifled any genuine pursuit of knowledge.
One has to be very learned indeed to uncover all that history, but
fortunately for those of us who are interested only in understanding the
writings themselves, no such historical background is of any use. In fact it
takes us far away from anything Aristotle wrote or meant.
By chance1
when Aristotle's books dominated the centers of European learning, the
common language of higher learning was Latin. When in tum later
�6
thinkers rebelled against the tyranny of the established schools, it was a
Latinized version of Aristotle that they attacked. They wrote in the
various modern European languages, but the words and phrases of
Aristotle that they argued with and about came into those languages with
the smallest possible departures from the Latin.
Thomas Hobbes, for example, writing in 1651 (in the next to last
chapter of the last part of Leviathan), makes a common complaint in a
memorable way: "I beleeve that scarce any thing can be more absurdly
said in naturall Philosophy, than that which is now called Aristoteles
Metaphysiques...An.d since the Authority of Aristotle is onely current [in
the universities], that study is not properly Philosophy, (the nature
whereof dependeth not on Authors,) but Aristotelity...To know now upon
what grounds they say there be Essences Abstract, or Substantial] Formes,
wee are to consider what those words do properly signifie...But what then
would become of these Terms, of Entity, Essence, Essential], Essentiality,
that. ..are... no Names of Things... [T]his doctrine of Separated Essences, built
on the Vain Philosophy of Aristotle, would fright [men] ...with empty names
as men fright Birds from the Corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a
crooked stick."
The usual translations of Aristotle are concerned most of all with
preserving a continuity of tradition back though these early modem critics
of Aristotle. Richard McKean, in a note to a philosophic glossary, defends
this practice: "The tendency recently in translations from greek and latin
philosophers, has been to seek out anglo-saxon terms, and to avoid latin
derivatives. Words as clear and as definitely fixed in a long tradition of
usage as privation, accident, and even substance, have been replaced by
barbarous compound terms, which awaken no echo in the mind of one
�7
familiar with the tradition, and afford no entrance into the tradition to one
unfamiliar with it. In the translations above an attempt has been made to
return to the terminology of the... english philosophers of the seventeenth
century. Most of the latin derivatives which are used...have justification in
the works of Hobbes, Kenelm Digby, Cudworth, Culveiwell, even Bacon, and
scores of writers contemporary with them... ff]he mass of commentary on
Aristotle will be rendered more difficult, if not impossible, of
understanding if the terms of the discussion are changed arbitrarily after
two thousand years." (Selections from Medieval Philosophers, Vol. II, pp.
422-3., Scribner's, 1930)
The tendency deplored by McKeon has not made its way into any
translations of the writings of Aristotle known to this writer. There was
some hope of it when Hippocrates Apostle announced a new series of
translations, and included the following among its principles: "The terms
should be familiar, that is, commonly used and with their usual meanings.
If such terms are available, the use of strange terms, whether in English or
in some other language, adds nothing scientific to the translation but
unnecessarily strains the reader's thought and often clouds or misleads it."
(Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. x, Indiana U.P., 1966) This is a sentiment
worth endorsing, but Apostle respects it only to the minor extent of
avoiding such pretentious phrases as ceteris paribus (Latin for "other
things being equal"), and nothing in his translations would disturb McKeon.
But if Apostle's general claim is correct, and if in addition Aristotle never
used technical jargon in his own language, then surely to use such language
to translate him is to confuse Aristotle's writings with a tradition that
adapted them to purposes that were not his. And if that Latin tradition
distorted Aristotle's meaning and was untrue to his philosophic spirit, until
�8
all that remained was the straw man so easily ridiculed by Hobbes and
every other lively thinker of his time, then to insist on keeping Aristotle
within the confines of that caricature is perverse.
It is never possible to translate anything from one language to another
with complete accuracy, and it is especially difficult to translate an author
who takes liberties with common usage in his own language. But in this
case there is one simple rule that is easy to follow and always tends in a
good direction, and that is to avoid all the conventional technical words
that have been routinely used for Aristotle's central vocabulary. In fact,
virtually all those words are poor translations of the Greek they mean to
stand for. The word privation, for instance, will not be found in this
translation for the simple reason that its meaning cannot be expected to be
known to all educated readers of English. The commentaries on Aristotle
use the word extensively, but if the Greek word it refers to has been
adequately translated in the first place, you will not need commentaries to
tell you what it means. Here that Greek word will be translated sometimes
as deprivation, sometimes as lack, according as one or the other fits more
comfortably into its context. What matters is not whether Latin or AngloSaxon derivatives are used, but whether an understandable English word
translates an understandable Greek one. Accident is a perfectly good
· English word, but not in the sense in which it appears in commentaries on
·Aristotle; the Greek word it replaces has a broad sense, that corresponds to
our word attribute, and a narrower one that can be conveyed by the
phrase "incidental attribute." In this case again, Latin derivatives are
available which cany clear and appropriate meanings in English, since one
does not need to know any Latin to ferret them out. It is true that adcadere has a sense that could have given rise to the meanings we attach to
�9
the words "incidental" and "attribute," but it did not in fact transmit that
meaning to its English derivatives. There is some pedantic pleasure in
pointing out those connections, but to use the word accident in that sense
is to write a forced Latin masquerading as English, guaranteed to confuse
the non-specialist reader, where Aristotle used the simplest possible
language in a way that keeps the focus off the words and on · the things
meant by them.
But to undo the mischief caused by McKeon's third example, substance,
stronger medicine is required. Joseph Owens records the way this word
became established in the tradition.
(The Doctrine of Being in the
Aristotelian 'Metaphysics', pp. 140-143, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1951) It is a comedy of errors in which Christian scruples were
imposed upon a non-Biblical theology, and a disagreement with Aristotle
was read back into his words as a translation of them. This translator
ignores the contortions of the tradition and without apology uses the
barbarous Anglo-Saxon compound thinghood. This is a central notion in
the Metaphysics, and in all Aristotle's thought, though it occurs rarely in
the Physics, and the word "substance" does nothing but obscure its
meaning. Lively arguments about substance go on today in the secondary
literature, but a choice must be made, and the primary texts of Aristotle
are better, clearer, richer, deeper, easier to absorb, and more worth
pursuing than the commentaries on them. · As it stands in the usual
translations, the word "substance" is little more than an unknown x, for
which meaning has to be deduced by a kind of algebra, while Aristotle
shows (Metaphysics 1028b 2-7) that just asking what the thinghood of
things consists in, and what is responsible for it, unlocks the highest
inquiry of which philosophy is capable. For the promise of such a return, it
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is worth risking a little barbarity. The barbarism of a word like thinghood
is just the fact that it falls far outside common usage in our language, and
not in a direction that needs any historical or technical special knowledge
to capture it, but in one that invites the same flexibility that poets ask of
us. We cannot read such a barbarism in a passive way, but must take
responsibility for its meaning. This in itself, in moderation and in welljudged places, is something good, and is an imitation of what Aristotle does
with Greek.
It has already been remarked that the present translation does not
always use the same English word for the same Greek one. This is partly
because no English word ever has the same full range of meaning as any
Greek word, so that such a range has to be conveyed, or unwanted
connotations suppressed, by the use of a variety of near-synonyms. It is
partly because a Greek word may have two or more distinct uses that
differ by context; in this way, the word for thinghood will often be
translated as "an independent thing." It is also partly because Aristotle
always paid attention to the fact that important words are meant in more
than one way. For him this was not a fault of language, but one of the
ways in which it is truthful. A word often has a primary meaning and a
variety of derivative ones, as a reflection of causal reiatlons in the world.
A diet can be healthy only because, in a different and more governing
-sense, an animal can be healthy, and there can be a medical knife only
because there is a medical skill. This array of difference within sameness
usUally cannot be lifted over from Greek to English, and has to be gotten at
indirectly. In the Physics, every kind of change is spoken of as a motion,
though the word for motion is gradually and successively limited until it
refers strictly only to change of place. This progression determines the
�11
main structure of the inquiry, but in English the path is not as clearly
indicated by transitions of meaning within a single word. And finally,
there are some words that have many translations that are equally good in
their different ways. In such cases, this translation rejoices in variety; this
again is an imitation of Aristotle's general practice. Where the traditional
translations are marked by rigid, formulaic repetitions, Aristotle loves to
combine overlapping meanings, or separate intertwined meanings, to point
to things the language has no precise word for. It is the living, naturat
flexible character of thinking that breathes through Aristotle's use of
language, and not the artificial, machine-like fixity one finds in the
translations.
This last point should not be taken as a promise of smooth English, but
just the reverse. Idiomatic expressions and familiar ways of putting words
together conceal unthinking assumptions of just the kind that philosophy
tries to get beyond. The reader will need a willingness to follow sentences
to places where meaning would be lost if it were forced into well-worn
grooves, and will need to follow trains of thought that would not be the
same if they did not preserve Aristotle's own ways of connecting them. As
far as possible, this translation follows the syntax of Aristotle's text.
Montgomery Furth has followed this same procedure in a translation of
part of the Metaphysics, and apologizes for the result as neither English
nor
Gree~
but Eek. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Books Vll-X, p. vi, Hackett,
1985} Furth does this because of an interest in following Aristotle's logic
faithfully, but he retains all the usual Latinized vocabulary of Ross's Oxford
translation, so that the resulting language might better be called Leek. The
present translation goes farther, in vocabulary and syntax both, beyond
the Latin and toward the Greek, and could be called Gringlish, but for this
�12
as well it comes before you without apology.
Furth violates English
sensibilities for the special purposes of graduate students and professional
scholars; this translation violates them for the common human purposes of
joining Aristotle in thinking that breaks through the habitual and into the
philosophic.
A philosophic physics?
Now it may seem odd to combine philosophic aims with the topic of
physics. It may seem that Aristotle had to speculate philosophically about
the natural world because he did not have the benefit of the secure
knowledge we have about it. In the current secondary literature, one sees
at least some scholars who think they might learn something about
thinking from De Anima, or about being from the Metaphysics, but articles
on the Physics seem at most to pat Aristotle on the head for having come
to some conclusion not utterly in conflict with present-day doctrines. This
kind of smugness is a predictable result of the way the sciences have been
taught to us. Conjectures and assumptions, because they have been part of
authoritative opinion for a few centuries, are presented to us as stories, or
as facts, without recourse to evidence or argument. Particular doctrines,
even when they stand on theoretical structures as complex and fragile as a
house of cards, or even when they presuppose a picture of things that is
flatly in contradiction with itself, tend to be prefaced with the words "we
know... " All the rhetoric that surrounds the physics of our time tells us
. that philosophic inquiry need not enter its territory, that here the
philosophizing is over and done, the best minds agree about everything,
and non-experts couldn't hope to understand enough to assess the
evidence in any case. Strangely, the physics of the twentieth century is
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surrounded by the same air of dogmatic authority as was the schoolAristotelianism of the sixteenth century.
But there are two kinds of support for the present-day physics that
seem to lift it above dogmatism. One is a long history of experiment and
successful technology, and the other is the greatest possible reliance on
mathematics. These are both authorities that cannot be swayed by human
preferences, and cannot lie.
Their testimony can, however, be
misunderstood, and can be incorporated into a picture of the world that
fails in other ways. But even if the current physics contains nothing
untrue, one might wish to understand it down to its roots, to unearth the
fundamental daims about things on which it rests, which have been lost
sight of in the onrush of theoretical and practical progress. To do this one
has to stand back from it, to see its founding claims as alternatives to other
ways of looking at the world, chosen for reasons. The earliest advocates of
the "new physics" did just that, and the alternatives they rejected all stem
from Aristotle's Physics. Martin Heidegger has said that "Aristotle's
Physics is the hidden, and therefore never adequately studied,
foundational book of Western philosophy." ("On the Being and Conception
of ct>U:U: in Aristotle's Physics B, 1," in Man and World, IX, 3, 1976, p. 224)
The physics of our time is inescapably philosophic, ifonly in the original
choices, preserved in it, to follow certain paths of thought to the exclusion
of others. To see that physics adequately and whole, we too need to be
philosophic, to lift our gaze to a level at which it can be seen to be one
possibility among many. Only then is it possible to decide rationally and
responsibly to adopt its opinions as our own.
But there is a second respect in which twentieth-century physics has
opened its doors to philosophy, and will not be able to close them. The
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physics that came of age in the seventeenth century, and seemed to have
answered all the large questions by the nineteenth, is limping toward the
end of the twentieth century in some confusion.
Mathematics and
technology have coped with all the crises of this century, but the picture of
the world that underlay them has fallen apart. It was demonstrated
conclusively that light is a wave, except when it shines on anything; then it
arrives as particles. It is shown with equal certainty that the electron is a
particle, except when it bounces off a crystal surface; then it must be a
wave, interacting with the surface everywhere at once. Just when atomic
physics seemed ready to uncover the details of the truth underlying all
appearances, it began to undercut all its own assumptions. A wavemechanics that held out an initial promise of reducing all appearances of
particles to the behavior of waves failed to do so, and degenerated into a
computational device for predicting probabilities. The most far-seeing
physicists of the century have shown that particles and waves are equally
necessary, mutually incompatible aspects of every atomic event, and that
physics, at what was supposed to be the ultimate explanatory level, must
abandon its claim to objectivity. The physicist is always describing, in
part, his own decisions to interfere with things in one way rather than
another; this brings along, as a causally necessary conclusion, the collapse
of the belief in causal determinism. When Hobbes laughed at Aristotle, he
.was certain that he knew what a body is. Today all bets are off.
But some physicists have been unwilling to give up their dogmatic
habits without a fight. Even Einstein, after he had taught the world to give
up the rigid Newtonian ideas of time, space, and mass, was unable to
suspend his unquestioned assumption that bodies have sharply defined
places, and cannot interact except by contact or by radiation. Niels Bohr
�15
and Werner Heisenberg had announced the most radical of revolutions,
requiring physicists to ask what knowledge is, and no longer to answer by
pointing to what they do. Einstein, in a famous 1935 collaboration ("Can
Quantum-Mechanical Description of Reality be Considered Complete?",
Physical Review 47), tried to hold off this final revolution, saying in effect
"I know enough about the fundamental structure of the world to be certain
that some things cannot happen." Experiments have revealed that those
very things do happen, that the state of one particle is provably dependent
on whether a measurement is performed on a distant second particle, from
which no signal could have radiated. But a new and opposite tactic permits
some physicists to embrace this or any other seeming impossibility
without admitting the need for any philosophic re-thinking of the way
things are. Listen to these words of Richard Feynman: "We always have
had a great deal of difficulty in understanding the world view that
quantum physics represents. At least I do, because I'm an old enough man
that I haven't got to the point that this stuff is obvious to me...you know
how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it
becomes obvious that there's no real problem." (quoted by N. David
Mermin in The Great Ideas Today, 1988, p. 52) So if the discoveries of
quantum physics make you feel an urgent need· to re-examine the
presuppositions of physics, just repress that feeling for a generation or
two, and it will go away.
Perhaps more than any other reason for resisting opening physics to
philosophic examination, there is the plain fact that there is no need for it
to do anything differently.
Whatever happens can be described
mathematically, and new discoveries are readily incorporated into some
mathematical scheme, and then predicted. Technology aQ.vances no less
�16
rapidly in areas in which the explanatory ground has been cut from under
our feet, than in those in which its workings are intelligible. But the new
physics arose out of a desire to know, and has undeniably become a highly
questionable kind of knowing. Indeed, the very fact that its picture of the
world can collapse while leaving its mathematical description and practical
applications intact is a powerful stimulus to wonder. While wishing
physics well in all its dealings, some of us may simply want to understand
what it is and what it isn't. But we cannot see how its various strands
have separated without understanding what it was to begin with, so again
we are thrown back to the choices by which it came into being, and thus in
turn to the picture of the world that it rejected. From this standpoint,
though, that is more than a quest to uncover something past and
superseded.
It entails the risk of being convinced that the original
decisions of the seventeenth century physicists were not all worthy of our
own acceptance. It is possible that parts of Aristotle's understanding of
the world might serve to heal our own dilemmas and confusions.
The things that are
Where should an understanding of the things around us begin? It
might seem that there are plain facts that could serve as uncontroversial
starting points. What are some of the plainest ones? The stars circle us at
night, the sun by day. Rocks fall to earth, but flames leap toward the sky.
Bodies that are thrown or pushed slow down continually until they stop
moving. Animals and plants belong to distinct kinds, which they preserve
from generation to generation. The visible whole is a sphere, with the
earth motionless at its center. These are facts of experience, so obvious
that the only way to be unaware of them is by not paying attention. If you
�17
disbelieve any of them it is not because of observation, but because you
were persuaded not to trust your senses. No physics begins by looking at
the things it studies; those things must always be assigned to some larger
context in which they can be interpreted. Aristotle states this in the first
sentence of his Physics by saying that we do not know anything until we
know its causes. Nothing stands on its own, without connections, and no
event happens in isolation; there must be some comprehensive order of
things in which things are what they are and do what they do. Physics
seeks to understand only a part of this whole, but it cannot begin to do so
without some picture of the whole.
But it has been noted earlier that none of Aristotle's inquiries begins
with the knowledge that most governs the things it studies. We never
start where the truth of things starts, but must find our way there. That
means that we cannot dispense with some preliminary picture of things,
though we must be ready to modify it as the inquiry proceeds. What is
Aristotle's preliminary picture of the whole of things? It is one that
permits the plainest facts of experience to be just the way they appear to
us. We live at the center of a spherical cosmos as one species of living
thing among many, in a world in which some motions are natural and some
forced, but all require causes actively at work, and cease when those
causes cease to act. The natural motions are those by which animals and
. plants live and renew their kinds, the stars circle in unchanging orbits, and
the parts of the cosmos-earth, water, air, and fire-are transformed into
one another by heat and cold, move to their proper places up or down, and
maintain an ever-renewing equilibrium. This picture is confirmed and
fleshed out by Aristotle's inquiries in writings other than the Physics, but
since Aristotle never writes "scientifically," that is deductively, there is no
�18
necessary or right order in which they should be read. All those inquiries
stand in a mutual relation of enriching and casting light upon one another,
and the Physics is in an especially close relation with the Metaphysics.
It is not only a picture of the whole that is assumed in the Physics, but
also a comprehensive understanding of the way things are.
In the
Metaphysics, this latter is not assumed but arrived at by argument,
through the sustained pursuit of the question, what is being? Since being
is meant in many ways, Aristotle looks for the primary sense of it, being as
such or in its own right, on which the other kinds of being are dependent.
That primary sense of being is first identified as thinghood, then
discovered to be the sort of being that belongs only to animals, plants, and
the cosmos as a whole. For these pre-eminent beings, being is being-atwork, since each of them is a whole that maintains itself by its own
activity. For any other sort of being, what it is for it to be is not only
something less than that, but it is in every case dependent on and derived
from those highest beings, as a quality, quantity, or action of one, a relation
between two or more, a chance product of the interaction between two or
more, or an artificial product deliberately made from materials borrowed
from one or more of them. Life is not a strange by-product of things, but
the source of things, and the non-living side of nature has being in a way
strictly analogous to life: as an organized whole that maintains itself by
continual activity. In the central books of the Metaphysics, Aristotle
captures the heart of the meaning of being in a cluster of words and
phrases that are the most powerlul expressions of his thinking. · In the
usual translations-substance, essence, actuality, and actuality again-they
not only fall flat but miss the central point: that the thinghood of a thing is
�19
what it keeps on being in order to be at all, and must be a being-at-work
so that it may achieve and sustain its being-at-work-staying-itself.
Now the physics of our time adopts an understanding of being that is
exactly opposite to that of Aristotle, in the principle of inertia. The
primary beings are what they are passively, by being hard enough to
resist all change, and do nothing but bump and move off blindly in straight
lines. The picture of the world assumed by this physics is of atoms in a
void, so there can be no cosmos, but only infinite emptiness, no life, but
only accidental rearrangements of matter, and no activity at all, except for
motion in space. This is ancient idea, that goes back long before Aristotle's
time. Lucretius finds it appealing, as a doctrine that teaches us that, while
there is little to hope for in life except freedom from pain, there is little to
fear either, since a soul made of atoms will dissolve, but cannot suffer
eternal torment. There are reasons of two other kinds that make this
picture of things attractive to the new physics.
First, it makes it
unnecessary to look for causes. Just because everything is taken to be
reducible to atoms and the void, every possible event is pre-explained.
Mechanical necessity takes over as the only explanation of anything, so the
labor of explanation is finished at one stroke. And second, this picture
makes every attribute that belongs to anything, and every event that can
happen, entirely describable by mathematics. The glory of the new
physics is the power it gains from mathematics. The world that is present
to the senses is set aside as "secondary," and the mathematical imagination
takes over as our way of access to the true world behind the appearances.
The only experience that is allowed to count is the controlled experiment1
designed in the imagination, with a limited array of possible outcomes that
are all interpreted in advance.
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From its beginnings, mathematical physics moves from success to
success, but almost from the beginning its mechanistic picture of things
fails. Newton begins his Principia with the assumption that all bodies are
inert, but in the course of it shows that every body is the seat of a
mysterious power of attraction. Is this simply a new discovery to be
added to our picture of the world? Shall we say that there are atoms, void,
and a force of gravitation? But the whole purpose of the new worldpicture was to avoid occult qualities. And where do we put this strange
force of attraction? There is no intelligible way that inert matter can be
conceived as causing an urge in some distant body. Shall we say that the
force resides in a field? A field of what? The Principia shows that the
spaces through which the planets move are void of matter. How can a
point in empty nothing be the bearer of a quantity of energy? This new
discovery can be described mathematically, but it does not fit into the
world-picture that led to it, and cannot be understood as something added
to it. Something similar happens with light, which is discovered by
Maxwell to be describable as an electromagnetic wave. But a wave is a
material conception: a disturbance in a string, or a body of water, or some
such carrier, moves from one place to another while the parts of the body
stay where they were. So when it is shown that a iight-bearing aether
would need to have contradictory properties, electromagnetic radiation is
left as a well-described wave motion taking place in nothing whatever.
In the twentieth century, the mechanist picture underlying
mathematical physics has broken down even more radically, in ways that
have been mentioned above. Popularizations of physics usually tell us that
the ideas of Newton and Maxwell failed when they were applied on an
astronomic or atomic scale, but remain perfectly good approximations to
�21
the phenomena of the middle-sized world. But in what sized world can
matter be inert and not inert, and space empty and not empty? And the
middle-sized world is characterized more than anything else by the
presence of living things, which the atoms-and-void picture never had any
hope of explaining, but only of explaining away. Shall we at least say,
though, that we have learned that the world is not a cosmos? Let us listen
to David Bohm: "The theory of relativity was the first significant indication
in physics of the need to question the mechanist order... [I]t implied that no
coherent concept of an independently existent particle is possible...The
quantum theory presents, however, a much more serious challenge to this
mechanist order... so that the entire universe has to be thought of as an
unbroken whole. In this whole, each element that we can abstract in
thought shows basic properties (wave or particle, etc.) that depend on its
overall environment, in a way that is much more reminiscent of how the
organs constituting living beings are related, than it is of how parts of a
machine interact... [T]he basic concepts of relativity and quantum theory
directly contradict each other... [W]hat they have basically in common...is
undivided wholeness. Though each comes to such wholeness in a different
way, it is clear that it is this to which they are both fundamentally
pointing." (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Ark, 1983, pp. 173-6)
According to Bohm, it is only prejudice and habit that keep the evidence
of the wholeness of things from being taken seriously. The contrary view
is not just an opinion, but one of those fundamental ways of looking,
thinking, and interpreting that permit us to have opinions at all, and to
decide what is and what isn't a fact. To abandon the ground beneath our
feet feels like violence, especially when no new authority is at hand to
assure us that there is somewhere else for us to land We
t~nd
to prefer to
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live with unreconciled dualities. Descartes notoriously makes the relation
of mind and body a "problem." Newton speaks in his General Scholium as
though gravitation were incapable of explanation by physics, a
supernatural element in the world. Leibniz speaks of two kingdoms, one of
souls and one of bodies, as harmoniously superimposed (as in Monadology
79). Kant tells us that we are free, except insofar as our actions are part of
the empirical world.
We sometimes speak of biology as something
unconnected with physics, as though what is at work in a tree or a cat is
not nature in its most proper sense. We have had the habit so long that we
consider it natural to regard ourselves, with our feeling, perception, and
understanding, as an inexplicable eruption out of a nature that has nothing
in common with us. Might it be possible to find a more coherent way to
put together our experience? Perhaps it would be worthwhile to suspend,
at least for a while, our notions of what can be and what it is for something
to be, to try out some other way of looking.
A non-mathematical physics
The world as envisioned in Aristotle's Physics is more diverse than the ·
world described by mathematical physics, and we must accustom
ourselves to a correspondingly richer vocabulary iil order to read it.
Motion means one thing to us, but irreducibly many kinds of thing when
Aristotle speaks of it, and the same is true of cause. We tend to use nature
as an umbrella-word, a collective name for the sum of things, while
Aristotle means it to apply to whatever governs the distinct pattern of
activity of each kind of being. It would be possible to use different English
words for these three ideas, to bring out what is distinctive in Aristotle's
meanings, but here it seems best to keep the familiar words.and push their
�23
limits beyond their prevalent current meanings. Nature, cause, and motion
are the central topics of the Physics, and come to sight first as questions; it
is important to see that Aristotle and the later mathematical physicists
were ultimately asking about the same things. Nature is mathematized not
as an interesting game, or to abandon a harder task in favor of an easier
one, but in order that the truth of it may be found.
In the Assayer, Galileo makes the famous claim that "this grand book,
the universe, .. .is written in the language of mathematics." Later in the
same book, in a discussion of heat, he explains why. "I suspect that people
in general have a concept of this which is very remote from the truth. For
they believe that heat is a real phenomenon, or property, or quality, which
actually resides in the material by which we feel ourselves warmed
...Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would
probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence I think that tastes,
odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object
in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the
consciousness.
Hence if the living creature were removed, all these
qualities would be wiped away and annihilated."
But shapes, sizes,
positions, numbers, and such things are not mere names, imposed on
objects by the consciousness of the living creature, because "from these
conditions, I cannot separate [a material or corporeal] substance by any
stretch of my imagination." (Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, Anchor,
1957, pp. 237-8, 274) The direct experience of the world has the taint of
· subjectivity, but the mathematical imagination captures the object just as
it is. Sadder but wiser physicists would no longer try to read themselves
out of physics; they too are living creatures, interpreting the experience of
a consciousness, with all the risk and uncertainty that accompanies such an
�24
activity. But our use of language may betray our second thoughts, and pull
us back to Galileo's point of view.
What is motion? Do you think of something like a geometrical point
changing position? What about a child moving into adolescence? Warmth
moving into your limbs? Blossoms moving out of the buds on a tree? A
ripening tomato, moving to a dark red? Are these other examples motions
in only a metaphorical sense, while the first is correctly so called? Are the
other examples really nothing but complex instances of the first, with
small-scale changes of position adding up to large-scale illusions of
qualitative change? For Aristotle, the differences among the kinds of
motion determine the over-all structure of the Physics, but they first of all
belong together as one kind of experience.
The kinds of becoming
correspond to the ways being belongs to anything, and being-somewhere is
only one aspect of being. A thing can also be of a certain size, or of a
certain sort or quality, and can undergo motion in these respects by
coming to be of another size, or of a different quality, by some gradual
transition. It can even undergo a motion with respect to its thinghood.
One thinks first of birth and death, but eating displays the same kind of
motion. A cow chomps grass, and it is no longer pa.rt of the life of a plant,
and soon it is assimilated into the body of the cow. This is no mere change
of quality, since no whole being persists through it to have first one, then
some other quality belonging to it. Something persists, but first in one,
then in another, kind of thinghood.
In any encounter with the natural world, it is the kinds of change other
than change of place that are most prominent and most productive of
wonder. Mathematical physics must erase them all, and attempt to argue
that they were never anything but deceptive appearances of something
�25
else, changing in some other way. Why? Because those merely local
changes of merely inert bodies can be described mathematically. But if the
testimony of the senses has a claim to "objectivity," and to be taken
seriously, that is at least equal to that of the mathematical imagination,
then there is no necessity of such a reduction. And in fact the reduction of
kinds of motion that is required is not just from four to one, but to less
than one. Aristotle has considerable interest in change of place, but such a
thing is possible only if there are places. Motion as mathematically
conceived happens in space, and in space there are no places. Underneath
the idea of motion that is prevalent today lurks this other idea,
unexamined and taken on faith, that there is such a thing as space.
Aristotle twice makes the argument that space, or empty extension, is
an idea that results only from the mis-use of mathematics. It is the exact
counter-argument to Galileo's claim that ordinary people project their nonmathematical ideas onto the world. Aristotle says that the mathematician
separates in thought the extension that belongs to extended bodies. (This
is sometimes called "abstraction," but the word Aristotle uses is the
ordinary word for subtraction.)
There is nothing wrong with this
falsification of things, which makes it easier to study what has been
isolated artificially, so long as one does not forget that the original
falsification took place. But some people do just that, and read this
extension, which they have subtracted from bodies, back into the world as
though it were empty and somehow existed on its own, prior to bodies.
Now, in the imagination, it is possible
~o
examine this "space" and
determine all sorts of things about it. It is of infinite extent, for example,
and since it is entirely empty, no part of it can have any characteristic by
which it could differ from any other part. If our impulse,. when thinking
�26
about motion, is automatically to give it a mathematical image, that is
because we have pre-supposed that the ultimate structure of the world is
space. But this supposition is laden with consequences and ought not to be
adopted blindly. Aristotle says that one of the reasons physics cannot be
mathematical is that the mathematician abolishes motion. Physics is the
study of beings that move, and motion is a rich and complex topic, but
within the constraints of "space" every form of motion disappears, except
for one which is diminished out of recognition. If it is in space that our
examination begins, nature will be nowhere to be found (but will survive
as a mere name) because space is, from the beginning, a de-natured realm.
Conversely, without the imposition of the idea of space, it is possible for
nature to be understood as part of the true constitution of things, because
motion in all its variety can be present. But since motion is not reduced to
the pre-explained realm of mathematics, it is necessary to understand
what it is. Aristotle says that, so long as we are ignorant of motion, we are
ignorant of nature as well. But how can one give a rational account of
motion? To assign it to some other genus would seem to make it a species
of non-motion. In fact, two of Aristotle's predecessors, Parmenides and
Zeno, had argued that motion is completely illusory. Parmenides argued
that any attempt to say that there is motion must
drum that what is-not
also is. And Zeno, in four famous paradoxes preserved by Aristotle, tried
to show that any description of motion involves self-contradiction of some
kind. It would seem that motion has to be accepted as a brute fact of
experience, from which explanations can begin, but which cannot itself be
explained But Aristotle, for the first and perhaps only time ever, did give
motion a place not only in the world but in a rational account of the world,
explaining it in terms of ideas that go deeper. The Parmenidean challenge
�27
is met by Aristotle primarily in the Metaphysics, where he shows that
being must be meant in more than one way. His response to Zeno's
challenge spreads over the whole of the Physics, and is concentrated in his
definition of motion.
Aristotle defines motion in terms of potency and being-at-work. In the
first book of the Physics there is a preliminary analysis of change that
discovers the ultimate explanatory notions available to the inquiry to be
form, material, and the deprivation of form. Material is described as that
which, by its own nature, inherently yearns for and stretches out toward
form. This should never be called matter, by which we mean something
that stands on its own with a determinate set of properties (has weight,
occupies space, preserves its state of motion in a straight line). What
Aristotle means by material, on the contrary, is (1) not inert, (2) not
necessarily tangible, (3) relative to its form, which may in tum be material
for some other form, (4) not possessed of any definite properties, and (S)
ultimately a purely "ideal" being, incapable of existing in separation, which
would be rejected by any "materialist." Form, in turn, does not mean
shape or arrangement, but some definite way of being-at-work. This is
evident in Book II of the Physics, and arrived at by argument principally
in VIII, 2 of the Metaphysics. Every being consists of material and form,
that is, of an inner striving spilling over into an outward activity. Potency
and being-at-work are the ways of being of material and form.
The usual translations render potency as potentiality, which might
suggest mere indeterminacy or logical possibility, which is never the sense
in which Aristotle uses it. What is worse, though, is the rendering of
being-at-work, and the stronger form of it used in the definition,
being-at~
work-staying-itself, as actuality. This has some reference, by way of Latin,
�28
to activity, but is a useless word that makes it completely impossible to get
anything resembling Aristotle's meaning out of the definition.
"The
actuality of the potentiality as a potentiality" becomes a seventeenthcentury joke, the ultimate example of the destruction of healthy common
sense by pretentious gobbledygook. Does it refer to the actuality that
belonged to the potential thing before it changed? That's not a motion, but
something that precedes one. Does it refer to the actuality that exactly
corresponds to the pre-existent potentiality? That's not a motion either,
but something left when the motion ends. Does it mean, though it would
have to be tortured to give this sense, the gradual transformation of a
potentiality into an actuality? That at least could refer to a motion, but
only by saying that a motion is a certain kind of motion. Perhaps it means
that motion is the actuality of a potentiality to be in motion. This is surely
the silliest version of them all, but respected scholars have defended it
with straight faces. An intelligent misinterpretation of the definition was
put forward by Thomas Aquinas, who took it to mean that the special
condition of a thing in motion is to be partly actual while partly potential,
and directed toward greater actuality of that same potentiality. But this
account would not distinguish motion from a state of balanced equilibrium,
such as that of a rock caught in a hand, still straining downward but
prevented from falling any further.
The account is subject to this
ambiguity because it focusses on an instantaneous condition, a snapshot of
a thing in motion, which is what an actuality is, but by no means what a
being-at-work is.
What Aristotle said was that motion is the being-at-work-staying-itself
of a potency, just as a potency. When an ongoing yearning and striving for
form is not inner and latent, but present in the world just as itself, as a
�29
yearning and striving, there is motion. That is because, when motion is
present, the potency of some material has the very same structure that
form has, forming the being as something holding-on in just that particular
motion. This does not mean that every motion is the unfolding of some
being into its mature form; every such unfolding can fall short, overshoot,
encounter some obstacle, or interact in some incidental way with some
other being. It does mean that no motion of any kind would take place if it
were not for those potencies that emerge of their own accord from beings.
Motion depends on the organization of beings into kinds, with inner
natures that are always straining to spill into activity. Only this dynamic
structure of being, with material straining toward form, and form staying
at work upon material, makes room for motion that is not just an
inexplicable departure from the way things are, but a necessary and
· intrinsic part of the way things are.
For example, consider the most uninteresting motion you can think of,
say the falling of a pencil from the edge of a desk onto the floor. What is
the potency that is at work, and to what being does it belong? The potency
is not that of being at that spot on the floor, and the being that has it is not
the pencil at all, since it is no genuine being. The potency at work here is
that of earth to be down, or of the cosmos to sustain itSelf with earth at the
center. No motive power belongs to the pencil as such, but it can move on
its own because there is present in it a potency of earth, set free to be at
work as itself when the obstacle of the desk is removed. And the motion is
not defined by the position or state in which it happens to end up, but by
the activity that governs its course; the former is an actuality, but is not a
being-at-work. Just as Newton's laws give a set of rules for analyzing any
motion, Aristotle's definition directs us in a different way to bring the
�30
structure of any motion into focus: first, find the being, and then find the
potency of it which the motion displays, or to which the particular motion
is incidental. No motion, however random or incidental, gains entrance
into the world except through the primary beings that constitute the
world.
Aristotle sometimes argues about a body A that moves from B to C. Our
first impulse may be to let A be represented by a point, the motion by a
line, and Band C by positions. But Aristotle always has in mind an A with
some nature, and a motion that may be from one condition to another
rather than one place to another. Even if a motion from place to place is in
question, those places would not be neutral and indifferent positions, but
regions of the cosmos, that might or might not be appropriate surroundings
for body A. The argument might be about something like continuity, so
general that the particular Band C need not be specified, but it makes all
the difference in the world that they represent motion in its fullest sense,
as spelled out in the definition. The mathematized sort of motion, that can
be fully depicted on a blackboard, is vulnerable to the kinds of attack
present in Zeno's paradoxes.
Motion as Aristotle understands it,
constituted by potency and being-at-work, deriving its wholeness and
.·
continuity from a deeper source, overcomes those paradoxes.
(The
particular arguments will be looked at in the commentaries on the text.)
It is evident from this account of motion that material and form are
understood as causes. The usual examples given for material and formal
causes, an inert lump of bronze and a static blueprint, miss the point, that
material meets form half-way, and form is always at work. And it is not
just motions that they cause, but everything that endures. We tend to
speak of causes as events that lead to other events, since that is the only
�31
kind of causality that remains possible in a mathematically-reduced world,
but Aristotle understands everything that is the case as resulting from
causes, and every origin of responsibility as a cause. Something called the
"efficient" cause has been grafted onto Aristotle's account; it means the
proximate cause of motion, like the bumping of billiard balls. This is
sometimes even used as a translation of one of Aristotle's four kinds of
cause, but not correctly. Aristotle speaks of the external source of motion
as one kind of cause, the flrst thing from which the motion proceeds. The
incidental and intermediate links, that merely pass motions around
without originating them, are not causes at all, except in a derivative sense.
All of Aristotle's causes stem from beings, and are found not by looking
backward in time, but upward in a chain of responsibility.
There is a fourth kind of cause, in most cases the most important one of
all, the final cause. This is often equated with purpose, but that is only one
kind of final cause, and not the most general. A deliberate action of an
intelligent being cannot be understood except in terms of its purpose, since
· only in achieving that purpose does the action become complete. The claim
that final causes belong to non-human nature becomes ludicrous if it is
thought that something must in some analogous way have purposes. What
Aristotle in fact means is that every natural being is··a whole, and every
natural activity leads to or sustains that wholeness. His phrase for this
kind of cause is "that for the sake of which" something does what it does or
is what it is. Does rain fall for the sake of the crops that humans grow?
No, but it does fall for the sake of the equilibrium of the cosmos, in which
evaporation is counter-balanced by precipitation in a cycle of
ever~
renewed wholeness. That wholeness provides a stable condition for the
flourishing of plants and of humans, in lives and acts that come to
�32
completion in their own ways. Aristotle's "teleology" is just his claim that
nothing in nature is a fragment or a chance accumulation of parts. To
grasp the final cause of anything is to see how it fits into the ultimate
structure of things. But surely there are fragmentary things and chance
combinations to be found around us. Aristotle finds it as strange that some
thinkers deny chance altogether, as it is that others think chance governs
everything. From Aristotle's standpoint, even chance always points back
to that which acts for the sake of something, since it results from the
interference of two or more such things. It therefore represents not an
absence of final causes, but an over-abundance of them, a failure of final
cause resulting from a conflict among final causes.
Because such incidental interactions lead to innumerable unpredictable
chance results, nature is not a realm of necessity, but neither is it a realm
of randomness, since the forms of natural beings govern all that happens.
Aristotle speaks of the patterns of nature as present not always but "for
the most part." His way of understanding the causes of things does not
need to do violence either to the stability or to the variability of the world,
but affirms the unfailing newness-within-sameness that we observe in the
return of the seasons and the generations of living things. It offers an
example of a physics that interprets causality without recourse to
mechanical necessity or mathematical law. Both the collision of billiard
balls and the co-variation of the two sides of an algebraic equation are too
random in their beginnings and too rigid in their consequences to . be
adequate images of the natures we know.
The shape of the inquiry
�33
It has been mentioned above that all Aristotle's inquiries are dialectical.
His writings have structures that are not rigid but organic, with parts that
are whole in themselves, but arranged so that they build up larger wholes.
In Book I of most of his works, he reviews what has been said by his
predecessors, and here that is combined with a preliminary analysis of
change, which concludes that it must always imply the presence of some
material that can possess. or be deprived of form. This first analysis of
everything changeable into form and material is then available as a
starting point to approach any later question. Next comes the heart of the
Physics, in Book II and the beginning of Book III, of which an account has
been given in the last section of this introduction. It begins with a
definition of nature that has all the characteristics Aristotle attributes in I,
1 to proper beginnings: it starts from what is familiar to us, is clear in its
reference but unclear in its meaning, and takes its topic as a whole and in
general, without separating out its parts or their particular instances.
Since it defines nature as an inner cause of motion, the first task is to
explore the meanings of cause and motion, not as words or logical classes,
but through disciplined reflection on our experience. The result is a
sharpened and deepened understanding of a way of encountering and
interpreting the world. This is a more sustained use of the kind of analysis
that took place in Book I, that dwells on a topic to unfold into clarity what
was already present in an implicit and confused way.
A second kind of analytic reasoning begins after motion has been
defined, a successive examination of conditions presupposed by the
presence of motion in the world. This occupies the rest of Books III and
IV. Zeno had taught everyone that motion presupposes infinity, and
Aristotle turns first to this.
He finds a non-contradictory way to
�34
understand the infinite divisibility of motion, but his conclusion that there
is no infinite extended body is incomplete as it stands. It depends upon
the claim that things have natural places, and so the topic of place must be
e.xplored next. Place is understood as a relation to the parts of the cosmos,
on
but this topic in turn dependsLthe next, since the exclusive array of places
in the world results from the impossibility of void. The e.xploration of the
idea of void completes this sequence, since the arguments against it stand
independently. But motion also entails time, to which Aristotle turns next,
finding that it is not in fact a presupposition but a consequence of motion.
Time is found to result from a comparison of motions to one another, that
can only be carried out by a perceiving soul. Like place, time is not a preexisting container, and not graspable by the mathematical imagination.
Each of them is an intimate relation amongs beings, intelligible only when
the particularlity of this world is taken into account.
The last four books of the Physics take up the kind of cause and the
kind of motion that are least central in Book II. The formal, material, and
final causes of a living thing are internal to it, and constitute its nature,
and it has parents that are external sources of its motions of birth,
development, and growth. But as Aristotle mentions at the end of II, 2,
both other human beings and the sun beget a human being. All life is
dependent upon conditions supplied by the cosmos, which seems to
maintain itself primarily through cycles of local motion. Books V through
VIII trace a complex argument up to the source of all change of place in
the world. In its broadest outline, that argument is reminiscent of the
structure of the Metaphysics. Though the Metaphysics is put together out
of a large number of independent pieces, it has perhaps the clearest line of
unifying structure of any of Aristotle's works. The meaning of being is
�35
pursued through four most general senses, to an eight-fold array of kinds
of non-incidental predications, to its primary sense of thinghood, to the
source of thinghood as form, to the meaning of form as being-at-work, to
the source of all being-at-work in the divine intellect. It thus culminates
in the discovery of the primary being that is the source of all being, and
gets there from the innocent question, which of the meanings of being is
primary?
A similar progressive narrowing of the meanings of motion takes place
in the Physics. In Book III, motion was said to be of four kinds: change of
thinghood, alteration of quality, increase and decrease, and change of place.
In Book V it is argued that motion properly understood is from one
contrary to another, passing through intermediate states or conditions. But
coming-into-being and destruction should be understood strictly as
changes not to a contrary but to a contradictory condition, abrupt changes
that have no intermediate conditions to pass through. Thus in a strict
sense there are only three kinds of motion. But in Book VI it is argued
that there is a certain discontinuity in every qualitative change.
If
something black turns white, it goes through a spectrum of intermediate
shades, but it can be regarded as still being black until sometime in the
course of the motion. In a change of quantity or place·; once the thing is in
motion it has departed from its initial condition, however much one might
try to divide the beginning of the motion. So in the still stricter sense of
being unqualifiedly continuous, there are only two kinds of motion.
Finally, it is pointed out in Book VII that quantitative change must be
caused by something that comes to be present where the changing thing is,
so that it depends always upon a change of place prior to it, and it is
argued in Book VIII that change of place is the primary kind of motion in
�36
every sense in which anything can be primary. The analysis goes one
more step, to the primary motion within the primary kind, which is
circular rotation. This is the most continuous of motions, so much so that it
alone can be considered a simply unchanging motion.
Though the definition of motion in Book III applies to all motions, its
application is most straightforward in the case of those motions most
opposed to the primary kind, those that involve the greatest amount of
change. Birth, development, and growth obviously unfold out of potencies
that are present beforehand, and these changes point most directly to the
inner natures of things that operate as formal, final, and material causes.
But at the opposite extreme of the spectrum of change there is changeless
circular motion. Because it moves without changing, it can be in contact
with a completely unvarying cause. The last step of the inquiry in the
Physics is the uncovering of a motionless first mover, acting on the cosmos
at its outermost sphere. It is a source of local motion that not only holds
the cosmos together, but contributes to the conditions of life by descending
through the lower spheres, including that of sun, to maintain the stable
alternation of the seasons. Nature is thus seen as twofold, originating in
sources of two kinds, the inner natures of living things and the cause
holding together the cosmos as the outer condition of iife. This is reflected
in a bi-polar relation of motion and change, in which the ascending scale of
motions· (leading to the first external mover), is also the descending scale
of changes (starting from the coming-into-being of new beings). The twodirectionality of the scale is all-important. Aristotle does not reduce
change to change of place, but traces it back, along one line of causes. But
the primacy of local motion in the cosmos does not abolish the primacy of
the opposite kind of change, spilling over out of potency, that guarantees
�37
that even changes of place will be wholes, not vulnerable to the attacks of
Zeno. The Physics has a double conclusion, displaying the continuity rooted
in potency as present in the limit of mere change of place, as a final and
deepest refutation of Zeno, which becomes one of the last steps in the
argument that uncovers the motionless cause of motion.
Acknowledgements
The interpretation presented here has been stewing for almost thirty
years, since my first college teacher, Robert Bart, opened my eyes to
Aristotle's definition of motion in particular, and to the whole project of
looking beneath and behind the presuppositions of modern science. Jacob
Klein's "Introduction to Aristotle" is printed here as an appendix to help
those who might wish to read further in Aristotle's writings; it was my
first guide on that journey. Klein had heard Martin Heidegger lecture on
Aristotle in the 1930s. This translation owes much to Heidegger's example
of the possibility of reading Aristotle directly, not through the language of
either the Latin tradition or the science of recent centuries. Heidegger
suffers in translation almost as much as Aristotle does, but a good English
version of his lectures on Book II, Chapter 1 of the Physics is cited earlier
in this introduction. He is too ready to see form
as presence-at-hand,
uninvolved in the joining of things and emptying of one thing into another,
and he is much too ready to talk about "the Greek idea of (whatever),"
when discussing an insight that may have been achieved by only one or
two thinkers, but as an antidote to the deadening effects of most
commentary on Aristotle he is hard to beat.
This translation was a gleam in my eye for about fifteen years, until it
was made possible by the generosity of St. John's College, the National
�38
Endowment for the Humanities, the Beneficial Corporation, and the Hodson
Trust. Students and colleagues at St. john's have read drafts of it in classes
and study groups. I am grateful for their conversation, and above all for
encouragement given to me in 'this work, shortly before his death, by J.
Winfree Smith. Whatever faults this translation may have, it had the
merit of giving delight to that good man.
The marginal page numbers, with their a and b divisions, are from the
standard two-column Bekker edition. The line numbers between them
match up with the lines of the Oxford Classical Text. Ross's text as given
there is followed with a few departures into his notes of variant readings;
in the first paragraph of V, 3, for example, Ross has needlessly scrambled
the text, and the translation follows the manuscripts in everything but the
placement of one sentence. The old Oxford translation by Hardie and Gaye,
outside of Aristotle's central vocabulary, was an invaluable aid to the
meaning of many words and phrases, and Ross's commentary was the
source of a number of references. Ordinary parentheses in the text contain
Aristotle's own parenthetical remarks; square brackets are used
occasionally for my own insertions, when these go beyond repeating an
antecedent of a pronoun. In one instance (at the end of IV, 8), curly
brackets are used around a passage that is not in th·e early manuscripts
but appears in some late sources. The text is interspersed with running
commentary, and preceded by an extensive glossary, intended in part as a
supplement to this introduction.
This translation is not intended to stand in place of Aristotle's inquiry in
pursuit of nature, but to draw you closer to it. If what you find in the
translation makes you want to go further, you should consider reading
Aristotle's own Greek. His grammar is elementary, and · his style is so
�39
repetitious that it doesn't take long to catch on to; the only difficulty in
reading him is the concentration required to keep his pronouns straight.
But if that route does not appeal to you, it is still possible to join with
Aristotle just by doing your own thinking about the questions he raises, in
the light of the broadened and deepened array of possibilities he leads us
to see.
Annapolis, Maryland
May, 1993
�
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Introduction: Philosophic Writing
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1983-08-06
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Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 6, 1983 by Joe Sachs s part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Sachs is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk is a draft of his introduction to his translation of Aristotle's <em>Metaphysics</em>. His talk compares and contrasts the writings of Plato and Aristotle and in particular the differences and similarities between the Platonic Dialogues and Aristotle's corpus.
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lec Sachs 1983-08-06
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text
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Philosophy
Aristotle
Plato
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Sachs, Joe, 1946-
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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Santa Fe, NM
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus.
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A community of learning... in a land of Cartesians?
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Transcript of a lecture given on August 30, 2002 by David Levine as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Levine, David Lawrence
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2002-08-30
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text
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pdf
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Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859.
Descartes, René, 1596-1650.
Plato
United States -- Intellectual life
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English
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24000652
Friday night lecture
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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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CD
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00:56:51
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Seeing the forms
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Audio recording of a lecture given on October 31, 2003 by Peter Pesic as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Pesic, Peter
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2003-10-31
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sound
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mp3
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Plato
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English
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20011366
Friday night lecture
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Text
GOING FOR GOLD
Linda Wiener
St. John’s College
Santa Fe, NM 87505
The 1966 film, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, is the first of Sergio Leone’s great
Spaghetti Westerns, made in Spain, with Italian actors and American stars, this is the film that
made Clint Eastwood a star. According to Brent Kliewer of the College of Santa Fe, it is the
most recognizable film music score in history and the success of the film turned Italy’s film
industry into a spaghetti western industry for the next decade. Briefly, it is the story of three men
and their search for $200,000 in gold that belongs to none of them.
I’ve come to believe that a major focus of this film is the exploration of some of the
questions and motifs raised in Plato’s great dialogue, The Republic. Today, I want to explore
some of the parallels between these two works, and reflect on Sergio Leone’s and Plato’s views.
Plato’s Republic is an extended conversation about Justice. In Book I, this question is
asked by Socrates: “Can a gang of robbers or thieves…that set out for some unjust purpose in
common, achieve their object if they deal unjustly with each other?” Obviously, this is one of the
questions of the movie as well. This part of the conversation concludes: “They could not keep
their hands off each other if absolutely unjust, it is clear that some justice was in them and by this
justice they accomplished as much as they did.”
We are also told a few other things about justice in Book I. “Justice gives friendship and
a single mind” while “the work of injustice…is to implant hatred.” The analogy between justice
and gold is also raised in this first book. We are told that the search for justice is something more
valuable than even gold.
What and where is this justice? In Book 4, the narrator, Socrates, and his interlocutors are
looking for justice in the city and decide that maybe if they look for justice in one man, then by
analogy, they can find in in the city. The soul of man is determined to be in three parts: the
largest part are the desires (epithumos), for sex, food, alcohol, money, and luxuries. This part is
associated with the merchant class. Next is the spirited part, or fighting spirit (thumos),
associated with the military or guardians. This part is concerned with victory, glory, and honor.
The highest part is reason (nous), which is concerned with truth. Reason’s job is to guide and
order the other two parts and is associated with the wise rulers; the philosopher kings.
The three men of the title correspond to the three parts of Plato’s soul. Let’s meet them.
We are first introduced to The Ugly, played by Eli Wallach, when 3 bounty hunters, guns
blazing, burst into the place where he is eating, CLIP: BURSTING OUT The word in Greek is
aisxros, which means ugly or base. His name in the movie is Tuco, Greek for luck or chance, and
indeed he does seem to act by whim and according to the desire of the moment. This first view of
him with a turkey leg in one hand and a gun in the other tells us a lot.
Next we are introduced to The Bad, played by Lee Van Cleef, and nicknamed Angel
Eyes in a long sequence in which he tracks down the name of a man, Bill Carson, and learns that
he has a lot of gold. He kills a lot of innocent people, and also his not very nice or innocent boss.
CLIP: KILLING BOSS He is a killer, not by necessity or in the heat of the moment; he kills
with pleasure. Bad in Greek is kakon, which also means evil.
Our introduction to The Good, played by Clint Eastwood and nicknamed Blondie, is even
more protracted. We first see him killing three bounty hunter war out for the $2,000 reward for
1
�turning in Tuco. He then brings him in and collects the reward. Next we see him here: CLIP:
HANGING Notice the long list of crimes of desire for which Tuco is condemned. Turnso out
they have an interesting scam going and an interesting relationship with each other. It is worth
noting that the very title of the film THE Good, THE Bad, and THE Ugly has strong Platonic
resonances.
The foiled hanging is followed by an important scene. CLIP: DIVIDE MONEY Here,
one of the main dicta of the proper relationship between the parts of the soul is violated. It is
important to Plato that the desires take orders from the reason, and not the other way around and
also that each part get its proper share. Here, the desires want more than their share.
The next time they do their scam, The Good almost misses his shot and then splits their
partnership: CLIP: LEFT IN DESERT Kalos means good or beautiful in Greek. How is this
Good? I asked myself this and realized that Plato had the answer and that this film was about his
answer. The answer I got from Plato was this: The epithumos, or desires, really always has a
rope around its neck. The headlong rush of the desires toward their goal mean they often lead to
the noose and even more, need a noose around the neck in order to be controlled at all. The Good
is doing good here, though it may not seem so. But, really how could an outlaw and a killer be
Good (capital G)? That is a question I want to defer until later. The Good, as reason, does
contrast considerably with The Ugly. He is consistently soft spoken and dispassionate compared
with the rambunctious enthusiasms and anger of Tuco. He is also, like Plato’s Good, rather
abstract in that he has no real name and no family or history that we hear of.
Meanwhile, in his own brutal way, Angel Eyes tracks Carson and Tuco tracks Blondie.
When Tuco tries to switch roles by hanging The Good, it doesn’t work. Then Tuco tries to get
revenge by forcing The Good to walk in the desert without water. It is here that things really get
rolling.
At the fatal moment when Tuco is about to shoot Blondie, a runaway coach comes by. It
is here we meet the man The Bad was seeking at the beginning, the one who knows where the
gold is buried, Bill Carson. Carson tells Tuco the name of the graveyard, but when Carson sends
Tuco to get some water, it is Blondie who is told the name on the grave. Carson dies, and
suddenly: CLIP: DON’T DIE We can see they need each other because neither has enough
information to get the gold alone.
Gold, in the Republic is constantly used as the material metaphor for The Good, which is
the object of philosophical desire. Another symbol is the sun, by the bright light of which truth is
seen. It is an almost constant presence in this movie. Leone suggest that it may be these outlaws,
outside of the city, who have more understanding of things as they really are and who can find
the gold. The caves where people are deluded by shadows and showmen in this movie are The
Church, the saloon, family homes, and military barracks.
The Church is a presence. Tuco is very superstitious and crosses himself when he sees a
dead body or kills someone. However, though the monks in the movie are kind and care for the
wounded and sick, they are not necessarily closer to truth. Here we see Tuco with his brother:
CLIP: MONASTERY.
The civil war has been a constant presence in the movie, leaving bombed out towns and
wounded soldiers in its wake. Socrates, in Book IV tells about the important role the guardians
play in the city. But, he says, “if the guardians are no good they ruin the whole city…and all are
unhappy.” Now we move into the military world as our two heroes are captured: CLIP: GREY
TO BLUE. We see that there is not a good and bad side in the war, all warriors are alike.
2
�We now meet The Bad again as a sergeant in the Union army; he is shown to be a brutal
and dishonest officer. He is alerted to our two heroes because Tuco has taken the name of
Carson. He has Tuco tortured until he gives the name of the cemetery in a scene too brutal for me
to want to show. However, it is important.
Plato knows that the military man is dangerous unless he has the right education and is
under the control of reason. Otherwise, as seen here, “he teams up with the desires” and turns
brutal and savage. Tuco is sent off to die and The Bad teams up with Blondie to go for the gold.
He does not torture him, and here, the spirited part shows himself, at least outwardly,
considerably more civilized in the presence of the reasoning part.
Tuco escapes and they all end up in yet another bombed out town. When Blondie hears
Tuco’s gun he knows he is there and goes to rejoin him. The Good, who had formerly deserted
The Ugly as not worthy, now goes to seek him, showing that he knows that he cannot, in fact, do
without him. Together they shoot down The Bad’s henchmen (though he escapes) and head off
together for the cemetery. They are captured again and taken to the Captain: CLIP: FIGHTING
SPIRIT. There seems to be no intrinsic fighting spirit in these men.
Here. They really see the stupidity and futility of the war of a whole people deluded by
shadows; the best of them, like the captain, can only escape through drink. Blondie remarks “I’ve
never seen so many men wasted so badly.” The supposed evil of these outlaws pales in
comparison with the institutional violence wrought by the civil war. The gold is on the other side
of the bridge over which the armies are fighting, so they blow up the bridge to get the armies to
leave and incidentally save many men. They head again for the cemetery.
Plato tells us in Book VI that the “inborn nature of those beautiful and good is
gentleness.” CLIP: DYING SOLDIER. Even when they are so close to the gold, The Good still
spares some time to comfort a dying young soldier, sharing his cigar (a symbol of friendship in
this film) and covering him with his coat. The goodness of The Good has become more apparent
to me by this time. I think The Good has learned a few things as well, symbolized (more on this
in a bit) by the changing of his duster for the poncho.
If we saw the real value of The Good in the previous scene, we see the real value of The
Ugly here: CLIP: LOOKING FOR GRAVE. Plato speaks of the need for strong desires in the
one who will become a great philosopher; we can’t imagine The Good performing this
passionate search for the grave. In fact, reason must be dragged by the desires to begin his
philosophical search at all.
The name on the grave is Arch Stanton which is Greek. Archos, first or to begin; Stanton,
a neuter participle meaning a thing which stands. The whole name means something like the first
foundation or first thing to stand on. I’m not sure what to make of this yet.
The Bad shows up, and though we have seen the three main characters in all
combinations of two in the film, this is the first time all three are together. Here we see The
Good take control of the group and demand they earn the gold which is not, it turns out, in Arch
Stanton’s grave at all. The climactic scene take place on the fields of the dead, just as Plato’s
Republic ends in the land of the dead, where souls have to choose what their subsequent life will
be. In the Platonic myth, they can choose well or badly based on their ability to think about their
past and know what is best. This is a similar moment of truth. CLIP: SHOOT OUT.
The death of Bad shows that, for Leone, we ultimately cannot live with or train the
fighting spirit as represented by The Bad. It must be eliminated. This is a significant difference
from Plato, who places high hopes in the guardian class. Tuco digs and finds gold, in the
adjoining grave, with no name on it. Just like The Good, the Gold does not belong to anyone in
3
�particular, but is there for those who search and persevere and dig. But also, Sergio Leone
suggests that the search is long and arduous.
The whole hanging motif is repeated, Blondie divides the gold in half “just like old
times.” Before we end let us go back to the question in Book I of The Republic. Can unjust men
achieve a common goal? The answer seems to be yes, but only when the group or the parts of the
soul are well ordered and under the control of reason. However, the different parts must
appreciate what they can and cannot do; The Good needs The Ugly as much as the other way
around. It turns out that Tuco was in the end worth more than $3,000. And, at least in Leone’s
view, the fighting spirit has turned into mere savageness, a destructive force for society and one
who wants all the gold for himself alone. He must be destroyed for others to live.
CLIP: SHOOTING DOWN. They split at the end, as they have split up before.
The Ugly is still his old self. But, the last scene causes me to revisit some of the earlier
conclusions. The Good seems to have learned some valuable lessons and effected a
transformation. Notice that he rides off on Tuco’s dark horse and notice also that he is wearing
the poncho he obtained from the dying young soldier. I believe this means that he rides off as a
whole human being, with all three parts of his soul. The dark horse represents the desires (as in
the chariot metaphor in The Phaedrus) and the poncho from the young soldier represents the
fighting spirit in a more innocent, uncorrupted state. We cannot live with the fighting spirit in the
form of the institutionalized violence and savagery represented by The Bad, but we cannot
simply do without such an essential part of our soul, either. The Good rides away with $100,000.
However, the benefits to him are far more than just Gold; they are a full and well-ordered soul of
a philosopher.
Remark of one of the audience members: the film shows that the life of the mind, as represented
here by Clint Eastwood, is THE coolest thing that there is in the world.
4
�BOOKMARKS
Name
Chapter
Start
Finish
Bursting Out
3
5:39
5:48
Killing Boss
6
16:36
17:27
Hanging
9
21:53
22:58
Divide Money
9
23:39
24:12
Leave in Desert
11
28:11
29:13
Don’t Die
24
1:02:09
1:02:46
Monastery
27
1:13:56
1:14:51
Blue or Grey
29
1:17:48
1:18:37
Fighting Spirit
47
1:59:10
2:00:16
Dying Soldier
55
2:17:34
2:19:17
Look for Grave
57
2:22:48
2:23:24
Shoot Out
60
2:29:21
2:32:22
Shooting Down
63
2:39:10
2:40:45
5
�
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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paper
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5 pages
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Going for gold : Sergio Leone reads Plato in The good, the bad, and the ugly
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on July 7, 2004 by Linda Wiener as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Wiener, Linda, 1957-
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2004-07-07
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text
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pdf
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Plato
Leone, Sergio, 1929-1989.
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English
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24002968
Graduate Institute
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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13 pages
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Plato's Sicilian expeditions
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Transcript of a lecture given on July 21, 2004 by Peter Pesic as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
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Pesic, Peter
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2004-07-21
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Plato
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English
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24003341
Graduate Institute
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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19 pages
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Seeing the forms
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on October 31, 2003 by Peter Pesic as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Pesic, Peter
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2003-10-31
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text
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pdf
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Plato -- Contributions in theory of knowledge
Plato
Perception (Philosophy)
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English
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24000788
Friday night lecture
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St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
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St. John's College Meem Library
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An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus.
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paper
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23 pages
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The Eleatic stranger and Parmenides in Plato's Sophist
Description
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Transcript of a lecture given on January 28, 2004 by David Bolotin as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Bolotin, David, 1944-
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2004-01-28
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text
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pdf
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Plato. Sophist.
Plato
Eleatics
Philosophy, Ancient
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English
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24000881
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