Aristotle: Philosophy, Politics and Legacy in Western Thought

Aristotle: The crisis initiated by Greek democracy, which intensified with Plato, continued into the time of Aristotle. Alexander, a disciple of Aristotle, intended the creation of a Great Empire that extended Greek culture beyond the narrow limits of Greece. This adventure, however, was linked to the conquest of the Empire by Greece and Rome. Thereafter, changes occurred that profoundly transformed the understanding of politics.

Aristotle proposed a social philosophy and sought to address the crisis of his culture and give it a philosophical response. Unlike Plato, who dreamed of an ideal city, he proposed a flexible political system that combined democratic and aristocratic elements, although it kept the priority of the city over the individual. Aristotle was born in Macedonia, within a family of physicians. At the age of eighteen he moved to Athens, where he entered the Academy of Plato. After Plato's death, he moved to Asia Minor and later to the court of Philip of Macedonia, where he was responsible for the education of his son Alexander.

He then founded his own school, the Lyceum, where he developed an immense task across all fields of knowledge. After the death of Alexander and the rise of anti-Macedonian sentiment, he went into exile in Chalcis, where he died.

Works

His works include writings on logic, on nature and science (physics, biology, astronomy), on politics, and on rhetoric and poetics, as well as the Metaphysics and the Nicomachean Ethics.

Metaphysics and Critique of Plato

Aristotle criticized Plato's theory of Forms. For Aristotle, the Forms are not separate essences that exist beyond sensible things. Such a duplication of the world, he argued, creates many difficulties and does not explain the essence of things. Instead, he held that the essence of things must be found within them, and that definitions should capture the forms of individual objects.

Nature, Origin and Becoming

Aristotle warned against the false etymological interpretation of how things develop. He distinguished between the seed as the source of growth, the movement of natural change, the matter that is primitive (arche), and the essence of natural things. Every being that has in itself the principle of movement has its own nature.

Potentiality and Actuality

To explain change, Aristotle distinguished between substantial change (when a being comes into existence or ceases to exist) and accidental change, which affects only a quality of a thing. Accidental change involves three elements: the subject, the form and the privation. Accidental change may be quantitative (affecting quantity), qualitative (affecting the qualities of a substance) or locative (translation).

Aristotle used the concepts of potentiality and actuality to distinguish between what something is and what it may become. Potentiality is the possibility of being something; actuality is the fulfilment of that possibility. He distinguished entelechy, the fulfilment of a potentiality, from energeia, the act of carrying out an action. Movement is thus defined as the incomplete and imperfect actualization of a potentiality.

Substance and Hylomorphism

Substance is what lies beneath accidents. There are two kinds of substance: the first substance is the concrete individual, and the second substance is the universal shared by all beings of a kind. Aristotle's theory of hylomorphism holds that every natural thing is composed of matter and form. The form determines what a thing is, while the matter is the raw material capable of receiving that form. Matter alone cannot be determined; it becomes a specific thing only when it possesses a form.

The Four Causes

Aristotle identified four causes: the material cause (what something is made of), the formal cause (its structure or essence), the efficient cause (the agent that produces change) and the final cause (the purpose or end). The final cause is especially important in human action, where beings act consciously toward a purpose.

Theology and the Unmoved Mover

In his metaphysical theology, Aristotle posited a first mover, an unmoved being that causes the eternal movement of the cosmos. This first mover is the origin of all motion, while itself being moved by nothing.

Science and Logic

Aristotle's science sought to explain general principles as well as particular phenomena through rigorous reasoning based on demonstration. Some truths require no demonstration, such as the principle of identity (everything is identical to itself) and the principle of non-contradiction (one cannot affirm and deny the same thing at the same time and in the same respect).

Aristotle is considered an empiricist. He held that knowledge begins with the senses, which perceive particular qualities such as dimensions and colours. These perceptions are recorded in the imagination, and the active intellect abstracts the universal concept from them, while the passive intellect receives it. He distinguished two kinds of intellect: the passive intellect, which is tied to each individual and perishes with him, and the active intellect, which is eternal, separable and immortal.

Human Beings and Society

A living being is composed of matter and form: the body (the matter) and the soul (the form that determines the body as the kind of thing it is). Hylomorphism allows us to conceive of a living being as a composite unit of body and soul. The soul does not survive the body, since, for Aristotle, only the active intellect is eternal.

Aristotle distinguished three kinds of soul: the nutritive soul, common to all living beings, which concerns nourishment and reproduction; the sensitive soul, which involves sensation and appetite, as well as the capacity for locomotion; and the rational soul, which is the distinctly human capacity for thought and reasoning, and the highest form of life. Human activities are divided into two kinds: those of the intellect and those of the will. The will is subordinate to reason and involves deliberation, which considers the consequences of future actions, and choice, which is the decision to act.

Ethics

Aristotle held that there is an ultimate goal toward which all human actions are directed. This highest good is happiness, or eudaimonia. His ethics is therefore eudaimonistic, since it considers the ultimate aim of human life to be happiness. Happiness is not a passing pleasure but the full development of human capacities, especially the capacity for reason.

For Aristotle, the good life is primarily one of rational contemplation, but it also requires virtue. He distinguished two kinds of virtue: ethical virtues, acquired through habit and practice, which regulate the irrational part of the soul and relations between people, such as courage, temperance and justice; and dianoetic virtues, which belong to the intellect and to thought. Virtue is not innate; it is acquired through practice and requires conscious choice. Virtues lead us toward happiness, while vices lead us away from it.

Politics

Aristotle described human beings as political animals, meaning that people naturally live in society and can only achieve happiness within a community. The political character of human beings is shown in their capacity to use language to discuss what is just and unjust.

He identified three good forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy and polity. Each has a corrupt counterpart: tyranny, oligarchy and democracy in the degenerate sense of mob rule. Among the forms of government, he considered the polity, a mixed constitution combining democratic and oligarchic elements, to be the most stable and desirable.

Legacy

Aristotle is perhaps the philosopher who has most influenced Western thought. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, his works were largely lost to Western Europe. They survived through Arabic and Islamic scholars, who translated and studied them. In the thirteenth century, Latin Europe rediscovered his works, and Thomas Aquinas found in them a foundation for a Christian philosophy.

In the twentieth century, logic produced new alternatives to Aristotelian methods, yet his thought remains relevant to education, the analysis of human actions, and political and literary criticism. His ethics teaches that one should act with rationality and temperance, guided by virtue and toward happiness. His systematic approach also gives coherence to our thinking and to our knowledge.

Aristotle's realism, in which science seeks to describe reality as it is rather than to manipulate it, offers a valuable counterpoint to forms of thought that aim to shape reality to suit their own ends. In the end, his philosophy helps us approach the truth more closely and live a good life.