Aristotle was Plato’s student, just as Plato had been the student of Socrates (He’s the guy in in blue, in the middle of the picture, pointing downwards). Yet, even though he was originally a disciple of Plato (the guy on the left, pointing upwards), he ended up disagreeing with Plato on the most fundamental of philosophical issues. Not only did he split from Plato, he actually founded a rival school in 335 BC to Plato’s Academy, named The Lyceum. Aristotle is also famous for being the tutor of Alexander the Great.
Universals vs. Particulars
Whereas Plato believed that there was essentially a “split reality” (the world of universal, unchanging forms vs. this world of ever-changing and imperfect particulars), Aristotle taught that the forms are not in some other, higher, perfect dimension or world. Rather, they are found within the present, particular objects all around us. “Ultimate reality” is to be found within the particulars, not is some other world of unchanging forms. This view obviously had implications for how one views God. Aristotle described God as “thought thinking itself,” or as “the unmoved mover.” Rather than having perfection as being as “other-worldly” reality that must be imposed on this imperfect world, Aristotle argued, essentially, that the “seeds of perfection,” if you will, are to be found within this imperfect world, and are to be cultivated so they can grow to their fullness.
Therefore, whereas Plato preferred essentially a dictatorship of a philosopher-king to govern society, Aristotle preferred a democracy in which citizens could devote all their time to contemplating philosophy and virtue, and having a say in how society should be governed. One could understand why the two men had their views: Plato actually witnessed the shortcomings and destruction of the Athenian democracy, whereas Aristotle wasn’t even born yet. Instead, Aristotle witnessed the rise of King Philip the Macedonian.
Aristotle’s philosophy (as we will later see) had a tremendous impact on the later “High Catholic Age,” namely in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. For that reason, it is necessary to spend some time explaining as simply as possible some of the most significant aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy. This means delving a bit into philosophical terminology and concepts.
Plato taught that a person’s soul was a completely different entity than the material body in which it was trapped, just like the universal form of something was completely different than the ever-changing particular piece of matter that faintly reflected it. But for Aristotle, such a division between universal-form/particular-matter was wrong. For Aristotle, a person’s soul was the form of the body. Every human being is an intricate combination of universal and particular, of form and matter. This combination of form and matter is what Aristotle called the substance of the individual thing.
To put it more simply, Plato would say that you are a soul trapped in a body (hence the term “body and soul”), whereas Aristotle would say that your body is an intricate part, along with your form, of your soul/substance—perhaps a new term is needed: “body and form = soul.” For Plato, the material world of the senses consists of shadowy distortions of ultimate reality that can only mislead people who trust in their senses, whereas for Aristotle, the material world of the senses, for all its incompleteness and constant change, points us in the right direction of truly understanding ultimate reality; it provides clues to the ultimate reality of the forms that we can piece together with our logic and reason.
In any case, since Aristotle believed that the forms of things are to be found within the particular things in the material world, he believed that we can learn about morality by observing nature. By observing things in nature, we can use our logic to reason our way to understanding the universal forms, and hence our moral obligations. Such moral obligations cannot be “proven” in any scientific sense, but they can be reasoned out from observable things in nature (hence, the concept of “metaphysics”).
Actuality and Potentiality
So what Aristotle reasoned was this: just as everything is a combination of both form and matter, and since form is unchanging and matter changes, that meant that everything is a combination of what Aristotle called actuality and potentiality. Why do things change in the first place? Aristotle said the reason why things change is that within everything there is a combination of actuality and potentiality. Take a blue rubber ball, for example. (I got this example from Edward Fesser’s book, Aquinas). There are certain aspects it possesses that are essential to it being a ball: it’s solid, it’s round, it’s bouncy—those things are part of its essence of being a ball. If it were a square, for example, it wouldn’t be a ball. On the other hand, if it was red instead of blue, it would still be a ball. But in its current form, it is actually a blue, rubber ball.
Potentially though, the blue rubber ball can become something else. If someone painted it, it would become red; if someone melted it down, it would become a pile of soft goo; and if someone then reshaped it and then painted it green to look like Gumby, that blue rubber ball could potentially become a green rubber Gumby doll. Of course, once that happened, what was once potentiality (i.e. it could become Gumby) is now actuality (i.e. it now is Gumby). And what was once actuality (i.e. it was a blue rubber ball), is now no more.
Now three things need to be pointed out here. First, the blue rubber ball does not have the potential to become just anything else. Its potentiality must be “rooted in the thing’s nature as it actually exists” (Fesser 11). It doesn’t have the potential to grow a tail, start barking, and become a dog. Its potential is limited to what is already contained in its actual nature. Second, whatever change happens to that blue rubber ball, the source that initiates that change has to come from outside the ball. In other words, no potential can “actualize” itself. For that potential to become actualized, something from outside must initial that change. The ball cannot heat itself and make itself gooey, and thus actualize its potential to become gooey all on its own. That change that turns a potentiality into an actuality has to be initiated from outside the ball. Third, Aristotle held that actuality has metaphysical priority over potentiality. What that means simply is this: potentiality cannot exist on its own as pure potential, with not actuality at all (Fesser 12). As soon some potentiality comes to exist, it no long is potentiality.
By contrast, you can have actuality exist without potentiality…well, sort of! You can’t, because as long as you are a living human being, you are susceptible to change and various potentialities that are inevitably initiated from outside yourself. Your genetic code will cause you to go bald, or become near-sighted as you get older; your favorite high school teacher might be the reason you learn French. But there is one being, according to Aristotle, that is pure actuality, in whom there is found no potentiality—God. Human beings, if you will, by virtue of being “souls” comprising of both form and matter, are always in a state of becoming. By contrast, God, by virtue of being pure form, and immaterial, is pure actuality, and thus is in a constant state of actualized being. He isn’t becoming anything; He simply is.
Now, Aristotle’s concept of God certainly is not that of the Christian God. Aristotle’s described his concept of God as “Thought thinking itself.” Aristotle’s God was the fundamental ground of all being that initiated and sustained the constant change we find in this material world of particulars, but he was not “personal” in any way. Nevertheless, as we will look at later, Aristotle’s concept of God—being that he is involved with the material world as its ultimate sustainer—was nearer to the Biblical understanding of God than that of Plato’s concept of God.
Aristotle’s Four Causes
Since Aristotle believed that the ever-changing material world of particulars can provide us with clues to understanding the universal forms, he developed a method to understanding and categorizing the natural world. In effect, Aristotle is the one who really introduced the concept of the scientific method. It basically works like this: Aristotle said that you can take any particular thing in the world and, through logic and reason, categorize what that particular thing is particularly for. He called this the Four Causes. We will use our rubber ball as a way to illustrate this.
Aristotle’s first cause was what he called the Material Cause: what material is the thing made of? In the case of a rubber ball, it’s quite obvious: it is made out of rubber. You can do this with everything: a table is made out of wood; a football is made of pigskin, etc.
Aristotle’s second cause was what he called the Formal Cause: what form, structure, shape, or pattern does the thing exhibit. In the case of the rubber ball, we would say that the ball is in the form of a sphere, it is a solid, and it is bouncy. A table, on the other hand, would be flat, solid, and possible a square; a football would be oblong, bouncy to a degree…you get the idea.
After determining the material that makes up a thing, and the form/shape of a thing, the third cause is what Aristotle called the Efficient Cause: how did that thing come to be what it was (or in Aristotelian terms, what was it that actualized the potentiality of the thing). The efficient cause of the rubber ball would be the workers and machines at the Acme Rubber Ball company; the table’s efficient cause would be the factory and workers at which it was made; the football’s efficient cause would be the workers at the Wilson company.
The final, and probably most important, cause is what Aristotle called (not surprisingly) the Final Cause: what is that thing’s purpose, and what is it for? The final cause of a rubber ball is to be a play thing for a child; the table’s final cause is to be a thing on which one eats dinner; the football’s final cause is, you guessed it, to be used in football games! The final cause was no doubt the most important cause for Aristotle. For it was the purpose of a thing that ultimately defined the thing and gave it meaning. Without a final cause, without a purpose, meaning cannot exist. For Aristotle, everything in the material world had a purpose and final cause, and it is this purpose that points things in the material world to the world beyond the material world.
These four causes, Aristotle argued, provided a complete explanation of any given thing. Although Aristotle’s theories took a back seat to Plato’s for the first millennium of Christian thought, Aristotle made quite a comeback during the High Catholic Age, in no small measure thanks to Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest Catholic theologian and philosopher of all time. We will return to Aristotle, particularly his concept of a final cause, with our discussion of Aquinas and the development of Christian philosophy during the High Catholic Age. For Aquinas used Aristotle’s concept of a final cause in his philosophical arguments for the existence of God. We will then return to this concept again in our discussion of modern philosophy, for many modern philosophers deny the existence of final causes outright. But more on that later.
Equality? Not So Fast
The last thing we should note about Aristotle is that, like Plato, Aristotle did not believe all men were created equal. In fact, he was a full supporter of the institution of slavery. After all, Aristotle reasoned that if the truly enlightened men had to spend their time doing menial labor, they wouldn’t have the time to contemplate, reason, and pursue things like virtue and wisdom. Simply put, the thinkers and philosophers couldn’t be bothered with just base work! Besides, (and this is perhaps the one thing that Aristotle did agree with Plato on!), Aristotle reasoned that slaves were nothing more than ignorant, dumb beasts anyway…nothing like enlightened, free men!
And so, being men of their time, both Plato and Aristotle firmly believed (on philosophical grounds, even) that human beings were not equal, and that some were, by their very nature, simply destined to be slaves to the intelligentsia of their day. Yes, even the famed Athenian democracy was nothing more than a democracy for the intellectual elites. Slavery was still practiced, encouraged, and rationalized by the very philosophy of ancient Greece.
Hellenistic Greece (323-146 BC)
In any case, Alexander the Great’s rapid imperialistic expansion across the known world, and then his sudden death, marked the end of the Classical Greek period. Alexander had taken Greek culture and promoted it in every land he conquered, as far as India. Therefore, when he died, the entire known world was united to a certain degree through Greek culture, but it was a “sham of Greek culture.” Alexander’s empire was soon divided up into four parts, each run by essentially military dictators who were more interested in maintaining their power than they were in cultivating culture and learning.
And so, while these various “Greek-influenced” dictators eventually ran their respective “mini-empires” into the ground, philosophy became less and less concerned with questions concerning an ideal society and government (after all, such topics wouldn’t be too welcomed in a military dictatorship!), and more and more concerned with the inner life of the individual. The result of all this was an odd (but all too strangely familiar) mix within those cultures of the Hellenistic world. There were the philosophers who debated the more “heady” questions of existence; and then there were the masses who were still dedicated to (and fearful of) the many gods. In fact, virtually every city-state, known as the polis, was centered around temples. These temples weren’t built to house large congregations, but rather to actually house that particular god. So even after hundreds of years of philosophical thought stemming from the likes of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, most of the commoners still were essentially slaves to both the gods and to their respective rulers.
