Posted on: October 20th, 2016 Aristotle from 30K ft. (for comps)

I’m thankful to have a smart and virtuous colleague with whom to study for comps (one “hurdle” in my PhD program in philosophy), which as of right now I am planning to take in March of 2017.

My colleague asked me to try to articulate a broad summary of Aristotle, sort of from “the 30,000 foot view.” Here’s my stab at this challenge:

For Aristotle all of reality is in the process of becoming, except that he would not quite put it that way, in those Platonic terms. “Process,” yes, but “becoming,” no.

Rather, from the point of departure supplied by Parmenides, he’d say that all reality is in the process of moving or developing (out of potency) into full act, full energeia.

This is true in all three disciplines he adumbrates: his natural philosophy, his metaphysical / theological philosophy, and his ethical philosophy. This cosmic process culminates in the work of the Unmoved Mover, who “moves” the rest of the cosmos by final causality, and it forms the basis for his ethico-politics in that the latter provides the conditions of possibility for the highest human activity/energeia: contemplation of the divine.
There is one gaping exception to this “rule” / pattern, however: the historical realm. For Aristotle, that is, there is zero development historically, absolutely no growth or progress toward some kind of telos in historical terms, for the cosmos as a whole or indeed for mankind within it. It’s not that he entertains this idea and then rejects it by arguing against it. Rather, it seems never to have occurred to him. For him, time is a mere accident of history (Physics IV), animals and human beings die and materially decay, and all of this has continued and will continue from and to infinity.

It is as if the Unmoved Mover is forever holding a carrot above the cosmos, and the cosmos is forever striving to reach the goal, but always already in the end failing, falling short. (The most compelling candidate for “success” in this striving would be that realm above the moon, that of the celestial bodies, perhaps the most outer sphere of them, with their quasi-unchanging and perfect circular motion.)

In the lower sphere, the realm of “nature” where things can be rationally penetrated and articulated only “on the whole and for the most part,” the closest approximation of the perfection / simplicity of the UM is the philosopher in contemplation, an activity (actus / energeia) uniquely related to eudaimonia, which he describes in glowing, metaphysical, divine terms at the very end of the Ethics.

 

 

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