Theories of Human Nature: Chapter 9 – Aristotle – Part 1
Aristotle: The Ideal of Human Fulfillment
Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was a student of Plato’s and the tutor of Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s background in biological subjects made him more of an empiricist [truth discovered primarily by the senses] as compared to the mathematician Plato’s rationalism [truth discovered primarily by reason.] Aristotle attended Plato’s academy but founded his own school, the Lyceum, later in his life. [Both schools would exist, in some cases off and on, for between 500 and almost 1000 years.]
Aristotle wrote on an amazing range of topics including: logic, metaphysics, epistemology, astronomy, physics, meteorology, biology, psychology, ethics, politics, law, and poetics. [I think we can safely say that Aristotle influenced more subjects for a longer period of time than any thinker in the history of humanity. His scientific ideas were often false, but they were the received wisdom for 2000 years. His logic is still used and his influence in multiple areas of philosophy is still felt.] For our purposes we will mainly focus on the Nicomachean Ethics, based on lecture notes taken by his students.
Metaphysical Background: Forms as Properties, and the Four Kinds of Question – Aristotle is not a classical theist like Augustine or Aquinas, but he does have a conception of an unmoved mover, a changeless cause/sustainer of the processes of the universe. Again this is not a personal god who cares about human beings or is the object of worship. [It is more like a power or energy that keeps things in motion by attracting them toward it.]
Aristotle rejects Plato’s belief in independently existing forms. There is something common to things that share a concept x, but that essence/form/pattern/structure is embedded in thing itself. We don’t need to escape from a cave, but see clearly what is in it. [Everything is a composite of form and matter. The form is the pattern or structure of a thing and the matter is what makes something an individual thing. Everything in the world is a formed matter; that is matter in a certain form. You never find matter without form---which would be like a primordial goo---and you never find form without matter---with the exception of the unmoved mover. Some forms are very primitive—a brick is basically just the shape of heated clay—while others are very complicated---like that of a human being.]
But in what sense is the essence of catness shared by all cats? Is this form a thing or a quality? Does a given form like health or goodness apply to all healthy or good things? Aristotle thought not. You can be healthy or good in different ways so he doubted that there was a unitary form of goodness. Pleasure, honor, and wisdom may all be good, but they are good in different ways hence there is no single form of goodness.
Another way of understanding his metaphysics is to consider the 4 causes, four questions we can ask about a thing in order to understand it: 1) material cause—what something is made of? 2) formal cause—what kind of thing is it? 3) efficient cause—what caused it to exist? And 4) final cause—what is its purpose or function? [This works well to understand human artifacts like statues or books, but the idea of a final cause is harder to determine for people, much less for inanimate objects. Aristotle is expressing a teleological view of reality—the idea that nature is goal-oriented. [This view has been undermined and rejected by modern science.] But Aristotle’s analytic nature laid the groundwork for the analysis prevalent in modern philosophy.]
Theory of Human Nature: The Soul as a Set of Faculties, Including Rationality – Plato was a dualist who believed that we are composed of two substances, a material body and immaterial mind. Aristotle rejects this. [No wonder his views were so much harder to reconcile with Christianity than Plato’s.] As a biologist, Aristotle recognized that living things include plants as well as human and non-human animals. [He says that plants have a vegetative structure (a way of functioning) which is primarily about taking in nutrients, reproducing, and the like. Non-human animals have this structure plus a sensitive structure which uses senses to interact with the environment and initiates desires. Human animals add to this a rational structure which makes them unique.] Each different thing then has a different structure or form. This is its formal cause in his language. Thus some things have a richer or more complex form than other things.
Thus the form of something does not exist independently; it is not an entity in itself. Rather it is the specific pattern or structure or form of a thing which defines how it exists and functions. [It is different to be structured as a rock, tree, dog, or human.] Thus for Aristotle it makes no sense to talk of a soul or mind without a body, for the essence of a person is embedded and intertwined with their matter. You can’t take it out of the body. [And to think Roman Catholic natural law theory is Aristotelian through and through.]
The only exception is that divine intellectual functioning may take place without a body. Yet it is hard to see how this could be the case. For example even if computers think without bodies their thought still depends on material components. Disembodied thought is conceptually problematic, although many Christians and Islamists who followed Aristotle welcomed the possibility. As for ordinary embodied human beings Aristotle’s major distinction is between their rational component and their emotions and desires. He also distinguished between theoretical and practical reasoning.
Aristotle also held that humans are social and political creatures who have activities common to all. He also thought that we can only reach our full development in societies. However he does not think that woman are rational creatures, and his remarks are quite disparaging toward them. Perhaps worst of all, Aristotle advocated a doctrine of natural slavery—the idea that some are naturally slaves. He thinks this is the status of non-Greek barbarians. Still we should not reject the rest of Aristotle’s thought because he was a misogynist, racist, and imperialist. [Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery heavily influenced the Catholic Spanish conquerors of the new world, many of whom used this doctrine to justify their horrific treatment of the people of the new world. For more see the disputations during that time held particularly at the University of Salamanca.]
