Aristotelian Philosophy

Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre

Kelvin Knight

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745619774, 9780745619767
• eBook ISBN: 9780745638218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Aristotle is the most influential philosopher of practice, and Knight's new book explores the continuing importance of Aristotelian philosophy. First, it examines the theoretical bases of what Aristotle said about ethical, political and productive activity. It then traces ideas of practice through such figures as St Paul, Luther, Hegel, Heidegger and recent Aristotelian philosophers, and evaluates Alasdair MacIntyre's contribution. Knight argues that, whereas Aristotle's own thought legitimated oppression, MacIntyre's revision of Aristotelianism separates ethical excellence from social elitism and justifies resistance.

With MacIntyre, Aristotelianism becomes revolutionary. MacIntyre's case for the Thomistic Aristotelian tradition originates in his attempt to elaborate a Marxist ethics informed by analytic philosophy. He analyses social practices in teleological terms, opposing them to capitalist institutions and arguing for the cooperative defence of our moral agency. In condensing these ideas, Knight advances a theoretical argument for the reformation of Aristotelianism and an ethical argument for social change.

1

Aristotle’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy

To begin the history of an Aristotelian tradition with Aristotle is not to diminish the importance of such predecessors as Socrates or Plato, nor even of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras or Democritus. Aristotle’s love of wisdom was inspired by theirs, and it was in critical engagement with them and others that he based many of his arguments. Therefore his influence upon Stoics and neo-Platonists, and upon us, is also often theirs. Nonetheless, in historical hindsight it is clear that Greek and classical philosophy reached its culmination in his work.

Aristotle is now widely regarded as the first philosopher who dealt with both theoretical and practical philosophy whilst differentiating incisively between them. On this view, theoria concerns that which is universal and cannot be otherwise, whereas praxis concerns particularities that are subject to human choice and change. Theoretical wisdom is about truth whilst practical wisdom is about action, and therefore, whereas his teacher, Plato, would have had theorists rule, Aristotle tells us that theory is one thing and practice quite another. There is much that is valid in this view. However, in this chapter I shall sketch some aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy in another way, suggesting that the distinction between his theoretical and practical philosophies can be overdrawn. There is continuing merit in the more traditional interpretation, according to which what Aristotle writes of practice should be understood in the light of what he writes of theology, of ontology and of nature. That said, my representation of Aristotle’s philosophy will be less sanguine than its portrayal by tradition.

Aristotle as Innovator

Aristotle inherited Plato’s robust philosophical realism (Gerson 2005). Like Parmenides and Socrates, Plato thought that what is most truly real, what most really is, is that which is unchanging. He developed this idea of absolute being into his famous doctrine of atemporal, universal and immaterial forms. Aristotle tells us that Plato believed these forms to be entirely separate from our world of sensuous particulars. Aristotle agrees that God (theos) and such celestial entities as the Sun enjoy a kind of eternal and self-sufficient (autarkes) being and activity (energeia) which we cannot share but only contemplate. Crucially, he also agrees in regarding the best life for human beings as that of theoria, the activity of such contemplation.

Aristotle explicitly disagrees with Plato when he brings the forms down to Earth and recasts them as natural kinds, such as plant and animal species. Nonetheless, even here he remains significantly Platonic. Individual animals may come and go, but, he insists, the species of which they are particular instances are themselves universal and eternal forms. Although revising Plato, in retaining a robust account of forms Aristotle may be understood as siding with him against Heraclitus’ perspectivism, Empedocles’ evolutionism and Democritus’ atomistic materialism. For Aristotle, atemporal and universal forms inform – genetically determinate the nature (physis) and temporal development of – individual animals. A species is real and conceptually separate from the particular individuals in which it is instantiated, but, he emphasizes, it has no substantial existence apart from those material individuals. Therefore, he reverses Plato’s order of priority in describing the form of a species as only a ‘secondary being’ and the reality of a substantial individual (a ‘this’), combining form with matter, as ‘primary being’ (Categories 2a11–14). Such primary, individual subjects are the basic entities of which such insubstantial things as qualities and changes (metabolai) may be predicated. That the world of such sensuous particulars is one of change does not entail that it is one of Heraclitean flux or of mere chance. As forms imbue nature with an elemental order, much of changing reality can be analysed, explained and specified in terms of determinate processes of coming-into-being (genesis), of contingent movements (kineseis) of substantive beings, and of different species’ characteristic activities (energeiai).

Energeia is a word of Aristotle’s own coinage. Literally, it means being in (en-) work (ergon) or at work or, more simply, working. When not translated as ‘activity’ it is usually rendered ‘functioning’. It is something predicated of an individual being, or of a specific kind of being. We could understand it as denoting the condition of being energetic, so long as we understand this energy as expended in the performance of a specific activity; that is, in the activity, work or function characteristic of the way of life (bios) of some species, or characteristic of the craft of some kind of worker, or even characteristic of some kind of tool. For Aristotle, all beings are to be understood in terms of the activity characteristic of their kind, but kinds of being differ in the degree of self-sufficiency of their specific activities. Whereas the constant activity of the Sun requires nothing external for its sustenance, plants and animals require light and nutrition if they are to live and reproduce, artisans additionally require external direction of their activities, and tools require artisans for their very movement.

Developing an idea from Plato and Anaxagoras, Aristotle argues that the most self-sufficient activity is that of the divine, or God, because this comprises self-activating intelligence (nous) thinking of itself. God’s activity is performed for its own sake and is therefore complete (teleios) and good (agathon) in itself. As such, Aristotle hypothesizes, it is an object of attraction to every other intelligent being in the cosmos, including human beings. God is, in this sense, the cosmos’s prime mover.

We may note here that energeia should not be understood as ‘functioning’, at least if description of something as functioning is taken to imply that it is essentially a means to some further end. Aristotle’s God has no further end. Nor is it (it is not the personal God of Judaic or Christian theism) the world’s creator or originating cause. Aristotle’s theological postulate is that God causes movement as an object of attraction, through its perfect activity, to other beings. Conversely, the postulate of an utterly complete being does not imply that it is a final end in relation to which the energeia of every other being should be understood as a means. God’s simple activity of pure thinking (noesis) is utterly self-sufficient, and this self-sufficiency is what comprises its perfection. It is self-causing and has no need or use for anything external to it. Aristotle therefore proposes no great theocentric chain of beings or of ends and means. Nor does he propose any such anthropocentric chain (Johnson 2005). Aristotle theorizes neither the cosmos nor sublunary nature as a providential or interdependently functioning system.

What Aristotle does propose is that each kind of being has its own characteristic kind of activity, engagement in which constitutes the good for that kind of being. If other beings imitate God in their own energeiai, then what those other beings and their activities imitate is something self-sufficient and complete. In order to get this central point across, he resorts to a second terminological and conceptual innovation. This second coinage is entelecheia. Rather as he neologizes energeia from ergon, so he invents entelecheia from telos. Telos is commonly translated as ‘end’, but ‘completion’ would often be more accurate. A being’s entelecheia is its state of completion, its ‘actuality’ in the standard translation. Just as God is perfectly constant energeia, so too is God perfect entelecheia. In contrast, the actuality of a temporal being is the fulfilment of its natural potential. Its entelecheia is its complete or final good. These two terms – energeia and entelecheia, or activity and actuality – are often interchangeable, as energeia denotes the activity characteristic of a form of being and entelecheia denotes the fully developed or completed being of some form of actor. For Aristotle, what is most essential to being – including human being – is not its material constitution but its working, not what a particular being is made of but what it does.

Aristotle follows philosophical tradition in affirming that the best activity of which human beings are capable is contemplation of that which constantly is. In engaging in such activity, individuals are fulfilling their highest potential, so that theoria is good in itself and a means to no further end. This is because it is in contemplating the divine that humans come the closest of which they are capable to participating in divinity. Not only do they contemplate what is immutable, but their contemplative activity is in a sense itself atemporal. It is at once being done and done, completed, and it is not a means to any further, future end.

Contemplating is not the only human energeia that allows of entelecheia. An activity comparable to noesis is aisthesis or perception or, especially, seeing. The activity of seeing, like that of contemplating, cannot be divided into temporal parts and cannot be done more quickly or slowly. However, Aristotle has an altogether less elevated understanding of seeing than of contemplating, and this for at least four reasons: seeing gives us knowledge of external beings only as changing individuals and not as unchanging forms; it is not an energeia of the human psyche (psyche) or of the human being as a whole but of a bodily part, the eye; seeing is an activity that is not unique to humankind but is shared with other animals; and it is an activity that is not only an end in itself but also a means to other ends, as when an animal sees food to eat or another individual with which to mate and reproduce. Reproduction of its form is the closest that a plant or a non-human animal can get to immortality and divinity. Reproduction is a second way in which humans can approximate to divinity but an inferior way to contemplation, both because it is shared with lower beings and because it is for the sake of the child and not just of the actor. Aristotle identifies human completion with the activity of theoria most of all because it is the activity that is most unproductive or ‘useless’ (Nightingale 2004). If it were a means to some further end it could not be our telos.

Change

A particular being has the potential to engage in the energeia characteristic of its kind and, in so doing, to actualize its good. Another potential, common to all terrestrial beings, is that to undergo or undertake temporal and contingent changes. All animals have a potential for locomotion, or change of location, but, although seeing is an activity, walking is not. Walking is a kinesis rather than an energeia because it involves what we might call an ordered succession of temporal stages (rather than, as is often said, events) with a beginning and a terminus, and more particularly because it is done in order to reach some destination or some other, further goal, such as health. Deliberating is another temporal process, undertaken in order to reach some conclusion.

The processes of a being’s genesis and of its later decline and death are not kineseis, Aristotle occasionally stipulates (especially at Physics V: 1), because a kinesis is predicated of a continuing being. Nonetheless, geneseis are changes as distinct from activities. They are processes of coming-into-being, not workings or completions characteristic of some kind of being. Aristotle denies that beings can come to be from nothing, either materially or formally. The form of individual animals exists before they do, because species are eternal, and each animal inherits its form from its parents (to be more exact, Aristotle proposes that it inherits its matter from its mother and its form through its father).

Aristotle argues that an analogous process of coming-into-being occurs in manufacture, and says that all art (techne) involves genesis (e.g. Nicomachean Ethics (NE) 1140a11, Generation of Animals 734b21–735a4). The building of a house resembles the conception, gestation and birth of a horse in that it is a temporal process with a beginning and an end. The coming-to-be of each, when happening, has not yet happened, and when it has happened is no longer still happening. Only when the house is built or the foal born is the process (not the being) teleios, complete or at an end. Its completion is the initial formation of the foal or the house.

It may be tempting to assume that Aristotle’s term telos here confuses two different ideas of an end: first, that of a temporal terminus, as in the ending of a process of walking, building or gestation; secondly, that of the intentional aim or goal of the actors who bring a house or foal into being. But there is no such confusion. Aristotle does not here intend telos to denote either the termination of a process or the intention of an actor. If a house remains half built or a mare miscarries, then the process has terminated but nothing is completed. Nor does Aristotle display the confusion often attributed to his refrain that ‘art imitates nature’ of fallaciously imputing purposiveness or intentional agency to nature. Although it is the case that intentionality can be attributed to human builders in a way that it cannot to equine parents, Aristotle regards conscious purposiveness as inessential even to manufacture. If the house is built or the foal born, then what is completed is not any intention of the producer but a process of coming-into-being. Conversely, if any process occurs by chance rather than intention, then it may be completed just the same. Genesis is not an energeia that occurs in an actor, but a metabole that occurs in a product.

For Aristotle, what we call purposiveness introduces contingencies into artificial processes, which diminish the necessity that is fully present in their natural analogues, and this is a major reason that he proposes it to be art that imitates nature and not vice versa. However, this is not the most important disanalogy between art and nature. With regard to generation, there is an absolute difference between the two in that the products of art have a different form from the producer, whereas in nature they are the same; a foal and its parents are beings of the same kind, but a house and its human builder are not. Artefacts, unlike animals, have no internal source of growth, completion or reproduction (or, rather, had no such source in any of the artefacts of Aristotle’s time). An artificial form exists only as a paradigm (paradeigma) in extant and substantial artefacts and as an account (logos) in both the shared craft knowledge and the individual psyches of artisans, who then apply it to inform raw material. What changes in building is not the being of the builder but that of, for example, the wood which is hewn from a tree to make beams. To repeat, production (poiesis) occurs not in the producers or their actions but in that which those actions bring about. It is with this theoretical reason that Aristotle justifies his insistence that poiesis is a process that occurs for the sake not of the producer but of the product.

The explanatory capacity of Aristotle’s concept of telos is most famously articulated in his juxtaposition of four types of ‘cause’ (aition) of beings, found most fully in the Physics (II: 3) and Metaphysics (Delta: 2). The first type of cause that he mentions is that from which something is made, and his examples – the bronze of a statue, the silver of a bowl – are often taken to indicate how important is reflection upon material production to his focal idea of causation. The second type of cause is the form or paradigm of something, although he does not here (where he is distinguishing between that matter and form which together compose substantial beings) refer to any such simple instance as a statue, bowl or house. The third type is, in translation, variously called the generative, productive, efficient, moving, motive, prior, agent or, even, acting cause, and Aristotle himself describes it as the source (arche) of change (and conversely of rest), having just said that ‘all causes are sources’ (Metaphysics 1013a16). It may return our attention to processes of production and of what I have already called the reproduction of form; he here cites a father as the cause of a child. Crucially, this cause, as that from which change occurs, is some being external to and separate from that which is produced or otherwise changed, and in this natural generation is again analogous to artificial. This is therefore an entirely different type of cause than the fourth type, a thing’s telos, which is that for the sake of which something undergoes change.

A thing’s telos is its hou heneka, its that-for-the-sake-of-which, and the common translation of telos as ‘final cause’ is understandable in the context of Aristotle’s general account of causation. He argues that what comes first in nature or reason is the form for the sake of which something happens, even though he acknowledges that it is not what comes first temporally. As we have seen, what comes first temporally he describes not (as in most modern accounts of causation, such as that of Donald ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Aristotle’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy
• 2 Christian Practice and Medieval Philosophy
• 3 Aristotle in Germany
• 4 A Revolutionary Aristotelianism
• Conclusion
• References
• Index