c. What ought to come next is the determination of the Aristotelian Idea, and here we have to say, in quite a general way, that Aristotle commences with Philosophy generally, and says, in the first place, regarding the value of Philosophy (in the second chapter of the first book of the Metaphysics), that the object of Philosophy is what is most knowable, viz. the first and original causes, that is, the rational. For through these and from these all else is known, but principles do not become known through the facts which form their groundwork (ὑποκείμενα). In this we already have the opposite to the ordinary point of view. Aristotle has further declared the chief subject of investigation, or the most essential knowledge (ἐπιστήμη ἀρχικωτάτη) to be the knowledge of end; but this is the good in each thing and, generally speaking, the best in the whole of nature. This also holds good with Plato and Socrates; yet the end is the true, the concrete, as against the abstract Platonic Idea. Aristotle then says of the value of Philosophy, “Men have begun to philosophize through wonder,” for in it the knowledge of something higher is at least anticipated. “Thus since man, to escape from ignorance, began to philosophize, it is clear that for the sake of knowledge he followed after knowledge, and not for any utility which it might possess for him. This is also made evident by the whole course of its external history. For it was after men had done with all their absolute requirements, and with what concerns their comfort, that they first began to seek this philosophic knowledge. We hence seek it not for the sake of any outside utility that it may have. And thus as we say that a free man is he who exists on his own account and not for another, Philosophy is the only science that is free, because it alone exists for itself—it is knowledge on account of knowledge. Therefore in justice it will not be held to be a human possession,” in the sense that, as we said above, (p. 11) it is not in the possession of a man. “For in many ways the nature of man is dependent, so that, according to Simonides, God alone possesses the prerogative (γέρας), and yet it is unworthy on man’s part not to seek after the science that is in conformity with his own condition (τὴν καθ̓ αὑτὸν ἐπιστήνην). But if the poets were right, and envy characterized divinity, all who would aim higher must be unfortunate;” Nemesis punishes whatever raises itself above the commonplace, and makes everything again equal. “But the divine cannot be jealous,” i.e. cannot refuse to impart that which it is, as if this knowledge should not come to man (supra, pp. 72, 73) “and—according to the proverb—the poets utter many falsehoods. Nor ought we to consider that any science is more entitled to honour than the one we now investigate, for that which is most divine, is also most worthy of honour.” That is to say, what has and imparts what is best is honoured: the gods are thus to be honoured because they have this knowledge. “God is held to be the cause and principle of everything, and therefore God has this science alone, or for the most part.” But for this reason it is not unworthy of man to endeavour to seek the highest good which is in conformity with him, this knowledge pertaining to God. “All other sciences are, however, more requisite than Philosophy, but none more excellent.”
It is difficult to give a more detailed account of the Aristotelian philosophy, the universal Idea with the more important elements, for Aristotle is much more difficult to comprehend than Plato. In the latter there are myths, and we can pass over the dialectic and yet say that we have read Plato; but with Aristotle we enter at once upon what is speculative. Aristotle always seems to have philosophized only respecting the individual and particular, and not to have risen from it to the thought of the absolute and universal, to the thought of God; he always goes from the individual to the individual. His task concerns what is, and is just as clearly divided off as a professor has his work divided into a half year’s course; and though in this course he examines the whole of the world of conception, he yet appears only to have recognized the truth in the particular, or only a succession of particular truths. This has nothing dazzling about it, for he does not appear to have risen to the Idea (as Plato speaks of the nobility of Idea), nor to have led back to it the individual. But if Aristotle on the one hand did not logically abstract the universal Idea, (for then his so-called logic, which is something very different, would have had as its principle the recognition of one Notion in all) on the other hand there appears in Aristotle the one Absolute, the idea of God, as itself a particular, in its place beside the others, although it is all Truth. It is as if we said, “there are plants, animals, men, and also God, the most excellent of all.”
From the whole list of conceptions which Aristotle enumerates, we shall now select some for further examination, and I will first speak of his metaphysics and its determinations. Then I will deal with the particular sciences which have been treated by Aristotle, beginning by giving the fundamental conception of nature as it is constituted with Aristotle; in the third place I will say something of mind, of the soul and its conditions, and finally the logical books of Aristotle will follow.
[1. The Metaphysics.]
Aristotle’s speculative Idea is chiefly to be gathered from his Metaphysics, especially from the last chapters of the twelfth book (Λ) which deal with the divine Thought. But this treatise has the peculiar drawback noticed above (p. 128) of being a compilation, several treatises having been combined into one. Aristotle and the ancients did not know this work by the name of the Metaphysics; it was by them called πρώτη φιλοσοφία.[87] The main portion of this treatise has a certain appearance of unity given to it by the connection of the argument,[88] but it cannot be said that the style is orderly and lucid. This pure philosophy Aristotle very clearly distinguishes (Metaph. IV. 1) from the other sciences as “the science of that which is, in so far as it is, and of what belongs to it implicitly and explicitly.” The main object which Aristotle has in view (Metaph. VII. 1) is the definition of what this substance (οὐσία) really is. In this ontology or, as we call it, logic, he investigates and minutely distinguishes four principles (Metaph. I. 3): first, determination or quality as such, the wherefore of anything, essence or form; secondly, the matter; thirdly, the principle of motion; and fourthly, the principle of final cause, or of the good. In the later part of the Metaphysics Aristotle returns repeatedly to the determination of the Ideas, but here also a want of connection of thought appears, even though all is subsequently united into an entirely speculative Notion.
To proceed, there are two leading forms, which Aristotle characterizes as that of potentiality (δύναμις) and that of actuality (ἐνέργεια); the latter is still more closely characterized as entelechy (ἐντελεχεια) or free activity, which has the end (τὸ τέλος) in itself, and is the realization of this end. These are determinations which occur repeatedly in Aristotle, especially in the ninth book of the Metaphysics, and which we must be familiar with, if we would understand him. The expression δύναμις is with Aristotle the beginning, the implicit, the objective; also the abstract universal in general, the Idea, the matter, which can take on all forms, without being itself the form-giving principle. But with an empty abstraction such as the thing-in-itself Aristotle has nothing to do. It is first in energy or, more concretely, in subjectivity, that he finds the actualizing form, the self-relating negativity. When, on the other hand, we speak of Being, activity is not yet posited: Being is only implicit, only potentiality, without infinite form. To Aristotle the main fact about Substance is that it is not matter merely (Metaph. VII. 3); although in ordinary life this is what is generally taken to be the substantial. All that is contains matter, it is true, all change demands a substratum (ὑποκείμενον) to be affected by it; but because matter itself is only potentiality, and not actuality—which belongs to form—matter cannot truly exist without the activity of form (Metaph. VIII. 1, 2). With Aristotle δύναμις does not therefore mean force (for force is really an imperfect aspect of form), but rather capacity which is not even undetermined possibility; ἐνέργεια is, on the other hand, pure, spontaneous activity. These definitions were of importance throughout all the middle ages. Thus, according to Aristotle, the essentially absolute substance has potentiality and actuality, form and matter, not separated from one another; for the true objective has most certainly also activity in itself, just as the true subjective has also potentiality.
From this definition we now see clearly the sort of opposition in which the Idea of Aristotle stands to that of Plato, for although the Idea of Plato is in itself essentially concrete and determined, Aristotle goes further. In so far, namely, as the Idea is determined in itself, the relation of the moments in it can be more closely specified, and this relation of the moments to each other is to be conceived of as nothing other than activity. It is easy for us to have a consciousness of what is deficient in the universal, that is, of that which is implicit only. The universal, in that it is the universal, has as yet no reality, for because implicitude is inert, the activity of realization is not yet posited therein. Reason, laws, etc., are in this way abstract, but the rational, as realizing itself, we recognize to be necessary, and therefore we take such universal laws but little into account. Now the standpoint of Plato is in the universal; what he does is to express Being rather as the objective, the Good, the end, the universal. To this, however, the principle of living subjectivity, as the moment of reality, seems to be lacking, or it appears at least to be put in the background. This negative principle seems indeed not to be directly expressed in Plato, but it is essentially contained in his definition of the Absolute as the unity of opposites; for this unity is essentially a negative unity of those opposites, which abrogates their being-another, their opposition, and leads them back into itself. But with Aristotle this negativity, this active efficacy, is expressly characterized as energy; in that it breaks up itself—this independence—abrogating unity, and positing separation; for, as Aristotle says (Metaph. VII. 13), “actuality separates.” The Platonic Idea, on the other hand, is rather that abrogation of opposites, where one of the opposites is itself unity. While, therefore, with Plato the main consideration is the affirmative principle, the Idea as only abstractly identical with itself, in Aristotle there is added and made conspicuous the moment of negativity, not as change, nor yet as nullity, but as difference or determination. The principle of individualization, not in the sense of a casual and merely particular subjectivity, but in that of pure subjectivity, is peculiar to Aristotle. Aristotle thus also makes the Good, as the universal end, the substantial foundation, and maintains this position against Heraclitus and the Eleatics. The Becoming of Heraclitus is a true and real determination, but change yet lacks the determination of identity with itself, the constancy of the universal. The stream is ever changing, yet it is nevertheless ever the same, and is really a universal existence. From this it is at once evident that Aristotle (Metaph. IV. 3-6) is controverting the opinions of Heraclitus and others when he says that Being and non-being are not the same (Vol. I. p. 282), and in connection with this lays down the celebrated maxim of contradiction, that a man is not at the same time a ship. This shows at once that Aristotle does not understand by this pure Being and non-being, this abstraction which is really only the transition of the one into the other; but by that which is, he understands Substance, the Idea, Reason, viewed likewise as an impelling end. As he maintains the universal against the principle of mere change, he puts forward activity in opposition to the numbers of the Pythagoreans, and to the Platonic Ideas. However frequently and fully Aristotle controverts both of these, all his objections turn on the remark already quoted (Vol. I. p. 213) that activity is not to be found in these principles, and that to say that real things participate in Ideas is empty talk, and a poetic metaphor. He says also that Ideas, as abstract universal determinations, are only as far as numbers go equal to things, but are not on that account to be pointed out as their causes. Moreover, he maintains that there are contradictions involved in taking independent species, since in Socrates, for instance, there are several ideas included: man, biped, animal (Metaph. I. 7 and 9). Activity with Aristotle is undoubtedly also change, but change that is within the universal, and that remains self-identical; consequently a determination which is self-determination, and therefore the self-realizing universal end: in mere alteration, on the contrary, there is not yet involved the preservation of identity in change. This is the chief point which Aristotle deals with.
Aristotle distinguishes various moments in substance, in so far as the moments of activity and potentiality do not appear as one, but still in separation. The closer determination of this relation of energy to potentiality, of form to matter, and the movement of this opposition, gives the different modes of substance. Here Aristotle enumerates the substances; and to him they appear as a series of different kinds of substance, which he merely takes into consideration one by one, without bringing them together into a system. The three following are the chief among these:—
a. The sensuous perceptible substance is that in which the matter is still distinguished from the efficient form. Hence this substance is finite; for the separation and externality of form and matter are precisely what constitute the nature of the finite. Sensuous substance, says Aristotle (Metaph. XII. 2), involves change, but in such a way that it passes over into the opposite; the opposites disappear in one another, and the third beyond these opposites, that which endures, the permanent in this change, is matter. Now the leading categories of change which Aristotle names are the four differences, in regard to the What (κατὰ τὸ τί), or in regard to quality (ποιόν), or in regard to quantity (ποσόν), or in regard to place where (ποῦ). The first change is the origination and decay of simple determinate Being (κατὰ τόδε); the second change is that of the further qualities (κατὰ τὸ πάθος); the third, increase and diminution; the fourth, motion. Matter is the dead substance on which take place the changes which matter passes through. “The change itself is from potential into actual existence; possible whiteness transforms itself into actual whiteness. Thus things do not arise casually out of nothing, but all arises out of what exists, though it exists only in potentiality, not in actuality.” The possible is thus really a general implicit existence, which brings about these determinations, without producing one out of the other. Matter is thus simple potentiality, which, however, is placed in opposition to itself, so that a thing in its actuality only becomes that which its matter was also in potentiality. There are thus three moments posited: matter, as the general substratum of change, neutral in respect of what is different (ἐξ οὗ); the opposed determinations of form, which are negative to each other as that which is to be abrogated and that which is to be posited (τι and εἴς τι); the first mover (ὑφ̓ οὗ), pure activity (Metaph. VII. 7; IX. 8; XII. 3).[89] But activity is the unity of form and matter; how these two are in the other, Aristotle does not, however, further explain. Thus in sensuous substance there appears the diversity of the moments, though not as yet their return into themselves; but activity is the negative which ideally contains in itself the opposite, therefore that also which is about to be.