A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

Ethics.

Economics.

Politics.

4. Poetic Philosophy.

Art.

Poetry.

Rhetoric.

Aristotle’s Starting-Point. The two early influences in Aristotle’s mental development offer an explanation for his philosophical point of view. These influences were his empirical training in medicine and his conceptual training in the moral ideals of the Academy. Plato had convinced him that if there were to be any true science, it must be founded on concepts that are unchanging. His own scientific training, however, reinforced by the influence of Democritus, made him respect the value of empirical facts. While the philosophical problem for Aristotle was the same as that for Plato, the difference between them was in the main a matter of emphasis due to their different starting-points. Plato started with the refutation of the Protagorean theory of perception, and consequently he emphasized the value of the conceptual world; Aristotle, however, felt that Plato had overestimated the conceptualworld, and he emphasized the importance of empirical facts. Both when a member of the Academy and later, he strongly contended against Plato’s evaluation of the world of Ideas, because they so transcended the sense world that they neither explained nor illuminated it. Aristotle’s reaction against Plato’s theory furthermore gives us a more correct notion of what Plato really taught. If conceptions are to enter into knowledge, they must not exist in the clouds of abstraction. He maintained that Plato had increased the difficulty of the problem by adding a second world of entities quite distinct from the world of nature. The same problem that Plato confronted still exists unanswered, said Aristotle. It is the problem of the twofold world. If Ideas are apart from things, we could not know that they existed, we should not be able to know anything about them, nor should we be able to explain the world through them. It is true that Plato, in his later draft, had conceived Ideas to be teleologically related to the physical things, but how could this be if they were apart from things? Thus in his reaction from Plato’s theory of Ideas, Aristotle reëstablished the world of perceptual fact. This is the starting-point of Aristotle.

The Fundamental Principle in Aristotle’s Philosophy. The first question then is, How did Aristotle reëstablish the perceptual fact? What means did he employ to give the perceptual fact a reality? The answer to this question will be the statement of Aristotle’s fundamental principle. It will show his advance over Plato by showing his new estimate of the perceptual world. Plato accepted the Protagorean doctrine of perception, but also gave it a new value by placing perceptionsbeside conceptions in the world of reality; Aristotle developed Plato’s teaching about perceptions by linking them inseparably with conceptions. Aristotle felt that Plato’s difficulties arose from the lack of close relationship between conceptual Being and perceptual fact. What is that linkage? What binds abiding reality and changing phenomena so closely? The linkage is development. Development is the relation between conception and perception. It is the fundamental principle in the philosophy of Aristotle throughout and places a new estimate upon the value of perception. Perceptual facts apart from conceptions have no reality; conceptions apart from perceptions are mere abstractions. In the world of reality conceptual Being resides in the perceptual facts, and the perceptual facts express conceptions. They always exist together in a linkage or relationship that is teleological, purposeful—the linkage of development. An abstract statement of this relationship is, “Aristotle felt the conceptual necessity of the empirically actual.” Perhaps the clearest statement of this fundamental principle can be made in the terms of evolution. It is this: true reality is the essence which unfolds in phenomena. Notice that this sentence has two parts equally freighted: reality is an unfolding essence; reality is in phenomena. The true universal must be thought as realizing itself through its development in particulars; the true concept as realizing itself through its development in percepts; the true abiding Being as realizing itself in its development through change. On the one hand, reality is the essence of things; on the other, reality has existence only in things.

True reality is the individual.