No More Learning

This attribution has the most far-reaching consequences for the formulation of the concept of matter in Aristotle - in particular the consequence I have already mentioned: that as Aristotle's philosophy is elaborated matter ceases to be the indeterminate, empty entity which it initially appears to be according to the logic of this philosophy, and becomes, it must be said, the very thing from which he had so assiduously distinguished
it, a kind of substance.
Now, I have mentioned these critical misgivings because a philo-
sophy cannot be understood without thinking it through critically. To seek to understand something in philosophy without at the same time criticizing it is, in my view, an impossible procedure; and I suspect that whenever a distinction is made between understanding and criti- cism there is some kind of authoritarian demand behind it: First make sure you have understood, and by then you will be rid of all your critical quibbles. That is such folly, I think, because philosoph- ical propositions are always put forward with a claim to truth, and can only be understood by reconstructing this claim to truth. But that can only be done by including in the analysis what I have just called criticism, by questioning their truth. The idea that one could under- stand any philosophical idea without criticism, without questioning
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? its truth, I regard as methodologically quite untenable. That is why, in expounding Aristotle's Metaphysics for you, I always present its salient points, and thus the essential problems arising from it, in the form of a critique. Now the critique I have just summarized for you is no great feat for a consciousness versed in epistemology and logic. Yet I should like to say that at the very point where Aristotle's work provokes, if you like, our strongest dissent, it nevertheless contains an extraordinary amount of truth. And, having made no secret of the criticism, I would say that it is more important that you should be
aware of this truth than that you should write down at this point that Aristotle has perpetrated this or that error, which we, having made such wonderful progress since then, can mark down against him and thereby dispose of the matter. The history of philosophy is not so simple. It is, on the contrary, remarkably complex, in the sense that while it moves through the medium of criticism, and while false ideas
are certainly refuted by criticism, this refutation almost never has the effect of disposing of them entirely. Rather, philosophical questions are always a bit like those self-righting toys, seeming to be knocked over but reappearing in changed historical-philosophical constellations, demanding an answer. And I believe that anyone who wants to un- derstand what philosophy signifies as history, as history of the mind, should be aware of this curious ambiguity: on the one hand, the critical
attitude towards philosophy, and between philosophies, and on the other the fundamentally open character of philosophical questions, which cannot be definitively disposed of by such criticism. One needs to be aware of this if one is not to succumb, on the one hand, to a naive rationalism with regard to the history of philosophy, or, on the other, to an equally naive belief in an 'eternal conversation of philo- sophical minds' carried on down the millennia, which has nothing to
do with history. Neither view is correct, and both these extremes are intermingled in the history of philosophy in a way which is very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to define in abstract terms.
Coming now to the truth content of this doctrine of Aristotle's, I would like to point out that in Kant, where possibility is placed squarely on the side of form,3 something said by Aristotle is mis- understood, as it is in the whole of epistemology, and only reappears in Hegel's dialectic. It might indeed be no bad way to present the Hegelian dialectic if one were to see it as a renewal of the controversy between Kant and Aristotle on a higher level - a view, incidentally,
which finds plentiful support in Hegel's own History of Philosophy. For Aristotle's definition of matter as potentiality contains something which can perhaps be seen as the real foundation, or, in medieval language, the fundamentum in re, of every synthesis. It is the idea
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? ? that every form depends on its material as much as the material depends on the form - whereas we, influenced by the Copernican revolution brought about by Kant and the ensuing development, have all been trained to see matter as conditioned, so to speak, by form, and to believe that spirit lays down the laws followed by nature, as Kant put it in his famous formulation of this inversion. 4 According to this doctrine of Aristotle's, there is no categorial form to which there is not a corresponding moment in matter which calls for it. Aristotle
knew - and I do not think this can be emphasized enough - that so-called syntheses, that is, the bringing together of facts in concepts, judgements and conclusions, are not mere adjuncts, or pure operations of the subject of cognition, but are only possible if there is something corresponding to them in that to which they are applied, that is, in matter. If (to give an example which does not occur in Aristotle) you judge that 4 + 3 = 7, this contains not only the synthetic function of the consciousness which brings these moments together, but also a real, factual basis on which this kind of synthesis can be made. Admittedly, it does so in a manner which implies that without the
synthetic judgement which brings 3 and 4 together, we should know nothing of that factual basis, so that the synthesis is a necessary part of it. On the other hand, however, this synthesis would not be possible, and the statement 3 + 4 = 7 would be false, if a factual moment, which admittedly is inseparable from the synthesis, were not already contained in the material being judged.
That is not expressed by Aristotle in the epistemological form I have chosen for it here, but it does appear in his work in the form of a doctrine of substance. This states that two essences, which are posited absolutely as principles, the essence ! JAY} and the essence fLOPrp? , must always come together in order that such a thing as reality can exist. But he was the first to see that, in this interrelatedness, form - despite its self-sufficiency, which he emphasized just as much as Plato - can only be the form of a reality if there is something correspond-
ing to it in reality itself. And that is Aristotle's outstanding discovery, which I consider more important than the hypostasis of the two merely additively connected categories, ! JAY} and fLOPrp? , which he used to illustrate this point. Now, to take this further: matter without any form, pure matter - if one might put it like that - is called by Aristotle first matter, 1l'PWTY} ! JAY};5 and this is the point where the
concept of a1l'Etpov, the unbounded, appears in his work. But this a1l'Etpov does not refer to anything that we might remotely equate with the modern concept of infinity, but means simply that any determina- tion of an object is a 1l'Etpap, a bounding of that object, whereas pure ! JAY}, or 1l'PWTY} ! JAy}, which is absolutely without any such restriction,
,,
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? has no boundary, since it is absolutely indeterminate. 6 However - and this is crucial - this having-no-boundary is not interpreted in his thought, as it is in the whole of modern philosophy, as something transcendent, going beyond the possibility of contingent experience, in keeping with the modern interpretation of infinity. Exactly the opposite is the case in Aristotle, for whom 7TPWTY] vAy], because it lacks bounding, is something impoverished which needs its form. For Greek thought, therefore, the infinite, if such an idea is conceived at all, is a mere scandal, something repugnant which still lacks its destiny, its form. Oswald Spengler noted in this context that for antiquity, with its plastic mode of experience/ reality lay in the bounding of the infinite by form and not in infinity as such. Despite the barrage of criticism unleashed on Spengler for such remarks,s what he says on this central point of Aristotle's philosophy seems to me by no means
as perverse as people are apt to insist in 'polite society'. One might ask, of course, whether this concept of matter, of absolutely unformed 7TPWTY] vAy], is not itself, as a concept, a form; for by speaking of matter as an dpx? , a principle, I have already abstracted from the immediacy of matter itself and reduced it to its most general concept - so that if Aristotle speaks, as I have just done, of pure matter, of 7TPWTY] vAY] which has absolutely no form, he is actually contradicting himself,
since speech about it is itself something formed. While I shall not keep this criticism to myself, I would again point out that, with important thinkers, the real problems are located where they make
so-called errors, and that nothing is more foolish than to dismiss them by pointing out those errors, as I have just done. For one must be on one's guard against the idealist misconception - especially threatening at this point - that because we cannot speak about anything, or have anything, which is not mediated by form, form must therefore be the only thing which is.
Having touched on these matters, I should like to say something about a very basic question of metaphysics which, I realize, goes far beyond the scope of a historical introduction to Aristotle, but con- cerns a state of affairs which one needs to be aware of if one is to occupy oneself usefully with metaphysical questions today. The fact
that, just by talking about matter, one endows this matter with form - that is, conceptual form - should not be confused with the meaning of this form itself. The peculiarity of the concept of vAy], or matter, is that we are here using a concept or speaking of a principle which, by its meaning, refers to something which is not a concept or a principle. We only correctly understand what a concept such as vAY] means if we realize that its conceptual meaning refers to something non- conceptual. The paradox facing us here is removed if we do not
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? allow ourselves to fetishize the language or conceptual system we use. It is true that we can only speak in a way which is mediated through language, but for that reason language itself, as one phe- nomenon among others, becomes a part of reality as a whole, a moment of reality, and should not be hypostatized over against it. It is in the nature of language that we can speak of an absolutely form- less matter, even though speaking of formless matter is itself a form. It is as if we were in the prison of language but were able to recognize it as a prison. I have set out this dialectic for you because I believe that philosophizing begins at exactly the point I have just shown you, where one refuses to be fobbed off with curt pronouncements such as that matter as a 'primary concept' or 'first principle' is itself a form,
so that the concept of formless matter is meaningless; one actually starts thinking at such points and reflects further on them. And if I had to characterize the difference between the kind of thinking I advocate and positivist thinking, I would say that non-positivist thinking is precisely that which is not content with the rigid logic of exclusivity - the logic of either-or: either mediated or immediate, either concept or pure non-conceptuality - but analyses phenomena in such a way that seemingly self-evident statements like the one I just mentioned grow more and more shaky. What seems to me to be unique about philosophical concepts is that, in face of the despair which philosophy can sometimes induce, they provide, if not the
'consolation of philosophy'/ then at least a consolation for philo- sophy. Philosophy has the curious characteristic that, although itself entrapped, locked inside the glasshouse of our constitution and our language, it is nevertheless able constantly to think beyond itself and its limits, to think itself through the walls of its glasshouse. And this thinking beyond itself, into openness - that, precisely, is metaphysics.
1
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29June 1965
? I have spoken repeatedly in these lectures of the problem of media- tion in Aristotle, emphasizing that the more one concerns oneself with questions of the dialectic the more the problem of what is called mediation forces itself into the centre. I wanted to use the example of Aristotle to show you the source of the problematic of development. In general, I have not presented Aristotle's Metaphysics to you as a piece of immutable ontological wisdom, as it is doubtless presented
in many other places. I have shown it from a different
arguing that in this still relatively unproblematic yet very sophisticated philosophy you can see, as in a test tube, the problems which were later to unfold in an infinitely more differentiated and complex form throughout the history of western philosophy. For Aristotle the prob- lem of mediation lies in the fact that the merely possible, that is, the absolutely formless - I would remind you that for him possibility is not form but matter - never exists and never could exist for itself. In
this he gives expression to an insight which idealist philosophy later stated in the subjectively reflected form that matter, as far as we can speak of it, is mediated by consciousness. In Aristotle, by contrast, forms - and this is the moment of Platonism which remains un- changed in Aristotelian philosophy - are imperishable and eternal; and this imperishability and eternity is inherent in each individual
form. That is, if you like, the rescuing or conservative moment in Aristotle, in contradiction of the critical moment. Now, many of you will feel compelled to ask why it did not occur to a thinker as astute as Aristotle - who, after all, was the founder of the whole of western
perspective,
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? logic - that there can be no form without something formed - an objection which cannot fail to arise at this point. In view of the reciprocity of form and content which I have explained, it is very surprising to us that someone could assert that there can be no matter, no content, without form, but fail to apply the same consideration to forms, attributing an autonomous existence to them instead.
I believe that, as in most philosophical cases of this kind, it will be useful to try to reconstruct what it was that enabled Aristotle to overlook this reciprocity, when it applied to form. It will also lead us beyond the particular Aristotelian problem to a more universal prob- lematic. For - I cannot repeat this often enough - we should not take unfair advantage of our posterity by regarding Aristotle as more
stupid than us. To understand Aristotle, I believe we should reflect briefly on the nature of the concept. The concept, as we know, is a unity, the unity of the properties of the elements subsumed under it. Thus, if I have three elements, A with the index 1, B with the index 1 and C with the index 1, then 1 is the concept for these three elements, since it brings out what they have in common, and does so only with regard to what I wish to call the identical properties of these elements. Now, the abstraction from the particular content which is performed here has a very peculiar quality, which is probably based on count- less considerations, especially metaphysical and ontological ones. For
in referring to the item which I have just called '1' as the concept, or in some cases the essence, of the elements it subsumes, I generally disregard the special spatial and temporal positions of the elements subsumed under this concept. And even if, for example, I subsume under the concept of contemporaries extremely antithetical people, such as Hitler, Stalin and Churchill, their contemporaneity - if by that I define all the people who played a decisive individual role between
1930 and 1950 - is a general concept which is independent of the particular existence of these people. That is, to put it very crudely, I can speak of the contemporaneity of these three contemporaries even when they are long dead. Because I have turned it into a general concept, their contemporaneity, which here defines the conceptual unity formed by the three political contemporaries, is now not a temporal entity. We could, if we were so inclined, talk about these three men, defined by their contemporaneity, as long as we liked. Inherent in the concept, therefore, is a curious de-temporalization of what it refers to. The concept as such, once established, is not tem-
poral; it relates, of course, to something temporal, it has its temporal content, and a critical analysis will finally uncover time as an impli- cation of its meaning. But in the first place, through its formation, the concept is independent of time. This is undoubtedly connected
to
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? practical processes involved in the formation of thought, which have taken place in certain phases of the development of humanity. In order to create some kind of order in successive circumstances, no- menclatures or systems of thought were created which could survive with a certain constancy in relation to the temporal elements which they encompassed. Now it seems to me to be the case at this point - and, indeed, in the whole tendency to see ontology as a doctrine of invariants, of the timelessly abiding - that this timelessness of the concept represents a aTEpYJat<;, an impoverishment, a deficiency of the concept. For this timelessness is mediated through abstraction; and that which is simply omitted from the concept, so that it can be formed and maintained as a constant, is now attributed to it as its in- itself quality, and even as its 'positivity', its superiority. The reflec- tion which leads to the realization that the timelessness of the concept is itself something which has become, which has arisen and is not an
attribute of the concept in itself, is a very late reflection; and it has no more place in the philosophy of Aristotle, which is exemplary in this respect, than it has in that of Plato. And what could be described as the greatest paralogism of all in metaphysics, and as the crucial fal- lacy in traditional philosophy as a whole, is nothing other than this de-temporalization of the meaning of concepts, which is produced by the way in which concepts are formed, but is attributed as an inherent property to that which they subsume.
That, I believe, is the mechanism which lies behind Aristotle's positing of forms and concepts as something eternal and immutable. What is taken away from them by abstraction, the moment of de- temporalization, he has ascribed to them as a positive quality, as
their ontological priority, their pure being-in-itself. And it can be said that the whole of western thought has been placed under the spell of this conclusion drawn by Aristotle, and by Plato before him. Even Hegelian philosophy has been unable to divest itself entirely of this illusion. I would like to use a brief example to show you the absurdities generated by this transference of the structure of the con- cept to being itself. About thirty years ago, perhaps slightly less, a so-called philosopher named Maximilian Beck, who came from the phenomenological school, published in emigration a book with no less a
? title than: Psychology. The Nature and Reality of the Sou! . ! This book, which, apart from what I want to tell you, is one of the purest sources of merriment known to me in philosophical literature, where such sources are far from rare, is concerned, among other
things, with the immortality of the soul. In discussing this it adopts the modern practice of disconnecting the concept from the subjective act of abstraction which produced it, and states (as Husserl would
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? probably also have done) that the soul of each individual person corresponds to an essence of that soul. That is to say that one can 'look upon' this soul, can verify its existence. In plain language, he argues that one can obtain a pure concept of the soul of each individual without any coincidence between this essence or this concept of the
individual's soul, to which the philosopher has access, and actual existence. By means of phenomenological operations, therefore, one can arrive at a pure concept of the individual soul, but only by sub- tracting the question as to whether this soul actually exists. I can, following Husserl, identify all its qualities, all its concrete fullness, without positing its spatial-temporal existence. This enables Maximilian Beck to arrive at an unusually simple and quite astonish- ing solution to the question of immortality. He says that this essence called the 'soul', this concept of the soul of each individual person, which I can identify in all its concrete materialization, is - eternal. Thus, if a phenomenologist possesses such a concept of the essence or
soul of someone sitting here in the front row, and if that concept is adequate, it can never perish. It abides; it is objectively valid even when no person who has it is alive, or even when there is no empiri- cal person to which it could refer. And to the extent that this essence of each individual person is independent of any spatial-temporal fate, it can be said - according to Beck - that immortality exists, that these essences of each and every individual are immortal. By contrast, indi- vidual people - says Herr Beck condescendingly - are, of course, mortal, but that has absolutely nothing to do with it. The individual consciousness, the individual body, the individual psychology of a person is also mortal. Nothing except the possibility of each person,
which is concrete but purified of all existence, the pure concept of each person, is immortal. And that is supposed to solve the problem of immortality - while people themselves amount to nothing, and can be annihilated.
I believe, Ladies and Gentlemen, that you need to reflect for only a moment on what such a theory is worth in comparison to the expec- tation of immortality, or the hope of salvation, expressed in the great religions, to realize that the hypostasis of the concept as something eternal and imperishable has here become simply a fraud, a deception, in relation to the true meaning of such a concept in a context of this kind. Well, in this instance we are only dealing with the foolishness of a demented phenomenologist; but it often happens that pathogenic cases are more revealing than so-called normal ones - as is the case with this ineffably fatuous solace. What use is it for one's concept to be, for some logical reason, immortal, if one is nevertheless a heap of ashes? When a doctrine of this kind is coupled to a concept such as
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? immortality, its absurdity and pretentiousness become obvious. But I do not say this to engage in polemics against Herr Beck, but only because I believe it shows in blatant form something of the fraudulence of such an approach to a question like that of immortality, which, after all, is one of the most central of all metaphysical questions, and because it relates to the sublime doctrines of the great philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to St Thomas Aquinas and, if you like, to Descartes as well. Kant was the first to avoid this hypostasis, but even for him the concept has a moment of autonomy, of hypostasis, since his work contains pure forms of an almost pre-Aristotelian kind,
which are not required to be the forms of a possible content. I hope these remarks have made clear to you why Aristotle fails to reflect on the mediateness of form, and that if the idea of the autonomy of form is taken seriously - that is, if it is applied to something as fundamen- tal as the concept of immortality - it has consequences the absurdity of which is beyond dispute.
Now, in Aristotle himself this hypostasis of form has a consequence which holds his whole system together, is its precondition, or how- ever one likes to express it. Because he understands pure form, as pure actuality or pure reality, in the way I have described, it becomes the only force which realizes the purpose - TO 015 EVEKa - contained in scattered individual things. It thus becomes a causa (inalis, an ulti- mate causality on the basis of which the process of the universe is
constituted. And it might be said that just as the relation of reality to possibility is in a curious way stood on its head in Aristotle, in an analogous way the relation of purpose to cause is also stood on its head. For according to it purposes are the only and the true causes; in comparison, what is usually referred to as causality has, as we shall soon see, a very bad press in Aristotle. However, this general obser- vation requires further differentiation. There are four kinds of cause
in Aristotle, a division which remained in force throughout medieval philosophy and reappears in Schopenhauer, in his book On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. According to Aristotle, there is, first, the material cause - although he does not use the terms 'material' and 'formal' in the way we use them in normal logic, but in the sense of the antithesis between vAT) and fLOPCP? , which I have explicated for you in detail. The material necessity or cause arises from vAT), in so far as it is mere stuff and has not yet been formed. Then come the classes of the formal cause - the one arising from fLOPCP? - the moving cause and the final cause, the causa {inalis
or TEAoc;, of which I have already spoken. It is not difficult to see - and it was recognized relatively early in the history of Greek philoso- phl - that the last three classes of causes: the formal cause as the
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74
flOPrp? , the moving cause which orientates everything which is to- wards itself, and lastly the final cause as the highest - are all the same, and that, if radically reduced, they all actually coincide with
the fourth. It can therefore be said that, despite this 'fourfold root of the principle of reason', only the two main dualistic categories, vAT) and flOPrp? , appear in Aristotle - or perhaps it would be better to say, only the categories of Dvvaflt<;, as the mere possibility residing in matter, and of EVEpYHa, as the actuality realized in it. Originally, therefore, his philosophy contains only the dualism of form and mat- ter, which dominates his entire Metaphysics, in much the same way
as it has again become the determining dualism of metaphysical thought in modern philosophy since Descartes.
This is complicated, however, by the mediating element in the philosophy of Aristotle, to which I attach such weight. It manifests itself in the fact that, while everything determinate is drawn to the side of form, nevertheless matter - as I have indicated more than
once already - becomes far more than the mere possibility which it is supposed to be in his philosophy. There is a curious tension and difficulty in the concept of vAT) in Aristotle; on the one hand it is denigrated, disqualified, censured in every respect, including the moral, while on the other there is the remarkable assumption whereby this element, though heterogeneous with regard to form, is endowed with a kind of animation, a tendency, even a certain kind of yearning. There is, of course, a reason for this. For the very fact that he con- ceives matter, as I have explained, as a pure possibility which is itself mediated categorially as that which is possible - this very fact implies a concept. What is possible is an existing thing which is determined in relation to another which it has not yet become. For this reason the concept of pure possibility already includes a kind of determinateness which, in strict accordance with Aristotle's thesis, it should not have. However, if he understands vAT) as the possibility of form, that is, as
something which is at least potentially able to be determined by some- thing else, he is forced to go beyond this idea that possibility is a pure empty x, which vAT) at first appears to be. In fact, far more formal determinants have their origin in matter, as he conceives it, than might first be supposed. For he endows this possibility of matter, which we have subsequently called necessity in the scientific sense, with causality or, to use the Greek word, avaYKT).
AvaYKT) is the mythical notion of the intertwinement of all living things in a fate in which everything has to make atonement according to the ordinance of time, as it is expressed in the famous saying of Anaximander. 3 And the notion of avaYKT), like all mythical ideas, was originally a category of natural philosophy, that is,
LECTURE TEN
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. . . . . . . -
a rationalization
? ? ? ? LECTURE TEN 75
? or secularization of a doctrine of the animating forces of nature. This mythical, natural origin of avuyK'ry, or necessity, survives in Aristotle in that this kind of necessity is attributed to matter, and not, as is the case in modern philosophy, above all in Kant, to the reflecting subject. And, of course, it never occurred to Aristotle to consider this natural necessity, this avuYK1), merely as a conventionally subjective entity. No doubt, the substantiality of causality as a part of fate never became problematic for ancient people. This is precisely the point on which antiquity never went beyond mere reflection on its own mythological ideas.
It also seems to me highly revealing that he attributes something else to matter: what in modern terms we would call 'chance', and for which there are two concepts in his work, firstly aVT6/LaTov, that which moves by itself, and secondly TUX1), containing the mythical idea of the way things just happen to turn out. I will point out -
although I do not want to pursue this very central problem here -
that the concepts of causality as natural causality and as chance, which appear to be strictly antithetical, have always been associated in a certain way in philosophy. Because the regularity of natural causal- ity can never equal the internal coherence of successive moments, as Aristotle seeks to describe it through his teleology, everything causal also seems to have a moment of the fortuitous. And, perhaps more important, apart from the moment of causality there are all those
moments which cannot be subsumed under the principle of identity and which, in accordance with the omnipotent principle of identity in thought, must appear as extraneous and accidental. There is thus a curious correlation between causality and chance; and the more relentless the dominance of causality, of causal-mechanical thinking, becomes in the world, the more the category of chance increases, as a kind of reminder of how much meaning, how much internal coher- ence, has been lost through the predominance of causality. No doubt there are also social reasons for this - the fact that, as rationality has increased in the means of social organization, the ends of social or- ganization have remained irrational, fortuitous. And this relationship
is reflected in the correlation of causality and chance, which, of course, are now undergoing a remarkable convergence, as the law of prob- ability, which is profoundly bound up with chance, has begun to displace causality in microphysics and quantum mechanics. 4
You can see, therefore, that Aristotle attributes far more than one
would expect to vA1), which he had himself demoted to something
totally abstract. It becomes, in a sense, the repository, the refuge of those mythical categories which were displaced by the advance of the Greek enlightenment, and especially by the rationality of Plato and Aristotle himself. And both these moments - on the one hand, blind
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76 LECTURE TEN
? natural causality which is not transparent to itself, which is not an idea, the moment of blindness in causality, and on the other, TEAo? , teleology, which is like the idea of a creator - go back, like chance, to Aristotle. In his Metaphysics these moments have the function of limiting the purposive activity of pure form, of fLOPCP? , or, finally, of the 'unmoved mover'. 5 You therefore have before you a basic schema of the whole of western metaphysics; in it you can observe, as if under a microscope, the difference between natural causality and teleology, which has its foundation in reason or in freedom. This doctrine of a causality based on freedom, on a consciousness independent of blind
UVUYK1), goes back to the Aristotelian dualism and is reproduced in that of Kant. 6 However, as soon as the dichotomy of form and matter enters a state of flux, in which the two appear to be reciprocally mediated, this antithesis of causality and freedom also becomes fluid, dynamized, as it is in Hegel.
You can also see here - and I should like to close with this point - how a metaphysical theme such as that of freedom - which at the
beginning of these lectures I called one of the fundamental themes of metaphysics - only takes on the form familiar to us through the unmediated antithesis of vA1) and fLOPCP? , which is the special feature
of Aristotle's philosophy. I have explained the structure of Aristotle's Metaphysics at some length in order to show you that metaphysics does not consist in the isolated treatment of its so-called main themes, as first appeared when I read out a list of those resounding themes; it resides in the structural relationship between these themes, and finally in the tendency to unify them or form them into a system. And you will see that the concept of unity, the One, does indeed emerge at the apex of Aristotle's Metaphysics. ? You cannot, therefore, understand metaphysics by finding out how the separate metaphysical themes - being, God, freedom, immortality, or whatever they may be - are treated by different philosophers. You can only understand these categories through the place they occupy in a philosophy considered
as a whole. And if I may give you a piece of advice which may help your own philosophical understanding, it is that while you should always strive to understand philosophical categories as strictly and precisely as possible in terms of their meaning and effect in their particular place, you should also be aware that there is no philo- sophical category which does not take on a meaning that is different from its general meaning through the structure, the total context, of the thought in which it appears. And in understanding philosophy it is this specific meaning which matters.
? LECTURE ELEVEN
6July 1965
?
? ? I have discussed the determinants of matter in Aristotle's Metaphysics, and the negativity of these determinants, seen in its most extreme form in the concept of natural causality and chance. In Aristotle these are qualities of vAT) and not of fLOPCP? , and thus are qualities of 8vvafLt? , of abstract possibility (Hegel would say), and not of EVEpYEta, of ideas which have become concrete. Now, according to Aristotle, all the imperfection of nature originates in matter. All notions of inert, sluggish matter, of rudis indigesta moles, as the Latin poet expresses it,l go back to this thesis of Aristotle that matter is to blame for the imperfection of the world. So, too, in a sublimated form, do all ideas
of mere existence as something untouched and abandoned by mind and meaning. I do not think it is usually realized (and perhaps I may draw your attention to it here) how much the notions of so-called everyday life - what I call ' bleating', the ideas passed uncritically from mouth to mouth, or presented as self-evident in leading or not-so- leading articles in newspapers - how much almost all these notions are cultural assets which have sunk down from the upper stratum, to use the language of the sociology of literature. That is to say, they are simply residues of great metaphysics, of great philosophy, which,
through being severed from an original context which has lapsed into oblivion, take on the character of seemingly self-evident truths. The
self-evidence is only apparent, since they owe their obviousness or compellingness to the structures in which they first appeared, whereas they are now treated as matters of fact which require no further justification, and precisely thereby are transformed into untruths. This
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? applies especially to the antithesis of matter and form in Aristotle, which can be said to have pre-formed the familiar dualisms in our received ideas to an extent of which we are entirely unaware. It is really the same as with Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme, whose rhetoric teacher explains to him that there are two kinds of speech, prose and poetry, and who then asks: 'Oh really, and what do I speak? ' When he is told that it is prose, Jourdain exclaims proudly: 'Goodness! I've been speaking prose all my life and I didn't even know it! '2 And we speak Aristotle all our lives and 'don't even know it', except that this is not such an innocent matter
as the good Monsieur Jourdain's prose.
For example, the difference between the heavenly and earthly
spheres, which has become so central in Christian doctrine and led for the first time in Augustine to a kind of hierarchy of intra-mundane happenings,3 points back directly to this Aristotelian dichotomy or dualism. Even the categories of male and female are distinguished according to the same dualism by Aristotle, all the higher, form- giving categories being equated with the male - as was only too self- evident in a patriarchal society - and the merely material and existent with the female. No doubt you will all have endured a learned school- teacher telling you that the roots of mater and materia are related,
and you will recall the ensuing howl of triumph - that, too, is an echo from Aristotle's Metaphysics. Behind it, of course, lies the dis- tinction between the principle which controls nature and the nature oppressed by this principle and presented, because oppressed, as amorphous. With some exaggeration one might say that the world of vAY) in Aristotle is the world of the prehistoric imagination, which
Bachofen called matriarchal, while the world of logos, the world of the Olympian gods, of the centralizing principle, is equated with
fLOPCP? .
And you will see that this idea of the centralizing principle applies to his thought in a far stricter sense than emerges from what I have just said. But the most important quality attributed to matter is its resistance to form, and according to Aristotle this resistance explains something which is of special thematic importance for him: the specific character of change or development, which he conceives as gradua1. 4 What you have here is, fundamentally, the later problem of Christian theology: why the world created by God is not a divine world, why it is not already perfect. This, too, is answered in accord- ance with the same dualistic principle, which states that creation opposes, or in some way resists, pure identity with the creator. And even the complementary principle, that, on the other hand, some urge towards the highest principle is present in matter, in creation,S you will also find prefigured in Aristotle's Metaphysics. There is already
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? here, if you like, a sketch of the dialectic, even though Aristotle does not reflect thematically on this concept. And it would not surprise me if the Aristotelian motif had played a considerable role in the concep- tion of the world process or the absolute in Hegel, whose work can be very well described at an idealist reprise of Aristotle's. For accord- ing to this doctrine, movement is caused or triggered just because matter opposes its potential, is in contradiction to it, because any existing situation is inherently rigid; in later philosophy it was there- fore called 'mere existence'. Similarly, in the philosophy of history,
for example, it can be said that revolution was triggered in 1789 just because of the ossification of absolutist conditions in France, which was more extreme than in any other country. The special rigidity of such social conditions, their resistance to EVEpYELa, is thus made into the actual cause of the opposed, radical development.
Further, it is only matter, conceived in this way as a kind of auto- nomous principle, which in Aristotle makes it possible for the lowest generic concepts which we have - that is, the concept 'dog' or the concept 'human being' - to be split up into a multiplicity of individuals,
which have nothing general in them. This results from Aristotle's curious conception of the concrete, which I have mentioned to you repeatedly, as a kind of sum of the absolutely indeterminate and concept-less existing thing on the one hand and its concept on the other. It might be said with some exaggeration that matter is the principium individuationis in Aristotle, and not, as we are inclined to think, form, which is that which determines a particular thing as particular. For him, however, individuation itself is founded precisely on this particularization - the lack of identity, or full identity, of an
existent thing with its form. 6 Individuation thus becomes something negative in Aristotle. And that, too, is a basic thesis of all western metaphysics, as it reappears in Kant, where cognition is equated with the determining of an object in its generality and necessity, and as you find it worked through to its extreme in Hegel, where only the universal manifesting itself through individuation is the substantial - whereas anything which lies outside the identification with the universal principle is regarded as absolutely insignificant, ephemeral
and unimportant. I do not think I need to elaborate here the theme which was central to my lectures in the last semester:7 the incalculable consequences of the elevation of logical universality as the positive
metaphysical principle, and of the branding of individuation and par-
ticularity as the negative. If the so-called great tradition of philosophy
has anywhere lent its name to ideology, it is at this point. The univer- sal manifesting itself as pure form is, of course, the existing form of social dominance in abstracto; and according to this definition the
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? bigger battalions in world history are justified in advance. You have here the equation of the universal with the good. You can say - as Zeller has rightly pointed outS - that antithetical definitions such as those applied by Aristotle to matter have turned matter into the opposite of what the concept of matter implies; that is, matter in his thought becomes a second principle endowed with its own force. That, too, later had uncommonly far-reaching consequences - I am trying today to make you aware of those moments in Aristotle which have been precipitated in the general stock of ideas and have domin-
ated the whole philosophical tradition to an incalculable degree. Its consequences were that people have forgotten, if they ever knew, that when they think of matter in general as that which is opposed to a principle of a different kind, the principle of mind, they are, if you like, dematerializing matter by turning it into a principle. What the concept of matter points towards, the only reasonable content and meaning
of this term, is the non-conceptual. And one of the most remarkable characteristics of the concept is that, although itself a concept, it can yet refer to something which is not a concept; indeed - if one traces out the reciprocal foundation of intentions - in the end it must mean something non-conceptual. Given the direction which the whole philo- sophical tradition has taken as a result of the Aristotelian dualism, it is the case that through the covert substitution of the general concept
of 'matter' for materials, matter has itself been turned into something ' which it ought precisely not to be: something conceptual. Only deter- . minants which are really of such a conceptual kind are recognized
qua matter. 9
The consequence which this had for philosophy was idealism, and
one might say without exaggeration that Aristotle was an objective idealist, except that he didn't know it, if you will forgive such a lax turn of phrase. In other words, the fact that I can only speak of matter in concepts, even if these concepts themselves mean something which is not material, prepares the ground for the identification of all mat- ter with the concept, and finally for the dissolution of all matter in the conceptual, the reduction of all objectivity to the thinking sub- ject, in which the idealist interpretation of philosophy later consisted. These considerations, extrapolated from some of the most remarkable definitions and characterizations in Aristotle's discussion of matter, make his ideas more plausible in retrospect than would a purely genetic approach, focused on the difference between knowledge for us and knowledge in itself at that time. They enable us to understand why Aristotle sometimes attributes primary being, 7TPWTY} ova{a, to pure, that is, formless, individual entities, to T6DE TL qua vAy}, and sometimes equates it with form itself. The explanation is that, because
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? of the relation between form and content posited in this dualism,
content, or matter, is itself multiply, if antithetically, determined. As
a result, Aristotle is never quite sure whether he should treat it as
primary being, 7Tpcf)7YJ ova{a, because it is something and has very
definite properties, or whether, in line with the general trend of his
Metaphysics, he should reserve the determination of 7TPWTYJ ova{a to ,"
f-LopcpYJ or EVEPYEW.
It is the relation of matter to form which gives rise to movement,
? or change of any kind, in Aristotle. Change is confined to that which has form, so that, correlatively, that which has no matter and is pure EVEpyna is not subject to change. One might say that pure actuality, actus purus - and this is the supreme paradox of this philosophy - is also the eternal. It may be supposed that the real purpose - or, better, the real interest - of Aristotle's Metaphysics lay in the attempt to bring together the change in being, or in existing things, which
was ineluctably taking place with the advance of empirical science - and he was an empirical scientist - with the Platonic moment of eternity and immutability. Latent in his philosophy is a contradiction between the Eleatic and Platonic element of the doctrine of being and the unmistakable moment of change associated with the advancing Greek or Hellenic enlightenment. Thus the whole construction of Aristotle's Metaphysics is really focused on this one problem: how is change possible? And this change or movement is derived by Aris- totle from the relation of form to matter; it is, so to speak, the result he obtains from his ontology, in which these moments are distinguished. The task is to deduce why mutability exists from the basic structure of being itself, that is, from the dualism of vAYJ and f-L0PCP? located within being. The mutable is to be spun out, so to speak, from the immutable - a problem which later recurs in Hegel, whose Logic is
both a prima philosophia (that is, an ontology) and a dialectic (that is, a radically elaborated theory of development). This ambiguity of philosophy at its later peak is also fully prefigured, therefore, in the philosophy of Aristotle.
The answer to this question given by Aristotle will not surprise you, after all we have said about his Metaphysics. It is that movement - by which he means an upward movement or change, the advancing
amelioration of everything which is through its increasing determina-
tion by the absolute - is to be equated with the realization of the
possible, in so far as the possible is opposed to natural causality. That
is
really Aristotle's central proposition. And this proposition, that movement is the realization of the possible, already implies the Hegelian thesis of history as progress in the consciousness of free-
dom. 1O I remind you that for Aristotle determination by fLOPrp? is the
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? ? opposite of determination by avayK'Y], and thus of blind necessity. This conception also contains, at least implicitly, an inversion of the Hegelian proposition! ! of the reality of the rational (an inversion also to be found in Hegel himself). To formulate such a conception, Zeller
quotes a passage which does not come from the Metaphysics but from the Physics: ? TOU ovvaf-LEt OVTO? EVTEAEXEta ft TOLOUTOV. 12 That is to say, that which is by virtue of its possibility becomes by virtue of its entelechy; movement is the becoming real of the possible. But Aristotle is not content to let matters rest with this proposition about movement in abstracto. At this point he already feels the need for mediation or, as one also says, for concretion; he therefore asks how this movement arises in the first place. He now argues as follows: the impulse towards movement can only come from something which already is what the moved object is to become through its movement.
That is, I would say, a typically rationalistic inference based purely on concepts, of the kind you will find over and over again in the philosophy of the seventeenth century. It is exposed, of course, to the
entire Kantian critique of conclusions drawn from pure concepts. But in the sense that he drew conclusions from pure concepts Aristotle truly was a rationalist. And it was not just an external historical connection when medieval scholasticism, the philosophy whose essen- tial feature was the procedure of drawing conclusions from pure concepts, harked back to Aristotle. On this crucial point the thinking of Aristotle was, if you like, already scholastic - for example, in propositions like the one I have just mentioned: that the impulse towards movement can only come from something which already is what the moved object is to become through its movement. This presupposes that the two moments, the mover and the moved, are
structured in a rational, purpose-directed way, are inwardly deter- mined in precisely the manner from which the whole of modern natural science has emancipated itself. And if you imagine such a proposition in relation to the classical, causal-mechanical physics asso- ciated with the name of Newton, for example, you will understand why the genesis of the modern natural sciences has been to such a major degree an emancipation from Aristotle - from the doctrine of the reality of forms and the teleology dependent on it. Already implied in that doctrine is the motif of full-blown idealism, that the movement of the particular towards the absolute already presupposes that abso- lute. Aristotle's theory of motion is only comprehensible if one assumes that, in any movement, that towards which it wants to move is also the agent of the movement. And Hegel's Logic attempted to explicate precisely this presupposition, now applied to spirit, by means of epis- temological reflection, and to show how something which is effective
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? from the first subsequently manifests itself in and for itself. It can therefore be said in a precise sense that Hegel's work seeks to recover the ontological programme of Aristotle's metaphysics through a tran- scendental, subjectively directed analysis.
According to Aristotle, every movement presupposes two things: a mover and a moved. And for him this applies to self-moving things as well. Even when we can speak of something as moving itself, we find in it two different elements or principles: the moving and the moved. This doctrine in Aristotle is based on the human being, who is the
only self-moving entity - apart from animals - which we can know. According to this theory, the human being is divided into two prin- ciples; the moving principle, which is the higher, the immaterial and the spiritual; and the moved, the material principle. This provides another illustration of how we all 'speak Aristotle' without knowing
it. For the entire figure of the dualism of body and soul, the so-called body-mind problem which dominates the whole of western thinking and becomes an overt philosophical theme in the seventeenth-century rationalism of Descartes, goes back to Aristotle's conception of the human being that has just been mentioned. The whole later dualism of substances, of body and soul, and thus the whole question of how these dualistic moments, body and soul, are interrelated, was formu- lated for the first time, and in all its trenchancy, in this ontological
anthropology, which divided the human being itself into a moving principle and a moved, material principle. In this division the mover is the actual or the form, and the moved is the potential or matter. Only form - EVEpyna - causes matter, despite the moments of resist- ance it contains, to move towards it. It should not be overlooked here that in Aristotle - who, like all truly significant philosophers,
was more concerned with expressing phenomena than with unifying them seamlessly and without contradictions - the question of the relationship between what might be called the immanent tendency of matter, and the opposed principle of the resistance of matter to form, was never completely articulated and elaborated. For whereas I ex- plained to you earlier that matter was defined essentially as the resist-
ant, antithetical and thus dialectical moment in face of the reality of
form, it is also the case (as I believe I pointed out to you at the outset,
together with the affinity of this theory to the later one of Schelling)13
that matter itself is also endowed with a yearning, an 0pEyw{}at or
0Pf1-? ' towards form as the good or the divine. This points again, of
course, towards the Hegelian motif I mentioned to you: that matter
itself, without knowing it, simply through its possibility, is already
spirit. For only as something spiritual can it be endowed with this 0Pf1-? which is gradually realized in it.
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? And this need of matter for form is defined by Aristotle as the need for the good or the divine. The identification of form as the universal, of the good as the moral norm and of the divine as the highest
metaphysical principle, is already accomplished in Aristotle's Meta- physics. And that, too, has become through Christianity a universal idea, which we generally accept simply as a result of our education, without reflecting on its connection to a specific philosophy, and therefore on the philosophical problems implicit in it. Now, Aristotle
states that where matter and form touch movement must always and necessarily arise. 14 This proposition of the touching of matter and form is, one might say, another of the Aristotelian archaisms. That is, it is one of those elements or moments in his thought which we find it hard to envisage, since these two moments, matter and form, are here suddenly separated as two absolutely different principles, and then retrospectively brought together. This inconsistency is, how- ever, connected to the fact (as I have repeatedly pointed out, and
would reiterate here) that subjective reflection is essentially absent in Aristotle, so that he is not really aware of the abstract character of either his concept of form or his concept of matter as principles, and therefore hypostatizes both moments. The remarkable, exciting, but at the same time constantly puzzling thing about Aristotle's philosophy is that he simultaneously recognizes the reciprocity, the interdepend? ence of form and matter, and nevertheless treats them as so separate that their interdependence remains a merely external relation and their internal mediation is not recognized. True, they are mediated in the sense that one cannot really exist without the other - with a crucial exception which we shall come back to in the next lecture - but this dependence is not such that one principle contains the other within it as a condition of its possibility. This externality is strikingly demonstrated in Aristotle's doctrine that these two prin? ciples actually do touch each other from outside - almost, one might say, as if they were two different substances, if that does not sound too paradoxical - so that movement only arises through the kindling which occurs when the two things come together. It is easy to poke fun at the somewhat mythological aspect of this idea from our later
standpoint. But if you picture once more the basic structure I tried so strenuously to make clear to you in the first part of this lecture series, you will see that this apparent naivety is itself the necessary fruit of the basic structure.
And now, the decisive question for Aristotle - which takes us to the central problem of the connection between the dynamic moment and the ontological moment - is how these two moments are related structurally. But I should prefer not to embark on that question today.
? ? ? LECTURE TWELVE
8July 1965
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I told you in the last lecture that in Aristotle's Metaphysics move- ment arises from the touching of matter and form. And I pointed out that the additive moment of these two basic categories emerges very clearly in his work. That is to say that while he knows that one does not exist without the other - to that extent he entertained the idea of mediation - he did not perceive this mediation within the categories themselves, but only in their amalgamation. It might be useful at this point, where we are nearing the end of our discussion of Aristotle, if I add something which I ought, perhaps, to have said earlier, as it might have facilitated understanding. When one hears
terms such as 'matter' or 'form' - and this really applies not just to Aristotle but to an understanding of the whole of ancient philosophy - one is not quite sure what to make of them. I did at least touch on this problem by saying! that when Aristotle speaks of matter he sub- stitutes the concept of matter for matter itself, and that this substitution - or 'subreption', as Kant would have called it - is the vehicle which allows him to make matter into a kind of second principle. Now there
is something rather peculiar about all these categories in antiquity. I imagine that you are at least vaguely aware, from the history of philosophy, that the term 'hylozoism',2 meaning the animation of natural categories, is applied to the earliest Greek philosophers, the Ionian nature philosophers. And you will recall that in them physical and metaphysical entities, that is, physical concepts and metaphysical essences, were curiously intertwined - which is connected to the fact, of course, that the ancient concepts are essentially secularized gods.
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