No More Learning

In his work the extremes are not themselves mediated, but only something intermediate between them, as is in keeping with the overall principle of this philosophy, the ideal of which is the happy medium, or the fLEaOTT)C;. This principle of the
happy medium, of moderation between the extremes, is thus the central problem. As it is taught in the Ethics,ll and the Politics, this moderation is transposed, as it were, into the absolute, in that being is presented as something like the happy medium between form and matter - though with a heavy emphasis on form. I would only add that in this non-dialectical conception of mediation Aristotle was a
true Platonist, since precisely this manner of defining concepts as the happy medium between their extremes is a schema which constantly underlies the argumentation in the Platonic dialogues. When, for ex- ample, plato defines courage, in an elaborate procedure, as the happy medium between reckless daring on one side and cowardice on the other,12 that is precisely in keeping with this climate of thought.
You may think that I am demanding an awful lot of subtlety from
you at this point. Having identified something mediated, which cannot
be dissolved with chemical purity into either side, so to speak, but
links them both, I then distinguish further whether this 'both' is only
a
compound. But I have to tell you that - as you will find confirmed
again and again if you study philosophy in any depth - the so-called
large philosophical questions are regularly decided by such subtleties,
such questions of detail. For example, the overall question whether
some such thing as a 'first philosophy', or the dissolution of philosophy
? chemical mixture, to use the terms of natural science, or a genuine
into its
each first principle postulates the other within itself, by virtue of its own meaning - this question really depends on how one stands with regard to such subtlety. If I said earlier that I was behaving in a somewhat schoolmasterly manner in criticizing Aristotle on this point, I should like to correct that now - for it is here that the historical coefficient really enters the argumentation. I have just mentioned
principles, is possible, or whether it cannot be done, since
?
?
48 LECTURE SEVEN
? ? the moment of dialectical mediation, by which a stronglyphilo- sophical concept is dependent, through its own meaning, on the non- conceptual, from which it has been abstracted. 13 This moment only became thinkable - and this is not just a facile a priori interpretation made post festum, but one that withstands proper scrutiny - once thought had passed through substantial subjective reflection; that is, once it had been realized that categories, such as those of form and matter used here, are themselves abstractions produced by the mind. They cannot, therefore, be posited in their immediacy as absolute,
but can only be operated, as Hegel would put it, as something already posited. This discovery of subjectivity as the constitutive element of knowledge was entirely foreign to antiquity. Even where subjective modes of speech appear in antiquity - which is not seldom - we should not confuse them with modern ones, since they are applied there to an individual, personal relativism; that is, the validity of knowledge is related to the particular constitutions of individual people. But the question that has given such force to the concept of subjectivity in the history of modern philosophy - the question whether subjectivity actually conditions or constitutes truth and objectivity - is alien to the whole of ancient philosophy. And if it is true that correspondences with past intellectual formations can only be recognized if one places them at a distance, rather than rejoicing that they are just the same as ours (if one discerns the commonalties while being attentive to incompatibilities), that is precisely the reason why Aristotle's thought, which in intentione recta, fundamentally, is orientated towards the concept of substance, and as yet has no con- ception of self-reflection, was unable, for that very reason, to grasp
the concept of the dialectic.
I would only add that, in the above remarks, the last word has not
been said on the problem of the dialectic. It would be a misunder-
standing to conclude from what I have said that the conception of a
dialectical philosophy is essentially and always subjective. There are
further reflections on reflection, by which this subjective reduction is
itself surpassed and negated. I say this only so that you do not believe
that I wanted here to advocate simply a subjective-idealist kind of
thinking instead of the ancient ontological one; that is far from my
intention. I only wanted to show that a dialectical understanding of
the basic concepts of metaphysics, with which Aristotle is concerned,
is simply not possible unless reflection on subjectivity has advanced
much further than it had in his thought. I would also note that,
through Aristotle's peculiarly additive doctrine, the concept of matter
is extremely dematerialized, is turned into something very indefinite and general. And since, as I have just said, subjective reflection had
LECTURE SEVEN 49
? not yet taken place in Aristotle, it is all the more surprising how far his thought agrees in very fundamental moments with later idealist thinking, which does perform this subjective reflection. If it is the case that all determinants, all that which makes something what it is, really stem from its form; and if, by contrast, matter is really some- thing quite indefinite, quite abstract, then we have already, in the midst of this pre-subjective, ontological thinking, a precise sketch of the later idealist doctrine according to which the matter of cognition is absolutely indeterminate, receiving all its determinants and thus all its content through form, that is, through subjectivity. 14
However, I should now define precisely how Aristotle differs from the whole of modern thought. In Aristotle's work - and he is again a Platonist in this - the concept of form is not yet equated with thought, with the function of the subject. Rather, form is, as it were, picked
out by a mechanism of abstraction from the diversity of that which is, and above all from the diversity of what is formulated in language, and is then made into something existing in itself, instead of being identified as an operation of the subject. One might say, therefore - if I may speak anachronistically once more - that Aristotle's meta- physics is an idealism malgre lui-meme. It has the same consequences - the de-qualification of its own matter and thus the denigration of
matter itself - which idealism was to have so emphatically later, but without having encompassed the medium of idealism (that is, con- stitutive subjectivity) as such. One is obliged to ask, therefore, what
remains of matter in Aristotle, if all its determinants have been stripped
away and attributed to form. What is left behind is an emptiness
which has to be filled; and this idea that pure matter is something
abstract and empty that has to be filled leads to the central doctrine
of Aristotle's Metaphysics: that matter is not a solid entity one can
hold on to but is just pure possibility; and that, by contrast, the real
is actually form. In a certain sense this idea, too, recurs in idealism, in
that reality is conceived as what is constituted by the subject, and
matter as the indetermi. nate. But the remarkable thing, with which
we really do find it hard to empathize, is that this distinction is made
from a
some way be formed. This concept of possibility only exists in Aris- totle, of course, because, although he sees these two main principles, form and of matter, as belonging together in some way, he nevertheless
naively realistic standpoint. What we believe we can hold in our hands as the most important thing of all is presented here as something quite indeterminate and empty, as the mere possibility of what might emerge from it, while the true reality is form; we, on the contrary, are accustomed to understand form as that through which something existent, a TaoE TL, or whatever you like to call it, must in
?
? 50 LECTURE SEVEN
? believes that they can be grasped as essences independent of each other, which, though interrelated, are not so interrelated that one is constituted by the other through its own nature.
This problem, still unresolved in Aristotle, that matter is really an emptiness which only comes to exist through its own reflection, through its form, is not developed further until Hegel's Logic, which likewise has an objective orientation. And I should like to close by pointing out, for those of you who are interested in Hegel, that the usual derivation of Hegel from German idealism reflects only one side of his work. On the other side, because of the objective orientation of Hegel's Logic, constant reference must be made to Aristotelian logic, from which he took this idea, as has been demonstrated in detail
in the work of the Oxford philosopher Geoffrey Mure,15 to which I would draw your attention here. We shall continue from this point next week.
? ? ? ? ? LECTURE EIGHT
22 June 1965
? Perhaps I might begin today by recalling the distinction I tried to make at the beginning of these lectures, in order to show you what is specific to metaphysics. For, if I could make a methodological point straight away, it is not enough, when defining the meaning of a con- cept of such historical depth as that of metaphysics, to outline the main areas of subject matter within it, or its essential content and the way in which it is treated. Even the understanding of concepts in- cludes a moment of negation, in that, to understand a philosophy,
for example, one needs to know what its specific rhetoric was really directed against. If one seeks to understand a philosophy purely from within itself, just from what is written down, one usually does not get very far. One needs to develop a faculty for discerning the emphases and accents peculiar to that philosophy in order to uncover their relationships within the philosophical context, and thus to under- stand the philosophy itself - that is at least as important as knowing
unequivocally: such and such is metaphysics. Bearing this in mind, I would remind you that rather than talking about its verbal meaning I tried to describe metaphysics in a precise sense as the unity of a critical and a rescuing intention. 1 That is to say that metaphysics is always present where enlightened rationalism both criticizes traditional notions and ideas, ideas existing in themselves, as mythological, and
at the same time - and not just out of an apologetic need, but out of a concern for truth - wants to save or restore these concepts, which reason has demolished, precisely through the application of reason, or even to produce them anew from within its own rational resources.
?
52 LECTURE EIGHT
? This can be said, for example, of the most famous theory of Aristotle, which concerns us now, the one concerning matter, VAy], and form, Eloo') or fLOPrp? . After criticizing the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, it
sought, while remaining aware of this critique and as a consequence of it, to salvage an essential moment of that doctrine, the precedence of the idea, the priority of form. And I repeat that this double-sidedness is prototypical of all metaphysics, even the Kantian, where the famous statement in the Methodenlehre, that he had set limits to reason in
order to make room for faith,2 points to precisely this ambivalence. The intention I am speaking of was given clear expression by Aris- totle in the proposition that true knowledge always has as its object the necessary and immutable, as in Plato. 3 You should bear in mind here, however, as in the case of all the concepts of ancient philosophy,
that the concept of causality, or of cause, as it appears - in a complex form - in Aristotle, should not be understood as a category founded on subjectivity, but as something inherent in the objective world and indicated by the form of linguistic expression. In contrast to the neces- sary and immutable, the sensible is treated in Aristotle as fortuitous or inferior - and the case is very similar in Plato. Admittedly, you do not find in Aristotle the Platonic notion of the non-existence of sensible matter; this is clearly connected to his doctrine concerning
fLY] DV, the sensible, the spatial-temporal, is the absolutely non-existent; But if I could remind you here of the methodological principle that, in philosophy, the problems are to be found in the smallest nuances, it should be noted that, despite this different valuation of the sensible - a valuation generally attributed to Aristotle's tendency towards empiricism in contrast to classical rationalism - this changed position with regard to the sensible is not so far removed from the Platonic doctrine of the non-existent as might first be thought, and as some passages in Aristotle suggest. This is because matter, VAy], as the pure possibility of that which is, is divested of all specific determinants, is seen as the absolutely indeterminate and really as a mere craving for determination; and it is only this striving which qualifies it as possib- ility, with which matter is equated in Aristotle. So that if one were to
the relation of form to matter. Nor do you find the doctrine that
take the Hegelian step of saying that the absolutely indeterminate is the same as nothingness, one could find the famous Platonic pro- position in Aristotle as well; except that - and this, in my view,
demonstrates the splendour and originality of Aristotle's thought - he refused to take this step. And it is one of the most profound and truly dialectical contradictions in Aristotle's philosophy that while OVVUfLL'), the matter of cognition, is said to be indeterminate, it is not only indeterminate - that he does not adhere to the thesis of the
? LECTURE EIGHT 53
? ? absolute indeterminateness of that which has not yet attained form. I shall take this opportunity to point out something which may help you to gain a somewhat deeper understanding of philosophy than what you read in the textbooks: it is that, in general, one does not understand philosophy by eliminating contradictions, or by chalking up contradictions against authors - there is no significant philosoph- ical author who could not be convicted of this or that contradiction. One understands a philosophy by seeking its truth content precisely at the point where it becomes entangled in so-called contradictions. This is true in the most emphatic way of Aristotle. As far as the sensible in his work is concerned, it is treated as inferior but not as non-existent. In this he has placed himself in what is called the Platonic tradition; and both philosophers contribute to the low valuation
of everything sensible which later remained characteristic of ideal- ism in the widest sense. In his formulation, sensible matter could
\'l'\f-L\'l' equa11ywe11beasnotbe;E'VO"EX0f-LEVOVKatELVatKat YJHvat,hesays. 4
What he really has against the merely existent, therefore, is not so much its indeterminateness as what in later philosophy was referred to as its fortuitousness, its contingency. And you will hear later5 that the notion of the fortuitousness of matter -- in contrast to the regular- ity of form - indeed played a major role in Aristotle under the name
of TO aVT0f-LaTOv (from which our 'automatic' is derived), and through the use of the old mythological term TVXYJ, meaning that history, too, was assigned this major role.
Matter - this proposition states - might be or equally well might not be. I should like to point out in passing that this thesis, which actually is one of the invariants occurring throughout metaphysical thinking, is by no means as self-evident as it purports to be. If one were to ask, at the crude, schoolroom level, where one of the main differ-
I
? ences
lies, the answer would probably be that metaphysics places every- thing in the idea or in reason or, subjectively speaking, in the mind, and therefore values sensible matter, which is genetically connected to q;vm<;, the material, less highly. I would ask you to reflect for a moment whether this conception is really as compelling as we are generally told; and I would here use the method of immanent criticism, which means taking the a priori ideal literally, and asking whether there are not also so-called a priori characteristics of cognition which are by no means non-sensible in nature. The phenomenological school was the first to point this out, in Husser! , in the doctrine of what he called the contingent a priori,6 and far more strongly in Max Scheler. 7 According to this doctrine there are also determinants which are valid
between the metaphysical and the anti-metaphysical traditions
a priori, that is, absolutely and necessarily, but only on condition
?
54 LECTURE EIGHT
? that some sensible matter is given. Therefore, although they claim absolute, a priori validity, they depend on something like the exist- ence of the sensible. Examples of this are taken from certain areas of physics and optics. 8 If it is said, for example, that in the optical similarity series violet lies between red and blue, then as long as colour sensations of the types blue and red exist it will be impossible, no matter how hard one tries, not to imagine that the colour we call violet is anything other than intermediate between the two other colours. We are certainly dealing here, therefore, with an a priori proposition; but it is one which could hardly be called necessary in the strict sense insisted upon by Aristotle - because the fact that on the basis of known nerve processes we see something like red and blue cannot itself be inferred from pure thought, but is a kind of given. I offer this as the simplest possible critique of the assertion made by the metaphysical tradition that the a priori is always purely mental, in order to show you that even if the sphere of the a priori is given the weight it has in the idealist and ontological tendencies, it certainly does not follow that sensible material and sensible relation- ships should be excluded in the way that that tradition has asserted as self-evident since Plato. 9
But I should like to go beyond this relatively simple insight by pointing out that the absolute separation of the realm of the intelligible or rational from that of the sensible itself contains a cer- tain short-sightedness in its analysis of what is called the mental sphere. By this I refer to the sphere which is generally described as the most abstract of all, that of so-called pure logic. All purely logical propositions contain the concept of a something, a substrate, how- ever constituted, for which they are valid. Without the supposition of such a something, about which, for example nothing contradictory may be said - to cite the true and unique central proposition of traditional logic - without this substrate, however abstract it may be, no such thing as formal logic is possible. lO But it does not require great acuity to discover - and I would encourage you to do this for yourselves, as I do not want to take the time to do so here - that within this something, no matter how pale, sublimated, abstract, spiritualized it may be, there is ultimately a reference to some sensible matter. It is doubtless impossible to fulfil this something in any way without recourse to the sensible, if it is to be given any meaning at all - other- wise it would remain permanently within the tautological sphere of mind. And the concept of something no longer has any conceivable meaning in the theory of logical forms if it is constantly expressed only through forms; it can no longer be grasped at all - although logic remains dependent on this something. If the consideration I have
? ? ,"'
? ? LECTURE EIGHT
55
? just indicated (but not worked out) is correct, it has extraordinarily wide implications for the problem with which we are concerned at present. For it means that even in the most abstract sphere, in which, if anywhere at all, the pure concept of the a priori operates, it is not possible to eliminate the sensible in the manner required by the dichotomy which is taken for granted by all metaphysics. It means that in order to attain to the most extreme a priori pro- positions conceivable, the most formal propositions of logic, we always come up against sensible matter in the prolongation of what is meant by the something. Without any sensible matter, therefore, it is impossible to conceive the forms themselves - which would be no more than the working out of the idea that, contrary to Aristotle and that tradition, we can only conceive the so-called principle of form, or any kind of categorial form, as mediated through some content,
and not as something absolutely different from it. Form is always the form of something, just as, if you were asked quite simply and naively what a form is - and it is always useful to go back to the simplest cases of linguistic usage to clarify such matters - you would probably say that form is something by which material is formed; this olive-green area (the blackboard), let us say, is articulated by the fact that it appears to you as rectangular. It would not occur to you to speak of form independently of its being necessarily the form of something. But in face of this idea embedded in language and in immediate consciousness metaphysics has remained coy; it has, as it were, kept mum about this moment of the 'form of what? ' which is implicit not only in form but in the meaning of the concept of form itself. In Kant the distinction between the non-sensible, which is con- ceived purely in terms of concepts, and the sensible, which can just as well be as not be, is taken over directly in his distinction between the real and the possible. 1 1
Only that which is conceived purely in terms of concepts, the
thesis runs, is as immutable as the idea. What Aristotle overlooks
here, and about which we shall have more to say later, is, first of all,
quite simply the abstractive quality of concepts. That is to say that,
in
This moment of abstraction, that the concept is itself mediated by the sensible, is not understood by Aristotle - and here, too, he stands on Platonic ground. Reflection on the act of the subject by which such a thing as an idea or concept comes into being does not take place. To
order to come into being at all, concepts must refer to something sensible from which they are abstracted. In being abstracted the con- cept retains a multiplicity of features common to sense data while excluding those features which are not common to the individual objects subsumed under the concept - in this case mental objects.
?
?
56 LECTURE EIGHT
? be sure, both thinkers analyse how thought elevates itself to concepts, but here the concept is presupposed as the in-itself, and despite all the epistemological reflections to be found in both thinkers, they overlook the fact that the path they describe is not external to the concept but is a necessary moment of that concept; it is inherent in that concept's meaning and cannot, therefore, be disregarded in con- sidering the concept. In other words, if Aristotle teaches the immanence of the concept in the object, by which he appears to dissolve the abstractness of the concept in relation to what it subsumes, for him this immanence of the concept in the object is ontological; that is, the concept is in itself in the object, without reference to the abstracting
subject. True, it is connected to the non-conceptual element within the object in a manner which Aristotle himself never clearly elabor- ated; and I would even say that it is inseparable from that element. But the real nature of the relationship between the concept and what it refers to in the concrete object is never worked out. The reason is that the concept is conceived as something existing in itself, which, in a sense, migrates into the real object, where it is amalgamated with the sensible material. To characterize once more the difference between the Aristotelian immanence of the concept and a dialectical view, one might perhaps use a scientific image and say that in Aristotle the
relationship of concept to concrete things is that of an amalgam and not of a chemical compound, in which the two apparently antithetical moments or elements are so fused that one cannot exist without the
other .
The interest which motivated Aristotle in arriving at this interpre-
tation was really an interest in change. And one might discern a very fundamental step in the development from Plato to Aristotle in the fact that while Aristotle, too, located truth in the immutable, he was nevertheless interested in change, attempting to grasp in it a relation to the unchanging - whereas in Plato any interest in change lay far in the background. In Aristotle, therefore, as is almost always the case with advancing enlightenment and differentiation, thought became incomparably more dynamic than in Plato. And it can now be said - if I might for a moment describe the trajectory of Aristotle's Meta- physics from this aspect - that Aristotle's work is an attempt to bring together the motif of form with that of change, which he no longer
denies but analyses. To be sure, form is still regarded as that which exists in itself and ranks higher; in this Aristotle takes the entirely traditional view that form, EVEpYELa, is superior because it is lasting, unchanging and purer. It could also be said that Aristotle attempts to discover how the idea of the eternally immutable, as the higher, is to
be synthesized with that of the mutable, as that which presents itself
? ? ? LECTURE EIGHT
57
? to us empirically. And here Aristotle arrives at an extraordinarily important and profound insight, that all change presupposes some- thing unchangeable, and all becoming something that has not become. It might be doubted - and this doubt is, if you like, the quintessence
of Kant's critique of metaphysics - whether the conclusion drawn from becoming to something which has not become, and from change to the unchanging, is legitimate. But first, before dealing with that question, it should be noted that this conclusion contains the implic- itly dialectical view that the notion of something dynamic, of change, of becoming, is impossible without reference to something fixed. This is, I would say in passing, one of Aristotle's most magnificent dis- coveries, to which we are hardly able to give its due weight because it has become so self-evident to us that we no longer know what an enormous exertion of genius its attainment must have cost. The idea that there can be no mediation without the immediate - though also, of course, no immediacy without mediation - and that there is no movement which is not the movement of something which, relative to it, has a moment of fixity, later became the central proposition of
dialectical philosophy, or one of its key tenets. And this idea, that we cannot imagine change except in relation to something fixed, was conceived, as far as I am aware, by Aristotle - unless one interprets certain tendencies in Plato's late dialogues in this sense, on which point, given the highly controversial character of the Parmenides dia- logue in particular, I would not presume to pass judgement in face of the conclusions of conventional philologists.
I did say, however, that in Aristotle there is a kind of short-circuit or false conclusion at this point. It is the supposition that, because every change needs something fixed, or all becoming something which has become, this fixed thing must be absolutely unchangeable. This false assumption, which is one of the main concerns in Kant's critique in the doctrine of antinomies,12 is always taken at face value, as one of the antitheses of the transcendental dialectic. I believe you can only understand how Aristotle arrived at this curious conclusion if you bear in mind that the concept of the infinite was foreign to anti- quity, and that really means to ancient mathematics. I am aware that this statement, like all such statements, can be met with counter- examples. I also know that in ancient mathematics there were early
forms of infinitesimal calculus. And in one of the next lectures we shall have occasion to notel3 that Aristotle sometimes uses the concept of
the
non-limited, which goes back to the a:7TEtpOV of Anaximander. 14 Despite this, I believe it is legitimate to maintain that the permeation of the whole of consciousness by the notion of infinity, and the distinc- tion between the finite and the infinite, as presupposed by the concept
?
?
58 LECTURE EIGHT
? of transcendence in monotheistic religions and as buttressed by the hegemony of infinitesimal mathematics in the modern natural sci- ences - that all this was alien to antiquity. If you will concede this for a moment - and I think one may concede it without doing too much violence to the texts - you will readily understand that precisely such determinants as that of an absolute cause, and all the categories which for us have the character of the transcendent, that is, which can only be posited in infinity, in accordance with our whole education and our habits of thought - become in his thought determinants of the finite, simply because the world (if I may put it like this) is finite; and
because infinity, or the idea that the world is absolutely unlimited, is entirely foreign to his thinking.
And I would say that the fact that ontology, by its nature, posits mental categories as absolutely valid is connected with this constitutive character of finitude, since these categories are themselves conceived within a finite realm, within a closed world - whereas there is no space
for them in the open world, blown apart by the concept of infinity, in which we have lived, to an increasing degree, for almost four hundred years. To that extent it might be said that ontology, as the attempt to encompass something infinite with finite determinants, itself has some- thing archaic about it; that it is something which, in some sense, has
been left behind by the development of mind towards the present concept of the infinite. However, if one were to review and analyse the history of philosophy from this perspective one would come across countless archaisms of this kind - a fact which, paradoxically enough, has been repeatedly emphasized by the opposite position, the school of Heidegger, although there it is seen as something positive. What must be noted, therefore, is, firstly, that one can only speak of change with reference to something fixed; and, secondly, that the positive tendency of metaphysics stems from the fact that infinity was alien to
antiquity. For this reason, relationships or categories which we can no longer imagine except in terms of the infinite, and therefore as transcendent, were turned in antiquity into relationships of finitude. I would only add that the switch to the concept of infinity in later philosophy is, of course, connected to the increased prominence given to the knowing subjectivity, the spirit (Geist), since the spirit was defined from the first as something infinite in itself - in contrast to the finitude of the diversity to which it is related. Now this doctrine of immutability, with the connected notion that all mutability finally goes back to something immutable, has survived throughout the history of metaphysics, to the point that it became the subject of Kant's third antinomy. u And it has also had incalculable consequences for theology, since Aristotelian theology really has its centre in
this
? LECTURE EIGHT 59
? doctrine, in the form of the doctrine of the 'unmoved mover' of all things. 16 The unmoved mover is, fundamentally, nothing other than pure form existing in itself, which, as it were, draws everything up towards it. Although itself immobile, it is like a magnet of pure actu- ality, or pure energy, pulling up everything which is merely potential towards it and, in this way, realizing itself to an ever-increasing de- gree. That, really, is the core of Aristotle's Metaphysics, if the core is defined as the point at which his metaphysics passes over into theology. The central point of any metaphysics is probably to be found where the transition between metaphysics and theology takes placeY And it takes place precisely in this relationship of the immobile to motion, to which it is mediated by the fact that it draws everything which merely exists to itself. And, in a sense, motion is already latent in the merely existent, since the latter, as potentiality, has within itself the ability to move towards the most perfect and highest order of being. The idea of the analogia entis, the analogy between the creature and
the creator,18 is thus already sketched out, if you like, in this theory of Aristotle.
Aristotle's Metaphysics therefore raises a further question - the question of what the unchanging, or that which has not become (das Ungewordene), actually is. And this gives rise to two categories which
have had a decisive influence on the subsequent history of western metaphysics, the concepts of substance and accidence. These two con- cepts will be examined in the next lecture.
? ? ? ,
?
,
LECTURE NINE
24June 1965
? We now have to consider the question of what the unchanging, or that which has not become (das Ungewordene), which might be called the ontological residue in Aristotle's ontology, actually is. In seeking an answer we come across two determinants which cannot be resolved into each other, and which are thus the source of the dualism which
has exerted a crucial influence on the whole history of western philosophy. On the one hand we have the substrate, which is subject to change, and on the other the properties; change consists in the communication of properties to the substrate. But the properties - to make you aware of this straight away - are not regarded as something transient and secondary, but as constant, unchanging, something which has not become. And indeed, it is on these properties that Aristotelian philosophy placed the greatest emphasis throughout its
development, and to which it attached the gravest importance. That, ? then, is the origin of the dualism which has been predominant through- ' out the western tradition, which was first expressed through the con- cepts of the substantial and the accidental, then became central to medieval philosophy, including its terminology, and from there passed over into the rationalist philosophy of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. We now know that these philosophers represent two things: both the nominalist protest against scholasticism, and a direct continuation of the Aristotelian-scholastic problematic. Such is the complexity of the history of philosophy, which escapes any simple formula.
What I just
now called the substrate, and which I ask you to distinguish from substance - please forgive the pedantry, but not for nothing are we
? ? LECTURE NINE 61
? nearing the realm of scholasticism, where it is impossible to manage without a certain measure of subtlety in the definition of terms - the substrate, then, is what Aristotle calls 'matter' or 'stuff': in Greek vAY], translated into Latin as materia. The term was taken up again by the phenomenological school to designate the material element, irreducible to meaning or intention, in the facts of consciousness, and is probably familiar to you from there. But in Aristotle it has not this subjective, epistemological meaning but a thoroughly objective, ontological one.
Here you must distinguish terminologically - to reiterate the point in order to eliminate any confusion - between vAY] and ova{a. Ova{a means true being and refers, on the one hand, to the determinate, individual thing and, on the other, to fLOPrp? , form, or ElSo,>, essence in the Platonic sense - whereas vAY], as something universal and inde- terminate, represents neither this specific thing here, T6SE TL, nor, on the other hand, the general, idea-like quality of the form or the fLOPrp? . Now the properties which this vAY] takes on are called either ElSo,>, like the Platonic Ideas, or (I believe I told you this in one of the lectures before the Whitsun vacation) fLoPrp? , meaning much the same as 'form'
(Gestalt). I don't attach importance to this terminology for its own sake, but because, without it, I cannot explain a crucial twist in Aristotle's thought - which, I would say, is the most specifically Aris- totelian feature of his entire philosophy. For him, the substantial is precisely not what I have just called the substrate, it is not matter; on the contrary, matter and substance are distinguished in his work - if I might express it in modern terms. For Aristotle the substantial is pure form, exactly as the Idea is substantial in Plato, while the whole hylic level, matter in the sense of that which is given only in sensible terms, is the non-existent, fL? av. And this peculiar twist, by which substance is equated with form rather than matter in Aristotle, comes about
because the substrate, vAY], or matter, is stripped of all determinateness, so that it becomes something entirely empty, and comes extraordin- arily close to the non-existent in Plato. This results from a process of reduction through abstraction, although this abstraction is not sub- jected to any specific critical reflection in Aristotle's objectively orien- tated philosophy. This in turn gives rise to a paradox, an idea running counter to all popular notions, which has dominated the whole of metaphysical consciousness to the point where it has become a kind of second nature to thought. It is the idea that form, which might be thought to be ephemeral and unreal, something merely conceptual and pale, in contrast to the real and tangible solidity of matter, is made into the true reality, in contrast to which - at least to begin with - the other, hylic stratum, matter as the substrate of cognition,
is reduced to something in the strict sense unreal, mere potentiality.
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? You can already find here - to draw your attention to what I regard as a crucial connection in the history of philosophy - the principle of idealism, by which the mental appears as the truly real, while that which is given by the senses, the sensible object of experi- ence, is seen as less real, a mere function. The ramifications of this principle are still seen in the positivist conceptions of Hume or Ernst
Mach. To this extent, therefore, Aristotelian philosophy is idealistic, in the precise sense I have just defined: that a higher order of reality is attributed to forms than to their content. But this is a very peculiar kind of idealism, in that it is really an objective idealism, an idealism conceived only with regard to the objects of knowledge, but not, or not essentially, with reference to the thinking subject. However, be- cause the forms, or E? (YjY , to which a higher order of reality is ascribed, are the forms or properties of something, they are not, as in Plato, simply being-in-itself, but are always mediated by that ofwhich they are the forms. A circumstance which I pointed out to you in one of the last lectures has therefore made itself felt in Aristotle's thought: that we cannot speak of a form without saying: the form ofsomething. We do not speak of form as such, but of the form of a painting, of a piece of music, or, to use this frightful example once more,l the form
of this blackboard. At this point, therefore, Aristotle's reflections are extraordinarily complicated. On the one hand, the Platonic doctrine that Ideas or Forms have being in themselves is maintained, in the sense that reality - or at any rate, higher reality - is attributed only to them; but, on the other hand, this reality is not susceptible to thought,
or only within that in which it is realized. This makes the question of the realization of form the central problem. For while form is re- garded as the higher reality and that which has true being-in-itself, nevertheless, it has this being only within matter. Thus, the truly fundamental problem of Aristotle's philosophy becomes the question of the realization of form. And this question is, at the same time, none other than the question about change, which relates both to the effect of form on matter and to matter itself, and finally, to the rela- tion between the two. Aristotle's position on this point is an extremely advanced one, in that he not only recognizes these two poles of be- ing, as we might call them, but also subjects their relationship to ? analysis; and in that his philosophy, as a theory of invariants, now has its point of attack in precisely this relationship between its two opposite poles.
Through this twist, Aristotle's critique of Plato's philosophy, which I discussed first, is taken over into his attempt to rescue it, which I discussed next. In accordance with what I have just said - that while form is the higher category, matter cannot be conceived without form
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? or form without matter - the goal, or T/)\o<;, of becoming or change is that matter should take on form. This concept of TEAO<;, or final purpose, has become perhaps the most fertile of all Aristotle's con- cepts for philosophy, since it is the origin of the distinction between cause and purpose. Purpose is defined for the first time as the higher category, which draws the lower towards it - in contrast to cause, or causes, which are said to be effective only in the lower realm, the realm of matter. The whole problematic of the relation of cause to purpose, which is, of course, the theme of Kant's third critique, the
Critique ofJudgement, and the entire subject matter of teleology - whether we should think of an entity in a causal-mechanical way, or from the standpoint of that towards which it tends, its higher destiny - therefore has its origin in this basic Aristotelian doctrine, which can really be called the core of the Metaphysics. From it Aristotle derives, as the crux of his Metaphysics - at the centre of which we find our- selves now - a theory which runs exactly counter to naive intuition. If we leave aside speculations like those of Heraclitus or the Eleatics, this is the first time that philosophy has placed itself in direct opposi-
tion to so-called natural common sense. This is especially out of keeping with a scientifically conceived philosophy like Aristotle's, which otherwise gives so much scope to common sense. This theory states that form is the true reality; to express it Aristotle uses specific terms which have become famous, such as EVEpYEw or EVTEMxEta,
and also TO EVEPYEtI1: ov, meaning that which must come into being through energy, through form. For him, therefore, reality is actually energy; it is reality only in so far as it is formed reality - and it is not the material of that reality. Matter, by contrast, is defined as mere possibility or potentiality, because it must always have within it the possibility of attaining such reality, of attaining its form, its fLoPrp? . Matter is therefore called DVvafLt<;, which is very peculiar, since, fol- lowing the Greek meaning of the word, we associate DVvafLt<; with the concept of force. But here DvVafLt<; means the same as possibility; it is, therefore, precisely not the static and unchanging entity that we might
associate with the concept of matter, but is, as the word indicates, a dynamic principle. If I might give you a cross-reference to the later history of philosophy, this doctrine of Aristotle's is a speculation which reappeared at the height of German idealism, in Schelling, where matter is likewise conceived, in an objective dialectic, as a principle which has the inherent tendency to move towards a higher form - except that in Schelling this comes about in the light of a subjective
reflection which has already taken place. 2 That is to say that in Schelling the spirit of matter is already seen as the absolute subject - a reflection which, of course, cannot be present in Aristotle.
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? ,
I repeat, therefore: form is reality, EVEpyna, while matter is mere possibility, Dvvap,L<;. It could therefore be said that Aristotle's metaphysics is an idealism which has not yet reflected on itself, an objective idealism. However, the mediation of form and matter which
follows from this concept of reality is not really carried through by Aristotle. I have already stated this in principle but would like to recapitulate it at this point. Although the two terms, 'form' and 'mat- ter', are related to each other, this is done only externally, through the capacity of matter to become something other than it is; that is to say, it is not itself always also form, it is not mediated within itself by
form. As a result, despite the anti-Platonic twist, form becomes once again something existing in itself, whereas, according to a consistent theory of mediation, it would be dependent on matter. We are pre- sented with the paradox that although form, according to its own concept, can only be the form of something, it now becomes, as the logical conclusion of Aristotle's thought, absolute reality. And, as a result of the same unmediated dogmatism, possibility becomes an equally paradoxical concept. Pure possibility is, of course, a formal
determinant in which thought and categorization are implicit. In Aristotle's philosophy it is only conferred on matter, vAYj, through form. Yet the fact that something contains the possibility of becoming something else is now attributed to it as if it were a property before all determination, residing in matter as such. 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
LECTURE NINE 65
? 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.
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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.