No More Learning

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LECTURE FOUR
? ? he saw as antithetical, Plato and Aristotle; he contrasted what today would be vulgarly called the idealist Plato to the realist Aristotle,
who, as Goethe put it, had his feet planted firmly on the earth. 7 After what I have just said, my assertion that metaphysics really began with Aristotle will be doubly shocking (I seem to be bent on shocking you) because the importance Plato seems to attach to the higher world, to transcendence, as against the world itself, appears to make him far more metaphysical than his pupil Aristotle. But I believe we have arrived here at the central, problematic point from which you will be best able to understand what metaphysics really means. For even if we concede that Plat08 gave much greater weight, nolens volens (or however it may be), to the world of f1-? DV, or non- being, to the world of sensible experience, than he should have done according to the strict doctrine of Ideas; and even if we concede further that this tendency in Plato grew stronger in the course of his
long life, one thing is quite definitely lacking in his work: reflection on how these two spheres - of direct experience and of the Idea, the concept, the One, or whatever you like to call it - are related to each other. It might be best to say that while the traditional problems of metaphysics present themselves in the structure of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, they do so, as it were, objectively, without being reflected thematically in his philosophy. While it is true that the ten- sion between the sphere of transcendence and the sphere of that which is merely the case, between TO OV and Ta DVTa, is present in Plato's philosophy, because it is unavoidable, breaking through again and again, his philosophy is not constituted in such a way that this tension is central to his speculation. Now, what I should really like to make understandable to you is that the sphere of metaphysics in the
precise sense only comes into being where this tension is itself the subject of philosophy, where it comes within the purview of thought. It might be said, therefore, that metaphysics arises at the point where the empirical world is taken seriously, and where its relation to the supra-sensible world, which was hitherto taken for granted, is sub- jected to reflection.
It is possible to imagine the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, without doing it too much violence, as a secularization of theology. The Platonic Ideas have been called the gods turned into concepts, and one would scarcely disagree, just as the supreme Idea, the Idea of the Good or of Justice, TO ayat'f6v or ? oLKawavvYj, is frequently referred to in Plato as t'fE6<;, probably in direct continuation of a Socratic tradition. But the problem posed by this secularization is
that once the gods are turned into concepts, that is, entities of ap- pearance, their relationship to appearances becomes something quite
? LECTURE FOUR 19
? other than if the gods were simply located in the Beyond, on their Olympus. This problem emerges again and again in the epistemolo- gical and logical difficulties with which Plato has to contend. But, if I might put it thus, he was naively theological in failing to draw from the secularization of the gods into concepts, which he had brought about, the conclusion that the relation of the concept or the Idea to the world of appearances was thereby radically changed, and made problematic. One might define metaphysics as the product of a breach between essences - the gods secularized as ideas - and the phenom- enal world, a breach which is inevitable as soon as the gods become concepts and being becomes a relation to existing things; at the same time, however, these two moments cannot be naively related together or formulated concurrently. I believe this way of stating the matter may better define the locus of metaphysics in the history of philosophy, and thus define the essence of metaphysics as well (for I believe the essential is always historical), than would be possible in the relatively
superficial lectures one might give on the themes of metaphysics. Following from this definition one might say that metaphysics, because it attempts to regard the Ideas as something linked to the empirical world but endangered by advancing secularization, was itself threatened from the first in its own development. In this con-
nection it is certainly no accident that nominalism - the radically rationalistic view which denied any autonomous existence to ideas - based itself precisely on Aristotle, and did so twice over, both in Arabian philosophy and in scholasticism; although, as cannot be
emphasized too much, Aristotle himself, as you will find out, was anything but a nominalist. When Heidegger refers to metaphysics as a kind of rationalistic decline from the original understanding of
being in archaic philosophy,9 I cannot entirely disagree, from a strictly phenomenological viewpoint, with his characterization. On one hand metaphysics is always, if you will, rationalistic as a critique of a conception of true, essential being-in-itself which does not justify itself before reason; but, on the other, it is always also an attempt to
rescue something which the philosopher's genius feels to be fading
and vanishing. There is in fact no metaphysics, or very little, which is
not an attempt to save - and to save by means of concepts - what
appeared at the time to be threatened precisely by concepts, and was
in the process of being disintegrated, or corroded, to use the more
affective language of the ancient anti-Sophists. Metaphysics is thus,
one might say, something fundamentally modern - if you do not
restrict the concept of modernity to our world but extend it to in-
clude Greek history. And it is no accident that metaphysics re-emerges in the High Middle Ages, a period of urban bourgeois culture in
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LECTURE FOUR
? ? which the naive immediacy of Christian faith was already breaking down; and then a second time in the broad movement of thought which is generally embraced by terms such as the Renaissance, the Reformation and humanism.
Aristotle, in the first truly metaphysical work of literature - the one which gave that branch of philosophy its name - criticizes the Platonic attempt to oppose essence to the world of the senses, as something separate and absolutely different from it. Above all, he criticizes the Platonic hypostasis of universal concepts as a duplica- tion of the world. In this he makes a very strong and legitimate case, based on the argument that all the attributes of the Ideas are derived from the empirical world, on which they live, rather as the rulers lived on the work of their servants or slaves. At the same time, how- ever, he then seeks in his turn to extract an essential being from the sensible, empirical world, and thereby to save it; and it is precisely this twofold aim of criticism and rescue which constitutes the nature of metaphysics. The polarity between critical rationality, on the one
hand, and the pathos of rescue, on the other, points to the essence of traditional metaphysics, or at least has done so throughout its his- tory. Metaphysics can thus be defined as the exertion of thought to save what at the same time it destroys. That this formulation is ten- able, and not arbitrary, is indicated, I believe, by the fact that the very same structure which I have demonstrated to you in principle by the example of Aristotle's Metaphysics - or as a precondition of that work - is also characteristic of Kant's position with regard to
the problem of metaphysics. Although Kant, in upholding a blunt, unreconciled dualism, undoubtedly has more in common with the philosophical climate of Plato than of Aristotle - and the Critique of Pure Reason contains, in the introduction to the section on the Ideas, the finest pages ever written about Plato,10 pages I would most strongly urge all of you to read - it can be said that in this double intention of critique and rescue Kant was closer to Aristotle, whom he did not particularly like, than to Plato. ll If you will take this historical-philosophical interpretation on trust for the time being, you will perhaps understand why I consider it necessary, for a correct understanding of the concept of metaphysics, to begin with an over- view of the main theoretical motifs of Aristotle's work. This does require you, however, to take some account of his historical position, for only this will allow you to picture more concretely what I have in mind.
This task is made more difficult today - in philosophy, not in classical philology - by the influence of Heidegger and his school. Although he recognized very clearly the rationalist, Enlightenment
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? ? LECTURE FOUR 21
? ? moment in Aristotle, Heidegger attempted to rediscover a much more 'pristine' Aristotle, to an extent which is hard to conceive. And be- fore going on to Aristotle I think I need to offer a brief critique of this approach. I'd like to do this by examining closely a very specific piece of interpretation, since I believe that such things are more clearly revealed by concrete details, rather than by remaining on the level of general assertion. I am concerned here with the first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and I shall consider only this one sentence. I shall write this sentence in Greek on the blackboard; I am aware that many of you do not know Greek, but there is no other way to proceed; and I shall explain everything you need to know in order to understand it. The sentence is as follows: lluv'TE'; av&pw7TOt 'TOU do/vat 0p/yov'Tat cpVUEt. I2 According to the generally accepted trans- lations, this means: people by nature strive after knowledge. A well- known translation renders it as: 'All men by their very nature feel the urge to know. '13 This sentence is reproduced in Heidegger's Being and Time (please keep in mind the usual translation: all people by nature strive zealously after knowledge). Heidegger's version - which, incidentally, is presented cautiously, not as a direct translation - is as follows: 'The treatise which stands first in the collection of Aristotle's treatises on ontology begins with the sentence: lluv'TE'; av&pw7TOt 'TOU
dOEvat 0p/yov'Tat cpVUEt. The care for seeing is essential to man's Being. ' It is not my purpose here to poke fun at the stiltedness of this passage, for a mannered, estranging approach to a strange text can have a very salutary function. And I'd like to say at once that Heidegger offers resistance to the flattening out of Greek texts when rendered into our language, as has traditionally been done. How- ever, his interpretation here does not produce simply the salutary alienation effect I referred to, but violates the meaning on the most literal level. When he says, for example: 'man's Being rim Sein des Menschen]',t4 the human being is already put in the singular, pre- supposing a priority of the essence of the human being, and thus a kind of anthropological ontology, which in Aristotle is still to be established. I5 Aristotle does not say 'the human being', or 'existence as such', but simply and plainly 'all people', 'the people', and not 'individual people'. For dO/vat means quite simply to know, and av&pw1TOt 'TOU dOEVat OpEyoV'Tat means: people earnestly seek or strive after knowledge. Now it is undoubtedly correct, as I had occasion to indicate to you earlier,16 that this dO/VaL contains the stem [f]to, which is also in lOEa and which characterizes the sensory relationship of seeing. But in his interpretation Heidegger simply suppresses the whole history of language which, starting from the rich, sensible
? conceptions originally associated with words, progressively sublimated
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LECTURE FOUR
? ? the words into concepts. This happened in Greek just as it has happened in our language. There can be no doubt that at the stage when Aristotle wrote, EtOEVat already meant to know in the sense of a consciousness emancipated from the sensible present. But because ontology, which in Aristotle is only a theme for discussion, is, as I have said, presupposed by Heidegger in an act of 're-pristination', consciousness is supposed to have a direct sensible perception of
essence, or being, or whatever it may be, as if it were something existing in itself. And so Heidegger translates this EtOEVat back to its much earlier lineage as sensible presence, although by this stage it had entirely lost that quality.
He then says that 'the care of seeing is essential to man's Being' [Im Sein des Menschen liegt wesenhaft die Sorge des Sehens]. Here it becomes blatantly clear what Heidegger is up to. Anyone even slightly acquainted with the history of ancient philosophy and having the
rudiments of Greek will know that the word CPVUEt is a philosophical term which - about a hundred years before Aristotle; I cannot give you the exact date - played a part in Socraticism and Sophism, in opposition to {fEUEt, as that which is so 'by nature', as against what is merely posited, what is {fEUEt. The term for 'essential' would be quite different, perhaps QV'TWS- or QV'TWS- QV, as it appears in Plato; but quite certainly not CPVUEt, since there is in CPVUEt an echo of cpvms- and thus a memory of physical nature from the old hylozoistic period. So the sentence means quite simply - very much in keeping with the men- tality of Aristotle, who was a peculiar mixture of an ontologist and a professor of physics - that human beings, as they are, strive by nature for knowledge. But as for the idea that this was meant in the sense17 of some definite ontological pre-structuring of existence in which being was to be revealed - no shadow of that is to be found in Aristotle. Finally, the word 0pEyw{fat means no more than to exert
? oneself, to long for, to strive after something - and has not the slight- est connection with care [Sorge], which, as we know, is one of the core categories in Heidegger. On the contrary, the straightforward
'love of wisdom,18 has had foisted on it an existential interpretation - that it harbours the care of Dasein for its being - although, as you will see in any dictionary, no philology or linguistic knowledge can produce a link between this 0pEyw{fat and the concept of care.
In examining this sentence in some depth I believe I have shown you what I wanted to develop as the main idea of this lecture: that
Aristotle starts out from an everyday, rational, sensible conscious- ness and attempts, by reflecting on what is given directly by the
senses, to attain insight into true being - instead of presupposing this essential realm, as was the case in archaic thought. If that were not
LECTURE FOUR 23
? ? the case - if this sentence were as Heidegger interprets it - then Aris- totle would not really be a metaphysician, but precisely the onto- logist which, in a different place, Heidegger says he is not. 19 But the moment of tension in metaphysics is located exactly in this seemingly straightforward, empirical sentence, in which, however, the striving for knowledge and thus, objectively, for absolute truth, is posited as
need - so that here, too, everything is finally constituted from the point of view of truth. And this really defines quite clearly the intel- lectual climate within which Aristotle's Metaphysics has its place. In the next lecture it will be time to tell you something about the con- tent of the Metaphysics.
a
? ? LECTURE FIVE
1 June 1965
? ? ? I shall start today by presenting to you, as best I can, some of the main ideas in Aristotle's Metaphysics; this will lead on to some reflections on the problem of metaphysics in general. I shall base my exposition mainly on the account given by Eduard Zeller,1 although I am well aware that, with regard to philological details, scholarship on Aris- totle has made extraordinary progress since the time of Zeller's work. I should like to take this opportunity to say, however, that much of this detailed progress seems to me to have been at the expense of philosophical vision, which was available to Zeller as a member of the Hegelian school to a degree which has subsequently been entirely lost. I therefore prefer the overview and insight he gives us in his
book to a possibly greater accuracy of detail, as I am more concerned to throw light on the problems and history of metaphysics through Aristotle than to give you an irreproachably punctilious account of that philosopher's work.
The definition of metaphysics is to be found in the first book, Book A. It agrees with what I have already told you about the themes of metaphysics/ even though its subject matter is somewhat narrower than the diversity of themes we are accustomed to associate with that term. The book states that metaphysics is the 'science of first prin- ciples and causes';3 one is struck first, of course, by the link with the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, which likewise promises to deal with the first principles, the highest concepts, the causes of phenomena. The first complex which can be extracted from Aristotle's work Meta- physics4 and which is fundamental to all the rest - I'm expressly
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25
? following Zeller in this - is the complex of the particular and the universal, which can be said to be really the basic theme of Aris- totelian Metaphysics. And I should point out to you straight away that in the case of Aristotle - unlike that of Plato - one can talk of a system, to the extent that the methodological and, above all, the epistemological considerations we are accustomed to summarize under the title of the Organon are so closely bound up with the argumentation of the Metaphysics that some of the main arguments of the latter work go back to these methodological writings, the
Organon. In particular, they go back within this methodological cor- pus to the work on the Categories (KaTYJyop{at). I shall only touch on the fact that 'categories' in Aristotle means something quite differ- ent than it does in Kant, namely the basic forms which are brought to light by an analysis of the procedures of speech, and not the basic subjective forms of thought; I assume that most of you are aware of this. s In starting from the problem of the particular and the universal in Aristotle, I am following up something I set out in the last lecture, the idea that metaphysics in general has the dual character of the crit- ical or, as is often said, the destructive, and of the apologetic and rescuing; and you will see that this characterization applies in an exceptional degree to Aristotle.
It can be said that his treatise - I mean his deliberations, since they were not contained in a separate treatise - his deliberations on the problem of the particular and the universal, fall initially within the
sphere of his critical work. However, the accent here is on 'initially', and this gives rise to a problem with which the whole of Aristotle's Metaphysics confronts us. The first thesis, it might be said, is that the universal is not substantial; that it is not, like the Platonic Ideas, which are universal concepts, something existing in and for itself, independently of its realization. Rather, one can only speak of a universal to the extent that it manifests itself in a particular. In other words, reflection on the process of abstraction has much more force in Aristotle's deliberations on the universal than it had in Plato, but
does not go so far as to conceive universal concepts as pure abstrac- tions. Rather, the difficulty and, if I might put it thus, the point of Aristotle's Metaphysics is that while, on the one hand, one cannot think of the universal independently of that in which it is concret- ized, on the other hand, it is not a mere abstraction in relation to the particulars subsumed under it. If you can picture the problem in this accentuated form, I believe you will be able to cope with the difficulties of this theory straight away. In general, one can only deal with difficulties by looking them in the eye. And Aristotle does make things rather difficult for us by presenting himself as a
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LECTURE FIVE
'commonsensical' type of thinker in whose work, as in that of a number of British thinkers later, the most unfathomable problems appear initially as if they could yield self-evident answers to simple human understanding, whereas in reality they conceal abysses. I touch here on the specific difficulty presented by an interpretation of Aris- totle as a whole. Let me return now to what I indicated at the outset, that I should like to relate my exposition of Aristotle to the history and overall themes of western metaphysics. It can be said that his doctrine that the universal is not a substantial moment contains the
seeds of what is called nominalism, which holds that universal con- cepts exist post rem and not ante rem. But - and I say this to exclude all misunderstandings from the outset - it would be a grave mis- understanding to describe Aristotle himself as a nominalist. I could say that his Metaphysics circles around this theme; that its problem lies precisely in the contradictory situation whereby on one hand the
universal is denied substantiality while, on the other, universal con- cepts are not mere abbreviations of the particulars subsumed under them - rather, they have an attribute which raises them above flatus vocis, above the mere breath of the voice. And if you want to under- stand the concept of metaphysics, you must pay attention from the first to this constellation of moments in Aristotle's Metaphysics. He says that, in contrast to the universal, only the particular is substan- tial; that only the single, apparent, concrete phenomenon is real. This concept of reality or, better, this concept of the substantial in his work, is denoted by the noun ovuta, from which the Latin term for substance is derived/ and which itself is derived from Elvat, to be.
This ovuta, or 1TPWT17 ovu{a, 'primary being', constitutes, from this perspective, the quintessential theme of Aristotle's work. Only the particular shall, to begin with, be such an ovu{a; only it shall be real.
This takes us to the second basic thesis of Aristotle's Metaphysics concerning the relationship of universal to particular: the thesis that essence or, as Plato would say, the Idea, does not lie outside the things whose essence it is, but is only in so far as it is in things themselves. In other words, Plato's basic doctrine, concerning the xwpw/-to,; of the Ideas as against the existent, the 'abyss of meaning,7
which separates the Ideas or the universal concepts from the concrete individual things subsumed by them, is challenged by Aristotle. And his approach has what looks like a thoroughly progressive and mod- ern moment in stating that, if I separate the Ideas completely from everything existent and make them absolutely autonomous, I turn them into an existent of a second power, of a second, higher order. In modern terms we would say that I objectify or reify the Ideas. And from this he derived the entirely plausible objection that the whole
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? ? world would then be duplicated; on one hand there would be a world which is mere appearance and on the other a world which is being- in-itself, but which borrows all its qualities from the empirical world,
so that it reappears in the latter - from which issue all kinds of logical conundrums. I shall point out in passing (to show you how contemporary all these Aristotelian questions are) that exactly the same problem makes itself felt in modern epistemology and meta- physics, as when Husserl posits a region of pure essences - of, shall
we say, immanent consciousness - and a region comprising the high- est unity of psychological determination; this would give rise to a double world: on one side a highly formalized psychology and on the other a doctrine of pure essences, of the forms of consciousness.
Finally, if the Ideas are presented as absolutely xwp{,;, absolutely separate, as was the case in Plato, this gives rise to a second inconsist- ency of which Aristotle accuses Plato, and which forms the pivot of his own Metaphysics. It then becomes inconceivable how - as Plato taught and as Aristotle himself teaches with even greater emphasis - the universal, the Ideas, could have any motive force, or how far they could be the causes of their own appearances; for they are said to be absolutely separate from precisely the phenomenal world they are supposed to move. And when we are faced by such a division, by the positing of two absolutely different spheres, one of which, for the sake of brevity, we shall call the ontological and the other the ontic, the sphere of existing things, it is simply impossible to conceive how
one might interact with the other, as Plato - and Aristotle again demonstrates this with great critical acuity - steadfastly teaches. This problem, too - how it is possible for a pure idea to be an efficient force acting on phenomena - has cropped up throughout the entire history of philosophy. I should like to illustrate it (again with regard to the persistent influence of this idea on the history of metaphysics in particular) by the example of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. The problem with which this work of moral philosophy grapples
above all (although he never states squarely that this is its real con- cern) is how the moral law, which is something purely spiritual, arising from the intelligible world and independent of any empirical determination, manages to act upon the empirical world - as a com- pulsion or duty to act in accordance with the ideas. s If you look at
the Critique ofPractical Reason from this point of view, you will see that Kant took enormous pains in trying to resolve this question; and that he was only finally able to do so by the complete intellectualiza- tion of the will, so that even those acts which affect the empirical world through the pure ideas are conceived as purely intellectual acts. Kant fails here to realize that if these acts are purely intellectual one
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LECTURE FIVE
,
cannot really understand how th(! y could become objective, how they could objectify themselves at all in the world of phenomena. This problem, therefore, which can b(! levelled as criticism against Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, is already fully contained in Aristotle's Metaphysics, in the form of his r(! alization that if the Ideas or univer-
sal concepts are absolutely xwp{,;, that is, a realm of autonomous essence, it is impossible to conceive how and how far they can be causes of phenomena.
Now, the argument for the thesis of the substantiality of the par- ticular, which I mentioned to you, is that nothing which is predicated on some other, underlying thing can be substantial. That is, only that is substantial which does not need something else in order to exist. And with regard to the ovu{a, in the sense of particular things, he now argues, somewhat curiously, that this characteristic - that we do not need anything else in order to recognize it - is possessed only by particular things. This version of the concept of substance is a fun- damental thesis of western metaphysics. It holds that the substantial is that which needs nothing else in order to exist; this tenet has
been handed down by scholasticism and, remarkably, reappears in the philosophy of Descartes. As Koyre has shown/ Descartes's philo- sophy is linked to scholasticism to an extraordinary degree, far more extensively than one would expect, given Descartes's polemical atti- tude towards his educators. Yet this concept of substance recurs in the Principia, in the famous formulation that substance is that 'quod nulla re indiget ad existendum';l0 that is, which needs no other thing in order to exist. And if you will permit me a brief historical aside, this interpretation of substance, as that which needs nothing else in order to exist, has survived throughout the entire history of philosophy. Not only is this definition of the concept of substance to be found among Spinoza's famous definitions in the Ethics,! 1 for example, but it even re-emerges in modern philosophy, in Husserl's
Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. 12 Precisely this theorem of Descartes, incidentally, has its origin in the 'doctrine of categories' in the Organon. 13 In Aristotle, therefore, metaphysics is as tightly bound up with logic and epistemology as it was to be again at the height of western philosophy, in Kant and Hegel.
I should like to point out that this thesis includes something which is not said in as many words but which has its origin here and forms part of the bedrock, if you will, of the whole of western thought. We are all brought up so much within it that (until philosophical reflec-
tion liberates us) we take it for granted; it is truly like second nature to the mind. According to this doctrine, that thing is substantial - in the sense that it needs nothing else - which requires no means by
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? ? ? LECTURE FIVE 29
? which we can perceive it; it is, in other words, the immediate. Thus, at the beginning of western metaphysics, stands the statement that that on which everything is supported, on which everything depends and by which knowledge should be orientated, is the immediate -
the form of the particular which Aristotle first equates with that which really and truly exists. However, at this point you must also be aware of a difference. For with a thinker as deeply connected to
western philosophy as Aristotle it is especially important to differen- tiate historically, to avoid producing a general philosophical mush in which everything communicates with everything else. The immediacy implied in the basic doctrines of Aristotle that I have set out for you is not conceived by him - at least, not primarily - as the immediacy of sensory experience. It is not, therefore, an immediacy in relation to our capacity for knowledge. And it can be assumed that Aristotle, as a pupil of Plato, was acquainted with the critique of the immediacy of subjective sensory certainty in the Theaetetus,14 and that he had assimilated it into his thought. His immediacy, therefore, is not an immediacy of consciousness, it is not 'les donnees immediates de la conscience',15 but, if one can put it so paradoxically, it is the immedi- ate in itself. Here, of course, critical reflection is at once confronted with the question of how one can speak of 'immediacy in itself' at all,
since any such immediacy, about which something is predicated, can only be immediacy for a consciousness which predicates it.
But, apart from that, I'd like to make another criticism here - not just for the sake of criticizing a historical thinker, since such an attempt would display a naivety which, I assume, you would not expect from me any more than from yourselves. I make it in order
to show you that a theory like the one I am expounding leads to extraordinary difficulties within itself. For to introduce you to Aris- totle's Metaphysics cannot be simply to set out his main theses; it must give you an awareness of the problems of his metaphysics. And to do that is necessarily to point to the difficulties which are con- cealed beneath the plausibility of the argumentation. Now, Hegel taught that there is no immediacy which is not at the same time mediated. 16 If you accept that Hegel successfully proves this point -
and I would think that there are few moments in Hegel's Logic which are as obviously convincing as this proof17 - it is no longer clear what the traditional metaphysical notion of substance, as that which absolutely requires no mediation, is supposed to mean. And it seems to me to be one of those curious anachronisms, not to say archaisms,
which the history of philosophy, and especially of metaphysics, drags along with it, that while it engaged in the critical reflections on the concept of immediacy that I have just described, it did not perceive
in
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30 LECTURE FIVE
? that the doctrine of substance, that is, the conception of substance as that which exists primarily and immediately in itself, was necessarily and profoundly affected by those reflections. If I were to say to you that philosophy has taken too little notice of this throughout its history, that would be unjust and incorrect. It has, of course, taken notice, in the form of radical nominalism, but it has not taken notice in its rationalist-speculative-idealist mainstream, if I may put it like that.
It is certainly the case that Hume, who, if you like, represents
the furthest logical conclusion to be drawn from Aristotle's doctrine of the reality of the particular, disintegrated the notion of substance for this very reason. That is to say that the concept of substance, at first inseparably bound up with the concept of the particular thing, gives way in his thought to a critique which states that the thing itself does not really exist, but only the habitual associations of subjective modes of appearance, which we then conventionally regard as things. In accordance with this, Kant turned the concept of substance into a subjective function, an activity - something which the mind produces within objects, and no longer the thing existing in itself which Aristotle terms substance qua thing. On the other hand, however, in his doctrine of ideas and, in general, in his conception of the mundus intelligibilis, the intelligible world, the notion of substance in the old Aristotelian sense still prevails in Kant's thought. 18 You can see at this point how the logical conclusion later drawn from the doctrine which begins with Aristotle - that full reality can only be attributed to particular things - resulted from an attitude which, as I said earlier, was foreign to Aristotle and to antiquity (with the exception of Sophism): the orientation towards the subject. Only when the doctrine of the reality and immediacy of the particular is combined with the conception that this immediacy is only an immediacy for the subject, is a thoroughgoing nominalism, of the kind I have just briefly illustrated by the example of Hume, possible. And, to put the matter negatively, that is also the reason why one cannot speak of nominal-
ism in Aristotle, despite the incipient tendency towards it that I have indicated. How the matter might be stated positively - you will see in a moment. To put it quite simply, there is something naively realistic in the notion of substance as used by Aristotle, and you will only be able correctly to understand his Metaphysics as a whole - something which is not easy for us today - if you do not see it in terms of our ubiquitous subjective reflection, but, to use an expression from
of of
scholasticism, in intentione recta. That means, to see it in terms the immediate objectivity of the external world, and not in terms mediation through the perceiving consciousness.
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31
? This curious intersection between the doctrine of the reality of the particular and, at the same time, a naively outward-turned realism, is another necessary feature of the structures of Aristotle's thought. Now, the truly Aristotelian element, which constitutes the entire difficulty I have been speaking about, is the fact that, despite this fundamental postulate of the reality of the particular, and the assertion that only that is substantial which does not need anything else but exists im- mediately, he was very emphatically a philosopher of mediation. To understand how this idea or (one might almost say) this cult of the immediate, of the existent in itself, is entwined in Aristotle's thought with the idea of universal mediation, is the fundamental problem in understanding the Metaphysics; and I would ask you to concentrate on this problem. You will then see - to jump ahead - that the con- cept of mediation found in Aristotle is extraordinarily different from that which those with a Hegelian training - and there will be more than a few of them among you - understand by mediation. Here, too, I would repeat like a scholastic: distinguo, I distinguish. You can only grasp the specific nature of Aristotle's approach if you dist- inguish very strictly what is meant by mediation, by middle (Mitte),
and by the intermediate (das Mittlere) in Aristotle from what they mean in the dialectic. For, to state this in advance, Aristotle was anything but a dialectical thinker, although he was at the same time a thinker of immediacy and a thinker of mediation. One might say, if I might give this a Hegelian twist, that the thesis of immediacy and the thesis of mediateness were themselves not mediated in his work - if you will allow me to make a dialectical point at this juncture. Of course, this was not such a crucial issue for Aristotle, since the dialectic did not exist at that time, so that he could not distance or differentiate his method from it in the way I have just done. Rather,
it is in keeping with the whole temper of Aristotle's philosophy, which is one of limitation, of respect, of moderation, of /1-W6TYJ<;, that he softens and limits the doctrine of substantiality as immediacy by introducing the idea of improper or secondary substances, which he calls 8EVTEpat ova{at, 'second substances'. One might also refer to them, perhaps, as second essences;19 although the word 'second' clearly indicates that they are not pure immediacies but products of abstrac- tion. They are 'second' because they only come into being on the basis of what is given primarily, particular things. These 8EVTEpat ovatat, these secondary or improper substances, cannot be hypostatized, as one would say in modern philosophical terminology, but are con- tained in particular things; they are thus immanent and not tran-
scendent. And this thesis - that although on the one hand substantial
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LECTURE FIVE
concepts exist, they are not xwp{? , they do not have their being beyond individual existing things, but are only embodied in them and are immanent to them - is really the basic thesis of the whole of Aristotle's Metaphysics. It is the source of the fundamental difference between this philosophy and Plato's - its dynamic character. For if these 8ELITEpat ova{at are immanent in particular things, instead of standing opposed to them as something external and alien, it is no longer absurd or inconceivable, Aristotle argues, that these essences
should have an effect on particular things, or that a mediation should be established between the Idea and scattered existence. I should like to close with that remark, and will continue from this point in the
next lecture.
? LECTURE SIX
3 June 1965
? ? In the last lecture I spoke about the 8EVTEpat ova{at, which can be translated as essences of second degree or second power. These can- not be posited as existing outside substances, or things - as the lang- uage of modern philosophy would make it appear. According to Aristotle they cannot be hypostatized, but are immanent in substances, and not, like the Platonic Ideas, transcendent. I also pointed out that a
problem which really is hardly comprehensible in terms of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas is at least prefigured in this aspect of Aris- totle. It is the question of how one is to conceive the mediation between the world of ideas and the world of sensible objects, or, in Kantian terms, the mediation between the noumena and the phenom- ena. I should like to express this very cautiously, as the 'ideas', now, are no longer xwp{<;, that is, they are no longer separated from the sensory, from objects, from the stuff of knowledge, but are realized only in so far as they are in these existent things. And the problem of causation, of the primary cause, which I mentioned as one 'of the problems from which metaphysics itself starts out/ is solved in prin- ciple in Aristotle's Metaphysics by the fact that this world of sensible
appearance is teleologically orientated towards these ideas or pure possibilities, which are supposed to be contained within them. In Aristotle there is an expression for this relationship of the ideas or possibilities to the existent: E'v KaTu 7TOAAWV:2 that is to say, the One in the
Many. You can see here the perspective from which I view everything I have to tell you now about Aristotle's Metaphysics. In this perspective, the themes I have just mentioned persist throughout
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? 34 LECTURE SIX
? the whole of western metaphysics. As in the game of Miihle, the pieces are already on the board in Aristotle's metaphysics; in the later phases of metaphysical thinking they are pushed about a good deal and then,
finally, as in the end-game in Miihle, they start to hop - in the form of irrationalism. For this reason, the expression 'One in the Many' is of especial interest, and I bring this term to your attention because it recurs in almost exactly the same form in Kantian philosophy, at the point where the synthesis formed by the mind [Verstand], which
according to Kant is the act of cognition, or is cognition itself, is referred to as 'unity in diversity' [Einheit in der MannigfaltigkeitV Aristotle's conception of the relationship of concept to individual existent or, to put it in Aristotle's terms, of form to matter, really contains nothing other than such a unity in diversity. I should like to point out, incidentally, that exactly the same idea that I have just
sketched also appears in the late Plato, and that it, not least, has given rise to the speculation I spoke of,4 that Aristotle may possibly have had a retroactive influence on his teacher in his late period, in the Platonic dialogue Parmenides, which, in many respects, is the most enigmatic and peculiar structure in the whole corpus of Plato's work. In it the thesis is put forward that the One exists only as the
unity of many, and that the Many exist only as a manifold of units. This idea of the reciprocity, the interrelatedness of the universal and the particular, clearly had a powerful hold on the human mind at
that point in its history. And in Aristotle it gave rise to the formula- tion I have just mentioned, which is especially important because this very idea of reciprocity - that on the one hand unity cannot exist independently of multiplicity, but, on the other, that multiplicity is only constituted by virtue of the One - this basic idea is already present in the formula of Aristotle that I have discussed.
You can see, therefore, that the idea of unity in diversity, which in the history of modern philosophy has been transposed into the notion of the ordering subject through which this unity is produced, has its
origin in ontology. That is, it stems from the fact that this unity is supposed to be the unity of being itself, which is prior to all the particular and individual things from which being is composed. This is so much the case that even the formula of unity in diversity is itself to be found in as many words in the Greek philosophers - so much is the whole of western thinking in thrall to this tradition. And it might not be entirely idle to wonder whether this whole way of thinking has been subjected, through the influence of this idea, to a kind of channelling, which has forced everything in a quite specific, very compelling but also restrictive direction; and whether what we in
later times have come to see as the rigour of ancient philosophy, or of
? LECTURE SIX 35
? philosophy in general, could be traced back to this narrowing of the Greek tradition to the relationship of the universal to the particular. Now, in Aristotle - and this is the fulcrum of his Metaphysics, the point you need to understand if you are to grasp this highly peculiar and self-contradictory structure - the universal or the form (they are the same thing in Aristotle) is, just as it was for his teacher Plato, the higher reality. In this doctrine, therefore, what I said in the last lecture with regard to the reality of the immediate is found to be stood on its head. Whereas, as it seems to me, the particular thing,
or, as it is called in Aristotle, the T6bE Tt, was first regarded as the only reality or true being, now, on the contrary, the form is the higher reality. I shall write this concept of T6bE Tt on the blackboard. This concept, too, is fundamental to the whole of western thought - since all references to facticity, to 'that there', to that which cannot be dissolved in concepts and yet for which a conceptual name is sought, originate in this word T6bE Tt. T6bE Tt - and this is very interesting with regard to the whole temper of Aristotle's thinking - is not really a concept at all, but a gesture; T6bE Tt amounts to 'this', and points to something. And Aristotle realized that a concept for this, by its nature, non-conceptual thing could not actually be formed, that it could only be expressed by a gesture - whereas later this gesture became a term, which was finally precipitated in concepts
such as a 'given', a 'datum', in scholasticism haecceitas, or whatever such terms might be.
I would now draw your attention to a major shift which took place in philosophical terminology at this point, and from which you can see the specific quality of Aristotle's Metaphysics from a different side. For what in Plato was called the Idea and as such was some- thing absolute, existing in itself, is now suddenly called form. In place of the opposition between the true being of the world of the Idea
and the non-being of the world of sensible diversity, we now have the difference between form and matter. I shall write these two terms on the blackboard as well, as we shall have to use them constantly. 'Form' means much the same as the modern term Gestalt in the narrower sense; in Latin it was translated as forma; the Greek word is f-t0pf[J? , familiar to all of you from words such as morphology. The word for matter - that to which this form relates - is VAT], translated into Latin as materia. I said that this transformation of terminology, which - in place of the traditional Platonic terms l8Ea and Elbo,>, on the one hand, and TtL DVTU, on the other - now talks of f-tOpf[J? and VAT], has fundamental implications for the subject matter itself.
You can see this quite clearly from the fact that when we speak of 'form' this term always contains a reference to something of which
?
?
36 LECTURE SIX
? the entity in question is the 'form'. The concept of 'form', therefore, is never a self-sufficient, autosemantic concept such as that of essence. Moreover, at this point Aristotle's terminology is still at a watershed: the terms /J-op({J? and Elbo') - Plato's term - still alternate; the term
Elbo'), used in Plato's sense, still exists for Aristotle. And, conversely, v). :ry, matter - as the quintessence of everything which is robE TL, 'here', and is therefore matter, cannot be conceived as something which does not also have form. The very choice of these reciprocal, interrelated terms, which reflect the real themes of Aristotle's Meta- physics, therefore shows this philosophy to be as I have characterized it: an essentially mediating theory.
This notion of form as the force immanent in v). :ry, matter, this concept of the immanent idea which at the same time is the power centre which moves matter, is the decisive concept in Aristotle's Meta- physics. It is a concept which in our world has survived as another word for force: the concept of EVEpyna, energy. Now, standing
opposed to this energy, as realized form, is the concept of bvva/J-L'), which refers to pure possibility. However, in Aristotle this pure pos- sibility is that which is not yet formed, or is only now being formed:
possibility for him is really what we call matter; and the term which Aristotle's Metaphysics uses for it is bvva/J-L'). Around the relationship between these two moments, as we would call them today (although that would be anachronistic and far too modern, so that it would perhaps be more exact to call them categories) - around this relation-
ship the whole of Aristotle's Metaphysics revolves. s
This, I believe, is the point where I may be able to clarify most
vividly the difference between the whole of ancient metaphysics, and what it has become. For, at first sight, when seen from the standpoint of the more recent western tradition, there is something uncommonly paradoxical in the ideas I have just expounded, and I am not sure whether you have all grasped this paradox fully. Moreover, when expounding bodies of thought remote from us in time, I regard it as a duty to make the differences at least as clear as the identities. And these bodies of thought - despite the tradition or, one might almost say, because of it - include the work of Aristotle. I believe that to perceive the essence of historical phenomena and, above all, of phe- nomena of intellectual history, it is necessary not only to empathize with them or, to use that dreadful expression, to bring them close to
us; indeed, that generally has the opposite effect. The actuality of such concepts, and their true depth, can only be apprehended by first placing them at a distance - in order to make us aware both of the constitutive nature of history and of the wholly different conceptions which this procedure obliges us to form, especially with regard to
? LECTURE SIX
37
? matters which we have always thought we already knew, which were as familiar to us as if they came from our own childhood, yet which, looked at more closely, turn out to be quite different. Anyone who, as a European, has had sudden, surprising contact with Indian phe- nomena will be able to understand this double effect of closeness and extreme, alien distance. To clarify what I mean with regard to Aristotle: for us it is generally the case, when we speak of possibility, that we think of form, pictured as a form which has not yet found a content, whereas, when we speak of reality, we mean essentially that which is filled by sensible material. Look, for example, at the definitions of possibility, reality and necessity in the 'Postulates of empirical thought in general' in the Critique ofPure Reason. 6 For a fundamentally ontological mode of thinking like that of Aristotle, which still gives precedence to the Form or the Idea, this conception of possibility, though self-evident to us, looks like the exact opposite. I think you need to be aware of this difference if you are to under- stand what stands at the beginning of metaphysics and has dominated it ever since. For it is precisely the notion that the idea or the noumenal, the intelligible sphere, is more real than the empirical, which really
forms the core of the metaphysical tradition. And only if you are aware, from the outset, of this paradoxical quality inherent in all metaphysics, will metaphysics cease to be an innocuous subject and reveal the difficult, demanding side which you need to experience if you want to have a sense of what metaphysics really means.
In Aristotle, therefore - in keeping with the idea that the 8EVTEpat ova{at, the second essences, have a higher reality than the first - it is the case that EVEpYEta, which is form in so far as it is realized in matter, represents the higher, more substantial reality, just because it is form. In this respect Aristotle is, again, a Platonic thinker. Matter, by contrast, which for us is precisely the moment which decides the degree of reality, as that which is given by intuition, is demoted in this philosophy to mere possibility. To state the position paradoxically, reality in Aristotle's philosophy corresponds to what we call possibil- ity, and possibility to what we call reality. You can only gain access to his philosophy if you first perform this inversion. You will, more- over, have little difficulty in recognizing once again, in this position
of Aristotle's, the Platonic motif that the world of the Ideas is more real than the world of the merely existent. The difference is that in Aristotle these two spheres no longer simply diverge, but an attempt
is made - and I stress, an attempt
extent, therefore, that EVEpYEW confers a higher order of reality than 8vvafJ-t<;, to the extent that for Aristotle matter becomes mere pos- sibility, he is the opposite of what he appears at the first level of his
-
to bring them together. To the
?
38
LECTURE SIX
? ? thought, which I presented to you in the last lecture. For in this respect he is a realist in the medieval sense, who teaches the precedence of universals over individual things, and not a nominalist. This must be emphasized strongly, for if one simply includes him among the nomin- alists on the grounds that, historically, two nominalist developments branched off from his thought (as I believe I have already indicated7), one entirely misunderstands the nature of his metaphysics. I recall that the late Alfred Weber, at the sociologists' conference in Heidelberg - it must have been in 1954 - read a papers in which he referred to Aristotle without further ado as a nominalist, on the grounds I set out for you in the last lecture. And when, seeking to save the honour
of the history of philosophy and reluctant to let pass anything which flew so directly in the face of facts, I sketched for him some of the ideas I have expounded to you today, the nonagenarian9 scholar grew
quite angry and never spoke to me again. But I cannot help it: understand Aristotle means to recognize that both these moments are contained in his work; and that the conflict between them is resolved by giving precedence to the universal concepts or Forms. It might be
said - as Herr Haag formulated it recentlylO - that the contradictions and difficulties in which Aristotle gets caught up here really contain in latent form the whole problematic history of ontology, as the history of the relation of the universal to the particular, or of possib- ility to reality. I would also say that in Aristotle the relation of the universal to the particular is equated to that of possibility to reality - this, too, is a crucial aspect of his metaphysics. And this equation is carried out by attributing a higher order of reality to embodied essence than to matter, which now is mere possibility, because it has not yet found its form.
Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, this leads on to a basic inconsistency to which I must draw your attention. I do this, as I have said, not because I regard it as either possible or timely to criticize Aristotle
as one would a modern thinker; that seems to me a foolish and anachronistic procedure. I do so because I wish to make you aware of the immanent problems and the inherent dynamic of this first sketch of a metaphysics, which then led on to metaphysics in general. The first thing to be said is that Aristotle, who undoubtedly pos- sessed the most extraordinary powers of thought, despite being with- out the experiences of the more than two thousand intervening years, must himself have been aware of these problems. The question raised
by his work is, quite simply: how is it possible that a philosopher who attached such enormous weight to the concept of the first cause (we shall come back to this), could, on the one hand, maintain that the only reality was the immediate, the TObE TL, but then, on the other,
to
? ,
? LECTURE SIX
39
? could regard the mediated, the concept realized and formed in mat- ter, as the higher reality? The answer given by Aristotle has also become a canonical theme of the whole of subsequent western meta- physics: it is based, quite simply, on the distinction between genesis and validity. u According to Aristotle it is simply the case that for us what is primarily given, and to that extent is absolutely certain, is robE Tt, the immediate; but that in itself the higher is fJ-0p({J? or Elbo,>, the idea. A distinction is therefore drawn between the path followed by knowledge in its development towards its concept, and the truth content of that knowledge, as it is in and for itself. And these two moments are placed by Aristotle in a simple, unresolved opposition, without any attempt to reconcile them; instead, he is content - somewhat mechanically, I would say - to create departments. On one side, the procedural department: how do we arrive at know- ledge? what exists first for us? - and on the other the ontological or speculative department: how is the order of essences constituted in itself? I would point out that this Aristotelian procedure, too, has had highly peculiar consequences, continuing right up to contem- porary philosophy. Max Scheler, who taught at this university for the last part of his life,12 took over this same Aristotelian doctrine, which was mediated to him through medieval scholasticism; his late metaphysics, especially, is based essentially on the separation he made - as if by an 'abyss of meaning' - between the moment of genesis, the way in which we become conscious of structures or essences or whatever they may be, and the validity of ideas in themselves. 13 And
underlying Husserl's thinking in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, the first volume of Logical Investigations, which was really the source of the entire reawakening of ontology, is the basic idea to be found in Aristotle which I have just set out for you: that genesis, how I arrive psychologically at logical propositions, has absolutely nothing to do with the validity, that is, the truth or untruth, of the purely logical or mathematical propositions in themselves. 14 Moreover, the tradition leading to this, being the scholastic tradition, goes back to Aristotle. Its main carriers in the nineteenth century were Bernard Bolzano and Franz Brentano; the latter was Husserl's teacher. There is at this point, therefore, a direct link to Aristotelianism.
Genetically, therefore, in terms of the advance of knowledge, what is immediate and sensibly certain is primary, according to Aristotle; in terms of validity - that is, objectively - the universal comes first. This state of affairs becomes even more peculiar and paradoxical in
that Aristotle follows Plato in giving primacy to what comes first temporally, as that which we prize and rank highest - much as, in a feudal social order, the older a family is the finer it considers itself to
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40
be. Aristotle took over this idea of the higher rank of what came first in the most emphatic way, so that it is hard to see how the oEVTEpa ouaLa, the second essence, the result of a process of abstraction and therefore something which came later, should suddenly be ranked higherY I should like to read out the passage from Book A in which he argues that we always value the first and oldest thing higher, because I believe it is pivotal to what I understand generally by the term prima philosophia, or 1TpdJTT] f[JLAOaof[JLa, which Aristotle ex- pressly held metaphysics to be. This notion of a first philosophy clearly implies the same primacy of what comes temporally first, and
you may detect the peculiarly paradoxical nature of Aristotelian thought, to which I want to draw your attention today, quite simply in the congealed form of the terminology. I mentioned that for him, or for the scholiasts who gave the book its title, metaphysics meant WTa Ta f[JVaLKa, that which follows after the doctrine of physical nature; it is oEVTEpa ouaLa, that is, the mediated, the secondary, which, therefore, is already presupposed by being. Now, however, meta- physics is supposed to be 1TPWTT] f[JLAoaOf[JLa, the first philosophy, the doctrine on which all else depends. I should therefore like to read you this passage from Book A, relating to Thales. Book A, by the way, describes essentially the prehistory of metaphysical speculation
up to Aristotle's own work, and as such is still one of the most important sources on the history of Greek philosophy. The passage comes from Section 983 b, and reads as follows: 'It has, indeed, been suggested that the very earliest thinkers, long before Thales, held the
same view of primary substance. ' He is probably thinking of Hesiod here. 'For they made Oceanus and Tethys the parents of generation and spoke of the gods as swearing by water, which they called Styx. For what is oldest is honoured most, but the witness under oath is honoured most of all. '16 The witness is honoured because it is he who authenticates the oldest thing, so that in this sense everything depends on him. Here, therefore, is Aristotle's explicit formulation, which, in the Metaphysics, is to be found in all the passages - (or, more properly, all the strands of thought), in which everything that
has not evolved or become what it is, and is therefore the oldest thing, which has always existed, is regarded as the condition of the possibility of any becoming - an idea taken over directly from Aristotle by Hegel; and in which the final cause, that is, the divinity, is seen as the 'unmoved mover' of all things. Aristotle's famous formulation of this doctrine of the unmoved mover is UKLVT]TOV KLVOVV. 17 In this con- ception, therefore, as in the relation of genesis to validity, Aristotle is inconsistent with regard to primacy, attributing it sometimes to TOOE TL and sometimes to EtOO<;. Inevitably, purely on the basis of this
LECTURE SIX
? ? LECTURE SIX
41
? immanent contradiction, this doctrine proved unsatisfactory18 - and thus provided the motivation for the whole subsequent history of metaphysics. If the primary - and not by accident is the primary something material, in this case water, as it also was for Thales, on whom Aristotle bases his argument here - is to be ranked higher in the ontological sense, or regarded as the more original entity, as modern ontology might express it, one cannot conceive how the 'secondary', the derivative, the result of abstraction (and the OEVTf;pat ova{at, the universal concepts embodied in existing things, are sec- ondary in that sense), can now be ranked higher. 19 Conversely, how- ever, it is equally hard to conceive why the sensibly certain, in its fortuitousness and individual restrictedness, as expressed in TOOE Tt, in the infantile language of 'that there', can be regarded at the highest thing, the foundation of all knowledge. And it can be said that this aporia, between the higher rank awarded on the one hand to the most abstract categorial determinants, or, in extreme terms, to pure logic, and, on the other, to the pure immediacy of that which is given here and now - this aporia has been a constant theme of metaphysics. However, if one takes seriously the idea of mediation, which is
sketched20 but not fully worked out in Aristotle, the idea that form and matter are really moments which can only be conceived in rela- tion to each other, the question as to which of them comes absolutely first or is ranked absolutely higher becomes transparent as a false abstraction. And one will then trace the forms of the concrete media- tion of these moments, instead of treating the product of abstraction which keeps them apart as the only rightful source of truth. That, really, is the connecting thread which, in my opinion, leads from Aristotle's metaphysics as a whole to the questions currently occupy- ing the minds of philosophers in this field.
? ? ?
?
? LECTURE SEVEN
15June 1965
? ? Ladies and Gentlemen, I shall continue where I left off before the Whitsun holidays, in the middle of my discussion of Aristotle's Meta- physics. You may perhaps recall that I said last that the modern problem of the relation of genesis to validity was also posed by Aris- totle. On the one hand he argued that T()OE Tt, what is immediately given, was absolutely primary, while on the other he established a
spiritual or mental hierarchy in which Ideas, or Forms, as he called them, were given that status. 1 I should like to draw your attention to a paradox which seems to me extremely characteristic of the whole history of metaphysics, and which is sketched as a kind of prototype in Aristotle's Metaphysics. There are two predominant conceptions of apx? , or 7TPOJTOV, running through the whole history of philosophy.
On one side is the idea that what is directly given, the immediate facts of consciousness, should be posited as primary; from the con- nections between them the subjectively orientated form of epistemo- logy sought to construct the quintessence of that which is. On the other side, however, primary status is given to the pure concept, which always stands at the origin of rationalistic versions of epistemology. Epistemology has worn itself out trying to reconcile these two notions of the primary, which exclude each other, so that you might have reason to doubt the validity of the whole approach which posits
some absolutely primary thing. 2 According to Adam Riese, an expon- ent of simple traditional logic, it is clear that both of them cannot
be primary. Nevertheless, these two approaches, which historically gave rise to the antithesis between empiricism and rationalism, have
? ? LECTURE SEVEN
43
? always had a good deal to say for themselves. The various empiricist tendencies have maintained that they go back to something given which is not mediated by anything else and of which one can be certain beyond doubt. The other tendencies, which started out from the pure concept as the absolutely primary, can claim that, compared to the purity of the mental entity, its sensible content is either something transient and changing, or even, as the Platonic tradition holds, is actually deceptive. The exclusivity of both moments
is untenable, since both can be refuted by simply asking: which of them is absolutely primary?