No More Learning

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.
? ? LECTURE FIVE
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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? 32
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
?
? 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? The only possible answer is that each of these principles - if I can call them that - always implies the other, or that, in Hegel's language, the two principles are mediated by each other.
I should add here that to call them principles is an improper use of language, since in the strict sense one can only speak of principles rationalistically, when dealing with purely mental entities, whereas what is immediately given, which ultimately means sensations, is something non-conceptual and therefore cannot be a principle. But you may be able to recognize here something of the 'misere de la philosophie',3 in the fact that even this non-conceptual element, this non-principle, which nevertheless is constitutive of, and inherent in, all philosophy, cannot appear within that realm - which, heaven knows, can only operate with concepts - except in the form of a concept. It is therefore not merely a piece of terminological pedantry to say that philosophy, through its very form, contains a pre-judgement in
favour of principles. That means, in general, that if we want to give primacy to the sensible moments of knowledge we cannot simply, so to speak, put forward 'green' as a given entity - or we can do so, but it won't take us far philosophically. We shall immediately have to abstract from what is given by the senses and thus, even when operating at this opposite pole, are already moving within the same conceptual language which is located at what I might perhaps call
the rationalistic pole. 4 This consideration - that both these mutually exclusive approaches which postulate something certain and primary are untenable - leads on, as a consequence, to what I have called mediation. And, to repeat the point, it was Aristotle's immeasurable innovation in philosophy to have been the first to be aware of this problem of mediation. Both the difficulty of understanding his work,
and the criticism to which it is open, stem precisely from the fact that one must both grasp the meaning of the term mediation as he
created it, and understand why the concept of mediation failed in his work. To say that it failed may sound schoolmasterly, but unfortu- nately, if one takes an idea seriously, one has little alternative.
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44
LECTURE SEVEN
? ? I also wanted to point out that a very up-to-date problem is con- cealed behind this two-pronged approach of Aristotle's, which posits the sensibly certain as primary for us, and the pure forms as primary
in themselves - that is, metaphysically primary as the pure 'movers' of everything that is. It is the question whether the genesis of con- cepts can indeed be separated from their truth content, as happens whenever genesis and validity, or the primary for us and the primary in itself, are kept apart, as is the case in Aristotle's Metaphysics. This gives central access to what is called the problem of ideology, since
the question raised by the latter is indeed whether the objective truth of propositions and concepts is fundamentally independent of their origin. I cannot set out here the entire problematic of the theory of ideology;5 I can only sketch the connection between the problem of ideology and that of epistemology, which concerns us at present. In the case of ideology, too, it is extremely difficult to come to a simple Yes or No decision; just as, in general, it seems to me that the work
of philosophy, which is essentially one of differentiation, cures us of the habit of demanding simple alternatives of Yes or No where the subject we are reflecting on may perhaps allow neither alternative. In the course of philosophical work one becomes aware that to insist on knowing 'is it such or is it such? ' has something infantile about it; and if there is any such thing as an educative value of philosophy, it may lie in the fact that it weans us from that kind of naivety. So, to return to our subject, to reduce knowledge to its genesis is a bit like
arguing that the validity of mathematical propositions should depend on the conditions under which mathematics came into being socially, or even on the psychological conditions under which mathematical or logical judgements are made. That, clearly, is nonsense. To that extent the separation of genesis and validity undoubtedly has some justification, and it is the very great merit of Edmund Husserl to have been the first to draw attention emphatically to this point as early as the 1890s. 6 On the other hand, if one simply separates knowledge from its genesis - if, in other words, one ignores the sedimented history contained in any piece of knowledge - a part of the truth is also lost. Truth is then pinned down to a claim of timelessness, which itself depends on something taking place within time, the process of
abstraction which disregards temporal moments. There is in this con- text, therefore, a very central problem of how these possibilities are related to each other. I shall not dwell on the question whether this is a metaphysical or an epistemological problem; such distinctions, in any case, are difficult to maintain in concrete cases. I would only repeat that while the truth content of knowledge or of a proposition certainly cannot be reduced simply to the way in which it has come
? LECTURE SEVEN 45
? about, nor can its genesis be disregarded in the truly dictatorial man- ner advocated by Max Scheler, for example - with, in some cases, the absurd consequence that a number of concepts which undoubtedly have their origin in social conflicts (a fact that even he does not dispute) are nevertheless supposed to have an intrinsic validity which has absolutely nothing to do with these conflicts. 7 This whole tangle of problems, too - like, one might say, the whole problematic of philosophy - has its origin in the work of Aristotle.
I would add - in order to avoid stopping short at this point with a question - that the genetic moments are not, as it seems to vulgar prejudice, simply external to knowledge, but are inherent in the char- acter of validity itself. This takes us back to the idea of mediation. One might formulate the matter by saying that truth has a temporal core,8 or, as Husser! , who turned his attention to this problem in his late phase, expressed it: that even in its objectivity truth also has an
'implied genetic meaning' (genetisches Sinnesimplikat). 9 Moreover, this problem also occurs in Kant, where, on the one hand, synthetic judgements are supposed to be timelessly valid a priori, yet, on the other, are constituted by the spontaneous activity of consciousness, and thus, finally, by the work of the mind; so that something supposedly timeless has a temporal moment as the condition of its possibility. That seems to me to be the only possible answer to this question. I
shall just take this opportunity to point out that you can really see here, from a central position in philosophy, how deeply sociology and philosophy are interrelated, and how little the transition from one to the other is a mere fLETu{3ame; de; &'\'\0 yEvoe;. This is simply because, if it is realized that the moment of the origin or the temporal genesis of knowledge, with all the temporality it involves, is inherent in the character of truth, is not external to it in the manner of truths which change with time, but founds the character of truth itself, then it is no longer possible to perform the absolute separation between the question of the social origin or the social history of an idea and its truth content in the manner required by the usual scientific division of labour. Nor does this amount to a sociologization of philosophy; rather, sociological problems are immanent in philosophical ones,
and immanently philosophical reflection leads necessarily to these problems. This approach, incidentally, is radically different from that of the sociology of knowledge, which confuses the origin of know- ledge with its truth content in a merely external sense - but this, too,
I can touch on only briefly here.
Now why - this is the real question with which Aristotle's Meta- physics confronts us - does Aristotle, a mediating thinker, stop short at this peculiar dualism between the primacy of T60E TL, the immediately
? ?
? ?
46
LECTURE SEVEN
? given, and of the idea? And why does he accept so relatively lightly the resulting contradictions and difficulties, some of which I have sketched for you ? The central contradiction - to return to the specific problematic of Aristotle's work - is that, on the one hand, the idea is supposed to be only immanent, only mediated, only something inher-
ing in an existent and not transcendent with regard to it; yet, on the other, it is made into something which has being in itself. Expressed in these bald terms, this is a contradiction which is very difficult to resolve. We arrive here at the point where the intellectual achieve- ment of Aristotle has to be defined, as well as the historical position occupied by a thinker who can be described as the ancestor of bour- geois thinking and at the same time as a pupil of Plato. He raised the question of the mediation between the universal and the particular as no philosopher had done before him - and he was fully aware of this achievement. And if you read Aristotle, most of what he has to say about earlier thinkers sounds - well - a little benevolent and patron- izing, as one writes about half-savages. He has what I might almost call a splendid academic arrogance, which colours the whole tone of what he writes about those earlier thinkers who lacked the precise
knowledge available to him. This is highly characteristic of the temper of his thought. Thus, he raised the question, but did not solve it. The true core of the problematic of Aristotle's work is that he, unlike Plato, posed the problem of mediation with extreme clarity, but, nevertheless, did not achieve mediation. And to understand how these two things are connected is the true task presented by his work - and thus is the task facing the traditional approach of western philosophy.
For he conceives the relation between the categories of form and matter, which is central to his metaphysics, as an external relation, although they are interdependent in his work. That is to say that he understands the existent as composed additively of form and matter. And for this reason the two categories, although neither can exist without the other, appear as absolutely separate - instead of being perceived as abstractions which only designate moments, neither of which can be thought independently of its opposite, and both of which
need the other through their very concepts. To put this paradoxic- ally, one might say that in Aristotle mediation is not itself mediated; that while he recognized that neither moment could exist without the other, he saw this interrelatedness almost as a quantitative agglom- eration; he saw it additively, as a conjunction of these two moments, which could not be kept apart in chemical purity, as it were, yet were not dependent on each other in terms of their meaning and constitu- tion. That is the point he reached, and his critique of Plato, which I have expounded for you,10 has proved as much. It might be said that
? LECTURE SEVEN 47
? in the Metaphysics - and not only there but in the whole of his philo- sophy, especially the ethics and the theory of the state - Aristotle was a mediating thinker. He was a mediating thinker in the sense that his concern was always to find an intermediate position between two extremes, so that existence is to be understood here as a middle term
between form and matter. But this mediation is really only something existing between the extremes, and not that which is implicit in the meaning of the extremes and is accomplished through the extremes themselves. If you will permit me this anachronistic horror, I would say that he is the mediating thinker par excellence, yet one lacking the idea of the dialectic. 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.