No More Learning

The interest which motivated Aristotle in arriving at this interpre-
tation was really an interest in change. And one might discern a very fundamental step in the development from Plato to Aristotle in the fact that while Aristotle, too, located truth in the immutable, he was nevertheless interested in change, attempting to grasp in it a relation to the unchanging - whereas in Plato any interest in change lay far in the background. In Aristotle, therefore, as is almost always the case with advancing enlightenment and differentiation, thought became incomparably more dynamic than in Plato. And it can now be said - if I might for a moment describe the trajectory of Aristotle's Meta- physics from this aspect - that Aristotle's work is an attempt to bring together the motif of form with that of change, which he no longer
denies but analyses. To be sure, form is still regarded as that which exists in itself and ranks higher; in this Aristotle takes the entirely traditional view that form, EVEpYELa, is superior because it is lasting, unchanging and purer. It could also be said that Aristotle attempts to discover how the idea of the eternally immutable, as the higher, is to
be synthesized with that of the mutable, as that which presents itself
? ? ? LECTURE EIGHT
57
? to us empirically. And here Aristotle arrives at an extraordinarily important and profound insight, that all change presupposes some- thing unchangeable, and all becoming something that has not become. It might be doubted - and this doubt is, if you like, the quintessence
of Kant's critique of metaphysics - whether the conclusion drawn from becoming to something which has not become, and from change to the unchanging, is legitimate. But first, before dealing with that question, it should be noted that this conclusion contains the implic- itly dialectical view that the notion of something dynamic, of change, of becoming, is impossible without reference to something fixed. This is, I would say in passing, one of Aristotle's most magnificent dis- coveries, to which we are hardly able to give its due weight because it has become so self-evident to us that we no longer know what an enormous exertion of genius its attainment must have cost. The idea that there can be no mediation without the immediate - though also, of course, no immediacy without mediation - and that there is no movement which is not the movement of something which, relative to it, has a moment of fixity, later became the central proposition of
dialectical philosophy, or one of its key tenets. And this idea, that we cannot imagine change except in relation to something fixed, was conceived, as far as I am aware, by Aristotle - unless one interprets certain tendencies in Plato's late dialogues in this sense, on which point, given the highly controversial character of the Parmenides dia- logue in particular, I would not presume to pass judgement in face of the conclusions of conventional philologists.
I did say, however, that in Aristotle there is a kind of short-circuit or false conclusion at this point. It is the supposition that, because every change needs something fixed, or all becoming something which has become, this fixed thing must be absolutely unchangeable. This false assumption, which is one of the main concerns in Kant's critique in the doctrine of antinomies,12 is always taken at face value, as one of the antitheses of the transcendental dialectic. I believe you can only understand how Aristotle arrived at this curious conclusion if you bear in mind that the concept of the infinite was foreign to anti- quity, and that really means to ancient mathematics. I am aware that this statement, like all such statements, can be met with counter- examples. I also know that in ancient mathematics there were early
forms of infinitesimal calculus. And in one of the next lectures we shall have occasion to notel3 that Aristotle sometimes uses the concept of
the
non-limited, which goes back to the a:7TEtpOV of Anaximander. 14 Despite this, I believe it is legitimate to maintain that the permeation of the whole of consciousness by the notion of infinity, and the distinc- tion between the finite and the infinite, as presupposed by the concept
?
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58 LECTURE EIGHT
? of transcendence in monotheistic religions and as buttressed by the hegemony of infinitesimal mathematics in the modern natural sci- ences - that all this was alien to antiquity. If you will concede this for a moment - and I think one may concede it without doing too much violence to the texts - you will readily understand that precisely such determinants as that of an absolute cause, and all the categories which for us have the character of the transcendent, that is, which can only be posited in infinity, in accordance with our whole education and our habits of thought - become in his thought determinants of the finite, simply because the world (if I may put it like this) is finite; and
because infinity, or the idea that the world is absolutely unlimited, is entirely foreign to his thinking.
And I would say that the fact that ontology, by its nature, posits mental categories as absolutely valid is connected with this constitutive character of finitude, since these categories are themselves conceived within a finite realm, within a closed world - whereas there is no space
for them in the open world, blown apart by the concept of infinity, in which we have lived, to an increasing degree, for almost four hundred years. To that extent it might be said that ontology, as the attempt to encompass something infinite with finite determinants, itself has some- thing archaic about it; that it is something which, in some sense, has
been left behind by the development of mind towards the present concept of the infinite. However, if one were to review and analyse the history of philosophy from this perspective one would come across countless archaisms of this kind - a fact which, paradoxically enough, has been repeatedly emphasized by the opposite position, the school of Heidegger, although there it is seen as something positive. What must be noted, therefore, is, firstly, that one can only speak of change with reference to something fixed; and, secondly, that the positive tendency of metaphysics stems from the fact that infinity was alien to
antiquity. For this reason, relationships or categories which we can no longer imagine except in terms of the infinite, and therefore as transcendent, were turned in antiquity into relationships of finitude. I would only add that the switch to the concept of infinity in later philosophy is, of course, connected to the increased prominence given to the knowing subjectivity, the spirit (Geist), since the spirit was defined from the first as something infinite in itself - in contrast to the finitude of the diversity to which it is related. Now this doctrine of immutability, with the connected notion that all mutability finally goes back to something immutable, has survived throughout the history of metaphysics, to the point that it became the subject of Kant's third antinomy. u And it has also had incalculable consequences for theology, since Aristotelian theology really has its centre in
this
? LECTURE EIGHT 59
? doctrine, in the form of the doctrine of the 'unmoved mover' of all things. 16 The unmoved mover is, fundamentally, nothing other than pure form existing in itself, which, as it were, draws everything up towards it. Although itself immobile, it is like a magnet of pure actu- ality, or pure energy, pulling up everything which is merely potential towards it and, in this way, realizing itself to an ever-increasing de- gree. That, really, is the core of Aristotle's Metaphysics, if the core is defined as the point at which his metaphysics passes over into theology. The central point of any metaphysics is probably to be found where the transition between metaphysics and theology takes placeY And it takes place precisely in this relationship of the immobile to motion, to which it is mediated by the fact that it draws everything which merely exists to itself. And, in a sense, motion is already latent in the merely existent, since the latter, as potentiality, has within itself the ability to move towards the most perfect and highest order of being. The idea of the analogia entis, the analogy between the creature and
the creator,18 is thus already sketched out, if you like, in this theory of Aristotle.
Aristotle's Metaphysics therefore raises a further question - the question of what the unchanging, or that which has not become (das Ungewordene), actually is. And this gives rise to two categories which
have had a decisive influence on the subsequent history of western metaphysics, the concepts of substance and accidence. These two con- cepts will be examined in the next lecture.
? ? ? ,
?
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LECTURE NINE
24June 1965
? We now have to consider the question of what the unchanging, or that which has not become (das Ungewordene), which might be called the ontological residue in Aristotle's ontology, actually is. In seeking an answer we come across two determinants which cannot be resolved into each other, and which are thus the source of the dualism which
has exerted a crucial influence on the whole history of western philosophy. On the one hand we have the substrate, which is subject to change, and on the other the properties; change consists in the communication of properties to the substrate. But the properties - to make you aware of this straight away - are not regarded as something transient and secondary, but as constant, unchanging, something which has not become. And indeed, it is on these properties that Aristotelian philosophy placed the greatest emphasis throughout its
development, and to which it attached the gravest importance. That, ? then, is the origin of the dualism which has been predominant through- ' out the western tradition, which was first expressed through the con- cepts of the substantial and the accidental, then became central to medieval philosophy, including its terminology, and from there passed over into the rationalist philosophy of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. We now know that these philosophers represent two things: both the nominalist protest against scholasticism, and a direct continuation of the Aristotelian-scholastic problematic. Such is the complexity of the history of philosophy, which escapes any simple formula. What I just
now called the substrate, and which I ask you to distinguish from substance - please forgive the pedantry, but not for nothing are we
? ? LECTURE NINE 61
? nearing the realm of scholasticism, where it is impossible to manage without a certain measure of subtlety in the definition of terms - the substrate, then, is what Aristotle calls 'matter' or 'stuff': in Greek vAY], translated into Latin as materia. The term was taken up again by the phenomenological school to designate the material element, irreducible to meaning or intention, in the facts of consciousness, and is probably familiar to you from there. But in Aristotle it has not this subjective, epistemological meaning but a thoroughly objective, ontological one.
Here you must distinguish terminologically - to reiterate the point in order to eliminate any confusion - between vAY] and ova{a. Ova{a means true being and refers, on the one hand, to the determinate, individual thing and, on the other, to fLOPrp? , form, or ElSo,>, essence in the Platonic sense - whereas vAY], as something universal and inde- terminate, represents neither this specific thing here, T6SE TL, nor, on the other hand, the general, idea-like quality of the form or the fLOPrp? . Now the properties which this vAY] takes on are called either ElSo,>, like the Platonic Ideas, or (I believe I told you this in one of the lectures before the Whitsun vacation) fLoPrp? , meaning much the same as 'form'
(Gestalt). I don't attach importance to this terminology for its own sake, but because, without it, I cannot explain a crucial twist in Aristotle's thought - which, I would say, is the most specifically Aris- totelian feature of his entire philosophy. For him, the substantial is precisely not what I have just called the substrate, it is not matter; on the contrary, matter and substance are distinguished in his work - if I might express it in modern terms. For Aristotle the substantial is pure form, exactly as the Idea is substantial in Plato, while the whole hylic level, matter in the sense of that which is given only in sensible terms, is the non-existent, fL? av. And this peculiar twist, by which substance is equated with form rather than matter in Aristotle, comes about
because the substrate, vAY], or matter, is stripped of all determinateness, so that it becomes something entirely empty, and comes extraordin- arily close to the non-existent in Plato. This results from a process of reduction through abstraction, although this abstraction is not sub- jected to any specific critical reflection in Aristotle's objectively orien- tated philosophy. This in turn gives rise to a paradox, an idea running counter to all popular notions, which has dominated the whole of metaphysical consciousness to the point where it has become a kind of second nature to thought. It is the idea that form, which might be thought to be ephemeral and unreal, something merely conceptual and pale, in contrast to the real and tangible solidity of matter, is made into the true reality, in contrast to which - at least to begin with - the other, hylic stratum, matter as the substrate of cognition,
is reduced to something in the strict sense unreal, mere potentiality.
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? You can already find here - to draw your attention to what I regard as a crucial connection in the history of philosophy - the principle of idealism, by which the mental appears as the truly real, while that which is given by the senses, the sensible object of experi- ence, is seen as less real, a mere function. The ramifications of this principle are still seen in the positivist conceptions of Hume or Ernst
Mach. To this extent, therefore, Aristotelian philosophy is idealistic, in the precise sense I have just defined: that a higher order of reality is attributed to forms than to their content. But this is a very peculiar kind of idealism, in that it is really an objective idealism, an idealism conceived only with regard to the objects of knowledge, but not, or not essentially, with reference to the thinking subject. However, be- cause the forms, or E? (YjY , to which a higher order of reality is ascribed, are the forms or properties of something, they are not, as in Plato, simply being-in-itself, but are always mediated by that ofwhich they are the forms. A circumstance which I pointed out to you in one of the last lectures has therefore made itself felt in Aristotle's thought: that we cannot speak of a form without saying: the form ofsomething. We do not speak of form as such, but of the form of a painting, of a piece of music, or, to use this frightful example once more,l the form
of this blackboard. At this point, therefore, Aristotle's reflections are extraordinarily complicated. On the one hand, the Platonic doctrine that Ideas or Forms have being in themselves is maintained, in the sense that reality - or at any rate, higher reality - is attributed only to them; but, on the other hand, this reality is not susceptible to thought,
or only within that in which it is realized. This makes the question of the realization of form the central problem. For while form is re- garded as the higher reality and that which has true being-in-itself, nevertheless, it has this being only within matter. Thus, the truly fundamental problem of Aristotle's philosophy becomes the question of the realization of form. And this question is, at the same time, none other than the question about change, which relates both to the effect of form on matter and to matter itself, and finally, to the rela- tion between the two. Aristotle's position on this point is an extremely advanced one, in that he not only recognizes these two poles of be- ing, as we might call them, but also subjects their relationship to ? analysis; and in that his philosophy, as a theory of invariants, now has its point of attack in precisely this relationship between its two opposite poles.
Through this twist, Aristotle's critique of Plato's philosophy, which I discussed first, is taken over into his attempt to rescue it, which I discussed next. In accordance with what I have just said - that while form is the higher category, matter cannot be conceived without form
? LECTURE NINE 63
? or form without matter - the goal, or T/)\o<;, of becoming or change is that matter should take on form. This concept of TEAO<;, or final purpose, has become perhaps the most fertile of all Aristotle's con- cepts for philosophy, since it is the origin of the distinction between cause and purpose. Purpose is defined for the first time as the higher category, which draws the lower towards it - in contrast to cause, or causes, which are said to be effective only in the lower realm, the realm of matter. The whole problematic of the relation of cause to purpose, which is, of course, the theme of Kant's third critique, the
Critique ofJudgement, and the entire subject matter of teleology - whether we should think of an entity in a causal-mechanical way, or from the standpoint of that towards which it tends, its higher destiny - therefore has its origin in this basic Aristotelian doctrine, which can really be called the core of the Metaphysics. From it Aristotle derives, as the crux of his Metaphysics - at the centre of which we find our- selves now - a theory which runs exactly counter to naive intuition. If we leave aside speculations like those of Heraclitus or the Eleatics, this is the first time that philosophy has placed itself in direct opposi-
tion to so-called natural common sense. This is especially out of keeping with a scientifically conceived philosophy like Aristotle's, which otherwise gives so much scope to common sense. This theory states that form is the true reality; to express it Aristotle uses specific terms which have become famous, such as EVEpYEw or EVTEMxEta,
and also TO EVEPYEtI1: ov, meaning that which must come into being through energy, through form. For him, therefore, reality is actually energy; it is reality only in so far as it is formed reality - and it is not the material of that reality. Matter, by contrast, is defined as mere possibility or potentiality, because it must always have within it the possibility of attaining such reality, of attaining its form, its fLoPrp? . Matter is therefore called DVvafLt<;, which is very peculiar, since, fol- lowing the Greek meaning of the word, we associate DVvafLt<; with the concept of force. But here DvVafLt<; means the same as possibility; it is, therefore, precisely not the static and unchanging entity that we might
associate with the concept of matter, but is, as the word indicates, a dynamic principle. If I might give you a cross-reference to the later history of philosophy, this doctrine of Aristotle's is a speculation which reappeared at the height of German idealism, in Schelling, where matter is likewise conceived, in an objective dialectic, as a principle which has the inherent tendency to move towards a higher form - except that in Schelling this comes about in the light of a subjective
reflection which has already taken place. 2 That is to say that in Schelling the spirit of matter is already seen as the absolute subject - a reflection which, of course, cannot be present in Aristotle.
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LECTURE NINE
? ,
I repeat, therefore: form is reality, EVEpyna, while matter is mere possibility, Dvvap,L<;. It could therefore be said that Aristotle's metaphysics is an idealism which has not yet reflected on itself, an objective idealism. However, the mediation of form and matter which
follows from this concept of reality is not really carried through by Aristotle. I have already stated this in principle but would like to recapitulate it at this point. Although the two terms, 'form' and 'mat- ter', are related to each other, this is done only externally, through the capacity of matter to become something other than it is; that is to say, it is not itself always also form, it is not mediated within itself by
form. As a result, despite the anti-Platonic twist, form becomes once again something existing in itself, whereas, according to a consistent theory of mediation, it would be dependent on matter. We are pre- sented with the paradox that although form, according to its own concept, can only be the form of something, it now becomes, as the logical conclusion of Aristotle's thought, absolute reality. And, as a result of the same unmediated dogmatism, possibility becomes an equally paradoxical concept. Pure possibility is, of course, a formal
determinant in which thought and categorization are implicit. In Aristotle's philosophy it is only conferred on matter, vAYj, through form. Yet the fact that something contains the possibility of becoming something else is now attributed to it as if it were a property before all determination, residing in matter as such. This attribution has the most far-reaching consequences for the formulation of the concept of matter in Aristotle - in particular the consequence I have already mentioned: that as Aristotle's philosophy is elaborated matter ceases to be the indeterminate, empty entity which it initially appears to be according to the logic of this philosophy, and becomes, it must be said, the very thing from which he had so assiduously distinguished
it, a kind of substance.
Now, I have mentioned these critical misgivings because a philo-
sophy cannot be understood without thinking it through critically. To seek to understand something in philosophy without at the same time criticizing it is, in my view, an impossible procedure; and I suspect that whenever a distinction is made between understanding and criti- cism there is some kind of authoritarian demand behind it: First make sure you have understood, and by then you will be rid of all your critical quibbles. That is such folly, I think, because philosoph- ical propositions are always put forward with a claim to truth, and can only be understood by reconstructing this claim to truth. But that can only be done by including in the analysis what I have just called criticism, by questioning their truth. The idea that one could under- stand any philosophical idea without criticism, without questioning
LECTURE NINE 65
? its truth, I regard as methodologically quite untenable. That is why, in expounding Aristotle's Metaphysics for you, I always present its salient points, and thus the essential problems arising from it, in the form of a critique. Now the critique I have just summarized for you is no great feat for a consciousness versed in epistemology and logic. Yet I should like to say that at the very point where Aristotle's work provokes, if you like, our strongest dissent, it nevertheless contains an extraordinary amount of truth. And, having made no secret of the criticism, I would say that it is more important that you should be
aware of this truth than that you should write down at this point that Aristotle has perpetrated this or that error, which we, having made such wonderful progress since then, can mark down against him and thereby dispose of the matter. The history of philosophy is not so simple. It is, on the contrary, remarkably complex, in the sense that while it moves through the medium of criticism, and while false ideas
are certainly refuted by criticism, this refutation almost never has the effect of disposing of them entirely. Rather, philosophical questions are always a bit like those self-righting toys, seeming to be knocked over but reappearing in changed historical-philosophical constellations, demanding an answer. And I believe that anyone who wants to un- derstand what philosophy signifies as history, as history of the mind, should be aware of this curious ambiguity: on the one hand, the critical
attitude towards philosophy, and between philosophies, and on the other the fundamentally open character of philosophical questions, which cannot be definitively disposed of by such criticism. One needs to be aware of this if one is not to succumb, on the one hand, to a naive rationalism with regard to the history of philosophy, or, on the other, to an equally naive belief in an 'eternal conversation of philo- sophical minds' carried on down the millennia, which has nothing to
do with history. Neither view is correct, and both these extremes are intermingled in the history of philosophy in a way which is very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to define in abstract terms.
Coming now to the truth content of this doctrine of Aristotle's, I would like to point out that in Kant, where possibility is placed squarely on the side of form,3 something said by Aristotle is mis- understood, as it is in the whole of epistemology, and only reappears in Hegel's dialectic. It might indeed be no bad way to present the Hegelian dialectic if one were to see it as a renewal of the controversy between Kant and Aristotle on a higher level - a view, incidentally,
which finds plentiful support in Hegel's own History of Philosophy. For Aristotle's definition of matter as potentiality contains something which can perhaps be seen as the real foundation, or, in medieval language, the fundamentum in re, of every synthesis. It is the idea
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66 LECTURE NINE
? ? that every form depends on its material as much as the material depends on the form - whereas we, influenced by the Copernican revolution brought about by Kant and the ensuing development, have all been trained to see matter as conditioned, so to speak, by form, and to believe that spirit lays down the laws followed by nature, as Kant put it in his famous formulation of this inversion. 4 According to this doctrine of Aristotle's, there is no categorial form to which there is not a corresponding moment in matter which calls for it. Aristotle
knew - and I do not think this can be emphasized enough - that so-called syntheses, that is, the bringing together of facts in concepts, judgements and conclusions, are not mere adjuncts, or pure operations of the subject of cognition, but are only possible if there is something corresponding to them in that to which they are applied, that is, in matter. If (to give an example which does not occur in Aristotle) you judge that 4 + 3 = 7, this contains not only the synthetic function of the consciousness which brings these moments together, but also a real, factual basis on which this kind of synthesis can be made. Admittedly, it does so in a manner which implies that without the
synthetic judgement which brings 3 and 4 together, we should know nothing of that factual basis, so that the synthesis is a necessary part of it. On the other hand, however, this synthesis would not be possible, and the statement 3 + 4 = 7 would be false, if a factual moment, which admittedly is inseparable from the synthesis, were not already contained in the material being judged.
That is not expressed by Aristotle in the epistemological form I have chosen for it here, but it does appear in his work in the form of a doctrine of substance. This states that two essences, which are posited absolutely as principles, the essence ! JAY} and the essence fLOPrp? , must always come together in order that such a thing as reality can exist. But he was the first to see that, in this interrelatedness, form - despite its self-sufficiency, which he emphasized just as much as Plato - can only be the form of a reality if there is something correspond-
ing to it in reality itself. And that is Aristotle's outstanding discovery, which I consider more important than the hypostasis of the two merely additively connected categories, ! JAY} and fLOPrp? , which he used to illustrate this point. Now, to take this further: matter without any form, pure matter - if one might put it like that - is called by Aristotle first matter, 1l'PWTY} ! JAY};5 and this is the point where the
concept of a1l'Etpov, the unbounded, appears in his work. But this a1l'Etpov does not refer to anything that we might remotely equate with the modern concept of infinity, but means simply that any determina- tion of an object is a 1l'Etpap, a bounding of that object, whereas pure ! JAY}, or 1l'PWTY} ! JAy}, which is absolutely without any such restriction,
,,
? LECTURE NINE 67
? has no boundary, since it is absolutely indeterminate. 6 However - and this is crucial - this having-no-boundary is not interpreted in his thought, as it is in the whole of modern philosophy, as something transcendent, going beyond the possibility of contingent experience, in keeping with the modern interpretation of infinity. Exactly the opposite is the case in Aristotle, for whom 7TPWTY] vAy], because it lacks bounding, is something impoverished which needs its form. For Greek thought, therefore, the infinite, if such an idea is conceived at all, is a mere scandal, something repugnant which still lacks its destiny, its form. Oswald Spengler noted in this context that for antiquity, with its plastic mode of experience/ reality lay in the bounding of the infinite by form and not in infinity as such. Despite the barrage of criticism unleashed on Spengler for such remarks,s what he says on this central point of Aristotle's philosophy seems to me by no means
as perverse as people are apt to insist in 'polite society'. One might ask, of course, whether this concept of matter, of absolutely unformed 7TPWTY] vAy], is not itself, as a concept, a form; for by speaking of matter as an dpx? , a principle, I have already abstracted from the immediacy of matter itself and reduced it to its most general concept - so that if Aristotle speaks, as I have just done, of pure matter, of 7TPWTY] vAY] which has absolutely no form, he is actually contradicting himself,
since speech about it is itself something formed. While I shall not keep this criticism to myself, I would again point out that, with important thinkers, the real problems are located where they make
so-called errors, and that nothing is more foolish than to dismiss them by pointing out those errors, as I have just done. For one must be on one's guard against the idealist misconception - especially threatening at this point - that because we cannot speak about anything, or have anything, which is not mediated by form, form must therefore be the only thing which is.
Having touched on these matters, I should like to say something about a very basic question of metaphysics which, I realize, goes far beyond the scope of a historical introduction to Aristotle, but con- cerns a state of affairs which one needs to be aware of if one is to occupy oneself usefully with metaphysical questions today. The fact
that, just by talking about matter, one endows this matter with form - that is, conceptual form - should not be confused with the meaning of this form itself. The peculiarity of the concept of vAy], or matter, is that we are here using a concept or speaking of a principle which, by its meaning, refers to something which is not a concept or a principle. We only correctly understand what a concept such as vAY] means if we realize that its conceptual meaning refers to something non- conceptual. The paradox facing us here is removed if we do not
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68 LECTURE NINE
? allow ourselves to fetishize the language or conceptual system we use. It is true that we can only speak in a way which is mediated through language, but for that reason language itself, as one phe- nomenon among others, becomes a part of reality as a whole, a moment of reality, and should not be hypostatized over against it. It is in the nature of language that we can speak of an absolutely form- less matter, even though speaking of formless matter is itself a form. It is as if we were in the prison of language but were able to recognize it as a prison. I have set out this dialectic for you because I believe that philosophizing begins at exactly the point I have just shown you, where one refuses to be fobbed off with curt pronouncements such as that matter as a 'primary concept' or 'first principle' is itself a form,
so that the concept of formless matter is meaningless; one actually starts thinking at such points and reflects further on them. And if I had to characterize the difference between the kind of thinking I advocate and positivist thinking, I would say that non-positivist thinking is precisely that which is not content with the rigid logic of exclusivity - the logic of either-or: either mediated or immediate, either concept or pure non-conceptuality - but analyses phenomena in such a way that seemingly self-evident statements like the one I just mentioned grow more and more shaky.
What seems to me to be unique about philosophical concepts is that, in face of the despair which philosophy can sometimes induce, they provide, if not the
'consolation of philosophy'/ then at least a consolation for philo- sophy. Philosophy has the curious characteristic that, although itself entrapped, locked inside the glasshouse of our constitution and our language, it is nevertheless able constantly to think beyond itself and its limits, to think itself through the walls of its glasshouse. And this thinking beyond itself, into openness - that, precisely, is metaphysics.
1
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29June 1965
? I have spoken repeatedly in these lectures of the problem of media- tion in Aristotle, emphasizing that the more one concerns oneself with questions of the dialectic the more the problem of what is called mediation forces itself into the centre. I wanted to use the example of Aristotle to show you the source of the problematic of development. In general, I have not presented Aristotle's Metaphysics to you as a piece of immutable ontological wisdom, as it is doubtless presented
in many other places. I have shown it from a different
arguing that in this still relatively unproblematic yet very sophisticated philosophy you can see, as in a test tube, the problems which were later to unfold in an infinitely more differentiated and complex form throughout the history of western philosophy. For Aristotle the prob- lem of mediation lies in the fact that the merely possible, that is, the absolutely formless - I would remind you that for him possibility is not form but matter - never exists and never could exist for itself. In
this he gives expression to an insight which idealist philosophy later stated in the subjectively reflected form that matter, as far as we can speak of it, is mediated by consciousness. In Aristotle, by contrast, forms - and this is the moment of Platonism which remains un- changed in Aristotelian philosophy - are imperishable and eternal; and this imperishability and eternity is inherent in each individual
form. That is, if you like, the rescuing or conservative moment in Aristotle, in contradiction of the critical moment. Now, many of you will feel compelled to ask why it did not occur to a thinker as astute as Aristotle - who, after all, was the founder of the whole of western
perspective,
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70 LECTURE TEN
? logic - that there can be no form without something formed - an objection which cannot fail to arise at this point. In view of the reciprocity of form and content which I have explained, it is very surprising to us that someone could assert that there can be no matter, no content, without form, but fail to apply the same consideration to forms, attributing an autonomous existence to them instead.
I believe that, as in most philosophical cases of this kind, it will be useful to try to reconstruct what it was that enabled Aristotle to overlook this reciprocity, when it applied to form. It will also lead us beyond the particular Aristotelian problem to a more universal prob- lematic. For - I cannot repeat this often enough - we should not take unfair advantage of our posterity by regarding Aristotle as more
stupid than us. To understand Aristotle, I believe we should reflect briefly on the nature of the concept. The concept, as we know, is a unity, the unity of the properties of the elements subsumed under it. Thus, if I have three elements, A with the index 1, B with the index 1 and C with the index 1, then 1 is the concept for these three elements, since it brings out what they have in common, and does so only with regard to what I wish to call the identical properties of these elements. Now, the abstraction from the particular content which is performed here has a very peculiar quality, which is probably based on count- less considerations, especially metaphysical and ontological ones. For
in referring to the item which I have just called '1' as the concept, or in some cases the essence, of the elements it subsumes, I generally disregard the special spatial and temporal positions of the elements subsumed under this concept. And even if, for example, I subsume under the concept of contemporaries extremely antithetical people, such as Hitler, Stalin and Churchill, their contemporaneity - if by that I define all the people who played a decisive individual role between
1930 and 1950 - is a general concept which is independent of the particular existence of these people. That is, to put it very crudely, I can speak of the contemporaneity of these three contemporaries even when they are long dead. Because I have turned it into a general concept, their contemporaneity, which here defines the conceptual unity formed by the three political contemporaries, is now not a temporal entity. We could, if we were so inclined, talk about these three men, defined by their contemporaneity, as long as we liked. Inherent in the concept, therefore, is a curious de-temporalization of what it refers to. The concept as such, once established, is not tem-
poral; it relates, of course, to something temporal, it has its temporal content, and a critical analysis will finally uncover time as an impli- cation of its meaning. But in the first place, through its formation, the concept is independent of time. This is undoubtedly connected
to
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? practical processes involved in the formation of thought, which have taken place in certain phases of the development of humanity. In order to create some kind of order in successive circumstances, no- menclatures or systems of thought were created which could survive with a certain constancy in relation to the temporal elements which they encompassed. Now it seems to me to be the case at this point - and, indeed, in the whole tendency to see ontology as a doctrine of invariants, of the timelessly abiding - that this timelessness of the concept represents a aTEpYJat<;, an impoverishment, a deficiency of the concept. For this timelessness is mediated through abstraction; and that which is simply omitted from the concept, so that it can be formed and maintained as a constant, is now attributed to it as its in- itself quality, and even as its 'positivity', its superiority. The reflec- tion which leads to the realization that the timelessness of the concept is itself something which has become, which has arisen and is not an
attribute of the concept in itself, is a very late reflection; and it has no more place in the philosophy of Aristotle, which is exemplary in this respect, than it has in that of Plato. And what could be described as the greatest paralogism of all in metaphysics, and as the crucial fal- lacy in traditional philosophy as a whole, is nothing other than this de-temporalization of the meaning of concepts, which is produced by the way in which concepts are formed, but is attributed as an inherent property to that which they subsume.
That, I believe, is the mechanism which lies behind Aristotle's positing of forms and concepts as something eternal and immutable. What is taken away from them by abstraction, the moment of de- temporalization, he has ascribed to them as a positive quality, as
their ontological priority, their pure being-in-itself. And it can be said that the whole of western thought has been placed under the spell of this conclusion drawn by Aristotle, and by Plato before him. Even Hegelian philosophy has been unable to divest itself entirely of this illusion. I would like to use a brief example to show you the absurdities generated by this transference of the structure of the con- cept to being itself. About thirty years ago, perhaps slightly less, a so-called philosopher named Maximilian Beck, who came from the phenomenological school, published in emigration a book with no less a
? title than: Psychology. The Nature and Reality of the Sou! . ! This book, which, apart from what I want to tell you, is one of the purest sources of merriment known to me in philosophical literature, where such sources are far from rare, is concerned, among other
things, with the immortality of the soul. In discussing this it adopts the modern practice of disconnecting the concept from the subjective act of abstraction which produced it, and states (as Husserl would
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? probably also have done) that the soul of each individual person corresponds to an essence of that soul. That is to say that one can 'look upon' this soul, can verify its existence. In plain language, he argues that one can obtain a pure concept of the soul of each individual without any coincidence between this essence or this concept of the
individual's soul, to which the philosopher has access, and actual existence. By means of phenomenological operations, therefore, one can arrive at a pure concept of the individual soul, but only by sub- tracting the question as to whether this soul actually exists. I can, following Husserl, identify all its qualities, all its concrete fullness, without positing its spatial-temporal existence. This enables Maximilian Beck to arrive at an unusually simple and quite astonish- ing solution to the question of immortality. He says that this essence called the 'soul', this concept of the soul of each individual person, which I can identify in all its concrete materialization, is - eternal. Thus, if a phenomenologist possesses such a concept of the essence or
soul of someone sitting here in the front row, and if that concept is adequate, it can never perish. It abides; it is objectively valid even when no person who has it is alive, or even when there is no empiri- cal person to which it could refer. And to the extent that this essence of each individual person is independent of any spatial-temporal fate, it can be said - according to Beck - that immortality exists, that these essences of each and every individual are immortal. By contrast, indi- vidual people - says Herr Beck condescendingly - are, of course, mortal, but that has absolutely nothing to do with it. The individual consciousness, the individual body, the individual psychology of a person is also mortal. Nothing except the possibility of each person,
which is concrete but purified of all existence, the pure concept of each person, is immortal. And that is supposed to solve the problem of immortality - while people themselves amount to nothing, and can be annihilated.
I believe, Ladies and Gentlemen, that you need to reflect for only a moment on what such a theory is worth in comparison to the expec- tation of immortality, or the hope of salvation, expressed in the great religions, to realize that the hypostasis of the concept as something eternal and imperishable has here become simply a fraud, a deception, in relation to the true meaning of such a concept in a context of this kind. Well, in this instance we are only dealing with the foolishness of a demented phenomenologist; but it often happens that pathogenic cases are more revealing than so-called normal ones - as is the case with this ineffably fatuous solace. What use is it for one's concept to be, for some logical reason, immortal, if one is nevertheless a heap of ashes? When a doctrine of this kind is coupled to a concept such as
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? immortality, its absurdity and pretentiousness become obvious. But I do not say this to engage in polemics against Herr Beck, but only because I believe it shows in blatant form something of the fraudulence of such an approach to a question like that of immortality, which, after all, is one of the most central of all metaphysical questions, and because it relates to the sublime doctrines of the great philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to St Thomas Aquinas and, if you like, to Descartes as well. Kant was the first to avoid this hypostasis, but even for him the concept has a moment of autonomy, of hypostasis, since his work contains pure forms of an almost pre-Aristotelian kind,
which are not required to be the forms of a possible content. I hope these remarks have made clear to you why Aristotle fails to reflect on the mediateness of form, and that if the idea of the autonomy of form is taken seriously - that is, if it is applied to something as fundamen- tal as the concept of immortality - it has consequences the absurdity of which is beyond dispute.
Now, in Aristotle himself this hypostasis of form has a consequence which holds his whole system together, is its precondition, or how- ever one likes to express it. Because he understands pure form, as pure actuality or pure reality, in the way I have described, it becomes the only force which realizes the purpose - TO 015 EVEKa - contained in scattered individual things. It thus becomes a causa (inalis, an ulti- mate causality on the basis of which the process of the universe is
constituted. And it might be said that just as the relation of reality to possibility is in a curious way stood on its head in Aristotle, in an analogous way the relation of purpose to cause is also stood on its head. For according to it purposes are the only and the true causes; in comparison, what is usually referred to as causality has, as we shall soon see, a very bad press in Aristotle. However, this general obser- vation requires further differentiation. There are four kinds of cause
in Aristotle, a division which remained in force throughout medieval philosophy and reappears in Schopenhauer, in his book On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. According to Aristotle, there is, first, the material cause - although he does not use the terms 'material' and 'formal' in the way we use them in normal logic, but in the sense of the antithesis between vAT) and fLOPCP? , which I have explicated for you in detail. The material necessity or cause arises from vAT), in so far as it is mere stuff and has not yet been formed. Then come the classes of the formal cause - the one arising from fLOPCP? - the moving cause and the final cause, the causa {inalis
or TEAoc;, of which I have already spoken. It is not difficult to see - and it was recognized relatively early in the history of Greek philoso- phl - that the last three classes of causes: the formal cause as the
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flOPrp? , the moving cause which orientates everything which is to- wards itself, and lastly the final cause as the highest - are all the same, and that, if radically reduced, they all actually coincide with
the fourth. It can therefore be said that, despite this 'fourfold root of the principle of reason', only the two main dualistic categories, vAT) and flOPrp? , appear in Aristotle - or perhaps it would be better to say, only the categories of Dvvaflt<;, as the mere possibility residing in matter, and of EVEpYHa, as the actuality realized in it. Originally, therefore, his philosophy contains only the dualism of form and mat- ter, which dominates his entire Metaphysics, in much the same way
as it has again become the determining dualism of metaphysical thought in modern philosophy since Descartes.
This is complicated, however, by the mediating element in the philosophy of Aristotle, to which I attach such weight. It manifests itself in the fact that, while everything determinate is drawn to the side of form, nevertheless matter - as I have indicated more than
once already - becomes far more than the mere possibility which it is supposed to be in his philosophy. There is a curious tension and difficulty in the concept of vAT) in Aristotle; on the one hand it is denigrated, disqualified, censured in every respect, including the moral, while on the other there is the remarkable assumption whereby this element, though heterogeneous with regard to form, is endowed with a kind of animation, a tendency, even a certain kind of yearning. There is, of course, a reason for this. For the very fact that he con- ceives matter, as I have explained, as a pure possibility which is itself mediated categorially as that which is possible - this very fact implies a concept. What is possible is an existing thing which is determined in relation to another which it has not yet become. For this reason the concept of pure possibility already includes a kind of determinateness which, in strict accordance with Aristotle's thesis, it should not have. However, if he understands vAT) as the possibility of form, that is, as
something which is at least potentially able to be determined by some- thing else, he is forced to go beyond this idea that possibility is a pure empty x, which vAT) at first appears to be. In fact, far more formal determinants have their origin in matter, as he conceives it, than might first be supposed. For he endows this possibility of matter, which we have subsequently called necessity in the scientific sense, with causality or, to use the Greek word, avaYKT).
AvaYKT) is the mythical notion of the intertwinement of all living things in a fate in which everything has to make atonement according to the ordinance of time, as it is expressed in the famous saying of Anaximander. 3 And the notion of avaYKT), like all mythical ideas, was originally a category of natural philosophy, that is,
LECTURE TEN
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a rationalization
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? or secularization of a doctrine of the animating forces of nature. This mythical, natural origin of avuyK'ry, or necessity, survives in Aristotle in that this kind of necessity is attributed to matter, and not, as is the case in modern philosophy, above all in Kant, to the reflecting subject. And, of course, it never occurred to Aristotle to consider this natural necessity, this avuYK1), merely as a conventionally subjective entity. No doubt, the substantiality of causality as a part of fate never became problematic for ancient people. This is precisely the point on which antiquity never went beyond mere reflection on its own mythological ideas. It also seems to me highly revealing that he attributes something else to matter: what in modern terms we would call 'chance', and for which there are two concepts in his work, firstly aVT6/LaTov, that which moves by itself, and secondly TUX1), containing the mythical idea of the way things just happen to turn out. I will point out -
although I do not want to pursue this very central problem here -
that the concepts of causality as natural causality and as chance, which appear to be strictly antithetical, have always been associated in a certain way in philosophy. Because the regularity of natural causal- ity can never equal the internal coherence of successive moments, as Aristotle seeks to describe it through his teleology, everything causal also seems to have a moment of the fortuitous. And, perhaps more important, apart from the moment of causality there are all those
moments which cannot be subsumed under the principle of identity and which, in accordance with the omnipotent principle of identity in thought, must appear as extraneous and accidental. There is thus a curious correlation between causality and chance; and the more relentless the dominance of causality, of causal-mechanical thinking, becomes in the world, the more the category of chance increases, as a kind of reminder of how much meaning, how much internal coher- ence, has been lost through the predominance of causality. No doubt there are also social reasons for this - the fact that, as rationality has increased in the means of social organization, the ends of social or- ganization have remained irrational, fortuitous. And this relationship
is reflected in the correlation of causality and chance, which, of course, are now undergoing a remarkable convergence, as the law of prob- ability, which is profoundly bound up with chance, has begun to displace causality in microphysics and quantum mechanics. 4
You can see, therefore, that Aristotle attributes far more than one
would expect to vA1), which he had himself demoted to something
totally abstract. It becomes, in a sense, the repository, the refuge of those mythical categories which were displaced by the advance of the Greek enlightenment, and especially by the rationality of Plato and Aristotle himself. And both these moments - on the one hand, blind
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? natural causality which is not transparent to itself, which is not an idea, the moment of blindness in causality, and on the other, TEAo? , teleology, which is like the idea of a creator - go back, like chance, to Aristotle. In his Metaphysics these moments have the function of limiting the purposive activity of pure form, of fLOPCP? , or, finally, of the 'unmoved mover'. 5 You therefore have before you a basic schema of the whole of western metaphysics; in it you can observe, as if under a microscope, the difference between natural causality and teleology, which has its foundation in reason or in freedom. This doctrine of a causality based on freedom, on a consciousness independent of blind
UVUYK1), goes back to the Aristotelian dualism and is reproduced in that of Kant. 6 However, as soon as the dichotomy of form and matter enters a state of flux, in which the two appear to be reciprocally mediated, this antithesis of causality and freedom also becomes fluid, dynamized, as it is in Hegel.
You can also see here - and I should like to close with this point - how a metaphysical theme such as that of freedom - which at the
beginning of these lectures I called one of the fundamental themes of metaphysics - only takes on the form familiar to us through the unmediated antithesis of vA1) and fLOPCP? , which is the special feature
of Aristotle's philosophy. I have explained the structure of Aristotle's Metaphysics at some length in order to show you that metaphysics does not consist in the isolated treatment of its so-called main themes, as first appeared when I read out a list of those resounding themes; it resides in the structural relationship between these themes, and finally in the tendency to unify them or form them into a system. And you will see that the concept of unity, the One, does indeed emerge at the apex of Aristotle's Metaphysics. ? You cannot, therefore, understand metaphysics by finding out how the separate metaphysical themes - being, God, freedom, immortality, or whatever they may be - are treated by different philosophers. You can only understand these categories through the place they occupy in a philosophy considered
as a whole. And if I may give you a piece of advice which may help your own philosophical understanding, it is that while you should always strive to understand philosophical categories as strictly and precisely as possible in terms of their meaning and effect in their particular place, you should also be aware that there is no philo- sophical category which does not take on a meaning that is different from its general meaning through the structure, the total context, of the thought in which it appears. And in understanding philosophy it is this specific meaning which matters.
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6July 1965
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? ? I have discussed the determinants of matter in Aristotle's Metaphysics, and the negativity of these determinants, seen in its most extreme form in the concept of natural causality and chance. In Aristotle these are qualities of vAT) and not of fLOPCP? , and thus are qualities of 8vvafLt? , of abstract possibility (Hegel would say), and not of EVEpYEta, of ideas which have become concrete. Now, according to Aristotle, all the imperfection of nature originates in matter. All notions of inert, sluggish matter, of rudis indigesta moles, as the Latin poet expresses it,l go back to this thesis of Aristotle that matter is to blame for the imperfection of the world. So, too, in a sublimated form, do all ideas
of mere existence as something untouched and abandoned by mind and meaning. I do not think it is usually realized (and perhaps I may draw your attention to it here) how much the notions of so-called everyday life - what I call ' bleating', the ideas passed uncritically from mouth to mouth, or presented as self-evident in leading or not-so- leading articles in newspapers - how much almost all these notions are cultural assets which have sunk down from the upper stratum, to use the language of the sociology of literature. That is to say, they are simply residues of great metaphysics, of great philosophy, which,
through being severed from an original context which has lapsed into oblivion, take on the character of seemingly self-evident truths. The
self-evidence is only apparent, since they owe their obviousness or compellingness to the structures in which they first appeared, whereas they are now treated as matters of fact which require no further justification, and precisely thereby are transformed into untruths. This
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? applies especially to the antithesis of matter and form in Aristotle, which can be said to have pre-formed the familiar dualisms in our received ideas to an extent of which we are entirely unaware. It is really the same as with Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme, whose rhetoric teacher explains to him that there are two kinds of speech, prose and poetry, and who then asks: 'Oh really, and what do I speak? ' When he is told that it is prose, Jourdain exclaims proudly: 'Goodness! I've been speaking prose all my life and I didn't even know it! '2 And we speak Aristotle all our lives and 'don't even know it', except that this is not such an innocent matter
as the good Monsieur Jourdain's prose.
For example, the difference between the heavenly and earthly
spheres, which has become so central in Christian doctrine and led for the first time in Augustine to a kind of hierarchy of intra-mundane happenings,3 points back directly to this Aristotelian dichotomy or dualism. Even the categories of male and female are distinguished according to the same dualism by Aristotle, all the higher, form- giving categories being equated with the male - as was only too self- evident in a patriarchal society - and the merely material and existent with the female. No doubt you will all have endured a learned school- teacher telling you that the roots of mater and materia are related,
and you will recall the ensuing howl of triumph - that, too, is an echo from Aristotle's Metaphysics. Behind it, of course, lies the dis- tinction between the principle which controls nature and the nature oppressed by this principle and presented, because oppressed, as amorphous. With some exaggeration one might say that the world of vAY) in Aristotle is the world of the prehistoric imagination, which
Bachofen called matriarchal, while the world of logos, the world of the Olympian gods, of the centralizing principle, is equated with
fLOPCP? .
And you will see that this idea of the centralizing principle applies to his thought in a far stricter sense than emerges from what I have just said. But the most important quality attributed to matter is its resistance to form, and according to Aristotle this resistance explains something which is of special thematic importance for him: the specific character of change or development, which he conceives as gradua1. 4 What you have here is, fundamentally, the later problem of Christian theology: why the world created by God is not a divine world, why it is not already perfect. This, too, is answered in accord- ance with the same dualistic principle, which states that creation opposes, or in some way resists, pure identity with the creator. And even the complementary principle, that, on the other hand, some urge towards the highest principle is present in matter, in creation,S you will also find prefigured in Aristotle's Metaphysics. There is already
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