Aristotle and Plato

The Plato we are supposed to know from his dialogues is one who posited that, for every name we give to bodies in the world there is a bodiless being in another world, one while they are many, static while they are changing, perfect while they are altogether distasteful. Not surprisingly, those for whom this is Plato find his doctrine absurd, and welcome an Aristotle whom they find saying that being in its highest form is found in an individual man or horse, that mathematical things are abstractions from sensible bodies, and that, if there is an ideal man apart from men, in virtue of whom they are all called men, then there must be yet a third kind of man, in virtue of whom the form and the men can have the same name, and yet a fourth, and so on. You can't stop adding new ideal men until you are willing to grant that it was absurd to add the first one, or anything at all beyond just plain men. This is hard-headed, tough-minded Aristotle, not to be intimidated by fancy, mystical talk, living in the world we live in and knowing it is the only world there is. This Aristotle, unfortunately, is a fiction, a projection of our unphilosophic selves. He lives only in a handful of sentences ripped out of their contexts. The true Aristotle indeed takes at face value the world as we find it and all our ordinary opinions about it--takes them, examines them, and finds them wanting. It is the world as we find it which continually, for Aristotle, shows that our ordinary, materialist prejudices are mistaken, and the abandonment of those prejudices shows in turn that the world as we found it was not a possible world, that the world as we must reflect upon it is a much richer world, mysterious and exciting.

Those of you for whom reading the Platonic dialogues was a battle you won by losing, an eye-opening experience from which, if there is no going forward, there is certainly no turning back, should get to know this Aristotle. But you will find standing in your way all those passages in which Aristotle seems to be discussing the dialogues and does so in a shallow way. Each dialogue has a surface in which Socrates speaks in riddles, articulates half-truths which invite qualification and correction, argues from answers given by others as though he shared their opinions, and pretends to be at a loss about everything. Plato never straightens things out for his readers, any more than Socrates does for his hearers. To do so would be to soothe us, to lull us to sleep as soon as we've begun to be distressed by what it feels like to be awake. Platonic writing, like Socratic talk, is designed to awaken and guide philosophic thinking, by presenting, defending, and criticizing plausible responses to important questions. The Platonic-Socratic words have only done their work when we have gone beyond them, but they remain in the dialogues as a collection of just what they were intended to be -- unsatisfactory assertions. Hippocrates Apostle finds 81 places in the Metaphysics where Aristotle disagrees with Plato. It is not surprising that Aristotle himself uses Plato's name in almost none of those places. Aristotle is addressing an audience of students who have read the dialogues and is continuing the work of the dialogues. Many, perhaps most, of Aristotle's students would, like scholars today, find theories and answers in Plato's dialogues. Aristotle would not be earning his keep as a teacher of philosophy if he did not force his students beyond that position. Aristotle constantly refers to the dialogues because they are the best and most comprehensive texts he and his students share. Aristotle disagrees with Plato about some things, but less extensively and less deeply than he disagrees with every other author that he names. The Metaphysics inevitably looks like an attack on Plato just because Plato's books are so much better than anything left by Thales, Empedocles or anyone else.

My first assumption, then, was that the Metaphysics is one book with one complex argument, and my second is that, in cohering within itself, the Metaphysics may cohere with the Platonic dialogues. I assume that discussions in the dialogues may be taken as giving flesh to Aristotle's formulations, while they in turn may be taken as giving shape to those discussions. One need only try a very little of this to find a great deal beginning to fall into place. For example, listen to Aristotle in Book I, Chapter 9 of the Metaphysics: "the Forms...are not the causes of motion or of any other change...And they do not in any way help either towards the knowledge of the other things..or towards their existence...Moreover, all other things do not come to be from the Forms in any of the usual senses of 'from.' And to say that the Forms are patterns and that the other things participate in them is to use empty words and poetic metaphors." A devastating attack on Plato, is it not? Or is it? Aristotle says that positing the Forms explains no single thing that one wants to know. But doesn't Socrates say in the Phaedo that to call beauty itself the cause of beauty in beautiful things is a "safe but stupid answer"--that one must begin with it but must also move beyond it? Again, everyone knows that the Platonic Socrates claimed that the forms were separate from the things in the sensible world, off by themselves, while Aristotle insisted that the forms were in the things. Recall the Phaedo passage just referred to. Does not Socrates say that the cause of heat in a hot thing is not heat itself but fire? Where, then, is the form for Socrates? Aristotle taught that the causes of characteristics of things were to be looked for not in a separate world of forms but in the primary instances of those characteristics right here in the world. This doctrine may seem to be a rejection of Plato's chief postulate, but listen to Aristotle himself explain it in Book II, Chapter 1 of the Metaphysics: "of things to which the same predicate belongs, the one to which it belongs in the highest degree is that in virtue of which it belongs also to the others. For example, fire is the hottest of whatever is truly called 'hot', for fire is cause of hotness in the others." Do you hear an echo? Again, Aristotle teaches that form is to be understood as always at work, never static as is the Platonic form, or is it? Do not the Stranger and Theaetetus agree in the Sophist that it would be "monstrous and absurd" to deny that life, motion, and soul belong to the intelligible things? Do they not indeed define being as a power to act or be affected? Does not Socrates in the Theaetetus entertain the same definition when he construes the world as made up of an infinity of powers to act and be affected? Plato's dialogues do not set forth a theory of forms. They set forth a way to get started with the work of philosophic inquiry, and Aristotle moves altogether within that way. Much in his writings that is a closed book to those who insist on seeing him as Plato's opponent opens up when one lets the dialogues serve as the key.

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