Aristotle – Philosophy Scare

20. Hobbes’ Hidden Aristotelianism

Was Thomas Hobbes a lousy speller or a good one, but only by the standards of his time?

And I belieeve that scarce any thing can be more absurdly said in naturall Philosophy, than that which is now called Aristotle’s Metaphysiques; nor more repugnant to Government, than much of what hee hath said in his Politiques; nor more ignorantly, than a great part of his Ethiques (Hobbes, Leviathan Cambridge 1991 p. 370).

Hobbes here condemns Aristotle’s thought as vigorously we condemn Hobbes’ spelling. The old Greek contributes absolutely nothing, it would appear, to Hobbes’s philosophy: not to his physics, his ethics, or his politics.

But old folks persist. The very subtitle to Leviathan: “the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill,” contains words which sound suspiciously like Aristotle’s account of ousia (#8). Could Hobbes, while thinking that he is rejecting Aristotle, only be reinstating his basic metaphysical structure—without, apparently, even knowing it?

Hobbes spells out (!) his argument thusly:

The only way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend [people] from the invasion of Forraigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort, [that] they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will….By this Authoritie, given him by every particular man in the Common-Wealth, [the sovereign] …is inabled to conforme the wills of them all, to Peace at home, and mutuall Ayd against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the Essence of the Common-Wealth (Lev. pp. 87f).

So a commonwealth must able to distinguish its inhabitants from “forraigners” and to fend off “invasion,” which for Hobbes is synonymous with causality itself, for causality is nothing but the “invasion” (incursus) of one body by another, i.e. the displacement of one body when another body intrudes into the place it occupies (de Corp. VI. 6, VIII. 19, IX.5, pp. 23, 65, 72). So the commonwealth must have a determinate boundary.

Within that boundary a single authority, the sovereign, exercises a power so absolute as to be able to “conform” the wills of everyone else to peace (thus exercising what I call disposition over those wills), and to mutual aid in war (a case of what I call initiative). It is thus entirely in keeping with Aristotelian usage for Hobbes to call the sovereign the “essence” of the commonwealth; the sovereign plays the role of form in Aristotelian ontology (again, see #8).

In keeping with an unsavory philosophical tradition, I will call the sovereign a “he.” But a sovereign, I will note, can for Hobbes be a he or a she, or a they—sovereignty is not tied to gender, and can be vested in any number of people as long as they act in a unified way

The extended discussion of sovereign power in Leviathan Chapter XVIII expands upon this reappropriation of Aristotle in a total of twelve points. According to the first two of these, the people cannot overthrow their sovereign and get a new one, nor can he relinquish his position—because he is their unity, and without him they are not “a people” but merely a “multitude.” Sovereign power can end only where the sovereign no longer has the power to fulfill his part of the covenant–and Hobbes phrases this requirement in terms of an analogy to the ousiodic structure of the human individual:

The Soveraignty is the Soule of the Common-Wealth; which once departed from the body, the members do no more receive their motion from it (Lev. p. 114; emphasis added).

Boundary is further determined and consolidated in the third point, which asserts that anyone who protests against an act of the sovereign is, literally, an out-law:

he must either submit to their decrees, or be left in the condition of warre he was in before; wherein he might without injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever (Lev. p. 90).

In fact, the sovereign’s dispositive power goes far beyond what is required for preserving peace; it is a power to maintain social order in general. The sovereign has the right to decide what can be taught in society (#6) and sets up the regulations which govern the apportionment of property (#7), of offices (#10), of rewards and punishments (#11), and of honors (#12). He also decides the lawfulness of smaller groups which may form within the society (Lev. pp. 115-123)

The sovereign’s dispositive power over his subjects is so extensive that he cannot injure them: whatever he does to his subjects will not count as an “injury.” There are thus no standards for the right exercise of his power other than those he himself sets (## 4, 5). Sovereignty, in short, is “power unlimited” (Lev. p. 115), and the relation of subjects to sovereign has a familiar air of ancient domesticity:

As in the presence of the Master, the Servants are equall, and without any honor at all; so are the Subjects, in the presence of the Soveraign (Lev. p.93).

When we confine our gaze to Aristotle’s and Hobbes’s strictly political doctrines, the polis and the Commonwealth look very different. Curtis Johnson has summed their differences up as follows: for Aristotle, the state exists by nature, and humans are by nature political; the aim of the state is the good life. For Hobbes, the individual is by nature inimical to others; the state exists by convention, and its aim is security.[1] But when we look to the metaphysical bones which underlie these very different bodies politic, we find them both to be versions of ousiodic structure, exhibiting the three ancient traits of boundary, disposition, and initiative. The form of the Hobbesian commonwealth is the sovereign, exercising both dispositive and initiatory power. Its inhabitants are the matter.

Though Hobbes’s political structure thus has the classical features of an Aristotelian ousia, the justification for them is different indeed. It is not for Hobbes, as for Aristotle, written in all of nature that for any community there must be a single archê. Nor is it a metaphysical or rationalist truth about some ideal realm. Ousia has neither natural nor supernatural warrant–and seems, in fact, to break out, in Chapter XVIII, with no warrant at all.

[1]Curtis Johnson, “The Hobbesian Conception of Sovereignty and Aristotle’s Politics” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985) pp. 327-347

11. Dancing Around the Metaphysical Barn

Plato and Aristotle take opposed positions on the question of where the “principle” of a thing, that which makes it what it is, is located. For Plato, such a principle is a form separate from the thing, in which the thing “participates.” For Aristotle, the principle shapes and organizes the thing from within, as its essence.

So why, if they are so opposed, do Plato and Aristotle, when pushed, turn into one another?

For Plato, forms are things and so must have their principles outside them. Republic 509b tells us that the ultimate principle of all of them, which makes each form what it is, is the form of the good. And this form has no principle beyond itself: it is “sovereign” over the entire intelligible order. Plato finesses this conclusion by claiming that the form of the good has no determinate nature, and so needs no further determining principle, but the fact remains: to understand the form of the good we must look to it, not beyond it; to that extent, Plato has become an Aristotelian.

For Aristotle, the principle of a thing is to be found within the thing; but what about the set of all material things, the cosmos itself? It is not only a thing, but an ordered thing, with earth at the center and the sphere of the fixed stars at the edge. Where does this unifying order come from?

It cannot come from anything within the cosmos, for everything within the cosmos contains matter, which means it can change. Anything which can change at all will eventually change, incrementally, into something else—at which time the thing it originally was will cease to exist. The world for Aristotle had no beginning in time; so if the principle of the cosmos were within it, like an essence, the cosmic order would have ceased to exist by now (see Phaedo 72b-d for a related argument).

So in Metaphysics XI, Aristotle concludes that the ordering principle of the cosmos is outside the cosmos: the immaterial, purely rational, and so consummately ordered, prime mover. The cosmos, we learn, “loves” the prime mover, but is unable to unite with it; so it imitates it by ordering itself. Whence this “love” (ἔρως), and what is it? We are not told; as Platonic did with participation (#8), Aristotle owes us a theory and gives us a word.

All of which was laid bare by Kant, most spectacularly in his “Third Antinomy.” The thesis of that antinomy states that everything has a cause; and since a cause for Kant at least partially precedes its effect in time, nothing can cause itself. The causes of a thing, the principles which make it what it is, are thus outside the thing, as with Plato.

The antithesis states, by contrast, that some things—free actions—are not caused by anything preceding them in time. To find the principle of a free act, you must look at the act itself, where you will find the atemporal moral law. So the antithesis is, broadly, Aristotelian .

Each of these two contradictory statements, Kant tells us, can be proven. What he doesn’t tell us is that his proofs are reductio’s: The proof of the thesis assumes the antithesis and demonstrates its falsity; the proof of the antithesis does the reverse.

So if you choose the (Platonic) thesis, you will eventually be forced into the (Aristotelian) antithesis, to avoid an infinite regress of causes according to which the form of the good would have a principle outside it, and that principle would also have a principle outside it, and so on…(This argument was known to Aristotle, who mysteriously called it the Third Man.)

If you choose the (Aristotelian) antithesis, you will be forced to adopt the (Platonic) thesis, on pain of locating the eternal order of the cosmos within the cosmos itself, where it cannot be because the cosmos contains matter. Matter brings change, and since anything which can change at all will eventually change into something else, the cosmic order would not be eternal.

These are not arguments (Kant’s “proofs” are notoriously bad) so much as ingrained tendencies. When we look at them that way, we see that Kant has sketched the structure of a metaphysical barn, around which Platonists and Aristotelians had been chasing each other for centuries—right up to the third antinomy itself, which abruptly stops the chase.

It does this by claiming that the thesis belongs, not to reality, but to one faculty of the mind (the understanding) while the antithesis belongs to another faculty, reason. Kant’s solution is not only abrupt, but more than a bit ad hoc (in spite of the hundreds of pages of argument intended to establish it). It also, as we will see, has other, and severe, problems—problems so severe as to impeach Kant’s entire “transcendental philosophy.”

But we also see, already, that if Kant had written nothing other than the “Third Antinomy,” he would have been the most important philosopher since Aristotle. Because it was he who uncovered, buried in the texts of the history of philosophy, an ancient and worrisome structure: the metaphysical barn.

10. Aristotle, Freedom, and Choice

One surprise when you read Aristotle is just how unimportant freedom is to him. It may be our central political value, but Aristotle rarely even mentions it. When he talks about the quality of being free, ἐλευθεριότης, he just means the ability to spend money wisely: “liberality.” What we want from society is not freedom but justice: fair distribution of resources, fair punishment for misdeeds, and so on.

A lot of people are unwilling to countenance this downgrading of freedom, and seek in Aristotle’s pages a “higher freedom,” the ability to act, not according to desire, but according to reason.

Insofar as we are human beings, we should certainly act rationally, for according to Aristotle reason is our human essence. But in the opening chapters of Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, I think we find a more complex and interesting possibility.

There, Aristotle discusses a pair of concepts allied to what was later called freedom: ἑκών, voluntarily or happily, and ἄκων, under constraint or unhappily. Aristotle glosses what we do ἑκών as what we are responsible for. When we act ἄκων, or as we might say unfreely, we are in fact not acting at all, for something else is constraining us. In such cases we are not responsible for what we do.

What is it, then, to be “responsible” for one’s act? For Aristotle, as is typical of him, responsibility has various kinds and degrees; but in the strictest sense, we are responsible for things we choose to do. Freedom is then, most strictly, freedom of choice. How very modern!

Not so fast. What does Aristotle mean by “choice” (προαίρεσις)?

Choice for him—again, in the strictest sense—results from deliberation (βούλευσις). Deliberation, in turn, relates what Aristotle views as the two morally-relevant components of the human mind: desire and reason. Desire is an impetus toward something other than itself (desire, we may say, doesn’t desire desire). The overall name for what it seeks is ἐυδαιμονία, which is often (though controversially) translated as “happiness.” Basically, it denotes, not a feeling (as “happiness” does), but everything in your life going as well as it can.

Reason has (again, as is typical for Aristotle) different degrees and forms. In deliberation, reason begins from one’s overall concept of happiness and, using as premises what one knows about the world and one’s position in it, reasons back from that end through various means to it until it arrives at one’s current situation, determining what one can do here and now that will lead most efficiently to happiness. Since one desires happiness, one will then automatically perform that act. Reason and desire come to agreement, and their confluence produces the action.

When an act is performed after reasoning things out this way, then, it arises from the agent’s entire moral psychology, i.e. as the confluence of its two components, reason and desire. The source of the action is then (in the strictest sense) the person performing it, who is therefore wholly “responsible” for that action. If we go on (as Aristotle doesn’t) and call such an action “free,” we arrive at a definition of freedom: freedom is the ability to express your whole self in your actions, where your “self” is the totality of your desires (or at least the currently relevant ones) plus your reason.

Your desires tell you what you love, and reason tells you what you are good at: Aristotle’s “whole self” is not simply reason or desire, but coincides with what I call the “personal nature” of the individual (# 9). We may say that freedom for Aristotle is the ability to express your personal nature in your actions.

The whole point of deliberating is then to identify the single course of action that will most efficiently lead to happiness. It may happen, however, that deliberating arrives at a number of actions that I can perform right now that all lead, with equal efficiency, to happiness. In such a case, the alternative actually chosen has nothing rational to recommend it over its alternatives, and the choice is merely random. Choosing among alternatives, in fact, is servile:

But it is as in a house, where the freemen [ἐλευθέροις]are least at liberty to act at random [ὅ τι ἔτθχε ποιεῖν], but all or most things have been prescribed for them, while the slaves and the animals do little for the common good…(Metaphysics XII.10 1075a19022, my translation).

Freedom for Aristotle has nothing to do, then, with freedom, as (roughly) the ability to choose one of a number of alternatives, where the choice itself has no previous cause (and so is called an act of ”free will”). That concept of freedom, our concept, has theological, and—as we will see—specifically Christian, origins. It has to, because (as Kant argues) it implies a break in the chains of natural causality: as what Kant called the capacity to begin something truly new, freedom cannot come from nature, which—for Kant anyway—is causally governed through and through.

In the world of quantum physics, to be sure, there are uncaused events, such as proton decay. Kant, though he knew nothing of quantum physics, calls such events “spontaneous.” But, as Hume had already pointed out, who values such spontaneity? It cannot be anything other than a capacity for totally random activity; and who wants to act that way? For Hume, a free action is one that arises from one’s “internal character, passions, and affections”—or from what I call one’s “personal nature” (Hume, Enquiries, Oxford 1902 p. 99). Similarly for Aristotle.

Free choice in Aristotle’s sense requires extensive knowledge of oneself, while free choice in our sense requires only the power to act without cause. And you cannot know yourself without knowing a lot about the world and society you live in. Such knowledge was once summed up as the “liberal arts,” which is not an arbitrary name but tells us that such studies give us the knowledge we need to be truly free.

To say that something has theological, or even Christian, roots does not mean that it is false; but we see that there are at least two problems with the theologically-derived sense of “freedom:” it is an ad hoc revocation of natural causality, and it denies the necessity of self-knowledge. The latter makes it a philosophy which proclaims the irrelevance of philosophy.

9. Aristotle and Tax Avoidance

You don’t have to dig very deeply into American conservative thought before you come across the Rand Fantasy. This is the dream, explored by Ayn Rand in her Atlas Shrugged, that the talented and strong-willed few, who supply the rest of us with food, shelter, clothing, and such meaning as our lives can tolerate, simply stop working, annoyed by bureaucrats telling them how to run their businesses and taxing the wealth they create.

Rand may not be taken very seriously by academics, but beyond the ivory tower, arguments based on the Fantasy course through American society like the bulls through Pamplona. We hear it over and over again: taxes and government regulations must be kept to an absolute minimum, lest the gifted few—more recently baptized “job creators—” simply stop working, or at least stop working so furiously hard.

Rand famously claimed to find nothing of value in the history of philosophy except Aristotle. This is a bit extreme, given her obvious affinities with Nietzsche and his predecessor, Max Stirner (whose main work was actually entitled Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, “The Individual and His Property”); but there is certainly plenty in Aristotle that prefigures Rand. Much of humanity, he thinks, consists of “slaves by nature:” people who are bright enough to understand and follow orders, but not bright enough to figure out which orders to give (Politics I.5-7). The truly bright people, the “great-souled” ones (Nicomachean Ethics 1107b22-1108a3) have what Aristotle calls “active reason,” which enables them to make correct decisions in life. They do great things, and are entitled to great rewards—the greatest being the freedom to live as they think best.

All very Randian–as far as it goes. For like James B. Conant at Harvard (# 6), Rand did not read her favorite Greek philosopher all the way to the end. In particular, she did not understand Aristotle’s theory of human motivation.

While all humans share the species-nature of “human being,” he believes that different people are fitted, by whether by nature or by habituation, to do different things. Thus, some people are good at drinking; and since you enjoy what you’re good at, they love to drink. Others are good at hunting and love to hunt, others at philosophy and, as its very name implies, love wisdom (Nicomachean Ethics 1172a). Each individual, then, has what I will call a “personal nature.” One’s personal nature is the set of talents and aptitudes, partly natural (like height for a basketball player) and partly acquired (like skill in surgery) that determines what she or he loves most in life, and becomes best at.

Since your personal nature determines what you love to do, it will (like any nature) inevitably manifest itself in your actions. A poet-by-nature, we may say, can no more dispense with writing poetry than a fish could abjure swimming, or a river could flow uphill. Someone whose personal nature makes them love something is willing to sacrifice almost everything else to it—and won’t even regard it as a “sacrifice.”

In such cases, monetary rewards are largely irrelevant. Poets rarely gain significant wealth from their poetry, but they write it anyway. Really gifted teachers often tell me they’d “teach for free,” if they could. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made incredible amounts of money, but that was not their goal (if it were, Gates would not be giving most of his away).[1] They originally set out to pursue a vision; and what I am calling their “personal nature” is what generated that vision.

So what would Aristotle say about someone who seeks to increase their wealth by avoiding taxes?

He would say that such a person is not doing what they do “by nature.” If they can refrain from their work, then they don’t really love it. Which means that they have not devoted to it the kind of uncompromising and single-minded effort it takes to get really good at something in the first place. Such people can be worthy practitioners in their field, but the heights of excellence are reserved to those who love what they do. And if you love doing something, you’ll do it for free. Eisphoraphobia, fear of paying taxes, is for the second-raters.

One benefit of looking to Aristotle here is that we see how issues of tax avoidance differ from issues concerning government regulation. People who know how to do something really well usually don’t appreciate being told how to do it by others, who are almost certain to know less—not by the government, or by their board of directors, or for that matter by their mother. If the constraints placed on them actually change the nature of the work so much that it is no longer what they love doing by nature, one can certainly imagine them quitting. So the ani-regulation argument is more respectable than anti-tax arguments.

More respectable, but not impregnable. There are people, we know, who are really good at torturing and killing other people (some of them, indeed, make quite a bit of money at it). Not all personal natures are meritorious, and some need to be suppressed—by governmental force, if need be.

I don’t know if Ayn Rand thought that a killer-by-nature should be allowed to kill, but I am quite sure that if she did, she would be wrong. It is up go society to decide which activities it should countenance. Only once an activity has been approved by society can those who are really good at it in virtue of their personal natures be left to conduct it as they see fit.

[1] Jobs put it forcefully: “I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important,” Jobs said in 1996 PBS documentary. He co-founded Apple in 1976, as a 21-year-old. “I never did it for the money.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/14/steve-jobs-i-never-did-it-for-the-money.html

accessed August 31m 2020

8. Aristotle’s Fix

With Aristotle, philosophy is fixed: a problem with Plato is solved, with the result that certain tracks are laid, a certain intellectual prairie is fenced, and the mental grooves in which philosophy will move for millennia are dug out. Aristotle does this by hammering together two divergent rails of Plato’s system.

Plato posited unchanging Forms and changing sensibles. What holds these two realms together remains a mystery, yet together—somehow—they must be. How else will the forms have title to guide our actions, and how else can soul move between them, as it apparently must?

Plato is uninterested in such questions. His attention goes to the χορισμός, the spacing or separation between forms and sensibles, rather than to their necessary unity. So when it comes to the overall relation between forms and sensibles Plato owes us a theory but, as Aristotle points out (at Metaphysics I.9) gives us just a word — “participation,” μέθεξις.

Some might say (I did, in # 5) that this is a good thing—that it enables Plato to convey the human comedy in its tragic dimension. But Aristotle looks at it from the other side: the “separation” of Forms from the human world leaves them unchained from everything they are supposed to explain. Their whole domain becomes a limitless, philosophically unneeded complication of the sensory world. Individual forms cannot be defined, and morality becomes tragedy;

So Aristotle kills his teacher: he rejects, not the entirety of Plato’s theory of forms, but one of its core components, the separation of forms from the sensible, changing world. The eternals are to be found within the temporals. They are essences, not forms, and now Aristotle has to do what he thinks Plato should have done: not merely describe humans dealing with an unexplained separation, but actually explaining the relation between an essence and the thing whose essence it is. That explanation goes by way of matter, the other major component of a thing. Matter is so cryptic and unstable that we might just call it everything in a thing which is not its form.

Explaining the relation of form, now essence, to things, now matter, is the core of Aristotelian metaphysics. The treatment extends through the three central and tortured books of his Metaphysics: Zeta, Eta, and Theta. I have followed it elsewhere (Metaphysics and Oppression, Chapter One), and have argued that in the end, the relation between essence and matter is one of domination. Or, seen from matter’s point of view, of oppression.

Essence for Aristotle exercises a threefold domination over matter: it draws a boundary for the thing, excluding most of the cosmos from it while allowing some matter into it; the proper amount varies with the kind of thing it is (elephant essences need a lot more matter than squirrel ones). The essence also establishes and maintains the order of events within those boundaries, arranging or disposing the parts of the thing; and it has the initiative to govern the thing’s interactions with what is outside its boundaries—the rest of the world—when those interactions are as they should be. Thus, a person’s interactions with other people and things are as they should be when they are governed by the human essence, which is reason (λόγος) itself.

Boundary, disposition, and initiative—or exclusion, control, and isolation—are the watchwords here, the essential features of Being itself, or as I call it (following Aristotle) ousia. The three are found for Aristotle on the level of the human individual, whose essence is reason; in the household, where reason is found in the pater; in the state, where reason solves the conflicts that arise because human individuals have only very partial, and so perspectival, knowledge of the world; and on the level of the cosmos itself, where the ultimate essence, also known as the Prime Mover, orders the movement of the stars and so the passage of the seasons, and so human life.

Aristotle’s model of Being, as I have traced elsewhere (Metaphysics and Oppression), will become an obsession of philosophers. They will, down through the ages, explicate it, justify it, apply it, tinker with it, challenge it, and finally criticize it; but they will never leave it behind. This means that numerous engines of oppression in society—patriarchal households, capitalist factories, slave plantations, totalitarian states—will operate according to philosophical blueprints, established by Aristotle.

Who was only trying to kill his teacher.