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.