Summary: Metaphysics
The Metaphysics is a collection of 14 books compiled not by Aristotle himself, but by the librarian Andronicus of Rhodes, after Aristotle's death. The term 'metaphysics' was never used by Aristotle, who spoke of 'first philosophy'. Yet this book with its murky origins had a major influence on Western thought.
Other works: Physics Nicomachean Ethics On the Soul Poetics
Metaphysics commonly refers to that which is "beyond the physical", i.e. that which is not accessible to our senses, that which lies beyond the sensible world.
Book A
Aristotle asserts in this first book of the Metaphysics that every man has a natural desire to know, and the pleasure taken in the perceptions of the senses is a proof of this.
Man, unlike animals, knows how to organise his experience, and therefore enjoys it infinitely more. Experience is not yet science, but science and art come from experience. It is in fact through the abstraction of multiple similar experiences, that the mind forms general notions and accesses science.
Aristotle defends experience, and it is perhaps partly from this text that we have tended to oppose an Aristotle empiricist to a Plato who would be a rationalist:
Even it may be noticed that people who have only experience to rely on seem to succeed better than those who, without the data of experience, only question reason 1.
The reason is simple: experience makes us aware of particular cases, reason of general notions, whereas in action we deal only with the particular. The doctor does not treat Man, but Socrates, this or that man.
Reasoning allows him to know the causes of things. It is on this precise point that it finds its superiority over experience, which is content to note as a fact the existence of things, without looking for their cause.
Philosophy, in other words wisdom, has as its object the causes and principles of things.
It is in this book of the Metaphysics that we find expressed the famous idea that originally as today, it was astonishment and admiration that led men to philosophy
2.
The philosopher, then, is one who, like a child in its earliest days, is astonished and amazed at the phenomena around him; and let what is be, and let it be such.
Among the sciences, those are particularly philosophical which are sought for their own sake and not for any material advantage.
Since to know a thing is to know its cause, we must acquire the science of primary causes.
This is then an opportunity for Aristotle to make a rapid assessment of the different kinds of causes identified in the Physics:
- the essential cause: The essence of the thing, what makes it what it is
3
- the material cause: the matter of the thing
- the motive cause: the origin of the movement of the thing
- the final cause: The final purpose for which the thing is made
in other words the good of the thing
since good is the final end of everything that happens and moves in this world
4.
This leads Aristotle to revisit the history of philosophy, attributing the same common character to the philosophers who preceded him (essentially, the pre-Socratics: Anaximander, Empedocles, etc.).
These would have privileged the material cause. This particular value accorded to this type of cause would come from the idea, not yet made explicit, of substance: under the various changes that reality would undergo (accidents), a fixed material substance is maintained: fire (Heraclitus), air (Anaximenes), water (Thales). The pre-Socratics agreed on this principle of a material substance, the cause of all things, but simply differed on its nature.
The inadequacy of this conception stems from its inability to explain movement. Where does the movement of things come from? A lump of iron, in its inertia, cannot transmit motion to anything: matter alone cannot explain motion.
Some pre-Socratics, such as Parmenides or Zeno of Elea, absurdly came to deny the existence of movement, in order to preserve their fascination with the material cause.
However, the evidence of motion must be admitted, and so there must be a driving cause.
Moreover, matter and motion cannot explain the Good, the order and regularity of the universe. It must be an intelligence, and not simply matter or motion, that is at the origin of the universe, understood as cosmos (an orderly whole) and not as chaos.
This is where the intelligence of the universe comes in.
This is the contribution of another pre-Socratic, Anaxagoras, the only wise man at a banquet of drunken people
.
Aristotle goes into detail about the doctrines of the Presocratics in an attempt to show their inadequacies.
1 Metaphysics, book A, 1
2 A, 2
3 A, 3
4 ibid.