Summary: Metaphysics
Aristotle's Metaphysics is a collection of 14 books, compiled posthumously by Andronicus of Rhodes, a librarian in ancient Rome. The term 'metaphysics' does not appear in Aristotle's own writings; he spoke instead of 'first philosophy'. Despite its uncertain origins, the work exerted a profound influence on Western thought.
Other works: Physics Nicomachean Ethics On the Soul Poetics
Metaphysics commonly denotes that which lies beyond the physical — beyond what is accessible to the senses.
Book A
In the first book of the Metaphysics, Aristotle asserts that every human being has a natural desire to know, and the pleasure we take in sensory perception is evidence of this.
Unlike animals, humans are able to organise their experiences, and therefore derive far greater benefit from them. Experience is not yet science, but science and art arise from experience. Indeed, it is by abstracting from multiple similar experiences that the mind forms general notions and arrives at scientific knowledge.
Aristotle defends the value of experience, and it is perhaps partly from this text that we have come to contrast an empiricist Aristotle with a rationalist Plato:
It may even be observed that people who have only experience to rely on seem to succeed better than those who, without the data of experience, rely solely on reason1.
The explanation is simple: experience acquaints us with particular cases, while reason furnishes general notions; yet in practice, we deal only with particulars. A doctor does not treat Man in the abstract but rather Socrates, or this or that individual.
Reason enables the doctor to understand the causes of things, and it is precisely in this capacity that reason surpasses experience, which is content to observe that facts obtain without seeking their cause.
Philosophy — or wisdom — has as its object the causes and principles of things.
It is in this book of the Metaphysics that we find the famous idea that originally as today, it was astonishment and wonder that first drew human beings to philosophy
2.
The philosopher is one who, like a young child, remains astonished by the phenomena around him — one who lets things be, and receives them as they are.
Among the sciences, those that are most truly philosophical are pursued for their own sake, and not for any practical advantage.
Since to know something is to know its cause, we must seek the science of primary causes.
This leads Aristotle to give a brief overview of the different types of causes he identified in the Physics:
- The essential cause: the essence of the thing, that which makes it what it is
3
- The material cause: the matter of the thing.
- The efficient cause: the origin of the thing's motion or change.
- The final cause: the ultimate purpose for which the thing exists
— in other words, its good
, for the good is the final end of everything that occurs and moves in this world
4.
This leads Aristotle to revisit the history of philosophy, identifying a common characteristic in the philosophers who preceded him — chiefly the pre-Socratics: Anaximander, Empedocles, and others.
These early thinkers, Aristotle explains, gave particular importance to the material cause. This emphasis stemmed from an implicit notion of substance: beneath the various changes reality undergoes (accidents), one stable, material substance endures: fire (Heraclitus), air (Anaximenes), water (Thales). While the pre-Socratics agreed on the existence of a material substance as the cause of all things, they disagreed about its nature.
The inadequacy of this conception lies in its failure to explain motion. Where does the movement of things originate? A lump of iron, inert in itself, cannot transmit motion to anything: matter alone cannot account for movement.
Some pre-Socratics, like Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, went so far as to deny the existence of motion altogether — an absurd conclusion born of their exclusive focus on the material cause.
However, the reality of motion must be acknowledged, and so there must be a driving cause.
Moreover, matter and motion cannot explain the Good, the order, and the regularity of the universe. It must be an intelligence, and not merely matter or motion, that lies at the origin of the universe, understood as cosmos — an ordered whole — rather than chaos.
This is where the concept of a universal intelligence comes into play.
This insight came from another pre-Socratic thinker, Anaxagoras — the only sober man at a banquet of drunkards
.
Aristotle examines the doctrines of the pre-Socratics in detail, demonstrating their limitations.
1 Metaphysics, book A, 1
2 A, 2
3 A, 3
4 ibid.