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 writings; he referred instead to 'first philosophy'. Despite its uncertain origins, this work had a profound influence on Western thought.
Other works: Physics Nicomachean Ethics On the Soul Poetics
Metaphysics commonly refers to that which is beyond the physical—that is, what is not accessible to our senses and lies beyond the sensible world.
Book A
In the first book of the Metaphysics, Aristotle asserts that every human being has a natural desire to know, and the pleasure taken in sensory perceptions serves as evidence of this.
Unlike animals, humans know how to organise their experiences, and therefore derive far greater enjoyment from them. Experience is not yet science, but science and art arise from experience. Indeed, it is through the abstraction of multiple similar experiences that the mind forms general notions and gains access to scientific knowledge.
Aristotle defends the value of experience, and it is perhaps partly from this text that we have developed the tendency to contrast an Aristotle empiricist with a Plato who would be a rationalist:
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 makes us aware of particular cases, while reason provides us with 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.
Reasoning allows the doctor to understand the causes of things, and it is precisely in this capacity that reason surpasses experience, which is content to observe the existence of facts 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 led human beings to philosophy
2.
The philosopher, then, is one who, like a child in its earliest days, is astonished and amazed by the phenomena around him—who lets what is be, and accepts it as it is.
Among the sciences, those that are particularly philosophical are those pursued for their own sake, and not for any material advantage.
Since to know something is to know its cause, we must seek the science of primary causes.
This leads Aristotle to provide a brief overview of the different types of causes 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
, since 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, attributing a common characteristic to the philosophers who preceded him (essentially, the pre-Socratics: Anaximander, Empedocles, etc.).
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), a 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, in its inertia, cannot transmit motion to anything: matter alone cannot account for motion.
Some pre-Socratics, like Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, absurdly went so far as to deny the existence of motion—an absurd conclusion born of their exclusive focus on 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 the regularity of the universe. It must be an intelligence, and not simply matter or motion, that stands at the origin of the universe, understood as cosmos (an ordered whole) rather than as chaos.
This is where the concept of a universal intelligence comes into play.
This was the contribution of another pre-Socratic thinker, Anaxagoras, the only wise man at a banquet of drunken people
.
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.