(Note:
What I submit below is an edited text of an email I wrote to my sister.)
Dear
Jeanie,
I
am reading through Aristotle's book known since Thomas Aquinas as “Metaphysics,”
a collection that Aristotle neither titled nor collected, but which is about
what he terms "first philosophy," or “theologia.” (This book, or
collection of related texts, was placed in the ancient catalogue of Aristotle’s
works after his Physics, and hence became known as “Meta ta Physica,” “after the
Physics.” The heuristic title was harmless, but it gave rise to a speculative
science known as “metaphysics.” As Aristotle conceives his “first philosophy,”
t is a search for the cause of causes, or what is presently called the ground of
being. (Physics is a study of causes of motion, and this pursuit seeks to find
the “first cause.” Werner Jaeger wrote a study many years ago on this
evidently composite text; clearly the extant book needs organizing and
editing. I need to read my copy of Jaeger to assist me in reading Aristotle’s
“Metaphysics.” For the most part, as far as I can tell, at least most of the
the individual books within the “Metaphysics” are ordered within themselves, and
make sense, although it is at times difficult to follow the argument, as it
seems to be composed from sets of notes. Presently I am working through the
famous Book Lambda, the last book of the Metaphysics, leading up to insights
into "the unmoved mover." A previous book (or what we might call a chapter, if
you will) on “being as being” made more sense to me than previously. And I
still like the short book, the second, as a kind of popular introduction to
philosophy, on the nature of truth. As for the first book of the Metaphysics,
which I will be studying more closely, it is an amazing account of work by
Aristotle’s predecessors, and includes his appreciation of the poets as “kinds
of philosophers” because they, too, wonder and seek the ground of being, albeit
in and through myth.
The
whole work begins with one of Aristotle’s blockbuster insights, ridiculed by
little minds who seem to want to misunderstand the ancient philosopher: “All
human beings by nature desire to know.” (I recall graduate students mocking the
claim.) But one can wonder, “Why does it seem that so many in our society have
ceased wondering, ceased questioning and seeking truth? Why is it that children
seem so inquisitive until they must endure a year or two in mass (public)
education? Adults who do not seek to know would rather, apparently, take the
easy way out and turn off their minds with drugs or mindless entertainment. The
human task is to question, and especially to seek to know the truth about
reality, and about God.
I
love Aristotle. He comes across as a real human being (especially, for me, in
his masterful Nicomachean Ethics), but ever as an astounding lover of truth
about every realm of being, and and a great teacher. In antiquity, Aristotle
was known for writing brilliant and beautiful dialogues, following the example
of his mentor, Plato, but most unfortunately, none of the dialogues has been
known since antiquity. What we have are his lecture notes, presented as
treatises. Admittedly, I usually enjoy studying Plato more, and have found him
more to my liking (although I love the Ethics); unlike some commentators, I have
long read these two philosophers as complementary for my intellectual growth,
and not as contrasts. Each illuminates the other. (And remember, Aristotle
studied under Plato for 20 years.). Both minds help me to read Hegel and
Voegelin, and provoke questioning. These fertile and brilliant minds search,
and do not come to rest in doctrines (although Hegel derailed himself with the
construction of his pretentious “System of Science.”) Leibniz, c 1712,
summarizes the two philosophical questions that wonder me: Why is there
something, why not nothing? And why are things as they are, not some other
way? For Leibniz, and for me, these questions point towards the mystery we call
“God.”
A
motivating experience for philosophizing is existence out of nothingness. This
remains a common human problem: each one exists on the edge of non-existence.
Awareness of this issue was much stronger in ancient societies than I realized
until my recent studies in Voegelin’s Ecumenic Age. Some rituals were
meant to magically reverse time and time’s action of lethally moving
being-things back to nothingness. Eliade wrote a number of books on this and
related problems in his studies of myth. I had to read Eliade as an
undergraduate in a "Philosophy of Religion" class taught by an excellent Danish
philosopher, who of course introduced us to Kierkegaard. And Kierkegaard surely
understands existence on the edge of non-existence, and the burdens our
precarious life places on each of us who faces reality courageously.
Yesterday
I unpacked my copy of Spinoza, and I want to study him on God. Reportedly,
Spinoza is a “pantheist” (whatever that truly means), and broke from the pattern
of "faith and reason,” of “religion and philosophy,” established by Philo
Judaeus at the time of Christ, and was highly influential in Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. I want to see if Spinoza reads the Greek philosophers
with fresh eyes, and appreciates noetic consciousness as itself revelatory. Did
he break from the religious nonsense about revelation in a book, and denying the
revelatory awareness that the Greek philosophers discovered? We shall see. In
any case, I ask: If philosophy is not revelatory, what is? (Yes, myths and
prophetic utterances can also be revelatory, but in a different way.) I think
that it is better, or at least more prudent and safe, to begin one’s search from
reason, and then explore. Of course a philosopher worth his salt would explore
mythical and religious texts in his quest for the ground of being, that on which
all of reality is founded. But one ought not to approach a text as “truth
revealed” in any final sense, lest he in effect box up the divine Mind in a
book.
Whitehead’s
claim that “Aristotle founded science but ruined philosophy” often comes to
mind. I think that his great thinker was wrong on both counts. Science had
beginnings before Aristotle, in the thinkers we know as the “pre-Socratics.”
But then again, Aristotle did give sciences a firm foundation, more than mere
speculation. As for “ruining philosophy,” the treatise form may have helped to
turn philosophy into doctrine, but there is no doubt in reading Aristotle that
one is encountering a searching intellect of the first order. It was lesser
minds who badly damaged philosophy by summarizing Platonic and Aristotelian
insights into simplistic doctrines. An example that comes readily to mind is
the “definition” of man as “the rational animal.” What I find in Aristotle are
his explorations of the noetic or rational power in human being, and he does
describe human as the being “having nous.” The later definition was
flat, cut and dried; in reading Aristotle, one discovers what it is to be human
as one studies to understand the philosopher’s explorations of reality. Reason
is discovered by reasoning, and human being is known through reasoning and
loving. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, and the loving search for the truth
about reality by using reason in a loving, creative way. The reason that one
uses is by its nature a sharing in the divine reason (nous) that shines
in, illuminating consciousness; and in exploring the structure of reality by
reason, one finds much that is reasonable in the world, that nature has a noetic
structure. In other words, the world, at least nature (physis) contains
much reasonable order, known by reason in man, cooperating with divine reason
shining in as one seeks to know the truth. And it is Aristotle, not a later
doctrinaire disciple, who explores the life of the mind, reasoning, as
ultimately moved by God in provoking the questions that engender the search
(zetesis).
Aristotle
did not ruin philosophy. Science explores what exists, the nature of reality;
philosophy keeps wondering, 'Why?' “Why is there something? Why does the Whole
exist at all? Why not nothing? Aristotle greatly advanced both sciences and
the science of sciences, φιλοσοφία. Of course there is now a legitimate and
independent philosophy of science. At this time, it is not the philosophy of
science that has my interest. Rather, following both Hegel and Voegelin, I am
especially interested in the philosophy of consciousness and the philosophy of
history, but also like the philosophers of old, ever wondering about the first
cause, the Why?
A
few hours ago I read a passage in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, with an aside
in which Aristotle notes that intellect alone survives death, not the rest of
psyche. I want to see if and how he explores this matter, but I am quite
sure that he does not do so in the Metaphysics, nor in his De Anima, his study
of the Soul. In any case, here is a difficult but worthwhile adventure. I
think that Thomas Aquinas explores this problem, too, that the intellect alone
outlasts death; but he must do so covertly (lest he taste some flames on the
matter of his mortal form); I have long thought this Thomas’ detailed “treatise
on the angels,” within his Summa Theologiae, is written as an exercise in
exploring the nature of intellect abstracted from matter (body) and bodily
passions, and hence as what in man endures into eternity. Does Spinoza teach
the survival of intellect beyond death, or dissolution into the All? We shall
see.
Philosophy
proceeds by wonder, and provokes wonder. Is it any wonder that I keep turning
to philosophy?
