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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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Aristotle's Spurned Legacy, by George J. Irbe (con't)
Aristotle's views on God and the soul Through the ages, most Western scholars have viewed Aristotle's concept of God and the soul rather disparagingly. For Aristotle, they say, God is the distant and uninvolved Prime Mover and the soul is simply a property of something that is alive, and therefore it is as mundane and of no more consequence than a biological property of the living being. Aristotle's concept has nothing in common with the immortal soul of man as envisioned by the three monotheistic religions which share the same roots in the Bible. It has been convenient for Western scholars, even those of agnostic or atheistic bent, to keep Aristotle's concept of God and soul out of the picture, so to speak, because of course -- and this whether one believes in the biblical God and soul, or does not -- the biblical model is the one and only genuine transcendental model of God and the human soul that one is supposed to recognize as such. Any other philosophy about God and the disposition of the human soul is paganistic and therefore unworthy of serious consideration. This narrow-mindedness, this tunnel vision, has prevailed through the centuries to our day, much to the detriment of Western thought. The consensus view of Aristotle's understanding of God is stated very well by Frederick Copleston in A History of Philosophy, Vol. I :
Aristotle's conjectures about the character of God are described accurately enough in the above quotes from Copleston. However, Copleston shows that he is as hung up as any other Western scholar always has been on the dogmatic belief that a "satisfactory rational theology" must be based on Divine intervention in the world of man. By "rational theology" he means, of course, the three bible-based religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. If there is no myth associated with it, if there are no religious rituals and objects, if God is not worshiped in a synagogue, church, or mosque, it is not "satisfactory rational theology." As for the soul, Copleston's remarks on De Anima in Chapter XXX of the History are also true to Aristotle's views. For Aristotle the soul is "the vital principle of living things"; it is "the cause and principle of the living body, (a) as a source of movement, (b) as a final cause, and (c) as the real substance (i.e. formal cause) of animated bodies." There are different types of soul, the lowest being the nutritive or vegetative soul, the highest the human soul. The human soul has all the attributes of the lower souls and in addition it has the power of intellect. Aristotle thought that of the several parts of the soul, all others die when the body dies, but "the active intellect is immortal." The immortal "active" intellect part of the soul has been translated into English as "mind"; the pertinent passage from De Anima reads:
When I read the above passage for the first time, I immediately thought of the philosophical consistency in Aristotle's conjectures about both God and the human soul (the part which he called the "active intellect"). The consistency is demonstrated by the following passage from the Metaphysics:
It was a pleasant surprise to me to realize how compatible is Aristotle's concept of God and soul as immaterial entities with my own belief in the immaterial Creator God - "a being that which no greater can be thought of" after Anselm, and my belief in the immaterial soul, after Popper and Eccles, in The Self and Its Brain. Aristotle and I are separated by a gap of 2400 years in knowledge and understanding of the Creator's universe. Consider what Aristotle had to work with as the prevailing hypothesis of the universe, described by Copleston in A History of Philosophy:
I cogitate on how Aristotle would re-define his First Mover, if, instead of struggling with the heavenly spheres, he had our knowledge and understanding (incomplete, but surely better than what was known and understood 2400 years ago) of the composition of matter down to its smallest particles and of the indistinguishability of matter from energy at these levels; and if his conjectures were based on our current hypotheses about the creation and the structure of the universe and on our observations of the on-going dynamic processes within it. I am convinced that Aristotle would propose a First Mover very similar to the Creator-God I believe in. I share Aristotle's belief that the soul is the vital principle of living things, and the only difference in our respective beliefs is that I consider the human soul (and all other souls of living things) to be indivisible unities whereas Aristotle divides the soul into parts. I believe that the immaterial soul can survive the physical death of the body, but Aristotle believes that only the active intellect, or the "mind" part of the soul survives -- one might say that the Aristotelian "active intellect" unites, appropriately enough, with the "Thought of Thought." Aristotle is also known for his scientific investigations, particularly in biology. I'm sure that today Aristotle would have no difficulty in modifying his ideas on the several parts of the soul to fit our modern knowledge in molecular biology. For example, Hugh Lawson-Tancred notes in his translation of De Anima (p. 164) that many scientists agree that the "formal cause" function of Aristotle's soul presages the role of DNA in modern biology. A proper and fair assessment of a person's philosophy -- particularly concerning transcendental matters -- should be based, first of all, on the person's major philosophical premises. The details surrounding these premises are of secondary importance; they are bound to reflect the conventional knowledge and understanding of the time. I understand Aristotle's major premises to be: (a) God is the Supreme Being, encompassing all that is good, (b) living things have a soul, and (c) there is a natural common-sense code of ethics and morals which men should live by in order to approach the state of goodness of the Divine. I am certain that Aristotle was a good man, fair and law-abiding. He had to be to be the author of the Nicomachean Ethics. There is one passage in the Ethics that I find particularly expressive of Aristotle's major premises. The following is from a mix of translations by W. D. Ross, J.A.K. Thomson and T. Irwin:
Aristotle repeated the same advice in Politics, when he was making the point that in order to have a good political community, there must first of all be good citizens:
Aristotle states that God is eternal and encompasses all that is good; good that we only attain on occasion and never as perfectly as God does:
However, even though men are but animals, Aristotle exhorts them to never cease, through the power of their reason, to live a good and virtuous life and to bring forth that Divine goodness which is in them in order to achieve immortality of their soul:
It seems to me that Aristotle's ideas about God were in a state of flux. That does not surprise me, in view of the unreal and even childish hypotheses of the universe which prevailed in his time. In Book XII of the Metaphysics Aristotle struggles with the cumbersome "heavenly spheres" and their "Prime Mover." In the above passage from the Nicomachean Ethics, where he deals with human emotions and values, he is thinking of God as the embodiment of ideal goodness which men must strive to emulate. Which leads me to wonder what heights of development this Aristotelian concept of God could have reached in the subsequent 2400 years up to our day, had it not been smothered and superseded by the dogma of the biblical God. Aristotle's spurned legacy If Aristotle's thoughts, as expressed in his lectures and writings, are evaluated while keeping in mind the political and social circumstances in which he had to try to make a good life for himself while upholding his standards of virtue, then one can conclude that Aristotle made a marvelous job of it. He understood the nature of man and knew that man was capable of being the worst of all animals, as has already been noted. Aristotle also knew how difficult it is to habituate men to live a good, virtuous life, but he never stopped trying to convince them to do so. Toward the end of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle discusses the problem and even recommends the use of the law, if necessary, to compel parents and teachers to provide the right up-bringing to children:
The Nicomachean Ethics is a truly awesome achievement by one man. It is the only practical and purely secular (and therefore the only worthwhile one, in my opinion) framework for a moral and ethical code of conduct. No one can testify to this with more authority than Mortimer J. Adler, who is a life-long student of Aristotle and who has used the Aristotelian framework to create just such a code for our own modern times. In Adler's words, from The Time of Our Lives:
Let me now repeat what I understand Aristotle's major premises to be: (a) God is the Supreme Being, encompassing all that is good, (b) living things have a soul, and (c) there is a natural common-sense code of ethics and morals which men should live by in order to approach the state of goodness of the Divine. I will be bold enough to claim that even if Aristotle expressed these premises somewhat differently, in line with the knowledge of his time, today he would re-state them in words very similar to mine. I have stated the three main premises in their conventional hierarchy of precedence. But, curiously enough (and I feel that Aristotle would agree with me), the third one which posits a natural moral and ethical code for men is the most important of the three. Because, if men cannot first of all decide on what they must do to make themselves human, contemplation about whether God and soul exist or not becomes as unnecessary for man as it is for other animals. The above sets the stage for my argument about Aristotle's legacy to mankind which mankind has chosen to spurn. Let's first recall Copleston's remarks about the lack of Divine operation in the world in Aristotle's philosophy about God, and that this lack excludes Aristotle's view of God from the classification of "satisfactory rational theology." In my opinion, the dubious "satisfaction" and the fraudulent "rationality" of the theology that Copleston is talking about, i.e. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, are based on the fact that morals and ethics are dictatorial edicts laid down by God; they are to be practiced by men not -- as Aristotle claims -- because men's common sense and reason tells them that it is good to do so, but because God commands them to do so. This God was conceptualized by an obscure tribe of the middle East. In order to flatter their own ego and please their own (very natural and human) selfish wants, they further conceived of this God as their Father, and themselves exclusively as His children. This God was paternal, tribal, and also personal; He protected the individual and the tribe from danger, and provided for their material needs. With this paternalistic God to back one up, one could compete fiercely with other tribes and other gods in the game of "my god is better than your god." This God, being like a father to you, also loves you personally, and because He loves you, He will forgive you for breaking His moral commandments, if you worship Him, plead with Him, pray to Him, ask for His forgiveness, etc. It is on this very point that Aristotle's moral code is unpalatable to the believers in the biblical God. Aristotle says that there is something of the Divine in men and asks men to use their common sense and their natural ability to tell good from bad and right from wrong, so that they may live a good life and strive to be as good as God is. The onus is entirely on man. If man acts contrary to the code, he acts contrary to the natural code for man's behavior. There is no one to forgive him for breaking it; therefore, he cannot act contrary to the code again and again and, having in each case shown the proper contrition, still feel that he is a good man living a good life. But that is precisely how man can misuse, usually to some selfish advantage, the moral code prescribed by the very personal and paternalistic biblical God; he can still feel that he is a good man even after any number of evil deeds, because he has asked for God's forgiveness after committing the evil deeds. The biblical religions offer what Aristotle cannot: a personal and paternal God who loves one and forgives one's immoral and evil acts, and, in the later development of these religions, promises one immortality in heaven or paradise. The biblical religions are religions of convenience, whereas Aristotle offers no convenient ways to evade moral responsibility, nor a convenient route to immortality. Therefore, it is not surprising that Western man chose the biblical God as his model and turned away from the philosophical model of the natural God (a non-dogmatic concept open to further development, understanding, and perfection) which was taking shape in the Greek civilization. Thus was Aristotle's legacy of a code of morals and ethics and his incipient hypotheses about God and the soul spurned by Western civilization. It was a great mistake to do so. One need only tune in to the latest news from the middle East to realize how great was the mistake.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics: Translated by H. Rackham [Loeb Classical Library] N/HR; Translated by W.D. Ross [Great Books of the Western World #9 -- Aristotle: II, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952] N/WDR. Politics: Translated by Benjamin Jowett [Great Books of the Western World #9 -- Aristotle: II, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952] P/BJ; Translated by Hippocrates G. Apostle [Peripatetic Press, 1986] P/HGA. De Anima: Translated by J.A. Smith [Great Books of the Western World #8 -- Aristotle: I, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952] DA/JAS; Translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred [Penguin Books, 1986]. Metaphysics: Translated by Hippocrates G. Apostle [Peripatetic Press, 1982] M/HGA. Other works: Conjectures and Refutations, by Karl R. Popper [Routledge, 1989]. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. I , by Karl R. Popper; [Princeton U. Press, 1986]. The Self and Its Brain, by Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles [Routledge, 1995]. A History of Philosophy, Vol. I, by Frederick Copleston, S.J. [Newman Press, 1950]. The Time of Our Lives, by Mortimer J. Adler [Fordham U. Press, 1996].
Questions/Comments? Post them in The Radical Academy Forum Mr. Irbe's Website: Classical Liberal George E-mail Address: George J. Irbe |
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