Aristotles_epistemology.pdf

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Personal Details

Principal Investigator:

A. Raghuramaraju

Department of Philosophy, University of Hyderabad

Paper Coordinator

P. R. Bhatt

Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Bombay

Content Writer

John Russon

Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph, Canada

Content Reviewer Language Editor

T. K. Nizar Ahmed Chitralekha Manohar

Former Professor, Department of Philosophy, SSUS Kalady Freelancer, Chennai

Description of Module

Paper Name

Philosophy

Subject Name

Epistemology I

Module Name/Title

Epistemology in Aristotle

Module Id

2.23

Pre-requisites

Objectives

To introduce students to the core texts and ideas of Aristotle’s epistemology.

Keywords

epistemological naturalism; empiricism; epistemology; the four causes; insight

holism;

Aristotelian

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Aristotle’s Epistemology Introduction Aristotle (384–322 BC) initially came to Athens from Macedon to study under Plato, and subsequently, went on to found his own philosophical school, the Lyceum. Though the works of Aristotle that we possess today take the form of coherent, organised treatises, it is generally believed that they are notes from his lectures, possibly recorded by his students. We cannot, therefore, assume that all of the Aristotelian texts perfectly reflect Aristotle’s view or that every passage will fit seamlessly with every other: despite the broad and systematic unity of Aristotle’s writings, we still must be careful in interpreting his texts, and we typically have to look for an overarching, unifying perspective that is nowhere explicitly articulated. This is especially the case with regard to Aristotle’s epistemology, since he did not write a separate treatise devoted to knowledge. To distil an epistemology from Aristotle’s texts, one must synthesise his discussions of understanding, sensation, learning and mind, while maintaining a focus on the broad philosophical orientation that shapes them all: overall, Aristotle’s philosophical approach to knowledge is naturalistic, holistic and empiricist. Giving an Account: Naturalism and Form The foundation of Aristotle’s approach to knowledge is found at the beginning of his Metaphysics, where he observes that “all human beings by nature strive towards knowing” (Barnes [1984], p. 1552). This is the naturalism of Aristotle’s epistemology: human beings are a particular kind of natural being, and to understand knowledge, we must understand it within this context of the natural capacities of organisms. In his work, On the Soul, Aristotle notes that, like plants and animals (and unlike inorganic natural bodies such as earth and water), we are living beings that engage in self-nutrition, growth and reproduction. Like animals (and unlike plants), we have sensory awareness and we move ourselves in space. But, unlike any other natural being, human beings also have the capacity to grasp reality intellectually and to communicate that understanding to each other through meaningful speech. It is these distinctive capacities that Aristotle identifies when he defines the human being, in Politics, Book I, Chapter 2, as “the animal having logos” (Barnes [1984], p. 1988), a phrase that has sometimes been misleadingly translated as “the rational animal”, but that is more accurately translated as “the animal that can give an account”. Analogously to the way in which a plant turns towards the sunlight or a tiger chases a deer, then, human beings are naturally drawn towards being able to account for things: towards understanding “why” about everything. To understand a thing is precisely to move beyond its immediate sensory form and to apprehend intellectually those unchanging, defining features of its being that are responsible for its dynamic, bodily reality. Like other animals, we apprehend the sensible forms of things, but, because of the presence of mind (nous) within us, we have the capacity to recognise the intelligible forms of things in and through our apprehension their sensible forms. In Metaphysics, Book I Chapter 1, and also in Posterior Analytics, Book II Chapter 19, Aristotle describes the experiential process involved in coming to understand something. Aristotle calls this process “epagogē”, which is sometimes translated as “induction”, but might better be translated simply as “learning”. Basically, our senses give us access to things, and through our ongoing practical engagement with those things, we become habituated to interacting with them in a meaningful way: we develop “experience” (empeiria) with those things. Once we have thus become practically familiar with things, we

3 are in a position to grasp their principles (archai) explicitly: to understand them. These passages are essential to understanding the distinctive, empiricist nature of Aristotle’s epistemology. Like other animals, we have perception (aisthēsis), that is, our bodies are characterised by sensory organs that allow us to be aware of things outside us. In On the Soul, Book II, Chapters 5–12, Aristotle studies the distinctive nature of the senses. The different senses – vision, hearing, touch and so on – are each responsive to a distinctive aspect of things (colour, texture, sound and so on), which Aristotle calls the “special sensible” of the sense, and there are also aspects of things (such as shape and motion) that are apprehended by more than one sense. In On the Soul, Book III, Chapters 1–2, Aristotle notes, however, that, though vision, for example, can apprehend a white colour and touch, for example, can apprehend a hard texture, the perceiving organism can also recognise that the white colour and hard texture belong to the same thing; this indicates, Aristotle argues, that these individual senses do not operate in independence of each other, but that they are themselves the differentiated aspects of a more basic, “common” power of sensing: it is the organism as a whole that senses through each of the individual sensory powers. Unlike British empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume, with whom we associate the understanding of sensation as a mechanical matter of being impacted by discrete sensory data, Aristotle, like contemporary ecological and phenomenological epistemologists such as James J. Gibson, John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, understands perception to be an organic matter of an animal’s apprehension of a total, meaningful form. 1 This notion from On the Soul that we perceive form corresponds closely to Aristotle’s notion of empeiria, “being experienced”, in Metaphysics, Book I, Chapter 1. In our everyday experience, we recognise that, through our ongoing practical engagements with things, we gradually become familiar with them. In such contexts, we find that, even without explicit theoretical study, we tend to develop a “feel” for things, and we grasp the “sense” of what they are and how to deal with them. A person who works with goats, for example, comes to “know” the nature of goats – she becomes “fluent”, so to speak, in her dealings with goats – and this knowledge is reflected both in her ability to get from the goats the behaviour she desires and in her ability to care for them effectively, that is, to respond to their needs. What such situations of empeiria remind us of is that our bodily, sensory engagement with things is typically not a matter of detached observation, but is a matter of practical engagement, and, further, that this bodily, sensory engagement is meaningful: within this bodily, sensory engagement, the nature of things is implicitly revealed. Understanding proper, then – what Aristotle in Metaphysics Book I Chapter 1 calls craft (technē) or science (epistēmē) – is thus a matter of grasping explicitly this sense that already implicitly animates our perceptual engagement. Posterior Analytics, Book II, Chapter 19 adds that coming to such an understanding is something we typically experience as a kind of enlightenment: we suddenly “get it”, and in a moment of intellectual insight (noēsis), we directly intuit the nature of the thing. Understanding the Cause: Holistic Empiricism This grasp of the intelligible form is what ultimately allows us to answer the question “Why?” about that which we perceive. Aristotle maintains that the question “Why?” can be answered in four ways, and the grasp of the intelligible form of the thing can be translated into an identification of the four “causes” (aitiai) of the thing in question: its “formal”, “final”, “material” and “moving” causes.

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For an introduction to these contemporary approaches, see Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Compare John Russon, “Aristotle’s Animative Epistemology,” Idealistic Studies 25 (1995): 241-53.

4 In everyday experience, we distinguish between the unchanging identity of the individual substance and its changing states. Indeed, the most distinctive mark of an individual substance, Aristotle remarks in Categories, Chapter 5 (Barnes [1984], p. 7), is precisely this fact that it remains the same despite changing between contrary qualities. As a tree frog grows from a tadpole to its mature form, for example, we recognise that it is the same individual, even though its size, its shape, its colour and its specific behaviours, all change. The growing frog changes from small to large, and even the fully grown tree frog can change its colour from green to red to white to black, and change its behaviour from waking to sleeping. In this sense, we recognise the unchanging “what-ness” of the individual in and through the changing ways in which that “what” is realised. Aristotle refers to this in Physics, Book II, Chapter 3 (Barnes [1984], pp 332-3) as the “what it is” (to ti esti) of the thing, and later scholars often refer to this as the “formal cause” or the “essence”.2 This defining “whatness” of the thing is never simply reducible to any single bodily state of individual – that is, the horse is just as much “itself” as a young colt and as a full-grown stallion – but it is, nonetheless, true that the identity “horse” is only realised as a distinctive type of body: the fact of being a horse only occurs in and as the specific context of horse anatomy. Said otherwise, the living being is an organism: a system of organs by which and as which that distinctive form of life is realised. Thus, corresponding to the “what it is” or the “formal cause” of a natural substance is a distinctive bodily arrangement or what Aristotle calls the “that out of which” (to ex hou) – the so-called “material cause” of the organism. And, indeed, though the horse is as much “itself” as a young colt and as a young stallion, we recognise nonetheless that it is the inherent nature of the horse to grow from being a colt to being a stallion. When the colt grows, in other words, its development is not arbitrary, but is the fulfilment of its nature. In this sense, the mature, adult form of the horse is the immanent goal of the horse’s development; it is the actualisation of its defining potentiality. Aristotle refers to this finished state that completes the organism’s development as the “that for the sake of which” (to hou heneka) or the “final cause” of its activity. Finally, we can recognise that organisms do not have any self-conscious plan to develop themselves to their natural completion. Rather, what we mean by calling them “natural” is that, by acting on their natural desires, they will automatically accomplish their own proper development, provided nothing hinders them. Each natural organism, that is, is naturally oriented towards wanting to do the sorts of things that will propel its development. Aristotle calls the organism’s natural desire to do what it needs to do the “first cause of motion in the thing” (hē archē tēs metabolēs hē prōtē) or the “moving cause”. Aristotle maintains, in the Posterior Analytics, Book I, Chapter 13 (Barnes [1984], p. 127), that we only truly know when we have moved from the “that it is” (hoti) to the “why it is” (dioti), and it is in the apprehension of the thing in terms of these “moving”, “material”, “formal” and “final” causes that we truly apprehend that which we encounter: to know the thing is to apprehend its immediate, changing state as the presence of these deeper causal realities. In identifying these four causes, Aristotle is thus drawing our attention to the way in which the reality of the natural thing is not reducible simply to its immediately existing state. On the contrary, the immediately existing state of the thing is only seen for what it is when it is seen in the context of its defining form (morphē or eidos) and its developmental goal (telos). Equally, Aristotle’s analysis aims to show that those defining (formal and final) realities, in turn, exist only in and 2

In On the Soul, Book II, Chapter 1, Aristotle also refers to the “what it is” of a living being as its “soul” [psuchē], (Barnes [1984], pp 656-7).

5 as the immediate bodily organisation and the immediate drives and desires (the material and moving causes) of the existing thing. That knowledge is defined by the apprehension of these four causes thus reveals simultaneously the inherently empirical and the essentially holistic nature of Aristotle’s epistemology: the focus on the material and moving causes emphasises that knowledge must be rooted in the specific actualities that are immediately present to us in experience, while the focus on the formal and final causes emphasises that we will only grasp these features when we recognise them as integrated together with and defined by larger contexts. Aristotle’s Method and Scepticism This notion that we have been exploring, that knowledge must begin from the immediately present actuality but will end in apprehension of a whole understood as organised by a formal or final cause, corresponds exactly to the distinctive method Aristotle himself employs in his major philosophical treatises. In his work, On the Heavens, Book I, Chapter 3, (Barnes [1984], p. 450), and again in Metaphysics, Book XII (Λ), Chapter 8, (Barnes [1984], p. 1697), Aristotle indicates that it is the responsibility of knowledge “to account for the phenomena” [apodōsein ta phainomena] 3, and in the Topics, Book I, Chapters 1–2, (Barnes [1984], pp 167-8), Aristotle writes that the proper route for scientific study (which he there calls “dialectic”) is to move from the “received views” (endoxa) regarding any aspect of reality – “the things that appear to all or to the many or to the wise” – to the defining principles (archai) of that reality. In his own philosophical investigations (of nature, of the soul, of politics, of being as such), Aristotle’s procedure is, in each case, first to begin by assembling the already existent philosophical views on the subject he is investigating. He then looks for a systematic integration of these views, to see how they are meaningful attempts to make sense of a single phenomenon. Sorting out the organisation of these views typically amounts to a clarification and an articulation of the inherent nature of the subject under investigation and this integrating of the received views typically affords the essential insight into the “causes” of the phenomenon in question. Later scholars have sometimes accused Aristotle of not treating epistemological scepticism – the view that knowledge of reality is impossible – as a serious issue. Indeed, though the sceptical movement in philosophy was already alive in Aristotle’s time, his own discussions of scepticism, such as in Posterior Analytics, Book I, Chapter 3 and in Metaphysics Book IV (Γ), Chapters 4–6, are quite brief. Rather than concluding that Aristotle does not treat scepticism seriously, though, it would be more accurate to say that there is a very basic way in which Aristotle conceives of knowledge differently than do the sceptics. Though there is a broad variety of views within the sceptical tradition, it has been common for both ancient and modern sceptics to construe our experience as a self-enclosed domain and to construe knowledge – or our attempts at knowledge – as a constructive operation we perform upon our more immediate experience. This model of knowledge as essentially something “artificial” does not at all correspond to Aristotle’s view, according to which, knowledge is more like something that blossoms within the relation of knower and known. The model of epagogē described in Posterior Analytics, Book II, Chapter 19, and Aristotle’s own method of studying the endoxa in order to intuit their immanent rationality, both point to knowledge not as something “made” – not as something we “do” – but as something that comes to us: something we receive. This sense of insight as something self-occurring and something we receive as a gift corresponds closely to Aristotle’s discussion of the nature of mind (nous).

The closely related expression “to save the phenomena,” (sōzein ta phainomena), is from Simplicius’ commentary on 'On the Heavens'. 3

6 Mind and Insight The ability to intuit the essence – the causes – of things is our experience of “mind”. In On the Soul, Book III, Chapters 4–5, Aristotle studies the distinctive nature of the mind (nous) and intellectual knowledge (noēsis). He argues that the mind is not so much our own power as it is a kind of illumination that we experience ourselves as receiving. What is distinctive of human beings is not that we are minds, but that we have access to the power of mind. Aristotle argues (in On the Soul, Book III, Chapter 4) that mind could not be a property of the individual person, because the individual always operates with a necessarily finite perspective, whereas it is the very nature of mind to be able to apprehend truths that are unconditioned by perspective. More exactly, if the mind were the power of a bodily organ, as vision is the power of the eye or grasping the power of the hand, then, Aristotle argues, the limitations of the organ would set the limits of that power. The eye, for example, occupies a specific spatial location, and thus, it can only see objects located where it itself is not. Again, bodily senses are themselves vulnerable to the qualities they apprehend, as hearing, for example, can be destroyed by too loud a sound, vision by too bright a light or touch by too hot a temperature. In these ways, it is clear that the bodily character of the sense entails that it operates with a necessarily finite perspective. The very nature of the mind, however, is that it apprehends things absolutely: universally and infinitely. To grasp the “whatness” of a dog is precisely to see through its always limited, finite actuality to its defining reality – a reality that precisely exceeds those finite limitations. In all of our experiences of grasping the causes (aitiai) or principles (archai) of phenomena – in all of our experiences of insight (noēsis) – we enjoy a perspective that exceeds the limits offered us by our senses. In this sense, then, the power of mind exceeds any of the powers of our bodily organism, and thus, it cannot be a property of our natural organism, but must be self-defined in independence of the body. Aristotle thus concludes that mind is not “our own”, properly speaking, but is a power to which we have access. Knowledge and Intellectual Virtue As the opening of the Metaphysics makes clear, knowledge, in Aristotle’s interpretation, is most basically to be understood as a practice through which we enact and fulfil our nature as human beings – as “animals having logos”. But whereas other animals fulfil their nature “naturally”, so to speak – that is, a camel, in engaging in its characteristic activities, will automatically grow up to be a mature camel – human beings must themselves take action to fulfil their own nature. In Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chapter 1, Aristotle argues that we do not “naturally” fulfil our nature, but instead, we must cultivate good habits in order for our native potentials to be released and realised. The fulfilment of our nature as “animals having logos” requires both cultivating our logos – our ability to “take account” as such – and cultivating our animality so that it embodies our defining capacities of logos. Cultivating our animality is a matter of developing habits of emotional response that are intelligently sensitive to the demands of behavioural situations; Aristotle refers to this as “moral virtue” or “virtue of character” (ethikē aretē). Aristotle refers to cultivating our logos as such as “intellectual virtue” or “excellence of thought” (dianoētikē aretē). Though knowing is something that is natural to us, the ability to know well must be cultivated. Craft (technē), science (epistēmē), wisdom (sophia) and prudence (phronēsis) are all “virtues” or “excellences” (aretai) of our logos. Knowing, in all its various forms, in other words, is not a simple matter of the deployment of an already established power. Instead, knowing is a matter of skilful practice, a matter of learning how to harness the various cognitive powers in the soul and to develop them to a state of excellent functioning. And this bringing of our cognitive powers to excellence – developing them to situations in which they are excellent according to the norms internal to knowledge as such – is

7 simultaneously a matter of making ourselves excellent. Indeed, Aristotle concludes his study of human nature in the Nicomachean Ethics by arguing that it is precisely in the “contemplative life” (bios thēoretikos) – life that attends to the whole range of our human needs, but that has knowing as its central focus – that our nature is most perfectly fulfilled. Conclusion Knowledge, as Aristotle interprets it, is to be understood as intimately connected with the world of nature. More specifically, it is to be understood as an essential and distinctive fulfilment of human nature, and as the blossoming of the inherent attunement of the human soul to the rest of nature. This account of knowing is naturalistic, holistic and empiricist. At the same time, Aristotle’s rigorous attention to the form our experience actually takes reveals knowledge to depend on insight – on the “gift” of an intellectual illumination that we receive, but that is not reducible to our natural condition.