Series | History of Ancient Western Philosophy, Pt. 15
Aristotle, On “Understanding Understanding Understanding.”
Cosmology & Theology in the Metaphysics
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Welcome to Part 15 of the series!
Here we’ll be taking a look at Aristotle’s cosmology, which — because he was a good pagan —could just as readily be called his theology, too.
We’ll also consider how a common translation of one of Aristotle’s most famous statements relates to the strange — but grammatically correct — sentence: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
You can also check out previous installments here:
For those who’ve been following along in the series, we’ve already touched on the way cosmology relates to metaphysics and ontology in Parts 13 and 14… so I’ll simply summarize with the reminder that cosmology is a sub-branch of philosophy concerned with the overall picture of reality — i.e. the cosmos — more than it is with the individual entities that show up there.
The lion’s share of Aristotle’s cosmology can be found in a book known as the Metaphysics.
As far as we know, this treatise was the first to ever bear that title, so it’s not just an empty colloquialism to say Aristotle “wrote the book” on this subject.
There are different accounts of how his book received the title Metaphysics. One of my favorites — which is probably apocryphal — tells how Andronicus of Rhodes, a Peripatetic scholar of the 1st century BCE, decided to copy Aristotle’s works for his students… since his school of thought considered Aristotle its founder.
The treatise he copied AFTER the Physics had no title… so he called it “After Physics” — or Meta ta Physika — and the name stuck!
The Recovery of Aristotle
By now, I probably should’ve mentioned how most of Aristotle’s works were lost to medieval Europe for roughly 600 years.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, there were VERY few scholars in Europe who were able to read Greek… perhaps fewer than 10 on the entire continent. Basic literacy rates dropped across the board, and most people spoke only their own local dialects.
Latin survived as the language of diplomacy and scholarship, but only the most educated clerks and priests would’ve been fluent. Boethius’s Latin translations of two of Aristotle’s logical works — the Categories and On Interpretation — were all medieval Europeans had access to.
BUT, Aristotle’s thought survived in the remnants of the Eastern Roman Empire and it THRIVED even further east.
When Rome collapsed, the remaining intellectual and cultural centers were mostly situated between Constantinople and the Chinese Dynasties — in Middle Eastern and Central Asian cities along the Silk Road… places like Aleppo, Baghdad, Tehran, Samarkand, and Kashgar.
In fact, at its height (around 700 CE), the Umayyad Caliphate stretched from the Iberian Peninsula all the way to Kashmir.
Had it not been for the efforts of Muslim rulers working together with both Christian and Jewish scholars to collect and translate Aristotle’s work into Arabic, much more would’ve likely been lost to the dustbin of history.
Between the 12th and 13th centuries CE, however, more than forty Aristotelian treatises made their way back into European consciousness, as they were slowly translated from Arabic to Latin. This renewed European interest in the Corpus Aristotelicum led to the rediscovery of copies of Greek originals from various corners of the continent. Reintroduction of these Greek texts included volumes like the Politics, which was never possessed by the Arabic speaking world.
Being Qua Being and First Philosophy
As the opening passages of the Metaphysics make clear, Aristotle will be focusing on the philosophy of first principles.
“all men suppose what is called Wisdom to deal with the first causes and the principles of things… Since we are seeking this knowledge, we must inquire of what kind are the causes and the principles, the knowledge of which is Wisdom.” [981b-982a]
As such, he claims the primary philosophical pursuit — or “first philosophy” — is to determine what being is IN ITSELF, or “being qua being.”
To get a sense of how this differs from what we’ve already seen in his Physics, let’s make a quick stop in his book called the Categories… which we glossed over in earlier installments.
As you can see below, Aristotle identified 10 classes of predicates that could be attributed to a particular subject. The first is the eidos of an ousia — or, the “what it is to be” of some particular thing — which we talked about in the previous entry. The other nine can be broken into two classes: those in which the predicate is internal to the subject and those in which it is external.
The main goal of the Metaphysics, then, is to elaborate the cosmic first principle — or archē — the ultimate condition for the possibility of ALL beings.
Substance and the Unmoved Mover
Aristotle picks up that idea of an individual substance — or, ousia — that was developed in the Physics and De Anima.
Since he’s chasing after first causes here, he’ll need to get a handle on how things change. So, he lays out three different types of substance, according to how they change.
· Those that are changeable and perishable (e.g. plants and animals)
· Those that are changeable and eternal (e.g. heavenly bodies)
· Those that are immutable…
As he sees it, if all substances were perishable, eventually EVERYTHING would cease to be — which would entail the ultimate destruction of the cosmos.
But… since there’s something in our cosmos rather than nothing, he concludes SOME things MUST be eternal. And, for this reason, Aristotle’s philosophy is usually viewed as a kind of ancient forerunner to notions like the cosmological argument and/or the anthropic principle.
In the very least, he claims, there are two things that are imperishable — viz. Time and Motion.
The first might seem pretty obvious. After all, if time were finite, then what would come “before” or “after” time? The very question already presupposes time’s infinitude.
Incidentally, Aristotle’s thoughts on time are still of some interest to modern scholars. As Bradley Dowden writes,
“Aristotle emphasized that the word time is not simply another word for change. He said, ‘that time is not change [itself]’ because a change ‘may be faster or slower, but not time….’ (Physics, chapter 10). In developing his conception of time, Aristotle proposed what has come to be called the relational theory of time when he said, ‘there is no time apart from change….’ (Physics, chapter 11).”
On the other hand, the imperishability of motion may seem less obvious…
For us in the 21st century, hearing the word motion usually calls to mind what modern physicists call ‘momentum’… but, if you think back to what we saw in his Physics, Aristotle used the term ‘motion’ to indicate something more abstract — the change from potentiality to actuality.
Perhaps a better analog for this Aristotelian conception of motion might be potential energy — like what’s stored in a pendulum when it’s pulled up to one side. Once the pendulum is released, the stored potential is converted to kinetic energy.
You might also have already noticed how ‘kinetic’ is connected to the Greek word Aristotle used for motion — i.e. kinesis.
According to Aristotle, then, continuous motion in particular subjects must be cyclical… as we saw in that in that acorn-oak example from Part 14.
And, this matches up with a geometrical truth about circles — which have neither beginning nor end.
So, Aristotle puts these ideas together to arrive at the conclusion that imperishable motion must be circular.
He applies this insight to the movements of the heavenly bodies, and argues that only an eternal and immutable source could generate eternal circular motion on such a grand scale. He calls this “the Unmoved Mover.”
In terms of potentiality and actuality, the Unmoved Mover is both the first and final cause of the universe — pure actuality — containing no matter, since it’s the very cause of itself.
But, this concept has been the cause (no pun intended) of a lot of confusion...
For Aristotle, the final cause — or the “why” of a thing — has to do with what it will BECOME… or, as he puts it elsewhere, the “for the sake of which” it exists. When WE hear someone say ‘cause’ we tend to think of whatever immediately preceded some effect — kind of like pushing over the first domino in a series.
But, that sort of “push” is what Aristotle called an “efficient cause” and it ISN’T what he has in mind with his Unmoved Mover.
He thought the notion of a “first” efficient cause was nonsensical… so, some of the later monotheistic interpretations of Aristotle’s idea that imagined a divine creator pushing over the first “cosmic” domino are a bit of an interpretive stretch. (After all, a “push” is a kind of movement.)
In order for the Mover to remain unmoved, then, it must cause movement in some non-physical way, by inspiring a kind of desire in other beings to actualize their potentiality.
That’s why Aristotle ties it to FINAL causes.
Peter Adamson offers an analogy for this sort of inspiration, that — as a once incredibly awkward middle-schooler — I can really relate to…
“Just as the pretty girl at the dance makes the boys shuffle shyly towards her without doing anything herself, so does [the Unmoved Mover], without moving, cause other things to move out of their aspiration to be like the divine.” — p. 283
Simply put, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover causes movement by attraction — or, as he puts it, through LOVE.
“it causes motion as being an object of LOVE, whereas all other things cause motion because they are themselves in motion.” [1072b]
Spheres of the Cosmos
Now that we’ve got an idea of how Aristotle thought the cosmic dance continued to move, we can start to sketch a picture of his cosmology.
He claimed that the entire universe existed in a series of nested spheres, kind of like Russian Matryoshka dolls.
Each of those spheres, he says, is ruled by a kind of eternal motion, inspired by its own principle, or unmoved mover. In this way, the ENTIRE cosmos is FULL of motion, or kinesis.
We might be tempted to say that some animal’s movement is controlled by the desire to satisfy the four F’s — feeding, fighting, fleeing, and… fornicating.
But, this is REALLY just another way of saying it’s moving toward its final cause, i.e. “fulfilling it’s telos,” by following its desire and actualizing its potential.
Aristotle says that ALL cosmic movement, then, is a result of this sort of life-force, or intellect [psyche and/or nous].
Hopefully, this helps you see how the principle of natural growth that he called physis is tied to the first principle of cosmic motion that he called nous, or intellect.
Understanding Understanding Understanding.
Towards the end of the 12th book of the Metaphysics — a.k.a. “Book Lambda” — Aristotle asks whether there are many movers or just one?
He concludes that the number of movers would have to correspond to the number of movement types… so he turns to astronomy to find that answer.
Most astronomers of his time agreed there were somewhere between 47 and 55 heavenly movements, and Aristotle agrees that’s a reasonable number.
Whatever their number, he claims, each unmoved mover must be engaged in the kind of intellectual attraction discussed above. As such, each mover continuously contemplates its own contemplation in a way that is conditionally dependent on the attraction of the Prime Mover.
In a nutshell, Aristotle is angling towards a conception of the divine that could very readily be called “the god of the philosophers”… since it’s a pure, non-anthropomorphic intellect.
He uses the phrase “Understanding understanding Understanding,” to describe this Prime Mover’s perfect existence of pure cognition.
This may seem terribly confusing — ESPECIALLY in translation!
I sometimes tease my university students about just how “impoverished” the English language can be, since we often have to use ONE WORD to mean so many different things.
After all, I LOVE my spouse. I also LOVE a nice bottle of 18 year-old single-malt whisky. But, surely I DON’T love them in the same way!
In the original Greek, Aristotle’s phrase is noesis noeseos noesis.
And, although that triple-understanding translation is TECHNICALLY a grammatically correct sentence — in a way similar to “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” — I’d suggest it’s more appropriate to think of Aristotle’s Prime Mover as: “AN understanding, in the PROCESS of understanding, what it is TO BE in understanding.”
In any case, this concept was picked up centuries later by theologians like Thomas Aquinas, who endeavored to bring Aristotle’s pagan ideas in line with Christian doctrine.
Peter Adamson puts it nicely:
“…it’s clear that Aristotle seriously intends us to regard the first celestial mover as worthy of respect and perhaps even something like worship… he ends his discussion in the Metaphysics with an unusually rhetorical passage, identifying the prime mover as the ultimate source of order in our cosmos (1075b–1076a). Quoting a line from Homer, he finishes with a flourish, saying “the rule of many is not good; let there be one ruler” (1076a)… authors in future generations will take note, and take advantage, weaving Aristotle’s theology together with the teachings of revealed religion.” — p. 184
Well, that was some pretty heady stuff. Let’s leave it there for now. We’ll pick up this thread in Part 16, when we consider how Aristotle connected ethics to the desire to emulate this divine Prime Mover.
See you there!
