Aristotle on Knowledge, Soul, and the Pursuit of Eudaimonia: From Perception to Contemplation

The first sentences of Aristotle (1998) read:

By nature, all men long to know. An indication is their delight in the senses. For these, quite apart from their utility, are intrinsically delightful, and that through the eyes more than others. For it is not only with a view to action but also when we have no intention to do anything that we choose, so to speak, sight rather than all the others. And the reason for this is that sight is the sense that especially produces cognition in us and reveals many distinguishing features of things.

We must begin any account of the nature of knowledge with what can be perceived. For this is rewarding in itself ("intrinsically delightful”), necessary for action, and the way in which we differentiate between different things and reach conclusions about them. In these few sentences Aristotle reveals perception as aesthetic, pragmatic, and scientific. His philosophy does not explore the aesthetic in any systematic manner. His philosophy of science is pragmatic: what "is” should be systematically observed in the light of its usefulness for the organism: he asks, what is the function of this or that organ, how did it come to be such as it is, how is to be it related to other organs.

In the same way his Ethics is very much a study of human behaviour, of how, to become a good man, you must behave like a good man - avoid extremes, be prudent, and so forth. He anticipates Montaigne in his wariness of any system of morals in which principles can be deduced from first considerations as in natural science. But he does believe in God and talks at length of the Soul as a dynamic process within the universe.

Aristotle’s great achievement was to provide Science with a synthesis of the different kinds of explanation that are necessary in any worthwhile scientific account of natural phenomena. He could take into account the theories of Democritus and Empedocles who had reached conclusions about the primary substance or material from which all things derived - what we now call atoms for the former, earth, fire, water and air for Empedocles. But he thought their accounts fell short of explaining the order and structure of plant and animal life: how he asked, could a purely material explanation, particularly those assuming an initial random set of conjunctions, show the way in which forms of life develop? Aristotle’s solution was to suggest that form, eidos, is inherent in the material.

He, we would say nowadays, "re-purposed” Plato’s forms, which supposedly existed eternally and independently of actuality - the ideal behind the real - so that substance and form ‘together’ play their part in the development of organisms. Adaptation requires the synergy of matter and form. To this synergy, he added two further aspects: the efficient cause, accounting for the movement of development, and the final cause that refers to the function of development, that is, the achievement of the form. Clearly, we cannot distinguish these four causes as independent influences. They must be understood as differentiations of a whole process, the influences that guide our search and the type of explanation we should offer.

For Aristotle the idea of function, referred to by the final cause, is fundamental; it may be seen as incorporating the other three causal perspectives. He considers the analogy of the woodcarver. You might inquire about the sort of wood being used and examine the techniques of carving employed, but such questions are subordinate to your understanding what the carver hoped to achieve - the idea in his mind at the beginning and the way that this idea grew to form the finished piece.

The idea is the form or essence. We understand nature and its parts in the same way, says Aristotle. We understand how the material and formal aspects of a living thing interact in the whole which is its completion. I take this to mean that the material and efficient causes are such as to facilitate the formal and final causes which provide the destination of fulfilment. Leroy (2015) points out that Aristotle’s model of explanation forms the present rationale for contemporary natural science in such disciplines as developmental biology, microbiology, and systems theory, all of which envisage information transmission as the connecting link in the causal chain. After Aristotle we are not condemned to posit a form independent of material or a material world independent of form.

The teleology built into this system of causal explanation also justifies the conclusion that the potential arises from and is the completion of the actual. In the natural world, it cannot be other than that: the seed becomes the plant, the embryo, the adult animal. In his Introduction to the Metaphysics, Lawson- Tancred (2004) suggests that Aristotle would have thought Nietzsche’s pronouncement, "Become what you are!”, simply redundant. It’s just the nature of organic growth. But he would not, I think, have thought it redundant in relation to a consideration of the poetic (the original meaning of poeisis is making) or of the ethical which consist of the task (our function) of our making something which stands symbolically alongside the events belonging to the natural world.

But clearly the two do not simply stand aside one another. We need a more precise definition of the nature of this making. In his Poetics Aristotle (2013) uses the Greek mimesis, often translated as ‘imitation’. This is inadequate since the symbolic making is not simply that of copying. One could say that the very exercise of forming a symbol automatically directs our attention to an object of perception in quite a different way: it is a transformation of experience because a symbol is never a particular attached to another particular; it is a symbol precisely because it derives its nature from being part of a meaningful whole - a language, the language of science, the language of social relations - which now provides the context of perception, the grounding of its meaning. The symbolic world does not copy what we see, it transforms our perception.

The term, representation, is an improvement, suggesting an activity of putting something before the mind, but still falls short of emphasising the imaginative aspect of symbolism - the way in which an experience is brought back to life by a creative ‘re-presentation’, as we saw with the sacrificial ritual or the cave painting, or with the "recollection in tranquility” of Wordsworth. The symbolic act of the poetic imagination in its origin and essence produces a real presence that arises from and completes a prior immediate experience. This is how we enter the world of the work of art - it reinstates the immediacy in a new form.

Now Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ is almost entirely concerned with the narrative of tragedy. He defines the tragic as the representation of an action "that is whole and entire and on an appropriate scale”: a whole in which the parts (beginning, middle, end) suggest the continuity of an implicit order. Completeness, proper scale, and unity, he says, are the defining aspects of a successful tragedy. These provide the framework within which the "reversal” of a sharp discontinuity of fortune that typifies all tragedy occurs - think of ‘Oedipus Rex’, Macbeth, Lear. But the reversal is not implausible and may well follow from a prior event or from some fault in the sufferer’s character which becomes apparent as the narrative progresses towards it end. The audience’s appreciation of how the tragic happening occurs in this concealed form is said to be one of fear and pity: fear at the horror of the event but pity for the victim. That leads finally to a sense of ‘katharsis’ or purification as we reflect upon our pity for the victim.

The nature of Aristotle’s katharsis is not immediately clear. The metaphor of purification suggests a kind of filtering of excessive feelings which hinder a reasoned evaluation of events, virtue, for Aristotle lying in the mean at which feeling contributes to understanding. Also, in observing the acting out of the tragic without actually suffering it, a distance from the actual is established which allows the space for enjoyment of the dramatic action. What unites these two factors is the sense of control over events. For at the beginning of symbolic development the tragic did not exist as a play; it was experienced intimately and regularly. It was the tragic reality of everyday life that necessitated the countervailing reaction of the sacrificial ritual in which a control of events, in themselves tragic, was acted out and in which the whole group participated. The virtue of the drama is to present the acting out as an object for contemplation.

Towards the end of ‘The Nicomachean Ethics’ (Book Ten) Aristotle argues that eudaimonia (often translated as "happiness”, but perhaps more accurately as "well being” or "flourishing” - its literal meaning is "having a good guardian spirit”) is the ultimate satisfaction to be gained in life. For happiness exists as an end in itself, not as a means to an end. It is certainly not amusement which merely satisfies the self, and which therefor is inevitably always incomplete.

He refers to the maxim of Anacharsis, "Play so that you may be serious”, as pointing us in the right direction. The freedom of play, as evidenced in the aesthetic, is the way to the seriousness of the good life, for goodness is inseparable from well being:

But if happiness is an activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable to assume that it will be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this can only be the virtue of the best part of us. Whether this be the intellect or something else - whatever it is that is held to have a natural right to govern and guide us, and to have an insight into what is noble and divine, either as being itself also divine or more divine than any other part of us - it is the activity of this part in accordance with the virtue proper to it that will be perfect happiness. Now we have already seen that this activity has a speculative or contemplative character. This is a conclusion which may be accepted as in harmony with our earlier arguments and with the truth. For contemplation is the highest form of activity, since the intellect is the highest thing in us and the objects which come into its range are the highest that can be known. (Aristotle, 1955, p. 303)

Contemplation, like happiness, is an end itself: it is self-sufficient. Happiness itself reaches its fulfilment in what is good, so that contemplation necessarily focuses on the good. Does this signify that Aristotle has fallen back into the Platonic idea distinct from the real? His own response to this question is, in the first place, stated in the same Chapter: rather than simply accept the flaws of our own mortal being, we should attempt, "so far as in us lies, to put on immortality and to leave nothing unattempted to live in conformity with the highest thing within us. Small in bulk it may be, yet in power and preciousness it transcends all the rest. We may in fact believe that this is the true self of the individual, being the sovran and better part of him”.

This is surely a clear denunciation of the so-called "Naturalistic Fallacy” which asserts you reason from the factual to the ideal - from "is” to "ought”. The "ought” is nothing but the true identity of the self living in accordance with its "better part”. We can "put on” the eternal virtues because they exist as our ultimate fulfilment, being thus both immanent and transcendent. Of course, Aristotle says, we are, as humans, of a composite nature, so that the expression of virtue in action is complicated through the contexts within which it exists - the complexities of our psychology and of the influences which work upon us from outside. But he insists that the happiness of contemplation ‘is’ something quite distinct.

How then does a reading of Aristotle help us to understand the respective roles of Precision and Soul? In the first place we should note the centrality of the interaction of material and formal cause in his system of explanation and its application to both physical and symbolic worlds. In the former the formal guides the material to its functional end, but also works within the parameters of the material itself, just as the symbolic forms itself through the body of the real. The model of the craftsman forming the object through skill exercised on the material is central: it encourages the natural scientist to search for the functional purposes embedded within the body and reminds the philosopher to think how forms (ideas) partake of the actual in their formation and expression. Bearing this in mind, the scientist can avoid the false extreme of the reduction of the formal entirely to the material and the philosopher avoid the other extreme of subordinating material circumstances to the idea.

We can look upon material and formal causation as two complementary perspectives. Modern science assumes that a unified process, extending from the most elementary physical part to ideas themselves, is adequately described in terms of information transmission, such a language being applicable equally to the spread of viruses and the dissemination of ideas. Psychology becomes Cognitive Neuroscience.

I shall return to this view in the third section of this chapter. I end this part with a defence of the mind’s freedom to "put on immortality”. Think of Beethoven’s curse on the inadequacy of "the wretched violin” - which is not able to express what should be expressed! But think also of your recollection of a departed loved one. Notice how in contemplation all that is contingent, unnecessary, falls away from the image you have before you to leave only the purified essential core - the characteristic stance, that way of looking at things, the smile. Of course, it was there all the time, but, surrounded by events, too dispersed to be decisively acted upon.

Contemplation is the concentration of the imagination on the individual person or moment that suggests the paradoxical truth of the "something absolute”: that it is a unity of individual expression, some one thing, with the absolute of an idea without contingency. We might call this the precision of the soul. We can, therefore, think of Aristotle as being rather more than "the founder of modern Science”. He could, without feeling any contradiction, explore the detail of animal forms and at the same time write in his Metaphysics and Poetics of contemplation as the road to the divine. He saw the soul as material (he thought all natural forms had soul) and, insofar as they are guided by a good spirit, as each fulfilling its idea. We are confronted once more with Nishida’s contradictory identity: idea and material are united as one and yet autonomous realms of meaning. We can love both the thing in itself and the idea which is its universal.