Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Miranda Abainza Magallanes.
Matt Teichman:
Hello and welcome to Elucidations. I’m Matt
Teichman.
Agnes Callard:
And I’m Agnes Callard.
Matt Teichman:
With us today is
Aristotle, founder of
the Lyceum in
Athens and professor of philosophy there. He is here to discuss his
philosophy. Aristotle, welcome.
Aristotle:
Thank you for having me, Matt; it’s a pleasure to
be here. I’ve had a surprisingly difficult time booking engagements,
given that I’m one of the most famous human beings ever to live. So
it’s a real treat to be here.
Matt Teichman:
This will be your ticket to fame, I’m sure.
So nowadays, when philosophers work on things, they usually try to pick something super specific to work on. You’re famous for having done that as well, except you did it for everything. I think it’s fair to say that the starting point for a lot of your philosophy is what you call ‘physics’. So what exactly is physics? Today, we think of physics as the study of how inert material objects behave—how they move around. Like, if I had a pool table with balls on it, how the balls would bounce. Is that what you mean by physics or, is it something different?
Aristotle:
No—you’re right that physics is really the
starting point of my philosophy. I grew up dissecting animals with my
father. It was a hobby of his; he was a doctor. Whenever we would find
some interesting creature at the market, or something like that, we
would dissect it and examine it and make notes on it and it was really
a sort of informal thing. But for me that was the sort of beginning of
my philosophical life, to learn about what these animals were like.
So physics for me, since childhood, really meant the study of
nature—but that was the study of the living things in nature. I
always came at physics from the perspective of questions about
biology.
Now, when I moved to Athens and started working there with Plato and the people in his school, their approach was quite different. Their approach was much more like the modern approach—which is to understand physics in largely mathematical terms. If you’re familiar with Plato’s physical theories, in the Timaeus for example, he suggests that everything in the universe is composed of very small triangles that would come together to form solid objects, and that these solid objects would then come together to form all of the things we see and can encounter in our everyday lives.
This is an approach quite a lot like the modern approach that—you know, with sort of atoms and subatomic particles—and it lends itself to a sort of mathematical analysis. The place where I stepped off from that is in thinking that the world that we actually encounter—the world that we see in front of us—is intelligible on its own terms.
Platonistic physicists and modern physicists alike would say that the world that we see around us isn’t the subject of a science. The subject of a science are tiny, microscopic, mathematically exact objects. My ambition was to see the macroscopic world—the whole world that we live in; the world that we actually experience—as the proper subject of a science. As something that we can know, understand, and investigate.
Agnes Callard:
Can I ask you a question about that? Why not
think on Plato’s behalf that that whole triangle thing is a way of
making the world that we see and encounter intelligible?
Aristotle:
If you think that the fundamental facts about
physics are going to be facts about these little triangles or
atoms… Atomism was a view represented by many different philosophers
in my day and it was a view that I ultimately opposed, though I
admired some proponents of it—
Matt Teichman:
—is atomism the idea that everything is made
of little tiny particles?
Aristotle:
Yeah; it’s much like the thought today, that
everything in the world is made up of very small bits that obey their
own laws and interact in specific ways.
Agnes Callard:
And the word atomos means uncut.
Aristotle:
Right.
Agnes Callard:
So they’re things you can’t cut.
Aristotle:
Right. We now think that we can cut atoms, but the
original conception of an atom was as a smallest irreducible unit of
matter, or mass.
Matt Teichman:
I guess the problem is that we keep figuring
out new ways to get smaller and smaller and keep cutting.
Aristotle:
Though it’s interesting, because of course
physicists won’t be satisfied until they get to the bottom of that.
It’s interesting to ask what is it that would satisfy
physicists—what would constitute the end of physics.
Matt Teichman:
A triangle?
Aristotle:
Yeah, exactly. Something like that—something
where you can’t find anything simpler than it. Principles, as it
were. The reason why I don’t think that that is a way of approaching
the world that we actually encounter—the world of trees and dogs,
and horses and people—is that the laws that are supposed to govern
the interactions between these tiny particles don’t allow us to say
anything about what happens to a tree—how it grows—except by
reducing it to the accretion of particles.
So in a sense, a tree is no different from a sedimentary rock that might gain particles just by geological pressure. This sort of physics remains silent on the sorts of things we encounter, or at best it has to just accept from us this idea that there are tulips and trees and tigers, and that those tulips and trees and tigers are things that we can draw boundaries around and study without having any account of its own about those things.
Of course, modern physicists just leave that to the biologists and there are intra-scientific principles: laws of physics that pertain to biology. But one thing that we don’t have from modern science is a kind of perspective that would allow us to be scientific about what kinds of beings are the real beings. What are the fundamental objects of study? Each science just takes that for granted, and however much they interact with each other, there’s no attempt to arrive at an answer as to what the fundamental beings are.
Matt Teichman:
So would it be fair to say that your version
of physics, the way we do it in the modern world, might be more like a
combination of modern physics and biology? The setup we have now
often is: well, physicists lay the foundations for how the tiny
submicroscopic particles are going to behave, and then they sort of
outsource the duty of explaining what that has to do with the behavior
of big living organisms to the biologists. It seems like on your kind
of picture of what physics is, physics would study all of that as a
piece: the submicroscopic part and the ‘macroscopic behavior of
organisms’ part.
Aristotle:
I think that that’s right. Just an interesting
little historical fact: when Francis Bacon criticized my work, in
writings that had a significant role in kicking off the modern
scientific project, his complaint about my work wasn’t that I was
wrapping everything up in a neat, little bow. It’s that I was
insufficiently obsessed with coherence and unity.
Bacon’s complaint about my work was that I would have these different fields: things like biology, and astronomy, and what you might call chemistry, the theory of mixture of simple bodies. What Bacon wanted was to instead establish a kind of hierarchy where there would be physics—sorry, I don’t know that I can attribute all this to Bacon—but the modern scientific project has been about establishing a certain kind of hierarchy, in which physics is a fundamental science and other sciences like chemistry and biology (and psychology, maybe) are ultimately built up on the work that physicists do. And that physics is a kind of limiting body, in that physicists are ultimately responsible for describing the mechanisms that any other science would posit, to explain what it’s doing.
My approach was quite different. I saw biology and astronomy (for example) as really involving different principles and being different kinds of science. My thought was that in order to make sense of the world as we encounter it scientifically, you would have to tolerate the possibility that each new thing you encounter could give you a new set of principles—a new understanding for how it should be organized—but that all of this would have to be unified in a certain sense. Not by something like physics, a science that speaks about fundamental interactions, but by what you might call metaphysics—which is to say a broad understanding of the terms in which each new level of organization would crop up. This is where I start talking about things like matter and form, or potentiality and actuality. These are attempts to describe the things that different sciences will have in common, without itself being the science of a fundamental kind of particle or object.
Matt Teichman:
What would be some examples of some of the
concepts we discussed? What would be an example of a physical
principle, or of a physical phenomenon in nature, and how would you
analyze that?
Aristotle:
This is the central topic of the early books of my
work called the
Physics, in which I
discuss the principles that are going to be the most basic terms in
which you would want to describe some phenomenon, and the causes,
which describe how you would go about explaining something. Take an
example of some phenomenon: a classic case would be the coming to be
of a dog, and—
Matt Teichman:
—and ‘coming to be’ means growing up from a
puppy to an adult?
Aristotle:
No; ‘coming to be’ would mean the coming into
existence of a dog. Coming into existence is really one of the
central problems motivating my physics, because it was what almost
every philosopher other than me—both in the ancient world and in the
modern world—thought to be impossible. That a new thing, a new
fundamental substance in the world could come into existence.
Matt Teichman:
Ah, right. Because before, we had nothing,
but now there’s this dog running around, and it seems like: how is
that even possible?
Aristotle:
Exactly.
Agnes Callard:
Can you say how other people explain—how
would other people talk about the coming into being of a dog, if they
think dogs can’t come into being?
Aristotle:
Well, suppose you’re an atomist and you think
everything in the world is just, as Democritus put it, atoms and void.
Then you would say there is no dog, really; there are atoms. The atoms
can sometimes take what we call a dog shape, for a while. But
nothing new has come to be there. It’s just a rearrangement of the
existing stuff. If you’re Plato, you have a theory that does permit
coming into being. You would have something like a form of a
dog, if Plato permits
a form of a dog. (He would never be entirely clear about what forms
there were.) But suppose there’s a form of a dog. Something could come
to be by coming to participate in that form, and the thing would be
something like an image of a dog. An image of that form—a kind of
reflection of it.
For me, it was important to understand how a dog—in the sense that we encounter one in the world—could really come to be. All of these other physicists are, in a way, saying the world has tricked you into thinking that a new thing has come into being. But really what’s going on here is just a rearrangement or presentation of something that was already there. The thing that my philosophy does is: it explains that a dog really can come to be. As far as I know, I’m still one of the very few philosophers who has that ambition.
But to get back to the question about how I would explain that, the central problem with coming into being was posed by one of my predecessors—probably the most important of my predecessors, other than Plato—named Parmenides. Parmenides had a theory that we might recognize today as being quite similar to Buddhism, in some of its incarnations—that the world is really a single immutable, unchangeable object. That there is no time or change; there are no divisions within the world. Everything is a vast ‘one’. Parmenides’ thought was that it wouldn’t make any sense to suggest anything different, because you would end up in contradictions. So if you said that within the one, there was a tiger, the tiger wouldn’t be the one being. The tiger and the one being would be different. But of course if the tiger and the one being are different, then the tiger can’t be a being. These are the sorts of puzzles we got into.
Matt Teichman:
So he has this very counterintuitive view that
there is only one thing. There aren’t multiple things; there are no
distinctions between things; there’s just one blob, not differentiated
in any way. This sounds pretty ridiculous to us—but the reason that
he took that view was that whenever you tried to unpack, make sense
of, and systematically think about what it would be for there to be
more than just one blob, you would fall into contradicting yourself.
Aristotle:
Right. And Zeno’s paradoxes—which are a bit
famous—are in defense of this view. Zeno said if you wanted to cross
a whole room, you would have to cross half of it first, but then you
would have to cross half of that half, and so on. So you could never
make any progress, because there would be an infinite number of
steps. This was an argument on Zeno’s part that motion is impossible,
in defense of Parmenides’ view that the world is a motionless whole.
I think it’s very difficult to overestimate the impact of Parmenides’ critique, even though it may sound ridiculous today. The problem of Parmenides was the problem that governed physical thinking (or attempts at physical thinking) for generations afterward, and my theory was no exception. As I saw it, the way to solve that problem was to suggest that everything that comes to be, such as our dog, is complex. And it’s complex in a specific way: it’s complex in that an element of it is a material element, and then another element of it is a formal element. A dog comes to be when some kind of material is affected by a form, in such a way that the form comes and sets that material in motion, and the material comes to take on the activity of a dog. An easier way to think about this would be: if you have a block of marble, and a sculptor can come along and impose a certain form on that with a chisel, such that at the end of the day, you have a marble statue. Then what it means for a marble statue to come to be is that this material stuff, the marble, takes on the shape of a statue.
Matt Teichman:
At least in the case of a statue, does ‘form’
just mean a spatial arrangement that gives it the shape of whatever
it’s a sculpture of—say, a man?
Aristotle:
Form can include that sort of thing. In the case
of a statue, you would think it would be more like what can depict
e.g. Zeus. So if you have a statue of Zeus, it’s not merely a shape;
it’s something that has to evoke the god. If you were to talk about,
say, a bronze sphere, then all we really mean by ‘form’ is shape, in
that case. If we were to talk about an animal, the form isn’t really
about the shape at all.
Matt Teichman:
I mean, you could have a block of marble in
the shape of a bear.
Aristotle:
Exactly; and that wouldn’t be a bear. It wouldn’t
be a bear because it couldn’t live the life of a bear. For an animal
or a human being, form is something like the total activity that
allows for the life of the thing. And that would include things like
its shape; so it’s important that bears are shaped the way that they
are. But it’s not limited to that. It includes also the digestive
processes of a bear, its ability to sense, and react to things, and
hunt, and that sort of thing.
Matt Teichman:
I almost want to say it’s like the ‘bearhood’,
or the ‘bearness’ of the bear. At the risk of sounding pretentious.
Aristotle:
Right. The bear has a whole life of its own and
that’s really what its form is: the bear doing bear things.
Agnes Callard:
Is that one of those things you were talking
about earlier when you said that things have their own principles? And
you can’t expect these common principles that are going to explain
everything? Is the bear one of those?
Aristotle:
Yeah, it is. Suppose we encountered a new kind of
animal that had a different kind of life than any of the land-going
life or the sea-going life. Something very new. It would be a mistake
to approach that by assuming that it should just be a version of the
things that we already have. You couldn’t, for example, if you had
only ever known plants, see an animal and think: well, this is a very
strange plant. It seems to move around. Its roots wiggle as it
moves. But it is a plant, of course—just like everything must be a
plant.
Instead, you would want to be able to say: this is something new, and we have to come to a new understanding of what it’s doing. This would require you to come to an understanding of something that no plant has—which is sensation, experience, emotion, pain, and pleasure. If you didn’t understand those things, you would never come to an understanding of what an animal was. Similarly—it’s impossible to imagine—but if you are a scientist who was encountering human beings for the first time and you said: ‘Ah, I see. This is another animal. This thing is here to look for food, reproduce, avoid pain, and seek pleasure’, you would have missed what human beings are. You would have failed to understand something important about us, just in the same way that you would fail to understand something important about an animal if you thought of it as just as a plant that wiggles.
So yes, you need to be able to approach things with an understanding that they might present you something really radically new. My philosophy was designed to do that. It was written to allow for us to encounter new things, and see them as new and see them as different, rather than assimilating them to the same atomistic interactions as everything else.
Agnes Callard:
Could I just ask as a side point, the Zeno’s
paradox thing—his paradox of motion—I guess there were a bunch of
solutions to that in the ancient world? Or a bunch of different
approaches. Can you just tell us what’s yours and why is it better
than the others?
Aristotle:
Let’s talk about the runner. The paradox goes like
this. You have a runner who wants to run from one end of a track to
the other. In order for the runner to get to the end of the track, he
first has to go halfway. We can worry first about this halftrack trip,
say, 50 meters or something. But of course, in order for him to go 50
meters, he first has to go 25. In order for him to go 25, he first has
to go 12 1⁄2, and so on. When it comes time to count the number of
steps in the runner’s trip—the number of journeys that he has to
make—we’ll get an infinite number. So the paradox is: how is it
possible that the runner could ever get to his destination, if he has
to take an infinite number of steps to get there?
Now obviously, runners get to the end of tracks. The point wasn’t to suggest that somehow the runner would be unable to complete their journey. The point was to suggest that a theory of motion that suggests that the runner could get to the end of their track would have to be incoherent. So if you’re Zeno, you posit this as a way of responding to the critics of Parmenides. The critics of Parmenides say to Parmenides: this is ridiculous—how could you say that everything is one and motionless?
Zeno would show that our suggestion that things move—that runners get to the end of tracks—is at least equally ridiculous. This puzzle was, like all of Parmenides and Zeno’s work, very important to the development of Greek science, and people had various different kinds of responses to it. The central response I dealt with and wrote against was a kind of atomism. But this is an atomism that might seem very strange to the modern ear—though maybe not to some modern physicists. It was the theory that space, spatial distances and time were composed of tiny, indivisible atomic units—
Agnes Callard:
—so, both space and time.
Aristotle:
Right. So that you could divide up a meter or an
hour in half, and in half again, and in half again, and in half
again. But at some point, you would have to stop. At some point, you
would get to a minimum unit of space or time.
Matt Teichman:
It’s like when you watch a movie on your
computer and you can advance frame by frame. The time is broken up
into 1⁄30 of a second, or whatever it is in the case of modern
technology.
Aristotle:
Exactly. On this theory, the world is like a
movie. Everything happens in these little frames. The thought was that
this solves the puzzle, because Zeno cannot insist that there are an
infinite number of steps on the journey. There’s a finite number,
maybe very large. But at some point, you get to a finite number of
steps, and the runner can complete that, given an equally complex but
finite set of units of time.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, and that’s literally true in the case of
a computer simulation. So it seems like, in a way, this is saying
we’re in a computer simulation. In this sense: the end of the day, the
smallest possible units of time are going to bottom out in something
specific, so that there’s always going to be a finite stretch.
Aristotle:
And I won’t claim to understand it, but apparently
modern physicists have suggested that time and space are composed of
tiny indivisible distances or times called Planck lengths and Planck
times. So it’s a theory
that still has some cachet today, though that’s unrelated to the
ancient theory. I opposed this conception of space and time by
positing that they were continuous—that they could be divided
indefinitely. And for me, the solution to Zeno’s paradox was that of
course you can divide the space that the runner has to cover
infinitely many times, but you could equally well divide the time
infinitely many times. Time was a magnitude just like distance. That
might seem quite intuitive to the modern ear, but it was not, to our
ears. I believe I was the first philosopher to suggest that time and
space necessarily have the same structure. I suggested that on the
basis of this sort of problem.
Matt Teichman:
So we were talking about the example of a dog,
and how it’s possible for the dog to now exist, where previously there
was no dog, and about what previous philosophers—who are kind of
like today’s scientists—had to say about that. The fact that some of
them said: well, there is no such thing as anything existing now that
didn’t exist before. Everything is made of particulate matter, and
what looks to us like new things getting created is just that stuff
getting rearranged. This might sound familiar to people today under
the heading of the law of conservation of matter. So everything is
always just getting rearranged; nothing new is ever getting
created. But what’s your take on a dog’s ability to be created?
Aristotle:
The thing to understand about matter, because you
might think that my theory suggests something like what I was
complaining about: namely, that matter would just be arranged into
various shapes and forms, but nothing new would come about. The thing
to understand about my conception of matter—that’s different from
the modern conception of matter as inert stuff—is that on my
understanding, matter is always relative to a change and relative to
what it becomes.
For example, one way of understanding this would be: consider the matter of a saw. You can’t make a saw out of wood or soap. A saw has to be made out of something harder than whatever it’s designed to cut. So it’s not as if when we make a saw we just take some inert matter, and shape it up into a saw shape. We think carefully about what kind of matter is appropriate to the saw. The matter has to be there for the sake of whatever the saw is supposed to do. This puts certain limits on what it can be.
Now think about that in terms of a dog. What kind of matter could you make a dog out of, if you were to make a dog, such that it could do dog things? You couldn’t just make it out of soap or marble or wood or anything like that. You would have to make it out of a dog’s body. A dog’s body is the only thing that can do dog stuff—that can hunt, and digest food, and reproduce, and sense, and all of those things. So when I say that something new has come to be, what I mean is not just that some form has come to be imprinted on some matter. There’s a change by which something has developed into the body of a dog, for the sake of doing those dog things.
Just to give a brief overview of the causal explanation, matter and form are two of my four causes. I posited four causes as a complete explanation of anything. The other two are the final cause, or the purpose of something, and the efficient cause, or the initial source of its motion. So again, to take an easy case, if you think of an axe, the formal cause of an axe would be its shape and structure. The material cause of an axe would be a wooden haft and the iron head. Its final cause—that is, the purpose for which an axe is made—is chopping. And, of course, the efficient cause would just be the one who made the axe: the axe maker.
These causes are related, in important ways. An axe has that specific shape because that’s the shape that conduces to cutting. When the person making the axe makes it, what they’re doing is thinking about: what would make this an ideal cutting tool? They have that in their minds as they’re trying to craft the axe. And so, they’re thinking about its purpose, in order to inform its shape. When they’re doing that, they’re also thinking about: what kinds of materials do I need to make it out of? What is this axe for chopping? If it’s made for chopping wood, then you might make it just out of a piece of iron. But if it’s made for, say, combat, you might make it out of a different material, such as bronze.
So the question ‘What is the shape of the axe and what will it be made out of?’ will be very much governed by this question, ‘What is it for?’ Really, in my study of animals, the central question is always: what is it for? What’s the purpose of the thing?
Matt Teichman:
Isn’t it kind of counterintuitive to think of
a dog as having a purpose? You know, an axe is a tool that I built,
because I need to use it for stuff. But a dog isn’t a tool that you
use for stuff, or that somebody built, is it?
Aristotle:
No, of course not. The dog isn’t an artifact of
anything. It wasn’t created by anything—except, maybe, by its
parents. The most natural way for us to think about purpose is the
purposes of tools, and things that we do in our own lives. That’s
what’s most familiar to us. But the idea of a purpose isn’t limited to
that and it doesn’t entail any sort of intelligence.
So for example—this is the example I use in my Physics—we all think that a spider’s web is there for something. It’s there for catching flies. If you don’t understand that that’s what a spider’s web is for, I would say that you don’t understand what a spider’s web is. You might see it and you might see that there are spiders on it, but to understand it is to understand that it’s something that the spider made in order to catch flies. Now, spiders have no intelligence at all. They have no foresight; they have no ability to reason. They don’t plan; they don’t have a design in their minds. Spiders are very simple creatures. But in this case we have a purpose without any intelligence. That makes it fairly clear that you can have something that does not have an intellect—or that isn’t produced by an intellect—that nevertheless has a purpose.
If you look at the dog, it might be strange to think of it as something with a purpose, but the dog seems very much to think that it has one. The dog will avoid certain things and it will pursue others. The dog’s nutritive system will keep it in a certain condition. If it gets sick, it will try to make it better. That sort of thing. The dog behaves as if it has a purpose, and the things that the dog does and its organs all manifestly have purposes.
Matt Teichman:
It sure looks like it has one when it sits
around obsessively sniffing everything.
Aristotle:
Exactly. It’s trying to discover something. It has
something in view.
Agnes Callard:
Isn’t there a difference, though—the spider
web seems easier to understand, because even if you don’t think of the
spider as having a mind, still the spider made it. And you can say:
the spider made it for a purpose. But with the dog, nothing made it
for a purpose, right?
Aristotle:
There wasn’t something else that made the dog for
a purpose, except the dog itself. Now one might ask: what is the
purpose of a dog? The purpose of a dog is the thing that the dog
manifestly pursues: namely, to be healthy, to experience the kinds of
pleasure distinctive of dogs: the pleasure of eating, of running, of
hunting, the pleasure of companionship, which dogs take such enormous
pleasure in. For each animal, there will be a distinctive way of life
that brings it pleasure and that constitutes its purpose. Part of
what it’s doing in doing that is reproduction, but there’s a modern
notion that the purpose of an animal is just to reproduce. I think
that that’s just a faulty inference.
All animals do reproduce, and reproduction is important to those animals. It’s one of the things that they pursue. But it doesn’t make sense to think that the purpose of an animal can just be to produce another one of its kind, the purpose of which is to produce another one, and the purpose of which of that is to produce another one, and so on. That will go on indefinitely. Purposes of the sort of things where they have to end. You don’t go to the store to buy some milk to bake a cake, to please a friend, and so on, forever. That has to come to a stop at some point when you think about: oh, this will make me happy—or this will make my friend happy—and that’s the end of the explanation. Similarly, for the dog, it does what it does because it wants to lead a life that contains the kind of pleasure distinctive of a dog.
Matt Teichman:
A lot of the time, when we contemporary people
think about what a purpose is, we’re either thinking about a person’s
intention, like in the examples you just mentioned—why did I go to
the store; well, I wanted to buy candy—or we think of stuff like: a
craftsman made this axe for the purpose of chopping wood. But this
notion of purpose that we’ve all just been discussing seems like it’s
deliberately much broader than the one that would cover those two
cases.
Aristotle:
Right; and it’s necessary to come to an
understanding of that broader view of purpose, because of the
significance of the purpose of something for understanding what it
is. Just to take these everyday examples, if you ask what somebody is
doing, or what some tool is, you will come to an understanding of it
once you understand what it’s for. So imagine you encounter on the
beach some object that you’ve never seen before, and it’s clearly
man-made, and you want to know what kind of a tool it is. Well, you
might examine it and discover what it’s made out of. Maybe it’s made
out of bronze, and you might notice that it has a certain sort of
structure. You might even discover who made it. But none of those
things really constitute an understanding of what the thing is and why
it is the way that it is, until you understand what it’s for.
I think precisely the same thing is true of animals. If you dissect an animal and you look at the various structures of its body—the complexity of which had only just started to be appreciated in my day—you would be absolutely lost, unless you pursued the question, ‘What does this organ do? What is it for?’ It might pump blood. It might filter the blood. It might contain food. It might exert force. But until you understand those things, observing what the tissue of the organ is made out of, or what its appearance is like—or anything like that—those are hopeless as starting points for understanding what’s going on inside of an animal. You need to understand the purpose of the things that it’s doing. And you can just apply the same reasoning to the behavior of the animal and to the animal as a whole. You would want to understand if a fox happens to be doing some fox thing, like digging at the ground, you understand what it’s doing when you understand that it’s building itself a shelter. And similarly—the fox as a whole—you understand what the fox as a whole is when you understand what it’s for, namely what the distinctive kind of pleasure and life of a fox is, such that it is trying to live that life.
Just to take a shot at this modern notion that the purpose of an animal is to reproduce, if that were true, why wouldn’t animals look very much the same as one another? We would see much less diversity, in a sense, or the diversity would be uninteresting. Maybe we would see a diversity of animals, but it would never occur to us to think much about the significance of that diversity, because of course, if a fox and a deer and a bacterium are all there to reproduce, there’s only one interesting thing about them, and that is their reproductive system. But there’s a lot going on with these animals that isn’t about that. They sense, and they move, and they enjoy things, and they have emotional lives.
Agnes Callard:
Could you say something about how that idea of
a purpose—could you relate it back to the kinds of purposes that we
most naturally talk about when I have some reason for doing something?
Aristotle:
Say a little more.
Agnes Callard:
Well, there’s a place where our concept of
purpose is at home, which is: I want a saw, for some reason, so I
build a saw. That saw now has a purpose, and its purpose is to enable
me to do the thing I wanted to do. And it has that purpose because I
made it for that reason. So that’s the way in which the concept of
purpose is at home in the modern world; it’s used that way. What I’m
trying to do is translate that back into your language and, be like:
‘How do you think about those purposes, the ones that we just made up,
so to speak?’
Aristotle:
When we’re talking about things like tools, we
have to think about them politically. That a tool is at home, not just
as the product of a certain person, but as part of a political
community. So for example, if I make a hammer, the reason why that
hammer has the purpose that it does—and the reason why that purpose
can inform its shape, and structure, and material, and all of those
things–is because there’s a community of people that understand what
hammers are, and how they’re used, and what we should do with them.
The political community sets up a kind of environment for the
discovery and production of things that have a certain kind of
purpose. Different communities will have different tools, of course,
and they’ll have different uses for things. But a place where the idea
of purpose is more at home in our lives on an individual level is in
action.
Everything we do, we do for some purpose. If you find somebody doing something and you discover that there’s no reason at all that they’re doing it—it doesn’t bring them pleasure, it didn’t seem fun to them, it’s not useful to them, they haven’t been ordered to do it, there’s no reason at all, they’re getting nothing from it—you would conclude that they’re not really acting at all. That they’re moving under some compulsion. Action has the idea of purpose written into its very heart. And it’s not as if each of our actions has its own purpose, and that those things aren’t related to one another; our actions come together, towards ever higher and higher purposes. If a student is attending classes, and buying books, and feeding themselves, and all of those things, that is all in anticipation of graduating at some point, and doing the kind of work that they want to do. They do this for the sake of their happiness.
The purpose of a human being is to be happy. Just as the purpose of a dog was to lead a life with a distinctive kind of pleasure of a dog, the purpose of a human being is to lead a life of happiness. And happiness is something different for us than just pleasure; our purposes converge on happiness. Now, if you thought that everything only has a purpose because it was designed to be so, or if you thought that everything has a purpose because it’s some action that you intentionally do and that there could be no purposes outside of that sphere, then you would have to conclude that human beings have no purpose.
But there, you just run into a straightforward paradox. If everything we do has a purpose but there’s no purpose for us, then why do we do anything? The purpose of a human being couldn’t be something that we plan on—tt couldn’t be an artifact that belongs to us.
Agnes Callard:
So do we have a purpose in the same sense that
a dog has a purpose?
Aristotle:
Yes. I mean, it’s different, of course, because
human beings are different from animals. Our purpose is happiness, and
happiness is distinct from pleasure. But they are very deeply
related. If I had to say it in a sentence, I would say that happiness
is having a source of pleasure within yourself—being a source of
your own pleasure. The sources of a pleasure for a dog always come
from the outside. There are always things like food, or an environment
it can run around in, or other dogs. Most of the sources of pleasure
for human beings are like that as well, but human beings are capable
of reason, and reason provides us with a source of pleasure that’s
internal. We can be the basis of our own happiness, in the way that a
dog cannot be the basis of its own life of pleasure.
Agnes Callard:
You say that happiness is having a source of
pleasure within yourself. For me, that sheds light on one of the
weirdest features of one of your books, which is that the
Nicomachean
Ethics has this
kind of surprise ending. We’re going along, reading the book, and it
seems like you’re talking about the happy life as being the life of
political engagement: being a ruler in a city. But then at the very
end, you turn the tables on us and you tell us: no, actually, the
happier life is the contemplative life, where you’re basically doing
philosophy. My life, I guess—your life, Aristotle. So is the
political life happy at all? In what sense does the politician have a
source of pleasure within him, and am I right that this is why you
have this surprise ending?
Aristotle:
The Ethics is ultimately written in order to
explain how you can come to act in such a way that you are the source
of your action, and that your knowledge of something is the source of
your action. That is, the aim of the Ethics is to explain how you
could know what you’re doing, in a deep way. It might seem that we
always know what we’re doing. But, say, when you take a drink of
water, why are you doing that? What are you doing? What’s the purpose
of what you’re doing? I think we all understand it’s in response to
being thirsty.
Now, what would it mean to really understand what thirst is—why you need water? There are biologists today who can tell you that. I had a theory of it that they’re going to disagree with. But understanding what it really means to drink a glass of water and why you do that is very difficult. It’s a question of science that very few people know the answer to. And even the scientists who understand the answer to that question, their answer will bottom out in things that have nothing to do with human beings—in facts of chemistry. So, in some sense, understanding why you need to drink water is not understanding something about human beings. It’s ultimately understanding something about chemistry.
What would it mean to understand what you’re doing, to really know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it? It would be to know exactly what kind of good you’re going to produce when you do the thing, and it would be to understand exactly how you’re going to produce it. So the theory in the Nicomachean Ethics is that we have that kind of understanding—that total and complete understanding of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it—only in the case of ethical actions. I mentioned building a hammer in the context of a city state, or of a political community. You might build a hammer knowing that people need hammers. But the question why—or what’s the role of that kind of work in the city state—is not something you need to understand in order to make a hammer. You just need to understand what the person who has contracted you wants. Ethical action and political action—and the good of political action—is the one case where human beings know what they’re doing from top to bottom. They understand the entirety of their action. And it’s that understanding that is happiness. Having a source of pleasure within yourself means having a source of pleasure that is your own understanding of something.
The reason why we get the surprise ending at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics is that there’s another way in which human beings can understand something: that is, understand it scientifically. And that is also a source of pleasure in people. People everywhere love to know. If you go and ask any old man for advice—if you come and ask me to do a podcast—we love to explain what we know, because it gives us the experience of knowing it. Every human being of every walk of life takes pleasure in that, and my suggestion at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics is just that. Take those things that you could know top to bottom, that you could really know all the way down, that you understand completely. Those things are going to be the greatest source of pleasure for us, and they’re contained entirely within us. At any point in your life, you can just stop and think about what you understand scientifically, or reflect on your actions—those actions that you know that you did well—and that would be a source of pleasure for you.
That’s what happiness is. It’s being able to feel pleased, and to feel pleased on the basis of something that is really good throughout your life and under your own power depending on nothing outside of you.
Matt Teichman:
Aristotle, thanks so much for joining us, and
for inventing science, philosophy and logic in more or less the same
form they exist now.
Aristotle:
Oh, you’re welcome, Matt. It was my pleasure.
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