Aristotle’s Metaphysics, one of the most influential works in Western thought, is a collection of fourteen treatises or books. The title is not by Aristotle and is due to a Hellenistic editor, traditionally identified with Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BCE). Metaphysics (ta meta ta phusika) means “the things after the physical things” and may point to the position of the metaphysical books in the Hellenistic edition of Aristotle’s works (after the physical books) or possibly to the order in which metaphysical issues should be learned in an ideal curriculum (after the study of physics). Aristotle, however, is not responsible for assembling the books of the Metaphysics into a single work. The collection is most likely to have been put together by Andronicus or someone else on the basis of the thematic similarities among the individual treatises. Although the Metaphysics is not a unified work in our sense, it seems undeniable that the different treatises of the collection pursue a general philosophical project or discipline, which Aristotle variously refers to as “wisdom,” “first philosophy” or even “theology.” Such a discipline is described in the Metaphysics as a theoretical science, as opposed to practical and productive sciences, and is sharply distinguished from the other two theoretical sciences, physics and mathematics. In many ways it would not be incorrect to describe Aristotle’s project in the Metaphysics as metaphysics.
Many of the issues Aristotle deals with—such as existence, essence, individuation, identity, Universals, the nature of material objects, just to mention a few—are certainly issues that we would comfortably describe as metaphysical. But in other respects, Aristotle’s conception of metaphysics is broader than ours, as it includes philosophical areas—such as rational theology, cosmology, philosophy of mathematics and logic—that do not obviously fall within metaphysics in our sense, though they may be closely related to it. Aristotle’s Metaphysics has been enormously influential in shaping Arabic and Latin medieval thought and has remained central to early modern philosophy as well. Over the last sixty years or so, the Metaphysics has been rediscovered by metaphysicians in the analytic philosophy tradition as a source of philosophical insights. This renewal of philosophical interest has been matched by a proliferation of sophisticated scholarly works on Aristotle’s writing. This article has the twofold aim of mapping out resources on the text of the Metaphysics and offering bibliographical guidance on the philosophical issues dealt with in Aristotle’s writing.
During the time that Aristotle articulated the central question of the group of writings known as his Metaphysics, he said it was a question that would never cease to raise itself. He was right. He also regarded his own contributions to the handling of that question as belonging to the final phase of responding to it. I think he was right about that too. The Metaphysics is one of the most helpful books there is for contending with a question the asking of which is one of the things that makes us human. In our time that question is for the most part hidden behind a wall of sophistry, and the book that could lead us to rediscover it is even more thoroughly hidden behind a maze of misunderstandings.
Paul Shorey, a scholar whose not-too-bad translation of the Republic is the Hamilton edition of the Collected Works of Plato, has called the Metaphysics "a hopeless muddle" not to be made sense of by any "ingenuity of conjecture." I think it is safe to say that more people have learned important things from Aristotle than from Professor Shorey, but what conclusion other than his can one come to about a work that has two books numbered one, that descends from the sublime description of the life of the divine intellect in its twelfth book to end with two books full of endless quarreling over minor details of the Platonic doctrine of forms, a doctrine Aristotle had already decisively refuted in early parts of the book, those parts, that is, in which he is not defending it? The book was certainly not written as one whole; it was compiled, and once one has granted that, must not one admit that it was compiled badly, crystallizing as it does an incoherent ambivalence toward the teachings of Plato? After three centuries in which no one has much interest in it at all, the Metaphysics becomes interesting to nineteenth century scholars just as a historical puzzle: how could such a mess have been put together?
I have learned the most from reading the Metaphysics on those occasions when I have adopted the working hypothesis that it was compiled by someone who understood Aristotle better than I or the scholars do, and that that someone (why not call him Aristotle?) thought that the parts made an intelligible whole, best understood when read in that order. My main business here will be to give you some sense of how the Metaphysics looks in its wholeness, but the picture I will sketch depends on several hypotheses independent of the main one. One cannot begin to read the Metaphysics without two pieces of equipment: one is a set of decisions about how to translate Aristotle's central words. No translator of Aristotle known to me is of any help here; they will all befuddle you, more so in the Metaphysics even than in Aristotle's other works. The other piece of equipment, and equally indispensable I think, is some perspective on the relation of the Metaphysics to the Platonic dialogues. In this matter the scholars, even the best of them, have shown no imagination at all. In the dialogues, in their view, Plato sets forth a "theory" by putting it into the mouth of Socrates. There is some room for interpretation, but on the whole we are all supposed to know that theory. Aristotle must accept that theory or reject it. If he appears to do both it is because passages written by some Platonist have been inserted into his text, or because things he wrote when he was young and a Platonist were lumped together with other things on similar subjects which he wrote when he was older and his thoughts were different and his own.
Many of the issues Aristotle deals with—such as existence, essence, individuation, identity, Universals, the nature of material objects, just to mention a few—are certainly issues that we would comfortably describe as metaphysical. But in other respects, Aristotle’s conception of metaphysics is broader than ours, as it includes philosophical areas—such as rational theology, cosmology, philosophy of mathematics and logic—that do not obviously fall within metaphysics in our sense, though they may be closely related to it. Aristotle’s Metaphysics has been enormously influential in shaping Arabic and Latin medieval thought and has remained central to early modern philosophy as well. Over the last sixty years or so, the Metaphysics has been rediscovered by metaphysicians in the analytic philosophy tradition as a source of philosophical insights. This renewal of philosophical interest has been matched by a proliferation of sophisticated scholarly works on Aristotle’s writing. This article has the twofold aim of mapping out resources on the text of the Metaphysics and offering bibliographical guidance on the philosophical issues dealt with in Aristotle’s writing.
During the time that Aristotle articulated the central question of the group of writings known as his Metaphysics, he said it was a question that would never cease to raise itself. He was right. He also regarded his own contributions to the handling of that question as belonging to the final phase of responding to it. I think he was right about that too. The Metaphysics is one of the most helpful books there is for contending with a question the asking of which is one of the things that makes us human. In our time that question is for the most part hidden behind a wall of sophistry, and the book that could lead us to rediscover it is even more thoroughly hidden behind a maze of misunderstandings.
Paul Shorey, a scholar whose not-too-bad translation of the Republic is the Hamilton edition of the Collected Works of Plato, has called the Metaphysics "a hopeless muddle" not to be made sense of by any "ingenuity of conjecture." I think it is safe to say that more people have learned important things from Aristotle than from Professor Shorey, but what conclusion other than his can one come to about a work that has two books numbered one, that descends from the sublime description of the life of the divine intellect in its twelfth book to end with two books full of endless quarreling over minor details of the Platonic doctrine of forms, a doctrine Aristotle had already decisively refuted in early parts of the book, those parts, that is, in which he is not defending it? The book was certainly not written as one whole; it was compiled, and once one has granted that, must not one admit that it was compiled badly, crystallizing as it does an incoherent ambivalence toward the teachings of Plato? After three centuries in which no one has much interest in it at all, the Metaphysics becomes interesting to nineteenth century scholars just as a historical puzzle: how could such a mess have been put together?
I have learned the most from reading the Metaphysics on those occasions when I have adopted the working hypothesis that it was compiled by someone who understood Aristotle better than I or the scholars do, and that that someone (why not call him Aristotle?) thought that the parts made an intelligible whole, best understood when read in that order. My main business here will be to give you some sense of how the Metaphysics looks in its wholeness, but the picture I will sketch depends on several hypotheses independent of the main one. One cannot begin to read the Metaphysics without two pieces of equipment: one is a set of decisions about how to translate Aristotle's central words. No translator of Aristotle known to me is of any help here; they will all befuddle you, more so in the Metaphysics even than in Aristotle's other works. The other piece of equipment, and equally indispensable I think, is some perspective on the relation of the Metaphysics to the Platonic dialogues. In this matter the scholars, even the best of them, have shown no imagination at all. In the dialogues, in their view, Plato sets forth a "theory" by putting it into the mouth of Socrates. There is some room for interpretation, but on the whole we are all supposed to know that theory. Aristotle must accept that theory or reject it. If he appears to do both it is because passages written by some Platonist have been inserted into his text, or because things he wrote when he was young and a Platonist were lumped together with other things on similar subjects which he wrote when he was older and his thoughts were different and his own.
No comments:
Post a Comment