Plato inherited a world intellectually divided between Parmenides’ vision of the constancy and immutability of being and Heraclitus’ vision of the constancy of change. Plato’s vision of reality is a strait vertical line between these two points, the immutable Ideas, the mutating world. It is mathematical, intellectual, oriental, serene. The world is a flickering shadow of a singular light. Here one contemplates, sees through the illusionary surface to the inner, the transcending truth. Aristotle’s vision is geometrical, Hesperian, ceaselessly moving. Reality is not characterized as a line between two points, it is a triangle in a square within a circle with tangents flying off in all directions, intersecting, forming more triangles, forming a polygon, enclosed in a greater circle, and all of this not on a singular plane, but multidirectional, solid, substantial, spherical. The Aristotelian universe races with life. It is the concrete, the reasonable world, and Aristotle’s mind tracks its every reason.
Aristotle sat at Plato’s feet for years, yet was never content with his master’s analysis. This polymath was too curious about too many things to ever entertain a doubt about the reality of the stuff of the material world or its real correlation with ideas which he held were derived from the analysis of the material. Thus, he declares there is no separate world of ideas. We navigate form the changing world of sensation to the constancy of ideas by understanding the causes of the changes. The sensible world may be in an endless flux, but the factors regulating that flux are constant. In understanding these factors operative in the sensible world we arrive at the knowledge of the world. There is one world functioning and presenting itself to us through causes and effects, one world encountered through sensation and understood through the intellect that extracts the essential and universal aspects of the sensed object and represents them in the mind as idea or concept therein providing a basis for sound and valid judgments.
Knowledge is not as Plato claimed some internal awakening or remembering. Neither is knowledge, the act of knowing, a type of pure mental abstraction from material experience. Knowledge is the result of intelligence (mind) meeting intelligibility (matter). Reality might be said to be porous. Knowledge is the interface between its components, mental and material, intelligence and intelligibility, yielding not an abstraction, but an assimilation of the intelligibility of matter. We know, and that which we know is that which is.
Aristotle proceeded by analyzing how we use and organize ideas, or concepts. He examines our concepts and how they are organized by us in a hierarchical fashion according to the various parameters of their meaning and application, how we relate concepts one to another, how we make judgments, how we combine strings of judgments to reveal cause or reason. He then slips beyond this exposition of cognition to theorize how this reveals the structure of reality in itself.
The Aristotelian theory divides reality into two fundamental logical principles: matter (potency), and form (act). Matter denotes a theoretical substratum, a pure indeterminate, a potentiality, open to being made a reality by some determining, activating, substantializing form. In brief, reality is in a constant state of becoming resultant of a ceaseless and orderly dance twixt potentiality and action. Aristotle might say “it is what we think it is”. Mind simply mines matter, refines from the data of sensation the heart or essence, the basic “forms” of things, giving forth the ideas or the concepts of things. The thing is, senses feel it, mind translates feeling and co-ordinates with like data yielding the idea that this is this and that is that. We have no reason to doubt the correlation of idea in our mind with thing in the world. We have no reason to think the world something less than real or intelligible.
Because every action is resultant of another action, somewhere in the process we must acknowledge the existence of a first action, a “Prime Mover”, which sets all action acting. Because this process is intelligible, rational, orderly, logical, there is in this catenation of action an end, a purpose, which also acts upon the process as a guiding or final cause. These principles are the Aristotelian divine: the Pure Act that begins all action and is also the exemplary and final cause of all action. But being pure action, this principle, this divine, can have no knowledge beyond itself, beyond its purity of being “the thought of thought”. This is a divine principle understood as abstract and all transcending, beyond and above all else. The divine principle in Plato is a frozen perfection. In Aristotle, while still a pure transcendent, it takes on a nuance, it tingles with movement and purpose.
According to Aristotle, “soul” refers to the “form” or activating principle of being human, to human-be-ing alive-ness, to life. Like Plato, he recognizes various aspects of soul, the sensible and the rational, and like Plato, the rational soul is conceived as having as its proper sphere of activity the abstract, universal and immutable, the cognition of that which is essential and necessary in beings. Therefore, immortality can belong only to that aspect of soul that is rational. Here, he could not escape the gravity of his master. The rational soul is impersonal, universal. The particularities of sense and desire (being neither essential nor universal) cannot, do not, enter the eternal. Thus like Plato, his divine principle and his personal principle are both logical entities, inherently eternal, non-personal. However, unlike Plato, wisdom or moral being is not confined to the mind reaching contemplation, but in living in a reasonable balance betwixt the possibilities the changing world offers, in finding and adhering to the golden mean.
I was once asked if Aristotle had found a pathway within his comprehensive analyses to make god something more accessible to everyman, and had he been able to subsume the sensible and concupiscible souls (life-forces) in man within the rational soul of man, and thereby “personalize” immortality, then might his vision of a life intelligently assimilating an intelligible world and pursuing a moral balance have the ascendency required to propel the Greek world with a breath and scope his student, the great Alexander, could only dream? To so embracing a question with so much hanging in hypotheses, my answer was brief: no. Aristotle was a philosopher, not a prophet. Despite his work in ethics, his audience is the academy, not the masses. His focus is the mind, not the soul, not the heart. His interest in the divine is as an object of cosmic analysis, not worship.
The evolution of thought is not a straight line from point A to B; it is divaricating and circuitous; it usually edges along adapting with subtle differentiation rather than all-embracing fulgurance. The evolution of heart is the same. There come times when the two intersect, but that vaulting of these two systems of our existence usually happens first in the intellectual arena, and therefrom filters into the emotive and religious forums accessible to everyman. Within Christianity, that arcing is first accomplished by the early Apologists (the expositors of the reasonableness of the faith) who merged contemporary philosophy with their religion, and thereby imbued Christian thought with a definite direction and vocabulary for a millennium and beyond. Arches and vaults tend to be stable structures. The systems of the mind and heart, however, continue to move, adapt, adjust, evolve, and as they do so must in some way transcend or traverse such vaulting, or topple it.