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An Entry from the Archives

I read Book Alpha of Aristotle's Metaphysics this afternoon (trans. Richard Hope). (A book is about 40 pages.) He reads like Bach sounds.

Book Alpha takes on a different cast when you read it looking for clues about the way in which things organize themselves into genuses and species. For example, the book begins, famoulsy, "All men naturally have an impulse to get knowledge." This is not an unargued premise. Aristotle presents evidence for it: "A sign of this is the way we prize our senses." We most highly value sight, even when "we have nothing practical in view." Why? "The reason is that of all the senses it can best bring us knowledge and best discerns the many differences among things."

So, now we know that knowledge has to do with seeing the differences among things. But, if you only see what makes something distinct, the world becomes populated by unique things, and knowledge is impossible: I need to distinguish Plato from Critias, yet see that both are men, and distinguish men from chickens yet see both are bipeds. So, knowledge requires the distinctions and groupings that a genus-species arrangement gives.

We see this in Aristotle's critique of Plato. Most of Book Alpha is given over to showing how Aristotle's predecessors got it wrong. Aristotle spends more time on Plato, his old teacher, than on anyone else. (Go have students!) Here's one of his complaints about Plato's notion of Ideas:

Also, there will be more than one pattern of the same thing, therefore more than one idea; of man, for example, animal and biped and at the same time also man-himself. [991a.25, p. 29]

Again, this is a problem that a nested, hierarchical view solves.

In Book Alpha the Less, Aristotle argues for a single "root," a single first principle. But, of course, this first principle is not just an abstract category. It is also what gives traits to what follows from it:

To explain a thing it is necessary to know which among a number of things that have some trait in common gives that trait to others. So, fire, being hottestst, is the reason why other things are hot. So, too, what is most true is the reason why other things are derivatively true. Hence, the principles of eternal things are necessarily most truel for they are true always not not merely sometimes; and there is nothing which explains their being what they are, for it is they that explain the being of other things. Consequently, status in being governs status in truth." [993b.20, p. 36]

So, we're not looking merely at the order of knowledge but also at the order of being.

BTW, it's hard for me to tell, but I think Aristotle is making a joke in this section:

Some require accuracy in everything; others are irritated by accuracy, either because they cannot follow a closely reasoned argument, or because they fear hair-splitting. There is something about accuracy that makes it seem unworthy to certain free spirits, either in business contracts or in rational exposition. [995a.10, p. 39]