1.17 Puett丨Aristotle: Empiricism and the Mean

Hello, Everyone. So, today we turn to thenext great philosopher in the Greek tradition, namely Aristotle. Aristotle, whowill be in many ways almost as influential as Plato, and certainly in theparadigms that have developed around the study of ancient Greek philosophy heplays a crucial role. So, as a Plato, let us begin there, and let us discusshow Aristotle has been presented in these narratives of the emergence of thegreat Greek miracle leading ultimately to the modern world of the West and thenturn to what Aristotle was perhaps really trying to do and place him in hiscontext.

But to begin with the paradigms. So, ifPlato is often portrayed as the figure who creates a transcendental vision, forthe first time in Western philosophy, Aristotle is often presented as hisantithesis, the figure who emphasizes empirical science. And if Plato isportrayed as the great transcendentalist, Aristotle is the great empiricalscientist, and often the two of these are seen as the key beginners of theWestern philosophical tradition, giving the key dialectic between transcendenceand empiricism, between the transcendental and the mundane that a figure likeHegel will see as the key dialectic driving the Western field tradition untilultimately its culmination in the modern world.

You certainly will not be surprised tohear that I'm going to question this narrative, but as always, I would like todo so by beginning with the question of what was Aristotle actually trying todo, then from there discussing his philosophy and his view of the cosmos and ofethics, and as always, placing this within a larger comparative perspectivethat I think, again, will shed some very intriguing light on both what he wasdoing and on the implications of his arguments.

So, to begin with a little bit of contextbehind Aristotle, Aristotle came of course after Plato. So, he saw Socrates andthe tragedy of Socrates' life. He saw Plato's attempt to build an academy, andAristotle, indeed, was a member of that academy, trying to gain the kind oftraining and discipline that a Plato was calling for. But immediately,Aristotle became concerned about the assumptions underlying the Platonicsystem. And particularly Aristotle became concerned that the overall—let's callit “metaphysics”—of Plato, the emphasis, in other words, on these Platonicforms that the philosophical soul was able to contemplate, Aristotle felt thatpre-answered too many questions. In other words, instead of giving the firmer,deeper, more profound foundation for true knowledge that Plato hoped, Aristotlethought it actually restricted the possible range of questions and, bydefinition, the possible range of answers.

So, what Aristotle did on the contrarywas to divide his philosophical work into different spheres. In these spheres,the idea would be let us begin by looking at the ways things operate and thenfrom there, try to drive larger principles about their implications. So, in thepolitical sphere, for example, he would literally try to collect differentpolitical orders, try to understand how they worked, try to physically readconstitutions of different societies that had them, and the goal of this was tophysically begin by seeing what is out there. What are the different ways thathumans have organized themselves politically? He did the same in the fieldsthat we would now call studies of the natural world.

So, he would look at physically what isout there and then try to derive principles from these. In terms of that latterissue, namely the natural world, one of the immediate implications of thisapproach is that he became extremely suspicious about the claim oftranscendental forms as being the one and only ways to understand the world. Onthe contrary, his move—Aristotle's—was to say, “Let's begin by looking at phenomenaand try to derive our understandings of those phenomena based upon an empiricalunderstanding of the ways they seem to be operating.” Now, in this sense, youcan see immediately why he would come to be known as the empiricist, as opposedto, in Plato's sense, the transcendentalist, but let me also note theimplications of what he was trying to do. The reason Aristotle was so concernedwith such an approach is he thought if we begin to do so, we can over timeformulate better ways to act in the world because we will formulate better waysof understanding the complexity of the world.

And to get at the key point of what hewas doing, let me momentarily turn away from the natural world and turn to thehuman world where I think we see Aristotle's theories at their very clearestformulation. Let's turn to his view of ethics. So, when Aristotle talks aboutethics, ethics for him means the proper way that humans should act in theworld. He has already, as we have noted, argued against the possibility ofclaiming you can come up with transcendental ways of answering the question ofhow best to live. For him, you begin by looking at practices. You begin bylooking at how people actually act in the world. And when you begin to do so,Aristotle  argues, you begin to see thatsome practices lead to bad ways of acting and others do not, which also means,by implication, ethics absolutely must be thought of as a practice. In otherwords, for Aristotle, the question is within the realm of human activities,what practices lead to better ethical ways of being and what practices do not?

This requires also that you look at thedifferent spheres within which humans interact. So, Aristotle begins the workthat we would now call sociological work of looking at how humans act in situationsof friendship, how humans act in household worlds, how they act in thepolitical sphere. And in each of these spheres, the question is: what would beethical ways of being within these different spheres? And as he beginsformulating this, what he comes up with is the argument that we should begin tothink of ethics as training and discipline to start practicing better in thesedifferent spheres, and when you are practicing and training yourself, whatyou're aiming at is not some transcendental ideal because it's not clear ifsomething like that would even exist for an Aristotle. What you're trainingyourself to do is to begin to sense in any situation, what would be themoderate way of acting.

In other words, in a situation where youhave different possibilities, which for him is the nature of the world, insteadof ever aiming toward any extreme, you're aiming toward the moderate positionthat will enable you to keep balancing options, and by continuing to balanceoptions, you begin slowly to be able to navigate any situation. And the abilityto so navigate situations is for him the practice of ethics. Or, putting all ofthis in a somewhat less abstract way of putting it, for Aristotle the key isyou are cultivating virtues. Right? You are cultivating the virtue of being anethical person, and you cultivate the virtue of being an ethical person bytraining yourself to sense situations, sense how to work with situations, andsense how not to fall for easy answers in situations.

In a sense, as you can see, it's kind ofthe opposite of a Platonic approach. The question is not “what is the idealform, in this case of a type of behavior?” It's “how do I train myself to havethe virtue to operate and navigate situations?” Now, I begin with ethics for areason that will become immediately obvious when we look at the largercomparative perspective. Because once it is phrased this way, you willundoubtedly note immediately how similar this is to yes, tellingly again, afigure we mentioned in an earlier podcast from China, namely Confucius. So, wenoted some intriguing parallels last podcast in terms of the concerns of aPlato and a Confucius. But here we see with Aristotle, not simply a similarityof concern but a similarity of answer.

With Confucius too, as we noted, ethicswas all about training and discipline, but what you're really training yourselfto do is not contemplate transcendental forums in a Platonic sense. You aretraining yourself to be able to sense situations better, and by sensingsituations better, you're gaining the ability to become well virtuous, meaning,again for Confucius as well, how to sense situations and how to act effectivelyin them. The implication, as we discussed for Confucius, is the world is messy,we are messy, and building a better world means sensing that messiness andtraining ourselves to work better with it, to create better interactions.

And with only minimal changes ofterminology, this is really what Aristotle is getting at as well. Right? It's amessy world, and we are training ourselves to understand that messy world andslowly train ourselves to live within it and work within it. And once we put itthis way, the work that he is so often, or at least I should say, soimportantly in those later narratives emphasized for creating, namely thenatural sciences, we see these in a somewhat different light. Aristotle  didn't see himself as trying to become whatwe would now call a natural scientist. For him, all of the work of trying to understandthe world is part and parcel of what he's talking about in ethics, right? It ispart and parcel of training yourself to see the complexity of the world, workwith that complexity, begin to understand that complexity and begin to livewithin it better. The same sort of a concern we saw in Plato, but now beginningwith the messiness and kind of staying there, and as such, it's an answer thatis well incredibly similar to what Confucius himself was doing. Two figures atthe opposite ends of Eurasia coming up with, in this sense, extremely similaranswers.

But we have also noted repeatedly thatalong with seeing the surprising parallels and similarities, it can be helpfulto see some of the differences, too. And here we see a very telling one. So, wenoted with Plato that Plato strongly commits themself to a view that somepeople at birth are better philosophers. They have better souls better able tocontemplate the transcendental form, and others do not. They should be at lowerlevels in the social hierarchy and should simply be the workers. Aristotleintriguingly will continue this piece of Plato, certainly in terms of adifferent cosmology, because Aristotle has gotten rid of the claim oftranscendental forms, but Aristotle very much continues the view that all ofwhat we have been discussing, namely the attempts to create the virtues withinthe self that will enable one to live ethically within the world. Aristotle iscommitted to the view that a few of us are born with the capability of doingso—a few of us.

He is equally committed to the claim thatmany of us are not, which means Aristotle will fully commit himself to the viewthat there is an elite world, an elite world of men who are capable of becomingvirtuous. And he is equally committed to the claim that some people are simplyborn incapable of doing this, and Aristotle commits himself to the view thatthey should be the slaves. And Aristotle develops this argument, amazinglyenough, out of his empirical research. Not, you'll be happy to hear, that hedid empirical research to show that some people were better at birth thanothers, but rather out of the empirical research that he was committing himselfto do by looking at existing practices. So, when Aristotle does his politicalwork, he notes the historical fact, unfortunately, that all of the societies heis looking at, mainly in Greece, of course, were slave societies. And Aristotletakes from this the fact that some of us are simply lesser and should beslaves, amazingly, the same conclusion of a Plato despite the radically differentcosmologies.

And here too, I would like to draw acomparison. So, I've noted the similarities between a Confucius and anAristotle in terms of their ethical vision, but here note a contrast. When aConfucius begins with the claim that we are simply messy creatures andeverything comes down to cultivation, Confucius expands that to everyone. Allof us are messy creatures. And if we are all messy creatures, we're all capableof cultivating ourselves to become better, which means from this perspective, thefact that we live in hierarchical societies isn't telling about the nature ofhumans, it's simply telling about the degree to which we have constructedhierarchical societies. But if we've constructed certain types of hierarchies,we of course could construct them differently.

Meaning that, and this is a key pointwe're going to see playing out over and over again, one of the intriguingthings you will see developing in China, dealing with these attempts toreimagine the world around them, is in China, you early on, as early asConfucius, get the view that if the world is messy, the world we create out ofthis messiness is a human construct and it's changeable, which potentiallymeans almost everything is changeable. This provides an intriguing contrast withwhat we're seeing in Greece, even in those places, and Aristotle being one ofthe most extreme examples of it, where you get views that seems so similar towhat you see in China, particularly in the vision of ethics, one key differencewill remain with this: that in Greece, so many of the philosophers willcontinue to be committed to a view that in the world outside and in humans aswell, there is a fundamental hierarchy. That fundamental hierarchy is natural.It is unchangeable. And in that hierarchy, some people are born to be better,others are not.

And so, intriguingly, when you go back toHegel's paradigm in which he will see the birth of science and rationality inancient Greece, he not only does not note all that we have been mentioning, butnote, even more importantly, he continues it. So all of these views, of course,Hegel continues to hold as, sadly, do many of those theorists in the 19th and20th centuries coming out of Hegel. And out of this, I think there is a largermessage, which is when we have so constructed ancient Greece in these Westernteleologies as this golden moment of enlightenment, we have not only, as we'venoted before, ended up misreading a lot of what was driving and motivating thephilosophers at the time, but we have equally fallen into the danger ofrecapitulating perhaps the pieces of their philosophies that most should bequestioned precisely because they are so built up as these great enlightenedthinkers.

So, here too, we see an intriguingopening in terms of our comparative explorations. On the one hand, I think abetter attempt to understand what these philosophers like Plato and Aristotlewere trying to do, but also and at the same time, we see some of perhaps thedangers that some of these philosophers fell into by failing to rethink theworlds around them sufficiently and tellingly, one huge difference that willdevelop in these different philosophical traditions will come down precisely tothat point. The degrees to which some things in natural and human world areseen as simply a fact and unchangeable and the degree to which, as in China aswe've noted already, the world is seen as radically changeable and thereforepotentially existing with no inherent pre-given fact, did not, could notconceivably be rethought and re-practiced. With that point, let me simplymention, we will now be turning to the next stage in the development of thesephilosophers, and this key difference that we've already begun noting in Greecein China will if anything become more pronounced in that next generation ofphilosophers. So I thank you very much, and I very much look forward to thediscussion to come.