A History of Greek Philosophy / ARISTOTLE

Page 10

As to this we may answer first that while formally Aristotle displays much the same ‘dualism’ or unreconciled separation of the ‘thing’ and the ‘idea’ as Plato, his practical sense and his scientific instincts led him to occupy himself largely not with either the empty ‘thing’ or the equally empty ‘idea,’ but with the true individuals, which are at the same time the true universals, namely, real objects as known, having, so far as they are known, certain forms or categories under which you can class them, having, so far as they are not yet fully known, a certain raw material for further inquiry through observation. In this way Thought and Matter, instead of being in eternal and irreconcilable antagonism as the Real and the Unreal, become parts of the same reality, the first summing up the knowledge of things already attained, the second symbolising the infinite possibilities of further ascertainment. And thus the word ‘Matter’ is applied by Aristotle to the highest genus, as the relatively indefinite compared with the more fully defined species included under it; it is also applied by him to the individual object, in so far as that object contains qualities not yet fully brought into predication.

And second, we observe that Aristotle introduced a new conception which to his view established a vital relation between the universal and the individual. This conception he formulated in the correlatives, Potentiality and Actuality. With these he closely connected the idea of Final Cause. The three to Aristotle constituted a single reality; they are organically correlative. In a living creature we find a number of members or organs all closely interdependent and mutually conditioning each other. Each has its separate function, yet none of them can perform its particular function well unless all the others are performing theirs well, and the effect of the right performance of function by each is to enable the others also to perform theirs. The total result of all these mutually related functions is Life; this is their End or Final Cause, which does not exist apart from them, but is constituted at every moment by them. This Life is at the same time the condition on which alone each and every one of the functions constituting it can be performed. Thus life in an organism is at once the end and the middle and the beginning; it is the cause final, the cause formal, the cause efficient. Life then is an Entelechy, as Aristotle calls it, by which he means the realisation in unity of the total activities exhibited in the members of the living organism. In such an existence every part is at once a potentiality and an actuality, and so also is the whole. We can begin anywhere and travel out from that point to the whole; we can take the whole and find in it all the parts.

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A History of Greek Philosophy : Table of Contents
Cf. D'Arcy W. Thompson, Aristotle's Natural Science

Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/history-of-philosophy/aristotle.asp?pg=10