A History of Greek Philosophy / ARISTOTLE

Page 11

If we look closely at this conception of Aristotle’s we shall see that it has a nearer relation to the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, and even to the doctrine of Reminiscence, than perhaps even Aristotle himself realised. The fundamental conception of Plato, it will be remembered, is that of an eternally existing ‘thought of God,’ in manifold forms or ‘ideas,’ which come into the consciousness of men in connection with or on occasion of sensations, which are therefore in our experience later than the sensations, but which we nevertheless by reason recognise as necessarily prior to the sensations, inasmuch as it is through these ideas alone that the sensations are knowable or namable at all. Thus the final end for man is by contemplation and ‘daily dying to the world of sense,’ to come at last into the full inheritance in conscious knowledge of that ‘thought of God’ which was latent from the first in his soul, and of which in its fulness God Himself is eternally and necessarily possessed.

This is really Aristotle’s idea, only Plato expresses it rather under a psychological, Aristotle under a vital, formula. God, Aristotle says, is eternally and necessarily Entelechy, absolute realisation. To us, that which is first in time (the individual perception) is not first in essence, or absolutely. What is first in essence or absolutely, is the universal, that is, the form or idea, the datum of reason. And this distinction between time and the absolute, between our individual experience and the essential or ultimate reality, runs all through the philosophy of Aristotle. The ‘Realisation’ of Aristotle is the ‘Reminiscence’ of Plato.

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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=11