Notes on Aristotle's Metaphysics (translated by Joe Sachs) Part III
Divisibility, number, and the transubstantial bread of philosophers
The Last Supper by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen
*
“On account of this impasse [aporia], some people talk about participation, and are at a loss about what is responsible for participation and what participating is...And the reason they say these things is that they are looking for a formulation that unites potency and complete being-at-work, plus a difference”
(p. 165)
Here Aristotle has made the doctrine of participation into an aporia, first reducing it to a caricature (he speaks of a doctrine of “co-presence” wherein a soul-thing resides side by side with a knowledge-thing or a body-thing) so that the sun of excess intelligibility in this doctrine of participation might be dimmed for our inspection. From there he can take this dim doctrine, a tangle of confused threads, and untangle it into a trajectory of thought, namely, his own doctrine of “hylomorphism”. Inquiry no longer stops at the deus ex machina of “participation”, a word we can bring in at every juncture to “explain away” a problem, but is able to continue its march forward into a new theoretical territory. It should also be mentioned that a deus ex machina, of this kind, is not somehow objectionable in itself. The objection to it is a relative one. It is objectionable not in terms of intelligibility, since as deus it does not lack this (on the contrary, it has too much intelligibility), but in terms of theoretical development, in terms of the march of thought, and it is from this relative standpoint that we can project this measurement which says “too much” as pertains to intelligibility—it is too much as pertains to this particular purpose. Insofar as thought wants to march and develop, this deus ex manchina can become a problem.
*
“Of potencies too, some will be irrational and some will include reason; and this is why all the arts and the productive kinds of knowledge are potencies...And all potencies that include reason are themselves capable of contrary effects...[e.g.] the medical art is capable of causing disease or health. And the reason is that knowledge is a reasoned account, while the same reasoned account reveals both a thing and its lack”
(p. 169)
Knowledge is a unity which is divisible, eminently into an opposition but also in other ways such as the indefinite analysis of parts. This pertains both to knowledge of a transcendental and of a transcendent kind. Both are a Logos, one discursive and the other symbolic. All divisions within the horizon of a symbolic knowledge (qua symbolic knowledge) retain the taste (gnosense) of unity. That is why symbolism, in the proper sense, is a genuine intellectivity, even if not yet a “pure contemplation”. The “topographical complexity of immediacy” is a complexity that tastes all throughout of unity, a unity which is at the same time more than a mere taste, a unity which is susceptible of being realized also in contemplation—that is, this taste is “gnosense”. Thus, the unity which one tastes is also a real unity, though one encounters it here in the mode of a taste subsisting in a certain “topographical complexity”, the topography of the world in which one is (in an intellective way). Gnosensiential unity always implies a gnosis which is that which is tasted, or encountered in this tasting, and as such “superior” to its tasting in a way.
*
“And that being-at-work is a better and more honorable thing than a potency for something worth choosing, is clear from these considerations”
(p. 181)
The “obviousness” of this choice between potency and act is a consequence of a prior condition of the whole philosophy through which we have been prepared for this moment. That is to say, the Aristotelian philosophy is already, at its most basic level, enunciated from the “standpoint” of active intellection. The priority is already determined in the manner of thought. Such a preference would not appear as obvious if like Heidegger, for instance, we ground ourselves in passive intellection. Then, not only will potency seem more “honorable” (or “authentic”), but this potency will appear differently all together. That is, potency will no longer appear as it does here, taken from the standpoint of active intellection. It appears as an “authentic being-in-the-world”, an unbroken stream in which the circle of “care” suffers no interference from the present-at-hand.
Taking the principle of “ontological inversion” into consideration, it stands to reason that, just as potentiality seems less “honorable” in this account, so actuality must seem so from the standpoint of a passively intellective account. In Heidegger's account, however, it seems that he has not given a fair hearing to actuality, and the tendency seems to be one of reducing it to the ontic. That does not seem to follow from a possibly rigorous account of the passively intellective character of Dasein, but from other interferences in his thinking, various residual Cartesianisms and the like, intereferences which prevent him from accounting for Dasein rigorously (this is what causes him to constitute Dasein as a “heap”, as I theorize elsewhere). One might hypothesize that actuality here, if we give it a fair hearing, would appear as a kind of decisive moment that stands out without tearing the fabric of “care”, almost a samadhi, an intensified pitch of being that appears within the flow of our being-in-the-world, an emblematic and exemplary unity within and together with the unity of our being-in-the-world. If this appears less “honorable” somehow, it is because from this standpoint we prefer the unassuming reality of the “uncarved block” which is our being-in-the-world. From this standpoint, that unassuming “flow” is more real by virtue of its inconspicuous simplicity. The Daoist undertones in this description are worth noting. Reality does not need to “stand out” in any way, even in the genuinely ontological (not ontic) way that such exemplary “acts” do. That is extra. We do not turn away from the extra and the wealth implied in it, but neither is the extra that which is fundamental, just by virtue of what it means to be “extra”. Reality is, first foremost, in the “uncarved block”. Again, this is now from the “standpoint” of passive intellection.
*
“The true or false is this: touching and affirming something uncompounded is true”
(p. 184)
There is a superficial resemblance here to atomism. An atom is the uncompounded part to which all things are reduced by division. The fundamental difference between atomism and the account here is this—the uncompounded wholes with which someone like Aristotle deals are intelligible ones, whereas the atom is unintelligible. Is this to say that the account of atom-ism (that is, a philosophy which centers on atoms) is unintelligible in toto? No, because the philosophy of atomism sets up an illusory facade behind which we must penetrate in order to see what atomism, as philosophy, really consists in. The facade is this—that the atom (together with void) is ontologically prior to the world which is composed of these partless parts. This facade-principle of atomism, however, is mere discursion projected after the fact. Even atomism itself is not premised on the priority of atoms, in actual fact, although it is precisely in the character of atomism, as a philosophy, to claim such a prioritization for itself. The atomist, as such, arrives at the atom precisely by dividing the prior wholeness of world which is initially given to him. Thus, even atomism indirectly posits the priority of wholes over parts, though never admitting as much in an “official” capacity. Atomism divides intelligible wholeness down to the level of unintelligible parts, and yet the account does not break down into sheer nonsense if only because of the indirect relation it maintains with its intelligible ground, however reticent it is to admit this relation. Thus, atomism is a species of scientific truth in its modern sense, a kernel of modernity in antiquity, a directed ignorance which is nonetheless grounded in a truth. Atomism is provisionally useful, irrespective of its untruth. With atomism, for instance, we can construct certain simplified cause-and-effect schemes in relation to bodies, and that can certainly have a degree of usefulness. A modern (this time chronologically) transposition of this atomism can be found in the Cartesian turn with its “clear and distinct ideas”. These ideas are in themselves unintelligible. Their “clarity and distinctness” is entirely borrowed from an unacknowledged prior intelligibility, an intelligibility prior to the transcendental horizon within which this philosophy exclusively resides.
*
“For oneness belongs to what is continuous, either simply or, especially, by nature and not by contact or by a binding cord...That is more so one and is more primary of which the motion is indivisible...especially if something is of that sort by nature and not by force, as those things are that are so by means of glue or bolts or being tied with a cord”
(p. 185)
While this is not precisely, directly, and explicitly what he is discussing here, it is still interesting to compare this passage, particularly the reference to “a binding cord”, with his account of aporia as a kind of knot, earlier in the text. Oneness, as such, is sheer in its continuity, and therefore not a knot, which is extended and divisible. Oneness is “indivisible continuity”, or continuity somehow taken apart from and prior to any divisibility after the fact. When oneness becomes a cord, it becomes a problem to be untangled. Taking our general insights about the knot of aporia, and extending them to this passage taken in its proper context (that context being the distinction between natural wholeness and artificial human constructions), we find an analogy between aporia and technology. Aporia belongs to the philosopher, the rational inquirer, and thus the human par excellence as “rational animal”. Aporia is not natural (if we take “natural” in its narrower sense), and therefore it is also especially human. It lacks an “organic” wholeness in the same way that technology lacks this. Thus, we have here in the work of Aristotle, implicitly, an acknowledgment of the possibility (or rather “real impossibility”) of a transgression of entelecheia, a transgression which is not something totally other from wholeness but another kind of wholeness (terms like “more so” and “especially” directly imply that we are dealing with degrees and kinds, and not that which is totally other), and, indeed, when put into action (“being-at-work”) another kind of wholeness-in-motion, or a revolutionary entelecheia. Aporia, or our inquisitive and philosophical problematizing of “natural wholes”, is continuous (!) with technological development. Aporia and technology are part of another kind of whole, a human whole in the fully non-natural sense of “human” (and therefore, there is also nothing “transhuman” here), and this other kind of whole occupies the same space as the natural ones, and is intimately related with them. The non-natural wholes are continuous with the natural ones, for human un-nature, in the form of technology and inquiry, is what is natural to humanity as “rational animal”. To be human is, from the beginning, to be Promethean, whether willingly (and audaciously) or unwillingly (hypocritically, circuitously).
*
“A particular thing is one by being indivisible in number, but that which is one by means of intelligibility and knowledge is indivisible in form”
(p. 185)
In case anyone doubted the fundamentally intellective (or to use an even scarier word that is the same thing—spiritual) character of Aristotle's philosophy, such passages as this establish it beyond any doubt. Thus, if one does not approach this kind of philosophical writing (the pre-modern kind, par excellence) with just that intellective factor as the conditioning background of our interpretation, then one will simply fail to understand it at all. It is precisely in the spirit of scientific inquiry that we moderns must accept intellectivity (or to again use the scarier word—spirituality) back into our thoughts, on its own terms. Otherwise, we miss out not only on a whole field of knowledge, but on that which is, in Aristotle's words, “most knowable”. That we have for a time made tremendous gains in science and social development precisely by not knowing this, by provisionally ceasing to know it, especially after the Cartesian turn, cannot be honestly denied. Our forgetting of intellect has been the precondition for these developments—ignorance has been, in this case, and in this respect, a great boon. I think, however, that we are especially primed to see now, at this historical juncture, the historical juncture in which the unified social order of communism is rearing its head, that we can have our cake and eat it too. We can be genuinely transcendental subjects, modern scientific subjects, and at the same time have at our disposal intellectivity, rob Olympus of the heavenly fire of spirit and bring it down to earthly application. The numerical indivisibility of “transcendental atomism” (the analytic a posteriori) which, to carry the metaphor further, can always be impossibly split, a split which is the explosive engine of development when applied skillfully (let there be no doubt but that science is dangerous, and that, at the same time, this fact, as such, is no objection to it), is in essence an inquisitive sharpness which cuts down to the bone of the intelligible indivisibility of form and modifies its very being, makes it to be something other than what it is (even if it appears to have always been so retrospectively). That is, modern science can effect a revolutionary entelecheia which is the same as to say a terraformation of being, and it does this to its greatest extent—a veritable quantity which transforms into ultra-Promethean quality—through a communist social order.
*
“Hence oneness is the source of number as number”
(p. 186)
What implications does this principle (a principle which is perfectly true) have for “atomism”? Division is always a division into ones. Division has a natural limit, but this limit is neither in the upward nor in the downward direction, both of which extend indefinitely as far as one likes. This limit is one that circumscribes division as such. It is the form of division, a stamp of its transcendent origins (as intelligible unity). When we divide, we produce ones which are smaller than those with which we began, and yet they are ones. The image of intelligible unity is preserved as the form of transcendental analysis, in the ones that it continually produces by cutting analysis, as well as in any synthetic judgment (which should not be confused with synthesis as such—see my notes on the Prolegomena) wherein we expand our ones in the “upward” direction. So long as we maintain this understanding in such abstract terms only, things appear very onesidedly “in favor” of intelligible unity. In practice, however, our analytical activity (which includes “synthetic judgment”, a type of analysis), scientific and philosophical inquiry, technological development, modifies the gnosensiential contours of intelligible unity, modifies the actual topography of immediacy. We employ the oneness of numerical unity “against” the unity of the world's form, a theoretical technology through which we divide, unite, and transform the earth.
*
“For everywhere, people seek as a measure something that is one and indivisible...That is why the measure of number is the most exact, since people set down the numerical unit as indivisible by anything”
(p. 187)
Thus, indivisible oneness is exactitude itself. This is true whether it is a question of numerical oneness, of the “atomic” oneness to which we reduce a magnitude, a provisional measure that is as exact as our present purposes require it to be, divided as far as we like or need, or whether it is a question of the oneness of intelligibility, whose exactitude has the character of an intelligible form immediately known and ineffably tasted, a concrete exactitude which does not submit to either denial or doubts—it is exact in the sense that it just is as it is.
*
“And we speak of knowledge or sense perception as a measure of things for the same reason, because we recognize something by means of them, although they are measured more than they measure...And Protagoras says a human being is the measure of all things, as if he were saying that a knower or perceiver were the measure, and these because the one has knowledge and the other perception, which we say are the measures of their objects. So while saying nothing, these people appear to be saying something extraordinary”
(p. 188)
Firstly, the distinction here between “knowledge” and “sense perception” is continuous with the previous distinction between intelligible oneness (of form) and the oneness of number, respectively. Sense perception, insofar as it is measured, is measured as a magnitude (of units). If we speak of “measuring” intelligible form, however, it is clear that we mean “measurement” in another, albeit related, sense. Measurement is generically ambiguous. In the case of intelligible form, one gets a sense of the whatness of a thing, and thus acquires a grasp on it, a point of access for dealing with it—one has plumbed it, taken its “full measure”, constituted it as a oneness. Secondly, we can say that “they are measured more than they measure” precisely because we can posit a distinction, however virtual, between the whatness that we taste (gnosense) in a form, and the oneness which we ascribe to that form, one the one hand, and, on the other, between the measure-able perception and the measurement we apply to it. The decisive factor in measurement qua measurement, whether in the numeric sense or the intelligible sense, is oneness. Thus, when we do make the aforementioned distinctions, it can be said that it is nothing other than oneness that measures knowledge and sense. Thus, thirdly, it follows as Aristotle claims that the Protagorean dictum says nothing at all. For, it says that a human being is the measure of things, which is to say that a human being as knower or perceiver is the measure of things, which is to say that oneness in knowing and perception is the measure of things. Thus, while sounding extraordinary, it tells us what should be considered above all obvious, namely, that magnitude is measured by units and that form is intelligibly known as a unity.
*
“The one and the many are opposed in more than one way, one of these ways being that of oneness and multitude as indivisible and divisible...What is one is named from its contrary and made clear by it, the indivisible by the divisible, since what is multiple is more perceptible, and the divisible more so than the indivisible, so that on account of perception, multitude takes precedence”
(p. 190-1)
If the multiple and divisible are more perceptible, than one may also say that the indivisible is more knowable, and we should note well that knowability (in an eminent sense, in an intellective sense) here affixes itself to the negative term, that which is in-divisible, not-divisible. Moreover, the form of these contraries is necessarily not a symmetrical one. We have a term, divisibility, and its negation, in-divisibility. The latter is of indefinitely vaster scope—it is everything other than divisibility. This “everything other” can be taken as a static totality or as a path. We take it as a path when we, enmeshed in multiplicity, apply indivisibility as an apophatic ascesis which successively abjures every divisible. From this we also come to reflect, as Aristotle himself points out above, that we know divisibility and indivisibility as mutually conditioning contraries (whatever their asymmetry). We can speak of indivisibility in a profounder sense, the indivisibility of the Absolute, of God, and the like, but the indivisibility we know, as a base line, is the relative kind. Thus, we have another distinction—indivisibility of the relative kind, which is eminently knowable, and indivisibility in a “profounder” sense, a transposition of the indivisibility we know to a superlative degree. If the former is knowable, the latter is too knowable, excessively intelligible. Indeed, it seems we only call it “indivisible” by analogy, for when one speaks of indivisibility one means some indivisible thing, but here we are beyond any external divisibility which could mark off one relatively indivisible thing from another relatively indivisible thing. If we speak of this “profounder reality” in terms of “indivisibility”, it seems that this may be chiefly because the path of indivisibility seems to lead there, or somehow point at it. This other indivisibility is also called “infinite”, taken in the strictest sense, the in-finite, that which has no limits whatsoever. That means—no internal or external limits. A set of numbers beginning with one, wherein a single unit is added successively such that we get “one, two, three, etc” is not “infinite” in this strict sense for both of these reasons. Its internal limit consists in the fact that “one”, in this sequence, is cut off from “two”. They do not collapse into one another (unless, in a certain way, one considers the fact that they are all composed of the self-same unit in different quantities). An internal limit divides each from the other. As for the external limit of this set, we can note that no matter how high this sequence counts, it will never reach the color orange. Thus, the “profounder indivisibility” is infinite, but not in the way that a mathematical set is said to be. If we approach this indivisibility, it is not by writing out theorems on paper, but through a certain ascesis.
*
“Since things that differ from one another can differ more and less, there is a certain kind of difference that is greatest, and this I call contrariety”
(p. 192)
Thus, the “infinite”, which in metaphysical literature is also sometimes referred to as the coincidentia oppositorum, is the union of the greatest difference especially, and not just of any difference. That is, one can think of it in terms of the union of all differences, but eminently one thinks of it as the union of the greatest difference, which is the difference represented by contrariety. Why even make such a distinction, between an eminent way of speaking of the infinite, and one which is comparatively less “eminent”? Precisely because this infinite, this “profounder indivisibility”, also has the significance of a path (for us). One might say that the union of contraries is a royal road, when taken by comparison with the union of any old difference. Curiously, “dialectics”, taken especially in a Marxist context, also works, much of the time, by posing things as contraries, as greatest differences, but this road seems to be heading in the opposite direction from the one just mentioned, not toward ascetic union with the infinite, but as a directed line of inquiry and activity which transforms the world, revolutionary praxis. Thus, there seems to be a greatest difference, a genuine contrariety, in the form of an opposite directionality, between Marxist dialectics and apophatic ascesis, between one manner of traversing the road of greatest difference and the other. These are opposite kinds of science, pushed to their maximum extremity. Indeed, Marxism is, in a way, modern science as such, for it takes the project of scientific modernity and pushes its implications fully into the social and historical field. It is thus, in a way, inclusive of all the modern sciences, and that is one reason why it is truly deserving of the appellation “scientific socialism”—it is the socialism of a scientific society, of a fully and unabashedly scientific society. Science, in its modern sense, never happens apart from society—its meaning is human and man is the social animal. It is through a communism that also takes metaphysics in grasp, that this society becomes fully and unabashedly scientific in both senses of “science”, albeit not in a merely static union of these, without partisan directionality, but with an audaciously Promethean spirit. Thus, communism is not only fully modern, but more modern than modernity. It is not a regression to tradition, but a “return” in a revolutionary sense.
*
“in contradiction there is no in-between while between contraries there is”
(p. 193)
Thus, if we were to be more terminologically exact in the previous note, we might have spoken more generally of “opposition” (of which Aristotle considers contrariety and contradiction to be types) rather than contrariety, since Marxism, of course, is especially known for concerning itself with contradictions. As an illustration of the above quote, for instance, proletariat and bourgeoisie are genuinely in contradiction. There is no in-between here. Petty bourgeoisie are not somehow a transitional category between these poles. Indeed, if anything, one might say they are in contradiction with themselves rather than directly with any other class, though they range themselves in social opposition to other classes, sometimes the proletariat, sometimes the “haute” bourgeoisie. They are bourgeoisie on the small scale, and at the same time a residuum of artisanship. They are the regressive class par excellence. They are bourgeois, but not bourgeois enough to develop the productive forces. They are fat and satisfied artisans of an inferior stamp. They are regressive, that is, somehow pointing to the past, and at the same time without a genuine historicity. They are ahistorical forces. Which, in human terms, is to say that they are effectively meaningless. They stand ranged against the meaningful progression of history and society. They are not, however, some unfathomable void, which would already be something rather bold, even heroic, in its own way. It does take some courage to face up to the void. On the contrary, wherever genuine social and historical meaning is vacated this class substitutes sentimentality. They are a void of meaning, but too cowardly to face their own voidness. They fill every emptiness with platitude and cliché, an emptiness, which as a fault line, could act as the genuine point of access to historical and social revolution if it were not covered over in this way. They are the stopgap of modern history, the break lever, the faltering engine. Let them be twice cursed like Canaan, cursed for his father Ham and cursed for himself. The petty bourgeoisie cover over the nakedness of the time, and for that they should be cursed.
*
“things are few not on account of the one, as some say, but on account of the two”
(p. 197)
Presumably because “one” is singular whereas “few” implies plurality. Hence, poverty is not a one, but a one and a one (two), at the minimum. “Internally”, I have a one and a one, and therefore know that this one is susceptible of multiplicity. I thus know that I have less ones than I could have, even if only hypothetically. If I only had the one, then I could not posit fewness in relation to it. Perhaps that one is the only one of its kind? In that case, I would have an “abundance” of it, in a manner of speaking. It would be my unique (uni-que) possession alone. “Externally”, a one and a one signifies poverty through comparison. I have this one, and you have that one, and your one is somehow better than mine, say, your singular collection of money is of a vaster quantity than my singular collection. Hence, the image invoked to clarify social need, is that of a small house next to a larger one (see Marx's Wage, Labor, and Capital). My needs are based on the two of comparison, the external comparison between my meager one and your lavish one, as well as the internal comparison between the amount of ones that I have and that which I could have.
*
“It makes no difference whether the tracing back of being turns out to be toward being or toward oneness, for even if these are not the same but different, still they are interchangeable, for it is the case both that what is one also in some way is, and what is is one”
(p. 210)
Not only are oneness (which stands in for knowledge) and being tactillectively interchangeable, that is, we can take either as a point of reference for contemplation with the same practical result, but they are, as it were, the paradigmatic instance of tactillection as such. For, what is involved in tactillection (“upaya”) is the structuring of activity (such as works of art, or ritual behavior) in a way that meaningfully grounds itself with reference to knowledge or being, even while being something other than what they ground themselves in, a finger pointing at the moon. Here it is knowledge and being which directly ground themselves with reference to each other in our contemplation. If I contemplate being, as a tactillective practice, I arrive at oneness (= knowledge), and if I contemplate oneness (= knowledge), as a tactillective practice, I arrive at being, at an ecstatic immediacy of just being. The Gordian Knot of knowing and being, that paradoxical nexus of all metaphysics, is already in itself the seed of all the tactillections that we construct in reference to it, such as in the intelligible manner we order our world and our lives (e.g. through Tradition). Tactillection, in other words, is not something we arbitrarily construct after the fact in order to arrive at this total knowledge (= being), but is already present in the structure of being and knowing itself, in their relation to one another. Being is a skillful means for knowing, and knowing is a skillful means for being. We are always already caught up in the skillful pranks that being and knowing play on each other.
Moreover, given that mathematics, particularly in the sense of a “qualitative mathematics” (in fact, Aristotle seems to call this “universal mathematics”—see Metaphysics, Book XI, 1064b), is fundamentally a study of oneness in its varied expressions, one should be able to interchange ontology proper with it—“Let none but geometers enter here". That a “qualitative mathematics” is centered here is a fundamental factor. One cannot substitute just any subsidiary mathematics (e.g. set theory), taken in a way exclusive of “qualitative mathematics”, as a substitute for ontology. We must have a grasp on the intelligibility of number, to begin with, if we are to extend any subsidiary mathematics into an ontology. We must know what these numbers and shapes with which we deal are, especially in a “symbolic” sense. It is then, and in that capacity, that any mathematics can be comprehended in terms of its ontological implications, its ontological “extensions”. Plato himself, in the Republic, says that the study of mathematics in its quantifiable dimensions, as theorems and axioms, is but a preliminary to the direct contemplation of the truth in mathematics. By memorizing mathematical axioms and practicing at their application, we have not yet penetrated to the truth in mathematics. Most readers of the Republic likely pass over this passage without much thought. The very idea of a “direct contemplation of mathematical truth” sounds so outlandish that it must barely register for them.
*
“Every sort of knowledge seeks certain sources and causes that concern each kind of the things known by them...Each of these [specified forms of knowledge], drawing a boundary around some class of things for itself, busies itself about this as something that is and is present to it, but not insofar as it is, but that is the business of another sort of knowledge different from these sorts...There is no demonstration of thinghood or what something is”
(p. 216)
The distinction here is between a gnosensiential knowledge (the “other sort of knowledge”), and the metaphysics which expresses it, on one side, and knowledge which is directly conformable to rational inquiry and generalization. These are two kinds of knowledge, two kinds of science. Moreover, there is no hard and fast boundary between them. Even rational knowledge qua rational knowledge has its own taste, its own gnosensiential distinctiveness. However, a certain distinction within this rational knowledge is necessary. On the one hand, in a general way, generalization has its taste as generalization, but we always generalize something in particular, for instance the general category “lions” (not “lions” in terms of their universality, which is another matter). This category “lions” has the gnosensiential distinctiveness of generality, like a spice added onto an already prepared dish. That “already prepared dish” is the universality of “lion-ness”, and the gnosensiential distinctiveness of this universality is a juiciness that seeps through the spice of generality no matter how much spice we add, no matter how far we elaborate the schematic abstraction of “lion”, taxonomically defining it, biologically and zoologically analyzing it, etc. Generality in general and particularity in general (and particularity [1] and generality are continuous—see, for instance, my notes on Kojeve's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel), have their gnoseniential distinctiveness, as generality and as particularity, an identical spice applied in all cases—generality is the salt of the rational earth. Let us not neglect the juice of universality, lest the salt lose its savor, for the real intelligible distinctiveness, in each case, is that of universality.
1: Whether one speaks of “particularity” or “individuality” is rather context dependent. There is no hard and fast distinction between these (as much as some would like to draw one), and at the same time they are not reducible to one another. Indeed, one might suggest that the preferential recourse to one, in this context, or the other, in that context, is largely a matter of tactillection.
*
“There are three classes of contemplative knowledge: physics, mathematics, and theology”
(p. 217)
“Physics”, here, is not modern physics, of course. For Aristotle, as he makes clear in these passages as well as elsewhere, physics is grounded in the intelligibility of things in motion, or what he calls entelecheia. Thus, it is an intellectively grounded science, and hence subsumed within the general category of “contemplation”. As for mathematics and theology, no special comment is necessary.
*
“And since nothing incidental takes precedence over things in their own right, neither then do incidental causes, so if fortune or chance is a cause of the heavens, intelligence and nature have a prior responsibility”
(p. 220)
This, in nuce, is Marxist materialism. A prior intelligibility as a grounding factor for the interpretation of chance and fortune. The chief grounding factor, however, as pertains to Marxist materialism, is human history and society, that is, precisely the domain of fortune as Aristotle conceives it. That is, fortune itself is penetrated to its intelligible marrow and converted into a science. That is just what it means when Marxism declares itself to be the first “historical science”. Moreoever, this domain of fortune, as an intelligible domain, is not restricted by the entelecheia of Nature. The entelecheia of society and history is a revolutionary one (granted, in the long term, this is equally true of Nature), and to be a “revolutionary entelecheia” is, from a theoretical standpoint, to say that the “quantity” of “incidental causes” condition the very ground of qualitative intelligibility. Quantity transforms into quality, and historical deed terraforms being itself.
*
“If the sum of things is some kind of whole, thinghood [ousia] is its primary part...of-what-sort it is comes next, and then how much it is”
(p. 231)
The ecclesiastical hierarchy of divided being, the “body of Christ”, as it were, divided and torn like the eucharistic bread, the transubstantial nourishment of philosophical inquiry. Transubstantial—that division which changes ousia, or “substance”, by electing it the “pope” of divided being, an election with the sacramental intent of rendering divided being intelligible, constituting it as a mandala with center and periphery (incidentally, the Tibetan term for “mandala”, kyil-khor, literally means “center-periphery”). It converts the “death” of being, cut up into various regions, into a new life, for us, the philosophical inquirers, and the manner in which it does this, namely, by raising up ousia, proceeds from the authority of (the Greek) language, that is, of the Word (made flesh in the entelecheia of physis). Being is the sacramental bread of philosophers, and like this bread must be cut up and bloodied in wine [1] if it is to be rendered salvifically efficacious. What is “saved” here is the world in its meaningfulness for the philosopher. Inquiry is initially always critical, it cuts and divides, indeed, even destroys. In raising ousia and electing the “pope” of being, we re-constitute the world as meaningful again, as it was before our inquiry divided being. If inquiry only divided and never reconstituted meaning the philosopher could never be “saved”. Even at the summit of modern thought, the Kantian philosophy (Hegel is the beginning of the denouement, the gradual dissolution of philosophical modernity into a stagnant pool), when Nature is divided into a sum of objects, a saving grace descends as the reconstitution of meaning in and through the a prior synthetic judgment. This “modernistic salvation” is a flattened transcendental image of the transcendent salvation of philosophers through the reconstitution of divided being, affirmed in different ways by Plato and Aristotle, with inverse “ritual orientation” (in Arabic, qibla), Aristotle toward being as entelecheia, and Plato toward contemplative ascent that, contemplating the intelligible, merges into the Form of the Good, beyond intelligibility.
1: The “wine” of meaning, the juice which is the taste (gnosense) in things (in traditional symbolism, such as that of astrology, the element of water is affiliated with the sense of taste), as “wine” is transcendent meaning (and “transcendent” does not mean “up-there-somewhere”). Wine is the juice of ecstasy, and meaning, in its fully intellective sense, is ecstatic, whether as the “ecstatic temporality” of Dasein or the ecstasy of contemplative ascent. Thus, to say that “wine” is necessary in this salvific ritual of reconstituting being is simply to say that this reconstitution must retain its gnosensiential distinctiveness, that the “taste” of intelligibility must be retained in the re-new-ed world that we constitute through this philosophical sacrament, that we do not end up with a world that is made up only of genera.
*
“It is necessary that there be something underlying the thing that changes into the contrary condition, since contraries themselves do not change”
(p. 232)
Contextually, he means materia, but because of the analogy between the “two nights” (see Guenon's Initiation and Spiritual Realization) this statement could equally refer to the coincidentia oppositorum. Marxists likewise might latch onto this explanatory principle from Aristotle—we want to account for a world of change, changes which proceed dialectically, through contrariety but also contradiction (see above for more on this distinction). We must posit an “underlying material” to make such change intelligible. In the case of Marxism, this “underlying material” has (or should have) the sense of “social and historical intelligibility”. It is within this intelligible horizon that the violent clash contradiction “impossibly” occurs, terraforms intelligible being, and produces historical and social development. Thus, as pertains to the analogy of the “two nights”, Marxism, in its most conventional sense, centers itself on the “lower night”, the materia, taken in a peculiar sense [1]. As for the other “night”, that of non-being, it is this principle which is the sine qua non of “metaphysics” in its fullest sense. Insofar as Marxism radicalizes itself in an unapologetically Promethean direction, an “Atlantean” direction, it also effects a seizure of metaphysics, principial science, as a theoretical implement next to modern science. One might further surmise that it is precisely through the practice (both in science and art) of rendering our social world “more real than real life” that we instantiate, in a progressive and indefinite sense, the “infinite intelligibility” of non-being. Put another way, the temporal radicalization of intelligibility, through the self-conscious terraformation of being, is a genuine image of the radical intelligibility beyond intelligibility (consider, for instance, Plato's account of the Form of the Good) of non-being. In the context of traditional metaphysical doctrines one might say that the materia just is the analogue of non-being. Through communism, this “just is” will no longer be a matter of passivity but of historical and social activity, an activity that renders human society “more real than real life” on a continual and progressive basis. It is precisely through progressive development of intelligibility that non-being is imaged most radically.
1: Peculiar because intelligible. Nevertheless, because of Marxism's scientific character, in the modern sense, it also, at the same time, and through the very same “materialism”, bears a relation to materia in its original sense, that is, to materia as the precondition of phenomenal diversity and multiplicity.
*
“And this [i.e. the materia] is Anaxagoras' 'one', since it is better than 'everything together', and it is also the 'mixture' spoken of by Empedocles and Anaximander, and what Democritus is talking about...One might in fact be at an impasse [aporia] bout what sort of non-being generation comes out of”
(p. 232)
A wonderful demonstration here of the thesis of progressive development in philosophy through caricature and aporia. Here Aristotle cites a number of thinkers, each quite different from the other, and lumps certain resemblances in their thought into (rather appropriately given the subject matter) a confused “mixture” that he can puzzle over. This “mixture” is made of the above mentioned “two nights”, the con-fusion in imprecise language (imprecision is relative to the one who demands more precision, the philosopher) of coincidentia oppositorum and materia. We have thrown into this mix the proto-materialist Democritus, the “mystic” Empedocles, the philosopher of intellect Anaxagoras (see my series on “communist metaphysics”). The doctrines of the latter two, in particular, can be taken as intelligible in an eminent degree, indeed, too intelligible, mythic and dazzling. Through a certain resemblance of language, Aristotle assimilates them to the unintelligible doctrines (and this unintelligibility, too, is a matter of degree) of Democritus, the “atomist”. This is not a meaningless assimilation precisely because, as a kind of proto-materialist, Democritus' doctrines stand in a certain analogy with a metaphysics of non-being (however loose this analogy in the specific case of atomism). Aristotle effects a rigorous differentiation between non-being and materia through puzzling over their mixture, albeit one that sidelines non-being precisely because of the “outward” directionality of Aristotle's thought. He is really only concerned with the material side of this divide, in bringing out its clarification through his aporia over these predecessors, because it is chiefly this side of the divide which possess relevance for his temporal account of intelligibility through entelecheia. In Plato, we find the inverse procedure. A rigorous doctrine of materia is not present there, though intimated indirectly. The speculations of the Cratylus might be instructive in this respect, where the “predecessor” in question is chiefly Heraclitus, here caricatured as a thinker of “pure change”, that is, as a thinker of an incoherent materia, a materia that, in a sense, ought not to be contemplated or clarified. One abjures it in favor of the intelligibility of form. Emphasis in Plato's thought, in general, is directed toward contemplative ascent, through the path of the forms, toward non-being, that is the Form of the Good, the “form” beyond the path of forms.
*
“Now if something has being in potency, still this is not a potency to be any random thing”
(p. 232)
Because potency in relation to a thing (an ousia) is an intelligible range, a form. In this respect, Aristotle is already working with a “materialism of intelligibility” and can be considered a predecessor of Marxism. Plato perhaps in other respects, but not in this one, namely, because for him materia is something to be abjured in the interest of contemplative ascent, not a range to be fathomed in terms of its temporal intelligibility (= entelecheia). For us, as Marxists, as moderns, “temporal intelligibility” becomes something that it was, of course, not for Aristotle—it becomes historical and social intelligibility, not the pristine image of eternality as instantiated in the planetary and celestial orbit of the “spheres”, but a revolutionary entelecheia that terraforms its own grounds and re-constitutes itself. In terms of theoretical activity, it is an incisive and dialectical criticism that allows us to immanently transcend all kinds of naturalisms and fixed teleologies, and it is in Plato that we find a type of this kind of dialectical criticism. Thus, in a way, Marxism is a kind of explosive combination of Platonic and Aristotelian forms of thought, weaponizing each against the other, and supporting each through the other.
*
“...art is a source that is in something else, but nature is a source that is in the thing itself”
(p. 233)
This is another point where we see a crucial difference between Aristotle and Plato. For Plato, the genuine artist works under the influence of a divine mania, and therefore, essentially, in and through a fully intelligible contact (a dazzlingly intelligible contact) with his subject matter. So much so, in fact, that as per Plato's consistently enunciated view, the artist has no special qualification to articulate the meaning of his own work. The artist's contact with his own work is too immediate to be readily converted by him into the mediation of language. That requires a capable philosopher, one who wrestling with sophists, is adept at wresting genuine meaning out of words. Aristotle, here, centers the art-nature distinction in terms of a posited “self-nature”, polarized as “other” in the case of art (“in something else”) and as “self” in nature—but “self” and “other” are two disguises for the same activity of automorphosis. Therefore, Aristotle is chiefly concerned with what can be said about art, what can be articulated about it, rather than with its genuine center of gravity in mania, the horizon wherein its meaning is unveiled “on its own terms”. This a perfectly legitimate concern. We should also be able to scientifically articulate art in terms of its “structure”, and drawing a distinction between “art” and “nature” certainly has a provisional usefulness to it, even if it is, in the final analysis, superficial. It is through such a distinction, though unintended by Aristotle, that one can radicalize entelecheia, dividing it into the merely natural kind, the reproduction of kind by kind, and the revolutionary sort of entelecheia, into which the other, in fact, collapses when we take a long term and evolutionary view of nature. When we follow Aristotelian thought to its logical conclusion, the “otherness” of art is unveiled as the radicality of nature itself. Art is what nature already is, only art does nature better than nature does. Humanity is not only fully natural in its technoscientific activity, it is the most natural thing there is. In Plato we also have an interesting and polarized dynamic. On the one side, art as divine mania, and therefore as something, in a manner, superior to nature. On the other side, we have art as the mere imitation of nature, as a play of shadows on the cave wall. Art seems to straddle and even compass the divide of heaven and earth, simultaneously lower than nature and higher than it. When these poles, too, are collapsed into one another, radicalized, we are gifted another notion of art, one especially adapted to communist conceptions, namely, art as the un-natural instrument which renders nature (including the intelligible horizon of human history and society) more natural, “more real than real life”, the means that progressively and developmentally intensify the intelligibility of the world through coordinated technoscientific activity under proletarian dictatorship. Moreover, the un-naturality of this instrument is not other than nature, but the un-naturality of nature, nature's internal precondition for its own naturality—or, to quote Blake, “where man is not nature is barren” [1].
1: Any kind of study of “nature” implies the prior (though, more often than not, unarticulated) distinction of microcosm-macrocosm (microcosm being assimilable to “man”). This distinction is nothing “occult”, but in fact a presupposition of any scientific inquiry whatsoever. See my notes on Chittick's Sufi Path of Knowledge.
*
“To suppose that potency takes precedence over being-at-work [energeia] is in a sense right but in a sense not right”
(p. 239)
A kind of implicit admission here, by Aristotle, of the validity of “ontological inversion”, that is, of the principle which states that the explanatory priority of passive intellect is just as credible as that of active intellect. A case is possible for both, though Aristotle is obviously slanted toward the latter. Within specifically Western philosophy, no one takes up the priority of passive intellect, and attempts to account for it on its own terms, until Heidegger who subsumes it within the aggregate “Dasein”. In this connection we should recall that the Greek for passive intellect is “nous pathetikos”, an intellect which “suffers” the vicissitudes of temporality, as it were, an intellect of angst and being-toward-death—though such assimilations require some reservation and distance precisely because Dasein, as constituted in Being and Time, is a kind of “heap”, a skanda, a theoretical aggregate that needs to be sifted so as to separate the wheat of passive intellect from the chaff Cartesianism. In any case, Aristotle makes his own priority quite explicit later on in the same chapter of book XII: “...therefore it is the being-at-work rather than the receptivity the intellect has that seems godlike, and its contemplation is pleasantest and best” (p. 242)
*
“That, then, there is an independent thing [ousia] that is everlasting, motionless, and separate from perceptible things, is clear from what has been said...But whether one must set down one or more than one such independent thing, and how many, must not go unnoticed...Those who speak of the forms say they are numbers, and about the numbers, sometimes they speak as though about infinitely many, but sometimes as though they had a limit at the number ten, but why the multitude of the number is just so much, nothing is said with a serious effort at demonstrative reasoning”
(p. 243)
The reason for such numbers (Aristotle goes on to cite a number of authorities as to the numbers of the “spheres” and the like) is, at base, the authority of some tradition. This “tradition” is not haphazard, but a repository of intelligibility which expresses itself in different terms, sometimes, as in this case, speaking of “infinitely many forms” and sometimes of “ten”. No further explanation is considered necessary. The symbolic intelligibility of these expressions is considered sufficient—until a fastidious philosopher comes along, an Aristotle, who demands a greater explicitness, converting these sayings into an aporia. That even Aristotle himself acknowledges the basic intelligibility of these accounts is made clear at the end of this same chapter (Book XII, chapter 8, 1074b). In order to explain how such mythic accounts could possibly possess this intelligibility, an intelligibility which renders them serviceable to the philosopher who comes along to interpret them and derive his own theoretically explicit doctrines from out of them, Aristotle goes as far as to posit a certain historical theory of catastrophe (one which he undoubtedly received by way of Plato—see, for instance, the Timaeus on the cyclical destruction of the world):
“There has been handed down from people of ancient and earliest times a heritage, in the form of myth, to those later times, that these beings [e.g. the forms, the motionless movers] are gods, and that the divine embraces the whole of nature...They thought the primary independent things [ousia] were gods, [and] one would regard this as having been said by divine inspiration, and, since it is likely that every kind of art and philosophy has been discovered to the limit of its potential many times, and passed away in turn, one would consider these opinions of those people to have been saved like holy relics up to now”
(p. 247)
The literalness of this explanation is neither here nor there. The fact that he feels that he must invoke an ancient origin for the sciences, not in a rudimentary form, but as fully fleshed out sciences, in order to be able to explain the fundamental intelligibility that inheres in these myths, is the only demonstration necessary that his own inquiry is but a specification of myth, that myth is a wellspring of science, a wellspring that we plumb and whose water we draw through aporia. We limit the unfathomable depths of this well to only that which can be carried up in the confines of our bucket, but it is the selfsame water, in either case.
*
“The things that are universal within mathematics are not about things that are separate from magnitudes and numbers, but are about these, but not insofar as they are of such a sort as to have magnitude or to be discrete”
(p. 257)
Exactly conformable to the points I have made about qualitative mathematics and “(discursive-conceptual) thought as the preliminary to (certain kinds of) intelligibility”.