Understanding Aristotle: From Causes to Ethics
Aristotle’s Four Causes
Aristotle proposed four types of causes:
- Material Cause: That of which a thing is made.
- Formal Cause: The structure or form that organizes the matter, making it what it is.
- Efficient Cause: The agent or force responsible for bringing about change or movement.
- Final Cause: The purpose or end for which something is made.
(If there is no matter, there is no way. If there is an agent that brings about change, there is a purpose.)
Aristotle’s Theory of Knowledge
The first step in the cognitive process, culminating in knowledge, is given by perception and experience, which is sensory knowledge. Common sense discovers experience. We can learn about particular substances, but the universal essence of being human is what gives structure to essences.
The process of knowledge involves:
- External Senses: Sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell (they can produce sensations but do not produce knowledge).
- Internal Senses: Common sense, imagination, and memory. Common sense integrates and unifies the various sensations, imagination forms mental images of objects, and memory retains those images. (If we only had these, we would be mere information-capturing machines).
The knowledge we gain through internal and external senses is sensitive, particular, and concrete.
Understanding is responsible for the abstract process, i.e., capturing the universal or essence. This is intellectual knowledge, specifically human.
Aristotle’s Anthropology
Body and Soul
The main theme is the soul. Early in his stay at Plato’s academy, Aristotle understood the relationship between the soul and the body. In a second period, the soul-body relationship is no longer seen as oppositional. Finally, in his Lyceum stage, he presents his hylomorphic theory of human beings. In this mature period, Aristotle criticizes Plato’s anthropological dualism. He claims that body and soul are not two different substances but inseparable elements of a single substance. The soul cannot live separated from the body; the soul is, therefore, a composite of matter and form (hylomorphism).
Functions of the Soul
The soul has different functions as a principle of life:
- Vegetative or Nutritive Function: This is the inferior function of the soul, present in all living beings, necessary for nourishment.
- Sensitive Function: This encompasses perception, imagination, desires, and movement.
- Intellective Function: This is the faculty by which we think and gain intellectual knowledge, effectively unique to humans.
Aristotle’s Ethics
Aristotle aimed to discover the mechanisms that coordinate human behavior. These acts are guided by character (tendencies and passions) and by thought. Aristotle’s ethics is an empiricist conception (experience teaches what is good), unlike Plato’s. It does not pretend to know how one can think of the good; rather, thought can help one to be good. There may be no good in the idea itself. Aristotle states that no one seeks the good in itself but their own good. All decisions we make and actions we take are aimed at an end, a good that is pursued. That to which all humans tend to aim is happiness; it is the good that we seek for its own sake. For Aristotle, the good of each thing consists in the function that is proper to it, i.e., its specific excellence or capacity, i.e., its virtue. In humans, our specific activity is reason and intellect. Therefore, we derive the following human virtues: ethical or moral (justice, kindness, generosity), and dianoetic or intellectual (wisdom, prudence). To acquire moral virtue, we need exercise and experience; only if we create in ourselves the habit of making good decisions do we acquire virtue. For Aristotle, the individual acts freely, choosing between virtue and vice, and the optimal decision is always the middle ground between two extreme behaviors, excess and defect, which are equally detrimental. The middle ground is not determined in the abstract or general but according to the circumstances and situation of the individual.
There are no precise rules that help one to be virtuous; only the experience of a wise and experienced person can advise on how to choose the right balance.
Virtue is not innate but rather the ability to be virtuous, which must be actualized and developed into a habit.
From an ethical point of view, Aristotle emphasizes the dianoetic virtue of prudence, which controls desires and wishes to decide the optimal middle ground, allowing us to achieve the good or happiness.