PHILOSOPHICAL EGGS

In this post I want to shed some light on the ultimate principle of explanation in Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) systematic worldview, the thing without which nothing can move and develop: God. To approach his theology we need to take a look at his conception change.

Change

Aristotle introduced an innovative and influential account of change as the passage from potential to actual. The water is potentially hot and then, as we put it over a flame, it becomes hotter thus actualizing this potential. We can then take it off the flame and allow it to cool down thus actualizing its potential to become cool. Both these transitions are change. In Aristotle’s world substances, or form/matter compounds which can take on predicates while remaining the same but which cannot be predicated of anything else (e.g, chairs, trees, cats, people, and computers), are always changing by actualizing all kinds of potentials with regard to quantity, quality, relationship, location, time, position, possession, action, and being acted upon (these are nine of Aristotle’s ten categories that happen to a substance; the one missing category would be substantial change in which a substance itself comes into being or passes away).

But an account of change needs more than an actualization of a potential. For Aristotle observes that something actual must be in place prior to a given potential which allows that potential to exist and be actualized at all. From these insights about change we get a basic Aristotelian axiom:

Actuality is always both ontologically (in terms of reality) and temporally prior to potentiality. 

For example, I have the potential to learn more about Aristotle because this potential exists in me as an actual individual with actual mental and bodily aspects. Only with these actualities in place can the changes involved in learning about Aristotle occur.

However, it doesn’t take long to see that bodies are obviously full of potentials to acquire or lose various traits and functions. And the soul, which Aristotle sees as the guiding form of the body or an actuality that contains within it various potentials that can be actualized over time (such as our natural essence to reason), is also full of potentials insofar as we are capable of expanding our understanding. Indeed, we can expand it quite a bit since Aristotle thinks we can understand the essential forms of everything that exists! For him, the process of understanding an essential form is one in which our intellect becomes one with the form it understands. But if our intellect is potentially any form then it mustn’t have a form of its own. So what he refers to as our “passive intellect,” our ability to receive any form, is completely potential. Moreover, our natural desire to actualize our rational essence by receiving all forms reveals that the soul, while actual, is nonetheless radically incomplete. And what is true of us is true of every living being in the physical world: they, too, are incomplete form/matter compounds full of potentials which undergo change as they seek to actualize their essences. 

But how can all this striving occur without there being fully actualized forms to strive towards? Aristotle argues we need fully actualized forms that exist prior to forms which include potentials in themselves and in the bodies they inform. Without them there would be no desire and everything would come to a stand still. But where can such complete forms exist? Not in the ever-changing physical world composed of incomplete substances undergoing change. So where? 

Aristotle’s Theology

Aristotle primarily explores this question in chapter or book 12 (Lambda) of his difficult work Metaphysics. His answer: completely actual forms exist in the mind of an immaterial substance which exists outside the changing physical world. This mind will be the source of all change while remaining changeless since it lacks the potentials required for change: it will be an unmoved mover. And without potentials it won’t lack anything and so won’t have imperfections; it will be timeless since time is the measure of change and it is changeless; and it will be completely immaterial since matter is potential and it lacks potential. Such a being, however, is nonetheless active—indeed it is engaged in a timeless and perfect act—and this act is thinking its own contents or “thought thinking thought” (see below for my post which explores how Aristotle can make sense of a timeless act). Rather than being an efficient cause which moves things through physical force, God is the ultimate formal and final cause of everything insofar as its thoughts are the fully actualized forms (formal causes) which set natural goals for everything and generate desire for their completion (final causes). In doing so the unmoved mover’s relationship to things moved is akin to how the beloved generates motion in the lover: “And it produces movement insofar as it is loved, whereas it is by being moved that the other things move.”

Let’s take a closer look at this God and its relationship to both the world and ourselves with the help of Jonathan Lear who offers a plausible interpretation of Aristotle’s theology in his excellent work Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge University Press, 1988):

“What is needed is a conception of the order of the world as a response to God. God does not intervene in the world, but the world can be conceived as an expression of desire for God. And this expression of desire must be conceived within the general framework of Aristotle’s world. I should like to offer a conjecture. Suppose that God is actively thinking the primary substances [the fully actualized forms of substances] to be found in the world. Suppose, further, that his thinking forms a well-ordered whole. Then we can see the world as a whole as dependent on God: for the realization of form in the natural world depends upon the antecedent existence of form at its highest level of actuality. But form or primary substance at its highest-level actuality simply is God. And the desire which God inspires is none other than the desire of each organism to realize its form. Each natural organism has within it a desire to do those things necessary to realizing and maintaining its form. This desire is part of the organism’s form or nature itself: form is a force in the organism for the realization and maintenance of form. It is the desire in each individual organism to sustain its life and reproduce that is responsible for the eternality of the species. By reproducing, the individual organism can partake in (divine) immortality of the only sort available to it — the immortality of the species.  From the perspective of a physicist or a biologist, all that a developing natural organism is trying to do is to realize its form. However, from a metaphysical perspective, one can see that in trying to realize its form, the organism is doing all that it can do to become intelligible. It is also doing the best job it can do to imitate God’s thought — and thus to imitate God himself. God’s thought does not reproduce the structure of the world: the order of the world as a whole is an attempted physical realization of God’s thought. This is a conjecture. And yet this conjecture does have the quality of the missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. For using nothing other than the basic principles of Aristotle’s world — form, mind, higher level actualities, substance — we can make sense of God’s relation to the world. And, aside from the fact that the world as a whole depends upon God, there is another piece of evidence which supports the conjecture. God’s thinking is to some extent like ours [as Aristotle tells us]:

‘On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. And its life is such as the best which we enjoy, and enjoy but for a short time. For it is ever in this state, (which we cannot be), since its actuality is also pleasure. (And therefore waking, perception, and thinking are most pleasant, and hopes and memories are so because of their reference to these.) And thinking in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thinking in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And mind thinks itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that mind and object of thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e. substance, is mind. And mind is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the latter rather than the form is the divine element which mind seems to contain, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the activity of mind is life, and God is that activity; and God’s essential actuality is life most good and eternal.We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God, for this is God.’

God is a principle of heaven and nature: Aristotle calls him a way of life. And it is a way of life that is ‘such as the best which we enjoy,’ though because of our natures we can only live it for short periods of time. This way of life to which we have intermittent access is clearly the life of contemplation which Aristotle describes at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics: a life in which man contemplates essences or primary substance. This ought to give us insight into the principle of heaven and nature. For our understanding of the divine is not confined to that which can be revealed by rigorous argument: ‘from the outside’ as it were. Some of our life, that part which we spend contemplating, is divine: our appreciation of the divine ought thus to be enhanced by our recognizing in ourselves a way of life that we at times live. Now when we are actively contemplating, our minds become identical with the objects of thought. What we are contemplating are essences which we have encountered embodied in natural organisms, so our minds become identical with the essences we are contemplating. So mind contemplating an essence is itself that very essence. It is that essence at the highest level of activity” (pp. 295-297).

Lear then provides a helpful elaboration on this startling insight that our contemplative understanding is divine:

“[W]hen man fully satisfies his desire to understand, when he comes to understand the principles and causes of the world, he is not acquiring understanding of a distinct object which, as it turns out, is divine. The understanding is itself divine. Since ‘human mind contemplating form,’ ‘substantial form,’ ‘primary substance,’ and ‘God thinking himself’ may be various ways of describing the same thing — form at the highest level of actuality — man’s understanding is not merely of the divine, it is divine” (p. 311).

The Unmoved Mover and the God of the Monotheistic Traditions

This fully actual being that thinks all fully actualized form has much in common with the God of the monotheistic faiths. But there are plenty of radical differences as well as the entry “God, Western Concepts” from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out: 

“Aristotle made God passively responsible for change in the world in the sense that all things seek divine perfection. God imbues all things with order and purpose, both of which can be discovered and point to his (or its) divine existence. From those contingent things we come to know universals, whereas God knows universals prior to their existence in things. God, the highest being (though not a loving being), engages in perfect contemplation of the most worthy object, which is himself. He is thus unaware of the world and cares nothing for it, being an unmoved mover. God as pure form is wholly immaterial, and as perfect he is unchanging since he cannot become more perfect. This perfect and immutable God is therefore the apex of being and knowledge. God must be eternal. That is because time is eternal, and since there can be no time without change, change must be eternal. And for change to be eternal the cause of change-the unmoved mover-must also be eternal. To be eternal God must also be immaterial since only immaterial things are immune from change. Additionally, as an immaterial being, God is not extended in space.”

And R.G. Collingwood offers a helpful account of the differences and similarities in his book The Idea of Nature (CT: Martino Publishing, 2014):

“Plato in the Timaeus represents God, in virtue of His creative act of will, as the efficient cause of nature, and the forms, in virtue of their static perfection, as its final cause; Aristotle, identifying God with the forms, conceives one single unmoved mover with a self-contained activity of its own, namely self-knowledge, [thought thinking thought], thinking the forms which are the categories of its own thought, and, since that activity is the highest and best possible [Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10, Chapter 7], inspiring the whole of nature with desire for it and a nisus towards reproducing it, everything in its degree and to the best of its power.

There are certain points in this theory which appear strange and even perhaps repulsive to persons brought up in a Christian tradition. In the first place, Aristotle has much to say about the love of God ; but for him God does not love the world, it is the world that loves God. The love that makes the world go round is neither God’s love for us nor our love for each other, but a universal love for God which is wholly unreciprocated. I do not want to explain away the contrast between this idea and those of Christianity, but I must point out that the contrast is diminished when we notice the difference of terminology. The word for ‘love’ in Aristotle is [eros], which means the longing of what is essentially imperfect for its own perfection; [eros] is the upward-looking or aspiring love felt by that which feels itself inferior for that which it recognizes as its superior. That was explained once for all in the classical discussion of [eros] in Plato’s Symposium, The Christian word for ‘love’ is [agape], which is originally the downward-looking or condescending love felt by a superior for an inferior; it is the contentment one has in things which though admittedly imperfect serve very well for the purposes of their station in one’s life. By denying that God loves the world, Aristotle is only saying that God is already perfect and has in himself no source of change, no nisus towards anything better; by saying that the world loves God, he is saying that the world is restless in its search for a perfection already existing in God and identical with God.

But in the second place — and this is less easy to reconcile with our ordinary notions — Aristotle denies that God knows the world, and a fortiori denies that He created it by an act of will or has any providential plans for its history or the life of anything in it. Such a denial no doubt relieves the mind of many embarrassments; it relieves us of the necessity to think of God as beholding and tolerating, or still worse as deliberately causing, the evils of which the world is full, which is always a grave moral difficulty to the popular Christian theology ; and it relieves us of the necessity to think of Him as seeing colours, hearing sounds, and so forth, which would imply His having eyes and ears, or alternatively as knowing a world so different from ours that we can no longer call it by the same name. But although these are great gains, they are offset by what we cannot but feel to be greater losses. The thought of God as watching over the life of the world, directing the course of its history, judging its actions, and bringing it ultimately back to unity with Himself, is a thought without which we can hardly care to think of God at all. Here again, I do not want to deny the contrast between the Aristotelian and Christian conceptions, or to suggest that the Aristotelian is, even on purely philosophical grounds, the better; but the contrast is mitigated if we recollect that the self-knowledge of God in Aristotle’s theory means His knowledge of [fully actualized mind] as such, with its articulated structure of forms; and that since we too, so far as we are rational, share in [fully actualized mind], our self-knowledge and our knowledge of the forms are participations by us in the life of God, and for that very reason bring us within the circle of God’s self-knowledge. Even the blind impulses of inorganic nature, though in themselves neither parts of God nor known to God, are directed towards goals which are known to God and are indeed aspects of His nature” (pp. 87-88).

God in the Here and Now

This overview has been very brief and can only touch on the basics of a very complicated topic. Nonetheless, I think a plausible view of God in Aristotle has emerged which can be characterized as a divine conceptualist view, that is, one in which things like Platonic forms and eternal truths are actually ideas in the mind of God rather than being independently existing abstract entities. We see that without the unmoved mover’s timeless contemplation of its ideas or fully actualized forms there would be no development, no desire, and no striving on the part of substances to become more and more of what they essentially are. This God is certainly not a loving God who creates the world out of nothing, listens to prayers, intervenes in human affairs, and guides the universe with a providential hand towards a just outcome. But our desire to understand the world is inseparable from God insofar as our understanding of the true and fully actualized forms of things is only possible by participating in God’s fully actualized mind. One way to interpret this participation is to say that our fallible, changing, and imperfect “passive intellect” can nonetheless grasp universal truths precisely because there is an infallible, unchanging, and perfect “active intellect” that supplies those universal truths to us. In his book On the Soul, Aristotle uses light as a metaphor which can apply to our intellect’s relation to God: just as light illuminates colors allowing us to see them, so our participation in the divine mind illuminates the forms of substances allowing us to know them. So we are intimately connected to God insofar as we lead the rational life. And there is a kind of providence is at work insofar as our natural end as rational animals is grounded in the unmoved mover. For the desire to know and achieve wisdom in the heart of human nature reveals that our love of wisdom is not just a subjective interest of some people called philosophers. Rather, it is a basic desire of the human soul born out of a need to imitate the perfect form of humanity in God’s mind. Thus to do philosophy is to experience a degree of true fulfillment and commune with God not in some heaven to come but in the here and now. The love of wisdom is the love of God.

For Augustine’s divine conceptualism go here.

For Leibniz’s divine conceptualism go here.

For my divine conceptualist argument inspired by Aristotle, Augustine, Leibniz, and various contemporary philosophers go here.

To see how Aristotle can make some sense of the unmoved mover’s timeless act of thinking go here.

For all my posts on Aristotle go here.