Metaphysics

Summary

The Metaphysics is not a single book but fourteen books of lectures and notes, gathered after Aristotle's death under a title that means simply 'the things after the Physics'. Aristotle's own names for the inquiry are 'first philosophy', 'wisdom' and, once, 'theology'. Its question is the broadest one a person can ask: what does it mean for anything to be, and what are the first causes of all that is? Book I opens with the line every student remembers, that all men by nature desire to know. Aristotle traces a ladder from sensation to memory to experience to art, illustrating it with the physician who knows not only that a remedy helped Callias but why it helps all patients of a certain constitution. Wisdom is knowledge of first causes, sought not for use but out of wonder. He then reviews his predecessors, from Thales' water to Plato's Forms, as partial discoveries of the four causes (matter, source of motion, form, and end), and closes with a sharp critique of the Forms. Book II warns that the difficulty of truth lies in us, as the eyes of bats are dazzled by daylight, and argues that the chain of causes cannot run back without end. Book III lays out the puzzles that the rest of the work must resolve. Book IV names the subject: being qua being. 'Being' is said in many senses, but, as everything called 'healthy' refers to health, all of them refer to substance. Aristotle then defends the most certain of all principles, that the same attribute cannot at once belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect, by showing that anyone who speaks meaningfully already relies on it. Books V and VI add a philosophical dictionary and a division of theoretical knowledge into physics, mathematics and theology. The central Books VII to IX ask what substance is. He argues that universals are not substances, that form is the cause by which matter is a definite thing, and that actuality is prior to potentiality. Book XII (Lambda) is the summit. Since motion is eternal, there must be an eternal unmoved mover, pure actuality without matter, which moves the heavens as an object of love moves the lover. Its life is thought, and since it can think only of what is best, its thinking is a thinking on thinking. Aristotle calls this being God, living, eternal and most good. Books XIII and XIV return to the Academy's theories of mathematical objects and Form-numbers and reject them. Read in a classical Christian school, the Metaphysics shows how far careful reason can go toward a first cause, and also where it stops: Aristotle's God moves the world without creating it, knowing it, or loving it in return. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote a full commentary on the work, adopted its arguments while correcting it by the doctrine of creation. The library attaches W. D. Ross's public-domain translation, divided into Books and Parts that follow the traditional chapters.

Plot or Argument

• Book I (Alpha): from sensation to wisdom, and the predecessors

  The desire to know, the ladder of sensation, memory, experience, art and science, and the claim that wisdom is knowledge of first causes sought for its own sake. Philosophy begins in wonder. Aristotle surveys Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Pythagoreans and Plato, finding in each a grasp of one or two of the four causes, and in Part 9 argues at length that the Forms neither explain change nor exist apart from things.

• Book II (little alpha): the difficulty of truth

  Truth is easy in that no one wholly misses it and hard in that no one grasps it adequately; the fault lies in our reason, like bats' eyes in daylight. Gratitude is owed even to predecessors whose views were superficial. There cannot be an infinite series of causes of any kind, and the method of each inquiry must suit its subject.

• Book III (Beta): the puzzles

  A list of aporiai: whether one science studies all causes and all substances, whether there are substances besides sensible ones, whether the principles are genera or elements, universals or individuals, perishable or imperishable, and whether being and unity are themselves substances. Aristotle argues that one cannot untie a knot without first seeing it.

• Book IV (Gamma): being qua being and the first principle

  There is a science of being as being. Being is said in many ways, all referred to substance, as 'healthy' is said of a diet, a complexion and a body with reference to health. The principle of non-contradiction is the most certain of all principles; Aristotle defends it by refutation against those who deny it, and examines the related claims of Heraclitus and Protagoras that appearances are all equally true, noting that no one who dreams he is in Athens sets off for the concert hall there.

• Book V (Delta): a lexicon of first philosophy

  Entries on principle, cause, element, nature, necessary, one, being, substance, same and other, prior and posterior, potency, quantity, quality, relative, complete, limit, disposition, privation, having, whole, accident and others, each distinguishing the senses in which the word is used.

• Book VI (Epsilon): the divisions of theoretical science

  Physics studies things that move and are not separate from matter, mathematics things unmoving but not separate, and first philosophy things both unmoving and separate; this last Aristotle calls theology. Accidental being and being as truth are set aside as not proper objects of the science.

• Books VII–VIII (Zeta, Eta): what substance is

  Substance is investigated as essence, universal, genus and substratum. Matter alone cannot be substance; universals are not substances; essence and definition belong primarily to substance. Generation by art and nature is analysed through the example of the physician, in whose soul the form of health exists before he produces health in the body. Book VIII treats form as the actuality of matter and explains the unity of a definition.

• Book IX (Theta): potentiality and actuality

  Aristotle distinguishes active and passive potencies, rational and irrational, refutes the Megarian claim that a thing has a capacity only while exercising it, and argues that actuality is prior to potentiality in definition, in substance and, in the decisive sense, in time.

• Books X–XI (Iota, Kappa): unity, and a summary

  Book X analyses the one as measure and the kinds of opposition, especially contrariety. Book XI summarises Books III, IV and VI and excerpts the Physics; scholars dispute whether it is Aristotle's own digest or a later compilation.

• Book XII (Lambda): the unmoved mover

  After classifying substances as sensible perishable, sensible eternal, and unmovable, Aristotle argues that eternal circular motion requires a mover that is itself unmoved and pure actuality. It moves as an object of desire and love. Its activity is thought thinking itself, and it is God. Part 8 uses the astronomy of Eudoxus and Callippus to estimate the number of such movers at fifty-five; Part 10 compares the good of the universe to the order of an army under its general and ends with Homer's line on the rule of one.

• Books XIII–XIV (Mu, Nu): against mathematical substances

  A sustained critique of the Platonists, Speusippus and Xenocrates, who made numbers and mathematical objects separate substances or derived the Forms from the One and the Great-and-Small. Aristotle argues that mathematical objects exist only as aspects of sensible things abstracted by thought.

Characters

• Thales of Miletus, predecessor examined

  Named in Book I as the founder of natural philosophy, who made water the material principle of all things.

• Heraclitus, predecessor examined

  Cited for fire as principle and, in Book IV, for the view (as some report it) that the same thing can be and not be, which Aristotle rejects.

• Empedocles, predecessor examined

  Credited with four material elements and with Love and Strife as moving causes, the first to use two contrary sources of motion.

• Anaxagoras, predecessor examined

  Praised for making Mind the cause of order, 'like a sober man' among random talkers, but faulted for using it only as a last resort.

• The Pythagoreans, predecessor examined

  Held that the principles of number are the principles of all things; their views shape the debates of Books I, XIII and XIV.

• Plato, teacher and chief interlocutor

  Aristotle's teacher, whose theory of separate Forms is criticised in Book I, Part 9, and again in Books VII, XIII and XIV.

• Protagoras, opponent

  The sophist whose saying that man is the measure of all things Aristotle treats as a denial of the principle of non-contradiction.

• Speusippus, opponent

  Plato's nephew and successor at the Academy, criticised for multiplying kinds of substance and for denying that the good is present at the beginning.

Lessons

• Wonder as the beginning of wisdom

  Aristotle does not say philosophy began with usefulness. People philosophized, he argues, once the necessities of life were secured, and they did so because they wondered: first at small puzzles, then at the moon, the sun and the origin of the universe. A person who wonders admits ignorance, which is why even the lover of myth is in a way a lover of wisdom. The lesson for a school is that delight in knowing for its own sake is a natural good, not a luxury, and that the admission 'I do not know' is where learning starts.

  • What ladder does Aristotle trace from sensation to wisdom in Book I, Parts 1–2?
  • Why does he say the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom?
  • Is a subject less worth studying if it has no practical use? Answer from Aristotle and then for yourself.

• The principle no one can deny

  In Book IV Aristotle defends the principle that the same attribute cannot at once belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect. He does not prove it from something more certain, since nothing is more certain; instead he shows that anyone who says anything definite already assumes it. If 'man' may equally mean 'not man', speech collapses. He adds a dry observation: no one who seriously holds that all appearances are true behaves that way, and the man who dreams he is in Athens does not get up and walk to the concert hall. The lesson is that some first principles are known not by proof but by the impossibility of living or speaking without them.

  • Why does Aristotle refuse to demonstrate the principle of non-contradiction directly?
  • How does he use the opponent's own speech to refute him?
  • Where do people today claim to reject this principle, and do their actions agree with their words?

• Form, matter and the healer's mind

  In Book VII Aristotle explains making through the example of a physician. Health exists first as a form in the physician's soul; he reasons backward from health to a uniform bodily state, from that to warmth, and from warmth to something he can do now, such as rubbing. Then the making runs forward. The example teaches the four causes in miniature and shows that intelligent action begins with knowing the end. It also makes the point, later taken up by Christian thinkers, that order in a thing can come from a mind that conceived it first.

  • Trace the physician's chain of reasoning in Book VII, Part 7, step by step.
  • In what sense does Aristotle say that health comes from health?
  • Choose a craft you know and describe its work as Aristotle would, from form in the mind to product.

• What reason can and cannot reach about God

  Book XII argues that eternal motion requires an eternal unmoved mover, pure actuality, which moves the heavens as the beloved moves the lover and whose life is thought thinking itself. Aristotle calls this being God and says its life is the best, enjoyed always as we enjoy contemplation only briefly. The argument shaped the 'first way' of Thomas Aquinas. But Aristotle's God does not create the world, does not know it in its particulars, and does not love it; the world loves him. Students can admire the reach of the argument and see clearly where revelation says more than Aristotle did.

  • Why does Aristotle think the first mover must be unmoved and without matter?
  • What does he mean by saying that it moves 'as being loved'?
  • Compare Aristotle's God with the God of Genesis 1 and John 1: what is shared, and what is missing?

Context

The Metaphysics comes from Aristotle's teaching in the Lyceum and was never published by him as a single treatise. The title, meaning 'after the Physics', probably reflects its place in the edition of Aristotle's school writings associated with Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century BC. In late antiquity it was commented on by Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Neoplatonists; in the Islamic world by Avicenna and Averroes; and in the Latin West it arrived in stages, through the twelfth-century translation of James of Venice and the thirteenth-century version of William of Moerbeke, transforming the schools of Paris and Oxford.

Composition

The books were composed at different times, some perhaps during Aristotle's years in the Academy and others in the Lyceum period (335-322 BC); 'c. 350-322 BC' marks this range. Book XI repeats much of III, IV and VI, Book II (little alpha) may come from a student's notes, and Werner Jaeger's influential thesis that the books record a development away from Platonism remains disputed. The library's text is W. D. Ross's Oxford translation (first published 1908), transcribed by the MIT Internet Classics Archive.

Reception

Thomas Aquinas wrote a line-by-line commentary on the first twelve books and drew on Book XII for his proofs of God's existence, while correcting Aristotle by the doctrine of creation from nothing. The Condemnation of 1277 at Paris targeted propositions associated with readings of Aristotle such as the eternity of the world. Early modern philosophers from Descartes to Bacon defined their projects against the scholastic metaphysics derived from this book, and twentieth-century philosophers revived its questions about substance and essence. It was included in the Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990), volume 7.

Comparisons

• Summa Theologica

  Aquinas' first way (Part I, Question 2, Article 3) argues from motion to a first unmoved mover in terms that come from Physics VIII and Metaphysics XII. Yet the Summa insists that God creates from nothing and knows singulars, two points Aristotle's unmoved mover lacks; comparing the two shows where Aquinas adopted Aristotle and where he corrected him.

• Posterior Analytics and Physics

  The Physics supplies the theory of the four causes and of motion that Metaphysics I reviews and Book XII completes; the eternal-motion argument of Physics VIII is the premise of the unmoved mover. The Posterior Analytics explains why first principles cannot be demonstrated, the point Book IV applies to non-contradiction.

• Categories

  The Categories treats the individual as primary substance without asking what makes it one thing. Metaphysics VII–VIII take up that unasked question and answer that form, the actuality of matter, is substance in the primary sense, a notable shift in emphasis from the logical treatise.

• Parmenides

  The young Socrates of the Parmenides already meets objections to the Forms, including a regress like the 'third man' that Aristotle presses in Book I, Part 9. The comparison shows that some of Aristotle's criticisms had been raised inside Plato's own school.

• The Nicomachean Ethics

  Ethics X praises the contemplative life as the most divine human activity; Metaphysics XII says the first mover enjoys always the life of thought that humans enjoy only briefly. Together they show how Aristotle's highest ethical ideal is modeled on his account of God.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The Metaphysics is not about medicine, but medicine is Aristotle's favourite model of a craft that joins universal knowledge to individual cases, and the examples are telling for the history of medicine. Book I contrasts the experience that a remedy helped Callias with the art that knows it helps all phlegmatic or bilious patients burning with fever, a compact statement of how Greek medicine classified patients by constitution. Book IV uses 'healthy' as the model of a word with many related senses. Book VII describes the physician reasoning back from health to warmth and producing warmth by rubbing. These are illustrations within a philosophical argument; they show what Aristotle assumed about medical practice rather than offering medical teaching of his own.

• Book I (Alpha), Part 1

  Experience knows that a treatment helped Callias and Socrates; art knows it helps all of a given constitution, such as phlegmatic or bilious people burning with fever. The physician cures the individual, so theory without experience often fails.

  Physicians Doctors Humoral Medicine Ancient Medicine
• Book IV (Gamma), Part 2

  'Healthy' is said of what preserves health, produces it, is a symptom of it, or is capable of it; 'medical' is said of what possesses or serves the medical art.

  Ancient Medicine
• Book IV (Gamma), Part 5

  Against relativism: appearances to the sick and the healthy are not equally authoritative, and the physician's opinion on whether a man will recover outweighs the ignorant man's.

  Physicians Doctors
• Book VII (Zeta), Part 7

  The physician's reasoning from the form of health to a uniform bodily state, to warmth, to rubbing; health exists in the soul of the physician before it exists in the patient.

  Physicians Doctors Ancient Medicine

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a dialogue in which a student who says 'everything is just a matter of opinion' meets Aristotle in the Lyceum. Have Aristotle use only the arguments of Book IV to show the student what his own speech assumes.

• Essay

  Aristotle says that all men by nature desire to know. Write an essay testing the claim against your own experience of school, curiosity and boredom, and decide whether the desire is natural, learned or both.

• Classroom

  Make a chart of the predecessors in Book I. For each thinker, record his principle, which of Aristotle's four causes it captures, and what Aristotle says it misses.

• Essay

  Compare the unmoved mover of Book XII with the God who speaks in Genesis 1. Using the text, explain what Aristotle's reasoning reaches and what it cannot reach.

Further Reading

• Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas

  Aquinas' line-by-line exposition, the most influential Christian reading of the work.

• Aristotle's Metaphysics: A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary, W. D. Ross

  The translator's own two-volume Greek edition and commentary (1924).

• The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, Joseph Owens

  A classic study of how Aristotle relates being, substance and the divine.

• Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, Werner Jaeger

  The developmental thesis about the order of the books, still debated.

• Aristotle for Everybody, Mortimer J. Adler

  A plain introduction for students to Aristotle's ideas of cause, being and God.