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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.