The Metaphysics

488 Pages·1999·1.83 MB·English

by  Aristotle

METAPHYSICS
ARISTOTLE was born at Stageira, in the dominion of the kings of
Macedonia, in 384 BC. For twenty years he studied at Athens in the
Academy of Plato, on whose death in 347 he left, and, some time later,
became tutor of the young Alexander the Great. When Alexander
succeeded to the throne of Macedonia in 335, Aristotle returned to
Athens and established his school and research institute, the Lyceum, to
which his great erudition attracted a large number of scholars. After
Alexander’s death in 323, anti-Macedonian feeling drove Aristotle out of
Athens, and he fled to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322. His
writings, which were of extraordinary range, profoundly affected the
whole course of ancient and medieval philosophy, and they are still
eagerly studied and debated by philosophers today. Very many of them
have survived and among the most famous are the Ethics and the Politics.
HUGH LAWSON-TANCRED was born in 1955 and educated at Eton and Balliol
College, Oxford. He is currently a Departmental Fellow in the
Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College in the University of
London. He has published extensively on Aristotle and Plato and is
engaged in research in the philosophy of linguistics and cognitive
science. He also translates widely from the Slavonic and Scandinavian
languages. His translations of Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric and De Anima
are also published in Penguin Classics. He is married with a daughter
and a son and lives in north London and Somerset.
ARISTOTLE
Metaphysics
Translated with an introduction by
HUGH LAWSON-TANCRED
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England This translation first published 1998
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Copyright © Hugh Lawson-Tancred, 1998
All rights reserved The moral right of the translator has been asserted Except in the United States
of America, this book is sold subject
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PARENTIBUS OPTIMIS
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
THE METAPHYSICS
Book Alpha
Book Alpha the Lesser
Book Beta
Book Gamma
Book Delta
Book Epsilon
Book Zeta
Book Eta
Book Theta
Book Iota
Book Kappa
Book Lambda
Book Mu
Book Nu
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PREFACE
There are, no doubt, some books of which it can be justly claimed that
they will both prove invaluable for the new student and be a source of
stimulation for experienced readers. This is not such a book. Indeed, I
have doubts about the extent to which such a work can be produced on
the subject, at any rate, of Aristotelian metaphysics.
Forced, therefore, into choosing between an exoteric or an esoteric
translation of the Metaphysics, I have complied with the constraints of
time and of the limitations of my own competence in seeking to address
myself orbi rather than urbi. The result, I hope, will be a useful, if
humble, rung on the Wittgensteinian ladder up which anyone seeking to
become acquainted with Aristotle’s central ruminations on the substance
of the world must climb.
Three brief acknowledgements. I would like to express my gratitude to
the Philosophy Department of Birkbeck College, to whom I am indebted
for an extraordinary amount of philosophical stimulation and
encouragement over the last ten years. During the course of making this
translation, I became a husband and a father. This experience has caused
me to wonder whether Aristotle may exaggerate the importance of what
persists through any change. An older debt of similar nature is
acknowledged by the Dedication.
H. C. L.–T.
Queens Park
June 1998
INTRODUCTION
1. Substance
What is the purpose of studying metaphysics, and what is the purpose of
studying the Metaphysics? It has been argued in the twentieth century
(and before) with great force, elegance and coherence that there is no
point in studying either, and indeed that the temptation to take seriously
the latter and perhaps also the former can only be a source of deep
philosophical perplexity. On the other hand, in previous philosophical
epochs metaphysics was routinely regarded as the pinnacle of
philosophical speculation and the Metaphysics was effectively taken to be
its founding charter. There have been many great thinkers for whom the
most important question in philosophy has been what response we
should make to the claims of metaphysicians in general and of Aristotle
in particular.
Of course, we cannot tell the value of metaphysics until we have
agreed what it is, nor that of the Metaphysics until its central doctrines
are at least provisionally familiar. In this introduction I shall say a little
about the ambitions and limitations of metaphysical thinking and then
try to show why Aristotle’s treatise should be considered a paradigm of
such thinking, whatever attitude we come to take to its central claims. I
also broach two other topics. The first concerns the peculiar nature of
the Metaphysics as a composition (some would say a compilation). The
general architecture of the work is fraught with problems, and there are
intriguing and important issues about just how the text that we have
before us came into being. The second topic I discuss is the nature and
purpose of the present translation.
Many philosophers, conspicuously including Aristotle, as we shall see,
have held the view that the understanding of anything either depends on
or is profoundly facilitated by obtaining the correct definition of it at the
start of one’s investigation. If this is right, then it seems certain that we
cannot reach understanding of philosophy itself, and certainly not of
metaphysics. Many attempts have been made to put into a nutshell the
core project of the metaphysician, but severally and collectively they
serve only to show that the subject is too elusive and strange to be
pinned down in any very manageable way. The nature of metaphysics
can only be indicated, if at all, by suggestion rather than stipulation.
And perhaps the best way to suggest its nature is to contrast it with
other forms of inquiry, and especially with science. The nature of science
itself is hardly perspicuous, but it will perhaps be agreed that science
attempts to clarify the structure and processes of our world through the
patient observation of its sensible phenomena and the cautious or bold
construction of hypotheses that are in some way answerable to such
observations. The conclusions of science are provisional, their
confirmation holistically sensitive to the repercussions of events across
the whole range of our experience. This sensitivity of the conclusions of
science seems ambiguous and has always been taken in two ways, either
as an indication that the scientist is responding to a pattern outside
himself to which he must constantly adjust his assumptions or as a
reason for deep scepticism about the capacity of the whole enterprise to
deliver a convincing picture of the world.
If the latter attitude is adapted to the evolving image that science
offers, then this can either be the occasion of a more comprehensive
scepticism which holds that there are, quite generally, severe restrictions
on the understanding that we can have in any way of our predicament or
lead to the desire to seek some more secure, and therefore fundamental,
formof knowledge about the world which will not be thus vulnerable to
the fluctuations of theoretical fashion. This desire is the point of
departure for metaphysics. What the metaphysician is after is a
comprehensive account of how the world is that is somehow immune to
the uncertainties overshadowing all our reflections on the course and
content of our experience. The metaphysician wants to understand the
world once and for all.
But how is such understanding to be obtained? Well, two ways in
which the world may be available to non-scientific comprehension are
that advocated by the religious believer (who may well also be disposed
to acknowledge absolute moral values) and that of the mystic (who may
also be unusually sensitive to aesthetic experience). The believer
standardly lays claim to an understanding of the world that is based on
the revelations of a higher Person, and the mystic will insist that certain
episodes or aspects of his or her experience are endowed with a value
and significance that gives him or her the authority to make broad
pronouncements on the arrangement of the world. Neither of these
approaches is necessarily incompatible with the project of metaphysics,
but neither are they constitutive of it. They both purport to provide the
kind of knowledge that the metaphysician wants, but they go about it in
ways that are not his.
What is distinctive of metaphysics is that it is, like science, a rational
project. What this means is that the metaphysician purports to give
grounds for his large conclusions that are not founded either on the
appeal to divine authority or on a claim to experience of a privileged
kind. The metaphysician aspires, and pretends, to reach his conclusions
by logical arguments commencing from assumptions which would be
readily accepted by any reasonable person. From the pig’s ear of our
experience he fashions the silk purse of his vision of the cosmos.
Kant, for instance, starts from the truism that our experience contains
particular phenomena between which our minds see general patterns
and concludes that the world that we know is the product of the
interaction of occult faculties which are constitutive of our subjectivity
and that the world in itself is utterly beyond our scrutiny. Russell notes
that many sentences of ordinary language are compositions of simpler
sentences, with independent meanings of their own, and concludes that
the world must ultimately be made up of atomic units whose mutual
disconnection is not a chance of nature but a logical necessity. Plato
remarks that the descriptions that we give of objects in our world are
usually in some way relative to the context of presentation and he passes
from this to the conclusion that reality consists of a world of eternal and
unchanging entities, of which the world we know is merely a pale
reflection. And so on. Always the process is the same: the input is
simple, even banal, features of our daily dealings with the world, the
output an extraordinary and dramatic reassessment of the fundamental
structure of that world.
The metaphysician, then, is open to the objection that, even if we
concede the desirability of the sort of knowledge that he seeks, his