06 - Story of Aristotles Philosophy by Will Durant

In this engaging little Blue Book No. 39, renowned author Will Durant explores the life and teachings of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.), a brilliant Macedonian thinker who was once a student of Plato and later became the mentor of Alexander the Great. While Alexander set out to conquer the world, Aristotle returned to Athens to establish the Lyceum, where he made groundbreaking contributions to biology, logic, literary theory, ethics, and political science. Rejecting the abstract ideals of his teacher Plato, Aristotle focused on the natural world, famously studying the development of the chick embryo. He viewed the universe as a dynamic interplay of matter in motion, with God as its initial driving force. Contrary to the belief that social evils stem from private property, Aristotle argued they arise from the inherent flaws of human nature. He believed that while we find catharsis in tragic theater, real life necessitates a pursuit of balance, reason, dignity, and the golden mean in all aspects. (Pamela Nagami, M.D.)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter five of the Story of Aristotle's Philosophy by Will Durant.
This librovox recording is in the public domain recording by Pamelinagami,
Chapter five, Metaphysics and the Nature of God. His metaphysics
grew out of his biology. Everything in the world is

(00:21):
moved by an inner urge to become something greater than
it is. Everything is both the form or reality which
has grown out of something which was its matter or
raw material, and it may, in its turn be the
matter out of which still higher forms will grow. So

(00:41):
the man is the form of which the child was
the matter. The child is the form, and its embryo
the matter, the embryo the form, the ovum the matter,
and so back till we reach, in a vague way,
the conception of matter without form. All but such a

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formless matter would be no thing, for everything was a form.
Matter in its widest sense, is the possibility of form,
and form is the actuality the finished reality of matter.
Matter obstructs form constructs. Form is not merely the shape,

(01:24):
but the shaping force, an inner necessity and impulse, which
molds mere material to a specific figure and purpose. It
is the realization of a potential capacity of matter. It
is the sum of the powers residing in anything. To do,
to be, or to become. Nature is the conquest of

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matter by form, the constant progression and victory of life.
Footnote Half of our readers will be pleased and the
other half amused to learn that. Among Aristotle's favorite examples
of matter and form are woman and man. The male
is the active formative principle. The female is passive clay

(02:12):
waiting to be formed. Female offspring are the result of
the failure of form to dominate matter. End footnote. Everything
in the world moves naturally to a specific fulfillment of
the varied causes which determine an event. The final cause,
which determines the purpose, is the most decisive and important.

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The mistakes and futilities of nature are due to the
inertia of matter resisting the forming force of purpose. Hence
the abortions and the monsters that mar the panorama of life.
Development is not haphazard or accidental. Else how could we
explain the almost universal appearance and transmission of useful organs.

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Everything is guided in a certain direction from within by
its nature and structure and antilichi footnote Entelechia having echo
its purpose telose within antose, one of those magnificent Aristotilian
terms which gather up into themselves a whole philosophy. The

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informed reader need not be reminded that the orthogenic school
of evolution finds its first formulation in these passages of
Aristotle and footnote. The egg of the hen is internally
designed or destined to become not a duck but a chick.
The acorn becomes not a willow but an oak. This

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does not mean, for Aristotle that there is an external
providence designing earthly structures and events. Rather, the design is
internal and arises from the type and function of the thing.
Divine providence coincides completely, for Erristotle with the operation of
natural causes. Yet there is a God, though not perhaps

(04:06):
the simple and human god conceived by the forgivable anthropomorphism
of the adolescent mind. Aristotle approaches the problem from the
old puzzle about motion. How he asks, does motion begin?
He will not accept the possibility that motion is as
beginningless as he conceives matter to be. Matter may be eternal,

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because it is merely the everlasting possibility of future forms.
But when and how did that vast process of motion
and formation begin which at last filled the wide universe
with an infinity of shapes. Surely motion has a source,
says Aristotle. And if we are not to plunge drearily

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into an infinite regress, putting back our problems step by step, endlessly,
we might must posit a prime mover, unmoved primum mobila emotum,
a being incorporeal, indivisible, spaceless, sexless, passionless, changeless, perfect, and eternal.

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God does not create, but he moves the world. And
he moves it not as a mechanical force, but as
the total motive of all operations in the world. God
moves the world as the beloved object moves the lover.
He is the final cause of nature, the drive and
purpose of things, the form of the world, the principle

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of its life, the sum of its vital processes and powers,
the inherent goal of its growth, the energizing and telochy
of the whole. He is pure energy, the scholastic actuspurus
activity per se, perhaps the mystic force of modern physics
and philosophy. He is not so much a person as

(06:01):
a magnetic power. Yet with his usual inconsistency, Aristotle represents
God as self conscious spirit, a rather mysterious spirit. For
Aristotle's God never does anything. He has no desires, no will,
no purpose. He is activity so pure that he never acts.

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He is absolutely perfect. Therefore he cannot desire anything. Therefore
he does nothing. His only occupation is to contemplate the
essence of things, And since he himself is the essence
of all things, the form of all forms, his sole
employment is the contemplation of himself. Poor Aristotilian God. He

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is a hua fino, a do nothing king. The king reigns,
but he does not rule. No wonder the British, like Aristotle,
his God is obviously copied from their king, or from
Aristotle himself, our philosopher so loved contemplation that he sacrificed

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to it his conception of divinity. His God is of
the quiet Aristotilian type, nothing romantic, withdrawn to his ivory tower,
from the strife and strain of things all the world
away from the philosopher kings of Plato, or from the stern,
flesh and blood reality of Yahweh, or the gentle and

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solicitous fatherhood of the Christian God. End of Chapter five