Last Aristotle Lecture

Drawing on material from: Kurt Riezler: “Physics and Reality”

Lectures from Aristotle for modern physics. Held at an International Congress of Science, Physics and Reality.

New Haven, Yale University Press; London, H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1940. (

Ladies and Gentlemen of the 21^st Century:

Let me speak to you from ‘the other side.’ But before beginning, I invoke the gods according to my country’s and my era’s custom, for you and I need their aid if we are to understand each other. Then I want to give you thanks for letting me speak to you. Professor Schwab also merits recognition. He has tried his best to make me understandable to you, even though I feel he has misrepresented my thought here and there. But I have not come from beyond the Styx to set the record straight.

I am here rather to cast a critical gaze upon what you are, who you think you are, and how you conceive of your world. This is not meant to reject your findings and persuade you of my views. What I really want to do is plead for the values and interests, the kinds of questions I have raised, still find worthwhile pursuing, but perceive to be largely missing in your context.

Some of you may feel it odd that I can come here and speak to you ‘in person’ having argued that the soul stops to exist when its body stops functioning. You owe this opportunity to my error – not the only erroneous factual assumption in my teaching. After death I found out that the ancient beliefs about the soul are right: I did find myself in Hades, and have been entertaining myself doing what I did ‘above:’ following the development of science, ethics and metaphysics from the realm of shadows ‘down below.’ I have given permission to return for just this occasion: to communicate to you a critical view on your lives and time. To tell you how I feel about the development, the present condition, the triumph of your science and its worldview.

As I see you and your age as caught in a maze, snared by habits and trapped by methods from which you cannot free yourselves. But from my distance I may perchance see things you cannot see. I do not know whether my voice, an alien voice, can find access to your ears, but also whether their sense can enter your minds, scientifically minded as you are, or your hearts as human beings.

First of all I beg you not to expect me to praise your achievements. For this purpose you do not need me. Certainly, from my stammering and often erroneous explorations to your calculating experiments the progress has been extraordinary. You have the most ingenuous instruments, you use the most efficient methods, and you know the most astounding laws. Your ships, automobiles, airplanes, your communication via phone and television unite the globe, connect events and let everything happen at the same time. Your computers solve in seconds problems we could not even tackle. Your catapults and projectiles pull down cities and upturn stones from the bottom of your fields. You have sent man into the space between the stars. For this and still more you have my humble admiration.

My wonder at your successes is not my greatest wonder, however. The first sentence in a book I wrote when I was young, says: All men by nature desire to know. The most intense of all our experiences – yours and mine - is your desire for knowledge. But in vain do I look for the place of this experience in your scheme of the universe. There is no place for the experience of knowledge in your scheme of the universe. This, not your successes, is what astonishes me most.

From my vantage point I think I know why the experience of knowledge has not and cannot have a place in your scheme. The reason is that you have shut yourselves off from nature. The further you penetrate into what you call nature the more elusive you become to yourselves. What, by Zeus, have you been doing?

The nature you mean as scientists is not the nature you mean when you say ‘I am.’ Nature is one, immutable, eternally varying – the way of Being in all beings, revealed as eternal movement, formation, deformation, and transformation. You yourselves, your desire for knowledge, you are Nature, as well as and as what you call nature around you. And yet you have opened between your comprehension of yourselves and your knowledge of nature a chasm that engulfs in darkness your common being. You realize it. In all the splendor of your inventions this is your secret grief and the scandal of your science.”

[Up to here the slightly modified opening of a lecture delivered by The Aristotle scholar Kurt Riezler in 1940 at an International Congress of Science. (Riezler, Kurt, Physics and Reality, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940.) What follows is Martin’s:]

Ultimately, you miss out on both sides: at the side of nature you reduce the world you encounter to the things your science can explore. And that science lets itself be guided by instrumental reason: how to control nature, force it to answer your questions, and use it to your ends. And at the side of yourselves, your culture, your souls and your good, you have given up on a comprehensive picture of yourselves and at an effort to find a comprehensive good for all of you. These have been major motives of my thinking. Let me remind you of some of my motives and ideas, because I think they should be on the agenda of today’s thinking, and – perhaps – on the agenda’s of those who think it is worth while to be serious about the kind of life they want to lead. You have given up on major motives for my thinking, motives I take to be valuable.

Do not misunderstand my effort. I am a philosopher, not the preacher of a religion. My guide is the truth and what can be found out about how we ought to do live. I have had plenty of time to see the progress of knowledge, as well as the changes in methods to pursue that good. I have learned that our bodies are not regulated by the four humors of Hippocrates, and the world is not constituted by fire, air, water and earth. I have understood that our earth is not at the center of the universe. I have to accept, although not without pain, that the new world that has emerged is not throughout teleologically ordered. I am not trying to convince you to turn back to my errors or to attitudes that you have had good reasons to abandon. Slavery is one of them.

But you could do things I have practiced, starting where you are and on the bases you have since achieved. These are some of them:

Aiming at the whole

I try to paint, in concepts, a comprehensive picture of what the universe and our world are like, what our place in this universe is, and what we ought to do at the place where we are. I aim at a comprehensive understanding of . . . everything, not more and not less. I am aware of the fact that the idea of comprehensive understanding manifests a certain arrogance. Is everything accessible to thinking and does a thinking approach offer the best knowledge? And arrogance, I have come to learn, is a vice that induces error. Your modern science is based on observation and controlled experiment. In that respect the approach of your modern science is not thinking but observation.

But pardon the philosopher for the opposition: Modern science is a thinking – yes, it is a thinking as well! – a thinking that ties itself to observation, and to mathematical expression. But, from my point of view, observation is not independent. It relies on assumptions set by thinking, some explicit, most inexplicit. I have had to learn that painfully myself, when one after the other of my observations fell to advances and changes in science. The sun does not ‘rise’ and ‘set.’ The blood does not ‘ebb’ in our body. Where in your world is the effort to adopt a relativizing stance towards observation and experiment, or to try to weave the knowledge of science into a view of that tries to embrace the cosmos at large and our place in it? Yes, you must accept that that cosmos is a changing nature, has its own beginnings, perhaps in a Big Bang, and may be led by entropy in the form of an immobile frozen state. Yes, we have come about in evolution, unplanned, by chance, and will, in all likelihood evolve into other kinds of beings and one-day die out. But we are unique in knowing this. And possess unique means of destruction, intervention and regulation. Where are the principles that guide our actions, principles other than our advantage? Where do we assume responsibility for the things that are in our power?

My thinking may appear not to do that. I have to admit that my reflections and theses will appear to be lofty, many of them as false from your point of view. The most inadequate ones have been the Ptolemaic world picture, the ideas of the four elements and the four humors, the hypothesis that the blood moves in us in a tidal way. Careful observations, but also changes in thinking, have shown these assumptions not to be fruitful.

In my defense I may be allowed to point out that I would never have done what the church did with the ideas I taught, and my predecessors and followers in the world you call “the ancient world.” I never have them to the rank of a dogma, prohibiting everyone to even consider alternatives. This is not my style! They are claims to knowledge. And every claim is fallible and open to criticism. But the interest in the whole, and the will to subject everything to thinking does not exclude observation and experiment. It just says: try to integrate whatever you get to know into a comprehensive whole. The interest in the whole, and the idea that nothing is alien to thinking and that thinking is an integrative activity aiming at knowledge and understanding of the whole is something that has driven philosophy since its beginning and has not completely died down.

Aiming at the whole, in knowledge and practice seems to me to be a value, and goal that is worthwhile pursuing.

Aiming at homogeneity

I also think that huge areas you perceive as distinct and separate can be thought to be homogeneous. Homogeneity: something possesses homogeneity when it can be accounted for by the same principles. I have tried to achieve that homogeneity by carving out wide area of being and knowledge under the name of nature and the principle of change. The four principles I used in my accounts – you have translated them as “causes” - are the main epistemic tools for analyzing change and stability in a world that has an internal tendency to change. In that world stability is absence of change, due to forces of preservation. I am perfectly aware that in your world my causes will not do the job of final analyses they did in my world. But I am deeply suspicious of the idea that mathematical expression should be the ultimate and exclusive tool for a homogenous understanding of our reality. In the first place, it focuses on quantitative phenomena, and reduces qualitative changes to changes in quantitative. And then, it is a grid that is sensitive only to general, repeatable occurrences, thus pushing unique and unrepeatable events, the singular, into the realm of the unknowable, or demanding different principles for the singular, the exceptional, the rupture and the irregular.

Homogeneity of Animals and Humans.

Another point of homogeneity. Over centuries your culture has made a great effort to distinguish human beings from animals. You said, for a long time: We are different. We aren’t animals. We have souls that give to us freedom and let us participate in a world beyond that world. Animals don’t. I have to admit that I am not entirely innocent in that respect. But: Do I deny that we have souls as some of your scientists and philosophers do? Do I refuse to accord rationality and mastery to our souls, as do those who reduce humans to a species of matter and physiological or chemical processes? I assert that we are animals and have souls, and that our souls make us a special species among the animals. I do not claim for us a place above and beyond the animal world. We are animals like other animals. Our reason distinguishes us as a specific kind of animal in the animal world. It does not give us a footing in a world other than that we share with all the other living beings. It also grounds a responsibility we have towards ourselves, our fellows, and that part of the world that is not us. Is this not a more realistic and more modest conception of us than the one many of you have and your culture implicitly transmits from one generation to the next?

The humanistic and the scientific world picture

In your world, humanists use ‘unscientific’ methods, and humanists see scientists as intruders into their own realm. Where today are the philosophers who try to work out principles that cover things ‘natural’ (in your understanding) and things human and try, at the same time, to account for all the things we want to know about them? Science, you think, explains through laws and experiment. The humanities try to understand who we are, transmit to us what we have been and what our cultures have acquired. They also try to give us a sense of the values we ought to live by. You place value-free science at one side, and value-laden interpretation at the other side. Reduction, compartmentalization and shared lack of understanding between the attitudes are the rule. How can you let that stand? In my thinking we aim at knowledge in order to lead good lives. And we follow and respect the natural orders in the lives we ought to live. I am encouraged by some of the more recent developments I see: Changes in the attitudes towards animals and the environment. They show the holistic and integrative pattern that guided my thinking.

Aiming at order

You have been offered a glimpse of how I analyze things into smaller or simple elements and look for the order of the elements I analyze. The causes orient different analyses and answer to different kinds of questions we have in a world of change. But a complete understanding requires use of all of them, and they turn out to be organized: form and matter are mutually dependent. Finality and efficiency apply to beings that need to unite form and matter. I isolate elements first, to then think about their order.

When I analyze the soul, I turn to something that is not entirely different from the inanimate world, but is an integral part of the world of change. So, the tools I have been using in what you call ‘inanimate nature’ and study as ‘Physics’ are the same tools also used in the study of the soul. The soul can also be analyzed from the point of view of the causes. It is form relative to a matter, which is the body. It comes out of things that bring it about. But before all, it pursues purposes, some of them it ought to pursue in the form of excellence. Exploring the soul in an analytic spirit, allows me to find how a form participates in life, and lays the ground for my ethics, which asks that soul orient our lives to be good lives. More generally, I try to account for differences inside of fields that are homogenous in principle.

My efforts have been directed at assigning to everything its exact place in a coherent order of things. After analysis and synthesis thinking and its knowledge have a third task. That task, but also that ability of thinking consists in finding or, well, producing an order that is transparent to itself, and thereby to us, and to tell us, what our own active contribution is to that order: the idea of a well-led life. In my view thinking is not only able to achieve such a task. It also has a duty to pursue this task. And it can gain insight into why and how this task falls to thinking. Contemplation and a contemplative life specialize in this high-order task of thinking. But there also is political life. This is the life that is actively involved with bringing about and maintaining the right order of things in human matters and a good order of the community.

I am perfectly aware of the fact that the orders I thought I had found are not and cannot be the orders of your world. I also understand how difficult it is to order your world in a comprehensive way. Yours is so much more complex than mine. But looking around I see more centrifugal than centripetal efforts. You have let knowledge of things human and knowledge of things ‘natural’ drift apart. I am not only thinking of different spheres. What intrigues me more is the event that one and the same item is explored in two different ways that have no way of communicating with each other.

One recent development in your world I find promising from the point of view of order. It looks as if your world had been, for your culture, an infinite pool of means, to be used and exploited in any way you find fit. Encouraged by religious beliefs you have behaved like certain tyrants did in my world, thinking they were absolute masters. Fortunately this attitude combined with your technology has interrupted the order of your world sufficiently for you to begin to think about how to maintain and re-establish orders that are out of joint. At the scientific side this idea has inspired ecology as a discipline that tries to gain knowledge of dynamic equilibria in complex relations between climate, the earth, and living beings. This looks to me exactly as the attitude towards knowledge I have been advocating: Gaining insight into the orders of the world. Not, in my ethical view, with the purpose of becoming tyrants in the realm of the earth, but with a view of integrating ourselves and our interests into these orders. You

I come from a family of doctors. At our end, we do not treat with the extensive knowledge you now have. Allow me all the same a critical gaze on your attitudes. Your doctor is supposed to use the methods of your science. But where, in your present scheme of things is the view that accounts for the role of the soul in illnesses, primarily seen as disturbances of the organism? Or: How are treatments through drugs integrated with treatments of the soul in mental illnesses? Wherever I look, I see the absence of the comprehensive, integrative effort in mainstream attitudes. Qualitative and quantitative analyses compete, instead of supplementing each other. Interpretation and understanding compete with ‘scientific’ explanation instead of appearing as branches of the same effort to gain insight into a subject matter. Causal accounts do away with teleological accounts instead of being applicable side by side as were my efficient and final cause. Finality or, in more modern terms, purposiveness, recedes or vanishes from the analytic gaze, even where it helps understanding as in history and psychology. Where is the effort to rethink purposiveness in order to adapt it to the conditions of your world?

The soul and its roles

This is where I think you miss out most by having abandoned or simply lost the motives and values behind my thinking.

Why did I introduce the threefold hierarchy of soul-faculties – vegetative, animal, and specifically human? It was not only to establish in us a hierarchy of values? Take the lowest of my faculties: the nutritive and reproductive soul. It is, in my view, the life-conferring active element in us. It is the vegetative form that gives life and corporeal form to each individual as it is becoming, be it plant or animal. It is also the constant drive to maintain us against the forces of disintegration. Is our homogeneity with the animal world not well suited to be supplemented by Darwin’s idea of evolution, still far from my horizon at my time? You will object that evolution does not know of a vegetative soul and that modern science explains our becoming without having recourse to something like a soul. But does it? I thought of the soul as forming form, and had nothing to attach it to. Modern science has discovered the genetic underpinning of our formative being. Ultimately “soul” is just a term. Does the genetic program in us not the job I ascribe to the soul? It steers our growth and our becoming as it steers our constant renewal. Our immune system defends our integrity against intruders that threaten that integrity. The active soul I conceived of is the core of self-forming life. In my language, “self-forming” is “auto-poetic.” And it is a source of deep satisfaction to me that ‘auto-poesis’ has been taken up by some present-day scientists as basic trait of life. When genetically steered reproduction and self-preservation is in place, then we have forms that give their form to themselves, from the inside of the programs they transmit and recompose in the changes of generation. Couldn’t even evolution be called ‘autopoetic?’ If, as the theory claims, evolutionary changes are random, then the potential for random change and the emergence of new forms of life is also an inherent self-transformative capacity of life.

Ethics and the rational soul

Looking at you from the realm of shadows I cannot help pitying you. You lead pitiful lives, undignified lives, lives of self-enslavement. You have shrunk and split the role and function of the rational soul, basically depriving your souls from pursuing the value I value most: mastery. This is why reason occupies the highest place in my hierarchy of functions. No, mastery for you and mastery for me are not the same thing. You want to be masters of the world and, perhaps of your fellow men, for a purpose. Your mastery is control of others and availability of means in the pursuit of your desires. Mastery is a means. I think you even exploit yourselves in the pursuit of wealth and standing. Ultimately, the scope of your desire to mastery is the world. Your interest is in power. This is at least the attitude I detect in your culture, even if you do not personally adopt it, you will be its user and you will benefit from it. You think of morality as a constraint, something that limits you in the pursuit of your desires an interest, something that limits the use of power. I think of ethics as guiding me to the right kind of self-realization.

The mastery I have in mind is of a very different kind. It is, before all, self-mastery, not mastery over others and the world. Where it meets the world and fellow human beings it is interested primarily in their self-mastery, and not in my being their masters. I admit that mastery of the world may just not be an issue for my age, because we felt surrounded by superior powers, powers we would be unable to master. Our destinies appeared to us as precarious, depending on chance. As a consequence, we focused on ourselves as the realm over which we had a chance to gain mastery. Often, it looked more important to us to muster the strength of dealing with something that happened to us than to gain the tools to get what we desired.

That said, mastery in this limited sense – self-mastery first, mastery of fellow beings next, the right kind of political order that would favor as well as practice mastery in that sense, these are the highest values for me. They rank above pleasure, the possession of mundane goods, upon reflection higher even than respect for the gods! I felt that we had a potential for excellence in us, and that our self-mastery was the choice and systematic pursuit of those excellences. In this way, we would build the right character, and become the best we can become. Do not think that these excellences just concern one’s own life. They include civic excellences. But they also include the political order. Here, participation and competition for ‘the best’ are the excellences to be pursued.

Let me adopt your language, in order to be more understandable. You do not think in terms of excellences and virtues. You think in terms of values. I try to translate some of my ideas on virtues into the language of values. Now you may find many of my values not to be central to your concerns, and others you are concerned with missing. I readily concede that, even though I think truthfulness, justice, courage and practical wisdom are values that are worthwhile pursuing everywhere. Feel free, to add or subtract, for example compassion and consideration for others; care for others and benevolence towards others; charity and generosity; willingness to cooperate and to be a good neighbor. Virtues or values will change with the times and the culture. My concern is not with specific values, but with the attitude towards value. Ethical values should be values that are chosen and pursued for their own sake. They are meant to be the terms in which I define what makes me and others ‘good people.’ I have probably overemphasized the idea that specific values belong to our nature. What looks more important to me today is the fact that values are chosen, pursued, and that the activities they orient be done for the sake of this values, and not for further goals. The choice of highest moral values is the first act of mastery. The rational soul does two things here. It is that through which I select my values. What shall I adopt as that which defines my own value and the value of my life? Here, the rational soul is involved at the choosing side. But it is also at the receiving end. For it receives the form of the values through which I define my worth. Here you find the first expression of my idea of self-mastery: I am the master of myself by giving to myself the goals that define my value and the value of my life. So, if I am the agent in all this, then I take care of myself, and of my soul, in choosing my basic values. To not do this, is not to care about my soul, and let it go wherever it may tend.

Self-mastery continues at the next stage. The rational faculty of the soul is not the only citizen in the polis of the soul. Desires, affects, and appetites are also there. How does this bundle of often-conflicting tendencies get organized? I think that the rational soul has a specific function here. Again: it is not the function of the tyrant ruling through orders and overwhelming power. It is rather the function of an authority recognized by the other functions, but also with great persuasive, and occasionally, at the limits, coercive functions towards them. There is something like an internal politics that plays between values, appetites, feelings and desires. The whole needs to be brought into a coherence that allows the highest values to be realized in the best possible way, while also serving the aspirations of the others. Self-mastery is the work at my character in such a way that I become, as it were, the work of my own craft. And, once more, the soul is at both ends: it is something through which I take care of myself, and it is my work as good or right character. Finally, the procedure of reaching decisions and actions is, another piece of the self-mastery. The openness of that process in the play between values and negative values, virtues and vices lets me achieve two things at the same time: I impose on myself and my activity the values I choose. And I determine the activity that counts as realization of my values. I am a subordinate by self-subjection, and a master in the determination. Both at the same time.

I think that this is a way of giving dignity and worth to our lives, and that it is superior to lives that pursue their well-being or let their rules be prescribed to them by their environment or their faith.