Ep. 335: Aristotle on Fundamental Explanations (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life, episode 335, our first take on Aristotle's metaphysics. I believe we're in book one and have just finished chapters one and two. We read up at least through seven, plus there's a very short book two that we also read, so let's get going. After three, he at least brings up, you know, this is not his introduction of it, the four causes. Should I give the Sachs version?

0:36 Wes: Yeah, yeah, go for it.

0:38 Mark: Since it is clear that one must take hold of a knowledge of the causes that originate things, since that is when we say we know each thing, when we think we know its first cause. While the causes are meant in four ways, one of which is thinghood, or what it is for something to be, since the why leads back to the ultimate reasoned account. And the first why is a cause and source. Another is the material of underlying things. A third is that from which the source of motion is. And the fourth is the cause opposite to that one, that for the sake of which or the good, since it is the completion of every coming into being and motion, which have been sufficiently looked into by us in the writings about nature.

Still, let us take up also those who came before us in the inquiry about beings and philosophized about truth. Okay, so this is all just the introduction to. He's going to talk about a bunch of other philosophers. Those all look familiar except the first one, thinghood. What it is for something to be, which is the formal cause. Right. Whatever it is that determines that it's this thing and not another thing.

1:38 Wes: So thinghood is translating the word ousia, which is often translated substance. And the what it is to be. The toti is the essence, usually typically translated its essence or to ti estin is another phrase that Aristotle use a lot. Uses a lot, which is just treated as synonymous with and translated as essence. And he's putting the two together here because he's kind of foreshadowing one of the answers to his inquiry. As we get into the next recording, when we talk about book four, it's going to turn out that his inquiry into being, he's interested specifically in the concept of substance. And the answer to the question of substance is going to be essence. And on this, you know, in a way he's in agreement with Plato. There's these essences are the fundamental explanations of things. It's just that Plato wants to put them into these external forms in a different realm.

2:31 Dylan: So the ousia, the substance, the thing hood is accounted for by the what it is to be. When you say it that way, it verges on sounding tautological. Right. I say, well, what makes a thing a thing? Well, it's what it is to be.

2:47 Mark: It's a thingness that makes it a thing.

2:49 Dylan: It's the thingness that makes it a thing. I know that it's not exactly. And there are important points about parsing it out that way.

2:56 Wes: So we should point out that the concept of essence, of what it is to be, is kind of the real world, corresponds to the horismos, the definition. And it isn't the only candidate. So, right. Matter, he's going to go through some of the other possibilities. Matter is a pretty obvious candidate that the pre Socratic philosopher is focused on. You want to know what the substance of things is? It's matter. Or take his account in the categories, which we did. Did we do that last year? Forget when we did that. But his account. And is it really. Is it years ago?

And I'm thinking it's way longer ago than that. The account in the categories is just that it's like a substance attribute. It looks like a very much like a substance attribute type of metaphysics. Properties of things, or the attributes of things are dependent entities. They can be predicated of this underlying subject or substrate, but the substrate itself, the underlying subject, is substance, just in the sense that it cannot be predicated of anything else. So that was Aristotle's answer in the categories, where actually his thinking has evolved at the point where he's writing the metaphysics, those two things are not simply correlated anymore.

And his picture looks a little bit more Platonic than it was in the categories.

4:15 Mark: Yeah, so that's where he starts when he's talking about other philosophers, is those who gave material causes. Thales most famously, everything is water. And he goes through, yeah, this person said it was air, and this person said it was fire. He puts Heraclitus in the fire category. Even though our Eva Brann interpretation of Heraclitus put Her in the ratio, like the Pythagoreans, it seems, or some sort of combination.

4:39 Wes: What's funny is he's going to accuse Plato of being like a Heraclitean, a Parmenidean and a Pythagorean. Those are all accusations that he levels at Plato. But anyway, he just goes through this,

4:52 Mark: you know, why would you. If there's only one substance and that's the only cause, why would anything happen?

4:59 Seth: Right.

4:59 Mark: Oh, so we got to introduce two substances. So even Parmenides famously, oh, there's only the one. It's unchanging. That's the world as it is in itself. But the world as we perceive it, it's got two opposing, for it has light and dark. That you at least need two things battling against each other. But as good scientists, we can probably figure out two forces that just act in opposite. Like how could that actually explain like the intricacies of motions that we see? Again, it's just saying, well, one is operating here and not there. There's a ratio of the strength of the two in this area.

And sort of trying to get, you know, like everything would be zeros and ones or something. Like maybe there is a coherent way to chase this down and say that oh, there are two fundamental forces and just the combinations of those things and how they affect each other and can explain the entire macroscopic world. I don't think Aristotle buys that.

5:52 Wes: It sounds like we've jumped past the four causes here.

5:55 Dylan: He's gone into the materialistic theories, we can come back to it. I don't know that the material causes that they're being thought of as forces. When you talk about light and dark, I didn't get them as forces, but as substances. Maybe light and dark, maybe they're forces of two different kinds.

6:14 Wes: He'll present the materialist theories and then he's going to say, but hey, where does the motion come from? How do we.

6:18 Dylan: Exactly.

6:19 Wes: And then he's going to talk about people like Anaxagoras or whoever it was, strife and all that stuff. So. But yeah, we should do the four causes.

6:26 Dylan: It's a reply to materialism, is that you have opposites of one another that amount to being forced as good versus bad and stuff like that.

6:36 Wes: Well, those are add ons. Those are ad hoc add ons to the theories.

6:40 Seth: Yeah, let's get through. Just enumerate the four causes first because the critique he's going to make of all those various things makes a lot more sense if you take into account that he's Got this in mind ahead of time. So, okay, there's the knowledge of the cause that originates things. So of things that you can know as the first cause.

6:59 Mark: That sounds like all of them, frankly.

7:02 Wes: We're unnumbered. Cause number two, which is the matter.

7:05 Seth: This is the preamble to that I was going to try to enumerate. There's four causes. Can be meant in four ways. Thinghood, which we just talked about. Substance and. Or essence, the material cause. Then there's the source of motion, as he calls it, or change. I read that as being and becoming. Or change. I don't know if that's right. And then there's what the Sachs translation calls the good, which I struggled with, but I came to an understanding as like, essentially things being created, beautiful or ugly, good or bad, essentially, none of the other causes can account for normative. I don't even know if that's a judgment. Thing is the.

7:47 Wes: That for the sake of which. It's like seeing eyes. The final cause explanation of an eye is seeing. It's functional explanation.

7:55 Seth: Functional.

7:56 Dylan: Or if you said final cause, that's what you would be referring to.

7:59 Seth: Okay.

7:59 Wes: Yeah. So the final cause is the. That for the sake of which. Which Aristotle repeatedly identifies with two things. One is the good, and then the other is telos. So the end. So this is his. The fourth cause is his teleological cause.

8:13 Dylan: And both words are there in the Sachs. Yes, both the words. The forsake of which. Or the good and the end, the purpose and the good.

8:23 Wes: He repeatedly. We shove all those things together that for the sake of which the telos and the good. Which you can see why. Right. You know, how do we explain what an eye is? Well, it's for the sake of seeing. It's telos. Right. Developmentally, the end towards which this particular organ has grown is when it reaches completion of its coming to be. That's what it is. It is that seeing thing. And the good of the eye is seeing. Right. We think it's not a good thing if the eye is damaged and we can't see.

8:56 Dylan: So we've got.

8:58 Seth: What is it? Final, efficient. What are the four causes?

9:02 Wes: Formal, material, efficient, and final.

9:06 Mark: Yep.

9:07 Seth: Okay. I think I know what material is. We just went through final teleological. Which one's efficient and which one's formal?

9:13 Mark: Yeah. Efficient is motion. You know, it's like there must have been an original billiard ball that hit all the other billiard balls. Or the original domino, let's say.

9:22 Wes: That's why we should pause on these.

9:24 Seth: Because we're aggravating west.

9:25 Wes: Well, the Routledge lays it out very clearly because it becomes a bit misleading. So in the case of the material cause, I think the way listeners should think of this is Aristotle is thinking a lot about biology and a lot about things being born and growing and, you know, growing to completion. So the Routledge guide encourages us to think of matter as the that out of which things come to be, which will turn out to be much more like a seed than, say, bronze. In a way, the whole bronze is the matter of a sphere. Example turns out to be very misleading, which we could talk about in more detail. And then in the case of the efficient cause, it's not just billiard balls knocking against each other, the efficient cause, it's essentially a parent.

10:13 Dylan: It's the source of motion.

10:14 Wes: It's the source of the motion, but in particular it's how does the form get imprinted on the new thing? So the causes can be more than one at once, right? So it's how does this form get. Use motion to put its form on a new form. So I would think of matter as the seed cause and the efficient cause is the parental. I always just think of it as the parental cause.

10:37 Dylan: It's a good clarification that brings the efficient cause into biology. But it's still your parents banging on each other are going to get you the child, right?

10:47 Wes: It's like form transfer, right? It's the motion, it's the source of change, but it's a source of change that is formal, right? It's the way the form gets into

10:59 Dylan: the matter and the way the form changes.

11:02 Seth: You're not going to believe this. I'm embarrassed almost to say that that was an incredibly helpful clarification because I don't know what it is in my head that I have been thinking of the term formal. Not when you said imprints the form. I was thinking formal, like, you know,

11:21 Mark: versus the fancy clause.

11:23 Wes: Yes.

11:24 Seth: Something. Not that. So now that his discussion later on, which we won't have time to get to today, I don't think he goes on about like, what participation in the form could actually mean. The way you explain it, Wes, if you've got this structure of, you know, there's the efficient cause, there's a material cause or the material out of which. And that somehow the efficient and the material cause, or the efficient cause imprints the form on the material. Right? And ultimately does so for the purposes of teleological seeing that. Now that makes a lot of sense, particularly in that sort of semi biological Metaphor.

But it also explains why he kind of goes off on like, what the hell could participation in the form actually mean? In the section where he's talking about Platonic forms is what does that actually look like? And what would that actually mean? Again, in the context of this, he feels like maybe he's got a richer explanation.

12:19 Wes: Empty poetical talk.

12:22 Seth: Yes.

12:22 Dylan: Your observation about formal cause is one that I remember having the same kind of epiphany. Oh, now I understand why it's also called material. But the same thing is for efficient cause.

12:34 Mark: Wait, it's not. It's not. Cause material is a different one. Right.

12:38 Wes: So the formal cause is the essence is the first one. It gets confusing because in a way, the efficient cause sounds like the formal cause because it's the form transfer cause. It's what puts the form into the matter. It's the source of motion, I think. Or the starting point of movement is another. That's a literal translation. The way he puts it, the formal

12:58 Dylan: cause is the starting point of movement.

13:00 Wes: Yeah. So what explains how something comes to have the form that it does?

13:06 Dylan: That's its thinghood.

13:07 Wes: Yeah. I mean, ultimately, if we think about where we're going with this and being at work, being itself, he's going to do something ingenious. The becoming is the big puzzle for these guys. Change is the big puzzle. And Aristotle's going to say, actually, I can show you how being and becoming are not just in conflict. I'm going to show you how becoming serves the purpose of being. We need activity. You're going to see this critique repeatedly in the Metaphysics. We can't get anywhere without motion. We need activity. We need motion. And we need it even to explain persistence. We need it to explain what looks static, cannot be explained without some underlying dynamic system. Without motion.

13:47 Mark: Sounds a little like Eva Brann's Heraclitus, that you need the tension, you need the dynamism of the system to keep it. Or is that still is tension of the taut bow that actually does not imply motion? Am I taking that too literally?

14:01 Wes: Well, I mean, Heraclitus, right, famously thought everything was in flux.

14:04 Dylan: Sure.

14:05 Wes: But yeah, and it's just what you do with the flux, Right. Do you say the forms are out here or are the forms imminent, as people often will say? Aristotle wants to say they are. Or can you say something about the flux, that, hey, the flux is actually integral in producing form. Form is a product of motion and not just antithetical to it.

14:24 Mark: The form matter distinction, I always remember vividly for Aristotle because of his most hilarious wrong biological theory, which does come up in our reading, not until chapter six, but just the idea that when the male seed enters the female womb, the womb is just providing material, it's just giving, here's some cells. And then the sperm has the entire blueprint. All the genetic material is coming from the sperm. So the sperm is the act was the efficient cause. But then the form is the blueprint that's in the sperm and the womb has the matter.

15:01 Dylan: The hyle.

15:02 Wes: I think we can leave off there's a discussion in the religion about matter's potentiality and the very sophisticated discussion of what matter is. But I think we're going to get to that later in Aristotle anyway. And so that could probably wait and we could do these his objections to these various materialistic theories.

15:20 Mark: I mean, I thought I summed it up, which is that material does not make itself change. For instance, he says the bronze does not make a statue. So in a sense the bronze is the cause of the statue being the way it is in that, you know, it has a particular material constitution. But it is clearly not enough bronze lying around to just spring into becoming a statue. We need more than that. So these philosophers who thought everything is water, that explains everything, it's just, no, that's not enough of an explanation.

15:55 Wes: So these philosophers, right, they are doing something very natural, which is they're saying, well, the substance of things, you know, if we're thinking about that as an underlying subject of which different properties might inherent at different times. And that explains change, right? The properties stick to the underlying substance and things change. And you know, so what persists? Well, air, water, fire and earth or atoms are the things that persist and everything else is in motion. So ultimately stability is kind of hidden, right? It produces a macro level appearance of some stability because we aren't just seeing change, we're seeing a dog and we're seeing the dog stay a dog and all that stuff.

In other words, these are my logical explanations or these are explanations that look at parts and wholes and try to explain the wholes in terms of the parts. We think, okay, let's just look at the composition of things and that's going to tell us what we need to know.

16:52 Dylan: But isn't there also when you make a move like everything is water, you're going to a universality to simplifying things down into a one thing. And there's still the criticism there that. I mean, isn't Aristotle effectively saying, you have the right instinct, right? We want to get to something Universal, but it's not satisfactory for the following reasons. It's leaving out key things that need to be part of our explanations. In that I'm trying to understand the world, trying to figure things out. There are too many things that aren't figured out.

17:30 Wes: Yeah, I mean, we have to explain how other things are derivative of these different elements. And there's a qualitative problem. The whole is greater than the parts. You know, I brought that up before. If we're all made of earth, we don't actually. That's the one that most people don't use. But if we're all ultimately water, well, we don't all just look like water. So where do we get the emergence? Yep, it's the same problem for modern science. I mean, it's not a problem that goes away.

17:55 Mark: But do you say I'm made of atoms? Do I look like an atom to you?

18:00 Wes: But yeah. So as Mark was saying, all of these materialistic theories leave out the cause of change. So where do we get our motion from? I mean, you could say fire produces motion, which Aristotle says that was one of the solutions that people tried to come up with. But the thing that he ends on is even if you could somehow say. And modern science would say that. Modern science would say, yeah, actually we would call the elements and the atoms and all the other stuff. It does include motion. The motion principle is there down at the microstructural level that swerve. Aristotle will say, even if you could do that, what about the apparent order? So how does that give rise? Right. It's fine to have motion at the microstructural level. Why would that give rise to stable entities of certain kinds? In other words, why does it look like intelligent design? Let's just put it that way.

18:47 Seth: Why is it not completely random?

18:49 Wes: How do you explain that? That's the way he ends this critique of the materialist theories? I think so. He'll say, let's just say fire produces motion. Okay, I'm a materialist, got the elements. Well then how do you produce all the apparent teleology and biological natural kinds, quote unquote, the good or noble state of some beings? That's what Aristotle means by that. How do you explain the growth and development towards this pre planned and defined end? Aristotle will say, it doesn't seem like it could be mere luck. He uses this word, luck. If you guys remember from Lucretius reading, there's a very natural selection like account in there.

Because Lucretius wants to say he's a materialist. As well. It's all atoms, right? This is sourced in Epicurus, but it's all these invisible atoms. They're just geometrical, why would they ever produce any order? Basically, Lucretius's explanation is that, well, if you just. It's like monkeys with the typewriters, right? If you just jumble up things enough randomly, eventually they're going to produce these self replicating forms and then you're off to the races because it's self replication, but basically it has to be luck, and that's what Aristotle doesn't like.

19:53 Seth: So then in the section where he's talking about, to get back to Mark's comment from the last episode, or maybe it was earlier, this one, I can't remember, then he talks about the people who have the idea of the opposites to generate motion. So the idea that there's some sort of dynamic tension between light and dark, sky and earth, whatever, odd and even,

20:19 Dylan: right and left, still unmoving, right?

20:22 Seth: He says you can pick your material substrate, you can call it earth, fire, water, whatever you want underneath this, but these substances are in conflict with each other. And he makes a reference to Hesiod saying there's some legitimacy there, because if Hesiod said it, then we have to at least acknowledge it. But ultimately, even if you account for motion using substance in combination with the material, it still doesn't answer the same objection, right? There's still the same objection with the pure materialist, which is why is there a stable set of replicable things that are generated by those forces?

And by the way, you still have to answer the question, which forces? Is it one set of opposites? Is it 10 essential ones? Is it? And then you have to come up with some kind of an account of, well, how do they come into complex formulation with each other to do all this stuff? And it's still not going to give you the account. It's still not going to be able to answer the question you need answered.

21:19 Wes: Yeah, he starts out section four basically with that teleological worry, the good what's the cause of the good and noble state. Even if you say there's motion in things and what's the arche, what's the principle? And then you get Hesiod and Parmenides positing Eros and then strife with Empedocles, because we need to account for bad and ugly things too, right? It's not all just. Universe isn't just all shits and giggles. It's not all just order and form. But anyway, he talks about Anaxagoras as introducing intelligence. Basically, it's like Anaxagoras is an intelligent design theorist, it sounds like, and that he calls a deus ex machina.

So I think the overall critique here is that this is really ad hoc. You're just going to come up with these kind of ad hoc explanations for why things are ordered the way they are. You're going to say, okay, there's attraction, there's repulsion, there's this that. But that doesn't really do the trick of telling us why. And of course it doesn't, because you need some concept of evolution if you really wanted to understand it. Right. You can't just say, oh, it's attraction, repulsion, things cling together. Voila. A cat. No, cat is a functional organism.

You can't explain functionality in that way.

22:30 Mark: I recall at one point we were pitched, or I discovered or something, somebody had written a book on Anaxagoras whose writings do not persist. And I feel like we should pursue this more because maybe he has an element that's in Plato, that's not an Aristotle. It's not just that he's an intelligent design theorist. It is that instead of water being the one element, mind is the one element. So he's more Spinoza. He's more the first idealist, maybe. I don't know if that helps. Like, it certainly seems less gimmicky than why is there so much order in the universe? Well, because somebody wanted it there. No, no, it's because the stuff itself is mind stuff, and so it organizes itself intelligently. Both of those are pretty mystical sounding.

23:19 Wes: No, no, good point, good point. I was being. Yeah, I was mischaracterizing him.

23:23 Dylan: Well, you're characterizing the way Aristotle characterized him.

23:25 Wes: Right, right. He goes into Leucippus and Democritus a bit in section four. And it's a really weird. Because we don't get the word Adam. I'm like, you know, yeah, where are the atomists? What do you have to say about the atomists? Aristotle. Doesn't that sound good to you? But he just talks about the full and the slash, solid and the void.

23:46 Mark: Is that just the translation that. Is he really avoiding the word that is normally translated as atom? Or is the word translated Adam being translated as.

23:54 Wes: No, it's not being translated as full. The full and the void are supposed to give rise to beings through. Basically, he talks about shape and order and position. It does sound vaguely like Epicurus and Lucretius as well, which is that, as we would expect, why do things have the properties they do at the level that we experience them. Well, there are these invisible atoms and through their ordering and positioning, they account for these emergent phenomena as we experience them. He's going to make the same accusation here again of them not telling us where the movement comes from.

If you remember in Lucretius, I think everything just falls in Lucretius. And then there's the swerve, which is critical because nothing is going to start sticking together unless you have a swerve. But what's crucial here is that, yeah, these are not dynamic atoms. These are not atoms with motion in them. And Aristotle's right to think if dynamism is not built in at this level, then we have a problem.

24:49 Mark: We're in chapter four, right?

24:51 Wes: That's at the very end of section four. Yeah.

24:54 Mark: I had a note here, just that he mentions that why would we think there's the final cause, the good that for the sake of which aren't there bad things too? So we have a sort of theodicy of the only real causation is something that is trying to bring things together. But anyway, some of these philosophers, right, Hesiod is one of them here. Yes, strife. So there is the dark force of entropy and ripping things apart or something that is counteracting love. And I don't know that I make the strong division between. When I sort of raised this prematurely, Dylan, you were saying, oh no, there's just two substances, at least for some of these before we got to love and strife.

But it seems like all these guys that if there's only one substance, it seems like it's a substance with built in motion. What Wes was just referring to is the atoms that don't have built in motion. That was sort of the exception because all these philosophers recognized if you just describe stuff then you're not describing change at all. So you describe the stuff as having

25:58 Dylan: a character, as of a character of change itself.

26:00 Mark: Yes. So saying something is a material thing and saying something is a force. I just don't know that these guys make the distinction.

26:07 Wes: But what if there is no change? Sorry, that's a good segue into Section 5 and Parmenides. Actually, no, that's Pythagoreans related unchanging numbers. What if everything is just numbers? In section five he's going to take on the Pythagoreans, the math people, the math nerds, of whom Plato apparently is one of them.

26:30 Dylan: He thinks isn't there that you have to have. What's the saying above the door? You Know you have to know geometry before you show up at our school.

26:40 Wes: But he's gonna, weirdly, later on in section nine, which I don't think we're gonna talk about, but because he has a description of Plato as thinking the forms are numbers, which is not something we ever see in the dialogues. So weird.

26:51 Dylan: Yeah.

26:51 Wes: And then critiquing that, and it's a very complicated critique.

26:54 Mark: We tried to, in a close reads recently, you know, tried to. What does he actually say about the forms? Like, does he have a theory of forms? And at least according to Sachs here, like, there is no theory of forms in the dialogues. Like, there's teasers. Think about this as a problem, but that supposedly there was a theory of forms that was taught in Plato's school and this is what Aristotle is reacting to. So it's very weird. Like, we think we've done plenty of Plato to know what the forms are, but actually we're getting something new and much more concrete from Aristotle's take on it.

27:25 Wes: So the Pythagoreans will say numbers are primary. They're good candidates for being the elements of everything, the first principles.

27:34 Dylan: Yeah. It's worth pointing out that things like harmony or the ratios between things that. A little bit like Heraclitus, where you have the tension in the bow which is born out of the relationship between two things and it's that relation that matters. That's also going to be true for the Pythagoreans. It's not just numbers. When we think of, oh, there's a number, the whole number. It's the relationships between them.

27:58 Wes: Yeah. And those can stay the same through change. Yes. Right. So this is a very intuitive idea that they're onto. And it is, of course, at play in modern science. Modern science, we are saying to some extent that we're not saying things are numbers, but math is very important.

28:11 Dylan: Where we're saying the world is numberable. That's straight up Galileo.

28:15 Wes: Right.

28:16 Mark: It fits patterns, scientific laws. You know, force equals mass times acceleration or whatever. Your favorite law is that these are ratios.

28:23 Dylan: That's all a way of saying it's numberable. Right, Right.

28:25 Wes: But also that's a more complex form of ratio, which is the thing they're talking about here. So you can have something change, but the ratio between its parts stay the same. So if you're confused and you say, how are things changing at the same time? Numbers as a really attractive candidate because they can tell you that maybe it's certain ratios staying the same have something to do with the being of this world that is otherwise in flux.

28:51 Dylan: Yeah. I just want to make a point that what you're talking about there is something that you lose when you turn ratios into fractions. The harmonies that you get out of music that are based upon individual ratios that are in a dynamic relationship. You can have that ratio stay the same through change. That's something that's present in ratios that is not present when you turn it into its own new number.

29:17 Wes: So this idea that there are ratios and harmonies seem to be a basis for higher level attributes including the soul. He mentions the soul and understanding and justice. In a way numbers and ratios seem to do more justice to those things and to the world of being than to matter. He says they're even so. I love this line. They're so eager like to fit everything to their model. They had to add a tenth invisible planet. Right. Because they wanted these consistencies between whatever some numerical harmony reason so we just can't see it. It's like it's their version of noticing a gravitational perturbance that they can't explain. And so you know, saying okay, maybe there's another planet out there.

30:02 Dylan: Which is a great reason actually it's

30:04 Mark: where the cybermen live. That's the planet on the opposite side of the sun. That's doctor who's take on Aristotle. Just. All right.

30:12 Wes: I think next is the most people want to do more number stuff. The advocates of the one Parmenides.

30:17 Mark: I mean should we say why the numbers are wrong? That I mean just the fact that this doesn't show motion either. Right. Isn't that the main thing saying that numbers seem strangely inert just like strange straight matter. I mean was there something more to it critique than that? He says there are other problems with it. Like the idea of the units. Like how do the numbers relate to each other? What is the unit of a number? And so there's sort of ontological problems raised by making a number a thing. But I didn't completely understand those points.

30:48 Seth: Yeah, I thought there was. If you're thinking about the numbers kind of explaining the formal aspect and doing it in terms of ratios. You would have a number ratio which would be like human being and then two other somehow number ratios. That would be Mark and Seth as human beings and two legged.

31:07 Mark: Wasn't it like that every property becomes a ratio?

31:10 Seth: Yeah. You get this proliferation of ratios trying to. To explain the formal aspect of things. It was very confusing and very hard to understand.

31:19 Mark: I believe proliferation is the portmanteau. If you want to use that

31:25 Wes: some who proposed the elements of the universe had a singular nature quote, unquote, singular nature. I think he then tells us he's not going to actually go into much detail on this because they don't know how to deal with motion and say that the universe is not movable. So others have the sense to add the principle of motion to their scheme, but the Parmenides do not.

31:45 Mark: I feel like we can just refer, folks, to our excellent Parmenides episode where we discuss this very thing.

31:50 Wes: I mean, the basic idea is only the one exists, so everything seems diverse and in motion. But that's a phenomenological illusion underneath everything. It's all actually one. It looks that way in perception, but if we look at things just from the standpoint of reason, what we see is a completely static unity. In a way, it's a little bit like the Pythagoreanism thing, you know, with the ratio that stays the same. It's like that on steroids. So you just say there's a static principle that explains the whole world. And that is one thing. That's one principle, one element. And everything that phenomenologically seems to be becoming somehow comes out of that. It's like the ultimate unified theory, let's say.

32:40 Mark: What else do we need to mop up here?

32:42 Wes: Plato's forms is section six, where it starts into it, then there's a summary.

32:47 Mark: Can we sum up the issues? I mean, it's the same problems that Plato has with Plato's forms in the Parmenides, for instance, of like, well, what is this participation? How could a form that's just out there, even if it provides a blueprint of the thing, how could it actually do anything? You would need, as you said, the efficient cause to insert it. So. So I'm going to use forms, but that's not going to be my only. According to our editor here, one of the footnotes, I'm not finding it here, but was pointing to the Eleatic stranger defines form as potency.

Making the forms causes by ascribing life, motion and soul to them, making them a combination of motion and rest. So maybe that is like the Empedocles or whatever, like the other thinkers that believed in a material basis for things. Well, the material has some motion shot through it, at least on this part of Plato's presentation. Maybe he had the idea of motion shot through his forms as well. So the question is just for Aristotle, like, does he like that description? Aristotle seems to think putting the form in the thing specifically and not out in an otherworldly heaven actually helps you explain how it does what it does and why not everything has to have a form.

It's only things that are a being at work, that have a telos, that have an eternal purpose in this, that is what the form is. It's blueprint. So like something that has DNA. Whereas another footnote, I love the footnotes in the Sachs said you might think that like a bed has a form because when. Yeah, this is for. In section nine, a craftsman has a blueprint for a bed. And this is part of how Aristotle introduces or how Plato somebody introduces the idea of forms in this way. But that for Aristotle definitely that does not persist. He sort of kicks that example out.

It's only if the bed had its own internal blueprint and could self replicate, then it would have a form. So this saves us from two leggedness being a form and.

34:42 Wes: And mud. Right. If we remember in the Parmenides, Plato himself gives all the critiques one could ever want of the theory of forms in Parmenides and the whole concept of participation, Socrates rakes it. I mean, no, not well, Parmenides, the character Parmenides rakes it over the coals and Socrates can't do anything about it. But here there is again the problem of change in motion. And he represents Plato's theory as involving starting with the one. And the one somehow generates forms from the great and the small. So the matter in this or the thing that plays the role of the matter is the great and the small.

The one kind of seeds that and then generates the forms, and then the forms generate the perceptibles, generate physical objects. And Aristotle's going to say that doesn't work. And I think his argument here is not unrelated to one of the problems that we saw with German idealism, which is that you can talk about a transcendent, say transcendental ego, like a Fichtean ego all you want. But how do you produce contingency? How do you produce facts? Right? You can say there's all this formal stuff all you want. So for instance, having a form of dog that doesn't spit out little dogs, that doesn't tell you where they are in time and space, that doesn't tell you what they did with their lives, doesn't tell you anything.

It's just purely formal. I think that's his critique here. So they don't really generate multiplicity. And he uses the analogy of reproduction to try to intuitively convince us that you can't really just get materiality out of formality. You can't get contingency and matter out of form.

36:23 Mark: So I really did not understand this stuff about the dyad. In chapter six I have a quote. I don't have the line number Plato's like the Pythagoreans. But to have made a dyad in place of the infinite as one thing, to have made the infinite out of the great and small, was peculiar to Plato.

36:42 Wes: So the dyad is the great and small.

36:45 Mark: Is this the case of. This is the Plato's as it was taught in Plato's school.

36:49 Wes: We only learn of this through Aristotle. That's incredible.

36:52 Mark: Wasn't there some reference to the Symposium in here? You know, at least in a footnote about like, oh, that's where the dyad comes from is that motivating force of eros involves some sort of dyad and that's where we get motion out of form.

37:05 Seth: I thought the dyad was the one in the many.

37:07 Mark: That would make a lot of sense.

37:09 Wes: But here it's the great and the. I mean in this chapter he doesn't mention one in many.

37:13 Seth: Yeah, I don't even know what the great and small.

37:15 Mark: Yeah. What does the great and the small mean?

37:16 Wes: This.

37:16 Mark: Is this for all the knowledge of Plato?

37:18 Wes: Yeah, it's weird. It sounds weird. And when Aristotle talks about Plato he sounds really weird and mystical and the forms are numbers and it's just. Yeah. So apparently there's a whole like Plato club got really weird, but they didn't put it in the dialogues.

37:33 Seth: But I have this image, Wes, of Phil Hartman's caveman lawyer sketch from Saturday Night Live of Aristotle being. I'm just a simple caveman, but I can't understand how the many could participate in the one without being. Your ways confuse and frighten me. Your metaphysics confuses and frightens me.

37:57 Wes: I wonder if Aristotle had that faux humility at the academy driving everyone crazy.

38:03 Mark: I mean, I remember Plato having tried to be very concrete and so that talking about like, is the form of the hot itself hot. There's sort of the essence of hotness that is physically heating all the things. And so we don't want to say that the form. I don't remember what the solution to this was. Maybe Aristotle's just pointing out these, these problems. And this is maybe one of the things that, you know, Parmenides was bringing up in the dialogue against Socrates. Talking about the great and the small seems very on brand for Plato. Socrates, in trying to present.

It's not that the forms are like in this mystical heaven and we can only get at them through myth or something like that. No, it's the great and the small. You're pointing at the. I don't know. I can't make sense of this. You know, the great is outside the cave and the small is in the cave. The shadows are small. What does this all mean?

38:57 Dylan: The real key is that it's just missing the phrase all the creatures that would solve everything.

39:06 Mark: I got it. It's definitely all. All is wise and wonderful in this is explained by the metaphysics, by the final causes.

39:13 Wes: Before we end, I just want to say, in section seven, which is the last section of our reading, our official reading, he tells us that, you know, part of the reason for doing the survey is to see, are there any causes I didn't think of in the physics? And he says no, that none of them appealed to any other cause than the types I mentioned. They all had a material cause, like the elements, or the great and small, or the limited. Some people were worried about a cause of movement, an efficient cause, like with eros and strife and all that, or fire, although he doesn't mention that here.

And then he'll say they don't really do a good job of explaining essence of the. What it is to be, or ousia, the substance. And he'll say, Plato was the best. Plato did the best job at that because he makes forms, the essences of perceptible things. And, you know, we're going to see that he likes this idea of essence, and he doesn't make the mistake. He'll say here something that confuses me, which is that Plato does not make the mistake of trying to treat essence as matter, as the matter, the perceptibles, as the materialists do. And he doesn't say the forms are the starting points of movement in the same way that the materialists do with fire or eros or strife.

40:19 Mark: Because he's more like Parmenides, where the forms actually are. They couldn't cause movement because they are eternal and unchanging. And so it's actually only their intersection with the material changing, basically false phenomenal world that produces the appearance of change. Is that right? Am I just describing Plato as a parmenidean?

40:40 Wes: I don't know. Well, he's accused of being a parmenidean by Aristotle. So the final thing he has to say is that when they talk about the good, they screw it up, because he has a really interesting critique that they don't understand teleology. So if you say love or intelligence or understanding, causes the movement of things. That's not the same as saying that they are the forsake of which. So you would think it would be. But he's going to say, actually, really, you're just using them as efficient causes. You don't get this idea of a functional explanation, even if it seems like that's what you're deploying when you talk about, say, understanding.

41:22 Dylan: They're just another form of efficient cause.

41:24 Wes: Oh, that's Eros. It's for love. It moves things.

41:26 Dylan: But no, you're saying Eros moves things. That's not the forsake of which.

41:31 Mark: All right, let's wrap up. We're going to come back and talk about books, four and seven parts of them, unless we change our minds before we actually record next time and want to have more than three episodes here. But that's what the syllabus says, so that's what I'm going to start doing. I hope you enjoyed this. Hope you buckle down. There's more to come. I think if we can say it's three and then out, maybe people will be less likely to check out than if we say there's indefinitely many on this book.

42:03 Dylan: It gets pretty awesome.

42:05 Wes: Yeah. I don't know why we have to. We should savor this and.

42:09 Mark: All right.

42:09 Wes: Grok it well, completely.

42:12 Mark: Let's see how we're savoring. I feel better about it now than I did when I was reading it.

42:16 Wes: Let me put.

42:17 Dylan: Yeah, okay.

42:19 Seth: I'm gonna say my good night.

42:20 Mark: Yep.

42:21 Seth: Good night.

42:22 Dylan: Good night.