Thread by @deontologistics

While I’m experimenting with sincerity in the bath, it’s worth trying to say something sincerely nice about a thinker whose influence I spend a lot of time lambasting: Aristotle, the first to truly betray Plato, the one true Judas of the Socratic tradition.

First and foremost, after spending enough time talking to @benedict, amongst other things, I’ve come to the opinion that betrayal is an integral part of a well functioning intellectual ecosystem. There are many examples of betrayals and counter betrayals through the tradition.

The abstract logic of evolution through determination becomes computationally concrete in the form not simply of anti-thetical theories but systematic rivalries with various degrees of institutional structure, from competing individuals to warring research programs and beyond.

The commitments articulated by one generation display abstract promises and concrete failures, and often the only way for the next to have fidelity to the one is to rebel against the other, to return to an earlier fork in the road and take the path not travelled.

This is the history of rationalism and empiricism in the ‘Western’ philosophical tradition, less two modern tendencies synthesised by Kant than two perennial rebellions changing places with each temporary synthesis. I’m on team Plato, for the moment, but it wasn’t always thus.

I was influenced by Popper’s critical rationalism early on, but this inferential fallibilism is obviously indebted to the experiential skepticism of Hume, not to mention several centuries of productive epistemological warfare encoded in the (academic) structure of the sciences.

I was won over to team (superior) empiricism by Deleuze’s audacious anti-Heideggerian metaphysical project, but the slow realisation that his inversion of Platonism was better seen as a Platonist retort to Aristotle eventually brought me back into the (logico-mathematical) fold.

I’ve recently been explicitly tracing the history of Platonic counter-revolutions to Aristotelianism and the role of mathematics therein, but I’m here not to talk about these, but why anyone might want to be an Aristotelian in the first place. What will to betrayal lies herein?

Here are 5 solid points in Aristotle’s favour: 1) he systematises philosophical/scientific knowledge, 2) he formalises logic, 3) he stands up for becoming, 4) he stands up for sensibility, and 5) he grounds ethics/politics in concrete questions of individual/collective life.

1. There is a reason Aristotle's writings produced an audible sonic boom when they hit Europe after reimportation from the Islamic world. Here was a guy who wrote the handbook to the whole of reality and the human condition to boot. The systematicity is staggeringly impressive.

2. The reinforced skeleton of this system is the formalisation of propositions, syllogisms, terms, and categories. I often complain that these aren't taught to students, because much pre-C20 philosophy makes far more sense when you realise *everyone* was taught them.

3. This gives him the tools to take Plato's fairly dismissive treatment of the world of becoming to task, not simply performing the first inversion of Platonism (from secondary to primary substance), but articulating the project of physics in terms of temporality and persistence.

4. This goes hand in hand with a sophisticated epistemology of explanation that explicitly thematises the distinction between reality and appearance, disarticulating Plato's appeal to abstract universals, and providing an account of thought/sensation as situated in becoming.

5. Aristotle provides an account of the good life which, though it's as Socratic as Plato in privileging the auto-examined life, remains committed to a certain pragmatism: one must learn to live first, before one can learn to reflect on it, and then maybe realise this wisdom.

1-5 contain many storied biases, from logical limitations and normative naturalism to manifest metaphysics and literal slavery, but I think there's a worthy legacy there for some. I'll resist them tooth and nail, but no doubt be made a better thinker for it.

If there's one aspect of Aristotle's legacy I find most inspiring it is the thoroughly institutional nature of his betrayal. Given my many critiques of the current state of the Academy, I am constantly tempted to put on my boots and walk away, seeking some new Lyceum.

But even if I don't give into this temptation to exit the Academy, I can't resist the wanderlust it invokes: the peripatetic drive to walk from place to place, talking to whoever I find, learning from their experiences as much as my own. Socratic solidarity on the move. 🖖