Book VI continues with an examination of science and art. We'll get through two chapters again today.
Let us begin, then, from the beginning, and discuss these states once more.
"These states" being what we develop out of our sensation, reason, and desire: the states in ourselves that are connected to the truth we find in the world.
Let it be assumed that the states by virtue of which the soul possesses truth by way of affirmation or denial are five in number, i.e. art, scientific knowledge, practical wisdom, philosophic wisdom, intuitive reason; we do not include judgement and opinion because in these we may be mistaken.
It's easy to miss that this implies that truth is necessarily connected to wisdom and intuitive reason. We expect it to be connected to scientific knowledge, the first state he will examine, but not necessarily so: we are used to science being mistaken to a certain degree. That is because our science is experimental. Aristotle's was connected with the apprehension of a Form, which guarantees thing coming to be "always or for the most part."
Now what scientific knowledge is, if we are to speak exactly and not follow mere similarities, is plain from what follows. We all suppose that what we know is not even capable of being otherwise; of things capable of being otherwise we do not know, when they have passed outside our observation, whether they exist or not. Therefore the object of scientific knowledge is of necessity. Therefore it is eternal; for things that are of necessity in the unqualified sense are all eternal; and things that are eternal are ungenerated and imperishable.
The classic example is astronomy, the stars being thought at the time to have been ungenerated and eternal, as well as more necessary than we now think that they are. In Aristotle's time, the motions of the stars had been known for generations and generations, and had not changed. Now we know that stars also have a life cycle, and can change for several reasons.
Mathematics is a purer example. The Forms of points and lines, the postulates and axioms and theorems, that were formulated by Euclid (c. 300) in the generation after Aristotle (384-322) persisted until the 19th century. Though Euclid had not formulated his work in Aristotle's time, the basics of geometry had existed since Pythagoras (570-495) as major entities of Greek thought, and had pre-existed ancient Greece in places like Babylon by perhaps 1,500 years. (All those dates are B.C., and thus reversed in order; lower numbers are later.) You can see how they might be thought to be eternal and ungenerated; indeed, philosophers of mathematics even today argue as to whether or to what degree mathematical truth is created by our conventions about how to handle mathematics, or alternatively are indeed basic features of the reality we inhabit.
Again, every science is thought to be capable of being taught, and its object of being learned. And all teaching starts from what is already known, as we maintain in the Analytics also; for it proceeds sometimes through induction and sometimes by syllogism. Now induction is the starting-point which knowledge even of the universal presupposes, while syllogism proceeds from universals.
Syllogism is analytic in the sense that it is merely breaking down what you know to see what else you already know; it is not a process of learning but of realization. The classic example:
A) All men are mortal.
B) Socrates is a man.
C) Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
We haven't, in the conclusion, learned anything new. We have simply realized that we knew something about Socrates we had not perhaps come to realize before.
Induction is a problem. However, it seems to be indispensable pragmatically, and it works reasonably well most of the time. If we are adequately random in our selection of examples, it is mostly reliable. Still, it is striking to see it here considered a reliable road to true universals from which syllogism would then be possible. That is, it turns out, unfairly optimistic as a view of what scientific knowledge can do in practical fields to include physics and chemistry; but the closer you get to true math, the better it works. In mathematics and strict logic, where the objects of knowledge are indeed true universals, induction is reliable within its proper guardrails.
There are therefore starting-points from which syllogism proceeds, which are not reached by syllogism; it is therefore by induction that they are acquired. Scientific knowledge is, then, a state of capacity to demonstrate, and has the other limiting characteristics which we specify in the Analytics, for it is when a man believes in a certain way and the starting-points are known to him that he has scientific knowledge, since if they are not better known to him than the conclusion, he will have his knowledge only incidentally.
Let this, then, be taken as our account of scientific knowledge.
The account is of a kind of knowledge much more limited than what we take science to be, but more certain. Yet even in scientific knowledge, we are now aware of yawning gaps beneath our feet.
4
In the variable are included both things made and things done; making and acting are different (for their nature we treat even the discussions outside our school as reliable); so that the reasoned state of capacity to act is different from the reasoned state of capacity to make. Hence too they are not included one in the other; for neither is acting making nor is making acting.
This rather artificial distinction could use some examples to flesh it out, as it seems debatable as phrased.
Now since architecture is an art and is essentially a reasoned state of capacity to make, and there is neither any art that is not such a state nor any such state that is not an art, art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning.
Emphasis added as always in this commentary. This is a better example today than even in Aristotle's time. We have in Abstract Expressionism a kind of making as close as possible to unreasoning making, things like Jackson Pollock that are almost random in drip-patterns of paint. Yet even there we can discern that reasoning took place about what to do and how to do it. Art is, then, necessarily involving of a course of reasoning that is rightly connected to the truth as logic is truth-preserving when it is soundly constructed.
All art is concerned with coming into being, i.e. with contriving and considering how something may come into being which is capable of either being or not being, and whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made; for art is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being, by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature (since these have their origin in themselves).
There is horse-breeding, though, which seems to be an art that applies itself to things that come to be in accordance with nature. We long ago became capable of line-breeding horses for desirable traits, for example fitness to bear saddles and gaps in the teeth that allowed for bits; we therefore in a sense made horses into what they are. Likewise horse-training, in which we and not nature brought out their courage: we, indeed, clothed their necks with thunder. Aristotle does not consider this, in spite of his close attention to biology. Xenophon knew it, however; he also wrote a famous early treatise on horsemanship.
Making and acting being different, art must be a matter of making, not of acting. And in a sense chance and art are concerned with the same objects; as Agathon says, 'art loves chance and chance loves art'. Art, then, as has been is a state concerned with making, involving a true course of reasoning, and lack of art on the contrary is a state concerned with making, involving a false course of reasoning; both are concerned with the variable.
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