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The Constitution of Logical Existences (Bergson, Reader of Aristotle)

Franklin Leopoldo e Silva
Traduction de Renata Takatu

Résumés

Cet article cherche à expliciter certains aspects de l’interprétation bergsonienne d'Aristote, principalement ceux qui font d'Aristote un éminent représentant de ce que Bergson appelle la philosophie des formes. La lecture de Bergson cherche à montrer qu’il n’y a pas de différence significative entre Aristote et Platon, dans la mesure où les deux sont attachés au fondement d’une connaissance basée sur l’ontologie immobiliste de Parménide. Ainsi, le cadre catégorial aristotélicien et le principe ontologique de la Forme des Formes, ou Forme Pure, cherchent à trouver une solution à l'aporie parménidienne en renvoyant l'immobilité à l'étrangeté logique de la connaissance, ou l'objectivité à la connaissance des existences dans leur aspect logique.

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  • 1 In the text “The Life and Work of Ravaisson” one of the objections Bergson makes to Ravaisson’s wor (...)

1Upon first reading, the identification that Bergson makes between Plato and Aristotle regarding the constitution of a universe of forms containing the principles of the world of becoming — and, ultimately, its truth — is surprising. But if we examine Bergson’s reading of Aristotle, we see that the historical vector that Bergson calls Philosophy of Forms retrieves an interpretation of the Platonic and Aristotelian Logos that justifies — at least from the point of view of the consequences for the knowledge of the reality of becoming — the “merely verbal” difference that Bergson believes exists between the two philosophers,1 regardless of Aristotle’s criticism of the doctrine of Ideas. The reference to the Parmenidean Logos is certainly the reason behind this identification. However, this is not without its problems, insofar as the Aristotelian project is usually defined, based on the texts, as an attempt to overcome the logical-metaphysical impasse bequeathed by the Parmenidean conception of being, by constituting a categorial knowledge that allows logical truth to be reconciled with the articulation of the real. How, from then on, can we justify a perspective which, by identifying Plato and Aristotle from the point of view of an immobilist ontology, refers them both to the common source of a philosophy which had assimilated every articulation to contradiction? On the other hand, is it not true that Aristotle criticizes the Platonic procedure of constituting logical existences as essential realities that are independent of the world of becoming? The point is that, by acknowledging this criticism and seeking to delimit its reach, Bergson will understand it as an introduction to another procedure of constituting logical existences, tributary to the same fundamental presuppositions.

2For Bergson, the Platonic presupposition of knowledge would be present in Aristotle as an analytical development of the immobilist logical foundation. In a sense, one could even say that the foundation appears in Aristotle in a more radical way, since he rejects the multiplicity of the World of Ideas in favor of a single source of ontological derivation, the Prime Mover — a consequence, perhaps, of the ultimate explanation of the cosmological function of the Idea of Good:

It is true that no one of the manifold concepts could exist apart, such as it is in the divine unity: in vain should we look for the ideas of Plato within the God of Aristotle. But if only we imagine the God of Aristotle in a sort of refraction of himself, or simply inclining toward the world, at once the Platonic Ideas are seen to pour themselves out of him, as if they were involved in the unity of his essence: so rays stream out from the sun, which nevertheless did not contain them (Bergson 1911, 322).

3Aristotle would have therefore criticized the Platonic procedure of constituting logical existences as an essential reality, but not logical essentiality in itself as the only philosophical option for constituting the foundation. He will then seek, through another procedure, to constitute another essentiality of the same tenor and which serves the same function. That is, the immovable, immutable, logical character of the foundation is still Aristotle’s aspiration in terms of constituting a doctrine of knowledge.

  • 2 “In this intuition we should see God expand in Ideas. This it is that does everything, playing in r (...)
  • 3 “Mais comment, chez l’homme, ces formes intelligibles pourront-elles actualiser l’intellect, alors (...)

4For Bergson, the founding character of immutability in the realm of science in Aristotle is manifested, above all, in the role of the active intellect — nous poietikos — which would encompass integral science, an object of a virtual intuition that the passive intellect realizes discursively, in the difficult and ever incomplete journey that goes from sensible multiplicity to the unique integrality of knowledge.2 Here, Bergson is certainly interpreting the famous De Anima passage in which Aristotle tries to solve the challenge of knowing something else through the intellect. Since every movement from potency to act requires a principle already in act, we would have to admit that there is an active principle promoting this movement when the intellect, which is potentially that which it will know, turns this knowledge into act. Aristotle says that what the mind thinks must be in it in the same way that letters are on a tablet that still contains no actual writing (Aristotle 1984a, 53). For actual knowledge to exist, the active intellect acts as the sun that actualizes potential colors, making the intellect identify with the object (Aristotle 1984a, 54). It is in this sense that Bergson seems to understand that the active intellect contains science, of which we could have a view if the nous poietikos were the object of the same conscience we have of the passive intellect. The latter, in fact, is totally indeterminate, a simple receptacle that “does not think for itself.”3 Thus, the appearance of intelligible forms would be something quite mysterious, since it cannot be due to the forms themselves, which do not actually exist yet. What remains is the hypothesis of a communication between the “formal” or active intellect and the forms virtually contained in sensible images. It is in this sense that Aristotle says that the active intellect makes the intelligible. These would be the object of total and instant view if this making did not take place according to the avatars of discursivity, once the contact with things, mediated by sensation and image, is affected by the passive intellect. The intelligible would all be condensed in the Form of Forms, that is, science would be ready in this divine intellect, hence Bergson’s metaphor of the “outpouring” of ideas, upon God’s inclination towards the World. To deny the individual reality of Ideas is also to deny the possibility of contemplation once the dialectical effort is over: what remains is the progressive re-editing or construction of divine knowledge.

5Once the founding principle of the world of becoming has been determined, the knowledge about things will be organized around this immutability/change relationship. Bergson believes he has found the key to this organization in a principle that was not explicitly formulated in ancient philosophy and that would guide all intellectual construction aimed at grasping the chain of things. “The affirmation of a reality implies the simultaneous affirmation of all the degrees of reality intermediate between it and nothing” (Bergson 1911, 323). The framework within which knowledge will develop is therefore designed in advance in terms of degrees of perfection. This means that science will necessarily be guided by the assumption that from the single and immutable principle to the various modes of sensible reality, the route is taken in terms of a diminishing or degradation of being. Sensitive determinations will soon find their proper place in this organization of knowledge: they will be many other ways in which being moves from determination to indetermination. The path, a priori, is traced between the maximum of being and pure nothingness. In between, the ways of grasping becoming will be organized, always moving from multiplicity to unity. Thus, the sensible determinations that are most immediately graspable by perception and even by the primary stages of intellectual knowledge will be the first and most powerful determinations for us in the order of discursiveness, and the intelligible determinations, which come last in relation to our cognitive apparatus, will be the first and most real in the order of being. Therefore, it is immediately a matter of referring the qualitative plurality of becoming to a set of fixed forms that provide reality with the necessary stability for intellectual grasping, without the problems that, according to Aristotle, would result in the ontological duplication of the Platonic solution. Thus, dividing and ordering reality will no longer occur according to transcendent paradigms, but established on a formal frame based, according to Bergson, on the Aristotelian belief in the natural adequacy between language and things, a belief that is, moreover, natural to human intelligence and that leads thought to end up being truly regulated by language. “Such is the first proceeding of our thought: it dissociates each change into two elements — the one stable, definable for each particular case, to wit, the Form; the other indefinable and always the same, Change in general. And such, also, is the essential operation of language. Forms are all that it is capable of expressing. It is reduced to taking as understood or is limited to suggesting a mobility which, just because it is always unexpressed, is thought to remain in all cases the same” (Bergson 1911, 326).

  • 4 “Above all one might discuss the question what on earth the Forms contribute to sensible things, ei (...)
  • 5 ‘‘In general, though philosophy seeks the cause of perceptible things, we have given this up (for w (...)
  • 6 “La réalité de l’individu ne se définit pas et ne se conçoit pas, sauf exception de l’individu supr (...)

6Therefore, the Aristotelian version of the Philosophy of Forms would remain strictly faithful to the eidetic character of knowledge. Regarding the Aristotelian critique of the World of Ideas, Bergson sees there only the replacement of Plato’s radical dualism by an immanent and ascending formal organization that preserves the principle of explaining change through the immutable. The rejection of radical dualism is well expressed in Aristotle’s critique. Ideas are unable to account for the substantiality of existing things, nor can they explain how things come to be.4 From Aristotle’s point of view, this means that Ideas do not fulfill the function of organizing the knowledge about things, as the mere position of other realities is not enough to explain the reality of the sensible world. Ideas do not provide the reason and the cause of phenomena that really exist. Through Ideas, we cannot reach any causal explanation that would allow us to grasp the coming-to-be of things.5 The essence of existing things cannot be detached from the things themselves: this difficulty seen by Aristotle in Plato will not cease to exist in his own doctrine. The difficulty of reaching individuals through concept continues to be the burden of the concept’s universality. If the primary substance is the individual, there is no way of reaching it through a concept that has, in the true sense of the expression, a substantial content. The essence that defines the individual’s being is the form that is common to all elements of the class to which it belongs; however, what individualizes it is matter, which Bergson characterizes as the undefinable in Aristotle’s thought, since it corresponds to the brute indeterminacy of change in general. For this reason, knowing the individual is not really knowing it as an individual substance, but knowing the substantiality that surrounds and determines it.6 Given that this determination stems from the universal—a precondition for science—the preconditions for this determination will have to be established with the necessary logical anteriority. Bergson does not seem to see in Aristotle’s immanence of forms an essential modification of the Platonic procedure. For him, the suppression of ontological anteriority is not something that deviates Aristotle’s thought from its Platonic nature. For this reason, he will see in the constitution of forms immanent to the sensible just another version of the logical foundation of reality. Could this mean that the sensible is necessarily subordinate to the means we have to express it?

  • 7 “And the attempts of some who discuss the terms on which truth should be accepted, are due to a wan (...)
  • 8 “De cette manière on pourrait dire sans doute que la nécessité logique est le transconcept qui corr (...)
  • 9 “La nécessité, qui est propre à la consécution des raisonnements peut bien être incomplète, en ce q (...)
  • 10 This is how Scholz interprets the passage from Posterior Analytics I, 2, 71 b 19 ss.: “If knowledge (...)

7Granger places the Analytics at the level of Aristotelian thought in order to clearly mark the anteriority of the problematics exposed there to the theoretical sciences. The fact that the Prior Analytics, for instance, never thematize the relation of real causality shows that we are not facing an ontological approach, science or art. Both the Prior Analytics and the theoretical sciences strive for universality, but in the first case, this “is not that of beings, object of science; it is trans-conceptual, not tied to any particular substance, and only relating to being insofar as this being is in the Dianoia, being as truth and falsity.” (Granger 1976, 104) This means that in Aristotle there is a need to previously establish a framework of notions and rules of procedure that guarantee the theoretical sciences a correct approach to the object. In this previous stage, thought is not concerned with being in its real manifestations, merely seeking the “production of valid reasoning.” “Prior Analytics describe the game of building conclusive reasoning in an abstract universe whose elements are terms, not beings” (Granger 1976, 104). In addition, Aristotle alerts us to the need to know these rules of the game (Granger’s expression) before approaching Physics or First Philosophy, theoretical sciences.7 There can therefore be no doubt about the propaedeutic nature of the analytics as well as the entire content of the Organon. Granger also highlights the fact that the study of the deductive necessity link is a precondition for understanding causal links in the theoretical sciences. Without this formal analogon of causality, we would not be able to determine with certainty the causal chain of the physical world.8 Likewise, the Posterior Analytics would be the study of the conditions of applying reasoning to theoretical objects, also participating in the propaedeutic nature of Logic. This system of preconditions is undoubtedly the field in which Bergson’s reflections—on what we could perhaps call, despite the apparent paradox, the natural conventionality of intelligence—are developed. The need to establish preconditions for ordering the real derives from the very mechanism of intelligence and is seen by philosophers as something inherent to things themselves. The critique of cognitive procedures never goes back to the very founding instance of these procedures, which is human intelligence itself.9 This is made clear when scientific constructivism is considered “natural.” Heinrich Scholz comments on the fact that the fundamental and indemonstrable presuppositions required for the inferential chain are taken by Aristotle to be naturally situated at the threshold of demonstrative knowledge and not conventionally established as premises. He sees this as a characteristic of Greek thought in general. Thus, certain requirements of the conceptual discourse are taken as unquestionable principles of a set of demonstrated propositions about a certain domain of knowledge.10 It follows that the preconditions of science must be truer than science itself: “[…] the fundamental truths from which result the propositions that, in order to be accepted, must first be demonstrated need to be more evident than any of these propositions” (Scholz 1980, 11). The finitistic nature of Aristotelian science, within which Scholz believes he can speak of “axiomatics,” thus implies a set of propositions that are external to the demonstrated body of science, and guarantees, as a basis for inferences, the demonstrations developed within a domain. The principles of science, which are immediately evident, formally circumscribe the theoretical field and schematize the procedures, providing, a priori, the type of results to which knowledge must aspire.

  • 11 Hamelin points out the fact that we cannot understand even the original presuppositions of thinking (...)

8We should make an observation here about a rather difficult issue to deal with in the Aristotelian context. It is well known that Aristotle considers logical principles to be the principles of things and that genera, for instance, are as real as individuals. It is this reality of the universal that keeps us from considering categories as formal elements in the modern sense.11 The metaphysically objective dimension of the universal causes the anteriority of the notion to also be an anteriority at the ontological level. In On the Parts of Animals, Aristotle gives a clear explanation: against those who support the idea of the contingent development of a living being, he states that the seed always has a potential that corresponds to the development of the being and that the generative agent pre-exists both logically and chronologically. There is a necessity here which causes such a being to always contain the elements that it must possess in view of what it is; from the form this or that being possesses, one can understand how and why it contains these or those elements, in this or that arrangement. The being’s configuration and organization enjoy logical and ontological priority over its material composition because they are the ones that make us understand the latter. This allows one to understand that the formal “nature” is more important than the material nature and that, in the organization of knowledge, the former has a founding nature and primacy over the latter. It may be interesting to note that, for Bergson, the elements alone do not explain the final result either. But it is also not possible to reconstruct, from the current form, a path of the natural process that would have existed for the finality of this or that production, a form for which the elements would have been mechanically organized. The example of the mechanism of the eye in Creative Evolution illustrates the Bergsonian view of the problem: our tendency is to regard natural production as analogous to human labor of a mechanical kind. In the organization of the eye, we see an immense amount of work involved in the composition of cells to obtain a form that is suitable for performing its function well. Because we deconstruct the eye to understand it, we assume that nature has constructed it by going the other way around. The complexity of the finished mechanism leads us to conceive of a mechanical complexity in the creation of the organ. This way of seeing things sheds no light on an important issue: “This contrast between the complexity of the organ and the unity of the function is what gives us pause” (Bergson 1911, 88). The problem stems from considering nature as a “workman, who […] proceeds by the assemblage of parts with a view to the realization of an idea or the imitation of a model” (Bergson 1911, 88). If we paid more attention to the simplicity of the function than to the infinite complication of the organ, we might come to see that the two sides of the issue are not of the same importance, neither do they share the “same degree of reality.” “The simplicity belongs to the object itself, and the infinite complexity to the views we take in turning around it, to the symbols by which our senses or intellect represent it to us, or, more generally, to elements of a different order, with which we try to imitate it artificially, but with which it remains incommensurable, being of a different nature” (Bergson 1911, 89). In short, the decomposition of elements that we use to try to understand reality is not a procedure that is symmetrical to the formation of this reality, because nature does not work through composition, but by creating indivisibly. It would be like trying to reproduce with mosaics all the shades that a painter applies to the canvas in the single, indivisible act of a brushstroke. Our recomposition would not match the whole, just as our analysis of the eye fails to explain the act of seeing solely through the elements it identifies. Aristotle sees in his predecessors, especially in Empedocles, the absence of an explanation that connects the organization of the elements to the final form that the being possesses. From the point of view that interests us here, and putting aside the problem of finality for now, this means demanding that the explanation of reality should consider form as a reason (logos) for material organization. This alternative is, however, the very one criticized by Bergson, who sees in it the same inadequacy as the mechanistic explanation. We can recall the famous example of the hand passing through iron filings: even if we disregard that the final position of the iron particles is random, even if we consider that the final arrangement of the filings is the result of a plan contained in the form of the hand passing through it, we would not truly grasp the process by supposing that it is possible to analytically explain the organization of the whole based on an ideal recomposition of the elements. For the particles were not arranged according to the shape of the hand, either by chance or by design. What exists is the result of a simple and indecomposable act. Therefore, there is no anteriority of form as a paradigm for a natural process of constituting things that could be seen from the traditional perspective of the form/matter duality. “But the truth is that there has been merely one indivisible act, that of the hand passing through the filings: the inexhaustible detail of the movement of the grains, as well as the order of their final arrangement, expresses negatively, in a way, this undivided movement, being the unitary form of a resistance, and not a synthesis of positive elementary actions” (Bergson 1911, 94). We are not interested here in addressing the biological aspect of Bergsonian ontology or the link between the theory of knowledge and the evolutionist conception. We would just like to point out that the absence of formal in Aristotle, which makes the logical anteriority of notions an ontological priority, leads us to say that Bergson’s critique must focus on Aristotelianism more sharply than on the philosophies of subjectivity and Kantian formalism, for the very reason that the metaphysical character of the categorization of the real in Aristotle perhaps more clearly reveals the unconscious interpolation of practical intelligibility needs between being and speculation. Also, we cannot fail to point out that interpolation appears even more strongly and more visibly when the priority of form over matter is seen through the lens of the principle of necessity. In fact, Aristotle says that the presence of a certain function in a living being necessarily means that this being’s elements must be organized in a certain way. This is because the function already pre-exists in the elements and in their organization, since it is a question of actualizing a latent form, a principle of organization.

9From this perspective, we understand why knowledge must retrace the logical (and ontological) path from form to matter, establishing the formal cause and the final cause as the principles of knowledge. To know is to separate, to analyze the form/matter compound that presents itself in the empirical world, to intellectually grasp the forms as principles of organization of the material becoming. Also, we better understand why the propaedeutic conditions of science must be truer than science itself. The truth in the framework of assumptions and notions that will be applied in the demonstrations must have a greater degree of truth than the demonstrations themselves, as we have seen in Scholz’s comment. But from a Bergsonian point of view, there is more to it. Science, conceived as the development of the apprehension of becoming based on these conditions, will be considered more real than the becoming itself, since it can provide us with the system of reality, in which we find the key and the scheme of what things are or come to be through the movement that knowledge seeks to organize. Science, as a condition for the possibility of knowledge, anticipates reality, which, when considered at the level of becoming, is, so to speak, less real: it will become effectively real when it becomes the content or realization of the possibilities of knowledge. “The physical will be defined by the logical. Beneath the changing phenomena will appear to us, by transparence, a closed system of concepts subordinated to and coordinated with each other. Science, understood as the system of concepts, will be more real than the sensible reality” (Bergson 1911, 328).

  • 12 Also Pellegrin (1981): “D’une part il ne fait aucun doute que pour le Stagirite la connaissance dis (...)

10This greater degree of reality for science is certainly due to its stable, systematic, conceptual nature. Therefore, along the same lines of Bergson’s argument, one can also understand the even stronger reality of a knowledge conceived as divine intuition. When we immobilize the becoming in logical and theoretical concepts, we make a move that is still that of discursive thought. We travel the logical path from the individual to the species to the genus: each of these classes of terms represents the introduction, at a certain level, of immobility into the becoming. But we are still a long way from being able to condense all the possibilities of becoming into a single intellectual moment in a clear and absolutely timeless intuition. The immanence of forms implies that the universal must be, as Granger puts it, “pulled out of becoming” (Granger 1976, 32), in an act of immobilization that would constitute the apprehension of the intelligible.12 Therefore, regardless of how great the difference between Plato and Aristotle, one must admit that the presence of the contemplative ideal as the ultimate goal of science would be an important element—among many others, evidently—in linking Aristotle to the Philosophy of Forms, or in pointing out, in a general sense, the Platonic nature of all attempts at the intellectual ordering of becoming. For Bergson, the virtual or implicit presence of this timeless The One is the most important result of the speculative use of intelligence: there we see, in effect, transfigured into a demand for pure and consequent thought, the intellectual tendencies which, starting at the level of perception, force us to prioritize stability in our relationship with the sensible world.

  • 13 Also: ‘‘Si donc on peut dire que dans la connaissance intellectuelle l'âme devient pierre, étant co (...)

11What has been said up to this point about the logical and ontological priority of stability can be extended to the Aristotelian potency/act duality. Here too, knowledge appears as the realization of potentially demarcated possibilities. It is in this sense that it is possible to understand what Aristotle says in De Anima: that somehow the soul is all things. It potentially contains the intelligible and we reach the intelligible essence of a reality when we grasp its form through the intellect. The essence cannot be fully actualized in matter; this is why the knowledge of things has a greater degree of reality than the things themselves, as the active intellect, through the process of abstraction, emphasizes the essential that is imperfectly contained in the form/matter compound. The noetic level is the level of actualization: the concept is where the world becomes fully real. For this reason, in the case of uniquely intelligible objects, such as mathematical essences, knowledge completely coincides with its object from the outset. But the group of things that make up the sensible world is a network of potentialities “waiting” to be actualized when the intellectual act of knowledge impinges on it. This network of possibilities is a permanence, a means for the real to subsist until its substantialization is achieved through the categorial form. It is undoubtedly in this respect that Bergson considers that in Aristotle the real world is the imperfectly realized logical one. To attain perfect knowledge, logic and reality would coincide so completely that there would be no need to demarcate the difference between potency and act. This is why Aristotle sees the divine intellect as a pure act, since there is no matter that “establishes the distance between the known object and the cognizing subject” (Moreau 1977, 609).13 God does not need to make abstractions, but for us, abstraction is the only way to access true reality, the essence of the object in question. This is how the object’s truth is linked to its reference to that which it no longer is, so to speak, the object itself, at least in its immediate aspect. It is in such a reference that Bergson sees the constitution of the “void” or the “interstice” where another explanation could apply, equally general and distanced from the concreteness of the object (Bergson 1946, 9).

  • 14 Cf. Koyré 1985, 174: “Tout, ordre cosmique, harmonie : ces concepts impliquent que dans l’Univers l (...)
  • 15 “The science of the ancients is static. Either it considers in block the change that it studies, or (...)

12In this way, both the formulation of philosophical problems and their solution suffer from a fundamental prejudice, which could be called the prejudice of virtuality: the belief in the formal pre-existence of truth and the resulting need to reconstruct the real to achieve knowledge in accordance with this virtuality. The category of necessity, in fact, only applies to reconstructed becoming. “To surmount these difficulties raised by the intellectual representation of movement and change, to get around them by an increasingly subtle intellectual labour, required the principal effort of ancient and modem philosophers. It is thus that metaphysics was led to seek the reality of things above time, beyond what moves and what changes, and consequently outside what our senses and consciousness perceive. As a result, it could be nothing but a more or less artificial arrangement of concepts, a hypothetical construction” (Bergson 1946, 16-17). The hypothetical of such a construction lies precisely in the a posteriori rearticulation of the transition of becoming from the segments into which it has previously been divided, according, as we have seen, to the previously established conditions that allow us to segment based on a logic to which things must necessarily conform. This qualitative articulation of becoming must correspond “to privileged or prominent moments in the history of things,” precisely the moments that take on the essential form for us, where we are not interested in the transition or passage from one form to another. This explains, according to Bergson, why Aristotelian science institutes categories such as natural place, natural movement downwards or upwards according to whether bodies are heavy or light, etc. (Bergson 1911, 331). Such qualifications express the moments of becoming in which things can be taken in their essential form, which would correspond to what things naturally are.14 Ancient science does not indefinitely decompose becoming, as modern science will later do. The division it makes tends to allow the global characterization of a segment of becoming according to the usual boundaries of perception and language. Becoming, given that it is qualitative, must be understood from its privileged moments. These instants coincide with indivisible portions of experience, because the matter that constitutes the content of becoming demands that certain objective contours be respected.15 We reconstruct reality from its natural articulations and not from any articulation. The instants are not all equated into a quantitative becoming. The real imposes the mode of division on the spirit. This is why the knowledge of change implies the knowledge of the defining instants of change: hence the importance of the notion of telos for understanding movement. Movement is, moreover, described by a concept and never equated as a relationship between spatial and temporal magnitudes: it will be either uniform, rectilinear, or circular, and these forms are ranked according to the greater or lesser possibility of partial identification with immobility. These characteristics will serve as differentiating elements in Bergson’s comparative analysis of the ancient and modern sciences.

13In what way can we say, in this context, that the order of knowledge reproduces the order of being? This question is important insofar as, for Bergson, the attempt to imitate the ontological order is what will cause philosophical thought to see, in the anteriority of the conditions of knowledge, the basic instance, the inevitable starting point for the description of reality, bearing in mind that, for intelligence, everything moves from possible being to real being. But is it not possible to consider the institution of the very duality between the orders as a resource of intelligence to refer the ideal of knowledge to a point outside of the subject’s temporality? What is the point of recognizing that the time of the knowability of things goes from the accidental and mutable multiplicity to the one and immutable essence, if not to alert us to the fact that this path is merely the expression of man’s negativity with respect to being and to show us the anteriority of essence as the order that truly coincides with being? Therefore, the truth will always result from the inversion of the subject’s temporality, for only in this inversion will we be able to see the genesis of things.

  • 16 “Nous retrouvons ici l’idée d’une cognoscibilité en soi, liée à une essence même du principe, et qu (...)

14In the book Delta of Metaphysics, Aristotle distinguishes between the prior for knowledge and the prior according to nature and essence, and he adds that this is the fundamental sense. The prior according to knowledge is further subdivided into prior according to the sensible and prior in the logical order. The prior in the logical order is the point of departure for knowledge: the universal. Science, therefore, presumes that the sensible order will be replaced by the logical order, given that science takes place in the realm of the universal. The primacy of essence in the knowledge of things implicates the inversion we have already mentioned. The function of the latter is not only to refer to the principles of things, but also to show that each and every knowledge derives from a prior knowledge. This requirement is expressed by Aristotle right at the beginning of the Posterior Analytics. Still taking the perspective of Meno’s famous aporia, Aristotle will try to maintain the condition of anteriority while at the same time escaping the connatural character of Platonic science. This is yet another way of understanding Bergson’s assertion that the difference between Aristotle and his master is “only verbal.” By replacing reminiscence with the intrinsic clarity that guarantees the epistemological self-sufficiency of principles, Aristotle will keep the anteriority that is essential to knowledge only at the level of Logic 16. But keeping it at the level of logic in no way diminishes the demands and the importance of what is prior. On the contrary, this will require us to establish the very science of principles and to attribute to it not only logical anteriority but also the character of greater knowability.

  • 17 “Si la nature semble ‘syllogiser’, c’est que le syllogisme ne fait que traduire le mode de producti (...)
  • 18 “…les limitations de l’homme, en particulier de ces facultés de connaissance, son moins des négatio (...)
  • 19 “Le savoir véritable est, en effet, analogue à l’action démiurgique dans la mesure où il coïncide a (...)

15For the rest, epistemological anteriority appears as a sign that knowledge really does reproduce the order of things and that the description we draw up of nature coincides with the actual genesis that takes place there: the demonstration of truth is no different from the movement of reality.17 As is well known, in Aristotle this anteriority also sets up the problem of the genus of knowledge that corresponds to the principles, given that they cannot be demonstrated. In this case, indemonstrability goes hand in hand—almost paradoxically, one might say—with the greater degree of exactness and the greater knowability of principles. Therefore, there seems to be a disconnection between the logical path necessarily followed during demonstration and the demands for greater clarity and greater knowability for the principles prior to the demonstration. The complete science of principles, both at the logical and ontological levels, only God could possess. Aubenque emphasizes this strange similarity between man and God: it is as if the human essence, when fully realized, enabled the intuitive knowledge of principles—knowledge which is in fact impossible given our condition.18 It is important to highlight the fact that this knowledge of principles, clear and simple in itself, is laborious and almost inaccessible to us. We cannot, therefore, clearly imprint in our knowledge and our discourse the way in which the truths we have reached derive from other higher or more fundamental truths. Our knowledge does not reach the point of departure of intelligibility in itself. But the fact that we can become aware of this duality leads us, albeit along an indeterminate path, to the coincidence between knowledge and the production of reality. We will try to imitate this coincidence by inverting the natural order that first gives us multiplicity and change, and by turning the one and the immutable into their precondition. We will try to reproduce the order of reality using technical manipulation, which, taken to the highest possible level, would show us, we believe, the demiurgic action itself.19

16The duality of the in itself and the for us in relation to knowledge will, according to Bergson, encourage us to understand our science as a laborious reconstruction of something that is already done. In fact, the ideal coincidence of total knowledge with the totality of the real from its genesis acts as a paradigm for us to accept the—at least partial—coincidence of the logical sequence of intelligence with the movement of the real. At most, we will say that if this sequence does not express the totality of the real in all its nuances, it would at least express its essential organization, at least what we can grasp of it. Even more so, perfect science, the plenitude of all the connections between principles and consequences, is found completed: it is enough to stick to this existence, even if we never accede to its entire content, not least because what matters is the logical perfection of this existence. The content exists and we know what its overall content is: eternity instantly unveiled, becoming in the truth of its movement: the totality of its elements in an immobile composition. At least this is how Bergson’s reading, which we are trying to reconstruct, seems to capture it.

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Bibliographie

Aristotle. 1934. De l’Âme. Traduction Nouvelle et Notes De J. Tricot. Vrin: Paris.

Aristotle. 1981. La Métaphysique. Tome 1. Traduit par J. Tricot. Paris: Vrin.

Aristotle. 1984a. “On the Soul.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Volume One. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Aristotle. 1984b. “Metaphysics.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Volume Two. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Bergson, Henri. 1911. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Bergson, Henri. 1946. The Creative Mind. Translated by Mabelle L. Adison. New York: Philosophical Library.

Aubenque, Pierre. 1962. Le Problème de l’Être chez Aristote. Paris: PUF.

Granger, Gilles-Gaston. 1976. La Théorie aristotélicienne de la science. Paris: Aubier.

Hamelin, Octave. 1931. Le Système d’Aristote. Paris: Felix Alcan.

Koyré, Alexandre. 1985. Études d'histoire de la pensée scientifique. Paris: Gallimard

Moreau, Joseph. 1977. « Remarque sur l’ontologie aristotélicienne ». Revue Philosophique de Louvain.

Scholz, Heinrich. 1980. “A Axiomática dos Antigos.” Cadernos de História e Filosofia da Ciência, CLE, UNICAMP, 1.

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Notes

1 In the text “The Life and Work of Ravaisson” one of the objections Bergson makes to Ravaisson’s work on Aristotle is that he exaggerates the difference between Plato and Aristotle: “He may also perhaps have pushed a bit far, even to the point of converting it into a radical opposition, the frequently light and superficial, if not to say verbal, difference separating Aristotle from Plato” (Bergson 1946, 266).

2 “In this intuition we should see God expand in Ideas. This it is that does everything, playing in relation to the discursive intellect, which moves in time, the same role as the motionless Mover himself plays in relation to the movement of the heavens and the course of things” (Bergson 1911, 322).

3 “Mais comment, chez l’homme, ces formes intelligibles pourront-elles actualiser l’intellect, alors qu’elles ne sont elles mêmes rien d’actuel, enveloppés qu’elles sont dans la sensation et l’image ? C’est ici qu’intervient l’intellect qui fait, le nous poietikos, comme on dit les commentateurs. Il actualise les intelligibles enveloppés dans les images ; et en ce sens, en ce sens limité seulement, il fait les intelligibles” (Hamelin 1931, 386). Naturally, it is not the case here to expand on the incredibly difficult question raised on the Chapter 5 of Book III of De Anima.

4 “Above all one might discuss the question what on earth the Forms contribute to sensible things, either to those that are eternal or to those that come into being and cease to be. For they cause neither movement nor any change in them. But again they help in no way towards the knowledge of the other things (for they are not even the substance of these, elso they would have been in them), nor towards their being, if they are not in the particulars which share in them; […]” (Aristotle 1984b, 8-14). ‘‘La plus importante question à poser, ce serait d’aborder quel concours enfin apportent les Idées aux êtres sensibles, qu’il s’agisse des êtres éternels ou des êtres générables et corruptibles. En effet, elles ne sont pour ces êtres cause d’aucun secours pour la science des autres êtres (elles n’en sont pas, en effet, la substance, sinon elles seraient en eux), ni pour expliquer leur existence, car elles ne sont du moins pas immanentes aux choses participantes […]’’ (Aristotle 1981, 8-14).

5 ‘‘In general, though philosophy seeks the cause of perceptible things, we have given this up (for we say nothing of the cause from which change takes its start), but while we fancy we are stating the substance of perceptible things, we assert the existence of a second class of substances, while our account of the way in which they are the substances of perceptible things is empty talk […]’’ (Aristotle 1984b, 23-26). ‘‘D’une façon générale, alors que la Sagesse a pour objecte la recherche la cause des phénomènes, c’est précisément ce que nous alissons de côté (car nous ne disons rien de la cause d’où vient le principe du changement), et, dans la pensée d’expliquer la substance des êtres sensibles, nous posons l’existence d’autres espèces de substances mais quant à expliquer comment ces dernières sont les substances des précédentes, nous nous contentons de paroles creuses ; […]’’ (Aristotle 1981, 23-26).

6 “La réalité de l’individu ne se définit pas et ne se conçoit pas, sauf exception de l’individu supréme. La réalité de l’individu lui vient de la matière, non de la matière qui est un universel, et entre comme telle dans les définitions et les concepts, mais de la matière concrète, celle qui n’est pas des pierres et des bois en général, mais cette pierre et ce bois. (…) Et pourtant il a bien vu lui-même que si les quiddités et les choses font deux, il n’y aura pas de science des êtres et que ce dont il y aura science ne sera pas” (Hamelin 1931, 127). Hamelin’s interpretation (individuation by matter) is the one that has traditionally prevailed. However, Aristotle’s texts and the interpretations of his thought that propound individuation by form cannot be ignored. The topic falls outside the scope of this text. Leopoldo e Silva mentions the French translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics writing the following phrase: Tricot provides a summary of how the issue stands in his translation of Metaphysics, 1 (Aristotle 1981, 392, note 2).

7 “And the attempts of some who discuss the terms on which truth should be accepted, are due to a want of training in logic; for they should know these things already when they come to a special study, and not be inquiring into them while they are pursuing it” (Aristotle 1984b, 2-6). “Quant aux tentatives de certains philosophes, qui, dans leurs discussions sur la vérité, ont prétendu déterminer à quelles conditions on doit accepter des propositions comme vraies, elles ne sont dues qui à leur grossière ignorance des Analytiques : il faut, en effet, connaître les Analytiques avant d’aborder aucune science, et ne pas attendre qu’on vous enseigne pour se poser de pareilles questions” (Aristotle 1981, 2-6).

8 “De cette manière on pourrait dire sans doute que la nécessité logique est le transconcept qui correspond analogiquement aux concepts ontologiques de la causalité” (Granger 1976, 105). Cf. also: “En tant qu’Analytique II, elle fournit, à travers les préceptes d’un art, une description de la nature de la science […]” (Granger 1976, 105).

9 “La nécessité, qui est propre à la consécution des raisonnements peut bien être incomplète, en ce qu’elle est considérée comme détachée de leur point d’ancrage ; elle n’en est pas moins de nature, non de convention” (Granger 1976, 106).

10 This is how Scholz interprets the passage from Posterior Analytics I, 2, 71 b 19 ss.: “If knowledge is as we characterize it (something like an assertion of statements that are demonstrated), then it is necessary for every apodictic science to spring from true assertions that are found in the first place, immediately found, and prior to any deduced proposition” (Scholz 1980, 11).

11 Hamelin points out the fact that we cannot understand even the original presuppositions of thinking as absolutely formal. As for the principle of non-contradiction, for example: “Il n’a aucunement l’idée d’une loi non-contradiction qui flotterait au-dessus des choses. La loi de non-contradiction est pour lui une nécessité, non de la pensée, mais des essences mêmes, un principe qui est à l’œuvre dans les choses” (Hamelin 1931, 92-93). On the other hand, Granger recognizes that we cannot see in Aristotle an idea of form separated from its content, at least with “the same connotations, which are otherwise complex, that we have after Leibniz, Boole, Frege and Russell” (Granger 1976, 97), but he does not fail to emphasize that it is possible and necessary to see in Aristotle a “logical formalism.” “Si nécessaires que demeurent les précautions qui nous avons prises pour éviter de le confondre d’emblée avec ses aspects modernes, elles ne sauraient nous interdire de le reconnaître, et nous commandent au contraire d’en fixer précision les traits” (Hamelin 1931, 105).

12 Also Pellegrin (1981): “D’une part il ne fait aucun doute que pour le Stagirite la connaissance discursive, même dans la rigueur apodictique de la forme syllogistique, n’est qu’une pensée infirme. C’est en effet la pensée humaine qui a besoin de cette exposition dans les moments successifs de la discursivité : le Dieu, pensée de la pensée, (Met., 9, 1074, b 34) ne syllogise pas, mais abolit le temps dans l’éternel instant de l’intuition de lui-même” (Aristotle 1981, 186).

13 Also: ‘‘Si donc on peut dire que dans la connaissance intellectuelle l'âme devient pierre, étant connue, devient vraiment elle-même, atteint la pureté de sa forme, la perfection, de son essence, qui autrement ne se réalise que dans une matière où elle ne peut s’actualiser pleinement : «[…] L’abstraction, effectuée par l’activité intellectuelle ou intellect actif, ne se réduit donc pas à une opération logique de triage, d’élimination du particulier pour faire apparaître l’essentiel ; elle aboutit à une promotion ontologique ; elle fait passer les choses sensibles au niveau de l’existence noétique, elles obtient ainsi dans l’âme une actualisa1ion qui s’approche de celle de l’intelligible dans l’intellect divin’’ (Moreau 1977, 610).

14 Cf. Koyré 1985, 174: “Tout, ordre cosmique, harmonie : ces concepts impliquent que dans l’Univers les choses sont (ou doivent être) distribuées et disposées dans un certain ordre déterminé ; que leur localisation n’est indifférente ni pour elles, ni pour l’Univers; qu'au contraire chaque chose a, selon sa nature, une « place » déterminée dans l'Univers, la sienne propre en un sens. Une place pour chaque chose et chaque chose à sa place : le concept de « lieu naturel » exprime cette exigence théorique de la physique aristotélicienne.” Koyré also emphasizes that cosmic order is confounded with the permanence of things in their natural places, which is why every movement is some sort of violence and somehow introduces disorder into the cosmos. We believe that this interpretation closely resembles the Bergsonian view of Aristotelian physics and, in a general sense, of ancient cosmology, mainly because of the preponderant role given to a deontic logic (permanence) in the consideration of the movement of becoming.

15 “The science of the ancients is static. Either it considers in block the change that it studies, or, if it divides the change into periods, it makes of each of these periods a block in its turn: which amounts to saying that it takes no account of time” (Bergson 1911, 334).

16 “Nous retrouvons ici l’idée d’une cognoscibilité en soi, liée à une essence même du principe, et que semble posée a priori en dehors de toute référence à la connaissance humaine” (Aubenque 1962, 54).

17 “Si la nature semble ‘syllogiser’, c’est que le syllogisme ne fait que traduire le mode de production des choses : toute la théorie de la démonstration et de la science dans les Analytiques suppose cette coïncidence entre le mouvement par lequel la connaissance progresse et celui par lequel les choses sont engendrées” (Aubenque 1962, 55).

18 “…les limitations de l’homme, en particulier de ces facultés de connaissance, son moins des négations que des privations, que l’homme de fait en appelle à l’homme de droit et que la vérité de l'homme phénoménal est à rechercher, non dans sa condition effective, mais dans l’essence d l’homme en soi, qui s’apparente étrangement au divin […]” (Aubenque 1962, 59).

19 “Le savoir véritable est, en effet, analogue à l’action démiurgique dans la mesure où il coïncide avec l’ordre naturel de la génération. Réciproquement l’activité de l’artisan sera une bonne introduction à la connaissance” (Aubenque 1962, 66).

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