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ABSTRACT
I begin by highlighting central texts from Aristotle that demonstrate both an appreciation of the rich coupling of subject and object that has been the subject of much of the most exciting and innovative phenomenological work and a fundamental methodological commitment to answering to the terms of experience. I then turn to Plato’s dramatic portrayals of Socrates’ distinctive practice—the “Socratic method”—first to document the subtlety that Socrates displays in his dialogical embrace of the description of lived experience and then, with him, to see the depths of existential change that are integral to the commitment to this method.
Notes
1 Husserl, Ideas I, 44. For the meaning of this principle, see Moran, “Choosing a Hero” and Russon, “Phenomenological Description and Artistic Expression.”
2 On the interpretation of Husserl’s method, see, for example, Wiggins, “Edmund Husserl’s Influence on Jasper’s Phenomenology” and, (especially in relationship to Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology as “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself form itself” [Being and Time, §7, 58]), Hopkins, Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger, Chapter 1.
3 For the meaning of this Heideggerean term, see Being and Time, Division I, Chapter 3.
4 Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics is often construed as presenting a kind of method, but this is the method of scientific demonstration, not a method of discovery. On this distinction, see Owens, “Aristotle’s Definition of Soul.” On the methodological and epistemological issues intrinsic to the Posterior Analytics, see Bronstein, Aristotle on Knowledge and Learning; Bronstein convincingly argues that the Posterior Analytics is systematically organized to study, first, learning by demonstration, second, learning by definition, and third, learning by induction; it is only this third that corresponds to the method of discovery, which is the subject of only the single, final (and notoriously cryptic) chapter in the Posterior Analytics, (on which point, see note 12, below).
5 See Physics II.1.193a3-4 on the “obviousness” of nature and Metaphysics IV[Γ].4-6 for the dismissal of skepticism; Aristotle’s remarks in Metaphysics IV(Γ) are in fact highly resonant with the discussions in Plato’s Theaetetus, a dialogue in which issues of skepticism are taken quite seriously. For an interpretation of Aristotle as a realist who does not take skepticism seriously, see, for example, Barnes, “An Aristotelian Way with Scepticism”; on the interpretation of the epistemological themes in Plato’s Theaetetus, see Kirk, The Pedagogy of Wisdom.
6 Aristotle also, of course, wrote ground-breaking works of logic and metaphysics, but their orientation remains centrally defined by his understanding of phusis; and, for reasons that become clearer below, it seems to me there is good reason to construe Aristotle’s writings on human affairs (i.e., ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetics) as included in the study of phusis. As Gadamer writes in Dialogue and Dialectic, Aristotle thinking is throughout determined by “the insight into the nature of what lives” (200).
7 On the meaning of this term in the Aristotelian context and on the character of the diverse writings collected together under this title, see Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, 69–106.
8 This is in keeping with Aristotle’s general analysis of animal life in which aisthēsis is recognized as a defining power of animal life; see, for example, On the Soul II.3, 414a32-414b6. For a compelling interpretation what Aristotle means by aisthēsis, see Diamond, Mortal Imitations of Divine Life, Chapter 3.
9 In this respect, Aristotle’s approach is resonant with the “ecological” perspective of von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans and Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Aristotle’s studies in History of Animals similarly resonate with an “ecological” model of the pairing of organism and environment; for a helpful introduction to this work, see Lennox, “Aristotle’s Biology.” von Uexküll’s work is central to Heidegger’s interpretation of animal life in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.
10 Aristotle has relatively little discussion of the experience of learning in the context of technical and scientific cognition; his most explicit statement is his discussion of epagogē—typically but perhaps misleadingly translated as “induction”—in Posterior Analytics II.19, a text largely parallel with the passage from Metaphysics I (A) that we are studying. For a general discussion of the contemporary interpretation of this text, see Ferejohn, “Empiricism and the First Principles of Aristotelian Science”; see also Gadamer, Truth and Method, 314–16.
11 On this distinctive human practice of making articulate, see Aygün, “Human Logos in Aristotle” and Sparshott, Taking Life Seriously, 45–48, 101.
12 Metaphysics I (A).1.980a21.
13 For interpretations of childhood development that address these themes, see Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others”; Simms, The Child in the World; and Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. On the rich notion of “growth” as it pertains to childhood development, see Dewey, Democracy and Education, Chapter 4.
14 Faulkner, The Unvanquished, 173.
15 On knowledge “in the hands,” compare Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 145.
16 On the relationship between the intuition of first principles and the appropriate habituation (of which moral habituation is exemplary), see Kosman, “Understanding, Explanation, and Insight in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics” and Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Understanding Knowledge,” especially 129–32. For a rich and detailed interpretation and assessment of Aristotle’s analysis of moral habituation, see Sparshott, Taking Life Seriously, 70–112. On the rationality of moral situations, compare Gadamer’s discussion of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in Truth and Method: “Just as we ‘see’ from the geometrical analysis of plane surfaces that the triangle is the simplest two-dimensional plane figure, so that we can go no further with our subdivisions, but must stop here, so in moral consideration the ‘seeing’ of what is immediately to be done is not a mere seeing, but nous” (287).
17 “Excessive as well as deficient gymnastic exercises destroy strength, and, similarly, both drink and food destroy health as they increase or decrease in quantity, whereas the proportionate amounts create, increase, and preserve health. So it is too with moderation, courage, and the other virtues. . . . Moderation and courage are indeed destroyed by excess and deficiency, but they are preserved by the mean.” Nicomachean Ethics II.2.1104a15-19, 25-27, (trans. Bartlett and Collins).
18 On the structure of virtue and vice, see Russon, “Personality as Equilibrium,” especially 626–29.
19 Nicomachean Ethics II.2.1104a5-10: “matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of health. The general account (logos) being of this nature, the account (logos) of particular cases is yet more lacking in exactness; for they do not fall under any set of precepts, but the agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion (ton kairon), as happens also in the art of medicine or of navigation” (trans. Ross, revised by Urmson in Complete Works). On these issues, see Sparshott, Taking Life Seriously, 79–80, 88, 101.
20 Compare the texts that begin and end the Posterior Analytics: “All teaching and all intellectual learning come to be from pre-existing knowledge” (I.1.71a1-2) and “From perception there comes memory . . . and from memory, experience (empeiria); . . . and from empeiria, there comes a principle of skill and of understanding” (II.19.100a3-8).
21 Posterior Analytics II.19.100a13-14.
22 This practice corresponds to statements Aristotle’s makes about method in Topics, Book I, Chapter 1, where he maintains that the dialectician should move from the endoxa—“the things that appear to all or to the many or to the wise”—to the defining and self-evident principles (archai) of that field; (see Topics I.1.100a19-22: the first principle “should command belief in and by itself.”) On the interpretation of this principle from the Topics, especially in relation to ethical inquiry, see Frede, “The Endoxon Mystique”; on its relevance to Aristotle more broadly, see Aygün The Middle Included, pp 6-14; on the idea that this is a “proto-phenomenological method,” see Kirkland, “Colloquium 6 Dialectic and Proto-Phenomenology in Aristotle’s Topics and Physics.” See Physics IV.10-14 for an example of the rich deployment of this method (in the discussion of time).
23 For more substantial discussion of this text, see Russon, “Self-Consciousness and the Tradition in Aristotle’s Psychology.”
24 In his study of astronomical phenomena in Metaphysics XII (Λ).8, Aristotle again uses just such language in defence of his argument: his argument answers to the imperative “apodōsein ta phainomena”—“to account for the appearances,” (1073b36-37 and 1074a1)—and similarly in On the Heavens I.3 he remarks that “the account (logos) bears witness to the phainomena and the phainomena to the logos,” (270b4-5).
25 For Merleau-Ponty’s rich discussion of this point, see Phenomenology of Perception, Part I, Chapter 6.
26 Republic VII.514a1-2 (trans. Bloom).
27 Republic VII.514a-517a, 520c.
28 Republic VII.518c5-7, d3-4: “The instrument with which each learns . . . must be turned around (strephein) . . . There would therefore . . . be an art of this turning around (tēs periagōgēs).” It must be turned until it is able to endure looking at the good (517c8-d1). For a phenomenologically rich discussion of the epistemology of the Republic, see Sallis, Being and Logos, 413–54.
29 I refer to this famous image as a “cartoon” (an exaggerated, simplified image) in allusion to the Athenian Stranger’s discussion of the pedagogical significance of childish portrayals in the Laws II.657e-658e; cf I.644d-645d and VII.803d-804c. For a rich, phenomenological interpretation of this image, see Aygün, “An Apology in the Cave Light.” On the inadequacy of Heidegger’s interpretation of the cave image, see Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence, Chapter 6; Hyland writes (139), “Through a misreading of the cave analogy in Republic book 7, Heidegger interprets Plato as abandoning the Greek experience of truth as aletheia rather than, as I now hope to show, paradigmatically exhibiting it.” On the pedagogical function of this image, see McCoy, Image and Argument in Plato’s Republic, Ch. 8.
30 On the interpretation of Meletus and especially on the significance of these words of Socrates, see Crooks, “Inventing Socrates,” 110–13.
31 Apology 22e-24a; see especially 23c: “those examined . . . are angry at me, not at themselves.”
32 Euthyphro 5d-e.
33 Crito 43a-46a.
34 That this reflects Crito’s character is perhaps corroborated further by Crito’s behaviour at Phaedo 34d-e, where he again works against Socrates’ own values in promoting the apparent good of securing Socrates’ comfort by inhibiting philosophical conversation.
35 On the ways in which our unreflective choices are also matters of social participation, such that we live in the “obviousness” of a kind of social prejudice—roughly, what Heidegger calls “das Man”—see Russon “The (Childish) Nature of the Soul in Plato’s Apology.” See Heidegger, Being and Time, Division I, Chapter 4.
36 On the existential transformation that Socratic questioning calls for, see Kirk, “Initiation, Extraction and Transformation”; on the theme of “what we honour,” see Recco, Athens Victorious, 96, 137–38.