What is a Man?

Aristotle on the Illogic of Contradiction

(Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker in The Gates of Hell at the Musée Rodin, Paris. Source: Creative Commons)

“We should not only be grateful to those in whose opinions we share, but also to those who have gone astray. For even the latter have contributed something, since they have prepared the condition for us.”

“All men by nature desire to know.”

“If nothing can be truly asserted, even the following claim would be false, the claim that there is no true assertion.”

~ From Aristotle’s Metaphysics

“It’s great to be here,” jokes one of our favorite 20th century philosophers, Keith Richards, whenever he appears on stage, “Hey... it’s just great to be anywhere.”

Mr. Richards is right, of course; it is great to be anywhere... even here, in the roaring 2020s, an era some have called “post-truth,” where feelings often weigh heavier than facts and the term “lived experience” is routinely conscripted to “prove” that reality is somehow subject to opinion. 

And yet, it wasn’t always this way...

In the sometimes spooky though altogether non-trivial jurisdiction of the metaphysical, there’s simply no place for conscious contradiction. At least, not for Aristotle. The Father of Logic himself even went so far as to propose a law (more about which below) expressly forbidding it. But before we delve into that, let us take a step back in order to afford ourselves a wider, grander view of the “world” of metaphysics itself.

We might begin our little inquiry in the following manner: What is metaphysics and what is it like? Indeed, one would be hard pressed to conduct even the crudest analysis of any thing without the service of these two, basic questions. And, in a way, it is precisely these questions which metaphysics itself seeks to answer…what is there? (what exists, the fundamental nature of the world and of being) and what it is like? (the characteristics that help us to describe these very natures).

Although the prefix “meta” actually means “beyond,” leading many scholars to misinterpret its meaning as the study of what is “outside of” or “beyond” nature, Aristotle himself used the term to describe what he saw as the “first philosophy.” For him, it was physics, then the basic questioning of and about them: metaphysics. The subject, to which Aristotle referred to as “Queen of the Sciences” was, and in many ways still is, the primary means by which we delve into both the existence and essence of all that is.

Kindly, and with the fastidious scientific exactitude for which he was known, Aristotle divided the study of metaphysics into three distinct (at least they remained so at the time) categories. They were:

1. The Universal Science – The study of first principles, the very method of inquiry itself and the correct procedure by which it would be illuminated;

2. The Ontological – The study and (again, meticulous) classification of beings and entities, including those of both physical and mental nature, and the changes these beings and entities undergo and;

3. The Study of Natural Theology – All things germane to religion, creation, the divine and the endless and, perhaps, ultimately unknowable workings and motivations of the gods.

Having not ourselves confidently progressed past the first of the first (of the first…) of these principles, we shall confine our comments to that of the Universal Science category. By way of introduction, let us examine Aristotle’s three Laws of Thought, the basis of what is often called Term (or Aristotelian) Logic.

In the first such law, Aristotle gets what ought to be obvious out of the way with the Law of Identity (A = A). Of course, the question “why is an apple an apple?” is, in itself, meaningless. By being an apple, it cannot, logically, be something other than such. That a something is what it is – and not something else – ought to be apparent from the outset, says Aristotle. “The fact that a thing is itself is the single reason and the single cause to be given in answer to all such questions as why the man is man, or the musician musical.”

The second rule, as we’ve discussed, is the Law of Non-Contradiction, which holds that opposing statements cannot be both true in the same sense and at the same time. Eg. The claims “X = Y” and “X ≠ Y” are mutually exclusive. Indeed, Aristotle himself reasons, “One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time.”

Complement to this second law of thought is Aristotle’s third law, that of the Excluded Middle. Here the mighty inquirer sets out to eliminate confounding compromise – at least in the metaphysical sense of the word. Simply put, something must either be…or not. “To be or not to be,” as Shakespeare had it almost two millennia later. A proposition is true, in other words, or its negation is.

But might it not be the case that some ambiguity of terms muddies the waters, we hear Fellow Flâneurs ask? All the more reason, Aristotle would argue, why precise definitions matter from the outset.

Aristotle, here from Metaphysics:

“It is impossible, then, that “being a man” should mean precisely “not being a man”, if ‘man’ not only signifies something about one subject but also has one significance….

…[It] will not be possible to be and not to be the same thing, except in virtue of an ambiguity, just as if one whom we call “man”, and others were to call “not-man”; but the point in question is not this, whether the same thing can at the same time be and not be a man in name, but whether it can be in fact.”

So it was from the sturdy moorings of these three Laws of Thought, Aristotle set off into the oceanic philosophical undertaking ahead of him.

What is? he first wondered, and what is it like?

We can’t say for sure why the ancient Greeks took it upon themselves to embark on such a formidably exhaustive examination of all things under – and including – the Gods themselves, but we are certainly glad they did so. Without Aristotle’s Herculean efforts in paving the way in this, the first of all philosophies, we might have been left intellectually adrift, thousands of years later, wondering what on earth a man (or, for that matter, a woman) really was. 

Until next time...

Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires, Argentina ~ February, 2023