Class Reflections: Aristotle's Metaphysics book 1
what is it that we want to know, and why do we want to know it?
Today we moved on to the next philosopher whose ideas we are studying in my Foundations of Philosophy classes at Marquette University. Unsurprisingly I expect to most, that’s Aristotle. Given the restrictions of time imposed by the academic semester, I can never cover as much of his works as I’d like to, but as the saying goes, better to light a candle, rather than curse the darkness. So my students get two weeks worth of Aristotle, consisting of one day on Metaphysics book 1, followed by three days on selected portions of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
After talking a bit about Aristotle himself, how we got this term “metaphysics”, and what we generally mean by that word in philosophy, we launched into the first set of topics in the class, spurred by Aristotle’s often repeated dictum “all people by nature desire to know”, and we unpack that a little bit. Pantes anthropoi to eidenai oregontai phusei, the original Greek runs.
Note that this passage is typically translated “all men. . .”. Anthropoi denotes “human beings”, not specific as to gender, and so I point that out. Eidenai means “to know”, and the term oregontaiis a verb that signifies the broadest sense of “desire” in Aristotle’s works. Wanting to know things is a drive and need deep in our guts, a central dimension of what it means to be human, part of our nature, you might say.
Of course, that’s not a desire unique to human beings, and we chat a bit about what it is that cats are curious about. Depending on the cat in question, this can be quite a bit. But we human beings have a vastly expanded range of matters we desire to know about by comparison to most other animals. I point out that, if we’re being honest, most students in the early weeks of the semester are not particularly curious about the discipline of philosophy. Maybe by the end of the semester, what we have read, discussed, and thought about in our class could promote such a desire on their part, but that’s a question to be settled further down the line.
I’m a big believer in meeting students where they are, precisely in order to take them along somewhere else. So I ask them what it is that they do have a desire to know. We spend a good bit of time exploring this, and putting those broad topics onto the board. The first of these is whatever it is that they are majoring in as students, that is, the discipline that they selected as their field of study. This is actually an important moment for them, because I make a point that I end up reinforcing at multiple points in the semester. If they’re not really interested in knowing about the key topics and ideas germane to their major, they have really made a bad choice for themselves.
Imagine selecting something like nursing as what you’re going to study for four years, and as a profession you plan to enter, if you’re not particularly interested in the workings of the human body and all of its bits and pieces, and moreover what goes wrong with it and how to at least try to fix what’s wrong. Imagine selecting a path for yourself like business marketing, if you’re not interested in what makes some campaigns work and others fail, in what people’s motivations for buying products are and how to appeal to them.
Making money, having a “safe bet” career, enjoying a certain social prestige are all reasons a person might select a field. But if that interest, that curiosity, that desire to know is lacking, sooner or later what they do is going to get stale and dull. They do have something to look forward to, though, a nice midlife crisis somewhere down the line.
As human beings, of course, we are curious about all sorts of other things as well, and I ask them to consider what else they want to know about. There’s a kind of standard set of matters that college students in their late teens and early 20s will typically bring up with minimal prompting, and then there’s the matters they are more reticent to acknowledge, but about which they do want to know as well.
Today, interestingly, one of my students - a young woman who frequently contributes in class, and who seems genuinely interested in the topics we’re delving into - made an admission that I saw other students nodding their heads in agreement with: “celebrities and gossip”. This is an ages-old human fascination. We have desires to know all sorts of things about people we will likely never meet, let alone interact with. And many of us also want to know things about the people we do know and interact with, whether they are family or friends, neighbors or coworkers, casual acquaintances or people we’ve been connected with our entire life.
There’s a number of other matters. We want to know what different things taste like, whether we’ll enjoy eating them or not, perhaps even how to make them for ourselves, or where the best places are to get them made by someone else. We want to know what’s happening next in series that we watch featuring entirely fictional people (sometimes quite derivative - my wife and I are currently watching the show Elementary, with a Holmes and Watson set in mid-2010s New York City). When we play a video game, we wonder “what happens if I push this?” or “what’s that over there?”
We also want to know answers to a further set of questions about the matters we want to know about. We don’t just want to learn and know whether or not something is the case. We also want to know a deeper question, and that’s the one that takes us into the field of metaphysics (though not exclusively there, of course), and that is the question WHY. And as we soon find out with Aristotle, there usually isn’t just one single answer to that question. We spend the bulk of the class exploring his analysis of the four causes and his short history of previous philosophers engagement with some of those causes. But that’s a topic I’ll put off for another set of reflections about our class some other time.
You might want to take a bit of time to think about what it is that you desire to know. What matters do you have that motivation, that yearning, that orientation towards? And what is the WHY for your desire(s) to know?