X. Religion and Art
Aristotle presents us with the religious cult of Pure Act and astral intelligences, which animate the celestial bodies. Pure Act, which is not a creator and which ignores terrestrial becoming and hence is not divine providence, can be the object only of a rational cult.
Astral intelligences, which have a true influence upon cosmic becoming, would give place to a physical religion. Religious teaching in Aristotle is inferior to Plato.
Popular religion is not justified by Aristotle's metaphysics and, with Plato, Aristotle opposes mythical polytheism. He is nevertheless induced to admit the traditional Grecian religion which, even though not justified metaphysically, is a means of educating the people.
Art for Aristotle is imitation. But he proposes a different basis for this imitation than does Plato. Art does not tend to imitate the contingent element of nature, but the intelligible, that which in nature is rational and universal.
The artist must look not at nature as it is presented, because this model is always imperfect, but he must look at what it ought to be. He must imitate this ideal type of reality. This concept established, art, for the Stagirite, contrary to Plato, has a high educative value.
Even when the clash of violent contrast is presented in tragedy, art awakens in the soul the ideal type of reality, and hence, rather than stir up the passions, frees the soul from disturbances (catharsis) which have their origin in the passions.
XI. Deficiencies of the System of Aristotle
The metaphysics of Aristotle has as its historical and logical precedent the system of Plato, whom Aristotle tries to surpass. The problem which troubled Plato most was the reconciliation of the "being" of Parmenides with the "becoming" of Heraclitus, and that Plato solved this problem with a metaphysical dualism (Ideas -- non-being) and interposed between these two points the work of Demiurge, which effect the becoming.
For the world of Ideas Aristotle substitutes the concept of Pure Act; he replaces Platonic non-being, an irrational reality, with the concept of potentiality, or tendency toward new perfection (act). The great merit of Aristotle consists in this surpassing of Plato's system; this is his finest contribution to metaphysics.
But metaphysical dualism is present in Aristotle no less than in Plato. Aristotle's Pure Act is completely separate from potency; Pure Act is not the creator of potency; it ignores the existence of potency and the tendency of potency toward act or perfection. This tendency of potency is directed toward Pure Act, since the latter is the efficient and final cause of the former.
Yet Pure Act knows nothing of its own causality. What is the origin of this potency, which is no mere nothing, from the moment it possesses the potency to be something?
This is the great question which remains unanswered in Aristotle because he did not have a concept of creation in which potency and act arise from nothingness through the volitional act of Pure Act.
It is useful to point out another deficiency in Aristotle regarding the concept of form, or entelechy, as he calls it. For Aristotle entelechy is the form immanent in matter, in which it develops itself according to its own nature. There is no doubt that the concept of entelechy -- as a principle which limits and determines the possibilities of matter -- is the most outstanding and original contribution which Aristotle gave to philosophy.
However, the historian of philosophy has to note that it is exactly this fundamental Aristotelian concept that has caused one of the most profound crises of thought in regard to the human soul.
According to Aristotle's famous definition the human soul is "the entelechy of a natural body having life potentially within it." (1) Now Aristotle himself acknowledges that the nature of the human soul is not such that the soul is limited to the organic operations of the vegetative and sensitive life; the soul also possesses understanding, which is an operation "unmixed" with matter and is "divine."
Thus it would be expected that Aristotle, who gave the concept of a form acting in dependence on matter, would expound also the nature of a form independent of matter; in other words, Aristotle should have made clear what is the nature of the intellective soul in itself and in its relations with the human body.
Unfortunately this was not done, and such a lack was to give origin to the question of the separated intellect.
References:
(1) On the Soul, II, i, 412a, 20.
