A Note on Plato and Aristotle
May. 29th, 2019 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
endymions_bowerRe: Phaedrus 249bc: A human "must understand a general conception formed by collecting into a unity by means of reason the many perceptions of the senses; and this is a recollection of those things which our soul once beheld, when it journeyed with the God and, lifting its vision above the things which we now say exist, rose up into real being," (trans. Fowler).
Now, we know from the testimony of Diogenes Laertius (3.15) that Plato did in fact extend this capacity to animals, grounding their ability to incarnate as humans not on their having previously "fallen" from human status, but on capacities virtually coextensive with being a living thing in the first place. Now, if this capacity is indeed so widely held, then we might think about it in a less "cognitive" fashion altogether. Isn't the first general conception collected together into a unity from the flux of experience the conception of the integral self, personal identity as such? The Stoic concept of oikeiôsis is useful here: creatures first "appropriate" themselves as something to sustain and foster, and then add wider and wider circles of concern from there.
Now jumping over to Aristotle, and the problem of the content of the "thought thinking itself" which is at once the divine way of being and the reason why things go round in the cosmos, what if thought "thinks itself" whenever it cognizes a self-identical property? (There is of course a suggestion here of Kant's transcendental unity of apperception.) And the first such is the moment of the self-appropriation of the individual, I=I (but not necessary to be thematized in this fashion, if we accept the Platonic position reported by Diogenes).
The proper attribute of the prime unmoved mover would thus extend essentially to all living things, beginning in each case from the moment of self-appropriation. In this fashion, the activity of the prime unmoved mover can be understood simply as the intellectual individuation of living things, which move themselves so as to sustain and expand their self-integration to the best of their capacity. This aligns the prime unmoved mover better with the Platonic first principle, as its lower-order expression on the intellective and psychical planes.
Now, we know from the testimony of Diogenes Laertius (3.15) that Plato did in fact extend this capacity to animals, grounding their ability to incarnate as humans not on their having previously "fallen" from human status, but on capacities virtually coextensive with being a living thing in the first place. Now, if this capacity is indeed so widely held, then we might think about it in a less "cognitive" fashion altogether. Isn't the first general conception collected together into a unity from the flux of experience the conception of the integral self, personal identity as such? The Stoic concept of oikeiôsis is useful here: creatures first "appropriate" themselves as something to sustain and foster, and then add wider and wider circles of concern from there.
Now jumping over to Aristotle, and the problem of the content of the "thought thinking itself" which is at once the divine way of being and the reason why things go round in the cosmos, what if thought "thinks itself" whenever it cognizes a self-identical property? (There is of course a suggestion here of Kant's transcendental unity of apperception.) And the first such is the moment of the self-appropriation of the individual, I=I (but not necessary to be thematized in this fashion, if we accept the Platonic position reported by Diogenes).
The proper attribute of the prime unmoved mover would thus extend essentially to all living things, beginning in each case from the moment of self-appropriation. In this fashion, the activity of the prime unmoved mover can be understood simply as the intellectual individuation of living things, which move themselves so as to sustain and expand their self-integration to the best of their capacity. This aligns the prime unmoved mover better with the Platonic first principle, as its lower-order expression on the intellective and psychical planes.
