“Aristotle is not a modern philosopher”—This is the opening sentence of Sean Kirkland’s provocative and important new book, Aristotle and Tragic Temporality. That Aristotle is not a modern philosopher is obvious from a historical standpoint. But Kirkland is saying something much more, that Aristotle has typically been read with a modern lens, which means the formative effect on philosophy by schemes of thought beginning with Descartes. Such a lens, Kirkland argues, has missed or distorted significant elements of Aristotle’s philosophy that should be retrieved, particularly a tragic sense of temporality that helps illuminate his distinctive approach to ethics. Kirkland’s text is a careful study that pays due attention to a wide range of scholarship (evident in expansive endnotes). The book is made up of an introduction, four chapters, a conclusion, an extensive bibliography, index, and index locorum.
Kirkland begins by emphasizing Aristotle’s account of sublunar nature in the Physics, which attends to moving and changing phenomena, an ever-circulating world of presence and absence, being and nonbeing, shown in Aristotle’s core concepts of dunamis and energeia, natural modes of being in temporal “stretches” between privation, potentiality, and actualization. Herein Aristotle’s sense of telos is a non-present “cause,” a yet-to-be-that-can-be, a future-oriented teleology that Descartes and other modern thinkers specifically disputed in favor of efficient, mechanical causality when understanding nature. For Aristotle, every “present” is informed by a dynamic of past and future forces (pp. 9-20). Accordingly, Kirkland wants to disarm the attribution of a “metaphysics of presence” to Aristotle (pp. 22-23). As shown in some developed endnotes, Kirkland is influenced by Heidegger’s distinctive reading of Aristotle, which found certain phenomenological elements that disturb traditional ontological assumptions.
Early on (pp. 24-25), Kirkland establishes a central point about Aristotle: he does not traffic in the modern subject-object binary launched by Descartes, a divide between mind and world that issues the perennial problem of skepticism, of how or whether an interior consciousness can come to know an external world, and how the mind’s ideas can properly represent entities outside the mind to generate “objective” scientific knowledge that repairs the imprecision of ordinary commonsense. Kirkland aims to show how Aristotle’s phenomenology of appearances is from the start world-engaged and so not burdened with a task of bridging separate spheres of mind and world. Noteworthy in this respect is Aristotle’s claim that perception and thought on the one hand and their referents in the world on the other hand are two potentialities of a single actuality, so that thinking, for instance, is the things that it thinks (De Anima 429b-431b), just as teaching and learning are not two separate phenomena but one actuality (Physics III.3), where an action is not “cut off” (apotetmēmenē) from what is acted upon (Physics 202b2).
Kirkland recognizes that the post-modern Heidegger found much philosophical value in the pre-modern Aristotle, but also that Heidegger saw some deficiency in Aristotle compared to his own radical temporal ontology. Yet Kirkland wants to show more resonance in Aristotle for a post-modern sense of time, which is not stuck in measurable now-points. By Kirkland’s understanding, Aristotle sees the present as “stretched” between past and future (pp. 68-69), and accordingly as an unstable presence that embodies a tragic finitude.
To situate his account, Kirkland’s second chapter takes up Aristotle’s distinction between scientific demonstration (issued in the Analytics) and dialectic (in the Topics), where demonstration offers the most secure form of knowledge stemming from universal first principles, and dialectic negotiates engagement with received opinions, which does not rise to the level of demonstrative knowledge. A long-recognized problem in research on Aristotle is that the bulk of knowledge established in his texts follows dialectical reasoning, not demonstration, by proceeding from endoxa, common opinions, not first principles. It is here that Kirkland ably shows how modern assumptions about subjective “belief” measured against objective reality and knowledge get in the way of appreciating the cogency of Aristotle’s phenomenology, because endoxa are not weighted on the side of subjectivity but on the appearing of “what is” to human comprehension—and so not confined to mere “beliefs” that cannot count as objective knowledge. Inquiry, then, navigates appearances and resolves any evident puzzles or problems, usually by coordinating what the Topics calls the “many and the wise.” Such a phenomenology amounts to assuming that truth should not be so unusual as to violate common sense (as in Parmenides’ denying change) nor so ordinary as to block refined wisdom (as in the idea that happiness is nothing but pleasure). Rather than operate deductively from first principles and screen out received opinion (as in Descartes), philosophy for Aristotle moves toward cognitive principles by balancing common understanding and cultivated insights, usually by way of overcoming blockages (aporiai) to inquiry (pp. 86-88). Appearances, therefore, do not hide reality; they initiate inquiry and move from what is first known to us toward knowledge of the nature of things themselves—a movement captured in the word archē, which means both a beginning and a governing principle (pp. 92-98). It is this kind of phenomenology that Kirkland follows in exploring the meaning of time in Aristotle, primarily by way of texts that are usually not coordinated: the Physics and the Poetics, along with a linkage suggested in the Nicomachean Ethics.
Kirkland’s third chapter is titled “Staging Temporality in the Poetics.” The preceding chapter had set things up with Aristotle’s analysis of time in the Physics, where phusis is the natural movement of sublunar beings toward their telos, their intrinsic tendency toward a fulfilled or completed state. Included in Aristotle’s account is the phenomenon of chance, meaning the accidental intersection of separate lines of telic movement, which means there is no global necessity in nature; sometimes things simply happen by accident. Such happenstance is also evident in the Nicomachean Ethics, where the natural tendency of desire for things that are good can be contravened by something beyond a person’s control. What is within control is the cultivation of virtue, namely capacities to pursue what is good and bring happiness to whatever degree possible. What is noteworthy in the Nicomachean Ethics is that, in the course of laying out ingredient conditions for human fulfillment, there are occasional remarks about ruination, about a virtuous person coming to grief in life without rectification. Aristotle’s merely parenthetical mention of this is striking when measured against the 10 books of Plato’s Republic arguing against the ruination of a good person. In any case, it is in the Poetics that Aristotle offers articulation of possible ruination in his analysis of tragic poetry. Here Kirkland can lay out a sense of tragic temporality by way of the intrinsic finitude of sublunar natural life established in the Physics.
Kirkland’s account of the Poetics emphasizes Aristotle’s assumption that artistic mimēsis is not a low-grade, or even deceptive mode of knowing, but rather a basic form of human learning. Indeed, tragic drama offers audiences comprehension of something “universal” in the human condition, namely that happiness is not necessarily inscribed in natural life, that a good person can come to grief, not by way of some natural calamity, but by their own path in pursuing some perceived end—and not because of some moral “flaw,” but rather a “mistake,” which is the right way to translate Aristotle’s concept of hamartia. In this respect, Kirkland might have emphasized more the primacy of “plot” over individual character (1450a13-15), so that, for instance, what is central in Oedipus Turranos is not Oedipus, but the larger course and structure of events enveloping him in something beyond his own control—which accords well with Kirkland’s promotion of tragic temporality. Useful in this respect would have been attention to Aristotle’s preference for a “single” over a “double” plot” (1453a), the latter being a reversal of a good person suffering bad fortune or a bad person enjoying good fortune, and the former depicting a good person coming to bad fortune, period. In any case, Kirkland does well to read catharsis, not as a “purgation,” but a “clarification,” a learning about something basic in the human condition, that, no matter our knowledge or ability, there is an “excessive, unknowable, and unmasterable past and future between which we are situated” (p. 130), and that human action is implicated in reversals of fortune (pp. 149-152). In this respect, Kirkland reads pity and fear, rightly in my view, as an audience’s compassion for a hero’s undeserved suffering and fear that something comparable can befall them as well. Such emotions, he argues, must go together in witnessing a performance—to show how a character’s fate is not theirs in the theater, but potentially theirs in life (p. 152); and where the artifice of the theater allows a more measured response than the extreme emotions portrayed on stage, which Kirkland connects with Aristotle’s core virtue of phronēsis and which represents an inexact “ethics of finitude” (p. 157).
The value of Kirkland’s study is in drawing out implications in Aristotle’s philosophy that can elude modern predilections, and that exceed the typically measured style of Aristotle’s writings. In other words, Kirkland’s account is true to Aristotle’s thought but distinctive in finding a vitality subliminal in the texts themselves and missed by much standard commentary. Modern assumptions about rational governance in ethics—as in Kantian universals or a utilitarian calculus applied to cases—are not at work in phronēsis, where a virtuous person discerns, even “perceives” what to do in particular circumstances. With such a non-formulaic phenomenology of telic desire, Kirkland ably shows how Aristotle is not a modern moral philosopher either.
Kirkland is not alone in distinguishing Aristotle’s ethics from modern assumptions, but he stands out in focusing on the temporality of moral life and its tragic implications: how the futurity of desire and Aristotle’s insistence on habituation formed in the past together unfold in the imprecision of a present kairos, a particular and momentous slice in time (pp. 176-200). Being ethical here is more “finesse” than rational ordination, and it is not pictured as a chapter in some larger story of moral consummation, as in Plato’s drama of the soul, a comparable Christian story, or even secular “shadows” of Christian theology (to use Nietzsche’s term for modern scripts of rational schematics). Also distinctive is Kirkland’s attention to links between Aristotele’s ethics and the Poetics, how the recognition of ethical finitude is reiterated in his account of tragic poetry (which makes that text so much more than a work of aesthetics). Even though Aristotle does recognize and promote the real possibility of human flourishing, there persists a sense of cognitive and existential limits in natural life that Kirkland’s book articulates so well.
One thing missed: Although Kirkland’s focus on tragic temporality and ethical finitude is able to disturb the charge that Aristotle’s philosophy represents a metaphysics of presence, offstage is that part of Aristotle’s thought most liable to the charge, namely the metaphysics of the unmoved mover, which surpasses the limit conditions of sublunar phusis with a domain of permanent actuality that protects against potentiality having the last word, which would echo poetical renditions of the priority of “night” (Metaphysics 1071b27-28). That theological position, and temporary access to it by theoretical contemplation in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics—where Aristotle extols surpassing our mortality for a glimpse of what is divine in the human soul—at least shows significant interest in exceeding temporal finitude. Nevertheless, Kirkland is right to focus on the tragic limits in sublunar phusis—where all the action is for human beings anyway. Yet even with respect to the unmoved mover, I would supplement Kirkland’s account with something from my own work, namely an unusual kind of tragic condition when considering the unmoved mover.[1] Aristotle rules out immortality for the human soul; indeed, wishing for it is wishing for the impossible (Nicomachean Ethics 1111b23). Yet the unmoved mover moves as a final cause, as an attraction, an “object of love” (Metaphysics 1072b3-4). In fact, all natural beings move as they do by “yearning” for divine actuality, and for the sake of it (De Anima 415a23ff). But no natural life form can achieve pure actuality; decay and death are built into phusis (Generation and Corruption II.10; Youth and Old Age 478b26; De Anima 412a14-15); nature is ever enveloped by temporal limits (Physics 221a26ff). And here there is a tragic paradox: I live in the way I do by loving what I cannot have, but that I can at least glimpse temporarily when engaged in theoria. Surely this kind of unrequited love is exactly what would motivate Schopenhauer’s pessimism—how absurd that I be moved by what is denied me! That Aristotle was not a pessimist is therefore remarkable—and it might even border on Nietzsche’s attempt to bring tragedy and life affirmation together (Kirkland does take up Nietzsche in Ch. 3). In any case, this only adds to Kirkland’s insightful study of Aristotle, which shows surprising facets of a classic Western thinker when read against the grain of standard philosophical assumptions.
Notes
[1] See “A Story of Unrequited Love: The Tragic Character of Aristotle’s Philosophy,” Epoché 19/2 (Spring 2015), 287-296. I feel able to supplement Kirkland’s book in this way because my article is listed in his bibliography, but it is not taken up in his text (this bypassing can indeed happen in the course of researching and composing a book).