Make. Do.

Aristotle, as a philosopher, can impart upon us only philosophical understanding. His ability to reason his way to a deep understanding of the nature of a thing gives him no more power to control or change that thing than one to whom that thing is a complete mystery. In this way, philosophical understanding can be seen as less productive than scientific knowledge. After all, if science leads us to better understand something – genetics, for example – that understanding can impart the power of influence or even control.

For Man the Maker, this is why philosophy is less important than science. Philosophy brews us no beers and builds us no iPhones.

The Maker is not the only archetype of Man, though – and the others aren’t so concerned with being productive. In living our lives and running our societies, we are using our knowledge and understanding in a practical, rather than productive, way. For these pursuits, philosophy is much more useful than science.

Part II: Man the Maker, concluded

The Greeks had no word or concept like our “creative” so, instead, when discussing the mind of Man the Maker, Aristotle and Adler refer to productive thinking. This would be the generative thought that is associated with invention or innovation. In the creation of any thing, two phases of thought are required: (1) productive thinking and (2) know-how. The difference between the two is exemplified in the differing roles of the architect and the construction foreman.

Of course, one person might possess both of these capabilities, but they are separate nonetheless. The important thing to note, however, is that both are processes of the mind – the mind is the principal factor in human production; everything else is instrumental.

The Greek word techne (from which we get technique and technician) is equivalent to the Latin word ars (from which we get art) – both mean skill. In that vein, an artist is a person who has the know-how/skill/technique for making things. We could go further and call them creative artists if they also have the productive idea from which the thing can be planned and made.

In this sense, a carpenter is an artist. What about a doctor, though? Or a teacher? Obviously, they have SOME important know-how! There is a fundamental difference, though – the desk made by a carpenter would not have otherwise existed, whereas the learning effected by a teacher might have. Whereas the carpenter produces his desired product, the teacher and doctor must cooperate with nature to achieve theirs.

In the end, Aristotle draws all kinds of artists – productive, cooperative, and “artistic” – together by the goal of all art: to create something that is well-made. How else can we explain the appreciation we might feel for a “beautiful” car or dress or, hell, the latest Apple product. Man the Maker is an artist, in one sense of the word or another, because he appreciates beauty and craftsmanship.

Part II: Man the Maker, continued further

As we know, Aristotle set the change of coming to be (or passing away) apart from the more mundane change of place, alteration of quality, and increase or decrease of quantity. Simply put – pieces of wood becoming a chair is not the same thing as the green chair turning red. In order to better understand how that truth applies to natural generation, we start by investigating artificial products.

Adler is a big fan of “coming to terms” with your author if you want to really understand him, and five terms are crucial to this demonstration:

• Matter: the matter that comprised the pieces of wood now comprises the chair.
• Form: the carpenter can imbue these pieces of wood with the form of a chair.
• Privation (a lack of some virtue): these pieces of wood have a privation of chairness.
• Potentiality: these pieces of wood have the potentiality of being a chair.
• Actuality: these pieces of wood that HAD the potentiality of being a chair have now actually become a chair.

You’ll note that potentiality and actuality are mutually exclusive. The pieces of wood either CAN be a chair or they ARE a chair. To that end, privation is necessary for potentiality, but it is not sufficient by itself. After all, a crème brûlée also has a privation of chairness, but it also lacks the potentiality of becoming a chair.

Suppose, however, that there were totally formless matter – you might say that it would have limitless potentiality. Then again, you might say that it would have no potentiality whatsoever. Heck, you could even say that, by definition, that matter does not exist, and there is no point wasting our breath discussing imaginary nonsense. So long as we are talking about artificial production, you would be totally justified in that opinion; birth and death, however, are more tenacious mysteries.

Remember the tomato I had you eat in the last entry? Well what if you were a wolf, and the tomato a rabbit? When the wolf eats and digests the rabbit, does the rabbit matter become wolf matter? What about the fertilization of a rabbit egg by a rabbit sperm? What is the relationship of the egg matter and the sperm matter to the resulting baby rabbit? If you believe that anything persists in those changes, it is to that which Aristotle was referring when he spoke of formless matter.

Part II: Man the Maker, continued

Regarding any human production, the first question must be: “what is it going to be made of?” You need materials to make anything and, to a certain extent, these materials define the product. The next question is “who made it?” Someone has to effect the creation of the product, or it would not be produced. Next, you ask “what is it that is being made?” If something is produced, it must have a form. Finally, all there is left to ask is: “why is it being made?”

The answers to all of these questions, taken together, cause a product to come into being, so they are called the four causes. Each is necessary, but not sufficient by itself. “WAIT!” you might say – not everything is made with a conscious purpose! Some things just are. Well, with human productions, we can generally come up with some satisfactory answer, even if it’s just “fiddling around” or “throwing crap at a wall to see what sticks.” Nature is a more enigmatic creator. Let’s take a look at those causes again to see what we can learn of “why” from the other three:

1. Material cause: that out of which something is made.
2. Efficient cause: that by which something is made.
3. Formal cause: that into which something is made.
4. Final cause: that for the sake of which something is made.

If you have a green chair in your room and you paint it red, all four causes are present: material (the green chair), efficient (you), formal (the red chair), and final (a more aesthetically pleasing bedroom, perhaps). What about the green tomato ripened into red? It has causes, as well: material (the green tomato), efficient (energy from the sun), formal (the red tomato)… but what about the final cause? The sun wasn’t going out of its way to ripen that tomato. It had no conscious motivation. In truth, the redness of the tomato is a purpose unto itself.

What do all of these causes tell us about Aristotle’s fourth kind of change: coming to be or passing away? Well, consider the red tomato: when you eat it, it nourishes you and the matter that made up the tomato now makes up you. Is the tomato now a person? Are you now a tomato? Of course not, but some kind of fundamental change has taken place in the matter itself: tomato matter has become human matter.

But what IS “tomato matter?” What is “human matter,” for that matter? (heh) Most importantly: what is “matter itself?” The answers to these questions cut to the heart of what it means for man to be a maker.

Part II: Man the Maker

Not everything that results from human behavior is a “work of art,” nor can we even necessarily call it man-made. It would be normal to say that a man made a house, or that he made a fire. Of course he made the house, but did he really make the fire? Perhaps he started it, but that only means that he caused it to happen at a certain time in a certain place. Aristotle draws a threefold division of occurrences:

1. a natural event (ex: a wildfire),
2. an artificial happening (ex: a “man-made” fire), and
3. an artificial product.

You might notice that it is called a product, and not a creation. Simply put, men aren’t conjurers – they cannot create something from nothing; they make one thing from another.

Aristotle drew inspiration from his predecessors, but he also sought to avoid their mistakes, as he saw them. Avoiding the extreme positions of “everything always changes” and “everything is constant,” Aristotle noted the more logical middle ground – that in any change, something must remain constant. If I hand you an apple, it will change positions and ownership, but it remains the same apple.

With that in mind, Aristotle classified the kinds of change that can occur to a body:

1. local motion (change in place),
2. alteration (change in quality),
3. growth/shrinking (change in quantity or size), and
4. coming to be and passing away (becoming or ceasing to be what it is).

Obviously, #4 is special – Aristotle separated it from the others, as it is a more fundamental change. It applies to things as well as people – just as a corpse of a man is not the man, a demolished building is not the building (you might say it has lost its building-ness). While he acknowledged that something remained (the corpse, or the rubble), he did not have a name for the phenomenon we call the conservation of matter. Here, he felt that an investigation into reuse of building materials in artificial products would be instructive for understanding the transformations involved in coming to be and passing away.

(Aside: I thought it was interesting that Aristotle did not call local motion caused by man “artificial motion.” Rather, he called it “violent motion,” because it violated the natural tendency of the object to remain at rest.)

Part I: Man the Philosophical Animal, continued

There are three primary directions that human activity can take, and these are the three dimensions that make up and describe any person. They are:

1. Man the maker – the artist or artisan,
2. Man the doer – the moral and social being, and
3. Man the knower – the student and teacher.

It is important to point out that the knower doesn’t have a monopoly on thinking. All three are thinkers, although you could say that the maker entertains more “productive” thought and the doer more “practical,” as opposed to the knower’s “theoretical” or “speculative” thought.

Aristotle himself wrote on each of these kinds of thinking. His defining work on the “productive” sphere is titled Poetics. It isn’t merely about poetry, though; the Greek word from which we get the word poetry is a general term for any kind of making, not just making art. People don’t only care about making art; there are countless more “useful” things that people make, and can take pride in making well.

Here, Adler takes a step back to bring up some much grander terms: truth, goodness, and beauty. These are the universal values that appeal to human nature, and they correspond to the three dimensions of human thought.

• Man the maker is concerned with beauty, with trying to produce well-made things.
• Man the doer, both as an individual and a member of society, is concerned with good and evil, right and wrong.
• Man the knower is concerned with truth.

I have to admit – it gives me a bit of a thrill that these correspond so well with my concept of Garra Ronnie Res (in the same order, no less!). Whether that is a reflection of the timeless truth of Aristotle’s message or something more cosmically significant, it is kind of exciting that it came to me in a dream.

Aristotle for Everybody

Part I: Man the Philosophical Animal

The book begins with a discourse on categories. Aristotle was fascinated by categories, and Adler points out how that is important to most of his teachings. Beyond the elementary “animal, vegetable, mineral” distinctions, the first significant claim is that humans are different from other animals in one respect: our ability to “play philosophical games.”

(Note: Covey makes exactly this claim in 7HoHEP to explain mankind’s freedom to choose, and therefore the importance of proactivity and responsibility)

Aristotle also made the distinction between bodies (on one hand) and their characteristics or attributes (on the other). We can consider the attributes of a thing without thinking of the thing itself, but we cannot change them without changing the thing. What’s more – things CAN be changed, whereas attributes cannot; green does not become red, but a green thing can change to a red thing (like a bell pepper, or tomato).

Here, Adler steals my heart once again, with a semantic aside about the meaning of the term “thing.” You see, Aristotle uses the term “thing” interchangeably with the term body (see above) – that is, a physical object. One issue: he ALSO uses “thing” as a counterpart to “person” (as in “person, place or thing”). We do the same thing today, actually. From his other books, I know Adler is a big proponent of being mindful of authors’ wordplay – their intentional use of language in a way that, because it is unusual, must be explained to the audience. Wordplay like this (which Adler calls a “Term”) is a flashing red light, a dead giveaway of on idea that the author feels is of utmost importance.

What is the importance, though?

Human beings are physical things in one sense of the word and not in another when we call them persons, not things. As physical things, as bodies, they have the three dimensions with which we are all acquainted. As persons, the also have three dimensions, which are quite different.

And what are those three dimensions of humanity? Stay tuned to find out...