It is a testament to the concept of towering intellect when your ideas, only partially preserved over the ancient recesses of time, contribute to the fundamental core of our understanding of just about everything 2400 years later.  That is the essence of the man Aristotle (384BC – 322BC) who lived in Greece at the time where the means of measurable information was minuscule and the depth of thought and reason by those observers of their world  immense.  In the ancient world,  Greece swung way above its tiny weight in relative resources and manpower on the basis of its celebration of the intellect.   In the realm of reason, giants lived – Socrates begot Plato and Plato begot Aristotle.  Aristotle was uniquely among them a true polymath.  Everything interested him; he spent his 62 years learning and expounding on diverse topics such as zoology, physics, logic, the arts, psychology and economics.  Of particular note was his interest in the meaning of everything, that world where the human intellect goes to understand the why things are, and have come to be.  The world of metaphysics is not for the casual afternoon of contemplation.  The arguments that form the foundation of a logic explaining existence, causation, effect, time and space have absorbed the greatest of our perceptive thinkers over the eons.  Understanding the abstraction of things helps to bring clarity to the underlying essential truth, independent of the point of observation.  Aristotle, reaching across the 24 intervening centuries, has much to tell us about our current intellectual vacuousness and lack of rigor and casualness regarding truth.

Aristotle perceived a world that existed not as some abstract projection of reality, but as full of real substance under constant tension from the sum of its parts.  In a beautiful contemplation well beyond my power to deliver or do justice in a few sentences, Aristotle dealt with the basic conundrum of whether it is possible that something could ever emanate  from something else; how is it possible that something could seemingly come from nothing, an impossibility if existence is real and not a projection or simulation.  The first concept was that which exists, or actual, has the potential to change, but requires that its specific, associated potential to change be actualized by another entity, or actualizer.  In simple framing, as described by Edward Feser in his wonderful treatise,  Five Proofs of the Existence of God,  a hot cup of coffee left out over time cools, yet, while hot, its coolness does not yet exist, but must come into being affected by another.  The hot coffee, though hot, has a potential to coolness, but requires an outside force, an actualizer- i.e. the cool air around it, or the ice cube you drop in it.  The air has the potential to cool the coffee but only if it has sufficient potential for coolness actualized by the air conditioner that acts upon it.  The air conditioner’s potential to cool air is actualized by the freon that circulates within it.  The freon’s potential to circulate is actualized by the motor that actualizes the circulation of the freon.  The motor’s potential to actualize the circulation is actualized by electricity, the flow of electricity actualized by the power plant, and so on and so on.   The potential each entity has to change is actualized by an actualizer, and so change occurs all the time through actualizers moving upon the actualized until one gets to the point of existence from non-existence, at which the first actualizer must be self actualized or could not exist , its existence always actual and not affected by change. That self actualized entity moves causation without being acted upon because it is inherently fully actualized and therefore devoid of potential to be acted or moved upon.  It is the core of all existence, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.

I am not so foolhardy to think that the above paragraph talking superficially about a cup of coffee remotely orients one towards Aristotle’s concepts regarding an Unmoved Mover, a fully actualized, “unique, immutable, eternal, immaterial intellect that is the uncaused ultimate cause of everything other than itself”.  Aristotle was not concerning himself with questions of man’s reason for existence or the possible existential relationship of the thinking being towards the devine.  He was concerned with metaphysics, not divinity.

The logic however has much to teach us about our society’s looseness with truth, and current disdain for the accumulated thought of the generations that came before them.  Post modernists and their reliance on narrative to describe the world around them rather than any rationally derived understanding of underlying truth leads to the vacuousness of today’s lives and crisis mongering.  Approaching the search for truth as a device that must be actualized by a narrative or not exist at all, is codified in all our modern misunderstandings of man as both the maker and breaker of our age’s ills. Man is ultimate, and ultimately destructive.  We must therefore remove ourselves from yesterday’s mistakes, and accept our burden to cleanse the ignorant past. The narrative expresses itself as “settled” or “unmoved” by alternative potentials or actualizers.   The world’s climate existed in ideal form before man, and man’s effect upon it is conclusive and ultimate in its “change” toward the worst.  Wealth is finite, and therefore one man’s accumulation of wealth actualizes another becoming poorer – redistribution is the only “settled” science to restore appropriate balance.  Sex is fluid; the concept of “man” or “woman” is an intersectional perception not a biological truth.  God does not exist, because if He did, there would not be inequity and evil.  Science is fully realized truth, and any rational outcome simply awaits the unveiling of that truth through more science.  Our failings as a society are systemic, and inherent because of our biases, not our individual potentials. The settled narrative substitutes for truth.   Our politics are devoid of consensus, because that would require rationalizing cause and associated effect.  We fall for conspiracy theories, fragments or distortions of facts, collective blindness and fear mongering that fits our narrative, because the more complex, nuanced underlying truth is potentially going to challenge us and take us to places we do not wish to go.

Aristotle taught his students, including his most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, that ultimately the universe functions far beyond us, upon its own logic, on its own timetable, and with potential outcomes dependent upon the forces that actualized the potential.  Human beings can only attempt to conceptualize the larger truth, but are owners only of their place in existence, awaiting the actualizing of their potential by the untold number of forces that are actualized themselves in an innumerable series of interactions.  It is left to each human the intellect that perceives the appreciation of what was possible, what was actualized, and what was inevitable.  It is our unique gift among species.

It is left to the Unmoved Mover alone, to be responsible for it all.