4.9.4 Was Aristotle Right After All?
While something whose manner of being is to refer to the explanation it provides, to persist in being what it is by allowing itself to be appropriately modified, and to retain previous modifications, is wholly unfamiliar to modern science, we suggest that such a manner of being is something which might have been quite familiar to Aristotle. Indeed, note the superficial resemblance between this mode of being and Aristotle’s being-at-work-staying-itself, entelechia. True, for him the vital principle of modification resided in the Being of the things themselves, constantly at work there, rather than in the external demands driven by the varied explanatory employments of the object. Still, the object of explanation used in modern science may resemble the material upon which the form, represented here by the all-pervasive need man feels to explain, is constantly at work. As Joe Sachs says in his Introduction to Aristotle’s Physics:
Material is described as that which, by its own nature, inherently yearns for and stretches out for form. What Aristotle means by material is: not inert, not necessarily tangible, relative to its form, not possessed of any definite properties, and ultimately a purely ideal being. Material should never be called matter, by which we mean something that stands on its own with a determinate set of properties: has weight, occupies space, preserves its state of motion in a straight line. Form, in turn, means some definite way of being-at-work.
Replace ‘matter’ with object of experience, ‘material’ with object of explanation, ‘form’ with being-at-work-explaining, and you have our argument. Even the assertion that material is relative to its form and that it is not possessed of any definitive properties, fits.
Objects of explanation used by the modern scientific project to explain the observed behavior of ordinary objects of experience thus appear to have returned to science some measure of that intrinsic purposefulness which it possessed in Aristotle’s physics and which was expressly and radically eliminated from it by Descartes. It reflects perhaps the newness-in-sameness of which Joe Sachs speaks in the Introduction to his translation of Aristotle’s Physics:
Aristotle’s way of understanding the causes of things does not do violence either to the stability or to the variability of the world, but affirms the unfailing newness-within-sameness that we observe in the return of the seasons and the generations of living things. It offers an example of a physics that interprets causality without recourse to mechanical necessity or mathematical law.