The main point of contention about science doesn’t come from an anti-science stance. People who make it their business to refute that long discredited position are doing little more than shooting from the hip. Rather it’s to correct against a misplaced complacency and false sense of security that still linger today from discredited or outmoded science and ‘science-y’ doctrines.

The lasting mystique attached to Aristotelian doctrines treating physics, metaphysics, and logic is an example. Anyone will tell you this is foundational stuff in the study of the history of the Western canon, which is not the same as that which justifies a blanket citing of these doctrines as though they represent some cornerstone of truth to be used in the shaping of American culture or private sentiment.

A sizeable section in Bertrand Russell’s classic volume The History of Western Philosophy is devoted to a close scrutiny of this founding father, at the end of which Russell concludes his doctrines are “wholly false” (1945, 1972, 202). Regarding Aristotle’s logical treatises, Russell advises:

Any person in the present day who wishes to learn logic will be wasting his time if he reads Aristotle or any of his disciples. None the less, Aristotle’s logical writings show great ability, and would have been useful to mankind if they had appeared at a time when intellectual originality was still active. Unfortunately, they appeared at the very end of the creative period of Greek thought, and therefore came to be accepted as authoritative. (202)

Let that sink in. Not only can creative and original thought still be “wholly false,” but in the absence of a general capacity for creative, logical, and intellectual originality in a given time period it can be accepted as authoritative. In the case of Aristotle, it’s a widely accepted view that this was how his philosophy dominated for 2,000 years until the arrival of sustained critical ability and original thought.

As far as originality, Russell maintains Aristotle appears to have only “half-emancipated himself” from what Raymond Williams would call a “slavish imitation” of Plato’s Forms, such that the metaphysical existence Aristotle accorded to the Forms of his predecessor speaks to a hypostatization (a construal of them as having a real existence) and reification (in which an abstract concept is considered to be real).

As far as essential concepts, such as the concept of ‘essence’ in connection with Aristotle’s logic, “what you are by your very nature,” this is a “muddle-headed action, incapable of precision” (Russell 164-165). The concept of potentiality, when reduced to some fundament, “always conceals confusion of thought” (167).

The metaphysical notions of potentiation and actualization especially are doozies whose tortuous logic leads us down a path of largely private justifications concerning who is deserving of a share in God’s immortality and who is not. Aligned with political interests, the only ‘potency’ this kind of bad metaphysics is capable of pulling off is to pull one over on the unsuspecting. After all, who wouldn’t want conferral of form by external material forces such as status and wealth? Unfortunately, only some are permitted this, the others’ failure to attain to real mobility stemming from their having failed to attain to ‘actuality.’ ‘Actuality’ is explained as having to do with the desire to become ‘real.’ Applied to past political and economic interests, this clearly constituted a blatant misuse and bad stewardship of collective resources, disproportionately distributed to begin with. Yet such misrepresentation still today is viewed as legitimate in some sectors, likely due in part to the length of the original combined with the inconsistent use of key terms, as Russell notes:

The soul, we are told, is the form of the body. Here it is clear that ‘form’ does not mean ‘shape’…in Aristotle’s system, the soul is what makes the body one thing…It would seem, then, that ‘form’ is what gives unity to a portion of matter, and that this unity is usually, if not always, teleological. But ‘form’ turns out to be much more than this, and the more is very difficult. The form of a thing, we are told, is its essence and primary substance. Forms are substantial, although universals are not…Things increase in actuality by acquiring form; matter without form is only a potentiality. (165-166)

Therefore, if a statue possesses form, it has a ‘greater actuality’ than the block of marble it becomes separated from, giving it ‘unity.’ This is how unity is conferred on matter, and matter that’s given form becomes progressively more like God.

In the past, the hard sciences are said to have been closed to study, yet at the same time we were expected to “adhere to them totally” (Bruno Latour). Unless they had been discredited, one couldn’t ask after their “context, history, naïve perception, or how beholden they are to their own past” (Latour). Aristotle’s writings are not considered the hard sciences, clearly, but this is not to say they are lacking in instruction, especially where they afford a view of a great mind, which generally makes for pleasurable reading, along with their possessing historical value, as noted.

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