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For Aristotle, to be is to be an individual, a “this” (tode ti), and so the ultimate principle must be conceived as an individual being, God, rather than an originally undifferentiated principle. Like the ultimate principles in the other three philosophies Aristotle’s God is beyond “being” understood as “physical being”: a) God is beyond the scope of physics because God is eternal, unmoved, and separable; b) God is without magnitude or parts and is indivisible; c) in God alone subject and object coincide. But because Aristotle’s principle is an individual distinct from other individuals, its cosmological creativity does not take the form of self-differentiation like Neo-Confucianism’s derivation of the world from the Great Ultimate, Plotinus’ derivation of it from the One, or Plato’s derivation of the forms from the Idea of the good. For Aristotle the meaning of the world is to be found not in its source but in its goal, not emanation or self-differentiation but teleology. The ultimate principle, Aristotle’s God, is entirely self-contained and at rest. Unmoved and unmoving, God cannot create by taking action. God’s creativity is the metaphysical equivalent of a gravitational pull by which the natural world is brought into a rational order. It is a motion towards God rather than from God or a first principle. Like Plato, Aristotle shares the Greek dualistic view that creation does not occur ex nihilo but by bringing order and purpose to pre-existing material that is otherwise random and chaotic – although for Plato and Aristotle, unlike the religious tradition, “pre-existing” means ontologically distinct rather than temporally prior. Aristotle argues that 1) anything that seems good moves others through their desire (orexis) for the good; 2) in so far as God exists by necessity, God’s mode of being is good; 3) therefore God moves all things by being the object of orexis or eros.
This is hard to conceive. How can we make sense of a claim that seems to imply that plants grow and rivers flow because they love God? Aristotle’s God is not loved as a person, like the God of religion. God is pure rationality. Like Plato, Aristotle sees rationality as the fundamental principle of reality, and since for Aristotle this principle must be an individual, the rational principle becomes a pure mind whose “thinking is a thinking on thinking”. This still does not seem very helpful if it now implies that plants and rivers love rationality. The Metaphysics begins with the words, “All human beings have by nature a desire to know.” The word translated by “desire” is orexis, the same word used in Book Λ when Aristotle says that anything that seems good moves others through their desire (orexis) for the good. Our desire to know is our desire for the ultimate good, pure rationality, God. We are not normally aware that this is the goal our desire is pulling us toward. We are aware at first only that we enjoy sense perception, especially sight, even when no practical advantage is involved. Since sense perception is the beginning of knowledge, our love of sense perception is just the most immediate manifestation of our love of knowledge and rationality: “for this reason waking, perception, and thinking are most pleasant” (Metaphysics Λ7.1072b17). Our enjoyment of sense perception leads beyond itself to a love of more advanced forms of knowing: memory, experience, and conceptual knowledge (Metaphysics Α.1). Beyond these is a kind of thinking that is higher still, theoria or contemplation, in which we can briefly experience the rationality that is God. Thus our love of lower forms of knowledge is really an intimation of our love of God, our love of the pure non-relational rationality that is the goal and purpose and meaning of the universe.
This may explain the roots of human motivation, but how does it explain non-human activity? The opening words of the Metaphysics say that our innate desire to know is not only insofar as we are human beings, but insofar as we are natural beings: “All human beings have by nature a desire to know.” Our desire is an expression of the fundamental teleological movement of nature as a whole. At the beginning of Λ.10 Aristotle says that just as an army contains its good both in its leader and its order, the universe contains its good both in its object of desire, God, and in its order which is analogous to that of a household. The head of a household in Aristotle’s day is the only one who directly contributes to civic society, through his political participation. In an analogous way the human race is the only one that directly contributes to achieving nature’s goal of rationality. But the head of the household can accomplish his ends only with the support of the entire hierarchy of family, servants, and animals that enable the household to function. In the same way, human beings could not fulfill the goal of nature if we were not supported by the animal, plant, and mineral realms. It is not that plants grow and rivers flow out of love for the mind of God, but that nature as a whole does what is necessary for its highest manifestation, human beings, to achieve that goal. We are like the fruit of a tree, which could not exist without all the other parts. Only human beings are capable of reaching the goal and achieving consummate happiness (Nicomachean Ethics X.8.1178b24-32), but lower forms of life, in seeking to thrive, seek to emulate the actualization of God as far as their nature allows. Their efforts to survive are a love of life, and implicitly of the most actualized life, which is God (Metaphysics Λ7.1072b26-30), and they emulate God’s eternality in their desire to reproduce themselves through procreation (De Anima 2.4.415a-26-b2). In the case of non-living phenomena like rivers, that lack not only the human ability of reasoned choice but even the animal drive toward survival and procreation, their love of God takes the form of a tendency – that by analogy we might call a striving – toward regularity. The laws of nature are the initial manifestation of rationality, the most elemental emulation of the perfect mentality that is God. As Aristotle puts it, “It is on such a principle that the heavens and nature depend”.
(excerpted from chapter 3)
