Plato, Aristotle & the Origins of Philosophy

[applause] >> Well, thank you, comrades. Aristotle once wrote that philosophy begins in wonder. And I think this really nicely captures the curiosity we feel as human beings. A curiosity that provokes us to ask questions like, "Why is that the way that it is?" And very often, "Why are things not as they first appear?" And in questioning, we come to understand the partial limits of received wisdom. We scrutinize our own opinions, and very often we are motivated to dig much deeper. And for Aristotle, this is what he viewed as the role of the philosopher, to pursue knowledge in the broadest sense of the word. For only with knowledge can man escape ignorance and arrive at an understanding of the world and our place within it. Now, it probably goes without saying that for most of man's history, they've not been afforded the ability to really think beyond their immediate needs. This was true, of course, for the majority of our species' existence. In hunter-gatherer tribes, survival was really the main task at hand, and the hand-to-mouth existence precluded any kind of theoretical understanding. But Aristotle was the first to observe that it's really with the advent of class society that a divide begins to set in between the thinkers and the doers, mental and manual labor. And really only on this basis can a sliver of society be afforded the leisure time to pursue theoretical inquiry and to push back the barriers of human ignorance. And 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, once considered the the cradle of the of civilization, it was the scribes and the priests that were afforded this time to posture on the universe, to begin to develop mathematical formulas and systems to understand the planets and the solar eclipses. In the old Egyptian kingdom, it was the priestly class that developed practical arithmetic and also a calendar in order to really understand the Nile's flooding patterns. And these leaps forward in human thought required a certain economic base. They required a gigantic state which was able to support a cast of people of the leisurely class to think on things. The priests of ancient Egypt did not have to till the lands, plant the crops, erect the obelisks, or inscribe the tombs of the pharaohs. No, these thinkers could harness nature for human ends and they were elevated above society. And really the social role that they played was to affirm the divinity and authority of the kings. And they mainly did this through religious mysticism. And it was only really with the slave economy in ancient Greece that philosophy could begin in earnest. In the bustling maritime city of Ionia, for the first time ever before, as Bella said in the introduction, man tried to understand nature in terms of nature. And this marked a revolution in human thought. Thales is credited by Aristotle as the first philosopher because he sought to find a unifying principle for the universe from which everything could be explained. And he understood this primary substance to be water, something from which all else is derived and to which all returns. Now, at first glance, this might not seem so different from the mythology that that prevailed at this time. For instance, in the in the old Egyptian kingdom, there was the creation myth that posited that the universe emerged from this chaotic ocean. And for those that have read Hom- Homer's Odyssey, you will know of Odysseus, the sea god, who is postulated to have created the universe from water. But, there is one decisive difference between these past explanations, and that's Thales in his explanation sought no recourse to god. What he did was he looked for something permanent and persisting in all of the flux and change of the world to answer the question, "What is reality made of?" Well aware of the limits of our senses and how unstable everything can feel in the world, he sought to find a natural element to explain the manifold complexity of the world. And it's very likely that the rationale for choosing water was the role it plays in nourishing life. There are others that imagine it's because of the sea trade in Ionia, which brought most of its wealth. And really this break with mythology is primarily a question of method. Thales argued that in all of this change there is something permanent that can be understood through reason alone. And this is where philosophy truly begins. Marx commented much later that mythology was bound up with all early attempts to understand the natural world. And this was handed down throughout the course of centuries by religious mysticism, by rituals and ceremony. And so, in order to really understand the significance of Thales, we can't really compare it to our present conceptions, today's understanding, but really by understanding more what preceded him. Because before this point, the gods controlled everything. They were the divine cause of everything. In Egypt, for instance, you can find in the reliefs of the temples the sun god Ra, who was supposed to have breathed and with moisture and air the the earth and the sky were created. And in ancient Greece, the gods were not simply powerful beings. They were the forces of nature given flesh and blood. Take Zeus, for instance, the most powerful of the gods. He was seen as the manifestation of the atmosphere who would rain down his thunderbolts when he was angered. This is what Thales and his followers in Ionia were decisively breaking from and instead they formed grand cosmological explanations for the beginning of the cosmos. The Thales student Anaximander, he didn't believe the primary substance to be water. He understood it as warring opposites and he began to develop a theory of matter in general and positive that the universe itself was infinite. And for his own student Anaximenes, he went a little bit further and began to explore how matter could transform from one quality into another. As Marxists we understand that this marked the birth of materialism where the material world is primary and natural observable elements are seen as the principal causes of the way reality is. And there are two key points I want to draw out of this. The first is it's no accident that these ideas and the birth of philosophy happened in ancient Greece because it was the most sophisticated and complex society that humanity had ever gone through at this point. In fact, the practical activities of trade across the Mediterranean required a thinking far broader in character than what was needed in the past. And the Ionian philosophers themselves were merchants, wealthy merchants that almost had a material incentive to see what was general in the sea of particulars, to imbibe themselves with a knowledge of different climates and cultures and conditions. That is to say, philosophy first emerged as a means for man to increase his mastery over nature. And the second point that I wanted to make is that with the Ionians we really see most of all the brilliance of human intuition and reason. There was no means of testing one's hypotheses, or there was no scientific lab that you could go into to investigate the nature of matter. In fact, the slave mode of production, which is incredibly unproductive compared to capitalism, conditioned this low level of science and culture. And yet, despite all of this, these thinkers began the process of breaking man from mysticism. They began this process and they understood philosophy as the crowning jewel of all science. And I would really strongly recommend comrades to read Alan's book on this, The History of Philosophy, where he talks about the heroes of antiquity. There is so much we actually take for granted today that was fought for by the Greeks. And it's difficult to believe sometimes that thought was required to go into the basic conceptions that we have inherited today. But rather than going through all of the the schools of ancient thought of ancient Greece in this lead-off, I wanted to make a general point about the development of human thought that Alan traces through his book, following very closely how Hegel does it in his lectures on the history of philosophy. And this relates to progress. Because as we know today, progress in thought, progress in society is shunned in the halls of academia. In fact, it's incredibly unfashionable [snorts] to to say that you believe that that progress exists or that progress is possible. And in fact, when many academics look back on the history of philosophy, they see it almost as a comedy of errors, a tiresome repetition of the same debates again and again, bringing us no closer to anything truthful. And I say when philosophy is understood in this way, it destroys the living, breathing essence of it as a discipline. It becomes a series of random people engaging in discussion where no one opinion is greater than the other. But the philosophy of ancient Greece tells a completely different story to this. It's in fact impossible not to look at the history of philosophy and see a spiral of development, a feedback loop between different philosophers, and even at stages between contradictory schools of thought. To continue with the example of the Ionians, it was Thales that wrote that matter was animate and alive. And this gave a massive stimulus for his followers to go on and try understand what the unifying principle of the universe was. And this was then taken to a much higher plane by the atomists, by figures like Democritus, who tried to work out a materialist explanation for everything, understanding the atom to be the basic block of all reality. And then there was the Epicureans after this, but one particular example I want to focus on is after Greece had fallen. Thank you. You actually find in the in in Rome the philosopher Lucretius, who wrote a wonderful poem on the nature of things. And this is a magnificent exposition of materialism. In this poem, he repudiates the the idea of God having any agency in this world. His whole purpose is to deprive God of any worldly function and to chase him out of his hiding places of human ignorance. And he views nature as the inexhaustible source of all creation. And it's far more poetic than I could ever be, so I would really encourage everyone to read it. And in fact, Lucretius, in my opinion, bears a striking resemblance to many of the ideas of the Enlightenment, which we'll hear about in the next session. We can also find another spiral of development when we go back to the philosophy of Heraclitus, who himself rejected this uh this uh this quest of the Ionians to to search for permanence of finding one basic substance from everything was derived. Instead, he observed that everything lives by conflict, and whatever lives lives by the destruction of something else. And this inspired one of his very famous aphorisms, "Fire lives the death of the air, and air of fire. Water lives the death of earth, and earth that of water." Taking essentially the four elements that were used to understand the world and placing them in opposition to one another. And Heraclitus' riddles really perplexed the school in Elea, the Eleatics, Parmenides, Zeno, and others, who ended up not understanding this nature of contradiction, and in fact denying that motion could ever take place. And this led them to the conclusion of doubting everything that material reality existed at all. And in fact, these debates inspired Aristotle to deve- to develop a theory of change, to look at potentiality and actuality, and to concretize this process of becoming, which in turn laid the groundwork for Hegel's logic. So, what we see in the history of philosophy is the dialectic at work. There is no dry repetition of the same debates, but a real living progression. What is rational is preserved, it is refined, and it is hammered into shape by this great galaxy of philosophers that came before. What we can also find when we look back at ancient Greece is that social life conditions consciousness. The crisis in Athenian society provoked a crisis in all previous thought. By the fifth uh century before Christ, in Athens in particular, society had become riven by contradiction. It was on the one hand part urban, part rural, part free, part slave. Wars of expansion brought pride and punishment in equal measure. You had Homer's myths sitting alongside the uh the speculative ideas of the materialists and the uh and the atomists. And you had a class battle waging between the oligarchs and the aristocracy against the maritime and commercial populations over questions of democracy. And Athens in its classical period was really at the cutting edge of antiquity, in its architecture, in its poetry, in its science, in its culture. And at the start of Socrates' life, the Athenian constitution was the most democratic in the entire world, which provoked the wrath of oligarchs that wanted to reestablish their their firm grip on power. Now, by the time of Socrates' death, everything was in disarray. A feeling of weariness and disgust by a world that had lived out outlived itself began to really seep into the class outlook of all. It was one of those moments in history where everything began to be doubted. All that was holy was profane, to use Marx's expression. And as Marxists, we understand that in revolutionary upheavals, there are days where decades happen. Well, comrades, I would say in the lifetimes of of Socrates, uh Plato and Aristotle, there were decades where centuries happened. From the loss of Athens to Sparta in the 30-year war, the Peloponnesian War, to the vast expanse of Alexander the Great into Asia and then his death. And there was a saying at the time, the Athenians were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others, which I think captures it very well. The turbulence of the events was leading to a turbulence in thought, which seeped into the battleground of philosophy. And the sophists were really children of this age of uncertainty. Now, the sophists are not so much a philosophical school, but more of trained professionals in rhetoric, in philosophy, that would go around charging a price, and they would often gravitate towards Athens. And today, sophistry is mainly associated with trickery and deceit. And this, I would say, is the destination of this trend of thought. It's always destined to end there. But in its beginnings, the Sophists were rationalists and free thinkers, people that challenged all existing orthodoxy and faith. They were not so interested in the theories of the cosmos, but shifted the axis of philosophy towards human nature and conduct, from the objective to the subjective. They brought philosophy, in fact, into the realm of social relations, where in the past ethical matters were left simply to the playwrights and the poets. And Protagoras is probably the most famous of the Sophists, and he proclaimed that man is the measure of all things. And here we can see the seeds of subjectivism, right? That there is no objective world, uh and many of his followers said, "Even if there were an objective world, we would not be able to communicate or understand it." With that in mind, what I'm about to say might be a little bit surprising, but the Sophists actually represented a They had a revolutionary edge and a progressive edge to what they were putting out there. Because what Protagoras was highlighting is that real living man was in fact the measure of all matters, and Greek society was not based on timeless principles inspired by the gods, but all matters of human affairs were being settled by force. Increasingly, Athens and many of the city-states around resembled a jungle, where you could find the ruthless pursuit of self-interest of all classes involved. And in a distorted way, this philosophical idea reflected the class contradictions engulfing Athens. One government was being knocked down by another, and might was the only law that the powerful answered to. Now, that all of that said, um some of these Sophists were just grifters. They were just wandering around teaching people how to play with words and see the many sides of of issue in order to win an argument. But there are some extremely profound insights in [clears throat] some other sophists. I wanted to give two examples. One is Critias, who was actually a vengeful oligarch, who argued that the Greeks had been persuaded to believe in a race of gods in order to keep them in check by their own fear and keep them law-abiding. Now, this was a very revolutionary idea of of the day, because in fact the Athenian constitution, the constitution in Sparta, was meant to have been handed down by Apollo. Think for instance of how the commandments came down to to Moses on on Mount Sinai. So, for a group of intellectuals to be saying, "Well, actually, the laws are not timeless. They are in fact made by man and they can so easily be undone." was a very, very extreme and subversive idea. And another sophist that I found, Antiphon, he went as far as saying to his students, "It is only by law that one man is a slave and another is free." And he taught his students that they're by nature there was no difference between men in their intelligence uh and in fact the rule of the master over the slave was therefore unjust. And here we see what I was trying to describe. Philosophy brought into the realm of social relations and the highlighting of man's conditions in proving uh what what they are. And I think this is a supreme irony of history when you think about it, that these ideas that are very critical and materialistic sounding were developed by intellectuals who didn't believe there was an objective world. But there are many twists and turns like this in the history of philosophy. And these ideas were beginning to resonate and actually fuel this feeling of disarray within Athens. And so Socrates appears on the scene, uh a man that would walk around harassing people with questions, go to all of the rich parties in the marketplaces. And Socrates himself made it his life mission to combat this. Um it's worth saying that Socrates never wrote anything down and is really remembered mainly through play writes but also his students. He's the lead protagonist of most of Plato's dialogues and it's quite clear that Plato after a certain point used the character of Socrates to espouse his own views. Now there is a dividing line between where Socrates ends and Plato begins. It's contested. But for the sake of this lead off, I think it's it's fair to say, and this is my own uh opinion, that Socrates is usually recounted as a man that thinks about the ethical sphere. And so when you get to the broader kind of metaphysical or epistemological claims, it's assumed that Plato has uh is using Socrates almost as his puppet. But to come bring it back bring it back to the Sophists who stressed the relativity of morals and values, Socrates aimed to distinguish what is universal and what is general. And that's why in most of the early dialogues, um, you will find them take the form of what is virtue, what is beauty, what is justice. I reread uh a short dialogue on in preparation for this, Euthyphro, uh which is named after a man that was handing in his father for manslaughter and he cites piety as the reason for for why he did that. And in this dialogue, which is very short, I'd encourage everyone to read it, Socrates asked the question, "Well, what is piety?" And this was a pressing matter because Socrates was uh awaiting trial for his impiety and for corrupting the youth. And Euthyphro gives many many different examples of impiety and piety. But he never gets to a general uh a general definition. And so Socrates complains, "I asked you for one thing, but you have given me a whole swarm of virtues." And this is quite typical of how the early dialogues go. And it's really why Socrates has gone down in the annals of history as the unresting critic, as the man that no one could satisfy by any of their answers. And I would say even though most of his philosophy revolves around the ethical realm, for me the most interesting thing is the method of inquiry. Because throughout the course of a dialogue, you could see the most boastful aristocratic Athenian being shown to be a fool. And Socrates' opponents could never really get to the essence of what they speak of. That is to say, these people could give many examples of justice and beauty, but they had no understanding of what made things just or beautiful. And through the course of the discussion, you can really see the beginnings of a scientific method, a basis of scrutinizing common opinion, and showing how these prejudices hold up a mirror to society. And Socrates had this ability to show how even the most simple of opinions, when taken to its extreme, could have the most the most radical end point. The most extreme conclusion could be drawn. And even though most of the early dialogues do not end with a kind of eternal truth, for me this was never really the point. The format is not so much an elaborate system of doctrines with everything fully worked out. In fact, the dialogues give a sense of philosophy being living and unfinished, and they can at times be deeply puzzling. You can feel when you're reading them almost as if you're kind of laying hold to the truth for the definition which Socrates' interlocutors were searching, and then it can just so easily slip away. And the fact that Socrates was said to I think to be the wisest man of all by the Delphian Apollo, despite him being a man that said, "I know that I know nothing." I think does give a sense of the kind of playful and elusive role he he he had as a philosopher. And really reading the dialogues was actually my introduction to philosophy as a as a 14-year-old. And there was one metaphor that that really stood out when I was reading Meno. One of Socrates' interlocutors compares him to a stingray. They say, "The way that that your that your objections pierce through causes paralysis in its victims." And I remember reading this and thinking, "Wow, I wish I had that power." You know, there's something almost magical about it. And now I'm older and wiser and I'm a Marxist, I think I understand what that power is. Socrates was able to break things down into their component parts and show it from many different sides. I.e., he was able to use dialectics, a primitive form of dialectics, as a weapon against his opponents. And I think there's probably a lesson in here for us as Marxists. And Socrates himself has kind of been immortalized by the fact that he was forced to drink hemlock uh by his trial, which you can find in the apology, and this charge of impiety uh to the gods and corrupting the youth. But the most profound thing that Socrates did, in in truth, was actually school Plato, his his foremost student and the person that would turn to philosophy after his death uh to understand how Athenian society could be responsible for the crime of killing the greatest philosopher that had ever lived. And Plato went far further than his teacher. And there were two philosophical pillars which must be mentioned. The first is uh the theory of forms, and the second is the theory of the soul, which I would say both of which have become stock-in-trade for philosophical idealism. On the forms, in fact, Plato was very influenced by past battles between different uh schools of thought. From Heraclitus, he understood that change never ceases, that one thing is in the same position and in another at the same time. But he drew the conclusion from this that no knowledge could be granted from this world because knowledge requires a stable object. From the Eleatics, he understood that there was such a stable reality, but one that could be discovered only through the activity of the mind working apart from the senses. And from this, he argued that the world that we experience is defective. It's filled with error. But there is a more real and perfect realm populated by eternal, timeless, cha- changeless forms that are responsible for the structures of the world that we live in. So, this is his first idea. The second is on the soul. And in fact, he lifted this from the Pythagoreans, the the mystical cult that worshiped numbers, and he developed it to a much higher level. In the dialogues, he speaks of how humans do not learn. They recollect from the perfect realm of forms. And both of these claims really support and depend upon one another. The soul's immora- immortality is propped up by the theory of ideal forms, which are eternal. And the theory of forms depends on the activity of the soul separate from the body. And it might sound a little bit familiar. You know, this was massively popularized in in Greco-Roman culture, and really the essence of it lives on in a lot of Christian canon. Now, maybe comrades have heard the allegory of the cave, or better yet, watched the the Matrix, which is kind of the modern-day representation of this. But in this tale, we are all sat as prisoners facing a wall, and we see kind of these murky things appear on a screen-like thing on the cave wall. And these are the projections of the the pure forms passing back and forth. And the philosopher is the one that understands the kind of the shallowness of these shadows, and seeks divine truth and understanding from the the form of good, the light, and its and its sunbeams that are shining into the cave. Now comrades, when you read this in the Republic, it's a very, very beautiful image, but it gets everything the wrong way around. Like all idealist philosophy, it reverses the relations between material reality and the ideas that populate our minds. What Socrates began, which was a search for universals, for for general theories, is taken to an extreme by Plato, and where the forms actually become empty poetic metaphors. And the issue that Plato had, as all idealists have had after him, is finding a way to connect these two realms, right? The the grubby world that we experience, which is imperfect, and the perfect forms that are supposed to sit above this. And in the Symposium, which is one of my favorite dialogues, one of the characters explains the search for beauty as such. She says, "First, you have to understand bodily beauty, and then you reflect beauty in one's ways. The next rung of the ladder is to take the beautiful way of life and apply it to scholarship, and then you can understand the vision of beauty itself. And then we take the big leap, understanding beauty stripped of its fleshy color, and understanding how beauty and truth become one." Now, this is again very conceptually pleasing, but it is devoid of any content. I'm sure comrades can see that. And that is because correct generalizations are drawn from real material things. And in fact, I'd go further. You've probably noticed this tendency in in philosophy when you study it, towards idealism. And I would say, if you are working only with words, or thinking about thought, it is logical that these should be endowed with a life and power of their own. And think about it. Under all class society, reason and mind are placed above practice. Matter is inherently unruly, and it's been assumed by many philosophers that the mind has to impose order on it. And it's very clear in Plato's philosophy. Mind and matter are opposed like slave and master. And this really does have a social foundation. The separation of a small wealthy elite, the thinkers, from the real world gives gives rise to this back-to-front view of reality. This exaggerated place and power for thought in the development of all things. In fact, it turns human reason, which itself is a product of nature and society, into its creator. Now, the last thing I wanted to say about Plato connects to this. He can be considered the first class ideologue of his day. Cuz he understood, probably better than anyone else, the subversiveness of materialist philosophy. In his final work, The Laws, he writes of the materialists as godless men who undermine religion, ferment civil strife, and believe that nature exists by chance. And Plato did begin what his teacher Socrates had started in this regard. >> [clears throat] >> A staunch defense of aristocratic rule. And he spells this out many times in his political philosophy. Where on many occasions, he will defend slavery as ordained by nature, and also champion the rule of a few rather than the rule of the many. In his In his Republic, he imagines the perfect state, the Callipolis, which is a society ruled by reluctant philosophers who have warriors and producers as their loyal subjects. And when one of the interlocutors challenges this kind of ideal idyllic utopia or dystopia, depending on how you're looking at it, Socrates replies, "Well, we will convince people through the noble lie. We will tell citizens that the gods have mixed different metals into their souls. Gold for the rulers, silver for the warriors, and bronze for the producers. So, the assignment of metals signifies the assignment of classes. It encourages the individuals to embrace their assigned societal roles and discourages anything any kind of class strife and convincing the population that the place they they hold, the where they are on the rung of the ladder, was ordained by God. So, religion he understood was the cornerstone of aristocratic rule. And Plato was really an outstanding representative for his class. But most of all, he was a peerless idealist who helped shape Western thought for millennia. Now, last but last not least, I have to deal with Aristotle. Come as you might know, I've I've saved the hardest until last. And it's not for nothing that that Hegel described Aristotle as a man whose like no later age has ever produced. Because he poured his energy into understanding every single discipline, every single subject that had captured the imagination of Greek society. And the most remarkable thing is it's it's supposed that only 31 of his 200 treaties actually survived. Now, unlike his teacher Plato, he believed that our senses gave us a direct line to the real material world. Not only this, that our senses were dependable and that how things first appear give us hints as to how things actually are. He viewed the purpose of practical science as as not being there to simply describe the world, but actually to seek its deep invariant patterns. He sought the necessity that exists within nature. And he was a man of science. He was a great experimenter. In many ways, he anticipated an understanding of DNA. And his student Alexander the Great, when he was on the his wars of expanse, he would seek for all new discoveries of plants and animals to be sent back for Aristotle to work on. And I think this is probably where Aristotle gets his reputation as a materialist from. Uh and it's kind of been it's been put on a fresco, The School of Athens by Raphael in the in the Vatican City. It's a beautiful piece of art. I'd recommend all comrades go and see. And in this you have on the on on the central steps Plato pointing upwards, and Aristotle kind of with his palm down cautioning him to bring him back down to earth. But the the truth is it's far more complicated than this. And really Aristotle vacillated between materialism and idealism. He was as concerned with his experiments and observation, despite the low level of scientific technique at the time, as much as he was interested in first principles, in metaphysics, in what existed beyond the questions that physics could answer. And I would actually caution comrades about trying to fit philosophers in general consistently and neatly into boxes, and especially the case in ancient Greece. After all, a figure like Plato who said, "The purpose of philosophy is to prepare one for death." Um the reason he said that he wasn't a nihilist, exactly, but he said this because only then would the soul have the opportunity to reunite with the perfect realm. So he was all there, he was you know kind of you know a worldly philosophy if you will, two-world philosophy. He himself displays a point an extreme interest in politics, in political life to a far greater degree than Aristotle. And in fact, when you read The Republic, what you find is a materialist understanding of how constitutions were made, how city-states were evolved, and also of political charters and so on. But Aristotle did engage in a lot of speculative thought, grappling with the big questions of time, motion, eternity. And some of these brought him right into the swamp of idealism. And you can find this with his conception of God, the unmoved prime mover, who is not even aware of the world, and is essentially reason thinking on itself. He described it as pure actuality. Uh it's probably no surprise that this was the thing that Hegel probably liked the most about Aristotle [laughter] in his lectures on the history of philosophy. But now there are some insights that are incredibly modern and materialist. And I wanted to take the question of time, which he discusses in his physics. And he deals with the objections of the Eleatics, who believed that time was an illusion. And he begins his investigations with a series of puzzling questions. If time exists, then what kind of thing is it? Is it the sort of thing that exists independently and absolutely? Or is it rather the sort of thing that depends upon things for its existence? And after approaching it from many, many different angles, he writes, "Time is the measure of motion with respect to the before and after. Time is to motion as length is to line. It cannot exist independently, just as if there were no lines, there would be no length. If there were no motion, there would be no time." And he continued later on in the passage, "Motion must have always existed, nor can time come into being or cease to be. For there cannot be a before or after where there is no time." "Movement then is also continuous in the sense in which time is. For the time is either the same thing as motion or an attribute of it." So he believed he understood that there was no beginning of of time. And that the universe had existed for eternity. And this is strikingly materialistic, anticipating time and space as the mode of existence of matter and motion. Now I mentioned earlier Aristotle spoke about potentiality and actuality, and he anticipates on some level the unity between matter and energy. He observed that everything contains two aspects. Matter, which within itself contains the potential for an infinite amount of transformations, and form is how he describes it. That's his technical term, which is kind of like the active principle, the the the living force, if you will. And in developing this uh this idea of movement from potential to actual, he's speaking about the process of becoming, how transformations take place within the world. But I would say in most of Aristotle's writings, he does veer in an idealist direction on this. He does not dissociate matter from form, but he does at many points describe matter as passive and form as the active uh driver of transformation. So, throughout nature, form strives to realize itself against the resistance of matter, is essentially what he's he tries to say. And this is tied into his general teleological viewpoint, the belief that everything has a goal that it is striving towards. And this is underpinned by his belief that everything in the universe has a final cause. That is to say, there is a purpose to every compound of matter and form. Now, to give his famous example of the bronze statue, you can ask what it's made of, what its structures are, who made it, but Aristotle said that all past philosophers had missed the main question. Why was it made? What is its purpose? And he said, "This can only be understood when you understand things as having a kind of ordained goal." And we see this kind of wavering between materialism and idealism in his fascination with life and anatomy. You know, whilst on the one hand trying seeking to understand, for instance, the the basic anatomy through dissections and this sort of thing, he also did, on the other hand, develop in a kind of elaborate theory of the soul. And the in in De Anima, his book, he writes, "The soul is cause also as an end. All the parts of the body are thus the organs of the soul and hence exist for its sake." So, essentially, the soul is the cause of motion. It's what animates the matter. And so, the two are placed together, but the soul is given the precedence as the life force. Now, in preparing for this talk, I realized that if you pick and also from speaking to other comrades who have uh written contributions, if you pick any particular topic, there is almost a certainty that Aristotle has written something quite profound about it, which made this very, very difficult task. And I would say, the way I understand it is Aristotle is the apogee of Greek thought. As someone who tried to understand all branches of knowledge and to kind of systematize it. In his full stature, he stands as one of mankind's greatest teachers. He is the highest representative of this process that had gripped ancient Greece, which was the striving for a rational insight into the world. And Aristotle was a genius in the fullest sense of the word. But without the pathfinders of Ionia, the battles between the Heracliteans and the Eleatics, the skepticism of the Sophists, the Socratic method, the realm of forms, and the countless philosophers that I've not been able to mention, there would have been no conditions for someone called Aristotle to pass the threshold that divides the potential from the real. And I often reflect on a quote by Leon Trotsky when it comes to the question of genius. He wrote, "How many Aristotles are herding swine and how many swineherds are sitting on thrones?" Now, I began this talk by saying that it was at the beginning of class society that man was afforded the ability to think. And that really was a half-truth. Because man in general has never been given such a right. Class society has impoverished people, not just materially, but psychologically for millennia, hemming in the real true potential that exists. And it will only be through socialist revolution that all men and women will be freed from the drudgery of work and for the first time in history we can collectively lift up our eyes and look to the stars. Thank you. >> [applause] [cheering]