Episode 7 - Aristotle's World View
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
NOTE: I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I’d recommend reading the previous post to refresh yourself. If you’re a new subscriber to my substack, I’d invite you to start at my review of the first episode of this lecture series.
In the last episode, we explored the hierarchy that Aristotle laid out which separates rational things (i.e. people), from everything else. His perspective was very axial. That is, he internalised the idea of second-order thinking, where we take a step back and reflect on the ways in which we’re self-deceptive. To him, this second-order thinking was the hallmark of rationality. It’s important to keep this in mind, because our modern culture has reduced rationality to tracking and manipulating logical statements. For Aristotle, the process of cultivating one’s character was a core part of rationality since it prevents foolishness. That is, when people know what the right thing to do is, but for whatever reason don’t do it.
Humans have a fundamental drive to be in contact with reality as closely as possible, despite their vulnerability to foolishness. As discussed in previous episodes, Plato suggested that wisdom is the process of reducing our inner conflict, so that we can know the world as clearly as possible. Aristotle took these ideas along with his ideas of cultivating character, and developed them further. In his model, the core motivation of rationality is to come into contact with reality as closely as possible, as reliably as possible. This framing naturally took him deeper into an investigation of what it means to truly know something.
Conformity theory
What does it mean to truly know something? Let’s make this a bit more concrete. Suppose we’re considering a chair. Who has a better understanding of it?
Someone able to precisely generate statements about the chair by gazing at it. For example, its dimensions, colour, texture, etc.
Someone able to take an arbitrary piece of wood and craft an identical chair. Or to perhaps satisfactorily repair the original chair.
Most people would claim that the latter has a better “understanding” of the chair. Well, what does the chair-maker have that the other one doesn’t? They have in their mind what’s called the “structural-functional organisation” of the chair. That is, they have a closer understanding of the “essence” of the chair because they have an actionable blueprint of it in their mind. Aristotle called this structural-functional organisation of a thing its “eidos”.
To him, knowing something is to mentally possess the eidos of the thing. That is, to share the pattern/blueprint of the thing in our mind, by conforming our mind with that blueprint.
That was pretty abstract. Let’s break it down. Suppose that I gave you a chair and asked you to “know” it. There are progressively deeper levels of knowledge that could be accessible to you:
Look at the chair from lots of different angles, and note its shape, texture, size, etc.
Get closer to the chair and touch it. To sit in it and to understand what it feels like to use it.
To understand it so deeply that it’d be possible to take a hunk of wood and make a replica.
Each level creates a progressively richer mental model of the chair. But notice that in (2) and (3), it’s necessary for us to somehow change ourselves to start possessing the eidos of the chair.
In Aristotle’s framing, to possess the eidos of a thing means that our minds have somehow conformed to the thing’s eidos and have the capacity to reproduce the thing inside our inner world. For Aristotle, there’s no distinction between knowing and being. Knowing a thing isn’t just changing our beliefs (i.e. propositions about the world). We have to actually interact with the thing, change ourselves by conforming to it, and therefore change our being in the world. Charles Taylor, John Vervaeke and others call this “contact epistemology”.
Participatory knowing is when we conform and shape ourselves to know a thing. This is very different from propositional knowing, where I stand apart and generate propositions about a thing.
Generating satisfaction through alignment with the world
Aristotle’s theory of knowing/being satisfies a deep human desire of being in contact with reality as closely as we can. When we’re trying to make sense of something, the eidos of that thing in our mind is increasingly aligned with the eidos of the thing we’re trying to understand. Note that this doesn’t mean that whatever we think is going to be true by default. But if we do all the axial second-order thinking and rational reflection, once we latch onto an eidos we can be more confident that it’s correct. That is, we can be more confident that the pattern in our minds is aligned with the pattern in the world.
I know that’s a bit abstract. Consider the following example. Suppose you’re at a party and John tells you that Susan said she has a crush on you. You don’t believe him because you weren’t there. You don’t know if John was sober at the party, and it was pretty noisy. So you ask your friend Varun because you know he was there. Varun’s a good guy, and he’s usually honest with you. He also happened to be sober. He corroborates John’s statement. Now you’re feeling more confident that Susan might have a crush on you. Notice what’s happened here. You enacted the Socratic method. You checked that all the relevant organs of cognition were working correctly (e.g. sobriety), you checked that the environmental conditions weren’t too distortive (e.g. noise), and you’re looking for intersubjective agreement (e.g. did many people experience this)? At the end of this second-order process, you’re a lot more confident that the pattern in your mind is in alignment with reality.
Aristotle’s geocentric view
But notice that this process is predicated on certain knowledge that we already have. Just because we’re more confident in our model of the world doesn’t mean it's infallible, or even accurate.
It’s this process that likely caused Aristotle to construct his geocentric view of the universe. He believed that everything was made up of elements like Earth, Fire, Water and Air. He believed that all objects moved according to a pattern called “natural motion”. In this model, everything has a natural place and is moving to where it belongs. Things made up of Earth want to be closer to the earth, water wants to be closer to water, fire wants to move up and air is above. This sounds ridiculous to us now. But it’s deeply plausible if we don’t possess modern knowledge, and follow the Socratic process. For example, when we burn a piece of wood, the fire pushes the smoke up. All that’s left is the ash, which falls down to the earth. This was the state of science for thousands of years.
In this framework, everything in the cosmos moves purposefully and meaningfully. Again, don’t focus on the factual veracity of his model. Look at how plausible it would be, if we had the same information that he did. Even though our physical sciences have been updated by Newton and Copernicus, our subjective experience still finds Aristotle’s theory satisfying. That is, we often have an unshakeable feeling that we’re the central actors in our own stories. An instinctive feeling that the only narrative that’s true is our own. And that everything in the world is happening in relation to us, and the relevance of the world ends when we die (i.e. are no longer the central participants).
Defining a worldview
Suppose that we have a geocentric model of the world, and we subscribe to the conformity theory discussed above. These two theories end up being mutually supportive. The geocentric theory gives us an account of how the world is structured. We must know the world more deeply to update this account. This causes us to conform ourselves to it, which starts a feedback loop. This feedback loop is what we shall call a “worldview”. To put it another way, inside a worldview there’s a tight coupling between our understanding of our own understanding, and our understanding of the world.
Agent-arena relationship
The geocentric theory affords a model of the world where all of our actions are meaningful. It naturally affords us the ability to view the external world as an “arena”, within which we and other people are the “agents”. An arena is a place that’s organised in such a way that we know what possible actions can be taken, and how to measure and calibrate our own performance. On the other hand, to be an agent is to be capable of pursuing our own goals in the arena. It’s to be able to organise our actions and cognition so that they appropriately fit the arena.
Having a worldview affords a coupling between the agent (i.e. ourselves) and the arena (i.e. our perception of our environment). Aristotle’s description of reality articulates both an arena and how we’re able to take actions within that arena. Knowing the arena informs our understanding of our agency, and vice versa. There’s a powerful co-identification here, and it’s something we do all the time.
Let’s make it more concrete. Imagine that we’re a football player playing a game in a stadium. That setting informs the range of actions that we can take in any given moment. We have an intuitive notion of what the agent-arena relationship between us and the environment looks like. If we suddenly stop playing the game and start quacking like a duck, it would surprise a lot of people and wouldn’t fit the environment. But note that some co-identification is also constantly happening. By being a player, we’re assuming the identities of the other players, the referees, the crowd, etc. and therefore the range of reasonable behaviours that we might expect from them.
All of us are often engaged in multiple agent-arena relationships simultaneously. Some of them might also be nested inside one another. For example, even when we’re in a football game, we’re not just trying to be good football players. Perhaps we’re also trying to be good parents, citizens, etc. that might all necessitate that we become good football players.
This process by which we co-identify our agency and the arena we’re in, informs the “existential mode” that we’re in. These existential modes offer a through line narrative of all the actions we take in the world, and ties them together. If we don’t have an agent-arena relationship, then our actions don’t have any meaning. If we’re a football player in a stadium and suddenly start trying to play tennis, it’ll seem absurd. The environment will also simultaneously reject our absurd actions.
We’re all existing in some existential mode, whether we want to or not. Whether it’s conscious or not. We can’t help it. It’s essential for us to make sense of our reality.
Worldview attunement and nomological order
“Worldview attunement” is what Clifford Geertz calls the feedback loop involved in the construction and updates to a worldview. It’s really important for an existential mode to fit into a process of worldview attunement. The world is constantly changing, so our worldview needs to change with it. If it doesn’t, then our agent-arena relationship will start to break down. It won’t make any sense and will create a feeling of absurdity. This is one of the ways that the meaning crisis is manifesting itself today. It’s likely what people mean when they say that the world seems absurd to them.
Our scientific worldview allows us to intellectually understand the world and to generate propositions about it. But it doesn’t give us existential guidance. That is, it doesn’t tell us how we fit in the world. Neither does it tell us how we can transform ourselves to better fit within it. That’s exactly what Aristotle is offering us. He’s showing us how our project for intellectually understanding the world can be integrated with our project for understanding how our existence fits into the world.
Nomological order comes from nomos, the Greek word for “law”. A nomological order exists when an agent has a worldview that’s undergoing attunement in an ongoing fashion, so that new agent-arena relationships are unfolding naturally. When this is happening, a person doesn’t experience absurdity and experiences a satisfying connectedness with the world that they’re experiencing. So the nomological order is “law-like”, in the sense that there’s a deep convergence between our best attempts to understand the world, and our attempts to understand our place within it. The world seems to have a very meaningful underlying structure, and all of this is disclosing itself to us gracefully.