Aristotle is the one man without whom smartphones would not exist today. Any other thinker could be removed from the development of the Western world—philosopher, scientist, poet, or theologian—and the course of technological evolution would remain virtually unchanged, save for a few details. However, without Aristotle scientific progress would not have been what it became.
This may sound exaggerated, especially to those who know little of what Aristotle truly taught, or who think of him merely as a Greek philosopher who spoke about “being”. Yet the statement expresses an evident truth. For science has always been, and can only ever be, the handmaid of philosophy; and it was Aristotle’s way of thinking that, after lying in partial shadow for several centuries, established itself as the single framework of thought for the entire Western mind. From the High Middle Ages to our own day—save for a few enclaves of Platonic or esoteric spirit—Western man, not only philosophers (some of whom were in fact the few who opposed it), but anyone at all, is intrinsically Aristotelian, most often without even realizing it.
When the Arab philosophers—above all Averroes—brought Aristotle’s thought into Europe, he became the guide, the reference, the unquestioned authority upon which Western thought would rest for centuries. Ipse dixit—“he himself said it”—was how Aristotle was cited. Scholastic philosophy, the Christian system that succeeded the Patristic age of Neoplatonic inspiration, was entirely built upon Aristotle’s writings: from the distinction between ens and essentia to the ontological proof of God’s existence. In the Comedia, Dante calls Aristotle ’l maestro di color che sanno (“the master of those who know”) and indeed his vision of God is modeled upon the prime unmoved mover. Modern philosophy began when Descartes sought to break free from the Aristotelian view of reality, replacing it with an approach that started not from the object but from the subject. Aristotelianism then evolved into the various forms of empiricism that countered idealism; and from it also sprang positivism, grounded in a purely mechanical view of the world. Later, the logical philosophies of the nineteenth century continued Aristotle’s legacy in symbolic form, and the analytic philosophies of today remain unmistakably Aristotelian—precisely because they are analytic. One may recall, as a sign of Aristotle’s centrality to every thinker of genuine depth, that Heidegger began his own path with a study on the multiple meanings of being in Aristotle.
To what, then, should this overwhelming presence of Aristotle in Western thought be ascribed, so pervasive that it may be said to form its very logical framework? In other words: does the reader realize that his own way of thinking, and everything that surrounds him, is a direct consequence of what Aristotle once thought? This question may be approached from several angles, all leading to the same conclusion.
What, at its foundation, does contemporary technology rest upon? Computers—and the whole of electronic technology—are built upon the binary language: 1 or 0. If it is 1, it is 1 and not 0; if it is 0, it is 0 and not 1. The fact that each bit is either 1 rather than 0, or 0 rather than 1, is the very foundation of our present world: if a bit could be both 0 and 1 at once, the entire structure would collapse. Now, the logical mechanism by which one understands that a bit which is 1 cannot simultaneously be 0 is nothing other than a rudimentary expression of the principle of non-contradiction. And it was precisely this principle that Aristotle formulated, in Book Gamma of the Metaphysics: It is impossible that the same attribute should at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect. (For the friends of quantum mechanics, it may be observed—not so much that its very objectification was made possible by the Aristotelian approach, but rather that it is studied and understood always and inevitably within the limits of the logical-analytical mind.) Yet the principle of non-contradiction lies at the root not only of the sciences; indeed, the sciences are but a continuation of its universal efficacy. The entire life of every human being is fundamentally bound to it—both the objective life of the outer world and the inner life of the mind. Take any aspect of human existence: each one, without exception, falls under the rule of non-contradiction, precisely in the terms in which Aristotle himself formulated it.
Then Aristotle said many other things (the distinction between potentiality and actuality, inference and deduction, the doctrine of the four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final, and so forth) which, like the principle of non-contradiction, lie at the foundation of everyone’s life; but, one may say, every inference of Aristotle is itself grounded upon that very principle.
Nor is it necessary to multiply examples to recognize that this very principle, once it has been conceived, stands at the root of everything—or at least of all Western thought. Indeed, every philosopher of the Western tradition, and consequently every scientist, has always relied upon this rule; and it is upon this very rule that the reasoning was validated which gave rise, in succession, to all the discoveries of progress. The whole of Western thought has always—and only—used this criterion to distinguish what is true from what is false.
A questo punto si deve fare un passetto oltre, ponendosi la domanda su come e perché Aristotele sia giunto a enucleare il principio di non contraddizione. Aristotle reached this point by applying his superlative rational intellect to nature—to nature as a whole and to its particular manifestations. He imposed his rational faculty upon reality, and thus, in perfect logical coherence, perceived that reality itself mirrored the principle of non-contradiction as the rule of its very subsistence. In other words, Aristotle demonstrated once and for all how the rational mind operates. After him, it was merely a matter of applying the fundamental principle he had unveiled, of continuing along the path he had marked—and indeed, that is precisely what happened: Aristotle established the equivalence between logic and ontology, that is, that what conforms to (human) reason—and only that—is true. And in fact, Aristotelian logic, laid out step by step in the writings later gathered under the Organon, yet implicit throughout the Metaphysics, the Physics, and all his works, remained unchanged, save for minor adjustments by Kant, until Frege, who merely renewed the operational mode Aristotle had discovered by substituting propositions with symbols.
Naturally, Aristotle did not create ex nihilo the substance of the concepts he formulated; rather, he was the one who possessed the power to discern and to articulate them—and indeed, no one, from his time to ours, has ever surpassed him on that level. What Aristotle created was instead the forma mentis proper to rationality: the mindset capable of mastering it, even while remaining subject to it.
To understand the Aristotelian framework in its entirety, one must still ask what the scope of the principle of non-contradiction is. It has been said that it concerns “reality,” but what, precisely, does Aristotle mean by reality? For him, reality consists first of all in everything that falls within the reach of the five ordinary senses. It also includes those suprasensible entities, later called metaphysical, whose existence must be held necessary according to reason—for instance, the prime unmoved mover, which moves all things by attraction while itself remaining at rest, whose necessity follows from the mere fact of motion on earth and from the consequent need to posit a cause for it. Aristotle, however, denies reality to the other entities posited by earlier philosophers, above all to Plato’s Ideas, since in his logic they are not necessary. From this perspective, it becomes evident that the logical structure of modern science is profoundly Aristotelian: from the results of physical observation it proceeds to draw the logically necessary consequences, theories to be tested and demonstrated according to the principle of non-contradiction.
Aristotle also wrote on ethics, politics, and the natural sciences—as his later counterpart Hegel would do—and in these domains as well he remained an undisputed authority for centuries. The ether, for instance, conceived by Aristotle as the substance of space, continued to be regarded as a natural element until Einstein (Aristotelian, in his own way, no less) demonstrated through the theory of relativity that it was no longer needed. Yet in every field he addressed, the ultimate foundation for Aristotle was always the principle of non-contradiction.
For this reason, it is correct to say that whoever believes reason to be the proper means of knowing reality must, in truth, be called an Aristotelian. Several philosophers of the twentieth century attempted in vain to refute the principle of non-contradiction through logic itself. Nietzsche had already called it a fable, and Heidegger showed that it was, in truth, inadequate to grasp anything beyond the merely ready-to-hand reality. In fact, the refutation of the principle of non-contradiction is not only possible but even quite simple, without any need to appeal to Gödel’s proofs.
For two millennia the Western world has revolved around the goddess Reason—and yet Nietzsche, and a few other restless spirits, would tell us that reason is of no use at all? At this point one must take a step back—ascending from Aristotle to Plato—for Aristotle was Plato’s disciple at the Academy in Athens. Whereas Aristotle takes for granted that reason is the necessary and sufficient instrument for understanding reality, Plato, in many passages—passages that scholars and philosophers, all prostrate before the goddess Reason, tend to forget or to neutralize—states clearly that reason, though a useful tool for grasping reality, is a limited, fallible, and derivative means. True knowledge of true reality, which is not merely that which resists our limited physical senses, is attained only through nous—not the mere intuition of common parlance, nor a mystical rapture, but the direct experience of truth itself. From the Platonic standpoint, then, one must simply say that Aristotle, though the supreme genius of Western thought, lacked nous; and thus believed that his reason could comprehend everything.
Plato affirms what in India has been the very alphabet of knowledge for countless millennia; there, Aristotle would have been regarded as a coarse and self-referential sophist.