§5. Results

1. Aristotle repents before Plato.

(a) Aristotle writes (Met. IV 3, 1005 b 15-20):

"The principle which everyone who comprehends any thing must possess is not a hypothesis; and what a man needs to know, if he knows anything, he must have at his disposal from the very beginning. Thus it is clear that the principle which possesses these properties is the most certain of all, and now let us indicate what this principle is. It is impossible that the same thing should be and should not be inherent in the same thing and in the same sense."

It is clear that Aristotle here preaches the formal-logical law of contradiction, or, better said, the law of non-contradiction. Thus, Aristotle wants to build all his most principled philosophy formally, logically. The identity of being and non-being, teaches Aristotle (IV 4), is possible only in the order of confusion of concepts, in which case being and non-being are understood in different senses; moreover, the first principle is the first because it cannot be proved. Protagoras deliberately uses the polysemy of concepts, not for the sake of truth, but for the sake of argument; and the universal variability of Heraclitus presupposes the existence of immutable essences, that is, neither Protagoras nor the natural philosophers can refute the law of contradiction, but, on the contrary, make use of it (IV 5).

Aristotle further writes (IV 7, 1011 b 23-24):

"In the same way, there can be nothing in the middle between two contradictory judgments, but about one [subject] every definite predicate (hen cath'henos hotioyn) must either be affirmed or denied."

In these words Aristotle formulates another law of formal logic, and this whole chapter of the Metaphysics contains as many as seven arguments in favor of this law of the excluded middle.

Thus, Aristotle deliberately and quite consciously wants to build his philosophy with the help of the methods of formal logic. However, two extremely important conclusions follow from this.

(b) In the first place, Aristotle himself revealed his own cards with regard to the criticism of Plato. Why does he always say that no ideas exist in themselves, but only a thing? The key to this kind of argument lies precisely in the Aristotelian cult of formal logic. Does not Aristotle recognize the existence of ideas in themselves and of the immaterial mind as the "seat of ideas"? Not only does he admit this, but he even goes much further than Plato in this respect, creating, as we have seen, a most detailed and difficult argument for the existence of such a mind. What is the matter? The point is in the cult of formal logic, which requires that a material thing be in itself, and its idea in itself.

On the other hand, why does Aristotle constantly assert that the essences of things must not be outside things, but in the things themselves? In the first place, it contradicts Aristotle's basic doctrine of the immateriality of the cosmic Mind, on which, as we have seen, all the specific properties of this Mind are based. And besides, the same formal logic forced him to deny the essence of things outside the things themselves and to recognize them only within the things themselves. For formal logic cannot understand how the idea of a thing is at once and simultaneously both outside the thing itself and within itself. The essence of a thing, according to Aristotle, is immaterial and immaterial. But in this case it is meaningless to raise the question whether the idea of a thing exists in itself, that is, only outside the thing, or whether it exists only in the thing itself, and in no other place. The dialectician Plato admits the existence of the ideas of things as outside the things themselves (since these ideas are immaterial; and it is as senseless for Plato to find any material or spatial properties in them as in our most ordinary multiplication table), and in the same way in the things themselves (since the idea of a thing comprehends this thing and is the cause of everything that is done with this thing).

Thus, Aristotle's criticism of Plato's ideas is based on the fact that he rejects dialectics in the sense of the doctrine of being, and instead of dialectics he uses the most ordinary formal logic, from the point of view of which, in fact, no opposites are compatible, and, in particular, being is always only different from non-being and can never be identical with it.