§15. The “Experience” of Classical Philosophy
Aristotle criticizes Democritus for assimilating perception and intellect (nous). For his part, Democritus thinks that wisdom and insight are the outcome of ardent perception and memory, and he does not agree that the ability to grasp universals cannot be accommodated by the cognitive powers he identifies.
He equates wise phronesis with perception and ignores the distinctive nature of nous, which was easy to do since this nous-intellect had only recently been invented by Socrates and Plato and made the foundation of their rationalism. Michael Frede thought we should see the idea of reason in classical philosophy as something these philosophers invented and advocated. “The decisive step was taken by Socrates in conceiving of human beings as being run by a mind or reason.” Socrates took a substantial notion of soul, still new in his time, as accounting for an animal’s life and characteristic activities, and interpreted it as a mind or reason, and proof of humanity’s immaterial vocation. Eventually, as Plato and Aristotle worked it out, this power of intellect or reason has three principle qualities.130First, it has its own needs and desires; for instance, to know the truth and obtain the good. These are desires of reason, not merely desires that reason approves of. Rationality also brings with it certain assumptions about the world. Reason is the source of basic knowledge without which we could not begin to think. While Aristotle rejects innate ideas, he says it belongs to reason to acquire certain beliefs. A third prepossession of reason is to elevate humanity above the brutes, who are captured by sensation, passive, and irrational. We are made for better things. We can discriminate true and false, partly because we can discriminate good and bad reasoning.
This rationalism is the background of everything that classical philosophy has to say about perception, experience, and empiricism.
The distinction between perception and thought is so familiar that we forget it had to be invented, that Plato did it, and that the point of the invention was to advance rationalism. This perception is not an activity of the soul. It occurs in the body and has to be reported to the soul as a condition on awareness. Plato puts perception deep in the body, which he sets in another realm of being from the intellectual mind and the objects of scientific knowledge. Perception concerns qualities, which are our affects, and offer no insight into real beings. Perception tracks changes, and is incapable of thinking the changeless and incorporeal. Empirical knowledge is wood iron. Science does not begin without a conversion, turning away from perception, which holds thought down in the body.Only after Plato is aisthesis recognized as a function and manifestation of the soul, as it is in Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics. Aristotle bequeathed a detailed idea of soul as the organ of images and thought. It seems to be with him that the European preoccupation with representation begins. How can the being, present in nature, be present again for intellect? Aristotle’s answer describes a carefully regimented process of imagination. Local changes registered by sense instigate images, which convey the forms intellect requires to demonstrate the truth of nature. With experience, the forms are recovered and science begins.
Classical thought regards aisthesis as passive, an impression, a passion forced on the body by impact. For Aristotle, that passivity makes perception an instrument of science, while for Plato it disqualifies perception, which proves to be nothing but feeling, our own body, revealing nothing of true being. Aristotle, silently following Alcmaeon and Democritus, makes perception an instrument in the genesis of science. Without the senses, nothing is given to think, but in thinking we exercise a rational power to extract the intelligible form that is the substance and truth of nature.
Experience is an indispensable phase in the genesis of science, but inadequate by itself for a theorematic knowledge that rises above accidental and individual facts to the explanation of their necessity. Science requires experience from which to educe the universal, but the science consists in that universal, extracted from experience by reason’s special epagoge power. Intellect does not merely collaborate with experience, as Galen will have it, but surpasses and dominates it.Aristotle situates experience between memory and perception, an idea he may have acquired from his medical learning. Physicians are Aristotle’s example when he explains experience, but unlike the doctors, Aristotle’s philosopher is uninterested in methods of inquiry. Even while laying down groundbreaking examples of empirical research Aristotle is unreflec- tive about his method. The only method he actually explained is a method of demonstrating accomplished science, not organizing research. Plato denigrates empirical inquiry violently. There is nothing to know in sensible things, so research methods are moot. The one time Plato discusses inquiry (and then merely in passing), the method he describes is Hippocratic.131