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F Abusing Aristotle
Kellie Robertson

Speculative in contemporary usage often denotes something

that is not grounded in fact, not based in the actual world.
This is a term of suspicion for some (as in the phrase merely
speculative) and of approval for others (as in the introduction to Towards Speculative Realism, where the philosopher
Graham Harman asserts that speculative serves as a kind of
homeopathic inoculation of realism, ensuring that realism is
not equated with an interest in a dull commonsense realism
of genuine trees and billiard balls existing outside the mind,
but a darker form of weird realism bearing little resemblance
to the presuppositions of everyday life).1 Yet in medieval
scholastic usage, this term was frequently used to denote the
very material science of physics, a science whose goal was to
describe and analyze everyday experience, the dull commonsense realism of things. Ockham, in the prologue to his
commentary on Aristotles Physics, describes the overlap between physics and metaphysics, asserting that physics is also
primarily speculative.2 Thus, for Ockham and his contemporaries, looking at a rock was just as speculative an endeavor
Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures
(Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), 2.
2
William Ockham, Ockham on Aristotles Physics: A Translation of
Ockhams Brevis summa libri physicorum, trans. Julian A. Davies (St.
Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute, 1989), 5.
1

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as imagining how that rock was transformed by your looking
into a mental or intentional object. What I find useful about
the recent turn to speculative realism is that it reminds us of
the speculative nature of both the physical sciences and moral
philosophy. This paper is in part a meditation on how the
specters of Aristotle (pace Derrida) haunt the modern intellectual divide that seeks to partition off the dull physical
world from our metaphysical engagement with it.
Medieval scholasticism is often imagined as being virtually
synonymous with Aristotelianism, but the scholastic relation
to him was often ambivalent, sometimes openly hostile. Aristotle was not always viewed as the wise magister, although his
writings formed the core of the arts curriculum from the thirteenth century onwards. His pervasiveness apparently
prompted a backlash. This reaction is witnessed by the wellknown figure of the so-called Aristote chevauche, or mounted
Aristotle, that depicts the wise philosopher yielding to carnal
desire. On his hands and knees, he is portrayed being ridden
about a garden by Alexanders crop-wielding mistress, Phyllis.
A figure for the spirit overcome by the flesh, wisdom by concupiscence, this cautionary Aristotle appears on many varieties of household goods as well as in literary fabliaux and sermon exempla.3
Abusing Aristotle has a long, varied, and even, on occasion, entertaining history. The ubiquity of this image of Phyllis topping Aristotle says less about putative medieval gender
relations and rather more about the re-appropriation of Aristotle by male scholastic culture. It is no coincidence that this
image really takes hold in the thirteenth century, a time when
Aristotles influence was starting to transform the majority of
universities across Europe. If Phyllis was the most visible Aristotle-abuser of the Middle Ages, she was by no means alone:
many ecclesiastic officials, concerned about pagan knowledge
infiltrating the university curriculum, began to denounce both
On the mounted Aristotle tradition, see Susan L. Smith, The Power
of Women: A Topos in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
3

ROBERTSON: ABUSING ARISTOTLE

the philosophy and the man. While the 1277 condemnations
of Aristotles natural philosophy were the most well-known
and far-reaching censure of Aristotle, his legacy provoked all
kinds of local pamphlet wars, including a debate over the ultimate resting place of his soul, that gave rise to a genre of
quodlibetal questions under the rubric, Utrum Aristoteles sit
salvatus. Unsurprisingly, most conservative theologians
packed him off to hell.4
If, as Tolstoy reminds us, every family is unhappy in its
own way, so too every age engages in a family romance with
Aristotle that, more often than not, ends unhappily (albeit in
distinctively different ways). As the medieval ardor for Aristotle cooled--abruptly or gradually depending on which historian of science you believe--early modern attacks on Aristotle
took the form of unhappiness with his ostensible animism and
teleological naivet, not to mention his popish sensibility.
This sentiment is expressed most succinctly in an analogy
attributed to Martin Luther: In a word, Aristotle is to divinity
as darkness is to light.5 While Im tempted to spend the rest
On the controversies surrounding Aristotle, see Fernand van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1955), and
Edward Grant, Science and Theology in the Middle Ages, in The
Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Later Middle Ages (Washington,
D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010). On the quodlibetal question genre, see Anton-Hermann Chroust, A Contribution
to the Medieval Discussion: Utrum Aristoteles sit salvatus, Journal
of the History of Ideas 6 (1945): 23138, and Ruedi Imbach, Aristoteles in Der Holle: Eine anonyme Quaestio Utrum Aristotiles sit
salvatus' im co. Vat. Lat 1012 (127 ra-127 va) zum Jenseitsschicksal
des Stagiriten, in Peregrina Curiositas: Eine Reise durch den orbis
antiquus: Zu Ehren von Dirk van Damme, ed. Dirk van Damme, Andreas Kessler, Thomas Ricklin and Gregor Wurst (Freiburg: Universittsverlag, Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994).
5
Proposition 50 of Luthers 97 theses posted in 1517. An English
version of these theses can be found in Martin Luther, Martin Luthers Basic Theological Writings, trans. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989). On the reception of Aristotle in the early
modern period more generally, see Stephen Gaukroger, The Emer4

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of my essay quoting a string of mean, pithy Aristotelian epithets from the seventeenth century, Ill instead address one
question raised by the longue dure of unease with all or part
of the Aristotelian project: how relevant is this project, in the
form re-articulated by medieval scholasticism, to the challenges, ethical and scientific, that we face today? To answer
this, Ill address the return to Aristotle in two very different
strains of recent philosophical thought: the school of revolutionary Aristotelianism spawned by the writings of Alasdair
MacIntyre, which are concerned with redefining a pragmatic
ethics, and Graham Harmans weird Aristotelianism, a realist ontology that seeks a middle path between contemporary
versions of monism (the Deleuzo-Guattarian/eliminativist
camp) and correlationism (whether associated with Hegelian
idealism or deconstruction). This paper will describe the ways
in which these two strains of what might be called neoAristotelianism are both a return to and a departure from the
late medieval scholastic Aristotle, a tradition that MacIntyre
and Harman both self-consciously attempt to recuperate in
characteristic, and characteristically extraordinary, ways.
COMRADE ARISTOTLE
The decline in reputation suffered by Aristotle in the early
modern period and the Enlightenment was to last a substantial while. If we look at the relatively rough evidence provided
by Googles ngram viewera tool that has definite limitationswe can discern, at least in rough outline, Aristotles
fortunes in print over several centuries [Figure 1].6 While an
gence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity,
1210-1685 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), and Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
6
The Ngram tool can be found at http://books.google.com/ngrams
(accessed 31 January 2012). For a discussion of the uses and limitations of this tool, see Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva
Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, William Brockman,
The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and

ROBERTSON: ABUSING ARISTOTLE

uptick is evident at the end of the twentieth century, this upward trend is still only relatively significant when compared,
for instance, to the frequency with which Plato is cited [Figure
2]. This statistical snapshot suggests that Aristotles print
footprint re-expands dramatically in the 1980s.

Figure 1. Google ngram, Aristotle as percentage of words in

print in the Google Books corpus, 1600-2008
Speculation on what lead to the growing citation of Aristotle
at this particular cultural moment aside, it is the case that the
publication of Alasdair MacIntyres After Virtue in 1981 was
part of a broader resurgence of interest in Aristotle.7 The prologue to that book suggests a post-apocalyptic, Riddley Walker-esque scenario wherein a civilization must piece back together its cultural values from a few remaining fragments, an
Erez Lieberman Aiden, Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, Science, December 16, 2010; doi: 10.1126/
science.1199644.
7
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd
edn. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); hereafter
cited parenthetically in text, by page number.

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archaeological project that necessarily results in a partial rendering of its past-directed present. Polemically, the rest of the
book argues that this scenario is analogous to the state of contemporary ethics, since the received language of morality (2)
in which philosophers regularly trade is but a piecemeal, incoherent thing, according to MacIntyre; at best, it is merely
relativist, at worst, instrumental and emotivist.

Figure 2. Google ngram, Aristotle vs. Plato as percentage of

words in print in the Google Books corpus, 1600-2008
According to MacIntyre, this fragmentary state of
knowledge is the direct result of what was lost in the transition
from medieval to early modern, from Catholic to Protestant:
the end-directed drive of the Nicomachean Ethics that transformed human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be into humannature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos (51). In MacIntyres narrative, Protestantism vitiated ethical teleology, and
in doing so, man was denied any comprehension of [his] true
end (51); consequently, moral pronouncements no longer
have purchase on what is verifiably true or false. Reason, emptied of any explanatory power in theology, is shunted off to
experimental science, an anti-Aristotelian science that sets

ROBERTSON: ABUSING ARISTOTLE

strict boundaries to the powers of reason (52) and, since it
could not legitimately speak about ends, confines itself only to
describing the means in ever-increasing detail. Thus MacIntyre concludes:
Hence the eighteenth-century moral philosophers engaged in what was an inevitably unsuccessful project;
for they did indeed attempt to find a rational basis for
their moral beliefs in a particular understanding of
human nature, while inheriting a set of moral injunctions on the one hand and a conception of human nature on the other which had been expressly designed to
be discrepant with each other. . . . They inherited incoherent fragments of a once coherent scheme of thought
and action and, since they did not recognise their own
peculiar historical and cultural situation, they could
not recognise the impossible and quixotic character of
their self-appointed task. (53)
The Enlightenment said that man was an innately rational
creature, but that his moral sense was not rationally directed
towards an innate goal. On this view, modernity (and modern
liberalism in particular) is not just false-consciousness (as in
Latour) but a willful blindness to its own historical position.
Modernity is the petulant tragedy of a child putting together a
puzzle that has lost some of its pieces, but who insists on continuing in the face of this knowledge.
Critics either praise MacIntyre for an anti-capitalist vision
that seeks to repair the antinomy of the modern world
through a return to Aristotelian values or they critique him as
a naf communitarian who romanticizes pre-modern ethics, a
retrograde crank in the tradition of Thomas Carlyle.8 Despite
Examples of critics who find MacIntyres model useful would include Peter McMylor, Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1993). More critical responses include, for example,
Martha Nussbaum, Recoiling from Reason, New York Review of
Books 36 (1989): 3642; and Gary Kitchen, Alasdair MacIntyre: The
8

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such criticisms, MacIntyres work has spawned a movement of
so-called revolutionary Aristotelianism.9 As the political
application of MacIntyres ethics of virtue, this movement
argues that, since capitalism writ large prevents us from seeing
our shared values, we must train our vision on the local, on
working for the common rather than the individual profit in
ways that facilitate asking questions about character and moral choice that capitalism, by design, prevents us from asking.
So does revolutionary Aristotelianism qualify as Aristotle abuse? I will admit to being enticed by the idea of revolutionary Aristotelianism; at least enough to get the t-shirt
were there to be one. Like many recent historians, MacIntyre
is indignant at the early modern treatment of Aristotle, claiming that the medieval scholastic AristotleAquinass Aristotleis the true Aristotle. Yet the Aristotle that emerges
from his account of the Middle Ageswhat he refers to as
the predecessor culturemay not look immediately familiar
to medieval historians of scholasticism either. It would perhaps come across as a bit too William Morris-y: on this
view, Aristotle stands for intimate communities engaged in
reciprocal economic and ethical exchanges on a small scale, a
philosophical vision of community with which MacIntyre
combats the paradoxes of modern liberal society. The problem
with this Aristotle is less that it is historically inaccurate
than that it is partial in the way that MacIntyre accuses postEnlightenment philosophy of being partial. His scholastic
Aristotle is primarily the Aristotle of the Ethics seasoned with
occasional dashes of the Rhetoric and the Politics. Yet for
Aquinas and his contemporaries, Aristotle was also the author
of numerous treatises of natural philosophy; the Aristotelian
world was one in which metaphysical moral values and physical movements both operated according to similar laws, a
Epitaph of Modernity, Philosophy & Social Criticism 23 (1997): 71
98.
9
See the articles collected in Paul Blackledge and Kelvin Knight, eds.,
Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyres Revolutionary Aristotelianism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011).

ROBERTSON: ABUSING ARISTOTLE

model of inclination that drew rocks as well as souls towards
their respective natural places.
MacIntyres diagnosis of the disorder of contemporary
ethics points to a rupture between the medieval and the early
modern, but what is lost is not necessarily a shared sense of
teleological ethics, a consensus on the facts of human nature, but instead this analogous relation between the everyday and the transcendent. The seventeenth century largely
discards the physical basis of Aristotles philosophy only to
preserve the metaphysical. Out went the Physics, On the Heavens, On Meteorology, and the Generation of Animals, while the
Ethics and the Politics were keepers. MacIntyre turns away
from the real implications of his apocalyptic fable, and his
later work is similarly amnesiac on the relation of natural science and moral ethics. As the scholastics regularly maintained, both physics and metaphysics are speculative sciences, domains of knowledge constituted through practical reasoning (ratio practica) and demonstration (demonstratio).
WEIRD ARISTOTLE
The recent turn to speculative realism in continental philosophy has also revived Aristotles reputation as a relevant philosopher. The philosopher Graham Harman has recently suggested on his blog that we embrace a weird Aristotelianism.
He writes:
Here is my proposal: German Idealism has had its
moment in the sun in continental circles. We now
need a weird Aristotle. (I add the adjective weird not
just for perversitys sake, but because Aristotle can
easily be turned into a bore in the wrong hands).10

Graham Harman, Nice Cairo Evening Scene [weblog post], Object Oriented Ontology, January 5, 2011: http://doctorzamalek2.
wordpress.com/2011/01/05/nice-cairo-evening-scene/.

10

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By weird Aristotle, Harman means, in part, an Aristotle not
distorted by what he identifies as the occasionally self-serving
framework of twentieth-century continental thought. Like
MacIntyre, Harman is rightfully indignant about the way Aristotle has been represented in this tradition: the philosopher
is synonymous with all that is tedious and obsolete. And when
Aristotle is not being made redundant, he is suffering a perhaps worse fate: the greatest Aristotelian of modern times,
Leibniz, has been allowed into contemporary discourse only
through Deleuzes utter falsification of his position.11 You
can hear the branches snapping as Harman sets up the philosophical brush burning necessary before he can launch into
his own re-appropriation of the Physics and the Metaphysics.
Deleuze-bashing aside, Harmans real use for Aristotle is as a
stick with which to beat post-Kantian, specifically Hegelian
Idealismthe belief that, to differing degrees, mind filters our
access to the material world, and thus the material has no real independent existence. Harmans rehabilitation of Aristotelian substance allows him to imagine a physical thinga
rock, a baseball, a weapon of mass destructionin all the glory of its concreteness as opposed to the view of empiricists
such as David Hume who would reduce a material object to,
in Harmans memorable idiom, an internal diamond encrusted with an accidental grime of relations.12
For Harman, Aristotle is a useful tool to prevent not just
the reduction of things to mere relations but also to prevent
the opposite view that reality precedes relations. In Harmans
essay On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and
Radical Philosophy, he contrasts these two opposing tendencies and explains why he considers them to be equally misdirected.13 Harman has dubbed these tendencies undermining
Harman, Nice Cairo Evening Scene.
Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, 150.
13
Harman, Graham, On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno,
and Radical Philosophy, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds. Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham
Harman (Melbourne, Australia: re.press, 2011), 2140.
11
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and overmining. Philosophy undermines the object by
claiming that there is some further physical particle to which a
thing may always be reduced. On this view matter is the
deeper principle to which appeal is always made. Schools of
this type would include atomism and more recently, eliminativism, the reduction of subjective experience to biological
phenomena. On the opposite view, philosophy overmines
the object by privileging relationalism over reality. Being is
only or primarily relational, and our access to these relations
is most often described in terms of languages ability to represent thought. Here we would find a continuum from Idealism
to most flavors of social constructionism (including deconstruction). In different ways, both of these schools of thought
attempt to eliminate the object from philosophy according
to Harman.
In rejecting these two umbrella approaches to objects,
Harman needs another approach, and this is where Aristotle
comes in handy. While Harmans talk elaborates his position
more fully, I will just say that what most interests me about
Harmans turn to Aristotle is that it depends on a revised version of Aristotelian substantial forms. In Aristotelian hylomorphism, substance is composed of both matter and form,
joined together in such a way that neither properly precedes
the other. Matter is not merely inert stuff because it contains
within it the potential susceptibility to form; likewise, form as
actuality is not wholly immaterial because a given form is
limited by a predisposition to certain types of matter.14 This
ontological mixing was what got Aristotle accused of being an
animist and a panpsychist in the early modern period, a period in which matter became purely passive and physical as
opposed to the lively medieval substance indissolubly linked
14
For a detailed discussion of substance ontology, see Anneliese
Maier, On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy, trans. Steven D.
Sargent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); and
Mary Louise Gill, Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

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to the active immateriality of form. The beautiful simplicity of
the Aristotelian model as interpreted by the scholastics is that
it applies equally to the world of physics (it explains how the
matter of an acorn remains continuous with the matter of the
oak) as well as metaphysics (it explains the soul as the necessary spiritual form of the human body). Suffice to say that few
philosophers have taken substantial forms seriously since the
Enlightenment. For Harman, Aristotelian substance lets him
re-think the Enlightenment separation of matter and form in
ways that allow active and passive qualities to be smuggled
back and forth across the de-militarized border between the
human and the non-human, the animate and the inanimate
(just as it did for medieval scholastics). Harmans twist, however, will be to redefine the idea of form in a way that allows
for the reality of collective entitiesobjects composed of objectsa maneuver that may or may not qualify as Aristotle
abuse. What the historian R. H. Tawney famously said of
Marxthat he was the last scholasticmay perhaps now be
said of Harman.
Harmans return to the Aristotelian idea of form as the
basis of his ontology is radical, perverse, and, to my mind,
promising for several reasons. First, it opens up a space in the
history of philosophy for reconsidering scholastic theories of
hylomorphism as part of a longer genealogy of materialism, a
genealogy from which the Middle Ages is regularly excluded.15
Even without Harmans twist, his analysis shows the ways in
which certain aspects of hylomorphism are compatible with a
realist ontology. Second, I think it allows us a new way to return to the notion of teleology that is not a priori a reductive
one. In doing so, it re-opens a door that was kicked shut, initially, by early modern writers such as Bacon, who mocked
Aristotles human-sized, end-directed notions of becoming as
See Kellie Robertson, Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto, Exemplaria 22:2 (2010): 99118. Harman himself dislikes the term materialism, and claims that what he does is realism without materialism; see Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, Toward a
Speculative Philosophy, in The Speculative Turn, 9 [118].

15

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the worst kind of anthropocentrism. More recently, the prejudice against teleology has been re-affirmed in the work of
Deleuze and Guatttari and those who advocate a flat ontology, one where becoming has no direction and, therefore,
leaves open a world of infinite possibility. On this view, teleology is seen as oppressive or, at least, like Aristotle himself,
boring. Flat ontology, in doing away with the problem of determinism, raises other problems, such as how to explain how
a specific thing comes into existencewhy this instead of
that? Finally, and most importantly, it has the potential to do
what MacIntyres revolutionary Aristotelianism promised
but did not deliver: it makes possible a philosophy where ethics and physics share mutually informing principles. The existing separation of the two, a legacy of the Enlightenment, is
one of the many consequences of a Cartesian dualism that
rendered matter purely physical and hence passive. A neoAristotelian physics would seem to offer a currently unfashionable but useful starting point for opening a dialogue with
philosophies enamored of something transcendental like God,
form, mind, language, or, more recently, becoming. The challenge for Harman and the rest of those working in the speculative realist vineyard is to articulate what kinds of ethics arise
from this weird Aristotelian physics. Precisely how weird
would Aristotle need to be in order to make such an ethics
possible?
For Harman, Aristotle has become a rallying point for
those who want to revive philosophical problems left unresolved by centuries of post-Kantian Idealism. In particular,
Aristotle has been seen as one potential answer to the failures
of what Quentin Meillassoux has termed correlationism
the idea that if I claim to think of an object beyond thought,
then I am thinking it, and thereby turning it into a correlate of
thought in spite of myself. Hence the object is nothing more
than its accessibility to humans.16 The insidious effects of
correlationism in both its Hegelian and deconstructive forms
16

Harman, On the Undermining of Objects, 22.

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can be combated, according to Harman, with a return to Aristotelian ideas of potentialitythe potentiality of matter to
receive certain kinds of forms as outlined in the Physics, which
granted physical objects autonomous relations with other objects outside of their relations with the human. Aristotle seems
to be one of the lighted exits through which we can get back
to the great outdoors in Meillassouxs phrase, an exterior
essentially lost in post-Kantian philosophy. These recent metaphysical conflicts reprise the medieval debate over Aristotelian physics to the extent that they both ask what is really real? Is it the physical object in itself or some surrogate object
to which it pointswhether this object is Platos transcendent Idea, a Christian God, or an intentional object in the human mind. There is thus a surprising through-line from the
medieval inheritance of Aristotle to its most recent realist avatars. What both the medieval and the modern debates demonstrate is that there is never a shortage of partisans who want to
keep Aristotle weird, and, if given time, perhaps even make
him truly revolutionary.