thinking to new possibility, and we see that there is more to it: more than soul-self, more than something that inheres in humans, more than our usual understandings. (We will take up this question of the ψυχή in part 3, where the central question is the non-dual dynamic of radiant emptiness.)
Aristotle’s “causes.” Perhaps the most exciting foray in this new and enriching way of reading Greek philosophy emerges when we look at Aristotle. Here I offer a quick glimpse into the possibilities that emerge when we take Aristotle’s Greek for what it says from itself, rather than from the many overlays and coverings from the history of Western philosophy post-Aristotle, and above all when we go underneath the usual English translations of Aristotle. We do this by relistening to the Greek text and retranslating the words. This we do “from within the word in the Greek” and what thinking calls for in this retrieval. (Here I am guided by Jacob Klein.14)
What happens when we look at Aristotle’s notions of matter and form (also known as potentiality and actuality, especially in the Latin of the Scholastics)? Let us look at the first two of the four “causes” that inhere in everything that exists. Aristotle’s thinking always started with what was there, concretely and in experience – and then thought it back to what must be its “causes.” But the Greek word for “cause” here is αἴτιον-aition. This has little to do with the traditional, current notion of cause in “causality” or cause and effect. Surely our current notion is quite useful in many ways. But does it say what the Greek word αἴτια says? αἴτιον comes from the Greek word αἴτιος. Checking several Greek– English dictionaries, Ι find these words: cause, mother, motive, reason; ground, motive, antecedent; responsible for; activating, actuating, borne in upon, conducive, contributing, motivating, precipitating; instrumental.
So αἴτιον says so much more than cause! For starters, we can say that, for what is there in front of us, for the way things are – concretely and experientially there – αἴτια are aspects or conditions of phenomena or things. These “causes” are not anything solidly or physically there that “cause” anything, but rather those aspects or conditions of a thing that are responsible for it, that activate it,
14 Klein, “Aristotle: An Introduction.”