Found Sci (2008) 13:217228

DOI 10.1007/s10699-008-9139-6

The God Concept: Aristotle and the Philosophical

Tradition
Joseph A. Tighe

Published online: 15 August 2008

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract Before beginning a paper on metaphysics, it is wise to acknowledge the papers

own metaphysical assumptions. In what follows, we must bear in mind that the history
of philosophy is as interpretively diverse as it is long. We will begin with the premise that
Metaphysics is indeed a foundational science. We will posit that Aristotles corpus is unified;
that is, that Aristotle can be read as a systematic philosopher. Moreover, we will assume
that the history of philosophy is itself a unity. If we posit such, philosophy can be read
as a comprehensible continuity: a certainly contestable position. We must bear in mind that
similitude is decidedly not identity; however, similitude does imply a certain conceptual correlation, one which, when pressed, may yield interesting, if not unexpected, results. Thus,
we will travel at lightning speed through what took a snails pace to develop, mapping,
so to speak, the structure of the unmoved mover of Aristotles Metaphysics (1941) onto the
traditional historical divisions of the history of philosophy. We will begin with Aristotle himself in the Ancient period, move to Averroes (the Ibn-Rushd of this paper) in the Medieval
period, focus on Descartes and Spinoza as Modern thinkers and, finally, end in Heidegger
and Sartre in Contemporary philosophy. This is philosophy with a capital P, which may or
may not be the readers preferred position, let alone the writers. But, for our purposes here,
it is, nonetheless, inevitable.
Keywords

Aristotle Averroes Descartes God Spinoza

1 Aristotle: The Metaphysics of Metaphysics

Metaphysics is first formalized in Aristotles Metaphysics. In his search for the causes and
principles of all things, Aristotle ultimately argues that there must be a God, in the form of an

This article was presented at Aristotelian Encounters, Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg, The Netherlands,
January 2728, 2007.
J. A. Tighe (B)
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
e-mail: B.Mosselmans@roac.nl

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unmoved mover, who is responsible for the reality of the world. He says in Book 12, Chapter
7 of the Metaphysics, On such a principle [i.e. God/the unmoved mover], then, depend the
heavens and the world of nature (p. 1072b). On such a principle, Aristotles own system
reaches its apogee. Aristotles philosophical system in the Metaphysics must be a comprehensive one. His Organon, Physics, Ethics,-Politics,-and his many other texts all depend
on his Metaphysics for their ultimate justification insofar as the Metaphysics provides the
teleological arguments for their otherwisewhat might be described asphysical accounts
of reality. The philosophical problem of the Metaphysics is a profound one: the search for
the ultimate causes of knowable reality. Aristotle finds himself in the position of having to
found reality on some cause that is itself uncaused. For Aristotle, this cause is the unmoved
mover, which Metaphysics as first philosophy or theology investigates. Such has been the
perennial theme of philosophy, especially metaphysical or systematic philosophy. Looking
to Aristotle, we find that the long history of metaphysical inquiry has time and time again,
one might even say, inevitably, come to the same end: the necessity of God.
Of all of his works, Aristotles Metaphysics is probably the most important and the most
difficult; hence, the tradition of scholasticism and Thomist and Averroeist interpretations of
Aristotle. The difficulty of discovering a firm metaphysical foundation for philosophy as a
science has perplexed almost every major modern thinker, most notably, Descartes and Kant.
Contemporary philosophy finds Heidegger and Sartre grappling with metaphysics and ultimately denying it as a valid field of philosophical inquiry, perhaps as a necessary conclusion
to their own respective arguments. And yet despite all of its richness, metaphysics has grown
up to be the ugly stepchild of philosophy. Indeed, in the United States, Metaphysics is
an oft misunderstood term, and at popular booksellers is not uncommon for it to be a shelf
devoted to UFO sightings, telepathy and spoon-bending.
Thus, to defend Metaphysics in the tradition of the thinkers I will mention throughout this
paper, I would like to propose that we set Metaphysics on the firm foundations it demands as
a science. In order to do this we must necessarily return to Aristotle, for it is in Aristotles own
Metaphysics that we find not only metaphysics defined, but also its problems posited in the
most original way. Then, we must return to the beginnings of historical Aristotelianism. I will
do this by focusing on how Aristotle is understood through a major preserver of his work: the
philosopher Ibn-Rushd (Averroes). My larger aim is to explore how Averroes interpretation
of the unmoved mover of Book 12 of the Metaphysics might be seen as structurally similar
to claims made by Descartes, Spinoza, Heidegger and Sartre in their respective projects.
Through a close analysis of Aristotles own work, a careful reading of Ibn-Rushds text, and
an explication of some of the major works of western philosophy, we might arrive at a more
critical interpretation of Aristotles Metaphysics and at a better understanding of metaphysics as a philosophical practice. Essentially, what we will find is that Aristotles metaphysics
demands God. Then, through Ibn-Rushds reading of Book 12 of the Metaphysics we will
discover what Aristotle means by God. Afterward, we will investigate this Gods structure
by comparing it to claims made by Descartes, Spinoza, Heidegger and Sartre. What will
discover are two things: (1) that Aristotelian metaphysics remains to this day the horizon of
metaphysical thinking as such, and that (2) Metaphysics is indeed a valid field of inquiry and
not some paranormal phenomenon, either literally or philosophically.

2 Aristotles Unmoved Mover: A Structural Necessity

I have already mentioned above that Aristotle requires God. To sum up the argument
in brief: Aristotle requires God insofar as his notion of efficient causation necessitates a

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constant to keep causation itself in motion, i.e., a self-caused thing. This self-caused thing is,
famously, the unmoved mover of Book 12 of the Metaphysics. Aristotle begins Book 12 of the
Metaphysics telling us that the subject of our inquiry is substance (p. 1069b); however, the
substance under investigation is a different kind of substance than has been dealt with prior
to Book 12. The kind of substance under consideration in Book 12 is eternal unmovable substance; whereas, most of the Metaphysics prior to Book 12 has been concerned with sensible
substance and its properties. However, before he can consider eternal unmovable substance,
Aristotle must demonstrate that such a substance is necessary. He does this through a careful examination of sensible things. The argument is, summarily, that sensible things share
analogously in matter, form, privation and moving cause (p. 1071a). Furthermore, sensible
things exist only as actualized potentialities, which means that their existence is potential,
i.e., contingent (p. 1069b). Aristotle states,
neither the matter nor the form comes to beand I mean the last matter and form. For
everything that changes is something and is changed by something and into something.
That by which it is changed is the immediate mover; that which is changed, the matter;
that into which it is changed, the form. The process, then, will go on to infinity, if not
only [the matter comes to have some form, but the form and the matter must also come
to be]; therefore, there must be some stop. (p. 1070a)
To avoid an infinite regress, Aristotle posits matter, form and the composite of matter and
form as substances, which do not come to be. He states further, the causes of substances
may be treated as causes of all things in this sense, that when substances are removed, all
things are removed (p. 1071a). Aristotle is arguing that there must be a cause of composite
substances (as particular combinations of matter and form), and this cause is a mover in the
form of an efficient cause. Of course, efficient causes themselves have their own efficient
causes, which leads to some difficulty about the origin of causation, i.e., motion. Aristotle
avoids this infinite regress in stating, [b]ut it is impossible that movement should have either
come into being or cease to be (p. 1071b). Aristotle posits a mover which moves but is itself
unmoved, which is, as it ends up in Chapter 7 of Book 12, God. Thus, through an analysis
of sensible substance, Aristotle reaches the conclusion that the first cause of all things is an
uncaused cause: God.
Certainly, there is more to say about this claim. About 2,500 years more to say, one might
claim. However, what is important here is that we understand that Aristotle posits God as a
structural necessity to his description of the universe: the universe as unified.

3 Medieval Insights: Ibn-Rushd, aka. Averroes and Aristotles Metaphysics

The Arab philosopher Ibn-Rushd, better known by his Latinized name, Averroes, spends the
first part of his commentary on Book 12 of the Metaphysics in a brief synopsis of the entire
book of the Metaphysics. He states that the book is divided firstly into two parts: one of
them the examination of the principles of the substance subject to generation and corruption,
and the other the examination of the principles of the eternal substance (p. 66). Averroes
understands Book 12 on the Metaphysics as Aristotles shift in focus from non-eternal substance to eternal substance. This is understood as a necessary move for Aristotle insofar as
he states [f]or if the universe is of the nature as a whole, substance is its first part; and if
it coheres merely by virtue of a serial succession, on this view also substance is first, and is
succeeded by quality, and then by quantity (p. 1069a). The Metaphysics might be thought
as the capstone to Aristotles entire philosophical outputthe culmination of his system, or,

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at the very least, its ultimate principles deduced from particular beings. The investigation of
the Metaphysics concerns substance, the first principle of all things.
The second line of Book 12 establishes what is at stake in the Metaphysics: Aristotles
philosophical system. In Book 12 of the Metaphysics, Aristotle has found it necessary to
posit the existence of God in order for reality to exist as his system understands it. Reality
requires a cause. Averroes states, Metaphysics is the science which undertakes the demonstration of the principles of the object of natural philosophy, and natural philosophy merely
postulates them (p. 74). Indeed, much of the early part of Averroes commentary on Book
12 is dedicated to categorizing for the metaphysician and the physicist their respective fields
of inquiry. For Aristotle, according to Averroes, the physicist1 investigates what there is,
and the metaphysician investigates what must there be for anything to be there to investigate.
Averroes writes the metaphysician is he who seeks what the principles of substance qua
substance are and shows that the separate substance is the principle of the natural substance,
but in explaining this problem, he takes over what has been explained in natural philosophy
(pp. 7475). Thus, if there is reality, metaphysics is the attempt to answer how there is reality:
the principle of reality. Metaphysics, moreover, grounds natural philosophy. Thus, according to Averroes, the separate physical sciences, e.g., Mathematics, Astronomy, Medicine, are
grounded as science insofar as they [exist] as principles of the movable substance (p. 75).
Metaphysics, however, inquires into the principles of substance qua substance. For Aristotle, this principle is God. God must exist in order for reality to exist since reality is subject
to generation and corruption and therefore cannot cause itself. Moreover, Gods existence
must be actual as opposed to potential. Aristotle makes this argument through a critique of
motion; he writes, if there is something which is capable of moving things or acting on
them, but is not actually doing so, there will not necessarily be movement; for that which
has a potency need not exercise it (p. 1071b). To prove that motion is a necessary existent,
rather than a potential one, Aristotle employs time to make his argument. Since time must
have always existed [f]or there could not be a before or after if time did not exist and time
is either the same thing as movement or an attribute of movement, an eternal mover, which
is itself unmoved, must exist. This unmoved mover is God. Therefore, Gods very essence
is actuality (p. 1071b). Because God exists, the world exists. Aristotle deduces a necessary
cause for an otherwise contingent reality. God is a principle existing by necessity and. . .by
virtue of its own character (Ibn-Rushd, p. 156). The Metaphysics, then, is the attempt to
conceive God. Yet, this God need not be thought deistically. Averroes hints at this in his
description of providence:
He [God] knows them [individual persons] by species, since it is impossible to know
them numerically. The view of those who think that Gods providence extends to every
person is right in a sense and wrong in another. It is right insofar as nobody is in a
condition peculiar to him, but (this condition) belongs to the class of this species. If this
is so, it is correct to say that God takes care of individuals in this way; but providence
for an individual, in which nobody else shares, is something which the divine bounty
does not necessitate. (p. 155)
Here we can see that Averroes is denying any conception of God that exceeds its necessity.
Indeed, for Aristotle and Averroes, it is the very notion of necessity that provides us with
God in the first place. For both thinkers, God is a necessary principle of reality. Insofar
as there are things that exist, these things exist in motion, either in terms of place or time.
Reality is continuous and infinite, even if we were to argue that it is eternally changing.
1 This is not in the contemporary sense; rather, in the sense of physical.

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And every continuous and infinite act, that is to say an act that did not cease and will not
cease, can only proceed from a power the act of which is infinite, i.e. a power which does not
change at all because of a defect of its act (pp. 167168). Thus, because there is a world,
there must be God. However, Gods necessity is only as a principle of reality.2 To speak as a
Kantian, God is the transcendental limit of possible statements about the world.

4 Modernity: Some Historical Comparisons

Aristotles argument for the necessity of God lays the foundation for similar claims of necessity. In the Modern period, we may think of Descartes move to God as Aristotelian. For
Descartes, God is the necessary cause for thinking itself, especially intellection. Descartes
writes in the Third Meditation, By the word God I mean a substance [sic] that is infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which
created both myself and everything else (if anything else there be) that exists (1984, The
Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 2, p. 31). Descartes finds himself in much the same
philosophical conundrum as Aristotle. That is, while attempting to found his scientia on a
firm principle that allows for a knowable reality, Descartes finds himself having to posit a
principle that grounds knowledge as such. This principle is, of course, God. Indeed, the last
paragraph of the Fifth Meditation makes this quite explicit:
Thus I see plainly that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends uniquely on my
awareness of the true God, to such an extent that I was incapable of perfect knowledge
about anything else until I became aware of him. And now it is possible for me to
achieve full and certain knowledge of countless matters, both concerning God himself
and the other things whose nature is intellectual, and also concerning the whole of that
corporeal nature which is the subject-matter of pure mathematics. (p. 49)
That Descartes system relies on God is typically met with antagonism by modern-day
students of philosophy, especially when one considers that Descartes begins his meditations
with radical doubt. It would seem, logically, that such doubt would in fact condemn Descartes to a kind of atheism. However, what is misunderstood here is the nature of Descartes
God. Descartes God is not so much a deist God as a structural necessity that grounds the
entirety of Descartes argument for truth. Indeed, Spinoza picks up this Cartesian thread in
his Ethics. For Descartes, we neednt understand God as a deity; rather, we can understand
God as the structure of the totality of reality as such: For if nature is considered in its general
aspect, then I understand by the term nothing other than God himself, or the ordered system
of created things established by God. And by my own nature I understand nothing other than
the totality of things bestowed on me by God (p. 56). Descartes sneaks this claim into the
Sixth Meditation, where he is ostensibly discussing the real distinction between the mind and
the body. If we understand this latter reference to God in terms of his dualistic distinction,
we may understand God as the totality of nature. God is the nature of totality. God is, as
Descartes has mentioned elsewhere, completeness or perfection. That God exists follows
from Gods perfection, and Gods existence (that a deist God really exists and were all
saved from the fires of hell) is not the primary concern of the Meditations, as is typically
2 Gods being would require being to be a predicate of the most perfect thing. According to Kant, the most

perfect thing is already most perfect without having being predicated of it. See Kants Critique of Pure
Reason, On the Impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God.

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understood of the text in undergraduate classrooms.3 If God is perfect, that is, if God is
complete, then of course God exists, since if God did not exist, God would lack something
(existence) and be imperfect and hence unknowable (p. 46).
It would seem that Descartes needs God, and Gods existence, only insofar as God is a
limit principlethe limit of totalitywhich, by virtue of its completeness, can be known. If
God, as the totality of nature, were incomplete or imperfect, then nothing could be known
since knowledge is, for Descartes, the recognition of clear and distinct ideas. Clarity is knowing a thing to correspond to the understanding of it (p. 54). This does not mean clarity in
representation; rather, clarity is to understand the essence of a thing. For Descartes, these
things are typically found in pure mathematics. Distinctness is to understand two things as
being separate from one another, for example, the mind and the body. These very principles
of clarity and distinctness rely on an immutable totality of possibly knowable things. If reality
were incomplete, if it was constantly becoming, reality could not be taken as an object of
knowledge and clear and distinct ideas would not exist insofar as from moment to moment the
rules of reality themselves would change. This is why, for Descartes, God has existed from
eternity and will abide for eternity (p. 47). In order for there to be knowable reality as such,
reality must have a limit, but this limit is not in the form of a proscription or limitation;
rather, it is the perfection of all things, a totality, a completeness. That reality is complete
allows reality to be known. This complete reality is God. For Descartes, God doesnt exist as
a deist God; rather, God is the necessary structure of reality as such. Ultimately, Descartes
makes the same argument as Aristotle: reality can be known because it is constant, even if
constantly changing; God grounds reality as its constant.4
But that God exists is distinct from God having existence. Descartes reintroduces
God only after he establishes that something can be known; however, the God of the Third
Meditation is a radically different God than the one Descartes mentions in the First. Rather
than the deceiving Godthe evil geniusof the First Meditation, Descartes, in the Third
Meditation, introduces the concepts of formal and objective reality in his discussion of God
(p. 28). The purpose of this language is to establish God as a principle of perfection, i.e.,
totality. God is the more perfect being which allows me to recognize my own defects
(p. 31). We see here that what Descartes is suggesting by this language is that there is a
3 See note above.
4 The question, of course, is why does Descartes go through the cogito to get to God? The answer, I think, sup-

ports the interpretation that God is, for Descartes, not a deity so much as the necessary outcome of Descartes
argument for knowable reality: scientia. In the First Meditation, Descartes explicitly take up the conception
of God as a deity; that is, he examines the long-standing opinion that there is an omnipotent God who made
[him] the kind of creature that [he] is (p. 14). From this conception of God, Descartes argues that he will
suppose therefore that not God, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has
employed all of his energies in order to deceive [Descartes] (p. 15). This is a truly a remarkable position
for the time. Descartes is, without explicitly saying so, taking the position that God is a falsifier: an entirely
heretical position. It is only through the use of careful qualifiers that Descartes avoids incriminating himself
with the church and likely being condemned, much like his contemporary, Galileo. Moreover, by sheer genius,
Descartes performs an analysis of God wherein the omnipotent God he mentions in the First Meditation
is not the same God he posits in the Sixth. Descartes, in effect, dismantles the God understood by religion,
examines the essential structures at play in this concept of God, and restores God as a sovereign principle of
reality, but this God is not the same God as the God of the First Meditation, who might be understood, in the
larger context of the First Meditation, as one of those things which can be called into doubt, as the title of the
First Meditation suggests. Thus, by the Second Meditation, Descartes can abandon any religiosity or piety and
instead argue from a firm, logical, philosophical principle, which is, of course, that the one thing that cannot
be doubted is that he is doubting. Hence, in the interpretation I am proposing here, the real philosophical
content of the Meditations legitimately begins at the Second Meditation, wherein, by establishing that there is
one thing which I cannot doubtnamely that I am a thing which thinksDescartes is able to posit that clear
and distinct ideas are possible, and hence, knowledge is itself possible.

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principle of perfectionperfection in the sense of totalitythat allows me to recognize my

own imperfection. If there were no totality, I could never recognize myself as lacking since
reality and I would share the same essential structure: incompleteness. But, and this is prefigured in the ability to doubt at all, because I do recognize myself as a lack, there must be some
thing which is itself a lack which grounds my knowledge of myself as a lack. This some
thing is God. And although perhaps one may imagine that such a being does not exist, it
cannot be supposed that the idea of such a being represents something unreal (pp. 3132).
The reality of this idea grounds any knowledge since knowledge, in order to be knowledge,
must be knowledge of some thing that exists and exists as immutable, but that is to say that
the idea exists, and its existence is its ideationthe being of the idea is its real existence.
Thus, by the end of the Third Meditation, Descartes posits that God exists by the mere
fact that [Descartes] exist[s] and [has] within [him] an idea of a most perfect being (p. 35).
Gods existence is not important for Descartes so that he can know that he is worshipping
correctly or that his eternal soul is safe, but, rather, God exists as that very being the idea of
whom is in me. . .the possessor of all the perfections which I cannot grasp, but can somehow
reach in thought, who is subject to no defects whatsoever (p. 35). For Descartes, on Gods
existence, as idea, knowledge itself is dependent, and because knowledge that we cannot
know is at least some kind of knowledge, God must exist, but exist as, idea of perfection,
perfection as completeness, which is to say, self-grounding actuality, i.e., principle, through
which existence is thought in the first place.
We can see that. For Descartes, this God, to whose essence alone existence belongs
(p. 47) shares the same fundamental structure as the unmoved mover in Aristotles Metaphysics. Aristotles unmoved mover is also a being whose essence is inseparable from existence:
it is a thinking that thinks itself. In Descartes, all this is quite clearly analogous to Aristotle. If
I understand myself to be something quite single and complete (p. 59), and I am a thinking
thing (p. 18), but at the same time I am a finite thinking thing whose finitude is given to me
by the author of my being, it follows that this author is himself a thinking thing. However,
the latter cannot be caused from without since, unlike myself, this author himself has no
author. Thus, this author, God, is a thinking thing which thinks its own thinking: a thinking
thinking itself. Indeed, this makes sense even in terms of the totality or perfection of Gods
existence. Gods creation and duration must be one and the same moment. Gods perfection
is immanent in Gods essence, and if God continually needed to maintain his existence in
duration, God would lack, which he cannot. It is the indivisibility of God that makes such
a convincing argument for causation. Gods cause is Gods existence. God is self-caused.
This characterization of God is analogous, if not synonymous, with Averroes description of
Aristotles God as absolutely simple, supremely perfect, and that which is chosen for
itself (pp. 152153). It is safe to conclude that Descartes description of God maps quite
nicely onto Aristotles.
Following Descartes, Spinozas first words in his Ethics are By that which is self-caused
I mean that whose essence involves existence; or that whose nature can be conceived only
as existing (Ethics 1D1). Gods activity, which is [movement] without being moved, being
eternal, substance and actuality (p. 1072a), is pleasure (p. 1072b). Because the unmoved
mover is free from matter, as Ibn Rushd states in the Commentary to Textus 37, Gods
pleasure is pure intellectual pleasure. Aristotle writes of the activity of God,

[T]hinking in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thinking
in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And thought thinks on
itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of

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thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and the
object of thought are the same. (p. 1072b)
The activity of God is thinking thinking itself. God is pure mind,5 and, since pleasure is
a necessary attribute of apprehension (Ibn-Rushd 1986, p. 158), which God has most perfectly, God is necessarily pure pleasure because God is a complete act, and really the most
perfect complete act. Gods perfection is the impetus for Spinoza in his conception of God.
We may see Spinoza as clarifying Aristotles conception of God in the Ethics. Book 5 of the
Ethics, Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom, is Spinozas exhortation that
the greatest possible life for man is a life spent in contemplation of God. Spinozas argument
is not piety; rather, the basis of his argument stems from a theorization of God which follows
Aristotle in Book 12 of the Metaphysics.
If, then, God is always in that good state which we sometimes are, this compels our
wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life
also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and
Gods self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God
is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal
belong to God; for this is God. (Metaphysics p. 1072b)
It is Aristotles conception of God that is the God of Spinoza. For Spinoza, since God is
pure good and pure pleasure, for man to achieve the highest possible pleasure, he must do
so through intellectual reflection on God. The intellect is endowed to humans as a mode of
God, which gives man the capacity for reflection on God. And, for Spinoza, since God is the
source of wonder, the best possible life is one that is spent in contemplation of God.
This love towards God is the highest good that we can aim at according to the dictates of
reason and is available to all men and we desire that all men should enjoy it. Therefore
it cannot be sustained by the emotion of envy, nor again by the emotion of jealousy. On
the contrary, it is the more fostered as we think more men to be enjoying it. (Spinoza,
Ethics VP20P)
Spinozas God, however, is not an anthropomorphic God. Spinozas God is privileged as an
activity rather than as a deity. Spinozas God is God, nature or substance. For Spinoza, God
is not a little man up in the sky who watches our every move. In fact, in the Ethics, it is quite
uncertain whether God cares about man at all. This kind of God already appears in Averroes
commentary, as we noted in the above discussion of providence. If Spinozas Ethics can be
read as a guidebook for living a life guided by reason leading, eventually, to what Spinoza
calls intellectual love of God, then such a life derives from adequate intuitive knowledge of
substance and, especially, of the infinite immediate modes of God expressed under the two
attributes of God available for human perception: thought, and extension. This translates into
an adequate knowledge of the human mind and its corresponding object, the body, as unique
modal expressions of infinite substanceGod, or nature. Spinozas concept of the conatus
is that with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being, and Spinoza goes on
to say that the conatus is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself (p. 3P7). Mans
conatus is his ability to thinknamely, to think himself in his relation with God, substance
or nature. This move is an important one. Averroes writes that our intellect thinks itself
only at times, not permanently (p. 158), and Spinoza would agree. While Spinoza certainly
believes that human thought is possible only insofar as God makes it so, Spinoza allows that
5 Might we also think this akin to Hegels Absolute Knowing?

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thinking itself, as an almost divine characteristic of man, allows man to approach God.
This approach may be understood in two ways: either as man approaching God as coming
closer to God as he ascends toward him; or man approaches God as man becomes like
God. In contemporary philosophy, it is the latter.
With the death of God in Nietzsche, we might be tempted to say that Aristotles God is
dead. However, this is not the case. In contemporary philosophy, God is re-understood as a
kind of limit case. God is the limit for thinking as such. Despite the fact that contemporary
philosophy rarely self-identifies as metaphysics, and sometimes even claims to overcome it,
the propositions laid out in Aristotles Metaphysics still persist in contemporary philosophy.
If we understand God as the limit of consciousness rather than of physical reality, we might
still see God in contemporary philosophers like Heidegger and Sartre. This makes sense if we
understand Aristotle as privileging objective reality and contemporary philosophy moving
more toward a subject-centered reality.
Aristotle was not concerned with questions of consciousness the way that contemporary
philosophy is. Questions about solipsism or even subjectivity were not questions for him.
Aristotle wanted a firm, perhaps we could say, empirical system for philosophical inquiry.
This system reaches its culmination in his Physics. At this point, however, Aristotle recognizes that reality as investigated in the Physics has no knowable cause, no foundation.
Aristotle is then forced to formulate a cause for the principles of reality. He does this by
deducing God from the motion of the heavens. Since the heavens are eternal but in motion,
they must move as the result of some eternal unmoving thing: God. Since God is the cause of
all things, the principle of all things is God, and Aristotles system has found its foundation.
Averroes writes of this foundation, we say that if the word God means that He is living,
eternal and most perfect, and it has been proved logically that there is such a thing, and
that He is the mover of the universe, then this is God (p. 161). After he has proven God,
Aristotle spends the rest of Book 12 elucidating what God is. In a creative reading, Gods
activity sounds very much like the activity of human consciousness in certain contemporary
philosophies. Furthermore, might we understand Aristotles need for positing God in a different way? Much like in the phenomenological epoch, by bracketing the reality of the real
in the Metaphysics by way of an attempt to found a momentarily unfounded reality, Aristotle
is left with only one way out: a thinking that thinks itself: a self-grounding actuality: God.
How can we understand this in contemporary philosophy, which is primarily concerned with
consciousness?

5 Heidegger and Sartre: Thinking Thinking

Martin Heideggers main purpose in Being and Time is to formalize, or logicize, Being,
the ontos, and he is less interested in asking the question of what it means to be than of
what structures allow for being at all. Characteristic of his cyclical logic, which is not
circular reasoning, but, rather a remarkable relatedness backward and forward, (p. 8)
his move in answering this question is that the very question itself is the answer sought in
questioning. For Heidegger, the answer to the question of Being is that the very being that
asks the question of Being is the only being that is capable of answering this question,
and if Being relies on a being to ask it; therefore, the answer to Being is something
that the being asking the question of Being will find in itself which it already has in the
asking. The asking of the question of Being then is to display a desire to understand Being
itself. Averroes writes of intelligence, that which thinks by itself, not by something else, is
better than that which thinks by an intellect in it (p. 158). Heidegger points out that in order

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to understand the world, there must first of all be a being in the world which understands
the world. This being seeks to understand itself through itself alone. Here we see the shift
from objective reality to subjectivity most clearly. Even if the shift in thinking is from the
objective worldas it is in Aristotleto the subject who questions the objective worldas
it is in contemporary philosophythe structure of the investigation remains the same. For
Heidegger, any understanding of Being will be one which understands the Being of the
being that seeks understanding in the first place. Heideggers search for Being is not altogether different from Aristotles search for Substance. Heidegger promises the reader that by
formulating the question of Being, he will arrive at an answer to the thus far unanswerable
question of what it means to be, much as Aristotle promises his reader an understanding
of substance.
Heideggers position in Being and Time stems from a deconstruction of the grammar
of questioning: in any given question, there is the Gefragtes, Befragtes and Erfragtes. These
components of a question are usually separate. But in Dasein, they collapse into a single category. If the definition of Dasein6 is to ask the question of Being, to ask what is Being is to
at once ask about, through and for Being. There is then, no separation of the asking about,
the thing interrogated, and the goal of questioning, for Being itself is what is being asked
about, what is being examined and the goal of questioning. Averroes writes of the activity of
the intellect, that which understands its own essence feels pleasure by itself; it is that which
truly feels pleasure; that which possesses this attribute is the intellect: when it acquires the
intelligible and understands it, it understands its own essence, for its own essence is the intelligible which understands (p. 158). Dasein, as questioning question, is a thinking thinking
itself. Furthermore, Heideggers later notion of denken7 may be seen as a human attempt
to imitate the activity of God. Heidegger writes, Being would be the unique which wholly
surpasses itself (the transcendens pure and simple). But this surpassing, this transcending
does not go up and over into something else; it comes back to its own self and back to the
nature of its truth. Being itself traverses this going over and is itself its dimension (2001
What Are Poets For? in Poetry, Language. Thought, p. 129). In any case, the question of
Being itself contains a circularity. Dasein is essentially that which has its being in question.
It is a thinking that thinks its own limits, which is its essence: it is a thinking thinking itself.
Similar to Heidegger in his philosophy if not in his politics, Sartres idea of a freedom
which wills itself freedom (Being and Nothingness, p. 798) takes as its structure Aristotles
notion of a thinking that is both thinking and thought. The for-itself as reflecting-reflected is
always already transcendent. Human reality is a perpetual surpassing toward a coincidence
with itself which is never given (p. 139). If the for-itself could transcend itself, the moment
of this transcendence would be a pure coincidence with itself, and the for-itself would be
afforded an absolute perspective of itself: the for-itself would become the for-itself-in-itself
and this would be the end of the for-itself as such. Seeking a foundation for the for-itself, Sartre claims that the for-itself is the in-itself losing itself as the in-itself in order to found itself
as consciousness (p. 130). Sartre explains that the very concept of foundation itself comes
from a lack of foundation that the in-itself realizes and thus gives itself to the modification
of the for-itself. The for-itself ends up as the project of the attempt to become in-itselffor-itself; that is, a self-caused unified being: God. Thus, to want a foundation is to be
for-itself. However, to state that the in-itself perceives itself as a lack and thus seeks to found
itself, thereby becoming for-itself, is to imply that the in-itself already has consciousness:
6 Here is a good place to acknowledge the difference between the early and later Heidegger. Dasein
becomes Da-sein in the later Heidegger. Some would argue, the later Heidegger is Heideggers Heidegger.
7 See Heideggers Contributions to Philosophy, Emad and Parvy Trans., Indiana UP.

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namely, consciousness of itself as a lack of foundation. Without consciousness, the in-itself

could not realize itself as a lack. But if it realizes itself as a lack, then the in-itself was already
for-itself. It seems that the foundation of the for-itself upon the in-itself becomes an infinite
regress. Ultimately, Sartre claims that answer to why the in-itself becomes for-itself is a
metaphysical problem and that metaphysics might offer some hypotheses as to why or how
the for-itself is founded as the in-itselfs lack (p. 788).
As in the delineation of Heideggers project above, Sartres for-itself takes as its essential
structure Aristotles conception of God. Averroes writes of God, intelligible and intellect
become one when it thinks because the receiving part and the received part of the intellect
constitute among themselves the intellect (p. 158). Sartres difficulty stems from a difficulty
in his conception of consciousness, which we can find characterized in Aristotles conception
of God through Ibn Rushds reading of Aristotle. Ibn Rushd writes, if its [Gods, as thinking
thinking] substance consists in thinking, then it will think either itself or another thing external to itself (p. 192). Mans consciousness, it seems, fails to achieve the absolute, and this is
precisely the point both Heidegger and Sartre want to make. Dasein and the For-itself are as
failures to think as God thinks. Indeed, were we to grant that we could think as God thinks, we
would no longer be either Dasein or For-itself, respectively. Indeed, this is a major difficulty
in this essay: what happens when we grant the structure of thinking as Aristotle defines it for
God to man? Inevitably, man fails. If man were to think thinking, which seems to be what
man is encouraged to do from Modern philosophy to the present day, man will have become
something else entirely, something that is no longer man at all. Indeed, Man would become
God. However, as Averroes says of thinking, man thinks one thought at a time; talented men
think many thoughts at once. But only God thinks everything at once (p. 193).

6 A Conclusion, of Sorts
And thus we have come to the very limit of our inquiry. When man attempts to think God, he
fails necessarily, and should he even succeed, he will necessarily be unable to communicate
with other men as he himself becomes no longer man. Aristotles conception of God is sophisticated enough to have laid the groundwork for over 2,000 years of philosophy. What I have
attempted to accomplish here is a brief overview of Aristotles argument for the necessity of
a God who is responsible for what we call reality, to show how Ibn Rushds commentary on
Book 12 of the Metaphysics helps us to understand what Aristotle is attempting to argue in
his text, and to demonstrate how Aristotles arguments might be understood in the context
of several major thinkers in the history of philosophy. These tasks are important insofar as
one must understand Aristotles God to understand the God of the history of philosophy;
moreover, if we can establish that Aristotles God is indeed a logical necessity arising from
the very act of thinking itself, then philosophy may be provided a new ground for a firm,
truly metaphysical, inquiry. We might find this foundation most clearly in Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason explores the limits of human consciousness in such a way that these
limits may be definite, that is to say, foundational limits. Thus, in phenomenology, we have
a metaphysics of limits, beyond which, we can say no more. And so I shall.

References
Aristotle. (1941). Metaphysics. The basic works of Aristotle (R. McKeon, Ed.). New York: Random House.

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Descartes, R. (1984). The philosophical writings of Descartes (Vol. 2) (J. Cottingham, R. Stoothof, & D.
Murdoch, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and time (J. Macquarie & E. Robinson Trans.). Cambridge: Blackwell.
Heidegger, M. (2001). What are poets for? In A. Hofstadter (trans.), Poetry, language, thought. New York:
Perennial Classics.
Ibn-Rushd. (1986). Metaphysics. In C. Genequand (Trans.), Islamic philosophy and theology (Vol. 1). Leiden:
E.J. Brill.
Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and nothingness (H. Barnes, Trans.). New York: Washington Square Press.
Spinoza, B. (1992). Ethics (S. Shirley, Trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett.

Author Biography
Joseph A. Tighe studies philosophy at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His interests include
critical theory, phenomenology, twentieth century French and German philosophy and philosophy of literature.
He has spoken at conferences throughout the United States, Canada and Europe and has published essays on
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. A book chapter is forthcoming on Michel
Foucault.

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