Is Aristotelian philosophy a natural ally of conservatism? Aristotle’s thought was indeed put to work by Thomas Aquinas and came, via the Catholic Church, to undergird the rigid social and political hierarchies that characterized much of medieval Europe and beyond. But was this alliance inevitable? Are cherished conservative principles—like essential social differentiation, natural function and a fixed cosmic order—incontrovertibly supported by Aristotle’s thought? Not according to Marxist theorist Ernst Bloch, who, in the early 20th century, rerouted Aristotle’s reception through medieval Islamic and heretical Christian philosophy, discovering there dynamic and utopian strains of interpretation—or, a “Left” Aristotelianism. Born of an ambivalence in Aristotle’s hylomorphism—or, the theory that all physical objects are composites of matter and form—Bloch attributes to the Aristotelian Left a shared commitment to “dialectical matter”—or, matter as a reciprocal agent in its causal interactions with form. What emerges is a conception of the world not rigidly ordered but incomplete, and therefore open to the possibility of change, if not perfection—possibilities conspicuously absent both from the world of the Aristotelian Right and from the “mechanical materialism” of modern science. Where does Bloch discover the seed of this concept of “dialectical matter,” and how does it germinate in the Aristotelian Left? Is this proposed tradition a coherent one? And, more generally, what theoretical resources does Aristotle’s thought offer those who wish to challenge conservative institutions that marshal Aristotle in an attempt to justify their own authority?
In this course, we will examine the prospects for a left-wing of Aristotelian thought, both within and beyond the tradition identified by Bloch. Beginning with Bloch’s foundational essay Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, we will read from a wide range of historical sources, including Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Giordano Bruno, Karl Marx, and Aristotle himself. What room does Aristotle’s hylomorphism leave for an active, agential conception of matter? How can we read Aristotle’s physics together with his political philosophy? And are there resources in the latter for a leftist critique of existing modes of production?
