A colleague once remarked to me that the Statesman is a ‘very lonely’ dialogue. Interpreters as different as the dean of Anglo-American analytical scholarship, Gilbert Ryle, and a leading Straussian have found it wearying and rebarbative to read. It has won little reflected glory from the analytical attention paid to its companion the Sophist in the last thirty years. Some have taken it to be mainly a discourse on the method of division, itself a procedure of dubious import, and in any case presented more fully in the Sophist, Philebus and Phaedrus. Others consider it essentially a discourse on political theory, though pallid beside the poignancy of the Apology and Crito, the vitriol of the Gorgias, the grandeur of the Republic, the monumentality of the Laws. Seldom have studies of the method and politics of the dialogue been combined in more than a consecutive way. This book explores their intimate connection.

Both the method and the politics of the Statesman hinge on the question of the authority of political expertise and how it is to be distinguished from rival forms of expertise rampant within the city.

The difficulty in defining odour

The last of the five senses to be considered in this work is smell. Aristotle examines smell in De Anima 11.9. When we begin reading 11.9 we expect Aristotle to start his account of smell by telling us what its proper object is. We expect that he will define the ‘smellable’ and then define smell as the potentiality to be like the smellable, just as he in 11.7 defined what vision was by first defining the visible. The expectation is eventually confirmed at De Anima 11.9 421b3–6 where Aristotle says that smell is of the smellable and unsmellable just as hearing is of the audible and inaudible and sight is of the visible and invisible. The claim links 11.9 back to 11.7–8 by emphasising that smell is to be explained in the same way as hearing and sight, namely, with reference to its proper object.

But before this he has argued that the smellable, that is odour, is difficult to define because we as human beings have an unclear sense of smell:

Why do we have sense-organs? We have ears, intricate structures composed of membranes, bones, channels, etc., a nose with two nostrils and a mucous membrane which covers a nasal cavity. We have taste buds, a range of tactile sensors under our skin, not to mention the eyes. Why?

The simple answer is that we have sense-organs because they enable us to perceive. A sense-organ, as Aristotle would say, is an organon, a tool or instrument of perception. But to understand why the sense-organ is instrumental in perception we must understand something about perception. Just as we must understand something about gardening before we can appreciate the usefulness of a rake, so we must understand something about sense-perception before we can see the point of having a sense-organ. An explanation of the sense-organs must therefore start with an understanding of what sense-perception is. Once we understand what sense-perception is, we can explain how the sense-organs help bring about sense-perception as we have understood it.

In modern science it can be taken for granted that the explanation of perception will refer to physical processes. For example, vision is said to be the process whereby the eyes ‘feed the brain with information coded into neural activity — chains of electrical impulses — which by their code and the patterns of brain activity, represent objects’.

Introduction

In this chapter I want to explain how, according to Aristotle, the medium of perception works. The discussion focuses on the medium of vision, that is, the transparent. In chapter I we saw how the transparent dominates Aristotle's account of the sense-organ of vision. Aristotle said that the inside of the eye had to be actually transparent (light) just as the medium in between the sense-object and the eye had to be actually transparent. I argued that this meant that the inside of the eye had to be transparent in order to be able to receive the sense-quality and mediate it to the seat of perception around the heart. The role of the transparent both outside the eye and inside the eye was to mediate the sense-quality.

In this chapter I shall inquire into the role of the transparent as a medium. This inquiry follows on the argument of chapter I. For if I was right in chapter I, this inquiry will not only affect the way we understand the transparent medium in between the eye and the sense-object as working but also the way in which we understand the transparent inside the eye as working for, according to chapter I, the role of the transparent inside the eye was the same as the transparent outside the eye.

To conclude, I wish to relate the various strands of the argument to the questions that I raised in the Introduction. In particular, I want to explore whether Aristotle's explanation of the sense-organs sheds any light on the functionalist debate.

I began this study by asking why we have sense-organs. Aristotle's answer was based on the idea that the sense-faculties are potentialities to be changed by certain objects. These potentialities are found only in certain sorts of matter. That was why we needed sense-organs. The sense-organs were the necessary material basis of perception. The matter had to be matter of a certain sort. For example, the ability to be changed by colours was known as transparency. But transparency was found only in certain sorts of matter, such as water. That was why the organ of vision was made of water. Similarly, the ability to be changed by sound was found only in matter that was resonant, such as air. That was why the organ of hearing was made of air. The ability to be changed by odours was found in water or air because both were potentially like odours, dry. So the organ of smell was made of water or air. The organ of touch consisted of all the elements, for it was only a mixture of the four elements that would make the sense-organ potentially like all the tangible qualities, the proper objects of touch.

What is perceiving?

My analysis of the sense-organs has followed the same pattern. There are two central claims. (1) The sense-faculty is defined by its ability to be changed by the sense-object as such. This ability belongs to an attribute. For instance, the ability to be changed by sound belongs to resonance. (2) The attribute is present only in a certain sort of matter. This, for example, is why we have an ear whose inside is composed of still air, for it is only still air (or water) that is resonant. The sense-organ is here hypothetically necessary in the same way that iron is necessary if the saw is to have the ability to saw.

The sense-organ is in this way explained as a necessary material basis for the first actuality that defines the sense-faculty. The analysis shows that a material basis is necessary if the first actuality to be changed by a certain sort of sense-object is to be present. So far then the focus has been on the relationship between the first actuality and the matter or potentiality of the sense-organ. The analysis has not shown that a material basis is necessary because the first actuality can only be actualised in a material change. Suggestions have been made at various points to the effect that there need be no material changes in perception.

The argument

This study aims to answer two questions in Aristotle. First, why do we have sense-organs? Second, why are the sense-organs composed the way they are? Aristotle's theory of the sense-organs, I shall argue, is briefly this. We have five so-called special senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. The five senses are powers or potentialities δυνάµειϚ that animals have to perceive certain objects — for example sight is the power to perceive colour while hearing is the power to perceive sound. The power to perceive a sense-object consists in the ability to be changed by the sense-object. When an animal perceives a sense-object, its sense-faculty is changed by the sense-object so as to become like the sense-object, for example when I see a red pillar box then my faculty of sight becomes red in a certain way. This ability that the sense-faculty has to be changed by a certain sense-object is what defines the sense-faculty, for example the faculty of sight is defined as what has the ability to be changed by colour. The faculty of hearing is defined as what has the ability to be changed by sounds, and so on.

The ability to be changed by a sense-object is something that is only found in matter.

Touch is the sense of direct contact

The verb ‘to touch’ can be used in two ways. We can say that a bottle touches the table. By this we may mean that the bottle is in direct contact with the table, that there is nothing in between the two. However, when I say that I touch the hardness of the table I may mean something different, namely, that I feel or perceive the hardness of the table. I touch the table in this way only when I am using my sense of touch. Similarly, we can say that the touch of your hand is cold. In that case too it is implied that I perceive your hand as cold by my sense of touch.

Perhaps it is more usual to use the verb ‘to feel’ rather than the verb ‘to touch’ as a verb of perception. One would say ‘I feel the hardness of the table’ rather than ‘I touch it’ if one wants to say that I perceive the table rather than that I am simply leaning on it with some part of my body. That is perhaps also why it seems more natural to use the verb ‘to touch’ when the idea is just that there is contact between two things and no perception takes place.