The Axiological Aspect of Aristotle’s Metaphysics

Abstract

The article deals with the relationship between metaphysical discourse and the ethical (axiological) context in Aristotle’s philosophy. The author discusses this issue in connection with the problem of the “deaxiologization” of theoretical knowledge in modern philosophy, articulated in the report of Alexander Sanzhenakov. The question is raised about the correlation of speculative and axiological aspects in the construction of the theory of knowledge in Aristotle’s philosophy. The author argues the thesis according to which the division of knowledge into theoretical and practical, and the affirmation of the higher status of the theoretical episteme in comparison with the practical episteme are strictly axiologically grounded in the philosophy of Aristotle. He also claims that human activity is described by Aristotle as an energetically revealed logos, and the authenticity of this external revelation (realization) is normatively conditioned. The author points to examples of such a normative paradigm in Plato, who emphasized that the value of a physical thing in the context of human experience is not related to its “nature”, but to its “use”. The author sees the source of this view in the philosophy of the pre-Socratics (first of all, in Anaximander): the mutual combination of ontological and moral dimensions within the unity of reality. In the thought of the Miletus School, devoid of analytic fragmentation of reality, the description of the existing order naturally includes the “rule of action”, which does not “follow” from this order, but is its necessary element. Only violent separation of ontology and ethics (is and ought, description and prescription) in the philosophy of Enlightenment gives rise to a false problem of their correlation and makes it necessary to build the Hume guillotine. It is shown that the epistemological discourse of Aristotle is built within the framework of metaphysical paradigm, which assumes normativity as an ineradicable element of the relevant judgment about the real state of affairs.