Aristotle, Myth, and Extraterrestrial IntelligencesAn Ancient "Super Natural" Philosophy of Religion

“If we followed in [Aristotle’s] footsteps, drawing on our sciences, from theoretical physics to engineering, economics and ethics, what conclusions would we reach? If we are to be Aristotelians now it cannot be by parroting Aristotle’s theories. Instead, it must be by taking him as a paradigm of how we might be philosophers and theologians ourselves — a ‘paradigm in the heavens,” so to speak, “for anyone who wishes to look at it and to found himself on the basis of what he sees. (Plato, Republic 529b).”

— C.D.C. Reeve, “Introduction” to Aristotle’s Theology: The Primary Texts

“It is a sure sign of the death of a religion when its mythic presuppositions become systematized, under the severe rational eyes of an orthodox rationalism, into a ready sum of historical events, and when people begin timidly defending the veracity of myth but at the same time resisting its natural continuance — when the feeling for myth withers and its place is taken by a religion claiming historical foundations.”

— Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, X (Golffing translation)

“If these things are real — and by all human standards it hardly seems possible to doubt this any longer — then we are left with only two hypotheses: that of their weightlessness on the one hand and of their psychic nature on the other. This is a question I for one cannot decide.”

— C.G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies

“Both the technological and fictional readings of something like the UFO phenomenon are part of the same world-story . . . materialism. On one level, materialism is just more monotheism in disguise. It is another jealous god. Instead of “My God is the only God,” now it is “There is only matter.” The story goes like this. Matter is made up of tiny dead things that are bouncing or waving around in predictable mathematical patterns. It’s all math. There is no meaning. There is no mind. Evolution is without a goal. It intends nothing. It is going nowhere. The universe is pointless.”

— Jeffrey Kripal, The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained in Real

Aristotle’s natural theology is a complicated and controversial affair. The upshot is that he arrives at the conclusion that there must be a system of eternal moving movers (the gods in the heavens) explanatorily united by a single unmoved mover (the god). Note well that Aristotle claims to arrive at the existence of the gods and the god scientifically, i.e. by making deductive inferences based on requirements for the intelligibility of empirical phenomena. Basically, he is impressed by the fact that sublunary substances, i.e., earthly beings composed of the basic elements (earth, air, water, and fire) move eternally. (For more on Aristotle on the eternity of motion see this lecture.) That is, terrestrial beings have come to be and passed away forever (and will do so forever). By Aristotle’s light, such motion (the coming to be and passing away of earth/air/water/fire composites) cannot account for itself (even if it is eternal), so it must be accounted for by a higher-order intelligibility that pulls all this earthly motion into a coherent system of motion. This cause of motion moves substances, so it must be a substance, but it cannot be moved in the same way (otherwise we have only kicked the can down the explanatory road). That is, the mover of earthly substances must be unmoved relative to earthly substances, i.e., it cannot be moved by them nor can it be moved in the same way. The high-order mover is utterly independent with respect to earthly movers. Since earthly motion is eternal (infinite into both the past and the future), so then the higher-order mover must be eternal. Moreover, this higher-order mover, since it accounts for earthly movement cannot be composed of the earthly elements (earth, air, water, and fire), and it is therefore immaterial with respect to earthly beings. The mode of causality by which this relatively unmoved/immaterial mover moves earthly beings is curious, since it must cause motion in earthly beings without being in earthly motion (otherwise it would fail as an explanation of such motion). The higher-order mover of early motion does not intervene in earthly affairs. Earthly beings must be moved by an attraction to this relatively unmoved/immaterial mover (desire, contemplation, or some such).

Suppose the moon, for instance, is the higher-order mover of earthly movers. The moon is then eternal (immortal), relatively immaterial (it’s not made of earthly elements), unmoving, aloof, and independent to the earthly beings it moves by its intrinsic attractiveness (nobility, goodness). That is to say, for Aristotle, the moon is a deity. Notice, however, the recurring qualifier, “relatively,” that needs to be appended to this higher-order mover. That is, the moon is immaterial, invariant, independent, etc. relative to earthly beings, but it still moves. Thus, there must be a higher-order of intelligibility that moves it by some sort of attraction and so on. The moon is likewise a relatively lower-order being whose motion is accounted for by its attraction to a relatively higher-order deity that is independent, immaterial, and unmoving with respect to it, say, Mercury. Even Mercury is also a relatively moved mover, so it too must serve a yet higher-order deity. This recursion of intelligibility, according to Aristotle, cannot go on to infinity, and therefore there must be a final heaven which synthesizes all of these hierarchies of deities (eternal movers) into an astronomical system. Such a heaven would be a first moving mover, so there must be something that moves it, which is moved by nothing else. For Aristotle, to be moved by nothing else is to be not moved at all. Thus, the god, the storied unmoved mover, contemplates only itself (it is attracted only to itself), while moving everything else solely by its irresistible attractiveness. The god is unqualifiedly unmoving, immaterial, and independent. Notice that the principle moving the system is not physical momentum a la Newtonian physics, but desire or attraction; Aristotle’s cosmology entails a universe suffused with beings whose motion is explained by a cognitive or quasi-cognitive relation to the beings that stand over them in terms of intelligibility (higher-order divinities). We might say that Aristotle’s universe runs on worship or interlocking hierarchies of contemplative admiration. Each level of the universe looks up to a higher-order intelligence that gives intelligibility (either directly or by transitivity) to all cosmological levels below it, terminating in the being, the god, whose contemplative worthiness makes sense of the entire cosmological system. Aristotle is quite comfortable with the notion of extraterrestrial intelligences! For him, the extraterrestrials have always been running things.

That is all very quick, and there is plenty to be said in terms of critical reply (especially with respect to my paltry presentation of Aristotle’s position), but my point in bringing Aristotle’s natural theology up is not to take up the argumentation in detail, but to consider the status natural theology holds in Aristotle’s systematic thinking. My main question is whether Aristotle’s attempted demonstration of divinity is a proof of the supernatural. Or does Aristotle offer a sort of naturalist reduction of the supernatural to tamer scientific categories? On the one hand, Aristotle would have nothing to do with contemporary forms of naturalism that frequently (though not exclusively) argue that the “whole show,” as C.S. Lewis famously puts it, can be accounted for in terms of the basic entities posited by contemporary physics. Aristotle is certainly no physical reductionist, and he is certainly very critical of the Democritian atomism abroad in his day. We need to be careful here too, as not all self-avowed naturalists are strict reductionists, but, in any event, the fact that Aristotle’s biological and psychological treatises operate by explanatory categories to some degree autonomous with respect to his physics (e.g., he introduces the notion of soul in De Anima to capture what is unaccounted by substantial form in the Physics) is enough to show that Aristotle is nothing like what we might have in mind as naturalist. Moreover, remember, Aristotle’s universe runs on a sort of quasi-cognitive attractiveness between cosmological levels. That’s not a picture of the world that sits well with most contemporary naturalism.

On the other hand, there is a sense that Aristotle denies that there need be any supernatural explanation in our understanding of the movement of substances. Aristotle’s nature is free-standing; it requires no outside explanation. The gods and the god are not interveners from the outside of nature, but, in some sense, part of the system of nature. Aristotle identifies the gods with the celestial bodies (planets and stars), and the god is the ultimate explanation of their motion, and the “whole show” can be explained within the categories of Aristotle’s science (even though that explanatory system is richly pluralistic). For Aristotle, nature is quite super, so there is no need for any notion of a supernatural. The super standing of nature is captured by a completed (metaphysical) science, and there is then no incongruity between natural and a “supernatural” explanation. This leaves little room for a natural - supernatural distinction. Though he arrives at a metaphysics and cosmology that takes the universe as an interlocking hierarchy of divinely governed realms of intelligibility, Aristotle’s story is entirely scientific and natural. These divinities, including the ultimate divinity, do not interrupt or intervene in nature, but instead are the completing principles of the intelligibility of nature. Aristotle’s natural theology does not compete with his natural science, but brings it to its ultimate point of completion. All of this is to say that I don’t think Aristotle’s cosmology and metaphysics fits at all comfortably in any of the standard camps entrenched in contemporary debates, and this, for my money, is one of the virtues of his position (and I would say much the same regarding his approach to the soul).

Does this mean that Aristotle’s cosmology is a sort of scientism, even if it is not narrowly naturalistic? Moreover, once we have incorporated divinity into our rational cosmology, what then of religion? That is, Aristotle’s cosmology, though not naturalistic in terms of the sterile categories of contemporary philosophy, does offer a counter explanation to the traditional mythological accounts covering some of the same ground. Aristotle thinks Mars is an intelligent divinity, but it’s not at all clear that he has anything (or anyone) in the least like the Ares of traditional Greek mythology in mind. Should we take Aristotle as debunking the traditional mythological religions? Aristotle takes up these issues in the following remarks, which I have cited before for other purposes. Having just finished outlining his metaphysical cosmology cum natural theology, Aristotle takes up the issue of popular religion explicitly:

“There is a tradition handed down form the ancients of the earliest times and bequeathed to posterity in the shape of a myth to the effect that the heavenly bodies are gods and that the divine encompasses the whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added later in a mythical way with a view to the persuasion of ordinary people and the view to its use for legal purposes and for what is advantageous. For they say these gods are human in form or like some of the other animals, and also other features similar that follow from or are similar to those just mentioned. But if we separate the first point from these additions and grasp it alone, namely, that they thought that the primary substances were gods, we would have to regard it as divinely said, and that while it is likely that each craft and each philosophy has often been developed as far as possible only to pass away again, these beliefs about the gods have survived like remnants until the present. In any case, the belief of our forefathers and of our earliest predecessors is to this extent alone illuminating to us.” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Reeve (Hackett, 2016), 1074a36-1074b13).

This passage contains some of the most interesting and, for my money, under-appreciated things Aristotle claims. There are three types of epistemic relations to the gods that Aristotle considers. First, there is an original or Ur insight, given in the form of some sort of myth, “to the effect that the heavenly bodies are gods and that the divine encompasses the whole of nature,” and Aristotle has a high view for this “divinely said” mythos. It seems that our primordial ancestors had some deep insight or revelation regarding the relation of divinity to nature, even if they had no properly scientific understanding of these issues. Second, there is a further elaboration of the primordial insight in terms of anthropormorphic and crassly animistic mythologies. Here, Aristotle seems to be mistrustful, chalking these elaborations up to legal and political techniques for persuading the populous. Finally, Aristotle has his own scientific account of divinity. What is interesting is that he seems to think that the original Ur mythos and his cutting edge scientific demonstration arrive at essentially the same cosmological/theological conclusions. That is, he encourages us to separate the original mythical insight from its later politicized elaborations so that we can see that our primordial forefathers fundamentally agreed with his scientific findings, i.e., “the primary substances were gods.” Aristotle is not above some bit of de-mythologizing, as he is happy to let the easily manipulated superhero stories pass away like all outmoded crafts and philosophies, but his de-mythological project is not totalizing. Aristotle concedes that “the belief of our forefathers and of our earliest predecessors is to this extent alone illuminating to us,” i.e., to the extent that we leave behind the later elaborations, the original Ur myths are insightful and have something to teach us. What I find fascinating here is that the “us” Aristotle is referring to seems to be those of us who have gone through the process of completing his cosmological science. In other words, the originary myths Aristotle has in mind (and he tantalizing does not give us a hint about them beyond their barest content) have something illuminating to say even to the student of First Philosophy. That is, Aristotle’s rational cosmology purports to demonstrate divinity as suffusing nature and gets us over facile comic book caricatures of the divine, but it does not have all there is to say about the matter. Even completed science can still be illuminated by the Ur myths. Thus, for Aristotle, it is not a question of science replacing mythology, nor does myth place some artificial limit on science. Rather, he seems to have a cross-germinating relationship in mind: on the one hand, science moves us to rational footing with respect to divinity while disabusing us of easily manipulated faux understandings, and on the other hand, the originary myths still provide some sort of insight that illuminates even scientific understanding. Science completes the picture in an explanatory sense (though in a way that includes divinity), but there is still something more to be said (or maybe shown) by the mythologized experiences of our primordial ancestors. There is a sort of insight or experience that is even super scientific, meta-metaphysical.

What exactly are these original insights or experiences that Aristotle claims have been pass down by our primordial ancestors? I don’t know, but I think Jeffrey Kripal is trying very hard to find out. In fact, his method of investigation is something of a contemporary case of the methodological stance that Aristotle is suggesting in the passage I quoted above. Kripal is an expert in the comparative study of religion, a well-established academic, who takes very seriously all order of paranormal phenomena that are typically dismissed out of hand in polite scholarly circles (unless of course something spooky happens to fit our preferred ideological or religious commitments). Here is how he describes the sorts of events he considers in a book he co-authored with Whitley Striber (a well-known experiencer of the anomalous):

“I collect and compare the earlier building blocks, the anomalous events or extraordinary experiences that may (or may not) eventually lead to a religious belief or institution. These anomalous building blocks, these tiny personal religions before religion, are historical facts, as real and as important as any other recurring historical fact. They happen. What hey are actually are is quite another matter. But here is the thing. If you resist the temptation to believe these events (that is, provide them with some definite religious category, judgment, or interpretation) but instead collect them, arrange them into patterns, and put them on a flat, fair table to analyze, they remain “super” enough. But they no longer appear so odd, and they are certainly anecdotal,” as the debunkers like to label them (as if intellectual cop-out explains anything at all). Quite the opposite, these super states begin to look like universal, if always morphing attributes of a shared human mindspace. They begin to look, well, natural.” (The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained is real, p. 6, author’s emphasis)

Kripal shares Aristotle’s view that the world does not fit at all neatly into the tired oppositional categories of contemporary academic debate, i.e., natural vs. supernatural, physical vs. non-physical, etc. Rather, Kripal suspects that anomalous phenomena, experience of UFOs, apparitions, trance states, ESP, etc. are not supernatural interventions into nature, but instead reveal that nature is super. That is, once we have done the careful phenomenological work of collecting and analyzing these experiences, both in the the distant past and among our contemporaries, we will find that they are too common and too well-patterned to dismiss. The so-called anomalous is only anomalous to the degree that these occurrences are not welcome in some iteration of the consensus version of reality. Once we have done the hard work of taking experience seriously (including phenomena we don’t much like taking seriously), then we will see that nature is pretty spooky. That’s not because nature is full of gaps and miracles marking supernatural interventions, but because nature is quit super all on its own. “The heavenly bodies are gods and that the divine encompasses the whole of nature,” as Aristotle puts it. This is why Kripal and Striber entitle their book “The Super Natural” instead of “The Supernatural.” Of course Kripal and Striber are not out to defend Aristotelian cosmology (that’s not the point), but they do operate by a view of the metaphysical standing of nature and divinity (the “super”) interestingly akin to Aristotle’s.

There is also an important methodological commonality in this vicinity. One of Kripal’s central methodological commitments is to steer a careful path between two common errors: reductive comparison and religious comparison. The former

“can be pictured as a straight arrow moving from right to left, that is, from a present worldview to a past one. Religious comparison can be thought of as an equally straight arrow moving from the left to the right, that is, from a past worldview to a present one. As the reversed arrow suggests, these two comparative practices are really not so different from each other. Which is another way of saying that they make the same mistake, if in opposite directions.” (The Super Natural, p. 13)

In other words, reductive comparison pretends to a wholesale debunking of prior mythos (or contemporary myths like UFOs) as mistaken or obsolete primitive explanations that can now be superseded by rational and scientific understandings, e.g., “What the primitive Greeks thought were deities, we now know to just be planets.” Religious comparisons make the opposite but analogous move of seeing rational and scientific findings or even recent “anomalous” experiences as truncated versions of a preferred religious mythology, e.g., “The planets are just a new way of talking about the gods like Mars” or “UFOs are angels and demons.” Instead of falling into either of these approaches (a choice between a tyranny of the past or a tyranny of the present), Kripal would have us take the experiences seriously, and ask what these basic encounters, once we have done the necessary phenomenological archeology that brackets both our contemporary (scientific) and religious expectations, show us about what nature is really like. This approach is again much like what Aristotle exhibits above. On the one hand, Aristotle does not take the popular mythological inheritance abroad in his day at face value; he believes his scientific findings give him ample grounds to set aside these anthropomorphic and animistic images. On the other hand, Aristotle is open to what a deep sort of “myth,” or a primordial experience had by his distant forbearers, might be able to do in terms of illuminating his rational cosmology. Like Kripal, Aristotle (ever the empiricist!) recommends that we take experience seriously enough to bracket the complacency following on our scientific successes and the comfort of the preferred mythologies of our cultural moment.

Kripal and Aristotle are both open to the possibility of another sort of insight that is not limited by our contingent cultural commitments, and which is not a competitor with our best scientific understandings. As Kripal puts it, “Maybe an entirely different way of knowing is being called for here. Maybe these events cannot be explained because they are not caused through any ordinary physical channels. Maybe they are are expressions of something. Maybe we should be reading them” (The Super Natural, p. 192). These insights, if they really are distinct from both our scientific understandings (however well-grounded) and inherited mythological traditions, would not yield another “positive truth to measure and prove,” nor will they bless us with “some new piece of folklore to believe.” Rather, this openness to the insights of primordial experience (the Ur mythos) might be “a playful reminder that our present cognitive hardware and cultural software are simply not up to the task of understanding who we are and what (or who) the world is” (The Super Natural, p. 192). On Kripal’s view, these insightful experiences serve precisely to show us that our current worldviews (scientific and religious) are, even if complete in their own terms, not quite the whole story, and Aristotle seems to agree. Indeed, he says elsewhere in the Metaphysics that the question of the meaning of being is may never be fully closed: “Indeed, the question that was asked long ago, is now, and always will be asked, and is always giving rise to puzzles — namely, What is being?” (Metaphysics, Z1, 1028b2-3, Reeves translation). Maybe the question of being remains open because there is another source, in addition to metaphysics and rational cosmology, to which we we must listen (or “read” in Kripal’s preferred hermeneutical idiom) in order to move beyond the philosophical puzzles, and that is why primordial mythical insights need to be allowed to express themselves in order to augment our rational sciences.

I write this not only to note the felicitous congruence between Kripal’s and Aristotle’s methodologies in considering religion. That’s all well and good, but there is a bigger point to be made. If we are to take C.D.C. Reeve’s advice given in the epigraph to this essay seriously, and I am inclined to do so, then being an Aristotelian is not merely to parrot Aristotle’s theories. (Though maybe Aristotle is not as far wrong cosmologically as we once thought.) Rather, to be Aristotelian is to take up his intellectual dispositions, which is to use the broadest possible range of human experiences to construct the broadest possible unified understanding of the world. Doing so, as I believe Kripal shows us, will require an openness to taking certain phenomenon seriously as vehicles of cosmological and theological insight that may not sit well with the sort of cultural conservatism that is often associated with Aristotelianism. That discomfort, however, might be the necessary expense of taking Aristotle seriously, instead of sticking to our own convenient caricatures of the Philosopher.

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