Essence of Aristotle

Aristotle and I have had a rocky relationship. I once informed my philosophy professor that I thought he was a hack and a butt-head. However, I eventually realized that Aristotle's concept of essences is quite familiar to the way I myself view the world, and after that I had to give him some credit. I still kind of think he's a sucker, though. (Contrary to the teachings of his master Plato, Aristotle believed women were inferior to men, and basically said women are men with unfortunate birth defects of the body and mind.)

Beyond my feminist's disagreements with his stratification of sexes, I found myself quite interested in the essence of Good which Aristotle describes in Nicomachean Ethics. He writes, "the word 'good' is  used in as m any senses as the word 'is'... so clearly good cannot be a single and universal general notion; if it were, it would not be predicable in all the Categories, but only in one" (19). So if the nature of the Good's manifestation can vary (it could be G-D in the "Category of Substance" or moderation in the category of "Quantity") how does one identify Good when one sees it? Because it contains the essence of Good, of course!

Epistemology is the study of how one knows what one knows. Both Plato and Aristotle were interested in answering the question of how man knows anything. Plato taught that there are two world, our own imperfect material world and the perfect world of Ideas. Our souls reside in the world of Ideas when we are not incarnate in material bodies. Then, when we are incarnate, we can identify a box as a box because we remember the perfect Idea box from the world of Ideas. Although the material box one sees is imperfect, we recognize its similarity to the perfect Idea box.

Aristotle believed that we recognize a box as a box because it contains the essence of box. All boxes have a certain essence (Could it be described as a metaphysical DNA?), and when we encounter a particular box we know it is a box because we have met with essence of box before.

So when it comes down to Good, which Aristotle has depicted as an expansive and fluid concept which should be hard to pin down, we know it because we can find the essence of Good within it. Aristotle even rejects the Platonic concept of an eternal ideal good, because the ideal good will not "be any more good because it is eternal, seeing that a white thing that lasts a long time is no whiter than one that lasts only a day" (21). I like this because while there is something to be said for things that continue interminably through the winding of spacetime, I think things can only be really truly beautiful if they are fleeting, and the fact that one day something must decay or be lost is what makes it worthy in the moment.

Aristotle says that good "appears to be one thing in one pursuit or art and another in another: it is different in medicine from what it is in strategy, and so on with the rest of the arts" (25). The essence of Good can be found at the end of almost any pursuit, "for instance, the end of the science of medicine is health, that of the art of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory," etc. (Aristotle, 3), which leaves me with a question. As a seamstress, what is my Aristotelian essence of Good? Is it as simple as saying that a garment is Good, since that is the end goal of sewing? Or is the end goal of an art really the skill that is gained through repetition, making skill Good?