Selection from

Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2-3.

Aristotle certainly thought that within an individual's history the desire to know develop in content: that is, the individual develops a richer sense of what it is he wants to know. The structures of the world and of our own souls conspire to encourage this development. Man is not born with knowledge, but he is born with the capacity to acquire it. But the world must cooperate with him if he is to exercise that capacity. Man starts life with the ability to discriminate among sensory phenomena, an ability he shares with other animals. His soul retains a record of its sensory encounters. The world, for its part, offers man repetition and regularity in his sensory encounters. Through repeated encounters with items in the world, our sensory discriminations develop into memory and then into what Aristotle calls 'experience.' Experience Aristotle characterizes as 'the whole universal that has come to rest in the soul.' From repeated perception of particular men, we form the concept of a man, and the knowledge that this thing we see is a man is experience. If the universal, or concept, were not somehow already embedded in the particular, we could not make the transition from bare sensory discrimination to knowledge of the individual. As Aristotle says, 'though one perceives the particular, perception is of the universal.' The world, then, provides a path along which man's curiosity can run. Because the universal is embedded in particulars, a person's first explorations among particulars will naturally lead him toward a grasp of the embodied universal. Having acquired experience, or knowledge of individuals, we are able to formulate more abstract forms of knowledge, the arts and sciences (technai and epistēmai). Each stage of cognitive development is grounded in the previous stage and the structure of the world itself helps us to ascend from the Cave of Ignorance. It is only because the world offers a course along which man's inquiries can run that his desire to know has any hope of being satisfied.