Wrestling with Aristotle: My Journey Through "Metaphysics"

Review:

Let me start with a confession: I didn’t choose to read Aristotle’s Metaphysics because I thought it would be fun. I chose it because I wanted to challenge myself.

I picked up Metaphysics because I kept hearing Aristotle’s name in smart-sounding YouTube videos and thought, “How hard could it be?” Spoiler: Very.

I wanted to understand the roots of deep philosophical thinking, the kind of stuff that makes you sound smarter in conversations. What I didn’t expect was to be completely overwhelmed—and oddly fascinated—by a book that often felt like trying to solve a riddle written in another dimension.

Reading Metaphysics is not like reading a modern self-help book or a novel. There’s no clear story, no characters to root for, no juicy twists. Instead, you get questions like: What is being? What does it mean to exist? And Aristotle doesn’t exactly hand you the answers. He throws you into the middle of ancient Greek thought and expects you to swim—or at least float—with him.

At first, I sank.

I had to read most paragraphs two or three times. I kept Googling words like “substance,” “essence,” and “potentiality,” even though I thought I knew what they meant. The sentences were long, the structure was dense, and it often felt like Aristotle was arguing with people I’d never heard of—Plato, Parmenides, and some thinkers he never even named. It was like walking into the middle of a heated debate in a foreign language and being expected to contribute.

There were moments I seriously wanted to throw the book across the room. But somehow, I kept coming back to it, like it was daring me to keep going.

But then something weird happened.

After a few chapters (or “books,” as Metaphysics calls them), I started to get into it. I started recognizing patterns in his thinking. Aristotle wasn’t just being difficult—he was trying to untangle reality itself. He asked questions I’d never thought to ask, like whether all things have a cause, and if change means becoming something completely new or just becoming more of what you already are. I felt like I was eavesdropping on a very old, very intense philosophical therapy session.

Some ideas genuinely blew my mind. For example, Aristotle talks about the “unmoved mover”—a first cause that sets everything in motion but is itself unchanged. That idea alone made me pause and stare at the wall for a few minutes. It’s the kind of thought that doesn’t give you answers right away but sits in the back of your mind like a mysterious box, waiting to be opened later.

Even though I didn’t fully understand every part, I felt like I had a conversation with someone much smarter than me, and that was oddly inspiring.

By the time I reached the end, I didn’t feel smarter—I felt stretched. Like my brain had done yoga for the first time and was sore but strangely satisfied. I may not have understood everything, but I understood something. And maybe that’s what Aristotle wanted all along—not perfect knowledge, but a thirst for wisdom.