Hearing, along with speaking, pertains to man's very possibility. Because man can hear, he can learn. Both senses, hearing and seeing, have, in different ways, a privilege: hearing makes possible communication, understanding others; seeing has the privilege of being the primary disclosure of the world, so that what has been seen can be spoken of and appropriated more completely in λόγος.
Aristotle determines definitively the being of man with the following anticipatory characterization: τὸ δὲ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένος <ζῇ> καὶ τέχνῃ καὶ λογισμοῖς (b27ff.). This determination of the Being of man shows that the γένεσις of σοφία in the Metaphysics coincides perfectly with that given in the Nicomachean Ethics. "The human race (i.e., the strain of beings that are characterized as living) lives τέχνη καὶ λογισμοῖς." Here are united the two modes of λόγον ἔχον familiar to us from the Nicomachean Ethics: the ἐπιστημονικόν and the λογιστικόν. And this characterization of the Being of man implies that man has at his disposal a higher mode of orientation than animals. This orientation itself has various levels. φύσει μὲν οὖν αἴσθησιν ἔχοντα γίγνεται τὰ ζῷα, ἐκ δὲ ταύτης τοῖς μὲν αὐτῶν οὐκ ἐγγίγνεται μνήμη, τοῖς δ᾽ ἐγγίγνεται (a27ff.). Animals have for the most part mere αἴσθησις, though many also have μνήμη, "retention." Μνήμη does not here mean memory but rather the ability to think of something in the widest sense; this μνήμη does not require λόγος or νοεῖν. καὶ διὰ τοῦτο ταῦτα φρονιμώτερα καὶ μαθητικώτερα τῶν μὴ δυναμένων μνημονεύειν ἐστί (b1f.). On the basis of this capacity to retain, living beings have a certain φρόνησις, i.e., φρόνησις in a broader sense, a particular certainty in their orientation. Those animals that can hear have at the same time the possibility of learning in a certain sense; one can train them. Μνήμη, the one that, understood in this quite broad form, is already in animals, plays a fundamental role in the development of τέχνη as a mode of orientation of man. In quite definite ways αἰσθάνεσθαι develops into ἐμπειρία: ἐκ μνήμης.
b) Ἐμπειρία. The referential connection: as soon as-then.
Its temporal character.
γίγνεται δ᾽ ἐκ τῆς μνήμης ἐμπειρία τοῖς ἀνθρώποις: αἱ γὰρ πολλαὶ μνῆμαι τοῦ αὐτοῦ πράγματος μιᾶς ἐμπειρίας δύναμιν ἀποτελοῦσιν (b28ff.) "In man, there arises from μνήμη an ἐμπειρία; many μνῆμαι (of the same state of affairs) develop the possibility of a single ἐμπειρία, a single procedure." What is essential in ἐμπειρία is the retaining present of a determined connection of occurrences in a single affair. Aristotle later (981a7ff) introduces an example of ἐμπειρία from medicine, which we may take up now. If everyday experience devises a determinate remedy for a poor state of health, for a particular bodily state of man, then these remedies are at first unaccompanied by any real insight into the effective connection of the remedy with that which it is supposed to cure.