The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (10 page)
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Authors: Daniel J. Boorstin
Tags: #General, #History, #Philosophy, #World
Aristotle was in Athens in the summer of 323 B.C., when news came of the death of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great. Alexander was only thirty-two, and many doubted that he could be dead. This was the signal for the Athenian Assembly to declare war against Antipater, Aristotle’s patron, who held the garrisons for Macedonia. The Macedonian prodigy Aristotle, Antipater’s friend, was also naturally suspect. He became another victim of the familiar charge of “impiety.” The trumped-up charge was based now on an accusation that Aristotle had written a paean to his old patron, the pro-Macedonian Hermias, as if he were a god. He fled to Chalcis, a Macedonian stronghold, to prevent the Athenians from “sinning twice against philosophy.” Aristotle died in Chalcis in 322, at sixty-three years of age. His will made generous provisions for his family and for emancipating some of his slaves.
The philosopher Aristotle, Bertrand Russell observes, was “the first to write like a professor . . . a professional teacher, not an inspired prophet”—“Plato diluted by common sense.” Aristotle’s success as a professional teacher is nowhere better proven than by the decisive and enduring shape he has given to every subject he interpreted. Yet he avoided the narrowness of the pedant. There was no subject, question, or field of knowledge that this Seeker failed to encompass. The amazing scope of his curiosity and knowledge would never be matched in Western thought. The next such effort we shall see was Diderot’s
Encyclopédie
(1751-1756), which required the collaboration of the great thinkers of the age in thirty-five volumes. In retrospect, as amazing as the scope of Aristotle’s writings was their succinctness, for he managed to compress his universal survey into only fifteen hundred pages. Later encyclopedias have used the crutch of alphabetical arrangement of articles to give an appearance of order. But Aristotle created an order that derived from the subjects themselves. While the obviousness of some of these ideas might embarrass the subtle philosopher, it is this commonsense view of experience that has given Aristotle his perennial appeal.
For the heart of Aristotle’s seeking is the way of common sense. By starting philosophic treatises with common sense, Aristotle gives his ideas a plausibility that puts opponents—especially subtle philosophers—on the defensive. The order that he finds then does not seem imposed by the philosopher, but seems rather a progressive classification of everyone’s experience.
Aristotle’s treatises commonly begin with what everyone seems to agree on. And he is not afraid of appearing banal. “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit,” his
Ethics
begins, “is thought to aim at some good. . . .” “Every state is a community of some kind,” opens the
Politics,
“and every community is established with a view to some good.” Even the
Metaphysics
takes off from a commonplace: “All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses.” Aristotle sets out from the assumption “that what everyone believes is true. Whoever destroys this faith will hardly find a more credible one.” And he follows Hesiod (eighth century B.C.), the father of Greek didactic poetry, who said that “No word is ever lost that many peoples speak.”
Aristotle’s deference to common sense, the common opinion, would help give him the insight to his God and served him in other areas, too. The general experience made his
Nicomachean Ethics,
with its emphasis on the mean, seem eminently sensible. And he commonsensically insisted (against Plato) that the virtues are multiple, that they are fostered less by contemplation of some changeless Idea than by a “habit of choice.” And his
Politics,
too, as we have seen, rests on the common political experience of his time.
But Aristotle’s deference to the institutions of his own time also channeled and confined his social ideas and explains the obsolescence of some of his works in modern times. The conspicuous example is his view of slavery. Nowhere does he more clearly reveal his immersion in the customs of his age or his reluctance to defy what “everyone” believed. At the beginning of his
Politics,
he explains that the state is made up of households “and the first and fewest possible parts of a family are master and slave, husband and wife, father and children.” “He who is by nature not his own but another’s man, is by nature a slave; and he may be said to be another’s man who, being a human being, is also a possession.” He concedes that some deny such a natural distinction and insist “that the distinction between slave and freeman exists by law only, and not by nature; and being an interference with nature is therefore unjust.” He concedes, too, that slavery by mere right of conquest is unjust. The child of a “natural slave,” he says, may not always be a natural slave, and Greeks should not enslave Greeks. He argues, too, that master and slave share the same interests. The master should reason with his slave, and “it is expedient that liberty should be always held out to them as the reward of their services.”
So he aims to justify slavery as a reflection of the unity of nature. “For in all things which form a composite whole and which are made up of parts . . . a distinction between the ruling and the subject element comes to light. Such a duality exists in living creatures, but not in them only; it originates in the constitution of the universe.” Having freed himself from Platonic abstractions, he still has confined his thinking in forms of his (and his community’s) making. The broad empirical spirit that governed his comparison of alien constitutions somehow did not liberate him from the habits of his own household.
Starting from the wholesale—the gross common experience—Aristotle then proceeds to the retail, breaking down experience into many classes. As Aristotle is a master of the unities of experience, so he is a master—and a pioneer—in sensing the diversities and classifying experience into manageable parts. The
Metaphysics
begins by distinguishing man from the other animals, the
Ethics
by distinguishing the ends of different actions, the
Politics
by classifying the different communities and kinds of governments. The
Poetics,
starting from “the primary facts,” then distinguishes the different forms of imitation—Epic Poetry and Tragedy from Comedy and Dithyrambic Poetry. Different kinds of tragic plots are described and the kinds of characters defined. Whether or not the reader agrees with Aristotle, he has from the outset a feeling of grasp on the subject, its extent and varieties.
Aristotle’s bent for classifying would have a lasting, and also inhibiting, influence on biological thought for following centuries. He was so dominated by the reality and distinctiveness of every individual in nature that he gave currency and authority to the idea of species, the existing forms of nature. In a revised, empirical version of Plato’s forms or ideas, Aristotle saw the species in nature as fixed and unalterable, each reproducing after its kind. Then there could be no such thing as a new species. Thus the idea of original and unchanging species was his way of showing the constancy and uniformity of nature, and its constant, challenging variety.
Aristotle explained the intriguing
scala naturae
(ladder of nature) with a sophistication that engages the modern biologist:
Nature advances from the inanimate to animals with such unbroken continuity that there are borderline cases and intermediate forms of which one cannot say to which class they belong. First after the inanimate come plants. These differ from each other in the degree to which they appear to have life, and in comparison with other bodies appear animate but in comparison with animals inanimate. And the transition from them to animals . . . is continuous, there are creatures in the sea about which one might well be in doubt whether they are animals or plants. (
Historia Animalium
)
The medical tradition in his family and his interest in the specifics of experience made Aristotle an industrious and scrupulous observer of plants and animals and their parts and functions. What Aristotle’s “ladder of nature” lacked in order to become a theory of evolution was the dimension of time. If he had seen the ladder in time as well as in space he might have glimpsed the possibility of emerging and disappearing species. Perhaps he was discouraged from this by a notion inherited from Plato that Forms were permanent and preceded matter. And Aristotle’s obsession with the vivid and specific units in the cosmic order encouraged him to believe that the species had always existed and were indestructible. Every place in the ladder had been filled in nature and the loss of any species would leave an unnatural gap.
Aristotle’s God for a Changeful World
Only the simplest explanation can account for the uncanny commanding appeal of Aristotle’s works in the Western centuries. For he was a Seeker who had a wondrous capacity to see the contrary and contradictory features of experience without giving in to the temptation to philosophical oversimplification. Yet he was not afraid of seeming obvious. To attempt to summarize his work would be no more useful than to summarize an encyclopedia. We can only hope to capture his spirit. He believed in the unity and continuity of nature and at the same time in the primacy of the particular in human experience: “The observed facts show that nature is not a series of episodes, like a bad tragedy. As for believers in the Ideas, this difficulty misses them; for they construct spatial magnitudes out of matter and number” (
Metaphysics
).
Nature, to Aristotle, showed continual motion and change—“So, goodbye to the Forms. They are idle prattle, and if they do exist are wholly irrelevant.” No Platonic simplicities! For Plato sensible objects existed only as they were related to changeless intelligible objects. Not for Aristotle, for whom the particular sensible object—example of a species—was the only real existence. Thus the reality of musicians did not depend on some Idea called Music. The very existence of the abstraction depended on the individuals: “Musicianship cannot exist unless there are musicians.” Musicalness cannot exist unless there is some one who is musical.
Everywhere Aristotle saw purpose, and every species in nature was the fulfillment of a unique potentiality. And potentiality meant growth and motion within the limits of the species. His powers of observation, and even his teleology, led him to some insights. Charles Darwin, whose “two gods” were Linnaeus and Cuvier, found them “mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.” In the troubled field of embryology, the leading modern historian Joseph Needham finds “the depth of Aristotle’s insights into the generation of animals” unsurpassed by any later embryologist and never equaled. For teleology, Needham shrewdly observed, “is, like other varieties of common sense, useful from time to time.” Aristotle’s powers of observation and his talent at recording made him the giant of ancient biology. Neoplatonist philosophers criticized him for neglecting theology and paying too much attention to physical matters. But Aristotle preferred the insights of “those who have spent more time among physical phenomena.” They are “better able to posit the kind of principles which can hold together over a wide area,” while “those who through much abstract discussion have lost sight of the facts are more likely to dogmatize on the basis of few observations.”
It is surprising, in view of Aristotle’s commonsense preference for observation and not “losing sight of the facts,” that he spread himself across the whole world of experience and aspiration. But for Aristotle the meaning was hidden in the particulars of experience. The scope of his work was itself witness to his belief in the unity of experience and his confidence that it could somehow be encompassed by the human mind. And so he confirms his axiom that “the actuality of thought is life.” He divides all knowledge into practical, productive, or theoretical. And the theoretical sciences are three: Physics (the science of nature), Mathematics (the science of the quantitative aspect of things), and Theology (“first philosophy” or the science of being).
Another study, preliminary and basic to all the others, is Logic. Aristotle calls it Analytics. It is not itself a science but an essential tool to all the sciences. Analytics is a suggestive name for it, for it is devoted to analyzing the processes of thought. The need for this science is plain, since knowledge is of the universal. But the realities that need explaining are only of individuals, of which, strictly speaking, there can be no “knowledge.” How, then, make the leap from the specific experience to the general truth? Logic (for Aristotle, Analytics) was the science of that leap.
Aristotle pioneered in making the ways of expressing our thoughts into the subject of a science—which meant dealing with the forms of thought apart from subject matter. So Aristotle is commonly said to be the founder of logic. And his vocabulary and his framework for this science have dominated the West until the last century. The syllogism with its three parts (major premise, minor premise, conclusion) was Aristotle’s idea. For him it described the technique of drawing conclusions from premises, or deductive reasoning. His logic included not only the technique of drawing conclusions from premises (the formal syllogism), but also the science of demonstration (how to use reason to serve science) and “dialectic,” the technique of using reason to win a debate. His several treatises on logic came to be called the
Organon
(or Instrument), which he considered necessary for understanding any subject.
Some see Aristotle as a pioneer not only in philosophic self-consciousness but in historical self-consciousness. He was, according to Werner Jaeger, the first thinker to set up along with his own philosophy a conception of his own place in history. He presents his own ideas as coming from his criticism of Plato and others before him. So Jaeger would make him “the inventor of the notion of intellectual development in time.”
In the customary arrangement of the two-hundred-odd titles attributed to Aristotle in ancient catalogs, first come the treatises on logic, the
Organon,
followed by the physical treatises (
Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology
), the
Metaphysics, On Psychology (On the Soul),
short physical treatises (
On the Sensible, On Memory, On Sleep and Sleeplessness, On Dreams, On Prophesying, Longevity, Youth and Age
), biological treatises (
On the History and Parts of Animals, On the Motion, On the Gait, and On the Generation of Animals
),
Ethics, Politics, The Athenian Constitution, Rhetoric,
and
Poetics.
Of this staggering encyclopedic array of treatises none was without influence on Western thought, and several (for example, the
Organon,
the
Ethics,
the
Politics,
and
Poetics
) provided the dominant Western framework and vocabulary until recent times.
Aristotle’s overwhelming influence was due not only to the amazing inclusiveness of his surviving works but also to his emphasis. While Plato had first put him on the paths of philosophy, it was his reaction against Plato that gave him his distinctive appeal and explained how he suited the future of the West. Plato’s appeal had been the charm of the ideal, the enduring, and the changeless. But Aristotle’s interest in nature and experience led him to focus on a world of motion, change, and time. It was the changeful variety of nature that fascinated Aristotle the biologist. For Aristotle, then, there was no real world of the static. When he saw the chicken, he imagined its coming from the egg. When he saw an egg he imagined a chicken.
Nature for him was a realm of unfolding purposes. He repeatedly said that nature does nothing in vain. Which led him to his teleology, his emphasis on ends. The biologist in him also encouraged his search for purpose, which has never ceased to obsess biologists. Why is the plant or animal shaped as it is? Which means, for what purpose? The search for the rationale of living plants and animals, their generation and their motion, dominated his thinking about nature and led him, too, to the idea of potentiality, the power to become the fulfilled individual of the species—which awed and fascinated him.
This obsession with the changeful world of motion also drew him to the idea that gave him his potent role in Christian Europe. He, too, was unable to escape the yearning for changelessness in a world of change, which Plato had so elegantly embodied in his theory of forms. The concluding Book of his
Physics
aims to show that motion, like time, “always was and always will be”—“an immortal never-failing property of things that are, a sort of life as it were to all naturally constituted things.” Which set the stage for Aristotle’s God—the Unmoved Mover. This may have been as much a deference to common sense—the prevalent views of his community—as to logic or evidence. The Unmoved Mover was his name for the most divine being accessible to man. Since the activity of God was thought, it was also man’s highest faculty.
That which is capable of receiving the object of thought, is mind, and it is active when it possesses it. This activity therefore rather than the capability appears as the divine element in mind, and contemplation the pleasantest and best activity. If then God is for ever in that good state which we reach occasionally it is a wonderful thing—if in a better state, more wonderful still. Yet it is so. Life too he has, for the activity of the mind is life, and he is that activity. His essential activity is his life, the best life and eternal. We say then that God is an eternal living being, the best of all, attributing to him continuous and eternal life. That is God.
Even in describing the Unmoved Mover, Aristotle makes activity his ideal.