Early Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Chapter Three Early Aristotle (384-322 BC) Aristotle's life was beset with both opportunity and improbability. He was born in Stagira, Macedon, the son of Nicomachus, the court physician of Macedonia's King Amyntus III, who was also the grandfather of Alexander the Great. Alexander later became Aristotle's student and still later, his pa- tron. Aristotle traveled to Athens at the age of seventeen to study in Plato's Academy, and he seems to have become Plato's favorite and most productive disciple, having authored a variety of texts and dialogues more or less sup- portive of Plato's philosophy. It seems Aristotle left Plato's Academy shortly before Plato's death in 348-47 BC, possibly because of growing theoretical differences as perhaps illustrated for example, by Plato's insistence in Laws X that elderly atheists be executed despite Socrates' ordeal on similar charges. After Plato's death Aristotle seems to have returned to Athens to compete for the vacant leadership of the Academy, only to find that Plato's nephew Speusippus, had already been selected to serve as its director. Aristo- tle then severed ties with the Academy and left Athens accompanied by Theophrastus, a fellow student who became his principal disciple for the rest of his life, as later suggested by his final will in which Theophrastus was included along with Aristotle's own family. Aristotle next taught at Assos, where he enjoyed a close friendship with its dictator, Hermias and his adoptive daughter, Pythias, whom Aristotle married. Within the next year or so he was summoned to Mitylene by King Phillip to tutor his son, Alexander the Great, and he served in this capacity for two years before Alexander became regent of Macedonia during Phillip's military campaign abroad. Aristotle's ties with Alexander remained amicable during Alexander's Asian conquests despite Alexander's execution of Aris- totle's nephew Callisthenes for insubordination. On friendly terms with both Alexander and Antipater, Alexander's regent in Greece, Aristotle returned to 63 64 Chapter 3 Athens in 335 BC after an absence of twelve years. Unable to join Plato's Academy despite Speusippus's recent death, he established his own school, the Lyceum, and remained there for the next thirteen years as a scholar and teacher, both gathering a large assortment of scientific data and teaching his students as they strolled among the colonnades (perapitos-hence the use of the word "peripatetic" to describe his teachings). This was the most productive phase in his life. With the help of his disciples, he was estimated to have authored as many as four hundred texts, which would roughly be equivalent to long chapters in a modem book. Among the 150 to 200 texts that can be identified by their titles, not more than thirty or so can be definitively traced to Aristotle's authorship. Some scholars have estimated that he could reliably be identified as the sole author of only four of these texts and that most of the rest were recorded or partially authored by his disciples. However, his unique style that combined precision and complexity seems the same throughout most of them, suggesting that Aristotle's authorship was for the most part his own. A million words of text can be attributed to him, compared to Plato's output of 600,000 words. Unlike Plato, Aristotle more readily took into account alternate possibilities suggested by others, and his analysis displayed this skill in a variety of fields. Whereas Plato could expatiate at length in response to relatively short ques- tions posed by his disciples, Aristotle put effort into summarizing credible analysis by others before launching into his own more conclusive findings in such fields as physics, biology, aesthetics, metaphysics, rhetoric, govern- ment, politics, and, not least, deductive logic. He formalized ethics based on the so-called Golden Mean as the pursuit of moderation relevant to all as- pects of human behavior. Similarly, his Politics suggested appropriate roles in society, and his Poetics identified the impact of catharsis--i.e. emotional gratification--as the most essential aspect of literary achievement. Altogether he played an essential role in establishing all these fields of inquiry and at advanced levels. Aristotle's intention was the full elucidation of complex issues rather than inspirational effect, but his effort turned out to be successful on both ac- counts. His methodology alone was a valuable contribution in encouraging the sustained pursuit of a "smaller and finite number of principles" as ex- plained many centuries later by Ockham's famous "razor"--which was also effectively Aristotelian--that the simplest adequate explanation is finally the most likely. Aristotle offered exactly this justification, for example, in De Caelo (On the Heavens), "Obviously then it would be better to assume a finite number of principles. They should in fact be as few as possible, consis- tent with proving what has to be proved." 1 In other words, final analysis should be both sufficient and appropriate to the theoretical issues under con- sideration. Notably, with regard to cosmology his unified explanation of the universe turned out to consist of a basic theory of "mass in sustained mo- Early Aristotle (384-322 BC) 65 tion"-effectively combining two of the three ingredients in Einstein's famous equation. This reductive skill of Aristotle was important to the ad- vancement of both science and philosophy. As for Aristotle's secular perspective, a major difficulty is that much of his analysis was in conflict with one or more orthodoxies, and censorship too often became a factor either through the destruction of texts or through their textual modification. The outright eradication of ancient secular texts was commonplace throughout ancient and medieval history, and today's almost total absence of extant writings by Strato, Theophrastus, and Clitomachus suggests a similar fate, as does the absence of Democritus' theory of atom- ism, including Aristotle's single essay on Democritus. To avoid censorship and the possibility of prosecution by the citizens of Athens, Aristotle reserved the full examination of his theories for his students and disciples, while his less offensive writings were made available to the public. Plutarch records a letter to Aristotle from Alexander the Great that obviously refers to this distinction: Alexander to Aristotle greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine [i.e. information exclusively for the benefit of students]; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been particularly instructed to be laid open to all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell. 2 Here Alexander asserted his presumed right as an ex-student to have access to Aristotle's theories that were to be kept unavailable to the public at large. By publishing his ideas, Aristotle had disregarded this supposed con- vention. Alexander's complaint discloses the distinction at the time between "exoteric" public knowledge and "esoteric" oral doctrine or "knowledge of what is excellent," the latter reserved for colleagues and disciples as opposed to fellow citizens at large. 3 The right to examine this information was re- stricted to these privileged individuals, and whatever was later preserved was recorded only in the so-called "acroamatic" transcripts in the possession of Aristotle himself. Quite by accident it was the strictly esoteric texts that became available for publication many centuries later. The texts available to the public at large at the time have all been lost, whereas those kept confiden- tial were later salvaged and continue to exist today. Arguably, Aristotle's grand theoretical synthesis was the most remarkable achievement of ancient Greek philosophy. While Plato's unified concept of transcendent mind, as earlier suggested by Anaxagoras, provided a substan- tial philosophical advance upon the scattered assortment of theories by pre- Socratic natural philosophers, Aristotle provided a more challenging theoretical perspective that effectively reformulated these theories on a more defen- sible basis. By doing so he paradoxically laid the groundwork for both relig- 66 Chapter 3 ious orthodoxy and the many fields of scientific inquiry taken for granted today. His encyclopedic achievements included the invention of both biology and deductive logic as independent disciplines, and his later theoretical con- tributions anticipated Ockham's Razor, Bacon's induction, Spinoza's panthe- ism, Locke's behavioral psychology, Hegel's negative dialectics, Darwin's evolutionism, Dewey's functionalism, and, not least, modem psychology. I. COMPARISON WITH PLATO Whereas Plato can be credited with having invented modem idealism, Aris- totle's inductive analysis effectively set the stage for the secular achievement of the Renaissance almost twenty centuries later. As opposed to Plato's invention of "ideal forms" within a spiritual universe, Aristotle employed empirical analysis applied to the physical universe. His dialectical confrontation with Plato had been anticipated by the earlier standoff between Anaxagoras' theory of soul and the various concepts of materialism advanced by pre- Socratic natural philosophers culminating with Democritus. In the beginning Aristotle served as a loyal advocate of Plato's spiritual teleology, but he later pursued a materialist alternative with an emphasis on the "intrinsic order of nature" as confirmed by empirical evidence. This choice can be illustrated by his explanation in Generation ofAnimals on the study of bees: Such appears to be the truth about the generation of bees, judging from theory and from what are believed to be the facts about them; the facts, however, have not yet been sufficiently grasped; if ever they are, then credit must be given rather to observation than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with the observed facts.

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