Aristotle was to stay with Plato for twenty years, although virtually nothing of this period survives in his work. It is assumed that he absorbed many of the Platonic ideals, and he never lost the belief that rational thought was the supreme intellectual activity. However, his mind was too vigorous and wide-ranging ever to be confined to mere discipleship. His instincts were different from Plato’s. While Plato was always concerned with what could be discovered beyond physical reality, Aristotle was fascinated by what could actually be seen in the real world, especially what could be learnt from observation. Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens (ad 1510-11) in the Vatican shows the contrast well. Plato is depicted looking heavenwards, Aristotle with his eyes towards the ground.
While Plato’s works are engaging and easy to read and the issues are easily grasped, Aristotle’s are more complex. They may have originated as lecture notes and these were preserved in a library in Athens that was then taken to Rome as loot in the 80s Bc. Here a Greek philosopher from Rhodes, Andronicus, brought them together, edited them, and the result was the forty major works that survive today. Andronicus placed the treatise on the major problems of existence after, Greek meta, the volume of physics and so we still use the term ‘metaphysics’ today. Yet Aristotle always needed further explanatory commentaries, some of these, especially those of the Arab world, major works of philosophy in their own right.
Aristotle left Athens in 347, possibly after he had become dissatisfied with the teachings of the Platonic school. He spent some years teaching and researching along the Ionian coast before being summoned back by Philip of Macedon to tutor Philip’s 13-year-old son, Alexander. The relationship between two of the most formidable men of the fourth century seems to have left no lasting impact on either of them. After three years Aristotle returned to his native town, Stageira, and from there, in 335, he returned to Athens. Here he founded his own school, the Lyceum. It can be seen as the world’s first research institute, and the range and quality of its scientific work was only to be challenged in the ancient world by the schools of Alexandria. In 323 another outburst of anti-Macedonian feeling on the death of Alexander forced Aristotle out of Athens to Euboea, and here he died in 322, aged 62.
The range of Aristotle’s work is extraordinary. While he is remembered above all for his contribution to logic and his founding of zoology as a discipline, his surviving texts cover almost every aspect of knowledge. There are works on language, the arts, ethics, politics, and law. In the sciences he wrote on zoology, biology, astronomy, chemistry, and physics. He grappled with the major philosophical problems of change and causation, time, space, and continuity. In addition to his system of logic, he ranged over metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. He clarified and defined different areas of knowledge, separating the theoretical such as mathematics and metaphysics, whose main purpose was to find truth, from the practical, ethics and politics, and the productive, those concerned with making things.
One of Aristotle’s most attractive qualities was that he saw himself as part of a continuing intellectual tradition. When dealing with a particular issue he first brought together all previous contributions on the subject (this is why so much of the ideas of the pre-Socratics has survived) and concentrated on the problems they left unsolved. In contrast to Plato he did not try to fit solutions into some general preconceived framework but worried away at them as he found them, never assuming there were easy answers. (In his Aristotelian Explorations, chapter 3, ‘Fuzzy Natures’, Geoffrey Lloyd shows the ingenuity and open-mindedness Aristotle brought to such problems as finding a distinction between plants and animals when presented with sponges, jellyfish, sea anemones, and razor shells!) He also appears to be more sympathetic to public opinion. As a result there is often something provisional and speculative about his surviving works which makes them harder to read and understand than Plato’s.
Reasoning had been an essential part of early Greek philosophy. In the hands of Parmenides and Plato it had been elevated to the supreme way of finding the truth. However, there had been no systematic thought on what makes a valid argument and, without this, progress in mathematics and science in particular would always be restricted. It was one of Aristotle’s greatest achievements that he penetrated the problem and produced a system of logic that was to last unchallenged for almost 2,000 years. Its beauty and its authority lay in its simplicity.
First, Aristotle argued that the foundations of knowledge depend on propositions, statements on which all can agree. A proposition is made up of a subject, say ‘cats, and a predicate that says something about the subject, say ‘four feet’. The proposition then reads ‘Cats have four feet’. There are other possibilities: ‘No cats have five feet, ‘Some cats are black, ‘Some cats are not black’. Aristotle argued that almost every statement can be broken down into simple propositions such as this. (Later philosophers have found this too simplistic an approach.)
Once these propositions have been sorted out, they can be generalized by replacing the subject and predicate by letters: ‘All As are B’ or ‘Some Cs are D, for instance. These propositions can then be used in a wide variety of situations, whichever the philosopher wants to work with. The next step, taken in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, is to examine how propositions can be used as the basis for deductions. One has to start with two propositions. Take ‘A is a B’ and ‘All Bs are C. It follows logically that A is a C. (To put in an actual example: ‘Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Thus Socrates is mortal.’) This is an example of what Aristotle called a syllogism. ‘A sullogismus, he wrote, ‘is an argument in which certain things being assumed, something different from the things assumed follows from necessity by the fact that they hold.’ In the Prior Analytics Aristotle went on to look at the instances where logical deductions cannot be made. (‘A cat has four feet. A dog has four feet. Therefore a dog is a cat’ does not follow logically, for instance, and the student in elementary logic has to sort out why.)
Aristotle’s contributions in zoology were also to last over 2,000 years. Most of the fieldwork for his Zoological Researches was done while he was in Asia. It was a momentous work, bringing together observations of animals as varied as hyenas, elephants, sheep, and mice. Close examination was supplemented by dissection. When Aristotle wanted to understand the evolution of a chick embryo, he found a hen’s clutch and then removed an egg each day, comparing the difference in the development of each. Sometimes Aristotle made mistakes, at other times he relied on inaccurate hearsay, but as a total enterprise the Researches is formidable. It remains, however, a compilation of material. Aristotle never created his own experiments to further his understanding of animals. He believed that the essence of an animal could only be grasped if it were seen in its natural habitat.
Aristotle was, in fact, primarily an empiricist. He liked collecting and interpreting facts about the physical world as it existed and could be seen around him. He asked what could actually be said about a physical object. Taking a chair, for instance, what exactly is it? Aristotle said that a proper analysis would not only consider what it was made of (wood, perhaps) and what particular shape it had to take to be classified as a chair, but who made it and what its purpose was. He distinguished between the essential attributes of a chair (without which it could not be a chair) and incidental qualities such as the colour it was painted. Here again he broke with Plato. Suppose the chair was painted white. For Plato whiteness might be a Form, existing eternally. Aristotle took a more down-to-earth view. Whiteness was a quality of a particular chair and it did not exist as something independent of that chair. It depended on the chair for its being. (Similarly the soul was an intrinsic part of the human being, as embedded in it as the impression a stamp has made on a piece of wax. This was in contrast to Plato’s view that the soul was like a sailor on a ship; they worked together but one could be withdrawn from the other without the essence of either being destroyed.)
As this example suggests, Aristotle always went beyond mere observation. He does not just describe a chair, he is interested in the philosophical problems surrounding it in its existence as a chair. How, for instance, could a chair change into something else and what is the process involved? Is the capacity for change inherent in an object or does it need some outside force to initiate it? What is the cause of the chair being a chair? When looking at living animals he was fascinated by the problem of why they had the physical attributes they did. Why does a duck have webbed feet? Aristotle argued that it was because it had a role, that of being a duck, and the webbed feet were essential to fulfilling this role. The most important attribute of a human being was his ability to think rationally and so the highest state of being human was to develop this faculty to its fullest extent. Aristotle seems to be suggesting that there is an underlying purpose to nature, that of the self-fulfilment of every living being through the correct use of the attributes it possesses, eudaimonia.
It was inevitable that Aristotle would have a great deal to say about the particular nature of man and his role on earth, and he made important studies both in ethics and politics. As has been suggested above, Aristotle saw the development of reason as the supreme goal of human existence. However, unlike Plato, Aristotle never establishes precisely how reason is to be used. In some way it was associated with the achievement of moral excellence, but in his Ethics Aristotle argues that goodness cannot be achieved through reason alone. Rather a person becomes good by the disposition of goodness being trained into him as a child. Once this disposition has been gained and a person grows up orientated towards doing good, then the everyday doing of good depends on circumstances around him. Here reasoning appears to play a part in establishing the situations in which good actions are appropriate. The end result is a character that achieves goodness within a rationally integrated framework of ethical behaviour. The highest state that all human beings should aim for is eudaimonia, based on exercising one’s reasoning to its fullest extent in the pursuit of moral excellence.
It is not enough for each individual to take on the search alone. ‘Man, said Aristotle, in one of his more famous statements, ‘is a social animal’ (or ‘political animal’ as the phrase is often translated). One aspect of eudaimonia lies in living in harmony with those around one. Aristotle the empiricist was well aware of the political problems of the Greek city-states. He compiled an account, now lost, of 158 different constitutions, for instance. Insofar as he favoured one form of government it was democracy, but only in the restricted sense of government being open on equal terms to those with wealth and property. Aristotle shared the traditional contempt of the Greek for manual labour and trade, and those who indulged in them would have no part to play in government. He had no interest in the rights of women and defended slavery (see the quotation on p. 228). The goal was to establish eudaimo-nia for the city and this was to be achieved through the power of the state with a particular focus on the education of the young. ‘We should not think’, writes
Aristotle, ‘that each of the citizens belongs to himself, rather that they all belong to the State, and again, in the Politics, ‘whatever the majority [of the participating citizens] decides is final and constitutes justice. There is no room here for human rights in the modern sense of the term.
As Aristotle’s views on women and slaves show, he was in many ways a creature of his time. His views were conventional in other ways. He followed Empedocles in believing that the physical world was made up of four elements, fire, water, earth, and air, something he could never have established if he had relied on his own observations. (Aristotle did, however, modify Empedocles’ views by suggesting that each element was affected by opposites of hot and cold and dry and wet contained within it.) He adopted the conventional view that the earth was the centre of the universe. As Geoffrey Lloyd has argued, he often started with a hypothesis and then shaped observations to prove it. Aristotle was not a truly original thinker in the sense of digging down to bedrock and building from there. However, the scale of his work was prodigious. He initiated the first enquiry into the natural sciences that ranged over the whole spectrum of the physical world. Even when he did not provide clear answers he was never afraid to pose the key questions about the existence and purpose of matter.
Aristotle’s approach to empirical observation bore fruit in other thinkers, notably Theophrastus, his successor as head of the Lyceum, who was ready to question even his teacher’s findings. Theophrastus is known for his Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants that were so extensive and searching—they include the first system of classifying plants—that they have earned Theophrastus the title of ‘father of botany’. In the same tradition, the Cilician Dioscorides (active in the first century ad) accumulated a vast amount of material on the effects of plants on varied illnesses. De Materia Medica, in its Latin translation, survived as a medical handbook through the Middle Ages and its cures were only challenged for the first time in the sixteenth century. Even then Theophrastus and Dioscorides were lauded as the founders of natural history and are found gracing the frontispieces of many a herbal.
Despite these developments, Aristotle’s influence as an individual was, at first, surprisingly limited and he does not feature strongly among the Hellenistic philosophers even though many of these, such as Dioscorides, were following approaches he had pioneered. By late antiquity, Plato’s more abstract philosophy fitted better with the times and the Christian leaders criticized Aristotle for his focus on the natural world at the expense of the eternal one in the heavens. It was the Arabs who rediscovered him and responded to his genius and through their translations he passed into the west. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries his scientific work dominated medieval Europe, largely through the translations of his works into Latin from the Arabic and their championing within the Roman Catholic tradition by Thomas Aquinas (see further below, p. 674).
By 330 Bc, therefore, the Greeks had undertaken a revolution in ways of thinking. It is still easy to underestimate the revolutionary nature of what they had done. In his The Unnatural Nature of Science (London, 1992; Cambridge, Mass., 1994), Lewis
Wolpert has convincingly argued that there is nothing obvious about looking at the world in a scientific way. All the incentives are to try and make the world work on a day-to-day basis without speculating on its wider nature. It required a particularly combative form of mind to break through the limits of conventional thinking. Whether born in the law courts, the assemblies, or elsewhere, this is what the Greeks provided.
It is sometimes argued that the Greeks introduced rational ways of thinking which deadened the natural senses, depriving human beings of access to their emotions. This chapter has shown that in Athens at least this was not so. Plato may have insisted on the importance of reason, but in the same period the playwright Euripides was exploring the forces of unreason in his play The Bacchae. The achievements of the Greeks lay in making brilliant contributions to the understanding of both the rational and irrational aspects of human consciousness. (The Greeks themselves distinguished logoi (singular logos), rational accounts written in prose, from mythoi, stories, myths, and legends which were not intended to express rational truth and which were normally expressed in verse.) It is doubtful whether these breakthroughs could have taken place in a city that did not enjoy the combative and competitive atmosphere of fifth - and fourth-century Athens.
The western intellectual tradition could be said to be founded on the dual legacy of Plato and Aristotle. As Richard Tarnas puts it in his The Passion of the Western Mind (New York, 1991; London, 1996):
The constant interplay of these two partly complementary and partly antithetical sets of principles [Platonism and Aristotelianism] established a profound inner tension within the Greek inheritance, which provided the Western mind with the intellectual basis, at once unstable and highly creative, for what was to become an extremely dynamic evolution lasting over two and a half millennia. The secular scepticism of the one stream and the metaphysical idealism of the other provided a crucial counterbalance to each other, each undermining the other’s tendency to crystallise into dogmatism, yet the two in combination eliciting new and fertile intellectual possibilities.
Rhetoric
Homer’s heroes not only had to fight well, they had to speak well. It was the mark of the leader that he could persuade his followers to fight for him but, as Homer’s own epics show, the art of the spoken word with its capacity not only to motivate but to entertain and enthuse ran deep in Greek society. Rhetoric, the art of public speaking, was intrinsic to Greek and, later, Roman political and intellectual life.
As the Greek city-states established their own assemblies new contexts for public speaking emerged. There were not only the political debates (the setting for the deliberative speech): as has been seen the law courts offered the chance for political struggles to be played out through charging and defending individuals for assumed crimes against the state. This was the forensic speech recognized as a different genre from the deliberative. Here there were juries to persuade. Then there were the more formal speeches—the most famous of which is Pericles’ Funeral Speech in Athens in 431-430 (as re-created by Thucydides) in which he expounds the greatness of Athens (see earlier, p. 268). In the city festivals there are competitive speeches, some of them involving the recitation of set texts such as Homer’s epics. In his exhaustive studies of the origins of Greek science, Geoffrey Lloyd sees the struggle between speakers to persuade as fostering the growth of rational argument (earlier p. 193). Plato made the point that a written text could not answer back; an active debate using the interplay of the spoken word is more productive.
It is clear that even in democratic Athens, ‘aristocrats’ such as Pericles could still use their status as a means of getting heard, but increasingly speaking could be seen as a skill to be learned. It was the Sicilian orator Gorgias, who arrived in Athens in 327 to plead the case of his native city Leontini, who showed the Athenians how an audience could be manipulated. ‘Give me a theme’, he called as he entered the theatre, and then would argue whatever case was suggested to him. He understood how the spoken word had an emotional power beyond its meaning and could be exploited to this end. As he put it in the speech he made on Helen of Troy: ‘The power of a speech has the same relationship to the order of the soul as the order of drugs had to the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs expel different humours from the body and some put a stop to illness, others to life, so too some speeches cause pain, some pleasure, some fear, some induce confidence in the listeners, some drug and bewitch the soul with a certain bad persuasion.’ This, however, was the problem. As the debates in the Athenian assembly over the treatment of Mytilene (427) or the generals accused of letting sailors drown after a battle (406) showed, assemblies were susceptible to emotional manipulation by ‘skilled’ or unscrupulous speakers. In his play The Clouds, Aristophanes sets up a debate between ‘Just Speech’ and ‘Unjust Speech’ in which the latter triumphs through verbal trickery.
So while rhetoric became, and remained for centuries, one of the most important parts of the curriculum, the Greeks recognized that it presented moral and philosophical challenges. In his description of the Mytilene Debate in his The Peloponnesian War, the historian Thucydides uses a speech by one Diodotus to stress the importance of thoughtful speaking:
Haste and anger are, to my mind, the two greatest obstacles to wise counsel—haste, that usually goes with folly, anger, that is the mark of primitive and narrow minds. And anyone who maintains that words cannot be a guide to action must be either a fool or one with some personal interest at stake: he is a fool if he imagines that it is possible to deal with the uncertainties of the future by any other medium, and he is personally interested if his aim is to persuade you into some disgraceful action, and knowing that he cannot make a good speech in a bad cause, he tries to frighten his opponents and his hearers by some good-sized pieces of misrepresentation. . . the good citizen, instead of trying to terrify the opposition, ought to prove his case in fair argument; and a wise state, without giving special honours to its best counsellors, will certainly not deprive them of the honour they already enjoy; and when a man’s advice is not taken, he should not even be disgraced, far less penalised. (Translation: Rex Warner)
The most influential teacher of the early fourth century, Isocrates, stressed the importance of a speaker’s moral integrity. The speaker has a duty not only to develop his own character, so that he has the respect of his audience, but an understanding of the issues that he talks about:
One who wishes to persuade others will not be negligent of his own virtue but will pay special attention to it that he may get the finest reputation among his fellow citizens. Who does not know that words seem more true when spoken by those who lead good lives than by those whose lives have been criticised and that proofs based on a person’s life have greater power than those provided by speech? The stronger a person desires to persuade hearers, the more he will
Work to be honourable and good and to have a good reputation among the citizens____Oratory
Is good only if it has the quality of fitness for the occasion, propriety of style and innovative treatment.
So rhetoric is not only a practical skill, it is the expression of the educated mind at its best. This was not enough for Isocrates’ contemporary Plato. In his dialogue Gorgias, in which, not surprisingly, Gorgias is resurrected to play a key role, rhetoric is denounced as a mere knack, in which truth is manipulated through the emotional force of oratory. It was left to Aristotle to produce what became the most famous work on the subject, Rhetoric. Aristotle was an orator himself so he is able to provide practical hints but he is more interested in the specific way in which rhetoric acts to persuade. ‘There are three kinds of persuasive means furnished by the logos, those in the character of the speaker, those in how the speaker is disposed, and those in the logos itself, through its demonstrating or seeming to demonstrate.’ One must not only learn how to speak, but reflect on what it means to speak well.
As regards style, it is the speaker’s duty to be clear, fitting to the occasion and not over ornate.
Rhetoric is, inevitably, shaped by the contexts in which it is needed and Athens provided the stimulus for some of the greatest orators of all time, among them Demosthenes, whose career will be outlined later. Demosthenes, however, provides a reminder of just how difficult a practical art effective rhetoric was. His early attempts at public speaking ended in humiliation and he had to train himself through placing pebbles in his mouth to achieve his clear diction. Yet rhetoric could persuade and inspire. At the end of his long life Isocrates himself was credited, in a speech addressed to Philip of Macedon, with providing the inspiration for the spread of Greek culture as a civilizing force for Asia.
If democracies need persuasive speakers, monarchies foster the formal panegyric, the speech of welcome or praise to a ruler that often takes a highly ritualized form. These emerge in the Hellenistic period. In republican Rome, on the other hand, there was once again an electorate to be swayed or, in the law courts, a jury to be convinced. Cicero was the master of Roman rhetoric, the first Roman to achieve political office on his skills as an orator rather than as a soldier. His Philippics (44-43 Bc) are the last great set of deliberative speeches before the coming of the empire eclipses political oratory.
This does not mean that the skill of public speaking disappears. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek living in Rome in the second half of the first century Bc, revived the memory of the great orators of the fourth century especially Isocrates and Demosthenes and lamented the decay that had taken place since then. Rhetoric became a standard part of traditional education and its continuing value was the theme of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (c. ad 95), a work which maintained its influence not only in the Roman empire but when classical learning was revived during the Renaissance. By the second century ad, rhetoric reappears among the Greeks as part of the revival of their traditional cultural skills, but also with the specific aim of representing cities before the emperor in the hope of gaining his patronage. (For this Second Sophistic see below, p. 543.) One of the most influential teachers from a later period was Menander of Laodicea (possibly the beginning of the fourth century) who laid out the conventions for a wide variety of speeches, including the correct way to address a city or an emperor (the panegyric). Yet another context was the sermon, which, in the mouths of a master such as Ambrose of Milan or John Chrysostom in the late fourth century, became a major tool in the creation of a Christian society. Augustine himself, it is often forgotten, was the city orator in Milan before his conversion. (See further Erik Gunderson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric, Cambridge and New York, 2009 and George Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric, Princeton and London, 1994.)
World History
