The Lagoon

by Armand Marie Leroi

  Perhaps, then, what marks the physiologoi as early scientists is not so much the use of naturalistic explanations for the mysteries that the world presents, as rational ones. They believed that wisdom did not merely have to be received, but that ideas were worth debating and, if need be, discarding. They argued with each other and those who came before them; they were ambitious for their ideas. Here is Heraclitus (fl. 500 BC) evaluating some of his predecessors: ‘great learning does not teach sense: for otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus’. Nasty – and unmistakably the sound of an intellectual at work.

  Most of the physiologoi weren’t much interested in biology. Empedocles (c. 492–432 BC) was an exception. A Sicilian of noble birth, he was an orator, poet, politician, healer and charismatic seer. In the opening lines of his religious poem Purifications, he presents himself as an immortal god and describes how, when he enters a city, thousands flock to him requesting cures and oracles – requests which he satisfied, on at least on one occasion, by raising the dead. Jesus with an ego, then, or Zarathustra with attitude, but he was also an immensely influential natural philosopher who wrote On Nature, several thousand lines of verse containing, among other things, a cosmogony, a zoogony, a mechanistic, if implausible, theory of respiration and a four-element chemistry that Aristotle would adopt as his own.

  Empedocles’ biology reflected the medical lore and practice of his day. So, too, did his appetite for magic and mysticism. Yet even as he pranced around Sicily performing miraculous cures to adoring crowds, on the other side of the Mediterranean Hippocrates (fl. 450 BC?) was going to school. In the plateia of Kos town there is a plane, ancient and gnarled, that is – so the label claims – the very tree under which the adult Hippocrates once sat dispensing cures and wisdom. It can’t be the same tree, but then the medical writings that are attributed to Hippocrates probably aren’t his either. Parts of the Corpus Hippocraticum, a medley of some sixty works, are old enough to have been written by him or his pupils, but others date from around the first century AD.

  Most of them are sober, professional texts that give naturalistic explanations for disease. Some are simple case studies, but others are more intellectually ambitious. The author of Fleshes says he wants to ‘explain how man and the other animals are formed, that is, come about, what the soul is, what health and sickness are, what is bad and good in man, and what causes death’. Profound or banal, they’re very different from Empedocles’ effusions. Here’s ‘Hippocrates’ on curing acute diseases:

  Often, in such cases, you will find ‘oxymel’, as a drink, extremely useful. It helps bring up sputum and promotes breathing. It is best employed under the following conditions. When strongly acidic, it is particularly effective in cases where there is difficulty in bringing up sputum. By lubricating the sputum, it facilitates expectoration thus clearing the windpipe as if with a feather. This is soothing to the lung and brings relief. And if, in combination, it achieves these effects, it must do much good.

  And here’s Empedocles’ approach:

  Any remedies there may be, defences against harm and age / you alone will know them; I will make sure you know them all. / You’ll put a stop to the winds, their tireless might pouncing / upon the land, their whirling breath, a withering force upon the crops. / Equally, if you so choose, you’ll bring on whirlings equally strong . . . / Even from Hades you will bring up men, men whose might has withered with time.

  Aristotle would call Empedocles’ style ‘lisping’.

  It may seem that all Aristotle needed to do to become a scientist was to broker a marriage between the questing, querulous physiologoi and the dourly empirical medics. Which is what he did. That he managed it, however, is a tribute to the power of his mind.

  VIII

  LITTLE ABOUT ARISTOTLE’S life is certain. The ancient sources, a dozen or so of them, were written centuries after his death and often contradict each other. Muddled in transmission, riddled with gossip and warped by the politics of rival philosophical schools, they have been churned over by centuries of scholars seeking the man behind the works. The results are meagre; the agreed facts could be written on a page.

  He was born in 384 BC in Stagira, a coastal town not far from modern Thessalonika. His father, Nicomachus, was an Asclepiad – part priest, part physician. No common quack, he was physician royal to Amyntas III of Macedon. This is less impressive than it sounds. Macedon was a semi-barbaric backwoods state with a court to match. At the age of seventeen Aristotle was sent to Plato’s Academy in Athens. He remained there, as student and teacher, for nearly twenty years.

  By the time the teenaged Aristotle arrived at Athens to sit at Plato’s feet, the tradition of natural philosophy, no more than two centuries old, was dead. Literally so: Democritus of Abdera, the last and greatest of the physiologoi, had died just a few years earlier. Years later, Aristotle would see in Democritus a formidable adversary, a foil against which to test the mettle of his own system. Democritus, Aristotle says, made advances. ‘But [even] at this time men gave up inquiring into nature, and philosophers diverted their attention to political science and to practical goodness.’ He was talking about Socrates.

  Socrates (469–399 BC) was a stonemason with a taste for speculative thought. As a young man, he loved natural philosophy. At least that is what Plato makes him say in The Phaedo. He puzzled over the origin of life, the physical basis of thought and the motions of the heavens. His efforts were for naught. He followed, or tried to follow, the arguments of the physiologoi, now this one, now that, but he only wound up confused. Did 1 + 1 = 2? By the time he was done, he could no longer say for sure. He was, he concluded, ‘uniquely unfitted for this sort of inquiry’. Besides, it seemed to him, the physiologoi never gave the right kind of answers – or even asked the right kind of questions. When they explained why the earth is flat or round or whatever shape they supposed it to be, they should have explained why it is best that it be so. But they never did. Instead, they appealed to ‘natures’ – and those are not true causal explanations at all. (‘Fancy being unable to distinguish between the cause of a thing and the condition without which it could not be a cause!’)

  Disillusioned by the physiologoi’s singular lack of interest in discussing why the universe was good, Socrates turned away from the study of the natural world. Xenophon picks up the tale:

  Unlike most others Socrates did not discuss the nature of the universe, and investigate the state of what intellectuals call the cosmos or the features necessary to bring celestial phenomena into existence. Instead he argued that those who speculated about such things were wasting their time. The first question he would ask was whether this sort of speculation was based on a conviction that they already had a thorough understanding of human affairs. Did they really think it was appropriate to focus their investigations on the divine at the expense of the human?

  The physiologoi, with their welter of mutually inconsistent theories, were like ‘madmen’. They were social parasites too:

  He raised a further point about these people. Those who study human affairs, he said, think that their subjects will be productive for themselves and other potential beneficiaries. Do those researching celestial phenomena really believe that discovering the features necessary for things to come into existence will allow them to produce, on demand, winds, waters, seasons and any others they might add to the list? Or do they, in fact, have no such expectation but are quite satisfied with discovering how things of this sort come about?

  Scientists disagree, therefore they are foolish; who are they to play God?; what good is their work to me? – all this is the authentic voice of anti-science through the ages; it is its first breath. Ethics are so much more useful. ‘Socrates called philosophy down from the heavens, placed it in cities, introduced it into families, and obliged it to examine into life and morals, good and evil.’ That was Cicero’s judgement – and he meant it as praise.

  IX

  SURROUNDED BY A wall
, the Academy had a gymnasium, a sacred olive grove and a garden. Its foundation stones can be seen in a Piraeus park, but the wire, wilting trees and litter make it hard to reconstruct the place. Plato, who had bought the property, founded his school there around 387 BC. Diogenes Laertius lists some of Plato’s pupils: Speusippus of Athens, Xenocrates of Chalcedon, Dion of Syracuse and a dozen more from around the Hellenic world including two women. It was less a modern college than a philosophical club. Students didn’t pay fees. That in itself made it a very different kind of enterprise from the schools run by the sophists and rhetoricians who were in the business of teaching Athens’ youths how to speak nicely, get ahead and win in court.

  When Aristotle arrived Plato himself was packing his bags for a two-year trip to Sicily. He probably left his nephew, Speusippus, in charge. Fortyish and famously bad-tempered, he is said to have thrown, in a fit of pique, his favourite dog down a well. Yet he may have taken the youngster under his wing; there are traces of his thought in Aristotle’s. Even so, if Plato’s dialogues, the doxography of the Academicians and Aristotle’s recollection are reliable guides to the scope of the talk in the Academy’s garden, then natural philosophy was off the curriculum. Or, if it was there at all, it was so in a peculiar form.

  Socrates’ interest in moral theology had become Plato’s. Of course, it is hard to separate the two since Socrates wrote nothing, Plato wrote much, and much that Plato wrote is voiced by ‘Socrates’. Yet while Plato’s Socrates is not as crudely anti-scientific as Xenophon’s, Plato’s mature philosophy is no less inimical to science than Socrates’ jibes; far more so because he wrote so beautifully and because his works have survived complete.

  The Republic, Plato’s most famous dialogue, gives his views on the aims and methods of natural philosophy. Glaucon and Socrates are discussing the education of Philosopher Kings. Should the young study astronomy? Yes, says Glaucon, it’s useful for all sorts of things: agriculture, navigation and war. Socrates gently disabuses him of this ‘vulgar’ utilitarianism. Well, then, replies Glaucon, perhaps they should study astronomy because it ‘compels the soul to look upwards’. This, he hopes, is the sort of answer that Socrates is looking for, but, once again, he is disabused. Glaucon is being much too literal-minded: the only study that turns the soul’s gaze upwards, says Socrates, is that which deals with ‘being and the invisible’ – by which he means the true reality that lies behind the superficial appearance of things. Studying the stars, he continues, help us to do this, but not very much. The actual movements of the stars are only an imperfect representation of the invisible realities; you might as well search for geometrical figures in a picture. And these realities can ‘be apprehended only by reason and thought, but not by sight, or [Glaucon] do you think otherwise?’

  Glaucon doesn’t think otherwise. He capitulates entirely to Socrates’ – Plato’s – anti-empiricism. And, a few pages later, when the talk turns to the study of harmony, the two men join in jeering at those physiologoi ‘who vex and torture the strings’ of their instruments, ‘laying their ears alongside, as if trying to catch a voice from next door’ in an effort to understand the rules of harmony and the limits of musical perception. These ‘worthies’ (the musical physiologoi) ‘do not ascend to generalized problems and do not consider which numbers are inherently concordant and which not and why in each case’.* They fiddle about with harps when they should be working out a general, formal theory for the musical order that they dimly perceive; a theory that would account for the beautiful and the good that we hear in music; a theory that would unify the harmonies of music with the movement of the stars. ‘A superhuman task’, comments Glaucon – which may seem to us an understatement.

  Plato should have left it there. Had he done so then we could at least credit him with becoming modesty. He didn’t. Late in life he wrote a work that purports to describe and explain the natural world – all of it. For all its ambition, it is a quarter as long as The Republic. The brevity is telling.

  X

  PLATO’s TIMAEUS RECOUNTS the creation of the cosmos and all that it contains: time, the elements, the planets and stars, humans and animals. Although short, it aspires to be encyclopaedic, covering ontology, astronomy, chemistry, sensory physiology, psychiatry, pleasure, pain, human anatomy and physiology – with an aside on why the liver is the source of prophecies – and the origin of disease and sexual desire. All this makes it look like a work of natural philosophy.

  If so, then it is a very strange one. Devoid of scholarly citation, empirical evidence or even much reasoned argument, The Timaeus is a drawing-room monologue that delivers, with bland assurance, one implausible assertion after another. Deeply religious, it aims to reveal why a divine workman, the Dēmiourgos, constructed the world. It is also a work of political propaganda that shows what the ideal city of The Republic would actually look like. Indeed, it’s not even clear that Plato intended The Timaeus as a contribution to natural philosophy. He claims to want to give an account of the visible world; however, he begins by cautioning us that he will deliver only an eikōs mythos – a plausible tale. In part this is because he’s really after an account of the world that lies beyond the senses; and any account of this flawed, but visible, world will bear an uncertain correspondence to that perfect, but invisible, one. But it is also because he’s not terribly interested in giving a rational account of even this world.

  Plato gives the game away with his account of the origin of the animals. Once, he says, there existed men who were to varying degrees depraved or just foolish. They were transformed into the various animals – creepy-crawlies, shellfish and the like – according to their diverse vices. Birds ‘sprang by a change of form from the harmless but light-witted men who paid attention to the things in heaven but in their simplicity supposed that the surest evidence in these matters is that of the eye’. He’s talking about astronomers.

  Did Plato really believe that birds were reincarnated natural philosophers? Or did he simply seize the chance to crack a poor joke? Let us be charitable and assume the latter, for the former is too bizarre even by the elastic standards of fourth-century zoology. But that joke betrays the true nature of The Timaeus: it is not a work of natural philosophy at all, but a poem, a myth, a ponderous jeu d’esprit that revels in its own ambiguity.

  The assessment may seem harsh. Plato shared the Pythagoreans’ fascination with geometry, and The Timaeus contains one of the first attempts to use mathematics to describe the natural world. ‘Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here’ is said to have been inscribed on the lintel of the Academy’s entrance; the same phrase is written above the swipecard-sealed doors of any Department of Physics, even if you can’t see it. Then, too, if Plato’s science is barely distinguishable from theology so, to judge by the pronouncements of some physicists, is modern science: ‘If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.’ Plato? No, Hawking.

  The comparison doesn’t save Plato. Here is an example of his style of mathematical modelling: ‘The second species of solid is formed out of the same triangles, which unite as eight equilateral triangles and form one solid angle out of four plane angles, and out of six such angles the second body is completed. And the third body is made up of one hundred and twenty triangular elements, forming . . . [etc.]’ That’s a passage about the elements, one written by a man evidently deeply in thrall to the mystery of Number.

  Nor may we simply excuse Plato as being the product of his age. To be sure, the physiologoi also had a taste for grand theorizing free of the constraints of empirical evidence. But they, at least, meant what they said. They do not snigger or dodge behind the shelter of myth. Moreover, just a few years after Plato had composed The Timaeus, one of his own students would commence a relentless, reasoned assault on the citadel of reality, this reality, that in modern print runs to more than a thousand pages: an exhaustive, not to say exhausting, analysis of what his predecessors thought about th
e causes and structure of the natural world, why those predecessors (more often than not) are wrong, what he thinks they are and the empirical evidence for thinking so. Aristotle would turn his back on his teacher’s idealism and see the world, our world, for what it is: a thing that is beautiful and so worth studying in its own right. He would approach it with the humility and seriousness that it deserves. He would observe it with care and be unafraid to dirty his hands doing so. He would become the first true scientist. That he made of himself this after having been taught by one of the most persuasive intellects of all time – that is the mystery of Aristotle. All he ever said by way of explanation is: ‘piety requires us to honour truth above our friends’.

  XI

  IN 348 OR 347 BC Aristotle suddenly left Athens. There are at least two accounts that attempt to explain why.

  In the first he leaves out of pique. For twenty years he’s worked in Plato’s Academy. His colleagues call him ‘The Reader’, but he’s original too. Perhaps too original. Plato, with a hint of asperity, called him ‘The Foal’ – he meant that Aristotle kicked his teachers as a foal kicks its dam. Aelian, writing centuries later, tells a story that isn’t particularly to Aristotle’s credit and hints of power-struggles at the Academy. One day the elderly Plato, doddery and no longer that sharp, is wandering in the Academy’s gardens when he comes across Aristotle and his gang who give him a philosophical mugging. Plato retreats indoors and Aristotle’s posse occupies the garden for months. Speusippus is useless against the usurpers, but Xenocrates, another loyalist, finally gets them to move on. Who knows if this is true; but it is certain that when Plato died the top job didn’t go to Aristotle but rather to Speusippus and that, coincidentally or not, this is when Aristotle heads east.