KOSMOS
PINNOPHYLAX & PINNA – FAN MUSSEL CRAB & FAN MUSSEL – NEPINNOTHERES PINNOTHERES & PINNA NOBILIS
XCVII
WHEN ARISTOTLE SPEAKS of ‘perfection’, it’s often easy to understand him in simple zoological terms. More ‘perfect’ progeny are more fully developed at birth than less ‘perfect’ ones. And when he says that the arrangement of some organ is ‘better’ than another, he usually gives some quite ordinary functional reason for why it is so. But, as he reveals his vision of the order of living things, it becomes plain that another, metaphysical value system is also at work.
Aristotle’s animal geometry (above–below, before–behind and left–right) does not map on to the geometry of modern biology (anterior–posterior, dorsal–ventral and left–right). That’s fair enough: his geometry is trying to capture functional analogies, ours structural homologies. His valuation of the poles is more alien – when he tells us that above is more ‘honourable’ (or ‘valuable’) than below, before more honourable than behind and right more honourable than left. There is, apparently, some biological rationale for these assessments: sense organs are arguably more useful than buttocks or tails; eating is, for most people, more pleasurable than defecating; more people are right handed than left. Even so, one may wonder whether honour or value deserves a place in a functional biology – it doesn’t have one in ours.
Yet his teleology is riddled with such value judgements. He says that the position of the heart in the middle of the body is dictated by its embryonic origins. But it is also located more above than below and more before than behind, ‘For nature when allocating places puts more honourable things in more honourable positions, unless something more important prevents this’ – the language suggests the seating plan at a dinner. One may wonder why, then, the human heart (actually its apex) is located on the inferior left, but Aristotle has inserted a caveat – ‘when nature does nothing . . .’ – and gives a patently ad hoc explanation that it’s needed there to ‘balance the cooling of things on the left’. He thinks, of course, that the right-hand side of the body, being more honourable, is hotter than the left, and that this is especially so in humans, and so the heart has to shift to compensate for the left’s relative coolness.
Even when not speaking of honour, Aristotle appears to think that certain geometrical arrangements are simply ‘better’ than others, independently of their functional worth. He thinks it is better for organs to have a single origin. He likes symmetry. Given that the heart – the sensorium – is in the middle, it’s ‘best’ that it have three chambers: the middle chamber is a single origin which the others nicely counterbalance. This is a murky side to his biology. One senses the influence of popular, Pythagorean or, most likely, Platonic notions of value. The biology – if one can call it that – of The Timaeus is not so much riddled with religious values as founded on them.
Plato’s influence is most obvious when Aristotle considers man. He is explicit: man is his model not only because he’s the animal we know best, but also because he is the most perfect animal of all. The axes of the body are most differentiated in humans; in other animals they’re present but in a confused sort of way (in quadrupeds, recall, the above–below and before–behind are the same). In the same way, the characters of animals – courage, timidity, intelligence and the like – that are regulated by the sensitive soul are better developed in humans than in any other animal. For some of these features human exceptionalism is merely quantitative (we differ from animals by the more and the less); for others the difference is qualitative (we differ by analogy). There’s a sense in which a swallow shows intelligence when it builds its beautiful little nest, but human intelligence is of an altogether different kind.
Since the capacities of the sensitive soul are most developed in humans, it is among humans that their variation is most obvious. You can see this in the difference between the sexes. Males are generally more courageous and faithful than females, but less compassionate, deceitful, shameless, jealous and depressive. Should a female cuttlefish be struck by a trident, Aristotle says, the male heroically sticks around to succour his mate; should the male be hit, the female just scarpers. It’s like that in humans, just more so. It seems that Aristotle has, in general, quite a dim view of female character, that he thinks that women are less perfect than men. Actually, that’s putting it rather gently for, in The Generation of Animals, he says that females are ‘immature’, ‘deficient’, ‘deformed’ and even ‘monstrous’. Feminist scholars have made much of this.
As well they might. However, I don’t want to put Aristotle in the dock for his gender ideology, but only for his science. It’s not that he doesn’t have his reasons – of course he does, he’s Aristotle. He asks: why are the two sexes found in separate bodies? After all, it doesn’t have to be that way; it isn’t so in plants; separate sexes need, then, to be explained.* The explanation is teleological: animals (most of them, at any rate) have distinct sexes because it’s ‘better’ that way. The reason it’s better is quite abstract. One of the ways in which Aristotle expresses la différence is by saying that males contribute the moving cause and females the material cause to their progeny. The moving cause is, he asserts, superior to the material since it embraces the animal’s definition and form. And, he continues, it’s better if superior things do not mix with inferior things. This is just axiomatic. So it’s better for males and females to exist in separate bodies than in a single body.
The existence of separate sexes is, then, due to a division of labour between the causal powers required for reproduction, with males having a superior role. Superior? He actually says ‘more divine’. Well, at least that give females some purpose in life. The rest of his sexual biology is consistent with this skewed assessment: girls are produced when the semen fails to ‘master’ the menses; males are hotter than females; semen is purer than the menses; form is superior to matter and so on. He gives no empirical evidence for any of this. On the other hand, eunuchs are mutilated and feminized. The inference that females are defective is reasonable, even if it doesn’t really follow.
When he turns to humans as a species, his passion for connecting and explaining, always ardent, becomes boundless. He links a long list of our features together – libidinousness, volume of sexual secretions, fecundity, posture, limbs, bodily proportions, hairlessness, blood type, heart structure, sociality and, above all, intelligence – in a complex causal web. One can enter this web at almost any point, for example, at sex.
Aristotle thinks that we are exceptionally libidinous: only humans and horses have sex during pregnancy. We are so because we produce more seed, for our size, than any other animal.* Because women produce so much menstrual fluid, they are also, for their size, unusually fecund. Most large animals produce only one offspring, and so, usually, do women. But women also frequently bear two or three; he’s even heard of quintuplets.
Why do we produce so much seed? Aristotle gives two answers, both based on his physiology. The first is that, of all animals, we have the hottest and most fluid bodies. The second is that we are naked. Unlike other animals, we don’t have tusks, horns or even very much hair; since we don’t expend nutrition on such things we can put our nutrition into seed. Aristotle is particularly insistent that hair is grown at the expense of semen. Eunuchs and women, he observes, don’t go bald because they spend much less than men. On the other hand, bald men are exceptionally keen on sex. He also thinks that semen drains matter from the brain, which is why too much sex gives you sunken eyes.*
All this Aristotle explains in The Generation of Animals. But it is in The Parts of Animals that he gives the ultimate reason for human exceptionalism. That’s where he explains why humans are naked. We are so, it turns out, because we alone have an ultimate weapon, one that can be turned into any other – a talon, claw, horn, spear or sword – as we please, namely, our hands; for our hands can make and grasp all of these; and following the principle of economy (‘nature does nothing in vain�
��) we therefore don’t need any other.
Why do we have hands? Anaxagoras said that humans are the most intelligent animals because we have hands. That, says Aristotle, is to reverse the true direction of causality: we have hands because we are the most intelligent of animals (for only a highly intelligent creature would be able to use them). Moreover, we can have hands because, uniquely, we stand upright. So why do we stand upright? We do so because we grow that way. All animals are dwarfish, not only in stature, but in intellect, compared to us. And we grow that way because we are the hottest of all animals – which, along with our pure and thin blood, makes us the most intelligent of animals. So posture and intelligence are closely linked by material necessity. There’s a final cause too, and here we come to the end of this long causal chain. We are upright and can reason not merely because we are the most perfect animal, but because we are the most divine. That is just part of the definition of our substance, not to be explained. Thus, it turns out, the reason that we are special in so many ways – even, piquantly enough, so rampantly libidinous – is because we, of all animals, are close to God.
XCVIII
IN HISTORIA ANIMALIUM, DISCUSSING the various ways in which animals differ from each other, Aristotle distinguishes several levels of social organization. Most animals, he says, are solitary, some are gregarious, but a few are ‘political’ in that they work together for some common goal. Cranes, he thinks, are exceptionally intelligent birds in that they ‘submit to a leader’ who, with loud calls, keeps his flock in check in the course of their migratory flights.* His favourite political animal is, of course, the honeybee.
The intricate habits of bees obviously fascinate him. He records how they visit only one kind of flower at a time; how they recruit their fellows to a patch of blooms and how they waggle when they arrive at the hive carrying a load (but he does not know why).* While some workers busy themselves producing honey, others construct the comb and yet others collect water – a beautiful division of labour. The leader bee (his ‘king’, our queen) is also a specialist designed for only one purpose: the production of more bees. Honeybees have a collective goal: the maintenance of the hive. They keep the place spotless. They die in its defence. They ruthlessly regulate its internal economy and dispatch members surplus to requirements. Drones, those useless creatures, are particularly at risk.*
It’s all fascinating. Yet Aristotle’s discussion of honeybee behaviour points to a glaring hole in his biology: behavioural ecology. He explains so much about animals, but not why they behave as they do. There is no Habits of Animals to set alongside The Parts of Animals and The Generation of Animals. As a result we don’t know his answers to some extremely interesting questions.
How, for example, do bees regulate their affairs? In his Oeconomicus Xenophon gives one view. Ischomachus, a rather smug character, is telling Socrates how he instructed his young bride to manage their household. I told her, he says, about the queen bee. The queen bee (and she really is a queen rather than a king) instructs the workers what to do, parcels out the food, oversees the construction of the comb and the rearing of the young. You, my dear little wife, should do the same.
Xenophon’s queen bee is the ruling intelligence of a command economy. Of course, his dialogue, written around the time that Aristotle was at the Academy, is no more a contribution to apiology than was Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, but it probably does reveal how an educated fourth-century Greek thought the hive ran. (More so since Xenophon was the sort of gentleman-farmer who could write an elegant little essay On Hunting with Dogs.) Xenophon’s view, however, doesn’t seem to be Aristotle’s. His leader bee shows a dearth of managerial instincts: it just sits about generating more bees. The only time that it exhibits any initiative is when it zooms off with a swarm in tow to make a new hive. It also exists on sufferance. Workers, he says, often kill young leaders lest they lead to faction (multiple swarms) and so weaken the hive. And should two swarms meet and unite, one leader is eliminated. In Aristotle’s hive the proletariat seems to be running the show.
But, as I said, it’s hard to know exactly how, or to what end, Aristotle thinks the hive is organized since he didn’t tell us. The absence of an ecological treatise is puzzling. The data are there. He saw that they could be built into a science for, in Historia animalium, he does venture a few ecological generalizations. In The Parts of Animals he also essays some ideas on how physiology affects animal characters. (Hot-blooded animals are courageous, cold animals timid – that sort of thing.) It’s the teleology, the functional biology, that’s missing. Perhaps there was a Habits of Animals long since lost; after all, only one-third of his works are extant. If so, he does not refer to it and the doxographers have left it off their lists. It’s also possible that he felt no need to write one, having already written a treatise on the most social animal of all – the work that we call the Politics.
XCIX
‘MAN IS, BY nature, a political animal’ – it’s his most frequently quoted apophthegm. It appears in Book I of the Politics. It is sometimes said to be Aristotle’s definition of our species, but it isn’t. If anything, his point is that we have quite a lot in common with some other animals. Aristotle’s politikē epistēmē – political science – is very sociobiological. Both sciences are rooted in animal behaviour; and both assume a strong view of human nature – that is, assume innate desires and capacities. Aristotle would agree with E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker: humans are not born blank slates; they have an innate desire to co-operate.*
To illustrate this instinct, Aristotle gives a quasi-historical account of the origin of the state. It began with the formation of the household. The basis of the household was a union between male and female. This wasn’t a reasoned choice, just the instinct to procreate. There was also a union between a natural ruler and subject who instinctively came together for the sake of protection. He means the domestic animals and slaves that nature has providentially provided for the Greeks. (Barbarians, being less évolué, do not distinguish between women and slaves.) Driving the point home, he adds that women and slaves are distinct since nature isn’t some cheapskate coppersmith who makes a multi-purpose device. (If the analogy sounds familiar, that’s because it appeared in his argument for specialization of insect organs.) It’s understandable that Aristotle can’t imagine a household without a woman. It’s more striking that he can’t imagine one without a slave or, at minimum, an ox.
The purpose of the family household, slaves and all, was to supply daily needs. Clusters of related households then formed multi-generational villages to supply non-daily needs. At first the villages were dispersed (‘as was the manner in ancient times’), but then they formed denser associations for the sake of complete self-sufficiency. The city-state – the polis – was born. The ability, desire and need to live in a state are among the marks of humanity. Any man who, by nature, cannot live in the state is either a ‘tribeless, lawless, hearthless’ monster – he quotes Homer on the Cyclopes – or a god.
That most men and women have an instinct to procreate, or that domesticated animals have an instinct to serve humans, seems uncontroversial. Just such instincts result in households consisting of two parents, two children and a dog. Aristotle’s account of the genesis of the state – social structures of increasing complexity driven by innate human desires for increasing economic capacities – also resembles many later evolutionary theories of the origin of the state.* But his story contains a less familiar element. Do some men have an instinct to be ruled by other men? Yes, says Aristotle, some men are ‘natural’ slaves:
A human being who belongs, by nature, not to himself but to another is, by nature, a slave. One human belongs to another if, despite his being human, he is a piece of property. A piece of property is, as a distinct entity, a tool, suitable for action.
What, exactly, makes a man a natural slave? It’s clearly not just the fact that he’s owned, for Aristotle immediately notes that some men are ‘legal’ slaves; they’re the plund
er of war. Nor is a natural slave just a man who was born to slaves. Rather, he’s one who is defective in some way and can’t help but be a slave:
People differ from each other as much as mind does from body and human from beast. Those whose function happens to be the use of their bodies (when this is the best that they can achieve) are slaves by nature.
Natural slaves are men so devoid of reason that they are basically animals.
Aristotle prized the life of the mind above all else; even so, this is quite extreme. In fact he quickly acknowledges that natural slaves are men and so have, at the very least, the ability to follow commands even if they can’t think for themselves. The natural slave is, then, a barely sentient tool that nature has provided for the use of men capable of reason. He also suggests that nature has made the bodies of natural slaves stronger and less erect than those of freemen, but he concedes that nature doesn’t always get it right and sometimes gives a freeman the body or soul of a slave. (He avoids the concomitant, that a slave may have the soul of a freeman.)
This is not an attractive theory. Unsurprisingly, Aristotle has often been accused of defending the injustices of the society in which he lived by appealing to nature – that is, of committing the ‘naturalistic fallacy’: the derivation of an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. (It is an accusation also frequently levelled at sociobiologists with far less justification.) That may or may not be so. The more interesting question, however, is: does it contain some truth?
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