He went to Euboea, the large island that is separated from the Attic mainland by only a narrow strait, another euripos. His maternal family had an estate there in Chalcis. Fragmentary letters from that time speak of solitary calm. He writes to Antipater that he regrets the revoked honours, but does not regret them very much. Another: ‘The more alone I am, the more fond I am of myths.’ Within a year he was dead.
His will, which has been preserved, begins: ‘All will be well, but in case it is not . . .’ He names Antipater as executor. He gives his daughter in marriage to Nicanor, once his ward, now an officer in Alexander’s army. To Herpyllis – a slave?, a concubine?, a second wife?, in any event a woman who shared his bed – he bequeaths real estate, silver, furniture and slaves. He disposes of about a dozen slaves. Favoured slaves are to be freed, given money and subordinate slaves. A student is sent home. He commissions statues to the memory of his parents and guardians. Other statues are to be erected at the shrines of Zeus and Athena the Preserver to give thanks for Nicanor’s safe return from the East. He asks to be buried next to Pythia ‘as she wanted’. It isn’t much. It’s the only real glimpse that we have of Aristotle the man rather than Aristotle the mind.
Theophrastus became head of the Lyceum. Diogenes Laertius says that two thousand pupils attended his lectures. Presumably that’s a cumulative total, but even so it shows that the school flourished. Theophrastus’ last will and testament depicts it as having a temple to the muses, a museum containing maps and a bust of Aristotle and, of course, a garden. He left it all to his fellow philosophers so that they might reside there ‘on terms of familiarity and friendship’. Strato ‘The Physicist’ became head of the school. It continued, but without distinction, until 86 BC when Sulla pulled it down.*
At the foot of Lycabettos, the Hill of Wolves, lies a patch of scrub and some ruins. They are no more than foundations, stone blocks arranged in grids, of the sort that only archaeologists can understand. Flimsy structures covered in plastic sheets show that the archaeologists themselves were once there, but the dig has long been abandoned and now has a desolate air. On Rigillis Street, along its ranks of purple-bloomed jacarandas, a high fence keeps you out, but from the grounds of the adjacent Byzantine Museum you can get a decent view through the wire. An irritable guard will accost you; but explain what you’re after, why you’re there and he’ll walk with you and – a true Athenian – have a cigarette while you look at where Aristotle once taught.*
THE LYCEUM, CENTRAL ATHENS, JULY 2011
Strabo tells the story that Theophrastus bequeathed the Lyceum’s library to one Neleus who took them to Skepsis, a mountain village that lies interior to Assos on the Turkish shore; and that, for nearly two centuries, the scrolls lay rotting in a cave until they were bought by that Athenian bibliophile, then looted by Sulla and taken to Rome. It’s probably true. Those are the books that, in the first century AD, were edited and arranged by Andronicus of Rhodes into the form that we have today. They can’t, however, have been the only copies. Within a century of Aristotle’s death, the Ptolemies began to build their great library at Alexandria. It certainly held Aristotle’s and Theophrastus’ works. Alexandria became the centre of scientific research. Mechanics, astronomy and medicine flourished. Many philosophers there called themselves ‘Peripatetics’ in honour of Aristotle’s school.
Amid all this new science there is, however, a curious gap: biology. There were scientifically minded physicians (Herophilus, Erasistratus) and, later, the natural-history-minded encyclopaedists (Pliny), poets (Oppian) and paradoxographers (Aelian) of Rome. There was also the greatest physician-scientist of them all, Galen of Pergamon. But there was no one who tried to explain living things, in all their diversity, as Aristotle had. No one who did zoology or botany. No one who saw, as he saw, that each creature reveals to us ‘something natural and something beautiful’. No one would do so for a thousand years and more.
CVI
A QUESTION LINGERS. If, as I have claimed, Aristotle was indeed such a great biologist; if, as I have claimed, there is hardly a facet of our science that he did not illuminate; if, as I have claimed, many of our theories are built upon his, then why has his science been forgotten?
Of course, his neglect is not absolute. The authors of biology textbooks occasionally register dutiful obeisance (‘Aristotle was the father of . . .’) before passing swiftly on. Classical philosophers still study him as they always have and always will. But to modern biologists he is a void attached to a name. His scientific works and the system that they contain have been lost to common knowledge as surely as if they had been eaten by moths complete. And even when one chances across a scientist who, unaccountably, claims to know something of Aristotle’s work, the assessment is more likely than not to be irrationally harsh, even unseemly: ‘a strange and generally speaking rather tiresome farrago of hearsay, imperfect observation, wishful thinking and credulity amounting to downright gullibility’ – so Peter Medawar, essayist, scientific statesman, Nobel Laureate in physiology and medicine on the books that contain the origin of his science.
Medawar wrote these lines in 1985.* Their tone, however, is pure seventeenth century. It’s the tone of the early Royal Society of London, the association of scientists of which Medawar was rightly proud to be a Fellow. The anachronism explains all. Medawar’s abuse was aimed not at Aristotle the father of science but at Aristotle its greatest foe. He was, indeed, re-enacting, for a new generation, the origin myth of modern science; the myth in which Aristotle was the giant who had to be slain so that we could pass through the straits of philosophy to reach the open sea of scientific truth that lay beyond; the myth in which Aristotle is little more than an endlessly fecund source of empirical, theoretical and methodological error; the myth that explains his absence from the scientific pantheon next to Linnaeus, Darwin and Pasteur; the myth that explains why not one scientist in a thousand can name, much less articulate a single result from, his scientific works. I say it is a myth and, insofar as history matters at all, it is certainly a pernicious one for it omits all that we owe him. But it is a myth that has this much truth: that Aristotle’s science was the principle casualty of the Scientific Revolution. It may even be said that modern science was built on its ruins.
CVII
IN THE TWENTY-THREE CENTURIES since his death, Aristotle’s works have been lost and found many times. In early medieval Christendom his oblivion was nearly complete. Bits of the Organon, relics of Byzantium, still circulated, but the Metaphysics, Poetics, Politics and natural science were all effectively extinct. The recovery of his works was in large part due to the Christian reconquest of Moorish Spain. In 1085 Toledo, that jewel of Al-Andalus, fell to Alfonso VI of Castile. Among the treasures contained within the city was most of the Corpus Aristotelicum preserved in Arabic along with paraphrases and commentaries by Avicenna, a Persian, and Averroës, an Andalusian, Muslims both. Translated into Latin by Michael Scotus, Aristotle’s works began to circulate throughout Europe.
Two dates, appealing for their symmetry, capture the flux of his fortunes over the subsequent four hundred years. In 1210 the University of Paris banned the teaching of Aristotle’s natural philosophy in the Faculty of Arts on pain of excommunication. In 1624 the Parliament of Paris, urged on by the Faculty of Theology, banned the teaching of any doctrine opposed to his on pain of death. The significance of the dates lies in the truism that authorities only issue bans when they sense the wind blowing against orthodoxy and that, by the time they get around to doing so, it’s always far too late.
Aristotle’s attractions proved irresistible to medieval scholars. Even the Parisian ban extended only to the Faculty of Arts; theologians could still read him and did. In 1245 Albert Magnus, a Dominican appointed professor at Paris, began a vast paraphrase and commentary on Aristotle’s works based on Scotus’ translation. A few decades later his student, Thomas Aquinas, began to construct his equally ambitious synthesis of Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian theology. Thomas abolis
hed Aristotle’s division between first and second philosophy – easily done since it was blurred by Aristotle himself – and turned natural philosophy into a branch of theology. Thomas’s God, the primum movens immobile, is Aristotle’s unmoved mover; the teleology of his ethics is Aristotle’s too.*
The triumph of the Thomist synthesis rendered Aristotle’s philosophy supreme. In Inferno IV, published around 1317, Dante called Aristotle ‘the master of those who know’. The cost of philosophy was science. Following Thomas, the schoolmen of Oxford, Coimbra, Padua and Paris toyed endlessly with substance, potentialities, form-and-matter compounds, categories and all the other cogs in the Philosopher’s metaphysical machine. Their method was disputatious, their factions innumerable, their writings interminable and their conclusions stultifying. Much of it wasn’t very Aristotelian at all. They reigned over Europe’s universities for three centuries.
There were, of course, deviations from Thomist orthodoxy. In the 1500s various thinkers, mostly extramural, critiqued the schoolmen on Platonic, Epicurean, Stoic, materialist or entirely novel grounds. In Warmia, Copernicus proposed a new cosmic geometry; in Calabria, Telesio sketched a new, materialist cosmogenesis. Given the intimate tie between natural philosophy and theology, such novelties were risky. The Neapolitan monk Giordano Bruno developed a comprehensive pantheistic cosmology and, for his efforts, was tried by the Inquisition for heresy and, in 1600, burnt at the stake.
Galileo captured the mood. In his Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, 1632, he argued his physical system as a dialogue between three men: Salviati (Galileo’s champion), Sagredo (a persuadable cipher) and Simplicio (an Aristotelian). Who, asks Simplicio, will guide us if we abandon Aristotle? Anyone with eyes in his head and his wits about him can serve as a guide, replies Salviati. But eyes were precisely what Simplicio lacked. He is said to have been modelled on Cesare Cremonini, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Padua, who – the story is so delicious that one suspects it to be apocryphal, but it nevertheless appears to be true – refused Galileo’s invitation to look through a telescope at the mountains of the moon since if the moon were not a perfect sphere then it must be corruptible and Aristotle said it wasn’t. How very Aristotelian – and, as Galileo observed, how utterly unlike Aristotle.
CVIII
ARISTOTLE’S PHYSICAL SYSTEM suffered grievously at the hands of the new scientists. By the middle of the seventeenth century his cosmology and theory of motion were obsolete. His chemistry took longer to kill. His biology, rich in empirical data, fared best. Even in the thirteenth century Albert Magnus drew from it the right conclusions. ‘The aim of natural science’, he wrote, ‘is not simply to accept the statements of others, but to investigate the causes that are at work in nature.’ And: ‘Experiment is the only safe guide in such investigations.’ He accordingly added much new animal lore, some of it first hand, some borrowed from other sources, to his synopsis of Aristotle’s zoology. Compare Albert’s use of Aristotle to Thomas’s and it is hard to resist the conclusion that the eclipse of the former by the latter retarded the development of natural science by centuries.
This thought gains additional force from the fact that in the sixteenth century Aristotle’s biology helped to break the hold of Thomist scholasticism. In 1516 Pietro Pomponazzi, professor at Bologna, published Tractatus de immortalitate animae, in which he counterposed the Thomist doctrine of the immortality of the soul, established as dogma by the Fifth Lateran Council of 1512, against Aristotle’s arguments for its mortality. The book was burnt at Venice. Powerful friends and a cautious defence preserved its author from the same fate. In 1521 he published de Nutritione et augmentatione – on nutrition and growth – based on Aristotle’s Generation & Corruption. And then he taught a course on The Parts of Animals – the first since antiquity. ‘I don’t want to teach you,’ said this delightful man. ‘I came here not because I am more learned, but because I am older. The love of science pushed me, therefore I am ready to be whipped and want you to teach me’ – his words, to his students, faithfully recorded by one. It wasn’t a zoology course, but Pomponazzi didn’t hesitate to contradict Aristotle on empirical grounds. Discussing the (accurate) account of the avian nictitating membrane in The Parts of Animals II, 3, he lamented that he had dissected a chicken but failed to find it. ‘I wasted my hen and I have found nothing!’
But Pomponazzi, unusually for a schoolman, had a medical degree from Padua. Within a few decades, the anatomists of Padua and Bologna’s medical faculties – Vesalius, Fabricius, Falloppio, Colombo and Eustachi – were dissecting corpses. They were guided by that other great authority of antiquity, Galen, but did not hesitate to call Aristotle in their support. In 1561 Ulisse Aldrovandi became the first Professor of Natural Science at Bologna (lectura philosophiae naturalis ordinaria de fossilibus, plantis et animalibus was his splendid title). He established a botanical garden and a museum, and began to collate and rearrange Aristotle’s zoology, as well as any other material he could find, into a vast encyclopaedia. Naturalists such as Salviani, Belon and Rondelet went down to the markets of Rome and Montpellier and sorted out the fish. This wasn’t a rejection of Aristotle’s science; it was its rediscovery and revival.
The anatomists and naturalists of the sixteenth century left Aristotle’s explanatory theories largely intact. Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of the blood, 1632, and ovular embryology, 1651, cut deeper. But Harvey was a man who could love both Aristotle and the evidence of his eyes.
For although it be a more new and difficult way, to find out the nature of things, by the things themselves; than by reading of Books, to take our knowledge upon trust from the opinions of Philosophers: yet must it needs be confessed, that the former is much more open, and lesse fraudulent, especially in the Secrets relating to Natural Philosophy.
How very true. Yet he also told John Aubrey that he’d be better off reading Aristotle than the new ‘shit-breeches’. He meant by that, inter alia, Descartes.
Aristotle’s empirical findings may have formed the foundations of modern biology, but his explanations of how animals actually work were vulnerable to assaults on his physical theory. The fascination of Aristotle’s natural science is precisely the extraordinary way in which it interlocks. I said that Aristotle is no ontological reductionist; that he would never say that a child or a cuttlefish is just the stuff from which it is made. That’s true: forms are, for Aristotle, more fundamental than matter. He is, however, a theoretical reductionist for he does believe that higher-level phenomena are explicable in physical terms. A son resembles his father because his father’s form shaped him in the embryo. It sounds mysterious but can be explained in terms of the physical action of pneuma and the heating and cooling of material substances as evidenced by seminal foam. Very well, but dispense with pneuma and the whole account falls apart. Destroy Aristotle’s theory of motion and much of The Movement of Animals no longer makes sense; deprive the elements of their ‘natures’ and the physiology of The Length and Shortness of Life, Youth & Old Age, Life & Death and The Parts of Animals ceases to work; revive atomism and the elements of the Generation & Corruption no longer cycle; set the Earth spinning about the sun and the celestial engine of The Heavens fails. Deprive the world of its eternity and you strip every living thing of its reason to be.
Yet it was neither his association with scholasticism nor his zoological errors, nor even the falsification of his physical theories, that accounts for the oblivion of Aristotle’s scientific thought; for the fact that, if he is remembered as a scientist at all, it is as a muddle-headed ancient (scarcely distinguishable from Pliny), rather than as the engineer of the greatest scientific structure ever built by one man, and the first to boot; rather, it was the belief, a foundation stone of the New Philosophy, that his explanatory system was corrupt to its core. And here Medawar gets it right. For he credits – no, celebrates – one man for having done more than any other towards the destruction of Aristotle’s reputation. Enter Francis Bacon.
> CIX
THE FUTURE LORD CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND brooded over Aristotle’s works like a vulture over a kill. No scientist himself, he was the New Philosophy’s most ardent theorist and propagandist. In the prolix periods of The Advancement of Learning, 1605, his hostility to Aristotle is palpable:
And herein I cannot a little marvel at the philosopher Aristotle, that did proceed in such a spirit of difference and contradiction towards all antiquity, undertaking not only to frame new words of science at his pleasure, but to confound and extinguish all ancient wisdom, insomuch as he never nameth or mentioneth an ancient author or opinion, but to confute and reprove . . .
Aristotle was, Bacon said, like an ‘Ottoman Turk, in the slaughter of his brethren and with success’.
That Aristotle is generous with criticism and parsimonious with praise towards his predecessors is undeniable. But so what? It’s a scientist’s job to disagree. Besides, the remarkable thing is precisely how each of his books begins with a round-up of what his predecessors thought before moving on to his own solutions. Aristotle’s treatises have the structure that academics have used ever since.* As Bertrand Russell said, Aristotle was the first man to write like a professor.
Bacon, however, had a complex agenda. He wanted to paint the Philosopher in the colours of the quarrelsome scholastics, contrast their intemperate disputations with the new, civil kind of scientific discourse that he envisioned (but that his own writings hardly exemplify) and indict Aristotle for injustice towards the true scientific heroes of antiquity, the physiologoi.
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