The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Yet precisely such a prodigy emerged from classical Athens. Seekers found clues in the successes, failures, and confusions of predecessors, who became their inspiration, their targets, their resource. From Socrates, Plato learned both caution and the need for bold patterns of meaning of his own. From Plato, Aristotle learned the perils of deserting the world of the senses. Still the later somehow did not make the earlier irrelevant. Seekers, like artists, never wholly displaced those who had tried before. They all enlarged and enriched the menu.

  Aristotle is the colossus whose works both illuminate and cast a shadow on European thought in the next two thousand years. Though thoroughly immersed in fourth century B.C. Athens, he was an outsider. “The Stagirite,” his nickname in the Middle Ages, underlined his non-Athenian origins. Born in Stagira, a town in northeastern Greece in 384 B.C., he did not come to Athens until he was seventeen. His father, Nicomachus, was the personal physician to the king of Macedonia, Amyntas, who was the father of Philip of Macedon and grandfather of Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s family had a long tradition in the practice of medicine, then the most practically minded of the Greek sciences. After he was left an orphan, he was sent to Athens for his education. There he joined Plato’s Academy, as a student. But he never ceased to be a stranger. As a “metic”—a resident foreigner—he could not own real estate in Athens.

  “In Athens,” Aristotle recalled in a letter written just before his death, “the same things are not proper for a stranger as for a citizen; it is difficult to stay in Athens.” He is reported to have observed acidly that the only honor the city of Athens ever gave him was the accusation of impiety, in 323 B.C. Plato was away on his second Sicilian frolic when Aristotle first came to Athens. But despite Plato’s occasional absences Plato’s spirit dominated the Academy.

  The impressionable young Aristotle was only one among many foreigners attracted to the Academy by Plato’s fame in northern Greece. He seems to have read Plato’s dialogues during these years. And he was especially impressed by the Phaedo, which became his model for his own commemoration of a friend many years later. Even his works attacking Plato’s theory of ideas reveal how deeply Plato had influenced him. But he was not sympathetic to the emphasis on mathematics in the Academy, signaled by the legendary inscription over the entrance: “Only geometers may enter.” “The moderns have turned philosophy into mathematics,” Aristotle would later complain in the Metaphysics, “though they pretend that one should study them for further ends.” Plato provided a shining target for the young and increasingly independent outsider. Plato’s grand otherworldly theme that denied the reality of the sensible world proved the perfect challenge, for Aristotle’s practical spirit was obsessed with the range and variety of experience. Still, he was sympathetic enough to Plato’s intellectual sallies to remain in the Academy for twenty years. He did not leave the Academy until Plato’s death in 347 B.C., and even then went to join another circle of Plato’s followers.

  In retrospect we might wonder why Aristotle, reputedly Plato’s most brilliant pupil, was not then named head of the Academy. But he had probably already spoken out against Plato’s theory of forms. A more eligible candidate was Speusippus, son of Plato’s sister. As a “metic”—a resident alien—Aristotle could not have inherited the property without a special dispensation. The rising Demosthenes was at this very time stirring Athenian fears of the perils from Macedonia, where Aristotle had been born and raised. Nor could Aristotle return to Stagira. It had just been destroyed (348 B.C.) by Philip as one of the last obstacles to his expansion of his Macedonian empire, and the Athenians had not been able to rescue it.

  All this provided the opportunity for Aristotle to set out on his own version of Plato’s Sicilian adventure. Joined by Xenocrates, a friend from the Academy, he went in search of a site for a new academy, and was attracted by an adventurous king, Hermias, of a small kingdom in Asia Minor, whose capital was Atarneus. Hermias may have visited the Academy in Athens, and seems to have welcomed the enlightened guidance of Platonic philosophers. He assigned a city, Assos, for their new Academy, and gave his niece and adopted daughter to Aristotle in marriage. At Assos the philosophers met and conversed in a peripatos, a covered walk, the prototype of Aristotle’s later more famous academy. And there Aristotle pursued his lifelong interest in nature, recorded in numerous references in his Natural History to places and creatures in this part of Asia Minor. But Hermias met a violent death at the hands of the Persians before he could become a Platonic philosopher-king. Aristotle would praise his lost patron in a eulogy to Arete, Virtue. After only three years at Hermias’ academy, Aristotle moved to the nearby island of Mytelene, where he was when Philip of Macedon went seeking a tutor for his son Alexander.

  In a historic coincidence the West’s most influential philosopher was instructing the future conqueror of the most far-flung empire of the West before Roman times. Plutarch reports on Philip’s search for the world’s greatest philosopher to tutor his thirteen-year-old son. The reasons for Philip’s choice of Aristotle are not clear, for Aristotle had not yet a grand reputation. Perhaps Aristotle himself had sought the post to ensure the rebuilding of his hometown of Stagira. We do know that Aristotle was handsomely rewarded for his tutorial services, and that he died a rich man. It also appears that Philip and Alexander subsidized Aristotle’s research in natural history by assigning gamekeepers to tag the wild animals of Macedonia. Unfortunately, the drama ends in anticlimax, for there is little evidence of Aristotle’s lasting influence on Alexander the Great. Aristotle never mentions Alexander in his surviving works, nor refers directly to his time as tutor in Macedonia. Nor do we have a report from Alexander himself of his impressions of the world’s greatest philosopher. Bertrand Russell uncharitably speculates that the ambitious young Alexander must have been bored by “the prosy old pedant set over him by his father to keep him out of mischief.”

  “The young man is not a proper audience for political science,” Aristotle complained, “he has no experience of life, and because he still follows his emotions, he will only listen to no purpose, uselessly.” Still, Aristotle seems to have written some pamphlets especially for the young Alexander, among them On Kingship, In Praise of Colonies, and possibly The Glories of Riches. For the practical-minded Aristotle the Platonic philosopher-king ideal must have seemed pure fantasy. He was more impressed by the possibilities that resided in the actual character of “the Hellenic race,” which was intermediate between the Europeans, who were “full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill; and therefore they retain comparative freedom, but have no political organization, and are incapable of ruling over others,” and “the natives of Asia . . . intelligent and inventive, but . . . wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery.” By happy chance, the Hellenic race, situated between them, was “intermediate in character, being high-spirited and also intelligent. Hence it continues free, and is the best governed of any nation, and, if it could be formed into one state, would be able to rule the world.” But by including barbarians with Greeks, Alexander’s grandiose scheme failed to reap the special benefits of the Hellenic character.

  After three years, when Alexander was only sixteen, his father, Philip, went on a campaign against Byzantium and left his son as regent. This ended Aristotle’s term as tutor but was only the beginning of a Macedonian friendship with the general Antipater that would shape his life. When the twenty-year-old Alexander came to the throne in 336 and set out on his ambitious Asian campaign, he left Antipater as his regent for Greece. Aristotle benefited from his developing friendship, and he named Antipater as the executor of his will. All this helps explain Aristotle’s paean to friendship in his Ethics. “Without friends no one would choose to go on living, though he possessed every other good thing.” Macedonia was dominating Greece, and the Macedonian power over the peninsula would be helpful to Aristotle on his return to Athens. But the Macedonian connection would eventually be his doom.


  10

  On Paths of Common Sense

  Returning to Athens and finding the Academy under less friendly auspices, Aristotle set up his own teaching center in the Lyceum, a grove and gymnasium near Athens, which Socrates himself had enjoyed. There Aristotle would stroll on the public walk (peripatos) talking philosophy with his students until it was time for their rubbing with oil. Following the plan of the Academy, the Lyceum too was a cult of the Muses along with lecture rooms and a library. Legend credits Aristotle with collecting here the first extensive systematically arranged library. Symposia, or festive meals, were conducted by rules that Aristotle himself composed.

  At the Lyceum, Aristotle lectured, pursued scientific research, supervised and collated the research of disciples. The mornings he gave to lectures for serious scholars, his evenings to any who wanted to come. He walked as he talked and so became the “peripatetic” philosopher. The atmosphere was quite different from that of Plato’s Academy with its Way of the Dialogue, where the light came from sparks struck by conversing minds. Here Aristotle sought the light of experience of the sensible world, to which Plato gave no dignity. Aristotle was closer to the pre-Socratic Ionian philosopher-scientists who asked what the world was made of and how it worked. He collected his own notebooks on all subjects, and made them available to students. Assigning each student a different topic, he encouraged students to make their own observations and draw conclusions from what they found. When pupils found the odorous dissection of some of Nature’s minor works repulsive, Aristotle replied, “The consideration of the lower forms of life ought not to excite a childish repugnance. In all natural things there is something to move wonder.”

  The most conspicuous contrast to Plato’s Way was in politics. While Plato’s Republic painted a glowing picture of an ideal commonwealth, Aristotle’s speculations were solidly based on his assistants’ descriptions of 158 different operating Greek political systems. A surviving example is the recently discovered Constitution of Athens, the first book of the series, perhaps written by Aristotle himself. The lost 157, probably by his students, covered the Mediterranean world from Marseilles in the west to Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus, communities on the Aegean, Ionian, and Tyrrhenian seas, elsewhere in Europe, and in Asia and Africa. Yet Aristotle sensibly cautioned that in political science we should be content with “the truth roughly and in outline.” “It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just as far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.”

  During these twelve years at his Lyceum, Aristotle rounded off the works that made him our first encyclopedist and the shaper of the Western vocabulary on all subjects from logic and poetry to politics and biology. We cannot know for sure how much of this legacy was influenced by Plato, and how much was a reaction against Plato. Nor do we know for sure the order of his surviving works. The very “writings” of Aristotle—which in the late Middle Ages became a kind of sacred scripture for Western Christianity and the basis of “Scholasticism,” and interpreted with relentless textual pedantry by modern historians—are shrouded in mists of uncertainty.

  Surprisingly, the works of Aristotle that have survived are not the works that he had “published.” It is not his afternoon and evening talks to all comers, his popular or literary works, but his morning lectures to serious scholars at the Lyceum that remain for us. With his fellow philosophers at the Lyceum he was continually revising these “lecture-manuscripts.” The surviving “works” of Aristotle, then, probably include some of Aristotle’s own notes, amplified or explained by the notes of his students or his fellow teachers. Besides, there are research reports compiling facts gathered by members of the Lyceum on every conceivable subject—from the shape of animals’ limbs to the laws and constitutions of every known state. His work On the Parts of Animals and the rediscovered Constitution of Athens are samples. Aristotle’s boundless curiosity and his effectiveness as a teacher appear in his collections of questions arranged by subject, each beginning with a “Why . . . ?” and then offering alternative answers, “It is because . . .”

  Oddly enough, it was this collection of notes from many hands that became the revered “works” of Aristotle in later centuries. And while the writings of other great thinkers have commonly been designed for an audience—learned or popular—the surviving works of Aristotle are different. They record work in progress, the Seeker at work with himself, reflecting and emending as he went along. While they lack the wit and poetry of Plato’s dialogues, they have a pedestrian momentum of their own. Reading Aristotle, we join a mind trying to sort out the trivia of experience and relate them to the grandest questions.

  The selective survival of Aristotle’s encyclopedic miscellany is itself a saga. The pioneer Greek geographer Strabo (c. 63 B.C.-A.D. 19), who had settled in Rome (c. 20 B.C.), tells the story. At his death Aristotle left his library and writings—along with the directorship of the Lyceum—to his versatile friend and colleague Theophrastus (c. 371-c. 287 B.C.), who had earned his leadership of the Peripatetic School by his writings on botany and his Metaphysics, and marked new paths for essays by his witty “Characters.” At Theophrastus’ death he left Aristotle’s literary remains to a younger philosopher Neleus, whom he expected to be his successor at the Lyceum. Neleus came from a town called Skepsis in Anatolia, in the area where Aristotle had enjoyed the patronage of Hermias. Neleus then left them to his own heirs who were not philosophers. When the Attalid kings of Pergamum invaded Skepsis seeking works for their library, these heirs had buried the books in an underground cellar, where they were left to mold and moth. Still, they eventually found a buyer for the disintegrating books and papers.

  The bibliophile Apellicon made and published new, careless copies. The next chapter in the Aristotelian saga is reported by Plutarch. When Sulla (138-78 B.C.), the Roman general, captured Athens in 86 B.C. in his campaign against Mithridates, he seized Apellicon’s library, including the books and papers of Aristotle, and brought it to Rome. There, luckily, a disciple and admirer of Aristotle, the grammarian Tyrannio, friend of Cicero and Caesar, secured the confidence of the librarian, worked on the books, organized the papers, and made new copies. Cicero himself so admired Aristotle’s “golden flow of speech” (in his dialogues now lost) that he said he had tried to write “in the Aristotelian manner.” Happily, Tyrannio supplied his copies to Andronicus of Rhodes, also an admirer of Aristotle.

  And it was this Andronicus who opened a newly informed era in the fame of Aristotle. About 40 B.C. he arranged the works in the order in which they have survived, and on which later lists rely. He wrote his own treatise on the works, wrote a life of Aristotle, and provided a transcript of Aristotle’s will. Before Andronicus, Plutarch observes, “the earlier Peripatetics were clearly clever and scholarly men in themselves, but had no extensive or accurate acquaintance with the writings of Aristotle and Theophrastus.” Andronicus had unwittingly given shape to the philosophic and scientific vocabulary of Christian Europe.

  The fate of Aristotle’s works again dramatized the difference between his way of seeking and Plato’s, for the influence of Plato’s Way was continuous, through small groups of friends and disciples. The dialogues that Plato himself had written and recited in the Academy were soon collected. By contrast Aristotle’s influence was interrupted or perhaps not fully launched until three centuries after his death, when finally some coherent version of his writings became available. Plato’s Academy, formally organized as a religious guild, had the aura of a great spirit reaching out to all listeners. But Aristotle’s legacy was a body of knowledge, marking the path of modern learning—accumulating the facts of the world and human experience with an explanation of causes. Aristotle’s legacy, then, was not the power of a charismatic personality of grand poetic gifts, but rather the accumulation of a lifetime of scholarly observation. And before Aristotle’s writings were reco
vered by Andronicus, there were centuries of opportunity for his ideas to be distorted. Plato’s was an unbroken tradition, Aristotle’s was a series of renaissances.

  Aristotle was in Athens in the summer of 323 B.C., when news came of the death of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great. Alexander was only thirty-two, and many doubted that he could be dead. This was the signal for the Athenian Assembly to declare war against Antipater, Aristotle’s patron, who held the garrisons for Macedonia. The Macedonian prodigy Aristotle, Antipater’s friend, was also naturally suspect. He became another victim of the familiar charge of “impiety.” The trumped-up charge was based now on an accusation that Aristotle had written a paean to his old patron, the pro-Macedonian Hermias, as if he were a god. He fled to Chalcis, a Macedonian stronghold, to prevent the Athenians from “sinning twice against philosophy.” Aristotle died in Chalcis in 322, at sixty-three years of age. His will made generous provisions for his family and for emancipating some of his slaves.

  The philosopher Aristotle, Bertrand Russell observes, was “the first to write like a professor . . . a professional teacher, not an inspired prophet”—“Plato diluted by common sense.” Aristotle’s success as a professional teacher is nowhere better proven than by the decisive and enduring shape he has given to every subject he interpreted. Yet he avoided the narrowness of the pedant. There was no subject, question, or field of knowledge that this Seeker failed to encompass. The amazing scope of his curiosity and knowledge would never be matched in Western thought. The next such effort we shall see was Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751-1756), which required the collaboration of the great thinkers of the age in thirty-five volumes. In retrospect, as amazing as the scope of Aristotle’s writings was their succinctness, for he managed to compress his universal survey into only fifteen hundred pages. Later encyclopedias have used the crutch of alphabetical arrangement of articles to give an appearance of order. But Aristotle created an order that derived from the subjects themselves. While the obviousness of some of these ideas might embarrass the subtle philosopher, it is this commonsense view of experience that has given Aristotle his perennial appeal.