The Lagoon Read online

  The reason why there are so many unmoved movers is because each of them powers just one of the spheres in Aristotle’s geometrical model of the cosmos. All the stars, having a simple, unitary motion, can be assigned to one sphere. The moon, the sun and five planets, with their more complex motions, require another fifty-four. (Parsimony was never a strength of geocentric cosmologies.) The unmoved movers have their origin in Aristotle’s mature theory of motion. In this theory, still to be formulated when he wrote The Heavens, every motion requires a previous motion. Now aithēr spheres can no longer move themselves, they need to be kept in motion. But he doesn’t want an infinite regress of movers driving every sphere, so he gives each one an unmoved mover. The evolution of his physical theory, cosmology and theology are all inextricably intertwined.

  The unmoved movers obviously don’t pull or push their spheres around since then they’d be moving movers; besides, they’re immaterial so they can’t. Instead each drives its sphere by being its object of love and desire. This sounds odd, but it’s a different kind of moving cause from simple physical causation for it depends on cognition. Aristotle says that the unmoved movers ‘touch’ the celestial spheres, but are not touched by them. We are to understand this not as a literal, physical touch, but as a psychological alteration – the sort of thing we mean when we say ‘I am touched by your solicitude’ or ‘I am moved by her beauty.’ Even animals which can move themselves ultimately depend on objects of desire to prod them into action. Love, it turns out, really does make the world go round.*

  Aristotle’s cosmos is now looking very busy. Add up all the spheres and their unmoved movers and he has 110 entities of varying degrees of materiality and divinity in Earth orbit. The reason that he can claim, within just a few paragraphs, that there are so many unmoved movers and also insist that there is only one is that, like so much in Aristotle’s world, they come in a hierarchy with one at the top. This, of course, is the unmoved mover responsible for the outermost stellar sphere. The ‘first unmoved mover’ has, in some sense, control of all the others. It may be their ultimate object of love and desire. It is Aristotle’s ultimate God.

  In the Metaphysics, Aristotle reveals, in sweeping periods, the purpose and nature of this entity:

  On such a principle [the first unmoved mover], then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. And it is a life such as the best which we enjoy, and enjoy for but a short time (for it is ever in this state, which we cannot be), since its actuality is also pleasure. (And for this reason are waking, perception and thinking most pleasant, and hopes and memories are so on account of these.) And thinking in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thinking in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and object of thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e. the essence, is thought. But it is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the possession rather than the receptivity is the divine element which thought seems to contain, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.

  This is what God does: he thinks. Normal thinking isn’t good enough for him, so he spends his time ‘thinking . . . thinking of thinking’ – noēsis noēseōs noēsis. This is a God who knows neither love nor hate, who neither creates nor destroys, who does not save, condemn or even judge; this is a God utterly indifferent to Earthly affairs, yet upon whom, ironically, the very existence of the universe depends.

  In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle discusses the best sort of life to lead. The good life is obviously one of active virtue, and there are many ways in which virtue can be achieved – in politics or in the army, say. But the virtue that derives from such things is entirely utilitarian. The best way that a man can spend his life is in contemplation for that has no utilitarian goal; it’s pleasurable in itself. Elsewhere he relates a story. Someone asked Anaxagoras what was the point of being born, to which the great physiologos replied: ‘to study the heaven and order of the whole cosmos’. The answer rang true to Aristotle; he told the story at least twice. But he warns that none of us can ever achieve a life of pure contemplation. There are so many things, the mundane things of everyday life, and the human things – the sense is disparaging – that distract us from the divine life of the mind. Nevertheless we should ‘strain every sinew’ to ignore them and devote ourselves to pure reason. That is where true happiness lies.

  His works, pitiless in their detachment, show us what he means. He was, after all, a man who wrote of the press of sexual desire but not of Pythia, his long-dead Asian love; of the rise and fall of states but not of Alexander, the conquering boy whom he unleashed upon the world; of the very structure of reality while scarcely mentioning by name his teacher whose life’s work he effortlessly assimilated, appropriated and then destroyed. This is the life of reason – the scientific life – and, when you contemplate the rank of squat volumes, the shelves of papyrus scrolls that they once must have been, and the relentless march of his arguments page after page after page, you cannot help but feel that he has confused the causality; that he did not so much search for God as reconstruct Him in his own image.

  Yet there is another side to Aristotle’s God. For it is not only philosophers and scientists that can, indeed must, strive to be like Him; every natural thing partakes, to howsoever humble a degree, of His qualities. Indeed, it is only now that we can truly understand the meaning of the words with which Aristotle must have begun his great course, and with which I began this book:

  So we should not, like children, react with disgust to the investigation of less elevated animals. There is something awesome in all natural things. Some strangers, so the story goes, wanted to meet Heraclitus. They approached him but saw he was warming himself by the stove. ‘Don’t worry!’ he said. ‘Come on in! There are gods here too.’

  Even a cuttlefish is, in some way, divine. It is a sweet and solemn thought. Had I a God – had I a God – it would be Aristotle’s God.

  THE STRAIT

  OF PYRRHA

  DETAIL FROM THEODORE GAZA’S TRANSLATION OF ARISTOTLE’S ZOOLOGICAL WORKS, 1552

  CIV

  IN 340 BC, SWAYED by Demosthenes’ nationalist oratory, Athens allied with Thebes against Macedon. Philip, goaded into action, marched south. In August 338 the armies met at Chaeronea. Philip was victorious but merciful. He neither enslaved the survivors nor occupied Athens, but returned the bones of her thousand dead for burial. When he was assassinated two years later the Athenian mob celebrated. The new king, they said, was just a boy. They forgot that Alexander was a battle-hardened twenty-year-old. In 335 Thebes revolted. Alexander levelled it. Athens submitted. That was the year that Aristotle returned. He had been away for twelve years. He was nearly fifty.

  Although a friend to the conquerors, he was not unwelcome. The city remained divided between Demosthenes’ nationalists and pro-Macedonian aristocrats. Now the former were chastened (Demosthenes narrowly escaping being fed to Alexander to appease his wrath), the latter ebullient. And Aristotle had a close friend in Antipater, soon to become Alexander’s European viceroy. The new philosopher in town was probably quite fashionable.

  He rented some buildings at the Lyceum and began to teach. It is said that he gave his more difficult, technical lectures in the morning and public discourses in the afternoon. Senior colleagues – Theophrastus, Callippus – would have lectured too. His students
came from across the Hellenic world. He set them to work. The data in Historia animalium could, perhaps, have been collected by one man; but that and the 158 constitutions of the Greek states and the list of victors of the Pythian games and his records of the dramatic works performed at Athens? Other encyclopaedic projects are hinted at too. Their scale suggests that the Lyceum was not merely a gathering of philosophically minded friends, or even a school, but a research institute.

  We may wonder what, exactly, Aristotle taught. Superficially it’s clear enough. The works of Aristotle that we have all appear to be lecture notes or, at least, unpublished manuscripts, and all derive from the Lyceum’s library. They are a curriculum. But matters cannot be so simple. In many ways, large and small, the texts appear to contradict each other. The small contradictions can be dismissed as the errors of scribes, the insertions of successors, the places where Aristotle changed his mind about, say, the octopus’ brain. The large contradictions are less easily explained. There are two approaches you can take to resolving them. First, you can try to show that the apparently inconsistent texts are, if read rightly, consistent after all. Second, you can allow that Aristotle changed his mind on important matters too; that by the time of the Lyceum some of the texts were out of date and languishing in the stacks, while others represented his current thought. That seems reasonable. Who, after all, philosophizes for forty years and doesn’t?

  There are fashions in these things. In 1923 Werner Jaeger, a young German philologist, published Aristoteles: Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung.* It gave a vision of Aristotle as he metamorphosed from a young man under Plato’s influence, through several stages, to the mature, empirically minded philosopher of the Lyceum. Jaeger believed that he could order the composition of particular parts of the Corpus Aristotelicum, that he could show that Metaphysics Books A, B, M 9–10 and N were written in Assos against Speusippus, while Z, H and ⊖ are part of an entirely separate, later enterprise; or that Politics II–III, VII and VIII, so Platonic in tone, were written before the empirical IV–VI.

  His scheme, brilliant and a little mad, enchanted Aristotelians until the 1960s. Since then it has been unpicked so that little of it remains. These days, perhaps still in reaction to Jaeger, classical philosophers often emphasize the unity of Aristotle’s thought. Points go to those who can show that the seemingly irreconcilable is, in fact, not. To admit that Aristotle might have changed his mind, or the meaning of his technical terms, seems to be held as an admission of defeat.

  Yet this way of reading Aristotle conceals as much as it illuminates. After all, two facts are indisputable: that he began his intellectual life as a student of Plato, writing Platonic dialogues on Platonic themes, and that he ended it having developed a system of thought that, whatever its debt to his predecessors, contained the elements of natural science. It would be astonishing indeed had this transformation not left its mark on his works. For me, this transformation manifests as two Aristotles. We can, crudely, call them the philosophical and the scientific Aristotles. By this I do not mean Aristotle’s distinction between first and second philosophy or theologikē and physikē; rather I mean our distinction, the distinction that we see at a time when philosophy and science are very different enterprises.

  It’s partly a matter of style. On the one hand, there are the a priori arguments of the Metaphysics, the Organon and even the Physics and The Heavens. On the other, there are the arguments of the zoology, Meteorology and Politics, based on, or at least tempered by, data. Here, from The Heavens, is an example of the former. Aristotle is explaining why there cannot be more than one world:

  We must now proceed to explain why there cannot be more than one world – the further question mentioned above. For it may be thought that we have not proved universally of bodies that none whatever can exist outside our universe, and that our argument applied only to those of indeterminate extent. Now all things rest and move naturally and by constraint. A thing moves naturally to a place in which it rests without constraint, and rests naturally in a place to which it moves without constraint. On the other hand, a thing moves by constraint to a place in which it rests by constraint, and rests by constraint in a place to which it moves by constraint. Further, if a given movement is due to constraint, its contrary is natural. If, then, it is by constraint that earth moves from a certain place to the centre here, its movement from here to there will be natural, and if . . . [etc.]

  I shall not try to explicate. It is an edifice of pure a priori reasoning, a series of claims that are taken to be self-evidently true or else derivable from other self-evidently true claims. It illustrates the truism that, although any science needs basic principles to get off the ground, it can’t get far on them alone. Here, by contrast, is an example of the more empirical Aristotle. In The Generation of Animals he is explaining how animals nurture their embryos:

  As previously stated, in live-bearing animals the embryo achieves growth through the umbilical cord. In animals the soul has a nutritive power (alongside the others) so it sends this cord like a root into the uterus. The cord is made up of blood vessels in a sheath, more of them in larger animals such as cattle, a single one in the smallest and two in those of middle size. The embryo gets its nourishment in the form of blood through this cord: for many blood vessels terminate in the uterus. All animals without teeth in the upper jaw . . . [etc.]

  The zoological works, too, are rich in long, deductive chains of reasoning, but supporting data are usually close to hand. That is the difference. To Aristotle both The Heavens and The Generation of Animals were physikē; to us one is cosmic philosophy, the other reproductive biology.

  It’s a matter not just of style but also of substance. There is often a conflict between theory and practice. There is a conflict between the syllogistic theory of demonstration of the Posterior Analytics, with its austere programmatic certainties, and how Aristotle actually does science.* In his empirical works he invokes other modes of demonstration but is vague as to what they are. Often he offers only dialectical plausibility: here are some explanations, here are some arguments against them; this one seems best. There is a conflict between his insistence that each domain of knowledge should be kept distinct and how he then ignores their boundaries. There is a conflict between the taxonomic essentialism of the Categories and the pragmatic casualness of his animal classification in Historia animalium. There is a conflict between his insistence in the Metaphysics that artefacts and animals are utterly distinct, that the former, indeed, aren’t even to be granted the ontological status of ‘entities’ (ousiai), and the mechanistic flavour of his explanations in the zoological works. I shall return to this. There is a conflict between his simple male/female :: form/matter dichotomy and the complexities of his theory of inheritance. There is a conflict between his anti-materialism – that is, his entire causal theory – and his belief in spontaneous generation. Some scholars see one or more of these conflicts as irreconcilable; others see them as the same thoughts expressed in different ways. To me, they collectively speak of a philosopher who has been mugged by empirical reality – or at least what he takes it to be.

  It is tempting to suppose that these two Aristotles belong to different times of his life; that there is an early, philosophical and a later, scientific Aristotle. The first sat under a tree in the Piraeus picking holes in Plato’s theory of definition by division, the second on a quay in Lesbos prodding a pile of fish. I think that there is much truth to this, but have neither the courage nor the expertise to separate them and certainly not to impose some chronology on the texts.* Besides, once you start down that road, it’s hard to know when to stop. All students of the Metaphysics agree that it is a disparate series of treatises cobbled together by a later editor. But what about apparent contradictions within The Generation of Animals? It seems to be a single, if imperfectly unified, work. We would murder to dissect.

  For this reason I, too, have tried to present an Aristotle who does not disagree with himself. And if, on on
e or two occasions, I have allowed that the texts are not consistent, that once he thought one thing and later another, it has been only as a final expedient, as an exegetical sword to be swung in extremis when all others have failed to cut the knot. This much is also true: cease rootling about in the texts, step back and view the Corpus from a distance, and a grand unity becomes apparent. Whatever its imperfections and inconsistencies, it offers a system of awesome completeness. Much of this is due to the biology. Of all the things in the world that he might have studied, that he might have devoted his life to, Aristotle identified living things as most worthy of his attention. Nearly all the rest – his metaphysics, system of causal explanation, physics, chemistry, meteorology, cosmology, politics, ethics, even his poetics* – bear the mark of that decision.

  As to why the Corpus shows such varied styles of argument, the explanation is easily to hand. In our day philosophers and scientists are distinct academic castes with distinct ways of arguing. But who is to say that, more than two thousand years ago, a man could not be both at once? That the scientist might not displace the philosopher, but be added to him? Such a man, I take it, was Aristotle when, walking along the winding paths of the Lyceum’s gardens, he began to teach.

  CV

  HE TAUGHT FOR TWELVE years or so. But then Alexander died in Babylon. The Athenians celebrated once again. The anti-Macedonian party turned nasty. They accused Aristotle of praying to Hermias, his friend, dead so long ago, and charged him with impiety. Politics were certainly at play. Had they wanted to get him for heresy they should have attended his lectures on astrotheology. The Delphians had honoured him (and Callisthenes) for recording the victors of the Pythian Games. Now they revoked the honours and smashed the tablet on which they had been proclaimed. He decided to leave. ‘I will not allow the Athenians to commit a second crime against philosophy.’ He was thinking of Socrates.