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ARISTOTLEāS WORKS AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION
Aristotle was the systematic philosopher of ancient times. In the Middle Ages he was raised again to authoritative prominence. Danteās famous characterization of him is often cited: he is the central āmaster of those who know,ā with Socrates and Plato at his side. The break of the modern sciences with āarid scholasticismā from the seventeenth century on resulted in a long eclipse of Aristotelian philosophy. The revolt against authority in favor of appeal to experience, coupled with a genuine devotion to the novel elements in the growth of science, pushed Aristotle into what seemed at times merely a backwater in the history of philosophy. And the history of philosophy itself seemed to many an advanced thinker simply the history of human error before men got on the proper path. The more Aristotleās writings on questions of physics remained unread, the more items that were cited tended to be curious scraps. Why should one take seriously a philosopher who believed that the sublunar elements are earth, air, fire, and water, when Democritus already had advanced an atomic theory; who reported that when a menstruating woman looks at a mirror, the mirror is tinged red; who attacked Empedocles because he offered an evolutionary-sounding idea; and who, when he approached something like a principle of inertia, declared it absurd?
Yet Aristotleās eclipse was only partial. His social and humanistic sideāhis ethical, political, and aesthetic writingsācontinued to be influential. Was that because these were backward areas, or because they present perennial problemsāthe same for ancient and modern timesāor because he had fashioned adequate solutions? Aristotleās logic, his clearest claim to originality, remained the staple throughout the nineteenth century, though encased in later oversimplifications, and permeated college texts as late as the 1930s.
In the twentieth century a very surprising thing happened. Instead of remaining in āappropriateā relegation in the history of philosophy, Aristotle became once more a living philosopher. The more our contemporaries developed logic, the more they found Aristotle interesting to look at afresh. The more the philosophy of science advanced in its probing of contemporary problems, the more it asked itself what could have been the structure of a system that held menās minds for two millennia, and what held it together conceptually. The more ethical and political theory diverged, the greater became the interest in a philosophy that had unified ethics and politics within a single comprehensive outlook. The more metaphysics was indicted in a positivist onslaught as ābad grammar,ā the more attractive it found a philosophy that had attempted to combine linguistic and functional analysis. Contemporary philosophy itself, now more than ever questioning its own nature, discovered it could learn much from seeing how a systematic philosophy was built under different conditions of human knowledge, and how it held together. Of course, there are still some who look back with regressive longing for dogmatic philosophical truthāa strange status to assign to Aristotle, who in the thirteenth century represented science against mysticism. But on the whole it is fast becoming clear that what attracts in Aristotle is a great philosopher at work, and the way in which ideas are being forged, organized, and used. Our age is one in which there is a critical need in all fields for ideasāideas that will make sense of rapidly accumulating data and break through older frameworks of thought. Thus the modern fascination with Aristotle is the fascination of mind with mind at work, sharply, profoundly, and systematically. Aristotle may yet come to be understood as he never was understood before. In the fashionable language of the moment, modern consciousness is involved in a philosophical dialogue with Aristotle.
In this dialogue, Aristotle is represented by his works, now long a traditional corpus with a life and career of its own. There are five volumes in the massive Berlin edition (the Bekker edition) of Aristotleās works, and there are twenty-three volumes of the Greek commentators on Aristotle (also published in Berlin, between 1882 and 1909), not counting supplementary volumes. Both numbers are deceptive, but in opposite directions. Of the five volumes of Aristotleās own works, only the first two contain the Greek texts; then come Latin versions, and then notes, fragmentary quotations, and index. On their side, the twenty-three volumes of ancient commentary give only a small picture of the vast historical enterprise of commenting on Aristotle.
The corpus of Aristotleās own works covers almost every major area of human inquiry. The list of general topics dealt with is itself impressive: logic, philosophy of science, physics, astronomy, meteorology, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, theory of poetry. (A fuller outline of the works and their contents is given in appendix A.)
What are the works like? They are clearly technical products in science and philosophy, laying the foundations of field after field. They may have been texts for teaching or guidelines for research or both. Yet for all their systematic and encyclopedic character, they do not appear to be treatises that flowed continuously from the masterās pen. They have a put-together quality; in many cases treatments of separate topics are joined in a larger work with connecting threads. The parts of some of the works are even named separately in some of the ancient lists. The putting together may have been Aristotleās own doing, or that of his disciples or editors. It has sometimes been suggested that we have here lecture notes taken by students; but without going into comparative reflection on the character of studentship in various eras, we may note the hypothesis that they are lecture notes prepared by the professor himself either for delivery or as topical treatments to be read for discussion. Different versions of the same subject, such as we find in the Eudemian and Nicomachean ethics, would thus represent such outline discussions as edited by Eudemus, Aristotleās friend and colleague, and Nicomachus, his son. On the other hand, some scholars impressed by the fullness and subtlety of treatment do not rest content with any mere lecture-note or outline-discussion theory, and believe that Aristotle compiled many of the works, at least, rewriting and perhaps expanding them. But it has even been suggested that the works are the product of a whole school over several generations rather than one manās massive accomplishment.1
Whatever determined their form, the writings had an exciting history, both in ancient and in modern times. They were used as a basis for teaching, and were handed on; they were put into a definitive edition by Andronicus in the first century B.C. and were destined for endless commentary. One account has it that the works were left by Theophrastus, Aristotleās successor, to a disciple who took them away to Asia Minor, where they were hidden in a cellar for protection and recovered in a dilapidated condition only shortly before the time of Andronicus, when they were returned to Athens and later carried off to Rome. Controversy has centered on whether Aristotleās successors did have his technical works for the centuries that followed his and Theophrastusā death. The preponderant view now seems to be that there was some access through other copies; the school did branch out to other centers in the Hellenistic world.2 It does, however, appear as if the public at first received Aristotle in terms of his earlier dialogues; his technical works became the subject of commentary and gained a wider influence only after being taken up by the Neoplatonists in the third century A.D. By the early sixth century, when it is usually saidāthough apparently incorrectly3āthat the Emperor Justinian closed the philosophical schools of Athens (529 A.D.), the works had already engaged the energies of important commentators of such different philosophical schools and religions as the Aristotelian (Alexander of Aphrodisias, 200 A.D.), the Neoplatonist (Porphyry, ca. 232-304 A.D., and Simplicius, early sixth century A.D.), and the Christian (Philoponus, ca. 490ā530). It was Simplicius who carried the works to Persia shortly after 529. Constantinople already had an Aristotelian school, and from this source the works went into Syriac versions. In the ninth century they went from Syriac into Arabic, and so through the Arab world into Spain. The great Arabic commentators were Avicenna (980ā1037) and AverroĆ«s (1126ā98). In Hebraic philosophy during this period, Maimonides (1135ā1204) is the outstanding Aristotelian.
The Christian world of the early Middle Ages knew very little of Aristotleās works. Boethius (ca. 480ā524) in the late Roman world had translated two of the introductory logical works (Categories and On Interpretation) together with Porphyryās introduction to them. This was practically all that was directly known for a long while; even Abelard in the twelfth century knew only the Prior Analytics in addition.
From roughly the mid-twelfth century to the mid-thirteenth century the works came into the Christian world, translated from the Arabic along with Arabic commentaries. They rapidly became the basis of philosophical education in the universities as well as the inspiration for philosophical development in Christian thought. But troubles arose with conservative religious authorities, who feared the impact of the scientific elements in Aristotelian thought. For that matter, Arabic religious influence had led to the condemnation of AverroÄs in the Arab world, and some material that the Arabic commentators had stressed came most into conflict with Christian dogmas. This situation was gradually ameliorated when the Greek texts became available after the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204; then fresh commentary on the text, taking issue with the Arabic versions, became possible. Even those who knew little or no Greek, like Thomas Aquinas, could have Latin translations made for themselves from the Greek. In any case, Aristotle triumphed and his works remained the basis for university education into the sixteenth century, in spite of critical attacks by Renaissance thinkers. This was not, however, a dogmatic Aristotelianism, as recent researches have shown, but a use of the works for setting problems and engaging in alternative interpretations.4 A school of careful commentary existed in Padua, whose outstanding representative was Zabarella (d. 1589). It is ironic that just when the intellectual world was probably best prepared for appreciating the Aristotelian works critically, it lost interest in them.
Classical scholars, however, never stopped burrowing. The nineteenth-century Berlin edition became in turn the basis for further advance. Textual emendations eventually filled the gaps left by slips of the pen in transcriptions over the ages, by uncertain Latin, by Syriac and Arabic translations, and evenāif we give momentary romantic credence to the cellar storyāby the nibbles of mice. The twentieth-century texts are a collective scholarly achievement of insight, patience, and devotion. For example, Joachim, in the preface to his revised text and commentary on On Coming-to-be and Passing-away, tells us of the patient line-by-line discussions in the meetings of the Oxford Aristotelian Society that By-water had founded: āThe study of Aristotle (we could not but feel) demanded our utmost efforts: no labor could be spared, no detail neglected, no difficulty slurred. We were engaged upon an enterprise arduous indeed and infinitely laborious, but emphatically and supremely worthwhile. It was as if we were privileged to spend those Monday evenings in close and intimate communion with the very spirit of original work.ā5 He points out that when he worked on his book in the second decade of the twentieth century, there existed no modern English editions of the Physics, On the Heavens, or Meteorology. And, of course, there was a gap between textual edition and English translation. It was not, however, to remain so for long. Out of the same group came the Oxford translations of Aristotleās works in twelve volumes. Later, in the United States, the Loeb Classical Library editions appeared, so that anyone in the English-speaking world today, with only a smattering of Greek, can correlate the original on the left-hand page with the English on the right. Even more, the last few decades have witnessed the novel phenomenon of a diversity of translations of some of the works. In the contemporary revival of Greek literature and philosophy in translation, Aristotle is not yet running second to Homer, but he is coming on apace.
Moreover, just as the ancient and medieval world heaped commentary on commentary, so the contemporary classical and philosophical scene is the setting for an almost exponential outpouring of articles and books. The diversity, often the conflict, of interpretation is striking. From small-scale disagreements over a passage or middle-sized variations in interpreting a chapter or even a whole work, to large-scale conflicts over the philosophy in its total pattern, it is as if the corpus were functioning as a Rorschach test to focus and bring out the beliefs and intellectual aspirations of the writers.
The reader may be tempted to ask whether all this expenditure of energy is worthwhile. Indeed, if the scene is so crowded and so variegated, why are we interposing another book between the reader and the corpus? For that matter, why does not philosophy simply tackle its problems afresh, using the latest available techniques, as science seems to do, rather than try to develop itself by studying its history? The answer involves two more questions. One is why there exists such an intense interest in the history of philosophy and in the analysis of individual, particularly central, figures. The second is how we are to explain the diversity of interpretation and assess the effects of different philosophical approaches on our current understanding of Aristotle.
The intense interest centers of course not only on Aristotle, but on Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Wittgenstein, among others. No doubt there are different grounds for interest in the different figures. Plato was the first philosopher in the western tradition to articulate the full range of philosophic problems, and he did it with passion. (One can sympathize with Alfred North Whiteheadās remark that all the rest of western philosophy is a footnote to Plato.) Aristotle gives us the first explicitly systematic philosophy and fashions the shape of traditional problems. Descartes is a turning point of vast significance. Kant is a colossus standing at the crossroads: nearly all the fields of previous philosophy converge in him, and he refashions the directions that they all take thereafter. Hegel unifies philosophical thought in a historical synthesis. Marx overturns a world. Wittgenstein bewitches a generation. And so on. The phenomenon we are considering is not the property of philosophy alone. Giants of literature, music, and art invite the same interest and stimulate the same attentionāwitness the obvious cases of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michelangelo. Scientists are no exception, as the increasing work on Newton, Galileo, Darwin, and others makes clear.
So pervasive an interest must have a profound basis. Is it itself a historical phenomenon? The founders of our country read the ancients as if they were contemporaries to argue or agree with, and the Bible, especially the Old Testament, as history from which current lessons or solutions to current problems were easily gleaned. After Hegel it is more likely that the ancients were read to learn how problems originated than to find possible answers. A decade or two ago there was a strong tendency to look on the past as gone and transcended and the present as utterly new with its own utterly novel problems; it became almost a defiant commonplace of the young that we cannot learn from the past. But the very fact of rapid change has turned attention to the understanding of change itself and added a historical dimension to the traditional search for the perennial in human life and thought. Accordingly, today we see a resurgence of historical consciousness. We are beginning to accept the lesson that to neglect the past is to rob ourselves of the knowledge and the sense of growth, of the development, the dynamics of change, the alternatives that are posed in events and ideas particularly at critical and turning points, and to leave ourselves provincially bound to the presuppositions that for historical reasons happen to be the ones in our current patterns. Science itself is the most recent field to learn this lesson, and the scientific study of the history of science is its latest product. Whatever the explanation, in the case of philosophy at least, the revival of the history of philosophy as a way of philosophizing, rather than as an archaic interest, has been striking in its scope and its results.
As to the second question, the problem of explaining the diversity of interpretation is part of the general question of the possibilities of historical truth. On the one hand there are the sheer objectivists, who believe that the historian simply tells us what happened and that the Aristotelian scholar as a master of the corpus simply tells us what Aristotle thought. From their perspective, diversity of interp...