A Critical History of Greek Philosophy by W. T. Stace (short story to read txt) 📖

that, in some sense, he must be a great personality. He cannot be an insignificant person. He cannot be a nonentity. Be he good or bad, he must be conceived in the grand manner. Milton's Satan is not good, but he is great, and would be a fit subject for a tragedy. The soundness of Aristotle's thought here is very noteworthy. What is mean and sordid can never form the basis of tragedy. Modern newspapers have done their best to debauch this word tragedy. Some wretched noteless human being is crushed to death by a train, and the newspapers head their paragraph "Fearful Tragedy at Peckham Rye." Now such an incident may be sad, it may be dreadful, it may be horrible, but it is not tragic. Tragedy no doubt deals with suffering. But there is nothing great and ennobling about this suffering, and tragedy is concerned with the sufferings of greatness. In the same way, Aristotle does not mean that the comic {331} hero is necessarily a wicked man, but that he is, on the whole, a poor creature, an insignificant being. He may be very worthy, but there is something low and ignoble about him which makes us laugh.

Tragedy brings about a purification of the soul through pity and terror. Mean, sordid, or dreadful things do not ennoble us. But the representation of truly great and tragic sufferings arouses in the beholder pity and terror which purge his spirit, and render it serene and pure. This is the thought of a great and penetrating critic. The theory of certain scholars, based upon etymological grounds, that it means that the soul is purged, not through, but of pity and terror, that by means of a diarrhoea of these unpleasant emotions we get rid of them and are left happy, is the thought of men whose scholarship may be great, but whose understanding of art is limited. Such a theory would reduce Aristotle's great and illuminating criticism to the meaningless babble of a philistine.

7. Critical Estimate of Aristotle's Philosophy.

It is not necessary to spend so much time upon criticising Aristotle as we spent upon doing the same for Plato, and that for two reasons. In the first place, Plato with his obvious greatness abounded in defects which had to be pointed out, whereas we have but little adverse criticism for Aristotle. Secondly, Aristotle's main defect is a dualism almost identical with that of Plato, and what has been said of the one need only be shortly applied to the other.

At bottom Aristotle's philosophy is the same as Plato's, with some of the main defects and crudities removed. Plato was the founder of the philosophy of the Idea. {332} But in his hands, idealism was clogged with unessentials, and overgrown with excrescences. His crude theory of the soul as a thing mechanically forced in and out of the body, his doctrines of reincarnation and recollection, the belief that this thing the soul can travel to some place far away where it will see those things the Ideas, and above all, what is the root of all these, the confusion between reality and existence, with its consequent degradation of the universal to a mere particular--these were the unessentials with which Plato connected his essential idealism. To take the pure theory of Ideas--albeit not under that name--to purge it of these encumbrances and to cast them upon the rubbish heap, to cleanse Plato's gold of its dross, this was the task of Aristotle. Thought, the universal, the Idea, form--call it what you will--this is the ultimate reality, the foundation of the world, the absolute prius of all things. So thought both Plato and Aristotle. But whereas Plato began to draw mental pictures of the universal, to imagine that it existed apart in a world of its own, and so might be experienced by the vision of the wandering soul, Aristotle saw that this was to treat thought as if it were a thing, to turn it into a mere particular again. He saw that the universal, though it is the real, has no existence in a world of its own, but only in this world, only as a formative principle of particular things. This is the key-note of his philosophy. Aristotle registers, therefore, an enormous advance upon Plato. His system is the perfected and completed Greek idealism. It is the highest point reached in the philosophy of Greece. The flower of all previous thought, the essence and pure distillation of the Greek philosophic spirit, the gathering {333} up of all that is good in his predecessors and the rejection of all that is faulty and worthless--such is the philosophy of Aristotle. It was not possible for the Greek spirit to advance further. Further development could be only decay. And so, in fact, it turned out to be.

Aristotle deserves, too, the credit of having produced the only philosophy of evolution which the world has ever seen, with the exception of that of Hegel; and Hegel was enabled to found a newer theory of evolution only by following largely in the footsteps of Aristotle. This was perhaps Aristotle's most original contribution to thought. Yet the factors of the problem, though not its solution, he took from his predecessors. The problem of becoming had tortured Greek thought from the earliest ages. The philosophy of Heracleitus, in which it was most prominent, had failed to solve it. Heracleitus and his successors racked their brains to discover how becoming could be possible. But even if they had solved this minor problem, the greater question still remained in the background, what does this becoming mean? Becoming for them was only meaningless change. It was not development. The world-process was an endless stream of futile and purposeless events, "a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Aristotle not merely asked himself how becoming is possible. He showed that becoming has a meaning, that it signifies something, that the world-process is a rationally ordered development towards a rational end.

But, though Aristotle's philosophy is the highest presentation of the truth in ancient times, it cannot be accepted as anything final and faultless. Doubtless no philosophy can ever attain to finality. Let us apply our {334} two-fold test. Does his principle explain the world, and does it explain itself? First, does it explain the world? The cause of Plato's failure here was the dualism in his system between sense and thought, between matter and the Ideas. It was impossible to derive the world from the Ideas, because they were absolutely separated from the world. The gulf was so great that it could never be bridged. Matter and Idea lay apart, and could never be brought together. Now Aristotle saw this dualism in Plato, and attempted to surmount it. The universal and the particular, he said, do not thus lie apart, in different worlds. The Idea is not a thing here, and matter a thing there, so that these two incommensurables have to be somehow mechanically and violently forced together to form a world. Universal and particular, matter and form, are inseparable. The connexion between them is not mechanical, but organic. The dualism of Plato is thus admitted and refuted. But is it really surmounted? The answer must be in the negative. It is not enough by a tour de force to bring matter and form together, to assert that they are inseparable, while they remain all the time, in principle, separate entities. If the Absolute is form, matter ought to be deduced from form, shown to be merely a projection and manifestation of it. It must be shown that form not only moulds matter but produces it. If we assert that the one primal reality is form, then clearly we must prove that all else in the world, including matter, arises out of that prime being. Either matter arises out of form or it does not. If it does, this arising must be exhibited. If it does not, then form is not the sole ultimate reality, for matter is equally an ultimate, underivative, {335} primordial substance. In that case, we thus have two equally real ultimate beings, each underived from the other, existing side by side from all eternity. This is dualism, and this is the defect of Aristotle. Not only does he not derive matter from form, but he obviously sees no necessity for doing so. He would probably have protested against any attempt to do so, for, when he identifies the formal, final, and efficient causes with each other, leaving out the material cause, this is equivalent to an assertion that matter cannot be reduced to form. Thus his dualism is deliberate and persistent. The world, says Aristotle, is composed of matter and form. Where does this matter come from? As it does not, in his system, arise out of form, we can only conclude that its being is wholly in itself, i.e., that it is a substance, an absolute reality. And this is utterly inconsistent with Aristotle's assertion that it is in itself nothing but a mere potentiality. Thus, in the last resort, this dualism of sense and thought, of matter and Idea, of unlimited and limiting, which runs, "the little rift within the lute," through all Greek philosophy, is not resolved. The world is not explained, because it is not derived from a single principle. If form be the Absolute, the whole world must flow out of it. In Aristotle's system, it does not.

Secondly, is the principle of form self-explanatory? Here, again, we must answer negatively. Most of what was said of Plato under this head applies equally to Aristotle. Plato asserted that the Absolute is reason, and it was therefore incumbent on him to show that his account of reason was truly rational. He failed to do so. Aristotle asserts the same thing, for form is only {336} another word for reason. Hence he must show us that this form is a rational principle, and this means that he must show us that it is necessary. But he fails to do so. How is form a necessary and self-determining principle? Why should there be such a principle as form? We cannot see any necessity. It is a mere fact. It is nothing but an ultimate mystery. It is so, and that is an end of it. But why it should be so, we cannot see. Nor can we see why there should be any of the particular kinds of form that there are. To explain this, Aristotle ought to have shown that the forms constitute a systematic unity, that they can be deduced one from another, just as we saw that Plato ought to have deduced all the Ideas from one another. Thus Aristotle asserts that the form of plants is nutrition, of animals sensation, and that the one passes into the other. But even if this assertion be true, it is a mere fact. He ought not merely to have asserted this, but to have deduced sensation from nutrition. Instead of being content to allege that, as a fact, nutrition passes into sensation, he ought to have shown that it must pass into sensation, that the passage from one to the other is a logical necessity. Otherwise, we cannot see the reason why this change occurs. That is to say, the change is not explained.

Consider the effects of this omission upon the theory of evolution. We are told that the world-process moves towards an end, and that this end is the self-realization of reason, and that it is proximately attained in man, because man is a reasoning being. So far this is quite intelligible. But this implies that each step in evolution is higher than the last because it approaches nearer to {337} the end of the world-process. And as that end is the realization of reason, this is equivalent to saying that each step is higher than the last because it is more