Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis

David Roochnik

Description

In 1935 Edmund Husserl delivered his now famous lecture "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity," in which he argued that the "misguided rationalism" of modern Western science, dominated by the model of mathematical physics, can tell us nothing about the "meaning" of our lives. Today Husserl's conviction that the West faces a crisis is no longer an abstraction. With the ever-present threat of nuclear explosion, the degradation of the oceans, and the possibility that climate change will wreak havoc on civilization itself, people from all walks of life are wondering what has gone so terribly wrong and what remedies might be available.

In Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis, David Roochnik makes a lucid and powerful case that Aristotle offers a philosophical resource that even today can be of significant therapeutic value. Unlike the scientific revolutionaries of the seventeenth century, he insisted that both ordinary language and sense-perception play essential roles in the acquisition of knowledge. Centuries before Husserl, Aristotle was a phenomenologist who demanded that a successful theory remain faithful to human experience. His philosophy can thus provide precisely what modern European rationalism now so painfully lacks: an understanding and appreciation of the world in which human beings actually make their homes.
Acknowledgments
A Note to the Reader
Prologue
Introduction: Why Aristotle Matters

1. The Stars Are Eternal.

I.1: There are Only Three Dimensions.
I.2: Threeness Determines Wholeness.
I.3: There Are Four Elements.
I.4: Elements Naturally Move to Their Natural Place.
I.5: The Circle Is Perfect.
I.6: The Body Moving in Circular Orbit Is External.
I.7: History Is More or Less Bunk.
I.8: Religion Bears Witness to the Truth.

2. Nature is Purpose.

II.1: Teleology Is Good Science.
II.2: Intelligent Design Isn’t All Stupid.
II.3: Some Beings Are Natural; Others Are Not.
II.4: Form Is Nature More than Matter.
II.5: Form Is More Divine than Matter.
II.6: Nature is Hierarchical.
II.7: To Understand Nature, Study Its Best Examples.
II.8: The Finite Is Better than the Infinite.
II.9: Good Science Appreciates Things as They Are.

3. Being Is Good.

III.1: Metaphysics Is Onto-Theology.
III.2: There Are Substances Out There.
III.3: We Know a Substance When We See One.
III.4: God Is Alive and Good.
III.5: To Stand Firmly.

4. Truth Is Easy.

IV.1: If the Eye Were an Animal, Vision Would Be Its Soul.
IV.2: The World Is Nourishing.
IV.3: Perceiving Is Like Eating.
IV.4: We Are Wrong More Often than Not.
IV.5: Thinking IS Like Perceiving (Which Is Like Eating).
IV.6: We Can Say What We Think.
IV.7: We “Truth” the World.

5. The Theoretical Life Is Divine.

V.1: Life Is Meaningful.
V.2: Happiness Is Objective.
V.3: Good Life Comes from Good Habits.
V.4: Freedom Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be.
V.5: Moral Evaluation Requires Stories.
V.6: Smart Moral People Are Better than Dumb Moral People.
V.7: Lack-of-Leisure Is for the Sake of Leisure.
V.8: Theâria Is Not “Contemplation.”

6. Enough Is Enough.

VI.1: The Best City Needs the Best Life.
VI.2: The Practical Life Is Not the Best.
VI.3: Natural Slavery Is Justified.
VI.4: A Woman’s Place Is in the Home.
VI.5: Small, but Not Too Small, Is Beautiful.
VI.6: War Is for the Sake of Peace.
VI.7: Philosophy Cures.

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Philosophie antique
• Philosophy
• Ancient philosophy
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 13 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438445205
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUNY series in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Anthony Preus, editor

Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis
DAVID ROOCHNIK

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Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roochnik, David.
Retrieving Aristotle in an age of crisis / David Roochnik.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in ancient Greek philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4518-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-4519-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Aristotle. I. Title.
B485.R565 2012
185—dc23
2012005001
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to several generations of Boston University students who allowed me to think through Aristotle's writings with them. In particular, I would like to thank Nir Eisikovits, who, as a member of a seminar that took place more than a decade ago, helped me to understand better what it is I find so profoundly attractive in the Philosopher's thought.
I am grateful to the Humanities Center of Boston University for granting me a semester of research leave during which I wrote the first draft of this book. I am fortunate to have had two fine colleagues and friends who also doubled as chair of my department during the years of preparation it took to write this book: Charles Griswold and Dan Dahlstrom.
The University of Chicago Press generously allowed me to reprint a portion of my article “What is Theoria? Nicomachean Ethics , Book 10.7–8,” which appeared in Classical Philology (©2009 by the University of Chicago), as did the Review of Metaphysics for “Aristotle's Defense of the Theoretical Life: Comments on Politics VII” (2008).
Mr. I-Kai Jeng provided me with valuable editorial assistance and prepared the index for this book. Any mistakes that remain are surely my own.
A Note to the Reader
Like Aristotle, I begin many a sentence with “we.” This pronoun is meant to refer to the reader and myself. I use it on two occasions. First, I often discuss what I take to be experiences we all share. So, for example, we experience physical bodies as having three dimensions and time as being constituted by a past, present, and future. Second, sometimes “we” refers to us as residents of contemporary culture who hold certain views and general conceptions that have been taken for granted since the advent of the modern period (conceived as around 1600). So, for example, we know that the earth orbits the sun. My use of the pronoun may sometimes seem presumptuous. If so, the reader is invited to challenge it. Indeed, a goal of this book is precisely to make us wonder who “we” are.
The genius of Aristotle's thought is found in its comprehensiveness and its coherence. He thinks through the entire world from top (the stars) to bottom (the earth). As a result, no part of his work, no individual argument or theoretical bit, can be fully appreciated without an understanding of where it fits in the whole. For this reason, this book must, at least in summary fashion, address the entirety of his worldview. I urge readers to defer judgment on any particular item that is discussed until they are able to locate it within the context of the whole thought. As a guide to doing this, I will frequently point to later sections of the book by using the symbol (>). So, for example, to refer ahead to chapter 3, section 5, the reader will see (> III.5 ). To offer reminders of what has already been discussed, I will use the symbol (<).
As Aristotle scholars will quickly realize, I sometimes devote a short section to a topic that would require a long book to be fully addressed. To compensate for such brevity, in the endnotes I often cite scholarly works that offer accounts far more elaborate than my own. I also point the reader to background material and occasionally discuss textual points that are particularly controversial. It is not necessary, however, to turn to these endnotes in order to follow the book's argument. The body of the text can stand on its own, and a knowledge of Aristotelian scholarship is not required to understand it.
Unless otherwise noted, translations of Aristotle are my own. Included in the Bibliography are the Greek texts that were used as well as English translations that I have consulted. I have consistently rendered the titles of Aristotle's works into English, rather than into Latin. So, for example, instead of De Caelo I opt for On the Heavens . All spellings of Greek words are phonetical. The Greek η (êta) is rendered by “ê” and ω (omega) by “ô.” All lexical information comes from the Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon . Quotations are typically followed by a parenthesis containing the standard pagination and line numbering of the 1831 edition of Immanuel Bekker.
This book builds on and borrows its title from an earlier work, Retrieving the Ancients: An Introduction to Greek Philosophy (Blackwell, 2004). Even though its chapter on Aristotle was but one of four, it became clear to me in writing it that the entire book was Aristotelian in spirit. The present book substantially elaborates much of what was asserted in chapter 4 of that work. As a result, there are a few pages of overlap between them, all of which are noted.
Prologue
While it took years of study to prepare to write this book, its immediate inspiration came from attending a performance of Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia . One scene in particular, the fifth in Act 2, convinced me to write it as I have (namely, as a polemic). It features Bernard, a scholar of romantic poetry who is doing some research on Lord Byron. In the ferocious speech that follows, he is responding to a comment made by Valentine, a biologist who is mathematically analyzing the fluctuations in the grouse population at his home, Sidley Park in England. He has just described Bernard's own research as “trivial.” Also on stage is Hannah, also a literary scholar but one with a greater commitment to historical accuracy than Bernard seems to have. They are antagonists throughout the play. Bernard wrote a scathing review of Hannah's best-selling biography of Lady Caroline Lamb and has just informed her that there was an error on the dust jacket of her book. (It contained a drawing of Byron and a woman falsely identified there as being Lamb.) In turn, Hannah sums up her views of Bernard's beloved romantic period by calling it a “sham”:
“It's what happened to the Enlightenment, isn't it? A century of intellectual rigor turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius” ( I.2 ).
Finally, there is Chloë, Valentine's sister, who is enamored of Bernard.
Bernard: Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars—big bangs, black holes—who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you pleased with yourselves?
Chloë: Are you against penicillin, Bernard?
Bernard: Don't feed the animals. ( Back to Valentine) I'd push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I'd lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.
Hannah: ( Loudly ) What the hell do you mean, the dust-jacket?
Bernard: ( Ignoring her ) If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? It is contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When Father Painted the Parlour?’ Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. ‘She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.’ There you are, he wrote it after coming home from a party. ( With offensive politeness .) What is it that you're doing with grouse, Valentine, I'd love to know?
( Valentine stands up and it is suddenly apparent that he is shaking and close to tears .)
Bernard “preferred” Aristotle's cosmos to the expanding universe of contemporary physics for, he says, “we were quite happy” with it. Of course, he is wrong, at least if his “we” refers to his companions, for neither Valentine nor Hannah shares his affection for the old philosopher's “fiftyfive crystal spheres.” 1 Nonetheless, he explains his preference to them when he declares, “If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate.” Apparently, Aristotle's cosmology somehow can teach us about ourselves, something the quarks and quasars of mathematical physics, which conned “us out of all that status,” cannot do.
Although Stoppard surely has sympathy for Bernard's views, it would be a mistake simply to attribute them to the playwright. For he makes it abundantly clear that Bernard is a foolish man. He has convinced himself that one Ezra Chater, a minor literary figure, was killed by Byron in a duel after the poet had seduced his wife, and this was why Byron left England for Lisbon