Aristotle and the Irrational - T. Gould

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Aristotle and the IrrationalAuthor(s): Thomas GouldSource: Arion, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer, 1963), pp. 55-74Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162836 .Accessed: 20/09/2014 03:31

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ARISTOTLE AND THE IRRATIONAL

Thomas Gould

1 N ONE OF A SERIES OF LECTURES which Gilbert Murray deUvered in New York in 1912 he said:

Anyone who turns from the great writers of classical Athens, say Sophocles or Aristotle, to those of the Christian era must be conscious of a great difference in tone. There is a change in the whole relation of the writer to the world about him. The new qua?ty is not specifically Christian: it is just as marked in the Gnostics and Mithras-worshippers as in the Gospels and the Apocalypse, in JuUan and Plotinus as in Gregory and Jerome. It is hard to describe. It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism; a loss of seff-confidence, of hope in this life and a faith in normal human effort; a despair of patient inquiry, a cry for infaUible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a con

version of the soul of God. It is an atmosphere in which the aim of the good man is not so much to Uve justly, to help the society to which he belongs and enjoy the esteem of his fellow creatures; but rather, by means of a burning faith, by contempt for the world and its standards, by ecstasy, suf

fering, and martyrdom, to be granted pardon for his un

speakable unworthiness, his immeasurable sins. There is an

intensifying of certain spiritual emotions; an increase of sen sitiveness, a failure of nerve.

[Five Stages of Greek Religion ( 1925), p. 155] 'The failure of nerve' is, I suppose, originally a schoolboy's taunt.

When it is appUed by Murray to a whole civiUzation, however, to ourselves, that is, at a critical moment in our past, the phrase takes on surprising dignity and seems full of meaning. Indeed, in the years since 1912, in the dark days when it appeared as though irrationaUty were finally taking over, that our civiUzation had lost, once and for all, the strength and courage to face Ufe with rea son and sanity, many a writer on both sides of the Atlantic found himself reaching for Murray's phrase once again. But what ex actly does the "failure of nerve" imply when it is used of the slow, steady dissipation of rationaUty in the third and second centuries

B.C.? Just why did men?even men among the intel?gentsia, the writers of books, setters of opinions, and leaders of society?turn progressively away from rationaUty: away, that is, from the per ception that it is not only possible, but all-important to figure things out as well as one could? Why did they seem almost to

want to forget that we must work continuously to see through silUness, prejudice, and irrational passion, and to ask ourselves

what aU of the alternatives might be, the probable consequences


56 ARISTOTLE AND THE IRRATIONAL

of each, the standards of evidence and verification, and so on? How are we to

explain the fact that men were more and more

frequently overcome with the feeUng that it was somehow sinful even to try to Uve rationaUy, that one must worship power, and

take nameless, mindless fears and feelings of guilt to be the ulti mate truths?

Murray's explanation for that failure of nerve was more or less

orthodox. After the collapse of the city state, at the establish ment, that is, of Alexander's empire, men could no longer orient

themselves from their city walls, he argued. PoUtical power was so far away that the ordinary citizen could no longer hope to affect poUcies by argument or action; and distant decisions af fected his own life, as often as not, only in economic uncertain

ties, wars against peoples with whom he had no quarrel, or sud den, inexpUcable uprootings and dispossessions. The old gods of the city were exposed for what they were: empty and unable to

protect or comfort. Then, as a result of Alexander's efforts to unite

Greek and oriental civiUzations, the men of the West began to taste the bittersweet wines of the East?those personal and emo

tional cults which are the chief export of Mesopotamia and the Levant?and they drank ever more greedily and deeply.

There is surely much truth in this analysis, but there are some holes in it as well. For one thing, Chaldean astrology, magic, cults of personal salvation, rites of purification through ecstasy, and other phenomena from Asia and Africa were well known to

the Greeks even before the great age of Pericles. What one wants is more insight into the spiritual decay which allowed these mar

ginal ways of approaching Ufe finally to triumph. Economic and poUtical explanations are not sufficient. For another thing, the centuries immediately following the conquests of Alexander were

marked, not merely by these new allegiances to dark powers, but also by an ever more widespread devotion to a rather f ooUsh kind of rationaUsm. Murray tended to exaggerate the sentimental and religious sides of the Stoics and Epicureans. Taken all in all, thev

were, in one sense of the word, more rational than Plato and

Aristotle. For while the classical philosophers assumed that only the gifted few could really live the life of reason?that the rest

would have to borrow the necessary intelUgence from the laws and from the wisdom of their betters?the Stoics and Epicureans offered systems which made the rational Ufe available almost im

mediately even to the most Umited person, man or woman, em

peror or slave. One feels that there was indeed a failure of some

sort in the generation which saw the triumph of Macedonia, the death of Aristotle, and the foundation of the Stoics and Epicu reans; but just what happened then, and why it took so long to show its full effect, is far from clear.

Sooner or later someone was bound to offer a Freudian inter


Thomas Gould 57

pretation for this failure of nerve. It was offered, in fact, by Mur ray's successor at Oxford, E. R. Dodds, in a series of lectures

which he deUvered in California in 1949. These lectures, which he dedicated to Murray, were called The Greeks and the Irra tional.1 Dodds traces with almost ghouUsh delight the slow spread of darkness: mysteries, occultism, alchemy, astrology, theurgy; belief in the evil eye and daemonic possession; terror at post

mortem punishment; the attribution of magical powers to certain

animals, plants, and precious stones; the adoration of a mediator who would intercede between the initiate and his god; the hungry look-out for a savior?all that weakened the world and made it

susceptible to the disease to which it eventually succumbed, Christianity. 'In all the sixteen centuries of existence still awaiting it' (in 200 B.C.) he says, 'the Hellenic world would produce no

poet as good as Theocritus, no scientist as good as Eratosthenes, no mathematician as good as Archimedes, and

. . . the one great name in philosophy would represent a point of view believed to be extinct?transcendental Platonism. To understand the reason

for this long-drawn-out decline,' he says, 'is one of the major prob lems of world history' (p. 244). Then, after warning his audience

modestly that the study of men's attitudes toward their irrational experiences is only part of this larger problem, Dodds offers a suggestion meant really to explain the whole decline of Greek rationaUsm.

Dodds' phrase for this event is nowhere near as good as Mur

ray's. In fact, he borrows a phrase from Erich Fromm, of all people.2 It is 'the Fear of Freedom'. The idea which it repre sents is more interesting: it might be summed up in the more lurid phrase, 'The Revenge of the Id.' Dodds points out that the really startling thing about the schools of philosophy which took shape just after Aristotle's death is that they tended to deny the

very existence of the unconscious parts of the human mind,

especially those untamable and irrational energies of which the conscious personaUty can have only circumstantial evidence, but from which, unbeknownst to itself, it really draws all its fires. This forgetfulness or suppression by the Hellenistic philosophers could have been the thing which finally undid them, he argues, for, as Freud showed, rationality can be sustained by a man only so long as he remains alert to the signs of these volatile and brutish drives and admits

ownership to them as a part of his true self. If we ex amine the philosophies of the healthier period, Dodds points out,

we find a great contrast: they were in full possession of this vital insight. Plato, for instance, spoke of a monster in us all, whose

1 Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951. 2 Escape from Freedom (New York, 1941). See Dodds p. 252. The

Freudian theory implied in the lecture which Dodds calls "The Fear of Freedom," bears little enough resemblance to the mixture of

Marxism and Romanticism in Fromm's book.



bestial and unholy appetites we are aware of reaUy only when we are asleep; elsewhere he spoke of a terrifying black horse which the driver of the soul can never hope entirely to understand or subdue. Freud's term for this unconscious energy is the 'it,' 'das

Es' or, as it is usually translated in EngUsh (with an added sinis ter sound not in Freud's German) the id. He too pictures it in one passage as a horse,3 although in his version we each ride our horse rather than drive it from our chariot: the id, he says, is the aUen brute which suppUes its rider with speed and energy, but is capable also of throwing him and trampling him to death if its power is forgotten for a minute. As the desires of the id are un conscious, not only their nature but their very existence must be inferred indirectly from dreams, sUps of tongue, thoughtless be

havior, and so on; and indeed, it was not until our own time that a really tnistworthy technique was devised for unmasking and examining this under-Ufe. But the founders of psychoanalysis

were always eager to point out that the great men of classical antiquity too?Sophocles, Euripides and Plato above all?were vividly and continuously aware of this counter-self. Indeed, sug gests Dodds, if these ancients had not had this amazing self knowledge, their brilUant rationalism could not have lasted for a day.

Now it is a cardinal tenet of psychoanalytic theory that you cannot reaUy reason with the id; in order to Uve a rational Ufe you must allow the monster some sort of satisfaction in aU its

wants, in your dreams, fantasies, day-dreams, and a thousand otherwise inexpUcable rituals, large and small, pubUc and private, conscious and unconscious, all through your Ufe. If you refuse altogether to recognize its demands?a thing which you can do only by deUberately withdrawing your attention from the evi dence for its existence?it will simply take over: hysteria, insanity, paralysis, despair, uncontroUable obsessions?its revenge has many forms. For the id, it seems, harbors two strident and dictatorial drives, both of which, unless heavily disguised, are utterly ab horrent to the conscious self: it has a Umitless appetite for camal gratification, and a will to destroy?to destroy something outside itself if it is aUowed the chance, to destroy itself if it is not. It is incapable of responding directly to reason, because it knows no law outside itself, not even the laws of cause and effect. Nor does it have so much as a sense of time. UnUke our conscious selves it never rests, night or day. We can relax in sleep, notice, only by inventing dreams which fool the id, making it think that it is getting what it wants. (Luckily it does not know the difference between an image and a fact. ) But we must fool ourselves at the same time. If the disguise becomes too thin, allowing our con scious selves to

recognize what the monster reaUy wants, we wake

3 New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Tr. W. J. H. Sprott (London, 1957), p. 102.


Thomas Gould 59

up instantly, in a cold sweat. And if a man is not allowed to sleep at all, or even to day-dream, for several days and nights in a row, a

collapse of the conscious Will follows with horrible inevita

biUty?as certain governments in the East have discovered to their deUght. The id takes over and rational judgement is no longer possible. But in fact, we all lay ourselves open to this kind of catastrophe whenever we fail to keep alert to the signs of the clamoring beast within ourselves, whenever we deny its exist ence or underestimate its power. Consider then, Dodds suggests, if our whole civiUzation did not make precisely this mistake

beginning somewhere about the end of the fourth century B.C. Are not the phenomena of the following centuries classic symp toms of the revenge of the id? We denied altogether the existence of the irrational within us, and so eventuaUy we were deprived of the strength to Uve the Ufe of free, rational individuals.

This thesis is controversial, of course (to say the least!). But it deserves very careful consideration. Now the basic theory is not the chief difficulty, I think. Indeed, Dodds has chosen one of the

most successful of Freud's ideas. In fact, since the triumph of psychoanalysis in the 1920's, many forms of hysterical breakdowns have all but disappeared among the educated. We are too aware of our unconscious now to let things get to that state: we sUp into various boring neuroses instead. In other words, Freud's

theory about the revenge of the id has been verified by the fact that it has effected a change in the phenomena. Not that HoUy

wood has heard about this yet, to be sure. They continue to show us "Freudian" thrillers where hysterical paralysis is inevitably explained as the result of childhood "traumas," and the Uke. But

we are actually beyond that now, thanks to Freud himself. Con

sider this one item: shell-shock, the complete collapse of the

personaUty under stress, so common in the First World War, was

virtually unknown in the Second World War. Nor does the trouble Ue in the assumption that what an indi

vidual may suffer, a whole civiUzation may suffer also. That is an idea which has proved brilUantly illuminating, from Plato's Re

public to Freud's Totem and Taboo. Rather, what we must do now, in the wake of Dodd's suggestion, is to re-examine antiquity itself, and see how far the idea may need to be modified if it is to explain the facts. Dodds seems to be mainly right about the Stoics, for instance, that they denied the existence of an incor rigibly irrational element within the human psyche, but it ap pears that the Stoics were by no means unanimous in this assump tion, as he admits. And Dodds seems to be right only in a very queer sense when he Usts Aristotle along with Plato as one of those of the great healthy period of rationaUsm who had a deep respect for the unquenchable power of the irrational.

This is a point of considerable interest, because if Aristotle



really was the last to respect the id, then we will still be able to assume that the fatal mistake coincided with the traditional date for the end of classical Greece?the beginning of the "Hellenistic" period, the generation, that is, which was just getting under way when Aristotle died. If, on the other hand, Aristotle turns out to have denied the reality of the irrational, then we must look for the error farther back, at least as far as the period of Aristotle's youth and Plato's old age, and perhaps farther back yet, to the heyday of classical Athens.

Did Aristotle accept the existence of the id or not? It would seem that one would only have to look at the texts and find out. It is not so simple, however. If you collect together all of Aristotle's remarks on madness, melancholy, ritual cures, dreams, tragic

pleasures and wild music; his visions of god and cosmic beauty, individual failure and poUtical stupidity; his analyses of action

under stress, anger, drunkenness or sexual passion; his acceptance of war, evil rhetoric, slavery, poetry and upsetting melodies; to

say nothing of his detailed theories of mutilations and monstrous

births?you find that he is almost always acute, sensitive and intelUgent about this factor of reality. One comes away from

Jeanne Croissant's Aristote et les Myst?res (Li?ge, 1932) with the feeUng that Aristotle was deeply impressed with the ubiquity of irrationaUty in the world?in contrast to his master Plato, who lashed out with rage or spat with disgust at people who could not obUterate irrationaUty from their Uves.

On the other hand, if you collect Aristotle's careful analyses of the

metaphysical status of necessity, chance, luck, and human

emotions; and even more when you look at his treatment of nature

and causation in general, you cannot but be struck by the dis

covery that Aristotle simply leaves no place for truly irrational motion in Plato's

sense?absolutely undirected energy, energy

working toward no genuine good whatever. All motion in the universe, according to Aristotle, is actually rational in the strict sense of the word?aimed

unerringly at some real advantage however often conflicts between such aims may result in failure, waste, or tragedy in this or that part of the sublunary world. That is, a lamb headed straight for all that a lamb should be

might get in the way of a wolf headed straight for all that a wolf should be. The result will be unfortunate from the shepherd's point of view (to say nothing of the lamb's). But there is nothing irrational here, it is all expUcable by the identification of the several genuine goods being pursued, the perfection of lambhood and the perfection of wolfhood. And anyhow, in the universe

as a

whole, the death of a lamb is an inconceivably trivial event. As for the so-called irrational passions within men's psyches, they are

irrational, not in the sense that they are aimless, but in the sense

that their tendencies are simple and unambiguous?like the wolf's,


Thomas Gould 61

or like a rock when it hurtles toward the center of the universe, or

like a tree as it grows ever closer to a perfect specimen of its kind. When Aristotle zeroes in on the most basic of all of his differences from Plato, it is precisely this feature which he hits on: whereas Plato had thought that there must be a source of unpredictable, undirected, unanalysable energy in the universe

preventing the visible world from attaining perfection, he, Aris totle, saw for the first time that one needed no such hypothesis.

And surely this squares well with our general impressions of both Plato and Aristotle. When Aristotle discusses irrational phenomena, it is always to show that they

are not really irra

tional, that there is no true difference between these and rational phenomena. And when Plato tells us that all irrationality is bad by definition, it is because he has a healthy respect for its undying power, and understands the impossibiUty of reconciling it with true

rationality. It is Plato, not Aristotle, who has given us so

many unforgettable pictures of the undersides of our psychic energy. In the Republic, as I mentioned before, he speaks elo quently of the id in his vision of the many-headed monster which comes aUve at night in the dreams even of some apparently good and happy men, and in the Phaedrus he Ukens the id to an ugly, vicious black horse quite capable of wrecking the chariot of our soul. The desires of this black horse are an obscene parody of our reasonable aims; but it is a permanent part of us, Plato argues, so

we had just better get used to it and learn how to render as harm less as possible its hideous tendencies and appetites. In the world as a whole, too, Plato says, there is a similar wild and essentially

unpredictable energy, which he calls Necessity or Chance?tend encies which even the designer of the universe could not reduce

entirely to his plans. Look around you: you see that things are

tending toward perfect patterns everywhere?toward strength, beauty, and splendor?whether you think of horses, trees or men, or indeed powers, colors, orders, dimensions, excellences of every sort; but you also see that all of the horses, all of the trees, and all of the men are maimed in one way or another, and pure water exists no more than pure blue or the purely equal. Confusion,

waste and unhappiness reign to a greater or lesser degree abso

lutely everywhere, with the possible exception of the outer heavens. If there is energy toward perfect patterns, then, there is also another kind of energy?energy toward no goals whatever, planless motion, "wandering" as Plato says, incapable of being harnassed entirely for the purposes of intelligence. Plato was

against the id. (If intelligence is the best possible move toward genuine well-being, how could one defend wnintelUgence?) But to be against the irrational is hardly the same as to fail to under stand it.

One can read many, many pages in Aristotle, on the other hand, and find, really, very little appreciation of the irrationaUty of



irrational phenomena. The element of Necessity which so haunted Plato's would-be cosmos is defined out of existence by Aristotle. It has two main senses: the inevitable push of a piece of matter toward the perfection of some species, or the unwanted interrup tion in such a process caused by the interference from another

piece of matter on the way toward its perfection (as in the case of the lamb and the wolf.)4 Or, of course, you can speak of Necessity in a "hypothetical" sense: if the lamb is to reach the full glory of its species, it will need to find in its pasturage the foUowing proportions of the various species of crude elements, and so on.5 But Necessity as a source of unruly motion, a fountain head of failure, ugUness, and corruption, he specificaUy denies.6 As for Chance, that is not a real cause either, it is just what we say when two or more purposive processes yield as an incidental side effect an event which some person or natural tendency might have aimed at, although none did. In reaUty, all motion and process in the whole of the universe is purposive, however true it may also be that the criss-cross of various processes down here beneath the moon never aUows any single being to reach absolute per fection, even for a minute. After all, in addition to the rather

wasteful interactions between individual plants and animals (not too wasteful, though, Aristotle thought) there is also an inevitable frustration resulting from the fact that higher patterns of perfec tion?complex organisms like men?are realized, not by pure matter

directly, but by matter already pre-formed by more elementary patterns: flesh, grain, water, and so on. Even here, however, nature acts Uke a

marvelously economical housewife, Aristotle

points out,7 often utiUzing the apparently waste materials with wonderful ingenuity.

The patterns of perfection being striven for by matter are reduced by Aristotle to the species of plants and animals, and their parts, also the various kinds of crude elements (these are distinguished by the place in the universe at which they would come to rest?their tendencies toward the center or the periph ery), and finally, the patterns which men are driven to super impose on their surroundings, artifacts, buildings, poUtical or

ganizations, health, speeches, plays, and so on. In addition, each of the heavenly spheres has a beauty which is being realized in its

perfect circular motion, and the universe as a whole is moved

round and round by desire for the most beautiful of all things,

4 See, e.g. Eudemian Ethics II 1224 a 15 ff. and b 10 ff., also Posterior Analytics II 95 a 1 ff., and De partibus animalium I 639 b 25 ff.

5 See especiaUy Physics II ch. 9, and cf. Augustine Mansion, Intro

duction ? la Physique Aristot?licienne2 (Paris, 1946) 282-289. 6 Metaphysics e ch. 9, Cf. ch. 10, N ch. 4, and Physics I ch. 9. Cf.

De anima III 430 b 22. 7 De generatione animalium II744 b 16 ff.


Thomas Gould 63

God. Now Aristotle claims that if you could discern all of these patterns, from the lowliest to the most august, you would have a

complete explanation for every single thing that happens in the whole universe. This is because the only other thing in nature, matter, has neither resistance nor any independent energy of its own, only love and desire for the perfection of these patterns, nothing else. As he puts it in the clearest of the several passages (Physics I, ch. 9) where he contrasts his analysis of nature with the one which he learned from his teacher, while Plato thought that matter simultaneously cooperated with and frustrated the realization of the patterns, Aristotle saw that matter was motivated

only by desire for these patterns. What failure there was could all be traced to the effect of mutually exclusive patterns pulling the same substratum. And the frustrations are trivial, Aristotle thought, in comparison with the glorious order of the whole (Metaphysics A ch. 10).

All of this, all that I have said so far about Aristotle's vision of the universe, is reasonably clear and for the most part, quite uncontroversial?it is all there in Aristotle's writings, and accurate analyses wiU be found in any decent study of Aristotle's system. And yet you will also find it said, in handbook after handbook, monograph after monograph, that there are really two processes at work (sometimes in cooperation, sometimes at cross-purposes) in all natural events?that in addition to the pull of the perfect

patterns you also have other tendencies latent in matter itself.8 Now it is true that when Aristotle describes individual events, especially the coming-into-being of an individual specimen of some species of plant or animal, he does, quite often, speak of irregularity or resistance in the stuff itself, preventing it from

becoming a perfect example of its kind;9 but in the passages where he broadens his scope and discusses with rigid precision the true nature of aU of the factors involved in a natural event,

Aristotle leaves no possible explanation for this apparent resist

8 E.g. Eduard ZeUer, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics, tr. by

B. F. C. CosteUoe and J. H. Muirhead (London, 1897) I 355, ff. and 465, ff.; J. L. Stocks, Aristolelianism (London, 1925) 45-57; L?on Robin, Aristote (Paris, 1944) 15&-158; Mansion, op. cit. 289-90; H. H. Joachim, Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford, 1951) 184; D. J. Allan, The Philosophy of Aristotle (Oxford, 1952) 47-8;

Friedrich Solmsen, Aristotle's System of the Physical World (Ithaca, 1960) 104-5. The only exceptions seem to be the discussions of

Physics I ch. 9 and the like which merely accept Aristotle's analysis of matter without questioning whether or not he was always consistent, e.g. W. D. Ross' edition of the Physics, and Harold Cherniss, Aristotle's Criticism of Plato and the Academy (Baltimore, 1944) 90. 9

E.g. De partibus animalium I 642 a 1, ff. where there are said to be two causes, Necessity (identified later as the Material cause) and Final Causation. C.f. also De generatione et corruptione II 336 b 20-24. See the passages cited by Mansion, op. cit. 289, notes 28-30.



ance of matter but that the other patterns which were already pulling the matter at

a more elementary level?the patterns identi

fied as crude elements, tissues, organs, and so on?were not pull ing the matter into just those realizations which would be re

quired if the new, unifying pattern were to be perfectly reaUzed. What we must remember is that there simply is no such thing as

entirely unpatterned matter?one makes a house, not out of

matter, but out of wood or bricks. If we tried to build a house out of water, we would discover, not that matter as such resisted

us, but that the tendency of this bit of matter to flow and evap orate?to behave, that is, according to the pattern of water

would preclude the construction of a foundation or a wall. If Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings are turning brown, that is not

because matter has a tendency to undo his designs, but because the particular matter which Leonardo chose tended toward pat terns which were incompatible with his higher plans for them.

The very same thing happens in conception and digestion, Aris totle suggests. The only difference really is that in the appropria tion of matter for natural constructions, the specifications about the structure of the raw materials are dictated with a preciseness beyond the wildest nightmares of an artist or artisan (cf. De anima 1403 b 11-14).

Now, how can we explain the persistence of this erroneous

notion that Aristotle believed matter as such to be the cause of failure in the realization of the patterns striven for in nature and art? Well, for one thing, we can certainly blame Aristotle's own

careless writing; in particular, he does not always take the pains

to make quite clear just how he means the words "matter" or "irrational." But then Aristotle is never a very considerate writer.

Indeed, he regularly asks a great deal of his readers, namely that

they keep the whole of his immensely complex analysis of reaUty vividly before them at all times. But there is a much more impor tant reason for this almost universal

misunderstanding, and that is

the gross improbabiUty of Aristotle's idea itself?the very sugges tion itself that the whole world could be shown to be really flawlessly rational if we but looked closely enough. We look around us and we see that nature, Uke ourselves, does indeed seem to strive for patterns; and we reaUze that if it were not for these patterns we should be unable to make any sense of

our

perceptions of separate experiences and make predictions which will be vaUd for the future; but we also see, as Plato taught us to do, that these patterns are never actually reaUzed. We have to

perceive with our minds, not our eyes, where things are tending, for our eyes give us only an infinite sequence of unique percep tions?similarities but no identities among our experiences in this

perpetual flux. Surely, we say, this points clearly to some kind of an irreducible brutishness and irrationaUty in the very stuff of the

world: how, we ask, could Aristotle possibly have avoided that


Thomas Gould 65

conclusion? In fact, we today are, in a way, as far as we well could be

from Aristotle's vision of a completely rational universe. It might be

argued that, on this question, we are closer to Plato than to Aristotle. For a sensible man, we feel, must be constantly aware

of the appalling aspects of our world as well as of the orderly aspects. Indeed this is what we mean by being "reaUstic." Our own Uves are full of ugliness and hardships, triviality, absurdity and

emptiness, and a man who does not see this, we say, is Uving in a dream. And as for nature with a

capital "N," well, how could that be anything but worse? If even a man's Ufe is usually, to use Hobbes' famous phrase, "solitary, nasty, brutish and short," how much less satisfying yet, we feel, must be the brief survival, say, of a hen, a rat, a weed, a piece of mud or a drop of Uquid?

We could not bring ourselves to take seriously any philosopher who denied that. Our vision of natural processes has been per fectly stated by Walt Disney in his films of wild-Ufe: some un beUevably hideous rodent, insect, or reptile is forever being shown eating an equally unedifying enemy in long, slow, ugly gulps.

Our sciences all tell the same tale: physics, medicine, psy chology, anthropology?all catalogue the weird array of unin telligent drives which we take to be the real world. In fact, we are always faintly embarrassed to find traces of intelligence, beauty or excellence, even within ourselves. Aristotle suggested that the

pull of rational goals on the mind of an intelligent man has an exact counterpart in the pull which the patterns of nature exert on

matter; we are far more struck by the thought that probably our conscious plans and rational designs are really no more meaning ful than the spin of the electrons of which our brains are made. If we do look for something in nature which mirrors our own souls, we find it quickly enough, but it is not the orderUness, it is the planless and destructive tendencies which we instantly recog nize as

counterparts to the stupidity, vulgarity, violence, and blind self-gratification which we know all about within ourselves. Now we notice, with some satisfaction, that Aristotle was a level headed chap, realistic and downright scientific in his spirit. Further, we notice that, far from denying the existence of the waste and failure everywhere which so impresses us, he spends many pages describing it, often in painful detail. And so we are

simply baffled and greatly disappointed when we come to the grossly inadequate metaphysical accounts which Aristotle gives of these brute tendencies. How, we ask, can one man describe nature so well and yet deny the existence of irrational energy altogether? And so, instead of taking a closer look at his descrip tion of natural drives, we tend to turn our backs on his meta

physics. We conclude that, despite Aristotle's odd failure to allow any real status to genuinely purposeless energy, when he came

actually to describe a human or natural event, he must have



slipped again and again into the inevitable Platonic assumption that matter as such, by a sluggishness and aimlessness of its own,

was the true author of all imperfection. "To what other source,

indeed," says Eduard Zeller,10 "could this be traced?" But the truth is that Aristotle apparently did not see it that

way. He tells us repeatedly and consistently that the source of violence or resistance in the realization of a pattern should be

traced, not to energy or sluggishness in the stuff of the world as such, but to other patterns also pulling the same piece of matter.11

And since rationaUty means action aimed accurately at a genuine

good?and all of these patterns are causes of motion precisely because they are good, the goals which motivate both men and nature?true irrationaUty, energy aimed at no genuine good, does not exist

anywhere in the universe, according to Aristotle. He

really did deny the reaUty of the irrational, the id, in all of nature and therefore, a fortiori, in man. The temptation is then very great to throw up our hands and assume that surely Aristotle could not have kept this clearly in mind throughout his meticulous in

vestigations of the whole of the universe; but let us resist that temptation and make instead as brave an effort as we can to

visuaUze what the world would look like to a man who denied the existence of irrationaUty.

Let us begin with the large, obvious things: storms, earth quakes, famines, diseases, wars, murder, the inevitabiUty of pain and death. Well, says Aristotle, you have to keep these things in

perspective: conflicts and failures of this sort, you will notice,

actually occur only in that fraction of the universe which is below the

sphere of the moon. Beyond, where rectilinear motion with its

inevitable stops and starts is totally unknown, all is beauty and

eternity. God turns the outermost sphere, he is in direct contact

only with that, and the farther you get away from him, the more confusion you must expect. But then, as in any well-run state or

household, the master must be in efficient command every minute

of the day and night, but the lowliest servants can be allowed to waste a good deal of their Uves just kilUng time (Metaphysics A ch. 10). And the system works remarkably well, really. The sun

moves north and south every year with a perfect rhythm; and this creates seasonal

changes, which in turn cause the patterns shaping

the cruder mixtures down here to survive eternally despite every

thing. That is, the parent, when the proper season arrives, stamps

its pattern on to a piece of matter?an oak onto its acorn, a man

onto his sperm?and separates it off from himself. The pattern,

then?what it is to be a full grown oak or what it is to be a full grown, happy man?pulls at the matter, utiUzing appropriate

new

matter from its environment, until maturity is reached and it is

10 Op. cit. 357. 11 The relevant passages are collected by Cherniss, loe. cit. (n. 8

above).


Thomas Gould 67

time to pass its pattern on again. In this manner, the eternal

survival of the species is guaranteed even if sooner or later some

thing inevitably destroys the pattern of each individual speci men (De generatione et corruptione II ch. 10). Indeed, so beau tifully arranged is the whole, that the variety of the species which are able to survive in this manner forms a perfect ladder or chain, from the lowest to the highest kind possible?none are left out (Historia animalium VIII 588 b 4-16, De partibus animalium IV

681a 12-16). So you see, when that wolf prevented the lamb from achieving the full splendor of what it is to be a sheep, nothing really very important happened.

As for nature's inevitable little errors every time it tries to

produce an individual specimen of some species, that too is not

really very hard to explain, Aristotle thought.12 Conception is precisely parallel to the creative process in the human arts, he points out: the pattern is realized by being superimposed, as it were, onto foreign matter, the matter being selected as already suitably formed on a more elemental level. Error obviously is

possible at either of two points; either the matter itself is not

suitably pre-formed (as in the case of the man trying to build a house out of water) or the active striving toward the new pattern is itself somehow distracted by other goals. Why is it, Aristotle

muses,13 that the young of wild animals look very like their par ents, but the young of human beings often do not? Could it be, he suggests, that animals concentrate when they copulate while

men's minds sometimes wander? It is the man, notice, who passes on the pattern; the woman's only job, Aristotle thought, was to

supply the original mixture of differently patterned matter (De generatione animalium I 729 a 11). Now if the man does his part well, if other goals do not divide his energy at the crucial mo ment, the foetus will be male and will strive, not only for the pattern "what it is to be a full-grown and happy man," but will strive also toward re-producing all of the little peculiarities which

made the father unique?the frustrating side-goals which drew the

father into baldness, irrascibility and so on. If the stamping of the pattern is not done well, however, various things may happen. Aristotle outlines and classifies these accidents in grisly detail. The most common, he says, and the most interesting monstrosity is the female (De generatione animalium IV 775 a 16). This

peculiar phenomenon he calls an ava-n-qpla ^vo-lkt] a "natural lame ness,"?"natural" because, although the woman is indeed a botched

attempt at realizing the pattern Man ( after all, male and female cannot be two species of the genus Man, because they do not each reproduce their own kind), nevertheless nature does utilize

12 Most of the relevant passages are collected by Mansion, op. cit.

114, ff. 13 Problemata X 10, written perhaps by one of Aristotle's students,

but entirely orthodox in its implications, I think.



this waste product in a most ingenious way in the process of try

ing again the next time around. And then another whole class of

monstrosities, giants, dwarfs, and the like, follow inevitably from conceptions in which the matter presented by the female is pre formed by patterns other than the most congenial ones. But in all fairness to nature, it must be said that it really does amazingly

well: look around you and you will see an astonishing number of really good attempts at reaUzing that intricate pattern known as

Manhood. In fact, Aristotle points out (Nicomachean Ethics II 1106 b 14-15), nature, which pursues its patterns without con sciousness or deliberation is

really much better than we human

beings are in that imitation and completion of nature we call art.14 But this brings us to the most crucial point of all in our project

to picture the world as harboring no truly irrational tendencies. How are we to account for all of these foolish lusts, passions, fears, hungers, and distracting emotions which are always leading you and me into stupid, ruinous decisions? If all of the activities in the whole universe are caused by the single-minded love of

matter for the perfection of these patterns, whether it be a stone falUng off a cliff, a plant unfurling its leaves, or a beast pursuing its prey, what in the name of heaven is a man doing when he finds it advisable to go against an involuntary or instinctive drive

within him? Is man, by reason of his intelUgence, the only irra tional thing in the universe? That would indeed be an odd conclu sion. But consider for a minute. It is a fact, after all, as Zuckerman

showed,15 that whereas rats never err in sexual matters (isolate them from birth, then put them together, a male with a female, and they will know exactly what to do), an ape, because of his superior intelUgence, has to be taught by his elders in these

matters. And as for human beings?the difficulties which they discover in trying to make sense of their sexual relations are all too well known.

"Congenital ignorance," concludes Aldous Hux

ley, is apparently "the condition of intelligence." But does that mean that the more intelUgent an animal is, the more Ukely it is

to make mistakes? Yes, in one sense, but that is really only because reason means the

abiUty to act in more than one way.16 And this

14 Protrepticus fr. 13, Physics II ch. 8, also 194 a 21-2, Politics VII

1337 a 2, Meteorol?gica Iv 381 b 6-7. 15 See Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts, vol. 17 in the Collected Works (London, 1949) 137 f.

16 Metaphysics 6 ch. 1-5, especially 2 and 5. As for Aristotle's

peculiar and very unsatisfactory attempts at avoiding absolute de terminism in nature (De interpretatione 19 a 6-b 4, Metaphysics E ch. 3 and K ch. 8, De generatione et corruptione II ch. 11, De partibus animalium + 640 a 8-10. Nicomachean Ethics III ch. 1-5 and I ch. 3), see Mansion, op. cit. 315-333, also H. Maier, Die Syllogistik des Aristoteles (T?bingen, 1896) I 83, ff., H. H. Joachim, Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford, 1955) 108-11, also 22-6, and W. L. Newman, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford, 1887) I 16-24.


Thomas Gould 69

in turn is a good thing to have, for it follows that there must be more than a single drive toward the reaUzation of the main pattern in question. For instance: the rock never errs in hurtUng toward the center of the earth (throw it upward ten thousand times,

Aristotle points out, and you will never even begin to pervert it from its true instincts [Nicomachean Ethics II ch. 1] ), but if it is one inch from the edge of a cliff it is powerless to further its course by moving over?it will continue to press downward with

tireless futility and move nowhere. Plants, on the other hand,

push aside dirt, correct for the slope of a hill, turn their leaves toward the sun?all sorts of things. But a plant is powerless to defend itself against a goat if one should choose to chew off all of its bark. The goat, by contrast, is well able to defend itself

against attacks from its enemies, say from a hungry fox?it can

fight or run away. But to stop chewing bark and to consider what

might be done to prepare for future fox raids is quite beyond the powers of the goat. Man, on the other hand, can do just that: lay aside his interest in present satisfaction and look ahead to remoter

contingencies. Thus to have intelligence, although it means that one makes ever so many more mistakes, also means that one has

the abiUty to perceive and pursue the perfection of a complex pattern with far greater precision than is open to the unintelligent.

But this still leaves unanswered the excruciating problem of the metaphysical status of those instincts and desires which the

prudent man must squelch or resist. In the battle between fear and reason, or between lust and reason, for instance, what is

really going on? Why, on Aristotle's analysis, are fear and lust, not just as rational as reason? We cannot allow him to make this one

exception in the whole universe. The desire to save our skin or to

experience pleasure must be just as rational-motivated, that is, by a genuine good?as the fall of that stone or the anger of that fox. Here is our ghastly paradox once again:

a rational deci sion when it vetoes a natural desire seems to be the one irrational

thing in the universe! But we have not caught Aristotle yet; he slips out of our net once more. All passions, he suggests,

are

indeed rational, in the strict sense, caused, that is, by the pull of genuine goods, but we are never in fact presented with one soli

tary drive within us which we must frustrate for our own higher benefit: we are invariably presented with two, mutually exclusive, passions of this sort, and the intelligent decision is to take that course between them which is aimed most economically toward the true realization of the pattern Man?toward our highest pos sible happiness, in other words. True, if a man is wanting in

perception and has been badly trained, he will have exercised one of the pair of conflicting passions to the point where it is far too strong for him to battle against; but there was theoretically a time in his Ufe when it was still possible for him to avoid this state of affairs (Nicomachean Ethics III ch. 5). The fact that a man



can eventually find himself with an incorrigible character, a state

where he can no longer feel clearly the pull of his truest good, is no more

surprising, Aristotle suggests, than is the case of the man who could have thrown a stone a minute ago but finds that that is no longer in his power now that he has dropped the stone out of his hand. However little we may be aware of the fact in daily life, especially after we have been corrupted by bad habits, the truth is that regrettable desires invariably pull on us in mutually exclusive pairs, and our most efficient course always lies between the two.

This infamous, much ridiculed theory of moral excellence as a

tendency to take the mean path between extremes is surely one of the hardest to explain of all of Aristotle's blunders. It cannot be accounted for, I think, except as a desperate attempt to solve an

incredibly difficult metaphysical problem?a problem resulting from his

attempt to explain away all real irrationaUty. True, Aristotle is marvellously ingenious in finding psychological argu ments to make the theory seem plausible. Even when he is forced

to say, for instance, that simultaneous with a desire to flee from

battle, we also invariably feel a desire to run head-long into fire (Nicomachean Ethics II ch. 7 and III ch. 6-9), he manages to touch upon something which may well be true. In addition, he finds that the theory fits tolerably well with some others of his ideas, and even with ideas latent in Plato's teachings.17 It remains a bizarre theory, however, and is indicative of the difficulty in herent in Aristotle's main program: to clear the universe of any

charge of harboring irrational impulses. In fact, there are quite a number of famous philosophical

puzzles, I would maintain, which can be solved only if we take seriously this insistence by Aristotle that true irrationality has no real existence. For

example, there is the curious fact that Ari

stotle, who did not have a poetic atom in his body, should have been the one to defend the rationality of poetry and tragic drama, whereas Plato, one of the great poets of all time, had found it necessary to lash out in terror at the power which poetry and tragedy could wield over men's minds.

Let us look at this strange development. Poets and dramatists, Plato pointed out, are imitators. That is, they show the outsides of things: how men walk, talk, show fear, delight, and so on.

What poets do not do is go, Uke philosophers, directly to the heart of things and explain what is really going on. But alas, says Plato, a clever poet can also seem so convincing in his imitations

that his audience, deeply moved, assumes that it must have un

derstood something marvellously profound. Not that either the poet or the audience could articulate the new insight in rational

language; but that discovery is only taken as proof of the Umi 17 Cf. Republic X 619 a ff., the Philebus passim, De anima II 424 a

2, ff., III426 a 27, ff., 431 a 11-20, Physics VII ch. 3.


Thomas Gould 71

tations of rational language. The literate man of Plato's time, like the literate man of our own time, felt that somehow there was

surely far more wisdom in great imaginative art than in rational

investigations. But this was a feeling which Plato wanted to fight. It is not only good poetry and drama, Plato pointed out, which sweeps men along and gives them this sense that they are getting extraordinary insights. Men find different things profound accord ing to the wisdom which they bring with them into the theater.

And what is worst of all, the real secret of the persuasiveness of tragedy is that its music and myth draw their compelling excite

ment entirely from the release which they give to the dangerous irrational tendencies dammed up within our psyches. The trouble

with learning from poetry, then, is that one has to be a philoso pher first before he can tell which poems are wise and which are not.

The judgment of history has gone against Plato in this matter, but not so much because his

analysis was unfeeling or unsound, I think, as because philosophy never again reached the standard for rational discourse which Plato set for it. On the other hand,

Aristotle's reputation in modern times has been immeasurably

enhanced by the odd chance that his metaphysics forced him to reinstate drama and poetry as rational and therefore good. Let us see how that worked.

In Aristotle's system, as I pointed out before, the only differ ence between human and non-human energy is that in the non

human world, the patterns are right there in the matter which

they are pulling?as the pattern of the full-grown oak must be there pulling the acorn from within?while in human actions the pattern is in some person's mind, drawing him on to reproduce the pat tern in matter which he finds lying at hand (Physics II ch. i). Indeed, when a doctor brings into being the pattern Health, not in another body, but in his own, his art is precisely like a natural

process. Now when a man is motivated by the belief that he should bring into being some pattern which he sees in his mind say a house, a speech,

a constitution or a play?how are we to

explain the appearance of that pattern in his mind? Did he invent it? Certainly not, says Aristotle, any more than a father invents the pattern Man in the act of conception (Metaphysics Z ch. 7-8). One of the advantages of Aristotle's system over Plato's, after all, is that all of the patterns which the mind perceives in nature and art may be assumed to exist at any given moment

embedded right there in matter, nowhere else, and yet to be permanent nevertheless, simply because they survive by eternal

propagation of their kind. Still, a house can hardly pass on its pattern to another house in exactly the same way in which a man

keeps his pattern going in his son. Presumably what happens is that a housebuilder see a house built by another man, compre hends the principle and the advantages, and is led to build a



house for himself (cf. De partibus animalium I 639 b 17, ff.). Or perhaps in backward times, he sees the requisite pattern im pUed in nature. (Think how much Greek architecture resembles a forest.) Aristotle did believe that the arts progressed and de cUned, that they found full realization in one generation and

were but dimly perceived in others;18 nevertheless, he insisted that no pattern can have been invented ex nihilo, either in nature or in human activities, or they would not be eternal and there fore not universals and objects of knowledge. Therefore the pat tern House, also the pattern Tragedy, must have existed forever,

passed on from one reaUzation to another (cf. Metaphysics ? 1047 a 2?of the art of housebuilding).

But tragic drama presented a very special problem, for two reasons. First, Aristotle was all too well aware that tragedies were a recent and local taste. Second, Plato had trained his biggest guns on tragedy and shown with horrible clarity how destruc tively irrational it could be. Thus Aristotle had to demonstrate, first, that the pattern which, when well reaUzed, was caUed Tragedy had really been around all the time, and, secondly, that it was as rational as any of the other activities and institutions in

which men habitually engaged themselves?that it was not an evil, in other words, but a good.

Aristotle's solution shows wit and cleverness. He picks up Plato's very words and makes them work for his theory. Plato said that drama was imitation. Very well, then, says Aristotle, that wiU

work admirably as a way to identify the eternal activity which is expressed in writing and attending dramas. Children, notice, do not have to be taught to imitate; it seems to be a natural need. Then if we assume that epic poetry is but a less effective mani festation of the same eternal pattern (Poetics 1459 a 5 ff.), we can trace a gradual progress in the perception as to how this pattern is best reaUzed. When men wrote epics in the dim past,

they were pursuing the pattern which moderns reaUze better in

plays, Aristotle suggests. But what is the good in this pattern, what is it that draws men to reproduce it as men are drawn to

reproduce the pattern House or Health? Plato directed our at tention to the manner in which drama rouses us to disturbing emotions of pity and fear (Republic X 606). Very well, then, let us take our cue from the way in which the arousal of violent emotions has a purifying effect in many an ecstatic ritual (cf. Politics VIII ch. 7). Why may we not assume that the arousal of pity and fear has just this effect on us in the theater? Finally Plato said that drama imitated the actions of men (ibid. 603) ; but we can answer that an imitation of an action can be selective,

highly reveaUng, and even philosophic in that it displays order and essential beauty?in other words, it completes the tendencies of

18 Politics VII 1329 b 24, ff., also II 1264 a 3, ff., Metaphysics A 1074 b 10, ff. and Laws III 676.


Thomas Gould 73

Nature and reveals the eternal patterns themselves! Now let us

prove our case by a careful examination of the most effective

plays, and voil?, we have reinstated poetry as a rational activity.

Poetry is rational?imagine being driven by your metaphysics to trying to prove that!

Well, there it is: the world as it looked to a man who denied the reality of genuine irrationaUty. If Aristotle had not also been a very great genius, the whole project would have been irritating, even monstrous. But I suppose we should be glad that somebody tried it. Or should we? According to Dodds' version of the

Freudian theory, it was precisely because our civiUzation once

tried to argue that the irrational did not exist, that irrationality finally took over and reigned for centuries. If Aristotle was the first to show how we might systematically ignore all evidence of the id, then, according to Dodds' argument, he may have been one of the chief authors of the downfall of ancient rationaUsm. Or was Aristotle just a child of his generation, as we say? Was he perhaps just the cleverest of many people who were thinking along those lines at that time? Still, the guilt would seem to be very great on the head of the first man to show just how the suppression of our awareness of true irrationality was consonant

with progress in every department of science and art. But what are we to make of this larger theory?that a whole

civiUzation loses its abiUty to hang on to reaUty whenever it suppresses all memory of the existence of the id? There is a new book inspired by Dodds as much as by Freud himself, which tries to explain the insanity of the French Revolution, coming as it did at die end of an age of reason and enlightenment, as an

example of the same phenomenon.19 Perhaps, then, this pattern? hard-won rationaUty, followed by super-rationaUty denying all irrationaUty, followed by the triumph of irrationality?is repeated at

many levels at the same time, within individual lives, nations,

generations, and whole civilizations. But let us not allow this

exciting discovery to cause us to over-simplify the facts. We must remember that the age of enlightenment was also the age of Blake and Swedenborg; the age of Freud cUmaxed in the Second

World War. And right in the heyday of ancient rationaUsm we find, not only Aristotle, but Socrates too, in a way, and perhaps also some of the Sophists, arguing the id right out of existence.

Dodds closes his lectures with the pious hope that we today, armed as we are with the new vision given us by psychoanalysis,

will never suffer so violent a withdrawal from reasonableness as our fathers did at the end of antiquity (op. cit. pp. 254-5). But this raises a doubt from another quarter. When we classify and explain our every irrational drive, are we not doing just what

19Brigid Brophy, Black Ship To Hell (London, 1962) 279, ff. and 359.



Aristotle did? Are we not saying that, in a sense, such drives are not

really irrational at all if they are understood correctly?20 In addition to

confessing our ownership to the id, then, something else is

required of us: we must contrast with it our rational selves and honor this above the id. What kind of a victory would you have over your irrationality if, like Aristotle, you just calmly ac

cepted it as no anomaly but an inevitable expression of the uni versal law of nature? Is our scientific investigation of irrationality, by making us doubt that there is such a thing as rationality, lead ing us once more to Aristotle's fatal error? The alternative, I sup

pose, is Plato's way: recognize that the truly irrational must always remain

essentially incomprehensible; accept circumstantial evi dence that it exists, that it is immortal, and that it is your enemy;

tap it cautiously in symbols and in song; and hate it with all the love of life which you have in you!

20 It is true that Freud was a convinced duaUst to his dying day, and that he often emphasized the fact that to be irrational meant to be

incomprehensible (e.g. the lecture cited above in note 3, especially pp. 98-99 ) ; but one meets this vivid awareness of what is meant to be truly irrational only very infrequently in his followers.


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Aristotle and the Irrational - T. Gould

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