Aristotle was born in 384 BC at Stageira, a seaport on the coast of Thrace in the northern Greek dominion of Macedonian Kings. Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, the court physician to the Macedonian King Amyntas, died while Aristotle was young. At the age of 17 Aristotle went to Athens where he studied for 20 years in Plato’s Academy. When Plato died in 347 Speusippus took over as head of the Academy and Aristotle left to work with his friend Hermeas in Mysia. A short time later he became the personal tutor of Alexander, the son of Philip of Macedonia, until Alexander succeeded to the Macedonian throne in 336 and set off on his conquests to become Alexander the Great. Aristotle then returned to Athens to set up the Lyceum, his school and scientific research institute. Here he established his reputation as a popular and erudite scholar and peripatetic philosopher. When Alexander died in 323 Aristotle left Athens, driven out by anti-Macedonian feelings, to take refuge in Chalcis in Euboea. He died after complaining of a stomach ailment in 322.
Aristotle’s writings dominated the course of ancient and medieval philosophy and their influence remains strong, having had various kinds of impact on otherwise disparate branches of modern thought. Descartes established modern philosophy against the authority that Aristotle’s name had accrued during the medieval period; but this is the equivalent of a rhetorical flourish, for the principles of thought that Descartes outlines are those that Aristotle himself established in several treatises: that the desire for knowledge as an activity of the mind is accessible to all; that the activities of the mind constitute the life of human beings; and that the desire for truth constitutes the single genuine source of human happiness.
Of the works that Aristotle was known since ancient times to have written, about a third survives, and this in an edition prepared by the peripatetic philosopher Andronicus about two centuries after Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus had inherited his manuscripts. During this time, an ancient narrative reports, they had been hidden in a cave and eroded by the cumulative effects of worms and mould before ultimately finding their way to Andronicus in Rome. The Andronicus edition forms the basis of modern editions of Aristotle, which amounts, for instance, to 2383 pages in the revised Oxford translation but, as this includes some certainly spurious works, it would be fair to say that little more than about 2000 modern pages of Aristotle’s writings exist from an estimated original 6000. The most important source, outside the extant writings, for Aristotle’s life and works remains Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, who lists the equivalent of 550 books. Most of the topics covered by these books are represented at least in part by the extant writings, so they can be regarded as representative of the extraordinary range of Aristotle’s interests. Scholars generally observe a discrepancy between the style of these writings and existing reports of Aristotle’s wonderful erudition as a popular speaker. All the writings in the Andronicus edition share the same severe and technical concision, totally lacking in both charm and rhetorical ornamentation, often without even the courtesy of clear transitional passages between statements or sections. Some scholars have been led to interpret this lack of rhetorical tact as a sign that these writings are lecture notes, prepared and revised over many years for the purposes of rigorous philosophical exposition and for advanced students, members of the Lyceum’s inner circle. The popular material, reserved for more public evening discussions, must have survived in Athens for a few years after Aristotle’s death but has since been lost to time.
Aristotle’s writings fall into three distinct categories, which represent what he considered to be the general structure of human knowledge, as follows: the theoretical writings (including metaphysics, mathematics, logic and natural science); the practical writings (on ethics and politics); and the writings on productive arts (including art, music, literature and rhetoric). While these categories remain distinct the relations and interactions between them are always of paramount importance, as seen especially clearly in the Ethics, which establishes a ground for human action in a network that connects episteme (science), praxis (action) and poiesis (production) in such a way as to keep them mutually distinct and yet inseparable in practice.
Some of Aristotle’s most significant works include those that more or less found the natural sciences, especially the Historia Animalia, or “Researches on Animals,” in which Aristotle painstakingly describes and organises his in depth physical understanding of every known animal in Greece, starting with anthropos (Man). The exhaustive descriptions demonstrate that Aristotle must have spent many years on this project, covering both his Athenian periods and his time in Macedonia while tutoring Alexander. The work is factual and descriptive, and it embodies a classification system that relies as much on analogical relations between, say, hoof and nail, as it does on detailed empirical observation. He divides the parts of animals up according to the functions they perform. While one or two serious, even risible, errors stand out (the bison’s defensive strategy of propelling corrosive excretions at speed from its behind), the extraordinary wealth of technically correct and thorough detail, some of which received modern scientific corroboration only late in the nineteenth century, justifies Aristotle’s reputation as by any standards an extraordinary natural scientist.
In this he differs from his own teacher Plato, whose writings demonstrate a theoretical inclination to abstraction, ideally untainted by what he distinguishes from and subordinates to philosophy as its empirical and its rhetorical shadows: Plato recommends scepticism towards any kind of knowledge grounded in the vagaries of sensible perception, belief, opinion or rhetoric, including arguments of the Sophists, whose rhetorical brilliance allowed them to make persuasive cases independently of their truth or falsity, as well as poets, such as Homer, whose literary brilliance threatened to mystify and seduce their credulous audiences. It has never been possible to reconstruct a chronology of Aristotle’s works and thereby to reconstruct any sense of his intellectual development, for the Andronicus edition contains many un-specifiable cross references, additions and interpolations that render such an ordering at best speculative and provisional. Nonetheless, his alignment with aspects of Plato’s philosophical project as well as his explicit objections to aspects of Platonic doctrine can be consistently traced, and Aristotle’s emphasis on empirical research would be an important part of this.
Aristotle inherited during his time as a member of Plato’s academy the sense of a quest for the unification of all branches of knowledge and thus for what we now refer to as a metaphysics, the name (meaning “after the Physics”) that the Andronicus edition gives to Aristotle’s book on general philosophical principles. The Metaphysics examines the possibilities of thought thinking itself and it offers a technical consideration of beings qua being, thus anticipating modern philosophy’s rediscovery of fundamental ontology, particularly in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, which takes Aristotle as its starting point. Furthermore, Aristotle’s contributions to the systematic development of a science of logic, in the Prior and the Posterior Analytics and the Topics help to bring this project about by establishing the logical structure of knowledge and its conditions of possibility. The Prior Analytics, for instance, details the conditions according to which one can reason from general premises to conclusions (the syllogism as the form for a deduction) or from particular cases to general knowledge (reasoning from particulars, or induction).
The Prior Analytics also outlines, with typical brevity, the logical form now known as abduction, which allows reasoning about issues where neither the existence of general principles nor the pertinence of particular cases would be adequate for knowledge, such as, in Aristotle’s example, the concept of justice (a virtue). In cases like this Aristotle recommends reasoning by analogical abduction (literally “leading away”), which would mean borrowing logical forms from other domains and producing communicable arguments by analogy, that is, by the substitution of one problem for another: “For example, let A stand for what can be taught, B stand for scientific knowledge, and C for justice. It is obvious that scientific knowledge can be taught; but it is not certain that virtue is a kind of scientific knowledge. If, therefore, BC is as convincing as AC, or more so, it is an abduction; for we are closer to scientific understanding having taken something extra, where previously we did not have scientific understanding of AC.” On this example, then, we might understand justice by analogy with the way we understand a scientifically verifiable state of affairs, thus suggesting a convincing way of teaching virtue. Indeed, in the sections on justice in the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle borrows the example of economic exchange to demonstrate how one might imagine the ideal conditions for social justice. Once we observe that the conditions in question are presented by Aristotle as grounded already in a kind of analogy, then we understand the importance of analogy as a fundamental condition for his whole system, unifying the differentiated domains in exemplary ways.
Analogy plays a key role when Aristotle takes explicit exception to Plato concerning the fundamentals of philosophy: the ontological basis of reality and the epistemological conditions for human experience of it. Plato’s doctrine of forms proposes a hierarchy according to which the abstract universals, the forms or ideas of all particular things, take precedence over the particulars, their impoverished empirical copies. So, for instance, the eternal idea of a table precedes the in principle infinite reproduction of it in actual finite copies. Plato’s quest is for an axiomatic as in Euclid’s geometry, which derives its truths from a few simple axioms; in the same way the totality of human knowledge would be derived from a few primary truths. Aristotle, on the contrary, takes the analogical relation itself as primary, thus accepting the mutual independence of all beings and all domains of theoretical, practical or productive knowledge, but at the same time affirming their implicit connection “universally and by analogy.”
If the weighting of Aristotle’s extant writings emphasises his work in theoretical knowledge, then this does not overshadow the force and the influence of his works on practical and productive knowledge. In the sphere of practical knowledge, the Nichomachean Ethics remains one of the most celebrated books in all philosophy and The Politics is required reading for all students of political science. The two books are closely related. In the former Aristotle teaches that the highest end toward which all human activity can be directed is eudaimonia, which implies a habituated moral condition analogous to wisdom, an intellectual condition produced by philosophical contemplation. One attains eudaimonia, the “good life,” by developing intellectual virtues, such that by the habitual application of reason (which is partly technical) one achieves through praxis (activity) a state much like sophia, or wisdom (which is theoretical). This would ensure a stable emotional as well as intellectual state of the soul. Several crucial analogical relations are thus implied. First, moral virtue implies finding a relative mean between extremes of excess and deficiency. Finding such a mean requires a kind of expertise in analogy with the productive arts like medicine. But while the productive arts have ends outside themselves (a doctor practices medicine for the health of his patient), praxis is in itself its own end. Secondly, virtuous acts are distinguished from intellectual virtues by the fact that they require conscious choice, while intellectual virtues concern truth and falsity. So praxis can be understood in terms of affirmation and negation in analogy with truth and falsity. The difference between sophia (which concerns the truth) and praxis (which concerns decision) can be mediated by analogies with pure science, expert production, and various kinds of reasoning, making praxis teachable by analogy, as the Nichomachean Ethics demonstrates by example.
For Aristotle ethics and politics are closely related because politics concerns the government of a society in which men can develop their full potential. In The Politics Aristotle focuses on the possibilities of good government and what can go wrong with it. The best kind of government, he argues, would be one that took into account the interests of all its citizens. Three possibilities emerge, as follows: a single benevolent ruler; rule by a small responsible aristocracy; or a kind of constitution that involved representatives of each citizen in office. Each possibility, however, is at threat from its corresponding perversion: monarchy can become tyranny; aristocracy might always (and in fact often does) become oligarchy; and well organized constitutions tend to degenerate into mere democracies, or as Aristotle puts it, tyrannies by the majority. Aristotle’s practical if provisional solution, as ever in the quest for analogical middle terms, is to square the interests of the tyrannous oligarchic elements (the rich few) with the tyrannous democratic elements (the many in favour of freedom) and to strike a pact that would maximise the otherwise antagonistic claims of wealth and freedom, thus deriving the best form of government from existing conditions rather than attempting to apply a Platonic idea.
The final works in Aristotle’s corpus, as represented in the Andronicus edition, are the works concerning productive knowledge: The Rhetoric and, in fragment only, The Poetics. The Rhetoric, which on the surface provides thorough classical instruction for making persuasive arguments, is of crucial importance in the contexts of philosophy generally and of Aristotle’s thought in particular. The history of rhetoric in ancient Greece is intrinsically related to the struggle for truth, a struggle in which the claims to truth, through logic or analytics, are set against the implications of rhetoric, which suggests a relativity of points of view in place of true premises. The struggle reaches its height in Plato’s philosophy, which maintains a strict division between antithetical couples like the true and the probable, science and opinion, the universal and the particular, and philosophy and literature. Aristotle treats rhetoric not only as an art, a techne, but also as having a foundation in logic, which reveals a condition that lies between the values of truth and opinion and that in Aristotle’s hands promises to reconcile this previously antithetical pair.
If The Rhetoric has been rediscovered late in the twentieth century after relative neglect during the modern period, the existing fragment of The Poetics has been the continuous subject of voluminous commentary and dispute since the middle ages. Poetics, according to Aristotle, belongs to the genus of mimesis, or imitation. He distinguishes between kinds of art according to the manner in which an art imitates: the arts that imitate by means of colour and shape (painting and sculpture, for instance) do so in spatial extension; those that imitate by voice and music produce their effects through temporal succession. Mimesis, along with one or two other crucial terms, is never properly defined in the existing fragment of The Poetics. But the standard translation, “imitation,” often leads to paradoxical formulations. What art imitates—or reproduces—according to Aristotle, are actions (praxis), emotions, virtues, and states of mind. In this he takes explicit exception, once again, to Plato, who argues that poets are trespassers in domains reserved for justice and truth, imitating only sensible experience, the impoverished shadow of true reality. The Poetics in its entirety would have provided a typology of the whole of literature but the fragment that remains deals only with tragedy. If tragedy arouses fear and pity in its audience, Aristotle argues, then this arousal functions as a kind of purgation or catharsis. Aristotle never explains the term and this has, as a result, been the focus of much dispute. A full treatment of the term catharsis is promised in The Politics, during a discussion of the powers of music: “Music should be studied, not for the sake of one, but of many benefits, that is to say, with a view to education, or with a view to catharsis (the word catharsis we use at present without explanation, but when hereafter we speak of poetry, we will treat the subject with more precision).” Perhaps the more precise discussion occurs in the lost second book of The Poetics. Nevertheless, the Aristotelian notions of mimesis and catharsis are still key terms in literary theory.
Courses in literary criticism often begin with The Poetics, but the relevance of Aristotle’s philosophy for modern literary theory lies less in the one existing fragment that he devoted to literature than in the continuing relevance of his attempt to both distinguish and establish connections between philosophical, practical and poetic ends without privileging one over another, and for the location of irreducibly rhetorical and figurative elements in philosophical discourse. During the 1950s and 1960s critics like Wayne C. Booth, R. S. Crane and Walter Sutton reproduced the Aristotelian attitude in their attacks on the a priori assumptions of formalist criticism and the values associated with the critic’s assumed impersonal and objective viewpoint, establishing instead a “rhetoric of literature” that observes the effectiveness of a text’s address. Meanwhile Martin Heidegger’s continuing subterranean influence on literary theory has its roots in the discovery by the young Heidegger of Franz Brentano’s “On the Several Senses of Being According to Aristotle,” which paved the way for Heidegger’s Being and Time. The so called analogy of being (which had more or less defined the basis of scholastic metaphysics) returns consistently to inform Heidegger’s later works, including the seminal “Origin of the Artwork,” which claims for literature its role as the ultimate house of being.
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Citation: Phillips, John. "Aristotle". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 January 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=149, accessed 16 October 2024.]
