Aristotle was born in Stagira, a small Greek town on the coast of the Chalcidice peninsula in the northern Aegean, close to the Macedonian kingdom. His father was court physician to Amyntas III of Macedon. He studied with Plato in Athens from 367 to 348 BC, then moved to the court of Hermias of Atarneus, in the Troad, another pupil of Plato, one of whose relatives became Aristotle’s wife. After a period in Lesbos, Aristotle joined Philip of Macedon’s court as tutor to Alexander in 342. After Philip’s death in 335 he returned to Athens and stayed there until Alexander’s death in 323 when the anti-Macedonian reaction forced him to withdraw to Chalcis, the Euboean city from which his mother had come.
Aristotle was thus exposed both socially and intellectually to contradictory influences. Socially, he belonged to the Greek polis in the last generation of its struggle to retain autonomy—a limited local autonomy in the case of Stagira, the claim of a fading imperial power in the case of Athens—but at the same time he had firsthand experience of living in the new form of society which was to succeed the polis. Intellectually, his father was part of the empiricist tradition of Greek medicine with its emphasis on careful reporting and observation as the only basis for accurate prediction of the likely future course of a disease, while his teacher Plato believed that the visible world was merely an imperfect reflection of a reality which could be apprehended only intellectually, and thought it the right and duty of the philosopher to reason out the correct course for humankind and society and then—if only he could—impose his prescriptions on his fellow-citizens.
This second source of tension in Aristotle’s life, between opposing epistemologies, was much more productive than the first. It led him firmly to assert the intellectual satisfactions, as well as the practical utility, of studying apparently low forms of animal life and engaging in the messy activity of dissection (Lloyd 1968), and to extend the methods of research developed in medicine to the whole field of biology; it also led him to reflect systematically on logic and processes of reasoning, both human and animal. The characteristics which humans shared with animals, instead of being seen in a negative way as inescapable defects (mortality) of a ‘lower nature’ which had to be subdued, became a basis for understanding, a transformation with particularly far-reaching implications for psychology. At the same time the principles of argument which had been being worked out piecemeal in law courts, assembly debates, medical practitioners’ disputes and treatises (see Lloyd 1979), mathematical proofs and philosophical dialectic were drawn together in a systematic way which helped to establish methodology or ‘second-order thinking, thinking about thinking’ (Elkana 1981) as a problem in its own right. Aristotelian logic eliminated many of the sophistic puzzles that had perplexed earlier philosophers, extended the idea of ‘proof’ from mathematics to other areas of scientific and philosophical thought, and even, by implication, anticipated modern concern with the relation between logic and language. Aristotle’s comprehensive interests and systematic organization of research provided the first foundations for the idea of a university as a place where students are taught how to extend knowledge in all its branches. Discussion and criticism of earlier views was part of the method.
In principle, Aristotle’s procedure of taking earlier opinions, particularly those of Plato, and criticizing them on the basis of observation, coupled with his experience of the Macedonian court, might have produced important transformations in political theory. In practice it hardly did so; Aristotle’s political and social thought remained enclosed within the frame of the city-state. His view that chremastiké, the art of money-making, was morally wrong prevented him from developing an understanding of the growing importance of trade and commodity production in the economy, and in general his empirical attitude tended to lead to a confusion between the statistically normal and the normative. Since domination of males over females, parents over children and masters over slaves was so widespread, it must be right. Belief in the superiority of Greeks over barbarians led Aristotle to assert that some ethnic groups are naturally fit only for slavery, a view which had a long career in the service of racism, though Aristotle himself thought of culturally rather than physically transmitted qualities. The view that the family, observable in animals as well as humans, is the basic form of society had already been put forward by Plato in the Laws (earlier Greek thinkers had pictured primitive human society as a herd rather than a family: Cole 1967). Aristotle took it up and extended it, producing the model of development from family to gens and from gens to phratry, tribe and city which was to have such an important influence on anthropological kinship theory in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Possibly the growing importance of private life in fourth-century Greece, particularly for those not directly involved in politics, helped to make this view of kinship ties as the basic bonds of society attractive (see Humphreys 1983a, 1983b).
The fact that Aristotle lived an essentially ‘private’ life (whatever his relations with the ruling Macedonian elite may have been) is also responsible for his marked interest in the study of friendship, which plays a large part in his Ethics. Friends were the philosopher’s reference-group, the people who assured him that the philosophical life was indeed the best life; Aristotle’s discussion of friendship supplied the basis for the stoic idea of the ‘cosmopolitan’ community of wise men. At the same time Aristotle’s relations with the Macedonians had given him plenty of experience of patronage and friendship between unequals: his acute remarks here were to prove useful to later Hellenistic philosophers grappling with the problems of royal power and patronage.
There is no doubt that Aristotle was a shrewd observer of human behaviour. He firmly rejected the Socratic view that virtue is knowledge, on the grounds that people often know what they should do but fail to do it; what we call virtues are consistent patterns of behaviour, though conscious thought must also enter into them. How the habit of virtuous behaviour is to be inculcated Aristotle does not really tell us. He accepted social conflict as inevitable; rich and poor have opposed interests and the best way to achieve stability in society is to have a large middle class of intermediate wealth who will hold the balance between them. This emphasis of the middle class as the key element in society is part of his more general belief that virtue and right action is a mean between two extremes, an adaptation of the Delphic maxim méden agan, ‘nothing to excess’.
Medical theory helped Aristotle fit a much more liberal attitude than Plato’s towards the arts into this framework. Though care must be exercised in choosing music and stories for children, adults can benefit from having their emotions stirred by music and tragedy because this purges them of excess emotion. In an important book, Jones (1962) has argued that Aristotle’s remarks on tragedy have been misunderstood in the European tradition and, when correctly interpreted, can throw light on the difference between Greek conceptions of the person and of action and those of the modern western world.
In a sense Aristotle seems to be a consolidator rather than an innovator, a systematizer and synthesizer of ideas originally raised by others. Nevertheless, the new fields of research he opened up, his contributions to methodology and scientific terminology, and the intelligence of his criticisms of earlier views and proposed solutions to philosophical problems make him a founding figure in many branches of research. The works which survive were written for teaching purposes rather than for the general public: their inelegant, rather jerky style gives an attractive impression of an unpretentious thinker who faced difficulties and objections to his own views honestly.
S.C.Humphreys
University of Michigan
References
Cole, T. (1967) Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology, Cleveland, OH.
Elkana, Y. (1981) ‘A programmatic attempt at an anthropology of knowledge’, in E.Mendelssohn and Y.Elkana (eds) Sciences and Cultures 5.
Humphreys, S.C. (1983a) ‘The family in classical Athens’, in S.C.Humphreys, The Family, Women and Death, London.
——(1983b) ‘Fustel de Coulanges and the Greek “genos”’, Sociologia del diritto 9.
Jones, H.J. (1962) Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, London.
Lloyd, G.E.R. (1968) Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his Thought, Cambridge, UK.
——(1979) Magic, Science and Religion, Cambridge, UK.
Further reading
Guthrie, W.K.C. (1981) History of Greek Philosophy, VI. Aristotle: An Encounter, Cambridge, UK.
Wood, E. and Wood, N. (1978) Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Social Context, Oxford.
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