Chapter II: Development From Platonism

Turning now from the man to the philosopher as we know him best in his extant writings (see _Aristoteles_, ed. Bekker, Berlin, 1831, the pages of which we use for our quotations), we find, instead of the general dialogues of Plato, special didactic treatises, and a fundamental difference of philosophy, so great as to have divided philosophers into opposite camps, and made Coleridge say that everybody is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Platonism is the doctrine that the individuals we call things only become, but a thing is always one universal form beyond many individuals, e.g. one good beyond seeming goods; and that without supernatural forms, which are models of individuals, there is nothing, no being, no knowing, no good. Aristotelianism is the contrary doctrine: a thing is always a separate individual, a _substance_ ([Greek: ousia]), natural such as earth or supernatural such as God; and without these individual substances, which have attributes and universals belonging to them, there is nothing, to be, to know, to be good. Philosophic differences are best felt by their practical effects: philosophically, Platonism is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism a philosophy of individual substances: practically, Plato makes us think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven, Aristotle of the natural and the whole world.

So diametrical a difference could not have arisen at once. For, though Aristotle was different from Plato, and brought with him from Stagira a Greek and Ionic but colonial origin, a medical descent and tendency, and a matter-of-fact worldly kind of character, nevertheless on coming to Athens as pupil of Plato he must have begun with his master's philosophy. What then in more detail was the philosophy which the pupil learnt from the master? When Aristotle at the age of eighteen came to Athens, Plato, at the age of sixty-two, had probably written all his dialogues except the _Laws_; and in the course of the remaining twenty years of his life and teaching, he expounded "the so-called unwritten dogmas" in his lectures on the Good. There was therefore a written Platonism for Aristotle to read, and an unwritten Platonism which he actually heard.

To begin with the written philosophy of the Dialogues. Individual so-called things neither are nor are not, but become: the real thing is always one universal form beyond the many individuals, e.g. the one beautiful beyond all beautiful individuals; and each form ([Greek: idea]) is a model which causes individuals by participation to become like, but not the same as, itself. Above all forms stands the form of the good, which is the cause of all other forms being, and through them of all individuals becoming. The creator, or the divine intellect, with a view to the form of the good, and taking all forms as models, creates in a receptacle ([Greek: hypodochae], Plato, _Timaeus_, 49 A) individual impressions which are called things but really change and become without attaining the permanence of being. Knowledge resides not in sense but in reason, which, on the suggestion of sensations of changing individuals, apprehends, or (to be precise) is reminded of, real universal forms, and, by first ascending from less to more general until it arrives at the form of good and then descending from this unconditional principle to the less general, becomes science and philosophy, using as its method the dialectic which gives and receives questions and answers between man and man. Happiness in this world consists proximately in virtue as a harmony between the three parts, rational, spirited and appetitive, of our souls, and ultimately in living according to the form of the good; but there is a far higher happiness, when the immortal soul, divesting itself of body and passions and senses, rises from earth to heaven and contemplates pure forms by pure reason. Such in brief is the Platonism of the written dialogues; where the main doctrine of forms is confessedly advanced never as a dogma but always as a hypothesis, in which there are difficulties, but without which Plato can explain neither being, nor truth nor goodness, because throughout he denies the being of individual things. In the unwritten lectures of his old age, he developed this formal into a mathematical metaphysics. In order to explain the unity and variety of the world, the one universal form and the many individuals, and how the one good is the main cause of everything, he placed as it were at the back of his own doctrine of forms a Pythagorean mathematical philosophy. He supposed that the one and the two, which is indeterminate, and is the great and little, are opposite principles or causes. Identifying the form of the good with the one, he supposed that the one, by combining with the indeterminate two, causes a plurality of forms, which like every combination of one and two are numbers but peculiar in being incommensurate with one another, so that each form is not a mathematical number ([Greek: mathaematikos arithmos]), but a formal number ([Greek: eidaetikos arithmos]). Further he supposed that in its turn each form, or formal number, is a limited one which, by combining again with the indeterminate two, causes a plurality of individuals. Hence finally he concluded that the good as the one combining with the indeterminate two is directly the cause of all forms as formal numbers, and indirectly through them all of the multitude of individuals in the world.

Aristotle knew Plato, was present at his lectures on the Good, wrote a report of them ([Greek: peri tagathou]), and described this latter philosophy of Plato in his _Metaphysics_. Modern critics, who were not present and knew neither, often accuse Aristotle of misrepresenting Plato. But Heracleides and Hestiacus, Speusippus and Xenocrates were also present and wrote similar reports. What is more, both Speusippus and Xenocrates founded their own philosophies on this very Pythagoreanism of Plato. Speusippus as president of the Academy from 347 to 339 taught that the one and the many are principles, while abolishing forms and reducing the good from cause to effect. Xenocrates as president from 339 onwards taught that the one and many are principles, only without distinguishing mathematical from formal numbers. Aristotle's critics hardly realize that for the rest of his life he had to live and to struggle with a formal and a mathematical Platonism, which exaggerated first universals and attributes and afterwards the quantitative attributes, one and many, into substantial things and real causes.

Aristotle had no sympathy with the unwritten dogmas of Plato. But with the written dialogues of Plato he always continued to agree almost as much as he disagreed. Like Plato, he believed in real universals, real essences, real causes; he believed in the unity of the universal, and in the immateriality of essences; he believed in the good, and that there is a good of the universe; he believed that God is a living being, eternal and best, who is a supernatural cause of the motions and changes of the natural world, and that essences and matter are also necessary causes; he believed in the divine intelligence and in the immortality of our intelligent souls; he believed in knowledge going from sense to reason, that science requires ascent to principles and is descent from principles, and that dialectic is useful to science; he believed in happiness involving virtue, and in moral virtue being a control of passions by reason, while the highest happiness is speculative wisdom. All these inspiring metaphysical and moral doctrines the pupil accepted from his master's dialogues, and throughout his life adhered to the general spirit of realism without materialism pervading the Platonic philosophy. But what he refused to believe with Plato was that reality is not here, but only above; and what he maintained against Plato was that it is both, and that universals and forms, one and many, the good, are real but not separate realities. This deep metaphysical divergence was the prime cause of the transition from Platonism to Aristotelianism.

_Fragmenta Aristotelis._--Aristotle's originality soon asserted itself in early writings, of which fragments have come down to us, and have been collected by Rose (see the Berlin edition of Aristotle's works, or more readily in the Teubner series, which we shall use for our quotations). Many, no doubt, are spurious; but some are genuine, and a few perhaps cited in Aristotle's extant works. Some are dialogues, others didactic works. A special interest attaches to the dialogues written after the manner of Plato but with Aristotle as principal interlocutor; and some of these, e.g. the [Greek: peri poiaeton] and the _Eudemus_, seem to have been published. It is not always certain which were dialogues, which didactic like Aristotle's later works; but by comparing those which were certainly dialogues with their companions in the list of Aristotle's books as given by Diogenes Laertius, we may conclude with Bernays that the books occurring first in that list were dialogues. Hence we may perhaps accept as genuine the following:--

1. Dialogues:--
[Greek: peri dikaiosunaes]: On justice.
[Greek: peri poiaeton]: On poets (perhaps cited in _Poetics_, 15,
1454 b 18, [Greek: en tois ekdekomenois logois]).
[Greek: peri philosophias]: On philosophy (perhaps cited in
_Physics_, ii. 2, 194 a 35-36).
[Greek: peri politikou]: A politician.
[Greek: peri rhaetorikaes hae Grullos]: On rhetoric.
[Greek: protreptikos]: An exhortation to philosophy (probably in
dialogue, because it is the model of Cicero's dialogue
_Hortensius_).
[Greek: Eudaemos hae peri Psuchaes]: On soul (perhaps cited in _De
Anima_, i. 4, 407 b 29, [Greek: kai tois en koino levomenois
logois]).

2. Didactic writings:--
(1) Metaphysical:--
[Greek: peri tagathou]: On the good (probably not a dialogue but a
report of Plato's lectures).
[Greek: peri ideon]: On forms.
(2) Political:--
[Greek: peri basileias]: On monarchy.
[Greek: Alexandros hae hyper apoikon]: On colonies.
(3) Rhetorical:--
[Greek: technaes taes theodektou sunagogae]: The _Theodectea_
(cited in the Preface to the _Rhetoric to Alexander_ (chap.
i.)), and as [Greek: ta theodekteia] in the _Rhetoric_ (iii. 9,
1410 b 2),
[Greek: technon sunagogae]: A historical collection of arts of
rhetoric.

Difficult as it is to determine when Aristotle wrote all these various works, some of them indicate their dates. Gryllus, celebrated in the dialogue on rhetoric, was Xenophon's son who fell at Mantineia in 362; and Eudemus of Cyprus, lamented in the dialogue on soul, died in Sicily in 352. These then were probably written before Plato died in 347; and so probably were most of the dialogues, precisely because they were imitations of the dialogues of Plato. Among the didactic writings, the [Greek: peri tagathou] would probably belong to the same time, because it was Aristotle's report of Plato's lectures. On the other hand, the two political works, if written for Alexander, would be after 343-342 when Philip made Aristotle his tutor. So probably were the rhetorical works, especially the _Theodectea_; since both politics and oratory were the subjects which the father wanted the tutor to teach his son, and, when Alexander came to Phaselis, he is said by Plutarch (_Alexander_, 17) to have decorated the statue of Theodectes in honour of his association with the man through Aristotle and philosophy. On the whole, then, it seems as if Aristotle began with dialogues during his second period under Plato, but gradually came to prefer writing didactic works, especially in the third period after Plato's death, and in connexion with Alexander.

These early writings show clearly how Aristotle came to depart from Plato. In the first place as regards style, though the Stagirite pupil Aristotle could never rival his Attic master in literary form, yet he did a signal service to philosophy in gradually passing from the vague generalities of the dialogue to the scientific precision of the didactic treatise. The philosophy of Plato is dialogue trying to become science; that of Aristotle science retaining traces of dialectic. Secondly as regards subject-matter, even in his early writings Aristotle tends to widen the scope of philosophic inquiry, so as not only to embrace metaphysics and politics, but also to encourage rhetoric and poetics, which Plato tended to discourage or limit. Thirdly as regards doctrines, the surpassing interest of these early writings is that they show the pupil partly agreeing, partly disagreeing, with his master. The _Eudemus_ and _Protrepticus_ are with Plato; the dialogues _on Philosophy_ and the treatise _on Forms_ are against Plato.

The _Eudemus_, on the soul (_Fragmenta_, 37 seq.), must have been in
style and thought the most Platonic of all the Aristotelian writings.
Plato's theory of the soul and its immortality was not the ordinary
Greek view derived from Homer, who regarded the body as the self, the
soul as a shade having a future state but an obscure existence, and
stamped that view on the hearts of his countrymen, and affected
Aristotle himself. After Homer there had come to Greece the new view
that the soul is more real than the body, that it is imprisoned in the
carcase as a prison-house, that it is capable of enjoying a happier
life freed from the body, and that it can transmigrate from body to
body. This strange, exotic, ascetic view was adopted by some
philosophers, and especially by the Pythagoreans, and so transmitted
to Plato. Aristotle in the _Eudemus_, written about 352, when he was
thirty-two, also believed in it. Accordingly, the soul of Eudemus,
when it left his body, is said to be returning home: the soul is made
subject to the casting of lots, and in coming from the other world to
this it is supposed to forget its former visions: but its disembodied
life is regarded as its natural life in a better world. The _Eudemus_
also contained a celebrated passage, preserved by Plutarch (_Consolat.
ad Apoll._.27; _Fragm._ 44). Here we can read the young Aristotle,
writing in the form of the dialogue like Plato, avoiding hiatus like
Isocrates, and justifying the praises accorded to his style by Cicero,
Quintilian and Dionysius. It shows how nearly the pupil could imitate
his master's dialogues, and still more how exactly he at first
embraced his master's doctrines. It makes Silenus, captured by Midas,
say that the best of all things is not to have been born, and the next
best, having been born, to die as soon as possible. Nothing could be
more like Plato's _Phaedo_, or more unlike Aristotle's later work _on
the Soul_, which entirely rejects transmigration and allows the next
life to sink into the background.

Hardly less Platonic is the _Protrepticus_ (_Fragm._ 50 seq.), an
exhortation to philosophy which, according to Zeno the Stoic, was
studied by his master Crates. It is an exhortation, whose point is
that the chief good is philosophy, the contemplation of the universe
by divine and immortal intellect. This is indeed a doctrine of
Platonic ethics from which Aristotle in his later days never swerved.
But in the _Protrepticus_ he goes on to say that seeming goods, such
as strength, size, beauty, honours, opinions, are mere illusion
([Greek: okiagraphia]), worthless and ridiculous, as we should know if
we had Lyncean eyes to compare them with the vision of the eternal.
This indifference to goods of body and estate is quite Platonic, but
is very different from Aristotle's later ethical doctrine that such
goods, though not the essence, are nevertheless necessary conditions
of happiness. Finally, in the spirit of Plato's _Phaedo_ and the
dialogue _Eudemus_, the _Protrepticus_ holds that the soul is bound to
the sentient members of the body as prisoners in Etruria are bound
face to face with corpses; whereas the later view of the _De Anima_ is
that the soul is the vital principle of the body and the body the
necessary organ of the soul.

Thus we find that at first, under the influence of his master,
Aristotle held somewhat ascetic views on soul and body and on goods of
body and estate, entirely opposed both in psychology and in ethics to
the moderate doctrines of his later writings. This perhaps is one
reason why Cicero, who had Aristotle's early writings, saw no
difference between the Academy and the Peripatetics (_Acad. Post_, i.
4, 17-18).

On the other hand, the dialogue _on Philosophy_ ([Greek: peri
philosophias], _Fragm._ 1 seq.) strikingly exhibits the origin of
Aristotle's divergence from Platonism, and that too in Plato's
lifetime. The young son of a doctor from the colonies proved too fond
of this world to stomach his Athenian master's philosophy of the
supernatural. Accordingly in this dialogue he attacked Plato's
fundamental position, both in its written and in its unwritten
presentment, as a hypothesis both of forms and of formal numbers.
First, he attacked the hypothesis of forms ([Greek: taen ton ideon
hypothesin], _Fragm._ 8), exclaiming in his dialogues, according to
Proclus, that he could not sympathize with the dogma even if it should
be thought that he was opposing it out of contentiousness; while
Plutarch says that his attacks on the forms by means of his exoteric
dialogues were thought by some persons more contentious than
philosophical, as presuming to disdain Plato's philosophy: so far was
he, says Plutarch, from following it. Secondly, in the same dialogue
(_Fragm._ 9), according to Syrianus, he disagreed with the hypothesis
of formal numbers ([Greek: tois eidaetikois arithmois]). If, wrote
Aristotle, the forms are another sort of number, not mathematical,
there would be no understanding of it. Lastly, in the same dialogue
(_Fragm._ 18 seq.) he revealed his emphasis on nature by contending
that the universe is uncreate and indestructible. According to Plato,
God caused the natural world to become: according to Aristotle it is
eternal. This eternity of the world became one of his characteristic
doctrines, and subsequently enabled him to explain how essences can be
eternal without being separate from this world which is also eternal
(cf. _Metaph._ [Zeta] 8). Thus early did Aristotle begin, even in
Plato's lifetime, to oppose Plato's hypothesis of supernatural forms,
and advance his own hypothesis of the eternity of the world.

He made another attack on Platonism in the didactic work [Greek: peri
ideon], (_Fragm._ 185 seq.), contending that the Platonic arguments
prove not forms ([Greek: ideai]) but only things common ([Greek: ta
koina]). Here, according to Alexander the commentator, he first
brought against Plato the argument of "the third man" ([Greek: ho
tritos anthropos]); that, if there is the form, one man beyond many
men, there will be a third man predicated of both man and men, and a
fourth predicated of all three, and so on to infinity (_Fragm._ 188).
Here, too, he examined the hypothesis of Eudoxus that things are
caused by mixture of forms, a hypothesis which formed a kind of
transition to his own later views, but failed to satisfy him on
account of its difficulties. Lastly, in the didactic work [Greek: peri
tagathou] (_Fragm._ 27 seq.), containing his report of Plato's
lectures on the Good, he was dealing with the same mathematical
metaphysics which in his dialogue _on Philosophy_ he criticized for
converting forms into formal numbers. Aristoxenus, at the beginning of
the second book of the _Harmonics_, gives a graphic account of the
astonishment caused by these lectures of Plato, and of their effect on
the lectures of Aristotle. In contending, as Aristotle's pupil, that a
teacher should begin by proposing his subject, he tells us how
Aristotle used to relate that most of Plato's hearers came expecting
to get something about human goods and happiness, but that when the
discourses turned out to be all about mathematics, with the conclusion
that good is one, it appeared to them a paradox, which some despised
and others condemned. The reason, he adds, was that they were not
informed by Plato beforehand; and for this very reason, Aristotle, as
he told Aristoxenus himself, used to prepare his hearers by informing
them of the nature of the subject. From this rare personal
reminiscence we see at a glance that the mind of Plato and the mind of
Aristotle were so different, that their philosophies must diverge; the
one towards the supernatural, the abstract, the discursive, and the
other towards the natural, the substantial, the scientific.

Aristotle then even in the second period of his life, while Plato was
still alive, began to differ from him in metaphysics. He rejected the
Platonic hypothesis of forms, and affirmed that they are not separate
but common, without however as yet having advanced to a constructive
metaphysics of his own; while at the same time, after having at first
adopted his master's dialectical treatment of metaphysical problems,
he soon passed from dialogues to didactic works, which had the result
of separating metaphysics from dialectic. The all-important
consequence of this first departure from Platonism was that Aristotle
became and remained primarily a metaphysician. After Plato's death,
coming to his third period he made a further departure from Platonism
in his didactic works on politics and rhetoric, written in connexion
with Alexander and Theodectes. Those on politics (_Fragm._ 646-648)
were designed to instruct Alexander on monarchy and on colonization;
and in them Aristotle agreed with Plato in assigning a moral object to
the state, but departed from him by saying that a king need not be a
philosopher, as Plato had said in the _Republic_, but does need to
listen to philosophers. Still more marked was his departure from Plato
as regards rhetoric. Plato in the _Gorgias_, (501 [Alpha]) had
contended that rhetoric is not an art but an empirical practice
([Greek: tribae kai empeiria]); Aristotle in the _Gryllus_ (_Fragm._
68-69), written in his second period, took according to Quintilian a
similar view. But in his third period, in the _Theodectea_ (_Fragm._
125 seq.), rhetoric is treated as an art, and is laid out somewhat in
the manner of his later _Art of Rhetoric_; while he also showed his
interest in the subject by writing a history of other arts of rhetoric
called [Greek: technon ounagogae] (_Fragm._ 136 seq.). Further, in
treating rhetoric as an art in the _Theodectea_ he was forced into a
conclusion, which carried him far beyond Plato's rigid notions of
proof and of passion: he concluded that it is the work of an orator to
use persuasion, and to arouse the passions ([Greek: to ta pathae
diageirai]), e.g. anger and pity (_ib._ 133-134). Nor could he treat
poetry as he is said to have done without the same result.

On the whole then, in his early dialectical and didactic writings, of which mere fragments remain, Aristotle had already diverged from Plato, and first of all in metaphysics. During his master's life, in the second period of his own life, he protested against the Platonic hypothesis of forms, formal numbers and the one as the good, and tended to separate metaphysics from dialectic by beginning to pass from dialogues to didactic works. After his master's death, in the third period of his own life, and during his connexion with Alexander, but before the final construction of his philosophy into a system, he was tending to write more and more in the didactic style; to separate from dialectic, not only metaphysics, but also politics, rhetoric and poetry; to admit by the side of philosophy the arts of persuasive language; to think it part of their legitimate work to rouse the passions; and in all these ways to depart from the ascetic rigidity of the philosophy of Plato, so as to prepare for the tolerant spirit of his own, and especially for his ethical doctrine that virtue consists not in suppressing but in moderating almost all human passions. In both periods, too, as we shall find in the sequel, he was already occupied in composing some of the extant writings which were afterwards to form parts of his final philosophical system. But as yet he had given no sign of system, and--what is surprising--no trace of logic. Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician against Plato; a metaphysician before he was a logician; a metaphysician who made what he called primary philosophy ([Greek: protae philosophia]) the starting-point of his philosophical development, and ultimately of his philosophical system.