Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  In Aristotle, Greek cosmology achieved its most comprehensive and systematic development. His view of the cosmos was a synthesis of his many predecessors’ insights, from the Ionians’ and Empedocles’s ideas concerning natural elements to Plato’s astronomy and the problem of the planets. The Earth was the stationary center of the universe, around which the heavenly bodies rotated. The whole cosmos was finite and circumscribed by a perfect sphere, within which were set the fixed stars. Aristotle based the Earth’s uniqueness, centrality, and immobility not only on self-evidence and common sense, but also on his theory of the elements. The heavier elements, earth and water, moved according to their intrinsic nature toward the universe’s center (the Earth), while the lighter elements, air and fire, intrinsically moved upward away from the center. The lightest element was aether—transparent, purer than fire, and divine—the substance of which the heavens were composed, and its natural motion, unlike that of the terrestrial elements, was circular.

  One of Plato’s pupils and Aristotle’s contemporaries, the mathematician Eudoxus, had taken up the problem of the planetary movements and provided its first answer. To preserve the ideal of perfect circularity while also saving the appearances of the erratic motions, Eudoxus devised a complex geometrical scheme whereby each planet was set in the inner sphere of a group of interconnected rotating spheres, with the fixed stars at the universe’s periphery constituting the outermost sphere. Although every sphere was centered on the Earth, each one had a different rate and axis of rotation, by which means Eudoxus was able to construct—using three spheres each for the Sun and Moon, and four each for the more complex movements of the other planets—an ingenious mathematical solution accounting for the planetary movements, including their retrograde periods. Eudoxus thus achieved the first scientific explanation of the irregular motions of the planets, providing an influential initial model for the subsequent history of astronomy.

  It was this solution, somewhat elaborated by Eudoxus’s successor Callippus, that Aristotle integrated into his cosmology. Each of the aetheric spheres, beginning with the outermost one, communicated its motion to the next one by means of a frictional drive, so that the motions of the inner spheres were the combined product of the peripheral sphere along with the relevant adjoining ones. (Aristotle also added intermediate counteracting spheres to separate properly the planetary motions from each other, while maintaining the overall motion of the heavens.) In turn, the celestial spheres affected the other, sublunary elements—fire, air, water, and earth—which because of those movements did not remain purely separated in what would be their natural state in successive spheres around the Earth, but instead were pushed into varying admixtures, thereby creating the great multiplicity of natural substances on the Earth. The ordered movement of the heavens was caused ultimately by the primary Unmoved Mover, and the other movements of the planetary spheres from Saturn down through the Moon were caused in turn by other timeless, immaterial, and self-thinking intellects. These heavenly bodies Aristotle considered to be gods, a fact he considered to have been accurately conveyed by the ancient myths (although in other matters he believed the myths were an unreliable source of knowledge). All terrestrial processes and change were therefore caused by the celestial movements, which were ultimately caused by the highest formal and final cause, God.

  It was especially in regard to his theories concerning astronomy and the supreme Form that Aristotle approached a Platonic sort of idealism, and in some respects went even further than Plato. By so strongly emphasizing the transcendent quality of mathematical Forms, Plato had occasionally portrayed even the heavens as only an approximate reflection of the perfect divine geometry—a judgment also reflecting Plato’s notion of anankē, the imperfect irrationality shadowing the physical creation. But for Aristotle, Mind was in a sense more fully omnipotent and immanent in nature, and in his earlier years he concluded that the ordered mathematical perfection of the heavens and the existence of the astral deities affirmed the heavens themselves as a visible embodiment of the divine. In so doing, he joined together more explicitly the Platonic focus on the eternal and mathematical with the tangible world of physical reality within which man found himself. He upheld the natural world as a worthy expression of the divine, and not, as Plato often strongly implied, something merely to be seen through or left behind altogether as an encumbrance to absolute knowledge. Despite the generally secular cast of his thought, Aristotle defined the role of philosophy in his influential work De Philisophia (extant now only in fragments), which was to mold the ancient conception of the philosopher’s profession: to move from the material causes of things, as in natural philosophy, to the formal and final causes, as in divine philosophy, and thus to discover the intelligible essence of the universe and the purpose behind all change.

  Yet as distinguished from Plato’s idealism and stress on the need for immediate intuitions of a spiritual reality, the overall thrust of Aristotle’s philosophy was decidedly naturalistic and empiricist. The world of nature was of primary interest to Aristotle, who was the son of a physician and early exposed to biological science and medical practice. In this sense his thought could be said to reflect the Homeric and Ionian sense of life characteristic of the heroic age, in which the present life was the preferred, more real realm of existence (in contrast to shadowy Hades, where the disembodied soul lacked virtually all vitality), and the physical body’s active involvement in love, war, and feasting was recognized as the essence of a good life. Concerning such matters as the body’s worth, the soul’s immortality, and man’s relation to God, Plato’s sensibility was less Homeric and Ionian, and more reflective of the mystery religions and the Pythagoreans. Aristotle’s attention to and high valuation of the body more directly reflected the widespread classical Greek appreciation for the human body as expressed in athletic prowess, personal beauty, or artistic creation. Plato’s attitude in this regard, while often genuinely admiring, was distinctly ambivalent. In the end, Plato’s loyalty lay with the transcendent archetype.

  Aristotle’s renunciation of self-subsistent Ideas also had major implications for his ethical theory. For Plato, a person could properly direct his actions only if he knew the transcendent basis of any virtue, and only the philosopher who had attained knowledge of that absolute reality would be capable of judging the virtue of any action. Without the existence of an absolute Good, morality would have no certain basis, and so for Plato ethics was derived from metaphysics. For Aristotle, however, the two fields were of fundamentally different character. What actually existed was not an Idea of the Good relevant to all situations, but only good persons or good actions in many varying contexts. One could not attain absolute knowledge in ethical matters as one could in scientific philosophy. Morality lay in the realm of the contingent. The best one could do would be to derive rules empirically for ethical conduct that held probable value in meeting the complexities of human existence.

  The proper aim in ethics was not to determine the nature of absolute virtue, but to be a virtuous person. That task was necessarily complex and ambiguous, evading final definition, and required practical solutions to specific problems rather than absolute principles that were universally true. For Aristotle, the goal of human life was happiness, the necessary precondition for which was virtue. But virtue itself had to be defined in terms of rational choice in a concrete situation, where virtue lay in the mean between two extremes. Good is always a balance between two opposite evils, the midpoint between excess and defect: temperance is a mean between austerity and indulgence, courage a mean between cowardice and foolhardiness, proper pride a mean between arrogance and abasement, and so forth. Such a mean can be found only in practice, in individual cases relative to their specific conditions.

  In each of Aristotle’s concepts in contrast to Plato’s—yet always within the Platonic framework of form and purpose—there was a new stress on this world and this life, on the visible, the tangible, and the particular. Although both Aristotle’s ethics
and his politics were founded on definitions and goals, they remained linked to the empirical, the contingent and individual. Although his universe was teleological and not randomly mechanical, his was generally an unconscious natural teleology, based on the empirical perception that nature draws forward each individual thing to its formal realization, “doing nothing in vain.” Form was still the determining principle in Aristotle’s universe, but it was primarily a natural principle. Similarly, Aristotle’s God was essentially the logical consequence of his cosmology, a necessary existent on physical grounds, rather than the mystically apprehended supreme Good of Platonic thought. Aristotle assumed the power of reason strenuously forged by Socrates and Plato, and applied it systematically to the many kinds of phenomena that existed in the world; but while Plato employed reason to overcome the empirical world and discover a transcendent order, Aristotle employed reason to discover an immanent order within the empirical world itself.

  The Aristotelian legacy was thus predominantly one of logic, empiricism, and natural science. The Lyceum, the school which Aristotle founded in Athens and where he conducted his peripatetic discussions, reflected this legacy, being more a center for scientific research and data collection than a semireligious philosophical school like Plato’s Academy. Although in ancient times Plato was generally judged the greater master, that evaluation would be dramatically counterbalanced in the high Middle Ages, and in many respects it would be Aristotle’s philosophical temperament that would come to define the dominant orientation of the Western mind. So considerable was his encyclopedic system of thought that most scientific activity in the West until the seventeenth century was carried out on the basis of his fourth-century B.C. writings, and even when moving beyond him modern science would continue his orientation and use his conceptual tools. Yet in the last analysis, it was in the spirit of his master Plato, though in a decisively new direction, that Aristotle proclaimed the power of the developed human intellect to comprehend the world’s order.

  In Aristotle and Plato together, then, we find a certain elegant balance and tension between empirical analysis and spiritual intuition, a dynamic beautifully rendered in Raphael’s Renaissance masterpiece The School of Athens. There, in the center of the many Greek philosophers and scientists gathered in lively discussion, stand the elder Plato and the younger Aristotle, with Plato pointing upward to the heavens, to the invisible and transcendent, while Aristotle motions his hand outward and down to the earth, to the visible and immanent.

  The Dual Legacy

  This, then, was the achievement of classical Greek thought: Reflecting the archaic mythological consciousness from which it emerged, informed by the artistic masterworks that preceded and accompanied it, influenced by the mystery religions with which it was contemporaneous; forged through a dialectic with skepticism, naturalism, and secular humanism; and in its commitment to reason, empiricism, and mathematics conducive to the development of science in succeeding centuries—the thought of the great Greek philosophers was an intellectual consummation of all the major cultural expressions of the Hellenic era. It was a global metaphysical perspective, intent on encompassing both the whole of reality and the multiple sides of the human sensibility.

  Above all, it was an attempt to know. The Greeks were perhaps the first to see the world as a question to be answered. They were peculiarly gripped by the passion to understand, to penetrate the uncertain flux of phenomena and grasp a deeper truth. And they established a dynamic tradition of critical thought to pursue that quest. With the birth of that tradition and that quest came the birth of the Western mind.

  Let us now attempt to distinguish some of the principal elements in the classical Greek conception of reality, especially as these influenced Western thought from antiquity through the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. For our present purposes, we may describe two very general sets of assumptions or principles inherited by the West from the Greeks. The first set of tenets formulated below represents that unique synthesis of Greek rationalism and Greek religion which played such a significant role in Hellenic thought from Pythagoras through Aristotle, and which was most fully embodied in the thought of Plato:

  (1) The world is an ordered cosmos, whose order is akin to an order within the human mind. A rational analysis of the empirical world is therefore possible.

  (2) The cosmos as a whole is expressive of a pervasive intelligence that gives to nature its purpose and design, and this intelligence is directly accessible to human awareness if the latter is developed and focused to a high degree.

  (3) Intellectual analysis at its most penetrating reveals a timeless order that transcends its temporal, concrete manifestation. The visible world contains within it a deeper meaning, in some sense both rational and mythic in character, which is reflected in the empirical order but which emanates from an eternal dimension that is both source and goal of all existence.

  (4) Knowledge of the world’s underlying structure and meaning entails the exercise of a plurality of human cognitive faculties—rational, empirical, intuitive, aesthetic, imaginative, mnemonic, and moral.

  (5) The direct apprehension of the world’s deeper reality satisfies not only the mind but the soul: it is, in essence, a redemptive vision, a sustaining insight into the true nature of things that is at once intellectually decisive and spiritually liberating.

  The immense influence on the subsequent evolution of Western thought exerted by these remarkable convictions, at once idealist and rationalist in character, can scarcely be exaggerated. But the Hellenic legacy was a dual one, for the Greek mind also fathered a very different, equally influential set of intellectual assumptions and tendencies, which to some degree overlapped the first set but to a crucial extent acted in tense counterpoint to it. This second set of principles can be summarized roughly as follows:

  (1) Genuine human knowledge can be acquired only through the rigorous employment of human reason and empirical observation.

  (2) The ground of truth must be sought in the present world of human experience, not in an undemonstrable otherworldly reality. The only truth that is humanly accessible and useful is immanent rather than transcendent.

  (3) The causes of natural phenomena are impersonal and physical, and should be sought within the realm of observable nature. All mythological and supernatural elements should be excluded from causal explanations as anthropomorphic projections.

  (4) Any claims to comprehensive theoretical understanding must be measured against the empirical reality of concrete particulars in all their diversity, mutability, and individuality.

  (5) No system of thought is final, and the search for truth must be both critical and self-critical. Human knowledge is relative and fallible and must be constantly revised in the light of further evidence and analysis.

  Very generally speaking, both the evolution and the legacy of the Greek mind can be said to have resulted from the complex interaction of these two sets of assumptions and impulses. While the first set was especially visible in the Platonic synthesis, the second set gradually evolved out of the bold, many-sided intellectual development that dialectically impelled that synthesis—namely, the Presocratic philosophical tradition of naturalistic empiricism from Thales, of rationalism from Parmenides, of mechanistic materialism from Democritus, and of skepticism, individualism, and secular humanism from the Sophists. Both of these sets of tendencies in Hellenic thought had deep nonphilosophical roots in the Greek religious and literary traditions, from Homer and the mysteries to Sophocles and Euripides, with each set drawing on different aspects of those traditions. Moreover, these two impulses shared a common ground in their uniquely Greek affirmation, often only implicit, that the final measure of truth was found not in hallowed tradition, nor in contemporary convention, but rather in the autonomous individual human mind. Most consequentially, both impulses found their paradigmatic embodiment in the richly ambiguous figure of Socrates, both found vivid contrapuntal expression in the Platonic dialogues, and both found a bril
liant and seminal compromise in the philosophy of Aristotle.

  The constant interplay of these two partly complementary and partly antithetical sets of principles established a profound inner tension within the Greek inheritance, which provided the Western mind with the intellectual basis, at once unstable and highly creative, for what was to become an extremely dynamic evolution lasting over two and a half millennia. The secular skepticism of the one stream and the metaphysical idealism of the other provided a crucial counterbalance to each other, each undermining the other’s tendency to crystallize into dogmatism, yet the two in combination eliciting new and fertile intellectual possibilities. The Greek search for and recognition of universal archetypes in the chaos of particulars was fundamentally countered by an equally robust impulse to value the concrete particular in and for itself—a combination that resulted in the profoundly Greek tendency to perceive the empirical individual in all its concrete exceptionality as something that could itself reveal new forms of reality and new principles of truth. An often problematic yet immensely productive polarization thereby emerged in the Western mind’s understanding of reality, a division of allegiance between two radically different kinds of world view: on the one hand, to a sovereignly ordered cosmos; on the other, to an unpredictably open universe. It was with this unresolved bifurcation at its very basis, with the accompanying creative tension and complexity, that the Greek mind flourished and endured.