For Sylvia Jane III

Yet if free will in the sense under discussion  is bound up with the notion of the autonomous individual soul we ought to consider the argument of Averroes (Ibn Rushd).

The Moors of the 12th century had access to the writings of Aristotle -- the Christian world didn't rediscover Aristotle until they started winning back large parts of Spain, and ended up in the possession of some of the (formerly Moorish) libraries.

Anyway, Averroes wrote a learned commentary on the works of Aristotle, and the part of his commentary that most concerns us right now involves the idea of the human soul. Simplifying the matter considerably, one may say that Averroes --
invoking Aristotle's authority -- believed that there is only one true immortal human intellect, or soul. Our individual selves, our personalities, come about because this one common soul is mixed with a lot of different individual bodies.

Perhaps our bodies are so many stained-glass windows in a Church. The underlying mind, the “active intellect,” is the same –the light of the sun outside the Church. But the streams of light are differentiated as the various “passive intellects” once they have passed through the material of the windows.

If anything like this is so, where will we locate our notions of freedom? In the passive or in the active intellect? Or perhaps in the stained glass itself?

Philosophy After Aristotle

On June 11th I quoted a passage from a book by philosopher Shadworth Hodgson, TIME AND SPACE (1865). 

Here's a later passage from the same book discussing Greek philosophy after Aristotle: 

"Here the progress of speculative metaphysic was checked for many centuries.  Until Descartes, no one arose capable of carrying on the deveopment of metaphysic from the point where Aristotle left it, or proceeding to the separation of ontology from metaphysic, and educing reflection out of direct understanding."

By "the separation of ontology from metaphysic" Hodgson means roughly the separation of the question "how did the world come to be as it is?" from the question "how is it?"  A little bit later he writes, "The remaining schools of philosophy in Greece were all schools of practical philosophy, Stoic, Epicurean, Cynic, Cyrenaic, the Academies, and the Sceptics; they were not exclusively indeed but primarily and predominantly practical; speculative knowledge was not their chief purpose...."

Aristotle: Some Thoughts

The combination of Aristotle’s ethics with those of Christianity is a very awkward fit. Aristotle’s ethics was all about becoming the “great-souled man.” His audience consisted of those who had the necessary preconditions for his description of the great-souled: free born, for example, and at least comfortable in material things – enough so that crass matters of trade would not concern them. If this is so for you, then you can concern yourself with the greatness of your soul in Aristotle’s sense.

“He [the great-souled man] is one who will possess beautiful and profitless things rather than profitable and useful ones,” says Aristotle.

(By the way, in the translation of the relevant passage to which I just linked you, W.D. Ross uses the adjective "proud" where a more literal translation would be "great-souled," and a flat-footed transliteration would be "magnanimous." I know no Greek myself, ancient or modern -- but these alternative renderings of the word are easy enough to find in the literature, even when directed at a popular audience. Bertrand Russell explains, in a footnote to his famous "History of Western Philosophy," that neither "magnanimous" nor "proud" quite captures Aristotle's meaning.)

Well, proud buddy, some of us need those profitable and useful things. In the way that the first disciples of Jesus needed, say, a fishing vessel and a net. These weren’t luxuries. They weren’t beautiful in the luxury-goods sense Aristotle had in mind. So the first disciples of Jesus were not even in Aristotle's chosen audience.

A little later, still describing his protagonist, Ari writes that he will walk in slow steps, with “a deep voice and a level utterance; for the man who takes few things seriously is not likely to be hurried, nor the man who thinks nothing great to be excited, while a shrill voice and a rapid gait are the results of hurry and excitement.”


One wonders how this guy ever got his admission ticket to the Great Philosophers’ Club?

It doesn't seem to me that this guy ended up with a good referential morality for anything but the ruling elite, those who never had to adopt a rapid gait because someone else was doing all the work for them.

Indeed, although Aristotle is sometimes used as a figure of contrast to Plato, the contrast is not really as marked as often thought. Consider politics. Plato famously devised a three-class theory of the City (aka the State). At the top are the rulers, who should also be philosophers. In the middle are administrators and the military, whose guiding virtue must be bravery, and at the bottom are slaves and working free people who must actually ... you know ... do productive stuff. Their passions are dangerous so their guiding virtue must be obediance. Consider Dorothy's three friends on the way to the Emerald City, and you have the gist of this class structure. But Dorothy, with good Kansas/American sentiments, played no favorites among them. (And doesn't she say, in the balloon-launch scene, that she loved the Tinman best? An inversion of Platonism, then.)

Anyway, it seems to me that Aristotle adopted his teacher's politics without much change, except that he shrunk its geographical scale from the city to the estate. Consider a working estate in the countryside outside of Athens. There is the magnanimous man who owns the place, and who is a philosopher who has studied Aristotle and knows that he should walk slowly and buy beautiful trinkets for his home. He is top dog. Beneath him are his wife and children, and perhaps a hired estate manager, who must administer the place on his behalf. Because he's too wrapped up in magnaminity to do such things himself. Beneath them are the manual laborers, whether freeborn or chattel, and beneath them the beasts of the field.

This has nothing to do with Christianity, which was preached first to shepherds tending their beasts in the field. I don't imagine those shepherds had a lot of beautiful and useless things.

That some bright medieval thinkers managed to baptize Aristotle was a striking accident of history, a project that was also one of the borrowings of the west from the Muslim world of that time, but I can not accept what seems to be the presumption on the part of many Christians even today that it was a fortunate move.