ARISTOTLE AND THE REECHANTMENT OF NATURE
The magical woods where Aristotle lived with nymphs
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/culture/2015-12/28/c_134957769.htm
Aristotle's legacy lives on－not only in philosophical texts worldwide but also in little-known physical ruins in Greek Macedonia's forests.
As something of an Aristotelian, I couldn't resist commenting on this article. The headline alone catches the eye. The very idea of Aristotle, the first man to do science on a systematic basis, living with nymphs is indeed suggestive. I see it as invoking the kind of reenchantment we need in the world. We need to overcome the Weberian disenchantment which characterises the modern world.
This gives me the excuse to write on one of my favourite documentaries, "Aristotle's Lagoon" by Armand Marie Leroi, Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College London.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QesWw3Zz0Ms
This is a beautiful documentary that gives us Aristotle the thinker as against Aristotle the authority, Aristotle the man who seeks to know, love and value the world around us. And it makes us value that world too, to be thankful for the life we have, for the gift of nature. There's enchantment here, in nature and in coming to know nature. To know is to love and to love is to know.
Aristotle was the dominating influence in the schools and universities, and scholasticism and dogmatism has worked to overshadow his achievements. It took two millennia for the authority of Aristotle in science to be overthrown. That Aristotle had become such a constrictive authority in the first place was not Aristotle's fault. Here is a great BBC documentary, Aristotle's Lagoon, which emphasizes Aristotle's enduring importance as a biologist, 'the first and perhaps the greatest biologist ever.'
Aristotle was a pioneer biologist, a fact that tends now to be overlooked.
'Aristotle, the man who gave us logic, poetics, political philosophy had also know, loved, and sought to understand the natural world...the world of animals and plants ... he discovered order in the chaos of organic diversity .. he invented a science.. difficult and yet wondrous.'
But the most important thing for me is that Armand Marie Leroi gives us back Aristotle “the thinker” as against Aristotle “the authority”. Aristotle’s voracious appetite for knowledge, how it all fits, what it all means, characterises his work. And such was the advance in knowledge that he made that Aristotle’s works came to be used as authoritative for centuries. That is the death of thought, of course, but that was the fault of the epigones, not Aristotle. Aristotle was clear on this point.
If at any future time [the facts] are ascertained, then credence should be given to the direct evidence of the senses rather than the theories.
Aristotle: De Generatione Animalium
This is not a crude assertion of fact over theory. As Armand Leroi points out in the documentary, Aristotle was doing much more than accumulate facts, he was doing something systematic, he was doing science.
Theories guide, direct, enlighten, structure, but they neither imprison nor blind, not if we stick to ascertaining the facts, observation of how the world is.
There is a freshness to Aristotle’s writing, his thirst for knowledge is clear. This is the philosopher discovering nature.
Aristotle was not prejudiced by theory, he was not influenced by something someone had said some time ago. Everything he writes seems to be his own observations. In a wonderful passage in the Invitation to Biology Aristotle says it’s not good enough simply to study the stars, no matter how perfect and divine they may be, rather we must also study the humblest of creatures, even if they seem repugnant to us. And that is because all animals have something of the good, something of the divine, something of the beautiful..
“In all things of nature there is something of the marvellous.” — Aristotle
But Armand Leroi makes it clear that Aristotle collects facts, lots of facts, details, arranges and classifies.
Aristotle explored the marvels of the natural world. With the help of fishermen, hunters and farmers, he catalogued the animals in his world, dissected them, observed their behaviours and recorded how they lived, fed, and bred. In his great zoological treatise, Historia animalium, he described the mating habits of herons, the stomachs of snails, the sensitivity of sponges, the flippers of seals, the sounds of cicadas, the destructiveness of starfish, the dumbness of the deaf, the structure of the human heart and much, much more. And then, in another dozen books, he explained it all.
“What he does next was revolutionary: having sorted the facts, he begins to pit theory against observation.
The scientific legacy he left is not vast, it is monumental. It was read, copied and plagiarised and, by the thirteenth century, it was taught in universities throughout Europe.
Leroi believes much of modern biology was founded by Aristotle, “so why have we forgotten him?” he asks. One of the reasons was that some of his biology was wrong. This is science at its self-cleansing best.
The documentary has a message that it is pertinent and poignant. Aristotle’s lagoon, where he discovered and analysed nature first hand, is suffering ecological degradation. “Biodiversity has declined,” says Leroi. And the fishermen are complaining of declining catches. The lagoon is just a microcosm of wider ecological degradation and devastation in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. It represents an “unutterable sadness”, says Leroi at the site where Aristotle had done all that pioneering biology so many centuries ago.
Study nature not books was the cry of modern scientists as they overthrew Aristotle’s authority – and Aristotle would have been the first to agree with that statement. I love Plato, he said, but I love truth more. Studying nature is what Aristotle had done all those centuries ago.
Praise him for his prescience, condemn him for his errors, Aristotle has much to offer. “Taking things apart was the task of twentieth century biology. Putting them back together again is the task of the twenty-first century,” says Armand Leroi.
This is a wonderful documentary, beautifully presented, and brings Aristotle alive in a way that Aristotle himself had shown the world to be alive. Each generation must read Aristotle anew. We need to read Aristotle again, to see again many things we have forgotten, and must learn again, learn anew.
The first sentence in the Metaphysics defines Aristotle: “All men desire to know, but not all forms of knowledge are equal, the best is the pure and disinterested search for the causes of things.”
For Armand Leroi, this is “a claim for the beauty and worth of science”.
A sublime, elegant, passionate documentary which makes the claim for the beauty and worth of Aristotle.
Professor Leroi answers some questions on the programme below:
Why was Aristotle so important for science? Well, Aristotle is a remarkable figure. Everyone knows him as the father of logic and philosophy, but people forget that he was the father of biology too. About a third of his surviving texts relate to biology and actually his thoughts on the subject inform his philosophy, his metaphysics and his ideas on a number of topics.
Why have people forgotten Aristotle’s contribution? His influence on early science was immense. It was so massive in fact that the science revolutionaries felt they had to destroy him during their attack on the old scientific system.
Despite this the impact of Aristotle’s thought endures to this day.
Even Darwin remarked: “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.” What we’re trying to do with this programme is recover Aristotle for biology.
He had a deep and integrated physiological system for understanding the world around us.
Is it useful for scientists to have knowledge of the history of their field? I don’t think knowledge of the history of science is essential but it does give a more global view and appreciation of the possibilities of science. As an example: Aristotle was insistent that the crucial point of understanding in dissection comes when putting the parts back together to see how an animal works as a whole. This very much chimes with systems biology today.
As a university scientist why is it important for you to reach out to the public at large, through programmes like Aristotle’s Lagoon?
For three reasons:
Firstly the public pays for science, so it’s important that we show them what we’re doing.
Secondly, there are always anti-scientific forces in society, in various guises, and an ongoing battle. Scientists should always take the opportunity to show people how science is the only way to understand the natural world.
Finally, science is a source of stories. These can give us joy and inspiration in what we do, and they have the added quality of being true, or as true as we can know. It’s natural for scientists to want to share these stories.
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/…/newssum…/news_13-1-2010-11-23-3
I can go on forever about this. Science as an endless conversation about the world. And this is the approach Aristotle takes.
The Lagoon: How Aristotle invented science by Armand Marie Armand Leroi
Armand Leroi's book is a beautiful read (although too harsh on poor old Plato).
The writing alone sets it apart from the bulk of the philosophy books I have suffered over the years, a clear, flowing, graceful style with moments that combine real depth and poetic beauty. I can’t praise the clarity of the language enough.
Armand Leroi opens with Aristotle’s ‘Invitation to Biology’, and this is what impresses about this book: we are invited into this world, with no special qualifications required other than the ‘desire to know’ and the willingness to pick up a cuttlefish and learn from nature. ‘For there are gods here to’.
Leroi quotes the 'invitation to biology' as follows:
"It is not good enough to study the stars no matter how perfect they may be. Rather we must also study the humblest creatures even if they seem repugnant to us. And that is because all animals have something of the good, something of the divine, something of the beautiful."
Aristotle valued nature and animals of every type. ‘For inherent in each of them there is something natural and beautiful.’
Armand Leroi comes at this from the scientific angle. The big point to make, though, is that Aristotle offers us a way of putting fact and value together, the ‘is’ and the ‘ought to be’, without committing the naturalistic fallacy. Aristotle, in Armand Leroi’s view, was the first scientist. I’d go further. I’d argue that Aristotle demonstrated the relevance of his scientific studies, particularly in biology, for the world of practical reason, ethics and politics. In searching for an integral approach to the world, we can do no better than start with Aristotle.
The Lagoon review – Armand Marie Leroi's rewarding study of Aristotle's science A sumptuous, beautifully written account of the Greek philosopher's forays into biology reveals the intellectual debt we owe him.
“Science is a modern term, but while Aristotle was a philosopher, he also smells like a scientist to me: his craving of data in all forms – anatomical, reproductive, taxonomic – his seemingly anachronistic empiricism about biology, these are classic symptoms of our disposition.”
http://www.theguardian.com/…/the-lagoon-armand-marie-leroi-…
The Lagoon: How Aristotle invented science The Greeks cast their science from first principles, without troubling to examine the natural world. Aristotle changed everything, argues this elegantly written book.
http://www.theguardian.com/…/the-lagoon-armand-marie-leroi-…
‘This book is powerful, graceful and charming. Leroi's prose is as blue-white bright as an Aegean sky reflected from a whitewashed wall. Buy the hardback if you can – it is beautifully designed and deftly illustrated. Having airy theories is all very well, but if you really want to know the world, to discover what makes it tick, you have to observe it, catalogue it, and take it to pieces.’
‘Everything Aristotle wrote, whether about natural history or poetry or politics, formed part of a grand, interlocking, philosophical scheme.’
If you think Aristotle is old and outdated, remove the blinkers and start to do some serious thinking.
‘The pendulum is swinging his way, as experiments on tiny parts of nature in the form of genes and their activities, divorced from the creatures in which they are normally found, are giving way to genomics, in which scientists try to grasp the interplay of thousands of genes at once, with explicit reference to the questions Aristotle was interested in – how animals grow from eggs; why some animals live longer than others; and, ultimately, why we all grow old and die.’
Darwin knew almost nothing of Aristotle until 1882, when William Ogle, physician and classicist, sent him a copy of The Parts of Animals he'd just translated. In his note of thanks, Darwin wrote: "From quotations which I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion of what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle."
And here is a review that allows room for Plato, and brings Aristotle’s own theos out of the shadows.
‘The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science,’ by Armand Marie Leroi http://www.nytimes.com/…/the-lagoon-how-aristotle-invented-…
And here is the view from the New Scientist Was Aristotle the inventor of science? http://www.newscientist.com/…/mg22329870.700-was-aristotle-…
Reviews http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-lagoon-9781408836200/
Here is a world where things actually do exist, where things are real, a real world of living things. Even better, it is a world that we can observe, analyse, discover, explain. Armand does a fine job in demystifying Aristotle’s four causal explanation, and has no trouble making sense of it in terms of contemporary scientific understanding. Molecular biology has made form – eidos – respectable. ‘Final causes, too, have been demystified. Aristotle saw that they are needed when the phenomenon to be explained appears to have a goal.’ Why do goal-directed entities exist? Darwin’s answer is that they exist because evolution by natural selection produced them. ‘It is Bacon’s sneers at teleological answers of this sort … that now look quaint’.
“Failure to understand what is obvious can be caused by inexperience: those who have spent more time with the natural world are better at suggesting theories of wide explanatory scope. Those who have spent time arguing instead of studying things as they are show all too clearly that they are incapable of seeing much at all.” (Aristotle).
‘The passage comes from On Generation and Corruption. The argumentative types are the Platonists. Their obsessions – intangible Forms, numerology and geometry – caused them to deny the evidence of their own eyes. They were blind to the structure of the world, this world. The passage is a prelude to the Invitation to Biology. For, when Aristotle said that we must attend to even the humblest creatures since there are gods there too, he was not only urging some students to pick up their cuttlefish, he was arguing, as he would until the end, with Plato’s shade. He was doing what every scientist who opens a new domain of enquiry must do: defend it before his peers. Of the whole, vast natural world, the Academy deemed only the stars worthy of study. But, and this is Aristotle’s point, we do not live along the stars: we live here, on Earth….’
‘Nor do we live just anywhere on Earth… Lesbos and the lagoon at Pyrrha gave to Aristotle a place, calm and lovely, where he could be among natural things… Biologists often have such places. They need them, for ideas do not come from nothing, they come from nature herself.’ (Armand Leroi, The Lagoon 2014 pp.375-376).
As I say, paradoxical as it may seem, if Aristotle was the first scientist, he also offers a way to the reenchantment we need. Armand Leroi makes the case for Aristotle as being the first scientist. Thales has an earlier claim. Thales defied the gods, saw order in nature and its laws rather than chaos, and thereby demystified the world. Disenchantment was an achievement. But it has come at a price. We have taken the world apart to see how it works. Now we need to understand, and respect, how it all works when the parts are all together.
Leroi concludes with an observation from the Metaphysics, which in paraphrase goes:
"All men desire knowledge, but not all forms of knowledge are equal. The best is pure and disinterested research into the causes of things, and searching for them is the best way to spend a life."
In sum, Aristotle is back!! For me, the exciting aspect of this recovery of Aristotle the scientist and the biologist is the implications for ethics and politics. We have lived through a time in which atomism and mechanicism has prevailed over essentialism. Essences are out, dismissed as fixed, timeless substances. Purpose is out, evidence of a teleological form of reasoning for which there is no basis in nature. The problems we have had here are problems with our categories. The result of our scepticism has been a purposeless materialism that has left us adrift in the world. Now, there are signs of a real transformation in the way we understand ourselves and the world we live in. We live in a purposive universe.
Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's Science of Nature by Mariska Leunissen
'In Aristotle's teleological view of the world, natural things come to be and are present for the sake of some function or end (for example, wings are present in birds for the sake of flying). Whereas much of recent scholarship has focused on uncovering the (meta-)physical underpinnings of Aristotle's teleology and its contrasts with his notions of chance and necessity, this book examines Aristotle's use of the theory of natural teleology in producing explanations of natural phenomena. Close analyses of Aristotle's natural treatises and his Posterior Analytics show what methods are used for the discovery of functions or ends that figure in teleological explanations, how these explanations are structured, and how well they work in making sense of phenomena. The book will be valuable for all who are interested in Aristotle's natural science, his philosophy of science, and his biology.'
'No idea is more synonymous with Aristotle and none more fundamental to Aristotelian philosophy than teleology. So it is quite remarkable that there have been only two full-length monographs in English exclusively devoted to the subject -- Monte Johnson's Aristotle on Teleology (OUP 2005) and now Mariska Leunissen's Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's Science of Nature. (There is one other monograph in Italian: D. Quarantotto, 2005, Causa finale, sostanza, essenza in Aristotele, Saggi sulla struttura dei processi teleologici naturali e sulla funzione dei telos, Napoli: Bibliopolis.) The strength of Leunissen's book, which sets it apart from other discussions of Aristotle's teleology, is that her interpretation is developed from a careful analysis of Aristotle's actual use of teleological explanations in the biological works, which is where most of the interesting material is to be found. She examines an impressive assortment of textual examples and offers a detailed exposition of their content. The result is a rich account of how Aristotle thinks teleological causation operates in nature and how final causes are to be integrated into a more comprehensive picture of explanation in natural science. Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's Science of Nature is an important contribution to scholarship on Aristotle's teleology. And while Leunissen's will certainly not be the last word on the subject, her book has added significantly to the debate and must be engaged with by anyone wishing to tackle the subject from this point forward.
The main argument of the book is organized around three central ideas. First, Leunissen argues that in order to grasp Aristotle's teleology we need to make a distinction between two types of teleological causation, what she calls "primary" and "secondary" teleology. Second, explanations in natural science often make use of teleological principles (such as "nature does nothing in vain") which, according to Leunissen, function as heuristic devices: they are deployed by the natural scientist to help uncover those causally relevant features that are to be picked out in ultimate explanations. Third, the scientific value of final causes for Aristotle lies in their having explanatory rather than causal priority. Among other things, this has significance for how we understand Aristotle's puzzling remarks about demonstrations through final causes in Posterior Analytics II 11. My review will be devoted to a critical assessment of these three claims. And while I take issue with several aspects of Leunissen's interpretation, overall I found her arguments both illuminating and persuasive.'
Read on ...