David Bolotin: An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics: With Particular Attention to the Role of His Manner of Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
A much-ridiculed Victorian lady hoped that Darwin’s theory of evolution was untrue, or, if true, that would not become generally known. As a matter of principle our contemporaries assume that what is true ought always to be made known, that generally-known truth is an unmitigated good, at least in the long run. this assumption has had many consequences, some trivial (you and I probably know more about the British royal family than is entirely healthy), some good (we also know more about health), some catastrophic. In the last category I count false opinions disseminated as if they were true, Marxist dialectic and Nazi race theory being two conspicuous examples. The Victorian lady had a point. She may not have understood science, but she knew something about civilized society.
In line with the Enlightenment project, we moderns have been taught to dismiss Aristotle’s physics as a teaching one or two steps beyond superstition. Can anyone today imagine that the moon is alive, or that the human species is eternal? Does anyone still suppose that the earth is the center of the universe, or that a moving body is trying to get to its ‘natural place’?
David Bolotin agrees that these Aristotelian teachings are now risible on their face. But he denies that Aristotle believed them any more than we do. To follow Bolotin’s argument is not only to overcome one’s superficial impression of Aristotelian science but to reflect upon the character of science—’ancient’ and ‘modern’—in its uneasy relations with the political orders. If ‘science’ means knowledge, more specifically the knowledge of nature, then science does not easily fit into the City of God or the City of Man. If science doesn’t easily ‘fit in,’ if it is vulnerable to misuse and abuse, it needs a defense, an apologia. The Enlightenment exaltation of science was intended to make science invulnerable to attack by giving it some of the authority of the old religious establishments. In view of the attempts at ‘deconstructing’ science in the academy today, and in view of the dangers of the abuse of science and the popularity of pseudoscience, a more cautious stance might be in order.
The defense science has received in the past three centuries has been in a sense far too effective. The rhetoric of Enlightenment tends toward religious fervor without religious consolation, the churchy sort of atheism on display in such unlovely personalities as H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. When the quest for certitude pushes into scientific terrain—as it must, if science bears heavy public responsibility—the explorer takes on a pilgrim’s confidence about the destination. He is therefore quite likely to lose his way in a quest where the perplexities are the markers on the road map. Not only does excessive certitude infect science with unscientific dogmatism, it degrades the social and political forms within which any orderly inquiry must proceed.
Aristotle approaches both nature and political life more cautiously than his critics do. For example, when he addresses the problem of how things come into being, he avoids the extreme of poetic accounts on the one hand and of reductionism on the other. To endorse the poetic account in its extreme form—that beings come out of nothing—would be to call into question the existence of nature itself as an object of sustained inquiry. Why study something that is radically contingent upon the many and conflicting wills of the Hesiodian gods? But to attribute beings to an atomized or otherwise inchoate natural substrate would be no improvement; chaotic matter is no better subject of knowledge than warring gods. Aristotle accordingly teaches that form and substance cohere, generating individual beings. He does not believe he knows how this generation occurs. If modern physics (for example) leads physicists back to a ‘Big Bang.’ they tacitly admit that the earliest act of coming-into-being destroyed the conditions of its own occurrence. The remaining evidence of the character of those conditions may well be compromised, indeterminate to scientists.
In considering Zeno’s paradox—if any distance consists of infinitely divisible parts, how can any object traverse that distance?—Aristotle similarly demarcates a space for natural science between religion and mathematics, those twin spheres of certitude. The certitude of religiosity depends on revelation of divine thoughts and actions, which unassisted human reason cannot fathom; the certitude of mathematics depends on abstraction, which unassisted human reason fathoms readily but which the stuff of nature does not resemble. (Thus statistics, the set of modern mathematical techniques designed to describe empirical reality, is probabilistic not apodictic.) Aristotle insists on the foundation of natural science in the perception of individual beings. Neither the infinity of religion nor the infinities of geometric abstractions can account fully for natural objects ‘on their own terms’—as one natural being, man, looks at another. Zeno’s paradox conflates mathematics and science. So, in its own way, does modern political science, starting with Hobbes. A natural scientist need to live with an ‘infinity’ which is really synonymous with indeterminacy. Political men cannot be so relaxed, and so had better not be, or pretend to be, so scientific.
With acute attention to textual detail—the empeiria of reading—Bolotin shows how Aristotle navigates what might be called a ‘second sailing’ for natural science. Unlike the first sailing, the inquiries of previous natural philosophers, this one can avoid the Scylla of political ire and the Charbydis of apolitical folly. Aristotle himself did not entirely avoid Scylla; he had to leave Athens at the right moment in order to avoid reliving the fate of Socrates. But his writings eventually became eminently respectable, in tandem with the biblical religions as understood by thinkers who knew how to think on two tracks. In Bolotin’s words, Aristotle “regarded the task of natural science to be articulation of the manifest character—understood as the true being—of the given world, a world whose ultimate roots he did not think that this science could ever discover.” Thoughtful religious people and prudent scientists alike should be able to live with that formulation, and for centuries many of them did. The symbiosis of religion and natural science may be fruitful; much that is important in modern science and mathematics has resulted in the study of change, a study that a Bible-centered civilization is more likely to care about than was ancient Greece or Rome. But the synthesis of religion and natural science has issued in impressive displays of evil and folly. Bolotin’s Aristotle help to keep the categories straight.
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