ARISTOTELIAN HILARITY AT PYTHAGORAS’ EXPENSE

...If I were to select a little sample of Aristotle’s sparkling humor, as well as of his engaging writing ability, the following, taken from Aristotle’s references to Pythagoras in his Physics, is as good as any:

“They say that the whole heaven is limited, the opposite to what those of Italy, called the Pythagoreans, say; for these say that fire is at the center, and that the earth is one of the stars, (!) and moving in a circle (!) about the center, it produces night and day. And they assume another earth opposite this, which they call the counter-earth, not seeking reasons and causes for phenomena, but stretching phenomena to meet certain assumptions and opinions of theirs and attempting to arrange them in a system.”

(This passage is so magnificently funny that I must make good use of it in my own discourse on the value of “duality” with a pointed reference to the “counter-earth” in presenting the concept of the ‘two superpowers’ as necessary to world balance, in other words, the dear old dialectic principle…

But this one aspect of the passage does not exhaust its value. As always with a work of genius, one single sentence can contain complex multiple-thrust ideas. Aristotle’s comment here about “not seeking reasons and causes for phenomena, but stretching phenomena to meet certain assumptions and opinions of theirs” is an excellent quote to use in my attack on the ideologues. I wish I could put this quotation on a little card, and use Aristotle’s clout toward such a worthy endeavor.)

There is no doubt that Aristotle here is having a good time at Pythagoras’ expense. But he, most certainly, deserves turning the tables on, as already hinted throughout his excerpts by my red exclamation marks. It is well known that in many matters astronomical, Aristotle is much inferior to Pythagoras, particularly, in the matter of geocentricity, which Aristotle mistakenly maintained, whereas Pythagoras was far ahead of him in this regard.

Generally speaking, we can, with Aristotle or without him, make a strong scientific case contra Pythagoras and successfully debunk the science of the Pythagorean ideas. But had these ideas been science only, their scientific value would have been so utterly extinguished by now that we would have had no need for either Pythagoras, or Aristotle himself, or for most of the greatest scientific thinkers of the past anyway, because their utility to science has been to serve as a fertilizer for future discoveries, and is presumably of no interest to us, once they have outlived their scientific usefulness. What can the Greeks, or the Renaissance men, or the pillars of the Enlightenment, or Sir Isaac Newton, or Nietzsche…-- what can any one of them possibly tell our age about the power of the microchip, or about Saturn’s moons, or about the medical treatment of debilitating diseases, etc.? No, we do not need them at all to teach me science. But we certainly need them for something else: the perfect conversation, helping us think, and therefore to exist not as mere animals, but as a thinking human beings that we are. We need them to increase our capacity for originality, ergo, creativity. The human race needs them today not to make use of their outdated science, but to make all modern and future science possible.