ENCYCLOPAEDIA AND BEYOND

I have once joked about this mammoth project of mine that I am in the process of writing a veritable encyclopaedia of stuff, and this may be true to a certain extent, considering the variety of my subjects and taking measurement of it in millions of words. But, seriously speaking, the only philosopher in the history of the world who ever attempted writing a bona fide encyclopaedia was none other than Aristotle. In this even if superficial similarity of effort, I have a certain kinship with Aristotle, multiplied by yet another outstanding affinity: our common love for the Peripatetic. [In plain words, our common love of walking.] At the same time, we have what seem to be irreconcilable differences: his style is far too “academic” for my liking. (The reader may have noticed my allusion not only to the modern meaning of the word, which fits Aristotle’s description to a tee, but to Plato’s Academy, as opposed to Aristotle’s Lyceum, which explains the rather esoteric pun.) As Bertrand Russell writes about him:

“He is the first to write like a professor: his treatises are systematic, his discussions are divided into heads, he is a professional teacher and not an inspired prophet; his work is critical, careful, pedestrian, without any trace of enthusiasm. The Orphic elements in Plato are watered down in Aristotle, and mixed with a strong dose of common sense… Where he is Platonic, one feels that his natural temperament has been overpowered by the teaching which he has been subjected to. He is not passionate, or in any profound sense religious. He is best in detail and in criticism; he fails in large construction, for lack of fundamental clarity and Titanic fire.”

Nietzsche seems to concur with Russell in this assessment. (I realize that I am putting this chronologically backwards, but following my train of thought, I cannot help it!) He places Plato above Aristotle, in so far as his choice of kindred shadows is concerned, but puts Aristotle above Plato in the questions of methodology: The great methodologists: Aristotle, Bacon, Dèscartes, Auguste Comte. (#468 of Wille zur Macht.)

(In this regard, the American political philosopher Leo Strauss, on whom I have several separate entries  in various sections of this book [see, for instance, Lenin In America, posted on June 30, 2011, or the three-parter The Posthumous Wild Adventures Of A Nice Jewish Thinker, posted on 14-16 December 2012, etc.], makes a similar distinction, very much to my liking. There are “scholars” and “great thinkers,” he says, in the sense that most so-called “philosophers” are in fact scholars: methodical and cautious. What is a mark of the great thinker, however, is boldness and creativity. Commendably, he calls himself a scholar.)

It is in this sense of his outstanding methodological effort that Aristotle succeeds as a literal encyclopaedist (and where I can only use the word encyclopaedia figuratively, as applied to my own work). There is yet a differently worded general historical assessment of Aristotle in Russell, which is the following:

“In reading any important philosopher, but most of all in reading Aristotle, it is necessary to study him in two ways: with reference to his predecessors, and with reference to his successors. In the former aspect, Aristotle’s merits are enormous; in the latter, his demerits are equally enormous. For his demerits, though, his successors are much more responsible than he is. He came at the end of the creative period in Greek thought, and, after his death, it was two thousand years before the world produced any philosopher who could be regarded as his equal. Towards the end of this long period, his authority had become almost as unchallenged as that of the Church, and in science, as well as in philosophy, had become a huge obstacle to progress. Ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine; in logic, this is still true at the present day. But it would have been at least as disastrous if any of his predecessors (very significantly, I should add to this his successors too!) (except, perhaps, Democritus) had acquired equal authority. To do him justice, we must forget his excessive posthumous fame, and the equally excessive posthumous condemnation, to which it led.”

Bertrand Russell’s apologetic caveats notwithstanding, he does not go far enough in vindicating Aristotle against the charges of having been too famous and influential over two millennia, for his own good. What I inserted in the last paragraph as a comment, in red font, goes right to the heart of this issue, and so does My Apology To Aristotle. No author of a definitive scientific or philosophical theory can escape criticism of his successors unless those focus on the success of his trailblazing, instead of on the failure of his effort to pave the new road with an everlasting asphalt.

And nobody in the history of science and philosophy has been a greater trailblazer in every compartment, however small, of human endeavor, comprehensively and across the board, than the great Aristotle. No one has ever come close to Aristotle’s stature, which the title of my present entry here adequately represents as Encyclopaedia And Beyond.