MY APOLOGY TO ARISTOTLE

Alexander’s Magnificent Shadows section now resumes with the Aristotle subsection.

(This is presumably a humorous entry, which I penned earlier in a trance of silliness, and I am too greedy to let go of it altogether now, even having recognized its silliness. My two, and only two, excuses for letting it stay on, are one that I can always let go of it later, if I really want to; and two, that it may just be that, after all, it is not so silly as I first thought it to be…)

On behalf of myself, and partly of Nietzsche, I convey this sincerest apology to the great Aristotle for once coming close to calling him a bum. (Well, not quite, but still…)

In my implicit criticism of Aristotle, I may have followed Nietzsche rather uncritically, when I once sort of accused the great Greek, together with Plato, of each creating their overly ambitious (and easily refutable!) philosophical theories, rather than remaining good Pre-Socratics, and limiting their mental excavations to smaller, but priceless nuggets. No more such silly criticism on my part! For one, these Hellenes have more nuggets sprinkled throughout their respective ores than the sum total of the Pre-Socratics. Besides, it takes the genius of a Plato or an Aristotle-- no less-- to reveal those Pre-Socratic nuggets to us, the posterity, otherwise, our dear Parmenideses and Empedocleses would not have existed for us at all!

And yet another point.—Maybe, and probably, the Pre-Socratics were as ambitious as their famous super-epigones, which means that their legacy may have included some quite extensive ‘debunkable’ theories. However, for some unknown reason, they had somehow been fortunate enough to avoid the horrible fate of being “extant.” Thus, I strongly suspect, for instance, that the old sage Pythagoras must have left behind some delectably nutritious mammoth, which would subsequently provide food to a motley string of claimants to his glory, loosely known as the Pythagoreans...

I am also sure that the great demi-god Empedocles had a much-much longer story to tell than what we are giving him credit for, but, perhaps, it contained too much gobbledygook to be understood and passed on by his contemporaries. In fact, the same, or almost the same, could be said of all other pre-Socratics!

The bottom line here is that a single folly of penning down a silly theory must not disqualify any bona fide pre-Socratic, Socratic, or post-Socratic mind from the Pantheon of “monolithic” PreSocratica Sempervirens just because the posterity did not bother to burn his whole manuscript, leaving us with nothing but some shreds of pure wisdom which we could admire, in innocent ignorance, from then on…

In other words, vivat Aristoteles!