History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [96]
For my part, while I agree with Benn about the character of Alexander, I nevertheless think that his work was enormously important and enormously beneficial, since, but for him, the whole tradition of Hellenic civilization might well have perished. As to Aristotle's influence on him, we are left free to conjecture whatever seems to us most plausible. For my part, I should suppose it nil. Alexander was an ambitious and passionate boy, on bad terms with his father, and presumably impatient of schooling. Aristotle thought no State should have as many as one hundred thousand citizens,2 and preached the doctrine of the golden mean. I cannot imagine his pupil regarding him as anything but a prosy old pedant, set over him by his father to keep him out of mischief. Alexander, it is true, had a certain snobbish respect for Athenian civilization, but this was common to his whole dynasty who wished to prove that they were not barbarians. It was analogous to the feeling of nineteenth-century Russian aristocrats for Paris. This, therefore, was not attributable to Aristotle's influence. And I do not see anything else in Alexander that could possibly have come from this source.
It is more surprising that Alexander had so little influence on Aristotle, whose speculations on politics were blandly oblivious of the fact that the era of City States had given way to the era of empires. I suspect that Aristotle, to the end, thought of him as 'that idle and headstrong boy, who never could understand anything of philosophy'. On the whole, the contacts of these two great men seem to have been as unfruitful as if they had lived in different worlds.
From 335 B.C. to 323 B.C. (in which latter year Alexander died), Aristotle lived at Athens. It was during these twelve years that he founded his school and wrote most of his books. At the death of Alexander, the Athenians rebelled, and turned on his friends, including Aristotle, who was indicted for impiety, but, unlike Socrates, fled to avoid punishment. In the next year (322) he died.
Aristotle, as a philosopher, is in many ways very different from all his predecessors. He is the first to write like a professor: his treatises are systematic, his discussions are divided into heads, he is a professional teacher, not an inspired prophet. His work is critical, careful, pedestrian, without any trace of Bacchic 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 to which he has been subjected. He is not passionate, or in any profound sense religious. The errors of his predecessors were the glorious errors of youth attempting the impossible; his errors are those of age which cannot free itself of habitual prejudices. He is best in detail and in criticism; he fails in large construction, for lack of fundamental clarity and Titanic fire.
It is difficult to decide at what point to begin an account of Aristotle's metaphysics, but perhaps the best place is his criticism of the theory of ideas, and his own alternative doctrine of universals. He advances against the theory of ideas a number of very good arguments, most of which are already to be found in Plato's Parmenides. The strongest argument is that of the 'third man': if a man is a man because he resembles the ideal man, there must be a still more ideal man to whom both ordinary men and the ideal man are similar. Again, Socrates is both a man and an animal, and