Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [17]
Although affluent by birth, Aristotle was an extraordinarily hard worker all his life, sparing himself nothing in his quest for knowledge. When Plato read his Phaedo dialogue aloud, wearied auditors tiptoed out one by one, but Aristotle, and he alone, stayed to the end. On his honeymoon he devoted much of his time to collecting seashells, and he labored so assiduously at his research and writing that he completed 170 works in forty years.
Aristotle was born in 384 in Stagira, in northern Greece. His father was court physician to Amyntas II, King of Macedonia, whose son would become Philip II, father of Alexander the Great. Medical knowledge being traditionally passed down from father to son in Greece, Aristotle must have learned a good deal of biology and medicine; this may account for the scientific and empirical outlook that later made him the quintessential Realist, as opposed to Plato’s quintessential Idealist.
He came to Plato’s Academy at seventeen and stayed until he was thirty-seven; then he left, some say in anger, when Plato died and his nephew, rather than Aristotle, was appointed successor. He spent thirteen years away from Athens, first as philosopher-adviser to Hermeas, tyrant of Assus in Asia Minor; then as head of a philosophic academy at Mytilene on Lesbos, then as tutor to the teenage Alexander at Pella, King Philip’s capital. All the while, he was intensely busy reading, observing animal and human behavior, studying the skies, collecting biological specimens, dissecting animals, and writing. Some of his works, cast in dialogue form, were said to have been literary masterpieces, but all of these are lost. The forty-seven that remain, though intellectually profound, are numbingly prosaic and pedantic; they were probably lecture notes and treatises meant only for school use.
At forty-nine, at the height of his powers, Aristotle returned to Athens. Although the presidency of the Academy again became vacant, he was again passed over. He then founded a rival institution, the Lyceum, just outside the city, and there assembled teachers and pupils, a library, and a collection of zoological specimens. He lectured both morning and afternoon while strolling up and down the peripatos, the covered walk-way of the Lyceum (whence our word “peripatetic”), yet doubled his scholarly output by parceling out areas of research to students, much like today’s professors, and marshaling their findings in one work after another.
After thirteen years at the Lyceum, he left Athens when anti-Macedonian agitation broke out and he came under attack because of his Macedonian connections. His reason for moving away, he said, was to save the Athenians from sinning twice against philosophy (the first sin having been the conviction and execution of Socrates). He died the following year (322), at sixty-two or sixty-three, of a stomach illness.
None of this explains the immensity of his accomplishments. One can only suppose that, as with Shakespeare, Bach, and Einstein, Aristotle was a genius of the rarest sort who happened to live in a time and at a place that particularly favored his extraordinary abilities.
To be sure, many of his theories were later overturned or abandoned, and his scientific writings are riddled with myths, folklore, and outright errors. In his impressive De Generatione Animalium (History of Animals), for instance, he reported as fact that mice die if they drink in summertime, that eels are generated spontaneously, that human beings have only eight ribs, and that women have fewer teeth than men.
But unlike Plato he had the hunger for empirical data and the love of painstaking observation that have characterized science ever since. Despite the high value he placed on deductive reasoning and formal logic, he continually stressed the importance of inductive reasoning— the derivation of generalizations from observed cases or examples, a fundamental