With so much attention these days focused on teaching and curricula, why not take a look at a man whom Philip Freeman, a professor of humanities at Pepperdine University, calls The First Teacher? That’s Aristotle, and Freeman’s book, titled just that, is the latest in Yale University’s series, Ancient Lives, new evaluations, flaws and all, of some of the enduring men of ancient history who have relevance to our own time.
Aristotle, whose dates are 384 BC to 322 BC, and who was orphaned in his teens and died in exile, was unique. He came from the small city of Stagira in the northern frontier of Greece where his father was a court physician. The family was aristocratic and well off, and Aristotle received a fine education, memorizing Homer and studying mathematics and music – not only because it was expected of him but because he loved the life of the mind.
Dante called him “the master of those who know among the family of philosophers.” What survives of his work suggests he was not just a towering intellect but a humane and collegial individual. He disagreed with Plato, with whom he studied, but never had ill words for his former teacher. He truly was an exemplary “philosopher” – a lover of wisdom - and wanted the educated life to lead to a virtuous and happy life. He was neither a seeker of power or riches, and though he absorbed some of the pernicious attitudes of his day – a belief that slaves were inferior human beings and women hardly the equal of men – he manifested those prejudices, Freeman says, in a sympathetic way, never cruel.
It was in argument and sense-backed empiricism that Aristotle made his mark. His extant works on ethics, logic, politics and poetry used to be part of a common core in college, his research in natural science understood as the starting points of the disciplines of biology, zoology, cartography and embryology.
And yes, as Freeman acknowledges, he made errors, some serious, but they do not distract from his overall influence in promoting a natural interpretation of the world, and of humans. As Freeman reminds us, “most ordinary Greeks were traditional and deeply religious,” and, “philosophers often were treated with suspicion and distrust, sometimes, [as we know from Socrates] at the cost of their lives.” Aristotle persevered. He believed consistently that the responsibility for governing should be left to educated men with sufficient means to devote themselves wholeheartedly to public service.
If only Aristotle’s work on logic alone were to make its way back into classrooms, there might be some hope that reason and evidence-based argument, not fallacies and outright lies, might counter fringe fanaticism. The examples Freeman provides of Aristotle’s deductive schema are strikingly apt, as this one: “There is an increase of immigration into Athens as was true of Spartans. Crime is up in Athens. Therefore, the Spartans are to blame.”
Aristotle became “the first person in history to create clear rules for discovering truth.” He was also the first to think deeply and systematically about ethics and its role in living the good life especially in training leaders. He had a big library of his own, in addition to the one at his school which he generously opened to friends and colleagues.
Freeman is so clear and fair in his narrative that this short book could stand as a model for biographies of people whose fame has to be speculative to some extent. “Only 30 treatises of his estimated 200 works have endured the centuries intact,” and some of them, Freeman notes, are of a dubious or ambiguous nature, possibly altered by rivals or enemies. The surprise is that Aristotle’s Will survived and was consulted by philosophers later on. The irony is that this supremely rational empiricist proved attractive to medieval Arab philosophers and to Christian theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas who made him the cornerstone of their own routes to the divine.
