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Aristotle’s Lost Thoughts
On a list of thinkers from antiquity who contributed most to modern thought, Aristotle’s name would be found at or near the top. Aristotle was making scientific observations in the ancient world long before anyone knew about science. Unlike his own teacher, the great philosopher Plato, Aristotle believed that the world and everything in it obeys natural laws. He also believed that acquiring knowledge about natural laws would lead to the truth about what we in modern times call objective reality. In many ways, Aristotle, born in Greece in 384 B.C., was a modern thinker.
Aristotle conducted scientific research in what is now Turkey before returning home to ancient Greece. He had spent time classifying plant and animal life through the species level—work that is still done by scientists today—before King Philip II of northern Greece made a historic request of the learned man. The king asked him to tutor his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander. The boy was being groomed to someday replace his father as king and required a superior education. Perhaps no one in the world at that time had so much knowledge about so many subjects as Aristotle. In exchange for accepting the assignment, Philip II restored Aristotle’s hometown and the citizenship of its overthrown inhabitants. The land and its people had been earlier overthrown by Philip II.
Alexander would become Alexander the Great and live to essentially conquer the world. Many readers of history know about Alexander’s military expertise. Fewer, however, know of his lifelong love of learning. Throughout his battles that led as far east as India, Alexander slept with a copy of Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad. The copy was given to him, with handwritten notes, by Aristotle. Alexander would remark that while his father gave him life, Aristotle taught him how to live.
The closeness between Alexander and Aristotle began to dissipate before the end of the great king’s short life. While out battling the world, Alexander learned that his teacher had published a portion of his esoteric ideas. These were thoughts that Aristotle had decided never to share with the public. He would only discuss them orally with special acquaintances, including Alexander. Alexander wrote to his teacher that he was disappointed to learn of the publication.
Aristotle did make at least one attempt to smooth the feathers of his student. He explained that even though he had published some of his esoteric thoughts, the public would never understand them. The language would be meaningful only to those who had shared in direct discussion with Aristotle himself.
Despite Aristotle’s brilliance—his ability to skip countless generations of human experience to arrive at modern thought through some mysterious backdoor—some of his mental habits were apparently stuck in antiquity. Genius belongs to no individual person, not even the mind and spirit it inhabits. The idea that even a portion of Aristotle’s mental makeup should have been locked away for the appreciation of a privileged few is almost unthinkable today. As it is, the modern world lost much of what Aristotle left behind. Politics, the endless battles over property, and time destroyed the bulk of his writings. What remains in the twenty-first century is a treasure that avails itself to anyone who seeks it.