How to Read Aristotle, and Why
Aristotle is both a historical personage and a mythic figure. As a mythic figure, he represents the “bad old days” prior to modern science (although science, for its part, has dispensed with most of the myths of the moderns). Reading Aristotle, then, is always a retrieval of the thinking of the historic personage whose accomplishments range from founding the major scientific disciplines, to inventing the only non-natural language to have succeeded in becoming a common tongue in known history (koine Greek).
Rather than try to give an overview of Aristotle’s works and some sort of generic means of interpreting them, I’ll shorten this article and hopefully make it more effective by speaking of a single example of Aristotle’s thinking, the misinterpretation attributed to it by modern science, and retrieving the meaning of it in properly historical terms.
Somewhat infamously, Aristotle followed earlier Greek thinkers in naming the “elements” as four (at least initially, to which he then added a fifth element, aether). The four are well known: earth, water, air and fire. Modern science smugly considers itself superior by knowing some few hundreds of “elements”, but does “element” here mean the same?
Aristotle’s elements are essentially archetypal. Though Aristotle was faithful to the technological essence of western thinking and thought from out of techne as art and fabrication, the technologies of the time were by no means capable of differentiating all the “elements” we know of. However, Aristotle was certainly familiar with different types of “earth”, such as gold, tin, bronze, dirt, etc. Aristotle uses the term “substance” to differentiate these and would use the same term for all the “elements” of the moderns. The four (or five) elements in Aristotle, then, refer to something else.
If the translators of Aristotle understood Aristotle from a full historical perspective, the elements would be translated as solids (earth), liquids (water), gases (air) and the transformative potential between them (fire). Each named element is an archetypal substance that defines a given field of substances. The fifth element, aether, has no properties but exists as the medium or background against which the other elements may be experienced. (as a side note, once an experiment that discredited aether via misunderstanding it had been performed, physics found it couldn’t continue without Aristotle’s concept and introduced “quintessence”, a word formed from the Latin phrase “quinta essentia”, the translation of Aristotle’s “fifth element”).
This understanding can also guard against taking Aristotle’s tracing of the celestial spheres at face value. Since only aether can properly move in a circular fashion, but has no sensible properties, the apparent circular movement of the heavens is impossible, and Aristotle’s treatment of the celestial spheres becomes a rather obvious argument ad absurdum, since things in the heavens are visible and thus not made of aether. (Aristotle in fact explicitly states that the heavenly bodies are made of the same “elements”, though not necessarily the same “substances”, as those found on Earth.
Applying this type of retrieval throughout Aristotle’s work requires some effort, but it is well worth it. While devotees of Galileo may poke fun at Aristotle’s view that the heavier an object, the more it tends towards the center, Aristotle was fully aware that “heavier” and “lighter” were only relative, and explicitly distinguished both from mass, which could be measured absolutely. More cogently, the popular theory among cosmologists that a supermassive black hole is to be found at the center of the spiral galaxies at least is based on the same intuition without the argument to sustain it, nor any overt evidence to support it.
Any given page of Aristotle’s greater works, such as the physics, will if read properly dispel numerous superstitions and unwarranted beliefs, most of them invented during that most superstitious age of western history, the one we ironically refer to as “the enlightenment”.
