Progress and History

by Unknown

Aristotle, in short, is haunted, like Plato, by the idea of cycles, alternations, decline and progress, progress and decline. He feels this both in the life of States and in the whole life of the world. He speaks of the same discoveries being made over and over again, an infinite number of times, in the history of civilization. And his words recall the sad passage in Plato's Laws (676) referring to the numberless nations and states, ten thousand times ten thousand, that had risen and fallen all over the world, passing from worse to better and from better to worse. Similarly Aristotle will speak of degraded animal forms, and sometimes write as though the animal world could sink back into the vegetable altogether.

Admitting, however, something like progress within the different cycles, we must ask a little more about the kind of progress which Aristotle would have desired. (I take Aristotle again as a typical Greek.) Man at his best, he clearly holds, in trying to realize his true nature should aim at a happiness which involves a harmony of all his faculties, a harmony inspired and led by the highest faculty of all, the Reason which rejoices in the contemplation of what is at once true and good and beautiful.

Now in this aim, we must ask, does a man need other men and other creatures, and in what sense does he need them? Here, I think, we come on two inconsistent tendencies in Aristotle's thought, connected with two different ways of regarding the hierarchy of existences. We say that one existence is higher than another. Does this mean that what we call the lower are only so many blundering attempts to reach the higher? That every creature, for example, which is not a thinking man is, on the whole, a mistake? Aristotle often does speak like that. Woman, he says in one passage, is only a mutilated male.[22] The principle which ought to develop into the active power of thought could not, he explains, in women master the recalcitrant element which is always thwarting perfection, and thus woman is man manqué. On these lines of thought it is easy to slip into looking on all other forms of existence as merely valuable in so far as they serve the direct purposes of men, and indeed only of a few men, those namely who are able to think as philosophers. This is the kind of view according to which, as the satirist suggests, cork-trees only grow in order to make corks for champagne-bottles, and the inferior races of mankind only exist to furnish slaves for the higher. And Aristotle does, on occasion, lend himself to such a view: he justifies a slavery in which, as he says, some men are to be treated merely as living tools. And yet on his own principles every man ought to aim at realizing his own end, and not merely the ends of others.

But there is a widely different view, also present in Aristotle, and truer to the essence of his thought. It is a view instinct with that reverence for all existence of which I spoke at first, and it holds that all the different natural types, high or low, could all be united in one harmony, like an ordered army, as Aristotle himself would say, in which the divine spirit was present even as the spirit of a general is present in his men. The greatest thing in man, Aristotle thinks, is the godlike power of apprehending the different characters of all the things around him, and this of itself suggests the belief that all these characters have a value of their own, unique and indispensable, each aiming at a distinct aspect of the Divine, each, if it fulfilled its inner nature, finding, as Plato might have said, the place where it was best for it to be. Again, it is clear from Aristotle's whole treatment of the State, that when he wrote his famous phrase, 'Man is by nature a political animal', he meant that man, as we should say, is essentially social. It is part of man's goal to live with others; it is not merely a means to the goal. His highest happiness lies in the contemplation of the good, and the good, Aristotle says, can be contemplated far better in others than in ourselves. This is a profound saying, and from this thought springs the deep significance of friendship in Aristotle's system. The crown of the civic life he takes to be the community of friends who recognize the good in each other, and enjoy each other through this. The wider this community, then, we must surely say, the better.

For Aristotle then, man's perfection ought to mean the perfection of every individual, and progress, so far as he conceives it, involve progress towards this end. This should lead on to belief in the supreme importance of the individual soul, and to Kant's great principle that we should always treat each man as an end in himself.

Thus, if we concentrate on the hopeful elements in Plato and Aristotle, we may fairly say, I think, that we can see outlined in their philosophies something like the following belief: every natural thing in this world, and every natural creature, so far as it is good,—and all are more or less good,—tends to express some distinct aspect of a perfect harmony: we human beings are the first on earth to be definitely conscious of such a tendency, the first to be able definitely to direct it to its true goal, and our business in life is therefore threefold: to make actual our own function in this harmony, to help other creatures to actualize theirs, and to contemplate every such manifestation, in men or in things, with reverence and rejoicing.

The harmony, if complete, would be a manifestation of a divine reality, and thus the love of God, the love of our neighbour, the love of nature, self-development, political life, scientific study, poetic contemplation, and philosophic speculation, would all unite in one comprehensive and glorious task.

This, surely, is hopeful enough. But the Greek hope faltered and sank. Could this harmony ever be realized? Would not the thwarting element in the world always drag it down again and again, and drag some men down always, so that after all progress was impossible, and for some men should not even be attempted? As a matter of fact, Plato and Aristotle do limit their exhortations to a narrow circle of cultured Greeks, and even with them they doubt of success.

Now this despondency came partly, I think, through the very sensitiveness of the Hellenic nature. The spectacle of the ever-baffled struggle in Nature and Man they felt at times almost intolerable. Aristotle saw that this perpetual failure in the heart of glorious good made the very essence of tragedy. The tragic hero is the man of innate nobleness who yet has some one defect that lays him open to ruin. Man is set in a world full of difficulties, a world much of which is dark and strange to him: his action and those of others have results which he did not, and in his ignorance could not, foresee; he is not strong enough for his great task.

All the Greek poets have this deep sadness. Homer has it, in and through his intense feeling for the beauty and energy of life. There has never been such war-poetry as Homer's, and yet there has never been any which felt more poignantly the senselessness in war. 'And I must come here', Achilles says to his noble enemy at the close, 'to torture you and your children.'