"QUOTES": ARISTOTLE AND THE HISTORY OF ANIMALS

IN HIS WELL-CRAFTED PODCAST, Literature and History, host, Doug Metzger, provides the wonderful image of Aristotle as he wades through tide pools and lagoons along the shorelines of Lesbos, studying the creatures he finds there. Around the same time that his former pupil, Alexander the Great was out conquering most of the known world, Aristotle wrote his findings in a book called The History of Animals in the fourth century B.C. Metzger goes on:

“The mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell considered Hellenism’s slow fall away from science one of its great tragedies. Russell wrote that Greece’s earlier philosophers had an attitude that in the main, was genuinely scientific whenever it did not merely embody the prejudices of their age. But it was not only scientific; it was imaginative and vigorous and filled with the delight of adventure. They were interested in everything - meteors and eclipses, fishes and whirlwinds, religion and morality; with a penetrating intellect they combined with the zest of children. From this point onwards, there are first certain seeds of decay, in spite of previously unmatched achievement, and then a gradual decadence. What is amiss, even in the best philosophy after Democritus, is an undue emphasis on man as compared with the universe. By now, you understand the point, I’m sure. The late Roman Republic, and the first days of the Empire are, from a historical perspective, mesmerizing in their eventfulness and scale. And though Aristotle would never be forgotten, his biological studies wouldn’t prove influential for a long time. Instead, the marvels of the natural world, whether we consider them a divine creation or simply an elegant efflorescence of physics and chemistry – the world beyond human affairs, with all of its frogs, and tide pools, and flocks of migrating birds, took second place next to our central pursuits of material power and blessed afterlives. We looked down into lagoons, but only to see our own reflections and envision extrasensory worlds that would someday welcome us. It would be a long, long time before we, like Aristotle did 2,300 years ago, again took to wading in tide pools and making notes about what we saw there."

As Metzer suggests, a wrong turn happened. Man became ascendant over all other creatures. We grew apart from nature, and came to see ourselves as not needing it. Instead we came to think of nature as something we needed to fear or conquer. It remains to be seen whether we have developed sufficient understanding and willpower to step down from the throne we've made for ourselves, and once more wade among the tide pools and shorelines of our world, and to feel a necessary sense of wonder about it all.

[I'll be adding other posts under the heading: "QUOTES", from time to time. So much brilliant thinking, so little time!]

Cheers, Jake.