Depth of Field in the Pursuit of Aristotle

I was advised very early on in graduate school that if I wanted to get a job I would have to do some original work. So, weighing my options, I slowly settled on the impact of Aristotle on the development of allegory (I know, how cool am I?). But I came to my interest in this came as an accident joined with purpose given me by circumstances.

I had been lucky enough to have been studying with Sylvia Huot, one of the world’s experts on the Roman de la Rose, during my undergraduate years. So when I got into graduate school, I read and reread it more than any other poem, mostly because she was an excellent teacher, and I learned more in less time when she was teaching me.

So one day I came across a line in the Rose during a speech of Reason in which she says that she will now (I paraphrase) ‘demonstrate things that are indemonstrable.’ I didn’t at the time know much about demonstration, so I went to the library and looked up the process of demonstration, and what I found shocked me. It turns out that in the language of scholasticism (derived from Aristotle) that knowledge could be divided into a priori axioms on which we build a posteriori scientific postulates. Our a posteriori postulates are only as good as the a priori (and indemonstrable) premises that they rest on (follow this link if you are interested in learning about this).

I thought (naively as it turned out) that there was a small article to be had from my insight about the process of combining the (a posteriori) language of demonstration with the (a priori) language of indemonstrables. I was still confused about what Reason could mean. But I thought that all I had to do was to dig deeper and I would be able to sort out what Reason was talking in her ‘scientific’ language. The whole thing was new to me.

The Situation in Criticism in the late 80s and early 90s

It turned out that it was new to everyone, because I couldn’t find anyone who had written about ‘science’ of logic in the Roman de la Rose. There were reasons for this. Within the narrow—and conservative—field of medieval studies, thinkers followed D. W. Robertson, Jr., who had announce triumphantly that all works of medieval could be reduced to a simple parable of Babylon (boo hiss!) and Eden (yay for Eden!). In his Preface to Chaucer, he declared that the pattern of medieval literature could be derived from Augustine. This lead cynical me to reduce Robertson’s position to this: ‘All works of medieval literature mean the same thing and fortunately for us, Augustine thought it first.’

Now none of my professors were as dogmatic about every work literature meaning the same thing. But they did think that Robertson was an important thinker, because he had introduced the principle of ‘alterity’ to medieval studies. Therefore, they could give up on him so easily. Charlie Wright, one of favorite professors at the University of Illinois, assigned a book written by his academic mentor who expanded the insight of Roberston to include all the other sources, Christian and pagan, of information which were regularly used in the Middle Ages. I called this the Bible of medieval studies. The Medieval Christian Literary Imagery: A Guide to Interpretation is still one of the books I consult first when I am working with a new medieval text.

Robertson had distinguished the medieval way of thinking about the world from more modern ways of thinking about the world by dividing ‘medieval’ ways of thinking about the world from ‘modern’ ways of thinking about the world. The modern way was based in our superior science and had us trapped in the world. The medieval way was to launch out of ‘this world’ to the next through the process of allegory. Thus, he distinguished his medieval model on the basis of its ‘alterity’ (for regular readers, think Enlightenment oppositional pairs) from the then (1962) unproblematic New Criticism.

But in the 80s and 90s, the larger community was learning to distrust the Romantic New Critical metaphysical model of the individual as the key to metaphysical completeness, just as Roberston had learned to distrust the individual a generation before. Just as the ‘old historicism’ was starting to fray in the medieval community, a New Historicism had taken root in the broader academic community.

Going Our Separate Ways

While most thinkers in the academy were thinking about criticism in terms of Marcuse and Alinsky strains of post-Enlightenment thought, which posited a bifurcation of thought between two stable posts, my way out of the labyrinth of ignorance was to follow science, which it seemed to me had not been fully explored.

I was going to the library and studying up on Aristotelian scholastic science. To my professors, this was a dead end. In his Preface to Chaucer, Robertson had casually dismissed ‘Aristotelian jargon’ as a ‘convenient academic refuge’ (Preface 312) that had no impact of the process of allegory. For the most part my professors believed it. I knew that this wasn’t true. Why else would Reason have used such Aristotelian language if she didn’t really mean to bring up the topic for debate? I decided that those smarter than I might still be right, but I also decided that it couldn’t hurt to test the scientific waters.

So I pursued my path alone, while the old-fashioned New Critics pursued theirs, medievalists pursued their way through the labyrinth out of historicism, and the postmodern critics followed their thread in. No one stood in my way because they didn’t understand what I was doing (and until the very end no one did).

The Rewards of Science

Both Plato and Aristotle sought to reconcile their science with their metaphysics. The more absolute distinction between science and metaphysics was a medieval invention. Granted, some thinkers (like Thomas Aquinas) sought to reconcile the two, but more thinkers followed Averroes, who distinguished science from metaphysics. I followed the way of thinkers like Siger of Brabant (I know; how cool am I?) who taught ‘the doctrine of the double truth,’ that is ‘saying one thing could be true through reason, and that the opposite could be true through faith’ (Wikipedia).

The rewards for following my own path alone through the thickets of scientific reason, rather than the well-traveled and better paved metaphysical roads, were huge on a personal scale. I was able to figure out some of the cruxes that had baffled medieval and Renaissance scholars for decades or even centuries.

On the public scale, my efforts were met with sometimes severe criticism. I think I’ve told you the story of the one and only time that my wife saw me deliver a paper on Boethius. A nice, white-haired old woman gave her paper after me. When she was done, she said she had to address me personally and said that my paper ‘was a travesty!’ and she launched into a full-scale attack. She was joined by several people in the room, for whom my paper was worse than a travesty. It went against everything they believed.

But I kept on in my pursuit of science, because the rewards were great enough that the ad hominem assaults on my character that resulted were of secondary importance. They only mattered if I let them matter. I didn’t, so they didn’t.

A Further Reward

There were other rewards for pursuing a science that no one was looking at on account of their definition of aesthetics in metaphysical terms, which told people that aesthetic thought was supposed to give us ‘the whole picture’ and had nothing to do with mere science.

The one thing I wanted to point out to my readers today is just how science changes our perception of the universe. I will use my example of Aristotle. I had gradually become convinced that it was the rise of scholasticism in the late 11th and early 12th centuries that had been responsible for the rise of allegory, and not, as my professors thought, the metaphysical cast of mind that ‘all medieval thinkers had’ on account of their being raised in a universe of faith.

Well this caused me to distinguish the thought of Plato from Aristotle. Plato, I learned, had given us a model of metaphysics in which, at the top of the universe, could only be appreciated through a veil of ‘fiction’ (see my first post on Atlantis for a brief excerpt from my dissertation). But Aristotle wanted to put his thought on a more solid basis. He proposed to place ‘universals’ within ‘nature,’ rather than giving in to Plato’s insistence that they were out of nature in a (perhaps) made-up secondary sphere.

That was okay for a while, but I was sometimes challenged to keep such distinctions clear in my mind. For instance—and I cannot remember where I first encountered this sentiment—some thinkers thought that Plato and Aristotle were on the same page in regards to universals. Plato called them forms, while Aristotle called them ‘universals,’ but both thought that there was a second world that thinkers needed to account for in their explanation of the world.

That was disturbing to me, but I assumed that scholars knew what they were talking about, so I dealt with their expertise. But it did nothing to help me out with my feeling that there were some serious distinctions between Plato and Aristotle that separated their thought.

To make matters worse, I then picked up a book by Daniel W. Graham called Aristotle’s Two Systems in which Graham argues (convincingly to my mind) that Aristotle proposes not one but two scientific systems. What’s more, these two systems can’t be reconciled to one another. I decided I needed to look into the reasons for that.

I had help in this, since the philosophical community had had their interest piqued by the (then radical) thesis of Graham’s book. It continues to be an area where I take intense interest in following the as yet incomplete philosophical theories as to why Aristotle would do such a thing, Joel? But in the world of literary criticism, where the search for final solutions reigned, no one could help me, since I was pursuing a field which no one knew anything about.

It got even weirder for me. As I started to learn about Aristotelian psychology, I first learned about it in terms of its broad outlines. Starting with the De anima, I learned that Aristotle had divided the brain into two parts: a passive intellect that received sense impression equally and an active intellect, where reason sorted things into ‘universal’ categories.

This made sense, but when I turned to Michael V. Wedin’s Mind and Imagination in Aristotle, I discovered that philosophers weren’t sure exactly how Aristotle had meant men to receive his thought, because on closer examination it was found that Aristotle had not been perfectly consistent with his words. His loose use of words introduced another level of complexity into my universe that I was trying to construct from scratch to explain what no one else had been able to explain.

My Microscope

I didn’t react as expected (it seems I never do). The thing that other scholars had done was to decide that since there was no perfect perspective that would reconcile the whole of thought that they could say whatever I thought and no one could stop them, since there was no possibility of a person or a God who had authority over them. That was the standard answer, derived from metaphysics.

I chose instead to take a lesson, not from metaphysics, but from science, and medieval science at that. In the course of my dissertation I had read a lot of Roger Bacon‘s work on optics (again, how cool am I?). So I conceived of my work on Aristotle in terms of a microscope.

When you look into a microscope, you usually have to focus it on the object you are looking at. That fact that sometimes you find your microscope focused on the object without your having to turn the focusing knobs doesn’t mean you don’t have to focus. It is merely an accident. Moreover—and this is important—the fact that some things go out of focus is a problem of the instrument. Just because I’m not looking at something doesn’t mean it’s not there. It only means that I’m not focusing on it at the moment.

Lumpers and Splitters

Matters of focus involve scientists in matters of depth of field. If I’m looking at one area of an elephant very closely, I may not be able to see the whole. That doesn’t mean there’s no whole elephant. It just means that people who look at individual cells in elephant toenails don’t see the whole elephant, while people who look at the whole elephant to get a good look at the microscopic view of the toenails. (It’s sad, really).

This occurred to me after Charlie Wright had given me one of the greatest lectures I have ever heard in his office. He contrasted his approach to criticism to mine. I was, he informed me, a lumper. I wanted to lump all experience together to come up with a ‘system.’ He, on the other hand, was a splitter. He wanted to focus on a microscopic area of life as intently as possible.

In my (still-forming) metaphor, we had different, but not incompatible, focuses.

How I Organized My Experience with Aristotle

So I divided up my experience with Aristotle into discrete parts, as follows:

• On one level, both Plato and Aristotle share a belief in a two-tiered universe.
• Within that universe, they could be divided into two opposite poles: Plato viewed forms as the province of ‘fiction,’ whereas Aristotle viewed universals as within nature.
• Within Aristotle himself, things started to fragment into two systems (Graham)
• And more than that, if we went down even farther (according to Wedin), we couldn’t necessarily make out what Aristotle meant to be telling us.

My Experience in and Out of Graduate School

While I was in graduate school, I still held out hope that these various systems could be resolved together as one, as Charlie Wright had said.

I’ve lost my confidence in the ultimate reconcilability of these various perspectives. I now think that information is gained as well as lost as we travel through the various levels and that there there is no metaphysically perfect way of looking at the universe. This is something I want to explain further, but I will save it for another post. But this perspective on the loss of information as we travel through the levels of thought puts me at odds with those who read postmodern works which are dedicated to ‘ends’ (see Paul Shehan’s chapter on ‘Postmodernism and PhilosophyThe Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, p. 20-42 for more on this topic).

I had been educated in science, not metaphysics. On that account, I distrust metaphysics. Its answers are too final. And it’s not that I have more faith in the final solutions of science. It’s just that I prefer the more tentative and temporal conclusions of science to the more permanent and otherworldly solutions of metaphysics.

In the world of science, it is not the ‘end’ that endures. It is the tentative ‘means’ to an end. Only by posing a hypothesis do we progress in science. And scientific hypotheses are never final solutions. Moreover, in scientific systems there is no need to blame an ‘other’ for the faults in our systems. We scientists keep our minds open to the possibility that we could be (and often are) wrong.

In fact, the longer I have been out of the academic community, the more I have learned about scientific perspectives that I could never have found had I elected to stay behind the metaphysically-constructed Ivory Curtain.

And it’s all on account of a simple phrase about Reason’s ‘demonstrating the indemonstrable.’ Not bad for a lifetime’s work, but I’m not done yet.