Friday, July 28, 2023

Aristotle in a New Perspective, by Olavo de Carvalho

Embedded in the works of Aristotle is a core idea that has escaped the perception of almost all his readers and commentators, from Antiquity to today. Even those who perceived it – and there were only two, as far as I know, over the millennia – simply noted it in passing, without explicitly attributing to it a decisive importance for the understanding of Aristotle’s philosophy.

However, it is the very key to this understanding, if by understanding we mean the act of grasping the unity of a man’s thought from his own intentions and values, rather than judging him from the outside – an act that involves carefully respecting the unexpressed and the implied, rather than suffocating it in the idolatry of the “text” objectified, tomb of thought. I call this idea the Theory of the Four Discourses. It can be summed up in one sentence: human discourse is a single potency, which actualizes in four different ways: poetics, rhetoric, dialectics, and analytic (logic).

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my mother
NICÉA PIMENTEL DE CARVALHO

and in memory of my father
LUIZ GONZAGA DE CARVALHO

Epigraph

“The greater a thinker’s conceived work – which by no means coincides with the extent and number of his writings – the greater, in that work, is that which was left unthought, that is, that which, through it and only through it, comes to us as never thought before.”

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

Prologue

THIS BOOK IS OLD AND NEW: it reproduces the text of An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture (Rio de Janeiro, IAL & Stella Caymmi, 1994), but with the addition of four chapters (IV, “The Universal Typology of Discourses”,1 V, “Reasons for Credibility”, VI, “Milestones in the History of Aristotelian Studies”, and VII, “Notes for a Possible Conclusion”), and a supplement, Aristotle at the Dentist: Controversy between the Author and the SBPC_. The added chapters are not new, but unpublished: they have circulated until now only as handouts in my courses. As for the supplement, which circulated for a time as a pamphlet attached to some copies of_ An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture_, but not all, it includes: (a) the text in which I responded to the unbelievable “Critical Evaluation” that the Editorial Committee of the journal_ Ciência Hoje2 made of An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture_;_ (b) the article I published in O Globo in response to two dimwits (or rather, fools and jesters) who defended the indefensible and took the opportunity to opine against a thesis they admitted not having read (thus dealing with a case of critical telepathy); (c) some of the letters I sent to the publication’s director, Ênio Candotti, trying to make him aware of his obligations, an effort to which he resisted with the necessary bravery to finally make me understand what the old theology meant by the expression ignorantia invincibilis_._

In the controversy that erupted around An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture between December 1994 and February 1995 in the Rio de Janeiro press, the most curious thing was that my opponents, lavish with opinions about an author they had never seen fatter nor seen after the diet, were unable to say a single word about the content of the thesis defended here, which certainly not only escaped their understanding but also their circle of interests, being, as it is, entirely unrelated to futile conversations of old gossips. Publicly challenged to discuss it, they preferred to take refuge in the realm of personal insults, where their trembling and spiteful souls felt safer, as it might be their natural habitat_. However, by an unfortunate or fortunate coincidence, this controversy in_ O Globo ran parallel to another, on a different subject, through the pages of Jornal do Brasil_, which led the two disputes to become entangled. They would not have become entangled, to be sure, if many supposedly intellectualized minds in this country perceived things less according to Aristotle’s categorical distinctions than according to a puerile Eisensteinian superimposition of images or an Epicurean “logic of appearances,” a method in which a pig or fowl can exhibit certain skills even before reaching maturity. And since the subject of the second controversy was none other than the moral judgment of the_ intelligentzia_, which, right or wrong, I accused of unconscious complicity with the banditry in Rio de Janeiro,3 many members of that class, feeling attacked at some vulnerable point on their corporate epidermis and not knowing exactly where the blow was coming from, thought it better to take precautions against my most innocent Aristotle as well. Naturally, this meant not having read him. The result was indeed an imbroglio, in the best style of a_ crioulo doido_, in which bad conscience, class vanities, ideological nitpicking, prodigious philosophical ignorance, and a firm determination not to understand anything came together in a united front to combat something they had no slightest idea of what it was, but in which their olfactory cells, as suspicious as those of a country bumpkin in New York, believed they could detect the vague scent of a formidable threat. Seeing all those little chicks running breathlessly under the protective wings of corporate solidarity, I could not help but conjecture that in the play that unfolded in their little mental circus, they had cast me in the role of the fox in the henhouse. A very flattering attribution to my humble self, but positively crazy. Or perhaps not: perhaps an accurate premonition that a voice that speaks perfectly seriously, with that sincerity that unites heart and brain, ethos and logos, can ruin the whole effect of the meticulously staged comedy that Brazilian intellectual life has become, scare the audience, and force the troupe of worn-out clowns to seek another job. I don’t know, and in truth, I don’t care: it’s their problem._

My problem, the only one that mattered in this case, was to know whether there is or is not a unity of the four discourses in Aristotle’s logic and whether we can draw anything useful from it for our current quest for interdisciplinary knowledge. I don’t understand how those guys ever imagined that a person entangled in such a tricky question could have the time or curiosity to know their opinion about his person, about whom he himself doesn’t bother to think anything, since he discovered, freed from the egocentric conflicts of adolescence, that there is a vast world beyond his navel. Much less do I think anything about those creatures, whose conduct, however evidently stupid, gives me no basis to judge their personalities as a whole, which I don’t know and which, in the strictest sense of the word, is not my business. Creating opinions about one’s fellow beings is one of the most idle occupations to which a man can dedicate his wretched life. As Henry James used to say, masters talk about things; servants, about people.

Chapter V, a reproduction of a lecture from the Philosophy Seminar_, will help the reader grasp the historical perspective in which my investigation of the Four Discourses is deliberately situated in the evolution of Aristotelian studies worldwide. And this perspective, once the eye has embraced it at least in a glance, will allow the reader to see the vital importance that the subject of this book has not only for the History of Philosophy but also for the conception of a global and integrated culture, of a global and integrated education, in which humanity’s best hopes are now deposited. The contrast between the altitude of these considerations and the pettiness of the reactions that the book has aroused in this part of the world does not fill me with any revolt, as my sinful soul is more inclined to gluttony, laziness, and lust than to foam with anger, but rather an irremediable sadness, filled with dark omens about the role that this country intends to play in the spiritual history of the world. A sadness that I disguise by laughing — laughing the melancholic laughter of the defenseless spectator facing a historical tragicomedy._

In any case, the reproduction of these documents in this volume not only aims to record for posterity a regrettable reality of the present. My response to the SBPC’s “consultant” contains some important developments of the central argument, including from a metaphysical point of view, which I had purposely omitted from the body of the work. If the anonymous character lacks any other merits, this one cannot be denied to him: he gave me the opportunity for explanations that, waiting for a chance to receive more detailed development, might never have occurred.4

It must be added that not everyone in the academic community imitates in their way of thinking those three neurons which, according to the latest counts, exist in the head of the editor of Ciência Hoje_, of which, for reasons of economy, he enjoys in condominium with Profs. Gilberto Velho and Carlos Henrique Escobar, leaving none for Mr. Antônio Callado (who had them in abundance but spent them all writing_ Quarup_). Mr. Fernando de Mello Gomide, in a letter to_ O Globo about the episode, made pertinent observations about the philosophical ignorance of our scientific elites. Soon after, the Catholic University of Salvador, BA, through the academic coordinator of its Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences, Prof. Dante Augusto Galeffi, took the initiative to cleanse the honor of the Brazilian academic community, inviting me to give a series of lectures on the subject of this book, which I did in May 1995 (under the title I later adopted for this volume) to an audience of the most intelligent and dedicated students I have ever seen in Brazil. The ones who finished removing the stain with which this episode had tarnished the reputation of our academic establishment were Profs. Miguel Reale, by accepting an abbreviated version of this work for presentation at the V Brazilian Congress of Philosophy (São Paulo, September 1995), where I finally had the opportunity to hear and respond to worthy and intelligent objections presented by three authentic men of knowledge: Milton Vargas, Romano Galeffi, and Gaston Duval.

I cannot but thank all those who supported me in this battle that I neither sought nor rejected against established ignorance. Evandro Carlos de Andrade opened the pages of O Globo so that I could defend myself there, making the combat between a distinguished unknown and the entire gallery of cardinals gathered in council under the apostolic blessings of Pope Ennius I somewhat less uneven. Elizabeth Orsini made the excellent report that brought the issue to the public. Bruno Tolentino, with the satirical vein inherited from his ancestor Nicolau, took up the fight, went to the field, and made the SBPC bigwigs a national laughingstock. Among the many who wrote to me and to the Rio de Janeiro newspapers in my defense, I must make special mention of the philologist Daniel Brilhante de Brito. A few weeks before the trouble erupted in the press, I had sent him a copy of An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture, asking him to rigorously inspect my speculations about Aristotle’s vocabulary. I did this trembling with fear, aware that my knowledge of the Greek language was not much higher than the level of philosophical culture of the SBPC “evaluator.” Only I know the relief I felt when the master, instead of taking me aside to give me a scolding, wrote to Jornal do Brasil to praise me in public, just when the philosophophagists were trying to roast me alive.

It is not necessary to say that this whole episode with the SBPC deeply impressed me, showing me that the ineptitude of our educated classes could be much broader than the casual samples that had reached me until then might have led me to suspect. The impact of this experience was, at first, depressing, like that of a teacher who, after giving his best to explain a certain topic for months, suddenly realizes that the class understood absolutely nothing. The perception of the ineffectiveness of his pedagogical efforts would come there, as it came to me, accompanied by a terrible feeling of loneliness, of being in a strange land surrounded by strangers. It reminded me of the scene in Woody Allen’s movie, where the character without any character, Zelig, interned in a mental institution and receiving daily visits from the psychiatrist, believes he is the therapist who receives the patient in his office. Not coincidentally, Zelig was, in his imaginary university, a professor of masturbation.

Rio de Janeiro, September 1996.

Prior Note to the First Edition of “An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture”

IN THE FORMAT OF A HANDBOOK, the first of the texts that make up this booklet has been circulating among my students since 1993, and the second since 1992. However, they summarize an idea that I have been presenting in my courses since 1987: the idea that, in Aristotle’s philosophy, the Poetics, Rhetoric, Dialectics, and Logic (Analytic), founded on common principles, form a single science.

An opinion so contrary to the dominant tendencies in the interpretation of a great philosopher for several centuries should, when presented in public in the form of a book, however detailed and modest it may be, appear in its entirety, precise, and accompanied by a demonstration as extensive as possible. This is not the case with this booklet. The idea is presented here in a compact summary, with no more support than some very general indications of the lines of possible demonstration. 5

Not that it is still in the author’s mind in its infancy: its complete exposition and thorough demonstration have already been given, several times, in my courses, being recorded on tape and transcribed into handbooks. 6 An unusually agitated life, which bears no resemblance to the idealized image of a serene scholar among his books that the theme of this book might suggest to the reader, has prevented me from giving this material the appropriate and definitive verbal form. For this reason, I had to choose, one day, between publishing my interpretation of Aristotle in a provisional abbreviation or waiting for some smart individual, one of those who make up a good third or fourth of our educated population, to present it as their own and highly original discovery, having heard it in my courses and conferences, or perhaps repeated by someone who had heard of it from afar.

For I not only discovered this idea but also dedicated several additional years of my life to it, giving it broad practical applications in the field of pedagogy and philosophical methodology, which the Stagirite master, if he were to see them, would not entirely disown, at least as I flatter myself to believe. And without bragging, I won’t, however, hand it over on a silver platter to the first vulture that comes along.

Hence, merely to protect its priority, I decided to publish this summary, which, though brief, I believe does not lack precision or serious gaps, and moreover serves as an introduction to more comprehensive expositions that will follow, with God’s help.

Rio de Janeiro, August 1994.

I. The Four Discourses7

THERE IS EMBEDDED IN THE WORKS of Aristotle a central idea that has escaped the perception of almost all of his readers and commentators, from Antiquity to the present. Even those who perceived it — and there were only two, as far as I know, throughout the millennia — simply noted it in passing, without explicitly attributing to it a decisive importance for understanding Aristotle’s philosophy8. However, it is the very key to this understanding, if by understanding is meant the act of grasping the unity of a man’s thought from his own intentions and values, instead of judging him from the outside; an act that implies carefully respecting the unexpressed and the implied, rather than suffocating it in the idolatry of the reified “text”, the tomb of thought.

I call this idea Theory of the Four Discourses. It can be summarized in a sentence: human discourse is a single power, which actualizes in four different ways: the poetic, the rhetorical, the dialectic, and the analytic (logic).

Stated this way, the idea doesn’t seem very remarkable. But if we notice that the names of these four modes of discourse are also names of four sciences, we see that from this perspective, Poetics, Rhetoric, Dialectics, and Logic, studying modes of a single power, also constitute variants of a single science. The very diversification into four subordinate sciences must be based on the reason of the unity of the object they focus on, under penalty of failing the Aristotelian rule of divisions. And this means that the principles of each of them presuppose the existence of common principles that subordinated them, that is, that apply equally to fields as different from each other as scientific demonstration and the construction of tragic plots in theatrical plays. Then the idea that I have just attributed to Aristotle already begins to seem strange, surprising, extravagant to us. And the two immediate questions it suggests to us are: did Aristotle really think this way? And, if he thought, did he think correctly? The issue therefore splits into a historical-philological investigation and a philosophical critique. I will not be able, within the dimensions of this presentation, to carry out either satisfactorily. However, I can inquire into the reasons for the strangeness.

The astonishment that the idea of the Four Discourses causes at first contact comes from a deeply ingrained habit of our culture, to view poetic language and logical or scientific language as separate and distant universes, governed by sets of laws immeasurable between themselves. Ever since a decree by Louis XIV separated “Letters” and “Sciences” into different buildings9, the gap between poetic imagination and mathematical reason has continued to widen, becoming a kind of constitutive law of the human spirit. Evolving as parallels that sometimes attract and sometimes repel but never touch, the two cultures, as C. P. Snow called them, have consolidated into separate universes, each incomprehensible to the other. Gaston Bachelard, a mathematician doublé poet, imagined he could describe these two sets of laws as contents of radically separated spheres, each equally valid within their limits and on their own terms, between which man transits like from sleep to wakefulness, detaching from one to enter the other, and vice versa10: the language of dreams does not contest that of equations, nor does it penetrate the world of the other. So profound was the separation, that some wished to find for it an anatomical foundation in the theory of the two cerebral hemispheres, one creative and poetic, the other rational and ordering, and believed to see a correspondence between these divisions and the yin-yang duality of Chinese cosmology11. Furthermore, they thought they discovered in the exclusive dominance of one of these hemispheres the cause of the ills of Western man. A somewhat mystified view of Chinese ideograms, disseminated in pedantic circles by Ezra Pound12, gave this theory more than enough literary backing to compensate for its lack of scientific foundations. The ideology of the “New Age” finally consecrated it as one of the pillars of wisdom13.

In this framework, the old Aristotle posed, along with the nefarious Descartes, as the very prototype of the rationalist beadle who, with a ruler in hand, kept our inner Chinese under severe repression. The listener imbued with such beliefs can only receive with indignant astonishment the idea I attribute to Aristotle. It presents as an apostle of unity one whom all were used to viewing as a guardian of schizophrenia. It contests a stereotyped image that time and almanac culture have consecrated as an acquired truth. It stirs up old wounds, scarred by a long sedimentation of prejudices.

Resistance is, therefore, an accomplished fact. The only thing left is to confront it, proving, first, that the idea is indeed Aristotle’s; second, that it is an excellent idea, worthy of being retaken, with humility, by a civilization that rushed to retire the teachings of its old master before having examined them well. Here I can only briefly indicate the directions where these two demonstrations should be sought.

Aristotle wrote a Poetics, a Rhetoric, a book on Dialectics (the Topics) and two treatises on Logic (Analytics I and II), in addition to two introductory works on language and thought in general (Categories and On Interpretation). All these works were practically lost, like the others by Aristotle, until the 1st century BC, when a certain Andronicus of Rhodes promoted a collective edition, on which our knowledge of Aristotle is still based today.

Like every posthumous editor, Andronicus had to bring some order to the manuscripts. He decided to base this order on the division of sciences into introductory (or logical), theoretical, practical, and technical (or poietic, as some say). This division had the merit of being Aristotle’s own. However, as Octave Hamelin wisely noted,14 there is no reason to assume that the division of a philosopher’s works into volumes should correspond one-to-one with their conception of the divisions of knowledge. Andronicus took this correspondence for granted and grouped the manuscripts, therefore, into the four divisions. But, lacking other works that could fall under the technical label, he had to put there the Rhetoric and the Poetics, separating them from the other works on the theory of discourse, which composed the apparently closed unit of the Organon, a set of logical or introductory works.

Added to other circumstances, this editorial accident was prodigious in consequences, which are still multiplying today. First, the Rhetoric — the name of a science abhorred by philosophers, who saw in it the emblem of their main adversaries, the sophists — did not arouse, since its first edition by Andronicus, the slightest philosophical interest. It was only read in rhetoric schools, which, to make things worse, were then in rapid decline because the extinction of democracy, suppressing the need for orators, removed the raison d’être of the art of rhetoric, enclosing it in the glass dome of a narcissistic formalism.15 Soon after, the Poetics, in turn, disappeared from circulation, only to reappear in the sixteenth century.16 These two events seem fortuitous and unimportant. But, added together, they result in nothing less than the following: all Western Aristotelianism, which, initially slowly but accelerating from the eleventh century, formed in the period that goes from the eve of the Christian Era to the Renaissance, completely ignored the Rhetoric and the Poetics. As our image of Aristotle is still a legacy of that period (since the rediscovery of the Poetics in the Renaissance aroused interest only among poets and philologists, without touching the philosophical public), until today what we call Aristotle, to praise or to vilify him, is not the flesh-and-blood man, but a simplified scheme, set up during the centuries that ignored two of his works. In particular, our view of Aristotle’s theory of discursive thought is based exclusively on analytics and topics, that is, on logic and dialectics, amputated from the base that Aristotle had built for them in poetics and rhetoric.17

But the mutilation did not stop there. Of the edifice of the theory of discourse, only the top two floors — dialectics and logic — were left, floating without foundations in the air like the poet’s room in Manuel Bandeira’s “Last Song of the Alley”. It was not long before the third floor was also suppressed: dialectics, considered a lesser science, as it dealt only with probable demonstration, was overlooked in favor of analytical logic, enshrined since the Middle Ages as the key to Aristotle’s thought. The image of an Aristotle made up of “formal logic + cognitive sensualism + theology of the Unmoved Prime Mover” solidified as a historical truth never contested.

Even the prodigious advancement of biographical and philological studies pioneered by Werner Jaeger 18 did not change this. Jaeger only overthrew the stereotype of a fixed and ready-made Aristotle, to replace it with the living image of a thinker evolving over time towards the maturity of his ideas. But the final product of this evolution was not, in the aspect here addressed, much different from the system consecrated by the Middle Ages: above all, dialectic would be a Platonic residue in it, absorbed and surpassed by analytic logic.

But this view is contested by some facts. The first, highlighted by Éric Weil, is that the inventor of analytic logic never uses it in his treatises, always preferring to argue dialectically.19 Secondly, Aristotle himself insists that logic does not bring knowledge, but only serves to facilitate the verification of already acquired knowledge, comparing them with the principles that underlie them, to see if they do not contradict them. When we do not have the principles, the only way to seek them is dialectical investigation, which, by confronting contradictory hypotheses, leads to a kind of intuitive illumination that highlights these principles. Dialectic in Aristotle is, therefore, according to Weil, a logica inventionis, or logic of discovery: the true scientific method, of which formal logic is only a complement and a means of verification.20

But Weil’s timely intervention, while it dispelled the legend of a total hegemony of analytic logic in Aristotle’s system, set aside the question of rhetoric. The academic world of the twentieth century still subscribes to the opinion of Sir David Ross, who in turn follows Andronicus: the Rhetoric has “a purely practical purpose”; “it is not a theoretical work” but “a manual for the orator”.21 But to the Poetics, on the other hand, Ross attributes an effective theoretical value, without noticing that, if Andronicus was wrong in this case, he might also have been mistaken about the Rhetoric. After all, from the moment it was rediscovered, the Poetics was also mainly regarded as “a practical manual” and interested writers more than philosophers.22 On the other hand, the very book of the Topics could be seen as a “technical manual” or at least “practical” — for in the Academy, dialectics functioned exactly as such: it was the set of practical norms for academic debate. Finally, Andronicus’s classification, once followed to the letter, results in endless confusion, which can all be resolved at once by admitting the following hypothesis, however disturbing it may be: as sciences of discourse, Poetics and Rhetoric are part of the Organon, the set of logical or introductory works, and therefore are neither theoretical nor practical nor technical. This is the core of the interpretation I defend. It implies, however, a profound revision of traditional and current ideas about Aristotle’s science of discourse. This revision, in turn, risks having major consequences for our view of language and culture in general. Reclassifying the works of a great philosopher may seem like an innocent scholarly endeavor, but it is like moving the pillars of a building. It may require the demolition of many surrounding constructions.

The reasons I claim to justify this change are as follows:

  1. The four sciences of discourse deal with four ways in which a man can, through speech, influence the mind of another man (or his own). The four modes of discourse are characterized by their respective levels of credibility:

(a) Poetic discourse is about the possible (δυνατος,23 dínatos), primarily addressing the imagination, which captures what it presumes (εικαστικος, eikástikos, “presumable”; εικασια, eikasia, “image”, “representation”).

(b) Rhetorical discourse aims at the plausible (πιθανος, pithános) and aims to produce a firm belief (πιστiota;ς, pístis) that supposes, beyond mere imaginative presumption, the consent of the will; and man influences the will of another man through persuasion (πειθο peitho), which is a psychological action based on common beliefs. If poetry resulted in an impression, rhetorical discourse must produce a decision, showing that it is the most appropriate or convenient within a certain framework of accepted beliefs.

(c) Dialectical discourse is not limited to suggesting or imposing a belief, but tests beliefs, through trials and attempts to pass them through objections. It is thought that comes and goes, through crossroads, seeking truth among errors and error among truths (δια, diá = “through” and also indicates duplicity, division). That’s why dialectic is also called peirástica, from the root peirá (πειρα = “proof”, “experience”, from where comes πειρασμος, peirasmos, “temptation”, and our words empiria, empiricism, experience etc., but also, through πειρατες, peirates, “pirate”: the very symbol of the adventurous life, of the journey without a predetermined course). Dialectical discourse finally measures, through trials and errors, the probability of a belief or thesis, not according to its mere agreement with common beliefs, but according to the superior demands of rationality and accurate information.

(d) Logical or analytical discourse, finally, always starting from premises admitted as indisputably certain, arrives, through syllogistic chaining, at the certain demonstration (αποδειξις, apodêixis, “indestructible proof”) of the veracity of the conclusions.

It is visible that there is a credibility scale increasing: from the possible we rise to the plausible, from this to the probable and finally to the certain or true. The very words used by Aristotle to characterize the objectives of each discourse evidence this gradation: therefore, there is less of a difference in nature between the four discourses than of degree.

Possibility, plausibility, reasonable likelihood and apodictic certainty are, therefore, the key concepts on which the four respective sciences are built: Poetics studies the means by which poetic discourse opens to the imagination the realm of the possible; Rhetoric, the means by which rhetorical discourse induces the listener’s will to admit a belief; Dialectics, those by which dialectical discourse investigates the reasonableness of admitted beliefs, and, finally, Logic or Analytics studies the means of apodictic demonstration, or scientific certainty. Now, the four basic concepts are relative to each other: the probable is inconceivable outside of the possible, nor this without confrontation with the reasonable, and so on. The consequence of this is so obvious that it is surprising that almost no one has noticed it: the four sciences are inseparable; taken in isolation, they make no sense. What defines and differentiates them are not four isolatable sets of formal characteristics, but four possible human attitudes towards discourse, four human motives to speak and listen: man discourses to open the imagination to the immensity of the possible, to make some practical resolution, to critically examine the basis of the beliefs that underlie his resolutions, or to explore the consequences and extensions of judgments already admitted as absolutely true, building with them the edifice of scientific knowledge. A discourse is logical or dialectical, poetic or rhetorical, not in itself and by its mere internal structure, but by the objective to which it tends in its entirety, by the human purpose it aims to achieve. Hence, the four are distinguishable, but not isolatable: each is what it is when considered in the context of culture, as an expression of human intentions. The modern idea of delimiting a “poetic language in itself” or “logic in itself” would seem to Aristotle’s eyes an absurd substantialization, even worse: an alienating reification.24 He was not yet contaminated by the schizophrenia that has become the normal state of culture today.

  1. But Aristotle goes further: he points out the different psychological disposition corresponding to the listener of each of the four discourses, and the four dispositions also form, in the most patent way, a gradation:

(a) The listener of the poetic discourse has the task of loosening their demand for plausibility, admitting that “it is not plausible that everything always happens in a plausible way”, to grasp the universal truth that might be suggested even by a seemingly implausible narrative. 25 Aristotle, in short, anticipates the suspension of disbelief that Samuel Taylor Coleridge would talk about later. By admitting a more flexible criterion of plausibility, the reader (or viewer) concedes that the misfortunes of the tragic hero could have happened to him or any other man, that is, they are permanent human possibilities.

(b) In ancient rhetoric, the listener is called a judge, because a decision, a vote, a sentence is expected from them. Aristotle, and in his wake all the rhetorical tradition, admits three types of rhetorical discourses: the forensic discourse, the deliberative discourse, and the epideictic discourse, or of praise and censure (to a character, a work, etc.).26 In all three cases, the listener is called to decide: on the guilt or innocence of a defendant, on the utility or harm of a law, of a project, etc., on the merits or demerits of someone or something. They are, therefore, consulted as an authority: they have the power to decide. If it was important in the listener of the poetic discourse that imagination took the reins of the mind, to take it to the world of the possible in a flight from which no immediate practical consequence was expected, here it is the will that hears and judges the discourse, to, deciding, create a situation in the realm of facts.27

(c) The listener of the dialectical discourse is, at least internally, a participant in the dialectical process. This does not aim at an immediate decision, but at an approximation of the truth, an approximation that can be slow, progressive, difficult, tortuous, and does not always achieve satisfactory results. In this listener, the impulse to decide must be indefinitely postponed, even suppressed: the dialectician does not wish to persuade, like the rhetorician, but to reach a conclusion that ideally should be admitted as reasonable by both contending parties. To do this, they must curb the desire to win, being humbly willing to change their opinion if the opponent’s arguments are more reasonable. The dialectician does not defend a party, but investigates a hypothesis. Now, this investigation is only possible when both participants in the dialogue know and admit the basic principles on which the issue will be judged, and when both agree to honestly adhere to the rules of dialectical demonstration. The attitude here is one of impartiality and, if necessary, self-critical resignation. Aristotle expressly warns his disciples not to venture to argue dialectically with those who are ignorant of the principles of science: it would expose themselves to mere rhetorical objections, prostituting philosophy.28

(d) Finally, on the plane of analytical logic, there is no more discussion: there is only the linear demonstration of a conclusion that, starting from premises admitted as absolutely truthful and proceeding rigorously by syllogistic deduction, cannot fail to be certain. The analytic discourse is the monologue of the master: the disciple’s role is only to receive and admit the truth. If the demonstration fails, the matter returns to dialectical discussion.29

From discourse to discourse, there is a progressive narrowing, a tightening of the admissible: from the unlimited openness of the world of possibilities we move to the more restricted sphere of beliefs actually accepted in collective praxis; but, from the mass of beliefs subscribed to by common sense, only a few survive the rigors of dialectical screening; and, of these, even fewer are those that can be admitted by science as absolutely certain and function, in the end, as premises for scientifically valid reasoning. The proper sphere of each of the four sciences is therefore delimited by the contiguity of the preceding and the subsequent. Arranged in concentric circles, they form the complete mapping of communications between civilized men, the sphere of possible rational knowledge.30

  1. Finally, both scales are required by the Aristotelian theory of knowledge. For Aristotle, knowledge begins with sensory data. These are transferred to memory, imagination or fantasy (φαντασια), which groups them into images (εικοι, eikoi, in Latin species, speciei), according to their similarities. It is on these images retained and organized in fantasy, and not directly on the sensory data, that the intellect carries out the sorting and reorganization from which it will create the eidetic schemas, or abstract concepts of species, with which it can finally construct judgments and reasoning. From the senses to abstract reasoning, there is a double bridge to be crossed: fantasy and so-called simple apprehension, which captures isolated notions. There is no leap: without the intermediation of fantasy and simple apprehension, one does not reach the upper stratum of scientific rationality. There is a perfect structural homology between this Aristotelian description of the cognitive process and the Theory of the Four Discourses. It could not be otherwise: if the human individual does not reach rational knowledge without going through fantasy and simple apprehension, how could the community—be it the polis or the smaller circle of scholars—reach scientific certainty without the preliminary and successive assistance of poetic imagination, the organizing will expressed in rhetoric, and the dialectic sorting undertaken by philosophical discussion?

Rhetoric and Poetics once removed from the “technical” or “poiêtico” exile in which Andronicus had put them and restored to their condition as philosophical sciences, the unity of the sciences of discourse leads us to a surprising verification: it embodies an entire Aristotelian philosophy of culture as the integral expression of the logos. In this philosophy, scientific reason emerges as the supreme fruit of a tree rooted in poetic imagination, planted in the soil of sensitive nature. And as sensitive nature is not for Aristotle just an irrational and hostile “exteriority”, but the materialized expression of the divine Logos, culture, rising from the mythopoetic soil to the peaks of scientific knowledge, appears there as the humanized translation of that divine Reason, mirrored in miniature in the philosopher’s self-consciousness. Aristotle indeed compares philosophical reflection to the self-cognitive activity of a God who fundamentally consists of self-awareness. The peak of philosophical reflection, which crowns the edifice of culture, is indeed gnosis gnoseos, the knowledge of knowledge. Now, this is accomplished only in the instant when reflection recapitulates its entire trajectory, that is, at the moment when, having reached the sphere of scientific reason, it understands the unity of the four discourses through which it has progressively risen to this point. There it is prepared to pass from science or philosophy to wisdom, to enter into Metaphysics, which Aristotle, as Pierre Aubenque rightly emphasized, prepares but does not fully realize, since its kingdom is not of this world.31 The Theory of the Four Discourses is, in this sense, the beginning and the end of Aristotle’s philosophy. Beyond it, there is no more knowledge per se: there is only the “science that is sought”, the aspiration of supreme knowledge, of sophia whose possession would mark at the same time the realization and the end of philosophy.

II. An Aristotelian Model of Cultural History

The vitality of Aristotelian philosophy of culture can be evidenced by its evident application and extension, which Aristotle himself did not undertake but which we can do in his name: the Theory of the Four Discourses not only describes the basic structure of the cultural world but also its dynamics or at least one of the fundamental principles of its evolution. We can call it the principle of the succession of dominant discourses.

This principle can be summarized as follows: Each of the four discourses enjoys authority during a certain period of history, and the order of the succession of dominant discourses follows the scale of increasing credibility, from the poetic to the analytical. By “authority,” I understand the implicit foundation of automatic credibility that the public grants to the discourse of the dominant class.

  1. The poetic discourse arises with the first oracles, in the depths of time. It is, by excellence, the discourse of a priestly caste. It is the model of the Vedas, the poems of Homer, the Tao-te-king, and the Old Testament. It is characterized by insisting “relatively little on a clear separation between subject and object: the emphasis is rather on the feeling that subject and object are linked by a common power or energy… common to human beings and the natural environment… Words are charged with power or dynamic forces”; uttering them “can have repercussions on the order of nature.” 32
  1. The poetic discourse gradually loses its authority in the West with the dissolution of the traditional Greek religion from the 7th century BC onward, with the advent of religious individualism and the worship of Dionysus, when poetry becomes an instrument of expressing individual emotions not necessarily shared by the community. 33 The rhetorical discourse begins to dominate with the establishment of the polis and, above all, after Solon’s reforms (6th century BC). It spreads through the activity of sophists, teachers of oratory of the dominant class. It retains its authority in Greece and later in Rome until the end of the Roman Republic (1st century BC) when its raison d’être disappears (with no politics, oratory becomes a gratuitous exercise). As a structuring force of social consciousness, rhetoric gradually becomes the object of research and school study; with Quintilian (1st century AD), we are already in the era of school rhetoric: the occupation of scholars detached from active life. 34

  1. The advent of Christianity (a graft of eastern origin) opens a hiatus in this evolution, temporarily restoring the authority of poetic language, which remains dominant until at least the end of the Patristic Era (6th century AD). But soon, the Christian tradition would be carried along by the general course of evolution.

  2. The dialectical discourse, inaugurated by Socrates (5th century BC) and exemplified in Plato’s Dialogues, where it appears as the supreme instance for arbitrating all metaphysical, scientific, ethical, and political questions, does not become socially dominant (despite the expansion of philosophical schools in the ancient world) until the end of the Patristic Era, from which point it progressively becomes the basic instrument of unifying Christian doctrine and defending it against heresies (surpassing the purely rhetorical arguments of the early exegetes, such as Tertullian). The height of the prestige of dialectics is reached in the great scholasticism of the 13th century when dialectical language is definitively adopted as the “official” garb of Christian thought. German Idealism, five centuries later, is a late dialectical reaction to the advance of the new logical-analytical science. 35

  1. The logical-analytical discourse remains in the background until the 16th century when classical rationalism, with Spinoza, Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz, begins to establish the primacy of an entirely deductive science. 36 This new model will even influence Catholic theology: in the 18th century, St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Moral Theology appears as a monument to deducivism, even in matters that could be thought deeply hostile to such ordering. Strengthened by advances in mathematics, deducivism reaches the peak of its authority in the 20th century with Einstein and Planck’s new theoretical physics, mathematical logic, the success of computational models, etc. The empire of science is the empire of analytical logic. 37
  1. With each transfer of prestige, the previous discourse does not fall into disuse but changes its place, acquiring new functions that ultimately produce profound changes in its internal constitution:

(a) With the reign of rhetoric, poetry ceases to be the language of a collective religion to become the expression of individual feelings, while becoming aware of itself as a means of expression and, as a result, improves technically: in opposition to the simple and natural greatness of epics, come the delicate refinements of Greek lyric poetry.

(b) Rhetoric, as it loses its authority, undergoes three fundamental changes: 1st, it becomes the object of erudite systematization, with Quintilian (one can only systematize in a closed scheme what is no longer valid or current; compared to Quintilian’s sum, Aristotle’s and Cicero’s Rhetorics – directed at an audience interested in their immediate practical use – seem partial and provisional sketches); 2nd, it is no longer used as much in political and forensic speeches but in private communication (ars dictandi, the art of writing letters); 3rd, it begins to merge with poetics, organizing a comprehensive survey of topoi, commonplaces, figures of thought and language for all objectives and situations, and it is from this survey that all modern literature is born 38, as well as the Western concept of “literature” as an autonomous activity.

(c) With the strengthening of the analytical discourse (especially from the foundation of the first Faculty of Sciences by Napoleon), the dialectical discourse, cornered, seeks refuge in the field of History and the “humanities,” attempting to preserve its privileges there in opposition to the victorious advance of the logical-analytical method, which dominates the natural sciences. The result is twofold: on one hand, the formation of current “human sciences”; on the other hand, with Hegel and Marx, the elevation of dialectics to a comprehensive philosophy of History. Hence, a double conflict has arisen, which remained somewhat relevant in our century at least until the 1970s: on one hand, the dispute between human and natural sciences; on the other hand, the war between Marxists and neopositivists. 39

The fate of poetic discourse in a world governed by analytical logic is interesting and at the same time tragic. Initially, poetics becomes increasingly conscious of itself as a set of linguistic means, causing “literature” to gradually acquire an autonomous place as an expression of culture. Later, with Mallarmé and Joyce, this autonomy is taken to its ultimate consequences: literary form proclaims its independence from any “content,” severing its ties with the world of human experience and knowledge. The “closure” of poetics in itself, which is partly a radical and desperate protest against the primacy of analytical discourse, gives certain works of 20th-century literature an enigmatic tone that simulates the mystery and magical language of primitive oracular poetry. However, it is an individual expression without public authority, and no one expects it to have power over the external world. It is an “empty” oracle, a pure conceptual form of an oracle without true oracular function. 40 It marks the end of a cycle.

Thus, the Theory of the Four Discourses implicitly contains a whole descriptive model of cultural history, which can also be applied with good results to other civilizations. For example, in the Islamic world, the initial oracular phase begins with the revelation of the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet; soon after, parties are formed, each with its rhetoric; 41 the proliferation of rhetorical discourses creates the need for dialectical sifting, which comes with Al-Kindi, Al-Ghazzali, Avicenna; finally, Islamic theology is organized into a deductive system thanks to the great orthodox commentators, such as Bukhari. In the 20th century, the theology of the fundamentalist movement takes abstract consequentialism to extremes, for example, with Said Qutub’s thirty-volume commentary, Under the Shade of the Qur’an – the equivalent, in its structure (not in content, of course), of St. Alphonsus’s Moral Theology.

That this theory, although not an explanatory-causal model but merely descriptive, has such profound explanatory power when applied to the historical evolution of civilizations should not be surprising since Aristotle is, after all, the very inventor of the concept of organic evolution, whereby the identity of a substance is not only its static pattern but the matrix of its transformations in time, a dialectic of permanence in change. Aristotle was also the introducer of genetic explanation, not only in natural sciences but in the history of thought. It is an intrinsic requirement of the dialectical method: each of Aristotle’s treatises begins with a historical review, in which the present state of a question is explained by the temporal evolution of debates – which ultimately makes Aristotle also the inventor of the genre “History of Sciences.” It is not surprising, therefore, that from him arises, even after so many centuries, the inspiration for a new model of cultural history.

What is strange is that the Aristotelian vision of cultural unity has faded over time, without any of the nostalgics of lost unity having remembered to seek it in Aristotle, finding it easier to look for it in China. 42

III. The Presence of the Aristotelian Theory of Discourse in Western History43

It has been told to you in the previous classes that this course is based on an original idea of Aristotle; that this idea, embedded and somewhat concealed in Aristotle’s writings, had to be unearthed and brought to light so that we could derive from it the principles of a new pedagogy.44

Everyone knows that Aristotle wrote a Poetics, a Rhetoric, a treatise on Dialectics (the Topics), and a set of books on Logic, or as he preferred to call it, Analytic Demonstration, gathered under the general name of Organon.

Equally known is the importance of Aristotle’s ideas in the evolution of Western thought, and it is recognized that these books, in particular, served as a rule and framework for countless ideas and creations of the European mind for over two thousand years. Such influential works must logically have also extended their scope to Education. Indeed, generations of philosophers and scientists were trained in the Organon, just as generations of poets, orators, playwrights, and novelists absorbed many of the basic rules of their craft from the Poetics and the Rhetoric. Aristotle, without a doubt, is one of the fathers of European culture, alongside Plato. To measure the extent of the influence exerted by these two philosophers in shaping this culture, one only needs to note that the other two formative forces that joined it were both collective creations, solidified through centuries of experience: Roman law and Judeo-Christian theology. At the origin of European culture, the contribution of the two Greek philosophers stands in importance and durability next to the legacy of two entire civilizations.

However, despite its magnitude, the influence of Aristotle followed a line of development that, when examined more closely, appeared strange and abnormal to me. We will see what it entails. Even more surprising is the fact that, in general, historians had not noticed this abnormality.

To describe this most peculiar phenomenon briefly, I must first step back and discuss Aristotle’s epistemology.

It is widely known that, in the secular debate between empiricist and rationalist epistemologies, Aristotle’s position occupies an intermediate stance, which, for lack of a better name, is called intellectualism. This intermediate position has often been misunderstood, leading to Aristotle being labeled, depending on the occasion, either a thorough rationalist or the father of empiricists.

The prototype of a pure rationalist was Spinoza, who believed that solitary reasoning, operating solely according to its own laws and independently of external data, can attain the highest truths, whereas only uncertain and accidental knowledge can be obtained from experience.

The symmetric opposite of Spinoza is John Locke, the apostle of radical empiricism. According to Locke, man is born like a blank slate, on which successive experiences imprint images until, through the accumulation of similar cases, the images organize themselves into patterns collectively called “reason”; thus reason itself is born from experience.

Aristotle’s so-called intellectualism consists of attributing interconnected and complementary functions to both reason and experience, so that in the discussion of the origin of knowledge, neither can unilaterally claim primacy in its contribution.

But it is not merely a static balance between opposites. Aristotle was also the inventor of a concept that would become, to this day, one of the most fruitful in philosophy and science, which is the concept of organic development; as such, he believed that we can only truly understand an entity or phenomenon when we study its genesis and the progressive development of the internal structures that constitute it. Therefore, when addressing the problem of knowledge, he described the origin and development of the human cognitive apparatus in such a way that both the empiricist and the rationalist perspectives harmoniously fit into it, each referring to a phase and aspect of the cognitive process. When this unity of knowledge as the potency of a living form that grows and develops was lost sight of, the debate between empiricists and rationalists arose, and Aristotle, against his will, was enlisted sometimes in one camp and sometimes in the other.

Reasoning in an Aristotelian manner: we can only comprehend a dispute and eventually resolve it when we investigate the common ground from which the antagonisms emerged; the investigation of genesis will, in most cases, reveal the adversaries as nothing more than “enemy brothers.” Indeed, in Aristotle, one can find an initial synthesis whose elements, centuries later, would manifest themselves divided in the antagonism of rationalists and empiricists.

According to Aristotle, all human knowledge originates, temporally, in sensations. If our five senses did not inform us about what happens in the world, we would have no knowledge at all. However, all animals have sensations, and in this sense, they know as much as we do. If some animals know more than others, the difference should not be sought in sensations but in some other function that has a decisively superior development in them. This function is memory. 45 Humans are the animals with the richest and most differentiated memory, and therefore, they know more than other animals.

Up to this point, Aristotle seems like an empiricist. But for him, memory is not just a passive record. It is also an imaginative faculty that combines and blends images, creating new patterns. Memory and imagination, for Aristotle, constitute a single faculty that he calls “fantasy,” which performs two different operations: it either repeats the same images or combines them with others, forming an inexhaustible multitude of mixtures. The simple image retained in memory, schematically reproducing a being or a fact, is called a “phantom” by Aristotle (without any macabre connotations). As the phantoms accumulate in memory, it starts reacting creatively, recombining these images, schematizing them, selecting them, and simplifying them, so that a multiplicity of similar phantoms can condense into a single image. Imagination organizes the contents of memory, aligning battalions of phantoms into synthetic images or schemas, designating things species by species, not unit by unit. Therefore, to recognize the idea of “cow,” a person does not need to remember, one by one, all the cows they have seen, which would make the work of intelligence unfeasible. Instead, the person produces in their imagination a single schematic image of a cow, and this represents “all” cows or, in technical terms, the species “cow.” The prototypical image indicates the “essence” of the cow species, synthetically encompassing all cows. Not coincidentally, the Greek word “eidos” that Aristotle uses means both “essence” and “image”; and in Latin, the word “species” means indifferently “species” in the sense of “class of similar beings” or also “image.” Imagination bridges the gap between sensory knowledge and logical thought.

Logical thought essentially consists of coherence between schemas. It represents a vast structuring of relationships of contiguity, succession, relevance, opposition, similarity, difference, hierarchical scaling, and so on. How could it perform these operations “directly” on the inexhaustible variety of sensory data? Without prior selection, summarization, and simplification in memory and imagination, it would take the force of divine thought to contain the ungraspable multiplicity of sensory inputs within a logical framework. However, logical thought does not operate directly on the perceived but only on the selected and simplified part that is deposited and remains in memory in the form of schemas or “species.”

This is how the ultimate conquest of logical thought becomes possible: the “concept.” The concept encompasses in a single mental operation not only species of beings but also species of relationships between beings and species of species, i.e., genera. And from one genus to another, it can ascend to encompass the most general and universal relations, conceiving merely possible relations and the gradations of possibility that hierarchize and relate possibilities to each other.

But the concept is nothing more than a purely verbal (although unexpressed) schema that further simplifies the sensory schema with which memory in turn summarized a whole species of beings. This means that thought only acts from a certain level of generality upwards. Hence, the imaginative faculty plays a strategic role: for the five senses, only the “here and now” exists, the concrete case, the immediate data; for thought, only the concept, the general, the scheme of schemes, increasingly rarefied and universal, exists. Without the imaginative mediation, these two cognitive faculties would be separated by an abyss. Humans might have sensations like a rabbit, and internally they might think something, like a computer, but they would not be able to think about what they feel “in fact,” that is, reason about their lived experience; nor could they, on the other hand, guide experience through reasoning to seek new knowledge. They would be as efficient as a computer operated by a rabbit and as alive as a rabbit drawn on a computer screen.

Logical thought would not be possible without the aid of this faculty, often disregarded, maligned, abandoned to children and the insane: imagination. When what was “presented” to us by the senses becomes “representation,” an image repeated from myself to myself through imaginative mediation, only then does thinking become possible. Many times, meditating on this, I have realized it is a miracle, or, if you prefer, a paradox. For thought, only the generic exists, and the generic is nothing in particular, while, for the senses, the image is always of a singular and concrete being. Imagination produces a strange being, the “species,” which, at the same time, is singular and generic. In the senses, a cow is a cow. In thought, the concept of a cow is not any specific cow; it is merely a mental schema. However, in imagination, a cow is either a single cow or many cows, as one pleases, and it is also a cow that is all cows at the same time. This madness is the foundation of the connection between logical thought and lived reality. That’s why later, Ricardo and Hugo de S. Vítor would honor imagination with the title “imaginatio mediatrix” — “mediating imagination.” And many centuries later, Benedetto Croce would confess: “If man were not a fantastic animal, he would not be a logical animal either.” 46 In Greek and medieval cosmologies, imagination or fantasy was considered the microcosmic analogue of the World Soul in the cosmic scale; through the World Soul, the eternal archetypes contained in the divine Reason or Logos descend and become real living beings. And in the Christian world, the World Soul was identified with the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of the incarnate Logos. The Aristotelian theory of imagination lies at the heart of all this.

Thus, according to Aristotle, knowledge is constituted through a series of progressive filtrations, selections, and structures starting from the senses (experience) and culminating in the rational structuring of knowledge. This, in turn, rationally organizes action, enabling a new form of experience, and so on. Each faculty that comes into play during cognitive ascent operates a new selection between the accidental and the essential and inserts the knowledge obtained into an increasingly broad, cohesive, and functional structure. Knowledge does not come from experience or reason alone; it comes from the rational structuring of experience deposited in memory and refined by imagination. This structuring molds, on the one hand, the constitution of humans as biological beings and, on the other hand, the universal ontological principles intuitively grasped and diversely reflected in the forms of the four discourses. For Aristotle, knowledge is a unified and organic process that rises progressively from elementary forms, common to humans and animals, to the grand syntheses of science and philosophy.

This unity, this organic nature of knowledge, is the main thesis of Aristotle’s epistemology. It is an inheritance that, abandoned during centuries of dispute between rationalists and empiricists, was resumed in the 20th century by Maurice Pradines with his “law of reciprocal genesis” of cognitive faculties,47 by Jean Piaget with his genetic theory of logical structures,48 and in a more restricted domain, by Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar. The Aristotelian seed continues to bear fruit.

But the unity of the cognitive process in Aristotle is a result or expression of the unity of the human being itself. Aristotle’s epistemology derives from his anthropology, or conception of man.

According to Aristotle, man is the rational animal. Rational animality is the definition or essence of man. Animality and rationality are fused in him essentially and inseparably. The description of the cognitive process given by Aristotle is nothing more than the narrative of the transition from animal knowledge, or purely sensory knowledge, to rational knowledge or properly human knowledge. But it is not the “conversion of the animal into man” as Engels called it; rather, it is a perfect continuity, through a mutation that does nothing but reveal, in the final form acquired by a being in its evolution, an essence that was present from the beginning, secretly directing that evolution.49

This must be understood in the light of Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and act. “Act” means effective, complete, evident, and realized. The philosophical terminology still uses the word “actual” in this sense, which sometimes sounds strange because the Portuguese word “actual,” by losing the “c” from the old spelling, has lost its meaning of effectiveness, retaining only that of contemporaneity, which is much narrower compared to the Aristotelian concept of “act.”

Potentiality is defined by act, not vice versa. Every power is the power to manifest itself in the act of power, and thus potentiality cannot be conceived in itself and independently of act. Act, on the other hand, is act independently of potentiality (this is why the supreme power, God, is defined as Pure Act by Aristotle).

Thus, when Aristotle defines man as a rational animal, he does not mean that all men are effectively and in all aspects rational, nor that reason is a “powerless power,” incapable of actualizing itself. On the contrary, man as a species is defined by the potentiality of reason, precisely to the extent that this potentiality seeks to actualize itself and can do so. A man may, accidentally, be deprived of the means to actualize the potentiality of reason, but the human species is human precisely because, in it, this potentiality tends to be actualized and indeed does so in most cases. (According to Aristotle, “privation” is an abnormality, and the definition of a species precisely expresses what is normal, or rather, normative, in it.)

One can say that a newborn baby is “not yet” rational, that reason is embedded in it in a latent state. But potential reason is already reason, and nothing else, because it is potential precisely to the extent that it tends to become actual. Thus, the history of the genesis of human knowledge is nothing but the history of the transition of human reason from potentiality to actuality. From sensory knowledge to imaginative knowledge and from there to rational knowledge, there is no cutting or rupture, but only the progressive actualization of the rational potentiality that is already embedded in the sensations themselves. Similarly, each material entity has, in its sensible form, the expression of its internal organizing principle, which constitutes its intelligible aspect. Through a series of abstractive purifications, knowledge consists in grasping the intelligible in the sensible (and not outside and above it, as Platonic thought claimed).

Furthermore, in Aristotelian metaphysics, each being has an entelechy or immanent purpose that defines it and secretly directs it towards the goal in which it fully realizes itself. Therefore, reason, as entelechy, directs from within the cognitive evolution of man until the full actualization of the potentiality that defines him. Thus, reason does not “emerge” suddenly and from outside, superimposing itself on imagination and sensations, but it is already in some way embedded, intertwined, and active in sensitivity and, later, in imagination. Karl Marx, a great admirer of Aristotle, would draw the implicit conclusion from this epistemology, observing that in man, knowledge through the senses is not just an animal function but is, from the beginning, human sensitivity50. Maurice Pradines would go further with a grand attempt to describe the hidden role of rational intelligence interwoven with sensitivity, like a secret compass directing the initial cognitive experiments of the newborn51. Man is not rational only when he reasons but also implicitly when he perceives and imagines. He could never become human if he were not already human from the beginning.

This brief description of Aristotelian epistemology and anthropology could be complemented with Aristotle’s cosmology, which shows the cosmos arranged in hierarchical degrees from the divine reason to the beings of the sensible world. This would show the genesis of human knowledge as a kind of inverted and dialectically complementary image of the structure of the world. However, that would be an explanation too extensive, and in fact, it is not necessary to provide it in order to understand perfectly well where I am heading.

I want to reach the inevitable conclusion that if the cognitive process, for Aristotle, is an organic unity that stems from sensations, goes through imagination, rises to thought, and reaches the rational organization of the world, without leap or discontinuity, then the method of knowledge, the Organon or methodological instrument that structures scientific activity, should also be a cohesive unity, the expression of an organism evolving without gaps. It should encompass all modalities of knowledge, from sensory to rational, establishing the links and passages from one to the other, as well as conversions and returns, so that we see the stages developing from within one another without rupture. To this end, the Organon should contain, before proper logic, a “logic of imagination,” without which the framework of sciences would risk being reduced to a mere set of formal schemes, disconnected from the reality of experience. In other words, thinking more about the pedagogical aspect of the Organon: should the formation of the wise not begin with the discipline of imagination?

However, when we examine Aristotle’s methodological writings, the Organon, as we know it today in the form consecrated by the selection made by Andronicus of Rhodes and repeated in all subsequent editions of the Aristotelian corpus, we see that it already starts from rational knowledge and upwards; it deals with the science of concepts as if they were causa sui, not requiring, as a prerequisite, a science of images. Compared to his epistemology, anthropology, and cosmology, Aristotle’s methodology seems like a statue that, starting from the waist up, floats in the air without legs or pedestal.

Many writings of Aristotle, it is true, have been lost. The history of Aristotle’s manuscripts is a true adventure novel, in which most of the characters end up dead or disappeared. Perhaps among these missing works was a methodology of imaginative knowledge. Whatever the case may be, what passed into history as Aristotle’s methodology is what is found in the Organon, and nothing else.

As it stands, the Organon continued to exert a great influence on philosophy, science, and education over the centuries, without anyone remembering to ask where the imaginative knowledge, so important in Aristotle’s overall philosophy, had gone. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Organon played the role of an instrument and philosophical propaedeutic in higher education, as originally intended, without raising any eyebrows over the fact that it only opened access to the sciences and philosophy, but not to any form of imaginative knowledge. Isn’t it strange that this happened in a time when the arts developed at least as much as philosophy, and when the principles of architecture (to mention just one of the arts) are closely related to the principles of logical thought? 52

At the same time, the public continued, since antiquity, to read the Rhetoric and the Poetics (the latter less, as will be seen later), but as if they had nothing to do with the Organon and were merely marginal works, more practical than theoretical, composed by the Greek sage during his leisure hours from “truly serious” philosophical work.

The public interested in the Rhetoric and the Poetics, in fact, became increasingly distinct from the philosophical audience, which focused on reading the Organon and the treatises on Physics and Metaphysics, leaving those works of a more “literary” nature to the more imaginative, less intellectual, and… less capable individuals.

The Rhetoric continued to arouse interest, but mostly among grammarians rather than philosophers. Even the political importance of the work diminished over time. As ancient democracy dissolved, giving way to more centralized regimes, there was no longer a need for orators, as public debates became scarce; thus, Rhetoric became a mere school exercise.

As for the Poetics, it was almost entirely forgotten already in antiquity and remained in obscurity until the end of the Middle Ages. According to the eminent philologist Segismundo Spina, “the Poetics probably did not have much diffusion in antiquity. Horace himself, whose Ars Poetica is clearly inspired by the Greek philosopher’s work, does not seem to have directly known Aristotle’s Poetics.” 53 In the East, there was still some interest in it: a Syriac version emerged in the 6th century and was translated into Arabic in the 11th century. In the West, it was only during the Renaissance that “Aristotle’s Poetics became the object of curiosity, editions, studies, and translations… The classical aesthetics developed throughout the 16th century in Italy is based on the small Aristotelian code.” 54 The first work to draw attention to this work seems to have been Francesco Robortelli’s commentary, published in 1548.

From then on, an increasing number of translations and commentaries expanded the influence of the Poetics, which from the 16th to the 18th century was at the center of debates for and against classicism aesthetics. Interestingly, this interest was almost exclusively limited to poets, playwrights, literary theorists, far from the circle of professional philosophers. The latter not only remained indifferent to the revival of the Poetics but also distanced themselves more and more from the Aristotle they knew, driven by a general rebellion against scholasticism that erupted around the same time and marked the beginning of the so-called modern philosophy, with Descartes, Bacon, Newton, Galileo, Leibniz. This philosophy, driven by a new concept of experience (mathematizable experience proposed by Galileo, as opposed to the old criterion of immediate sensory experience defended by scholastics), took increasingly divergent paths from medieval thought (and thus from Aristotle, at least as understood in the Middle Ages). Historians did not hesitate to interpret the emergence of Renaissance philosophy and science as liberation from the Aristotelian yoke that had lasted for over fifteen centuries.

How strange it is! The Renaissance, as everyone knows, brought about a revaluation of literature, poetry, and rhetoric, which gained cultural prominence that had been denied to them in the Middle Ages, dominated by academic philosophy. This revaluation occurred alongside and partly thanks to the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics, so that Aristotle, just when they believed to dethrone him in the scientific field, resurfaced as the patron of literary revival.

The most peculiar aspect of all this is the following. The Middle Ages, even though they found nothing about imaginative knowledge in Aristotle, cultivated and elevated this mode of knowledge to a great perfection, as seen in the aesthetics of the Victorines, 55 St. Thomas Aquinas, 56 and St. Bonaventure, as well as in the pedagogical synthesis of the Liberal Arts that gave Dante Alighieri the formula for artistic perfection: the truths of the Quadrivium shaped in the forms of the Trivium. In short, the medieval universe is absolutely incomprehensible without reference to a type of imaginative, symbolic thought that seems to have developed entirely apart from Aristotle’s aesthetic ideas, which were only rediscovered in the 16th century. Now, the advent of modern science coincides precisely with the dissolution of this symbolic thinking, which, at the threshold of modernity, was gradually replaced by a classificatory system based purely on logical analysis. 57

Perhaps because of this, Aristotle’s Poetics was understood in the West in a markedly rationalistic sense, to the point where classical poetics of the 16th and 17th centuries entered history as synonymous with formalistic rigor and strict control of the imaginary. But can we truly interpret Aristotle in this way, or is this just Aristotle seen through the lens of a rationalistic century?

Whatever the case may be, the succession of episodes I am recalling marks one of the most intricate stages of the evolution of Western thought. The events I mention have hardly been elucidated by historians. In fact, most of them didn’t even notice the strangeness of these events: an Aristotle that resurges while another declines, a rise of the arts (at the expense of pure philosophy) simultaneously with the disappearance or devaluation of symbolic language, a rationalistic aesthetics founded on an author who valued imaginative knowledge as a prerequisite for the rational – all this forms such a tangled web that it is enough to shatter the simplicity of the “Middle Ages vs. Renaissance” scheme, equated with “Aristotelianism vs. modern science.” The transformations that occurred during this period were not uniform; from the arts to science, from philosophy to religion, they were in many cases diverse, confusing, and even contradictory. Above all, the history of Aristotelian influence loses its apparent linearity here and becomes entangled in a knot of contradictions.

If, however, we look to the other side of the world, to the East, where Aristotle’s works came to us in Arabic versions from the 11th century onwards, we will see that things took a different turn there. Of course, there were also confusions (such as taking a Neoplatonic school’s Theology as a work of Aristotle for centuries), but what matters here is that in Islamic philosophy, Aristotle was understood in a slightly different way, and perhaps we should look to this philosophy for the solution to some of the enigmas mentioned above. But that is a task for historians. For me, here, it is important to highlight the following point: in Islamic philosophy, at least the general notion of an integral methodology of Aristotle was preserved, linking imaginative knowledge to rational knowledge, while this notion was lost in the West. This loss – which, in turn, remains to be explained – could be at the root of the confusions I mentioned.

For instance, Avicenna explicitly states that Aristotle’s Logic, or Organon, is divided into Poetics, Rhetoric, Dialectic, and Proper Logic, in addition to Sophistics.

Notice well: he says that the Poetics and the Rhetoric are part of the Organon as much as the Topics, the Analytics, etc. Avicenna doesn’t tell us much more about it, but what he said is enough to show that he understood the unity of the discourses' sciences in Aristotle in approximately the sense that interests us.

However, this was not the understanding in the West. Western philosophers focused their attention on Logic and Dialectic, leaving Poetics and Rhetoric to the grammar teachers… With this, the vision of the organic unity of Aristotle’s methodology was lost and relegated to the background.58 The amputated part, later taking the form of classical aesthetics in the Renaissance, would seek its revenge, while in the philosophical field, the new Renaissance science buried the scholastic version of Aristotelian Logic and Dialectic. Ironies of History.

IV. Universal Typology of Discourses59

ONCE ESTABLISHED that, according to Aristotle, there are four fundamental types of discourse, the question remains whether he is right, or if there might be three, or five, or ninety, and whether it would be better to arrange them differently and according to another set of relationships. It is left to ascertain what arguments we can summon in defense of the Aristotelian conception that were not proposed — and perhaps not even foreseen — by Aristotle himself. The logical necessity of the hypothesis of the four discourses remains to be demonstrated, preferably by approaching the topic from a different perspective than that taken by the Stagirite, in a way that shows that the same result can be reached through other routes. And if there is an approach that, though invented by Aristotle, is almost never practiced by him, it is precisely the analytical-demonstrative method. I shall reason, therefore, in the manner of Spinoza, by pure deduction, more geometrico, showing that by this path, one arrives at the same results that philology suggests through the interpretation of texts and that dialectics supports by the exclusion of contrary hypotheses.

I. Basic Concepts

  1. Every discourse is movement, a progression from one proposition to another. It has an initial term and a final term: premises and conclusion, with development in between. The formal unity of discourse depends on its unity of purpose, i.e., the arrangement of its various parts towards the desired conclusion.

  2. Premise is what is taken as already known or admitted and thus lies before the discourse. There are explicit and implicit premises: the former are mentioned at the beginning or in the body of the discourse; the latter are not stated. The omission of premises can be intentional or not. The speaker may have certain beliefs so deeply ingrained and habitual that they are inadvertently taken as premises; in this case, we call them presuppositions, to differentiate them from deliberately omitted premises.

  3. The unity of purpose manifests itself in the fact that the various parts that make up a discourse must be connected by some link, whether it be logical, analogical, chronological, etc. I refer to this link as formal unity, with the caveat that various types of links, present in the same discourse, can serve the same unity of purpose.

  4. The purpose of every discourse is to induce a modification in the listener, however slight and fleeting it may be. Changing one’s mind is a modification; receiving information is a modification; experiencing an emotion is a modification.

  5. The listener’s acceptance of the proposed modification is termed credibility.

  6. I call initial credibility the prior disposition to follow a discourse, accepting at least provisionally its premises; final credibility is the full acceptance of the proposed modification.

Initial credibility requires the provisional acceptance of premises; it itself is a premise. Final credibility consists of accepting the conclusions as well as (implicitly at least) the consequences that may follow from them.

  1. Definition of discourse. — Since the premise is what is already believed, the conclusions will be referred to here as the believable. Thus, discourse is the transition from the believed to the believable, through a series of connections.

  2. Effective discourse is one that achieves final credibility; unsuccessful discourse is one that, starting from initial credibility, does not reach final credibility. (In this sense, the rejection of the modification by the listener is also a modification, only negative.)

  3. Every discourse aims at positive final credibility.

  4. These concepts, principles, and criteria apply to all discourses, of all possible genres: from parliamentary oratory to lyric poetry, from newspaper reports to philosophical treatises, from a moral reprimand given by a father to his son to the annual report of a company to its shareholders. The demonstration of this universal applicability will follow from the theory presented in the paragraphs below.

II. Possibility of a universal typology of discourses

Typology involves differentiation based on extremes or poles. Every typology is based on maximum differences, which can be purely ideal and unattainable in practice, and real elements approach them asymptotically without ever reaching them.

Is it possible to have a typology of discourses deduced aprioristically from the very concept of discourse? The multitude of existing discourses — not to mention the possible discourses — as well as the incomprehensible variety of their forms, themes, subjects, and styles seem to indicate that it is not possible. However, the concept of discourse — the transition from the believed to the believable — already includes the idea of a maximum and a minimum: because what is believed is, by itself, the maximally believable, and what is believable at the end of the discourse is what will be believed. Therefore, without a scale ranging from the maximally believable (which is what is already believed, hence already credible) to the minimally believable (which is merely theoretically possible to be believed), there could be no discourse. The scale of credibility — of both premises and conclusions — is a condition for the possibility of discourse. This scalar nature of credibility shows that a theoretical and a priori typology of discourses is not only possible but necessary. If there were no scale of discourses according to credibility, there could be no discourses.

The question then arises: should the scale be based on the credibility of premises or conclusions? The answer is: obviously, on the premises, as the credibility of conclusions depends on them. Since the conclusion of one discourse can be the premise of another discourse as soon as it is believed, it follows that there is a scale of premises, and the degrees of this scale will give rise to the degrees of the theoretical typology of discourses.

III. Scale of premises

Regardless of its subject matter or theme, the totality of possible premises thus covers a scale ranging from the maximally credible to the minimally credible.

MAXIMUM (certain, true)

MINIMUM (possible)

The maximum degree of credibility is attributed to the absolutely true or absolutely certain. Here, I speak from a formal and functional perspective; it matters little whether the maximally believed premise is actually true or certain in its content, i.e., materially true; what matters is that, in discourse, it is taken as true. In the scale of veracity, the opposite of the absolutely true is the absolutely false. However, in the scale of credibility, which is what concerns us, if the maximum degree of credibility belongs to the absolutely true — or perceived as such — then the minimum degree cannot belong to the absolutely false because what is admitted as false is never taken as a premise for anything, precisely because it has already been challenged. Saying that something is false is equivalent to rejecting it as a premise and, therefore, rejecting its consequences, i.e., rejecting the discourse; and except in the case of logical demonstration ad absurdum, this takes us out of the realm of the typology of discourses. In the ad absurdum demonstration, on the other hand, the admittedly false is hypothetically accepted as true precisely to demonstrate that it leads to absurd conclusions; thus, even in this case, the credibility of the premise is what underpins the possibility of the discourse. Hence, the minimally credible — the lower pole of our scale — does not correspond to the false because the false is not minimally credible; it is incredible, thus lying outside and below the scale of credibility. If the maximum degree belongs to the absolutely true, the minimum degree corresponds to the minimally true, i.e., the merely possible. Below the possible, i.e., below the minimum degree of possibility, there exists only the impossible, which is the incredible, the false, and is beyond the scale of credibility.

The typology of possible discourses, therefore, begins with the polarization of premises (and consequently the resulting discourses) into maximally credible (or absolutely true) and minimally credible (or merely possible).

That would be the end of the typology if it were limited to a simple linear scale; the other types of discourses would have to be arbitrarily determined according to an indefinite number of degrees on this scale, or empirically inferred from the examination of the variety of existing discourses, which would be an endless task and would result in an indefinite number of intermediate types as well. Therefore, either the scale ends there, or we have to find another pair of extremes, another polarity, which, articulating with the first, produces a system of extreme directions in a cross pattern, maximally irreducible: the system of four directions transforms the scale into typology, converting simple quantitative gradation into qualitative differentiation.

IV. The four discourses

If every discourse is a movement, starting from something to reach something, and we exclude the possibility of an infinite discourse, which starts from the absolute beginning of everything to reach the absolute end of all things, passing through all possible things, then we can conclude that every discourse is a segment. It can be extended indefinitely, backwards — towards the ultimate foundation of premises — or forwards, in an indefinite series of consequences.60 What stops it at any point — backwards, by fixing or assuming the premises that will remain unchallenged, or forwards, by renouncing consequences that extend beyond a certain point — is a simple human decision. Of course, we can admit universal principles that would be the extreme prior limits of discourses, but this changes nothing of what we have said because, receding to a universal principle, a discourse would not find a limit beyond which it would be impossible to continue receding, but only the limit of evidence, of obviousness, beyond which continuing is unnecessary, although not impossible. The discourse that recedes to the ultimate — or rather, first — foundation could continue indefinitely; it would merely become redundant, halting in the indefinite exploration of the already known and the repetition of the evident. On the other hand, the indefinite extension of consequences could escape the limits of human thought, or at least of verification, but theoretically, it would not be obliged to stop. Thus, there is an unlimited extension at the beginning, into the ocean of evidence of first principles, and an indefinite extension of unverifiable or irrelevant consequences at the other extreme. Therefore, what determines the beginning and end of every discourse is not the concept of discourse as such, but an empirical, real factor: will, or contingent human convenience that moves toward the production of this or that particular discourse.

This empirical factor is, simply, the desire for maximum certainty or the inconvenience of contenting oneself with minimal certainty; or the desire to extend credibility from the known to the knowable. In each individual discourse, a human decision cuts the axis of the scale of credibility, establishing, in cross, another polarity: in each specific case, maximum certainty is not always possible, and minimum certainty is not always sufficient for desired ends. From this observation, two intermediate types of discourses emerge. Note well: two types, not just one, as would be the simple intermediate point on the vertical scale. These two intermediate points or types are, on one hand, the discourse that tends toward maximum certainty but cannot attain it, and the discourse that, not requiring maximum certainty nor tending to it, can obtain something more than minimum certainty. Between the discourse based on the absolutely true and the one based on the merely possible, two intermediaries arise that are not points on a linear scale, but movements, tensions, dynamics that tend laterally from a maximum point to a minimum, or from a minimum to a maximum, like this:

MAXIMUM (certain, true)

MINIMUM (possible)

The first is the one that starts from sufficient credibility, i.e., from the probable; the second is the one that, not being able to reach the true or even the probable, also does not content itself with the merely possible but desires the plausible and starts from the plausible.

These are the four levels of truth according to Aristotle: the certain, the probable, the plausible, and the possible. These are the four types of premises that discourses can take as starting points, and also the degrees of credibility to which they can aspire in their conclusions. Depending on the degree of truthfulness of their premises, each discourse only demands to be believed to the degree of credibility corresponding to them: if it starts from the merely possible, it does not claim more than merely possible conclusions, and if it starts from the absolutely true, it seeks to impose absolutely true conclusions. This is the universal and a priori foundation of the four discourses discussed in Aristotle’s Organon:

  1. The analytical discourse — or logical-formal discourse — is one that starts from premises considered absolutely certain or universally accepted and proceeds with rigorous development according to the formal laws of thought, syllogistic logic, to reach conclusions that are absolutely certain or universally compelling.

  2. The dialectical discourse is one that starts from premises that may be uncertain but are accepted under certain circumstances and by a more or less homogeneous audience knowledgeable about the subject; in other words, it starts from probable premises. Admitting various possible lines of development for such premises, the dialectical discourse compares and confronts these developments, excluding or combining them also according to the rules of logical coherence.

  3. The rhetorical discourse starts from the current convictions of the audience, whether true or false, and seeks to lead the audience to a plausible conclusion.

  4. The poetic discourse starts from the tastes or mental and imaginative habits of the audience and, playing with the possibilities found there, seeks to create an appearance, a simulacrum, leading the audience to provisionally accept as true, by free consent, something that was admitted beforehand to be merely fiction or convention.

FINAL SCHEME OF THE UNIVERSAL TYPOLOGY OF DISCOURSES

VERTICAL AXIS: necessity.

TRANSVERSE AXIS: contingency.

V. The Motives for Credibility

We have seen that the four discourses differ primarily in their degrees and modes of credibility. Now let’s study in more detail the psychological reasons that determine credibility in each of the four cases.

I. Poetic Discourse

It gains credibility through its magic: it makes the listener “participate” in a world of perceptions, evocations, and feelings, so that there is no gap between the poet and their audience. The communion, both spiritual and contemplative, of experiences “is as if life itself were speaking” (an expression used about Tolstoy, but which ideally applies to the poet in general). For this reason, Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that one of the basic conditions for appreciating poetry is a suspension of disbelief, a suspension of doubt and realistic critical demand. The listener or reader of poetic works temporarily sets aside critical judgment to more directly engage in the contemplative experience proposed to them. The analogy between the contemplation of art and the phenomenological epoché is evident: in both cases, we suspend judgment of “existence” to more freely grasp the “essences.”

In poetic discourse, credibility takes the form of a consented participation in a contemplative experience proposed by the poet.

The “magical” effect of this participation also requires, as a preliminary condition, a community of language and expression between the poet and the listener. They must not only speak the same language fluently but also have an equivalent mastery of vocabulary, syntax, etc. What the poet says must be instantly understood without too much intellectual mediation; otherwise, the poetic effect will not be produced. However, there is a difference: the poet’s mastery of linguistic resources must be active—meaning they can use them creatively—while the listener’s mastery is passive: they can comprehend the meaning of the poet’s use, even if they cannot produce a similar effect themselves.

This is why poetic works written in a remote era, with words strange to our vocabulary or syntactic constructions unfamiliar to us, no longer evoke poetic effects unless the barrier of difficulties is artificially removed, either through the intervention of a philologist or an explainer or through our personal effort of research, analysis, and interpretation. The aesthetic appreciation of ancient or foreign works becomes an indirect experience, achieved through intellectual and critical mediation. Since, in ordinary people, critical intellectual activity and direct experience are separated by an abyss that only a long education can overcome, this experience is practically inaccessible to most individuals. The possibility of “recovering” the original and living sense of the poetic experience depends on the reader’s culture and ability: the more familiar they are with technical interpretive procedures, the less laborious the intellectual mediation becomes, and the easier their access to the poetic experience. For the beginner reader, the effort of interpretation itself becomes an obstacle, and many poetic universes remain closed to them. Regular philological study and constant exercise in interpretation open horizons of whose existence the average reader does not even suspect.

Of course, there are exceptions, works that, even though written in another era, remain accessible more or less directly and apparently do not present major interpretative difficulties. In many cases, this apparent ease is deceptive and based on fortuitous affinities. The reader ends up appreciating the work for reasons unrelated to it. A person accustomed to psychoanalytic ideas enjoys Oedipus Rex without realizing that Sophocles' Oedipus had no Oedipus complex; only Freud’s interpretation does. Or a young person seeking “mystical experience” outside the confines of the “dogma” they consider narrow admires St. John of the Cross without realizing that, outside Catholic dogma, there is no possibility of truly understanding St. John of the Cross. It’s like an indigenous person who, arriving in Rio or São Paulo and encountering a statue of Peri and Ceci, develops great admiration for the city, believing that the indigenous people are objects of public worship there. Or like the Baron de Itararé, who joined the Integralist movement because he understood that the movement’s motto was: “Goodbye, Homeland and Family.”

Only true literary culture can correct these subjective deviations, which seem to me to be the standard of literary taste among young university students today. Their literary education, based on occasional worship of randomly selected authors—according to the preferences of their teachers or the oscillations of fashion—does not allow them to have a comprehensive view of the world of letters, neither in its historical context, nor in terms of a hierarchy of literary values, nor even in the system of genres and forms. As a result, their literary appreciations mirror the story of the blind men and the elephant. “It’s a post,” said the first one, feeling a leg of the animal. “It’s a snake,” guaranteed the second, grabbing the trunk. “It’s a banana leaf,” asserted the third, stroking the thin edge of the ear. As a result of such experiences, the young person, after a few years of “studies,” concludes that arbitrary taste is the supreme standard of judgment. This conclusion is flattering because, in these days of narcissism and the cult of youth, anyone under thirty is eager to become the measure of all things. A multitude of illiterate little tyrants.

A true literary culture can correct these distortions by introducing a sense of proportion, significant appropriateness, hierarchy of literary values, etc., into the experience of poetic works.

In any case, the initial impression of affinity and intimate agreement should never be taken as a criterion of value. Some works may be more “strange” and not easily engaging, yet they may have much more to tell us when we become capable of understanding them. Opening ourselves to new possibilities of understanding is the essence of education. However, this does not mean that poetic works, to move us, should be written in the style of our everyday speech to avoid causing any strangeness. On the contrary, if everyday speech had the power to move us, we would live immersed in a sea of emotions and never fall into banality and boredom. Poetic discourse precisely breaks this state of banality and boredom through its “strangeness.” But there are two types of strangeness: magical and intellectual. Intellectual strangeness creates a critical distance between us and the poetic work, weakening or nullifying the poetic experience; magical strangeness, on the other hand, gives poetic language an aura of prestige and oracular authority, allowing it to ascend to the sphere of what romantic aesthetics called “the sublime,” beyond the merely “beautiful.” The difference is that one of these forms of strangeness is accompanied by a feeling of rejection and nonconformity, while the other produces fascination and participation. We will not delve into the details of how these effects are produced. (The so-called Brechtian strangeness, which is of an intellectual nature, is entirely different. The theater of Brecht leads the spectator to critically estrange the action of the characters, not the work as a whole. In this sense, it retains its “magical” influence, in fact powerful, behind a curtain of critical distancing.) For now, what matters is to point out that the credibility of poetic discourse, in all cases, arises from the “magic” made possible by the consented participation in a contemplative experience, and this consent concretely takes the form of a suspension of disbelief, of a (temporary and uncommitted) agreement to “enter the game.”

Lastly, the community of experiences, if understood in a spiritual and contemplative sense, rather than physical, should not be seen as limited to the “subjective” sphere of experience. There is nothing to exclude the hypothesis that, through a spiritual medium, poetic works may have “physical” effects on the reader, and these effects may be objective and repeatable, once the required cultural and psychological conditions are met. It seems that in the initial stages of human culture, poetic language is recognized as possessing, par excellence, this faculty and even the power to unleash physical effects in the surrounding nature through the magic of words. The common origins of poetry and magic (understood as the science and technique of working with subtle forces of nature) constitute a thorny and complex subject that we will address more carefully in more advanced stages of our course. For now, we should merely note that the poetic experience is in no way dependent on pure subjective arbitrariness. Once the initial conditions are met—consent to participation and a community of linguistic resources—the poetic effect follows along perfectly identifiable lines, and all of this should be the object of science, not of caprice.

II. Rhetorical Discourse

Essentially aims to persuade someone to do or not do something: approve or reject a law, wage war or establish peace, elect or overthrow a ruler, acquit or condemn a defendant. Every rhetorical discourse contains, therefore, more or less explicitly, a command or an appeal. Its intention is that this appeal be heeded, this command obeyed.

Its influence on the listener is thus quite different from that of poetic discourse. The latter worked a transformation in the soul of the listener, but since this transformation occurred at very deep levels, it could not result in an immediate and practical external effect, translating into a specific and determined decision or action. Poetic discourse, in fact, predisposes certain attitudes from afar rather than ordering or soliciting them. The influence of rhetorical discourse is less profound, but more evident and immediate, more translatable into external actions. While poetic discourse seeks to absorb the entire soul of the listener, leaving a profound mark that integrates into their personality “as if life itself were speaking,” but relinquishing any immediate practical benefit, rhetorical discourse contentedly influences the listener for a certain period of time and for the purposes of a specific decision or action. The lawyer speaking in the courtroom does not intend to profoundly and lastingly transform the jurors' souls but merely persuade them to acquit or condemn the defendant in that precise circumstance. If they regret their vote later, it matters little: the influence of rhetoric ends at the exact point where the action unfolds as expected.

Poetic discourse does not give the listener any specific order. Even when it expresses commandments, as is the case with religious epics, it does so in symbolic language that allows for a variety of subsequent interpretations, and it is only through these interpretations (expressed, in turn, in dialectical or rhetorical language) that the very general commandments become specific norms. Some sacred texts, however, contain explicit exhortations and commands, mixed with symbolic expressions. For this reason, some scholars, like Frye, prefer to classify these texts in an intermediate genre, the Kerygma, a blend of poetic and rhetorical. This denomination can be accepted, with the caveat that in every discourse, poetic and rhetorical elements will never be fused into a homogenous mass but will always remain distinguishable.

Rhetorical discourse, on the other hand, always issues an order or request that, even if implicit, will always be concrete and determined; hence, it must be immediately understandable (that is, immediately related to the practical circumstances that concern it). A poetic discourse may have as many “interpretations” as one desires, without harming its effect, which sometimes becomes deeper with more varied interpretations. In contrast, a rhetorical discourse must be unambiguous: if it can be interpreted in various senses, it will have no effectiveness. Obscure words may fascinate or move, but they cannot transmit a precise and determined order. (This does not mean that a particular rhetorical discourse cannot also contain poetic virtues and, in this sense, reverberate with a multiplicity of symbolic meanings, as long as the literal meaning is guaranteed.)

The credibility of rhetorical discourse lies in its ability to make the listener desire something (or reject something). This effect is achieved through an identification, at least apparent and momentary, of the listener’s will with the orator’s will. The orator makes the listener feel that the proposal contained in the discourse ultimately coincides with the innermost will of the listener. It is no longer merely a consented participation in a certain contemplative experience but the admitted agreement with an identity of wills, hence of decisions.

Rhetorical discourse fundamentally appeals to the listener’s sense of freedom, to their impulse to decide, to act on their own, and assert their will. That’s why ancient rhetoric considered it essential for the speaker to first grasp the inclinations of the audience to bridge those inclinations and the desired objective.

Of course, there are false bridges: the orator makes the audience imagine they want one thing when, in fact, they want another, which the orator tries to make them forget for a moment. But the efficacy of such tricks is quite limited, and their constant use diminishes the orator’s credibility. True rhetoric is always based on the authentic will of the audience, seeking only to gently guide or transform it, without forcing changes, much less deceiving the audience. Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest orators of all time, said: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” The rhetorician knows that the will, ultimately, can only be persuaded to do precisely what it wants, and at most, it is possible to exchange a superficial and momentary will for a deeper one that already lies latent in the heart of the audience. In this sense, rhetoric appeals to the best in the soul of the listener and thus serves a moral and political function, as an exercise in responsible decision-making.

III. Dialectical Discourse

Aims to convince through rational means, independently of the listener’s will, or even against it. For this to be possible, the only preliminary condition required is that the listener accepts the arbitration of reason and agrees with some premises in common with the speaker, generally taken from the prevailing beliefs of their social or cultural milieu, common sense, or scientific consensus.

Note that, in the scale of discourses, the initial level of trust required of the listener decreases from poetic to analytical. Poetic discourse demanded a suspension of disbelief, almost an surrender; rhetorical discourse requires at least trust and sympathy for the speaker’s person (or else they must earn them). Dialectical discourse requires much less: the listener only needs to trust their own power of reasoning and the generally accepted premises; the direction of the discourse will be controlled by the listener themselves, always ready to reject conclusions that seem to escape logical sequence.

The credibility of dialectical discourse, therefore, depends solely on two factors:

  1. The listener must commit to following the logic of the argument and accept as true the conclusions that cannot be logically refuted.

  2. A common ground must be found from which to derive the premises.

This credibility ultimately depends on the listener’s level of education and intellectual honesty. Dialectical discourse is directed at a rational and reasonable listener who intends to conduct themselves rationally and reasonably, who agrees to subject their will to reason and who possesses some common knowledge with the speaker. Its success depends on finding a listener under these conditions.

IV. Analytical Discourse

Starts from premises that are taken as evident and unquestionable, and seeks to reach results that, within the limits of these premises, must be accepted as absolutely certain. Its credibility depends on two things: the listener’s ability to follow step by step a closed logical reasoning without losing the thread, and their awareness of the absolute truth of the premises. The first condition depends on specialized logical training. The second condition is only fulfilled in two cases: (a) when dealing with very general premises that no one can deny in good conscience, such as the principle of contradiction; (b) when the discourse is directed at a scientific audience, informed and capable of treating specific premises (drawn from a certain sector of science) as absolutely true, either by being able to verify them directly or by having the ability to deal with admittedly relative premises by conventionally treating them provisionally as absolute, leaving aside any discussion that denies them. In other words, analytical discourse can only function when dealing with truths that are either very general for a general audience or very specific for a highly specialized audience.

For instance, an audience of physicists may more or less conventionally accept certain principles of physics, knowing that they might be refuted tomorrow or later, but still agreeing to treat them as absolutely valid until they are refuted, while making every effort to overthrow them. This mental attitude, which combines the absolute logical rigor of consequences with the sense of the permanent revocability of premises, and which is a prominent feature of the scientific spirit, can be extremely uncomfortable for a cultured listener who lacks specialized training. The credibility of analytical discourse depends, ultimately, on the scientific capacity of the audience. Here, Saint Albert the Great’s warning applies: "To those accustomed to vulgarity and ignorance, philosophical certainty seems sad and arid, either because they have not studied and are unable to understand such language, ignoring the effectiveness of the syllogistic apparatus, or due to the limitation or lack of reason or talent. Indeed, a truth that is obtained with certainty through syllogistic means is of such a nature that it cannot be easily grasped by one who does not study, and is entirely incapable of it for one with limited vision."61

VI. Landmarks in the history of Aristotelian studies in the West

The history of Aristotelian studies in the West consists of a certain number of remarkable discoveries, which from time to time have brought to light new aspects of the work of the Stagirite.

In the 1st century BC, the revelation of the Aristotelian texts found and edited by Andronicus of Rhodes marks the beginning of the era of Aristotelian studies.

In the 6th century AD, the translation of Aristotle’s logical works by Boethius marks the beginning of the absorption of Aristotelian thought by the Church, a process that would culminate in the 13th century with St. Thomas Aquinas. Boethius is considered the first scholastic. Before him, Aristotle was certainly not unknown, but the view of him was very generic, his figure being confused with the Platonists under the common designation “the Academy.”

In the Commentaries on Aristotle by St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century), for the first time the West has a complete and structured vision of Aristotle’s thought, which since antiquity had only been known in partial and fragmented ways.

In the 16th century comes the rediscovery of the text of the Poetics, disappeared since antiquity. The edition with commentary by Francesco Robortelli causes a stir throughout educated Europe and results in the formation of the literary aesthetics of classicism, which will dominate Western literature until the 18th century.62

In the 19th century, the standard edition of the texts of Aristotle by the Berlin Academy, under the responsibility of Immanuel Bekker, greatly expands interest in Aristotelian studies. As a result, the systemic view of Aristotle’s thought, inaugurated by the scholastics, is refined and confirmed in a series of remarkable works, mainly by Félix Ravaisson, Essay on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1837), Franz Brentano, The Diversity of the Meanings of Being according to Aristotle (1862), and Octave Hamelin, Aristotle’s System (course of 1904-5, posthumously published by Léon Robin in 1920).

At the entrance of the 20th century, the systemic view is contested by Werner Jaeger (Aristotle: Groundwork for the History of His Development, 1923). According to Jaeger, founder of the so-called “genetic” school, Aristotle began as a pure Platonic metaphysician, ended up as a “positive” natural scientist, disbelieving in metaphysics. Jaeger’s position is radicalized by Pierre Aubenque (The Problem of Being in Aristotle, 1962), who shows us a tragic, almost skeptical Aristotle, in opposition to Platonic religiosity.

In response, Ingemar Düring (Aristotle’s “Protrepticus”: An Attempt at Reconstruction, 1961) values the genetic method, probing Aristotle’s youthful texts, while invalidating Jaeger’s thesis of a substantial change of orientation that would have occurred in the philosopher’s maturity. Similarly, Augustin Mansion (First Philosophy, Second Philosophy, and Metaphysics in Aristotle, 1958) and Eugenio Berti (The Unity of Knowledge in Aristotle, 1965) invalidate the second part of Jaeger’s thesis, showing that in Aristotle Physics is inseparable from his Metaphysics.

A completely new line of investigations is inaugurated by Éric Weil (Logic in Aristotelian Thought, 1951), proposing the revolutionary thesis that dialectic, not logic, is the scientific method par excellence in Aristotle. The thesis is demonstrated in detail by Jean-Paul Dumont (Introduction to Aristotle’s Method, 1986). It decisively contributes, albeit indirectly, to prove the unity of the Aristotelian system, against Jaeger and Aubenque.

Of course, there have been hundreds, thousands of other remarkable works. But these eight episodes mark the decisive moments, the substantial changes in orientation in the understanding of Aristotle’s philosophy and its absorption by the West.

My work sought to consciously fit into this evolution,63 taking advantage of the contributions of Weil and Dumont to found the view of a much more systemic, much more cohesive and “organic” Aristotle than the scholastics themselves could have suspected.

Weil conjectured that a new approach to Aristotle’s method would produce a turnaround in the view of his philosophy as a whole. This new approach started from the question (so obvious that no one had asked it over twenty centuries): if logic is so central in Aristotle, why doesn’t he ever use it in his treatises, preferring dialectical exposition?

Deepening Weil’s hypothesis, Dumont meticulously demonstrated that “anyone who adheres to a shallow interpretation of Aristotelianism, which reduces the Topics [that is, Dialectics] to a mere introductory discourse of the Posterior Analytics [that is, Logic], would make Aristotelianism an attempt to found a pure logical formalism, which happened quite often. [And with this] it would prevent us from recognizing the creative force and the genius depth of the Topics, which are the work of a young philosopher already in possession of an original method. Aristotle’s method makes a metaphysics capable of confronting the complementary points of view that express the diversity of causes possible.”64

Even before knowing Dumont’s work, but taking Weil’s conclusions that he would come to confirm for granted, I raised the following questions based on them:

  1. If Aristotle, from a young age, already had the integral dialectical method, then he created it during the years he taught Rhetoric at the Platonic Academy. Rhetoric and Dialectic therefore developed simultaneously and in close association, and not the latter after the former. Aristotle himself places Dialectic as a theoretical deepening of Rhetoric and Rhetoric as a “political” expression of Dialectic. In this case, however, the separation of the Topics and Rhetoric, made later by Andronicus, only has the value of an editorial arrangement, and does not reflect the close kinship of the two sciences as Aristotle imagined it.

  2. Weil is absolutely right to emphasize the importance of the Topics, whose contempt would lead, as Dumont rightly saw, to transforming Aristotelianism into “a pure logical formalism”, contrary to the declared intentions of the Stagirite, according to whom logic does not discover anything, but only confirms. But saying this is not enough. Aristotle admits no separation, no abyss between logical formalization and sensible knowledge; this separation defines, for him, knowledge that is logically correct but ontologically false. Hence his barely disguised contempt for mathematics, which he qualifies as a good study for teenagers. However, in this case, there must be, in Aristotle’s own method, a bridge between discursive thought and the senses, otherwise the method would reduce to pure formalization without connection to the real.

  3. Where is this connection? It cannot be in the Topics, as dialectics does not start from immediate data, but from current scientific opinions. It must be lower. It is also not in Rhetoric, as rhetorical argumentation also does not start directly from sensible data, but from current popular opinions.

  4. Among philosophers, Aristotle is the one who most emphasized the systemic unity of knowledge. It would make no sense, therefore, for him to employ a method cut into two separate tiers — discourse on top, senses on the bottom, like a kind of Cartesianism avant la lettre. On the contrary: for Aristotelianism to have the minimum coherence, it was necessary that the structure of his method had a rigorous homology with the overall structure of Aristotelian science. Now, this science starts from individual sensible beings, to gradually elevate, through species and genera, to universal being. The cognitive bridge between sensible beings and species is, according to Aristotle, phantasia (function that for him simultaneously designates memory and imagination). Phantasia, as a real phenomenon, is studied in the treatise On the Soul (psychology). Therefore, to complete the homology between the method and the system of science, that part of the method is missing which would correspond, in the sciences, to psychology, and that would study the method by which, starting from sensible data, the images (phantasms) are formed from where the concepts of species will subsequently come. In the writings of Aristotle that have come down to us, this part of the method does not exist. But there are mentions of this issue in the Poetics. Poetry, according to Aristotle, acts on the human body, through sound and image (in theater), and by showing universal truths in the actions of individual characters, works in a manner exactly analogous to phantasia, where the image of a body in space can represent not a single being, but its species, making the bridge between perceiving and thinking. Therefore, Poetics corresponds, in the sphere of the method — that is, of the sciences of discourse — to the “first floor”, the connection between sensory data and the universe of discourse. Poetry is the bridge between the “world” and “discourse”. Without poetics, understood as the seed of the discursive method, Aristotelianism is amputated from its material and sensible root, to which the Stagirite attached so much importance, and whose defense was the reason for his early break with the Platonic doctrine of ideas.

Building on these foundations, my thesis demonstrates, in a much more radical way than in Weil and Dumont, the profound unity of the inspiration that governs all of Aristotle’s work. It definitively blocks any attempt to make Aristotelianism a tool in service of tragic dualism, materialism, or a mathematizing Neo-Platonism. It takes the Aristotelian thesis of the unity of knowledge to its ultimate consequences, showing that this unity cannot be fully realized at the level of discourse, but requires the integration of discourse into the sensible world, biological life, and the social context. For Aristotle, discourse does not form a separate world, but is part of the natural, “biological” effort of the living entity to elevate itself to the conception of the universal that includes it.

My thesis seeks to reclaim the “systemic” and “ecological” spirit of Aristotelianism, at a time when universal culture is anxiously striving to reclaim the systemic and unitary sense of knowledge and the integration of knowledge into an ecological—or ecocosmic—vision of the living being. This desire is eloquently expressed, for example, by Edgar Morin:

I am increasingly convinced that the anthropo-social science needs to be articulated with the science of nature, and that this articulation requires a reorganization of the very structure of knowledge.65

Considering that Aristotle is one of the founding fathers of Western culture and science and the very inventor of the notion of “structure of knowledge,” what could be more important for contemporary scientific debate than rediscovering in his work the root of the integrative and systemic spirit claimed by Morin?

VII. Notes Towards a Possible Conclusion

THE IDEA OF THE FOUR DISCOURSES, not expressed in any of Aristotle’s texts, pervades all his thought and is implied not only in the theses of Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics, but in the very modus exponendi et argumentandi typical of the Stagirite.

It is in it, and not in the explicit content of the theses defended at each stage of Aristotle’s intellectual development, that we should seek the key to the unity of the Aristotelian system. In my view, it is strange that anyone would think of contesting this unity by appealing to biographical considerations, which are widely conjectural; because in Aristotelianism as in any other philosophy, as indeed in any human endeavor, the ultimate unity can never be achieved in the realm of accomplishments, and always remains as a guiding ideal that only appears as such before the beginning and after the end.

The end to which Aristotle’s effort tends (the constitution of knowledge as a demonstrative and apodictic system) remained for him only an ideal, is evident from the very fact that in none of the known treatises does the master use logical demonstration, preferring the dialectical route. If we understand, by the Theory of the Four Discourses, that for Aristotle knowledge is like a tree, which sinks its roots in the soil of sensations and rises gradually through imagination, will and thought to apodictic certainty, we must admit that the life of human knowledge can never cut off its roots and enclose itself in a demonstrative system, without this system, in the same act, being condemned to encompass only the most general and abstract planes of the sphere of known things and that, in this way, it ceases to be effective knowledge to become merely the formula of a possible knowledge, to be actualized, precisely, in the return to the singular things that the senses offer us. The wise man, in the Aristotelian sense, is not one who has risen to the heaven of Platonic essences, but one who, returning from the heights, knows how to go _re_cognizing, in the variety of sensible things that present themselves to him in space and time, the principle of unity that insinuates itself in them. Aristotelian wisdom is not only episteme, but fronesis, wisdom of action, guidance of the soul in the twilight of life’s changing situations. The complete realization of the demonstrative system would dispense with fronesis, because it would convert us into gods or angels.

The debate between those who bet on a systematic Aristotle or an aporetic Aristotle is thus resolved in an Aristotle who, circularly, rises to the unity of the system by the aporetic (dialectic) route and returns to the variety of problematic experience bringing from heaven that memory of the light of unity, which is precisely fronesis, guidance of man in scientific investigation as in active life.

It is in this dynamic circularity (and not in the pure and simple architecture of the explicit theses) that the essential unity of the Aristotelian system lies, not a simple unity, but unity of the diverse, as in everything that is real and living; even more, unity that is defined by an entelechy (the ideal of the system) and not by mere logical coherence, more or less mechanical, between the parts, or by a utopian (and unnecessary) persistence of the same convictions throughout a life; because unity is never, in the living being, and especially in the living being called man, static equivalence of all moments, but rather tendency, through the diverse, to a purpose that encompasses, explains and redeems everything.

We must never forget that Aristotle, when he entered the Academy, already had extensive knowledge of anatomy and physiology acquired in the domestic environment, and that this knowledge had already deeply impregnated him with the idea of organicity, or unity in diversity, which will guide all his logical, physical, metaphysical and ethical speculations and will be the unmistakable mark of his style of thinking.

Already in his first investigations on the theory of discourse, recorded in the book of Categories, the problem of the diversity of the meanings of being appears. It is fantastic that modern analysts attributed the Aristotelian solution of this problem to purely grammatical and linguistic speculations66, instead of seeking their inspiration in the simple experience of unity in diversity, which the young philosopher had brought from his training as a doctor’s son.

After describing the system of categories from a purely logical and linguistic point of view, that is, as a simple classification of possible predicates, Jonathan Barnes asks: 67 “Why the change from classes of predicates to classes of beings?” A curious question, for this passage, this change, exists only for Barnes and generally for the modern interpreter, accustomed to taking the logical-linguistic point of view as prior and independent, but not for Aristotle. For him, it is not knowledge that follows the models of language, but language that presents itself to him, from the beginning, according to the model he already knew: the organic model of unity in diversity. The system of categories is a biological approach to language and thought, not a logical-linguistic approach to knowledge.

So much so that unity in diversity is the key with which Aristotle seeks to solve all the problems he encounters: from the problems of the method (such as the famous dialectic resolutions according to the different meanings of the same word)68 to those of physics (according to the different viewpoints from which one can focus, for example, the soul), and even the supreme questions of metaphysics.69

Now, the unity of diversity, being the supreme key, cannot, in turn, be explained and justified: it seems to be, for Aristotle, one of those first truths that do not need proof, although it is based on it, as Dumont well demonstrated, the very principle of the dialectic method which, in turn, will lead to the revelation of the first principles of analytics.

If we ask where young Aristotle became aware of this supreme principle, we can only find this answer: in the contemplation of the living organism.

In the Academy, however, Aristotle comes to learn a concept which, fused with this, will give birth to the theory of the Four Speeches, to the creation of the entire Aristotelian method, and to the definitive takeover, by the young philosopher, of the spiritual powers that were his own.

This concept is the one that Plato conveys through the metaphor of the Line.70 The diagram is set out in the Republic, a work from Plato’s maturity, from which we can presume that it was a subject of teaching and debate in the Academy precisely at the moment when young Aristotle arrived there, in which it must have left a deep impression — that type of fertilizing impression that he attributes to the rites of mysteries.

On the extreme left and from bottom to top, the first column says: doxa (opinion) and episteme (science), that is, the lower and the higher mode of knowledge. On the extreme right, the respective objects of these modes of knowledge: doxasta and noeta. In the middle columns, on the left appear the cognitive faculties, two of opinion (eikasia or imaginative faculty; pistis, or faith faculty), two of science (dianoia or thought; noesis or, let’s say to abbreviate, intellectual intuition), forming an ascending scale. To the right, the objects of knowledge corresponding to these faculties: eikones or images; zoa or living and moving entities; mathematika or mathematical entities; and finally, arkhai, supreme principles or models.

Plato does not explain these concepts with precision anywhere, but it is manifest that there is the general framework of Platonic gnoseology. It is also evident the rigorous correspondence between the four faculties that appear in the middle-left column and the four speeches of Aristotle:

FACULTY (Plato) DISCOURSE (Aristotle)
εικασια poetic
πιστις rhetorical
διανοια dialectic
νοεσις analytic (apodictic)

The most elementary prudence recommends seeing in this Platonic scheme the remote origin of the concepts of the four speeches and the schematization of their respective sciences by Aristotle.

Even more interesting is to observe that a symmetrical correspondence does not exactly occur between the objects that Plato assigns to the four faculties (middle-right column) and the objects of the four discourses, in an ascending scale from poetic to analytic. If images are the object of poetic discourse, living beings are not objects of rhetorical discourse, but of dialectic, which according to Aristotle is the proper method of physics; mathematical entities, in turn, are for Aristotle objects of apodictic demonstration, not of dialectical dispute, and finally the arkhai or supreme principles are not, in the Aristotelian system, objects of any discourse, but of self-evident intuitive knowledge (to which one arrives, it is true, by the mediation of the dialectic).

Both the symmetry and the asymmetry marked there show that Aristotle was deeply impressed by the Platonic scale of modes of knowledge (to the point of preserving it in the definition of the four speeches), but that, trying to give these modes a rigorous conceptualization that he had not found in Platonism, and at the same time wishing to give the scale an organicist sense according to the style of thinking that was his own, he ended up being forced to break the symmetry of the Platonic model and to give his personal gnoseological speculations a different direction. Conservation and overcoming of Platonism are in fact, at all times of his development, the constants of Aristotle’s effort.

Not coincidentally, the top of the scale is the most disquieting zone of comparison between the two schemes, Platonic and Aristotelian. If in Platonism the supreme knowledge, noesis, gives us knowledge of the arkhai or principles, and if in Aristotelianism, on the other hand, the supreme discourse, the analytic, does not give us proper knowledge, but only the apodictic certainty of the knowledge already obtained, then we see that the ideal of a knowledge in which the fully realized analytic discourse coincides with the self-evidence of the arkhai known by intellectual intuition is implied in Aristotle, that is: where the fullness of the ability to prove equals the fullness of intuitive evidence. Put another way: the supreme ideal of knowledge would include, at the same time, united in an indissoluble synthesis, the immediate evidence of intuition and the coerciveness of rational proof. Only the realization of this ideal would allow knowledge to be fully systematic, without any aporetic residue. But it is an ideal that can neither be achieved nor abandoned. It cannot be achieved, because its effective realization for all domains of knowledge would be equivalent to the quantitative infinity in act, which Aristotle himself shows to be impossible. Nor can it be abandoned, because it is the image of infinite knowledge (not quantitative) that moves and structures the conquest of possible knowledge, which without it would be lost in an empiricism devoid of rational structure and all apodictic foundation.71

This is why Aristotle is a thinker who is both systematic and aporetic; this is why, guided by the ideal rule of the system (logical-analytical), he proceeds, in practice, by the dialectical method; this is why, always aiming at the universal and the eternal, he insists on always seeking it hic et nunc, in sensible particular beings; this is why he proclaims, at the same time, in apparent contradiction, that the supreme reality is God and that the only reality that exists are the sensible particular beings, especially the living beings; and this is, finally, why Aristotle would become, among the Greek philosophers, the favorite master of Christian thinkers: because his thought prefigures, in the enigma of the universal in the living singular, the mystery of the Incarnation. Active devotion to supreme science, to infinite wisdom, is, ultimately, the essence of all true philosophy and all true religion.

Aristotle at the Dentist

I. De re aristotelica opiniones abominandæ, or: meows of a dead cat

Depressing considerations about the “Critical Evaluation” of my work An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture by the Editors Committee of the journal Science Today , from the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science.

BACKGROUND — At the end of 1993, my text “An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture”, a summary of some lectures on “Thought and Current Relevance of Aristotle” that I had been giving at the Laura Alvim Culture House, was sent to SBPC for evaluation and possible publication in the journal Science Today, at the initiative of Dr. Ivan da Costa Marques, a member of this scientific society, who greatly honored me with his presence in the course.

After nearly a year, as there was no response, I felt free to publish the article in a book. At the beginning of October 1994, I received from the printer the first copies, impeccably printed. On the same day — mere coincidence or Jungian synchronicity, who knows —, I found in the lobby of my building an envelope from the SBPC with the return of the originals, the notice that the article had been rejected by the Editors Committee and the suggestion that, being a work on dental education (yes, that’s right: Dentistry), it would find better reception in a specialized journal.

I then wrote to the journal, informing that neither I nor Aristotle himself had the slightest idea of the dental interest of our speculations; that the return was late and unnecessary, since the work was already published in a book; and that, given the strangeness of the reason alleged for the refusal, it seemed that the work had not even been examined.

A few days later, I received from the journal editor an irritated letter, which blamed a typist for the dental slip and assured that the article had been examined with much attention by capable people — and as proof attached a “Technical Opinion” in ten lines and a “Critical Evaluation” in two and a half pages of small print.

The “Opinion” approved the publication of the article, provided that its second part was cut out,72 but recommended passing the issue to the examination of a second specialist. The “Critical Evaluation” brought the opinion of the second specialist, decidedly against publication.

In the following pages, I examine point by point, in the order they are presented, the reasons of the “specialist”, where I found:

Serious historical information errors 3
Errors due to ignorance of Aristotelian texts 5
Serious errors in interpreting the Aristotelian text 8
Paralogisms 3
Inversions of the meaning of the criticized text 2
Spelling errors 3
Others 2
TOTAL 26
AVERAGE PER PAGE 10

— which, considering the position of the said person as a consultant of the largest Brazilian scientific journal, is reason enough for us to put our hands on our heads and ask: but what is happening in this country, my God?

I. From bibliography

  1. The consultant, male or female, starts by pointing out the author’s outdated bibliography:

The author seems to ignore the immense production on Aristotle published in recent years, whether in specialized magazines, conference proceedings, theses, and books that have long since surpassed the narrow frames of scholastic interpretation and the “stereotypical image that time has enshrined as acquired truth”. The contrast of an Aristotle “guardian of schizophrenia” (the Scholastic Aristotle) and Aristotle “apostle of unity” presented as “shocking” novelty seems to indicate that the author has not been following the debates developing in numerous research centers…

The criticized article disputes interpretations of Aristotle that see a radical separation or opposition between the poetic-rhetorical and dialectical-analytical discourses in the thought of the Stagirite.

Would this type of interpretation be an old relic long surpassed by the “immense production” of studies on the subject? Contesting it would be nothing more than kicking a dead cat? The consultant assures that yes; that only an uninformed novice would present this contestation as a “shocking novelty”.

It is surprising, therefore, that he himself assures, lines later, that the discourse of the poets as well as the discourse of the jurists belong to another register and do not lead to scientific discourse, rather they move away from it… The discourse of the poets as well as that of the rhetoricians neither introduces nor prepares the discourse of science which represents, on the contrary, a rupture in relation to these…

It is incomprehensible. On the one hand, the consultant says that the dualist image of the Aristotelian theory of discourse is a museum piece, that it is not even worth contesting anymore. On the other, he defends it as his personal opinion.

He accuses me of kicking a dead cat while at the same time showing off the live cat. And the damn thing, brought to the stage, won’t stop meowing.

Does the consultant not know the current state of the debates well enough to know that the old opinion is still valid, or does he not know himself well enough to realize that he himself believes in it?

My hypothesis is that he doesn’t know enough about either: then evaluating my knowledge by his, and my self-awareness by his, he thought he could impress me with a bluff.

  1. A bluff, yes, because when accusing what seems to be my ignorance of the recent bibliography on the subject, he evades indicating in it a single title relevant to the theme, whose ignorance could seriously harm the formulation or conclusions of my study.73 Nor could he, in fact, indicate it, since the theme is very rare and practically ignored by scholars. Taken together, it is a theme absent from the bibliography, as I pointed out in my work, since St. Thomas Aquinas.

The demand for bibliographic support on a topic on which there is none can only come from someone who ignores the existing bibliography and has no idea about the state of the question.

  1. It’s true that in many points, the scholastic interpretations of Aristotle are surpassed. In many points, but not in the one I point out. This has never been even discussed, as any scholar of the bibliography knows. Isolated aspects of the theory of discourses have been addressed with some frequency, but they do little to confirm or deny my overall interpretation. It is precisely the generalized silence around this theme that has made it possible for the dualistic interpretation of the theory of discourses to penetrate deeply into the mental habits of Western intellectuals, to the point of becoming an unconscious presupposition. An unconscious presupposition is an idea that one believes in without knowing that one believes: it dominates and manipulates from behind those who don’t give it importance. The consultant himself personifies a typical and flagrant example when being scratched by a dead cat.

II. Originally old

The consultant continues:

The author presents a thesis which he believes to be revolutionary and innovative… that, without a shadow of doubt, is totally original but that… etc. etc.

Flattering but, again, incomprehensible. How could the thesis be original that, due to ignorance of the recent bibliography, does nothing more than contest old theses already surpassed?

III. Too much topic for just one book

Next, the consultant begins to point out “some serious mistakes” he believes he has found in my work:

Aristotle did not deal with discourse only in books catalogued as Organon; both Poetics and Rhetoric, as well as Book IV of Metaphysics, have as their object the analysis of discourse – discourse of the sophists, discourse of the poets, discourse of the jurists, or discourse of science.

Wrong. Book IV of Metaphysics — or, more properly, Book G of Metaphysics, since the Roman titling is only adopted in popular editions (I hope the consultant doesn’t only know Aristotle from them) — does not deal with the analysis of discourse, but with the very concept of “first philosophy”. Even a genius like Aristotle would not be able, in the little more than a dozen pages that make up this chapter, to delimit the territory of a new science and still find space to discuss there the discourse of the sophists, the discourse of the poets, the discourse of the jurists etc…

IV. Introductory sciences

Despite recognizing that Aristotle dealt with discourses in works not belonging to the Organon, the consultant states:

This does not justify the inclusion of Rhetoric and Poetics among the “introductory sciences”, as these are considered introductory in relation to the “first science” or the “sought-after science”, later termed metaphysics.

Very wrong. Dialectic and logic — sciences of the Organon — are not introductory only to metaphysics, but to the theoretical sciences in general and even to practical and technical sciences. It couldn’t be otherwise, because sciences in Aristotle form a system and the Organon is an introduction to the system, not to a particular science. This is an obvious fact that no beginner ignores. The consultant himself, with the unique consistency that characterizes his reasoning, recognizes lines later that dialectic is the method of Ethics.

V. Apophantic

Here comes more:

The discourse of poets as well as the discourse of jurists belong to another register and do not lead to scientific discourse, rather they move away from it as “other discourses”. This distinction is clearly marked when Aristotle restricts his analyses to the “apophantic logos”, the only one to encompass the question of truth/falsehood, distinguishing it from interjection and prayer (expressions of feeling and desire). The “apophantic” function of scientific discourse, an absolutely central notion in Aristotle, is totally ignored by the author.

God help me! I never expected to live long enough to see a philosophy professor confuse apophantic and apodictic!

Apophantic, my son, is simply a declarative sentence, which affirms or denies something, while an interjection or prayer affirms or denies nothing. How can one suppose that only and exclusively the discourse of science (the logical-analytic discourse) is apophantic, that the others affirm or deny nothing? A lawyer who proclaims the defendant innocent is not affirming anything? The judge who decrees him guilty does not affirm anything? The epic poet who narrates that Telemachus set out in search of his father and did not find him, doesn’t affirm or deny anything? Aristotle would certainly never entertain such nonsense.

All four discourses are apophantic, all equally: all affirm and deny; all can be — each in its own way and at its own level — true or false. None of them is a mere interjection or appeal.

Yes, they differ in their level of truthfulness, or rather, credibility, and scientific discourse differs from the others by being the only demonstrative one, capable of irrefutable proof, that is, the only apodictic one — and not, damn!, apophantic.

The confusion is so gross, so primary, that it gives me a mixture of disgust and pity to have to dissect it for a pompous academic, a consultant of the country’s largest scientific institution. It’s depressing.

I would not wish to insist on this subject, but, just to give an example, how could our consultant reconcile the notion of poetry as mimesis (which he says I ignore) with the assertion that only scientific discourse is apophantic? How could the poet imitate reality without affirming or denying anything about it?

Furthermore, Aristotle states that poetry “is more philosophical than history” because it speaks of man in general while history deals only with the particular. How could poetry state general truths about man without affirming or denying anything, and confining itself to moans and interjections?

It is true, indeed, that Aristotle excludes from analytics, and attributes to poetics and rhetoric, the study of non-apophantic sentences, that is, those that merely express desires, requests or orders74. But it would be frankly abusive to conclude from this that, in the philosopher’s intention, poetics and rhetoric should strictly limit themselves to studying this type of sentences, excluding all apophantic propositions from their field: this would simply make these two sciences impossible, emptying the concepts of possibility and likelihood of all meaning. “Analytics only deals with apophantic propositions” is not the same as “Only analytics deals with apophantic propositions”. What Aristotle meant, in the highlighted text, is clearly that the study of poetics and rhetoric also covers other types of sentences that go beyond the strict area of interest of analytics, which is obviously the case.

VI. The function of Dialectic

As for the considerations about Dialectics, the author ignores the function that Aristotle (albeit reluctantly) assigns it when it comes to establishing the principles of analytics itself.

  1. If I say that the four sciences of discourse are inseparable, that there is between them a scale of increasing credibility and that this scale corresponds to the degrees by which man ascends from sensible perceptions to apodictic rational knowledge, it is obvious that each one prepares the ground for the next one. How I could have said these things ignoring the function that dialectic exercises in the search for the principles of analytics is something that surpasses human understanding.

  2. The consultant demonstrates his attachment to the old image of Aristotle, which he himself qualifies as outdated, by placing, in parentheses, that Aristotle “reluctantly” recognizes the debt of analytics to dialectics. Why “reluctantly”? The expression implies a certain disdain that Aristotle would have for this science in comparison with the other, when in fact the growing tendency of Aristotelian exegesis (with which the consultant claims to be so up-to-date) is to recognize as valid the thesis of Weil, according to which dialectic is for Aristotle the method par excellence, of which analytics is only an extension and complement.75 Of course, I resolutely subscribe to this thesis. For this very reason, I see in the note that the consultant places in parentheses a clear sign that he is still attached to the old image of Aristotle that I challenge in my work, an image in which dialectics has only a localized and secondary function.

Whence one can extract a precious advice: before despising a dead cat, make sure it is not a living lion.

VII. Help me St. Gregory!

Then the very informed one begins to give me History lessons:

“All Aristotelianism that formed at the beginning of the Christian era until the Renaissance”. The author’s statement is entirely mistaken since “at the beginning of the Christian era” Aristotle was ignored by the Church Fathers and only became known in Europe in the so-called High Middle Ages (12th century) thanks to the invading Arabs, the School of Translators of Toledo and later to S. Gregory the Great and to S. Thomas Aquinas.

To these lessons, I must respond that:

  1. S. Gregory the Great could not have done anything in the 12th century, much less “later”, as he died in the year 604. Whoever wrote about Aristotle at the time was St. Albert the Great (damn typist!).

But even in relation to St. Albert, it would be absurd to say that he spread Aristotle in Christian Europe, since he only undertook his Commentaries to appease the outcry that was being raised everywhere against the Physics of the Stagirite, which, defending the hypothesis of the eternity of the world, seemed to contradict the Scriptures head-on. Since there can be no outcry against an unknown author, it is clear that Alberto’s work is the effect and not the cause of the spread of Aristotle. Thomas, for his part, is posterior to Alberto, of whom he was a disciple and whose Commentaries he completed.

  1. The idea that Aristotle was only known in the West from the 12th century may be enshrined in popular booklets, but there is not a single expert on the matter who does not know that it is a basic mistake. What was brought to the West by the Arabs were only Physics books. The logical works and the Metaphysics, at least, have always been read – in better or worse versions, directly or through comments – loved and hated in Christian Europe since the early centuries. I find them cited and discussed, with greater or lesser extent and accuracy, in numerous passages from St. Augustine, Clement of Alexandria (2nd century), Eusebius of Caesarea (3rd century), St. Isidore of Seville (6th century), the anonymous author of the Confutatio dogmatum quorundam Aristotelicorum (year 400), in Irenaeus of Lyon (2nd century), in Marius Victorinus (3rd century), in Arnobius of Sicca (3rd century), in Firmicus Maternus (4th century), in Marcel of Ancyra (4th century), in St. Basil the Great (4th century), in Eunomius of Cyzicus (4th century), in Nemesius of Emesa (4th century) and in Theodoret of Cyrrhus (5th century), not to mention the existence, in patristic times, of an entire Christian theological school inspired by Aristotle (the Antioch school), as well as the translations, whether of Aristotle himself, whether of Porphyry’s comments, undertaken by Boethius long before the Toledo translators were born and Albert and Thomas existed even in the form of spermatozoa. 76

This is what I – a complete ignorant of the bibliography – was able to locate. I imagine what the consultant, a very informed guy, would find if he agreed to study the subject before teaching it.

Well, one may ask, if I consulted all these authors, why didn’t I quote them? Simple: because, of all they talk about Aristotle, I found nothing that referred to the theme of my work, and the obligation of quotations is to be pertinent, not to show off erudition, as my consultant would like me to do.

  1. Whoever ignores the sources of a classic theme and only knows about the subject through recent bibliography cannot be considered an expert, but at most a hard-working novice. This, assuming that my consultant actually knows the recent bibliography. But it is obvious that he does not know it, since reading either the works of Dumont, Düring, Millet, Barnes, or even the classic books of Brentano, Jaeger, Ravaisson, Hamelin, Mansion, Le Blond, Ross and tutti quanti, would show him right away the impossibility of giving an opinion on the subject based only on them and without direct access to the sources; and if he had gone to the sources, he would not have said what he said.

VIII. I can’t get one thing right

“Above all, dialectic would be a Platonic residue, absorbed and surpassed in analytical logic.” Although Aristotle considers analytics a more rigorous method and more proper for science than Platonic dialectics, this does not mean that he considers dialectics “absorbed and surpassed”…

  1. Finally, the consultant said something that one can agree with: that Aristotle, after constructing logic, retains dialectics as a valid method. By saying this, he rightly opposes the belief that “dialectic would be a Platonic residue, absorbed and surpassed in analytical logic”. Only that, curiously enough, he attributes this opinion to me, without noticing that it is precisely the one I vehemently reject.

In fact, it is the opinion of the Solmsen school, which, endorsing Weil, I expressly oppose regarding this point. 77 It is true that, in the article, I did not cite Solmsen, but this was not necessary since his opinion on the matter is discussed in the quoted passage from Éric Weil.

Why does the consultant attribute to me an opinion that I contest? To more easily refute it and present as his the merits of someone else’s argumentation? Or does he do it simply because he can’t read?

IX. Dialectics again

After having rescued dialectics, as per Aristotle’s wish, the consultant jeopardizes everything by saying that it only remains a valid method because

there are fields of knowledge or regions of being that, as they are not governed by necessity, cannot be approached by an analytics.

  1. Would the consultant be so kind as to explain to me how a dialectics restricted to the fields “not governed by necessity” could establish, as he previously said, the principles of analytics? Would these be merely probabilistic and “not governed by necessity”?

  2. In fact, Aristotle assigns to dialectics a much more decisive role than that of an ad hoc logic for the fields of knowledge “not governed by a necessity”. The texts are very clear on this point, and assign a triple function to dialectics: 1st, it is a logic of the probable, or of the reasonable; 2nd, it is a pedagogical practice, a training of the spirit for scientific discussion; 3rd, it is the method for finding the founding principles of any new science.78

  1. Finally, the dialectics that Aristotle preserves is not the Platonic one, but his own, very different from it both in function and in technique and purposes.

X. Of disinterested knowledge

“The four sciences of discourse deal with four ways in which man can, by word, influence the mind of another man.” With this statement, the author again ignores the concept of apophantic logos and the affirmation that theoretical science is “useless and disinterested” — a condition of possibility for its objectivity and freedom. Theoretical science does not aim to “influence the mind of another man”, but to make manifest by discourse the being itself.

  1. The consultant falls back into the confusion between apophantic and apodictic, about which I have nothing more to declare.

  2. When Aristotle states that theoretical science is disinterested, he means that it does not aim at any practical ends, but certainly does not mean that knowledge of the truth is not a desirable end, nor that the demonstration of truth, made by logical-analytical discourse, is a harmless act that should not exert any influence on the listener. On the contrary, the apodictic demonstration exerts the most imposing of influences, by offering conclusions that must be necessarily admitted by anyone capable of understanding them. As Clement of Alexandria (one of those Church Fathers who, according to the consultant, never heard of Aristotle) well said about this, “the logical data from the demonstrations produces, in the soul of the one who followed the demonstrative chain well, a faith so vigorous that it does not even allow him to imagine that the demonstrated object could be different from what it is, and subtracts it from the influence of the doubts that want to insinuate themselves into our spirit to deceive us”.79

The very distinction between dialectics and analytics can only be properly conceived by reference to a very concrete discourse situation, to the different relationship, in one case and another, between speaker and listener: “The difference [between dialectics and analytics], says Éric Weil, is according to Aristotle that which exists between the course given by a teacher and the discussion undertaken in common, or, to put it another way, that which exists between the scientific monologue and dialogue”.80

When the master in his monologue manifests — apophantically — the very truth of being, should the rigor and objectivity of science consist in the listener remaining deaf and indifferent?

Our consultant sets up a false opposition between “influencing men” and “demonstrating the truth”, and attributes it to Aristotle himself, who could never accept it.

XI. Poetics and mimesis

The tireless consultant continues in search of my mistakes:

Poetics does not deal with the possible (according to Aristotle, this is the object of Rhetoric), but with a literary genre: Tragedy… The author ignores the central role of mimesis and catharsis.

  1. Poetics does not deal with tragedy, but with poetry in general, of which tragedy is just one of the modes. It is true that only the introduction and the section referring to tragedy of the work have survived, but the disappearance of the other parts was certainly not in Aristotle’s plans, and the introduction contains enough indications about the poetic in general.

  2. As for the claim that Poetics does not deal with the possible, Aristotle himself, after classifying literary work as a kind of mimesis or imitation, clarifies: "The poet’s own work is not to narrate the things that really happened, but those that could have happened or that are possible".81

Only a very inattentive reader will fail to recognize there the two elements that, in the Aristotelian method, make up a definition: the proximate genus and the specific difference. Poetry therefore belongs to the genus mimesis, it is a form of imitation, and its specific difference is that it does not imitate what happened (as History does, for example), but rather the possible.

The imitation of the possible is the very definition of the poetic work, and whoever loses sight of this definition will not understand much of what Aristotle says next about tragedy. This is precisely the case of our consultant — according to whom, however, I am the one who ignores the central role of mimesis. What role, for heaven’s sake!, if not the one indicated in the definition?

As for catharsis, of which the consultant also believes I know nothing, I at least know that according to Aristotle it could not occur if poetry, like history, imitated the real and not the possible. Because, in Aristotle, the real is always particular and the possible is generic. By imitating the generic and not the particular, “poetry is more philosophical than history and has a higher character”.82 Now, “the particular [or historical real] is what Alcibiades did or what happened to him”, and it interests Alcibiades more than anyone else. The generic, on the other hand, interests all men: if we are moved by the hero’s misfortune, it is because it is not the real and particular fate of so-and-so or such-and-such, but the generic fate that can befall any of us. If poetry imitated the historical real as such, there would be no catharsis that could withstand the distancing effect — almost Brechtian — of Shakespeare’s famous question: “What have I to do with Hecuba, or Hecuba with me?” The definition of poetry as the imitation of the possible thus leads us to the very heart of the mystery of catharsis — another Greek word that our consultant uses only as a pseudo-erudite bluff, being, as he is, incapable of understanding the most obvious implications of the concept.83

XII. Plausible?

Further on the same subject:

According to Aristotle himself, the plauseble (sic) is a central element of Tragedy — it’s therefore unclear how it can be considered the defining element of Rhetoric.

  1. First of all, my friend, plauseble is your grandmother. And don’t start with that excuse that it was the typist’s fault, because you’ve written this thing no less than three times.

  2. As for the plausible, there is a clear difference between the poetic plausible and the rhetorical plausible. In defining poetry, Aristotle uses the phrase “plausibly possible”, while in rhetorical argument what counts is the plausible as such, or, in other words, the “plausibly real”. There’s no way to confuse them: the rhetorical argument must be plausible in the sense that it imitates the true, the real, the historical, not merely the possible. In a courtroom speech, for instance, the lawyer does not try to show that the defendant is possibly innocent through plausibility, but that he is actually innocent: plausibility, here, lies in persuasion, a strong assent of the will, even without dialectically conclusive proofs and even less apodictic ones. Meanwhile, in poetic work, as we’ve seen above, the spectator only has to admit the possibility of the events — and, in this sense, the requirement for plausibility is attenuated, according to Aristotle’s rule that “it’s plausible that sometimes things happen in an implausible way”. If, on the other hand, the spectator were to accept the facts as real, mistaking the key and listening to the poetic discourse in a rhetorical manner, poetry would immediately lose its cathartic effect, as it would be speaking only of “Alcibiades” and not of the human genre. Being persuaded of a possibility is not the same as being persuaded of a fact.

The confusion is, to say the least, silly.

  1. It is Aristotle himself who uses the term “plausible” to define the type of credibility of rhetoric. With his baseless guess, the consultant simply shows he is unaware of the Greek text, where the use of the word πιθανοσ leaves no room for the slightest doubt on this point.

It’s scandalous that a scientific work should be subjected to the judgment of someone who only knows the subject from secondhand readings and is unable to evaluate even the use of vocabulary.

XIII. Tragedy and metaphysics

“From the limitless openness of the world of possibilities”… The author’s statement is incorrect: there is no “limitless openness” in Aristotle’s world of possibilities since the act precedes potentiality, hence the possible is entirely determined by the potentialities contained in reality.

  1. My dear consultant, have you read what you just wrote? It’s pure nonsense. If the act precedes potentiality, how could it be predetermined by it? Ah, I see: it was another typist error.

  2. Even corrected into a logically coherent form, your reasoning would remain false, since the power of the first cause is, according to Aristotle, infinite.84 This “positive” infiniteness of the first cause could not be repeated as such in the effect produced, and the result is that on the cosmic scale, infiniteness, which in the divine was supreme perfection, becomes a defect, incompleteness, deprivation, accidentality, because “nature flees from the infinite and always seeks a final term”.85 It’s more than obvious, on the other hand, that the powers contained in a singular being only predetermine the possibilities of its normal development, but not the accidents it may suffer. Accidents are, in principle, unlimited and unlimitable: as inverted reflections of divine infiniteness, they do not derive from the power of the being that suffers them, but from the divine power itself. Their root is not in the “positive” constitution of the finite being, but in its incomparability with the infinite. Therefore, each being, having a defined and limited power, is at the same time, subject to unlimited accidents. The very incomparability between the divine and the cosmic makes it so that, on the cosmic scale, the accidental necessarily exists, and it is from this surprising and almost paradoxical connection between necessity and accident that the fundamental inspiration for one of the main literary genres, the tragic genre, is born. In it, accidents — and not normal developments — are chained according to an iron necessity, in a kind of logic of the absurd, which only Grace (this, yes, a notion absent in Greek philosophy) can break. If the possible were predetermined by the powers of the finite being, as the consultant intends, tragedy would be absolutely impossible, because everything would unfold according to the constitutive normality of each being and there would be no accidents, let alone the metaphysically necessary accident that constitutes the very core of the tragic conflict. Tragedy does, indeed, open up to the limitless possibilities, because if it did not, it would not be a tragedy.

Yes, my friend: it’s very nice to use words like catharsis, mimesis, apophantic, act and power, etc., to impress laymen and pose as a sage. But these words take revenge, hiding their meaning from anyone who disrespects them by using them for circus display purposes.

XIV. Historical evolution

There is no way to talk about historical evolution in Aristotle. As a Greek, Aristotle’s conception of time is circular and not linear; time eternally returns upon itself and there is no way to properly talk about History in the matrix of Aristotelian thought.

  1. What nonsense is this? The very founder of historicism, Giambattista Vico, had a circular conception of time, the famous corsi e ricorsi. Does this mean “there is no way to properly talk about History in the matrix of Vico’s thought”?

  2. Aristotle, as no one ignores except our consultant, was the first to introduce the historical prism in the approach to philosophical questions, as well as the principle of genetic explanation in natural sciences and in gnoseology itself. This alone makes him, among the Greeks, at least a precursor of modern historicism and evolutionism. Obviously, it’s a historicism only in nuce, but who said something more than that?

  3. Aristotle nowhere affirms the circularity of time, but rather the circularity of the movement of the first cause.86 And if he himself defines time as the “measure of movement” (a measure operated by the soul)87 and says that the act of the first cause is infinite, it is clear that the “circularity” of the movement of the first cause is subtracted from the temporal measure and has nothing to do with the circularity of time. The belief that Aristotle, “as a Greek,” had to think exactly like other Greeks is foolish: a philosopher’s thought is not deduced from the general beliefs of the community to which he belongs, but is discovered by direct study of his texts.88 Presuming a priori that the individual members of such and such historical community have to be mentally limited by common beliefs is to condemn oneself to never understanding a single philosopher. In fact, it’s dispensing with trying to understand them, resolving their philosophy in advance through sociological generalizations of appalling primitiveness. Unfortunately, in Brazil this vice seems incurable.

XV. I still can’t get even one thing right

The consultant, not understanding what I say, prefers to assign me what I do not say — preferably some patent absurdity that he can easily contest, so as to pretend that he has knocked down my arguments when he has only knocked down some foolishness of his own invention. He falls back on this abuse several times. But here he oversteps all the bounds of audacity and shamelessness:

Locating the Dialectic in the Patristic era is to ignore reality… etc. etc.

Yes, of course it is. It would be absurd if I had done that. But the fact is that I did exactly the opposite. What is said in my work is: “The dialectical discourse… does not become socially dominant before the end of the Patristic Era.” 89 Why is it that whenever he agrees with me the consultant has to pretend that I think the opposite of what I think, so as not to admit that I got something right?

XVI. The Four Discourses over time

Then the unfortunate one states his own general law of cultural development, with which he intends to contest mine:

...in various cultures the so-called four discourses coexist and apply to different spheres of human reality and political life. Attempting to establish a “dominance” of a certain discourse seems to us an anachronistic resurrection of positivist discourse with its Law of Three States._

  1. Here is a revolutionary novelty: each culture simultaneously develops the four forms of discourse, with never a predominance of one. Fantastic! This means that the science of rhetoric did not develop in Greece before the Socratic dialectic; that Tertullian and Origen’s rhetorical apologetics is not anterior to the dialectical elaboration of Christian doctrine by the scholastics; that Islamic rhetoric does not reach its climax with Imam 'Ali centuries before the success of dialectic with Al-Ghazzali, Avicenna, and Ibn 'Arabi; and that in all cultures the logical-scientific discourse arises and achieves its full expression at the same time as the mythopoetic discourse, as evidenced by the scientifically recognized fact that all primitive cultures — Eskimos, Pygmies, Bantus, Upper Xingu Indians, among others — have bequeathed us, along with their mythology and symbolic art, also their treatises on logic, mathematical physics, etc., etc., etc.

That the human being has the permanent and simultaneous aptitude — the potential — for the four discourses, is something that cannot be denied (it is, moreover, reasoning Aristotelically, an indispensable precondition for there to be a succession of discourses over time). But to pretend that in fact and historically the four manifest at the same time as expressions of culture is foolishness.

On the other hand, it is clear that knowledge of scientific value can be embedded even in mythopoetic discourse, as indeed happens. But this does not make the mythopoetic discourse logical-analytic, as to form; and it is the succession of forms of discourse — not their contents — that my article deals with, at least for those who know how to read.

  1. As for the mention of the Law of Three States, it is a simple association of ideas, and too remote to be not impertinent. More plausible would be the association with the Marxist theory of succession primitive community / feudalism / capitalism / socialism, which at least coincides with my theory in terms of the number of stages. But if the consultant is used to judging scientific theories by the associations of ideas they fortuitously suggest to him, his true vocation is for occultism, not science.

XVII. Conclusion

Both the author of the long “Critical Evaluation” and the author of the brief “Technical Opinion” that precedes it were particularly bothered by the idea of the historical succession of discourses, which to the former seemed “extremely naive” and to the latter “founded on very fragile bases”.

Of course, this idea is presented at the end of my work without any claim of exhaustive proof, but simply as an example of the living potentialities, the relevance of Aristotle’s thought, its aptitude to pose for us, even today, relevant intellectual challenges. The model of the succession of discourses, which Aristotle’s texts hint at and which the facts suggest is quite plausible, is one of these challenges, and that’s how I presented it. The consultants, instead of taking it as an opportunity for serious discussion, preferred to feel offended in their pride and rejected it on futile allegations. The critical evaluator did neither evaluation nor criticism, limiting himself to producing a figure of speech. The person responsible for the “Technical Opinion” thinks he has disposed of the idea with a simple adjective: “naive”. Besides having an overly high concept of his own authority, this individual must imagine that, in the expression “technical opinion”, the word “opinion” is a verb, thus the mission of the opinion-maker is to give a technical appearance to improvised opinions.

As for the critical evaluator, his evaluation only made him get into, as seen, a critical situation. Narrow minds, accustomed to identifying scientific rigor with the indispensable but not therefore sufficient computation of minutiae, tend to see a priori as undue pretension any broader theoretical explanation that does not come with the reassuring stamp of some celebrity of the day. They therefore exempt themselves from examining it and involuntarily revert to the principium auctoritatis, destroying the scientific spirit they imagined they were defending.

People who behave this way should look in the mirror before calling someone naive. Naive is to assume, without solid and well-founded reasons, that things happened, in the history of some culture, according to an order of succession other than the one presented in my Aristotelian model — because this inversion would be at least highly unlikely, as it is evident to anyone who asks the following questions:

  1. Can a culture develop an art of political discussion before possessing a mythopoetic universe that fuses the community of feelings and values in which the public credibility of arguments must take root?

  2. Is it possible for a dialectic — an art of rational discourse sorting — to develop before there are even factions in dispute?

  3. Can a technique of apodictic demonstration develop before there are even a practice and an art of discussion?

Moreover, it is only in the most superficial appearance of its scheme that the idea of discourse succession can recall the old and peremptory generalizations of Comte, Marx, Brunschvicg, Sorokin and tutti quanti. It is not, firstly, a causal hypothesis, but the simple descriptive scheme of a fact that chronology attests: the mythopoetic discourse arises first, the rhetorical next, then the dialectic, and finally the analytic. Aristotle himself, in formulating the dialectic and laying the foundations of the analytic, was aware that this culminated all previous evolution of Greek thought; and, if he did not apply the same model to the description of other cultures, this is not a reason for us not to try to do it in his name, even with over two millennia of delay. Moreover, trying to do it is absolutely mandatory, since a basic precept of the scientific method commands testing the first hypotheses before moving on to the next ones.

In the second place, it does not imply any “progress” in the qualitative sense, and much less a global teleology of History, as do, for example, the theories of Marx and Comte. To hastily disqualify it as naive generalization, to try to cast upon it the mantle of demoralization that weighs on outdated metaphysics of History, is a rhetorical ploy unworthy of true men of science. A theory is not judged by its vague and fortuitous similarities with other theories.

The author of the “Opinion” — more restrained and sensible, I admit, than the “Critical evaluation” — obviously did not ask the above questions and is even less capable of citing a single example of a culture where the chronological succession of events diverges from the presented model. He rejects the hypothesis, then, out of mere irrational antipathy, naively or maliciously believing that an adjective is worth a refutation. The most surprising thing is his lack of curiosity, the sovereign laziness that yawningly rejects a question so as not to have to think about it, and goes back to sleep without evaluating what he loses. It is this false sense of superiority that turns the Third World intellectual into a very characteristic type; this sublime indifference that, like the “miserable Castilla” of Antonio Machado’s poem, "wrapped in her rags despises what she ignores".

However, I praise his prudence in transferring the judgment to another instance.

As for the author of the “Critical Evaluation”, I have already shown, in the previous pages, that he is ignorant of the matter, an artist of bluff, almost a “man who knew Javanese”, whose presence on the Committee of Editors of a serious magazine like Science Today is, at the very least, a tropical extravagance. May God grant that he is a young man, still capable of renouncing false poses and embarking on an authentic intellectual life, for which he undoubtedly has talent, only lacking the scrupulosity in whose absence all talent becomes an occasion for mistakes and harm. If he feels humiliated when reading my words, good for him: shame, Nietzsche said, is the mother of learning. Needless to say, I am fully available to him for any further explanations, and I will be pleased to assist him without any personal grievance of any kind and confident that, if he listens to the biblical command not to despise reprimand, he can still become someone.

Note that at no time did I question the magazine’s right to approve or veto the publication of my article. I was so uninterested in this publication that, in October, not having received a response from SBPC, I simply had the text published in book format — which automatically made its reproduction in Science Today inappropriate.

When sending my October 24 letter to the magazine, I had no intention of protesting against non-publication — which in addition to being untimely would be a childish insolence — but simply to express my surprise at the alleged reasons, whose comic nature no one can deny.

However, upon receiving D. Yonne’s response and reading the two annexes, I was truly astounded, scandalized and, to tell the truth, even a bit irritated. Not because I feel personally a victim of injustice — which I consider an inferior sentiment that is abused too often today — but simply because I notice, once again, one of the noblest intellectual activities being usurped by the trend towards pseudo-intellectuality that is, along with the ethical insensitivity of politicians, one of the biggest scourges of our homeland. The ethics of intellectual life is a prerequisite for the moral regeneration of a nation, and in this country we have seen many intellectuals place themselves as judges of public morality before demanding from themselves the fulfillment of their state duties. To me, the man who knew Javanese infiltrated into universities and cultural institutions in general is as scandalous, as damaging to the country as a João Alves or a P. C. Farias. More so than these, in fact: because they only squander material heritage, while he corrupts the soul and intelligence, the supreme goods on which the dignity of the human species rests.

Rio de Janeiro, November 9, 1994.

II. Challenge to the corporatist usurpers90

The RESTLESS DISPOSITION to opine about a text they did not read evidences well the mentality of Carlos Henrique Escobar and Gilberto Velho. The first one, for not liking my opinions about his ideological comrades,91 expressed in an article that has nothing to do with the case, allows himself to emit reckless judgments about a subject he doesn’t know from afar, which is not characteristic of a man of science, but of an ideologue, a cheap propagandist, incapable of seeing the issues except through the prism of his political preferences. As for Gilberto Velho, he resorts to the easy expedient of attributing to me what I did not say: at no time did I complain about “discrimination”. How could a reviewer I don’t know discriminate an author he ignores? I complained, indeed, of being judged by an incompetent person. Prof. Ênio Candotti also resorts to the trick of avoiding the merit of the issue, asking “what would happen” if every dissatisfied columnist with an opinion put it into discussion. What would happen is that the SBPC would no longer have in its panel of consultants neither the inept who judged my text nor stars — or show-offs — who presumptuously opine about what they did not read. The Brazilian academic establishment wants to oversee and judge the entire country, but cannot stand being examined. As Karl Kraus said about such people: “They judge so they won’t be judged”. Prof. Candotti says there was no reason for scandal. But he was, due to his omission, the only one to blame for the scandal. Having received a copy of my pamphlet weeks ago, he did not move to give it an answer, time passed and the issue ended up in the newspapers, when it could have been resolved discreetly if Prof. Candotti did what was his duty: seek clarification on the matter. As Dr. Cláudio Ribeiro well emphasized, “it is up to the editor to diagnose the failure”. Prof. Candotti is there for this, and not to reject a priori any complaint, whether under the presumption of infallibility of the academic corporation, or under the insignificance of its possible errors. In addition, Prof. Candotti forgets that the SBPC receives public money: if an irregularity in its work is denounced, it has the obligation to investigate it, rather than react like an offended maiden and refuse to discuss the subject. In my letter, by the way, I was very respectful to the SBPC, stating that the ineptitude of one of its members did not in any way detract from the honor of the entity. I see, however, that Prof. Candotti, out of pride and stubbornness, prefers to risk the image of the SBPC as a whole, rather than acknowledging the mistakes of just one of its members. What solidarity! Either this reviewer is a very important person, or Prof. Candotti finds it normal that scientific societies are like secret societies, which protect their members under a pact of loyalty to the death.

As for Callado, his stupid question — “How does he manage to reach the main newspapers?” — has a two-part answer: 1st, I have been there for thirty years, as a professional journalist; 2nd, the newspapers do not select their collaborators according to Antônio Callado’s criteria. Thank God, Callado is neither a consultant nor a personnel manager at any newspaper. If he were, he would use the weight of his prestige to veto the hiring of his adversaries. His hypocrisy is clearly revealed at the moment when, denying to make censorship, at the same time he falls back on the attempt to close the doors of the newsrooms to me. What a depressing thing! But it does not stop there: by calling me “unknown”, Callado is lying or he is senile, since he has known me personally for a long time — it was out of charity to an old man that I did not want to remember this detail until now — and it makes no sense, moreover, to label as unknown an author whose books have received, as Callado knows perfectly well, the qualifiers of “stupendous” (Herberto Sales), “very important” (Bruno Tolentino), “excellent” (Josué Montello), “magnificent” (Jacob Klintowitz) etc.

In the end, the arguments used against me in this controversy are reduced to a carnivalesque exhibition of prestige, to the argumentum auctoritatis and to the argumentum baculinum. I ask: of all these gentlemen, who knows Aristotle enough to judge the case, even assuming they had read my work? Bruno Tolentino is right when he calls them usurpers. They are as usurpers as a Collor or a João Alves: they don’t steal public money, but they use their positions and circle of friends to assign themselves an intellectual authority they do not have. I publicly challenge all these gentlemen to discuss, based on the texts and documents, the objections I made to my reviewer. All will run away, cowardly hiding behind corporate protection, without which each of them is, in this matter, just a helpless boy lost in the desert of his ignorance. Of those interviewed, only Profª. Rosângela Nunes and Dr. Cláudio Ribeiro declared, with exemplary humility, that they could not judge what they had not read. But both admitted, in principle, at least the possibility of serious errors in the opinion. For the rest, this hypothesis is unthinkable by definition. SBPC locuta, causa finita, right? Incapable of scientific debate, they played with the marked cards of officialdom and the spirit of clique.

III. Letters to Ênio Candotti

First

Rio de Janeiro, November 16, 1994

Dear Sir,

Responding to a suggestion from our mutual friend, Dr. Ivan da Costa Marques, I am sending you a copy of a document that I submitted to the SBPC journal regarding recent events.92

Both Dr. Ivan and I believe it would be useful and fair to inform you of this incident, albeit somewhat indigestible.

Hoping you will forgive me for asking you to devote some of your time to reviewing this document, time that could perhaps be better dedicated to other things, I thank you in advance. With my best regards,

Sincerely,

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

Second

Rio de Janeiro, January 2, 1995.

Dear Sir,

In comparison to your statements to O Globo newspaper on December 28, the letter you published in the same newspaper the following day is a prime example of nonsense. Claiming that the complexity of the subject may confuse the lay reader, you request that the debate regarding my work on Aristotle be moved from the daily press to the discrete pages of “a specialized magazine”. Does the SBPC then recommend for discussion in a specialized journal a piece of work that it considered unworthy of being published in a science dissemination periodical? Should philosophy specialized magazines be less demanding in article selection than Ciência Hoje? Mind you, it was not due to excessive specialization that my work was rejected. D. Yonne Leite was definitive: my text, she said, “did not meet the minimum conditions for a scientific work”. Does Ciência Hoje consider itself superior to specialized journals to the point of sending them the leftovers of its garbage can?

When a sensible person says senseless things, we must assume that they were either distracted or have some ulterior motive. The hypothesis of distraction being unlikely in such a decisive situation, it remains to suppose that you just wanted to hush up the scandal, and for this purpose, you hastily used an improvised pretext. The falseness of your position seeps even from the pseudoliterary image — of an infamous bad taste — that ends your letter: what you wanted to hide were not Aristotle’s cavities — about the state of whose dentition History has left us no indication —, but rather the cancer of pseudo-intellectuality, which gnaws at the organism of the SBPC and feeds on it. The only serious dental problem I find in Aristotle is his famous count of women’s teeth, which according to him are more numerous than men’s (Aristotelis insignis negligentia). He does not complain of cavities anywhere, but if he had any, he could consult the famous specialist in peripatetic dentistry — Dr. Yonne Leite —, who would certainly have an easier time filling them than plugging the holes in the Aristotelian knowledge of the evaluator who examined my work.

Your statement to the same newspaper reflects the arrogance of an elite society that, used to charging without being charged, already believes that everyone has the obligation to consider it a priori excluded from any suspicion. Always accusing, denouncing, pontificating, the SBPC has ended up conforming to the pulpit, taking it as a second nature, and has lost sight that it also has responsibilities to fulfill, since it lives on public money. Your question — what would happen if every author who disagreed with an opinion decided to complain — is foolish, to say the least. What would happen — don’t you really know? — is that:

1º The SBPC journal would no longer misuse the people’s money by paying for the services of incompetent evaluators (maybe there aren’t many, but how to know if investigation is prohibited?).

2º It would have learned to be humble, to respect the public, to be demanding with itself rather than settling in the presumption of its own infallibility, like a new priestly caste — currently under the pontificate of Ennius I.

On the other hand, if you wanted the issue to be discreetly resolved among scholars, His Holiness had enough time to take measures in this regard, since he received a copy of my observations on the “critical assessment” of my work93 weeks before the case was published in the press. Therefore, he has no reason to complain about the scandal, which was generated in the womb of his omission.

As for your paternal concern for the soul of the lay public — as if you and D. Yonne weren’t also laypeople in Aristotle! —, it’s a pure obscurantist maneuver. The one who has to fear this discussion is not the public: it’s the SBPC. Among the millions of readers of O Globo, there are certainly more cultured and capable people than on the editorial committee of Ciência Hoje94. However notable the members of that committee imagine themselves to be, they do not have the authority of a new Holy Office to decide what the public is or is not mature enough to know. Pretending to protect the public, the SBPC protects itself, hiding the incompetence of its editorial committee under a cloak of opacity woven with the discourse of transparency.

I have never held the Brazilian intelligentsia, much less the academic community in particular, in high regard, but, by the recommendation of our mutual friend Dr. Ivan da Costa Marques, I expected a more elegant attitude from you.

Sincerely,

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

Suggested Readings

Das Categorias, trad., notas e comentários de Mário Ferreira dos Santos, São Paulo, Matese, 2a. ed., 1965.95

La Métaphysique, trad., introd, notes par J. Tricot, 2 vols, Paris, Vrin, 1993.

Metafísica, ed. trilingüe por Valentín García Yebra, 2a. ed., Madrid, Gredos, 1990.

Organon, 5 vols., trad. J. Pinharanda Gomes, Lisboa, Guimarães, s/d.

Organon, 5 vols., trad. J. Tricot, Paris, Vrin, 1950-1966.

Poética, trad. e introd. por Eudoro de Souza, Lisboa, Guimarães, s/d.

Poétique, texte établi et traduit par J. Hardy, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1932 (várias reedições).

Retórica, Introd., trad. e notas por Quintín Racionero, Madrid, Gredos, 1990.

The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Edition, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols., Princeton Univ. Press, 1991.

B) Comments and Studies

AUBENQUE, Pierre, La Prudence chez Aristote, Paris, P.U.F., 1963 (réed. 1993).

AUBENQUE, Pierre, Le Problème de l’Être chez Aristote. Éssai sur la Problématique Aritotélicienne, Paris, P.U.F., 1962 (réed. 1991).

BARNES, Jonathan, Aristóteles, trad. Martha Sansigre Vidal, Madrid, Cátedra, 1993.

BOUTROUX, Émile, Études d’Histoire de la Philosophie, 4e éd., Paris, Alcan, 1925.

BOUTROUX, Émile, Leçons sur Aristote, ed. par Jêrome de Grammont, Paris, Éditions Universitaires, 1990.

BRENTANO, Franz, De la Diversité des Acceptions de l’Être d’après Aristote, trad. Pascal David, Paris, Vrin, 1992.96

COPLESTON, Frederick, A History of Philosophy, vol. I, Greece and Rome, New York, Doubleday, 1993.

DUMONT, Jean-Paul, Introduction à la Méthode d’Aristote, 2e éd., Paris, Vrin, 1992.97

DÜRING, Ingemar, Aristóteles. Exposición e Interpretación de su Pensamiento, trad. Bernabé Navarro, México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 1990.98

GOMEZ-PIN, Víctor, El Orden Aristotélico, trad. Virginas Careaga, Barcelona, Ariel, 1984.

HAMELIN, Octave, Le Système d’Aristote, éd. Léon Robin, 4e éd., Paris, Vrin, 1985.

JAEGER, Werner, Aristóteles. Bases para la Historia de su Desarrollo Intelectual, trad. José Gaos, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984.

MANSION, Suzanne, Études Aristotéliciennes. Reccueil d’Articles, Louvain-la-Neuve, Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1984.

MILLET, Louis, Aristóteles, trad. Roberto Leal Ferreira, São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1990.

MOREAU, Joseph, Aristote et son École, Paris, P.U.F., 1962 (réed. 1985).

PORFÍRIO, Isagoge. Introdução às “Categorias” de Aristóteles, trad., notas e comentários de Mário Ferreira dos Santos, São Paulo, Matese, 1965.

REALE, Giovanni, Introducción a Aristóteles, trad. Victor Bazterrica, Barcelona, Herder, 1985.

ROBIN, Léon, La Pensée Grecque et les Origines de l’Esprit Scientifique, Paris, Albin Michel, 1923 (réed. 1973).

ROSS, Sir David, Aristóteles, trad. Luís Filipe Bragança S. S. Teixeira, Lisboa, Dom Quixote, 1987.

SPINA, Segismundo, Introdução à Poética Clássica, São Paulo, FTD, 1967.

TOMÁS DE AQUINO, Sto., Comentários a Aristóteles, trad. Antonio Donato Paulo Rosa, 6 vols., manuscrito inédito.99

WEIL, Éric, Éssais et Conférences, 2 tomes, Paris, Vrin, 1991.100

C) Other works of interest for the study of the Four Discourses

CURTIUS, Ernst-Robert, Literatura Européia e Idade Média Latina, trad. Teodoro Cabral, Rio, INL, 1957.

FEYERABEND, Paul, Contra o Método, trad. Octanny S. da Motta e Leônidas Hegenberg, Rio, Francisco Alves, 1977.

FRIEDRICH, Hugo, Estrutura da Lírica Moderna, trad. brasileira, 2a. ed., São Paulo, Duas Cidades, 1991.

FRYE, Northrop, Le Grand Code. La Bible et la Littérature, trad. Cathérine Malamoud, Paris, Le Seuil, 1984.

HIGHET, Gilbert, The Classical Tradition. Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, New York, Oxford University Press, 1957.

LAUSBERG, Heinrich, Elementos de Retórica Literária, trad. R. M. Rosado Fernandes, Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2ª ed., 1972.

LE GOFF, Jacques, Os Intelectuais na Idade Média, trad. Luísa Quintela, Lisboa, Estudios Cor, 1973.

PANOFSKY, Erwin, Architecture Gothique et Pensée Scolastique, trad. Pierre Bourdieu, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1967.

PERELMAN, Chaim, Traité de l’Argumentation. La Nouvelle Rhétorique, Bruxelles, Université Libre, 1978.

PRATT, Mary Louise, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1977.

SNELL, Bruno, A Descoberta do Espírito, trad. Arthur Morão, Lisboa, Edições 70, 1992.

VAN TIEGHEM, Philippe, Petite Histoire des Grandes Doctrines Littéraires en France. De la Pléiade au Surréalisme, Paris, P.U.F., 1946.

Credits

Aristotle in a New Perspective: Introduction to the Theory of the Four Discourses
Olavo de Carvalho
Published in Brazil
1st edition – June 2013
2nd edition – October 2013

Editorial Manager
Diogo Chiuso

Editor
Silvio Grimaldo de Camargo

Editing
Arno Alcântara Júnior

Editorial Board
Adelice Godoy
César Kyn d’Ávila
Diogo Chiuso
Silvio Grimaldo de Camargo

International Cataloging in Publication (CIP) Data

Carvalho, Olavo de

Aristotle in a New Perspective: Introduction to the Theory of the Four Discourses / Olavo de Carvalho – Campinas, SP: VIDE Editorial, 2013.

e-ISBN: 978-85-67394-09-1

  1. Modern Philosophy 2. Philosophical Essays and Studies. I. Olavo de Carvalho II. Title

DDC – 501.01

Indices for Systematic Catalog

1 Modern Philosophy: Essays – 190.2

  1. Distributed in 1987, in the format of handouts, to students of the course “Introduction to Intellectual Life.” — As for Chapter II, it is only the second part of Chapter I of An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture, which I thought it best to separate.↩

  2. SBPC, Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science.↩

  3. Referring to the series of articles “Bandidos & Letrados,” which Jornal do Brasil began publishing on December 28, 1994.↩

  4. Specifically referring to paragraphs 1, 12, and 13 of the document, whose reading will greatly help the reader understand the scope of my central thesis.↩

  5. The present volume goes a little further: it exemplifies, in Chapter IV, one of these lines of demonstration.↩

  6. An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture contained only chapters I to III.↩

  7. Instead of reproducing exactly the text of the first edition, this chapter follows the slightly corrected version that, under the title “The structure of the Organon and the unity of the sciences of discourse in Aristotle”, I presented at the V Brazilian Congress of Philosophy, in São Paulo, September 6, 1995 (Logic and Philosophy of Science section).↩

  8. These two were Avicenna and St. Thomas Aquinas. Avicenna (Abu 'Ali al-Hussein ibn Abdallah ibn Sina, 375-428 H. / 985-1036 A.D.) categorically affirms, in his work Nadjat (“Salvation”), the unity of the four sciences, under the general concept of “logic”. According to Baron Carra de Vaux, this “shows how vast was the idea he had of this art”, in whose object he had included “the study of all the various degrees of persuasion, from rigorous demonstration to poetic suggestion” (cf. Baron Carra de Vaux, Avicenna, Paris, Alcan, 1900, pp. 160-161). St. Thomas Aquinas also mentions, in the Commentaries on the Second Analytics, I, 1.I, no. 1-6, the four degrees of logic, of which he probably became aware through Avicenna, but attributing to them the unilateral sense of a descending hierarchy that goes from the most certain (analytical) to the most uncertain (poetic) and giving to understand that, from the Topics “downward”, we are dealing only with progressive forms of error or at least deficient knowledge. This does not exactly coincide with Avicenna’s conception nor with the one I present in this book, and which seems to me to be that of Aristotle himself, according to which there is not properly a hierarchy of value among the four arguments, but rather a difference of functions articulated among themselves and all equally necessary for the perfection of knowledge. On the other hand, it is certain that St. Thomas, like all the medieval West, did not have direct access to the text of the Poetics. If he had, it would be almost impossible for him to see in the poetic work only the representation of something “as pleasant or repugnant” (loc. cit., no. 6), without reflecting more deeply on what Aristotle says about the philosophical value of poetry (Poetics, 1451 a). In any case, it is an admirable achievement of the Aquinas to have perceived the unity of the four logical sciences, reasoning as he did from second-hand sources.↩

  9. See Georges Gusdorf, Les Sciences Humaines et la Pensée Occidentale, vol. I, De l’Histoire des Sciences à l’Histoire de la Pensée, Paris, Payot, 1966, pp. 9-41.↩

  10. Bachelard’s work, reflecting the methodical dualism of his thought, is divided into two parallel series: on one hand, works on the philosophy of sciences, such as Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique, Le Rationalisme Appliqué, etc.; on the other, the series dedicated to the “four elements” — La Psychanalyse du Feu, L’Air et les Songes, etc., where the vacationing rationalist freely exercises what he called “the right to dream”. Bachelard seemed to possess a mental switch that allowed him to move from one of these worlds to the other, without any temptation to build another bridge between them other than the freedom to operate the switch.↩

  11. For a critical examination of this theory, see Jerre Levy, “Right Brain, Left Brain: Fact and Fiction” (Psychology Today, May 1985, pp. 43 ff.).↩

  12. Ezra Pound made a huge fuss about Ernest Fenollosa’s essay, The Chinese Characters as a Medium for Poetry (London, Stanley Nott, 1936), giving the West the impression that the Chinese language constituted a closed world, governed by categories of thought inaccessible to Western understanding except through a true twist of the concept of language itself. However, Chinese symbolism is much more similar to Western symbolism than cultural chasm appreciators think. One glaring similarity that has escaped these people is the one that exists between the structure of the I Ching and the syllogistics of Aristotle.↩

  13. The belief in the theory of the two hemispheres is common to all the theorists and gurus of the “New Age”, like Marilyn Ferguson, Shirley MacLaine and Fritjof Capra. About the latter, see my book A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural. Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci, Rio de Janeiro, Instituto de Artes Liberais & Stella Caymmi Editora, 1994. The most curious thing about this theory is that it aims to overcome the schizophrenia of Western man and begins by giving it an anatomical basis (fortunately, fictitious). — It is obvious, from what follows, that I do not take too seriously the attempts, as meritorious in their intent as miserable in their results, to overcome dualism through the generalized methodological mishmash that admits rhetorical persuasiveness and imaginative effusion as criteria of scientific validity (see for example Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, trans. Octanny S. da Motta and Leônidas Hegenberg, Rio de Janeiro, Francisco Alves, 1977).↩

  14. “It is perhaps excessive to demand that the works of an author correspond point by point to the classification of sciences as this author understands them.” (Octave Hamelin, Le Système d’Aristote, published by Léon Robin, 4th ed., Paris, J. Vrin, 1985, p. 82.)↩

  15. I am referring to the period of so-called “school rhetoric”. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated by Teodoro Cabral, Rio, INL, 1957, pp. 74 ff.↩

  16. This makes the plot of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco even funnier, a purposely impossible plot that the uninformed viewer takes as plausible fiction: for how could a dispute arise around the disappeared Second Part of Aristotle’s Poetics, at a time that was unaware of even the First?↩

  17. In the medieval framework, the phenomenon I describe certainly has some relation to a social stratification that placed the wise and philosophers, a priestly class, above poets, a class of court servants or fair artists. The inferior status of the poet in relation to the wise is noticeable both in the social hierarchy (see the decisive role that the clerici vagantes, or goliards, an entire “ecclesiastical proletariat” on the margins of universities, played in the medieval literary development), and in the hierarchy of the sciences themselves: literary studies were strictly outside the educational system of scholasticism, and the highest philosophical conceptions of the Middle Ages were written in quite coarse Latin, without this, at the time, causing any strangeness and much less aesthetic scandal reactions as those that would erupt in the Renaissance. See, in this regard, Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, translated by Luísa Quintela, Lisbon, Estudios Cor, 1973, Chap. I § 7.↩

  18. See Werner Jaeger, Aristoteles. Bases para la Historia de su Desarrollo Intelectual, trans. José Gaos, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1946 (the original German is from 1923).↩

  19. This observation has given rise to a dispute among interpreters who consider Aristotle a systematic thinker (who always starts from the same general principles) and those who see him as an aporetic thinker (who tackles problems one by one and goes up in the direction of the general without having much certainty of where he will end up). The approach suggested in the present work has, among others, the ambition to resolve this dispute. See, later, Chap. VII.↩

  20. See Éric Weil, “La Place de la Logique dans la Pensée Aristotélicienne”, in Éssais et Conférences, vol. I, Philosophie, Paris, Vrin, 1991, pp. 43-80.↩

  21. Sir David Ross, Aristóteles, trans. Luís Filipe Bragança S. S. Teixeira, Lisboa, Dom Quixote, 1987, p. 280 (the original English is from 1923).↩

  22. Since its first commented translation (Francesco Robortelli, 1548), the rediscovered Poetics has shaped the standards of literary taste for two and a half centuries, while in the field of Philosophy of Nature, Aristotelianism recedes, banished by the victorious advance of the new science of Galileo and Bacon, Newton and Descartes. This shows, on the one hand, the total separation between literary thought and philosophical and scientific evolution (a separation characteristic of the modern West, which will worsen over the centuries); on the other hand, the indifference of philosophers to the rediscovered text. On the Aristotelian roots of the aesthetics of European classicism, see René Wellek, História da Crítica Moderna, trans. Lívio Xavier, São Paulo, Herder. Vol. I, Chap. I.↩

  23. For technical editing difficulties, I omit here the accents of the Greek words.↩

  24. Four facts from the history of contemporary thought highlight the importance of these observations. 1) All attempts to isolate and define by their intrinsic characteristics a “poetic language”, differentiating it materially from the “logical language” and the “everyday language” have utterly failed. See, in this regard, Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1977. 2) On the other hand, since Kurt Gödel it is generally recognized the impossibility of removing all intuitive residue from logical thinking. 3) The studies of Chaim Perelman (Traité de l’Argumentation. La Nouvelle Rhétorique, Brussels, Free University, 1978), Thomas S. Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) and Paul Feyerabend (cit.) show, convergingly, the impossibility of eradicating all dialectic and even rhetorical element from scientific-analytical proof. 4) At the same time, the existence of something more than a mere parallelism between aesthetic principles (that is, poetic, in a broad sense) and logical-dialectical ones in the medieval worldview is strongly emphasized by Erwin Panofsky (Architecture Gothique et Pensée Scolastique, trans. Pierre Bourdieu, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1967). These facts and many others in the same sense indicate more than the convenience, the urgency of the integrated study of the four discourses.↩

  25. See Poetics, 1451 a-b.↩

  26. On the three modalities in the rhetorical tradition, v. Heinrich Lausberg, Elements of Literary Rhetoric, trans. R. M. Rosado Fernandes, Lisbon, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2nd ed., 1972.↩

  27. Rhetoric, 1358 a — 1360 a.↩

  28. Topics, IX 12, 173 a 29 ss.↩

  29. Between analytics and dialectics, “the difference is, according to Aristotle, that which exists between the course of teaching given by a professor and the discussion carried out in common, or, to say it another way, that which exists between the scientific monologue and dialogue” (Éric Weil, op. cit., p. 64).↩

  30. It is almost impossible that Aristotle, a natural scientist with a mind full of analogies between the sphere of rational concepts and the facts of the physical order, did not notice the parallelism — direct and inverse — between the four discourses and the four elements, differentiated, they too, by the gradation from the densest to the subtlest, in concentric circles. In a course delivered at IAL in 1988, unpublished except in a series of notebooks under the general title of “Theory of the Four Discourses”, I investigated this parallelism more extensively, which here can only be mentioned in passing.↩

  31. See Pierre Aubenque, Le Problème de l’Être chez Aristote. Éssai sur la Problematique Aristotélicienne, Paris, P.U.F., 1962.↩

  32. Northrop Frye, The Great Code. The Bible and Literature, trans. Cathérine Malamoud, Paris, Le Seuil, 1984, pp. 44-45.↩

  33. Cf. Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, ed. Wilhelm Nestle, transl. by L. R. Palmer, New York, Meridian Books, 1955, pp. 24-36 (the original German is from 1883; it is a summary, made by the author himself, of his monumental work Philosophie der Griechen).↩

  34. On school rhetoric, see Ernst-Robert Curtius, European Literature and Latin Medieval Ages, trans. Teodoro Cabral, Rio, INL, 1957, Chap. IV, 4 and 8.↩

  35. On dialectics in German Idealism, see the always current work by Josiah Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism, from 1906 (Spanish translation by Vicente P. Quintero, El Idealismo Moderno, Buenos Aires, Imán, 1945).↩

  36. See José Ortega y Gasset, La Idea de Principio en Leibniz y la Evolución de la Teoría Deductiva, in Obras Completas, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1983, vol. 8.↩

  37. This does not mean that the public’s credibility of the argument is due to it actually having a scientific (logical-analytical) foundation but simply because the public assumes it does. Similarly, during the time of the hegemony of the mythopoetic discourse, this discourse would not necessarily have all the properties attributed to it by Frye; it would be enough for the public to expect it to have those properties. Today, laws against smoking, for example, or anti-inflation decrees, are not accepted because they actually have a scientific foundation (which can be endlessly debated) but because the public believes they do. The authority of a shaman, likewise, does not necessarily rest on real magical powers but on the general belief that he possesses such powers. In all cases, the foundation of credibility has an element of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if society believes that an idea has a scientific foundation, it supports research in that direction and neglects investigation in other directions; and, as Lévi-Strauss correctly observed, the general belief in a magical power is, to some extent at least, a real source of magical power (see “The Sorcerer and His Magic” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Chaim Samuel Katz and Eginardo Pires, Rio de Janeiro, Tempo Brasileiro, 1975).↩

  38. Curtius, op. cit., Chap. I, sees in this phenomenon the origin of the peculiar characteristics that distinguish European literature from all other literatures.↩

  39. This theme remains relevant, at least in Brazil: the dispute between social democrats and neoliberals opposes the authority of dialectics to that of analytical logic. Elucidating the differences in methodological assumptions is the only way, in my opinion, to arbitrate this debate fairly, as I sought to do in the final pages of O Jardim das Aflições. Needless to say, in both cases, authority does not imply validity, but merely the expectation of validity: the dialectics of social democrats or the logic of neoliberals does not always surpass, in fact, the level of rhetorical claims.↩

  40. See Hugo Friedrich, Structure of Modern Poetry, Brazilian translation, 2nd edition, São Paulo, Duas Cidades, 1991, Chap. I.↩

  41. Muslim rhetoric immediately reached its peak of perfection in the first generation following that of the Prophet, with Imam Ali.↩

  42. As occurs, for example, in F. Capra, The Turning Point, trans. Álvaro Cabral, São Paulo, Cultrix, 1982.↩

  43. Lecture given at the Permanent Seminar of Philosophy and Humanities of the Institute of Liberal Arts in May 1992. Recorded on tape, transcribed by students, and edited by the author.↩

  44. The pedagogical applications of the Theory of the Four Discourses will not be the subject of this volume. They are not a project, but rather a work already in progress for almost a decade in the Philosophy Seminar.↩

  45. Met., A, 1, 980a21-30.↩

  46. Benedetto Croce, Logica come Scienza del Concetto Puro, Bari, Laterza, 1971 [1st ed., 1905], p. 5.↩

  47. Cf. Maurice Pradines, Traité de Psychologie Générale, Vol. I, Le Psychisme Élémentaire, 3rd edition, Paris, P.U.F., 1948, pp. 108-109, 376-379, 390-396, and 691-726.↩

  48. V. Jean Piaget, Biologie et Connaissance, Paris, Gallimard, 1967.↩

  49. It is also in this profound sense, not just as a student of comparative anatomy, that Aristotle was considered by Charles Darwin himself as a precursor of the theory of evolution. However, when we understand that Aristotelian evolutionism is shaped according to the theory of potentiality and actuality, it becomes plausible to seek in Aristotle a principle of arbitration and reconciliation between evolutionary and anti-evolutionary theories, through the use of dialectics that distinguishes between the various meanings of concepts. For a long time, it was believed that there was an incompatibility between fixed species concepts and animal evolution; I believe that this incompatibility could be overcome by simply distinguishing between logical (metaphysical) and biological species, a distinction that certainly would not escape Aristotle himself, who emphasized the non-existence of purely logical-mathematical forms in nature.↩

  50. Cf. Karl Marx, 1st Thesis on Feuerbach.↩

  51. Pradines, loc. cit.↩

  52. V. Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholastic Thought, trans. Pierre Bourdieu, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1978.↩

  53. Segismundo Spina, Introduction to Classical Poetics, São Paulo, F.T.D., 1967, p. 47.↩

  54. Spina, loc. cit..↩

  55. V. Edgar De Bruyne, Studies on Medieval Aesthetics, trans. Armando Suárez, o. p., Madrid, Gredos, 1958, vol. III, pp. 214-265.↩

  56. V. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 2nd ed., Milano, Bompiani, 1970.↩

  57. V. Gilbert Durand, Science of Man and Tradition, Paris, Tête-de-Feuilles/Sirac, 1978.↩

  58. St. Thomas, in the passage cited in note 1, even mentions the gradation of credibility, but takes it in the sense of a scale of validity, which results in judging the four discourses from the point of view of analytics, considered as the model of perfection to which the other discourses would tend. That is, St. Thomas touches on the subject, but does not delve into it.↩

  59. Lecture recorded on tape, transcribed by Ana Célia Rodrigues. São Paulo, 1989. Distributed to students in Rio de Janeiro in 1991.↩

  60. This also applies to narratives: every narrative can, in principle, recede indefinitely in the direction of antecedents or proceed indefinitely in the narration of consequences.↩

  61. Opera omnia, XVI/1, p. 103.↩

  62. V. René Wellek, History of Modern Criticism, trans. Lívio Xavier, São Paulo, Herder, 1967, v. I, Chaps. I-VII; Philippe Van Tieghem, Petite Histoire des Grandes Doctrines Littéraires en France. De la Pléiade au Surréalisme, Paris, P.U.F., 1946, pp. 1-58; Paul Hazard, La Crise de la Conscience Européenne — 1680-1715, Paris, Gallimard, 1967, v. I, Chaps. I-II.↩

  63. It is obvious that the history of Aristotelian studies encompasses other interesting developments, among them some very recent ones, but not in the direction of the themes that interest this study. V. for example M. A. Sinaceur [ org. ], Aristotle Today. Studies Gathered on the Occasion of the 2,300th Anniversary of the Philosopher’s Death, Paris, Ères, 1988. Some are closer to our theme, but neither reinforce nor weaken the thesis presented here: I refer especially to David Metzger, The Lost Cause of Rhetoric. The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in Aristotle and Lacan, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1995, and Victor Gomez-Pin, The Aristotelian Order, Barcelona, Ariel, 1984. The recent wave of Aristotelian debates in the Anglo-Saxon milieu focuses, on one hand, on the interpretation of the De Anima, to determine whether Aristotelian psychobiology can or cannot be considered a precursor of current materialistic functionalism (v. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s De anima, Oxford, Clarendon, 1995); on the other hand, on ethical issues (v. Anthony Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995) topics very different from the one addressed in the present book.↩

  64. Jean-Paul Dumont, Introduction à la Méthode d’Aristote, 2nd ed., Paris, Vrin, 1992, p. 208 – Emphasis by the author.↩

  65. Edgar Morin, La Méthode. I. La Nature de la Nature, Paris, Le Seuil, 1977, p. 9.↩

  66. It seems that the first to propose this hypothesis was Rudolf Carnap. To disprove it, it is enough to note that the first grammatical speculations in Greece are more than two centuries later than Aristotle.↩

  67. Jonathan Barnes, Aristóteles, trans. Marta Sansigre Vidal, 2nd ed., Madrid, Cátedra, 1993, p. 72.↩

  68. V. Dumont, op. cit.↩

  69. V. Franz Brentano, De la Diversité des Acceptons de l’Être d’après Aristote (1862), trans. Pascal David, Paris, Vrin, 1992.↩

  70. Rep., 509d6 to 511e5.↩

  71. The theme of apodictic science as a normative ideal would be taken up, more than two millennia later, by Edmund Husserl, in The Crisis of European Sciences. Husserl would see in the revival of this ideal the only hope of salvation for European humanity in the face of the approaching catastrophes. The present work is openly inspired by Husserl’s program (see The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, edited by Walter Biemel, translated by Enrico Filippini, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 4th ed., 1972, pp. 40-43).↩

  72. The reasons are explained below in § 17.↩

  73. The consultant complains about the “poverty of the bibliography presented”. He does not specify whether it is a poverty of quality or quantity, but since there are titles from Jaeger, Weil, Hamelin, Ross, and Zeller, classics of Aristotelian studies, I suppose he is referring to quantity. Does the aforementioned usually read the magazine Science Today? If he does, he will notice that twenty-five referrals are a number that is within the average usually presented in the articles published there. Exceeding this average – with the risk, moreover, of multiplying useless citations – would be nothing more than a lack of education.↩

  74. Peri Herm., 4: l7a.↩

  75. See, for example, Jean-Paul Dumont, Introduction à la Méthode d’Aristote, 2nd revised and expanded edition, Paris, Vrin, 1992.↩

  76. It is clear that nothing is found, in the patristic period, that approximates the depth and breadth of the Aristotelian exegeses of the 13th century. But between saying that this primitive Aristotelianism was of low quality and that it absolutely did not exist, the difference is the same as between affirming that the SBPC’s opinion is crap and that the SBPC did not issue any opinion.↩

  77. V. An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture. Introduction to the Theory of the Four Discourses (Rio de Janeiro, IAL/Caymmi, 1994), p. 16.↩

  78. Top., I, 2, 101a-b.↩

  79. Stromata A, VI, 33,2.↩

  80. Éric Weil “La place de la logique dans la pensée aristotélicienne”, in Essais et Conférences, vol. I, Paris, Vrin, 1991, p. 64 (cited in n. 20 of A Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture).↩

  81. Poet., 1451a.↩

  82. Id. Ibid.↩

  83. I allow myself to remind the excited theorizer of Greek theater that I am the author of three small books on the theme of poetics: The Crime of Mother Agnes or the Confusion between Spirituality and Psychism (São Paulo, Speculum, 1983), Symbols and Myths in the Film “The Silence of the Lambs” (Rio de Janeiro, IAL/Caymmi, 1992) and The Literary Genres: Their Metaphysical Foundations (Rio de Janeiro, IAL/Caymmi, 1993).↩

  84. De cælo, I, 7, 275b.↩

  85. De gener. anim., I, I, 715b.↩

  86. Met., L, 7,1072a.↩

  87. Phys., IV, 219a-223a.↩

  88. Locking all the Greeks in the cage of eternal return was a demented generalization operated by Nietzsche to aurify with the prestige of classical antiquity an idea that he himself had invented. The great philosopher-poet was, in terms of classical philology, nothing more than a very self-important amateur, whose interpretations, without sufficient grounding in the texts, were completely discredited by Ulrich von Willamowitz-Möllendorf’s analyses. I don’t know who were the consultant’s professors at college, but it is quite possible that, in this country, there are still academics who take Nietzsche seriously as a philologist.↩

  89. An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture, p. 30.↩

  90. Published in O Globo, Jan 7, 1995.↩

  91. I am referring to the series of articles “Bandits & Lettered” — Jornal do Brasil, December 1994 — which, investigating the psychological complicity of Brazilian intellectuals with the Carioca banditry, aroused somewhat rabid reactions from some members of the lettered community, among them the writer Antônio Callado. The controversy around “Bandits & Lettered” was simultaneous and parallel to the mess with the SBPC, but I will not reproduce it here as it is not relevant to the theme of this book; some details are given in an appendix to the series of articles, which is reproduced in my book The Collective Imbecile: Brazilian Uncultured Current Events (Rio de Janeiro, Faculdade da Cidade Editora and Academia Brasileira de Filosofia, 1996).↩

  92. I refer to De re aristotelica opiniones abominandæ.↩

  93. He even received two copies: one at the SBPC, another at home, which I sent to him personally.↩

  94. As a professional journalist, for thirty years I have been waiting for scientific debates to invade the pages of the daily press. Now that they are starting to get there, I don’t see the benefit of sending them back to the specialized ghetto. I was also editor of scientific journals (Atualidades Médicas and Clínica Geral), and even at that time, I lamented that so many important topics were discussed away from the eyes of the general public.↩

  95. A remarkably significant work, marred by editing errors.↩

  96. Essential.↩

  97. Essential.↩

  98. Solid and always reliable.↩

  99. The translator [Antonio Donato Paulo Rosa] has been seeking in vain for years to publish his monumental work.↩

  100. Essential. Says more in thirty pages than many generations of philologists.↩

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