Other arguments appeal to the complexity of the world’s organization, seen as a huge ecosystem in which all the parts are mutually interdependent. The Stoics also appeal to the way that animals are well-suited to their environments and mutual interrelations, but they are not interested in these for their own sakes, merely for the indication they give that the world is a well-organized whole.
Thinking of the world as designed, the Stoics often compare it to a house or a city, and since these are obviously designed for the sake of their inhabitants, this makes prominent the point that for the Stoics the world is rationally designed for the obvious beneficiaries, namely rational beings – that is, gods and humans. As far as humans are concerned, therefore, the rest of the world – plants and animals – is designed for our benefit. This leads the Stoics to a very anthropocentric view of the world, in which grain, olives and vines are for us to consume, sheep for clothing us with their fleeces, oxen for pulling our ploughs and so forth. Such a world-view is almost guaranteed to kill the curiosity about nature’s wonders that we find in Aristotle, and it leads to an exploitative attitude to the rest of the natural world, a strikingly ugly contrast to the humanitarian attitude we find in Stoic thought to all humans, whatever their social roles.
Epicurus alone among the ancient schools denies that in nature we find any teleological explanations. Nothing in nature is for anything, neither the world as a whole nor anything in it.
Positively, Epicurus asserts that our world, and in the course of time infinitely many worlds, have grown up as a result of random collisions of atoms in empty space. This is, he claims, a sufficient explanation, given enough time. We have seen that given the state of other beliefs about the world in ancient culture (for example the absence of any indication of the real age of the world), Epicurus’ position here was bound to seem weaker than it does to us, and one reason that one or other form of teleology was so common in ancient thought was just the implausibility of the alternative.
Epicurus also argues against the opposition, and here appeals to the idea that an unbiased view of our world does not make it look like the product of design, or at any rate of a very good design. Most of the world is not habitable by humans, for example; human attempts to survive are constantly threatened by the unpredictability of natural factors (droughts, hurricanes and so on) and by hostile environments and other species that render human life a struggle. Humans, with their helpless babyhood and lack of natural weapons, do not seem particularly well-adapted to compete for survival with other species. And so on.
Epicurus’ arguments are effective only against the view that the world was providentially designed for the benefit of humans. Even so, there are responses: perhaps the problems humans encounter are due to the fact that rational design in the universe has only inferior materials to order. And Epicurus never really meets the point that with no appeal to any kind of purpose in nature he has a hard time explaining how random collisions of atoms result in the regular well-adaptedness of species to their environments.
The legacy of these ancient disputes became greatly simplified. Already in the ancient world both Jews and Christians found Plato’s Timaeus acceptable as a philosophical explication of the creation story in Genesis. This is not surprising, since the Judaeo-Christian God is the creator of the world, and designed it so as to be good. Moreover, humans have a privileged place in it. In the Middle Ages the view that prevailed was the design view: everything in the world, including us (indeed especially us) was created to fulfil its place in the world, which is to be found in God’s design for it. Humans are the special beneficiaries of this plan, and the rest of creation is designed for us to put to our use.
In the Middle Ages, when Aristotle’s views were rediscovered, they were fitted into the design view, since they were fitted into a theological framework in which the world is the creation of a designer God. Aristotle’s own more subtle position was not appreciated; the only alternatives were seen as being that the world is the result of divine design or that it is the product of mere random happenings. The latter view was not taken seriously until the Renaissance, when Epicurus’ views again became influential and inspired some philosophers to reject the entire medieval world-view.
This world-view included, and indeed had itself largely come to be formed by, the philosophy of Aristotle. But that itself had become greatly altered in the process. Aristotle’s view of nature, including his ideas about ends in nature, had become part of a large theological system. In the process, his own tentative and co-operative methodology was forgotten as his ideas were hardened into a system, increasingly seen as a complete and all-inclusive system, with answers to everything. The medieval poet Dante calls Aristotle ‘the master of those who know’ – in other words, the great know-it-all, something very different in spirit from Aristotle’s own enquiry in a spirit of curiosity and wonder.
The new learning of the Renaissance replaced the system of Aristotelian-ism, but because this had become deeply entrenched in the universities it hung on for surprisingly long, and became associated with self-protective and reactionary rejection of new kinds of thinking. A similar phenomenon happened with Aristotle’s ethical and political thought, which was elevated to a central place by the Roman Catholic Church. This rigidification of Aristotle’s thinking has led to equally unsubtle rejections of his ideas, and to refusal to engage with them in detail. In periods when Aristotle was regarded as The Great Authority, intelligent thinkers have often rejected that authority, while Aristotle’s own attitude has been lost. Because Aristotle’s own works are quite difficult to read, hostile attitudes to his ideas get passed on from book to book, and get accepted by people who have never actually engaged with him as a philosopher. Even today, it is quite common to find sometimes paranoid hostility to Aristotle on the part of people who have never read more than a few quotations pulled out of context and who think of him simply as an authority to be rejected.
This is an extreme example of the way in which ideas from ancient philosophy can get used and reconfigured by subsequent traditions, in a way which pulls them out of their original context of argument. Sometimes this can be invigorating, and produce a new and fruitful engagement, as happened when Plato’s Republic became a political text in the nineteenth century (see Chapter 2) and with Aristotle for much of the Middle Ages. But if the interpretative tradition goes on too long (especially without serious competition) and gets too rigid and institutionalized, the result can become stultifying, and can end with hostile unthinking rejection. And this makes it harder to get back to the original and engage with it from our own perspective.
6. Aristotle, portrayed as serious and studious
Aristotle and authority
‘The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed. Therefore, since the truth seems to be like the proverbial barn door, which no one can fail to hit, in this way it is easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not the particular part we aim at shows the difficulty of it . . . It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those whose opinions we may share, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought.’