Aristotle is one of only six people in history to have had an opinion on absolutely everything. The others are all still alive: four of them have their own talkback radio shows and my wife is married to the sixth.
Aristotle thought that the hour leading up to midnight was a time of special calm. This was because earthquakes were most likely to strike at midnight; failing that they would strike at midday. His meticulous observations of the natural world often led him to advance with supreme confidence towards some strange conclusions. He likened the earth to a living body and earthquakes to the exhalation of wind. So a seismic tremor was a bit like someone farting in the middle of the night.
Aristotle is seldom on anyone’s list of favourite writers. His books have a hard edge to them: he was a collector of data and, in so far as he wanted to make a big picture of life, the universe and everything, it was going to be made out of this raw material. He was an intellectual bower bird and his philosophy was built like a nest, twig by twig, scrap by scrap. Aristotle covered a vast field, but in any area, from logic to biology, from ethics to cosmology, his work is meticulous but generally devoid of human warmth or storytelling. He engages the issue not the reader. It is curious that Aristotle chose the line of work he did because he didn’t suffer fools gladly. Philosophy is the wisdom of suffering fools.
Perhaps Aristotle’s turn of mind owes something to the fact that his father was a doctor in an age, the fourth century before Christ, when the most helpful thing doctors could do was tell you what they saw. So the boy grew up with an appreciation of the power of observation. For Aristotle, the whole natural world was a book of symptoms. If you watched them closely enough, eventually you’d be able to describe something like a general condition.
Just as significant in turning Aristotle into Aristotle was the fact that he went to a good school. The Academy was an institution which is said to have started in an olive grove, a place of rest, once sacred to the goddess Athena. Athena was the girl who steered Odysseus back to his bed.
The Academy was founded by Plato and, by the time Aristotle arrived there from Macedonia at the age of seventeen around 367 BC, it had been going for about twenty years. The Academy has since given its name to a dizzying number of places which are nothing like it, least of all the one that hands out awards to badly dressed actors with lots of people to thank. The original Academy didn’t have a syllabus, a prospectus, an enrolment policy or a policy on the availability of nuts and chips at the tuckshop. It didn’t have resources, facilities, mission statements, values documents or projected outcomes. Nor, despite popular belief, did it make students think. On the contrary, it allowed them to think. There’s a difference. The Academy didn’t want to change the world, only to understand it. As a result, it changed the world.
Aristotle studied under Plato until the latter died in the middle of the century. Plato’s output diminished after his death, which was rare in those days. It was not the case, for example, for Plato’s own teacher, Socrates, who, thanks to Plato and his dialogues, did some of his best work posthumously. Once Plato was dead, Aristotle then spent the rest of his life trying not to be Plato. He returned to Macedonia but later came back to Athens and started his own school, called the Lyceum. The Lyceum also began in a garden and students did their philosophy by walking around, thus coming to be known as the Peripatetics. They preferred a restless philosophy, one of inquiry rather than contemplation.
Plato and Aristotle have come to be seen as opposites, bookends on the shelf of Western thinking. And they had different ideas about sleep.
It is not surprising that Aristotle should write a treatise on sleep. Sleep has always been widely practised in philosophical circles. When I was at university, tutorials in philosophy were always held after lunch when the circadian rhythms of the body tend naturally to dip towards sleep: the cultural practice of the siesta originates less in a need to escape hot weather and more in a willingness to honour what the body wants to do anyway. I discovered a long-held belief among undergraduates that the purpose of philosophy was to create rest, not disturb it. Students soon learned that the most comfortable way to sleep in an upright chair is with your hand placed on your brow like a visor, keeping the light out of your eyes and at the same time making it hard for others to know if they are open or closed. Almost as effective is the practice of resting your elbow on your knee and then putting your chin on your hand, furrowing your brow in a parody of concentration. This is the posture of Rodin’s famous thinker, a statue which, when you look twice, appears to be an image of a man engaged in the futile struggle of humanity in the face of existential confusion – that is, the struggle to stay awake. With a bit of practice, you can be fast asleep but still look like you are deep in thought, which may indeed be the case. The mind can be more active asleep than awake. And more creative too.
When I was studying Philosophy 101, one of my fellow students spent the entire course asleep. He always arrived before the rest of us and remained behind when we left, so some of us wondered if he lived in the room, which had been occupied by our teacher, a contemporary of Aristotle, since ancient times. The student seemed so comfortable that, at the start of the year, some of us had thought he might be the tutor.
This impression was underlined by the fact that Ann, the real tutor, a woman of some standing in the world of philosophy, also spent the whole year fighting sleep. She was a pacifist. So she didn’t fight very hard. In her case, however, sleep was a pedagogical technique. She had found that the best way to keep a class on its toes was to doze off yourself.
While the professor slumbered fitfully, the rest of us talked about anything and everything, whether or not it was relevant to the lecture we had heard before lunch. That’s the beauty of philosophy. There’s nothing that’s not on the course. Philosophy is rather like French cooking. It requires a lot of raw material. In my experience, French cooking involves a whole morning of shopping. Tired and cranky, you get home with a carload of food and then spend a long afternoon in the kitchen. After a ten-hour day and a trolley load of groceries, all you end up with is half a cup of gravy.
Our professor believed that first-year tutorials were mainly the shopping and chopping part of the exercise. She slept while all the great issues of life flew around her ears in a frenzy of adolescent self-importance. She’d heard it all before, many times, especially the learned opinions about sex delivered by students new to the game. About the third week of term, she did intervene to ask if someone could lend her some coins for the parking meter. Then, at the end of the course, she announced that those of us who came back next year would be ready to start real philosophy. The recidivists discovered that that was when the arduous work of distillation began. Philosophy goes through a lot of junk in the search for an essence. But you need the junk to start with.
Only one person in our tutorial group failed to speak all year. He just slept. He didn’t even stir when one of the young women in the room, an advocate for ‘reading culture’, ‘reading society’, ‘reading movies’, ‘reading fashion’ – reading, it would seem, everything except books – posed the question as to whether or not he really existed. To be heckled by a girl on the grounds of non-existence would have excited a reaction from most males. But not this guy. He was an ideological sleeper and nothing was going to budge him from his position.
Some of us were a little surprised when the gentleman in question topped the year. Perhaps he had the only mind that had remained unsullied by use; perhaps he had discovered sooner than most that the best philosophy is generous with thought but mean with words. Meanwhile, the young woman who wondered if he existed or not had gone out of her way to get proof one way or the other. She was pregnant to him by the time the results were published. She told her friends that the only way to get him to wake was to sleep with him. She went on to write a thesis in praise of Platonic relationships.