Greatest of the Greek Logicians
THE STYLE of Aristotle’s treatises is so clinical and detached that it is easy to forget how close he was to the relentless violence of his time. In fact, Aristotle was intimately connected to one of the Mediterranean world’s most violent political machines: the regime of the kings of Macedon. His father had been court physician to Philip II’s father,1 but Aristotle was packed off at around the age of seventeen to the turbulent city of Athens, where he entered the school founded by Plato, the Academy. The Academy must have seemed a tranquil oasis amid the perils of the age. We know precious little of Aristotle’s time there, but we do know he remained roughly twenty years and probably served as an instructor. Plato is said to have dubbed him “the reader” for his studies, and when Aristotle speaks of Plato in the treatises that come from later in Aristotle’s life, even when criticizing his teacher’s doctrines, he speaks with affection. Nevertheless, when Plato died in 347 B.C., Aristotle was passed over for the Academy’s leadership, and so he went east to Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) to the Greek-speaking settlements along its coast to strike out on a new path.
Aristotle is said to have accepted an invitation to reside with an old friend, Hermias, who had risen from slavery to become ruler of the cities of Atarneus and Assos. Aristotle eventually married Hermias’s niece Pythias and seems to have devoted his years in the East at least partly to research in biology. But there was soon trouble brewing for Hermias, who was exploring the idea of a military alliance with Macedon (which lay to the north of classical Greece). Hermias had planned to help Philip in an invasion of the Persian Empire, but in the end he was captured by Persian military officers, tortured, and executed. (According to legend, Hermias’s last message was, “Tell my friends and companions that I have done nothing weak or unworthy of philosophy.”) Aristotle may have been living on the nearby island of Lesbos when he learned of Hermias’s fate, but finally Aristotle returned to Macedonia to accept an offer to tutor the young Alexander, then about thirteen years old. This arrangement seems to have lasted some three years, though what influence he might have had on his prestigious pupil, we don’t know.
The next phase of Aristotle’s life came with the assassination of Philip in 336 B.C. Aristotle’s tutoring had already ended when Philip was stabbed to death by a disgruntled bodyguard. Philip had indulged in an ancient tradition of Macedonian kings—polygamy—and he had just had another son by a new wife; in consequence, suspicion of complicity in the attack fell almost instantly on an earlier wife, Olympias, Alexander’s mother. But the assassin was killed as soon as he struck the fatal blow, and so he told no tales. Nevertheless, according to ancient writers, Olympias later had the new wife and her infant son murdered.2
With the demise of Philip, Aristotle’s royal pupil then ascended the throne, and Alexander began his brief but meteoric reign. Some Greek cities took Philip’s assassination as a signal for revolt, but Alexander responded by having the entire city of Thebes destroyed in 335, exempting nothing but its temples and the ancestral home of the poet Pindar. Resistance died out. Then, at about the same time, Aristotle returned to Athens to establish a new school—his famous Lyceum—with Macedonian financing.
In some respects, Aristotle’s Lyceum flourished in a political vacuum, intellectually remote from events on the ground. For example, Philip’s conquests had already put an end to the old city-state system of Greece, yet in his treatises Aristotle still speaks of the city-state (the polis) as if it were the only natural political unit. Also, Alexander is thought to have wanted to extend Greek culture far to the east, eventually to the Indus River in present-day Pakistan, and to have advocated a “marriage of East and West” by urging his Macedonian officers to take Persian wives. Yet Aristotle still clings to an earlier Greek conception that Greeks are somehow biologically superior to non-Greeks.3
As for personal relations between the two men, ancient writers say Alexander sent his teacher biological specimens from the new lands he had conquered, but the authenticity of these tales is doubtful, and against them we must also set the unhappy story of Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes. Callisthenes had accompanied Alexander’s army as official historian and had also been put in charge of educating the royal court’s pages. But when some of these pages were then arrested for allegedly conspiring to murder Alexander, one of them said under interrogation that Callisthenes had spoken in their lessons of political constitutions, tyrants, and tyrannicide. As a result, Alexander ordered that Callisthenes be imprisoned in a cage that could be moved with the army from place to place, and after many months in the cage, Callisthenes died.4
It is difficult, then, to see Aristotle as a mere stooge for Macedonian hegemony, but, in fact, it is difficult to get any clear picture of the philosopher at all. The style of his surviving writings is terse, critical, professorial—containing little in the way of passionate fire.5 So far as his demeanor goes, the ancients called him the Peripatetic, meaning he walked about while lecturing. This was, however, the fashion of the time: to walk back and forth with one’s students beneath an arcade or stoa.6 Nevertheless, what we can say is that Aristotle turned the validity of arguments into a distinct object of study. And the best way to see the difference between his efforts and those of anyone else is to take a moment to compare his work with developments elsewhere in the ancient world, especially in India. Events in ancient India will give us a clearer picture of what was happening in ancient Greece.
THE STUDY OF ARGUMENT IN INDIA
The study of argument in India goes back at least to the fourth century B.C., perhaps farther, but ancient Indian philosophers never investigated valid argumentation as such—a fact that becomes evident once one looks at the most common of all forms that Indian philosophers did investigate, the Indian syllogism, which initially appeared around the second century A.D.7 The Indian syllogism traditionally has five parts, or members, as follows:
1. A proposition to be proved
2. A reason for its being true
3. An example to show that the reason embodies a general rule
4. An assertion to the effect that the reason applies to the case at hand
5. An assertion that the proposition must therefore be true
A stock example goes like this:
1. The hill is on fire.
2. This is because it is smoky.
3. Wherever there is smoke, there is fire—as in a kitchen.
4. And there is smoke in this instance.
5. Therefore, there must be fire here, too.8
Now there is some question as to whether this form is actually an effect of Greek models carried to India by the conquests of Alexander,9 but, however that may be, the Indian syllogism as a rhetorical form is entirely natural even for English speakers. Imagine, for instance, two automobile drivers arguing in the streets of New York about whether one of their automobiles is on fire. At least part of the exchange might go like this:
Your car’s on fire! Why? ’Cause it’s smoking! Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. That’s how it works in your kitchen, right? Well, you got smoke here, buddy. So I’m telling you, you got fire!
In form, these utterances follow the classic Indian pattern: proposition, reason, rule with a further example, application to the case at hand, and conclusion. Still, there is a basic difference between the way an ancient Indian philosopher approaches this argument and the way any Greek logician after Aristotle approaches it. The difference is that the Indian philosopher treats it as a rhetorical form whereas the Greek seeks out what we would now call a logical form.
More precisely, the Indian philosopher has structured the syllogism for maximum rhetorical force, and he does this by including repetitions. The first and last elements of the syllogism both express the point to be proved, and the second and fourth elements both express what a Greek logician would call the minor premise (that the hill is smoky). But the Greeks typically cut these repetitions away. Instead, after Aristotle, a Greek logician renders the argument like this:
In terms of a pattern, we now have the same structure as the following:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
But why do the Greeks eliminate the repetitions while the Indians don’t? To answer this question will be to understand why the study of the validity of arguments started in Greece—and uniquely in Greece.
Part of the answer is that the Greeks and the Indians have different aims. Both groups definitely grasp the argument’s validity, and if they didn’t, they would hardly make paradigms of their respective versions. But the Indians want to use the argument for persuasion. The Greeks, on the other hand, want to analyze how it works. Specifically, the Greeks aren’t asking whether the argument is valid; whether it is valid is the question one asks if one’s purpose is to persuade. Instead, the Greeks are asking why it is valid; they want to know what structural features make it so. But once the Greeks ask this further question—why it is valid—they see straightaway that the argument is valid in virtue of three elements, not five. The argument is rhetorically forceful because of five elements but valid because of three. In effect, then, the Greeks distinguish rhetorical force from logical force.
In fact, Indian philosophers spoke of a three-part syllogism later in history, in the fifth century A.D.,10 but they never investigated the many different forms valid syllogisms might take.11 Nor did the ancient Chinese. Chinese philosophers of the third century B.C. working in the tradition of Mo Tzu distinguished fallacious inferences that came from constructing sentences in parallel. (For example, if we ask about a man’s illness, then it follows that we ask about the man; yet, if we dislike the man’s illness, then it doesn’t follow that we dislike the man; the first inference is valid, but the second is fallacious.)12 Nevertheless, these Chinese philosophers never investigated valid argumentation as such, not in the sense of what structural features make an argument valid. Indeed, the historical truth here is really quite stark: no ancient culture ever investigated valid argumentation as such except Greeks or people influenced by Greeks. But the truth here is even more stark.
THE SINGULARITY OF ARISTOTLE
So far as the historical record goes, all studies of deductive logic—meaning all investigations of logical necessity as a relation between propositions—derive from Aristotle alone. If anyone else ever investigated the matter independently of his influence, that person has left no historical record of the work. Of course, various ancient peoples studied argumentation—debate, reasoning, controversy, disputation, refutation, and deliberation—but these studies always mixed logical force with rhetorical force. Only Aristotle made logical force a subject of study in isolation from an argument’s other features. Other thinkers also studied the difference between genuine knowledge and mere belief, but this, too, is different from studying validity. (An argument can be valid even if none of its premises count as genuine knowledge, and an invalid argument can have genuinely known elements. Knowledge and validity are different subjects.) In sum, then, every study of validity we have comes either from Aristotle or from his readers—or from his readers’ readers—and this includes later Greeks, later Romans, early medieval Arabs, twelfth-century Europeans, and students of modern symbolic logic and computer programming around the world.
In some ways, this dependence on Aristotle is utterly astounding. As a matter of history, we might make similar claims for the physical laws of Galileo, at least in the sense that all modern physics builds on Galileo’s laws. Even students of relativity and quantum mechanics, though they depart from Galileo, still learn Galileo first. But modern physics is a specialized field of subtle experiments and mathematical equations; valid argument, by contrast, is something we all use every day. All peoples distinguish between rational arguments and irrational ones. Yet, for some reason, Aristotle is the only person on record to have invented a study of what makes an argument rational, at least when it comes to deductively valid structures.
Of course, valid arguments aren’t the only species of rational ones. Validity is treated by logicians under the heading of deduction, but there is a whole other domain of rational inference: induction. Deduction concerns logical necessity, but induction concerns probability. (For example, if the sun has always risen in the past, then it will probably do so in the future; this argument isn’t deductively valid, but its conclusion is still inductively probable.) In consequence, validity is only part of rationality, not the whole of it. Even so, the thing to notice is that, to a logician, induction is still a matter of logical relations between propositions, quite apart from rhetorical force and quite apart from whether the argument’s premises count as genuine knowledge. For induction no less than deduction, logical force is still distinct from rhetorical force, and a theory of knowledge is still distinct from a theory of logic. And to study logical force at all still requires a distinction between the logical force of deduction and the logical force of induction—because these two sorts of logical force are different. Yet the only person who seems to have invented a study of logical force for its own sake is the enigmatic Peripatetic; everyone else has had his example to follow.
How can this be?
For the moment, we seem to be heading toward a Great Man theory of logic. It would seem that, without Aristotle, no one on Earth would study logic—not in the precise sense. Yet, on further reflection, this Great Man theory is implausible, because logic doesn’t really require a Great Man in the first place. In saying this, we don’t mean to deny Aristotle’s greatness but only to say that we can all study logic anyway, without a Great Man, because the basic idea of validity isn’t that deep. We can all perceive validity with just a few examples.13 What sets Aristotle apart, in other words, isn’t that he could grasp the idea of validity any better than we can. Instead, what sets him apart is that he and the Athenians who attended his lectures found the idea interesting at a time when no one else did. The real question, then, is why they did so.
To reinforce this point, we should remember that philosophers in both ancient India and ancient China distinguished what they called fallacies, and by fallacies they meant mistakes in reasoning, not simply mistakes in rhetorical presentation.14 They regarded some arguments as logical, others as illogical—quite apart from rhetorical force. What they didn’t do, however, was study the difference between the logical and illogical as a matter of formal structure. Formal structure was Aristotle’s key move.
To put this last observation differently, logical form is apparently what gives rise to logical force, but logical force is distinct from rhetorical force. Thus logical form is distinct from rhetorical form. After all, the five-part Indian syllogism is a rhetorical form, but it becomes a logical one only after the repetitions are deleted because the repetitions have nothing to do with its validity. What Aristotle initiated, then, wasn’t simply an investigation of validity but validity in virtue of form, and this, indeed, is how we understand validity today. When we now assess the validity of an argument, we explain the particular by appeal to the general, and we regard particular arguments as valid because they embody certain general forms. The generality of these forms, which we have also called “patterns,” is expressed by our use of variables—our As, Bs, and Cs—as in some of our earlier examples:
| All As are B. | If A, then B. |
| C is an A. | A. |
| Therefore, C is B. | Therefore, B. |
So the question is why Aristotle became interested in logical form.
(As a technical aside, we should note that professional logicians often use the expression “logical form” in a more restricted way, so that it applies only to statements expressed in an artificial language constructed to represent logical structure. Since Aristotle lays out no such artificial language, he specifies no “logical forms” in this sense. Nevertheless, his purpose is clearly to analyze logical structure, and he represents it by distinguishing patterns, which he calls “schemata.” These logical patterns are different from rhetorical ones, and we think it most intelligible for ordinary readers if we continue to call these patterns “forms,” though the professional can just as easily substitute the word “schemata” or “structures.” Either way, our point is that Aristotle’s aim is to study the same structural features that an artificial language is meant to reveal.)15
THE EFFECT OF THE ATHENIAN ASSEMBLY
Now, in explaining Aristotle’s interest, one crucial point seems obvious from the start: If we mean to study valid argumentation as such, then our particular reasonings will need to exhibit the same logical forms repeatedly. Otherwise, if our reasonings rarely exhibit the same form twice, our analysis will never give us much for making generalizations. Each argument will be unlike the others, and we will find very little that is common to them all. So we won’t be studying logical forms in the first place. Yet this is exactly where the Athenian Assembly made such a difference. The Assembly highlighted forms—the same forms over and over—and we can see why this would happen if we pause to remember just how much the social situation in Athens differed from the situation in India.
In public assemblies like the one in Athens, controversies come and go; different issues arise from week to week, sometimes day to day. But, in that case, the most common methods of argument will tend to return time and again because speakers learn from experience that only some tactics are rhetorically effective. In an assembly of ordinary citizens, the audience’s attention span is limited; if a particular question becomes too complicated, the audience begins to lose interest. In consequence, then, speakers will tend to use only simple logical forms, and there are only so many simple forms to go around. As a result, many forms will occur repeatedly. Given enough time, the effect of studying argument in a public assembly is to focus attention on logical structure.
In India, by contrast, argument was studied not in public assemblies but in cloistered schools—a crucial difference when compared with Greece. Indian princes allowed nothing like the Athenian Assembly to develop, and there were no geographical features to generate the economic and social conditions for such an assembly in the first place. Instead, debates were usually disputations between learned philosophers who represented competing schools (the debates being officiated, in many instances, by a prince or magnate). Consequently, the study of argument in India had a different emphasis.
In India, the schools existed to expound ethical and metaphysical doctrines, but the doctrines were complicated from the start. Each such question was a world unto itself.16 Common forms of argument did indeed appear, but the essence of the controversy was typically more complex. Additionally, many of these schools existed precisely to defend some such doctrine from novel forms of attack. Thus the effect of argumentation in India was to emphasize not logical forms, but the doctrines themselves. It was the doctrines that endured, the arguments for and against them that changed. The same spiritual questions returned over and over, but the arguments made about them came and went, and these arguments were logically complicated, not logically simple. As a result, Indian philosophers left behind an enormous mass of analysis, but this mass is essentially an analysis of ethics and metaphysics, not an analysis of argumentation.
In a word, we owe the discovery of validity, at least in part, to the existence of the Athenian Assembly. The Assembly, unlike a school or a temple, served as a showcase of forms. This is much of the story of why logic began where it did—in classical Greece—but not the whole story. It still doesn’t explain why the Greeks neglected to study formal validity until the late fourth century B.C.
THE SOPHISTS
Throughout the fifth century—from the days of Aeschylus at the beginning to the days of Pericles, Sophocles, and Socrates at the end—the idea of formal validity went unexplored. Nor was it explored in the first half of the fourth century in the days of Plato. To be sure, Plato often spoke in his philosophical dialogues of “necessity,” but he included in this idea what we would now call “physical necessity”; he didn’t expound a distinct conception of logical necessity as something different from physical laws. Instead, argument was still conceived as in India and China—as a mix of logic and rhetoric. The Greeks called this sort of inquiry the study of elenchos, which we might now define as “trial by argumentation.” Aristotle notes that the study of valid argumentation is something he has had to invent entirely on his own.17 In short, something happened between the days of Pericles and the days of Aristotle to make the whole subject of validity more interesting. Equally important, this same something must have affected not only Aristotle but others—because Aristotle had an audience. So what was this change?
The crucial change will become clearer if we take a closer look at Athenian politics and especially at the enormous political disasters of the fifth century B.C. But not only must we turn to the fifth century’s disasters; we must also look at the fourth century’s reaction to them. In particular, fifth-century Athenians committed two grave errors that fourth-century Athenians never forgave. First, the Assembly lost the long and bitter war with Sparta, a defeat that cost Athens its empire and caused the city’s population to decline by roughly half.18 Athens lost control over its many subjugated cities in battles that filled up twenty-seven years. (This was the Second Peloponnesian War, in which two grand alliances—Athens and Sparta—struggled for control of Greece from 431 to 404.) Second, as a coda to these events, in 399, the Athenians executed their philosopher Socrates. These actions outraged the next generation, but more significant for logic was how the next generation explained them. The next generation blamed both Athenian errors on deceptive public speaking. This indignant reaction was essential to the discovery of validity, and the person who expressed it most forcefully was Aristotle’s teacher Plato.
In his writings, Plato blames both Athenian mistakes on the teachers of public speaking. The Athenians allowed themselves to be deceived by clever but irrational speeches—or so Plato believed—and the leading villains in his account were the Sophists, who would later serve as foils for the development of logic.
The Sophists were the first paid teachers in Greece, originally deemed wise men—the word “sophist” comes from the Greek sophos for “wise”—who typically claimed to teach “excellence.”19 In practice, however, many of them seem to have focused on the art of winning debates by any means, fair or foul. This, at least, is the picture Plato paints for us, and the tendency to win a debate at all costs is the meaning we now give to “sophistry”; it means rhetorical trickery. Nevertheless, in its beginnings, the Sophistic movement was a dignified affair.
The first professional Sophists are supposed to have been Corax and his student Tisias in Greek-speaking Sicily beginning in the 460s B.C.20 The Sophists were probably Greece’s first grammarians—in some ways eminently scholarly—and, in fairness, we should remember that almost everything we read about them comes from their enemies. Perhaps, then, they weren’t nearly as mercenary as we are told. Their interest in oratory came from an older Homeric tradition, whose heroes aspired to be “doers of deeds and makers of speeches,”21 and their skepticism toward traditional Greek religion may have given important impetus to science. The Sophists preferred natural explanations to supernatural, and many commentators see the stamp of this rationalism even on the great historian Thucydides. Nevertheless, the thrust of many of their doctrines was to reduce all matters of right and wrong to a mere question of what was popular and what wasn’t.
We don’t approve of things because they are good, the Sophists suggested; rather, such things are good only because we approve of them. The Sophists sometimes expressed this view by saying that all is merely “custom” (nomos). A similar meaning was often attributed to the utterance of the Sophist Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things”; if Man approves it, it is good; if Man doesn’t approve it, it is bad. In fact, the notion that all matters of goodness or beauty are strictly in the eye of the beholder has a respectable philosophical pedigree; Thomas Hobbes expounds this doctrine, and David Hume defends a highly sophisticated version of it.22 Nevertheless, what distinguished many of the Sophists was the sheer crudity of their appeal. They often aimed bluntly at popularity alone, and their effect on rhetoric was to stress whatever techniques proved persuasive, whether rational or not. The Greeks themselves called this emphasis “making the worse into the stronger argument.”23
Plato describes this approach as applied to Athenian politics in his dialogue the Republic, which is set sometime between 421 and 413 B.C., though composed much later, after Socrates’ death. Plato writes,
Suppose a man were in charge of a large and powerful animal, and made a study of its moods and wants; he would learn when to approach and handle it, when and why it was especially savage or gentle, what the different noises it made meant, and what tone of voice to use to soothe or annoy it. All this he might learn by long experience and familiarity, and then call it a science, and reduce it to a system and set up to teach it. But he would not really know which of the creature’s tastes and desires was admirable or shameful, good or bad, right or wrong; he would simply use the terms on the basis of its reactions, calling what pleased it good, what annoyed it bad.24
Plato sees this animal as public opinion, and the man who teaches this science is the Sophist.
The Athenian reaction to Sophistry, when it finally came, was good-humored at first, then violent. The Sophists had descended more on Athens than on any other city because its opulence had made it the most lucrative market. But in 423, the playwright Aristophanes ridiculed the Sophists’ teachings in his play the Clouds, and in Aristophanes’ telling, the most influential of all the Sophists was none other than the philosopher Socrates. Socrates, of course, denied this accusation, but it also happened that the Delphic Oracle, believed by many Greeks to be the voice of the god Apollo, declared that no one living was wiser than Socrates.25 (Recall that the Greek word for “wise” was sophos.) Thus it was easy for many ordinary Athenians to suppose that Socrates really was a Sophist.
Then, in 399, by a large jury’s majority vote (a jury that may have numbered five hundred and one), Socrates was sentenced to death. The official charges were for corrupting the young and believing in gods of his own invention, but Socrates had insisted at his trial that the real complaint against him, though false, was that he had taught others to “make the worse into the stronger argument.”26
Such, then, was Plato’s polemic, and the effect of this polemic—indeed, the effect of the whole fifth-century experience—was to stress, emphasize, and underline the distinction between merely persuasive arguments and truly rational ones. This is the distinction the Sophists had blurred. The rational can seem persuasive or unpersuasive, and the persuasive can be rational or irrational. The great mistake of the Athenians, in Plato’s telling, was to confuse these different things. They confused persuasiveness with rationality. This was why their politics had proved disastrous. But Plato wasn’t alone in this judgment; it was the judgment of his generation. Many of his readers agreed. Part of his legacy, in brief, was to school the next generation of Athenian residents in the distinction between rhetorical force and logical force.
THE SEPARATION OF LOGIC FROM RHETORIC
Once this distinction was drawn, it was only a matter of time before the earlier Greek study of elenchos resolved itself into two distinct studies: logic and rhetoric. Logic concerned rationality, but rhetoric concerned persuasion. Aristotle’s analysis was only a short, further step because a large part of his generation had already come to believe that rationality and persuasion were different—a point Plato had made convincingly. Admittedly, neither discipline (neither logic nor rhetoric) can be fully adequate without the other; Plato had already demonstrated the weakness of an illogical rhetoric, but an unrhetorical logic has drawbacks, too. The chief defect of an exclusive attachment to logic is that it leaves us unprepared to act when we need to influence others. As Pericles once remarked, “A man who has ideas but lacks the power to express them is no better off than a man who has no ideas at all.”27 What necessarily concerns the citizen, then, is the area where the two disciplines overlap.
Viewed against this political background, logic as a separate field of study is actually a consequence of democracy—but democracy in crisis. The discovery of logic was the work of a generation of Plato’s readers reacting in dismay to democratic follies. The sheer spectacle of these follies had given the Athenians a powerful new motive to study argumentation—not just to win debates or establish creeds but (so they believed) to help them save their country. This new motivation became part of the spirit of the age. Aristotle’s treatment of validity still required a further insight: logical force depends on logical form. But the ground for this insight had been already prepared by bitter experience. This is the historical circumstance that made Aristotle’s ancient discovery intellectually important to his time.
Of course, the type of explanation we offer now will always be at least partly conjectural; we can’t go back and look into the souls of people long gone and know with certainty why they found some subjects more interesting than others. As for Aristotle’s own words, he says he investigates syllogisms to determine the proper conditions of demonstration, and he says the effect of demonstration is to acquire epistēmē, which is usually translated as “knowledge” or “science.”28 But the thing to remember is that epistēmē was already an established Platonic theme, and for Plato it was definitely a political theme.
In the ideal state of Plato’s Republic, the true philosopher-rulers have knowledge (epistēmē), whereas most people—the people who dominate the Assembly—deal only in “opinion” (or doxa). Plato hammers at these ideas relentlessly, and even his emphasis on the study of mathematics is justified in the same manner—as a subject fit to be contemplated by the political rulers of the ideal state and as something to be carefully distinguished in the rulers’ education from the mere vagaries of the Assembly.29
Aristotle would have been fully aware of the political import of these doctrines, however much he might have differed on the details. He had been a member of Plato’s Academy for two decades, where such attitudes would have been common. Many of Aristotle’s contemporaries would have been equally mindful of Plato’s constant stress on the supreme importance of distinguishing genuine knowledge from passing opinion.
The result, then (in our view), was a chain of cause and effect: Greek geography gave rise in the fifth century B.C. to an unusual political system—the system of simple democracy—and a crisis in this system then generated an intellectual reaction that ultimately turned logic into a distinct field of inquiry.
The foolishness of public opinion is, of course, the underlying theme behind all these endeavors, and both Aristotle and Plato come back to that foolishness repeatedly. In fact, both thinkers are profoundly antidemocratic.30 Yet it is important to add that public foolishness, to the extent that it really exists, doesn’t come from stupidity; instead, it comes from something different—and this is a point the social elites of history have often got wrong. The problem isn’t that democratic voters are unintelligent; the problem is that they are distracted. Ordinary citizens have other jobs to do aside from politics, and when the day is done, they often have less time for distinguishing political fact from political fiction—or for analyzing arguments; hence the distracted manner of the Athenian Assembly.
Winston Churchill famously remarked that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms.31 The chief defect of direct democracy is that the voters tend to be inattentive, but the chief defect of rule by an elite is that the elite becomes self-serving. Not only do the elite pursue their own interests; they also become convinced that their narrow interests are really the public interest. (As it happens, Adam Smith makes this very same complaint against the elite that constitutes the business sector when he sums up its strengths and weaknesses in The Wealth of Nations.)32 Thus most modern political systems have tended to gravitate between these extremes, such that public opinion is given some force but not unlimited force. (Public opinion may also tend toward sensationalism, but a taste for the sensational often comes from grinding labor. If you are tired at the end of the day, you often find it easier to satisfy your appetite for drama by following some juicy scandal than by investing serious mental energy in high art or public policy.) As a result, ordinary citizens, when compared with those who have extended leisure, tend to analyze politics more slowly, and this is why the application of logic to politics, even today, is still partly the burden of schools and universities.
Whether democracies should give power to an intellectual elite is an old and thorny question, and of course those who fancy themselves the elite are often the biggest fools of all; nevertheless, the thing to remember in the Athenian case is that their democracy was simple rather than representative. There were no constitutional checks on public enthusiasm of the sort envisioned by James Madison and the other architects of the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia. Instead, swings in public mood resulted instantly in new commands. Fleets were diverted, generals were recalled, and cities were spared or destroyed depending on the Athenian humor. In consequence, whenever a modern democracy finds itself grappling with similar problems today, it repeats, to some degree, this bleak, ancient experience.
In fact, in trying to understand these fundamental mechanisms and Aristotle’s reaction to them, what we are really wrestling with is yet another instance of one of history’s greatest enduring puzzles: the puzzle of reconciling the intellectual equality of peoples with the singularity of the classical Greeks.
We suppose, rightly, that the different peoples of the world are intellectually equal; our different races, populations, and social classes all descend from a common stock of ancestors whose existence in evolutionary time is recent. The rise and fall of civilizations is so brief in comparison with evolutionary change among whole populations that no theory of genetically inherited traits is likely to explain it. Genetic differences may arise among individuals, but genetic changes across large groups are slow and slight. Yet, in logic as in other fields, the classical Greeks loom large. How can this be?
The puzzle seems daunting, but it is easier to solve once we recall the special effects of the classical Greek environment, especially the political effects. The lay of the land and the smoothness of the water were singular in themselves, and from these circumstances nearly all else flowed.
Aristotle’s insight into logical form lives on even as we type these words on a digital computer—because a computer (as we shall see later) is really an electronic embodiment of logical form. But before Aristotle could reach his insight, the Athenians had paid for it in blood. Classical Greek wisdom really came out of classical Greek folly. As their poet Aeschylus describes such costs near the beginning of his Agamemnon, “He who learns must suffer. And, even in our sleep, pain falls drop by drop upon the heart till at last, against our will, comes wisdom, by the awful grace of God.”