Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis

Epilogue

Epilogue The story’s over. It began with the stars and ended on earth, where a philosopher living in a peaceful, moderately sized city has the leisure to study the world. Finite and purposive, just like us, Aristotle’s world stands before our eyes, ready to be studied. It is neither the infinitesimally small universe of the particle physicist nor the impossibly vast one of the contemporary astronomer. It is, instead, our niche, our place, and it remains the center of human life. Even today, when the computers are zipping at unimaginable speed and the impulse is always to make them faster yet, this world must not be denigrated. For it is at risk of being overwhelmed by forces unleashed through the application of the mathematized science to whose authority we have become mindlessly accustomed to defer. The bombs waiting to be exploded and the vast amounts of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere are only the most egregious examples. In our age, an age of crisis, Aristotle offers a great philosophical resource, for the world he illuminates so brilliantly is humanly scaled and inhabitable. And it is the one in which we actually find meaning in our lives. For this very reason it is both easy and common for today’s intellectual to hold Aristotle in contempt. But this would be a terrible mistake. As Tom Stoppard’s character Bernard reminds us, “a great philosopher is an urgent need.” And the job of the philosopher, unlike that of the contemporary scientist, is to understand who and where we are. Bereft of such understanding, we will become careless with what nourishes us best. Regardless of how powerful our technologies become, such carelessness will be catastrophic. Of course, Bernard is something of a fool. And so are we who, like him, “prefer” Aristotle at this late date. Indeed, it may seem that the logic of this book requires us to embrace illusions: the sun orbits the earth, stars and species are eternal, organisms are purposively structured, and ordinary language is ontologically informative. In fact, however, these are truths; 217 218 / Epilogue truths about the world as it is experienced within the limits of a human time frame. Even though he was mistaken about the death of Ezra Chater, Bernard is not wrong about everything. Perhaps the lesson of Arcadia, then, is that a willingness to be foolish is a risk worth taking. ...