Free The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler Page A
Authors: Arthur Koestler
opposite trends in philosophy. On the one side there was the "materialistic" trend, which had started with the Ionians, and was continued by men like Anaxagoras, who believed that homo sapiens owed his superiority to the dexterity of his hand; by Heraklitus, who regarded the universe as a product of dynamic forces in eternal flux; and culminated in Leucippus and Democritus, the first atomists. The opposite tendency, which originated with the Eleatics, found its extreme expression in Parmenides, who taught that all apparent change, evolution and decline, were illusions of the senses, because whatever exists cannot arise from anything that does not, or is different from it; and that the Reality behind the illusion is indivisible, unchangeable, and in a state of static perfection. Thus, for Heraklitus Reality is a continuous process of Change and Becoming, a world of dynamic stresses, of creative tensions between opposites; whereas for Parmenides Reality is a solid, uncreated, eternal, motionless, changeless, uniform sphere. 13
The preceding paragraph is, of course, a woeful oversimplification of developments in one of the liveliest periods of philosophic debate; but my purpose is merely to show how neatly the Aristotelian model of the universe solved the basic dilemma by handing over the sub-lunary region to the Materialists, and letting it be governed by Heraklitus' motto "all is change"; whereas the rest of the universe, eternal and immutable, stood in the sign of the Parmenidian "nothing ever changes".
Once again, it was not a reconciliation, merely a juxtaposition, of two world-views, or "world-feelings", both of which have a profound appeal to the minds of men. This appeal was increased in power when, at a later stage, mere juxtaposition yielded to gradation between the opposites; when the original Aristotelian two-storey universe – all basement and loft – was superseded by an elaborately graded, multi-storeyed structure; a cosmic hierarchy where every object and creature had its exact "place" assigned to it, because its position in the many-layered space between lowly earth and high heaven defined its rank on the Scale of Values, in the Chain of Being. We shall see that this .concept of a closed-in cosmos graded like the Civil Service (except that there was no advancement, only demotion) survived for nearly a millennium and a half. It was really a Mandarin Universe. During these long centuries, European thought had more in common with Chinese or Indian philosophy than with its own past and future.
However, even if European philosophy were only a series of footnotes to Plato, and even though Aristotle had a millennial stranglehold on physics and astronomy, their influence, when all is said, depended not so much on the originality of their teaching, as on a process of natural selection in the evolution of ideas. Out of a number of ideological mutations, a given society will select that philosophy which it unconsciously feels to be best suited for its need. Each time, in subsequent centuries, when the cultural climate changed in Europe, the twin stars also changed their aspect and colour: Augustine and Aquinas, Erasmus and Kepler, Descartes and Newton each read a different message in them. Not only did the ambiguities and contradictions in Plato, the dialectical twists in Aristotle, admit a wide range of interpretations and shifts of emphasis; but, by taking the two jointly or in alternation, by combining selected facets of each, the total effect could virtually be reversed; we shall see that the "New Platonism" of the sixteenth century was in most respects the opposite of the Neoplatonism of the early Middle Ages.
In this context I must briefly return to Plato's loathing for change – for "generation and decay" – which made the sublunary sphere such a disreputable slum-district of the universe.
Aristotle himself did not share this loathing. As a keen biologist, he regarded all change, all movement in nature as
The preceding paragraph is, of course, a woeful oversimplification of developments in one of the liveliest periods of philosophic debate; but my purpose is merely to show how neatly the Aristotelian model of the universe solved the basic dilemma by handing over the sub-lunary region to the Materialists, and letting it be governed by Heraklitus' motto "all is change"; whereas the rest of the universe, eternal and immutable, stood in the sign of the Parmenidian "nothing ever changes".
Once again, it was not a reconciliation, merely a juxtaposition, of two world-views, or "world-feelings", both of which have a profound appeal to the minds of men. This appeal was increased in power when, at a later stage, mere juxtaposition yielded to gradation between the opposites; when the original Aristotelian two-storey universe – all basement and loft – was superseded by an elaborately graded, multi-storeyed structure; a cosmic hierarchy where every object and creature had its exact "place" assigned to it, because its position in the many-layered space between lowly earth and high heaven defined its rank on the Scale of Values, in the Chain of Being. We shall see that this .concept of a closed-in cosmos graded like the Civil Service (except that there was no advancement, only demotion) survived for nearly a millennium and a half. It was really a Mandarin Universe. During these long centuries, European thought had more in common with Chinese or Indian philosophy than with its own past and future.
However, even if European philosophy were only a series of footnotes to Plato, and even though Aristotle had a millennial stranglehold on physics and astronomy, their influence, when all is said, depended not so much on the originality of their teaching, as on a process of natural selection in the evolution of ideas. Out of a number of ideological mutations, a given society will select that philosophy which it unconsciously feels to be best suited for its need. Each time, in subsequent centuries, when the cultural climate changed in Europe, the twin stars also changed their aspect and colour: Augustine and Aquinas, Erasmus and Kepler, Descartes and Newton each read a different message in them. Not only did the ambiguities and contradictions in Plato, the dialectical twists in Aristotle, admit a wide range of interpretations and shifts of emphasis; but, by taking the two jointly or in alternation, by combining selected facets of each, the total effect could virtually be reversed; we shall see that the "New Platonism" of the sixteenth century was in most respects the opposite of the Neoplatonism of the early Middle Ages.
In this context I must briefly return to Plato's loathing for change – for "generation and decay" – which made the sublunary sphere such a disreputable slum-district of the universe.
Aristotle himself did not share this loathing. As a keen biologist, he regarded all change, all movement in nature as