Aristotle, the Scale of Nature, and modern attitudes to animals - In the Company of Animals

George Gaylord Simpson, one of the great biologists of this century, began his book on The Principles of Taxonomy (1961) with the statement that, "Any discussion should start with a clear understanding as to what is to be discussed." What will be discussed here is how the animal kingdom has been classified in the European-speaking world since the time of Aristotle, and how these classifications have affected our attitudes to animals today. I will start with the dominating role that Aristotle played in European civilization for an incredible length of time. Then I will go on to discuss how this dominance began to crack in the eighteenth century, and how it was finally broken apart in the nineteenth century, nearly 2000 years after Aristotle's death. Broken apart it may have been, yet Aristotle's philosophy is still with us; it is the backcloth to our attitudes to animals, and, in fact, to the whole way we live and think, even if we do not agree with the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which as late as 1875 claimed that many of Aristotle's works, "make an excellent curriculum for training young men and fitting them for the superior business of life."

Aristotle's Life and His Books on Natural History

Aristotle was born in 384 BC and died, aged 63, in 322 BC. Like Darwin, whose breadth of knowledge on natural history may have been almost comparable, Aristotle was described as always having "weak health."

After the death of his father in 367 BC, Aristotle, who was then 17 years old, went to live in Athens. There he spent the next twenty years studying under Plato. Plato died in 348 BC, aged 81, and then Aristotle went to live in Lesbos, where at the request of King Phillip of Macedon, he became tutor to Phillip's son, the young Alexander, later to become Alexander the Great. In 336 BC, Aristotle returned to Athens where he established his school in the garden Lyceum, teaching as he walked about, from which his school of philosophy came to be known as Peripatetic. Aristotle's books would probably have been written first on papyrus or parchment, and it has been claimed that they were the basis of the famous library in Alexandria which was later to be destroyed. It is not known if any of his books survive in their entirety; it is more likely that what remain are mostly notes and materials for lectures that Aristotle gave to his students. However, the knowledge about zoology that is contained in the works we have will never cease to amaze the reader who can learn an enormous amount, even today, from his translated books. I will quote just one example from the History of Animals on the incubation habits of birds to give a taste, which I hope will inspire more people to read the works of Aristotle for information as well as pleasure:

I mentioned when speaking of pigeons that the male and female

take it in turns to sit on the eggs. Most other birds do the same

but the males of some kinds sit only long enough to give the

female time to get herself some food. The nests of all marsh

birds are built near swampy and grassy places, and as a result of

this the birds can remain sitting quietly on the eggs and get some

food for themselves and so not go without eating altogether.

Among crows, too, the females only sit on the eggs, and remain

on them from start to finish: the males fetch food for them and

feed them. The female wild pigeon begins to sit in the afternoon

and stays on the eggs all night until breakfast time; the male sits

for the remainder of the day (Peck, 1970, VI. viii 564a 10-15).(1)

When discussing the truly remarkable influence of Aristotle it is first of all necessary to remember that he lived more than 300 years before the birth of Christ. He had no microscope, no knowledge of the circulation of the blood, or of gravity, or of the solar system, or even that the world was round. He believed that the Earth was stationary and the center of the world; he thought the seven planets (including the sun and moon) moved around the earth in oblique courses to the left, while the outer heaven or sphere of the stars, composed not of perishable matter but of divine ether, moved from left to right with perfect and regular motion returning on itself, deriving its motion from an encompassing essence which itself was not moved.

Aristotle's Belief in the Four Causes

Aristotle, and probably most of his contemporaries, believed that the universe was a continuous chain; at one end was the purely potential, matter without form or qualities; at the other end was the actual, which was ever existent. The actual always had to precede the potential. Thus, the seed was the potentiality of the plant, and the plant must always have preceded the seed, the fowl the egg, and so on. This was the system of cause and effect, which made up what Aristotle called "Nature" and which he believed was of eternal duration, although it could be modified and altered by two unpredictable elements of Causation, thence and the will of Man. Aristotle's beliefs about the natural world thus were based on the philosophy of Causes, or what we might call today "reasons." To know, said Aristotle, was to know by means of Causes. A thing was explained when you knew its Causes, and a Cause was that which was responsible, in any of four senses, for a thing's existence (Peck, 1970, p. xxxviii). If we take a pigeon as an example, then the four Causes that explain its existence would be: (1) The Motive Cause: the parent pigeon which produced an egg; (2) The Material Cause: the pigeon's egg and its nourishment; (3) The Formal Cause:.the egg as it developed and hatched into a chick that had the characteristics proper for a pigeon; (4) The Final Cause: the: end towards which the process advanced, the perfected pigeon.