THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF POST-ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY
The rest of the story of Greek philosophy is soon told, for it is the
story of decay. The post-Aristotelian is the least instructive of the
three periods of Greek thought, and I shall delineate only its main
outlines.
The general characteristics of the decay of thought which set in after
Aristotle are intimately connected with the political, social, and
moral events of the time. Although the huge empire of Alexander had
broken up at the conqueror's death, this fact had in no way helped the
Greek States to throw off the yoke of their oppressors. With the
single exception of Sparta, which stubbornly held out, they had
become, for all intents and purposes, subject to the dominion of
Macedonia. And the death of Alexander did not alter this fact. It was
not merely that rude might had overwhelmed a beautiful and delicate
civilization. That civilization itself was decaying. The Greeks had
ceased to be a great and free people. Their vitality was ebbing. Had
it not been one conqueror it would have been another. They were
growing old. They had to give way before younger and sturdier races.
It was not so many years now before Greece, passing from one alien
yoke to another, was to become no more than a Roman province.
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Philosophy is not something that subsists independently of the growth
and decay of the spirit of man. It goes hand in hand with political,
social, religious, and artistic development. Political organization,
art, religion, science, and philosophy, are but different forms in
which the life of a people expresses itself. The innermost substance
of the national life is found in the national philosophy, and the
history of philosophy is the kernel of the history of nations. It was
but natural, then, that from the time of Alexander onwards Greek
philosophy should exhibit symptoms of decay.
The essential mark of the decay of Greek thought was the intense
subjectivism which is a feature of all the post-Aristotelian schools.
Not one of them is interested in the solution of the world-problem for
its own sake. The pure scientific spirit, the desire for knowledge for
its own sake, is gone. That curiosity, that wonder, of which Aristotle
speaks as the inspiring spirit of philosophy, is dead. The motive
power of philosophy is no longer the disinterested pursuit of truth,
but only the desire of the individual to escape from the ills of life.
Philosophy only interests men in so far as it affects their lives. It
becomes anthropocentric and egocentric. Everything pivots on the
individual subject, his destiny, his fate, the welfare of his soul.
Religion has long since become corrupted and worthless, and philosophy
is now expected to do the work of religion, and to be a haven of
refuge from the storms of life. Hence it becomes essentially
practical. Before everything else it is ethical. All other departments
of thought are now subordinated to ethics. It is not as in the days of
the strength and youth of the Greek spirit, when Xenophanes or {341}
Anaxagoras looked out into the heavens, and naively wondered what the
sun and the stars were, and how the world arose. Men's thought no
longer turns outward toward the stars, but only inward upon
themselves. It is not the riddle of the universe, but the riddle of
human life, which makes them ponder.
This subjectivism has as its necessary consequences, one-sidedness,
absence of originality, and finally complete scepticism. Since men are
no longer interested in the wider problems of the universe, but only
in the comparatively petty problems of human life, their outlook
becomes exclusively ethical, narrow, and one-sided. He who cannot
forget his own self, cannot merge and lose himself in the universe,
but looks at all things only as they affect himself, does not give
birth to great and universal thoughts. He becomes self-centred, and
makes the universe revolve round him. Hence we no longer have now
great, universal, all-embracing systems, like those of Plato and
Aristotle. Metaphysics, physics, logic, are not studied for their own
sakes, but only as preparations for ethics. Narrowness, however, is
always compensated by intensity, which in the end becomes fanaticism.
Hence the intense earnestness and almost miraculous heights of
fanatical asceticism, to which the Stoics attained. And an unbalanced
and one-sided philosophy leads to extremes. Such a philosophy,
obsessed by a single idea, unrestrained by any consideration for other
and equally important factors of truth, regardless of all other
claims, pushes its idea pig-headedly to its logical extreme. Such a
procedure results in paradoxes and extravagances. Hence the Stoics, if
they made duty their watchword, must needs conceive it in {342} the
most extreme opposition to all natural impulses, with a sternness
unheard of in any previous ethical doctrine save that of the Cynics.
Hence the Sceptics, if they lighted on the thought that knowledge is
difficult of attainment, must needs rush to the extreme conclusion
that any knowledge is utterly impossible. Hence the Neo-Platonists
must needs cap all these tendencies by making out a drunken frenzy of
the soul to be the true organ of philosophy, and by introducing into
speculation all the fantastic paraphernalia of sorcery, demons, and
demi-gods. Absence of sanity and balance, then, are characteristics of
the last period of Greek philosophy. The serenity and calm of Plato
and Aristotle are gone, and in their place we have turgidity and
extravagance.
Lack of originality is a second consequence of the subjectivism of the
age. Since metaphysics, physics, and logic are not cultivated, except
in a purely practical interest, they do not flourish. Instead of
advancing in these arenas of thought, the philosophies of the age go
backwards. Older systems, long discredited, are revived, and their
dead bones triumphantly paraded abroad. The Stoics return to
Heracleitus for their physics, Epicurus resurrects the atomism of
Democritus. Even in ethics, on which they concentrate all their
thought, these post-Aristotelian systems have nothing essentially new
to say. Stoicism borrows its principal ideas from the Cynics,
Epicureanism from the Cyrenaics. The post-Aristotelians rearrange old
thoughts in a new order. They take up the ideas of the past and
exaggerate this or that aspect of them. They twist and turn them in
all directions, and squeeze them dry for a drop of new life. {343} But
in the end nothing new eventuates. Greek thought is finished, and
there is nothing new to be got out of it, torture it how they will.
From the first Stoic to the last Neo-Platonist, there is no
essentially new principle added to philosophy, unless we count as such
the sad and jaded ideas which the Neo-Platonists introduced from the
East.
Lastly, subjectivism ends naturally in scepticism, the denial of all
knowledge, the rejection of all philosophy. We have already seen, in
the Sophists, the phenomenon of subjectivism leading to scepticism.
The Sophists made the individual subject the measure of truth and
morals, and in the end this meant the denial of truth and morality
altogether. So it is now. The subjectivism of the Stoics and
Epicureans is followed by the scepticism of Pyrrho and his successors.
With them, as with the Sophists, nothing is true or good in itself,
but only opinion makes it so.
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