Saving ta legomena: Aristotle and the history of philosophy

And it is just to feel gratitude not only to those whose opinions one shares, but even to those whose pronouncements were more superficial, for they too contributed something, since before us they exercised the active condition [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] of thinking.--Metaphysics 1.2.993b11-15 LET US BEGIN WITH ARISTOTLE as Aristotle so often begins with us: by attending carefully to the words of the ancients. Xenophanes, who Aristotle so generously claims "made nothing clear," (1) nevertheless gives voice to the hope and tragedy of the human condition: "But from the beginning the gods did not reveal all things to mortals; but by seeking they discover better in time." (2) Ours is not a world of superlatives but of comparatives--the best, the purest revelation of truth remains concealed to us, and yet, in time, indeed, by searching, we discover better. Xenophanes emphasizes the temporality of human striving, and one might imagine that this points not merely to the progressive attainment of ever more effective articulations of the truth, but also to the cumulative effect past articulations always already have on present attempts to give voice to the nature of things. Despite his rather harsh judgment of Xenophanes, Aristotle's own words resonate with his: The investigation [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] concerning the truth is in one sense difficult, in another sense easy. A sign of this is that no one can obtain it adequately [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], nor do all fail; but each says something concerning nature [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], and although one by one each adds little or nothing to it, from all of them being gathered together something great comes into being. (3) Like Xenophanes, Aristotle begins with human finitude: the capacity [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] adequately to obtain the truth has not been granted to human beings. And yet, like Xenophanes, Aristotle does not recoil from this, but insists that something great comes into being when the polyphony of articulations concerning nature is assembled. Theoretical inquiry into the truth here involves not a detached seeing, but an engaged saying. Indeed, truth does not find expression in the isolated articulation of a single voice, but rather resonates in a polyphony of voices that emerges out of the various ways each engages the world by articulating "something concerning [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]." Thus, Aristotle's own investigations into [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] begin by attending to the voices of his predecessors. This methodological orientation toward [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], the things said, is no idiosyncratic accident. Rather, as Wolfgang Wieland has suggested, it is "an integrated moment of the objective investigation itself." (4) Indeed, this orientation toward the things said by those who came before runs throughout Aristotle's work, from his investigation into nature, to his treatment of the soul, to his inquiry into ethics; for in each case, the investigation into the truth begins where we find ourselves, always already addressed by the things said by our predecessors. In order to apprehend the central methodological role that Aristotle's engagement with the things said has for his own attempts to articulate the truth, it will be necessary to sketch the basic contours of Aristotle's phenomenological approach to [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]. This will allow us first to offer a corrective to what seems to have emerged as a kind of received orthodoxy concerning Aristotle's engagement with the history of philosophy in which, it is alleged, Aristotle manipulates the thinking of his predecessors such that they turn out to be nothing other than, as Harold Cherniss so colorfully put it, "'stammering' attempts to express [Aristotle's] own system." (5) Yet, in his writings on [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII. …