Aristotle, the Great Organizer 亞里斯多德：把知識分門別類的人

🔊In 343 BCE King Philip of Macedon invited him to tutor his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander. What Aristotle taught the boy who would conquer the Persian Empire is unknown, and the relationship cooled later. In 335 BCE, as Alexander set out for Asia, Aristotle returned to Athens and founded his own school at the Lyceum, a grove sacred to Apollo. His followers became known as Peripatetics, from the covered walkway, the peripatos, where they talked. The Lyceum collected books, specimens, and the constitutions of 158 Greek cities. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, anti-Macedonian feeling swept Athens, and Aristotle, suspected as a Macedonian sympathizer, left the city. He died the next year on the island of Euboea.

前 343 年，馬其頓國王腓力邀請他擔任十三歲的兒子亞歷山大的老師。亞里斯多德教了這個後來征服波斯帝國的男孩什麼，我們並不知道；兩人的關係後來也冷淡了。前 335 年，當亞歷山大出發前往亞洲時，亞里斯多德回到雅典，在呂刻昂（一片獻給阿波羅的樹林）創立了自己的學校。他的追隨者被稱為「逍遙學派」，名稱來自他們交談的那條有頂迴廊 peripatos。呂刻昂收集了書籍、標本，以及 158 個希臘城邦的憲法。前 323 年亞歷山大去世，反馬其頓的情緒席捲雅典；被懷疑同情馬其頓的亞里斯多德離開了這座城市。他在第二年死於優卑亞島。

🔊The Metaphysics opens, in W. D. Ross’s translation, with a sentence that could stand over the door of any library: “All men by nature desire to know.” Aristotle tried to satisfy that desire in every direction, and he sorted what he found. Logic came first, as the tool for all the rest, and his writings on it were later collected as the Organon, the instrument. Then came the theoretical sciences, which study what cannot be otherwise: physics, the study of nature, mathematics, and first philosophy, which later editors called metaphysics. The practical sciences, ethics and politics, study how to act well. The productive sciences, such as rhetoric and poetics, study how to make things. The names of our university departments still follow much of this map.

《形上學》的開頭，在 W. D. Ross 的英譯裡，是一句可以掛在任何圖書館門口的話：「所有的人天生都渴望知道。」亞里斯多德試著從每一個方向滿足這份渴望，並把他找到的東西分類。邏輯排在最前面，作為其餘一切的工具；他關於邏輯的著作，後來被編成《工具論》。接著是理論性的學問，研究不可能是別種樣子的東西：物理學（研究自然）、數學，以及第一哲學，後來的編者稱之為形上學。實踐性的學問，倫理學與政治學，研究怎麼好好行動。製作性的學問，例如修辭學與詩學，研究怎麼製造東西。我們大學各系所的名稱，至今仍大致沿著這張地圖。

🔊His most useful tool for explaining anything was a set of four questions, later called the four causes. In the Physics, in R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye’s translation, a cause can be “that out of which a thing comes to be,” such as “the bronze of the statue”; “the form or the archetype”; “the primary source of the change,” as “the father is cause of the child”; or “the end or ‘that for the sake of which’ a thing is done,” as “health is the cause of walking about.” He applied the same patience to animals. Defending biology against those who found it beneath philosophy, he wrote in the Parts of Animals that “we must not recoil with childish aversion from the examination of the humbler animals. Every realm of nature is marvellous.”

他用來解釋任何事物最有用的工具，是一組四個問題，後來被稱為「四因」。在《物理學》裡（R. P. Hardie 與 R. K. Gaye 的英譯），一個原因可以是「一個東西由之生成的那個東西」，例如「雕像的青銅」；可以是「形式或原型」；可以是「變化的最初來源」，例如「父親是孩子的原因」；也可以是「目的，或『為了它而做』的那個東西」，例如「健康是散步的原因」。他對動物也用同樣的耐心。有人覺得生物學不配列入哲學，他為生物學辯護，在《動物之構造》裡寫道：「我們不可以帶著孩子氣的厭惡，退避對較卑微的動物的研究。自然的每一個領域都是奇妙的。」

🔊Aristotle’s great disagreement with Plato was about the Forms. For Plato, beauty itself exists apart from beautiful things. For Aristotle, there is no separate world of Forms. The form of a horse exists in horses, as the structure and capacities that make each one a horse, and we know it by studying many horses. He criticized his teacher openly and with evident reluctance. In the Nicomachean Ethics, in Ross’s translation, he notes that the Forms “have been introduced by friends of our own,” and adds, “while both are dear, piety requires us to honour truth above our friends.” His ethics followed the same down-to-earth path. The human good, he argued, is “activity of soul in accordance with virtue,” and it takes a whole life, “for one swallow does not make a summer.” In the Politics, in Benjamin Jowett’s translation, he called the human being “by nature a political animal,” a creature that flourishes only in a community.

亞里斯多德與柏拉圖最大的分歧，是關於形式。對柏拉圖來說，美本身獨立於美的事物而存在。對亞里斯多德來說，並沒有一個獨立的形式世界。馬的形式存在於馬之中，是使每一匹馬成為馬的那個結構與能力；而我們是靠研究許多匹馬來認識它。他公開批評自己的老師，而且顯然很不情願。在《尼各馬可倫理學》裡（Ross 譯），他指出形式論「是我們自己的朋友提出的」，然後加上：「兩者雖然都可貴，虔敬卻要求我們把真理看得比朋友更重。」他的倫理學也走同樣踏實的路。他論證：人的善是「合乎德行的靈魂活動」，而且需要一整個人生，「因為一隻燕子不成夏天」。在《政治學》裡（Benjamin Jowett 譯），他稱人「天生是政治的動物」，一種只有在共同體中才能興盛的生物。

🔊What survives of Aristotle is mostly lecture notes and treatises, edited by Andronicus of Rhodes some three centuries after his death. His polished dialogues, which Cicero praised, are lost. After the fall of Rome his works largely disappeared from the Latin West, but they were translated into Syriac and Arabic, studied in Baghdad and Córdoba, and commented on by Ibn Rushd, whom Europeans called simply “the Commentator.” When Latin translations reached the new universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Aristotle became so central that Thomas Aquinas referred to him as “the Philosopher.” His physics was overturned by Galileo and Newton, and his biology was surpassed. But logic, ethics, and the idea that knowledge should be organized into fields with their own methods still carry his mark.

亞里斯多德留存下來的，大多是講稿與論著，由羅德島的安德羅尼柯在他死後大約三個世紀編輯而成。他那些文筆優美、西塞羅稱讚過的對話錄，都已經失傳。羅馬滅亡之後，他的著作在拉丁西方大多消失了；但它們被譯成敘利亞文與阿拉伯文，在巴格達與哥多華被研讀，並由伊本・魯世德加以注釋；歐洲人乾脆稱伊本・魯世德為「那位注釋家」。當拉丁文譯本在十二、十三世紀傳到新興的大學時，亞里斯多德變得如此核心，以致湯瑪斯・阿奎那提到他時，就稱他為「那位哲學家」。他的物理學被伽利略與牛頓推翻，他的生物學也被超越了。但邏輯、倫理學，以及「知識應該被組織成各有方法的領域」這個觀念，至今仍帶著他的印記。