The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

0 the gospel of hellas
Aristotle, while a disciple of the Academy, attempted to “Platonize” his
world conception. 176 In the last two decades of his life, during which Aristotle
was his pupil, Plato wrote the dialogues with an increasingly methodological
basis (Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Parmenides and Philebus). In these he
relegated the character of Socrates more and more to the background. He
finally abandoned him completely in his Laws. This was the method and
attitude of Plato during the years which influenced the young Aristotle, who
now took a decisive step in the direction of pure logic. His very first works—
Eudemus or On the Soul; Gryllus, On Rhetoric; and Protreptikus—were praised by
Cicero, the greatest stylist of classical Latin, as examples of “the golden stream
of Aristotelian prose.” Cicero incorporated in his Hortensius the thoughts
of Aristotle’s Protreptikus and it was this same book which converted Saint
Augustine to religion: “This book has changed my mind and it gave my wishes
and my desire another goal ... I strove now for immortal wisdom with incredible
ardor of my heart.” 177 That was the effect of one of the earliest works which
Aristotle wrote while still under Plato’s eye at the Academy!
A single example in Eudemus shows how the teaching of the categories and
the logic of the syllogism were conceived. Aristotle opposed the conception
of the materialists that the soul is identical with harmony and has no other
manifestation. He showed that harmony and soul belong to two different
categories. “Opposed to the harmony of the body is the disharmony. Disharmony
is disease, weakness and ugliness; harmony is health, strength and beauty.
But I say that the soul is none of these, for even Thersites had a soul in spite of
all his ugliness. Therefore the soul (which has no such opponent as has harmony
in disharmony, belonging, therefore, to another category) is not harmony.” 178
The soul is a substance. Aristotle argued about this in the following way: The
soul is not the form (morphe, eidos) of something, but the form of something (not
eidos tinos but eidos ti). The soul as the entelechy of a natural body potentially
possesses life. It is substance and being according to the Logos of the world. In
this early dialogue we already encounter a pure syllogistic method of conclusion.
This was the genuinely “Aristotelian” part of his work.
Aristotle was already the father of logic at the Academy of Plato! It goes
without saying that this logic of the early years was but a seed or germ in
comparison with the blossoms and fruits of his later life. Yet from the very