Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Aristotle on sleep and dreams 191Homer, in the well-known metaphor of the gates of horn and ivory in theOdyssey (19.560ff.), which distinguishes between true and false dreams, andin the Hippocratic work On Regimen quoted above, which differentiatesbetween dreams of a divine origin and dreams that have a physical origin. 32However, these counter-arguments based on a classification of dreams intodifferent categories would not impress Aristotle: it is clearly inconceivablefor him that a god incidentally and ad hoc uses a natural phenomenon toserve a purpose which is different from its normal, natural goal.On the other hand, the passage also shows that Aristotle does not simplyconfine himself to a rejection of a divine origin of dreams: his criticism isdirected against the specific assumption of dreams being ‘sent’ by the gods,of divine messages being ‘sent’ through the medium of dreams. But that doesnot imply that the phenomenon is deprived of any divine aspect whatsoever.In the sentence ‘they are beyond human control, for the nature (of thedreamer) is beyond human control, though not divine’ he recognises thatdreams still have something ‘super-human’ because the natural constitutionof the dreamer, which is the cause of the dream, is itself something beyondhuman control. It appears from another passage, in the preface to On Sleepand Waking quoted above, that the word daimonios is not to be understoodin the sense of ‘sent by demons’, but in the sense of ‘beyond human control’(the opposite, so to speak, of ‘human’, anthrōpinos): what appears to us ina dream is beyond our control, just as it is beyond our control what kindof natural, physiological constitution we have.It may incidentally be observed that the structure of Aristotle’s argumenthere is strikingly similar to that found in the Hippocratic works On theSacred Disease and Airs, Waters, Places (see chapter 1 above). In the formertreatise, the author rejects the view that epilepsy is sent by the gods, andone of the arguments he produces is concerned with the distribution ofthe disease among different kinds of people, which he claims is differentfrom what one would expect if it were sent by a god. Thus in 2.4–5 hesays: ‘Here is another indication that this disease is in no way more divinethan the others: it affects the naturally phlegmatic, but not those whoare choleric. Yet if it were more divine than other diseases, it would haveto occur with all sorts of people in equal manner and make no distinctionbetween phlegmatic and choleric.’ And in Airs, Waters, Places 22, the authorargues against the belief in the supernatural origin of impotence among theScythians, again by pointing out that the actual distribution of the affliction(predominantly among wealthy people, who can afford horses) is exactly32 On this distinction see van der Eijk (2004a).