Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

202 Aristotle and his schoolat night and because in sleep we perceive these slight movements moreclearly than in the waking state. Aristotle does not say to which categorythe dreams discussed here belong, but it seems that, if the category of‘coincidence’ (sumptōma) is eliminated, these dreams stand to the eventsthey predict in a relationship of signs (sēmeia), and that both the event andthe dream go back to a common cause.It is difficult, however, to see how the experiences described here can beaccommodated within Aristotle’s theory of sleep and dreams. They clearlydo not fulfil the requirements for dreams as posited in On Dreams; nordo they seem to belong to the category of borderline experiences, because,again, Aristotle stipulates that they appear to us stronger than in the wakingstate. Unless we were to assume that Aristotle is contradicting himself, wemight prefer to accept that in addition to dreams and to the borderlineexperiences of hearing faint sounds and suchlike, he recognises yet anotherkind of experience during sleep and that, by calling these experiences enhupnia,he uses the term in a less specific, more general sense than the strictsense in which it was used in On Dreams. After all, as I have said, the wordenhupnion basically means ‘something in sleep’, and this could be used bothat a more general and at a more specific level. But in that case, very little isleft of Aristotle’s initial, a priori assumption that sleep is an incapacitationof the sensitive part of the soul, for it turns out that we are perfectly wellcapable of perceiving these movements while asleep, provided that the atmosphericconditions are favourable. Nor is it open here to Aristotle to saythat these movements originating from remote places such as the Pillars ofHeracles are perceived by us not ‘in so far as’ we are asleep but in so faras we are, in a certain way, already awake: in fact, Aristotle explicitly saysthat we receive these stimuli ‘because’ we are asleep – indeed, they ‘causeperception because of sleep’ ( ), whichseems in blatant contradiction to everything he has said in On Sleep.A different approach to this problem is to seek an explanation for theseapparent inconsistencies in what Charles Kahn has called ‘the progressivenature of the exposition’ in Aristotle’s argument. 54 In the course of his argument,Aristotle sometimes arrives at explanations or conclusions whichimplicitly modify or qualify things he has said earlier on without recognisingthis explicitly or revising his earlier formulations. Instead, he simplygoes on, eager to explain as much as he can and carried away by the subtletyand explanatory power of his theories, but without bothering to tell ushow these explanations fit in with what he has said earlier on. This may be54 Kahn (1966).