Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

204 Aristotle and his schoolThis polemical nature may also be related to the fact that Aristotle has arather low estimation of the importance or value of dreams. As his discussionshows, and in particular the passage from 463 b 12–18 quoted above, dreamsdo not have any cognitive or moral significance and do not contribute inany way to the full realisation of human virtues. True, Aristotle concedesthat in some cases foresight in sleep is possible, but this is not to be takenin the sense of a special kind of knowledge which some people possess, butrather in the straightforward sense of ‘foreseeing’, in a somewhat accidentaland uncontrollable manner, what later actually happens. He does not assigna final cause to dreaming, and the answer to the question of the purposeof dreams is only given in a negative way. In the passage 463 b 14 discussedabove, Aristotle says that dreams ‘do not exist for this purpose’, to serveas a kind of medium for divine messages. His own view seems to be thatdreams simply exist as a necessary (i.e. non-purposive) side-effect of twoother ‘activities and experiences’ of living beings, namely sense-perceptionand sleeping, both of which do have a purpose, sense-perception beingessential to living beings, and sleep serving the purpose of providing thenecessary rest from the continuous activity of the sense-organs.This lack of a teleological explanation is not something to be surprisedat, for as Aristotle himself says, one should not ask for a final cause witheverything, for some things simply exist or occur as a result of other thingsor occurrences. 57 The only conceivable candidate for being the final cause ofdreams – divination – meets with scepticism on Aristotle’s part. Foresight insleep is not an intellectual or cognitive virtue in the sense of the Aristoteliannotion of excellence (aretē ); on the contrary, it occurs with people whoseintellectual powers are, for some reason, weakened or inactive. Prophecy insleep is a matter of luck and belongs to the domain of chance: it escapeshuman control, and its correctness can only be established afterwards, whenthe event that was foreseen has actually taken place. Mantic knowledge isnot knowledge in the strict sense (for many dreams do not come true,463 b 22–31), and the insights gained by it, if correct, are at best ‘accidentalinsights’, which only concern the ‘that’, not the ‘because’: they only point tothe existence or occurrence of something without providing an explanationfor this.This low estimation provides an additional reason why Aristotle shows solittle interest in the contents and the meaning of dreams, which was one ofthe questions with which this investigation started. It will have become clearthat the ‘omissions’ in Aristotle’s discussion of dreams that I mentioned at57 Part. an. 677 a 16–19.