3. Aristotle and the End of Classical Greek Philosophy¶
Core Argument¶
Aristotle (384–322 BC), the foremost pupil of Plato, broke decisively with his teacher’s idealism. Where Plato derived reality from perfect, abstract Ideas, Aristotle proceeded from the concrete facts of sense perception, using induction to arrive at general principles. He collected and classified data across physics, biology, and other domains, pioneering the systematic method that underpins modern science. In the Metaphysics, he offered an early account of dialectical categories, even as he formalised the three laws of formal logic—identity, contradiction, and excluded middle. For Aristotle, logic and dialectics were complementary: formal logic holds within fixed limits but cannot grasp motion or change, which involve contradiction. He rejected Plato’s disembodied Forms, arguing that the universal exists only through the material particulars given in perception. Matter, for Aristotle, is eternal, ceaselessly changing, and contains both substance—the potential for infinite transformation—and energeia, an innate moving force. He held that motion and time have always existed, anticipating the dialectical materialist view that time, space, and motion are modes of existence of matter. Lenin considered Aristotle close to materialism.
Yet Aristotle never fully broke with idealism, wavering between the two. He conceded to religion by positing an unmoved First Mover as an eternal substance and pure actuality. This argument is flawed: an immaterial First Mover cannot impart motion to a material universe, and the concept merely shifts the causal question back without answering it. The idea of a First Cause is unscientific and mystical, for the chain of causation is endless. Aristotle also advanced a teleological interpretation of nature, holding that all phenomena are determined by an ultimate purpose. This led him to invert Anaxagoras’ insight that hands enabled intelligence, arguing instead that intelligence preceded hands. Teleology held back science until Darwin provided a rational explanation of adaptation. The Alexandrian period that followed saw fruitful research: Theophrastus established botany and questioned teleology, while Strato pioneered experiment. Great advances were made in mechanics, astronomy, and mathematics, including the Antikythera mechanism. However, these discoveries did not lead to an industrial revolution because the slave economy provided no incentive for labour-saving technology; production was for use, not exchange, and slaves could not be trusted with delicate machines. The slave mode of production undermined the free peasantry, and its contradictions led to prolonged decline when the supply of cheap slaves dried up.
This decay was expressed in the philosophies of cynicism and scepticism, which turned away from the world and denied the possibility of knowledge. Sceptics like Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus argued that nothing can be known because every proof requires further proof ad infinitum. This marked a degeneration from objective idealism to subjective idealism and ultimately solipsism—the notion that only ‘I’ exist. The text argues this is the philosophical basis for false interpretations of quantum mechanics by Heisenberg and others. Scepticism reflects a society in irreversible decline, where old ideals break down and uncertainty spreads. While Montaigne’s scepticism played a progressive role in criticising religious dogma, Hume and Kant’s variant opened the door to religious faith and was taken over by modern bourgeois philosophy as logical positivism. The common feature of these declining slave-society philosophies is a retreat from the world, a philosophy of despair. Epicureanism and Stoicism displayed this tendency: Seneca preached stoic ethics while amassing 300 million sesterces through usury. Kautsky explains that Epicurus’s rational pleasure-seeking suited idle exploiters, while Stoicism’s emphasis on virtue appealed to those disillusioned with worldly pleasures. Suicide became common in Imperial Rome. This threshold between philosophy and religion produced mysticism and irrationality. Plotinus’s neoplatonism, with its unknowable One, mystical communion, and Holy Trinity, was taken over wholesale by Christian apologists, producing a theology combining Oriental religion and decadent Greek idealism that dominated European culture for two thousand years.