On not liking Aristotle (sexual equality edition).

Cleanthes the Stoic wrote a book titled "on the fact that virtue is the same for a man and for a woman." His teacher Zeno, his rival Aristo, his successor Chrysippus, and the later Stoic Epictetus also (with varying enthusiasm) accepted this view. The doctrine is Socratic (see in particular the beginning of the Meno and Xeno's Symposium) and middle-period Platonic (think of the female guardians in the Republic, less numerous but quite equivalent to the males); Plato is also supposed to have accepted two female students in his Academy, of whom one wore women's and the other men's clothes. It is also, naturally, a Cynical doctrine, an important illustration of the ways in which living socially perverts our basic natures. Cynics and Cyrenaics, the schools that identified philosophy most closely with ways of living and teaching most closely with performance and demonstration, both featured prominent women teachers. The unmarried Cynic couple Crates of Thebes and Hipparchia of Maroneia became a model of the highest ideals of love as enabler of life; the Cyrenaic leaders are Aristippus of Cyrene, his daughter Arete, and her son Aristippus, known as "metrodidakter" or "mother-taught." The Epicureans were not especially tempted by virtue-talk but they certainly thought that both sexes would live well according to the same principles, and we know of three (I think) female members of the Epicurean community. (Possibly they thought the same of non-human animals as well, who nevertheless were not capable of pleasures as great as humans can have.) The other schools of ancient philosophy -- various brands of logicians and skeptics, mainly -- were by design unwilling to make claims of such a nature. (The Pythagoreans are a more difficult case.)

But Aristotle thought that women were -- biologically, rationally, psychically, virtue-wise -- defective men. True, this was (and implicitly remains) a common view even among "civilized" people, the ones he engaged with. But he spent twenty years in the Academy surrounded by people who thought otherwise -- including presumably the two women there. The idea must have occurred to him. It must have been treated as a respectable if controversial view in at least those circles. Yet he never seems remotely tempted by the thought. He never mentions it as a view that one would uphold only paradoxically, as he does some of Socrates's other unconventional views (such as that no one willingly does wrong). (I am told, however, that Straussians have taken the proclaimed in principle equality of souls of differently-sexed individuals as a sign that the surface meaning of the book is intended to draw us by its patent absurdity towards another sort of reading.) The issue doesn't seem to bother him.

My point is not that all ancient philosophers were feminists but Aristotle. That's not true. Later in the Republic Plato has nasty things to say about particular kinds of mothers, and in the Timaeus he makes us almost a separate enough species -- occupying a separate space on the ladder of reincarnations, below men and above the rest of the animals. Two of the three female Epicureans we hear of are given only insultingly sexualized nicknames ("Mammarion," which Martha Nussbaum briskly translates as "Tits," can hardly have been the woman's real name). When Cynics and Stoics and Epicureans ask "should I marry?" the question is always "should I, as a man, marry?" Chrysippus discusses the meritoriousness or lack thereof of virtuous behavior whose alternative is not tempting under the rubric of "abstention from ugly old women." They weren't feminists. They had, in general, no special concern for women.

But they were humanists; they believed that the human soul or mind or self was first and foremost human. (Again, perhaps not the Cyrenaics or, in some ways, the Epicureans.) They thought that the ways we lived in society needed to be plumbed very deeply before we could pretend any confidence as to whether and what they showed us about what human beings are.

The same dynamic shows up with regard to poor people: the other schools accepted poor people in principle while making little effort to accommodate many of them. (I know of three notable exceptions: Socrates, born into the middle class, self-ruined through failure to work, and supported by aristocratic friends; Cleanthes, who supported himself by manual labor even while heading the Stoic school -- and was rewarded with the insulting nickname "the Ox"; and Epictetus, a slave not freed until middle age, by which point he was already a notable Stoic lecturer.) And the same with regard to non-Greeks. Pythagoras, like many of the natural philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries, was an Italian; the Cyrenaics are named for their home in northern Africa; Zeno, as a Cypriot, may have been either Greek or non-Greek, we do not know which (though Diogenes Laertius and Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations preserve some charming ethnic slurs against him as a Phoenician); Socrates and the Cynics explicitly self-identified as citizens of the universe in contradistinction to Greeks, as did most of the Stoics. But Aristotle -- not Plato or Chrysippus the aristocrats, but middle-class, Macedonian (the Macedonians think they are Greeks, but other Greeks do not think they are Greeks. They're the Mormons of the ancient Hellenic world), disenfranchised Athenian resident Aristotle -- thinks that all non-Greeks are natural slaves and that any important kind of virtue is impossible without the leisure that comes with wealth.

I would not object to calling Aristotle the most important philosopher of all time, nor perhaps to calling him the most brilliant. And there is much good in his embrace of convention. But it is not a coincidence that the same man is both the ancient philosopher most dismissive of skepticism and the ancient philosopher most oblivious to alternative possibilities of social ordering. It makes him very hard to read sometimes.

On correct use of prosody.

Here is "Life and Love" by the Earl of Rochester:


All my past life is mine not more
The flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams given o’er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.

What ever is to come is not,
How can it then be mine?
The present moment’s all my lot,
And that as fast as it is got
Phyllis, is wholly thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows,
If I, by miracle, can be,
This live-long minute true to thee,
‘Tis all that heaven allows.


I love the way he uses rhythm to build impatience here. It's perhaps intrinsic (at least natural) to the abaab stanza, all the more so if you tease the reader by speeding up the "b" lines to trimeter from the "a"s' four-beat structure. He really makes the most of the flexibility of English iambic meters, too: the patient lecture in four strict iambs of "Whatever is to come is not" followed immediately by the three beats -- a petulantly insistent trochee and two iambs -- of "How can it then be mine?"

Sorry, terminology note: trimeter = 3 beats per line, tetrameter = 4 beats per line, pentameter = 5 beats per line. The metrical units are just as simple. They're defined by beats, that is, more particularly, by patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. An iamb is unstressed-stressed, like "again." A trochee is stressed-unstressed, like "chocolate." Hence iambic pentameter = a line based on the rhythm u-s u-s u-s u-s u-s: "My other loves have been ethereal." But substituting in other feet -- especially trochees (s-u, remember; in iambic meters it is exceptionally common for a line to start with a trochee, which is typically followed by a chain of strict iambs: "Fear fills the chamber, darkness decks the bride," or indeed "How can it then be mine?"), dactyls (s-u-u, or oom-pah-pah if you prefer) or anapest (u-u-s or pah-pah-oom: "For fear it would make me conservative when old"), and the occasional spondee (s-s; when used in iambic meters usually complemented by a pair of unstressed syllables: "to a green thought in a green shade") -- is not only acceptable but expected. Truly all-iambic verse becomes tiresomely monotonous and sing-songy ("The flying hours are gone") very quickly. Even that can be used to advantage by a skilful meter reader: it's a major source of the child-like feel Frost sets up in the first few stanzas of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and perhaps even more important to the way the final stanza forces us to slow down with a suddenly crippling weariness. -- You see how the technical terminology is just a way of getting at what moves us about these lines.

Anyway, Rochester uses form to give his argument emotional and logical momentum. That's all. Very simple point. I should have something to say about the Epicurean legacy to Renaissance carpe diem poems, since I'm sure the resurgence of a sort of tragic-minded hedonism, after the rediscovery of Hellenistic texts and the concomitant rise in the popularity of Epicurean philosophy, is not entirely coincidental. Where by "tragic-minded hedonism" I mean roughly the argument from the claim that (1) we will not always exist, certainly not in this current format, via (2) pleasure is a pretty excellent thing, to (3) I am not sure what else there could be for us to take into consideration when we deliberate about the future besides the goodness of pleasure and the fact that when death comes we will cease to be persons. This is an Epicurean argument, thoroughly, -- though they left it to Marvell & Rochester & al. to add the corollary (4) sleep with me. I don't know how much more I have to say about that. The presentism ("What ever is to come is not") is interesting, perhaps, since it's neither Epicurean nor intrinsic to the carpe diem genre. (You don't have to deny the existence of any moment other than the present in order to feel a certain urgency about it: think of Marvell, before whom lie deserts of vast eternity.)

Oh -- and "Phyllis" is a Greek name conventional to the pastoral lyric. This isn't a pastoral, of course, but there's some relationship between this and that sort of seduction.