weird imaginations

One feature shared by Aristotle and Husserl is that while both are viewed as respectably dull, stodgy, pillar-of-society killjoys in stylistic terms, both happen to have really weird philosophical imaginations. Their lack of literary pyrotechnics, and their lengthy soporific passages, combine to lull the reader into a drowsy state that is not conducive to noticing their weirder moments. But those moments are definitely there.

In Aristotle, in particular, they are sprinkled so liberally throughout his major works that whoever described Aristotle as “middle-aged” (wasn’t it Alasdair MacIntyre?) was perhaps not paying enough attention to the strange moments. Here’s a small but typical example, from late in Book 3 of the Physics (I’m quoting here from the Waterfield translation, Oxford University Press). The point under discussion is Aristotle’s view that the infinite only exists potentially, not actually:

“Third, it is absurd to rely on what can be thought by the human mind, since then it is only in the mind, not in the real world, that any excess and defect exist. It is possible to think of any one of us as being many times bigger than he is and to make him infinitely large, but a person does not become superhumanly large just because someone thinks he is; he has to be so in fact, and then it is merely coincidental that someone is thinking it.”

“Well ain’t that a coincidence… I was just thinking of a superhumanly large person, and I’ll be damned if there isn’t one coming toward us right now– over there.”

Aristotle is also hard to beat as a closer. Here are the final words from Book 3:

“This is all I have to say about the senses in which there is and is not such a thing as infinity, and about what infinity is.”

Recalling my theory of how each person “gets away with” certain things that no one else can, perhaps Aristotle is the only one who can get away with such a statement, just as Nietzsche is the only one who can get away with lines like: “Since I will shortly confront humankind with the heaviest task that has ever been set before it…”

To take another of my favorite examples, Sade is surely the only writer who can get away with using the phrase: “The extensive wars wherewith Louis XIV was burdened during his reign…” as the opening to a pornographic novel. And I do think Sade is one of the great stylists, and obviously quite irreplaceable as a literary voice. (Not to mention as a human character. How many people literally escape from prison by putting a mannequin under the blankets to fool the guards and then rappelling down the prison wall with sheets tied into a makeshift rope? And forcing that maid to trample on a crucifix showed some real flair, don’t you think? Now that’s what I call a pervert with a sense of style.)

In any case, this is perhaps the litmus test of great style, whether literary or personal… What can a given person, author, musician, or geographical place do that cannot possibly be done by anything else? If you can eventually figure out how to answer that question in your own case, then you will have found your true vocation.

And if you’re lucky enough to find it– run with it. No one else can do it. You’re not interchangeable: no one is. But you can be lulled into behaving as if you were interchangeable, serving a function that anyone else could serve just as easily.