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August 28.
There are chatterers in words. Aristotle is a chatterer in thoughts.
He cuts his bread for minds.
August 30.
Aristotle. — His works were dictated (vid. the end of the sophistic.) He was the first to invent and teach the rules of argumentation (ibid.)
His method was above all to be assiduous and exact in defining, that is, in assigning to each word its usual sense and its precise meaning, a method whose necessity Socrates had been the first among philosophers to feel.
His merit is: 1° in subject matter, an almost universal knowledge. For he knows everything known before him, everything known in his time, and taught some new truth on every subject; 2° in his mind, a marvelous clarity and an extreme breadth; the multitude of things he knew never caused any confusion in his ideas; 3° in his style, nothing too much or too little; abundance and economy, charm and austerity, the nude and the clothed are equally present. In Pliny’s style we find the coloring of paintings. In Aristotle’s there is only the juice and color of flesh. It is true flesh on bones and sinews, neither lean nor plump. It is the ancient Mercury.
His faults are what is no fault in a teacher’s writings: a chatter of thoughts necessary to those who wish to teach the young to think; repetitions a listener cannot do without, but which he would have spared his readers had he written only for the wise. He cuts his doctrine into pieces like bread given to children. The rest belongs to his time. There are many useless things for us in his writings because he destroys in them many philosophical errors we do not hold. If he errs through subtlety, it is as a sensible man, a solid man, and an enemy of the subtle.
He was the first to devote himself to the great distinction between spirit and matter in nature (the earliest philosophers, who still had followers, had seen in the world only a blind and physical force. He reproaches Empedocles and Democritus for this) and [to] the no less important distinction between the sublime truths we glimpse and the palpable truths we handle and can prove in the sciences. He recognized the preeminence of the former.
Of the two ways of philosophizing, the one by which we know seemed to him preferable to the one by which we prove, establish, destroy. Yet he wished the philosopher by profession to know how to know, establish, defend, attack, and destroy; and he was the first to discover and teach the art of doing so.
His mistake was to wish everything in his books to be doctrinal, that is, capable of being proved, defended, placed beyond attack, not considering that there are truths, perhaps the most beautiful, that one can only lead others to imagine.
This is what Plato, for example, had considered. His doctrine of ideas explained to the mind the formation of the world and its relations with God. That was enough. Aristotle, in attacking as a point of dogma what Plato taught only as a means of explanation, showed neither wisdom nor that candor in reasoning he recommends somewhere when he says that the philosopher must philosophize nobly and in good faith.
His philosophy sufficed for the human mind for fifteen hundred years, and no other will better offer it the means of satisfying both its reason and its fancies, so fully are the useful and the curious, the useless and the necessary, considered there in turn. All ideas had more or less passed through his mind, and the seeds of all notions are found more or less developed in his works. His logical, physical, metaphysical, political, moral, and zoological writings may be called an ocean of intelligence, as Homer’s have been called an ocean of poetry.
We must treat our lives as we treat our writings, bring the middle, the end, and the beginning into accord, into harmony. To do so, we need to make many erasures in them.
Energy spoils their pen (young people’s) as loud singing spoils their voice. Learning to husband one’s strength, one’s voice, one’s mind, one’s talent: that is the use of art and the only means of excelling.
Strong, concise style. One must end there, not begin. To refine upon what is subtle, to change the solid into the fluid, and the fluid into the smoky: stop at vapor, at cloud, etc.
Children and weak minds ask whether the tale is true. Sound minds examine whether it is moral, whether it is artless, whether it makes itself believed.
On those minds so hot that their thoughts exhale in smoke and burn up within them from the moment they take shape there.
September 12.
That what is outside us (what we see, what we touch) is not what we know best.
September 15.
Truths. Their subordination, (or subordinatement, subordinance). That there are truths that annul other truths, or at least annul their usefulness. That one must always examine whether a truth is dependent.
That the name truth should be given only to what concerns natures, essences, existences par excellence; that all the rest deserves only the name fact.
One must respect religions, is a truth. Such-and-such a religion is true or false, is only a fact.
One could maintain, against Plato’s view, that what we know best is what we have not learned. (vid. his Alcibiades A.)
The people (with all due respect to Plato) teach justice very well.
September 23.
The dreams of love. Those of ambition. The dreams of piety.
— He clothes us and armors us by giving us the intelligence to make weapons and clothes for ourselves.