Thinking Mortal Thoughts

Debra San

There is something quite odd about the ancient Greek advice to "think mortal thoughts" (or "think of mortal things"), for what human being past the flush of youth has not trembled at the thought of mortality? Consciousness of our mortal condition is considered a hall-mark of the human species, and is no doubt the reason we alone among the species on the planet entertain notions of divinity. Why then are we counseled to think about what we cannot help thinking about anyway? And what purpose does the advice serve: are those who tender it eager to promote their own fearful frame of mind? Or, on the contrary, are they urging us to be courageous in the face of death? Perhaps the advice intended is to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Or perhaps "mortal thoughts" are suicidal thoughts, and the object is to shuffle off this mortal coil in a manner, time, and place of our own choosing.

Clearly, taken out of context, the injunction "think mortal thoughts" can mean any number of things. But in the context of ancient Greek culture, "think mortal thoughts" means roughly this:

"Since you are not one of the immortal gods, be mindful of your limits as a human being. Consciousness of the inevitability of your death should inform the way you live your life, for just as your lifespan is limited by your mortality, so too are your capacities for understanding, for action, and for achievement. This is the truth of your condition; if you don't accept it, you'll be frustrated at best, and at worst you'll incur divine wrath and retribution for attempting to push past your proper human boundaries into sacred turf where you don't belong and aren't wanted. Don't trespass. Don't even think about it. Don't assume, in a futile exercise of hubris, that you're a special case whose transgression [End Page 16] (huperbasia) will be exempt from dire consequences. Gnothi sauton, know yourself as a mortal being, and meden agan, do nothing to excess, or you will suffer the fate of Icarus, who aimed too high and died for it, or the fate of Phaethon, who was destroyed by forces which he thought he could control."

The advice presented here echoes throughout classical Greek drama, whose tragic protagonists are the theatrical descendants of Icarus and Phaethon. When Antigone compares herself to Niobe, the Chorus must remind her that "she was a god, born of gods, and we are only mortals born to die" (925-26). ¹ In her failure to think mortal thoughts, Antigone resembles her father, whose refusal to acknowledge his limits is so profound that even after mutilating himself in horror at the discovery of his own transgressions, he must still be reminded that he is no longer "the master of all things" (1675). ² Pentheus in the Bacchae lacks the stature of either Oedipus or Antigone, but like them he has pretensions beyond the limits befitting a mortal; he fails to exercise the "simple wisdom [that] shuns the thoughts of proud, uncommon men and all their god-encroaching dreams" (427-29). ³ In his arrogant and unrealistic attempt to pit his own puny powers against the incomparable force of the immortal Dionysus, Pentheus suffers the fate of those whose hubris overcomes the temperate virtue of so¯phrosune¯, "the wisdom that accepts" (390). Even the bloodthirsty, pre-Eumenides Furies of the Eumenides accept the limits which moderation entails: they understand that Zeus "appointeth the mean as the master in all things" (531). ⁴

One might expect that this cautionary, temperate strain in Greek thinking would appeal to Aristotle, whose doctrine of the mean in Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics might have come straight out of the Oresteia. And yet, when the caution is expressed in the maxim "think mortal thoughts," Aristotle rejects it, claiming that human beings should try to aim their thoughts at a level so high it cannot really be reached by mortals, which is to say a level as high as that of the immortal gods, whose contemplative, intellectual activity (theo¯ria) soars far above the practical plane of quotidian human activity: "we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal . . ." (1177b31-33). ⁵ This is a stunning statement for Aristotle to make. The advice he warns us against would seem to be entirely compatible with his own doctrines of mean and moderation: it is designed to correct our tendency to overestimate ourselves (the perennial Greek question of metron), but in no sense does it advise us to [End Page 17] underestimate ourselves instead. To put it in Aristotelian terms, an excess is not cured by a deficiency. To think mortal thoughts is to keep in check the tendency of healthy self-esteem (what Aristotle in Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics calls "self-love" [1169b2]) to grow unhealthfully excessive. Centuries later, in Milton's earthly paradise, even the garden of Eden must have its lush growth pruned if it is not to turn into a wilderness. As Eve says to Adam,

        well may we labor still to dress
This Garden, still to tend Plant, Herb and Flow'r,
Our pleasant task enjoin'd, but till more hands
Aid us, the work under our labor grows,
Luxurious by restraint; what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides
Tending to wild.

(Paradise Lost IX, 205-12)⁶

For a classical Greek advocate of temperance, "wanton growth . . . tending to wild" would be an apt image for the tendency of the human spirit to grow agrios (wild in a rural, uncultivated way) and hubristiko¯s. But just as a certain amount of violence is involved in the human "pruning," "lopping," and "binding" of nature, there is a certain vio-lence done to the human spirit in cutting it off from its full range of possibilities. The deep desire to express that full range, to stretch the human will and the human intellect as far as they will go, and then still further, speaks to an archaic strain of Greek thought that is not only older than the Athenian view of temperance, of accepting limits, of thinking mortal thoughts, but is fundamentally at odds with the Athenian view. We know this archaic strain as the heroic Greek drive for arete¯, excellence, and for kleos, glory and honor, a drive to always do and be one's best so as to surpass all others. Anything less--any so-called "mean"--would be, from this perspective, tantamount to mediocrity (a word whose etymology is quite relevant here). This archaic view did not conveniently disappear in the classical period, when the polis began to bloom. Indeed, if one tries to think of classical Greek exemplars of moderation, the only literary figures who come to mind are either singularly uninspiring mediocrities (e.g., the timid Ismene of the Antigone, who pleads with her sister not to "rush to extremes" [80]), or they are immortal deities (e.g., Athena in the Eumenides) who need not think mortal thoughts anyway, or they are collective voices (the Choruses [End Page 18] in the plays), who by virtue of their collectivity cannot serve as models to be emulated by individuals.

The tension between the two competing strains of Greek thought is nowhere more brilliantly conveyed than in the two famous odes of the Antigone. The first ode, which tells us how deinos, how strange or terrible or awe-inspiring, we humans are, simultaneously celebrates our drive to assert ourselves beyond our mortal limits and chastens us to consider the consequences of such transgressions, for the very source of our glory is the source of our ruin. The ode in the second stasimon continues this troubling theme: we mortals are touched with greatness, but "that greatness never shall touch the life of man without destruction." ⁷ The deinos nature of the human condition is, essentially, the paradox of human aspiration aware of its equally dark and dazzling sides.

It seems to me that this paradox, and the desire to resolve it, haunt the Nicomachean Ethics no less than they haunt other critical works of western literature and philosophy, and that the passage in Book X in which Aristotle advises us not to think mortal thoughts is only the most visible evidence of this haunting in the treatise. Many scholars would not agree with this assessment. They do find the passage problematic--it requires either "an interpretation . . . that minimizes the conflict between it and the rest of the work" ⁸ or an acknowledgment that it is "in flat contradiction with several important positions and arguments of the EN taken as a whole" ⁹ --but either way, few if any commentators would agree that it represents a recurring inconsistency. Indeed, some find nothing strange in the passage at all. ¹⁰ Those who do, however, consider it to be an anomaly in the work. Sarah Broadie believes it is unsupported by any other argument that Aristotle has previously made in the treatise. ¹¹ J. O. Urmson's surprise at the passage may be discerned from his word "seems" sandwiched between two "no doubt"s: "No doubt Aristotle was, in general, like most Greek sages, inclined to accept a doctrine of moderation, though in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics he seems to believe in a rather immoderate indulgence in contemplation of the immutable. But no doubt he was inclined. . . ." ¹² Martha Nussbaum finds the passage "not surprising" (p. 375) after having identified several other instances in Aristotle's corpus that "are at odds with the general anthropocentrism of Aristotle's ethical method" (pp. 373-74), but she nonetheless sees it as a step that "is taken . . . only once" and "does not fit with its context" (p. 375).

I would like to suggest that if one views the statement in which [End Page 19] Aristotle repudiates mortal thoughts as an aberration in the Nicomachean Ethics, one misses an important albeit conflicted dimension of the work. This dimension best reveals itself, ironically enough, in translation, in what Urmson calls "the thoughtless traditional translation of ethike aret¯e and kakia as 'moral virtue' and 'vice'" (p. 160). Urmson objects to these terms on the grounds that they oversimplify and therefore distort Aristotle's thinking. But given the archaic heritage of arete¯ as an excellence of heroic rather than reasonable proportions, the tension between arete¯ as "excellence" and arete¯ as "virtue" is built into the very language Aristotle uses. As a fourth-century philosopher who considers rationality to be a defining faculty or arete¯ of the species, he develops an eminently rational doctrine of the mean designed to temper dysfunctional human inclinations within proper mortal bounds and thereby maximize human good, and he associates this doctrine with various practices of moderation throughout the treatise. But as a Greek for whom the drive for a specifically heroic arete¯ is still a strong (if no longer burning) imperative, he is not entirely comfortable with his own doctrine. This discomfort, which expresses itself in Book X as a call to think like the gods, has sometimes been interpreted as a Platonic element in Aristotle's thinking, an element characterized by the desire to inhabit an abstract, purely cognitive realm, disburdened of all the mortal mess, all the bother and pain of the human condition. ¹³ But if one views Aristotle's statement in another light, the light of his culture's mythic past, then his desire is anything but Platonic; it is fiercely and desperately human. Desperate because doomed: there is no way one can actually, as opposed to imaginatively, relive the past. (Were this not true, the power of myth and the cathartic compass of tragic drama would shrink significantly.) Desperately human because the desire to excel oneself is a distinctively human urge: unless motivated by some practical end, neither animals nor the gods are moved to push beyond their own limits (which the gods have none of anyway except in so far as they limit one another). To strive for its own sake as a "self-sufficient" activity (Aristotle's term) is to express a uniquely human component of human identity.

It is not, however, compatible with the cautioning advice to think mortal thoughts. I have suggested that Aristotle's rejection of this advice is not an aberration in the Nicomachean Ethics, but rather the most visible evidence of his struggle to reconcile divergent meanings of arete¯. How readily is that less visible evidence uncovered? As his thought develops from one book of the treatise to the next, we can, I think, [End Page 20] discern a gradual but distinct devaluation of those states of mind (such as so¯phrosune¯) that are "virtues" rather than "excellences" precisely because they are associated with thinking mortal thoughts. In Book II, for example, he endorses so¯phrosune¯ by offering it as a golden mean in his discussion of moral virtues and vices . But in Book IV, his discussion of the magnificent man prompts him to revise his attitude toward temperance and toward the value of the mean: "The proud man . . . is the man we have described. For he who is worthy of little and thinks himself worthy of little is temperate, but not proud, because pride implies greatness" (1123b4-6). Having made this startling association between the mean of temperance and the state of being unworthy, Aristotle immediately back-pedals a bit by telling us that the proud or magnificent man "is an extreme in respect of the greatness of his claims, but a mean in respect of the rightness of them; for he claims what is in accordance with his merits" (1123b13-15). Despite Aristotle's momentary back-pedalling, however, the path he is on still leads away from the temperate ideal of thinking mortal thoughts. What this path is leading toward does not become apparent until the beginning of Book VII, when he abandons all pretense of seeking the mean, and reverts to basic polarities of opposition, with no intermediary term. Advising against brutishness, which is "a state of character to be avoided," he presents the opposite of brutishness not as reasoned, temperate wisdom which accepts its own limits, but as a virtue of Homeric proportions:

superhuman excellence, something heroic and divine, as Homer has represented Priam saying of Hector that he was very good,

For he seemed not, he,
The child of a mortal man, but as one that of God's seed came.

Therefore if, as they say, men become gods by excess of excellence, of this kind must evidently be the state opposed to the brutish state.

(1145a19-25)

"Men become gods": a fanciful, mythical conception--but it is, after all, only what "they say"; surely Aristotle himself does not believe it is possible. And yet apparently he does, for a few sentences later we find him saying that "it is rarely that a godlike [divine] man is found" (1145a28). Rare or common, the notion of a man becoming a god is extraordinary--until one recalls the direction in which he has been [End Page 21] heading: once the classical ideal of the middle way is allowed to recede from mortal view, there is no where to go but up. And up he continues to go, from the simile of Homeric heroism in Book VII ("as Homer has represented Priam saying of Hector . . .") to the metaphor of Homeric heroism in Book IX: the good man, the man of healthy self-esteem, "would prefer a short period of intense pleasure to a long one of mild enjoyment, a twelvemonth of noble life to many years of humdrum existence, and one great and noble action to many trivial ones" (1169a21-25). This is, of course, a perfect description of Homer's Achilleus; it is also the final necessary stepping stone before his full declaration of apostasy in Book X, where his rejection of the advice to "think mortal thoughts" is at last made explicit. The context he chooses for this declaration is significant: he is not discussing glorious, patriotic deeds or memorable political achievements or anything remotely resembling the activities of either a Homeric or a classical hero; he is discussing the activity of contemplation--which happens to be the central activity of his own life. Compared to the lives of Achilleus, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Oedipus, Antigone, Medea, et alia, one might suspect that the sedentary life of the mind is a rather tame one. In fact, even when one assesses it by rational rather than emotive criteria (the rational criteria of "self-sufficiency, leisureliness, and unweariedness"), the activity of the intellect only "seems . . . to be superior in worth" to political and military actions (1177b15-26). The real question is: can anything confirm even its equivalence? Yes: the careful (if not entirely conscious) groundwork Aristotle has laid in Books II through IX enables him in Book X to cast the dazzling light of Homeric grandeur on his own life--and to do so without simultaneously taking on the post-Homeric onus of unseemly transgression, for in devaluing those states of mind such as so¯phrosune¯ that are associated with thinking mortal thoughts, his groundwork has subtly devalued the concept of "transgression." Huperbasia and similar Delphic-like concepts do not apply to the philosophic hero who pursues the life of the intellect, for such a hero pursues this life

not in so far as he is man . . . but in so far as something divine is present in him. . . . If intellect is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us. . . . (1177b27-34)

[End Page 22]

Aristotle's advice to "make ourselves immortal" should not be confused with later Christian thought about the nature of the afterlife, as some commentators have done when they suggest that Aristotle's advice offers "an orientation that helps prepare for Christianity's ultimate acceptance of Aristotelian theology, since Christianity promises man a destiny so exalted as to justify him in thinking immortal thoughts." ¹⁴ The immortality Aristotle advocates is put on in this life, and it is put on by the exercise of intellect, not by the grace of God. In fact, if parallels can be drawn between Aristotelian and Christian attitudes on this matter, the most obvious analogy to draw is between Christianity and the cautionary advice that Aristotle rejects. If, in a fit of anachronistic fancy, one were to imagine Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer repainted as Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Christ (or a medieval icon of Jesus on the Cross), one might imagine him scribbling the following notes, perhaps for supplementary passages to the Nicomachean Ethics: "Christian values seem curiously consonant with the values expressed in the maxim to think mortal thoughts. By accepting the limits of human mortality, isn't one chastened into a state of mind comparable to Christian humility? In resisting the temptations of Icarus or Phaeton, isn't one resisting the pride in self that brought Satan down from the skies?" And indeed, in his commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, St. Thomas Aquinas claimed that Aristotle's so¯phro¯n is equivalent to Christian humilis. ¹⁵

But one need not have the mind of Aristotle or Aquinas to notice such resemblances. Consider how readily the cautionary advice offered by the Chorus in Aeschylus' Eumenides translates into the language of a Christian sermon:

Times there be when fear is well;
Yea, it must continually
Watch within the soul enthroned.
Needful too straits to teach humility. ¹⁶

(517-21)

Wickedness breedeth,
and pride is the name
of her child

(533-34)

The seed of just men shall never perish.
Not so the froward and foolish heart. . . .

(552-53)

[End Page 23]

"Froward" is a word with strong Christian resonance; Richard Crashaw uses it in Charitas Nimia to indicate how stubbornly and willfully we mortals transgress our limits:

     Let froward dust then doe its kind,
And give it selfe for sport to the proud wind

(29-30) ¹⁷

Drawing its inspiration from the book of Psalms, Charitas Nimia asks "Lord, what is man?" and answers: "a thing of nought. . . . wormes. . . . peevish clay. . . . some foolish flye grown wanton." That true Christian humility requires this sort of self-abnegation and self-effacement is precisely what troubles Milton so much in Book XI of Paradise Lost, where each time the word "submit" is uttered, we can practically feel the word sticking in Milton's throat, although the voice that issues the word is Adam's:

                if by prayer
Incessant I could hope to change the will
Of him who all things can, I would not cease
To weary him with my assiduous cries:
But prayer against his absolute Decree
No more avails than breath against the wind,
Blown stifling back on him that breathes it forth:
Therefore to his great bidding I submit.

(XI, 307-14)

A short while later, the angel Michael makes explicit what this submission entails; it will require Adam "to temper" all his emotions and "[b]y moderation" bear all circumstances:

          so shalt thou lead
Safest thy life, and best prepar'd endure
Thy mortal passage. . . .

(XI, 361-66)

Allowed a preview of this mortal passage, which is a panoply of miseries to be visited upon the human race, Adam weeps with compassion--but only "till firmer thoughts restrain'd excess" (498). The recommended pious constellation of humility, temperance, submission, and endurance thus bears strange fruit for a proto-Christian: the restraining of compassion. [End Page 24]

The classical precursor to Christian humility (the sophronein of the Eumenides, which Thomson in fact translates as "humility") seems at times to be as much a source of discomfort for Aristotle as Christian humility is for Milton. When Aristotle urges us to forget mortal thoughts and do all that we can to live "in accordance with the best thing in us," he is implicitly interpreting so¯phrosune¯ not merely as piety or wisdom or temperance or moderation, but as a crippling ethos of restraint that would enable us to endure our mortal passage only by denying us the most noble impulses a human being is capable of aspiring to, if not actually achieving.

The unacknowledged implications of Aristotle's thinking must have been sensed most keenly by Nietzsche when the latter was developing his analysis of nineteenth-century European values. For example, Aristotle's impatience with moderation prompts him in Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics to offer "superhuman excellence" as the sole counter-force to brutishness (that is, to the animal baseness which in Christian terms becomes Crashaw's "wormes" and "flye"); Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals ¹⁸ explicitly identifies brutishness or baseness with humility, and he calls such "negative concepts . . . late, pallid counterparts" of an earlier passionate credo of nobility (p. 171). In Book IV of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's nostalgia for lost Homeric heroism prompts him to devise the proud or magnificent man, whom he calls "the best man" (1123b29). One can only guess how much this Aristotelian creation inspired Nietzsche, who believed that "all truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation" (p. 170), and who devised a superhuman Übermensch to embody the surging Homeric heroism which Judeo-Christian humility had suppressed. The analogy between Aristotle's magnificent man and Nietzsche's Übermensch should not be pressed too strongly, of course, not only because there are significant differences between the two, but because the attitude giving rise to the Übermensch is unequivocally contemptuous of all that is "tame, hopelessly mediocre, and savorless" (p. 176), whereas the mag-nificent man is the product of Aristotle's unresolved ambivalence about the values which the magnificent man transcends. Consider the statement I previously referred to as "back-pedalling": the magnificent man "is an extreme in respect of the greatness of his claims, but a mean in respect of the rightness of them; for he claims what is in accordance with his merits" (1123b13-15). The statement is perfectly logical, but the logic is used to rationalize the conflicting "natural tendencies" (1109a15) of its author; it attempts to make the extremity of the magnificent man compatible with the doctrine of the mean. [End Page 25]

No such attempts at reconciling incompatibilities would seem to be in evidence in the advice to reject mortal thoughts. On the contrary: when he elaborates his advice with claims such as "the life according to intellect is best" (1178b7), he appears to be promoting a divorce rather than a reconciliation between the infamous western dichotomies of mind and body, intellect and emotion, theory and practice. Can this really be what Aristotle is doing, given the highly integrative nature of his central effort?

One can make a very strong case that this is exactly what he is doing here, uncharacteristic though it may be. ¹⁹ Whether it is what he entirely means to be doing is another, and ultimately unanswerable, question. But certain clues are extremely provocative.

Consider, for example, Broadie's belief that Aristotle intends us to understand theo¯ria, the activity of contemplating or theorizing, as what she calls a "detached" pondering, which is to say detached from the "laboriousness . . . . of much of what passes as theo¯ria on the human level." Broadie's argument is that laboriousness does "not easily transfer to a god's activity or capture the measure of what Aristotle means by 'the divine element in us'" (p. 401). This is persuasive, for Aristotle specifies that "the excellence of the intellect is a thing apart" from those moral excellences "connected with the passions" or any of the sensory and emotional elements that create the "composite nature" of human life (1177a19-22). But at this point let us note the passion--both in the sense of intense emotion and in the sense of passio, suffering--with which Aristotle proposes that we theorize ourselves into immortality; it is a passion Ross well captures in the disturbingly corporeal image of his translation: we must "strain every nerve." Aristotle's temperate manner doesn't typically suggest such images. What could easily be overlooked as a virtual throwaway phrase is, I believe, a small but important clue to what Aristotle might intend by theo¯ria, and to the deeply experiential, non-detached meaning that intellectual activity has for him.

A second indication of this possible meaning comes from the fact that he does call it an activity, energeia, from which we derive our English word "energy." His characterization of contemplation as an activity is central to the seemingly strange advice he gives us humans to try to make ourselves immortal, and to the even stranger advice that we attempt do so by exercising that which is simultaneously "divine" (1177b30) and quintessentially human: "intellect more than anything else is man" (1178a8). Logic would suggest that a being (or any given faculty of that being) is either human and mortal, or divine and [End Page 26] immortal, with no mean possible; to be human and immortal seems like a contradiction in terms. But to phrase the options this way is make life and death the critical factors of differentiation between human and divine, and Aristotle is not here addressing the issue of being alive versus being dead; that is, he is not conceiving of immortality in the literal sense of whether one will live forever or not. (Achilleus' heroic choice was precisely to forego longevity.) Nor is he conceiving of immortality more abstractly, as the eternal life of an elusive, noncorporeal essence, be it Platonic Form or Christian soul. Aristotle quite specifically conceives of immortality as a potentiality of human behavior; it is a potentiality "to live in accordance with the best thing in us" (1177b34), however that best thing may be defined. Now if immortality is a function of how a human being behaves, it is a function of how a human being acts. We are used to thinking of action in purely physical terms, that is, as action upon the physis of the world: we construct huts or skyscrapers, till soil or split atoms, navigate oceans or hurtle in missiles through outer space. But the action Aristotle has in mind is the action of the mind: "the activity of intellect, which is contemplative" (1177a18).

There is one other element in Aristotle's own presentation that should be noted here: right before giving his advice to reject mortal thoughts and to try to make ourselves immortal, he tells us that the life he is recommending "would be too high for man" (1177a27). The most obvious way to interpret this statement is as a pre-emptive acknowledgement of possible objections his advice might raise: "If intellect is as divine as you say, Aristotle, then wouldn't the life of intellect you recommend be out of human reach, given that we're all supposed to think mortal thoughts?" But on some level Aristotle is doing something more than simply anticipating objections; he is issuing an extraordinarily considerate warning against his own advice, as if to say: "What I'm proposing may be too high for you. Don't anticipate that it will be a safe and passive event centered on mortal and so¯phro¯n thoughts; it must be an active event, a vigorous contemplation or pursuit of knowledge by which mortals, in attempting to resemble or achieve divinity, run the risk of reaping the terrible consequences our tragic poets have dramatized for us. Consider what happened to knowledge-hungry Oedipus. Understand that the seemingly innocuous mental activity of thinking is just as dangerous as more spectacular physical feats such as flying too close to the sun."

Of course for Aristotle, the mortal danger is precisely the point: it [End Page 27] endows the human thinker with immortal, heroic stature, no less heroic than the statue by Rodin. Would it be better to avoid the danger--at the loss of arete¯--by thinking safe, mortal thoughts? The dilemma is not entirely unlike those raised on the frontiers of modern scientific knowledge--for example, just how deeply into the secrets of DNA and of splicing genetic material should we allow ourselves to delve? In fact, the issues raised by Aristotle's rejection of thinking mortal thoughts have worried humankind ever since the Renaissance. Milton expresses it in theological terms when he has Adam tell Raphael that the Angel has taught him to live

The easiest way, not with perplexing thoughts
To interrupt the sweet of Life, from which
God hath bid dwell far off all anxious cares,
And not molest us, unless we ourselves
Seek them with wand'ring thoughts, and notions vain.
But apt the Mind or Fancy is to rove
Unchekt, and of her roving is no end;
Till warn'd, or by experience taught, she learn,
That not to know at large of things remote
From use, obscure and subtle, but to know
That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the prime Wisdom. . . .

(Paradise Lost, VIII, 183-94)

Milton's covert ambivalence about the proper domain and scope of the aspiring mind finds overt expression in Montaigne. On the one hand, Montaigne advises himself to exercise so¯phrosune¯ and think mortal thoughts: "Greatness of soul is not so much pressing upward and forward as knowing how to set oneself in order and limit oneself. It regards as great whatever is adequate, and shows its elevation by liking moderate things better than eminent ones. . . . Man does not know the natural infirmity of his mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest. . . ." On the other hand, like Aristotle in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, Montaigne wants to "make himself immortal" through the unrestrained, uninhibited exercise of his intellect: "No spirited mind remains within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its power of achievement. If it does not advance and press forward and come to bay and clash, it is only half alive. Its pursuits are boundless and without form. . . ." ²⁰ This is the same frame of mind which prompts Marlowe's Tamburlaine to claim that Nature [End Page 28]

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world:
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite

(Part One, II, vii, 20-24) ²¹

Such dramatic intellectual ambition, which we tend to call Faustian, is essentially Aristotelian; it is the consequence of Aristotle's bold impulse to reject mortal thoughts in favor of a specifically intellectual heroism, a heroism of the mind. We may be surprised to find that his impulse is expressed by Milton, Montaigne, Marlowe, and Goethe in terms which Aristotle himself, as a member of ancient Greek culture and as a deeply teleological philosopher, would presumably have found distasteful: Adam says that there is "no end" of the Mind's roving; Montaigne says that the sprited mind's pursuits are "boundless and without form"; Tamburlaine climbs "after knowledge infinite"; Faust gathers the treasures of the human mind (des Menschengeists) in order to grow closer to the Infinite (dem Unendlichen) (Part One, 1810-1815). ²² But given the fact that Aristotle glorifies the intellect on the basis of an heroic ideal, perhaps we should not be surprised; as Northrop Frye observes, "because the heroic is above the normal limits of experience, it . . . suggests something infinite imprisoned in the finite." ²³ Aristotle does not of course call this mysterious something "infinity," which is a concept he elsewhere disparages; ²⁴ he calls it "immortality"; but whether he acknowledges it or not, his rejection of thinking mortal thoughts is a rejection of the limits of human finitude. Put positively, it is a capacious desire for the infinitude of human potential.

Brookline, Massachusetts

Notes

1. Sophocles, Antigone, in The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 102.

2. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Fagles (note 1), p. 250.

3. Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 559.

4. Aeschylus, Eumenides, in The Oresteia of Aeschylus, trans. George Thomson (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 319.

5. All citations to the Nichomachean Ethics (also known as EN) come from the revised Oxford translation in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, trans. W. D. Ross (rev. J. O. Urmson), vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

6. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

7. Sophocles, Antigone, in E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), p. 50.

8. David Keyt, "Intellectualism in Aristotle," p. 138, in Paideia (special Aristotle issue, 1978): 138-57.

9. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 375.

10. For example, Kathleen V. Wilkes finds that 1177b31-1178a2 closes "the gap that loomed large in the theoretic life between what a good man did and what it was good for man to do." "The Good Man and the Good for Man," p. 349, in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, ed. Amélie Okensky Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 341-57.

11. Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 404.

12. J. O. Urmson, p. 161, "Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean," in Rorty, pp. 157-70.

13. Among those who attribute the passage in Book X to a Platonic strain in Aristotle are J. D. Monan, Moral Knowledge and Its Methodology in Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), John M. Cooper, Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), and Nussbaum.

14. Helen North, Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology vol. 35 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 211.

15. Cited in R. A. Gauthier, Magnanimité (Paris: J. Urin, 1951), p. 456.

16. It is no accident, I assume, that the word Thomson here translates as "fear"-- --is the very word Sophocles recycles as in his great ode in the Antigone.

17. Richard Crashaw, "Charitas Nimia, or the deare bargain," in The Meditative Poem: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse, ed. Louis L Martz (New York: Doubleday, 1963), pp. 316-18.

18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956).

19. Among those making this case are Cooper, pp. 144-80, and Nussbaum, pp. 373-77.

20. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, "Of Experience," in Selections from the Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1948), pp. 98-114.

21. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, ed J. W. Harper (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 39.

22. Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 190.

23. Northrop Frye, Fools of Time (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 5.

24. For example, in his Physics (III.7.208a), Aristotle asserts that "being infinite is a privation, not a perfection but the absence of a limit."