In response to Russell's declaration of Platonic
aesthetics early in Scylla and Charybdis,
Stephen declares himself a follower of Aristotle and ticks
through a checklist of things he knows about that philosopher:
his having studied under Plato, his founding of a rival
philosophical school, his generally more empirical approach,
his disagreement about the nature of the Forms, his defense of
representational art, his examination of the senses, and his
influence on the Scholastic philosophers. These thoughts
strengthen Stephen's resolve "Hold to the now, the here"
instead of pursuing transcendent spirituality. Punning on the
name of Aristotle's school, he reflects whimsically that his
views are "very peripatetic."
Russell proclaims that the business of art is to reveal
Platonic "essences," anything less being "the speculation of
schoolboys for schoolboys." This prompts Stephen's observation
that some students grow up to become masters: "— The
schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely.
Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy." Plato founded his
Academy in ca. 387 BC, and Aristotle studied there for fully
two decades, from age 17 to age 37. He left the Academy in 347
BC, one year after Plato's death, and in 335 he founded his
own school on the grounds of the Lyceum temple. He led this
so-called Peripatos until his death in 322. John
Eglinton mocks him as a mere child compared to Plato: "One can
see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm."
Stephen holds a different view: Aristotle absorbed the
teachings of his master, developed his own system of thought,
and trained a new generation of scholars in new disciplines,
new logical methods, a new philosophy.
Various associations branch off from this observation that
Aristotle studied with Plato but developed his own
philosophical system. One is the fact that Aristotelianism
survived and thrived long after its founder's death. "The
schoolmen" refers to the Scholastic philosophers of the
later Middle Ages, men associated with Europe's recently
founded universities: Paris, Bologna, Padua, Naples, Cologne,
Oxford, Cambridge, and others. They brought Aristotle's ideas
and his logical methods into their Christian culture by
translating his works into Latin, producing reams of
commentary on them, and incorporating his methods into their
own philosophical investigations. First and foremost, Stephen
is no doubt thinking of his beloved Thomas Aquinas.
He also is thinking of Aristotle's revision of the Platonic
doctrine of Forms. For Plato, the Ideas or Forms exist
independently of their manifestations in sensory experience
and are more real than those shadowy appearances. This-worldly
horses (to adapt the example that Stephen cites) are nature's
copies of an ideal Horse that exists on a truer plane of
being. Aristotle came to a different conclusion: the
constitutive forms exist only in conjunction with the matter
that they act upon, and they can be known only by abstracting
an intelligible principle from the class of empirical
phenomena in which it is manifested.
Stephen whimsically meditates on this process of logically
abstracting universals from particulars: "Unsheathe your
dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse."
The essence of horses is to be found not in Russell's "world
of ideas" but in the qualities that one observes hanging
around horses. "Whatness" translates the Scholastic term quidditas,
which Stephen has used in part 5 of A Portrait to
define beauty: "the scholastic quidditas, the whatness
of a thing." This medieval term translated Aristotle's Greek to
ti en einai, "the what it was to be" of a particular
thing. Although it represents Aristotle's empiricist effort to
bring Platonic universals down into the realm of sensory
experience, there is nothing empirical or experiential about
whatness, or, for that matter, forms. Everyone has seen
horses, but no one will ever see "horseness." Perhaps this
contradiction lies behind Stephen's bemused tone.
In a sentence just before these thoughts about form, Stephen
has glanced at Plato and Aristotle's disagreement about
the value of representational art: "Which of the two...would
have banished me from his commonwealth?" In the
sentences that follow, he contrasts the desire of Platonists
like Russell to transcend time, space, and mutability with his
own Aristotelian desire to ground abstract thinking in the
world of becoming: "Streams of tendency and eons they worship.
God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you
damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red
globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after Blake's
buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a
shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future
plunges to the past.
"God: noise in the street" recalls Stephen's
anti-transcendental effort (in Nestor) to imagine a radically
immanent divinity that inheres in the empirical world
rather than hovering beyond it. "Space: what you damn well
have to see" recalls his Aristotle-influenced thought
(in Proteus) that the visible world is
"ineluctable,"
not to be thought away by closing one's eyes. "Hold to the
now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past"
recalls his Aristotelian meditation (in Nestor) on the
mechanism by which the "infinite
possibilities" of a hypothetical future are reduced to
the hard, discrete historical facts that we call the past.
These three details share an interest in embodied
particularity––things taking shape in concrete lived
experience rather than in airy abstractions.
As for "peripatetic," a typically Joycean three-level
pun is involved. The Greek word means "walking around."
Aristotle's school acquired this name because the Lyceum
temple had many walkways, and ancient legends held that
Aristotle lectured while strolling about these spaces. But any
god who takes the form of "a shout in the street" also
deserves the name: he walks the streets instead of sitting on
an airy throne somewhere. Finally, the novel that Joyce wrote
is peripatetic because its characters spend an entire day
walking around those streets. If the right possibilities are
actualized, Stephen will not just imagine a peripatetic god.
He will bring a peripatetic book into the world.
