Very peripatetic

Read More

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.