Thursday, October 1, 2009

Aristotle and Carnivals

I've often wondered about little Aristotle, an orphan with a strong father (Nichomachus, after whom Aristotle named his one and only son). Aristotle studied under Plato, and said things about how teachers are more important than parents (by which he meant male tutors are more influential than fathers). Why did Aristotle choose to research in Lesbos? Why didn't he name any treatise, not just a major work like Nichomachean Ethics, after his one and only daughter? Why did his separational method, that he named logic, see females in nature - because so clearly and logically separate from males - as so much lower than their counterparts?

How did he come to love such pigeonholing? How did he come to despise the dialectic method of his teacher, the poetry of Sappho (Plato's tenth muse), the parables of Aesop and of the Libyan so naturally bar-bar-ic and black and born like a slave, the thought of meta-noia as a threat to meta-physics, the threat of the supernatural to Nature?

Wouldn't he have hated how well Maya Angelou knows him? How my blogger friend Sue so recognizes his influence on her? How feminist philosophers and women rhetoricians and egalitarian bible scholars understand and appropriate his methods for their purposes as they, in their bodies in his Nature, also do so much more than he was willing by his separational logic to do?

But wouldn't he have loved the pigeonholing of the carnivals of blogging? Don't they so conveniently categorize if they celebrate? Wouldn't he have scoffed at the barbarism while saying See the deformities in this classed category?

So here are some carnivals of bloggers by classification. Won't you know your Aristotle? And yet won't you know more?