Part 13

Aristotle here seems to be following not any ideal system, but the actual practice of his time, a practice which Euripides (fr. 319) had already condemned. The gap in age between husband and wife is far too great for any real physical or moral companionship. The husband, moreover, remaining unmarried until the age of thirty-seven, can hardly be supposed to have escaped from the illicit connections which were allowed and encouraged by Athenian custom: to say that such an one is in his prime is surely to mis-state the case. The art of being a grandfather also under this system tends to disappear, for a man could hardly hope to see grandchildren of his own, if neither he nor his sons married till they were thirty-seven: his daughters, of course, as Euripides again tells us (fr. 320), on marriage passed altogether out of their father’s life. The whole arrangement is obviously wrong, but it suited the conditions of Athenian domestic life, where a young wife could be more easily kept in subjection and large families were neither desired nor customary; and because it existed, therefore to Aristotle it seemed right.

The female, found to be inferior in a moral and political sense, is also considered by Aristotle to be physically inferior to the male, and in the treatise _On Generation_ he deals with this question frequently and at some length:

Male and female differ in their essence by each having a separate ability or faculty, and anatomically by certain parts; essentially the male is that which is able to generate in another, the female is that which is able to generate in itself and out of which comes into being the offspring previously existing in the parent.[10]

The distinction of sex is a first principle:

An animal is not male or female in virtue of an isolated part or an isolated faculty: when that which distinguishes male and female suffers change many other changes accompany it, as would be the case if a first principle is changed.[11]

The treatise is concerned chiefly with the phenomena of reproduction:

For the business of most animals is, you may say, nothing else than to produce young, as the business of a plant is to produce seed and fruit.[12]

Sex-characteristics accordingly are described mainly in accordance with their reproductive functions.

As regards the origin of sex and the causes of male and female, Aristotle is a curious mixture of prejudice and insight. He begins thus:

To suppose that heat and cold are the causes of male and female, or that the different sexes come from the right and left, is not altogether unreasonable in itself, for the right of the body is hotter than the left.

With him it is an unquestioning belief that the right is, in nature, superior to the left, the upper to the lower, the front to the back; and nature, when no more important purpose stands in the way, places the more honourable part in the more honourable position. So it is that the heart, which is the nobler organ, is in the upper part of the body, while the stomach is in the lower. As he is equally sure that the male is superior to the female, the male elements in reproduction will come from the right or noble part of the body.

But the part taken by the male and female elements in the process of generation is, according to Aristotle, absolutely different. The child is not formed from a mixture of both, but the female contributes the material, the male is the active agent. The analogy used is that of a bed: the female is the wood, the male the carpenter, who, from the wood, makes the bed. The female is passive, the male is active:

It is through a certain incapacity that the female is female: females are weaker and colder in nature than males, and we must look upon the female character as being a sort of natural deficiency.[13]

Women, in Aristotle’s view, are rather plants than animals; for the animal differs from the plant, chiefly in having sense-perception. If the sensitive soul is not present, the body is no better than a corpse, and this sensitive soul is supplied only by the male. The female provides the material, the male fashions it; the body is from the female, the soul from the male, who can stand outside the body just as the artist stands outside his creation. It certainly seems that female children progress more quickly than male, but that is merely a proof of their inferiority; for all inferior things come sooner to their perfection or end, and as this is true of works of art so it is true of what is formed by nature.

These quotations will illustrate that curious depreciation of the female element in nature and especially in man which is one of the weaker points in the treatise. It is continually recurring; for example, in describing the hair of animals these are the reasons given for baldness:

The front part of the head goes bald because the brain is there and man is the only animal to go bald, because his brain is much the largest and moistest. _Women do not go bald._[14]

So in the discussion of voice we read:

The voice of the female is higher than that of the male in all animals, and in man this is especially noticeable. A deep note is _better_ than a high pitched: depth belongs to the nobler nature, and depth of tone shows a sort of superiority.[15]

Nor is this view of the physical, and consequently the mental, inferiority of the female confined to the _De Generatione_: it permeates the _History of Animals_, and finds its clearest expression there in a passage which perhaps gives the ultimate reason of Aristotle’s error:

In all genera in which the distinction of male and female is found, Nature makes a similar differentiation in the mental characteristics of the two sexes. This differentiation is the most obvious in the case of human-kind and in that of the larger animals and the viviparous quadrupeds. In the case of these latter the female is softer in character, is the sooner tamed, admits more readily of caressing, and is more apt in the way of learning. With all animals, except the bear and the leopard, the female is softer in disposition than the male, is more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, and more attentive to the nurture of the young. The traces of these differentiated characteristics are more or less visible in every species, but they are especially visible where character is the more developed, and most of all in man. The fact is, the nature of man is the most rounded off and complete, and consequently in man the qualities above referred to are found in their perfection. Hence woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold. She is, furthermore, more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of more retentive memory. She is also more wakeful, more shrinking, more difficult to rouse to action, and requires a smaller quantity of nutriment.[16]

The Athenian women of the fourth century were the women that Aristotle knew best, and, given Aristotle’s character and scientific method, it is not surprising that he should judge Woman in the abstract to be an inferior animal. If he had been a little more of a poet and idealist—in other words, if he had not been Aristotle—he might have taken another view; but considering the facts of Athenian life in his day, and Aristotle’s disposition to cling to facts, we need not wonder at his estimate. The real mischief—and Aristotle’s influence in this matter has been an enormous hindrance to human progress—was done not by the philosopher himself, for in his time the position of women could hardly have been altered for the worse, but by his blind followers in later ages when his slightest word was regarded almost as inspired truth. Aristotle himself is never dogmatic (he leaves that to weaker men), and does not profess to give anything but the somewhat casual expression of his own personal knowledge and opinions.

It is hardly right to blame him: women in his time undoubtedly were the inferior sex, and Aristotle is always the prophet of things as they are. The _protégé_ of the absolute monarchy which had overthrown the city-states, he has no belief in abstract freedom or in social reform. For him, what is is right. ‘Women and slaves are inferior,’ he says to himself, ‘by the conditions of existence as I see them: _therefore_ they are inferior by the laws of nature,’ and although he knows that this inferiority was the result of the conditions of their life, his business is only with facts.

But he generalises from insufficient data: Woman for him means the women of his time, and although he points out the influence of environment, he fails to distinguish between innate and accidental characteristics. And so again, in treating of the female sex in nature, he is too inclined to confine himself to the higher mammals. He emphasises the case of the herbivorous animals, those that go in herds, and are polygamous in their habits: deer, for example, where the male has a distinct advantage in size and strength; while he says little of the carnivora, who hunt in pairs and are monogamous, where the female tends to be equal in every respect to the male. Insects he almost disregards, and the microscope, in the hands of a naturalist of genius like M. Fabre, has opened up for us a world from which Aristotle was debarred by the material limitations of his instruments.

We see now that Nature, at least, has no favoured sex, and that Euripides’ words are as true in a zoological as they are in a sociological sense: ‘All that can be said of the male can be said equally well of the female, and _vice versa_.’ The male that in some species is the stronger and more active, in others is the weaker and plays a passive rôle. The female mantis that devours her feeble mate is the reverse side of Nature’s picture. So again, all the fascinating problems of parthenogenesis, whereby the female may produce for several births without the intervention of the male, have received a new light from the close study of the hive. Aristotle’s chapter on bees suffers materially from lack of first-hand knowledge, and, as Professor Platt says, although it is greatly to his credit for hard thinking, it reveals the fact that he knew next to nothing about the subject. Of course, the whole method of bee-generation is totally at variance with Aristotle’s theory of male superiority, and if he had possessed our knowledge his theory might have been modified. In the world of insects, at least, feminism reigns; the male is weak and subservient, the female is the ruler. Often the male is an accident; the female would have sufficed. So true is this that a modern essayist, M. Remy de Gourmont, writing under the influence of Fabre’s discoveries, can vary Aristotle’s analogy and compare the female to the clock and the male to the necessary key that winds up the mechanism.

But although Aristotle can scarcely be said to understand all the mysteries of sex, he anticipates some of the most fruitful investigations of modern research, and in all questions of pure science, within the limits of his own experience, he is almost infallible. It is unfortunate that his experience of women was misleading, and that the problems of feminism do not always fall within the confines of science. That he was wrong in this matter is chiefly the fault of his times and their social conditions, and those who live in other days and amid other surroundings should remember his own significant words, spoken indeed about bees, but equally applicable to other social animals:

Such appears to me to be the truth, judging from theory and what I believe to be the facts. But up to the present the facts have not been sufficiently comprehended; if ever they are, then credit must be given to observation rather than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with observed facts.

And with that quotation we may well leave him: _Amicus Aristoteles; magis amica veritas_. If the facts of modern existence show women to be the inferior sex, then, and then only, are we moderns justified in holding that opinion. But every man should judge for himself on the evidence that his own observation gives, and not be influenced by the theories of other men or by the literature of the past.

In Aristotle’s time, for reasons which this brief survey of Greek literature has, perhaps, made plain, the facts of women’s nature were certainly not sufficiently comprehended. Euripides and Plato are almost the only authors who show any true appreciation of a woman’s real qualities, and to Euripides and Plato, Aristotle, by the whole trend of his prejudices, was opposed. His mistake was that he failed to realise the moral aspects of feminism. A nation that degrades its women will inevitably suffer degradation itself. Aristotle lent the weight of his name to a profound error, and helped to perpetuate the malady which had already been the chief cause of the destruction of Greece.

FOOTNOTES

[1] _Ethics_, vii. 7.

[2] _Ibid._ vii. 6.

[3] _Ethics_, iv. 15.

[4] _Ibid._ iv. 9.

[5] _Rhet._ A. v. 6.

[6] _Ethics_, viii. 8.

[7] _Ibid_, viii. 12.

[8] _Ethics_, viii. 8.

[9] _Politics_, 2, 9.

[10] _De Generatione_, 716, a, 18.

[11] _Ibid._ 716, b. 10.

[12] _Ibid._ 717, a, 20.

[13] _De Generatione_, 728 a.

[14] _Ibid_, 784, a.

[15] _De Generatione_, 787, a.

[16] _Hist. An._, 608, b (trans. Thompson).

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY MACKAYS LTD., CHATHAM.