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Aristotle was a hypnotist!

"The emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear and the like, with their opposites. We must arrange what we have to say about each of them under three heads. Take, for instance, the emotion of anger: here we must discover (1) what the state of mind of angry people is, (2) who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and (3) on what grounds they get angry with them. It is not enough to know one or even two of these points; unless we know all three, we shall be unable to arouse anger in any one. The same is true of the other emotions. So just as earlier in this work we drew up a list of useful propositions for the speaker, let us now proceed in the same way to analyze the subject before us."

-- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book 2, section 1.

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Permalink Reply by Matthew J. Powderly on July 26, 2008 at 7:20pm: Aristotle was a great mind. What he talks about deals with hypnosis yes, but also basic psychology. Everyone knows that emotions affect, effect, and change. Rhetoric is about swaying peoples' opinions, manipulating - there is no doubt that great rhetorics would have knowledge of such things.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Pnosis on July 27, 2008 at 12:50pm: Erudite and cool. Thanks! Pnosis from Pnosis.com; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Conrad Cook on August 2, 2008 at 9:16am: Then again, sometimes he was just cracked:

At the same time it becomes plain ... that as the eye [in seeing] is affected [by the object seen], so also the eye produces a certain effect upon the object. If a woman chances during her menstrual period to look into a highly polished mirror, the surface of it will grow cloudy with a blood-coloured haze. It is very hard to remove this stain from a new mirror, but easier to remove from an older mirror.

-- Aristotle, On Dreaming, Part 2; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Conrad Cook on August 4, 2008 at 6:35am: I'm also not partial to his notion that women's souls are not as developed as men's.

Aaah, you're just saying that because you're female.

Seriously, Aristotle was naive in a lot of ways. Mostly I like reading him for the same reason I like reading other paleo-science: it's just really cool to see people from 300+ BC trying to figure out the world with reason.

True story:

There's a book you may know called The Peloponnesian War, written by Thucidydes, who was a contemporary of Socrates. The story is that Athens and Sparta, the two biggest Greek city-states, got in a war over their colonies. (They'd take over other city-states, which would pay them tribute.) Athens was the first democracy and run by merchants; Sparta was a warrior society, in which the women had more political power than usual.

Eventually Sparta won the war, deposed the Athenian leadership (who went into exile) and imposed a new government on Athens, based on the Spartan system. The new leaders tyrranized and terrorized the Athenians, killing traitors and confiscating their property.

Finally the leadership came back and knocked them over (and killed Socrates for being a Spartan sympathiser). Sparta, meanwhile, was undergoing economic collapse because it used all its resources in the war; and so both empires were still broken when, a few years later, Alexander the Great swept through, crushed them both without breaking a sweat, and added them to his empire. (And installed Aristotle in the Athenian university, which he had fled from when public opinion turned against him.)

Ok, so that's why in college I'm reading this book by Thucidydes, about the Athens-Sparta war: and when I read this kind of book I don't always read the forewards, because a lot of time they're useless. Half the time it's political anyway -- they get some egghead academic who makes decisions about tenure or something; I don't know, but a lot of forewards are useless.

But I took the chance on this one, and it was really good information: about how the Greeks had been nomadic people, when they settled the pennisula, how they came to form permanent settlements, had early carreers as pirates, and so on -- really good stuff, very clear and useful for understanding the back story to how the people got there and what the story was.

I kept getting more impressed until I started asking, "Who is this guy?" -- and went looking for his name. And I had trouble finding it. It wasn't in any of the usual places -- they told you the translator, but not who edited the thing. You know, usually they have his (or her) name and university at the end of the foreward, and maybe the date.

And I was thinking that maybe I'd write the guy an email, if he was still around at that university. Just to say that he had a very clear way of writing and that it was good information in that foreward, if he remembered writing it, and that I appreciated it. But I was looking at the title page and the copyright info and I still couldn't find the editor's name.

I'd been puzzling over this for twenty minutes -- I'm not kidding, twenty minutes -- turning this book over, reading and re-reading all the useless info -- on the back, on the publication page, etc -- that most sane people usually skip, when it gradually dawns on me:

I'm not finding the name of the editor, because there is no editor. The foreward was not an addition to the text; the foreward was part of the text. I had been looking for Thucidydes' email.

Conrad.; ▶ Reply to This