204 Aristotle and his school
This polemical nature may also be related to the fact that Aristotle has a
rather low estimation of the importance or value of dreams. As his discussion
shows, and in particular the passage from 463 b 12 – 18 quoted above, dreams
do not have any cognitive or moral significance and do not contribute in
any way to the full realisation of human virtues. True, Aristotle concedes
that in some cases foresight in sleep is possible, but this is not to be taken
in the sense of a special kind ofknowledgewhich some people possess, but
rather in the straightforward sense of ‘foreseeing’, in a somewhat accidental
and uncontrollable manner, what later actually happens. He does not assign
a final cause to dreaming, and the answer to the question of the purpose
of dreams is only given in a negative way. In the passage 463 b 14 discussed
above, Aristotle says that dreams ‘do not exist for this purpose’, to serve
as a kind of medium for divine messages. His own view seems to be that
dreams simply exist as a necessary (i.e. non-purposive) side-effect of two
other ‘activities and experiences’ of living beings, namely sense-perception
and sleeping, both of which do have a purpose, sense-perception being
essential to living beings, and sleep serving the purpose of providing the
necessary rest from the continuous activity of the sense-organs.
This lack of a teleological explanation is not something to be surprised
at, for as Aristotle himself says, one should not ask for a final cause with
everything, for some things simply exist or occur as a result of other things
or occurrences.^57 The only conceivable candidate for being the final cause of
dreams – divination – meets with scepticism on Aristotle’s part. Foresight in
sleep is not an intellectual or cognitivevirtuein the sense of the Aristotelian
notion of excellence (aret ̄e); on the contrary, it occurs with people whose
intellectual powers are, for some reason, weakened or inactive. Prophecy in
sleep is a matter of luck and belongs to the domain of chance: it escapes
human control, and its correctness can only be established afterwards, when
the event that was foreseen has actually taken place. Mantic knowledge is
not knowledge in the strict sense (for many dreams do not come true,
463 b 22 – 31 ), and the insights gained by it, if correct, are at best ‘accidental
insights’, which only concern the ‘that’, not the ‘because’: they only point to
the existence or occurrence of something without providing an explanation
for this.
This low estimation provides an additional reason why Aristotle shows so
little interest in the contents and the meaning of dreams, which was one of
the questions with which this investigation started. It will have become clear
that the ‘omissions’ in Aristotle’s discussion of dreams that I mentioned at
(^57) Part. an. 677 a 16 – 19.