Great Riddlers: Aristotle

The Greek Empire is one of the most powerful and learned civilizations to ever exist. They had a sophistication of infrastructure and technology that would not be achieved again after them for hundreds or maybe even thousands of years. One of the great scholars of this society that helped achieve this high status for the Greeks was Aristotle. Aristotle was a man that lived between 384 BC and 322 BC. Like his predecessor and teacher, Plato, Aristotle was a man who contributed to a lot of different fields. Compared to his teacher Plato and Plato’s teacher Secretes, Aristotle contributed to more fields than any of these three fathers of academia. Some of the fields he wrote about include politics, government, logic, music, physics and zoology. This wide variety of topics that he covered created the first comprehensive system of Western philosophy. Aristotle was a great man of logic and science, and like many men of logic and science he was very interested in the topic of riddles.

Aristotle’s interest in riddles was primarily created by his view of riddles with respect to rhetoric. He discusses them on two different occasions in two of his works: The Rhetoric and the Poetics. In the Rhetoric he discusses riddles as an effective and good way to create good metaphors. He goes on to say that this is because metaphors imply riddles. This means that riddles use unusual wording to describe something in a veiled way, and this veiled message is made possible through the use of a metaphor. Similarly, in Poetics, Aristotle states that riddles allow us to describe something that would otherwise be impossible to describe with straightforward language. Another way that Aristotle showed his great appreciation for riddles was his systematic collection of them. He spent a lot of time collecting riddles that he would find from various sources, his favorite being the Delphic Oracle and Aesop.

Aristotle spends a lot of time discussing riddles, in theory, throughout his works and how important they are in literature and discussion of complex topics, but it’s somewhat hard to find actual riddles in these works. One riddle that does come from one of his works, Poetics, goes as follow: “I saw a man glue brass on another with fire.” This riddle uses strange wording by using glue rather than weld or another alternative. This makes this riddle fall into the category of barbarisms. The metaphor in the riddle is what makes it a riddle rather than a statement.

Aristotle was a great and inventive man who contributed to essentially every broad field. He will always be remembered as one of the fathers of Western philosophy.