"Posterior Analytics" (1983)

"Thus, as we maintain, to know a thing’s nature is to know the reason why it is. And this is equally true of things insofar as they are said without qualification to be, as opposed to being said to possess some attribute, such as being equal to two right angles, or greater or less. It is clear, then, that all questions are a search for a middle." — Aristotle

The analysis was getting on his nerves, and this was likely because some of those very fine threads they were reeling out to study were his nerves. They were reeling out the threads of his spirit and putting them under scrutiny.

A rant today. How great that Centipede Press has for years been publishing Lafferty in handsome volumes. It’s nice to have the stories in such a fine package, but I wish there were more intellectual respect for Lafferty himself. Today I came across the following, part of a synopsis on the Centipede homepage for its most recent volume, Mad Man. My heart sank a little:

“As an authorial chameleon, Lafferty commands the role with poise, tact, and quizzical inventiveness. Go ahead and decipher "Posterior Analytics." An economics term, you ask? No! It’s Lafferty’s clever poke at the so-called experts who can’t dig themselves out of trouble even with all the answers at their cortical tips.”

Did the person at Centipede not know that Posterior Analytics is part of Aristotle’s logic? Why didn’t they check before writing about it? Did they really feel qualified to write the promotion, despite that level of incuriosity? Given all this, what do they think is clever about the story? That some oddball intellectuals, some “so-called experts,” get taken down a peg? A lot is going on in the story, from the Benson miracle grass, named after Robert Hugh Benson and laced with his ideas, to the Stoiks (or Stoicheoi), a Greek word Aristotle used to mean “elements,” which Lafferty clearly uses for some deeper reason I can’t yet make out. This is what happens when people try to sell Lafferty but don’t want him to be anything other than what they keep turning him into: science fiction’s weird O. Henry. "O, that Lafferty."

"Posterior Analytics" is set in a busy downtown area where greenery is required, a Potters Field. It serves as a lunch spot for city dwellers and a burial ground for the unidentified and non-citizens. The place is strange in many ways, but the plot begins in earnest when figures buried the night before rise from their graves and walk away, brushing the dirt off themselves. The “Alien Analysis Center,” which borders Potters Field, handles extraterrestrial cases.

One group of aliens, the Stoicheoi (or Stoiks) doesn’t need to be identified because they approach the Center on their own and introduce themselves. They, too, are interested in analysis. As the story unfolds, agent Henry Sounder investigates the disappearance of fellow agent Jill Discovery, who vanished while looking into a Stoik named Kerelspook. Henry and Jill learn that the Stoiks employ a process called “the little death,” which leads both human agents through out-of-body experiences and leaves them buried alive in Potters Field.

That’s the plot in a nutshell. So what does it have to do with Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics?

Very briefly: Aristotle’s Prior Analytics is the part of his Organon that lays out the rules of categorical logic, while the Posterior Analytics develops his theory of scientific knowledge grounded in the operations of that categorical logic. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds, but consider two syllogisms. “All brownies taste like chocolate; this is a brownie; therefore, this tastes like chocolate” belongs to the Prior Analytics: it’s formally valid and rests on a straightforward observation. By contrast, “All things that contain a high proportion of sucrose as a flavoring substance are sweet; every brownie contains a high proportion of sucrose as a flavoring substance; therefore, every brownie is sweet” goes beyond observation. It is a causal account of sweetness. In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle argues that when the middle term expresses the cause (in this case, the presence of sucrose, a material cause), it transforms a bare inference into what Aristotle considers a scientific demonstration (his term is episteme), because it shows not only that something is the case, but why it must be the case.

The deep-cut joke of Lafferty’s "Posterior Analytics" is that even this kind of causal, scientific explanation, Aristotelian in form, is useless if what you really need is a shovel to dig yourself out after being buried alive. Henry’s inane infodump, which he gives when buried alive at the end of the story (he is interred near Jill Discovery and has her as a captive audience), is an Aristotelian demonstration: Henry grasps a universal causal "law," that any being able to separate its spirit from its body in a “little death” and later re-enter that body will "come back," and he subsumes the particular case of the Stoicheoi (and thus himself and Jill) under that law. This leads him to the necessary conclusion that the resurrections in Potters Field are the result of Stoicheoi episteme.

The out-of-body trick supplies the middle term that is “prior and better known” in the order of explanation; once Henry sees that middle term, he knows not just that (Prior Analytics) the buried crawl their way out of Potters Field, but why (Posterior Analytics) they must do so if they do not want to perish. They have passed through what the Stoiks call "the little death" and returned to their bodies. That satisfies Aristotle’s demand in the Posterior Analytics that scientific knowledge proceeds “through the cause.”

Henry's laughably inappropriate demonstration, as Jill keeps frantically asking about the shovel, moves from observed effect to explanatory cause in first-figure form, exactly the shift from syllogistic validity to causal necessity that marks off Posterior from Prior Analytics demonstrations. But Henry is going to suffocate to death.

So no, it’s not an economics term. Reading that in a Lafferty promotion makes me cringe, with its view that this story is just a rip-snort guffaw at inept eggheads and bureaucrats who get themselves into a fix. I wish the people doing what they can to keep Lafferty in print could also take him seriously as a thinker and an artist, even if this story isn't one of his best. The people behind the Centipede volumes should know what they're working with.