By giving activities like pottery making and metallurgy a comparable (albeit inferior) status to pure contemplation, Aristotle highlighted the value of everyday human activities that yield practical material benefits. Technē, Aristotle wrote, is one of the crucial ways by which “the soul arrives at truth,” since it involves “a reasoned productive state … concerned with bringing something into being,” based on certain rational principles, such as making a vase or a suit of armor, or building a house.22
In this way, Aristotle opened the door for a future technological society.a The Platonist looks at nature and says, “What does it mean?” So does the Aristotelian, but then he poses an additional question: “What’s it good for?” That’s why Ralph Waldo Emerson called him the first of the “moderns.” Ayn Rand, of all people, would have agreed. Without Aristotle, there would have been no Archimedes and no Steve Jobs. There probably wouldn’t have been a Hiroshima, but neither would there have been gene splicing or laser surgery. We can complain about where technology has taken us. However, we can’t ignore how we got started on the journey: a few brief lines in a book on ethics written more than twenty-three centuries ago.
It is characteristic that Aristotle’s remarks on technology should surface in a book on ethics. The same practical outlook shaped Aristotle’s approach to the other key question every Greek had asked since Socrates: “What is the good life?”
On one side, Aristotle’s starting point is the same as Plato’s. The best life is the one in which we follow our reason, not our passions or emotions. But man’s function is not just to think—which Aristotle admits to be the highest of all human activities—but also to do.
Aristotle outlines his approach in his Nicomachean Ethics.b It takes us down from Plato’s mountaintop and puts us back on the street, where merchants are selling and families and slaves are passing by; where prostitutes and money changers are looking for customers and mothers are looking for their children; where some men are making deals and running for office and others are trying to decide whether to go to work or go to a taberna. This is not a realm of illusions or shadows in a cave. This is real life.
So what do we find there? Some people are stupid and ignorant and behave badly, just as Plato pointed out. But the vast majority are simply doing their jobs, raising families and paying the bills and trying to be good husbands and citizens—in Aristotle’s terms, performing their function and fulfilling their potential as human beings. Their problem is learning how to do it better. The job of ethics, Aristotle asserts, “is not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may become virtuous,” especially in our daily dealings with others.
We can see the difference in outlook in the famous last scene in the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, when the British doctor, played by James Donald, watches the violent denouement from the hill overlooking the bridge. He sees the men frantically killing one another, mortars and rifles firing blindly, the sudden spectacular explosion of the bridge, and the train crashing into the Kwai River. It’s over in a few breathtaking minutes. The doctor’s only comment from his lofty perch is “Madness, madness!”
This is the Platonic view of human action, the view looking down from the mountaintop back into the cave. Aristotle’s response is that this isn’t madness at all. Anyone seeing the entire movie realizes everyone is following his own separate agenda from the start. The Japanese colonel has his bridge to build; the British colonel sees building it as a way to restore his men’s morale; others, however, have a mission to blow it up. From the lofty Platonic perch, it all looks like chaos. But from the Aristotelian point of view of the individuals involved, every action has its reasonable—if at times violent—point.
So it is with life. We live in a world of separate individuals, each following his or her agenda and narrative. Moral questions necessarily arise when we interact with others, and we have to make decisions about what to do. The problem is not knowing an ideal right from an ideal wrong, Aristotle insisted, but knowing how to behave toward others in the real world and still uphold certain timeless moral standards.
This is why for Aristotle ethics is not a science. We aren’t looking for moral perfection. “In fact, such a life is not possible for man,” Aristotle states. “If it were, he would be a God.”23 Instead, we look for advantage and improvement. From that point of view, Aristotle assures us, learning to be virtuous is not that hard. It’s all a matter of practice and learning the habits that go with it.
At times, Aristotle sounds like the behaviorist B. F. Skinner—and just as Aristotle is the original father of science and technology, so he opens the path to the calculus of Western behaviorism. “The whole concern of both morality and political science must be pleasures and pains,” is how he states it in the Ethics. The key is teaching people how to take pleasure in doing the right thing and experience pain in doing the bad thing. We teach our children to brush their teeth and share their toys and save their allowance by rewarding them if they do and punishing or scolding them if they don’t. We do this for their sake, not ours, in order to teach the habits that will make them be happy, healthy human beings.
Adults are no different. “Moral goodness is the result of habit,” he writes, pointing out that the words for character and custom are the same in Greek: ethos.24 A large share of the laws and customs in a city like Athens was set to inculcate the kinds of personal virtues Plato and Aristotle wanted their fellow citizens to have. Aristotle’s point was that learning those virtues took more than laws. It took building habits based on a relative calculus of pleasure and pain.
However, unlike modern behaviorists like Skinner, the eighteenth century’s Jeremy Bentham, or today’s Richard Dawkins, Aristotle doesn’t rest on a purely mechanical or materialist view of either nature or man. The transformative power of good habits, and Aristotle’s principle that practice makes perfect, rests on our essential spiritual purpose. The goal of man from the start is to be happy, and “it is virtuous activities that determine our happiness.”25 As human beings, we have an inborn disposition to virtue; if we want to cultivate that disposition, which most of us do (who really revels in being evil?), we need to cultivate the habits that go with it.
Aristotle’s formula seems very simple. Yet how different from Plato’s! For Plato, true knowledge, including the knowledge of the true nature of pain and pleasure, solves everything. For Aristotle, it is possible to be good even if we don’t know exactly what we are doing, or why. The habit, and the behavior that flows from it, is enough to do the job.
This is why, in a notorious passage in Book Five of Ethics, Aristotle concedes that a good man could be a bad citizen, and vice versa. In fact, most people are geared this way. Few meet the standard of doing the right thing because they know it’s the right thing in all matters and at all times. No one, that is, except Aristotle’s so-called great-souled man, the man who is good to the highest degree in everything and knows it and is proud of it—but who is, perhaps thankfully, in short supply.
And yet, as Aristotle notes, the world is basically a good, not an evil, place. This is true especially on the day-to-day matters that really count in the life of a family or a community. Most people want to be loved; most people want to be admired. “In every community there is supposed to be some kind of justice and some kind of friendly feeling.” Most people even “wish what is good,” if only for themselves.26 Even bank robbers will sometimes carry out the garbage or send Mother’s Day cards—if only because habits, including good ones, are hard to break.
As a rationalist, Aristotle was willing to concede that doing good is not as optimal as knowing the good. In fact, practice makes perfect applies to bad habits as well as good. As human beings, we have the potential for both. It all boils down to a question of the choices we make: not just at the start of the journey, but at every point along the way. If we resolve to be alcohol-free but have a drink every time it’s offered, we will never get there. Choice and intention are the dynamic elements in our moral life, and “i
ntention is the decisive factor in virtue and character.”
This is how Aristotle ends up with his most famous, and most misunderstood ethical doctrine—that of the mean. He states it simply enough:
Virtue aims to hit the mean.… It is possible, for example, to feel fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and pleasure and pain generally, too much or too little; and both of these are wrong. But to have these feelings at the right times on the right grounds toward the right persons for the right motive and in the right way is to feel them in an intermediate, that is the best degree; and that is the mark of virtue.27
Hence, the courageous man is neither cowardly (shunning all dangers) nor foolhardy (embracing all dangers); the generous man is neither a miser nor a man who gives away everything so that his family has nothing; and so on.
Stated in this way, Aristotle’s theory of the mean seems simple-minded; or to quote Bertrand Russell again, common sense pedantically expressed. However, if we change the word mean to proportion, we get closer to what Aristotle must have meant—and large parts of his Ethics as well as his Politics make more sense. The mean represents not so much a literal middle point as striking a balance between conflicting impulses and choices, and seeing our way through to the other side.
That balance differs depending on where we are in terms of time and situation, and who we are. This is one reason Aristotle believed that the practice of virtue was different for different social classes, or for masters and for slaves: not (or at least not entirely) because Aristotle was a snob, but because he recognized that our status and occupation put us in different real-life situations that require a nice judgment (sophrosyne, or prudence), rather than a rote formula of right versus wrong, in order to arrive at what to do.
Again, virtue is an activity, not a state of mind. Like all dynamic action, physical or otherwise, it demands a sense of balance, of centeredness, which no single set of rules can supply. Socrates had asserted it was better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. Aristotle wants to ask: Are you sure? Aren’t there circumstances when it is better to do wrong to someone—say, knock an elderly blind lady to the curb—in order to prevent a greater wrong—say, letting her get run over by a truck? The decisive issue in moral action for Aristotle is always our intention—in this example, our desire to save someone from certain death. It does not lie in the nature of the action itself.
Socrates and Plato, to their credit, did recognize that circumstance and intention can complicate moral judgments.c Aristotle’s point was that all forms of morality are situational, because morality takes place in a real, live-fire environment, and in virtual time, just like all the forms in the rest of nature.
So in the end we are back where we started, in a constantly evolving world of actualities and potentialities. We all have the potential to be good and the potential to be bad. But which we become depends on the choices we make as rational beings and the dispositions that arise over time from those choices.
In the dialogue Phaedrus, Plato brilliantly compares human beings to charioteers driving the two horses of our human nature: our soul of reason and our irrational animal passions. The charioteer’s task “is difficult and troublesome,” he says, as we try to give the lead to the one and rein in the other. But if we do it well, we will live a virtuous life and reach the goal of every wise man and “in the course of [our] journey” behold “absolute justice and discipline and knowledge” before the soul “withdraws again within the vault of heaven and goes home.”28
Aristotle’s soul, by contrast, is like the bareback rider. She has only one horse, herself. She needs to stay balanced on that horse with subtle adjustments of her body to keep her seat and stay in control as she takes in the scene, adjusting her pace to the road and terrain, going neither too fast nor too slow, but never falling off or throwing the horse into confusion—and never losing sight of the final goal.
Those who wish to be virtuous, Aristotle concludes, “are compelled at every step to think out for themselves what the circumstances demand, like a navigator on a ship at sea or a physician.”29
Not a surprising view from one who saw Plato’s moral absolutism as contrary to human happiness—and not a surprising turn of phrase from a doctor’s son.
* * *
* It is also possible that Speusippus sent Aristotle and his colleague Xenocrates to Assos to open a branch of the Academy. We simply do not know.
† Especially in his Categories and the two parts of the Analytics.
‡ Fl. second century CE.
§ At least the study of metaphysics. The term itself comes from one of his later editors as a way to refer to the work that comes after Aristotle’s Physics—quite literally, “after the Physics.”
‖ The last purported to reveal the ten ways in which everything that exists can and should be scientifically classified: by substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection.
a It also opened the door wide enough for mathematics to get back into Aristotle’s theory of science and knowledge, as a way to calculate and measure changes and results.
b So called because his son Nicomachus edited the first published version.
c For example, in Book I of the Republic.
Was Athens in the fifth century BCE a model for how men should govern themselves? Aristotle said yes; Plato said no.
Five
GOOD CITIZEN OR PHILOSOPHER RULER?
There will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed, my dear Glaucon, of humanity itself, until philosophers become kings in this world.
—Plato, Republic
It is not the nature of the polis to be a unity as some thinkers say that it is, [and] what is said to be the supreme good of the polis is actually its ruin.
—Aristotle, Politics
Despite their differences, Plato and Aristotle agreed on many things.
They both stressed the importance of reason as our guide for understanding and shaping the world. Both believed that our physical world is shaped by certain eternal forms that are more real than matter. The difference was that Plato’s Forms existed outside matter, whereas Aristotle’s forms were unrealizable without it.
Both shared the typical Greek chauvinism about non-Greeks, treating them as barbarians and unfit for serious study. Both condoned the pedophilia prevalent in upper-class Greek circles and the subordinate role of women. And neither uttered a word of condemnation of slavery. Later Western intellectuals would specifically quote Aristotle in its support.*
But they did clash bitterly over how men should be governed.
Aristotle’s politics is like his ethics. It is rooted in real life, the Greek polis as he knew it, especially Athens, for which he wrote a description of its constitution that we still have. Aristotle believed that the goal of political institutions was man’s improvement rather than his perfection. He believed the way to do this was by encouraging each individual to realize his potential, rather than force him to submit to a collective order.
By contrast, the most famous Platonic dialogue, the Republic, is all about raising that collective order to the highest-pitched perfection. Plato explicitly made the individual’s health and happiness dependent on the larger political community.1 Whereas Aristotle looked to Athens as his basic political model, Plato preferred Sparta, Athens’s great rival.
Plato’s outspoken admiration for Sparta reveals a lot about his ultimate political agenda. That state’s regimented and austere values (Sparta was more of a collection of agricultural villages than an urban city) stood in sharp contrast with sophisticated, freewheeling, commercial Athens. However, Spartans could beat any opponent on the field of battle, even when outnumbered, and no one questioned a Spartan’s courage or his word—or dared to.
Spartan citizens were not allowed to use money, practice a trade, make a statue, or write a poem. Neither are Plato’s Guardians in the Republic. For all its limitations, in his Republic and the Laws, Sparta was proof to Plato that freedom was a funct
ion of solidarity and unity of purpose.2 Aristotle, by contrast, saw Athens as proof that men can be free only if they are individuals and are allowed to live their lives as they, not others, see fit. “Freedom from any interference of government,” rather than submitting to its dictates, no matter how just, is one of Aristotle’s hallmarks of a democratic society.3
Over the centuries, Aristotle’s politics will lead the way for Western advocates of individualism and democracy, including America’s Founding Fathers. Plato’s communitarian vision points very much in the other direction, with ugly consequences. Yet curiously, both drew their arguments from the same vision of freedom in the Greek polis. Their disagreement arose over how to fulfill that ideal—and Western political thinking has been split down the middle ever since.
In this sense, Aristotle’s view was more parochial and traditional. If Aristotle saw Athens as a largely positive example of the polis ideal, Plato’s politics was a biting critique of Athenian democracy. This was not just because it had put his beloved teacher, Socrates, to death. It was a negativism shared by nearly everyone in Greek intellectual circles in the mid–fourth century BCE. Democracy, and the polis generally, had proved to be a disappointment. Its troubles were reflected in factional strife and declining economies, plus the weakness of the Greek states in confronting the emerging colossus from the north, the kingdom of Macedonia. As one scholar put it, “The fourth century was suffering from political evils which many of the more thoughtful men of the time regarded as incurable, and the sight of which only too often induced a feeling of pessimism and despair.”4
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