1. The metaphysical treatises shed light on the point we last discussed, and that makes them an important introduction to Aristotle’s ethical system. From his Dialectics we might have concluded that he rejected Plato’s doctrine of Ideas as a scientific account. It would not follow that he gave up the belief in some ideal of excellence, which runs through all mythologies and has never left the hearts of men. But his conception of God simply as the ground of nature shows at once that, in his mind, acknowledging God’s perfection has no connection with a scheme of practical life and conduct. He does not lack sympathy with Plato, or with any philosopher who tried to explain men’s dreams on this subject. He simply has not found in himself, and does not recognise in others, the want which every age has tried to express in so many forms. So it becomes an interesting question: what foundation in Aristotle’s ethics takes the place of the Theology that is so plainly the foundation of Plato’s?
2. The answer leads us to a very important treatise, the three books on the Soul. It contains more of what has in our day, especially here and in Scotland, been called metaphysics than the works that bear that title. The first book, as usual, examines earlier theories. Aristotle thoroughly disposes of the notions of Democritus, Empedocles and the Pythagoreans, and shows why we can never be satisfied with calling the soul motion, or the principle of motion, or the primary element, or number. In the second book he develops his own doctrine. The soul belongs to the category of entities, so it has a matter and a form. Here, as elsewhere, the matter coincides with its δύναμις (potentiality), and the form is ἐντελέχεια (actuality). The soul is neither separately but the result of both. Sight, for example, requires the energy of vision, the faculty of vision, and in addition an organ, an actual eye. What is true of this sense is true of the whole substance of which it is a part. The soul has its energy and its faculty distinct from the organ through which both appear, yet it requires such an organ. The soul is not a body, but neither is it without a body. In general, what distinguishes a living creature (ζῷον) is that it has a ψυχή (soul).
3. But not all living creatures have a soul exercising the same δυνάμεις (faculties). All the faculties that can exist in any living creature are these five: receiving nourishment (θρεπτική), sensation (αἰσθητική), motion in place (κινητική), impulse or desire (ὀρεκτική), and intelligence (διανοητική). The nutritive faculty is the lowest and is present in every case, so the soul with this faculty alone may be attributed to vegetables. Wherever any higher faculty is present, all the lower exist too. Under each head there is an interesting discussion of the faculty’s character and limits. Under the first, the question is whether the life in each plant must be considered the active or only the passive instrument of its self-sustenance. Under sensation, more complicated points arise, and Aristotle enters into the whole theory, examining each sense in detail. This is the discussion carried on with so much liveliness and depth in one part of the Theætetus. The opinion there attributed to Protagoras, which Plato does not deny so far as the doctrine of sensation goes, apart from its moral consequences, is nearly the same as Aristotle’s: sensation is neither in the organ nor in the object, but is generated between them, as the effect of the medium through which they communicate. The question of the motive faculty at once involves us in something higher than itself, since movement must depend on impulse, and this is true in all creatures. Sense-appearances do generate impulses or desires, but we must not therefore attribute a governing power to sensation. Rather, the nature of the faculty of impulse determines how these appearances influence it, than that it is determined by them. So each creature seems to have a nature, seen expressly in this faculty of impulse. How, then, does man differ from other creatures? Not, it seems, by lacking this impulsive faculty, nor by its being less truly his nature than it is theirs, but by having the dianoetic faculty to direct it and act with it. The true nature of man consists in the coincidence and joint working of these two. So the soul may be considered as having three portions, distinct logically and not materially: one wholly without reason, one rational, and one that participates in reason.
In this psychological system we find the root of the Aristotelian ethics we were looking for: they begin in Psychology and end in Politics.
Section VII. The Aristotelian Ethics
1. At the opening of the Nicomachean Ethics, long regarded as the fullest statement of his views, Aristotle says that Ethics is an introduction to Politics. So he does not identify the two as Plato does; it is possible, indeed necessary, to treat them separately. In his usual way he looks for the grounds of society in the nature of man. He cannot accept Plato’s simple willingness to treat outward necessities and accidents as the occasions of society. To him that carries a further step, full of Plato’s idealism: the supposition that Society itself involves some higher Unity than any particular society expresses. What seems to him to pervade all things, almost as a law of the universe, and above all to be the secret of human order and government, is a principle of equality and adjustment. The same principle, in another form, drives his ethics. Virtue lies in a mean, and in a sense is a mean. Government, which is also a mean, is therefore naturally occupied with sustaining the virtue of individuals, and that virtue is in turn government’s chief safeguard. This must be noticed, or the connection between the two spheres, which Aristotle acknowledges as much as his master did, will not be apparent. Many difficulties will also seem insurmountable to a reader who takes the Ethics as a complete system and forgets that, for practical purposes, an educating, directing power is presumed to reside in a governing body whose nature and functions are not yet defined.
2. But Virtue, the attainment of this mean, is not in Aristotle’s view the formal aim of a man’s life or of society. Once the notion of an absolute good, introduced by those “dear” and troublesome men the Platonists, is out of the way, there remains one obvious and generally admitted end of all human desires: happiness is emphatically the human end. But if it is human, its definition must be sought in what is peculiarly characteristic of human beings. It cannot lie in powers we share with other creatures, so not chiefly in the nutritive or sensory powers. It must consist in some exercises or energies, since in these the soul or life of every creature shows itself. So it must lie in the energies of our best and highest nature, exercised not at intervals but through a whole life, a life with enough outward prosperity to give them free scope.
3. But all energies need a direction, and the right direction of its energies is the virtue of each class. What, then, is specifically human virtue? It must be in the man. On our psychology, the impulsive faculty is the constitutive faculty of the human soul, though its excellence consists in being subject to the reasoning faculty. Virtue will therefore imply the presence and harmony of both, though it will be found most characteristically in the first. So it must be a habit. But of what kind, and what is its aim, given that an absolute good or ideal is out of the question, and that happiness cannot be the aim, since happiness is exactly what we are now analysing? Aristotle says we are not to worry about scientific accuracy in definitions. Our purpose is practical: we want to form an actual man of a certain character, not a theoretical one.
4. Practically, then, what we blame as mischief and derangement is in every case excess. There is an excess called timidity and one called foolhardiness; one called prodigality and one called narrowness or avarice. But extremes presuppose a mean, and this is what our habit aims at; virtue generally lies in it. Yet we aim at action, and actions are specific, not general. How, then, do we arrive at specific virtues? Their species are determined by their distinct objects: some habits concern external pleasures, others the passions of the mind. In each case the practical purpose defines the virtue. A general description of the excesses and their corresponding means can be given that really applies in all cases. Still, the excess may differ for each man, according to his actual circumstances and his proneness to one side or the other. Liberality, for instance, is practically a different quality in the rich man and the poor, and one must resist the temptation to profusion, the other to meanness. Virtue is therefore in a mean that is a mean relative to us, not one that can be fixed absolutely and invariably by rule.
5. It follows that this habit presupposes a faculty of choice, or predetermination. Is that the same as willing? Clearly not: willing concerns ends, choice concerns the means to ends. It implies a right end and a right determination of the will toward it. It may be called deliberative desire (and the reader will note how steadily the psychological axiom we mentioned is kept in view). But to what cases does this will or counsel apply, and how far does it depend on us? We do not deliberate about things absolute or eternal, nor about things in the sphere of accident. What remains is whatever is done by us or with our concurrence. Some of these may be taken from our control by actual violence, and this gives rise to questions of casuistry, such as whether a virtuous man will submit to do wrong or to die; each case must be decided on its merits. In ordinary cases the doubt is whether inclination is itself a force upon will and reason. Aristotle disposes of this first by remarking that no reasonable man can confuse an influence on the impulse with a force that prevents its operations; and second by admitting that such influences may produce an incapacity for a particular action, but that this incapacity results from a previous habit which need not have been formed. Habits, then, are in our power; actions not always.
6. With these foundations settled, he turns to the particular ethical virtues, where his acute and often delicate powers of observation have room to work. The temper of mind Shakspeare has wrought into us does not like to see any character as the mere development of one quality. We dislike hearing of a man as the Magnificent, the Magnanimous, the Modest, the Temperate, or the Just. But this doubtless suited Greek habits. Aristides, Themistocles and Cimon, even if they had no set purpose of realising a particular type of character, fall more readily into certain moulds than the traditional figures of ancient Rome or modern Europe. How a similar tendency was revived at one period in Christian society, and how that revival was tied to a scholastic reverence for Aristotle, we may have to notice later.
7. Two of these virtues deserve special notice, because they throw light on the whole system and on ethical inquiry generally. The first is Justice. Is it not itself an abstract of all the virtues? We have seen Plato’s answer in the Republic. Aristotle treats it differently, yet shows how much he felt his master’s influence even when rejecting his ideas. In one sense, he says, justice is a complex of virtues: it is the habit that chiefly disposes us to obey the laws, and since laws forbid excesses of every kind and encourage every kind of virtue, justice has respect to them all. But there is such an offence as overreaching, and there must be a specific virtue answering to it, related to the general one. The evil is inequality in matters of property; the virtue is evenness or equality. This implies on each side an excess, a more and a less, in reference to given persons. The virtue aims at preserving the right proportion between things and persons and restoring the balance when it is broken. Remove the restriction to property, and justice would seem the very virtue of virtues, so emphatically does it preserve the mean. But that restriction makes it harder to say how far the virtue belongs to the individual and how far to the State. So justice, though more narrowly meant, becomes for Aristotle as for Plato a debatable ground between the two regions. At all events it must be regarded as the ethical virtue of a statesman.
8. The other virtue is temperance. It is opposed to intemperance and involves the general notion of an even mind undisturbed by sensual desires, so it might seem to include self-restraint. But in Aristotle’s psychology the soul has a rational, an irrational and a quasi-rational part. The quality that controls the irrational or merely animal nature need not be the same as the one concerning the quasi-rational part, the passions and affections. The name temperance goes to the first, self-restraint to the second. A curious consequence follows: this self-government seems distinct not only from the virtue concerned with sensual desires but even from virtue itself, since virtue has its chief seat in the impulsive nature over which self-restraint is supposed to rule. So after the catalogue of virtues we are puzzled to find a book opening with three moral states to be avoided (vice, lack of self-control, brutishness) and three good states corresponding to them (virtue, self-restraint, and a divine excellence as far above ordinary humanity as brutishness is below it). The result seems inevitable to anyone who reflects on the system: what preserves virtue must somehow be distinct from virtue. But it must also be admitted that it considerably impairs the symmetry of a design otherwise singularly complete.
9. Before Aristotle touched on this preserving power, which belongs to the purely ethical side of man, he had to explain more distinctly than in his psychology the intellectual faculties to which such important functions are given. He begins by reaffirming that the impulsive and intellectual faculties must co-operate for any good moral act; or, as he puts it more neatly and more in line with his own view of the intellect, what the one affirms or denies the other must pursue or avoid. The soul, he says, may affirm or deny truly in five ways: by art, by science, by practical wisdom, by wisdom, by intuition. Art is what we would call the creative or poetic faculty, in its highest and lowest sense. Science is its converse: it deals with what cannot be otherwise, does not fashion but perceives, and concerns universals, not particulars. Aristotelian science, as we have seen, deals with conclusions, not premises. But some faculty must deal with premises, a tact, intuition or spiritual sense, and this is intuition. Its sphere seems very limited, being bounded on one side by science and on the other by wisdom. Wisdom, we were told in the Metaphysics, deals with principles, so it might seem to cover all that is assigned to intuition. But that which affirms things to be so without reasoning is surely distinct from the faculty that searches for causes through long and winding labyrinths. When intuition is said to deal with premises, the first operation is meant; when wisdom is, the second. Practical wisdom, the last of the five, is different yet has something of the others. Like art, it deals with what changes and can be changed, but it is perceptive and discriminating, not productive. So far it resembles science, though its subject-matter is wholly different. It has the quickness of tact that intuition has, but only as the result of practice and experience. It is therefore, like wisdom, a laborious investigating faculty, yet its end is practice, not speculation. The practical, experienced man is thus contrasted with the meditative, speculative one, though wisdom may usefully assist practical wisdom. From this analysis it is evident that practical wisdom is the quality which, combined with right character, meaning a proper condition of the impulsive faculty, produces virtue. The doctrine of Socrates that virtue is practical wisdom (stated somewhat carelessly, since the real Socratic doctrine treats virtue as science, the knowledge of what is absolutely good, prudence being only a guardian faculty that protects the soul, in seeking that knowledge, from the seductions and confusions of sense) is said to be only one side of the truth. Practical wisdom is not virtue, though virtue cannot exist without it.
10. We have seen that justice occupies, to a certain extent, the same position in Aristotle’s system as in Plato’s, as a link between morals and politics. But Aristotle could not help seeing that justice, under the conditions he had imposed, explained very imperfectly the connection of human society with the life of the individual. This dry, hard principle of distribution, exchange and rectification could never replace the music of Plato’s Commonwealth. Reflecting on this, he seems to have concluded that Friendship fills the void, and that Friendship and Justice together make up the social law. So seen, Friendship holds the most important place in an ethics always looking onward to Politics, and it is no wonder he gave it two elaborate books. Anyone acquainted with Greek tradition and mythology knows how much the Greek mind was occupied with the subject. There, as elsewhere, physical and moral thoughts were intertwined, and the same language described the law of sympathy between sky and earth and between man and man. Aristotle takes care to free himself from these ambiguous phrases, which he perhaps lacked the imagination to see as more than metaphors, and fixes on Friendship as one of the essential conditions of our nature to which the very existence of communion must be referred.
11. On this footing he has no hesitation in setting aside many popular notions of friendship as giving an inadequate view of it. He rejects the doctrine that friendship rests ultimately on utility or pleasure, not with sentimental indignation but as contrary to facts and reason. Such friendships are transitory and depend on accidents, which shows the practical man as much as the philosopher that the essence of friendship is not found in them. The friendship of good men for each other must be the source from which we deduce its nature. Here alone we learn its conditions, or even its possibility, for properly speaking it is possible only if one man can really delight in another and love him as himself. A politician seriously reflecting on the existence of society must feel that a principle is at work among men which can be defined only in these terms; that its imperfect appearances in the world, so far as they are imperfect, make its meaning less intelligible; that if selfishness were absolute it could not exist at all; and that the highest form in which it shows itself is the test of its character. Aristotle states these conclusions again and again with great precision. On their strength he says that the idea of equality or proportion is as discoverable in friendship as in justice; only that in justice the worth of each object comes first and its fitness to us second, while in friendship fitness comes first and worth is subordinate. On the same ground he holds that friendship is seen in its true working not in clubs, societies or partnerships, where men associate for some specific object (though justice is needed there too, as assessor and complement, every kind of society implying a law to regulate it as well as a motive to form it, a principle of government as well as of concord), but in a polity of which all these are portions. An inquiry into the different kinds of government thus becomes connected with an inquiry into the law of friendship.
12. In this passage we see how far Aristotle surpassed Plato in understanding relationships, while falling short of him in everything concerning the absolute. In the relations of father to son, husband to wife, and brother to sister he finds three primary forms of friendship, and the grounds of the three kinds of government to which all others reduce: Monarchy, Aristocracy and Timocracy, whose corruptions are Tyranny, Oligarchy and Democracy. Under each true form friendship and justice exist and sustain each other, but friendship takes its peculiar form from the society. In a monarchy it is the friendship of patronage and reverence. In an aristocracy it has the conjugal model, one party being respected as superior in worth and keeping that respect only while he asserts dominion on that ground. The fraternal type of equality is preserved in all friendship under a timocracy. In the depraved forms friendship is depraved and weak, and in tyranny, which he counts the worst because it corrupts the best, both friendship and justice vanish, subjects being regarded as animals and so incapable of human qualities. With this law of sympathy established as one of the two necessary conditions of human fellowship, and virtue shown to be the necessary condition of friendship, Aristotle goes on to settle many questions of deep practical interest. The most important concern the relation between friendship and self-love. In what sense is friendship a part of self-love, and in what sense opposed to it? Since pleasure and utility have already been separated from friendship, the vulgar notion of self-love must be separated from it too. Still, ordinary language suggests some analogy between the two, and it is hard to get beyond saying that the friend is loved as another self. May the difficulty then be solved thus: self-love may itself be distinguished from all thoughts of profit and loss, and the wise and good man is the true self-lover, the only one who is at one with himself and can enjoy his own company? If so, it would be wrong to seek the ground of friendship in self-love; it would be truer to say they illustrate each other. Only the man capable of friendship will have himself for a friend, and only he who can enjoy and love himself can enjoy and love another. These two books on Friendship are certainly not the least profound of Aristotle’s writings, and to the general reader they will be by far the most delightful.
13. From this subject we pass, in the tenth book, to Pleasure: what it is, how far, as some philosophers teach, it is to be denounced as an evil, and how far it is a good or connected with the good. Aristotle argues against many prevalent definitions. He shows why it is neither a movement, nor a process of coming into a state, nor the filling up of a want. He thinks the universal longing of mankind sufficient witness that pleasure is something real and worthy in itself, not merely a means to another end, and an examination of the facts leads to the same conclusion. But it also refutes the opinion that pleasure can be made a distinct formal purpose of life. It is the flower or consummation of something else. The exercise of sight and the exercise of hearing each bring their own pleasure after them, but the pleasure is tied to the energy and cannot be severed from it. So to understand what pleasure is, and what the highest pleasures are, you must understand what energies are and what the highest energies are. You cannot refer the last to the first; you must refer the first to the last. The energy most appropriate to each creature brings the pleasure appropriate to it; “the energy of the soul, according to virtue,” brings man the highest pleasure. The pleasure an act gives the one who performs it is the test that the act has become habitual to him and that he has acquired the corresponding character. The man who delights in musical energies has become a musician; the man who delights in just acts is a just man.
14. From this analysis of pleasure the step is easy to reconsidering happiness, and so to a brief review of the whole treatise. Happiness he has found to be the end of man, and to consist in the use of his highest energies, not, like pleasure, merely to result from it. What, then, is the highest happiness? It is that of the contemplative man. If we can imagine the life of the gods, it is absurd to attribute to them justice, which concerns contracts and conventions, or temperance, which implies temptations they cannot suffer, and so with most of the acts that preserve the mean for man. We must believe their life to consist in contemplation. But those who can attain this celestial life need early discipline and education. They must be trained to avoid the extremes in which evil lies and to practise the virtues which are the conditions of, and preparation for, contemplative happiness, though it transcends them. For the rest there must be a discipline to cultivate whatever capacities they have, or, if they resist, to coerce and punish them. Here is the field for the science of Politics. Aristotle says the Sophists had reduced that science to a mere teaching of how to talk and argue, but its foundations lie in ethical knowledge and ethical practice, and without them it is worthless and rotten. This is the introduction to the book on Politics.
Section VIII. Politics of Aristotle
1. We can give our readers only a few hints for studying this treatise. Valuable and interesting as it is, it can never stand to Aristotle’s other writings as the Platonic Republic stands to Plato’s dialogues. It is certainly closely connected with his Ethics and his Ontology, as our earlier remarks show, but it is connected with them as a set of results and deductions, not as a principal and fundamental part of his design. The doctrine set out so carefully in the Metaphysics, that every substance presupposes a ruling, active power and a submissive, receptive faculty or matter, reappears here in the most obvious outward facts. The relation of male and female is taken as the first hint of society and as containing its principle. The fellowship implied in that relation involves another idea, rule and subjection, which finds its complete expression in the relation of master and slave. Compare these two relations with the relation within each man, explained in the Psychology and illustrated in the Ethics, between the reasoning power, the faculty that shares in reason, and the mere animal nature. You feel at once that they explain each other and show the condition under which society is meant to exist. Where reason is developed and its authority acknowledged, where the faculty that shares in reason is in fellowship with it and subordinate to it, and where the animal nature is controlled, there you have the true condition of the individual man and the true condition of society. There the relations of husband and wife, and of master and servant, will be kept; they will not be arbitrary but lawful and orderly.
2. In such a state of things only a polity is possible. Since this is the only true condition of each man, a political state is evidently his only proper and natural condition, and every other is anomalous. The constituents of a polity are found in a household, but a house is not therefore a miniature city, and a city is not merely a collection of households. Each has its own nature and laws. Yet each alike consists in human relations, finds in them the end of its existence, and must regard all means and instruments in reference to them. Economy is not primarily the management of the household’s goods or property; that is secondary and accidental. It is mainly the right ordering of the household itself. The slave is the link between the two branches of economy: he must be considered an instrument, and yet treated as a man. A polity can be composed only of freemen, as much because only a freeman understands how to obey as because only he understands how to govern.
3. Almost necessarily it follows from this view, first, that Aristotle should heed the Platonic idea of unity as little in his Politics as in his Metaphysics. He should utterly abhor any attempt to embody that idea by abolishing distinct relationships, since in his opinion these are the very foundation of society. He should count as good all forms of government that rest on some actual relation, and as evil all that have become in any sense arbitrary. He should therefore acknowledge, much as Plato did, three true forms and three departures from them. He should look on the democratic departure, the attempt to set up a society in which all govern, with no more complacency than the others. And at the same time he should take as his ideal the form from which democracy is a deviation, the one that makes all freemen eligible to govern, though not necessarily sharing in government. These seem to us the main principles of the book. Once they are understood, its occasional difficulties and contradictions will be less puzzling, its place in relation to the rest of the philosophy will be felt, and its value as a key to the political science of modern as well as ancient times will be appreciated.