The political animal: How Aristotle linked individual ethics to the destiny of the state

“ The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of which his Politics is the other half. Both deal with one and the same subject. This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the “philosophy of human affairs;” but more frequently Political or Social Science. ”

“ In considering Aristotle’s doctrine respecting the ἀρχαὶ of ethical and political science, and the way in which they are to be discovered and made available, we should keep in mind that he announces the end and object of these sciences to be, not merely the enlargement of human knowledge, but the determination of human conduct towards certain objects: not theory, but practice: not to teach us what virtue is, but to induce us to practise it — “Since then the present science is not concerned with speculation, like the others. ”

“ The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of which his Politics is the other half. Both deal with one and the same subject. This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the “philosophy of human affairs;” but more frequently Political or Social Science. In the two works taken together we have their author’s whole theory of human conduct or practical activity, that is, of all human activity which is not directed merely to knowledge or truth. ”

“ Since we require knowledge of the moral and social nature of men not merely to satisfy an intellectual interest, but as a basis for a sound system of education and government, Politics, the theory of government, and Ethics, the theory of goodness of conduct, which for Aristotle is only a subordinate branch of Politics, belong to Practical, not to Theoretical Philosophy, a view which is attended by important consequences. ”

“ For the Greek thinkers, however, who first systematically dealt with the subject, Ethics was a branch of Politics, i. e., the Science of Government. Aristotle, like Socrates and Plato, took for the starting point of his argument the sovereign good, or the idea of absolute well-being. All that man undertakes has an aim which, under analysis, is found to be the greatest advantage to him who is acting. Accordingly all knowledge tends to this end; and as all its elements are more or less connected, there must be one, the final end of which is essential ”

“ Aristotle’s ‘Politics.’
The ‘Ethics’ of Aristotle end with the words, “Let us then commence our ‘Politics.’” He had described virtue and happiness, but neither of these, he says, [1] is attainable by any human being apart from society. Moral development and the full enjoyment of the exercise of our powers equally demand certain external conditions; they cannot exist save by the aid of a settled community, social habits, the restraint and protection of laws, and even a wisely regulated system of public education. ”

“ Connected with Aristotle's system of ethics was his system of politics, the former being only a part, as it were, of the latter; the former aiming at the happiness of individuals, the latter at that of communities; so that the latter is the perfection and completion of the former. For Aristotle looked upon man as a “political animal”—as a being, that is, created by nature for the state, and for living in the state; which, as a totality consisting of organically connected members, is by nature prior to the individual or the family. ”

“ Man is by nature a social creature; he cannot isolate himself without becoming either more or less than man—“either a god or a beast.” The state is, therefore, a prime necessity for the “well-doing and well-being” of the individual. In fact, says Aristotle, [2] you cannot form any conception of man in his normal condition—that is to say, in a civilised condition—except as a member of a state. On these grounds Aristotle proposed to go on to the writing of his ‘Politics’ as the complement and conclusion of his ethical treatise. ”

“ It is the legislator's task to frame a society which shall make the good life possible. Politics for Aristotle is not a struggle between individuals or classes for power, nor a device for getting done such elementary tasks as the maintenance of order and security without too great encroachments on individual liberty. The state is "a community of well-being in families and aggregations of families for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life." ”

“ Others again, who possess the conditions of happiness, go utterly wrong from the first in the pursuit of it. But since our object is to discover the best form of government, that, namely, under which a city will be best governed, and since the city is best governed which has the greatest opportunity of obtaining happiness, it is evident that we must clearly ascertain the nature of happiness.
We maintain, and have said in the Ethics, if the arguments there adduced are of any value, that happiness is the realization and perfect exercise of virtue, and this not conditional, but absolute. ”

“ In the Ethics he discusses the nature of individual happiness or well-being; in the Politics he treats of the state as one of the chief means through which the individual attains to happiness. The object of the Politics is both practical and speculative; to explain the nature of the ideal city in which the end of happiness may be completely realized; to suggest some methods of making existent states more useful to the individual citizen than they were in Aristotle's time, or had been in the past. ”

“ For intellect is what mainly makes a man what he is, and is divine and immortal.
To turn from Ethics to Politics, the good of the individual on a small scale becomes on a large scale the good of the citizen and the state, whose end should be no far-off form of good, and no mere guarantee of rights, but the happiness of virtuous action, the life according to virtue, which is the general good of the citizen. Hence, the citizen of the best state is he who has the power and the purpose to be governed and govern for the sake of the life according to virtue. ”

“ It looks back to the Ethics as the Ethics looks forward to the Politics. For Aristotle did not separate, as we are inclined to do, the spheres of the statesman and the moralist. In the Ethics he has described the character necessary for the good life, but that life is for him essentially to be lived in society, and when in the last chapters of the Ethics he comes to the practical application of his inquiries, that finds expression not in moral exhortations addressed to the individual but in a description of the legislative opportunities of the statesman. ”

“ The justest distribution of political power is that in which there is least waste of political ability.
Further, the belief that the constitution of a state is only the outward expression of the common aspirations and beliefs of its members, explains the paramount political importance which Aristotle assigns to education. It is the great instrument by which the legislator can ensure that the future citizens of his state will share those common beliefs which make the state possible. ”

“ The types by which the contrast of the two lives is illustrated, Rachael and Leah, Mary and Martha, are familiar to all readers of Christian literature.
+The Theory of the State+.--Man is by nature a political animal, a being who can only develop his capacities by sharing in the life of a community. Hence Aristotle definitely rejects the view that the state or society is a mere creature of convention or agreement, an institution made by compact between individuals for certain special ends, not growing naturally out of the universal demands and aspirations of humanity. ”

“ It is in the state that that common seeking after the good which is the profoundest truth about men and nature becomes explicit and knows itself. The state is for Aristotle prior to the family and the village, although it succeeds them in time, for only when the state with its conscious organisation is reached can man understand the secret of his past struggles after something he knew not what. ”

“ The clue to the right interpretation is given by Aristotle himself, where in the last chapter of the Ethics he is paving the way for the Politics. In the Ethics he has not confined himself to the abstract or isolated individual, but has always thought of him, or we might say, in his social and political context, with a given nature due to race and heredity and in certain surroundings. So viewing him he has studied the nature and formation of his character—all that he can make himself or be made by others to be. ”

“ Hence the Ethics, where his attention is directed upon the formation of character, is largely and centrally a treatise on Moral Education. It discusses especially those admirable human qualities which fit a man for life in an organised civic community, which makes him "a good citizen," and considers how they can be fostered or created and their opposites prevented. ”

“ The discussion of the kind of education desirable for the best kind of state, in which to be a loyal citizen and to be a good man are the same thing, is perhaps the most permanently valuable part of the Politics. Though Aristotle's writings on "practical" philosophy have been more read in modern times than any other part of his works, they are far from being his best and most thorough performances. In no department of his thought is he quite so slavishly dependent on his master Plato as in the theory of the "good for man" and the character of "moral" excellence. ”

“ An aristocracy, of which I have already treated in the first book, is rightly called so; for a state governed by the best men, upon the most virtuous principles, and not upon any hypothesis, which even good men may propose, has alone a right to be called an aristocracy, for it is there only that a man is at once a good man and a good citizen; while in other states men are good only relative to those states. ”

“ We are accustomed since the growth of the historical method to the belief that states are "not made but grow," and are apt to be impatient with the belief which Aristotle and Plato show in the powers of the lawgiver. But however true the maxim may be of the modern nation state, it was not true of the much smaller and more self-conscious Greek city. When Aristotle talks of the legislator, he is not talking in the air. ”

“ We think more naturally of law-making as the special right of the people and administration as necessarily confined to experts.
Aristotle's Politics, then, is a handbook for the legislator, the expert who is to be called in when a state wants help. We have called him a state doctor. It is one of the most marked characteristics of Greek political theory that Plato and Aristotle think of the statesman as one who has knowledge of what ought to be done, and can help those who call him in to prescribe for them, rather than one who has power to control the forces of society. ”

“ So the Athenians, when they were founding their model new colony at Thurii, employed Hippodamus of Miletus, whom Aristotle mentions in Book II, as the best expert in town-planning, to plan the streets of the city, and Protagoras as the best expert in law-making, to give the city its laws. In the Laws Plato represents one of the persons of the dialogue as having been asked by the people of Gortyna to draw up laws for a colony which they were founding. The situation described must have occurred frequently in actual life. ”

“ The legislator is the only possible teacher of virtue.
Such a programme for a treatise on government might lead us to expect in the Politics mainly a description of a Utopia or ideal state which might inspire poets or philosophers but have little direct effect upon political institutions. Plato's Republic is obviously impracticable, for its author had turned away in despair from existing politics. ”

“ Hence any one who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just, and generally, about the subjects of political science must have been brought up in good habits. For the fact is the starting-point, and if this is sufficiently plain to him, he will not at the start need the reason as well; and the man who has been well brought up has or can easily get startingpoints. ”

“ For what concerns Ethics, Aristotle tells us that the first principles are acquired through a course of well-directed habitual action; and that they will be acquired easily, as well as certainly, if such a course be enforced on youth from the beginning. In the beginning of the Physica, he starts from that antithesis, so often found in his writings, between what is more knowable to us and what is more knowable absolutely or by nature. ”

“ Even if you must have regard to wealth, in order to secure leisure, yet it is surely a bad thing that the greatest offices, such as those of kings and generals, should be bought. The law which allows this abuse makes wealth of more account than virtue, and the whole state becomes avaricious. For, whenever the chiefs of the state deem anything honorable, the other citizens are sure to follow their example; and, where virtue has not the first place, their aristocracy cannot be firmly established. ”

“ But as there are three grounds on which men claim an equal share in the government, freedom, wealth, and virtue (for the fourth or good birth is the result of the two last, being only ancient wealth and virtue) , it is clear that the admixture of the two elements, that is to say, of the rich and poor, is to be called a polity or constitutional government; and the union of the three is to be called aristocracy or the government of the best, and more than any other form of government, except the true and ideal, has a right to this name. ”

“ Plato's Republic is obviously impracticable, for its author had turned away in despair from existing politics. He has no proposals, in that dialogue at least, for making the best of things as they are. The first lesson his philosopher has to learn is to turn away from this world of becoming and decay, and to look upon the unchanging eternal world of ideas. Thus his ideal city is, as he says, a pattern laid up in heaven by which the just man may rule his life, a pattern therefore in the meantime for the individual and not for the statesman. ”

“ Aristotle has none of the high enthusiasm or poetic imagination of Plato. He is even unduly impatient of Plato's idealism, as is shown by the criticisms in the second book. But he has a power to see the possibilities of good in things that are imperfect, and the patience of the true politician who has learned that if he would make men what they ought to be, he must take them as he finds them. His ideal is constructed not of pure reason or poetry, but from careful and sympathetic study of a wide range of facts. ”

“ Aristotle's failure does not lie in this, that he is both idealist and realist, but that he keeps these two tendencies too far apart. He thinks too much of his ideal state, as something to be reached once for all by knowledge, as a fixed type to which actual states approximate or from which they are perversions. But if we are to think of actual politics as intelligible in the light of the ideal, we must think of that ideal as progressively revealed in history, not as something to be discovered by turning our back on experience and having recourse to abstract reasoning. ”

“ Aristotle in his Constitutions had made a study of one hundred and fifty-eight constitutions of the states of his day, and the fruits of that study are seen in the continual reference to concrete political experience, which makes the Politics in some respects a critical history of the workings of the institutions of the Greek city state. In Books IV., V., and VI. the ideal state seems far away, and we find a dispassionate survey of imperfect states, the best ways of preserving them, and an analysis of the causes of their instability. ”

“ We proceed now to inquire what form of government and what manner of life is best for communities in general, not adapting it to that superior virtue which is above the reach of the vulgar, or that education which every advantage of nature and fortune only can furnish, nor to those imaginary plans which may be formed at pleasure ”

“ It is as though Aristotle were saying: "I have shown you the proper and normal type of constitution, but if you will not have it and insist on living under a perverted form, you may as well know how to make the best of it." In this way the Politics, though it defines the state in the light of its ideal, discusses states and institutions as they are. Ostensibly it is merely a continuation of the Ethics, but it comes to treat political questions from a purely political standpoint. ”

“ We see in Aristotle's defence of slavery how the conception of nature as the ideal can have a debasing influence upon views of practical politics. His high ideal of citizenship offers to those who can satisfy its claims the prospect of a fair life; those who fall short are deemed to be different in nature and shut out entirely from approach to the ideal. ”

“ But one peculiarity of Aristotle’s ideal politics is the comparative smallness of their scale. Like a true Greek, he does not think of nations and empires, but of city-states. It has been said that the city-state was something like the University of modern times. Aristotle regarded it as an organism of limited size, in which every citizen should have his function, and in which every one should be personally known to the rulers. He said (‘Eth.’ IX. x. iii.) that 100,000 citizens would be far too many to constitute a state. ”

“ Aristotle's peculiar relations to the court of Macedon may have hindered him from freely entering upon this subject, or may have biassed his views; but the real fact seems rather to have been that, while he was a great philosopher, he was no statesman, and that, absorbed in the researches of science and in the dreams of an ideal state, he did not see the actual dangers of his country so clearly as his patriotic contemporary Demosthenes saw them. His contribution to politics was abstract and scientific, and as such remains valid for all time ”

“ The governing ideas of any polity are always best expressed by those to whom they stand for the absolute and final truth; and there is no form of polity which the student of political science should study with more care than the city-state. Just because it is comparatively simple, just because it is unlike the states with which we are personally acquainted, it contains the key to many modern problems. Aristotle is the best interpreter of an essential link in the chain of political development.
But he is something more than this, more than a Greek who states the case of Greece. ”