Aristotle - Contents

Aristotle

1. Let's Keep Things The Way They Are

2. Aristotle's Waffle on the Function Argument

3. Happiness: Is Virtue Sufficient

4. How Many Divisions Has the Soul?

5. What About That Mean?

6. Are Incontinent Fools Wise?

7. How to Judge Actions

8. Aristotle Fiddles the Mean on Courage

9. If Virtue is Voluntary, So is Vice

10. Friendliness is Not Just For Friends

11. Is Aristotle Too Egoist?

12. Goodwill and Friendship

13. Does a Happy Man Need Friends?

14. Aristotle and Justice

Aristotle and Justice

These days when we talk about "justice" we either mean the "Justice!" of the left, the overturning of oppression, or the equable workings of bourgeois justice, the disentangling of the mess of bankruptcy or the curbing of single young men with the criminal justice system.

But it is obvious from the Nichomachean Ethics that justice was a rather different concept back in ancient Greece.  For instance, Aristotle starts right off in Book V with his virtue-as-mean approach when he asks "what sort of mean justice is, and between what extremes the just act is intermediate."

These days, we don't talk about a "just act," except when discussing an Act of Congress.  But Aristotle says that by "justice" we mean "that kind of state of character which makes people disposed to do what is just and makes them act justly and wish for what is just".  What is he talking about?

He continues by defining the unjust man, as "grasping and unfair", as men that "pray for and pursue" the things they should not.  So on this argument we are talking about justice in relation to our neighbor.   Indeed he goes on to define justice as "another's good", doing "what is advantageous to another".  Thus the "worst man is he who exercises his wickedness both towards himself and towards his friends, and the best man is not he who exercises his virtue towards himself bu he who exercises it towards another; for this is a difficult task."

Then Aristotle goes on to discuss the two divisions of institutional justice: "in distributions of honor or money" and in "a rectifying part in transactions between man and man."  In distributive justice he calls for a distribution of equal when the parties are equal and unequal when the parties are unequal.  And the distribution must be "according to merit".  The only trouble is that people disagree about merit.  Democrats identify is "with the status of freeman", oligarchs with wealth or noble birth, and aristocrats with excellence.  Thus the just is "proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion."

When we come to rectificatory justice, the idea of proportion is different.  Here we have an inequality created by a injury.  The job of a judge is to try to restore a damaged equality with a penalty.  The man who has committed the injury has made a gain, and the other party has suffered a loss.  The idea is to rebalance gain and loss, penalizing the man who has made an unjust gain: "therefore corrective justice will be the intermediate between loss and gain."

Some think that justice is "reciprocity," and Aristotle finds that the normal exchange of goods and services is inspired by this kind of justice.

But what about political justice, the relation of all this to men as citizens?  It requires, Aristotle says, "men who are free and... equal."  Given their propensity for injustice "we do not allow a man to rule, but rational principle, because a man behaves thus in his own interests and becomes a tyrant."  So in Aristotle's time as in our own, people wanted a government of laws, not of men.

The Marxists have made a big deal about "reification" the objectivification under capitalism of ideas and social relationships into things and commodities.  You can see their point.  Justice in our time is a much heavier and ponderous thing than it seemed to be for Aristotle.  And the blame for that must lie mostly with the Left, beginning with the Marxians, who want to make everything into a matter of justice and "reify" every issue into a monster government bureaucracy.  There is something in Aristotelian justice that is still ethereal and light as air.

That is a spirit that we should try to recapture for ourselves in the long journey to escape the ponderous mechanisms of justice under modern big government.

Does a Happy Man Need Friends?

Can a solitary man be happy? Maybe. But if you are Aristotle, and you believe that "man is a political creature and one whose nature is to live with others" it would be strange for a happy man to live like a Hindu sadhu in solitary contemplation.

Some people, Aristotle notes, disagree. They say that the fortunate man doesn't need friends. But they are missing the point, at least in Aristotelian terms. For such a person measures other people by their usefulness. His friends are the second-class friends that are not founded on "goodwill" but pure utility or pleasure.  Enough of him!

That is not Aristotle's way. For him, happiness, eudaimonia, is full human flourishing, and full human flourishing must mean friends of the best kind: other virtuous men full of practical wisdom that do the right thing for the right reason in the right way at the right time. A happy, virtuous man needs friends, not for what they can do for him, but for what he can do for them. For a happy, virtuous man will want to spread the wealth around.

And besides, a solitary man would find it hard to be "continuously active," says Aristotle, and since activity is in itself pleasant, therefore friends are needed to provide the occasion for activity. Not only that, but "a certain training in virtue arises also from the company of the good." Even in Aristotle's time, people had to "use it or lose it." And that goes for virtue.

And besides (again?), just as life for animals is perception, life for man is defined "by the power of perception or thought". Thus to perceive and think and see that we perceive and think, and to perceive that one lives is in itself pleasant etc., etc., and since life is desirable and pleasant so then will be the perception of the life of a man's friend, because all the happiness and pleasure of considering one's own life will apply to the consideration of one's friend's life, "and this will be realized in their living together and sharing in discussion and thought".

Oh good. So that is settled. You can see, as so often in Aristotle, the charming hidden agenda. The purpose of life is to sit around and philosophize with a worthy friend. So therefore the happy man, reaching his full flourishing, is a man with the capability and the virtue to philosophize wisely--with a like-virtuous and happy friend. Q.E.D.

Goodwill and Friendship

Says Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics IX-5: "Goodwill is a friendly sort of relation". but not the same as friendship.  And the reason is simple.  In goodwill there is not the "intensity or desire"  that arises in "friendly feeling".  We would not necessarily "do anything with" people to whom we feel goodwill but not friendship.

You might say, he writes, that goodwill is "a beginning of friendship", for philia starts with delight in the "form of the beloved".  But delight does not mean love.  Love means a longing when the beloved is absent and a craving for his presence.  The feeling of goodwill does not encompass longing and craving.

Aristotle seems to suggest that goodwill comes close to his definition of his second-class friendship, that based on utility or pleasure, for he says "The man who has received a benefit bestows goodwill in return for what has been done to him".  Yet he denies it, saying that goodwill "does not arise on those terms", i.e., the friendship based on utility or pleasure.  That is because, he says, the exchange of benefits is "only doing what is just"; men are not friends if they cherish each other "for the sake of some use to be made of" the other.  No, Aristotle insists, "goodwill arises on account for some excellence or worth, when one man seems to another beautiful or brave".

If this is so, then Aristotle is proposing that goodwill is the flash of pleasure that, e.g., a man feels when he sees a beautiful woman across the room.  But he has already said that goodwill does not involve "intensity or desire" and that certainly gets involved in the feeling that a man has in the fleeting view of a beautiful woman.

What then does Aristotle mean?  He just wants to say that goodwill is a feeling, the precursor to friendship, a delight in the other.  But it is not, repeat not, to be dirtied with the second-class transactional friendships based on utility and pleasure.  The best friendship is about love, wanting to spend time, to live next to the other person, wanting good for the other person for their own sake, and not a utilitarian quid pro quo.

And yet surely a friendship based upon utility or pleasure could just as easily start with the goodwill that Aristotle approves of, the glance across the room, the good feeling at seeing the beautiful or brave.  We proceed to friendship, because today and tomorrow we could use a bit of beauty, or could enjoy the pleasure of being around a tasty piece of beautiful fluff.

On Aristotle's view of goodwill, his second-class friendship is not really a friendship.  Only the best kind, the friendship between equals, based on love and wanting the best for the other person on their own terms, only that is the real thing.  Goodwill is the precursor to real friendship, the frisson of attraction.  And it is not to be confused with mere pleasure or mere utility.

Is Aristotle Too Egoist?

It is the fashion today to privilege the notion of "altruism" over the notion of selfishness. Things done for another, in the right way at the right time for the right reasons, are considered worthy. Things done to liberate a group of victims of exploitation are beyond reproach. But things done for ourselves, particularly when performed by businessmen and patriarchs, is tainted with the stain of egoism. This Manichean system, stripped of its veil of illusion, is a system, naked, brutal and direct, to privilege government and political action over those of private citizens in the economic sector and civil society.

Thus some may criticize Aristotle's celebration of eudaimonia of the good man in a life of virtue to be "objectionably egoist."

But we should pause for a moment and consider what might be meant by "objectionable egoism." For when Aristotle speaks of "love of self" in Nichomachean Ethics IX-8 he opens the discussion only to differentiate between the self-loving man "who is grasping" with regard to "wealth, honours, and bodily pleasures" and the man who strives for the noblest deeds, and what "is best for itself" and who "does many acts for the sake of his friends and his country". The latter self-loving man is clearly a horse of a different color.

Perhaps we should extend Aristotle's distinctions in self-love further. Both his ideal types are egoists, but the former is clearly a crude egoist, driven merely by "the irrational element of the soul". The other is a rational egoist, who does things for himself according to practical wisdom, in the right way for the right reason at the right time. It is invidious to call the latter an "objectionable egoist" just as it is pointless to dignify the crude selfishness of the man of appetite with the epithet "objectionable."

Perhaps, in Aristotle's time, there were no objectionable egoists. Evidently, our time is different. So who is this "objectionable egoist?" He is not the man of simple appetite; we call him a selfish bastard, and so he is. Nor is he the naïve egoist, the seeker after a successful career in business or the libertarian follower, perhaps, of Ayn Rand. Anyway such a man at least follows a rational principle, and can justify his egoism with the philosophy of sentiment from the Scottish Enlightenment. No, in our time the "objectionable egoist" can be none other than the government university professor or the liberal NGO activist. For these are people that trumpet to the world their selfless altruism while living a life of utter egoism. Nothing can be more objectionable.

Aristotle has a notion of egoism (to the extent that egoism is possible before the separation of body and mind in Descartes) rather different in mind for his eudaimonia, the life of happiness, conducted as a pursuit of virtue adding up to practical wisdom, doing the right thing in the right way for the right reason at the right time. This individual eudaimonia, Aristotle makes clear, this life of happiness, does not occur in a selfish vacuum, but in a life of full social and political connection. The good man does not love himself as a narcissist might, but in the fullness of practical wisdom, acquiring his happiness through his social contribution. The Aristotelian virtues are not what we would now call strategic or instrumental; they are social virtues, and the good man, in acquiring excellence in these virtues—at an appropriate mean between defect and excess—acquires a social excellence, a facility to contribute to the happiness of his friends not for his sake but for their sake, and to his polis because the practice of political science, next to philosophy itself, is the final end and purpose of individual virtue.

In setting up his argument in Book 1 of Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle defines "happiness" as the one thing we choose for itself, for every other good we choose "for the sake of happiness." But this happiness does not exist in a vacuum, sufficient for a solitary man, but occurs in a social context, and includes "parents, children, wife, and in general... friends and fellow citizens, since man is born for citizenship." Thus "the function of man is activity of the soul which follows or implies a rational principle", in accordance with the best and most complete virtue. And that activity extends to "a complete life."

Aristotle does not require that this happiness, this activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life, occur in a state of self-denial. He looks for a happiness issuing from a complete human flourishing, He sees happiness identified with virtue and with virtuous activity, for "in the Olympic Games it is not the most beautiful and the strongest that are crowned but those who compete". And this life is "pleasant," for "the lovers of what is noble find pleasant the things that are by nature pleasant." Virtue, as we say, is its own reward; it "has its pleasure in itself." Aristotle does not see the world as illusion, and practical activity meaningless. He sees happiness issuing from a real life virtuously led in a real family in a real society in accordance with practical wisdom.

Aristotle does not consider that happiness comes unearned, merely as a gift from the gods, although, he twinkles, if it were a gift of the gods, it would be appropriate, "inasmuch as it is the best." Happiness, he asserts, "comes as a result of virtue and some process of learning and training", the "prize and end of virtue". Happiness is not something that just comes to you; it is the reward of effort and practice.

The practical ethics of Aristotle, celebrating a life of practical wisdom at the virtuous mean between excess and defect, does not satisfy those who yearn for a more salvific meaning of life. From Plato's Republic to Buddha's enlightenment to the Christian idea of poverty to the modern secular religions that define themselves against ordinary human flourishing, Aristotle's eudaimonia represents at best a low bar to aim at and at worst an "objectionable egoism." Plato calls for the destruction of the family and the raising of children by the state. Buddhism calls for a radical departure from ordinary human flourishing as the only way to overcome suffering, and Siddhartha Gautama set the tone by dumping his noble inheritance, his wife and children for a life of contemplation and teaching. Christianity called for complete separation from worldly goods and pursuits, and has ever after wobbled on the edge of an extreme asceticism that rejects the workaday world. The modern secular religions set themselves against the bourgeois ambition and domesticity. They want to bury all egoism and mobilize the entire population in the service of the state, recreating the Prussia of which Mirabeau said it was "not a state with an army, but an army with a state." Even philosophers like William James have found themselves hankering after the moral equivalent of war, celebrating a suspension of normal domestic life in the cause and excitement of moral emergency.

Whatever may be the merits of these utopian fancies, they have not delivered on their promises except when implemented as shadows of themselves. Humans as social animals combine in a mysterious mixture the selfishness of egoism and the selflessness of altruism. They serve others to serve themselves, as Adam Smith declared. Everyone understands that untrammeled egoism is derisive, but not a few imagine that social cooperation means nothing unless it means altruism. Aristotle's life of practical wisdom is a healthy mean between the extremes of selfishness and selflessness. He takes the world as it is, a world of families, of activity, of friendship and politics, and proposes a method not to transform it but to shake a little of the slackness out of it.

It is natural that the good and happy man should "be a lover of self (for he will both himself profit by doing noble acts, and will benefit his fellows)". But he will not shirk his duties as a citizen in his bath of self-love. He does not live congratulating himself on his virtue, for his self-love is a consequence of his happiness, and his happiness a consequence of his living a life of practical wisdom, living the right way for the right reasons at the right time. He is consequently ready to sacrifice his equanimity "for the sake of his friends and his country", ready to "throw away both wealth and honors... gaining for himself nobility" in the activity of the soul following its rational principle.

A man of his times, Aristotle does not worry much about the happiness of women and slaves. But then what modern elitist worries that marriage is collapsing among the white working class and the minority underclass?

Friendliness is Not Just For Friends

Aristotle's idea of friendship is a central idea of his Nichomachean Ethics.  One supposes that its importance lies in the central need of friendships that Aristotle desires in political affairs:  the citizens must be friends, based on an equality of virtue and power, if they are to govern their polis successfully: "Friendship seems too to hold states together".  We have seen in the United States recently how much that mistrust and the erosion of political friendships "across the aisle" have cost the nation.  When partisans only desire to score points on the opposition, the national interest gets thrown under the bus.

Aristotle perceives three kinds of friendship.  There are those who love for the sake of utility: the use the other person has for them.  There are those who love for the sake of pleasure.  But Aristotle is not much interested in that sort of friendship, for such friendships are focused on what is good for oneself, not for the other person.

"Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves."  That is the kind of friendship that Aristotle believes in.  As for the other kinds?  They are included anyway in the perfect friendship of good equals, because good friends are naturally useful to each other and pleasant too.

One may, however, be friendly to other people without being friends.  Aristotle praises friendliness as a mean of doing the right thing in the right way at the right time that lies between the extremes of obsequiousness and churlishness.  Although "no name has been assigned to it" it most resembles friendship.  But it is not actually friendship because "it implies no passion or affection."

It seems obvious that "in gatherings of men, in social life and the interchange of words" that a proper friendliness is appropriate.  Aristotle notes that this friendliness would adapt itself according to the situation.  Proper friendliness would differ: for intimates one style is appropriate, for strangers another.  And Aristotle recognizes, by his extremes, that proper friendliness avoids both rudeness and fawning while recognizing that normal intercourse must involve some level of disagreement and conflict.

The template that Aristotle proposes, as a mean to avoid both giving unnecessary harm and receiving it, it the behavior that a friend might use with a friend, the natural and sensitive behavior of the good man who wishes good for the other person as they would desire it.  Only, of course, in mere friendliness his virtuous man does not presume to love or hate the other.

However, Aristotle's perfect friendship is necessarily the love between equals, and the virtuous mean of friendliness applies to interactions also between unequals.  Friendliness will mean different behavior from superior to inferior than from inferior to superior.  In all cases, the mean of friendliness presumes behavior that is "befitting," a mean peculiar to each social situation that avoids the excess of churlishness or the defect of obsequiousness.

If Virtue is Voluntary, So is Vice

Virtuous actions are voluntary, we want to say, for "the end... is what we wish for, the means what we deliberate about and choose". Yet we like to think that people don't actually choose vice, but only happiness: "no one is voluntarily wicked nor involuntarily happy". Aristotle wants to attack this because it obviously threatens his notion that both virtue and vice are choices.

It could be that a man is ignorant of the means of happiness, but it is notable that legislators do not agree. They say ignorance of the law is no excuse. It may be that a man is careless, and thus his slack life ends up in his being unjust or self-indulgent.

But Aristotle says all this is a choice. You can suppose a man is ill involuntarily, but maybe in the past he had the choice, and disobeyed his doctor. So we could say that he threw away his chance to be well. Thus blindness from birth is one thing, but blindness from drunkenness another.

Of course, we inherit some virtue by nature, but the good man adopts the means of virtue voluntarily. Thus virtue consistently practiced becomes a state of character, as one who trains for a contest becomes excellent by training.

Clearly, Aristotle finishes, all our actions are voluntary: we have a choice each time we act. We start in the right direction, but the progress of our state of character is not so obviously voluntary, just as  health is not the result of specific actions. But since we had the power "to act in this way or not in this way" states of character are voluntary.

And that takes us back to the basic position. Virtue, the state of character, is the result of right action in the right way at the right time. And vice is the reverse.

Aristotle Fiddles the Mean on Courage

It's easy enough to set up a general law or rule.  It's when you have to apply the rule in practice that the fun begins.  So it is with Aristotle's idea of the mean when applied to the virtue of courage.  He defines virtue as a mean between two vices such as "the man of practical wisdom would determine it", for the vices exceed or fall short of "what is right in both passions and actions while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate."  Then, when our man of virtue actually goes forth and acts in the world he acts upon three principles: he must have knowledge, must choose his acts for their own sakes, and must proceed from "a firm and unchanging character."

Very good, that is the theory.  How does it work out in practice when considering the virtue of courage?

In practice Aristotle wants to privilege a certain kind of courage.  It is the courage of the hoplite, the citizen-soldier that stood in line with his fellow citizens  to defend his polis.  You can understand why.  The independence and civic pride of each polis depended upon the courage of its hoplites, the first heavy infantry in history.  Heavy infantry is designed for "shock" battle, and victory depends on soldiers with the courage or the discipline to stay in line, not matter how bad things get.  How about your Aristotelian mean then?

You might think that the professional soldier, experienced and knowledgeable in the "many empty alarms in war" and the contingencies of fighting, would represent the mean.  But the professionals "turn cowards" when things turn against them "while citizen forces die at their posts."  In other words, the professional soldier observes the mean of courage, while the citizen-soldier stands at an excess.  Perhaps the professional soldier, although possessing knowledge, suffers a defect since he does not choose acts for their own sakes, but subordinate to the job of professional soldiering.  Still, he seems to exhibit a firm and unchanging character: he does what is sensible and practical.  Does not then the citizen soldier exceed the mean when he continues to fight shoulder to shoulder with his brothers against all odds?

The "sanguine" also merit the back of Aristotle's hand.  They are "confident in danger" because they are used to success.  But put them in a sudden firefight and they run, unlike the braver man who is "fearless and undisturbed in sudden alarms".  The "ignorant" are just as bad as the sanguine, only worse.  If "deceived about the facts" they often fly from the battle as soon as they are undeceived  And as for courage from "passion", why "wild beasts act under the influence of pain".  Men who fight under the influence of passion, when from anger or pain, are "pugnacious but not brave".  They act not from honor or rule, but from feeling alone.  But Aristotle allows their pugnacity as "something akin to courage."  So here Aristotle keeps with his system: passionate courage is all from feeling, not a balanced application of feeling and reason.

To privilege his citizen-soldier, Aristotle must meddle with his definition of courage, defined back in Book II-2 as the mean between the excess of rashness and the defect of cowardice.  "For the man who flies from and fears everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger become rash." (1104a21-23)  Now he wants us to forget that, for his hoplite must not observe the mean but exceed it if his polis is to win the shock battle of heavy infantry.  Now he says that the man who "exceeds in fearlessness has no name".  Really?  I thought he was the rash chap.  Not a bit of it.  The rash man, it turns out, "is thought to be boastful and only a pretender to courage".  Most of the rash men are "a mixture of rashness and cowardice."  It turns out that the coward and the rash man are similar.  They both of them exceed and they both of them fall short.  So Aristotle's new analysis conveniently leaves the courageous man in the middle (rather than at the extreme you'd think he is at since both the rash chap and the cowardly chap fall short in the courage department).

Why all this fol-de-rol? Aristotle could have held with his excess-mean-defect model just by saying that the rash are wild and excessive.  They want to rush out and attack the enemy rather than advance in the right way at the right time with the right intention.  Sounds like he'd had a bad day in the agora and had forgotten his system for a moment.

So what then is the man of courage?  He lives a mean between fear and confidence, but some things he does not fear: "poverty and disease" and "the things that do not proceed from vice".  Certainly he should fear "insult to his wife", but he must "stand his ground against what is awe-inspiring" even unto death and be willing to face the noblest death, to fall in battle.  Thus he fears what he should, and fears not what he should not, for the "brave man feels and acts according to the merits of the case and in whatever way the rule directs."  Courage is the bravery of the hoplite soldier, but not the courage of the professional soldier, not the man in a fury of passion or anger, nor the habitual courage of the "sanguine" person used to conquering, not the courage of the ignorant.  Courage is for "facing what is painful", accepting pain for the end aimed at.  In the virtuous man, the virtue of courage is all the more excellent since the more virtuous a man is, the more painful is the thought of death.


The idea of the mean is a great idea.  It's just that, when it comes to courage and the defense of the city-state, the mean between excess and defect just doesn't cut it.  The deeper Aristotle gets into his analysis of the courageous person the more his model of the mean falls apart.  See how he proceeds.  In Book III-6 some things are to be feared; some are not.  But the epitome of courage is courage in battle, courage against death, "the most terrible of all things".  Never mind death at sea or from disease; the courageous man is only concerned with the noblest things: death in battle, which is "honored in city-states and at the courts of monarchs."  But this is not a mean between excess and defect, but a striving towards the utmost.  He is "brave who is fearless in the face of a noble death."  What then becomes of courage as a mean "with regard to feelings of fear and confidence"?  They are all forgotten in the celebration of a good death.

But wait, now we are done with Book III-6.  In Book III-7, the brave man, "dauntless as may be" may now, Aristotle tells us, "fear even the things that are not beyond human strength".  But he will "face them as he ought and as the rule directs".  Now the courageous man is not fearless after all, and so we are back at the mean, and the right action at the right time in the right way.  But he will, of course, do all this facing of fear only for a noble end.

You can go just so far with that.  Then it is best to pull up like Mr. Brooke.  In Book III-8 we gather to dispose of the courage of professional soldiers, the passionate, the sanguine and the ignorant, who are said to be courageous but, according to Aristotle, are not.  We come to praise only the courage of citizen-soldiers who "die at their posts" rather than admit that discretion is the greater part of valor.

Finally, in Book III-9, Aristotle trims his notion that courage is a mean between confidence and fear.  It is really more about fear, the "things that inspire fear", for "facing what is painful" just as the boxer takes the distressing blows for the pleasant aim of winning the "crown and the honors".  Thus it is not necessarily always the case that the exercise of virtue is a pleasant, lifelong journey of eudaimonia.  Getting there is often painful.

It's all very well to talk of virtue as a mean between excess and defect.  But the man of virtue is not in fact living at a delicate balance point between two extremes.  The virtuous person is hacking through a jungle armed only with a machete, he is living an arduous life that is located right out on the edge of the Bell Curve.  The man practicing the virtue of courage is straining to the utmost to practice that virtue in the right way at the right time for the right reason.  He is standing shoulder to shoulder with his fellow citizens slowly advancing towards the opposing line of hoplites.  His reward is not to occupy a mean but to cherish the hope that, if he falls in the melée, his awful and painful death will be celebrated as noble and honored by his fellow citizens.

It is telling that the Prussians solved the problem of shock battle with "Prussian discipline" and file closers.  They felt that the fear of combat could only be neutralized by the mindlessness of discipline and the fear of the sergeant.  It was only the in the 20th century that the Germans turned away from compulsion and General von Seeckt called for soldiers "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility."  So for Seeckt courage came more from confidence, not from overcoming fear or a mean between confidence and fear.  Courage is a matter of extremes, as Aristotle accepts, when he shifts his gaze from theory to practice.

How to Judge Actions

If you are a philosopher like Aristotle or maybe a legislator in the business of judging the actions of lesser mortals, you need a template, a measure, by which to rule and hand out honors and punishments.

To do this you probably need to be able to "distinguish between the voluntary and the involuntary" action.  Sometimes, of course, you have to do something, such as throw goods overboard in a storm, that you would normally never do voluntarily.  And sometimes you would face death rather than voluntarily do something evil.

But what about things done by reason of ignorance?  Obviously, says Aristotle, everything "done by reason of ignorance is not voluntary".  Now he makes a fine distinction.  Suppose you do something in ignorance that you would presumably not do voluntarily.  If you repent of your action, your action is "involuntary."  If you do not repent, your action is "not voluntary."

So, says Aristotle, if you throw a pointed spear at a friend, thinking that your spear "had a button on it", your action would be involuntary, since you would surely repent of your action.  That is action in ignorance that is involuntary.  It is hard to think of an action in ignorance that is "not voluntary," i.e., not repented.  Suppose you threw a pointed spear at an enemy thinking it had a button on it.  Would you regret the action when the poor chap fell down dead?  If you didn't regret, the action in ignorance would be "not voluntary."  Perhaps a better example would be Candidate Romney saying that he doesn't worry about the "very poor."  Everyone thinks that this is a stunning error, because conservatives do too worry about the poor.  But if the struggling middle--the folks that Romney says he does worry about--were to wake up and say to themselves, "Wow, finally a politician that cares about us and not the bloody poor!" then Romney would not repent of the action in ignorance.  So that would be action in ignorance that is "not voluntary."

But Aristotle is not yet done.  He does not want to admit that actions due to anger or appetite could be involuntary.  The "wicked man is ignorant of what he ought to do" but that does not make his ignorance involuntary.  Actions done in ignorance but where "the moving principle is in the agent himself" are voluntary.  Thus we could say that the liberal welfare state policies that have cratered the working class are voluntary.  Liberals may have been ignorant of the specific consequences of their policies, but they cannot hide from the results.  It is evil to encourage people to exchange their birthright for a mess of pottage.  Period.

Are Incontinent Fools Wise?

You might wonder why Aristotle is so interested in incontinence that he devotes the whole of Book VII of his Nichomachean Ethics to it.  Is that really a problem for philosophers to worry about?

Well, it is, at least the kind of incontinence that Aristotle worries about.

The continent man is one "ready to abide by the result of his calculations" while the incontinent man is "ready to abandon them."  Why does the continent man abide by his calculations?  Because he knows "his appetites are bad, and refuses on account of his rational principles to follow them."  The incontinent man, on the other hand, abandons his rational principles "as a result of passion."

But if you chop logic like the sophists, worries Aristotle, then you might end up unraveling your rational spaghetti into believing that "folly coupled with incontinence is virtue."  For if continence makes a man stand by a false opinion, then it is good if an incontinent man, that abandons "any and every opinion", abandons a false opinion.

Aristotle briskly clears away the problem of this sophistical mirage, the virtuous incontinent, for he argues that the incontinent man is in the position of someone "having knowledge in a sense and yet not having it, as in the instance of a man asleep, mad, or drunk."  He is like a city that "passes all the right decrees and has good laws, but makes no use of them".  He is neither good nor bad, just a muddle.

But what about the continent man with the wrong opinion?  Well, Aristotle says, these are likely strong-headed people, "hard to persuade in the first instance and not easily persuaded to change".  This is to suggest that an continent man can be consumed with "passion and appetite".  On the contrary, the "continent man will be easy to persuade".  For being a man of rational principle, he is not led by his appetites and his pleasures, but readily bows to rational persuasion.

But let us not confuse the incontinent man with the self-indulgent. The first stands by his choice, and is not apt to repent his follies, while the incontinent man means well but is led astray by his passions.  The self-indulgent man is "incurable and the incontinent curable."  Think of the difference between dropsy and epilepsy, says Aristotle. The "former is a permanent, the latter an intermittent badness."

So that's all right!

What About That Mean?

Every virtue, says Aristotle, brings things into good condition.  Therefore virtue is also "the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well."

Does that mean that the harder you work at virtue, the better?  Not exactly, for virtue is not found in extremes, writes Aristotle, but at the mean between two extremes.  It is "an intermediate between excess and defect."   Thus the great Aristotelian notion of the mean.

But the mean is not a rigid thing, half way between the extremes of excess and defect.  If "ten pounds is too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds."  The mean is an individual thing for each person.

Thus, the mean for Milo the excellent wrestler in the eating department would not the the same as for "the beginner in athletic exercises".  Obviously, Milo would need to eat a lot more than you or me. He's a wrestler in training. Therefore the appropriate mean for him is a lot more than for the beginner.  Today, we would say that it is one thing for a Tour de France competitor to consume 5,000 calories per day, but quite another thing for a couch potato.

The point is that "the master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate," the mean between the extremes. But the mean for each virtue is not the same for everyone; the mean is the intermediate that leads to virtue in each of us.  It is a "mean relative to us" according to a rational principle as a "man of practical wisdom" would determine.

Vice, of course, is different. There is no mean there for Aristotle. It is just bad. There is no such thing as "adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way". Of course that says nothing about adultery with a slave.

With the virtue of honor, according to Aristotle, the mean is "proper pride"; the excess being "empty vanity" and the defect "undue humility."  Aristotle understands honor here as aristocratic pride.  But in Honor: A History, the modern James Bowman defines honor rather differently.  It is the reputation that a hoplite infantryman would have for staying in line, or a GI for supporting the buddies in his unit.  It has nothing to do with aristocratic pride, but is rather the reputation for courage under fire.

Indeed aristocratic pride, so ubiquitous in The Iliad, is a corruption of honor.  It is the insistence that an aristocrat be treated as though he were courageous and unflinching in combat, whether or not he is.

You could call aristocratic honor a vice.

How Many Divisions Has the Soul?

Stalin famously inquired in 1944 how many divisions the pope had.  Reportedly, Pope Pius XII replied that “You can tell my son Joseph that he will meet my divisions in heaven”.

Almost as confusing is Aristotle's explanation of the elements of the soul in Nicomachean Ethics I 13. OK, chaps, he says, there are, first of all, the rational and the irrational, although they are not quite as obviously discrete elements as "the parts of the body."

Never mind about the vegetative aspect of the irrational soul, he says, that operates even in nurslings and embryos, not to mention "full-grown creatures."  This irrational element seems to operate in a world of its own and is uninfluenced by reason.

However, there is another irrational element that seems partially connected with the rational element, and indeed can be influenced by it.  This element is an "appetitive" and "desiring element."  It might move a man "aright and towards the best objects".  But there seems to be another principle that "fights and resists" the rational principle.  Thus the appetitive element shares in the rational element only "in so far as it listens to and obeys it".

Now here is where things get tricky.  The appetitive irrational element seems to be subdivided into two parts, the one that does the right thing on its own, and the other capable of obeying the the rational principle as articulated, e.g., by one's father.

But what about the rational principle?  What about that?  Well, that seems to be divided into two sub-elements too.  For "some of the virtues are intellectual and other moral".  The man of good character we praise for being "good-tempered or temperate"; the wise man for "his state of mind".

So there we are.  For the Aristotelian soul we have a rational element and an irrational element.  We divide the rational element into the intellectual and moral, and the irrational into vegetative and appetitive.  But the appetitive we subdivide into a rational part, insofar as it is persuaded by or obeys the rational principle, and the irrational part, which just does what it does, in opposition to the rational principle.

How many divisions has the soul?  Counting only "leaf" elements, we have five.  Counting all nodes from the complete soul on down, we have a total of nine.  Who knows how many divisions there will be in heaven?

Remember, the point of all this is to understand that "activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue" which is happiness or eudaimonia.

Happiness: Is Virtue Sufficient

Our good friend Aristotle defines happiness (eudaimonia, the good life, or human flourishing) as "activity in accordance with virtue."  But is virtue sufficient for happiness?

Obviously, we can say, it is not.  In the first place, he considers virtue as the springboard of happiness.  If you want to have a good life, your actions must be done in accordance with virtue.  But virtue is the accumulation of habits and education, not to mention contemplation.  They are the necessary means by which we can build the necessary facility, the aptitude, skills, and attitude necessary to a good life.

Happiness is not just a man living a life of virtue in isolation; it requires what Aristotle calls self-sufficiency.  He means, by this, living not just in solitary virtuous splendor, but in a family, responsible for women, children and slaves, and the community of the city-state, "for man is born for citizenship."

And Aristotle tells us that happiness must extend over the whole of life.  It is not just a moment.  We cannot call a man happy if he has been buried, like Job, in unspeakable miseries and has lost everything: wife, children, camels, goats, and sheep.  But we do not wait to call a man happy until we are sure that his descendants will also be happy.

Aristotle seems determined to confuse us when he suddenly turns from his assertion that the practice of political science in legislation is the highest good.  in NE X 8 he ups and tells us that, "perfect happiness is a contemplative activity.  This seems a rather unworthy descent into special pleading for his own function and profession.  Do not plumbers think that the world begins and ends under the kitchen sink?  Do not economists tell us that the world would be a better place if politicians listened more to economists?  If the best life is a life of contemplation, where then is "activity in accordance with virtue?"  He is getting close to the east Asians who tell us that the best is Nirvana, the absence of all striving and acting.  In this case, of course, happiness as virtue collapses precisely into a trance of philosophy, and activity of life reduces to mere intellectual irritability.

Charles Taylor speaks of the best life in two dimensions: a basic human flourishing, of course, but also an attempt to reach for something higher, something transcendent.  Perhaps Aristotle, in his bios theoretikos, his life of contemplation, is making his own reach for transcendence, for "the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative."

In that case happiness is just virtuousness, dissolved into blissfulness.

Aristotle's Waffle on the Function Argument

In our western canon there is perhaps no stronger support for reason than Aristotle's "function argument" in Book I, Chapter 7 of the Nichomachean Ethics.  But plenty of people have challenged the throne of reason.

For instance, in the Daodejing, the Chinese challenge to the rationalism of Confucianism, the ideal is not reason but an effortless spontaneity, the Dao, the Way of life.  Everything is downhill from the Way.

When the way is lost, virtue appears;  when virtue is lost, kindness appears; when kindness is lost, justice appears.

And, one might suspect, when justice is lost, then power appears.

Something similar appears in the West with the Romantic rebellion, a reaction against the totalitarian idea that Reason is everything.

In the Ethics, Aristotle hangs his hat on reason, that "the function of man is an activity of soul [anima] which follows or implies a rational principle," and a good rational principle, well executed, at that.

[H]uman good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtues, in accordance with the best and most complete.

This would add up to happiness (i.e. eudaimonia, which translates as human flourishing) and that in a complete life.

At the beginning of the Ethics, Aristotle tells us what all this is leading to: the highest good, as in managing the relations between men in the polis.  Here he establishes that the highest good is the combination of subsidiary goods, as the skill of harness-making is subsidiary to horsemanship, and horsemanship subsidiary to strategy, and strategy to politics.  And the highest good is clearly politics,

since politics uses the rest of the sciences... it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from... this end must be the good of man.

 But in Ethics X 8, Aristotle backs up a bit, and, once he has dealt with mere pleasure, and established "happiness is activity in accordance with virtue," he discovers that the highest form of happiness is found in "the man who is contemplating the truth", for he doesn't need money like the liberal man, or power like the brave man.  "[F]or deeds many things are needed" but not for the contemplative life.

Anyway, says Aristotle, the contemplative life is much like the life of the gods, for it is ridiculous to imagine them running around doing absurd things like dispensing justice, signing contracts, or confronting dangers.  No, "Happiness, therefore, must be some form of contemplation."  The gods must "delight in what was best and most akin to them (i.e. reason)" in other words, philosophers, and "the philosopher will more than any other be happy."

This is straying rather far from the simple function argument, that happiness is virtuous action according to a rational principle, and that, moreover, the highest and best form of the good is political science and legislating the good of the polis.

In fact, if you think of philosophy as getting close to the gods, then it must be getting close to some kind of ineffable, effortless spontaneity.  Which is what the non-rational Daodejing was proposing about the same time, only thousands of miles away in China.

Let's Keep Things The Way They Are

For Aristotle, the natural order of things is the hierarchical order of city-state Greece.  Masters rule over workers, patriarchs over households of women and slaves,  and statesmen over states.  Every action aims at some good, and the arts that combine subsidiary arts are better.  Thus the highest good involves the rule of the state, for politics encompasses all the other arts as its rule encompasses the rule of all the subsidiary groups.

"Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal."  Anyone outside the state, by nature rather than accident, is like Homer's denounced "tribeless, lawless, hearthless one."  But Aristotle is taking Homer's words out of context.

When the ageing Nestor pats Diomedes on the back and tells him he's young enough to be his son, and is really a good chap, he says

Surely a tribeless, lawless, homeless man
Is he who loves to stir the strife of war
In his own people

and not a nice young man like Diomedes.  Nestor is trying to calm the Achaeans, stirred up by Diomedes' harsh words against Agamemnon.  Agamemnon has had it with the Trojan War and Diomedes, to the approval of the troops, wants to continue.  Calm down, chaps; let's put a steak on the barbie, says Nestor.

By interpreting Nestor's remarks as a put-down of all heads of rebellion, Aristotle is revealing his wider agenda.  He wants not just the natural evolution of things, but a specific order of things.   He asserts the natural evolution of separated villages to coalesce into a state, thus enabling the bare needs of life to expand into the good life.  Parts coalesce into wholes, wholes into bigger wholes and the more developed a thing, the closer it is to its nature.  But that is not enough.  He wants the old to rule the young, for the old aim at knowledge, not action.  And of course men should rule over women and slaves and the Greeks should rule over barbarians, as today we would say that the educated should rule over the bigots and the bitter clingers.

This is a view of social life that experiences the good as an eternal hierarchy, a return to a golden age after the humiliation of the Peloponnesian War.  It does not seem to comprehend the cycle of rise and fall, of birth and death.  We moderns believe it is precisely in the conflict between young and old, between the established order and the rebellious tribeless, lawless, hearthless ones that life is injected into a declining dynasty, and a new social order grows out of an exploitative patriarchy. Natural to us means to maintain a harmony with the growth and the cycles of Nature.

For Aristotle the "final cause and end of a thing" is the best.  For us it is the fleeting moment before the onset of "creative destruction" or the fin de siècle before the revolution.