Part 8

It is this branch of politics which Aristotle discusses in his _Ethics_. He never contemplates a study of the individual's good apart from politics, the study of the good of the society. What then is the good or the best kind of life for an individual member of society? Aristotle answers that as far as the mere name is concerned, there is a general agreement to call the best life, _Eudaimonia_, Happiness. But the real problem is one of fact. What kind of life deserves to be called happiness? Plato had laid it down that the happy life must satisfy three conditions. It must be desirable for its own sake, it must be sufficient of itself to satisfy us, and it must be the life a wise man would prefer to any other. The question is, What general formula can we find which will define the life which satisfies these conditions? To find the answer we have to consider what Plato and Aristotle call the work or function of man. By the work of anything we mean what can only be done by it, or by it better than by anything else. Thus the work of the eye is to see. You cannot see with any other organ, and when the eye does this work of seeing well you say it is a good eye. So we may say of any living being that its work is to live, and that it is a good being when it does this work of living efficiently. To do its own work efficiently is the excellence or virtue of the thing. The excellence or virtue of a man will thus be to live efficiently, but since life can be manifested at different levels, if we would know what man's work is we must ask whether there is not some form of life which can _only_ be lived by man. Now the life which consists in merely feeding and growing belongs to all organisms and can be lived with equal vigour by them all. There is, however, a kind of life which can only be lived by man, the life which consists in conscious direction of one's actions by a rule. It is the work of man to live this kind of life, and his happiness consists in living it efficiently and well. So we may give as the definition of human well-being that it is "an active life in accord with excellence, or if there are more forms of excellence than one, in accord with the best and completest of them"; and we must add "in a complete life" to show that mere promise not crowned by performance does not suffice to entitle man's life to be called happy. We can see that this definition satisfies Plato's three conditions. A vigorous and active living in a way which calls into play the specifically human capacities of man is desirable for its own sake, and preferable to any other life which could be proposed to us. It too is the only life which can permanently satisfy men, but we must add that if such a life is to be lived adequately certain advantages of fortune must be presupposed. We cannot fully live a life of this kind if we are prevented from exercising our capacities by lack of means or health or friends and associates, and even the calamities which arise in the course of events may be so crushing as to hinder a man, for a time, from putting forth his full powers. These external good things are not constituents of happiness, but merely necessary conditions of that exercise of our own capacities which is the happy life.

In our definition of the happy life we said that it was one of activity in accord with goodness or excellence, and we left it an open question whether there are more kinds of such goodness than one. On consideration we see that two kinds of goodness or excellence are required in living the happy life. The happy life for man is a life of conscious following of a rule. To live it well, then, you need to know what the right rule to follow is, and you need also to follow it. There are persons who deliberately follow a wrong rule of life--the wicked. There are others who know what the right rule is but fail to follow it because their tempers and appetites are unruly--the morally weak. To live the happy life, then, two sorts of goodness are required. You must have a good judgment as to what the right rule is (or if you cannot find it out for yourself, you must at least be able to recognise it when it is laid down by some one else, the teacher or lawgiver), and you must have your appetites, feelings, and emotions generally so trained that they obey the rule. Hence excellence, goodness, or virtue is divided into goodness of intellect and goodness of character (moral goodness), the word _character_ being used for the complex of tempers, feelings, and the affective side of human nature generally. In education goodness of character has to be produced by training and discipline before goodness of intellect can be imparted. The young generally have to be trained to obey the right rule before they can see for themselves that it is the right rule, and if a man's tempers and passions are not first schooled into actual obedience to the rule he will in most cases never see that it is the right rule at all. Hence Aristotle next goes on to discuss the general character of the kind of goodness he calls goodness of character, the right state of the feelings and passions.

The first step towards understanding what goodness of character is is to consider the way in which it is actually produced. We are not born with this goodness of tempers and feelings ready made, nor yet do we obtain it by theoretical instruction; it is a result of a training and discipline of the feelings and impulses. The possibility of such a training is due to the fact that feelings and impulses are rational capacities, and a rational capacity can be developed into either of two contrasted activities according to the training it receives. You cannot train stones to fall upwards, but you can train a hot temper to display itself either in the form of righteous resentment of wrong-doing or in that of violent defiance of all authority. Our natural emotions and impulses are in themselves neither good nor bad; they are the raw material out of which training makes good or bad character according to the direction it gives to them. The effect of training is to convert the indeterminate tendency into a fixed habit. We may say, then, that moral goodness is a fixed state of the soul produced by habituation. By being trained in habits of endurance, self-mastery, and fair dealing, we acquire the kind of character to which it is pleasing to act bravely, continently, and fairly, and disagreeable to act unfairly, profligately, or like a coward. When habituation has brought about this result the moral excellences in question have become part of our inmost self and we are in full possession of goodness of character. In a word, it is by repeated doing of right acts that we acquire the right kind of character.

But what general characteristics distinguish right acts and right habits from wrong ones? Aristotle is guided in answering the question by an analogy which is really at the bottom of all Greek thinking on morality. The thought is that goodness is in the soul what health and fitness are in the body, and that the preceptor is for the soul what the physician or the trainer is for the body. Now it was a well-known medical theory, favoured by both Plato and Aristotle, that health in the body means a condition of balance or equilibration among the elements of which it is composed. When the hot and the cold, the moist and the dry in the composition of the human frame exactly balance one another, the body is in perfect health. Hence the object of the regimen of the physician or the trainer is to produce and maintain a proper balance or proportion between the ingredients of the body. Any course which disturbs this balance is injurious to health and strength. You damage your health if you take too much food or exercise, and also if you take too little. The same thing is true of health in the soul. Our soul's health may be injured by allowing too much or too little play to any of our natural impulses or feelings. We may lay it down, then, that the kind of training which gives rise to a good habit is training in the avoidance of the opposite errors of the too much and the too little. And since the effect of training is to produce habits which issue in the spontaneous performance of the same kind of acts by which the habits were acquired, we may say not merely that goodness of character is produced by acts which exhibit a proper balance or mean, but that it is a settled habit of acting so as to exhibit the same balance or proportion. Hence the formal definition of goodness of character is that it is "a settled condition of the soul which wills or chooses the mean relatively to ourselves, this mean being determined by a rule or whatever we like to call that by which the wise man determines it."

There are several points in this definition of the mean upon which moral virtue depends of which we must take note unless we are to misunderstand Aristotle seriously. To begin with, the definition expressly says that "moral goodness is a state of will or choice." Thus it is not enough that one should follow the rule of the mean outwardly in one's actions; one's personal will must be regulated by it. Goodness of character is inward; it is not merely outward. Next we must not suppose that Aristotle means that the "just enough" is the same for all our feelings, that every impulse has a moral right to the same authority in shaping our conduct as any other. How much or how little is the just enough in connection with a given spring of action is one of the things which the wise man's rule has to determine, just as the wise physician's rule may determine that a very little quantity is the just enough in the case of some articles of diet or curative drugs, while in the case of others the just enough may be a considerable amount. Also the right mean is not the same for every one. What we have to attain is the mean relatively to _ourselves_, and this will be different for persons of different constitutions and in different conditions. It is this relativity of the just enough to the individual's personality and circumstances which makes it impossible to lay down precise rules of conduct applicable alike to everybody, and renders the practical attainment of goodness so hard. It is my duty to spend some part of my income in buying books on philosophy, but no general rule will tell me what percentage of my income is the right amount for me to spend in this way. That depends on a host of considerations, such as the excess of my income above my necessary expenses and the like. Or again, the just enough may vary with the same man according to the circumstances of the particular case. No rule of thumb application of a formula will decide such problems. Hence Aristotle insists that the right mean in the individual case has always to be determined by immediate insight. This is precisely why goodness of intellect needs to be added to goodness of character. His meaning is well brought out by an illustration which I borrow from Professor Burnet. "On a given occasion there will be a temperature which is just right for my morning bath. If the bath is hotter than this, it will be too hot; if it is colder, it will be too cold. But as this just right temperature varies with the condition of my body, it cannot be ascertained by simply using a thermometer. If I am in good general health I shall, however, know by the feel of the water when the temperature is right. So if I am in good moral health I shall know, without appealing to a formal code of maxims, what is the right degree, _e.g._ of indignation to show in a given case, how it should be shown and towards whom." Thus we see why Aristotle demands goodness of character as a preliminary condition of goodness of intellect or judgment in moral matters. Finally, if we ask by _what_ rule the mean is determined, the answer will be that the rule is the judgment of the legislator who determines what is the right mean by his knowledge of the conditions on which the well-being of the community depends. He then embodies his insight in the laws which he makes and the regulations he imposes on the educators of youth. The final aim of education in goodness is to make our immediate judgment as to what is right coincide with the spirit of a wise legislation.

The introduction of the reference to will or choice into the definition of goodness of character leads Aristotle to consider the relation of will to conduct. His main object is to escape the paradoxical doctrine which superficial students might derive from the works of Plato, that wrong-doing is always well-meaning ignorance. Aristotle's point is that it is the condition of will revealed by men's acts which is the real object of our approval or blame. This is because in voluntary action the man himself is the efficient cause of his act. Hence the law recognises only two grounds on which a man may plead, that he is not answerable for what he does. (1) Actual physical compulsion by _force majeure_. (2) Ignorance, not due to the man's own previous negligence, of some circumstances material to the issue. When either of these pleas can be made with truth the man does not really contribute by his choice to the resulting act, and therefore is not really its cause. But a plea of ignorance of the general laws of morality does not excuse. I cannot escape responsibility for a murder by pleading that I did not know that murder is wrong. Such a plea does not exempt me from having been the cause of the murder; it only shows that my moral principles are depraved.

More precisely will is a process which has both an intellectual and an appetitive element. The appetitive element is our wish for some result. The intellectual factor is the calculation of the steps by which that result may be obtained. When we wish for the result we begin to consider how it might be brought about, and we continue our analysis until we find that the chain of conditions requisite may be started by the performance of some act now in our power to do. Will may thus be defined as the deliberate appetition of something within our power, and the very definition shows that our choice is an efficient cause of the acts we choose to do. This is why we rightly regard men as responsible or answerable for their acts of choice, good and bad alike.

From the analysis of goodness of character, we proceed to that of goodness of intellect. The important point is to decide which of all the forms of goodness of intellect is that which must be combined with goodness of character to make a man fit to be a citizen of the state. It must be a kind of intellectual excellence which makes a man see what the right rule by which the mean is determined is. Now when we come to consider the different excellences of intellect we find that they all fall under one of two heads, theoretical or speculative wisdom and practical wisdom.

Theoretical wisdom is contained in the sciences which give us universal truths about the fixed and unalterable relations of the things in the universe, or, as we should say, which teach us the laws of Nature. Its method is syllogism, the function of which is to make us see how the more complex truths are implied in simpler principles. Practical wisdom is intelligence as employed in controlling and directing human life to the production of the happy life for a community, and it is this form of intellectual excellence which we require of the statesman. It is required of him not only that he should know in general what things are good for man, but also that he should be able to judge correctly that in given circumstances such and such an act is the one which will secure the good. He must not only know the right rule itself, which corresponds to the major premiss of syllogism in theoretical science, but he must understand the character of particular acts so as to see that they fall under the right rule. Thus the method of practical wisdom will be analogous to that of theoretical wisdom. In both cases what we have to do is to see that certain special facts are cases of a general law or rule. Hence Aristotle calls the method of practical wisdom the practical syllogism or syllogism of action, since its peculiarity is that what issues from the putting together of the premisses is not an assertion but the performance of an act. In the syllogism of action, the conclusion, that is to say, the performance of a given act, just as in the syllogism of theory, is connected with the rule given in the major premiss by a statement of fact; thus _e.g._ the performance of a specific act such as the writing of this book is connected with the general rule what helps to spread knowledge ought to be done by the conviction that the writing of this book helps to spread knowledge. Our perception of such a fact is like a sense-perception in its directness and immediacy. We see therefore that the kind of intellectual excellence which the statesman must possess embraces at once a right conception of the general character of the life which is best for man, because it calls into play his specific capacities as a human being, and also a sound judgment in virtue of which he sees correctly that particular acts are expressions of this good for man. This, then, is what we mean by practical wisdom.

So far, then, it would seem that the best life for man is just the life of co-operation in the life of the state, which man, being the only political animal or animal capable of life in a state, has as his peculiar work, and as if the end of all moral education should be to make us good and efficient citizens. But in the _Ethics_, as elsewhere, the end of Aristotle's argument has a way of forgetting the beginning. We find that there is after all a still higher life open to man than that of public affairs. Affairs and business of all kinds are only undertaken as means to getting leisure, just as civilised men go to war, not for the love of war itself, but to secure peace. The highest aim of life, then, is not the carrying on of political business for its own sake, but the worthy and noble employment of leisure, the periods in which we are our own masters. It has the advantage that it depends more purely on ourselves and our own internal resources than any other life of which we know, for it needs very little equipment with external goods as compared with any form of the life of action. It calls into play the very highest of our own capacities as intelligent beings, and for that very reason the active living of it is attended with the purest of all pleasures. In it, moreover, we enter at intervals and for a little while, so far as the conditions of our mundane existence allow, into the life which God enjoys through an unbroken eternity. Thus we reach the curious paradox that while the life of contemplation is said to be that of our truest self, it is also maintained that this highest and happiest life is one which we live, not in respect of being human, but in respect of having a divine something in us. When we ask what this life of contemplation includes, we see from references in the _Politics_ that it includes the genuinely aesthetic appreciation of good literature and music and pictorial and plastic art, but there can be no doubt that what bulks most largely in Aristotle's mind is the active pursuit of science for its own sake, particularly of such studies as First Philosophy and Physics, which deal with the fundamental structure of the universe. Aristotle thus definitely ends by placing the life of the scholar and the student on the very summit of felicity.

It is from this doctrine that mediaeval Christianity derives its opposition between the _vita contemplativa_ and _vita activa_ and its preference for the former, though in the mediaeval mind the contemplative life has come to mean generally a kind of brooding over theological speculations and of absorption in mystical ecstasy very foreign to the spirit of Aristotle. 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. Mankind, he urges, have never existed at all as isolated individuals. Some rudimentary form of social organisation is to be found wherever men are to be found. The actual stages in the development of social organisation have been three--the family, the village community, the city state. In the very rudest forms of social life known to us, the patriarchal family, not the individual, is the social unit. Men lived at first in separate families under the control of the head of the family. Now a family is made up in its simplest form of at least three persons, a man, his wife, and a servant or slave to do the hard work, though very poor men often have to replace the servant by an ox as the drudge of all work. Children when they come swell the number, and thus we see the beginnings of complex social relations of subordination in the family itself. It involves three such distinct relations, that of husband and wife, that of parent and child, that of master and man. The family passes into the village community, partly by the tendency of several families of common descent to remain together under the direction of the oldest male member of the group, partly by the association of a number of distinct families for purposes of mutual help and protection against common dangers. Neither of these forms of association, however, makes adequate provision for the most permanent needs of human nature. Complete security for a permanent supply of material necessaries and adequate protection only come when a number of such scattered communities pool their resources, and surround themselves with a city wall. The city state, which has come into being in this way, proves adequate to provide from its own internal resources for all the spiritual as well as the material needs of its members. Hence the independent city state does not grow as civilisation advances into any higher form of organisation, as the family and village grew into it. It is the end, the last word of social progress. It is amazing to us that this piece of cheap conservatism should have been uttered at the very time when the system of independent city states had visibly broken down, and a former pupil of Aristotle himself was founding a gigantic empire to take their place as the vehicle of civilisation.