A Critical History of Greek Philosophy by W. T. Stace (short story to read txt) 📖

passions by reason. Socrates was wrong in supposing that virtue is purely intellectual, that nothing save knowledge is needed for it, and that if a man thinks right he must needs do right. He forgot the existence of the passions, which are not easily controlled. A man may reason perfectly, his reason may point him to the right path, but his passions may get the upper hand and lead him out of it. How then is reason to gain control over the appetites? Only by practice. It is only by continual effort, by the constant exercise of self-control, that the unruly passions can be tamed. Once brought under the yoke, their control becomes habit. Aristotle lays the utmost emphasis on the importance of habit in morality. It is only by cultivating good habits that a man becomes good.

Now if virtue consists in the control of the appetites by reason, it thus contains two constituents, reason and appetite. Both must be present. There must be passions, if they are to be controlled. Hence the ascetic ideal of rooting out the passions altogether is fundamentally wrong. It overlooks the fact that the higher form does not exclude the lower--that were contrary to the conception of evolution--it includes and transcends it. It forgets that the passions are an organic part of man, and that to destroy them is to do injury to his {318} nature by destroying one of its essential members. The passions and appetites are, in fact, the matter of virtue, reason its form, and the mistake of asceticism is that it destroys the matter of virtue, and supposes that the form can subsist by itself. Virtue means that the appetites must be brought under control, not that they must be eradicated. Hence there are two extremes to be avoided. It is extreme, on the one hand, to attempt to uproot the passions; and it is extreme, on the other, to allow them to run riot. Virtue means moderation. It consists in hitting the happy mean as regards the passions, in not allowing them to get the upper hand of reason, and yet in not being quite passionless and apathetic. From this follows the famous Aristotelian doctrine of virtue as the mean between two extremes. Every virtue lies between two vices, which are the excess and defect of appetite respectively.

What is the criterion here? Who is to judge? How are we to know what is the proper mean in any matter? Mathematical analogies will not help us. It is not a case of drawing a straight line from one extreme to the other, and finding the middle point by bisection. And Aristotle refuses to lay down any rule of thumb in the matter. There is no golden rule by virtue of which we can tell where the proper mean is. It all depends on circumstances, and on the person involved. What is the proper mean in one case is not the proper mean in another. What is moderate for one man is immoderate for his neighbour. Hence the matter must be left to the good judgment of the individual. A sort of fine tact, good sense, is required to know the mean, which Aristotle calls "insight." This insight is both the cause and the {319} effect of virtue. It is the cause, because he who has it knows what he ought to do. It is the effect, because it is only developed by practice. Virtue renders virtue easy. Each time a man, by use of his insight, rightly decides upon the mean, it becomes easier for him to discriminate next time.

Aristotle attempts no systematic classification of the virtues, as Plato had done. This sort of schematism is contrary to the practical character of his thought. He sees that life is far too complex to be treated in this way. The proper mean is different in every different case, and therefore there are as many virtues as there are circumstances in life. His list of virtues, therefore, is not intended to be exhaustive. It is merely illustrative. Though the number of virtues is infinite, there are certain well-recognized kinds of good action, which are of such constant importance in life that they have received names. By the example of some of these virtues Aristotle illustrates his doctrine of the mean. For instance, courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness. That is to say, cowardice is the defect of boldness, rashness the excess, courage the reasonable medium. Munificence is the mean between pettiness and vulgar profusion, good temper between spiritlessness and irascibility, politeness between rudeness and obsequiousness, modesty between shamelessness and bashfulness, temperance between insensibility and intemperance.

Justice hardly comes into the scheme; it is rather a virtue of the State than of the individual, and it has been thought by some that the book devoted to it in the "Ethics" has been misplaced. Justice is of two kinds, distributive and corrective. Its fundamental idea {320} is the assignment of advantages and disadvantages according to merit. Distributive justice assigns honours and rewards according to the worth of the individuals involved. Corrective justice has to do with punishment. If a man improperly obtains an advantage, things must be equalized by the imposition on him of a corresponding disadvantage. Justice, however, is a general principle, and no general principle is equal to the complexity of life. Special cases cannot be foreseen, The necessary adjustment of human relations arising from this cause is equity.

Aristotle is a pronounced supporter of the freedom of the will. He censures Socrates because the latter's theory of virtue practically amounts to a denial of freedom. According to Socrates, whoever thinks right must necessarily do right. But this is equivalent to denying a man's power to choose evil. And if he cannot choose evil, he cannot choose good. For the right-thinking man does not do right voluntarily, but necessarily. Aristotle believed, on the contrary, that man has the choice of good and evil. The doctrine of Socrates makes all actions involuntary. But in Aristotle's opinion only actions performed under forcible compulsion are involuntary. Aristotle did not, however, consider the special difficulties in the theory of free will which in modern times have made it one of the most thorny of all philosophical problems. Hence his treatment of the subject is not of great value to us.

(b) The State.

Politics is not a separate subject from Ethics. It is merely another division of the same subject. And {321} this, not merely because politics is the ethics of the State as against the individual, but because the morality of the individual really finds its end in the State, and is impossible without it. Aristotle agrees with Plato that the object of the State is the virtue and happiness of the citizens, which are impossible except in the State. For man is a political animal by nature, as is proved by his possession of speech, which would be useless to any save a social being. And the phrase "by nature" means the same here as elsewhere in Aristotle. It means that the State is the end of the individual, and that activity in the State is part of man's essential function. The State, in fact, is the form, the individual, the matter. The State provides both an education in virtue and the necessary opportunities for its exercise. Without it man would not be man at all. He would be a savage animal.

The historical origin of the State Aristotle finds in the family. At first there is the individual. The individual gets himself a mate, and the family arises. The family, in Aristotle's opinion, includes the slaves: for, like Plato, he sees no wrong in the institution of slavery. A number of families, joining together, develop into a village community, and a number of village communities into a polis (city), or State. Beyond the city, of course, the Greek idea of the State did not extend.

Such then is the historical origin of the State. But it is of capital importance to understand that, in Aristotle's opinion, this question of historical origin has nothing on earth to do with the far more important question what the State essentially is. It is no mere mechanical aggregate of families and village communities, {322} The nature of the State is not explained in this way. For though the family is prior to the State in order of time, the State is prior to the family and to the individual in order of thought, and in reality. For the State is the end, and the end is always prior to that of which it is the end. The state as form is prior to the family as matter, and in the same way the family is prior to the individual. And as the explanation of things is only possible by teleology, it is the end which explains the beginning, it is the State which explains the family, and not vice versa.

The true nature of the State, therefore, is not that it is a mechanical sum of individuals, as a heap of sand is the sum of its grains. The State is a real organism, and the connexion of part to part is not mechanical, but organic. The State has a life of its own. And its members also have their own lives, which are included in the higher life of the State. All the parts of an organism are themselves organisms. And as the distinction between organic and inorganic is that the former has its end in itself, while the latter has its end external to it, this means that the State is an end in itself, that the individual is an end in himself, and that the former end includes the latter. Or we may express the same thought otherwise by saying that, in the State, both the whole and the parts are to be regarded as real, both having their own lives and, in their character as ends, their own rights. Consequently, there are two kinds of views of the nature of the State, which are, according to Aristotle, fundamentally erroneous. The first is the kind of view which depends upon asserting the reality of the parts, but denying the reality of the whole, or, what is the same {323} thing, allowing that the individual is an end in himself, but denying that the State as a whole is such an end or has a separate life of its own. The second kind of false view is of the opposite kind, and consists in allowing reality only to the whole State, and denying the reality of its parts, the individuals. The opinions that the State is merely a mechanical aggregate of individuals, that it is formed by the combination of individuals or families for the sake of mutual protection and benefit, and that it exists only for these purposes, are examples of the first kind. Such views subordinate the State to the individual. The State is treated as an external contrivance for securing the life, the property, or the convenience of the individual. The State exists solely for the sake of the individual, and is not in itself an end. The individual alone is real, the State unreal, because it is only a collection of individuals. These views forget that the State is an organism, and they forget all that this implies. Aristotle would have condemned, on these grounds, the social contract theory so popular in the eighteenth century, and likewise the view of modern individualism that the State exists solely to ensure that the liberty of the individual is curtailed only by the right of other individuals to the same liberty. The opposite kind of false view is illustrated by the ideal State of Plato. As the views we have just discussed deny the reality of the whole, Plato's view, on the contrary, denies the reality of the parts. For him the individual is nothing, the State everything. The individual is absolutely