Proceedings of the Belmont Aristotelians - 03/09/2005

So I had a continuation post planned, but I’ve decided to reorient things for the sake of the lay reader. Suffice to say that Plato’s ethics are grounded in a universal Good. Aristotle doesn’t require a universal; indeed, he suggests it wouldn’t be helpful anyway. Ethics, or character, is about the activities of the rational human soul that aim at well-living and express the human virtue. Activities expressing virtue are crafts like shoemaking, pottery or generalship, but they come from the specifically human capacity to reason and express a virtue peculiar to humans.

As an activity, the good life is only minimally dependent on outside factors like the stock market, natural disasters, and the malicious actions of others. The completely happy life, however, will probably require good outside things more than bad. The point is that we have power to discover and practice virtue; we do not require college degrees because virtue is an expression of our essential natures as human beings. Aristotle’s ethics are therefore very democratic because the “system requirements” for a full, good human life are few and generally present in most people.

The trick is they have to be practiced. Just as the cobbler must make many shoes before he can consistently make good shoes, humans must perform many courageous or just actions before they can consistently act courageously or justly.

I recently had an opportunity to act justly or unjustly with a person I do not even know. I had submitted a review of a book to a website run by a friend of mine and one of his friends. His friend objected to much of the tone of the piece and because he felt it assumed a certain worldview which he felt was inappropriate to the nature of the site. A variety of options presented themselves to me. I could accept the criticism and change the piece to suit his preferences as editor. I could obstinently refuse and accuse him of restricting my freedom as a writer. I could simply withdraw the piece.

I took about a week to settle my emotions, then reread the piece, and decided that I in fact disagreed with the editor’s objections – not that they were inappropriate objections, but that they didn’t apply to my piece. The hard part was writing the e-mail that argued against those objections while still trying to respect the objector, as is his dessert. This, I suppose, would be an ensemple of humility, generosity and maybe even a little courage. The point is not so much that I’m a virtuous person (though I hope I am) but that situations calling for virtuous behavior often appear in the mundane day-to-day events of our lives. As Jacob reflected this evening, some of us may be more inclined naturally to such and such virtues, while finding others difficult, and some of us will be just the reverse, but if virtues are crafts then we can all learn them – but we must do them.

Proceedings of the Belmont Aristotelians - 03/02/05

Aristotle says that humans are political animals. Plato seems to assume the same. Even today, we still struggle with the relation of the individual to the group. How should my “private” self relate to my “public” self?

Jonathan, one of our “founding” members, having read my last Proceedings post, rightly objected that Plato’s imaginary city in the Republic was created, in Socrates’s terms, “playfully,” and on analogy with the human soul, and it is not clear Plato thought the specific arrangement of the rational, spirited and instinctual parts of the soul could really be extended to the city. That is, it's basically about the "private" self. Socrates is often ironic in the text, and many developments of the city must have struck even the Greeks as absurd. On the other hand, to the Greek mind the individual’s identity existed meaningfully only as a part of the state, that is, as part of the group, defined constitutionally according to that group’s values. So the Greek character is always and necessarily considered with reference to the group, and not merely within the individual. But, as our visitor, Bobby, pointed out this week, for the Greeks, character was also a kind of absolute ideal to live up to and participate in. Not a set of rules, but also not a mere personal, or even social, decision.

The Republic can be read as a kind of philosophical justification and exploration for character, broken down into its component parts of justice, moderation, courage and wisdom. The people involved in the dialogue assume these are desirable traits, but want to establish their intrinsic desirability, and not just their usefulness for obtaining other goods.

To draw this all together, then, we might say that if Plato considers democracy the third stage of decay of the ideal city, he does so rhetorically and only on terms of the analogy between the city and the human soul. For a city of people with good characters, we would hope, would be a healthy city no matter what its constitution. However, if you read Plato it is difficult to really get away from his references to actual democracies and their faults. I, too, resist his priority of the aristocratic state over the democratic. If this is the case, it must be because I, we, do not believe in this same absolute character that the good man will find – or we do not believe humans fundamentally good. If there is a good, we should not object to good men and women leading our society. If there is no good, we are left to defending our own desires and wishes, but then we cannot demand of society that it protect those desires without showing how such and such will protect everyone’s desires – and this is the beginning of the modern state. (To Be Continued...)