Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle (384–322 b.c.), the greatest systematic philosopher of ancient Greece, was born in Stagira, an outlying city near Macedonia. He spent twenty years in Plato’s Academy, leaving on Plato’s death in 347, and later founded his own school in the Lyceum at Athens in 335/334. Part of the interval was spent as tutor to Alexander, son of Philip, king of Macedonia. Aristotle’s father had been court physician to an earlier Macedonian king. As Macedonia advanced in its conquest of Greece, Aristotle’s connections with the Macedonian monarchy roused Athenian hostility. In 323, in the anti-Macedonian reaction that followed Alexander’s death, Aristotle was indicted on the charge of impiety and withdrew to Chalcis, where he died the next year.
His massive surviving works range over all fields of inquiry: logic and theory of science, physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and aesthetics. In most of these he laid the basis for the subsequent development of the disciplines. The scope and analytic thoroughness of his works have made them perennially influential. In the late medieval world they constituted the major available corpus of science, and Dante characterized Aristotle as “the master of those who know.” A reaction against his philosophy came with the rise of modern science, but his social and humanistic writings have maintained a continuous appeal.
Aristotle’s distinctive contributions to social science are (a) a methodology of inquiry that focuses on man’s rationality yet stresses the continuity of man and nature rather than a basic cleavage; (b) the integration of the ethical and the social, as contrasted with the dominant modern proposals of a value-free social science and an autonomous ethics; and (c) a systematic foundation for morals, politics, and social theory, and some basic concepts for economics, law, and education.
Methodology and general outlook. Aristotle’s foundation work in logic, of which the syllogism is best known, analyzes general forms of inference. His conception of systematic knowledge is rationalistic, aiming at deductive organization, with primary premises stating the essence, and theorems deriving properties. Beyond essence and property lie incidental or accidental features, and there is no science of the accidental. The distinction between essential and accidental—for example, a man is essentially rational but only accidentally white—is not offered as a relative pragmatic one, but as corresponding to types actually present in nature or reality. Basic concepts and relations in each field are grasped directly as outcomes of an inductive process. Data are furnished by accumulated observation, common opinion, and traditional generalization; and theoretical principles emerge from analytic sifting of alternative explanations.
His explanatory approach is teleological, using the model of craftsmanship: nature works like the artist, although it operates unconsciously. The scientist must therefore look for materials, structure, causal agencies, and directive goals or functions. These concepts are answers to the questions: Out of what? What is it? From where? and For the sake of what? They have been called the material, formal, efficient, and final causes, respectively. In conscious action, the final cause may lie in a purpose beyond the object analyzed, but in natural processes it is the emerging form that guides development, for example, from acorn to oak or from embryo to adult. Even in physics, Aristotle sees the fall of a stone as the striving of its earthen nature to reach its natural place at the globe’s center. Order has priority over disorder in Aristotle’s outlook, as a consequence of the conception of indwelling nature; he rejects the view that change is primary and that all equilibrium analysis is only approximate and falsifying. There are real structures in things; the world is a plurality of what we would today call homeostatic systems, whose groundplan may be discovered and rationally formulated through a kind of structural—functional analysis. Like the world itself, the order is neither imposed from without nor evolved, but eternal.
Matter and form are relative analytic concepts. Dynamically, however, matter is construed as potentiality for determinate development or activity and form as culminating actuality. Thus, man’s psychic life is seen as the actualization of his organism’s potentialities. The soul (psych?) is to the body, says Aristotle, as the power to cut is to the axe. His focus is on the total interactive situation in which man and his specialized organs, the object and its special properties, and relevant features of the medium are brought into relation in the particular activity, whether it be eating, seeing, dreaming, or thinking. His method is thus a general field approach that enables him to correlate physical and physiological study with phenomenological and behavioral study. Philosophically, he avoided the sharp dualisms of body and mind, objective and subjective, that have beset modern psychology since Descartes gave a primary metaphysical role to matter and consciousness. Aristotle’s analysis of human functions culminates in a view of man as distinctively rational, able to express his nature self-consciously and attain contemplative understanding of the orderly principles of different fields.
His methodology thus served admirably for discovering existent order—whether in classifying animal species or mapping constitutions of citystates—and for seeing the development by which the normal individual reaches mature form. It does not provide a method for dealing with evolutionary development in which the new emerges out of a seedbed of constant and incidental mutation.
Ethics and politics . Aristotle’s teleological approach sees man striving toward one ultimate end, which Aristotle identifies as happiness. Since the good is defined as what all men aim at, the normative is not invoked transcendentally; rather it is systematically grounded in the needs, goal seeking, and possible outcomes of human social living. While theoretical contemplation is given the crowning role as man’s highest activity, most of Aristotle’s inquiry is directed to the practical good in man’s social practices and relations. Ethics and politics are continuous. The one studies virtues as character formations, the other studies institutions; but both are concerned with finding ways in which the human make-up realizes fullest expression and how in less than ideal conditions this may be approximated. Aristotle’s integration of the ethical and the social, of norm and fact, is thus not a failure to appreciate a much labored modern distinction but its implicit rejection, based on the assumed continuity of man and nature and an underlying teleology.
The Politics embodies Aristotle’s conclusions from a study of the history and development of 158 constitutions, the constitution of Athens being the only one that survives. The Politics is more than political science. We find in it a concept of a natural order of human institutions, the projection of an ideal order, and the classification and analysis of existent sociopolitical forms and their evaluation to provide a practical program.
Although in Aristotle’s own lifetime, his pupil, Alexander the Great, was building a vast empire and cosmopolitan philosophies of man were to appear, Aristotle himself expressed the conception of the older city-state. The polis, the organized small-city community, represents the natural fruition of man’s sociality. The sophists had insisted on a dichotomy between nature and convention; Aristotle thus took his stand on the natural, rather than the conventional or contractual character of social relations. Direct participation in the constitutional processes of the polis is the essence of citizenship, and the megalopolitan society, with its lone isolated individuals, is contrary to nature. While in the Ethics Aristotle classified basic types of association in terms of the individual motivations of “utility,” “pleasure,” and “common ideals,” in the Politics he studied the specific social relations: master–slave, husband–wife, parent–child, ruler–ruled. He was attentive to qualitative distinctions in the different relations rather than subsuming all political phenomena under a single concept of power or dominance-submission. The conservative potential in his natural order concept is seen in his defense of slavery and of the inferior position of women, as befitting a lower rationality, more capable of following a prescribed good than of actively understanding it.
The ideal order that Aristotle projected is an aristocracy, emphasizing the quality of men and apportioning rule according to merit. He regarded this not as inequality but as a proportionate type of equality, contrasting with oligarchic apportionment (according to wealth) and democratic apportionment (numerical or arithmetic equality). He did not expect conditions in most societies to be favorable for the ideal order, and his preponderant concern, therefore, was with the analysis and evaluation of existent forms.
The classification of constitutions is twofold: (a) a dichotomy between genuine forms, directed to the common interest, and perverted forms, exploitative on behalf of the ruling party; and (b) a numerical classification of rulers into one or few or many. This dual classification yields kingship, aristocracy, and polity (rule by numerous substantial citizens) as genuine forms and tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy as perversions on behalf of the monarchy, the wealthy, and the poor, respectively. Behind this formal classification lies an active concern with locating the vital operative differences in the character and organization of society. Thus he identified oligarchy as rule of the rich rather than merely of the few, and democracy, with its equalitarian slogans, as expressive of the interests of the poor. His examination of subtypes in each of the major divisions—for example, five varieties of kingship, five of democracy, four of oligarchy—reveals both their socioeconomic bases and the conditions under which they may be expected to function. Special detailed attention is paid to the sources of revolution, and, in an almost detached spirit, Aristotle suggested how particular forms may avoid it. A sense of inequality is seen as particularly conducive to revolution.
Aristotle took the central fact of political life in the states of his time to be the war between rich and poor. His prescription for harmony between citizens is polity—a kind of middle-class rule. This is congruent with his general opinion that correctness lies in the mean. In his theory of moral virtue, each virtue is construed as a mean between two vices, for example, courage is a mean between rashness and timidity, harmonizing natural feelings of fear and confidence into a stable pattern. In the Politics, the mean consists in balancing the opposite forces of oligarchy and democracy, so that both the arrogance of wealth and the despair of poverty may be avoided. Numerous governmental compromise devices similar to checks and balances are suggested by him. His general attitude to the democratic masses was far more favorable than might have been expected from a disciple of Plato. Aristotle did not regard the mass of men as having a dragonlike appetite that can only be repressed rather than assuaged. He saw appetite as plastic raw material for virtue or vice and men as capable of exercising considerable collective judgment on the effects of policies and the adequacy of rulers.
Aristotle’s Politics has served as a foundation work for the whole Western tradition. It had a central influence from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, notably in the political thought of Thomas Aquinas and subsequent Christian political thinkers and also in diverging lines such as the political Averroism of Marsilius of Padua. From the sixteenth century on, particular strands in the Aristotelian work stimulated various developments in politics: for example, his economic treatment of politics influenced Harrington in the seventeenth century; sociological elements were taken up by Montesquieu in the eighteenth century; and his concept of community influenced idealist political philosophies such as those of T. H. Green and Bosanquet in the nineteenth century. Apart from the specific content of Aristotle’s work, his general concept of a natural order for man with permanent institutional forms has attracted antirelativist and antievolutionary political theorists. On the contemporary scene, it is often fused with attempted revivals of natural law.
Economic concepts . In Aristotle’s discussions of household management, of the art of acquisition, and of conflicts over property forms, we find basic analyses of production, distribution, and exchange. Aristotle recognized that different modes of production yield different ways of life, and he was conscious of the limits imposed by productive processes; for example, he fantasied an automation myth, in which shuttles move of themselves, as the one condition that would render slavery unnecessary. His general preference was for the society of agricultural estates, not highly intensified commercial society. In analyzing exchange, he distinguished in effect between use value and exchange value and offered a theory of money as a conventional device for indirect exchange. This condemnation of the use of money to produce more money in usury, which he saw as an unnatural distortion of ends, had great influence on medieval views of this subject. Against Plato, he defended private property, largely for its influence on character and the promotion of responsibility; but he was ready to allow considerable social demands on private property for public purposes [seeEconomic thought, article onancient and medieval thought].
Legal concepts . Aristotle seems to have been especially interested in legal concepts. In the Ethics, he distinguished distributive justice, and the different principles of distribution in different types of constitutions, from corrective justice, which restores the balance upset by man’s wrongdoing. His concept of natural justice, distinguished from that of conventional regulations by its universal force, is a precursor of much subsequent natural law theory. A concept of equity is advanced to meet the complexity of particular conditions and the approximate character of legislative enactment. In the Politics, rule of law is preferred to rule of the legislator, chiefly as a protective device against corruption. The Rhetoric, essentially a handbook of training in legislative and judicial controversy, includes much on specific legal method and legal argumentation, combining psychological, ethical, logical, and stylistic materials. In this work, all the tricks of the trade are revealed, but not without a central moral focus on the public’s welfare.
Education . Aristotle’s moral and political writings include considerable treatment of educational themes. Moral virtues are to be developed by practice, with a master as model, rather than through intellectual learning. The process of learning culminates in the development of the facility to make moral decisions, the sensitively cultivated perceptions of men of “practical wisdom.” Similarly, the propaedeutic role of laws and institutions is as strong in Aristotle’s thought as it was in that of Plato or John Stuart Mill. The unfinished, last part of the Politics deals specifically with education. Tying his theory of education to an analysis of human psychology and the ethical theory of the good, he urges that industry be regarded as only a means to leisure and war as only a means to peace. Hence public education is primarily turned to the activities of peaceful leisure, and its goals embrace training for character, citizenship, and cultural pursuits. Cultivation of rational ability and critical judgment is pivotal. For example, Aristotle asked whether liberal education should include learning to play a musical instrument; he concluded that it should, but only up to the point necessary for acquiring sound judgment of musical performance.
Abraham Edel
[For the historical context of Aristotle’s work, seeEconomic thought, article onancient and medieval thoughtand the biography ofPlato. For discussion of the influence of his ideas, seeJustice; Natural law; Political theory; and the biographies ofAquinas; Bosanquet; Green; Harrington; Marsilius of Padua; Montesquieu.]
WORKS BY ARISTOTLE
Works. Translated into English under the editorship of W. D. Ross. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1908–1952.
[Works]. The Loeb Classical Library, Greek Authors. 17 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967–1965. ? Each volume entered separately. The Greek text is given with the English on facing pages.
Politics. Edited with an introduction, notes, and appendices by Ernest Barker. Oxford Univ. Press, 1946. ? A paperback edition was published in 1958 by Oxford University Press.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jaeger, Werner W. (1923) 1948 Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development. 2d ed. Oxford: Clarendon. ? First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Oxford University Press. A major twentieth-century developmental study.
Organ, Troy W. 1949 An Index to Aristotle in English Translation. Princeton Univ. Press.
Randall, John H., Jr. 1960 Aristotle. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. ? An interpretative study of Aristotle’s ideas as living philosophical outlook in modern context. A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Columbia University Press.
Ross, William D. (1923) 1960 Aristotle. 5th ed., rev. London: Methuen. ? The most complete study. A paperback edition was published by Meridian Books.