Individual and Community in Greek Thought V

I think it is high time that the class starts to show that it is alive.

Participants are requested to post brief summaries of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics. Each person should take one book (the Republic has 10 books, the Politics has 6) and write a 500 word (max) summary. This will be very useful later. This means that I will expect these 16 posts before August 1. Those not writing now will write on Cicero and Polybius starting perhaps next week.

Plagiarism will invite severe penalties.

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Ευδαιμονια
2. Aristotle 

Plato's conception of the good life is one which is both heroic and tragic. It works by submitting the constituents of living to the most searching forms of scrutiny and rejecting whatever does not meet its requirements: `an unexamined life is not worth living'. The attempt to strip life of its accidents and its inessentials in the quest of an absolute purity has to be conducted through a process of exclusion, and at the end a great part of what normally passes as the human has to be placed aside: material benefits, poetry, rhetoric, the imitative arts, madness. That all these return at important points to complicate the argument is familiar to us, but that need not concern us at the moment. When we turn from works like the Philebus to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics one of the changes we are likely to notice is in the attempt to seek accommodation for a variety of constituents within the fold of ευδαιμονια:

Yet evidently it (the good life) needs the external goods as well; for it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment. In many actions we use friends and riches and political power as instruments; and there some things the lack of which takes the lustre from happiness, as good birth, goodly children, beauty; for the man who is very ugly in appearance or ill-born or solitary or childless is not very likely to be happy,and perhaps a man would be still less likely if he had thoroughly bad children or friends or had lost good children or friends by death ... happiness seems to need this sort of prosperity in addition; for which reason some identify happiness (ευδαιμονια) with good fortune, though others identify it with virtue. (1099 a-b)

Aristotle is linking and virtually equating two major technical terms in his ethical vocabulary: ευδαιμονια and μακαριοτης [eudaimonia and makariotes], the good life and happiness or blessedness. But in this argument both are seen as being to some degree contingent upon circumstance: both apparently can be disrupted by the vagaries of fortune. Thus one view or version of ευδαιμονια  can seem more like ευτυχια [eutuchia], good luck. This is not the sense we have generally in Aristotle's writing though. In other places we do find the state of happiness being connected with inner virtue. Evelyn Cope distinguished between good fortune and good luck in Aristotle by pointing out that the former is related to αυταρκεια [autarkeia], self-rule, and so is impervious to changes in material circumstance. In a famous passage in the Politics Aristotle describes the happiness of the virtuous and says: `herein of necessity lies the difference between good fortune and happiness; for external goods come of themselves and chance is the author of them, but no one is just or temperate by or through chance.' (1323 b 25-30). The debate is a substantial one and has drawn attention in contemporary ethical writing.

The question that concerns us here relates to whether the notion of happiness in Aristotle can be conceived of purely as a state of being, or whether it necessarily a form of activity - not merely mental, but social and political. The drift of Aristotle's thought is towards the latter option: as he says in the Poetics, the end and aim of human life is a kind of activity not just being a certain kind of person (1450a). Thus though in the tenth book of the EN he is prepared to accept the view that philosophical wisdom is the pleasantest of all activities, and that the contemplation of truth is the most permanent pleasure known to human beings (1177a), he is also aware that even the philosopher and the perfectly just man needs the necessities of life and it is only through the possession of these that the just man is able to operate: he needs other people in respect of whom he can be just. There is more than a shadow of Plato in his encomium of the philosophical life as being the most self sufficient, on account of the fact that the philosopher contemplates only truth. But though the pleasures of deliberation of the truth are sufficient in themselves and engaged in for any other reason (as the action of the politician is directed ideally at personal and communal happiness) the kind of life that they entail would, in the final analysis be beyond the realm of the human (1177b). To be perfectly in tune with reason would be to be like a god: `(i)f reason is divine, then in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life'.

What remains possible within the human realm is a more modest definition of virtue:

But in a secondary degree the life in accordance with the other kind of virtue is happy; for the activities in accordance with this befit our human estate. Just and brave acts, and other virtuous acts, we do in relation to each other, observing our respective duties with regard to contracts and services and all manner of actions and with regard to passions; and all of these seem to be typically human. (1178a)

The god-like philosopher sets no store by actions and sees them even as a hindrance to contemplation, but the just man `in so far as he is man and lives with a number of people, he chooses to do virtuous acts'. For Aristotle then, politics is an ethical activity as much as the inquiry into the realm of ethics is `political science, in one sense of the term' (1094b). The necessity for community as condition for responsible living is powerfully presented in the detailed discussion of friendship, φιλια [philia], in which Aristotle refuses to countenance the suggestion that the eudaimon individual can be happy without friends, who are called the greatest of external goods (1169b9-10). `Surely it is strange' he writes, `to make the supremely happy man, μακαριος [makarios], a solitary man ; for no one would choose the whole world on condition of being alone, since man is a political creature and one whose nature is to live with others' (loc. cit. 16-19)

Aristotle's version of the good life thus is necessarily a social one. Nussbaum perceptively remarks that it is formulated that in a critical juncture in Greek history, a period of political upheaval and uncertainty, when philosophy was turning `to philosophical defenses of the solitary good life' (FG 346). As such the cultivation of selfhood is at the same time a supreme form of altruism. The good man, says Aristotle, is a lover of self, for it is in the interest of the self that he will engage in noble acts for his friends and country and if necessary die for them. Renunciation of offices, wealth and pleasure, and even action for one's friend is, in the end, a form of the care of the self. (1169a)

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See: Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986)