The Republic: Book II

Having been introduced to the question(s) of justice (δικαιοσύνη), and provided summary arguments by Socrates, Glaucon remains unconvinced. He makes an extreme argument in favour of injustice which he hopes Socrates will denounce and in its place exalt justice.

Glaucon asserts that justice originates ‘as a compromise...for lack of power to do wrong’, and that ‘men do right only under compulsion’. He protests that men behave justly only because of the reputation and respectability it brings. If a man could go about ‘with the powers of a god’, never being caught for wrongdoing, he would always choose to do wrong; moreover, granted complete unaccountable licence, a man would be thought a fool if he chose to do otherwise.

Taking the argument to a logical extreme, Glaucon says that ‘the highest pitch of injustice is to seem [δοκειν] just when you are not’. The completely unjust man who seems just and has the reputation of being just is invested with all the benefits of society; whereas the truly just man must strip himself of all offices not knowing whether his justness or his reputation brings him these rewards. There is a reversal in the positions of the truly just man and the completely unjust man: it is the unjust man who merits public office and the favour of heaven, and so the unjust life is better than the just life.  

Adiemantus seconds Glaucon and pitches even higher saying that heaven itself allots a hard life to the good man and gives prosperity to the wicked. Moreover, he says, the unjust man can absolve wrongdoing by means of sacrifice. Thus, while there is nothing to be gained but trouble from absolute right-doing, with absolute wrongdoing ‘our desires our fulfilled in this life and in the next’.

Socrates is challenged to explain how ‘justice is intrinsically superior to injustice whether gods or men see it or not’.

Socrates posits that the community (πολις) is analogous to the individual (ανδρος) and proposes to examine the community for understanding what justice is. Arguing that a community naturally comes into existence for no individual is self-sufficing, Socrates asserts that it is best if each individual masters one skill and exchanges its products with others, benefiting the community as a whole. Beginning with a farmer, a builder, a tailor, and a cobbler, the minimal basic city grows to include shepherds, cowherds, craftsmen, agents of foreign exchange and so on.

Glaucon objects to this ‘community of pigs’ which is without ordinary comforts (such as the sofa), and the polis transforms into a luxurious one with appropriate attendants. But now the enlarged community must have access to greater resources, and will have to expand physically. Moreover, Socrates points out, it will attract the attention of other communities which are jealous of its luxury. This is the point where Guardians become important. Keeping in mind the early premise of mastering one skill only, guardians must be trained solely to be guardians. The task of guardianship cannot be performed well, if at all, by other citizens. Additionally, the guardian’s work being most important, (s)he requires the greatest skill and practice in, and a natural ability for, guardianship: the guardian must be swift, strong, spirited and philosophic (loving true understanding), and the guardian’s education must accordingly cultivate mind & body.

As education begins with stories (μύθος), Socrates argues for the censorship, in this proposed community, of all poetry appertaining to religion and to heroes or other admirable, therefore imitable, figures. The Gods must be represented as the cause of only good, as doing only good, and being only good; heroes must never be shown crying or complaining; and there should no misstatements about human life such as ‘wrongdoers are happy’. In other words, poetry must (re)present human life in only the best way.

The Republic: Book I

Plato discusses the notion of ‘justice’ and its worthiness through Socrates in Book I of The Republic that opens with a festive scene where the Greeks celebrate in honour of the Goddess Bendis that is to be followed by an equestrian torch-race in the evening. The whole work (The Republic) is narrated by Socrates after the day of the festival to a small party comprising Critias, Timaeus and Hermocrates.

The previous day Socrates had involved in a discussion on the definition of ‘justice’ which was articulated by one of his aged companions, Cephalus as ‘speaking the truth and paying one’s debts’. But this was counteracted by Socrates who presented them with a problematic situation and enquired if a weapon should be returned to a mad person because it rightfully belonged to him despite being conscious of its dangers at the wrong hands? If giving a person his rightful “due” is considered ‘justice’ then it can be surmised that friends deserve “good” while we owe “evil” to our enemies. But Plato reasons through Socrates that men mostly err in judging “evil” from “good” which often results in harming friends and helping enemies. It, thus, brings out the incoherence of the former statement about ‘justice’.

Thrasymachus, the Sophist rushes into the conversation to savagely contradict Socrates’ reasoning faculty and claims ‘justice’ to be nothing more than the interest of the stronger where the rulers are actuated by the love of offices. Does it pay to be just then? Socrates refuses to delegitimize justice by claiming men’s fallibility in taking the right decisions that often harms their self-interest. Therefore, the government of a nation (tyrannical, autocratic or democratic) cannot incessantly work for its own good without considering the felicity of its subjects just as a shepherd’s sole concern is for the well-being of its flock of sheep “since the perfection of art is actually ensured whenever all the requirements of it are satisfied”.

Is injustice then more “gainful” than ‘justice’ and does it have more “strength”? While Thrasymachus classifies ‘justice’ with “sublime simplicity” (for the honest man does not try to gain advantage over the just) and ‘injustice’ with “discretion” (for the unjust man’s undetected astute moves are advantageous and profitable for him), Socrates once again employs the analogy of art to annul this statement. A skilled doctor or a musician does not try to gain more than a skilled man of the same profession. He rather aims at outshining the unskilled man for he considers that a “just” action. But the unskilled man makes random efforts at excess. Thus, the skilled falls on the virtuous side (as “knowing is wise” and “wise is good”) and the unskilled on the side of the evil because it is contrary to wisdom which is considered as a virtue. Also Socrates proves wrong “that injustice had strength” by citing the example of a band of bandits where every member has to have some remnant of ‘justice’ in them for harmonious co-existence (as injustice creates division within the self and with others). Therefore, absolute injustice cannot account for absolute strength.

Every art has an end and a virtue or “excellence” to attain the end and the proper end of the soul is “life” that is attained through “justice”. Book I of The Republic does not end with an exact definition of ‘justice’ but moves away from the conventional definition of it thereby proving it to be virtuous and desirable.

Augustine and the rejection of classical political theory

Here are some extracts from an article I wrote a long time ago. I hope it will make the reading of the sections from Augustine easier.
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Augustine is widely seen as the architect of a Christian view of history, sharply distinct from the forms of classical history: the view is substantially true, for even though earlier Christian writers had written on the way the history of man must be understood, the clarity and depth of Augustine’s treatment make it the most accessible and exhaustive treatment of its kind. There are however problems of assessing this view simply, for Augustine is primarily a polemical writer and he is often concerned with making hard distinctions, and thus simplifying issues. Another difficulty is terminological, for like many other early Christian writers, Augustine is apt to try to organize his arguments around the particular uses of words: when he says, memorably, for instance “ what is the life of the saints if not a social life?” (si non esset socialis vita sanctorum) he is far from asserting the supreme value of the vita socialis. It takes little thought to realize that many of the key words that figure in a discussion of history – time, eternity, politics, society, fortune, providence, and so on –Augustine continually shades and sharpens the nuances of words.

We might start with a point about time, a subject on which Augustine has much to say. The quotation is from XII.14 of the City of God.

The Physicists for their part considered that there was only one possible and credible way of solving this difficulty; and that was by the postulate of periodic cycles. They asserted that by those cycles all things in the universe have been continually renewed and repeated, in the same form and thus there will be hereafter an unceasing sequence of ages, passing away and coming again in revolution. These cycles may take place in one continuing world, or it may at certain periods the world disappears and reappears, showing the same features, which appear as new, but which in fact have been in the past and will return in the future. And they are utterly unable to rescue the immortal soul from this merry-go-round, even when it has attained wisdom: it must proceed on an unremitting alternation bewteen false bliss and genuine misery.[1]

In the present passage he is talking about a restricted and specific issue, that of theories of cyclical recurrence of the universe put forward by pagan writers. The “controversy” that he alludes to at the beginning of the passage cited is discussed in earlier chapters of the twelfth book. Taking the possible objection to the Christian belief that human beings were created less than 6000 years before the present, he strongly argue that such a date in no way impugns human dignity: for, had human beings existed for sixty thousand years or six hundred thousand, this period of time would have no significance in the context of divine being:

...God's pause before the creation of the world and was eternal and without beginning, so that compared with it an inexpressibly large number of centuries, which must still have an end and a defined extent, is not so much as the smallest drop of water compared with all the oceans of the world; for in this comparison, though one is tiny and the other incomparably huge, still both terms are finite.[2]

For Augustine the doctrine of cyclical recurrence is false because it runs contrary to both the eternal, timeless being of god, and the time-bound existence of the human subject in the world, at the conclusion of which the soul too is delivered into immortality, whether that of suffering or that of happiness.

Undoubtedly Augustine is thinking here both of Plato[3], whom he cites repeatedly, and Aristotle and the Stoics, whom he does not cite at all, all of whom use the image of the circle in trying to understand problems of time and history. Aristotle for instance is trying to understand time in terms of motion when he says:

...all other things are discriminated by time, and end and begin as though conforming to a cycle; for even time itself is thought to be a circle... time is the measure of such locomotion and is itself measured by such. (Physics, iv, 223b-224a)[4]

Of course, Aristotle is clearly aware that the circle is no more than a figure of speech here, and not an inherent quality of time itself. Other classical writers may have expressed the image more simply, constructing a cyclical pattern of historical movement. Though the Graeco-Roman historian Polybius is most often identified with the doctrine of the cycle of constitutions, J.B. Bury points out that the idea is actually very old:

The theory of a recurring cycle of political constitutions which comes from Plato and the Stoics is an application of the cyclical theory of the world process which was propounded by the early philosophers. Such a theory is more or less implied by Anaximander and Heracleitus but it was clearly formulated, in very definite terms by the Pythagorean school [5].

Augustine’s principal criticism of the doctrine of cycles is located in his assertion of the uniqueness of Christ’s sacrifice: “For once Christ died for our sins; and, rising from the dead, He dieth no more.” A second point is more argumentatively made. If true happiness is that which is without end (i.e. to be true, happiness must be eternal), it must be put outside of time altogether: “if the soul goes from misery to happiness, nevermore to return, then there is some new state of affairs in time, which will never have an end in time. If so, why cannot the same be true of the world? And of man, created in the world?"[6]

There is little doubt that the image of the circle and of cyclical recurrence is widely disseminated in classical notions of time. It needs to be stressed though that though the image of a cycle could be used to structure forms of human behaviour and social development, it seems correct to point out that the idea that all things come around in circles is often more of a rhetorical commonplace than a considered philosophical doctrine. The oft quoted maxim "there is nothing new under the sun" could coexist with a belief in the uniqueness of certain historical events or political conditions. It need not be said that the idea that classical historiography thas a homogenous character is patently false. Thucydides's sly reference to "the absence of the fabulous" in the first book of his history is clearly directed at his elder confrere Herodotus. Aristotle famously dismissed history as being of limited value because it dealt only with particular events and did not allow an ascent into generality. Aristotle of course is a hostile witness: but then even the great works of Greek history like those of Herodotus and Thucydides while assuming the importance of writing history make no claim for any kind of grand design in history, save occasionally repeating the commonplace that human affairs or fortunes follow a repetitive course. "Whoever shall wish" writes Thucydides, " to have a clear view (saphes skopein) both of the events which have happened, and of those which will some day, in all human probability, happen in the same or a similar way – for these to adjudge my history profitable will be enough for me" (History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.22.4)[7] Both Herodotus and Thucydides – who offer widely different models of historical narrative - evince strong faith in the intelligibility of history: Herodotus’s comparative, ethnographic approach as much as Thucydides’s attempt to study the problem of historical causality.

Post-Aristotelian – particularly Roman - writers were more willing to make the connection between time’s movement and that of history. The Polybian anakuklôsis politeiôn summarises the expectation that a study of history could shed light on the pattern of changes in the state of the polity. Here too it would be more correct to say that in general the classical mind did not expect anything radically new in history: at the same time there was no real consensus on the degree of intelligibility the universe – the phusis – had. To study the past in the form of history was to prepare oneself for the future because it could be reasonably expected that the future would not in any radical way differ from it. Yet human life, imagined in the complementary yet distinct forms of epic, tragedy and history, continually pointed the degree to which the past could not in fact fully prepare us for the present or the future. As John Pocock observed the recurrent trope in Greek history is that of irony, the recognition that human affairs rarely turn out the way in which human beings think that they will[8]. The comparison with the great forms of poetry seems all the more relevant.

…

For Augustine, secular political life, replete as it was with examples of virtue, it could not be the means to salvation. The institutions of political and social life themselves are so affected by the consequence of Adam's sin that they cannot play any role in man's ultimate destiny. Rome was never a republic, he says, because true justice never had a place in it. The Christian imagination radicalized concepts like justice, liberty and truth, and attributed to them special and unalterable meaning. True justice, writes Augustine, "is found only in that true commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ; if we agree to call it a commonwealth, seeing that we cannot deny that it is the weal of the 'community'" (II.21)[9] .

…

Augustine's reflection on society in the City of God, thus, is shaped through difference and contrast. The two cities radiate a whole web of distinctions, which serve to define the life of the elect. These distinctions, one might say are both symptomatic and constitutive: from the earliest phases of its growth, Christian thought reveals the importance of a mode of thought that is based on radical alterity. The emphasis on the unavoidable existence of the Christian saints within the structures of historical time, their vita socialis, serves ultimately to expunge the value of worldly experience altogether. The city of God exists, as it only can, within the saeculum, disordered and tension-ridden as it is. History as a whole, as Robert Markus observes, is:

the consequence of a world plunged into the ambivalence of time: time as the vehicle of sin and tragedy, as well as the redemption ... Man, therefore, creates a historical situation for himself in the very same act in which he provides God with an opportunity to exercise within human history his saving work.[10]

The saint is both in and out of the saeculum, experiencing and sharing its tragic character, but also insulated from it through grace. Society, thus, is for Augustine at the very best remedial. It may try to address the chaotic state that results from the fall, but cannot cure it. H.A.Deane points out that for Augustine, political authority, like illness or distress, is among the consequences of man's fallen condition[11].

This may help us to better understand the nature of the socialis vita sanctorum. Certainly it is a social life, but by the same token it is also full of tension and insecurity. Augustine tells a parable about a wise judge who is forced by circumstance to dispense injustice (XIX.6)[12]. We recognize that his actions are prompted by a desire for justice and order, yet we find that his desire leads him to the commission of unjust acts, like the torturing of innocent witnesses. Ever so often, he suceeds only in bringing death and destruction on the heads of many. "We acquit the judge of malice", says Augustine, but "we must nevertheless condemn human life as miserable". Social life has its needs and to acquit them we entangle ourselves further and further in a web of necessity. The ultimate expression of freedom that Augustine can think of is thus the prayer of the Psalmist: "Deliver me from my necessities". Throughout the City of God we confront this ditsressing and disturbed vison of human life . Suffering inevitably from an infection so deep that no human agency can properly redress it, human society – whether we examine it at the level of household, city or world – is ridden with injustice and sadness. Neither secular ethics nor political virtue can cure this malady.

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[1]Augustine, City of God , trans. H Bettenson, ed. D.Knowles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 487

[2]Augustine, City of God, p. 486

[3]The reference is to Timaeus 28-9

[4]The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R.McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 300

[5]J.B.Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians (New York: Dover, 1958), p.205

[6]Augustine, City of God, p. 487

[7]Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1. 22.4; trans. C.F.Smith (Loeb Classical Library, London: William Heinemann, rev.ed. 1928), vol. 1, p. 41

[8]On this, see J G A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) Chap. I; an interesting if somewhat extreme view of the rhetorical character of classical historiography is developed by A J Woodman in Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988). Woodman contends that for the classical intellect, writing history was a "rhetorical genre", for a discussion of Thucydides, see Ch I, esp. pp 23 ff.

[9]Augustine, City of God, p. 75

[10](Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) , 10-11)

[11]H A Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963) p. 117

[12]Augustine, City of God, p. 860

Individual and Community in Greek Thought VI

Comedy and Tragedy

We conclude this discussion with a brief reflection on the ways in which the notions of individual and community are presented in the forms of Greek drama. As with the other issues I have dealt with, I can merely hint at one of the many possibilities that could be taken up. It is clear that these forms are profoundly interesting from the point of view of our subject dealing as they do with the refractions of self and other, merit and responsibility, the group and the hero. These forms may also be thought to afford us our deepest insights into the construction of individual identity, and the intimacy with which the self is realized is undoubtedly unique to them. Vernant's unwillingness to grant the notion of the `ego' or the person (MI 321) a substantial place in Greek thought seems to skirt around the experience of tragedy. Medea's troubled realization

               I know indeed what evil I intend to do

               But stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury (1078-9)

is obviously different from the mode of the confessional or the diary, but is no less an attempt to document a state of psychic intensity. My argument however is not about the individual themes of drama as about their forms. The two great modes of fifth-century Greek drama - quite irrespective of theories of origins - seem to reveal a kind of complementarity in respect of their formal dispositions. Some of these contrastive relationships are touched upon by Aristotle in the Poetics (chs. 2-5, passim). One of the distinctions made is in respect of the agents of the respective forms, with tragedy seen as imitating those better and comedy those worse than ordinary people (ch. 2, 1448a). It is likely that better and worse at this point are not moral terms and are used mainly in a technical sense (Aristotle glosses `worse' as a species of the ugly, 1449a). It may be that Aristotle has the possibilities of idealization and satire in view; but a more fanciful interpretation could be that tragic and comic agents are distinguished on the basis of the forms of intelligence that they exhibit. Tragic intelligence, on the face of it, is noble and heroic, but also lacking in pragmatism. When we consider the ends that the tragic hero pursues, we see that self-preservation is not one of them, for he/she fails (or refuses) to try to protect himself or herself by trying to evade death and disaster. Comedy on the other hand interiorises a kind of intelligence that corresponds to Detienne and Vernant's classification of μητις [metis], cunning or pragmatic intelligence, a stochastic ability that agents exhibit in averting danger and forestalling their enemies. In this sense a shade of ethical valuation is present: there is no doubt that Aristotle regards self-abnegation (itself a form of triumphant self-regard, see supra) as ethically superior, and would presumably class comic intelligence as the inferior kind of self-love stigmatized in the Nicomachean Ethics. Detienne and Vernant point out that pragmatic intelligence, the logic of self-preservation, is conspicuous by its absence in the early philosophical traditions, Greek as much as Christian.

Should one then see tragedy as tending towards a `greater' good - individual and communal alike - and comedy restricted by the limits of self-interest? Or, to put it in a different way, does the action of tragedy more readily invested with marks of altruism than that of comedy? The great paradigms of tragic action - especially as found in Sophocles - could be thought of as supporting such a conclusion: Oedipus acts on behalf of the community, taking its sufferings upon himself:

               For in your case his own particular pain

               Comes to each singly; but my heart at once

               Groans for the city, and myself, and you

The wounded outcast Philoctetes is made to lay aside his anger and pride and take up his magic bow in aid of the Argives. On the other hand, the clever agent of Aristophanic comedy is often seen as assiduously pursuing self-interest, as the sharp capitalist Dikaiopolis in the Akharnians, or the farmer Gorgias in the Peace. It seems to me the case however that the experience of reading the plays themselves suggests otherwise. Comedy reverses the logic of self-interest that it introduces at the beginning - the Aristophanic hero is usually at the beginning to be very much in a minority - to suggest that what we had so long read as `cunning' intelligence is actually the basis of a new view of the world. One might say, therefore, that in comedy altruism is only misrecognized as egoism; the hero's actions form the basis of a transformation of the social order.

Tragedy, on the contrary, holds on to a concern for the self that is unique in the Greek experience. Whatever may be the reasons assigned for the hero's actions - family honour, state interest, communal safety, the enmity of fate - the real cause for acting must be discovered within the self of the protagonist. The action of tragedy decisively separates the heroic individual from the community he or she initially forms a part of: the protagonist is viewed in a state of radical singularity, a naked selfhood. This is the reason, perhaps, that it is the tragic theatre that is able to comprehend aspects of human experience that are ineluctably private: madness, irrationality, the life of the emotions, confusions of identity and gender. Thrown upon the resources of his own selfhood, the tragic hero can act only for himself or herself, notwithstanding how others appropriate the same actions or benefit from them.

Texts

Here is a list of the texts which will be studied in class. Not all of them will be done in full: but the arguments in all cases are important and will require careful attention. Soft copies of all these texts will be made available before August 1.
Please also note that blog posts are part of the grading process for the course.

Texts
Section 1
Bartolus of Sassoferrato: Treatise on City Government, 1330
Bartolus of Sassoferrato: On the Conflict of Laws, c1340
Marsiglio of Padua: Defensor Pacis, 1324
Giovanni Villani: Extracts from the Florentine Chronicle, c 1340
Francesco Petrarca: Rules for the Successful Ruler, c1350

Section 2
Leonardo Bruni: Panegyric on the City of Florence, 1403-4
Leonardo Bruni: Funeral Oration for Nanni Strozzi, 1427
Baldassare Castiglione: The Courtier, 1528
Desiderius Erasmus: Education of the Christian Prince, 1516

Section 3
Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince, 1513

Niccolo Machiavelli: The Discourses, 1517

Francesco Guicciardini: Dialogue on the Government of Florence, c1520

Section 4

Jean Bodin: Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1576

Section 5

Martin Luther: On the Robbing and Murderous Horde…, 1525

Jean Calvin: On Civil Government, 1539

Christopher Goodman: Superior Powers, 1558

Philip du Plessis-Mornay: Defense of Liberty, 1579

A few more may emerge as the discussion progresses.

Do start reading the texts, side by side with Skinner's Foundations.

I've put all the relevant texts in the Dropbox folder.

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)

Individual and Community in Greek Thought IV

Ευδαιμονια

1. Plato

Both war and religion are important themes in the Greek drama, and here the configurations of the individual and the communal have evidently have significant bearing on egoism and altruism. I would, however, like to defer the discussion of the drama till we have looked at a few examples from philosophical writing. It is necessary to limit our discussion severely here, for there is the real danger of being swamped by the material available. It may be argued that the respective realms of το ιδιον and το κοινον, the individual and the common, are most efficiently disposed in Greek philosophy, with the quest for happiness, ευδαιμονια [eudaimonia], being posited as the end of both personal and communal living. The idea needs, however, further elucidation, and I would like to discuss two sets of examples from Plato and Aristotle respectively. In the Republic (344 e) Socrates links the idea of justice, the foundation of social existence, with living happily. In response to Thrasymachus' blustering attempt to prove that forceful injustice is `stronger, freer and more masterful' than justice, Socrates says that the question needs to be understood in more general way: `Do you think it a small matter that you are attempting to determine and not the entire conduct of life that for each of us would make living most worthwhile?' Socrates' defence of justice begins with the attempt to constitute the state `from the beginning'. As justice is a personal attribute, it is that of the state too: but as the state is larger than the individual, the scope of justice is larger in the state than in the individual. The origin of the city is in the fact that individuals lack many things: dwelling together as mutual helpers and associates, through an interchange of giving and taking (369 e). The discovery of the origin of the city in this kind of necessity allows us to strike a perfect mean between self interest and communal interest.

Though the parallel between the just individual and the just state is continually reiterated, it seems correct to say that the Republic promotes specificity without individuality. The absolute needs of justice, understood as a hard division of acquired skills and natural propensities, does not leave any room for the emergence of individual identity. The process is viewed more as a fusing of individual capacities in the interests of the community: the guardians, the military elite, are imposed certain restraints like a ban on private belongings and wealth, frugality of life, restrictions on movement and communal residences. When this lack of a `private' dimension to their lives is commented upon - the appurtenances of fine living, sacrifices to the gods, convivial hospitality - Socrates argues that the happiness of the state rather than of any individual class is what matters here. It is not just that political life is seen as being as valuable for the philosopher as the contemplative life. If in both cases the sources of instability and disharmony - in the soul as much as in the state - need to be identified and eliminated, one line of approach is by radically altering the boundaries of self and other. In Book Five of the Republic, identifies family and private property as the principal causes for social conflict and proceeds to get rid of these problems by communalizing sexual relationships and child-rearing: instead of doing away with the notion of property, it is spread among all the members of the community. Martha Nussbaum observes this requires a transformation of life from the very beginning: `farmed out to interchangeable wet-nurses, prevented from forming special or intimate bonds with particular parental figures, and later with particular sex-partners, these citizens will treat all citizens as ... interchangeable exemplars of the same values' (FG 159). The best-ordered city is that, says Socrates, in which `the greatest number use the words `mine' and `not mine' of the same things in the same way'. The argument is repeated in the Laws: the first and best society is one with the best constitution and the best code of law, and in which all means have been taken to eliminate everything we mean by ownership from life; .... all possible means have been taken to make even what nature has made our own in some sense common property (739 c).

Because the realm of το ιδιον has thus been forcibly uprooted from the process of living, all actions one might say, are automatically altruistic: not because there is a definite ethical predisposition of this kind, but because of the way in which the orders of the private and the public have been reconstituted.  

Yet a certain uneasiness remains in the argument, and we may well feel that we have grasped the wrong end of the stick. Much as Plato admired the Spartan model, and drew upon features of the Spartan αγωγη in his own ideal of παιδεια [paideia], or education, the radical effort at social engineering that he outlines in Republic seems to have its roots in certain basic philosophical concerns which are repeatedly expressed in his discussions of wisdom and pleasure. The need for stability and the attempt to view the object of philosophical contemplation in its purest form lead to a notion of absolute value. The superiority of the philosopher's life is because the constituents of this life are the most stable and valuable: a truly rational standpoint would necessarily and in every case lead to the identification of the same objects of pleasure. At the same time because we are necessarily committed to modes of social life, the pursuit of philosophical goods, ευδαιμονια, is complicated and restrained by the instability of social life and the variability of the interests of the members of the community. The answer therefore is to imagine plurality in the form of unity, and postulate as much of the pleasures of philosophical contemplation to the community as possible. The comparison of the individual and the community in the Republic appears in this view not as an attempt to get rid of the private but to make the community operate as far as possible as an individual:

"That is the kind of state then, I presume, that, when anyone of the citizens suffers aught of good or evil, will be most likely to speak of the part that suffers as its own and will share the pleasure or pain as a whole." (462 d-e)