A good problem
The fact that Socrates wrote nothing, himself, but made such an impression on others, makes him pretty easy to write about. Moreover, the fact that Plato’s central arguments about the Realm of Pure Forms cannot stand up to rational scrutiny makes discussions of his ideas relatively straightforward.
However, when it comes to philosophers who have a vast range of good ideas, matters become much more difficult, and so it is with Aristotle.
Don’t misunderstand; a wealth of good ideas that continue to resonate, today, more than 2,200 years after they first appeared, means that the need to cull through them makes for a good problem. Still, it is a problem.
Aristotle of Stagirus, born a generation after the death of Socrates, in 384 BCE as the son of Nichomachus, court physician to Amyntas, king of Macedonia, contributed to the development of Western Civilization about as much as anybody possibly could. Unfortunately, that means it takes a lot of work to winnow things down a bit. The finest – and most significantly critical — student ever produced by Plato’s Academy, in Athens, he may have written up to 200 treatises, of which only 31 survive – mostly in the form of lecture notes.
Aristotle contributed to many fields of study, including mathematics, physics, ethics, political theory and metaphysics, as well as botanical science and agriculture. In most areas, he not only contributed, he changed the study of the topics, profoundly. While perhaps not quite as impressive as it sounds, by modern standards (Classical Greece had limited enough knowledge that anyone who studied assiduously could master the state of the art on many different topics), it nonetheless demonstrated a rare intellectual discipline.
There’s no way this blog can cover Aristotle’s many gifts, or even begin to scratch the surface of the tens of millions of words that others have written about him in the more than 2,300 since he lived and worked. Moreover, I’ll not try to exhaustively recount everything he did in a long and productive life of study and contemplation.
Rather, I’ll just focus on the two (or three, or four…) topics that I think most profoundly shaped Western philosophical thinking – and those I think remain the most valid, today. I’ll start with the largest disagreement Aristotle had with Plato’s thinking – the disagreement that caused him to leave the Academy, travel around the Greek world, for a bit, and eventually return to Athens to start his own university at the Lyceum, a gymnasium located just outside the eastern walls of Athens.
As with any other student, Aristotle started out as a dutiful follower of the teachings of his professors and, as with many students, he eventually began to question the validity of the lessons he learned. However unlike most students, Aristotle had the intellectual chops to not only stand up to Plato’s thought, but to provide a better model of reality than even the premiere student of Socrates.
Plato, as with Socrates before him, tried to address the subjectivism of the sophists with the claims that all virtue and all beauty were just different aspects of some sort of universal beauty, some sort of cosmic virtue. Plato further tried to argue that the entire universe and every material thing in it acted as a projection of the Realm of Pure Forms, which somehow had a connection to the human mind that made us capable of slowly discovering reflections of perfect virtue, perfect beauty, in much the same way as we discover mathematical proofs.
To Aristotle, that argument seemed to offer a weird combination of absurd simplicity and intricate complexity. The concept that all virtue and all beauty were merely facets of the same core forms seemed entirely too simplistic, to him, while the question of how awareness of the contents of the Realm of Pure Forms made it into human minds seemed to present absurdly convoluted implications.
Rather than try to tackle how best to prove Plato’s notions, Aristotle took a step back and questioned the underlying assumptions. What if each idea had as an inherent quality its own virtue (or lack, thereof)? What if the beauty of a thing (a flower, a statue, a mountain, a sunset on a wine-dark sea) existed not a reflection form some otherworldly realm, but lay within the thing, itself?
With those questions, Aristole dispensed with the awesome complexity of the implications of some sort of higher realm and how it connected to the human mind, and made virtue and beauty part of the same material universe in which human minds existed. Each flower had its own beauty, distinct from the beauty of other flowers or, for instance, sunsets or well-tended gardens, or well-designed buildings or attractive young men and women.
That meant the human mind, as it existed in the material universe, simply perceived the inherent beauty of the natural world, with no need for extra-dimensional information streams that somehow wrote pale reflections of pure ideas into human consciousness.
However, it also opened up questions about the validity of the dismissal of sophistry, which to Socrates and Plato required the existence of external, objective definitions of moral values toward which everyone could equally strive, and all reach the same answers.
After all, if each physical thing had its own beauty, and each concept had its own virtue, then each human mind had its own subjective values, its own subjective perceptions of beauty. If so, wouldn’t that render utterly absurd any attempt to determine the “best” ways of living and thinking for all human beings? Wouldn’t that indicate the jury of Athens had every right to condemn Socrates for violating their views of “piety” and the importance of traditions?
Aristotle addressed the issue by examining the nature of humanity, itself, and inquired into the purpose of our existence in an effort to clearly define our metaphysical place in the universe.
If we reject the notion of the Realm of Pure Forms, he said, and argued that beauty and virtue exist inherently in things, themselves, then those aspects of things and beings that make them uniquely beautiful indicate their true nature, and thus their purpose.
That means, to understand what human beings are, and gain insight into the purpose of human existence, then one must look at what makes human beings unique, Aristotle argued. Of all the animals that existed in this world, Aristotle noted, only human beings had the capacity for rational thought and, as such, the best possible purpose of human existence and the only way to achieve a “good life” is to live according to the dictates of reason.
Not that Aristotle ever thought that could ever be easy. He noted that it took a great deal of discipline and effort to rein in human appetites and passions, and that weakness of will (which Socrates attributed solely to “ignorance” and Plato struggled to explain) possessed by many people. We constantly struggle, Aristotle said, to overcome our base instincts and, in fact, many never find a way to do so.
However, he noted, some ways of living seem to work better than others, and those brought up that way seem to better able to achieve a virtuous life based in which reason finds the proper balance between temperament and appetites.
Aristotle said that children raised in a household that had enough affluence that they’re mostly free from want start off with a real advantage. It also helps to have loving parents who themselves valued both education and ethical self-discipline (in the absence of the second, the first tended to create manipulators, or even tyrants…).
A child raised with that foundation had a much better chance to grow into an adult able to achieve the modestly prosperous life that loaned itself to the intellectual and emotional balance needed to live a life of reason. Too much money frequently proved a distraction, Aristotle said, while power all too frequently resulted in self-destructive impulses.
On the other hand, Aristotle argued, ascetic deprivation seemed to lead to irrational fanaticism and other mental problems. As such, the proper life lay somewhere in the balance between indulgence and deprivation, he said, although the exact balance point varied from one person to the next.
So, the best possible way to achieve a “good life” is to recognize that, as creatures uniquely capable of rational thought, humans needed to live according to the dictates of reason, even though we also possessed the full range of instincts, appetites and passions.
That seems pretty sensible, by today’s standards, but that’s because much of those modern standards have their roots in Aristotle’s observations, written more than 2,300 years ago.
Links
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/
http://philosophypages.com/hy/2s.htm
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html