Teaching the Questions Aristotle's Philosophical Pedagogy in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politic - S....

Teaching the Questions: Aristotle's Philosophical Pedagogy in the "Nicomachean Ethics" andthe "Politics"Author(s): Stephen SalkeverSource: The Review of Politics, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Spring, 2007), pp. 192-214Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf ofReview of PoliticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20452875 .

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The Review of Politics 69 (2007), 192-214. Copyright ? University of Notre Dame DOI: 10.1017/S0034670507000514 Printed in the USA

Teaching the Questions: Aristotle's Philosophical Pedagogy in the Nicomachean Ethics and

the Politics

Stephen Salkever

Abstract: It is widely acknowledged that the style of Plato's political philosophizing is radically different from the systems and doctrines approach established by Hobbes and confirmed and redirected by Kant. But what about Aristotle? Does he intend to produce systematic political theory in sharp contrast to Plato's question-centered dialectics? This essay argues that Aristotle's political science is equally as dialogical as Plato's. Taken together, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics form a single set of lectures, craftily organized to lead its immediate Greek audience (the equivalent of Socrates' interlocutors in Plato) deeply into the questions and problems that are Aristotle's theoretical basis for the paradigmatically human activities of practical reason (phronesis) and thoughtful choice (prohairesis). He accomplishes this goal by allowing none of the answers he or his audience might propose to stand unchallenged, thus acting as another, albeit soberer, Socrates to his politically concerned audience then and, potentially, now.

Political Science as Liberal Education in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics

One way of defining contemporary liberal education is to say that students come in looking for answers and leave, we hope, asking questions, questions about how they are-and how they should be-related to the world around them, their culture or cultures, their friends, to the past and future, to their abilities and limitations as human beings living in a particular time and place. This movement from a request for answers to a persistent questioning of the answers is the standard pattern of the Platonic dialogues and the sub stance of the claim that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. The classic statement of what a liberal education is and is not occurs in

Republic 7, 518b6-clO: Paideia is not a matter of putting knowledge into empty souls, but rather of turning souls and potential learners around, away from a focus on the things that come into being and toward the brightest of the things that are. My argument is that this same pedagogical intention determines the

pattern of Aristotle's lectures on what he calls political science (politike),

192



NICOMACHEAN ETHICS AND THE POLITICS 193

the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, as well. Aristotle's explicit account of liberal education in the Politics 8 defines it as the education necessary for free human beings, that is, those who have the opportunity (and thus also the problem) of determining their way of life for themselves. The problem such education must solve is how to be at leisure in a noble or beautiful way, rather than in a slavish, banausic, childish, or vicious way (1337a-1338b).

My sense of Aristotle is that he speaks to us in these works essentially as a liberal educator of young Greek men.' This means that he, like Plato, aims to move his audience to a point outside their own tradition, to liberate them partially and subtly from their Greekness in the interest of making them better human beings. His texts are, like Plato's dialogues, written dialectically and rhetorically, rather than as systematic demonstrations or deductions. Dialectically, they engage in conversation or dialogue with the opinions of others (sometimes named, sometimes not) on the questions they consider; rhetorically, they want to influence their particular audience in a particular direction, rather than trying to measure up to a universal stan dard of deductive validity. For Aristotle, as much as for Plato, philosophical writing cannot be precise and systematic without distorting our understand ing of the things that are. My specific claim about Aristotle's intention in the Nicomachean Ethics and

the Politics is that Aristotle tries to move an audience that deeply honors public life-and that is interested in hearing that life celebrated-closer to the practice of philosophical inquiry about public life, understood as the asking and re-asking of questions that are never answerable once and for all. He sometimes argues explicitly for the value of this shift (as at the end of Book 6 of the NE). Mainly, however, he tries to achieve his aim by guiding the audience of the Ethics and Politics on an extended tour of

lrThis view of Aristotle's intention as protreptic rather than systematic or doctrinal

was first set out at length by Tessitore (Aristide Tessitore, Reading Aristotle's Ethics: Virtue, Rhetoric and Political Philosophy [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990]) and is developed by, among others, Mara (Gerald M. Mara, "Interrogating the Identities of Excellence: Liberal Education and Democratic Culture in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics," Polity 31, no. 2 [1998]: 301-29; Mara, "The Logos of the Wise and the Politeia of the Many: Recent Books on Aristotle's Political Philosophy," Political Theory 28, no. 6 [2000]: 835-59); Salkever (Stephen G. Salkever, "Aristotle and the Ethics of Natural Questions," Instilling Ethics, ed. Norma Thompson (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000], 3-16); Smith

(Thomas W. Smith, Revaluing Ethics: Aristotle's Dialectical Pedagogy [Albany: SUNY Press, 2000]); Frank (Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Collins (Susan D. Collins, Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006]). Anyone familiar with these works will know that my reliance on Collins, Frank, Mara, Smith, and Tessitore goes far beyond anything that can be

acknowledged in a footnote.



194 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

plausible answers, some endoxic,2 some more clearly his own, to the question of the most choice-worthy human life. Aristotle uses this extended tour to demonstrate that all such univocal answers to the question of the human good are unstable and unsatisfactory, both theoretically and practically. But he supplies no final formulation of just what human happiness really means to take their place. As a result, the Ethics and Politics are as aporetic, as perplexing, as any Platonic dialogue: they return us to the question with which we began. But like Plato's dialogues, these texts are not merely or aim lessly perplexing, but protreptic, designed to show that the question itself, if properly asked, of the best life can be continually illuminating in a variety of circumstances. Aristotle, like Plato, wants both to perplex his audience and to supply it with intellectual tools for capitalizing on the perplexity he hopes to induce. His primary goal in this educational project is not to turn his audience into either good citizens or good philosophers, or even to reconcile citizens and philosophers,3 but to produce deeper, more reflective, more serious, more prohairetic people. In other words, Aristotle's goal is not to set out a

universally true political science or philosophy (politike), but to contribute to the formation of an educated public.4

2That is, answers that are prominent and widespread in the Greek culture he and his students share: "The endoxa are opinions about how things seem that are held by all or

by the many or by the wise?that is, by all the wise, or by the many among them, or

by the most notable (gn?rimoi) and endoxic (endoxoi, most famous) of them." Topics 100b21ff.

3Although Tessitore (Reading, 1996) makes an excellent case that such reconciliation

is one aim of the Ethics, strong arguments for treating the Politics as fundamentally

aporetic are presented by Ambler (Wayne Ambler, "Aristotle's Understanding of the Naturalness of the City," Review of Politics 47 (1985): 163-85) and Davis (Michael Davis, The Politics of Philosophy: A Commentary on Aristotle's Politics [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996]).

4In proposing this reading, I am not speculating on what might have been in the mind of the historical Aristotle (though any reading must accord with such historical information as we possess), but trying to arrive at the intention in the light of which the text of the Ethics and Politics makes most coherent sense. Any attempt to make coherent sense out of a text implicitly constructs what Wayne Booth (Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983]) calls an

"implied author," whose "intention" represents that coherence; another way of

saying this is what Gadamer (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall [New York: Continuum:

Crossroad, 1989], 369-79) and Strauss (see Paul A. Cantor, "Leo Strauss and

Contemporary Hermeneutics," in Leo Strauss's Thought: Toward a Critical

Engagement, ed. Alan Udoff [Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991], 267-314), citing Collingwood, refer to as the logic of question and answer. To read a text

well is, in effect, to construct a plausible authorial voice; or, to read well is to infer

a set of questions to which the explicit text, the words on the page, can be read as

an answer.




Insofar as Aristotle's project continues Plato's, we may surmise that his immediate audience is not unlike Plato's in its desire for a successful political life: members of this audience admire and wish to emulate Pericles above all, but feel a guilty attraction toward the apparent freedom and power of the tyrant. They are also inclined to believe that a thorough education in politike will substantially boost their chances of a successful political career. As O'Connor and Smith have argued, Aristotle's text seems to presuppose an audience of eager young political leaders of a variety of characters, not unlike Socrates' interlocutors in Plato's dialogues, some resembling Callicles, Meno, and Alcibiades, others the more promising types such as Cleitophon, Glaucon, Theaetetus, and Theages.5 Aristotle must change what his audience wants, but if he announces this as his goal at the outset, he is doomed to failure. Thus, a less direct approach is mandatory. Without some such assumption about Aristotle's designs on his immediate

audience, it is hard to see what to make of the glaring, internal contradictions in the text of the NE and the Politics. Many of these contradictions concern the

I also want to avoid dichotomizing the audience into potential philosophers and

potential politicians. My hypothesis about the audience is close to O'Connor's and

Smith's, though less schematic. According to O'Connor (David K. O'Connor "The

Ambitions of Aristotle's Audience and the Activist Ideal of Happiness," in Action and Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle, ed. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins [Albany: SUNY Press, 1999], 109), Aristotle assumes that his "nobly brought up" audience will have developed a commitment

to and a taste for an "active" life, generally a life of political leadership, as

opposed to a life of sensual enjoyment: "Aristotle's primary addressee is a man

driven by ambition, an ambition that manifests itself fundamentally if not ultimately in politics." What Aristotle does to that audience, according to O'Connor, is to

replace their "political action" (praxis)-based conception of human life with his own "function" (ergon) or "actuality" (energeia) idea of what it means to be truly active. This enables Aristotle eventually to make the paradoxical claim (in NE 10 and Politics 7), relative to the endoxa, that the sedentary theoretical life is considerably

more "active" than the political life. Plato carries out this same unannounced shift

from a praxis-vocabulary to an ergon-vocabulary in his introductory discussion of

the question of the most profitable life for a human being in book 1 of the

Republic. For the numerous passages in Plato containing these surreptitious switches

from the vocabulary of praxis and man to the vocabulary of ergon, caring, and human

being, see Salkever (Stephen G. Salkever, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990], ch. 4; and Stephen G. Salkever, "Plato on Practices: the Technai and the Socratic Question in Republic 1," in Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, ed.

John J. Cleary and William Wians [Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1992], 8: 243-67).

50'Connor ("Ambitions") and Smith (Thomas W. Smith, "The Protreptic Character of the Nicomachean Ethics" Polity 27 (1994): 307-30; Smith, Revaluing).




value of a political life. He asserts, for example, that political life is an end in itself (NE 6, 1140b6-7; Politics 1), but he also asserts that political praxis is only an instrumental means to something better (NE 10; Politics 7), in the same way that war is choice-worthy only as a necessary means to peace. If we take these assertions out of context and ask him which he stands by, he will not answer; we need, instead, to watch him as he plays out each of these claims and exposes the limitations of each. Thus, if we begin our reading with the assumption that the text is a set of systematically arranged propositions, we cannot help but misread it.

A related source of misreading is the long-standing academic tradition of treating the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics as two separate systematic treatises, the first containing Aristotle's ethics and considered the property of departmental philosophers, and the second presenting his political theory and belonging to political science departments.6 The two works are different in character, but they do not seem to be directed to different audi ences or to be concerned with separate subject matters-they are complemen tary works of practical philosophy or political science (politike). Internal evidence (the last chapter of NE 10) suggests a clear transition from the end of the Nicomachean Ethics to the beginning of the Politics. The differences between the two works are of a kind to suggest that they are interdependent parts of a single course of lectures that comment on one another. My argu ment is that Aristotle's two texts should be read as scripts for lectures that need to be completed by reading or performance in a particular historical context, not as treatises to be accepted or rejected universally. They raise ques tions that they do not answer. Like Plato, Aristotle's task is to establish a language or discourse for evaluating laws and customs (nomoi) and regimes (politeiai), to introduce a new kind of theoretical language into political debate, a language that provides a new way of answering the ordinarily unasked question, What questions should I bring to ethical and political life? Like Plato's image of Socrates-the-gadfly, the aim of Aristotle's political philosophy is neither to take sides in a partisan debate nor to set out the pro cedural terms for reaching a fundamental consensus on the questions that provoke debate, but to supply a theory that can incite and shape debate of a certain kind, to redirect it by supplying the debaters with new ways of asking and addressing old questions. Theory's job in Platonic/Aristotelian political science/liberal education is to persuade us of the importance of what might be called "natural" questions-those, like the question of the best life and the best regime, that cannot be answered theoretically

6This is so in spite of the fact that most commentators, whatever their interpretive orientation, would acknowledge that the two works are not separate and distinct trea

tises. For example, Irwin and Fine (Terence Irwin and Gail Fine, Aristotle: Selections

[Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995], xix) say this: "The Ethics leads

directly into the Politics; indeed, the two treatises are parts of a single inquiry that

belongs to political science."




(by Plato or Aristotle) but which must be answered (by us) practically-in context. Although he is a profound critic of the politics of his time, Aristotle's goal is

not to lay down the rules for founding a better polity. Rather, he wants to introduce his audience to philosophy as more than a method to solve certain problems, as an activity in its own right, a way of life, or a part of a way of life. This must be done carefully, since it is not a goal Aristotle's audi ence of Glaucons and Menos has in mind from the moment he addresses it. Thomas W. Smith puts this nicely: "Aristotle's purpose in writing the Nicomachean Ethics was not to set forth theoretical conclusions about human hap7piness but to show us why we need constantly to ask questions about it." The questions insisted on by the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics are all squarely rooted in one large question, the one Plato's Socrates poses to Callicles in the Gorgias and to Thrasymachus in the first book of the Republic: "Do you think it is a small matter to try to determine the way of living life as a whole (holou biou diagoge) through which each of us would have the most profitable (lusitelestate) life?" (Rep. 344el-3). Both Plato and Aristotle insist on the importance of persistently asking and responding to this question. Asking and responding to it is what distinguishes the serious person (the spoudaios) from the trifler (the phaulos).8 But this subtle call to phil osophy, for Aristotle as well as Plato, is not a manifesto for some single principled, spiritual discipline: both the nature of the truth about the best life and the audience's resistance to that truth rule simplicity out. For Aristotle, the practical work of logos is to reflect on our desires, to trans

form them from biologically inherited impulses to parts of a mature person ality that we, along with the nomoi and the mentors of our childhood and- as he will argue in books 8 and 9 of the NE-our friends, construct. Unlike the modems, Aristotle acknowledges no guarantee of success, even if fortune smiles, because vice-in this case immoderation-as well as virtue, is "accord ing to thoughtful choice (kata ten prohairesin)" (1151a6-7)9-even though Aristotle has just said in book 6 that action based on the prohairetic interplay of logos and desire is what makes us human beings (1139b4-5), and even though he will say in book 3 of the Politics that human eudaimonia can almost be defined as living kata te^n prohairesin, according to thoughtful choice (1280a33-34). For Aristotle, serious reflection on what sort of life we want to lead can result in a right (orthe) decision or not (1150a33-35), in spite of the fact that the central recommendation of the Ethics is that we take life seriously. For him, there is no scientific method and no categorical

7Smith, "Character," 330.

8And above all Aristotle is, as Sparshott (Francis Sparshott, Taking Life Seriously: A

Study of the Argument of the Nicomachean Ethics [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994]) says, urging his audience to take life seriously.

9Note that Aristotle does not say, here or anywhere else, that the thoughtful choice

(prohairesis) that results in vice is not really prohairesis at all.




imperative that can rescue us from this doubt. The best advice he can offer us in our dilemma does not come in the shape of a rule but in his discussion in book 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics about the importance of having character friendships, intimates who allow our self-perceptions to become actualized (energeia), and hence open to reflection and critique, in a way we cannot

manage on our own (1171b32-1172al). But Aristotle's theoretical politike^ can also provide us with an explanation

for this problem-the uniquely problematic character of the question of the best human life- and he does so at the end of NE 7, in the passage at 1154b20-31. Here he says that our nature is composite, not simple, because we are mortal. As a result, human activities that seem desirable and pleasant because they support our attempts to stay alive may clash with other activi ties, such as inquiry and logos in general, that please and attract because they define us as human beings. In a way, the message at the end of NE 7 is that we are constituted by two natures rather than one, and that the human good can only be clearly understood in the light of the good of a different and god-like being. Aristotle's image here of nature (phusis) contra nature (1154b23) can suggest, from a modem point of view, a tragic view of humanity as the end lessly conflicted species.10 This invocation of a more perfectly actualized being is not an aporetic end to inquiry but, like his references to gods at the end of NE 6 and the ones to follow in Nicomachean Ethics 9 and 10, it serves instead to clarify the many-sided problem of human virtue. Aristotelian gods don't need habituation, or a sense of honor and shame, or nomoi, or edu cation in politike, or friends (not to mention good fortune, some property or wealth, and a body temperature in the normal range). Humans, however, do need all of these things. If we could somehow slice off the most perfectly active work of which human beings are capable and preserve it forever as an independent entity, we would be gods. The problem of human virtue thus becomes how to honor our unique kinship with the divine while realizing that it is kinship only, not identity, and without in our bedazzlement slighting the complex and varied possibilities for an excellent prohairetic life inherent in those potentialities for desire and thought that are ours alone, not shared

with the gods or with other animals. This, essentially, is the starting point that Aristotle's theorizing passes on to deliberative inquiry and phronesis the lesson he wants to teach. If I am correct, then it must be the case that the central theoretical insight of his political philosophy can become clear to his auditorsfor the first time only at the end of Book 7 of the NE.

The style in which Aristotle presents his lesson must be elliptical- discur sive, rather than algorithmic and deductive-because it is hard for people

who have been raised in the habits and longings of his audience to grasp, and also because the lesson itself is full of nuance and qualification.

10For a subtle development of this view about the end of NE 7, see Sparshott (Taking, 260-63).




To understand the lesson, Aristotle appears to think that his audience must be prepared by what comes before in the Nicomachean Ethics and what comes after in that text and in the Politics. In what follows, I will sketch the shape of that discourse, spending more time on the Nicomachean Ethics than the Politics, since we political theorists are presumably more familiar with the latter. I will conclude with several suggestions about what we lose when

we read either of these two works independently of the other. In doing so, I will touch briefly on what we have to gain from reading in this way now.

The Strategy of Aristotle's Discourse in the NE and Politics

In the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that the aim of his course of lectures is action (praxis) rather than knowledge (NE 1, 1095a4-6) and that the inquiry is undertaken not to acquire theoretical knowledge, but in order to become good (NE 2, 1103b26-30). But Aristotle's theoretical message seems as charged with ambiguity as his rhetorical intent: from book 1 of the NE on, Aristotle asserts what appear to be two distinct views of the human good: one supports a life of action and politics, the other sup ports a life of philosophical inquiry that keeps the concerns of a political life at a certain distance. At the same time, however, Aristotle repeats in various contexts the idea that there is a unified way of answering the question of the good life: by understanding the specific human work or activity (ergon), we can understand the human good. His initial statement of what the best life based on an understanding of the human ergon is, in book 1 of the NE, is one that fully endorses the political life: "We posit that the ergon of a human being (anthropos) is a certain bios, and this bios is an activity (energeia) of the soul and activities (praxeis) that are with logos, and that it is the work of a serious male (spoudaios aner) to do these things nobly and well" (1098al3-15). This empha tic reference to maleness and to praxis as components of the best life, reminis cent of Pericles, looks like a clear resolution to the problem. The human good is not the life Aristotle says the many prefer, based on the quest for sensual gratification (1095bl5-17), but the life chosen by "refined and active (prakti koi) people" who see the good as honor (time), "the telos of the political life" (1095b22-23). But Aristotle does not allow this initial formulation to stand unchallenged.

Immediately after stating that "we posit" the human good to be the life of the serious male politikos, he appends a lengthy series (1098a20-1098b8) of cau tions, saying that this is only an inexact "sketch" to be "filled in" later, that some beginnings come from habit, and that facts are not the same as expla nations. These qualifications raise questions about the finality of Aristotle's apparently ringing endorsement of Greek political life and about the identity of the "we" who "posit" the supremacy of that life. Aristotle has already planted seeds of similar doubts about the political life

a few pages earlier in a discussion (1095b-1096a) of the three (rather than




two) ways of life that might claim to be definitively human. He says there that a third candidate for the title of human good is the bios theo^retikos, the life of study, which will be examined later. Aristotle alludes to this third life and its preeminence once more in the discussion of the intellectual virtues in NE 6 and in the discussion of super-human virtue in NE 7, but he does not discuss it thematically until NE 10, where he argues that such a life surpasses the political life in embodying the human ergon. There he says that the happi ness of the political life-the life of the serious male devoted to honor-is not the happiest or best life for a human being (he uses anthro^pos in book 10, not aner); the happiest is the life of inquiry and study, the theoretical life (1177b). Praxis and maleness recede together as normative features of humanity, but this recession is not announced until the very last book of the Nicomachean Ethics. Strikingly, the very same depreciation of maleness and praxis occurs in the next to last book of the Politics, though now with more elaborate expla nation as well as a new account of ways in which the two lives might coexist. But from book 1 until book 10, the Ethics unfolds with the theoretical life as a sort of subliminal presence, a cloud in the bright sky of honor, maleness, and

political virtue. This will not be apparent to the listener or reader encounter ing Aristotle for the first time. Aristotle will introduce the theoretical alterna tive as a candidate for the title of the serious human life only after he has

shown a variety of ways in which the way of life of the serious male devoted to politics and honor-a life so immensely and likely attractive to his audience-is internally inconsistent. Before praxis can be rehabilitated in the light of a new theoretical understanding, it must (rhetorically) be allowed to fall of its own weight. My interpretive claim is that unless we understand this, the design of the NE and the Politics as a course in political science makes no sense at all.11 The question of the identity of the shared

nEven earlier in NE 1, Aristotle has suggested a possible incoherence within the pol itical life itself (1095al8-26). Here he says that both the many and the cultivated (char ientes) agree that happiness or flourishing (eudaimonia) is the highest good, and that

"happiness follows living well (eu zen) and acting well (eu prattein)." Good praxis and good living lead to happiness. But the many and the wise (whom Aristotle now

substitutes, without comment, for the political charientes as the alternative to the

many) disagree about what happiness is. The many, he says, see eudaimonia this

way, as "one of the things that are visible and apparent, such as pleasure or wealth

or honor (time), and others think other things?and often the very same person will have different opinions: when sick thinking it health, when poor wealth; and when

they are aware of their own ignorance, they wonder at those who speak of something

great (mega) or something beyond them." The many are not presented here as slaver

ing gratification-seekers, but include those who identify living well with honor and

greatness?which only one page later will be attributed not to the many but to the refined and active (compare 1095a23 and 1095b22-23). Aristotle seems to imply here that if a concern with honor is the core of the political life, then that life may not be so different from the life of those for whom "refined and active men" have con

tempt, the many, as the refined and serious political men would like to think.




"we," of who we are and what we assume, is one of the central unstated but unavoidable aporiai that constitute the "beginning" of Aristotle's politike. In raising it, he invites his audience to reconsider who they are, or who they want to be-though without explicitly thematizing this invitation.

There is, thus, good reason to wonder whether the definition of eudaimonia Aristotle provides in 1098a-a serious male's political praxis informed by logos-will turn out to be adequate. These doubts are reinforced by other aporiai Aristotle raises (and does not resolve) about happiness in book 1. Is a virtuous life always happy? No, since bad fortune can destroy not only content ment but real happiness as well, as in the case of Priam (llOOa, asserted again in Book 10, 1176a33-35). Can we ever know with certainty whether a particular life is happy? No, because the quality of one's life is affected by how one's des cendants and friends live (llOla). The impact of fortune and the indefiniteness of the boundaries of a human life exclude the possibility of any certainty about matters of virtue and happiness. But Aristotle neither removes the aporiai nor treats them as the end of the story. He pushes the logos on with the aporiai about happiness and virtue still in place, saying that such aporiai are evidence for the view that any stability in human happiness is due to virtue rather than fortune (llOOb). We should, therefore, want to know better what virtue is. He further indicates that whatever this virtue is, it may have less to do with praxis and with political honors than with intelhlgence or phronesis (1095b26-30), whatever that may turn out to be.

Nicomachean Ethics 1 concludes with a discussion of the human soul, as a preliminary to considering human virtue in the light of the question of the best way of life yet again: "Since eudaimonia is some activity (energeia) of the soul in accordance with perfect (teleia) virtue, it would be necessary to examine virtue" (1102a5-6). It turns out that we have not yet considered virtue adequately. Furthermore, Aristotle's new beginning on the question of eudaimonia removes "praxis" from the definition of the human ergon stated in 1098a. Aristotle both underscores and balances this change by reminding us immediately that virtue is a proper subject for politike because true lawgivers, such as those of Sparta and Crete, made citizen virtue a chief concern: "[T]hey want to make citizens good and obedient to the nomoi" (1102a9-10). The tension about empirical politics and Aristotle's virtue, hinted at here by an unremarkable equation of goodness and law abidingness, remains alive through the Ethics and Politics until Politics 7, at which point Aristotle announces that the Spartans, from Lycurgus onward, do not really differ from everyone else in their conception of the good: as grasping as anyone else, they think the good is power and conquest, not virtue (1333b-1334a). They differ only in believing that a truncated vision of virtue (in which virtue is equated with being a real man, with andreia) is the instrumentally best way to get the power everyone (i.e., the many as well as the refined) desires.

But we are yet a long way from Aristotle's emphatic criticism of what refined Greeks think is best in the realm of the political. Book 1 of




the Ethics does not place virtue and the political life in direct opposition, far from it. Still, in the technical account of the soul that concludes NE 1, the central place is occupied by logos, rather than by any distinctly political faculty, such as spiritedness (thumos). The soul is composite, with several parts, although these may be separable in analysis only. One part has logos; a second does not, though there is no clear specification of what logos means as yet. The part without logos is further divided into a part-including growth, decay, and digestive activity-that works without logos, and another part-involving a variety of desires-that may or may not "listen to" logos. This latter part Aristotle calls character (ethos), and says that specifically human virtues can be of two kinds: "ethical" or moral virtues, those involving ethos, such as liberality, manliness, and moderation, and virtues of thought, "dianoetic" virtues, such as wisdom and phronesis. The moral virtues are those that arise from habit (as ethos, character, arises from ethos, habit), and will be considered first. It will soon turn out that these moral virtues are impossible without the intellectual virtue of phronesis, and this weakening of the distinction between moral and intellectual virtue will not surprise the careful listener who recalls Aristotle's remark in book 1 that political people should realize that what matters is phronesis rather than honor and greatness. In the first book of the Ethics, Aristotle places widely held views about virtue and the political life in such a new light that he may well have puzzled his original auditors in two respects: his ambivalence about the value of the pol itical life, and his reliance on terms whose meanings are evidently technical, not drawn from ordinary language or the endoxa.

Having left this aporia about eudaimonia as a standing qualification on the power of generalizing theory to clarify human life, Aristotle then proceeds to outline his own biological account of human life and human virtue. This outline runs from the beginning of book 2 to the middle of book 3 and culminates in three related propositions:

1) Excluding those forces we cannot control, such as fortune and natural aptitude, virtue is the key element of happiness.

2) Character (ethos), developed by habit and by growing up under a particular set of laws and practices, is the key element of virtue.

3) "Thoughtful choice" or prohairesis is the key element of character: "The virtues are prohairesis, or not without prohairesis" (1106a3-4). Without phron e^sis, all the habituation in the world cannot turn into virtue of character.

Again, we must be careful not to confuse this last proposition with the Kantian identification of virtue and reason. For Aristotle, desire for the human good intertwining with thought about that good mutually transform each other into a "prohairetic hexis," a firm inclination to thoughtful choice that is the indis pensable foundation for human virtue. Such a psychic condition is our natural

destination, though it cannot be achieved without appropriate habituation (not to mention good luck). In the context of this theory of moral development,




Aristotle's own teaching in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics can be seen as an attempt to influence the way his generally well-brought-up audience desires the human good, but to do so indirectly, by changing the concepts and terms in which they think and speak about that good. Quite appropriately, then, from the middle of book 3 of the Nicomachean

Ethics on, Aristotle gives his readers or auditors not a defense and application of his psychological and ethical doctrines, but a series of exemplary figures who exhibit and embody human virtue in different ways. His task is not to provide systematic theory, but to bring abstractly theoretical eudaimonia to imaginary life by showing us individuals or types that in different ways and to different degrees embody his idea of human happiness. This is Aristotle's "virtue ethics": as in Plato's dialogues, the human good is realized in particularly individual ways of life rather than in action-guiding rules. The order in which these figures are arranged is from images of virtue that are most familiar and accessible to Aristotle's students to images of virtues and ways of life farther from the conventional Periclean Greek wisdom and closer to Aristotle's notion of the human good.12 As he suggests he will do, he begins with the virtues and lives most accessible to his audience and ends with the vision of the human good that seems truest to him. Aristotle does not, in other words, write as a Rawlsian "public philosopher" whose task is to articulate and clarify the deepest insights of his tradition, but criticizes that tradition in terms of a standard that is not a familiar part of the culture's vocabulary. At the heart of his rhetorical task is a dilemma similar to the one Plato faces in the dialogues: the problem of introducing that vocabulary without calling excessive attention to its strangeness. Leo Strauss puts it this way: "Such a philosophic critique of the generally accepted views is at the bottom of the fact that Aristotle, for example, omitted piety and sense of shame from his list of virtues, and that his list starts with courage and moder ation (the least intellectual virtues) and proceeding via liberality, magnanimity and the virtues of private relations, to justice, culminates in the dianoetic virtues."13 Aristotle's arrangement of the moral virtues is part of his attempt

12My reading differs from a more common view, that the order of the virtues is an ascent

from the most material to the most "spiritual." On the latter, stemming from Aquinas, see

Sparshott, (Taking, 147-49). Sparshotfs own position is that the list of the ten virtues in NE 3 and 4 follows the order of the development of civilization, from the need for war (manli ness) and sex (moderation) to the need for civility (affability, tmthfulness, and wittiness). I would say instead that the movement is from the virtues that make least use of practical wisdom or phronesis (like manliness and moderation), through those (like justice and

decency) which make most use of phronesis, and finally to a virtue and way of life that seems, but only seems, to be beyond phronesis altogether.

13Leo Strauss (Leo Strauss, "On Classical Political Philosophy," What Is Political

Philosophy? And Other Studies [Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959], 94). Sparshott makes a similar point, citing both the rejection of shame as a virtue and Aristotle's assertion

that several key virtues and vices have no Greek names. Like Strauss, he claims that




to move the philosophical life closer to the center of the world of thought of his audience and the manly life closer to the margins. While each exemplary figure portrayed in the Nicomachean Ethics represents

a mature and coherent way of life that goes beyond immature pleasure seeking regulated only by an unsteady sense of shame, they do so in quite different ways. The differences between them stem from the different horizon-like visions of the human good that animate them. The first two figures to be considered here, the manly man (andreios) and the great-souled man (megalopsuchos) take the Periclean goods of freedom, honor, and great ness as their limiting horizon. The third and fourth, the just man (dikaios) and the decent man (epieikes), discussed in NE 5, go beyond Periclean freedom and greatness to embody nomos and the public good as a limit. The fifth and sixth ways of life, the phronimos (defined in book 6) and the friend (discussed in books 8 and 9) go beyond nomos and politics to treat the human good itself as a goal. The last way of life presented in the Ethics, the theoretical human being (sketched in NE 10) goes beyond humanity to adopt the divine or the good of Aristotle's (though not the Greeks') theos as the central aspiration of a virtuous human life. From the middle of book 3 (1115a) through the end of book 4, Aristotle

takes up ten particular virtues of character, ones he had already mentioned briefly in the form of a diagram in book 2 (1107a-1108b).14 Aristotle says nothing about why he has chosen these particular virtues rather than others, nor does he give reasons for the order of their presentation. But think ing through these questions suggests a great difference between Aristotle's list and one his audience of young Greek males might be expected to bring to the lectures. The first two virtues he discusses, manliness and moderation, would no doubt appear on any endoxic Greek list of the virtues, nor is it strange that

we must pay close attention also to what Aristotle omits: "More strikingly, the virtues

of 'piety' (eusebeia) and 'holiness' (hosiot?s) are not on his list. Actual Greek life was saturated in religion; Aristotle's failure to countenance it shows clearly enough that,

whatever he is doing, he is not simply describing the folkways or the prevailing value system" (Sparshott, Taking, 142).

14They are, in order, manliness (andreia) and moderation, both concerned with "feel

ings"; four virtues concerning the external goods of money and honor: liberality

(eleutheriotes) in matters of small sums of money, magnificence (megaloprepeia) regard ing great sums, a nameless virtue that is a mean between lack of ambition and love of

honor in matters of small honors and dishonors, and greatness of soul (megalopsuchia) where large-scale honors and dishonors are concerned; one virtue again concerned

with a feeling, this time anger (orge), a "nearly nameless" mean between irascibility and slavishness that Aristotle proposes to call "gentleness" (praotes); and finally, three virtues having to do with "logoi and actions in communities": truthfulness (as

opposed to self-deprecating irony and boastfulness), wittiness (as opposed to boorish

ness and buffoonery), and affability (as opposed to grouchiness and obsequiousness).




manliness is listed first. But Aristotle, without comment, drastically narrows the scope of both of these virtues relative to the endoxa. Strictly speaking, according to Aristotle, manliness refers only to our response to the fear of death and wounds in battle, and not, for example, to our willingness to risk the security of private life in order to achieve preeminence in the polis: "In the decisive sense, one is said to be andreios when he fearlessly faces a noble death and those things that lead to it-such things especially concern military affairs" (NE 3, 1115a32-35). For Aristotle, war is unavoidable if one is to escape slavery in a world of warring poleis, and thus manliness is a genuine virtue because it is needed to protect the prohairetic life, which cannot flourish without a polis and its laws and practices. Plato's Socrates uses a similarly instrumental version of manliness in the Republic. Speaking to Glaucon in book 3, he says that the guardians will be andreios if "they choose death in battles over both defeat and slavery" (386b5-6). Aristotle's account of the occasion and activity of manliness in the Nicomachean Ethics is like Plato's in omitting all of the vitality and daring that characterize Pericles' funeral oration, in which the Athenian war dead are congratulated and envied for trading in their fleeting mortal existence for an earthly immor tality as part of the shining narrative of Athenian imperial adventure. Aristotle's severe lowering of the rank and meaning of manliness relative to his audience's expectations is maintained throughout both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics.15 He treats it as a necessary virtue, but not of the highest order; to seek occasions for the display of the manly virtues makes no Aristotelian sense. War, he notes, is the occasion for the greatest of honors; but this proves only that honor is a seriously imperfect guide to virtue when virtue is defined, as Aristotle wants it to be, in terms of prohairesis.

15Aristotle's treatment of manliness in NE 3 as a surprisingly low and ordinary virtue is reinforced for his Greek audience by the word he chooses to characterize

the action, the praxis, of the manly man. Over and over, the verb Aristotle uses to

identify what the andreios does is hupomenein, to remain behind (though others flee), or to stand fast. (He uses it at least eleven times in the space of five Bekker pages, and uses menein, to remain, at least twice.) This notion of manliness as stolidity in

battle is Greek enough, since it calls to mind the virtues of the hoplite phalanx. But it does not correspond at all with the active and daring virtues Pericles ascribes to

Athens' adventurous citizen-soldiers. His audience cannot be surprised that he con

cludes his discussion of manliness by saying that men who possess other virtues will have more to value in life and thus find it harder to accept death in battle than those who possess no other good than manliness. The most virtuous people will not

make the best soldiers because they will feel a greater pain at the prospect of death.

The best soldiers may be those who have only andreia and not other virtues (1117b). What appears noble and great to the manly man will not be, humanly speaking, the

greatest good. Aristotle's intention is not to discredit manliness but to problematize

it, to raise questions about its sufficiency and coherence.




The figure of the great-souled man brings the horizon of freedom, honor, and manliness into sharper critical focus. The megalopsuchos is concerned with greatness to the exclusion of every other good and virtue, and greatness requires being seen as great by others. The quest for greatness leads the mega lopsuchos into a life without the wonder that opens the way to philosophy, and

without the friendship within which (Aristotle will argue in NE 8 and 9) human virtue and happiness can flourish.16 The pursuit of honor and greatness seems to threaten the pursuit of the human good.17

Book 5 is a new beginning. Aristotle here introduces a new and more com prehensive virtue (justice and decency) and a new and more comprehensive horizon (the nomoi). This is a very different way of being political than we have seen to this point (though it is still exclusively male, and thus not simply human). The indication of this comes in Aristotle's statement that it is not necessary to discuss universal justice at length, since that is the same as complete virtue. Invoking universal justice, he says, is simply a way of reminding ourselves that the laws instruct us to practice every virtue and lay down an education to promote the common good. Aristotle then adds the following: "It is necessary to set aside until later the decision whether the education through which an individual becomes an unconditionally good man (ane'r) is in politike or something else; for, presumably, being a

good man (aner) is not the same as being every good citizen" (1130b26-29). Aristotle's gender-specific language here is significant and is frequently obscured in translation into English. Whenever he speaks of human virtue or the human ergon in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, as in book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics, he uses the expression anthro^pos, human being, without specifying gender.18 When he speaks of the political life, by contrast, he consistently uses the word ane^r, male. The reason why politics is

16Sparshott (Taking, 151-53) ingeniously proposes that Aristotle must imagine the

megalopsuchos as the sort of god-like ruler called the absolute or all-powerful monarch (pambasileus) in Politics 3, 1284a3-b34. High ranking officials, Sparshott says, must act the part: "When Shakespeare's Harry became Henry V, he immediately dumped Falstaff." But nothing in Aristotle's text supports the view that the megalopsu chos holds or desires to hold any public office at all.

17"m truth, only the good person (ho agathos) is worthy of honor" (1124a25)?not the

great man, unless he also happens to be good, which is especially hard, according to

Politics 4, 1295b, for those who possess extremely large quantities of the goods of

fortune, such as wealth and good birth.

18My claim is that Aristotle, in the NE and the Politics, does not use aner to refer to human beings as such. His motive, like Plato's, is to challenge what he sees as the

mistaken and widespread Greek inclination to identify virtue with virility. For an extended discussion and text references, see Salkever {Finding, 178-85). For an insight ful and thorough treatment of aner and andreia in Plato, see Hobbs (Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]).




necessarily a male affair, according to Aristotle, becomes clearer in book 1 of the Politics: politics involves ruling as well as being ruled, and women cannot rule men because their deliberative ability is not sufficiently "authoritative" - although it is not clear whether the cause of this lack of authority is that women are by biological inheritance incapable of decisive practical reasoning, or that males are generally unwilling to listen to women, however reason able.19 Whatever the reasons, Aristotle consistently treats politics as a male world, and so when he raises again in Politics 3 the question of the virtue of the good citizen, he asks whether the good citizen is a good male, ane^r, and not whether the good citizen is a good human being, anthro^pos (1276b). But since Aristotle, like Plato, is consistently in control of whether to say aner or anthropos, the question of whether the good citizen is also the good man raises a more comprehensive question, whether the good man is a good human being. Stated otherwise, this is the question of whether the two male orientations so far elaborated in the Nicomachean Ethics-the perspective of honor and the manly or great-souled man, and the perspective of nomos and the decent man-are an adequate background for the prohairetic life. The movement beyond justice and the nomos in the next book of the Nicomachean Ethics suggests a negative answer.

The laws open greater scope for phronesis-this horizon is much more demanding, intellectually, than the horizon of honor and greatness. It is hard to know what the just thing to do is (1137a9-12), because the just itself is not the same as the legal. Thus the reflection on justice and the laws leads to a sense of the inadequate or at least provisional quality of the horizon they supply. But the inadequacy of these perspectives does not require Aristotle to discard them or absorb them into a more comprehensive perspective. Instead, he retains honor and the nomos as plausible orientations toward the question of the good life-along with his criticisms of them-as he goes on to consider a more directly theoretical orientation in the rest of the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics. Moreover, Aristotle consistently uses the word epieikes, along with spoudaios and phronimos, as his principal names for the best sort of human being. Perhaps the strongest evidence for Aristotle's retention of the political orientation as a plausible answer to the question of the human good is that, in his ultimate discussion of the best life in Politics 7 (1324a-1325a), he says that the primary contenders in the per

manent debate about the best life are those who defend the political life and those who defend the philosophic life (1324a29-32). His position is summar ized in this carefully worded sentence: "It is clear that there are just about two ways of life that are thoughtfully chosen (proairoumenoi) by those human beings who are most ambitious about virtue (ton anthropon hoi philotimotatoi pros areten), both now and in the past. The two I mean are the political and the philosophic lives." The manly life is still an option at the end of his lectures

19For discussion of this passage at 1260al3, see Salkever (Finding, ch. 4).




on politike, but it must be considered from the horizon of the anthropos, not from that of the andres alone.

Books 6 and 7 are in a sense the most analytic books of the Nicomachean Ethics, concerned to make distinctions that are apparently generated by Aristotle's theory itself, rather than by the substantive and rhetorical pro blems of moral education the work addresses. Book 6 presents relatively precise distinctionS20 among ways of thinking or intellectual excellences or virtues, situating phronesis in relation to scientific inquiry (episteme and sophia), to craft (techne), to political science, to amoral instrumental shrewd ness (deinotes), to a general grasp of human affairs that does not lead to action (sunesis), to good guessing (eustochia), and to a nondeductive grasping of either the first principles of the unchanging things or the nature of a par ticular situation calling for action (nous). Aristotle opens book 7 by announ cing a new beginning, one that recognizes that vice is not the only kind of character to be avoided. Vice must now be distinguished from incontinence (akrasia) and bestiality; as a result, virtue itself must be distinguished from two other admirable hexeis: continence and divinity. But the distinctions so carefully drawn in books 6 and 7 are not classifications for their own or for theory's sake; instead, they serve Aristotle's delineation of a third kind of

moral horizon, the human good, and a way of life that centers on the activities of practical reason and prohairesis. This horizon is more comprehensive and theoretically coherent than the horizons of greatness/honor and justice/ nomos set out in the first five books. But like the earlier horizons, Aristotle's depiction of the prohairetic life devoted to the human good includes the rec ognition of a limit that serves to temper our enthusiasm, a limit supplied by his indication of a yet more comprehensive and coherent horizon, the one supplied by Aristotle's own idea of divinity, or of the best kind of being, or the most complete good. This is not simply added on to the picture of the human good; as books 6 and 7 make clear, it is impossible to understand what the human good is without understanding in some detail the ways in which it is less than perfect. In particular, while we hear early in book 6 that a life of thoughtful choice, a prohairetic life, is emphatically and norma

tively a human life (Book 6, 1139b4-5), we also hear by the middle of book 7 that such a life can be devoted to vice (kakia) as well as to virtue (Book 7,

1151a5-7). As with greatness and justice, in order to understand clearly the life guided by the human good, it is necessary to see beyond it. Aristotle's discussions of pleasure and of friendship in books 7-10 are

responses to this perplexity. His two separate discussions of pleasure, at the end of Nicomachean Ethics 7 and the beginning of Nicomachean Ethics 10, which serve as brackets to the lengthy discussion of friendship in 8-9, are

20Irwin's (Terence Irwin, Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, 2d ed. [Indianapolis: Hackett

Publishing Company, 1999]) glossary provides a helpful guide to Aristotle's usage of terms in books 6 and 7.




dialectical throughout. His intention is not to propose a systematic theory of pleasures and pains but to persuade his auditors that, in this matter at least, they are better off listening to the many than to a more distinguished few who either demonize (in NE 7) or deify (in NE 10) pleasure. His contempt for sim plifying moralists is more colorful and acerbic than the general tone of his prose: "Those who assert that we are happy when we are broken on the wheel or when we fall into great misfortunes, so long as we are good, are will ingly or unwillingly saying nothing" (1153bl9-21). Aristotle also rebuts the sophisticated hedonist position set forth by Eudoxus, especially in book 10, but seems to see hedonism as closer to the truth than antihedonist moralism: "The fact that all pursue pleasure, beasts as well as human beings, is some kind of sign that pleasure is somehow the best thing in itself ... for everything that is by nature has something of the divine" (1153b25-32). But his central teaching is that both sides fail to see that pleasure and pain are not indepen dent entities, but feelings an animal agent has subsequent to its performance or nonperformance of some activity, energeia -eating or fighting or crafting a law, for example, or listening to music or gazing at the heavens or at the parts of an animal, or simply being alive. What matters, so far as happiness is con cerned, is which activities we choose to pursue; pleasure and pain can't them selves be chosen as ends to be pursued or avoided, since they are only signs of the way a particular agent feels about a particular activity.21

If "the pleasure question" proves to be a blind alley for those puzzled by the problem of how to counter the uncertainty of the prohairetic life, the dis cussion of friendship (philia)-which is utterly novel, not a standard Greek philosophical topos like the relationship of the pleasant and the good-is much more positive. The friend is concemed with the good fully actualized human life. Philia absorbs justice (1155a). The peak of living together (suze^n) for human beings is sharing discourse, articulate speech (logos), and thought (dianoia) (NE 9, 1170b12-15). Friends seem to be the greatest external good (1169b9-10), directly contradicting a judgment made in the context of the megalopsuchos that honor is the greatest external good (1123b20-21). This is because "friendship furnishes the primary context within which human beings may grow in self-knowledge and virtue."22 This is not to say that other contexts are replaceable by virtue-friendships; families and polities are still necessary. But friendship matters most and will be noted least, thus requiring two full books of the Nicomachean Ethics. Nevertheless (NE 8, 1159a), some incoherence, some degree of aporia still remains: Friends

21 "It is necessary to treat the pleasure or pain that follows upon an activity (ergon) as

a sign of the hexis" (NE 2, 1104a3-5). Aristotle does say that pleasures and pains are also "activities," since they are neither potentialities to do something nor movements

from one condition to another, but activities of an especially dependent sort, ones that

are consequences of and somehow complete the primary activities for each actor

(NE 10, 1175al0-21). 22Jacob Howland, "Aristotle's Great-Souled Man," Review of Politics 64, no. 1 (2002): 50.




don't really wish their friend the greatest good, to become a god, because we need the friend as another self, as our equal (NE 9 1166a); moreover, we are friends to ourselves most of all (1168b). Yet we need friends to actualize our excellence-in one sense, we need such friends even more than we need good nomoi and the freedom that depends upon manliness. The rhetori cal strategy of the Nicomachean Ethics is such that the horizons or focal points presented later rank above earlier ones-being as such over human being, human being over human law, and human law over human freedom. Similarly, later exemplary ways of life are in some sense superior to earlier ones-the philosopher over the friend, the friend over the practically wise man without friends, the practically wise man over the decent man, the decent man over the just man, the just man over the great-souled man, and the great-souled man over the manly man-but they are all unstable in various ways, both theoretical and practical. As a result, later exemplars and horizons do not erase or supersede earlier ones in a Hegelian manner. Given the unique and immense variety and contingency of human life, and given that we do not and cannot know or choose in advance the challenges our lives will set for us, each of them (as well as their relative rank order) must be kept in mind as a theoretical guide to the prohairetic life.23 One way of putting this relationship among the different horizons would be to say that Aristotle wants to caution his audience against treating some good things as if they were the only good things. He does not say that that the phro nimos should stop caring about honor or about justice or about the human good or about the divine good. These things are all in some way good by nature. His intention, instead, is threefold: first, to rank these goods or hor izons relative to the standard implicit in the activity of being; second, to

warn us against being too serious (or not serious enough) about any one of

them;24 finally, to indicate that theory cannot go beyond the first two points, and that decisions of each individual or community about the mix

23My discussion here is greatly indebted to Tessitore (Reading). Tessitore argues that

apparent inconsistencies in the text of the NE, such as the one giving rise to the much

discussed intellectualist vs. exclusivist debate about what Aristotle thinks is the best human life, can best be understood by dropping the assumption that Aristotle is

writing systematic philosophy for other philosophers and thinking instead about how he might be trying to affect the audience implied by the text. This allows Tessitore to treat ambiguities and inconsistencies as intentional and leads him to assert a strong connection between Aristotelian and Platonic political philosophy: "The edifying moral-political teaching of the Ethics rests upon a theoretical foundation that is intractably aporetic. Aristotle's deep and insufficiently appreciated agreement

with Plato on ethical matters lies in the irreducibly dialectical basis in which his account of ethical inquiry is set" (120).

24It seems clear that he is most worried that his Greek audience will take honor too

seriously and the nature of the whole not seriously enough. Even so, he never denies

that honor is indeed a genuine human good by nature: "Some people are mastered by




among these plural goods that is appropriate for them is not a task for philosophy, but for phronesis informed by a serious engagement with philosophy.

The second half of book 10 makes a case for the superiority of the theoreti cal life to the practical; Aristotle presents it as more secure, less open to contingency, than any practical life. It is continuously active- something that we sublunary beings cannot possibly be. The reason that the political life is ranked lower than the philosophic life is not that it is dependent on other people and external goods but that the excellent citizen is dependent on other people and institutions in a particular way: the political life is limited by the connection between politics and war and by the dependence of the political life on nomos.25 Human happiness is "unimpeded activity" (energeia anempodistos, NE 7 1153b9-12, see also Politics 4 1295a36-37).26 The word anempodistos appears to be an Aristotelian coinage; the image it conveys is a freedom from anything under your feet to trip you up. What impedes us all is death; we are creatures of conflicting pleasures because we are mortal (1154b20-25), vulnerable to mortality as well as to vice. What trips up good citizens are not other people-since nothing prevents the people we live with from being philosophic friends who help remove obstacles to energeia-but rather the exigencies of war and of the nomoi. Is it possible to imagine a political life that transcends war on the one hand and law on the other, one that is thus as free from "trouble" within the defining limits of inherited human potential as the philosophic life? If not, why not? In a sense, these are the central questions the last book of the NE bequeaths to the Politics. This is why the Politics begins with a return to the horizon of the nomoi and

of justice. The NE takes for granted a "decent upbringing," and goes on to ask how theorizing about actions and ways of life can improve the character of already well-raised people. The answers that it gives to this question are varied and complex and cannot be reduced to a system. But they all presup pose that "we" -the community of well-raised souls the lectures seek to establish in speech-are already present. There are, to be sure, indications throughout the text that the prejudices of well-raised Athenians about the best life cannot so easily be sustained-in particular, the views about honor held by the typical Athenian gentleman-but the overriding message is almost always one of a harmony between Aristotle's theory and existing prac tice. Dissonance is kept in the background, even in places such as book 10's discussion of the inferiority of the political life to the theoretical life, where

or pursue against logos naturally noble and good things by being more serious than

they ought to be about honor or about children and parents" (NE 7, 1148a28-31). 25Cf. Tessitore, Reading, 108.

26"As was said in the Ethics, the being (to einai) of the happy way of life (bios) is

according to unimpeded virtue."




we expect it to be strong and clear. But the Politics continually brings such dissonance into view; its central purpose may be to address directly the ques tion bracketed by the Nicomachean Ethics, the question of just what it means to have a "decent" upbringing, how such an upbringing may be achieved, and the conditions both within and beyond our control that support and/or obstruct the practice of moral education or character formation.

The whole of the Politics encompasses a more careful tour of the possibili ties covered by the horizon of the laws -possibilities that are criticized, such as the life of the master in book 1 and the utopian solutions to the political problem proposed in book 2-possibilities that seem promising though flawed, such as the lives of the citizens of Sparta, Crete, and Carthage in book 2, of the just and manly citizen in book 3, and of the semi-political farmer of middling means in books 4-6. Once more, as in the Nicomachean Ethics, the culmination of this political discourse, in book 7, is a glimpse at a transpolitical horizon. Once more, the end of the Politics, just like the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, leaves us with the question of the extent to which political life, necessary as it is, can be brought into some sort of harmony with the highest human aspirations. That question is posed in at least two ways: first, by Aristotle's exposition of "the polis according to prayer" in book 7; second by his discussion of liberal education in book 8. I believe that we are meant to see the first as deeply flawed (since this "ideal" polis is compelled to allow all its soldiers to graduate to full deliberative citizen ship, whether they have the virtues for it or not; because this polis depends on slavery that is against nature; and because this polis venerates gods who have nothing to do with the unmoved movers of Aristotle's theology).27 The second gives us the beginnings of an account of what we have been doing all this time, and leaves it to us to continue.

How Are the Two Texts Related?

The Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics are linked texts, but how do the two differ? The Politics seems both more and less theoretical than the Nicomachean Ethics. It is more theoretical in that it is more clearly governed by an application of the universal standard of nature as a means for evaluat ing particular laws, practices, and polities. The Nicomachean Ethics seems to take the standards of virtue that are most approved by the Greek endoxa too much for granted, while the Politics frequently and insistently calls

many of these endoxa into question before the bar of teleological human nature. But the Politics is less rich in its theorizing-the Nicomachean Ethics, not the Politics, is the book in which Aristotle lays out in some detail

27For argument and text references for this interpretation of the significance of

Politics 7, see Salkever (Stephen Salkever, "Whose Prayer? The Best Regime of Book 7 and the Lessons of Aristotle's Politics" Political Theory (35[2007]: 29-46).




(though always disclaiming precision) his views about the character of human nature and the human soul. The Politics without the Ethics loses its metaphysical and psychological ground. Reading the Politics alone makes Aristotle's political philosophy look too much as though it were a freestand ing political theory in the manner of Rawls and Habermas. The Politics is also less theoretical in that it is more empirical, drawing on examples from a variety of times and places to provide a kind of thick description of ancient Greek (and not only Greek) politics. Leaving the Nicomachean Ethics out has no doubt contributed to the badly mistaken yet widespread view that Aristotle is somehow the father of modern "civic republicanism." To avoid that misreading, we need to know about the ideas of potentiality and actuality that inform Aristotle's use of the word "nature," and we need to know about the hylomorphic soul-it is crucial that every reader of the Politics bears in mind Aristotle's remark (in the De Anima) that if the eye were an animal seeing would be its soul. On the other hand, the Nicomachean Ethics without the Politics reads too

much like a sympathetic exposition of the Greek endoxa about the good life. Aristotle is, as we have seen, countercultural in the Nicomachean Ethics, too, but his rhetorical design seems to require that this criticism be muted. But the Politics makes us see the world of praxis and nomos as a much less tract able place, partly because it calls attention to a problem that arises but is not extensively discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics, and that is the problem of war and its relationship to human virtue-the problem that I think is the prin cipal lesson Aristotle wants to teach in book 7 of the Politics. There is a kind of temperamental difference between the two works: the Nicomachean Ethics can often seem cheerful and hopeful about the world as Aristotle sees it, while the Politics is much darker, drawing our attention frequently to obstacles to human virtue and happiness that are inseparable from the nature of things. The Politics thus appears to me to be deeper, more empirical, and less confi dent than the Nicomachean Ethics.

Finally, what can we at present gain from reading Aristotle as if he were addressing us indirectly? The recent revival of interest in Aristotle has produced several valuable answers about what we might gain as moral and political agents, some noting important similarities between our own political situation and that of Aristotle's original audience, others suggesting the great value of rethinking our own practical situation from the ground up by entering into a world of thought radically different from our own.28 My own suggestion is that a rhetorical reading of the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics indicates that Aristotle also has something important to teach us as practitioners of politike, of political theory or science. To follow this Aristotle, our philosophizing about practice must contain three elements.

28Frank (Democracy) and Collins (Rediscovery) provide persuasive arguments, respectively, for these two imperfectly reconcilable points of view.




First, we must identify a central problem or problems confronting our own contemporary endoxa, ones that these endoxa are inadequate to solve. Aristotle does this by indicating ways in which Greek political life both empowers and subverts human excellence. Second, we must articulate a conceptual language for addressing these problems that, to some degree, transcends the particular endoxa from which it emerges by bringing to light a proposal about human psychology. Aristotle does this in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics by proposing a teleological theory of human nature and of the prohairetic life. Third, we have to reflect, as Aristotle does throughout, on the permanent problem of theory and practice, the problem of the extent to which the language developed in our second element can and cannot be brought to bear on the problems identified in our first. These three elements can be thought of as adequacy conditions that point toward an Aristotelian model of political inquiry that focuses on identifying natural questions and thus avoids both modernism's scientistic deductive systematicity and post

modernism's distrust of attempts to articulate truths about the meaning of human life.



Teaching the Questions Aristotle's Philosophical Pedagogy in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politic - S....

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