Ancient Greek Philosophy

Philosophy 233

Paul Fairfield, Queen’s University

© Paul Fairfield 2023

Contents

Part 1: Before Socrates

Part 2: Plato, Republic

Part 3: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

PART ONE

Before Socrates

Western philosophy, as the story is often told, began rather suddenly during the prelude to the classical era (roughly the fifth and fourth centuries BC) in ancient Greece in the region of Ionia (now the western coast of Turkey) and in the form of three convention-defying thinkers named Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. These figures appeared more or less out of nowhere and initiated the great transformation “from mythos to logos,” an adage that encapsulates the revolution that the birth of western philosophy, if not western civilization itself, has long been described as representing. On this variant of the somewhat fanciful “Greek miracle” story, philosophy enjoyed something of an immaculate conception at this radical turning point in intellectual history. Mythical thinking was abandoned in favor of purely rational conceptions of the world, leading within a short time to the great systems of Plato and Aristotle.

Beginnings are always elusive, and while stories of miraculous departures have their charms, they also do violence to the real dynamics that are always visible below the surface of intellectual invention. Philosophy, science, or any mode of thinking that one would wish to call rational has a long prehistory which, while often difficult to trace, is vital to understanding its nature. This momentous transition point in western intellectual history was no total departure but an organic development that continued and altered a conversation the origins of which are shrouded in obscurity but that extend well prior both to the classical period and to this trio of sixth-century Ionians. The old formula, “from mythos to logos,” overdramatizes what occurred, overlooks the strong continuity with philosophy’s more ancient origins, and misunderstands the scope of the Ionians’ achievement. Philosophy from its inception belonged within a remarkably complex network of ideas extending well back into the archaic (roughly 800 to 480 BC) and still earlier periods and across numerous regions particularly to the east. It did not invent an altogether new system of thought but constituted a new phase within one that had been long established.

“This intellectual revolution,” one historian writes, “appears to have been so sudden and so radical that it has been considered inexplicable in terms of historical causality…. All of a sudden, on the soil of Ionia, logos presumably broke free of myth, as the scales fell from the blind man’s eyes. And the light of that reason, revealed once and for all, has never ceased to guide the progress of the human mind.” The transformation involved a “change in tone and the use of a secular vocabulary” along with “a new mental attitude, a different intellectual climate.” (Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, 103-4, 107) “Myths were accounts,” the same historian writes, “not solutions to problems. They told of the sequence of actions by which the king or the god imposed order…. When the natural order and atmospheric phenomena (rains, winds, storms, and thunderbolts) become independent from the functions of the king, they cease to be intelligible in the language of myth…. They are henceforth seen as questions open for discussion,” and “[t]hese questions …, in their new form as problems, constitute the subject matter for the earliest philosophical thought.” (Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks, 376.) I’d suggest we subtract the teleology and the triumphalism of the traditional story and instead emphasize the continuity and gradualness of this development. A good deal of the old mythos was preserved, and the logos itself appeared not as a bolt of lightning but something decidedly more mundane.

Some ideas superseded others, but partially, while old dynamics and tendencies remained much as they had been. Thinkers and writers themselves remained largely urban aristocrats and the conversation in which they effected a turn continued to reflect their social position and “the striving for power” which, as another scholar notes, Thucydides regarded as “[t]he primary force in history,” including the history of ideas. “For the future will be of the same kind as the past. Thucydides’ view of history is typical of the Greek understanding of history in general. Historical movement is understood in the same way as the cosmic movement, in which all change is simply the same thing in new constellations.” (Bultmann, 15) There is nothing simple about this, but the metaphor of shifting constellations is an apt description of this turning point in the history of ideas in pre-classical Greece. The Greek genius was not for invention ex nihilo but for fusing and reworking ideas that were in most instances borrowed either from their archaic and pre-archaic past or from neighboring cultures, ideas of a great many kinds from a great many contexts while turned toward a novel set of problems.

Myth

The story of philosophy begins with its prehistory, in particular with epic poetry. No attempt will be made here to distinguish myth, religion, oral legend, and the epic poetry in which all of it found expression, while philosophy and science emerged from this as a new branch on an old tree. Mythos and logos were not opposing forces but stood to each other organically. What is to be avoided are anachronistic impositions of concepts and distinctions that were foreign to how Greek thinkers in this early period viewed the world. The primary word here is mythos, but what was this? It was not a technical term and lacked the kind of precision that modern philosophers often seek. Its basic connotation was narrative, speech, or word, and it was in no way opposed to truth or knowledge. A story could contain or lack veracity, but one that was passed down in oral tradition was believed to be in some way revelatory of a humanly significant truth, and where no chasm separated the profane from the sacred, the literal from the figurative, or the philosophical from the religious. As another historian writes, “We know very little about the Eleusinian mysteries, but those who took part in these rites would have been puzzled if they had been asked whether they believed that Persephone really had descended into the earth, in the way that the myth described. The myth was true, because wherever you looked you saw that life and death were inseparable, and that the earth died and came to life again.” (Armstrong, 56-7) The idea didn’t merely please the imagination; it was true, in a sense of that in which one could place one’s trust, all the while remaining an uncertainty and a mystery. It shed light on some fundamental matter of human existence and generated not objective facts so much as possibilities and a larger way of thinking which likely heightened rather than quenched a sense of wonder at the world.

Philosophy begins at no absolute starting point but in certain attitudes, realizations, and experiences which include the same experience of wonder from which myth likely emerged. The point is speculative, but my speculation is that philosophy’s original impetus differed little from how it originates today for any individual who chooses to take it up, which is usually in some experience of being amazed and grabbed by something, some question that will not let one go—the shock of disappointment and suffering, an encounter with finitude and mortality, or a sense of wonder that there is a world at all, and one that is intelligible to us. There is a suspension of the mundane and a need to give an account of our experience—to tell a story, offer an explanation, fashion a theory, or otherwise find the language that allows us to cope, psychologically and cognitively, with an experience that troubles us. Mythos likely originated the same way, not as a flight of fancy but as a serious-minded articulation of the world of human experience. It was neither irrational nor literal but an attempt to make sense of life as they lived it.

Something similar can be said of philosophy, although it would begin to speak in a different idiom. Myth aimed at a truth that was transformative and that could guide one through the difficulties and complexities of life. The characters and the world of which it spoke were neither empirical nor anti-empirical but existed on a different plane. A Greek hero was a human embodiment of nobility while the gods themselves were personifications of values and forces that were in no way divorced from mortal humanity. They are us, or an aspect of our being, imaginatively presented but that aimed at the same time at an interpretation that is revelatory or richly suggestive. Myth and philosophy drew from the same well, and if tensions developed between them it was the tension that often develops between two beings that are of much the same kind. The mythical world was not inert but was animated by something vital yet elusive; it was “full of gods,” as Thales is reported to have said, and so was the real world of which this “first philosopher” spoke. It was a world in which ordinary human conflicts were played out on a grand scale while the sense of life was heightened. Armstrong speaks of myth as a “perennial philosophy [which] expresses our innate sense that there is more to human beings and to the material world than meets the eye.” (Armstrong, 6-7)

None of this stood in opposition to the logos. Myths could be and were criticized long before the philosophers, including on grounds of veracity and morality. “Criticism of Homer,” another historian points out, “is very old. ‘Much the poets lie’ sounds already in Solon like a proverbial saying; and in Hesiod the Muses’ admission that they know how to tell ‘many lies’ seems to be directed against the Homeric tales of the gods. Towards the end of the sixth century the sharp and final judgement was formulated by Xenophanes: ‘Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all things which among men are reproach and blame: stealing, adultery and mutual deception’…. Plato had only to draw these strains together and systematize them in order to forbid all this, and especially all Homer, in his ideal state.” (Burkert, 246) Questioning both myths themselves and the manner in which poets related them was customary as no official formulation of a myth existed, even while certain ones gained popularity. None was authoritative or dogmatic, and all were open to lines of questioning that philosophers would take up and extend.

The question of whether the Greeks through any of these centuries actually believed in their myths is not straightforward. For the Greeks as for so many ancient and prehistoric civilizations, these stories were true but not necessarily in a literal sense, as one believes it will snow tomorrow. To say that Homer was the foremost teacher of archaic and classical Greece doesn’t mean that his poetic works contained information which might admit of empirical or historical evidence. It means that his works were true in a sense of the word for which there is no epistemology. This truth is imaginative, potentially transformative, and pregnant with meaning. It is a truth about our existence, and symbolism reigns. The truth of these narratives was sanctioned by time and related by those who knew, in the sense of those who had heard the stories told by someone on whose word one could rely. They were believed and not believed, reinterpreted and criticized, but accepted as a guide for living.

Mythos encompassed what we call religion, art, philosophy, history, ethics, science, and likely a few other things. The Greek attitude toward it was likely complex and more than one. Less worldview than life-view, it was without dogma, scripture, or a professional priesthood; what mattered was public ritual and social cement more than personal belief, and whether an individual offering a sacrifice or citing Homer believed, half believed, or withheld belief may have been a casual matter even while myth itself was not. Gods and stories were many and varied by region, making any kind of orthodoxy or unified belief system impossible even while we speak of a tradition that was at once Greek and more than a little open to foreign influence. Holding a belief was indistinguishably cerebral and emotional, personal and social, and polarities of theism/atheism, believer/nonbeliever, truth/falsity, and myth/reason are obstacles to our understanding.

The same can be said of the poet-philosopher. The motley assortment of intellectuals and writers who would later be known as the first philosophers were also poets, albeit with a difference and not all in the same way. They were myth makers, myth refiners perhaps, and if their attitude toward and questions about the tradition were somewhat new their fundamental orientation was old, as was their social role. A pursuer of wisdom (sophia) was not a new species but largely continuous with several others to which the philosopher stood as something of a younger sibling. Shaman, seer, sage, bard, poet, physician, mathematician, scientist, rhetorician, and sophist were all akin, with overlapping roles and modes of discourse, and philosophy drew upon all of them in many ways. The use of poetic language was not a return to a pre-philosophical medium; the message itself was poetic, and poetry was already philosophical. The poetic word was not being employed as one of several tools in a toolbox but was the medium in which the ideas themselves took form. Asking whether any of these poet-philosophers was “really” poet or philosopher is like asking a singer-songwriter of today whether they are “really” a singer or a songwriter. They were generalists, thinkers in a broad sense, and if the mode of truth upon which they would eventually settle was more literal than Homer, this was no total departure. Mythos had never been child’s play, and when at the height of the classical period Plato and Aristotle composed dramatic dialogues it was neither pre-philosophical nor a pandering exercise. At this late date the poet remained “the undisputed leader of his people” (Jaeger, 150), and poetry “is the leading force in all public life; it is the medium which reaches many people at once, and which expresses and shapes general opinions and ideas; until the middle of the sixth century it enjoyed a monopoly in this.” (Burkert, 125)

Archaic Greek philosophers gradually distinguished themselves by adopting a mode of discourse and an attitude that were not more serious than the alternatives but somewhat more argumentative. Thinkers of this period “did not call themselves ‘philosophoi,’ nor did the people of their day refer to them as such. Strictly speaking, it is anachronistic to identify the Archaic thinkers as philosophers (sophoi or sophistai would be the correct terms). But even if we bow to convention and use the term ‘philosopher,’ it is difficult to identify the precise criteria that distinguish the ‘philosophic’ thinkers from other sages in this period.” (Nightingale, 174) Wisdom seekers were a competitive bunch, and whatever sophia they claimed needed to be expressed and performed for a public audience, whether they were poets, statesmen, physicians, or anything else. By Plato’s time philosophy had gained a reputation for a certain kind of rigor while retaining the generality of the sage, and public performance assumed primarily the forms of writing and teaching. If the object remained truth, it needed to be approached directly and in accordance with a particular set of norms.

Naturalizing the Sacred

These early philosophers were not specialists in a form of knowledge that was unprecedented and purified of religious and poetic elements. Their manner of thinking was not sacred and was explicitly open to contestation. The philosopher was not rejecting religious ideas but trying to translate them into abstractions. Let us not speak of “demythologizing”; mythos emerged from the philosophers’ speculations unscathed and afforded them a set of preoccupations and a vocabulary that were philosophy’s original impetus. We can speak of these early philosophers as naturalizing myth, calling it down from the heavens and into the public square and marketplace (agora), so long as we don’t overstate the change. Neither the Milesians nor later presocratics were pioneers of rationalism, and by no means did they jettison all talk of divinity and the sacred but rather spoke of them on a new register.

The register itself prized logical explanation over traditional narrative, or the philosophers came unhurriedly round to this preference. All sophia needed to be brought within the logos, not in defiance of the poets but increasingly in competition with them and with the various other sophoi and sophists who are also offering their services to Greek audiences. The competitive or agonistic search for truth was not new, but the philosopher’s emphasis on universality, definitional strictness, and the notion of a unified structure underlying the world was. Archaic and classical Greek philosophers were continuing a conversation with Homeric tradition while drawing it in a moderately different direction and asking new questions. Rational discourse enjoyed no sudden liberation from myth but reorganized its basic elements in a piecemeal way which from the standpoint of later centuries and with much forgetfulness appeared as a revolution and a miracle.

The philosophers were not spinning concepts out of thin air but reinterpreting material that was old and largely mythic. Their hypotheses about the natural order were not scientific in a modern sense but extensions and partial secularizations of cosmological stories, formulations carried out at a different level of abstraction perhaps but still bearing on how the world came into being and in what it consists. Pursuing philosophy resembled initiation into the mysteries and called for a way of life that was stringent, exclusive, and almost divine. The activity of knowing brought mortals into proximity with the gods at the same time that it affirmed our own human nature as rational beings. Being at home in both the disputations of the agora and a realm of pure thought, the philosopher was as much a citizen of two worlds as the poets had been and could run back and forth between the sacred and the profane. There remained something spiritual about this desacralized knowledge, something appealing to aristocratic intellectuals, and was worldly and otherworldly at the same time.

The basic concepts with which archaic philosophers were working included physis—nature, or the fundamental and vaguely animate and divine material from which the world emerged and of which it was made up—water, earth, fire, god, soul, law, cause, substance, essence, matter, and some others. These early philosophers developed a strong preference for abstract nouns, things that sit still and are what they are, over verbs, powers, and anthropomorphisms. Mythic wildness needed to be domesticated, arrested, or otherwise translated into something more object-like. Substances, even divine ones, seemed more graspable, and what was in some measure new was the manner in which the philosophers sought to delimit linguistic usage.

Philosophy represented a call to order and an expression of impatience not with myth in its entirety but with casual speech, intellectual sloppiness, ambiguity, and stories that were not always edifying. Forms of knowledge had emerged that were stricter than the poetic and that seemed in some respects more satisfying, if also drier. The philosophers’ innovation consisted not in pure creation but in importing into the search for wisdom particular notions and methods from not only myth but mathematics, astronomy, biology, economics, and similar arts, or in discerning which elements from this large palette could be applied to philosophical questions. Plato, for instance, borrowed heavily from mathematics. The concepts of virtue (arete) and justice (dikaiotes), for example, are based upon geometrical notions and reflect a view of social relations as ideally reflecting the due measure and equality of the natural order. Plato and Aristotle’s strong emphasis upon proportion, the mean, moderation (sophrosyne), symmetry (isonomia), and avoiding excess (hubris) were basically mathematical as well as common Greek themes. Notions of the soul and the daemonic are borrowings from myth. Plato’s Forms would resemble the divine archetypes which ordinary objects stand to as copies or shadows, while Socrates himself was a new Achilles and an inheritor of the heroic tradition. Plato and Aristotle both founded philosophical schools which bore a resemblance to religious centers and brotherhoods of old, among the many examples we could mention of Greek philosophers borrowing from the other arts and whatever was around in trying to resolve a relatively novel set of questions.

The Origin Problem

“[P]hilosophy began with Thales,” Bertrand Russell confidently declared, and countless others have repeated this point, the original author of which was Aristotle. (Russell, 24) The hypothesis has simplicity on its side as well as historical pedigree, but little more. Thales, according to Aristotle, was not content to account for the world in mythic terms but insisted upon empirical evidence aided by reason and was the first to do so. This hypothesis regarding “the beginning” quickly becomes complicated. As Gadamer pointed out, “in reference to the beginning, Aristotle also mentioned Homer and Hesiod, the first ‘theologizing’ authors, and it may be correct that the great epic tradition already represents a step along the path toward the rational explanation of life and the world, a step that is then fully initiated by the Presocratics.” (Gadamer, Beginning, 13) Thales was no Adam but part of a tradition just as Homer and Hesiod had been, and as were all the philosophers who followed him. All these writers came out of an oral tradition that was hardly non-philosophical and that began in the way that summer does. Only prophets see absolute beginnings; the rest of us select a convenient early point beyond which the trail becomes too difficult to track.

Another problem with standard accounts of philosophy’s origins is that the Greek intellectual world in the archaic period was borrowing heavily from neighboring civilizations, just as its language itself was not indigenous but an Indo-European offshoot. The first philosophers inherited a tradition that was teeming with gods, narratives, competing natural explanations, and intellectual problems many of which were not of Greek vintage. The nature of the divinities, the origin and constitution of the world, the coming to be and passing away of things, the problem of the one and the many, the issue of proportion, the nature of virtue, the soul, and immortality were questions that preceded the Milesian school and were not specifically Greek. It is a plausible hypothesis that philosophy itself, depending on how we define it, was an import or an amalgam of imports from what the Greeks called “barbarian” cultures, and which was taken up at first by a small number of Greek aristocrats whose taste for the esoteric and the exotic was not limited to epic poetry and luxury goods.

The origin problem has no solution. While it’s customary to look to Thales as the one who got the whole thing started, Thales himself neither appeared out of nowhere nor advanced doctrines the likes of which had never been heard. He was a sage (sophos) in a long line of sages, one of the seven wise men of Greece, and an aristocrat reputed for a range of knowledge spanning politics, astronomy, cosmology, engineering, and mathematics. To our knowledge he wrote nothing—what is known of him stems from a handful of fragments in Aristotle—and while he has long been spoken of as a scientist and physicist, the natural order about which he theorized was far from devoid of myth and divinities. The world as he described it is in some sense alive and also divine; it is “full of gods,” although what he understood this to mean is impossible to state with any certainty. He conceived no separation between the material and the spiritual, the inanimate and the animate, and it is a view that Greek audiences would have readily understood as would many of their counterparts in the Mediterranean and near-eastern world. Thales was not the first to seek a unifying principle behind the multiplicity of the world, some underlying explanation spanning religion, science, and any other form of knowledge that was to be had. His inquiries likely drew upon contacts to the east and south of Ionia, and in particular with Babylonian, Persian, and Egyptian influences. This Greek citizen would have enjoyed ready access to several neighboring traditions, as would Anaximander and Anaximenes, all of whom may be seen as bridge builders, synthesizers, and sifters of the various speculations that were extant in the archaic period.

In 585 Thales successfully predicted a solar eclipse and is reputed also to have predicted the solstices and to have been the first Greek geometer. Several mathematical theorems were also attributed to him, although this in uncertain. More probable was the prediction of the eclipse, although it’s likely that he based this not upon any causal knowledge but upon empirical observations made by Babylonian or Egyptian priests. Some luck may also have been involved. Thales more than likely enjoyed access to Babylonian and/or Egyptian astronomical records, and the astonishment that his prediction caused in the Greek world was likely made possible by a combination of fortune and an importing of knowledge from beyond the region of Greece. His prediction, while impressive, was not the first of its kind; lunar eclipses had begun to be predicted about a century prior in Assyria.

Above all, however, Thales is known as a cosmologist and for the hypothesis that water or moisture is in some way the origin and/or ultimate constituent of the world. The source again is Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and the meaning is not clear. What is clear is that numerous near-eastern myths had spoken since the second millennium of water as the primeval source of the natural world. Every object of sense emerges from and is (more debatably) constituted by water, and the world itself floats on water in the fashion of a piece of wood. Thales likely borrowed this idea from mythical conceptions imported into Greece from Mesopotamia or Egypt. The primal waters or Homeric ocean from which all things emerge had been “rationalized” in the sense of translated into an abstraction, as later philosophers would also attempt. Many archaic sophoi were developing a taste for abstractions which may have been combined with an impatience for older and more storied formulations, and it is a preference that intellectuals of later centuries would largely share. These concepts were not inventions but imaginative appropriations and translations of their largely mythical predecessors, and Thales’ watery cosmology is only one example of this.

A similar analysis applies to the second in the trio of Ionian philosophers. Anaximander, a younger contemporary of Thales, is known to have written a treatise in prose around the year 548. This text, as one scholar expresses it, “rightfully attains a place not only as the first philosophical book in prose but also as a rationalized version of Hesiod’s Theogony, an Hellenized version of the Babylonian creation story, the Enuma elish. These earlier poetical narratives tell of the origins of the cosmos and its series of developments to the present world order. The surviving doxographical fragments show that Anaximander’s book explored these same matters.” (Hahn, 11.) Hesiod’s narrative, or something resembling it, was now a theory which could be contested using evidentiary standards rather different from poetry. If much of the content and force of the old account was retained, the mode of truth was now different; it was to be a “rationalized version,” one for which reasons could be adduced which did not appeal to the traditional divinities.

No more than a fragment of this “first philosophical book” is extant, making it largely speculative just how strict its author was in curtailing reliance upon poetic and mythical ideas. The lone fragment we possess leaves room for skepticism and was noted in the sixth century A.D. by Simplicius: “Anaximander said that the principle [archē] and element [stoicheion] of existing things was the indefinite [apeirōn]; he was the first to use this name for it. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some other infinite/indefinite nature, from which all the heavens and the worlds within them come into being. And the source of coming-into-being for existing things is also that into which perishing takes place, ‘according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time,’ as he describes it in rather poetic terms.” (Quoted in McEvilley, 31) Anaximander’s apeirōn, Aristotle reported, was both unlimited and “divine, immortal, and indestructible,” again putting into question the former’s ostensible elimination of mythical references. (Aristotle, Physics 203b7) The term itself is an abstraction of mythical ancestry and was an hypothesis that competed with Thales’ and similar accounts of the composition and origin of the cosmos. The notion of a primal unity from which all beings emerge and become gradually differentiated was retained but is no single element but rather an agon of conflicting forces.

Anaximander’s account of the cosmos is centered around notions of mathematical-geometrical proportions which were familiar to an archaic Greek audience. This mathematical orientation also informed a map of the world that is often credited to him. The constitution of both the cosmos and the earth is mathematically ordered and governed by ratios. The earth is comprised of Europe and Asia, two equal segments that were surrounded by bodies of water and stood to each other in equilibrium. The larger universe is similarly constituted by clashing forces (dynameis) which sometimes achieve a harmony that is simultaneously mathematical and political. There is a reciprocal rhythm to the cosmos, Anaximander believed, an endless back-and-forth between opposing forces which in time may achieve a unifying balance of power (isonomia). The constant tendency of elements is to struggle against each another in the manner of fire and water or hot and cold, and to remain in opposition until either one destroys the other or a balance is achieved. Any victory of one force over the other is compensated for by a defeat elsewhere in the system, while the world as a whole exists in equilibrium. The world that we see is a product of a series of stages, repetitions of this eternal rhythm, which begin and end in “the boundless.” Thales’ monism (the world is made up of one basic element) remains, but it is a monism not of a single element but of a principle of mathematical symmetry and political justice, one that mirrors both geometrical ratios and relations between Greek city-states. The struggle for power between states and between factions within a state reflects the eternal dynamic of the universe, and whatever justice exists is brought about by achieving a balance of forces which always threatens to collapse into a new round of conflict.

Anaximander’s general orientation was almost certainly informed by his knowledge of Babylonian mathematics and astronomy. The concepts that he introduced were largely imported from the Greek world’s neighbors to the east, a consequence of the interaction that was occurring by this time between the civilizations of the Mediterranean and near-eastern world. It was informed as well by a mythical tradition which the Mylesian did not secularize so much as refine, particularly in his conception of the divine as a principle that underlies the emergence and constitution of the world rather than a godly personification. Anaximander’s originality was not in invention but in creative appropriation of whatever elements of knowledge were available to him, whether in Greek or foreign tradition, and applying them to a line of questioning that itself was not new. Anaximander’s younger contemporary and probable student Anaximenes took the view that air was the basic element of the world. His book ventured both this hypothesis and that the process of change and differentiation is essentially one of condensation (water, earth) and rarefaction (fire, stars), not a simple repetition of the earlier identification of air (breath) and soul (consciousness) but a variation of it which was naturalistic but still divine.

Philosophical Borrowings

These early philosophers had a boldness about them. They were traditionalists with a difference; the difference itself didn’t lie in any abandonment of poetic and mythical ideas or questions but in importing into an old conversation a mode of discourse that was more abstract, methodical, and plainspoken. The Milesians were not introducing rationality into the world but borrowing a conception of it from some combination of mathematics, cosmology, geography, architecture, politics, economics, and perhaps a few other arts, and making it speak to an old worldview or life-view in such fashion as to change the conversation over time. The search was on for an explanatory system that could provide more naturalistic and abstract solutions to familiar problems regarding the origin, history, and constitution of the world and the possibility of unity and order in a universe that appears disordered and ever changing. “Philosophy and science,” as another historian states, “start with the bold confession of faith that not caprice but an inherent orderliness underlies the phenomena, and the explanation of nature is to be sought within nature itself.” (Guthrie, 44) “Confession of faith” is an apt phrase; this was a gambit that beneath the world as it appears to us is a system that is lawlike and intelligible in more literal terms than the poets could articulate. Why should the world be intelligible at all, in the sense of knowable to human beings? It could only be because we are constituted as rational beings while the world itself has a rational and knowable order to it.

The Greek city of Miletus in the sixth century was a bridge between east and west. Located at the eastern limit of the Greek world, it was exposed to economic and cultural currents from neighboring and older civilizations to the east and south, particularly Babylon, Persia, and Egypt. A thriving commercial center and the heart of Ionia, its international trade links were extensive and created opportunities for intellectual contact through a great extent of the Mediterranean and the east as far as India. These early philosophers were not importing entire systems of thought from any of these cultures but something more selective and synthetic—borrowing particular intellectual elements in forming a palette from which a relatively novel set of accounts, later describable as “philosophical,” could be articulated. It is highly probable that Egyptian mathematics and Babylonian astronomy were especially important influences and were integrated together with Homeric and other traditionary material in the first venturings of Greek philosophy. The number and extent of such borrowings is much contested, however the evidence shows Miletus at this time to have been a dynamic and wealthy meeting place of commercial, cultural, and intellectual currents from disparate regions until it was destroyed by the Persians in 494.

Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes were not miracle workers but creative borrowers, and the same description applies to the great philosophers of the classical period. This is not to downgrade the achievement of any of these thinkers but to understand it in the context of the times. The gradual turning that was the beginning of philosophy was made possible by a genius for synthesis and a hospitality to ideas from wherever they could be found. The ill-fated Ionian revolt against Persia that began in 499 precipitated a westward migration of philosophy to centers in Italy, Sicily, and mainland Greece, particularly Athens, over the course of the fifth century. Once again it was Ionians who played a leading role in the formative period of Athenian philosophy, and once again what they appear to have been seeking was an intellectual climate and a plurality of thought similar to what Miletus had offered. By the middle of this century, Athens had emerged as a major political and military power as well as a commercial and cultural center in the Greek world. Ideas of many kinds and from many places could be exchanged and contested there with relative ease, and the process of receiving and refining a wide assortment of ideas continued through Plato, Aristotle, and beyond. Athens was by no means the only major center of intellectual life in the Greek world, but what likely gave it an advantage was the combination of plurality—religious, cultural, artistic, and so on—and power.

The myth of the “Greek miracle”—that in philosophy, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle came out of nowhere like a bolt of lightning, as did other facets of Greek culture—is likely a very large distortion. Contemporary evidence suggests extensive contacts between western and eastern cultures, interactions that go beyond trade and territorial conflict. As a rule in ancient history, knowledge travels along trade routes and where one finds significant interstate or international commerce, in combination with some degree of wealth and stability, one soon finds an intellectual center. Aristocratic sophoi of many variations, Greek and otherwise, tended to travel and to be broadly curious about their counterparts in lands sometimes far from their own. It has long been noted that areas of philosophical and religious overlap between, for instance, India and Greece both exist from an early date and are difficult to describe as coincidental. A full inventory of conceptual similarities would require book-length treatment and our point here concerns the forest and not the trees.

In the archaic period the Persian empire and its court likely played an especially important role as a meeting place for a great variety of knowers and artists from many regions to the east, the west, and the south. The details are speculative, but the likelihood is that some number of intellectuals from Greece, Egypt, the near east, and India travelled to the Persian imperial court around the time that the Upanisads were being written and presocratic philosophy was emerging, particularly from the mid-sixth to the early fifth centuries. Persian rulers would have likely had a special interest in foreign physicians, and at a time when distinctions between medical, religious, and philosophical knowledge were very loose. Seventh-century Greece saw an “orientalizing” phase, again suggesting that interactions with the east were likely to have been extensive, not only in that century but from around the middle of the second millennium when the movement of goods along sea and caravan routes became well established from the Mediterranean to India.

Stories abounded in ancient Greece of archaic intellectuals travelling to the middle east, western Asia, and Egypt in search of whatever knowledge was to be had there. Egyptian mathematics, like Babylonian astronomy, was a practical science, and while both achievements are impressive what they appear to have lacked is the Greek penchant for philosophical abstraction. There was something innovative in the way that early Greek thinkers were appropriating ideas from their neighbors and predecessors, a mode of knowledge that was more theoretical and also an end in itself.

Examples of probable eastern and southern influence on presocratic thought are numerous, but a short list would include the following. If Greek philosophy is an outgrowth of mythos, many of these myths themselves appear to have been imported, including Hesiod’s account of the origin of the world which has clear middle-eastern parallels. Hesiod’s creation story in Theogony was likely borrowed from Babylonian tradition and possibly the book of Genesis. The role of the gods, the emergence of order from chaos, the notions of a primordial unity and of creation as a divinely caused differentiation of elements were all popular themes in near-eastern myth. On these tellings, the early history of the world concerns an emerging of form, rational order, and justice from an original chaos, a process involving struggle and a mighty overcoming of menacing forces. Specific parallels between narratives and divinities from the middle east through Egypt and Greece are many. Apollo himself was no ordinary divinity but a symbol of order, rationality, art, healing, and justice, among other things, and his oracle at Delphi served for more than a millennium as one of the foremost religious sites in the Greek world. This great symbol of the Greek victory over barbarism was a barbarian import while philosophical prose itself, this most orderly and rational form of expression, was nothing sui generis but an art borrowed from practical and legal texts, a synthesis of mythical content and technical form. Invention here again lay in synthesis, the novel integration of familiar accounts of the gods and a divine order with a mundane form of writing imported from more pragmatic contexts.

The beginning of philosophical prose in itself has long been regarded as a radical advance, a great calling down from the heavens of sophia itself or perhaps a raising of it to a higher order of conceptual tidiness and argumentative rigor. Prose writing could be more systematic and clear, less fraught with drama and emotionality, and could speak in a different register, but it is worth recalling that philosophers in both the archaic and classical periods were opting for this by degrees and were in no way abandoning “the poetic.” This includes Plato and Aristotle. Plato, for all his worries about the consequences of certain forms of poetry, was a poet, and so was his student, Aristotle. Aristotle’s dialogues are lost to us, but the philosophical dialogue of which he and Plato were the acknowledged masters was an artful synthesis of poetry, prose, myth, dramatic action, and any literary and rhetorical element that could be brought to bear in persuading an audience. Indeed, the very distinction between philosophy and myth does not appear to have preceded these two writers. These early philosophers, in short, were picking up ideas and forms of writing from wherever they could find them and combining influences from near and far in an effort to turn the conversation in a moderately new direction.

The familiar assertion that the emergence of philosophical and scientific rationality during the lead-up to the classical era represented the crossing of an intellectual and psychological Rubicon—from “archaic,” “dark age,” or perhaps “primitive man,” whose propensity for mythical and magical thinking had something childlike about it, to a qualitatively more developed mentality—is evidentially sparse, as are the notions of discrete mentalities and the primitive mind itself. This transitional period in western intellectual history is not a developmental story. The ancient gods never did flee. Rather they travelled, had their names changed, altered their appearance, and employed new prophets. The philosophers themselves did not expel so much as naturalize them, speak of them in a more formal mode of discourse while retaining a good deal of their substance. Many Greek divinities themselves appear to be survivals from the neolithic and indeed paleolithic eras.

The Archaic Landscape

Greek philosophy was a high point in ancient intellectual history, although the impression of radical transformation or a sui generis event is mistaken. Nothing was brought to an end—a primitive mentality, an age of superstition, a childhood of the mind—and nothing appeared out of nowhere. Philosophy in Greece grew out of the mythos that preceded it. Reason was an offspring of unreason, one might say, although a more accurate statement is that philosophical rationality was an imaginative synthesis of traditionary material both local and imported, mythical and practical, ethereal and technical, and in short of whatever intellectual elements this slightly eccentric group of thinkers found about them and saw fit to add to their palette, ask some awkward questions about, or turn to a different discursive purpose.

They were relatively free to do this because the Greek world lacked an organized and state-sponsored priesthood, was part of a network that spanned various societies of the Mediterranean and middle-eastern world, had a tradition of hospitality to a wide range of gods and an ethos that prized a good agon in the realm of ideas. Polytheism has a limited potential for orthodoxy. An Athenian intellectual at the height of the classical period could still encounter trouble if he were to gain a reputation for introducing new and strange gods and teaching them to impressionable youths—indeed a good deal of trouble—but he would need to push the envelope, as Socrates did. Free thinking in itself was not a death sentence, and while an important element of conservatism always characterized ancient polytheism, large-scale intolerance did not fit easily into this mode of thought. The intellectual landscape of archaic Greece was overrun with gods, holy men, seers, poets, and what would later be called philosophers, scientists, and artists, practitioners of many arts all interacting, jostling for position, and competing for prestige and audiences. Religious continuity was the norm, and the miscellany of divinities that was in place by the eighth century essentially held its position until the sixth century A.D., and even then was put down by force and still not eliminated completely.

Polytheism’s resilience owed much to its openness. The large view of the world and of human existence that it expressed exhibited a sense of the contingency, the complexity, and the mystery of the world of human experience. Piety consisted in the dignified enactment of rituals that were as old as the tradition and that were also various. The gods themselves were many, and polytheists typically saw little difficulty in identifying a foreign divinity with one of their own. Myths didn’t need to be believed and often likely were not in any literal or dogmatic sense, which would have contributed to the syncretic attitude of many “believers,” although one might better say participants. Religion or myth was something that one did—enacted in a social setting, related stories about, and showed some reverence for. Greek city-states largely resisted theocracy, although nor should we imagine an altogether free marketplace of ideas. In this intellectual landscape ideas and texts could circulate widely and in some relative freedom, and when the Persian empire flexed its muscle over Ionia, intellectuals could prudently migrate west to emerging cultural centers elsewhere in the Greek world.

Classical Greek thinkers themselves, including Plato and Aristotle, were far from holding that their own era represented any great advance over their predecessors. The golden age always lay in the past, and change, as they saw it, mostly amounted to deterioration. Philosophy itself, according to them anyway, was no culmination or miraculous development but something more like a conversational turn. In what did the crudeness of a Homer or a Hesiod consist, or the age-old tradition on which they were drawing? The age-old mythos from which philosophy emerged did not radically differ from that of several neighboring civilizations, and if it would eventually be eclipsed by different modes of discourse speaking in a someone different idiom, it is less likely that the new ways better satisfied old spiritual or intellectual needs than that they created and went some way toward satisfying new ones.

Finally, why do philosophers always return to the Greeks? Don’t think of this merely as a museum tour in the history of antiquated ideas but the beginning of a tradition that is our own, and indeed a living tradition. These thinkers were responding to the challenges and the intellectual complexities of their times, as philosophers still do (and not only them), and many of their questions remain our questions. Some of their answers we will probably reject, but their attempts to think through the problems of their times still serve as an exemplar, and any attempt to start thinking anew without any connection to our ancient predecessors is doomed to failure. Whether there is progress in the history of ideas is not a straightforward question and the answer may well be negative. As one of the foremost twentieth-century philosophers, Hans-Georg Gadamer, expressed it, “I ask that the reader take what follows as an attempt to read the classic Greek thinkers the other way round as it were—that is, not from the perspective of the assumed superiority of modernity, which believes itself beyond the ancient philosophers because it possesses an infinitely refined logic, but instead with the conviction that philosophy is a human experience that remains the same and that characterizes the human being as such, and that there is no progress in it, but only participation. That these things still hold, even for a civilization like ours that is molded by science, sounds hard to believe, but to me it seems true nonetheless.” (Gadamer, Idea of the Good, 6)

PART TWO

Plato (about 427—347 BC)

We begin with the story of Socrates (469-399 BC) as Plato depicted him in his dialogue “The Apology.” I won’t ask you to read “The Apology,” although it’s short and makes for fascinating reading. Here’s the concise version of the story. There once was a man who annoyed many of his fellow Athenians by asking them philosophical questions rather persistently and in a manner that caused them to become aware of their own ignorance. They killed him.

If that’s a little too concise, here are some more details. Plato wrote in dialogue form, and Socrates appears in most of Plato’s dialogues as the central character, including the Republic, which we will be reading in its entirety. There is more than a little uncertainty as to the resemblance between the historical Socrates and Socrates as he’s depicted in Plato’s writings. In many of these dialogues, Socrates, who wrote nothing, appears to be little more than a mouthpiece for Plato himself while in others, especially Plato’s early writings, scholars largely believe the Socrates who is represented to coincide more or less with the historical figure, although of course the words that Plato attributes to Socrates couldn’t possibly be more than his best attempt at a recollection of conversations that would have occurred some time prior if at all. “The Apology” is among Plato’s early dialogues and it’s believed to be an historically accurate representation of the trial that took place in Athens in 399 BC, during which Socrates stood accused of corrupting the youth and of teaching strange doctrines regarding the Greek gods. The dialogue is an account of the trial, and the heart of it features Socrates not “apologizing” but telling his story in a rather plainspoken but also bold and at times provocative fashion. An apologia is more like a justification than an apology in our ordinary sense of the word. He wasn’t sorry; on the contrary.

The story of Socrates goes about like this. But first, a photo:

I’m not certain he was quite so athletic, but anyway: notice that both Socrates and, in the previous photo, Plato, Socrates’ student or disciple of sorts, are pointing up. What are they pointing at? The Italian renaissance painter Raphael in his famous painting of “The School of Athens” (also above) depicts Aristotle, by contrast, as gesturing downward. What is going on here? Aristotle, as we shall see in Part 3 of this course, had what we might call a more empirical mind than his teacher Plato, who was more inclined toward mathematics. Plato and Plato’s Socrates have a more mathematical turn of mind than Aristotle, whom we might describe as more scientific, to speak in somewhat simplified terms; “in Aristotle’s eyes, Plato was too much of a mathematician.” The philosopher just cited adds: “the basic difference between Plato and Aristotle is … Plato is mathematically oriented, while Aristotle sticks to physics and, above all, to biology.” (Gadamer, Beginning, 34, 73) Aristotle in Raphael’s painting is gesturing down to the ground or to the world of familiar experience where Socrates and Plato are urging us to look up to a higher realm of ideas or what Plato would call “Forms” (usually in the upper case). I’ll return to the Forms later, but in short they comprise a transcendent and intelligible realm that is above and in some sense more real than the world of ordinary experience or the world of material nature. Philosophers, Socrates and Plato were urging us, must look up, as a ship’s navigator looks up at the stars rather than focusing always on what lies ahead. This, in a sense, was what Socrates was urging his fellow Athenians to do: to look up or to reflect in a serious way on what passes for knowledge in our society, to think in a more rational and critical way about the many ordinary opinions that we all hold. How many of those opinions amount to real knowledge? For Socrates the answer is not many. Knowledge and opinion are not the same, and “the unexamined life,” as he famously said, “is not worth living.”

The story begins with a report Socrates heard to the effect that the famous oracle at Delphi, when asked whether anyone is wiser than Socrates, answered no. How, Socrates asked, can this be? Socrates did not claim to be a wise man. On the contrary, the doctrine for which he would become famous is the docta ignorantia or the doctrine of ignorance: all I know, in other words, is that I don’t know much of anything. Knowledge has limits, and Socrates was well aware of the limits both of his own knowledge and of other people’s knowledge. He would go on something of a quest to find out for himself whether the oracle was correct, going often into the Athenian agora and engaging in informal conversation with whomever he encountered, including statesmen, poets, and others reputed for their knowledge. These conversations would typically begin with someone claiming, as one might do in the course of an ordinary day, to know something, whether it be about morality, politics, the gods, beauty, love, or much of anything. Socrates would then proceed to ask a series of questions of his interlocutor, who was usually enthusiastic to tell Socrates everything he knew. Typically, as the conversation would unfold, Socrates would reveal to his interlocutor through a series of questions that the person held not real knowledge but an opinion only, and usually a false opinion. Socrates’ practice of revealing his interlocutor’s ignorance wasn’t malicious but it didn’t enamor him to his fellow Athenians, and over the years he gained a negative reputation. How often do human beings, then or now, pride themselves on their knowledge, or what they take to be knowledge? Having the rug pulled out is not a pleasant experience, particularly for those who think themselves learned.

By the age of seventy, Socrates had been doing this for some decades, and his reputation as “the gadfly of Athens” had passed from one generation to the next. A gadfly is a nuisance, and a growing number wanted to be rid of him. His accusers declared Socrates to be a corrupter of the youth and also impious, an atheist in the sense of not believing in the traditional Greek gods and of introducing new and strange gods. The charges were clearly spurious, but the problem Socrates needed to point out to the jury is that his reputation had become so well established that the jury is likely to believe anything his accusers say. In making his case Socrates was speaking to a jury of five hundred of his fellow Athenian citizens, as was the legal custom at the time. The proceedings were quite informal and boisterous, with a seventy-year-old Socrates having to shout to be heard over the noise of the jury. We shouldn’t imagine a modern legal trial with a small jury in a quiet and orderly court room, quite the contrary.

Nonetheless, Socrates would proceed in his usual way to ask some questions of his accusers, and in the course of the back-and-forth it became apparent that his accusers didn’t know what they were talking about. To begin with, he pointed out, he is the last person to be introducing new and strange doctrines as the only doctrine he holds is the doctrine of his own ignorance. As for corrupting the youth, Socrates quickly dispatched this charge as well, demonstrating in the case of both accusations that they’re not worth taking seriously. At times Socrates likely came across to the jury as dismissive and somewhat supercilious, and this did not help his cause.

The majority in the jury sided with the accusers, and the trial then moved into the sentencing phase. Ordinarily, someone in Socrates’ position would have humbly asked for a sentence of banishment from Athens or perhaps some jail time and a fine. Instead, he proposed that he be rewarded in the manner of a public benefactor, living out his days at public expense, receiving free meals, combined perhaps with a small fine which his friends would pay on his behalf. Predictably, the jury was incensed and sided again with his accusers who had asked that Socrates be put to death. And so he was, in the form of being forced to drink hemlock, which is what he is reaching for with his right hand in the painting above.

Socrates’ heroic death combined with his intellectual humility and steadfast commitment to philosophical dialogue created a reputation for him that survives to the present day as something of a patron saint of philosophy. Of his actual philosophy we know little, but Plato’s writings ensured for him a foremost position in the western philosophical tradition, more for his practice as a philosopher and his relentless pursuit of knowledge than for any knowledge he actually possessed. True wisdom, as he told the jury, belongs to the gods. Human beings—philosophers—at most pursue it. This is the true meaning of philosophy: the love (philia), in the sense of the pursuit and not the possession, of wisdom (sophia) or of a knowledge that especially bears upon life and how we’re living it. His double imperative that we live an examined and also a virtuous life has been echoed constantly by philosophers through the twenty-four centuries since he lived.

Biography

Plato was born in or around 427 BC and lived until 347 BC, dying at the age of about eighty. Unlike Socrates, Plato had a decidedly aristocratic background, both his father’s and mother’s families being among the more distinguished in fifth-century Athens. Not a great deal is known about his life. He almost never mentions himself in his dialogues, although he would have surely received the best education available in this era and was clearly knowledgeable of the great Greek dramatists and poets, the Greek philosophers and scientists, the sophists and rhetoricians. Aristotle’s writings contain numerous references to Plato’s thought but not to his life. He grew up in an era dominated by conflict between Athens and Sparta while within Athens itself, competing democratic and oligarchic factions dominated the political scene. This was a turbulent time; between the Peloponnesian war (431-404), a major attack of the plague, and the dynamics of democratic politics, Plato’s early years witnessed a great deal of change and conflict. It is unknown whether Plato served in the military, however it is most likely that he participated in political debates in the Athenian assembly. Plato never married.

Plato (“Platon” in Greek) is not likely his real or given name but a nickname which may have been given to him as a young man by his wrestling coach. Platon is a Greek word meaning broad, likely referring to his broad shoulders or possibly his forehead. His given name may have been Aristocles, meaning best reputation, although this is uncertain. What is known is that Plato referred to himself as Platon in his mature years.

One thing we can say with certainty is that the decisive event in his early life was encountering Socrates, who was older than Plato by about forty years. Socrates’ execution in 399 would have had a profound effect on the young disciple, and Plato mentions himself by name, or he has Socrates mention him, in the “Apology.” Prior to Socrates’ death, it seems that Plato was intent upon a career in Athenian politics, which is unsurprising given his background and family connections. It may well have been Socrates’ trial and execution that convinced Plato to give up a career in politics for one that roughly followed his master’s example. This travesty of justice combined with his observations of the Athenian experiment in democracy likely convinced Plato of the futility of politics. Biographers report that after Socrates’ death Plato spent time travelling to Italy, Egypt, and Cyrene and subsequently returned to Athens whereupon he founded his famous school, the Academy (likely named after the Athenian hero Akademos), in 387 which was to be an institution devoted to philosophical and scientific research. From the standpoint of later intellectual history, the creation of this school was momentous, and it would remain in place long after his death, until 86 BC when it was destroyed by the Roman dictator Sulla. After creating the school, Plato would become its president and he would teach there until his death. The Academy has often been thought of as the first university or proto-university, and with some justification. Actual universities would not appear until the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries in major European centers, but these looked back in some ways to Plato’s school. The existence of a permanent center for higher learning meant that young aristocratic men could travel to Plato’s Academy rather than learn from the itinerant teachers called sophists whom Plato took a dim view of and would make frequent reference to in his dialogues.

Plato would spend twenty years presiding over and lecturing at the Academy. Aristotle was his most famous student; Aristotle reports that he spent ­­­twenty years studying at Plato’s Academy, leaving only upon Plato’s death. As one scholar notes, “Probably we are not to think of Plato as writing much during these twenty years. He would be too busy otherwise, and … there is the strongest reason for thinking that most of his dialogues, including all those which are most generally known today, were all composed by his fortieth year, or soon after.” (Taylor, 7)

In 367, Dionysius I, autocrat of Syracuse, died and a sixty-year-old Plato was invited to travel to Syracuse in order to teach his successor, the thirty-year-old Dionysius II, a man whose education it appears had not been entirely successful. Plato was invited by Dion, a brother-in-law of Dionysius II, to carry out this task. Dion was enthusiastic about Plato’s idea of a philosopher-king, and Plato was tasked with instructing Dionysius II in the art of being a wise ruler. Plato accepted the invitation and, without aiming so high as to create in Syracuse a replica of the ideal republic, he did what he could to educate the young ruler. The venture did not succeed, and after a few months Plato returned to Athens.

It is commonplace for the works of ancient writers to be lost to us either in whole or in part, but Plato’s complete writings have managed to survive and to be passed down to our time. The conversation on which the Republic was based likely happened around the year 421 when Socrates would have been about fifty years old or a bit less. Plato was a child at this time and would have composed the dialogue some years later, drawing no doubt on his brothers’ reports on its subject matter. The Republic was written around 375, which is toward the end of Plato’s early or Socratic period—which was followed by his middle or transition period and subsequent mature and late periods. In this and most of his dialogues, Plato was clearly concerned both to preserve and to rehabilitate the reputation of Socrates, a teacher whom he would always venerate highly. These dialogues are more than recollections of Socrates’ conversations but are original philosophical works in which the thought of Plato and his teacher are very difficult, and often impossible, to disentangle.

Plato’s influence upon the subsequent course of western philosophy and theology through until the present day cannot be overstated. The twentieth-century philosopher A. N. Whitehead famously remarked that western philosophy in its entirety is but a series of footnotes to Plato. This is overstated, of course, but it’s a fitting commentary on a philosopher who has been a major influence on more or less every major philosophical development in the west for over two thousand years.

Republic, Book 1

We turn now to the Republic, the principal character in which is Socrates once again, although the Socrates who appears in this dialogue should be understood as the voice of Plato as much as or more than the historical Socrates. How many of Plato’s views Socrates also held is a matter of speculation. In what follows, then, I’ll be speaking of Plato and Socrates as one.

This lengthy conversation or dialogue begins as Socrates and his friend Polemarchus are on their way to the house of Cephalus, Polemarchus’ father, following a religious festival. The conversation begins with Socrates and Cephalus casually discussing old age. The conversation soon comes round to the topic of justice, as Cephalus maintains that the essence of justice is to speak the truth and to pay one’s debts. Socrates is unsatisfied with this definition, but before Cephalus can respond to Socrates’ criticisms he takes his leave and Polemarchus replaces his father in the conversation. Speaking the truth and paying one’s debts, Socrates counters, are examples of just actions, but they’re not the definition or the essence of justice itself. What Socrates is after is such a definition, not mere examples. Polemarchus suggests that justice is giving what is owed to a person, to which Socrates replies, what exactly do we owe to people? What do we owe to our friends and to our enemies? Polemarchus replies that we owe benefits to our friends and harm to our enemies. Socrates asks, can it be right for a just person to harm anyone, including one’s enemies? If you were to harm a horse, the horse doesn’t become better but worse. If you harm a person, the person also doesn’t become better but worse. Can justice consist in making someone worse? People who are harmed are likely to become even more unjust, so it would be odd for justice to consist in making someone less just. Wouldn’t we expect the just person to assist others in becoming more just? In other words, Polemarchus’ definition will not do.

At this point the rather aggressive and ill-mannered Thrasymachus intervenes with his own definition of justice, which Socrates also dispatches without much difficulty. Justice, Thrasymachus claims, is whatever is to the advantage of what he calls “the stronger” or those who hold power in the state. Might makes right. Whoever has power makes rules that benefit themselves, and that is the meaning of justice. Socrates quickly refutes Thrasymachus as follows: don’t rulers sometimes unknowingly create rules that are disadvantageous for themselves? When they do, is it just for the people to obey those rules? Thrasymachus answers in the affirmative. If so, the people are acting to the disadvantage of the stronger. Moreover, it seems to be the case that any art or craft works for the benefit of someone who is not the practitioner oneself but someone else. In medicine, for example, the physician works for the benefit of the patient. The whole practice of medicine is meant to serve not the physician but the patient. Socrates also mentions the example of horse breeding; is this not for the benefit of horses? One trains a horse so that it can become a better horse.

As the conversation goes on, Socrates gets Thrasymachus to concede, after a bit of a tantrum, that a just person is both wise and good, acting more for the benefit of others than oneself. The just person not only possesses a better character than the unjust, Socrates asserts, but is also happier. How is this, that the person who acts for the benefit of others is not only happy but happier than someone who pursues power and other advantages for oneself? Would it not be more intuitive to say that the happiest person is the egoist, as Thrasymachus believes? It will be important to Plato to counter this and to claim that the person who is most just is also most happy. We will return to this later in the dialogue, but before the end of Book 1 Socrates proposes that the good of anything must be understood with reference to that thing’s function. A horse, for example, has a function, and a good horse is one that performs its function well; it is “good” in the sense that it is “good at” performing its function. Something similar must be said of the human being or of the mind or soul. This too has a function, and a good human being must be understood with reference to this rather than with reference to its desires. The mind or soul may pursue its function well or badly, and one who lives well must surely be happy while someone who lives in the opposite way must be unhappy. One scholar notes, “Any craftsman possesses a certain skill, he knows how to do something or make something, he is good at his job. The Greeks always tended to identify the useful and the good….. The virtue of any craftsman was just this being good at his craft. So indeed do we speak of a good carpenter, but we do not go so far as to speak of the ‘goodness’ of a carpenter in this sense. The Greeks did. Hence the Socratic formula arose in a perfectly natural way; its first meaning was: ‘to be good at something is a matter of knowledge’ and then it came to mean ‘to be good is a matter of knowledge.’” (Grube, 217)

For Socrates, as for Plato, the ultimate question of philosophy is, what is the good life for human beings. How should we live? What is a person of good character like, and is this person happy? Answering this last question in the affirmative will be very important for Plato, but it will take some argumentation to demonstrate this. Plato would always emphasize the deep connection between knowledge and the good. As one scholar notes, “The belief that goodness is a matter of knowledge can … be attributed to the historical Socrates. He wished to reduce all excellence to some kind of knowledge and was profoundly convinced that ‘no man does wrong on purpose’ because no man is willingly ignorant. Plato also maintained this apparent paradox throughout; it is asserted in almost every one of his works.” Further, “The Socratic doctrine is expressed by two formulae: ‘goodness is knowledge,’ and its corollary ‘no man sins on purpose’; closely allied with these is … the advice of Apollo at Delphi: know thyself.” (Grube, 216)

Book 2

Thrasymachus leaves off in a huff and we don’t hear much from him again, leaving Glaucon and Adeimantus, Plato’s brothers, to take up Thrasymachus’ argument. Glaucon and Adeimantus remain Socrates’ main interlocutors through until the end of the Republic. What Socrates needs to demonstrate at this point is what justice is and why it’s desirable. It is desirable, he will argue, both because it leads to beneficial consequences and because it is good in itself, or we properly value it for its own sake. Virtue is its own reward; it also brings about rewards for the just person, but only as a secondary matter. Socrates here is trying to counter the more popular view that leading a just and virtuous life is valuable only as a means to an end, and where the end is being well thought of by one’s peers or having a good reputation. Living a just life, on this common view, is burdensome for the individual, and if it is valuable at all, it is valuable only instrumentally or as a means to an end. Justice, Socrates wants to demonstrate, is praiseworthy on its own. How and why is this so? This argument will not be completed in Book 2 but will continue in later sections of the Republic.

Glaucon now tells a story about the ring of Gyges. In this mythical narrative, a shepherd discovers a magical ring which when he turns the setting of the ring toward himself he becomes invisible to others while when he turns the setting outward he becomes visible again. The story invites each of us to imagine how we would act if we had the power to disappear and reappear at will, that is, if no one could see you and the various things that you do, how would your behavior change, and would it change at all? Would you be tempted to act in unjust ways if doing so wouldn’t adversely affect your reputation? Think of how today, for example, our own verbal behavior can change rather dramatically when we’re able to hide behind a computer screen and say things anonymously. We all know that many will say things anonymously that they would never say to a person face to face. What becomes of justice when we can become invisible in this way, Glaucon asks? Is the upshot of this story that justice is only valuable as a means to an end? Greek aristocrats—and not only them—commonly valued personal reputation very highly, and often regarded justice as burdensome in itself and valuable only as a means of being well thought of by others. It will not be easy for Socrates to counter this widespread viewpoint. Remember that Socrates himself gained a bad reputation among his fellow Athenians which in the end cost him his life. He is urging us to value reputation far less and personal virtue far more, but he must present an argument for this view.

The conversation to this point has focused on justice within the individual. The focus now shifts to political justice or justice in the city-state. Socrates proposes that justice may be more easily understood on a larger social scale than within the individual, although it’s not exactly going to be easy to discern it there either. What is a just city like, bearing in mind that the Greek world at this time consisted of a large number of independent city-states rather than a nation in the modern sense? Imagine we are designing a new city-state from scratch. How would we design it? What would its laws and constitution look like? How large would its population be? Who would the citizens be? What kinds of work would need to be done? What sort of institutions should it have? In general, what would an ideal or ideally just republic look like?

As the dialogue unfolds, Socrates consistently maintains that justice within the individual soul in a sense mirrors justice in the general society. Individual justice and political justice are two, but they are two sides of a single coin. How this is so, Socrates will need to spell out over the course of the dialogue as a whole. Whether Plato’s primary concern in the Republic was with developing a political philosophy or a philosophy more centered around the individual—how a virtuous individual comes to be, including especially what their education properly consists in—is debatable. A plausible case can be made for both readings, but be that as it may, it will become Socrates’ task in advancing an overall conception of justice to demonstrate the deep parallels that he sees between justice within the individual and justice within the city-state. The Republic may be read as a book primarily of political philosophy, moral philosophy, or educational philosophy—with quite a lot of metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics included as well—but in any case, Plato is advancing a systematic philosophy centered around the concept of justice. At the heart of it is Socrates’ question of how one should live. Educational issues would always be at the forefront of Plato’s concerns; indeed, “it might in fact be claimed that the majority of Plato’s dialogues do deal with this topic [education], at least in a tangential manner. When we use education in the broad sense of training, instruction, or instructive inquiry in general, we may quite rightly say that it constitutes the only ‘theme’ to be found in every one of Plato’s dialogues.” (Mitscherling, 40)

The conversation then turns to a consideration of the different kinds of city-state. The first candidate is quickly dismissed by Glaucon as fit only for pigs. It is a city that looks after our basic needs only, such as the need for food and shelter. The city would have a division of labor but not much else. The second, more cultured and luxurious, city caters to a greater range of needs and appetites than the first model but is found lacking for its tendency to lead toward factionalism and war. To prevent this, our city will need what Plato will call guardians. This will emerge as a class of citizen-soldiers, police, and political rulers, and it is this class or section of the population that is Plato’s primary concern throughout the Republic. A much larger segment of the population consists of farmers, tradesmen, businesspeople, slaves, and general workers. Plato will have a good deal to say about this class as well, although his primary concern is always with the guardians, including both their social and political function, their overall way of life, and especially their education.

The question of how the guardians are to be educated now emerges as one of the primary, if not the primary, question of the entire dialogue, and Plato will go into considerable detail in describing this education, including their musical education and the kind of stories that should be told to them in childhood. An important hypothesis emerges in Book 2, which is that works of art or aesthetic objects generally do far more than merely please or entertain those who experience them but have a profoundly formative influence, especially on the young. In an important sense, each one of us, particularly at a formative stage of life, becomes what we see or otherwise experience. The child who is exposed to what is bad—whether it be stories of human beings or gods behaving immorally or aesthetic objects of whatever kind that are unedifying—easily becomes bad. The reverse is also true. The details of this psychological hypothesis will need to be examined as the conversation continues.

Plato, we must keep in mind, had an aristocratic background and was part of an aristocratic society. Many of our modern sensibilities, including political egalitarianism, need to be bracketed if we want to understand much of anything about ancient Greek civilization, including Plato’s philosophy and Aristotle’s as well. Socrates points out in Book 2 that human beings are not equal in the sense that we’re not all constituted the same way. Some have talents and capacities that others do not (or not much), and in designing our ideal city we should aim to align particular human beings with careers that are appropriate to them or jobs that fit with a person’s individual nature. Some are more rational than others; some are more appetitive or passionate than others. In a just society everyone should do the kind of work toward which their nature inclines them, rather than the kind of work they desire. A social order that is organized around the personal desires of individuals will always be inclined toward egoism, factionalism, and social strife. A just society does not consist in people doing their own thing but doing what is in their nature to do and what is beneficial to the whole.

Back to the question of the guardians and their education: the function of the guardians is to protect and to rule the city. What, then, are the characteristics of a good guardian? Think of a guard dog. This is a dog that is ferocious to its enemies yet gentle to its owner, and a similar principle will apply to the guardians of our ideal city. If our city is at war, our soldiers need to be ferocious in defeating the enemy, yet toward their fellow citizens they must be protective and caring. What sort of upbringing and education is likely to produce guardians of this kind? They will need, of course, a good deal of military training, yet this will not be enough. As a good guard dog can distinguish friend from foe and understand how to treat both, so the guardians must have a certain amount of knowledge. There will need to be physical education for the body and a different kind of training for the mind or the soul. The first is relatively straightforward while the second is not. How do we form the soul? It begins with musical training, where this (mousike) refers not only to music in a familiar sense but also poetry, dance, and various kinds of stories. All of this matters far more than we might think, for it is the soul that we’re speaking of and how it comes to be what it is. Socrates worries seriously about the stories that are conventionally told to children, as parents today worry about the kind of material children are exposed to on the internet, in movies, and so on. If we become what we see, what are we seeing? What stories are parents, nurses, and others telling to the young? The foremost Greek storyteller and teacher of a kind was Homer, and what we find in Homer (and Hesiod and others) is a wide variety of stories about human beings, heroes, and gods acting sometimes virtuously and sometimes viciously. Sometimes Homer and the other poets tell the truth and sometimes they lie. The gods, for example, are often depicted as acting in ways that would be considered vicious if performed by human beings. Gods and heroes, Plato fervently believes, are virtuous and are neither evil nor the cause of evil. Stories about them should be both true and morally edifying, especially when they’re going to be related to the young. The “lies” that poets tell can be very harmful indeed. One Plato scholar remarks, “Since children’s minds are easily molded, one must cautiously regulate what they are told. The poets must depict the gods only as they really are, and not as acting in any manner undivine. They must also praise the noble life and the life hereafter, in order that the youths will be led to choose that noble life and, when older, as guardians of the polis, not fear death through force of undesirable habit. Further, because art often involves imitation, it must be rigidly specified precisely what sorts of things the poets and other artists are to be allowed to imitate. Since the guardians must imitate only courage, temperance, piety, and the like, so must the poets imitate only such virtuous qualities as these.” (Mitscherling, 18)

By the end of the Republic, Socrates will conclude that poets must be banished from our city, and it is a point that has long raised the eyebrows of Plato’s readers. How could this writer, who was himself a highly skilled stylist, who makes regular use of myth, metaphor, dramatic narrative, and any number of literary and rhetorical devices, and who also loved poetry and other forms of art, become such an ardent proponent not only of censorship but of banishment of the artists? This point remains much disputed among Plato scholars; while some continue to take Plato’s arguments at face value, others such as Hans-Georg Gadamer argue that “Plato’s criticism of poetry is … not to be taken literally…, but rather as the vehicle whereby he criticizes the highly pernicious influence of the teachings of the Sophists.” (Mitscherling, 66) I’ll return to this later.

Regarding the gods: when we see Socrates referring to “the gods,” or sometimes “the god,” it’s important to bear in mind that the Greeks were polytheists and their conception of the divinities was very different from Jewish and later Christian monotheism. As one scholar notes, “Where the Christian says that God is love or that God is good he is first asserting, or taking for granted, the existence of a mysterious being [or, more accurately, either “a being” or “being” itself—not a trivial distinction], God, and making a qualitative judgment about him. He is telling us something about God. With the Greek the order was frequently reversed. He would say that Love is god or Beauty is god; he is not assuming the existence of any mysterious divinity but telling us something about love and beauty, the reality of which no one could deny. The subject of his judgment, the thing of which he speaks, is in the world we know, and in that world pagan thought was focused in classical times. By saying that love, or victory, is god, or, to be more accurate, a god, was meant first and foremost that it is more than human, not subject to death, everlasting…. Any power, any force we see at work in the world, which is not born with us and will continue after we are gone could thus be called a god, and most of them were.” Furthermore, “It is true that these abstractions were clothed with a human form by Greek artists and poets. But this anthropomorphism, though it certainly affected the popular conception of the divinities, was, to the educated Greek at least, definitely symbolic. At times the symbolism was no doubt lost sight of by the ordinary worshipper and the anthropomorphism was very crude.” (Grube, 150-1) Plato didn’t discuss the Olympian gods, and it’s very unlikely that he believed in them in any literal sense. In the Republic, the gods refer in a somewhat vague way to divine powers. Plato’s conception of ultimate reality centers on the Forms, and the Forms and the gods are never discussed together and nor are they identified. It is not at all clear what, if any, relationship they have.

Book 3

The conversation remains on the topic of the guardians’ education and the kind of stories that should be told to them in childhood. Book 10 will return to this topic. Socrates in Book 3 goes into considerable detail describing the kind of “musical training” that is suitable for the guardians. If one of the main virtues of the guardians is courage, how is courage best instilled in the young? It is not, Socrates says, by telling them stories of cowards or of people who are thought to be brave but who behave cowardly in battle or anywhere else. It is by relating stories of courageous people acting courageously in difficult circumstances, of heroes acting heroically. They should not be told stories that will lead them to fear death, such as stories about a terrifying afterlife. Soldiers must not fear Hades, for if they do then they will run from danger when they are called upon to stand and fight. During his trial, Socrates told his jury that he did not fear death. A virtuous person does not fear this but cares primarily about their moral character. The same must be true of the guardians. They must neither fear death, be cowardly, lie, nor give into their passions. They must practice habitually a kind of courage and restraint of which the masses are not particularly capable.

Human beings are natural imitators, Socrates observes, and this practice of imitation over time forms habits that in turn form the soul. Imitation itself is both natural and dangerous—dangerous for what it can sometimes lead to in later life. Is all imitation bad, or only some of it? If one imitates a coward, it is more than possible that one will become a coward. Does the same hold for the imitation of courage, or is imitation itself the problem? A person, Socrates says, cannot imitate many things well but only one. One could not imitate well both the courageous and the cowardly, as one could not become both a good carpenter and a good soldier. A good soldier must be a trained professional, and one can’t be a trained carpenter or physician or philosopher at the same time. Some specialization is required if one is to practice any art or profession well. A guardian, then, should learn to imitate from childhood only people who are just, restrained, and courageous. Not all imitation, then, is bad, but only the imitation of bad behavior. The soul comes to be what it is through imitation and through the works of art it is exposed to, even including the kinds of musical instruments and rhythms that it hears.

He then turns to the question of physical education and diet, a somewhat less philosophical matter than musical education. The guardians’ diet and physical training should not be lax or self-indulgent but optimally conducive to strength and good health. Nothing especially surprising there.

Finally, the conversation turns to the question of how political rulers ought to be selected within the guardian class. Plato now relates the famous “myth of the metals” before describing the general lifestyle of the guardians. The myth of the metals is introduced in answer to the question of political rulership: who should hold power in the ideal city-state, given that more or less everyone not only wants power but believes themselves worthy of power. Remember that Plato was living in a democracy and was himself no fan of democracy. The basic problem with democracy is the demos themselves, the people or the citizens. Most people, he strongly believes, lack both the knowledge and the moral character that are necessary preconditions of political rule. If we want our city-state to be just, its rulers must be just, and this will not happen in a democracy. Athens’ experiment in democracy, in his view, is a failure. It was also by a majority vote of the five hundred citizens making up Socrates’ jury that Plato’s teacher was put to death.

The demos are not fit to rule, but they think they are. We’ll have to convince them that it is best for the city to be ruled not by themselves but by someone chosen from the guardian class. How are we going to convince them? This is where the myth of the metals comes in. We’re going to tell the people what Plato famously calls a “noble lie.” Ordinarily, lying is a vice, but in this case Plato will make an exception. We’ll tell them that when the god forms every human being, the god deposits within them a particular kind of metal. Those who will later be capable of ruling the city-state are born with gold within them. The rest of the guardian class has silver within them, while those who form the masses have iron and bronze within them. This is the condition into which one is born, and a mark of a just society is that everyone lives the kind of life to which they are individually suited. If everyone in the city is told this story in childhood, they will come to believe it and will act accordingly. Usually, one is born with the same metal as one’s parents, but exceptions may be made and some upward mobility will be possible. The offspring of a craftsman or a farmer will ordinarily follow in their parents’ footsteps, but in some cases they may be found to have silver or even gold in their nature, in which case they may be allowed into the guardian class. One scholar writes, “as a general rule, a man will find his natural place in the ‘class’ to which his parents belong…. But the rule has its notable exceptions: there are those who prove quite unfitted for the work of the class into which they are born, and those who show themselves qualified to take their place in a higher class. Hence it is part of Socrates’ idea that the early life of the individual shall be under close and constant surveillance and subjected to repeated tests of character and intelligence…. [N]o one is to be ensured by the accident of birth in a particular social status, and no one is to be excluded by it from rising to the highest eminence.” (Taylor, 275)

Socrates goes on to describe the way of life and the living conditions of the guardians. Unlike the rest of the citizenry, the guardians should possess no private property but for a small number of personal possessions. This is because the guardians must be far more civic-minded than the rest of the population, and property leads to selfishness. Also, the guardians should live communally, as soldiers do, and be paid a modest salary only. We will return to this later.

Book 4

Adeimantus expresses a worry at this point that the guardians may not be happy with their rather regimented life. Socrates answers that what matters most in our city is not whether anyone or any group in particular is especially happy but whether they’re living virtuously and gaining the kind of happiness that is suitable to their individual natures. It’s the happiness and well being of the city as a whole that matters most, not the personal happiness of any of the guardians or anyone else. The guardian who dreams of being wealthy desires the wrong things.

Our city has now been described at least in outline form and it exhibits all the virtues of a just state, in particular the virtues of justice, courage, temperance, and wisdom. To say that a city-state is wise means not that its craftsmen and farmers are wise but that its rulers are. To say that it is courageous means that its guardians exhibit this virtue, and to say that it is temperate and restrained means that the masses are so, as to each class belongs its own virtue. The primary virtue that is to be expected from the masses is temperance or restraint over the passions that can threaten to overwhelm people with this nature. What is to be expected of them is that they not get carried away with their appetites, including especially the appetite for power, for when this appetite is indulged, as it is in a democracy, the result is always disastrous. The salient virtue within the guardian class is courage, although it’s not the only one. Temperance and wisdom might be expected here as well, but courage has a special importance over these. The city’s ruler must also exhibit each of these virtues but wisdom most of all. It is best that everyone in the city-state stay in their lane, as it were, and do their own work for otherwise the society as a whole deteriorates into injustice and vice: “the good life,” one scholar writes, “is the proper functioning of every part of the soul in its proper place and a man is master of himself when his feelings and his passions are obedient to his intellect … as a state is its own master and happy when the councillors’ commands are obeyed by the rest of the people and when each of the three classes is satisfied with its position.” (Grube, 134) Meddling in the work of another, whether it is the philosopher doing the work of a farmer or vice versa, not only makes for bad work but undermines the city. Socrates can now propose a working definition of justice in the city-state: a just state is one in which economic activity is pursued by people with appetitive natures, the defence of the city is carried out by the spirited natures (those who are capable of courage and of becoming angry, not blindly but while turning this toward the defence of the city), and political power belongs to the wise.

Having now a conception of political justice, we can try to understand the nature of justice within the individual, and it is here that we encounter Plato’s famous tripartite theory of the human soul or the psyche. Every human being in the world should be understood as being composed of three elements or components: a rational part, a spirited part, and an appetitive part. These three parts correspond to the three classes that have been mentioned and the three types of metal within our natures. For Plato, human beings all have or are constituted by these three parts. We are all rational beings, and we are all spirited (a touch hot-headed) and also passionate beings. If the spirited part is the part of us that gets angry, anger is not merely a passion or an appetite. Socrates’ reason for distinguishing the spirited part from the appetites is because there are times when one can become angry at the passions themselves, as when one becomes angry with oneself for indulging some desire that one knows one shouldn’t. If the spirited element in our nature can stand against the appetites then we are speaking of two parts of the soul rather than one.

This tripartite nature of the soul is universal for human beings, but—and this is the important part—within every person one of these three parts prevails over or is stronger than the other two. Even the most rational person has passions, and even the most appetitive natures are rational in some, albeit weak, degree. Aristotle would later define human beings as rational animals or as the being that possesses the logos (reason, also language and word). The logos is what makes us human and what distinguishes us from other species. It is also the most god-like aspect of our nature. Plato would share this basic sentiment. In the “Phaedrus,” Plato gives us the image of a charioteer and a team of two horses as a representation of the ideal human soul. The charioteer symbolizes reason, while the two horses are the spirited and the appetitive parts of the soul. These horses can run like the wind, but they are liable to run off a cliff without a rational charioteer.

Justice within the individual, then, is found when reason governs the spirited and appetitive parts of our nature, not when the passions are simply repressed but when they are channeled in a virtuous direction. Socrates suggests at the end of Book 4 that there are five kinds of soul and, corresponding to these, five kinds of political constitution. More on this later.

Book 5

Socrates remarks that it’s going to be necessary to change rather radically the structure of the family within the guardian class. The family, of course, is a rather important social institution, and Socrates remains silent on the family as it pertains to the moneymaking class or the masses (the appetitive natures), yet among the guardians he now proposes essentially to abolish the family and to replace it with a new model. In this model, there is to be no marriage in our familiar sense of the word. The matter of human reproduction will also need to change radically. First, what is Plato’s issue with the family? The traditional family structure, as Socrates points out, creates strong loyalties which can come into conflict with the guardians’ primary loyalty which is to the state. A soldier in battle, for instance, may be called upon to risk his life, and he may be less inclined to do so if he’s worried about leaving his wife and children to become impoverished in the event of his death. A political ruler as well must be loyal to the city as a whole and not to his own family members. As one Plato scholar explains this point, “the chief reason is that he realized that the family is the point at which private property and all the evils that go with it are centred. He therefore attacks it in a characteristically provocative manner. Family interests are in practice frequently at variance with those of the whole community; a man labours to amass wealth in order to give security to his wife and children and in so doing he comes to look upon the rest of the citizens as his opponents if not his enemies.” (Grube, 270)

Socrates suggests that among the guardians, women and children should be shared or held in common. Adeimantus asks Socrates to explain his meaning and to justify this. Much of Book 5 finds Socrates trying to answer this question. Also, the guardians’ children will not be raised by their parents but by the city as a whole. Why so, and how will this work? The proposal is that we will no longer have one man marrying one woman, with the two of them living together and going on to have and raise their own biological children. Instead, there will be sacred ceremonies of a kind that take place during festivals which will happen periodically throughout the year. During one of these ceremonies, a particular man and a particular woman will be “married” for the duration of the festival only and for the purpose of impregnating the woman. The man and woman will not choose each other freely but be assigned to each other on a somewhat rigged lottery system. This lottery system will appear random to the men and women (another “noble lie”), but unbeknownst to them they will be individually assigned by the city’s rulers to each other on the basis of their proven abilities and suitability for reproductive purposes. Picture a dog breeder; the breeder doesn’t let the dogs choose their own partners but selects which ones are the best and places them together for the purpose of reproduction. The same basic model will apply here. The best men and the best women will reproduce with each other and as often as possible. The purpose of the lottery system and the deception is to prevent the lesser guardians, who will not reproduce, from becoming resentful of their betters. These inferior guardians will blame chance instead of the rulers for their bad luck at these ceremonies. Children born of the better parents will be raised in a separate part of the city by nurses, while any children born of the lesser guardians will be left to die, likely by exposure which was a common practice in ancient Greece. The reproductive age for women will be twenty through forty and for men from the point that follows their peak as a runner (thirty?) until fifty-five. Beyond these ages, men and women can have sex as they wish (apart from incest, although it will be rather difficult to know in this system who is related to whom).

Because children will be separated from their mothers at birth and raised communally, biological children and parents will not know each other, or no particular child will know who their biological mother or father is and vice versa. A man or woman will think of himself or herself as father or mother to all children born nine months after a given marriage ceremony, and children will see all of the guardians as their parents. Children born at around the same time will call one another brother and sister. As for slaves, we should endeavor not to enslave our fellow Greeks but “barbarians” only. Greeks in general, not only one’s fellow citizens in the city-state, are one’s natural brothers and sisters, but the same can’t be said of foreigners. It was axiomatic to ancient Greeks that non-Greeks were not their equals and that slavery was a natural condition. Slaves for the most part were prisoners of war and their offspring and served in a wide variety of roles throughout the Greek world and far beyond. The question of the morality of slavery does not arise in the Republic or anywhere else in Greek or later Roman philosophy as it was a commonplace view throughout the ancient world that slavery was indispensable to an agricultural economy. These aristocratic cultures did not share our modern attitudes toward such matters or toward work itself; for the Greek aristocrat, a life of relative leisure was far preferable to one of hard work.

Socrates next proposes that male and female guardians should receive the same education and, if they have the same abilities, should fulfill the same roles, including political leadership. This was quite a radical proposal in the context of the times, and it surely would have surprised Plato’s readers. It is not against nature for women to become philosophers, physicians, musicians, or any other role within the guardian class.

Socrates now advances his famous proposal that it’s the philosopher who should rule the city-state. Plato surely knows that this would strike his readers as bizarre, so he has some explaining to do. Who is this philosopher, and what entitles him or her (yes, the philosopher may be female) to become a political ruler? Socrates’ answer crucially bears upon the notion of the Forms. This idea of the Forms now plays a central role in the dialogue and in Plato’s philosophy as a whole. To know something, Plato maintains, is not merely to hold an opinion. Any human being can and does hold opinions which may be true or false. Knowledge is not mere opinion or belief. Knowledge can only ever be true (there is no such thing as false knowledge, although there are innumerable false opinions or beliefs), and its object is what he terms a Form: “Plato has assumed from the outset that knowledge is attainable, and that knowledge must be (i) infallible and (ii) of the real. True knowledge must possess both these characteristics, and any state of mind that cannot vindicate its claim to both these characteristics cannot be true knowledge. In the Theaetetus he shows that neither sense-perception nor true belief are possessed of both these marks; neither, then, can be equated with true knowledge.” (Copleston, 149)

The philosopher is the only one in the city who has access to the Forms and therefore to real knowledge. This kind of knowledge is not identical to the wisdom that, according to Socrates, belongs only to the gods. Wisdom is for the gods; human beings, philosophers in particular, at most pursue wisdom, but they never possess it securely. In the words of one philosopher, “Plato furnished the word ‘philosophy’ with a somewhat artificial and decidedly unconventional emphasis; for him, philosophy was the sheer striving after wisdom or truth. For Plato, philosophy was not the possession of knowledge but only the striving for knowledge.” (Gadamer, Beginning, 15) This doesn’t amount to a complete skepticism or the view that knowledge is unattainable by human beings. Knowledge is attainable, according to Plato, and when it is attained what we know are the Forms. What, then, are these?

Book 6

Book 6 will address this last question and include a general discussion of the philosopher-king, the distinction between knowledge and belief, and more on the philosopher’s education. There is a lot going on in Book 6, so let’s have a look at the major themes.

There are, Socrates says, many a counterfeit philosopher and few genuine ones. A false philosopher is a lover not of knowledge but of belief and usually of profit as well, and there are many of them about. Many of them were known as sophists, and Plato held a majority of this group in very low regard. Most of them he regarded as charlatans motivated by profit rather than a genuine love of learning. The philosopher loves learning on a wide variety of subjects, and for its own sake. Our pejorative term “sophistry” is derived from this collection of traveling teachers who in the fifth and fourth centuries were centered in Athens and travelled to cities throughout Greece offering their services in teaching the art of persuasion or rhetoric. Such persuasion, of course, could be misused and, as Plato saw it, frequently was in both the political assembly and the law courts. Rhetoric could be variably rational or irrational, and the two should be kept strictly apart. Plato believed he was witnessing in the Athens of his time a lamentable decline in philosophical as well as poetic discourse, and much of the blame lay with the sophists. “The teachings of the Sophists had, in short, resulted in a new conception of justice—basically that which we find Plato attributing to Thrasymachus in the Republic …—and this new political ethos, while surfacing perhaps most evidently in the public speaking of statesmen and litigants, emerged also in the more strictly philological enterprises of the Sophists. They influenced the popular conception of poetry, which, while still regarded as the repository of knowledge, came to be viewed as lending itself to variant and quite forced interpretation. In short, poetry itself came to be perverted.” (Mitscherling, 65)

The true philosopher is not a sophist. One scholar writes: “Plato is responding in the whole of what he says to a near-total moral dissolution in his society and to the concurrent sophistic rhetorical techniques that confound any real moral reasoning and substitute for it more or less disguised rationalizations of cupidity and the unbridled will to power. This advent of sophism is the occasion for his thought. Consequently, Plato turned to mathematics, for he saw there a kind of reasoning that was self-evidently invulnerable to sophistic ‘tricks,’ and which in its structure must be similar to the unshakable reasoning by means of which Socrates held to what he knew to be right.” (Gadamer, Idea of the Good, trans. Introduction, xiii) What makes a true philosopher? This is a person whose life is organized around the pursuit of truth. They care little for reputation or material wealth. Socrates himself was relatively poor and his reputation, as we have seen, was thoroughly unfavorable. This didn’t trouble Socrates in the least, or so Plato depicts him. What matters to the philosopher is knowledge, not for the sake of any profit that might be derived from it but as an end in itself. The true philosopher has an insatiable curiosity and pursues knowledge habitually. We see this in Socrates’ own practice as a philosopher. In this dialogue, the reader can easily become impatient with Socrates’ line of questioning, as did many of his interlocutors. We see him pursuing a line of questioning relentlessly and not settling for the easy answer. The philosopher must be rigorous and painstaking, slow to reach a conclusion and when one does, it is on the basis of a rational argument alone. We are not to jump to conclusions or affirm beliefs based on emotion, popular opinion, or anything other than solid reasons.

Later in Book 6, Socrates introduces Plato’s famous theory of the divided line. Here’s a depiction of it:

A                                 B                                 C                                 D                                 E

Being (metaphysics):

A—B: images, shadows, (likely) works of art

B—C: physical/material objects

C—D: mathematical objects

D—E: the Forms

Cognition (epistemology):

A—B: imagination

B—C: belief

C—D: reasoning or thought

D—E: understanding

As we move along the line from left to right, objects or beings become increasingly “real” while our mode of cognition becomes increasingly clear and certain. On the being or object side, an object in A—B, for instance an image of a house such as a drawing, is a mere copy or an imitation of a similar object in B—C, the house as a material object. Otherwise stated, the image is modeled on the physical house. Similarly, an object in C—D such as the number three can be copied in B—C as follows: 3, but this 3—the black mark on your screen—has less reality than the number three itself, which is immaterial. This thing: 3, is not three itself but a particular representation of it. Still more real than the mathematical object of three is the Form of three, or three-ness. You can think of three-ness or the Form of three as the definition of three, only a definition that has actual being—not material but intelligible or knowable being. We make mental contact with three-ness through the understanding, not the senses and certainly not the imagination. Similarly, the Form of human being (human-ness) is more ultimately real than any particular human being, and a particular human being is more real than a drawing or a mirror image of them. A work of art, then, as an example of something in the A—B range, is but a copy of a copy of a copy.

Also, as we move along the line from left to right, our mode of cognition or mental grasp of reality becomes increasingly clear and certain. Imagination (A—B), for example, does not amount to knowledge or even belief (B—C), while belief is separate from knowledge. Real knowledge is found in C—D and, still more definitely, in D—E. What we understand with clarity and certainty are the Forms. We reason about mathematical objects. We have beliefs or opinions about physical objects. And we imagine images, shadows, and works of art. Poets, then, in spite of the beauty of their achievements, describe a world that is three times removed from reality. The five senses do not deliver knowledge but only belief. Real knowledge is attained through the very practice that Socrates and his interlocutors in the Republic are engaged in, the practice of dialogue or, to use Plato’s technical term, “dialectic.” It is the philosopher who engages in this practice habitually and so becomes acquainted with true reality. That’s why they should rule the city. They’re the only ones who know anything, although mathematicians place a close second. What we call natural scientists, relying on their senses, have beliefs but no knowledge, and artists are a step below them.

Let’s have a closer look at Plato’s notion of the Forms. The Republic is a dialogue about justice, among other things. Our question, what is justice, is answered not when we can point to an example of a just city-state (an example is but a copy or an imitation of something else) but when we have something that is closer to a definition. Socrates has defined justice as a political virtue in which appetitive natures engage in economic activity, spirited natures see to the defence of the city, and a philosopher-king holds political power; to this political virtue corresponds a virtue of the soul in which reason prevails over the spirited and appetitive parts of one’s nature. To understand justice, then, is to mentally grasp this definition, not to employ the senses or the imagination. The crucial point here is that this definition has being, that is, intelligible or knowable being, not material being. It doesn’t change, even as its examples or instances do or are various. A Form is something like a definition, only one that exists not merely in a dictionary or in your mind or brain but in a transcendent order of reality. Justice is real, the good is real, the Form of human being is real, and so on, and more real than particular just cities, good things, and individual people. The latter are copies or imitations of their Forms.

Forms or Ideas (synonymous terms) do not change. Change and contingency are marks of imperfection, and it is generally characteristic of the world that we perceive with our senses, the world of nature, that it changes continually. The triangle that I draw on a blackboard also changes and can be erased or modified. It is neither a perfect triangle nor what we can call “triangle itself.” It is a copy of triangle, or it is “a” triangle, not triangle. A straight line, to take another example, can’t be drawn on the blackboard but belongs to a different order of being than the physical. It is a properly mathematical object, and these can be copied or represented in the form of physical objects, but imperfectly. As one Plato scholar puts it, “The theory of ‘ideas’ is the belief in eternal, unchanging, universal absolutes, independent of the world of phenomena; in, for example, absolute beauty, absolute justice, absolute goodness, from which whatever we call beautiful, just or good derives any reality it may have…. [T]he word Idea in this connection is a very misleading transliteration…. The nearest translation is ‘form’ or ‘appearance,’ that is, the ‘look’ of a person or thing.” (Grube, 1)

Socrates doesn’t spend a lot of time in the Republic actually arguing for the existence of the Forms, but Plato does have a few closely related arguments as follows. First, a science such as medicine deals not with my health or yours but with health itself. Health must therefore exist as a unified object of knowledge; this object is a Form. Second, my cat Fluff is one particular cat, not cat itself or cat-ness. Cat is a general concept of which Fluff is only one example. Cat must exist (not just cats), and this is a Form. Third, even if every particular cat in the world were to disappear, cat-ness would not, and nor would it change. Again, cat or cat-ness itself is a Form. When you think about it, we actually spend a fair amount of time talking and reasoning about objects that the senses never make contact with, such as justice or the number three. We can point to just laws or just actions, or to three objects or a mark on a blackboard, but the senses don’t make contact with three itself or justice itself. The fact that we reason about and know the truth about them suggests that they exist in a reality to which the senses don’t have access. Plato scholars have spent a great deal of time trying to analyze Plato’s theory of the Forms, but Plato’s dialogues themselves spend curiously little time discussing it. He’s clear that there is a Form of the Good, justice, beauty, and the kind of concepts that philosophers are generally interested in, but it’s not entirely clear whether there’s a Form for every object in the world. Is there a form of computer or of toilet? It’s uncertain, although in Book 10 Socrates does allude to a Form of couch or bed.

The foremost or highest Form is the Form of the Good (upper case), which Socrates illustrates by means of the metaphor of the sun. As the sun illuminates or renders intelligible everything in the world of nature, so the Form of the Good illuminates or renders intelligible all the other Forms which comprise the intelligible realm. Socrates throughout this dialogue wants to know what is the Good, where this means not what things are good but what is goodness itself. Once the philosopher has beheld the Form of the Good, he or she can then understand all the other Forms and also gain a deeper understanding of mathematical objects, physical objects, and images and shadows. More on the Good later.

Still on the subject of the philosopher-king, Socrates now proffers the famous metaphor of the ship of state. Imagine a ship with a large crew, every member of which believes himself to be fit to be captain. Each one of them looks straight ahead at the sea and any objects in the ship’s path and believes that they understand the art of navigation. The true captain, Socrates points out, is not only looking straight ahead but up toward the stars and is attentive to wind, weather, the seasons, and so on. This person is mistaken by the other members of the crew as a useless stargazer, a dreamer. The philosopher always stands to the rest of the people as the true navigator stands to the other crew members and is mistaken for an idle ignoramus. This reputation of the philosopher is exacerbated by the sophists, who are constantly mistaken by the people for philosophers or knowers when they are typically charlatans for hire.

Book 7

Socrates now introduces his allegory of the cave, which will illustrate in a different way his doctrine of the divided line and his theory of education. This allegory will lead into a general discussion of mathematics and the philosopher’s education and will provide further justification for the claim that the state should be ruled by a philosopher-king.

Let’s look at the famous cave allegory. We are to imagine the entire human race as living in an underground cave. All of us are prisoners in this cave and are seated in rows of chairs where we are bound but not aware of our restraints. Our head can only face forward such that we cannot look to either side or behind us to see the others in the cave, all of whom are in an identical position but without knowing it. We believe ourselves to be free, and yet we are bound in our chair facing forward toward the back of the cave. This wall that we are facing resembles a movie screen and the cave itself resembles a movie theatre. All that we can see are the images on the screen, and our whole lives are spent watching these images. We have never seen anything but these images which we therefore take to be reality. Were someone to tell you that the images on the screen are only images rather than real objects, you wouldn’t believe them.

Behind the prisoners, near the entrance to the cave, is a large fire which illuminates the cave. Between the fire and the rows of prisoners is an elevated roadway, and along this roadway a series of objects are being continually carried, all of which cast shadows on the wall that the prisoners are facing. All of the images the prisoners see are shadows cast by the fire, and these shadows are mistaken by all the prisoners for real objects. A number of people will be needed to carry these objects along the roadway. They themselves are not prisoners and some of them will be speaking and will be heard by the prisoners.

Next, we’re to imagine one of these prisoners slowly releasing himself from his bonds and very gradually turning around in his seat to behold the situation he has been in since childhood. He becomes confused as he sees the objects being carried along the roadway and the fire, and it occurs to him that the world is not as it had seemed to him. Slowly he gets up and walks toward the front of the cave and eventually to the world outside or above. Remember in the paintings above that both Socrates and Plato are pointing upward, toward a world that is more ultimately real and more knowable than the world we perceive with the senses. Our erstwhile prisoner is now able to walk outside and his eyes must slowly adjust to the sunlight. As his eyes gradually become adjusted, he sees at first shadows and images that resemble the shadows with which he is familiar in the cave. As they adjust further, he sees physical objects of various kinds and eventually he looks up toward the sky and beholds the sun. This process is difficult and takes time. The sun, representing the Form of the Good, illuminates the world, and our philosopher now fully realizes the true condition of the prisoners in the cave. He has no wish to return to the cave but would much prefer to spend his life pursuing knowledge in the world above. He also knows that should he return to the cave and tell the prisoners what he had seen and reveal to them the truth of their condition, they wouldn’t believe him, just as the ship’s crewmen reject the true navigator. His eyes having become adjusted to the light of day, were he to return to the underground cave, he would be less able to recognize the images and shadows that the prisoners see, confirming in their eyes his ignorance. Our philosopher would find true happiness outside the cave, but as Socrates has said, what matters in the city is not the happiness of one individual or group but the happiness of the city as a whole. It is as an act of civic duty that the philosopher must return to the cave and rule the city-state. This is an important point for Plato: the philosopher becomes a ruler not out of a desire for power but out of public obligation only. A sure mark of someone who is unworthy of power is that they want it and pursue it, as they do in a democracy. Those who are best suited for power never desire it.

The education of the philosopher-king is to proceed in the following stages: first comes the musical and physical education already discussed as well as elementary mathematics. Next comes two or three additional years of physical education, followed by ten more years of mathematics and then five years of training in what Plato calls the dialectic. This is followed by fifteen years of political education, following which the student should be prepared to understand the Form of the Good and all the other Forms. This is to be a lengthy and difficult educational process that forms the student into a genuine philosopher who is at once knowledgeable and virtuous and worthy therefore of political leadership.

That’s a lot of math, you’ll have noticed. Plato would have inscribed at the entrance to the Academy, “Let none but geometers enter here.” This is because he regarded mathematics as something of a gateway to higher forms of knowledge, philosophy in particular but also politics. Mathematical reasoning elevates the mind above ordinary empirical experience and is far more rigorous and logical than our ordinary ways of thinking about life and the world. Plato would always have a deeply mathematical turn of mind and can be said to have seen the world as a mathematician might. The lengthy discussion of mathematics in Book 7 leads into a discussion of the dialectic, and it’s important to Plato, as it would later be to Aristotle, that one not begin to study the higher forms of knowledge before one is ready. Philosophy requires a long preparatory period, and if we study it without adequate preparation we’re likely to end up one of the sophists whom Plato held in contempt. One of his fundamental complaints against the sophists is that they’re not intellectually rigorous; too often they’re persuasive only in the sense of being manipulative. Too much democratic discourse, Plato believes, is persuasive only in a base sense of being flattering, of telling people what they want to hear, and of being selfish rather than rational. Mathematics is an education in a rationality that elevates us above democratic, sophistical, and rhetorical modes of speech.

Once suitably prepared, our philosopher’s education turns toward the dialectic, or rational dialogue, the kind of dialogue that Socrates and his interlocutors are practicing in the Republic. As well, dialectic may be thought of as “a capacity to see universal relations between things, to come to correct conclusions from given premises and a readiness to revise his premises if his conclusions do not agree with given facts.” (Grube, 273) After five years of this, the philosopher is ready to spend the next fifteen years engaged in practical political training, including in matters of war, climbing the political ladder as it were in service to the city. By the time our philosopher is prepared to govern, he or she has attained the age of about fifty and has been educated and tested in various ways to ensure they are best suited to this role.

Book 8

The description of the ideal city-state, now named Kallipolis (beautiful city), and the person who corresponds to this ideal is now near completion. This is a thoroughly aristocratic order, governed by the perfect aristocrat. The conversation now turns to four other kinds of political constitution and the four kinds of human beings who correspond to them. Each of the four, Socrates maintains, represents a gradual deterioration from the ideal, and in the order in which the four are described.

The first deterioration from Kallipolis is timocracy (timē connotes honor and kratia means rule or power), a term meaning rule by the spirited natures in the city. The spirited natures love honor which is gained through various kinds of victory, above all in war, so this kind of state is sure to be aggressive in matters of war and is admired by many for this reason. This kind of state emerges when the guardians supplant the philosopher-king and claim power for themselves.

The deterioration of timocracy is oligarchy (oligos means few, arkho means command), or rule by a powerful subsection of the population, which in turn is ruled by their appetites—not all the appetites but the necessary ones, often especially the love of money. An oligarchic state isn’t ruled by the demos or citizenry in its entirety but by a somewhat small and powerful elite within them, often the wealthy.

The deterioration of oligarchy is democracy (demos plus kratia), a constitution in which the appetitive natures again rule but in larger numbers than under oligarchy. Under democracy, not only the necessary appetites but the baser ones are pursued indiscriminately. Democracy claims to value freedom, but its constant tendency is to degenerate into factionalism and civil war as each citizen or group pursues their love of power and other egoistic ends. The freedom it speaks of is a counterfeit freedom, a slavery to the appetites and especially the lower ones.

The deterioration of democracy is tyranny, for out of this chaos will emerge a tyrant who is essentially a leader of the mob and like them is ruled by passion, especially the unnecessary appetites, and he rules the state in a similar way. A tyrant has all the power of a philosopher-king but neither knowledge nor virtue. This is the worst kind of state, and it was far from uncommon in Plato’s time.

Plato is decidedly not a believer in political progress. (Progress is an early modern notion; one finds no trace of it in the ancient world. The golden age, for the Greeks, always lay in the past.) On the contrary, the constant tendency is for states to deteriorate and also the people who govern them. The love of knowledge and virtue in a perfect aristocratic order readily degenerates into the love of honor, which deteriorates again into a love of money, which deteriorates again into a love of power and other base appetites.

Book 9

Socrates continues his description of the tyrant, both how this figure emerges out of democracy and his general psychology and character. This is a rather vile individual who is singularly unfit for political power, but the world in which Plato lived was not lacking these characters. He is ruled by his lower appetites and will stop at nothing to satisfy them. His passions rule him in the same way that he rules the city-state. The only law of this state is the arbitrary will of the ruler, who is the worst sort of human being.

The conversation then returns to the earlier question of whether the philosopher-king and the guardian class more generally are happy. We have seen that the philosopher-king assumes power not out of desire but on the basis of civic duty only. Similarly, the whole guardian class is to live a very unselfish life. They are to possess very little and they won’t have the kind of lifestyle and family life that the appetitive natures will. It will seem to many that happiness in this state belongs to the appetitive types and not to the guardians and definitely not to the philosopher-king. Socrates must now return to some of the arguments he has already formulated in hopes of justifying the claim that the guardians and the philosopher-king will be happy indeed, or happy enough. The conclusion appears counterintuitive, so Socrates will have a good amount of work to do here.

Why is the philosopher-king happy? Recall that, for Socrates, there are essentially three types of people in the world, and to each of the three belongs a particular form of happiness. There is the rational type who find their happiness in the pursuit of knowledge and virtue. There is the spirited type who love honor and victory, and there is the far more numerous appetitive type who find happiness in money-making and various other common desires. This third type is the least happy, for what they love is fleeting and shallow. The spirited types find their happiness in something more noble and enduring than the appetites, but their honors and victories are also fleeting and base relative to the philosopher’s pursuit of wisdom. Knowledge is enduring and unchanging, and so is its object, the Forms. The life of the philosopher is nobler, more god-like, and also happier than the others.

The most competent judge of the different forms of happiness is the philosopher. This is because the appetitive natures have no experience and no understanding of the philosophical life—the examined life—and recall Socrates’ famous statement at his trial that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” It’s not worth living because it’s base and animalistic. What it imagines as its freedom is another form of slavery. The philosopher has experienced the different forms of pleasure and happiness, unlike the other two natures, and is best positioned to form a judgment. To many, it will appear the philosopher-king is little different than the tyrant, and neither more nor less happy than the latter. Socrates calculates that the true king is not only slightly happier than the tyrant but far more so, to be precise 729 times happier. Socrates’ mathematical calculation is mystifying, but his point is clear.

Book 10

This final book of the Republic finds Socrates and his interlocutors returning to the topic of censorship which left off in Book 3. What kind of poetry, and works of art more generally, should be permitted in our ideal state, having described both the state itself and the character and education of its ruler? A democracy which claims to value freedom will welcome any and all such stories, be they true or false, noble or base, or in short whatever pleases its audience. What of our ideal state?

He returns to the concept of imitation (mimesis). This is not a simple “monkey see, monkey do” kind of imitation but something more human and more formative. Psychologically and metaphysically, imitation is what human beings do, especially the young. It’s through repeated imitation of the people and things we see that our mind and character are formed and that we come to think, feel, and act in the ways that we do. Stories of human beings or gods acting badly often lead young people to imitate their example and form habits that become permanent. This is how a bad character is often produced, so anyone who cares about the education of the young and ultimately about the well being of the society must think seriously about the stories we tell children and other young people. Art forms the soul, and it does so through the practice of repeated imitation, which is natural to human beings. The artist himself or herself is also an imitator, and an imitator not of reality but of a copy of reality: a painting, Socrates says, of a couch is an imitation of the material couch. The material couch is a copy or imitation of the Form of couch, from which it follows that the work of art is a few steps removed from true reality. If imitation is a natural activity that human beings engage in, it’s also something that we need to watch over and regulate. It should be noted here that, as one Plato scholar expresses it, “the tenth book of the Republic is not directed toward poetry per se, but toward the technē of mimēsis [the technique or art of imitation], which Plato regarded as both pernicious and pervasive…. Given the mimetic [imitative] nature of all art and poetry, it could be, and was being, employed in a manner detrimental both to Athens and to her individual citizens. The welfare of the polis had been placed in jeopardy. The attention of the people was being directed more and more away from the intellectual pursuit of knowledge and toward the hedonistic pursuit of sham appearance, of mere mimetic spectacle devoid of any valuable content. This was taking place … not only on the stage but in the classroom and the Assembly as well.” (Mitscherling, 73-4)

What kinds of stories should be told, then? Not surprisingly, only those that depict human beings and gods acting virtuously and harmoniously. Since the stories of Homer, Hesiod, and the other poets present a mix of good and bad, they must all be banished from our city. Censorship is as vital to our souls as healthy food is to our bodies. Unedifying stories are like junk food for the mind and destroy the rational element at an early stage of its formation. Socrates tells us that he’s very hesitant to draw this conclusion for the reason that he greatly admires the Greek poets, the great tragedians and others who not only entertain but teach. For Plato, Homer was the great teacher of the entire Greek world, and it’s no small matter to him to conclude that his writings must be forbidden.

Finally, Socrates turns to a brief discussion of the immortality of the soul. (A more thorough discussion of this topic is found in the “Phaedo.” The main arguments for the immortality of the soul in that dialogue are as follows. First, it is a general principle, Plato maintains, that things tend to arise from their opposites. Day is born of night, and night of day. Sleeping comes from waking, and waking follows sleeping. By the same token, death comes from (or follows) life, so life must come from death. Second, education does not involve putting anything in the mind so much as recalling what was previously in the mind, where previously means in a life before the present life. All education is recollection of what we knew prior to our birth in this present life. See the “Phaedo” for the details of these arguments.) The soul is not destroyed at death but is eternal. It existed before our present life and will exist after it. The conclusion of this discussion and of this dialogue is that justice is far preferable to injustice, in this life and in the life beyond.

The Republic ends with the myth of Er, which illustrates the theme of justice as its own reward and as advantageous at the same time. In this story, Er is a brave man who is killed in battle, but after twelve days he comes back to life and tells of what he witnessed in death. He tells of how his soul traveled to another world, and of how in this place he came upon judges who separated those who had lived just lives from the unjust. The just were sent upward to the heavens while the unjust were sent down below the earth, weeping and lamenting. When it came his turn for judgment, the judges told him that he would return to life and that he should tell everyone what he witnessed. Er relates that the unjust were compelled to remain below the earth for a thousand years and every wrong they had committed would need to be repaid ten times over. The upshot of this story is that we had better attend to our souls, and the way to do this is by living a just life.

So ends the Republic. Among the many ongoing debates to which this dialogue has given rise is exactly how literally we are to take many of Plato’s rather utopian political prescriptions. While literal readings have long been common, some prefer a more metaphorical or mythical interpretation. Gadamer, for one, suggests “one must take all the institutions and structures in this model city as dialectical metaphors. Of course, reading dialectically does not simply mean taking the opposite of what is said, to be the true belief. Here, reading dialectically means relating these utopian demands in each instance to their opposite, in order to find, somewhere in between, what is really meant—that is, in order to recognize what the circumstances are, and how they could be better made. Per se, the institutions of this model city are not meant to embody ideas for reform. Rather, they should make truly bad conditions and the dangers for the continued existence of a city visible e contrario. For example, the total elimination of the family is intended to display the ruinous role of family politics, nepotism, and the idea of dynastic power in the so-called democracy of Athens at that time (and not only there).” (Gadamer, Idea of the Good, 71)

PART THREE

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Biography

Aristotle was born in 384 BC in the small town of Stagira in northern Greece. This is fifteen years after Socrates’ death, so while he never met Socrates, Aristotle knew Plato very well and in fact spent no less than twenty years in Athens studying at Plato’s Academy, leaving only upon Plato’s death in 347. His father’s name was Nicomachus, and Aristotle would also have a son by this name. The title of the Nicomachean Ethics is likely the name that Aristotle’s son gave to it rather than Aristotle himself. Nicomachus the son was responsible for preparing the manuscript for publication, so either he or possibly one of his associates gave the book its title.

Aristotle’s father was a physician to Amyntas, the Macedonian king, so it was a well-connected aristocratic family that Aristotle was born into. Many early Greek philosophers whom we tend to think of as Athenians were actually from other Greek towns and cities and relocated to Athens, and this is true of Aristotle as well. He spent a good deal of time in his youth at the court of Amyntas and was a friend of the latter’s son Philip, the future king of Macedon.

He would go on to spend the majority of his years in Athens, however, being originally drawn there at the age of seventeen in order to study at the Academy. He would never become an Athenian citizen, however. His father being a physician, Aristotle would have likely become somewhat knowledgeable of biology and medicine before studying philosophy with Plato, and he would always retain a basically empirical frame of mind.

Upon Plato’s death, his successor as head of the Academy was his nephew Speusippus. It’s quite possible that Aristotle hoped for this position and was disappointed that it was given to someone else. Why it went to the nephew is unknown, as Aristotle seems to have been a candidate for the job. At any rate, he left Athens following this and spent some time travelling with friends to various Greek cities in his native Macedonia and in Asia Minor. He went first to the city of Assos in Asia Minor where he continued his studies not only of philosophy but of natural science, both of which were lifelong interests of his. After three years in Assos he moved on to the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea. After two years there he accepted an invitation from Philip of Macedon to work as tutor to his fourteen-year-old son, the future Alexander the Great. As one scholar writes, “The idea of the greatest philosopher of the day instructing the boy who was to become the greatest general the Greeks ever produced is one that may fire the imagination. Yet the influence that Aristotle had on Alexander, either as his tutor or afterwards, was negligible.” (Lloyd, 6) No trace of Aristotle’s political views is discernible in Alexander’s later career as ruler of the Macedonian empire. Alexander was a conqueror and would expand his short-lived empire as far east as India, and this was not a policy that Aristotle ever endorsed. Despite this, as one scholar notes, “The philosophical tradition likes to think that Aristotle had a great deal to do with making Alexander a genuine Greek, with a passion for spreading by force Hellenic ideals. The friendship endured, with some later coolness; on his excursions in the East we are told Alexander always was careful to send biological specimens back to his old teacher.” (Randall, 17-8)

Aristotle returned to Athens in 335, shortly after Alexander assumed power from his now late father Philip. Rather than return to the Academy he taught at another school called the Lyceum where previously Socrates, Isocrates, and Plato had all taught. The Lyceum was located just outside of Athens and was a temple to Apollo Lyceus (the wolf-god). There Aristotle set up his own school for philosophical and scientific research which was modelled on the Academy and which became known as the Peripatetic school. It would survive until the third century AD, and after Aristotle’s lifetime it was largely dedicated to preserving and refining Aristotle’s writings and ideas. The school was named after the covered and colonnaded walkways (peripatoi) where Aristotle and his students would meet to discuss a range of philosophical and scientific topics. He served as the head (scholarch) of this school until 322. It was during this thirteen-year period that the writings of his that are extant were written, and they consist essentially of lecture notes rather than works composed for publication.

Alexander died in 323 at the age of 32, and his death was quickly followed by the Lamian or Hellenic War, a revolt of Athens and other cities of mainland Greece against their Macedonian overlords. Anti-Macedonian sentiment was ascendant and prompted Aristotle, a Macedonian, to leave Athens in 322. Like Socrates, he was being charged with impiety, and he left in order to prevent Athens from, in his words, “sinning twice against philosophy.” He died in the same year in the nearby city of Chalchis at the age of 61 or 62.

Aristotle was married and had two children, the first a daughter by his wife Pythias, and after the death of his wife a son, the above-mentioned Nicomachus, by a woman he would live with named Herpyllis. “His character is reported to have been warm and affectionate: he was a kind husband and father, and a true friend, not a mere thinking machine. Rumor goes also that he had a bald head, thin legs, small eyes, and lisped; and that he dressed smartly.” (Randall, 19-20)

“Aristotle’s writings,” as one scholar notes, “fall into two main groups, the treatises, which form by far the greater proportion of his extant work, and the literary or ‘exoteric’ works, which have survived only in the form of ‘fragments,’ that is quotations preserved by other authors…. In most cases the ‘exoteric’ works differ from the treatises chiefly in being non-technical compositions written for wide dissemination.” (Lloyd, 9-10) The latter writings are unfortunately lost to us, while the “esoteric” treatises, which were not likely intended for publication, survive. After Aristotle’s death his treatises were arranged and edited into publishable form by later members of his school. This collection of writings includes some works that were written not by Aristotle himself but by later scholars who were carrying forward lines of research that he had initiated. His various writings ranged from philosophical dialogues to treatises, while “[s]ome of this research was antiquarian: he had compiled a list of the victors in the Olympic games, with their records. He prepared literary chronicles: he drew up lists of the competing dramatists and the prize winners. He investigated the facts of political science: he collected digests of the constitutions of 158 of the Greek city-states…. He collected psychological problems, and put together large histories of philosophy, and of the sciences.” (Randall, 20)

His texts that survive were largely lost to the west for a number of centuries and were preserved, translated, copied and recopied in Byzantium and the middle east until their eventual recovery in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the major intellectual centers of western Europe, which in turn inspired the scholastic movement in medieval philosophy and theology.

Aristotle’s influence upon the subsequent course of western philosophy until the present day would equal Plato’s, and these two continue to be regarded, along with Socrates, as the greatest of ancient Greek philosophers. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century would famously refer to Aristotle simply as “the Philosopher” while his influence on medieval Islamic thought was also profound and enduring.

Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1

Let’s begin with some preliminary remarks about this text. We’re immediately confronted with the difference in literary style from Plato’s Republic. The Nicomachean Ethics, like all the surviving works of Aristotle, clearly does not exhibit the literary style and polish of Plato’s dialogues. Aristotle did write in dialogue form, however all such writings are lost to us. Ancient writers who were familiar with Aristotle’s dialogues often spoke of them as equal to Plato’s in terms of philosophical and literary sophistication, but all of Aristotle’s writings that are extant come in the form of formal prose treatises which are unremarkable from a stylistic or literary point of view. As one scholar notes, “in the Academy, Plato himself gave lectures and his hearers took notes. It is important to notice that these lectures were not published, and that they stand in contrast to the dialogues, which were published works meant for ‘popular’ reading. If we realise this fact, then some of the sharp differences that we naturally tend to discern between Plato and Aristotle … disappear, at least in part. We possess Plato’s popular works, his dialogues, but not his lectures. The situation is the exact opposite in regard to Aristotle, for while the works of Aristotle that are in our hands represent his lectures, his popular works or dialogues have not come down to us—only fragments remain.” (Copleston, 130) Scholars largely agree that the Nicomachean Ethics and the rest of his surviving works were not likely intended for publication but were essentially lecture notes which Aristotle used while teaching at the Lyceum, or they consist of notes compiled by his students at this school. Lecture notes, then as now, are not typically written for a general audience but for the teacher’s eyes only and perhaps the students as well. The Nicomachean Ethics does not make for particularly exciting reading largely for this reason. Relative to Plato’s Republic, readers have long found the Nicomachean Ethics to be relatively clear and straightforward but bland. Despite this, it also stands among the foremost of ancient philosophical texts. Keep in mind while reading this book that its author was writing both as a philosopher and as a teacher whose students, like those at the Academy, consisted of young male Greek aristocrats who were anxious to hear from the most eminent philosopher of his time about what the good life for human beings consists of. Our question remains Socrates’s question: how should we live? What is the good life and, inseparable from this question, what is the good or just society?

Throughout this book we will see Aristotle responding to Plato, sometimes in disagreement but more often in basic agreement with Plato’s conception of virtue and the good life. The relation between Aristotle and Plato is not identical to that between Plato and Socrates. Plato has always been viewed as something of a disciple of Socrates, and while Aristotle should be understood as agreeing with Plato far more often than not, it would not be accurate to describe Aristotle as Plato’s disciple, as we shall see. Often we find Aristotle going a few steps beyond where Plato left us, providing further elaboration and development of concepts that Plato and some other thinkers outlined but that called for greater clarification and defence. While it has long been customary to oppose Plato and Aristotle as philosophers, it should be kept in mind that no one prior to the early modern era saw these two as standing to each other in any kind of oppositional relation, and it’s a mistake to regard them as at odds on philosophical fundamentals. The differences between them will become evident as we proceed, but for the most part these two thinkers were on the same page most of the time while differing on some important matters.

The topic of Book 1 is the good life for human beings, and Aristotle will return to this general topic throughout the text as a whole. What, in the grand scheme of things, is the good at which human life as a totality aims? Each of us pursues many values, and some such aims are subordinate to others while some are ends in themselves. But what is the ultimate or highest good at which human life aims, where this is at once a factual or empirical question as well as, and more importantly, a moral one. We are asking not only how do human beings conduct themselves in their lives but how should they do so. When we ask a moral question, we’re not merely asking what do human beings do as a matter of fact but what they ought to do. We find Aristotle asking the factual question quite often: “what do they say,” and especially what does Plato say, on this or that matter, but when Aristotle asks this question he is doing so as a preliminary matter only. “What they say,” or what Plato says, may or may not be acceptable to Aristotle, and we find him throughout this text providing his own analysis and argumentation on a given issue after hearing what some notable thinkers or the general population have had to say about the matter. “He attends to the opinions of ordinary people, of the ‘better class of people,’ and of intellectuals. He taps the common culture, the works of the poets in particular, for ethical materials. He invokes customs and practices, and appeals to ‘what we say’ (and sometimes to etymology). He believes that most views that are widely held, or have been handed down, or have been carefully arrived at, contain some truth, although the truth often leads to error unless it is corrected and qualified.” (Broadie, 11)

He begins Book 1 with the claim that every human action—also every art and inquiry—aims to bring about some good. Indeed, we commonly define “the good” as that toward which human activity in general aims. An important question immediately becomes, is there any one ultimate good which all human action endeavors to bring about, or must we speak of the good as pluralistic? He immediately notes that such ends would at least appear to be many. He mentions the art of medicine, for instance, as aiming at the good of health while shipbuilding aims at constructing ships. Similarly, the aim of military strategy and activity is achieving victory in war, while the aim of economics is wealth. Immediately, then, we seem to be confronted with a wide variety of goods which human actions and arts are oriented toward achieving. On the other hand, as we have seen, Plato has insisted upon speaking of the good as a unity and as a Form; the good is one, even while appearing upon first glance to be many. Our question, then, is whether the good is one or many. Upon first inspection, it appears to be many, but we must investigate the matter further.

Think of all the values, purposes, or ends that human beings seek: knowledge, pleasure, entertainment, money, friendship, and so on and so forth. It’s a long list, and some of these are clearly sought not as ends in themselves but as means only. Money, for example, doesn’t appear to be much good unto itself; it’s good for what it buys. It is, as moral philosophers say, instrumentally valuable, not intrinsically valuable. Many other values are like this, while many others appear to be valued for their own sake. Love, friendship, or knowledge might be valued as means toward ends outside of themselves, but they’re more likely to be valued intrinsically or as ends in themselves. If there is such thing as a highest good in human life, Aristotle reasons, it must surely be an aim that all human beings pursue and as an end in itself. Many will say the highest good in life is politics or political power. Aristotle disagrees with this and defends the view that there is a way of life that is above the pursuit of political power. It is the contemplative life or the way of life of the philosopher, as Plato had also argued. This is not going to be obvious to Aristotle’s readers or students, so he will have a great deal of argumentation to do to persuade us of this. Most people don’t live a particularly contemplative or examined life. His claim is not that we do pursue this in fact but that we should, or that this is the highest form of life for human beings, but why so?

Aristotle makes what can appear to be a merely passing remark early on in Book 1 about the nature of the inquiry to follow, yet it’s of the highest importance. He states, “Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts.” (1094b12-13) His meaning is that the inquiry that follows bears upon the good life for human beings, and it’s an understatement to say that we will encounter some ambiguity and uncertainty on the way. The good life is not 2 + 2 = 4, so if the reader or student is expecting the same clarity and precision that one finds in a discipline like mathematics, one will be disappointed. When the object of knowledge is complex and ambiguous, as it is in our case, we must speak of it accordingly, one might say impressionistically and also empirically. In other words, Aristotle is going to speak of the good life for human beings “roughly and in outline,” because the object of knowledge itself forbids the kind of clarity, precision, and certainty that some may want. (1094b21) When we read Aristotle’s ethics in combination with modern ethical theories such as Kantian deontology or utilitarianism, we might expect to find something like a philosophical foundation for ethics and perhaps a decision procedure as well. Aristotle will offer neither of these for the reason that a foundation and a decision procedure represents an absurd overestimation of what philosophical rationality can provide. One who has been well educated, then, will look for the degree of clarity and precision that a given field of knowledge permits of, and they will also not form judgments about matters of which they lack the necessary knowledge or life experience. He mentions the study of politics and ethics as an example of a field in which we will not expect a great deal of wisdom from the young for the reason that they lack the kind and degree of experience of which he is speaking.

Aristotle now poses the question that is the central concern of this study: if all human activity aims at some good or end(s), what is the ultimate good at which it aims, and is it one or many? He begins by asking his usual question: what do they say is good, and where “they” refers to people in general but in particular to the more aristocratic types—those who are likely to be his students at the Lyceum? They answer: happiness. As to what happiness itself is, opinions differ widely. Some say it is wealth, others power, others honor, others pleasure of one kind or another. The most common answer is pleasure, and Aristotle is not going to be content with this answer. There is a higher form of happiness than this, and some say it’s politics or the pursuit of power. Could this be true? Let’s add, he suggests, a third way of life, and with Socrates and Plato in mind: the life of contemplation. The highest good, if there is one, should be something that can’t be easily taken from one, and these other things—pleasure, honor, power—can be given to us and taken away quite easily whereas the happiness that comes from philosophical contemplation cannot. There is something solid and permanent to happiness in this form, and the same can be said of a life of virtue. Virtue and knowledge, unlike money and honor, are not merely means to ends outside of themselves and once they are attained they can’t be taken from us. Aristotle famously begins his book Metaphysics with the statement, “All men by nature desire to know,” and where he goes on to say that we desire knowledge sometimes as a means but rather often, and more importantly, for its own sake. The same can be said of virtue and happiness. Were someone to ask you, why do you desire happiness, you likely wouldn't know how to answer but to say that happiness is its own end.

Is the good itself one? The answer would appear to be no, because of the variety of ends or aims that human beings pursue. As one philosopher expresses it, “clearly the best in human action is something different in each case, that is, not something common to all cases, and at least of all, common to all existent things in general.” He adds: “the main argument [of the Nicomachean Ethics], in which everything culminates, is that the idea of the good is of no practical use.” (Gadamer, Idea of the Good, 146, 151) Some goods are higher than others, so to some degree it will be possible to arrange them in a kind of hierarchy, but to say with Plato that the good is one and that it’s a Form is another matter. How can we say that an activity like weaving or carpentry aims at a shared good, and that it’s the same good as navigation and military strategy and business and medicine and friendship? All these goods are good, Plato says, by virtue of their common participation in “the Good,” but Aristotle doesn’t think this at all obvious. They look to be separate activities pursuing separate goods. Each of these arts pursues “a good” but without speaking of “the good.” He is going to disagree with Plato’s view that being virtuous is necessarily bound up with both an education in philosophy and mathematics and also with a theoretical grasp of “the good” itself. Instead, what we should focus on are the virtues themselves and how they form a kind of package deal: one either exhibits the virtues in one’s actions or one doesn’t, and whether one does or doesn’t appears to have nothing to do with understanding a Form. Instead, it has to do with our upbringing and the kind of habits that we have cultivated. Aristotle’s objection against Plato that he essentially, and quite unnecessarily, made “the good” into some kind of metaphysical object that is separate and apart from the many good things of this world continues to generate scholarly debate as to how to interpret this objection. The philosopher just cited asks: “Just what is the being-for-themselves of the ideas [or Forms] supposed to express in Plato? Does it really imply the opening up of a second world, supposedly separated from our world of appearances by an ontological hiatus? … That the ideas are ideas of appearances and that they do not constitute a world existing for itself are expressed negatively by Plato…. Aristotle himself says explicitly that there is a basic reason for postulating the ideas: in view of the ever shifting tides of appearances, everything hinges on knowledge of their ideas if there is to be any knowledge at all…. One need only keep in mind what Plato had in view and the historical motivation that led him to carry out this separation of the ideas from appearances. Before him lay the entire expanse of the mathematical sciences. There is hardly a better characterization of the fact that Euclidean geometry refers to pure spatial relationships—and not to the sensory images of a circle or triangle that we draw as illustrations—than its requirement that mathematical constructs be separated from the sensory world.” (Gadamer, The Idea of the Good, 16-7)

Far more clear is Aristotle’s view that the highest good that human beings pursue by nature is happiness or eudaimonia (“eu” or “well” and “daimon” or “spirit”), and where happiness is less a state of feeling than an activity of living well. While eudaimonia is standardly translated as “happiness,” the difficulty with this, as another scholar points out, “is that ‘happiness’ in ordinary usage often means a good feeling or a feeling good; in fact, a sort of pleasure or being pleased. But an ancient Greek, knowing that someone is in such a state, either in general or about something in particular, would not on that account attribute eudaimonia to the person. For one thing, the person might, as we could put it using English words in the ordinary way, be simultaneously happy about this and unhappy about that; but one cannot be said to be eudaimon (the adjective) about one thing, and the opposite about something else. This is because being eudaimon is not about something: it is not a feeling or an attitude that has an object…. Regarding someone as eudaimon is more like ascribing a status, or applauding. It is to imply that the person is admirable, even enviable, an exemplar of life at its best.” (Broadie, 12) Eudaimonia may also be translated as “flourishing” or “well being.” To live well, as Aristotle thinks of it, is to live and to conduct ourselves in accordance with our properly human “function” or task (ergon). We must now ask a metaphysical question: what is the function of a human being, and also what is the nature of a human being? What makes a human being human? His answer is reason (logos): the human being is a rational animal, as well as a social or political one. If reason constitutes our human essence, the function of such a being must be to live in accordance with our reason. How, then, does a rational animal live and act in the world? Such a being must not merely pursue pleasure, as other animals can do, but live in accordance with the rational part of our nature and, inseparable from this, in accordance with virtue. A good life is a properly human life, and the latter must be understood with reference to our function as humans. The happiness that is appropriate to rational beings is one in which reason, not passion, determines how we will live, and what reason determines is that we ought to conduct ourselves in accordance with the virtues or “excellences” which he will go on to describe in detail. In saying this, Aristotle is not disagreeing, or not much, with Plato. Human happiness, virtuous actions, and rationality are bound up together, but the details of Plato’s position here requires elaboration and defence, and Aristotle is going to try to provide this.

The kind of happiness that Aristotle is describing is more human and also more solid than the happiness that is bound up with pleasure, however he’s also aware that happiness also requires what he calls the “external goods” of life, meaning a certain level of material comfort, health, social relationships, power, reputation, and so on. One who lacks money, for example, will be incapable of generosity, just as one who lacks friends will be deprived of opportunities to exhibit this virtue by acting for their benefit. An important element of luck or good fortune, then, is needed to live a good life. Those born into unfortunate circumstances—whether it be a bad upbringing, a bad city, poverty, etc.—will find happiness more elusive than others, but even here the kind of happiness he is speaking of will likely remain at least partially within our grasp. As long as our function remains that of a rational being, a good life is attainable. He also remarks that even when grave misfortune happens to a virtuous person, “nobility shines through” or good character remains in place and our happiness is inseparable from our character. (1100b30)

We can define happiness, then, as “an activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue.” (1102a5) Happiness again is an activity or a way of life far more than it is a feeling state. It is pleasant, but it doesn’t revolve around the pursuit of (especially bodily) pleasures, and it is so bound up with other values—honor, friendship, wealth, etc.—that in order to understand what happiness is we need to view it within a larger picture of a well-lived life. There are many goods and virtues to be sought, and even as these can be elusive and subject to chance, they also have a relative permanence about them and they are typically had in common or not had at all. There are exceptions to this, as he points out, but the exceptions don’t undermine this general principle.

Book 2

Aristotle begins Book 2 by making an important distinction between two kinds of virtue. There are virtues of mind or soul—what he terms the intellectual virtues—and the ethical virtues or those that concern our actions and, inseparable from this, our character. The intellectual virtues range from more theoretical to practical forms of reasoning while the moral virtues are numerous and require their own individual analyses. Book 2 begins a general description of the ethical virtues which will continue through Book 5. These chapters can be understood as something of a catalogue of the virtues of action, where Aristotle follows his usual method of asking what views people reputed to be wise hold about courage, temperance, and so on, before providing his own analysis.

First, what is a virtue and how is it acquired? In short, he’s going to define a virtue or excellence as a “state of character” which is acquired through habituation. The word “ethics” comes from the Greek word ethos which can be translated as habit. The ethical person has formed certain habits which lead or accustom them toward performing good actions. We don’t call a person good whose actions are habitually bad. As free and rational beings by nature, we have a potential to become either virtuous or vicious, and whether we go one way or the other depends in large part on the habits we form in the course of our upbringing. At this formative stage, we repeatedly meet situations that call for particular actions and responses, and repeated actions give rise to habits and skills that, as Plato observed, tend to remain with us through life. These habits can be good or bad, and over time they give rise to our character. We commonly say that a certain action is either in someone’s character or it’s out of character, suggesting that our character or the habits that comprise it make certain kinds of actions easier or more natural for us than others. As Plato noted, we become just by acting justly, we become courageous by acting courageously, and so on.

What does Aristotle mean by defining virtue as a state of character? He takes the view that “things that are found in the soul are of three kinds: passions, faculties, states of character,” and since virtue is neither a passion nor a faculty it must be a condition of a given person’s character. (1105b20) By passion he means any emotion you might experience, while a faculty is more like a capacity or ability to do something or to feel something. The capacity to feel compassion, for example, is a faculty, as is reason itself. We don’t praise or blame people for their faculties or for their ability to perform certain actions but for the actions themselves. Likewise, we don’t praise or blame someone for how they feel but for what they do. A state of character is a condition that strongly inclines one, again in the way of a habit, to perform good actions.

Aristotle then introduces the very important concept of the mean, sometimes called “the golden mean.” His basic idea is that virtuous action typically is intermediate between two opposite extremes, both of which are vices. Moderation in nearly all things is the rule here, and the virtuous person practices this habitually and is not given to extremes. As Aristotle gives an account of the various ethical virtues, we see him continually demonstrating that the virtuous path is intermediate between vicious extremes. Thus, courage is intermediate between the deficiency that is cowardice and the excess that is rashness. Friendship is intermediate between the excess of obsequiousness and the deficiency of coldness. He qualifies this basic point in a couple of important ways. First, even moderation itself must be practiced in moderation; there are certain actions, in other words, that are always right or always wrong. We should not murder in moderation, nor can we be excessively happy. Second, the mean is not to be understood in simple mathematical terms as the objectively intermediate between extremes but in relative terms only. He mentions the example of moderation in diet: if two pounds of food is not enough and ten pounds is too much, six pounds represents the objective mean, however some require more food than others. A wrestler may require eight pounds while a child may require four. The mean in such a case is relative to the person and is not absolute or mathematical. The mean, for Aristotle, is always relative to the person in this way.

A rough table of the virtues and their corresponding vices:

How, then, are we to know where the mean lies in a given situation which calls for a moral decision? The general advice to follow is more like a guideline than a formal rule, and as is generally the case with guidelines, there is a considerable gray area that we will need to deal with. Moral situations are particular, and the mean is a universal or an abstract principle. The difficulty with universals, guidelines, and principles is that they don’t tell us in a given situation exactly what course of action we ought to take. This is why we find Aristotle saying in Book 2, as he would say elsewhere, that acting virtuously means acting “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way.” (1106b20-22) In a given situation, of course, what we want to know is not whether we ought to act at the right time and with the right motive but what the right time is, what the right motive is, and so on, and it’s important to note that Aristotle refuses to give us a formal decision procedure such as the utilitarian standard of always seek the general happiness. There is no guarantee that the right motive in one circumstance will be morally right in a different circumstance, and the same can be said for the right time, the right objects, the right people, and the right way. If I tell you to do something in the right way, I haven’t told you much, and it’s because I can’t; there are too many variables to say in the abstract. You’re going to have to figure this out for yourself by focusing on the particular features of the situation before you or by, as we say, using your judgment. We’ll return to this point in Book 6. For now, he is content to say that a virtuous person possesses the intellectual virtue of good judgment, and that this intellectual virtue is needed for the proper exercise of all the ethical virtues. No set of algorithms will ever codify the virtue of good judgment. The latter must be understood as an art or a skill, and it’s no more formalizable than the art of speaking well, writing well, dancing well, or any other art. Aristotle emphasizes the difficulty of this task. There are many ways to be vicious and few to be virtuous. Finding the mean is difficult, and the difficulty of the task goes some way toward explaining why many are vicious and few are virtuous. It’s not only that immoral behavior tends to be easier and more impulsive but because identifying what is good is often far from self-evident. The virtuous person must have two kinds of knowledge, and is like an archer in this way. An archer, first, must have a clear site of the target. This is a theoretical or abstract knowledge of what the virtues are, and it’s insufficient. We must also know how to handle the bow, which is where the art of judgment comes in. Both are difficult, but the latter is more difficult than the former. Identifying the mean in a given situation is like hitting a bullseye and is about as difficult. We’ll return to this later.

Book 3

Aristotle’s topic remains the ethical virtues through the third chapter of the book. He distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary action and says that only that which one does voluntarily is subject to moral appraisal. Involuntary actions refer to those that are undertaken either through compulsion or owing to ignorance. The cause of the action in either case is something outside of the agent and beyond their control, so their actions can neither be praised nor blamed in these cases. There can also be a bit of overlap between voluntary and involuntary actions. He mentions as examples being in a ship at sea during a storm and having to throw goods overboard in order to avoid sinking and also a tyrant ordering someone to do something that under ordinary circumstances would be immoral. Actions committed under compulsion are either involuntary or at most semi-voluntary and are neither morally good nor bad. In principle, when the cause of a person’s actions is not the person him- or herself but something outside the self, the resulting actions are neither virtuous nor vicious.

Aristotle now draws a distinction between actions that are done “by reason of ignorance” and those that are done “in ignorance.” This may look like hairsplitting, but it’s quite an important distinction. When one acts by reason of ignorance, one is lacking knowledge of the circumstances in which one acts and thus one is not acting voluntarily and can neither be praised nor blamed for whatever consequences result. For example, in playing hockey one might try to lift an opponent’s stick and accidentally hit him in the face with one’s own stick. One isn’t acting on purpose here but accidentally or from ignorance of what would happen if one moved one’s stick in a certain way. If the action is not done with intent, it’s not a moral offence but something done by reason of ignorance. On the other hand, one acts “in ignorance” for example when one gets drunk and drives and consequently hits someone. Here again, one didn’t intend to cause harm, but the important matter is that one put oneself in a condition of ignorance or mental incapacity before acting. This action is voluntary because getting drunk is voluntary, and accordingly is subject to moral judgment. So is any crime of passion or action that comes about because of anger or loss of self-control. Even if one doesn’t choose to lose one’s temper, one chooses to act while in this state. A more general ignorance of the difference between right and wrong is also subject to moral appraisal; any competent adult can be expected to know this, at least in a general way.

Morality, then, crucially bears upon the issue of choice or voluntariness. In principle, no one is morally responsible for that over which one has no control, including when one acts while lacking information about what would happen if one did X rather than Y—unless it can reasonably be said that one should have known this. One might try to save a drowning person and actually cause them to drown when they might have survived if one had left them alone. This action isn’t blameworthy because one had no way of anticipating what was going to happen. On the other hand, if I insult my friend and hurt their feelings, I can’t claim my act was above reproach for the reason that I didn’t think they would be hurt; this is something one should know, and it’s therefore voluntary—it’s within one’s power to do or not do—and blameworthy.

His next question concerns whether we ever morally deliberate about what values we’ll hold or if we deliberate about means only. Clearly, we must form judgments regarding means, as when I need to think about how I can make my friend happy in a given set of circumstances. The question here is, given the desire to make my friend happy, what should I do to bring this about? But do I also deliberate about ends, such as whether to make my friend happy or unhappy? Some say that we only deliberate about means, not ends. Ends are given, while the means of obtaining them must be thought about. Aristotle defends the view that a sensible person deliberates only about means and not ends, and he provides the examples of doctors and orators. A doctor deliberates only about how to make a patient healthy, not whether to make them healthy or unhealthy. An orator deliberates about how to persuade an audience, not whether to. The end is assumed.

Is it within our power to be virtuous? It is indeed. No one is vicious or immoral by nature but only by choice. The virtues are cultivated, as we have seen and as Plato also said, by exercising them or by acting virtuously and by cultivating habits of doing so. Over time these actions form habits which in turn form our character, so all of this lies within our power. What about physical qualities such as blindness or being overweight? Are such things ever blameworthy? His answer is that it depends on the circumstances. If one was born blind or becomes blind because of a disease that is beyond one’s power to cure, one isn’t blind voluntarily and so it isn’t blameworthy. If one is blind because of drunkenness or self-indulgence, it is blameworthy. Similarly with being overweight; if it’s genuinely beyond one’s control, it’s involuntary and not blameworthy, but otherwise it is.

He then turns to the ethical virtue of courage (andreia). It can be seen, he says, that courage is intermediate between the deficiency that is cowardice—a vice—and the excess that is rashness or rushing unthinkingly into dangers that a sensible person would avoid, also a vice. Courage is the virtue that bears upon acting in the face of fear, whether such fears are rational or irrational. A courageous person isn’t fearless, but they overcome their fears and act when it’s rational to do so, as when a soldier on the battlefield stands and fights the enemy rather than runs away. A person in such circumstances who doesn’t experience fear isn’t courageous but insensible. Some fear is rational here, but it isn’t a reason to flee. He then describes the virtue of temperance or self-control. Temperance is a mean between the excess of pleasure (especially the bodily pleasures) which is self-indulgence and the deficiency, a condition that’s far less common and which we might also call insensibility if it has a name at all. The temperate person enjoys the pleasures of life, but they’re not undisciplined in how they pursue these or in selecting which ones they will indulge and which one’s they’ll resist. The virtuous person exhibits a kind of internal harmony where one isn’t constantly at odds with oneself regarding what we desire and how we’ll pursue this. Some conflict between reason and passion, and between one passion and another, is an ineliminable feature of human existence, but if we cultivate virtuous habits this will not rise to a level where we are seriously divided within ourselves. Deep internal divisions of this kind are most often an indication of a less than good character. It’s also true that a thoroughly evil person may achieve a kind of inner harmony, where bad actions are echoed by bad desires or desires for the wrong things. This kind of character, Aristotle believes, is most often suffering from a psychological affliction and isn’t fully rational. The only remedy to this is a proper upbringing, where bad habits will not be cultivated and one won’t be ignorant of the difference between right and wrong.

Book 4

Aristotle’s analysis of the ethical virtues continues. Next up are virtues associated with money, honor, anger, and social relations more broadly. We begin with liberality, a virtue that concerns how we spend our money. The liberal individual is said to be generous with their money but also judicious in the sense that they both give generously and are wise in choosing to which people or causes they will give. Spending too much money and on the wrong things is the vice of prodigality, especially when one spends lavishly on self-indulgent pleasures. The opposite and far more common vice is stinginess or what he calls meanness, which is motivated essentially by greed or an excessive love of gain. Again, Aristotle says that the liberal person “will give to the right people, the right amounts, and at the right time, with all the other qualifications that accompany right giving,” and without specifying what the right people, the right amounts, and so on, are. (1120a25) We’re unable to say in the abstract what the right people, the right amounts, and so on, are as this depends upon various contingencies. The right amount, for example, is dependent upon how much money is needed to achieve a given end. Money is needed at different times, by different people, and under different circumstances, making it too complex a matter to say in the abstract how much money a person should give in order demonstrate liberality. Also, it’s not only the rich who can exhibit this virtue. A poor person who donates the same amount as a rich person is more liberal and more praiseworthy than the latter. Aristotle was living in a society in which aristocrats were expected to donate rather generously toward a number of public causes. The refusal to do so was frowned upon quite seriously, even as greed and selfishness were likely about as common then as now. Civic-mindedness was commonly held in very high regard and was also necessary to keep the society functioning.

A closely related virtue is what he calls magnificence. This is essentially liberality on a larger scale and involves donating large sums of money to public causes. This is a virtue of the wealthy and powerful and again involves discernment and taste in deciding that to which one is going to donate and in what manner. The magnificent individual is motivated at once by public spiritedness and the love of honor, as when one donates, to use Aristotle’s examples, toward a building, a chorus, or a trireme (a ship) that will benefit the city as a whole. Such expenditures should not be showy, tasteless, or egotistical in appearance. This individual will also furnish their own house lavishly and elegantly, as this too is part of the city and should add to its beautification. This virtue can also be exhibited excessively in the form of extravagance and deficiently in the form of stinginess. The greatest expression of magnificence requires political power since it is the rulers of the city-state who have the authority to oversee expenditures on large public projects which benefit the community as a whole.

The next virtue to be discussed is pride or magnanimity. The proud believe themselves to be worthy of great things and are in fact so worthy. This isn’t a virtue for everyone but for those of good character only. A person of bad character who believes oneself worthy of great things isn’t proud but vain. Such an individual is worthy of little and the highest virtue to which they can aspire is temperance or self-control. One of good character who believes oneself unworthy of great things isn’t to be praised but is excessively humble, and this for Aristotle constitutes a vice. The proud individual seeks honor, whether it be in the form of public honors or a good reputation, and regards these as their rightful due. Since having a good character is a necessary precondition of pride, Aristotle calls pride “a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes them greater, and it is not found without them.” (1124a1-2) Pride is also a rare virtue, as the moral character of most people is nothing great. An excess of pride is boastfulness, the deficiency a kind of slavishness. The magnanimous individual isn’t a narcissist but possesses an honest estimation of their own worth.

Next are the vices and virtue associated with anger. The virtue he calls “good temper” or patience, and it is had by those who once again resist extremes of excess and deficiency. The excess of anger is irascibility and is exhibited by the person with both a short fuse and a tendency toward rage. The deficiency is less common and is found in the slavish character. It is no virtue, for Aristotle, never to be angry. The good-tempered person is angry at the right things and in the right degree. The sight of injustice, for example, rightfully inspires anger. The good- or even-tempered individual is closer to deficiency than excess, being slow to anger and refusing to hold onto grievances for a long period of time.

Next is the virtue of truthfulness, where this includes telling the truth about oneself. The deficient person here is either self-effacing or a liar while the excessive is the egotist or boaster who overstates whatever good deeds one may have done. The truthful person is more likely to understate the truth about one’s accomplishments than to brag, as bragging is always in bad taste. They don’t parade their achievements or virtues, but nor do they go the opposite extreme.

A couple of other virtues are wittiness and shame. The witty person has a sense of humor that is intelligent and avoids the extremes of buffoonery and sternness. Shame bears primarily upon our attitude toward our own misdeeds and is intermediate between audacity or brazenness and a humility that is servile and undignified. The right kind of shame involves an honest recognition and remorse over one’s misdeeds.

Book 5

Our next topic is the ethical virtue of justice. The first thing to note is that justice is, like all the ethical virtues, a certain state of character, and to see what kind of state this is we get a clue by looking at the unjust individual. As Aristotle has said, there are many ways of being vicious and fewer of being virtuous, and the same is true for justice and injustice. Consider the unjust person. They may be either lawless, grasping, unfair in their dealings with people, or any combination thereof. They act for the perceived good of oneself at the expense of others. Justice concerns our dealings with other people, and the first thing we notice is that the just person acts for others’ benefit and is not selfish, as Plato had also said. We can distinguish injustice into two basic kinds: unlawfulness and unfairness. The common criminal is the clearest example of the former, while the latter may be unfair in their business dealings, for example, or in everyday relations with their neighbors. Fairness isn’t the same as obeying the law but bears upon a variety of moral claims that our fellow citizens rightfully make upon us. Fairness has to do with proper proportion. To take a classic example, if I have a whole pie and I cut you a small piece and myself a large one, all other things being equal, I have taken more than my share and you are right to complain that I’m being unfair. The unjust person in a sense has too much of some good or other while the person who has been treated unjustly has too little. The latter has been shortchanged or cheated out of their rightful share. In transactions of this kind the general principle is equality. In economic transactions, a fair trade is one in which both parties can see that each is benefitting more or less equally from a transaction that doesn’t leave one party obviously better off than the other. The mean that justice in this sense of fairness achieves, then, is between having too much and having too little. Justice aims at an equality or reciprocity which is not at all the same as modern egalitarianism. No ancient thinker was an egalitarian in the sense of calling for an equality of socio-economic condition for the population as a whole. Justice is more like an inner disposition, where one endeavors to benefit others by giving them their rightful share, whether it be of goods or one’s time or services, and in a way that is proportional and reciprocal.

Strict justice can tend toward a strict equality or some other condition which may require correction in the form of the virtue of equity (epieikeia), which he calls “a correction of legal justice.” (1137b12). Legal justice can sometimes require correction, as when the law requires that all citizens do X but in a particular circumstance an individual will suffer some harm or misfortune by doing X. Equity is the virtue that aims to tailor some universal moral requirement to an individual or case that may be an exception to the rule. The equitable is the reasonable or suitable given all the facts of a particular situation, and it often calls for a leniency that we wouldn’t grant in other cases. Legal justice is universal in the sense that it’s applicable to all, but the difficulty with such universal moral requirements is that one size doesn’t always fit all and there are sometimes good reasons to make an exception or perhaps to apply a universal in some other way. If I give a student an extension because they’re sick and refuse it to one who isn’t, I may be (again, other things being equal) demonstrating equity. Moral cases are particular, and in deliberating it’s important for Aristotle that we not become rule fetishists but make sure we’re doing the best we can in the situation before us given all the facts of the case.

Finally, while it’s obviously possible to treat others unjustly, he then asks whether it’s also possible to treat oneself unjustly. He mentions the example of voluntarily stabbing oneself. This act is contrary to the law and is unjust, but it’s worth noting that such an act as Aristotle sees it is an injustice not against oneself but against the state. The person who commits suicide isn’t treating oneself unjustly, but they are harming the general society by violating its laws. One can’t voluntarily be treated unjustly.

Book 6

The topic now shifts from the ethical to the intellectual virtues. Many of us regard Book 6 as perhaps the philosophically richest chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics, and it continues to stand as one of the most noteworthy analyses of ethical judgment in the western tradition. Aristotle argues in opposition to what we might call ethical formalism or the view that in deliberating about moral matters what we are doing is essentially following rules that can be fully spelled out in advance of any actual cases on which those rules come to bear. As Aristotle has suggested in the case of the virtue of equity or reasonableness, what matters most when we are making an ethical judgment about what is to be done in a particular circumstance is not rules formulated in advance but the case before us. Ethical deliberation is more like reading a situation and seeing from the situation itself what is to be done than applying to it an abstract rule. Rule following is sometimes the right and sometimes the wrong course of action; everything depends on the details of the case before us, which is why we find him using phrases like “the right motive,” “the right time,” “the right reasons,” and so on, phrases that can’t be exactly defined in general terms.

What the philosophical study of ethics can’t do is formulate a decision procedure or a method that, if scrupulously followed, determines what we ought to do in any and all situations that call for a moral judgment. Ethical theory can describe the general nature of the virtues, as Aristotle is attempting to do in this book, but it can’t prescribe the particulars of how we ought to act and deliberate. The moral question, what is to be done, always comes down to the circumstances that are before us. These are so various and complex that it’s impossible to formulate a set of rules that could do justice to such complexity, no matter how detailed the rules. We find a parallel to this in the other arts: in medicine a physician possesses enormous information about how to treat various medical conditions, but no amount of general information will dictate exactly how one should treat a particular patient. An athlete may have a vast knowledge of their sport, but such knowledge—including an exhaustive knowledge of the rules—doesn’t tell one what play to make here and now. The practitioner of any art—medicine, law, navigation, military strategy, teaching, sports, poetry and the other arts, etc.—must use their judgment, as the archer must know how to handle the bow in addition to seeing the target clearly. In making a judgment call, one “sees” what is to be done and then does it. Asking how one knew to make this call rather than that is like asking a great hockey player how they knew to pass the puck rather than shoot; one sees what needs to be done and does it. Making judgments is rational, but the reasons are tied to the situation before us. We can say in general terms, pass the puck when the other player is in a better scoring position, but this abstract rule underdetermines the decision we need to make in the moment. Similarly, we can say that a soldier ought to be courageous on the battlefield, but this doesn’t apply in every case; sometimes a strategic retreat is indicated by battlefield conditions. Everything is contingent on the case of which we’re speaking.

In urging us against rule fetishism, Aristotle doesn’t go to the opposite extreme either. The ethical virtues are indeed general moral requirements, and in many (perhaps most) situations the proper course of action is to show courage, friendship, liberality, and so on, in a fairly straightforward way. There are also actions that we should never do, no matter the circumstances, such as murder and theft. A virtuous person knows how to make judgment calls of this kind. A person of bad character may know how to get what they want, but this skill is what he calls cleverness rather than good judgment.

The Greek word for ethical judgment or practical judgment is phronêsis. Aristotle has said that in making such judgments one is in the position of finding the mean between excess and deficiency, not always but in a large majority of cases. When we’re confronted with a moral choice, the answer in most cases is to pursue the path of moderation, not in a mathematical way but in the right way, with the right motive, etc. Now, what is the right way, the right motive, etc., and how are we to know this? Phronêsis is the intellectual virtue or capacity of mind that allows us to see this, and it is more a matter of perceiving than inferring or calculating. I see that my friend is in need and I decide that I should help him. Often it’s as simple as this, while in other cases it’s far more difficult because there may be conflicting moral considerations that I must take into account. Let’s say my friend is unemployed and can’t pay his rent, so I give him some money for the rent. This might be an easy call, but now consider that my friend prides himself on his self-reliance and may be insulted if I offer him money. Should I still offer him money? Maybe it would be better in this circumstance to offer him a loan, thus saving his pride while also solving his immediate problem. This looks like a reasonable course of action, until another moral consideration comes into play: I’m also hard up for money and if I lend some to my friend then I won’t be able to afford enough food for my family. I’m now in a position of having to weigh conflicting values, and no rule tells me how I must do so. What is the algorithm for what to do in this case? There isn’t one; I must use my judgment, and this is what the person with practical wisdom or phronêsis is able to do in a way that is even-handed, flexible, and reasonable and while always focussing on the details of the situation before one rather than rule following. This person isn’t overly infatuated with rules and sometimes departs from them when the situation before them demands it. A hockey referee must enforce the rules of the game, but the better ones know when you should call more penalties and when you should put the whistle away and let the teams play. A skilled referee doesn’t call penalties in exactly the same way during the first period of a regular season game and in overtime of the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final, or one who does is a rule fetishist rather than a proper judge. A good referee or judge of any other kind can be seen as constantly looking back and forth between moral universals (abstract principles, rules, values, laws, or virtues) and the particular situations and actions upon which they come to bear, but while being ultimately more concerned with the particular than the universal. We come by this kind of knowledge through long experience, if at all, and we don’t expect this of the young.

Human beings grasp truth, Aristotle tells us, by means of five intellectual virtues or forms of knowledge. These are what he terms “art [technê], scientific knowledge [epistêmê], practical wisdom [phronêsis], philosophic wisdom [sophia], intuitive reason [nous]; we do not include judgment and opinion because in these we may be mistaken.” (1139b17) Technê is the kind of knowledge we find in the arts and crafts and pertains especially to the creation of works ranging from poetry to furniture. Like phronêsis, technê deals with what is contingent, not with what necessarily must be. Epistêmê, on the other hand, concerns what is necessary and eternal, and it includes both scientific and mathematical knowledge. It crucially involves the capacity to demonstrate and to prove. Nous or intuitive reason grasps first principles and is a kind of intellectual counterpart to sense perception. One doesn’t prove the validity of first principles such as the law of identity (A is A) but sees or intuits this; it is self-evident, although nous is also acquired gradually in the course of experience. Sophia refers to a more comprehensive theoretical wisdom of the kind that philosophy seeks, and especially to a knowledge that is relevant to how we live. Wisdom is a combination of intuitive reason and scientific/mathematical knowledge. It’s the habitual pursuit of sophia that, he will later argue, constitutes the best, the happiest, and most properly human way of life, if also the rarest.

The most central point Aristotle raises in Book 6 concerns the non-technical or non- methodological nature of ethical reasoning. One scholar notes, “an essential difference between technical-theoretical reasonableness and practical reasonableness becomes discernible here at once. When he who knows is required to give reasons in any other case but practical matters, he can draw upon a general knowledge that he has learned. It is exactly this recourse to general knowledge that characterizes technê or epistêmê…. But things look very different in respect to the exercise of practical reason. Here one cannot rely upon previously acquired general knowledge, and yet one still claims to reach a judgment by one’s own weighing of the pros and cons and to decide reasonably in each case. Whoever deliberates with himself and with others about what would be the right thing to do in a particular practical situation is plainly prepared to support his decision with nothing other than good reasons, and he who always behaves this reasonably possesses the virtue of reasonableness, of ‘well-advised-ness.’” (Gadamer, The Idea of the Good, 35-6)

Book 7

We turn now to the ethical virtue of continence (enkrateia) and the vice of incontinence (akrasia). Both concern how we stand to the pleasures and especially the bodily pleasures. By now it won’t surprise us to see Aristotle recommending that we practice some moderation in this department. Remember that happiness is the highest good of human life, so we won’t expect Aristotle to renounce the various forms of pleasure, either intellectual or physical. The virtuous life is a happy life, but it’s not one that’s organized around the pursuit or maximization of the various pleasures. It is pleasant but not pleasure-focused. The latter way of life is that of the hedonist and it’s beneath our nature as rational beings. It is animalistic and base, but once again we don’t find Aristotle going to the opposite extreme or endorsing any kind of strict asceticism where we renounce the pleasures entirely. Once again it’s a question of balance or of pursuing the right pleasures in the right way at the right time and in the right measure. What is the right way and the right measure? Again, there’s no rule for this. It’s a matter of phronêsis, not epistêmê.

Continence is the virtue of self-mastery, where when we judge that a certain pleasure should not be indulged but we are tempted, we stop ourselves. The incontinent person does not but is self-indulgent in a way that is usually hedonistic. The person who gives in to anger when they shouldn’t, or who holds onto anger for too long a time, is also incontinent, and we could think of many other examples of this vice. The incontinent person doesn’t lack moral knowledge but they don’t act upon it. They may suffer from weakness of will and a self-indulgence or brutishness that has become habitual and difficult to resist. They may also know what is good but refuse to do it out of indifference or willfulness. As Aristotle points out, Socrates believed that there’s no such thing as incontinence or failure of the will and that all vicious behavior is to be accounted for by a lack of knowledge. Aristotle disagrees; it is perfectly possible, and indeed not uncommon, for one to know the good and yet not do it and also to know what is bad and do it anyway. It happens, and it’s due to a failure not of knowledge but of the will.

Continence and incontinence obviously apply to bodily desires, but they apply as well to the passions regarding wealth, honor, and anger. None of these should be indulged without limit and too much or too little of any of them is a vice. The appetites themselves are not morally good or bad but are given facts of our existence. Morality concerns actions, not the passions but rather how we stand to the passions or what we do with them. A happy and virtuous life makes a certain allowance for the pleasures, and as a general matter we can say that pleasure is a good. What it’s not is the good. The good life is pleasant and indeed more pleasant than the alternatives, but again it’s not one that’s ordered around their maximization.

The point Aristotle is making is basically empirical: as a matter of observed fact, human reason sometimes comes into conflict with one or more passions, and one passion can readily conflict with another (I want to lose weight, but I also want that doughnut). This is readily seen, and what it suggests is that we are more than occasionally in conflict with ourselves. In an extreme case, such internal conflict can lead to moral indifference where one no longer cares what is right or wrong but does whatever one feels like. This person is evil (phaulos or kakos), Aristotle says, and is ruthless in their pursuit of money, power, or whatever pleasure it is, and the person who habitually acts this way is typically unhappy and full of self-loathing. In speaking of the evil person, he is talking not about the person who occasionally gives in to temptation but about a chronic condition.

The conclusion of this chapter “is that pleasures are good, though in certain cases this judgment must be qualified in a way that fits in with the standard view that certain pleasures do not attract the good person. We ought not to trust our pleasure-instincts outright, but we certainly ought not to be suspicious of them through and through and in principle. This applies even to the pleasures of the flesh, which have their limited place in life…. Very many people, according to Aristotle, regard those pleasures as immensely desirable, but this is a mistake.” (Broadie, 66-7)

Books 8 and 9

The next two books are on the ethical virtue of friendship (philia), and the fact that he writes two lengthy chapters on this theme indicates how important Aristotle believes friendship to be. No one would choose to live without friends, he says at the outset of Book 8. What is it about friendship that is so important, and what are the different varieties of friendship, using the term quite broadly? He’ll address these questions in Books 8 and 9 as well as the reciprocal nature of friendship, friendship between equals and non-equals, and some related issues.

There is a close relationship between friendship and the rest of the ethical virtues, Aristotle maintains, as a person of good character will typically enjoy positive relationships with people. Friendship, however, is somewhat more multifarious than we might think. He now famously presents the view that friendship comes in three forms (he will later add a fourth). I may befriend someone because they are either (1) useful to me, (2) pleasant to be around, or (3) virtuous, or some combination thereof. The three kinds, then, are distinguished by the nature of the tie that binds the friends together. Let’s look at each of the three.

First, the friendship based on utility or usefulness is fairly self-explanatory. One befriends someone because they’re useful to one in some way. This relationship is based on a calculation of self-interest which is likely to be mutual and will last for as long as it continues to satisfy that utility. I befriend an accountant because I’m hoping he’ll help me with my taxes; he befriends me because he’s hoping I’ll lend him my books. You can think of a thousand examples that are some variant of this. These friendships tend to be fleeting because the tie on which they’re based is contingent and often temporary. They’re quickly made and unmade, and so is the next type of friendship.

Second, we have the friendship that is based on pleasure. This may refer to any number of pleasures, mental or physical. Again, since the basis of this relationship is contingent and often fleeting, so is the friendship itself. It’s a relationship that is based not on the friend’s character but on their capacity to please me in some way, and it’s questionable whether this should even be spoken of as friendship at all. It is commonly thought of this way, so Aristotle is content to call this and the first type of relationship a friendship at least in a loose sense. Both parties do benefit the other, so the relationship is based on reciprocity and also a kind of equality, however they are also likely to be quarrelsome and untrusting. The first two kinds of friendship are highly defective, Aristotle says, and are categorically different from friendship in the true or highest meaning of the word. Both the first two are essentially self-regarding in the sense that it isn’t the other person I love but what I can get from them, on the model of an economic transaction. The other is really just a means to an end. Both are found especially among the young and the old while the third form is typically found in those in their prime or in middle age. The first two are also the only kinds of friendship that morally bad people can have.

Third, we have what is sometimes termed “perfect friendship” or, more simply, friendship itself. The tie that binds two people together here is the recognition of our friend as a person of good character. Friendship is perfect when both parties are equal and alike in virtue. While their association will bring a certain amount of utility and/or pleasure, this isn’t what holds them together. What does are shared activities and interests. Here both parties encourage one another in performing virtuous actions and seek the good of the other not out of self-interest but for the friend’s own sake. Friends wish the best for each other and are mutually beneficent or demonstrate a quality of good will (eunoia) that isn’t present, or not in the same degree, in the first two kinds of friendship. In the first two, any good will one has for a friend is likely bound up with one’s own self-interest while in the third one seeks the good of the other for the other’s sake. Whereas the first two kinds of friendship are contingent and fleeting, the third kind is neither since it is based on something (character) that is relatively constant.

In Aristotle’s view, this third type of friendship is quite rare since it’s had only by people of good character and these people are not numerous. Also, such a relationship places considerable demands on both parties, making it impracticable to have many such friendships. You can’t have a million friends. (Those people on Instagram aren’t your friends.) You might at most have several such relationships and most people will have none but only relationships of the first two kinds. Perfect friends must spend a lot of time together and are likely to be engaged in some mutually beneficial undertaking. Aristotle says they are likely to live together as well, although he’s not speaking of marriage. (We’ll get back to marriage below, and you may not like what he has to say about this. Hint: Aristotle wasn’t a twenty-first-century feminist.)

In true friendship, the friend is what he calls “another self,” not in a narcissistic way where you love someone because they’re just like you are but you love them because their moral character is both virtuous and similar to your own in this way. The two must be alike in virtue of their character, not merely their personality or their likes and dislikes. He cites the adage, “Birds of a feather flock together.” Like is drawn to like, at least in this type of friendship (not necessarily with the first two, where opposites can attract). Aristotle was not what we might call a strong egoist, or a proponent of the view that this kind of friendship comes down to rational self-interest. It is in one’s interest to have such relationships, but within it what one pursues above all is the good of the friend and for their own sake. A kind of self-love is involved here, for the virtuous person does love or otherwise esteem oneself, but not in a narcissistic sense. Furthermore, for Aristotle love is merited. A person of bad character doesn’t warrant love or even self-love. One should love or esteem oneself only if one’s conduct justifies it.

Do we need friends? Aristotle has already answered this very strongly in the affirmative, partly because this is natural given the kind of social beings that we are but also for additional reasons. Some believe that the sort of noble individual Aristotle is describing is self-sufficient and has no need of friends, but the opposite is the case, he thinks. The virtuous need friendship more than anyone else, for otherwise they have no one whom they can benefit. A person of good character always seeks the good of others and isn’t preoccupied with oneself. The less virtuous and more common sort need friends both because this is a natural value for human beings and for the benefits they can get from them. Young people, he says, are mostly motivated by emotion and so need friends and lovers to satisfy their passions while old people need friends for more practical reasons. Friendship is an imperative for all of us regardless of our station in life, and both in good times and in bad. When misfortune strikes, we need the support of our friends while when we are faring well, we need them for reasons ranging from altruism to companionship, family life, and so on. Friendship, he says, is more necessary in bad times but more noble in good.

Finally, all three kinds of friendship he has described so far are based on equality between the parties. There is an additional form of friendship that is between two people who are not equal, whether it be due to a difference in age, development, experience, sex, or moral character. Parents and their children, for instance, are not capable of perfect friendship because they’re not equals, and the same is true of marriage; this would have been self-evident to Aristotle’s ancient readers and students. The same is true of rulers and their subjects and people of different ages. When there is a sizeable difference of the kinds just mentioned between the two parties, the friendship is imperfect for reason of their inequality.

Book 8 also includes a brief discussion of the three types of political constitution and their degenerate forms. I’ll return to this a bit later.

Book 10

The final book of the Nicomachean Ethics returns to the topic of Book 1 and contains a broad-ranging analysis of pleasure and happiness, including the question of the highest form of happiness for human beings. His answer to this last question will be quite reminiscent of both Socrates and Plato—so yes, you should all become philosophers and he was undoubtedly right about this. It’s not too late to change your major.

But first, it is a common belief, Aristotle points out, that the pursuit of pleasure is natural to human beings. Many take the view that pleasure is not only a good but the good itself since we all pursue it, while others take a dimmer view of pleasure. Plato demonstrated that pleasure isn’t the good itself although the good life is pleasant and indeed the most pleasant of all. Somewhat ironically, the way to maximize pleasure is not to pursue it but to pursue knowledge and virtue. Aristotle will agree that pleasure is only desirable if it’s brought about by morally good conduct and if it’s experienced by the virtuous person. This kind of person is the standard for pleasure, just as we judge which foods are good by the standard of the healthy person. In order to judge things, we require some standard of value, and we find this in the human being who is both fully rational and virtuous and not by appealing to popular opinion or your own opinion. This doesn’t mean that the only way to know what is pleasant is to watch what such individuals do and to follow their expert advice but that to live well we must order our lives around virtuous activity.

Among the various pleasures that human beings pursue, one basic distinction is between the pleasures of the body and those of the mind, and it’s no surprise that Aristotle is going to propose that the latter are higher and more god-like than the former, which we have in common with non-human animals. As a general rule, what we share with other animals is in the grand scheme of things lower than that which we share with the gods, in the view of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and a great many ancient thinkers. The life that is devoted to the (especially bodily) pleasures is brutish and animalistic relative to the way of life these philosophers are recommending. Aristotle’s readers wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see him taking this view. In defending it he again appeals to the idea that every kind of animal has a proper function. The function of an ox is not that of a fish, nor the dog that of a bird. The good ox is “good at” being an ox, which means it is good at pulling a cart or a plow in the field. A good horse is a fast runner and works well with its rider. It isn’t good in itself but it’s good at performing its function and its particular form of activity. It isn’t much different for human beings: our rationality is our human essence (that which makes us human) and our function, and our happiness and proper pleasure is to act in accordance with this function. The pleasures that we ought to value most highly are those that are proper to human beings, which are not the ones that most people pursue.

As we near the end of the book, Aristotle now has a more complete answer to the question, what is the good life for human beings. Happiness of some kind is indeed the highest good that we can seek, but there are very different forms of happiness and everything depends on which kind we seek. Everyone, even the thoroughly evil person, thinks they are pursuing happiness and has some idea of what happiness consists in, but most of us are radically in error as to where true happiness is to be found. The three general conceptions of happiness are the pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of power, and the pursuit of wisdom. Let’s have a final look at all three.

First, if we take pleasure to mean (as most of its advocates do) primarily the pleasures of the body, we can quickly dismiss this as beneath the nature of a rational being. It is vulgar and sometimes animalistic, although he doesn’t deny that physical pleasures can be very pleasant and even good. But they are not the good because by the standard of the person who is fully rational, knowledgeable, experienced, and happy, pleasure is not our ultimate goal. It is a goal, but it plays a subordinate role in a properly human life. Everyone needs a certain measure of amusement, entertainment, and bodily pleasure, but beyond that moderate measure it becomes a vice. We pursue these things in order to recharge our batteries, as it were, so that we can return to nobler pursuits. Remember that Aristotle was an aristocrat living in the midst of an aristocratic society, as is true of a large majority of ancient philosophers. Some pursuits and some passions are noble while others are base, and this hierarchical distinction is deeply rooted in ancient Greek culture.

He endorses Plato’s argument that when we imagine a pleasure-filled life and then add rationality and wisdom into it, it is improved. But the highest good can’t be improved upon in this or any other way, from which it follows that the life of pleasure isn’t best. Also, he notes that pleasure isn’t something that we pursue directly but it’s something that is felt as a consequence of some activity or experience. We pursue the activity or experience, and pleasure attends it, but we don’t exactly pursue it. The pleasure that comes from playing a sport well and the activity of playing a sport well are not the same; the good we pursue is actually the activity while pleasure is its accompaniment.

Aristotle takes more seriously the view that the highest happiness is found in the life of power and politics. This way of life is nobler than the first, he believes, as it more closely approximates our properly human function, but it is nonetheless flawed. We can have all the power in the world, but if we lack wisdom that power isn’t good for much and it’s probably not even good. The incompetent ruler is exactly the one who loves power too much and knowledge and virtue too little. Again, if we imagine a person having all the power one could want and then adding knowledge to this, the result is an improvement, so power can’t be the highest good. Additionally, the life of politics has a down side. There are few individuals, if any, who are more vicious than the political tyrant, even as this person has unlimited power. We’ll return to Aristotle’s political views below, but for now his main charge against the life of politics is that a great deal of it is spent trying to remedy injustices and social problems of various kinds, and it would be odd to say that the best life is one spent largely remedying evil. War, for example, isn’t something undertaken for its own sake but is resorted to as a necessary evil, as a way of defending the state against a foreign aggressor, let’s say. This is no leisurely pursuit of a positive good but something bad in itself, and we can say much the same of many of the everyday activities and decisions that political rulers undertake. Often, we are deciding upon the least bad among a range of bad options rather than pursuing an excellence of some kind. Pursuing the good here is constantly mixed up with the bad, as the whole realm of politics is morally tainted or at least far from perfect. Keeping your hands clean is probably impossible in this way of life.

Much better than the life of politics is the life of contemplation, and his discussion of this will lead into the argument of the Politics. The life of politics is to be preferred over the pleasure-seeking life, but it’s less good than the philosophical. This is the main hypothesis he wishes to defend in Book 10 and he will amplify and spell out further a basic idea that he has already expressed. The political life is not unhappy, but it’s at most second best. More perfect is the contemplative life where our human function is pursued optimally, for its own sake, and in a way that is pleasant without being devoted to pleasure. It is devoted to knowledge and virtue, as ends rather than means, and the happiness that accompanies them. One who lives in this way exercises in full both the ethical and intellectual virtues in a way that accords with our rational nature and (inseparable from this) that is semi-divine. We can imagine the gods spending their days in this way and without interruption. Human beings can’t do this all day every day, but we can do this in a more limited way. A properly human life is constantly striving to become divine.

Even Plato’s philosopher-king would live a worse life than Aristotle’s philosopher since the latter is without the moral taint that is inseparable from political rulership. All the virtues can be cultivated in this way of life and without the continual drag that politics brings. Political life is constantly at risk of deteriorating into injustice, and in a way that is not true of the life of contemplation or theory (theoria). We do not pursue the latter for the sake of a goal outside of itself; the opposite is true of the first two forms of happiness. A life devoted to study and intellectual conversation with our equals is the life that Plato’s philosopher-king wishes for but can’t pursue because of a civic duty to rule the city. This is an important point: the philosopher-king doesn’t want power, and those who do are unworthy of it. The pursuit of power for its own sake is base, according to Plato, and Aristotle agrees with this.

Happiness, then, isn’t at all what we most commonly think it is, a condition of the feelings or a constant state of emotional satisfaction but an activity of a particular kind. It isn’t a psychological phenomenon but a moral and intellectual one, more a continual process of activity than a way of feeling that is centered around the pleasures. Think of happiness as what one does rather than how one feels. Most human beings focus to an excessive degree, Aristotle believes, on how they feel when what matters most, from the point of view of both morality and happiness, is how we conduct ourselves. Are we cultivating the kind of virtues, both ethical and intellectual, that Aristotle has been describing throughout this book? If so, happiness will come, and a kind of happiness that will endure even when misfortune befalls us, as it does to us all in some way or other. This form of happiness alone is self-sufficient and fully in accord with our rational nature and function. “If happiness,” as he says, “is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue,” and it is this to which he is urging his readers. (1177a12) As one scholar puts it, “The point that both [Plato and Aristotle] wish to make—which is the fundamental point of agreement between them concerning the good—is that, in distinction to gods, human beings are always under way toward the divine, or, as Gadamer puts it, their best life is philosophia, not sophia, that is, striving for wisdom, not wisdom itself. Human beings are finite, not absolute—never absolved from the ‘remnant of earth’ (Goethe) in them that inevitably involves them in the task of living well here in the practical world. Seen this way, the life of praxis is a second best not in the negative sense, but in the sense of one of two ‘best-nesses’ that together constitute the good human life, the life of reason in its combined theoretical and practical functions. Thus, in both Plato and Aristotle, the good emerges as that toward which we are striving, that for the sake of which, that at which we aim.” (Gadamer, Idea of the Good, trans. Introduction, xxviii-xxix)

One final question is whether we are virtuous and happy by nature or whether we (might) become this through habit-formation or education. Aristotle suggests that while some appear to be naturally inclined toward virtue due to simple good fortune, most of us require a good deal of habituation and education to this end, and that the general society and also the state through its laws play an important role in cultivating good habits particularly in youth. He repeats Plato’s observation that habits formed at a young age are changed only with difficulty, so it is important that the individual with the general support of the community cultivate the right habits at an early stage of their development. Rational arguments will have little effect on those who have been brought up with bad habits as the power to overrule the passions in such natures is weak. We must learn to love what is good and despise what is base from an early age, or the higher form of happiness he has been describing will elude us. The discussion at the end of the book shades into politics and logically leads into his next book, the Politics.

More on politics

Aristotle’s political philosophy—the details of which we won’t cover here (for this, see his Politics)—complements his ethics. If the latter seeks to describe the best way of life for rational beings, political theory tries to identify which social institutions best accord with this, and where the basic political unit remains the city-state (polis) which it had been for Plato. Human beings are social-political animals by nature, according to Aristotle, and accordingly our individual happiness cannot be ultimately separated from our participation in the public life of our society. He would defend neither a strong individualism in a modern liberal sense nor the opposite, a collectivism in which the person is subordinate to the state. One finds no strong separation between the values of individuality and community in Aristotle’s politics; indeed, any such strong separation is an early modern notion. The happiness or well being of one can’t be separated from the well being of the city-state as a whole, and the essential purpose of the state is to provide for the common good of the city.

The fundamental question of politics, then, is what constitution and other political institutions and policies are most conducive to the happiness of the people as a whole, although in an aristocratic culture of course this will slant toward the well being of the more aristocratic element. What political arrangements optimally enhance human life? Justice will be understood as that which promotes such happiness and injustice as that which hinders it.

Aristotle possessed an extensive knowledge of the kinds of constitutions that prevailed in the myriad Greek city-states and far beyond and was in a position to compare their various virtues and vices always from the standpoint of what is optimally conducive to human well being. A principal question he considers is whether the polis is best ruled by a single individual, by a small group, or by the citizenry as a whole (understanding that the requirements of full citizenship in the Greek world limited this group to a minority of the population). There are six main forms of government, of which three should be regarded as deviant forms of the three others. The first is monarchy, and its deviant form is tyranny. In both cases we have political power concentrated in the hands of one person. The second is aristocracy or rule by “the best” (aristoi), a smallish elite whose status is based on some combination of knowledge and virtue. The deteriorated form of this is oligarchy, or rule by the wealthy. The third is rule by the many (there is no obvious word for this), and its deviant form is democracy. As Plato had said, democracy is far from the best form of government for the basic reason that most citizens lack the requisite good character and wisdom needed to identify what is conducive to the general happiness. It’s better than the other two deviations, but that’s not saying much. Democracy is premised on the view that all citizens are equal, and for Aristotle as for Plato, they are not, or not in the ways that matter. Democracy overvalues personal freedom (a fine term for licentiousness) and undervalues the well being of the city as a whole.

Ever the moderate, Aristotle finally settles for a mixed constitution in which elements of aristocracy and democracy are combined, and especially the former. This isn’t a perfect form of government, in his view, but it represents a reasonable and realistically attainable compromise for this decidedly non-utopian political philosopher. It is the best we can achieve under real-world conditions, although exactly how this would work calls for a great deal of interpretation.

So ends our little introduction to ancient Greek philosophy. The larger field of ancient philosophy in the west is vast and would include later Roman thinkers who drew heavily upon Plato and Aristotle in particular and eventually blended with various Judeo-Christian ideas to pave the way for the tradition of medieval philosophy and theology. The rule here again, if we look at the big picture of the transition from the Greeks to the Romans and into medieval Christian thought, is continuity and gradualness, with constant borrowing and refining of inherited ideas rather than any total break from the past. The same is true of the eventual transition from the medieval tradition into early modern thought, but that is a story for another day.

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