INTRODUCTION | 5 | Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the

ABSTRACT

He spoke with a lisp, had small eyes, and was discovered upon his death to have owned many dishes. So Diogenes Laertius, whose third-century Lives of Eminent Philosophers is our best source of ancient bibliographical information as well as of ancient trivia, tells us about Aristotle. He was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, the son of a royal Macedonian physician, named, as Aristotle’s son was to be, Nicomachus. He spent about twenty years at Plato’s Academy in Athens, reportedly leaving Plato’s school out of annoyance that Plato’s nephew Speusippus was appointed Head after Plato died in 347. Whether because of ancient academic politics or not, he did leave Athens at that time. During the period of about twelve years that followed he was reputed to have been the tutor of the young Alexander, later to be the Great. He also during that period probably gathered, working primarily from Lesbos, most of the data that informed the biological writings for which he was later to be renowned. He returned to Athens in 335 and established his own school at a public walk in the Lyceum, where he and his pupils supposedly walked while conversing, hence earning the description “peripatetic.” The school, along with Aristotle’s books, was left in the hands of his student Theophrastus when he died. His will, it is

also reported, ordered that his personal slaves be freed, although not immediately upon his death. One tradition has it that he ﬂed Athens in 323 when the death of Alexander caused a ﬂurry of anti-Macedonian feelings that led to his being indicted on a charge of impiety, saying, referring of course to Socrates, that he was leaving in order to prevent Athens from “sinning twice against philosophy.” He died in 322, a year after Alexander. Even the relatively small portion of Aristotle’s works reported

on the ancient lists that remains to us (thought to be about oneﬁfth) are astounding in their volume and range. He collected volumes of information about animals, categorized and described what he learned precisely, and gave careful thought to how animals viewed as structured living organisms were to be explained. He did the same for plants, thus inventing the science of biology, although not the notion of it, since he didn’t classify the study of animals and the study of plants as part of the same inquiry. He also thought systematically about the different psychological capacities, or different kinds of souls, that distinguished different types of living beings from each other. He was a sophisticated mathematician, and made enormous strides in physics, which for him was the general study of natural objects, that is, basically anything non-artiﬁcial composed of form and matter and having an internal source of change. He wrote on aesthetics and rhetoric, as well as on logic and explanation. And all of that is leaving aside his still inﬂuential metaphysical writings, and the moral and political ones. He had both a clearer conception of the lines between different areas of inquiry and a more coherent integrated picture of the entire universe than anyone had had or perhaps ever would again. He probably knew everything any human being, at least in his part of the world, knew at the time that he lived. Seventeen centuries later Dante accurately described him as “the master of all who know.” If any of his interests can be taken as the central or deﬁning one,

especially if the deﬁning is, as is traditional and seems natural, relative to Plato, it is surely the interest in biology. One of the very few touches of genuine eloquence to be found in any of our surviving texts comes in a heartfelt plea early in the Parts of Animals (644b21-645b1) to look for and see the beauty in all

animals. While still Platonist enough to admit the superiority of the ungenerated and imperishable natural objects (planets and such) he seems almost contemptuous of anyone put off by the appearance of animals. Even the ugliest ones, he suggests, have a kind of beauty, and are thus a source of enormous pleasure for those who have come to understand and appreciate the arrangement and working of their parts in light of the life of the organism as a whole. While a passionate interest in the nature and kinds of animals does not perhaps logically lead to a rejection of the Platonist metaphysics comfortable for those who see mathematics as the basic science, it certainly provides a kind of push by temperament toward the more empirical. Although Aristotle is beholden to Plato in all sorts of areas and in all sorts of ways, the disembodied abstract forms of his teacher are replaced in their role as the most real components of the universe by individual natural substances, of which animals clearly seem to have held the most fascination for him. Hence the clichéd comparison familiar from Raphael’s depiction in The School of Athens of Plato pointing upward and Aristotle downward (or at least middle-ward) does in fact capture something of importance both about Aristotle’s ofﬁcial metaphysics and about his stronger orientation toward the empirical. Animals and other natural objects were not the only subjects of Aristotle’s research. He also was responsible for a descriptive history of the constitutions of Athens, which, along with parts of the Politics, has made him an unparalleled and invaluable source for ancient political historians. The same broadly empirical stance shows up in the Politics. Both earlier political thought and existing examples of political arrangements are seriously examined. In both cases the focus is not simply on how coherent they seem theoretically, but on how well various arrangements work in practice. The positive proposals put forward, which are aimed to a signiﬁcant degree at ordinary and quite imperfect cities, are openly based on historical and psychological information of all sorts. Some of Aristotle’s works have, of course, retained their philo-

sophical appeal and plausibility over the centuries better than others. Admirers of Aristotle have a much easier time with his ethical writings, which can seem not only the most approachable and congenial of all his works but in some respects a positive

improvement on, and at least the equal in sophistication to, modern and contemporary work, than with the Politics, which seems on the whole distant and sometimes downright abhorrent. The fact that he famously defends slavery and doesn’t even see a need to defend the subordination of women puts him out of touch with us. But these are hardly views there is any surprise in ﬁnding coming from an ancient Greek. Somewhat more surprising, or at least less predictable simply on the basis of temporal and geographic location, and for that reason more disappointing, is his less than fully admiring attitude toward democracy. Discomfort or disappointment with the Politics on these grounds is no doubt exacerbated by its having been written in Athens, the birthplace of democracy. It seems so obviously ﬁtting that one of the great philosophers of ancient Greece should have been an articulate and profound defender of democracy, and Plato is clearly out of the running. Aristotle is, without a doubt, less hostile than Plato, but there is plenty of room between being less hostile than Plato and being the champion one looks for, and Aristotle is rather closer to the former than to the latter. There are nevertheless lessons to be learned here about differ-

ences between ancient and modern democracies, or, perhaps more to the point here, ancient (such as it was) and modern democratic theory. The classical Greek polis about which Aristotle was still writing was a far smaller and probably unimaginably more intimate community than any modern democratic state. Aristotle is able to suggest, and one presumes he does this without it sounding ridiculous, that ideally a city should be small enough for all the citizens to be familiar with each other (Politics 1326b11-24). He offers no estimates, but surely did not have in mind anything larger than Athens at the time. All estimates about ancient Athenian population numbers are very highly speculative, but it is thought that Athens, by well before Aristotle’s time, had roughly thirty thousand citizens. Although the details are, again, sketchy, Athens was by that time democratic in the sense that all non-slave free males born of citizen parents were citizens, earlier property qualiﬁcations for citizenship having been abolished. Decisions were made primarily by a citizen Assembly, which every citizen had the right to address. It met about forty times a year, with as many as

six thousand in attendance. There were also a large number of metics, or resident alien non-citizens. They had no political or property rights and only attenuated legal rights. On the other hand, they had many regular citizen duties, and were apparently often well assimilated into Athenian cultural life. Aristotle is undoubtedly the most famous Athenian metic. The male citizens were probably outnumbered, and perhaps by quite large numbers, by male noncitizens, that is, by metics and slaves. The slaves, in turn, greatly outnumbered the metics. Almost all civic ofﬁces, except a few very high-level military and ﬁnancial positions, were ﬁlled annually by lot. There was pay for jury duty and for attendance at the Assembly. Hence, neither Plato nor Aristotle in rejecting democracy, insofar as each does, was rejecting a political and economic system much like any of ours today. Nor could democracy then have been justiﬁed in the ways we would now justify it. Enlightenment notions of individual liberty and autonomy were still in the future. These sorts of differences are worth noting and understanding, both for their sheer historical interest and for what we can learn, by way of contrast, about our own political assumptions. There is at least a touch of irony, as well as material for reﬂec-

tion, in our differing contemporary responses to the content of Aristotle’s ethical writing and to the content of his political writing simply insofar as Aristotle himself saw them as very much part of the same work. Aristotle did divide ethics proper, the treatment of the condition of soul or individual character that constitutes excellence or virtue and happiness in an individual, from politics proper, the consideration of the social or political arrangement that constitutes excellence or virtue and happiness in a city. Nevertheless, the Nicomachean Ethics is written as the prequel to the Politics, in at least the superﬁcial sense that its closing chapter explains the need for the discussion of the topics that are taken up in the Politics. The link is far from superﬁcial, however; these are not simply two separate areas of inquiry that both need to be covered, as might be thought by someone believing that philosophers ought to say something about both private and public life or private and public morals, or about both individual virtue and institutional justice. Ethics and politics will turn out to be very much two pieces of the same inquiry in the sense that they have

the same aim, and are constituted by the same expertise. Indeed the Nicomachean Ethics (1094b11) describes itself as engaged in a “kind of politics.” Political inquiry encompasses private life, and an individual’s life and virtue are described in light of that individual’s place in the political community. This connection appears early on in the Nicomachean Ethics.

The work begins by noting that all inquiry and all action aim at some end conceived of as good.