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The Enlightenment is an era in which the hylomorphic Philosophy of Aristotle transforms itself into a broader metaphysical view in which it is claimed that the practical reasoning governing our conduct is regulated by both principles and a moral law. One aspect of this transformation was a more formal reorganisation of the Aristotelian ideas of arché and psuche, in relation to the arts and sciences involved in leading the good spirited flourishing life( eudaimonia). In this reorganisation perhaps the biological determinants of psuche fell away in favour of the more psychologically oriented determinants. We maintain, however, that the essence-specifying definition of Aristotle, namely rational animal capable of discourse, is embraced by Kant, and this can be seen in the later elaboration upon Kantian Philosophy by Freud’s Philosophical Psychology. This aspect is best manifested in Kant´s work “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”. Kant’s reorganisation emphasises also the primacy of practical reasoning and a system of concepts orbiting around the theme of agency and the categorical activity of Action. Action for Kant, retains the quality of bringing about good in an environment of a world “worlding”, and subjecting oneself to events that happen: events calling upon the agent for action. In this arena of reasoning the account we are given, or the “logos” of the phenomena we encounter, refers to world-building instrumental actions that transmit the “forms” of children, artefacts(houses etc) and important ideas in the community. For Kant, as for Aristotle, Action and all forms of activity aim at goods-in-themselves such as health, courage, justice, and wisdom, (in the spirit of areté, arché, diké, eros, and eudaimonia). Kant’s Political Philosophy can also be seen to be a sophisticated elaboration upon the hylomorphic naturalism of Aristotelianism : one which, coming as it does millennia after the fall of city states to the empire-builders, proposes a view of a cosmopolitan fully global “kingdom” of ends lying one hundred thousand years in the future (a kingdom that will be based on universal human rights which could not exist without acceptance of the categorical imperative of a moral law). In this account Kant embraces the necessity of mans social/political nature, a necessity that requires “good” laws and public education to realise human potential to the full. Kant also shares with Aristotle an appreciation of the value of religion. There is perhaps a shift away from the centrality of the theoretical idea of God, toward the practical idea of the freedom but there is nevertheless a firm commitment to an idea of the divine and the sacred that sees man’s rationality as limited in form compared to the thought of eternal unchanging Being whose primary form surpasses our limited understanding. The good will, for Kant, is the will guided by the forms or principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and he often refers to this absolute in terms of the “holy will”. Man may be composed of the material of “crooked timber” (his animality) but he has sublime potential whch can be realised in actualisation processes that occur with the assistance of principles: processes that aim at the ultimate good of a kingdom of ends.
The focus upon the practical idea of Freedom was undoubtedly a Kantian contribution which to some extent revised hylomorphic ethical and political philosophy. The idea that “everything created by man was destined for ruin and destruction” was a reference by the oracle, not just to the crooked timber of humanity, but also to the way in which the potential to become a good being, with a good will, living in a good community was being stifled by the ways in which we were choosing to organise these communities. The Aristotelian focus upon justice needed to be complemented by an idea of freedom that respected universal human rights and this in turn required the political creation of an international institution whose responsibility it was to protect these human rights internationally(The United Nations).
Centuries of discussion of the idea of “I think therefore I am” enabled the construction of a very abstract and theoretical idea of consciousness and this discussion was certainly on Kant’s mind when he was formulating his critical Philosophy. Criticism of the Philosophies of the “new men”, e.g. Descartes and Hobbes, with arguments resembling those used by Aristotle to criticise the dualism and materialism of his time was a priority of the Kantian agenda. The Kantian “architectonic” of the canon of sciences resting upon a metaphysical and logical foundation, was also reminiscent of the Aristotelian project. Kant, however, does not seek to authenticate the proliferation of university subjects of his time and probably was suspicious of both the principle of specialisation that reflected the guild structure of the towns and cities of the time and the instrumental/pragmatic spirit in which many subjects were taught. The new men had certainly succeeded in launching a search for what was new and different at the expense of “first principles”. The Enlightenment spirit of “sapere aude” was, with the advent of Hegelian Philosophy, being diluted by a spirit in which some felt that everything was possible, and many felt that nothing was possible anymore. The real realm of possibility was obscured by the self obsessed fantasy constructions of a manic-depressive mentality.
The Spirit of the Enlightenment, up to the point of Hegel’s appearance, rivalled the Spirit of the Golden Age of Greece. Hegel, it can be argued constructed a form of idealism in which the retinal image of Culture was turned upside down and the world was seen through a pair of Stratton spectacles darkly—North became South in the name of dialectical logic. It would not be, however, until the World was ravaged by two World Wars in the twentieth century, that an attempt was made to remove the spectacles and see real possibilities again. In the interim, Freudian Psychology would chart the contours of insanity in the spirit of Kantian Psychology, and in a way that acknowledged mans instinctive endowment in hylomorphic terms. After the second world war an old Kantian “possibility” was realised with the creation of the United Nations and the war against totalitarianism was fought on the terrain of human rights. The metaphysics of Morality had condensed from a cloud of potentiality into the actuality of a global organisation. The metaphysics of Politics also began to return to the Aristotelian idea of the “Politics of the golden mean” and public education began the task of educating the “classical” middle class of men. Both freedom and justice were important ideas in the restoration of what had been lost. Restoration was also on the agenda of the later Wittgenstein when he retreated from his earlier position of reductive logical atomism, and began using Aristotelian phrases such as “forms of life” in the context of a Philosophy of Action that was neither behaviourist nor pragmatic, but shared some of the commitments of hylomorphic and critical rationalism. The unique focus of Wittgenstein was however on the medium of communication, namely language, but it nevertheless succeeded in providing the philosophical community with arguments against logical atomism, logical positivism, non hylomorphic forms of naturalism, instrumentalism, pragmatism, phenomenalism, existentialism etc. This reshaped the philosophical landscape sufficiently for both hylomorphism and critical Philosophy to reemerge as significant historical landmarks. Wittgenstein insisted that Language had a rational structure and thereby avoided the relativism associated with a blunt “language creates the world” formula. For Wittgenstein grammatical investigations were essence specifying activities and therefore presupposed the rational principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason shared by both Aristotle and Kant. Language–for Wittgenstein–was an activity embedded in a form of life and had the teleological function of aiming at the good. Whether the concept of “language-games” embedded in these forms of life was a useful one or not remains to be fully evaluated. A game is minimally constituted of moves (e.g. Kn to QB4), rules, and principles(Protect your queen) but somehow the seriousness of the world appears to be missing in such an idea. Both life and the issue of the quality of life are serious matters and reducing them to conventional regulation by rules would not be taken seriously by either Aristotle and Kant. Neither Philosopher would for example consider viewing the laws regulating life and the quality of ones life in a society as arbitrarily conventional. The idea of the rule governed game does however have the advantage of closing down the number of real possibilities that can occur in the course of the development of sequence of events. The number of possible “moves” of possible “agents” is circumscribed and because it is so, is amenable to mathematical calculation using Bayes’ theorem (the probability of an event occurring is determined by the information we have relating to that event). If the field of variables to be calculated is indeterminate or “open”, no value can be calculated. The idea of a game(being a closed field of variables) therefore, is one way of introducing mathematics into the arena of the social sciences, but it is important to note that the introduction of this concept is at best hypothetical (if human activity is regulated by rules, then we can determine its value). Both Plato and Aristotle would regard the introduction of mathematics into the field of human action as problematic on the grounds that mathematics manipulates abstract images of things rather than those things themselves. Games and images. for serious philosophers concerned with Being qua being and first principles, do not engage with the seriousness of life and its catastrophes and calamities each of which is capable of bringing the ruin and destruction of all our hopes and desires. It is this latter aspect of life that is the concern of Ethics and the categorical forms of language that govern this region of our existence. Kant went in search of an absolute in the arena of ethics and found it in the form of the idea of the good will. To use a Wittgensteinian metaphor to describe this hylomorphic “move”, one could claim that a cloud of practical Philosophy was condensed into a drop of Philosophical Psychology. One needs, however, to detach the idea of a game from this reflection and insert the idea of a good will into a hylomorphic framework of first principles, thought, self-knowledge, and self-sufficiency for it to become completely intelligible. The essence- specifying definition of man as a rational animal capable of discourse also needs to be part of the apparatus of explanation/justification. Practical reasoning and first principles govern the “moves” that can be made in the ought-system of concepts we encounter in the arena of the explanation/justification of actions that aim at both the good in itself, and the good in its consequences. Universality and necessity are important features of reasoning in this system of concepts.
Needless to say, the introduction of a Cartesian inspired idea of consciousness into such a context of explanation/justification is merely going to destabilise the system. Kant in his willingness to divide the whole of the mind into the parts of Sensibility , Understanding, and Reason, does however invite a non Cartesian idea of Consciousness into the arena—an invitation that would later be accepted by Freud when he constructed a topography of forms of Consciousness differentiated into the agencies of the ego, id and superego. The three principles of Energy-Regulation, Pleasure-Pain and Reality could well have come from Freud’s reading of Aristotle earlier in his career. These are not first principles but rather domain-regulating principles that presume a self actualising process over a long childhood of living among the discontents of civilisation. Hughlings Jackson was also an influence on the Freudian neurological account of higher centres interacting with lower centres. The language centres of the brain and Language as an activity of the mind obviously stretches over the domains of sensibility and understanding and perhaps over the domain of reason too. It plays an important role in the Freudian system by being the medium through which preconscious and unconscious items are brought into the “light” of consciousness which itself, according to Freud, has an instinctive base and is in fact a vicissitude of instinct. Language for Freud engages with both sensibility and thought in its various forms and becomes not just the medium of disclosure of difficult to access thoughts and feelings, but is also connected in a complex way to the memory system which is used in the process of “the talking cure”. The compulsion to repeat traumatic events over and over again, for example, is partly caused by the inability to “remember” these events in the normal way ( which enables the thought of the event to fade in intensity over time).
For Kant the idea of a form of life stretches from the animal/instinctive to the rational animal capable of discourse, and to the divine will that is not limited by the lifetime of physical organ systems that can fail with trauma or age. This continuum testifies to the inherent tragedy of the human condition that can lose the gift that makes it what it is. The form of life of the divine is unchanging for both Aristotle and Kant.
The Gods of course were the subject of Homeric concern and Homer was on Plato’s mind when he considered excluding artists from his ideal Republic. Homer we know portrayed divine beings as quarrelling, deceptive beings, using humanity as a means to their selfish ends. This called into question one of the essence-specifying features of divine beings, namely, that they ought to be necessarily good. Aristotle too would have objected to the contamination of the idea of the divine with human qualities. Kant speaks of the divine life in terms of the holy will but does not attribute physical action to this form of life and thereby shares with the Greeks the idea that even conceiving of the divine as acting to create the universe is inconceivable and requires an intermediate form of life , e.g. the demiurge.
Aesthetic creations of artists are activities, therefore, that ought to aim at the good in the spirit of areté and this is one way in which “forms” are communicated in the polis. The other two types of forms that assist in the building of civilised communities are the reproduction of children for these communities and the transmission of “good” ideas in the name of education. These latter ideas are the most important and in this respect insofar as artists take upon themselves this role they ought to respect the integrity of these ideas. In aesthetic contexts, for Kant, we communicate ideas of reason using categories of judgement. The best forms of art will strive to produce objects that help to explain the mysteries of human life and existence, thus promoting a self understanding that is part of the Delphic project for rational animals capable of discourse, namely to “know themselves”. These objects are presented as goods-in-themselves in a context that requires a certain amount of psychic distancing from the everyday instrumental concerns of life. They also require a culture in which understanding of the media of artistic communication is an important part of the process of building a civilisation. Art, in the Aristotelian architectonic of his scientific curriculum is a productive science which nevertheless has necessary connections with Truth and the theoretical sciences as well as “the Good” that is aimed at by the practical sciences. It was the work of Aristotle that suggested the definition of Philosophy as the systematic understanding of the world as a systematic whole. Kant continued this tradition by claiming that reason seeks for the totality of conditions for anything that happens or requires explanation or justification.
There are differences between the projects of Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy but we have argued in this work that the differences lie on a continuum at least insofar as basic principles and worldview are concerned. In the 20th century a contrary view emerged in relation to the Ethics of the above two systems. Let us examine this further by referring to a relatively recent work by Gerard J Hughes entitled “Aristotle on Ethics”(London, Routledge, 2001). Hughes confirms the connection we are proposing in his outline of the topic, structure and aim of Aristotle’s ethics:
“What do we aim at in life?What is it that would make living worthwhile? A worthwhile life must surely involve developing our specifically human characteristics to the full.How could we find out what those are?Upon reflection we can see that what is most characteristically human about ourselves is the way in which thought colours all our lives–not just intellectual pursuits, but also our feelings and emotions, our choices and relationships. So we start by considering the was which thought influences those traits of character which contribute to living a worthwhile fulfilled life…We need to think about choice and responsibility in more detail.”(P.11)
The conditions for understanding the meaning of these reflections are embedded in the Greek language: in the meaning of the words, areté, diké, arché. epistemé, eros, ananke, and eudaimonia. Responsibility and choice presuppose freedom as well as the right view of akrasia (weakness of the will) which, according to Aristotle, is a failure of rationality. The Nichomachean Ethics is crystal clear in its position that all activities aim at the good and the specific relation to epistemé insofar as ethical activities are concerned is that if we know the good we will do it. Akrasia, then, as a phenomenon, is characterised as a kind of confusion caused by the cognitive system being overwhelmed by intense desires , emotions etc, in a similar way in which the functions of the body are overwhelmed by the overconsumption of alcohol. This confusion can neutralise the activation of the knowledge we have of the premises constituting the reasons for the action concerned —so the knowledge lays dormant in the system because other systems relating to the sensible part of the mind are using all available energy for their purposes.
Ethics and Politics are both Practical sciences and aim at the good, not theoretically, but with the aim of becoming Good, i.e. to possess in Kantian terms a good will. Kant. like Aristotle, views this matter in terms of the principles of logic regulating premises, e.g.
Promises ought to be kept
Jack promised Jill he would pay the money back he borrowed from her
Therfore
Jack ought to pay Jill the money he owes her
The above argument mirrors the typical form of an ought argument that refers to the virtues of Promising and honesty. We see in this argument the integration of truthfulness and areté (doing the right thing at the right time in the right way). The ought major premise is a necessary warrant for the formulation of the intention to do a particular action. Promises, we know are not merely ethically important, they are of central importance to the process of ruling in civilisation-building political activity. Promising is the arché of Politics, and is intimately related to the demand placed upon the shoulders of politicians to take responsibility. The Greeks were the first to begin the understanding of these virtues in the context of Political Power. Dunamis is one Greek term for power and this concept is closely related to the hylomorphic ideas involved with the actualising of potential. It is also itself an idea that responds to Glaucon’s challenge in the Republic to prove that Justice (diké) is both good in itself and good in its consequences. Power in the Greek philosophical mind was related to the sacred and the divine and thereby possessed both a civic aspect as well as a divine aspect. Dunamus was therefore a characteristic of the divine being, and therefore something sublime and mysterious. Using the power of the law to bring Socrates to justice, for many intellectuals of the time, was a sacrilegious act because the power that brought people together was a divine power and it was clear at least to them that Socrates was aiming at the good in his philosophical activities in the agora. The Latin term religio contains an interesting reference to binding things together that might otherwise fall apart or fragment. The idea of diké, (Justice), on the other hand, contains the meaning of separating things that do not belong together–perhaps we can conceive of this as the drawing of a line between those possessing a good will (Socrates) and those that are weak willed (his accusers). Justice also carries with it a consequentialist idea relating to its recipients deserving what they get out of life, and here we can see the importance of the role of the system relying on agents of justice acting with a good will. That was not the case with the accusers of Socrates and a miscarriage was the inevitable result. Socrates was accused of bringing new Gods into the polis and corrupting the minds of the youth. The accusers of Socrates were, then, not just guilty of abusing a legal system but they were also defiling what was sacred.
The next great era of Cultural restoration after the Golden Age of Ancient Greece began with the Renaissance and culminated in the Enlightenment. In these centuries there was an intensification of all forms of human activity but particularly in the arenas of Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics, and Theology. Politics was becoming more and more important than Theology, and Aesthetics was also threatening to displace Ethics at the level of individual action. The science of physics was also growing in importance. Generally in cognitive terms there was a move away from justification in terms of the principles of reason and understanding, and toward explanation in terms of the principles of judgement. The Kantian response to this state of affairs was to shift the focus of Philosophy from Theoretical rationality to Practical rationality, to crush pseudo-metaphysical projects, and to initiate reflection into several central issues in the arena of Philosophical Psychology. In doing so he retained the relation of the Sublime to both Ethics and Theology. The practical idea of Freedom replaced the theoretical idea of God as the central metaphysical concern, and became a central focus of both cultural and political activity. Hegel, of course, was to destroy this web of relations with an idea of Spirit embedded in a form of dialectical reasoning best suited to contexts of exploration/discovery rather than contexts of explanation/justification. For Hegel, the development of mans Sensibilities became more important than the development of his intellectual powers of understanding and reason. Hegel’s criticism of Kant led eventually to a Romantic idea of man as sufficient unto himself, as long as he follows his instincts, emotions and passions. It was this “spirit” that was instrumental in forming the idea of heroic men for whom “everything was possible”, even if the vast mass of men were beginning to feel “nothing was possible anymore”. Kant’s Critical Philosophy along with its underlying hylomorphic commitments was submerged in this new form of populism that appeared to be able to create mass movements that would later play a catastrophic role in the political events of the 20th century where both fascism and communism found soil in which to flourish. The Aristotelian idea that Politics ought to concern itself with noble and just actions was washed away by waves of selfish pity and fear. The Aesthetic object and its descriptions of of the sensible activity of man (his feelings, emotions, passions) occupied the public stage and distracted attention from more complex explanations and justifications of world-events. The world lost its depth, and inner exploration and discovery supplanted external objective concerns. The relation between areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) and eudaimonia (leading the good spirited flourishing life)was ruptured. One curious consequence of this state of affairs and the intellectual reaction to it was the elevation of a mathematical form of arché (axioms) above forms of explanations/justifications such as the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. This, some observers have noted, may have been an inheritance of the Cartesian conception of the external world in terms of a system of coordinates( by a system of thought that confirmed the existence of man in the bare terms of the Cogito argument). God “saved” the whole Cartesian system from collapsing by guaranteeing that life was not a dream that we might at any moment awake from. At the beginning of the 20th century this commitment to mathematical forms of reasoning focussed upon German idealism as the source of fundamental confusions about the nature of reality. For some obscure reason both Kant’s Critical Philosophy and Hegel’s historical actualisation of world spirit were placed inside the same pair of brackets. The Kantian arguments against materialism and dualism of the Cartesian kind were disregarded and these oppositions unsurprisingly emerged in new forms. The idea of Consciousness also emerged as an organising principle of experience and the imagination was appealed to as an important power of thought. Heidegger’s reflections on this era of our history pointed to what he called a “forgetfulness of Being” but it nevertheless criticised Kantian appeals to Ancient rational principles and claimed that Kant had missed an opportunity to rest his whole critical philosophy upon the foundation of transcendental imagination. This forgetfulness included the forgetfulness of of the objective rational quality of the good but Heidegger failed to acknowledge this aspect of modernism: a forgetfulness that rejected the Aristotelian argument for the good-in-itself:
“If there is some point to everything we do, something we want for its own sake and which explains why we do everything else, then obviously this has to be the good, the best of all. And there has to be some such point otherwise everything would be chosen for the sake of something else and we would have an infinite regress, with the result that it would be futile and pointless to want anything at all.”(1, 2, 1094a 18-22)
On this account the good spirited flourishing life would also include the qualification that nothing was lacking in such a life and this contributed to making this the most worthwhile of all forms of life: a life that is deserved only by those who have led virtuous lives. Only organisms possessing the powers of discourse and rationality could lead such lives and whilst the power of the imagination might be important for the purposes of correctly conceiving of what is possible and what is not, it is nevertheless the case that the principles of rationality are of greater importance for determining the correctness of ones conceptions.
Aristotle’s requirement that men ought to lead lives of contemplation is partly shared by Kant, but it is not clear whether Kant shares the Aristotelian characterisation of the importance of “theoria” and its connection to thought and the activity of God. It is clear however that our theoretical understanding of this Primary Being that is the manifestation of Pure Form or Pure Principle is limited, and we have more access to this pure form via our practical activities that aim at the good in the realm of the noumenal.
Areté is connected to ethical action or “deeds” in accordance with the following Aristotelian formula:
” So a virtue is a habitual disposition connected with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, a mean which is determined by reason, by which the person of practical wisdom would determine it.”(11, 6, 1106b 36-1107a2)
The above disposition is not connected to the disposition to feel sensations occurring in the sensible part of the mind, because, as Aristotle maintains, no one is praised or blamed for having feelings. Agents are praised or blamed for their choices and their choices build upon the reasons the agents have for doing whatever they have chosen to do. One can praise or blame the agent’s reasons and we can also blame him/her for his/her character. The reference to the golden mean in the above quote is meant to highlight the processes involved in the acquisition of our habits–processes that occur primarily in the context of exploration/discovery. The reasons an agent gives in contexts of explanation/discovery differ significantly from the reasons given in a context of exploration/discovery that occurs largely in the mode of the hypothetical. Sufficient explanation or justification is praised and insufficient explanation/justification is blamed. Self-sufficient justification is of course a key to leading a worthwhile flourishing life. Habits can also have a technical character(techné) in which case we are praised or blamed for a skill we possess as measured by the quality of the objects created by those skills. This contrasts with the ethical case in which it is the reasoning leading to the intention or action that is praised or blamed and there is also an epistemic element related to our knowledge or lack of knowledge of what is good-in-itself. If we build good houses we are called a builder and this instrumental power is praised. The form of praise a man receives for his good will and good character however is a different form of praise and is more desirable because in our scale of values epistemé is more valuable than techné because the former is good in itself and good in its consequences whereas the latter has merely an instrumental value—good in its consequences.
Emotions such as carelessness or cowardice in the course of a battle are what they are, but the praise-blame system will introduce a willingness to transform ones responses into a more rational response. Areté is the key idea to apply here, and a part of its application to the behaviour of soldiers in battle is not just doing the right thing at the right time in the right way, but also perhaps having the right feelings at the right time and both of these can be shaped by discourse and rationality. The man whose character has been shaped by practical reasoning over a long period of time, is called a phronimos, a great-souled man, a virtuous man. He has become the master of the golden mean. The relation of emotions to knowledge is a complex matter involving objects we are concerned with, and ways of of being aware of the world that are regulated by the lower order principles of energy regulation, and pleasure-pain. We know that in emotional states, the world can take on the “colouring” of the emotion. In my anger, I am as likely to lash out at substitute objects as I am at the real cause/object of my anger. In such a state my perception is of a world that is hostile to my agency and intentions. Sartre calls this a magical transformation of the world, but a supplementary account comes from the work of the Later Wittgenstein which showed us how perception in the form of seeing something as something ( a triangle as “half a square” or as having “fallen over”) appears to be half sensibility and half thought. In such an experience, Wittgenstein implies that I can become conscious of myself as organising my experience, especially in those cases where I first see one aspect of the thing and then another. Seeing the triangle as half a square is of course less of a magical transformation than seeing it as having “fallen over”. The emotions, then, might also fall on a continuum of perception and thought and be subject to regulation by different principles. Courage, for example would be a more complex entity than anger and this might explain why we praise agents manifesting the former and blame agents for manifesting the latter. More thought obviously appears to be involved in the former “virtue”(areté). As we ascend the hierarchy of virtues to the wisdom of a phronimos, or ruler of a Republic, the principles involved become more abstract and require more complex explanations that may rely on the kind of knowledge we find in the architectonic of theoretical, practical, and productive sciences. These explanations/justifications will also rest upon “First Philosophy” and the higher order principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Wittgenstein once claimed in one of his earlier “Notebooks” that the world of the happy man is a different world to that of the unhappy man. Happiness is of course a precipitate of the good spirited flourishing life, and both Socrates and Aristotle bear witness to the way in which leading examined and contemplative lives are different forms of life to lives that lack these properties. The question “Why?” plays an important role in such lives, as does the accompanying forms of consciousness of awe and wonder at a world and a soul that appears to be susceptible to endless exploration. It is of course not difficult to think of the happy man leading a good spirited flourishing life as someone who systematically deliberates about the Good-in-itself , Good consequences, and Good means to ends. This kind of deliberation occurs naturally in the context of explanation /justification and begins with the arché of first principles, e.g Promises ought to be kept, and ends in a particular verdict/telos of a particular action that ought to be performed. The “attitude” involved in such a deliberation is that of a Kantian judge putting questions in a tribunal whose purpose it is to reason its way to a grounded judgement. The phronimos deliberates in this fashion, in the spirit of areté, proceeding from the arché to the telos.
Perusal of the Greek language used in Athenian courts reveals the use of the terms “hekon” and “hekousion” which Hughes translates as “willingly”. This is the fundamental condition required for holding someone responsible for their actions. Modern philosophical discussions of willed actions involves reference to “intention” which is technically defined (in Anscombe’s work on “Intention”) in terms of the agent seeing his action as falling under a particular description, e.g. “shooting a deer moving in the wood”. If, as a matter of fact, it turns out that I shot my father, it is the task of the tribunal to determine whether the shooting of my father occurred intentionally or not. The presumption is that an investigation will be able to reveal the relevant facts necessary to make such a determination. What I did immediately after ,during, and before, the act may contain decisive evidence, as may what knowledge I had, e.g. did I know my father was in this region of the wood. If I could not have known he was, there the tribunal must find me not guilty of murder, but may well find me guilty of some other criminal act relating to negligence, perhaps because sufficient precautions were not taken before the act of shooting occurred.
For Aristotle, Eros and Philia are the “bonding” conditions that shape families, villages and cities. Kant prefers the term “respect” for the attitude involved in treating people as ends in themselves, whether they be familiar figures or strangers that visit the agora. This respect even for strangers carries with it the expectation that these strangers will both understand and respect the laws of the city. The absolute of the good will that we encounter in the Kantian ethical system we can also encounter in Aristotelian philia toward strangers. Aristotle himself was a stranger in Athens as a young man. Philia is also Aristotles term for friendship and there are three forms of friendship: relations of utility, relations of pleasure, and relations involving the good-in-itself. In relations of utility the parties involved seek mutual utilitarian benefits. In relations of pleasurable transient interaction, the utilitarian relation to the external world is to some extent suspended, e.g. in the case of the meeting with strangers and people one knows in a symposium where the collected company enjoys discourse and feasting together. In the case of the deepest forms of friendship where two people care for each other as ends in themselves, there is in this latter case, as there may not be in the former, a preparedness to sacrifice ones own goods for the person who is ones friend. Here we are clearly dealing with the goods for the soul that are necessary to lead a good spirited flourishing life(eudaimonia).
The difference between Politics and Ethics insofar as Aristotle is concerned is partly due to the fact that political theory is a more abstract reflective elaboration upon ethical principles in the public context of justification we encounter in the arenas of justice. Aristotle’s “justifications” did not extend to arguing for the justification of the existence of the city-state, perhaps because for him it is the mark of an educated man to know when to require a justification and when one is not required because of the self-evident certainty of the issue. For Aristotle it is self evident that the idea of a state is both good-in-itself and good in its consequences as long as the laws governing that state are rationally constituted and respected, i.e they are just laws. Part of the essence of being human involves living in organised communities in which the laws can facilitate actualising processes that will provide one with a reasonable quality of life. We have a need not merely to live (survive) but to live well and this manifests itself in a commitment to public education (communication of knowledge of “the sciences”).
To argue as Hobbes does that the law is mere words unless these words are defended by swords, is to reject Aristotle’s political (hylomorphic) naturalism. The basis for such a rejection is usually based on the claim that the laws of a city are mere artificial conventions necessary to prevent internecine strife in a community. Aristotle’s political views rest on a view of human nature and cultural development that is historically constituted of structures building upon structures, in organic fashion. The family might well survive in a benign environment, if the family was large enough, but, as Hobbes claimed, life in a state of nature would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Families that unite into a village will experience advantages that are both utilitarian and pleasurable but still lacking some of the goods of the external world and most of the goods for the soul that can be provided by a well functioning polis. The family and the village are social structures that are assimilated by the polis. These structures are transformed into a unit of self-sufficiency that provides a quality of life that only knowledge of the Good can bring with it. Our modern obsession with the private individual alone in his chamber of consciousness would have seemed a regressive concern for Aristotle.
Aristotle was very familiar with the political problems of his time partly via the works of Plato and partly via the research of his own school into a large number of constitutions of city-states (158). He develops as a consequence a schema of good and deviant states based on an idea of The Good that rejects “noble lies” and other questionable Platonic practices outlined in “The Republic”. Here “The Good” is characterised as “Aristos”(“the best”)(Shields Aristotle, P 365) and this conception combines the best elements of oligarchy and democracy into a so-called “aristocracy” in which an emerging educated middle class will unite the polis into a self-sufficient unit where peace reigns. It is this form of constitution, Aristotle argues, that will most likely provide the conditions necessary for its citizens to lead a good spirited flourishing life, a virtuous life.
Such a constitution would include respect for techné and allow a free cultural space for rhetoric and poetry. In these activities, which aim at the good, there will be a reliance upon areté, arché and epistemé. The telos of rhetoric, Aristotle argues, is political persuasion via enthymemes and related rational instruments. Rhetoric was of course used (abused?) by the accusers of Socrates to end the philosophers life, but Aristotle would not have regarded this use of pseudo-arguments as legitimate rhetoric. For him the measure of rhetoric was Truth, and this measure was discarded by the accusers of Socrates who were using rhetorical devices for their own utilitarian (technical) ends. This testifies to the weakness of all technical activities–namely, that they can always be detached from the knowledge of the good in itself, and used for evil purposes (consequences). So far as rhetoric is guided by the truth and the good, however, it is rationally constituted and will contain principles that may even be “first principles”.
Poetry for Aristotle, is connected to learning even if there s an element of “imitation” involved. The production of poetry is for the purposes of learning via the imitation of reality. Actors dress up in clothes, imitating real kings and strut about a stage amidst scenery imitative of castles or cities. The words they utter are also imitative of characters they are attempting to portray. This, for Aristotle, is a natural form of learning something about something, e.g. that flatterers are not to be trusted, that kings are not gods etc. Learning such things brings us a non-utilitarian form of pleasure connected to epistemé and the knowledge of the good. We are, in the above examples, clearly learning about the essences of things in practical contexts, especially if the creator of the production is a genius, a great souled writer like Shakespeare. The spirit of tragedy contains necessary references to Thanatos, suffering, and Ananke, all of which are capable of evoking powerful emotions in man, e.g. pity at undeserved suffering and fear of ruin and destruction at the hands of processes we do not fully understand. The question “Why?” looms in tragedies as it does in most other processes of change initiated by humans and if the semblance of an answer suggests itself in the work of the great souled artist this purifies the minds of the audience leaving them in a musing contemplative state. Presumably in such lessons we also learn something about the self that is thrown into the midst of events of considerable magnitude. Even if the tragic work is historical it is not facts as such that are important but rather universal “possibilities” that are suggested in the prophecy of the Greek oracle: “everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. Learning that flatterers are not to be trusted or kings are not gods, then, is a matter of learning about the universal possibilities of tragedy.
Christopher Shields in his work on Aristotle points out in a chapter dedicated to the legacy of Aristotle that his works were not distributed for several hundred years after his death, and when they became available again, the Neo-Platonists dominated the means of production with their commentaries. When all philosophical schools were closed by order of the Emperor in the 6th century AD, Aristotle’s works were again “lost”, until Aquinas discovered a translation. Aquinas’ interest was largely religiously inspired and his interest at best could be described as perspectival. Shields insightfully comments upon Aristotle’s legacy in the following :
“Often enough the views rejected as Aristotelian in the early Modern period are not recognisable as such to anyone with a primary familiarity with Aristotle’s texts.”(P.401)
This is certainly true of the writings of the “new men” e.g. Descartes and Hobbes, and their rationalist and empiricist followers, who failed to understand the Aristotelian arguments against dualism and materialism. Shields notes that hylomorphism today is viewed as an interesting alternative to the extremes of reductive materialism and Cartesian dualism that continue to flourish in our universities (P.402). There is, however, no acknowledgement of either Hylomorphic or Critical theory in spite of the fact that these positions have been the most effective critics of the above extremes. There is also no acknowledgement of the relation of Aristotelian to Kantian metaphysics. Instead Shields focuses upon postulated differences between the ethical theories of these two philosophies. Elisabeth Anscombe and her followers are cited as lying behind this state of affairs. We believe, however, that the story of the relationship between these two philosophies is more complex and that the reason for this postulated opposition between the two ethical theories, the so called deontological and teleological opposition, rests upon misinterpretations of Aristotelian and Kantian metaphysics.