Aristotle

384-322 BCE

Greek philosopher. A pupil of Plato, the tutor of Alexander the Great, and the author of works on logic, metaphysics, ethics, natural sciences, politics, and poetics, he profoundly influenced Western thought. In his philosophical system theory follows empirical observation and logic, based on the syllogism, is the essential method of rational inquiry.

Ethics, Politics, Poetics

Aristotle tells us that education is accompanied by pain. An education In Aristotle himself certainly involves, if not pain, at least difficulty. Unlike hi master, Plato, he is charmless. Furthermore, the fact that we do not possess his original works but only what has come down to us as probably students’ notes, does not make for readability. You are warned not to expect from Aristotle the pleasure Plato offers, except that pleasure which comes from following the operations of a supreme brain.

Aristotle’s intellect was one of the most comprehensive, perhaps the most comprehensive, on record. He wrote everything from marine life to metaphysics. While it is unwise to say that all these writings (many of merely antiquarian value today) can be related under a single system, it is true that Aristotle was a systematizer in the sense that Plato was not. He believed in the collectability and relatability of all knowledge. He spent his life collecting and relating. Our idea of an encyclopedia, a most fruitful notion, goes back to him.

Today we would say he was of upper-middle-class origin. At seventeen or eighteen he left his small native town of Stagira for Athens. Here for twenty years he studied at Plato’s Academy. The influence of Plato is marked in his work (often by disagreement or development), but we know nothing about the personal relations between the two greatest philosophers of antiquity.

After Plato’s death Aristotle sojourned for five years in Asia Minor and Lesbos, possibly engaged in biological research, for his mental bent was scientific and investigative, rather than artistic and speculative. In 343/2 BCE he went to Macedon to tutor the future Alexander the Great. There is no evidence, despite all the sentimental romancing, that he greatly influenced Alexander’s mind. The one great Alexandrian idea, that of a world imperium, is not Aristotelian.

In 225/4 BCE Aristotle returned to Athens; organized his own school. The Lyceum; taught, wrote, investigated. In 323 BCE, perhaps because of his suspect connections with the Macedonian party, he found it expedient to exile himself form Athens. A year or so later the mere man Aristotle died in Chalcis, in Euboea. His influence, however, though it has had great downward swoops, has never died.

We cannot comment here on his crucial pioneering in logic—he is credited with biological and cosmological sciences or esthetics. His Poetics, an analysis of classic Greek tragedy, has had a profound and continuing effect on literary criticism. In general we may say that his whole approach to life is more earthbound than Plato’s, less utopian, certainly more geared to the actual nature and abilities of the ordinary man or woman.

This is borne out by a reading of the Ethics and the Politics.

The Ethics tries to answer the basic question, What is the Good? It involves an inquiry into happiness and the conditions that attend it; and into virtuous actions, thought of as means between two extremes of conduct. The “Golden Mean” is an Aristotelian catchword.

Ethics is a part of politics, for to Aristotle (and the Greek citizen in general) the individual cannot be thought of fruitfully except as a social and political animal. The Politics deals specifically with men in association. Much of our twenty-four hundred years of speculation as to the best form of government, whether ideal or contingent upon circumstances, traces back to ideas found in the Politics. This is not to say that Aristotle gives us universal political “truths”—for example, his views on slavery (as on women) are conditioned by his era. But his classification of the forms of government; his sense of the state as a development, not an imposed system; and his notion that the state must have a moral aim beyond that of a mere freezing of power; all this makes him alive and pertinent today.

The serious reader (and for Aristotle no other kind is possible) can handle all of the Ethics. Take it slowly. You might concentrate on Books I, II, III, VI, and X. Of the Politics, possibly the first and third of the eight books are the easiest of access.