10.4 — Aristotle

Twenty years at Plato's Academy, and then he disagreed with the central doctrine.

Later tutor to Alexander the Great, and founder of his own school, the Lyceum. His surviving works are mostly lecture notes rather than finished writing, which is why they are dry and dense.

He wrote on logic, physics, biology, psychology, ethics, politics, rhetoric, poetry and metaphysics, and in most of those fields he was the starting point for the next two thousand years.

The break with Plato

His objection to the Forms is short and it is devastating.

Saying that a beautiful thing is beautiful by participating in Beauty does not explain anything. You have given the problem a name and placed it somewhere else. And you now have two things to explain instead of one — the beautiful thing, and the Form — plus the relationship between them, which nobody can specify.

His alternative: the form of a thing is in the thing.

A statue is bronze arranged in a shape. The shape is not in another world; it is the arrangement of this bronze. Matter and form are two aspects of one object, not two objects.

Which brings philosophy back down to the observable world, and Aristotle went and looked at it. He dissected animals, catalogued species, studied the development of chick embryos day by day, and made careful observations of marine life that were not improved on for centuries. He got a great deal wrong and he was doing biology.

The four causes

His framework for explanation, and it is more useful than it looks.

To explain anything, you need four answers.

The material cause — what is it made of? Bronze.

The formal cause — what is its shape or structure? The figure of a man.

The efficient cause — what brought it about? The sculptor.

And the final cause — what is it for? To honour a victor.

Modern science kept the first three and threw out the fourth, and that was mostly correct: asking what a rock is for produces nonsense.

And the fourth is indispensable for living things and for anything made. You cannot explain a heart without saying it pumps blood. You cannot explain a chair without saying what it is for. Biology quietly uses functional explanation constantly, and the philosophical debate about whether that is legitimate is still running.

Ethics: the mean, and eudaimonia

And this is where Aristotle is most useful, and it is the tradition Part 13 builds on.

The question

Not "what is the right action" — which is how ethics is usually posed now. "What is a good life, and what kind of person do you have to be to have one?"

And the answer is eudaimonia, usually translated "happiness" and badly. It means something closer to flourishing, or doing well at being a human being. It is not a feeling and it is not a state you get into; it is an activity — living well over a whole life.

And it comes from arete, excellence or virtue — the qualities that make you good at being a person, the way sharpness is what makes a knife good at being a knife.

The doctrine of the mean

Every virtue sits between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency.

Courage between recklessness and cowardice.

Generosity between extravagance and meanness.

Proper pride between vanity and self-abasement (8.9 is the same distinction).

Wit between buffoonery and boorishness — and it is worth noticing that being unable to be funny is treated as a moral defect.

And the mean is not the average. It is relative to the person and the situation, and Aristotle says so explicitly. The right amount of anger, at the right person, for the right reason, at the right time, in the right way — and he adds, drily, that this is hard and rare and deserves praise.

How you get it

And here is the part that makes Aristotle practical rather than theoretical.

Virtue is a hexis — a settled disposition, a habit — and it is acquired by practice.

You do not become brave by understanding courage. You become brave by doing brave things until it is what you do.

His own words: we become builders by building and harpists by playing the harp; so we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

And therefore: it makes no small difference whether we are habituated one way or another from childhood — it makes all the difference.

This is the same finding as 8.1's defensible core of karma — what you repeatedly do changes what you are — and the same as Volume VI's behavioural conclusion, and the same as 9.8's practice-not-insight. Four traditions, one answer.

Phronesis

And the capstone concept, which is the most useful single idea in Aristotle.

Phronesis — practical wisdom. Not cleverness and not knowledge of rules. The ability to see what a particular situation actually requires.

Because the mean is relative to circumstances, no rule can specify it. Knowing that courage is between recklessness and cowardice tells you nothing about whether to speak up in this meeting.

Phronesis is what closes that gap, and it is acquired only through experience. Aristotle says explicitly that young people can be brilliant mathematicians and cannot be practically wise, because practical wisdom requires having seen a lot of particulars.

Which is why he thinks ethics cannot be taught to the young in the way geometry can, and why the honest answer to "how do I know what to do" is: watch people who do it well, and accumulate cases.

Logic

And the achievement that dominated everything after him.

He invented formal logic — the study of argument forms independent of content.

The syllogism: all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal. And the crucial move is that the validity depends on the form, not on men or mortality. Substitute anything and the structure holds.

He catalogued the valid forms and the invalid ones, and this was so complete that Kant, two thousand years later, said logic had not advanced a step since. He was wrong — the nineteenth century transformed it — and the fact that it stood that long is the point.

Compare Nyaya's five-part inference (9.6), developed independently, which requires an example where Aristotle requires only form.

Politics

Two ideas that survive.

Man is by nature a political animal — zoon politikon — **meaning a creature that lives in a polis. **A human being outside a community is either a beast or a god, he says, and not a proper human at all.

And the classification of constitutions, which is still used. Rule by one, few, or many; each in a good form and a corrupt form. Monarchy corrupts to tyranny, aristocracy to oligarchy, and constitutional government to mob rule.

His own preference is for a mixed constitution with a large middle class, on the grounds that the very rich will not obey and the very poor are too resentful, and a state dominated by people in the middle is the most stable. Which is an empirical claim, and it has held up rather well.

What is wrong

Stated fairly.

His physics is wrong in almost every particular, and because his authority was so enormous it actively blocked progress for centuries. Heavier objects do not fall faster.

He defended slavery as natural for some people, which is indefensible and was contested even in his own time.

And his account of women is straightforwardly wrong and was used for two millennia.

These are not incidental. A thinker whose method is careful observation got these badly wrong because he did not look, and accepted what his society believed — which is the standing warning about the method.

What to carry from this page

Ask what a good life is, not only what the right action is. The second question without the first produces a person who has never done anything wrong and has not done anything.

Every virtue is between two vices, and the mean is relative to the situation. Which means no rule will give you the answer.

You become brave by doing brave things. Practice, not understanding — and every tradition in this volume agrees.

And phronesis is acquired by accumulating particular cases. Which is the argument for this whole volume: Parts 2 and 3 are two hundred worked cases.

Next: 10.5 — the school that produced the most immediately useful philosophy ever written, largely by a slave and an emperor.