In Search of the Good Life

Through the Eyes of Aristotle, Maimonides, and Aquinas

Corey Miller

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532653230
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What is the Good Life? Learn from some of the greatest minds in Greek, Jewish, and Christian thought. Comparing their thought reveals a new apex reached in the age-old question concerning the relationship of Jerusalem and Athens, faith and reason. Few have been more influential in Judaism and Christianity than Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, yet Aristotle influenced them both in significant ways. By adopting and adapting some of Aristotle's best thinking, we can appreciate Maimonides' and Aquinas' search for the Good Life from their respective views, ranging from the fall to human perfectibility. This examines human nature, the human telos, and how each would prescribe the route to the Good Life. For all three, it is ultimately about the knowledge of God. But what does that mean? The comparative approach is more illuminating than if considered in isolation. Comparatively, Aristotle's approach may be characterized as informational, Maimonides' as instructional, and Aquinas' as pneumatic-relational. The role of faith as a virtue in both Maimonides and Aquinas makes a substantive difference over Aristotle's in philosophical and practical ways. It is used to exploit their accounts of the human fall, moral perfection, and ultimate human perfection--the knowledge of God.

1

A Common Teleological Background: Aristotle

The purpose of this chapter is to set up the philosophical background and problems in Aristotle that Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas endeavor to resolve or improve on by suitably adapting Aristotelian thinking for their purposes. To do this, I will provide a plausible and broadly characterized Aristotelian view of the good life—an account of Aristotle’s understanding of human perfectibility roughly shared or taken for granted by both thinkers.

First, I will trace the basic Aristotelian structure of the human good by considering raw human nature, its ultimate end, and how to get from man as he is in the raw to man as he could become. Second, I will address certain problems the account raises that have the effect of rendering the human end elusive for most people to obtain given certain preconditions necessary for the good life. That is, on this account, there are certain things that disqualify most people from ever reaching the prize, the good life. Third, I will look at the narrow gate through which a few might pass to experience the good life; finding that, even while elusive for most, it becomes elusive even for the best of men as a mere human idealistic façade or else quite rare and episodically unsustainable. In essence, I will show that Aristotle’s eudaimonistic view of human perfectibility ends with a whimper rather than a bang as one cannot be optimistic about the attainability of the good life. The Aristotelian account lacks certain necessary features of the best life for man, even the best of men (much worse for the worst of them), which is where the medievalists will make their advance.

In addition to observing the structure, problems, and a possible way through to attaining the good life, we will see Aristotle setting the stage for the Aristotelian move made by the two medievalists. Most interesting, as Aristotle’s view on human perfection is developed and understood by an individual’s philosophical speculation and relevant activity, it reveals a striking two-tier notion of moral virtue (a necessary precondition to the ultimate perfect life of intellectual virtue).

Ironically, the moral bifurcation Aristotle makes between fully virtuous acts and merely virtuous acts winds up itself being just one part of the additional bifurcation that both Maimonides and Aquinas are committed to in their respective philosophies, given a certain nexus that without which the virtues are less than virtuous and virtue itself is less accessible than even Aristotle’s scheme supposed. This nexus of key features becomes all the more important to obtaining the good life. Indeed, without it, to use Aristotelian idiom, the virtues become like matter without form. As Aristotle’s perfect life is found lacking (i.e., an exhibit of Aristotelian privation), it is here where the medievalists seek to supply the form, and where the Maimonidean and Thomistic man (given their richer ontology) will always be in an advanced state relative to the good life over the Aristotelian man.1

The Basic Structure of the Human Good

Aristotle’s vision of the human good is eudaimonistic, teleological, and intellectualist. Eudaimonism is the view that happiness is the ultimate justification of morality.2 It is the well-lived life favored by a god. Aristotle is also, from a contemporary viewpoint, an ethical naturalist (ethical terms refer to natural properties and are therefore defined via factual terms).3 As an ethical naturalist, he holds that nature determines normalcy. In some respects, Aristotelian ethical structure seems to fit our moral experience, a structure that dominated the schemes of both the classical and most prominent Western theistic traditions. It is fundamentally the Aristotelian teleological structure of the world that the major theistic traditions in the West were more than willing to co-opt for their own projects in philosophical theology.4 This structure was analyzed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (NE).5

On a fundamental level we see a stark contrast between man as he actually is in his raw, uncut, and otherwise untutored form, and man as he could become if he only realized his potential that is grounded in the essence of human nature. Accordingly, then, ethics is the field of thought that informs man on how to make the transition from one state to the next via practical reason. It presupposes some account of potentiality and actuality as elaborated by Aristotle: man as he is “in the raw” (human nature), and man as he may become if he understood his human telos, a term often translated “end,” “goal,” or “purpose.” This teleological structure of Aristotle’s view of human nature is a microcosm of his view of all of nature, which is likewise teleological.

In short, ethics informs us as to what one ought to do, ethically, if one is to attain the good life. We thus have the threefold and interrelated schema: raw and untutored human nature with attending capacities, principles of rational ethics prescribing how humans ought to live to attain the good life, and the fully developed human in the form of the good life.6 To say what one ought to do according to this view is to say what will in fact lead to one’s eudaimonia, one’s flourishing, according to the natural kind of thing it is.

While someone may object that this is guilty of the ‘is-ought’ fallacy, a modernist charge, the classical and theistic picture denies the modern fact/value dichotomy according to which it is fallacious to derive an ‘ought’ conclusion from an ‘is’ premise, value from fact. This objection ignores that there are some cases where it is legitimate to do so, those cases in particular where there is a functional concept employed.

For instance, from the proposition, “This watch fails to keep time well,” we can infer a value statement, “This watch is a bad watch,” where we define watch in terms of its purpose or function. The criteria for defining a watch and for a good watch are similarly factual criteria. The way something is in its nature defines how it ought to function. Thus, in some instances, to call something good is to make a factual statement. And the good for man is grounded in that which is most salient about human nature wherein man functions well or good when he functions properly, the way man ought to function in order to flourish. In any case, we are simply representing the historical view.7

Human Nature and Its Natural Capacities

Aristotle’s ethical theory, and his overall theory of the human good, rests (in part) upon his view of human nature as such. In considering the good life, we should first want to know what sort of life it is and then inquire about the good for that sort of life. Thus, it is appropriate to consider Aristotle’s metaphysical and psychological grounding for ethics.8

Basic to Aristotle’s ontology is substance, the subject of predication (e.g., “Socrates is white,” where Socrates is the subject), as discussed early on in the Categories. Later, after he discovered the distinction between form and matter, it became common for Aristotle to describe natural substances in hylomorphic terms.9 That is, an individual substance is a unified matter-form composite. This is true of humans, where body is to matter what soul is to form. What makes matter what it is specifically is its form. Aristotle believed that living things have a nature, and humans have a specific nature and thus a specific form. To identify the form of something is to identify the natural kind to which it belongs (e.g., human, lion, etc.) In Physics II, Aristotle ties form and function together by contending that a natural organism is its form, arguing that its functional properties are the essential explanatory properties of its activity or behavior.10 If we can discover the characteristic ac...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Common Teleological Background: Aristotle
• Chapter 2: Maimonides and the Good Life
• Chapter 3: Aquinas and the Good Life
• Chapter 4: Maimonides and Aquinas in Dialogue
• Conclusion
• Bibliography