Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Aristotelianism

Modernity, Conflict and Politics

Andrius Bielskis, Eleni Leontsini, Kelvin Knight, Andrius Bielskis, Eleni Leontsini, Kelvin Knight

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350122192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This compelling and distinctive volume advances Aristotelianism by bringing its traditional virtue ethics to bear upon characteristically modern issues, such as the politics of economic power and egalitarian dispute. This volume bridges the gap between Aristotle's philosophy and the multitude of contemporary Aristotelian theories that have been formulated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Part I draws on Aristotle's texts and Thomas Aquinas' Aristotelianism to examine the Aristotelian tradition of virtues, with a chapter by Alasdair MacIntyre contextualising the different readings of Aristotle's philosophy. Part II offers a critical engagement with MacIntyrean Aristotelianism, while Part III demonstrates the ongoing influence of Aristotelianism in contemporary theoretical debates on governance and politics. Extensive in its historical scope, this is a valuable collection relating the tradition of virtue to modernity, which will be of interest to all working in virtue ethics and contemporary Aristotelian politics.

Part 1

The Aristotelian tradition of virtues

1

Four – or more? – political Aristotles

Alasdair MacIntyre

The four political Aristotles whom I will discuss are Aristotle himself, Aristotle as understood in the thirteenth century by Aquinas, Aristotle as understood by some sixteenth-century renaissance Aristotelians, and the Aristotle of the present day, object of scholarly enquiry, subject of a huge and, even as we speak, ever-growing number of dissertations, invoked politically from time to time by protagonists of several alternative and rival points of view. So my first remarks are about Aristotle himself or rather about his text. I note immediately that a high proportion of the statements that scholarly commentators make about that text fall into one of two classes. Either they are presented as obvious truths, and so are scarcely worth repeating, or they are much disputed claims, only to be asserted if backed up by extensive interpretative argument. So what is someone to do if, as now, they need to provide a brief but accurate portrait of Aristotle as a political figure in less than five pages, so that what they say will unavoidably be highly contestable but shamelessly unargued? If they are shameless enough, they will simply proceed with the task. As I do now.

I

I begin by juxtaposing two aspects of Aristotle. He famously asserted that the human being is by nature a political animal (Politics, I.2.1253a2-3); an animal, that is, whose well-being requires citizenship in a polis. But he himself resided for part of his life in Macedonia, which was not a polis, and for an even longer period in Athens, where he was a metic, a resident alien and not a citizen. And his friends and allies among the Macedonian elite imposed on Greece a form of rule quite other than that of a polis. Yet, on Aristotle’s view, someone without a polis must be either a beast or a god, and evidently Aristotle did not think himself to be either of these. What he did think of himself as was an enquirer, someone exemplifying another universal human trait, the desire to understand. So, as such an enquirer, how might he have conceived his political role and function? When Aristotle returned to Athens in 335, no longer a member of the Academy, but a teacher and researcher, presiding over other teachers and researchers at the Lyceum, he was nearly fifty years old. What political role would Aristotle have expected a man of his achievements and that age to play?

The relevant texts are from Book VII of the Politics and Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics. In the former, Aristotle dissents from Plato’s view that soldiers should be one kind of person and rulers another. They should be the same people, but at different times in their lives, since ‘younger men have dynamis, but older men have phronēsis’ (Politics VII.8.1329a14-16). Aristotle thus seems to have envisaged the political life as proceeding through stages, beginning with a period of military service, then a period of undertaking those tasks of personal and political decision-making through which phronēsis is acquired – the phronēsis required for ‘deliberation about what is expedient and judgment about what is just’ (Politics VII.9.1329a4-5) – and finally the stage of holding those high offices in which phronēsis is exercised as a ruler. But if this is so, something has been left out, for in his discussion of political education at the close of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle makes it clear that for the acquisition of political phronēsis deliberative experience, although necessary, is not sufficient, since ‘if anyone wants to become adept in a technē or in theōria, he must go to the universal’ (NE X.9.1180b20-22). How is he to do that? What has been left out is just what Aristotle intended to supply in his teaching at the Lyceum. His political role and function is that of the educator, and that role can only be discharged by two different kinds of attention to the formation of moral habits.

First, attempts to instruct will be fruitless unless the students have already developed to some significant degree those moral and intellectual habits without which political learning cannot take place. Lacking such habits, the student will be guided by passions and immune to argument (NE X.9.1179b26-9). Second, the aim of instruction is to produce legislators who will know how to design, enact and administer laws that will inculcate those same habits, so that citizens may learn how to rule and how to be ruled for the common good of the polis (NE II.1.1103b3-6). Such political education does of course require more than good habits. It also requires a degree and kind of experience that is inevitably wanting in the young, but also missing from those whose upbringing has resulted in an inability to learn from experience (NE I.3.1095a2-6). Notice that these remarks all come from the Nicomachean Ethics, not the Politics, something not surprising if we follow Richard Bodéüs in understanding the former as just as much a political discourse as the latter.

Bodéüs’s (1982) claims in Le philosophe et la cité are of course contentious (for measured criticism, see Francis Sparshott’s 1997: 413–16). But I do not think that his critics have shown him to be mistaken in what he asserts, only in what he denies, in his giving too exclusively a political account of Aristotle’s intentions. What critics have rightly emphasized – Sparshott is an excellent example – is not only that Aristotle’s concern with moral and intellectual habits extends beyond the political, but also that, unless we give due weight to this, we shall not understand Aristotle’s conception of politics. The good of the citizen qua citizen is the common good of the city. But the good of the citizen qua human being is more and other than his good qua citizen. And the moral and intellectual habits, the virtues, that the citizen needs are human virtues. Aristotle insists that the virtue of the citizen is not the same as the virtu e of the human being, that one can be a good citizen without being a good human being (Politics III.4.1276b35-1277a5 and III.4.1277a12-25). But he also says that, when rule is exercised over free human beings, ‘the good citizen must have the understanding and the ability to rule and to be ruled and this is the virtue of a citizen’ (Politics III.4.1277b12-15). Yet one cannot have the understanding and ability to rule without phronēsis, and one cannot have phronēsis without also having the moral virtues, the virtues of the human being as such.

What then is the relationship between the achievement, together with one’s fellow citizens, of the good of the polis, and the achievement by each citizen as an individual of his own final good as a human being? Aristotle poses this question in Book VII of the Politics, when he discusses the disagreement between those who hold that the best life for a human being is the life of political practice and those who hold, to the contrary, that it is the life devoted to philosophical enquiry. Aristotle’s response is to argue that this is a badly framed set of alternatives. The activities of dianoia and theōria, the activities of philosophical enquiry, are as much or even more a part of the life of practice as are political activities (Politics VII.3.1325a16-1325b23). The plain inference is that the political life is by itself an incomplete life for a human being. It is indeed through developing and exercising the virtues in the life of the polis that we become rightly disposed and directed towards the achievement of our final end, but we will be politically in error if we believe that, or act as if it were the case that, there is not more to each life than politics. We will also of course be in error if we suppose that the pursuit of our ultimate end can, except in some exceptional cases, be an alternative to the pursuit of the ends of political life.

If so, one conclusion follows for us as interpreters and teachers. The Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics have to be taught together or not at all. Yet academic practice is such – and has been such for a very long time – that almost always the Nicomachean Ethics is taught in courses in moral philosophy to one set of students and the Politics in courses in political theory to quite another. The presupposition of such practice is that ethics is one thing, politics quite another, and that questions about the relationship between the two are to be raised only after each has been studied largely in isolation from the other. The lesson to be learnt is that the organization of the curriculum always has intellectual and sometimes moral and political presuppositions. And, if I am right, the presuppositions of our modern curriculum are and have been anti-Aristotelian. So that to teach students to read Aristotle’s texts as they should be read is to teach against the cultural grain.

It is important that the thesis that the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics must be read together can be held without a commitment to Bodéüs’s interpretation of Aristotle’s purposes. It was urged upon us in a 1984 article by A. W. H. Adkins (1991: 75–93), whose compellingly argued contention was that ‘the relationship of ergon to aretē and eudaimonia, and the importance of all three to Aristotle’s ethical and political thought’ (Adkins 1991: 92) can only be understood when the Ethics and the Politics are read together. Adkins laid particular emphasis on the relationship between the ergon of a ruler and the ergon of a human being, and in this I would want to follow him. Why so? For two different and contrasting reasons.

First, there is the place that this relationship has in Aristotle’s instructive accounts of what he takes to be cases of political failure, for example in what he says about Sparta and in his analysis of the danger to democratic constitutions posed by the characteristic democratic conception of freedom. The Spartans prized and praised virtue, but their almost exclusively military conception, or rather misconception, of the virtues resulted in a lack of ability to manage their own affairs. ‘They find it necessary to undertake large wars, but there is never any money in the public treasury’ (Politics II.9.1271b11-13), something to be remarked not only of the Spartans but also of contemporary, far from Laconic Americans. On Aristotle’s view, it is because they – certainly the Spartans, and perhaps also the Americans – are defective in respect of the human ergon that they are defective in respect of the ergon of a ruler.

At first sight, a very different case is that of those democrats who undermine democratic constitutions because of their democratic misconception of liberty. On that democratic view, ‘to be free is to do whatever one wants’ (Politics V.9.1310a31-2); it is to be free from external interference that may frustrate one’s desires. But, on Aristotle’s view, this is a misconception of freedom. To be constrained by respect for the constitution is not to be unfree, but to live in security. Democracies thus become the victims of demagogues, and the bad political outcomes for both victims and victimizers have their source in failures to discipline and transform their desires. Once again, it is because rulers are defective in respect of the human ergon that they are defective in respect of the ergon of a ruler.

That human beings qua human beings, qua rational animals, have a distinctive ergon is then, so Ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Aristotelian tradition of virtues
• Part 2 Modernity, conflict and MacIntyrean Aristotelianism
• Part 3 Virtue ethics and modern social and political theory
• Index
• Copyright