Augustine tells us that, in reading Cicero’s dialogue Hortensius, he was led to turn to a life of philosophy and ultimately to faith and a sense of utter dependence upon divine grace. For Augustine, then, philosophy was the vehicle to a recognition of human finitude and the unrestricted character of God’s power. But the Hortensius was itself inspired by Cicero’s reading of Aristotle’s dialogue, the Protrepticus or Exhortation to Philosophy. In this work, of which only fragments remain, the young Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) calls the reader to a life of searching for knowledge, a life of inquiry, research, and the investigation of all things.
Aristotle himself lived such a life, as one commentator puts it, “driven throughout his life by a single overmastering desire—the desire for knowledge.” Later, in the famous first sentence of his Metaphysics, Aristotle would acknowledge that he shared this desire with all people: “all men by nature desire to know.” Ultimately, it is a desire that would result in Aristotle’s remarkable achievements in the study of biology, psychology, logic, physics, ethics, politics, and much else. It would also find its place at the core of his ethics and politics. The relation between virtuous conduct and intellectual activity is a controversial feature of Aristotle’s moral thinking, but one interpretation is that he conceived of the good life, which we all desire above all else, as a self-sufficient life devoted to inquiry and contemplation. For Aristotle, then, philosophy or the search for knowledge and understanding will enable man to become as divine as he can ever be; it involves the human recognition of all that human beings can attain and of the way in which divinity is within human grasp. Ironically, the roots of Augustine’s life of grace and dependence upon God lie in Aristotle’s humanistic and naturalistic conception of the self-sufficient philosophical quest for divine knowledge and thereby for the good life.
Aristotle was born in 384 B.C.E., in Stagira, a small town in Chalcidice in northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, was a physician in the court of Amyntas, king of Macedon, and a member of a guild devoted to Asclepius, the god of medicine. Although Nicomachus died when Aristotle was still very young, he had probably begun to teach his son something of Greek medicine and biology. These interests had a long-lasting impact on Aristotle.
In 367, at the age of seventeen, Aristotle made the most important move of his life. He left Stagira for Athens, where he became a member of Plato’s intellectual and religious fellowship, the Academy. Plato was probably the most dominant intellectual influence on Aristotle throughout his life. He remained in the Academy—studying, teaching, lecturing, and writing—for twenty years, until Plato’s death. It was during these years that Aristotle wrote a number of literary dialogues, in the Platonic style, among them the Protrepticus and the Eudemus or On the Soul, which deals with the separate existence and immortality of the soul. Only fragments of some of these dialogues exist today. It was in this period too that Aristotle tried out radically anti-Platonic views and strategies in works such as the Categories.
In 347 Aristotle left the Academy and Athens. Plato had died; his nephew Speusippus had been appointed to replace him, perhaps to keep the property in the family or perhaps for ideological reasons; and in 348 Philip of Macedon sacked the town of Olynthus, provoking a wave of anti-Macedonian feeling, spurred on by the oratory of Demosthenes and his supporters. Aristotle, with a few fellow philosophers, fled Athens, sailing east to the coast of Asia Minor and arriving at Atarneus, at the invitation of its ruler, Hermeias, who settled them in the town of Assos. After two or three years, Aristotle moved to Mytilene, near Lesbos, where he met Theophrastus, who was to become his most important companion and pupil. Aristotle also married Hermeias’ niece, Pythias, who bore him two children, a daughter, Pythia, and a son, Nicomachus, after whom the Nicomachean Ethics is named.
Two years later, in 342, Aristotle accepted Philip’s invitation to settle in Pella, capital of Macedonia, and later in the royal castle at Mieza, to tutor the king’s thirteen-year-old son, Alexander. We know little concerning their relationship or about the content of Alexander’s education. Subsequent events make it hard to believe that Aristotle taught Alexander anything about ethics or politics. Alexander was strongly committed to a blending of Greek and foreign cultures and conceived of a vast, disparate empire without the centrality of the polis (city-state); Aristotle would have differed on both matters. Aristotle is thought to have composed for Alexander a work on monarchy and one on colonies, but we know nothing of their content or influence on Alexander.
In 340 Alexander was made regent, and Aristotle probably settled in Stagira until Philip’s death, in 335, when he returned to Athens. The next dozen years were the richest and most productive of Aristotle’s life. First, he sought to establish his own school or fellowship (thiasos), the Lyceum, renting some buildings in a grove northeast of the city, a site sacred to Apollo Lyceius and, as tradition has it, a favorite spot of Socrates. Second, Aristotle engaged in a vast array of investigations. These were based on prior and ongoing research and the collection of data, views, and positions, conducted by himself and his associates. He lectured, taught, and cultivated an environment of study that yielded writings on biology, logic, rhetoric, physics, metaphysics, ethics, politics, the arts, and more. Only twenty percent of this output remains, but it is sufficient to establish Aristotle as a giant of Western intellectual culture.
In 323 Alexander died. Once again anti-Macedonian feeling erupted in Athens, and Aristotle saw charges of impiety fabricated against him. He fled to Chalcis, in Euboea, “to save the Athenians,” as he put it, “from sinning twice against philosophy.” There he died a year later, at the age of sixty-two. Diogenes Laertius, the third-century doxographer, preserves his will, in which he arranges his affairs and those of his family with sensitivity, kindness, and generosity. It is a rare opportunity to glimpse the humanity that existed so delicately alongside an incomparable, unrelenting intellect and an all-consuming desire for knowledge.
It is hard to understand with any depth the concrete person whose life spanned these turbulent years. This much, however, is clear, that Aristotle’s life and his thinking were joined in an attempt to live the best life possible for a human being. This is the life that he examines, defends, and endorses in his great ethical and political works, especially the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics. There he locates the core of human life in the enrichment of our character; there he associates this goal of eudaimonia (human flourishing or well-being) with the functioning of soul at its highest level, the level of reason; and there he explores how reason functions, together with desire, pleasure, deliberation, and decision, in everyday life and in the life of inquiry and contemplation. Moreover, the good life is the object of our most important and strongest desire, and the political is the context of associations and structures best suited to enable its achievement.
Aristotle’s account rises out of a tradition of natural philosophy in the fifth and fourth centuries; it attempts to unite religious, scientific, and moral aspiration in such a way that human life in fourth-century Greece is seen to take on meaning and purpose. Later, in the Middle Ages and in the modern world, Aristotle’s theory loosed itself from the ancient polis and found new adherents who agreed with Aristotle that moral character is a complex interplay of rational judgement, deliberation, desire, decision, community, law, and much else. Whether this conception of moral character and the good life could be freed from Aristotelian science and its teleological order was and is a difficult question. But it does nothing to discredit Aristotle’s own attempt to practice philosophy and thereby to articulate and to live the best life possible for human beings.
Recommended Readings
Barker, Ernest. The Politics of Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946.
Barnes, J., M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji (eds.). Articles on Aristotle. Vol. 2. Ethics and Politics. London: Duckworth, 1977.
Broadie, Sarah. Ethics with Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Cooper, John. Reason and Human Good in Aristotle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975; Hackett, 1986.
Hardie, W.F.R. Aristotle’s Ethical Theory. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Irwin, T. H. Aristotle’s First Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Keyt, David, and Fred Miller (eds.). Essays on Aristotle’s Politics. Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1991.
Kraut, Richard. Aristotle on the Human Good. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Miller, Fred D., Jr. Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Moravcsik, J. (ed.). Aristotle. Garden City: Doubleday, 1967.
Mulgan, R. G. Aristotle’s Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, updated 2001.
Okin, Susan Moller. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Reeve, C.D.C. Practices of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Rorty, A. O. (ed.). Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Sherman, N. The Fabric of Character. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.