Mary P. Nichols: Aristotle’s Discovery of the Human: Piety and Politics in the “Nicomachean Ethics.” Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 50, No. 2, Winter 2024. Republished with permission.
If, as Aristotle famously remarks, human nature centers between beasts and gods, and since he writes extensively about beasts (their parts and their movements) but not so much about the gods, and since, furthermore, human conceptions of the divine orient human moral and political life, should the reader of the Nicomachean Ethics not pay close attention to what the philosopher has to say about the divine? Yet few recent commentators have done so, until now. In this careful, richly textured commentary, Mary P. Nichols undertakes the Aristotelian task of correcting the balance.
For her frontispiece, she selects a passage from book 5: “Reciprocity holds the city together, our reciprocating not only harm for harm but also good for good. Shrines to the Graces are therefore placed along the roadways, to foster doing good in return, for this belongs to gratitude. One ought to help in turn one who has been gracious, and even to initiate reciprocal giving.” (vi). Aristotle thus takes Hesiod’s three Charites or Graces, named Joyfulness, Shining, and Bloom, and gives them a political dimension Hesiod does not suggest, a dimension that recalls not only Aristotle’s classification of man as a political animal but his description of the relation of husband and wife (here, Zeus and Hera, parents of the Graces) as the nucleus of political life proper, as distinguished from rule of parents over children and of masters over slaves. To discover the human is to discover politics, reciprocal rule, as exemplified by the ways of the divine. [1] “A good human life,” Nichols writes, “which reflect both the virtues and the limitations of the human, would therefore neither deny the human connection to the divine nor try to eliminate the distance between the two” (1); a good human life is pious, in that sense. And “a good political community has, in turn, the task of supporting such a life by encouraging human achievement, and we can judge it by how well it does so” (2). Indeed Aristotle’s “references to the gods and to the divine support human activity and achievement a” aiming at happiness, the purpose all human beings strive for (2).
In so striving, human beings make mistakes. In considering magnanimity or greatness of soul, which looks to be the crowning moral virtue, “Aristotle warns against its assumption of divine-like perfection”; instead, he “attempts to turn the great-souled individual to friendship,” another form of reciprocity (2-3). This must be done because unlike “other natural beings, who develop their ends by nature, unless chance or human activity divert them,” human beings “must acquire” the ethical virtues “by their own efforts” (2). In undertaking those efforts and again unlike beasts, “we wonder at the divine,” looking up from our own lives, as Odysseus and his crew mates navigated by the stars (2). Looking up enables us to “look ahead” (2) with better guidance than we would receive simply by looking inward, consulting only our heart and our desires—those foolish and contradictory counselors, as another philosopher observed. Looking up does not, however, mean going up. There is the good and indeed the best for human beings, but it is not the same as the complete good, the good of the whole. “It is in that gap that Aristotle made the discovery of the human life that he contributes to philosophy,” the “unique place of the human within the whole” (3). Even the wisest of men, the ones Aristotle calls the most self-sufficient, “are not simply self-sufficient,” and the wisdom of the wise consists partly in understanding that and in accepting that condition gracefully, that is, with “gratitude and joy” (5).
And with reciprocity: “I attempt to show that divine knowing as well as beneficence is a model for politics, while divine beneficence as well as knowing is a model for philosophy” (6). Piety understood in this sense “is not one virtue among others” but the foundation of “our striving for the good, as manifest in the various virtues Aristotle discusses” (7). In her commentary, Nichols proceeds as Aristotle does, “not merely presenting conclusions he has reached about human life,” in the manner of divine revelation, but by “showing how he has reached them” (8) Philosophers remain human, un-Zarathustrian.
Dividing her book into eight chapters placed between an introduction and not a conclusion—nothing final—but some “afterthoughts,” Nichols attends to “the question of self-sufficiency of the political life” in her commentary on book 1 (8); ethical virtues as “habits” in her commentary on books 2 and 3 (9); “how our virtues develop through living with others” (book 4) (10); justice and charity, both elements of reciprocity or gracefulness (book 5); the intellectual virtues of prudence and wisdom and their relation to philosophy (book 6); the contrast between human strength and divine perfection (book 7); instances of reciprocity in friendship, family, the political community, and philosophy (books 8 and 9); and the relationship of the human with the divine (book 10). Her afterthoughts consist of some (indeed) gracious suggestions on how to understand modern liberal institutions and practices “on different grounds” than we moderns prefer (16). “For Aristotle, the challenges of political life can summon the moral and intellectual excellence of which human beings are capable, without leading to the dogmatism and fanaticism that liberal theorists sought to avert” and without succumbing to an equally dogmatic secularism (17).
Such a commentary ought to be read in the spirit in which it is offered, consulting each of Aristotle’s ten “books” or chapters along with Nichols’s observations, reciprocally. Accordingly, it would be as silly as it would be futile to offer a summary of her observations; better to identify certain of those observations that her commentary apart from the others—the Nicholsian distinctives, so to speak.
Although she begins her account of Aristotle’s initial discussion of the good (to agathon) with the opening of the Ethics, where he explains that all arts, inquiries, actions, and choices aim at the good, she quickly reminds her readers of the passage in the Metaphysics 1072b, where he designates “the highest god as the divine, or god” (21). The cosmos “is like a divine gift that aligns with our capacities to receive it,” while at the same time requiring human beings themselves to exercise those capacities (21). Aristotle leaves it open “whether the highest good is something separate from the cosmos or its very order” (1075a). According to the Ethics, the highest good of human nature, happiness (eudaimonia) might come “from divine allotment or in some other way” (1099b). [2] To inquire into these matters, in Nichols’s words, we must “keep our longing and thinking alive” (21). That is, we must exercise our distinctively human capacities.
We do so within a political community, which fosters our virtues through habituation, accomplished large through obedience to the laws set down by that community. “Only then can we deliberate and choose how to act, gaining freedom from the very laws that form us” (21). In this, the Ethics is a book that educates its readers—a book “political throughout, even if it leads beyond politics” (22). While the art of politics is indeed the architectonic art, aiming at the highest, the most comprehensive good, for its citizens, it does not order human life perfectly. The highest good, what is truly beautiful, is “pursued and chosen apart from its serving some other good, apart from its utility,” and it “is not subordinate even to the political community,” however well ordered that community may be (26). To refine our understanding of that good, Aristotle writes the Ethics, which suggests that there are two “most architectonic” arts: the work of the statesman and the work of the philosopher (23). The statesman’s architecture proceeds by arguments illustrated by examples, which provide an intellectual rather than a habitual form of experience. If the statesman educates the young by habituation through the intermediary of law, “Aristotle offers the experience needed by the inexperienced,” by the young, by inviting them to think more clearly (29). No prophet or divine lawgiver, “Aristotle does not understand ‘by himself,’ for he both learns from others and shares what he learns with them”—another instance of reciprocity (34). In a way, then, philosophizing on ethics and politics is itself political in the strict sense, graceful and therefore divine. “As Aristotle’s own investigation in the Ethics proceeds, we too ‘theorize’ along with Aristotle” (36). Both statesman and philosopher encourage friendship—the political friendship of citizenship, deliberation in common aiming at the common good, or intellectual friendship, dialogue aiming at discovering the truth.
To theorize is to put the wisdom the philosopher loves, that he longs for, ahead of even the reciprocity of friendship and of politics. “It is pious to honor the truth first,” Aristotle stipulates, “especially for a philosopher” (Nic. Eth. 1096a). To honor truth before friendship is not to dishonor friendship but to refine it, inasmuch as my friend needs to know the truth as much as I do. “This is the first time that Aristotle mentions philosophy in the Ethics, and he appeals to it only to defend why he does what he does,” as a philosopher (37). Moreover, “this is the only time in the Ethics that Aristotle calls something ‘pious’ or ‘holy,’ thereby “connect[ing] piety with his own philosophic activity and way of life” (37). Indeed, he quickly moves to condemn “unholy crimes” as degradations of the human nature he seeks better to understand (38).
Very well, then, what is the happiness we all long for? “Happiness completes the other goods we seek,” since the good we need to attain happiness must be chosen before we can attain happiness itself (44). We choose the lesser goods “for the sake of” happiness, Aristotle writes (1097b), and Nichols observes that the phrase “for the sake of” is a translation of the Greek charin, a word etymologically related to charein (to delight in) and charis (grace, graciousness) It is “almost as if we choose goods that grace us with happiness, as if happiness were a sort of grace that accompanies good choices” (44). We experience this delight, this joy, this grace “less as a product of our activity than as a gift that comes along with it” (44). The reciprocity grace entails being one dimension of political life, happiness for political animals cannot amount to the self-sufficiency of individuals. “Happiness is possible only for one who does well the work or task that belongs to a human being qua human,” qua political—reciprocating, graceful—animal (45). But politics requires choice, and choice (as distinguished from impulse) requires reasoning. The distinctively human work or task, then, is activity, the energeia, of the human soul in conformity with reason. And “like the human work itself, as he defines it, Aristotle’s own work in the Ethics is a work of his soul accompanied by reason” (47). Insofar as he reasons, Aristotle can reach not only beyond himself but beyond his time, making himself immortal, divine, as far as possible for a human being. Happiness is not a gift of the gods or a matter of chance, as “it cannot be simply bestowed upon us”; “we must make it our own” by engaging in virtuous activity and being aware of what virtuous activity is, since being unaware would make us less than fully human (53). We become aware of virtue as virtue by the struggle within each soul between its distinctively human dimension, reason, and the nonrational dimensions of the soul, which often oppose reason but also can obey it. “Aristotle’s work will constitute the model for a politics that fosters self-rule and supports happiness in a way that the lawgivers of Crete and Sparta”—widely reputed to be among the most virtuous cities—were “unable to do” (59).
What are the virtues, the strengths of soul without which we cannot be graced by happiness? Aristotle addresses this question in his second and third books. As strengths of soul, they cannot amount merely to obedience to commands, whether parental or governmental, even if the commands are just. “Aristotle’s discovery that character differs from the habits that engender it lie at the heart of his Ethics, whose title literally means ‘those things that involve character'” (62). In making this discovery, Aristotle himself displays intellectual virtue, “build[ing] on common opinion” but not merely following it and, indeed, “attempting to instruct and educate it” (62).
He does not even follow the authority of the first political philosopher, Socrates, who associates virtue so closely with knowledge. On the contrary, “the end in asking about virtue is not to know what virtue is, but to become good, and that requires doing virtuous deeds,” an exercise that “yields ‘greater truth’ (1107a28-34) about virtue, and about the beautiful, the just, and the good,” registering “a better claim to ‘philosophizing’ (1252b1-2, 1181b15)” than the Socratic approach. “There is no virtue unless those actions come from ourselves”; thus, one must attempt to discover in what sense we can “understand virtue and character as a human being’s own when their origin and so much of their development depend on external factors” (64). “The truth of human life,” which the moral and political philosopher seeks and the statesman needs to understand in order to rule rightly, “involves both self-rule and dependence on others” (65). Self-rule is the rule of reason in our actions; perfected through habit, virtues are dispositions of characteristics, known to be good by reason but crucially reinforced by steady action over time. It is not only by thought but “by action that we come to know the world,” knowing “what sort of beings we are and what sort of world we live in” (68). Those who merely speak of virtue, those “who take refuge in words should not suppose they are philosophizing,” having “miss[ed] the truth one learns from acting” (68).
At this point, Aristotle introduces his account of the several virtues as means between extremes—courage as the mean between cowardice and rashness, for example. “Aristotle’s introduction of virtue as a mean may be the most obvious way in which he revises—and both moderates and elevates—common parlance about the virtues” (69). Common parlance about the virtues identifies them with obedience to commands, including divine commands. This suggests that Aristotle also moderates and elevates common parlance about divinity. Nichols emphasizes the way in which Aristotle not only substantially expands the Socratic-Platonic list of four virtues but identifies virtues which as yet have no names and names them. “He fashions new words out of previously existing ones and puts words to new uses to reveal there is more in what is known to us than of which we are aware” (72). He does not invent, much less ‘create’ new virtues; he gives articulation to human intuitions. “Virtues are rooted in passions that most of us experience, and they consist in our becoming properly disposed toward them rather than in rejecting them altogether” (75). To become properly disposed toward our passions is first to reason about them, then to put these passions, so refined and improved, into action, but the very act of reasoning, bringing them under the rule of reason, includes giving them accurate names, finding a right logos.
Equipped with such a logos, we can then make choices of actions instead of acting impulsively, under the sway of what is rightly called blind passion. “Choice occurs only after deliberation”—very much out of our own deliberation, not from commands that enter our souls from outside (77). We must think about those commands, too, along with thinking about our passions. “Aristotle’s connecting ethical virtues with both habit and choice offers a middle ground between tracing one’s character to one’s community and tracing it to one’s own choices and actions. We do not control the beginning more than it might seem” (81). And political rule itself encourages this, inasmuch as no good legislator rules only by force but also by persuasion, leaving an opening for thought among citizens under the rule of law.
Aristotle’s first example of a virtue, courage, in its purest form occurs not in political life but in battle. Civic courage, aiming at honor, is a dilute form of courage, whereas battlefield courage aims exclusively at the beautiful and the noble quite apart from any reward beyond the beauty and nobility of the act itself. What, then, is the beautiful? Nichols seems to say that beauty in an action is something “complete in itself not moved by nor subordinated to anything outside itself” (85). In this, “the act of courage is the paradigm of the free act” (85) and battlefield courage, risking life itself, showing human nature acting not “for” anything but displaying self-rule in the face of fear of personal oblivion. If so, this is the closest Aristotle gets to Kant, although unlike Kant he never departs from nature but rather affirms it. With respect to divinity, Nichols follows Ann Charney, who understands Aristotelian courage respecting the gods as the means between excessive fear of the gods, which would lead to “paralysis because of the vastness of the unknown,” and the rashness brought on by the belief that one is “loved by the gods,” expecting their protection in any circumstance. [3]. Nichols adds that “atheism, paradoxically, might have a similar effect as the belief in the gods’ unbounded reign” (88 n.16), resulting in the secular fanaticism of some ‘revolutionaries.’
If courage is the virtue of war, exhibited in the face of pain, moderation is the virtue first associated with the opposite circumstance, peace, and is exhibited in the face of pleasure; it is the Odysseus to war’s Achilles. Odysseus exhibits moderation in feasting, that is, with regard to food and drink. The beauty of moderation exhibits completeness less in its purity than in its harmoniousness, the balance it establishes between insensibility to pleasure and the dissipation that longs for excessive pleasure. “Moreover, the pleasures of food and wine can belong to free persons not merely to slavish ones, pleasures Aristotle (and Homer) connect with music” (89), to harmonies perceived by the ear. If bodily desires “are great and vehement,” Aristotle writes, “they even knock the rezoning power out of commission”; “this is why a temperate person needs to be in harmony with reason, for the aim to which both look is the beautiful” (1199b).
Seen within the city especially in times of peace, moderation moves toward the preeminently social virtues, “the virtues that involve their living together” (90). Humans living together need to take care not to preen themselves as gods or descend into bestiality—politically, into tyrants or their subjects. “In book 4, Aristotle places even greater emphasis on ways in which the ethical virtues manifest the freedom possible for human beings” (91).
The virtue of liberality conduces to living freely, the mean between stinginess and dissipation. Nichols pays particular attention to the seeming liberality of the tyrant, who gives freely but only after obtaining his wealth by seizing it from others; his “great resources come from great injustice,” and “impiety is at the center or core of the tyrant’s vice,” inasmuch as he loots not only cities but temples, staling even from the gods themselves (95). The virtue of munificence, located between the vices of chintziness and wastefulness or vulgarity, aims at beautiful and wonder-inspiring public works, often temples to the gods. The man of munificence might go wrong, however, if he forgets that his freedom to endow great works leads him to forget how much he depends upon others—those from whom he inherited his wealth, for example. That is, he may forget the social relations upon which he depends for his kind of greatness; he needs reminding that he himself is nothing to be wondered at. His greatness inheres more in the external works he endows, not so much in himself.
Greatness of soul is another matter. Megalopsuchia is the crown of the moral virtues. The great-souled man seeks the highest honor—the “greatest of the external goods”—from the most serious people, “assessing himself worthy of great things” and indeed being “worthy of them” (1123b)—achieving the mean between smallness of soul and vanity. “The great-souled individual manifests [the] human potential for freedom and the virtuous activity it makes possible, stepping back even from acting until he finds action worthy of his greatness” (100). In this, he is a person of both self-knowledge and justice. This notwithstanding, Nichols inclines to cut the magnanimous man down to size, warning that he “tends to forget his limits,” being “not as independent and self-sufficient as he tends to assume” (100). If he begins to act out of pride, he will become a figure of comedy or of tragedy. “Aristotle attempts to educate him, to remind him of his humanity”—his social and political nature—while “preserving the greatness that manifests humanity’s achievement” (100). Nichols especially worries that the great-souled man never gives himself to wonder, there being nothing great in his eyes, perhaps even including the gods. Philosophy begins with wonder, so magnanimity evidently cannot open itself to the divine. In all, Nichols prefers the courageous man, who acknowledges human limits by seeing the limit death imposes on him, even as he risks death. Aristotle might reply that the great-souled man understands that genuine honor comes only from human beings who are good, and true greatness of soul is difficult—virtuous in the sense of something acquired only by striving—because “it is not possible without the beauty that belongs to goodness” (1123a).
There is an unnamed virtue, the mean between lacking the love of honor altogether and excessive passion for it. Nichols is more interested in the next virtue Aristotle discusses, gentleness, which settles between a deficiency of anger at wrongdoing and irritability at every small infraction. A gentle person forgives readily; if the great-souled man inclines to forget favors he has received, the gentle man forgets the injuries he has sustained. “Gentleness is a virtue conducive to our living with others” (108), although it might veer toward going along in order to get along. Both magnanimity and gentleness require the virtue of justice to supplement them.
Nichols names the unnamed virtue between obsequiousness and the habit of complaint as something resembling friendship, although it is not friendship. Another word might be considerateness, the virtue of one who “will associate in different ways with people in high position and those he just happens to be around, and with those who are more or less known to him, and similarly in accord with other differences, allotting what is fitting to each sort, choosing for its own sake to join in giving pleasure, but being cautious about giving pain, and thinking out the likely consequences—with respect to what is beautiful or advantageous” (1127a). Nichols sees in this virtue something of Aristotle himself, who may or may not know those whom he addresses in his treatise, and of course cannot know those who may read it later on. “He is not simply setting a standard for the virtuous activity of others, but he is also describing one by which he himself may be judged” (110) and, it might be added, a standard by which all those who teach or write about him may be judged.
Another such standard is truthfulness, the name Nichols gives to the unnamed virtue between the vices of boasting and habitual irony. She remarks the matter of trust that both of these forms of lying throw into question. Of the two, Aristotle is less critical of irony, that Socratic characteristic. There is irony and then there is irony: unlike the magnanimous man, who speaks with irony to the many, “Aristotle’s gracious ironist” speaks not out of contempt for others or even out of consideration for them, but out of his unpretentious knowledge of the difficulty of speaking the whole truth in every circumstance (113).
Since “in life there is also relaxation” (1126a), Aristotle next turns to a consideration of with, that Shakespearean virtue. The playfulness of with stays between boorishness and buffoonery. Enjoying the ambiguity of language, the witty man shows in his love of puns and other wordplay his freedom “from conventional usages that limit seeing by limiting speech” (115). This virtue, too, “resembles friendliness, which gives pleasure and pain as are appropriate” (116). This suggests a sort of justice that does not strictly follow the law—equity.
Nichols ends her account of this cluster of social virtues with the question of aidōs, which might be translated as shame or, if suitably refined, as reverence. Aristotle regards shame more as a passion than a virtue, blushing being no matter of choice. Shame is nonetheless a kind of mean, falling “between being ashamed of nothing (or shamelessness) and being ashamed of everything,” shyness (121). She tracks Aristotle as he finds some virtue in shame, as it “supports both confidence and deference, protecting our humanity against succumbing to the slavishness of beasts and against resuming the status of gods”—a “fitting conclusion for Aristotle’s survey of the virtues that manifest our resources for acting and our involvement with others when we do so” (121).
It is noteworthy that all of the social virtues require a sort of master virtue, justice, to guide them. Justice itself is the topic of book 5. One needs with to understand justice because it is a word with “multiple meanings,” as is “the good” (124). In one sense, justice is the whole of virtue, insofar as justice is the lawful and the laws “talk publicly about everything” (1129b), “command[ing] the deeds of all the virtues and forbid[ding] those of all the vices” (125). But there is also “justice in the particular case” under the rule of law, “which secures what is fair or equal” (125). This particular justice may be distributive—having to do with the distribution of the goods of the community—or corrective—restoring a distribution that has been violated. Complexities and indeed difficulties arise because the laws, although comprehensive or complete, cannot address each particular case. The laws must be supplemented by three “other ways” to consider justice: reciprocity, natural justice, and equity (126).
Lawful or complete justice pursues equality, whether in the distribution of goods (honors, money) in proportion to merit (‘equal pay for equal work,’ for example) or in correction by “restor[ing] the balance when the proportion established by the law has been violated” (128-129). Without just persons to distribute and to correct, lawful justice would become “static and idle,” eventuating in “tragic conflict among those for whom justice delayed is justice denied (132).
Reciprocity, characteristic of the Graces and definitive of political rule itself, addresses correction by inflicting legally ordained pain in exchange for illegally imposed pain—fining a thief, killing a murderer. As to distribution, one sees reciprocity in exchange, as measured by money, the medium of exchange; commerce is one of the things that “hold the city together” (1132b). Citizens exchange not only monetary goods but goods generally, in imitation of the Graces, in honor of whom cities place shrines in the roadway “to foster reciprocal giving, for this belongs to gratitude” or charis (1133a). Punitive or corrective justice “is supplemented by these feminine deities” (136), rather as husbands and wives complement one another in the household. Unlike the magnanimous man, who only wants to give and not to receive, the Graces, and good citizens imitating them, readily give and receive. Perhaps the magnanimous man is more like a king than a citizen in a ‘mixed regime’ or politeia.
Natural justice also supplements lawful justice. Natural justice is equality in ruling and being ruled according to merit. “The just ruler, Aristotle tells us, derives nothing more from his ruling than his just portion equal to one’s merit in relation to others”; he is “part of the community” participating in the “reciprocity between rulers and ruled,” in “shared governance, in which ruler and ruled fulfill their potential as political and rational beings” (138-139) In their human nature, in this reciprocity, they avoid claims of divinity or even claims to be “conduits of divine revelation” (142). “Laws or conventions concerning worship must be consistent with human freedom,” that is, deliberation and choice (141). “By treating natural justice as a form of political justice, Aristotle teaches that there should be limits to laws and conventions and calls upon political communities to support them”; laws commanding human sacrifice or permitting incest or adultery are “impious or unholy,” as are laws commanding human rulers to be worshiped as if they were gods (142). The standard of natural justice would substantially revise some of the legal conventions of the political communities Aristotle saw.
Finally, equity supplements lawful rule, avoiding the conditions of tragedy depicted in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The discussion of equity highlights one of the most important themes of the Ethics, the importance of weighing circumstances when coming to a sound judgment of any action, past, present, or future. Consideration of circumstances also requires understanding of the intention of the person confronted by circumstances, “the origin of an act and the intention or purpose of the agent” (144). Strict application of even a just law might well prove unjust, without the “act of grace” equitable judgment is (144). Like Aeschylus, Aristotle “seeks a politics that stems cycles of violence and vengeance”; unlike the tragic poet, “he does not rely on stories of divine intervention for establishing institutions and securing their operation” (145). His divinities, symbolized by the Graces whose temples dot the public roadways—guiding the very way of life of the polis—allow and encourage “reciprocity among human beings” (146). As a result, tragedy disappears: “the equitable person does what is noble, without the sacrifice of his life that Achilles’ nobility required” (150). And so “to lovers of the beautiful, who are ready to sacrifice themselves, Aristotle will offer friendship,” as seen in the final books of the Ethics (150). “Here in his discussion of equity he offers them the ‘superior’ justice he calls equity and assigns to the equitable the beautiful work in the political community that those who take less for themselves might accomplish with less ostentation than Achilles’ sacrifice” (150).
In all, “there is less cause for indignation, for example, if politics can improve upon chance in doling out just rewards and punishments, or in structuring political activity so that citizens share rule, if it recognizes natural justice as a part of political justice, and if the laws allow their correction by equity” (153). With Aristotle’s teaching in mind, young men like Glaucon and Adeimantus need not contemplate “a city that will remain only in speech” (153). And mature statesmen may learn that “ruling in the city must take into account the capacity of citizens for self-rule” (154). This concludes his inquiry into the ethical virtues, leaving the intellectual virtues for book 6.
Intellectual virtues are indispensable to achieving the ethical virtues: Without prudence and wisdom, how would one choose the mean between extremes? Wisdom, which contemplates unchanging things, guards against hubris, bringing men to see that they are less divine than the best things in the cosmos; prudence, knowledge of changeable things, fits actions to good ends.
Aristotle identifies three more ways to attain truth. In addition to wisdom, science and mind attend to the unchanging things; in addition to prudence art attends to the changeable things. “Inasmuch as the whole is composed of things that change or perish and those that are ‘eternal, ungenerated, and indestructible’ (1139b), the human soul that knows them must be akin to both.” That is, “the world is our home” (159). But neither is it transparent, easy to understand. “Through the intellectual and ethical virtues, and not less through knowing ourselves through our deeds and sufferings and through dealing with perplexities we encounter, the world becomes a home for us” (161, emphasis added). We long to know, as Aristotle writes at the beginning of the Metaphysics, but that longing sets before us no simple task. As old-fashioned mothers used to say in ice cream parlors, our eyes are bigger than our stomachs.
Aristotle begins with science, epistēmē. Mathematical knowledge exhibits a charming precision, but it is a precision that comes at the expense of a misleading equality. I can make a list and add up the correct number of items, but that tells me nothing about the nature of the items listed—their origin, their form, their material composition, the purposes which the items or the collection of items may be good or bad for. Similarly, an airtight geometric proof demonstrates the truth of abstractions, but life does not consist simply of lines and points. “The study of politics cannot be a mathematical discipline,” and so cannot be known precisely (164).
If politics is, as Aristotle tells us, architectonic, knowing it means approaching through art, technē; if politics requires knowing what to do in circumstances crucial to the flourishing and indeed the survival of the political community, knowing it also means approaching through prudence, phronēsis. “Art determines what is otherwise left to chance,” bringing order as legislators do (172). “Prudence guides our deliberation, choices, and actions about what is good or bad” and is exhibited by statesmen and household managers (172). Nichols remarks that art and prudence are indeed intellectual virtues; Aristotle gives them a higher rank than Plato’s Socrates inclines to do, even going to the trouble (in the Metaphysics) of identifying a poet “who supports human activity rather than crush[ing] it with tales of divine jealousy” (172).
Aristotle then returns to an approach to knowledge of the unchanging things, mind (nous) and wisdom (sophia). Mind perceives the indemonstrable starting points or archē of things; translators also call it intellectual intuition, and a fuller account of it may be found in the Posterior Analytics. Science demonstrates, proves, but “there is no demonstration of the beginning points of science” (175). We trust our intellectual intuitions because we must. There is no getting around them. You cannot prove that round is not square; Yu can only perceive that is so. Wisdom is the combination of the first principles discovered by mind and the demonstrative knowledge that is science. But “without access to first principles, and hence trust, wisdom is not possible—nor science” (176). Those who do not take into account all five ways of knowing are not wise, notably the philosophers who so concentrate their minds on the heavens that they fail to see what is in front of them here, down to earth.
This failure is not only a failure of attention to where we are walking but also of attention to our own souls, the way our souls work. “Book 6 is Aristotle’s book about self-knowledge” (180). Self-knowledge and piety go together, Aristotle teaches, because self-knowledge includes the knowledge that we long to know but do not know everything; we are not gods. Crucially for political life, we do not know enough to remake the world. Such philosophers as Thales and Anaxagoras, “who look up at the heavens, must also look to themselves, if only to better understand the highest, for it is that to which human longing is directed” (181). Anaxagoras’ science “cannot promise to make us masters and possessors of nature, for [science] begins with trust,” trust in the goodness of the cosmos as the home of man, “in contrast not only to Anaxagoras but also to Descartes, who begins with doubt instead of trust,” and whose “certainty of knowledge based on a certainty of self leaves human beings alienated from any world that is not of their own making” (181).
At the same time, prudence alone and the political life it animates will not suffice. Without “a wisdom that recognizes what is more divine than human beings,” prudent men “will tend to collapse into a cleverness at attaining their goals and their understanding of human beings, including themselves, into one of prudential beasts” (182). “Aristotle’s word to the wise is at the same time one to the prudent, for he urges both to self-knowledge, the former by understanding the higher in light of their longing for the good, the latter by understanding that securing and preserving the good for a political community is more beautiful and even more divine than securing only their own. We might understand Aristotle’s thought as a pious mean that avoids the excesses of modern approaches that elevate human beings to gods (cosmos-makers) or reduce them to beasts” (182).
Political prudence consists of architectonic or lawgiving prudence and of judging: there is also the prudence of household management, which consists of three kinds of rule often seen in cities—parental/kingly, marital/political/reciprocal, and masterly/tyrannical. Ethical virtue and prudence depend upon each other. It cannot be virtuous to exercise ingenuity in pursuit of some bad purpose. But it cannot be prudent to ingeniously pursue a bad purpose, inasmuch as to succeed would be injurious. “Prudence guides the ethical virtues as much as it is guided by them, toward living well and achieving happiness in their practice” (186).
Even as he has completed his discussion of the five ways of approaching truth, Aristotle introduces “three new capacities: good deliberation (eubolia), comprehension (sunesis), and consideration (gnōmē),” all of which he “connects…with prudence” (187). Admittedly, had Aristotle omitted discussing these capacities, “readers might not have noticed anything missing,” but the inclusion does serve an important purpose, Nichols maintains: “the occasion [for us] to reflect on his own activity in the Ethics (and therefore ours along with his), and on the ways in which it is similar or akin to prudence” (187). Good deliberation is a sort of searching, one of the first steps in making any prudent choice. In the Ethics, Aristotle obviously does just that, “for example, by examining what virtues constitute a good human life” (188). Comprehension or astuteness attaches to the examination of the perplexities seen in contradictory opinions and is characterized by judgment (kritikē) of those opinions, separating wheat from chaff. Consideration or thoughtfulness is better translated as “knowing with,” “understanding another as like himself”—a capacity indispensable to forgiveness and equity (190). All three capacities prove the crown of ethical virtue, magnanimity, by “bring[ing] the great of soul down from their height ‘to share in speeches and deeds in living together,” while “turn[ing] the wise from gazing at the heavens in searching for the good for themselves and others, a search that issues in ‘knowing with’ others and therefore knowing them as knowers too” (191).
Neither wisdom nor prudence, then, consists of the whole of virtue. To achieve virtue’s purpose, happiness, a human being needs both, must strive for both. They complement one another. Although wisdom and prudence are needed in cities, “there is a good beyond prudence and beyond the political community,” apprehension of which is nonetheless crucial to the well-being of the political community (195). Without the first principles of the Declaration of Independence, where would an invention of prudence, a United States Constitution, find its bearings? “That politics gives orders about everything in the community does not mean that it should rule the gods, just as it should not issue orders to the wise, especially those like Socrates who are wise in human wisdom and who, like the political community, defer to the divine” (195). Politics must leave freedom for piety and philosophy alike.
Book 7 marks a new beginning, a consideration of the human soul, knowledge of which deepens self-knowledge, knowledge of one soul. Nichols marks the difficulty of attaining such knowledge, calling this “Aristotle’s book of perplexities,” of aporiai (199). That politics concerns the soul may be seen in the fact that this is the one place in the Ethics in which Aristotle reveals his own self-knowledge as “one who philosophizes about politics” (1152b). Consideration of the human soul discloses the human need for friendship, which culminates in the highest form of friendship, philosophic friendship, which brings some human beings to “the wondrous pleasures” of philosophy (1177a). The inquiries spurred by wonder never attain perfect or godlike wisdom, however: “Human beings are not the best things in the cosmos, but they can live their lives with them ‘in mind'” (199).
In so living, the human soul needs to exercise self-rule, enkrateia. Self-rule “contends against and controls desires contrary to reason in order to perform virtuous deeds” (200). While some persons are “good-natured”—parents readily distinguish ‘easy babies’ from ‘difficult children’—nature “leaves it to us,” to freely-choosing human beings, to master our powerful desires. One might say that the passions are the ethical equivalents of the natural slaves Aristotle describes in the Politics —beings that perceive reason and can be ruled by it, but do not themselves reason. Self-rule shows “how ethical virtue comes to be, how it is preserved, and what is involved in its practice” (201).
What are souls, these ‘selves’ that we need to rule in order to be virtuous, fully human? Souls’ invisibility makes them difficult to study. True, actions are visible but they are not entirely reliable ‘indicators’ of virtue or vice. “We must judge as best we can” (208). Neither the Sophists nor Socrates provide an adequate roadmap, the Sophists because they are only pretended philosophers, Socrates because he at some points identifies virtue as knowledge, vice as ignorance. While Sophists secretly dismiss knowledge as a support of virtue, Socrates seems to ignore the fact that a soul can know very well what virtue is but fail to do the work needed to achieve it, using reason “to justify desires” not to rule them (212). It is not enough to say to yourself, Be prudent! “One who knows only that he should act as prudence determines would not know what to do” (212-213). Rather, “we must own our knowledge by using it and applying it to particular cases, especially to our own case. Only then do our actions become our own” (213). In fact, the Platonic dialogues show Socrates as a warrior as well as a knower, a man of spiritedness as well as reason. While spiritedness may overrule reason (as seen in the excessive pride Niobe takes in her children, who she claimed were superior to the gods, or in parents and dog owners, who imagine that their babies can do no wrong), reason cannot rule without it. If spiritedness serves the lower instead of the higher it leads to bestiality, to incest—love of one’s own raging out of decent control. Nichols understand Aristotle further to observe that child abuse is the worst kind of bestiality because it causes a cycle of abuse, imitation of parents’ abusiveness by the children which is the exact opposite of the cycle of goodness practiced by the Graces.
Political philosophy can influence self-rule, although it cannot simply cause it, by setting down a set of teachings, which might be adapted into a set of laws, governing pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are conduits to the soul’s nature. This can be turned to good effect because “most people are looking not for the pleasures of a Sardanapalus, the legendary king known for his sensual indulgences… but for joy, blessedness,” the charis of the Charites, the Graces (221). Although pleasure accompanies the good, it is not the good itself; the happiness all humans seek is not pleasure. “Human beings understand themselves to be thinking beings, and their good to consist of using their minds,” but the pleasures should be examined by the mind, since some pleasures are beneficial, others harmful (222). There is pleasure and indeed joy in virtue, and in the reasoning that virtue entails. For human beings, unlike gods, pleasure mixes with pain, since the pleasure of exercising virtue consists in overcoming the pains caused by the passions that cloud reason. Aristotle’s word for the roadway shrines to the Graces literally means “impediments”; the monuments to the Graces symbolize the pains the Graces overcome (226).
The gods enjoy pleasure unmixed with pain. In this sense, one might suggest, as Aristotle does, that “all things by nature possess something divine” (1153b). “He suggests that there is something divine not only about mind, but about life itself, just as he claimed in the Politics that it was impious to destroy life” (228). The measured divinity of life and of the mind makes other human beings worthy of consideration. With this, Aristotle turns to the topic of friendship.
Aristotle “spends more time on the goods [friendship] provides than on any other virtue he has previously discussed,” and friendship too has its “perplexities,” however we might wish it untroubled” (231). Friendships are graceful, “requir[ing] awareness of reciprocal good will” or eunoia—literally, good-mindedness (232). They might be friendships for advantage and utility, for pleasure, or for sharing the good. Only the latter are likely to endure and are the best. Friendship begins in the family but points beyond it, toward the polis (“friendship holds cities together” [1155a]) and even beyond political life to self-awareness and, potentially, to philosophy (a word that has philia, or friendship, built into it).
One of the perplexities of friendship is whether, in desiring the best for your friend, you might want him to become a god. No: if your friend were to become a god, he would no longer be himself, no longer be what he is, a human being: “A friend will wish the greatest good for his friend, not for someone else who he might become.” Nor “would we wish to become gods, for then we would lose our friend, who is good for us.” Friendship is a form of love, and those who love need; human beings, not gods, need friends with whom the pursue the good. Although this love inheres in shared humanity, friendship is not philanthropy, nor is it popularity. “In friendship, we love someone,” a fact that clarifies Aristotle’s previous discussion of equity, whereby a judge judges “the particular” not simply “in light of the universal,” the law, but in light of the circumstances of the case, including the intentions of the one he judges (241). One might go so far as to say that just judges are friends of a sort, even friends of the guilty, giving them what is best for them, even if that is painful, just as a good friend will criticize me if I go wrong. Like a good judge, friendship is just but equitable. Both good judges and good laws need good regimes to support them, regimes that encourage friendship to flourish.
How, then, does friendship move from the family to the city, where judges judge equitably? Parental rule is kingly, consisting of issuing commands for the good of the ruled, the children. Masterly rule is tyrannical, consisting of issuing commands for the good of the master; “there is little or no friendship between a tyrant and his subjects,” any more than there is friendship “between a master and a slave, insofar as he is a slave (1161a30-b6)” (245). Kingship of the “absolute” variety approaches tyranny, and even the best kingship is just only when the child is a child, incapable of sharing in rule. The best friends in the household are the husband and wife, who rule reciprocally, whereby “each has something to contribute, not merely to each other but to the way in which they express their love or their children,” as fathers and mothers tend to rule children in different, complementary ways (251) In so ruling, they bring their children to maturity, into shared rule not in their immediate family but in the polis. “Only with a release from the family can human beings come to develop their potential as political animals,” as “political friends” (252). Political friends or citizens consist of like-mindedness, both in their relations with the regime of the polis and in their enjoyment of freedom to associate in pursuits mutually enjoyed, whether those might be hunting or philosophizing—philosophy itself being a kind of hunt. True, like-mindedness might also describe two men who both want to rule, but if both are virtuous, they will share rule, and if one or both is not virtuous, they are not the best of friends. “Such friendships are likely to be rare, for such people are few” (1156b). “Most people want what is beautiful but choose what is beneficial, and while it is a beautiful thing to do good not in order to be repaid in kind, it i beneficial to have something good done for one” (1162b-1163a).
That is to say that my good friend loves himself because “he is in agreement with himself and desires the same things with all his soul” (1166a). “The intellect chooses the best for itself, and the decent person,” the one of eunoia, “obeys the intellect” (1169a). But such “noble self-lovers rise above self-interest in any narrow sense, in giving so much to their friends” (262) As always in Aristotle, “human happiness… lies in the activity of virtue”; friends compete, but in “benefiting the other, and they ‘retaliate a good deed by doing one in turn,'” like the Graces (262). In doing so, virtuous persons prolong their good activity, making it more effective, that is, better. And in prolonging good activity, they make the polis better. In this, they fulfill their nature as human beings: “A human being is meant for a polis and is of such a nature as to live with others” (1169b).
Friendship also conduces to self-knowledge. We all have our beliefs and opinions, but “how do we know that we aren’t deceiving ourselves?” (265). Self-deception is bad; our friend wants the good for us; he will pull us back from self-deception. “To know oneself, even or especially as someone who thinks, requires knowing another like oneself, someone who also thinks, who affects one’s own thinking, and whose thoughts one affects in turn” (265); friends “perceive together” (1170b). When both the love the good, “they can become more like what they love, and they are able to become better” (271). Nichols quotes Leon R. Kass: “Aristotle brings us to understand that virtue is essential to friendship, friendship is essential to self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is essential to happiness.” [4] Happiness is not something one has. It is “a certain way of being-at-work”; like the virtues that contribute to it, happiness is not a possession but something we do, a way of life (1169b).
The final, tenth book contains “Aristotle’s final word on happiness in the Ethics, although as usual things are not that simple” (275). “We expect that Aristotle will provide a conclusive answer to the governing question of the Ethics as a whole: What is human happiness and what is the best way of life to achieve it—the life of pleasure, of politics, or of theory (275)? But for Aristotle the love of wisdom and the inquiries leading philosophers closer to it seldom conclude. Paul the Apostle ridiculed philosophers as men who are always seeking, never finding, to which Aristotle (and Socrates) might have replied: Exactly so.
Yet neither does Aristotle necessarily hold the philosophic life to be simply superior to all the others. “Contrary to many readings, which understand Aristotle to elevate the life of the mind over the active life of politics and ethical virtue (see 1178a9), I argue that Aristotle finds the theoretical activity that belongs to humans at their best, who are ‘composite beings’ (1178a22), in a range of activities” (277). Both the life of theory and the life of politics, even the life of the gods themselves, “are subject to the divine influence of the Graces” (277).
Aristotle begins book 10 with the theoretical and political question of education, since his preceding discussion of friendship firmly places politics on the foundation of friendship, friendship on the foundation of virtue, and indicates that learning cannot occur without ethical and intellectual virtue. “People educate the young by steering them by means of pleasure and pain” (1172a). That steering has a purpose: “What is most conducive to virtue of character is to enjoy what one ought and hate what one ought” (1172a). Should human beings be steered toward a life of pleasure?
Aristotle denies that pleasure is “altogether base” (280), as the more ascetic souls among us proclaim, but neither is it identical to the good, as the philosopher Eudoxus, whose name means ‘good opinion,’ insists. It is true that we choose pleasure “for itself,” not as a means; in this it resembles happiness (1172b). And some pleasures are good. Still, “not every pleasure is choiceworthy” (1174a). In itself, pleasure is good, but if caused by actions that are bad or have bad effects its goodness will be undermined by those actions or effects. Pleasure is better associated with “replenishment of a natural condition,” “restoration of a deficient condition to a healthy one, learning, and sense perception (283). The last two of these pleasurable conditions please us because they give us a sense of completion “in the now” (284). At the same time, seeing (for example) a temple “in the ‘now’ reveals only the temple’s form, its beautiful structure, but not its origin or end, its past or future, those who constructed the temple and their purpose in doing so” (285). “The present is incomplete without the past or the future but the pleasures of “the now” may lead us to wonder about origins and purposes (285). Then again, “the now,” as experienced, hints at the eternal—the whole, “or the god, which qua eternal cannot be understood in terms of past and future, origin or final cause” 285). Pleasure is a false eternal that can put us in mind of the eternal, if the soul experiencing it is rightly educated. “Pleasure is not the good, but good is the measure by which we can judge and even rank pleasures” (286). Educators should lead students to take pleasure in good activity, life itself being “a certain kind of energeia” wherein each person will direct his energies toward “those things and by means of those capacities that satisfy him most” (1175a).
Human beings take pleasure in play, but “happiness does not consist in play” (1176b). One who dedicated his life to play would not be a spoudaios, an homme sérieux, as the French say in their aspirational moments. Such a man plays in order to be serious, in order to refresh himself. Nichols takes Aristotle’s brief passage on play in 10.6, playfully elaborating on it in a fine and philosophic jazz riff. Aristotle, she suggests, “introduced a novelty in his recapitulation about happiness, play itself, almost in the way play enters life, unplanned and without apparent purpose” (290). Play “gives us reason to trust that we are able to choose things for themselves rather than for their consequences, simply because they are worthy of choice” as we choose “deeds of ethical virtue” for their nobility and acts of thinking for themselves, as were, for their intrinsic delight (291). “Play could be said to celebrate that this freedom and happiness are possible” and to induce us to find them in our serious activities (291). “We must play for the sake of play if we are to play for the sake of our serious work” (292). That is why “Aristotle includes play in book 10 alongside the deeds of ethical virtue and the activity of hat is most divine in us, our minds” (292). It is the philosophic life that sees “the conjunction of seriousness and play” (293).
“If happiness is energeia according to virtue, it is reasonable that it would accord with the most excellent virtue, and this would be the virtue belonging to what is best. So, whether this is the intellect or something else that seems naturally to rule, to command, and to possess intelligence concerning what is noble and divine, whether it itself is in fact divine or the most divine of the things in us—the energeia of this, in accord with the virtue proper to it, would be complete happiness” (1177a). What, Nichols asks, “are the pleasures that belong to philosophy,” that often arduous inquiry into perplexities (294)? Aristotle’s treatment of playfulness can give philosophizing a certain welcome brio along with a needed modesty. If one understands that philosophizing can bring him closer to the truth without any expectation of ever reaching the whole truth, one may delight in serious thinking without descending into some grim dogmatism or into the frivolity of the sophists. “Aristotle’s god does not wonder,” being pure thought thinking itself (295). Human thinking, however, including human thought thinking about human beings—political philosophy—means both “theorizing about human beings and theorizing in the way that human beings can.” For the god, these two ways of thinking are “inseparable”; for human beings, they are related but necessarily separable, and human thinkers must retain that separation, lest they overstep or under-step the humanness of their nature (297). Nichols firmly insists that not only does the Ethics lead to the Politics, to contemplation of the distinctively political nature of human beings, but the Metaphysics does, too. “Philosophy that remains in the pursuit of wisdom must turn to politics” (299).
The reciprocity that defines politics returns us to the Graces. Aristotle does not think of them, or of the other gods, as poets present them. “There is no source in extant literature for the specific tasks of the Graces that Aristotle assigns to them,” and Zeus and his brothers scarcely “serve as promising examples” of the division of ruling powers (301). As for “the god,” as distinguished from “the gods,” “for the divine mind to think but itself” could mean either that the god becomes “identical with the objects of his thought”—which would make the objects of his thought “more honorable than” the god “who has no independence from them”—or that the god “thinks himself in abstraction from any other object of thought,” making him “separate from the world,” unwise with respect to it (302 n.19). This parallels the perplexities Aristotle raises concerning the Platonic ideas—how can such utterly ‘abstracted’ beings cause anything?—but this will not be Aristotle’s last word on the subject. It is nonetheless evident that Aristotelian piety leads him to understand the gods as more just and reasonable than the gods as poets present them.
That is, to the extent we can understand them. “We do not really know enough about the gods to rule out their beneficence, or to know what form their beneficence might take” (304). Therefore, we should neither “claim for ourselves an exclusive capacity for beneficence” nor assume that the gods will take care of us without any effort of our own (305). But “Aristotle can state his own purpose”—to write his book “not only to contemplate virtue but to act virtuously”—even “if he does not know the extent to which the highest is akin to him” (305). He acts not as if under the rule of an angry god but as if under the rule, following the example, of the Graces.
That many do not act as if under the rule of the gods of any kind may be ascribed to poor education. “It is not the need for force as much as it is the need for education that explains Aristotle’s turn to politics, for the lack of education increases the need for force” (307). A tyrant will rule by fear because he has neglected to provide a good education for his subjects. “Aristotle’s new political science…distinguishes politics from despotism,” teaching the need for reciprocity and the need for laws that establish a genuinely civic education, an education in ruling and being ruled in turn (308). Laws come in because, unlike direct rule by persons (very much including parents in the household), the impersonality and universality of law is less likely to stoke resentment. “Those who wish their children to become good must therefore study politics and legislation,” inasmuch as “only in considering the universal can one see what is unique about the particular, and therefore treat it in the best way possible” (309). Enacting such laws is the activity of the statesman, quite possibly one who has read the Ethics and the Politics, mindful of political regimes and of the divine, both.
“A politics in which we deliberate about the beneficial and the just fosters the activity of our minds, and therefore what is most divine in us, without collapsing politics into religion,” since “we govern ourselves, elevated by the models of divine activity of thought and beneficence that Aristotle reflects in his own work” (314). That is also the right way to think about Plato’s ideas. “The politics to which his Ethics leads him is therefore not possible without piety, for it requires the activity of our minds, or what is ‘most akin to the gods,’ while accepting that we are at best only akin, since we are mortal—and hence composite beings” (315).
In her concluding “Afterthought,” Nichols gracefully does what Aristotle himself might well do, were he alive now: explain the relevance of Aristotelian piety for modern liberal political regimes, currently under attack from within and without. The Aristotelian ethical sensibility comports with such regime: “If our kinship with the divine checks moral righteousness and impositions of religious orthodoxy” (319)—the latter being a major concern of modern liberals in their struggle to prevent the continuation of religious warfare. Since the institutions designed by modern liberals encourage politics understood as reciprocal rule, “we need less a reform of our institution than a new way to understand them” (320) Aristotle understands human virtues as “manifestations of freedom” exercised by “living with others and sharing in speeches and actions”—in a word, politics. Church should indeed be separate from State, “but politics and religion are entangled, in the support they need from the other” (322). The Signers of the Declaration of Independence were right to appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world as the fit judge of the rectitude of their intentions. The Graces would smile upon American self-government and indeed upon the commerce that goes on in the commercial republic. Aristotle would agree that prudence dictates that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, however fervently contemporary politicians may call for ‘change.’
What needs to be faced squarely, however, is the modern state, which requires something like modern liberalism if lives, liberties, and the pursuit of happiness were not to be tyrannized by a centralized ruling apparatus fortified with products of modern technology. The modern liberal insistence on individual rights held against the state, along with the complementary insistence that governments effect the safety and happiness of citizens, an insistence given constitutional weight by such devices as representation and federalism, all derive from the necessities imposed by the modern state, which crushed feudal decentralization and whatever might have remained of the ancient polis Aristotle himself might have been skeptical of the prospects for genuine politics within an empire and might have wondered if an empire of liberty could sustain its political liberty, even with its impressive array of instruments of prudence.
Notes
- Well, all right. Zeus and Hera weren’t really (i.e., mythologically) the parents of the Graces. But they should have been, and even a humble book reviewer might conceive of a myth, every now and then, at the risk of being called not graceful but nympholeptic.
- Translations of Aristotle here and throughout are those of Nichols.
- Ann Charney, “Spiritedness and Piety in Aristotle,” in Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophical Investigations from Socrates to Nietzsche, ed. Catherine H. Zuckert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
- Leon R. Kass: “Professor or Friend? On the Intention and Manner of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” in Paul T. Wilford and Kate Havard, eds.: Athens, Arden, and Jerusalem: Essays in Honor of Mera Flaumenhaft (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), p. 26.
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