Ariel Helfer, ed.: Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life. Letters I-IV. Translated with introduction and interpretive essay by Ariel Helfer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023.

 

In his introduction to Plato’s Letters, Ariel Helfer recounts Plato’s three visits to Syracuse. In 387 B.C., when that city-state was ruled by Dionysius the Elder, Plato met the tyrant’s brother-in-law, Dion, whom he converted to philosophy or, perhaps, merely convinced of philosophy’s worth. “Converted” translates the word Socrates uses as he converses with Plato’s brother, Glaucon, in the Republic. Socrates describes the way in which a human soul, chained in place by the rulers, can be “turned around,” away from the idols’ shadows on the walls of the cave. The cave represents the confines of the polis, the idols being the artifacts designed by the rulers to keep the people, shackled in place, in their thrall, taking the shadows of those idols, the opinions given them by the ruler/priests, as truths. The opinions derive from the various stories describing the founding of the polis (often said to have been blessed by the gods) and the alleged heroic actions of its subsequent rulers. Philosophy breaks the shackles and reorients the soul toward the light, nature, outside the cave ruled by conventions. 

Twenty years later, Dionysius having died, and his son having taken the throne, Dion asked Plato to return, reporting that Dionysius the Younger might also be converted to philosophy if Plato tutored him in it while advising him on politics. Rivals of Dion raised suspicions that he and Plato were conspiring against the twenty-year-old ruler; Dionysius believed them, exiled Dion and eventually acceded to allowing Plato to return to Athens. But in 362 B.C., Plato returned, having been told that Dionysius might indeed be brought to philosophize under his guidance. This effort was no more successful than the first. Plato escaped, and Dion returned to Syracuse, fought a civil war, and deposed the tyrant, only to be assassinated by his own false friends. 

The thirteen letters in which Plato describes these events, explaining and defending his motives for acting as he did, may or may not be genuine in whole or in part. Helfer argues not only that they are genuine but that they form a unified whole, a book—indeed, the first known epistolary novel. As such, they give students of Plato a unique “glimpse of Plato in action,” addressing “a distinctive and essential feature of Plato’s political philosophy that, at its peak,” has as its theme “the relationship between philosophy and politics as such.” Whereas the Republic addresses this theme in theory, the Letters addresses it in practice, and, as the proverb goes, actions speak louder than words. This “literary unity thesis” was advanced in 1934 by Franz Dornseiff, a German classicist who held that the letters constitute a fictional or semi-fictional book, its elements “carefully arranged, not in chronological order or by addressee, but in accordance with a more complex plan whereby themes, motifs and lessons are developed or juxtaposed to suit the author’s various intentions.” 

Your reviewer can claim none of the qualifications that would be needed to weigh in on the facts of the matter in any sensible way. He is happy to go along with the Dornseiff/Helfer thesis, however, because it makes the Letters so much more interesting.

Helfer observes that the Letters is the one work in which Plato writes in his own voice, albeit a voice that shifts its tone depending upon whom he addresses. He presents himself as a man who has failed; Dionysius did not convert to philosophy. He acted as he did “to serve the cause of philosophy in Sicily,” but in so doing hardly mentions Socrates, his own philosophic mentor, the central figure in his dialogues; and even then, he describes Socrates not as a philosopher but as an elderly friend, a man of justice and piety, simply. “If not by the light of Socratic wisdom, how did Plato think it best to approach and to manage practical and political affairs?” This turns out not to be an easy question to answer. Though brief, the Letters is complex, indeed as convoluted as a Platonic dialogue. Helfer excellently clarifies the intention behind Plato’s “confusing and paradoxical” manner of writing by dividing his inquiry into three parts: Plato’s political counsel; his “defense and promotion of philosophy”; and the causes and implications of “the disaster that unfolded for Plato in Sicily.” The central inquiry turns up Plato’s “two distinct ways of presenting or discussing philosophy in the Letters, namely, as the need for “a regime of philosophic rulers,” which “Plato presents as the key to humanity’s political salvation,” and, less but in a sense more ambitiously, “the activity of philosophy as a quest for clarity and understanding, and thus for individual fulfillment, without reference to its political utility.” These two ways of thinking about philosophy “roughly correspond to Plato’s relationships with Dion and Dionysius, respectively. To understand “these two different—sometimes even incompatible—portraits” of philosophy, Helfer points especially to the five letters in which philosophy is explicitly discussed: letters Two, Six, Seven, and Ten. He keeps his eyes on the overarching questions: Why did Plato journey to Syracuse, and not only once but three times? How did these journeys, one of which Plato compares to the Odysseus’ dangerous voyage between Scylla and Charybdis, benefit philosophy, the way of life chosen once one’s soul has turned around?

Helfer’s brilliant and, as far as I can see, accurate interpretation leaves his reader with one important task: to put his insights back into Plato’s letters as they unfold within the book, beginning with Letter One, “a portrait of Plato slamming the door shut behind him on his way out of Syracuse,” or, more precisely, from the safety of Athens upon his return. Plato begins the letter to Dionysius with his characteristic citation, “Do well!”—itself a formula worth inquiring into. Is it encouraging or admonitory? What is “well”? And what is the relation of doing to wellness, whatever wellness might be? Plato has already set himself a task.

Whatever wellness is, Plato rebukes Dionysius for failing to do it, in fact for wasting the philosopher’s time, and “such a long time,” at that (309a). Although Plato “had become most trusted of all in managing your rule, you were receiving the benefits while I was enduring the slanders” concocted by envious courtiers (309a). “Brutal things” were done in your regime, and Plato had not “gone along with them” (309b). But even so, “I was sent away more dishonorably than would be proper if you were dispatching a vagrant and directing him to sail away after having been occupied for so long a time with you” (309b). Dionysius’ parting bestowal of a gold coin upon his philosophic guest only added insult to injustice, as it didn’t even cover travel his travel expenses and, besides, gold isn’t as valuable as “the intellect of good, like-minded men” (310a). In parting, Plato offers some stern free advice: “Be strong, and recognize how greatly you have erred with us, so that you may bear yourself better toward others” (310a). To do well, one first needs strength of soul, not the tyrant’s command of physical force.

Well. What are to make of this “sententious reprimand,” as Helfer calls it? Plato has introduced several of the most important topics he will address in the book. The relation between doing and thinking (both the practical thinking a political man needs to undertake and the theoretical thinking of philosophers); the question of how to spend both time and money (that is, the question of one’s way of life); the question of honor, reputation, among both political and philosophic men; the question of how to discern truth, first of all in the political realm, where conspiracies real and imagined (imagined sincerely or cunningly) abound; the question of right or just conduct: none of these matters will be neglected in the letters to come.

Letter Two, the first to discuss philosophy explicitly, also addresses Dionysius. The young tyrant evidently has replied to Plato’s adjuration with one of his own, demanding that Plato restrain his “associates”—evidently, Dion and his friends—from “doing or saying anything nasty” to or about Dionysius. Regime change is afoot, he suspects, not without reason. Plato denies that he rules his associates and, it must be noted, Dionysius, an erstwhile associate, had decided against Plato as an adviser and ruler. “For if I were thus ruling the others, and you, and Dion, then would there be more good things for us and all the other Greeks,” as “I myself am great by rendering myself a follower of my own reason,” rather than the whisperings of the slanderers you consulted before exiling me (310c-d). “In the future,” you ought to test your advisers, especially those ‘conspiracy theorists,’ by checking with me, first. “Send me a note to ask,” for “I shall neither shrink from, nor be ashamed of, speaking the truth” (310d). Speech and reason, the modes of philosophy par excellence, have their limits as means of rule; qua philosopher, one cannot be a king, since not all of one’s subjects will be ruled by you by their consent.

“By nature,” thus beyond but also within the walls of the cave, “practical wisdom and great power come together in the same place, and they always pursue and seek each other and come to be together” (310c). Those who rule need practical wisdom, phronēsis, at a minimum to sustain themselves in rule. And “human beings” as such, not only rulers, “enjoy both conversing about these themselves and hearing others do so, both in private intercourse and in poems” (310c-d). Plato recalls four such instances of partnerships known from histories between the wise and the powerful: Hiero and Pausanias, both of whom conversed with the poet Simonides; Periander of Corinth and Thales the Milesian philosopher; the Athenian Pericles and the philosopher Anaxagoras. Wise Croesus, Solon, and Cyrus, however, are distinctive, in Helfer’s words, because they were lawgivers, “more self-sufficient” than those who needed the wise counsel of others; they combined wisdom and power in one person. Plato also recalls stories of poets concerning Creon and the blind prophet Tiresias, Polyidus and the lawgiver, Minos, Agamenon and wise Nestor, Odysseus and Palamedes, and finally, “as it seems to me,” Prometheus and Zeus (311b). “There is a critical shift in the meaning of phronēsis when we cross over to the poets’ presentations,” Helfer observes; the wise men the poets portray “possess their wisdom through divine revelation or the at of divination,” a wisdom “compatible with, because it is dictated by, their piety; and their usefulness as political advisers lies in their ability to communicate what the gods want or intend.” This raises “a great and abiding question of political philosophy: Is the highest wisdom, and therefore the ultimate guide for human action, accessible to reason and the senses unaided by revelation, or is divine revelation necessary for the most prudent human life and therefore for the best possible regime and laws (cf. Meno 99b1-d5)”?

Whether philosophic or divinely inspired, some of these wise men came “into conflict with one another” (most spectacularly, Prometheus and Zeus), some became “friends,” others “like-minded about some things and conflicting about others” (311c). Given the lasting fame of such stories—fame brought about by nature, by the human nature of rulers, of the wise, and indeed of everyone–you and I, Dionysius, are likely to be remembered in speeches, long after we are dead. Men such as ourselves should “care about the time to come” and the speeches about us that will be made about us; unlike the propensity for listening to such speeches, care about them is not human, by nature, but in accordance with “a certain nature,” the nature of “decent” men as contrasted with the nature of “the most servile” men (311c). They want to “hear well of themselves,” not only now but in the future; Plato even professes that he “make[s] this out to be evidence that those who have died have some perception of things here; for the best souls divine that these things are so, while the most depraved ones don’t say so, but the divinations of the most divine men are more authoritative than those of the men who aren’t” (311d). If Dionysius will not be ruled by the speech of a philosopher, perhaps he might be ruled by the speeches of prophets, by divinely-inspired poets, having something of a longing for immortality in his soul? As for Plato, “I myself say that opinion and speech about the true philosophy will be better if we are decent, but if we are petty, the opposite”; he hastens to add that “we could act no more piously than to take care, nor more impiously than to be careless” (311e). Unlike Anaxagoras, the pre-Socratic materialist philosopher who advised Pericles, adding to the suspicions among Athenian citizens that philosophers are dangerous atheists—very much including Socrates, whose teachings were confusedly associated with materialism by one of his accusers at trial—Plato will not suffer philosophy to be tarred with the atheist brush.

That is, Plato evidently has concluded that if the tyrant will not or cannot philosophize, remaining immune to appeals to the rational part of his soul, then he might respond more favorably to the call to honor, an appeal to the thumotic, the spirited, part of his soul. If Dionysius does not philosophize, might he join Plato in building a good reputation for those who do? “I myself came to Sicily with a reputation of being quite distinguished among those in philosophy; and I wished, by coming to Syracuse, to get you as a fellow-witness in order that, through me, philosophy would be honored even among the multitude” (311e-312a). Plato evidently sees a political alliance between ‘the one’ in Syracuse, its tyrant, and ‘the many,’ the people, an alliance typically made against ‘the few,’ rich and often high-born. But the tyrant’s distrust prevailed, largely because “many” were “making noise” about the philosopher, even as they did in Athens, regarding Socrates (312b). Despite his previous reprimand, he offers Dionysius another chance: “If you have come to disdain philosophy altogether, bid it farewell,” but “if the things from us are agreeable to you, then I also should be honored most” (312b-c). This will “honor philosophy” but also, Plato claims, bring “good repute” to you, “in the view of many,” who will consider you “a real philosopher” for having compared and contrasted the distinguished Plato with unnamed others, even as Socratic philosophers compare and contrast opinions, dialectically (312c). Plato takes care to bring honor under the rule of justice: If you honor me, I will honor you; if you don’t honor me, “I will keep quiet”; “but if I honor you without you giving honor, I will seem to admire and pursue riches, and we know that this, among everyone has no beautiful name” (312c), as it is what the greedy, logic-chopping Sophists do, not the philosophers. Honor begets honor; if you give it, “it is an adornment to us both,” a reciprocally beneficial thing, but if I give it without reciprocity (in Aristotle, the specifically political, non-tyrannical relationship), then “it is a reproach to us both” (312d). Tyrants rule unreasonably and dishonorably; Plato invites this tyrant to elevate his rule, if not to reason then at least to lasting good repute. If he does not, so much the worse for him, and as for Plato and philosophy, they have their own defenders, Plato first among them. As Helfer remarks, “it is not enough for Plato to cut ties and wash his hands of the whole Sicilian affair; he must attend to the rippling effects upon his reputation of having involved himself so openly in an ordeal that is becoming increasingly messy.”

But Plato is not done with holding out the attractions of philosophy to Dionysius. He changes the subject, abruptly, addressing a question Dionysius had raised. “The little sphere is not in the correct condition,” Plato writes (312d). “This is the first indication in the Letters of what Plato’s education of the tyrant Dionysius may have contained,” Helfer remarks, and this is “the only passage in the Platonic corpus in which Plato himself explicitly undertakes to teach someone the highest principles of his philosophy.” But what is the “little sphere”? Helfer suggests that it is an orrery, a model of the cosmos used to teach astronomy and the geometry that underlies it, pursuant to “an education in the mathematical necessities underlying reality as we know it, which has the power of liberating the student from superstition by suggesting the possibility of a comprehensive causal account of the cosmos that is naturalistic or does not have recourse to supranational divinities or other supernatural elements.” More, and more cryptically, Plato mentions “the nature of the first”—the first cause, the archē of the cosmos?—the “king of all things” around whom all things orbit and move “for the sake of him” (312d). Plato links “the first” ruler of all to nobility; he is “responsible for all the noble things” (312d). Helfer cautions that “Platonic interpreters over the millennia have espoused such a great variety of unprovable hypotheses regarding the identity of Plato’s ‘king of all things’ as should make us wary of offering yet another attempt at deciphering the enigmas.” Plato complicates rather than clarifying the enigma by mentioning “second things” that “are around a second” and “third things around a third” (312e). The enigma, Helfer prudently observes, may be the point; these truths, if they are truths, are far from self-evident. “The human soul reaches out to learn about them, what sort of things they are, looking to the things akin to itself, of which none is in sufficient condition” (313a). Mystery induces wonder, and wonder induces a certain kind of erotic longing, a longing not for bodies or even for souls but for the truth about the whole; here philosophy or the love of wisdom begins, whether or not fear of God or gods is where wisdom begins. But human souls do not begin as beings capable of approaching these mysterious things, and many will never be capable. Still, the soul asks, “What sort of thing” is the cosmos, with its first, second, and third orbits and causes? Just as Dionysius was ’caused’ by his parents, born of his mother, Doris, in pain, so one result of the erotic longing of philosophy produces “labor pains” not in the body but in the soul (313a). These labor pains are “responsible for all evils,” and “until one is relieved of them, one never really hits upon the truth” (313a). All evils? This might mean that the strife of politics, caused not only by eros misdirected towards physical pleasure, not only by eros misdirected towards false honor, towards ‘lording it over’ other human beings, can also derive from wrongful understanding of the divine and of nature, misunderstandings concerning “the nature of the first.” 

Plato tells Dionysius that these considerations indicate “how we need to be disposed to one another” (313c). He does not propose a return to Syracuse. The philosopher and the tyrant should instead communicate through an intermediary, Archedemus, with Dionysius continuing to ask such questions, and any other “perplexities” that may “seize you” (313d). “And if you do this two or three times, and sufficiently test the things sent from me,” in the Platonic-Socratic way, “I would be amazed if the things that are presently perplexing will not come to be very different for you than they are now. Take heart, therefore, and do thus; for never did you dispatch, nor will Archedemus ever transport, a thing nobler and dearer to the gods than this cargo.” (313e-314a). Helfer writes, “If this letter should inspire Dionysius to believe that Plato can help him resolve his philosophic problem”—a decidedly big “if,” Helfer ventures to observe—than “Plato will be in a better position to dictate the future terms of their relationship and thereby to manage the problems he identified in the letter’s first half.” Given the pains one must endure in philosophizing, and given Plato’s rather forbidding remark that some of his students have taken “no fewer than thirty years” to experience what Helfer calls “the shift in perspective Plato unrealistically proposes.” Dionysius “may remain in a kind of intellectual limbo of partial understanding for the rest of his life.”

Plato ends his second letter to Dionysius with a warning about their means of reciprocation, their means of long-distance philosophic dialogue through an intermediary. “Beware lest these things ever be exposed to uneducated human beings” (314a). While “many” might conceivably learn to respect philosophy, that will never happen if they learn the thoughts generated by philosophizing, which seem “ridiculous” to them (314a). And even those of “good natures” may distort them, making them seem “inspired” instead of rationally achieved in a laborious process Plato likens to the purification of gold (314a). Again, beware: “Beware in examining these things lest you come someday to regret their having been unworthily exposed now,” an evil that can be avoided if you learn them “by heart” instead of writing them down (314c). Despite all Plato has written in all of his complex, often aporetic, sometimes lengthy dialogues, “I have never written anything at all about these things,” nor shall I (314c). My Socratic dialogues do not portray the elderly Socrates, who was my friend, but “a Socrates become beautiful and strong” (314c), as it were a mythological Socrates, one who, he hints, is no “mouthpiece for Plato himself,” as Helfer puts it. Do not rely on my writings for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, you jurors who read this letter. Instead, he writes to the tyrant, “read this letter many times,” committing it to memory, putting it into your soul, then “burn it up” (314c). 

Helfer raises a skeptical eyebrow. Dionysius evidently did not burn the letter. Perhaps he did not want ardent but arduous philosophy to get too far into his heart. Nor did Plato necessarily expect him to burn it, or to burn with curiosity about the nature of the first, or at least to burn long enough to raise his mind to it. Readers of Plato’s writings will not find truths laid out for them; his writings, are dialogic and fictionalized, dramas of philosophic dialectic (itself a sort of drama), whose golden words must be purified by persistently inquiring minds. “It is only in Letter Two that Plato provides an honest acknowledgment of the ‘labor pains’ brought about by the deepest philosophic questioning,” the “psychological obstacles to the pursuit of Platonic philosophy” as distinguished from the logical challenges addressed in the famous Letter Seven. These psychological obstacles include the human-all-too human inclination to reason only a bit, only until it becomes painful—too difficult, too challenging to one’s own prior attachments.

In this, philosophizing shares something in common with tyrannizing, although not in Nietzsche’s sense of being the most spiritual manifestation of the will to power, or in Augustine’s related sense of the libido dominandi. Socrates was charged not only with impiety, with claiming that the earth is nothing but a stone, with nothing divine about it, but with corrupting the young, making them into immoralists. In a sense, philosophizing does indeed ‘corrupt’ the young in the estimation of the rulers of the polis, insofar as it makes them deviate from unquestioning belief in the nobility and veracity of the idols of the cave. Tyrants also challenge convention; in antiquity, a tyrant was often defined as a monarch who came into power without the blessing of law. But to found any regime, to change the existing regime, requires tyranny so defined, such lawbreaking, as Helfer sees. And would not Plato’s efforts to reform the tyrant, to turn his soul to philosophy, if seriously intended, not change the regime of Syracuse, at very least making Dionysius a just if not legitimate ruler, or, if the turn is complete, leading him away from ruling the polis altogether, preparing the way for Dion’s planned revolution? At the end of the letter, after his instruction to burn it, Plato (Helfer notices) advises Dionysius on “more mundane” matters than the nature of the first. It transpires that Plato and Dionysius have been engaged in a sort of commerce in human beings, as Plato sends some of his philosophic companions to Dionysius’ court, where they enjoy the same dangerous patronage he had enjoyed, for a while. Why send philosophic youths to the tyrant? As Helfer remarks, democratic Athens was not necessarily safer for philosophers than tyrannized Syracuse. And it was Dionysius, not respectable Dion nor the Athenian polloi, who did engage in philosophy “somewhat seriously for some period of time.” 

By the time of Plato’s third consecutive letter to Dionysius, circumstances have changed. Plato signals this immediately, shifting from his characteristic salutation, “Do well!” to “Rejoice!” That sounds quite buoyant, until one learns that Plato has heard that Dionysius has written to the Delphic oracle, “Rejoice and preserve a tyrant’s life of pleasure” (315b-c). That is no way to address a god. “I, on the other hand, would not, in a call to a human being—let alone a god—encourage anyone to do this: to a god, because I would be commanding against nature, for the divine lies far away from pleasure and pain; to a human being, because pleasure and pain engender much harm, the pair of them begetting badness at learning, forgetfulness, imprudence, and hubris in the soul” (313c). For Plato, a god is limited to his nature; the Delphic god, Apollo, in particular, has a rational nature. To ascribe a life of pleasure to a god, and especially that god, is to contradict, to misunderstand, his nature and indeed the natural order, the cosmos itself, and perhaps “the nature of the first,” whatever that might be. In Helfer’s words, “according to Plato, gods are constrained by nature; knowledge of nature can indicate to us such limitations as may exist on the power of the gods.” It is also to misunderstand philosophy and to ignore the natural limits of human beings. Readiness to learn, memory, prudence, and the intention to follow a rational inquiry wherever it leads, without preening oneself on one’s intelligence or on what one has learned so far are all indispensable to philosophy as a way of life, as a sort of regime. As Helfer remarks, “pleasure is not simply the good, nor is pain simply the bad (though it is bad). Each must be evaluated according to its utility in fostering intellectual virtue, and both pleasure and pain are found to be positively harmful when measured by this standard.” Plato’s salutation is therefore ironic, biting; if Dionysius knew himself, knew his own nature as a human being, he would neither address a god as if a god were a pleasure-seeking tyrant nor expect any god to bless him for being one.

Helfer associates Plato’s salutation and admonition with his concern for the reputation of philosophy, since “Dionysius’ attitude toward the gods might well be thought to be a reflection of the education he received from Plato,” including Plato’s teaching on the nature of the first. Dionysius’ greeting to Apollo “is driven by the tyrant’s regrettable lack of prudence or practical wisdom”—characteristic of the hubristic soul. And there is more, an indication that Plato has the prudence Dionysius lacks. Since, as we know, Plato expects anything written down to circulate beyond its immediate readership, this defense of philosophy will convince more of its future readers than Socrates’ public apologia. “A man who publicly defends himself in writing against slander and rumor will be suspected of distorting the facts in his own favor,” so “he stands a better chance of winning the trust and favor of his judges if his private correspondence concerning the very matters in which he requires a defense appears to exonerate him.” Dionysius may never achieve such prudence, which is indispensable to any ruler. He will fail not only at philosophizing but at ruling. His incapacity to “do well” as a ruler, his rejoicing in pleasure, confuses him with respect to the nature of the ‘final’ rulers, the gods; his character prevents him from thinking, from living, from ruling well.

Pleasure knows no limits; tyrannical love of pleasure comports with rule without limit, over one’s own people and over others. Tyranny is imperialistic. Plato rebukes Dionysius for telling some ambassadors that he, Plato, had “prevented” him from liberating Greek city-states in Syracuse from barbarian rule and from “replacing the rule of tyranny with kingship” in Syracuse and had later urged Dion to overthrow his rule (315d). On the contrary, as “you yourself know,” while in Syracuse “I was taking seriously, in a measured way”—a non-tyrannical way—some “other, minor things and the preludes to the laws” (316a)—an introductory explanation, as Americans would place a preamble to their constitution. Measure and law characterize kingship, not tyranny; Dionysius has slandered Plato in an attempt to deflect blame for his own bad acts of omission and commission. So, let’s set the record straight. “I came to Syracuse, having been called by both you and Dion” (316c). Plato had known Dion, his guest-friend and a mature man; Dionysius was then young, inexperienced, and “very unknown to me” (316d). Once you had exiled Dion, “the sensible partner,” I was stuck with you (316d). There being no genuine reciprocity, no political relations, with a tyrant, “by necessity” I could only “bid farewell to the political things for the remainder of the time” I spent in Syracuse, prudently “bewar[ing] the slanders of the envious” and continuing to serve as a friend to you “as much as possible” (316e). When Dionysius undertook a war, Plato finally negotiated his release; Plato does not associate himself or philosophy with physical warfare. Thus ended his first expedition to Syracuse.

Once peace returned, Dionysius repeatedly wrote to Plato, urging him to return and promising to bring Dion back, too. Dion himself wanted Plato to accede to these requests, “to sail and not become soft” (317c). But by now (some two decades on), Plato could make the excuse of advanced age and also point to the continued slanders of himself and of Dion by those Syracusans who wanted none of their own pleasures, gratified by the “riches and the power of the rest of excessive property,” the licentiousness, of the Syracusan way of life, reflecting as it did the character of the tyrant (317d). Part of the property in question belonged to Dion, and there were those who had their eyes on it. Plato finally yielded, as “there was need that no one of my friends ever accuse me on the grounds that, because of my faintness of heart, all that was his”—Dion’s—though “it might not have been lost, was utterly destroyed” (317e). Upon arriving, I requested that you “reconcile with Dion and recall him,” and “had you then obeyed me,” things might have turned out better “for you, and for the Syracusans, and for the other Greeks” (317e). But as it happened, you allowed others to appropriate his property, bringing on Dion’s military invasion and the ongoing civil war. For his part, you, Dionysius, accused Plato of being Dion’s ally against him, and in your clouded vision as a “doer of injustice,” acting “for the sake of money,” this is true; I would not be “persuaded by the greatness of your rule to betray an old friend and guest-friend who was doing badly because of you—someone in no way worse than you, if I may so so—and choose you,” doing “everything in whatever way you commanded” in “your wolf-friendship” (318d-e). Dionysius took the occasion to scorn Plato and his teaching, saying, cuttingly, “So it’s once I had been educated, to do geometry? Or what?” (319c). So much for the utility of a liberal education. In his hubris, the tyrant remains tyrannical. What is the point of continuing to advise him?

Plato’s friend, Dion, is morally better than Dionysius, but is he better for philosophy? In Letter Four, Plato writes to Dion, following his exchange with Dionysius, and after the tyrant’s overthrow, regarding Dion’s exile, his property, and especially his intention to found a new, more just regime of Syracuse. Plato describes himself as having been “very serious” about seeking a resolution to their affairs in Syracuse and with its ruler, “for the sake of love of honor for the noble things more than anything else,” as “I believe it to be just that those who are in truth decent and who do such things hit upon the proper reputation” (320a-b). While the virtue of courage, and the physical attributes of speed and strength “would seem to belong also to certain others,” truthfulness, justice, magnificence, and decorum concerning truth, justice, and magnificence should be honored even more (320b-c). Honor, good repute, should be Dion’s concern, inasmuch as “you are watched by all” (320d). “Be prepared to show up Lycurgus himself as outdated, as well as Cyrus, and anyone else who ever seemed to be distinguished for his character and regime” (320d-e). But, Plato warns, foreign onlookers have also seen that the very love of honor among eminent Syracusans, including those who have been your allies in the civil war, now threatens Dion’s enterprise with factionalism. Consider that “you seem to some to be rather lacking in the proper courtesy. Let it not escape your notice that it is through being agreeable to human beings that it is possible to act, but stubbornness dwells in loneliness. Good luck.” (321b-c). Dion has his own problem with hubris, and that hubris has made him as much a ‘man alone’ as Dionysius was. As Helfer puts it, “Dion never understood or cared about the animosity he aroused in Syracuse with his rigid, moralistic preaching about philosophy.” This must have been especially irksome to Syracusans, and especially dangerous to Dion and his effort at political founding, given the pleasure-loving ethos of the previous regime, long ingrained in both ‘the few’ and ‘the many’ there. It was a more successful founder, Solon, who conceded that he had given Athenians not the best laws but such laws as they could bear. In his entrancement with the idea of the Platonic philosopher-king, in his hubristic supposition that he could become such a one, Dion may be setting himself up for political failure. And for Plato, he is also discrediting philosophy, albeit in the opposite way Dionysius had done. Whereas Dionysius’ friendship with Plato could be slandered as the corruption of a once-noble youth, a reprise of Anaxagoras’ corruption of Pericles, a case of philosophy inducing a good boy to go bad, Dion’s friendship with Plato could be slandered as the inculcation of priggishness, a case of philosophy making our ruler insufferable. Either way, “the reputation of philosophy” takes a hit; after all, Helfer writes, “the whole doctrine of philosopher-kingship, and in this sense the whole Republic, were conceived out of a necessity Plato felt to praise philosophy in light of his observations of political life,” an attempt “to bolster the public image of philosophy,” especially in view of the dialogic character of Socratic-Platonic philosophy. To engage in dialogue, one needs other people; to perpetuate the philosophic enterprise, the way of life or regime of philosophy, one needs to locate philosophers within political regimes. But if the figure of the philosopher-king is mistaken for a tyrant or as a pest of a priest, philosophers and the philosophy they practice will remain at peril. “In Dion’s zealous love of Platonic philosophy as the truest foundation of justice and virtue, we see something of what Plato hoped people would think and say about philosophy on the basis of his work.” Those hopes are now dimming, now that the not-really-philosophic moralist, also a moralist who lacks one needful virtue, prudence, has managed to boost himself into a position of rule. Helfer calls Letter Four the equivalent of the comic satyr play that traditionally followed the presentation of a series of three tragedies in the Greek theater. While Dionysius’ failure to become a philosopher ended in tragedy, Dion’s impending failure to become a “founding lawgiver” for Syracuse evokes the “poignant humor of this letter.” It, too, will end in the death of the protagonist, but it may be that some deaths are tragic, some comic. Might Dionysius’ story be tragic because in him Plato lost a potential philosopher (as Nietzsche said of Emerson)—eros misdirected is still eros, after all—while more thoroughly tested Dion could never have been a real philosopher?

Machiavelli lauds his prince as a man alone. Plato shows why the sort of thing is not to be praised. An isolato will not do well, by Platonic or even Machiavellian standards, although he may at times rejoice.

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

1. 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.
2. Translations of Aristotle here and throughout are those of Nichols.
3. 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).
4. 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.

François-Jean Marquis de Chastellux: Agriculture and Population the Truest Proofs of the Welfare of the People: Or, an Essay on Public Happiness: An Investigation on the State of Human Nature Through the Several Periods of History, from the Earliest Date to the Present Time. Originally published in 1772. Volume II.

 

Having pointed to the deficiency of human happiness, of the welfare of the people in antiquity, in his second volume Chastellux turns to modernity, arguing that his Europe, Europe in the eighteenth century, has seen the widest extension of public happiness in world history, although he expects better still to come. The immediate task is to remove the vestiges of feudalism while fending off a mistaken esteem for ‘the ancients.’

Because there is a “connection between the happiness of mankind and their legislation,” and “the rude covenants which supplied the place of laws amongst the barbarian nations” of early Europe have not been thoroughly expunged, these drags on humanity ought to be removed (II. Sec.3. i.1). Europe’s rude origins persist, as seen in such terms as ‘fief,’ ‘vassalage,’ and ‘lord paramount’—words indicating that Europeans are “the heirs of the Goths and the Lombards” (II. Sec. 3. i.2). To this day, even representations of antiquity can bring European savagery to the surface, as when “young students from the academy, or perhaps even from the philosophical schools,” attend some play featuring “an actor, whom the public seem to idolize,” offend one another during the course of the performance, and end up killing one another in a duel (II. Sec.3. i.2-3). “One might suppose the theater to be filled with the citizens of Athens,” but they are, “in their transports,” “converted into Sicambrians, or Scandinavians” (II. Sec.3. i.3).  But simply “examine our laws, observe our customs, and see how continually prejudice and reason, politeness and barbarity are blended together”; Europeans still “resemble those formidable animals, whom it is necessary to render tame,” and to do so “we must think on their natural ferocity” (II. Sec.3. i.3). As for their barbaric past, “it is of little consequence what we have been, provided there be no reason to blush for what we are” (II. Sec.3. i.3). Even with that barbaric past the differences between “our laws and the laws of the ancients” are considerable and worthwhile (II. Sec.3. i.5).

The connection between human happiness and law, indeed between law and the character of men “in general,” consists of example and custom. “What people shall set these examples, what people shall form these customs”—the rulers, the politeuma—must therefore be understood (II. Sec.3. i.4). We must not then hesitate to trace Europe’s origins back to feudalism, “if we wish to acquire some idea of those powerful nations, who, dividing amongst each other the western part of this little quarter of the globe, called Europe, are, to the eye of philosophy and reason, the whole world” (II. Sec.3. I.5). Nor is Chastellux indulging in what anthropologists will later call ‘ethnocentricism’: not only did the Europe of his time enjoy substantial imperial ‘reach’ on other continents, but modern philosophy and reason, in the form of modern science and the technology it has invented, were already transforming the world in their image, from Beijing to Rio de Janeiro. As he foresaw, modernity has conquered the planet, and Chastellux anticipated that it might.

He is also right about conquest. Europeans are “all equally the posterity of those barbarous people who have ravaged the earth. Here are no indigenous nations. Our ancestors have all conquered the country which we inhabit, or, at least, continued to be the sources of a future race, they, notwithstanding, yielded up their rights, their customs, and even their names to the conquerors” (II. Sec.3. i.5). The universality of modernity and of conquest are facts that our contemporary ideologues of ‘Third Worldism’ incline to cover over.

Throughout all of human life, ancient, medieval, and modern, two human types have predominated: agriculturalists, living in fertile lands, migrating peacefully only when the lands they have cultivate give out; and warriors, living in mountains or deserts, probably fugitives from the valleys but returning to conquer them when the comfortably settled populations become “corrupted by success,” no longer able to fight (II. Sec.3. i.6). “Hence arise two principles of government, absolutely opposite to each other: and from hence, also, proceeds the entirely new organization of political societies,” the one active, the other passive (II. Sec.3. i.11). 

What was “the general spirit, which actuated the barbarians, who invaded our western countries” (II. Sec.3. i.13)? Feudalism existed “in potentia amidst the first establishment of these barbarians” (II. Sec.3. i.16). Barbarians were organized as military units, a “politico-military” order,” with “a king, chiefs, and officers”; “this army takes possession of a country in which they mean to settle” (II. Sec.3. i.19). They enslave the peaceful farmers, whom they rule initially “with terror,” but the longer they stay the more “the conquerors melt into humanity, and the laws and customs of [the farmers] begin to prevail” (II. Sec.3. i.21). The barbarians slowly become civilized, while retaining “all their singular ideas of a personal vassalage,” obedience to a person, a form of rule “independent of properties” persisting in an agricultural setting for which property rights are necessary for prosperity (II. Sec.3. i.17n.). 

Chastellux considers England a purer example of such rule than France. The Gauls, when conquered by the barbaric Franks, were already under subjection to the Roman law, but the English Saxons were half-savage, conquered by the Romans but never fully mastered by them. In England, chieftains, called ‘thanes,’ ruled clans consisting of freemen and serfs. The clans met in assembly and, unlike the Franks, who were “always at war,” the Saxon clans for the most part stayed at home, cultivating their lands (II. Sec.3. i.39). Even Charlemagne, who reduced many of the warring peoples of continental Europe “to subjection,” could not establish solid property rights and never adequately moderated “the spirit of war” there (II. Sec.3. i.43). After Charlemagne, “the lot of humanity was more miserable than ever” (II. Sec.3. i.43).

Nonetheless, “an entirely new form of government,” an “effect of chance” unanticipated by “the ancients who discussed, supposed, and guessed at everything,” proceeded from this first stage of feudalism. “This is feudal government in its second state, in its regularity, and such as it still exists in our times” (II. Sec.3. 43). Beginning with Henry IV, French kings exchanged “benefices” for revenues, supplies, and services from the aristocrats. Benefices were guarantees that aristocratic lords could pass their titles to their heirs. But by stabilizing aristocratic succession the kings strengthened the aristocrats vis-à-vis themselves. The Roman Catholic priests, often the second sons of aristocrats, took the opportunity to enrich themselves. “The people alone are neglected: they were considered as the spoil for which all disputed, the prey form which each received his share of carnage” (II. ec.3. i.46-47). The people were granted very limited rights, namely, instruction in reading and writing for the children, liberty to sell their produce at market, and a sub rosa right to settle disputes among themselves—this, a privilege formally reserved to their landlords.

But with the weakening of monarchy and the laws monarchs had established and enforced, aristocrats began to fight one another, again. “One barbarous, dreadful law long remained; it was the law of war,” specifically, “combats against each other, and even against their sovereigns, whensoever their feudal rights could not be otherwise determined” (II. Sec.3. i. 49). This was trial by combat, “worthy of such ferocious men” (II. Sec.3. i.49). On occasions when they became exhausted, aristocrats turned not to the monarch but to their fellow aristocrats among the clergy for arbitration of disputes. At the same time, while “the church usurped an authority over the secular powers, the pope usurped an absolute authority over the church,” eventually raising their own armies and attacking “the most respectable crowns” with the weapon of excommunication (II. Sec.3. i.53). “Ferocious chiefs, satiated with having worried each other, and at once he victims of absurd credulity and infamous debauchery,” saw their riches squandered by Church-inspired attempts to conquer Jerusalem, having abandoned their estates for the deserts of Palestine (II. Sec. 3. i.54). With “all policy, divine and civil, violated and aggravated by turns, such is the picture in which human misery and depravity seem carried to their utmost length” (II. Sec.3. i.54). Even the revival of learning seen in the thirteenth century amounted to something like the temporary rally of the terminally ill, who “recover from a long agony to breathe for a moment, and then relapse” (II. Sec.3. i.54). “It may with propriety be said, that wheresoever the mind can make herself mistress of the truth, the worst is over. In this respect, she resembles a swallow which, being confined within a room, strikes itself a hundred times against the wainscot or the ceiling, before it can discover the window, which some beneficent hand has thrown open to facilitate its escape.” (II. Sec.3. i.59n.). No such beneficent hand extended to European minds during these centuries. 

Given the existence, and persistence, of the feudal system throughout Europe, Chastellux must still account for the differences between England, France, Germany, and Italy within that system, significant differences indeed. Although the Normans conquered England in 1066, a series of “shocks” (rebellions, famine, plagues) enabled “the great vassals” eventually to take arms “for the preservation of their rights,” less than two centuries later (II. Sec.3. i.59). “From hence arose that government of property and representation, that free and half-democratical government which subsists at present” (II. Sec.3.59-60). Not so in France, where “new forms were introduced” not by the aristocrats but by the kings; these new forms included the “Estates General” and the system of “sovereign courts,” the beginnings of “absolute monarchy” (II. Sec.3. i.60). In Germany, “ignorance, ferocity, differentiation [i.e., the many sovereign German political communities], and a rival spirit kept alive by a balance of powers” sustained themselves longer than in other European countries; “force was the perpetual alternative” to reconciliation (II. Sec.3. i.60). Finally, Italy saw “two tyrants”—pope and Holy Roman emperor—ruling “under pretense that they were successors,” one of the Apostle Peter, the other of Charlemagne—jostled for power along with many city-state republics and “little tyrants” who squabbled internecinally rather in the manner of the ancient Greeks (II. Sec.3. i.61). Chastellux examines each country in more detail.

“In England, the first complaints were made by the Great, against the crown” (II. Sec.3. i.62). These aristocrats allied with the burghers, many of them in the commercial towns. This led to the Magna Carta, stipulating an elected Parliament “always assembled, always in action, under the name of conservators of the public liberties (a wise precaution, to which this Charter is indebted for its permanence)” (II. Sec.3. i.63). The aristocracy was divided into greater and lesser barons, the latter eventually “blended with the simple knights,” a much more numerous class; “this is the origin of what the English call Gentry” (II. Sec.3. i.63 and 63n.). Since only the greater barons could afford to attend Parliament regularly, it became effectively a ‘house of lords.’ Near the end of the thirteenth century, Edward I called together representatives of the gentry in the counties and the burghers in the towns to assemble in the ‘Model Parliament’; this ‘house of commons’ was empowered not only to advise but to consent to laws. “Of all portions of the British government,” the House of Commons “is the portion the most founded on reason, and the most favorable to property” (II. Sec.3. i.64).

“In France, the case is totally different” (II. Sec.3. i.66). There, “the people, harassed by the tyranny of the Great, and a general anarchy, had recourse to the royal authority” (II. Sec.3. i.66). Thus dependent upon royal favor, the people had no institutional ground on which to defend their liberties. Although eventually assembled in Philip the Fair’s “Third Estate,” French burghers acted “like some inferior, admitted to the table of a great man”; moreover, they were called to assemble only occasionally, when the king was assured of their compliance to his wishes, for brief sessions that allowed little or no time for debate. “Thus, then, these assemblies rather contributed to shake the feudal government,” to hinder the aristocrats and empower the king, “than to establish a representative government” (II. Sec.3. i.69). Meanwhile, the clergy amassed riches; France is “continually destined to be the victim of religion” (I. Sec.3. 2.78). Religious persecution of Christians deemed heretics (most notably the Albigenses) and Jews roiled the country; “an intolerant spirt has raged in France as violently as in any other state whatever” (II. Sec.3. ii.87). [1] There was no real peace under the kings from Clovis through Louis XIV—well beyond the medieval period. 

Chastellux calls medieval Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, “a great Club of sovereigns, who have subjected themselves to strict rules and chosen one of their number to take the great chair” as emperor, “and act as president” (II. Sec.3, i.72). Thus, the rights of the princes are respected, the rights of the people largely neglected. “The question is whether the Germanic government renders the people more happy,” and the answer is no; they “languish under oppression” (II. Sec.3. i.73). While the regime guards the hunting rights of one prince another, it “also deprives Germany of fine roads, of canals, of arts, and of riches,” with guard houses instead of manufacturers dotting the landscape (II. Sec.3. i.73). 

In Italy, the rivalry between Emperor and Pope has allowed the several “weaker states a time to rise and to secure themselves” (II. Sec.3. i.62-63). Of Italy’s two “celebrated republics,” Venice is the worse, the rulers “keep[ing] the people in ignorance and slavery,” the aristocrats conspiring against one another in the Great Council, at times active, at times devolving power into the hands of the smaller Council of Forty, effectively a subcommittee of the larger, unwieldy, factionalized Great Council. The Doge, elected for life by the Great Council, often encouraged such factionalism. Chastellux reserves discussion of the other important republic, Florence, for his consideration of the Renaissance. 

In general, then, modern European governments owe their origins to barbarism. “Formed in ignorance,” European governments remain shadowed by some of “the darkness that covered the earth from the Constantine to the Medicis” (II. Sec.3. i.74). “Our monarchies are old, but our reason is still young” (II. Sec.3. i.74). The problem was that philosophy and the “agreeable arts” generally, once awakened, remained where they were in Constantine’s time, with the “rational sciences neglected,” “the study of nature” still subordinated to “the study of words”; “all minds were possessed with a passion for frivolous controversies and empty subtleties” (II. Sec.3. i.75). That is, the Renaissance or rebirth of thought, the period from Erasmus to Descartes, saw “the human understanding…engaged in little else but sharpening its faculties”—a good thing in itself, but not yet conducive to the public happiness (I. Sec.3. i.75). Chastellux decries his contemporaries’ “frenzy for exalting the past ages, at the expense of blackening the age in which we live” (II. Sec.3. ii.88). Such sentiments impede “the progress of human reason”: “What, in fact, can be more discouraging than this persuasion, that as we proceed, we constantly become worse?” (II. Sec.3. ii.89). On the contrary, in “those times, in which the useful sciences [were] not being sufficiently expanded, mankind could only have acted right by chance or by instinct” (II. Sec.3. ii.89). The notion that we must deplore the luxuries of modern times in contrast with the austere piety of the Middle Ages and even the rebirth of philosophy in the Renaissance ignores the fact that in those times “the only remedy which could be devised” to stop plague and famine was “to order prayers and processions,” while “the causes and the cures of plagues [were] not the objects of inquiry” (II. Sec.3. ii.96). “More processions but no physicians”: such was the “convention suggested by ignorance, to preserve the union of terror and idleness” seen in the clergy (II. Sec.3. ii.96). “The good old time is a moral superstition; it will, indeed, pass away like other superstitions, but its disappearance will be later, on account of those vain ideas with which it is connected,” especially the supposition that “sound morals” are “the fruits of opinion” instead of “honest toil” (II. Sec.3. ii.107). Religious orthodoxy and the valorization of military heroism result from, and reinforce, indolence and aristocracy, regimes in which rule over opinion and contests of honor prevent the peaceful virtues of industry and thrift from flourishing, and indeed look down upon those virtues with contempt. “In order to regret the good old time, it is necessary to be ignorant. It must however be confessed that, in these times,” near the culmination of the Enlightenment, ignorance is still no rarity” (II. Sec.3. ii.110).

Prior to the Enlightenment, “people were not only strangers to real happiness,” they “had never taken the road which might have led to it,” and even “the most esteemed governments, and the most revered acts of legislation have never been directed to that sole end of all government, the acquisition of the greatest welfare of the greatest number of individuals” (II. Sec.3. iii.112). Crucially, this is also the “universal end of all philosophy” (II. Sec.3. iii.124). Chastellux regards the purpose of government and of philosophy to be identical, very much unlike the more cautious political philosophers of classical antiquity, who understood the political life and the philosophic life to be in tension; philosophy might find ways to prevent Athens from sinning twice against philosophy, but the inclination to such sin would always be there. Chastellux shares the optimism of the moderns, and especially of the Enlightenment moderns. “We shall attempt to prove, first, that a principle tending towards perfection, a cause of amendment, exits at present; secondly, that this principle and this cause have already acted in a very sensible manner” (II. Sec.3. iii.112-113). He is convinced that although religion and classical philosophy, wedded to one another and to the regimes of prior times, precipitated catastrophe, the modern philosophy of the Enlightenment, liberated from religion but wedded to regimes, and especially to republican regimes, will enable man to reach “the height of moral perfection” in accordance with a “science, a doctrine for each individual” and “a science for societies, for empires, and for mankind in general” (II. Sec.3. iii.113). 

What has delayed the Enlightenment, and what hinders it, still? “We generally err,” even when we reason, “by considering things too abstractly” (II. Sec.3. iii.115). Here is where Florence comes in. “Happy Florence! dear to every people, free, yet not ambitious, rich, yet not conquering! thou, New Athens! and yet far more amiable, far more fortunate than Athens, since without falling under the yoke of tyrants, thou has rather appeared to abdicate than to lose thy liberty, and has, in fact, only exchanged it, for the mildest of all governments” (II. Sec.3. iii.118). Florence under the rule of the Medici, “justly considered as the restorers of arts and sciences,” benefited by the fall of the Greeks, who were “the greatest enemies of reason” because they reasoned abstractly, fell to the Turks (II. Sec.3. iii.120). “It was a fortunate stroke in favor of the human understanding, when the saber of the Turks cut asunder the Gordian knot of this miserable logic,” tool of the Catholic Church (II. Sec.3. iii.121). In the Renaissance, “the study of books…preceded the study of things,” and that is understandable, as “to read usefully, it was first necessary to read right” (II. Sec.3. iii.122). While it is true that “when these studies had been revived, still mankind remained, for a while at a greater distance from the proposed end, than they had ever been,” because books became the human mind’s sole object, “substituting the instrument in the place of the work”—he “who admires authors too much finds it difficult to surpass them, and all worship degenerates into superstition”—two men, Montaigne and Bacon, managed to rise above mere erudition and to look at the nature of things. These were the first enlightened minds—uninfluential until subsequent centuries, to be sure, but making a start. Meanwhile, even the pope who encouraged the renaissance of letters, Leo X, paid for his patronage by establishing “a commerce of indulgences”—the “last stage of despotism” at which “every soul revolted and grew sensible,” Chastellux notes with some irony, “that salvation had been rated at too dear a price” (II. Sec.3. iii.126). And in the political realm, the Hapsburgs and Bourbons fought treasury-draining wars. The French became convinced, “having paid excessive taxes,” that “the glory of the king their master was purchased at rather dear a price,” too, as did the English, who “also pulled down their fortune and their treasures” in fighting that king (II. Sec.3. iii.140). 

“Peace, highly advantageous to the progress of reason, and philosophy, is particularly so, when appearing amongst a people already exhausted and satiated with war”; it is at that point “that all frivolous ideas are effaced” and pain channels minds away from “agreeable subjects” to “useful subjects” (II. Sec.3. iii.141). Indebted princes “permit [their subjects] to be happy, that they may be either more patient or more able to pay” those debts (II. Sec.3. iii.141). The “love of riches” had hitherto caused human calamities, spurring wars and intensifying the desire for luxury among the few, at the expense of the many, but now it became “the remedy for those calamities with which it had afflicted human nature” (II. Sec.3. iii.141). Such words as ‘feudal’ and ‘domanial’ fall into disfavor, “while the words, property, agriculture, commerce, liberty, supply the place of the barbarous vocabulary of the schools” as “scholar will become patriots” and philosophers will be citizens” (II. Sec.3. iii.142). With utilitarian, Enlightenment philosophy turning nature to the relief of man’s estate, as Bacon urges, “whoever shall have rendered himself useful, whether by his actions, his example, or his writings, shall find his name within the registers of beneficence”—as the useless honor bestowed upon clergy and warriors gives way to honor bestowed upon such philosophers as Descartes, “who found the laws of Dioptrics,” Newton, who found “the laws of Optics,” and Franklin, “another Prometheus,” whose discovery of how electricity might be harnessed has “placed mankind on an equality with the gods of antiquity” by “rendering the celestial fire docile to” man’s laws (II. Sec.3. iv.161-162). 

Chastellux dislikes Aristotle while retaining something like Aristotelian moderation. He endorses the Enlightenment revolution in thought but opposes political revolution, precisely because it disturbs the orderly course of scientific reason. “The most fortunate circumstance which can happen in general to every people is to preserve their princes and their forms of government” (II. Sec.3. iii.138). Politically, this means a “rational” and “necessary” form of the balance of power in Europe, one in which weak states are secure from “any daring attack, any sudden and rapidly conducted invasion,” a security that can be obtained by a system of “defensive alliances, which will not suffer the strongest powers to attack the weakest powers, without being exposed to a long and doubtful war,” and adjustments to political borders in a way that enables a weak power, “when attacked” to “find time to have recourse to its allies” (II. Sec.3. iii.138). This arrangement, too, will divert some funds from commercial to military use, and the actual practice of balance-0f-power geopolitics continues to impede “the voice of reason” (II. Sec.3. iii.140). 

All of this means that the sobriety induced by bloodshed and debt will not suffice, by itself, to further public happiness; nor will the progress of philosophy by itself do so. “I know that political misfortunes dispose the people to listen to the voice of reason; but this voice must be lifted up somewhere; it must possess powers of expression, and above all, it must be listened to with pleasure,” as “the human mind” becomes “more enlightened with regard to facts and more indifferent about opinions,” no longer sending men to war over the doctrine of transubstantiation” (II. Sec.3. iii.145-146). At the same time, a philosophy of “logomania,” of syllogism—those “quirks of Aristotle” (II. Sec.3. iii.149n.) criticized by Bacon—must be expunged in favor of modern science. And even that will not do.

“It was not sufficient that men had obtained a knowledge of the physical world,” an enterprise whereby “the human species found only half its food” (II. Sec.3. iv.162). “A vast field was opened…in the moral world” (II. Sec.3. iv.161), as “slavery always begins with opinion” (II. Sec.3. iv.167). Here is where the Reformation performed its service. The “Gospelers,” as Chastellux calls the Protestants, who initially lacked any institutional standing, had “recourse to natural law,” in the light of which they “attentively scrutinized the principles of the civil and ecclesiastical government” (II. Sec.3. iv.167). Themselves scrutinized by the people and condemned by the Catholic Church, they found it “necessary to preserve an austerity in their morals and severity in their tenets” (II. Sec. 3. iv.167). But “controversy, the dangerous flame of which frequently burns but always enlightens, submitted everything to discussion,” and “from this theological labor” an “unexpected fruit” emerged: “Philosophy arose slowly on the ruins of opinion,” now teaching “the people, their rights, the sovereigns their duty, and all, moderation” (II. Sec.3. iv.168). Modern moral and political philosophy recalls the wisdom of Solon, who undertook to give the Athenians not “the best laws which he could possibly have enacted but the best laws which they could have followed”; “let us,” we moderns, we men of the Enlightenment, “allow that the welfare of mankind is of all objects the most interesting, and that even the good may be too dearly bought” (II. Sec.3. iv.173).

After all, “what architect will ever advise the setting fire to Paris, that it may be afterwards rebuilt on a regular and magnificent plan?” (II. Sec.3. iv.174). (The answer would be Napoleon, and then Hitler—precisely the sort of men Chastellux seeks to prevent the Enlightenment from spawning.) While a lawgiver may impose “whatsoever laws he chooses” upon “an unpolished people,” “the business of reason, of philosophy, and of sound polity is rather to amend than to change the government,” rendering democracy “less licentious,” aristocracy “less haughty,” monarchy “less ambitious,” and despotism, if it “can still exist within enlightened nations,” “more mild, and, at the least, bend to reason” (II. Sec.3. iv.174). We see this already in the republican confederacies of Holland and Switzerland, and in some of the states within the Austrian Empire. These modern states enjoy more liberty than the freest of the ancient states, if partly because both households and farms in modern Europe feature no slavery, “a barbarous custom, which separated the human species into two classes, and which unworthily debased the most serviceable of all individuals” (II. Sec.3. v.210). The abolition of slavery, in addition to the advances of modern science in medicine and technology, accounts for the far greater populations of modern European states, and a burgeoning population indicates an augmentation of happiness among the people.

The prosperity of republics and the abolition of slavery in Europe follows a general pattern. “The greater number of those provinces which compose our modern monarchies”—the overwhelming majority of regimes at the time—enjoy “privileges, laws, and customs, which limit the sovereign authority” (II. Sec.3. iv.177). The same condition prevails in North America, where the constitutions of Locke, governing South Carolina, and William Penn, governing the state named for him, differ as far from the laws of Sparta as the way a farm is managed and the Benedictine Order—even given the substantial slave population of South Carolina. In England’s American colonies, “the leading principle of [the] moral system is equality” and “the leading principle of [the] political system is agriculture” (II. Sec.3. iv.179).

How to prove that modern liberty and enlightenment conduce to happiness? Chastellux posits agriculture and population as the main indicators of public happiness. Agriculture fosters industriousness and supports a larger population. He demonstrates (at some length) modern agriculture to be more productive than that of antiquity. The moral benefits of industry over idleness have already been shown. But is population increase beneficial? And does it result from wise and just legislation? After all it might be caused by material, not moral causes, by favorable climates and soils. Chastellux directs his readers’ attention to England. England supports a people whose agriculture steadily increases its production at a rate higher than the population growth; it must consume more per capita than nations that do not see such prosperity. “This, then, is the surest sign of the felicity of mankind” (II. Sec.3. vii.256). And yet, the English climate is far from favorable to agriculture and it, along with “their ancient manners and their frequent revolutions”—all conducing “to discontent and melancholy” (II. Sec.3. vii.264). Soils and climate are the physical causes of public happiness, methods of agricultural production, moeurs and political stability the non-physical causes, the ones that can be shaped by legislation. Sound laws conduce to civil peace in one sense; the make civil war less frequent. They do not prevent “oppositions, remonstrances, murmurs,” and these do not make a nation “miserable” (II. Sec.3. viii.273). They are rather signs of life and intelligence. “Behold a vain and stupid people, whose frivolousness blinds for a moment, but who, certainly, are running forwards to their own ruin. On the contrary if I perceived all minds in action; if I observed them scrutinizing whatsoever might be good or bad, useful or detrimental; if public welfare, although frequently misunderstood, was the object of all their inquiries; if their conversations, whether reasonable or splenetic, were often turned to legislation, agriculture, and commerce; if all these interesting questions were discussed; if all different opinions were advanced, debated, and refuted; I should say, Behold a people already exceedingly estimable, who begin to be happy, who deserve to be happy, and who, in the end, will be more happy.” (II. Sec.3. viii.275). Rome ascended with dissension; the civil peace under such tyrants as Nero and Domitian was “the calm of the grave” (II. Sec.3. viii.277). 

On the opposite extreme from the calm of the grave is war. If the deadening peace under tyranny paralyzes minds in silence, war “intoxicates the mind with a thirst for transient glory and amuses the people with public rejoicing, which are always interrupted by the tears of individuals”; wars distract minds from “objects of real utility” (II. Sec.3. viii.278). Chastellux hopes that war will become “less obstinate and more uncommon,” thanks to Europe’s network of alliances and mutual defense treaties, which “have rendered Europe one vast republic, one immense confederacy” (II. Sec.3. viii.281). Armaments have become quite expensive, military knowledge has diffused equally among the nations, the powerful nations groan under debt and taxes. “National hatred” might still incite war, but “national hatred exists only amongst the mob” and modern peoples are preoccupied with commerce. Religious fanaticism? No: “such is the progress of reason, that, were a superstitious people still to exist, they would be governed by wise and enlightened princes; and were superstitious princes to exist, they would govern people too well instructed to second their folly” (II. Sec.3. viii.281-282). As for some barbarian conquest, where would the conquerors come from. The Ottoman Turks are in decline; “their empire will be portioned out and dismembered, so that from its vast ruins, free and happy states will arise” (II. Sec.3. viii.285).

If calamities return to Europe, they will not arise from “vulgar and barbaric prejudice” but from “some sound maxims newly established” (II. Sec.3. viii.286). The “generally acknowledged utility of a very extensive commerce” is one such sound maxim, but it might be pursued by the wrong means, as for example through imperial wars, the most recent of which had cost France most of her North American colonies. (II. Sec.3. viii.286). Prosperity cannot issue from “a rage for planting stakes in the snow” (II. Sec.3. viii.286). Empire aims at “exclusive commerce,” monopoly instead of free trade; “all traffic not founded on a free exchange of commodities is not commerce, but a tribute” (II. Sec.3. viii.287). And every such extensive rule “must fall, sooner or later, and involve commerce in its ruin” (II. Sec.3. viii.287). Even now, the Americans are moving “towards independence,” although Chastellux judges that a “civil war” for independence will likely be avoided, that “a contentious peace,” not “a decisive war” between England and the colonies seems more likely (II. Sec.3. viii.295). 

Chastellux bases his optimism regarding a lasting peace in Europe not upon the goodwill of princes but the exigencies of finance. Princes may be “the arbiters of mankind” but they are also “the slaves of nature and the times” (II. Sec.3. ix.312). “The wants of the exchequer are the truest tutors of kings” (II. Sec.3. ix.307). National indebtedness has occurred because the wealthy classes in Europe can afford to pay for wars but do not want to, while the people may sometimes want to go to war but cannot afford to pay for it. Since (as Locke argues) all riches and all property derive from labor, and since “the real inequality of fortune lies between those who labor and those who make others labor,” the rich “purchas[e] the labor of the people in competition with the state,” their rival when it comes to obtaining labor (II. Sec.3. ix.319, 322). Such competition strips the land of its cultivators and strips the cultivators of the artisans who supply them with tools. “Thus, nations have been crushed because the burden which should have been divided between all has been borne only by those classes of citizens the most useful to the state,” those who work for a living (II. Sec.3. ix.322). To avoid this, states fighting wars borrow money, spreading out the necessary financial exactions. Hence debt, which effectively gambles property you own in the hope of acquiring more property by war, no matter what your political regime is. Statesmen who contemplate war with the intent of augmenting the public happiness should ask themselves: Are the people in need of an immediate alleviation of suffering, as when a foreign state attacks? and Does the money needed to win the war cost more than the benefits the state is likely to receive from it? National debt in itself isn’t the problem; “excessive expenses” are (II. Sec.3. ix.253). Given that “all labor,” the source of wealth, “represents subsistence for one part of the citizens,” the laborers, and “enjoyments for the other part,” those who hire labor, “every disposition which attacks this commerce makes a direct attack on the welfare of nations”; this places all public expense, whether for fighting wars or improving the conditions of peace, in a “predicament” best solved, to the extent it can be solved, by keeping state expenses as low as possible—that is, as low as is consistent with the public welfare (II. Sec.3. ix.355).

Whom to target for budget cuts? “No saving could be truly advantageous to the state, except the saving which diminishes the number of useless men maintained at the expense of productive and industrious men” (II. Sec.3. ix.363). Soldiers can be very far from useless, but priests are another story, being “idle, useless” men who have “renounced the world” and bring “no children on the state,” and do not defend the state from its enemies (II. Sec.3. ix.363). Chastellux’s Enlightenment allies are mistaken to attack religion with ridicule. “It is not irreligion but sound policy that shall throw open the cloisters,” policies that will end public subsidies to clergy, inducing most of them to start working for a living, leaving the few dedicated priests, “true ministers of morality and virtue,” to “receive that respect to which they are entitled” (II. Sec.3. ix.365). 

Chastellux concludes his book by answering what he describes as a frequent, important but “extremely dangerous” criticism of the Enlightenment project: “In what will it all end? Will not man be constantly the same?” (II. Sec.3. Conclusion 366). He answers by observing that human beings can exercise decisive influence over their way of life, as legislation and morals “render men either more, or less happy,” as Montesquieu and Helvétius have shown (II. Sec.3. Conclusion 366). Thanks to that, “great progress” has already occurred, as Chastellux has undertaken to prove; the public happiness of the moderns far exceeds that of the ancients (II. Sec.3 Conclusion 366). 

For this progress to continue, men must be further enlightened. Education is the indispensable precursor of sound legislation. What has “established so great a difference between man and man, between nation and nation” is “error”—whether political, philosophic or religious. Chastellux”s book amounts to a compendium of such errors, despotism and religious intolerance being first among them. The discovery of the Americas impeded progress by giving “baits to the ambition of maritime nations,” thereby prolonging despotic rule (II. Sec.3. Conclusion 373). And although Christianity succeeded in “diffus[ing] among mankind a uniform and general system of morality,” that morality “soon disappeared under its multiplied dogmata, and this morality itself was never extended to all the different relations of man, in his social capacity”—that is, Christian morality remained centered on relations among individuals, love of God and love of neighbor (II. Sec.3. Conclusion 373). But now, the intellectual and moral landscape has been cleared, as the ideas and moeurs of the philosophes permeate Europe and begin to permeate the rest of the world, thanks especially to commerce, which works toward “encompas[sing] all those parts of the world which are still barbarous, still too far removed from perfection, in order that sensible minds may be induced to desire a longer life”; “assimilate mankind, therefore, and you make them friends,” “affiliate them by their opinions” (II. Sec.3. Conclusion 375). “Philosophers! Preachers! Moralists! rather employ your talents in forming a people of honest men, than a small number of heroes” (II. Sec.3 Conclusion 375).

The failure of the Enlightenment project to eliminate war and tyranny, despite its efforts to establish free commerce among peoples, to turn the “logomania” and “logomachia” of ancient philosophy to experimental science for utilitarian purposes, and its vast expansion, effectively the universalization of education, has not gone unremarked. The attempt to take morality out of the alleged clouds and bring it down to the low but solid ground of individual self-interest has indeed weakened the religions, but it has not ridded human souls of fanaticism. Less noticed, perhaps, is the intellectual counterpart of that low but solid ground. Plato understood philosophy as an enterprise for the very few, and not because he was an ‘aristocrat.’ Philosophy inquires into the settled customs and beliefs of any regime in which it arises; if brought to the attention of the citizens in a careless way, it will be misunderstood and misapplied, as Plato’s Letters demonstrates. To Enlightenment men, even to such a moderate as Chastellux, all manner of men deserve the title, ‘philosopher.’ Frederick the Great, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson—all of them ‘philosophers.’ Political men are invited to assume philosophic pretensions. This has not gone well.

 

Note

1. Chastellux acerbically remarks that “it was not recollected that [Jews] had crucified the Son of God until God had permitted them to become rich” (II. Sec.3. ii.86).