Stephen Salkever: Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Philosophy. Part Two: Back Again. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

 

The Nicomachean Ethics leads into the Politics. Although “the greatest human good, happiness or flourishing (eudaimonia), is a kind of self-sufficiency,” Aristotle understands self-sufficiency as the energeia of a naturally political species, as part of “a life with parents and children and a wife and friends generally, since human being (anthrōpos) is by nature political” (Nicomachean Ethics 1097b8-11). As a result, “our political judgments should not differ in kind from the complex balancing of heterogeneous interests that characterizes the operation of practical wisdom in private life.” Ethical wisdom and political wisdom are both phronēsis. “There is no separate political sphere (as, say, for Hannah Arendt [or indeed for many ‘moderns’]) that defines a separate political interest.” Aristotle’s understanding of politics accordingly derives as much from his teleological biology as his ethics does. 

Politics means the relationship of ruling and being ruled in turn, in contrast to the relationship of master and slave. Whereas some modern philosophers (Carl Schmitt, but also many libertarians) regard politics as mastery, and mastery as a natural thing, while others regard it as a matter of convention and force only, unnatural, “in opposition to both slavemasters and abolitionists, Aristotle concludes that slavery is justified only insofar as (a) it is necessary for the leisure without which virtue cannot be developed, (b) it does not threaten the philia or friendship without which politics is impossible (Politics 1255b12-16), and (c) the slaves differ from the masters as much as the body from the soul or other animals from human beings generally.” If “the absolute solutions offered by slavemasters and abolitionists are wrong insofar as they rest on false theoretical presuppositions,” the choice between a political regime and a masterly regime (and then again between a regime that features both political and masterly rule), “will vary from circumstance to circumstance, depending on the dangers and possibilities of the moment.” The state of New Hampshire may not be wrong in requiring prisoners to stamp out license plates with the motto, “Live Free or Die,” in the spirit of regarding prisons as penitentiaries. Such choices cannot be reduced to a formula because “political goods are not commensurable in the way that economic goods are (1283b3-11)”; “they can be ranked, but not converted into units of exchange.” To think seriously about politics, one must never appeal to “misleading principles that abstract one human interest or possibility—even the highest or most definitive—from the complex range of human needs,” in the manner of “rule morality.” Political thought and speech need to be ‘politic,’ tactful, “a virtue systematically absent from all forms of rule morality.” Tact evinces a recognition of “the essential complexity of human interests.” “The link between theory and practice is not to furnish rules but to show why theoretically derived principles are mistaken if understood in an unqualified fashion” but instead to “perform the delicate task of thinking about what aspects of our knowledge of human needs and possibilities are most relevant to political choice.”

Although ethical and political goods are not quantitatively commensurable, they are commensurable relative to the mean, which lies between extremes, in two ways: “in relation to the ousia or specific nature of human beings, and in relation to the kairos, to the particular moment at which an action-choice arises and the particular individuals involved.” These ways of deliberating “describe two different kinds of rationality, politkē and phronēsis” the former assisting the latter by “drawing attention to the theoretical presuppositions of various possible courses of action and subjecting these to criticism in light of the human ousia, of the rankings appropriate at the level of nature.” Helpful, but not dispositive: politikē can inform choices but phronēsis remains indispensable to finding the mean. One destination on the road of human life is Athens, the other Thebes, and the serious person, the spoudaios, travels back and forth between the two, “though always bearing in mind the greater seriousness of phronēsis” when it comes to making choices. A well-ordered human soul will exhibit both kinds. 

Politikē and phronēsis are as readily, or more readily, endangered as any other natural human attribute. These dangers are political and nonpolitical; there are many “attractive activities and relationships” that draw us away from them, leaving bodies and souls alike unguarded. Salkever devotes one chapter to “a threat to political rationality that directly concerned him,” namely, “the Greek tendency to identify virtue and virility.” It should be remarked that Salkever taught at Bryn Mawr College; an emphasis on the defects of excessive manliness might go over well there. His choice of that topic can itself be described as Aristotelian—a gracious nod to circumstance. (Harvey C. Mansfield’s essay on the virtues of manliness may well exhibit a similar astuteness, as Mansfield teaches at Harvard, where men are present but embattled.) Salkever’s final chapters take Aristotelian political philosophy into modern America, “suggesting ways in which a concept of the virtue of rationality would enrich our theoretical justification of the modern liberal regime and indicating how such a justification might inform thinking about liberal public policy.” Are modern circumstances such as to make Aristotelian theory and practice impossible? A modern state is no polis, and self-sufficiency, self-government, may be harder to achieve there. Against the encroachments of modern states, modern philosophers and citizens assert individual rights, a move Aristotle doesn’t quite make. Such assertions often clash with the exigencies of modern political life, especially but not only in wartime. 

The Greeks listened to their great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, both of which valorize manly virtues to the point of nearly identifying virtue with manliness. Aristotle offers a critique of the ethical and political opinions and practices of Greece, doing so not foolishly, by presenting “entirely new rules or systems to replace the norms and practices governing existing moral and political life” but prudently, by “enrich[ing] political deliberation by pushing the conversation, as it were, to take an evaluative step outside itself for a moment” and to reflect upon those practices, suggesting a wider “range of political options.” “Given this intention, the appropriate theoretical tone is one that avoids both prophetic certainty and self-abnegating neutrality.” 

Sharp distinction between the sexes have not confined themselves to antiquity. Modern political philosophers have associated nature with man and appearance with woman (Rousseau), sublimity with man and beauty with women (Kant), the public and universal with man, the private and particular with women (Hegel) patriarchy and class domination with man, matriarchy with woman (Engels), logic and language with man, body, expression, and feeling with woman (Nietzsche). Aristotle might ‘speak’ to them, too.

The manly, Periclean political ethos of Athens “formed the point of departure for the philosophizing of Plato and Aristotle,” and both “urge a significant improvement in the status of women,” without succumbing to anything like the ideologies of modern feminism. Rather, each entertains “significant reservations” about “the view that the best human life is that of the committed citizen” on the Periclean model, with its celebration of courage, honor, and fame—goods associated with the ‘thumotic’ or spirited aspect of the soul, which makes war and pursues glory. Plato and Aristotle consider this “a mistaken assessment of the relative importance of different human needs, and thus a mistaken understanding of the best human life.”  The Socratic way of life, as presented by Plato, is neither conventionally male or female, neither centered in the battlefield or even the “public space” broadly, nor in the household. Socrates dialogues with citizens in the marketplace, schools, and private homes, “spreading perplexity and self-concern among those” his way of life “touches by calling into question the language in which they have their being.” 

For his part, biologist Aristotle criticizes the conventional Greek notions “that virtue and slavishness are biologically inherited, the idea that virility or courage is the foremost human virtue, and the Periclean opinion that all quiet people and cities are useless.” He does this because he takes the nature of human beings to be political because they are capable of reason; that is what makes humans distinctive among the animals. If politics derives from rationality, then “living according to reasonable laws and customs” will enable us to “develop and support our biologically inherited potentiality for living rationally.” Masterly rule, by contrast, derives from an excess of thumos in the souls of the rulers and a deficiency of thumos in the souls of the ruled; neither is amenable to living rationally. Political rule should extend to the individual soul itself, with reason, nous, guiding but not commanding desire, orexis. If men are more apt to rule, they are entitled to rule politically, not tyrannically, framing their rule within the “impersonal” authority of the laws. “Women should not rule, but they should be ruled as fellow citizens—that is, they should get the same benefits from the political relationship as males—and not as children or slaves, whose needs, and hence whose status, are entirely different (temporarily or permanently) form the needs of their rulers.” Aristotle understands the needs of women, the benefits rightly “supplied by the political relationship” with men, as “a stable and reasonable order” or regime “in which they can become rational animals,” inasmuch as they share with men not only the need for security but the need to develop “the virtues or excellences whose potential expression we inherit biologically.” For this, men and women will need to develop the virtue of moderation, even as men will be more virile, women more industrious. Because politics is manly but less unreasonably so than war and tyranny, politics channels the distinctively manly virtue into peaceable but still honorable activity. 

And if the household is preeminently the domain of women, that domain, the realm of the family, “is needed not simply for procreation or bare living, but for the development of rationality and happiness,” for living well. The family can contribute to the “moral education” of children, and thereby to the polis. The polis is less dangerously masculine than the battlefield, but it still inclines to conflict. To counter manly virility and the hubris it easily descends into, children need to develop “the sense of shame that is an indispensable precondition for deliberative or thoughtful living.” Boys in whom mothers and fathers instill a sense of shame will likely to live their political lives as more rational adults than those who are reared to be shameless. And parenting itself gives husbands and wives “a real job to do,” one that “can check the danger of excessive civic-mindedness that seems always to threaten to turn the most tightly knit cities into armed camps,” into Spartas. A “habitual disposition to worry that one’s initial response to a situation might be wrong, or the fear of disgrace, is a necessary prelude to mature deliberation and paideia.” Neither shameless nor shy, the person capable of shame will live within the mean between those extremes, within household and polis alike.

In terms of those aggregations of families within the polis now called social classes, the middle class will serve as the balancer between the few who are rich and the many who are poor because “those of moderate means are subject neither to hubris nor to envy or hopelessness.” Middle-class citizens are “open to actualizing their logos, and not likely to be swept away” by such passions. With this balance, there can also develop certain kinds of friendships, social ties, whether of “mutual utility” in business, “mutual friendships” among the witty, and “a mutual sense of human virtue or goodness of character.” Political friendship forms still another set of ties, animated by a shared sense of honor. To prevent honor-loving from careening into political conflict, civil war, Aristotle commends not only the life of the household but music and, for a very few, philosophy. But even the honor-loving man par excellence, the great-souled or magnanimous man, the man “who represents the peak of moral virtue,” has so developed his sense of honor as to understand that he should live deliberatively, act slowly, “owing to a sense that nothing much in the realm of action is very great.” 

All very well, but does any of this translate into the regime of modern republicanism or “liberal democracy”? If so, how? Although Salkever esteems this regime as “a good thing,” one that “aim[s] at the elimination of arbitrary restraints on the power of individuals to make lives for themselves,” the predominant political-philosophic theories that attempt to defend it tend “incoherently to depend on a conception of liberal culture or character” that liberal theory “cannot defend.” In response, some political theorists have concluded that liberalism and democracy themselves do not cohere, that one or both must be jettisoned. But it is the theory, not the regime, that causes the problem, and especially the approach to theorizing that moderns have taken. Liberal theory has been “too abstractly political, concerned too much with just distributions and not enough with the question of appropriately virtuous character.” This has been true of libertarianism and socialism, alike. In proposing an alternative, Aristotelian approach to thinking about modern politics, Salkever cautions that “we do not learn how to construct a more Aristotelian society, precisely because there is no such thing. The function of theory is not to construct or imagine social blueprints or foundations.” 

Contrary to critics of Aristotle who haven’t read Aristotle with much care, Salkever maintains that “there is no essential conflict between [Aristotle’s] teleology and the liberal commitment to tolerating a wide variety of conceptions of the good,” corresponding to the wide variety of more or less decent human types. Against the claim of John Rawls, who imagines that Aristotle holds up “but one conception of the good which is to be recognized by all persons, so far as they are fully rational,” a “distortion typical of those who misread Aristotle as a Thomistic natural lawyer,” Salkever takes from Aristotle “a style of theorizing, a sense of the voice that is most appropriate for stating the problems of our society theoretically without imposing universal theoretical laws about which we can (and should) have no real conviction,” a voice that “follows from a complex understanding of human goods as theoretically commensurable, but not so precisely comparable as to allow conversion into commands.” An Aristotelian political philosopher is politic, not a prophetic lawgiver, not a Cartesian or Kantian or Nietzschean lawgiver, and not a Hegelian, Marxist, or Deweyan proponent of supposed laws of ‘History.’ Nor, finally, is democracy morally egalitarian in the sense of a regime that attempts, or pretends to, moral neutrality.

Rightly understood, democracy is neither “a value-neutral decision procedure,” such as majority rule, nor “a morally compelling ideal,” such as “a participatory community of equal citizens.” Neither morally neutral nor morally ideal, democracy is “a potential susceptible of a variety of actualizations; it is matter rather than form,” given the obvious fact that democratic regimes “can be wonderfully good, despicably evil, and much in between.” Liberal democracy is “the name we give to a good democracy,” one that governs itself by judgment that considers circumstances, not laws alone, and therefore “depend[s] primarily on the character of its citizens, and not in the first instance on the laws and institutions,” although law and institutions matter “because of the way they affect the character of citizens, and should be evaluated in that light.” It is the question of character that modern liberalism has inclined not to answer with sufficient insistence and clarity, a mistake Aristotle doesn’t make.

Modern liberalism’s vulnerability may be seen in the impressive critiques to which it has been subjected, many of which recommend cures worse than the supposed disease. Hegel, for example, maintains that liberal individualism destroys itself by subjecting societies to a misconceived liberty centering on “needs, accidental caprices, and subjective desires.” Marx denounces liberal individuals as “monads,” unfit for any genuine society. Both philosophers “view liberalism from the perspective of dogmatic belief in a progressive and substantial history; from that perspective, liberalism seems not only bad, but somehow false, illusory, not really there.” And even when thinkers reject progressivist historicism as implausible, they persist in regarding it as insubstantial, as seen in Nietzsche’s satirical portrait of the “last man,” in Weber’s description of what sociologist Talcott Parsons called the “iron cage” of bureaucracy that takes the place of aristocracies in democratic civil societies, in Heidegger’s railings against the utilitarianism of modern technology. All of these critiques originate in Rousseau’s inveighing against the “bourgeois” man, who is neither fully a citizen nor fully an individual, neither a Solon nor a solitary walker. But if liberal theory is incoherent in its neglect of the virtues needed to sustain liberal democracy, “the antiliberal view of liberalism’s incoherency appears to rest on an unwillingness to see—or perhaps a willing denial of—anything substantial in the historical form of life that brought modern liberalism into being,” not only the rejection of the modern middle class but the “rejection of Enlightenment rationality as either incomplete or simply wrong.” It is noteworthy that Rousseau’s sharp dichotomy—the resolutely political man and the philosopher—recurs to the pre-Aristotelian resistance to moderation and to the prudential reasoning that moderation supports.

In Salkever’s view, modern liberal philosophers have made themselves vulnerable to Rousseau and his progeny by making the mistake of abstracting from “historical circumstances,” positing a never-existing ‘state of nature’ in their attempt to overcome feudalism, the “family status and social institutions” that had imposed “arbitrary privileges of wealth and rank” upon the middle and ‘lower’ classes alike. But some of the moderns can be understood on non-theoretical grounds, as well: “the abstract quality of Hobbesian and Lockean political thought looks very different if we see it not as mechanistic atomism run wild, but as a reasonable estimate of the sources of restraints against individual liberty in their time.” And indeed Locke (for example) himself attends to the formation of character, as seen in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  (Aristotle, however, would moderate, not denigrate, ‘poetic’ impulses to nobility.) Salkever doesn’t initially consider this aspect of Locke, taking him to be a sort of populist on the one hand and a defender of individual natural rights on the other, an unstable pairing: “Why should a majority consider the protection of private rights to be the chief political goal?” And why should an individual citizen in a democratic regime shirk his citizen responsibilities as much as possible, “attempt[ing] to secure the benefits of political cooperation without paying any of its costs,” leaving him, and his regime, vulnerable to the ambitions of anti-liberal ideologists? As to liberals’ increasingly rare invocations of religion, their God has been “little more than a great enforcer in the sky, called in at need to buttress the shaky foundation of civil authority,” a “patchy remedy rather than part of a plausibly attractive way of life.”

What Salkever proposes, and sketches, is “a direct challenge to the antiliberal argument that liberalism is the politics that answers the requirement of bourgeois nullities.” Here, he ‘corrects’ his portrait of Locke, remarking that the philosopher does indeed specify “the character of those who can be good citizens,” namely those who are (in Locke’s words) “honest, peaceable, and industrious,” ready to defend the natural rights of life, liberty, and happiness understood as health and freedom from pain, along with the “possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like”—in a word, property in persons and in things. But, Aristotle-like, Salkever finds this good but not sufficient. In Locke and many of the moderns, “there is no explicit teleological argument linking” the modern liberal conception of virtue “to a conception of the human good,” and “no discussion of why the commonwealth should embrace those who are honest, peaceable, and industrious, and not, for example, the pious, charitable, and merciful, or the virile and patriotic,” although the seventeenth-century European penchant for devastating religious warfare obviously provided circumstances making honesty, peaceableness, and industry quite attractive, and the even more devastating ideological nationalist and ideological warfare to come hardly made them unattractive to the sane. But Salkever’s point is that the bourgeois virtues lend themselves to boredom among the ambitious, doing little to satisfy the heat in their souls. 

Aristotle would take a different approach. He would begin with the understanding that a political regime necessary, natural, but not in the sense of spontaneous or self-organizing. “Education is necessary for its establishment,” and since “the shapeless tyrannical dream is both deep and not accidental, an education equal to conquering it cannot take the form of mere preaching or admonition.” The difference “between the spoudaioi and the phauloi, between those who are serious about living virtuous lives and those who are concerned with pursuing particular pleasures in a disorderly way,” seeking thing after thing, power after power, in a quest that ceases only in death, remains constant in human beings. As the character in the gangster movie agrees, upon being asked what he really wanted, the phauloi want more. They define freedom as doing as they like. They adopt “the mistaken belief that an orderly life such as is lived within a genuine politeia (one whose goal is education in virtue) is slavery rather than salvation.” Good laws and education set limits on desires, but “such an education may run counter to our powerful attachment to our own survival…present[ing] an extremely difficult problem of persuasion or political education.”

Aristotle nonetheless finds some reason to hope for democratic regimes that are decent, if not entirely good. Some of ‘the many’ may have better souls than some among ‘the few,’ and all of the many may sometimes behave better than the few, as a whole. Further, to alienate the many altogether makes them enemies of the polis, and dangerous enemies, too, given their overwhelming number. For these reasons, “the dēmos may be more open” to the rule of law, passionless law, “a sort of reason without desire,” than “the rich or the well-born.” “The many are less corruptible than the few, since the people as a whole are less likely to be overcome by anger or by some response to angry feelings—such as spiritedness—and so to make the usual political mistakes,” mistakes originating in excessive ambition. “The basis for Aristotle’s explanation is not a romantic idealization of the virtues of every dēmos, but the predictive proposition that the wealthy will tend to be motivated by the love of honor”—they already enjoy a surfeit of material goods— and “the dēmos by love of gain, and that the greatest crimes…are consequences of an unlimited love of honor and preferential regard.” As a result, the vices of the many who are poor are “easier to check” than the vices of the few who are rich, “so under certain circumstances a democracy can be a regime in which a substantial degree of political virtue is realized.”

“The easiest way of securing this opinion” in a democracy “is not by direct instruction but by economic regulations that favor farming, limit the amount of property which may be held, reduce poverty, and separate political office from financial reward.” Such a regime will see its middle class increase, as the many who are poor prosper and the few who are rich offer them jobs that pay. “Familial prosperity” and “the rule of law,” along with a civic education consistent with both, can foster the formation of “decent characters” who have learned “to love and hate the right sort of things,” resisting the blandishments of the demagogues who see opportunity in democracies. 

Tocqueville describes an America that resembled what Aristotle had in mind for democracy. The beginning of wisdom in reading Democracy in America is to take Tocqueville’s opening remark seriously, that his book isn’t about America, that he did not come to America to study the United States but to study democracy, with the understanding that the United States was “the sample democracy” in the world at that time. And democracy, for him, isn’t primarily a political regime but an egalitarian civil society within the modern state, a civil society that contrasts with the declining social hierarchy that still prevails in Europe and elsewhere, a civil society whose most prominent families still burn with the love of honor, “rather than the need to live a life,” to “earn their livelihood by work of some kind and who will, therefore, be most concerned with acquiring the wealth they lack, rather than honor or military glory.” 

It is true that the United States is much larger than any ancient democracy in Greece, a modern state not an ancient polis. And the America Tocqueville saw was a commercial republic, even with respect to its agriculture, not based on the subsistence agriculture practiced by most of the ancients. It is true that Aristotle is no enemy of commerce, preferring “the very large, non-Greek, commercial city of Carthage” to any polis he saw near his home. But he never saw the large, international commercial markets that later prevailed in Europe, although of course he did see some international trade. The difference between ancient and modern international markets was finance, a market in finance itself, “a new form of human relationship, one not tied to political or religious traditions, an institution that enabled individuals to establish themselves by means of clever enterprise.” This market magnified the importance of money, and “the love of wealth as such is an appropriate and perhaps inevitable response to the conditions of life in a world in which birth or rank provides no security, in which lives must be lived, for better or worse, without the guarantee supplied by family ties.” From now on, independence must be “pecuniary independence” (as no less a moralist than Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it), not to-the-manor-born social status. 

As Tocqueville understood, the American Founders designed a new kind of republic with a new institutional structure for this new world of America (geographically) and of democracy (morally and socially). This is the familiar Constitutional order of a government with institutional checks and balances, not democratic or oligarchic but representative of the people as a whole—a people whose factions will play off one another, moderate their ambitions in spite of themselves, because representative government or republicanism enables democracy to extend itself over a large territory with a large and diverse population. “The political system can thus moderate the importance of habits and outcomes that belong to the system of market exchange.” Such a people will pursue their “need to amass exchange value in a reasonable and orderly way, a way of life that valued public service without despising the pursuit of financial security,” a way of life “that encouraged scientific inquiry as well as national prosperity,” having seen the link between the two. Benjamin Franklin’s famous list of virtues leaves courage and piety unmentioned, but hardly warrants the charge of philistinism with which he has been belabored by writers ranging from D. H. Lawrence to Alasdair MacIntyre. Franklin commends a life rather like his own, “one in which economic success supports and encourages political activity, both aiming an independent life rather than at an unlimited acquisition of power.” For Franklin and the modern middle class, living well means living comfortably—not mere self-preservation but “commodious” self-preservation, as Locke calls it. Comfort is moderate, not the flashy result of unmitigated greed.

To moderate desire, Americans have perfected in their private lives what Tocqueville calls self-interest properly understood. Such self-interest avoids the extremes of Kantian idealism and Benthamite-utilitarian selfishness—the latter, it should be said, amended by the second-generation utilitarian, John Stuart Mill, who at times sounds a bit like Aristotle. For both Aristotle and Mill, “human virtue is not a transcendence of humanity but is the name given to those personality traits or settled states of character that contribute to human happiness,” although Mill retains the utility maximization rule, alien to Aristotle’s approach. For Aristotle, “virtue must not be understood as separate from the goal of happiness, but as constituting eudaimonia, at least so long as bad luck does not intervene between a virtuous potentiality and a happy outcome.” Unlike the moderns, Aristotle never holds out the likelihood of mastering fortune. Human happiness “does not mean being pleased with oneself; it means living in a thoughtful way,” a way of life, a regime for the soul—again, on the observable natural grounds that human beings speak and reason. And as a Christian would look to the example of Jesus as the model of virtue, so Aristotle commends looking to the spoudaios as “the only measure for deciding whether an action is good or not,” aside from “the metaphor of the mean.” Natural right comes in persons, in human beings, and is never abstracted into natural rights or natural law. Justice “seems especially to be an aspect of friendship” (Nicomachean Ethics 1155a22-28), a thing seen in persons and their relations, “to be understood teleologically as a relationship through which human beings flourish.” Such relationships can be sustained within the framework of a good regime, but they are not understood merely as instruments for supporting that regime. (Aristotle considers “political friendships” more as alliances forged by a common interest, not the best sort of friendship.) “Friendships depend on a certain close and affectionate feeling that simply cannot be shared with the world at large,” a shared interest “in one another’s goodness.” “What friendship gives us is the opportunity to become more human, not through altruistic concern, but through our being ability to see and examine what we are, affectionately and critically, through talking with our friends, since essentially ‘a friend is another self’ (1166a31-32.)” 

Political regimes, then, may be evaluated not so much in terms of some abstract definition of justice but “in terms of the extent to which they make genuine friendships possible.” Salkever observes that such friendships will “be more likely in a liberal democracy than in Sparta or republican Rome.” Even more pertinently, such friendships will be more likely in a liberal democracy than in a modern tyranny, a ‘totalitarian’ regime that moves to sunder friendships and families, defining only allegiance to the rulers as just. Aristotelian political science in modernity will look much like the political science of Tocqueville, “articulat[ing] forms of life that exhibit the best and worst possibilities inherent in a particular context” and “examin[ing] the laws and customs of the place with an eye to determining how they do or do not moderate the pursuit of wealth intrinsic to all democracies.” Aristotle surely would not disagree with Tocqueville’s remark, that “democratic men love general ideas because they save them the trouble of studying particular cases.” Both men urge political scientists to resist that tendency of the regimes in which they live, and which they study.

Given the circumstance of political life lived within modern states, not poleis, Tocqueville warns against the danger of “individualism,” by which he means withdrawal from political life, an exclusive concern with family, close friends, and business. That is, whereas Aristotle needs to moderate the hyper-politicized Greeks of his time, Tocqueville needs to moderate the demi-citizens of modernity, without denouncing them in the manner of Rousseau. Few such persons will keen after political fame in the manner of Robespierre or Napoleon; in addressing them, political scientists need rather “to show democrats why they need to be concerned with the interests of society at large.” Political liberty is the condition to be praised, among democrats, not economic liberty (in the manner of libertarians), and not Machiavellian-Rousseauian republican ardor or, as Salkever puts it “the literary attractions of republican radicalism, such as rhetorical vividness and force.”  A middle ground, rather, linking “individual interest” to the interest of the country, now that “disinterested love of country has fled beyond recall” with the poleis that sustained it. One such link is commerce, which, commercial souls must learn, cannot be sustained without liberties guaranteed by the state, a fact that makes the territory of that state and the regime that rules it matter, personally, to every citizen, especially in view of those states eager to seize its territory and change its regime into one inhospitable to commerce. Family, religion, and the rule of law need defenders, and there is no one to defend them but citizens who understand their self-interest well, in their pursuit of living well. For Tocqueville, the central criterion for evaluating policies proposed by democrats is to ask whether they “develop habits of mind or dispositions that incline people toward rule without tyranny and obedience without slavishness.” In this way, “good citizenship can appear in guises other than the mask of the Roman patriot.” 

True, Tocqueville’s America isn’t the America Salkever lives in, “an immensely larger and more diverse polity,” no longer so isolated from foreign enemies, no longer likely to expand in territory. “Given these changes, mechanical application of Tocquevillian conclusions about institutional reform are always out of place,” as Aristotle and Tocqueville himself would see. Political philosophers live “the life of inquiry or reason,” in “opposition to dogmatic or reductive systems of explanation.” That life requires “a taste both for listening to others and for independent inquiry.” Such a way of living and especially of thinking “is in fact needed to sharpen our sense of what liberalism is for, and the ways of life this regime aims at supporting,” namely, lives “deliberately chosen rather than arbitrarily or willfully determined.”

 

 

Stephen G. Salkever: Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Philosophy. Part I: From Practice to Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Aristotle: De Anima. C. D. C. Reeve translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2017.

Thomas Aquinas: Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. Kenholm Foster and Silvester Humphries translation. Notre Dame: Dumb Ox Books, 1994.

Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan Collins translation. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011.

Aristotle: Politics. Carnes Lord translation. Second edition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013.

 

Aristotelian ethics commends moderation, comprehensively. Famously, Aristotle defines each virtue as a “mean”—the proximate center between two extremes. A virtue is not an exclusively human characteristic; the virtue of a horse is to run well, the virtue of an oak to grow tall and straight. Virtue is excellence in the nature and action of a being. Because “everything is continuous and divisible, it is possible to grasp the more, the less, and the equal, and these either in reference to the thing itself or in relation to us” (Nicomachean Ethics 1106a). “The equal is also a certain middle term (to meson) between excess and deficiency” (1106a). For human beings, “virtue is concerned with passions and actions, in which the excess is in error and the deficiency is blamed; but the middle term is praised and guides one correctly”; “virtue is skillful in aiming at the middle term” (1106b). Aristotle gives several examples: the virtue of courage is the mean between the deficiency, fear (cowardice) and the excess, confidence (recklessness); liberality the mean between stinginess and prodigality; magnificence the mean between parsimony and vulgarity; magnanimity or greatness of soul the mean between micropsychia, smallness of soul, and vanity; an unnamed virtue is the mean between unambition and ambition; gentleness the mean between unirascibility and irascibility; truthfulness the mean between an ironist, always understating matters, and the boaster, always overstating them; wittiness the mean between boorishness and buffoonery; friendliness the mean between surliness and obsequiousness. And so on.

Unlike a geometric figure, however, the human soul resists measurement; finding the mean is an inexact science, not a simple exercise of applying a theoretically derived rule to human practice. What theoretical knowledge can do, however, is to clarify that practice. Salkever intends, Aristotle-like, “to clarify the character” of “Aristotle’s practical philosophy” and to undertake an Aristotelian approach to “contemporary discussions of liberal democracy.” Those discussions have ranged from “treating politics as a perfectly soluble problem”—the assumption of many contemporary ‘social scientists’—or as “a tragic dilemma or paradox,” as seen in writings by the numerous epigoni of Nietzsche and Heidegger. This (very wide) spectrum includes the conventionalism of Michael Oakeshott and Richard Rorty and the historicist progressivism of Hegel and Marx. Unlike so many thinkers, Aristotle doesn’t offer an ethics that operates like a computer printout; “in Aristotle’s understanding the relationship of theory to practice is not direct” but instead establishes “an indirect connection that avoids both dogmatism and relativism.” For him, “the theory of the human good aids practice by serving as a basis for drawing out and criticizing presuppositions about human needs that are implicit in particular political institutions and policies.” Because those particular institutions and policies must be adapted to the specific circumstances that prevail in and around a given political community at the time choices must be made, “the way in which goods are ranked relative to human needs in the abstract will not be the same as their ranking in any particular situation,” and so “theory can inform practical deliberation and judgment, but cannot replace it.”

In Part I of his book, Salkever answers two challenges to Aristotelian ethics: one from moral relativists who deny that there is any “such thing as a human good apart from the goods or desires of particular individuals or cultures”; the second from those who affirm the existence of a human good but further claim that “this good is clearly and precisely intelligible to those who know how to see it.” 

He begins with the relativists. Relativism is a theory, and, like all theories, it is “at its inception evaluative and explanatory,” beginning with “the sense that there is a human need for a universal perspective on the basis of which the local and particular things take on a new and better meaning, a meaning not supplied by the traditional accounts of the gods, by the poets, or by the city and its laws,” a need prompting an enterprise, “whether we call it scientific or philosophic,” that “is inseparable from the perception of a human interest in rationality as a way of life.” Theory aspires to universality and objectivity; relativists, for example, makes a universal claim about what the human good is, a rational claim about human irrationalism. They even may claim that knowing the irrationality of human ‘goods’ or desires is a good thing; knowledge is somehow inseparable from living well, even among those who deny that claims about living well have any rational content. 

Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle claim that, on the contrary, human conduct is teleological by nature, and nature is rationally knowable. Although Heraclitus and Plato differ profoundly in their claims about nature—Heraclitean flux and Platonic forms could not be more opposed—both contend that “a certain disposition and orientation toward [the] phenomena [is] inescapable for anyone who accept the explanation” they offer. But whereas Heraclitus’ dictum, “Everything flows,” directly associates human life with the rest of the cosmos, Plato’s Socrates ‘brings philosophy down from the heavens,’ teaching that “the way to determine whether a proposed virtue of way of life is truly desirable is to ask whether that life corresponds to the function or work (ergon) that defines human beings as a specific class, different from, say, horses and knives”—related to “the rest of the universe,” to be sure, but distinct within it. Because human practice and indeed philosophy itself cannot be ‘read’ directly from ‘on high,’ Socrates and Plato both avoid the prophetic style of Heraclitus, speaking or writing with irony and playfulness. Socrates’ “unwillingness to say all that he knows, and his insistence on saying different things to different people consistently defeat the expectation that theorizing should result in a set of general rules or customs of the same order of determinateness and precision as those of the city,” with its laws. Because “nothing can be done as it is said,” “moderation and tact are the virtues controlling the philosopher’s speech,” and the philosopher’s theorizing “is not a substitute for particular choices” but “rather, it is a preparation for making them.” In the Phaedo, Salkever observes, Socrates says that logoi [speeches, including rational speeches] are like human beings: the surest way to end up hating either is to trust them without limit.”

This leaves the status of Plato’s forms as it were up in the air. It may be that he propounds them with the same irony as he speaks to Adeimantus and Glaucon. Aristotle straightforwardly refutes the theory; although Plato says that particulars somehow ‘participate’ in the forms, this “metaphor is insufficient as a causal account.” Aristotle instead proposes that “while there are no universals which exist separately from individual instances, every natural thing can be understood in terms of the potentiality (dunamis) and function or actuality (energeia) which define it.” If the potential of the thing or an action might or might not be actualized, if its beginning (archē) ‘contains’ a manner of growth and motion (today’s example would be DNA), then an account of the nature of that thing or action must be “both explanatory and evaluative.” That is, the archē implies an end, a telos, which either does or does not fully unfold. A good oak, a good horse is one that has reached this end, achieved its nature without injury or impediment. “The form (eidos) or end (telos) or actuality (energeia) of a thing is the primary means of explaining what each natural thing is, and this explanation is at the same time evaluative or critical.”

The same goes for human nature, for human beings, “since in giving an account of any given human being or human culture”—by which Salkever means a politeia or regime—we “must characterize its goals or practices in terms of and relative to the goals that define human being as a certain kind of entity.” This, however, with an important distinction, as already understood by Plato’s Socrates: “Human beings are unique among living things in being threatened with the danger of an episodic or disorganized life, and that is our greatest need (though generally not, as a matter of fact, our strongest desire) is to actualize our capacity for living according to some reasonable plan, the details of which will vary widely, just as our capacities and situations vary.” “Human nature understood as a hierarchy of ends serves as the perspective from which to judge the extent to which various characteristic ways of life and cultural institutions are just or right (dikaios) by nature,” providing “a ground for judgments that are at once causal and evaluative,” although that ground or standard does not take the form of a universal law. It “varies, within limits, from place to place and person to person.” The existence of the ground or standard, human nature, precludes moral relativism, while the sensitivity to the rational need to heed the circumstances by and in which human beings live their lives precludes moral ‘absolutism.’ The “central activity” of political philosophy or science provides “a causal account of particular things,” that is, the activity of “placing a particular individual or practice relative to the universal which defines it as human or mammalian or whatever.” 

Nature is teleological. This claim is neither “shocking nor contrary to the way in which we all encounter the world, without science, through language.” It only assumes that “our world happens to be the sort of place in which events are not loose and disconnected but occur in the context of wholes of the sort we call kinds or species and Aristotle calls natures.” The species we find in this world act in a way that moves toward the fulfillment of ends, and that includes “scientific inquiry itself.” Science means knowledge; as a matter of fact, in accordance with their nature, human beings want to know, and the knowledge acquired by “placing particulars relative to relevant universals is the single most desirable human acquisition or good, at least most of the time,” being the way in which we perceive, move toward, and coordinate all other ends. In parting from this “classical teleology,” ‘modern’ or ‘Enlightenment’ science follows Machiavelli, “subvert[ing] the ordinary way of encountering and articulating the world while endorsing the judgment of the great majority that the greatest human need is not rationality, but power or freedom.” The great majority: modern science is the brain, so to speak, of the phenomenon Tocqueville calls ‘democracy,’ in America and throughout the world.

Modern science rejects teleology by (mis)understanding nature as matter in motion, as a set of particular events and elements which cause other events and combine into compounds by concatenations that follow certain predictable patterns or ‘natural laws.’ This science privileges physics over biology by reducing biological wholes to their parts, life into nonliving elements; modern social science imitates mathematical physics in the course of a cognate reductionism. Natural organisms are no longer said to be teleological wholes but teleology slips into modern social science, anyway, in the form of its attempt to (again, per Machiavelli) master human nature by discovering which causes result in which effects, then manipulating the causes to produce the effects social scientists desire. Embarrassment about this leads to ‘pragmatism,’ the attempt to make practice into and end in itself, as seen in, for example, the writings of Richard Rorty, who tells his readers that human communities are “shaped rather than found,” belonging to, loved by, their creators, who love them as their own. “What matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right”; community in the Cave, not the ascent from it. “But why,” Salkever asks, “should the need for community be more important than, for instance, the need for theoretical inquiry?” “To say that liberals can best justify themselves if they ‘simply drop the distinction between rational judgment and cultural bias'” is to deny the possibility of evaluative explanation at the same time one is practicing it,” to issue a command that exempts one’s moral and cultural relativism from its own strictures. The command rests on the decidedly non-relativist but usually unexamined claim that “the greatest human need is the need for power, in the sense of the maximally efficient accumulation of resources for achieving whatever goals our hearts happen to desire,” and, concurrently, that slavery is “the greatest threat to humanity”—an idea “expressed in our time as the need for emancipation or liberation or empowerment.” This is an “argument from a final cause,” but a “concealed” one, concealed indeed from most of its proponents. Aristotle already had his reply ready: although democratic, this belief “is uniquely dangerous to democracies because it acquires a certain respectability through the false identification of freedom with living as one pleases.” But since, as Socrates notes, the desires are foolish and contradictory counselors, a democratic regime founded on this identification will wreck itself, if it isn’t wrecked by rival regimes before it collapses by its own illogic. [1]

Thus, teleology turns out neither to be hopelessly ‘metaphysical’ in the pejorative sense of the word nor “inextricably bound to a false cosmology.” It is biological, a science that begins with noticing that in “the world of observable change, of the generation and corruption of organisms,” patterns are discernible; Aristotelian biology seeks “to determine what these patterns are, to distinguish species from species.” Biology is an empirical science. Empirically, “the properties of living organisms are not reducible to those of their inanimate components.” That being so, “to be alive is to be a living something, a horse, a human being, and so on”—organisms are “individuated within species.” Both their irreducible wholeness and their species forms “a way of life definitive of a particular species.” (This will turn out to be politically important, since one element of a politeia or regime is its Bios ti, its way of life.) Wholeness in the way of the species constitutes what Aristotle calls the anima, the soul of the organism, which “is not separate from its matter or body,” except for purposes of analysis. In terms of life as lived, a corpse is no longer a human being, as it lacks soul, its principle of life, and movement (including its growth). “‘Matter’ is always relative to the form it takes, and souls is simply the functional state of such matter.” Thus, “an organism’s nature is determined more by its soul than by its matter, more by its species character than by its organs.” That way of life is its actuality, its energeia, aiming at its purpose or end. There are, then, “grades of being,” “from purely random potentiality (matter, body, parts) to purely organized actuality (form, soul, wholes, function)”. Not all natural phenomena are teleological; rainfall isn’t intrinsically teleological, nor are rocks. A biologist will see, as anyone can see, that organisms depend upon the nature of these nonteleological, nonliving beings for their own life, but this leaves open the question of whether that dependence implies an overall design or Designer of the cosmos. Living phenomena are teleological, including human beings. As such, one can call an individual organism better or worse “with reference to the being [ousia] of each sort of thing,” each species (Physics 2, 199b 30-32). In terms of cosmology, “the universe is neither a random heap nor a gigantic unitary animal; rather, it is composed of interdependent parts which are themselves wholes.”

Aristotle denies that such species-defining actualities can be known with “the certainty and precision of mathematics.” Nonliving beings can be known more precisely than living beings; they are not self-directed but are subject to external forces more readily measured than the immanent and purposeful energeia of organisms. “The major resistance to the assumption of Aristotelian science is…more likely to be political than scientific,” as modern science has been animated by the Machiavellian/Baconian ‘project’ of mastering nature and fortune for the relief of man’s estate. We moderns want to control nature “for human ends,” and Aristotelianism resists that precisely in order to raise the question of what human purposes should be. Get rid of teleology and you don’t know, a problem that results in the tendency of ‘moderns’ to smuggle purposes in, surreptitiously, as noted.

What, then, is the human purpose, the human ‘good’? Salkever finds “Aristotle’s approach to social science”—Aristotle himself always says “political science”—to be “superior to the two principal approaches characteristic of our time, empiricist and interpretive social science.” Empiricist social science can give no guidance for human action, although it can inform human choice of action; interpretive social science (much of anthropology, for example) can talk about purposes, but only “more or less ‘from the native’s point of view,'” that is, from the perspective of a given ‘culture.’ Interpretive social science cannot, and indeed in principle refuses, to say whether one ‘culture’ or regime is better for human beings than another. Aristotelian political science encompasses both empiricist and interpretive social science while also providing an account of human nature that serves as a framework for judging the relative goodness of the several regimes and their many variants. 

Politics means ruling and being ruled in turn. In households, such rule is seen in the relations between husbands and wives, whereas the rule of parents over children and of masters over slaves are command-and-obey relations, the first for the good of the ruled, the second for the good of the ruler. All political regimes have three characteristics. They are structured by nomoi (meaning both laws and customs); they are also structured by “some procedure for ruling and being ruled in turn, rather than, say, by force, chance, or wisdom”; and the ruling choices “are motivated by the desire to improve the lives of all the citizens,” ensuring that they both live and live well. (In a masterly regime, neither of those goods are ensured.) Since so many regimes are in fact bad—defined by ruling for the sake of the rulers, exclusively—much of Aristotle’s political science “is devoted to explaining why politics is so unusual and how other kinds of associations,” not only bad regimes but such sub-political associations as families, clans, friendships, armies, and markets “distort real politics in his sense of the term.” 

Stepping back for the moment, Salkever shows why modern empirical social science will not do. Aristotle never saw it, but he knew Democritus’ “assertion of the universality of external efficient causality (a claim shared by modern science).” Against this, Aristotle observed that all organisms are self-moving and that “all animals” moreover “move by choice (prohairesis) or intellection (noēsis).” In the De Anima, Aristotle calls the soul (psuchē) “the starting point [archē] of all living things,” not separate from the body (De Anima 402a2). Animals as distinct from plants gain knowledge of the world, and this knowledge begins with their souls. That knowledge informs its movements, whereas the movements of plants involve no knowledge. The souls of both plants and animals seek nourishment, but the growth enabled by the nourishment they find has limits imposed by nature, unlike fire (416a15; see also Aquinas, Lecture IX. 532). Limits imply knowability. Animals know things, and this knowledge begins with sense perception, which also has limits based upon a mean; place an object at some great distance from the eye and the eye can’t see it but place it on the eye and it can’t be seen, either. The same goes for sound, odor, and the other senses: too far or too close, too much or too little deranges sense perception. “Excesses in perceptible objects destroy the perceptual organs, for if the movement is too strong for the perceptual organ, the ratio is dissolved (424b25-30, Aquinas Lecture II.556); the “perceptual capacity…is not capable of perceiving after the perceptible object has been too intense” (429a30). The naturalness of the mean, then, holds well beyond ethical and political life—both of which govern the desiring, not the perceiving, aspect of the soul; the naturalness of the mean is not even distinctively human. Human beings are distinctive because their souls move in accordance not only with sense perception, desire, and knowledge but with rational understanding. Understanding receives the form, the species, of things; because it entails no organ that it can be injured, understanding receives the most intelligible things most clearly (429b1). Intense intelligibility doesn’t bother it; on the contrary, the more, the better. But by seeing the forms, the natures of things, including the soul’s several aspects, it can guide nourishment, perception, and desire toward the mean in action, although it does not directly prompt action. The soul, as Salkever puts it, is “the definitive activity of an organism,” or, in Aristotle’s metaphor, “If the eye were an animal, sight would be its soul” (412b18-19). 

Only human souls are characterized by praxis, this concatenation of perception, thought, and desire. “The subject of politikē or political science is ta prakta, matters concerning practice.” This is not the will, which is nowhere to be found in Aristotle’s writings but “the result of a specific,” specifically human, “kind of desire.” While animals, like humans, can make mistakes, desire things that are bad for them, “in general, an animal’s pleasures are appropriate to its ergon: most dogs, spiders, and mules take pleasure in the sorts of things that all members of their species appropriately desire.” With human beings, however, desires vary considerably not as contrasted with other species but as contrasted among individuals of their own species; this is “the major source of human inequality,” as (for example) some yearn to rule, some to serve, many only to be ‘left alone.’ What is more, it is the human capacity to understand, to reason, that intensifies these intraspecies divergences. Some people are better at reasoning than others; “natural slaves” and children do not deliberate well, as they can make a choice (hairesis) but not a deliberate choice (prohairesis). “For human beings, biological inheritance is much less powerful in determining a way of life” than it is in other animal species, and this is true both for individuals and for the groups they form, from families to poleis. At all levels, “the heart of a specifically human life is not that it is freely willed rather than necessitated,” as the moderns sometimes insist, “but rather that it operates as a coherent whole rather than a series of moments.” Only we can ask ourselves, What is the good for ourselves? Given our diverse natural capacities, let alone our diverse circumstances, temperaments, habits, our answers will be controversial with others of our kind. “It is this controversy that provides the central problem for, and the raison d’être of, the social scientist. Awareness of the problematic character of human happiness leads to the realization that individual prohairesis requires theorizing about the human good in general.” We controvert one another’s claims about what living well is, and such controversies might lead to attempts at removing other humans’ capacity to live, at all.

Human beings are political because they have reason and speech; they are not capable of reason in order to be political. By reason and speech, they seek justice, an ordering of life according to their claims of what it is to live well. The laws poleis establish express these claims. Speech is not simply, or even primarily, a means of conveying information or expressing one’s ‘self’—the ‘self’ being the modern substitute for soul. Reasoned speech “rather makes it possible for us to discover through deliberation the kinds of goals in terms of which we can best organize our lives—those means which for us constitute human happiness,” the purpose of human life as flourishing according to the nature of our species. As we do so, we need laws and customs—conventions—to “help bring us to an awareness of what is best for us.” Laws and customs can provide a framework for such deliberation, and themselves embody prior deliberations by those who have shaped them. It is in this sense that Aristotle calls the laws “reason without desire” (Politics 1287 a32). And “living according to laws is…said to be essential throughout life because unmediated logos is not strong enough to overcome most people’s occasional resistance to moderation and living well,” living in according to the mean between extremes. The laws’ impersonality helps, because, as Aristotle remarks, “people hate those who oppose their impulses, even if this is rightly done” but laws that require things that are rightly done cause much less sting of resentment (Nicomachean Ethics 1180a21-24). For Aristotle, “political life thus understood appears neither as the peak of human excellence nor as a strategy for protecting individual rights or powers” but instead “answers to the human need for authority, for a structure of reasonable prejudice to support and sustain good ways of life.”

What does it mean to “live well” by nature, not merely by convention or by assertion? By nature, human beings live well insofar as their lives “are ordered by the specifically human telos.” Crucially, as with so many natural things, “this goal is expressed not in terms of some transcendent ideal or rule of obligation, but as a mean, which in turn is defined as an appropriate logos or proportion of opposing tendencies.” A good character “must be a mean relative to each individual’s capacities and circumstances. “In living this way, persistently over time, a human being develops a hexis,” a set of “qualities in an individual that are relatively firm and definite at any moment, the qualities that identify individuals as more, or at any rate other, than a bundle of unrealized potentials.” Not only human beings have a hexis; in all things, the hexis is “that by virtue of which [they] are what they are”—again, “ordered wholes rather than heaps of elements.” This is why Aristotelian political science resembles other sciences—less precise than the others but nonetheless seeking to know and to understand things as they are. “The basis for any understanding of human affairs must be a perception of what constitutes a well-ordered person, just as the practice of medicine must begin with a perception of what constitutes a healthy somatic constitution.” Both political science and medicine rely “on a procedure that can be figured by the metaphor of the mean, a certain optimal ordering of the elements of the thing being ordered, whether that thing is a person as such a simply a body,” although “the means that social science has in view is much more difficult to discern than the medical mean…and is even more subject to case-by-case variation,” souls and their relations with other souls being more complex than bodies.

Regimes aim at instantiating ways of living well by the means of laws and customs. “To achieve the possibility of rational conduct we require a long period of habituation,” enhancing what we are naturally given. “The curious and decisive fact about human life is that we have a profound biological need for an institution that will shape our desires into healthy patterns, but a relatively weak natural impulse towards institutions of that sort (as opposed to our powerful natural impulse to form families or clans.” This is why poleis are so often badly ordered, why “there will almost always be a difference between a good human being without qualification and a good citizen of a particular city,” since “the conception of the human good implicit in the city’s laws may be mistaken,” and, “even if it is not, the good citizen must accept the interpretations of the laws made by others even if they seem less than fully rational, except when that citizen in turn holds political office.” Given this reality, often so difficult to accept, political scientists ought therefore to aim not at “fashioning a utopian alternative institution” or, alternatively, or at avoiding the tasks of criticizing and guiding altogether—tasks that will prove difficult enough. Human beings vary from one to another, complicating any attempt to formulate policies for a group of them; more, each polis aims at multiple purposes, which include living, living well, and living together—all of which can conflict, given the many circumstances in which the polis finds itself. “Political organization and authority are not fully justified unless the nomoi of that organization are reasonable means toward the development of healthy personalities, but that organization cannot continue to exist unless those same nomoi are also reasonable ways of providing for the security of the polis and maintaining a good level of integration or civil friendship”; further, “the requirements of virtue and those of peace and integration seldom coincide,” a dilemma that “does not admit of precise theoretical resolution.” And this is more, even, than the presence of good laws and customs: “Poleis will be well governed only to the extent that citizen-governors have or are virtuous hexeis; otherwise, the resources of the polis are likely to be used for the wrong purposes,” as “passion perverts even the best when they are ruling” (Politics 1287a31-32). And it is quite “difficult to persuade people to be just when they have the power to act unjustly,” a fact that involves political science with “a rhetorical problem,” in addition to all the others.

For example, the deliberation rulers should undertake requires leisure. But such “unleisurely ways of life” as farming, commerce, and crafts “are absolutely necessary for the survival of the polis,” and the interests of the several classes will differ. “Therefore, some whose ways of life are necessary for poleis must as far as possible be excluded from active citizenship if the polis is not to be twisted by the pressing claims of private or economic interest.” In small towns today, local business owners may take control and then push forward policies that serve themselves, to the disadvantage of everyone else; parents on school boards will often pad the budget ‘for the sake of the children,’ that is, their children. “A determination will thus have to be made in each case concerning how far to modify the claims of excellence in view of the subordinate, though indispensable, requirements of stability and integration.” A well-modulated, just balance “must be struck,” but this will be “the work of the wise citizen (the phronimos) who has a solid grasp of the possibilities and dangers of local conditions, and not the social scientist,” usually. What the political scientist can provide is a “general theory based on considerations of human nature and the human good or goods,” as it is “only through such theorizing [that] we can gain a clear sense of the problems that politics must solve,” but this science, practiced prudently, will understand that “the problems it brings to light do not admit of precise theoretical solutions,” and those solutions seldom translate directly into practice.

Theorizing constitutes only one of four tasks for political science. In addition to understanding the “best regime,” the “one to be prayed for” but hardly likely to be implemented, political scientists need to know what regime will be best under less than optimal conditions, “when we cannot take stability and integration for granted” (the topic of Politics Book 4), to know how a given regime may be made more stable and coherent (Book 5), and to know “the technique of bringing existing regimes closer to the best.” To undertake this task, political scientists need a well-measured recognition of the imprecision of their science but also a “proper habituation or upbringing” and the “maturity” that comes from experience—a sound hexis. (“This is not a problem for sciences such as arithmetic and geometry.”) “The distinction between youthful passion and mature reason, then, is not here a difference between heated commitment and indifferent reflection, but rather the difference between an observer who is a loosely knit collection of psychic parts and one who is closer to having become a distinct and irreducible organism.” [2] Such personal qualities serve all scientists, not only political scientists; an impassioned, inexperienced youth is likely to acknowledge that “the principle that the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time,” inasmuch as he is less likely to reason, to think logically. He doesn’t really want to. [3]

Political science is not self-sufficient but “rather an instrumental condition of practical wisdom (phronēsis), the excellence of deliberating about particular choices that Aristotle sees as the way to the best of goods among the practical things.” I “can clarify deliberation about our particular lives both by enriching our political vocabulary and by suggesting possible alternatives to political life as such.” The general good discovered by theorizing and the particular good achieved in practice are both the same and not the same, in the way that the road from Thebes to Athens is also the road from Athens to Thebes—a “single completed motion but as a continuous back and forth.” “The best work of social science would be the development of more clearheaded and less vehemently serious citizens.”

Salkever completes his account of Aristotelian political science by looking still more closely at “how theory informs practice.” He is especially concerned to vindicate Aristotelian teleology from “the charge that it irrationally seeks to establish a dogmatic foundation for scientific and practical reason.” Aristotle regards scientific or theoretical reason not as “abstract speculation alone” but as “the activity of seeing the universal in the particulars before us.” Practical reasoning or prudence must differ from this, since deliberating well about living well can be done by “people of much experience and little theory,” as grandparents delight in remarking. Political philosophy and the political science that forms a part of it is primarily a matter of such prudential reasoning, although theoretical reasoning can helpfully inform it. Rules-based moralities (preeminently, now, Kantianism) abstract from “a central feature of human life,” the way of life of a given polis, and indeed the regime generally; they also abstract from circumstances, which even rule-bound judges concede to ‘alter cases.’ Rules-based morality strive for certainty, perhaps in an effort to replicate the certainty of faith in God and His commandments. But reasoning isn’t revelation, even if what God reveals is Himself as Logos. “Rule morality treats social life as fundamentally unproblematic,” treating persons impersonally. But for Aristotle, moral and political philosophy resemble biology more than mathematics—concrete, not abstract, and teleological, not deductive.

Accordingly, “the phronimos, the person of practical wisdom or prudence,” does not formulate precise rules but thinks and acts in terms of “a metaphor—the metaphor of the mean—whose function is to clarify problems of practical choice, and not to resolve them.” As an example, Salkever considers E. M. Forster’s novel, Howard’s End, in which the main character, Margaret, comes to see that her captain-of-industry husband’s sentimental charitableness amounts to an “unweeded kindness,” a kindness without prudence, the sort one sees in “well-intended children.” “What is lacking in such a person is not the ability to desire or will some universal goal, but an ability to understand the problems and possibilities that belong to a particular context.” Aristotle commends no natural laws, whether Thomistic or Hobbesian, and no Kantian categorical imperative or utilitarian calculus, either. “Our needs,” which are “biologically inherited,” “constituted for us by nature, rather than created by our wants, desires, or actions,” are “complex and frequently conflict with one another.” Each individual is “heterogeneous,” reflecting “heterogeneous interests and needs”; so is each polis. For this reason, “good or reasonable action-choices are not deductively valid and necessary applications of universal rules, but more like well-informed guesses, resting on complex perceptions of that balance of importance and urgency that is likely to be best for us.” Moral and political theory provide not so much ruling principles from which right actions can be deduced as “rules of thumb that hold true usually or for the most part, such as the rule that one should repay debts in preference to doing favors.” Although it cannot “supply practice with determinate rules of action,” theory “can inform and improve situational judgment in three ways: by explaining why such judgment must attend to person, y pointing out the way in which different persons or relationships correspond to different needs, and by calling attention to the commonest sorts of errors,” thereby articulating “the richness and complexity of the natural world of human needs and interests.” In this, Aristotle comes to sight as more realistic than either the modern ‘idealists’—no great challenge—or modern ‘realists,’ the Machiavellians who dismiss Aristotelian morality as so much heavy baggage.

But “can this approach to moral reasoning be extended to political or public matters”? And can it be so extended now, in modernity, where modern states have replaced poleis? Salkever turns to this question in Part II.

 

 

Notes

1. Salkever addresses one noble but incoherent attempt to remediate this dilemma, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981). Because MacIntyre begins with the historical-relativist assumption that Aristotle reflects Greek political culture, rejection “the possibility of any natural or biological grounding for teleological explanation,” and because he also takes the characteristically ‘modern’ stance that “human beings are individuated within social roles, without qualification, as if Aristotle had never insisted on the distinction between the good human being and the good citizen,” his teleology is in the end a matter of convention, only. His book registers a “tone of frustration with philosophy as a whole,” resulting in his “proposal that what we need most now is not rationality but ‘the construction of local forms of community,’ the virtues of the monastery rather than the study.” For additional discussion of MacIntyre, see “Two Critiques of Nihilism” on this website, under the category, “Philosophers.”
2. “According to Aristotle, experience (empeiria) is a more specifically human attribute than is sensation (aiesthēsis). All animals are capable of sensation, but humans are more capable of experience, of connecting sensations by memory and holding them together in the experience of a single universal (for example, human being) that arises from the sensation of individuals”; “for Aristotle the work of science is articulating experience, while for the mainstream of modern science it is connecting sensations.” 
3. “Since the archai of first philosophy and natural science, like those of social science, come from experience, the young cannot become philosophers or natural scientists, although they can be first-class mathematicians or geometers” because “the principles of mathematics come from abstraction, the principles of the others come from experience.” There have been many chess prodigies, no political prodigies. This is well understood in monarchic regimes; when a king dies untimely, his young heir continues in school, leaving rule of the kingdom to a regency.

 

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

 

Having shown how the tyrant, Dionysius the Younger, and the aspiring philosopher-king, Dion, failed as philosophers but especially as rulers, Plato turns in Letters Five and Six to corresponding with two more sober men, the young Perdiccas III of Macedon, then under the regency of his brother-in-law, and Hermias of Atarneus, a former student of Plato and friend of Aristotle, who is said to have arranged Aristotle’s marriage to his daughter. In some respects, Perdiccas serves as a parallel life to that of Dionysius, both of them young men, Hermias to that of Dion, both of them mature men. 

To Perdiccas, Plato offers counsel on the customs of guest-friendship and of sacred counsel. Plato has sent one of his students to him, as he had done for Dionysius. According to one account, the student, Euphraeus, inspired a love of philosophy in the young king, and Perdiccas reciprocated by raising Euphraeus to a position of honor in his court. A guest-friend, indeed. As to sacred counsel, Plato advises Perdiccas on the nature of political regimes—that is, on ruling, the divine action par excellence. Political life is ‘polytheistic’ in the sense that each regime has “a certain voice,” even as certain animals have distinctive calls (321d). But whereas animals call to other animals, regimes call to other rational beings. Yet only “a very few” observers understand what democracies, oligarchies, and monarchies are saying as they speak to gods and human beings, with actions that “follow” their voices (321e). When regimes follow their voices they flourish, but if they imitate the voices of other regimes they are ruined. Euphraeus can help you to find the right voice for your regime, “the speeches befitting monarchy” (322a).

“But if someone, having heard these things, should say, ‘Plato, it seems, pretends to know what things are advantageous to a democracy, but when it was possible to speak to the demos and to counsel the things best for it, he never went up to utter a sound,'” how to reply (322a)? True enough, but the Athens of Plato’s own time (having already executed Socrates, among other actions) saw “a demos already elderly and habituated by those who came before to do many things unlike to his own counsel”; the philosopher would have been foolish to attempt to advise it, “taking risks in vain and doing nothing more” in a regime that had descended into “an incurable state” (322b). “Political wisdom is likely to be as much an object of suspicion in a democracy as in a monarchy,” Helfer rightly observes. Plato makes no mention of philosophy itself in this letter, content to recommend his philosophically-minded student, with good effect. Perdiccas ruled for five years, killed in a disastrous military expedition against Illyria, which had seized upper Macedonia. It would be helpful to know what we do not know—what Euphraeus advised in regard to the venture—but it is at least clear that this was no imperialist lunge, rather an attempt to counter an act of imperialism. 

Plato sends students to Hermias, introducing them as persons likely to benefit the tyrant and likely to benefit from him in turn. His letter is addressed to all three men. “Friends who are steadfast who have healthy character” are more valuable than a multitude of horses or an additional military alliance or additional gold (322d). Young Erastus and Coriscus will prove to be such friends to Hermias, as Plato has tested them and found them of moderate and trustworthy character. For his part, Hermias can protect them, as “they are inexperienced on account of having been occupied with us…for a long part of their life” (322e). It will be recalled that Plato had regarded his time spent in Syracuse with Dionysius a waste of his time and Dionysius regarded the beginnings of a liberal education at the feet of Plato a waste of his time; as a ruler, Hermias spends his time deliberating and acting, not philosophizing, whereas the young philosophers have spent their time becoming liberally educated, not in ruling. As Helfer suggests, “the study of philosophy in Plato’s Academy has rendered them perfectly upright but desperately vulnerable; by attending for so long to the attainment of ‘true wisdom,’ they have failed sufficiently to acquire ‘the human and compulsory’ wisdom that would allow them to fend off the ‘wicked and unjust.'” This being so, these two human types should “hold fast” to one another, “arriv[ing] at a single braid of friendship” (323b).

If, however, one of you becomes disgruntled with this bond and you “resolve to dissolve it,” write a letter of accusation to me, and I will attempt to reconcile you (323b). If you do this, “unless the dissolution happens to have been great,” our joint philosophizing should succeed better “than any incantation whatsoever,” any pious utterance, to “naturally implant and bind you together again” in “friendship and community” (323b-c). Plato playfully calls this “a good prophecy,” claiming “that we will do all these good things, if a god should be willing” (323c). More seriously, he calls this “a compact and sovereign law” among the four of them,” as “playfulness…is a sister of seriousness, and swearing by the god who is leader of all things”—perhaps the “first by nature,” mentioned in his letter to Dionysius?—both “the things that are and the things that will be,” can be known to us, provided “we really philosophize,” as “clearly as is within the power of happy human beings” to know that god (323d). If the tyrant consents, he will be less a tyrant, having submitted to a form of the rule of law.

Helfer contrasts the real Platonists with Dion. “Dion did not really understand what philosophy means for Plato.” Erastus and Coriscus do, but as a result of their ardent and laborious studies they are helpless in any polis, needing the political protection of one such as Hermias. Philosophy alone is not a solution to politics, although Euphraeus’ Platonic political science can be helpful to a young ruler like Perdiccas. Letter Six “is a bridge between [the] drastically truncated presentation of philosophy” moralizing Dion embodied “and the correction of that distortion.” Letter Six both “upholds the notion of philosophy as the basis of trustworthy friendship” and acknowledges philosophy’s “essentially dynamic and transpolitical character.” While insisting on the pious character of philosophy, Plato takes care to propose the covenantal law as a hedge against “the danger of human inconstancy.” After all, will Hermias, with his “limited capacity for philosophy,” sustain the friendship? The young philosophers will be loyal, but how useful can they be to this ruler, beyond their trustworthy friendship? After all, “the philosopher does not wish to spend time in, or even think about, the practical requirements of political activity,” even if he comes to be capable of doing so, in time. And indeed “the real lesson of the letter…is the demonstration of the practical infeasibility of this ideal arrangement,” “the regime” within the regime in Atareneus “that [Plato] has founded.” While he has written “a critical safeguard” into the sovereign covenant—the three philosophers outnumber the lone non-philosopher—the unphilosophic ruler will retain all the physical power, leaving “the philosopher at the mercy of the ruler,” should the tyrant turn especially tyrannical. “Plato cannot rule by means of fear because he can muster no threat of force against the powerful Hermias”; persuasion is his only available means of rule. Worse, this “solution to the philosopher’s need for protection is inappropriate in any real circumstances, since the philosophers must always constitute a tiny minority of the political community.” Letter Six serves as “an introduction to the central political challenge of Plato’s political-philosophic writings.” The “doctrine of philosophic rule is necessarily mythical.” Letter Seven will address this matter, showing much more elaborately “how Plato calls into question the political efficacy of philosophy.”

Plato addresses the seventh letter to “intimates and comrades of Dion,” who by now had been assassinated (323e). These men carry on a civil war against the rule of the assassins. Letter Seven is the central letter in the book, and also the longest. 

Plato recalls that Dion “supposed that the Syracusans should be free, dwelling under the best laws” (324b). His opinion originated from his association with Plato, who explains his own political career. Even before reaching the age of full citizenship, Athenian Plato expected to engage in “the common affairs of the city” (324c). But the regime of the Thirty Tyrants, effectively installed by the Spartans after their defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, with some “intimates and acquaintances of mine” among its number, did not “manage the city by leading it from a certain unjust life to a just way,” as Plato had hoped, but instead imposed a violent purge of those Athenians who had opposed the surrender (324d). The leader of the Thirty, Critias, had been a student of “my friend, the elderly Socrates, whom I would scarcely be ashamed to say was the most just of those in that time” (324e). That is, the worry that the conduct of Dionysius, Plato’s student-tyrant, might reflect badly upon his teacher was a possibility Plato had seen in Athens, decades earlier. This, despite the fact that when the regime commanded Socrates to “carry off one of the citizens by force to be put to death in order that he should participate in their affairs whether he should wish to or not,” Socrates courageously refused the command, “risked suffering everything rather than become a partner in their impious deeds” (324e-325a). As for Plato, “I was disgusted and I withdrew myself from the evils of that time” (325a). The subsequent democratic regime that replaced the brief rule of the Thirty Tyrants was even worse, at least regarding to philosophy, killing Socrates “on grounds of a lack of pious veneration” (325c). As Helfer remarks, Plato passes over in silence the second charge against Socrates, that of corrupting the young. One reason for that may be that the addressees of the Seventh Letter are young men. 

Upon reflection, and with further observation of politics in Athens and elsewhere, Socrates came to understand how hard it is “to manage the political things correctly” (325d). This is because it is hard to find “men who are friends and faithful comrades,” without whom one can do nothing politically, as the reign of Dionysius, that man alone, confirmed (325d). The corruption of existing regimes, with their “written laws and customs,” makes this nearly impossible, inasmuch as bad regimes foster bad character in rulers and ruled alike (325d). Being a philosopher, Plato continued to consider how regimes might be improved, but “with respect to acting I was always waiting for propitious moments” (326a). They never came. I “ended up thinking, concerning all the cities now, that all of them are being governed badly—for what is of their laws in in a nearly incurable state without some amazing artifice [or preparation] together with fortune” (326a). Echoing the words of the Republic 473c, Plato then concluded that “the human tribes will not cease from evils until either the tribe of those philosophizing (correctly and truly, that is) should come into the positions of political rule, or that of those who are in power in the cities should, by some divine fate, really philosophize” (326b). Plato tacitly invites the late Dion’s allies, and perhaps especially those reading his book, to measure the odds of either eventuality.

Journeying to Italy and Sicily for the first time, he found that “the life that is there called happy” consists of eating and copulating, habits that prevent the young from “becoming practically wise,” men of phronēsis (326b), or indeed to cultivate any other virtue. Here is where Dion came in. His association with Plato, his attempt to philosophize, was the “beginning” of “the problems that have now come to be concerning Dion and of those concerning the Syracusans”—namely, civil war—and, “it is to be dreaded, of still more, unless you would now obey my counsel, given now for the second time” (326e). For when Plato revealed to Dion “through speeches the things that seemed to me to be best for human beings and counseling him to do them, I was ignorant that I, without noticing myself, was in a certain way contriving what would come to be a dissolution of a tyranny” (327a). Dion “hearkened keenly and intently such as none of the young I have ever met,” choosing to “over the rest of his life in a manner differing from that of the many Italiotes and Siceliotes,” “cherish[ing] virtue more than pleasure and the rest of luxury” (327a). This annoyed “those living according to what is lawful convention in a tyranny” (327b). 

Had Dion left it there, had he simply lived a virtuous private life, he might have been written off as a peculiar character but deserving of no more than contempt. But Dion “apprehended” that his way of life was being emulated in others, if not in many (327c). More, he “held” (note well, not apprehending) that even the ruler, “even Dionysius could perhaps become one of these with the assistance of gods,” and if so, “both his life and that of other Syracusans would turn out to become one of indomitable bliss” (327c). And he further “supposed” that his good old teacher, Plato, might be brought in “as a partner in these things,” turn Dionysius toward philosophy and thus to found, “without slaughters, deaths, and the evils that have come to be, a happy and true life throughout the land,” a regime ruled by the philosopher-king in practice, not merely in theory, as in the Republic (327d). Does this not substitute Plato for the gods, or does it merely assume that Plato’s arrival has become possible thanks to a divinely arranged, rare circumstance? In the event, it was not a god who called Plato but Dionysius, having been persuaded by Dion to do so. Plato was rightly cautious about Dion’s bright hopes, but he eventually decided to journey to Syracuse, thinking that “if ever someone was to undertake to bring these intentions concerning both laws and regime to completion, it must be attempted also now” (328c). To that dubious hope, Plato added the worry that he might be “in danger of betraying, in the first place, the guest-friendship and comradeship of Dion, who had really come to be in no small dangers” (328d). More, what if Plato did not come and Dion were exiled, arriving in Athens (under the terms of guest-friendship) to rebuke Plato but even more philosophy itself for having betrayed him and having betrayed this unique opportunity to put philosophic theory into practice? In the words Plato puts into the mouth of Dion in this fictional scenario, “will you ever escape a reputation for vice? Far from it.” (329a). There would be no answer to this accusation against himself and philosophy, Plato claims.

“I went, in accordance with reason and in justice as much as can be for a human being,” who lacks godlike foresight (329b). “I left behind my occupations, which were not indecorous”—as we know, his teaching in the Academy he had founded—in order to live “under a tyranny that didn’t seem to be fitting with respect to my things or to me” (329b). This nonetheless acquitted him “in relation to Zeus Xenios,” that is, the god of gods in his aspect of guardian of guest-friendship, while “rendering the philosopher’s part impeachable” (329b). That is, by showing himself both pious and philosophic, he defended himself and philosophy against one of the charges the Athenian demos had leveled against Socrates.

Upon arrival in Syracuse, however, he found not philosophic or friendly speech but “everything around Dionysius full of strife and slanders about Dion in relation to the tyranny” (329c). His concerns about Dion’s safety confirmed, he defended him “to the extent I was capable,” which wasn’t very far; Dionysius soon accused Dion of “plotting against the tyranny”—of a form of thought animated by philosophic principles, if not by the virtue of prudence (329c). In exiling Dion, Dionysius begged, or rather insisted, that Plato stay behind. Did he find something of value in the philosopher, or was he simply ensuring that his putative regime enemies could not reunite and continue their supposed conspiring against him? “While he did grow ever fonder of me as time went on during his intercourse with my way and character, he also wished for me to praise him more than Dion and to hold him to be more especially a friend than him,” spurred on by the “amazing love of victory” typical of a thumotic soul (330a). In this, Dionysius never came to pursue the regime, the way of life, of philosophy; worse, “he shrank from it, fearing, on account of the slanderers’ speeches, lest he should become ensnared in some way and Dion come to accomplish everything for himself” (330b). Plato persevered in his efforts but Dionysius, “resisting, won out,” not in persuading Plato to prefer him to Dion but in resisting philosophy (330b). 

Should Plato have persevered instead of getting out of town? No: “One who is counseling a sick man adhering to a regimen that is depraved with respect to health ought first to change his life into something else, and if he is willing to obey, at that point to suggest other things too; but if he is not willing, I would hold one who flees from counseling such a one to be both a man and a doctor, and one who remains to be the opposite: unmanly and artless. It is indeed the same with respect to a city as well, whether it has one sovereign authority or more.” (330c-d). With a slave, it is another matter; in that case, one can use force. But there is no sense in “mak[ing] myself hateful by admonishing in vain” or in flattering them either (331c). Yet isn’t that what Dion did, in Syracuse? Making himself hateful by admonishing in vain? His followers should take note. One should speak to one’s city “if it does not appear to him to be nobly governed, if he is neither going to be talking in vain nor to be put to death for speaking; but he should not bring force against a fatherland to produce a change of regime when it is not possible for it to come to be the vest without exile and slaughter of men; rather, he should keep quiet and pray for the good things for both himself and the city” (331d). Plato makes it explicit: “In this same way, indeed, I would counsel you,” and this is how Dion and I counseled Dionysius; govern yourself, first, then “acquire faithful friends and comrades” attracted to you by your virtue before attempting to reform Syracuse or to recolonize Sicilian cities misruled by barbarians, the latter task undertaken but never achieved by his father (331d-e).

But neither did the virtuous Dion succeed in founding a good regime in Syracuse after returning to the city and expelling the tyrant. Dion’s virtue attracted friends, to be sure. In this enterprise, he brought with him two brothers from Athens who had “come to be [his friends] not from philosophy but from the promiscuous comradeship belonging to most friends, which they work out through hosting someone as a guest-friend or through initiation into the lesser and greater mysteries” (333e). Once victorious in Syracuse, they betrayed Dion, participating in his assassination. This was a “shameful and impious thing” to do, but it must be noticed that although Plato makes much of the congruence of traditional customs, piety, and philosophy, rational inquiry shows that such customs and piety do not guard a man from false friends as well as philosophy—in particular political philosophy, which ought to alert its students to the importance of prudence. Plato immediately displays such prudence, observing that just because the two men in question were Athenians they did not necessarily represent the ethos of that city. I, Plato, am also an Athenian, but never betrayed him, even when tempted by the blandishments of the Syracusan tyrants. Plato “had become a friend to Dion not through vulgar friendship, but through partnership in liberal education” (334b). As for Syracuse, and your continued attempt to rule it in line with Dion’s intentions, but not with his folly, his wish “to make use of justice” without considering the ethos of Syracusans (335c). “Let not Sicily, nor any other city, be enslaved to human masters, but as my speech [logos] has it at least, to laws; for otherwise it is better neither for the enslavers nor the enslaved,” nor for their descendants (334c-d). And, now recurring to a pious thought, “one really ought to be persuaded by the ancient and sacred speeches, which indeed reveal to us that the soul is deathless, and it has judges, and that it suffers the greatest penalties whenever it is rid of its bodies; wherefore ought one to believe that it is a smaller evil to suffer even the great sins and injustices than to do them” (335a). 

How, then, to rule Syracuse? Imitate Dion’s personal moderation, be alert to those among you who are “not capable of living in the Dorian way” (336d), do not seek vengeance against your defeated enemies but make them, “by a pair of compulsions, awe and fear,” and make yourselves too, in your prudence, “slaves of the laws” (337a). Select fifty elders and offer them “the greatest possible honors” in framing good laws (337c)—in marked contrast to the Spartans’ imposition of the Thirty Tyrants on conquered Athens. “The laws having been given, everything comes down to this: if those who have won victory should render themselves, more than the vanquished, subservient to the laws, everything will be full of salvation and happiness and there will be refuge from all evils; but if they do not, neither call upon me nor upon another partner for help against whoever is unpersuaded by the letter that has now been sent to you” (336e-337a).

All very good, sage philosopher, but if you had taken Dionysius’ measure in your second visit to Syracuse, why did you return yet again? And if the only reliable friends are the philosophic ones, and philosophic souls are so rare, why would you risk falling into the clutches of this tyrant a second time, inasmuch as he had not heeded the advice of you and your friend Dion the previous time? It isn’t hard to see that Dionysius might invite him back; as a point of honor, he did not want people to think he’d learned nothing from Plato—or so Plato surmises. But why would you accept his invitation?

We have reached what Helfer identifies as the midway point of Letter Seven, “which is to say the midway point of the entire Letters.” As Fortune or some other god or gods would have it, another philosopher, and indeed a philosopher-king of sorts, the mathematician Archytas of Tarentum, had spent time with Dionysius, writing to assure Plato that the young tyrant “had advanced in philosophy” (339b). For his part, Dionysius wrote, too, promising Plato to follow Plato’s wishes regarding Dion. Once again, Plato chose to put the thing to the test, for “if things really be as had been said, in no way [would he] betray this very thing,” philosophy, and thereby put himself under “so great a reproach” (439e). And although fearful and “divining not very nobly,” he set out; once again, his increasingly wan hopes were disappointed, but at least Dionysius, “next after a god,” did prevent “many who wished to destroy me” from doing so, perhaps out of a certain “awe” or shame (340a). Helfer observes that at least Plato had come to the assistance of Archytas and the other Pythagorean philosophers at Syracuse by appeasing Dionysius’ request; “it was to avoid jeopardizing them and their work that Plato once more ‘veiled himself.” But why was Archytas fired with false hopes for the tyrant? Here Plato unfolds the difficulties of the philosophic life, perhaps the main reason so few continue in it.

Students need to understand “what sort of thing the whole problem is and through how many problems and how much toil it lies” for those who undertake to solve it (340c). To “really be a philosopher, being both intimate with and worthy of the divine problem” one must “strain to follow” the path toward it (340c). Such persons, and such persons alone, consider “that life would not be worth living for one who would do otherwise,” and “will not let up until he should either bring everything to completion or obtain such a power that, separately from the one who has shown him, he is incapable of being a guide himself” (340c). On the other hand, “those who are not really philosophers, but have been tinctured by opinions just as those whose bodies have been burnt by the sun, once they have seen how many are the subjects of learning, and the extent of the toil, and the ordered daily regimen that befits the problem, hold it to be hard and impossible for themselves” (340d). Even worse are those “who persuade themselves that they have heard the whole sufficiently and have no further need of any problems” (341a). Such a one was Dionysius, who “pretended both to know and sufficiently to have a hold on many, even the greatest, things because of hearsay from other,” even to the point of writing “about the things he had heard, composing as though it were his own treatise,” although Plato himself professes to “know nothing of these writings” (341b). Even I, Plato, who have written extensively on Socratic and other efforts of philosophic inquiry, have written nothing about the divine problem, for “it is no way speakable as are the other subjects of learning, but rather, from the coming to be of much intercourse concerning the problem itself, and living together, suddenly, as from a jumping fire a light is kindled, and having come to be in the soul, it straightaway nourishes itself” (341c-d). Genuine philosophizing about the divine problem, if writable and speakable “to the many,” would be of the greatest benefit to them, as it would “lead nature forth into the light for all” (341d-e). But “I do not hold [that] to be good for human beings unless for some few—however many are themselves capable of finding them out through a small indication” (341e). Others will view such discoveries either with “incorrect disdain” or worse, “a lofty and empty hope as though they had learned some august things” (341-342a). 

Why so? Plato lists five levels of knowing. The first is naming, the first sort of knowledge children learn, once they begin to understand words: for example, ‘this is a circle.’ The second is definition; rationally explaining the thing named in verbal terms: a circle is “that which is everywhere equally distant from the extremes to the middle”—an account, however, which remains ambiguous, inasmuch as it could refer as easily to something called a ‘ring’ (342b). For more precision, one needs an image, “what is drawn and erased, and what is turned on a lathe and destroyed” (342c). Scientific knowledge comes after that, when “all this [is] set down in turn as one, being not in sounds, nor in shapes and of bodies, but within souls” as “the nature of the circle,” its species (342c). And there is still a fifth level, knowledge of “the very thing that is knowable and is truly a being” (342b). The need for this level, as Helfer remarks, is that it “makes it possible to say that the objects of our experience belong objectively and really to species or classes.” Overall, “this amounts to a far-reaching critique of any thoroughgoing materialism” and, one might add, any ‘subjectivism.’ [1]

It is easy to see the daunting features of this path of philosophic ascent. One needs to be “good-natured” to gain the “scientific knowledge of the good-natured” (344e). Aptness to learn and a good memory will not suffice to gain such knowledge. This suggests that the divine problem has to do with “the good,” which Plato’s Socrates mentions as somehow both the origin and ‘end’ or purpose of all natural phenomena. This may be why Plato now emphasizes in his account of inquiring into the nature of the whole the task of “learn[ing] the truth about virtue to the extent possible,” and of vice (344b). “It is necessary to learn them simultaneously, and also the false and true of the whole being simultaneously, with total occupation and a great deal of time” (344b). The difficulty comes with the necessary task of “rubbing against one another: the names, definitions, sights, and perceptions,” the dialectic that process with “kindly refutations,” “making use of questions and answers being without envy,” whereby, when considering what is good and what bad, “practical wisdom shines forth, as well as mind, straining to the utmost extent of human power” (344b-c). This is why a serious man considering “the serious beings” will not write about them, “cast them down amid the envy and perplexity of human beings” who, for the most part, will sneer, snicker, or become enraged at whatever has been discovered in the inquiry, and inquiry for the rigors of which they have neither taste, nor time, nor patience, nor the courage to persevere in (344c). Things that are written down—laws, to give the politically important example—are “not the most serious things” to the lawgiver, “if indeed he himself was serious,” philosophic (344c). For his part, Dionysius wrote about the divine problem “for love of honor” (344e). He was not a serious man, although he was a dangerous one, to others and to himself. 

With this, Plato brings matters down to earth. What the tyrant also wanted, aside from honor, was property, including Dion’s property. He also wanted power, and suspected, as already recounted, that Dion was plotting against him. Dionysius proposed an arrangement whereby Dion would profit from his property in Syracuse but could not withdraw the ‘principle,’ as we now would call it, without Plato’s approval, as the right to withdraw that property would give Dion revenues sufficient to fund a military campaign to overthrow Dionysius. Plato disgustedly saw through that ploy, counter-offering to stay in Syracuse but only if Dionysius put his offer in writing. Dionysius wanted nothing to do with that sort of writing—permanence of obligation being less appealing to the tyrannical soul than permanence of a reputation for wisdom concerning the highest things, however spurious that wisdom might be. In the event, Dionysius simply sold Dion’s property, not surprising Plato when he did it. Plato’s recalcitrance regarding the initial scheme proved “a persuasive argument for enmity against me” (349c), as Dionysius now charged that Plato had sided with Dion. Happily, the philosopher-king Archytas rescued the philosopher he’d persuaded to return to Syracuse.

Dionysius’ machinations brought on his ruin. Dion would not have marched against him, had Dionysius given him his money back or had reconciled with him. “But as it is they, having set out against one another, have had their fill of every evil” (350e). For his part, Plato declined Dion’s invitation to join him in the expedition to overthrow Dionysius, and Plato concludes his letter to Dion’s admiring followers with a measured eulogy. Their mutual friend nobly “preferred the suffering of impious deeds above the doing of them, yet being very careful not to suffer them; nevertheless he stumbled, having come to the peak of his overcoming of his enemies” (351c). Such a pious, moderate, sensible human being “would never be wholly deceived concerning the souls of such as they,” but although “a coming storm would not altogether escape his notice…the extraordinary and unexpected magnitude of a storm could escape his notice, and having escaped it, inundate him by force” (351d). A basically good but not prudent man, he did not understand the height of their “ignorance, depravity, and gluttony” (351e). He had not rubbed good and bad together long enough, as a genuine philosopher would do.

As Helfer observes, “there is no denying that the whole undertaking in Syracuse appears to have been a debacle.” Making a philosopher-king out of Dionysius was Plan A; Helfer likens this to Socrates’ proposal in the Republic. Had it succeeded, Platonic political philosophy would have been vindicated in the most spectacular way. Putting Dion in as king, with the best laws, was Plan B; Helfer likens this to the plan of the Laws. “Had Dion succeeded in giving good laws to the Syracusans his reputation of being associated with philosophy, more than any ability to govern wisely himself, would have benefited the reputation of philosophy in turn,” although in truth Dion was no philosopher but rather a gentlemanly admirer of it. He was “wrong ever to believe that Plato’s description of philosophic rule in the Republic was a blueprint for political action,” since philosopher have no “wish to rule” and the people have no wish “to be ruled by philosophers.” Plato more reservedly, more prudently, praised philosophy by saying that “human beings would not be free from evils until philosophy and political power should coincide,” but although he was cautiously ready to test the possibility he never wholeheartedly believed in it. Did Plato derive what political prudence he had from his philosophy as such? Helfer doubts it, since philosophy seeks to know the nature of things, and indeed the nature of the divine things, the rigorous inquiry into which more readily brings souls into the condition of Erastus and Coriscus. 

Yet, what of Plato himself? He has inquired into both the divine and the human, political things, not without result. With Erastus and Coriscus, might he be holding out the likelihood of the harmlessness of philosophy and of philosophers and their trustworthiness, while concealing their political knowledge—the result of their philosophic inquiry into the human nature that finds a home in nature as a whole? For one thing, as Helfer does not hesitate to cite, “the key failing of Dion’s political thought” is precisely his insufficient “attention to the difficult problem of political foundings.” He expects—and to Dion’s friends and admirers, Plato praises him for it—a bloodless founding, “recoil[ing] instinctively from the ugly business of ‘laying down the law’ for a new regime,” something the Athenian Stranger in the Laws most emphatically does not overlook. At the same time, Plato is no Machiavellian, one who rather takes delight in such ugly business. For one thing, “Plato is much less willing than Machiavelli to encourage the prospective founder to discard his belief in divine providence as a determining factor in human affairs.” Plato would set natural-right limits on founders, while recognizing that “political affairs belong too much to the realm of flux and chance to be mastered,” Machiavelli-like, “that great political undertakings require more good fortune than one can reasonably hope for.” 

In Letter Eight, Plato again addresses Dion’s “intimates and comrades,” but much more briefly. With Dionysius’ tyranny removed and Dion assassinated, Syracuse now roils with a regime dispute between those who want a new tyranny and those who want to “escape from tyranny” (352c). The short Dionysian dynasty had first been installed because the city had needed a defender against powerful Carthage, and it found one in the capable Dionysius the Elder, but once the emergency had passed the tyrants did what tyrants often do: turn their untender attentions upon their own people. Plato writes, “My speech urges to everyone: it urges those aiming at tyranny to turn away in flight and flee the purported happiness of insatiably hungry and mindless human beings, and to attempt to change into the form of a king, and to be slaves to kingly laws, having acquired the greatest honors both from human beings voluntarily and from the laws; and those pursuing free ways and fleeing the slavish yoke as being bad, I would counsel to beware lest they should ever fall into the disease of the ancestors out of insatiability for a certain unpropitious freedom, which disease they then suffered because of the excessive anarchy, making use of an unmeasured, passionate love of freedom” (354c-d). Sounding rather like his student, Aristotle, he denigrates the extremes of slavery and freedom, although “if each is in measure” (as in slavery to good laws and freedom understood as the rule of reason over the appetites), they are “altogether good” (354e). 

What would Dion say, were he still living? Plato imagines a speech by Dion, for the benefit of his intimates and comrades. Dion would say that there are three things to consider: soul, body, and money. All are good, so long as care for them is sought in that order, in a regime whose laws buttress that proper hierarchy. Syracusan freedom-lovers should accept “freedom under kingly rule” while would-be tyrants should enjoy “kingly rule for which they are accountable, with laws as masters both of the other citizens and of the kings themselves in case they should do anything illegal” (356c). This can be done if the founders of the new regime establish the kind of ruling institutions that will perpetuate the rule of laws—specifically, three kings, vested with military power and religious authority, thereby made capable of defending the city from foreign attack, along with a set of law guardians who would oversee the kings, with the power to block them from violating the law. Plato also recommends a policy: Syracuse should recolonize Sicily, expelling the barbarians. This effort seems directed at uniting the city, now at war with itself, by giving all citizens a noble, common purpose. “These things I intended to come to be for you while I lived,” Plato’s Dion says, “and I intend them now” (357d). Helfer points to the fact that Plato considers this speech a kind of prayer to hint that it may not prove to be practical. It is evident, for example, that enslaving oneself to the laws, which are written and therefore stable but rigid, does not meet the bar of prudential rule, which requires adjustment to ever-changing circumstances. And what “if there is a conflict between the law of the city” which here is obviously human, “and what the gods demand, such as we know from, for example, Sophocles’ Antigone?” In Letter Two, Plato himself “claims that he is ‘great’ because he makes himself ‘a follower’ not of the law, nor indeed of pleasure, but of his ‘own reason.'” Citizen-bodies can’t do that, being non-philosophers. 

Letter Nine goes to someone who may be more amenable to reasoned self-rule, the mathematician-ruler of Tarentum, Archytas, whom Helfer identifies as “the closest thing we find in the Letters to a philosopher-ruler.” This is the man who had entertained such hopes for Dionysius. Here, Plato mentions one of the difficulties of philosopher-kingship, citing a report that “you are restless because you are not capable of being released from the lack of leisure connected with the common things” (357e). After all, “the most pleasant thing in life is to do one’s own thing, especially if someone should choose to do things of such a sort as you too have chosen” (357e-358a). This notwithstanding, Plato counsels moderation. “You need to take the following to heart as well: that it is not only for oneself that each of us has been born, but one’s fatherland gets a certain portion of our birth, one’s parents another, and the rest of one’s friends another, and many things are given also to the propitious moment that overtake our life” (358a). In the philosophic life, lest we become defenseless Erastuses and Coriscuses, the virtue of moderation requires us to balance philosophizing with considerations that can, if well managed, protect the philosophic way of life within the regime of the city, the order of the family, and the network of friends, all of which can threaten that way of life, as seen throughout, but all of which can also support it, if philosophers take care to allocate their time prudently. “This theme quietly pervades the Letters from its very first words,” as Helfer recalls, when Plato complained to Dionysius about all the time he’d devoted to him.

Plato addresses the very short Letter Ten to Aristodorus, whom Dion (who was still alive at this point—the letters in the Letters are not chronologically arranged) has described as “a special comrade of his” (358c). Special because he understands philosophy in the Dionian way, “exhibiting a character that is the wisest one with a view to philosophy; for it is steadfast, and faithful, and healthy,” a view that Plato assures him is his own view of what “true philosophy” is (358c). But as we know, and as Helfer emphasizes, philosophy is much more than this, being the love of wisdom and the ardent pursuit of it an inquiry that yields ambiguous results. “Be strong and remain in the very character traits in which you now remain,” Plato writes in his best avuncular manner (358c). Decent readers who don’t read very carefully will come away with the impression that this Plato, and philosophers who follow him, are trustworthy fellows, no threat to the city and even commendable citizens.

The philosophers must not be seen as impious, then. This defense is the burden of Letter Eleven, addressed to the otherwise unknown Laodamas, a Greek colonist who is thinking of founding a new regime. Plato here insists, as he has done previously, that a founding consists in more than lawgiving. A city cannot be “well established without the existence of some authority caring for the daily regimen of both slaves and free in the city, so that it might be both moderate and manly” (359a). If the city already has good men in its politeuma, its ruling body, very well, but “if there is a need of someone to educate them,” who will do it? (359b). “What remains is for you to pray to the gods” (359b). Alternatively, and perhaps marginally more realistically, you will need a founder, “a man both noble and good” who also enjoys “great power” (359b). “Good luck,” indeed (359b).

Letter Twelve is Plato’s final letter to his own philosophic comrade, Archytas. He praises some memoranda Archytas has sent to him, memoranda quite possibly written by Archytas himself. Plato doesn’t mention the topics of the memoranda, which might range from comments on Dionysius the Younger to philosophic considerations. The author reminds Plato of the writer’s “ancient ancestors,” “good men” expelled from Troy by the tyrannical Laomedon, father of Priam (359d). Plato might be alluding to the exiles from Syracuse in the present day. He also mentions some memoranda of his own, which Archytas was waiting for; they are not yet ready, Plato tells him, but he has sent them, anyway, with the proviso that they be guarded from eyes unworthy to see them, reiterating the theme of caution with respect to anything written down, a caution Plato is confident his philosophic confidant shares.

The thirteenth and final letter begins jarringly: “It is denied that this is by Plato” (359e). Helfer draws a parallel between Plato’s disavowal of the full seriousness of his corpus of writings in Letter Two, and also to Plato’s final paragraphs in that letter, where he moves from “lofty philosophic subjects to a hodgepodge of quotidian matters.” Letter Thirteen, the last one to Dionysius, also contrasts sharply with the earlier letters, especially Letter One, “which of course was marked by strident denunciation of tyranny in general and Dionysius’ tyranny in particular.” What’s going on? 

Plato reminds Dionysius that the tyrant had once said he’d benefited from Plato. He sends some Pythagorean writings along, a further benefit, and announces that he is also sending Helicon, a student of the mathematician Eudoxus. He is someone Archytas might wish to converse with—another example of Plato’s interest in placing philosophically minded persons under the patronage of a ruler who might yet be brought to “honor Platonic philosophy,” as Helfer puts it. Plato judiciously includes some material gifts—a statue of Apollo for Dionysius and some jars of honey for his children. Helfer suggests that this contrasts with the conduct of imprudent Dion, who relied on appeals to moral rectitude alone in his dealings with men.

Plato then gets down to brass tacks: “I will be frank with you concerning money” (362c). He once again adjures the tyrant—who, we recall, has not dealt honestly with Dion’s property—to make sure that his “expenses be correctly spent and correctly returned,” lest he (the honor-lover) be impugned as a man “hard to do business with” (362d). Hard not only for Dion, but just as hard for Plato, it transpires, inasmuch as the wealthy Dion had been donating funds that Plato uses for wholesome “civic and familial duties” in Athens, to say nothing for the expenses Plato incurs in running his Academy. “It was the life of the Academy,” Helfer sees, “the support for his philosophic friends’ ability to live the philosophic life, that put Plato in the position of needing to raise funds in places like Syracuse.” A college president is a college president, then and forever after. Dion, his chief donor, is too high-minded to notice the material needs of philosophers; Dionysius, Plato’s chief worry, is perhaps too honor-minded to appreciate such a purpose. Put another way, Plato has indeed founded a regime, a regime ruled by a philosopher-king who rules within the larger Athenian city, which has seen more than one regime. Although the purpose or telos of Plato’s regime differs substantially from the purposes of any of the regimes of the city, it shares the characteristics of regimes generally: a ruler, a ruling way of life, a ruling purpose, and ruling institutions. The regime also needs a foreign policy, a way of dealing with other regimes in other cities, including a philosophic regime-within-a-regime in Syracuse. All regimes need revenues, philosophic regimes not excepted.

Helfer concludes: “the Letters is Plato’s attempt to clarify the meaning of his lifelong project of promoting and defending the reputation of philosophy, of seeking to make philosophy ‘honored even among the multitude.'” He does so in the course of narrating and commenting on a cautionary tale on the difficulties of philosophizing itself and of philosophizing in a politic manner.

 

Note

1. In the spirit of Socratic inquiry, Helfer cites serious problems with Plato’s account of the levels of knowledge in the Letters. First, Plato does not explain how the changing, perceptible things known at the first three levels relate to the imperceptible but knowable fifth level. Elsewhere, Plato unfolds a theory of “participation” in the forms/Ideas. But “Plato’s own work does not consistently stress this solution,” which he presents as an unquestioned doctrine only in the Phaedo. Although the Parmenides has the young Socrates presenting that theory, “Parmenides there advances a number of trenchant critiques that Plato never attempts to refute in any of his writings.” Second, in the Seventh Letter, the emphasis isn’t on participation of perceptible things in “the fifth” but on the participant. ‘Subjectively,’ Plato elsewhere (e.g., in the Phaedrus) links perceptibles to imperceptibles with his theory of “recollection,” but not here. Finally, the relationship between the fourth and fifth levels isn’t clear. If knowledge of the fourth level is prerequisite to “scientific knowledge of the fifth,” why is this “anything but the incoherent or circular claim that attainment of some scientific knowledge is a prerequisite to attainment of that same scientific knowledge”? What is needed is “an understanding of the nature of mind,” but the mind is hard to understand, a thing that “cannot be known in the same manner as the other beings of which scientific knowledge is possible.” This leads to the question of the question of the existence of “a cosmic mind or deity, knowledge of which is made out to be the goal of philosophy in Letters Two and Six,” but unmentioned here. In the Seventh Letter, then, Plato does not answer “the great questions” of mind so much as he “indicates the basic features—and some of their implications—of our intuitive belief that we know, or can come to know through sense perception together with mind, about the beings that make up the whole”; “some further metaphysical apparatus would be needed to make up a complete explanatory picture.” He has certainly “indicated no avenue along which we might still hope to find access to the ‘what’ of the beings, to any direct grasp of ‘the fifth’ itself.” Is there any divine or cosmic support, then, for justice and the other virtues? There are limits to human knowledge, which makes writing down claims about “the fifth” a misguided enterprise for the philosopher, as only a certain, rare, kind of human soul can live with the knowledge of those limits. “There is doubt or ‘perplexity’ (aporia) involved in philosophy that is generally ill suited to the human constitution.” This doubt opens the possibility that “true knowledge of the divine…is not necessarily compatible with the stories of Homer and Hesiod,” and therefore that true piety, which Plato identifies with true philosophy, may lead in a direction the vast majority of people don’t want to hear. In this, respectable Dion is farther from philosophizing than tyrannical, sneering Dionysius.