Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Michael Chase translation. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

 

One who loves wisdom, pursues it steadily as lovers will do, may organize his life around that love. To organize one’s life is to subject it to a regime, complete not only with a purpose but means of achieving that purpose—a way of life. Political communities also have regimes, and the individual, family, and social regimes within those regimes may find themselves in conflict with that more extensive regime, a conflict Socrates saw and eventually came to symbolize. 

Socrates wrote nothing. The evidence presented against him at trial was ‘hearsay’ evidence, exclusively. We know of him primarily because contemporary writers wrote about him: Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon. Writers are equally subject to political regimes because what they write has a purpose and a way about it, a regime, either or both of which may or may not prove palatable to their fellow citizens. Writings, then, are also regimes within regimes. The form of any writing is its ‘genre.’ In considering philosophy as a way of life and philosophic writings as one aspect of that way, Hadot rightly observes that “a text should be interpreted in light of the literary genre to which it belongs.” For example, Augustine’s Confessions is “essentially a theological work,” not an autobiography as we moderns tend to think. Augustine’s long and even tortured story of stealing pears when a youth symbolizes “the forbidden fruit stolen from the Garden of Eden, and the episode gives him the opportunity to develop a theological reflection on the nature of sin.” (Similarly, André Malraux maintained that the Confessions isn’t really autobiographical at all, “and it ends with a treatise on metaphysics.”) In Augustine’s literary genre, “it is extremely difficult to distinguish between a symbolic enactment and an account of a historical event.” “Understanding a work of antiquity requires placing it in the group from which it emanates”—that is, its philosophic ‘school,’ itself a regime—in “the tradition of [the school’s] dogmas, its literary genre, and requires understanding its goals.” “One must attempt to distinguish what the author was required to say, what he could or could not say, and, above all, what he meant to say,” since “the ancient author’s art consists in his skillfully using, in order to arrive at his goals, all the constraints that weigh upon him as well as the models furnished by the tradition.”

Ancient philosophic writings, and indeed ancient writings generally, formed a link between speakers who wrote nothing and writers. Ancient writings were ‘oral’ in the sense of having been dictated to a scribe and having been intended to be read aloud. “Writing is only an aid to memory, a last resort that will never replace the living word.” If a writer intends to teach his readers, he must remember that “true education is always oral because only the spoken word makes dialogue possible, that is, it makes it possible for the disciple to discover the truth himself amid the interplay of questions and answers and also for the master to adapt his teaching to the needs of the disciple”; “what is inscribed in the soul by the spoken word is more real and lasting than letters drawn on papyrus or parchment.” That being so, there are still ways in which written words might be made to produce some of the effects of spoken words. “Although every written work is a monologue the philosophical work is always implicitly a dialogue,” “tak[ing] into account the level of the interlocutor, and the concrete tempo of the logos in which it is expressed.” Ancient philosophic writers are not ‘system builders’ in the manner of Kant or Hegel. “This is obviously true in the case of Plato’s dialogues, but it is equally true in the case of the lectures of Aristotle,” which are not “manuals or systematic treatises,” as “many Aristotelian scholars” now tend to assume. First and foremost, if not exclusively, Aristotle “intended to train his students in the technique of using correct methods in logic, the natural sciences, and ethics.” Ancient writings are “written not so much to inform the reader of a doctrinal content but to form him, to make him traverse a certain itinerary in the course of which he will make spiritual progress,” as seen in “all the detours, starts and stops, and digressions of the work”; “for the Platonists, for example, even mathematics is used to train the soul to raise itself from the sensible to the intelligible,” as seen in the Meno. We moderns “have forgotten how to pause, liberate ourselves from our worries, return into ourselves, and leave aside our search for subtlety and originality, in order to meditate calmly, ruminate, and let the texts speak to us”—submit to the regime of “a spiritual exercise, and one of the most difficult.” That is because “the works of antiquity are produced under entirely different conditions than those of their modern counterparts,” and with a somewhat different purpose. Hadot writes “to eliminate the preconception the word hilosophy may evoke in the modern mind.”

A spiritual exercise in the philosophic sense submits to the regime of reasoning, of thought ruled by the principle of non-contradiction. (Indeed, lawyers still employ the phrase, ‘the rule of reason.’)  If an ancient writer contradicts himself, this may be less a sign of incompetence as a strategy to provoke the reader into thinking for himself. More than that, a spiritual exercise is “existential,” “putting into action all kinds of means” with the intention of acting upon the reader’s whole soul, including the soul’s imagination and sentiments. “Philosophy thus took on the form of an exercise of the thought, will, and the totality of one’s being, the goal of which was to achieve a state practically inaccessible to mankind: wisdom.” In the spiritual exercise, “we must represent to ourselves in vivid colors the dangers of such-and-such a passion, and use striking formulations of ideas in order to exhort ourselves,” forming habits of life and “fortify[ing] ourselves by preparing ourselves against hardships in advance.” This is not the stuff of systematic treatises, which attempt to lay out the nature of things, including our own nature, by means of words, discourse. But the existence, the life, of a human soul is never quite reducible to such treatment. “That’s why it often happens that a poem or a biography are more philosophical than a philosophic treatise, simply because they allow us to glimpse this unsayable in an indirect way.” Spiritual exercises “correspond to a transformation of our vision of the world, and to a metamorphosis of our personality,” our psuchē. 

It does so by placing the soul “within the perspective of the Whole.” Reason abstracts, drawing out the universal from the particulars, as seen most simply in naming things by deploying common nouns. Since life as lived consists in large part of a passing parade of events, appetites, and passions, “he who remains faithful to the Logos risks losing his life,” as “was the case with Socrates,” but also in another sense intends to ‘lose’ his life, get beyond the demands of the body and of concrete particulars generally. Hadot calls this “the fundamental philosophical choice”: “the subjugation” of “the body’s will to live to the higher demands of thought,” a regime that “is the training and apprenticeship for death.” This life, ancient philosophers agree, makes life better than ordinary, more intensely lived because lived with attention to itself and the world around it. Hadot cites Socrates, who tells his interlocutor in the Phaedo, “those who go about philosophizing correctly are in training for death, and that to them of all men death is least alarming.” Philosophic spiritual exercise aims not at a trancelike state but at freeing reasoned thinking from the passions, at reorienting the soul, turning it around—in a word, conversion, “a transformation of one’s way of being and living, and a quest for wisdom.”. “The only ones even to attempt to do so are philosophers”; “beneath all their conceptions of death, one common virtue recurs again and again: lucidity.”

“From such a perspective, even physics becomes a spiritual exercise,” as (for instance) the contemplation of the heavens provides “joy and serenity to the soul,” “liberating it from day-to-day worries” by activating the disinterested intellect. [1] As Porphyry remarks, theoria brings happiness to the human soul not by storing it with knowledge, simply but by making what it learns “nature and life” within it. “The goal of physics as a spiritual exercise was to relocate human existence within the infinity of time and space, and the perspective of the great laws of nature.” Logic, another dimension of philosophy, also bids philosophers to the rule of reason. Hadot goes so far as to say that “philosophic theories are in the service of the philosophic life,” even for ever-elaborating Aristotle, who eventually earned the title, ‘master of those who know.’

Hadot says that all the ancient philosophical schools maintained that “people are unhappy because they are the slaves of their passions,” desiring “things they may not be able to obtain, since they are exterior, alien, and superfluous to them”; happiness “is the return to the essential,” to that “which depends on us,” on our inner nature. Philosophy aims not only at wisdom but at autarkeia,” literally self-rule, which Hadot translates as “inner freedom” and others as “self-sufficiency.” A soul can achieve this “with the help of a philosophical theory of nature, but above all through moral and existential exercises,” ethics. 

Self-rule, self-sufficiency, inner freedom: yes, but not isolation. Philosophy is the spoken word, and not only words spoken to oneself. “Ancient philosophy was always a philosophy practiced in a group,” very often in schools, such as Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. “Ancient philosophy required a common effort, community of research, mutual assistance, and spiritual support.” And, after Socrates, it became political, especially among the Stoics, who even fielded a Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius. For them, “an essential place is accorded to the duty always to act in the service of the human community; that is, to act in accordance with justice,” unblinded by “political passions, anger, resentments, or prejudices.” “Inner peace is indispensable for efficacious action.” On this, the schools varied: Stoics and Aristotelians evidently understood political philosophy as entailing advice to rulers, perhaps even ruling itself, whereas Platonists had more reservations (despite the famous commendation of ‘philosopher-kings’) [2], and Epicureans preferred to recline tranquilly on their couches.

How far could philosophizing extend? Here, Hadot follows the example of the ancients by introducing a contradiction. Philosophy, he writes, “is an attempt to transform mankind.” And “within each school, philosophy signified the attempt to raise up mankind from individuality and particularity to universality and objectivity.” This might or might not be the voice of a philosopher or a historian of philosophy, but it is surely the voice of a democrat, an egalitarian. Elsewhere, however, he affirms that “people such as these,” philosophers, who find their joy in virtue, celebrate a festival their whole life long,” but “to be sure, there is only a small number of such people,” their lives “like embers of wisdom kept smoldering in our cities, so that virtue may not be altogether snuffed out and disappear” from the human species. There is a “strangeness” to this “phenomenon,” even as it has endured “throughout the whole history of Western thought,” albeit with many permutations. [3] “Strange indeed all those philosophers whose behavior, without being inspired by religion, nonetheless [or perhaps consequently?] breaks with the customs and habits of most mortals.” This is why his contemporaries called Socrates atopos, unclassifiable, neither straightforwardly a citizen nor a sage. The philosopher’s love of wisdom, as distinguished from any claim to possess wisdom, makes him “foreign to the world,” a “stranger in it.”  Such a person “must live his life every day, in this world in which he feels himself a stranger and in which others perceive him to be one as well,” a condition of attempting “to see things as they are from the standpoint of universal nature and the conventional vision of things underlying human society,” a “conflict [that] can never be totally resolved.”

Hadot pays particular attention to the Platonic/Socratic philosophers and the Stoics. “In the ‘Socratic’ dialogue, the question truly at stake is not what is being talked about but who is doing the talking”; “the Socratic dialogue turns out to be a kind of communal spiritual exercise,” usually conducted not in private but in the marketplace or, if in a home, ‘with company.’ The “exercise” urges the participants “to comply with the famous dictum, ‘Know thyself,'” “invit[ing] us to establish a relationship of the self to the self, which constitutes the foundation of every spiritual exercise.” If I truly come to know myself, I know that I am no sage but at best “a philo-sophos, someone on the way toward wisdom.” Wisdom encompasses ethical self-knowledge, that is, knowledge of “one’s true moral state.” In dialoguing, in reading dialogues, I learn what Anisthenes called “the ability to converse with myself,” to philosophize without other persons as interlocutors, as Socrates may have been doing when he spent time standing still, thinking. “Only he who is capable of a genuine encounter with the other is capable of an authentic encounter with himself, and the converse is equally true.” Readers of these dialogues will see interlocutors who shut themselves down or storm out of the conversation: “We must let ourselves be changed.” The dialectic “demands the explicit consent of the interlocutor at every moment., and that isn’t easy to bring about, since by consenting to each logical step in the argument he “discover[s] the contradictions of his own position or admit[s] to an unforeseen conclusion”—usually in front of his fellow citizens. Platonic dialogues are spiritual exercises in two ways: “the dialogue guides the interlocutor—and the reader—towards conversion,” a ‘turning around’ of the soul toward the Good, as Socrates calls it in the Republic; the dialogue’s success depends on the eros inherent in reasoning, the desire “to submit to the rational demands of the Logos.” “In order to perceive the world, we must, as it were, perceive our unity with the world” because “we can know a thing only by becoming similar to our object.”

Who, what, is Socrates? Alcibiades compares him to “the little statues of Sileni”—trickster spirits—that “could be found in sculptors’ shops, which concealed little figurines of the gods inside themselves.” Outwardly, Socrates was “ugly, buffoon-like, impudent, almost monstrous,” but this costume conceals, if not divinity, the eros for the divine, the Good, within. Socrates’ outward mask consists of “that famous Socratic irony,” his pretension of ignorance and impudence. Irony is “a psychological attitude in which the individual uses self-deprecation in an attempt to appear inferior to what he really is,” thereby drawing out the thoughts of his overconfident interlocutor, thoughts which turn out to be self-contradictory. “At the end of the road, the general turns out to have no idea of what courage really is, and the soothsayer doesn’t know what piety is.” Meanwhile, by following Socrates’ line of questioning and reasoning, the reader learns that he, like Socrates, ‘knows that he does not know,’ thanks to this experience of “what true activity of the mind is”; “he has been Socrates himself.” Socrates approached Alcibiades as if he were in love with him; his verbal irony masks his dialectical strength, while his erotic irony, which “consisted in pretending to be in love” with the youths whom he converses, can bring themselves, and Plato’s readers, to fall in love with him, and more importantly, to fall in love with sophia. This could happen when the one who supposed Socrates loved him discovered his own inadequacy under the philosopher’s questioning, learning that while his body might be worthy of being loved, his soul was not. The loving soul sees itself no longer as beautiful, as ‘having it all,’ but as poor, needy, even “good-for-nothing.” As befits a lover, then, the barefoot, penniless Socrates “embodies desire.” “In Socratic Eros, we find the same basic structure as in Socratic irony: a divided consciousness, passionately aware that it is not what it ought to be. “What the young men “love in Socrates is his love for, and aspiration toward, beauty and the perfection of being.” “In Socrates they find the path toward their own perfection.” Hadot goes a step too far in his description of this Eros, calling it irrational and detouring into Nietzsche’s hope for “a musical Socrates,” the “genius of the heart” who will synthesize Apollonian rationality with Dionysian ardor. Not at all. Just as the soul’s spiritedness generates the love of honor and soul’s appetites generate the several loves of the body, so does the soul’s reason generates the desire for wisdom. The desire for wisdom is rational; reasoning is indispensable to it. For Plato’s Socrates, nature is not synthetic but a thing of articulation.

Indeed, “Socrates pulled off his enterprise of dissimulation so well that he succeeded in definitively masking himself from history,” leaving no writings behind. As a result, “Socrates has always been used as a mask by those who have spoken about him,” beginning with Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon. “Especially in the subtle, refined form given it by Plato, the Socratic dialogue was intended to provoke in its readers an effect analogous to that produced by the living discourse of Socrates himself,” a condition of “disquiet in the soul” that can lead to its ‘turning around,’ away from the conventions of the regimes in which the reader lives, toward (as it were) the regime of nature. Among the moderns, Kierkegaard is closest to Socrates, acknowledging that “to be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner.” And, since actions often speak louder than words, Socrates himself teaches not only by words but by his actions, indicating that “we can never understand justice if we do not live it,” order our souls rightly to as to put our minds in a condition in which they can understand. Alcibiades shows why this is dangerous for the philosopher, saying “Socrates makes me admit to myself that, even though I myself am deficient in so many regards, I continue to take no care for myself, but occupy myself with the business of the Athenians,” who are unphilosophic, upholders of their traditional customs and opinions. They are suspicious of philosophic inquiry. “Concern for one’s individual destiny cannot help but lead to conflict with the state. This is the deepest meaning of the trial and death of Socrates.” And this is why irony is a philosophic necessity, first, because “direct language is not adequate for communicating the experience of existing, the authentic consciousness of being, the seriousness of life as we live it, or the solitude of decision making,” but also because ironic speech, which requires thought to understand, “can make indirect communication possible,” communication of thoughts at variance with prevailing customs and opinions. This understanding of philosophy sees that a real philosopher puts himself on the line, body and soul; he is in that sense an “existentialist,” serious in his play, avoiding philosophic system-building because he knows he is no sage. His school is “the school of the consciousness of not-knowing,” but of wanting to know.

The Stoics are much more explicitly undertaking an exercise, an exercise that “did not consist in teaching an abstract theory…but rather in the art of living.” The Stoics maintained that the passions were the main cause of “suffering, disorder, and unconsciousness” in human beings, bringing on “unregulated desires and exaggerated fears” in their souls. Philosophy is “a therapeutic of the passions,” a therapeutic linked, as in Plato’s Socrates, to the soul’s conversion or turning around. To achieve this, Stoics commend prosoche, attention, “a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit.” [4] What one should especially attend to is “the distinction between what depends on us and what does not.” One cannot change the past or control the future, but he can control our response to what is present by preparing his soul for whatever may befall. The Stoic does this by the exercise of meditation. “We are to represent to ourselves poverty, suffering, and death,” thinking of, then committing to memory, what we will do if, when, they befall us. “When the time comes,” the “maxims” we arrive at will enable us to “confront life’s difficulties face to face, remembering that they are not evils, since they do not depend on us,” but are “after all, part of the course of nature.” Nature is animated by reason; the things that happen to us happen ‘for a reason,’ and it our task to meet them with our own reason, not with wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

The title of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is better translated as Exhortations to Himself. They are a collection of hypomnemata, notes written each day by the author to himself. It is neither a systematic treatise, as readers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries supposed, nor is it a diary of Marcus’ inner workings, much less “a symptom of a psychological malaise”—attributable, according to certain twentieth psychologists, to a gastric ulcer or (in the doped-up mind of Thomas De Quincey), opium addiction. These exhortations are rather intended to prepare Marcus to place care of human things (he was, after all, an emperor) “within the perspective of universal nature,” a procedure Hadot calls “the very essence of philosophy.” Unlike so many political men, “Marcus has no patience for those who would try to console themselves for the brevity of existence by the hope that they will survive in the name they leave to posterity,” seeing that such a hope is almost always vain, and ‘in vain.’ “Marcus’ seemingly pessimistic declarations are not expression of his disgust or disillusion at the spectacle of life; rather, they are a means he employs in order to change his way of evaluating the events and objects which go to make up human existence.” He does this as the ancient philosophers so often do, by detaching those events and objects from “the conventional representations people habitually form of them.” By recognizing that a purple toga is by nature only a colored piece of cloth, he puts the passions we entertain when Romans see one—whether aspiration or envy, pride or resentment—very much in their place, their place in the rational order of the cosmos, which takes little note of such objects. It was Marcus, not one of Shakespeare’s characters, who first said, “What’s in a name?”

And so, “when Marcus speaks of the monotony of human existence, it is not in order to express his own boredom,” not to make much of a mood, “but in order to persuade himself that death will not deprive us of anything essential.” And as for “filth, dust, and other such apparently repulsive aspects of reality,” they are only “the necessary consequence of a natural process which, in the last analysis, goes back to universal reason,” the “accessory phenomena which accompany its transformations.” The “feelings of repulsion we eel in the presence of some phenomena which accompany natural processes are nothing but an anthropocentric prejudice.” Unlike the sentimental, ‘idealistic’ aesthetics of the modern Romantics, Marcus propounds “a realistic aesthetics which finds beauty in things just the way they are, in everything that lives and exists.” 

Marcus would discipline desire by strengthening the virtue of moderation, inclinations by the virtue of justice, assent by the virtue of truth, including the absence of hurried thought, which fails to find the truth. He “always sought to give to his thoughts the clarity, rigor, and striking formulations necessary to give them the sought-after therapeutical and psychagogic effect.” Far from evincing victimhood, taking himself to be the victim of fate or disease, Marcus “knew exactly what he was doing.” “It is extremely rare to have the chance to see someone in the process of training himself to be a human being.”

Epictetus propounded still another traditional Stoic idea: “the difference between discourse about philosophy and the practice of philosophy itself.” To discourse about philosophy was to separate its three parts: logic, physics, and ethics, each with its own set of topics for study. But “philosophy itself is the exercise of wisdom,” the exercise of logic, physics, and ethics. “On this level, we are no longer concerned with theoretical logical—that is, the theory of correct reasoning—rather, we are concerned not to let ourselves be deceived in our everyday lives by false representations. We are no longer concerned with theoretical physics—the theory of the origin and evolution of the cosmos—we are concerned with being aware at every instant that we are parts of the cosmos, and that we must make our desires conform to this situation. We no longer do ethical theory—the definition and classification of virtues and duties—we simply act in an ethical way.” To act ethically, Stoics weed out their desires, reducing them to those things obtainable by us because they “depend on us” and not on other persons and things. They then direct their remaining desires “first and foremost to human relationships within the city,” the duties of citizens, actions “bearing upon objects which do not depend on us—such as other people, politics, health, art.” “For him, the discipline of action consists precisely in acting in the service of the human community; in other words, in practicing justice oneself and in correcting injustices.” Finally, Stoics guard the realm of their freedom of soul by “assenting” only to the things that are really there, not to any phantasia, on the grounds that, in Epictetus’ words, “People are not troubled by things, but by their judgment about things.” In all of these exercises, the Stoics put theoretical reasoning at the service of practice, “so that, in concrete situations, we can act in conformity with mankind’s rational nature.”

The Epicureans practiced spiritual exercises, as well, but for different effects. For them, too, philosophy is “a therapeutics,” a way of “healing our own lives,” as Epicurus puts it. And, again like the Stoics, Epicureans held that unhappiness stems from fear of “things which are not to be feared” and desire “for things which it is not necessary to desire, and which are beyond” our control. They depart from the Stoics in identifying happiness not with duty but with pleasure, albeit refined pleasure. “The only genuine pleasure there is,” and one over which all human beings exercise control as long as they live, is “the pleasure of existing,” what a United States president once described as freedom from fear and from want. “This is why,” Hadot explains, “Epicurean physics”—a version of materialist atomism—can “liberate us from fear: it can show us that the gods have no effect on the progress of the world and that death, being complete dissolution, is not part of life.” There is a sort of “Epicurean piety,” expressed in Epicurus’ prayer, “Thanks be to blessed Nature, that she has made what is necessary easy to obtain, and what is not easy unnecessary.” Given materialist atomism, there isn’t really anyone to express thanks to; prayer itself becomes an element of the therapeutics. “For the Epicureans, in the last analysis, pleasure is a spiritual exercise.” Epicureans seek not pleasure in the form of mere sensual gratification, but the intellectual pleasure derived from contemplating nature, the thought of pleasures past and present, and lastly the pleasure of friendship,” which Epicureans hold to be “the spiritual exercise par excellence,” yielding “mutual affection and the confidence with which they relied upon each other.” This “invitation to relaxation and serenity” contrasts with Stoic tension and vigilance. It should be needless to say that Epicureans refused to trouble themselves with politics; political Epicureanism was invented in modernity, as seen in the writings of Thomas Hobbes and, among republicans, those of Thomas Jefferson.

What of the more familiar Christian spiritual exercises, most famously set forth by Ignatius of Loyola? “The conflict between pagans and Christians, from the second century AD on, is highly instructive,” in terms of the provenance of the texts in which philosophy and its spiritual exercises were expounded. “As both pagans and Christians recognized affinities between their respective doctrines, they accused each other of theft,” as Christians “claimed Plato plagiarized Moses,” while pagans “affirmed the contrary” regarding Christian humility as “nothing but a poor interpretation of a passage in Plato’s Laws.” The result was “a series of chronological arguments designed to prove which of the two was historically prior,” with Clement of Alexandria topping everyone by asserting that “the theft dated back even before the creation of humanity,” as “some wicked angel who, having discovered some traces of the divine truth, revealed philosophy to the wise of this world.”

For himself, Hadot regards Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises as “nothing but a Christian version of a Greco-Roman tradition,” as what is called asceticism is in fact a ‘baptized’ version of the pre-existing philosophic tradition. “Since its inception,” he claims, ignoring a well-known passage in a Pauline epistle to the contrary, “Christianity has presented itself as a philosophia,” although in fairness he means only that Christianity “assimilated into itself the traditional practices of spiritual exercises,” as seen in the writings of Clement, Origen, Augustine, and in the rules of several of the monastic regimes. [5] “Ancient spiritual exercises were preserved and transmitted by an entire current of ancient Christian thought,” a task made easier because God is Logos, as it is (although in another sense) for the Stoics. Clement links philosophy reconceived as Christianity with paideia, “by which he means the education of mankind” in accordance with “the complete revelation of the Logos” in the New Testament, “the true philosophy.” Wisdom no longer needs to be wondered about. As revealed, it can be taught as doctrine and requires no arduous effort to attain. This amounts to a substantial democratization of philosophy.

But “with the advent of medieval Scholasticism, we find a clear distinction being drawn between theologia and philosophia.” The logos about God became the “supreme science,” the love of wisdom its handmaiden. This “emptied” philosophy “of its spiritual exercises which, from now on, were relegated to Christian mysticism and ethics,” making philosophy theology’s “handmaid,” its role to “furnish theology with conceptual—and hence purely theoretical—material.” Christianity, not philosophy, was the right way of life; philosophy wasn’t a proper way of life at all. As with ancient philosophy, spiritual exercise was no mere “code of good moral conduct” but “a way of being,” the best and only true regime. “Under the influence of Greek tradition, the monastic life continued to be designated by the term philosophia throughout the Middle Ages,” as seen in Bernard of Clairvaux, who upheld “the disciplines of celestial philosophy,” and John of Salisbury, who assures his readers that monks are the ones who have “philosophized” rightly. Invoking a well-known Socratic thought, and the meditation practiced in the philosophic schools, Christians of this time regarded “remembrance” of God and of His commandments as “the most radical method for ensuing one’s presence to God and to oneself.” Philosophic self-knowledge became the examination of conscience, the attempt to ensure that it conformed to those commandments and to the Holy Spirit. Enkratia or good rule meant what Dorotheus of Gaz called the “cutting off of self-will,” the substitution of self-will with God’s will and thereby the attainment of “perfect apatheia,” the complete absence of passions. Scripture provided the spiritual character of such meditation, but “the texts from Scripture could never have supplied a method for practicing these exercises,” which “always presupposed the assistance of God’s grace” and “made of humility the most important of virtues,” but which borrowed their techniques from the philosophers, in another instance of the subordination of philosophy to theology and to the Christian way of life, the Christian regime. “In the final analysis, all these virtues were transfigured by the transcendent dimension of the love of God and of Christ.” Learning how to die now meant “to participate in the death of Christ.” 

Philosophy’s subordination had an unintended consequence: modernity. “From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries,” what Hadot calls “genuinely creative philosophical activity” would “develop outside the university,” under the rule of Catholic and Protestant churches, in the persons of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz.” “Philosophy thus reconquered its autonomy vis-à-vis theology.” But in a strategy seen in the conduct of proponents of heterodox thoughts ever since, modern philosophers took care to win a place within the universities, and especially in the German universities, as seen in such luminaries as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, “with a few rare exceptions like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche.” But philosophy adapted itself to the university way of life, largely satisfied with its status as a theorizing activity even as it freed itself from ‘handmaidship’ to theology. “In the modern university, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life or form of life—unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy.” Since so many universities, especially in Hadot’s Europe, are “state educational institution[s],” this may become a danger to philosophy’s independence. This had already happened in Eastern and Central Europe under the tyrannical and/or oligarchic regimes animated by Marxist ideology, the pseudo-philosophy of ‘scientific socialism.’ But in much of Western Europe and North America, “modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists,” i.e., as ‘analytic philosophy.’

Writing in the mid-1990s, Hadot does see resistance to the notion of exclusively theoretical philosophizing. With Nietzsche, but then with university-employed Henri Bergson and the many Existentialists, philosophy began to “return to being a concrete attitude, a way of life and of seeing the world.” He is not entirely satisfied with results, at least as seen in the writings of Michel Foucault, then enjoying a decided vogue in academic circles. Foucault lauded the “practices of the self” seen in the Stoics, with their “art of living.” But “It seems to me, however, that the description M. Foucault gives of what I had termed ‘spiritual exercises,’ and which he prefers to call ‘techniques of the self,’ is precisely focused far too much on the ‘self,’ or at least on a particular conception of the self,” one that is far more Epicurean than Stoic. The Stoics distinguished hedone (in Latin, voluptas), pleasure, from eupatheia (in Latin, gaudium), joy. “For them, happiness does not consist in pleasure, but in virtue itself, which is its own reward. And joy does not inhere in a modern ‘self,’ as it does in Foucault, but in the “perfect reason” (as Seneca puts it) of the soul, which ascends “beyond the self” to “think and act in unison with universal reason,” which Foucault, along with the rest of the moderns, regards as a myth; “according to a more or less universal tendency of modern thought, which is perhaps more instinctive than reflective, the ideas of ‘universal reason’ and ‘universal nature’ do not have much meaning any more.” “I can well understand Foucault’s motives for giving short shrift to these aspects” of ancient philosophy, “of which he was perfectly aware.” Foucault’s way of life was aesthetic, and aesthetics is an invention of the moderns. This may be why he says so little about the Epicureans, who seem to be more compatible with his stance; the Epicureans weren’t aesthetes but rationalists, convinced that they possessed a coherent understanding of the cosmos, an understanding they deployed to reinforce their way of life. Foucault shares little of the ancient philosophers’ esteem for reason, and particularly for the universality of reason. Whereas Foucault wants individuals to ‘invent themselves,’ to “forge a spiritual identity” by “writing down and re-reading disparate thoughts,” for the ancients thoughts should not be disparate “but chosen for their coherence,” the absence of contradiction among them. It is simply “not the case that writing constitutes the self”; it rather assists the philosopher in making his thoughts coherent. And the same was true of many early Christians: one monk thought of writing as a substitute for dialogue, as he who writes “is no longer alone, but is a part of the silently present human community.” How will I present myself to this community, the writer asks, preferring not to look the fool by contradicting himself, searching his writings for embarrassing contradictions. Foucault’s aestheticism “may be a new form of Dandyism.” It is the great-great grandson of Rousseauian revery. [6]

Among the moderns of his century, Hadot prefers the ‘phenomenologists’ Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who “want us to return to the world of lived perception or rather to perception-as-a-world, so that we may become aware of it.” This type of philosophy does not so much oppose science (“both, in their own way,” oppose “the world of habitual perception”) but philosophy as practiced by phenomenologists supplements science, which reduces the universe, “by both mathematical and technological means, to its quantitative aspects,” by “deepen[ing] and transform[ing] habitual perception, forcing us to become aware of the very fact that the we are perceiving the world, and that the world is that which we perceive.” For them, “disinterested, aesthetic perception of the world can allow us”—we moderns, saturated with modern science—to “imagine what cosmic consciousness might signify for modern man.” Painting, for example, “makes us feel the presence of things: the fact that” (in Merleau-Ponty’s words) “things are here,” not simply to be reduced to equations. “The experience of modern art,” which “makes things visible,” again, “allows us to glimpse the miracle of perception itself, which opens up the world to us.” Modern art is “the area of our experience in which there might be possible a relationship to the world bearing some resemblance to that which existed between the ancient sage and the cosmos: the world, that is, of perception.” Before Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, Bergson understood that modern man now “lives in the world without perceiving the world,” distinguishing “between habitual, utilitarian perception, necessary for life, and the detached, disinterested perception of the artist or philosopher.” And while “people in antiquity were unfamiliar with modern science, and did not live in an industrial, technological society,” most did not “look at the world any more than we usually do”; “such is the human condition.” The philosophers resisted the human condition, the conventions of the regimes they lived in, seeking to transcend them by the reasoning, philosophic ascent from ‘the Cave.’ 

Hadot most admires not the phenomenologists or the existentialists of his own century, however, but Goethe, the German philosopher-poet, friend of ancient thought and “a remarkable witness for the type of experience” he has been describing. Goethe’s Faust, “the personification of modern man,” searches for Helen, the symbol of the beauty of nature, “throughout all the mythical forms of ancient Greece.” Their meeting is “the meeting between two lovers” but also a “meeting between two epochs, and as full of meaning as the encounter of a human being with his destiny.” Modern man strives; ancient beauty soothes, consummates. In their dialogue, Helen begins to speak in rhyme, “the symbol of modern interiority”; like a Cartesian, she begins to have doubts; she “reflects upon her destiny,” that is, her past and her future. She begins to veer into ‘historicity’ or historicism in the modern philosophic sense. Goethe wants her to consider what she is doing to herself.  In a letter to a friend, he wrote that in antiquity the present moment was filled with meaning, to be “lived in all its reality and the fullness of its richness, sufficient unto itself”—an experience modern men no longer know how to grasp. For moderns, the present is banal; we place our hopes in the future. If Helen begins to feel ‘modern’ in her encounter with Faust, to Faust she reveals “what presence itself is: the presence of the world,” “that splendid feeling of the present. “It is ancient, noble Helen who reveals to him the splendor of being.” “This is what Goethe admired in ancient art, particularly in funerary art where the deceased was represented not with his eyes raised toward the heavens, but in the act of living his daily life,” in “knowing how to utilize the present,” “knowing how to recognize and seize the favorable and decisive instant (kairos).” This was the task of philosophy (both Epicurean and Stoic) and of poetry alike. Goethe strives to recover it, to “place the concentration of consciousness upon the present moment at the very center” of modern man’s way of life. True, “the Epicurean enjoys the present moment, whereas the Stoic wills it intensely; for the one, it is pleasure; for the other, a duty.” But in Faust, the two are combined in the phrases, “Only the present is our happiness” and “existence is a duty.” Not for the mature Goethe, the suicidal sorrows of young Werther. [7] For Goethe, “poetry in the truest sense is a kind of physics, in the sense we have define” as “a spiritual exercise, which consists in looking down at things from above, from the point of view of the nature or the all, and the great laws of nature.”

“Enjoying the present, without thinking about the past or the future, does not mean living in total instantaneousness.” It rather means not brooding upon past and future things, not “rehashing past defeats” or “cowering in fear of future difficulties,” distracting yourself from what is right in front of you, your life right now. “It is eternity—that is, the totality of being—which gives the present moment its value, meaning, and pregnancy,” the eternity as present in each moment of time. Goethe exhorts his readers to “Hold on to Being with delight!” As Hadot puts it, more prosaically, “for modern man in general, hypnotized as we are by language, images, information, and the myth of the future,” study of the philosophic life as lived by the ancients, yet still available to us, “provide[s] one of the best means of access to this wisdom, so misunderstood and yet so necessary. The call of Socrates speaks to us more now than ever before: ‘Take care of yourself.'” Order your soul rightly. What Goethe calls the “secular Gospel” of poetry, wherein Faust can meet Helen, each learning from the other, Christians can see, with Augustine, as the experience of turning the soul “inward upon itself” and finding “the fact that it is an image of the Trinity.” That is, “it is in the triple act of remembering God, knowing God, and loving God that the soul discovers itself to be the image of the Trinity.”

 

Notes

1. See H. G. Wells: The Island of Dr. Moreau in Seven Famous Novels by H. G. Wells (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934.
2. See Ariel Helfer, ed.: Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023) and the two reviews on this website, “Plato’s Politic Practice: Plato’s Letters I-IV” and “What Is Politic About Platonic Political Philosophy?” under the category, “Philosophers.”
3. Hadot is especially fascinated by the Hellenistic period, wherein the Greek philosophic texts were translated into Latin and the Mediterranean, Europe, and Asia Minor became progressively Hellenized. “Hellenic thought had the strange capacity to absorb the most diverse mythical and conceptual schemes,” although it may be that the capacity was not so strange, since ‘Hellenization’ in terms of philosophy wasn’t simply Hellenic or ‘nationalist,’ making an appeal to reason, that is, to human nature, to ‘universality.’ The divisions that existed were rather within philosophy, in the form of philosophic doctrines. As the schools became better established, “the dogmas and methodological principles of each school [were] not open to discussion” by its members; “to philosophize [was] to choose a school, convert to its way of life, and accept its dogmas.” While this “does not mean that theoretical reflection and elaboration are absent from the philosophical life,” such reflection and elaboration “never extended to the dogmas themselves or the methodological principles” themselves. As a result, much philosophic activity consisted of the exegesis of texts, written by the founders of the school to which one belonged and “religiously preserved.” According to the schools, “truth was contained within these texts.” It is true that eventually Platonism “came to absorb both Stoicism and Aristotelianism in an original synthesis, while all the other traditions” became “marginal.” “Thanks to the writers of lesser antiquity but also the Arab translations and the Byzantine tradition, this Neoplatonist synthesis was to dominate all the thought of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and was to provide, in some fashion, the common denominator among Jewish, Christian, and Moslem theologies and mysticisms.” 
4. Hadot remarks that this attention to oneself, “the philosopher’s fundamental attitude, became the fundamental attitude of the monk,” as seen in Athanasius’ Life of Antony. Antony is “supposed to have said to his disciples on his deathbed: ‘Live as though you were dying every day, paying heed to yourselves and remembering what you heard from my preaching.” It is of course certain that what Antony’s disciples heard from his preaching concerned the Creator-God, not nature.
5. In the case of some writers of this period (Origen being an obvious example), Platonic philosophy dominates Christian revelation; Origen twists Christianity into Neo-Platonism. Hadot recognizes this, writing, “We may well ask ourselves if such an identification [of Christianity with philosophy] was legitimate, and wonder whether it did not contribute to a large extent to the notorious ‘Hellenization’ of Christianity, about which so much has been written,” “a tendency already at work in the Jewish tradition, particularly in Philo of Alexandria,” who “portrayed Judaism as a patrios philosophia: the traditional philosophy of the Jewish people,” a move also confirmed by the historian Flavius Josephus.
6. See “Rousseau’s Solitary Walker,” on this website under “Philosophers.” On the origin of modern “aesthetics,” Hadot refers to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s 1750 work, Aesthetica, which contrasted veritas logica with veritas aesthetica, the latter being sincere emotion; the astronomer looks at the stars as a scientist while the shepherd talks about them to his beloved in a rather different way, with different intent.
7. See “Young Werther’s Wrongly Ordered Soul,” on this website under “Manners and Morals.”

 

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.