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The School of Athens

Aristotle was Plato’s student for twenty years. The relation betweenthese two philosophers has been constantly interesting to laterthinkers, even though no reliable word of Plato’s on the subject hassurvived, and Aristotle is surprisingly reticent about it. One depictionof the relation is by Raphael in a sixteenth-century fresco in theStanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, which has been called sincethe eighteenth century The School of Athens. The cycle of frescoes inthe room, which was the pope’s personal library, is often said to beRaphael’s greatest work. The School of Athens depicts a gathering ofthe most prominent thinkers of classical antiquity arranged in smallgroups that in turn make up a large circle, like the circle of the starsin classical astronomy. Their conversation is taking place inside amagnificent domed Renaissance church or temple, which is open atthe back to the blue sky beyond. The perspective of the paintingcomes to a vanishing point between Plato and Aristotle (just to theright of Plato’s left hand), and they are the only figures outlinedagainst the sky. Plato is an old man with long white hair and beard,and Aristotle is young, with his brown hair and beard trimmed. Eachis holding in his left hand a book, Plato the Timaeus (which describesthe causal influence of the eternal Forms) and Aristotle the Nico-machean Ethics (which describes the best life here on earth for humanbeings). With the index finger of his right hand Plato is pointing upto heaven, and his right arm and the book he holds in his left hand

Chapter 1

ARISTOTLE

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are both vertical. Aristotle spreads out his right hand, gesturinginwards toward the center, and this arm and the book he holds in hisleft hand are both horizontal. To Plato’s right are two major groups,one organized around Socrates who is energetically enumeratingpoints on his fingers,1 and below him another group aroundPythagoras, who is writing his system of the numerical proportionsto be found in musical intervals – apparently copying them from adiagram on a slate held by a youth or angel.

Raphael is giving us a traditional picture not just of the physicalappearance of each of these philosophers (mostly imaginary) but of“the intention of his soul.” For Plato the Forms are beyond us; oureternal souls get glimpses of them in our bodily lives through disci-plined contemplation. For Aristotle the forms are in the substanceswe experience, and our task is to make sense of this experience. Thereis disagreement here, and indeed Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethicsrejects Plato’s account of the Form of the Good, and says that if youhave to choose between your friends and the truth, you shouldchoose the truth. But to stop with the disagreement in the fresco, itturns out, is both bad art history and bad history of philosophy. Theoverall impression we get from the painting is not one of tension butharmony. The vanishing point of the perspective is between the twocentral figures. Raphael has set them up this way to suggest that theyare collaborating with each other, each emphasizing a complemen-tary and necessary part of the whole truth.2 It is as though they aretogether generating the forces (upward and inward) that keep thewhole circle of thinkers rotating in their prescribed orbits.

Raphael’s fresco is an expression of synthesis. He is drawing on aprogram laid down for him, perhaps by Egidio da Viterbo, who wasa prominent orator at the papal court where the frescoes were

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1 “He holds his fore-finger of his left hand between [the fore-finger] andthe thumb of his right, and seems as if he was saying, You grant me thisand this,” quoted anonymously in Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael,New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 77.2 This is a comment about the whole room that Raphael painted, not justabout The School of Athens. On the opposite wall is a fresco traditionallycalled the Disputà. The figures to the right and left of the altar in this frescoare mirroring the same strong vertical and horizontal gestures made byPlato and Aristotle. But the mystery of the sacrament is revealed to thewhole group, despite their disagreements.

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commissioned.3 Egidio undertook to recast the Sentences of PeterLombard, a twelfth-century textbook of theology that had receivednumerous commentaries over the previous three hundred years, aperiod dominated by the recovery of Aristotle in Europe. Egidiowanted to recast the Sentences “according to the mind of Plato,” re-conciling Plato and Aristotle in the way suggested by the greatItalian Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Egidio’s guidingprinciple was that “the highest human good is to be found in thatother life which is joined to God and sees the divine essence; but herewe pursue the greatest good that can be granted humanity on earth:that we be joined to God as completely as possible if we are joined inmind, in will, in contemplation, and in love.” The application of thisprinciple to Plato and Aristotle is that

these great Princes can be reconciled, if we postulate that things have a dual nature, one which is free from matter and one which isembedded in matter . . . Plato follows the former and Aristotle thelatter, and because of this (in fact) these great leaders of Philosophyhardly dissent from one another. If we seem to be making this up,listen to the Philosophers themselves.

Egidio goes on to quote Plato from the Timaeus where he teaches

that human-kind has the two natures, and we know one of these(natures) by means of the senses, the other by means of reason. Also,in the same book he teaches that each part of us does not occur inisolation; rather, each nature cares for the other nature. Aristotle, in the tenth book of his Ethics, calls humanity Understanding. Thusyou may know that each Philosopher feels the same way, howevermuch it seems to you that they are not saying the same thing.

Why should Egidio think that this passage from the tenth book of theEthics makes his point? It is because he knows, and he expects his audience to know, that by “understanding” (in Greek, nous)

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3 See Ingrid D. Rowland, “The Intellectual Background of the School of Athens,” in Raphael’s “School of Athens,” ed. Marcia Hall, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997, 131–70. She adds the parentheses in the following quotations.

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Aristotle is referring to that part of us by which we contemplate God.We will come back to this.

If the influence of Egidio is indeed to be found in the fresco, hisprogram gives us a complex relationship between the two “princes of philosophy,” a difference of emphasis but an underlying unity. The present chapter is not really about Raphael, but about Aristotle.But I am going to suggest that this account of the continuity between Plato and Aristotle is essentially correct. Aristotle’s thought,especially his thought about ethics, is as much vertical as it is hori-zontal when he gets to his conclusion, although the vertical themeis less conspicuous on his route to that conclusion. But before dis-cussing Aristotle, I want to go back to Plato’s predecessors, Socratesand Pythagoras. Where does the vertical theme in Plato come from?We tend to think of Plato as dependent on Socrates to the samedegree as Aristotle on Plato, but Pythagoras is historically just asimportant in Plato’s development. Raphael may be signaling this by the placement of the figures, with Pythagoras on the diagonal that leads from Plato to Archytas of Tarentum, the old man copyingfrom Pythagoras in the corner, who was Plato’s teacher and aPythagorean.

Plato’s interest in the Forms can certainly be traced back toSocrates’ questions to his carefully selected interlocutors, forexample “What is holiness?” to Euthyphro the seer, and “What isbravery?” to Laches the general. Plato records how in each case theconversational partner, who was supposed to be an expert, findshimself unable to give Socrates the definition he was looking for, and the dialogues end in failure despite Socrates’ conversational brilliance and passion. For example, Euthyphro tries to answer thatthe holy is what all the gods love. But Socrates asks, “Is the holy holybecause the gods love it, or do they love it because it is holy?” Socratesmakes it clear that he thinks the latter, and so Euthyphro has not told him what makes something holy. I will return to this question in the final chapter. Aristotle tells us that Plato developed his Forms as an answer to the Socratic quest for definitions. What makessomething holy is the pure Form of the Holy existing independentlyof our world in the eternal world of the Forms that we see clearlywhen our souls are separated from our bodies at death. In the Republic, Plato gives us a hierarchy. At the top is the Form ofthe Good, a Form that gives being and intelligibility to all the other Forms. Then come the other Forms that are, Plato says, “really

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real.” And finally there are material copies of the Forms, which “rollaround between being and not being.” In Plato’s Symposium he givesthe role of the Form of the Good to the Form of the Beautiful. TheGreek word kalon that I have translated “beautiful” has a range ofmeanings that no single English word captures. It can mean “noble”or “fine,” and is often linked by Aristotle with “good” and with“divine.” As we shall see, he makes “noble” the final criterion foractions or activities in accordance with virtue (arête, which can alsobe translated “excellence”).

Plato was influenced in the theory of Forms not only by Socrates,however, but by also by Pythagoras. We can see this influence inPlato’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul that contemplates theForms, and in the account in the Timaeus of the harmonic propor-tions of the world-soul and the individual soul, taken from the verydiagram that is held in front of Pythagoras in the fresco. At the endof his last work, Laws, Plato says that belief in God comes from twosources: the ever-flowing being of the inner life of the soul, and thesight of the eternal order of the stars.4 In his fresco, Raphael isemphasizing this side of Plato by putting the Timaeus in his hand,and making Pythagoras so conspicuous in the overall structure.Pythagoras gave an analogy for his low view of matter, and Platopicks it up in the Republic. There are three types of people who go tothe Olympic Games; the athletes go to compete, the businessmen goto make money, and the spectators go to watch. In the twenty-firstcentury we tend to rank these in descending order; the athletes havethe greatest honor and the spectators the least. In the Pythagoreananalogy, the order is reversed. The most honorable (the noblest, the most kalon) form of life is to contemplate with the mind alone, in the middle is the life of business and “affairs,” and the least honor-able is the man whose life is devoted to the body.

Behind Pythagoras is the line of Pre-Socratics, going back to the emergence of philosophy out of myth in the seventh century.This emergence was sometimes seen in the twentieth century as aprecursor of the victory of science over religion amongst the academic elite from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. But this is

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4 Immanuel Kant ends his Critique of Practical Reason in a similar way:“Two things fill the spirit with ever fresh and increasing wonder and awe,the more often and the more persistently they are reflected upon, the starryheavens above me and the moral law within me” (5: 161).

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anachronism. The Pre-Socratics did indeed find new explanations ofthe physical world that replaced the vivid narratives of gods and god-desses and their dealings with each other and with human beingsthat can be found in Homer and Hesiod. Aristotle, in looking back athis predecessors, describes Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus asidentifying the original principle of all things in water, air, and firerespectively. But the Pre-Socratics were not abandoning religion.Their explanations can better be seen as strongly motivated by thereligious desire to keep the divine free of unworthy human accre-tion, and they all thought of the origin of things as divine. WhenHeraclitus said that fire does and does not consent to be called“Zeus,” he was still full of reverence for the force that controlsthrough its various transformations the pattern of the cosmos; buthe did not want to associate this force with the rape of Ganymedeand Semele or with blood-sacrifices to appease the god’s jealousy ofhis prerogatives. (Heraclitus, with the face of Michelangelo, is prob-ably the brooding figure in Raphael’s fresco in the foreground, his leftelbow on a marble block.) Xenophanes pointed out that the Thraciangods have blue eyes and red hair and the gods of the Ethiopians havesnub noses and black skin, but he revered the one god “who, effort-lessly, wields all things by the thought of his mind.” Parmenides (inthe fresco on the diagonal between Plato and Pythagoras) claimed tohave been instructed by a goddess that all things are one. A strongsense of the divine can be found in all the Pre-Socratic philosophers.Even Epicurus, the atomist, (who may be the figure at the bottom leftwith a wreath) held that the gods exist, though they have no relationto our lives except to be entertained by us. And Protagoras, thesophist, claimed that he was not in a position to know either the manner in which the gods are or are not (another translation is“that they are or are not”) or what they are like in appearance. ButPlato presents him as telling the story that all humans have beengiven by the gods the gifts of respect and justice, so as to make pos-sible the founding of cities; this is why each human is able to be, as Protagoras says, “the measure of all things.”

The Protrepticus

Aristotle was born in 384 bce in Macedonia, a kingdom north ofthe Greek city states, where his father was physician to the king.

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When Aristotle was 18, his father sent him to Athens for his educa-tion, and Aristotle apprenticed himself to Plato in the Academy. Hestayed there for twenty years, until Plato died and there was a disputeabout who should take over the leadership. Speusippus (Plato’snephew) won, and Aristotle lost. He went to the other side of theAegean Sea to stay with a friend and former student Hermias, whowas the local ruler. Hermias was treacherously captured by the Persians and tortured for information about his secret treaties withKing Philip of Macedon. He steadfastly preserved silence and wasfinally crucified. Given a final wish before he died, he said, “Tell myfriends and companions that I have done nothing weak or unworthyof philosophy.” Aristotle wrote a hymn to virtue for his friend, whichbegins by stressing the immortal and noble fruit of mortal toil:

Virtue, much toiled for by the race of mortals,Noblest quarry in life,For your form, maiden,To die is an enviable fate in Greece,And to endure violent untiring labours.Such is the fruit you cast into the mind,Immortal, better than goldAnd parents and the soft rays of sleep.5

After his friend’s death he was invited back to Macedonia, andappointed tutor to the king’s son, Alexander. Aristotle translated atleast part of Homer’s Iliad into Macedonian for him, and instructedhim in the kingly virtues. When Alexander (the Great) grew up, hewent on to conquer the whole known world of his time, includingAthens. Aristotle, in the mean time, had returned to Athens andestablished his own school, the Lyceum. In 323 he left the city, “lestshe should sin against philosophy twice.” The Athenians had alreadykilled Socrates, and Aristotle was afraid that because of his associa-tion with Alexander they would kill him as well. He died the

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5 Poems F675 R(3). I have substituted the first line for the translation“Excellence, greatly striven for by mankind.” Unless otherwise specified, I am using the translation in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. JonathanBarnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. “Crisp” refers to thetranslation of Nicomachean Ethics by Roger Crisp, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000. (NE)

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following year. We tend to think of him as a philosopher, but in facthe did groundbreaking work in all the known disciplines of his timeexcept mathematics. He warns us against trying to take ethics in thedirection of mathematics, and he probably has in mind Speusippus,who (like the Pythagoreans) had tendencies in just that direction.

I am going to start with an early work of Aristotle, in order tostress the vertical theme that is prominent there and that I want to trace throughout his ethical writing. Raphael’s fresco portrayedAristotle gesturing inwards towards the center, rather than upwardstowards the heavens. Stopping with this contrast to Plato has becomea commonplace in the comparison of the two philosophers, and weneed to get beyond it.

While Plato was still alive and still Aristotle’s teacher, Aristotlewrote a work called Protrepticus, or “Exhortation to Philosophy,”which we have only in fragments.6 He writes to encourage others toembark on the way of life that he has found at the Academy, and thework is full of passion. He writes out of conviction that this is the best kind of life a human being can live, since it is the activity ofthe best and most characteristic part of us, our mind or nous. He says “Therefore all who can should practice philosophy; for this iseither the perfect life or of all single things most truly the cause ofit for souls.”7

Aristotle has a three-part hierarchy of functions. Humans haveplant-like functions, such as reproduction, and animal-like func-tions, such as perception. But there is also our nous, and to the extentthat we live by this part of ourselves and separate its activity fromthose of our other parts, we are living the highest and noblest kind of human life, which is the most godlike. How do we achievethis kind of separation? Aristotle says that the key is what we think

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6 The relation of the Protrepticus to Aristotle’s later work is a matter ofdispute. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Devel-opment [1923], trans. Richard Robinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press,1962, argued that it belonged to an early Platonic phase that was later outgrown and retracted. There is an excellent reconstruction of the text in D. S. Hutchinson and Monte Ransome Johnson, ‘Authenticating Aristotle’s Protrepticus,’ Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 29 (2005),193–294.7 B 96.

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about. The mind is operating at its highest level when it is think-ing about the highest objects. In contemplating what is eternal anddivine, our mind becomes godlike, or divine. While there are impor-tant ways in which Aristotle’s fully developed moral theory divergesfrom the Protrepticus, this thought survives.

The interpreter of Aristotle has to make a choice. Is “God” to bewritten with a capital letter, or should we write “god” or “the god”in lower case? The problem with writing “God” is that it suggests tothe reader that Aristotle is talking about the same being that thegreat monotheist religions have talked about for thousands of years.Aristotle’s god is in many ways very unlike this being, not acting in the world, and in fact not acting at all, but only thinking.8 In thesurviving fragments of the Protrepticus we are not given much detailabout the god’s thought. But in the Metaphysics Aristotle argues thatfor the god, as for us, the key to the status of this thinking is the statusof its object; since the god is the highest object, the only appropriateobject for the god’s thought is the god. The god is therefore “thoughtthinking itself.” This god does move or change things, but not bytaking any action; rather, the god moves everything “by beingloved.”9 The god is what everything else is trying to be like, to thedegree that it is naturally fitted for that god-likeness. I said in the Introduction that I would use the image of “God as magnet” tosum up the role that the god plays in Aristotle’s ethical theory. Theimage is actually used by Plato (at Ion 536a), and not by Aristotle,but it fits Aristotle’s account. Plato compares the drawing power of“the deity” to a magnet transmitting magnetic force through a chainof iron rings. I am usually going to use “God” with a capital “G” inwhat follows, because I want to point to the continuity of the verti-cal theme in the philosophers who are the subject of this book.

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8 There are traces in his later writing of a more traditional view: “If thegods pay some attention to human beings, as they seem to . . . it is reason-able for them to benefit most [those most like themselves]” (NE X, 8,1179a25ff.). If this benefiting is done by divine action, the view is not con-sistent with 1178b21, which says about the divine life, “If someone is alive,and action is excluded, what is left but contemplation?” See Richard Bodéüs,Theology of the Living Immortals, Albany: SUNY Press, 2000, for the sug-gestion that these are not merely “traces.”9 Metaphysics XII, 7, 1072b3.

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But I do not want to deny that there is a huge difference betweenAristotle’s views and the views of God in Judaism, Christianity, andIslam (which also differ on this within and between themselves invarious ways). We will see in the following chapters some attemptsat synthesis with Aristotle, but no orthodox theologian of any ofthese faiths would deny that God acts in the world.

On the view given in the passage I quoted from the Protrepticus,we humans are naturally fitted to be like God through contempla-tion. Aristotle returns to the analogy Pythagoras gave of the threetypes of life: “For as we travel to Olympia for the sake of the specta-cle itself, even if nothing more were to follow from it (for the con-templation itself is worth more than much money) . . . so too thecontemplation of the whole is to be honoured above all things thatare thought useful.”10 In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle puts thepoint in terms of three different ideals of the good life, or of happi-ness. Some people think this is the life of physical pleasure, and theyare encouraged in this by the lives of the rich and glamorous whoseem to specialize in the pursuit of extravagant sensory indulgence.Some people think the political life is the best. Aristotle agrees that itis more godlike to achieve good for one’s city-state (in Greek, polis)than for oneself as an individual, and that full practical wisdom isonly displayed in running the polis. But he concludes the work bypointing to a third life that is still nobler, and still closer to the divine,namely the life focused on contemplation. In the Protrepticus this iswhat he is exhorting his readers to undertake. Indeed, throughouthis ethical writing, Aristotle sees his task as recommending this kindof life. One way to imagine this is to go back to the myth at the endof Plato’s Republic in which people who are between lives choosewhich life to enter when they are reincarnated. Aristotle’s advicewould be appropriate for those making such a choice.

The vertical theme remains in his mature ethical writing. It is con-spicuous at the end of the Eudemian Ethics:

To conclude: whatever choice or possession of natural goods – healthand strength, wealth, friends, and the like – will most conduce to thecontemplation of God is best: this is the noblest criterion. But anystandard of living which either through excess or defect hinders the

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10 B 44, but I have substituted “contemplation” for Barnes’s second “spec-tacle,” and I have substituted “the whole” for “the universe.”

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service and contemplation of God is bad. This is how it is for the soul,and this is the best criterion for the soul, to be as little as possible awareof the irrational part of the soul as such.11

This doctrine is consistent with the Protrepticus, which compares thesoul’s conjunction with the body to a form of punishment used bythe Etruscans, who chained dead bodies face to face with the living,fitting part to part. The Nicomachean Ethics also concludes with con-templation (in Book X, Chapter 7, in Crisp’s translation):

If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable toexpect that it is in accordance with the highest virtue, and this will bethe virtue of the best element. Whether this best element is nous, orsomething else we think naturally rules and guides us and has insightinto matters noble and divine, and whether it is divine or just the mostdivine element within us, its activity, in accordance with its propervirtue will be complete happiness. That this activity is that of con-templation we have already said.

But this conclusion is in tension with the first book of the Nico-machean Ethics, and in the fifth section of this chapter, “Headingtoward the Good,” I will return to this tension and discuss whetherit can be resolved.

If the best activity is contemplation of God and whatever else ismost noble, where does that leave virtues like justice and moderationand courage and generosity? In the Protrepticus Aristotle says

But it is clear that to the philosopher alone among practitionersbelong laws that are stable and actions that are right and noble. Forhe alone lives by looking at nature and the divine. Like a good

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11 We do not know in what order the Nicomachean Ethics and the EudemianEthics were written, and the relationship is complicated by the fact that theyshare three books (in the Nicomachean Ethics books five, six, and seven, andin the Eudemian Ethics books four, five, and six). These books probablybelong originally with the Eudemian Ethics, but we do not know for sure. Wealso do not know whether the remaining parts of the Nicomachean Ethicsoriginally belonged together. See Sir Anthony Kenny, The Aristotelian Ethics,Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1978 and Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life,Clarendon Press; Oxford, 1992.

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helmsman he moors his life to that which is eternal and unchanging,drops his anchor there, and lives in accordance with himself. Thisknowledge is indeed contemplative, but it enables us to frame all our practice in accordance with it.12

Aristotle adds that contemplation helps with action in the same waythat sight helps with motion, since animals move towards or awayfrom what they see. In the same way we “choose some things andavoid others” in the light of the knowledge given us by contempla-tion. Another metaphor he uses more than once in the Protrepticusis that contemplation gives us a “boundary marker” of what is good,by reference to which the statesman determines what is just, what isgood, and what is expedient.13 Aristotle does not tell us just how thestatesman or the person of courage or moderation makes these con-nections, and the Protrepticus does not contain the contrast devel-oped in the Nicomachean Ethics between theoretical and practicalwisdom. But he does say that because we share in nous (which aloneof our possessions seems to be immortal and divine)

our life, however wretched and difficult by nature, is yet so delight-fully arranged that a human seems [a] god in comparison with allother creatures. “For nous is the god in us” – whether it was Hermo-timus or Anaxagoras who said so – and “mortal life contains a portionof some god.” We ought, therefore, either to philosophize or to sayfarewell to life and depart hence, since all other things seem to be greatnonsense and folly.14

Frequently the term Aristotle uses to express the special status ofthe activity of nous in our lives is “honorable” (in Greek, timios), in the same way the divine is honorable, and we will return to theconnotations of this word (unfamiliar in English) in the followingsection.

Aristotle’s repeated mention of the divine, which I have called hisvertical theme, has been troublesome to some of his twentieth-century interpreters. There has been a shift in scholarship towards

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12 B 49–51, but I have substituted “in accordance with himself ” for “hisown master.” The hymn to virtue written for Hermias, which I quoted atthe beginning of this section, gives the same flavor.13 B 38 and B 47.14 B 108–9.

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what I will call the horizontal, and this has accompanied the shiftaway from theism in the belief systems of many professional philoso-phers. Unfortunately Aristotle gets tentative when he starts talkingabout God. A good example is the passage I quoted from the end ofthe Nicomachean Ethics, which describes nous, as “being either itselfdivine or the most divine element in us.” We want to know which. Isnous divine, and does this mean it comes into humans, as Aristotleelsewhere says, “from outside” and perhaps leaves them at death tocontinue its own immortal life?15 Or is it just part of us, mortal likethe rest of us, but like God in its activity? We never get a satisfactoryor complete answer from Aristotle to these questions. And there aretwo attitudes we can take to this. If we find ourselves sympathetic tothe attempt to understand the divine, and we realize how extremelyhard it is to be clear about these topics, we will be patient with Aristotle and value the picture he gives us, even if it is indistinct. Onthe other hand, if we find the whole topic of the divine irritating, wewill leave those parts of Aristotle as unfruitful problems and con-struct an interpretation of his thought that gives them as little roomas we decently can. We will consign Aristotle’s views on this topic toa category together with his views on women and slaves, or his viewson spontaneous generation or the four (or five) basic elements ofmatter, and try to find a way to rescue what is still valuable in histheory. For example, Martha Nussbaum in The Fragility of Goodnesssays that what she calls the “Platonic step” of privileging the life ofcontemplation by linking it with the divine is taken “only once, in apassage that does not fit with its context and that is in flat contra-diction with several important positions and arguments of the ENtaken as a whole.”16 The one passage is the conclusion of the wholework, quoted by Egidio da Viterbo as I mentioned, and she proposesexcluding it as “inserted in [its] present position by someone else.”Another example is Larry Arnhart’s book Darwinian Natural Right,which is the topic of the final section of this chapter. But we shouldnote that the Greek words theos (“god”) and theios (“divine” or

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15 De Generatione II, 3, 736b28: “It remains for the nous alone to enter fromoutside and alone to be divine, for no bodily activity has any connectionwith the activity of nous.” De Anima III, 5, 429b22: “When separated [activenous] is just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal.”16 Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1986, 373–7.

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“godlike”) occur in the Nicomachean Ethics roughly twice as often asthe words eudaimonia (“happiness) and eudaimon (“happy”). This is astartling statistic, when we consider that Aristotle considers happi-ness the goal of our lives. I will try to justify in what follows the claimthat the divine is not only frequently mentioned, but does importantphilosophical work.

God and Nous in Nicomachean Ethics Book I

Chapter six

In this section I will discuss three passages from the first book of theNicomachean Ethics that help us see the role that Aristotle gives to the divine. I will start with the passage that is most directly con-cerned with his relation to Plato. In Chapter 6 of Book I Aristotleattacks the Platonist view of the good. This is a hard chapter, because Aristotle makes use of a large number of arguments that he statesin shorthand, as it were. He himself was part of the discussion ofthese arguments within the Academy, and he expects his audienceto be familiar with them. Alas, we are not, and we often have to guesswhat he means. The second argument in the chapter against a separate Form of the Good goes as follows:

Good is spoken of in as many ways as being is spoken of. For it isspoken of in [the category of] substance as god and nous; in quality,as the virtues; in quantity, as the measured amount; in relative, as theuseful; in time, as the opportune moment; in place as the [right] situa-tion. Hence it is clear that the good cannot be some common [natureof good things] that is universal and single; for if it were, it would bespoken of in only one of the categories, not in them all.17

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17 I am quoting, with a couple of alterations, Sarah Broadie’s translationin S. Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.She translates nous as “intelligence,” but I will stick with nous, and shetranslates ti as “what-it-is” rather than “substance.” Normally Aristotletalks not of “God” but of “divine” (the adjective) when attributing divinityto humans. Perhaps he wanted a noun here, because he was talking aboutthe category of substance. But the translation is disputable. It would be pos-sible to take the phrase “is spoken of in [the category of] substance as God

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What is Aristotle’s doctrine here? How is an analysis of goodnessin terms of categories supposed to work? I will start with a briefaccount of Aristotle’s view of substance and the other categories,and then come back to this passage in I, 6.18 Aristotle thinks of

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and nous” to mean “is spoken of in the category of substance, as for exampleGod and nous,” and (independently) to suppose that Aristotle is not talkingabout the God in us, but God as the unmoved mover. But Sarah Broadie’sway of taking the passage as referring to God as itself the good in (human)substance has advantages. The cases Aristotle mentions in the other cate-gories do not seem like examples at all, as though there could be lots of otherexamples that Aristotle could have given instead; rather, they seem to benames for the value predication itself. So in the category of quantity, Aristotle gives “the right amount,” in the category of time “the rightmoment” and so on. The right or opportune moment is not an example of goodness predicated in the category of time, but just what goodness predicated in the category of time is; similarly with “the right amount” and “the right place.” It is worth mentioning that the parallel passage in the Eudemian Ethics uses mostly the goods predicated in the various categories (though it puts God and nous in the reverse order), without using“as” at all (Eudemian Ethics I, 8, 1217b27ff.). Another possibility is to readthe passage as Sir David Ross does, translating, “For it is predicated both inthe category of substance, as of God and of reason, and in quality, i.e. of thevirtues.” He takes God and nous not as examples of the goodness being pred-icated in the category of substance, but as examples of substances of whichgoodness is predicated, and the virtues are the qualities of which goodnessis predicated, and so on. But again Aristotle does not seem to be using the cases in the other categories, such as “right amount” and “right time”as cases of things of which goodness is predicated. For the goodness is, soto speak, already there.18 I am relying on the account of the central books of the Metaphysics givenin my dissertation, “Aristotle’s Theories of Essence,” Princeton, 1975, andJohn E. Hare “Aristotle and the Definition of Natural Things,” Phronesis 24(1979), 168–79. But I subsequently discovered a more compelling accountof the same sort of view in Montgomery Furth, Substance, Form and Psyche:An Aristotelean Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Furth illuminates the difference between Aristotle’s accounts in the Cate-gories and in the Metaphysics by saying that the former is synchronic and thelatter diachronic, and therefore cognizant of matter and form.

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substance as the fundamental kind of being on which all other kindsof being depend. In the work called Categories he says that Socratesis a substance in the primary sense. If he is pale (an item in the cat-egory of quality) after being indoors in the winter, the existence orbeing of his paleness depends on the existence of Socrates, andSocrates’s existence does not depend on the existence of his paleness.The same is true if he is fat (an item in the category of quantity) oris in the market (an item in the category of place). In the Metaphysics,by contrast, Aristotle stresses the role of substance as the cause thatunderlies and explains change, and he describes two fundamentalingredients in causation: form and matter. Form is the internalorganizing activity of a thing that gives that thing unity throughchange. Matter is what form organizes. (This account does not,however, split Socrates in the way Plato splits up animals into bodyand soul, which can be separated at death.) Socrates is in these termsa substance in a secondary sense, a complex in which the matter ispotentially just what the form is actually.

Aristotle’s form/matter analysis goes through a number of differ-ent levels. If we consider a living substance, say a hedgehog, we cananalyze it into its form and its matter. Its form is its characteristichedgehog-type activity, and Aristotle says its soul is its capacity forthis activity. Its matter is the flesh and bones that are organized inthis activity. We can then take, say, the bones, and see that each bonecan be analyzed into bony stuff (the matter) and its organizing activ-ity for doing the kind of things a bone does (the form). And the bonystuff can in turn be analyzed into some more primitive stuff and itsorganizing activity. The process of development in the animal is thereverse of this process of analysis by the scientist, and can best beunderstood as a direction toward form. The more primitive kinds ofmatter are changed from simple to compound, and from inorganicto organic (though Aristotle does not have these concepts), by theimposition of form at different stages, until we have something thatis ready to be a mature hedgehog. When this happens, the matter hasbeen all used up, so to speak. There is nothing left for it to become inthe direction of substance. There is still potential for change (thehedgehog can roll up in the face of an enemy, for example a car). Butthe only remaining change in substance is regressive. The hedgehogcan decay, if squashed, into flesh and bones, and the bones into bonystuff, and eventually (if it is not eaten first) into inorganic stuff, readyfor the process to begin all over again.

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Aristotle’s point, as I understand it, is that only living things havethe right kind of self-directed development to count as complex sub-stances in this sense. A heap of sand is not a substance. If we takethe various grains of sand that make up the heap, they can be incontact with each other. But they do not make up the kind of unitythat persists through change that science is looking for.19 The sameis true if we take the drops of water that make up a lake, or the clodsof earth that make up a field. This is also true of human artifacts. A ball bearing and a baseball do not have the right kind of unitythrough change, because the principle of their persistence is not inthemselves but in their makers who designed them for some purpose.Because the baseball has a different purpose from the ball bearing, itdoes not have to be so perfectly spherical. Its purpose and shape arenot given by an internal source of change and development but bythe maker who produces it.

Aristotle’s view of substance is essentially biological, and has beenconfirmed to a surprising degree by contemporary science. His viewdoes not depend on his physics or chemistry, which are outdated. A current biologist, J. Z. Young, supports Aristotle’s view as follows:

The essence of a living thing is that it consists of atoms of the ordi-nary chemical elements we have listed, caught up into the livingsystem and made part of it for a while. The living activity takes themup and organizes them in its characteristic way. The life of a man con-sists essentially in the activity he imposes upon that stuff.20

This account of substance does not reduce the importance ofmatter as Plato’s Timaeus does, which teaches that material thingsare defective copies of Forms in another world. On the other hand, itdoes not reduce the importance of form, by teaching that everythingis matter, and that we can in principle reduce psychology to biology,and biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics. If we accept Aristotle’s account of substance, at least in outline, what implica-tions will it have for how we look at value? Life is, on the account

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19 For an excellent contemporary defense of this sort of metaphysicalview, see Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1990.20 J. Z. Young, An Introduction to the Study of Man, Oxford: Clarendon Press,1971, 86–87.

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I have outlined, a directional idea. To be alive is to be able to causechanges (both internal and external) in the direction that leadstowards being a mature member of a biological species. If somethingis a hedgehog, then it is already organizing changes in a good way,the way that fits the hedgehog-type destination. Nature sets a fittingdirection for how humans should live, by directing us towards ourform, our characteristic human activity.

Now we can return to our passage from Book I, Chapter 6. I willstart to explain it by means of a humble analogy with an AmericanPhilosophical Association (APA) meeting. The analogy is designed toilluminate how seeing a central good might help us see the goods inthe other categories. We might say that there is a central activity thatmakes a good APA meeting, and it is the doing of good philosophy.All sorts of other things go on at an APA meeting, such as placementinterviews and catching up with friends. We can discuss what is agood time for the meeting, or what is a good place for it. But the com-mittee that decides which papers will be read is doing the centrallyimportant work. (I say this with some animus because I have been on one of these committees, and I think their work is under-appreciated.) We might re-write Aristotle’s passage this way: GoodAPA meetings are spoken of in many ways. They are spoken of interms of the central activity as the reading of good philosophy papersand good subsequent discussion; in quality, the states of characterthat produce good philosophy papers and discussion; in quantity, thenumber of papers and commentators that allow for good philosophyto be done (fewer than at present); in relation, the utility of the meet-ings to the doing of good philosophy outside the meetings; in place,the hotel that provides enough good rooms at a reasonable price forgood philosophers to go there. The point is that the relation of sub-stance to the other categories is one of priority in explanation. Wecan answer questions about what is the right time and the right placeand the right amount because we know what the central activity is.In the same way, then, divine activity ought to be what settles ques-tions about what is a good time and a good place and a good amountfor human life. In particular, virtue is goodness predicated in the category of quality, not substance. Socrates is good in what he is, orgood essentially, by being god and nous, and his virtues are not in this way essential to him or to the goodness that he has essentially.

Aristotle is arguing that good is predicated across all the categoriesin the way that being is, and it is therefore so various that it cannot

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be something universally present in all cases and single. I will returnto this objection in the final chapter of this book. My present point isnot to discuss Aristotle’s quarrel with Plato, but rather his own viewof the relation between the good and the divine. The most naturalway to take the passage is that he is saying that the central thing thatconstitutes human life as good is god and nous. This brings us to themain difficulty. Sarah Broadie asks “What can it mean to say that the central human good is God?”21 Within Jewish, Christian andIslamic theology we are used to thinking that humans are not God,and therefore there is some kind of mistake in saying that we canhave divine activity. It is as though in the background of our thoughtthere was a separation or wall between the human and the divine,and it was blasphemous to attribute divine properties to humanbeings.22

The passages I quoted from the Protrepticus (where Aristotlequotes approvingly the saying that nous is the god in us) should makeus already suspicious about such a separation when interpretingAristotle. The Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries could be more relaxed about divinization because they made ample room fordifferent kinds of places on the continuum between humans andgods. There were, first, a number of divinities of different grades ofimportance. There was also the category of “spirits” (in Greek, dai-mones), and of beings like Socrates’s attendant spirit (daimonion). Infact Socrates himself is described by Plato as a “spirit-like man” (dai-monios aner).23 Then there are the heroes, like Hector. At the begin-ning of Book VII, Aristotle talks of a heroic and divine virtue, andquotes Priam saying of Hector, his son, that he “seemed not to be achild of a mortal man but of a god.”24 There is also the possibility of

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21 Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, 29.22 Eastern Christian theology is more relaxed about this, however, anddoes not mind talking about “deification” or “divinization” (in Greek theio-sis). There is, famously, one passage in the New Testament that suggestssuch language (II Peter 1: 3–4, New International Version), “[God] has givenus his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may par-ticipate in the divine nature [theias koinonoi phuseos].” The Cappadocianfathers, for example Gregory Nazianzus, had no difficulty combining talk ofour divinization with talk of God’s difference from us.23 Symposium 203a.24 NE II, 1, 1145a21–3.

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elevation, even during one’s lifetime, to the status of a godlike ordivine man. Aristotle says, in the same place, that the Spartans arein the habit of calling someone they particularly admire “divine.” Hereports the common idea that people become gods through a superi-ority of virtue.25 Then he remarks that the god’s state is more hon-orable than virtue, just as bestiality is more despicable than merevice. I will come back to this term “honorable” in a moment. Virtueis again given second rank, just as it was in I, 6. The best activity ofa human being is not activity in accordance with merely humanvirtue, but something that exceeds this in the way that gods exceedhuman beings.

This brings us to a structural point about how theological lan-guage is being used here. Humanity is being attributed the capacityto be more than merely human. Compare Aristotle’s statement in thePolitics (1287a27–32) that “He who commands that law should rulemay thus be regarded as commanding that God and nous aloneshould rule; he who commands that a man should rule adds thecharacter of the beast.” This is the very phrase we have been dis-cussing, “God and nous.” So there is a human good for us as indi-viduals, but the divine activity (which is not merely human) is toachieve this good for the polis through law. I want to emphasize thepoint that this contrast between the divine and the merely humandoes not need to occur in the context of a discussion of theoreticalwisdom as opposed to practical wisdom. The passage in the Politics isabout the making of law, and Aristotle is contrasting the rule of lawand the rule of merely human beings.26 Office holders, he says, evenif they are the best of men, are perverted by appetite and ambition.

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25 In a similar way in III, 7, 1115b10–11 Aristotle says that the coura-geous person will be unperturbed as far as a human being can be, and I takethis to mean that he will be afraid of the things that will be fearful to anyonewho is sane. But then even the things that are not beyond the human, hewill also fear, though he will stand his ground for the sake of the noble. I take it, though Aristotle does not say this explicitly, that the contrast iswith the divine human person who, by contrast, will not fear those things.26 Aristotle makes the same contrast in the Protrepticus between laws that are stable and divine, laid down for cities, and laws of other crafts, B 48–9.

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But Law is “Reason free from all passions.”27 The structural pointabout theological language is that Aristotle consistently uses it to getleverage up to something that is human but not merely human.28 Inthe final book of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle is going to use theterm anthropike, “human,” as a term for the second-rank of a com-parison of activities or states of which we humans are capable: “Thelife in accordance with the other kind of virtue is happy in a sec-ondary way, since the activities in accordance with it are human.”29

“Divine” is Aristotle’s preferred term for the first-rank activity orstate in this comparison.

Chapter twelve

Now we can go on to Book I, Chapter 12. The question of the chapteris whether happiness is a thing to be commended or instead some-thing to be honored.30 Aristotle says that we commend the goodperson and virtue in general, and commendation is appropriatebecause (in terms of the categories) such a person has a certainquality or stands in some sort of relation to something. But wecannot, strictly, commend the gods, since it is not commendationthat applies to the best things, but something greater and better.

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27 Compare the first use of “divine” in Book I, where Aristotle argues inChapter 2 that the inquiry of the Ethics is a kind of political science, for theend of this science is the human good. And then he feels it necessary to add,“while the good of an individual is a desirable thing, what is good for apeople or for cities is a nobler and more divine thing.”28 Compare the epigram from Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, “To err ishuman, to forgive divine.” Pope is not saying here that humans do notforgive, but that there is something humans do (namely forgiving) which isnot merely human. I am interested in the use of “human” here. Aristotlemight have said, “Ethical virtue is human, but contemplation is divine,”meaning that ethical virtue is merely human, and contemplation is morethan merely human, though still an activity of human beings.29 NE X, 8, 1178a10, 14, 21.30 Aristotle does not always make this distinction. See Topics, III, 1,116b36ff. “Commend” is a better translation than “praise” because we dopraise gods.

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Presumably, given the initial distinction between “commendable”and “honorable,” the something greater and better is honor. This iswhat Aristotle says in the discussion of the magnanimous man, whoboth thinks himself worthy of the greatest things and in fact is so.This means that he will be concerned with one thing in particular:the greatest external good, “which is what we render to the gods;such is honor.”31 In our passage in Book I, Chapter 12, Aristotle saysit is obvious that what we give the gods is something greater andbetter than mere commendation “since the gods and the most divine(godlike) of people we call blessed and happy.” No doubt people do infact commend the gods, by calling them, for example, just and brave,but as Aristotle says in Book X, this does not really make sense.32

What is true of the gods is also true of happiness, Aristotle says,“since we never commend happiness as we might justice, but rathercall it blessed as something better and more divine.” Virtue, forexample, is commended. But Aristotle says that by contrast happi-ness is something honorable. This also follows from its being a firstprinciple or starting point. “It is for the sake of this that we do all therest of our actions, and the starting point and cause of goods we taketo be something honorable and divine.” The words “and divine” hererefer back to the point Aristotle has been making about how it isinappropriate to commend the gods.

What is the criterion distinguishing the commendable and thehonorable? Aristotle, as Alexander reports, “said that among goodthings the honorable are the things that have more the character oforigin, as gods, parents, happiness; noble and commendable are thevirtues and the activities in accordance with them.”33 Aristotle’s par-adigm of what is good but not commended is the gods or the divine,and the Greeks related to their gods through honor in a complexpattern that we might call “an honor-loop”, though the Greek word(time) is broader than the English: the gods have their “honors,”

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31 NE IV, 3, 1123b15 (Crisp). See also IX, 2, 1165a21ff.32 NE X, 8, 1178b8–18. I will come back to this in the final chapter.33 Fr. 110 R(2), 1496a34. See also VI, 7, 1141a18ff. where Aristotle says that wisdom is knowledge of the most honorable things, and then con-cludes that it cannot be the same as political science, since human beingsare not the best things in the cosmos, but there are other things more divine, such as “the things that constitute the cosmos.”

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which we might better translate “functions”;34 we properly respondwith “honor”, which we might here translate here as “worship.” Thisincludes, for example, sanctuaries devoted to them, dedications,hymns, dances, libations, rituals, prayers, festivals, and sacrifices.35

In all of these the gods take pleasure, and in return they give “honor”to mortals in the form of help or assistance, especially in the areas of their own expertise.36 The difference in all of this from merelycommending the gods does not lie in our saying extremely goodthings about them; this much is common to commending as well.Rather, we put ourselves in a subordinate or inferior position, whichour honor (or worship) acknowledges but does not create. If we“think big” about ourselves, we thereby “think down on” the gods (Euripides, Bacchae 199), and fail to give them their proper honor.The same kind of honor-loop can be seen in the relation of a subjectto a king, who has honor in the sense of function or office, who isgiven honor by the gifts and obeisance of his subjects, and who giveshonor in return by helping those who give honor to him.

The commendable, by contrast, is commended “for its being acertain kind and its standing in a certain relation to something else.”In terms of the categories this is to say that what is commendable iseither a quality or a relation. To say it is a relation is to say that itderives its being from being related to something else. It would be presumptuous to commend a god for something he does well. Tocommend a god would be to “think big” about ourselves or to “thinkdown” about the gods, by placing them in relation to our standardsfor ourselves. Aristotle is objecting that actually the reference to astandard goes the other way round.37 Eudoxus was right to say that

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34 Thus Herodotus says that Homer and Hesiod assigned to the gods theirfunctions (in Greek, timai) and areas of expertise (in Greek, technai).35 See Jon D. Mikalson, Honor Thy Gods, Chapel Hill: The University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1991, 189.36 Thus Athena gives honor to her city in Aeschylus’s Eumenides(913–15), and Apollo gives his oracles as an honor to mortals in Sophocles’OT (787–89). Euthyphro reflects this pattern when he says to Socrates(Euthyphro 15a–b) that our gifts to the gods bring them honor.37 Aristotle’s point about the commendable being relative may be a differ-ent one. The virtuous person and the fast runner and the strong man aresaid to be good by having a certain relation to something outside themselves.

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other good things are commended by reference to the standard of thegod and the good. For this reason the commendable is relative (likevirtue) and the goodness of the gods is not. But we can also see thatthe commendable is a quality. Consider how odd it would be tocommend my son for being human (which is substance not quality).I commend him for being brave, something that humans can fail tobe and still be human. In the same way, in Chapter 6 virtue wasdescribed as quality, rather than substance. Suppose we put togetherthe point that we are not commended for what we essentially are (butfor qualities and relations) and the point that we give honor to whatis above us, and suppose we ask why Aristotle suggests that we givehonor and not commendation to happiness. I think we do notcommend someone for being happy, because being happy is centrallythe activity of something in us that is essential to us. This is true,even though not all humans are happy, and so happiness itself is notsomething essential to us. On the other hand, happiness is honor-able, and this means we put ourselves in a subordinate position withrespect to it, just as we do to the divine.

Here is a problem. How can we be in a subordinate position to hap-piness, how can it be honorable, if happiness is simply the humangood? I want to propose that we cannot make sense of this passagewith a one-level view of the human. We have to appeal to the dis-tinction between the human and the merely human. There is some-thing in us that is not merely human, and the activity of this thingis appropriately honored by us. For us to call something in ourselvesworthy of honor is to divide ourselves. Aristotle remarks that it isridiculous to commend the gods with reference to ourselves, and itmust also be in some way ridiculous to commend happiness with ref-erence merely to ourselves. As far as I can see, this only makes senseon a two-level view. Eustratius (one of the Greek commentators onthis passage) puts it this way, “We speak of divine things as exceed-ing commendation, but [merely] human things as commendablesince they fail to be honored, but achieve only commendation.” Sowhat is this thing in us that is not merely human? In the discussionof the active nous in De Anima, Aristotle says that which acts is morehonorable than that which is acted upon (namely, the passive nous),

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Part of Aristotle’s meaning is that the virtues are relative, because theyproduce something, namely action. See also Categories (7, 6b15), Rhetoric(I, 9, 1367b26ff.), and Eudemian Ethics (II, 1, 1219a40–b16).

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and the first principle is more honorable than the matter. Passive nousbecomes all things, and active nous produces all things, like light. Inthis extremely obscure passage, he says of the active nous that “it isnot the case that it sometimes thinks and at other times not. In sep-aration it is just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal.”38

Similarly at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics he says that nousexceeds in honorableness, and its activity is the most continuous andthe closest to immortality.39 The parallel is not exact, but suggeststhat the part of us that is not merely human is active nous.

Chapter ten

Aristotle says that happiness is “blessed” and this is a key term forour present discussion. I want to suggest that he distinguishes thehighest kind of happiness, which is blessed, from a more ordinarykind that is not. In Chapter 9 Aristotle is discussing how we get happiness. He says,

If there is anything that the gods give to human beings, it is reason-able that happiness should be god-given, especially since it is so muchthe best of the human things. But this question would perhaps bemore suited to another inquiry. Even if it is not sent by the gods,however, but arises through virtue and some sort of learning or train-ing, it is evidently one of the divine things. For that which is the prizeand end of virtue is clearly the best thing, and something both divineand blessed.40

The term “blessed” (in Greek, makarios) is a collateral form of aword (makar), which is used properly of the happiness of the gods asopposed to the happiness of mortals. In Homer the makares aresimply the gods. There is a contrast built into the term between two

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38 De Anima III, 5, 430a18ff. I will not try to explain this passage, but I amassuming that active nous is not God, if that is taken to imply that it is notpart of us. I have also said that Aristotle did not believe in personal immor-tality, so the separation of active nous cannot be our survival of death.39 NE X, 7, 1177a21–1178a1.40 NE I, 9, 1099b16–18 (Crisp, whose translation is used throughout thissection).

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kinds of happiness, the bliss of the blessed, and the less exalted happiness of mere mortals. What I want to ask is how much ofthis theological flavor is preserved in Aristotle’s use of the term“blessed.” The details of the argument in Chapter 10 are hard tomake coherent. But we have a better shot at this if we do not treat“happy” and “blessed” simply as synonyms of each other.41

Here is an analogy. We can think of the tuning of a piece of music,where the pitch A is set at 440 vibrations per second. The A will andshould vary in performance, between rising and falling intervals onstring instruments and the voice. But A = 440 is always there as astandard against which we hear the rest of the music, and we cancheck ourselves against it if we feel we are slipping. In the same wayblessedness is a standard of happiness against which we can see howour lived happiness in fact varies with our different circumstances.

In the final paragraph of Chapter 10, Aristotle says, “What is toprevent us, then, from concluding that the happy person is the onewho, adequately furnished with external goods, engages in activitiesin accordance with complete virtue, not for just any period of timebut over a complete life? Or should we add that he will live like thisand will die accordingly? The future is obscure to us, and we say thathappiness is an end and altogether quite complete. This being so, weshall call blessed those of the living who have and will continue to have the things mentioned, but blessed only as humans.” Here

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41 Here I am replying to Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness373–7. Nussbaum wants to deny a distinction between happy and blessedbecause she thinks interpreters have used a bogus distinction between thetwo to make Aristotle sound more like Kant. In Kant, something has moralworth independently of whether it is part of a happy life. Our desire for happiness is placed on the side of inclination and moral worth on the sideof duty. By introducing a distinction between “happy” and “blessed” we cantry to make Aristotle say that virtue is sufficient for happiness but not forblessedness, which also requires external goods. I agree that this distinctionis not to be found in the text. Virtue is not sufficient for happiness. Virtuouspeople can, Aristotle says, slip from a state of happiness because of misfor-tune, though they will not slip as far as wretchedness as long as they havevirtue. But denying this distinction in Aristotle does not mean denying alldistinction between happiness and blessedness, and I think the argument ofChapter 10 requires a distinction. Here I am agreeing with Kenny, Aristotleon the Perfect Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, 31–7.

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Aristotle gives an account of happiness as activity over a completelife in accordance with virtue and equipped with the external goodsthat virtue needs. He then adds something.42 What is he adding? Let us take the case of a man who is virtuous and engages in virtu-ous activities for a while, but then through misfortune loses the necessary externals for virtuous activity, and then, through nobleaccomplishments or good fortune recovers them. Perhaps he goesthrough this cycle more than once. Let us call him Antonio, after thecharacter in The Merchant of Venice who suffered disaster and wasrestored to good fortune. Such a person can properly be called happy,I think Aristotle would say, even though he has not been active inaccordance with virtue at every point in his adult life. On the accountof happiness in the final paragraph of Chapter 10 he is adequatelyfurnished with external goods and active in accordance with com-plete virtue over a complete life (which I take to mean “over the spanof his life as a whole”). But is Antonio blessed? I want to say, he isnot. He does not meet the permanence condition, since he has beenin and out of the best state. A blessed person is one who meets twoconditions: his happiness is, first, continuous and, second, gloriousand beautiful. We therefore get three possible states of the virtuousperson from this chapter. He can be blessed, and so uninterruptedlyactive in perfect activity (except, perhaps, when he is asleep). Thisstate cannot be lost and is divine. Then there is happiness of a sec-ondary kind, which can be interrupted, if there is sufficient misfor-tune, but is resumed. Then there is the state of the virtuous personwho has lost happiness through some disaster and does not regainit, but is still not wretched, because his virtue will shine through the

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42 The difficulty is to understand what Aristotle thinks he is adding. If wemake no distinction between happiness and blessedness, as Nussbaumwants, I think the argument becomes unintelligible at this point. As Kennysays, “Aristotle would be saying that someone is only really happy if he notonly currently enjoys the conditions for happiness but will continue to enjoythem until death. But that would mean that happiness could not be lost;someone who fell into misfortunes like Priam would not be someone whohad enjoyed a happy life and then lost it: he would be someone whose latercareer showed that he had never been happy at all.” But if this is what happiness already means, then Aristotle cannot be adding anything bysaying that the person will live like this and will die accordingly.

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disaster in the way King Priam’s virtue shone through the defeat anddestruction of his city.

Then Aristotle adds one more thing. The person in the highest ofthese three states is blessed, but only blessed as a human. There is apure form of the blessed or divine activity that is not available to us.In Book X, we are compared with a god to whom we have a likenessbut with whom we are not identical: “So the god’s activity, which issuperior in blessedness will be contemplative; and therefore ofhuman things the most akin to this would be the happiest.”43

The moral from these three passages in Book I is that Aristotlemakes a distinction between the divine in us and the merely human.If we are happy, then we will live with the conviction that this divinething in us is active to the fullest extent that is possible for humans.We will in this way recognize in our lives something worthy of honor,something not merely better than the rest of us but of a differentorder of merit. If this activity is consistent throughout our lives, thenwe will properly be called blessed. But there is a form of activity thatis honorable and blessed in a way that is beyond us, not merelybeyond the “merely human” but beyond the human, and that is theactivity of the non-human God.

The First Sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics

These three passages from book I suggest a view we will find articu-lated in Book X, but it is not the view of most of Book I, and the firstsentence of the book gives a more typical picture. The first sentencesof Aristotle’s works are often especially revealing about the con-tent of the work that is to follow. Here is the first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics: “Every art and every discipline, and similarly[every] action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good;and so the good has been aptly described as that at which every-thing aims.”44 I will make four points about this sentence.

The first point is about the phrase “is thought” (literally “seems”).It is typical of Aristotle to start with what seems right to “the manyand the wise.” His method, especially in his works of practical

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43 NE X, 8, 1178b21–24.44 This is Crisp’s translation, except that I have translated methodos as “dis-cipline” rather than “inquiry,” for a reason I will explain shortly.

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philosophy, is to start by collecting ordinary opinion (“the many”),which we might call “common sense,” and the opinions of his pre-decessors (“the wise”). He gives these opinions of the many and wiseinitial credence. He says at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, “Whatseems to all, this we say is.”45 Aristotle is not, therefore, starting hisinquiry from scratch, but from received opinion. In fact all philoso-phers are in the same boat in this respect, but some of them pretendthey are not. However, Aristotle is not merely describing the commonsense of his time. It is true that his picture is in many ways culture-bound. He describes magnanimity, as we saw, as the virtue of beingworthy of great honor and treating oneself as worthy of it, and saysthe magnanimous man accordingly has slow movement and a deepvoice.46 We can imagine that if there were a meeting to which themagnanimous man was late, he would not hurry to get there,because he would know that he was the most important personcoming and that the others would wait for him. Much of the descrip-tion of magnanimity and the other moral virtues is tied to mores inancient Athens. But Aristotle, though he starts from the opinions ofthe many and the wise, does not feel bound to stay there. His pictureof the best life ends up diverging significantly from conventionalopinion, when he exalts the life of the philosopher (his own kind oflife). Accordingly, he feels an obligation to explain how his concep-tion fits the familiar criteria of the chief good (such as being the mostpleasant, being self-sufficient, etc.). In an analogous way, the doctor’saim is the health of his patients. His professional account of thathealth may be different in some ways to the common sense notionthat most of his patients will have; but it cannot be too different,because his treatment needs to bring about a state that the patientfinds good.

The second point is that the beginning of the first sentence con-tains two pairs of terms, “art and discipline” and “action and rationalchoice.” “Art” (in Greek techne) is being used broadly here to cover all kinds of know-how, not narrowly to cover “art” as opposed to“science.” “Discipline” is probably the knowledge-base that controlsan art, as the architect (literally the “ruler builder”) controls thestonemason. True to his method, Aristotle is starting here with the opinions of his predecessors; in this case the first pair of terms

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45 NE X, 2, 1173a1.46 NE IV, 3, 1125a13.

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comes from Plato.47 But he goes on in the second pair to his own doc-trine. Aristotle is suggesting that action and rational choice arerelated in the same way as art and knowledge-base: rational choicecontrols action. So there is a similarity between these two pairs ofterms, but also a contrast, which Aristotle emphasizes in the nextsentence, “But there seems to be a difference in the ends; for someare activities, and others are products apart from these.” What is the contrast here?48

Both art and action have ends, Aristotle is saying, but art has anend that is a product (in Greek ergon, which also means “character-istic work” or “function”) apart from the activity of the art itself,whereas the end of action is not separate from the activity in thisway. He goes on in Chapter 1 to give examples of the first kind – shipbuilding and bridle-making and generalship. Ship-building is anart that produces a ship, bridle-making produces a bridle, and gen-eralship produces victory. Action, on the other hand, has as its end(we are going to discover) happiness, and happiness is activity inaccordance with virtue (or excellence). Aristotle is going to distin-guish different kinds of virtue, but all of them are dispositions to actor feel or think as reason prescribes; so the end of action is itselfdoing something or being active in a certain way. We can describethe status of the action or activity in terms of its nobility or how closeit is to the divine. Suppose in a battle I charge at the enemy when thegeneral gives the command. I am aiming at various ends, perhapsimmediately the rout of the enemy. But thinking more broadly (Aristotle would say) I am aiming at the noble (kalon), and what isnoble and divine is to be the kind of person who behaves in just thisway for the sake of his polis.49 My action is thus an expression of itsown end; it is doing what a noble person does. The end is not some-

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47 Gauthier and Jolif suggest that the first pair of terms comes from Plato,and the second is Aristotle’s own. See R. -A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif, L’Ethiquea Nicomaque, Vol. 1, Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1970, 3–5. Theterm I have translated “discipline” can be used more narrowly for theoreti-cal disciplines, but does not have to be.48 The distinction is important because it is picked up at the beginning ofthe next two major subdivisions of Book I; in Chapter 4 his terms are“knowledge” and “rational choice” and in Chapter 7 “art” and “action.”49 The good for the polis is more noble and divine than the good for an individual, NE I, 2, 1094b9–10.

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thing, like a ship or a bridle, which exists on its own when the artistwho produces it is finished with it.

Aristotle goes on to make the point that the arts come in a hier-archy. The bridle-maker, if he wants to make a good bridle, has toconsult the rider (who is the expert about bridles because he is theuser of them).50 The rider, if he wants to ride well, has to consult the general (who is the expert about riding because he is the user of the cavalry in battle). The general, if he wants to command well,has to consult the statesman (who is the expert about warfarebecause he is the user of the army to save the city). This is how Aris-totle gets to the conclusion that political science, the knowledge-baseof the statesman, is the most controlling and highest science, sinceit uses the other sciences and legislates what must be done and whatavoided. The consistency of this conclusion with the conclusion ofthe Nicomachean Ethics will be the topic of the following section of this chapter.

The third point about this first sentence will take longer to make.Aristotle might mean either of two different things by saying thatevery art and every action seems to aim at some good. He mightmean that every art and every action aims at what seems good to it.On this view even a bad person pursues what is bad because he or she thinks it good. The heroin addict takes the heroin for the pleasure or the relief. The thief steals the gold for the status (beingwell thought of by others) or the power that wealth gives him, andpursues those things as good.51 On the other hand, Aristotle mightbe making a more ambitious point: that it seems that every art andevery action aims at what is in fact good. On this view we would nothave, for example, shipbuilding unless ships were good. We wouldnot have bridle-making without the utility of bridles. And actionsaim at various things that are components of happiness, or meansto happiness, or expressions or consequences of happiness. For

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50 The interpreter of Aristotle has another choice here. Aristotle very oftenmakes points that are confined to males, where the contemporary philoso-pher would like to be inclusive of female and male. I will stick to male pro-nouns in making Aristotle’s points, but not in making my own.51 To pursue the evil as evil would make the subject, as Kant puts it, “adevilish being,” and this designation is not applicable to human beings. It is the devil who says, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Evil be thou my good” (IV, 110).

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example, we want to have friends, and friendship is a component ofhappiness. And health is a component of happiness, so we go to thedentist as a means to long-term dental health. And dancing in the street is an expression of happiness at the end of a war.

Arts at first sight fit better with this second view than actions do.It is plausible to say that the arts all aim at actual goods. This is bothPlato’s view and Aristotle’s. This does not mean that all practi-tioners of the art aim at good. Aristotle makes the point that the sameart that makes a successful doctor makes a successful poisoner. This art of knowing how different potions affect the body, and ofknowing the causes of disease, enables one person to keep herpatients alive and another person to cause her victims’ deaths. But the art itself, Aristotle would say, is aimed at the good of health.We might raise a counter-example: quasi-humorous expressions like “raising procrastination to an art-form” or “the art of spin-doctoring.” But the fact that these expressions are paradoxical makesthe point that when we call something “an art” we are thinking of itas headed towards the good; that is what gives these expressions theirpretension to wit.

I think Aristotle also intends the more ambitious view in the caseof actions, that it seems that every action aims at what is in fact good.One reason for thinking this is, again, Aristotle’s vertical theme. Inhis discussion of pleasure, he says that all (both beasts and humanbeings) “perhaps actually pursue not the pleasure they think theypursue nor that which they would say they pursue, but the samepleasure; for all things have by nature something divine in them.”52

Here Aristotle’s view seems to be that there is something directingour pursuits so that they aim towards what is actually good even ifwe do not acknowledge it.

Is it plausible to say that all actions are aimed at what is actuallygood? Is the taking of the heroin or the theft of the gold aimed atsomething actually good? Perhaps what is bad about the heroinaddict’s decision or the thief ’s is that they embody a wrongful rankingof the goods that are to be pursued. The addict is seeking pleasure orrelief from pain, and the thief is pursuing status or wealth. We mightsay there is nothing wrong in themselves with pleasure or status.Aristotle would certainly say that the good life will contain both ofthese things. What is wrong is to prefer these ends over other endsthat are ranked higher by reason. Virtue only allows you to pursue

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52 NE VII, 13, 1153b31–2.

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pleasure and status if they are consistent with what Aristotle calls“the noble.” The addict and the thief have placed things that can bepart of a good life, if properly ordered, at the top of their priorityscale, when actually they belong much lower down.

Just what are the roles of pleasure and status in a good humanlife? There is a whole spectrum of views about this. At one end of thisspectrum is the ascetic view that the best person is completely in-different to them. The Stoics (a school founded by Zeno of Citium,c.336–c.265) thought that the sage (who lived the best human life)cared only about two things: to be virtuous and to know that he wasvirtuous. He could be happy on the rack – an instrument of torturein which the victim’s arms and legs are tied to an expanding frameand he is literally torn apart. The sage is indifferent to the pain andhumiliation of this torture (though he may “prefer” some naturalgoods to others as better material for virtue). He can be virtuous evenin the midst of it, and he can know that he is virtuous. Aristotle’sview is different.53 The happy person has to have more than merelyvirtue and the knowledge of virtue; he must have at least a reason-able measure of external goods, and pleasure and status are includedhere. But do Aristotle’s happy people pursue pleasure and status fortheir own sake, or do they only pursue activity in accordance withvirtue, and then enjoy the pleasure and status that will accompanythis activity as side effects? That would be a middling-ascetic view. Itsays that we can only properly aim at virtuous activity, but we canproperly foresee pleasure and status as consequences and be pleasedat the prospect.54 Now, Aristotle does think that pleasure and statusaccompany virtuous activity. But I think, though this is controver-sial, that he allows the virtuous person also to pursue these goods fortheir own sake as long as they are pursued subordinately to thenoble. That is the least ascetic view of the three I have considered. It

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53 NE VII, 13, 1153b20ff., “Some maintain, on the contrary, that we arehappy when we are broken on the wheel, or fall into terrible misfortunes,provided that we are good. Whether they mean to or not, these people aretalking nonsense.”54 This is a version of what is sometimes called the doctrine of doubleeffect. It is like saying that in warfare we are only allowed to bomb militarytargets; but we can foresee as a consequence that we will sometimes hitcivilians, and this is permissible as long as it is not intended as an end or asa means to an end.

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says that I may eat a chocolate fudge sundae for the pleasure of it.But if I am a happy person, I will only want the chocolate fudgesundae in the context of a nutritionally balanced life, so that I willnot end up obese and impaired for virtuous activity. So this aimingat pleasure is still constrained under “the noble” by the virtue oftemperance. The pleasure is properly pursued as an end, but not asan unconditional good.55

Aristotle seems to put power (or rule) in the same category asstatus, namely something good as part of the good life, but not goodwithout qualification. We may disagree with him on this, and placepower instead in the same category in which he places money.56

Aristotle thinks wealth is not in itself a good, though it is necessaryfor the good life, but is only good if it is used for something good. Hesays of wealth that “we choose it for the sake of something else,” notfor itself, unlike pleasure and status that we seek both for themselvesand also for the sake of something else.57 But he also talks about thelife of the money-maker, and implies that some people do not see thatmoney has purely instrumental value (that it is only choice-worthy

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55 Christine Korsgaard makes a useful distinction between things wepursue that are ends (rather than means) and things we pursue that areunconditionally good (independently of what else we pursue). See C. Korsgaard, “Two Distinctions in Goodness,” Philosophical Review 92, 1983,486–505.56 Let us say that power is the ability to make other people do somethingor think something whether they want to or not. See Robert Dahl, “Poweras the Control of Behavior,” in Power, ed. Steven Lukes, New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 1986, 37–58. It seems right to say that not only canmoney and power be used for both good and ill (as can pleasure and status),and not only do they tend towards the corruption of the person who lovesthem (as do pleasure and status), but they do not have an initial valuationon their side, or a presumption of innocence until they are proved guilty.They do not have any internal resources to provide an initial resistance tothe corruption process. We might imagine (though Aristotle does not) thatGod is already pleased if we have pleasure (unless it is an evil pleasure) ora good reputation (unless it is based on deception); but God does not careone way or the other whether we have money or power, since everythingdepends on the rest of our disposition.57 NE I, 7, 1097a25–b6. It is significant that he does not say about powerwhat he says about money.

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for the sake of something else). This is a qualification to the claimthat all actions are aimed at what is actually good. It seems plausi-ble that we sometimes aim at things like money that are not in them-selves good or evil. Moreover, we sometimes seem to aim at them fortheir own sake. If this is right, then some actions aim at things thatare neutral as though they were good as ends. We can be in error notonly about the ranking, but about the initial placement of somethingas having intrinsic value.

Finally, I want to make a fourth point about this first sentence, andI will raise it as a question. Does the sentence commit a fallacy? Con-sider the following argument: Every boy loves some girl, and there-fore there is some girl that every boy loves. If this refers to some onegirl loved by every boy, the conclusion does not follow.58 The basicstructure of Aristotle’s first sentence seems to be: Every art and everyaction aim at some good; therefore there is some good, at which every art and every action aims. Is not this a straightforwardexample of the same logical mistake?

Suppose I ask my students, “Why did you come to class?” and theyanswer, “Because I wanted to learn something about Aristotle,” or,perhaps, “Because I need an ethics class for my major.” Then I mightask again, “Why do you want to learn something about Aristotle?”or, “Why do you want a philosophy degree?” and they might say,“Because Aristotle is a great philosopher, and if I understand him I am likely to get closer to the truth about how we ought to live.” Orthey might say, “Because it will help me get into law school.” Andsuppose I persist, “Why do you want the truth here?” or, “Why doyou want to go to law school?” Aristotle thinks that at some pointthey are all going to give the same answer; they are going to say,“happiness.” They may have different conceptions of what happinessis. They may think it is a life centered around contemplation andtruth, or they may think it is a life centered around making lots ofmoney and the status that money will give them, or they may thinkit is a life of sensory pleasure. But in any case, they will be aiming at

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58 We can see why the fallacy is sometimes called “quantifier shift,” if weput it into symbolic form. The premise is that for all x, there is a y such thatx loves y. The conclusion is that there is a y such that for all x, x loves y.What has happened is that the order of the quantifiers has been changed,or shifted, and the order matters for validity in this inference.

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what they think is happiness.59 Now we need to ask Aristotle, “Doyou have any argument that there is only one such end that wehumans pursue?” Why could it not be that when we trace backthrough the objects of our desires, we get to many independentthings we want for themselves? I might want truth and under-standing, friendship, and physical pleasure. But if these are all independent intrinsic goods, what is their relation to happiness?

This is the topic of the next section. But I want first to free Aristotle of the charge of committing a fallacy in the first sen-tence. Aristotle is not saying, “The good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim,” though that was the most widelyused English translation in the twentieth century.60 Aristotle wouldbe guilty of the fallacy, if he intended us to think he had establishedin this one sentence the existence of just one chief good for humanbeings. But he does not intend this. The question of whether there issuch a good remains open. His argument should be construed asfollows. He starts by pointing out that every art and every actionseems to aim at what I will call a “local” good. By that I mean a goodthat is located by that particular art or that particular action. Thus,shipbuilding aims at building a ship. The action of charging against

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59 This is Aristotle’s point in Chapter 5 of Book I, and it is the less ambi-tious point I distinguished earlier. I think Aristotle also holds the more ambi-tious view that human life is in fact aimed at contemplation, whether werealize this or not.60 Sir David Ross, The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1925. But the Greek has no words corresponding to “tobe.” This addition of “to be,” though it is perfectly natural, is misleading.For if you hear that some people declared that x is y, or that they declaredx to be y, you take it that they are committed to the existence of x. Strictlyspeaking this is not entailed, but it is strongly suggested. On the other hand,if you hear that they declared that x would be y, you no longer assume thatthey are committed to the existence of x. Consider a house-proud couple,who declare that the Emperor of China would be welcome in their house.They may know perfectly well that there is no Emperor of China, and theyare saying that if there were one, he would be welcome in their house. Whatthe Greek says in the first sentence is that they declared x y, and this isneutral between these two readings (that x is y, and that x would be y, if xexisted).

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the enemy on horseback aims at routing the enemy. Aristotle thenasks us what would be necessary if there were to be a “global” good.61

A global good would, he says, have to be related to everything in theway shipbuilding is related to ships and charging to rout. In otherwords, it would have to be that at which everything aims. But Aristotle is not yet committing himself to the view that there is sucha good, let alone claiming that he has proved there is. He will go onto to claim that there is such a good, but he has not done so in thefirst sentence. And so there is no fallacy. The first sentence of the firstchapter, and I think also the first sentence of the second chapter, isconditional: Should there be a chief good for human beings, it wouldnecessarily be that at which everything aims.

Heading towards the Good

In this section we will ask what kind of good Aristotle is talkingabout, and whether his view in the Nicomachean Ethics is consistent.Aristotle distinguishes, as Plato had done in the Republic, three kindsof good.62 There are goods like money that we pursue always for thesake of something else (they are “not-complete”), complete goods likepleasure and status, that we pursue both for their own sake and forthe sake of something else (they are “more complete”), and completegoods like happiness, that we pursue only for their own sake (theyare “most complete”). The chief good, Aristotle says, will be bothmost complete and self-sufficient. He says that we regard somethingas self-sufficient “when all by itself it makes a life choice-worthy andlacking nothing.” This second criterion adds to the first that not onlyis the chief good pursued only for its own sake, but it does not dependfor its activity on the presence of something else. Self-sufficiency heredoes not mean having no attachments to anyone or anything beyondoneself. In fact, Aristotle says that because we are social beings ourgood is social in the sense that it includes the good of other people(family, friends, and fellow-citizens). Also, he is not saying that a self-sufficient good has to be a single, un-mixed ingredient that in isolation makes a life worth living. Rather, the self-sufficient good

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61 See Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, 8ff.62 NE I, 7, 1097a25–b16.

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makes a life worth living all by itself, but it is in itself complex: activ-ity in accordance with virtue.

Aristotle concludes, “We think happiness to be the thing most ofall worth choosing, not counted as just one thing among others.Counted as just one thing among others it would clearly be moreworthy of choice with even the least good added to it. For the goodadded would cause an increase in goodness, and the greater good isalways more worthy of choice. Happiness, then, is obviously some-thing complete and self-sufficient, in that it is the end of what isdone.”63 This might seem to imply that the chief good has to includeall the complete goods, since happiness has to be the sort of thingthat could not be made better by the addition of even “the smallestof goods.” But it is doubtful whether this totally inclusive idea makessense. How could the idea of happiness already include, for example,the total pleasure from the best possible number of scoops of ice-cream that are part of the best possible life? There is no right answerto the question “How many scoops is that?” Aristotle is denying thathappiness is “counted as one (good) among many.” But this does notmean that happiness counts all complete goods inside itself, but thathappiness is not to be counted along with other good things at all. Wedo not list happiness as one of the good things in life (along with icecream), because happiness is itself a whole life that already has theone (complex) thing which makes a life worth living.

Aristotle then gives a three-step argument from the characteristichuman function (ergon) to the conclusion that happiness is “activityof the soul in accordance with virtue, and indeed with the best andmost complete virtue, if there are more virtues than one.” The firststep is to show that humans have a characteristic function or activ-ity. Aristotle’s argument for this in the Nicomachean Ethics is per-functory. But this is because he has a worked-out theory elsewherefor biological species in general, which I described briefly in an earliersection of this chapter. A life-activity (or activity of the soul, sincepsyche in Greek means both life and soul) is the characteristic activ-ity of a species if, and only if, every normal member of this speciesand no member of a lower species can perform it.64 Suppose we grant

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63 NE I, 7, 1097b16–21 (Crisp).64 See David Keyt, “Intellectualism in Aristotle,” in Essays in Ancient GreekPhilosophy, Vol. 2, ed. John P. Anton and Anthony Preus, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983, 367.

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him that nature sets a fitting direction for how humans should live,by directing us towards our form, our characteristic human activity.The second step is to show that a good human life performs its characteristic activity well. To see why Aristotle should think this,imagine that the inhabitants of the planet of some star far away aresetting up an intra-galactic zoo, and have dispatched emissaries tocollect the best human they can find. What kind of human shouldthey be looking for? There are all sorts of things that humans can do.But the aliens should not look for a human that can reproduce well,for even plants can do that (and some of them on a scale that putshumans to shame). They should not look for a human that can runwell (for cheetahs can do that better) or smell keenly (given the superiority of the canine sense of smell). No, they should look for ahuman that can think well, because that is what humans do uniquelyamong animals.65 A good human life will be one that performs thehuman function well. The third step is to argue that an activity isperformed well if it is performed in accordance with virtue. This is easy because of the definition of “virtue” (which is the same wordin Greek as “excellence”). So a good human life is one that performsthe characteristic soul-activity (which is thinking) in accordancewith virtue. Aristotle adds that if there are more virtues than one(involved in performing this characteristic function well), then hap-piness is activity in accordance with the best and most complete of them.

In Book X, Chapter 7, Aristotle concludes the whole argument ofthe work by returning to this argument from human function.

If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable toexpect that it is in accordance with the highest virtue, and this will bethe virtue of the best element. Whether this best element is nous, or

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65 Strictly it is a kind of thinking that is unique. A deer can think it isthirsty and go to a brook in order to drink. But it cannot have the universalthought, “Whenever deer are thirsty, they should go to drink.” Aristotle seesspecies functions as arranged (like arts) in a hierarchy. Plants are lower thananimals because normal plants lack functions (such as moving and per-ceiving) that normal members of animal species have. Animals with moresenses are higher than those with fewer. We get the same three-part hier-archy here as in the Protrepticus.

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something else we think naturally rules and guides us and has insightinto matters noble and divine, and whether it is divine or just the mostdivine element within us, its activity, in accordance with its ownproper virtue, will be complete happiness.

Aristotle goes on to say that a life of contemplation

is superior to one that is simply human because someone lives thusnot insofar as he is a human being, but insofar as he has some divineelement in him . . . But we ought not to listen to those who exhort us,because we are human, to think of human things, or because we aremortal, think of mortal things. We ought rather to take on immor-tality as much as possible, and do all that we can to live in accordancewith the highest element within us.

Then, at the beginning of the following chapter, he adds, “The life inaccordance with the other kind of virtue [i.e. the kind concernedwith action] is happy in a secondary way, since the activities inaccordance with it are human.”66

Now we can ask whether Aristotle is consistent in his positionabout the chief good in Books I and X of the Nicomachean Ethics. Thisis not a straightforward question, because there are different kindsof inconsistency. One kind is a flat-out change of mind, where aperson said or thought one thing and now says or thinks its oppo-site. But it is also possible for an author to express herself clumsilyand contradict herself when in fact she has a perfectly consistentview that needs more careful statement. A third possibility is a devel-opment of an author’s views, which leads to a kind of inconsistencydifferent from either of the first two kinds. She starts with one view– that A is paradigmatically B, because B is C – but then she decidesthat what makes something C is D, but B is not D. So she ends updenying that A is B, except in a secondary sense.

The following are two examples of this kind of development. First,an author starts with the commonsense idea that substance is paradigmatically something like Socrates, an individual member ofa species. Socrates underlies qualities, locations, etc., for examplebeing pale or being in the market. But then the author asks what

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66 NE X, 7, 1177a 12–16, 1177b26–34, 1178a 9–10 (Crisp) but I havekept the Greek nous and added parentheses.

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makes something the kind of thing that can underlie even when thequalities, locations etc. change and decides that it is form of a certainkind (the characteristic activity of the species). Socrates is not form,however, but a composite of form and matter, and he is therefore sub-stance only in a secondary sense. This development is what happensin the shift from Categories to Metaphysics Books VII and VIII.

Here is a second example. An author starts with the commonsenseidea that the good life is paradigmatically a life lived in accordancewith practical wisdom (at its best the life of the statesman). But thenthe author asks what makes something the kind of thing that canrule and direct a city, and decides that it is the activity of the highestpart of us, nous. But activity in accordance with practical wisdom isnot the activity of nous (namely contemplation), but a composite ofthis with handling particular things that change in the world. So thepolitical life is happiness only in a secondary sense. This developmentis what happens in the Nicomachean Ethics in the shift from Book I toBook X.

There are three ways to try to rescue Aristotle’s consistency thatI want briefly to reject, before exploring this suggestion further.67 Onepossibility is that Aristotle means throughout the Ethics to distin-guish our human good and our divine good. Contemplation is thedivine good, and activity in accordance with practical wisdom, in itsmost complete form the life of the statesman, is the human good.This is what he sounds as though he is saying when he distinguishesa happiness “in a secondary way” that is concerned with action. Butthis proposal does not fit the fact that our virtuous practical lives areregarded as both human and godlike throughout the NicomacheanEthics (indeed throughout Aristotle’s ethical writing). A second pos-sibility is that Aristotle has consistently in mind a single life that is a mixture of contemplation and virtuous practical activity, and he means to say that this life is happy in two different ways; its complete happiness is the happiness of the contemplator and its secondary happiness is the happiness of practical virtue. But this view does not fit Aristotle’s tendency to distinguish the threelives (as Pythagoras did), for example in Book I, Chapter 5, which

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67 The first is from H. H. Joachim, Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, Claren-don Press: Oxford, 1962. The second is from David Keyt, “Intellectualism inAristotle.” The third is from Richard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good,Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

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distinguishes the life of physical pleasure, the life of politics, and the life of contemplation. Finally, a third possibility is to say that Aristotle has a consistent picture of two different lives, one of whichis complete happiness and the other of which is happiness in a secondary way. The idea is that everybody would be best off withcomplete happiness, if that were available, but some people, bydefects of natural endowment or circumstance, cannot make it, andcan be happy only in the secondary way. But this interpretation doesnot do justice to the whole-hearted endorsement of the life of prac-tical virtue that we get in Book I and in the discussions of ethicalvirtue in the following books. The early books do not as a whole giveus the impression that Aristotle regards the life of practical virtue asa second best.

We should attribute to Aristotle the third kind of inconsistency I mentioned above. The use he makes of the notion of “the divine” ishelpful in understanding the shift that happens here. Aristotle startswith the dichotomy between art and action, and sets up happinessas acting well (in Greek, eupraxia), under the knowledge-base of thestatesman who knows how to use status, pleasure, nous, and everyvirtue in order to achieve this end. As he says in the function argu-ment I have just been describing, the human function is “some sortof life of action of the [part of the soul] that has reason.”68 Aristotleis reflecting a common picture or “common sense” that the mostadmirable human being is a ruler, or leader. When Socrates asksMeno what virtue (excellence) is, Meno’s initial reply is, “Simply thecapacity to govern human beings, if you are looking for one qualityto cover all the instances.”69 Similarly, in the Protrepticus Aristotlesays that the best humans are by nature rulers, the best part of us is by nature the part that rules us (namely nous), and the best spe-cies by nature rules the other species.70 In Nicomachean Ethics Book I Aristotle brings in the notion of “the divine” as a component of thiscommon picture, “For while the good of an individual is a desirablething, what is good for a people or for cities is a nobler and moredivine thing.”71 But the question that makes the shift in Aristotle’sethical thought is the question “What gives the ruler’s wisdom thiskind of authority?” Aristotle’s answer to this question leads him to

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68 NE I, 7, 1098a3–5, emphasis added. See VI, 5, 1140b7.69 Meno 72d1–2.70 B 29, 38, 95.71 NE I, 2, 1094b9–10 (Crisp).

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the conclusion that the kind of life that is immersed in governing is the good life only in a secondary way. This answer is formally in-consistent with some statements in Book I, but the inconsistency is of the third kind I distinguished.

In the Protrepticus we already find the thought that makes theshift, and again it is associated with the notion of “the divine.” The faculty that rules us by nature, nous, is divine, and its charac-teristic activity is to look at the divine and the eternal; it is divine and stable because it is imitating what is immortal and stable.72 Thestatesman on this basis has the boundary markers by reference towhich he should determine what is just, what is good, and what isexpedient.73 But then our noblest good must be activity in accor-dance with the characteristic virtue of this highest faculty, and thisactivity is not action at all but contemplation. I am not claiming thatAristotle’s thoughts about this in the Nicomachean Ethics undergo nochange from the Protrepticus. But the basic pattern is repeated.“Whether it be nous or something else that is this element which isthought to be our natural ruler and guide and to take thought ofthings noble and divine, whether it be itself also divine or only themost divine element in us, the activity of this in accordance with itsproper excellence will be complete happiness.”74 Contemplation isnot even finding out about God and the essences of things, which is a kind of detective action, but rather contemplating these exaltedobjects when they have been found. There will still be a need in thecontemplative life for the practical virtues, for the contemplator isstill aiming at what is noble (kalon) and will not be content withmeanness or cowardice or self-indulgence; but the exercise of thesevirtues will look different than it would if the practical virtues werethe focus of his life. For example, the magnificent man is describedas making great expenditures, such as equipping the city’s warshipsand paying for excellent theatrical productions at the city’s festivalsof Dionysus. But the contemplative life will not need such extrava-gant resources, and indeed will be reluctant to spend all the time andenergy that being magnificent requires. “We can do noble actswithout ruling earth and sea.”75 So the conclusion in Book X of the

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72 B 50.73 B 47.74 NE X, 7, 1177a13–17.75 NE X, 8, 1179a3.

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Nicomachean Ethics is that happiness has two kinds, and both of themare themselves presumably mixtures (though Aristotle unfortu-nately sets aside as “too large for our present project” the discussionof the separation of nous from the human compound of soul andbody). There is the life focused on contemplation, which still needstemperance and bravery and generosity; and there is the life focusedon the practical virtues, which still needs the boundary markersgiven by understanding, though the quality and quantity of first-hand reflection in this life may be reduced.

Even if we grant the conclusion in Book X that the best kind ofhappiness is focused on contemplation, we can still think of ethics asasking about action. A sentence at the beginning of Book II, Chapter2, helps us understand this combination: “Our present discussiondoes not aim, as our others do, at contemplation; for we are ex-amining [what virtue is] not in order [just] to know what virtue is,but in order that we might become good.”76 Once we conclude thatthe highest virtue is contemplative wisdom, and that the best kind ofhappiness is focused on activity in accordance with this virtue, westill need to know how to act. Aristotle’s view is that we become vir-tuous by acting in accordance with the virtues, so the answer to thequestion of how to act is also going to answer the question of howto become good. He uses the analogy of the racetrack, and Greekracetracks were shaped like a U, ending on the same line where theybegan and going around a turning post in the middle. We start offwith certain principles we inherit from our parents and society, and(because we are human) we ask questions about these as we getolder. We reach the turning post when we acquire a vision of thegood human life, knowing what virtue is and what happiness is.Then we can race back to the original line (where the judges sit), butnow with the principles not merely secondhand but fully appropri-ated as our own. But suppose what we discover at the turning postis that the noblest and best human life is not, as we originally learnedfrom common sense, a life focused on practical virtue but a lifefocused on contemplation. We still have to apply this discovery to our

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76 NE II, 2, 1103b27–8, parentheses added. The sentence is often trans-lated with “we are examining” used intransitively, in the sense of“conducting an examination.” The Greek verb can be used this way, but is more often used transitively. I owe this reading to R. M. Hare.

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practical lives, to our decisions about what to do with our money andour time and our friends. We will not have either the best or thesecond-best life unless we know how to make these decisions.77

I would like to end this section with a personal remark about thelife focused on contemplation and the life focused on practical virtue,since I have, at different times, tried to lead each of them (in a con-temporary form). I have taught at university and written books, butI have also worked on staff in Congress and as a consultant in a hos-pital, trying to apply whatever understanding I have of what is goodto making law and advising doctors. There is a real tension betweenthese life-ideals, and there are real frustrations as a result. In Con-gress, decisions have to be made on a fast-flowing schedule wherethere is very little time or energy for careful first-hand reflection. Onthe other hand, academic life often seems remote from the imme-diate welfare of one’s society (Aristotle would say, one’s polis), andthe best human life should surely contribute directly to this. I havenot settled in my own mind which of the two ideals is better, and I do not know how to do so.

Virtue

In the final section on Aristotle, I want to look at his treatment of virtue and practical reason. He gives his official definition ofethical virtue in Book II, “Virtue, then, is a state involving rationalchoice, consisting in a mean relative to us, and determined by reason– the reason, that is, by reference to which the practically wise personwould determine it.”78 Aristotle subsequently gives most of the termsin this definition more detailed treatment. I will focus on the twoideas that virtue lies in a mean, and that the mean is defined by reference to reason.

The virtues, Aristotle says, lie in a mean between excess anddefect. Some of them, like courage, can be described in terms ofemotions like fear and the appetite for risk. Some of them, like gen-erosity, can be described in terms of domains of operation such

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77 Protrepticus B 51, “This knowledge is indeed contemplative, but itenables us to frame all our practice in accordance with it.”78 NE II, 6, 1107a1–3 (Crisp).

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as how much a person retains and how much he gives or spends. Butin each case there is some continuum, and the virtue is a dispositionto feel or act in the middle of that continuum (which is just the rightamount). Thus the brave person feels not too much and not too littlefear and appetite for risk (but just the right amount to fight well as asoldier). The generous person spends and keeps not too much andnot too little (but just the right amount to preserve the size of theestate). Aristotle also says that the virtues can be thought of aspeaks, rather than intermediates. For example, suppose we are con-sidering how many calories we should eat in a day. We could imaginea graph with a descriptive continuum on the horizontal axis anddegrees of excellence on the vertical axis. I am simplifying here byexcluding related variables connected with nutrition. The horizontalaxis will range from zero calories to, say, ten thousand (when we aredead), and the vertical axis from the worst to the best state. At thejunction of the axes, zero calories coincides with the worst state (weare dead) and as the number of daily calories increases our state getsbetter. But at some point eating more calories does not improve ourstate, and indeed starts to damage it, until (as the calories increaseinto the many thousands) we reach again the worst state (we aredead). The line we would draw on this graph would be a curve fromthe base up to a peak and then down again to the base. In this wayAristotle can say both that the virtue (the disposition to eat the rightamount of calories) is a peak (on the vertical scale) and in a mean(on the horizontal scale).

This picture of the graph is, however, misleading. It suggests thatwe could work out what to do by looking at the extreme possibilities,and taking a path in the middle. But the mean Aristotle intends is,in his terms, “relative to us” and not what is intermediate by strictnumerical proportion. His example is Milo the boxer, who is consid-ering how much to eat. Suppose ten pounds is a lot to eat, and twopounds is a little; it does not follow from the doctrine of the meanthat Milo’s trainer will prescribe six pounds. For the right amountdepends on whether one is a boxer, or (for example) an accountantand whether (if one is a boxer) one has just started training or is infull career. Aristotle’s point is not that the right amount is differentfor every individual, but that it is relative to the life one is leading(and it is an objective question how much is right for each kind oflife). But if so, then how are we to determine what is the virtuousmean? Aristotle’s answer is given in the rest of the quotation: the

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mean is defined by reference to reason, that is to say, to the reason“by reference to which the person of practical wisdom would deter-mine it.” We are not given here a decision procedure in advance ofa decision, but a description of the kinds of decisions that a goodperson makes. Aristotle is saying that when we look back at the deci-sions that the person of practical wisdom makes, we will see apattern according to which the reasons he gives for his decisionslocate them between the typical decision-patterns of two recogniza-ble types of non-virtuous people, one type on the side of excess andthe other on the side of defect. The doctrine of the mean is not itselfgoing to tell us what risks to take for what ends at what times. If wewant an account of these matters, we need to know more about this reason-giving that characterizes the decisions of the person ofpractical wisdom and the target that Aristotle thinks this person isaiming at.

There is the beginning of an answer in his discussions of indi-vidual virtues, such as courage and generosity. The courageousperson will feel fear, for example when the enemy is chargingtowards him in battle, but will be able to resist “for the sake of whatis noble (since this is the end of virtue) in the right way and as reasonrequires.”79 So we have a name for what Aristotle thinks virtue aimsat: “the noble.” But what is this? He never gives an explicit definition,but there are some associations that he very often makes. The nobleis contrasted with the shameful (aischron, which can also be trans-lated “ugly”) and the base, and associated with what is worthy ofhonor. This means that it is valued for its own sake, not merely forwhat we can do with it. The term has an aristocratic flavor, and thecontempt for what is merely useful is typical of aristocratic value-systems.80 The masses have to spend their time scrabbling about toget enough food to eat and to find shelter and clothing. The many,Aristotle says, do not even have a notion of the noble, and they

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79 NE III, 7, 1115b12 (Crisp). For the case of generosity, see IV, 1,1120a24.80 Compare the scene in the novel Girl from the South by Joanna Trollope,which is about an old family from Charleston, South Carolina. A prospec-tive son-in-law is describing his sister to the matriarch of the family: “‘Well– she’s a midwife’. Sarah looked at him. Her finely penciled eyebrows saideverything. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘how very, very useful’.’’

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cannot be virtuous.81 Only gentlemen, what the Eudemian Ethics calls“noble-and-good” people, have the leisure and the resources for “thefiner things in life.” This is why the Spartans, who had no leisure,could be good people but not noble-and-good; they valued virtues likecourage, not for the sake of “the noble,” though, but for the sake ofthings like health and friendship.82 The class connotations of theword “noble” can also be seen in the Greek word I have translated as“generosity,” which can be translated literally as “the state of beingfree” in the sense that is opposed to being a slave.83 It is characteris-tic of the “free” person to be concerned with what is noble and notwith the merely useful. The noble is associated also with what is rareand hard to achieve. This is one reason it is worthy of honor. Nobil-ity also characterizes those who rule. Those who will never rule, forexample slaves and women, will never have complete virtue.

The final association I want to mention is that the noble belongswith the divine. This fits well with all the previous associations. InHomer deities are gentlemen and ladies on a grand scale. Aristotlequotes Homer more frequently than any other author in his descrip-tion of the moral virtues (thirteen times in this section of the Nicomachean Ethics), and in Homer the gods bear the same kind ofpatronage relation to the heroes as the heroes bear to the commonfolk. It makes sense in this context to think of the gods as having thenoblest kind of life, with the greatest ease and freedom and controlover others. I discussed earlier the notion of an “honor-loop” that ischaracteristic of the relation between both gods and humans andhigh-class humans and their clients. At the end of the NicomacheanEthics Aristotle tells us that happiness is activity of the best thing inus, which is nous, or whatever else seems to be the natural ruler andleader, and to understand “what is noble and divine” by being itselfeither divine or the most divine element in us.84 Many of the termsthat I have claimed are associated with “the noble” are collectedtogether by Aristotle when he is talking about the objects contem-

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81 NE X, 9, 1179b15.82 EE VII, 15, 1248b37–49a3.83 See John E. Hare, “Eleutheriotes in Aristotle’s Ethics,” Ancient Philosophy8, 1988, 19–32.84 NE X, 7, 1177a12–16.

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plated by nous; they are “extraordinary, amazing, difficult, anddivine, but useless.”85

If virtue aims at the noble, how is this consistent with Aristotle’sclaim that every action aims at the agent’s own happiness? Surelythe noble is an ideal independent of the agent, a way of life that couldgo on whether the agent existed or not, and that could indeed call onthe agent to make significant sacrifice (for example of his life in bat-tle)? It is telling, however, that when Aristotle considers this case ofdying in battle he feels that he has to give a justification in terms of the brave man’s reward either by posthumous honor or by thebrief moment of exaltation before being killed. (He might also havemade the point, though he does not, that if the brave man is notwilling to die, he has to live the rest of his life with dishonor.) Aris-totle never departs from the view that everything we do aims at ourown happiness, and therefore if we are also aiming at the noble itmust be as a description of the best life for ourselves. Having saidthat, however, thinking about the noble does take Aristotle towardsa less restrictive view of our happiness. It is noble to enlarge our con-ception of happiness to include the wellbeing of our households andfriends. Friendship in Aristotle is a more inclusive relation than wetend to think it, so that clients and fellow-citizens are counted askinds of friends. A catchy way to put this is that the “me-self ” be-comes a “we-self ” by this gradual enlargement, as though I couldbecome elastic and fit others inside my skin. Aristotle uses the lan-guage of “a different himself ” to talk first about a father’s relation tohis son, and then a virtuous friend’s relation to his friend. The fatherloves the son as “a different himself ” because the son came from him,and the virtuous friend loves his friend as “another himself ” becausehe relates to the friend and to himself in the same way (for example,he likes to spend time with himself and with his friend and there isa basic unity in griefs and joys internal to himself and with hisfriend).86 So the happiness of a good person will require the happi-ness of his family and friends (broadly construed). But he will onlyaim at their happiness to the extent that they have these special rela-tions with him. Aristotle is not proposing here that we value every

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85 NE VI, 7, 114166–7.86 NE VIII, 12, 1161b28 and IX, 4, 1166a32ff.

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human being as an end in himself or herself, or that our happinesscounts morally no more and no less than anyone else’s.

Another limit to how much we love a friend and how much welove ourselves is that we do not wish to become gods ourselves, andwe do not wish our friends to become gods.87 The reason we do notwant this for our friends is that if they become gods they will be toosuperior to us to remain our friends. So we want the greatest goodfor our friends “as human beings.” Aristotle adds the additionalqualification that we do not strictly want all the greatest goods forour friends, “since it is for himself most of all that each person wisheswhat is good.” The reason we do not want ourselves to become gods,even though that would be the best state, is that we would not anylonger be ourselves. The god already possesses the good perfectly “invirtue of being what he is.” But we humans, though we can becomedivine in a way through the activity of nous (which Aristotle sayseach person seems to be, or at least primarily to be), cannot becomedivine in the way the god is without becoming a different substance(and so, perishing). Here we have the distinction between the divin-ity we can have, as human, and the divinity we cannot.

The picture of a “noble” life gives rational choice a way to makedecisions. But the Aristotelian analogy of the racetrack might giveus pause about whether we really have choice at all. In the terms ofthe analogy we can only reach the turning post if we start from theright starting line, and then ask “why” questions about the practicesand principles we are being raised with. If a child has been broughtup in an environment in which he does not have virtuous models tointernalize, it is forever too late. It is natural to ask Aristotle whetherthe acquisition of virtue is itself voluntary.88 Aristotle thinks weacquire virtue by being trained in good habits, but does he think theconnection between this training and our acquisition of virtue iscausal, and so under causal law? I think the best way to interpret himis to say that he does not raise the question in this form. The same

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87 NE IX, 4, 1166a20–2 and VIII, 7, 1159a5–12. The text of the first ofthese passages is disputed, but see J. A. Stewart, Notes on the NicomacheanEthics, II, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892, 357–61. He argues against takingthe passage as an interpolation.88 The Eudemian Ethics answers this question affirmatively, on the basisthat we are praised and blamed both for our virtues/vices and for the actions that flow from them, EE II, 6, 1223a4–15.

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should be said about the notion of free will in Aristotle, which doesnot occur in its modern form in his writing.89 Because Aristotle did not have the idea that there is a single set of laws to which allnatural things are subject, he did not bother about whether humanchoosing is consistent with such a set of laws, and so about whether universal determinism is true or there is free will inconsistent withsuch determinism.90 A virtuous action is voluntary, he says, becauseits origin is in the agent.

Saying that a virtuous action is voluntary, however, is only part of what Aristotle means by saying that it is chosen. He says that children do things voluntarily (sometimes he even extends thisdescription to non-human animals), but they do not strictly speak-ing choose. For choice we also need reason. But what is this reason?Aristotle says “Mere thought moves nothing.”91 It is tempting tothink he means that what moves us, by contrast, is desire (whichadult humans share with children and animals). But he, in fact, continues, “[thought] must be goal-directed and practical . . . Sorational choice is either desire-related nous or thought-related desire,and such a first principle is a human.” As I will mention in Chapter3, Hume proposed that thought or reason is itself inert, contributingto action only by inferring conclusions from premises and byworking out means to previously established ends. This leaves it todesire to settle on the ends. But this is not Aristotle’s position. He is saying, rather, that reason is involved in determining the ends aswell as the means, but it is reason in the context of desire. They areunited in the apprehension of ends, and neither is enough by itself.If reason does not play this role, the person will be muddled or cloudyor conflicted, because of the desires and other passions that he feels.The good person is someone whose reason and desires are inharmony.

There are two different kinds of end that are involved here, andthey function very differently. One kind is happiness, under the

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89 R. -A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif, L’Ethique a Nicomaque, p. 266: “Theconcept was invented only after eleven further centuries of philosophicalreflection.” But in the next chapter I will claim that we can find somethinglike the concept in Augustine. For the view that Aristotle does have a conceptof will, see Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will, London: Duckworth, 1979.90 See Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, p. 130.91 NE VI, 2, 1139a35–6 (Crisp).

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description “the noble,” which has a high degree of generality. Theperson of practical wisdom will have insight into the best kind of lifefor humans to live. If I was right earlier there is a shift in the con-ception of this end from Book I to Book X. The other kind of end hasa high degree of specificity, and is perceived only in the situation inwhich a choice has to be made. Aristotle talks about perception inthis context, but he does not mean sense perception, rather, some-thing analogous, involved in seeing what to do. If I am decidingwhether to accept a late paper from a student, I am trying to discernwhether the student is someone who is genuinely trying to do goodwork under stressful circumstances or is manipulating me in orderto make his or her life easier. Aristotle uses the term nous to describethe apprehension of both kinds of end, the end which is general (“thenoble”) and the end which is specific to a situation.92 He uses “nous”because the apprehension is intuitive (like perception), rather thandiscursively working out the practical conclusion (like deliberation).Practical wisdom, on the other hand, is discursive, finding out theway to realize the general end in the specific situation that confrontsthe agent.

The harmony between reason and desire can break down. Aristotle discusses this breakdown under the heading “inconti-nence” (akrasia), sometimes translated “weakness of the will.” Thistranslation is misleading because it suggests that Aristotle has aconcept of the will that would be familiar to us. But his picture is dif-ferent in many ways. He introduces the discussion of incontinencewith a six-fold distinction in the states of a human being; divine(which exceeds the merely human on the one extreme), virtuous,continent (able to overcome wrongful desires and passions that are present), incontinent (unable to do so), vicious, and bestial(which exceeds the merely human on the other extreme, and whichAristotle says is mostly found amongst barbarians).93 Thus Aristo-tle’s account of the virtue of courage, unlike ours, is that the braveperson does not feel wrongful fear and love of risk in the first place.To feel wrongful desire or passion and resist it successfully is not, forhim, virtue but continence. Suppose a woman suffers from agora-phobia but nonetheless overcomes her fear and goes shopping in themall. On Aristotle’s account she is not being brave, but continent. A

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92 NE VI, 11, 1143a35ff.93 NE VII, 1, 1145a15–22.

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brave person would not feel such fears to begin with, though thispoint needs to be qualified by what Aristotle says about the divinehuman person, for even a brave but non-divine person, who is“unperturbed, as far as a human being can be,” will feel fears thatHector the hero did not.94 Centuries of thought about original sinhave made it easy to assume that even a good person’s will is subjectto temptation and the vestigial pull of “the flesh.” Aristotle’s accountof incontinence is, by contrast, an account of a certain complex kind of ignorance to which the virtuous person is simply not liable.To explain this, I need to describe the kind of error in deliberationthat Aristotle thinks occurs in incontinence.

I will present his account as a kind of civil war between a “good”syllogism and a “bad” syllogism both present within the incontinentperson.95 A temperate man is not prone to wrongful desires for fattyfood. When presented with some fatty food he ought not to eat (adonut), he knows how bad it is for him, and he leaves it on the platewithout even being tempted. An incontinent man also knows thatfatty food is bad for people (the “good” universal premise), and heknows roughly how many calories this donut has and that he is overhis healthy limit (the “good” particular premise). If he put these twopremises together, he would naturally refrain (like the temperateman). But he also knows that sweet food is pleasurable (the “bad”universal premise). And he knows that this donut is sweet (the “bad” particular premise), a knowledge activated by perception.96

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94 NE III, 7, 1115b10–11. Again this is a reference to the merely human.95 This is one classic reading. See Richard Robinson, “L’Acrasie selon Aristotle,” Revue Philosophique, 145 (1955), 261–80. But Aristotle does notuse the term “syllogism” here, and the analysis could proceed in terms ofthe conjunction of the two types of end I have just described.96 To see the significance of perception here, consider the case where theincontinent man is not presented with the donut on a plate, but there is anote on the table saying there are donuts in the cupboard. He will find the note much easier to resist than the sight and smell of the donut, eventhough it is perfectly easy for him to go to the cupboard. The point is thatphysical perception, the sight and the smell, has power over him, as if itcould cause his hands to reach out all on their own to the forbidden food.But Aristotle allows that there are cases of incontinence where the incon-tinent person is not swept away by passion like this, but plans ahead, pre-sumably to be in a situation where he can predict that the good syllogism

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What happens to him is that his desire for this sweetness in front ofhim is so strong that it puts out of gear, so to speak, the “good” par-ticular premise, so that he half-forgets during the episode all thoseunfortunate calories and/or his own need for a diet. Aristotle saysthat he knows but does not use the knowledge.97 Because of this, thecivil war inside him is won by the “bad” syllogism, and he eats the donut. Aristotle concludes, however, that the incontinent manhas preserved throughout the episode the knowledge of the good uni-versal premise, and it is not this knowledge that is “dragged aroundlike a slave.”

Now we can ask what kind of end has the power to produce virtue(in this case, temperance), and this brings us back again to the divine.Aristotle says in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics that knowledge ofthe chief good will have great “influence” on life (the term is from histheory of dynamics).98 Though he disagrees with Plato about theForm of the Good, his own account of happiness is supposed to sharewith Plato’s theory the feature that if we see the highest good clearly,we are more likely to act in accordance with it. Perception of lessergoods (for example, physical pleasures) is less likely to derail us, if ourdesire-related nous or our thought-related desire is already fullyengaged by a vivid insight into the highest good. Thus Aristotle saysthat bodily pleasures are pursued inordinately by those “who havenothing else to enjoy.”99 My hypothesis is that Aristotle uses the lan-guage of “the divine” in order that we will recognize and feel the“influence” of the highest good at its full strength. The language hastwo referents, the God who moves us and the divine in us. In Meta-physics XII Aristotle says that God moves by being loved, drawing usto be as like God as we are capable of being. In the Nicomachean

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will lose the civil war, NE VII, 6, 1149b14–18. See John Austin, “We oftensuccumb to temptation with calm and even with finesse,” from “A Plea forExcuses,” in Philosophical Papers, eds J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1961, 146n. A full account of incontinence needsto distinguish many more sorts of cases than Aristotle discusses.97 It follows that the syllogisms do not have the same particular premise.See Norman Dahl, Practical Reason, Aristotle, and Weakness of the Will, Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1984.98 NE I, 2, 1094a23.99 NE VII, 14, 1154b5.

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Ethics, human and non-human animals are said to “have somethingdivine” or “something superior to themselves” that seeks their ownappropriate good.100 For human beings, pleasure is not a reliabletracking system except for those who are already good people. ButGod is nonetheless drawing humans towards their good, eventhough this good is not what the wicked would think or say that theywere pursuing. Aristotle is assuming that we already want to be likeGod, or to be “blessed,” and he uses theological vocabulary for ourfinal end to help us become good, which he says is the goal of think-ing about ethics.101

A twenty-first-century person influenced by centuries of Jewish,Christian, and Islamic thought will have certain puzzles about Aristotle’s theology. Three questions in particular Aristotle will seemto leave strangely open. The first is whether there is one God or many.Sometimes Aristotle talks in the singular and sometimes in theplural, and he does not seem to mind the tension (or at least does nottry to resolve it): Within six lines he says, “Anything to do withactions would appear petty and unworthy of the gods” and “the god’sactivity which is superior in blessedness will be contemplative.”102

Second, he talks both about divinity being outside us and inside us:“Nous is either divine itself or the most divine element in us.”103

Third, he does not commit himself about whether God (or the gods)helps us achieve happiness or whether we do it ourselves.104 Butsimilar ambiguities can in fact be discovered either in the sacred texts

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100 NE VII, 13, 1153b32 and X, 2, 1173a4–5.101 NE II, 2, 1103b26–9.102 NE X, 8, 1178b17–23 (Crisp). See Bodéüs, Theology of the LivingImmortals.103 NE X, 7, 1177a15–16.104 At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics he leaves this question fordiscussion “in a different inquiry,” NE I, 9, 1099b14, and then at the endhe says,

If the gods pay attention to human beings, as it seems they do, it would bereasonable for them to take pleasure in what is best and most akin to them,namely nous; and reasonable for them to benefit in return those who most ofall like and honour nous, on the assumption that these people attend to whatis beloved by the gods, and act correctly and nobly. X, 8, 1178a24–29.

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or in the theological traditions of the three major monotheisticfaiths, and Aristotle is not unique in his difficulties at these points.105

I will close with three themes in Aristotle’s discussion of thedivine, all of them continuous with his predecessors (“the wise”)including Plato. The first theme is the divinity of law. Heraclitus hadspoken of the obligation to hold fast to the law of the city, “for allhuman laws are nourished by one which is divine”106 Aristotle says,“He who commands that law should rule may thus be regarded ascommanding that God and nous alone should rule.”107 We get closerto the divine when we ascend to the level of the city and its laws.Socrates in the Crito imagines the laws coming down, like a deus exmachina at the end of a tragedy, to confront him with the impiety ofescaping from prison. He is to serve them, they say, as children areto serve their parents, and if he does not, “then you will have to faceour anger in your lifetime, and in that place beyond when the lawsof the other world know that you have tried, so far as you could, todestroy even us their brothers, they will not receive you with a kindlywelcome.”108 There is an echo of this spirit in the civil religion thatattends, for example, US presidential inaugural addresses. “God” and“Country” are objects of a linked loyalty, a felt link between thecountry’s laws and the laws of the cosmos. Aristotle thinks that the statesman can appeal to the authority of the divine if his ethicalinstruction is genuinely aimed at the good of the city, and that wewill feel the motivation to obedience to what is nobler than we are asindividuals.

The second theme is the aristocratic extrapolation I mentionedwhen discussing “the noble.” The idea was that the gods ruled theelite of society in a way similar to that in which the elite ruled the many, and the elite were in this way the most like the gods (andwere sometimes officially divinized by their fellow-citizens). Earlier

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105 The Hebrew Scriptures talk about “gods” as well as “God,” e.g. Psalm16:4. Various Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologies likewise have dif-ferent emphases on God’s transcendence and immanence, and differentaccounts of the relationship between God’s sovereignty and humanfreedom.106 Diels 114.107 Politics III, 16, 1278a28–30.108 Crito 54c4ff.

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I stressed the connection between the divine and honor. In Homer,divine rule was exercised physically and without much moral con-straint, but, since Xenophanes, the Pre-Socratic philosophers hadbeen uneasy with this aspect of Greek religion. Xenophanes was amonotheist, and rebuked Homer for these disgraceful and presump-tuous stories. He thought of God as “effortlessly setting all things astirby the power of his nous.”109 In the same way, Socrates rebuked Euthy-phro, the religious expert, for the disgraceful stories he told about thegods. Socrates hoped to make progress in defining holiness, when heasked, “What is that supreme result which the gods produce whenthey employ our services?” But Euthyphro never produced a satis-factory answer.110 Socrates gave his own answer in the Theaetetus:that we should become “like the divine so far as we can, and that isto become just and holy with the help of wisdom.”111 Aristotleanswers Socrates’s question in the passage I have already quoted. Wedo what is most noble and gives most pleasure to the gods when we contemplate, because this is how we are most like them; we willthen be happy. But the happiness is still aristocratic in the sense thatit puts us above others, who properly honor us as we honor the gods.The Pythagorean picture of the three lives exalts the contemplativelife at the expense of the other two, which are the only options avail-able to most other people.

The third theme is that contemplation gives us access to the imper-ishable. Earlier I stressed the connection between the divine andblessedness (especially its permanence condition). In the Physics, Aristotle singles out Anaximander among his predecessors forthought about what is divine, deathless, and imperishable:

Hence, as we say, there is no source of this [the infinite], but thisappears to be the source of all the rest, and “encompasses all things”

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109 Diels 25. Aeschylus, the tragedian, gives the chorus a great openingprayer to Zeus in The Suppliants 96–103 (see the discussion in WernerJaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, Oxford: Clarendon Press1947, 45 and 212), which reflects this new view: “For gods act withouteffort:/ High from their hallowed seats/ they somehow make their ownthinking/ come all at once to pass.”110 Euthyphro 13e10ff.111 Theaetetus 176b.

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and “steers all things,” as those assert who do not recognize othercauses besides the infinite . . . And this, they say, is the divine; for it is“deathless” and “imperishable,” as Anaximander puts it, and most ofthe physicists agree with him.112

Aristotle has a more elaborate account of causation, and a differentaccount of infinity, but he does not depart from this central tyingtogether of the divine and the imperishable, which is the destinationand source of all change in the cosmos. The characteristicallyhuman means of connection with this source and destination is contemplation. In the Timaeus Plato says,

He who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom,and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, musthave thoughts immortal and divine, if he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he mustaltogether be immortal, and since he is ever cherishing the divinepower and has the divinity within him in perfect order, he will be singularly happy.113

Plato goes on to describe the process of feeding the divine principlewithin us upon the harmonies and revolutions of the cosmos. Aris-totle preserves the sense that the divine in us is sustained by think-ing about what is the most beautiful (most kalon, most noble), whichis what is fully active but without change. In the Metaphysics, this isGod, since God is fully active by possessing the object of God’s nous,which is God.114

Aristotle, at the end of the Eudemian Ethics, repeats these last twothemes. He says,

To conclude: whatever choice or possession of natural goods – bodilygoods, wealth, friends, and the like – will most conduce to the con-templation of God is best: this is the noblest criterion. But any stan-dard of living which either through excess or defect hinders theservice and contemplation of God is bad. This is how it is with the soul,

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112 Physics III, 4, 203b5–15.113 Timaeus 90c. The Greek for “the divinity” is daimona. See also Phaedo80d–81a.114 Metaphysics XII, 7, 1072b20.

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and this is the best criterion, to be conscious as little as possible of theirrational part of the soul in so far as it is irrational.115

Contemplation of God involves, as in Plato, an appropriate degree ofseparation from the irrational part of the soul. But it also provides acriterion (together with service of God) for the proper allocation ofnatural goods, which will follow the principle that the noblest peopleshould get the noblest goods since contemplators and servers of Godhave the noblest object in their activity. In this way Aristotle deriveswhat he describes in the Protrepticus as “boundary markers” bywhich the statesman can determine what is just, what is good, andwhat is expedient.116

Larry Arnhart

I will end this chapter by describing a contemporary version ofAristotelian ethical theory that does not give the place within thetheory that Aristotle gives to God or gods. The example I have in mind is Larry Arnhart’s book Darwinian Natural Right.117 This bookis an example of how the new discipline of evolutionary psychology(a revised version of what was called “sociobiology” in the 1980s)has been mined for data to support a non-theist ethical theory of anAristotelian type. The book is, however, just an example, and I do notmean to imply by the selection that it is the most successful example.Nor do I mean to claim that any such attempt is bound to fail in the

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115 I have used Kenny’s translation in Aristotle on the Perfect Life, p. 99.Kenny points out that the Oxford Classical Translation emends theon(“God”) to theion (“divine”) twice in this passage, without good warrant. F.Dirlmeier, Aristoteles, Eudemische Ethik, ubersetzt und kommentiert, Berlin:Akademie-Verlag, 1962 argues that even if we retain “God,” it has to meanthe highest part of ourselves. But Kenny shows that this reading cannot besustained.116 B 47. I will return to Scotus’s use of this principle in Chapter 2.117 Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of HumanNature, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998 (henceforth DNR). Some of thematerial here is taken from John E. Hare, “Evolutionary Naturalism andReducing the Demand of Justice,” Religion in the Liberal Polity, ed. TerenceCuneo, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005, 74–94.

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same way that I will claim Arnhart’s attempt fails. I have chosen this book because of its self-conscious attempt to construct an Aristotelian system of evolutionary ethics. My objections will not beso much to Arnhart’s attempt to do Aristotle without theology, butto his desire to make a de-theologized Aristotelian system reach thesame conclusions about how to live as systems that derive from con-temporary theological premises.

Arnhart says, “Aristotle says so little about religion in the Nico-machean Ethics that one could easily infer that it contributes nothingessential to the ethical life of human beings.”118 What is surprisingabout this is that, as I have tried to show, Aristotle mentions God orthe gods or the divine in the Nicomachean Ethics rather often. WhileArnhart gives a grudging place to Aristotle’s talk of God, he simplydoes not notice many of the passages where Aristotle talks about thedivine. This is a pattern repeated in much twentieth-century scholar-ship, though it is starting now to be corrected. The pattern is alsoconspicuous in the secondary literature on Kant from the twentiethcentury. The twentieth-century interpreter encountered all thesetheistic passages in the author he or she was interpreting, and foundthem embarrassing – relics of a bygone era from which the authorneeded to be extracted. So we had Bertrand Russell’s account ofLebniz’s system in five axioms, none of which mentioned God. Andwhen Lewis White Beck interpreted the First Critique of Kant he toldus that the theistic passages were due to clumsy editing, survivals ofa pre-critical period of Kant’s thought that a more careful editingwould have removed. The result of this de-theologizing was that thegreat authors of our tradition were left with incoherent systems. I have tried to show the importance of his theology to Aristotle, and I will try to do the same for Kant.

Arnhart concludes, on the final page of his book, “Perhaps thegreatest human good, which would satisfy the deepest human desire,would be to understand human nature within the natural order of thewhole” (emphasis added). By “natural” here he intends a contrastwith the supernatural, which he says is stressed by Christians. Thiscontrast is anachronistic if applied to Aristotle, since Aristotle makesno contrast between natural and supernatural, but contrasts the

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118 DNR 251. Arnhart does not deny that religious people can be helpedby thinking about God, but he thinks the deepest human good is to under-stand our situation within the natural order, DNR 275.

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natural with the artificial. But Aristotle does have a contrast betweenthe merely human and the divine in humanity, and also between thishuman–divine and the God who attracts us from outside the humansphere. This gives his theory a way to acknowledge the aspiration ofhumans to be more than merely human, and Arnhart’s exclusion of this dimension of Aristotle’s theory prevents him from acknowl-edging this. It is as though Arnhart is stuck with the “commonsense”position before the shift that I have attributed to Aristotle, the shiftthat comes with the thought (already present in the Protrepticus)about nous and the imperishable.

Arnhart sets up his system this way: the good is the desirable, and the desirable is what is generally desired by human beings. I willcall this “the double identity.” The premise is similar in function tothe first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics, setting the stage for thewhole book. By “generally desired” Arnhart means that these desiresare found in most people in every society throughout human history,though not necessarily in every person, since there may be defectiveindividuals who lack them. The connection he makes with evolutionis that evolution gave us these desires, operating selectively on ourspecies in the hunter–gatherer stages of our development during thePleistocene, because these desires enhanced our chances of survivaland reproduction.119 There are twenty such desires that he lists, andthe framework of his argument is that if a desire is general in thissense, belonging to this list, then its fulfillment is good. I do not wantto deny that there are desires that are general in this sense. That isan empirical question, and we should listen to what comparativeanthropologists tell us about it. Arnhart has done ethical theory aservice by bringing together much of the germane scientific litera-ture, not just from anthropology but from ethology and cognitive andsocial psychology. What I want to deny is the double identity.

Arnhart denies that there is any valid principle of ethics thatrequires disinterested benevolence. The following quotation comes in a discussion of Darwin’s inconsistency about ethics. Arnhart says,

Darwin is wrong in thinking that female sympathy – as rooted inmaternal care – can expand into a disinterested universal sentimentof humanity. After all, even maternal care manifests itself as a love of

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119 DNR 17, 30, 66, 81–2, 124.

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one’s own offspring and a willingness to defend them againststrangers. And although sympathy can be expanded to embrace ever-larger groups based on some sense of shared interests, this will alwaysrest on loving one’s own group as opposed to other groups. Darwin’sappeal to universal humanitarianism can only be explained as autopian yearning for an ideal moral realm that transcends nature,which contradicts Darwin’s general claim that human beings are fullycontained within the natural order.120

Arnhart thinks Darwin is misled by a false sense that there is some-thing wrong with motivation directed towards one’s own happiness.Here Arnhart prefers Aristotle to Darwin. He continues,

When individuals or groups compete with one another we must eitherfind some common ground of shared interests, or we must allow foran appeal to force or fraud to settle the dispute. The only alternative,which I do not regard as a realistic alternative, is to invoke some tran-scendental norm of impartial justice (such as Christian charity) thatis beyond the order of nature.

How does Arnhart reach the conclusion that there is no authori-tative norm of formal justice (counting each person as one and noperson as more than one)? The key is the double identity, the claimthat the good is what is generally desired. When Arnhart looks at thedesires he thinks evolution gave us in our hunter–gatherer stage hedoes not find a desire to respect humanity as something valuable initself. What he does find (among the list of twenty) are desires forsocial status, for political rule (though this is, he says, a natural maledesire not a natural female desire), for war (again a male desire), forwealth (that is, enough property to equip for a good life, and todisplay social status), and for justice as reciprocity. What is justice asreciprocity? It is fairness in exchange; a benefit for a benefit and aharm for a harm. Arnhart takes the notion from Hume, and forHume justice as reciprocity extends only as far as utility. A personwill be motivated towards reciprocity to the extent that she perceivesthat she will be benefited or that she will avoid harm. If we imagine,

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120 DNR 146, emphasis added. See also 76, “Throughout most of humanhistory, the social instincts within a tribe never extended beyond the tribe.”Arnhart has in more recent work modified this position.

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therefore, a society in which those whom we exploit will not be ableto harm us because of their weakness, we will not be moved by justiceas reciprocity to end the exploitation even if they resent it. This isHume’s conclusion, that no inconvenience would result from theexercise of such a power, and therefore the restraints of justice wouldbe totally useless, though we might be motivated by compassion andkindness.121

Aristotle notoriously held that women are inferior to men, andtherefore should never rule either in states or (over adult free males)in households, and he justified slavery on the basis that some peopleare by nature incapable of ruling themselves.122 Arnhart wants to letAristotle off the hook on slavery on the grounds that the ancientphilosopher is being deliberately confusing, so as to make us workout his hidden views, which are more humane.123 But for Aristotleto deliberately mislead us in this way seems to me quite alien to hischaracter, which is one of constantly seeking greater clarity. Weshould take his statements about women and slavery as giving hisown views. What is relevant in the present context is to connect theseviews with his account of human nature. Aristotle thinks that somehumans simply do not have the kind of rational self-control thatmakes ruling or freedom appropriate, and that is especially distinc-tive of human life. More deeply, humans by nature desire wealth,power over others, and high social status. Here Aristotle and Arnhartare in agreement. For Aristotle, as for Arnhart, the human goodincludes wealth and power and status. I think that Aristotle is for themost part right about the desires we are born with. He is not right,however, in the inference to the human good. We do naturally desirethese things, but it does not follow from the fact that we desire themthat they are good.

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121 See Jonathan Harrison, Hume’s Theory of Justice, Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1981, 276.122 See Politics I, 1, 1252a31–4 and NE X, 6, 1177a8–9.123 Arnhart is here relying on a typical interpretive strategy of LeoStrauss. Indeed Arnhart’s book begins and ends with quotations from Strauss. It is worth pointing out that Jonathan Lear, whom Arnhartcites as an ally in this interpretive strategy (DNR 173) does not in fact takesuch a position. See Jonathan Lear, The Desire to Understand, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1988, 197 and 208.

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One way to see this is to see that the natural desires conflict. I willillustrate this from Arnhart’s own treatment of the moral status ofwomen and slaves. He says

The natural pattern of desires typical for men is not the same as thattypical for women. Men typically have a stronger desire for sexualpromiscuity, while women typically have a stronger desire for intimatecompanionship. Men typically have a stronger desire for dominance,while women typically have a stronger desire for nurturance. Mentypically desire the solidarity of comradeship, while women typicallydesire the solidarity of kinship. Because of their typical desires, thedistinctive virtue of men is courage, while the distinctive virtue ofwomen is sympathy.124

We have here a refinement of the initial double identity. What is goodis not merely what is generally desired by humans, but what is gen-erally desired by natural subgroups of humans, such as males andfemales. This view is quite compatible, Arnhart says, with a feministnaturalism, and he quotes remarks by Carol Gilligan and othersecond-wave feminists about “a different voice.”125 But these femi-nists were not actually in favor of separating the political and domestic spheres and granting a complementary preeminence in thepolitical sphere to males and in the domestic sphere to females.

Arnhart has a term for conflict in natural desires, and he shoulduse it here too, though he does not. It is the term “tragedy.” We findtragedy whenever two natural desires conflict with no resolution bycommon self-interest. Arnhart does not give us any way to proceedin such cases except by coercion. What he cannot say, and what I want to say, is that a practice can be wrong (not merely tragic) evenif it does fulfill “natural” desires by the “naturally ruling” males. IfArnhart is to be consistent, he should say that male and femalemating strategies in general are tragic. He does say that lifetimemonogamy is unnatural, a frustration of natural desires, and there-fore presumably bad. After the children can manage on their own,he says, there is no natural need for a couple to stay together.126 Thenatural, and so best, strategy is what he calls serial monogamy, a

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124 DNR 123.125 DNR 127.126 DNR 265.

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succession of committed relationships. But he should, I think, gofurther, and admit that for males, even in a committed relationship,there is a natural desire, which is therefore good to fulfill, to beunfaithful.127 Arnhart cannot, as far as I can see, have it both ways.Given that what frustrates a natural desire is bad, he cannot both saythat males have a natural desire for promiscuity, and that what is best(and not merely tragic) for males is monogamous-albeit-sequentialfidelity. If males, in virtue of their natural political dominance, canenforce a double standard, according to which infidelity in females ispunished but infidelity in males is not, there will not be any obstaclein nature (as Arnhart views it) to their doing so.

The sense of tragedy is also the only conclusion I think Arnhartis entitled to in the case of slavery, and I will end this chapter withthis point. He thinks that there is a natural human desire for exploita-tion: “Like other social animals, human beings are naturally inclinedto exploitation through coercion and manipulation.”128 But there isalso a natural inclination on the part of slaves to resist exploitation.The result is, one would have thought, tragedy; one natural desirepitted against another.129 But Arnhart does not in fact conclude withtragedy. He concludes that slavery is wrong and should be abolished,because it is inconsistent with justice as reciprocity, which is anatural human desire. On this account it is because human slaves,unlike ant slaves, will effectively resist exploitation that human slave-owners are required by this kind of justice to acknowledge theirclaims. The problem with this account is that for millennia of humanhistory, the resistance of slaves was futile. Slavery was only abolishedin Britain when William Wilberforce and his friends obeyed theclaims of the kind of universalist morality that Arnhart thinks isunrealistic. The root problem here is that Aristotle and Arnhart areboth wrong to hold that it follows from the fact that we naturallydesire something that the satisfaction of that desire is good.

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127 Statistics are hard to be confident about here. An interesting study ona college campus reports that if an attractive stranger of the opposite sexapproaches and proposes sexual intercourse, 100 percent of the women inthe study refuse, and 75 percent of the males accept. R. D. Clark and E. Hatfield, “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers,” Journal ofPsychology and Human Sexuality 2, 1989, 39–55.128 DNR 167–8. See also 196.129 Arnhart does sometimes express himself this way, e.g. DNR 170.

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Aristotle is simply more consistent in moving from his premises tohis conclusions about the relations between masters and slaves andbetween men and women.

The point I end with is that Arnhart is stuck in a difficulty thatAristotle is not. Arnhart does have the notion of the supernaturaland he ties a certain set of moral notions centered on impartialjustice to a system that has such a God at its center. These moralnotions have the resources to reach the moral conclusions Arnharthimself wants to reach; I will return to this in the final chapter. But,by rejecting these notions, he has given himself the project of reach-ing these same conclusions without the same conceptual back-ground. He has proposed premises from evolutionary psychology tofill the gap. But if I am right, these premises cannot do the work hewants them to do.

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