Aristotle’s Philosophy: Virtue, Intellect, and Politics
Virtue (arete), according to Aristotle, is a kind of second nature, an artful habit that helps humans achieve the various goods and purposes for which they are trained, ultimately leading to happiness and resembling God as much as possible. Aristotle distinguishes between dianoetic (intellectual) and practical virtues. Dianoetic virtues, like wisdom and understanding, bring us closer to God’s immutability.
Dianoetic Virtues and the Intellect
Theoretical knowledge (wisdom and understanding) is acquired through learning and experience. It relates to the universal and necessary. Aristotle believed that there is nothing in the intellect that has not first passed through the senses. Each external sense organ reflects the qualities of objects, leading to the internal common sense. These data form part of the passive understanding, but are only organized by the activity of the intellect, which, through abstraction, separates the essential form (secondary substance) from the incidental information of individuals (who are the primary substance). Aristotle thus overcomes the Platonic conception of Ideas, highlighting the closer universal (species) versus the more generic and abstract that Plato emphasized.
For Aristotle, the soul is the form (functional) of the body, but the agent intellect is also separable from the body, just as form is separable from matter.
Practical Virtues: Ethics and Politics
Among the practical virtues, a distinction can be made between those of production (facere) and those of ethics and politics (agere). Prudence, rather than being a virtue itself, is the sound judgment that accompanies practical virtues, particularizing the universal and rationalizing actual practice. It is the most difficult virtue to achieve, and upon it depends success in ethical behavior, when choosing the middle ground between vicious excess and deficiency, and success in political activity, giving each class its due, so that the city may live with justice and/or stability, enabling its citizens to pursue happiness and divine autarchy through imitation.
Politics and the Nature of Man
In the field of Politics, Aristotle believes that man is sociable by nature, but nature alone is not enough to ensure a stable, virtuous (just), and happy life. This requires artificially perfecting life in the city and preserving it through the habit of virtue. Outside the city, there are only savage beasts or God (who needs no friends). Man, however, requires the mediation of others to realize or actualize the sound potential that exists in power within the family and tribe.
Forms of Government
Given the impossibility of carrying out projects of a perfect Platonic city, Aristotle analyzed 158 constitutions to determine the fairest. He concluded that there were three just forms (seeking the common good) and three unjust forms (seeking private interest), and that a cyclical process could be established among them:
- Monarchy degenerates into tyranny.
- The aristocracy rises against tyranny.
- Aristocracy slides into the clan-based oligarchy.
- Oligarchy leads to a popular uprising, resulting in democracy.
- Democracy degenerates into demagoguery.
- Demagoguery gives rise to monarchy once again.
Logic and Ontology
Aristotelian logic and ontology are parallel. His predicate logic reflects what is said about real things, given that individuals are the most immediate and concrete reality for Aristotle (the primary substance). However, as we have seen, their essential properties (characteristics and their classification as distinct from other individuals) are revealed through the second category of substance (species), captured by the seasoned Agent Intellect. Other qualities are accidental and do not change the essence of the individual, even if they themselves change.
The Sublunary and Supralunar Worlds
The specific nature of things is fully realized when it is actualized. In the sublunary world, this is manifested in three ways: as a generative and corruptible nature, as change (both quantitative and qualitative), and as a change of place. In the supralunar world, however, there would only be local movement, which, by its circular perfection, simulates the stability of God. Only God would be without matter: pure actuality, pure form, although (unlike Plato’s Demiurge) God neither created the world nor is concerned with it. As Pierre Aubenque says, God is the final Cause, but not the efficient, formal, or material cause of the world. The nature of the world, being material, moves, seeking a stability that it lacks and never fully achieves.