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. He distinguishes between dianoetic (intellectual) virtues and practical virtues.
Dianoetic Virtues
Dianoetic or intellectual virtues are those we share with God, because through them we approach divine immobility. Theoretical knowledge (wisdom and understanding) is acquired through learning and experience, and relates to the universal and necessary. According to Aristotle, there is nothing in the intellect that has not gone through the senses. Each external sense organ reflects the qualities of objects, leading to 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 other incidental information about individuals (who are the primary substance). Aristotle thus aims to overcome the Platonic conception of ideas, highlighting the more immediate 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
Among the practical virtues, a distinction can be made between those of production (facere) and those of ethics and politics (agere). Prudence, rather than a virtue, is the soundness accompanying practical virtues, particularizing the universal, or rationalizing actual practice. It is the most difficult to achieve, and on it depends success in ethical behavior, when choosing the middle ground between vicious excess and deficiency, or when succeeding in political activity, giving each class its due, so that the city may live with justice and/or stability, enabling its citizens to persist in imitating divine happiness and autarchy through mediation.
Politics
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 existed in power within the family and tribe.
Given the impossibility of carrying out projects for a perfect Platonic city, Aristotle analyzed 158 constitutions to determine the fairest. He considered that there were three fair constitutions (seeking the common good) and three unjust ones (seeking private property), and among them a cyclic process could be established: Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, against which the aristocracy would rise, only to slide into the clan-based Oligarchy. This would lead to a popular uprising resulting in democracy, which in turn degenerates into demagoguery, and from which monarchy would emerge 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). But 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 specialist through 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 have no matter, being 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 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.