Ethics and Politics: Comparing Plato and Aristotle
Some of the similarities we find between Plato and Aristotle are the connection between ethics and politics. The Platonic ruler must be wise, and wisdom links ethics and politics. In addition, the division into social classes recalls the three parts of the soul, each of which should seek to achieve its corresponding virtue.
For Aristotle, the relationship between ethics and politics is clear. If ethics is to provide a model of happiness, the proper purpose of politics is precisely to organize the polis so as to enable and facilitate the happiness of its citizens. As we saw in the contextualization, man is a social animal and cannot find happiness outside the polis. The lonely man is not self-sufficient and cannot achieve happiness on his own. Only by living in the city, in contact with other human beings, can a perfect and self-sufficient life be achieved. The town (politics, understood in the Aristotelian sense) allows individual happiness, which is the ultimate goal of ethics. Something similar happens in the model that Plato presents in The Republic: in the ideal city, happiness is achieved when everyone deals with that which is most proper and appropriate: the rulers are wise, those who excel in courage will be warriors, and those who excel in temperance will be producers, with the living conditions associated with each of these classes.
Differences Between Plato and Aristotle
As for the differences, it should be noted that Aristotle rejects moral intellectualism, the Socratic influence, which appears in the early Platonic dialogues. To know good is not enough to do good. The intelligence must join the will, one of the key concepts of Aristotelian moral philosophy. Not everyone who knows what is right tries putting it into practice. One must also want to do good. Without the concurrence of the will, one cannot speak of a virtuous man. So Aristotle goes on to say that prudence may be more important than wisdom; the prudent, without being wise, do good, while the wise, by a defect in their will, can put their knowledge at the service of nefarious purposes. When Socrates argued that no one knowingly does wrong, and that evil is rooted in ignorance, he was too optimistic. For Aristotle, there are those who do evil deliberately, knowing that they do evil; these people would be vicious, they want to do evil.
Another difference that is felt throughout Platonic and Aristotelian thought is Plato’s excessive Idealism, which is criticized by Aristotle. Even in the Ethics, Aristotle emphasizes its practical nature. While dianoetic virtues can be acquired through education, moral virtues need exercise and practice, which for Aristotle is much more realistic than Plato, for whom knowledge of the Idea of Good was a sufficient guarantee of moral performance. This difference between Platonic idealism and Aristotelian realism will also be felt in politics, where Aristotle’s theory is far more pragmatic than Plato’s, but also in metaphysics and theory of knowledge, becoming two main nerves that run through the thinking of both philosophers: the realist Aristotle versus the idealist Plato.
A final difference, somehow a consequence of the above, is the conception of the good. While for Plato the good is an idea, existing in a separate world and achievable mainly through knowledge, for Aristotle, the good is the telos, the end inherent in every being. Aristotelian realism cannot accept that the good of a being has a life outside, separate from that being, and therefore, influenced by his studies of nature, he argues that the telos is in every thing, which must be aimed precisely to develop that telos in a comprehensive manner. For Aristotle, it is inconceivable that a good thing be separated from it, while Plato would argue that it cannot be internal to the thing itself, but the true foundation of reality (and therefore everything) is Ideas.