Since happiness is an activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue, we must consider the nature of virtue; for perhaps we shall thus see better the nature of happiness.
This answers some of the objections that have been raised in the comments. We have now a definition of happiness, but it entails a definition of virtue. We need to study the virtues now, in order to better understand even the defined concept of "happiness."
The true student of politics, too, is thought to have studied virtue above all things; for he wishes to make his fellow citizens good and obedient to the laws.As an example of this we have the lawgivers of the Cretans and the Spartans, and any others of the kind that there may have been. And if this inquiry belongs to political science, clearly the pursuit of it will be in accordance with our original plan.
Emphasis added. The student of politics isn't studying virtue to make himself better, note, but to make his fellow citizens good and obedient to the laws. This is a point of discontinuity between Aristotle and American society, and to some degree between the Modern world and Aristotle. Americans think of virtue as a private matter. The function of the law is not to make us good people, but to set the most minimal limits possible on human behavior in order to enable us to be free within those limits. What we choose to do with that freedom is where we find out whether or not we are virtuous. It isn't anyone else's business.
Among the other Moderns, a less-strong version of this idea prevails. Kant, for example, divides his Metaphysics of Morals into two Doctrines: the Doctrine of Right, and the Doctrine of Virtue. The dividing point between those two is whether or not the state has the right to use physical force against you to require you obey. The Doctrine of Right is where force is permitted -- interestingly, marriage law is included here -- and the Doctrine of Virtue is where no one is allowed to force you to do the right thing. There is still a right thing, but it is yours to decide whether to be good or bad.
That is not true for Aristotle. As we will see when we reach his discussion of Justice, the point of the laws is to mandate virtuous behavior, to make everyone behave as if they were virtuous. You may not get genuinely virtuous people that way, but you at least get a society in which people are treating each other as if they were the virtuous people they aren't really.
Aristotle also wants people to develop the internal virtues, and to come to that point we have already discussed in which they want to be virtuous and find it pleasant to be. However, virtue is a matter of habituation; being forced to be better for a while can help you internalize the habits, and at least takes care of some of the bad behavior.
But clearly the virtue we must study is human virtue; for the good we were seeking was human good and the happiness human happiness. By human virtue we mean not that of the body but that of the soul; and happiness also we call an activity of soul.
Thus, this will not be a book on weightlifting or fast running, but on courage and justice.
But if this is so, clearly the student of politics must know somehow the facts about soul, as the man who is to heal the eyes or the body as a whole must know about the eyes or the body; and all the more since politics is more prized and better than medicine; but even among doctors the best educated spend much labour on acquiring knowledge of the body. The student of politics, then, must study the soul, and must study it with these objects in view, and do so just to the extent which is sufficient for the questions we are discussing; for further precision is perhaps something more laborious than our purposes require.
Socrates would have taken this and made a problem out of it for showing that the inquiry wasn't working well. Aristotle manfully accepts that we have to understand the subordinate questions in light of our inquiry into the prior questions. This is a difference between him and his predecessors.
This is a longer chapter, so I will put the rest after a jump break. There's an important new concept here, so don't skip it.
Some things are said about it, adequately enough, even in the discussions outside our school [i.e. the Academy], and we must use these; e.g. that one element in the soul is irrational and one has a rational principle. Whether these are separated as the parts of the body or of anything divisible are, or are distinct by definition but by nature inseparable, like convex and concave in the circumference of a circle, does not affect the present question.
You will recall that Plato made much of that division in the Republic, less in the Laws.
Of the irrational element one division seems to be widely distributed, and vegetative in its nature, I mean that which causes nutrition and growth; for it is this kind of power of the soul that one must assign to all nurslings and to embryos, and this same power to fullgrown creatures; this is more reasonable than to assign some different power to them. Now the excellence of this seems to be common to all species and not specifically human; for this part or faculty seems to function most in sleep, while goodness and badness are least manifest in sleep (whence comes the saying that the happy are not better off than the wretched for half their lives; and this happens naturally enough, since sleep is an inactivity of the soul in that respect in which it is called good or bad), unless perhaps to a small extent some of the movements actually penetrate to the soul, and in this respect the dreams of good men are better than those of ordinary people. Enough of this subject, however; let us leave the nutritive faculty alone, since it has by its nature no share in human excellence.
This is a restatement of something we touched on earlier: we are looking for the excellence of humanity, so we are going to look for things that humanity excels in beyond other forms of life. Even plants can seek nutrients from the world and turn towards the light; even animals can chase prey. We are looking for a higher quality that is more fit to serve as a source for a human telos.
There seems to be also another irrational element in the soul-one which in a sense, however, shares in a rational principle. For we praise the rational principle of the continent man and of the incontinent, and the part of their soul that has such a principle, since it urges them aright and towards the best objects; but there is found in them also another element naturally opposed to the rational principle, which fights against and resists that principle. For exactly as paralysed limbs when we intend to move them to the right turn on the contrary to the left, so is it with the soul; the impulses of incontinent people move in contrary directions. But while in the body we see that which moves astray, in the soul we do not. No doubt, however, we must none the less suppose that in the soul too there is something contrary to the rational principle, resisting and opposing it. In what sense it is distinct from the other elements does not concern us. Now even this seems to have a share in a rational principle, as we said; at any rate in the continent man it obeys the rational principle and presumably in the temperate and brave man it is still more obedient; for in him it speaks, on all matters, with the same voice as the rational principle.
This is the first mention of what will become very important in later chapters, the problem of knowing what is right but still doing wrong. This is usually translated, as here, as "incontinence." (The Greek is ἀκρασία, as opposed to ἐγκρατής for those who do have mastery over themselves, i.e. the continent; the root to which a- or en- is being applied translates directly as power. Thus, without power [over themselves] or empowered [etc.] would be another translation.) The classic example is the man who wishes to lose weight but finds himself sneaking a donut, or the man who wishes to be moderate in drinking but who exceeds the limit he set for himself more and more as the night goes along.
Aristotle would like to divide the soul into a rational part that continues to know what is right, and an irrational part that for some reason resists doing right just because it is right and that part of the soul resists the right. That is why he says this part of the soul has to have a share in the rational while remaining irrational: it has to have a share in the rational to recognize the right, even if its function (for some reason) is to reject that thing that is right.
We will discuss this question of incontinence a great deal more.
Therefore the irrational element also appears to be two-fold. For the vegetative element in no way shares in a rational principle, but the appetitive and in general the desiring element in a sense shares in it, in so far as it listens to and obeys it; this is the sense in which we speak of 'taking account' of one's father or one's friends, not that in which we speak of 'accounting for a mathematical property. That the irrational element is in some sense persuaded by a rational principle is indicated also by the giving of advice and by all reproof and exhortation. And if this element also must be said to have a rational principle, that which has a rational principle (as well as that which has not) will be twofold, one subdivision having it in the strict sense and in itself, and the other having a tendency to obey as one does one's father.
Here the good-upbringing argument appears again: the rational principle that knows the right and loves virtue was inculcated, we remember, in part by listening to stories from one's father or elders. It comes to serve an analogous role in our own minds.
Virtue too is distinguished into kinds in accordance with this difference; for we say that some of the virtues are intellectual and others moral, philosophic wisdom and understanding and practical wisdom being intellectual, liberality and temperance moral. For in speaking about a man's character we do not say that he is wise or has understanding but that he is good-tempered or temperate; yet we praise the wise man also with respect to his state of mind; and of states of mind we call those which merit praise virtues.
The distinction between the theoretical and the active virtues will become much more important later in the book, when we are discussing the best kind of human life in greater detail. For now, keep these introductory remarks in mind.
Thus ends Book One.
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