If these matters and the virtues, and also friendship and pleasure, have been dealt with sufficiently in outline, are we to suppose that our programme has reached its end? Surely, as the saying goes, where there are things to be done the end is not to survey and recognize the various things, but rather to do them; with regard to virtue, then, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it, or try any other way there may be of becoming good. Now if arguments were in themselves enough to make men good, they would justly, as Theognis says, have won very great rewards, and such rewards should have been provided; but as things are, while they seem to have power to encourage and stimulate the generous-minded among our youth, and to make a character which is gently born, and a true lover of what is noble, ready to be possessed by virtue, they are not able to encourage the many to nobility and goodness.
Not everyone has an equal capacity for virtue. We have seen this repeated many times, especially in Book IV. This is not only due to environmental issues -- for example, the presence or absence of a good upbringing -- but also due to these issues that Aristotle describes as character-based. Plato, meanwhile, had belabored repeatedly in his dialogues that great men often fail to produce great sons: even an extraordinary family will only sometimes, and not reliably, produce people with the highest capacity for virtue. This is a major theme of both the Protagoras and the Republic, for example.
So this brings us back to a problem Tom raised early: how does this program become workable? Aristotle has an idea that he is about to tell us, but at the beginning we have a program that is only workable for those who are interested in it: if you wanted to become virtuous, and you were willing to do the work, this is how you go about it. Yet the many do not wish to become virtuous, especially not if it requires work (as it does, since it is laborious practice until the habits form that make continuing it easy and pleasant).
What about them?
For these [who don't have that inner sense of honor that makes them pursue the program] do not by nature obey the sense of shame, but only fear, and do not abstain from bad acts because of their baseness but through fear of punishment; living by passion they pursue their own pleasures and the means to them, and and the opposite pains, and have not even a conception of what is noble and truly pleasant, since they have never tasted it. What argument would remould such people? It is hard, if not impossible, to remove by argument the traits that have long since been incorporated in the character; and perhaps we must be content if, when all the influences by which we are thought to become good are present, we get some tincture of virtue.
The important thing about shame is that it is an inner motivation to improve. Fear is fear of having things done to you in punishment, which puts the action outside of yourself: if there is no threat from outside, no actor other than you who will punish you against your will, there is no fear. If fear is all that was motivating you, you won't ever stretch yourself to improve.
If shame -- which is the other side of honor -- is what is motivating you, that's inside of you. Then your pursuit of virtue becomes an act of autonomy, a way of proving your freedom by doing great things that you wanted to do for reasons of your own.
So one method that might work is to encourage the development of shame in the shameless. This is not to be done negatively, by making people feel ashamed, but positively, by showing them what is noble and best that they could feel honor in attaining. This will only sometimes work because you need the potential virtue to be present for this upbringing to actualize.
Now some think that we are made good by nature, others by habituation, others by teaching. Nature's part evidently does not depend on us, but as a result of some divine causes is present in those who are truly fortunate; while argument and teaching, we may suspect, are not powerful with all men, but the soul of the student must first have been cultivated by means of habits for noble joy and noble hatred, like earth which is to nourish the seed. For he who lives as passion directs will not hear argument that dissuades him, nor understand it if he does; and how can we persuade one in such a state to change his ways? And in general passion seems to yield not to argument but to force. The character, then, must somehow be there already with a kinship to virtue, loving what is noble and hating what is base.
That last is a general Aristotelian point about how things come to be, which he develops especially in the Physics IIff: if a thing can become actually, it already existed as a potential. Aristotle tells us that we cannot make a saw out of wool: it didn't have 'the character... somehow there already.' Iron does have the right qualities, and thus its potential to be a saw or an axe can be realized actually. Virtue is the same. If you don't have the right potentials, the upbringing won't work on you: there's not the right quality to actualize to begin with.
In that case, Aristotle has another answer: use the fear.
But it is difficult to get from youth up a right training for virtue if one has not been brought up under right laws; for to live temperately and hardily is not pleasant to most people, especially when they are young. For this reason their nurture and occupations should be fixed by law; for they will not be painful when they have become customary. But it is surely not enough that when they are young they should get the right nurture and attention; since they must, even when they are grown up, practise and be habituated to them, we shall need laws for this as well, and generally speaking to cover the whole of life; for most people obey necessity rather than argument, and punishments rather than the sense of what is noble.
That is a sad ending to a noble book, but it provides the transition between ethics -- the study of the habits one should have -- to politics -- the study of forcing peace and order upon a polity. As we were told from quite early in the book, indeed as early as I.2, a political solution Aristotle favors is to have the law require people to act as if they were virtuous. It's not as good; just in the last chapter, he was saying that a perfectly good deed would have the right kind of will tied to the right kind of deed. If we can't have that, however, he's satisfied to have the right kind of deed done under threat and compulsion.
This is why some think that legislators ought to stimulate men to virtue and urge them forward by the motive of the noble, on the assumption that those who have been well advanced by the formation of habits will attend to such influences; and that punishments and penalties should be imposed on those who disobey and are of inferior nature, while the incurably bad should be completely banished. A good man (they think), since he lives with his mind fixed on what is noble, will submit to argument, while a bad man, whose desire is for pleasure, is corrected by pain like a beast of burden. This is, too, why they say the pains inflicted should be those that are most opposed to the pleasures such men love.However that may be, if (as we have said) the man who is to be good must be well trained and habituated, and go on to spend his time in worthy occupations and neither willingly nor unwillingly do bad actions, and if this can be brought about if men live in accordance with a sort of reason and right order, provided this has force,-if this be so, the paternal command indeed has not the required force or compulsive power (nor in general has the command of one man, unless he be a king or something similar), but the law has compulsive power, while it is at the same time a rule proceeding from a sort of practical wisdom and reason. And while people hate men who oppose their impulses, even if they oppose them rightly, the law in its ordaining of what is good is not burdensome.
"Reason and right order" will become a governing principle under Catholic Aristotelianism. Indeed, the Church is a big fan of this whole last chapter, which establishes the rightness of a rule-based ordering of more or less every aspect of life -- anything where virtue or vice might be involved. Who better to do it than the Pope?
Our own American society considers this whole thrust of legislation to be tyrannical. Prohibition wasn't burdensome? It sparked a tremendous growth in organized crime, violence in the cities, and if anything cemented the centrality of alcohol to American culture. Hate speech laws aren't burdensome? But they stop people's feelings from getting hurt, which is justice -- at least on Aristotle's terms, i.e., forcing people to treat each other as if they were virtuous. Of course we still have a version of the draft, which was one of Aristotle's early examples: the law should force you to report to the lines with your armor and weapons, as you would do if you were brave. Is that not burdensome?
Some have thought so; others have only wished to do their part. This is the division he's worried about: how do we get the ones who would dodge these onerous citizen duties to obey, if not through fear and force?
In the Spartan state alone, or almost alone, the legislator seems to have paid attention to questions of nurture and occupations; in most states such matters have been neglected, and each man lives as he pleases, Cyclops-fashion, 'to his own wife and children dealing law'. Now it is best that there should be a public and proper care for such matters; but if they are neglected by the community it would seem right for each man to help his children and friends towards virtue, and that they should have the power, or at least the will, to do this.
The Spartan state's regulation of especially young manhood is well known; too also the reason it was necessary, i.e. the domination of a large and dangerous slave population. Such martial cultures often go together with slavery or other manifest injustices: and thus, all the martial virtue being inculcated individually has to be set against the substantial vice being committed cooperatively. It makes a difference whose service that virtue is put into, and for what purpose.
It would seem from what has been said that [each man] can do this [i.e. inculcate virtue in his children and friends] better if he makes himself capable of legislating. For public control is plainly effected by laws, and good control by good laws; whether written or unwritten would seem to make no difference, nor whether they are laws providing for the education of individuals or of groups-any more than it does in the case of music or gymnastics and other such pursuits. For as in cities laws and prevailing types of character have force, so in households do the injunctions and the habits of the father, and these have even more because of the tie of blood and the benefits he confers; for the children start with a natural affection and disposition to obey. Further, private education has an advantage over public, as private medical treatment has; for while in general rest and abstinence from food are good for a man in a fever, for a particular man they may not be; and a boxer presumably does not prescribe the same style of fighting to all his pupils. It would seem, then, that the detail is worked out with more precision if the control is private; for each person is more likely to get what suits his case.
You will recall that Plato's Laws frequently turned on questions of how to educate the young, including by providing them with gymnastics as part of their mandatory education.
It is interesting to see that superiority of private education and medical care as a surviving truth since Ancient Greece. The argument is a good one: the public curricula will not be tailored to the needs of the individual student, but to mass application across many different people. So too with too-public medical care, which will end up reporting to distant bureaucracies rather than applying what is best for the individual who is paying for it.
But the details can be best looked after, one by one, by a doctor or gymnastic instructor or any one else who has the general knowledge of what is good for every one or for people of a certain kind (for the sciences both are said to be, and are, concerned with what is universal); not but what some particular detail may perhaps be well looked after by an unscientific person, if he has studied accurately in the light of experience what happens in each case, just as some people seem to be their own best doctors, though they could give no help to any one else. None the less, it will perhaps be agreed that if a man does wish to become master of an art or science he must go to the universal, and come to know it as well as possible; for, as we have said, it is with this that the sciences are concerned.
As has already been pointed out in this commentary, this is a substantial difference in the Ancient conception of what "science" is. Science for Aristotle is ideally unchanging, because it grasps eternal first principles and reasons from them -- as does mathematics, especially in Aristotle's day. Once a science is fully understood from these universals (i.e. the first principles), it should never change because the first principles will not change, and therefore everything that can be deduced from those principles will be known.
And surely he who wants to make men, whether many or few, better by his care must try to become capable of legislating, if it is through laws that we can become good.
Yes, "if."
For to get any one whatever-any one who is put before us-into the right condition is not for the first chance comer; if any one can do it, it is the man who knows, just as in medicine and all other matters which give scope for care and prudence.Must we not, then, next examine whence or how one can learn how to legislate?
Given that every science has a subject, this remark begins the closing of our inquiry into ethics and the opening of a study of political science.
Is it, as in all other cases, from statesmen? Certainly it was thought to be a part of statesmanship. Or is a difference apparent between statesmanship and the other sciences and arts? In the others the same people are found offering to teach the arts and practising them, e.g. doctors or painters; but while the sophists profess to teach politics, it is practised not by any of them but by the politicians, who would seem to do so by dint of a certain skill and experience rather than of thought; for they are not found either writing or speaking about such matters (though it were a nobler occupation perhaps than composing speeches for the law-courts and the assembly), nor again are they found to have made statesmen of their own sons or any other of their friends. But it was to be expected that they should if they could; for there is nothing better than such a skill that they could have left to their cities, or could prefer to have for themselves, or, therefore, for those dearest to them. Still, experience seems to contribute not a little; else they could not have become politicians by familiarity with politics; and so it seems that those who aim at knowing about the art of politics need experience as well.
That's Plato's point again: if this is a science, and therefore knowledge that should be apprehended by our rational souls, why can't we teach it to our sons? Why can't even acknowledged masters of statesmanship like Pericles reliably produce good sons?
But those of the sophists who profess the art seem to be very far from teaching it. For, to put the matter generally, they do not even know what kind of thing it is nor what kinds of things it is about; otherwise they would not have classed it as identical with rhetoric or even inferior to it, nor have thought it easy to legislate by collecting the laws that are thought well of; they say it is possible to select the best laws, as though even the selection did not demand intelligence and as though right judgement were not the greatest thing, as in matters of music.
These are all familiar objections to the sophists that Plato also explored at length.
For while people experienced in any department judge rightly the works produced in it, and understand by what means or how they are achieved, and what harmonizes with what, the inexperienced must be content if they do not fail to see whether the work has been well or ill made-as in the case of painting. Now laws are as it were the' works' of the political art; how then can one learn from them to be a legislator, or judge which are best? Even medical men do not seem to be made by a study of text-books. Yet people try, at any rate, to state not only the treatments, but also how particular classes of people can be cured and should be treated-distinguishing the various habits of body; but while this seems useful to experienced people, to the inexperienced it is valueless. Surely, then, while collections of laws, and of constitutions also, may be serviceable to those who can study them and judge what is good or bad and what enactments suit what circumstances, those who go through such collections without a practised faculty will not have right judgement (unless it be as a spontaneous gift of nature), though they may perhaps become more intelligent in such matters.
So, having mapped out a functional approach to living well -- at least for those of us with a strong sense of honor and shame, who can be motivated by the thought of noble actions -- we have a new set of problems in front of us. Aristotle thinks we need good laws, but there are serious problems and puzzles about what 'good laws' even are.
Now our predecessors have left the subject of legislation to us unexamined; it is perhaps best, therefore, that we should ourselves study it, and in general study the question of the constitution, in order to complete to the best of our ability our philosophy of human nature. First, then, if anything has been said well in detail by earlier thinkers, let us try to review it; then in the light of the constitutions we have collected let us study what sorts of influence preserve and destroy states, and what sorts preserve or destroy the particular kinds of constitution, and to what causes it is due that some are well and others ill administered. When these have been studied we shall perhaps be more likely to see with a comprehensive view, which constitution is best, and how each must be ordered, and what laws and customs it must use, if it is to be at its best. Let us make a beginning of our discussion.
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