Abstract
Aristotle begins Book VII of the Politics by setting a somewhat provocative twofold agenda: “It is necessary,” not only “to agree first on what is the most choiceworthy way of life for everyone, so to speak”; “after this,” it is then necessary to agree on whether it is “the same or different in common and separately/apart” (1323a19–21; see Newman,1 ad loc.). At the outset, Aristotle tables the question whether the best life for all or almost all humans in communities is not distinct from what is the best life for at least certain individuals living in some sort of (inner, spiritual) detachment. But after having broached this question, our teacher immediately says that “what ought to be used now” are “many things we believe to be said adequately” in certain “exoteric” (popular) “speeches about the best life” (1323a19–24). On this basis, he devotes the first chapter to articulating a “prefatory” argument leading to the gentlemanly conclusion that “the best life, both separately for each and in common for cities, is the one with virtue equipped sufficiently so as to partake of the actions in accordance with virtue.” In the same breath, however, he concedes that “all the pertinent arguments” have not been made; such would be “the deed of another leisure.” What is more, he stresses that he has conjured up certain objectors, some of whose challenges, he says, have not been adequately responded to (1323b37–24a4). Our tutor thus provokes our critical thought.2
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Notes
All references are to the text (by Bekker numbers) and commentary of W. L. Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, 4 vols. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1887–1902). Bekker numbers in parentheses refer to the Politics unless the title of another work of Aristotle is noted.
Carnes Lord, Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 182.
Consider Pericles’s Funeral Oration (Thucydides 2.35–46), which is silent about moderation (as opposed to “measure”), and promises eternal fame for Athens—and, through Athens, the Athenians—on account of her soldiers who die courageously for the sake of the city’s common good (understood as entailing imperialism). See also Mary P. Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotle’s Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), 211n5.
Aristotle has pointed out in the Ethics (1117b7–17) that it is not possible to say that the noblest deeds of manly courage, which play so great a role in the activities of civic virtue, involve happiness or enjoyment for the individual who enacts those deeds—except if we look beyond them to a further unspecified goal. Thomas ad loc. comments, “We must consider, however, that to some virtuous men death is desirable on account of the hope of a future life. But the Stoics did not discuss this, nor did it pertain to the Philosopher in this work to speak of those things that belong to the condition of another life”; see also Alexander Grant, Aristotle (London: Blackwood, 1877), 107–8;
Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 33;
Susan D. Collins, “The Moral Virtues in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” in Action and Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle, ed. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 134–35, 155n6 (but see also 156–57n13).
1325a5–7; this dimension of the meaning of the noble political life was exploited by the Platonic and Aristotelian political philosophers who arose within the Islamic world, in the development of their peculiar theories of jihad: see esp. Alfarabi, The Political Writings: “Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), Aphorisms #57–58 and 67;
Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing (the Shifa) (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), Bk. X, Ch. 5;
Averroes, Averroes on Plato’s “Republic” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974).
1325a8–15; John M. Cooper, “Political Animals and Civic Friendship,” in Aristotle’s Politics: Critical Essays, ed. Richard Kraut and Steven Skultety (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 88.
1325a34–36; cf. Rhetoric 1366a36–38. Newman ad 1325a32 suggests that the tyrant Jason—whose radical statement played such a key role in the dialectic of Bk. III, Ch. 4—is again referenced here, this time in regard to his statement that Aristotle quotes at Rhetoric 1373a25, illustrating the case of those who commit injustice against “those to whom, by doing them injustice, they will be able to do many just things, thus easily effecting a cure, even as Jason the Thessalian said that he had to do some injustices, in order that he would be able to effect many just things.” The statement became famous; see Plutarch “Precepts of Statecraft,” 24. For Jason’s imperial ambitions, see Richard Robinson, Aristotle: Politics Books III and IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 316
Thomas K. Lindsay, “Aristotle’s Appraisal of Manly Spirit: Political and Philosophic Implications,” American Journal of Political Science 44 (2000): 439.
Cf. Carnes Lord, “Politics and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Politics,” Hermes 106 (1978): 336–57 and Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle, 189–202;
Stephan Salkever, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 148; see again Alfarabi, The Political Writings: “Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts, Aphorisms #57–58 and 67; Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing (the Shifa), Bk. X, Ch. 5; Averroes, Averroes on Plato’s REPUBLIC.
See Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus as a whole, and Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (London: Longmans, Green 1899), I.19–20, 149–50, 169.
Franz Susemihl and Robert D. Hicks, eds., The Politics of Aristotle, Bks. I–V (London: Macmillan, 1894), ad loc. see this as so in contradiction to Aristotle’s theology in other texts as to indicate this cannot have been written by the philosopher; they ignore what can be conjectured to have been the teaching of his dialogue On Philosophy:
see Bernd Effe, Studien zur Kosmologie und Theologie der Aristotelischen Schrift “Über die Philosophie” (Munich: Beck, 1970).
Leo Strauss, “On Aristotle’s Politics,” Chapter 1 of The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964).
Friedrich Solmsen, “Leisure and Play in Aristotle’s Ideal State,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 107 (1964): 25–28;
D. A. Rees, “Comments on C. Lord,” in Aristoteles’ “Politik”: Akten des XI Symposium Aristotelicum, ed. Günther Patzig (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 216–17; Susemihl and Hicks, The Politics of Aristotle, ad loc. are so bewildered by the entire exposition that they are convinced that Chapters 2 and 3 cannot have been written by Aristotle but must be someone else’s interpolation.
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© 2013 Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax
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Pangle, T.L. (2013). Aristotle’s Politics Book VII on the Best Way of Life. In: Pangle, T.L., Lomax, J.H. (eds) Political Philosophy Cross-Examined. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299635_4
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