ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS AND POLITICS.*
IT is a singular fact, and one not altogether creditable to the University of Oxford, where the philosophy of Aristotle has for centuries occupied the highest intellect of the place, that no good English edition either of the Ethics or the Politics has yet been produced. We observe, indeed, among the announcements of the Clarendon Press a promised edition of the Politics by Mr. W. L. Newman, which has been long expected and will be eagerly welcomed, but for a new commentary on the Ethics we look in vain. There must be many lecturers at Oxford who have spent no inconsiderable fraction of their lives in a pa- tient and pertinacious scrutiny of every chapter and section of the book,—men who could literally fulfil in the case of the great sum- mary of ancient moral philosophy Macaulay's boast about Para- dise Lost, and restore the text in its integrity, if every edition were lost, and the commentators were one and all to disappear into the " long night " of oblivion which so many of them have deserved. Few books have been worshipped with the same blind idolatry or studied with the same absorbed and concentrated care, and we know of fewer still which present equal difficulties to the student, or which require in a greater degree from the cri- tic at once a comprehensive grasp of principles and a delicate yet resolute handling of textual and logical minutiae. The diffi- culties which beset the commentator on Aristotle, and the imper- fect manner in which they have as yet been met, could not be better illustrated than by the two works before us. Of these the one has reached a third and the other a second edition, and yet it must be admitted that the success which they have achieved is due in both cases, though in different degrees, rather to the ab- sence of competent rivals than to the adequacy or intrinsic merits of the books themselves. Sir A. Grant's edition of the Ethics has long been the recognised English text-book. The present edition differs from those which have preceded it mainly in the new matter which has been added to the preliminary essays of the first volume. These Essays have always been regarded as the most valuable feature of the book, and while we wel- come anything which tends to make them more complete and luminous, we cannot but regret that the author should have re- stricted himself to strengthening his work where it was already strong, and should have left in all their original and obtrusive prominence the numerous shortcomings of the commentary. Of the general relations of Aristotle's ethical system to his Logic and his Metaphysics, we do not desire a more able and penetrating ex- ponent, but for those who wish to trace the reasonings of the book itself, to follow out and connect its subtle suggestions, to keep a firm hold on the author's meaning in the labyrinths of casuistry and dialectic through which it winds, to see the lights and shades, the size and proportion of the arguments in their true perspective, the criticisms of Sir A. Grant form a nebulous atmo- sphere which bewilders and distracts. His analyses are diffuse, without being perspicuous ; his explanation of difficult passages are often inconsistent and almost always vague ; be uses a termi- nology which is peculiar to himself, and which sometimes invests the terms of Aristotle with the associations of modern philosophy ; and particularly in the so-called ,Eudemian books his corn- • Ethics of Aristotle. Edited by Sir A. Grant Third and Revised Edition. London: Longman s. 1875. Polities of Aristotle. Edited by R. Congreve. Second Edition. London Longman. 1875.
mentary is rather the work of a controversialist than of a critic. Space will not permit us to make good these charges at any length, but we may point out as familiar illustrations of some of the defects enumerated Sir A. Grant's interpretations of such well- known difficulties as . 5 . 17 : 5 . 5 . 12 : 6 . 11 . 4-6 ; his discussion of Aristotle's criticisms on the Platonic Ideas (Book i., chap. 6) ; and his whole treatment of the question of the authorship and explanation of the two accounts of pleasure hi Books vii. and x. Sir A. Grant's Ethics, however, has many virtues, while we may almost say that Mr. Congreve's Politics has none. We do not observe any substantial effort in the present edition to sup- plement the deficiencies of a book which is generally regarded as among the least adequate attempts to deal with the difficulties of a classical masterpiece that the English scholarship of the last thirty years has produced. Indeed, did we not know in other ways of Mr. Congreve's powers, we should say that his qualifica- tions to comment on the Politics were almost limited to an accu- rate knowledge of Grote's History, and an irritating and irrelevant faith in the principles of Comte.
It has often been remarked that Plato and Aristotle did not separate the spheres of ethics and politics. Such a separation was indeed impossible until, first, the conquests of Alexander, and then the extension of the Roman dominion, broke up the little communities of the ancient world, and made way for that distinc- tion between the good man and the good citizen at which Aristotle only darkly hints, and which to Plato would have involved a contradiction in terms. The Roman Republic fell in the attempt to adapt its old borough constitution to the enlarged responsibili- ties of empire, and the Stoic ' citizenship' in an ideal common- wealth is merely a phrase, which shows that morality has ceased to be municipal, and has become at once individual and cosmo- politan. Ancient society, as we know, was formed out of the coalescence of organised groups; the city or state was in the first instance rather a confederation of clans than an aggregate of in- dividuals. These clans had already been disciplined in the habits of obedience, and the power of combined action under a common head, which were the necessary conditions of success in the struggle for existence. Private rights were unknown ; each family was subject to a rigid patria potestas ; and the whole Bens or cor- poration of families, united by a real or pretended descent from a common ancestor, was bound together in the constant practice of ceremonial rites and sacrifices. These facts must be borne in mind, if we would understand the unchallenged omnipotence of the ancient State. The State gradually assumed the rights and privileges which in an earlier stage of society had belonged to the heads of families and clans, and took upon itself the direction of the ancestral and hereditary ritual. The process was far more rapid and complete in Greece than in Rome, where the archaic constitution of the family reluctantly succumbed to the inroads of the jus prxtoriunt. In Greece we find at a very early period that law, religion, political institutions, and social habits are re- garded as all alike emanating from the embodied and impersonated State, and possess in virtue of their descent an equal and inde- feasible authority. In this connection nothing can be more in- structive than the often observed tendency of the Greeks to con- ceive of their whole complex system of gradually developed rights and customs as having sprung at some definite moment in the past in full array from the brain of a hero or legislator like Lycurgus or Solon. The civil union did not begin, as Hobbes and Rousseau would have us believe, in a compact where individual rights were bartered away for public protection. The substitution of the more or less equable pressure of one supreme authority for the capricious and arbitrary rule of the head of the family brought with it a relaxation rather than a tightening of the old bonds, and the spirit of discipline and loyalty which prehistoric conflicts had ingrained never lost its continuity, but simply changed its object. The conception of the individual as having rights against the State, or as being an end in himself, is due, as Sir Henry Maine has well pointed out, partly to Roman law, partly to Stoicism, partly to Rousseau and Kant, and most of all, to Christianity. We may add that, as a matter of fact, and especially in our own history, particular rights have been asserted and developed as the social conditions of the time have made them necessary for the prosperity and progress of the people ; that they have been wrenched one by one from the State, and that, as a rule, it has only been in the course or at the close of a conflict which the sense of oppression or the desire for improvement has dictated that there has been any appeal to general principles or the axioms of philosophers.
We must not, then, be surprised at the wide scope given by the ancient thinkers to the functions of the State, or imagine that
their schemes involved an oppressive and unfamiliar interference with personal liberty. Their main anxiety was that the activity of the State should be duly economised and properly directed ; that its aim should be to make its citizens, not cultured tyrants like the Athenians, nor brutal tyrants like the Spartans, but men at the same time wise and virtuous ; and that to this end it should select good human material, and having got it, should concentrate all the direct and all the subtler influences of a well- organised commonwealth on training it after a perfect type. We have said that they wished to avoid the errors both of Sparta and of Athens. But to both Plato and Aristotle it seemed that there was more in Sparta to imitate than to reject, while the example of Athens was a kind of beacon to warn the Lawgiver. The tragedy of the fall of Athens left an ineffaceable impression on the mind of Greece; it was the supreme judgment of Nemesis in the national history. Why had the city which almost monopolised the splendid traditions of the Persian war, which had dazzled the Grecian world for more than half a century, which had given birth to Sophocles, and Pericles, and Socrates, succumbed to the narrow, isolated, selfish Sparta? This was the question which the philosophers set themselves to answer. Plato and Aristotle agree in their explanation ; Athens is the faxaro; Bipc.oc of the Politics, the wayroniAton roArreiZs of the Eighth Book of the Republic. Athens alone, or at least first, of the Greek communities relaxed the coercive and disciplinary powers of the State. In Sparta the regimen of Lycurgus still survived ; the national type might be a narrow and repulsive one, but every citizen was moulded according to it. Hence the unity of the State, the absence of civil strife (o-risatO, the constancy of pur- pose, the steadiness in action, the dogged and successful tenacity which made a body of rude and ignorant militiamen masters of Greece. But Athens prided herself on the freedom of her citizens from all restraint, and on the infinite variety of character to which she allowed scope and room. The more salient passages in the speech of Pericles might be recommended to an American orator for use on the Fourth of July next year. The Athenian asserts and glories in the very principles which are expounded in Mr. Mill's book on Liberty. The experiment of universal freedom was tried once, and once only, in the ancient world, and it proved a failure. The City of Liberty was the first to enslave fellow-Greeks ; the open- minded and illuminated Ecclesia condemned Mytilene, destroyed hielos, and despatched the Sicilian Expedition ; the men of culture, Alcibiades, kinsman of Pericles, Critias, tragedian and orator, both pupils of the greatest of philosophers, bequeathed to their country names and memories for which no infamy was too deep. Accustomed as we are to read the character of Athens in her poetry and art, and to judge the wonderful precocity of her political development by modern standards, we are apt to look upon Plato and Aristotle as members of the party of reaction, or as blinded to the attractive qualities of the great city by philo- sophical prepossessions. But after all, they were better judges even than Mr. Grote ; their repugnance to Athenian institutions is not a mere craze or fantasy—'t fears of the brave and follies of the wise "—but was due to a reasoned conviction that those in- stitutions were a departure both in form and spirit from the natural and only possible type of the Greek community.
These considerations may help us to realise the nature of the problem which Aristotle attempts to solve in his treatises on Ethics and Politics, and to appreciate the real significance of much in them which seems at first sight fantastic or mechanical. The philosopher takes for granted the conditions of Greek life as he saw and knew it. That the State should be small and self- supporting, that the growth of wealth and population should be carefully restrained, that a privileged and an unprivileged class should exist side by side, that virtue is a form of political activity, —these and many other paradoxes, which sound strangely to modern ears, are to him primary truths. Nothing can be more repellent to us than the almost cynical heedlessness with which the ancient thinker sacrifices the toiling multitude to his select moral oligarchy who appropriate the virtues by a kind of natural monopoly. We are astounded at the credulity that would en- trust the State with functions which only a perpetual and plenary inspiration could direct rightly, and at the ignorance of human nature which could mistake the enchaining power of habit for the essence of moral education. Virtue seems to be left without either a motive or a standard ; vice is abandoned to itself as desperate and incurable. Moral progress in its earlier stages is represented as a routine, made up of acts in which the agent is a mere automaton, and terminated by a sudden illumination which enables him henceforward to reduce his conduct to a syllogistic form. The good man in time acquires an unerring aptitude in the discovery and application of the minor premiss, while looming in the background, at a greater moral altitude, and breathing the rarified atmosphere of pure thought, we see the dim, ideal figure of the Self-sufficing Philosopher, groaning and travailing for the hour when he will become perfectly "actualised." But the conceptions of Aristotle only appear grotesque or artificial to those who will not take the trouble to transport themselves into his world. We have endeavoured to show that a Greek thinker had as much reason to abhor individualism as a modern democrat has to scout paternal government. It being assumed that the end of man is happiness, and that happiness consists in the most har- monious exercise of our highest activities, what machinery could seem so apt for the production of the end as the State by relations to which the higher activities are summoned into life? Sparta had never relaxed the educational theory of the State and mean as were her ambitions, she succeeded in them ; Athens, with far nobler conceptions of the meaning of national life, had abandoned it, and she fell. What was the secret of the ruin of splendid natures like Aleibiades,—the key to the moral mystery of a life of high purposes and base deeds (ciapccona)? Plato and Aristotle, who knew both by tradition and experience the instability of the Greek character, are practically at one in their solution of the difficulty. The intellect is allowed to develope itself too early, and the restraints on the passions are too soon removed. Noble ideals spring up in the same nature side by side with uncontrolled and insubordinate desires, and their co-existence results in a per- petual conflict, like the civil factions in a petty State ; the man's conduct is a tragic series of inconsistencies, because he lacks unity of purpose and a disciplined will. Give us fine natures, say the philosophers (who have an aristocratic contempt for the intellec- tual canaille), and a State organised like Sparta, but with a wider aim, and we will train them into perfect characters. From their very birth, nay, even earlier, every influence that can affect them shall be regulated by a sovereign authority working for a definite end. They shall learn the mechanical and unconscious virtues of discipline and obedient loyalty before their eyes are opened, and they know good and evil. Not until they have given proof that the passions are completely under control and move instinc- tively upon rational lines, shall they be introduced to the prin- ciples of moral action, the ends and ideals of conduct, which will at once explain their past lives, and enlighten and inspire their future. There will be no break of continuity ; the desires will not change their direction or moderate their force ; but action will be intelligent, and no longer the creature of habit ; the pur- suit of a conceived purpose will take the place of hope, and fear, and custom, and as experience grows and widens, it will gradually create a kind of moral tact.
This is but a rude outline of Aristotle's scheme, but it may suffice to show the connection between his theories and the actual evils and dangers of the society in which he lived. He only touches incidentally on the essentially modern problems of the freedom of the will, the motive to virtue, and the possibility of moral reformation in the completely depraved. He is, we must repeat, a Greek writing for Greeks, and he goes to the social sys- tem with which he was familiar for the machinery which is to steady and to raise the national character. And yet the philoso- pher seems to have foreseen the futility of his schemes. Plato had compelled his guardians to leave their intellectual pleasures and mix in the nobler life of politics. But Aristotle, who watched the gradual dissolution of the small communities of Greece, had " fallen on evil days and evil tongues ; " he saw that the life of the free citizen, who was at once both ruler and subject, was becoming more and more a memory, and he recalls fondly the tra- ditions of the great sages of the earlier history. The beautiful picture of Thales in the Themleitts may have suggested to him the ideal of the isolated and self-absorbed thinker, as at once the most attractive and the most attainable in the conditions of the time.
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