Week Eight

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

Rafael’s School of Athens portrays at its center Plato (left, in red) and Aristotle (right, in blue).

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Born in Stagira, a Greek colony in Thracian Chalcidice, adjacent to Macedon, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) systematized the philosophical revolution begun in Ionia, existentially radicalized in Socrates, and amplified in the transfigured political mythology of Plato’s dialogues—in which something more democratic than democracy shines forth: the address of truth, goodness, and beauty to each soul. Aristotle’s non-literary approach to philosophy, proceeding in treatises and grounded in a biological methodology, and less obviously mystical than previous philosophy, allows him to communicate a school system that will enable a secular, “Western,” approach to the world but which will also, paradoxically, be met with vigorous opposition from such founders of philosophical modernity as Hobbes and Francis Bacon.

Aristotle had been trained for twenty years, from when he was about eighteen, in the institution Plato had established, the Academy, which at first did not communicate an orthodox doctrine, but rather preserved the original Socratic dynamism of restless questioning pursued through argument (dialectic). Aristotle would go on to form his own school of philosophy (called Peripatetic) at the Lyceum, a temple dedicated to Apollo. But before that he was given a momentous mission. Aristotle’s love for the natural sciences no doubt had its roots in the medical tradition of his family. The symbiosis of medicine and philosophical inquiry could already be discerned in the work of Herodotus, as Halicarnassus was just across the strait from the island of Cos, where Hippocrates, “the father of medicine,” was active. Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, was court physician to a king of Macedon. Around 343, Aristotle was charged by another king of Macedon, Philip II, with the education of his thirteen-year-old son: none other than the one who would become Alexander the Great. Aristotle seems to have carried out this duty for seven years, that is, until Alexander’s accession to the throne. Philip had sought to unite the Greek city-states and take war to the old enemy of the Greeks: the Persian Empire. Almost succeeding, he was assassinated. His son would forge an empire with even greater reach than the Persian, indeed one of the greatest in the history of the world. He sought to synthesize “East” and “West,” indicating he understood the internal logic of the civilization that arose in Mesopotamia. Unfortunately, destroying the independent life of the polis, Alexander purchased this merging of horizons at the cost of human liberty, even seeking a Persian obeisance to himself. Aristotle’s death occurs the year after that of his most famous student. Alexander’s death in 323 B.C. marks the end of the Classical period, and the beginning of the Hellenistic.

- David Franks