| | Steve, I agree with Joseph's broader claim. It is interesting that while altruism based in religion at least is an attempt to improve the individual - to make you a good or better person and with a promise of eternal reward - secular philosophers abandoned any claim to self-interest. Even Immanuel Kant, who attempted to argue for the Enlightenment, advocated deontology, an ethics of duty to be followed whether you benefited or not. Broadly speaking, all of Greek philosophy was about achieving the good life, about your living right to live well.
Just as we have developed significantly sophisticated understandings of astronomy and music, so, too is our ethical theory of individualism far beyond theirs. It is important to keep Aristotle in his historical context. We are embarrassed by his advocacy of slavery as natural. Karl Popper places the origin of that in Aristotle's metaphysics, which like Plato's metaphysics sought the hidden perfect form or idea or essence from which the apparent and experiential world differs, strays, and devolves. Aristotle had his own virtues as a scientist, of course. On my blog, I cite his embryology of the chick as one of history's greatest scientific experiments.
As Ayn Rand said, Aristotle was the greatest of our philosophers, despite his faults. The faults remain, nonetheless. His Nicomachean Ethics instruct you and me on how to be good and better people. As such, we are more suited to enslaving barbarians and telling women what to do.
From The Open Society and It's Enemies by Karl Popper.
"… Those sensible things which are copies or children of the same original, resemble not only this original in their Form or Idea, but also one another, as do children of the same family ; and as children are called by the name of their father, so are the sensible things, which bear the name of their Forms or Ideas … 'They are all called after them', as Aristotle says."
"Though there could be no definition of any sensible thing, as they were always changing ', there could be definitions and true knowledge of things of a different kind. ' If knowledge or thought were to have an object, there would have to be some different, some unchanging entities, apart from those which are sensible ', says Aristotle , and he reports of Plato that ' things of this other sort, then, he called Forms or Ideas, and the sensible things, he said, were distinct from them, and all called ^after them. And the many things which have the same name as a certain Form or Idea exist by participating in it." OSIE, Page 24
"It will for ever remain one of the greatest triumphs of Athenian democracy that it treated slaves humanely, and that in spite of the inhuman propaganda of philosophers like Plato himself and Aristotle it came, as he witnesses, very close to abolishing slavery." Page 36
Against this great humanitarian movement, the movement of the ' Great Generation ', as I shall call it later (chapter 10), Plato, and his disciple Aristotle, advanced the theory of the biological and moral inequality of man. Greeks and barbarians are unequal by nature ; the opposition between them corresponds to that between natural masters and natural slaves."
"In order to show this, I may first quote Aristotle, another opponent of equalitarianism, who, under the influence of Plato's naturalism, elaborated among other things the theory that some men are by nature born to slavery. Nobody could be less interested in spreading an equalitarian and individualistic interpretation of the term 'justice '. But when speaking of the judge, whom he describes as a personification of that which is just ', Aristotle maintains that it is the task of the judge to restore equality '. He tells us that ' all men think justice to be a kind of equality ', an equality, namely, which pertains to persons '. He even thinks (but here he is wrong) that the Greek word for
'justice' is to be derived from a root that means 'equal division '. And when discussing the principles of democracy, he says that ' democratic justice is the application of the principle of numerical equality (as distinct from proportionate equality) '. OSIE Page 80
It [the State to Aristotle] has higher tasks than the protection of human beings and their rights. It has moral tasks. To take care of virtue is the business of a state which truly deserves this name ', says Aristotle. If we now try to translate this criticism into the language of political demands, then we find that these people want two things. First, they
wish to make the state an object of worship. OSIE Page 99
And here, I refer you also to Jacob Bronowski's passages about the barbarian horsemen, such as the Baktriari who still follow this life, and their German counterparts in World War II. "The idea that nomads or even hunters constituted the original upper class is corroborated by the age-old and still surviving upper-class traditions according to which war, hunting, and horses, are the symbols of the leisured classes ; a tradition which formed the basis of Aristotle's ethics and politics, and is still alive, as Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class) and Toynbee himself have shown ; and to these traditions we can perhaps add the animal breeder's belief in racialism, and especially in the racial superiority of the upper class. The latter belief which is so pronounced in caste states and in Plato and in Aristotle is held by Toynbee to be * one of the . . sins of our . .
modern age ' and something alien from the Hellenic genius' ([Toynbee] op. cit., Ill, 93). But although many Greeks may have developed beyond racialism, it seems likely that Plato's and Aristotle's theories are based on old traditions ; especially in view of the fact that racial ideas played such a role in Sparta.page " OSIE 203
That last above about the "old forms" is crucial to the presentation in OSIE. Popper argues that Greek philosophers (many of them, anyway) were troubled by change and sought to find permanent order. This goes back to Heraclitus and is echoed Aristotle and, of course in Plato's Republic. They both wanted to establish the old, traditional ways of living and do away with the flux and flow of modern life. We see this today. The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel talks mostly about the left and the Greens, but also about the right wing, about conservatives, libertarians, and Objectivists who look forward to armageddon and apocalypse.
"This anti-equalitarianism and its devastating effects has been clearly described by W. W. Tarn in his excellent paper ' Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind' (Proc. of the British Acad., XIX, 1933, p. 123 ff.), Tarn recognizes that in the fifth century, there may have been a movement towards ' something better than the hard-and-fast division of Greeks and barbarians ; but, he says, this had no importance for history, because anything of the sort was strangled by the idealist philosophies. Plato and Aristotle
left no doubt about their views. Plato said that all barbarians were enemies by nature ; it was proper to wage war upon them, even to the point of enslaving . . them. Aristotle said that all barbarians were slaves by nature . .' (p. 124, italics Poppers). OSIE page 206
(Edited by Xenocles on 1/29, 3:28pm)
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 1/29, 3:32pm)
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