Ethics and Politics: Sciences for the Mature

Politics in the narrower sense of nomothetics [constitution-making science] intends to teach the lawgiver how to create the institutions that will inculcate the ethical excellences in the citizens. Assuming for the moment that such a science of means for the desired end can be successfully developed, there remains the great question whether the desired end is valid in itself and whether we should invest any efforts in its realization.

The value of nomothetics depends on the validity of the prudential science of ethics as developed by Aristotle. What if somebody should challenge the truth of the Aristotelian propositions concerning excellences? What if he should advance an alternative catalogue of goods to be realized in society? If, for instance, we should make a rising standard of living the supreme value to be realized, the governmental institu­tions favoring the realization of this end would diverge widely from the standards developed in Politics VII and VIII. In brief: Aristotle has to face the famous “That’s What You Think!”

Aristotle realized the problem. In Nicomachean Ethics II, 3 and 4, he explains that political science (in the sense of a general science of action) has a lower degree of exactness than the demonstrative sciences. We can arrive at truth in a prudential science only by sifting opinions; and we must use some caution when we proceed from the general rules to a discussion of concrete cases. The reader should, therefore, receive the propositions in the same spirit in which they are made, “for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of things admits”— a golden rule that should be taken to heart by our contemporaries who feel unhappy because political science has not the same type of exactness as physics (1094b11-27).

Moreover, in order to discuss ethical problems with discernment, one must be well acquainted with them; the disputants must have had an all-round education and considerable experience in life and conduct, for these experiences are the basis of the discussion. Young men will, therefore, not profit much from the study of political science; and it makes no difference whether they are young in years or youthful in character.

Ethics is not a matter of abstract knowledge but of the actual formation of the man; hence, for persons lacking in self-restraint the mere knowledge of ethical rules will be of little use, while critical knowledge will be of great benefit for men whose passions are guided by reason. The pupil must be in possession of good habits in order to be an intelligent student of the noble and just, and generally of political science (1095b6).

Still, we have not disposed of the problem that different people desire different things as good. In the face of this fact we must either maintain, so it seems, that each man desires as good what appears to him as good and that, as a consequence, we have only apparent goods; or, that there is a real good, but that the persons who choose wrongly do not really wish what they desire. Aristotle solves the problem by defining as good what is wished for in the true sense, while conceding that every man wishes what appears to him as good.

He distinguishes between “true” good and “phenomenal” good; all goods are good in appearance, but only that phenomenal good is the true good that is desired by the true wish. The truth of the good is inseparable from the truth of the wish; hence, a critical debate about the good can be conducted only by men who are capable of desiring according to truth. Such a man Aristotle calls spoudaios. The translators render the term as “the good man.” It would perhaps be more adequate to speak of the serious, or weighty, man; or, in order to oppose him to the “young man” who is unfit for ethical debate, one might call the spoudaios the mature man, or the man who has attained full human stature. Such a mature man differs from others by seeing the truth in each class of things, being as it were their kanon kai metron, that is, their norm and measure (1113a29-35).

These reflections of Aristotle are perhaps the most important con­tribution to an epistemology of ethics and politics that has ever been made. We remember Plato’s problem of the truth (aletheia) of the myth. The truth of the compact unit of wish-good is, in the contemplative attitude, the problem that corresponds to the truth of the myth. In our preceding analysis of the cycle theory we have, furthermore, seen that the memory of the species in the infinite time of recurrent cycles takes the place of the Platonic unconscious from which, through anamnesis, the myth is drawn.

The reflections of Aristotle are of priceless importance in the history of ideas because here we can observe in the very act how the truth of the prudential sciences emerges from the truth of the myth. The debate about truth in action is neither a vain opining without verification, nor is it an intuition of “values” in the abstract. It is a critical analysis of the excellences in actual existence in a historical society. The prudential science can formulate principles of action (such as the mesotes) according to reason (logos) because it finds the logic of action em­bedded in the habits of man. The reality of habituation and conduct in a society has prudential structure, and a prudential science can be developed as the articulation of the logos in reality.

From this fundamental insight, then, follow the corollaries. The analysis of excellences can be conducted only by men who know the material that they analyze; and a man can know the excellences only if he possesses them. Moreover, its results can be understood as true only by men who can verify them by the excellences that they possess, that is, by mature men — or at least by men who are sufficiently advanced in formation of character themselves to understand the problem.

As a consequence, if we may adapt a famous formula, ethics is a science of mature people, by mature people, for mature people. It can arise only in a highly civilized society as its self-interpretation; or, more precisely, in that stratum of a civilized society in which the excellences are cultivated and debated. From such a social environ­ment the analytical consciousness of the virtues can flower; and this consciousness, in its turn, may become an important factor in the education of the young.

The intimate connection of a prudential science with a society in which the excellences are actualized raises a number of problems. They are on principle the problems that also arose on occasion of the Platonic myth of the soul; but they have undergone certain transformations in the Aristotelian medium of contemplation. Plato could develop the good politeia, he could actualize it in his own soul and in the souls of his friends, but he could not actualize it in historical reality as the order of Athens or of a Hellenic empire.

On the level of pragmatic history, the philosopher is not the ordering force of society; he is in competition with rival forces of various kinds. The Platonic vision of order is not a possession of mankind; it is the possession of a limited group; and the same holds true for the Aristotelian prudential science. Other groups, and they may be the majority in a society, will be less receptive, or not receptive at all, to such insights. Men differ from each other in a manner that Aristotle characterizes through a quotation from Hesiod:

Far best is he, who knows all things himself;

Good, he that hearkens when men counsel right;

But he who neither knows, nor lays to heart

Another’s wisdom, is a useless wight.¹

If we translate these lines (1095b10-13) into human types, we may distinguish between (1) men who have authority, (2) men who can recognize authority and accept it, and (3) men who neither have authority, nor can recognize and accept it.

If we define a good society as a society in which the highest good of man can be realized, then we arrive at the proposition: The existence of a good society depends on the social predominance of a group of men in whom the excellences are actualized, or who are the “norm and measure” in the Aristotelian sense. When the predominance of such a group is endangered, for one historical reason or another, by the masses whose passions (pathos) are not restrained by reason (logos), then the quality of the society will decline.

Political science, in the sense of a general science of action, thus, is inseparable from a philosophy of historical existence. The validity of its insights is not in question; but the validity will be socially accepted only under certain historical conditions. The previously adduced challenge of the “That’s What You Think” is, therefore, of considerable importance in a theory of ethics. The challenge cannot affect the validity of prudential science, but it brings home to us that the debate on ethics can be conducted only among the mature men and that a comprehensive study of moral phenomena must include a study of the moral attitudes of the fools or wights (achreios) in the Hesiodian verse.

A pathology of morals, in the most literal sense of a study of disorder through vagaries of passion (pathos), is quite as important for the understanding of political society as the prudential science of the excellences. If we understand the “That’s What You Think,” not as a challenge to validity, but as a manifestation of the revolt against excellence, we shall become aware how precariously balanced the good society is in historical existence. And we shall understand that a well-functioning society must provide institutions not only for the inculcation of excellences in the educable but also for the management of the ineducable mass.

Aristotle was aware of this problem. In Nicomachean Ethics X, 9, he reflects that the task of ordering a society would be easy if men could be taught virtue by discourse. Discourse can encourage a gener­ous youth of inborn nobility of character; it cannot guide the masses toward moral nobility (kalokagathia). The many are amenable to fear but not to shame; and they abstain from evil, not because of its baseness, but because they are afraid of sanctions. Living by passion, they pursue the happiness of pleasure; and they do not know about the noble pleasures because they have never experienced them.

To change the firmly rooted habits of such characters by argument is difficult, if not impossible. For, generally speaking, passions seem not to be amenable to reason but only to force. This being the state of things, it will be necessary to support the personal educational processes in a society by compulsory processes. The impersonal pres­sure of the law must come to the aid of personal influence and model conduct. The law has compulsory power (dynamis), and at the same time it is a rule participating in prudence and intellect (phronesis and nous).

A right system of laws, educating and enforcing the discipline of the young and sanctioning trespasses of the adult, is necessary for the stabilization of society. And the lawgiver is the man who knows how to devise institutions that will have the desired result of securing the social predominance of human excellence as understood by the spoudaios.² We arrive again at the definition of politics as the science of nomothetics but now under the aspect of a science that will provide the supplementary instrument of compulsion for keeping in line those members of society who cannot qualify as spoudaioi.

We are coming closer to the more subtle reasons that have moti­vated the subdivision of the general science of action into ethics and politics. After the pragmatic failure of Plato it was probably clear to everybody who cared about such problems that political society could dissociate into private circles in which the excellences were cultivated (as, for instance, the cult communities of the schools) and the politicians who pursued quite different ends. One still could develop a science of nomothetics as Aristotle did in his Politics, but whether the molders of the political destiny would make any use of it, that was the great question, probably to be answered in the nega­tive.

In view of the threatening possibility that the course of political history would annihilate the actual formation of a polity through the mature men, it became desirable to articulate the wisdom of the excellences independent of the problem of its political actualization. Through the Nicomachean Ethics, rather than through the Politics, the prudential wisdom of Hellas has separated from the contingen­cies of actualization and become the possession of mankind, or rather of that part of mankind that can recognize authority and bow to it. The Nicomachean Ethics is the great document in which the authority of the spoudaios asserts itself through the ages, beyond the accidents of politics.

Notes

1. Hesiod, Works and Days, 293 ff. Translated by W. D. Ross in the Oxford trans­lation of Nicomachean Ethics.

2. In this context again the problem of the spoudaios is elaborated, 1176a15 ff.

This excerpt is from Order and History (Volume III): Plato and Aristotle (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 16) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999)

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