THE CLASSICAL TRADITION--PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
The classical tradition in education is one of the ironies of history.
That pedants should have succeeded in making this tradition into a mere
convention is almost incredible. In the poetry, drama and philosophy
which we have inherited from ancient Athens there is a spirit of youth,
of freedom, of inquiry, of adventure. In the estimation of Egypt or of
India, the culture of Greece was _parvenu_. The striking thing about
the Greek spirit is its humanism, its lack of priestly tradition, its
independence of religious authority. The men of the fifth century
before Christianity were creators, not imitators. They were following
many lines of inquiry for the first time, unhampered by the prestige
of orthodoxy. A noisy populace could condemn the philosopher but could
not secure his deference to its beliefs. No idea, no institution was so
venerable or sacred as to escape critical examination. The practice of
examining all things was the method of education; its aim was the life
of Reason. There was no official instruction, no established truth,
no traditionally recognized knowledge. Student and teacher together
pursued wisdom not as scribes and custodians of ancient and hallowed
doctrine, but rather in the spirit of those who enter upon a voyage of
new discovery. Such is the spirit of the classical tradition and no
education is liberal which loses that spirit.
If we wish to know the meaning of a liberal education, we should turn
to those in whose lives and thoughts it was a living reality. I do
not believe that the student who grasps the significance of Plato’s
Apology, or the Phædo, or the Republic, can ever after be quite the
same. I once overheard a group of sophomores discussing the relative
greatness of various historical characters. Each had his favorite hero,
a conqueror, a statesman, an orator. One of the boys, who I afterwards
learned had discovered Plato’s dialogues for himself, said, “You
fellows are just repeating what you have heard people say or have read
in your history books. You’ll never know what a great man is till you
know Socrates. I think he was the greatest man who ever lived.” I saw
in his face a look of quiet earnestness which I have never forgotten.
Something was happening in that boy’s thinking. He was living through
an educational experience.
To the question what is an educated person like, one answer is, he
is like Socrates, or like Plato. Whitman said, “I and my kind do not
convince by argument; we convince by our presence.” In the Dialogues
there is a presence. Here the personality of a great genius stands
revealed. You really come to know Socrates. In his company you cannot
fail to delight in his humor, his brilliant flashes of insight, the
subtlety and tenacity and wide sweep of his thought, his daring, his
unfailing reasonableness, his candor and freedom of spirit. Whether
this personality is the Socrates of history or a creation of Plato’s
genius or a mixture of both is a matter that need not concern us
at present. Our aim is to “find” the educated man. Here by common
agreement is the supreme type.
Outside the Dialogues and a few such sources of information as the
writing of Xenophon, we know little that is authentic about Socrates.
Before Socrates there had been much speculation about natural phenomena
and the laws which govern the universe. Philosophers had begun to seek
naturalistic rather than mythological explanations of the world of
objects. This scientific interest was genuine, but the Greeks lacked a
logic of scientific method. Before man may think correctly, understand
his world or live wisely he must develop habits of exact thinking;
he must know what he means by what he says. He must examine his own
sentiments and beliefs, and presuppositions.
As an educator Socrates was positively revolutionary, subversive,
disconcerting. He stands out in sharp contrast to the other great
teachers of antiquity, and to most of those who have lived after him.
He gives mankind an entirely different idea of what education is. He
pursues knowledge; the others proclaim it. Unlike the philosophers of
India and Egypt or the prophets of Judea, _Socrates has no gospel_, no
creed, no made-in-advance message, no “thus saith the Lord,” no system
of “truth.” Others indoctrinate; Socrates proclaims his ignorance. He
is not a sceptic, for he believes that knowledge is not only possible,
but that men possess it, though they seldom make use of that which they
possess. Although not a sceptic, Socrates is decidedly an agnostic. He
shows popular ideas to be ignorance, mere opinion. Living at a time
when even the intelligent few had hardly begun to question traditional
illusions, he did not seek to lure his students back to acquiescence to
authority, but to develop a technique for testing all things. To use a
modern colloquialism, Socrates simply strove to “debunk” the minds of
his students. He tried to aid Athenian youths to understand themselves,
to think their way to some degree of freedom and mastery, to ground
their ideas of virtue, justice, government, in well-considered reason,
to gain temperance of judgment, to re-examine what they thought they
knew and see if it were knowledge or only opinion. And his was no mere
idle curiosity, but a serious and courageous facing of the elemental
problems of human living. He set the precedent for all subsequent
liberal education.
The herd loves nothing so little as the Socratic dealing with its
opinions. Such questioning is a challenge to popular faiths; it demands
that men reorient their minds to the values of experience. It arouses
in the opinionated the unwelcome suspicion that possibly they may be
deceiving themselves. It carries with it the suggestion that those
who uncritically accept dogma and custom are possibly intellectually
less alert than the critically minded few. It gives the hint that
conformity and moral earnestness are not enough for the good life and
that those who lay claim to ideas they have not thought out are a
little ridiculous. Every man who rises out of crowd-mindedness into
independent thinking weakens to that extent the faith of the crowd in
itself, and puts it on the defensive. Aristophanes gained popularity in
Athenian democracy by holding up the figure of Socrates to ridicule.
And when Socrates’ challenge could no longer be met with laughter, the
Fundamentalists of his day condemned the old philosopher to death on
the charge that he was corrupting the youth. As Woodrow Wilson once
said, “The human race has inexhaustible resources for resisting the
introduction of knowledge.”
How the influence of Socrates survives in the work of his pupil Plato
every school boy knows. It is also a matter of common knowledge that in
the beautiful dialogues which Plato wrote many years after his master’s
death, the figure of Socrates becomes little more at times than a
vehicle of the author’s own thought. But not every one thinks of the
dialogues as primarily a record of a great work of adult education.
The Socratic method of education is retained by Plato, but he modifies
the objectives. Plato has something to “teach.” Knowledge is still
found by the method of clarifying men’s thinking. But if men are to
live the life of reason, their knowledge must give them a definite
outlook on life. Plato seeks something to tie to. He is occupied with
the search for reality, “pure being.” His interest in mathematics
leads him to attempt to construe the world according to principles
of abstract thought. The world of _ideas_ is seen to be the ultimate
reality, the world of objects is but a manifestation,--as James put
it, but a “stereotyped copy of the deluxe edition” which exists in the
eternal. Hence knowledge is not only clear thinking; to know is to
possess reality. The real world consists of form, of idea, of universal
and abstract principle. Education becomes philosophic contemplation
of the ideas of the good, the true, the beautiful. A Francis Bacon or
an Isaac Newton in Plato’s situation would doubtless have developed a
logic of science. Plato elaborates a metaphysic. But it would be an
error to suppose that Plato is occupied merely with meditation upon
the transcendental. All knowledge is one. The truth, of which the mind
bears witness to itself, must ultimately prevail in the affairs of men.
The idea of the good must take the place of the old mythology. Wisdom
is virtue. The people are enemies of the truth and hate philosophy
largely because they have never known “a human being who in word
and work is perfectly moulded as far as he can be into the likeness
of virtue--such a man ruling a city which bears the same image.” Of
existing states, “not one of them is worthy of the philosophic nature.”
“But no one is satisfied with the appearance of good,--the reality
is what they seek; in the case of good, appearance is despised by
everyone.”
“Of this then, which every soul of man pursues and makes the end of
all his actions, having a presentiment that there is such an end and
yet hesitating because neither knowing the nature nor having the same
assurance of this as of other things, and therefore losing whatever
good there is in other things--of a principle such and so great as this
ought the best men in our State, to whom everything is entrusted, to be
in the darkness of ignorance?”
Thus Plato’s greatest dialogue, “The Republic,” interweaves the
speculative with the practical; it is at once a treatise on reality
and appearance, an inquiry into the nature of the good, an elaboration
of the abstract principle of justice into the constitution of an ideal
aristocratic republic, and a philosophy of education.
Jowett, in his introduction to the third edition to the English
translation of this dialogue, says,
“The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education,
of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and
Goethe are the legitimate descendants. Like Dante or Bunyan, he has
a revelation of another life; like Bacon, he is profoundly impressed
with the unity of knowledge; in the early Church he exercised a real
influence on theology, and at the Revival of Literature on politics.
Even the fragments of his words when ‘repeated at secondhand’ (Symp.
215 D) have in all ages ravished the hearts of men, who have seen
reflected in them their own higher nature. He is the father of
idealism in philosophy, in politics, in literature. And many of the
latest conceptions of modern thinkers and statesmen, such as the
unity of knowledge, the reign of law, and the equality of the sexes,
have been anticipated in a dream by him.”
“The Republic” begins with a discussion of justice. It is agreed that
justice is virtue and wisdom, and injustice is vice and ignorance.
Justice is the virtue both of an individual and of a state. In order
to discover the nature of this virtue, the author proceeds to “create
in idea a State.” The state must be protected from evil, it must
have guardians. The guardians need to have both natural gifts and
the qualities of a philosopher. The good watchdog must be able to
distinguish between the face of the friend and that of the foe. “And
must not an animal be a lover of learning who distinguishes what he
likes and dislikes by the test of knowledge and ignorance?”
“When we have found the desired natures, and now that we have found
them, how are they to be educated? Is not this an inquiry which may
be expected to throw light on the greater inquiry which is our final
end--How do justice and injustice grow up in States?”
Justice, he says, is each man doing his own business and not being a
busybody. One should practice the thing to which his nature is best
adapted. Justice is harmony, and harmony in the State is like harmony
in the nature of the individual. Intelligence must direct and control
the emotions, and the movements of the body. Hence in the just State,
men are to be divided into classes according to their degree of native
superiority.
This is not an easy task, for men will not easily be persuaded to
accept such distinctions of worth among themselves.
“How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods ... just one
royal lie which may deceive the rulers if that be possible, and at any
rate the rest of the city?”
“Well then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look you
in the face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which
I propose to communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the
soldiers, and lastly to the people. They are to be told that their
youth was a dream, and the education and training which they received
from us, an appearance only; in reality during all that time they were
being formed and fed in the womb of the earth, where they themselves
and their arms and appurtenances were manufactured; when they were
completed, the earth, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country
being their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for
her good, and to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are
to regard as children of the earth and their own brothers....
“‘Citizens,’ we shall say to them in our tale, ‘you are brothers, yet
God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command,
and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also
they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be
auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has
composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved
in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden
parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden
son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above
all else, that there is nothing which they should so anxiously guard,
or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the
race. They should observe what elements mingle in their offspring; for
if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and
iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the
ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend
in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be
sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are
raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle
says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be
destroyed.’”
Plato’s ideal state is thus an aristocracy of intelligence and of
virtue. There must be selection of those who are to rule. A series of
tests is proposed. Those selected must have shown greatest eagerness
to do what is good for their country. The youth are to be subjected
to various trials, toils, pains, conflicts, to determine whether they
can be forced to change their opinions by suffering pain, or by the
influence of enchantments, or the lure of pleasure, or as a result of
fear. Only those who come out of the trials victorious are to be made
rulers.
Their education is to be a rigid discipline, and it is to continue as
long as they live. Along with the tests which they must endure, the
young are to grow up in a healthy environment, and in an atmosphere of
simplicity. First a censorship is established to guard them against
evil influences. Only authorized tales are to be told them. Erroneous
representation of the gods is forbidden. As the young cannot judge
what is allegorical and what is literal, the state is to determine the
general forms in which the poets may cast their tales. Mothers may not
frighten children with myths. The Gods must never be represented as
the authors of evil. Nor may one be allowed to say that wicked men are
often happy and the good miserable. Elsewhere Plato says that no one
shall be permitted to travel abroad until he reaches the age of forty.
When he comes home he must tell the youth that the institutions of
other states are inferior to their own. If any man blasphemes, he is
to be put in the reformatory for five years. If in the end he remains
unrepentant he is to be put to death.
Plato requires that the young receive training in gymnastics and music
before entering upon the study of philosophy. Certain kinds of music
they may not be allowed to hear. Flute players are not to be admitted
to Plato’s state. Those who are clever at pantomime are to be exiled.
The theater is frowned upon, for the guardians must not be trained
to be imitators. Certainly they may not learn to imitate any kind of
illiberalism or baseness. In their acting they may not imitate slaves,
nor bad men, nor madmen, nor the neighing of horses, the bellowing
of bulls, nor the roll of thunder; nor may they represent smiths,
boatswains, or other artificers. And they may not play the part of a
woman old or young quarreling with her husband, or in conceit of her
happiness or when she is in affliction or sorrow or weeping--“and
certainly not one who is in sickness, love, or labor.”
There must be temperance and order and not too much laughter. There
must be no sensuality and coarseness. There will be no need of lawyers
and physicians. “There can be no more disgraceful state of education
than this; that not only artisans and the meaner sort of people need
the skill of first-rate physicians and judges, but also those who
profess to have had a liberal education.”
Thus would Plato direct the early education of the guardians of the
state. He has much more to say about protecting them from what he
regards as dangerous influences than about the subject matter in which
they are to be trained. His guardians are to become noble men; they are
not to be imitators or trained animals or exploiters or traders. It
is often said by those who believe in the materialist conception of
history that education is an instrument for exploitation by the ruling
class. In Plato’s state education is a mark of privilege, but his ideal
nobleman is a communist. He must not touch silver or gold; he must live
like a Spartan. He may call nothing his own, neither house nor wife nor
child. The rulers are to be philosophers, and philosophers, kings.
Hence the education of later life is the pursuit of philosophy. It is
knowledge of the idea of the good. True knowledge is drawn from within,
it is the turning of the eyes toward the light shed by the world of the
Idea, the spiritual world. It is the awakening of memories of ideas
seen by the soul of an earlier existence. Our world of concrete objects
and of sense experience cannot give this knowledge. Education deals
almost wholly with abstractions and with universals, and its method is
dialectic.
I think that much of the illiberalism of Plato grows out of his theory
of knowledge. To him as to Socrates, knowledge is of universals. Mere
awareness of concrete objects we will agree is not knowledge. If we
only knew unrelated things--just one thing and then another, as we have
them in sense experience, we could have knowledge _of_ them but not
_about_ them. It is the knowledge about things that gives the world
its meanings. Much of the significance of things depends upon how we
conceive their relations. Every concept is an abstraction; it signifies
not some concrete fact, but a class or a common quality which inheres
in a number of objects. So the Greeks sought to find concepts which
would not be self-contradictory and would hold for all of the class
to which they were applied, and for nothing else. The Greeks did not
seek accurate information concerning facts. They believed they had
exact knowledge when they had discovered just what they meant by any
concept. They had almost no experimental science. They had begun to
be deeply interested in the phenomena of nature but their interest
was largely speculative as yet. If they had possessed the modern
scientific laboratory their knowledge could still have been abstract
but it would have remained knowledge about nature. Knowledge would
have increased as men carefully observed objects, classified them,
studied their relations and made note of the changes which take place
under fixed conditions. By the method of forming hypotheses and then
trying to verify them by fact, knowledge could have been at once both
of the universal and of the concrete. It would have been recognized
all along that universals are merely descriptive terms signifying
common properties and that they do not stand for realities which are
independent of or outside the several individual objects in which these
properties are found. With Socrates, I believe, knowledge is about
universals, but he is primarily concerned with attaining clear and
workable abstractions, that is, he is interested chiefly in sharpening
the _instruments_ of thinking.
With Plato the interest in ideas is very different. He is a
mathematician. He is fascinated with ideas of number and of geometrical
form. Mathematics to many minds seems to consist of a world of pure
reason which is more permanent than the world of things. Philosophers
before Plato had wrestled with the problem of change. Existence was
seen to be a stream in which everything is carried along toward
its inevitable destruction. Every object at any moment is but the
cross-section of the process of its becoming something different. Our
bodies grow and perish, so also does all pass away. The rivers run to
the sea, the plants die, the temples of the gods crumble. Even the
mountains are but waves on the surface of a sea of time into which all
things sink and are lost forever. How can the temporary objects which
whirl past in the course of their transformation be said really to
exist? Existence surely must be endurance.
I think that Plato, like many thinkers since, saw the terrifying
significance of the flow of things and sought security and “reality”
in something permanent outside the process of change. What was more
natural than that he should turn to the realm of abstract thought? The
objects we perceive change, but a concept always means the same. The
world may pass away, things may each turn into other things, as water
into vapor and fire to smoke and the body to dust, but two and two are
still four, and the sum of the angles of a triangle remains constant.
Hence above and behind the world of objects there is a world of ideas
into which the teeth of time cannot gnaw.
You have only to believe that ideas have an existence independent of
the minds which think them and all is transformed. Instantly you step
out of Time into Eternity; form without content; number without things
to be counted; common properties of objects stripped of the objects in
which such properties inhere; the forms of logical discourse, minus
the things talked about and the talkers as well; goodness, without
anything in particular to be good; beauty in general, independent
of any concrete beautiful thing, truth universal and absolute and
outside experience. All this is now the _real_ world, and the world
of troublesome, fleeting objects becomes a shadow and a delusion.
Knowledge is knowledge of the “real.” In other words, knowledge is
about itself. The more abstract and universal an idea is the more
reality it has. The mind persuades itself that it possesses Being,
Motion, the Good and the Beautiful merely by the magic of thinking
about them in abstract terms. The universe is transformed into an
ordered system of postulates and verbal exercises. Education now is
something more than the clarification of concepts; it is initiation
into the superworld of eternal verities.
It is not my purpose to attempt a discussion of Platonic Idealism.
It has fascinated many of the most subtle minds of the race down to
our own times. It is the foundation of much Christian theology. Its
re-affirmation at the time of the Renaissance has brought with it the
restatement of many problems which must be considered in the course of
one’s education. My point is that Plato with all his genius contributed
to the tradition of liberal education a system of values very different
from the humanism and agnosticism of Socrates. His influence has often
tended to make the aim of education mere intellectuality, rather than
intelligent grappling with the problems of living, and to transform the
search for the good life into a flight from the realities of experience.
Go one step further and you land in ascetic mysticism. The Soul,
the Knower, is no more at home in the world of objects than is the
philosopher in the market place. It belongs to the spiritual world, the
higher realms of Being, in which ideas are forever pure and free of
distortion by matter. In the Phædo, Plato says that if we are to have
pure knowledge, the soul must be quit of the body which ever thwarts
it. Body and soul belong to different worlds. Plato thus prepares the
way for St. Paul and his doctrine that the spirit lusteth against the
flesh and the flesh against the spirit, and that to be present in the
body is to be absent from the Lord.
If matter is corruption and mankind is during life chained to the
material body, human nature ceases to be trustworthy. Plato’s distrust
of human nature bears fruit some centuries later in the statement that
the natural man is sin and death, and in the doctrine of regeneration.
And unregenerate man is prone to error. Knowledge of the truth comes
by divine revelation and is to be sustained by infallible authority.
Dissent is heresy; assent may be required in the interest of salvation.
We have not yet reached the position of Tertullian, “I believe that
which is absurd,” but Platonism is headed in that direction. Knowledge
which feeds on itself in the end eats itself up.
But there is in Plato something of far greater educational importance
than any metaphysic or theory of knowledge. When James said that in
the study of the classics one learns to recognize human excellence,
I wonder if he had Plato in mind. I have no doubt that Nietzsche was
thinking of him when he turned to philosophy for an answer to his
question, “what is noble?” One who deliberately strives to imitate
the manners and acquire the virtues of noble spirits, is a prig and
a clown. But unless education ennobles the mind, one becomes only a
well-informed cad. Nietzsche’s catalogue of noble traits is a little
absurd. We learn what is noble only when we see it. And efforts at
education “for character” are little more than cheap conventional
substitutes for such excellence. But there is a loftiness and sweep in
Plato’s thought which are more than genius; a graciousness which is
more than skill; a sincerity which is more than moral earnestness. He
has wrestled with the most searching problems that existence presents
to the mind of man, problems which each must face and to which he must
give his answer if ever he is to become a master spirit. Would you know
what nobility of mind is? Study Plato.
The tradition of liberal education is a golden thread woven into the
fabric of civilization. Viewed in the perspective of history, the
thread is often broken. It is worked into various patterns according to
the divergent interests of successive ages, each pattern expressive of
the values and meanings which men once held important. The patterns,
whether lovely or grotesque, whether they are woven in or are merely
_appliqué_, are the creations of the time. The thread belongs to all
times, and whether for this tradition we are more indebted to Plato
than to Aristotle is a question we leave to those who are interested in
the history of education. We are seeking to know what the tradition is.
I recently heard a teacher of philosophy say, “Aristotle is dead.” His
influence has died many times since the early death of his pupil, the
Macedonian conqueror, left the philosopher to the tender mercies of a
suspicious Athens. It would seem that the interest in Aristotle dies,
only to reappear subsequently in new configurations. He has something
that we always come back to when sanity returns after an epoch of
exaggeration and over-emphasis. If Socrates is critical intelligence,
and Plato nobility of spirit, Aristotle is sanity. All three are
essentials of liberal education.
One can hardly over-rate the extent of Aristotle’s influence upon the
education of western Europe. For many centuries men spoke of him as
“The Philosopher,” drilled their minds in his logic, added little to
his metaphysics, his natural philosophy, his principles of ethics and
politics. Three periods of intellectual awakening may be attributed
largely to the revival of interest in his writings--that of Rome at
the time of Cicero, whose education and philosophy was essentially
Aristotelian; that of the brilliant Arabic culture which preceded the
Crusades; and that of the scholastic education of western Europe,
at the close of the Middle Ages. In the last, Aristotle’s teaching
was very much distorted as a result of theological interest and of
ignorance of the Greek language; and his hold upon education had with
much difficulty to be broken before men could turn their attention to
the study of nature or develop a logic of science. Aristotle could not
have anticipated that his authority would one day become an obstacle to
the study of nature. He himself was the great naturalist of his age.
His extensive work of research and classification of natural phenomena
remained unequalled until modern times. Had the Greeks not despised
mechanics, Aristotle might have possessed the necessary instruments
for scientific experiment, and our knowledge of nature might have been
centuries ahead of where it is today.
Unlike Plato, his former master, Aristotle did not displace the world
of objects by a world of abstract thought. He seems to have held that
universals are real, but only as an account of the order which prevails
in the world. His logic is primarily instrumental. His whole philosophy
is an attempt at well-ordered common sense.
The “Politics” and “Ethics” contain Aristotle’s philosophy of
education. It is the task of the legislator to consider how his
citizens may be good men. This is also the task of the educator.
Goodness is not represented as obedience to divine commands. Neither
is its aim that of securing reward in a future life. The aim of
goodness is the good life, and the good life is the happy life, the
life that is lived well. Such a life requires certain material goods,
also friendships, health, good looks, leisure and _aretè_. There is no
word in English which is the exact equivalent of _aretè_. It is often
translated virtue, or excellence. But Aristotle has in mind a definite
quality of excellence, which includes distinction, good breeding,
self-command, wisdom, balance and poise, and equanimity in all things.
_Aretè_ is the art of living.
Nothing could be farther from Aristotle’s thought than that education
should become a separate interest or pursuit of a knowledge that
has nothing to do with the kind of life a man leads. To his mind
the central question for education is, what sort of man is it most
desirable that one should become. Moderns may justly criticise him
because he omits any reference to work, other than to say that it is
debasing. His philosophy of education is that of a leisure class. And
since work makes up the greater portion of most men’s experience in
life, it may be said that Aristotle would train men to possess the
subjective qualities of virtue only, and without reference to their
tasks and duties. It cannot be denied that his theory of education
has often been so employed. I have already discussed at some length
the relation of education to work. While Aristotle, like others of
his time, looks down upon labor, it does not follow that a man is
necessarily shut off from the good life as Aristotle depicts it merely
because he earns his own bread. Let us say that Aristotle is in error
when he says that work is debasing. We may still hold that if his “good
life” is good at all, it is good for the man who works for his living.
My point is that this philosophy of education is not unrelated to the
ordinary affairs of life, but that it points out those habits which
best enable one to turn such affairs to value and to happy use.
Aristotle has set forth his idea of the good man in no uncertain terms.
The good is not Plato’s absolute or ideal good--good in general; it
is _happiness_. It is to be attained not merely by philosophical
speculation, but by “an energy of the soul according to reason,”
by well-considered habits of choosing. Happiness is the aim of all
knowledge and of every act. But the educated do not agree with the
vulgar as to what it is. The latter believe it to be the accident of
good fortune. The former hold that it is the result of virtue. Virtues
are praiseworthy habits. “Virtue” therefore is a habit accompanied
with deliberate preference, in the relative mean defined by reason,
and as the prudent man would define it, “It is the mean state between
two vices, one in excess, the other in defect. Temperance and courage
are destroyed both by the excess and the defect, but are preserved by
the mean. Virtues are neither passions nor capacities.” They are not
mere moral enthusiasms nor any subjective state of mind. Wisdom and
deliberation are required for virtue. _The good man is the educated
man._
Education is not merely the teaching of morals, or the laying down
rules for behavior. The virtuous habits are not acquired by rote nor
exercised automatically. The habit of virtue is that of _appropriate
response_ to the situation, the response which is right because
“nothing may be” taken away from it nor added to it without causing it
to tend toward vicious excess or defect. There must be discrimination
or one will go to extreme. Courage is not mere bravery; it is that
well-considered “mean state” between fear and over-confidence.
Aristotle quotes Socrates to the effect that courage is a “kind of
science.”
The temperate man does not feel desire “except in moderation, nor more
than he ought, nor in any case improperly.” He does not desire things
which are dishonorable or beyond his means. He is in the mean in all
things, his desires are “according to the suggestions of right reason.”
Liberality is the mean between prodigality and stinginess. It is not
virtuous to give unless one gives wisely. “The liberal man therefore
will give for the sake of the honorable, and he will give properly for
he will give to proper objects, in proper quantities, at proper times,
and his giving will have all the other qualities of right giving, and
he will do this pleasantly and without pain; for that which is done
according to virtue is pleasant.”... “But if it should happen to a
liberal man to spend in a manner inconsistent with propriety and what
is honorable, he will feel pain, but only moderately and as he ought,
for it is characteristic of virtue to feel pleasure and pain at proper
objects, and in a proper manner.”
Magnanimity is a virtue if accompanied by intelligence. The magnanimous
are concerned with honor. He who being really worthy, estimates his own
worth highly, is magnanimous. He whose worth is low and who estimates
it lowly is not magnanimous, but modest. He who estimates his worth
lightly when he is really unworthy is vain. He who estimates it less
highly than it deserves is “little-minded.” In good or bad fortune,
the magnanimous will behave with moderation, he will not be too much
delighted with success nor too much grieved at failure. He must take
more care for truth than for the good opinion of men. He will not be
servile, for all flatterers are mercenary and low-minded. He will
not be given to the habit of too much admiring the great, nor will he
be fond of talking about himself or about other people; he will not
recollect injuries, nor be over-anxious, nor disposed to praise or
blame. “The step of the magnanimous man is slow, his voice deep and
his language steady: for he who only feels anxiety about a few things
is not apt to be in a hurry: and he who thinks highly of nothing is
not vehement and shrillness and quickness of speaking arise from these
things.... But vain men are foolish and ignorant of themselves ...
little-mindedness is more opposed to magnanimity than vanity, for it
is oftener found and is worse.” Hence a just appreciation of one’s
worth--knowledge of self, as Socrates would have said--is essential to
Aristotle’s ideal man.
Furthermore, meekness is a virtue only when it is a sign of
intelligence. “He who feels anger on proper occasions, at proper
persons, and besides in a proper manner, at proper times, and for a
proper length of time is an object of praise.” The meek man is not
carried away by passion. He who is excessively sensitive to anger is
irascible. He who is unsensitive is a fool.
Even the virtue of truthfulness must be exercised in moderation and
with good judgment. The excess of it is arrogance, the defect is
cunning or false modesty. Wit is also a virtue; the excess, Aristotle
says, is buffoonery or sarcasm, the defect is clownishness.
Justice is discussed in a manner quite different from that of Plato.
The problem of universal justice is dismissed, and justice is
considered in relation to various transactions between man and man.
Hence the necessity of defining “right reason.” Aristotle turns to a
discussion of Prudence, Intelligence, Deliberation, Wisdom. He says,
“It is not sufficient to know the theory of virtue,”--the end is
in “practical matters.” Aristotle holds the relation of morals to
education is much the same as that which we found it to be in the
preceding chapter. Mere precept and example are not enough; there must
be general culture, and education should extend throughout a lifetime.
“But reasoning and teaching, it is to be feared, will not avail in
every case, but the mind of the hearer must be previously cultivated
by habits to feel pleasure and aversion properly just as the soil
must be which nourishes the seed. For he who lives in obedience to
passion would not listen to reasoning which turns him away from it:
nay more, he would not understand it. And how is it possible to change
the convictions of such a man as this? On the whole, it appears that
passion does not submit to reasoning, but to force....
“Perhaps it is not sufficient that we should meet with good education
when young: but since when we arrive at manhood we ought also study
and practice what we have learnt we should require laws also for this
purpose.”
Aristotle discusses the desirability of public education. He thinks
that first men must become fitted for the duties of the legislator.
And since, he says, all previous writers have discussed the subject of
politics without scientific examination of the subject, he proposes to
undertake such an examination for himself.
Let us note that neither Plato nor Aristotle when considering the good
life, thinks that the individual may attain it in isolation. It is not
merely a quality of the soul, but has to do with all of one’s human
relationships. Aristotle says that it is very difficult for the young
to receive a good education under a bad government. He would seem to
make the state and the laws a means to education. And it is the aim
of both the state and education to enable the citizen to live happily.
Education is training in wisdom and virtue, and the exercise of these
is freedom. Those who are incapable of education are slaves by nature;
those who obey only passion and abstain from vicious things not because
they are disgraceful but for fear of punishment, cannot be reasoned
with; they must be restrained by force. Education is liberal in that it
enables a man to govern himself.
In comparison with Plato, Aristotle appears prosaic, worldly,
and lacking in charm and humor. Much that he says appears to us
platitudinous, for the same reason that the woman found Shakespeare’s
dramas full of familiar quotations. We forget how subversive of
convention and dogma it is to found the good life in the life of
reason. Aristotle has passed by mythology and tradition and the
sanctions of religion and has achieved a purely secular guide to
conduct. He has made freedom and happiness the goal of virtue and
education, and has done this without descending to utilitarianism. He
has made right reason the standard of life and has at the same time
given to the standard an æsthetic valuation. He has linked education
with conduct, and suggested a moral training which gives human nature
credit for some degree of intelligence. Aristotle is no longer “the
Philosopher.” Education in the modern world is necessarily set to tasks
very different from those of ancient Greece. But the good life is still
the goal, and Aristotle’s good man has remained one of the ideals of
liberal education.