Analysis
Aristotle’s discussion of incontinence refines Socrates’
famous claim that no one ever knowingly does wrong. According to
Socrates, ignorance is the source of all wrongdoing, and so perfect
wisdom is the best guard against vice. The idea of incontinence—a
rough translation of the Greek word akrasia, which
more accurately translates as “lacking self-control”—raises a problem
for this view because some people clearly do wrong knowingly. A
person addicted to cigarettes might light up, saying, “I know this
stuff is bad for me and I know I should quit, but I just can’t help
it.” This person does not smoke because she is ignorant of the ill
effects of smoking but because she lacks the self-control to do
what she knows is right. Earlier in the Ethics, Aristotle
suggests that virtue is, above all, a matter of habit, and someone
raised with the wrong habits will inevitably fall into vice. Virtue,
for Aristotle, is a matter of practice. For this reason, he differs
from Socrates and Plato by saying that an intellectual understanding
of virtue is not enough to guarantee virtue. We can do wrong knowingly
if we have not been raised with the strength of character not to
want to do wrong.
Aristotle’s emphasis on self-love makes more sense when
we understand it in the context of the Greek city-state. His argument that
self-love is more important than friendship positions him as one of
the early proponents of ethical egoism, the view
that if we all took proper care to become good people ourselves,
the world would work out for the best and there would be no need
for selflessness. This view may seem callous in the modern world
of capitalist individualism, where looking out for number one often
comes at the expense of others, but it is less odious in the context
of Aristotle’s Greece. The Greek city-states were tightly knit communities,
where citizens would identify themselves with their city to the
extent that exile was considered a fate worse than death. In such
a world, one’s own well-being was largely determined by the well-being
of one’s city, so it would be in the self-interest of every citizen
to look out for the welfare of the city-state and its citizenry.
Aristotle’s conception of self-love, then, is much more community
oriented than the self-love espoused by modern pseudophilosophers
such as Ayn Rand.
Aristotle’s ultimate conclusion that rational contemplation
is the highest good is based on a teleological conception of human
nature. According to Aristotle, everything in nature has a telos, or
end goal. The telos of a knife, for instance, is
to cut, and the telos of a shoe is to protect and
cushion the foot. In each case, we can see that the telos of
an object consists of its distinctive activity. According to Aristotle,
the distinctive activity of humans is our capacity for rational
thought. For that reason, the exercise of our rational powers is our telos, the
highest good we can achieve. Aristotle lists five intellectual virtues
with which we can exercise our rational powers. Prudence and art
are both practical virtues and hence means to other ends. Of the
other three, scientific knowledge and intuition both contribute
to gaining a broad understanding of things, while wisdom rests in
the contemplation we are capable of when we achieve this understanding.
As such, the exercise of wisdom in rational contemplation seems
to be the highest achievement of the intellectual virtues.
The conclusion that the telos, or end
goal of being human, is rational contemplation may seem strange
to modern readers, who have grown up in a world where nature is
not seen in such teleological terms. We might agree that knives
and shoes have distinctive activities, but only because they were
created by humans to serve very specific purposes. The analogy of
“distinctive activities” itself is at best tenuous, first because,
unlike knives and shoes, we were not created for a specific purpose
(so far as we know), and second because, depending on our point
of view, we could identify all sorts of activities as distinctive
to humans, from using tools to playing golf. Aristotle would argue
that only our rationality is an essential feature of our humanity:
we could be human even if we didn’t use tools or play golf, whereas
we couldn’t be human without being rational. However, even if we
accept this argument, we do not have to accept that we should concentrate
our energies on rational contemplation simply because that is the
“most human” use of our energies.
