Biographical Background
Aristotle was born at Stagira in northern Greece in 384 b.c. His father,
Nicomachus, was a physician at the court of Philip of Macedon, the
father of Alexander the Great. In 367,
Aristotle moved to Athens, which was the intellectual and cultural
center of ancient Greece. He spent many years studying in Plato’s
Academy, surrounded by other philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians. Plato
died in 347, and Aristotle
left the Academy in that same year. There is speculation that he
left because Plato had not chosen him as his successor. It is more
likely, however, that anti-Macedonian sentiment was growing in Athens,
and Aristotle was afraid of being persecuted for his associations
with King Philip’s court.
Over the next four years, Aristotle traveled throughout
the eastern Aegean area, studying and teaching. During this time,
he conducted a remarkable array of experiments and observations
in the biological sciences. In 343,
he was summoned back north to Macedonia to be the personal tutor
to the young Alexander the Great. While we know very little about
Aristotle’s influence on Alexander, there has been a great deal
of speculation and mythologizing about the relationship between
these two eminent figures.
As the Macedonians extended their empire over Greece,
it became safe for Aristotle to return to Athens. In 334,
he established his own philosophical school at the Lyceum, where
he taught for the next eleven years. His lectures covered almost
every area of study, including physics, metaphysics, ethics, psychology,
politics, and poetry. His pioneering work in logic and biology was
not improved upon for two thousand years.
In 323, Alexander the Great died,
and Aristotle left Athens, fearing another upsurge of anti-Macedonian
sentiment. Alluding to the trial and execution of Socrates some
seventy-six years earlier, Aristotle reportedly claimed that he
did not wish the Athenians to “sin a second time against philosophy.”
A year later, he died in Chalcis in Euboea.
Though Aristotle published many admired works in his lifetime, none
have survived to the present day. Those works that we do have consist
mostly of lecture notes from his courses at the Lyceum. That these
works were never intended for publication explains why they are
generally dry and hard to follow. The Nicomachean Ethics was likely
either edited by or dedicated to Aristotle’s son, Nicomachus.
Historical Context
The Greek world of Aristotle’s time was made up of small
city-states, each with its own autonomous government. The city-state consisted
of slaves, noncitizen manual laborers, children, women, aliens,
and citizens. The citizens were adult males, most of whom had been
born to citizen parents. The citizens governed the city, while the
slaves, laborers, and women did all the work to provide the necessary
food, shelter, and equipment. Because they were freed from the necessity
of meeting day-to-day needs, citizens enjoyed a great deal of freedom
and luxury. The leisure they enjoyed was highly valued
and made possible one of the greatest periods of intellectual energy
in human history. That this system was exploitative is hardly debatable,
but it also produced an incredible array of philosophy, drama, art,
and architecture. Aristotle’s students were young citizens whose
tuition was meant to prepare them for a life of civic duty.
There were few enough citizens that everyone in a given
city would at least recognize, if not know, one another, and all
citizens were expected to take part in public office. Unlike our
modern system of representative democracy, where we simply elect
officials to speak for us, all Greek citizens were expected to voice
their own opinions in large deliberative and judicial assemblies.
There was a strong bond of kinship created in citizenship, as the
same people lived together, governed together, served in the army
together, and enjoyed leisure time together.
The age of the city-state came to a close within Aristotle’s
lifetime, however, due to the efforts of his most famous pupil,
Alexander the Great. Alexander came to power in the northern kingdom of
Macedonia and within a decade had established one of the largest empires
the world has ever seen. When Alexander died, Greece once more became
fragmented, but the fierce independence of the city-states was a
thing of the past. Greek culture was on the decline, and within
a few hundred years, it would be swallowed up by the burgeoning
Roman Empire.
Philosophical Context
As the successor of Socrates and Plato, Aristotle was
the last of the great Greek philosophers. Philosophy first flourished
in Greece sometime in the early sixth century b.c. as inquisitive
thinkers began developing rational methods for investigating the
mysteries of nature and mathematics. These pre-Socratic thinkers
were as much scientists and mathematicians as they were philosophers.
While there is significant pre-Socratic influence in Aristotle’s work,
primarily in the sciences and metaphysics, his most significant influence
was undoubtedly Plato (427–347b.c.).
Plato’s philosophy was centered on his famous Theory of Forms, or
Theory of Ideas. The theory is based on the observation that there
must be some universal quality that all things classed under a single
name share in common. For instance, a flower is beautiful in a very
different way from a human, but both the flower and the human must share
something in common if we are to call them both “beautiful.” Plato’s
answer is that they share in common the “Form of Beauty,” which
is itself invisible, unchanging, and eternal. Anything that we perceive
in this world as beautiful is beautiful because it participates in
some way in the Form of Beauty. But while beautiful flowers will wilt
and beautiful humans will grow old and die, the Form of Beauty is
everlasting and unchanging. Plato theorizes that our world of sensible
experience, with its changes and disappointments, is but a poor reflection
of the ideal world of pure Forms that underlies our experience.
The goal of philosophy, then, is to train the mind to see beyond
the veil of experience and to contemplate the true reality of Forms
that lies behind it.
While Aristotle was undoubtedly influenced by Plato, this
influence was mostly negative. Most of his works, including the Nicomachean
Ethics, contain involved refutations of many of Plato’s theories.
Aristotle himself was an empirical scientist who felt that true
wisdom comes from examining the objects of experience and not from
trying to look beyond them. In the Ethics, he is
primarily critical of Plato’s Form of Good. According to Aristotle,
there is not a single Form by virtue of which all good things are
good. Instead, he discusses at length the multiplicity of the various
virtues.
Aristotle’s work in the Ethics is deeply
informed by his own work in the sciences and metaphysics. Properly
describing the breadth of Aristotle’s impressive system is far beyond
the scope of this Spark-Note, but Jonathan Barnes’s Aristotle (2000)
provides an excellent and brief introduction to Aristotelian philosophy.
In terms of impact on the Ethics, perhaps
Aristotle’s most significant concept is that of the teleology of
nature. According to Aristotle, nature works toward a telos, or
end goal. His biological work aims constantly at the question of
what purpose different aspects of plants and animals serve. He classifies
humans as “rational animals,” meaning that our telos is
rational. In other words, our function in life is to realize our
full potential as rational beings. If we are not fully rational,
we are falling short of our true nature.
This teleological view gives Aristotle’s Ethics a
clear sense of direction. Our goal in life is to achieve our true
nature, and this true nature consists essentially of rationality.
The purpose of a moral education, then, is to teach us how we may
become perfectly rational and immune to the temptations of our lower
animalistic parts.
Ethics is just one of a number of fields that Aristotle
classifies as “practical science.” Unlike the natural sciences,
which examine the world around us, these sciences deal with the
practical aspects of human society and how best to arrange this
society. The practical sciences are all closely connected, and Aristotle
frequently expounds on the connection between the good life for
the individual and the kind of state that could make this good life
possible. Hence, Aristotle’s Politics is an important
companion and sequel to his Ethics.
While the Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle’s
most popular work on ethics, there is a second work called the Eudemian
Ethics, which is far less widely read. Most scholars agree
that the Eudemian Ethics was written earlier in
Aristotle’s career and represents a less mature view. Books V, VI,
and VII of the Nicomachean Ethics are also found
in the Eudemian Ethics.
Aristotle’s influence on Western philosophy is difficult
to exaggerate. While his works were lost to the West for many centuries, they
were slowly transmitted back into Europe by Arab scholars during
the Middle Ages. Thanks mostly to the influence of Saint Thomas
Aquinas, Aristotelian philosophy became accepted almost as dogmatically
as the Bible during the late Middle Ages. While modern philosophy
broke significantly from the scholastic tradition of the Middle
Ages, Aristotle’s influence remains undiminished. In particular,
his emphasis on scientific reasoning and experimentation has been
a cornerstone of modern empiricist philosophy.
