Operating Under the Idea of the Ideal: Aristotle’s Naturalism

In his wonderful essay, ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, Kant laid down a challenge (one, for him, with Stoic roots): tell a story of humanity’s ‘history’ under the idea of a certain ideal. Specifically, tell it as a forward looking, trans-generational, process under the conception of the end, the telos, of a world eventually so organized as to acknowledge, and encompass, the realization of the full humanity of each and every human. History not as record but as process: a developmental political progression whose end is a cosmopolitanism, one at once moral and eudaimonic, fulfilling human potential. Kant, while emphasizing the central role of education in furthering this, does not there advocate any particular form of political resolution—whether central world government or global federalism of small scale units (a Foedus Amphictyonum)—nor does he broach questions of how much still further, dynamic, transitioning, or ‘Millian’ experiment, might, or rather should, be sustained within the realization of this universal goal: the degree of instability, of vulnerability to creative risk, of ‘unsocial sociability’, needed by, and for, a still vibrant, still liberal, enlightened humanity.

1. 1.

   See e.g. propositions 4 and 8. Kant talks of “a future large state body”, yet one that has only the “form of a very rough project” (8:28, Wood trans., 2009). I was much helped to an appreciation of Kant’s 1784 essay by Herman (2009). For progressive utopianism see e.g. Wilde (1891/2001), esp.141.

2. 2.

   Cf. the progression Plato traces from rustic ‘city of pigs’, to contemporary bloated city, to an ideal one within rational grasp, one emphasized as both optimal and possible (Republic Bk. 2-7) (not the social entropy of Bks 8-9, nor the cyclical history of the Politikos’ myth); Aristotle’s foreshortened historical story in Pol. 1.2; and the typology in 1.8-9 of earlier life-styles, based on modes of food acquisition, leading to exchange between larger units, to currency as facilitator, and thence to unnatural capitalism.

3. 3.

   Cf. Kant proposition 8; Aristotle Politics 7.1.1323a14-21; 7.13.1332b3-11; NE 10.9.1180a33-81b23. Politike is practical reason in its public form.

4. 4.

   “Folly [Unsinn], you conquer and I must yield! Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens”, Schiller, Maid of Orleans, Act 3 Scene 6. More is said about pleonexia and philotimia (to these Hobbes, (1651/1996), Bk.1.ch.13, adds diffidence, mutual mistrust-the negative shadow of prudentialism). For the odd neglect of folly, see Pitkin (1932), 21–6. (He provides a bibliography, and mentions the studies of Löwenfeld (1909/1921) and Kemmerich (1912).) See also: (1) Theophrastus’ Insensitive Man (anaisthetos): this highlights slow wittedness, absentmindedness, and inappropriately awkward behavior. The usual translation, ‘stupid’, if imprecise, is not wholly misleading: see Pitkin below. (2) Cipolla (1976/2011) articulates “the basic laws” of stupidity as:

   • L1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

   • L2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

   • L3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of people while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

   • L4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people infallibly turns out a costly mistake.

   • L5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

   Some seem marks rather than ‘laws’. Those who take the presence of (all or certain) other vices to be bound up with stupidity will baulk at L2. Cipolla’s rationale is his claim that the ratio of stupid persons in a group of any size or kind remains a natural constant—like the alleged ratio nature arranges between male and female births (23–26). The approach is au fond typically economic, combining an abstract prudentialist, ‘game-theoretic’, rationality with subjective valuation. Social privation, especially of education and free time, are apparently sidelined. (3) Pitkin’s curious 1932 distinguishes nine sorts, the deepest one being the failure of basic perceptions due to some insensitivity. Others: a failure correctly to integrate a set of perceptions individually clear, to put them all together so as to read situations; a failure to see ways or options to handle a situation, due to weak imagination and inexperience; dullness, due to poor conceptual shorthand to abstract and apprehend human complexity and its nuances; wandering attention, which results in muddling up situationally disparate concerns; a converse failure of controlled dissociation of significant factors and phases in situations, i.e. a failure of separation and prioritization; weak organization in planning; lack of imagination; failure to check results, or doing so by inadequate methods (40–42). For an Aristotelian many of these offer illuminating ways to flesh out their appeal to the notion-at times, slogan or mantra—of ‘situational appreciation’, concretizing its many aspects. (4) Aczel et al.’s 2015 study distinguishes three forms, of which confident ignorance beats out lack of control and absentmindedness as the prime one. Social stupidity seems even more neglected.

5. 5.

   Various versions of recapitulation theory, especially of cognitive development, whisper in the wings here. Such theories appear committed to an explanatory priority—as in Spencer’s claim: “…if there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order....the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little. It is provable both that the historical sequence was, in its main outlines, a necessary one; and that the causes which determined it apply to the child as to the race.” (1861), 61. At any rate, there are illuminating parallels and interconnections—the social medium into which the individual is inducted at their historical place, and which they in turn develop, or restrict, as may be (cf. Kant’s fourth proposition, of unsocial socialability; also Lawrence (2018), 193).

6. 6.

   E.g. Wolff (1970/1998), 72–78.

7. 7.

   I pursue the complexity of Hume’s stance elsewhere. For Nietzsche see e.g. (1887), I.1-2. Not that he puts reason back in place—wishing to use active drive theory as an alternative both to teleology and faculty psychology, and to mechanistic associationism. The disempowerment problem also arises over the active role for political theorists on the left, given a certain view of historical determinism. Cf. also Wolff ibid.

8. 8.

   Wittgenstein (1953), §206 “The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.”

9. 9.

   Hobbes (1651/1996), Book 1 ch.13; Nietzsche on Christianity in “its first radiance”, (1871–2) paragraph 6 (but then critical of the democrat’s uptake of this commitment, (1887), I.9). Pufendorf, (1673/1991), 61.

10. 10.

    This avoids certain temptations that talk of the ‘moral’ leads to. Aristotle more plausibly approaches this position of equality in terms of justice. Yet, on the one hand, his discussion is set at a more abstract level, where a formal demand for equality leaves open different concrete interpretations of the kind of equality to be respected (NE 5. 3.1131a24-29); on the other, the proper extension seems primarily that of one’s fellow citizens, and humanity at large would be a ‘metaphorical’ expansion from that core.

11. 11.

    Witness Aristotle’s sensitivity to, and use of, the haplōs/pōs (grammatically unqualified/qualified) distinction. Plato can be viewed as hypostatizing predicates—viewing them as naming measures, super-objective measures. It was an unnecessary dog-leg—the abstract Form of the Meter ‘indicated’ by the meter-rod in Paris; but there are worse errors.

12. 12.

    (1739–40), 3.1.2. and footnote.

13. 13.

    So e.g. Mackie (1977) ch.1, sec. 10; Hart (1961) ch.9 (he shares, at a political level, Foot’s early neo-Humean position over reason, and her position over morality, in (1972)).

14. 14.

    Cf. e.g. Pol.7.14. 1333a16-30; NE 1.13.. There are however complications in the thesis that the hierarchy is ordered around the ‘higher’ faculty. (i) With humans the upwards hierarchy seems to have a rationale: cf. ‘the medical thought experiment’ in Lawrence (2001). But mere animals are a kind of hinge moment. Is their nutritive soul for the sake of their perceptual one? Or are they rather perceiving, locomoting, plants? If not, what is their end, their principle of organization? (cf. Lawrence 2011, note 43). (ii) In the human case there is some further delicacy over the relation of fully rational chosen action to contemplation.

15. 15.

    ‘Meaninglessness’ may be granted, and mysticism advocated.

16. 16.

    Setting aside his darkness over equality, gender, and race.

17. 17.

    Themes pursued further in Lawrence (2005) and elsewhere. One might construe Aristotle as tempted by a global contextualism—our lives having value in the context of the kosmos, yet value enters the world through a single point of light, the intrinsic value of the ideal substance.

18. 18.

    See EE 1.8; NE 1.1.; 1.6. Cf. Lawrence (2006).

19. 19.

    For the first principle see NE 1.7.1097b25-28; for the second, conceptual, connection of “eu” with “kat’aretēn” 1098a7-12; 2.6.1106a15-24. (Aristotle himself extends his essentialism broadly both to the inorganic and the supra-organic. God—perfection or success in the category of substance—is for Aristotle the ultimate point, whose essence is simple pure activity, and so without organization and potentiality. The good haplōs haplōs.)

20. 20.

    (i) The “para phusin” is associated with violence (bia), which is why those who view slavery as forced claim it is para phusin and so unjust (Pol.1.3.1253b20-4). (ii) Aristotle sometimes distinguishes being merely “in accord” (kata) from “involving” (meta). I take the kata relation here to imply more than consistency, in fact an actual realization of essence.

21. 21.

    See EE 1.7.1217a21-29 on eudaimonia versus the sense of other creatures’ living well.

22. 22.

    Cf. also NE 10.9.1180a5-22; a32-b28, on the positive role of legislation; the, or a, principal aim of the politikos is to inculcate proper values, the excellences, in the citizens, without which they could not live successful lives (e.g. NE 1.9.1099b28-32; 1.13.1102a7-10; 2.1.1103b2-6; etc.). Locke (1664) appeals to Aristotle’s ergon argument in the first of the five arguments he offers for the existence of natural law, in Essay 1 (Essays 2–5 focus on our epistemic access to it, 6–8 on its authority).

23. 23.

    This fuller version is the norm for the activity—against which more primitive forms of bringing up can be measured, and count as limited, ‘defective’, types of that activity.

24. 24.

    For metron cf. Pol.7.14; NE 3.4. etc.

25. 25.

    Much delicacy is needed in pursuing such ideas, if elitism is to be avoided and the appearance of inappropriately telling people how to run their lives (cf. Lawrence, (2018)). Yet not addressing them, especially the need to provide education, and opportunities for the development and realization of human potential and creativity, is equally dangerous. Getting culture correctly placed is especially difficult. Plato preferred ‘the city of pigs’ to bloated contemporary society, but did not advocate the possibility or optimality of our remaining in the former healthy rusticity (cf. T.S. Eliot East Coker Sec. 1). Clearly too there is a different valence in a society at a rustic juncture historically, and one, say like the Amish, consciously resistant to a surround of urban sophistication.

26. 26.

    Cf. (a) Top. 1.11.105a5-7; cf. Plato Crito 50e-51b; (b) Euripides, Dictus N344; (c) Pol. 1.8. 1256b26ff, 37-39; 1.9.1257a3-4, 1257a28-30.

27. 27.

    Similarly Cicero: “For the nature of justice must be explained by us and that sought from the nature of the human” (De Legibus 1.17; cf. 1.20).

28. 28.

    The “hou” in “hou heneka” is ambiguous between neuter, that for the sake of which, and masculine, that for whose sake, i.e. between end and beneficiary: see EE 1.8.1218b10-11; cf. De An. 2.4.415b2-3, etc.

29. 29.

    Analogous because for Aristotle strictly artifacts do not possess essences.

30. 30.

    I see no need to suppose that every answer is thus flexible; some may not be because of the terms in which they are described (cf. NE 2.6.1107a8-17), others because of their paradigmatic centrality to our understanding of the concept, as with Anscombe’s example of the injustice of intentionally punishing the innocent.

31. 31.

    See further e.g. Lawrence (2018), 224–225.

32. 32.

    NE 1.4. 1095a18-20, 1.8. 1098b20-22. It also meets formal conditions on counting as the good, viz. unqualified finality, self-sufficiency, and greatest choosability as a good that cannot be aggregated (NE 1.7.1097a24-b20).

33. 33.

    Not quite accurate. For Aristotle full success would be contemplating successfully where that was the practically wisest thing to do: i.e. where the practically best thing for the human agent, situated as they were, i.e. optimally, was to contemplate. It is under-examined why Aristotle appears not to envisage possible defects re the activity of contemplating: as though it were, or involved, an activity of self-knowing, or rather of an understanding reflecting on, and transparent to itself, which, if it occurred, could only be successful.

34. 34.

    See e.g. Wallace (1978), 18–25, Bedau (1993) esp.47; and much else.

35. 35.

    Cf. Empedokles DK 8 (quoted by Aristotle, Meta D.4.1015a1a-2a).

36. 36.

    Cf. Hobbes, (1654), 110; Locke, (1664/1954), Essay 1, 113–117; Mackie, (1977), Ch.1. sec.8.

37. 37.

    The distinction needs clarification. E.g. does natural science fail this standard? Do precise arts, like grammar, pass it? (Is the fact that ‘necessary’ is spelt as it is one and same for all?)

38. 38.

    And perhaps the Tractatus too lays out the possible logical structure of any form of intelligibility: the crystalline map of the sayable which determines the structure of the be-able.

39. 39.

    Asked such a question, of course I try and fit into a frame of understanding: that I live here because it is convenient for this and for that… But in another sense, while I know where I live, there is no question of whether or not I really understand that.

40. 40.

    Whether there is an ‘as if’ understanding of a realm of convention, as of language as against natural representations (De Interp. 1), in parallel to an ‘as if’ essence of artifacts is another question for our list.

41. 41.

    There is some resonance here with the notion of clear and distinct ideas: as the idea of the triangle seemingly dictates all its instances or applications, while that of justice seemingly does not—it not being always just to return the borrowed item. This is to connect the notion of a clear and distinct idea with a certain view of following a rule, of applying an algorithm, a view of them as rails already fixedly stretching out, in the sense of containing all their applications already curled up inside them. The very perspective that Wittgenstein resists: cf. (1953) on rule-following. e.g. §§146, 152, 188, 218.

42. 42.

    At this point there is a distinction within wide natural law between ‘ius naturale’ which applies to humans and animals in virtue of the nature that is common to them and ‘ius gentium’, natural law within rational creatures, those capable of appreciating the common applicability of natural law to them (e.g. Aquinas’Commentary on the NE, §1019). At Summa Theologica 1a2ae Q94 a2 Aquinas distinguishes three levels of precept in natural law applying to the human according to three levels of shared nature: as with every substance, an inclination to preserve its own natural being; as with other animals, sexual intercourse, rearing of young, etc.; with the human alone, an inclination to the good according to the nature of his reason—the nature distinctive of the human (under this head Aquinas places the inclination to know the truth about God and to live in society).

43. 43.

    Hobbes, the translator of Thucydides, amid the stasis of his own time, was aware of the destructive power of human pleonexia and philotimia (Peloponnesian War III.82.8).

44. 44.

    Marx’s suspicions of division of labor lie elsewhere. In confining a human to be an X-er (carpent-er, plumb-er, etc.) one is boxing in freely creative work: our essence is to work, in a way that realizes, objectifies, our creative potential, not to be work-er (cf. an ideal of the Renaissance ideal of the human).

45. 45.

    The human is then not the subject of a single science.

46. 46.

    Cf. Miller (1995), 40–45, esp. 45.

47. 47.

    He then refers back to the earlier discussion in Pol.7.7 of the kind of natural qualities needed by the citizens of the best constitution: these are qualities that enable them to be easily led to virtue by the legislator, qualities of natural intelligence and pride (dianoiētikoi kai thumoeideis tēn phusin) (1327b36-38; b30-1). These are the dominant qualities needed for freedom, yet ones expressed within an optimal political cohesion, capable of ruling others (b31-33). The chapter engages with, and is partly critical of, Plato, especially over the latter’s view of thumos, as being, like the fierce guard-dog, aroused at the approach of strangers. By contrast, Aristotle urges it is rather what powers us to love, and is aroused by the neglect of friends. (The passage enriches our understanding of how Greeks understand thumos).

48. 48.

    E.g. NE 1.13.1102b13-25; Rhet 1.11.1170a9-14 and NE 10.9.1179b35f which mention how habit reconciles us to things naturally unpleasant, like studying; NE 10.9.1179b5-80a6.

49. 49.

    The details of this individual psychological unification and integration is the topic of another paper on NE 6.12-13.

50. 50.

    He quotes Polus’ adage with approval, Meta. A.1.981a3-5: “experience made skill, lack of it chance”. For the thought see also Phys. 2.8.199a15-17: “Generally skill brings to perfection (epitelei) those things which nature is unable to work through to completion (apergasasthai), and imitates the others”; Pol. 7.17. 1336b40-1337a1-3: “for every skill and education (paideia) wishes to fill out (anaplēroun) what is lacking in nature”; Plato Laws 10.889d4-6; for an earlier expression of the thought, see Antiphon TGF 55 F4.

51. 51.

    Natural objects, unlike artefacts, have “an innate hormē for change” (Phys. 2.1.192b18-19). It was perhaps not a great leap for John Philoponus to envisage then an acquired impetus to explain projectiles.

52. 52.

    Crudely one can distinguish the approaches of faculty-, of associationist-, and of drive-psychology. Nietzsche is drawn to the latter as an apparent way to avoid teleology on the one hand, and mechanistic passivity on the other. Briefly one can note that drive theory is itself autotelic (e.g. hunger a drive to eat); and again that faculty psychology was originally a description of the different ways things are alive, rather than providing the kind of explanatory role to which the virtus dormativa objection is addressed: a formal cause explanation rather than an efficient one.

Authors and Affiliations

1. University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

   Gavin Lawrence

Editors and Affiliations

1. Department of Philosophy, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Eichstätt, Germany

   Martin Hähnel

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