(Aristotle 4) Limits of Aristotelian Virtue (and Reason)

It’s like I have two souls, one Aristotelian and one Platonic-Christian. I think Aristotle was right in the big picture (though not on all his details, which are bound to his place and time). I think life would be a poor thing with no opportunities to develop the qualities of mind and spirit necessary to master any genuine discipline (i.e. become the kind of person that can thrive in a community practice). I even believe him when he tells us that a person who is not a part of an active political community – and MAGA is a Satanic parody of a genuine political community – falls short of living the best kind of human life. In capitalist mass societies, real politics – where your words and deeds matter, where you are taken seriously for what you say and do – are not really possible for the vast majority of people. (If I were a German citizen, I might join a party and see whether something like political life happens in such a party.) We can at best experience a kind of attenuated political life – for example, my department at the university is largely self-governing and in principle we all have a say in how the department is run. Disagreements are part of this. I am also mistrustful of a self that is nothing but a private self, unacquainted with the life of a real practice or discipline that includes some need to share a community with others.

     At the same time, I am moved by a picture of human life that doesn’t necessarily contradict this Aristotelian picture but is just very different and is often in tension with it. I will try to illustrate what I mean first.

   Ever since the boys started school I have occasionally encountered a particular beggar, sitting on the ground with his cup out. When I give him a little something, he always says “Merci” and “Alles Gute der Familie.” Now he is outside all those practices with their communities that enrich human life, which from Aristotle’s perspective makes human life worth living in the sense that we can only become fully human as part of them. [You can be a better or worse beggar, more or less effective. There is perhaps some skill and knowledge involved. But it is not a practice or a community in the relevant sense.] So for Aristotle the ground for respecting – honoring – that man does not exist. In justice I owe him nothing, not even the most basic form of acknowledgement. He belongs to the species homo sapiens but is not fully human – as for Aristotle neither were slaves, women, or children – or anybody else who was either deprived through no fault of their own or not capable of community, competence, or reason (which you develop within a practice or above all in a political community: recall for Aristotle you become courageous by doing courageous things, honest by telling the truth over and over, just by practicing justice, etc.; you need the political community for that). Aristotle could justify slavery and assigning women and children subordinate social roles for this reason without violating justice.

     It is easy for us to condemn Aristotle for these attitudes. But that is too shallow. The truth is that I cannot eliminate a residue of condescension in my charity to the beggar, and I don’t think I am alone. At my best I can pity him, can say to myself “there but for the grace of God go I.” But I don’t believe it. Part of me says: rather kill myself than humiliate myself like that. At best I can see the man as a person deprived by accidents of fate from becoming the kind of person who can lead a kind of life worth living. I cannot in my heart of hearts consider him my moral equal. A sign of this is that were I to learn that he died I might be sad but I would not feel like I felt when I heard this week that Bill Walton died of cancer at age 71, not just a great basketball player and someone who cared greatly about social justice, but a man with a zest for life that was always infectious. I didn’t even know Walton personally, but his death occasioned a kind of grief, like part of my world had also died. Because, as I am here just assuming that because I consider his life unworthy, thus consider him unworthy, I cannot consider his death an occasion for grief. So a bit of Aristotle is in me, in most of us perhaps. But the difference is: I don’t like it. I consider it a fault. Aristotle could only think that attitude was sentimental.

   Why do I feel like this? I will go on with this later.