(Aristotle 5) Limits of Aristotle, continued.

If anyone were to read this, I feel the need to apologize. It's just a journal, hurriedly written. Not writing really fit for a public. My main teachers for this line of thinking: Alasdair MacIntyre, Raimond Gaita, Christopher Cordner, Hannah Arendt - and of course Aristotle, whose Ethics I have been re-reading with great pleasure)

The Greeks in general and Aristotle in particular had no concept of ‘human dignity’: an abstract idea meaning that every human being, as human being, regardless of achievement, virtue, community standing or anything that has its source in our social being, has a kind of dignity, intrinsic worth, is somehow precious – and therefore deserves respect, recognized as morally our equal.

     In Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, Lear, having been cast out, encounters on the heath in a storm “Poor Tom”, a naked, barely clothed, obviously insane beggar (in reality Lear’s ‘good son’, Edgar, who is a fugitive, in disguise), and is moved to pity: “Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here’s three on ‘s are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art (III, iv).” Being homeless now himself, Lear shows some compassion for the vulnerability of the homeless and poor in the terrible storm. Prior to this he had never really thought about their plight. But in the storm he is learning to empathize with those at the bottom of society. He acknowledges that as King when he had the power and authority to effect social change he could have done more for them. Men who live in luxury should expose themselves to what the poor and homeless feel, he declares, so they can give their surplus wealth to them and make the world a more just place.

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou may’st shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just.

Mere humanity for Aristotle is like a fruit tree that was diseased or damaged by weather and never comes to bear fruit. Such a tree is worthless as a fruit tree whatever other uses can be devised for it. Mere humanity is not natural, as Lear almost suggests, who contrasts “unaccommodated” man with “pomp.” Let me just read “pomp” as Lear’s new understanding of everything society can give. For Aristotle, only a certain social-political form provides fertile soil for humanity to blossom into what it truly is. (I still remember my first football coach teaching us that we were the “real men” of the school. I learned to think of all the boys who didn’t play football as somehow inferior to us. They would never blossom into “real men.” Aristotle is not free of that kind of mentality.) True, it would be shameful for a virtuous man to belittle or harm a character like Poor Tom. But it wouldn’t be morally wrong in our sense. It wouldn’t have violated Poor Tom’s reality had Lear passed him by without even acknowledging he was there (for Aristotle).

     But like mine pity for the beggar, Lear’s pity seems laced with condescension. He can only see Poor Tom as a King sees a beggar, albeit a fallen King. He pities someone outside of an honor community from the perspective of someone in it. It is not that his pity includes the thought-feeling that, in essence, stripped of all the artificial add-ons of society, Lear is nothing but Poor Tom. When he says he should have “shown the heavens more just” he is partly saying that as King he should have taken measures to ensure no one end up like Poor Tom. The implication is that a life such as Poor Tom’s – the life of a mere human being not enriched by human society – is not worth living, is without inherent dignity. Such people are to be pitied precisely because they have been deprived of what Lear calls “pomp” incapable of developing their full human potential.

       We tend to emphasize compassion for those on the lowest end of the social scale much more than did the Greeks, but the attitude is basically Aristotle’s: it would have been better never to have been born; having been born, it is better to die soon. Despite our official commitment to human dignity, this attitude is very much with us. Consider this preface to a debate in the European Parliament:

 

Since the introduction of prenatal screening in Iceland, for instance, the vast majority of women (close to 99%) whose foetus tested positive for Down syndrome have terminated their pregnancy. Some EU Member States are not very far behind. In France, it is estimated that the proportion of women who have terminated their pregnancy due to Down's syndrome is around 77%, while in Denmark the rate is 97%. In Italy, Germany, the UK and Belgium, the rate exceeds 90% (from Parliamentary question - E-003055/2020, European Parliament).

 

What this reveals is the distinction between human life considered valuable and human life considered better not to exist.

   Or consider this description of a psych ward (from the book A Common Humanity, 2000) in which philosopher Raimond Gaita (a teacher of mine through his books) worked in a psychiatric hospital (his motivation coming from the mental illnesses suffered by both his parents as recounted in his autobiographical Romulus, My Father):

 

  In the early 1960s when I was seventeen years old, I worked as a ward assistant in a psychiatric hospital … It reminded me of some of the enclosures at Melbourne zoo. When patients soiled themselves, as some did often, they were ordered to undress and to step under a shower. The distance of a mop handle from them, we then mopped them down as zoo-keepers wash down elephants.

     The patients were judged to be incurable and they appeared to have irretrievably lost everything which gives meaning to our lives. They had no grounds for self-respect insofar as we connect that with self-esteem; or, none which could be based on qualities or achievements for which we could admire or congratulate them without condescension. Friends, wives, children and even parents, if they were alive, had long ceased to visit them. Often they were treated brutishly by the psychiatrists and nurses.

    A small number of psychiatrists did, however, work devotedly to improve their conditions. They spoke, against all appearances, of the inalienable dignity of even those patients. I admired them enormously. Most of their colleagues believed these doctors to be naive, even fools. Some of the nurses despised them with a vehemence that was astonishing …

      In contrast to Aristotle’s time – and Nazi Germany whose attitude towards such incurables shocked us but would not have shocked Aristotle, pity or compassion can barely keep such human beings among us. We couldn’t stomach the idea of “euthanasia.” We come up with institutions, sometimes, to deal with people in a “humane” way while separating them from everyday life. Arendt’s emphasis on the “right to have rights” I would translate as the need to live in a meaning-community. That is pure Aristotle. It is just another, more contemporary and less robust way of putting Aristotle’s core idea: that the full realization of human nature and the attainment of a good and virtuous life (eudaimonia) are possible only within the context of a political community (polis). I say less robust because to belong to a political community and enjoy the rights of being a citizen might be a necessary condition for humanity for Aristotle but it is not yet a sufficient condition. In addition, active participation is required.

     I could of course multiply such examples but will offer one more discussed by Hannah Arendt: the stateless. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt examines the plight of stateless people and how their situation challenges the notion of inalienable human dignity (she discusses human rights but the thinking works even better for dignity). Arendt argues that human dignity, supposedly inalienable and universal, is effectively meaningless when individuals are stripped of citizenship and the protection of a state. Stateless people, who lack any national affiliation, find themselves without the legal and political framework necessary to exercise and protect their dignity. Human dignity is thus compromised when individuals are deprived of a community that recognizes it.

        Stateless people do possess full human capacities. But although they may be highly educated and competent, they are still mere human beings without a community, having been expelled from theirs. As Arendt put it, they can say whatever they want but it doesn’t matter to anyone. Their actions may be unconstrained but they are not free because they don’t matter to anyone. This reveals an even deeper level of Aristotelian thought. It is not just developing virtues, as though the community is nothing but a means to becoming individually a full human being with a rich life. Being in a common life – with common projects – makes possible speech and action that reveals not only what we are (the dimension Aristotle focuses on) but who we are (the dimension that Arendt focuses on). It is only through mutual recognition as belonging that our words and actions matter. It is only through mutual recognition that our isolated ego can be transformed into something richer. It is through words and actions that stories can be told about it. It is through those possible stories that human plurality becomes actualized: that fact that we are (in potential at least) different in a qualitative sense that any person who has ever lived, who is alive today, and who will ever live. No two biographies would ever be the same for people who have the chance to reveal who they are through speaking and acting in meaningful ways. The fact that multiple biographies could be written of anyone is also a sign of a meaningful life. (Like anything meaningful – a poem – interpretation is needed.) The world is where this happens. To conceive of communities as belonging to a world is how Arendt deepens Aristotle without departing from him. We not only need a polis but a world.

     The beggar, the severely handicapped, the severely mentally ill, the statement, the pathological narcissist (i.e. the purely private self), the hedge fund manager, etc. are all in a sense outside the world looking in, in very different ways acting on or at least impinging on the world (and the community) from a position outside of it. It is only through pity or compassion that we can keep them among us. But pity is a conviction that – for whatever reason – a person has been contingently deprived of the possibility of living a fully valuable human life. And that is not a conviction that the lives of those we keep among us through pity are our moral equals or valuable as they are.

(Capitalism or whatever you want to call this economic-technological mechanism that determines the lives of people all over the earth is other-worldly. It is slowly but surely draining the world – the possibility of worlds – from human life. It is draining the possibility of meaning. The best metaphor for it is from Michael Ende’s Neverending Story: “the Nothing.” "The Nothing” is a multifaceted metaphor representing the dangers of losing imagination, creativity, hope, cultural heritage, and spiritual values – which are the source of meaning and which can only exist in the world, in a particular community in the world. In a way, we are all faced with the threat of becoming world-less beings for whom nothing outside the private, pre-worldly self can matter.)

    Is there a philosophical or religious attitude that allows us to see those who have fallen through the net of the world as fully our equals, a morally “one of us”? There is, and I am slowly and painfully working my way toward it. Before I get there I need to talk about how Aristotle was just as toxic for Christianity as Pharisaism (not as it was perhaps but as represented in the gospels).  I see this toxicity in two of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages: Dante and Aquinas. I see the way toward a non-condescending love or respect for those who fall through the cracks of Aristotle’s world in Tolstoy, Primo Levi, and Raimond Gaita. And yet Aristotle is also necessary, which my discomfort with aspects of Socrates and even Jesus teach me.