Here at the very end of the Nicomachean Ethics, after tens of thousands of words about human fulfillment, Aristotle somewhat wryly observes that words are powerless to encourage most people to understand and enact what is good and beautifully right, for they live by their feelings and respond more readily to correction and punishment than to wisdom and insight.
So who is the Nicomachean Ethics for? As he said in the beginning and reiterates here, it's for people of good character who have been raised well and already love what's beautifully right, but need to understand and practice it even more fully. This is especially important in our interactions with other people individually (thus Aristotle's major focus on love and friendship) and in society (where brotherhood is even more valuable than justice). This last topic leads Aristotle to end the Ethics by introducing politics as the crowning achievement and completion of the philosophic study of human affairs. So even though in X.6-8 he seems to have claimed that the best life is contemplative or a life of inquiry, immediately he brings things back to earth by reinforcing the centrality of sociality in human existence.
Although it might therefore seem that ethics is merely the handmaiden of politics, those who have read Aristotle's Politics know he ends that work by deeply considering the central role of education in the health of the community. Yet it's little noted by scholars that Aristotle makes a similar argument at the conclusion of the Nicomachean Ethics. Because character is so dependent on a good upbringing, early learning about the truly human way of life is key. Yet he says that we must maintain these beautifully right doings and feelings as adults, too, by practicing and applying what we've learned and enculturating [ἐθίζεσθαι / ethizesthai] ourselves to the highest possibilities of human existence. This kind of ethical education needs to be tailored to each person since the applications of what we learn are more precise when the practices are individualized [ἰδία / idia]. Only after achieving this kind of ethical improvement is it appropriate for someone who wants to gain greater skill and awareness in ethical understanding [ἐπιστήμη / episteme] to proceed to the study of ethical universals, since that enables such a person to give the kind of care [ἐπιμελεία / epimeleia] that can help others (friends, family, students, etc.) to become better people.
These musings, rarely remarked upon by ancient philosophy scholars, indicate to me that Aristotle saw himself as offering just this kind of care to the people in his own life and even to those who would read his writings after his passing. This hunch is reinforced by the fact that he immediately goes on to criticize the sophists of his day, who professed to know and teach how to improve their paying students and society at large but who didn't practice what they preached. For Aristotle, the deception [ἀπάτη / apatē] involved in sophistry is the very opposite of sagacity [σοφία / sophia], for the sophist lacks a commitment to truth whereas the sagacious person is dedicated above all to φιλοσοφία / philosophy as the love of wisdom and the search for truth, not only in theoretical inquiry but in practical experience. By reading this passage - and the whole of the Nicomachean Ethics - with care and attention, we come to see that Aristotle was deeply committed to philosophy as a way of life, just as Plato and Socrates were before him.
This journal entry marks the end of our walk through the Nicomachean Ethics. For the convience of future readers, I've reformatted this series of thirty posts into a standalone guide that I'll continue to update over time. And although I plan to go on a few more intellectual journeys with Aristotle (starting with his Eudemian Ethics), I've decided not to blog about those since in-depth analysis of Aristotelian texts might not be of general interest. I'll soon return to my regular schedule of philosophical reflections.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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