The Ethics of Aristotle
John Burnet
London: Methuen, 1900.

"There is a higher art in Aristotle's apparent confusion, and the spirit of the Platonic dialogue with its tentative arguments and provisional conclusions still lives in his dialectic procedure. He is seeking the truth along with his hearers and not expounding a ready-made system." (BURNET, p. xiv)

"If the efficient cause is in ourselves, it becomes possible for us to realise the object of our science, and this realisation becomes the 'end' or completion of the science. The object of it is no longer 'what is' (to on), but the genesis of 'what is to be' (to esomenon); we are no longer spectators but actors." (BURNET, p. xxliii)

"No one knew better than he did that a happiness which is not the happiness of individual souls is nothing at all. The state as such has no good that can be secured at the expense of the individuals who compose it. What Aristotle did hold was that, if we wish to find the Good for Man, we must seek it in a community of some sort." (BURNET, p. xxviii)

"[E]xcept in a community of some kind, man can never be complete, can never be all that he has it in him to be." (BURNET, p. xxix)

"From what has been said as to the nature of practical science, however, it follows that the starting-point of Politics will be a definition, not of something that is, but of something that is to be. It will not resemble the definitions from which deductive geometry starts, but rather the enunciation of a problem in geometrical construction, what in the older Greek geometry was called a hupothesis. Now the method by which we solve a problem of this kind is analysis, that is to say, we assume that the construction is made, and then ask what are the conditions of its being made until we come to something that is in our power, just as in a theoretical analysis we go on until we come to something we know to be true." (BURNET, p. xxxiv)

"The existence of an 'end,' or more exactly a completion (teleiosis) [fn1: The Greek word telos has quite different associations from the English 'end.' We may see from its use in common speech (telos echein, labein, epitheinai) that is implies the idea of completion. We must always think of it as the teleiosis of an eidos.] is due to the fact that nature and man have not only a source of motion in themselves, but also a source of rest. No animal or plant grows indefinitely; there is a point at which each is 'complete' or full-grown. Still more will it be the case that for the human soul there is a point at which it has nothing further to attain, and this will be the perfection or completion or 'end' of man." (BURNET, p. xlvi)

Citing Metaphysics 1021b21ff, Burnet notes: "[T]he complete (teleion) ... is defined as that outside which there is nothing (ou meden exo), that which requires nothing more to make its form complete." (BURNET, p. xlvi)

"[S]ince an activity is always something complete ... it must be 'in a complete life,' meaning by that a life which has developed to its full stature, which has reached the form appointed to it by nature. The body is complete when it has reached the limit which nature fixes for the growth of its species, and the rational soul too is full-grown at a certain stage of its development. But we must not imagine that when it has reached this completion, its life comes to an end.... It would be truer to say that life is only beginning when the 'end' in the former sence is reached; for now it is a complete or full-grown activity." (BURNET, p. 4)

"[G]oodness is a mean; it is the form which is the true nature of the human soul when fully developed." (BURNET, p. 73)

"Practical Wisdom, the virtue of that form of thought, must be capable, not only of apprehending the things that are good for man, the 'right rule' (orthos logos) to apply in each department of life; it must also enable us to see that the particular act under consideration is in the circumstances a case of that general rule. In theoretical science, it is to sense we must go for the particulars; but we can hardly call our perception of the character of a particular act by the name of sense. It is not unlike the intuition by which we apprehend mathematical relations; but even that is not the same. It is better to call it 'practical thought,' and to leave the explanation of its true nature to the physicist or the 'first Philosopher.' We all know quite well what is meant by it. And we now see how it is that the Mean is determined. The wise man, the lawgiver, has the form of goodness, the 'right rule' in his soul, and he has also the power of seeing how that form is to be embodied in a particular act. And he has the form of goodness in his soul just because he knows the end of human life; for the form is always determined by its end. The test, then, of whether a certain start of the soul is goodness or not is just the degree in which it is subservient to the supreme end of all human activity." (BURNET, p. 249)

"According to Aristotle, the growth of philia keeps pace with the growth of phronesis... the higher we rise in the scale of animal phronesis (cf. 1140a27) the wider and more permanent does philia become, till at last in man it appears as the feeling of union with his kind upon which the family, the state, and all other human associations rest. Cf. GA 753a7ff... Here we have the deifferent stages of philia clearly traced, and these stages are made to depend upon the degree of phronesis, or knowledge of the good for one's own kind, which is present at each." (BURNET, pp. 344-345)

"Pleasure then must be an activity or rather the completion of an activity. Pleasure is the completion of the activity of a subject at its best acting upon an object at its best. It is clear, then, that we can hardly distinguish the pleasure of the highest life from the highest life itself, and in this sense it is true that pleasure is the highest good. But this is not hedonism. Just because the pleasure and the activity which it completes are so closely bound up together that they can only be distinguished by an effort of thought, it follows that pleasures must differ specifically just as the activities do which they complete. There is therefore no sense in saying that pleasure in the abstract is the end. There is no such thing as pleasure in the abstract; but only pleasures that are inseparably bound up with certain activities." (BURNET, pp. 437-438)

END