CONSERVATIVE

The Necessity of the Good
Rémi Brague
We are all disciples of Aristotle. Whether or not
we realize it, whenever we are talking about the Good
we are working with ideas that are Aristotelian in origin.
We speak of good food and good company, good
behaviour and good outcomes. These modes of the
Good share a basic assumption: The good is not the
Good, but instead a quality or attribute of something
else. This is well and good. The Aristotelian way of
thinking has a proper role. But we’re losing our sense
of wonder and enjoyment. We do not see the Good in
which all these good things participate and from which
they draw their lustre. It is time, therefore, to put aside
Aristotle and rehabilitate Plato. For without him we are
in danger of losing our reason to want to continue as a
species.
Aristotle criticized his master Plato and observed
that, for practical purposes, the Idea of the Good is
useless for ethics. More useful is the prakton agathon, the
good that can be done. Plato’s Ideas are ideals, perhaps
idols, but in any case they are idle. Concrete things act
upon each other. To quote the ever-recurring example,
“a human being begets a human being”. Meanwhile, the
Platonic Ideas stay in their heavens and twiddle their
thumbs. In contradistinction to Plato’s flights of fancy,
Kant said that the philosophy of Aristotle is work. The
great Macedonian sage was a business manager of sorts.
He put the ideas in the things, expecting them to roll up
their sleeves and produce something.
look for a living, then for virtue, but only after one has
got a living”. Plato explicitly alludes to this aphorism
in the Republic when discussing the proper education
of the Guardians. The same view is expressed in other
proverbs, for example, primum vivere, deinde … philosophari
(first live, then philosophize). Machiavelli puts the same
sentiment into the mouth of a leader of the Ciompi,
who revolted in Florence: “We have no business to
think about conscience; for when, like us, men have to
fear hunger, and imprisonment, or death, the fear of
hell neither can nor ought to have any influence upon
them.” One can find everywhere stronger and morecynical
versions of the same. In Bertolt Brecht’s The
Threepenny Opera, the line “First comes the grub, then
morals” is in all mouths.
In all this we find the same basic assumption: The
good is something that we do. As a consequence, we
can do the good or fail to do it. From time to time,
we have to let it go provisionally, postponing it to the
fu¬ture. As the object of activity, it belongs to the
realm of practical philosophy, especially to the branch
that deals with the actions of people—which is to say,
morals. Little wonder that we have taken our moral
bearings from Aristotle’s ethics.
Being & freedom
But what if the Good is a condition of life rather
than one of its modes? And what if it is an absolutely
The secondary character of the Good?
From this active point of view, one can consider
the Good as superfluous, as something merely
decorative, as something that makes life more beautiful,
to be sure, but that one can perhaps take or leave. In
entertaining the good as a possibility that we might
do without, we are following Aristotle’s distinction
between life (zēn) and the good life (eu zēn). Aristotle
says the political community comes into being for the
sake of securing “the bare needs of life”. But it goes
on existing for the sake of the good life. To put it in
Marxist terms: Life, in the sense of being alive (zōē) or
leading a life (bios), is the infrastructure; the Good is
hardly more than a superstructure, something that sets
a crown on life. The Good is there as an adjective or an
adverb rather than a noun.
Given the clear priority of life, the Good is
certainly a good thing—nobody gainsays that—but it
is not necessary. Two cheers for the Good, but it is not
the most urgent task. What is most important is being
alive rather than not.
The secondary character of the Good is
expressed in the old popular wisdom of the Greek
people, upon which Aristotle and before him Plato
drew. The Milesian poet Phocylides, in the early 6th
century before Christ, gives us a saying: “We should
BRITISH LIBRARY
Image from p. 21 of Queen Summer; or, the Tourney of the
Lily & the Rose, written and illustrated by Walter Crane, and
published in 1891.
The European Conservative 39