GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

I2O ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE GREEKS
asked to remember that Aristotle's writings
have come
down to us in an incomplete and unrevised form; nor
can it be doubted that the possessor of a mind as tidily
logical as Aristotle's would have been at pains, had he
embarked upon the work of revision, to gather together
some at least of the threads which are now left in the air.
Some, but not, it would seem, all, for Aristotle's ethical
position does entail at least one inconsistency which
seems to me to be fundamental. To this I now turn.
The Life According to Reason. The doctrine which
I have hitherto been engaged in expounding suggests
that the best life for man is the life of willing participation
in the affairs of the State. The participation is of two
lands; for the minority, the "best", it takes the form of
legislating, administering and educating; for the majority,
the ordinary men, it expresses itself in co-operating.
But no conception of the good life higher than that of the
citizen of the State has as yet been suggested.
At the end of the Ethics, however, we are introduced to
a different conception of the good life. Aristotle's thought
is dominated by the teleological conceptions of which
I have given some account on an earlier page, 1 and it is to
teleology that he turns for his profounder conception of
the good life. Teleology insists that the highest good for
any organism is to be found in the complete development
of the nature of that organism. The complete development
of the nature of the organism is the realization of all its
capacities and, Aristotle adds,
it is the realization of its
japst- distinctive capacity. What, then, is the capacity
which distinguishes man? Aristotle answers that it is his
reason, ,Plants and animals live, animals feel, but only man
reasons. It is, therefore, in the last resort in the life guided
by reason that the end of man must be sought. But reason,
he point! out, is of two kinds; practical and theoretical.
These two kinds of reason are distinguished by reference
tp their subject matter, the practical reason being concerned
1 See Chapter I, pp. 30, 31.