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

88 ETHICS AND 'POLITICS: THB GREEKS
cumstanccs. We do not, after all, expect a medical recipe
which will cure the diseases of all bodies in all circum-
stances, and men's minds are certainly no less complex
than their bodies. In the last resort, indeed, every individual
constitutes what may be called a special case.
Aristotle's doctrines on the subjects of ethics and politics
are not, then, he warns us, to be applied too rigidly or
pushed too far. They apply in most cases and as a general
rule, but not in all cases and not as an absolute rule.
One could wish that every writer on the subject had been
equally modest
As I have already hinted, Aristotle's doctrines are
remarkable less for the originality of their conception
than for the wisdom of their exposition. In the end he
is found to have done little more than dot the i's and cross
the t's of the positions already reached by Plato. I propose
to illustrate this contention by selecting four of his general
conclusions which, while they are of first-rate importance
in themselves, follow very closely the lines of those already
enunciated by Plato. In the course of reaching them,
however, Aristotle has contrived to invest them with an
amplitude of scope, a richness of content, and a wealth
of detail which give them a new significance.
I. THAT MAN IS BY NATURE A
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL BEING
The first of these general conclusions to which I wish
to draw attention is an endorsement of Plato's view that
man is by nature a political being; it contains, therefore,
by implication a repudiation of the Social Contract theory
advanced by Glaucon *nd Adeimantus in the second book
of Plato's Republic. 1 In his work on political theory known
as the Polifas> Aristotle insists that it is only in association
with his fellows that man can grow. In isolation he becomes
"the tribeless, lawless, healthless" being of whom Homer
wrote, and is likened to an unprotected piece in a game
1 See Chapter I, pp. ig-fti.