Aristotle

Qu'est-ce que l'Absolu ? Dieu existe-t-il ?

A first unmoved mover that is thought thinking itself

Un Absolu impersonnelIl le dit expressément

Aristotle reaches God through physics and metaphysics, not revelation. If there is eternal motion, there must be a first mover that moves without being moved; in book Lambda of the Metaphysics this mover is pure actuality, without matter, and moves as the beloved moves, by attraction. Its life is the best: it is thought, and since the most excellent can only think itself, it is thought of thought. Aristotle calls it god and an eternal living being, but it does not create the world, which is eternal, nor know individuals nor answer prayer. It is an absolute that is faceless intelligence, final cause of everything, closer to a principle than to someone.

Qui suis-je ? Existe-t-il un vrai soi ?

The soul is the body's form; character is forged by habit and friendship

Un soi cultivé dans la relationIl le dit expressément

Aristotle rejects both Plato's separate soul and the atomists' materialism. In On the Soul he defines it as the form, the first actuality of a natural body that has life potentially: it makes no sense to ask whether soul and body are one, any more than to ask it of the wax and its shape. What we call character is not given: virtues are acquired by habit, becoming just by doing just acts. And the human being, by nature a political animal, is fulfilled only in the city and in friendship: the friend is another self. Only intellect, which in an obscure passage he calls separable, immortal and eternal, escapes this embodied form.

Pourquoi souffrons-nous ?

Happiness depends on virtue, but also on fortune and the city

Le désordre social et moralCela se déduit de sa doctrine

Aristotle does not ask about suffering in general but about why a life fails. His answer has several layers. The main one is vice: an ill-formed character, which does not feel pleasure and pain at the right things, lives in conflict with itself, and in book IX he describes the wicked man as someone who flees from himself. But virtue is not enough: happiness also needs external goods, and great misfortunes like Priam's can ruin it, though the good man bears them nobly. And since we are political animals, a badly ordered city and a bad education deform their citizens. Pain comes from disorder of character, from fortune and from the community.

Que se passe-t-il après la mort ?

The soul dies with the body; perhaps only intellect is immortal

Silence ou réserveCela se déduit de sa doctrine

If the soul is the form of the living body, as On the Soul maintains, it cannot exist without it, just as shape does not exist without wax; Aristotle describes no destiny of the individual soul after death. The exception is a brief and obscure passage: the intellect that makes all things is separable, impassive and unmixed, and it alone is immortal and eternal, though “we do not remember”. Since antiquity it has been debated whether that intellect is personal, common to all humans or even divine. The Ethics treats death as the most fearful of evils because it is an end, and the courageous man is the one who faces it nobly. About the beyond, Aristotle keeps his reserve.

Comment atteint-on la libération ou le salut ?

Happiness is activity of the soul according to virtue, culminating in contemplation

Par la vertu et l'harmonieIl le dit expressément

Aristotle seeks no exit from the world but the accomplished life within it. The Nicomachean Ethics defines happiness as activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life: one swallow does not make a spring. Moral virtues are acquired by habit and consist in a mean determined by practical reason; friendship and the city are their natural setting. In book X he adds that the highest activity is contemplation, because it is that of intellect, the most divine thing in us, and urges us to make ourselves immortal as far as possible. There is no grace or sudden illumination: there is cultivated excellence that makes a human happy insofar as one can be.

Faut-il un maître ?

Virtues are learned through good habits, laws and educators

Utile mais pas indispensableIl le dit expressément

Aristotle, who spent twenty years in the Academy and later founded the Lyceum, gives great weight to education but does not make it initiatory transmission. Moral virtues are acquired by habit, so it matters a great deal, or rather everything, to be habituated one way or another from youth. For this good educators and good laws are needed, and the Ethics ends by passing to the Politics precisely because the legislator is the great educator. But nobody can be virtuous for another: we become just by doing just acts. And in theoretical knowledge, loyalty to the teacher yields to truth: both being dear, piety requires preferring truth, he says when criticising Plato.

Le monde est-il réel ?

An eternal nature, in motion, that does nothing in vain

Un ordre naturel en transformationIl le dit expressément

Aristotle is the defender par excellence of the reality of the sensible world. Against Parmenides, he explains change through potentiality and actuality; against Plato, he places forms in things themselves. Nature is a principle of motion and rest in what possesses it, and acts for an end: it does nothing in vain. The cosmos is eternal, without beginning or end, with a heaven of perfect circular motion and a sublunary region of ceaseless generation and corruption. Even the humblest animals deserve study, because in all natural things there is something marvellous. The world is real, ordered and changing, and knowing it is the task of science.

Qu'est-ce que l'amour ?

Perfect friendship is wishing the other's good for their own sake

Une bienveillance ordonnéeIl le dit expressément

Aristotle devotes two books of the Nicomachean Ethics to friendship (philia), which he considers necessary for life: no one would choose to live without friends even with all other goods. He distinguishes three kinds by their motive — utility, pleasure and the good — and only the last is perfect and lasting: that of good people who wish the friend's good for the friend's sake. The friend is another self, and right self-love, that of one who loves the best in himself, is its foundation. Friendship has its degrees and proportions: that of parents and children, of spouses, of fellow citizens. It is an ordered goodwill that begins in the household and sustains the city.

Sommes-nous libres ou tout est-il déterminé ?

It is in our power to be virtuous and also to be vicious

Un libre arbitre réelIl le dit expressément

In book III of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle analyses the voluntary and the involuntary to delimit responsibility. Involuntary are acts forced from outside or done through ignorance of the circumstances; the others have their principle in the agent. Deliberate choice (prohairesis) bears on what depends on us, and it follows that virtue and vice are in our power: where it is up to us to act, it is also up to us not to act. Even character, once formed, is our responsibility, because we formed it by our acts. In On Interpretation he further argues that future contingents are not already settled.

Pourquoi méditer ou prier ?

Contemplation is the highest and happiest activity

Voir la réalité telle qu'elle estIl le dit expressément

Aristotle does not speak of prayer in a personal sense; his god hears no supplications. But he places at the summit of human life an activity that has something of what other traditions call meditation: contemplation (theoria). In book X of the Nicomachean Ethics he describes it as the activity of intellect, the most divine thing in us; it is the most continuous, the most pleasant, the most self-sufficient, the only one loved for its own sake, and in it a human lives according to what is divine in him. Its object is truth: causes, principles, the eternal. To contemplate is to see what is as it is, with no other end than seeing it.

La raison peut-elle connaître l'ultime ?

All humans by nature desire to know, up to the first causes

L'étude et le savoirIl le dit expressément

The Metaphysics opens by stating that all humans by nature desire to know, and that philosophy was born of wonder. For Aristotle reason can know the ultimate: wisdom is the science of first causes and principles, and it culminates in theology, the study of the first mover. The way is long and gradual: from sensation to memory, from memory to experience, from experience to art and science; first principles are grasped by intellect through induction. None of this is received by revelation: it is learned by inquiry, gathering the opinions of predecessors and examining their puzzles. Knowledge of the divine is the highest fruit of study.

Se retirer du monde ou le transformer ?

Man is a political animal: the good life is realised in the city

Ordonner la sociétéIl le dit expressément

For Aristotle the human being is by nature a political animal, and whoever cannot live in community or does not need it is either a beast or a god. The city exists for the sake of living well, and its good is greater and more complete than the individual's; that is why ethics leads into politics and legislation. Aristotle studied one hundred and fifty-eight constitutions and discussed in the Politics which regime is best. At the same time, in book X of the Ethics he places the contemplative life, the most divine and happiest, above the political life. But even the contemplative, as a human, lives among others and chooses to act in accordance with virtue.