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Nature, Custom, and Reason as the Explanatory and Practical Principles of Aristotelian Political Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

James Bernard Murphy
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Abstract

According to Aristotle, nature (physis), habit or custom (ethos), and reason (logos) are the first principles of social explanation as well as the first principles of moral excellence. Just as we explain the order found in a polity as the product of natural, customary, and rationally stipulated kinds of order, so we become excellent persons through our good natural potential, the development of that potential in right habits, and sound ethical reflection upon those habits. For Aristotle, nature and convention are not mutually exclusive; rather, nature, custom, and reason form a hierarchy such that custom presupposes nature, but cannot be reduced to it, while reason presupposes custom, but cannot be reduced to custom. It is argued that Aristotle's account of social order is superior both to the prior Sophistic accounts and to the account in Aquinas. Because Aristotle roots the order of deliberate human action in the order of nature and the order of custom, he focuses his ethical analysis not on the abstract freedom of choice but on the concrete freedom of the person who must act.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , Summer 2002 , pp. 469 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2002

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References

Thanks are due to Marcus Fischer, Roger Masters, Ian Lustick, Ted Miller, David Peritz, Mark Murphy, Robert Audi, Ronald Beiner, Walter Nicgorski and the anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts.

1. Bekker numbers from Greek text: Ethica Nicomachea, ed. Bywater, L. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894);Google ScholarPolitica, ed. Ross, W. D. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957).Google Scholar All translations and all paraphrases from the Greek are mine.

2. S. Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia, ed. SI, Robertus Busa (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1980), vol. 4, Sententia Libri Ethicorum (Prologue, n.l).Google Scholar All translations and all paraphrases from the Latin are mine.

3. Hayek, F. A., Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 36.Google Scholar Hayek here draws on Stebbing: “When we know how a set of elements is ordered we have a basis for inference.” Stebbing, L. S., A Modern Introduction to Logic (London: Methuen, 1950), p. 228.Google Scholar It is surprising that Hayek, a leading modern theorist of order, should nowhere, to my knowledge, cite either Aristotle's triadic conception of order or the seminal contribution of Thomas Aquinas. Hayek is thus clearly not within the Aristotelian tradition even if he can be illuminating of it.

4. Aristotle lists a variety of human sciences when he says that, in addition to ethics, we need to consider legislative science and constitutional law “to complete the philosophy of human affairs (peri ta anthrōpeia philosophia).” See Nicomachean Ethics 1181b15.

5. In the analysis of Aristotle's account of the three kinds of order, I draw freely on my book, The Moral Economy of Labor: Aristotelian Themes in Economic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), chaps. 2 and 4.Google Scholar

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15. Antiphon and Callicles champion physis over nomos; for Antiphon see Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. Diels, Hermann and Kranz, Walter (Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1954), frag. 44A.Google Scholar

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19. Hicks, R. D., Aristotle: De Anima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), p. 335.Google Scholar

20. Ronald Beiner brought this passage to my attention (Politics 1252b32): “nature is an end: what each thing is—for example, a human being, a horse, or a household—when its coming into being is complete is, we assert, the nature of that thing.”

21. See, for example, Physics 193al–2Google Scholar and Generations of Animals 770b9–17Google Scholar.

22. For a fuller discussion of the distinction between physei and kata physin, see my Moral Economy of Labor, pp. 124–29.Google Scholar

23. Politics 1332b2.

24. Metaphysics 1047b31.

25. Nicomachean Ethics 1179b21.

26. See Politics 1334b30ff and 1336a4.

27. Politics 1332b8. “Now in men reason and mind are the goal of nature, so that the birth and training in custom of the citizens ought to be ordered with a view to them” (Politics 1334b). 15Google Scholar.

28. The commentary on Politics 1332a38 reads: “Quare hoc oportet consonare inter se, scilicet naturam, consuetudinem, et rationem: semper enim posterius praesupponit prius.” In In Libros Politicorum Aristotelis Expositio, ed. Spiazzi, Raymundi (Turin: Marietti, 1951), p. 386.Google Scholar

29. See Aquinas, , In Decem Libros Ethicorum Aristotelis Ad Nicomachum Expositio, ed. Spiazzi, Raymundi (Turin: Marietti, 1949), Lib. VII, lec. 10.1. 14 [2143 ff]Google Scholar

30. Sententia Libri Ethicorum (Prologue, n.l).

31. Aquinas is here following Aristotle who, despite his triad, often reduces custom to either nature or law; for many examples, see my Moral Economy of Labor, chap. 4.

32. Aquinas, Sententia Libri Ethicorum (Prologue, n.5); Finnis, John, Aquinas: Moral Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 32–35.Google Scholar

33. Aquinas, Sententia Libri Ethicorum, Prologue, n. 13.

34. Ibid., Prologue, n. 4.

35. Ibid., Prologue, n. 6.

36. Aristotle Metaphysics 1025b19–27 and 1065bl–5.

37. Aquinas, Sententia Libri Ethicorum Prologue, n. 2.

38. Ibid., Prologue, n. 3.

39. See Aquinas, , Summa Theologiae, IaIIae, 96.2c, 96.4c; IIaIIae, 78.1 ad 3Google Scholar.

40. See Nicomachean Ethics 1094b11 and 1095b5–6; for a very different view of the political dimension of the nicomachean Ethics see Bodéüs, Richard, The Political Dimensions of Aristotle's Ethics, trans. Garrett, Jan Edward (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

41. These are the Prologues to the commentary on the ethics, to the commentary on the politics, and to the Prima Secundae of the Summa. One could, no doubt, interpret Aquinas's account of the virtues in the Secunda Secundae, as an effort to understand human actions in the psychological and social contexts in which virtues and vices are acquired. I do not deny that there are resources within Aquinas's philosophy to understand ethics in a more political context.

42. Aquinas, , Summa Theologiae,Google Scholar Prologue to IaIIae. Aquinas's explicit reliance on the theological premise of the imago Dei as the basis for his assertion of human free choice raises the question of to what extent the doctrine of free choice depends upon revealed truths. Finnis, who omits all reference to the imago Dei in his discussion of this passage, seems to deny the necessity of a theological premise (see his Aquinas, p. 20Google Scholar); Germain Grisez, by contrast, argues that “only believers accept the reality of free choice” (see his Christian Moral Principles [Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983], p. 67)Google Scholar.

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45. Maclver, R. M., Social Causation (New York: Harper and Row, 1942), p. 241Google Scholar.

46. Aquinas follows Aristotle in distinguishing choice from mere wish and in arguing that no one chooses save what he thinks he can do himself: impossibilities cannot be objects of choice. See Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1111b20–25 and Aquinas, , Summa Theologiae, IaIIae, 13.4c, 13.5c, 14. 4c.Google Scholar But, as Robert Audi reminded me, perhaps I can deliberately choose to do what is in fact impossible so long as I believe it is possible.

47. Finnis, , Aquinas, p. 20n 3Google Scholar, quoting from the Summa Contra Gentiles, II c.60 n. 5.

48. On the importance of control over the agenda of deliberation for democratic politics, see Dahl, Robert, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 112–14Google Scholar.

49. Aristotle considers whether acts are voluntary, not whether they are free.

50. Aristotle Metaphysics 982b25; Rhetoric 1367a33.

51. Aristotle Politics 1260bl.

52. Aristotle Metaphysics 982b22–28.

53. Aristotle, Politics 1310a 31–35Google Scholar.

54. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1075a19–23Google Scholar.

55. Aristotle Politics 1310a34–35; 1287a28–32.

56. Ibid., 1342a19–21 and 1338a32.

57. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1141b23.

58. On legislative art, see Nicomachean Ethics 1103b3ff; on right habituation in youth as being all important, see Nicomachean Ethics 1103b 24Google Scholar.

59. Maclntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 175Google Scholar.

60. On Aquinas's curious silence about the politics of his epoch, see Finnis, , Aquinas, p. 3Google Scholar.

61. Nicomachean Ethics 1179b21 and Politics 1332a40.

62. Nicomachean Ethics 1180b13.

63. Ibid., 1103a23; for natural (physikē) and true habitual (ethistē) virtue see 1151a18 and 1144b3.

64. Ibid., 1179b24ff.

65. Ibid., 1179b32.

66. Ibid., 1180a34 and Politics 1287b5.

67. As Gadamer, H.-G. says: “We are always dominated by conventions. In every culture a series of things is taken for granted and lies fully beyond the explicit consciousness of anyone, and even in the greatest dissolution of traditional forms, mores, and customs, the degree to which things held in common still determine everyone is only more concealed” (Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Lawrence, Frederick [Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1981], p. 82)Google Scholar.

68. “In short the prepositional acknowledgment of rules, reasons, or principles is not the parent of the intelligent application of them; it is a step-child of that application” (Ryle, Gilbert, “Knowing How and Knowing That,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 46 [1945–1946]: 9)Google Scholar.

69. Benedict, Ruth, Patterns of Culture [1934] (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 9Google Scholar.

70. As Giddens puts it: “The knowledgeability of human agents, in given historical circumstances, is always bounded: by the unacknowledged conditions of action on the ‘one side,’ and its unintended consequences on the other” (Giddens, Anthony, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982], p. 32)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71. See The New York Times, 1 03 1999, p. A21Google Scholar.

72. “The sphere governed by prudence is then in principle self-sufficient or closed. Yet prudence is always endangered by false doctrines about the whole of which man is a part by false theoretical opinions; prudence is therefore always in need of defense against such opinions, and that defense is necessarily theoretical. The theory defending prudence is misunderstood, however, if it is taken to be the basis of prudence” (Strauss, Leo, “Epilogue,” in Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, ed. Storing, Herbert J. [New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1962], pp. 309–310)Google Scholar.