The Five Great Philosophies of Life Part 7

CHAPTER IV

THE ARISTOTELIAN SENSE OF PROPORTION

I

ARISTOTLE'S OBJECTIONS TO PREVIOUS SYSTEMS

Our principles of personality thus far, though increasingly complex, have all been comparatively simple. To get the maximum of pleasure; to keep the universal law; to subordinate lower impulses to higher according to some fixed scale of value, are all principles which are easy to grasp and by no means difficult to apply. The fundamental trouble with them all is that they are too easy. Life is not the cut-and-dried affair which they presuppose. A man might have a lot of pleasure, and yet be contemptible. He might keep all the commandments, and yet be no better than a Pharisee. Even Plato's principle in actual practice has not always escaped the awful abyss of asceticism.

In opposition to Epicurus Aristotle says, "Pleasure is not the good and all pleasures are not desirable. No one would choose to live on condition of having no more intellect than a child all his life, even though he were to enjoy to the full the pleasures of a child. With regard to the pleasures which all admit to be base, we must deny that they are pleasures at all, except to those whose nature is corrupt. What the good man thinks is pleasure will be pleasure; what he delights in will be truly pleasant. Those pleasures which perfect the activity of the perfect and truly happy man may be called in the truest sense the pleasures of a man. The pleasure which is proper to a good activity is therefore good; that attached to a bad one is bad. As, then, activities differ, so do the pleasures which accompany them."

In our discussion of Epicureanism we saw that the principle of pleasure consistently carried out produced bad results, and, as in the case of t.i.to Melema, developed the most contemptible character. Aristotle shows conclusively why this must be so. Pleasure is the sign and seal of healthful exercise of function. A life which has all its powers in effective and well-proportioned exercise will, indeed, be a life crowned with pleasure. You cannot, however, reverse this proposition, as the Epicurean attempts to do, and say that a life which seeks the maximum of pleasure will inevitably have the healthy and proportionate exercise of function as its consequent. According to Aristotle healthy exercise of function in a well-proportioned life in devotion to wide social ends and permanent personal interests, is the cause of which happiness is the appropriate and inevitable effect. Seek the cause and you will get the effect. Seek directly the effect, and you will miss both the cause you neglect and the effect which only the cause can bring. The criticism which we quoted from George Eliot on the career of Melema is the quintessence of the Aristotelian doctrine. To put it in a figure: Build a good fire and warm your room, and the mercury in the thermometer will rise. The cause produces the effect. But it does not follow that because you raise the mercury in the thermometer by breathing on the bulb, or holding it in your hand, that the fire will burn, or the room will be warmed. The Epicureans and hedonists are people who go about with the clinical thermometer of pleasure under their tongues all the time, and expect to see the world lighted with benevolence and warmed with love in consequence. Aristotle bids them take their clinical thermometers out of their mouths; stop fingering their emotional pulse; go to work about some useful business; pursue some large and generous end; and then, not otherwise, in case from time to time they have occasion to feel their pulse and take their temperature, they will as a matter of fact find that they are normal. But it isn't taking the temperature and feeling the pulse that makes them morally sound; it is doing their proper work and keeping in vigorous exercise that gives them the healthy pulse and normal temperature.

There are, however, two apparently contradictory teachings about pleasure in Aristotle, and it is a good test of our grasp of his doctrine to see whether we can reconcile them. First he says, "In all cases we must be especially on our guard against pleasant things, and against pleasure; for we can scarce judge her impartially. And so, in our behaviour toward her, we should imitate the behaviour of the old counsellors toward Helen, and in all cases repeat their saying: If we dismiss her, we shall be less likely to go wrong." "It is pleasure that moves us to do what is base, and pain that moves us to refrain from what is n.o.ble."

On the other hand he says: "The pleasure or pain that accompanies the acts must be taken as a test of character. He who faces danger with pleasure, or, at any rate, without pain, is courageous, but he to whom this is painful is a coward. Indeed we all more or less make pleasure our test in judging actions."

Can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory statements?

Perfectly. On the one hand if we do an act simply for the pleasure it will give, without first asking how the proposed act will fit into our permanent plan of life, we are pretty sure to go astray. For pleasure registers the goodness of the isolated act; not the goodness of the act as related to the whole plan of life. Thus if I drink strong coffee at eleven o'clock at night, the taste is pleasant and the immediate effect is stimulating. But if it keeps me awake half the night and unfits me for the duties of the next day, in spite of the pleasure gained, the act is wrong. And it is wrong, not fundamentally because of the pains of wakefulness it brings; it is wrong because it takes out of my life as a whole, and my contribution to the life of the world, something for which the petty transient pleasure I gained at the moment of indulgence is no compensation whatsoever. Is not Aristotle right? Do we not pity as a miserable weakling, hardly fit to have been graduated from the nursery, any man or woman who will let the mere physical sensation of a few moments at the end of an evening count so much as the dust in the balance against the efficiency of the coming forenoon's life and work?

If we see this half of Aristotle's truth, we see that the other is not its contradiction but its complement. If we are sorely and grievously tempted by the coffee, if we give it up with pain, if saying "No, I thank you," comes fearfully hard, if we cannot forego it cheerfully without so much as seriously considering the drinking of it as possible for us, why then it reveals how little we care for the life and work of the morrow; and since life and work are but a succession of to-morrows, how little we care for our life and work anyway. If we had great aims burning in our minds and hearts, wide interests to which body and soul were devoted, it would not be a pain, it would be a pleasure, to give up for the sake of them ten thousand times as big a thing as a cup of coffee, if it stood in the way of their accomplishment. Yes; Aristotle is right on both points. Pleasure isolated from our plan of life and followed as an end will lead us into weakness and wickedness every time we yield to its insidious solicitation. On the other hand, the resolute and consistent prosecution of large ends and generous interests will make a positive pleasure of everything we either endure or do to promote those ends and interests. Pleasure directly pursued is the utter demoralisation of life. Ends and interests, pursued for their own sakes, inevitably carry with them a host of n.o.ble pleasures, and the power to conquer and transform what to the aimless life would be intolerable pains.

Aristotle rejects the Epicurean principle of pleasure; because, though a proof that isolated tendencies are satisfied, it is no adequate criterion of the satisfaction of the self as a whole. He rejects the Stoic principle of conformity to law; because it fails to recognise the supreme worth of individuality. He rejects the Platonic principle of subordination of appet.i.tes and pa.s.sions to a supreme good which is above them; because he dreads above all things the blight of asceticism, and strives for a good which is concrete and practical.

What, then, is this good, which is neither a sum of pleasures, nor conformity to law; nor yet superiority to appet.i.te and pa.s.sion? What is this principle which can at once enjoy pleasure to the full, and at the same time forego it gladly; which can make laws for itself more severe than any lawgiver ever dared to lay down; and yet is not afraid to break any law which its own conception of good requires it to break; which honours all our elemental appet.i.tes and pa.s.sions, uses money and honour and power as the servants of its own ends, without ever being enslaved by them? Evidently we are now on the track of a principle infinitely more subtle and complex than anything the pleasure-loving Epicurean, or the formal Stoic, or the transcendental Platonist has ever dreamed of.

We are entering the presence of the world's master moralist; and if we have ever for a moment supposed that either of these previous systems was satisfactory or final, it behooves us now to take the shoes from off our feet, and reverently listen to a voice as much profounder and more reasonable than them all, as they are superior to the senseless appet.i.tes and blind pa.s.sions of the mob. For if we have a little patience with his subtlety, and can endure the temporary shock of his apparent laxity, he will admit us to the very holy of holies of personality.

II

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN

Before coming to Aristotle's positive doctrine we must consider one fundamental axiom. Man is by nature a social being. Whatever a man seeks has a necessary and inevitable reference to the judgment of other men, and the interest of society as a whole. Strip a man of his relations and you have no man left. The man who is neither son, brother, husband, father, citizen, neighbour or workman, is inconceivable. The good which a man seeks, therefore, will express itself consciously or unconsciously in terms of other men's approval, and the furtherance of interests which he inevitably shares with them. The Greek word for private, peculiar to myself, unrelated to the thought or interest of anybody else, is our word for idiot. The New Testament uses this word to describe the place to which Judas went; a place which just suited such a man as he, and was fit for n.o.body else. Now a man who tries to be his own scientist, or his own lawgiver, or his own statesman, or his own business manager, or his own poet, or his own architect, without reference to the standards and expectations of his fellow-men, is just an idiot; or, as we say, a "crank." A wise man may defy these standards. The reformer often must do so. But if he is really wise, if he is a true reformer, he must reckon with them; he must understand them; he must appeal to the actual or possible judgment and interest of his fellows for the confirmation of what he says and the justification of what he does. This social reference of all our thoughts and actions, which Aristotle grasped by intuition, psychology in our day is laboriously and a.n.a.lytically seeking to confirm. Aristotle lays it down as an axiom, that a man who does not devote himself to some section of the social and spiritual world, if such a being were conceivable, would be no man at all. Family, or friends, or reputation, or country, or G.o.d are there in the background, secretly summoned to justify our every thought and word and deed.

Because man's nature is social, his end must be social also. It will prevent misunderstanding later, if we put the question squarely here, Does the end justify the means? As popularly understood, most emphatically No. The support of a school is a good end. Does it justify the raising of money by a lottery? Certainly not. The support of one's family is a good end. Does it justify drawing a salary for which no adequate services are rendered? Certainly not.

Yet if we push the question farther, and ask why these particular ends do not justify these particular means, we discover that it is because these means employed are destructive of an end vastly higher and greater than the particular ends they are employed to serve. They break down the structure and undermine the foundations of the industrial and social order; an end infinitely more important than the maintenance of any particular school, or the support of any individual family. Hence these means are not to be judged by their promotion of certain specific ends, but by their failure to promote the greatest and best end of all; the comprehensive welfare of society as a whole, of which all inst.i.tutions and families and individuals are but subordinate members.

Throughout our discussion of Aristotle we must understand that the word "end" always has this large social reference, and includes the highest social service of which the man is capable. If we attempt to apply to particular private ends of our own what Aristotle applies to the universal end at which all men ought to aim, we shall make his teaching a pretext for the grossest crimes, and reduce it to little more than sophisticated selfishness. With this understanding of his terms, we may venture to plunge boldly into his system and state it in its most paradoxical and startling form.

III

RIGHT AND WRONG DETERMINED BY THE END

We are not either good or bad at the start. Pleasure in itself is neither good nor bad. Laws in themselves are neither good nor bad. It is impossible to say with Plato that some faculties are so high that they always ought to be exercised, and others are so low that as a rule they ought to be suppressed. The right and wrong of eating and drinking, of work and play, of s.e.x and society, of property and politics, lie not in the elemental acts involved. All of these things are right for one man in one set of circ.u.mstances, wrong for another man in another set of circ.u.mstances. We cannot say that a man who takes a vow of poverty is either a better or a worse man than a multi-millionnaire. We cannot say that the monk who takes a vow of celibacy is a purer man than one who does not. For the very fact that one is compelled to take a vow of poverty or celibacy is a sign that these elemental impulses are not effectively and satisfactorily related to the normal ends they are naturally intended to subserve. All attempts to put virginity above motherhood, to put poverty above riches, to put obscurity above fame are, from the Aristotelian point of view, essentially immoral. For they all a.s.sume that there can be badness in external things, wrong in isolated actions, vice in elemental appet.i.tes, and sin in natural pa.s.sions; whereas Aristotle lays down the fundamental principle that the only place where either badness or wrong or vice or sin can reside is in the relation in which these external things and particular actions stand to the clearly conceived and deliberately cherished end which the man is seeking to promote. A simpler way of saying the same thing, but a way so simple and familiar as to be in danger of missing the whole point, is to say that virtue and vice reside exclusively in the wills of free agents. That, every one will admit. But will is the pursuit of ends. A will that seeks no ends is a will that wills nothing; in other words, no will at all. Whether an act is wrong or right, then, depends on the whole plan of life of which it is a part; on the relation in which it stands to one's permanent interests. For these many years I have defied cla.s.s after cla.s.s of college students to bring in a single example of any elemental appet.i.te or pa.s.sion which is intrinsically bad; which in all circ.u.mstances and relations is evil. And never yet has any student brought me one such case. If brandy will tide the weak heart over the crisis that follows a surgical operation, then that gla.s.s of brandy is just as good and precious as the dear life it saves. The proposition that s.e.xual love is intrinsically evil, and those who take vows of celibacy are intrinsically superior, is true only on condition that racial suicide is the greatest good, and all the sweet ties of home and family and parenthood and brotherly love are evils which it is our duty to combat. To deny that wealth is good is only possible to him who is prepared to go farther and denounce civilisation as a calamity.

He who brands ambition as intrinsically evil must be prepared to herd with swine, and share contentedly their fare of husks.

The foundation of personality, therefore, is the power to clearly grasp an imaginary condition of ourselves which is preferable to any practical alternative; and then translate that potential picture into an accomplished fact. Whoever lives at a lower level than this constant translation of pictured potency into energetic reality: whoever, seeing the picture of the self he wants to be, suffers aught less n.o.ble and less imperative than that to determine his action misses the mark of personality. Whoever sees the picture, and holds it before his mind so clearly that all external things which favour it are chosen for its sake, and all proposed actions which would hinder it are remorselessly rejected in its holy name and by its mighty power;--he rises to the level of personality, and his personality is of that clear, strong, joyous, compelling, conquering, triumphant sort which alone is worthy of the name.

How much deeper this goes than anything we have had before! A man comes up for judgment. If Epicurus chances to be seated on the throne, he asks the candidate, "Have you had a good time?" If he has, he opens the gates of Paradise; if he has not, he bids him be off to the place of torment where people who don't know how to enjoy themselves ought to go.

The Stoic asks him whether he has kept all the commandments. If he has, then he may be promoted to serve the great Commander in other departments of the cosmic order. If he has broken the least of them, no matter on what pretext, or under what temptation, he is irrevocably doomed. Plato asks him how well he has managed to keep under his appet.i.tes and pa.s.sions. If the man has risen above them, Plato will promote him to seats nearer the perfect goodness of the G.o.ds. If he has slipped or failed, then he must return for longer probation in the prison-house of sense.

Aristotle's judgment seat is a very different place. A man comes to him who has had a very sorry time: who has broken many commandments; who has yielded time and again to sensuous desires; yet who is a good husband, a kind father, an honest workman, a loyal citizen, a disinterested scientist or artist, a lover of his fellows, a wors.h.i.+pper of G.o.d's beauty and beneficence; and in spite of the sad time he has had, in spite of the laws he has broken, in spite of the appet.i.tes which have proved too strong for him, Aristotle gives him his hand, and bids him go up higher. For that man stands in genuine relations to some aspects of the great social end to which he devotes himself. And because some portion of the real world has been made better by the conception of it he has cherished, and the fidelity with which he has translated his conception into fact, therefore a share in the great glory of the splendid whole belongs of right to him. Good honest work, after an ideal plan, to the full measure of his powers, with wise selection of appropriate means, gives each individual his place and rank in the vast workshop wherein the eternal thoughts of G.o.d, revealed to men as their several ideals, are wrought out into the actuality of the social, economic, political, aesthetic and spiritual order of the world.

On the other hand, the man of scattered and unfruitful pleasures, the man of merely clear conscience, pure life, unstained reputation, with his boast of rites observed, and ceremonies performed, and laws unbroken, "faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null," is the man above all others whom Aristotle cannot endure.

Do you wish, then, to know precisely where you stand in the scale of personality? Here is the test. How large a section of this world do you care for, in such a vital, responsible way, that you are thinking about its welfare, forming schemes for its improvement, bending your energies toward its advancement? Do you care for your profession in that way? Do you care for your family like that? Do you love your country with such jealous solicitude for its honour and prosperity? Can you honestly say that your neighbour gets represented in your mind in this imaginative, sympathetic, helpful way? Do you think of G.o.d's great universe as something in the goodness of which you rejoice, and for the welfare of which you are earnestly enlisted? Begin down at the bottom, with your stomach, your pocket-book, your calling list, and go up the scale until you come to these wider interests, and mark the point where you cease to think how these things might be better than they are and to work to make them so, and that point where your imagination and your service stops, and your indifference and irresponsibility begins, will show you precisely how you stand on the rank-book of G.o.d. The magnitude of the ends you see and serve is the measure of your personality. Personality is not an ent.i.ty we carry around in our spiritual pockets. It is an energy, which is no whit larger or smaller than the ends it aims at and the work it does. If you are not doing anything or caring for anybody, or devoted to any end, you will not be called up at some future time and formally punished for your negligence. Plato might flatter your self-importance with that notion, but not Aristotle. Aristotle tells you, not that your soul will be punished hereafter, but that it is lost already.

Goodness does not consist in doing or refraining from doing this or that particular thing. It depends on the whole aim and purpose of the man who does it, or refrains from doing it. Anything which a good man does as part of the best plan of life is made thereby a good act. And anything that a bad man does, as part of a bad plan of life, becomes thereby an evil act. Precisely the same external act is good for one man and bad for another. An example or two will make this clear.

Two men seek political office. For one man it is the gate of heaven; to the other it is the door to h.e.l.l. One man has established himself in a business or profession in which he can earn an honest living and support his family. He has acquired sufficient standing in his business so that he can turn it over temporarily to his partners or subordinates. He has solved his own problem; and he has strength, time, energy, capacity, money, which he can give to solving the problems of the public. Were he to s.h.i.+rk public office, or evade it, or fail to take all legitimate means to secure it, he would be a coward, a traitor, a parasite on the body politic. For there is good work to be done, which he is able to do, and can afford to do, without unreasonable sacrifice of himself or his family. Hence public office is for this man the gateway of heaven.

The other man has not mastered any business or profession; he has not made himself indispensable to any employer or firm; he has no permanent means of supporting himself and his family. He sees a political office in which he can get a little more salary for doing a good deal less work than is possible in his present position. He seeks the office, as a means of getting his living out of the public. From that day forth he joins the horde of mere office-seekers, aiming to get out of the public a living he is too lazy, or too incompetent, or too proud to earn in private employment. Thus the very same external act, which was the other man's strait, narrow gateway to heaven, is for this man the broad, easy descent into h.e.l.l.

Two women join the same woman's club, and take part in the same programme. One of them has her heart in her home; has fulfilled all the sweet charities of daughter, sister, wife, or mother; and in order to bring back to these loved ones at home wider interests, larger friends.h.i.+ps, and a richer and more varied interest in life, has gone out into the work and life of the club. No angel in heaven is better employed than she in the preparation and delivery of her papers and her attendance on committee meetings and afternoon teas.

The other woman finds home life dull and monotonous. She likes to get away from her children. She craves excitement, flattery, fame, social importance. She is restless, irritable, out of sorts, censorious, complaining at home; animated, gracious, affable, complaisant abroad.

For drudgery and duty she has no strength, taste, or talent; and the thought of these things are enough to give her dyspepsia, insomnia, and nervous prostration. But for all sorts of public functions, for the preparation of reports, and the organisation of new charitable and philanthropic and social schemes, she has all the energy of a steam-engine, the power of a dynamo. When this woman joins a new club, or writes a new paper, or gets a new office, though she does not a single thing more than her angel sister who sits by her side, she is playing the part of a devil.

It is not what one does; it is the whole purpose of life consciously or unconsciously expressed in the doing that measures the worth of the man or woman who does it. At the family table, at the bench in the shop, at the desk in the office, in the seats at the theatre, in the ranks of the army, in the pews of the church, saint and sinner sit side by side; and often the keenest outward observer cannot detect the slightest difference in the particular things that they do. The good man is he who, in each act he does or refrains from doing, is seeking the good of all the persons who are affected by his action. The bad man is the man who, whatever he does or refrains from doing, leaves out of account the interests of some of the people whom his action is sure to affect. Is there any sphere of human welfare to which you are indifferent? Are there any people in the world whose interests you deliberately disregard? Then, no matter how many acts of charity and philanthropy, and industry and public spirit you perform--acts which would be good if a good man did them--in spite of them all, you are to that extent an evil man.

We have, then, clearly in mind Aristotle's first great concept. The end of life, which he calls happiness, he defines as the identification of one's self with some large social or intellectual object, and the devotion of all one's powers to its disinterested service. So far forth it is Carlyle's gospel of the blessedness of work in a worthy cause.

"Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

He has a work, a life purpose; he has found it, and will follow it. The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was happiness enough to get his work done. Whatsoever of morality and of intelligence; what of patience, perseverance, faithfulness of method, insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word, whatsoever of strength the man had in him will lie written in the work he does. To work: why, it is to try himself against Nature and her everlasting unerring laws; these will tell a true verdict as to the man."

When we read Carlyle, we are apt to think such words merely exaggerated rhetoric. Now Aristotle says the same thing in the cold, calculated terms of precise philosophy. A man is what he does. He can do nothing except what he first sees as an unaccomplished idea, and then bends all his energies to accomplish. In working out his ideas and making them real, he at the same time works out his own powers, and becomes a living force, a working will in the world. And since the soul is just this working will, the man has so much soul, no more, no less, than he registers in manual or mental work performed. To be able to point to some sphere of external reality, a bushel of corn, a web of cloth, a printed page, a healthful tenement, an educated youth, a moral community, and say that these things would not have been there in the outward world, if they had not first been in your mind as an idea controlling your thought and action;--this is to point to the external and visible counterpart and measure of the invisible and internal energy which is your life, your soul, your self, your personality.

IV

THE NEED OF INSTRUMENTS

Aristotle's first doctrine, then, is that we must work for worthy ends.

The second follows directly from it. We must have tools to work with; means by which to gain our ends. General Gordon, who was something of a Platonist, remarked to Cecil Rhodes, who was a good deal of an Aristotelian, that he once had a whole room full of gold offered him, and declined to take it. "I should have taken it," replied Mr. Rhodes.

"What is the use of having great schemes if you haven't the means to carry them out?" As Aristotle says: "Happiness plainly requires external goods; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to act n.o.bly without some furniture of fortune. There are many things that can be done only through instruments, so to speak, such as friends and wealth and political influence; and there are some things whose absence takes the bloom off our happiness, as good birth, the blessing of children, personal beauty. Happiness, then, seems to stand in need of this kind of prosperity."

How different this from all our previous teachings! The Epicurean wants little wealth, no family, no official station; because all these things involve so much care and bother. The Stoic barely tolerates them as indifferent. Plato took especial pains to deprive his guardians of most of these very things. Aristotle on this point is perfectly sane. He says you want them; because, to the fullest life and the largest work, they are well-nigh indispensable. The editor of a metropolitan newspaper, the president of a railroad, the corporation attorney cannot live their lives and do their work effectively without comfortable homes, enjoyable vacations, social connections, educational opportunities, which cost a great deal of money. For them to despise money would be to despise the conditions of their own effective living, to pour contempt on their own souls.

Is Aristotle, then, a gross materialist, a mere money-getter, pleasure-lover, office-seeker? Far from it. These things are not the end of a n.o.ble life, but means by which to serve ends far worthier than themselves. To make these things the ends of life, he explicitly says is shameful and unnatural. The good, the true end, is "something which is a man's own, and cannot be taken away from him."

Now we have two fundamental Aristotelian doctrines. We must have an end, some section of the world which we undertake to mould according to a pattern clearly seen and firmly grasped in our own minds.

Second, we must have instruments, tools, furniture of fortune in the shape of health, wealth, influence, power, friends, business and social and political connections with which to carry out our ends. And the larger and n.o.bler our ends, the more of these instruments shall we require. If, like Cecil Rhodes, we undertake for instance to paint the map of Africa British red, we shall want a monopoly of the product of the Kimberley and adjacent diamond mines.