It came to Aristotle clearly enough that above all questions of the physical world there loomed the question of questions - What is the best life? What is life's supreme good? What is virtue? How shall we find happiness and fulfilment?
He is realistically simple in his ethics. His scientific raining keeps him from the preachment of superhuman ideals and empty counsels of perfection. Aristotle begins by frankly recognizing that the aim of life is not goodness for its own sake, but happiness. For we choose happiness for itself and never, with a view to anything further; whereas we choose honour, pleasure, intellect - because we believe that through them we shall be made happy. But he realizes that to call happiness the supreme good is a mere truism; what is wanted is some clearer account of the nature of happiness, and the way of it. He hopes to find this way by asking wherein man suffers from other beings and by presuming that man's happiness will lie in the full functioning of this specifically human quality. Now the peculiar excellence of man is his power of thought. It is by this that he surpasses and rules all other forms of life, and as the growth of this faculty has given him his supremacy so we may presume, its development will give him fulfilment and happiness.
The chief condition of happiness, then, barring certain physical prerequisites, is the code of reason - the specific glory and power of man. Virtue or rather excellence will depend on clear judgement, self-control, symmetry of desire, artistry of means; it is not the possession of the simple man, nor the gift of innocent intent, but the achievement of experience in the fully developed man. Yet there is a road to it, a guide to excellence which may save many detours and delays; it is the middle way, the golden mean. The qualities of character can be arranged in traits in each of which the first and the last qualities will be extremes and vices and the middle quality a virtue or an excellence. So between cowardice and rashness is courage, between stinginess and extravagance is liberality; between sloth and greed is ambition, between humility and pride is modesty, between secrecy and Joquacity honesty, between moroseness and buffoonery good humour, between quarrelsomeness and flattery friendship, between Hamelet's indecisiveness and Quixote's impulsiveness is self-control. 'Right' then in ethics or conduct is not different from 'right' in mathematics or engineering; it means correct, fit, what works best to the best result.
The golden mean, however, is not like the mathematical mean, an exact average of two precisely calculable extremes; it fluctuates with the collateral circumstances of each situation; and discovers itself only to mature and flexible reason. Excellence is an art won by training and habituation; we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit; the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life - for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy."
Youth is the age of excess and extremes; 'if the young commit a fault it is always on the side of excess and exaggeration. The great difficulty of youth (and of many of youth's elders) is to get out of one extreme without falling into the opposite. Unconscious extremists took upon the golden mean as the greatest vice; they expel among the lower classes of the Roman Empire. A great step in the advance of humanity was taken when it was realized that the son of God was himself a carpenter's son and that His disciples included poor fisherfolk as well as rich lawyers like Paul. The attitude" that every individual soul was equally scared never faded from Christian theology but the social conditions of the Middle Ages made it unrealizable in actual fact. In the feudal hierarchy every man was born to a particular. station in life and any attempt to pass from one station. to another was impossible. In that stage of society the rights of Blood and Inheritance were supreme; they are at last losing their pre-eminence in consequence of modern taxation principles.
From the time of the Renaissance the rigidity of feudal class distinctions began to break down. But the process was very gradual. And we are becoming aware of an equally unpleasant fact, that the pre-eminence of Blood has been supplanted by the pre-eminence of Wealth. Undiluted capitalism produces plutocracy just as feudalism produced Aristocracy.
Before this unwelcome discovery was made, Rousseau had preached the Equality of Man. The idea took strong root in France. According to de Tocqueville, the real cause of the revolution was the demand for Equality not for Liberty; hatred of privilege not desire for self-government. But it is noticeable that among the particular rights enumerated in the Declaration there is no mention of Equality-the natural rights of men are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression. The authors of the Revolution were by no means communists; they were shopkeepers and peasants who aimed at nothing but security of ownership. They achieved their aim, with the result that there is a far greater measure of economic equality in France than there is in Britain. La carriers auverte aux talents (let the career open to the talents) was the part of the equalitarian creed achieved by the abolition of privilege. The careers of Napoleon and his marshals prove how real was the existence of Equality in this sense. Furthermore the code of Napoleon enforced Equality by insisting that inherited wealth had to be split up
And yet, though goods and relationships are necessary to happiness, its essence remains within us, in rounded knowledge and clarity of soul. Surely sense pleasure is not the way; that road is a circle. Nor can a political career be the way; for therein we walk subject to the whims of the people and nothing is so fickle as the crowd. No, happiness must be a pleasure of mind and we trust it when it comes from the persuit or the capture of truth. The operation of the intellect aims at no end beyond itself, and finds in itself the pleasure which stimulates it to further operation and since the attributes of self-sufficiency, unweariedness and capacity for rest... plainly belong to this occupation, in it must lie perfect happiness.
