Aristotle and the Three Graces
Adapted from "Aristotle's Discovery of the Human" by Mary P. Nichols, for RealClear Books & Culture.
The Three Graces come from Greek myth, associated by Homer and Hesiod with joy, celebration, and beauty. They have been rendered in Greek and Roman sculpture, and paintings from the Italian Renaissance to French impressionism, as well as countless modern and perhaps postmodern versions. They join hands in dance alongside the goddess of Love in Botticelli’s famous “Primavera.” It is not the poets, however, but Aristotle, who explains their specific calling: their public shrines remind human beings to benefit others in return, and even to initiate acts of beneficence. Their message does not describe human life so much as remind us of what it could—and should—be. Aristotle even refers to the work of the Graces in his discussion of justice in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he reminds us of what supplements and enriches legal and political arrangements.
The Graces so described seem to have little to do with our own liberal institutions and practices, at least as they are understood through the lens of liberal theory, with its emphasis on individual rights, and on governments that protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Because liberalism’s very principles of freedom and equality, however, offer no authoritative support for humanity’s spiritual life, moral aspirations, and devotion to truth, liberalism has become vulnerable to the charges of its critics whether modern philosophers such as Rousseau and Nietzsche or contemporary theocratic regimes, that it gives rise to a way of life one characterized by moral relativism, and even hedonistic self-gratification. Liberals long for a defense, just as they long for something more than such a life. They fear death, and seek self-protection and the comforts of life, but they also feel the pull of the Graces.
In Aristotle’s Discovery of the Human, Mary P. Nichols argues that his political thought can supplement and enrich liberal politics, just as he saw that the Graces might supplement and enrich the justice of political communities. His discovery of the human is manifest throughout the Nicomachean Ethics in his treatment of the human work and happiness, virtue and responsibility, friendship, and philosophy and wisdom, all supported by the human relation to the divine.
The book traces how throughout he brings the gods and the divine into his “philosophizing about human affairs.” In doing so, he elevates human life, for there is “something divine in us,” namely, our minds, and yet we cannot fully assimilate or fathom the divinity for which our souls long. Piety makes us aware both of our kinship to the divine and our striving for excellence and also of our incompleteness and limitation. It therefore undergirds a political life guided by and aiming at virtue while supporting moderation and tolerance. He justifies a liberal politics insofar as it allows what is highest in humanity, ethical and intellectual virtue, to flourish.
Our virtues for Aristotle are manifestations of freedom, but their exercise requires living with others and sharing in speeches and actions. They are not simply the “liberal virtues” sought as instrumental to liberal society, but the virtues that are the conditions for human happiness. They are exercised in our communities, and derive support from them, while they come in part through our own efforts. That is why our virtuous deeds are deserving of praise, and our failures are deserving of blame. Aristotle’s defense of freedom therefore cannot lead to a moral relativism when it insists on the deliberation and choice essential to virtue.
We are beings who unlike beasts have “longing minds” and “intellectual longings.” Although our mind is something divine in us, it is a “longing” mind. Longing indicates the absence of what we long for. Aristotle never attributes longing to the divine. Our longing mind supports our trust in a good or divinity that is “beyond us” for which we long and makes us akin to the divine, even though no divine being needs to pursue truth or deliberate. When Aristotle says that our choices can be understood as longing mind or intellectual longing, he means that we are free beings who are moved to pursue the truth and who are able to do so and that our longing—our desires, our spiritedness, and our wishing, indeed, our actions, including our politics—can be informed by thought.
Just as the divine is “beyond us,” we are incomplete or imperfect beings whose happiness depends on others. We are political by nature, friends are goods indispensable for our lives, and we are indebted to our families and others for our nurture and education and owe them care in return. As Aristotle says, self-sufficiency does not mean what suffices for someone by himself, living a solitary life, but what is sufficient with respect to parents, offspring, a spouse, and friends and fellow citizens. Aristotle’s statement that we are “joint causes” of our dispositions and actions acts as a reproach to those who see themselves as sole causes of themselves, who forget what they owe to families and political communities and even to what they have been given by nature. We are like the munificent individual whom Aristotle describes who has resources with which to begin, and the scientist who knows beforehand the principles he needs for science. In these and other ways, Aristotle’s rejection of human autonomy and defense of community resonates with the concerns of many contemporary critics of liberalism.
Aristotle, however, does not understand our lives as simply embedded in our communities. When he says that we are “joint causes” of our dispositions and actions, he defends individual freedom as well as its limits. Individuals are also causes of their dispositions and actions, not only their families, political communities, or friends. Our virtuous actions do simply conform to prudence; rather, they come from our own prudence. To be virtuous we must exercise our own judgment, rather than follow the good judgment of another. Statesmen arrange matters in their communities, which impact our lives, but Aristotle warns that they do not command the gods. So too they are concerned with friendship, which holds the city together, but the friendship of those who “share in philosophy” transcends the city. We learn from the communities to which we belong, but we also question them. We wonder, we inquire, about the political community, and even about the divine.
Aristotle’s treatment of the great-souled individual exemplifies this complexity. His virtue seems to free him of the impediments that circumscribe others and limit their actions, as if he could stand alone, worthy of the honor we assign to gods. It turns out, however, that he lacks knowledge of his own dependence on others, and that his lack of self-knowledge prevents him from undertaking the activity he craves and that alone makes him worthy of the honor he deems he deserves. By appealing to his desire to perform worthy deeds, to his dependence on honor and his shame, and even to his inclination to truthfulness, and by gesturing toward friendship, Aristotle attempts to bring him into the community, in ways that sustain rather than diminish his freedom.
So too Aristotle speaks of justice as the lawful, and of laws as commanding virtue and forbidding vice, but throughout his discussion of justice he shows the limits of law. In addition to the laws, the community requires support from what Aristotle calls reciprocal justice, an exchange of harms for harms and goods for goods, not merely the goods necessary for life, but the beneficent deeds encouraged by the Graces. Not all the Greek gods, to be sure, but these beneficent ones whom Aristotle calls forth, serve to illustrate the reliance of the city on the divine for fostering the good deeds that hold it together and for encouraging human beings to act as causes—to initiate good deeds rather than simply to perform them in return. Even more than reciprocity is demanded of human beings, inasmuch as there must be a first giver for there to be giving in return. Aristotle also appeals to a natural justice that structures and informs law for those who can share ruling and being ruled in their political communities and to equity, which corrects the universality of the law in particular cases and inclines to pardon. Equity thereby gives the individual case more than it is strictly or legally due. It is moved by a grace that goes beyond reciprocity.
Aristotle’s distinction between prudence and wisdom further limits the scope of political life. Prudence, the virtue of statesmen, is concerned with only what is good for human beings, whereas wisdom involves the highest or best things in the cosmos. At the same time, the division also protects political life against a wisdom that might claim divine-like knowledge, such as possessed by the Republic’s philosopher-kings, and by implication those who attempt to derive an authority to rule from religious orthodoxy, or even those whose secular orthodoxies entertain no doubt about their own wisdom. Prudence, not wisdom, is the virtue that guides politics. Aristotle’s own way of philosophizing nevertheless bridges the gap between these intellectual virtues, for he investigates not only the human goods, but their relation to the best or highest in the cosmos. His focus therefore does not demote politics in relation to what is higher but rather elevates it by trying to understand its place in a whole larger than itself, and indeed the ways in which human life touches divinity.
Aristotle’s treatment of friendship shows the mutual dependence of families and politics. Good family relations serve as models for good regimes and act as a reproach to deviant ones, providing standards for judging different regimes. At the same time, politics guards against the oppressive family relations that model deviant or unjust regimes, if only by providing a broader context for human life that limits the reach of the family over its members. More important, political communities also advance the ends of the family—the provision of life, nurturing, and education of the new generation that Aristotle identifies as the work of parents. Politics depends on families to begin this work that is its highest calling. Some friendships nevertheless go beyond the scope of law such as those who philosophize together. Here too Aristotle draws the outlines of a limited politics, limited, on one hand, by the families out of which political communities arise and whose ends they advance, and, on the other, by friendships that transcend politics.
Aristotle concludes the Ethics by praising theoretical or contemplative activities as highest and also preparing us for a further work on politics. For Aristotle, the theoretical activity of human beings involves a range of activities, not only looking up to the highest being or beings in the cosmos, but also the work of the statesman who “contemplates” the soul insofar as it helps him in securing the good of the political community, and that of Aristotle and his readers when they “contemplate” what preserves and what destroys political communities, and why some regimes are well governed and others not.
Because Aristotle advises his readers to think divine thoughts, and to live in accordance with what is most divine in themselves, their minds, while he preserves the distinction between human and divine, we are entitled to refer to his Ethics as a work of piety. Aristotelian piety goes hand in hand with his discovery of the human. Human beings do not merely occupy a space between god and beast and share something with both, but that space makes possible distinctive goods, such as self-awareness and friendship. It also makes possible a political life that belongs to beings who are political by nature because they have reason and speech and hence can deliberate together about what is advantageous and just. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics occur within that space while at the same time they protect it.
A pious awareness of the distance between ourselves and the divine supports a humble toleration of different religious communities. Not the diminution of the effect and influence of religion on civil life but reverence itself begets toleration, while holding pious citizens back from any attempt to assimilate politics to religion. On the other hand, politics, including liberal politics, cannot be traced to a godless assertion of human power over nature if the achievements of our reason are made possible, as Aristotle says, by “what is most divine in us.” We pursue happiness as we see fit, but we must see what is fit for human beings. Liberal politics therefore need not be understood as merely secular but could derive support from an Aristotelian piety. Aristotle does not merely give liberal politics a defense against its critics, but also leaves it with a high and demanding work to do.
Mary P. Nichols is Professor Emerita in Political Science at Baylor University. She is the author of many books and articles in the history of political thought, and in politics, literature, and film. Her books include Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom (Cornell); Socrates on Friendship and Community: Reflections on Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis (Cambridge); and Citizens and Statesmen: A Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics (Rowman & Littlefield). She has also published on film directors, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, and Whit Stillman, and classic authors such as Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner. She is a Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute in Clinton, New York. See more at https://www.baylor.edu/political_science/index.php?id=953840
