Aristotle’s project in the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) is to give his account of what it means to live the best life. He gives two primary suggestions: the philosophic life and the politically active life. Both of these involve what he calls happiness; the best life will be the happy one. Because humans are inherently political creatures that live together in cities under specific regimes, Aristotle’s project in the Politics is to establish what the best kind of regime is. I will illustrate this in two ways. First, I will draw parallels between passages in the NE and the Politics to show that his account of the best regime is motivated by his accounts of the best life. This parallel will show that this best regime is designed to help its citizens achieve the best kind of life. Next, I will show that in Aristotle’s view, the regime must legislate and more importantly educate its citizens with a view to what is required to live the best life. I will then show that though the United States’ conception of the best life is different from Aristotle’s, our own culture’s vision of the best life is also what informs our regime’s educational priorities.
Aristotle establishes in the NE that the best human life is the life aimed at the highest good: eudaimonia, or happiness. Happiness, he says, is not a result or a feeling gained as a consequence to something, but is rather an activity conducted for its own self-sufficient end. This end is not subordinate to any other ends, and is pursued for its own sake. Aristotle says that happiness is found in the “activities in accord with virtue” (1177a3). He gives the same account in book 7 of the Politics. He says that “the best way of life both separately for each individual and in common for cities is that accompanied by virtue” (1323b41). So for Aristotle, the best life is the happy one, and the happy one is accompanied by virtue, thus the life in accordance with virtue is the best life. He believes there are two main ways one can go about living virtuously.
The first, and what he considers primarily to be the best, is the philosophic life of study. If it is true that happiness is found in the activities in accord with virtue, then the best life will be lived according to the best virtue. Now the best virtue is the virtue of the best thing, and the “best thing is understanding” (1177a14). To understand, for Aristotle, is the greatest thing because it is entirely self-sufficient. It is the most stable, because we are “more capable of continuous study than any continuous action.” Aristotle believes this virtue is actually so great that it transcends the mere human, indeed, Aristotle says that someone dedicated to the life of study would not live as a “human being but as something divine,” (1177b33). In fact, the life of study is so great and self-sufficient that performing the ethical virtues like courage, temperance, generosity, etc. would actually impede this life because they are not as great.
But besides study, the “life of action is happiest in a secondary way” (1178a9) because the life of action allows humans to perform the other necessary virtues. As we said before, if performing the ethical virtues is necessary to live a virtuous life, it is not practical to dedicate one’s entire life to study, and Aristotle seems to view this life as the most practically accessible one to all humans. A person living a life of pure study is only possible if he does not work or fight in wars, and he is completely supported by the labor of others. Aristotle acknowledges that for someone to both have enough food to eat and have the leisure time to spend on noble pursuits like study, he cannot live alone, as his lone labor as a farmer would likely take up all of his time. Since we are merely humans, “our nature is not self-sufficient for study,” because we need a “healthy body and need to have food and the other services provided” (1178b35). Yes, Aristotle believes that man is a political animal, and he has to live with other humans. Aristotle’s ethical virtues require other people: courage can only be gained in war, generosity is only possible if there is someone to be generous to, and friendliness and wit require peers. If one dedicated their entire life to study, they would not have the opportunity to display courage in war, for example. Indeed, Aristotle believes that the degree of happiness is actually proportional to the amount of virtuous action (1323b22) we do. He establishes in the Politics that the best way of life for the individual human and the human in common is the life accompanied by this virtue, and happiness is the “same for individuals and cities.” But seeing as the city is a “community of similar persons for the sake of a life that is the best possible” (1328a37), a city that acts in accordance with the virtues will be the most happy, and thus be the best regime. Acting virtuously, then, is its own end, and living virtuously consists in having the correct end and discovering the correct methods of achieving it (1331b29). We will see Aristotle’s treatment of what a city should do specifically to act virtuously in the later paragraphs.
We have established that Aristotle’s account of the best life mirrors what he believes will create the best regime. If the city is to be the best, its people must be the best, which means that there needs to be a way for the city to cultivate the best people. He speaks on both practical and noble matters, meaning that the best regime must understand its “stock” of people and create the best lives possible based on what is understood of the best life in general. It belongs to an “excellent legislator to see how a city and the “stock” of human beings will share in the good life, and see the happiness possible for them” (1325a8) Not everyone is capable of the greatest happiness — maybe there are more farmers and merchants who are slavish and won’t be able to access it. But Aristotle believes that the citizens, the ones who participate in the regime and are capable of ruling and being ruled, have the opportunity to live the best life. His focus in the Politics is to outline how a city should be designed and what it should prioritize in order to cultivate a citizenry that can live their best lives.
This cultivation means that the people, especially the young, must be brought up in a way so that they will live the best, virtuous life. Aristotle acknowledges that it is difficult for the many to be virtuous, because they are compelled by pleasure and pain (1179b14), as opposed to a desire for the noble. But he explains in both the NE and the Politics that people gain virtue in three ways: nature, habit and reason (1179b20, 1332a41). By nature, people are capable of becoming virtuous. The potential is innate within all of us (1103a27), just as a flat sheet of metal has the potential to become a sharp knife if cultivated properly. This cultivation will start when the citizens are young. Because the young are guided more by their feelings than their reason, Aristotle says that we must first cultivate them by habit. For Aristotle, habit is important in repeating actions; a “state of character,” in this case a virtue, “results from the repetition of similar actions” (1103b22). A city cannot bring up someone from his youth without the right laws; if the laws prescribe the correct practices, then it won’t be hard to conduct merely virtuous actions when you’re already used to doing it (1180a15). A child is able to learn to become virtuous through following the laws which direct them to virtuous activity, and this repetition of virtuous activity will allow them to develop a virtuous state of character.
An important distinction to make before moving on to Aristotle’s specific strategy of educating the young is between the different parts of life. Life itself is divided up into two dichotomies: Occupation and leisure, in addition to war and peace (1333a32). Speaking of these matters involving action, Aristotle says that “some are directed towards necessary and useful things, others toward noble things. Just as the worse is always for the sake of the better, and the part of the soul obeying reason is always for the sake of the part that has reason itself, the necessary and useful things must be for the sake of the noble things, because the noble is better. Thus war must be for the sake of peace and occupation for the sake of leisure. So when it comes to a legislator designing the best regime, he must “legislate particularly to the things that are better and ends” (1333a39), thus he must legislate with a view to peace and leisure. He explains this by criticizing the Spartans. While they have a powerful army and certainly have courageous men in battle, their laws and education are with a view only to war. This is good for instilling courage in the youth, but it neglects all the other necessary virtues for happiness. When wartime is over and the city is at peace, Aristotle says the city falls apart — the people were never educated on how to be at leisure. Occupation and war skills are necessary, too, but are subordinate. Occupation is only necessary because people must work to produce food, homes and other essentials. War is necessary not to conquer others, but to prevent one’s own city from being conquered (1333b41). The best regime will prepare its people so that they are able to conduct both occupational and war duties, but would much rather be at leisure and peace. The virtues all support these different aspects of life: courage with a view to occupation, philosophy with a view to leisure, and temperance and justice for both (1334a24). Leisure in particular, is said “to involve pleasure, happiness, and living blessedly” (1338a2), and importantly, these benefits are “not available to those who are occupied,” because they are working towards some end that is not happiness in itself.
If the regime is to be designed with a view to leisure, and leisure consists of the pursuit of noble things, the regime’s laws and education must be made with a view to the pursuit of the noble. For people to want to pursue the noble in the first place, they must have had the right upbringing, and this is essential for living a virtuous life. Thus, Aristotle says the legislator’s primary duty is to decide on the right education (1337a12). He notes that education is not primarily for the youth to use that education to be better at doing a job or a craft. Indeed, being too good at something like farming or trading would mean that they do an occupation for a living instead of developing their virtues through political involvement and study. Instead, the education should not only be on account of utility, but “also because many other sorts of learning become possible through them” (1338a41). This education for the sake of learning more and acting well perfectly reflects Aristotle’s idea of what it means to live the best life. One should learn for the sake of itself, and through this learning the youth will be molded into virtuous people. For example, learning to draw is not good merely because of the utility of preventing yourself from being scammed at the market, but because it makes one “expert at studying the beauty connected with bodies” (1338b3).
For Aristotle, education in music plays a crucial role in his explanation of how we learn to properly appreciate and enjoy the noble (Jimenez, 14). Music education itself has no direct “use.” It has no use like how the education of letters is useful to money-making, or education of gymnastics might be useful to physical health. Music education, however, would be done not as being “useful or necessary but as being liberal and noble” (1338a32). Music, as something we do in leisure in a way that is enjoyed in itself and “has a natural pleasure” (1340a5), also has the quality of stirring up our internal emotions. Just as working out physically might make the body of a certain quality, education in music “makes the character of a certain quality by habituating it to be capable of enjoying in correct fashion” (1339a24). Education in music allows one to develop their tastes more properly. Music, which has the ability to inspire passion within us, and belongs among the pleasant things, can be used as a catalyst for the development of the correct feelings in the youth. Because virtue “is connected with enjoying in correct fashion and feeling affection and hatred” (1340a15), the youth must learn through habituation with music what the right feelings are, so that they may be virtuous and thus live the best life. Certain rhythms and melodies might make us feel anger, joy, sadness, or grief. Especially when this is played over a story or poem, these tunes will create feelings of association in the youth at different plot points. They will better understand what emotion is the correct one to feel in various moments. Thus music is capable of rendering the soul of a certain quality simply through habituation and association.
What Aristotle has said is that the best life is the virtuous one, and he sets up his regime to most successfully provide this life to its citizens. The regime must be designed not with a view to occupation or war but to leisure and peace, whereby the people can pursue the good that is good for the sake of itself and not because it is necessary for survival. The regime must prioritize this leisure, and instill these values in the young through education. As the young as best educated in virtue through habituation, music in particular is effective because its rhythms and melodies can evoke different emotions and sensations that create the correct associations. This repetition of association will eventually result in a virtuous state of character for the young, where they can find their own ways to live the best life, whether that be the life of study or the life of action. What the best life is, then, informs Aristotle’s conception of the best regime.
Now I will go on to show that the laws and public education of the modern United States is also set up with a view to what American culture considers to be the best life. Throughout our lives, especially when we are educated from youth, we are asked again and again to decide what we would like to do with our lives. An answer is necessary even from the first grade, and the question almost always relates to an occupation. When a child asks their parents why they go to school, it is rare for them to answer that education is valuable because it develops your soul, and it allows you to look at the world, notice problems, and think of solutions. Or that it’s valuable because the ability of humans to examine their own lives is what differentiates us from mere beasts. No matter what is said, the reason always leads back to education being necessary for children because they need to eventually get a job. This is a fair enough claim; Aristotle agrees that occupation is necessary towards life. We need food and shelter, and in the United States we need a stable income to provide that. But in our culture, one also needs a career that’s considered “fulfilling,” motivated by how most people will spend 9 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, and 40-50 years of their lives working a career. So from childhood, we are told again and again that we need to find something we enjoy, the implication being that if we don’t, our lives will simply be failures.
Today, it’s quite common that someone chooses a career because of the prestige associated with it and the vast amount of wealth it generates, and these two tend to coincide. The best life in America is one in which you can make a lot of money doing something you “love” or “fulfills” you. This is obviously a different conception of the best life from Aristotle; while he said that the best life must have a noble pursuit of virtue as its end, with occupation merely being a necessary thing to do on the side, in the United States occupation itself is the end. Our education system reflects this deeply. Children learn mathematics not because there is something inherently artful about finding truths in logical progression, but because math is “useful.” It allows us to pay taxes accurately, weigh the prices of one grocery store versus another, and calculate our personal budgets. In elementary school, the word problems always relate the amount of money something costs and how much you choose to buy; even something with as much interesting application as the binomial theorem (approximation of π) is taught in school instead to calculate compound interest. Physics is taught to prepare people for engineering, not because there is value in having a better internal representation of how the world works. The skill of writing is only with a view to your ability to express yourself to get into a decent university, by which the degree you receive will propel you into a job with higher prestige, instead of being useful because it is noble to express oneself well. But none of this education is motivated by the desire to help the young find ways to pursue the noble.
I think Aristotle’s intuition is correct — I agree that what the best life actually is should inform how the society itself is run. American citizens would do well to think about that. It’s quite easy to become habituated into a lifestyle where one merely continues climbing the socially accepted ladder of success because that’s what they have always done. Indeed, it’s what the regime and society has been designed to optimize. We should mold our values in life to not be so occupation-focused, lest we retire and realize we have nothing to do because we never learned how to be at leisure. Aristotle is right that it must start with education of the young. We have to educate them with a view to leisure rather than occupation for them to learn that things can be pleasant to learn simply to learn them. The best life is difficult to achieve, and Aristotle acknowledges that a lot of things have to go right for it to happen for any one individual. I think a quote from Bill Watterson encapsulates it perfectly.
“To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.”