This philosophical treatise, written by Aristotle, describes his theory of how best a man should live. It contains his thoughts on morality, reason, wisdom, friendship, happiness, courage, honor, and politics. He begins by debating what is truly excellent in life. “For no function of man has so much permanence as excellent activities (these are thought to be more durable even than knowledge), and of these themselves the most valuable are more durable because those who are blessed spend their life most readily and most continuously in these.” He settles on happiness as an end unto itself. “The attribute in question, then, will belong to the happy man, and he will be happy throughout his life; for always, or by preference to everything else, he will do and contemplate what is excellent, and he will bear the chances of life most nobly and altogether decorously, if he is ‘truly good’…. If activities are, as we said, what determines the character of life, no blessed man can become miserable; for he will never do the acts that are hateful and mean. For the man who is truly good and wise, we think, bears all the chances of life becomingly and always makes the best of circumstances…. And if this is the case, the happy man can never become miserable—though he will not reach blessedness, if he meet with fortunes like those of Priam.”
Moderation, or the middle path, is one of Aristotle’s keys to living the good life. “The intermediate state is in all things to be praised, but that we must incline sometimes towards the excess, sometimes towards the deficiency; for so shall we most easily hit the mean and what is right.” Next, he circles back to describe excellence, “With regard to the excellences in general we have stated their genus in outline, viz. that they are means and that they are states, and that they tend by their own nature to the doing of the acts by which they are produced, and that they are in our power and voluntary, and act as right reason prescribes.”
Aristotle details the qualities of the best men. “Honour is the prize of excellence and it is to the good that it is rendered…. Therefore it is hard to be truly proud; for it is impossible without nobility and goodness of character…. The proud man is concerned with honours; yet he also bears himself with moderation towards wealth and power and all good or evil fortune, whatever may befall him, and will be neither over-joyed by good fortune nor over-pained by evil. For not even about honour does he care much, although it is the greatest thing.” To this ideal, Aristotle contrasts the mass of men in the world, “For without excellence it is not easy to bear gracefully the goods of fortune; and, being unable to bear them, and thinking themselves superior to others, they despise others and themselves do what they please. They imitate the proud man without being like him, and this they do where they can; so they do not act excellently, but they do despise others. For the proud man despises justly (since he thinks truly), but the many do so at random.”
Aristotle continues describing the attributes of the best of men, “He does not run into trifling dangers, nor is he fond of danger, because he honours few things; but he will face great dangers, and when he is in danger he is unsparing of his life, knowing that there are conditions on which life is not worth having. And he is the sort of man to confer benefits, but he is ashamed of receiving them; for the one is the mark of a superior, the other of an inferior…. The proud man wishes to be superior…. It is a mark of the proud man also to ask for nothing or scarcely anything, but to give help readily, and to be dignified towards people who enjoy high position and good fortune, but unassuming towards those of the middle class; for it is a difficult and lofty thing to be superior to the former, but easy to be so to the latter, and a lofty bearing over the former is no mark of ill-breeding, but among humble people it is as vulgar as a display of strength against the weak. Again, it is characteristic of the proud man not to aim at the things commonly held in honour, or the things in which others excel; to be sluggish and to hold back except where great honour as a great result is at stake, and to be a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones. He must also be open in his hate and in his love (for to conceal one’s feelings is a mark of timidity), and must care more for truth than for what people will think, and must speak and act openly; for he is free of speech because he is contemptuous, and he is given to telling the truth, except when he speaks in irony to the vulgar…. Nor is he given to admiration; for nothing to him is great…. He is one who will possess beautiful and profitless things rather than profitable and useful ones.”
Finally, Aristotle details the attributes contained in the best of communities. To further these ideal attributes is the job of politics. “The unjust has been divided into the unlawful and the unequal, and the just into the lawful and the equal…. For practically the majority of the acts commanded by the law are those which are prescribed from the point of view of excellence taken as a whole; for the law bids us practise every excellence and forbids us to practise any vice. And the things that tend to produce excellence taken as a whole are those of the acts prescribed by the law which have been prescribed with a view to education for the common good. But with regard to the education of the individual as such, which makes him without qualification a good man, we must determine later whether this is the function of the political art or of another…. The constitutions are monarchy, aristocracy, and thirdly that which is based on a property qualification, which it seems appropriate to call timocratic, though most people usually call it polity. The best of these is monarchy, the worst timocracy. The deviation from monarchy is tyranny; for both are forms of one-man rule, but there is the greatest difference between them; the tyrant looks to his own advantage, the king to that of his subjects…. Monarchy passes over into tyranny; for tyranny is the evil form of one-man rule and the bad king becomes a tyrant. Aristocracy passes over into oligarchy by the badness of the rulers, who distribute contrary to merit what belongs to the city—all or most of the good things to themselves, and office always to the same people, paying most regard to wealth; thus the rulers are few and are bad men instead of the most worthy. Timocracy passes over into democracy; for these are coterminous, since timocracy too tends to involve a mass of people, and all who have the property qualification could be equal. Democracy is the least bad of the deviations; for in its case the form of constitution is but a slight deviation…. It is the ideal of monarchy to be paternal rule.”
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