The philosopher who allows you to discover life: Aristotle

Aristotle is Plato’s most famous disciple. Preceptor of the young Alexander the Great for three years but attracted by the prestige of Athens, the one nicknamed the Stagirite (because he was born in Macedonia in Stagira) or the peripatetic philosopher (because he taught while walking ) was the founder of the Lycée, a competing school of Plato’s Academy.

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Noting that “man naturally has the passion to know”, as he writes in the first sentence of his Metaphysics, Aristotle invests all fields of knowledge. He invents logic, lays the foundations of biology and psychology, founds ontology (the science of Being), identifies the principles of ethics and politics, explains the springs of poetics and rhetoric (oratorical art, which he breaks down into three notions that have become famous, ethos, logos and pathos) and proposes a way to achieve wisdom and happiness.

Convinced that it is necessary to “save the phenomena”, he refuses the world of Plato’s Ideas and privileges an inductive method (which starts from observable facts) to construct an entire system based on the idea that the finality, the impulse towards a goal, governs reality because “nature does nothing in vain”. Each being is an “informed matter”, shaped, or the actualization of a power. To think of an individual is to distinguish four causes in him: the material, formal, efficient and final cause. For example for a statue: the marble, the silhouette, the hammer and the desired beauty.

Devoting a third of his works to biology, Aristotle does not hesitate to practice dissections (for example on the chameleon) to identify the criteria that make it possible to classify living things and their anomalies. It ranks beings according to the soul that makes them live: vegetative, locomotive, deliberative. If man is distinguished by his reason, this must not forget his sensitive origin because “the soul never thinks without an image”. Seeking the principle of movement and denying the existence of a vacuum, he maintains that a “primary motionless motor” rotates the seven skies that make up the cosmos around the earth. If this physics will be denied during the Renaissance, it will serve the highest speculations of theologians of the Middle Ages, in particular those of Thomas Aquinas.

His moral and political philosophy, first inspired by Plato, quickly detaches itself from it: the virtue whose exercise is the condition of happiness is for him a happy medium between two excesses and requires experience. Reason is not enough to form the prudent man. And the latter cannot be satisfied with practicing morality: he must become a citizen because man is a “political animal”. Defender of democracy, unlike Plato, Aristotle codifies the proper use of speech in the assembly and sees in the tragic spectacles, which he studies in his Poetics, a tool to purge the passions of the citizen.

Difficult to read, Aristotle is undoubtedly the most influential thinker of all Antiquity.

Aristotle’s understanding of value is shaped within the framework of his moral views. Aristotle produced a work on moral philosophy called “Nicomachus’ Ethics”. Nicomachus, mentioned in this work, is the son of Aristotle. In this work, Aristotle says that every action desires the good and questions what this good is.

According to him, every action has a purpose. This purpose is about the good. According to him, a person will be happy when he achieves his goal, which is good. Happiness is the most beautiful and most pleasing thing. Happiness is the purpose of the soul. and the behavior in accordance with this purpose is the behavior in accordance with virtue. Therefore, according to Aristotle, virtue must be investigated and these virtues are the virtues of the human spirit.

According to Aristotle, virtue is a characteristic of man. According to him, it is possible to talk about two types of virtue. The first is thought and the second is character. The virtue of thought is acquired by the education of man, and the virtue of character is acquired by the habits of man. While the virtues of character are the virtues shaped by the environment of the person, the virtues of thought are the shaped virtues related to education and intellectual stance.

Aristotle states that excess or deficiency in human actions is not good and makes people unhappy. According to him, to be virtuous is to find the middle way between these two extremes. Virtue is corrupted by the excess or lack of actions. A person finds the middle way voluntarily. Being virtuous depends on it. Aristotle’s view is also known today as the golden middle (See: What is the Golden Middle?).

According to Aristotle, the right environment for happiness is social life. People who are not social cannot be happy. Aristotle said, “Man is by nature a political animal.” He wants to tell us this with his words. The secret of happiness must be sought in the social and political order. The state can ensure the happiness of individuals with the regulations it will make. Aristotle’s explanation of moral behavior on the basis of good and virtue is important in terms of realizing the responsibilities of people as a member of society in the contemporary world.