One man, one art.
This rule is laid down in the Republic of Plato as indispensable to the true city. If we contextualize this principle, which in the course of the Republic comes to light as the definition of justice (viz., "One man, one art"), we see that Plato defines justice as the principle which ensures maximal flourishing (in the sense of completion of a work) of the whole in which it inheres. This definition is justified by the agreement that justice is the human good, combined with the understanding that humans are creatures whose good consists in the completion of some work.
Justice, if the earlier treatment of it in the Republic as one art alongside others retains its currency, turns out to be the art of success in arts. But this definition renders it impossible to apply. One would have to have two arts, the art of justice and the art whose success it is to ensure. But the former art would consist in having only one art, which would make it impossible to have a second art to which it could apply.
There can therefore be no art concerning the accomplishment of the human good, and that is just what Aristotle thinks.
Oh, Amos...you got some 'splainin to do!
ReplyDeleteLet me just point out the obvious, to give things a point of reference.
You(provocatively)say:
"There can therefore be no art concerning the accomplishment of the human good, and that is just what Aristotle thinks."
Aristotle says:
"If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is, and of which of the sciences or capacities it is the object. It would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them; and we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this, e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric; now, since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man." (Ethics Book I - I forget the Bekker's)
I ask: Ho do you justify a reading of Aristotle that denies to the knowledge of things political the arche-techtonic ordering of all arts according to the manner of their proximate and ultimate telos? Is this a mere semblance that Aristotle is speaking of, as might be claimed fro his dialectical wording in such phrases as "And politics *appears* to be of this nature"? But where in Aristotle's discussion of the branch of knowing that deals with the polis (of which ethics is a part) does this possible interpretation gain its legitimacy, ground itself, and prove meritorious in some manner (i.e. even simply hermeneutically)?
I hope to give a fuller exposition, inspired by these demands, of the opening of the Nicomachean Ethics in a new post very soon. For now, let me just point out that the "dialectical" wording is couched within a hypothetical structure: "If..." etc. Nothing is established in the passage you quote (from memory?!), even dialectically.
ReplyDeleteI realize this does not answer your very valid question, but I think I can answer it, soon.