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Aristotle on Necessities and Needs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2017

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Extract

Aristotle's account of human needs is valuable because it describes the connections between logical, metaphysical, physical, human and ethical necessities. But Aristotle does not fully draw out the implications of the account of necessity for needs and virtue. The proper Aristotelian conclusion is that, far from being an inferior activity fit only for slaves, meeting needs is the first part of Aristotelian virtue.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 57 , December 2005 , pp. 113 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2005

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References

1 References in this paper are by the Bekker line numbers, and quotations are from the translations gathered in Barnes, Jonathan' Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. There is an argument to be had about whether modern philosophers should really use ‘original’ Greek texts, but this paper is not the place for it. I have relied on translators. (I could cite Aristotle in support of this approach: translation is the kind of necessity Aristotle thought we should delegate, because it is instrumental, cannot be desired for itself, and is distant from the life-enhancing end of doing the philosophy).

2 See for example Fraassen, B. van, ‘The Only Necessity is Verbal Necessity’, Journal of Philosophy 74 (02 1977), 71–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See for example Kripke, Saul, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)Google Scholar or Wiggins, DavidSameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

4 One might want to argue further, that existence needs are also closer to being absolute than the other two kinds of necessity mentioned in the Metaphysics: the necessity of coercion, or the necessity of following a certain form of reasoning.

5 There may seem to be two questions here: is needs-meeting a proper part of the life of the individual, or is it a proper part of the state? But for Aristotle, as for Plato, these two questions come together: ‘the same life is best for each individual, and for states and for mankind collectively’ (1325b31; see also b 14–32).

6 Thanks to Christopher Rowe, Sarah Broadie and Thomas Johanssen for pressing the objection that having others meet ordinary needs may be consistent with Aristotelian virtue.

7 Our own society, which subscribes to the myth of free rational equal agency, imposes an illusory equality on everyone, and then holds everyone up to the standards of a social game—capitalism—that only highly rational and capable individuals can actually hope to play and win. Adam Smith noted that capitalism depends on some self-deception about just how self-sufficient and independent we can be (see John O'Neill's contribution to this volume, p. *;). But Smith did not comment on the concomitant deception necessarily perpetrated by the capitalist state on its less able citizens when it embraces ‘free trade’. For trade to be ‘free’, everyone must be equally self-sufficient, have equal access to the market and equal skill in playing it. The capitalist state flatters its less able citizens as it opens the way for the more able to fleece them, and calls this fair play.