The Doctrine of the Mean in Aristotles Politics

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The Doctrine of the Mean in Aristotle’s Politics.
Examining the texts of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” and “Politics” side by side, one is bound to find parallels between his reasoning with regard to the individual and to the state. In “Nicomachean Ethics” Aristotle discusses happiness, virtue, and the good life on an individual level and lays out necessary provisions for the good life of a person. He maintains that virtue is a necessary element of happiness: a man will be happy if he has virtues of justice, courage, and temperance, each constituting a balance between the extremes. But this requirement of virtue for the happy life goes beyond the individual level, as we see it in “Politics”. There, Aristotle claims that man is by nature a “political animal” , and for that reason he can only achieve the above-mentioned virtues as part of a state. And since the city is formed by many individuals, the virtue of the state is constituted by the individual virtues of its citizens. It is therefore clear that fulfillment of requirements for the happy life of an individual, namely being virtuous and self-sufficient, is equally necessary for the state as a whole in order to be happy. We thus see that the virtue of a state is directly linked to the virtue of an individual, and that therefore the means of achieving the former will run parallel with those of the latter.
At this point, one might want to examine closer what Aristotle denotes by virtue, by what means it can be obtained, and what the effects of virtuousness are on something that possesses it. Aristotle identifies virtue as “a state that decides…the mean relative to us, which is defined by reference to reason… It is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency.” The key concept in this definition is the mean relative to us, by which Aristotle understands the intermediate between something that is equidistant from each extremity . As he puts it, in everything continuous and divisible we can take either too much of something, too little, or some intermediate that is between the excess and deficiency. Moreover, the mean relative to us is not merely a mathematical intermediate halfway between the two extremes. For if, Aristotle explains, “ten pounds is a lot for someone o eat, and two pounds a little, I does not follow that the train...

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...we turn to the middle class, which is a mean between the two extremes, to be a buffer between the upper and the lower classes. The middle class suffers least from ambition and is the most willing to listen to reason. Therefore, in order for the state to be good and stable, it is necessary to adhere to the mean and make the middle class as large as possible relative to the lower and the upper classes.
We have now observed a series of instances in which a constituent of an ideal regime has to comply with the Doctrine of the Mean in order to be efficient and make the state better and not worse. Having started with virtue and good life of an individual and extending the concept to the level of the state, we could see that the Doctrine is not merely a means of individual happiness. Rather, its application is much more universal, ranging from a single person to an entire city. In each case, though, the key is the same: moderation and avoidance of extremes. Whether we want to make an individual happy or the whole city, placing an object at the mean related to this object is what is necessary to make it virtuous, and virtue in turn will ensure its excellence.

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