in the Poetics: poetry is 'more philosophic and of graver import' than history since it is not concerned
with mere brute facts. But history, and other forms of human practical activity, contingent and particular
though they are, can still be usefully clarified and analysed by the philosopher.
The Nicomachean Ethics in particular has deservedly attracted lasting detailed concern because in it the
concerns of practical life-excellence, the best life, practical reasoning-are analysed with a beautifully
appropriate degree of rigour and abstraction. The theory that 'virtue lies in a mean', for example, shows
us the structure of our dispositions to action, and clarifies them to us without forcing them into over-
simple, artificial moulds. On practical reasoning, a topic on which few philosophers have said anything
both true and illuminating, Aristotle's account is still arguably the best in the field, showing us the
structure in what looks like the chaos of everyday deliberations without implausibly reducing all our
reasonings about action to a single form of calculation about how to achieve a single fixed end. The
project of explaining rather than rejecting the appearances appears here in its most accessible and still
relevant form. The ethical works display in a particularly happy way Aristotle's talent for applying the
appropriate method, for producing the explanation which clarifies the subject, but clarifies it in such a
way that we do not lose touch with our original view of the subject-matter and the difficulties it gives
rise to.
Aristotle has throughout appeared as belonging to the more outward-turning philosophical tradition
focused on explanation of the physical world and human society from the observer's viewpoint. It may
seem that he lacks Plato's, and Heraclitus', concern for the inner, the search in philosophy for personal
enlightenment. In fact it is easy to overdraw this contrast; there is in Aristotle a strong mystical streak.
But it finds expressions that are impersonal. In short, difficult, and undeveloped passages in De anima 3
and Me. eth. 10 he presents the peak of human achievement as abstract thinking which is a unity with its
object. And the first mover of Aristotle's universe, established through remorselessly technical argument
in Physics 7 and 8, is in Metaphysics 12 identified with god, and, in difficult and intense passages, with
thinking of this abstract kind, which is, in the case of god, 'thinking of thinking', a thinking that escapes
the mundane limitations of our cognitive activities, which always require a distinct object. It is clear that
these short and cryptic passages contain ideas of considerable importance to Aristotle, but he presents
them with no personal urgency, and, perhaps because he suspects it, none of Plato's appeal to the reader's
imagination.
It soon became standard to contrast Plato and Aristotle and to claim that their 'systems' were opposed in
every way. (A minority tradition claimed that they merely had different approaches to the same truths.)
There are obvious contrasts between them, beginning with their styles, but these are not easy to
characterize in general terms, if we give due attention to Plato's late dialogues and bear in mind the long
period of their common philosophizing in the Academy. Plato was always to have the wider appeal
throughout antiquity, partly because of his literary skill, partly because in the middle dialogues he
attracts the part of us that loves exciting generalizations. Despite Plato's more vivid depictions, it is
Aristotle who is concerned not to lose the complexity and delicacy of everyday experience; but this can
be done only at the cost of hard and detailed work not lending itself to popularization or literary
glamour. Typically, Aristotle's discussion of the soul or psyche, in the De anima and other works, is both
careful in its study of human and other animal physiology, and suggestive in its theorizing; philosophers