of a state. He argues that Plato does not take into account the facts of human nature;
present evils and abuses in society spring not from private ownership and the family,
but from basic human wickedness. He also finds gaps in Plato’s provisions, noting
that there are no arrangements for the majority, the third class of artisans and farmers.
Contemplating the class structure of Plato’s city, Aristotle sees two states in one, a
recipe for strife. Arguing that the whole cannot be happy unless all or at least some
of its parts are happy, he finds fault with Plato’s argument that the happiness of the
guardians is to be sacrificed to the happiness of the whole, clearly believing along
with Glaucon (Republic, 419)that Plato’s ideal city will be a dismal place to live in. He
himself, working empirically from an analysis of 158 existing constitutions, classified
governments under three headings: rule by the single person, rule by a few and rule
by the many. The first would be the ideal, but the corruption of it into tyranny is the
worst of all. Similarly, rule by the few will easily degenerate into a self-seeking
oligarchy. Though he had more faith in the collective judgement of the demos than
Plato, he favoured reform of extreme democracy to incorporate various checks and
balances. In the best polity, faction will be avoided if there is a strong middle class
(Politics, 1295–1296).
More radically, Aristotle came to reject the stark dualism of Plato’s theory of
ideas. He agreed with Plato’s rejection of the insistence of the Pre-Socratics that the
primordial substance was material, and accepted that the basic reality consisted of
forms, but denied that these forms exist apart from the sensible world. The form is
not transcendent but is immanent in the individual and the particular. The form and
its essence cannot exist apart from the things whose form and essence they are. In
rejecting the theory of ideas, he also rejected the belief that went with it, which Plato
had inherited from the Pythagoreans, that the body is the prison of the psyche or soul.
In his own work On the Soul (psyche, which is better thought of as the animating
principle), Aristotle does not allow that, as far as earthly life is concerned, the body
and the soul are two substances pulling in different directions and that the soul’s
purpose is to struggle free from the bonds of matter. Body and soul are one:
Let us go back again as from the beginning in the attempt to define what the soul
is and what might be the most general account of it. One kind, then, of the things
that there are we call substance, and part of this group we say to be so as matter
[hyle], that which is not in itself a particular thing, a second part we say to be so as
shape [morphe] or form [eidos], in accordance with which, when it applies, a thing
is called a particular, and a third as that which comes from the two together.
Now matter is potentiality [dynamic] and form is actuality [entelecheia].. .soul
is substance as the formof a natural body which potentially has life, and since this
substance is actuality, soul will be the actuality of such a body.
(On the Soul, 2, 1)PHILOSOPHY 205