10, 7). This leisure will be spent partly in relaxation and simple amusement, but the
man who would be happy will use it to further the life of the intellect, for ‘the intellect
more than anything else is the man’:
intellectual activity, taking as it does the form of contemplation, seems to excel all
other activities in the seriousness of its purpose, to aim at no end beyond itself and
to have its own unique pleasure, which enhances its activity. In this activity we easily
recognise self-sufficiency, the possibility of leisure and such freedom from fatigue
as it is humanly possible, together with all the other blessings of pure happiness.... If the intellect is divine compared with man, the life of the intellect must be divine
compared with the life of a human creature. And we ought not to listen to those who
council us Oman, think as a man should and O mortal, remember your mortality.
Rather ought we, so far as in us lies, to put on immortality and to leave nothing
unattempted in the effort to live in conformity with the highest thing within us.
(Ethics, 10, 7)
Aristotelian philosophy, which emanates from the last years of the independent polis
before the Macedonian conquest (and Aristotle had been criticized for showing no
apparent awareness of the coming change), represents the final and in some senses
the fullest philosophic expression of the best in Classical Greek civilization. The whole
tendency of his thought, unlike that of Plato, works with and not against the grain of
the best Athenian culture of his day. Here may be noted the purpose and value he
sees in literature and art. Nevertheless, it must be admitted at once that there is a
narrowness in his aristocratic outlook. He has not the respect of Herodotus for the
non-Greek (Politics, 1252b). Slavery he considered entirely natural (Politics, 1254a).
Unlike Plato, who advocates sexual equality in the Republic, he believes in the natural
inferiority of women (Politics, 1252b). But in the range of his interests, he embraces
more of life than Plato; no other Greek thinker opened up so many areas to intellectual
enquiry. And his idea of the good life, less exclusive than that of the other-worldly Plato,
comes from a generous affirmation of the purpose and value of earthly life. His own
achievements provide the recommending context for his praise of the intellectual life.
Hellenistic philosophy: post-Aristotelians
Athens was still the home of philosophy and attracted thinkers from the whole
Greek world. But where Plato and Aristotle had taken for granted that the full human
potential could only be realised in the developed polis, in the less exclusive Hellenistic
world of the third century as the city state began to weaken the two main philo-
sophical systems of the third century, Stoicism and Epicureanism, both desiderated
PHILOSOPHY 209