A: They're both concerned with the good of the (w)hole!
Alternate A: They both like looking up other people's butts.
Book II of that timeless tome The Republic opens with a question, an intellectual call-to-arms of sorts, put forth by that cheeky little whelp of a protégé Glaucon, The Shining One. Never one to beat around the bush, Glaucon asks his bud Socrates outright if there is any point in maintaining a code of personal decency. Glaucon argues that the importance placed on 'justice' is entirely a human construct, a social contract upheld not of some sort of sick altruism, but rather out of selfishness and fear. He calls justice "a mean between the best - doing injustice with impunity - and the worst - suffering without without possibility of requital". In essence, Glaucon here is invoking what I like to call the sticky-poko scenario. In a lawless society devoid of a fundamental justice triple con (construct -> concept -> contract), if Groucho pokes Chico with a stick, Chico is entirely welcome to poke Groucho back, and then Zeppo, watching the altercation from his dark little corner, is 100% entitled to shank each of them with some sticks of his own; therefore, to avoid the otherwise inevitable extinction of comedic genius, MGM puts the kibosh on sticky-poky altogether. Glaucon further develops this idea when he whips out his Ring of Gyges story, telling of a man - considered by himself and by his community alike to embody the quintessence of the "just" - who finds the Ring of Sauron in the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie and subsequently goes on a whirlwind seduction-and-killing spree due to his nascent invisibility 'n shit. Glaucon asserts that, with "impunity" assured, a 'just' man will default to the thoroughly unjust factory settings. Perhaps just to further to rankle his mentor, Glaucon then dreams up theoretical "perfectly just" and "perfectly unjust" men. He then places these dudes in a philosophical vacuum, a world of extremes in which the "perfectly just man" is completely self-sacrificing and his antithetical counterpart cunning as Fantastic Mr. Fox (which is pretty damn cunning). The plebs in this dystopia are a tough crowd, to say the least, and in this scenario the "perfectly unjust man", appearing (through wily deception!) to be the just one, is hailed for his dastardly ways, while the "perfectly just one" is kicked to the curb time and time again. This is an example of what I have dubbed "The Buttons and Mindy Complex" (after the characters in the long-running Animaniacs sketch, naturally). At the start of each episode, Buttons, a loyal cartoon collie, is charged with minding Mindy, a she-toddler with a penchant for mischief. After Mother departs, Mindy proceeds to systematically wreak havoc on everything in sight, leaving Buttons to clean up her mess. Of course, Buttons gets blamed every single time, while Mindy gets off scot-free on the basis of her apparent innocence and goshdarn cuteness. Remarkably, each season, Buttons continues to try to do the right thing, often at great personal cost. Although Glaucon might view the cur's actions as laudable, he questions the benefits of such attempted altruism, and and would cite Mindy's successes and Buttons' repeated failure as examples of its potential detriments.
Glaucon's question, at the heart of it, is "WHAT'S THE FREAKIN' POINT?" It's a challenging query to address, especially following all his mad convincing rhetoric. But God knows the Ancient Greeks loved them some challenges, and sure enough, Socrates calmly lets Glaucon's frenetic argument wash over him and comes up with an answer right quick.
After two hundred and fifty-some odd pages of largely one-sided "discussion", Socrates puts a stop to the harangue by employing that time-honored favorite among Greek philosophers and pre-school educators: the "let's draw a picture" approach. Socrates instructs his young friend to imagine a metaphorical structure of the psyche, consisting of one part "many-headed beast", one part fearsome lion, and one part cowering, week little man, ALL welded TOGETHER like some kind of Burton-esque circus freak. He then proceeds to ask Glaucon his own set of leading question, deftly ensnaring the supple young philosopher-in-training. The "many-headed beast", you see, is meant to represent desire; the lion, will; the man, reason and rationality. Therein lie the hook, line, and sinker; Socrates knows firsthand that no self-respecting Greek philosopher can resist the promise of the two R's. A real man, asserts Socrates, is in control of his will, and he uses it rationally to trim the many-headed weeds in his garden of desire. Like a city, says Socrates, a man must establish his own constitution and adhere to it if he wishes to take part in larger society. And if he doesn't - well, that's just embarrassing (we built this city on oration, goddamnit!). It's a little bit exploitive, this argument, for how could Glaucon possibly retort? "No, I'll just let my garden get out of hand." Not bloody likely!
So there we have the Socratic answer - not bad, for a man of his age and extraordinary ugliness. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, either. Had Glaucon felt testy that day, he could have perpetuated the discourse with a snide remark about weed killer or something, but as it were, he laid it to rest.
For the time being, that is. It wouldn't be too long before another sage Hellenic would crack open the case file.
Aristotle, as a general rule, tends more toward the loquacious than does Socrates. Book II of The Republic may last three hundred pages, but Glaucon seems chiefly responsible in that case, with his teacher only stopping him to kick in the occasional "hmm" or "no kidding". Socrates' M.O. was to let his mentees prattle themselves blue in the face for a while, and then spring the trap with a brilliant argument at the last minute, once they were all worn out and stuff. Aristotle preferred a didactic setting in which he alone played the didact, his students reduced to note-taking pencil pushers. Had Aristotle's been the chiton to which Glaucon had directed his line of inquiry, TR would have come out much, much longer than it already is (which is quite long).
But his chattiness isn't the only thing that set Ari apart from his predecessor. Aristotle shared Socrates' fascination with the soul, and he, too, divvied it up into three parts, only his were a little bit different. Aristotle believed that the soul was comprised of emotions, capacities, and dispositions, rather than lions and heads and whatnot. Emotions were pretty much emotions; capacities, "our ability to experience the emotions"; dispositions, "how we react - well or badly - to the emotions". Aristotle argues that emotions are neither virtues nor vices, and that same goes for capacities, but the lattermost division is a little bit trickier. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were mercilessly teased by their peers, and this made them angry, that much we know, and we certainly can't hold them accountable for it. Because they were hormonal teenage boys and MMORPG addicts at that, they probably had a higher-than-average capacity for feeling this anger, which, although not necessarily a designation to wear proudly on one's sleeve, we can hardly blame them for either. But had the ghost of Aristotle been wandering the halls of Columbine High School the morning of Tuesday, April 20, 1999, he would have harbored zero sympathy for the murderers even given all of this because (and only because) of how they chose to act on their emotions and capacities. Although the two three-part soul-structures hardly align, Aristotle's concept of the disposition is roughly analogous to Socrates' idea about reason; according to Aristotle, a cow (f'r'instance) cannot be judged on the basis of its actions because a cow doesn't come equipped with reason (and therefore, the power to mould a disposition) like a human does.
Aristotle continues to display shades of Socrates when he defines the "function of mankind" as "activity of the soul in accordance with reason". This all sounds very well and good, but what does it really mean? How can we as men (and ladiezzz) really be sure that we're all sufficiently reasonable and the like?
According to the A-Man, we need to be asking ourselves if we're hitting the mean? Not the arithmetic mean of the population, but the mean relative to us personally. Take Harris and Klebold. They had some serious capacity for anger, and so squeezing a stress ball probably wouldn't have done much to help their cases - but, in the end, neither did shooting up their high school. Maybe they ought to have punched a wall, or shot a squirrel - hell, even pulling a full-on Donnie Darko would have been a better choice, so long as they made sure it was an actual pedophile whose house they were burning down (hey, it's Ari's advice, not mine). The point is that, for somebody else - one of those Christian girls they killed, for example - the mean for anger resolution would have fallen somewhere very different on the spectrum, maybe someplace between ten Hail Mary's and a rebellious extra sip from the Cup of Salvation. "Know thyself." It's an Ancient Greek aphorism - some folks attribute it to Socrates, but either way, you can bet your bottom dollar that Aristotle would have been well familiar with it.
But back to Glaucon's original question. For Aristotle, being virtuous was more like being a virtuoso (mistranslation by way of Latin, perhaps?) than being a moral person. He thought that if you were 'virtuous' you excelled in what you did - which, if you were a man, was supposed to be chipping away at that "function of mankind" stuff. Therefore, for Aristotle, "activity of the soul in accordance with reason" was... good. So 'what's the point'? What do you mean, what's the point (pun intended?)? For the Ancient Greekies, few things were more shameful than a lack of virtuoso status. Had Aristotle been ready with his answer a few decades earlier, he could have owned Glaucon right on the spot.
But didn't Socrates say the same thing, to a certain extent? Certainly, he loved reason every bit as much as did Aristotle (and don't you forget it!). And, of course, the ability to keep one's 'weeds' in check is a skill set reserved for the virtuoso gardener. Of course, by attempting to model Socrates' and/or Aristotle's idea(s) of the well-kempt soul, vice will be eliminated, but only as byproduct. It's not like Socrates and Aristotle were cynical vice-lovers or anything (no more than you or I, at least), but, on their most basic levels, their soul blueprints didn't directly discuss the supposed evil inherent in what we call 'vice'. This stuff was pre-Christian, in a serious way.
So maybe those two crazy kids weren't so irreconcilable after all. And maybe the Greeks were more than sweaty, bronzed, olive-branch-toting pagans. They may have poisoned some of their great thinkers, but - to the best of my pitiful knowledge - they never had to worry about production codes or school shootings, either, so they must have been doing something right. So the next time you're down in SoCal and you decide to drop by The Habit for a quick bite, read that quote on the wall and stop and thank your Mediterranean forefathers. And above all, remember to keep your behinds hidden when consorting with philosopher-kings.
Much love and xenia,
Ur Pal,
LK!
