The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single
treatise of which his Politics is the other
half. Both deal with one and the same subject.
This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the
“philosophy of human affairs;” but more
frequently Political or Social Science. In the
two works taken together we have their author’s
whole theory of human conduct or practical activity,
that is, of all human activity which is not directed
merely to knowledge or truth. The two parts of
this treatise are mutually complementary, but in a
literary sense each is independent and self-contained.
The proem to the Ethics is an introduction
to the whole subject, not merely to the first part;
the last chapter of the Ethics points forward
to the Politics, and sketches for that part
of the treatise the order of enquiry to be pursued
(an order which in the actual treatise is not adhered
to).
The principle of distribution of the subject-matter
between the two works is far from obvious, and has
been much debated. Not much can be gathered from
their titles, which in any case were not given to them
by their author. Nor do these titles suggest
any very compact unity in the works to which they
are applied: the plural forms, which survive so
oddly in English (Ethic_s_, Politic_s_), were intended
to indicate the treatment within a single work of
a group of connected questions. The unity
of the first group arises from their centring round
the topic of character, that of the second from their
connection with the existence and life of the city
or state. We have thus to regard the Ethics
as dealing with one group of problems and the Politics
with a second, both falling within the wide compass
of Political Science. Each of these groups falls
into sub-groups which roughly correspond to the several
books in each work. The tendency to take up one
by one the various problems which had suggested themselves
in the wide field obscures both the unity of the subject-matter
and its proper articulation. But it is to be
remembered that what is offered us is avowedly rather
an enquiry than an exposition of hard and fast doctrine.
Nevertheless each work aims at a relative completeness,
and it is important to observe the relation of each
to the other. The distinction is not that the
one treats of Moral and the other of Political Philosophy,
nor again that the one deals with the moral activity
of the individual and the other with that of the State,
nor once more that the one gives us the theory of
human conduct, while the other discusses its application
in practice, though not all of these misinterpretations
are equally erroneous. The clue to the right
interpretation is given by Aristotle himself, where
in the last chapter of the Ethics he is paving
the way for the Politics. In the Ethics
he has not confined himself to the abstract or isolated
