John Anderson (University of Texas at Austin)
The fragments of Aristotle's works are unfortunately at present not given the attention they deserve. The material is fascinating in itself, but more importantly I argue they can challenge and contribute to our understanding of Aristotle's better-preserved works and ideas.
We require a paradigm shift in how these fragments are classified and treated. For over 100 years Jaeger's (1912) thesis of 'developmentalism' has determined how this material has been unfairly sidelined, almost dismissed. This present consensus maintains that Aristotle wrote his dialogues (which form the majority of the fragments) when he was still a student at Plato's Academy. As such, they reflect an 'immature' Platonic period of Aristotle's thought and are soon abandoned after his teacher’s death. There are numerous problems with this interpretation. In my paper I take the fragments of On Justice as a case study to point out this fallacious and unproductive reasoning.
On Justice was a dialogue written in 3 books. Its popularity and wide circulation is confirmed by consistent testimonies distanced spatially and historically (e.g. Rose 84,1; 84, 2; 84, 3). Of course, for centuries after Aristotle's death before Andronicus found and compiled his now fully surviving works (c. 60 BCE) people had little or no access to what we read today. Cicero was one such reader, basing his Hortensius on Aristotle’s Protrepticus. A testimony of Lactantius (Rose 85) is of particular significance, fascinatingly explaining the characteristics that distinguish justice from the other virtues. Justice, in his report, is of central importance in that without it an ethical agent is unable to outwardly display to others their internally developed character-virtues. Justice is thus qualified as necessarily outward-facing, but furthermore entirely requisite to enact tangible benefits beyond oneself. Justice is a visible expression of all an individual’s virtues in a way that contributes to societal well-being.
Examining this argument, I ask whether we can find anything consistent within NE book 5 where Aristotle treats justice most fully. And indeed elsewhere and in an extended passage (1129b27-30a7) we do in fact find this exact description and delimitation of justice. Justice we are told is always related to another, it is the only virtue which is another’s good, it is what reveals the man, and in fact, ‘neither the evening star nor the morning star is so marvellous’. Extraordinarily, the passage also rhetorically and compositionally stands out to resemble not the terse and disjointed writing we think characterises Aristotle, but rather the prose Cicero describes from reading his dialogues as 'flowing rivers of gold'.
This connection immediately proves against Jaeger's developmentalism that Aristotle should have entirely abandoned his 'earlier' thought expressed in his dialogues. Again, this reading establishes and refines how we ought to think Aristotle conceived justice distinctly from the other virtues. Finally, it makes us ask whether we might here even have another 'fragment' of Aristotle's works, cut and pasted as it were from On Justice. What comprised the fragments of the dialogues, we must not say, were forgotten by Aristotle. Nor should we forget them.