Aristotle’s Pathos As A Kind Of Extreme Suffering

Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher known to be the best in his reasoning; he was a student of Plato in Alexandria. Aristotle (384-322 BC) was born in the Greek colony of Stagira. His father, Nicomachus, was physician to the King of Macedonia. Early exposure to his father’s habits of scientific observation is thought to be a significant reason for his drifting from Plato’s idealism In 367 BC, Aristotle was sent to Plato’s Academy in Athens where he spent the next 20 years, until Plato’s death. Plato and Aristotle appear to have had great admiration for one another. Plato nicknamed Aristotle “the mind,” but did think of him as something of a dandy, paying more attention to clothes “than was becoming for a sincere lover of Wisdom. ” Aristotle provides a list of the different meanings of the term pathos. Among its meanings is the sense of pathos as a painful and destructive experience.

In Aristotle’s own words: misfortunes and pains of considerable magnitude are called pathos. Thus, pathos, for Aristotle, can mean that kind of extreme suffering that we encounter in Homer’s Iliad. In fact, in the Poetics, Aristotle explicitly refers to the Iliad as a work that is rich in suffering yet, we may ask: how does Aristotle conceptualize that experience about which it is so hard to speak? An answer may be found in the following passage of the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle first explicitly mentions King Priam and his suffering. He writes: “Happiness as it has been said requires completeness in virtue as well as a complete lifetime. Many changes and all kinds of contingencies befall a person in the course of his life, and it is possible that the most prosperous person will encounter great misfortunes in his old age, as the Trojan legends tell about Priam. When a person has met a fate such as his and has come to a wretched end, no one calls him happy. ” In this passage, Aristotle uses the suffering that Priam endures as an example of how a great misfortune can radically affect and alter the life of someone who seemed in every way of his life fully flourishing and happy. In fact, in the Iliad we find Priam praised for all those aspects of his life – his wisdom, tremendous political power, prosperity and his many children which are all important conditions for Aristotle’s conception. Most importantly, Aristotle must have considered Priam as an example of a virtuous person; otherwise he would not have described him within the context of a discussion on virtue and flourishing. For, in Aristotle’s language, only “activities in conformity with virtue constitute happiness. ” Yet, although a virtuous and flourishing person “will not be dislodged easily from his happiness by any misfortune that comes along” as Aristotle writes, there are exceptions. The case of Priam is so extreme that Aristotle admits that due to his misfortune, Priam can no longer be called a flourishing person. This means that although Aristotle maintains that the virtuous and flourishing person leads a stable life and is not easily moved and dislodged by misfortunes, there are limits to one’s endurance. The case of Priam shows that long-time wisdom, political power, prosperity and, most critically, virtue, can ultimately not protect us against extreme adversities. Aristotle’s recognition of our vulnerability is significant for various reasons.

In the first place it shows that Aristotle is very much aware of the fact that we, human beings, are in fact to be characterized by a fundamental lack. Our lives as they are lived are only complete when they are filled by others in particular, those whom we consider our friends. As Books 8 and 9 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics make clear, a life of eudaimonia includes a life shared with friends with friends as our staunchest critics, as mirrors to ourselves, and, poignantly put, as “second selves” whom we see as extensions of ourselves. This dependence upon the other also implies that the loss of friends in the case of King Priam, his dearest son constitutes a loss of our own self and thus a threat to our flourishing.