I really like Aristotle because he gets right to the point about why we have government. For Aristotle, the purpose of the state is the “good life.”
The end of the state is the good life, and these are the means towards it. And the state is the union of families and villages in a perfect and self-sufficing life, by which we mean a happy and honorable life (478).
And for Aristotle, the “citizen” is the one who has “the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state” and that “a state is a body of citizens sufficing for the purposes of life” (472). And these citizens, make up the structures and institutions of the state to bring about the “good life” for all those who make up the state.
A constitution is the organization of offices in a state, and determine what is to be the governing body, and what is the end of each community (488).
What is interesting to me, though, is that the glue that keeps the state together is not mere random geographical occupation, security, or commerce. On the contrary, the glue that keeps the state together is affection, loyalty, and friendship.
But a state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only: if life only were the object, slaves and brute animals might form a state, but they cannot, for they have no share in happiness or in a life of free choice. Nor does a state exist for the sake of alliance and security from injustice, nor yet for the sake of exchange and mutual intercourse; …. It is clear then that a state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. These are conditions without which a state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a state, which is a community of families and aggregation of families in well-being, for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life (478).
Again, though, friendship and community is not the end goal, but a means to a greater end. But what is this “good life” and what is government’s role in helping achieve the “good life”? Professor Adler argues that one of the great philosophical mistakes is the idea that “happiness” is a psychological state rather than an “ethical” state. He makes a distinction between “happiness,” which describes the sum total of a good life, and “contentment,” which better describes the psychological state we have when our momentary desires are being met.
In setting up this argument, he makes a distinction between “apparent goods,” things that we want or think we want, and “real goods,” things that we need, whether or not we know that we need them.
The two distinctions that we now have before us, distinctions generally neglected in modern thought – the distinction between natural and acquired desires, or needs and wants, and the distinction between real and merely apparent goods – enable us to state a self-evident truth that serves as the first principle of moral philosophy. We ought to desire whatever is really good for us and nothing else (Adler, “Ten Philosophical Mistakes,” 125).
This search for “real goods” versus “apparent goods” in our search for a “good life” reminds me of the narrator in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” Professor Roger Shattuck points out that Marcel, throughout the books, has three chances to succeed. He argues that Marcel “tries three solutions to the puzzle of life, and one after the other they fail” (Shattuck, “Proust’s Way” 71). He refers to three “false scents,” which include (1) prestige and social status, (2) love (in the sense of sentimental attachment and the attainment of physical desire), and (3) art as a vocation. Yet, “[e]verything seems to go wrong for Marcel. Social success is empty. Love and friendship carry him not to the discovery of another person but into closer quarrels with himself. Art escapes him.” This led Marcel to wonder if he had “some infirmity in [his] nature” (78). But even though the protagonist in these books constantly failed in his search, Shattuck argues, that “since error is recognized as a source of personal knowledge, the years of quest have not been wasted” (71). From this, perhaps, one of the real goods that we cannot get enough of is skill and knowledge. Not as a means to gaining wealth, but as a means of learning to know ourselves and to better understand the world around us. I would argue that this type of “real good” is something that we cannot get enough of and will bring us to the “good life” and a final state of Aristotelian happiness (sometimes referred to as “Eudaimonia”).
And from this, we can reason, that if happiness is getting whatever “is really good for us,” then the purpose of government:
… consists in the effort to discharge our moral obligations to seek whatever is really good for us and nothing else unless it is something, such as an innocuous apparent good, that does not interfere with our obtaining all the real good we need.
A just government can then aid and abet the pursuit of happiness on the part of its people by securing their natural rights to the real goods they need – life, liberty, and whatever else an individual needs, such as the protection of health, a sufficient measure of wealth, and other real goods that individuals cannot obtain solely by their own efforts (Id. 135).
The end of government, then, is not the accumulation of wealth or security. The accumulation of wealth and security is only a means to this greater end of living a virtuous or ethical life based upon self knowledge and knowledge of the world we live in.
