Everything has a function, and the human function is reasoned activity done well — so flourishing (eudaimonia) is a whole life of virtuous action, with each virtue a trained mean between excess and deficiency.
Where it stands on the axes
- The nature of realitycontested
- Dualist. Hylomorphism: things are form-in-matter, and soul is the form of a living body — two aspects, not two separate substances.
- How we knowcontested
- Empiricist. Grounded in observation of the world, though the first principles of a science are grasped by intellect (nous).
- What makes an action right
- Virtue-based. The founding text of the virtue tradition.
- Where meaning comes from
- Discovered. Teleology: the human good is discovered by reasoning about our characteristic function (ergon).
- What people are like underneath
- Constrained. 'Man is by nature a political animal'; we have a fixed function that defines our flourishing.
- Free willcontested
- Libertarian (free will). Voluntary action originates in us and we could act otherwise — pre-modern, but on the free-will side. Predates the framing of the free-will problem.
- The individual and the group
- Communitarian. The polis is prior to the individual; a human flourishes only within a community.
- How power should be arranged
- Hierarchical. Assumes natural hierarchies of role and rule — including his defence of natural slavery, now rejected.
- How change should happencontested
- Preservation. The Politics is preoccupied with how to preserve constitutions; moderation and stability are prized over upheaval.
Marked readings are ones serious scholars dispute; the note says how. Traditions are living arguments, not fixed doctrines.
A challenge to it
The situationist (drawing on modern psychology): Experiments suggest behaviour tracks situations far more than stable 'character.' If robust virtues rarely exist, an ethics built on cultivating them may be aiming at a fiction.
Inner Axis never pins a school on you. A reading describes where your answers resemble a tradition and where they part from it — a family resemblance, not a label you carry.