In our day, whoever loves to make distinctions is regarded as an eccentric whose soul clings to something that has long been vanquished.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 1844.
Several essays which I hope to present here in the near-future, on Milton’s fallen angels, Odysseus, and Timon of Athens, will be more graspable for those of my readers aware of a certain schema or theory I hold, one about “Ways of Life.”
Of course, my larger motivation for laying this out, is simply that when one thinks he’s learned something important and of benefit, he wants to share it.
The Five Wonderful Lives
Here they are, in proper order:
The Hero
The Poet
The Philosopher
The Statesman
The Holy Man
There are also Two Deceptively Wonderful Lives:
The Tyrant
The Kaleidoscopic Man
Some of my elaborations of the schema are original, but in the main, this reflects what the most thoughtful of the ancients, as well as their best medieval and modern students, believed; that is, it is the classical and classic view.
The main prompts which led to my discerning it were these: a) Plato’s insistence on the idea of philosophy as a distinct way of life, b) his saying that it has a special “quarrel” with that of the poet, c) his presentation of five soul-types in book VIII of the Republic, each of which correlates to a regime-type, d) the Strauss-influenced interpretation of number of texts, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics especially, which detects the “gentleman,” the kalos k’agathos, as the main intended reader, though philosophers would read it also,1 e) the way the ancient biographical tradition divided from the outset into the lives of the statesmen, philosophers, and poets, f.) a key pensée from Pascal, #308 which posits three distinct fields of greatness, of the carnal (the conqueror), of the intellect (the philosopher), and of charity (the saint).2 Prodded by these ideas, for nearly two decades I’ve assumed the truth of this schema, and from time to time have refined my thinking about it.
What spurred its initial formulation was my needing a thematic guide to a Great-Books & ancient history course I was teaching at (all-male) Hampden-Sydney College. I hit upon adopting the dress of a traditional schema, that of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—the one which includes the Great Pyramid, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes, etc.—resulting in what I then called the “Seven Wonderful Lives of the Ancient World.” It allowed me to put works we were reading in that course, Homer’s Iliad, Plato’s Republic, Plutarch’s Lives, and Augustine’s Confessions, into dialogue, and to underline a personal kind of guidance a young man could take from them. “Seven” worked, because I originally had the Kaleidoscopic Man, and a fellow I called the “Family Man,” in the main list.
I have since reduced the list to five. I had pedagogical reasons for slipping in the Family Man, as I knew it was a particularly American model that would appeal to many of my students, but upon further reflection, I saw it didn’t fit, given the emphasis of the other lives on the pursuit of greatness.
There were also problems with keeping the Kaleidoscopic Man in the original list. First, only Plato really talks about that life (his name for it is the “Democratic Man”). Second, like the tyrant’s life, which I also considered for the list, its attractiveness to the many does not change the fact that from nearly every philosophic, gentlemanly, or religious perspective, it is a mistake.
That is, the classical thinkers agree that consideration of happiness and the best ways of life at some point requires corrective discussion of the errant claims made for the tyrant’s life. Plato additionally sees that an idealization of democratic freedom, the one I label the Kaleidoscopic life (following his use of “multi-colored,” Republic, 557c), needs to be similarly discussed. Hence, my tacking these two on, as a supplementary list of the two deceptively wonderful lives.
Anyhow, while I have reduced the main list to five, my basic understanding of it remains this: these are patterns of life held by quite a few ancient thinkers to be the best of all.
Here’s the list and the supplement again, but this time with the texts which most illustrate each life in question:
The Hero: Homer, Iliad, Odyssey; various-sourced myths of Hercules, Perseus, etc.
The Poet: Plato, Republic, i.e., the relevant sections of II, III, and X; the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, etc.
The Philosopher: Plato’s works, esp. Apology, Meno, and Republic VI-VII and X; Aristotle’s works, esp. key sections of Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics.
The Statesman: Plutarch, Lives; Aristotle, Politics; Plato, Laws, Statesman; Xenophon, Anabasis; Thucydides, History
The Holy Man: The Bible; lives of saints; Augustine, Confessions, sections of The Mahabharata
The Tyrant: Plato, Gorgias, Republic books VIII-IX; Xenophon, Hiero
The Kaleidoscopic Man: Plato, Republic 555b-557c; Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Upfront Notes
--There was pretty wide agreement about the first four ways of life belonging to such a list, but the life of the Holy Man, despite its key examples in Greek poetry like Tiresias or Calchas, perhaps only became a serious entrant for Greco-Roman thinkers with the spread of Christianity.
--The hero category is primary, because definitional efforts to capture it, such as Luc Ferry’s definition of heroism as “the quest for great deeds that might earn eternal glory for those who accomplish them,”3 can be applied to all five categories.
--There are distinctions and subcategories within each of the five.
--One of these requiring immediate mention is the gentleman, a subcategory of the statesman. He is the man capable of serving the political community in a leadership position, and who has prepared himself accordingly, but is for some extended period of time, un- or under- utilized. He occupies himself not merely with political discussion, but often with poetry and philosophy, or, the more political derivatives of these such as rhetoric and history, perhaps gentlemanly farming and hunting (cf. Virgil and Xenophon) and finally, with friendship, the friendship-for-the-sake-of virtue described by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics.4
--There are distinct ways of life understood to not belong to the class of preeminent ones, nor to even to deceptively seem to belong among them. The most important of these is the money-maker, which in Plato’s Republic book VIII soul-type schema, is the life of the oligarchic man. It undoubtedly had its recommenders in ancient times, but like the tyrant’s life, it was scorned by nearly all the educated, and what is more, was never held up as quasi-heroic. It didn’t attract, as tyranny did, poetic champions or half-champions.
--Besides the money-maker’s, other ancient ways or modes of life never understood to be part of the best-way-of-life competition, would be a) those of the various kinds of craftsmen, with the doctor a perhaps problematic subcategory there (he can shade into the nature-focused philosopher), certain more basic economic roles like those of the b) hunter, c) farmer, d) slave, e) prostitute (incl. courtesan), and going beyond economics, f) the devoted-to-family man or woman, g) the similarly dutiful citizen, h) the lover, i) the friend, and j.) the professional (i.e., non-citizen) soldier.
Lurking at the Edge: the Ideal Polis Citizen
There is one quite-good but-not-outstanding life which did attract some attention, which I have not included in the list of five but which might plausibly belong to it: that of g), the dutiful polis citizen, assuming his city’s regime is a timocracy, a pretty-good democracy, or what Aristotle calls a “polity.” Admiration of the “average” Spartiate, or of the “average” Athenian, who in Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” account, combined learning with heroic warrior virtue, or of the generalized citizen (politēs) of Aristotle’s “ruling and being-ruled in turn” formulation, would be the key examples.
There is an obvious objection to including the good citizen in our list. The model here, a man who while striving for his own excellence, often makes way for the recognition of others’, and works also for a collective kind, could be regarded as such a major modification of the pursuit of greatness as to be a republican, or perhaps a proto-Christian, critique of the entire idea of Wonderful Lives. More positively put, the expansion of the idea, such that entire citizen bodies can be urged to become the new heroes, or to be liberally educated, alters it.
It is hard to resist the paeans sung to this ideal, especially those of certain modern scholars; i.e, it is hard to not feel they capture something special, a democratization of greatness that doesn’t debase it, at the heart of the Spartan, the generalized-polis, or especially, the Athenian life, when these were at their best.5
Celebrations of this ideal in ancient texts, however, are rarer than we’d like. I just mentioned a few, another is where Herodotus reports what Solon said to Croesus, the fabulously successful and wealthy king of Lydia, when asked by him who the was the happiest of all men, expecting to be told it was himself. Solon instead said it was a fairly obscure man of Athens, Tellus, and after him, two similar men of Argos, Cleobis and Bito. Now his most-obvious point was that these three men died shortly after performing a glorious and virtuous act for their communities, thus underlining the idea, which dominates the rest of Solon’s little speech, that no-one should be called happy whilst he lives since he could still suffer a reversal of fortune. But by my reading, this is also Solon the representative of the Greek way-of-life, highlighting before a king of an Asiatic empire the modest participation in real glory which dutiful polis citizens might gain even when they hadn’t obtained leading political positions, and the more in-balance character of their overall lives, ones less subjected to temptations, trials, and capricious fortunes than royal lives. (I, 31-32)
Distinctions within the Five
Hero: Divine lineage (e.g. Hercules, Achilles) v. more standard lineage (Coriolanus); Divine purpose (Hercules, Aeneas, Samson) v. more standard purpose (Achilles); Pure Warrior Hero (Achilles, Coriolanus) v. More Tactical/Statesman-like Hero (Odysseus); purely Excellence-Focused Hero (Achilles) v. Citizen-Soldier Hero (Hector).
Poet: epic, lyric, tragic, comic, and perhaps also the composer or visual artist. Modern era will have fewer doubts about the latter two belonging to the class, and will add essayist, novelist, and film-maker.
Philosopher: more Socratic/Humanities-focused v. more Naturalistic; either can have shadings into the poet, the latter can have shadings into the inventor-craftsman.
Statesman: as a founder or “legislator,” as a republican leader, as a general (i.e., most of the Lives in Plutarch), as a king or Caesar, as an advisor, and in a more sub-categorical sense, as a gentleman statesman-in-waiting.
Holy Man: prophet, seer, monk, priest, saint; “shaman” also, so long as the element of divine-powers-manipulating magic is not predominate.
Possible Combinations, with Examples
statesman/hero: Alexander6
godly statesman Moses, Numa
priestly poet certain Psalmists, Hesiod?
poetic philosopher or philosophic poet Plato, Virgil
statesman/philosopher Cicero, Pericles? Xenophon?
(In general, and for how this combination plays out in modern times, see Daniel Mahoney, The Statesman as Thinker, which I discussed here.)
saint/philosopher Augustine
We should also mention that rhetoric becomes so central to classical education, and shapes a good deal of historical writing as well, because it is the activity that, at least potentially, most mixes statesmanship, poetry, and philosophy. Of course, the debased rhetor, or the pretender to philosophy, is the sophist, who brings about degradation of poetry, calumny upon philosophy, corruption of statesmanship, and ultimately, destruction of polis liberty.
The Modern Additions, and Elevations
The Scientist/Technologist/Inventor
Grows out of the natural-science side of philosophy, but unlike most classical science, adopts Baconian ends which claim to be humanitarian, but wind up rather open to becoming anti-human. That is, the greatness of this life becomes all about innovations and powers, since real thinking about biotechnology reveals that one cannot really claim to be “alleviating the human estate” if one is prepared to develop the species, or individuals within it, out of humanity itself.
The Explorer
The examples are clear: Columbus and such. But the essence of the life is not; it seems some combination of the Jason-like hero, the scientist, perhaps the money-maker, and the statesman as conqueror.
The Money-maker
Two important new subcategories which point to the increased political power of the life: a) Money-maker as Entrepreneur (a debased founder); b) Money-maker as Administrator (a debased day-to-day statesman).
(I italicize this title, and others, to indicate an elevation of a life known to the ancients, into the list of the Wonderful ones.)
The Kaleidoscopic Man as Liberal/Democratic Man
For his “philosophic” celebration see, Rawls and his followers, or various post-structuralist, cosmopolitan, or pluralist theorists. For poetic celebrations that reveal the heroic caste this life can be given, see Whitman and especially, Bowie.
The Celebrity
Possibly more of a “mode” than a full way of life; its stand-out feature is a focus upon fame as opposed to honorable ambition, and a practical (i.e., money-making) grounding in the selling of media products to a mass audience.
The Montaignian Gentleman
The gentleman set free from political purpose, and even from moving in a poetic, philosophic, holy man, or educational direction; see ftnt. 4. Shades into Kaleidoscopic Man, and vice-versa.
The Family Man/Community Member
A particularly important ideal for American democracy—and in this sense, it combines with the money-maker, but particularly with the learns-to-serve-his-community money-maker described at certain points by Tocqueville. The ancients let themselves be more aware of the possible conflicts between the family and community duties, but something deep in us, something undoubtedly Bible-shaped in part, leads us to want to bind them.
There is a lot more to say and think about this modern ideal. A leading contemporary scholar on idealized Ways of Life, Mark Edmundson, shows in his brilliant Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals that the classic ideals (his list is of four—he omits the statesman) tend to override family commitments (e.g., Socrates and Xanthippe, Jesus on leaving family for discipleship, and Achilles choosing against returning home). Then again, important classical authors like Cicero and Confucius attempted to spell out what one’s duties to family entailed, and PostModernConservative’s intellectual father, Peter Augustine Lawler, combatted abstracted understandings of scientists and ideologists with reminders that we all understand ourselves as more than knowers, species-beings, or rights-bearing-individuals, but always also as—as they case may be—Americans, worshippers, friends, lovers, and sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, etc. Or see the Catholic understanding of the Family Man and Family Woman as a “vocation,” as articulated in the recent Harrison Butker speech Titus shared.
Again, this ideal cannot be put on the classic list because it rejects, or redefines, the pursuit of greatness. It is a modern elevation, but also recombination, of life-types understood by the ancients to be off the list. I stumbled into thinking about it out of a need to put some option before my Hampden-Sydney guys that they would recognize as readily doable, and fitting with the idea of the “American Dream.”
The Activist
A derivation of statesman—but one that requires a democratic situation. Admirable examples for us: Sam Adams, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Closest ancient parallels would be the better Roman tribunes, or the better rhetor-politicians.
The World Historical Figure
Viz. Hegel’s account—Napoleon was his big example; strictly understood and believed in, this eclipses/swallows all of the other admirable Ways of Life.
The Ideology Exhibitor
A baffling but widespread combination of activist, Holy Man, and tyrannical soul; aspires to be part of a World Historical movement; either Marxist, progressivist, dogmatically ‘kaleidoscopic’/pluralist, or, to mention the ideology we’re seeing the most right now, Woke-identitarian. Were the new totalitarianism which persons like myself worry about to fully arrive, our sanest-seeming Ideology Exhibitors would become the new capos and cadres, administrators of a sort.
The Dissident
Primarily to be understood as the negative of the Ideology Exhibitor, but has certain unique heroic/philosophic traits, as Chantal Delsol demonstrates in her chapter “The Figure of the Witness” in The Unlearned Lessons of the 20th Century; there also seems to be the dissident who bears witness against ideological falsehoods of non-Marxisant provenance, such as many of the anti-segregation activists circa 1900-1965, the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, many of the anti-abortion activists from 1973 to the present, and, as you knew I’d say, the Covid/Vax Disaster dissidents of our day.
Non-Western Perspectives
The Five Wonderful Lives schema is easiest to discern in the Greco-Roman classical world; however, significant parts of it show up in other civilized cultures prior to their direct interactions with the West. Again, I suspect the category of Holy Man only begins to feel fully distinct/developed in a Judeo-Christian or Hindu-Buddhist context, or, once their influences have come into the Greco-Roman one. In societies with few or no polis-like communities or procedures, the republican side of the statesman drops out. Similarly, so long as the Greek idea of nature, phusis, is absent, the philosopher may be impossible to distinguish from poets and holy men. But the hero, the poet, the monarchical statesman, and the tyrant, were known in pre-modern literary traditions across the whole world.
Female Perspectives
It was fortuitous that I first developed this schema at a men’s college. For it tends to impact and involve men more than it does women. Mark Edmundson frames the preeminent lives as ideals, and in my judgment, males tend to be more drawn than females, in the aggregate, in idealistic and ambitious directions.
To really address the issues here would require another essay. Such an essay would have to deal with the following:
--Woman as Mother, or to be abstract, as Dutiful Parent, is obviously the most important Way of Life, one of the good but not great ones, which women have tended to choose or to be directed into, and again, the ancients understood that one’s duty, whether male or female, to one’s family might shape most of one’s life. Moreover, we can well understand that even when it is stressed that the individual may choose from many life options, not a few moderns, often a majority, choose family duties first.
--Female examples of each of the Five Wonderful Lives occur, but we must underline their rarity. For women, the life of the connoisseur of the best examples of statesmanship, poetry, and philosophy is far more common than a life which results in a top-level exponent of such, even if we notice more examples since the days of Jane Austen. The Holy Man (or Saint) category is the only one where prominent female examples regularly occur, and over the ages.
--There is a feminist response to that which holds that very few women ever had the physical capacities to be heroes (agreed), that while somewhat more of them demonstrated outstanding abilities in statesmanship/generalship (cf. the queens Tomyris and Artemisia in Herodotus, and later on, Joan of Arc and Queen Elizabeth), women were usually excluded from opportunities in it (agreed), and that a general legal/cultural/economic debasement led to their seldom producing outstanding works in the fields of philosophy and poetry (here I disagree—this is part of the explanation, but cannot be the full one). For the last of those arguments, cf. Virginia Woolf’s chapter on “Shakespeare’s Sister” in A Room of Her Own.
--While I hold that any supporter of modern democracy must to some degree be a “feminist”—I call myself a “Susan B. Antony feminist,” for example—it is 2024. Everyone with an iota of taste is sick of “Mary Sue” characters in cinema, quite a few thoughtful young women are saying, “yes, women are in trouble,” and overall, I am far from alone in not seeing all that many of the clearly evident benefits of 60s-on feminism. Thus, it is far from clear that the uptick of top-level female poets, philosophers, and stateswomen—a real uptick, but one not as dramatic as Woolf’s theory would have led us to expect—has been worth the costs. Not that I believe our best examples, to take just the field of philosophy, Chantal Delsol, Mary Nichols, Catherine Zuckert, and Eva Brann, would have been impossible without 60s-on feminism!
--Feminists of most sorts still want to appeal to Greatness. To run with Woolf’s example, a posited woman of Shakespeare’s talent being born in our time would need something like the intellectual food he had, right? He was supplied or found his Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Plutarch, Homer, Chaucer, Machiavelli, etc. But where is it going to come from for her, even though all the doors to official academia are now open? Middle-class Mary Garth, probably the most admirable character of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, reached for her Plutarch when it came time to inspire the young, and the central character Dorothea Brooke, travelling a more torturous path, reached out for Pascal, the mysteries of mythology, and the insights of the fine arts to explore her own societally-squelched thirst for the heroic and the “theoretic.” I thus say we are all obliged to stand as enemies to the typical admins, journos, or profs of our day who use Woolf-like feminist grievances against the past as an excuse to sniffily dismiss, or simply eliminate, Great Books education in our time.
Challenges for “Ways of Life” Theory
--my account of the how the schema gets altered/mangled by modern times remains rough, incomplete, and uncertain.
--more work is needed on how to correlate general Platonic thinking on a.) the two or three admirable ways of life (if any) other than philosophy, on b.) the soul-type theory of Republic VIII, and on c.) his presentations of actual political and educational personages, such as Meno, Gorgias, Polemarchus, Glaucon, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Homer, and Dion.
--much more work is needed on how to think about the ancient ways of life outside of the five, and when they need to be thought of more as “modes,” or more like the “social types” that certain sociologists (e.g., Georg Simmel) have explored.
--the best versions of personality-type theory in psychology need to be grappled with, and applied (or not) to the theory. (If anyone wants to tip me to books, I’d be grateful.)
No Great Books Education, No Great Ways of Life Appreciation
Readers who have stuck this far likely feel I am providing something valuable for their own thinking, perhaps even their thinking about their own life-plans. But some of the readers who bowed out early likely did so because they are unfamiliar with the examples I rely upon—i.e., their lack of real liberal education made the piece distasteful. It is necessary to underline, as I conclude, that without Great Books Education, I never would have discerned the Five Wonderful Ways of Life. And it is necessary to insist, dear reader, that you cannot really appreciate them without a good deal of that education also.
And I need to say something else. The growing numbers of enthusiasts for classical education need to see that the ethical guidelines a student may gain from initial engagements with Aristotle and Aquinas is merely the 101 of a real education in ethics. At the higher levels, the student must grapple with the tensions and conflicting commitments within the classical mindset, even prior to Christianity, which are revealed in the texts which explore the Five Lives. As revealed also, in the way these writings often bring out what the best persons do when faced with opposition, politics, tragic choices, failure, etc. That is at least as important for instruction in morals, and arguably more so, than equipping students to reply, like good philosophy-schooled debaters, to the ballyhooed modern alternatives to classical ethics.
The young man and woman should thus be prodded to think about the roles and way-of-life models that could shape their own lives. At the very least, aspects of the Five greatness-seeking lives can be still be pursued by them, and they need to be made aware that many of the ways of life they are being pushed into come with limitations or contain pitfalls, especially the modern roles on offer. To take one example, a major dynamic of failure in our time is the way many persons’ attraction to the Family Man/Family Woman ideal has been exploited and held-hostage by the administrative class, which during the Woke-Ascendancy and the (very-much-ongoing) Covid/Vax Disaster demanded compliance and pretense, and of kinds antithetical to democratic community and personal integrity, as the price for keeping the family-supporting careers going. But there are other present-day pitfalls, and other opportunities, which students who have encountered the richer ethical thinking I am pointing to should be better able to discern.
Aristide Tessitore, Reading Aristotle’s Ethics, chap. 1
It is #793 in the most versions of the Sellier arrangement of the Pensées. Cc. Kierkegaard’s (i.e., “Johannes de Silentio’s”) similar trio in Fear and Trembling, which consists of the hero, the poet, and the lover of god: “One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became greatest of all.” (Para. 2 of the “Eulogy on Abraham”)
Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths, p. 247
Despite certain ancient examples which fit it, such as the retreat of Lucullus into luxurious estate-enjoyment, I believe the deliberately apolitical gentleman was never considered as an ideal until modern times—Montaigne was the primary thinker to make it attractive.(Cf. Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey, Why We Are Restless, 2-5, 10-49) In ancient times such a life would be seen as a merely temporary state bound to take a serious man into the lives of either poetry, philosophy, or holiness. Consider the situation of Augustine and his friends described in Confessions, VI, chaps. 6, 10, and 14: they wish to break from their place-seeking in a courtly form of rhetoric-centered and emperor-flattering “politics”--their eyes increasingly turn with longing towards the lives of the philosophers and monks.
Cc. these four passages: “Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as it was originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.” Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient & Modern, 5.
“For Plutarch, Lycurgus’s Sparta was the city par excellence. This fact alone set Plutarch apart from his philosophical forbears, the most prominent of whom looked upon Sparta as deeply flawed and ill-fated, owing to its inculcation of the love of honor (philotimia) rather than true virtue. Plutarch, by contrast, praises Lycurgus for recognizing that within the political form of the city, the desire for the esteem of one’s fellow citizens can mimic true virtue so closely as to be indistinguishable from it. The achievement…was…laws that maximized citizens’ visibility (and thus exposure to praise and blame) within the city, but minimized citizens’ visibility to those outside of the regime, thus making the city an ordered world…unto itself.” Hugh Liebert, Plutarch’s Politics: Between City and Empire, 4.
“The three hundred Spartans…were a special breed of men. Valor had been bred and drilled into them; it was their way of life. The triumphs of Athens were of a different order. Here, for the first and perhaps only time in Greek history, a whole people rose to the height of a great argument and lived and died like heroes. Where did the Athenians draw this greatness of spirit? Much has to be attributed to men like Miltiades, Aristides, and especially Themistocles. Much has to be attributed to Solon and Pisistratus and Clisthenes, the founders. But I would suggest that the way to Athens’ unique achievement was also prepared by her unique institution, the tragedy. By the time of Marathon the Athenians had had over forty years of direct communion with the heroic spirit through tragedy. No other Greeks had gone to such a school, and no others behaved quite as they did.” Gerald Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, 79-80.
“The excellent or complete human being is the end for which the city exists; for him, if for anyone, it might be said that freedom is ‘doing as one likes.’ …Moreover, the fully self-ruled men realize that the thing they rule, the self, is not something they make. …self -rule does imply ‘doing as one likes,’ for it requires that I do what I truly like, according to nature, or to put it another way, I must do what is ‘liked’ by nature, ‘the one’ of which I am only a part. ...The lesson can never be learned perfectly. …When government and law urge me to support the common good, the may find an ally in my reason or my soul, but they must expect resistance from my body and my senses conducted in the name of my dignity. [this is why]…Classical political philosophy argued in favor of the small state, in part because the polis was within the periphery of the senses, reducing the distance and the conflict between public good and private interest. …It makes possible ‘ruling and being ruled in turn,’ and it helps to strengthen public spirit. …Similarly, [real] democracy presumes some restraint on the extremes of wealth and poverty. …In summary, democracy claims to be a regime characterized by liberty, but it depends on restraint. …democracy is not a government by the best. …Democracies rely on true opinion, rather than knowledge, and on piety, rather than revelation. These lesser excellences, nevertheless, depend on the greater. Ordinary citizens need the example of the best human beings…” Wilson Carey McWilliams, Redeeming Democracy in America, 12-15, often channeling Aristotle’s Politics.
Some, such as Dante, classify Alexander as a tyrant. Whatever your judgment, we sure can’t classify his statesmanship as republic-fostering.
Hear, hear! Perhaps there is a way to sneak the greatness of "Way of Life Studies" into higher education to replace the corrupt kaleidoscope of other studies (e.g. "Gender Studies," "Queer Studies," "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Studies," etc.) But "Way of Life Studies" needs to be introduced at an even earlier age, even before high school if possible.
Great reminders from Kierkegaard, Strauss, etc. Mahoney's "The Statesman as Thinker" is also very helpful. I have a copy of Mark Edmundson's "Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals," so thanks for reminding me about that, and the Storeys as well.
You've mentioned Pascal's hierarchy of greatness, and I wonder about the ancient hierarchy. When you lay out the five wonderful lives in proper order, does that mean that many of the ancient and medieval authors, like Pascal later, championed the Holy Man over the Statesman, the Statesman over the Philosopher, the Philosopher over the Poet, and the Poet over the Hero? I suppose that the Holy Man is more of a medieval thing, from Aquinas etc., but the rest permeate ancient writings too.
I love Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life" on this question - or "Way of Life Studies."
Thanks for the full picture of Raphael’s frescoes showing the Poets on Parnassus and the Philosophers at Athens... I'm even more impressed by Raphael's greatness when I see the two frescoes side by side. I wonder where people like him fit into this schema... or people like Michelangelo, DaVinci, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, etc... and then Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. Then people like Roger Federer, Michael Jordan, and Lionel Messi. I am easily mesmerized by watching Leo Messi highlights.