Robert Greer Cohn

    Aristotle is conventionally considered to be a scientific rationalist and naturalist as opposed to Plato’s idealism but, although there is truth to the difference in tone, emphasis, and preoccupation, both essentially agreed on a fundamental and central balance of the two perspectives (psychic “dimensions” schematically: vertical and horizontal) in the cross-patterned concept of “decorum” (Greek prepon).
    Aristotle, quoting Simonides, calls it “foursquare” (cf, Zen Buddhist “mandala”): “[A man lives] decorously if he is.. ‘truly good’ and ‘foursquare’ beyond reproach” (Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Ch. 10).
    “..wisdom must be intuitive wisdom combined with scientific knowledge” (N.E., Book VI, ch.7).
    This is “squarely” in line with the cream of Western thought, as we have shown elsewhere: the eternal cross of sacred and human perspectives in Judeo-Chrustian vision (e.g., Hillel, Jesus, Kabbalah) Aquinas’s faith-reason balance; Descartes’s coordinate axes; Paschal’s related calculus and combined finesse-geometry pair; Kirkegaard’s post-Hegelian tetrapolar “absolute paradox” (in Philosophical Trivia); Mallarmé’s “symphonic equation” (Music and Letters”); Einstein’s space-time fluid cross; Heidegger’s similar pattern in “The Thing”: Jakobson’s metaphoric-metonymic pair, extended by Lacan; T.S. Eliot’s attempt to heal the “dissociation of sensibility” in modern literature. Yeats’s comparable aim.
    Aristotle’s “equity” is in this orthogonal “rounded” mold: “the equitable is just but not the legally just but a correction of legal justice” (Book V, child) Cf. jurisprudence and the balanced stance of our great Founders as of the quondam Harvard Law School: “Sub deo et sub lege”. (Its motto). We note the sequence, now widely skewed, there and in the “received ideas” (idées fixes) of dominant, shallow, modern American and global discourse.
    In Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle “boxes the compass” of polar opposites of excess and deficiency of the various virtues (courage, charity, etc.) arranged in a circle around the core, a central “mean” of generally temperate character. This is a complex, polypolar extension of the above-cited tetrapolar (bi-dimemesnional) cross of the main psychic  “dimensions” (schematically vertical and horizontal), as in the paradigmatic sequence above.
    Jame O. Wilson, in The Moral Sense, concludes with a similar scheme.
    Aristotle, contrary to the usual view of him, like Plato and all our greatest writers, artists, and thinkers, as we have demonstrated elsewhere, puts intuition and wisdom (and equity) above all:
    “no one praises happiness as he does justice but rather calls it blessed, as being something more divine and better” (Book One, Ch. II). His “happiness”, of course, is spiritual, contemplative, virtuous. But there is an important nuance between Aristotle and Plato (and Hebraic thought generally). For example, he separates nutrition from psychic nutrition, (Book I, ch.13), in a way the more poetic and fluid Plato would not have done (or Mallarmé or Joyce…)…Aquinas, influenced by Aristotle primarily, put such an anti-paradoxical principle—“the law of the excluded middle’: A cannot be not-A at the heart of modern Catholic philosophy, though the mystery of the Trinity involves the old continuity-discontinuity paradox of Zeno (cf. Heraclitus’s “The way up is the way down”).
    We subtly may sense here the long-range impact of the relative bent of Aristotle’s rational (logos) “linear” thinking and generally, altogether, that bent of Greek culture as opposed to Hebraic which over time brought about the modern “dissociative” skewing in our cultural “waste land”, the blighted humanities on campuses and stunted general discourse.
    So James O. Wilson though a staunch Christian, simply eliminates the sacred dimension from his major book on morals! All the other well-known “authorities” do likewise. We conclude with this: Aristotle, like Plato, Aristophanes, Plotinus et al., knew the total power of the sacred (as in his Metaphysics and Politics—the “godlike man’ as ideal leader) and the primacy of intuition, as stated above. But, as the twig is bent..A wrong turn of the “worm” as in Eden? He doesn’t deserve that much burden” he was a miraculous genius, like some other Greeks of that time. But as Toynbee shows, whole cultures flourish for while and decay. He is a big part of the glory that was Greece. Our Judeo-Christian culture used him, especially in the Medieval period, but tempered his rationalism with the Hebraic monotheistic sacred. Far more than he it was the Edenic snake—“You will be as gods”—who seduced us into the calculating and manipulative distortions of petty ego, will, and brain that he would have repudiated with all his basically good Greek heart.