... will attempt to highlight the similarities between Aristotle's and Arendt's notions of the private and public sphere and then show how their arguments are used as a critique of modern society. Aristotle's Highest Good Aristotle argues that the ruling principle of the polis is that the polis itself provides for all of man's higher activities. Aristotle's assertion that public life in the polis is more important by nature to the private life of the individual rests on his rational linear analysis of human development. That development, he holds, occurred in the context of nature, which inherently pursues only that which is good for it in the interests of self-sufficiency. Because the purpose of all life is self-sufficiency or self-preservation, Aristotle argues, the first and most primary action of individual humans was to associate in the interests of securing that self-sufficiency. Procreation is the natural impulse of humanity to leave behind ...

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