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Rational/Talking Animal

Sometimes I think zoon logon echon should be translated more literally as “talking animal” rather than the classic “rational animal”. (Perhaps “animal” should be “living being”, but here I am not worried about discrimination against plants.) Logos was a highly overdetermined word that could also mean word, ratio, measure, or principle, as well as language or reason, but the linguistic meanings seem to be more primary. Within the Aristotelian corpus there are several longer alternate phrasings, of which some stress the linguistic aspect and others the rational aspect. (The human being is said to be a “political” animal as well.)

I don’t think Aristotle imagined human reason to be separable from some articulation in language. Thus I disagree with those who want to interpret nous (classically , “intellect”) as some kind of originary intuition. This seems to me very alien to Aristotle’s whole way of approaching things. (Plotinus did explicitly treat nous as something like intellectual intuition, and had major influence on later readers of Aristotle. I do think there is such a thing as intuition, but it is not a kind of knowledge and it is not originary.)

Echon is literally “having”, which applies better to the linguistic interpretations of logos, whereas philosophically speaking we don’t strictly have reason as a full possession, but rather a potential for it.

That said, “rational animal” accurately conveys our two-sided nature. We are animals, and because we have language, we can potentially participate in reason.

But regardless of how well we do or do not take care of things, this has the effect of making us ethical beings. Who we are will turn out to be more than anything a matter of the commitments we make. This is transforming.

Incidentally, nothing about this says anything that singles out our particular kind of ape. It just happens that we only know of one biological species that meets this very abstract definition, but this is a merely contingent truth. So, all the talking species in science fiction would be human to Aristotle if they were real, and if we could prove that dolphins had a comparable linguistic ability, they would be human, too. (See also What Is “I”?; Psyche, Subjectivity; Individuation; Happiness; Second Nature.)

Happiness

The translation of Aristotle’s ethical goal of eudaimonia as “happiness” is misleading. Eudaimonia refers not to an immediate feeling or attitude, but to a state of affairs that is judged to have been the case by an observer. Properly speaking, it can only be the subject of a retrospective judgment that what it was to have lived that whole life was good. The goal of living beings is to live a life that is good for the kind of beings they are. (See also Commitment; Ends.)

Therapy

Martha Nussbaum wrote a book on the therapeutic intent of Hellenistic philosophy with respect to emotions. This was a particular extension of the broader ancient idea that philosophy was not just a theory of the world, but the way to the good life for a rational animal.

It actually seems to me that there could be such a thing as clinical philosophy. (To the partial extent that I think I understand Lacanian psychoanalysis, that seems to me to be a significant part of what Lacan was doing. He would have disagreed, because he claimed to have a point of view superior to that of the philosopher, but what makes his work interesting to me is the philosophical content and the way it is related to the clinical context.)

Ultimately, I think it is hard to separate ethics from something like therapy. Aristotle did not think this way. He in effect considered ethical discourse to be for the happy few who really don’t need therapy. But if we push ethics in a more democratic direction, then we do need therapy.

Neurophilosophy?

Aristotle would be fascinated by recent developments in neuroscience. I even imagine there is some connection between these developments and the general spirit of Aristotelian biology, with its emphasis on contingency and emergence.

Some enthusiasts seem to think that all these exciting discoveries make traditional philosophy obsolete. Nothing could be further from the case. Philosophy is pursuit of wisdom, not just knowledge. New empirical discoveries may be endlessly suggestive of philosophical implications and stimulating to thought. They are not a replacement for thought.

There is also a danger that too much dwelling on physiology — no matter how fascinating its implications — may lead by default back to a very old-fashioned physiological determinism that ignores linguistic, social, historical, cultural, and ethical considerations. What is needed is a balanced integration of reflection on these new discoveries with broader philosophical concerns.

Unconscious Intellect?

If intellect in a broadly Aristotelian sense is at least partly nonpsychological and has a significant linguistic/cultural/social/historical aspect, how does the nonpsychological aspect relate to the psychological aspect?

Many 20th century authors, from Frege and Husserl to Lacan, sharply rejected the idea that thought should be approached primarily in psychological terms. Also, we should not consider the individual psyche to be like an island with unambiguous boundaries. Aristotle uses the single word ethos (the main subject matter of “ethics” in his view) both for individual acquired character and for culture. Character is a sort of micro-culture. Plato already famously compared the soul to a city.

Beatrice Longuenesse, who previously wrote a marvelous book on the Kantian transcendental deduction, recently suggested an unexpected connection between Kantian transcendental considerations and Freudian metapsychology. Meanwhile, at the end of the day, Kant ends up relatively closer to Aristotelian ethics than it would first appear. (Many scholars have debated the fine points of this, and Nancy Sherman wrote a whole book on it.) So what about an Aristotelian metapsychology?

Actually, it seems to me that Aristotle is more interested in metapsychology than in what we call psychology, and that his views on thought are better considered in this light. Frege and Husserl might part company with us here, but logically oriented criticisms of psychologism do not rule out all uses of metapsychology (or even psychology, for that matter).

Owl

Hegel’s famous phrase “the owl of Minerva flies at dusk” refers to his Aristotelian view that ends are more important than origins. Since Minerva (Athena) is the goddess of wisdom, he is also emphasizing that wisdom is the product of a lengthy development, and implying that it is in a sense backward-looking.

Euclid is reputed to have quipped that “there is no royal road” to geometry. This applies to many other things as well. Understanding comes gradually, through practical engagement.

Intelligence from Outside

I very much like Aristotle’s cryptic remark in De Anima about intellect coming to us “from outside”. Intellect is very far from purely belonging to the individual psyche. On other grounds, I think our very notions of self only emerge through social interaction, and not any sort of originary intuition.

In a certain sense, then, specifically human as distinct from animal intelligence is already artificial in the sense that its basis is not purely organic. It cannot be separated from our acquisition of language and culture.

Where there is still a difference between human intelligence and anything in a computational domain is in the normative, practical dimension of human reason, which does not seem to be susceptible to formalization. Practical judgment (phronesis) cannot be programmed. (See also What Is “I”?)

Machine Learning?

So-called machine learning is producing all kinds of results these days. People find it very useful. Given what it actually is, though — purely statistical analysis of uninterpreted data — I think it is very misleading to call it learning by the machine. The simple execution of numerical computations and yielding of results — no matter how advanced the computations, or how useful the results — is not normally considered learning, and does not establish intelligence.

There could be a more interesting argument over whether software implementations of formal reasoning represent some form of artificial intelligence. The problem is, you cannot get real-world conclusions from purely formal reasoning, so the appearance of intelligence is rather limited.

AI researchers recognized this early on, and came up with the idea of complementing computational reasoning with some sort of “knowledge representation”. Then, in a fascinating spontaneous development within this specialized research domain, the pendulum swung back again, and there came to be a broad consensus that “knowledge representation” was best approached as intimately interdependent with reasoning.

Passive Synthesis, Active Sense

Husserl suggested an intriguing notion of passive synthesis, which I believe in his view would be the source of what Hegel calls mediated immediacy. Something like this could help round out the Kantian account of synthesis, which is strongly tilted toward active synthesis associated with deliberate conscious acts. Language is straining here; passive synthesis is just short of paradox. I think the idea here is that “passive” synthesis is synthesis that comes to us more or less ready-made, based on previous syntheses we have formed or socially assimilated.

Something related to this is also involved in the Aristotelian notion of a “common” sense, which in effect synthesizes our experience of sensible things into a unified whole. Aristotle’s remarks are in a very minimalist style, but were developed in a little more detail by the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias. Kant and Aristotle both generally treat sense perception in passive terms, but Aristotle’s common sense clearly cannot be entirely passive. Many medieval authors working in the broadly Aristotelian tradition developed more detailed accounts of sense perception in general as also involving an active component.

These various efforts to describe such processes in terms that are neither purely active nor purely passive seem very important to me as laying the ground for a reasonable account of human agency, free of both voluntarism and simplistic determinism.