Tag: Beautiful Soul

Ethics and Effectiveness

I’m sampling a French anthology edited by Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey and Gwenaëlle Aubry, Excellence in Life: On the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics of Aristotle (2002; my translation throughout). Dherbey’s essay “Ethics and Effectivity in Aristotle” aims to show that Aristotle anticipates Hegel in successfully overcoming the apparent opposition between pure principles and the real world. This makes a nice complement to Robert Pippin’s discernment of strongly Aristotelian notions of actuality and actualization in Hegel’s ethics.

Dherbey begins by noting that some people situate pure ethics outside of all real-world effectiveness, while viewing real-world effectiveness as inevitably involving moral compromise, shortfall, deviation, and corruption. He associates this with “romanticism, from Schiller to Sartre” (p. 1). I think of the “beautiful soul” criticized by Hegel. Aristotle avoids this unfortunate result by emphasizing what Dherbey calls the “weight” of ethics, or “the inscription of the moral act in an exteriority that prolongs it” (ibid). Brandom makes the related point that we do not own or control the full scope of our deeds.

“The one who does nothing cannot act well”, Dherbey quotes from Aristotle’s Politics. Moral excellence is not constituted by intentions alone. Dherbey says that for Aristotle, “the validity of the intention is judged by the act that realizes it, or doesn’t realize it” (p.4, emphasis in original). Pippin develops a similar point in more detail in his remarks on actuality in Hegel.

For Aristotle it is not enough just to have the good will that Peter Abelard took to be the basis of virtue. According to Dherbey, Kant’s affirmation that nothing can be called good, if not a good will, makes intention the very source of the goodness of a good act. I am impressed by Nancy Sherman’s argument that Kant came closer to Aristotle than is commonly thought. But in any case, while Aristotle is far from disregarding the importance of what we might call the agent’s subjectivity, for him the goodness of an act depends on more than this.

Dherbey notes a major cleavage between Aristotle and the Stoics on another related point. For Aristotle, “not acting ‘lightly’ signifies that ‘intentional’ action, in order to be virtuous, must take support from a stable foundation, from a support that is none other than ethos or character…. It is indeed character, more than punctual intention in the modern sense of the term, that governs ethical choice” (p. 5; see also What We Really Want). It was the Stoics who bequeathed to later writers a strong notion of punctual decisions. I find the narrowing of ethics to a focus on punctual acts of decision to have consequences that are quite pernicious.

In closing, Dherbey quotes Hegel’s remark in his History of Philosophy lectures that for Aristotle, “The good in general is not defined as an abstract idea, but in such a way that the moment of realization finds itself essentially in it” (p. 12).

I would add that this is deeply related to Aristotle’s argument against Plato that potentiality at least in part depends on actuality, rather than being a power that simply produces the actual (or being a template that fully anticipates the actual, as Leibniz seems to have held).

Good will does not vindicate an action, but it does provide an additional reason to be forgiving in our evaluation of actions that turn out badly.

Conscience and Conscientiousness

For Hegel traditional cultures were full of Ethical Spirit as a sort of direct identification with the customs of a community, but they did not recognize the genuine agency of living individuals. Harris in his commentary identifies three successive shapes of a spiritual self in Hegel’s Phenomenology. The crudest is the deeply alienated notion of a person as a bearer of legal rights, which dates back to imperial Rome. Far more sophisticated is the modern moral self, exemplified in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte. We saw that the moral self for Hegel came to grief in contradictions between its ideal of moral perfection and the imperfect reality of its actual life. It became stuck in an alternation between its certainty of an ideal truth that it externalized in God or a separate intelligible world, and the recognition that it was not that ideal and could not meet it.

A third form of spiritual self for Hegel is identified with Conscience and a “conscientious self”. Whereas the moral self externalizes its values in God and/or a separate intelligible world, the conscientious self internalizes its values and thoroughly identifies with them. In this way, the conscientious self avoids all the “real versus ideal” contradictions the moral self becomes mired in.

The standpoint of Conscience carries a different danger from that of the moral self. Hegel spoke of the moral self as “displacing” its values into a Beyond not unlike that of the Unhappy Consciousness. The self of Conscience is entirely “happy” in that its values are right here and its very own, but it is in danger of being too “happy”. Because all its standards are internalized, it is especially easy for it to fall into self-deception or hypocrisy.

I have puzzled more than usual over the transitions in this section. Harris’ commentary on this particular part, while containing many insightful remarks, did not really help me better grasp the transitions, as it generally has in the other parts.

After speaking about Conscience, Hegel goes on to talk about the Beautiful Soul. The term “Beautiful Soul” was already established in German Romantic literature. Hegel makes sharper negative remarks about it than he just had about the possible self-deception or hypocrisy of Conscience. Nonetheless, it seems that “Beautiful Soul” is just an alternate term for Conscience after all.

When Conscience goes too far in the direction of self-satisfaction, it degenerates into a smug figure perfectly insulated from all questioning or criticism. Confidence is a good thing, but a bad Beautiful Soul is always too easy on itself. It never doubts that everything it does is right.

Then we move suddenly from the Beautiful Soul to the evil-doer. The best explanation I’ve so far worked out for this is that the attitude of the evil-doer in general resembles the hypocrisy of a bad Beautiful Soul. As Plato said, all beings always seek the good (or rather what seems good to them); evil is precisely a distorted, overly narrow “good” accompanied by non-recognition of others or other points of view.

Hegel goes on to suggest that the “hard-hearted” judgmental attitude of the moralist who wants to hold others to standards unconditionally is subject to a hypocrisy of its own that is structurally not that different from the hypocrisy of the evil-doer. When they confront one another, each fails to adequately recognize the other. Hegel encourages us to look forward to a world in which each of them could freely confess the inadequacy of its recognition of the other, and then forgive the other’s inadequate recognition.

(Here my reading is departing slightly from that of Harris. Harris briefly criticizes language like I just used, which sounds like a moral ideal for the future, which he thinks would be too Fichtean for Hegel. I still worry about misconceptions of Hegel as an apologist for his own particular community, so I prefer Brandom’s suggestion that Hegel does not intend to claim the transition to mutual recognition is yet completed.)

We can always find fault with someone if we try hard enough. Hegel cites the aphorism that “no man is a hero to his valet”, but wants us to do better than that. The better perspective is that fallible humans with weaknesses can still be heroes.

Next in this series: Religion