Resolution and Freedom

Boulnois sums up the results of the investigation into Aristotelian ethical proairesis (resolution, or “choice”) and the ambiguities of freedom as follows.

“Is it necessary to say that this resolution is free? Does it include a choice? The concept of choice assumes the existence of an alternative, followed by the pursuit of one of its terms and the eviction of the other. And certainly, when there are many means, relating the one that appears best to the end pursued implies a choice. But on the one hand, as we have seen, it is always a matter of a generic capacity, common to many agents. And on the other hand, Aristotle never makes the concept of freedom intervene in relation to the question of choice, or even that of willingness” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 153, my translation throughout, emphasis in original throughout).

We only deliberate about or between definite alternatives, under definite conditions that we weakly “know” or deem to be applicable. This is not a wide open field, but a piece of topography with blurry details that deliberation will bring into better focus. In the domain of human actions, this kind of relative and comparative practical judgment (phronesis) is so essential that without it, there can only be anarchy or tyranny, and no ethics.

If we are honest with ourselves, we must recognize that even our best conclusions must in principle remain open to Socratic questioning. We are not the sole judge of our endeavors; our success in any endeavor depends partly on the judgment of others. Even the tyrant who denies reciprocity wants his authority to be recognized by others (only he does not return the favor).

“Nonetheless, Aristotle knows and uses the concept of freedom (eleutheria). But this pertains to politics and not to the theory of action. It indicates not the source of action, but its end. Eleutheros designates the human in a free condition, as opposed to the slave, but also one who is able to exercise political liberties, and who can, in a regime that permits it, be considered a full citizen. Moreover, the free human is also the one who breaks free of all political activity, to lead the life of a private citizen devoted to study” (ibid).

“The correspondence between the city and free humans is assured by an education adapted to each political regime, to allow them to become virtuous citizens. In effect democracies, which should be based on free humans, suffer a sophistical definition of freedom — as if freedom ‘consisted in doing whatever we want’, and as if the laws were for the human a kind of slavery, when they are ‘her salvation’. What is proper to the free human is to act in conformity with an order, necessarily; it is slaves who behave ‘randomly’, in a contingent manner” (pp. 153-154).

This and other matter-of-fact references to social inequality in Aristotle are commonly taken as evidence that he condones such inequality, or even aims to defend it. While our sensibilities might prefer it if he passionately denounced all such inequalities, Aristotle himself was by birth Macedonian and therefore deemed not a citizen of Athens. Unlike Plato, he had no wealthy and connected native family to help protect him from persecution. Socrates had been executed for speaking too candidly, and even Plato was forced into exile, so Aristotle did not have full freedom of speech. Nonetheless, in such cases he typically not only makes it explicit that he is referring to a (mere) matter of fact and not a norm, but also mentions a possible doubt, even though he does not develop it.

“We cannot exclude reflection on action from the concept of freedom, for this is its horizon. Ethics has for its task the formation of free humans in the city. Simply put, the (demagogic) definition of freedom as the ability to do whatever we want is precisely that against which the whole Aristotelian doctrine of virtue is constructed. On the contrary, it is following an ethical education, in exercising her resolution, that the human can acquire the surety of judgment and the pleasure in the good that characterize the free human. Indeed freedom is not the beginning, but the journey’s destination” (p. 154).

“Thus we can return to our initial inquiry.”

“For Aristotle, the problem of knowing whether a will acts freely or in a determined manner does not arise. Freedom and slavery are two modes of social existence of the human. The place of freedom is not the will, but in acting well. It is a matter of orienting ourselves to the good by virtue. — For him there is no question of will. Despite the Latin translation, hekousion (willing) does not mean ‘voluntary’ (voluntarium); it is rather the mode of our action, barring the cases of constraint and ignorance. Proairesis does not signify ‘free arbitration’ (liberum arbitrium), but decision, resolution. The stakes of this interpretation are much more fundamental than a problem of translation. It is the global hermeneutics allowing action to be elucidated that is radically different; willing action is that where ‘the principle is in us’; we are ’causes’, which is to say ‘responsible’. Freedom is the ethical horizon of our action, and not the metaphysical attribute of a will that Aristotle never envisaged” (ibid).

Proairesis is the rational outcome of a deliberation, not an arbitrary choice. Even the English terms “willing” and “voluntary” have an obvious etymological connection with “will” or voluntas that reflects the earlier Latin translations. But a closer look at how Aristotle uses the concepts that the later tradition calls by these names confirms what Boulnois is saying here — they have nothing to do with a radically undetermined metaphysical will.

“We have established six essential points.”

“1. An agent is responsible for her actions if she acts spontaneously, without constraint and without ignorance, that is to say she is not moved from the exterior and knows the sense of her actions. This spontaneity signifies that she is also master of not executing them” (pp. 154-155).

Boulnois’s French has contrainte, hence the English “constraint” here. But constraint, as a negative term, only narrows our options. Aristotle’s examples for this more specifically involve coercion (threats against one’s children, etc.) or extraordinary circumstance (throwing valuables overboard in a storm in hopes of keeping the ship from sinking) that positively push us to do something in particular that we would not do otherwise. For Aristotle, we are exempt from blame in this case precisely because the determination of the action in this case is not “from us”, but from coercion or extraordinary circumstance.

The term “master” to my ear suggests a total control, which is not Aristotle’s or Boulnois’s intent. The point here is the simpler one that the agent is able both to do and to not do various particular things. In the special context of the ideal sage discussed by the Stoics there really is total control, but the Stoics are careful not to assert that we have total control. But the Western theological mainstream claims that we through our “will” do have a strange kind of total control that gives us the whole responsibility for our inevitable sin, while God retains total control over the grace needed to overcome it.

A symmetrical practical ability to do or not do various particular things is what for Aristotle distinguishes a “rational” or discursively enabled capability of a being “having logos” from a purely “natural” capability, like that of fire to heat things. Fire has no ability to “heat or not heat”, but I as a discursively enabled being am capable of deliberating as well as simply doing. It is this discursively enabled practical ability to deliberate that for Aristotle gives me the ability to walk over there or not walk over there, or to raise a controversial point or not raise it.

“2. Willing action is that which ‘we cannot refer back to other points of departure than those that are found in us’. A contrario, this opens the way to a casuistics of excuses (constraint and ignorance). But it is not a question of starting from the agent to find in her a first principle of the triggering of action” (p. 155).

Both terms in the phrase “casuistics of excuses” seem to have negative connotations, but perhaps this is misleading. I see no such negative aspect applied to the criterion of willingness elsewhere in the larger argument.

“3. It is possible to analyze human action without postulating a central instance of arbitration, and without inscribing it in a physical determinism whose fabric it would need to tear apart. Ethics is thinkable without a theory of the will” (ibid).

Ethics in the first instance applies to the actions of the whole human being.

“4. Ethical action does not necessarily require a freedom of choice. It depends on a resolution (proairesis), which refers above all to a dimension of anticipation, and does not always imply a choice. Ethics is thinkable without a doctrine of free arbitration” (ibid).

This is a gentle understatement. Ethical judgment and ethical action are precisely not arbitrary.

“5. Resolution presupposes a process of deliberation by the agent: it at least implicitly evaluates the reasons for doing x rather than nothing; what she will do is not immediately obvious to her. That is to say that there are, for her, a multitude of options and of reasons for acting. But a) these options are only possible epistemically (she believes them possible, but they are not always really accessible). And b) these reasons for acting are not uncontrolled impulses; they refer to an ethical ideal that the agent pursues principally” (ibid).

In all practical matters, we deliberate and act with less than perfect knowledge.

“6. A stranger to the metaphysical problem of free arbitration, freedom is ethical in its essence; it consists in the ability to act well; it is only acquired at the end of an education in virtue, and an apprenticeship in moral discernment. Action is in effect evaluated morally not by what it produces, but by the virtue to which it bears witness” (pp. 154-155).

In ethical deliberation we are concerned with free and sincere inquiry into what we should do. For judgments about virtue, patterns of activity are more important than punctual acts. Character consists in such patterns of activity. Character is also more important overall than the consequences of particular acts. Ethics is ultimately about who we are, that is to say what kind of beings we are. But I also think that what our acts truly are includes what their consequences are, so I would not exclude consequences as Boulnois seems to do here.

“The good only appears in truth to one who investigates it with rigor, in a correct discernment. The one who is able to perceive it is the virtuous, the man of the good. All thought about action is situated in the horizon of the good, and freedom is nothing other than liberation from the bad” (pp. 155-156).

The negative freedoms that matter for ethics are freedom from coercion, freedom from ignorance, and freedom from automatically following our immediate impulses. There is no need to claim that we are somehow completely exempt from causality.

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power of self-determination. The (real) possibility of acting otherwise is not essential to it. It is not necessary to presuppose an autonomy of the will that is detached from all exterior determination. Nonetheless, as the Politics attests, Aristotle deploys a thought of freedom, which consists in ordering one’s actions to live in a virtuous way, in the context of a city itself ordered by laws — quite the contrary of the subjective arbitrariness that consists in doing what we want. And the fact that our action is necessarily determined by our desires does not reduce its ethical value. For what is truly worthy of praise and blame is virtue, that is to say the faculty of not being able to do otherwise than to take pleasure in the good. The key to ethics resides in the moral education provided for by the legislator, and not in the contingency of choice. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 156).

Positive freedom is the ability to act well.

Aristotle is the source of our idea of a “government of laws, not of men”. The aim of this is precisely to provide safeguards against subjective arbitrariness.

“It is here that the finitude of the human as agent reveals all its significance. We are on a finite plane, in the sublunary world where contingency reigns. And even if we admit that causes are sequenced in a necessary system of the world (which Aristotle refuses to do), we do not know the system (which is why apparent options or epistemic possibilities are sufficient for the agent, whether they are real or not). What’s more, if we could know it, it would not push us to act, because it would not be desirable. Just as the idea of the Good is useless because it does not move our desire and does not motivate our action, the idea that there is a sequence of causes and effects changes nothing in our way of living. Whether the world is determinist or undetermined, we have the same obligation: to act well, in conformity to virtue, amid the contingencies of the world of humans” (ibid).

This is an extremely important insight. Ethics does not depend on any metaphysical truth, knowledge, or assumption. Acting well only to requires us to be sincere, fair, reasonable, and kind in our dealings with appearances.

“On the plane of finite existence, no one knows if they have accomplished the action that is best absolutely. Similarly, in their reflections on our moral lack of power, Aristotle and Ovid speak of that which is ‘better’ (comparative) and not of that which is ‘the best’ (superlative). For this it would be necessary to possess all the elements that would allow us to judge for ourselves; but this information is given to us little by little, in the course of our journey. If I take a path, it is in following this path that its obstacles, its accidents, its advantages and its inconveniences are unveiled. But I do not know if another path offers more dangers, encumbrances, or advantages (and I can only run through them all afterwards, indeed in other conditions). The only way to know absolutely which path is best is to take two paths at once, which is impossible. — At least without recourse to an omniscient observer. Only such a one can see two paths at once. Only such a one can know which is the best in itself. It is thus that the God of metaphysics makes ethics enter another dimension, in which it will no longer be thought starting from finitude” (pp. 156-157).

Free Will as Love?

I was surprised and intrigued to learn that Augustine in various works seems to more or less identify will with love. Of course it is not surprising that a Christian theologian would write about love. I count 65 occurrences of the word “love” in Augustine’s famous early treatise On the Free Choice of the Will. But my quick scan of all 65 passages did not find this identification. Nor is this identification mentioned in the introduction to the Cambridge edition, or in a great many discussions of free will by other writers who mention Augustine. I have confirmed, however, that this surprising identification of will with love does appear in a number of Augustine’s other works, and is considered by some to be an important theme. I first encountered this identification of will with love quite recently, in secondary literature on Scotus. Then I found references back to Augustine.

Scotus reportedly makes this identification too. He also seems to hold that all virtue is virtue of the will. I think of virtue more generally as virtue of something like character or emotional disposition. Once a separate faculty of will and decision is posited in the human, I can see how it might seem plausible to locate virtue in the will. But I don’t think there is such a separate faculty, and Plato and Aristotle did not think so either.

We make judgments and decisions based on varying combinations of thinking and feeling. The particular drift or orientation of our judgments and decisions could reasonably be described as some definite will, but this does not justify the assumption that choice and decision should be attributed to a separate faculty that is independent of all our thinking and feeling, as well as of all external circumstance.

What is clear is that we want some things, and don’t want others. Plato and Aristotle call this desire. Our desires count as ours by Aristotle’s criterion of willingness. We are responsible for the whole of our desire, even though there are things we desire without choosing to do so. There is a whole spectrum of desires, some of which are ethically beneficial and highly rational, while others may be completely irrational and ethically harmful.

Greek philosophers may attribute some things to love that some moderns attribute to will. In this vein, we may be said to “love” all that we prefer or seek. Some of Augustine’s references to love have a rather similar sound.

In any case, Augustine and Scotus both emphasize the role of love in their trinitarian theology. Sometimes this is called an ordered love, to distinguish it from animal passion. This ordered love is what they call caritas, or charity. One of Boulnois’s numerous books on Scotus that is out of print and expensive has a title that translates to The Rigor of Charity. An introductory book on Scotus by Thomas Ward is called Ordered by Love. If there is a non-evil voluntarism, this emphasis on love might help explain it.

I believe that in recent browsing I saw a passage in Scotus arguing that the best love, which he calls theologically meritorious, is freely given with no thought of advantage, and therefore the will is free. Unlike all the other arguments for free will that put it in the register of power and efficient causality, love freely given is something I too hold dear.

Toward Essence

What does it mean to really explain something, as opposed to just making claims about it? According to Robert Pippin, this question underlies what he calls the key transition of Hegel’s Logic, between the “logic of being” addressed in several recent posts and what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

The logic of essence will itself eventually be superseded by the logic of the concept. With very broad brush, it seems to me one might expect that the logic of essence will be a representation of important insights Hegel attributes to Aristotle, whereas the logic of the concept is supposed to be a representation of what he claims as his own (and Kant’s).

“[Hegel’s] general approach [is] to begin with the least ‘mediated’, least theoretically committed determination and argue for the further determinations, further theoretical commitments, without which even these relatively simpler determinations would not be possible” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 211).

Hegel assimilates all simple predications or assertions to the logic of being, the inadequacy of which we have seen in some detail. Every word, phrase, or assertion taken in strict isolation reduces to meaningless noise, just like the attempt to “say” indeterminate Being. Only taken together and in some sort of context do words and assertions begin to mean something.

According to Pippin, “a mere list of contingent properties and quantitative measures cannot count as having determined any subject of those determinations as such” (ibid). Hegel “summarizes this problem by calling it the problem of indifference” (ibid). We still lack any even quasi-stable things to talk about.

An explanation is more than just a generalization. Explanation requires distinguishing the essential from the nonessential.

Hegel thinks that even something as sophisticated as the use of Newton’s inverse square law to account for the elliptical shape of planetary orbits is still only a compact way of making a complex assertion about relational properties, and does not give us a reason. This corresponds to the level of the “force and understanding” chapter of the Phenomenology, which reaches a purely relational point of view on mathematical physics, but still lacks the features Hegel associates with self-consciousness.

“[A] distinction between what is truly real or essential and what appears, or that way of thinking, is now on the Logic‘s agenda…. A practice exists, and we want to know not merely what happens or whether it exists but whether the practice is actually a religious practice. Or a computer wins at chess, but is it actually thinking? Something is displayed in a gallery, but is it actually art?” (p. 218).

“These questions are just examples. The Logic is not concerned with them, and, we should say, is concerned with actuality as such, the possible actuality of anything intelligible” (ibid). “These example questions… depend on ‘the logic of actuality’ as such, which simply means: how we think about what anything ‘really is’. As we have seen, the determinations of such conceptuality cannot be empirical; they must be understood, according to Hegel, as ‘products’ of thought’s self-determination of itself, a process that continually realizes thought’s apperceptive nature. Or: the concept gives itself its own actuality. Hegelian conceptuality has this subjective dimension (‘thought’s autonomy‘), even while also being the articulation of the conceptual structure of reality. This has nothing to do with spinning every actual, contingent species-form out of thought’s self-examination. The topic… is logical or categorical formality as such, not ‘what are the existing species-forms?’ ” pp. 218-219).

“The very title of a ‘logic of essence’ suggests (yet again) immediately the philosopher whom Hegel seems most to admire, Aristotle” (p. 219). “We found in the logic of being that, according to Hegel, it was not possible to specify a thing’s ‘actual’ being by qualitative and quantitative markers…. Since Hegel accepts the Aristotelian premise that actually to be is to be a this-such, where that means it is identifiable by being an instance of a kind, this means we have failed with respect to the question of actuality. We are thereby compelled, in the prosecution of the original task, to consider that, ‘actually’, a thing is not how it simply appears, looks, sensibly manifests itself, however regular or predictable. We have to say that in some way, what a thing actually is lies hidden, must be uncovered, posited, a product of thought, not a simple empirical apprehension as such” (p. 220).

The “original task” is the determination of meaning, which didn’t get very far in the logic of being, even though in the parts Pippin has skipped over, Hegel did develop resources for making broad classes of simple assertions or claims about appearance.

“What we will need is a comprehension of the difference… between the ‘essential’ and the ‘unessential’, and the basis for this differentiation” (p. 221). “[W]hatever seemings are, (in not ‘actually’ being), they exist and are determinate, a determinacy inexplicable, Hegel claims, by the ‘skeptics and idealists’ who claim that the distinction cannot be made, and therefore say, ‘everything is illusory'” (ibid).

Whoever claims that “everything is only mere appearance” turns out to have no basis for making any distinctions within the so-called appearance.

“Someone who had understood everything said onstage, the plot of Shakespeare’s King Lear, and the basic motivations of the characters, as those characters and others voice them, and had understood only that, would not, we feel entitled to say, have understood ‘the play’. Put in the simplest possible way, to understand the play, one has to do more than listen to it; one must think about it, or we can say, using the word most important for Hegel, ‘reflect’ on it, understand what lies ‘beneath’… these facts about plots and characters…. There is no such thing as a hidden meaning in King Lear; there are just the words spoken or found on the page. How we get from this clumsy metaphor to the ‘concept’ of King Lear in itself is the underlying story of the logic of essence” (pp. 223-224).

All meaning that is worth talking about has this same kind of non-thing-like character. It is constituted from relations of connection and disconnection.

“It would be a mistake to sum a person up, attempt to ‘understand’ her in the distinct way persons should be understood, simply by adding up or listing everything she did, from what she had for breakfast to volunteering for a dangerous mission. A person would not be properly understood by attention to such ‘immediacy’ alone (or her qualitative/quantitative/measured appearances, as in the logic of being). We need to understand her deeds as ‘mediated’ by what Hegel calls her ‘inwardness’…, something (and now in the most important difference with the logic of being) that we cannot see, that does not simply present itself” (p. 224).

The relations that constitute meaning do not themselves directly appear. This applies as much to things in general as to human character.

It is certainly ubiquitous that people and things also respond differentially to direct appearances, without anything deeper than a qualitative or quantitative appearance being involved. Mid-20th century behaviorism claimed that was all there is, that the meaning at issue here was a mere figment or conceit.

Pippin continues his previous example, “For example, we can’t really understand what she did except by some attention to her own formulation of the act description and to her avowed motive (her ‘intention’). Sometimes what happens should not count as a deed because there is not the proper connection of inner and outer. An accident happens. Something prevents her from realizing her intention; that is, something happens to her. She does not do something. What happens is not an expression of her character. On the other hand, as Hegel states the central claim of the entire logic of essence in a phrase, we must concede that any such inner self-construal can ‘prove itself’… only in what manifests that outwardly, in the deeds. (It is immediately important that this ‘test’ can fail.) Too radical a separation and we have someone trying to disown what she in fact did, to fabricate excuses. (‘Mistakes were made’; ‘It was never my intention to deceive/hurt/offend anyone’, etc.) We need this distinction, but we can’t establish which deeds are true manifestations of essence and which are merely aberrations by any statistical analysis of frequency, any simple inspection of what happens. We need to understand how ‘what shows’, ‘what manifests itself’ (Schein), can be said to reflect these deeds’ essence when it does (if it does, then as Erscheinung, appearance), even if, as appearance, no one deed is ever a manifestation or simple representation of essence as such ” (pp. 224-225).

It was this sort of point about the ethical meaning and use of actuality in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy that initially greatly impressed me in Pippin’s work (see especially Hegel on Willing). According to Pippin, this kind of question about the relation of actuality to appearances is just what Hegel’s “logic of essence” is all about.

Unexpectedly for me at least, this now provides the occasion for Pippin to tell us more specifically what he thinks “mediated immediacy” means in Hegel. As I mentioned before, I have always thought first of things like the experience of riding a bicycle or recognizing an object, which properly speaking are examples of “immediatized mediation”, bridging the gap between the intrinsic emptiness of immediacy in itself and our undoubtedly non-empty “immediate” uptake of things in ordinary experience. In other words, my attention was drawn to the way in which complex results of some previous synthesis can be pre-consciously associated to what we experience “immediately” in a new synthesis of imagination.

Hitherto, in thinking about the term “mediated immediacy”, I have focused on ordinary appearances of meaning, in contexts that according to Hegel are not adequate to “immediately” support the constitution of that apparent meaning. This is admittedly to disregard the surface grammar of the phrase.

Pippin here starts to give “mediated immediacy” a sense that is aligned with the surface grammar, and is also closely aligned with what he has just said the logic of essence is all about.

He continues, “Understanding this relation properly is what Hegel thinks allows him to speak of a mediated immediacy. The appearances are not denied as unreal. They ‘shine’ in their immediacy. But they can be understood in their determinate immediacy only as the manifestation of the thing that they are appearances of, and so are always mediated…. We can’t derive the appearances from a mediated (‘posited’, ‘reflected’, ‘thought-over’) essence. That would be a denial of their immediacy. But we don’t apprehend such appearances on their own, in pure immediacy, and then infer what appears. What appears is appearing in what manifests itself…. What a person does is tied to that person’s character, whatever it is. And understanding that character is nothing other than rightly understanding what that person has done. With respect to all the reflected dualisms introduced in the logic of essence, this thought in various forms remains the kernel of that logic throughout” (p. 225).

This is Hegel’s recovery of something like Aristotle’s qualified common-sense realism about experience. We say that we experience not just phenomena but also things, even if we are wrong about them sometimes. At the simplest level, though not itself thing-like, essence is what enables the distinction of things from arbitrary collections of appearances.

“This is also why essence is a retrospective reflection of what has been made manifest, why it is rooted in gewesen, the past participle of sein [to be] or ‘what has been’, a feature somewhat counterintuitive in an account of action. It is also why Hegel is happy to accept the Wesen/gewesen suggestion of temporality. It links his account with one he admired, Aristotle’s, whose term for what has often been translated as essence is to ti en einai, something like ‘the what it was to be’ of a thing” (p. 226).

Essence, I would suggest, subsists independent of time once constituted, but the constitution of essence for both Aristotle and Hegel has a dependency on appearances in time. It therefore could not be pre-given. We have to actively discover or construct it, often taking into account long sequences of appearances in time. These may wander in various directions or sharply reverse our previous expectation. Parts of them we will judge to be irrelevant. This is only the beginning of the story of essence, not the end.

“Ultimately on Hegel’s account, if we want to know whether this lie reveals a person to be a ‘liar’, what we need is not to have deeper insight into some thinglike essence, but to observe what else the person does over time and to understand the relation among these deeds, to interpret them or ‘think them over’ in their relation to each other. This will be a crucial point throughout the logic of essence, and it obviously raises the question of how to make, what guides us in making, this relational connection.”

It is relatively easy to express the openness of Aristotelian practical judgment. But we still have to do the work of judgment in each case, and due to the openness we will have committed to with Aristotle, there could not be a precise roadmap telling us how to do the work. But Kant already argued that at least at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, universals can meaningfully guide practical judgment, so perhaps something more could be achieved. Any such progress on how to judge what is essential would be priceless indeed.

“Finally, it is important to stress that this topic is being introduced very broadly. No particular theory of ‘essentialism’ is being entertained, and as already noted, making the general distinction just discussed could be achieved even by an account of the difference between transcendental and empirical subjectivity, or between categories and empirical concepts” (ibid).

Essence as such need not be taken as a specific “ontological commitment”. It means what is reasonably, reflectively judged to be important. That is part of the hermeneutics of things and of life, which we encounter as soon as we begin asking if someone or something is really or actually something-or-other. (See also Essence and Explanation; Hegel on Reflection.)

Next in this series: Essence and Explanation

Four Layers of Being Human

This is my own expansion of Aristotle’s classic “rational/talking animal” definition. In common with other animals, we have an organically grounded “imagination” that is a basis for consciousness and emotion. Then we have an acquired emotional disposition or character that corresponds to what Plato called the “middle part” of the soul. This is influenced by all the other layers. Third, our assimilation of language and culture and our more deliberately adopted values and commitments together constitute our ethos, as a kind of deeper essence of who we are. Finally, our vehicle for growth and change is our participation with others in the space of reasons.

Saying as Ethical Doing

Saying is a distinctive kind of doing. This goes way beyond the physical uttering of words, and beyond the immediate social aspects of speech acts. It involves the much broader process of the ongoing constitution of shared meaning in which we talking animals participate.

Before we are empirical beings, we are ethical beings. Meaning is deeply, essentially involved with valuations. The constitution of values is also an ongoing, shared process that in principle involves all rational beings past, present, and future. Our sayings — both extraordinary and everyday — contribute to the ongoing constitution of the space of reasons of which all rational beings are co-stewards. We are constantly implicitly adjudicating what is a good reason for what.

If immediate speech acts have ethical significance, this is all the more true of our implicit contributions to these ongoing, interrelated processes of constitution of meanings, valuations, and reasons. Everything we say becomes a good or bad precedent for the future.

Aristotle consistently treated “said of” relations in a normative rather than a merely empirical, factual, representational or referential way. Brandom has developed a “normative pragmatics” to systematically address related concerns. Numerous analytic philosophers have recognized the key point that to say anything at all is implicitly to commit oneself to it. As Brandom has emphasized, this typically entails other commitments as well. I would add that every commitment has meaning not only in terms of the pragmatic “force” of what is said, but also as a commitment in the ethical sense.

It is through our practices of commitment and follow-through that our ethical character is also constituted. As Robert Pippin has pointed out that Hegel emphasized in a very Aristotelian way, what we really wanted is best understood starting from what we actually did. In contrasting all this with the much narrower concept of speech acts, I want to return to an emphasis on what is said, but at the same time to take the “said” in as expansive a sense as possible. This is deeply interwoven with all our practical doings, and to be considered from the point of view of its actualization into a kind of objectivity as shared meaning that is no longer just “my” intention.

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.

Distinction

So, I want to say that distinction is something good, not a defect we ought to remedy. It is a fundamental symptom of life. Stoics, Buddhists and others remind us that it is best not to be too attached to particular forms. This is a wise counsel, but not the whole truth. I am tempted to say there is no compassion without some passion. Caring about anything inevitably involves distinction. It is better to care than not to care.

Everything flows, Heraclitus said. But in order to make distinctions, it has to be possible to compare things. Things must have a character, even if they do not quite ever stay still within their frames. Having a character is being this way and not that. Real being is always being some way or other. Its diversity is something to celebrate.

It is not immoral to prefer one thing to another. We can’t be who we are without definite commitments. Perfect apathy would lead to many sins of omission. It is better to have lived fully. We are not apart from the world, but inhabit the oceans of difference, and sometimes must take a side.

Fallible Humanity

Fallible Man (French ed. 1960) was the next installment after Freedom and Nature in Paul Ricoeur’s project for a philosophy of will. This account of our fallibility was to set the stage for the following installment dealing with the problem of evil, which I will address separately.

The main body of this shorter book develops a nice interweaving of Aristotelian and Kantian anthropology, with special emphasis on the role of feeling. We are “intermediate” beings, mediating beings, and as such there is an inherent “disproportion” in our relations to self. “[T]his ‘disproportion’ of self to self would be the ratio of fallibility” (p. 4; emphasis in original).

Ricoeur says we can retain neither the Cartesian distinction between a finite understanding and an infinite will, nor any other convenient mapping of “finite” and “infinite” to separate faculties. Character makes us finite, but our participation in language involves us in what he calls a kind of infinity. An ethical Self finally uniting these aspects of our being should be considered as an end and ongoing project rather than an actuality.

Philosophical anthropology has to proceed as a “second order elucidation of a nebula of meaning which at first has a pre-philosophical character” (p. 8). As a consequence, method has to be dissociated from the idea of a starting point. “Philosophy does not start anything independently” (ibid).

He adopts the language of Blaise Pascal (1623-62) on the “pathos” of human “misery”. I don’t like such pessimistic rhetoric, but fortunately Ricoeur says the whole pre-comprehension of this “misery” is contained in the more moderate Platonic myths of the soul.

“The [Platonic] soul… is the very movement from the sensible toward the intelligible… its misery is shown in that it is at first perplexed and searches…. The soul holds opinions and makes mistakes; it is not vision… but an aim. It is not contact and possession… but tendency and tension” (pp. 12-13). “Instead of a well-balanced structure, it is a non-determined movement, a system of tensions which emerges” (p. 14). Plato speaks of an ambiguous power of the soul that is affected by both reason and desire, and results from a kind of mixture. For Plato, the account must take a mythical form, because such matters cannot be explained in terms of permanent realities.

My body is a “zero origin” that ties every perception to a point of view (p. 33). Invoking a common Husserlian theme, Ricoeur notes that perception involves inference about the back sides of things that we cannot see, and so on.

More broadly, our character may be viewed as the summation of many limiting “perspectives”, at the same time that our engagement in acts of conceptual determination implicitly involves a degree of “transgression” of those pre-given limitations (p. 38).

Ricoeur argues that our very ability to recognize something as a perspective implicitly involves a “transgression” or escape from limitation by the perspective. “Therefore, I am not merely a situated onlooker, but a being who intends and expresses as an intentional transgression of the situation” (p. 41). “[T]he project of a phenomenology of perception, wherein the moment of saying is postponed and the reciprocity of saying and seeing is destroyed, is ultimately untenable” (p. 42). “I say more than I see” (p. 44). Referring to Hegel, he adds “We are always already in the dimension of truth” (p. 46). “The fact that the self is at variance with itself is the indefeasible worm in the fruit of the immediate” (ibid; emphasis in original). “Here again we must not move too quickly to the side of the subject, act or noesis, but proceed reflectively beginning with the object, content and noema” (p. 49). Referring to Aristotle, he talks about the “power of the verb” to express affirmation and judgment. “I myself become a synthesis of speech and perspective in this projection of objectivity” (p. 61). “[I]f point of view is a characteristic of openness, namely its narrowness, openness indicates that my point of view is transgressed” (p. 62).

Ricoeur says these considerations suggest something like the Kantian transcendental synthesis of imagination, in its mediating role between the passivity of sensible intuition and the activity of thought. He also relates them to the experience of time.

“Plato… advised against rushing headlong into the abyss of the infinite or into that of the One but recommended learning to linger in between…. What Plato said of the One we can apply to the totality. Nothing gives rise to deception more than the idea of totality. All too quickly it has been said: It is here, it is there, it is Mind, it is Nature, it is History. Violence is the next step” (pp. 73-74). Instead, the idea of totality should be taken as a task, a Kantian imperative.

Our practical finitude is summed up in the notion of character. Ricoeur provocatively suggests that our practical “infinitude” with respect to the constitution of meaning is summed up in Aristotle’s notion of happiness. What extends the mediation of the Kantian transcendental synthesis of imagination into the practical domain, he says, is the constitution of the person through Kantian respect.

“Character is the finite openness of my existence taken as a whole” (p. 89). There is no science of character. Ricoeur says “My humanity is my essential community with all that is human outside myself…. [M]y character is that humanity seen from somewhere” (p. 93).

Desire too fundamentally involves a kind of openness. We are not enclosed within our desire. But there is also an affective opacity or closing involved in attachment.

Bergson is quoted saying each feeling of sufficient depth represents the whole soul.

“The person is the Self which was lacking to the ‘I’ of the Kantian ‘I think’…. The Self is aimed at rather than experienced…. There is no experience of the person in itself and for itself” (p. 106). The person is the synthesis of the “antithetical notions” of character and happiness. “[T]he person is primarily the ideal of the person” (p. 110).

According to Ricoeur, feeling already overcomes the duality of subject and object. It simultaneously tells us something about both. Feeling is essentially concerned with values, and simultaneously with what is. “If one does not take into consideration the primordial disproportion of vital desire and intellectual love (or of spiritual joy), one entirely misses the specific nature of human affectivity” (p. 140).

Not pleasure itself but a blind preference for pleasure is evil. “[H]appiness, restored by the reflection on the ‘excellences’ of the ‘good’ man, is ultimately the highest form of the pleasant” (p. 148). Thomistic and Cartesian analysis of the passions fails to see the “innocence of ‘difference’ under the cloak of vain and deadly ‘preference'” (p. 163). “[E]ncountering of another person is what breaks the finite, cyclic pattern of the sensible appetite” (p. 168).

Kantian anthropology should learn from Aristotle’s treatment of pleasure, and seek to discover behind passions an innocent quest that is “no longer mad and in bondage but constitutive of human praxis and the human Self” (p. 170). Later he quotes Hegel saying all great accomplishments involve passion, while a morality that simply condemns passion is deadly and too often hypocritical.

“The quest for reciprocity, which no will to live can account for, is the true passage from consciousness to self-consciousness” (p. 184). “I esteem myself as a thou for another” (p. 188). “[T]his belief, this credence, this trust, constitutes the very feeling of my worth” (p. 189). “[I]ts character of belief makes its corruptions possible: what is believed is presumed; and the presumption of the preesumed can turn into the presumption of the presumptuous” (p. 190). According to Ricoeur, the unstable, ambiguous “middle part” of the soul in Plato’s myth mixes the vital and the spiritual. Feeling prospectively binds things together, in the process creating the disproportion of self to self. This is the fragility of the human being, with immense potential for both good and evil.

Next in this series: Middle Part of the Soul

Aristotelian Virtue

Aristotelian ethics is not just about cultivating virtue as a kind of good character. Although he does emphasize it a lot, ultimately character is just a means and a potentiality for actualization of the real goal of that part of living well that is under our power. The actualization itself comes from good practice (praxis), grounded in sound, well-rounded deliberation and choice. Aristotle also says the very best life is that of the philosopher. Not only is philosophy valuable in itself, but it also helps us deliberate.

The best deliberation and choice is supported by intellectual virtues, a concern for justice, and a spirit of friendship or love, but it would not even get off the ground without progress in the classic “moral” virtues, which are all said to pertain to our emotions or passions, and to how we are affected by pleasure and pain. Aristotle characterizes each of these emotional virtues as a kind of mean, or balanced emotional state.

Thus, courage is presented as a mean between rashness and cowardice. Temperance is a mean between self-indulgence and insensibility. Interestingly, justice and prudence are also included among emotional virtues, and subjected to a similar analysis. Other emotional virtues are presented as following the same pattern. Unlike the Stoics, neither Plato nor Aristotle advocated suppressing the emotions.

Emotional Intelligence

I originally glossed Aristotelian hexis as something like acquired emotional constitution. In adopting the contemporary term “emotional intelligence” for the kind of good development of hexis that is conducive to ethical development, I have in mind especially its broad association with a strong capacity for empathy and a related kind of self-awareness, rather than the details of a contemporary psychological theory. I also mean to recall something more like a kind of practical wisdom than any connection to what Aristotle said about intellect per se.