Hegel’s Recovery of Aristotelian Act

More than any other author, Robert Pippin has contributed to an understanding of the central role of Aristotelian act or “actuality” (energeia ) in orienting the thought of Hegel. (For general background on what is at stake here, see Actuality, Existence; Is and Ought in Actuality).

Hegel is the first modern philosopher to explicitly engage with Aristotle in a constructive way, and he does so informed by a broadly Kantian perspective. Though he is occasionally unfair to each of them, Kant and Aristotle are his two principal inspirations, and he very seriously aims to combine their respective insights. In the ways that Aristotle and Kant have been respectively stereotyped, this might seem a quixotic enterprise, but I think the past year’s posts here have provided ample indications that on the contrary, it may be exactly what philosophy needs.

In his book Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (2008), Pippin particularly develops an ethical dimension of Hegelian Wirklichkeit or actuality — which Hegel identifies with Aristotelian energeia — as the counterbalance to our subjective impulses and our unreflective, immediate sense of self (see Actualization of Freedom; Hegel on Willing). This in itself does not yet capture all the teleological dimensions of act pointed out by Gwenaëlle Aubry in her analysis of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but it accurately captures and sustains Aristotle’s own point that a person’s deeds are a more reliable indicator of character than her words.

In Hegel’s Realm of Shadows (2019), Pippin greatly expands the scope of his treatment of Hegelian actuality, based on a groundbreaking in-depth analysis of the marriage of Aristotle and Kant achieved in Hegel’s Logic.

On the Kantian side, Pippin emphasizes the fundamental orienting role of reflective judgment in Hegel’s view of “logic” (see More on Reflection; Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity; Reflection, Judgment, Process; Hegel on Reflection; Reflection and Dialectic; Apperceptive Judgment.)

What is actual for Hegel is always a matter of Kantian reflective judgment, and never a simple matter of putative facts. Kant and Hegel more explicitly develop the role of reflective judgment than Aristotle does, but we have seen that a kind of reflective judgment can reasonably be said to be the more specific ground of Aristotelian wisdom.

On the explicitly Aristotelian side, Pippin in an exemplary way points out the many ways in which Hegel uses Aristotle to help resolve Kantian problems. Especially important for this is Hegel’s removal of the qualifications in Kant’s endorsement of internal teleology, and his explicit return to a more full-bloodedly Aristotelian way of treating it (see Hegel’s Union of Kant and Aristotle; Essence and Explanation; “The” Concept?; Unconditioned Knowledge?; Life: A Necessary Concept?; The Logic’s Ending).

Internal teleology has nothing supernatural about it, but it represents an alternative to mechanistic or reductionistic styles of explanation. As Aristotle puts it, it is about explanation in terms of “that for the sake of which”, which allows for a deeper and more rounded understanding of the why of things, which is what explanation for both Aristotle and Hegel is about, first and foremost. And act or actuality is the key orienting term in Aristotle’s teleology.

Hegel on Ethics and Religion

Hegel had complex views on the relation between ethics and religion, and his thought on these matters evolved over time. As a teenager, he was impressed by writers of the German moderate Enlightenment, and immersed himself in the literature of classical antiquity. He graduated from the Lutheran seminary at Tübingen (where his roommates were the future philosopher Schelling and the future poet Hölderlin), but was reportedly very critical of the way theology was taught there.

Hegel’s earliest work is principally concerned with religious and social themes. He develops a critique of what he there calls “positive” religion, which he sees as putting excessive emphasis on particular representations, doctrines, and institutional forms. As a source for spiritual renewal, at this stage he looks mainly to the classical Greeks. He does not yet share Schelling and Hölderlin’s enthusiasm for Kantian philosophy. But a bit later, he begins to engage with Kant, and to move away from his earlier more unconditional classicism. In the works of this period, he interprets the teachings of Jesus as anticipating Kantian ethics, while also emphasizing love as a fundamental motivator. Now he begins to interpret Christianity and Kantian philosophy as the two main elements of a major historic spiritual advance beyond what was achieved in classical Greek culture.

I take the Phenomenology of Spirit to contain the best statement of Hegel’s mature views in this area, and will save that for last here.

His later lectures on the philosophy of history are very accessible, but in some ways extremely misleading. In general, Hegel popularizes and simplifies a lot in his lectures. And while today his so-called Philosophy of History is the best known example of this old genre, it is very much a genre piece. “Philosophies of history” particularly dedicated to valorizing the contributions of the nascent German nation had become commonplace in Germany since the late 18th century. University professors were civil servants who were expected as a condition of their employment to contribute to what might uncharitably be called propaganda supporting German nationalism and its state-sponsored religion. The most notorious characteristics of Hegel’s Philosophy of History in fact have much more to do with this obligatory social context than with the distinctive philosophy that Hegel develops mainly in the Phenomenology and the Logic.

Overly simplified formulations in the philosophy of history lectures are the main source for very common but deeply mistaken claims that Hegel sees world history as straightforwardly governed by a single linear and universal teleological unfolding (e.g., of “the realization of the consciousness of freedom”) that is either ordained by God, or itself constitutes God. As someone very interested in the details of Aristotelian teleology, Kantian “internal” teleology, and Hegel’s use of them, I see such a simplistic and overly strong historical teleology as completely incompatible with the principles Hegel defends in his main philosophical works.

Hegel does indeed see genuine progressive development within history, and not a mere succession of accidents as Aristotle was more inclined to do, but contrary to the common stereotype, this does not constitute or correspond to a global development of “History”, as if Hegel thought that History were itself an independent thing in its own right in the Aristotelian sense. History is just a summation of many largely independent developments, a very weak form of unity. Even in the philosophy of history lectures, Hegel points out what he considers to be instances of retrograde development — from better to worse — such as the transition from the Greek world to the Roman world.

If history for Hegel had the strong unity claimed by the stereotype, this would be logically incoherent. But for Hegel himself it poses no problem, because he has no commitment to such a strong unity. He emphasizes that the independence of Aristotelian independent things is not absolute, but he agrees with Aristotle that it is with the independent things that we should be principally concerned, in our attempts to understand history as in anything else.

In the philosophy of history lectures, Hegel is polemically concerned to contrast the modern “German world” — as the embodiment of freedom, genuine community, and progress — with the old “Roman world” of imperial absolutism, bureaucratic administration, and negation of the individual. Martin Luther is presented as the original hero of the German world, and Kant as his successor. Luther’s founding gesture is interpreted as the assertion of the priority of individual conscience over institutional authority, and thus as consistent with moderate Enlightenment.

Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion also aim primarily at an edifying popular presentation. There he among other things gives a sympathetic account of core elements of common Christian doctrine and symbolism, and eventually argues for the superiority of offenbare or “revealed” religion over other forms that he discusses with more limited sympathy. But at the same time, he seems to radically reverse the traditional understanding of revealed religion. For Hegel, offenbare means out in the open, intelligible in the light of day, not anyone’s private preserve. These again may seem to be compatible with the traditional meaning. But the kind of unconditional authority traditionally claimed for revelation is effectively ruled out by Hegel, who considers all appeals to unconditional authority to represent a low state of ethical development.

In some measure, what Hegel means by offenbare was Luther’s point too. Luther did after all translate the Bible to German so that more people could read it for themselves, and advocated that they do so. But for Luther, the text of the Bible is simply given to us by God as literal truth. He promotes a new direct authority of the literal text in the common tongue as a replacement for the mediating institutional authority emphasized by the Catholic Church. But for Hegel, no truth in the full sense of the word can depend on authority for its validation; the authority of a text can only derive from judgments about the content it articulates; and all such judgments could in principle be contested anew. Truth is a matter of intelligibility that should be understandable by anyone, never the special province of some particular authority. Hegel sees that behind emphasis on divine authority — as opposed to, say, goodness or love — lie strong claims on behalf of some human authority.

In Hegel’s Phenomenology, these issues are touched upon from multiple points of view. What corresponds to the later Roman world is particularly associated with the religious point of view of what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness, which emphasizes the extreme transcendence of an eternal and infinite monotheistic God, while devaluing worldly life. In general, Hegel’s portrayal of this kind of religion is unfavorable. Yet the unhappy consciousness is also said to have a progressive aspect, insofar as its new notion of the infinite God potentially leads to a questioning of the ultimateness of all finite representations, and thereby also to a questioning of any representation that is supposed to be simply given to us. Hegel explicitly suggests that the development of “negative” theology in the new monotheistic setting of the later Roman world leads in principle to the questioning of finite representations.

Later in the Phenomenology, Hegel at length and in several stages criticizes what happens when purely individual notions of Reason are applied to these matters. First comes the naive activist who unilaterally judges everything in the world by her own principles, and finds the world to be lacking. In part this has to do with uncharitable interpretation, even though there also really are plenty of things that are wrong with the world. But the main problem with this point of view is its complete lack of Socratic self-questioning. It focuses simply on the vigorous assertion of one’s own conclusions. Though this does involve a glimmer of self-consciousness, it is only a glimmer. The essentially reflective character of what Hegel means by self-consciousness is fundamentally lacking.

Much later still comes the Kantian/Fichtean moral self, which has a much more reflective character, and recognizes that it is bound by duties. But this moral self is still limited to a strictly individual point of view on what ought to be universal. Hegel thinks that ultimately, even the best — most sincere and open-minded — unilateral moral judgment by an individual involves an untenable hubris (the excessive pride commonly highlighted in Greek tragedies). As Brandom points out, one of the great lessons of the Phenomenology overall is that moral judgment should not be unilateral — anyone judging someone else must also confess and ask for forgiveness. This should in turn make us more forgiving of others. For Hegel, moral judgment is the province of participation in the universal community of rational beings, under conditions of mutual recognition. Only thus can individual and narrower community prejudices be overcome.

In between, Hegel discusses the relations between Enlightenment and faith. Here he is mainly concerned to defend faith against overly broad or unilateral Enlightenment critiques that, e.g., simply identify religion with superstition or a conspiracy of priests and kings, as if it had no relation at all to ethics.

Toward the end of the Phenomenology, as a resolution of the issues he has pointed out with the alleged self-sufficiency of the Kantian/Fichtean moral self, he develops an account of the essence of religion as having to do most fundamentally with promoting mutual recognition in a community. As I put it before, religion and the notion of something greater than ourselves for Hegel play an essential role in keeping individual conscience honest. This applies not only to some ideal philosophical religion we might imagine, but also to concrete, imperfect historical religion in real communities. Hegel now suggests that in this way, even concrete historical religion, in spite of its reliance on particular representations, helps us to overcome the limitations inherent to the individual moral self.

In a final turn, Hegel argues that religion and philosophy are in a way concerned with the same subject matter. The difference is that religion as usually understood assumes and works from particular representations of what is universal, whereas philosophy for Hegel aims to approach the universal in a universal way, and in this sense constitutes the “truth” of religion. To approach the universal in a universal way for Hegel necessarily involves beginning from the concrete. But it also involves letting the thought of that concrete actively explicate itself through reflection, rather than attempting to ground it in something said to be simply given to us, or to be justified by pre-existing authority.

In more traditional language, I am tempted to say this amounts to treating something like a negative theology that nonetheless does not turn its back on the world as taking precedence over all positive theology that presupposes particular representations. Negative theology and its analogues hold that no positive assertions we are capable of formulating about the divine should, strictly speaking, be held to be true, but that the divine can nonetheless be approached by saying it is not this, and it is not that. Giving precedence to this over the positive theology that presupposes particular representations has generally not been regarded as an orthodox position (unless perhaps we consider certain schools of Buddhism), but it is one whose possibility is suggested by the very existence of something like a negative theology.

Historically, anything like a negative theology has usually been associated with very strong insistence on the transcendence of the divine. If by analogy we apply the term to Hegel (which to my knowledge he never did himself), it must be with the proviso that for him its object would not be a transcendence, but rather something like the ultimate ethical intelligibility of life (which, we might say in an Aristotelian way, of all things properly knowable by us “most deserves to be called divine”), viewed as compatible with the recognition that many things in life are not as they ought to be, and need to change.

Normative Attitudes

Robert Brandom sees Kant and Hegel as both working to reconcile the modern notion that normative statuses depend on normative attitudes with a genuine bindingness and objectivity of normativity. The key point that he associates with modernity is the idea that normative statuses are not somehow pre-given. As I would put it, the normative statuses of things depend on complex reflective judgments involving many elements.

Brandom’s language about attitude-dependence is intentionally broad enough to encompass all the forms of modern subjectivism, which is the opposite evil to traditional groundings of normative statuses in pure deliverances of authority. At its most primitive level, it expresses the idea that everyone judges for herself, which is indeed a popular sentiment in modern culture. Expressed this way, without qualification, it makes it impossible to separate right from wrong. Brandom seems to want to say that even this vulgar subjectivism or voluntarism is historically progressive compared to the traditional “authority-obedience model”; I tend to think they are equally bad.

The real positive lesson that Brandom extracts from this, though, is something to the effect that everyone deserves a seat at the table in inquiries about the good. He does not himself support the view that everyone gets to judge everything for herself.

Indeed he points out that the very best version of this individualist view — Kant’s theory of the autonomy of moral subjects — is criticized by Hegel as one-sidedly individualistic. Kant complements autonomy with a strong emphasis on respect for others, but according to Brandom, Hegel also thinks that Kant effectively treats both autonomy and respect as principles that themselves do not depend on any normative taking of things to be such-and-such; i.e., at a meta-level Kant still treats autonomy and respect as the same kind of givens that he recommends we avoid depending upon in all our particular judgments. With his theory of the coming-to-be of genuine objective oughts through processes of mutual recognition, Hegel is able to show a genesis of autonomy and respect, as themselves instances of the same kind of normative taking involved in particular judgments.

I’m not completely happy with Brandom’s choice of the thin term “attitude” in this context. I would prefer to say, for example, that normative statuses depend on reflective judgment. Attitude by itself says nothing about its derivation; an attitude just is what it is, and might be entirely arbitrary. But I suspect that Brandom implicitly has in mind something like a complex propositional “attitude”. Then on his view of what it is to be a proposition, necessarily we are in the space of reasons, and subject to all of its dialogic give and take, just by having such an attitude.

Plato and Aristotle on Religion

Aristotle’s statements about “god” have sometimes troubled both religious people and non-religious people. For the believers they seem to say too little, and yet for nonbelievers they seem to say too much. But views that generate opposite complaints might be taken to represent a happy medium of sorts. In this troubled world of ours, so full of religious strife, the generous and optimistic spirit of Plato and Aristotle has much to be commended.

I use the lower case “god” to translate Plato and Aristotle’s ho theos, which can also be rendered “the god”. Many have read an incipient monotheism into this term.

In the course of their philosophical work, Plato and Aristotle address many issues relevant to religion, without attaching themselves to any particular creed or orthodoxy. Conventional Greek religion in their day was more concerned with ceremonial observance than with specific belief. Plato nonetheless criticizes the very human foibles attributed to the gods in Greek mythology, and generally rejects argument from authority in favor of shareable reasoning. For Plato, worthiness of the designation “god” implies a virtual identity with the good, the true, and the beautiful. A god would, for example, be incapable of jealousy. Aristotle shares this positive perspective, and does not speak about mythology at all, except in a literary way.

Reception of Plato and Aristotle in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions was largely filtered through the complex history of neoplatonism. At the same time, neoplatonism — and especially the work of its founder, Plotinus — greatly influenced later theology. Although Plotinus was nominally a polytheist, his philosophy focuses intensely on the relation of all things to the One. Augustine in his Confessions describes his reading of Plotinus as a halfway point toward his conversion to Christianity. During the Islamic Golden Age, an Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus circulated under the title Theology of Aristotle.

After the Roman Empire became officially Christian, the emperor Julian briefly attempted to overthrow Christianity, while claiming support from the later neoplatonic philosophy of Iamblichus. Iamblichus’ Athenian successor Proclus treats the works of Plato as themselves divinely inspired, while also broadly embracing the polytheisms of all nations. Proclus wrote a Platonic Theology as well as an Elements of Theology, and championed a theological interpretation of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides at great length. The Athenian neoplatonic school was eventually closed by the Christian Roman emperor for its persistent advocacy on behalf of pagan traditions.

The Alexandrian neoplatonic school under Ammonius sought to distance itself from the Athenian school’s advocacy of paganism, while at the same time shifting its curriculum to focus much more on Aristotle rather than Plato. Ammonius’ students included both the Christian John Philoponus and the pagan Simplicius, who between them authored the majority of the surviving Greek commentaries on Aristotle. Without endorsing all the details of either of their work, I find it inspiring that they were able to coexist within the same school.

Religion and politics both need more dialogue and less denunciation of the other. Plato and Aristotle and discussions of their work have much to teach us along these lines.

Ethical Roots of Aristotelian Dynamis

“The notion of dunamis is present from the earliest writings of Aristotle, associated each time with an ethical context” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 100, my translation throughout). She cites studies of this issue by D. W. Graham and E. Berti.

The Protrepicus is an Aristotelian dialogue, famous in antiquity as an exhortation for people to learn philosophy, but surviving only in fragments quoted by other authors. According to Aubry, it discusses dynamis in terms still based on those of Plato’s Theaetetus — a kind of having, as distinct from use — but it already introduces Aristotle’s neologisms of energeia and entelecheia, or act and the closely related notion of entelechy. Significations according to act are already treated as focal, relative to significations according to dynamis.

“Finally, the distinction also shows a normative and teleological sense” (ibid).

“The notion of energeia is found associated not only with that of usage, but also with that of good usage and that of end, and by the latter ultimately with that of ergon [a completed work] — the text having ultimately for objective the determination of the ergon of the soul, not only its function but the act in which its end properly resides” (p. 101).

We saw recently that Plato already used ergon in a sense like this. Aristotelian energeia is the fulfilling activity from which the Platonic ergon emerges.

“It is with a normative and teleological sense that the notion of ergon intervenes again in fragment 6: the accomplishment of the ergon in effect is that in virtue of which a thing can be called good, agathos, that in which also resides its virtue, arete. For in the case of a composite being, this work cannot be immediately determined: constituted of different parts, such a being is also constituted of multiple acts and multiple powers. Its end resides in the accomplishment of its best work, its most proper dunamis, indeed that of that part of it in which its identity most resides. For the human, her end and her happiness reside in the accomplishment of the power of thinking, phronesis, which is at the same time her divine part and her most proper identity. The notion of dunamis is thus articulated to those of ergon and of energeia, which themselves are articulated to that of end, telos” (ibid).

Much of Aristotle’s most characteristic thought is expressed here. (On a side note, I am especially intrigued that phronesis or practical judgment is here explicitly assigned the same ultimate role that theoria or contemplation plays in the Nicomachean Ethics. I have long been skeptical of any sharp contrast between these two. See Aristotelian “Wisdom”.)

“The Protrepicus strongly associates notions that were present but disjoint in Plato: that of effective usage, of ergon and end, which are conjoined in Aristotle’s invented terms of energeia and entelecheia” (ibid).

She also points out a discussion of dynamis in book IV of the Topics, where it is opposed to choice based on deliberation. No one should be blamed for a dynamis. “One does not say of a human who is capable of acting badly that she is bad…. The bad is the one who is not only capable of evil, but chooses it…. Contrary to what Platonic aristocratism affirms, there are no naturally good or bad [rational beings]; in particular, it makes no sense to speak of someone as naturally virtuous: because virtue, the Nicomachean Ethics says, is not a dunamis, a native power, an innate quality, any more than vice is. It is a hexis, a disposition acquired… by means of repetition of one same act, and of which the actualization, in its turn, is suspended from prohairesis [choice grounded in deliberation]” (p. 102).

Next in this series: Potentiality for Interaction

More on Reflection

The concept of reflection is fundamental to Kant and Hegel’s view of reason, and on a very down-to-earth level to supporting what I call emotional reasonableness.

Reflection occurs through the medium of discursive development. What we experience as immediate consciousness is the result of pre-conscious syntheses of imagination that in part build on past knowledge and experience in accordance with our dispositions and character, but in part simply represent shortcuts (assumptions and pre-judgments) that enable us to respond rapidly in situations where there is no time for prolonged reflection.

Neither Plato nor Aristotle has a Greek word that exactly corresponds to reflection in Kant and Hegel’s sense, but a similar concept permeates their work. Platonic dialogue is implicitly reflection that is shared between two or more persons. Aristotelian deliberation, contemplation, and normative saying are all implicitly grounded in reflection. Our higher destiny as talking animals is to reflect. What we reflect on includes deeds and motivations in general, not only the special kind of deeds that are sayings. It also includes relevant circumstances.

In recent times, Paul Ricoeur and Robert Pippin have each made important uses of the concept of reflection.

Aristotle on the Platonic Good

“Philosophy begins with wonder not that there are things rather than not, but that they are as they are” (Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu sans la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 1, p. 33, my translation throughout).

Here Aubry refers to Aristotle’s famous statement in book capital Alpha of the Metaphysics that philosophy begins in wonder. In the 20th century, Heidegger emphasized the question why there is something rather than nothing. Aubry is pointing out that that is not Aristotle’s question at all. As detailed in many posts here, it is the more particular what-it-is of things that Aristotle is mainly concerned to explain.

“Two texts, in Lambda and Nu, echo the critique of capital Alpha, and each time the insistence of Aristotle is the same, in underlining that he is, of all the philosophers, the first and the only to have posed the good as a principle” (ibid).

Of Aristotle’s four causes, the material cause and the source of motion were generally recognized by the pre-Socratics. The Pythagoreans and Platonists added something approximating to Aristotle’s formal cause. But Aristotle insists that even the Platonists made no real use of a concept of that-for-the-sake-of-which, and confusingly treated the good as a formal cause or as a source of motion instead.

In book Nu of the Metaphysics, according to Aubry he says that Plato’s successor Speusippus and the Pythagoreans “agree with the mythologists in seeing the good not as a principle but as an effect of order…. Beyond Speusippus, the allusion is to Plato…; the error of Plato is not in having posed the good as a principle in making it an attribute of the One, but in having made the One itself the principle” (p. 39).

The relevant passage in book Nu says, “Things that come down to us from those who wrote about the gods seem to agree with some people of the present time who say that the good and the beautiful are not sources but make their appearance within the nature of things when it has advanced. (They do this out of caution about a true difficulty which follows for those who say, as some do, that the one is a source. The difficulty is not on account of reckoning what is good to the source as something present in it, but on account of making the one a source — and a source in the sense of an element — and making number out of the one)” (Metaphysics, Sachs tr., pp. 291-292).

Aubry’s point rings true. Elsewhere Aristotle goes on at length about Speusippus’ and the Pythagoreans’ insistence on the central role of number, which gestures in the direction of a formal cause but is actually treated by them more like a kind of material cause. And when Speusippus and the Pythagoreans talk about the One, they seem to literally mean the number one. As Aristotle points out repeatedly, it is nonsense to make the number one the source of all things, and this also doesn’t explain anything.

I myself for many years simply accepted at face value an identity of the Platonic Good with the One as the source of all things, while downplaying the One’s connection with the mere number one, and emphasizing a sort of negative theology in the style of Plotinus, which eliminates all positive attributes of the One. This really just comes down to saying there is a source of all things, while leaving unclear the way in which it is a source. It also assumes the Platonic thesis — rejected by Aristotle — that there is a single form of the Good.

For Aristotle, the good is said in as many ways as being is. What is essential is not this good or that good, but the relevance of value and valuation to all judgment whatsoever and all doing whatsoever. That relevance appears concretely as that-for-the-sake-of-which, or “final” causality. This was Aristotle’s huge innovation.

Aubry reviews Aristotle’s critique of the Platonic Good in both the Nicomachean and the Eudemian Ethics, which focuses on its status as a universal or an Idea.

“Aristotle underlines that there is not a unique science of the Good, but multiple sciences having for their object different goods” (p. 44).

“To the Good as a genus — undiscoverable — and as Idea — useless and void — Aristotle opposes a good that is prakton [practical, in the ethical sense], a good realizable by the human, determined as the first term of a hierarchy of goods and ends, … which the Nicomachean Ethics calls ‘politics’…. If the critique of the Platonic Good leaves open this path, which the Ethics explore, it does not close off that which consists in posing a Good as principle, the relation of which to particular goods remains to be determined, and of the sort that it is neither that of a genus nor of a species, nor that of an Idea to its participants” (p. 45).

Once again, it will be only the causality of that-for-the-sake-of-which and the related details of act and potentiality that truly explain this relation.

Next in this series: Being and Becoming

Pure Act

I just received the 2nd French edition of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s God Without Power: Dunamis and Energeia in Aristotle and Plotinus (2020), which is now also labeled Archaeology of Power volume 1, reflecting publication of her second volume, Genesis of the Sovereign God (French ed. 2018).

“But the notion of act (energeia or entelekheia) says something else that that of form does not: not only substance, but also the good. Of Aristotelian invention, contrary to that of form which belongs entirely to Platonism, it appears first in ethical contexts; and if its axiological significance is not explicitly formulated in [book Theta of the Metaphysics], but only suggested via the identification of energeia with telos [end] and with ergon [work], it is on the other hand clearly readable in book Lambda. Furthermore, the project formulated in book capital Alpha of a ‘wisdom’ (sophia) capable of determining the good and the end, like that, defined in [book Gamma], of a science of ‘being qua being’, are both accomplished in the knowledge of a single object: act.”

“For such a project, Aristotle claims originality. He underlines that he is the first to have posed the good as a principle, and to have dissociated principle and power. Reading the history of philosophy reversed in relation to the one familiar to us, he considers thus that position of the good as principle is not a Platonic gesture. But if the Platonists have failed to think the status of the good as principle, that is in part because they did not identify its proper mode of causality. The double Aristotelian decision thus bears a unique formula: the principle is act. For to designate it thus, is to say at once that it is an essentially good substance, and that it acts not as power, but as the end of that which is in potentiality.”

“It is however also, and in conformity always with the project of Metaphysics [capital Alpha], to leave a place for the diversity of goods and of ends. For, like being, the good is said in many ways. And if the Ethics identify the good according to substance with god and with intellect, this is not the essence of all that could be called ‘good’, any more than it is the act of the other substances. So here again, Aristotle succeeds where Plato had failed: he succeeds at the same time in thinking the good’s status as a principle and the causality of the good, as well as taking into account the plurality of goods (which also says: the good is neither a power nor an Idea). However, a relation of foundation holds between the essentially good substance and the goods of the diverse substances. And this relation doubles itself, for the substance that is the human, in a relation of resemblance and a relation of knowledge, if theoria [contemplation], in which ethics finds its energeia and its supreme end, at the same time is similar to the divine act, and can have the latter as its object” (introduction, pp. 15-16, my translation).

The mode of causality of the good as first principle is as the end or that-for-the-sake-of-which, as a kind of attractor for potentialities. I’ve presented most of these ideas before, but this provides a very nice overview. Aubry gives a bit more weight to book Gamma’s proposed knowledge of being as such than I do, but the content that she ultimately gives to it is very close to what I end up with in reading book Lambda as a teleological meta-ethics (she calls it “axiology” or theory of values, but the concept is similar). In upcoming posts, I’ll take a look at her detailed analysis of the text of the Metaphysics. (See also The Four Causes Revisited; On the Good as a Cause; Aubry on Aristotle; Properly Human, More Than Human?.)

Aristotle’s main historical influence began only centuries after his death. His manuscripts were claimed by a relative and left to deteriorate in an attic. They were only edited around the 1st century BCE. Even then, they attracted only limited interest. Stoicism had meanwhile become dominant in Greek philosophy. The great early commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias did not flourish until late 2nd/early 3rd century CE, and was influential mainly via Plotinus and the neoplatonic schools. It was only with the late Platonic school of Alexandria in Egypt under Ammonius (late 5th/early 6th century CE) that Aristotle’s works became central to the teaching curriculum, and then they were read with a heavy neoplatonic slant. (See Fortunes of Aristotle.)

Next in this series: Distinguishing Act and Form

Empathy and Mutual Recognition

On a purely universal ethical level, it seems to me that empathy is to “double empathy” as respect for others is to mutual recognition. This is a lesson for all humans. Life is a two-way street.

“Mind reading” — the attribution of mental states to people — is not particularly empathetic or respectful. When I empathize with you, I don’t claim to read your mind. I pay attention to you in your particularity, without imposing my view of you on you.

Kantian respect for others is better served by not imputing mental states to people. The imputation of mental states tends to be presumptuous, and that can make it invasive.

What really matters for ethics are our commitments as evinced by words and deeds, not our supposed mental states. Our deeper intentionalities and spirit are embodied in the nuances and context of our “outer” words and deeds. What are often taken as clues to supposed mental states, such as facial expressions and vocal intonations, are superficial, ephemeral, and unreliable in comparison with these.

Explicit words should be questioned mainly when they seem to be out of sync with our deeds. Things like the spontaneous facial expressions and vocal intonations of others affect us psychologically, but that is as much a matter of our psychology as of the other person. The bottom line is that by themselves, these are not decisive evidence of what anyone’s attitudes truly are. Evidence of a person’s commitments and character comes from looking at the bigger picture of everything they say and do.

We all have the experience of fleeting feelings that we do not act on, but that momentarily affect us. Our spontaneous physical mannerisms may reflect these. Insofar as it is practically necessary to make judgments about people, we should judge them based not on superficial and ambiguous signs of the fleeting impulses they experience, but rather on the nuances and context of what they deliberately do.

For example, I work very hard not to show impatience with exasperating but ultimately harmless little behaviors of people I care about, but a flicker of impatience may nonetheless show on my face. In this kind of circumstance, I think someone deserves to be given credit for the deliberate choice not to make an impatient remark, rather than to be judged for a facial expression that was not a deliberate act.

The bigger picture is far more important than what is immediate. And we should not assume that other people’s subjective experience (or its relation to physical expression in the moment) is analogous to our own.

Empathy as an Ethical Stance

Ethically, empathy belongs in the same space as Aristotelian friendship, in which the friend is as another self; and with the golden rule; Kantian respect for others; and Hegelian mutual recognition. It is a prescription for non-egotism and avoidance of self-centeredness. Nothing is really more important than genuinely caring for others, which must include listening to them, and not simply doing or telling them what we think is right for them.

There is a fine line between making and asserting our own independent judgments of what is right — which every ethical being needs to be able to do — and imposing them on others. Empathy is what helps us navigate these gray areas.

I personally see a complementary principle that helps complete this. That is that we should in general as much as possible mean what we say, and say what we mean. I see this partly as a matter of personal integrity, and partly as a way of helping others understand us as best possible, when they may not themselves see things as we do. This can also be understood as a kind of more specific empathy for the listener on behalf of the speaker.