Tag: Ethics

“Mentalizing” vs Emotional Empathy

My old thumbnail sketch Mind Without Mentalism now feels very underdeveloped when read on its own, but a fair amount of supporting detail has appeared by now. Pursuing a tangent of a tangent, today I ran across a 2001 article by a distinguished German psychologist, claiming to have experimental evidence of a dedicated physical neurocognitive mechanism for “mentalizing” of more or less the sort that I consider to be a philosophical disaster.

Uta Frith writes, “normal individuals have the capacity to ‘mind read,’ that is, to attribute mental states to self and other. This is referred to as the ‘theory of mind’ or ‘mentalizing.’ The theory assumes that this capacity, far from being the product of complex logical inference, rests on a dedicated neurocognitive mechanism…. Experimental evidence shows that the inability to attribute mental states, such as desires and beliefs, to self and others (mentalizing) explains the social and communication impairments of individuals with autism. Brain imaging studies in normal volunteers highlight a circumscribed network that is active during mentalizing.”

It’s not my purpose to question the experimental results presented. Neuroscience has made tremendous advances, and undoubtedly will make many more. But some of its practitioners make very strong statements that generalize and make interpretations about the human “mind” based on results that are really far narrower.

Very different things are implicitly blurred together in this notion of “theory of mind” as a “capacity” that is “missing” in autism, which was originally developed by British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen.

It is one thing to practically recognize the beliefs and desires of other people that are different from one’s own. That is at once an ethical stance and an interpretive judgment.

It is something quite different to conceptualize beliefs and desires of oneself or others as mental states. Plato and Aristotle developed very rich accounts of human belief and desire without ever speaking of mental states or of a mind as such. Rather than attributing beliefs and desires to minds, they attributed them to people.

The author claims that “mind reading” is not a kind of inference, but rather is physically grounded. This has all the hallmarks of attempts at highly reductive empirical-physicalistic “explanation”. For example, assuming that the data in question did show a statistical difference in neurological activity between “autistic” and “non-autistic” people, that in no way proves that inference does not play a major role in the considerations of belief and desire relevant to ethical doing.

The beliefs and desires of concern to ethics are evidenced in speech and doing. Sensitivity to them requires only interpretative judgment, not positing of mental states.

The binary division between “autistic” and “non-autistic” is also extremely suspect. Official psychiatric diagnostic standards currently define “autism” as a broad spectrum rather than a univocal concept. Meanwhile, “non-autistic” would include both so-called neuro-typical people, and all the people who are different in other ways. That makes it what Hegel would call merely an indeterminate negation.

Paralleling the Hegelian ethical theme of mutual recognition, an alternative view of autism calling for “double empathy” has been developed by English sociologist Damian Milton. This is supported by recent studies that distinguished between “cognitive” and “emotional” empathy, while finding autistic people to have higher than normal emotional empathy.

The psychologists who have talked about this ambiguous “theory of mind” in relation to autism have focused on autistic people’s lesser capacity for what is called cognitive empathy, colloquially called “mind reading” above. But other researchers have suggested that emotional empathy is more closely related to ethical concern.

Being myself a poor “mind reader” whom others deem to have high emotional empathy, I abhor the suggestion that empathy and ethics depend on mind reading. (See also Empathy and Psychology; Empathy and Mutual Recognition.)

Primordial Choice?

Plotinus speaks of a primordial choice implicitly made by every human: to turn either toward the separated soul, or away from it. The idea is that such a choice comes first, and is not conditioned by anything. This is completely unlike Aristotle’s treatment of choice.

Aristotle discusses choice in the context of concrete ethical doings. A choice is the outcome of a deliberation, not something undertaken in a vacuum. Our freedom consists in many such choices, based on reasons. Our unfreedom consists in part in constraint by the cumulative consequences of all our previous choices.

(I call this particular kind of unfreedom superficial because because it is “unfree” mainly in the shallow sense that it is not completely unconditioned. A conditioning grounded in reasons that we assent to is very unlike a conditioning by relations of force. In a deeper sense, a grounding in reasons doesn’t at all make us less free; indeed, many philosophers have made a grounding in reasons the very criterion of freedom. Of course, our choices may also have unintended consequences, and we have to live with these as well. That is a less superficial unfreedom. And we may be swayed by passion or imagination, which is another kind. Or we may be constrained by relations of force.)

In modern times, various writers have abstracted the notion of unconditioned choice even further, so that in principle anything could be a matter of purely arbitrary decision. Completely unconditioned choice can only be arbitrary. Here lie the seeds of tyranny. (See also Desire of the Master.)

Operativity?

Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (2013) by Giorgio Agamben is the sixth book of a nine- or ten-volume series growing out of his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). In the course of it, he propounds his own variant of Heidegger’s “history of (the forgetting of) Being”. Like Heidegger, he seems to partly blame Aristotle for later historical developments that he casts in a very negative light. He particularly claims that Aristotle’s distinction of potentiality and actuality and Aristotle’s thesis of the priority of actuality — both of which I find to be extremely valuable good things — are the ultimate root of various modern evils. I also could not endorse his negative remarks about Kant. But many of the details of his analysis are quite fascinating. This will be another longer post.

Agamben is an eminent Italian scholar whose major influences include Heidegger, Foucault, and Walter Benjamin. He has written in depth about the ethical consequences of the existence of concentration camps. He has analyzed the wider implications of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s grounding of claims for the absolute sovereignty of the modern state in a voluntaristic theology of omnipotence. (But lately, some people have thought he went off the deep end vociferously opposing Covid vaccination.)

He begins, “Only what is effective, and as such governable and efficacious, is real: this is the extent to which office, under the guise of the humble functionary or the glorious priest, has changed from top to bottom the rules of first philosophy as much as those of ethics” (preface). [For this I tried an online Kindle edition, which is not so good for citation. There is only one page number for each two pages of the printed book, and the preface has no page numbers.]

The rhetoric here is reminiscent of Foucault’s “archaeological” period, and indeed the fine grain of his analysis noticeably follows an “archaeological” method as well, bringing up many distinctions that are typically blurred together in more conventional historical writing that aims to produce a simple, unified narrative. I find it encouraging to see that others have picked up Foucault’s “archaeological” approach, while turning it toward the history of philosophy. Agamben here offers an archaeology of selected elements of Western (especially Catholic) religious practice that he thinks have philosophical and broader social importance.

Agamben summarizes Heidegger’s discussion of the way medieval Latin translations of various Aristotelian philosophical terms changed their meaning as focusing on how the meanings were changed to make them compatible with creationism. Aquinas’ sophisticated philosophical defense of creation from nothing seems to be a major implicit target of Heidegger’s critique, though he does not mention Aquinas by name. An important part of Heidegger’s critique has to do with the same medieval developments promoting the status of so-called efficient causality and changing its meaning that I have been pointing out (most recently, here).

A major thesis of Agamben’s book is that the “new” notion of efficient causality originated much earlier than Heidegger places it, among the early Christian church fathers and some Roman writers they read, like Quintillian (1st century CE) and Calcidius (4th century). (Of course, that it was a notion of “efficient causality” would not have been recognized by authors unfamiliar with Aristotle.)

Agamben argues that this was associated primarily with accounts of the efficacity of the mass rather than the doctrine of creation. He posits the officium (“office”) of the priest performing the sacraments as the original model for a new kind of efficient cause, and argues that it was applied originally in theological notions of “governance” and “economy”, even though it could also serve as a model for creation. He emphasizes that the officium of the priest completely separates the action of performing the mass from the subject who performs it, which is what allows the mass to be effective as the work of God even if the priest who performs it is sinful.

He is particularly examines Latin uses of the term effectus. He notes that Quintilian distinguishes between arts in actu or in agendo like dance, “which has its end in itself and does not leave behind any work once the act is ended” (p. 43), and arts in effectu like painting, “which reaches its end in a work” (ibid). An opus is the effectus of an operatio. This passage from Quintillian is cited by 4th century Church Father Ambrose.

Agamben writes, “in truth [Ambrose] is moving in an ontological dimension that has nothing to do with Aristotle. What is in question is not the mode of being and the permanence of a form and a substance (that is, of a being that, in Aristotelian terms ‘is what it was’) but a dislocation of being into the sphere of praxis, in which being is what it does, is its operativity itself…. The work, which was in Aristotle the paradigm of being, is here only the proof and the effect of a working…. The ontological status of the liturgical act, of the opus Dei, in which being and praxis, effectiveness and effect, operation and work, opus operatum and opus operans are inseparably intertwined, here has its obscure precursor…. What is decisive here is that it is a specifically artistic operation (theatrical or choral) that furnishes a new ontological-practical paradigm, that is to say, that what is in question is not an ethical paradigm, but a particular technical paradigm. While Aristotle in fact considered the work (ergon) as the telos of the artisan or artist’s poiesis, here, by means of the paradigm of performing arts like dance and theater, which are by definition without a work, the telos is no longer the work, but the artis effectio (execution of the art)” (p. 44).

Again, there is no indication that the authors in question were even aware of how Aristotle used the corresponding terms.

What someone (not me) might call the “dislocation of being into the sphere of praxis” is by my reckoning a major part of what Aristotle himself aimed to achieve in the texts that make up what is conventionally called the Metaphysics. (But praxis is not really one of my words in English; I don’t think of it as a dislocation; and I think this still puts too much emphasis on “being” at the expense of things that matter more to Aristotle.) On my view, Aristotle in the Metaphysics offers a deliberately deflationary account of being as such, while devoting his main attention to a kind of teleological meta-ethics that constitutes what could equally be called first philosophy or “wisdom” or a kind of philosophical “theology”.

The example from Quintillian also poses an interesting question as to what Aristotle would say about dance or theatrical performance. The Poetics is mainly concerned with written works such as the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and only very secondarily with performance on stage. The writing of the works in question would be a standard case of poieisis (making or productive doing; root of English “poetry”). I’m inclined to think that the performative aspect of music, dance, or theater is better understood as a corner case of the mainly ethical non-productive simple doing that Aristotle calls praxis in Greek (root of English “practice”).

I don’t think it’s accurate to claim that this focus on performative doing in itself necessarily reflects or results in an essentially “technical” paradigm, even though artistic technique is involved in the examples. In calling it “technical”, Agamben implicitly invokes Heidegger’s fulminations against the modern technological world. I find it stilted to speak of doing performative art as an “operation”.

I think Aristotle wants us to see being largely in terms of doing. I don’t at all see a dichotomy of being versus doing in Aristotle, though maybe there is such a dichotomy between doing and “Aristotelian being according to Heidegger”. The ostensibly Aristotelian baseline to which Agamben compares later developments seems to be more assumed than argued for, and what he assumes is Heidegger’s concoction of being as presence.

“It is from this semantic constellation that an ontological paradigm is progressively elaborated among the Christian authors in which the decisive characteristics of being are no longer energeia and entelecheia but effectiveness and effect. It is from this perspective that one must consider the appearance in the Fathers, around the middle of the third century, of the terms efficacia and efficiencia, closely linked to effectus and used in a technical sense to translate (and betray) the Greek energeia” (ibid).

This tells us that the terms used in the eventual medieval translations of Aristotle to Latin already had well-established theological usages, which could not help but color the way that Aristotle was read in Latin. That is very important to know.

On the other hand, I’m already starting to think it is too broad a brush to associate any and all appeals to any kind of efficacy or effectiveness with the same criticisms that apply to more specific medieval and early modern uses of “efficient cause”.

Agamben points out that in explaining efficacia and efficiencia, Rufinus (340-410) gives the example of “the work of the blacksmith or of the one who effectu operis agit, renders his work effective (literally, ‘acts with the effectiveness of the work, with its operativity’). The thing and the work, considered inseparably in their effectiveness and in their function: this is the new ontological dimension that is substituted for the Aristotelian energeia. And it is interesting to note that before finding its canonical translation as potentia–actualitas, the couple dynamis-energeia had been rendered by the Latin Fathers as possibilitas–efficacia (effectus)” (p. 46).

By analogy with the housebuilding example from the Physics, Aristotle would say that properly speaking, the “source of motion” of the blacksmith’s work is the art of blacksmithing. Clearly Rufinus is speaking of something different.

It seems that Agamben implicitly wants to oppose any reliance on a concept of function. This is again an extremely sweeping condemnation, going far beyond specific notions of efficient cause.

He mentions that that “in Paul (and in his Latin translators) energeia indicates not a mode of being but the effectuation of a potency, the operation through which it receives reality and produces determinate effects” (p. 47).

This is also very important to know. Again, we have a pre-existing usage (this time in New Testament Greek) that would have encouraged distinctly non-Aristotelian interpretation of a key Aristotelian term among early Christian readers. The word energeia — which Aristotle had coined as a technical term for the most important modality of being (of which the first cause is the pure instance) — has entered into general circulation and lost its original precise meaning. It is used for a kind of happening in Paul.

“It is in Augustine (De gratia Christi et peccato originalis 1.4.5) that we find confirmed with perfect awareness the pertinence of effectus in ontology” (p. 46). Agamben concentrates on Augustine’s restatement of an argument by Pelagius that I won’t repeat. He concludes, “What is decisive is no longer the work as a stable dwelling in presence but operativity, understood as a threshold in which being and acting, potential and act, working and work, efficacy and effect, Wirkung and Wirklichkeit enter into a reciprocal tension and tend to become undecidable. This tension and this undecidability define the liturgical mystery that the Church recognizes as its most proper and highest task” (p. 47).

The stable dwelling in presence is Heidegger again. I think Aristotelian entelechy is a more nuanced concept, involving a kind of higher-order consistency in the pursuit within becoming of a goal that may itself be open-ended. Simple presence (even “presencing”) just is not an Aristotelian concept.

“The place where the ontology of effectiveness finds its complete expression is the theory of the sacrament as sign, elaborated by the scholastics from Berengar of Tours and Hugh of St. Victor up to Aquinas. According to this theory, what defines the sacraments is their being at once a sign and the cause of that of which they are a sign” (ibid).

“The decisive characteristic of the new effective ontology is operativity, to which the coinage of the adjective operatorius [by Ambrose] and, even earlier, the enormous diffusion of the term operatio (extremely rare in classical Latin…) both testify” (p. 48).

This linguistic point is again significant. I recall that variants of operatio play an important role in surviving manuscripts of the 13th century arts master Siger of Brabant, who not only was not a theologian, but was considered radically secular by some. This anecdotally supports the “enormous diffusion” of operatio.

Discussing a passage from Marius Victorinus, the Latin translator of Plotinus, on the Trinity Agamben concludes that the author is saying “operativity itself is being and being is in itself operative” (p. 50).

“[T]he mystery [of the liturgy] is the effect; what is mysterious is effectiveness, insofar as in it being is resolved into praxis and praxis is substantiated into being” (p. 54). “The sacramental celebration only causes the divine economy to be commemorated and rendered each time newly effective” (ibid).

“To what extent this effective ontology, which has progressively taken the place of classical ontology, is the root of our conception of being — to what extent, that is to say, we do not have at our disposal any experience of being other than operativity — this is the hypothesis that all genealogical research on modernity will have to confront” (ibid).

Maybe. But as broadly as he has defined it, in spite of all my scruples about “efficient causality” and sympathy for his concerns about sovereignty, etc., I would most certainly by Agamben’s lights be a captive of operativity, too, just for taking seriously the interplay between being and doing.

This kind of massively global generalization (a “metaphysics of operativity” applicable to nearly everything) is a recipe for confusing apples with alligators, so to speak. Too many different things are all being thrown together, which seems ironic and very unfortunate after all the careful “archaeological” scholarship oriented toward making additional distinctions.

Just to be clear, Agamben is the one calling these theological views views an “ontology” or a “metaphysics”.

“In the paradigm of operativity, a process that was present from the very beginning of Western ontology, even if in a latent form, reaches its culmination: the tendency to resolve, or at least to indeterminate, being into acting. In this sense the potential-act distinction in Aristotle is certainly ontological (dynamis and energeia are ‘two ways in which being is said’): nevertheless, precisely because it introduces a division into being and afterwards affirms the primacy of energeia over dynamis, it implicitly contains an orientation of being toward operativity. This distinction constitutes the originary nucleus of the ontology of effectiveness, whose very terminology takes form, as we have seen, by means of a translation of the term energeia. Being is something that must be realized or brought-into-work: this is the decisive characteristic that Neoplatonism and Christian theology develop, starting from Aristotle, but in what is certainly a non-Aristotelian perspective” (p. 57).

Now he says the paradigm of operativity was “present from the beginning”, meaning in Aristotle. How could the potential-act distinction “introduce a division into being” for a thinker whose most indisputable and elementary view of being is that it is said in many ways? There is no hint that he recognizes either Aristotle’s explicit subordination of sources of motion to that-for-the-sake-of-which, or his far from immediately “operative” paradigm for so-called efficient causality in something like the art of building.

Where Agamben says “certainly ontological”, this seems to recall Heidegger’s idiosyncratic specification that ontology is supposed to be about Being and not about beings. Agamben equivocates on the word “being”, substituting an extravagant and unitary Heideggerian meaning for Aristotle’s deflationary and multiple one based on uses of the word “is” in speech. (I get the impression that Heidegger detests Aquinas, and thus find it ironic how much he in a way ended up imitating him, in raising Being to the lofty heights.)

“The place and the moment when classical ontology begins that transformation is the theory of the hypostases [the One, Intellect, and Soul] in Plotinus (which will exercise a decisive influence on Augustine’s trinitarian doctrine through Marius Victorinus)…. [O]ntology is conceived fundamentally as a realization and a hypostatic process of putting-to-work, in which the categories of classical ontology (being and praxis, potential and act) tend to be indeterminated and the concept of will, as we shall see, develops a central function” (ibid).

Now we are back to talking about a major transformation in the hands of Plotinus and the church fathers, rather than continuity from the beginning. This part seems relatively much more solid, though I have doubts whether there is such a thing as “classical ontology”. The Greek term for the persons of the Trinity was none other than that used by Plotinus for his three “hypostases”. Augustine regarded his reading of Plotinus as second only to his conversion to Christianity among the milestones of his life. Agamben correctly points out that there is a connection between the way Plotinus introduces something like a kind of dynamism into the eternal, on the one hand, and the subtle mutual relations of the persons of the Trinity in Augustine on the other.

He quotes from Heidegger’s 1941 course “Metaphysics as History of Being”, referring to the conceptual transformations that accompanied the latinization of Aristotle: “Now ergon becomes the opus of the operari, the factum of the facere, the actus of the agire. The ergon is no longer what is freed in the openness of presencing, but what is effected in working. The essence of the ‘work’ is no longer ‘workness’ in the sense of distinctive presencing in the open, but rather the ‘reality’ of a real thing which rules in working and is fitted into the procedure of working. Having progressed from the beginning essence of energeia, Being has become actualitas” (p. 58).

Here again we see Heidegger’s idiosyncratic claim about the centrality of “presencing”, but this is a distraction. His point about the connotations of the Latin terms, on the other hand, makes good sense. These terms do have a somewhat “operative” feel, and a kind of bite that does not seem to be there in the Greek.

“Putting the creationist paradigm at the center of his reconstruction of the history of being leads Heidegger to define the central trait of modern metaphysics as a working in the sense of a causing and producing…. And it is this conception of being as effectiveness that, according to Heidegger, renders possible the transformation of truth into certainty, in which the human being, whom faith in God renders certain of salvation, secures its unconditional dominion over the world by means of techniques” (p. 60).

Here he speaks of “causing” in the modern sense, rather than Aristotle’s very different one of various kinds of why. It is quite true though that Aristotle regards considerations of “production” or “making” as something secondary compared to what in modern terms might be called ethical doing. Ethical doing is “more beautiful” than useful making, even though we also need what is useful. For Aristotle, what is more beautiful is more appropriate to the divine.

“It is just as much and above all governance and oikonomia, which in the last analysis can even provisionally put causal production between parentheses in the name of a more refined and diffuse form of management of human beings and of things. And it is this peculiar practice whose characteristics we have sought to define through our analysis of liturgy” (ibid).

Here the mutual relations between persons in the Trinity meet late Foucault’s analysis of power as something that is distributed throughout a field, rather than concentrated in points of authority.

Aristotle had distinguished between doing (praxis) and making (poieisis). According to Agamben, the Roman scholar Varro (2nd-1st centuries BCE) added a third, “distinctively Roman” type of human action (p. 81). “Gerere, which originally meant ‘to carry’, means in political-juridical language ‘to govern, administer, carry out an office'” (ibid).

So now we also have a Roman political dimension of government interacting with these ecclesiastical concerns. Whereas Hegel in his analysis of Rome especially focuses on the negative aspects of the “only one is free” character of the Roman emperor’s personal absolute rule, Agamben dwells on the institution of a commandist bureaucracy.

“The nature of office and its gerere is strikingly illuminated if one puts it in relation to the sphere of command, that is, with the action proper to the imperator” (p. 83).

“Here one can see the proximity between the ontology of command and the ontology of office that we have sought to define…. The official — like the officiant — is what he has to do and has to do what he is: he is a being of command. The transformation of being into having-to-be, which defines the ethics as much as the ontology and politics of modernity, has its paradigm here” (p. 84).

Elsewhere in the text he dwells on Hannah Arendt’s protrayal of the Nazi bureaucrat Adolph Eichmann, who lived for his office in this sense, in a book subtitled The Banality of Evil. I detest nothing more than arbitrary power, or power exercised arbitrarily, so I thoroughly understand the desire to denounce an “ontology of command”, even if I do not really believe first philosophy calls for an “ontological” approach. But as we will see, this concept too turns out to be dangerously vague.

Agamben thinks there is something wrong with the Aristotelian notion of hexis (emotional constitution or “habit”), which serves as a kind of mediating bridge between potentiality and act in a human.

“Habit is… the mode in which a being (in specific, a human being) ‘has’ in potential a technique, a knowledge, or a faculty, ‘has’ a potential to know and to act. It is, that is to say, the point where being crosses into having. But it is precisely this that constitutes hexis as an aporetic concept…. The strategic meaning of the concept of habit is that, in it, potential and act are separated and nonetheless maintained in relation…. Having the hexis of a potential means being able not to exercise it” (p. 93). “As Aristotle never stops repeating against the Megarians, someone truly has a potential who can both put it and not put it into action” (p. 94).

Potentiality is not univocally determining. It always involves multiple alternatives. The absence of univocal determination does not in itself constitute an aporia. This is how Aristotle accounts for human freedom, without making extravagant assumptions about the power of a “will”.

Agamben’s use of “aporia” also seems excessively broad. He seems to mean anything that is not subject to a univocal interpretation, and he writes as though aporia is necessarily a bad thing. For Aristotle, that is not the case at all; aporias for Aristotle provide valuable insight.

Agamben doesn’t like the fact that Aristotelian virtue is measured against practice. Apparently this is too “operational”. But how else are we to make ethical judgments? Ethics is first and foremost about good doing.

He sees Aquinas as already anticipating a Kantian notion of duty. “In the concept of virtue whose sole object is a debitum, of a being that coincides totally with a having-to-be, virtue and officium coincide without remainder” (p. 101). I haven’t specifically studied Aquinas on this point, but for Aristotle there is simply no such thing as a virtue that corresponds only to an obligation. Virtue is always being good in some positive way.

He does cite the late scholastic Francisco Suárez as calling specifically religious duty an “infinite debt”, but I don’t see what this has to do with Aristotle or Kant. He doesn’t like the idea of an “infinite task” either, but doesn’t explain why.

“Here one clearly sees that the idea of a ‘duty-to-be’ is neither solely ethical nor solely ontological; rather, it aporetically binds being and praxis in the musical structure of a fugue” (p. 106).

(I would say rather that attempts to approach first philosophy as “ontology” reach a fundamental aporia. Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel already showed us a way out of this mess.)

“It is obvious that the paradigm of duty or office… finds its most extreme and aporetic formulation in Kantian ethics” (p. 110). “What in Kant reaches completion in the form of having-to-be is the ontology of operativity…. It is not possible, however, to understand the proper characteristics of the ontology of operativity if one does not understand that it is, from the very beginning and to the same extent, an ontology of command” (p. 117).

“From the very beginning” presumably means in Aristotle. But where on earth would anyone claim to find and “ontology of command” in Aristotle? Notions of command and obedience really have no place at all in Aristotelian ethics. Theological and political voluntarism imply what might reasonably be called an ontology of command. Neither Aristotle nor Kant have anything to do with this.

As with Aristotle, what is “aporetic” in Kantian ethics is actually a strength. Kant leaves an irreducible role for thoughtful judgment about how to best apply principles to particulars in each case. The “aporia” is that Kantian ethics doesn’t aim to give us ready-made answers on what we should positively do, and is not reducible to any schema of unconditional command and obedience.

“The imperative presupposes as its foundation and, at the same time, as its object not a being but a willing…. One understands, from this perspective, why juridical-religious formulas (of which the oath, the command, and the prayer are eminent examples) have a performative character: if the performative, by the simple fact of being uttered, actualizes its own meaning, this is because it does not refer to being but to having-to-be” (p. 118).

I generally share Agamben’s concerns about the imperative form in grammar, which tends to absolutize a “should” or leave it standing in the air, when in reality every “should” is just as strong as the balance of reasons favoring it, and no genuine “should” is a matter of arbitrary obedience. Kant’s categorical imperative, on the other hand, is of a form that cannot possibly be simply “obeyed”, because it is only a procedural guideline.

Agamben recalls Hannah Arendt’s meditations on the trial of the Nazi bureaucrat Eichmann, who claimed to have sincerely followed Kantian precepts of duty in carrying out his governmental responsibilities. But whatever duty to the state he may have believed he was following was obviously antithetical to the universalism of Kantian ethics, which puts respect for all human beings over all other considerations. But Agamben even represents respect as something bad.

“Kant represents the moment when the ontology of command and having-to-be reaches its most extreme elaboration” (p. 120). “Kant’s thought represents… the catastrophic reemergence of law and religion in the bosom of philosophy” (p. 121).

Agamben strenuously objects to Kant’s superficial but nonetheless very prominent emphasis on duty. Duty was a favorite theme of Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia in Kant’s time, and Kant as a university professor was a civil servant. Kant’s talk about duty — which I also don’t particularly care for — was close to, if not in fact, a civil obligation of his position. But the real substance of Kantian ethics has to do with free rational search and testing for appropriate maxims to guide action in different kinds of situations. I prefer to express this in a more Aristotelian form of deliberation and practical judgment, but the import is the same.

He cites Pufendorf’s opinion that ethics should be expressed in terms of duties rather than virtues. But unlike Aristotle or Kant, Pufendorf really is a political voluntarist who does put the will of the sovereign ahead of everything else.

Kant abstracts duty to the point where it does not dictate specific actions, only a kind of procedural best practices for making judgments. This is far removed from what Brandom calls the authority-obedience model. Calling Kantian ethics an “ontology” of “command” as Agamben does seems utterly inappropriate. Kant is anything but a defender of arbitrary authority.

Next Agamben turns to the origins of the ontology of command.

“With a gesture in which one can make out the birth of the modern metaphysics of the will, Plotinus ultimately identifies will with being itself…. It is precisely this ‘voluntarization’ of Greek metaphysics that, by transforming from within both the image of the world of the Timaeus and the Aristotelian unmoved mover, will render possible the Christian creationist paradigm” (p. 126).

He is onto something real here. Although most of his treatises do not mention it, Plotinus in at least one of them speaks very explicitly of a will, which Plato and Aristotle do not. Agamben quotes from Plotinus’ treatise “Free Will and the Will of the One”: “all therefore was will and in the One there was nothing unwilled or prior to will: he was above all will” (p. 126). And again, “will [boulesis] and substance [ousia] must in itself coincide necessarily with being in itself” (ibid).

(On the other hand, Michael Frede has convincingly argued that the notion of a distinct faculty of will — or of the possibility of arbitrary choice, as distinct from choice based on goodness of reasons — is Stoic rather than neoplatonic in origin. Agamben’s focus on the Christian tradition also leads him to ignore Philo of Alexandria’s earlier development of a radically voluntarist theology of omnipotence, in explicit opposition to the whole previous tradition of Greek philosophy.)

He concludes, “The problem of the coming philosophy is that of thinking an ontology beyond operativity and command and an ethics and a politics entirely liberated from the concepts of duty and will” (p. 128).

Ethics and philosophy do still need to be freed from all-too-common dogmas regarding the very existence of arbitrary will not grounded in reasons; the priority of efficient causality over other kinds of explanation; and certain specific non-Aristotelian concepts of efficient causality that emphasize either immediate production or force. But only some concepts of duty are objectionable, and “operativity” is just way too broad a notion to be subject to a uniform evaluation or account. Global condemnation of operativity throws out the baby with the bath water.

On the Good as a Cause

Having recently prototyped a modest textual commentary of my own on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, I feel in a somewhat better position to begin examining the more detailed arguments of Gwenaëlle Aubry on what exactly the Metaphysics aims to do. Her very important 2006 work Dieu sans la puissance: dunamis et energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin highlights Aristotle’s own neglected statements on what his most distinctive contributions in first philosophy were, and argues that they make Aristotle very relevant today.

This leads to a very distinctive reading of the intent of the Metaphysics, which differs greatly from both the “ontological” view of Avicenna and the Latin scholastic mainstream, and the “forgetting of Being”, “metaphysics of presence” view promoted by Heidegger in the 20th century. Here I’ll just provide a top-level introduction.

Aubry sees the Metaphysics primarily as a very innovative work of philosophical theology, centered on what I would call a kind of teleological meta-ethics.

Aristotle’s first cause is the highest good, which works by attraction and motivation, not by creating, or by directly intervening in events. (This makes what Kant calls internal teleology Aristotle’s most fundamental explanatory principle, as is also made especially clear in Aristotle’s biological works, but also even in the Physics.)

Aristotle’s first philosophy treats the world as most fundamentally governed by the values that are at work in it. The logistical working out of means and ends is also essential to how things play out in the world, but Aristotle insists that orienting values come first in the order of explanation. The highest good is a kind of ultimate moral compass for those values. (And from a Kantian standpoint, the resolution of empirical questions of fact depends on the resolution of normative, ultimately ethical or meta-ethical questions of interpretation.)

Next in this series: Pure Act

For Itself

Hegel’s distinctive phrase “for itself” (für sich, literally “for self”) always seemed a little mysterious to me. It seems to refer to a self-aware being’s taking itself to be this or that, following a more or less Kantian model of judgment. That part is clear enough. But what in the world is something like “the concept in and for itself”?

Once again, the simple Kantian/Hegelian notion of reflection sheds a great deal of light on this. It applies on two levels.

First, there is a purely relational one that applies to anything that may be conceived as having characteristics that are mutually related to one another. These in turn may be construed in terms of a kind of self-relatedness of the underlying thing. In this sense, “for itself” would apply to things that have self-relatedness. This means practically everything, except perhaps some abstractly simple things like points in geometry.

Second, there is the level of self-relatedness that is internal to a reflective judgment or unity of apperception, and to the value-oriented self-consciousness arising from mutual recognition. Self-consciousness is not a detached spectator beholding multifarious relations, but has its very being within and amidst all those relations. We might say, then, that in this context the relations themselves are “self-conscious”. Similarly, concepts involved in reflective judgment are in a way necessarily “self-conscious” concepts.

In a way, our essence as human beings is the integral whole that results from — or is teleologically aimed at by — the self-consciousness of our concepts. This whole would be the totality of our commitments — everything we hold to be good, true, or beautiful.

For Hegel as for Aristotle, what count as “our” commitments and “our” concepts are not just whatever we assert are ours. The measure of what commitments and concepts are truly ours lies in what we do in life. And what we really did in any particular case is not just what we say we did or meant to do, but also what others can observe and evaluate.

In this way, to be “for oneself” is simultaneously to be for others, because what counts as one’s deed — and ultimately as oneself — is partly up to all those others who experience us. This doesn’t mean we are not entitled to make contrary assertions of our own that may be right; maybe in some particular case, the others affected by our deeds are prejudiced. For Hegel, the bottom line is that everyone affected gets a hearing in such cases, and the outcome — what is ultimately right — is not subject to a predetermined formula, but rather follows from all the fine details of each case. This is characteristic of the openness by which Kant first distinguished reflective judgment. It is also characteristic of Aristotelian practical judgment.

To be “for itself” or “for oneself” is to be a subject of reflective judgment. For humans, it is also to be a subject of mutual recognition.

At least in the first instance, “subject” here need not imply a self-conscious subject, just a thing with properties with which the judgment is concerned. But perhaps the human case suggests something about how a self-conscious subject could be thought of as a special case or elaboration of a simple Aristotelian “subject” or underlying thing.

What distinguishes Aristotle’s view of the higher levels of subjectivity (and, I think, Hegel’s too) from typical modern ones is that self-consciousness inheres not in the subject per se as a special kind of entity, but rather in the activity of reflection (contemplation, thought thinking itself, deliberation) in which the subject is involved.

Is and Ought in Actuality

Aristotle regards the priority of actuality over potentiality to be one of his most important innovations. He regards it as a necessary condition for anything being intelligible. Along with the primacy of the good and that-for-the-sake-of-which in explanation, it is also central to his way of arguing for a first cause.

The Western tradition generally did not follow Aristotle on these points. Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin monotheisms have most often treated God as an absolute power, seeking to put unlimited omnipotence first in the order of explanation, before goodness. Christians were happy to criticize occasionalism in Islam, but theologians like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham defended an extreme sort of theological voluntarism, which was taken up again by Descartes. In the 19th century, Kierkegaard valorized Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as unconditional obedience to God, claiming that faith should take precedence over ethics generally. In the 20th century, Sartre defended unconditional free will for humans, while asserting a militant atheism and the absurdity of existence. His currently influential follower Alain Badiou goes even further. He bluntly says that concern for ethics is a waste of time, and that dialogue and democracy are a scam — not just in particular cases, but in general.

Mainstream views of religion have always insisted that the absolute power is also absolutely good, but have been unable to show why or how this is the case. This has opened the door to simplistic but unanswerable arguments that the facts of the world cannot be reconciled with claims that it is governed by a good absolute power.

Instead of sacrificing ethics and the good on either religious or secular grounds, we should put them first. Leibniz argues that an emphasis on the absolute power or arbitrary will of God is bad theology, and effectively makes God into the kind of tyrant that Plato denounced (see also Euthyphro; Arbitrariness, Inflation).

Aristotle’s first cause doesn’t govern the facts of the world. It is the world’s normative compass. It is the pure good and pure fulfillment that all things seek, according to their natures and insofar as they are capable. Or as Hegel might say, it is pure Idea.

The priority of actuality is a priority of the good and of normativity. For Aristotle, we shouldn’t call something “actual” just because it exists or is the case. Rather, something is actual when it is the case that it is fulfilling its potential, as it “ought” to do.

It is not a matter of pure moralism either though. Actuality does involve an element of being the case; it is just not reducible to that. What is true also matters quite a lot in the determination of what is right, even though it is not all that matters. Every particular good is interdependent with particular truth. That is why Aristotle seems to make the understanding of causes into one of the most important elements of virtue, while at the same time cautioning us that ethics is not a matter of exact knowledge.

We are looking for a kind of mean here. What is true matters for what is right, but what is right also matters for what is true. Truth is not reducible to a matter of neutral fact. There can be no truth without intelligibility, and there can be no intelligibility without taking normative considerations into account in interpretation.

The Goal of Human Life

Book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is concerned with the ultimate goal of human life. Things said here about the key undefined terms of “intellect” and “contemplation” provide important background for what is said about them in book Lambda of the Metaphysics.

He begins with a discussion of pleasure. “For some people say that pleasure is the good, while others at the opposite extreme say it is completely base, some of them perhaps being convinced that it is that way, but others believing that it is better for our life to make pleasure appear to be something base, even if it is not, on the grounds that most people are heavily inclined toward it and are enslaved to their pleasures” (ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 181).

First, he suggests that it is not pleasure in its own right that is base, but a kind of enslavement to its pursuit.

Still referring to those who say pleasure is base, he continues, “But it may well be that this is not a good thing to say. For words that concern things in the realm of feelings and actions are less believable than deeds are…. For if someone who condemns pleasure is seen sometimes going after it, he seems to incline toward it because all of it is good, since making distinctions is not something that most people do. So true statements seem to be the most useful ones, not only for knowing but also for life; for since they are in tune with one’s deeds they are believed, and they encourage those who understand them to live by them” (ibid).

Saying that words are less believable than deeds expresses in very simple language the same point for which I have repeatedly cited Robert Pippin’s account of the ethical consequences of the Aristotelian priority of actuality in Hegel.

In passing, Aristotle observes that most humans over-generalize, whereas the philosopher is careful to make distinctions.

“Now Eudoxus believed that pleasure is the good, because one sees that all beings, both rational and irrational, aim at it, while in all things what is choiceworthy is good and what is most choiceworthy is best; so the fact that all things are carried to the same goal reveals that this is the best thing for them all (for each thing discovers what is good for itself, just as it discovers its food), and what is good for all things, and at which all things aim, is the good. His arguments were convincing on account of the virtue of his character, more than on their own account, since he seemed to be an exceptionally temperate man, so that he seemed to be saying these things not as a lover of pleasure but because that is the way things are in truth” (ch. 2, p. 181).

Here Aristotle again concretely applies the priority of actuality or being-at-work. In disputed ethical matters, the character of the speaker as observable by others in her deeds often has even greater importance than the quality of the speaker’s arguments.

“But what is most choiceworthy is what we choose neither on account of anything else nor for the sake of anything else; and such, by general agreement, is pleasure, since no one asks for what purpose one feels pleasure, because pleasure is chosen for itself. And when pleasure is added to any good thing whatever, such as acting justly or being temperate, it makes it more choiceworthy, but it is by itself that the good is augmented.”

It is always a key distinction for Aristotle whether something is chosen for its own sake or for the sake of something else.

“But surely the latter argument, at any rate, seems to show that pleasure is among the things that are good, but no more so than any other, since every one of them is more choiceworthy along with another good thing than when it is alone. Indeed, Plato argues in rebuttal by that sort of argument that pleasure is not the good, since a pleasant life is more choiceworthy along with intelligence than apart from it, but if the mixture is better, then pleasure is not the good, for the good does not become more choiceworthy when something is added to it. And it is clear that nothing else that becomes more choiceworthy along with any of the things that are good in themselves would be the good either” (pp. 181-182).

With the help of Plato, he leads us through a dialectical reversal of the apparent endorsement of Eudoxus’ position above. This last argument about pleasure holds true for any particular good, and therefore does not suffice to establish that pleasure is the good in an unqualified sense. We need to distinguish between any particular end that may be sought and the good in its own right, which he also calls beautiful.

He continues, “But what is of that sort, that we have any share in? For that is the sort of thing being sought. On the other hand, those who argue in opposition that what all things aim at is not good are not saying anything; for those things that seem so to all people, we declare to be so, and someone who destroys that trust will not very likely say anything that is more to be trusted” (p. 182).

Those who argue that what all things aim at is not the good are “not saying anything”. Here he seems to make two separate points. First, by calling this “not saying anything”, he implies that a denial that all things aim at the good ought to be considered as leading to debilitating incoherence. Such a denial does not just contradict the contrary view shared by Eudoxus and Plato, that the good (whatever else it may be) is that at which all things aim. What supports the view of Eudoxus and Plato is the possibility of mutual articulation and clarification between the what-it-is of the good and the what-it-is of the aims of things. The contrary view rejects that correlation, and offers nothing in its place to support articulation and clarification. In that way, it undermines intelligibility and discourse. This is not a proof that all things aim at the good, only a rationally persuasive argument.

Second, he claims that people in general — or what we might call common sense — in fact presuppose the correlation between the good and aims posited by Eudoxus and Plato. Again, this is only a rationally persuasive argument, not a proof.

He continues, “For if it were only things without intelligence that desire pleasant things, there would be something in what they say, but if beings with judgment desire them as well, how could they be saying anything? And perhaps even in the lower animals there is something naturally good that is stronger than they themselves are, that aims at their proper good” (ibid).

Here he tacitly equates intelligence with good judgment. Most things in life cannot be adequately dealt with using only logical reasoning from what can be known in a strict sense. In animals that do not have the ability to deliberate and make judgments of what ought to be done, he suggests that their nature as their indwelling source of motion takes the place of judgment.

“Nor is it the case that, if pleasure is not classed among the qualities, it is for that reason not among good things either; for the ways of being-at-work that belong to virtue are not qualities, and neither is happiness” (ch. 3, p. 182).

Pleasure, virtue, and happiness are not simple qualities. As was said more generally about states of things in the Physics, they involve complex relations.

“To those who bring up pleasures that are matters of reproach, one might say that these are not pleasant (for just because they are pleasurable to people who are in a bad condition, one ought not to suppose that they would also be pleasant to anyone except these…), … or else pleasures differ in kind, for the ones that come from beautiful things are different from the ones that come from shameful things, for it is not possible to feel the pleasure that comes from something just without being a just person, or the pleasure that comes from something musical without being a musical person, and similarly in the other cases. And the fact that a friend is different from a flatterer seems to make it clear that pleasure is either not good or varies in kind” (p. 184).

He concludes, “It seems to be clear, then, that pleasure is not the good and that not every pleasure is choiceworthy, and that there are some pleasures that are choiceworthy in themselves, differing in kind or in the things they come from” (ibid).

Pleasure is not the good, but pleasures associated with that he calls “beautiful” things, which are those that are good in their own right, are nonetheless choiceworthy in their own right.

“Now the activity of seeing seems to be complete over any time whatever, for there is nothing it lacks which would complete its form by coming about at a later time; pleasure too is like something of this sort. For it is something whole, and there is no time at which one could take a pleasure, the form of which would become complete after it went on for a longer time. Hence pleasure is not a motion…. But all the motions that are in parts of time are incomplete, and are different in form from the whole and from one another. For setting stones together is different from making grooves in a column, and these motions differ from the making of a temple; the making of the temple is something complete (for it is lacking in nothing in relation to what was intended), but the making of the foundation or of a decorative tablet is incomplete, since each of these is the making of a part. They are different in form, then, and it is not possible to find a motion complete in its form in any time whatever except in the whole” (ch. 4, pp. 184-185).

“But the form of a pleasure is complete in any time whatever…. [I]t is not possible to be in motion except in a stretch of time, but it is possible to feel pleasure, for what is in the now is something whole” (p. 185).

Pleasure, like seeing, is its own entelechy (something complete in itself), and not a motion. In the Physics, he treats the continuity of any given motion as itself a kind of imperfect entelechy, but here he emphasizes the contrast between motion and any more perfect entelechy.

“Now since every one of the senses is at work in relation to something perceptible, and is completely at work when it is in its best condition and directed toward the most beautiful of the things perceptible by that sense (for it seems that its complete being-at-work is of this sort most of all, and let it make no difference to speak of the sense itself, or of the organ in which it is present, as being-at-work), for each sense, that way of being-at-work is best that belongs to what is in its best condition, directed toward the best of what is perceptible by it. This would be most complete and most pleasant” (p. 186).

It is common to hear claims that perception for Aristotle is unequivocally passive. It does have a passive aspect that he emphasizes in On the Soul. But here he emphasizes that all perception is a being-at-work or actuality, and thus also an entelechy, by way of his identification of actuality with entelechy.

“[F]or there is a pleasure that goes with each of the senses, and similarly with thinking and contemplation, and its most complete activity is most pleasant, and it is most complete when it belongs to a power that is in good condition directed toward that which is of most serious worth among the things apprehended by it, and the pleasure brings the activity to completion” (ibid).

The greatest pleasure accompanies the most complete entelechy. This also applies to the first cause, which he conceives as an entelechy that is complete in an unqualified sense.

“When the thing perceiving and the thing perceived are at their best, there will always be pleasure when what acts and what is acted upon are present to one another. But the pleasure brings the activity to completion not as an active condition present within it all along, but as something that comes over it, like the bloom of well-being in people who are at the peak of their powers” (ibid).

Pleasure follows from the fulfillment of nature. But it is something that supervenes on that fulfillment.

“So as long as the intelligible or perceptible thing, and the power that discerns or contemplates it, are such as they ought to be, there will be pleasure in their being-at-work, for while the thing acted upon and the thing acting remain as they are and have the same relation to one another, the same thing comes about…. [But] it is impossible for anything belonging to human beings to be at-work continuously” (p. 187).

Being-at-work and entelechy inherently generate pleasure.

“But one might assume that all beings reach out for pleasure because they all desire to live. Life is a certain kind of being-at-work…. The pleasure brings the activities to completion and hence brings living to completion, which is what they all strive for…. For without being-at-work, no pleasure comes about, and pleasure brings every way of being-at-work to completion” (ibid).

All life is being-at-work and entelechy. There is no genuine pleasure apart from these.

“[W]ays of being-at-work that are different in kind are brought to completion by means that differ in kind…. [E]ach of the pleasures is bound up with the activity it completes, since the appropriate pleasure contributes to the growth of the activity. For those who are at-work with pleasure discern each sort of thing better and are more precise about it” (pp. 187-188).

To be at-work and to feel pleasure in it makes us better at whatever we are doing.

“Now since ways of being-at-work differ in decency and baseness, and since some are to be chosen, others are to be avoided, and still others are neutral, their pleasures also differ similarly, since a special pleasure goes with each activity. The special pleasure in an activity of serious worth is decent, and the special pleasure in a base activity is corrupt” (p. 188).

Here he distinguishes what I above called “genuine” pleasure from spurious apparent pleasure associated with a corrupt nature.

“Decency” (epieikeia) means ethical sensitivity. More specifically, for Aristotle it is an attitude that tempers the strict application of rules or laws with kindness and charitable interpretation. Leibniz also emphasized this in his philosophy of jurisprudence. Ethics answers to a higher calling than mere rules or law. This doesn’t mean that all rules and law should be thrown out. It does mean that within reason, kindness and charity and attention to particulars should take precedence over the rigid application of rules.

“But in all such matters, it seems that a thing is what it shows itself to be to a person of serious moral stature. And if this is beautifully said, as it seems to be, then the measure of each thing is virtue, or a good person, insofar as he is good, and what appear to be pleasures to this person would be pleasures, and the things he enjoys will be pleasant. And if some things that are hard for this person to endure appear pleasant to someone, that is nothing to be wondered at, since many kinds of corruption and damage happen to human beings” (p. 189).

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle interprets Protagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things” as a subjectivism that undermines any possibility of discourse. Here is Aristotle’s positive alternative: the virtue of a good person is the measure of all things. Intelligibility depends on normativity.

“[B]ut among the pleasures that seem to be decent, which sort or which one ought one to say is that of a human being? Or is this clear from the ways of being-at-work, since the pleasures follow upon these? So if there is one or more than one activity belonging to the man who is fulfilled and blessed, the pleasures that bring them to completion should be spoken of, in the governing sense, as the pleasures of a human being, while the rest are pleasures in a secondary and greatly diminished sense, corresponding to their activities” (pp. 189-190).

The highest pleasure of a human being will turn out to come from the entelechy of contemplative intellect.

“Now that the things having to do with the virtues, with friendships, and with pleasures have been discussed, what remains is to go through in outline what has to do with happiness, since we set this down as the end at which human beings aim. And the account of it would be shorter for those who take up again what has been said before” (ch. 6, p. 190).

The virtues and friendship are discussed in earlier books of the Ethics. Now he turns from pleasure to eudaimonia or “happiness”, which for Aristotle is a condition to be judged objectively, and not a subjective feeling.

“[O]ne ought… to place happiness in some form of being-at-work…. [O]ne ought to place happiness among those that are chosen for their own sake and not among those that are for the sake of something else, since happiness stands in need of nothing but is self-sufficient. And those activities are chosen for their own sake from which nothing is sought beyond the being-at-work; and actions in accord with virtue seem to be of this sort, since performing actions that are beautiful and serious is something chosen for its own sake” (ch. 6, p. 190).

Happiness comes from a substantial engagement in activities chosen for their own sake. No human gets to do this exclusively, but we do have the ability to choose some things only for their own sake.

“Even children believe that the things valued by themselves are the best things. So it is reasonable that, just as different things appear worthwhile to children and to men, so too do different things appear worthwhile to people of a low sort and to decent people…. [T]o each person, the way of being-at-work that results from his own active condition is the most choiceworthy, and to a person of serious worth that is the activity that results from virtue” (pp. 190-191).

At a certain level, we cannot avoid dealing with apparent goods. The way he approaches these is to focus on what seems good to fundamentally kind, reasonable people who take ethics seriously.

“But to be earnest and to labor for the sake of play seems foolish and too childish. But to play in order to be serious… seems to be right, since play seems like relaxation, and since people are incapable of laboring continuously, they need relaxation. So relaxation is not the end, since it comes about for the sake of being-at-work. And the happy life seems to be in accord with virtue, and this involves seriousness and does not consist in play” (p. 191).

He argues against the shallow association of happiness with play. Seriousness means not a dour attitude, but caring about what is reasonable and ethical.

“But if happiness is being-at-work in accord with virtue, it is reasonable that it would be in accord with the most powerful virtue, and this would belong to the best part. Now whether this is intellect or some other part that seems by nature to rule and lead and have a conception about things that are beautiful and divine, and to be either divine itself or the most divine of the things that are in us, the being-at-work of this part in accord with its own proper virtue would be complete happiness. That this way of being-at-work is contemplative has been said. And this would seem to be in agreement with the things said before and with the truth. For this way of being-at-work is the most powerful (since the intellect is the most powerful of the things in us, and the things with which the intellect is concerned are the most powerful of the things that can be known); it is also the most continuous, for we are more able to contemplate continuously than to act in any way whatever” (ch. 7, pp. 191-192).

This helps fill out what is said about the nature of the first cause in book Lambda of the Metaphysics. I think it tends to support the identification of contemplation with thought thinking itself.

“And we believe that pleasure must be mixed in with happiness, and by general agreement the most pleasant of the ways of being-at-work in accord with virtue is that which goes along with wisdom; at any rate, philosophy seems to have pleasures that are wonderful in their purity and stability…. And what is referred to as self-sufficiency would be present most of all in the contemplative life, for… the wise person is able to contemplate even when he is by himself, and more so to the extent that he is more wise. He will contemplate better, no doubt, when he has people to work with, but he is still the most self-sufficient person” (p. 192).

The highest pleasure is being-at-work in accordance with wisdom. Contemplation is more complete in itself (more of an entelechy) than anything else.

“And contemplation seems to be the only activity that is loved for its own sake, for nothing comes to be from it beyond the contemplating, while from things involving action we gain something for ourselves, to a greater or lesser extent, beyond the action” (ibid).

Contemplating is distinguished from the kind of acting that is the official concern of practical judgment (phronesis), as well as from any kind of making. For Aristotle, it is a more pure example of being-at-work than acting or making.

“So if, among actions in accord with the virtues, those that pertain to politics and war are pre-eminent in beauty and magnitude, but they are unleisured and aim at some end and are chosen not for their own sake, while the being-at-work of the intellect seems to excel in seriousness, and to be contemplative and aim at no end beyond itself, and to have its own pleasure (which increases its activity), so that what is as self-sufficient, leisured, and unwearied as possible for a human being, and all the other things that are attributed to a blessed person, show themselves as the things that result from this way of being-at-work, then this would be the complete happiness of a human being, if it takes in a complete span of life, for none of the things that belong to happiness is incomplete” (pp. 192-193).

For Aristotle, happiness or its absence is a characteristic of a whole life viewed in its completion.

“But such a life would be greater than what accords with a human being, for it is not insofar as one is a human being that he will live in this way, but insofar as something divine is present in him, and to the extent that this surpasses the compound being, to that extent also the being-at-work of it surpasses that which results from the rest of virtue” (p. 193).

Intellect “surpasses the compound being”. Once again, this suggests that for Aristotle, intellect is more than just a part of the soul that is a constituent of that compound.

“So if intellect is something divine as compared with a human being, the life that is in accord with intellect is divine as compared with a human life. But one should not follow those who advise us to think human thoughts, since we are human, and mortal thoughts, since we are mortal, but as far as possible one ought to be immortal and to do all things with a view toward living in accord with the most powerful thing in oneself, for even if it is small in bulk, it rises much more above everything else in power and worth. And each person would even seem to be this part, if it is the governing and better part” (ibid).

For Aristotle, intellect is immortal, although memory depends on the body. He is suggesting that we identify as much as we can with the immortal thing that both is within us and surpasses us. (See also Properly Human, More Than Human?.)

“[W]hat is appropriate by nature to each being is best and most pleasant for each, and so, for a human being, this is the life in accord with the intellect, if that most of all is a human being. Therefore this life is also the happiest” (ibid).

The same thing — intellect — that was said to be greater than what accords with an empirical human being, is now said to be “most of all” a human being in a non-empirical, normative sense.

“The life in accord with the rest of virtue is happy in a secondary way, since the activities that result from it are human ones…. Some of them even seem to derive from the body, and in many respects virtue of character is bound up together with our feelings. And practical judgment is linked together with virtue of character, and it with practical judgment, if the sources of practical judgment are dependent on virtues of character, while the right thing belonging to virtues of character is dependent upon practical judgment” (ch. 8, p. 193).

Here we have the source of claims that Aristotle regards practical judgment (phronesis) as distinctly inferior to contemplative intellect. This ought to be considered carefully.

It is true that practical judgement is inseparable from how we deal with our emotions, whereas he wants to say that intellect is not. But being inseparable from how we deal with our emotions need not at all imply being compulsively driven by the raw emotions we are dealing with. In passing, we feel all sorts of things that we do not act upon, because we judge that it would not really be appropriate to do so. We can have various degrees of detachment from things that we feel, even though we still feel them.

I want to say that there is a kind of contemplative, reflective, deliberative, interpretive judgment that is like practical judgment in that it is primarily concerned with particulars, but different in that its primary outcome is interpretation rather than action. I think that practical judgment about the right action could not function without relying on many interpretive judgments about relevant details, and indeed that such interpretive judgment is what does all the deliberative work in practical judgment, independent of whether that work results in action or not.

“But the happiness that belongs to the intellect is separate…. And it would seem to have little need of external props, or less than virtue of character has…. For the generous person will need money for performing generous acts…, and a courageous person will need strength, … and a temperate person will need opportunity” (p. 194).

He points out that the outcome of actions depends on circumstances. Contemplation has some minimal conditions too, but once those are met, its outcome does not depend on circumstances. But it is only the actions that have these additional dependencies on circumstance, not interpretive judgments as such.

“It is also a matter of dispute whether the choice or the actions are more determining of virtue, since it is present in both; it is clear that the completeness of it would consist in both together” (ibid).

Both intentions and outcomes are important for any normative appraisal of actions. Good intentions may warrant forgiveness for bad outcomes. But at the same time, deeds count more than words in the assessment of what someone’s intentions and values really were.

“[B]ut for the actions many things are needed, and more of them to the extent that the actions are of greater magnitude and more beautiful. But for someone who contemplates there is no need of such things for his being-at-work; rather, one might say that they get in the way of his contemplating. But insofar as he is a human being and lives in company with a number of people, he chooses to do the things that have to do with virtue, and thus will have need of such things in order to live a human life” (ibid).

A contemplative human being will almost always also be involved in non-contemplative actions and social interactions. For Aristotle, involvement in social relations is an essential aspect of what it is to be human.

“That complete happiness is a contemplative activity would also be made clear by the following consideration: we assume that the gods are most of all blessed and happy, but what sort of actions will it be right to attribute to them?… And for someone who goes through them all, it would be obvious that the things involved in actions are small and unworthy of the gods. But surely everyone supposes that they are alive at any rate, and are therefore at work…. But when someone who is living is deprived of acting, and still more of making anything, what remains except contemplation? So the being-at-work of a god, surpassing in blessedness, would be contemplative, and so among human activities, the one the most akin to this would be the most happy” (pp. 194-195).

Here he says that the being-at-work of a god is contemplation, and cites this as an additional reason why contemplation is the happiest human activity.

“For the gods, the whole of life is blessed, and for human beings it is so to the extent that there is in it some likeness to such a way of being-at-work…. But there will also be a need of external prosperity for one who is a human being, since nature is not self-sufficient for contemplating, but there is also a need for the body to be healthy and for food and other attentions to be present. But one certainly ought not to suppose that someone who is going to be happy will need many things or grand ones…; for self-sufficiency does not consist in excess any more than action does, and it is possible for one who is not a ruler of land and sea to perform beautiful actions. For one would be capable of acting in accord with virtue from moderate means (and it is possible to see this plainly, since private people seem to perform decent actions not less than powerful people but even more), and it is sufficient if that much is present, since the life of someone who is at-work in accord with virtue will be happy” (p. 195).

The happiness of a human life also has material prerequisites, but they are relatively modest. He suggests that the rich and powerful may be less virtuous and therefore less happy than others.

“And Anaxagoras, too, seems to have believed that the happy person is neither rich nor powerful, when he said it would be nothing to wonder at if such a person would appear strange to most people, since they judge by externals, perceiving these alone. So the opinions of the wise seem to be in harmony with our arguments” (ibid).

A person living a life that would ultimately be judged to be happy in the Aristotelian sense will have priorities that will appear strange to people who have no serious involvement with contemplation.

“Now such things have some trustworthiness, but the truth in matters of action is discerned from deeds and from life…. So we ought to examine the things that have been said by applying them to deeds and to life, and if they are in harmony with the deeds one ought to accept them, while if they are out of tune one ought to consider them just words” (pp. 195-196).

Having just cited the authority of a reputedly wise man for additional persuasion, he again points out that deeds observable by others are more trustworthy than anyone’s mere words, including those of an authority we respect.

“But the person who is at-work with intellect and takes care of this and is disposed in the best way toward it seems also to be most dear to the gods. For if some care for human beings comes from the gods, as is believed, then it would be most reasonable for them to delight in what is best and most akin to them (and this would be the intellect), and to do good in return to those who love and honor this most, since such people care for the things that are dear to them, and also act rightly and beautifully” (p. 196).

Here he argues that intellect and contemplation are what is most dear to the gods — even more dear, that is, than virtuous actions. This need not imply that particular virtuous actions are not dear to them also, only that the intellect, contemplation, and wisdom that among other things guide virtuous action are even more so.

“Now if what has to do with happiness as well as with the virtues, and also with friendship and pleasure, has been sufficiently discussed in outline, ought one to assume that our chosen task has its end? Or, as has been said, is the end in matters of action not contemplating and knowing each of them but rather doing them? Then it is not sufficient to know about virtue, but one must try to have it and use it” (ch. 9, p. 196).

Once again, he balances the emphasis on contemplation with an emphasis on complete ethical doing. This kind of careful concern for a balanced, multi-dimensional view of things is why I keep coming back to Aristotle.

“[A]s things are, discourses appear to have the power to encourage and stimulate open-natured young people, … but they are unable to encourage most people toward what is beautiful and good…. For it is not possible, or not easy, to change by words things that have been bound up in people’s characters since long ago…. [I]t is necessary for the soul of the listener to have been worked on beforehand by means of habits, with a view to enjoying and hating in a beautiful way, like ground that is going to nourish the seed” (pp. 196-197).

Here he repeats a point made in an earlier book about the extreme ethical importance of people’s emotional dispositions, and consequently of the way children are raised. Insofar as people have acquired a disposition for disordered emotions, it can be nearly impossible to have dialogue with them at the times when it matters most.

I don’t think it is ever acceptable to hate people as people. But someone who loves the good may legitimately hate actions and circumstances that are truly bad, just because they are bad. And those who stubbornly refuse to recognize others deserve to be harshly dealt with.

“For someone who lives by feeling could not hear the words that would turn him away, nor could he even understand them; when someone is in that condition, how is it possible to change his mind? And in general, feeling seems to yield not to reasoned speech but to force. So it is necessary for a character to be present in advance that is in some way appropriate for virtue, loving what is beautiful and scorning what is shameful” (ibid).

I prefer to use the English word “feeling” in a more positive way, and would substitute “disordered emotion” for it in the above. (See also Virtue Not a Potential.)

Independent Things

Having just posted notes on Aristotle’s Metaphysics book Zeta (VII), I wanted to pause for some personal reflections. The hands-on engagement of putting together a textual commentary like that with extensive quotes always gives me a quality of insight into the material that I don’t get from just reading or re-reading a text.

One of the ways Aristotle stands out as a philosopher — to speak a bit figuratively — is his philosophically generous attitude toward not only living, “independent” beings, but ordinary “things” of all sorts. This carries over into his ethics.

Engagement in the world, approached the right way, need be no distraction from our essential concerns. Rather, for Aristotle it is a fulfillment of the “purpose” of the kind of beings that we are. He encourages us to cultivate a feeling of being fundamentally at home in life in the world, a feeling strong enough to remain ultimately unshaken by our emotional responses to events and circumstances. By contrast, Plotinus, for instance, though appreciative of beauty in all its forms, ultimately directs our attention both spiritually and philosophically away from the world and toward the One. Modern philosophers tend to view the world as inert matter for us to manipulate, not something with which we would feel kinship and a sense of belonging.

Hegel criticizes Kant for being “too tender” toward objects, but I feel that this and some other remarks are a bit lacking in interpretive charity, even though Hegel is deeply Kantian in many ways. In particular, I have a lot more sympathy for Kant’s notion of “things in themselves” than Hegel did.

Kantian things in themselves don’t exactly align with either Aristotle’s notion of independent things or with the what-it-is of those things, but they have relations to both, which may suggest an alternate way out of the Kantian “impasse” that troubles Hegel. What Hegel regards as an unresolved impasse in Kant in this area is the irreducible gap Kant sets up between knowledge and things in themselves. But Aristotle also says we do not have knowledge of independent things or their what-it-is.

We may have knowledge of their articulations, but articulations are only expressible in terms of universals (words with posited meanings that are applicable to multiple things), while independent things and their what-it-is are particulars. Therefore, for Aristotle too there will be a sort of Kantian gap between knowledge and independent things. I have praised this as a kind of “epistemic modesty”.

We have only experience and acquaintance with independent things, not knowledge. We may also dialectically inquire, interpret, and make judgments about them, thus reaching relatively well-founded belief, but we cannot know them, because they are particulars independent of us, while all knowledge (episteme) is discursive.

When it comes to the what-it-is of things as distinct from the independent things themselves, we have no experience or acquaintance either, but only the “long detour” of dialectic, interpretation, and judgment. This, it seems to me, is what Hegel’s logic of essence addresses. In the logic of essence, Hegel speaks to Aristotelian considerations, and I would now say more specifically that Hegel’s logic of essence explores more or less the same dialectical level as Metaphysics book Zeta.

Kant’s things in themselves seem utterly remote and mysterious to nearly everyone — I dare say much more so than the Aristotelian what-it-is. A historical reason for this is not far to seek. Kant’s intellectual formation was in the milieu of the Wolffian school, within which the small fraction of the works of Leibniz published in his lifetime played a leading role.

Leibniz developed the highly original notion of the “complete essence” of a thing, corresponding to the way God would know it — as including every true statement about a thing, including all the empirical facts applicable to its past, present, and future. Leibniz’ God is concerned with the totality of logical truth about a thing.

From the point of view of Aristotle or Hegel, this turn to the totality of logical and factual truth abolishes the distinction between essence and what is not essence. It thus effectively abolishes the more specific concept of essence and a “deeper truth”. An emphasis on complete essence also foregrounds something we could not possibly experience over the sensible independent things with articulable properties that we do experience.

For Leibniz, naturally enough, only God knows complete essences. Humans could not possibly know them. What I want to suggest here is that the reason the Kantian thing-in-itself is inherently unknowable by us is that it basically is a Leibnizian complete essence.

Because a complete essence is no longer a proper what-it-is that can potentially be distinguished from the many incidental facts about a thing, it is far less tractable to Aristotelian or Hegelian dialectic than a what-it-is that at least potentially can be so distinguished. A complete essence poses head-on what Hegel calls the “problem of indifference”, which plagued early modern philosophy. Among all the true statements about a thing, there is no clear way to pick out which would be more relevant to what Aristotle would call the articulation of what-it-is.

While Aristotelian independent things and their what-it-is are unknowable because they are particulars, they remain relatively tractable to dialectical inquiry, and are therefore not radically unknowable to humans in the way a complete essence or thing in itself would be. Certainly Aristotle seems to say more about them that is meaningful than Kant is able to say about things in themselves.

Hegel wants to abolish things “in themselves” — not at all because he wants to abolish Aristotelian independent things or their what-it-is, but because he objects both to the Hermetic isolation of complete essences from one another and to the problem of indifference that complete essences pose. He in effect goes back to Aristotle on this.

It is important to emphasize that the independence of an Aristotelian independent thing means it cannot be just an object of consciousness. It is supposed to be a reality in its own right. While this is not the only point of view we may adopt, the kind of deeper truth that Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel all seek is not to be found by fleeing the world and leaving such realities behind.

If we accept an Aristotelian revision of the Kantian gap between knowledge and what is, the gap no longer brings inquiry to a halt. Then the broadly Kantian view that there is a gap and the broadly Hegelian view that we can go a long way toward overcoming it can both be sustained. (See also Practical Wisdom.)

Next in this series: Toward Potentiality and Actuality

Practical Wisdom

Practical “wisdom”, as I would use the term, would be an excellence in practical judgment. Aristotle says that practical judgment is neither knowledge nor opinion, but something grounded in deliberation that has an outcome in action. Such deliberation is a kind of doing that uses the the best resources available to it to determine the best action in concrete circumstances. Aristotle uses the Greek phronesis for both practical judgment and what I am distinguishing as practical wisdom.

Joe Sachs says in his glossary to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that phronesis is “The active condition by which someone discerns the right means to the right end in particular circumstances. Hence the intellectual virtue of practical judgment and the whole of virtue of character are mutually dependent and must develop together, since the right end is apparent only to someone of good character, while the formation of good character requires the repeated choice of the right action, which is impossible without practical judgment” (p. 209).

We might notice that this sort of pattern of mutual dependence between good judgment and good character is exactly the same as that of several mutual dependencies that are emphasized by Hegel in his discussions of what intelligibility in general requires. Of course this is no accident; Aristotle is Hegel’s inspiration for this kind of idea.

“Apart from virtue of character, the capacity to reason from ends to means is mere cleverness; practical judgment involves skill in making distinctions and seeing connections, but if one does not recognize that such thinking imposes upon oneself an obligation to act, that skill is merely astuteness” (ibid).

“The translation ‘practical judgment’ is chosen here as the best way of conveying Aristotle’s central understanding that ethical choices can never be deductions from any rules, principles, or general duties, but always require a weighing of particular circumstances and balancing of conflicting principles in a direct recognition of the mean” (p. 210).

Phronesis is a weighing, and not a deduction. This is extremely important, though I would use some other words than “direct recognition” in regard to the mean.

Aristotle is not qualifying a more general, pre-existing notion of “judgment” by calling it “practical”. We should not take literally this implication of the grammar of the English phrase “practical judgment”, which diverges from the Greek, in which phronesis is a single noun. As far as I can tell, phronesis just is Aristotle’s notion of what I have been calling “judgment”. Sachs also calls it “practical”, using the ethical connotations of that word from Kant. That is consonant with Aristotle’s meaning, though not literally present in the Greek.

I am fascinated by the possibility of a mutual inter-articulation of Aristotelian phronesis and the “reflective judgment” extensively dwelt upon by Kant and Hegel. It seems to me that the kind of weighing Aristotle emphasizes is inherently reflective in Kant and Hegel’s sense. (See also Reflective Grounding; Life: A Necessary Concept?; Reflection and Higher-Order Things; Reflection and Dialectic; Hegel on Reflection; Apperceptive Judgment.)

“Practical judgment is acquired primarily by experience of particulars, but also involves a knowledge of things that are universal” (p. 209).

This last qualification is important. Phronesis is directed at particulars first, but Aristotle never considers particulars in complete abstraction from applicable universals. The emphasis on particulars tells us that practical judgment will require open-ended interpretation, not a mechanical application of rules. But the reflective “knowledge of things that are universal” that contributes to practical wisdom includes not just classifications, but potentially, for example, all the lessons of Hegel’s Logic about interpretation and intelligibility in general, as well as any Kantian ethical universals that may be applicable.

(Most of the Logic’s development is an articulation of higher-order concepts, but the final stage of “the idea” explicitly involves a return to the concrete world, in which reflective judgment weighs particulars and higher-order concepts together. I want to suggest that this is Hegel’s own development of genuinely Aristotelian practical judgment. Properly understood, Hegel’s “absolute knowing” is nothing more than a making explicit of general conditions for practical “wisdom” in the sense above, fully compatible with the free play of Aristotelian phronesis in relation to particulars.)

The True and the Good

For Plato and Aristotle, considerations of truth are not separable from questions of value. Hegel pushes this further, to the point where only as good can anything really be true. He effectively argues for the identity of the true and the good. Apparent surface truths that are ugly have to be rejected as not really true. This means not that we should try to pretend they are illusory or unimportant, but that we should do something about them. It is up to us to make the world more true and right. This is how we participate in the “world’s purpose”. (See also Emancipatory Logic?; The Logic’s Ending.)