Wisdom and Judgment

For Aristotle, the ultimate aim of a talking animal as such is wisdom, which cannot be separated from ethical sensitivity and concern for others. This wisdom might be characterized as an excellence in reflective judgment or interpretation.

There has, however, come to be a traditional view of what is called judgment — especially common in early modern logic — that reduces it to the grammatical form of predication (“A is B”), and its truth to a matter of simple correspondence to fact, which is presumed to be independently knowable. Predication on this view aims to be a kind of authoritative saying of how things are, grounded in putatively immediate truth that is not supposed to depend on any kind of normative inquiry or process of interpretation in order to be known. Things just factually are certain ways, and judgments are conclusions produced immediately that are supposed to correspond to the facts. Judgments are either right, and thereby count as objective; or wrong, and to be dismissed as merely subjective. But in neither case do they involve any depth of engagement or extensive activity. They are “shallow”.

This dogmatic way of thinking, criticized by Kant and Hegel, is utterly alien to the kind of spirit of rational inquiry promoted by Plato and Aristotle, who thought that assertions should be grounded in reasons shareable and discussible with other humans, and not on vain claims of immediate insight. But both this reductive use of “judgment” for the mere immediate production of a representation, and the reduction of truth to a correspondence to presumed fact, have often been wrongly characterized as Aristotelian, when they are really of much later origin.

I would suggest that the very idea of better or worse judgment, or of judgment as something of which there could be an excellence, is incompatible with the shallow black-and-white view of judgment as simply right or wrong. Judgment as activity is anything but an immediate production. It is an extensive and intensive activity of interpretation and reflection.

The contemporary American philosopher Robert Brandom writes, “Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea…. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for…. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from unminded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental” (Reason in Philosophy, pp. 32-33; see Kantian Intentionality).

Over the course of many posts, we have seen not only that what Aristotle calls nous and gets translated as “intellect” is an activity and not a stuff, but also that it is intrinsically concerned to seek the better in each instance. The highest good for Aristotle is not a pre-given content, but the result of a truly consistent aiming at the better in life, where what is better is intelligible, and once again not pre-given, but expressible in terms of reasons that any human can share in evaluating.

A important notion of responsibility is also implicit in Aristotle, as when he points out that the freedom of ethical beings is not an arbitrary license, but is commensurate with the taking of responsibility. For Aristotle, unfree beings have no responsibility insofar as they are unfree. It is free beings capable of real deliberation and choice that have responsibility.

On the other hand, at a top level Aristotle prefers to stress the affirmative values of friendship, love, and reciprocity over the constraints of responsibility. For Aristotle, an ethically serious person guided by affirmative aims will turn out to be responsible in her actions. Kant was more distrustful of our affirmative aims, as possibly biased by our individual impulse, and therefore tended to emphasize duty and responsibility as more reliable motivators for ethical action. Aristotle has the more optimistic view that there can be such a thing as desire that is consistent with reason about what is better. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; The Goal of Human Life).

Cause

Aristotle flourished before the great flowering of Greek mathematics that gave us Euclid, Ptolemy, Apollonius, and Aristarchus. In his day, mathematics amounted to just arithmetic and simple geometry. In spite of the famous Pythagorean theorem that the square constructed from the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal in area to the sum of the squares constructed from the other two sides, the historic reality of the Pythagorean movement had more to do with number mysticism, other superstitions, and curious injunctions like “don’t eat beans” than it did with real mathematics.

I think Aristotle was entirely right to conclude that arithmetic and simple geometry were of little use for explaining change in the natural world. I’ve characterized his physics as grounded in a kind of semantic inquiry that Aristotle pioneered. We are not used to thinking about science this way, as fundamentally involved with a very human inquiry about the meaning of experience in life, rather than predictive calculation. For Aristotle, the gap between natural science and thoughtful reflection about ordinary experience was much smaller than it is for us.

Aristotle invented the notion of cause as a semantic tool for expressing the reasons why changes occur. Aristotle’s notion is far more abstract than the metaphor of impulse or something pushing on something else that guided early modern mechanism. Even though the notion of cause was originally developed in a text included in Aristotle’s Physics, the “semantic” grounding of Aristotelian physics places it closer to logic than to modern physical inquiries.

I think the discussion of the kinds of causes could equally well have been grouped among his “logical” works. In fact, the form in which we have Aristotle’s works today is the result of the efforts of multiple ancient editors, who sometimes stitched together separate manuscripts, so there is room for a legitimate question whether the discussion of causes was originally a separate treatise. We tend to assume that there must be something inherently “physical” about the discussion of causes, but this is ultimately due to a circular argument from the fact that the more detailed version of it came down to us as part of the Physics (there is another, briefer one that came down to us as part of the Metaphysics).

Since Hume and especially since the later 19th century, many authors have debated about the role of causes in science. Bertrand Russell argued in the early 20th century that modern science does not in fact depend on what I have called the modern notion of cause.

More recently, Robert Brandom has argued that the purpose of logic is “to make explicit the inferential relations that articulate the semantic contents of the concepts expressed by the use of ordinary, nonlogical vocabulary”. I see Aristotelian causes in this light.

I want to recommend a return to a notion of causes in general as explanatory reasons rather than things that exert force. This can include all the mathematics used in modern science, as well as a broader range of reasons relevant to life. (See also Aristotelian Causes; Mechanical Metaphors; Causes: Real, Heuristic?; Effective vs “Driving”; Secondary Causes.)

Freedom Through Deliberation?

All sincere deliberation cumulatively contributes to opening our minds.

Kant did not discuss Aristotle directly, but he clearly wanted to assert a stronger notion of freedom than emerges just from Aristotle’s distinction of willing from unwilling actions. This relative kind of voluntariness was not enough to ground the kind of freedom Kant was after. For Kant, as long as we are under the sway of our own internal impulses, we are not free, so a lack of external compulsion is not sufficient. But that is not the end of the matter.

“Will” for Kant turned out to be a rational, positively developed alternative to impulse, grounded in a concept (i.e., thoughtful interpretation) of law. Aristotle’s version of thoughtful interpretation in this context is deliberation. It makes sense that active deliberation would positively, incrementally contribute to deautomatizing our tendency to act or respond impulsively. So, I think the closest analogue for what Kant would call true freedom in Aristotle is action on the basis of deliberation. Everything Aristotle says about what is in effect acquired emotional intelligence is also relevant to these Kantian considerations. (See also Beauty, Deautomatization.)

Ethical Skill?

In mentioning “ethical skills”, I by no means want to imply that ethics overall could be reduced to something like a technical skill. People can have all sorts of skills and still be profoundly unethical. However, specific kinds of attentiveness and deautomation of impulse do become easier with practice. Aristotle also talks about people who are skilled in deliberation. (See also Beauty, Deautomatization; Freedom Through Deliberation?)