Living Well and Equity

“[A]n analogy between logos and medical treatment is extremely old and deep in ancient Greek talk about the personality and its difficulties. From Homer on we encounter, frequently and prominently, the idea that logos is to illnesses of the soul as medical treatment is to illnesses of the body. We also find the claim that logos is a powerful and perhaps even a sufficient remedy for these illnesses; frequently it is portrayed as the only available remedy. The diseases in question are frequently diseases of inappropriate or misinformed emotion” (Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 49).

“Philosophy’s claim, later on, to be ‘the art of life’ is a defiant and highly contentious claim. It is, in effect, the claim that it can do more for the suffering pupil than other available sources of logos, healing the suffering soul in a way that goes beyond the other popular arts and pseudo-arts. Above all, philosophy opposes itself here to superstition and popular religion” (p. 50).

“It seems to have been Democritus, however, who first really developed the analogy at length in a clearly philosophical context. ‘Medicine’, he wrote, ‘heals the sicknesses of bodies; but wisdom [sophia] rids the soul of its sufferings [pathe]'” (p. 51).

Nussbaum uses the literary device of imagining how an intelligent Greek woman might have experienced both Aristotle’s ethical teaching and that of the Hellenistic schools. To hear Aristotle’s lectures, she has to disguise herself as a man. Classical Athenian culture did not expect women to be involved in philosophy or politics.

The Aristotle I am interested in is the one who emphasizes mutuality and reciprocity, and therefore could not be reasonably interpreted as an “elitist”, a term that Nussbaum applies a couple of times.

Aristotle develops principles of mutuality from which it could be concluded that social inequality in general is wrong, but does not explicitly draw the conclusion. There are a few passing remarks that I find embarrassing, but in reading a historical philosopher, we should not blame the philosopher for incomplete emancipation from the preconceptions of her culture. Such remarks are made in passing in the philosopher’s capacity as a lay person, not in her capacity as a philosopher.

Plato on the other hand was an early advocate of equality of the sexes. Nussbaum suggests that the status of Plato’s aristocratic family enabled him to depart further from what was generally accepted in the culture.

“We should also bear in mind, however, that to include women in ethical/political instruction at Athens would have been a most unconventional step, bringing the practitioner public ridicule and criticism (as we know it did in the case of Epicurus). Aristotle, as a resident alien at Athens, without any civic, religious, or property rights, twice forced into exile by political opponents suspicious of his Macedonian connections, was not in a position to make surprising gestures — whereas Plato’s wealthy aristocratic family protected him from abuse” (p. 54).

She quotes from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics: “[E]veryone has something of his own to contribute to the truth … and it is from these that we go on to give a sort of demonstration about these things” (p. 58).

This is but one of many passages that evince a concern for all people.

And again, “We aim not to know what courage is but to be courageous, not to know what justice is but to be just, just as we aim to be healthy rather than to know what health is, and to be in a good condition rather than to know what good condition is” (p. 59).

Aristotle is often characterized one-sidedly as an intellectualist who values theory over practice. Here we see the other side. Being good is more important than knowing the good, even though he highly values knowledge. This also has an anti-elitist character.

Philosophical study should make us better at making choices in life. As Nussbaum summarizes, “If [ethics] makes human lives no better, it will be deservedly ignored” (p. 59).

“Aristotle does not mourn the absence of [standards independent of experience]: for the boundaries of experience are also, he holds, the boundaries of discourse and thought. The search for truth is the search for the most accurate account of the world, as we do (and shall) experience it. But this is unqualifiedly a search for truth; and no apologies need be made for using that word” (p. 61).

Here Aristotle anticipates Kant and Hegel.

“Nothing like a view of original sin plays any role in [Aristotle’s] thinking. He rejects the view that the good life is primarily a matter of luck or innate talent — and rejects these views as false ethical views — not on the grounds that some independent cosmic evidence refutes them, but on the grounds that such a view would ‘strike too false a note’, be too out of line with people’s aims and hopes” (ibid).

The status of humans with respect to the good is neither innate nor arbitrarily established.

“But human desires constrain ethical truth in a much more exacting way. For it turns out that the true account of the good human life must describe a life that contains ends that human beings choose for their own sake (as well as the willing choice of the ends); and it must, apparently, be inclusive of all such ends, lacking in nothing which, being added, would make the life in question better or more complete. This famous and much discussed requirement leads Aristotle, among other things, to rule out accounts that narrow the good life to that which can be completely controlled by the individual’s own agency” (p. 63).

This is the way that is neither innate nor arbitrary.

“When Aristotle’s method asks about desire and permits itself to be constrained by what people want and choose, it does not simply record the status quo, or commit itself in any simple way to preserving ordinary beliefs. Aristotle is not the ordinary-belief philosopher of our first chapter, because he refuses any simple majoritarian principle for sorting appearances, insisting on a deeper and more critical scrutiny. Appearances about ethics contain contradictions and ambiguities. The job of inquiry is to listen to every pupil’s contribution, along with previous theories and information about other societies — but not to stop there” (p. 64).

Once again, inquiry into the good is conceived as maximally inclusive.

“The accounts of the good that emerge in the existing works are, as we might by now expect, far from being uncritical records of ordinary belief. They are, in fact, extremely critical of many of the popular views they record: critical, for example, of the views allegedly held by most people about the importance of money, about bodily pleasure, about status and reputation, about anger and revenge” (pp. 64-65).

Inclusiveness does not mean equally accepting every detail of the status quo — quite the opposite.

“Not all people are able or willing to perform such a sorting; but the resulting account will nonetheless be true for them, as well as for those who do participate” (p. 65).

For them too, the results of ethical deliberation will be true in the sense of importantly valid, because the practical principles it seeks to elicit are inherently shareable, even when they are not straightforwardly available.

“For this procedure does claim to arrive at truth, despite the medical nature of its operations. Some reasons for this should already be evident. It insists on a rigorous scrutiny of appearances and on the fundamental role of consistency. It claims correspondence, too, with the deepest human beliefs and desires. And one further point should now be stressed. Results in ethics must be consistent, not just internally, but also with everything else held to be true: with the best accounts, then, of the universe, the soul, substance, and so forth. Exactly how far this will constrain the ethical account can be seen only concretely; and Aristotle never states that where there is a prima facie tension, ethical intuitions must yield to metaphysical or psychological appearances. But his demand for overall consistency helps to justify his use of the word ‘true’ in the ethical case, encouraging the idea that we are not just looking into ourselves, but also coming to grips with the world as a whole, as we experience it” (ibid).

This is really important. What is right must be consistent with the whole of what is true. But our judgment of what is true in a concrete sense also depends on many value judgments. Ethical judgment depends on the whole of our interpretation of things. But interpretation is by no means merely subjective. That it not be merely subjective is not a fact but a moral imperative. This is the “virtuous circle” of hermeneutics.

“Most of the sciences, as Aristotle understands them, deal with what is so always or for the most part. Their principles will therefore often be highly general. Medicine, however, on account of its practical commitment, must strive for a fully adequate perception of the particular cases before it” (ibid).

“Medical treatment, the conjunction of the two passages implies, is a form of bia [force], of external causal intervention. Argument is something else, something apparently gentler, more self-governed, more mutual” (ibid).

“[A doctor] must be flexible and attentive; if he simply insisted on going by the book, his treatment would be crude and medically irresponsible. The same, Aristotle argues, is true in ethical reasoning. General principles are authoritative only insofar as they are correct; but they are correct only insofar as they do not err with respect to the particulars” (p. 66).

“It is not only change over time that concerns Aristotle here; it is also the context-sensitivity of good ethical choice…. A rule, like a joke manual (like a medical textbook) would do both too little and too much…. In the context of love and friendship, it is possible that Aristotle may recognize particularity in a yet stronger sense, recognizing that some valuable forms of ethical attention and care are not even in principle universalizable” (p. 67). She mentions the love of a particular child or friend.

“In all these ways, general principles, if seen as normative for correct practical judgment, prove insufficient. Nor, for related reasons, is there any general algorithm that will suffice to generate, in each case, the virtuous choice” (p. 68).

“Aristotle has used the medical analogy to depict a philosophical approach to ethics that is practical, fruitfully related to human hopes and beliefs, responsive to the complexities of cases. But his conception of practical philosophy makes him turn away from the analogy at a crucial point, so that he rejects a group of ‘medical’ traits of philosophy that the Hellenistic schools will in many cases defend” (p. 69).

In the Eudemian Ethics, “Aristotle gives his reasons for excluding children and insane people from the range of those whose ethical opinions will be surveyed. He says that such people have many beliefs that no sane person would consider seriously. Then he adds what appears to be an argument for omitting the holders of these opinions from the philosophical process in which teacher and pupil are now engaged: ‘They are in need not of arguments, but, in the former case, of time to grow up, and, in the latter case, of either political or medical chastisement — for the administering of drugs is a form of chastisement no less than beating is’. Here Aristotle speaks of medical treatment as a causal technique for the manipulation of behavior; he links it with beating and sharply dissociates it from the giving and receiving of arguments among reasonable people. Similarly, in [Nicomachean Ethics] X.9, he speaks of irrational people whose condition yields not to argument but only to ‘force’ (bia)” (ibid).

“In Nicomachean Ethics VI.13 , Aristotle confronts an opponent who charges that the intellectual element in ethics is useless…. Aristotle does not dispute the opponent’s point about medicine; he implicitly grants that medicine has an intellectual asymmetry about it. Its practical benefits require that the doctor should know, but not that the patient should know; its logoi are authoritative and one-sided. He does, however, go on to dispute the claim vigorously for ethics, arguing that study and the application of intellect have a practical value for everyone in this area. Ethics appears to be less one-sided, more ‘democratic’, than medicine is: the benefits of its logoi require each person’s active intellectual engagement. (We now notice that even the positive use of the medical analogy … was strained: for it compared what each person ought to do in ethics with what the good doctor does in medicine.) This observation fits well with the contrast, in the Eudemian Ethics passage, between force and argument: ethical logoi are unlike medical treatment, in that they involve a reciprocal discourse in which the pupil is not ordered around by an authority figure, or manipulated by coercive tactics, but is intellectually active for herself” (pp. 69-70).

“Aristotle repeatedly claims … that the proper recipient of ethical arguments and lectures must already be a person of a certain maturity, who has been well brought up and who has both some experience and some passional balance…. Balance is necessary because disorderly people are ill-equipped for the give and take of rational argument, and they will ‘listen badly'” (p. 70).

“The real question seems to be why Aristotle opts for the sort of discourse that is gentle, complicated, reciprocal, and quite unlike force and drug treatment” (p. 71).

“In Nicomachean Ethics VI, he answers the opponent who claimed that intellectual grasp is useless by insisting, in fact, on the great practical value of clarity. We do not pursue our own health by studying medicine, he grants: but we do go after ethical and political goodness by pursuing the intellectual study of ethics because through the intellectual scrutiny of our ends we get a clearer vision of what pertains to the end, that is, of the constituents of the good human life and how they stand to one another” (ibid).

“The task demanded of logoi, being one of clarification and articulation, requires clarity and articulateness in the logoi themselves” (ibid).

“To live well, we must have our lives ordered toward some end of our choice. But then, ‘it is most especially important first to demarcate within oneself [diorisasthai en hautoi], neither hastily nor carelessly, in which of the things within our power living well consists’. This careful clarification is contrasted with the ‘random talk’ (eikei legein) in which most people usually indulge on matters ethical. Then, in a most important passage, Aristotle tells us that this enterprise, and its related goal of communal attunement, are best served by a cooperative critical discourse that insists on the philosophical virtues of orderliness, deliberateness, and clarity” (p. 72, citations by Becker numbers omitted).

She quotes Nicomachean Ethics again: “For from what is said truly but not clearly, as we advance, we will also get clarity, always moving from what is usually said in a jumbled fashion [sunkechumenos] to a more perspicuous view. There is a difference in every inquiry between arguments that are said in a philosophical way and those that are not. Hence we must not think that it is superfluous for the political person to engage in the sort of reflection that makes perspicuous not only the ‘that’ but also the ‘why’: for this is the contribution of the philosopher in each area” (ibid).

“The goals of personal clarification and communal agreement require a progress beyond the hasty and confused modes of ordinary discourse, toward greater coherence and perspicuity. But this, in turn, requires the sort of argument that sorts things out and clarifies, that leads people to shift their alleged ground by pointing to inconsistencies in their system of beliefs and, in the process, makes evident not only the fact of our commitments, but also their ‘why’, that is, how they contribute to one another and to the good life in general. Aristotle tells us unabashedly that to give this sort of logos is the business of the professional philosopher, and that this is why the philosopher is a useful person to have around and to emulate” (p. 73).

“Clarity, deliberateness, and logical consistency are not enough: arguments must also be medical in the good way, rooted in the particulars and attentive to them. But we should not let the empty glibness of some philosophers give ethical philosophy a bad name” (ibid).

She returns to the reasons for Aristotle’s ultimate rejection of the medical analogy — its focus on isolated individuals; the instrumental character of its procedures; the fact that it treats philosophical argument as purely instrumental; the asymmetry of roles it presupposes; and the fact that it discourages sympathetic exploration of alternatives.

The student of ethics “is to emulate the philosopher, entering actively into the give and take of criticism, being not subservient but independent, not worshipful but critical” (p. 74).

“When [Aristotle] begins his devastating criticism of Plato, he says that it may be difficult to criticize the views of those who are dear to us: but we must put the truth first, all the more since we are philosophers” (p. 75).

“Respectful dialectical scrutiny is a fundamental part of Aristotelianism. What we are after is to find out more clearly what we share or can share. And this requires a patient and non-hasty working through of the available accounts of the subject, accounts, as Aristotle says, of both ‘the many’ and ‘the wise’. Aristotle’s position is that each person has something to contribute to the ethical truth. As he remarks of some of the alternatives he is examining, ‘Some of these things have been said by many people over a long period of time, others by a few distinguished people. It is reasonable to suppose that none of them has missed the mark totally, but each has gotten something, or even a lot of things, right'” (ibid).

“[T]hey will usually be somewhat tentative and respectful of other possibilities. Insofar as they have done their historical and experiential work, they will be somewhat confident — they will not expect to be overthrown completely — but they leave open the possibility of revision and correction” (p. 76).

“Aristotle seems to be committed to something still stronger: that each questioned person’s beliefs contain at least some truth” (p. 77).

Next in this series: Emotion and Belief

Gadamer on Logos

“Hegel demonstrates that the pure ‘I’ is spirit…. The truth of the ‘I’ is pure knowing…. ‘[A]rt’, ‘religion’, and ‘philosophy’ … are absolute because they are no longer opinions of consciousness which extend to an object beyond that which presents and fully affirms itself within these forms” (Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, German ed. 1971, English tr. 1976, p. 77).

It is important to notice the directedness of this identification. Hegel is clearly not saying that spirit, whatever that is, should be understood in terms of a Cartesian ego that we experience immediately. Rather, he is saying that the “I”, whatever that is (which Kant analyzed as a pure indexical reference to a unity of apperception), should be understood in terms of what he calls forms of spirit. Ramified forms of Hegelian “spirit” (or Aristotelian ethos) effectively make up the contents of a unity of apperception.

I like the way Gadamer subtly folds in a reference to Plato’s sharp critique of “opinion”, and relates it to “consciousness” in Hegel. As I would put it, “consciousness” is the subjective form of that same appearance that Plato radically questions. Canonically for Hegel, consciousness is defined as an attitude that sees itself as looking out on fully preformed objects that are external to it. It does not see the mythical character of the Myth of the Given.

(Elsewhere, though, like many others, Gadamer treats consciousness as the common denominator of the whole Phenomenology, rather than a specific name for the lowest stage of spirit’s development, that is most of all superseded in the course of development of the Phenomenology. The true common denominator of the Phenomenology is one of those concepts that Aristotle mentions as being implicit in a context of use, without being adequately named by any noun in common speech.)

I also like Gadamer’s deflationary treatment (at least in the above passage) of “absolute knowing” in terms of the productions of art, religion, and philosophy. Hegelian absolute knowing, whatever that is, is not some impossible thing. It should be understood as that which is expressed in art, religion, and philosophy. Wherever there is art, religion, or philosophy, there is some form of absolute knowing in Hegel’s sense.

“Hegel lays his very own foundation, on which he rebuilds absolute knowing as the truth of metaphysics as Aristotle, for one, conceived of it in nous or Aquinas, for another, in intellectus agens. And thus a universal logic — which explicates the ideas of God before the creation — is made possible. Hegel’s concept of spirit which transcends the subjective forms of self-consciousness thus goes back to the logos-nous metaphysics of the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions, which predates the whole question of self-consciousness” (p. 78).

I must applaud this situating of Hegel in relation to Plato and Aristotle. Heidegger does the same, but gives the whole a decidedly negative spin (“forgetting of Being”, etc.).

Gadamer’s reference to Aquinas gives me pause. Aquinas developed his own highly original philosophy and theology, which uses core Aristotelian vocabulary in ways very different from those of Aristotle himself. This has resulted in great confusion, when Thomistic concepts are mistakenly re-applied to the reading of Aristotle.

The reference to ideas of God before the creation does recall a passage from Hegel. More recently though, Robert Pippin has convincingly argued that the passage is extremely misleading, for multiple reasons.

We also see here how Aristotelian “intellect” is something constitutive rather than something empirical.

“In Greek philosophy Hegel saw the philosophy of logos, or put another way, the courage to consider pure thoughts per se. As a result, Greek thought succeeded in unfolding the universe of ideas. For this realm Hegel coins a new expression, typical of him, namely, ‘the logical’. What he is characterizing here is the entire cosmos of ideas as Plato’s philosophy dialectically develops it. Now Plato was driven by the desire to provide justification for every thought and his doctrine of ideas was intended to satisfy the demand which Socrates makes in the dialogues that for every contention a reason or argument must always be given (logon didonai)” (ibid).

Pure thought just means thought that develops from its own resources, and in its workings avoids any decisive appeal to unjustified assumptions, authority, givenness, etc.

This helps clarify what Gadamer means by “logos philosophy”. Although in the first instance it seems to involve careful attention to language and to the pragmatics of communicative speech or writing, Gadamer links it to a shared view of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel — that the rarified thing we call thought is in principle capable of developing an adequate account of things. This giving of an account (another meaning of logos) has nothing to do with certainty or foreknowledge or immediate knowledge that could be simply possessed. Rather, it seems to be the space in which Socratic dialogue and Aristotelian phronesis do their work.

In his magnum opus Truth and Method, Gadamer briefly but explicitly ties in the logos (“Word”) from the Gospel of John. At greater length, he traces the origin of Romantic hermeneutics to early Protestant emphasis on direct reading of scripture over the institutional mediation of the Church. Above, we saw him invoke Aquinas on the agent intellect. Without fanfare, he seems intent on building an ecumenical bridge between Christianity and the ethical-rather-than-epistemic logos that he sees in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Gadamer on History of Philosophy

Gadamer’s preface to The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (German ed. 1978, English tr. 1986) provides valuable perspective on the history of 20th-century readings of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the nonexistent or negative relation of those readings to Hegel. I’ll excerpt a few dense paragraphs and then comment.

“Hegel, it cannot be denied, did indeed grasp the speculative tendency in both Plato’s doctrine of ideas and Aristotle’s substance ontology, since his thinking was so congenial to theirs. And to that extent he is the first in modern times to break through the schema of interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of the ideas shaped by Aristotle and further developed in Neoplatonism and the Christian tradition. Nor can one say that Hegel has remained without any lasting influence on scholarship in the history of philosophy. Such good Aristotelians as Trendelenburg and Eduard Zeller owe him a great deal. Above all, Hegel was the first to make the philosophical significance of Plato’s ‘esoteric’, ‘dialectical’ dialogues accessible. However, the unitary effect connecting Plato’s and Aristotle’s logos philosophy — which did not remain hidden from Hegel — was underestimated, it seems to me, in the period following him and continues to be until this day.”

“There are various reasons why. To be sure, there was a concealed, unacknowledged Hegelianism behind the neo-Kantian interpretations of Plato in Cohen and Natorp and in their successors Cassirer, N. Hartmann, Hönigswald, and Stenzel. But given their particular mentality, it was exclusively Plato, and not in the least Aristotle, who could sustain this generation of scholars, in their critical-idealistic purposes. A complete elaboration of Hegel’s insights was totally obstructed, on the one hand, by the dogmatic overlay superimposed on Aristotle by the neo-Thomism prevailing in the Catholic camp, and on the other, by the hereditary feud between modern natural science and the Aristotelian teleological understanding of nature or, in fact, any idealistic philosophy of nature. Furthermore, when it interpreted the ‘idea’ as the ‘natural law’, thereby bringing together Plato and Galileo, the neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato, especially that of Natorp, proceeded all too provocatively with the Greek text while remaining insensitive to historical differences. If one starts from this idealistic neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato, then Aristotle’s critique of Plato can only appear as an absurd misunderstanding. This fact further contributed to the failure to recognize the unitary effect in Plato and Aristotle, thereby blocking a full incorporation of the Greek heritage into our own philosophical thought. Such naive and trivial juxtapositions as ‘Plato, the idealist’, versus ‘Aristotle, the realist’, gained universal currency, although they actually only confirmed the truly abysmal depth of prejudice in any idealism of consciousness. In addition, the schema for which Hegel provided the inspiration which construed Greek thought as not yet able to conceive of the absolute as spirit, life, and self-consciousness, did not promote a proper evaluation of the fundamental significance of Greek thought for modern philosophy.”

“Nicolai Hartmann’s dissociation of himself from neo-Kantian idealism stimulated me to try to penetrate Aristotle’s thought, and the French and English research — of Robin, Taylor, Ross, Hardie, and, above all, the incomparable Hicks — proved most helpful in my endeavors. At the time, however, I fell far short of seeing the unity in the logos philosophy, which started with Socrates’ questioning and then quickly deteriorated in the post-Aristotelian period, but which, nevertheless, permanently determined the entire conceptual apparatus of Western thought. Encountering Heidegger turned out to be decisive for me at this stage. Heidegger had worked his way through both the Catholic-Aristotelian and neo-Kantian traditions, and in appropriating Husserl’s minutely detailed art of conceptualization, he had steeled the endurance and power of intuition, which are indispensable for doing philosophy with Aristotle. Here, then, was an advocate of Aristotle who, in his directness and the freshness of his phenomenological insights, far surpassed all the traditional shadings of Aristotelianism, who surpassed Thomism and, yes, even Hegelianism. To this day hardly anything has been made public of this event, but it has had its effect on academic teaching, and my own path was defined beginning there. By the time I published my first book in 1931 (Platos dialektische Ethik), the convergence, at least in the area of practical philosophy, of the aim of Plato’s thinking with Aristotle’s conceptual distinctions had become evident to me” (pp.1-4).

In this context, Gadamer contrasts “a phenomenological exposition of their subject matter itself” (p. 5, emphasis in original) to textual analysis.

“Decades of teaching were devoted to elaborating and testing what is called here the Platonic-Aristotelian unitary effect. But in the background was the continuous challenge posed for me by the path Heidegger’s own thought took, and especially by his interpretation of Plato as the decisive step toward ‘metaphysical thought’s’ obliviousness to being (Sein)…. The following studies too, it is hoped, will serve to keep alive both Platonic dialogue and the speculative dimension common to Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel” (ibid).

Gadamer points out that common German readings of Plato and Aristotle in part reflect Hegel’s interpretations. The reference to Aristotle’s “substance ontology” reflects a common reading of the Metaphysics that I reject. Gadamer is right though to point out that Aristotle’s explicit criticisms of Plato are not the last word on Plato. He is very right that after Aristotle, there was a breakdown in continuity of understanding.

Gadamer particularly points out the role of neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato and Aristotle in promoting a shallow opposition between the two. He helps to explain how it was that Heidegger came to be regarded as dramatically advancing the study of Plato and Aristotle, which seems quite preposterous to me.

Apparently in early 20th-century Germany, neo-Kantian and neo-Thomist accounts of Plato and Aristotle were the main available alternatives. As Gadamer presents it, each of these two had its own dogmatism and shallowness.

Heidegger was doing something clearly different from either, while appealing to an audience sympathetic to Romanticism, and to the vitalist Lebensphilosophie or “philosophy of life”. He offered an approach very different from that of neo-Kantianism or neo-Thomism. He was already famous in Germany as a charismatic lecturer, before the publication of Being and Time. Gadamer principally notes Heidegger’s “directness and freshness”, but seems to make no claim at all about Heidegger’s historical scholarship. Heidegger’s vigorous assertiveness must have impressed people. Gadamer is polite and circumspect, but the “continuous challenge” due to Heidegger that he says he felt must have been to defend Plato against Heidegger’s claims about the forgetting of Being.

Gadamer on Plato and Aristotle

Some of Gadamer’s most interesting work is on Plato and Aristotle. More so than many modern commentators, he sees their work as closely connected. He is especially fond of Plato. In the introduction to Gadamer’s The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, (German ed. 1978, English tr. 1986), translator P. Christopher Smith offers useful comments.

For Gadamer, “Plato and Aristotle both belong to the unified tradition of logos philosophy. In the Phaedo Plato’s Socrates turns away from naturalistic accounts of things to the logoi, our ways of speaking; similarly, Aristotle founds his investigations on ‘pos legetai’, how something is spoken of” (Smith, p. xiv).

At least in this work, the term “logos philosophy” is not explicitly defined. But in the passage above, it clearly indicates a linguistic character. It is nice to see a recognition that Plato’s — and even more so Aristotle’s — work has a substantial linguistic dimension.

Smith recalls that the Ionian pre-Socratics had “only two kinds of explanation at their disposal — from what, and by the agency of what — [and so they] could not properly grasp the cosmos, in which things occur for the sake of (heneka) what is good” (p. xv).

The moderns on the whole don’t really do much better than the pre-Socratics at recognizing what Aristotle calls “for the sake of” and the role it plays in the constitution of things. This involves not providential intervention, or even a reified indwelling ontological principle that could simply unfold. It is also not just a fact, but something that motivates without necessitating.

In Plato, “To begin with there are the refutational, or elenchtic, dialogues, in which Socrates confronts the great sophists of his time — Protagoras, Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus — and displays the emptiness of their claims to be able to teach virtue. In truth theirs is a technical mentality, and what they teach is only a techne of succeeding. The conclusion to be drawn from these dialogues — at times explicit, but more often implied negatively or indirectly — is that knowledge in virtue is somehow different from knowledge in techne. This shows up above all in the fact that virtue cannot be taught. And there is a further truth that emerges here, again largely unsaid, that the traditional ideas of arete upon which the sophists rely and which might be learned by imitating a paragon have become groundless and susceptible of sophistic dissimulation. Therefore, to withstand seduction by self-interest and by otherwise insatiable desires for sensuous gratification and power, to which sophism panders, one must now be able to give justification for what is good, that is, justification for one’s choices of what is right as opposed to what is wrong. But nobody seems to know how to do that, least of all those sophists who claim that they do” (pp. xv-xvi).

This concern with justification is something Gadamer shares with Habermas and Brandom. But Gadamer traces it all the way back to Plato, whereas Habermas and Brandom are modernists. It seems to me that Plato and Aristotle’s outrage at the Sophists has to do with the Sophists’ subversion of justification.

“The primary concern in these elenchtic dialogues, then, is a practical one, and that makes the Phaedo and the Republic, in which concern seems to shift to epistemological and ontological matters, appear to mark a definite transition in Plato’s thought. For in these next works the ‘ideas’ are introduced, and in the Republic even the ‘idea of ideas’, the idea of the good which would seem to serve as a first principle of both true knowledge and true reality. In the twentieth-century traditions of Plato interpretation — particularly the neo-Kantian, which found support for its theory of science in this ‘stage’ of Plato — would have it that the question Plato is addressing here is a new, theoretical one no longer related to the Socratic question concerning arete. But Gadamer sees a serious oversight here. A careful reading, he argues, shows that Plato is still dealing with the same issue” (p. xvi).

“Gadamer maintains … that if one asks what question is actually being addressed in the allegory of the cave, one sees that the concern is not just, or even primarily, a theoretical, scientific one, but in fact an existential-practical question of holding steadfastly to the truth in the face of tests or refutations (elenchoi) much as a soldier holds his ground in battle or a wrestler stands firm against attempts to throw him — this is the language Plato uses here. And what are these tests of mettle? The guardians will find themselves in a conflict between honest execution of the duties of their office for the public weal and the ‘pursuit of power after power’, as we in the English-speaking world might put it, using the words of Thomas Hobbes. The guardians, in other words, will be tested by the flattery of both their own desires for gratification and sophistic sycophants, flattery that might seduce them into sacrificing their integrity” (p. xvii).

“In short, it turns out that the theory of dialectic in which they are to be trained is a way of distinguishing and, above all, of distinguishing practically between right and wrong, good and bad. To do that, the guardians must know the idea of the good, for that idea is exactly what those in the cave do not know. The cave-dwellers’ technai (arts) give them the knowledge ‘how to’ do something, knowledge of the means to an end, but not knowledge of the end itself, the hou heneka, the ‘what for’…. Thus, knowledge of the good turns out to be not just a theoretical insight, not just a matter of logos (reasoning). It is a principle on ergon (deed), and makes possible constancy in the choice of the life that one leads (Aristotle: prohairesis tou biou)” (p. xviii).

The sense in which he says the guardians “must know” the idea of the good seems to me to be of necessity quite different from the way in which we may be said, e.g., to know the Pythagorean Theorem. I would rather say something like, the guardians “must have wisdom” about the good.

“And now the real meaning of the hypothesis of the eidos in the Phaedo becomes evident. As opposed to what the neo-Kantian school might have seen in it, the hypothesis of the eidos is not at all the ‘scientific’ postulation of a universal idea that is to be verified by the facts. As in the Republic, the issue in the Phaedo is how to head off whatever might mislead us, how to head off sophistic talk…. Hypothesizing the eidos thus has nothing to do with empirical verification but, instead, with making precisely these eidetic distinctions…. The paradigm for steadfastness … remains Socrates, who was not to be dissuaded from what he saw to be right, no matter what arguments concerning his own ‘advantage’ might be advanced. His arete was such that he would not even accept the escape from death offered to him by his friends” (pp.xviii-xix).

At first I was confused by the reference to verification by facts. To speak of empirical verification of an eidos would be a category mistake. But I think “the hypothesis of the eidos” refers not to any particular eidos, but to the general “hypothesis” that there are eidei.

The important point here is the Socratic “steadfastness”, where steadfastness means not being lured and fooled by the verbal tricks of the clever sophists, who aim at success and at victory in argument, rather than at truth and shared understanding. It seems very relevant today.

“[The Philebus] too begins with an ethical issue — whether the good life is one of pleasure or of intellect or of some third thing — and it also involves its interlocutors in the task of giving justification for their contentions concerning the good life, justification that will make their arguments invulnerable to the sophistic arts of confusing and confounding people with sleights of hand that interchange the one and the many” (p. xix).

“Here the techniques of Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology can be put to good use, for the task is to display the phenomenon that Plato is getting at. In the Philebus Plato speaks of the good as the structure of a ‘mixture’ someone might brew, the ‘potion’ as it were, which is our human life. The various ‘ingredients’, the kinds of pleasure and intellect, are not to be mixed indiscriminately, but well…. A ‘good’ mixture is thus one that has limits to it, and the good itself is limitedness (measuredness, or metriotes) in the midst of constantly threatening indeterminacy and limitlessness…. As measuredness, the good in the Philebus, we now see, is precisely Aristotle’s mean between the extremes” (pp. xx-xxi).

Paul Ricoeur also points out the importance of a notion of mixture in Plato. This undoes many old stereotypes about Platonism.

I am rather unclear on what Husserlian phenomenology is supposed to specifically contribute to the history of philosophy here. I imagine Husserl might question this claim himself. He wanted phenomenology to be a precise “science”, grounded in the phenomenological and eidetic reductions. Here instead we have a thoughtful examination of Plato’s metaphorical language.

“In anticipating Aristotle’s criticisms, it should be noted that, as measuredness, the good in Plato must be distinguished, or ‘separated’ intellectually, from the mixture itself. But if one abstracts from this metaphor, one finds that, as measuredness, the good is what Hegel calls ein Moment, namely, an aspect of something which does not exist separately from it. In short, it is in the thing of which it is the structure. Thus, when we say that it is choriston (separate), we are not denying that it is in the thing. We are saying only that it must be distinguished from the thing in our thinking” (p. xxi).

For Aristotle, a thing that is called “separate” is simply a thing that is conceptually distinct, whereas for Plato, separateness involves independence from matter. This means a thing that Aristotle calls “separate” may nonetheless never exist apart from the whole to which it belongs. This has been discussed in detail by Gwenaëlle Aubry.

“These striking convergences of Plato’s thought with Aristotle’s leave us puzzled about Aristotle’s critique of Plato. Why would he criticize Plato if in fact he and Plato are saying the same thing? “(ibid).

We should be careful about saying things are “the same”. I have sympathy for Leibniz’s argument that no two things are the same. Then there is the question, at what level of blurriness can we no longer distinguish two things? But again the important point is rather the relative one that it is on the whole a lot less false to say Plato and Aristotle thought the same, than it is to present them as if they were opposites, as has also been done at times.

“At the core of the argument in all three [of Aristotle’s surviving ethical works] is the contention that Plato improperly fuses the ontological and the practical in his applications of the idea of the good” (p. xxii).

“Aristotle, of course, is a consummate phenomenologist who wishes above all to avoid running distinct things together. But is it just his ‘descriptive caution’ that leads him to try to keep ontological and practical theory separate? Gadamer suggests that there is something else fundamental in Aristotle’s way of inquiring that leads him to put things as he does, namely, his orientation toward life science. Mathematically oriented thinking such as Plato’s would indeed lead to inquiry about the idea of the good as an abstract structure of good things…. But that is not the orientation of Aristotle’s questioning, which gives primacy to the concrete living thing” (p. xxiv).

“The relationship of moral theory to practice is not at all the modern relation of theory to practice in which an objective, neutral theory can be applied generally to particular problems. In distinction to producing something (techne, poiesis), doing the right thing is not simply an application of general rules” (p. xxvi).

Even Kant has qualification and subtlety in his rule-orientedness.

“In the first place, as Aristotle recognizes, we need an ‘appropriate principle’ (oikeia arche) for moral reasoning, which is not to be confused with mathematical deductive reasoning. For in moral reasoning I always find myself in a particular situation, and the task is not to subsume this particular case under a universal rule which I could know apart from the situation I am in, but to define from within my situation what the general rule is of which this situation is an instance. The particular virtues and virtue in general, as finding the ‘mean between extremes’ are not universal principles that I apply to a situation, but universalizations of what I am doing when I do what is right. Hence it should be noted carefully that, although Aristotle does indeed speak of the ‘practical syllogism’, he in fact uses this syllogistic reasoning only to exemplify the technical choice of the right means to an end” (p. xxviii).

This is an interesting hybrid view on the universality issue. It is certainly true that Aristotle does not treat ethical conclusions as a matter of deduction (instead, they are matters of interpretation).

“[Cleverness] deals with means to an end, and for just that reason, he says, it is to be distinguished from [moral reasonableness]” (ibid).

“Moral reasonableness” is how Smith translates Aristotelian ethical phronesis. This is a kind of reason, which I have called ethical reason.

“As both the Philebus and Aristotle’s ethical treatises make clear, human beings are not gods, and thus the life that is best for them has to be a life that combines theoria and praxis…. The point that both wish to make — which is the fundamental point of agreement between them concerning the good — is that, in distinction to gods, human beings are always under way toward the divine, or, as Gadamer puts it, their best life is philosophia, not sophia, that is, striving for wisdom, not wisdom itself. Human beings are finite, not absolute — never absolved from the ‘remnant of earth’ (Goethe) in them that inevitably involves them in the task of living well here in the practical world” (pp. xxviii-xix).

Finitism and infinitism are both said in many ways. The very sharp distinction being made here between humans and gods seems rather one-sided in relation to Aristotle.

Gadamer is apparently a pretty strong finitist, and strongly opposed to the infinitism he sees in Hegel. What infinity means in the more “deflationary” views of Hegel I have sympathy for is quite different from this. Meanwhile Aristotle literally says that the world is finite, but allows for an expansive notion of human being.

“Thus, in both Plato and Aristotle, the good emerges as that toward which we are striving, that for the sake of which (hou heneka), that at which we aim (to telos). But not only we. The whole universe is to be understood as striving for perfection…. [T]he universe, and not only human experience, is to be thought of in relation to the good ” (p. xix).

Rational and Natural Powers

“Theta 2 prolongs the analysis of dunamis in proposing another distinction, which no longer opposes active power to passive power, but power that is rational or accompanied by a logos, to irrational power. This analysis marks progress in comparison with Theta 1, in that it considers at the same time the relation of power to its effect. In so doing it gives a maximal extension to the notion, in manifesting that it applies as much to animate as to inanimate beings, and as much in the field of nature as in that of techne” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 121, my translation throughout).

“What distinguishes rational power is that it can be power for two contrary effects, ton enantion, where irrational power is only for one sole contrary: thus, the medical art can produce sickness or health, while fire can only heat. The logos in effect ‘shows at the same time a thing and its privation’…. Privation, which we have seen cannot in any case characterize a power, but rather characterizes its contrary, impotence, is given as the object of the logos that governs it. This object is nonetheless derived, or ‘in a certain way accidental’: it is in initially considering the positive contrary, or the form, then in negating it by reasoning that we see the negative contrary. The primacy of the positive contrary is thus maintained” (ibid).

The medical art and fire are very different kinds of things. They are both called “powers”, but the one is “rational” and the other natural or “irrational”. The medical art seems analogous to the art of housebuilding that serves as the canonical example of an Aristotelian principle of motion or “efficient cause”. Fire for Aristotle is one of four material elements defined by a division in terms of primitive qualities. In a recent post, we briefly saw how even the cyclical transformations of these qualitative elements can fit into an ultimately teleological schema, without any extravagant hypotheses.

We saw in the last post that Aubry’s strong emphasis on the distinctively Aristotelian dative form dynamei as characteristic of being in potentiality does not by any means rule out a recognition that Aristotle in fact devotes more space to the more common nominative form dynamis, which can after all be reasonably translated as “power”, which has wider non-Aristotelian usage, and which plays an important role in Plato.

Aristotle specifies the applicable meaning of logos in this context as the rational deliberation that governs prohairesis or choice, and thereby also governs the exercise of power or capability.

In the case of natural powers like that of fire to heat things, for Aristotle it is always a matter of power to do, cause, or undergo something definite. Then independently, as a matter of general logic (and of even more fundamental ethical seriousness about consistency of our assertions), we must affirm that a power we have stipulated to be for something definite is just that. If we accept that a particular “power” is for something definite, then we must also accept that is not a power for the opposite of that definite something, nor indeed for anything other than what it is for.

It is thoughtful deliberation that involves a consideration of pro and con, and determines a choice about the exercise of a power that in itself just is what it is. In the rational case too, the power at issue is still a power to do something definite, just like a natural power. But here the governing deliberation — in order to be a genuine deliberation at all — must be fundamentally open, and not predetermined in its outcome. This is how rational animals have freedom. We have flexibility and plasticity in the exercise of definite powers.

So we see that outside of first philosophy, Aristotle does use a more conventional notion of power. But Plato, Aristotle, and the classical Greeks generally regarded the idea of unlimited power — and indeed anything unlimited — with a kind of horror. (It seems to have been Philo of Alexandria who introduced the very un-Greek notion of infinite power.) Aristotle treats both rational and natural powers always as powers for something definite. It is reason, and more specifically deliberation about alternatives — not power in itself — that allows us freedom.

“This analysis allows two requirements that are apparently conflicting, but equally essential to Aristotelian thought about power, to be reconciled: affirming its positivity, all while introducing within it an indetermination” (p. 122, emphasis in original).

This is a really essential point about the nature of freedom. Besides developing the wholly new concept of being in potentiality, Aristotle distinguishes much more clearly than his predecessors between the more common notion of power and its exercise. Freedom belongs to the thoughtful exercise of definite powers and capabilities, not to any power in itself.

Next in this series: Critique of the Megarians