Summary of previous lecture:

Aristotle’s ethics offers us guidance and orientation for a ‘good life.’ It is a life that pursues excellences or virtues. Excellences are states of purposeful beings that can be evaluated as to how well they fulfill their purpose. Excellences tell us whether that being is a ‘better’ or ‘not-so-good’ specimen of its kind. In rational beings that have affects excellences deal with affects. But excellences spring from the nature of our rational soul. The more perfectly they come to be developed by an agent, the more perfect that agent becomes as an exemplar of the human kind. Because originally they lie dormant in us and do not develop automatically, the agent needs to acquire and fashion them in deliberate activity. I need to want my life to be shaped by the excellences, and I need to work at acquiring, maintaining, and adapting them to ever-changing circumstances.

Excellences or virtues guide us in our choices. But our choices and activities also give concretion and significance to those excellences. This difficult complex of interdependent determinations – we justify and evaluate our choices by appealing to the fact that they promote excellences; we confer flesh and bones to abstract excellences by determining their meaning in applications.

This was Aristotle formula for excellence:

“Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess, and that which depends on defect” (NE p. 393, 1107a1).

The grid, Aristotle offers to us for this two-sided activity is the idea that we choose the excellence as the right thing by determining it as an intermediate between extremes that are not the right thing. We have played that through for courage using the example of the freshman who fears to fail in a course based on Aristotle. The example was to show the openness of the decision and the fact that the decision is taken under normative constraints. This openness does not prevent the choice from being guided, for it evaluates alternatives by locating them on a scale of better or worse realization of the excellence.

Habit:

So far we have mentioned acquisition of an excellence. How do we let ourselves be guided by excellences when we have learned them? (NE p. 376, 1103a31) Big difference between the excellence of a pot and the excellence of courage, justice, temperance, truthfulness, or practical wisdom. Once the pot has its excellence, it does not vanish. (Although the matter of the pot needs entertaining.) Our moral excellences, however, are states that fade, vanish or even transmute into their extremes when they are not practiced. Reasons for this: (1) there is always some resistance to be overcome against the choice and the implementation of the right kind of conduct, (2) there also is the necessity to constantly redefine the excellence in different circumstances. Most importantly: (3) the habit and the habitus weaken and fade unless practiced. Comparison with the virtuoso musician. So, when Aristotle says: “Being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly,” . . . “states arise out of like activities” (NE p. 377, 1103b16 & 1103 20) he is not just pointing to learning. He is articulating a thesis about what it is to have the state of courage or justice. We have it only insofar as we practice it. We do not have it, or diminish its being in us, when we do not enact the excellence. For excellences: Being depends on doing. Being is a form of becoming. Or better: we are constantly in the state of becoming brave, perhaps also ‘more courageous.’ And the other way round: every case where there is an occasion for practicing a moral excellence, but we do not do so, diminishes the excellence and contributes to a state of vice. The process and practice has priority. The state is practice. And, as the ‘good life’ consists of having excellences, the good life is no more and no less than the practice of excellences – in the manner of choices that aim at the intermediate. That said, the more we build habit, the more it feeds back into future practice. A self-reinforcing and self-weakening activity.

Theophrastus’ Characters: How to Miss Out on Excellence by Opting for a Vice.

The Insincere Man:

Theophrastus’ ‘insincere’ man (IM, Course Reader p. 30) practices one of the extremes of truthfulness: the vice that is at the deficient end of the sincerity continuum. Interestingly, it is called ‘eironia.’ Fascinating transformation of concept: our irony has become a figure of speech only, the Aristotelian irony is also a vice (relative to truthfulness or honesty.) Some of the manifestations of habitual insincerity are pretty straightforward from our vantage point. But the type ‘IM’ Theophrastus outlines is unfamiliar to us. We do not recognize our idea of insincerity in many of the IM’s actions. Truthfulness for us: to tell the truth. Insincerity: to knowingly tell untruths; not to show the truth of the matter, especially of feelings, under circumstances where one should show them. Our insincerity is a kind of deceit. By contrast the ‘IM’ does exactly tell an untruth or deceive when he makes friendly conversation to his enemy instead of showing the enemy his dislike. How about bad-mouthing you behind your back and praise you to your face? For us today, he is vicious and deceptive, but not insincere. He blackens us towards others; and he hides that fact from us. We perceive the discrepancy between the two acts, but do not call them insincere because we do not primarily evaluate them from the point of view of truth. For us talking in a friendly way to someone is not a sign of friendly feelings towards that person. It can just be polite behavior. Furthermore, how can his evasiveness be insincere, when he tells those who come with urgent business to come back later, or does not admit what he is doing, or avoids taking a stand, leaving in the vague what he believes, how he feels, or how he judges things? Even more bizarre the blame the IM gets from Theophrastus for his little exclamations, as for example “I am absolutely staggered.” How often have we said ‘that’s awesome’ in a single day? But scrutiny reveals that there is always something here, that is there but not revealed, or something that is made manifest but is not the thing that is shown. Do we believe that the event we comment on is in fact awesome when we say ‘that’s awesome?’ So, the IM’s insincerity seems to not really consist in the fact that he believes one thing to be true or untrue and lets it look as if he believed the opposite. That attitude is certainly included in insincerity. But Theophrastus’ implicit idea of insincerity seems to require that the agent deliberately create or let stand a discrepancy between the inner and the outer, the private and the public persona. From Thepophrastus’ point of view, this falls to the side of extreme of insincerity. It is a deficiency in truthfulness. The deficient mode shows us indirectly that the scope of the virtue of truthfulness is much larger than we imagined. Could this cause us to have second thoughts about its moral adequacy? Ought we really to be pursuing the kind of openness and personal transparency Theophrastus seems to favor?

The Show-Off:

The ‘Show-Off’ (SO; Course Reader p. 31) also shows the difference of ancient and modern notions and values, particularly for Southern Californians who measure their value in wealth and proudly and conspicuously exhibit that value to their neighbors and the world at large. Let us assume against the truth that all the wealth we exhibit is wealth we really have. We may be show-offs. But we are not necessarily impostors!

Doesn’t Theophrastus mix excellences when he seems to tie ‘showing-off’ to making claims that not backed by facts? To ask the slave to stop at the bank lets the SO appear to be rich when in fact “his account totals one solitary drachma.” Theophrsatus opens his sketch by saying that the type SO will lay claim to advantages he does not actually possess? For us this is, again, a case of lying. False pretence runs through the sketch of the ‘show-off’ like a red thread, all the way to pretending that the rented villa is the traditional family mansion. For us to show off is a rhetorical strategy: It is to present something thought to be impressive in an exaggerated, highlighted manner with the aim to impress another. The fact that the trait underlying the presentation is actually there or is feigned, does not really matter for ‘show-off-ish-ness.’ ‘Show-off-ish- ness is to transgress convention by displaying what in this way ought not to be displayed. It is lack in modesty and reticence.

What could motivate Thepophrastus to include false pretence in show-off-ish-ness? I think the basic excellence the SO misses out on is not decency in exhibition of wealth or importance, but the discrepancy between appearance and being. In all of the examples, Theophrastus emphasizes that the show-off tries to appear as important, wealthy, descending from a god family, being well-connected, when in fact he is not. To appear to be more than one is.

Conclusion on Theophrastus:

Is there a common denominator to both vices? That would be the negative value of a discrepancy between the attitude one displays and the attitude one has (IM), and between what one is and what one appears to be. Truthfulness seems to imply that one display the attitudes one has. Proper pride seems to require that one gets exactly the recognition for the status one actually has. Here are two types who let their lives be oriented by appearing what they are not. But Aristotelian reason seems to demand that there be a match between outer appearance and external status on the one side, and that which appears or grounds the status one has. This match between the inner and the outer is pre-modern. Before the inner has acquired an idependent status that confers privacy to the inner.

How do the two types miss out on their excellence? They allow their life-orientation to be dominated by a craving for recognition and by the enjoyment of power that comes from hiding their inner from the public world. It is not difficult to detect the power theme in the sketch of the IM. They do not let proper reason tell them, that the coincidence between being and appearing, and the appearing of inner being in the outside world belong to reason, at least in the culture of the Alexandrian. (Homer’s heroes, by the way, show that same ideal of a match between the inner and the outer and the rapid externalization of the inner).

The striking oddity of the conglomerate of attitudes he calls insincere or ‘show-offy.’ There is system behind the bizarre assemblage. We live in a culture that has separated the domain of the ‘inner’ from the domain of the ‘outer.’ We think, feel and decide at the inner self. We perceive the outer, act on it, and express ourselves in the outer, towards the outer, when we choose to do so. The inner is our essential realm and forum. We have privileged access to it, but also enjoy the privilege to feel and think what belongs to us exclusively.

Why be good by pursuing excellences? What makes excellences good?

Can we argue with him, claiming that he does not lead a good life? What if he says, that he is living his idea of the right kind of life?

I am raising a question of a second order: What makes the excellences/virtues good, and the vices bad? Let us look at his rejection of a money-making life first. (NE p. 367, 1096a5-10). Where the acquisition of wealth is the dominant project in a life, Aristotle says, there that life is undertaken under a compulsion. We may wonder where the compulsion is when the life on money is a fundamental choice of an agent. (Disney’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck!). But Aristotle really argues that the compulsion lies in something else. Wealth is not a goal in itself. It is only a means for something else. From our point of view this is probably a normative statement: that is what the interest in wealth should be, for example to allow a life of leisure that can be spent in contemplation. In Uncle Scrooge, money has obviously become a goal in itself, a goal where the sheer possession and augmentation confer pleasure. A true scrooge reverses this instrumental relation. For him money becomes a goal in itself. From Aristotle’s point of view that is an aberration. Wealth is not a primary good, like health. It is not rational to desire wealth for its own sake. Wealth should be no more than a means to an end different from wealth itself. If that is the case, then a life that puts the highest value on wealth puts itself under the constraint of the things wealth can procure. Wealth is a conditional good. It is “merely useful and for the sake of something else.” (NE p. 367, 1196a6).

A problem Aristotle does not address at this place: money can buy goods that are worth for their own sake, like health or a life of contemplation. Money, as it functions in our environment, is the generalized access to very different kinds of good. Does that make it worth one’s while to pursue it for its own sake? I do not think so. But this opens a difficult discussion.

How about a different pursuit, the pursuit of pleasure? We are now asking whether such a life is not a good life too. Or perhaps the only good life. Aristotle is again very short in his rejection: A life of pleasure – understood as a life of enjoyment (NE p. 366, 1095b17) – is a preference for a life suitable to beasts. Aristotle seems to presuppose that practical reason aims at refinement and, I would think, at things that are not pleasurable. We begin to get a clearer notion why only his excellences are good, and are the only real good things for the pursuit of the good life. Pleasures may be something we pursue for their own sake. That would, by the way, include the more beastly ones and the more refined ones. But to be truthful or courageous or just is not per se pleasurable, and in many cases unpleasurable. If pleasure is the ultimate measure for the good life, then these other excellences will not be chosen. Not in our text, but Aristotle could think like this: the pursuit of pleasure carries with it a special and peculiar kind of dependence. I may be able to fashion my pleasures, at least to some extent. But even if I were their master in that respect, once they are in place, I will be the slave of my pleasures. I do not choose my pleasure and what provides them, in the same way in which I choose to be truthful, brave or just. The interest in pleasure always manifests itself in form of a desire. And desires motivate to go after their object. In cases of courage, truthfulness of justice we are the masters of both the decision to let our life be guided by the virtue and to choose it as guide in a given case, and we determine the object of the excellence in this case. Our mastery coincides with our choice of the excellence. That choice enables us to be masters in the application of the virtue, and to be masters of ourselves in dealing with the resistances.

What do we take away from the two negative cases for our question why the excellences designated by Aristotle are good? First, unlike wealth, these excellences are not goods because they are means towards something else. Excellences are chosen for their own sake and for the sake of no other good (NE p. 369/370, 1097a30-36). Why is truthfulness good? Because we choose it for its own sake only, and not also for the sake of anything else. This is of course not an argument! It is just saying the same thing in the answer and in the question. We are only explicating the goodness of the excellences, not giving an independent ground for their goodness. In other words: the question what makes excellences good and vices bad does not receive an independent answer, an answer that provides a reason beyond of what the excellences are. You may be a little disappointed. Does the philosopher have nothing more to offer for his ethics than an explication of what we mean when we look for a ‘highest good’ what we mean, he says, is a good that is good only for its own sake. But, then, Aristotle thinks that reason is here at both sides: at the side of the object and at the side of the inquiry into the object. The objects are the excellences. Reason has gains insight into itself, and its unconditional character when it finds that the excellences are autotelic goods. To articulate the highest goods is self-elucidation of reason. Not self-grounding! To act under the guidance of the highest goods is self-realization of reason.

Eudaimonia – Aristotelian Happiness

Those who have done the readings will have realized that my order of presentation follows the opposite direction Aristotle chooses. He starts with the form of the highest good, and works his way to the idea of choice and of the intermediate. We have worked our way from choice, back to the highest good and goods. Unlike wealth and money the excellences are goods we choose for their own sake. They are reason’s own tendency to become real and to fashion our lives, simultaneously goods we need to make real by choosing them and by choosing under their guidance. Is there something that unites all the excellences without being a further purpose to which they all are means? We have just seen that pleasure and enjoyment do not qualify, in spite of the fact that we also seek pleasure for its own sake (EN p. 368, 1096b18). However refined, pleasure will always be connected to the senses: sensuous pleasure, and the happiness based on pleasure will not be shared by excellences.

Is there something they all share? (NE p. 368, 1096b21-25). Aristotle thinks there is such a common feature. And it is, again, happiness, but a happiness of a specific kind. Aristotle calls it “eudaimonia:” ‘to be be-spirited in the good way.’ Let us call it ‘moral happiness’ in order to distinguish it from meaning ‘sensuous happiness.’ What is kind of a feeling is the ‘moral happiness? Aristotle calls it complete (NE p. 369, 1097a31) and self-sufficient (NE p. 370, 1097b7 & 15). The completeness is the lack of dependence of the excellences on other things justifying them, the fact that they are highest goods. Self-sufficiency is “that which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing.” (NE p. 370, 1097b15). Moral happiness thus seems to be a feeling of plenitude. Of having or pursuing something that makes one’s life worthwhile living: a good life. Living a life that seeks to enact excellences thus confers a feeling of completeness and self-sufficiency. Aristotle thinks that this is the purpose of man: “the kind of life” that consists in “an activity or actions of the soul” implying a rational principle” (choice of the intermediate between extremes), and the purpose of a good human being to be the good and noble performance of these, and . . .any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with . . . the best and most complete excellence,” “and that ‘in a complete life’” (NE p. 371, 1098 a12-20, citation modified). A (morally) happy man lives and fares well” (NR p. 372, 1098b20). His life is “in itself pleasant.” (NE p. 373, 1099a5), whether he enjoys what he is doing or does not.