Abstract
In this chapter, I argue that Plato and Aristotle provide analyses of virtue and practical reason that are strongly shaped by the structure of the technai (crafts, arts, skills). Socrates (Plato’s protagonist) assimilates virtue to skill, while Aristotle assimilates practical reason to a means-end technique. While both philosophers are sensitive to the problems these technē models generate, and try either to escape or to remedy them, they nonetheless remain under the impress of those models. I end by drawing a general lesson from this fascinating episode in intellectual history.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. ‘while we must begin with what is familiar, things are so in two ways – some to us [hēmin], some without qualification [haplōs]. Presumably, then, we must begin with things familiar to us’ (NE 1095b2–4); ‘Things are prior and more familiar in two ways … I call prior and more familiar in relation to us what is nearer to perception, prior and more familiar simpliciter what is further away. What is most universal is furthest away, and the particulars are nearest’ (Posterior Analytics 71b33–2a5). Cf. also Metaphysics 1029b3–12 and Topics VI.4 passim.
- 2.
NB Alcibiades on Socrates: ‘He is always going on about pack asses, or blacksmiths, or cobblers, or tanners…’ (Symposium 221e). Cf. Callicles on Socrates: ‘By the gods! You simply don’t let up on your continual talk of shoemakers and cleaners, cooks and doctors, as if our discussion were about them!’ (Gorgias 491a). For passages that depreciate the relatively unskilled (especially manual) crafts, see Protagoras 312b, 318e f; Republic 522b; Symposium 203a f.; Seventh Letter 341b.
- 3.
Contrast the vagaries of the enthousiazōn or divinely inspired person, who depends on a (purported) divine gift or theia moira. Socrates says such individuals are literally ‘out of their minds’, and are thus unreliable. NB his critique of rhapsodes and poets in the Ion (especially 533d–4b). Cf. Apology 22b–c; Meno 99c; Philebus 44c; Laws 719c.
- 4.
NB in the Republic, Socrates claims that ‘the part that puts its trust in measurement [metrōi] and calculation [logismōi] is the best part of the soul’ (603a). And in the Philebus, he holds that ‘The boundless multitude … in any and every kind of subject leaves you in boundless ignorance … since you have never worked out the amount and number of anything at all’ (17e). The Philebus even suggests that quantification and measurement are essential to any technē. See (e.g.) Philebus 16c, 55e, 284a–b, 285a. Cf. Republic 522c, 526b and Laws 645a, 747a–b, 819c.
- 5.
Pleasure is characterised either as uniformly bad (e.g., Philebus 67a–b; Laws 633e, 636c, 714a, 840c), or as evaluatively heterogeneous (e.g., Phaedo 83c; Gorgias 494e–5a; Phaedrus 258e; Republic 505b, 509a, 582e; Philebus 12c–d, 52c; Laws 658e–9a). For further details, see Angier 2010, 27–28.
- 6.
For more details, see Angier 2010, 28–30.
- 7.
- 8.
It might be objected that if, as Socrates maintains, ‘the good man cannot be harmed’ (Apology 41d), virtue does guarantee a kind of mastery over circumstance: it ensures, that is, against its own loss. And this is, pro tanto, true. But this is not the kind of mastery to which the technitēs aspires. He aims not merely to preserve his own expertise, but also to employ it successfully in foro externo – and the limited variables which it embodies, and to which it is subject, make this a realistic (if not perfectly realisable) aim. This disparity between the technitēs and the virtuous person is dramatised later in the figure of the Stoic ‘sage’, who, precisely in order to render his virtue invulnerable, restricts his moral ambitions to success in foro interno. It may be no accident, therefore, that the Stoics ascribe to him a technē tou biou, or ‘art of living’. For the technai import far higher standards of control than is possible in the moral sphere.
- 9.
Implicit here is Aristotle’s assumption that the virtues constitute a unity (see NE 1144b32–5a2). This reflects and underlines their difference from the technai, for being a pianist (say) has no constitutive or essential connection with being a builder – or even a trombone player. By contrast, Aristotle believes that being courageous (say) is impossible without having the other virtues. For an argument in favor of the unity of the virtues, cf. Toner’s contribution in this volume.
- 10.
NB NE 1105a30-b2: ‘The [virtuous] agent must be in a certain condition when he [acts]: in the first place, he must have knowledge, secondly he must choose the acts, and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his action must proceed from a firm and unchangeable character. These are not reckoned in as conditions of the possession of the technai, except the bare knowledge’.
- 11.
See Angier 2010, 47–48 for more detail on this argument, and how it revisits the central theme of Plato’s Hippias Minor.
- 12.
This is Terence Irwin’s preferred translation (see Irwin 1985).
- 13.
See Hume 1978, esp. Book II, Part III, Section III and Book III, Part I, Section I.
- 14.
NB Aristotle maintains that each technē ‘accompanied by reason [meta logou] is alike capable of contrary effects, [whereas] one non-rational power produces one effect; for example, the hot is capable only of heating, but the medical art can produce both disease and health. The reason is that science [epistēmē] is a rational formula [logos], and the same logos explains a thing and its privation’ (Metaphysics 1046b4–9). Cf. ‘on the one hand, the healthy produces only health and what can heat only heat and what can cool only cold, but the scientific man [ho ... epistēmōn], on the other hand, produces both the contrary effects’ (Metaphysics 1046b18–20); ‘Epistēmē may be used ... truly or to do what is wrong [hamartein], e.g., when a man voluntarily writes incorrectly, thus using knowledge as ignorance’ (Eudemian Ethics 1246a31–3).
- 15.
- 16.
Cf. ‘since in deliberating one always deliberates for the sake of some end, and he who deliberates has always an aim [skopos] by reference to which he judges what is expedient, no one deliberates about the end; this is the starting-point [archē] and assumption [hupothesis]’ (Eudemian Ethics 1227a5–9; cf. b25–8). Cf. also NE 1141b12–14, where Aristotle refers to the practical deliberator as ‘aiming [at an end] in accordance with calculation [stochastikos kata ton logismon]’, and NE 1113b3–4, where he asserts that ‘The end ... [is] what we wish for, the things contributing to the end [tōn pros to telos] what we deliberate and choose’.
- 17.
See (e.g.) NE I.13; 1139a3–5; Politics 1334b19–20.
- 18.
NB the seeming corollary of this: ‘as a condition of the possession of the virtues, knowledge has little or no weight, while the other conditions [viz. choosing good acts for their own sake from a firm and unchangeable character] count not for a little but for everything’ (NE 1105b2–4).
- 19.
See 72b18–25.
- 20.
See 100b5–17.
- 21.
- 22.
See Greenwood 1909, 46–47.
- 23.
Cf. ‘Warmth in the body ... is either a part of health or is followed ... by something that is a part of health; and [rubbing], viz. that which produces the part, is the last step [in deliberation]’ (Metaphysics 1032b26–9); ‘the deliberative orator’s aim is utility: deliberation seeks to determine not ends but the means to ends, i.e. what it is most useful to do’ (Rhetoric 1362a18–19).
- 24.
- 25.
See (e.g.) NE 1169a4–5; Politics 1286a17–18. Cf. Eudemian Ethics 1215b22–4, 1223b26–7; Rhetoric 1371a15. Smith cites more texts at Smith 1996, 65.
- 26.
Cf. NE 1098a4, 1102b13 f., 25–6, 33–4; Eudemian Ethics 1220b5–6, 1232a39–b1.
- 27.
NB ‘appetite is for pleasure … the object of wish is the good; pleasure and the good are different’ (Eudemian Ethics 1235b21–3). Cf. NE 1111b17–18, 1113a15–16. See Coope 2012 for the importance of rational desire in Aristotle.
- 28.
Hursthouse 2006 highlights the significance of these (rarely discussed) rational capacities.
- 29.
NB NE 1142b31–3: ‘If, then, it is characteristic of men of practical wisdom [phronēsis] to have deliberated well, excellence in deliberation [euboulia] will be correctness with regard to what conduces to the end of which practical wisdom is the true apprehension’. According to the scholarly consensus, this passage supports the anti-Humean reading of Aristotle, because it affirms the capacity of phronēsis to apprehend moral ends. But grammatically it is ambiguous, and could be affirming the capacity of phronēsis to apprehend merely ‘what conduces to the end’. For more on this, see Taylor 2016.
- 30.
- 31.
To repeat: ‘Does then virtue make the aim, or the things that contribute to that aim? We say the aim, because this is not attained by inference or reasoning … for as in theoretical sciences the assumptions are our starting-points [archai], so in the productive the end is starting-point and assumed. For example, we reason that since this body is to be made healthy, therefore so and so must be found in it if health is to be had – just as in geometry we argue, if the angles of the triangle are equal to two right angles, then so and so must be the case … If, then, of all correctness either reason or virtue is the cause, if reason is not the cause, then the end (but not the things contributing to it) must owe its rightness to virtue’ (Eudemian Ethics 1227b22–36).
- 32.
The difference being, of course, that Hume extrudes any trace of rationalism from his ethics, in conscious rebellion against the Aristotelian tradition.
- 33.
Jessica Moss argues that phantasia (imagination) sets aretaic ends, owing to its discernment of pleasure. While this discernment is cognitive, because it involves belief, it is not rational or intellective. In this way, Moss resurrects the proto-Humean, technē-inflected reading of the relation between virtue and practical reason – though now with a wholly new argumentative sub-structure. For a critique of Moss’ argument, see Taylor 2016, § 3.
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Angier, T. (2021). Plato and Aristotle on Virtue and Practical Reason. In: Halbig, C., Timmermann, F. (eds) Handbuch Tugend und Tugendethik. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-24466-8_4
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