Aristotelian Philosophy E-Book

Kelvin Knight

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 538

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Aristotle is the most influential philosopher of practice, and Knight's new book explores the continuing importance of Aristotelian philosophy. First, it examines the theoretical bases of what Aristotle said about ethical, political and productive activity. It then traces ideas of practice through such figures as St Paul, Luther, Hegel, Heidegger and recent Aristotelian philosophers, and evaluates Alasdair MacIntyre's contribution. Knight argues that, whereas Aristotle's own thought legitimated oppression, MacIntyre's revision of Aristotelianism separates ethical excellence from social elitism and justifies resistance.

With MacIntyre, Aristotelianism becomes revolutionary. MacIntyre's case for the Thomistic Aristotelian tradition originates in his attempt to elaborate a Marxist ethics informed by analytic philosophy. He analyses social practices in teleological terms, opposing them to capitalist institutions and arguing for the cooperative defence of our moral agency. In condensing these ideas, Knight advances a theoretical argument for the reformation of Aristotelianism and an ethical argument for social change.

Leseprobe

Aristotelian Philosophy

Aristotelian Philosophy

Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre

KELVIN KNIGHT

polity

Copyright © Kelvin Knight 2007

The right of Kelvin Knight to be identiifed as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Coyright, Deisgns and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-07456-3821-8

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1    Aristotle’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy

2    Christian Practice and Medieval Philosophy

3    Aristotle in Germany

4    A Revolutionary Aristotelianism

MacIntyre’s Marxism

‘Aristotelianism’

Social Ethics

Politics

Aristotelianism’s Reformation

Conclusion

References

Index

Acknowledgements

My greatest thanks are to David Held and Emma Hutchinson at Polity for their practical wisdom and their patient insistence, without which I might never have forced myself to free up sufficient time from more pressing academic duties to write this book. I am greatly indebted for comments upon drafts of the text to Andrius Bielskis, Paul Blackledge, Sarah Dancy, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jeffery Nicholas, Mary Ruskin, Benedict Smith, Alberta Stevens and Polity’s two readers, whom I now know to be John Horton and Mark Murphy. I also thank Kamalita for her encouragement and for reminding me of the reality of managerial oppression, Aidan Rose for demonstrating that a good practitioner can be a good manager, Lee Salter for technological assistance, Ron Beadle, Keith Breen, Tony Burns, David Charles, Philip Gorski, John Haldane, Duncan Kelly, Arthur Madigan S.J., Keith Tribe, Stephen Turner and especially Alasdair MacIntyre and Cary Nederman for copies of papers, and everyone who has responded to the papers in which I have, over many years, presented aspects of this book’s argument. I apologize to those scholars (Terence Irwin and Jim Lennox spring most immediately to mind) from whose work I have tried to learn but who receive no acknowledgement below, and to those to whom I would have wished to allow time to respond to certain lines of argument before publication. They, like others, should know that the book would have been composed differently had I known that it would be dignified with its present title. Now that the text is committed to print, I look forward to learning how to tighten up, straighten out, clarify and elaborate – even if never to complete – its developing argument.

As MacIntyre’s Selected Essays appeared between my submission of the manuscript and receipt of the proofs, I have been able to update numerous references to this more accessible source. All references to texts by MacIntyre in chapter 4 omit his name. All quotations are reproduced without any addition or omission of italicization throughout the book, and no mention of this is made within references. Where quotations are repeated, they are unreferenced. References to the works of Aristotle, Kant and the like include observation of the relevant conventions in ways that will, I hope, prove sufficient to enable a reader to locate a passage in any standard edition. Such works are only included in the References when published translations are cited.

Introduction

Aristotle’s practical philosophy – his philosophy of ethics, politics and economics – has had two great attractions. One is the image it presents of human excellence. The other is the notion that this image is projected by a theoretical philosophy – of nature, of logic and of being – that is awesome in its magnitude and influence.

Even if the ethical image is still bright, its theoretical projector is now tarnished. Aristotle’s account of nature has been contradicted by such heroes of modern science as Galileo, Newton and Darwin. His logic has been replaced. His metaphysics has been deconstructed. In sum, his theoretical philosophy is discredited. Nonetheless, the image remains. It is an image of personal excellence, of moral and intellectual virtue, of arete. Politically, it is an image of a community of such excellent individuals, sharing in discourse and in active pursuit of their common good. Unfortunately, when we look at the image more closely, we also see exclusion and oppression. In Aristotle’s Athens, the oppressed included women, slaves and workers. We might now try to project the image onto the screen of Britain or America, hoping to exclude the exclusions and see a modern picture of political freedom and moral harmony. But can we?

Karl Marx gives us one reason why we cannot, and Martin Heidegger another. Marx agreed with Aristotle that a good life is one of freedom from material necessity and freedom to rationally determine one’s own actions. He also observed that only a few have ever been able to enjoy such leisure and opportunity, and that they have only done so by commanding the labour of those producing the material goods they consume. We should surely agree that there is something profoundly wrong with such a situation, and with any ideology – such as Aristotle’s – that is used to justify it. We might therefore welcome Heidegger’s deconstruction of the traditional projector that is Aristotle’s theoretical philosophy, and we might approve the claim that what its deconstruction reveals is a contingent collection of components and, behind these, human being in all its immediacy, particularity and difference. What is claimed is that, even if it cannot free us from oppression, this deconstruction of philosophical tradition at least frees us from illusion.

But perhaps we wish to retain the picture of moral, intellectual and political excellence. Can it be saved? Even if the theoretical tradition is no more, might a tradition of Aristotelian practical philosophy somehow stand alone? To answer affirmatively is to deny that Aristotle’s practical philosophy need be understood as projected by, or based in, his theoretical philosophy. Recently, this has indeed been forcefully denied. The most famous of these denials is entitled After Virtue. We might therefore regret that its author, Alasdair MacIntyre, has since changed his mind. He still calls himself an Aristotelian, and he still calls Aristotelianism a tradition, but he no longer argues that an Aristotelian ethics and politics can be sustained apart from any Aristotelian metaphysics or biology. Without a philosophical understanding of the potentiality and good of human beings as such, any solely practical philosophy of human excellence is likely to become a self-serving and self-deceiving justification for arbitrary elitism, exclusion and exploitation.

If we look into the history of Aristotelianism, we might question our distinction of practical from theoretical philosophy. For Aristotle, theology was central to philosophy. With Christianity, the two were separated. Right and wrong were understood to be ordained by God. After a long period of revival, philosophy was itself divided between theory and practice by Wolff and Kant. Theoretical philosophy dealt with what is universal and, for Kant, how we can know of it. Practical philosophy dealt with what applies universally to human action or, for Kant, what ought to so apply. Hegel protested their division. Others abandoned theoretical philosophy for what had evolved, out of the subdiscipline of natural philosophy, into science. It was Heidegger who then urged us to abandon ideas of universality in our concern with practice. And it was Heidegger who invoked Aristotle as his principal source for the claim that an original concern with practical existence had been hidden by a philosophical tradition that pretended to universal knowledge.

Heidegger’s reinterpretation of Aristotle has pitted a supposedly authentic Aristotle against the Aristotle of tradition. Central to this revelation of a new Aristotle, and to the creation of a ‘neo-Aristotelianism’, is the conceptual distinction of action, or praxis, from not only theory but also production. A concern with action is simply with being and doing, and not with its temporal effects or products. A concern with effects, and with the techniques by which to produce those effects, covers over that original concern with being and doing. Such a distinction can indeed be found in Aristotle, who differentiates those engaged in acting from those employed in producing and denies to producers the possibility of human excellence. Producers work for the sake of actors, and actors alone are admitted to the political and ethical community.

In returning to the Aristotle of tradition, MacIntyre diminishes these conceptual distinctions and disputes their ethical and political implications. Instead, he distinguishes between what he calls practices and institutions, goods of excellence and goods of effectiveness. He agrees with Aristotle, and with Marx, that excellence cannot be attributed to workers as a class, but he denies still more emphatically that it can be attributed to their managers. His Aristotelianism is a particular tradition of theoretical reflection upon practical rationality, unafraid of conflict with more powerful rivals.

Such an Aristotelianism would have appeared strange when it could still be maintained that ‘Aristotle’s special glory [is] that every thinker is his pupil’, and that ‘“Aristotelianism”’ has never ‘in the history of philosophy’ been used to indicate any distinct ‘speculative tendency’ (Stocks 1925: 155, 154). When Heidegger attempted Aristotelianism’s deconstruction, it was identified not as a tradition but as the tradition. Aristotle would himself have been less surprised that his philosophy should be understood as contending with others, but he would nonetheless have contested MacIntyre’s identification of excellence with those who resist rather than exercise institutionalized power. Aristotle advised how to conserve political order, not to overturn it. This thought does not perturb MacIntyre because he argues that a progressive philosophical tradition comprises an ongoing argument and enquiry, and that this enquiry is not merely into the tradition’s norms and their application but also into its first principles. The question confronting contemporary Aristotelians is that of the extent to which their first principles require revision in order to sustain pursuit of human excellence as the final end of human action, and in order to sustain the claim that Aristotelianism constitutes the best theory so far of ethical practice and its political implications.

1

Aristotle’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy

To begin the history of an Aristotelian tradition with Aristotle is not to diminish the importance of such predecessors as Socrates or Plato, nor even of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras or Democritus. Aristotle’s love of wisdom was inspired by theirs, and it was in critical engagement with them and others that he based many of his arguments. Therefore his influence upon Stoics and neo-Platonists, and upon us, is also often theirs. Nonetheless, in historical hindsight it is clear that Greek and classical philosophy reached its culmination in his work.

Aristotle is now widely regarded as the first philosopher who dealt with both theoretical and practical philosophy whilst differentiating incisively between them. On this view, theoria concerns that which is universal and cannot be otherwise, whereas praxis concerns particularities that are subject to human choice and change. Theoretical wisdom is about truth whilst practical wisdom is about action, and therefore, whereas his teacher, Plato, would have had theorists rule, Aristotle tells us that theory is one thing and practice quite another. There is much that is valid in this view. However, in this chapter I shall sketch some aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy in another way, suggesting that the distinction between his theoretical and practical philosophies can be overdrawn. There is continuing merit in the more traditional interpretation, according to which what Aristotle writes of practice should be understood in the light of what he writes of theology, of ontology and of nature. That said, my representation of Aristotle’s philosophy will be less sanguine than its portrayal by tradition.

Aristotle as Innovator

Aristotle inherited Plato’s robust philosophical realism (Gerson 2005). Like Parmenides and Socrates, Plato thought that what is most truly real, what most really is, is that which is unchanging. He developed this idea of absolute being into his famous doctrine of atemporal, universal and immaterial forms. Aristotle tells us that Plato believed these forms to be entirely separate from our world of sensuous particulars. Aristotle agrees that God (theos) and such celestial entities as the Sun enjoy a kind of eternal and self-sufficient (autarkes) being and activity (energeia) which we cannot share but only contemplate. Crucially, he also agrees in regarding the best life for human beings as that of theoria, the activity of such contemplation.

Aristotle explicitly disagrees with Plato when he brings the forms down to Earth and recasts them as natural kinds, such as plant and animal species. Nonetheless, even here he remains significantly Platonic. Individual animals may come and go, but, he insists, the species of which they are particular instances are themselves universal and eternal forms. Although revising Plato, in retaining a robust account of forms Aristotle may be understood as siding with him against Heraclitus’ perspectivism, Empedocles’ evolutionism and Democritus’ atomistic materialism. For Aristotle, atemporal and universal forms inform – genetically determinate the nature (physis) and temporal development of – individual animals. A species is real and conceptually separate from the particular individuals in which it is instantiated, but, he emphasizes, it has no substantial existence apart from those material individuals. Therefore, he reverses Plato’s order of priority in describing the form of a species as only a ‘secondary being’ and the reality of a substantial individual (a ‘this’), combining form with matter, as ‘primary being’ (Categories 2a11–14). Such primary, individual subjects are the basic entities of which such insubstantial things as qualities and changes (metabolai) may be predicated. That the world of such sensuous particulars is one of change does not entail that it is one of Heraclitean flux or of mere chance. As forms imbue nature with an elemental order, much of changing reality can be analysed, explained and specified in terms of determinate processes of coming-into-being (genesis), of contingent movements (kineseis) of substantive beings, and of different species’ characteristic activities (energeiai).

Energeia is a word of Aristotle’s own coinage. Literally, it means being in (en-) work (ergon) or at work or, more simply, working. When not translated as ‘activity’ it is usually rendered ‘functioning’. It is something predicated of an individual being, or of a specific kind of being. We could understand it as denoting the condition of being energetic, so long as we understand this energy as expended in the performance of a specific activity; that is, in the activity, work or function characteristic of the way of life (bios) of some species, or characteristic of the craft of some kind of worker, or even characteristic of some kind of tool. For Aristotle, all beings are to be understood in terms of the activity characteristic of their kind, but kinds of being differ in the degree of self-sufficiency of their specific activities. Whereas the constant activity of the Sun requires nothing external for its sustenance, plants and animals require light and nutrition if they are to live and reproduce, artisans additionally require external direction of their activities, and tools require artisans for their very movement.

Developing an idea from Plato and Anaxagoras, Aristotle argues that the most self-sufficient activity is that of the divine, or God, because this comprises self-activating intelligence (nous) thinking of itself. God’s activity is performed for its own sake and is therefore complete (teleios) and good (agathon) in itself. As such, Aristotle hypothesizes, it is an object of attraction to every other intelligent being in the cosmos, including human beings. God is, in this sense, the cosmos’s prime mover.

We may note here that energeia should not be understood as ‘functioning’, at least if description of something as functioning is taken to imply that it is essentially a means to some further end. Aristotle’s God has no further end. Nor is it (it is not the personal God of Judaic or Christian theism) the world’s creator or originating cause. Aristotle’s theological postulate is that God causes movement as an object of attraction, through its perfect activity, to other beings. Conversely, the postulate of an utterly complete being does not imply that it is a final end in relation to which the energeia of every other being should be understood as a means. God’s simple activity of pure thinking (noesis) is utterly self-sufficient, and this self-sufficiency is what comprises its perfection. It is self-causing and has no need or use for anything external to it. Aristotle therefore proposes no great theocentric chain of beings or of ends and means. Nor does he propose any such anthropocentric chain (Johnson 2005). Aristotle theorizes neither the cosmos nor sublunary nature as a providential or interdependently functioning system.

What Aristotle does propose is that each kind of being has its own characteristic kind of activity, engagement in which constitutes the good for that kind of being. If other beings imitate God in their own energeiai, then what those other beings and their activities imitate is something self-sufficient and complete. In order to get this central point across, he resorts to a second terminological and conceptual innovation. This second coinage is entelecheia. Rather as he neologizes energeia from ergon, so he invents entelecheia from telos. Telos is commonly translated as ‘end’, but ‘completion’ would often be more accurate. A being’s entelecheia is its state of completion, its ‘actuality’ in the standard translation. Just as God is perfectly constant energeia, so too is God perfect entelecheia. In contrast, the actuality of a temporal being is the fulfilment of its natural potential. Its entelecheia is its complete or final good. These two terms – energeia and entelecheia, or activity and actuality – are often interchangeable, as energeia denotes the activity characteristic of a form of being and entelecheia denotes the fully developed or completed being of some form of actor. For Aristotle, what is most essential to being – including human being – is not its material constitution but its working, not what a particular being is made of but what it does.

Aristotle follows philosophical tradition in affirming that the best activity of which human beings are capable is contemplation of that which constantly is. In engaging in such activity, individuals are fulfilling their highest potential, so that theoria is good in itself and a means to no further end. This is because it is in contemplating the divine that humans come the closest of which they are capable to participating in divinity. Not only do they contemplate what is immutable, but their contemplative activity is in a sense itself atemporal. It is at once being done and done, completed, and it is not a means to any further, future end.

Contemplating is not the only human energeia that allows of entelecheia. An activity comparable to noesis is aisthesis or perception or, especially, seeing. The activity of seeing, like that of contemplating, cannot be divided into temporal parts and cannot be done more quickly or slowly. However, Aristotle has an altogether less elevated understanding of seeing than of contemplating, and this for at least four reasons: seeing gives us knowledge of external beings only as changing individuals and not as unchanging forms; it is not an energeia of the human psyche (psyche) or of the human being as a whole but of a bodily part, the eye; seeing is an activity that is not unique to humankind but is shared with other animals; and it is an activity that is not only an end in itself but also a means to other ends, as when an animal sees food to eat or another individual with which to mate and reproduce. Reproduction of its form is the closest that a plant or a non-human animal can get to immortality and divinity. Reproduction is a second way in which humans can approximate to divinity but an inferior way to contemplation, both because it is shared with lower beings and because it is for the sake of the child and not just of the actor. Aristotle identifies human completion with the activity of theoria most of all because it is the activity that is most unproductive or ‘useless’ (Nightingale 2004). If it were a means to some further end it could not be our telos.

Change

A particular being has the potential to engage in the energeia characteristic of its kind and, in so doing, to actualize its good. Another potential, common to all terrestrial beings, is that to undergo or undertake temporal and contingent changes. All animals have a potential for locomotion, or change of location, but, although seeing is an activity, walking is not. Walking is a kinesis rather than an energeia because it involves what we might call an ordered succession of temporal stages (rather than, as is often said, events) with a beginning and a terminus, and more particularly because it is done in order to reach some destination or some other, further goal, such as health. Deliberating is another temporal process, undertaken in order to reach some conclusion.

The processes of a being’s genesis and of its later decline and death are not kineseis, Aristotle occasionally stipulates (especially at Physics V: 1), because a kinesis is predicated of a continuing being. Nonetheless, geneseis are changes as distinct from activities. They are processes of coming-into-being, not workings or completions characteristic of some kind of being. Aristotle denies that beings can come to be from nothing, either materially or formally. The form of individual animals exists before they do, because species are eternal, and each animal inherits its form from its parents (to be more exact, Aristotle proposes that it inherits its matter from its mother and its form through its father).

Aristotle argues that an analogous process of coming-into-being occurs in manufacture, and says that all art (techne) involves genesis (e.g. Nicomachean Ethics (NE) 1140a11, Generation of Animals 734b21–735a4). The building of a house resembles the conception, gestation and birth of a horse in that it is a temporal process with a beginning and an end. The coming-to-be of each, when happening, has not yet happened, and when it has happened is no longer still happening. Only when the house is built or the foal born is the process (not the being) teleios, complete or at an end. Its completion is the initial formation of the foal or the house.

It may be tempting to assume that Aristotle’s term telos here confuses two different ideas of an end: first, that of a temporal terminus, as in the ending of a process of walking, building or gestation; secondly, that of the intentional aim or goal of the actors who bring a house or foal into being. But there is no such confusion. Aristotle does not here intend telos to denote either the termination of a process or the intention of an actor. If a house remains half built or a mare miscarries, then the process has terminated but nothing is completed. Nor does Aristotle display the confusion often attributed to his refrain that ‘art imitates nature’ of fallaciously imputing purposiveness or intentional agency to nature. Although it is the case that intentionality can be attributed to human builders in a way that it cannot to equine parents, Aristotle regards conscious purposiveness as inessential even to manufacture. If the house is built or the foal born, then what is completed is not any intention of the producer but a process of coming-into-being. Conversely, if any process occurs by chance rather than intention, then it may be completed just the same. Genesis is not an energeia that occurs in an actor, but a metabole that occurs in a product.

For Aristotle, what we call purposiveness introduces contingencies into artificial processes, which diminish the necessity that is fully present in their natural analogues, and this is a major reason that he proposes it to be art that imitates nature and not vice versa. However, this is not the most important disanalogy between art and nature. With regard to generation, there is an absolute difference between the two in that the products of art have a different form from the producer, whereas in nature they are the same; a foal and its parents are beings of the same kind, but a house and its human builder are not. Artefacts, unlike animals, have no internal source of growth, completion or reproduction (or, rather, had no such source in any of the artefacts of Aristotle’s time). An artificial form exists only as a paradigm (paradeigma) in extant and substantial artefacts and as an account (logos) in both the shared craft knowledge and the individual psyches of artisans, who then apply it to inform raw material. What changes in building is not the being of the builder but that of, for example, the wood which is hewn from a tree to make beams. To repeat, production (poiesis) occurs not in the producers or their actions but in that which those actions bring about. It is with this theoretical reason that Aristotle justifies his insistence that poiesis is a process that occurs for the sake not of the producer but of the product.

The explanatory capacity of Aristotle’s concept of telos is most famously articulated in his juxtaposition of four types of ‘cause’ (aition) of beings, found most fully in the Physics (II: 3) and Metaphysics (Delta: 2). The first type of cause that he mentions is that from which something is made, and his examples – the bronze of a statue, the silver of a bowl – are often taken to indicate how important is reflection upon material production to his focal idea of causation. The second type of cause is the form or paradigm of something, although he does not here (where he is distinguishing between that matter and form which together compose substantial beings) refer to any such simple instance as a statue, bowl or house. The third type is, in translation, variously called the generative, productive, efficient, moving, motive, prior, agent or, even, acting cause, and Aristotle himself describes it as the source (arche) of change (and conversely of rest), having just said that ‘all causes are sources’ (Metaphysics 1013a16). It may return our attention to processes of production and of what I have already called the reproduction of form; he here cites a father as the cause of a child. Crucially, this cause, as that from which change occurs, is some being external to and separate from that which is produced or otherwise changed, and in this natural generation is again analogous to artificial. This is therefore an entirely different type of cause than the fourth type, a thing’s telos, which is that for the sake of which something undergoes change.

A thing’s telos is its hou heneka, its that-for-the-sake-of-which, and the common translation of telos as ‘final cause’ is understandable in the context of Aristotle’s general account of causation. He argues that what comes first in nature or reason is the form for the sake of which something happens, even though he acknowledges that it is not what comes first temporally. As we have seen, what comes first temporally he describes not (as in most modern accounts of causation, such as that of Donald Davidson) in terms of some discrete event, such as an act of conception, but in terms of a process of genesis of which this particular individual is the product. His example in his fullest account of causation (as often elsewhere in his texts) is health, which was, in the developing Hippocratic tradition, the subject of an ethical craft (Miles 2004) about which he, as a doctor’s son, knew much. He notes that a person may walk for the sake of her health, or that drugs or medical instruments may be used for the sake of a patient’s health. When lacking, health is a good to be produced by some process. It is that for the sake of which some process may be begun, whether the taking of drugs or the taking of a walk or a doctor’s administration of a treatment or performance of an operation. In such cases, the telos could be described as an end in relation to which such processes as those of walking, taking medicine or operating may be regarded as means. Accordingly, in first deliberating about and then prescribing or executing some such means, a doctor may herself be regarded as a means to the health of the patient; or, more accurately, on Aristotle’s account, the generating means is the craft that is operationalized by the doctor acting specifically as a doctor (Metaphysics Zeta: 7). In any case, the doctor is not engaging in a veritably human energeia. Her setting in motion of a process within the patient is for the sake of the patient’s health and not of herself, either as a doctor or as a human being. What is normative and causal is health, and both the doctor and the medical process are mere means to health’s restoration and actualization in some particular patient.

Aims and Beneficiaries

Aristotle tries to draw an absolute distinction between activity and production. Energeia is internal to a being; it is necessarily present in the same being as is its source. In contrast, the source of artificial change is entirely separate from that in which the change occurs. Even in the case of a doctor curing herself, Aristotle insists that if we are to explain what is going on we must differentiate between the individual as possessor of productive craft knowledge and as patient receptacle of change. As a doctor, she is the external producer of health; as a patient, she is the beneficiary of the process that occurs within herself.

We might think that this contrast between activity and artificial change is a contrast of teleological with efficient causation, but this is not how it is presented by Aristotle. He both refuses description of doctoring in terms of activity and describes the process of health coming to be in terms of the completion of a process for the sake of which the efficiently causal doctoring occurs. A particular case of doctoring occurs for the sake of the individual patient and, also, for the sake of the universal form of human health, which is the aim of the medical craft.

Aristotle also expresses his distinction between activity and production in terms of a cross-cutting distinction between ‘two senses of “for the sake of which”’. This latter distinction has been perspicaciously enunciated by Monte Ransome Johnson, after careful reading of classical commentators. In one sense the phrase signifies ‘the aim of something’; in the other it signifies ‘the beneficiary of the achievement of that aim’ (Johnson 2005: 66; cf. On the Soul 415b2, Metaphysics 1072b2 and Physics 194a35–6, where Aristotle refers to a more extended discussion in his lost dialogue On Philosophy; Ross 1936: 509). In the sense of ‘aim’, that-for-the-sake-of-which is not any particular intention but some such universal form as that of a healthy human being. In the sense of ‘beneficiary’, that-for-the-sake-of-which is a particular being such as this individual patient. Once again, we may note that in neither sense is doctoring for the sake of a doctor qua doctor, who is, for Aristotle, merely the source and agent of change. In the same way, or so Aristotle argues, when a builder builds it is for the sake of bringing the form of the house or the temple (i.e. the building, in the nounal sense of a completed object) into substantial being and, also, for the sake of those who will live or worship in the building. In the sense neither of aim nor of benefit is the process of building for the sake of the builder. We might at least wish to add that a builder builds or a doctor cures for the sake also of pay (or perhaps as a favour, or under compulsion), but, for Aristotle, this social relation is entirely incidental and inessential to the process and its explanation. His ontology of causation is, at this basic level, not at all sociological. Theoretical philosophy precedes practical philosophy.

Johnson follows Aristotle in saying that an ‘animal reproduces both for the aim of participating in the divine and eternal form, and for its own benefit’, because such participation is the closest that it can get, as an individual, to immortality. He identifies this understanding of benefit with another: ‘furthermore, the process of reproduction directly benefits the animal insofar as it is just this process that has brought it into being and life’ (Johnson 2005: 74; cf. 175–8). But it is not one and the same temporal process of genesis that the individual animal causes as parent and was caused by as offspring, and therefore what we have is not just one ‘primary being’ as candidate for the status of beneficiary but two. A birth benefits both that which is born, in bringing it into being, and its parents. But we might well ask why, if this type of genesis can benefit the producer, the process of artificial production cannot do so also. Of course, manufacture cannot benefit the manufacturer in the same way that procreation benefits the father (as both moving and formal cause) in reproducing his own form. Nonetheless, we should at least acknowledge that such a productive process as doctoring or building is not rendered incapable of producing some benefit internal to the producer simply because it is undertaken for the sake of some external aim and of some external beneficiary.

Aristotle differentiates little between the good of individuals of the same species in his natural philosophy, and in his several biological treatises he normally applies the same principles to humans as to other animals. However, craft and manufacture, like language, are more or less unique to human beings. In his works of both theoretical and practical philosophy, he says that the beneficiaries of manufacture are the consumers of those products which are the aims of productive processes and of crafts. He intends (as we shall see below) both a hierarchy of consumers and a separation of producers from non-producers. Even though the crafts were once invented (Metaphysics 981b13–23), production is not, on his account, a matter of innovation or imaginative creativity, still less of rational invention. In imitating nature (rather than divinity), craft aspires merely to the reproduction of pre-existing but inferior forms.

The Good of Activity

The concepts of energeia and entelecheia not only denote what is most importantly distinctive in Aristotle’s concept of nature; they also denote what is elemental to his concept of virtue or excellence (arete). What is excellent is what is most good. Goodness is not (as argued by Plato) a form in itself but something predicated of other beings, and what is good for a substantive being is the actualization of its specific potential and form. Therefore, an excellent being must be one that has actualized or completed its form. Teleological explanation of change is explanation couched in terms of some final end, some that-for-the-sake-of-which or completion. A veritable telos is nothing less than the achievement of some such condition, the enjoyment of some such entelecheia. It is therefore incumbent upon Aristotle to identify and describe such constant actualizations of form in terrestrial and temporal beings.

Much of what Aristotle intends by the ‘form’ of a living being is detailed in his book Peri Psyches, better known by its Latin title, De Anima, or by its standard English translation, On the Soul. The soul or psyche is not, for Aristotle, anything immortal. On the contrary, it is inseparable from an individual living body. Even plants have specific psyches, and therefore the term denotes a kind of life and not simply of either psychology or animation. Here and in his biological treatises, Aristotle writes of nutrition, reproduction, locomotion, perception and thinking as energeiai.

Aristotle extends the concept of energeia in writing of the activity, the being-at-work, of the parts of animals. Terrestrial beings are composites not only of form and matter but also of different organs, each of which has its own energeia. As we have noted, an eye is defined not in terms of its material composition but of its essential activity of seeing, and an eye that sees clearly is a good eye. Seeing is an activity that is in a sense both self-sufficient and atemporal, and therefore an end in itself. However, seeing is also for the sake of the horse or the human that sees and is an integral part of what it is to be and to act as a complete horse or human. This is the central point of both On the Soul and On the Parts of Animals. As so often, Aristotle argues from common sense when he equates the actualization of an animal’s natural potentials with its telos, and its telos with its good. To say that an animal’s eyes see and lungs breathe for the sake of the entire animal is to imply that it is good for that animal to see and breathe. Each being’s good is its actualization of the characteristic ergon, work or self-moved activity of a being of its kind. We can, for example, talk of the good of Bucephalus and of the good of horses, and we can postulate that what would constitute the good life for Bucephalus is what would also constitute the good life for other horses, universally: seeing, breathing, grazing, galloping, interacting with other horses, mating, having foals, seeing those foals grow, and so on. Each form of animal is characterized by certain activities, and perhaps it is the actualization of its natural potential to engage in all of those essential activities that constitutes an individual animal’s telos. But presumably the animal’s entelecheia is something more than a simple aggregate of the activities of its different parts, with their respective activities and goods. So, alternatively, perhaps its highest and final good is that for the sake of which it not only comes into being and grows but also breathes and sees, and this is the actualization of the most distinctive or refined capacities of a being of its kind. In this case, the entelecheia of a composite being – unlike that of such a simple being as God, with its single, intellectual energeia – comprises an ordered hierarchy in which lesser activities are for the sake of higher ones and the excellence of an individual is the fullest development of those highest activities. This is an idea elaborated less in either Aristotle’s metaphysics or his natural philosophy than, as we will see, in his practical philosophy of what is humanly changeable through action (praxis).

The Best Human Life

That there is a human telos, a good life of specifically human work or activity, is the premise of Aristotle’s practical philosophy – his ethics, politics and economics. But his introduction of this premise in the Nicomachean Ethics – and also in his other ethical texts, the Eudemian Ethics (EE) and (if it is indeed by him) the Magna Moralia – contrasts with his usual accounts of the tele of other species. He indicates the peculiar singularity of the human good by adopting as its name the popular term eudaimonia. Literally, this means being possessed of a ‘well demon’. Our standard, subjectivist translation is ‘happiness’, but translations that more happily relate the concept to Aristotle’s biology or metaphysics are ‘flourishing’ (Anscombe 1958: 18–19, Cooper 1975: 89–90) or ‘well-being’. (Another, increasingly prevalent translation is ‘success’, leaving open whether eudaimonia is success for an individual in actualizing the human telos or, say, in simply out competing rivals.) Keen to identify this good as one of characteristically human activity, Aristotle proposes that eudaimonia is generally agreed to denote ‘living well and doing [acting, faring] well [eu prattein]’ (e.g. NE 1095a19). No Socrates, he considers the plausibility of this move to depend upon identifying the best life with those activities that his audience finds pleasurable or esteems, and then expends his persuasive efforts in establishing that what is most eudaimonistic is what is most lastingly admirable rather than most sensually and subjectively pleasurable. We might therefore understand him as accepting some of the received opinions of his wealthy Athenian listeners in order to argue against others. He does not deny them the benefit of pleasure, which we share with other animals and which supervenes upon various activities (NE X: 1–5), but he wants to persuade them that some aims are more rationally deliberated (NE III: 1–5) and defensible, and therefore better, than others.

What might seem to be more important here is not the content of the aims but the very process of deliberation, as this actualizes those rational capacities that are distinctively human and therefore allow of specifically human excellence. Accordingly, we might suppose that even though the deliberation of a doctor benefits her patient, it also benefits her as it actualizes her own potential as a human being. But this is denied by Aristotle on the basis of his absolute distinction between activities and processes, not only because healing is clearly a process, but also because even deliberation is a temporal process. The highest human good is the leisured activity of contemplation of what is unchanging, and this activity issues in the production of neither an artefact nor a decision. As we have seen, it is, on Aristotle’s account, our potential for such activity that most surely distinguishes us from other terrestrial beings, and its actualization is what in human nature comes closest to divinity. Knowledge and understanding are permanent achievements of a human being. Although other animals also have their own pleasures, their own reproductive activities, and even their own kinds of practical wisdom (phronesis) in pursuit of their specific goods (NE 1141a22–9), neither ‘horse nor bird nor fish can be eudaimon’ because none of them has any such share in the divine (EE 1217a24–8) as that which humans enjoy through its contemplation. Pleasures, like movements, are transient; knowledge is permanent.

The Nicomachean Ethics announces that we should aim at what is ‘the good and the best [tagathon kai to ariston]’ (1094a22), and Anglophone commentators have debated for the past 40 years (Hardie 1965; Lear 2004) or more (Greenwood 1909) as to whether this single aim should be understood to be ‘inclusive’ of a plurality of different activities and ‘ends’ or, alternatively, to be constituted by a single ‘dominant’ activity for the sake of which individuals’ other activities should be ordered. What has been agreed by the participants in this debate is that if eudaimonia is to be identified with a single, dominant activity, then this must be the purely intellectual activity of contemplating unchanging forms. If the ‘inclusivist’ interpretation of Aristotle were correct, his practical philosophy would be freed from ‘intellectualist’ domination by this single activity of theoria, and eudaimonia would instead comprise a plurality of energeiai and praxeis, of activities and actions. And yet, even though freeing praxis from theoria, the inclusivist interpretation would render Aristotle’s practical philosophy similar to his theoretical and natural philosophy in that it would make the human telos an aggregation of various activities in the same way that he describes the tele of other animals. But, even if what is at issue between inclusivist and intellectualist interpretations of Aristotle is not settled in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, then it surely is in the last. This clearly states that the best or most excellent human life is one of theoria, because contemplation is the most self-sufficient and complete activity available to us (NE X: 6–8).

What this leaves out of account is politics. Being naturally incapable of self-sufficiency as individuals, humans are naturally political animals. This human activity of politics involves the domination of other activities and, for Aristotle, their hierarchical ordering. For this reason, Aristotle considers politics the highest non-theoretical activity or type of praxis.

The most decisive contribution to the debate between intellectualist and inclusivist interpretations of the Nicomachean Ethics has been made by Richard Kraut. He argues that Aristotle considers the most perfect and therefore best life to be one of contemplation for the sake of which all other activities are undertaken, including politics, the task of which is to order all other, lesser activities. He qualifies this intellectualist interpretation only in adding that a life of specifically political action comprises a ‘second-best’ kind of eudaimonia, itself subserved by all activities other than theoria.

Kraut follows his interpretive argument about Aristotle with an argument against Aristotle. He acknowledges that philosophical and political lives can be good lives, but denies that they are necessarily the best. This denial is based in a rejection of Aristotle’s teleological ‘for-the-sake-of relation’, according to which ‘only lives organized around’ reasoning and ‘ends that are not pursued for the sake of further goals’ ‘deserve to be models of human flourishing’ (Kraut 1989: 356–7). Kraut’s objection to Aristotle’s argument is that it makes the best and second-best lives enemies of a more morally compelling account of the good life as something actualizable through any one of a plurality of human activities. His argument may be described as inclusivist, but not in the sense that a good life must include a uniform set of different activities. Rather, his argument against Aristotle is socially inclusivist. Kraut’s moral claim is that lives organized around any of a number of different activities may be considered good.

Theory, Action and Production

The plausibility of Aristotle’s denigration of lives spent in occupations other than those of philosophy or politics depends upon establishing the similarity of praxis to the activity of theoria and their shared dissimilarity from the process of poiesis. One necessary condition of this is the drawing of some consistent distinction between actions and productions. A difficulty facing any such comparison and contrast is that – unlike theoria, which produces nothing beyond itself and leaves everything as it is – praxeis are, like poieseis, often useful and effective. Indeed, Aristotle differentiates theoria from praxis on the very grounds that the one is concerned with what is immutable whereas the other concerns what is humanly changeable. Whilst what is paradigmatic of theoretical reasoning is the activity of thought timelessly thinking of itself, what is paradigmatic of non-theoretical reasoning is thought thinking of the form of something that is to be brought into being (see Metaphysics Lambda: 9, especially 1074b38–1075a5).

Another necessary condition of establishing the superiority of philosophers over politicians and, then, of both over producers is the drawing of a conceptual distinction between sophia, the intellectual excellence of those engaging in theoria (and also in natural science, insofar as this also involves knowledge of unchanging forms; as he does not foresee natural science becoming the handmaiden of technology, Aristotle proposes that the study of nature is also a complete activity because a means to no further end), and phronesis, the intellectual excellence of those engaging in political and other ethical praxeis, and, most especially, a distinction between both sophia and phronesis on the one side and, on the other, techne, the craft excellence or expertise apparent in production. This Aristotle attempts in Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics (repeated as EE V). He notes that technical expertise has often been dignified as ‘sophia’ and that it is in some ways analogous to the knowledge of philosophers, but he is far keener than those philosophers he follows to pin down what is disanalogous. His distinction between sophia and techne is underpinned by his distinction between energeia and genesis, in that contemplation is a human activity, a being-at-work, whereas craft causes a type of coming-into-being. As coming-into-being occurs in the product and not in the producer, Aristotle discounts it as a human energeia (despite etymology, and even though he elsewhere describes the weaving of webs and the building of nests as energeiai of spiders and birds). As technical excellence is manifest in the product, he describes it as a quality of the product and not of the producer. This corresponds to his description of the efficient cause of manufacture as the craft rather than the craftsperson. On his account, the artisan substitutes for the necessity operative in that natural generation which art merely imitates or completes; she merely facilitates the productive process. Aristotle takes care to conceptualize both the form of the product and the technical knowledge required for necessity to guide its production (as opposed to when, occasionally, this occurs through luck) in isolation from any account of the attributes of the producer as a human being. On his account, both the form and the craft are (respectively, formal and efficient) causes of the product in a way that the individual producer is not. He therefore reveals that, just as production is not a human activity in the same way as are contemplation and action, nor is craft skill an intellectual excellence inhering in humans in the same way as do theoretical and practical wisdom.

Aristotle also argues that craft skill is a capacity rather than either an activity or a virtue. It can be used or not, and can be used for either good or bad purposes. In this, craftiness or artifice differs from theoretical and practical wisdom alike. Theoretical wisdom is good in itself and so too, he stipulates, is practical wisdom, because it only pursues aims commended by the moral virtues. In this sense, practical wisdom does not deliberate. This lack of deliberation about practical wisdom’s ends might again appear to draw it close to craft skill in that ‘a doctor does not deliberate about whether to cure’ any more than does ‘a politician whether to produce good order’, but only about the means by which to do so (NE 1112b12–16).

Although Aristotle implies that a doctor is at least as likely to act Hippocratically as is a politician to act virtuously, he insists that to act Hippocratically is not the same as to act out of a virtuous character. To act as a doctor or shipbuilder is to refrain from deliberation about ends in a way that is similar to that in which deliberation is absent from natural processes (Physics 199b26–31). Art’s aim is given by necessity, as is nature’s. What Aristotle asserts is that, in this, both differ from virtuous action. The aims of such action are given not by necessity but by the actor’s excellent character. We have seen that a doctor deliberates about how best to bring about health before acting to do so, but, for Aristotle, medicine’s need of such technical deliberation merely evinces art’s inferiority to the spontaneity operative in nature. Once deliberation has apprehended what is necessary to secure art’s necessary aim, movement follows with a similar necessity to that of natural processes.

This argument is undermined elsewhere. Both the Eudemian Ethics (VIII) and Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics conclude with the analogy between politics and medicine. Aristotle here again distinguishes practice from theory in proposing that, just as doctoring does not direct health but is for the sake of bringing health into being, so politics does not direct the gods but only those things that subserve our contemplation of the divine (EE 1249b12–15; NE 1145a6–11). Similarly, at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics he compares education into the works (erga) of law-making with that into the products of medicine. As he repeats in Book One of the Eudemian Ethics, politics is itself a ‘productive science’, its product being good order in just the same way as health is the aim of medicine (1216b16–19). What all this indicates is that, even if a consistent distinction between poiesis and praxis were maintained, Aristotle’s more elemental conceptual distinction would remain that separating theoria from praxis and poiesis alike. But it is not, in any case, clear that a consistent distinction can be drawn between the production of artefacts or performance of services (so that, for example, the production of music is a poiesis, as distinct from its ‘aesthetic’ contemplation) and, conversely, the performance of actions that effect such states of affairs as military victories and well-ordered poleis. We might ask whether a speech by Pericles is any less a production than is a poem (poiema) by Solon or a play by Sophocles or a statue by Polycleitus or an operation by Nicomachus senior, and whether all are not as much expressions and examples of human agency as are Solon’s laws, Pericles’s securing of political order, Alexander’s victories, or Alexander’s impatient cutting through of perplexities.

Action, Production and Interpretation

The instability of Aristotle’s distinction of praxis from poiesis may be found in his account of the very logic of practical reasoning. The deductive structure of theoretical reasoning about forms is exemplified in the Prior Analytics’ account of the syllogism. Elsewhere Aristotle suggests that practical reasoning is exemplified in the logic of what commentators have called a ‘practical syllogism’, in which what is deduced from the premises is the proposition – or, as Elizabeth Anscombe argues (Anscombe 1963: 59–60), the performance – of an action. However, when we turn to the two clearest examples of such a practical syllogism, we find that neither is concerned with action as distinct from production. The clearest example outside the Ethics concerns the ‘production’ of a cloak, which Aristotle calls an ‘action’ (On the Motion of Animals 701a17–22). The clearest example within the Ethics is concerned with nutrition and the production of health (NE VII (EE VI): 3), and he here describes what he contrasts with theoretical reasoning as reasoning about ‘productive activity [poietikais prattein]’ (NE 1147a28).

That Aristotle fails to maintain throughout his corpus any consistent semantic distinction between poiesis and praxis, production and action, was not considered a problem when Anglophone scholarship on Aristotle really took off. This was less because of any historical thesis about Aristotle’s development than because of the spirit of the time and place in which that take-off occurred. In the early decades of the last century Oxford University still felt the influence of T. H. Green’s reception of German idealism and, also, of his appeal to Aristotle’s authority in theorizing a political community within which labour could be newly included. Ernest Barker, in dealing directly with the Politics, agonized over the difficulties of such an appeal, accusing Aristotle of mistaking ‘an external and unreal teleology’ for ‘a true’ and ‘internal’ teleology in describing workers as ‘means to an end external to themselves’ (Barker 1906: 226–7). However, we might well suspect that it is Barker who is contravening this Kantian and Hegelian distinction (see here) in postulating what may be called a communal functionalism (see here) in which ‘there is no relation of means and end between the lower and higher workers’ but all are ‘parts of one whole … each giving, each receiving, and all contributing to the common life by that which they supply’ (ibid.: 372). The issue could be dealt with more obliquely with reference to the Ethics (notwithstanding Barker in Aristotle 1948: 10). Even if W. D. Ross, editor of the Oxford Translation of Aristotle, was himself less ready to translate poietikais as ‘practical’ than is sometimes suggested (compare NE 1147a28 in Aristotle 1925 and Wiggins 1996: 258–9; it can still be claimed that poiein is usually translated as ‘action’, as in Wildberg 2004: 222), commentators who were more influenced by Green had ethical, political and even ‘sociological’ (see here) reason to minimize any difference between praxis and poiesis. Harold Joachim eulogized ‘the man who embodies’ productive science, ‘the skilled craftsman or the artist, whose “making” is alive with his own intelligent purpose’ and whose techne is ‘confirmed [in] thoughtful mastery of his materials’ and ‘incarnated in the “making” which it illumines and controls’. This man Joachim compared with one who embodies practical science, ‘the statesman or wise agent whose conduct is alive with his own intelligent insight’ (Joachim 1926: xv). In the lectures he delivered on the Nicomachean Ethics from 1902 to 1917, he emphasized the priority of Aristotle’s distinction of ‘speculative science as contrasted with practical and productive’ science, although noting that a distinction should be drawn between ‘praxis’ as energeia and ‘praxis’ as production (Joachim 1951: 2–3, 206–7). Later, G. R. G. Mure objected that ‘when Aristotle abstracts and considers the basis of moral conduct in the individual, he tends perhaps to overemphasize its difference from art’, and that he does not offer ‘a plausible account of art’. Habituation into virtue is ‘formally of the same nature as’ habituation into skill, and ‘the more a man’s talents and interests are absorbed by the steady direction of his energies in an important profession, the less chance there is of his being a bad man’ (Mure 1932: 137, 139).

The Oxford tradition of commentary has become decreasingly tentative in its treatment of Aristotle. J. L. Ackrill critically analysed Aristotle’s distinction of energeia from poiesis, kinesis and genesis in the Nicomachean Ethics (X: 4) and elsewhere (Ackrill 1997c), going on to raise ‘the real difficulty, that actions often or always are productions and productions often or always are actions.… The brave man’s action is fighting uphill to relieve the garrison, and the just man is paying off his debt by mending his neighbor’s fence.’ He proposes that an action must involve some such moral intention but also that the performing of the action involves producing some such result, and that ‘it does not seem natural to say in such a case that the agent has done two things at the same time’ (Ackrill 1997a: 213–14). What seems unnatural to Ackrill is precisely what is proposed by David Charles in Aristotle’s defence. Whereas Ackrill denies that Aristotle referred to a single exercise of intentional agency by ‘various act descriptions’ (ibid.: 217), Charles argues that Aristotle paid ‘sufficient attention to questions of action-individuation’ to maintain ‘the praxis/production distinction’ whilst acknowledging that a moral activity and a productive process can ‘co-occur’ in ‘one action-episode’ or ‘basic act’ (Charles 1986: 120–1; 1984: 62–6). On Charles’s account of Aristotle’s ‘ontological theory’, praxeis are ‘a subset of [human] activities’ comprising those ‘chosen for no further goal’, whereas productions are a subset of processes comprising those that involve skill and occur ‘in an object other than the agent’ (Charles 1986: 129). Activities and processes ‘form mutually exclusive classes of entity’ (Charles 1984: 35). Although the ‘individuation conditions’ of processes ‘are context-free’, processes are not ‘a fundamental ontological category’ (ibid.: 30–1) but exemplifications of the properties of fundamental substances. For example, it is a potential (even if not the natural or essential capacity) of wood that it may become the timber to make or repair a fence, but the process of it forming a fence should be understood as distinct from the intentional action of a neighbour repaying a debt even when the two co-occur, because the fence and the human are two absolutely separate beings.

Charles intends his ‘philosophical scholarship’ to demonstrate the ‘continuing philosophical value’ of Aristotle’s ontology by advancing ‘an Aristotelian account’ of action against positions in contemporary analytic philosophy (Charles 1984: ix–x). His principal target is ‘Davidson’s account of events as an irreducible category’, because this conflicts with Aristotle’s distinction ‘between processes and activities’ and identification of both as properties of substantive beings (Charles 1984: 35; despite revisions, Davidson continued to maintain that actions are ‘a species of event’: e.g. Davidson 2005: 285). However, he also opposes what Anscombe and others advanced as an Aristotelian account of action as issuing from, and sufficiently explained by, syllogistic reasoning. In opposition to this, he differentiates between efficiently ‘causal explanation’ of intentional action, in terms of motive desires, and its ‘teleological explanation’, in terms of goods internal to the action (Charles 1984: 197–202), and his claim that desire informs not just the premises of deliberation but also the decision whether to act on what reason proposes (ibid.: 96) has been criticized by other interpreters as instrumentalist or quasi-Humean (see chapter 4). What he regards as more elemental is Aristotelianism’s ontology. Once this is understood, it is possible to say that a production (such as mending a neighbour’s fence) ‘may be chosen as a means to acting justly right now, and acting justly right now chosen for its own sake without contradiction’ (Charles 1986: 130). He avoids saying of praxis what Ackrill says of it in his case for an inclusivist reading of ‘Aristotle on eudaimonia’ (Ackrill 1997b): that action is both a means and an end, or an ‘internal means’, in that a praxis is performed both for its own sake and for the sake of something else.