What would it be like to hang with Aristotle? Last night in "Intro to Ethics", we continued our reading of The Nichomachean Ethics. The second half of the class was devoted to intellectual virtue and we finished up with a discussion of the relation of practical wisdom to philosophical wisdom. It turns out that the great heroes of philosophy, Anaxagoras and Thales, had philosophical wisdom but not practical wisdom. In other words, they could uncover the deep mysteries of the cosmos, develop new ways to explain the world, but had trouble walking around without falling into wells and perhaps found the motives of other people somewhat insrutable.

Since Aristotle clearly respects these guys and thinks that this sort of intellectual virtue makes a superior sort of happiness possible, the conversations naturally turned to the character of Aristotle himself. NE is difficult going, in part because the presentation is simultaneously technical and conversational. There are those odds tangents, such as his distinction about adultery for profit compared to adultery for other motives. The section it appears in isn't about adultery and, moreover, Aristotle doesn't seem to be concerned about weighing the two to find one more or less blameworthy than the other, he just wants to make sure that they get properly categorized in the nomenclature of the virtues that he was in the process of constructing at that point. Why would he have done this? Maybe he's in the process of lecturing and he gets distracted by an interesting tributary of the virtues, maybe an enterprising student has noticed that unusual questions can get the professor off onto to strange tangents, so he's decided to toss off a question to get Aristotle off topic for the amusement of the class. Nonetheless, it's a tangent and these tangents are one place where the character of Aristotle sneaks through. I just offer that one as an example, there are other places as well.

Students started offering their impressions of the Stageirite. First off, that he was pretty nerdy, no surprise there. If the obsessive categorizing didn't signal some geeky tendencies, then the whole practical wisdom vs. philosophical wisdom was a dead give away, that part of the book is a defense of nerdy tendencies.

The next step was surprising there was a general agreement that Aristotle was too rigid, that he tended to see things in black and white, too much emphasis on exactitude. We had already discussed the part in Book I where Aristotle asserts that every science must be considered to its own degree of precision, which, in the case of ethics, isn't all that precise. Even more importantly, we had worked our way through his discussion of the moral virtues. "Virtues finds and chooses the mean", and here "the mean" is almost by definition a shade of grey, an indeterminate moderation between two extremes. I also recall sharing this opinion when I was first reading Aristotle, and even after having taken Intro to Philosophy. That was surprising since I'm sure that Tony Celano did not paint Aristotle as a fanatic for order.

When I was reading this time, I was really impressed at the extent to which Aristotle teases out fine distinctions and seeks the moderate position based on a subtle picture of both human nature and common place wisdom. He's certainly got little interest in condeming anyone or establishing exceptionless laws to seperate the worthy from the unworthy, it's all about figuring out how to thrive. This leaves me somewhat confused, why does he come across as such a jerk on first reading but only later as refined and sympathetic?  ¶ #

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