The Nicomachean Ethics - moderate Aristotle - clarity within the limits of the subject matter

 

I will borrow the quotation from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics I found on p. 186 of Gary Paul Morson’s extraordinary new study of the ethics if Russian literature:

Our discussion will be adequate if it achieves clarity within the limits of the subject matter.  For precision cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike, any more than it can be expected in all manufactured articles…  Therefore in a discussion of such subjects [the just, the good]… we must be satisfied to indicate the truth with a rough and general sketch…  For a well-schooled man is one who searches for that degree of precision in each kind of study which the nature of the subject at hand admits: it is obviously just as foolish to accept arguments of probability from a mathematician as to demand strict demonstrations from an orator.  (Bk I, Ch 3, tr. Martin Ostwald – Morson uses a different translation)

Aristotle will be surprised, and highly interested, in advances in mathematics that invalidate his last example, but aside from that what strikes me here is how Aristotle’s approach is so different than Socrates’s.  No pursuit of the perfect definition for Aristotle.  Close enough is good enough, even if the definition does not cover every weird edge case.  How much of philosophy is debate over weird edge cases?  Don’t waste your time, is Aristotle’s advice.  He has more interesting things to do than push fat people in front of trains.

I see one reason I have trouble writing this piece.  Aristotle is the philosopher of the moderate and the ordinary.  His ethical system is an extended argument for moderation in almost all things.  His arguments are too complex to label them common sense, but they are generally commonsensical.  He rarely says anything too strange or wildly imaginative.  He is not the philosopher to argue that nothing exists or to write a proto-novel about the pre-historic war between Athens and Atlantis.

In other words, I find Aristotle a little boring, in part because I am mostly sympathetic.

The material world exists.  It exists pretty much as you perceive it – close enough.  The epistemological  problems that bothered so many philosophers are nonsense.  Pleasure is real, so enjoy it, but don’t overdo it.  True happiness and true friendship are founded on virtue and contemplation, but other kinds of happiness and friendship are valuable, too.

Sounds good to me.

Someday I will read the hard stuff, Metaphysics and so on.  Not this time round.

The philosophers for “next month,” which is now, are the Cynics.  I have been enjoying a surprisingly well-written guide for students, Cynics (2008) by William Desmond, and enjoying even more the writing of Lucian, the great, unique 2nd Century satirist.  The fragments of my hero Diogenes the Cynic will fit in there somewhere.

Then we will turn to Epicureanism and its sublime poetic exposition The Nature of Things (or whatever title your translator chooses) by Lucretius.

Paradoxes and epistemology - early Greek philosophy as conceptual innovation - "Zeno argues fallaciously."

The conceptual innovation of Thales that we identify as the birth of philosophy quickly spun off other conceptual innovations.  A real conceptual innovation does not require a book or even an argument.  You say there are many gods?  But what if there were one? Or none?  Everything is made of, at the base, water.  Why not fire, or air?  The question about the basis of existence is more important than the zany answers.  Where did existence come from?  Does it change?  Can there be a thing that is not a thing, the “void”?  How does infinity work?  The questions explode.

Much effort is used to understand motion.  Does anything move at all?  The answer would seem obvious, yet Zeno of Elea shows that Achilles will never catch the tortoise, and that the arrow in the air is not actually moving at all.  I am happy to see that Aristotle finds Zeno as aggravating as I do. Here is Aristotle on the Arrow Paradox:

Zeno argues fallaciously.  For if, he says, everything is at rest when it is in a space equal to itself, and if what is travelling is always in such a space at any instant, then the travelling arrow is motionless.  This is false; for time is not composed of indivisible instants – nor is any other size.  (from Physics, tr. Jonathan Barnes in Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd ed., p. 104)

We are now used to the cinematic special effect that stops time and freezes the bullet in flight along with the jumping dog and the pouring water.  Maybe the hero will pluck the bullet out of the air.  Clearly the arrow is not moving in the frozen moment, nor in any other of the infinitely other frozen moments.  How, then, can we say it is in motion when at no point is it in motion?

I am with Aristotle here, but Zeno’s effect is to demand some deeper thinking about how motion and time work.  My experience is that I must relax into philosophy at least a bit.  Look for the useful question generated by the nonsense and worry less about, or even enjoy, the nonsense itself.

Zeno is defending the rational system of Parmenides, who argues, step by step, in the first half of a rather tedious poem, that existence consists of a single thing, a giant motionless sphere.  In the second half of the poem he describes a world with motion and things but says this is all “opinion,” a phony artifact of our unreliable senses.  Fine, go about acting like there are many things moving around, but really it’s all just that giant sphere of gray goo.  Parmenides has invented epistemology, starting with the radical position that our senses are simply wrong about everything.  The less radical, inescapable question, will never leave us: but how do we really know anything?  I had not known that the question was so old, almost as old as philosophy itself.

Next week I’ll write a bit about Heraclitus and Empedocles, who I singled out because my impression was that they are more enjoyable to read in their own right than most of the other early philosophers.  I have spent a couple of weeks testing this idea, and I think I was right.

Please read Greek philosophy with me - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, dog men, people jumping in volcanoes

Greek philosophy, readalong #2.

This idea got more interesting the more I thought about it, but had more organizational problems, plus the greater problem that I do not think of philosophy as a strength of mine.  My solution has been to convert the project into literature.

Is philosophy a branch of literature?  I treat it that way.  Philosophers, generally, do not.  As I progress this year perhaps this distinction will become clearer to me, or perhaps it will disappear.

I have organized nine months of reading – does that ever seem like plenty – along conventional historical lines like in many histories of philosophy and in the valuable Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (3rd century, probably) by Diogenes Laertius.  Each month I will work on a school or writer.  At the end of the month, I will write about a key text, giving the project a readalong-like quality, although anyone can read whatever seems interesting, obviously.  Ignore me except to the extent that I am useful.

Picking a text can be a challenge.  Among the dozens of Greek philosophers active from the 6th century BCE up to the Christian era we have intact, substantial texts for four of them: Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, and Theophrastus, and his are mostly about botany.  Everyone else exists only in fragments, or not at all.  Of course some, like Socrates, did not write anything.  What is a philosopher, anyways?

Here is what I want to read:

January: The Presocratics. The texts: the fragments of Heraclitus and Empedocles.  We will at first embrace the fragment.

The birth of philosophy in western Anatolia and spread to Italy.  Science and mysticism; forbidden beans and jumping in volcanoes.  Heraclitus and Empedocles both lead the pack in the substantial number of fragments and are particularly important to later literature.  Democritus, the inventor of the atom, was tempting, as was Pythagoras, as I understand it not actually the inventor of the Pythagorean theorem.

Tomorrow I will post some advice on how to read these writers.

February: Presocratics and Sophists.  Texts: Euthydemus and Theaetetus, Socratic dialogues by Plato.  The former is about the Sophists; the latter about the Presocratics.

March: Socrates.  Texts: Plato’s pieces about the death of Socrates, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Phaedo. 

Xenophon fits here, with his own Socratic dialogues and his Recollections of Socrates.

April: Plato.  Text: The Republic.

I am spreading Plato over many months because I hope to read lots of his work along the way.  I think of him as a significant literary artist.  We’ll see how much I get read.  Most Platonic dialogues (not The Republic) are quite short.

May: Aristotle.  Text: The Nicomachean Ethics.  The obvious literary choice after Poetics. 

June: Cynicism.  Text: the fragments of my hero Diogenes and selected satires of Lucian.  A number of Greek philosophers are exemplars of turning a severe personality disorder into a coherent ethical system.

Lucian is one of those writers who opened up later writers for me.  He solved mysteries.  He is a satirist and fantasist, not a philosopher, if there is a difference.

July: Epicurianism.  Text: On the Nature of Things (1st C. BCE) by Lucretius.  This is an epic cosmological poem, a masterpiece of Latin poetry, and also the grand presentation of Epicurian ideas.

August: Stoicism.  Text: I don’t know.  The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is the obvious one.  On the Nature of the Gods by Cicero?  Something by Seneca?  All, again, Roman.  Stoicism and Epicurianism turned into major, long-lasting schools of thought, yet barely a scrap of writing by the founding philosophers has survived.

September: Plutarch.  Texts: some relevant essays, like “On the Daimon of Socrates.”  Plutarch is Greek, at least, not a philosopher but rather the inventor of the familiar essay.  He often wrote about philosophical subjects.  I thought it would be valuable, perhaps refreshing, to end with a more deliberately literary figure.

I hope to read a lot more than the texts I have indicated.  My plan is to write some kind of reading journal on Fridays, discussing whatever I have been reading.  Tomorrow, for example, I will write about reading Diogenes Laertius and Presocratic fragments.

Please feel free to suggest modifications and alternatives.  I don’t know who else is really interested in this, even at the level of reading one book.  I know that I sure am interested.

Notes on Aristotle's Poetics - What are the conditions on which the tragic effect depends?

Aristotle did not invent literary criticism with Poetics (late 4th c. BCE, maybe) – we just read The Frogs – but for centuries it was the base of Western literary criticism, not a source of insight but rather a set of rules.  The Unities, the Tragic Flaw, catharsis, the ranking of forms, with the epic poem on top.  The medieval importation of Aristotle from Muslim Spain was a great advance for European civilization, but it was not always so good for literature.

How prescriptive did Aristotle mean to be?  I am not sure.  His initial impulse is the central one of the enterprise: experiencing a powerful work of literature, he wants to know why it affected him so much.  “What are the conditions on which the tragic effect depends?” (13, 681) So he assembles the evidence, arranging the tragedies by how they affected him, and begins to generalize.  Perhaps he is just describing his own taste, but the patterns he sees are clear enough.  One central action as opposed to many; stories about families; tragic results caused not by “depravity” but “in some great error on [the protagonist’s] part” (13, 682); writing that is a mix of the simple and ornate.  

These, the strange word, the metaphor, the ornamental equivalent, &c., will save the language from seeming mean and prosaic, while the ordinary words in it will secure the requisite clearness (22, 699).

Aristotle is the originator of “make it strange” (but not too strange).

Oedipus the King is the perfect tragedy for Sophocles, with other plays approaching it in power.  It is the best, so other plays should be like it, and then it is just a small step to must.  But it is clear enough that Aristotle valued other kinds of plays.  He criticizes Euripides in many ways but is fascinated by – finds a kind of catharsis in – Iphigenia in Tauris, a tragedy that is not even tragic.  But he has a strong taste for scenes of “discovery,” where the emotional effect turns on sister’s recognizing long lost brothers and so on.

That is one example of taste as prescript.  Here is another where Aristotle is obviously wrong, when he argues that a story should not be about:

… an extremely bad man [] falling from happiness into misery.  Such a story may arouse the human feeling in us, but it will not move us to either pity of fear; pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves… (13, 681)

His assumption that the bad man is not like ourselves is kind.  But my point is that many people absolutely love such stories, and also stories about virtue rewarded and for that matter vice rewarded.  Who am I to judge the catharsis of others?  But perhaps those stories are more common in a later, not less but differently fatalistic, Christian culture.

I have been quoting from the Ingram Bywater translation as found in the Modern Library Introduction to Aristotle.  Bywater conceals the key Greek terms.  A different translation might well look like a different argument.  I don’t know Greek, but I can see where they are hidden, where “fear and pity” translates “catharsis” [completely wrong! see comments below, please] – “The tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear” (14, 683).  Up above is the “tragic flaw” or “hamartia” concealed by, translated as, “some great error.”

I’m going to round out my look at Classical Greek literary criticism with On the Sublime or On Great Writing by Longinus (1st c. CE), whoever he was.  On the Sublime is not as play-centered as Poetics, so a bit of a tangent, but it is the major alternative to the aesthetics of Aristotle.  It is full of interesting things, and is perhaps sixty pages long.  I will try to write about Longinus at the end of the month, after the last Menander play.

I am also beginning to wonder if it would be a good idea to take a fresh look at Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which is directly related, or about two-thirds related, to this last year of reading, so maybe that will be the final text in the aesthetics series.  Please join me if interested.