Aristotle on the Scope of Practical Reason

Spectators, Legislators, Hopes, and Evils

Pavlos Kontos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367760496
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000399097
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book offers a new account of Aristotle's practical philosophy. Pavlos Kontos argues that Aristotle does not restrict practical reason to its action-guiding and motivational role; rather, practical reason remains practical in the full sense of the term even when its exercise does not immediately concern the guidance of our present actions.

To elucidate why this wider scope of practical reason is important, Kontos brings into the foreground five protagonists that have long been overlooked: (a) spectators or judges who make non-motivational judgments about practical matters that do not interact with their present deliberations and actions; (b) legislators who exercise practical reason to establish constitutions and laws; (c) hopes as an active engagement with moral luck and its impact on our individual lives; (d) prayers as legislators' way to deal with the moral luck hovering around the birth of constitutions and the prospect of a utopia; and (e) people who are outsiders or marginal cases of the responsibility community because they are totally deprived of practical reason. Building on a wide range of interpretations of Aristotle's practical philosophy (from the ancient commentators to contemporary analytic and continental philosophers), Kontos offers new insights about Aristotle's philosophical contribution to the current debates about radical evil, moral luck, hope, utopia, internalism and externalism, and the philosophy of law.

Aristotle on the Scope of Practical Reason will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in Aristotle's ethics, ancient philosophy, and the history of practical philosophy.

1 Fully Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom

1.1 Non-Motivational Practical Judgments

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle famously claims that practical wisdom (phronêsis) is “the correct reason” about practical matters. This conclusion is established on the basis of the mutual dependence that holds between correct reason and the ethical virtues: full (kuria) ethical virtue involves correct reason and, at the same time, being a practically wise person necessarily implies the possession of the ethical virtues. Practical wisdom is the intellectual state that renders good deliberate choice (prohairesis) possible and reliably triggers and guides morally good actions. Thus “practical truth” and practical thought are conceived exclusively from within the perspective of deliberate choice as the starting-point of action.¹ Moreover, in keeping with that perspective, practical wisdom is preoccupied with the agents’ own actions and what is good and advantageous for themselves.² The rationale seems to be that if practical wisdom does not result in actions, it is not practical at all. Let us call this the action-centered conception of practical matters. It echoes the shared conception of all those who read Aristotle’s ethics almost exclusively through the lens of the philosophy of action and a certain moral psychology and flirt with the assumption that only the reasoning that issues in action is genuinely practical.³

But, for better or worse, Aristotle’s technical terms always bear a narrow and a broad meaning. Indeed, the Nicomachean Ethics draws a broader picture of practical wisdom as knowledge of practical matters in general rather than as an intellectual virtue guiding our deliberate choices. Its very definition is a clear sign of this shift: practical wisdom is “a practical state, concerned with what is good or bad for human beings” (VI 5 1140^b5–6; see also VI 5 1140^b20–21). One can hardly miss the change in point of view: practical wisdom’s object, albeit still of a practical character, is no longer confined to the agent’s own actions, good, and advantage but extends to what is good for human beings in general. From this perspective, practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables us to know what kind of actions are, for the most part, appropriate for human beings or what kind of actions are good or bad for a specific group (specified according to natural capacities, age, gender, political environment, etc.), whether in particular circumstances or in the abstract.

Bouleusis is marked by the same ambiguity. At first, the term denotes the “deliberation” involved in deliberate choice. Good deliberation reaches the good, and the good is nothing other than what deliberate choice aims at: namely, the good action itself (VI 9 1142^b20–22). Being led by practical wisdom, good deliberation (euboulia) pays attention to our own actions undertaken for the sake of what we correctly understand as our good or advantage, given the alternatives open to us at present (VI 5 1140^a25–27, 31–33). The initial sketch of deliberation in Book III is even more resolute at excluding from its sphere everything lying outside the action-centered perspective: no one deliberates “about all human affairs either—for example, no Spartan deliberates about the best form of government for the Scythians, since none of these things come about through our own agency. We do deliberate, though, about things that are up to us and doable in action” (III 3 1112^a28–31).

However, in Book VI, the broad sense of deliberation echoes the broad sense of practical wisdom: the good deliberator is someone capable “of aiming at and hitting … the best for human beings of things doable in action” (VI 7 1141^b12–14). Here, no reference is made to our own actions but only to what admits of change thanks to human actions in general. Hence the action-centered perspective cannot be the end of the story. Otherwise, the practical affairs of Scythians or India or what happened in the past—whether in the agent’s own past or not—would remain orphan, so to say. And there is no doubt that we can think about and appraise them in moral terms and in terms of praise or blame. It would be odd to deny the possibility of such a mode of thinking, as if practical reason were incapable of and indifferent to considering practical matters when they do not overlap with the agent’s own deliberate choices and present alternatives of action. Besides, these matters are things that could be otherwise due to human intervention and, more specifically, due to morally relevant actions; they are not unchangeable and eternal things to be investigated by the scientific part of the soul.

Before such a narrow and a broad notion of practical reason, one might want to argue that when we look at practical matters from outside the ambit of our deliberate choice, we just exercise a sort of non-practical or theoretical thinking about them. This is indeed what we are doing when, for instance, we are involved in writing or reading a treatise of practical philosophy like the Nicomachean Ethics. On this view, then, there is a dichotomy between two kinds of reasoning about practical matters: the action centered and the theoretical.

My aim in this chapter is to disrupt this construal and exhibit a threefold distinction by identifying a kind of practical reasoning that is neither action centered and exercised from within the ambit of deliberate choice nor theoretical.⁴ To name it, I will use Aristotle’s term krinein—which in general means “discern” and, when applied on practical matters, may be rendered as “judge.”⁵ For reasons that will progressively become clear, I will call the “judge” (kritês) a spectator (theôrôs) and his/her judgments non-motivational practical judgments (henceforth: nmp judgments). The particularity of nmp judgments is corroborated in Nicomachean Ethics VI 10, where we encounter an intellectual virtue—namely, sunesis (comprehension)—that is not prescriptive (epitaktikê) and action guiding, as practical wisdom is, but merely capable of correct judgment, kritikê. Thus, it does not take part in actual deliberate choices but, nevertheless, does deal with those things one might puzzle and deliberate over.

Significantly, the judgment-oriented side of practical matters is the subject of an entire Aristotelian treatise: the Rhetoric. In its opening chapter, we read that rhetoric is concerned “with the sorts of things we deliberate about” and that, likewise, the judgment of listeners to speeches is concerned with the things “people deliberate about” (Rh. I 1 1357^a1–2, 24–25). Indeed, Rhetoric’s judge (kritês) is quintessentially someone who exercises the intellectual activity of judgment about practical matters that largely fall outside the sphere of his/her own actions. What is important for the moment is that the intellectual capacity to form such a nmp judgment is part of what Aristotle calls the calculative (logistikon) part of the soul—that is, the part also called “deliberative” (bouleutikon), again in the broad sense of the term, which denotes the rational capacity whose objects admit of being otherwise thanks to human activity.⁶

Now, the question I want to address is whether Aristotle actually does endorse my threefold distinction and whether a spectator’s nmp judgments—in the sense of judgments about practical affairs that do not concern the spectator’s own present motives for and plans of action—matter to him and to us. And if they do, how should we understand them?

I start by explaining what exactly, according to the analysis of comprehension (sunesis) in the Nicomachean Ethics, a spectator’s intellectual capacity consists of and how it differs from the action-guiding function of practical wisdom (1.2). Then I draw on the Rhetoric to shed light on Aristotle’s guiding paradigm of such a spectator (1.3). I return to the Nicomachean Ethics to argue that the enkratês is indeed a fully virtuous judge or spectator of practical matters (1.4). And I close by showing that Aristotle’s responses contribute to a philosophically appealing theory of judgment which clearly distinguishes two kinds of practical judgments and allows us to reshape the externalism-internalism debate (1.5). If I am right, then the scope of genuinely practical reason is, indeed, much broader than what it is often taken to be.

1.2 Comprehension

No doubt, the first place to search for an answer to the aforementioned set of questions is the Nicomachean Ethics VI 10, which is devoted to comprehension (sunesis),⁷ since the latter appears to be the virtue of judgment-oriented practical reason. There is no other extensive reference to it in the Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, or Politics.⁸ Let us, then, trace its main features in the passage that follows:

(1) Comprehension, too, that is, good-comprehension … is not the same as scientific knowledge … , nor is it any one of the sciences dealing with a particular area, as medicine is concerned with healthy things … For comprehension is not concerned with what always is and is unchanging, … but with those things one might puzzle and deliberate about. (2) That is why it is concerned with the same things as practical wisdom, (3) although comprehension is not the same as practical wisdom. For practical wisdom is a prescriptive virtue, since what should be done or not is its end, whereas comprehension is discerning [kritikê] only. (For comprehension and good-comprehension are the same …) (4) … just as learning something is called “comprehension” when one is using scientific knowledge, it is also so called when one is using belief to discern, when someone else speaks, matters with which practical wisdom is concerned—that is, discern correctly.

(VI 10 1142^b34–43^a15)

In (1), in reaction to Plato (see, for instance, Cratylus, 411a, 412a) and his neglect of the knowledge of perishable things, Aristotle dissents from identifying comprehension with scientific knowledge. Comprehension is not to be located in the scientific part of the soul, since it is not about eternal and unchangeable things but rather the same things deliberation is about. The intellectual state of comprehension belongs to the calculative part of the soul—i.e. the deliberative part. It should not be included, however, among the crafts since it is concerned with the same things as practical wisdom. Thus, it is strictly practical, not scientific or craft-like. This means that comprehension views practical matters from the perspective of “living well as a whole” (VI 5 1140^a27–28) or of “the best for a human being of things doable in action” (VI 7 1141^b13–14). But, according to (3), though practical, comprehension also differs from practical wisdom. And this divergence, as we saw, is due to the fact that practical wisdom is prescriptive while comprehension is merely judgment oriented.⁹

But what does “merely judgment oriented” really mean? Well, it does not involve charging comprehension with a sort of deficiency. For there is no doubt that comprehension is an intellectual virtue of some sort (I 13 1108^a7–8), since in both (1) and (3) Aristotle equates comprehension with good comprehension.¹⁰ Thus, comprehension does not fail to fulfill a function that it supposedly should, by its nature, fulfill. The contrast at issue is rather a matter of cartography. Insofar as it is prescriptive, in the sense of initiating and guiding actions, practical wisdom is active within the ambit of deliberate choice as the starting-point of actions. By contrast, insofar as comprehension is not prescriptive, it functions outside the ambit of deliberate choice, and, by entailment, its practical judgments are non-motivational.¹¹

We already know how to allay the worry that, if practical wisdom is practical in that it is connected with deliberate choice and the realization of actions, comprehension should be relegated to a “non-practical thinking about the good.”¹² Comprehension is practical, Aristotle says in (1) and (2), for it is clustered together with practical wisdom and craft-knowledge in the calculative part of the rational soul. Comprehension and practical wisdom differ only in their point of view: to have destroyed Troy is not an object appearing within the ambit of our deliberate choice, but obviously we can examine it from the judgment-oriented perspective as an option for those who once had decided to take Troy, and we can judge its moral correctness.¹³

And here is the dilemma we are facing—a dilemma that, formulated in quite different terms, also pervades the contemporary motivational internalism vs externalism debate. First, which is the common view, one might want to claim that the exercise of one and the same intellectual state admits of a certain ancillary differentiation according to whether it is active inside (by being prescriptive) or outside (by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Fully Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom
• 2 Straddling Borders: The Legislator’s Enigmatic Activity
• 3 Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck
• 4 Radical Evil
• Denouement: Aristotle’s Sailors
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Passages