Recovering Nature

Essays in Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Metaphysics in Honor of Ralph McInerny

John P. O'Callaghan, Thomas S. Hibbs, John P. O'Callaghan, Thomas S. Hibbs

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780268160715
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The recovery of nature has been a unifying and enduring aim of the writings of Ralph McInerny, Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame, director of the Jacques Maritain Center, former director of the Medieval Institute, and author of numerous works in philosophy, literature, and journalism. While many of the fads that have plagued philosophy and theology during the last half-century have come and gone, recent developments suggest that McInerny's commitment to Aristotelian-Thomism was boldly, if quietly, prophetic. In his persistent, clear, and creative defenses of natural theology and natural law, McInerny has appealed to nature to establish a dialogue between theists and non-theists, to contribute to the moral and political renewal of American culture, and particularly to provide some of the philosophical foundations for Catholic theology.

This volume brings together essays by an impressive group of scholars, including William Wallace, O.P., Jude P. Dougherty, John Haldane, Thomas DeKoninck, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Solomon, Daniel McInerny, Janet E. Smith, Michael Novak, Stanley Hauerwas, Laura Garcia, Alvin Plantinga, Alfred J. Freddoso, and David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

Part II

Ethics

5

John Case: An Example of Aristotelianism’s Self-Subversion?

Alasdair MacIntyre

The history of Western thought is punctuated by revivals of Aristotelianism. And often a central part in those revivals is played by some renewed interest in Aristotle’s ethics and politics. But such revivals are not lasting and characteristically are the prologue to some anti-Aristotelian mode of thought, so that the history of Western thought is also punctuated by rejections of Aristotelianism. What causes these cycles of revival and rejection? There is certainly no single answer, but sometimes at least it seems to have been the case that moral and political Aristotelianism has been self-subverting, that it has been its protagonists who brought about its downfall. And perhaps this was how it was with some Renaissance Aristotelians.

I

In Philip Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetrie the claims of the poet to be the preeminent teacher of the virtues are challenged by the moral philosophers and the historians. In this encounter the historians fare worst, but the moral philosophers turn out to be no better than the poets in telling us how we should live, while being a good deal their inferior at motivating us. So Sidney concludes of the poet that “therein, (namely in morrall doctrine, the chief of all knowledges,) hee dooth not merely farre passe the Historian, but for instructing, is well nigh comparable to the Philosopher; and for moving, leaves him behind him. . . .” What philosophers did Sidney have in mind?

At the very beginning of the Apologie Sidney provides a mocking portrait of those who compete with the poets for preeminence “among whom as principall challengers step forth the morrall Philosophers, whom me thinketh, I see comming towards me with a sullen gravity, as though they could not abide vice by day light, rudely clothed for to witnes outwardly their contempt of outward things, with bookes in their hands agaynst glory, whereto they sette theyre names, sophistically speaking against subtility, and angry with any man in whom they see the soule fault of anger: these men casting larges as they goe, of Definitions, Divisions, and Distinctions, with a scornefull interogative, doe soberly aske, whether it bee possible to finde any path, so ready to leade a man to vertue, as that which teacheth what vertue is?” Sidney probably wrote these words in late 1581, nine years after he had left Oxford. But he would not have had much, if any, occasion to encounter philosophers during his travels abroad or his time at court, so that it seems reasonable to suppose that it is the teachers of moral philosophy at Oxford whom he still has in mind. And the most notable of these was John Case.

Case was some thirteen years older than Sidney. It was in the same year (1568) that Sidney had entered Christ Church that Case had become a Fellow of St. Johns. Charles B. Schmitt¹ in his splendid account of Case’s life and work laid great emphasis both on the knowledge of Sidney’s writings exhibited in Case’s later work and on Case’s acquaintance with some of Sidney’s friends and with Sidney’s sister. But while Sidney was an undergraduate at Oxford, Case’s reputation as a moral philosopher had yet to be made. It was finally made by the publication in 1585, a year before Sidney’s death, of his Speculum quaestionum moralium, in Universam Ethicen Aristotelis, a detailed exposition of and philosophical commentary upon the Nicomachean Ethics, printed by Joseph Barnes on the press recently given to Oxford University by its Chancellor, Robert Devereux Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Sidney’s uncle. (So began the long and marvellous history of the Oxford University Press.) And it is to the Earl of Leicester that Case’s book is dedicated.

In the same year Sidney published his Discourse in Defence of the Earl of Leicester and it seems unlikely that he did not have some knowledge of the publication of Case’s book. If he had read it, he might well have felt that its definitions, divisions, and distinctions provided confirmation for his stinging portrait of the moral philosopher. But Case’s book is in an important way a reply to Sidney. I do not mean by this to imply that Case had read the Apologie, let alone that he had it in mind when writing the Speculum. The Apologie was not published until 1595 and, even if we entertain the remote possibility that Case had been shown the Apologie in manuscript, it is very unlikely that he could have seen it before a large part of the Speculum had already been written. What then do I mean when I say that Case’s Speculum is nonetheless a reply to Sidney’s Apologie? Just this, that Case’s Speculum articulates more adequately than any other book (the claim was not peculiar to Case, but is found elsewhere among Renaissance Aristotelians) the thesis that the teaching of moral philosophy, rightly understood, is the teaching of the moral virtues, that the moral philosopher is preeminent, not only in affording instruction about the theory of the moral virtues, but in making those whom he instructs virtuous. If Case’s arguments are sound, then Sidney’s arguments for the preeminence of the poets fail.

The claims made by Case were endorsed in some of the twenty-seven congratulatory Latin poems by his Oxford colleagues which precede the text. “The book,” declares the Vice-Chancellor of the university, “teaches all the several virtues by philosophizing.” And in the dedicatory epistle Case addresses the students of both English universities as one anxious to instruct them to practical effect. He is not merely engaged in expounding the text of the Nicomachean Ethics and in responding to a variety of objections to Aristotle’s theses and arguments, but is doing so in order to make his readers, if they are seriously attentive, better human beings in a way that only the teaching of moral philosophy can achieve. So Case’s Speculum asserts precisely what Sidney’s Apologie denies. But in so doing Case encounters an obvious initial difficulty.

At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle had argued that the young are not yet capable of learning what the moral philosopher has to teach. Their experience is too limited and they are guided by their as yet disordered passions (1095a 2–6). What they need is the discipline of practical habituation, not theoretical instruction. To act not only in accordance with what virtue requires, but virtuously is first to know what one is doing—that one’s action is what justice or courage or generosity requires, secondly to do what one does for its own sake, to do it just because it is the just or courageous or generous thing to do, and thirdly to give expression in so doing to a stable disposition to perform just or courageous or generous actions, whenever they are required. But Aristotle emphasizes that it is not the knowledge that moves us to action (1105a 30–1105b 3). So that it is not only that the young are not the moral philosopher’s appropriate audience. It is also that, on Aristotle’s view, the kind of moral training that produces virtuous character is a type of practical habituation and not theoretical instruction in moral philosophy.

II

It must seem then that Case would only have been able to answer Sidney if he had been willing to repudiate Aristotle. But this is not at all how Case proceeds. Instead he radically reinterprets Aristotle, without recognizing that he is doing so. Aristotle had remarked that one can grow older without becoming mature and that there are therefore older people who remain in the condition of the young. Case seizes on this as a first step in arguing that “young” is to be understood as referring not so much to age as to mores. “Wherefore it is not by being few or many in years, but by inconstancy and levity of mores that I define ‘young’ in these passages” (lib. I, cap. 3). The student, that is to say, must have the habits of a good student, but this habituation is preliminary to the moral education afforded by instruction in the Ethics. When we remember the age of the undergraduates whom Case was teaching at Oxford and whom he addressed in his dedicatory epistle, the difference between Case and Aristotle becomes even clearer. (Sidney who, after four years at Shrewsbury School, had become an undergraduate at the age of thirteen was younger than most, but there were many not much older.) The adolescent student whose preliminary education has implanted a desire to excel and a willingness to learn from his teachers is treated by Case as someone who already has all the prior habituation that he needs in order to be moved to the acquisition and exercise of the virtues by philosophical instruction.

Both the scope and the power thus ascribed by Case to moral philosophy make it necessary for him also to revise Aristotle’s conception of the virtue of prudence, phronesis, although once again Case was plainly unaware that he was engaged in such a revision. For Case in a preface addressed to the students of both universities had ascribed to the study of philosophical ethics great power: “It is the norm of mores, the mistress of the virtues, the gnomon (the measure on a sundial) of life, the rule of actions.” So much so that when he comes to the discussion of prudence, he confronts the problem of distinguishing between moral philosophy and prudence. The problem arises because on his account it seems to be the case that “Moral philosophy is the habit of acting with true reasoning concerning human goods: therefore it is prudence.” Case’s reply is that “Moral philosophy treats these goods in terms of genus, prudence in terms of species” (lib. VI, cap. 5). The philosopher supplies a set of moral generalizations; the prudent agent applies them to particular types of circumstance. Prudence is, so to speak, applied moral philosophy and without moral philosophy the agent would not have the requisite stock of generalizations.

How then does Case deal with Aristotle’s assertion that knowledge (scientia in Case’s translation) plays little or no part in virtuous action (Nicomachean Ethics 1105b 2–3)? He does so by quoting the passage in question and replying that the knowledge thus referred to is theoretical, contemplative knowledge. The knowledge that is required for virtuous action is what he calls a knowledge of circumstances, by which he means, so it presently becomes clear, the knowledge of what kind of virtuous action is required in whatever circumstances (lib. II, cap. 4). But to this further objections have to be raised. That the scientia circumstantiarum that is needed is prudence seems evident from Case’s definition of virtue, yet one can be learned without being prudent, so that the knowledge of circumstances—which presumably the learned possess—is not sufficient. Moreover the ignorant and uncultured often possess virtue, but, on this view of prudence, they cannot be prudent.

To this Case’s response is that two kinds of prudence must be distinguished. There is on the one hand particular prudence, which is the limited knowledge of how to act virtuously in some range of particular circumstances and this knowledge can be in the less experienced and the less learned. But there is on the other hand “heroic and general” prudence, “which is the knowledge of living well and of acting in accordance with all the virtues in every circumstance, and this is not necessary for everyone.” So the ignorant and uncultured can after all be prudent on this or that occasion, but only with an inferior form of prudence. And one can be learned without having the knowledge necessary for heroic and general prudence, a knowledge which is to be provided generally, even if not necessarily always, by moral philosophy. There remains one further objection.

“To obey the precepts of virtue is an act of virtue, but a boy can obey the precepts without prudence: therefore there can be an act of virtue without prudence” (lib. VI, cap. 13). What is noteworthy here is that Case does not reply, as Aristotle presumably would have done, by drawing a distinction between acts that conform to what the virtues require and acts that issue from the settled dispositions of a virtuous human being. Instead Case answers that “As the act of virtue is in the boy inchoately, so is prudence. . . .”

Moral development then is from the inchoate moral virtue and prudence of the very young to the development of virtuous habits over a certain limited range of cases to the heroic virtue, requiring heroic and general prudence, for which an education into the substance of Aristotle’s ethics is required. The notion that what Aristotle had provided was primarily a set of general moral precepts which can be taught to the well brought up young, so that they can then learn to apply these to their own particular circumstances, is not of course original to Case. It was this conception of Aristotle’s ethics that had led Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke named the Governour (1531) to include the Nicomachean Ethics along with Cicero’s De Officiis in the books of which tutors of young gentlemen were to make use. And when John Wilkinson published the first English translation of the Nicomachean Ethics in 1547 (not from the Greek, but from Brunetto Latini’s Italian), his title page read: “The Ethiques of Aristotle, that is to saye, precepts of good behavoure and perfighte honestie, now newly translated into English.”

Case however brings to the task of expounding Aristotle a kind of learning that is found in none of his English predecessors, but that matches the best of his European contemporaries. He draws upon both scholastic and humanistic sources and methods, making use of a wide range of older and newer commentators, including Aquinas, Buridan, and Burleigh. But his use of commentators is always subordinated to those educational purposes which provide his enterprise with its justification.

His methods of exposition were eclectic. He was, as an Aristotelian, opposed to Ramus’s positions and influence and he contributed to the debates between Aristotelian and Ramist dialectic. But he made use of Ramist schemes of division and of Ramist diagrams in setting out his Aristotelian subject-matter, putting these devices to the service of a type of commentary modeled on the scholastic treatment of Quaestiones Disputatae, where exposition proceeds through the posing and answering of successive objections, something that I have already illustrated in Case’s treatment of prudence.

Not every reader has been charmed by Case’s modes of exposition. Nancy S. Struever² has called them “technocracy run wild”³ and “reductive and baroque,”⁴ concluding that “the message is virtually submerged under the weight of the organizational modes.”⁵ And her criticism involves content as well as form, for she takes Case’s aim to be “to put forward as many familiar and comfortable moralisms as possible with the least expense of effort of reconciliation.”⁶ Struever’s criticisms however miss the point in two different ways.

First they ignore the excellence of most of Case’s expositions of Aristotle. Generally his use of techniques of division clarifies effectively what would otherwise be obscure to the student and his distinctions are just those that the beginning Elizabethan student needs. This is a book that reflects the experience of teaching undergraduates and that speaks to the teaching needs of Case’s colleagues as well as to the needs of his and their pupils. The questions put to Aristotle may not be quite the same as either the questions put by their medieval predecessors or their modern successors, but Case’s book is well-designed to move the attentive reader from being a naïve questioner of Aristotle to someone who has begun to learn from the text how to question Aristotle in Aristotle’s own terms.

Secondly, what Struever says may suggest that Case merely asserts what she calls “moralisms.” But it is of the first importance t...