Aristotle: Ethics

aristotle

Standard interpretations of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics usually
maintain that Aristotle (384-322 BCE.) emphasizes the role of habit in
conduct. It is commonly thought that virtues, according to Aristotle,
are habits and that the good life is a life of mindless routine.

These interpretations of Aristotle's ethics are the result of
imprecise translations from the ancient Greek text. Aristotle uses the
word hexis to denote moral virtue. But the word does not merely mean
passive habituation. Rather, hexis is an active condition, a state in
which something must actively hold itself.

Virtue, therefore, manifests itself in action. More explicitly, an
action counts as virtuous, according to Aristotle, when one holds
oneself in a stable equilibrium of the soul, in order to choose the
action knowingly and for its own sake. This stable equilibrium of the
soul is what constitutes character.

Similarly, Aristotle's concept of the mean is often misunderstood. In
the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle repeatedly states that virtue is a
mean. The mean is a state of clarification and apprehension in the
midst of pleasures and pains that allows one to judge what seems most
truly pleasant or painful. This active state of the soul is the
condition in which all the powers of the soul are at work in concert.
Achieving good character is a process of clearing away the obstacles
that stand in the way of the full efficacy of the soul.

For Aristotle, moral virtue is the only practical road to effective
action. What the person of good character loves with right desire and
thinks of as an end with right reason must first be perceived as
beautiful. Hence, the virtuous person sees truly and judges rightly,
since beautiful things appear as they truly are only to a person of
good character. It is only in the middle ground between habits of
acting and principles of action that the soul can allow right desire
and right reason to make their appearance, as the direct and natural
response of a free human being to the sight of the beautiful.

1. Habit

In many discussions, the word habit is attached to the Ethics as
though it were the answer to a multiple-choice question on a
philosophy achievement test. Hobbes' Leviathan? Self-preservation.
Descartes' Meditations? Mind-body problem. Aristotle's Ethics? Habit.
A faculty seminar I attended a few years ago was mired in the opinion
that Aristotle thinks the good life is one of mindless routine. More
recently, I heard a lecture in which some very good things were said
about Aristotle's discussion of choice, yet the speaker still
criticized him for praising habit when so much that is important in
life depends on openness and spontaneity. Can it really be that
Aristotle thought life is lived best when thinking and choosing are
eliminated?

On its face this belief makes no sense. It is partly a confusion
between an effect and one of its causes. Aristotle says that, for the
way our lives turn out, "it makes no small difference to be habituated
this way or that way straight from childhood, but an enormous
difference, or rather all the difference." (1103b, 23-5) Is this not
the same as saying those lives are nothing but collections of habits?
If this is what sticks in your memory, and leads you to that
conclusion, then the cure is easy, since habits are not the only
effects of habituation, and a thing that makes all the difference is
indispensable but not necessarily the only cause of what it produces.

We will work through this thought in a moment, but first we need to
notice that another kind of influence may be at work when you recall
what Aristotle says about habit, and another kind of medicine may be
needed against it. Are you thinking that no matter how we analyze the
effects of habituation, we will never get around the fact that
Aristotle plainly says that virtues are habits? The reply to that
difficulty is that he doesn't say that at all. He says that moral
virtue is a hexis. Hippocrates Apostle, and others, translate hexis as
habit, but that is not at all what it means. The trouble, as so often
in these matters, is the intrusion of Latin. The Latin habitus is a
perfectly good translation of the Greek hexis, but if that detour gets
us to habit in English we have lost our way. In fact, a hexisis pretty
much the opposite of a habit.

The word hexis becomes an issue in Plato's Theaetetus. Socrates makes
the point that knowledge can never be a mere passive possession,
stored in the memory the way birds can be put in cages. The word for
that sort of possession, ktÎsis, is contrasted with hexis, the kind of
having-and-holding that is never passive but always at work right now.
Socrates thus suggests that, whatever knowledge is, it must have the
character of a hexis in requiring the effort of concentrating or
paying attention. A hexis is an active condition, a state in which
something must actively hold itself, and that is what Aristotle says a
moral virtue is.

Some translators make Aristotle say that virtue is a disposition, or a
settled disposition. This is much better than calling it a habit, but
still sounds too passive to capture his meaning. In De Anima, when
Aristotle speaks of the effect produced in us by an object of sense
perception, he says this is not a disposition (diathesis) but a hexis.
(417b, 15-17) His whole account of sensing and knowing depends on this
notion that receptivity to what is outside us depends on an active
effort to hold ourselves ready. In Book VII of the Physics, Aristotle
says much the same thing about the way children start to learn: they
are not changed, he says, nor are they trained or even acted upon in
any way, but they themselves get straight into an active state when
time or adults help them settle down out of their native condition of
disorder and distraction. (247b, 17-248a, 6) Curtis Wilson once
delivered a lecture here at St. John's College, in which he asked his
audience to imagine what it would be like if we had to teach children
to speak by deliberately and explicitly imparting everything they had
to do. We somehow set them free to speak, and give them a particular
language to do it in, but they–Mr. Wilson called them little
geniuses–they do all the work.

Everyone at St. John's has thought about the kind of learning that
does not depend on the authority of the teacher and the memory of the
learner. In the Meno it is called recollection; Aristotle says that it
is an active knowing that is always already at work in us. In Plato's
image we draw knowledge up out of ourselves; in Aristotle's metaphor
we settle down into knowing. In neither account is it possible for
anyone to train us, as Gorgias has habituated Meno into the mannerisms
of a knower. Habits can be strong but they never go deep. Authentic
knowledge does engage the soul in its depths, and with this sort of
knowing Aristotle links virtue. In the passage cited from Book VII of
the Physics, he says that, like knowledge, virtues are not imposed on
us as alterations of what we are; that would be, he says, like saying
we alter a house when we put a roof on it. In the Categories,
knowledge and virtue are the two examples he gives of what hexis means
(8b, 29); there he says that these active states belong in the general
class of dispositions, but are distinguished by being lasting and
durable. The word disposition by itself, he reserves for more passive
states, easy to remove and change, such as heat, cold, and sickness.

In the Ethics, Aristotle identifies moral virtue as a hexis in Book
II, chapter 4. He confirms this identity by reviewing the kinds of
things that are in the soul, and eliminating the feelings and impulses
to which we are passive and the capacities we have by nature, but he
first discovers what sort of thing a virtue is by observing that the
goodness is never in the action but only in the doer. This is an
enormous claim that pervades the whole of theEthics, and one that we
need to stay attentive to. No action is good or just or courageous
because of any quality in itself. Virtue manifests itself in action,
Aristotle says, only when one acts while holding oneself in a certain
way. This is where the word hexis comes into the account, from pÙs
echÙn, the stance in which one holds oneself when acting. The
indefinite adverb is immediately explained: an action counts as
virtuous when and only when one holds oneself in a stable equilibrium
of the soul, in order to choose the action knowingly and for its own
sake. I am translating as "in a stable equilibrium" the words bebaiÙs
kai ametakinÍtÙs; the first of these adverbs means stably or after
having taken a stand, while the second does not mean rigid or
immovable, but in a condition from which one can't be moved all the
way over into a different condition. It is not some inflexible
adherence to rules or duty or precedent that is conveyed here, but
something like a Newton's wheel weighted below the center, or one of
those toys that pops back upright whenever a child knocks it over.

This stable equilibrium of the soul is what we mean by having
character. It is not the result of what we call conditioning. There is
a story told about B. F. Skinner, the psychologist most associated
with the idea of behavior modification, that a class of his once
trained him to lecture always from one corner of the room, by smiling
and nodding whenever he approached it, but frowning and faintly
shaking their heads when he moved away from it. That is the way we
acquire habits. We slip into them unawares, or let them be imposed on
us, or even impose them on ourselves. A person with ever so many
habits may still have no character. Habits make for repetitive and
predictable behavior, but character gives moral equilibrium to a life.
The difference is between a foolish consistency wholly confined to the
level of acting, and a reliability in that part of us from which
actions have their source. Different as they are, though, character
and habit sound to us like things that are linked, and in Greek they
differ only by the change of an epsilon to an eta, making Íthos from
ethos

We are finally back to Aristotle's claim that character, Íthos, is
produced by habit, ethos. It should now be clear though, that the
habit cannot be any part of that character, and that we must try to
understand how an active condition can arise as a consequence of a
passive one, and why that active condition can only be attained if the
passive one has come first. So far we have arranged three notions in a
series, like rungs of a ladder: at the top are actives states, such as
knowledge, the moral virtues, and the combination of virtues that
makes up a character; the middle rung, the mere dispositions, we have
mentioned only in passing to claim that they are too shallow and
changeable to capture the meaning of virtue; the bottom rung is the
place of the habits, and includes biting your nails, twisting your
hair, saying "like" between every two words, and all such passive and
mindless conditions. What we need to notice now is that there is yet
another rung of the ladder below the habits.

We all start out life governed by desires and impulses. Unlike the
habits, which are passive but lasting conditions, desires and impulses
are passive and momentary, but they are very strong. Listen to a child
who can't live without some object of appetite or greed, or who makes
you think you are a murderer if you try to leave her alone in a dark
room. How can such powerful influences be overcome? To expect a child
to let go of the desire or fear that grips her may seem as hopeless as
Aristotle's example of training a stone to fall upward, were it not
for the fact that we all know that we have somehow, for the most part,
broken the power of these tyrannical feelings. We don't expel them
altogether, but we do get the upper hand; an adult who has temper
tantrums like those of a two-year old has to live in an institution,
and not in the adult world. But the impulses and desires don't weaken;
it is rather the case that we get stronger.

Aristotle doesn't go into much detail about how this happens, except
to say that we get the virtues by working at them: in the
give-and-take with other people, some become just, others unjust; by
acting in the face of frightening things and being habituated to be
fearful or confident, some become brave and others cowardly; and some
become moderate and gentle, others spoiled and bad-tempered, by
turning around from one thing and toward another in the midst of
desires and passions. (1103 b, 1422) He sums this up by saying that
when we are at-work in a certain way, an active state results. This
innocent sentence seems to me to be one of the lynch-pins that hold
together the Ethics, the spot that marks the transition from the
language of habit to the language appropriate to character. If you
read the sentence in Greek, and have some experience of Aristotle's
other writings, you will see how loaded it is, since it says that a
hexis depends upon an energeia. The latter word, that can be
translated as being-at-work, cannot mean mere behavior, however
repetitive and constant it may be. It is this idea of being-at-work,
which is central to all of Aristotle's thinking, that makes
intelligible the transition out of childhood and into the moral
stature that comes with character and virtue. (See Aristotle on Motion
and its Place in Nature for as discussion energeia. -ed.)

The moral life can be confused with the habits approved by some
society and imposed on its young. We at St. John's College still stand
up at the beginning and end of Friday-night lectures because
Stringfellow Barr — one of the founders of the current curriculum —
always stood when anyone entered or left a room. What he considered
good breeding is for us mere habit; that becomes obvious when some
student who stood up at the beginning of a lecture occasionally gets
bored and leaves in the middle of it. In such a case the politeness
was just for show, and the rudeness is the truth. Why isn't all
habituation of the young of this sort? When a parent makes a child
repeatedly refrain from some desired thing, or remain in some
frightening situation, the child is beginning to act as a moderate or
brave person would act, but what is really going on within the child?
I used to think that it must be the parent's approval that was
becoming stronger than the child's own impulse, but I was persuaded by
others in a study group that this alone would be of no lasting value,
and would contribute nothing to the formation of an active state of
character. What seems more likely is that parental training is needed
only for its negative effect, as a way of neutralizing the irrational
force of impulses and desires.

We all arrive on the scene already habituated, in the habit, that is,
of yielding to impulses and desires, of instantly slackening the
tension of pain or fear or unfulfilled desire in any way open to us,
and all this has become automatic in us before thinking and choosing
are available to us at all. This is a description of what is called
human nature, though in fact it precedes our access to our true
natural state, and blocks that access. This is why Aristotle says that
"the virtues come about in us neither by nature nor apart from nature"
(1103a, 24-5). What we call human nature, and some philosophers call
the state of nature, is both natural and unnatural; it is the passive
part of our natures, passively reinforced by habit. Virtue has the
aspect of a second nature, because it cannot develop first, nor by a
continuous process out of our first condition. But it is only in the
moral virtues that we possess our primary nature, that in which all
our capacities can have their full development. The sign of what is
natural, for Aristotle, is pleasure, but we have to know how to read
the signs. Things pleasant by nature have no opposite pain and no
excess, because they set us free to act simply as what we are (1154b,
15-21), and it is in this sense that Aristotle calls the life of
virtue pleasant in its own right, in itself (1099a, 6-7, 16-17). A
mere habit of acting contrary to our inclinations cannot be a virtue,
by the infallible sign that we don't like it.

Our first or childish nature is never eradicated, though, and this is
why Aristotle says that our nature is not simple, but also has in it
something different that makes our happiness assailable from within,
and makes us love change even when it is for the worse. (1154b, 21-32)
But our souls are brought nearest to harmony and into the most durable
pleasures only by the moral virtues. And the road to these virtues is
nothing fancy, but is simply what all parents begin to do who withhold
some desired thing from a child, or prevent it from running away from
every irrational source of fear. They make the child act, without
virtue, as though it had virtue. It is what Hamlet describes to his
mother, during a time that is out of joint, when a son must try to
train his parent (III, Ìv,181-9):

Assume a virtue if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat
Of habits evil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence; the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature…

Hamlet is talking to a middle-aged woman about lust, but the pattern
applies just as well to five-year-olds and candy. We are in a position
to see that it is not the stamp of nature that needs to be changed but
the earliest stamp of habit. We can drop Hamlet's "almost" and rid his
last quoted line of all paradox by seeing that the reason we need
habit is to change the stamp of habit. A habit of yielding to impulse
can be counteracted by an equal and opposite habit. This second habit
is no virtue, but only a mindless inhibition, an automatic repressing
of all impulses. Nor do the two opposite habits together produce
virtue, but rather a state of neutrality. Something must step into the
role previously played by habit, and Aristotle's use of the word
energeia suggests that this happens on its own, with no need for
anything new to be imposed. Habituation thus does not stifle nature,
but rather lets nature make its appearance. The description from Book
VII of the Physics of the way children begin to learn applies equally
well to the way human character begins to be formed: we settle down,
out of the turmoil of childishness, into what we are by nature.

We noticed earlier that habituation is not the end but the beginning
of the progress toward virtue. The order of states of the soul given
by Aristotle went from habit to being-at-work to the hexis or active
state that can give the soul moral stature. If the human soul had no
being-at-work, no inherent and indelible activity, there could be no
such moral stature, but only customs. But early on, when first trying
to give content to the idea of happiness, Aristotle asks if it would
make sense to think that a carpenter or shoemaker has work to do, but
a human being as such is inert. His reply, of course, is that nature
has given us work to do, in default of which we are necessarily
unhappy, and that work is to put into action the power of reason.
(1097b, 24-1098a, 4) Note please that he does not say that everyone
must be a philosopher, nor even that human life is constituted by the
activity of reason, but that our work is to bring the power of logos
forward into action. Later, Aristotle makes explicit that the
irrational impulses are no less human than reasoning is. (1111 b, 1-2)
His point is that, as human beings, our desires need not be mindless
and random, but can be transformed by thinking into choices, that is
desires informed by deliberation. (1113a, 11) The characteristic human
way of being-at-work is the threefold activity of seeing an end,
thinking about means to it, and choosing an action. Responsible human
action depends upon the combining of all the powers of the soul:
perception, imagination, reasoning, and desiring. These are all things
that are at work in us all the time. Good parental training does not
produce them, or mold them, or alter them, but sets them free to be
effective in action. This is the way in which, according to Aristotle,
despite the contributions of parents, society, and nature, we are the
co-authors of the active states of our own souls (1114b, 23-4).
2. The Mean

Now this discussion has shown that habit does make all the difference
to our lives without being the only thing shaping those lives and
without being the final form they take. The same discussion also
points to a way to make some sense of one of the things that has
always puzzled me most in the Ethics, the insistence that moral virtue
is always in its own nature a mean condition. Quantitative relations
are so far from any serious human situation that they would seem to be
present only incidentally or metaphorically, but Aristotle says that
"by its thinghood and by the account that unfolds what it is for it to
be, virtue is a mean." (1107a, 7-8) This invites such hopeless
shallowness as in the following sentences that I quote from a recent
article in a journal called Ancient Philosophy(Vol. 8, pp. 101-4): "To
illustrate …0 marks the mean (e.g. Courage); …Cowardice is -3 while
Rashness is 3…In our number language…'Always try to lower the absolute
value of your vice.' " This scholar thinks achieving courage is like
tuning in a radio station on an analog dial. Those who do not sink
this low might think instead that Aristotle is praising a kind of
mediocrity, like that found in those who used to go to college to get
gentlemen's C's. But what sort of courage could be found in these
timid souls, whose only aim in life is to blend so well into their
social surroundings that virtue can never be chosen in preference to a
fashionable vice? Aristotle points out twice that every moral virtue
is an extreme (1107a, 8-9, 22-4), but he keeps that observation
secondary to an over-riding sense in which it is a mean.

Could there be anything at all to the notion that we hone in on a
virtue from two sides? There is a wonderful image of this sort of
thing in the novel Nop's Trials by Donald McCaig. The protagonist is
not a human being, but a border collie named Nop. The author describes
the way the dog has to find the balance point, the exact distance
behind a herd of sheep from which he can drive the whole herd forward
in a coherent mass. When the dog is too close, the sheep panic and run
off in all directions; when he is too far back, the sheep ignore him,
and turn in all directions to graze. While in motion, a good working
dog keeps adjusting his pace to maintain the exact mean position that
keeps the sheep stepping lively in the direction he determines. Now
working border collies are brave, tireless, and determined. They have
been documented as running more than a hundred miles in a day, and
they love their work. There is no question that they display virtue,
but it is not human virtue and not even of the same form. Some human
activities do require the long sustained tension a sheep dog is always
holding on to, an active state stretched to the limit, constantly and
anxiously kept in balance. Running on a tightrope might capture the
same flavor. But constantly maintained anxiety is not the kind of
stable equilibrium Aristotle attributes to the virtuous human soul.

I think we may have stumbled on the way that human virtue is a mean
when we found that habits were necessary in order to counteract other
habits. This does accord with the things Aristotle says about
straightening warped boards, aiming away from the worse extreme, and
being on guard against the seductions of pleasure. (1109a, 30- b9) The
habit of abstinence from bodily pleasure is at the opposite extreme
from the childish habit of yielding to every immediate desire. Alone,
either of them is a vice, according to Aristotle. The glutton, the
drunkard, the person enslaved to every sexual impulse obviously cannot
ever be happy, but the opposite extremes, which Aristotle groups
together as a kind of numbness or denial of the senses (1107b, 8),
miss the proper relation to bodily pleasure on the other side. It may
seem that temperance in relation to food, say, depends merely on
determining how many ounces of chocolate mousse to eat. Aristotle's
example of Milo the wrestler, who needs more food than the rest of us
do to sustain him, seems to say this, but I think that misses the
point. The example is given only to show that there is no single
action that can be prescribed as right for every person and every
circumstance, and it is not strictly analogous even to temperance with
respect to food. What is at stake is not a correct quantity of food
but a right relation to the pleasure that comes from eating.

Suppose you have carefully saved a bowl of chocolate mousse all day
for your mid-evening snack, and just as you are ready to treat
yourself, a friend arrives unexpectedly to visit. If you are a
glutton, you might hide the mousse until the friend leaves, or gobble
it down before you open the door. If you have the opposite vice, and
have puritanically suppressed in yourself all indulgence in the
pleasures of food, you probably won't have chocolate mousse or any
other treat to offer your visitor. If the state of your soul is in the
mean in these matters, you are neither enslaved to nor shut out from
the pleasure of eating treats, and can enhance the visit of a friend
by sharing them. What you are sharing is incidentally the 6 ounces of
chocolate mousse; the point is that you are sharing the pleasure,
which is not found on any scale of measurement. If the pleasures of
the body master you, or if you have broken their power only by rooting
them out, you have missed out on the natural role that such pleasures
can play in life. In the mean between those two states, you are free
to notice possibilities that serve good ends, and to act on them.

It is worth repeating that the mean is not the 3 ounces of mousse on
which you settled, since if two friends had come to visit you would
have been willing to eat 2 ounces. That would not have been a division
of the food but a multiplication of the pleasure. What is enlightening
about the example is how readily and how nearly universally we all see
that sharing the treat is the right thing to do. This is a matter of
immediate perception, but it is perception of a special kind, not that
of any one of the five senses, Aristotle says, but the sort by which
we perceive that a triangle is the last kind of figure into which a
polygon can be divided. (1142a, 28-30) This is thoughtful and
imaginative perceiving, but it has to be perceived. The childish sort
of habit clouds our sight, but the liberating counter-habit clears
that sight. This is why Aristotle says that the person of moral
stature, thespoudaios, is the one to whom things appear as they truly
are. (1113a, 30-1) Once the earliest habits are neutralized, our
desires are disentangled from the pressure for immediate
gratification, we are calm enough to think, and most important, we can
see what is in front of us in all its possibility. The mean state here
is not a point on a dial that we need to fiddle up and down; it is a
clearing in the midst of pleasures and pains that lets us judge what
seems most truly pleasant and painful.

Achieving temperance toward bodily pleasures is, by this account,
finding a mean, but it is not a simple question of adjusting a single
varying condition toward the more or the less. The person who is
always fighting the same battle, always struggling like the sheep dog
to maintain the balance point between too much and too little
indulgence, does not, according to Aristotle, have the virtue of
temperance, but is at best selfrestrained or continent. In that case,
the reasoning part of the soul is keeping the impulses reined in. But
those impulses can slip the reins and go their own way, as parts of
the body do in people with certain disorders of the nerves. (1102b,
14-22) Control in self-restrained people is an anxious, unstable
equilibrium that will lapse whenever vigilance is relaxed. It is the
old story of the conflict between the head and the emotions, never
resolved but subject to truces. A soul with separate, self-contained
rational and irrational parts could never become one undivided human
being, since the parties would always believe they had divergent
interests, and could at best compromise. The virtuous soul, on the
contrary, blends all its parts in the act of choice.

This, I think, is the best way to understand the active state of the
soul that constitutes moral virtue and forms character. It is the
condition in which all the powers of the soul are at work together,
making it possible for action to engage the whole human being. The
work of achieving character is a process of clearing away the
obstacles that stand in the way of the full efficacy of the soul.
Someone who is partial to food or drink, or to running away from
trouble or to looking for trouble, is a partial human being. Let the
whole power of the soul have its influence, and the choices that
result will have the characteristic look that we call courage or
temperance or simply virtue. Now this adjective "characteristic" comes
from the Greek word charactÍr, which means the distinctive mark
scratched or stamped on anything, and which to my knowledge is never
used in the Nicomachean Ethics. In the sense of character of which we
are speaking, the word for which is Íthos, we see an outline of the
human form itself. A person of character is someone you can count on,
because there is a human nature in a deeper sense than that which
refers to our early state of weakness. Someone with character has
taken a stand in that fully mature nature, and cannot be moved all the
way out of it.

But there is also such a thing as bad character, and this is what
Aristotle means by vice, as distinct from bad habits or weakness. It
is possible for someone with full responsibility and the free use of
intellect to choose always to yield to bodily pleasure or to greed.
Virtue is a mean, first because it can only emerge out of the
stand-off between opposite habits, but second because it chooses to
take its stand not in either of those habits but between them. In this
middle region, thinking does come into play, but it is not correct to
say that virtue takes its stand in principle; Aristotle makes clear
that vice is a principled choice that following some extreme path
toward or away from pleasure is right. (1146b, 22-3) Principles are
wonderful things, but there are too many of them, and exclusive
adherence to any one of them is always a vice.

In our earlier example, the true glutton would be someone who does not
just have a bad habit of always indulging the desire for food, but
someone who has chosen on principle that one ought always to yield to
it. In Plato'sGorgias, Callicles argues just that, about food, drink,
and sex. He is serious, even though he is young and still open to
argument. But the only principled alternative he can conceive is the
denial of the body, and the choice of a life fit only for stones or
corpses. (492E) This is the way most attempts to be serious about
right action go astray. What, for example, is the virtue of a seminar
leader? Is it to ask appropriate questions but never state an opinion?
Or is it to offer everything one has learned on the subject of
discussion? What principle should rule?–that all learning must come
from the learners, or that without prior instruction no useful
learning can take place? Is there a hybrid principle? Or should one
try to find the mid-way point between the opposite principles? Or is
the virtue some third kind of thing altogether?

Just as habits of indulgence always stand opposed to habits of
abstinence, so too does every principle of action have its opposite
principle. If good habituation ensures that we are not swept away by
our strongest impulses, and the exercise of intelligence ensures that
we will see two worthy sides to every question about action, what
governs the choice of the mean? Aristotle gives this answer: "such
things are among particulars, and the judgment is in the act of
sense-perception." (1109b, 23-4) But this is the calmly energetic,
thought-laden perception to which we referred earlier. The origin of
virtuous action is neither intellect nor appetite, but is variously
described as intellect through-and-through infused with appetite, or
appetite wholly infused with thinking, or appetite and reason joined
for the sake of something; this unitary source is called by Aristotle
simply anthropos. (1139a, 34, b, S-7) But our thinking must contribute
right reason (ho orthos logos) and our appetites must contribute
rightdesire (hÍ orthÍ orexis) if the action is to have moral stature.
(1114b, 29, 1139a, 24-6, 31-2) What makes them right can only be the
something for the sake of which they unite, and this is what is said
to be accessible only to sense perception. This brings us to the third
word we need to think about.
3. Noble

Aristotle says plainly and repeatedly what it is that moral virtue is
for the sake of, but the translators are afraid to give it to you
straight. Most of them say it is the noble. One of them says it is the
fine. If these answers went past you without even registering, that is
probably because they make so little sense. To us, the word noble
probably connotes some sort of high-minded naivetÈ, something
hopelessly impractical. But Aristotle considers moral virtue the only
practical road to effective action. The word fine is of the same sort
but worse, suggesting some flimsy artistic soul who couldn't endure
rough treatment, while Aristotle describes moral virtue as the most
stable and durable condition in which we can meet all obstacles. The
word the translators are afraid of is to kalon, the beautiful.
Aristotle singles out as the distinguishing mark of courage, for
example, that it is always "for the sake of the beautiful, for this is
the end of virtue." (111 S b, 12-13) Of magnificence, or large-scale
philanthropy, he says it is "for the sake of the beautiful, for this
is common to the virtues." (1122 b, 78) What the person of good
character loves with right desire and thinks of as an end with right
reason must first be perceived as beautiful.

The Loeb translator explains why he does not use the word beautiful in
the Nicomachean Ethics. He tells us to kalon has two different uses,
and refers both to "(1) bodies well shaped and works of art …well
made, and (2) actions well done." (p. 6) But we have already noticed
that Aristotle says the judgment of what is morally right belongs to
sense-perception. And he explicitly compares the well made work of art
to an act that springs from moral virtue. Of the former, people say
that it is not possible add anything to it or take anything from it,
and Aristotle says that virtue differs from art in that respect only
in being more precise and better. (1106b, 10-15) An action is right in
the same way a painting might get everything just right. Antigone
contemplates in her imagination the act of burying her brother, and
says "it would be a beautiful thing to die doing this." (Antigone,
line 72) This is called courage. Neoptolemus stops Philoctetes from
killing Odysseus with the bow he has just returned, and says "neither
for me nor for you is this a beautiful thing." (Philoctetes, line
1304) This is a recognition that the rightness of returning the bow
would be spoiled if it were used for revenge. This is not some special
usage of the Greek language, but one that speaks to us directly, if
the translators let it. And it is not a kind of language that belongs
only to poetic tragedy, since the tragedians find their subjects by
recognizing human virtue in circumstances that are most hostile to it.

In the most ordinary circumstances, any mother might say to a
misbehaving child, in plain English, "don't be so ugly." And any of
us, parent, friend, or grudging enemy, might on occasion say to
someone else, "that was a beautiful thing you did." Is it by some wild
coincidence that twentieth-century English and fourth-century BC Greek
link the same pair of uses under one word? Aristotle is always alert
to the natural way that important words have more than one meaning.
The inquiry in his Metaphysics is built around the progressive
narrowing of the word being until its primary meaning is discovered.
In the Physics the various senses of motion and change are played on
like the keyboard of a piano, and serve to uncover the double source
of natural activity. The inquiry into ethics is not built in this
fashion; Aristotle asks about the way the various meanings of the good
are organized, but he immediately drops the question, as being more at
home in another sort of philosophic inquiry. (1096b, 26-32) It is
widely claimed that Aristotle says there is no good itself, or any
other form at all of the sort spoken of in Plato's dialogues. This is
a misreading of any text of Aristotle to which it is referred. Here in
the study of ethics it is a failure to see that the idea of the good
is not rejected simply, but only held off as a question that does not
arise as first for us. Aristotle praises Plato for understanding that
philosophy does not argue from first principles but toward them.
(1095a, 31-3)

But while Aristotle does not make the meanings of the good an explicit
theme that shapes his inquiry, he nevertheless does plainly lay out
its three highest senses, and does narrow down the three into two and
indirectly into one. He tells us there are three kinds of good toward
which our choices look, the pleasant, the beautiful, and the
beneficial or advantageous. (1104b, 31-2) The last of these is clearly
subordinate to the other two, and when the same issue comes up next,
it has dropped out of the list. The goods sought for their own sake
are said to be of only two kinds, the pleasant and the beautiful.
(1110b, 9-12) That the beautiful is the primary sense of the good is
less obvious, both because the pleasant is itself resolved into a
variety of senses, and because a whole side of virtue that we are not
considering in this lecture aims at the true, but we can sketch out
some ways in which the beautiful emerges as the end of human action.

Aristotle's first description of moral virtue required that the one
acting choose an action knowingly, out of a stable equilibrium of the
soul, and for its own sake. The knowing in question turned out to be
perceiving things as they are, as a result of the habituation that
clears our sight. The stability turned out to come from the active
condition of all the powers of the soul, in the mean position opened
up by that same habituation, since it neutralized an earlier,
opposite, and passive habituation to self-indulgence. In the accounts
of the particular moral virtues, an action's being chosen for its own
sake is again and again specified as meaning chosen for no reason
other than that it is beautiful. In Book III, chapter 8, Aristotle
refuses to give the name courageous to anyone who acts bravely for the
sake of honor, out of shame, from experience that the danger is not as
great as it seems, out of spiritedness or anger or the desire for
revenge, or from optimism or ignorance. Genuinely courageous action is
in no obvious way pleasant, and is not chosen for that reason, but
there is according to Aristotle a truer pleasure inherent in it. It
doesn't need pleasure dangled in front of it as an extra added
attraction. Lasting and satisfying pleasure never comes to those who
seek pleasure, but only to the philokalos, who looks past pleasure to
the beautiful. (1099a, 15-17, 13)

In our earlier example of temperance, I think most of us would readily
agree that the one who had his eye only the chocolate mousse found
less pleasure than the one who saw that it would be a better thing to
share it. And Aristotle does say explicitly that the target the
temperate person looks to is the beautiful. (1119b, 15-17) But since
there are three primary moral virtues, courage, temperance, and
justice, it is surprising that in the whole of Book V, which discusses
justice, Aristotle never mentions the beautiful. It must somehow be
applicable, since he says it is common to all the moral virtues, but
in that case it would seem that the account of justice could not be
complete if it is not connected to the beautiful. I think this does
happen, but in an unexpected way.

Justice seems to be not only a moral virtue, but in some pre-eminent
way the moral virtue. And Aristotle says that there is a sense of the
word in which the one we call just is the person who has all moral
virtue, insofar as it affects other people. (1129b, 26-7) In spite of
all this, I believe that Aristotle treats justice as something
inherently inadequate, a condition of the soul that cannot ever
achieve the end at which it aims. Justice concerns itself with the
right distribution of rewards and punishments within a community. This
would seem to be the chief aim of the lawmakers, but Aristotle says
that they do not take justice as seriously as friendship. They accord
friendship a higher moral stature than justice. (1155a, 23-4) It seems
to me now that Aristotle does too, and that the discussion of
friendship in Books VIII and IX replaces that of justice.

What is the purpose of reward and punishment? I take Aristotle's
answer to be homonoia, the like-mindedness that allows a community to
act in concord. For the sake of this end, he says, it is not good
enough that people be just, while if they are friends they have no
need to be just: (1155a, 24-9) So far, this sounds as though
friendship is merely something advantageous for the social or
political good, but Aristotle immediately adds that it is also
beautiful. The whole account of friendship, you will recall, is
structured around the threefold meaning of the good. Friendships are
distinguished as being for use, for pleasure, or for love of the
friend's character.

Repeatedly, after raising questions about the highest kind of
friendship, Aristotle resolves them by looking to the beautiful: it is
a beautiful thing to do favors for someone freely, without expecting a
return (1163a, 1, 1168a, 10-13); even in cases of urgent necessity,
when there is a choice about whom to benefit, one should first decide
whether the scale tips toward the necessary or the beautiful thing
(1165a, 4-5 ); to use money to support our parents is always more
beautiful than to use it for ourselves (1165a, 22-4); someone who
strives to achieve the beautiful in action would never be accused of
being selfish (1168b, 25-8). These observations culminate in the claim
that, "if all people competed for the beautiful, and strained to do
the most beautiful things, everything people need in common, and the
greatest good for each in particular, would be achieved …for the
person of moral stature will forego money, honor, and all the good
things people fight over to achieve the beautiful for himself."
(1169a, 8-11, 20-22) This does not mean that people can do without
such things as money and honor, but that the distribution of such
things takes care of itself when people take each other seriously and
look to something higher.

The description of the role of the beautiful in moral virtue is most
explicit in the discussion of courage, where the emphasis is on the
great variety of things that resemble courage but fail to achieve it
because they are not solely for the sake of the beautiful. That
discussion is therefore mostly negative. We can now see that the
discussion of justice was also of a negative character, since justice
itself resembles the moral virtue called friendship without achieving
it, again because it does not govern its action by looking to the
beautiful. The discussion of friendship contains the largest
collection of positive examples of actions that are beautiful. There
is something of a tragic feeling to the account of courage, pointing
to the extreme situation of war in which nothing might be left to
choose but a beautiful death. But the account of friendship points to
the healthy community, in which civil war and other conflicts are
driven away by the choice of what is beautiful in life. (1155a, 24-7)
By the end of the ninth book, there is no doubt that Aristotle does
indeed believe in a primary sense of the good, at least in the human
realm, and that the name of this highest good is the beautiful.

And it should be noticed that the beautiful is at work not only in the
human realm. In De Anima, Aristotle argues that, while the soul moves
itself in the act of choice, the ultimate source of its motion is the
practical good toward which it looks, which causes motion while it is
itself motionless. (433a, 29-30, b, 11-13) This structure of the
motionless first mover is taken up in Book XII of the Metaphysics,
where Aristotle argues that the order of the cosmos depends on such a
source, which causes motion in the manner of something loved; he calls
this source, as one of its names, the beautiful, that which is
beautiful not in seeming but in being. (1072a, 26-b, 4) Like Diotima
in Plato's Symposium, Aristotle makes the beautiful the good itself.

I want to add just one more word, on the fact that the beautiful in
the Ethics is not an object of contemplation simply, but the source of
action. In an article on the Poetics I discussed the intimate
connection of beauty with the experience of wonder. The sense of
wonder seems to me to be the way of seeing which allows things to
appear as what they are, since it holds off our tendencies to make
things fit into theories or opinions we already hold, or use things
for purposes that have nothing to do with them. But this is what
Aristotle says repeatedly is the ultimate effect of moral virtue, that
the one who has it sees truly and judges rightly, since only to
someone of good character do the things that are beautiful appear as
they truly are (1113 a, 29-35), that practical wisdom depends on moral
virtue to make its aim right (1144a, 7-9), and that the eye of the
soul that sees what is beautiful as the end or highest good of action
gains its active state only with moral virtue (1144a, 26-33). It is
only in the middle ground between habits of acting and between
principles of action that the soul can allow right desire and right
reason to make their appearance, as the direct and natural response of
a free human being to the sight of the beautiful.
4. References and Further Reading

* Aristotle, Metaphysics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Green Lion Press, 1999.
* Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Focus
Philosophical Library, Pullins Press, 2002.
* Aristotle, On the Soul, Joe Sachs (trans.), Green Lion Press, 2001.
* Aristotle, Poetics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Focus Philosophical
Library, Pullins Press, 2006.
* Aristotle, Physics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Rutgers U. P., 1995.