Practical Wisdom

I was interested in particular by what Aristotle says about practical wisdom.  This intellectual virtue, concerned with finding the truth, is specifically related to action: “where living well as a whole is concerned, the person capable of deliberation will also be practically wise” (1140a).  Practical wisdom is talent in making decisions related to the whole of life (as opposed to skill, which relates to producing some specific thing).  Practical wisdom is also distinguished from scientific knowledge because it has the option of doing things differently, where scientific knowledge sees what is absolutely the way it is.

“It remains therefore that it is a true and practical state involving reason, concerned with what is good and bad for a human being” (1140b).  Practical wisdom, then, is concerned with actions–where the practical part comes in–and also with truth.  How exactly is it more true to do one thing than to do another?  I think it’s about doing what is good: no one deliberately does what is bad for himself, so then he would be deceived if he did something bad for himself and thus needs truth.  The reason, capacity for deliberation, with which we consider our actions engages with practical wisdom in order to help us determine what is best.

Practical wisdom is also the same thing as political science, since both things are concerned with what is best for humans–just practical wisdom relates to the individual more, where political science is connected to the community.

Since practical wisdom “is concerned also with particular facts, and particulars come to be known from experience” (1142a), this type of virtue can only be attained over time and through experiencing different life situations, which is why a young person cannot have it.  It would also seem to imply that it cannot be taught, or at least a component of it must be acquired through life instead of through teaching, again blurring the lines between how moral and intellectual virtue is attained.

Christian versus Aristotelian Virtue

I talked about this in my last post, but this time it’s more rooted in the text. Aristotle’s definition of virtue is really interesting because it’s so connected to what people see and think, and he’s so up front about that. It keeps surprising me, because in my upbringing, virtue is synonymous with being ‘righteous’, or godly: and Scripturally, that seems to have a lot to do with not being public in your goodness, keeping your attempts at virtue private (the command not to let your right hand know what your left hand is doing when you give, for example).

But Aristotle says virtue is significantly connected to what the community thinks of you, which I guess is more helpful and applicable than Plato’s type of virtue which is doing what you find right and connected to the Forms, not what people perceive as good at all. When talking about citizen courage, Aristotle says “it arises from virtue: it arises from shame and a desire for what is noble” (1116a), totally identifying virtue with a proper sensibility for what the culture lauds. He confirms this more when he talks about shame, saying this is “a kind of fear of disrepute” (1128b), that is, a fear of not being thought well of by one’s elders and betters.

There’s also an interesting divergence from my experience in the kinds of actions Aristotle says virtue consists of. He distinguishes between two ways of being virtuous: not doing shameful things, and doing noble things, and he says “it is more characteristic of virtue to . . . do noble actions than not to do shameful ones” (1120a). From a Christian perspective, both of these are equally important; the catechism I learned growing up talks about sins of omission and comission, so there is a distinction, but the thing is both of these are sins. I don’t think Aristotle is saying it’s not bad to do shameful things, but it’s less important. Also, there’s a consciousness in Christian thought (see: Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo) that we owe all our actions in obedience to God, so in fact where Aristotle implies there’s a possible kind of mean between doing good things and doing shameful ones, where you avoid doing either, Christians see even that neutral state as sinful.

Aristotle and Christianity

Class yesterday resonated with a lot of my concerns about using philosophy in Christianity, particularly the difference between Aristotle’s sources for the virtues and Christianity’s.  As we discussed, Aristotle frequently supports his arguments and ideas by saying that it’s what most people say or think.  This is, in fact, how he comes to most of his conclusions about virtue; for him, virtues are based completely in the society one is a part of, and conversely if you fulfill all the things a society praises you for, you are virtuous.  Therefore Aristotle’s virtues–courage, magnificence, generosity, and so on–are completely limited to what people see as good.

For Christians, this whole system rests on a very wrong assumption: that people are or can know good.  As we discussed, Aristotle doesn’t think humans enter the world with any negative or positive value morally, but he still does set up virtue to where people are the ultimate arbiters thereof.  In a sense, for Aristotle, humans create virtue as an idea as well as fulfilling it in fact.  In a Christian worldview, this idea is crazy.  Christians (in general and through the tradition) believe human nature is fallen; we have never seen what human nature really is or is capable of.  All of our judgments and conclusions about humanity are based on the broken version which is the only one we can access (incidentally, Christ is the closest thing we’ve seen to true humanity, and his teachings on virtue don’t look much like Aristotle’s, but I digress).

It surprises me, then, that Christianity (I’m specifically thinking of Josef Pieper, who’s very frequently taught in an academic Christian group I’m a part of) has adopted Aristotle’s view on virtue so much.  I’ve had teachers wax poetic about how they find Aristotle’s virtues the greatest help for their Christian walk; theologians write elegant discourses on these virtues; and poets work them into their image of Christian reality.  I’m amazed because Aristotle is so straightforward about how he’s drawing his ideas of virtue from his one culture in a non-Christian or Jewish setting in a broken world, and yet we still took them as Gospel truth.  I’ll have to research more on Aquinas and how he worked in Aristotle to a Christian perspective, but this causes me a lot of concern.

Philosophers and the Body

Several nuances in Aristotle made me think back to my reading of the Phaedo, and how concerned Plato was to demonstrate the priority of the soul over the body, and even the evil of the body in comparison to the soul.

Plato argues in Phaedo, jumping off from earlier philosophers like Zeno and Empedocles who tried to show that the senses and the body in general are deceived about reality, that since philosophy is the best pursuit, and philosophers turn away from their body towards immaterial realities, the soul is superior to the body.  In fact, the body is a trap for the soul, related to the cave in that it prisons the soul in this state where it can’t truly see the Good.  The soul can best attain its highest end, reason, when it isn’t troubled by the body’s needs and desires.  The body undermines the soul’s search for reality: “the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it” (66a).  Furthermore, the body is the cause of all the troubles (what Christians would call ‘sins’) to which humanity is prey.  Plato ultimately declares that “it is impossible to attain any pure knowledge with the body” (66e), and points to death as the purifying process which unites us with the Good once more, as we talked about in Symposium.

Aristotle never goes so far as to say that the body is evil, but he does agree with Plato that activity of the reason, not the body, is the highest goal of humans.  Our end cannot be mere life, since plants have that; nor can it be sentience, for animals have the same; “what remains is a life, concerned in some way with action, of the element that possesses reason” (1098a).  The highest human good is, as he will discuss later, contemplation, and that alone brings us happiness.  Aristotle doesn’t here reject the body in as strong terms as Plato, but he does set up a system where happiness is attained through only one activity (the others being properly ordered), which is not one of the soul.  These types of ideas persist into the Middle Ages at least, even though Christianity teaches in contrast to Plato that humans are creatures of body and soul, and cannot fulfill our true purpose without both.

Alcibiades’ Contradiction

The way Alcibiades talks interested me because he contradicts himself all the time, both about Socrates and in his own life. On the one hand, he’s always making contradictions about Socrates: when he first sees Socrates, he yells at him for choosing to sit next to the most beautiful man in the room and basically accuses him of unfaithfulness, but he later very clearly admits that he was never in any relationship with Socrates, who rejects him and all other men who approach him. And yet Alcibiades never gives up trying to make Socrates act like a lover towards him. He says that Socrates will be “grumbling that . . . I didn’t honor him even though he has never lost an argument in his life” (213E), but later he says that Socrates doesn’t care at all about surface reality, but only about the “figures he keeps hidden within” (217A).

He also contradicts himself in his behavior and intellectual state. He claims that Socrates’ words “have in themselves the power to possess and so reveal those people who are ready for the god and his mysteries” (215C), and that Socrates is like a Silenus statue which is hollow and silly on the outside, but filled within with figures of the gods. His arguments are “truly worthy of a god, bursting with figures of virtue inside. They’re of great—no, of the greatest—importance for anyone who wants to become a truly great man” (222A). The only people who can ignore Socrates’ arguments are “foolish, or simply unfamiliar with him” (221E)—but this is Alcibiades himself! He says that Socrates’ arguments “upset me so deeply that my very own soul started protesting that my life—my life!—was no better than the most miserable slave’s . . . he makes me admit that my political career is a waste of time, while all that matters is just what I most neglect: my personal shortcomings which cry out for the closest attention” (215E-216A). But instead of taking these words to heart, Alcibiades says, “I refuse to listen to him; I stop my ears and tear myself away from him” (216A).

This is an incredibly explicit example of the decline in the dialogues’ structure, and a rare amount of self-knowledge from an interlocutor. Alcibiades knows Socrates can show him the true forms of virtue, and he still rejects his teaching.

Pseudo-Dionysius and Pregnant Love

The answer Plato, through Socrates, through Diotima, gives about the true nature of love was really cool and a lot more nuanced and valuable, I thought, than what the rest of the speakers had to say.  I especially liked the idea that the true desire of Love is “reproduction and birth in beauty”.  That idea reminded me of a lot of Christian ways of looking at the love of God, which I remembered we got from Pseudo-Dionysius, who was a neo-Platonist of sorts if I remember correctly.  Pseudo-D pretended to be a contemporary of Paul, but really most scholars think he was a Syrian monk in the fifth or sixth century.  His status with regard to church orthodoxy is debated; I’ve had one teacher tell me the ramifications of his position lead to a completely weird structure that is totally not Christian, and another tell me he’s pretty much completely orthodox.  Either way, his ideas took a lot from Plato’s theory of the good.  He gives the maxim that the Good is self-diffusive, which sounds a lot like what Plato is saying here!  If Love, which is pretty much the Good if I understand Plato correctly, seeks to reproduce specifically in beauty, which is pretty much the same as goodness (Transcendentals), and God is love, then God must by nature reproduce; this makes a lot of sense if you’re talking about the Father begetting the Son and both breathing the Spirit, less if you’re talking about Creation.  Bonaventure also has a spin on this that I really liked last year (still do): he says Being and Goodness are both essential attributes of God’s nature.  It’s not that God will necessarily create, but that if he’s realizing the Being part of his nature in creation, he will also realize the Good part of it in salvation.

Bunch of jumbled thoughts here; mainly I was interested in seeing how this aspect of Love is taken up by a lot of early theologians.  Hopefully that came across.

Eryximachus and Control

Eryximachus’ speech in the first part of Symposium really interested me, because the examples he gives about Love controlling everything actually give the impression that we control Love; and that fits in with what we talked about in class, how the lover/beloved relationship impacts how all of these people see Love.  He was the older lover, so he would have seen his relationship as something he had most of the control over; but he’s still trying to spin it so Phaedrus feels like he’s really important in Eryximachus’ life.

The first example he talks about is medicine, and how ‘love’ (which he uses in a very Empedoclean way, as a force of bringing things together) is the point of all good medicine. Medicine is impacted by Love, if I understand him right, in that the medical practitioner’s goal is to foster the healthy parts of the body so that the whole healthy body will be drawn together in good love, instead of the sick parts making the rest deteriorate in bad love.  So Love kind of has a controlling role, but the physician has the main job in choosing and furthering the different kinds of love.  It’s a bit like in Protagoras, where Plato talked about how he expected Anaxagoras to show how Mind made everything the best it could be, but then he actually talked about how other things all are causes.

The second big one is music, although he mentions agriculture and physical education, both of which are things humans create and not directly given from the Love deity.  Harmony is created by ‘resolving prior discord between high and low notes’ (187B), which is done by people, to make the best resulting sound.  Therefore music is ‘the science of the effects of Love on rhythm and harmony’ (187C).

His final big example is piety, sacrifice and honoring parents.  Here, again, where he first said Love directs everything, he actually talks as though Love is controlled by us; we made sacrifices and honor parents in order to foster orderly love, in order to receive the best results from the gods.

Eryximachus makes some really interesting points, and adds a good bit to the conceptions of love presented before his speech, but he seems to be saying something very different from his thesis.  If I were grading this like a paper, I probably wouldn’t give him a good score, since his examples rather undercut his main point 🙂

More about Plato and Philosophy

I still have more words about this topic, especially after yesterday’s class!  I think it’s really interesting and probably telling that of all Plato’s dialogues, arguably none of them result in Socrates succeeding in persuading people to his view of things and philosophy.  The possible reasons for this are that Socrates’ method is flawed, that people just don’t understand philosophy, and that Plato’s using this as a rhetorical device to make the reader notice the problem.  Like with the cave, people don’t want to be dragged out of it.

It seems possible that Plato is trying to show Socrates’ method as unsuccessful, but I think if he were doing that for real, he would offer some other method that might work.  Of all the thirty-odd dialogues, they all follow basically the same form, so it really seems like if there were another solution he would have offered it at some point, it’s not like he was limited in what he could have written.  Instead, he keeps hammering home that people in general don’t understand philosophy and even the best person to explain it failed time after time.  It would make sense for him to be using this as a rhetorical device, and I think that’s maybe more likely than the other option, but I do think the idea is in play that absolutely no one understands philosophy, of normal people anyway.  Clearly some do get it, because Socrates sees it clearly and he has followers, among whom presumably Plato also understands; but all the people around him, in the city of Athens and the foreigners who visit, never manage to understand.

Is Plato really meaning that no one understands philosophy?  Perhaps he intends to warn the philosopher, that it can seem like no one in the world will connect with your ideas, but also to reassure you that your ideas will impact people, after death if not now.

Apology and Power

This text was really interesting, particularly Plato’s take on good and evil.  He seems to think, despite what he says about Athens being a noble horse, that institutions in general are corrupt.  He claims to have been sent by the god just to prod the city back to the good it’s always been capable of, but he also says that he’s too honest to survive in any kind of regular occupation: “wealth, household affairs, the position of general or public orator or the other offices, the political clubs and factions that exist in the city” (36b).  This pretty broadly covers public life: individual interactions and transactions are not on the list, but only jobs involved in the institution.  He also says that it is impossible for someone to promote justice from a public position; only private life can offer one a platform to encourage justice from.  He pretty clearly thinks that the whole public office is corrupt, since he is surprised at how many people voted in his favor, and he gives examples to prove it like the conviction of the navy generals and Leon of Salamis.

We see that Socrates doesn’t think everyone is corrupt, for sure, because of his young friends whom he seems to trust and care for a lot.  However, he rejects all ways of relating to people that involve transaction or any kind of acknowledged influence, as we see when he says he refuses to be called anyone’s teacher, and no one can claim to have learned from him.  If people choose to follow him around and imitate his style of thought, that’s their problem; all he does is bother important people and show them that they’re not as wise as they thought.  Socrates believes justice and goodness can only be achieved on a platform of individual people talking to one another with no authority acknowledged.  However, he does claim some authority, namely, divine power, in his being sent to Athens: in making this statement he is claiming that he and his way of relating to people have the support of the god.