[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This collection of fresh contributions on the connections between the two main ethical works attributed to Aristotle is a most welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on the EE and NE that has steadily grown in the last half-century. Before the 1970’s, there had been a consensus that the EE, while authentically Aristotelian, was deemed an earlier effort than the later (and better) NE. This view—the strongly developmentalist Case-Jaeger position—was based primarily on the conviction that the so-called common books (hereafter the CB, i.e. the 5th, 6th and 7th books of the NE, which were said to be the same as the 4th, 5th and 6th books of the EE) properly belonged to the NE and were only assigned to the EE to fill an obvious gap in that work. This consensus was shattered by Sir Anthony Kenny when in his 1978 The Aristotelian Ethics[1] he advanced a series of arguments, both philological and philosophical, but on especially computer-assisted stylometric grounds, for assigning the CB to the EE as a better fit based on unconscious, “topic-neutral” features of style (e.g., connectives, particles), when compared with the text of the undisputed books of the NE. A succinct account of the status quaestionis both before and after Kenny’s contribution is provided by the editor in his very informative introduction. Clear evidence that Kenny changed the game dramatically is found in the fact that in the last 12 years four translations of the EE into English have been published that include the middle books, which allows readers to get a feel for how the CB might have had at least their initial run in the EE even if they were revised by Aristotle or a later editor to fit into the NE as a whole. If we consider these two works as wholes that include the CB, we can compare them as complementary texts, with neither necessarily replacing the other. This allows us to see the works as directed at somewhat different audiences, as our editor explains. The EE, with its “greater technicality,” was aimed at “a philosophically more sophisticated audience already trained” in natural philosophy and Aristotle’s Analytics, while the NE may be addressed to a broader group of “less philosophically minded people” (p. 6). This opens up a series of “more specific questions”, such as comparing similar arguments in both treatises for significant differences, noting whether those that do show up are a “matter of exposition” or “doctrinal differences”, how their different contexts might possibly explain “peculiarities” and, of course, whether either work is “philosophically more satisfactory” than the other, and, finally, how they might be reconciled so that they are genuinely complementary and not in direct conflict (p. 7). The volume as a whole, then, is meant to “breathe new life into these issues”, allowing for “a degree of pluralism in the views presented, with contributors free to take various stances on the disputed issues. One important editorial choice was “to prioritize themes which have received less attention in the extant scholarship”; this means that recent good work on the discussion of friendship in EE VII, for example, is not treated.
Carlo Natali analyzes the preambles to both two works, in the light of how 4th BCE authors, especially Plato and Isocrates, employed this device, as well as Aristotle himself in other works, such as the Rhetoric, Politics and Metaphysics. These introductory discussions are written in a graceful, often quite self-consciously literary, style—unusual, for Aristotle, known to many readers of his Greek for what Thomas Gray memorably claimed “tastes for all the world like chopped hay, or rather like chopped logic”. Isocrates’ influence shows up in that EE I.1-6, for example, in avoiding hiatus, but more generally, “the Aristotelian way of writing preambles is more similar to Plato’s than to Isocrates’” (p. 30). Natali endorses the audience-difference contrast noted above, remarking that the EE’s proem is longer than that of the NE, but more dialectical and philosophically provocative with no mention of politics while that of the NE is less demanding of its public audience of free citizens (pp. 28-9).
Friedmann Buddensiek focuses on the important question of how the two ergon arguments leading to their definitions of eudaimonia differ, the EFA (1218b32-1219a39) and the NFA (1097b22-1098a18), as I shall term them. He argues for two main claims: (1) that the function of the EFA notion of ergon “is to highlight and to prioritize the energeia or the product over the corresponding disposition” (hexis) while that of the NFA “is to specify the energeia constitutive for the human good”; (2) the EFA “is compatible with weakly founded inclusivism”, which lacks “a criterion for inclusion of energeiai and aretai” in the overall argument while the NFA “relies on the specifying function of it notion of ergon” (p. 34). One difficulty with (2) is that by ‘inclusivism’ he does not mean to be raising the well-worn issue of a “dominant-end reading” of the 10th book of the NE with its strong emphasis on divine-like theoria as contrasted with the account of eudaimonia we find at the end of the EE that seems to many of us to include both practical and theoretical virtue in its summation. What is meant is a question of whether arete in the EFA when taken as a whole includes or excludes the virtue of a part of the soul, e.g., the vegetative part of the soul (p.41). The argument in this chapter is dense and was hard for me to follow. The main difference is that the EFA “employs the notion of the ergon of the soul, while the [NFA] employs the notion of the ergon of man”(p. 35) and this might make it closer to Plato’s Republic but it could also be argued that this brings the EE closer to the De Anima’s focus on human soul, as those who stress the philosophical background of its audience would see it.
Marco Zingano finds an important difference between the EE and NE when it comes to their rival definitions of moral virtue when considered along with their differing accounts of eudaimonia. The EFA in II.1 provides the genus and difference of happiness or well-being:
But since happiness was something complete (teleion ti), and living is either complete or incomplete, and so also virtue—one virtue being a whole, the other a part—and the activity of what is incomplete is itself incomplete, therefore happiness would be the activity of a complete life in accordance with complete virtue. (Solomon’s Oxford translation of 1219a35-9, as revised, but with ‘virtue’ in place of ‘excellence’ for arete.)
Noting that teleion here has two different senses, viz. “being complete and being perfect.” Zingano suggests that while the first might cover what it means for a life to be teleia, both senses are in play for virtue. For kat’ areten teleian, usually translated as ‘in accordance with complete virtue’, Zingano proposes ‘on the basis of virtue’, allowing us to see virtue as deploying “its causal power in bringing about happiness… more precisely, that virtue is the main cause of happiness” (p. 49). The EE’s definition of moral virtue makes essential reference to how well the agent deals with pleasure and pain in action while the NE is content to put pleasure and pain outside of its definition (p.56). The NE emphasizes the reasoning that the phronimos does in selecting the mean in action while the EE stresses the pain or pleasure the agent feels when acting (pp. 56-9). We seem to have in the NE “a stronger realization that morality lies in rationality” when it moves pleasure and pain outside of its definition of arete (pp. 60-61). This claim is provocative and well defended, both philosophically and with close attention paid in the footnotes to the many vexing textual difficulties that accompany any work on the EE, which is notorious for the often deplorable state of the text as it has come down to us. As is increasingly appreciated by many scholars working on the EE, here and elsewhere, instead of choosing which emendations to accept or give up, Zingano—joined by others in this book, Nielsen and Irwin in particular—tries to accept the readings of the manuscripts where good sense can be made of them. We shall see further evidence of how such conservatism can pay off.
Our editor, Giulio Di Basilio, takes up the comparison between the differing accounts of the voluntary. He zeroes in on the question of whether character states themselves can be said to be voluntary, as actions are claimed to be in both works. He argues that only the NE takes up this question in III.1-5 while the account in EE II.6-9 does not (pp. 64, 75). The argument is clear and straightforward. As is well-known, the NE account begins by drawing a positive account of voluntary action as basically one that is arrived at by negating the factors that make an action involuntary. Actions that are forced on us or done in ignorance are involuntary. The source (arche) of the action must come from within us (the internality condition) and the action is to be done with clear knowledge of what we are doing for it to be said to be fully voluntary (the knowledge condition). A question that naturally arises for us about whether we can be in control of our own character-formation, is notoriously not asked by Aristotle (p. 67). The basic strategy here is to show that the two conditions for voluntary actions from III.1 are extended in III.5 to apply equally to both virtue and vice (p.66). Consider the following from the last section of III.5:
Actions and states, however, are not voluntary in the same way; for we are in control of actions from beginning to end, so long as we know the particular circumstances, but [we are in control] of the beginning of states, while the progressive advancement [of the state], in the particular circumstances is not known to us [kath’hekasta de he prosthesis ou gnorimos], as in the case of diseases; but since it was up to us to use [the particular circumstances] this way or that way, for this reason [states] are voluntary. (1114b30 ff.)
Di Basilio interprets this “as a restatement of a vivid claim made earlier in III.5 about character traits: while we are not in control of retrieving a stone once it has been thrown, it was clearly up to us not to throw it in the first place (1114a16-19)” (p. 70). Although the stone analogy might be too strong in its suggestion that our characters cannot be changed once installed, we can take it “as a warning to make sure we throw the right stones, as it were; that is, that we develop the right habits” (p. 70). A passage in the 10th book (1179b15-20) points out that, while not impossible, it is “not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed as a result of one’s habits.” There are some passages in the EE that might appear to take up the issue of whether character itself can be said to be voluntary, but DiBasilio sees the NE as taking up the claim and defending it. If one agrees with the NE claim, the EE omission might suggest that the NE is a later improvement, but he shrinks from any strong developmentalist claim: “the two works pursue significantly different agendas in a way which resists simplistic assessments. Both of them deserve assiduous attention” (p. 75). Ben detto!
Karen Margrethe Nielsen’s chapter exhibits to my mind just the right combination of philosophical interpretation and philological sophistication that serious study of the EE demands but is difficult to bring off, especially in a mere 20 pages. She starts out with a brisk reminder of the effect of scholarly efforts since the Renaissance to deal with a text that has seen many attempts to “plaster over or repair the problems” presented by “the sorry state of the manuscript tradition” (p. 80). She likens the composition of the 1991 OCT to “a scholarly relay run started by David Ross, continued by [Richard] Walzer, and completed by [Jean] Mingay”. And, of course, any inspection of the app. crit. of modern editions will find many entrants in the race before this trio’s collaboration. The basements of EE editions are much fuller than those for the NE.
Prohairesis is a key concept in both treatises and this word has been translated in various ways, many of which are listed in the course of her argument. But she zeroes in on those that build in an interpretation stemming from a conjecture made by the 16th-century German scholar Friedrich Sylburg, the motive for which was to bring its definition of prohairesis into agreement with the much more familiar NE (p. 82). Having just reported that prohairesis is not to be identified with either doxa (belief) or boulesis (wish), nor even both together, we are told that it is based on these insofar as they are present in one who deliberately chooses (huparchei to prohairoumeno). He goes on to say:
But how it is based on them must be investigated. In a way, however, even the name itself makes this clear; for deliberate choice (prohairesis) is choice (hairesis), not unconditionally so, but of one thing before (pro) another, and this is not possible without investigation and deliberation. That is why deliberate choice is based on deliberative belief (1226b5-9, tr. Reeve).
The three commonly cited mss. all read pros where Sylburg emends to pro, with P and C (the twins) having heterou pros heterou where L has the accusative heteron in place of the second genitive (p. 87). The difference can be seen if we distinguish between a temporal and a preferential use of pro when it occurs in the compound word pro-hairesis. There is a difference between saying that one chooses one thing before another in time and claiming that one chooses one thing over another or prefers it to the other. The NE’s “nominal definition” of decision seems to invite the temporal reading. Nielsen translates 1112a13-17 as follows:
Then what sort of thing is decision, since it is none of the things mentioned? Well, apparently it is voluntary, but not everything voluntary is decided. Then perhaps what is decided is what has been deliberated (be)for(e) (to probebouleumenon). For decision involves reason and thought, and even the name itself would seem to indicate that what is decided [prohaireton] is chosen [haireton] (be)for(e) [pro] other things.
Modern English translations all accept Sylburg’s conjecture and differ only in opting for either the temporal or preferential understanding of the preposition in its context.[2] Sylburg sought to bring the EE passage into line with that from the NE, a familiar and better attested text. Nielsen claims that if we read pros instead of pro, we can see the EE as actually expressing a third sense of prohairesis, viz. a teleological sense (p. 87). The EE explicates the key notion of decision, then, as “a choice of one thing (an act) for the sake of another (the end)” (p. 93). This “teleological conception of decision” allows Nielsen to connect the passage expressing the EE’s nominal definition with other passages in the work, such as 1214b6-13, 1226b25-9, 1227a8, 18-21. She admirably defends her philological case for rejecting what so many have accepted without careful consideration of this failure to follow the mss. and opens up some new lines of interpretation in comparing the central notion of prohairesis in both works.
Mi-Kyoung Lee sets out to show, contra Kenny and following Dorothea Frede, that the undisputed books of the EE are “ignorant of many important ideas in the common book on justice” and that they fail to comport well with five major theses found in NE V (p. 102). Chief among these failures is that of not explicitly acknowledging the distinction between general and particular justice in V.2, a claim alluded to at NE II.7.1108b7-9 where we are told that ‘justice’ is used in more than one way. Another important difference is that general justice is said to be “complete virtue, although not without qualification” at 1129b26, whereas the EE, in its final book “bestows that epithet upon kalokagathia” (pp. 105, 102) at 1249a16-17 where we might have expected Aristotle to remember that “he had earlier given that crown to dikaiosune and not to kalokagathia” (p. 107). A further complaint is that the early claim that what is just is a mean between profit and loss at 1221a4, formulating a “puzzling triad that is simplistic compared with the way it is understood in the common book on justice”, making EE II.3 a mere “first stab” at an account of justice “before he worked out the details” in the CB. Lee’s chapter is the most aligned with the Case-Jaeger view. His last sentence has it that “Aristotle’s theory of justice grew and developed”, adding and revising “in interesting and important ways to the base he started with in the EE” (p. 116, my emphasis).
Christopher Rowe begins by noting that, while the undisputed EE is compatible with the CB account of phronesis, “the same is not obviously true of sophia” (p. 124). The undisputed NE clearly seems to line up with the CB. By contrast, EE books show “hardly a trace of the special kind of sophia introduced” in NE VI (= EE V) (p. 126). There the term is used in a traditional, “garden-variety” fashion, wisdom, or general expertise, above the normal but not the high- powered CB variety. Why should this be, if the CB belongs originally to the EE? Having “no definitive answer to this question” (p. 131), Rowe appeals to the EE’s inclusivism. In VIII.3 we find “the idea that we need to lead rational lives, whether practical/political or both practical/political and theoretical”. The EE “does not show, or have, the same interest in sophia as he betrays in the NE” (p. 130). Both works may fall “considerably short of the kind of unity suggested by labeling them ‘treatises’’ (p. 131) and the EE is written in the “crabbed, awkward, or elliptical style” familiar from other major works of Aristotle; that of the NE, given Rowe’s own “long experience as translator of the 10-book NE”, can be “golden, flowing, and full” (p. 131).
Jozef Mueller focuses on the fact that EE II.7-8 say a good deal about enkreteia (self-control) and akrasia (lack of control) in its account of the voluntary that lacks a parallel in the undoubted NE, finding in these chapters coherent conception of the shared value orientation of both —which he combines into a composite S/U character type (pp. 137-139). These chapters are compatible with the evidence in NE and the CB, the third book of which has the most to say about virtuous, vicious, strong, and weak characters. An important clarification of his study is that his only interest is in their “rationally adopted ends and values”, their “deliberations and decisions, but not their actions…” (p. 139). What he finds most questionable in familiar accounts that S/U’s are claimed to “have knowledge of the good”, to be “just like the virtuous person when it comes to their reasons and decisions” but differ from the virtuous “when it comes to their non-rational desires” (p. 138). But, if only the virtuous possess practical wisdom and phronesis “essentially involves” knowledge of the good”, a claim made clearly at 1140b20-21, it would seem that S/U’s lack such knowledge (p. 138). His strategy for ironing out this difficulty is to see that the problem is not one of an S/U failure to apply knowledge that they share with the virtuous. Rather, “they do not have knowledge of the good at all… do not have the same values as the virtuous people” (p. 139). He spells out 16 claims made about S/U types in these two chapters, all of which are consistent with the undisputed NE and CB. An important lesson that emerges from this complicated discussion is a denial that an “S/U’s decision is correct insofar as it picks the right action in the given circumstances and does so for the right end or goal (i.e., the fine)” (p. 144). Take the enkratic person who passes on the KFC bucket. She does not enjoy what she does, as the virtuous does: “her enjoyment centres on benefitting her health and on other future benefits” (p. 144). Similarly, the akratic “is pained by the prospect of future bad consequences”, such as sickness, “rather than by the shamefulness (or lack of fineness) in her action” (p.144). The motivation of the virtuous differs from that of the S/U in various ways, with the crucial difference being that the fine-and-good characters of EE VIII.3, always aiming at the fine (the kalon), “pursue the naturally good things only to the extent to which they are beneficial for the sake of that end (the fine)” (p. 149, my emphasis). The “mindset of the S/U agent” when thinking about what they should decide to do, conforms to the demands of virtue but their desires go against those demands” (p. 151, my emphasis). The enkratic may resist strong bad desires while the akratic gives in to them, but both adopt an end that is of the same sort as the end of their non-rational desires, namely pleasure” (p. 152).
Dorothea Frede begins with crediting Plato with the crucial insight “that there is no such thing as ‘pleasure’ pure and simple” where a variety of intentional objects determine the nature and value of pleasure” (pp. 156-7). At Philebus 12c-d we are reminded that both the debauched and sober take pleasure in their pursuits while the fool is pleased by his foolish opinions and hopes, whereas the wise takes pleasure in his wisdom. Plato does theorize that pain is a disturbance of a natural equilibrium while pleasure results from its restoration. Frede takes up the problems posed by the somewhat different accounts of pleasure in the 7th and 10th books of the NE. They don’t seem to be aware of each other and this has long been a major reason to assign the first discussion to the EE when it contained the CB and the second to the NE, whose compiler, whether Aristotle, his son Nicomachus, or some later editor, saw fit to borrow EE VI to fill in a gap, with no concern about the seemingly disparate accounts of pleasure. Frede is on record as being skeptical of the view that NE VII is “a remnant of the EE” but does not in this piece rehearse her earlier extended criticism of this position (p. 168). She treats book VII as “an integral part of the EN” (p. 169) wherein pleasure is, roughly, unimpeded activity, while book X has it that pleasure is “the manifestation of the perfection of an activity” that “is natural to the person in the sense that she has a natural affinity with it” (p. 157). An important claim made early on in the NE (at II.3.1104b13-16) is that pleasure and pain concern both actions (praxeis) and affections (pathe) but the latter seem to fade out after book III (p. 164) and this fact has lead many to underplay “a distinction between the ‘active’ and the ‘pathetic’ kinds [of pleasure and pain] when we focus only on the later books (p. 165). The undisputed EE assigns pleasure and pain “only to the soul’s non-rational part, not to the controlling part”, whereas the NE emphasizes “time and again” that virtues of character are equally concerned with” both actions and passions (pp. 165-6). Those who are more committed than she to seeing the first discussion of pleasure as integral to the EE will have to take into account the case she makes for a rather strong contrast between these works.
Giulia Bonasio tackles the crucially important topic of the EE’s definition of happiness as adding the notion of complete virtue (arete teleia) to that of a complete life. Following Kenny and Cooper, she argues that this “super excellence” is identified in VII3. as kalokagathia but she seeks to go beyond them by claiming that “Aristotle understands complete and whole—teleion and holon—in the sense that these expressions have in the Physics and Metaphysics” (p. 172). Unlike “four other contenders” for “the identification of complete virtue”—megalopsychia, dikaiosune, phronesis, and sophia—kk (to use the abbreviation Irwin employs) “includes all the virtues qua parts” such that they are connected to “form a whole” which “has a limit” and that this “core concept” of the EE is “theoretically innovative” (p. 173). When we are told that virtue, “since it can be a whole (hole) or a part (morion),” and could also be complete (as a whole) or incomplete (when a part), Aristotle does not specify exactly what he means by these distinctions (pp. 174-5). In other works, however, he does explain himself. Drawing on the Physics and Metaphysics, Bonasio summarizes their contribution as follows:
In the light of all this, virtue is complete when (i) it has all its parts connected in a way that they form a whole; (ii) it is one virtue that has other virtues as genuine parts rather than as a mere bundle that fails to be composed in the way that wholeness requires. Since we are talking about a virtue that has other virtues as parts, it seems plausible to say that the virtues are connected if they interact and co-function. (p. 177)
Bonasio carefully considers the four contenders for the title of complete virtue and claims that only kk fulfills that role, citing substantial passages from VIII.3 to make her case (pp. 180-2). One puzzling, unexplained feature in reaching this crucial conclusion is that she translates kalokagathia as “the virtue of being-beautiful-and-good” (p. 180) whereas I would agree with Irwin in calling the “composite virtue” fine-and-goodness (p. 188).
Terence Irwin also seeks to unpack that last chapter of the EE, especially when it is interpreted as claiming “it is possible to be good without being kk” (p. 188), citing the Spartans as paradigm cases (pp. 188-9). These Greeks are said to pursue virtue only insofar as it ensures obtaining natural goods and not for its own sake as kalon. He agrees with the claim that “kk is complete virtue” (p. 190), as Bonasio argues, but does not see the use of kalokagathia is as innovative as she does. That is, Irwin thinks the term is being used here as we find it in other 4th BCE authors, where it is “often applied to people who show some virtue that is salient in the relevant context” (p. 189). Honest men are said to be kk and those who are kk have a “public-spirited outlook” and show themselves to be valuable and patriotic citizens. “Aristotle does not simply reproduce these common opinions about kk” but “keeps them in mind in his discussion of the relation between kk and the individual virtues (p. 189). To see what the kk have that those who are merely good might lack “Aristotle divides non-instrumental goods into two classes” (p. 190); some, like health and strength, are natural goods but not fine and worthy of praise” (p. 191). The kk are those for whom the natural goods are not only good for them, as is the case with good persons generally, since they also have “fine and praiseworthy goods ‘because of themselves’”. They “engage in fine actions ‘for their own sake’ (1248b35-6)” (p. 193) and differ from the good in “that only the kk benefits from the natural goods” (p. 194, my emphasis). As for the legendarily brave Spartans, Aristotle says that they have only the “political state” (hexis) of “apparent bravery” which is “closest to genuine bravery” but not quite the real deal. It is here that Irwin insists on returning to the mss. of P,C and L, whereas most accept the Aldine reading agathoi at 1249a1 in place of the original agrioi, which means ‘wild’ and not ‘good’ (p. 201). The Spartans seek what they can get from military victories, which is “why (dio) they are wild men; for they have the natural goods, but they do not have fine-and-goodness—for the fine things do not belong to them because of themselves” (1248b39-1249a3, p. 195). It is worth noting that Mueller might disagree here, since he has a long footnote on p. 154 that retains agathoi in the face of Irwin’s suggestion, a rare example of explicit intertextuality in this collection.
Authors and Titles
- Introduction: Aristotle’s Two Ethics, Giulio Di Basilio
- The Preambles to the Ethics, Carlo Natali
- The Ergon Argument in the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics, Friedemann Buddensiek
- Pleasure and Pain in the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Definitions of Moral Virtue, Marco Zingano
- Voluntariness of Character States in Aristotle’s Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics, Giulio Di Basilio
- Decision in the Eudemian Ethics, Karen Margrethe Nielsen
- Justice in the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics, Mi-Kyoung Lee
- Sophia in the Eudemian Ethics, Christopher Rowe
- Neither Virtue nor Vice: Akratic and Enkratic Values in and beyond the Eudemian Ethics, Jozef Mueller
- Two Kinds of Pleasure (and Pain) in Aristotle’s Ethics, Dorothea Frede
- Complete Virtue, Giulia Bonasio
- The Wild and the Good: Conditions for Virtue in the Eudemian Ethics, Terence Irwin
Notes
[1] The best source for Kenny’s influential work on the EE is the second edition of TAE published by Oxford University Press in 2016, which adds two substantial chapters of “reconsiderations” that clarify his responses to his critics and retreat from some of the chronological speculation he had offered earlier.
[2] She quotes 5 of these, to which can now be added the most recent by C.D.C. Reeve: Aristotle: Eudemian Ethics (Indianapolis, Hackett, 2021).