The End of Man: Own Act, Virtue, and the Act with Reason Done Well

Orientation #

He begins in the middle of the question “which of these goods are better” (the threefold division of goods), relying on “what we learned about the better”: the end is always better than what is for the sake of the end (prev. lecture). He says the question of what human virtue is “we’re going to do eventually for man” and that Aristotle “is going to spend a lot of time” on it; the recording cuts off there. Verified sources indicate he reads from his handouts “Note on End or Purpose of Man” (pp. 1-3), “The First Definition of Reason” (p. 86) and “A Note on Practical Philosophy” (p. 10). The previous class established that the end is better than what is for its sake and applied it to the threefold division of goods; the next reworks the proofs for man’s end and the definition of virtue.

The class, in order #

1. Inside goods vs. outside goods (“I call them the inside goods”) #

He lumps goods of soul and body together as “inside goods” (we are composed of body and soul) and asks first whether inside or outside goods are better.

1. What we know about “better”: the end is always better than what is for the sake of the end.
2. So if induction shows one class is for the sake of the other, one can syllogize.
3. Induction (the “most proportioned way”): feet vs. shoes (stub your toe and you know which is for which); eyes vs. glasses; body vs. clothing (if the body were for the clothing, we’d be mannequins in a department store); you vs. the chair (are you for holding the chair down?); you vs. the mattress; you vs. the automobile (if you could be on campus without it, it could “stay home in the garage”).
4. Conclusion: outside goods are for the sake of inside goods; the end is better; therefore inside goods are better than outside goods. Outside goods get “the bronze medal”.

• Objection (his own): the art of carpentry is in the soul, yet it is for the sake of chairs and tables, exterior things. Reply: those things are in turn for the sake of something inside (the chair holds up your body). Likewise bookmaking is for the book, but the book is for the mind; the stereo for hearing Mozart; the painting for seeing (“I couldn’t see if I was blind”). So outside goods are for inside goods “either immediately or ultimately”.

2. Goods of the soul vs. goods of the body (“which of those two are better”) #

Three routes are sketched; the third is the one the class will take.

• Route 1: argue as before that the body is for the sake of the soul; but that requires knowing “that much about the soul and matter and form”, which is difficult.
• Route 2 (man vs. beast): man is better than the beast (even one who says “I don’t know that” runs straight between the dog and himself, knowing man is more). Goods of the body are those man has in common with the beast; goods of the soul are also called goods of reason (including what partakes of reason, like the moral virtues). Man is not better than the beast by what he shares with it (a beast may be stronger or healthier), so he is better by the goods the beast lacks, the goods of the soul.
• Route 3 (God vs. man): God is better than man; no one thinks the body more godlike than the soul; Shakespeare’s “exhortation to use reason” calls reason godlike, and friendship godlike. So goods of the soul, being more like divine goods, are better.
• A further way, “besides comparing man to the beast or to God”: reason out the end or purpose of human life, then judge which goods are closer to that end. Question: how does one reason out the end of human life? Break.

3. Must there be an end desired for its own sake? (“does this go on forever”) #

Plato in the Symposium and Aristotle in NE I speak of desiring one thing for the sake of another; does the series A-for-B, B-for-C go on forever, or is there something desired for its own sake and everything else for it?

• Student answers (“can’t be an infinite series”, “must be a first mover”) are pushed back: “there’s got to be a first cause, but why?”
• Story: the engineer at his father’s company (University of Minnesota) could not digest that philosophy was studied for its own sake; weeks later he answered his own question: “brain food”, you study it to go out and do something worthwhile with your brain. His view: nothing is pursued as an end.
• Consequence if so: “happiness is always one purchase away”; if you never get C, neither B nor A are really desirable; everything is done for something that would make the rest desirable, but you never reach it.

4. The argument that there is a last end (“how can I begin to desire anything”) #

1. If I desire A for the sake of B, B is the cause of my desiring A: I must desire health before I can desire medicine.
2. So before desiring A I must desire B; before B, C; before C, D.
3. If the series is infinite, no place in it is where I could begin, since every desire presupposes a prior one.
4. Therefore there is something I desire first, not for the sake of anything else, but everything else for its sake.

• Its name: sometimes “happiness” (a word whose meaning has “kind of degenerated”); Plato and Aristotle call it eudaimonia. Aristotle (NE I) says knowing what this is “would have a great weight” upon life, since everything else is done for it; this is what the Ethics is chiefly about.
• Aristotle in NE I first “draws a line around” it (Greek perigraphein), then sees the need to investigate other things before saying more fully what it is. He is helped by his teacher of twenty years, Plato.

5. Two definitions needed: end, and a thing’s own act (“what is meant by a thing’s own act”) #

The argument for man’s end rests on a connection between man’s own act and his end, so both must be defined.

• End (Aristotle, Natural Hearing II): “that for the sake of which”. Health is the end of taking medicine; knowing is the end of study; spending is the end of making money; the end of the chair is your sitting. So “that for the sake of which something is or is done”.
• A thing’s own act (Plato, Republic I; presupposed by Aristotle in NE I): what that thing alone can do, or at least does better than other things. The eye’s own act is to see (the only part through which we see); the ear’s, to hear. Boundary cases: a man on TV walking on his hands (not as well as on feet, so still the foot’s own act); a table knife used as a screwdriver (wrecks the knife, a substitute); his regular hammer used to flatten chicken when his wife’s special one couldn’t be found (“did the job, not as good”).

6. Two-layer induction: a thing’s own act is its end (“a tool’s own act is its end”) #

He makes a “long induction” in stages, looking at each thing’s own act and its end, from tools, organs and occupations.

• Tools: knife, to cut (he cuts an orange every morning); pen, to write; hammer, to hammer; saw, to saw (George Washington); corkscrew, to remove a cork (a knife tears the cork); screwdriver, to turn the screw. Induce: a tool’s own act is its end.
• Organs: “organ” is from Greek organon, tool; an animal’s body is “a body put together from tools”; the logical works of Aristotle are called the Organon because logic is the tool of philosophy, not for its own sake. Eye, to see; ear, to hear; heart, to pump blood (“maybe other things too”); liver, pancreas get more complicated. Induce: an organ’s own act is its end.
• Occupations: cook, to cook; pianist, to play the piano (hired in a restaurant “as pianist”); teacher, to teach; policeman, soldier. Each either alone can do it or is trained to do it better. Induce: each occupation’s own act is its end.
• Second layer: from these three, induce the more general proposition, a thing’s own act is its end or purpose. Further household cases: the CD player vs. his wife’s whipper vs. the vacuum cleaner, each with its own act.
• Aside on equivocation of “end”: “happiness is the end of life, death is the end of life, therefore death is happiness” confuses meanings.
• Reason from wisdom (the “opposite of induction”): the pair act and ability, taken up “in the book of wisdom” [ed.: apparently his course on wisdom; reading uncertain]; ability is always for the sake of act (the ability to see is for seeing), and whatever has its own act has its own ability, so its own act is its end. “But it’s easier to see this by induction”: induction is more proportioned to us.
• Aside: his freshman mathematics teacher, a cigar-smoking ex-paratrooper, wrote equations around blackboards on all four walls.

7. Man’s own act and the syllogism (“the act with reason is man’s own act”) #

Aristotle asks in NE I whether man is by nature without any act.

• Man’s own act is not just “to reason”: man is an animal with reason, so his own act is “the act with reason”. Fully understood (Shakespeare’s definition of reason), man alone has reason; even for “a dimwit modern” who thinks apes or dogs have minds, it is the act man has most of all. Either way it qualifies.
• Syllogism, first figure: a thing’s own act is its end; the act with reason is man’s own act; therefore the act with reason is man’s end. Middle term: man’s own act.
• Distinction: act with reason vs. act of reason. Every act of reason (understanding, reasoning, defining, inducing) is an act with reason, but not conversely. An act of the will, love, can be reasonable; an emotion can be reasonable: our Lord’s anger at the money changers and the Pharisees’ duplicity. Examples of ordering by reason: house on fire, get the baby out before the books (books first would be a disordered love); being bumped in the hall, consider whether accident, carelessness, intentional like the high-school bully, or using your kids for target practice (more anger). Even bodily acts, walking (an act of the legs, but reason says get exercise) or eating when and how much one should, are acts with reason.
• Not yet claimed: that the act of reason is better than the act of the will, or anything “more precise”; that may come later. Reason’s own act is the act of reason; man’s own act is the act with reason.

8. Done well (“not just to cut, but to cut well”) #

Returning to the inductions: the end of a knife is not just to cut but to cut well (a dull steak knife: “give me another knife”); a pen whose every other letter is blank is not achieving its end; his glasses (he can see without them, but the page and the ball game are blurred); a hearing aid. So the end of eye, ear, pen, knife, cook (who burns the meat), pianist (always missing a note), teacher is its own act done well. Re-induce: a thing’s own act done well is its end; therefore the act with reason done well is man’s end.

9. Virtue in the general sense (“much virtue in herbs, little in men”) #

Another way to say “done well”: the act with reason according to human virtue. People balk because they start from a narrow, particular notion of virtue; there is a meaning as general as “a thing’s own act”: virtue is what enables a thing to do its own act well, vice the quality whereby its own act is done badly.

• Knife: its virtue is sharpness, its vice dullness. Sharpness is not what a knife is, nor its cutting well, but the quality or disposition enabling it to cut well. Three questions follow: what is its own act, what is its virtue, how do you sharpen it (give it its virtue). The same three will be asked of man; human virtue is harder to find, and “there’s actually more than one of them”.
• Plaque on a friend’s kitchen wall, “much virtue in herbs, little in men”: the herb’s own act is to season; a fresh herb has the herb’s virtue (his expert-cook friend objects to dried herbs); herbs more often have their virtue than men have theirs. Our Lord: you are the salt of the earth; if salt loses its virtue it is cast out.
• Aristotle, Rhetoric: wealth is the virtue of money, poverty its vice, not the virtue of man. Money’s own act is to buy; the wealthy buy well (the hundred-dollar bottle, caviar), the poor buy the cheap cut, second-hand clothing. Aside: a Californian who gave newlyweds a book of a hundred ways to fix hamburger.
• His two eyes: the left sees better at a distance, so it is his “virtuous eye”, though not in moral virtue; it would take an ophthalmologist to say what shape of cornea is the eye’s virtue. So finding the virtue of a thing can take time; this is where Aristotle spends a long time on the virtues of man. Recording ends mid-sentence.

His words #

• inside goods / outside goods: goods of soul and body together vs. external goods.
• the better: the end is always better than what is for the sake of the end.
• bronze medal: the third place awarded to outside goods.
• goods of reason: another name for goods of the soul, including what partakes of reason (moral virtues).
• eudaimonia: Plato’s and Aristotle’s name for what is desired for its own sake; “happiness” in degenerated modern usage.
• perigraphein: to draw a line around the end (Aristotle, NE I).
• end: that for the sake of which (something is or is done).
• a thing’s own act: what that thing alone can do, or at least does better than other things (Plato, Republic I).
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• organ / organon: Greek for tool; the body a body put together from tools; the logical works as tool of philosophy.
• act and ability [ed.: act and potency]: ability is for the sake of act.
• act with reason vs. act of reason: the former includes acts of will, emotion and body measured or ordered by reason.
• virtue (general sense): what enables a thing to do its own act well; vice: what makes its own act done badly.
• human virtue: the quality or disposition whereby man does his own act well.

Texts #

Read in class

• Handouts “Note on End or Purpose of Man” pp. 1-3, “The First Definition of Reason” p. 86, “A Note on Practical Philosophy” p. 10 (verified sources; not named in the transcript).
• Plato, Republic, Book I: definition of a thing’s own act (paraphrased).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I: whether man is without an act; knowing the end has great weight; drawing a line around the end (paraphrased).

Mentioned

• Plato, Symposium (desiring one thing for the sake of another).
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing, Book II (definition of end).
• Aristotle, Rhetoric (wealth the virtue of money).
• Shakespeare’s “exhortation to use reason” (reason and friendship called godlike; definition of reason) (his phrase; locus not stated).
• Gospel: our Lord and the money changers; anger with the Pharisees; salt of the earth losing its virtue (loci not stated).
• Kitchen plaque: “Much virtue in herbs, little in men.”

His questions #

• Which are better, the outside goods or the inside goods? Inside goods: by induction outside goods are for their sake, and the end is better.
• Are my feet for the sake of my shoes, or my shoes for the sake of my feet? The shoes are for the feet; “if you stub your toe, you know.”
• Is man better than the beast by the goods he has in common with the beast? No; by the goods of the soul, which the beast lacks.
• Which is more godlike, the body or the soul? The soul; no one thinks the body more godlike.
• Does desiring one thing for the sake of another go on forever? No: if it did, one could never begin to desire anything; there must be a first thing desired for its own sake.
• What is a thing’s own act? What it alone can do, or at least does better than other things.
• What general truth underlies “a thing’s own act is its end”? Ability is for the sake of act; but induction is more proportioned to us.
• Does “act with reason” mean the same as “act of reason”? No; act of reason is only part; acts of will, emotion and body ordered by reason are acts with reason.
• What quality enables a knife to cut well, and what makes it cut poorly? Sharpness; dullness.
• What is man’s own virtue, and how is it acquired? Left open: to be investigated eventually, and there is more than one.