The Good, the Better and the End of Man: Own Act, Virtue and Proportion

Orientation #

He opens by reviewing “what good is”, “what is better”, and the rough reasoning to the end of man from last time (prev. lecture), then adds new ways of reasoning to that end and passes to virtue and the division of goods. He closes by pointing ahead to Nicomachean Ethics X, where Aristotle asks which virtue is greatest and determines the end of man more fully. The previous class built inductively to man’s end as “the act with reason done well”; the next argues that goods of the soul are better than goods of body and exterior goods. Verified sources say his handouts “Note on End or Purpose of Man” (pp. 1–4) and “A Note on Practical Philosophy” (pp. 7–9) are read from in this episode, and that the “more so” passage is Metaphysics II with Aquinas’s lectio 2.

The class, in order #

1. Review: wanted because good (“is it good because they want it”) #

Point: things are wanted because they are good, not good because wanted; reasoned by induction.

• Objection he recalls against “good because wanted”: everyone admits having wanted something not good for him.
• Why then is the good not always wanted, and the bad sometimes wanted? Between the good and desire come the senses or reason, which can be deceived by the likeness of the bad to the good, or can see the good in a thing and miss the bad.
• Direction of causality: the good acts on the heart through the senses or reason; the apparent good moves only because it resembles the truly good, “so the good itself is really the first cause.”

2. What is better: three meanings of “perfect” (“perfect has three basic meanings”) #

Point: in the “fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V] Aristotle distinguishes senses of perfect/complete, from which the rule about “better” is drawn.

1. Having all its parts — repas complet in a Quebec restaurant: appetizer, main course, dessert.
2. Complete in its kind, having all the ability of that kind — Homer the complete poet: plot (Aristotle: he taught the Greeks to make a plot), characters (Hegel: many-faceted like a diamond, against the one-sided French tragedians), diction and similes (generations of men like leaves; “I haven’t raked up leaves today”), and both tragedy and comedy (the lost Margites is to comedy as the Iliad to tragedy) — unlike Aristophanes or Molière, comedy only.
3. What has reached its end or purpose.

• Simplifying Aristotle: if perfect is better than imperfect, then the whole is better than the part and the end than what is for the end. Of these two the end/means is more fundamental, since the part is for the sake of the whole, so the whole is in a way the end of the part. Hence the most basic statement: the end is better than what is for the sake of the end.

3. Proving the end is better: induction and the “more so” principle (“it belongs more to the cause”) #

Point: the rule is shown both by induction and by a general principle he prefers to unfold.

• Induction: medicine vs. health; studying vs. knowing (his young son: why not be born knowing? — “you want to be born an angel?” whose mind is created full); making vs. having money; making vs. having dinner.
• General principle, stated by Aristotle and Thomas with “the brevity of wisdom” (“brevity is a soul of wit”): when the same belongs to two things, but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause. Unfolded through examples:
  • hot said of fire and of the air around it: fire is hotter;
  • wet said of water and of cloth: water is wetter;
  • logic/geometry: conclusion known because of premises, so premises are more known—“if the premises were not more known, would we use them to prove the conclusion?”;
  • train: engine pulls the car more than the car ahead of it, since mover is said of both but of one because of the other;
  • the Pietà: made more by Michelangelo than by hammer and chisel, though the chisel touched the marble, because they made it only as moved by him.
• Application: good/desirable is said of end and means, but of the means because of the end; therefore the end is more good.
• Extension: everything is made for the sake of being like God; “I am the Alpha and the Omega”; so God, the last end of all, is better than everything else — a starting point before saying how much better.

4. The best: man’s end by induction and categorical syllogism (“a thing’s own act is its end”) #

Point: what is better than all the rest is the best, the last end of human life; recalled as reasoned from two definitions.

• Definition of end: that for the sake of which something is or is done (sitting is the end of the chair; health of taking medicine).
• Definition of a thing’s own act (from Republic I): what it alone can do, or does better than anything else — seeing/eye, hearing/ear; walking is the feet’s own act though agile hands can walk “in no way as well”; uncorking is the corkscrew’s own act, not the knife’s, though a desperate man can pick a cork out with a knife.
• Connection, a “two-layered induction”: tools (pen writes, knife cuts—each tool is in your house for its own act), organs (Greek word for tool: eye, ear, front and back teeth, heart, liver), occupations (cook, teacher—why we hire and pay them); then the grand induction: a thing’s own act is its end or purpose.
• Syllogism (put on the board): Man’s own act is man’s end (from induction). The act with reason is man’s own act (man is the animal with reason; even the moderns say Homo sapiens, “the wise ape,” so at least he does it better). Therefore the act with reason is man’s end.
• Precision 1: the end is to do the own act well — a pen that skips (like a bad typewriter key), the eye (“why’d they give you those funny looking things in front of your face”), a heart that needs fixing, a cook who burns the meat, a pianist “like I would”. So: the act with reason done well.
• Precision 2 (Aristotle, NE I): throughout life — “one swallow does not make a summer” (his joke: a cocktail party swallow). Aristotle “draws this line around the end of man.”

5. From “done well” to virtue in the broad sense (“virtue is as general as a thing’s own act”) #

Point: the Greeks substitute “according to human virtue” (aretē) for “done well”, which requires virtue’s broad meaning, narrowed in the modern world.

• Own act vs. own virtue: not the same, but you must know a thing’s own act before its virtue or vice. Aristotle’s broad definition: virtue is what makes a thing good and its own act good; vice the opposite—the quality or disposition making the own act be done badly.
• Knife: own act to cut; virtue sharpness (not the same as cutting, nor as cutting well, but what enables cutting well); vice dullness (“sometimes you find this to the point dull”); the practical third question, how do you sharpen a knife.
• So one may say the knife’s purpose is to cut well, or to cut by its virtue.
• End of NE I: having defined man’s purpose, Aristotle sees the need to consider human virtue and divides it into moral virtue and the virtue of reason itself (intellectual; he just calls them “virtues of reason”). Note “act with reason” is broader than act of reason: will, emotions, even exterior acts like walking and eating can partake of reason; moral virtues are virtues of what partakes of reason, primarily in will or emotions. NE II–V treat moral virtues, VI the virtues of reason.
• Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew: a character studying that part of philosophy “that treats of happiness by virtue specially to be achieved” — a good description of the Ethics.
• How virtue is acquired: Meno opens by asking Socrates whether inborn, by practice, or taught; Socrates says he doesn’t even know what virtue is; but the philosopher eventually asks.
• Broad sense illustrated: friend’s kitchen sign “Much virtue in herbs, little in men” (fresh herb more virtuous than a year-old jar; can lose its virtue); “You are the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5) — salt losing its virtue is cast out, so a man who loses his; Rhetoric: wealth as the virtue of money (money’s own act is to buy; poverty its vice).
• Finding a thing’s virtue may take more study than the knife: what is the virtue of the eye? He sees better at a distance with his left, “my virtuous eye” (student: not moral virtue?).

6. Second way: proportion and the if-then syllogism (“the act with reason is to man as seeing is to the eye”) #

Point: the same induction material yields a shorter conditional argument through a proportion.

• Ratio vs. proportion: ratio is the order or relation of one thing to another (two terms); proportion, in Euclid’s sense (Greek analogia), is a likeness of ratios (four terms). IQ tests: supplying the fourth term shows you see the likeness.
• Digression on how important proportion is: Euclid V (theory of proportions) applied in VI—any regular figure on the hypotenuse equals those on the sides, beyond Book I’s Pythagorean theorem; Duhem: proportions the most common way things are found in physics; Einstein, Evolution of Physics, on de Broglie’s wave mechanics; the inverse-square law of gravity discovered by analogy to light diminishing as 1/x² (double the distance, a quarter the light); Plato’s Republic generated from the proportion soul-parts : city-parts; Aristotle’s “fourth book of dialectic” on simple proportions; Romeo and Juliet, “Death lies on her like an untimely frost / upon the sweetest flower of all the field”; the parables and “The Lord is my shepherd” (Lord : us :: shepherd : flock); proportions with one term twice (8:4::4:2) — the Our Father, “God will be to us as we are to our neighbor.” Senior seminar exercise: each student picks out the proportions of one book.
• Examples from the induction: seeing : eye :: hearing : ear — not that seeing and hearing are the same, but the ratios are alike. Mathematical warning: 2:3 :: 4:6, not 4:5 (likeness of ratio, not equal difference).
• The proportion: what is to man as seeing is to the eye? Its own act — the act with reason (broader than act of reason).
• If-then: if seeing is the end of the eye, then the act with reason is the end of man. An if-then statement is not a statement of fact; you need a statement that something is so. But it is more known to us that seeing is the eye’s end; therefore syllogize.
• Why this works: one ratio is more known. Grab a man downtown who never went to school — purpose of a pen? to write; a knife? to cut steak; the eye? to see; the ears? to hear; the purpose of man? “It ends there.” So you reason from the known ratio to the unknown or less known. As many such arguments as items in the induction, e.g. writing : pen :: act with reason : man.
• Adding precision forces it on both sides: seeing well : eye demands act with reason done well : man (as “hearing is to the ear” would be incorrect opposite “seeing well”); seeing well throughout life : eye gives act with reason done well throughout life : man; then the full if-then and syllogism.

7. Three kinds of syllogism (“uses all three kinds of syllogisms”) #

Point: categorical (the first argument), hypothetical/if-then (the second), and disjunctive/either-or (the third, coming).

• Euclid I uses all three; he thinks theorem 6 (equal base angles, equal sides) uses all three in one proof.
• Aside: three is the first number of which we say “all”; maybe back to the Trinity; Dei Verbum: Scripture, tradition, magisterium—none stands alone.

8. Third way: either-or from “living well” (“Is a man living well”) #

Point: starting from the common thought that the goal of life is to live well/do well (“Berquist, what have you been doing?"—reading the treatise on the Trinity, “that’s really living it up”).

• Is living well for a man the life of a plant (deathbed, “he’s on the way out”)? No. The life of a beast, sensing and emoting? No — Aristotle: strange for man to choose the life of something other than himself. So it must be the third: the life of reason, done well.

9. The division of human goods and why it matters (“which goods are better”) #

Point: back to the threefold division from the Apology, and the weight of the disagreement about which are better.

• Apologia is a courtroom term, the legal defense answering categoria, accusation; Socrates defends his life of examining the Athenians about the good things in life.
• The Greeks’ three goods, “and three is all there is”: goods of the soul (goods of reason, or involving reason; today “spiritual”), goods of the body (health, strength, beauty), exterior goods (possessions, clothing, house, books, food).
• Politics VII: everyone knows the three kinds and agrees we need some of all; the disagreement between philosophers and men in general is which are better. Socrates: goods of the soul much better; Athenians live as if body and exterior goods were greatest. His students admit Americans agree with the Athenians.
• Why “no little disagreement”: (1) whichever goods you think better, you seek as much as possible of them and are satisfied with the minimum of the rest, so the whole life is weighed differently; (2) since the end is better than what is for it, you look for the end of life among the goods you think better—wealthiest man, most beautiful woman, or among goods of the soul.
• Hence Aristotle, agreeing with Socrates, after treating all the goods of the soul (moral virtues, virtues of reason), asks in NE X which virtue is greatest, to determine man’s end more fully.

His words #

• “fifth book of wisdom”; his name for the place where perfect has three meanings [ed.: Metaphysics V]
• perfect / complete; (1) having all parts, (2) having all the ability of its kind, (3) having reached its end
• “that on account of which, more so”; when the same belongs to two things but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause [ed.: propter quod unumquodque, illud magis]
• end; that for the sake of which something is or is done
• a thing’s own act; what it alone can do, or does better than other things
• act with reason; broader than act of reason: acts of will, emotion and exterior acts that partake of reason
• aretē; Greek for virtue; broadly, what makes a thing good and its own act good
• vice; the disposition that makes a thing’s own act be done badly
• virtues of reason; his name for what are called intellectual virtues
• ratio; the order or relation of one thing to another (two terms)
• proportion / analogia; a likeness of ratios (four terms), Euclid’s sense
• if-then syllogism; hypothetical or conditional syllogism; either-or syllogism; disjunctive
• apologia / categoria; courtroom defense / accusation
• goods of the soul, goods of the body, exterior (outside) goods

Texts #

Read in class

• Handout, “Note on End or Purpose of Man”, pp. 1–4 (verified source)
• Handout, “A Note on Practical Philosophy”, pp. 7–9 (verified source)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II, Aquinas lectio 2 (verified source; the “more so” principle)
• Handouts “Note for Readings Two through Four”, p. 1, and “On Dividing Shakespeare’s Plays”, p. 3 (verified sources; not identifiable in transcript)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (“fifth book of wisdom”) on perfect
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (end of man, “one swallow”, division of virtue at its end), II–V, VI, X
• Aristotle, Politics VII; Rhetoric (wealth as virtue of money); “fourth book of dialectic” [ed.: Topics IV (inferred)]
• Plato, Republic I (own act), Republic (soul/city proportion), Meno, Apology
• Euclid, Elements I (theorem 6), V, VI
• Matthew 5, Sermon on the Mount; Psalm “The Lord is my shepherd” (inferred locus); Our Father; Revelation “Alpha and Omega” (inferred locus)
• Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew; Romeo and Juliet
• Vatican II, Dei Verbum
• Einstein, The Evolution of Physics; Duhem; de Broglie; Hegel on Homer

His questions #

• Do they want it because it is good, or is it good because they want it? Because it is good; the objection: we all have wanted what was not good for us.
• Why is the bad sometimes wanted? Senses or reason, between the good and desire, can be deceived or incomplete.
• Which is hotter, fire or the air around it? which wetter, water or cloth? which more pulls the car? The cause in each case: fire, water, the engine.
• Was the Pietà made by hammer and chisel or by Michelangelo? Michelangelo, though the chisel touched the marble.
• What is the definition of a thing’s own act? What it alone does or does better than anything else (a student’s “end or purpose” was corrected).
• Is a thing’s own act to achieve its end? No: a thing’s own act is its end.
• What would be the virtue of the knife? its vice? Sharpness; dullness.
• Four is to what as two is to three? Six, not five: likeness of ratios, not equal difference.
• What is to man as seeing is to the eye? The act with reason.
• Do the Americans agree with Socrates or with the Athenians? The students act as if with the Athenians.