Aristotle's Proemium to the Ethics: The Highest End, Method and Fit Hearers

Orientation #

He says “we’ve done that already” of the excursion on whether the good is defined by cause or effect, and of the second thing he taught, that the end is always better than what is for the sake of it (prev. lecture, not resolvable from the context block). Next time: “this key chapter” where Aristotle draws a line around the end or purpose of man, attached to the handout as Reading 2. He has the proemium to wisdom (Metaphysics) with him but “not going to give it to you yet.” The previous class treated moral virtue and the mean; the next works through Book I ch. 7 and hands out the Proemium to wisdom.

The class, in order #

1. Two ways to divide a book (“logical and understandable division”) #

Point: the editorial-and-reference division (ten books, chapters, Thomas’s lectiones, Bekker numbers) is for finding places; the logical-and-understandable division is usually into two or three and illuminates the work.

• Romeo and Juliet: prologue vs. play (a student suggested three, or by geography — that is the Midsummer Night’s Dream, he says); the play then divides into tying the knots and untying the knots. Shakespeare’s line “O time, thou must untangle this, it is too hard a knot for me to untie” shows the divider.
• Almost every work of Aristotle divides into proemium (Greek: paving the way) and the main body (Latin tractatus, drawing out); the proemium occupies the beginning of the first book and is divided against the rest of that book and all the others.
• Prologue and overture as comparisons: preparing the audience, a foretaste.
• Plato anticipated this in the Timaeus (the book Plato carries in Raphael’s School of Athens; Aristotle carries the Ethics): Timaeus gives a proemium, Socrates praises it, then the main discourse on the universe.
• The chief thing in a proemium: the skopos (target), Latin intentio libri; sometimes also the importance of what is aimed at and something on how to proceed.
• Both the proemium to practical philosophy (the Ethics contains the elements of political philosophy) and the proemium to wisdom (Metaphysics) end with an epilogue recounting what was done, going back in time: the third thing, then the second, then the first (Ethics; Thomas divides it into three); second then first (Metaphysics; Thomas divides it into two).
• Dei Verbum: the English translation said “introduction”; the Latin says proemium. A proemium is much shorter than an introduction (“leading in”): it says what you aim at and maybe how you go about it.
• On his handout, the last sentence of the proemium (top of page 3) is the epilogue: the hearer, how it should be received, what we propose — “let this pave the way” (verb prooidopoiesai, as he gives it).

2. Every art aims at some good; acts and products (“every art and every science”) #

Point: the first sentence is an induction manifesting the first definition of the good.

• Carpentry, cooking, tailoring, watchmaking each aim at a good; every science at knowledge; every action and choice at what seems good — hence “the good is what all desire.”
• Aside he would make here but has already done: is that definition by cause or by effect — good because we want it, or want it because good? Aristotle knows the answer but does not raise it here.
• Distinction: ends that are acts vs. ends that are products beyond the acts. Going to the art museum to see paintings, putting on a Mozart symphony: the end is the seeing or hearing. Making a chair, a table, spaghetti: the product is beyond the making.
• Where there is a product, the product is better than the act: the chair, not the making, is the ultimate end.

3. Many ends, and the order among arts (“the art of bridle making”) #

Point: as there are many arts, there are many ends; where one end is for the sake of another, the art about the first comes under, and is commanded by, the art about the second.

• Examples in the text: medicine/health, shipbuilding/ship, military art/victory (MacArthur: “no substitute for victory”), household art/wealth. Thomas notes Aristotle’s subtlety here: wealth is only a means, but Aristotle gives examples acceptable to his audience before determining the truth — “how careful Aristotle writes.”
• Bridle-making and saddle-making under horsemanship; the art of making rifles for the rifle, the rifle for the soldier, so the military art commands rifle-making. German guns in Russia: more precise than Russian ones but froze up, so they were remade like Russian guns — the commanding art dictates from the field.
• Pharmacist under the medical doctor: medicine is for health; a prescription is an order from doctor to pharmacist; the pharmacist as such need not know why, only how to make what the doctor orders.
• Chef and potato-peeler: “it’s not yours to question why” but to cut them as the chef says (chicken piccata pounded thin, like scaloppini).
• His father’s farm-wagon company: farm wagons flex on rough land and steel can snap, so his father specified the steel’s size and shape to the steel makers, and the lumber to the lumber people; steel and wood are for the wagon, so the wagon-making art commands those arts. (He once dropped a piece of steel on his toe.)

4. The chief art and the best good (“go on without end”) #

Point: the ends of chief arts are more desirable than those of the arts under them, and there must be some end desired for its own sake, which is the best.

1. The end is better than what is for the sake of the end (the second thing learned earlier); so health is better than medicine, the meal than the potatoes, the wagon than steel, the house than wood — and this holds whether the end is an act or a product (the painting is a product but is for the act of seeing).
2. If everything were chosen for the sake of something else it would go on without end and desire would be “empty and foolish”: if I desire A for B, I cannot desire A until I desire B; if B for C, not until C; so I could never begin to desire. Therefore something is desired not for anything further — Plato’s Symposium; commonly named happiness “not knowing exactly what happiness is.”
3. If A for B and B for C, C is better than B and B than A; if C is for nothing further, C is the best.

• “Would not the knowledge of this weigh greatly upon life?” — understatement; Thomas notes Aristotle’s modesty. The archer: if you do not aim at the target, for all practical purposes you will miss; so knowing the end of life is very practical.
• Thomas on the theological virtues: by faith we know the end, by hope we tend to it, by charity we are already united to it; charity greater than hope, hope than faith, but faith needed first.
• Hence Aristotle: try to get hold in outline what this is (anticipating the first book) and to which science or power it belongs.

5. The political art as most authoritative (“in virtue of the authority invested”) #

Point: the end of human life belongs to the art that commands all others, which is clearly the political art.

• The city closes restaurants (cockroaches), licenses driving, controls who may practise medicine or dentistry (he could not set up as “Burlesque dentist” downtown), drafts you into the military art, authorises Assumption College to grant degrees (“in virtue of the authority invested in me by the state of Massachusetts and the board of trustees”).
• The text: it sets in order which sciences are needed in cities, who learns what and how far; the most honoured powers among the Greeks come under it — the military (victory subordinate to the good of the city; “commander in chief”), the household art (laws on marriage, education), the art of speech (a city has force and persuasion; you cannot force everybody, so some must be persuaded).
• He stresses that you can reason either way: from subordination of goods (medicine for health) to subordination of arts (pharmacist under doctor), or from the doctor commanding the pharmacist to the subordination of the goods. So if the political art commands all arts, it aims at the good to which all other goods are subordinate — the good desired for its own sake.
• Result: the book is chiefly about the end of human life, a kind of foundation of the political art.

6. One man and the city; the godlike (“more beautiful and godlike”) #

Point: the end is the same for one man and the city, but achieving and preserving it for the city is better and more perfect.

• Helping one man (son, brother, friend) to be happy is lovable; for a nation or city it is more beautiful and godlike. Thomas’s remark: God acts for the good of the whole universe; acting for the whole city is more godlike than for one individual — even though one can sometimes do more for an individual. St Benedict and his rule; the founders of orders in the statues around St Peter’s square.
• Socrates’ definition in the Theaetetus: philosophy is becoming like God so far as possible for man; the same “godlike” reference returns in the proemium to wisdom. Practical philosophy, especially political, is like God in one way; wisdom in another.
• “The knowledge then aims at these things, being a form of political knowledge” — end of the first part. Not that our politicians know it: then they have no foundation.
• Aside: Alfred the Great, very impressive, interested in the theoretical life amid the disorders of the day, getting people to read Boethius, fighting the Danes.

7. How to proceed: the matter allows only rough truth (“show the truth roughly”) #

Point: the way of considering must fit the matter, and the matter of ethics admits only for-the-most-part certitude.

• Principle already in the Timaeus: your way of knowing fits the thing known — Mozart with the ears, Titian with the eyes, wine with nose and tongue (colour admired, but you don’t know a wine until you smell and taste it; “sounds like good wine — no”).
• Certitude not sought alike in all things, as neither in the products of the arts: the presidents’ busts blown out of rock in South Dakota cannot be as exact as a drawing on paper — “a beautiful comparison.”
• Difference and error about good and just things, “so that they seem to be by custom only and not by nature”: not Aristotle’s position, but that some think so is a sign the matter is less certain than geometry. (A student’s earlier question about what to say when the wife brings something home: not as clear as geometry.)
• Some have perished through wealth (kidnapping for ransom, Lindbergh’s baby, the wealthy man who buys his son an airplane that crashes at Athens; “I still got my son because I wasn’t wealthy enough”); through courage (the strong man who strains lifting what a weaker man would not; his mother’s warnings); through beauty (the beautiful woman taken by pirates, the plain girl left unhurt). So these human goods are imprecise.
• Thomas’s elaboration of “roughly”: applying something universal and simple to something singular and composed of many things.
• “From such things as are for the most part, to conclude such as are the same”: return what you borrowed — but not your gun when you are mad at your wife; never go through a red light — but when the lights at Salisbury and Park are frozen and everyone stops, common sense says go; return the car keys — but not when the lender has had too much; marry a non-Catholic — ordinarily no, but his mother did, “or I wouldn’t be here” (student exchanges on his Scandinavian name and his wife’s parish priest).
• Military-school anecdote: as roll-taker for the company escorting federal inspectors, he told a late cadet “stay right here, I’m not gonna mark you late”; the instructor commended his prudence — circumstances where you do not do what you normally would.

8. The educated man and akribeia (“accept the mathematician persuading”) #

Point: the educated man seeks certitude or precision in each subject to the extent the nature of the thing admits.

• Greek akribeia: certitude or precision — either makes sense.
• The example from the liberal arts (trivium: grammar, logic, rhetoric; quadrivium: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music): the mathematician the most precise, the rhetorician the loosest. Accepting the mathematician persuading demands less than mathematics admits; demanding geometrical argument from the rhetorician demands more than rhetoric (about singular human actions, full of exceptions) allows. “Again, the virtue lies in the middle.”
• Election predictions sidestepped or qualified; economists “barring unforeseen circumstances”; the stock market, understood better by some but not always called right — none demands the precision of the triangle’s interior angles.
• The rhetorician’s example: “the Westboro Mandarin, I had a wonderful meal there last week” — reasoning from singular to singular of the same kind, strength depending on likeness; the wrong chef may be on. The enthymeme reasons from what is true for the most part: a man staggering out of a bar is drunk — but people stagger for other reasons (his own dizziness last Saturday, checked at Memorial with a cardiac scan; “Perkins is drunk again”).
• Complete universality only in something very general: do good and avoid the bad; “return what you borrowed” is not always true.

9. Who is the suitable hearer (“the young man is not the proper hearer”) #

Point: each man judges well what he knows; the young and the followers of emotion are not suitable hearers, because the end is action.

• Lack of experience: his boyhood defence of matrimony — you can’t have children without the sacrament — shows inexperience; the man married twenty years vs. the young man on marriage; political knowledge needs vast experience most lack, and even ethics needs more than the young have; even irreligious men later see the folly of their youth.
• Followers of emotion listen “in vain and uselessly,” since the end is not knowledge but doing: friendship in Books 8 and 9 (which “we had”) is studied to be a friend and choose friends, not merely to know what a friend is.
• Young in age or youthful in character makes no difference: the playboy “is a boy”; the defect is not by time but by living by emotion.
• Useless as to the incontinent, who know something is bad but are overcome: Aristotle compares them to one who hears medical advice and does not follow it — why hear the doctor, why hear lectures on ethics, unless you will act? Knowing not to drink too much is useless if you cannot resist. Useful to those desiring and acting according to reason.

10. The epilogue, and the two divisions again (“let this pave the way”) #

Point: the epilogue recalls the hearer (experienced, wanting a reasonable life), how it should be received (no complete certitude; many things for the most part — free trade generally good, but infant industries may need protection), and what we propose (a line around the end desired for its own sake, foundation of political knowledge).

• The Metaphysics likewise: fourteen books is the editorial division; logically, proemium vs. the rest of Book One and two through fourteen. Shakespeare’s five acts are arbitrary, useful for reference; tying and untying the knots illuminates the play.
• Next time: the key chapter drawing the line around the end of man, which he leads up to gradually.

His words #

• editorial and reference division vs. logical and understandable division; the latter “usually into two or three.”
• proemium: Greek, “paving the way”; vs. tractatus, “the drawing out,” the main body.
• skopos: the target; Latin intentio libri, the aim of the book.
• epilogue of a proemium: recounting what was done, going back in time.
• introduction: “a leading in”; a proemium is much shorter.
• the good is what all desire (want).
• chief art: the art aiming at the good to which other goods are subordinate.
• practical philosophy: the Ethics contains the elements of political philosophy.
• looking philosophy / looking wisdom [ed.: speculative or theoretical philosophy].
• roughly: applying the universal and simple to the singular and composed (Thomas).
• akribeia: certitude or precision.
• enthymeme: reasoning from things true for the most part; the example: reasoning from one singular to another.
• incontinent: those who know something is bad but are overcome by emotion.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I, chs. 1–3 (the proemium), from his handout, with the epilogue sentence at the top of page 3.
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Ethics I, lectiones 1–3 (verified sources): the threefold division of the proemium, the induction, Aristotle’s subtlety on wealth, the “godlike,” “roughly.”

Mentioned

• Plato, Timaeus (proemium; way of considering fits the thing); Symposium (desire not for the sake of anything further); Theaetetus (philosophy as becoming like God).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I, opening chapters (proemium to wisdom, with epilogue); Nicomachean Ethics VIII–IX (friendship, done earlier).
• Thomas on the theological virtues (faith, hope, charity; locus not stated).
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (prologue); a line on time untangling the knot (play not stated).
• Vatican II, Dei Verbum (proemium in the Latin text).
• Raphael, School of Athens.

His questions #

• What is the logical and understandable division of Romeo and Juliet? Prologue and play; the play into tying and untying the knots.
• Is the good good because we want it, or do we want it because it is good? Raised as an excursion already made; not answered here.
• Is a chair better than making a chair? Yes; where there is a product, the product is the end and better than the act.
• Is there a connection between medicine and health? Medicine is for health, so the pharmacist’s art comes under the medical art.
• Is everything chosen for the sake of something else? No; then desire could never begin; something is desired for its own sake.
• If you don’t aim at the target, what are your chances of hitting it? For all practical purposes you will miss; hence knowing the end is practical.
• Why is acting for the city more godlike? God acts for the good of the whole universe (Thomas).
• Is it good to be wealthy? Ambiguous: some have perished through wealth; human goods are imprecise.
• Should you go through a red light? Should you marry a non-Catholic? For the most part no, but circumstances give exceptions.
• Why listen to lectures on ethics? Only if you want to act reasonably; the end is action, not knowledge.