Nicomachean Ethics I.7: Drawing a Line Around the End of Man—Reason as Man's Proper Function

Orientation #

The recording opens with the tail of the previous class: after this human virtue Aristotle goes through all the virtues “in the middle of books” and returns in Book X to what more precisely the end of man is, “we’ll look at this next time” (prev. lecture). He also refers back to “what we saw before”: that a thing’s end, if it has its own act, is in that act; to the “long induction we made”; and to the definition of moral virtue and the two kinds of virtue already discussed. At the end he turns to a new handout, the Proemium of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics], “I’m not going to give you too much wisdom here.” The previous class opened the Ethics with the proemium (Book I, chs. 1–3) and the division into proemium and tractatus.

The class, in order #

1. The chapter and its title (“draw a line around”) #

He sets aside the “whole dialectic” leading up to this chapter and reads only the part on drawing a line around the end of man. “Drawing a line” translates the Greek perigraphe, literally to draw a line around; the Greek for happiness is eudaimonia. Aristotle’s opening: that happiness is the best seems agreed; what is desired is that what it is be said more distinctly, and perhaps this will come about “if what man does is taken up.” He ties this to what was seen before: a thing’s end, if it has its own act, is in that act.

2. From the arts to the parts of man (“everyone for whom there is something to do”) #

Point: the good and well-being of anything that has its own act lies in doing that act; so too for man, if he has one.

1. Flute player, sculptor, every artist—and generally “everyone for whom there is something to do”—have their good in doing that. He glosses this more precisely with Plato’s Republic: everything that has its own act (the eye sees, the ear hears; the cook, the barber each have something to do).
2. So also for man, if there is something he does.
3. Objection Aristotle raises: are there acts of the carpenter and shoemaker, but of man none—is he “by nature without anything to do”? His aside: “Sometimes you wonder—an idle mind is the devil’s workshop.” He notes the order of the comparisons: first the fine arts (flute player, sculptor), then the practical arts (carpenter, shoemaker), and in the fourth paragraph the parts of man—eye, hand, foot, “each of the tools,” i.e. organs. Should one then lay down something man does besides all these?

3. Division of life to find man’s own act (“common even to the plants”) #

Point: man’s own act is found by eliminating what he shares with lower living things.

1. To live is common even to plants; so the nourishing and growing life is set aside (“My purpose in life is to feed myself and grow”—or reproduce; plants do all three).
2. Higher is sensing—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching—but this is common to horse, ox and every animal, “because animals are defined by sense.”
3. There remains the doing of what has reason. Student asked how Aristotle proceeds: inductively, from general to particular? He answers: it is a division of what you find in living things, eliminating what is common to plant and animal to be left with what is peculiar to man, “kind of an either-or argument.” Restated: everyone agrees happiness means to live well and do well; but plants, animals and man are all alive—does living well for a man mean living the life of a plant well, or the life of the cat here well, or the life of a man well? Not the first two, so the third: the life that involves reason.

4. Two ways of having reason: obeying it and being it (“as obeying or persuaded by reason”) #

Point: within the rational life Aristotle distinguishes what partakes of reason by obeying it (the basis of the two kinds of virtue discussed earlier) from what is reason.

• Plato represents the emotions as listening to or obeying reason; they must be habituated to this. Plato’s proportion: reason is to the emotions as the man is to the horse—the horse first tries to throw the rider, but if he keeps getting back on he eventually tames it. Aside: Washington Irving’s descriptions of taming prairie horses in the West (1832), wild at first then suddenly docile.
• Training begins with your parents (“You don’t want any more candy, do you?… I guess so”): if your emotions did not listen to your parents’ reason, even less will they listen to your own.
• So one part of man does not have reason itself but partakes of it, listens to it, obeys it. Aside: this is how Mozart represents the emotions in instrumental music, as against the Romantic period where “the emotions are kind of on their own”; Austin Farrer: the one thing the Romantic would not admit is that emotion should be subordinated to reason.
• The other part is reason essentially, having reason and thinking. And this is “said in two ways”: the ability/capacity and the act, of which the act “is more principal, for this seems to be said principally.”

5. Act, good act, and virtue: the human good defined (“the harpist and the good harpist”) #

Point: man’s own act is the act of the soul by reason or not without reason, and the human good is that act perfected by virtue.

1. Man’s own act is the act of the soul “by reason, or not without reason”: by reason as in reasoning, understanding, taking counsel; not without reason because the emotions, and even more the will, can listen to reason and go along with it.
2. The act of a thing and its good act are the same generically—the harpist and the good harpist; the cook cooks, the good cook cooks well. Virtue (already discussed) is what makes a thing good and its act good; so we add “excelling by virtue.”
3. Laying down that the act of man is a kind of life, the act of the soul with reason, and that each is completed by its own virtue: the human good turns out to be the act of the soul by virtue. He recalls that “soul” originally means the cause of life within living bodies; here it is the soul that has reason, not the plant or animal soul.
4. “And if there are many virtues, according to the best and most perfect.” Aristotle goes through the moral virtues (which partake of reason by obeying it), the virtues of reason in Book VI, and in Book X says the virtues are not all equal. Comparison: for the Christian the chief virtues are faith, hope and charity; St Paul says charity is greatest; Thomas in the Disputed Questions on hope says hope is greater than faith, but you must have faith first—so even these are not equal. Likewise the purely human virtues: in Book X the virtues of reason are superior to the moral virtues; the two chief virtues of reason are political foresight and wisdom, giving two supreme happinesses—the more human happiness according to political foresight (“the happiness of Winston Churchill”) and the philosopher’s happiness in wisdom, “a more divine happiness.”

6. Through a whole life; a line has been drawn (“one swallow does not make a spring”) #

Point (top of page four of the handout): a third part is added—not for a day, week or month, but through life. Aristotle quotes the proverb, as he often does to come back to something homely: one swallow does not make a spring, nor one day; so neither one day nor a short time makes one blessed and happy. “A line, therefore, has been drawn around the good”: not the most perfect definition of the end, but it tells you somewhat what it is; after going through and comparing the virtues, the end is determined more exactly. Student: “He set up the target.” He agrees: Aristotle uses skopos, target. A man who sees the target can aim at it and needs good aim to hit it; a man shooting his arrow out in 360 degrees will for all practical purposes never hit it.

7. Aristotle’s rules for hitting the mean (“bend a little bit in the opposite direction”) #

Point: after the general definition of moral virtue in Book II (habit with choice, existing in the middle, the middle towards us, determined by right reason—the virtue of foresight or prudence in Book VI), Aristotle gives rules for becoming virtuous; generally repeated acts make a man virtuous, but he gives three particular rules.

1. The bent stick: to straighten a bent stick you don’t bend it just to straight, you bend it a bit in the opposite direction. The virtue itself is closer to one extreme than the other, so as a rule you must bend toward the farther extreme. Examples: a coward wanting courage must bend toward foolhardiness; an old Dominican said the young brothers tend to be a bit puritanical, but that is how you hit the mean—“you can’t hit it directly”; George Washington’s first military encounters, exhilarated at being shot at, later “I was younger then,” yet ending courageous without risking life unnecessarily; the stingy young man becomes stingier when old as his physical powers decline and he needs his money, so if stingy young you will hardly be generous old, whereas the extravagant one runs into financial problems, pulls back, and is truly generous; temperance too is closer to the defect.
2. Know thyself (the seven wise men): you as an individual may incline more to one extreme—St Francis de Sales got angry very easily and had to bend the other way; someone meek whom people walk over must bend up the other way.
3. Beware of pleasure, “a different kind of rule”: it often leads people astray. He remarks this is a pagan philosopher saying it, not a Christian or a priest. (A student’s “avoid pleasure” and “what was the second one?” prompted him to re-order and restate all three.)

8. Digression: the balanced mind of Aristotle and teachers without envy (“the mind of the school”) #

Aristotle is “a practical man,” in his mind “well balanced”: abstract sciences like logic and wisdom, concrete ones like ethics and political philosophy, anatomy of animals, historical research into the Greek cities and their changes of government, his books on revolution still useful today—“the best, most balanced mind in history.” Plato is supposed to have come into school and called Aristotle “the mind of the school.” Three cases of an older teacher recognizing the younger man’s excellence without envy: Plato and Aristotle; Albert the Great going to Paris at the end of his life to defend Thomas’s teaching; Haydn and Mozart (Haydn’s later symphonies are better because of Mozart). On envy: one of the capital vices; it plays a considerable role in the Gospels with the Pharisees; Scripture says the devil tempted us out of envy and so sin came into the world; the novelists (discussed before) see envy as the black mark on ordinary friendship—envy at a friend’s greater success is contrary to what friendship is, and its frequency is a sign how inclined we are to that vice. Job: “Pride kills the great one, and envy the little one”—so the aristocrat is more subject to pride, democratic times to envy. Belloc’s humility toward Chesterton: hearing a poem read without the author’s name, “Who wrote that?"—“Chesterton."—“Ah, the master.” Thackeray’s little daughter asking why he didn’t write more like Mr Dickens: “Out to Bleak House you go.”

9. Turn to Wisdom (“Proemium of Wisdom”) #

He passes out a new handout, the Proemium of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics], and the recording ends.

His words #

• perigraphe; “draw a line around”—his rendering of Aristotle’s outline of the good [ed.: usually “sketch”].
• eudaimonia; happiness.
• “something to do” / “own act”; a thing’s proper activity, as Plato defined it in the Republic [ed.: ergon, function].
• “tools” (of the eye, hand, foot); the parts of man are organs.
• “obeying or persuaded by reason” vs. “being reason essentially”; the two parts of the rational life, basis of the two kinds of virtue.
• “ability and capacity to act” vs. the act; the latter “more principal” [ed.: potency and activity].
• “by reason, or not without reason”; the former reasoning itself, the latter emotions and will obeying reason.
• “political foresight”; the chief practical virtue of reason [ed.: prudence, phronesis]; “foresight or prudence” used interchangeably.
• skopos; target—what having a definition of the end lets you aim at.
• “the middle towards us”; the mean of moral virtue, determined by right reason.
• “the soul”; originally the cause of life within living bodies.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I, the “drawing a line around the end of man” passage, from his handout “Drawing a Line Around the End of Man” (through “top of page four”); Aquinas, In Ethic. I, lect. 10 (verified sources); NE I ch. 7 (inferred). Printed volume: DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 1085 (verified source).

Mentioned

• Plato, Republic (definition of a thing’s own act); Plato on reason and the emotions as man and horse (no locus given).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II (definition of moral virtue; rules for the mean), VI (virtues of reason, prudence), X (comparison of virtues, two happinesses).
• Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on hope (hope greater than faith).
• St Paul on charity as the greatest (no locus given).
• Job, “Pride kills the great one, and envy the little one” (no verse given).
• Washington Irving on taming horses in the West (1832); Austin Farrer on the Romantics; Aristotle’s books on revolution; Dickens, Bleak House.
• Handout: Proemium of Wisdom (next text).

His questions #

• Is man by nature without anything to do? No: like eye, hand and foot, man has his own act, found by division of the kinds of life.
• Seeking man’s own—what? end, or act? His own act, in order to find his own end.
• Is nourishing and growing (or reproducing) man’s own act? No; plants do these too, so it is set aside.
• Does living well for a man mean living the life of a plant well, of the cat well, or of a man well? Only the third, the life involving reason.
• Plato represents the emotions as partaking of what? Reason—listening to and obeying it, as a horse tamed obeys the rider.
• The human good is the act of the soul by what? By virtue; and if many virtues, by the best and most perfect.
• For the Christian the chief virtues are faith, hope and—what? are they equal? Charity; no, charity greatest, hope greater than faith, faith first.
• Through what must the activity by virtue last? Through life: one swallow does not make a spring.
• How do you straighten a bent stick? Bend it a little in the opposite direction—so incline toward the extreme farther from the vice.
• What is Aristotle’s third piece of advice? Beware of pleasure.