Is It Good Because We Want It? The Order of Ends and Arts, the Chief Good, and Political Science

Orientation #

He picks up “the good is what all desire” from where the previous class stopped (prev. lecture), and closes by saying they have finished “the first of the three things” in the proem; “we’ll look at the other two things next time, and as time allows, we’ll start to see how Aristotle draws a line around the end of man.” The previous class treated the paired proems of Aristotle and Aquinas, the next continues with good and end, certitude in ethics, and the fit hearer. Verified sources: Aquinas’s commentary on Ethics I, lectio 1 and 2 (his handouts “Proemium” and “Reading 2”), plus a matched stretch of Summa Contra Gentiles (the matcher gives I.76; he himself names II.39-45).

The class, in order #

1. The Socratic question about wanting and good (“Is wanting the cause or the effect of the good”) #

Point: Aristotle’s first definition invites the question Socrates puts to Euthyphro (pious because the gods approve, or approved because pious), transposed: do we want it because it is good, or is it good because we want it?

• Heisenberg’s remark that the Greeks taught us how to ask the right question.
• This is a question of before and after in the sense of the Categories (cause before effect): is wanting the cause of the thing’s goodness, or goodness the cause of wanting?
• Dialectic on the first side (good because wanted): if wanting made a thing good, wanting it would have made it good for you; but everyone has wanted something and later admitted himself it was not good for him. Examples: the man at the party who wants “another drink” and then is nauseated; the kid who drives too fast and ends up in traction; the impatient driver on the icy road who passes his wife and goes into a tree (“when winter comes, you have to learn how to drive again”, his father’s principle).
• Dialectic on the other side (wanted because good): the same examples turned round: if good causes wanting, how could anyone want what is bad? And since contrary causes have contrary effects, bad should cause turning away; yet people sometimes do not want what is good for them. How can the cause be there without the effect?
• Dialectical reasoning, as Aristotle defines it in logic: reasoning from probable opinions, even to opposed conclusions. Two tasks remain: reason out the truth, then answer the opposing argument.

2. Reasoning out the truth by induction from natural goods (“apart from our wanting to breathe”) #

Point: the most appropriate way is inductive, as Aristotle does; his own way is to take goods everyone recognizes as natural and ask whether something makes each good apart from our wanting it.

• Air, water, food: can you see, apart from wanting to breathe, that air is good for us? People see it.
• Sleep: the communists’ brainwashing by keeping men awake (you go crazy, eventually die); parents sending children to bed because they know the child cannot be awake at school tomorrow, even when the child does not want to sleep.
• Money: useful because we want it, or wanted because useful for buying all kinds of things?
• Reproduction: keeps this type of animal in existence, a good you can see in it.
• Knowledge: good to know the way home, where the car is parked, that some mushrooms are poisonous.
• Conclusion: in each case something makes the thing good for us apart from our wanting it; therefore we want it because it is good.

3. Answering the objection: what comes between good and wanting (“delicious poison”) #

Point: look again at before and after; something comes after the good or bad and before wanting or not wanting, namely knowing, or less precisely, some act of the senses or reason.

• Senses and reason can be deceived, especially by likeness: the good can resemble the bad and the bad the good.
• Delicious poison: you do not drink it because it is poison but because it tastes good; so one can want the bad and fail to want the good without good ceasing to be the cause of wanting.
• He thinks it worth stopping in this first paragraph: Aristotle’s own induction there is very good.

4. The definition is a beginning, not an end (“the beginning of our knowledge of the good”) #

Point: in Socratic fashion, ask the boy, who is closer to the starting point, what is good; he gives examples of things he wants and comes to see he calls them good because he wants them. So “what all want” defines the good by its effect, which fits its being the way we first know it (effects are known before causes).

• Later, in the “second book of wisdom” and in the Ethics, Aristotle connects the good with one of the four causes, the end; there you see more what the good is.
• Means are called good only in a secondary sense: medicine good because health is good; the book because knowledge is good; the printing press because books are good.
• When Aristotle draws a line around the inner purpose of man, a connection appears between what a thing is and its inner purpose: Hamlet, “What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more”; God “gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused.” Likewise a chair, a knife, a ballpoint pen: composing parts and inner purpose.
• Asides: the brother-in-law’s carpenter’s tools (“good to have the right tools”); the picnic without a corkscrew; the Foreign Legion retirees who open wine with a saber (glass in the stomach).

5. Difference of ends: acts and products (“some are acts, while others are products”) #

Point: “Whence it has been well said” shows Aristotle putting the starting point first; then he notes a difference of ends, already using good and end interchangeably.

• Some ends are acts: listening to Mozart’s Haydn quartets produces nothing; the end is the hearing itself (Haydn to Mozart’s father: “your son is the greatest composer known to me”).
• Others are products beyond the acts, and there the product is better than the act: the chair is better than making the chair.
• Aside: in Summa Contra Gentiles II, ch. 39-45, on the distinction and order of creatures, Thomas uses “the good is what all desire” as a premise; a little beginning, “great in its power”, running all the way through philosophy.

6. Many arts, many ends; examples fit for the audience (“of the military art, what?”) #

Point: since there are many acts in arts and sciences, there are many ends or goods: health for medicine, the ship for shipbuilding, victory for the military art (MacArthur: “in war there is no substitute for victory”; equally, in medicine no substitute for health), wealth for the household art.

• Thomas notes that in Politics I Aristotle denies wealth is the end of the household; there he says the end is the children. Aristotle often uses examples acceptable to his audience (the Greeks would say wealth), keeping them until the time comes to show their falsehood, especially in logic.

7. Order among arts and order among goods (“one art commands another art”) #

Point: Aristotle points out something further: not only many arts and many goods, but sometimes an order among them, seen on one side when one art (or its man) commands another, on the other when one good is for the sake of another; and you can argue from either, if known, to the other.

1. Proportion: health is to the medical art as medicine is to the art of the pharmacist (his word, with reservations).
2. The doctor’s prescription commands the pharmacist; and medicine is for the sake of health.
3. So: if this artist commands that one, the commander’s end is the end of the good the commanded aims at; and if this good is subordinate to that, the art aiming at the lower good is under the art aiming at the higher.

• Violin: the immediate end of the violin maker (Stradivarius) is a good violin; the violin is for the music; so the violinist who finds a defect in playing commands the maker to change it, “because his end must be the end of this one.”
• Aristotle’s bridle example: saddle making for riding; riding for the cavalry charge (Pickett at Gettysburg; the Light Brigade, “theirs not to reason why”); West Point once drilled on horses.
• Political over military: the president is commander in chief; victory is ordered to the preservation of the city (MacArthur’s last West Point speech); so the political art should command the military art, and the military art the weapon makers: the Germans in Russia redesigned weapons and tanks after finding Russian ones better in the cold.
• Defects found in use send you back to the maker: his engineer father’s experimental farm, wagons that snapped so he “always put more steel” (Grain King); the first attempts to fly, and rockets, redesigned many times.
• Where this is heading: Aristotle will ask to which art or science belongs the chief good of man, and answer that it must be the art that commands all the rest, the political art. Illustrations of the political art commanding the others: Assumption College grants degrees “in virtue of the authority invested in me by the Commonwealth”; his algebra teacher yanked into military service; the doctor’s licence on the wall, revocable for malpractice; the bakery sprayed for cockroaches and the Worcester prime-rib restaurant closed down; his own driver’s licence for a “pedestrian killing, flying coffin.”
• Since happiness is the end of man, the political art must be about it; Thomas says ethics is thus the elements of political philosophy. Politicians should know the Nicomachean Ethics; it is per se notum that government should encourage virtue and discourage vice, though today that sounds like discrimination. States grew beyond the city for economic and military reasons and lost sight of this; presidential candidates asked the purpose of man would say “above my pay grade.”

8. Is there an end desired for its own sake? (“for thus it would go on without end”) #

Point: after the break, the next paragraph: the man in the street asks of everything “what’s it good for?”; if everything were good for the sake of something else, would anything be good?

1. If A is for B, B for C, C for D, without end, nothing is worthwhile until the next is reached, and it never comes: everything in vain (“count to ten so I can count to twenty”).
2. Stronger: it is not even possible, because to desire A for B I must desire B first; so if everything were for something else I would always have to desire something else first and would never desire anything at all.
3. Hence there must be something desired for its own sake, else nothing in the series can be desired: to desire medicine I must desire health first; to desire the CD I must first desire to hear Mozart.

• Aristotle in the “second book of wisdom” argues the same from good being the same as end: everything would be a means, and it makes no sense to desire a means without an end.
• “Clearly this will be the good”: the good by antonomasia, and the best, because everything else is for it. Here too you learn the main reason for saying one thing is better than another: if this is the end of that, it is better (health better than medicine).
• Later text glanced at: “to say that happiness is the best seems to be agreed upon, and it is desired that what it is be said more distinctly”; he draws a line around it there but does not say fully what it is until Book X.

9. The weight of this knowledge; the archer (“just as archers having a target”) #

Point: would not knowledge of this “weigh greatly upon life” and its direction? (A student: “pondus meum amor meus.”)

• Archers with a target hit more upon what is right; aiming you may miss, shooting at random you have no chance. He calls the understatement “philosophical modesty”: in fact, for all practical purposes, you will not hit the end of life at all unless you aim at it.
• So we should try to get an outline of it (Greek perigraphe, drawing a line around), to be filled out in Book X after the virtues, and to say to which science or power it belongs.

10. The most authoritative knowledge: the political (“the one that is most of all a chief art”) #

Point: reasoning from the middle of the page, the science of the end of the whole human life must be the one that commands all the rest: the most authoritative, “most of all a chief art” (whence architect), and this is political knowledge, which orders which sciences are needed in cities, who should learn each and how far.

• Feeble modern form: Massachusetts statutes on schooling, American history, the president calling for more math because Chinese boys know more.
• The most honored powers under it (partly truth, partly Greek opinion): the military art (generals elected president: Grant, Eisenhower); the household art (laws on who may marry whom, at what age, blood tests); the art of speech (Augustine a rhetorician before conversion).
• Military and rhetoric are the two arms or tools of the political art: persuade most citizens, force some (Churchill’s effective speeches; the draft, boot camp). The household is under it for a different reason: Thomas says marriage is ruled partly by nature (inclination of man and woman, preservation of the race), partly by the city (this is how you get citizens and soldiers; a nation without new citizens disappears, hence bounties for children), and by the Church (new members of the mystical body). Bans of marriage: reasons for publishing them; Shakespeare’s hurried marriage needing witnesses and bonds in lieu of bans; the practical joker who cried out at the wrong wedding.
• In the household too the parents partly persuade and partly use “a little military power”; Thomas in the second part of the Summa: a man is needed because a woman alone cannot correct children. His father’s authority (“sit in that seat”; “you pay your bills” on the co-signed credit card).
• “Using the rest of the practical sciences”: building codes on wood, pipes, footings; carpenters registered. “Further ordaining by law what one ought to do and what to stay away from”: so the end of this science embraces the ends of the others, and this will be the good of man. In the Politics: the best government simply (aiming at man’s end), the best for most men given their virtue, and the best for this people.
• Aristotle is not naive: in the Rhetoric on fear, being in another man’s power is to be feared “because as a rule men do evil whenever they can”, a moral certitude from experience. Anecdote: the sophomore with a freshman carrying his books, laughing “all power corrupts”, and so making excuses for his sins.

11. The good of one man and of the city (“more beautiful and godlike when done for a nation”) #

Point: the end is the same for one man and for the city, but it is better and more perfect to achieve and preserve the city’s; worthy of love done for one man, more beautiful and godlike done for a nation and cities.

• Thomas in the commentary: God acts for the good of the whole universe; we cannot, but acting for the city is more godlike than for the family, and for the family better than for oneself alone.
• Thomas’s constant starting point: the common good is better than the private good, because the whole is better than the part; one argument in the Summa Contra Gentiles that God is the summum bonum is that he is the common good of the whole universe.
• Teaching one man the purpose of life and how to reach it is lovable; making a city happy is godlike (Alfred the Great acting for his country, translating Boethius into the vernacular; the Pope’s responsibility). “The knowledge then aims at these things, being something political”: end of the first of the three things in the proem.

His words #

• before and after (cause before effect): the sense in which “is it good because wanted” is a question of order
• dialectical reasoning: reasoning from probable opinions, even to opposed conclusions
• natural goods: air, water, food, sleep, reproduction, knowledge (money “almost”)
• inner purpose: his rendering for a thing’s end, tied to what it is [ed.: final cause]
• second book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics II]
• acts vs. products: ends that are the activity itself vs. ends beyond it
• the good by antonomasia: the good that is the good, the best
• pondus meum amor meus (student, Augustine): the weight of the end upon life
• philosophical modesty: Aristotle’s understatement “hit more upon what is right”
• perigraphe: drawing a line around, an outline
• chief art, architect: the most authoritative knowledge [ed.: architectonic]
• per se notum: government should encourage virtue and discourage vice
• common good vs. private good: good of the whole vs. good of the part
• summum bonum: God as the common good of the whole universe
• prima / prima secundae: the proem of Ethics I, and the next part to come

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I, opening chapters, from his handouts (Aquinas, lectio 1-2): “the good is what all desire”; “a difference of ends is seen”; the subordination of arts (bridle making, horsemanship, military); “if there is some end… we will for itself”; “clearly this will be the good and the best”; archers and target; the most authoritative knowledge; military, household, rhetoric under it; “worthy of love… more beautiful and godlike”
• Shakespeare, Hamlet, “What is a man…” (quoted from memory)
• Aristotle, Ethics, later passage: “to say that happiness is the best seems to be agreed upon” (glanced at)

Mentioned

• Plato, Euthyphro (pious because approved?)
• Aristotle, Categories, ch. 12 (senses of before and after)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II (good and end; the regress argument)
• Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II, ch. 39-45 (order of creatures); also SCG on God as summum bonum (matcher: SCG I.76)
• Aristotle, Politics I (end of the household is the children); Politics on the best regime
• Aristotle, Rhetoric, on fear
• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, second part (why man and woman are both needed for children)
• Aristotle’s logic on dialectical reasoning; Aristotle, Ethics X (happiness said fully)

His questions #

• Is it good because we want it, or do we want it because it is good? We want it because it is good; shown by induction from natural goods seen to be good apart from wanting.
• If good is the cause of wanting, how can people want the bad or fail to want the good? An act of sense or reason comes between, and it can be deceived, especially by likeness (delicious poison).
• Do we know causes or effects first? Effects; so defining the good by its effect (what all desire) fits its being the beginning of our knowledge.
• Which is better, making a chair or the chair? The chair; where there is a product beyond the act, the product is better.
• Why did MacArthur say in war there is no substitute for victory? Victory is the end of the military art, as health is of medicine.
• What is the art of making violins for? Immediately a good violin; the violin for the music; so the violinist commands the maker.
• If everything were good for the sake of something else, would anything be good? No: everything in vain, and indeed nothing could be desired at all.
• To which science or power does the chief good of man belong? The one that commands all the rest, political knowledge.
• Why is the household art under the political? Marriage is ruled by nature, but also by the city, since it is how citizens are gotten.
• Why is the common good better than the private? The common good is the good of the whole, the private of the part, and the whole is better than the part.