Happiness as Activity by Virtue: The General Meaning of Virtue, Moral Virtue and Choice, and Shakespeare on Reason

Orientation #

He says he wanted “to look at these texts here a little bit before we go to the prima secundae”; the class is the end of the Book I passage on the definition of happiness (handout pp. 3-4) and the Shakespeare handout. He refers back to “the three ways I mentioned in Aristotle’s arguments” (induction, proportion, either-or), from the previous class (prev. lecture). The previous class introduced, through tools and organs, the question whether man has an own act; the next opens Prima Secundae q. 1.

The class, in order #

1. The three parts of the definition of happiness (“the next to the last paragraph on page three”) #

Point: Aristotle’s definition has three parts, reached in order on handout pp. 3-4.

• First part (p. 3, next-to-last paragraph): he proceeds by either-or: what does it mean for a man to live well? the life of a plant, of a beast, or human life?
• Second part (last paragraph p. 3, top of p. 4): “done well.” He reads the text: the act of a thing and its good act are the same in general, “as of a harpist and a good harpist,” adding that it “excels by virtue”; it belongs to the harpist to play, to the good harpist to play well. So the human good “turns out to be an act of the soul by virtue, and if there are many virtues, according to the best and most perfect.”
• That last clause is why he “comes back again” in Book X after going through all the virtues (Books II-VI).

2. The general meaning of virtue (“much virtue in herbs, little in men”) #

Point: to see why acting well = acting by virtue, start from the common, not the narrow, meaning of virtue.

• Narrow meaning we jump to: human virtue, even one virtue (“a virtuous woman, a chaste woman”). Student: “strong” — he: a kind of analogy, but not the general meaning.
• General meaning: what makes a thing good and its own act good (its “haver and its own act”). So anything with an own act can have its own virtue, and its own vice; and the virtues of things other than man are more known to us.
• Knife: own act is to cut; its virtue is sharpness. Sharpness is not the knife, not cutting well, but something had by the knife that makes it a good knife and its cutting good. Two knives in his house: one “virtuous,” one “vicious”; the vice is dullness.
• The three-step method this gives ethics: (1) what is the thing’s own act; (2) what quality makes it do that act well (its virtue); (3) how is that quality acquired (sharpening). Same with man: man’s own act; the quality enabling him to do it well; how to acquire it — moral virtues and virtues of reason are acquired differently.
• Warren Murray’s kitchen plaque, “Much virtue in herbs, little in men”: an herb’s own act is to season; if it seasons well it has the virtue of an herb; an old herb has “lost its virtue.” Our Lord’s “salt of the earth”: he could have said “loses its virtue”; “savour” amplifies it.
• His two eyes: one sees the far students as “a blur,” the other more distinctly, so one eye is “more virtuous,” at least for distance (“for reading it might be different”). The eye’s virtue is harder to know than the knife’s, but the eye doctor could say what shape makes the seeing clear or not. Joke: it does not mean he looks at the girls with the bad eye — “it doesn’t have to do with moral virtue.”
• What he stresses: “most people don’t know where to begin when they hear the word virtue”; “this is where you’re supposed to begin” — see the virtue of the knife before the virtue of man.

3. Acting well = acting by virtue; the complete life; drawing a line (“one swallow does not make a spring”) #

Point: even before Book II defines moral virtue, the general idea of virtue makes “act well” and “act by virtue” equivalent, and this is what governs the plan of the whole Ethics.

• Shakespeare’s description (he says Taming of the Shrew, “early part”) of one studying “that part of philosophy that treats of happiness by virtue specially to be achieved”: if virtue is what enables you to do your own act well, and doing your own act well is happiness, then happiness is activity by virtue.
• Plan of the Ethics as he gives it: Books II-V moral virtues; VI virtues of reason; VII things that exceed virtue or fall below it; two books on friendship, “either a virtue or an effect of virtue.”
• Third part of the definition: “in a complete life.” One swallow does not make a spring, nor one day; study Euclid one week and you are not happy, a lifetime and you are. Christianity’s name for this: perseverance.
• “A line has been drawn around the good”: his rendering of perigraphē (peri around, graphē draw a line). Book X, after all the virtues, says more precisely: is the end according to political foresight or according to wisdom? The one more human, the other “more godlike and more divine,” so higher.

4. Shakespeare’s exhortation to reason as an argument (“What is a man”) #

Point: “What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more” — he calls it the greatest short exhortation to reason he knows — rests on a proportion, not the either-or.

• The three ways of reasoning to man’s end (recalled): large induction that a thing’s own act is its end, then syllogism; proportion (act with reason : man :: cutting : knife :: seeing : eye); the either-or of plant, beast, man.
• Which is Shakespeare’s? The underlying proportion: chief good of the beast : beast :: chief good of man : man. Shakespeare avoids pedantry by saying “sleep and feed” rather than “chief good of the beast.”
• Argument by alternating the proportion:
  1. If the chief good of man is no more than the chief good of the beast, then man is no more than a beast.
  2. But man is more than a beast (denial of the consequent).
  3. Therefore the chief good of man is more than the chief good of the beast.
• His mathematical parallel for students, since “you know the natures of numbers”: “What is a three, if it be half of four? Two, no more” — half of four : two :: half of six : three; if three is half of four it is no more than two, obviously absurd.
• On premise 2: if you deny it “we’ll treat you like a beast,” and you will protest at being treated like a dog — “it’s your own position.”
• Student adds: it also matches Aristotle’s third argument (living well = the life of a man, a reasonable life). He: many won’t admit it because they fear finding out they aren’t leading one; a “reasonable act” almost says “an act with reason done well.”
• Shakespeare had obviously read the Nicomachean Ethics; Troilus and Cressida alludes to who is not a proper hearer of ethics (prev. lecture on the hearer).

5. Aside: the theological virtues and their order (“faith, hope, and charity”) #

For the Christian the chief virtues are the cardinal and above all the theological virtues. He admires the proemium of Dei Verbum (the Latin says proemium, not “introduction”): it begins with sharing God’s life and ends with faith, hope, charity, citing Augustine on the order of generation — by believing come to hope, by hoping to love; once love arises it perfects hope and faith. These virtues make believing, hoping, loving “be done well”; one can believe “in a haphazard, feeble way” without the virtue (package-store customer who would be shaken if Christ turned out never to have existed).

6. Act with reason vs. act of reason; reason itself vs. reason by participation (“an act with reason”) #

Point: Aristotle’s division of human virtue at the end of Book I rests on this distinction, which is why he words man’s act as “an act with reason.”

• Every act of reason (reasoning, understanding) is an act with reason; not every act with reason is an act of reason. Taking a walk on doctor’s orders (Roger Carter’s story: “nothing wrong with you, you just don’t get any exercise”) is an act with reason, not an act of reason.
• Can an emotion be with reason? Reasonable anger: Christ angry at the Pharisees’ hardness of heart (Mark, he thinks). Reasonable love: “at this point we don’t know whether that’s the end of man or not” — we are not yet saying the end is understanding. (Byplay with the girls in class about sisters.)
• So: an act ordered or measured by reason but not an act of reason itself. Hence two kinds of virtue: moral virtues (second kind) and virtues of reason itself.
• Terminology: translations say “intellectual virtues”; he prefers “virtues of reason itself.”

7. The five virtues of reason (“right reason about making”) #

Book VI distinguishes five: art (right reason about making); foresight, “prudence” from the Latin (right reason about doing) — these two practical; nous/intellectus, natural understanding; reasoned-out understanding [ed.: science]; wisdom. Two are lowest species (natural understanding, wisdom, “only one of them”); three are genera: reasoned-out understanding (geometry, arithmetic, logic, natural philosophy), art (many arts, different matters), foresight — Thomas in the Secunda Secundae gives four: of the individual, of the father of a family, of the king, and military (“Douglas MacArthur”) [one word garbled: “Eternal foresight,” likely regnative; unclear in recording].

8. Where the moral virtues are, and the order Aristotle takes them (“the virtue of a man, vir”) #

• Moral virtues are in what can partake of reason: emotions and will. Courage in the irascible appetite (thumos); temperance and probably eutrapelia in the concupiscible; justice clearly in the will; Thomas in the Summa places liberality in the will. Divine Names: “God alone is liberal” — God has no virtues of the emotions but has those of the will (justice, liberality).
• Aristotle’s order: courage then temperance first, perhaps because both concern the body (what threatens it, what pleases it) — fundamental. Etymology: “virtue” from vir, connected with courage; Greek aretē likewise; the Medal of Honor is given for courage, not for temperance or a just life — courage recognized as virtue first.
• Then virtues about money (liberality, magnificence: “a man of substance”); honor (magnanimity; mildness, about being insulted); social virtues (truthfulness, eutrapelia, friendliness). Friendliness vs. friendship: friendliness shown to everyone daily, friendship one to one — “a woman is friendly, or she is really your friend.”
• Book layout: II defines moral virtue and exemplifies (liberality between stinginess and prodigality); III choice, then courage and temperance; IV the rest; V justice (“very important for a gentleman”); VI virtues of reason. Thomas’s two reasons the moral virtues come first: more known to us, and they dispose us to the virtues of reason — the intemperate are “not well disposed to the life of the mind,” nor to foresight (“explains what goes on in Washington”: a New York representative just resigned over a woman).

9. The definition of moral virtue and the middle towards us (“a habit with choice”) #

Student asks him to repeat: a habit with choice, existing in the middle towards us, as determined by right reason (i.e. by foresight).

• Middle towards us, not of the thing, and only reason can judge the circumstances:
  • anger: more or less than one should; someone using your kids for target practice vs. a bump in the hall (accident, or high-school kids bumping everybody?);
  • eating: Grandma’s Thanksgiving dinner — eat more, since she worked and would be disappointed; the little boy less than the working man, the working man more than the professor; farmers (brother Richard) need a meal between breakfast and lunch, we don’t;
  • drink: the surgeon not before brain surgery, maybe after ten hours; bomber crews over Germany could not eat before a mission, but were handed scotch on landing.
• “Choice” in the definition: one could almost say “a habit of choosing what is in the middle towards us” — choosing to drink moderately; the college brothers drinking to closing every Friday and Saturday got “a little vice,” needing the Jesuit retreat house. Choice itself is treated in Book III.

10. Choice is more me than emotion (“choice is more you”) #

Point: being true to yourself means being true to your reasonable choice.

• Marriage, his definition: stable union of a man and woman by mutual choice for the sake of children; the priest asks “do you take,” not “do you have wonderful feelings.” The tempted spouse is true to a sudden emotion, not to the choice.
• The alcoholic who has chosen to quit and then follows the urge: which is more him?
• Jury: premeditated murder is taken more seriously than a murder of passion, because it is more chosen; passion means less responsibility.
• Two Shakespeare plays: Proteus (Two Gentlemen of Verona), pledged to Julia with “twenty thousand soul-confirming oaths,” must pursue Valentine’s girl “to be true to himself” — concupiscible; Coriolanus true to his angry nature — irascible. Against them, Polonius: “to thine own self be true… thou canst not then be false to any man.” He sides with Polonius: reasonable choice is more you than sudden emotion — perhaps why “thine own self.” Compare the monastic vow, a considered choice, against “I want to be free.”
• Student: which play has the exhortation to reason? Hamlet, “a very key play,” with much on the nature of the play itself.

11. Shakespeare’s definition of reason: looking before and after (“looking before and after”) #

He calls Shakespeare’s “looking before and after” the best definition of reason — fuller than Aristotle or anyone; he was reading the Summa Contra Gentiles and struck by Aristotle’s “perspective” faculty [unclear in recording], but Shakespeare “puts it together.” The first sense of before and after is time: Falstaff is introduced asking the time of day, and Prince Hal calls it superfluous — the man who follows the urge to drink morning, noon or night observes no order (“a time for this, a time for that,” Scripture). Aristotle in On the Soul III: man is the animal with a sense of time. The surgeon wanting a drink an hour before operating is not using reason; a mother’s “it’ll spoil your dinner,” “fruit before candy,” is where use of reason begins. Brother Mark’s rule: never drink before noon.

12. Aside: gold and dust, and the danger of fashion (“Golden lads and girls”) #

Shakespeare’s two best uses of gold and dust (asked of his son-in-law’s sister, doing an English doctorate): the funeral song “Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust,” and Troilus and Cressida on fashion — “give to dust that is a little gilt more laud than gilt o’er-dusted.” The New York Times reviews new “dust” with a little gilt; Augustine is solid gold under dust. Samuel Johnson’s hundred-year rule: still read a century after death is prima facie evidence of worth. The newspaper, by its name, is about the new; the Bible is gold “that’s old stuff.”

His words #

• virtue (general meaning): what makes a thing good and its own act good; its haver and its own act.
• vice: the opposite quality, making the thing do its act badly (dullness).
• “a line drawn around the good”: perigraphē, peri + graphē [ed.: outline/sketch].
• act with reason vs. act of reason: an act ordered or measured by reason vs. reasoning or understanding itself.
• virtues of reason itself [ed.: intellectual virtues]; reason by participation.
• foresight [ed.: prudence]: right reason about doing; art: right reason about making.
• natural understanding (nous, intellectus); reasoned-out understanding [ed.: science].
• irascible appetite (thumos), concupiscible appetite.
• eutrapelia; friendliness (not friendship).
• moral virtue: a habit with choice, existing in the middle towards us, as determined by right reason.
• marriage: stable union of a man and woman by mutual choice for the sake of children.
• reason (Shakespeare): looking before and after.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I, end of the definition of happiness (handout “Drawing a Line Around the End of Man,” pp. 3-4; Aquinas lectio 10 per verified source).
• Shakespeare, Hamlet, “What is a man…” (handout “Shakespeare’s Understanding of a Play,” p. 25); Polonius, “to thine own self be true.”

Mentioned

• Nicomachean Ethics II-X (plan of the books); Book X on political foresight vs. wisdom; Book VI five virtues of reason.
• Aristotle, On the Soul III: man has a sense of time.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Secunda Secundae on kinds of foresight; liberality in the will; Summa Contra Gentiles.
• Dionysius, Divine Names (inferred): “God alone is liberal.”
• Dei Verbum, proemium, citing Augustine on faith, hope, charity.
• Gospel of Mark (Christ’s anger); “salt of the earth.”
• Shakespeare: Taming of the Shrew, Troilus and Cressida, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Coriolanus, Henry IV (Falstaff), the “golden lads” song (Cymbeline, inferred).
• Warren Murray’s plaque; Samuel Johnson’s hundred-year rule.

His questions #

• What is the general meaning of virtue? What makes a thing good and its own act good.
• What would be the virtue of a knife, and its vice? Sharpness; dullness.
• Which of my eyes is more virtuous? The one that sees the far students distinctly, for distance seeing.
• Why does Aristotle take acting well and acting by virtue as the same? Because virtue is what enables a thing to do its own act well.
• Is Shakespeare’s “What is a man” based on an either-or or on a proportion? On a proportion: chief good of beast : beast :: chief good of man : man.
• What is a three, if it be half of four? Two, no more — an absurdity showing the force of the argument.
• Is an act with reason the same as an act of reason? No; every act of reason is with reason, not conversely (taking a walk).
• Is reasonable love the end of man? Left open — “at this point we don’t know.”
• Which do you take more seriously, premeditated murder or a murder of passion? Premeditated, because more chosen; choice is more me.
• Who is right, Polonius or Proteus and Coriolanus? Polonius: reasonable choice is more you than sudden emotion.