Aristotle →
Nicomachean Ethics →
Book Ⅵ (intellectual virtues)
Up to now, in books two through five, we have been discussing the moral
virtues — most recently justice, and before that courage, temperance,
liberality, magnificence, pride, drive, good temper, amiability, a variety of
truthfulness, wit, and the quasi-virtue of shame. Now we’ll switch gears a bit.
You may have noticed that there’s been something that Aristotle has been
keeping behind-the-curtain up ’til now. He’s got us well drilled in his theory
of virtue: a virtue is found at the golden mean on a continuum of some
dimension of character between two opposing extremes of vice. He has, for
various dimensions of character, named and described the virtue and the pair
of vices it lies between. But he hasn’t said much about how we go about
locating this golden mean and how we know when we’ve found it.
I imagine Aristotle going out for breakfast:
Server: How would you like your eggs?
Aristotle: Just right.
Server: Come again?
Aristotle: Neither cooked so briefly or at such
a low temperature that they are too runny and mucilaginous, for this we
would call raw or underdone; nor cooked so long or cooked at such a high
temperature that they are tough or burned, for this we would call overcooked.
Instead, cook them at just the right temperature for just the right amount of
time, so that they are satisfying and delicious.
Server: Have you considered our fruit plate?
Here, Aristotle acknowledges and promises to relieve our frustration.
First, though, we’ll have to examine the lay of the land. There are two
parts of the soul, in Aristotle’s framework: the rational and the irrational.
The rational part is itself divided into two parts:
scientific
contemplates “the kind of things whose originative causes are invariable”
(the domain of science, intuition, and philosophy)
calculative / deliberative
contemplates variable things (the domain of practical wisdom and art)
That’s just a teaser; he’ll go to go into more detail in the coming sections.
Back in book two, we learned
that there are three things in the soul — passions, faculties, and
characteristics — of which virtues are of the third sort (characteristics).
In the previous section of book
six, we found out about the rational and irrational parts of the soul,
and the scientific and deliberative parts of the rational part.
Now we’re going to learn about the three things in the soul that “control
action and truth” and investigate which of these things is the originator
of action. These three things are:
sensation or perception
reason or intellect
desire, appetite, or impulse
By “action” he means “moral action” — not just activity of the sort any
animal engages in, but deliberate action of the sort that has potential moral
import. For this reason, he discards sensation/perception (which we share
with animals) as having any effect worth noticing on originating moral action.
Moral action originates in choice, and choice emerges at the
junction of intellect/reason and desire/appetite/impulse. For the choice to
be a good one, the reasoning must be sound and the desire right, and the two
must be connected so that the reasoning helps in the pursuit of what is
desired.
The reasoning in this case is of a practical sort — the
calculative/deliberative variety, rather than the scientific sort (see
’s
discussion of section one). Practical reasoning is mixed with desire — for
it to be good, it must be true and the desire must be a good one;
scientific reasoning, on the other hand, is unmixed — in its case truth is
the sole criterion of goodness.
Aristotle says that because choice requires a combination of desire and
reasoning, it cannot exist in a being that does not have an intellect or in
one that does not have a moral state or character from which desire springs.
The intellect alone cannot choose; it can only judge the wisdom of various
courses of action toward meeting a goal. It takes desire to pick a goal in
the first place, and then intellect to pick a course of action that brings
that goal closer to realization.
“Choice is either desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire, and such an
origin of action is a [hu]man.” That’s a mouthful. Here are how some of
the other translators have rendered this:
“Moral Choice is either Intellect put in a position of Will-ing, or
Appetition subjected to an Intellectual Process. And such a Cause is
Man.” (Chase)
“deliberate preference is either intellect influenced by appetite, or
appetite influenced by intellect; and such a principle is man.”
(Browne)
“…that moral election or preference, peculiar to man; which may be
called either impassioned intelligence, or reflecting appetite…”
(Gillies)
“purpose may be defined as desiring reason, or as rational desire, and
such a principle as this is man.” (Grant)
“The Will may consequently be defined either as ‘Intuition exciting an
Impulse’ or ‘Impulse fashioned by Reason’; and, having such a Will, man
is the mainspring of his own actions and a free agent.” (Hatch)
“Purpose, then, may be called either a reason that desires, or a desire
that reasons; and this faculty of originating action constitutes a
man.” (Peters)
“deliberate choice is either orectic intellect, or appetite possessing
a discursive energy; and man is a principle of this kind.” (Taylor)
“deliberate preference is either intellect influenced by desire, or
desire joined with intellect; and such a compound principle is man.”
(Vincent)
“purpose may be defined either as reasoning resultant upon impulse, or
as impulse coupled with reasoning. And in this sense and thus it is, that
man’s acts originate in himself.” (Williams)
Judging from these, it seems as though Aristotle is anticipating the question
of which comes first in the combination of reason and desire: does reason
yoke desire and start to plow, or does desire enlist reason to seek its
ends? Aristotle says it’s all a matter of how you look at it; neither is
more accurate — does the sperm penetrate the egg, or does the egg absorb
the sperm? It’s just a matter of how you choose to describe it.
Neither reason nor desire is capable of initiating action by itself. If you
trace any deliberate human action back to the spring it came from, you reach
a starting point where reason and desire combine, and you can trace the path
no further. How the merger happens is a mystery (or maybe Aristotle will
clear it up later on here, or in one of his works on psychology or biology),
but it isn’t a matter of choice on the part of desire or of reason,
since that choice can only happen after the merger takes place.
In some ethical frameworks, the picture we have is of something like reason
& temptation/desire teaming up to set us on a course of action, and then
a third faculty — conscience — struggling to interrupt this process and steer
us on a better path that is contrary to our desire but nonetheless better
according to some standard.
I think Aristotle would call this psychological hogwash. Conscience has no
toe hold, no way to influence moral action, except to the extent it is part
of reason or desire. We need to train our reason so we know how to behave
well, and we need to mold our characters so that we want to behave
well, and that’s the end of the story. If we do not actually desire what is
good, there is no third-thing inside of us that can step in and contradict
the other two.
This time, “the states by virtue of which the soul possesses truth by way of affirmation or denial are five in number.”
Or, as our panel of translators would have it:
five
faculties
habits
mental states
states of mind
modes
means
instruments
whereby
by which
in virtue of which
in which
by the aid of which
the soul
the intellectual faculty
the mind
attains truth
arrives at truth
is true
enunciates truth
arrives at truth and is in a state of truth
in affirmation or negation
in affirmation or denial
in whatever it asserts or denies
in its decisions
affirming or denying
whether affirmative or negative
Got that? Basically, there are five methods people use, to come to conclusions
about how things are, that are the sort of methods that can be made better or
worse in terms of how well they draw true conclusions.
Anyway, those five are (again, using the often wildly divergent translations
of our panel):
(Two others, hypolepsis — a.k.a. judgment,
supposition, conception, or impression — & opinion, Aristotle says are
inherently prone to error and so aren’t included among the five. Taylor
explains: “hypolepsis is the assent of the soul to each
term of a syllogistic process; and opinion is the assent of the
soul to the conclusion solely of a
syllogism.”)
Fortunately, Aristotle plans to cover each of these in some detail, so the
odd translation-overlaps shouldn’t trouble us much longer.
The first of the five that he delves into is #2 on the list above: science.
Science concerns those things that are invariable, eternal truths. We reach
these truths by starting with things we already know and then using
induction to
determine general rules from particular known instances, or
syllogism to derive
particular truths from general rules. In either case, you have both
scientific knowledge and access to the method by which you came upon it — that
is, you can demonstrate the logical path that led you to the truth.
“Scientific knowledge,” Aristotle says, is “a state of capacity to
demonstrate.” He also says that he goes into this in greater detail in
the
Analytics, which I haven’t cracked.
Your take-away from this is that science is the ability to get at
the truth about invariable/eternal things by using a demonstrable logical
process starting from other such truths.
There are two sorts of capacities: the capacity to act and the capacity to make.
Art concerns the second of the two.
Art is about the creation of new things, things whose origin is in the artist and that would not exist but for the willful creation of the artist (that is, not things that would have existed anyway).
It is “a productive habit joined with reason.”
Curiously, Aristotle says that “chance and art are concerned with the same objects.”
It’s an enigmatic phrase, and doesn’t seem to fit with what precedes or follows it.
I just take it as a reiteration of the point that Art concerns not the things that are invariable and eternal (as Science does) but the things that are variable and could be one way or another.
Your take-away from this is that art is the ability to create new things that would not exist but for the artist’s creation.
Wisdom is the ability to deliberate well about which courses of action would be good and expedient — in general, not to some particular end, as that would more likely be in the realm of Art.
Also, Wisdom concerns acting more than making, which also makes it distinct from Art.
When we say “my judgment was clouded” (by, say, anger or drunkenness), it’s usually this sort of wisdom that was faulty: the ability to choose our actions wisely.
There are two seemingly contradictory sentiments I run into in the translations of this section:
Wisdom is demonstrated by someone who chooses the best means to some particular end.
While with Art, the end is not the making but the thing being made; with Wisdom the end is good-acting and not any other end beyond the act itself.
I’m not sure how to make these sentiments agree.
Perhaps the first case is a sort of lower-case “w” wisdom — wisdom is about making practical decisions about how to act in pursuit of some end; the second case is a capital-“W” Wisdom — about making practical decisions about how to act in pursuit of The Ultimate End (eudaimonia) which itself takes the form of a life of activity.
Wisdom also is different from Science.
You only deliberate about things that might be one way or another; Science on the other hand concerns things that are invariable and eternal.
The final paragraph of this section is very difficult.
In Ross, it goes like this:
Practical wisdom, then, must be a reasoned and true state of capacity to act with regard to human goods.
But further, while there is such a thing as excellence in art, there is no such thing as excellence in practical wisdom; and in art he who errs willingly is preferable, but in practical wisdom, as in the virtues, he is the reverse.
Plainly, then, practical wisdom is a virtue and not an art.
There being two parts of the soul that can follow a course of reasoning, it must be the virtue of one of the two, i.e. of that part which forms opinions; for opinion is about the variable and so is practical wisdom.
But yet it is not only a reasoned state; this is shown by the fact that a state of that sort may forgotten but practical wisdom cannot.
There is such a thing as excellence in Art but not in Wisdom?
What does that mean?
It can’t mean that any example of wisdom is as good as any other, can it?
Can’t we say A is a better artist than B, and C is wiser than D?
Or is Aristotle asserting that you either are wise or you aren’t, with no middle ground?
One possible reading of this sentence goes something like this: In Art, if you’re very skillful, you know how to do the “wrong” thing at the right time — for instance, a blues piano player omitting a phrase from a melody or deviating from the meter for effect.
If you’re not skillful, missing a note or deviating from the meter just means you’re playing badly.
For this reason, we say that some artists are better than others — the best of them know how to skillfully deviate from the ideal form to reach for a higher perfection.
However, with wisdom, this isn’t the case: wisdom itself is the perfection; there is no better or worse way of “playing” wisdom.
There is only wisdom, which is good, and deviations from it, which are not good (indeed, intentional “skillful” deviations from it are especially bad, whereas simply mistaken deviations are more forgivable).
What about the last two sentences of the paragraph?
There he goes again, enumerating “parts of the soul.”
Are these two parts he’s mentioned before, or are they new parts?
It sounds like he’s referring to the two parts of the rational part of the soul: the scientific and the deliberative (see section one of book six), and asserting that Wisdom is a virtue of the deliberative part.
Then he says that Wisdom is different from other “reasoned states” by virtue of its durability.
Welldon says that this is because Wisdom is a moral virtue, whereas other similar virtues are intellectual only.
When you are wise, Wisdom gets lodged in your character, becomes a habit, and stays there — and there are always opportunities to use it, since you are always acting.
When you are merely smart, scientific, or clever, these things have more of a practical, means-to-an-end nature, and can atrophy if unused.
Your take-away from this is that wisdom is a virtue of the deliberative part of the soul and manifests in the ability to deliberate about what acts would be beneficial and expedient in leading a virtuous life.
When we discussed Science in
section three, Aristotle said
that science was the ability to get at the truth about invariable/eternal
things by using demonstrable logical processes like induction and syllogism,
starting with things you already know.
In order to bootstrap this process, you must already know something
invariable and eternal — something that you couldn’t have acquired by Science.
Aristotle says that Intuition is how we get our original “first principles”
from which we can begin using Science to derive the rest of our knowledge
about invariable/eternal facts.
This is what
Descartes was
after when he got down to brass tacks: he used Intuition to come up with
cogito
ergo sum, and hoped to use Science to fill in everything else from
there.
Your take-away from this is that intuition is the ability to
discover true first principles about invariable/eternal things.
Whereas Art is the skill needed to create things in a particular discipline,
and a good artist knows the philosophy of that art; Philosophy
here concerns the whole kit and caboodle — not just knowledge of some
particular discipline, but of all there is to know.
Aristotle says that this comes from being good at both Intuition and Science — that is, having the ability to intuit true first principles, and having the
skill to logically manipulate facts, starting from those first principles, to
derive new facts that are demonstrably true. Indeed Philosophy is hardly a
capacity of its own so much as it is a combination of Intuition and Science.
However, Philosophy as Aristotle is using it is only a subset of where
Intuition and Science combine. He restricts the term so that it covers
understanding not of day-to-day practical things like politics or medicine
(these things are covered by simple Wisdom), but of “the things that are
highest by nature… things that are remarkable, admirable, difficult, and
divine, but useless.”
Someone who is good at Philosophy is not necessarily very good at practical
things (think of the absent-minded professor stereotype — someone who can
describe in detail for you what the universe was like a fraction of a second
after the big bang, but can’t remember that class schedules are different
during Finals Week).
Your take-away here is that Philosophy is the capacity (and desire, I suppose)
to combine true first principles derived from Intuition with the sensible
logical method of Science in order to gain knowledge about The Big Questions — fascinating, uncanny, grandiose, and utterly impractical knowledge.
That’s the last of the five means by which the mind is capable of arriving at
truth about the truth or falsehood of things, so let’s review:
faculty
description
scope
variety of truth
Science
the ability to get at the truth using a demonstrable logical process starting from other truths
invariable/eternal things (scientific)
abstract methods
Art
the ability to create new things that would not exist but for the artist’s creation
variable things (deliberative)
productive
Wisdom
the ability to deliberate about what acts would be beneficial and expedient in leading a virtuous life
variable things (deliberative)
practical
Intuition
the ability to discover true first principles that can be used to bootstrap Science
invariable/eternal things (scientific)
abstract principles
Philosophy
the ability to use Intuition and Science to gain knowledge about the highest (though impractical) things
Practical wisdom, or prudence (phronesis), is one of the five faculties by which people can grasp the truth.
Aristotle covered it in section three of this book, where he said that it is a virtue of the deliberative part of the rational part of the soul that manifests as the ability to deliberate about what actions would be beneficial and expedient in leading a life of virtue and eudaimonia.
Here (and in the trailing paragraphs of section seven, which some people fold into this section), he has a few more things to say about it:
Practical wisdom is concerned with down-to-earth, human things, and things that it makes sense to deliberate about — that is, things that have a purpose that human action can influence (there’s no reason, for instance, to deliberate about whether to grow old or not).
Practical wisdom requires knowledge of both universals and particulars.
In this respect, it is like Philosophy (see section seven), though Philosophy concerns itself with impractical-though-interesting things.
The “universals” and “particulars” bit has to do with the syllogism.
For example:
All men are mortal (universal) Socrates is a man (particular) ∴ Socrates is mortal (practical wisdom about Socrates!)
You can go wrong in practical wisdom by failing to know the truth about either the universal or the particular.
For instance:
Cans that are swollen may contain rotten food that can make you sick (universal) The food you’re about to eat came from a swollen can (particular) ∴ You may get sick if you eat it (practical wisdom about your future!)
In this case, if you have faulty understanding of either the universal truth about swollen cans or of the particular truth about the can you’ve just opened, you’ll lack the important practical wisdom that will keep you from getting sick.
Or, try on this anarchist syllogism:
Theft is wrong (universal) Taxation is a variety of theft (particular) ∴ Taxation is wrong (practical wisdom)
You need the universal, the particular, and the logical process in order to get to the conclusion, and you can go wrong at any of these stages.
Intuition will get you the universal, but it may take practical wisdom itself to get you the particular from which you can draw appropriate conclusions.
Practical wisdom comes under different headings, depending on the sphere in which it is exercised.
For example:
heading
sphere
prudence
self-government
domestic management
home economics
legislation
the universal principles of politics
deliberative government
executive government; the carrying out in particular cases of the universals enacted by legislation
judicial government
The varieties of practical wisdom, from R.W. Browne’s The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle ()
The varieties of practical wisdom, from J.H. Muirhead’s Chapters from Aristotle’s Ethics ()
The varieties of practical wisdom, from Alexander Grant’s The Ethics of Aristotle ()
People who apply practical wisdom in their own lives are considered people of practical wisdom, while those who apply it to other peoples’ lives (for instance, the legislators, deliberators, and judges in the list above) “are considered meddlesome.”
But Aristotle asks us to consider whether it might be impossible for most people to mind their own business if some people didn’t try to apply their wisdom to problems of the community, and whether it is possible to mind your own business without at the same time minding the business, at least to some extent, of those you interact with, either in your household or in the community at large.
While it’s possible for a young person to be a savant with a genius understanding of something like mathematics, practical wisdom seems to be something that must be acquired through long experience.
Aristotle thinks this is because expertise in mathematics largely requires an intellectual understanding of abstract universals, while practical wisdom requires actual encounters with real-life particulars.
When you teach a young savant a mathematical truth, he or she grasps it as a truth immediately; but when you teach a truth of practical wisdom, the same student may have reason to be skeptical and to need to see that truth exemplified in real-life examples first before he or she can internalize it into his or her worldview.
Practical wisdom concerns things of “common sense” — knowledge that like that gained via Intuition (see section six) is known but cannot be justified via logical deduction from other facts.
However, knowledge gained by Intuition has to do with general, universal “first principles,” while the knowledge of practical wisdom has to do with particulars.
The sense we use to gain this knowledge is the one we use when, for instance, we see a drawing of a triangle and think “that is a triangle” without actually measuring the angles and counting the sides.
It is the sense that allows us to go from an observation to a particular fact, breaking out of the potentially endless loop of skeptical ratiocination to decide “aha!
I know such-and-such about such-and-such, so there.”
In the ninth section of the sixth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle looks into what makes good deliberation good.
Good deliberation is the characteristic quality of the prudent person.
Prudence is practical wisdom — the ability to deliberate well about what actions would be beneficial and expedient in leading a life of virtue and eudaimonia.
Good deliberation is a variety of inquiry, investigation, or seeking (inquiry in general can be toward good or bad ends, but good deliberation only toward good ends).
Among the things good deliberation isn’t:
scientific knowledge
Why not?
Scientific knowledge concerns things that are invariable/eternal (remember?) that are known.
Deliberation concerns things that are unknown and might be one way or another.
skill in conjecture, quick perception of causes, or clever guessing
Why not?
Clever guessing is quick and doesn’t involve reasoning, whereas deliberation is, well, deliberate: slow and careful.
sagacity, presence of mind, acuteness, quick-wittedness, or acumen
Why not?
Aristotle doesn’t say much about this except to call it a variety of conjecture or guessing.
One commentator compared it to the skill in science of coming up with good hypotheses and knowing which ones are worth pursuing.
correctness of knowledge / science
Why not?
Deliberation can be better or worse, but knowledge can only be either true or false (and if it’s false it’s not even knowledge anymore).
correctness of opinion
Why not?
Deliberation is a process of inquiry; opinion is a conclusion.
What’s left?
Dianoia: a.k.a. correctness of thinking, rightness of deliberation, rectitude of counsel, or correctness of the intellect.
There are four things that can masquerade as good deliberation, but that are really something else:
good reasoning towards bad ends (e.g. the incontinent or bad, but clever person)
true conclusions attained through fallacious logic
correct reasoning that arrives at true conclusions, but in an overly-cumbersome and time-consuming way
good reasoning toward ends that are good, but middling — ends that do not contribute to eudaimonia
In the previous section he looked at the component of prudence called “good deliberation.”
Now he’s going to discuss Understanding (a.k.a. Judiciousness, Apprehension, Intelligence, Moral Discrimination, or Appreciation).
By this, he doesn’t mean some specialized department of understanding (medicine, say, or geometry), or the sort of conclusory opinion about absolutes or scientific knowledge about particulars he’s mentioned in earlier sections.
Understanding is “about things which may become subjects of questioning and deliberation” — the same basic subject matter as good deliberation.
But while deliberation is meant to help us choose a course of action, Understanding doesn’t concern itself with choice but only with judgment: discovering the nature of a thing or situation.
(This can then be fuel for deliberation, of course.)
As such, it is distinct from but connected with prudence.
You can use your Understanding to draw conclusions, for instance, about what someone else says when they discuss matters in the domain of practical wisdom.
Even if you don’t know enough to judge the specifics of the case, your Understanding can help you decide whether they know what they’re talking about and to incorporate their wisdom into your own — to learn from the wisdom of others, to know a piece of good advice when you hear one.
You can also use Understanding to evaluate the choices of others.
Remember that you only deliberate about things that are in your power to decide; but you can use your understanding to come to conclusions about things that other people decide.
Remember how Aristotle said that moral choice happens when reason and desire combine?
It sounds to me like maybe Understanding is the reason-half of a morally correct moral choice.
But I would think that if this were the case that Aristotle would have made this explicit (or that some of the commentators in my panel would have pointed it out), so I think my Understanding must be weak here.
Remember when I shared Grant’s observation that the word Aristotle uses for what most translators called “equity” (epieikeia) “has a close connexion with what is called γνώμη [gnome] (consideration)”?
This γνώμη is the subject of the opening part of this chapter.
Aside from “consideration,” the various translators render it as judgment, candor, feeling, charitableness, or equitable decision, and relate it to suggnome, equity, forbearance, fellow-feeling, pardon, indulgence, charity, forgiveness, sympathy, or kindly judgment.
Chase insists that “[w]e have no term which at all approximates to the meaning of this word” and Stewart says “[i]t is perhaps impossible to bring out in any single English word the whole meaning of this term.”
In any case, it is the intellectual virtue that enables us to skillfully and correctly practice the moral virtue of equity: knowing when to deviate from the letter of the law in order to conform to the spirit of justice.
(Muirhead has a take on this that picks up where Aristotle’s very-brief discussion leaves off, if you want to pursue this further.)
Next, Aristotle pulls together the threads he’s been spinning in the recent sections.
Someone who has practical wisdom (or prudence) is able to make good decisions about how to act in the particular situations that come up in life.
It is not enough just to know good general principles, but you must also know how to analyze particular circumstances to know which principles apply, and have the practical ability to apply them well and the judgment to apply them with equity in such circumstances.
This requires all of the elements of Judgment, Understanding, and Good Deliberation.
The thing that ties these elements together is nous, a term that gave our panel of translators conniptions in this section.
It’s the same word Aristotle used for “Intuition” back in section six, but there he was using it exclusively to talk about discerning the first principles that make logical deduction possible in the realm of science.
Here, he uses it to refer to the realm of practical wisdom, and to refer not only to intuiting first principles but also for evaluating particular instances and even for drawing conclusions outside of the process of reasoning.
Some of the translators translate nous as intuition, moral perception, intelligence, common sense, or moral sense.
Grant translates it as “reason” which I think makes it seem too much like a process of conscious deliberation.
Stewart and Weldon try “intuitive reason.”
Jelf calls it “moral reason without reasoning (rational sense).”
Nous is Judgment, Understanding, and Good Deliberation that has become so well-practiced as to become second-nature.
It allows you to choose the right course of action immediately and intuitively, without having to think it over.
Having “good nous” is like having “a good eye for” something — being able to look at a situation and immediately recognize which aspects of it are important in deciding what your response to it should be.
Like having a good eye for something, this is acquired by experience and training, and can’t just be taught in the abstract.
Nous allows you to perceive moral good & bad almost in the same way as you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel things around you.
And it allows you to respond well and without thinking about it, the way a practiced tennis player knows how to respond to an incoming serve.
Any time you’re drawing logical conclusions, whether by syllogism or by induction, you have to start with certain “givens.”
You can derive givens from other givens, logically, and go back as far as you’d like, but at some point you have to come across givens that just are and that you agree to accept as true for the sake of making any forward progress.
The trick is choosing ones that actually are true.
With experience and nous, you gain the ability to choose givens that are both true and logically adjacent to the conclusions you need to draw in order to act, so that you can make good choices immediately without needing to go through a lot of logical handwringing ahead of time.
This ability develops in a person over time.
Because it is acquired through experience, rather than learned through teaching, it seems almost like a natural thing that comes on people as they get older.
For this reason, Aristotle says, it’s a good idea to keep an eye out for wise elders and pay close attention to their counsel and example, even when they don’t or can’t supply a good logical demonstration for why they’re doing what they’re doing or how they’ve come to the conclusions they’ve come to.
People don’t just automatically develop good nous with age, though.
It comes from being motivated by a love of truth and virtue, living attentively and temperately, and learning from your mistakes.
Those things require training and education.
While everyone develops some sort of nous as they mature, some people develop one that is dominated by a love of virtue/excellence, while others develop one that is dominated by a love of merely sensual pleasure.
Alas, though this process of developing a good nous sounds very interesting and very relevant here, Aristotle leaves it for one of his other works (De Anima maybe?).
In the twelfth and thirteenth sections of the sixth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle anticipates and answers some objections to his scheme of intellectual virtues.
Philosophy is the highest excellence of the scientific part of the rational part of the soul; Practical Wisdom is the highest excellence of the deliberative part of the rational part of the soul.
But what good are they, really?
Philosophical wisdom concerns things that are perhaps fascinating, but ultimately useless, so it isn’t any good to us is it?
On the other hand, practical wisdom is about things that are good for us, but it isn’t itself useful, since it is whether or not we obtain those things that determines whether we are happy — not whether or not we are wise about them.
For example, what benefits a person is to be healthy, and all the wisdom in the world about medicine and fitness won’t measure up against the actual state of being in good health.
Even if you claim practical wisdom isn’t wisdom about The Good so much as advice about becoming Good, it isn’t helpful.
If you already are virtuous, practical wisdom is superfluous; if you aren’t virtuous, then you would be just as likely to benefit by following the good advice of someone who does have practical wisdom, than you would by having any practical wisdom of your own.
The wisdom itself is of no real benefit.
Again, with a health analogy: if you’re healthy, knowledge of medicine is a superfluous luxury; if you’re sick, you’re probably better off consulting a doctor than trying to become an expert on medicine.
Aristotle seems to give conflicting advice on which is the preeminent intellectual virtue.
At times, he sees Philosophy as the ultimate achievement, but in this book he seems to concentrate on Practical Wisdom as guiding us in all of our affairs (including, presumably, in Philosophy).
Which is it?
Much of these objections comes from trying to bridge the gap between the intellectual and the practical.
Aristotle spent Book One talking about eudaimonia as the ultimate end we strive for.
He described it as a variety of activity, as living a thriving and excellent life.
He also described it as being objective — that is, you can look at someone’s life after they’re dead and gone and say “that there was a life of eudaimonia!”
Furthermore, he said that it is acquired by luck and virtue, where virtue is an established habit, or character-trait.
On the other hand, the intellectual virtues seem to be described primarily by internal, subjective knowledge and ability, with the objective capabilities they enable or the character traits they counsel being secondary.
Practical Wisdom is meant to bridge the gap, but is it just a theoretical construct designed for this purpose (a la the luminiferous aether) that has no real existence, or is it merely an epiphenomenon of virtuous character that should be of only trivial interest?
To complicate things, later in The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle is going to argue that intellectual excellence — that is, Philosophy — is a superior sort of excellence to practical, moral excellence.
He hasn’t gotten there yet, but objection #3 above alludes to this.
Aristotle’s answers to these objections are as follows:
Whether or not Philosophy and Practical Wisdom are useful to obtaining happiness is beside-the-point.
Each of them are themselves excellences of the soul, and so are part of eudaimonia for that reason.
To thrive and be excellent in all ways includes thriving and being excellent in purely intellectual ways.
Furthermore, Philosophy is useful in obtaining happiness.
It doesn’t do this in the way that medicine cures disease or an exercise regimen leads to fitness, but in the way that health itself contributes to its own continuance.
Being intellectually excellent is one element in having eudaimonia.
It requires a combination of reason and desire to make choices; good intellectual virtue means good reasoning, good moral virtue means good desires, the combination of the two makes for good choices that are likely to improve your life.
While it’s true that you can become healthy either by following a doctor’s good advice or by acquiring the medical wisdom that allows you to formulate that advice yourself — the analogy does not hold for actions regulated by virtue.
There is a difference between virtuous acts and acts performed virtuously, although objectively they may seem the same, the subjective difference is a big difference.
Possession of the moral virtues is an element of eudaimonia, and merely going-through-the-motions or being obedient to some moral code or lawbook isn’t enough to be virtuous: you have to be motivated by a love of virtue — even if the objective real-world effects are the same in either case.
Practical Wisdom is the cleverness that allows us to choose appropriate means to the ends we desire, combined with good ends.
(If it isn’t combined with good ends, it is merely cleverness; if it is combined with bad ends, we call it “cunning”.)
But, similarly, Virtue is the sort of basic sense we all grow up with (“all I really need to know I learned in Kindergarten”) combined with reason.
Good intentions without good reason to back them up “as often result in evil as in good.”
True moral virtue requires intellectual virtue, otherwise it is only uneducated good intentions.
Socrates taught that all virtue is a form of intellectual understanding — that if you intellectually understood yourself and the situation you found yourself in, the virtuous response to the situation would also be the only logically correct response — and so the key to becoming virtuous is to have an intellectual mastery of the various subject matter of life.
Aristotle disagrees with this, though he says that intellectual understanding is an important component of all mature virtue.
Practical wisdom is a combination of understanding the right means and knowing the right end; virtue is practical wisdom raised to the status of a habit or character trait.
Practical Wisdom serves to unify the virtues, or at least to provide a common substrate for them.
Some people have more of a natural ability or affinity for some virtues; other people for others.
This has led some people to say that the virtues are distinct from each other.
But Practical Wisdom can improve them all and develop them together harmoniously.
Finally, as to whether Practical Wisdom or Philosophy is superior, it is certainly Philosophy that is superior.
Practical Wisdom does not guide, restrict, or command Philosophy, but on the contrary, it guides, restricts, or commands us on behalf of Philosophy.
Using the health analogy, Practical Wisdom is like medicine, Philosophy is like health.
We use medicine not to tell us what health is, but to enable us to achieve health and stay healthy.
We’ve reached the end of book six of The Nicomachean Ethics and its examination of the intellectual virtues.
Today I’ll try to sum up what we learned in this book.
The intellectual virtues concern the rational part of the soul, are methods by which people arrive at truth, and come in two categories: the scientific (having to do with things that are eternal and invariable) and the calculative or deliberative (having to do with things that are variable or contingent).
There are five such virtues.
The scientific ones are Science, Intuition, and Philosophy, and the calculative/deliberative ones are Art and Wisdom.
Science allows you to draw conclusions in a logical, demonstrable fashion, from known facts and principles.
Intuition gives you the first principles and allows you to bootstrap the process of Science.
Philosophy answers the big questions, that, though impractical, are fascinating and remarkable.
Art gives you the ability to create things that would not exist but for the skill of the artist.
Wisdom enables you to choose the appropriate means for the ultimate end (eudaimonia) at which life points.
Of these, Philosophy is the greatest and Wisdom is its vital servant.
Philosophy is Science and Intuition applied contemplatively to The Big Questions, while Wisdom is Science and Intuition applied to practical questions of day-to-day behavior.
This practical application, in order to be really Wise and not just clever, requires the ability to deliberate well — to reach conclusions that are good not just in a middling sense but keeping in mind the big picture and the ultimate ends, and to reach these conclusions not just by happenstance but by a sound process of reasoning.
It requires the knowledge of general principles as well as the astute assessment of particular cases.
Wisdom is acquired by practice in such good deliberation.
It is a skill that requires experience more than theoretical knowledge.
Over time, it can become second-nature: less a matter of demonstrable logic or conscious deliberation than of intuitive understanding.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to look to the example of wise elders, even if they cannot necessarily explain themselves coherently.
Wisdom applies at various scales: to self-government, to managing household affairs, and to both the theory and practice of politics.
Equity, that moral virtue that allows you to transcend the letter of the law so as to apply the spirit of Justice behind the law, requires the understanding and good deliberation that is part of the intellectual virtue of Wisdom.
Moral action requires deliberate choice, and such choice happens when reason/intellect and desire/appetite combine.
Desire chooses the ends and Reason chooses the means, but it takes both together to actually pick a course of action.
This makes Wisdom important in that it helps us make our moral virtues more than just good intentions:
Wisdom, as an excellent form of reason, combines with moral virtues, as excellent forms of desire, to cause virtuous choices.
Moral virtues without wisdom to back them up become the sort of intentions that pave the road to hell.
Practical wisdom unifies, coordinates, and gives practical, real-world power to our moral impulses.
But even aside from this practical issue, intellectual virtues like Philosophy and Wisdom are excellences in their own rights, and therefore are ends of their own that contribute to our eudaimonia.
