Chicago (2014) 276pp £26.28 (ISBN 9780226136547)
This review is twinned with:
REASON AND CHARACTER: The Moral Foundations of Aristotelian Political Philosophy
Lorraine Smith Pangle
Chicago (2020) 319pp £26.48 (ISBN 9780226688169)
Though they are published six years apart, it is appropriate to review these two books together because they have been designed as a pair. As the author herself puts it, referring to the second book, it ‘grows out of a decades-long meditation on the Socratic claim that virtue is knowledge and the Aristotelian response to that claim’. The subject is crucial for both philosophers (as indeed it still is for us all): what exactly is virtue (good thinking and/or good behaviour), how is it important for our individual happiness and social/political harmony, how do we recognise it, understand it, and hold onto it? As Socrates famously put it in the Republic, ‘this question is about nothing less than how one ought to live’.
P.’s method is to subject the relevant texts to a forensic, meticulous examination, which pulls out and carefully studies all the twists and turns of the argument. In the first book she submits to this process four dialogues which are especially concerned with Socrates’ quest for the meaning of virtue: Apology (taken first because it provides the most succinct account of Socrates’ position), Gorgias, Meno, and finally Protagoras, which contains the fullest treatment of the question. In these dialogues Socrates presents this quest as of vital importance for the common good; if people knew clearly what virtue is they would always follow it, and would be happy, and the city would prosper; so he spends his time asking selected people how they see it, especially the great sophists, Gorgias and Protagoras, who claim (for a fee) to be actually teaching it. The interlocutors are all, of course, shown up to be deeply confused in their moral thinking. But Socrates’ own arguments are found to be astonishingly diverse and contain inconsistencies, paradoxes and apparent contradictions.
Virtue is either the means to happiness or the essence of happiness; but in that case, how do we explain heroic self-sacrifice for a good cause? Can virtue be taught? Partly, but not in the way that arts and skills are teachable. Virtue is either necessary for happiness but not sufficient, sufficient but not necessary, or both sufficient and necessary. If people knew what was virtuous they would always do it, therefore vice is always due to ignorance and should logically be pitied and reformed rather than punished; a badly behaved tyrant is therefore the unhappiest of men and cannot be blamed because he knows no better, but this seems counter to both experience and common sense; virtue, based on the knowledge of the good, is a single fundamental attitude underpinning all its different manifestations, yet it is clearly possible for someone to be virtuous in one respect but vicious in another (e.g., courageous but also intemperate). And so on.
As P. observes, these inconsistencies have led scholars to struggle to distinguish clearly what Plato’s doctrines really were and how they may have changed over time: but P. argues that the inconsistencies in the Socratic approach are designed to reveal the confusions in all our understanding, and that underlying them there is a coherent truth which we can discern without being able to state it precisely. We can recognise the good, and distinguish what is virtuous, by phronêsis, translated here as ‘active wisdom’, which is inherent in us (Plato has recourse to a reincarnation myth to explain it) but can be developed by training. Not many people have the leisure, or the stamina, to take such training to the highest level, which is why the few who can, the philosophers, should really be in charge. However, there is a final, shorter, chapter on a fifth dialogue, the Laws, in which an attempt is made to apply the Socratic thesis about the knowledge of virtue to a real polis; here the Athenian Stranger (who takes the place of Socrates) is brought to admit that humans in a society need rules and laws and some fear of punishment to conform to good behaviour, yet tries always to insist that such laws, as far as possible, should seek to reform, educate and rehabilitate people rather than condemn them.
In the second book, P. turns to Aristotle’s criticism of Socrates’ ‘virtue is knowledge’ theme in the Nicomachean Ethics. Like Plato, Aristotle regards virtue (personal and civic) as essential for human happiness, but he does not accept the proposition that virtue is merely knowledge, with its corollary that vice is simply ignorance and therefore involuntary. In contrast to Plato’s questioning method, Aristotle works through to his theories, like the scientist he is, by observing and classifying human behaviour, so that much of the Ethics consists in descriptions of different types of virtuous activity. Reason and intelligence are an important part of virtuous behaviour, but equally important are emotions, individual circumstances and the development of character through the formation of good habits.
P. turns her forensic spotlight onto the following themes: the part played by reason (NE 1 and 2), the extent to which people can choose their behaviour and are responsible for it (NE 3.1-5), descriptions of the different moral virtues (courage, moderation, the social virtues etc.), their purposes and the place of reason in directing them (NE 3.6-4.9), justice (natural and political) and the role of reason there (NE 5), wisdom (sôphrosunê), active wisdom (phronêsis) and the intellectual virtues (NE 6), and the problems of self-control (NE 7-10). Following the twists and turns of the argument, as she did with Socrates, P shows that Aristotle too can seem inconsistent in his attempts to grasp these slippery concepts: he backtracks, he drops promising lines of argument to approach a problem from a totally different direction, even, at times, he appears to contradict himself, and (a key point) he is unclear about the standards people can or should measure against when employing their active wisdom in making behavioural choices. As with Plato, such cruxes have often left scholars confused as to what Aristotle really meant (P. does not mention this, but one is reminded of the idea that used to be put about that NE may not have been directly Aristotle’s work at all but rather disjointed lecture notes assembled by his students). But the great merit of P.’s approach is that she argues, and I think convincingly shows, that underlying all this confusion there is a growing understanding which is much closer to Plato’s vision than at first appears. Moral virtue is the best guarantor of human happiness in its fullest sense; we have the power of discerning it and of conforming ourselves to it, and this power can be developed by education and habituation; to some extent at least, everyone can become a philosopher.
These books are not for casual reading and do take a bit of effort. This is not because of P.’s style, which is easy, jargon-free and on occasion quietly humorous, but rather because of the dense and abstract nature of the subject matter. But they do repay the effort. Anyone working on the texts described would find them an invaluable aid. Philosophy students who are not reading Greek would also find them helpful gateways into Plato’s and Aristotle’s thoughts on these moral problems. P. quotes from other scholars generously, including when she disagrees, and her notes and references are extensive. This enterprise is exactly what she has said it is: the fruit of lengthy pondering on two difficult authors, in a notoriously problematic area of moral philosophy, leading to a new and illuminating synthesis between them.
Colin McDonald