Aristotle on the Scope of Practical Reason: Spectators, Legislators, Hopes, and Evils 2020058266, 2020058267, 9780367756970, 9781003165262, 9780367760496

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Fully Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom
1.1 Non-Motivational Practical Judgments
1.2 Comprehension
1.3 Judgment in the Rhetoric
1.4 The Self-Controlled Person as an Excellent Spectator
1.5 Upending the Internalism vs Externalism Debate
2 Straddling Borders: The Legislator’s Enigmatic Activity
2.1 The Triptych: Action, Production, Theory
2.2 The Legislator’s Practical Wisdom (Nicomachean Ethics VI 8)
2.3 The Experience of the Would-Be Legislator (Nicomachean Ethics X 9)
2.4 Straddling Borders
3 Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck
Introduction
3.1 Hoping-Well
3.2 Mind Your Prayers
4 Radical Evil
4.1 Is There a Notion of Radical Evil in Aristotle?
4.2 Evil beyond the Limits of Vice
4.3 Radical Evil in the Politics
4.4 Evil and Curability
Denouement: Aristotle’s Sailors
Bibliography
Index of Names
Index of Passages

Citation preview

Pavlos Kontos’ book is an important addition to contemporary scholarship on Aristotle’s ethical and political thought. Covering topics very seldom dealt with in such detail, Kontos provides a fresh perspective so sorely needed to broaden our understanding of Aristotelian perspectives on moral and political life. Kontos’ book promises to become required reading for all those interested in Aristotle’s ethics and politics and their contemporary significance. —Sophia M. Connell, Birkbeck College, University of London

Kontos argues convincingly that for Aristotle we are not only agents but observers and students of ethical life, filled with hopes, prayers, and general principles derived from the study of political systems. His wide reading and detailed textual analysis illuminate many aspects of Aristotle’s practical philosophy that often receive little attention or entirely escape our notice. —Richard Kraut, Northwestern University

A genuinely fresh re-interpretation of Aristotelian practical philosophy, guided by a resolute attention to problems and texts important for Aristotle but generally ignored in recent scholarship. Wide-ranging and ambitious, and drawing upon work from diverse philosophical schools, Kontos both points out how rich our practical intelligence actually is, and argues for the equal richness of Aristotle’s vision. —Michael Pakaluk, The Catholic University of America

In his excellent study Pavlos Kontos leads his readers through almost unexplored territory of Aristotle’s practical philosophy. He makes a strong case for the idea that Aristotle’s practical reason is not only involved in action and motivation, but is required for a wide range of intellectual operations dealing with the realm of human affairs. This book will open up new avenues of discussion among both Aristotelian scholars and Neo-Aristotelian philosophers. —Christof Rapp, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Aristotle on the Scope of Practical Reason

This book offers a new account of Aristotle’s practical philosophy. Pavlos Kontos argues that Aristotle does not restrict practical reason to its action-guiding and motivational role; rather, practical reason remains practical in the full sense of the term even when its exercise does not immediately concern the guidance of our present actions. To elucidate why this wider scope of practical reason is important, Kontos brings into the foreground five protagonists that have long been overlooked: (a) spectators or judges who make non-motivational judgments about practical matters that do not interact with their present deliberations and actions; (b) legislators who exercise practical reason to establish constitutions and laws; (c) hopes as an active engagement with moral luck and its impact on our individual lives; (d) prayers as legislators’ way to deal with the moral luck hovering around the birth of constitutions and the prospect of a utopia; and (e) people who are outsiders or marginal cases of the responsibility community because they are totally deprived of practical reason. Building on a wide range of interpretations of Aristotle’s practical philosophy (from the ancient commentators to contemporary analytic and continental philosophers), Kontos offers new insights about Aristotle’s philosophical contribution to the current debates about radical evil, moral luck, hope, utopia, internalism and externalism, and the philosophy of law. Aristotle on the Scope of Practical Reason will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in Aristotle’s ethics, ancient philosophy, and the history of practical philosophy. Pavlos Kontos is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Patras, Greece. Publications: Aristotle’s Moral Realism Reconsidered (2011), L’action morale chez Aristote (2002). Co-editor: Evil in Aristotle (2018), Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political (2017), Gadamer et les Grecs (2005).

Aristotle on the Scope of Practical Reason Spectators, Legislators, Hopes, and Evils Pavlos Kontos

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Pavlos Kontos The right Pavlos Kontos to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kontos, Pavlos, author. Title: Aristotle on the scope of practical reason : spectators, legislators, hopes, and evils / Pavlos Kontos. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020058266 (print) | LCCN 2020058267 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367756970 (hbk) | ISBN 9781003165262 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Aristotle. | Practical reason. Classification: LCC B491.R4 K66 2021 (print) | LCC B491.R4 (ebook) | DDC 121/.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058266 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058267 ISBN: 978-0-367-75697-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-76049-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-16526-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Abbreviationsxi Introduction

1

1 Fully Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom 1.1 Non-Motivational Practical Judgments  13 1.2 Comprehension 16 1.3 Judgment in the Rhetoric 20 1.4 The Self-Controlled Person as an Excellent Spectator 31 1.5 Upending the Internalism vs Externalism Debate  40

13

2 Straddling Borders: The Legislator’s Enigmatic Activity 2.1 The Triptych: Action, Production, Theory  54 2.2 The Legislator’s Practical Wisdom (Nicomachean Ethics VI 8)  63 2.3 The Experience of the Would-Be Legislator (Nicomachean Ethics X 9)  72 2.4 Straddling Borders  85

53

3 Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck Introduction 97 3.1 Hoping-Well 101 3.2 Mind Your Prayers  119

97

4 Radical Evil 4.1 Is There a Notion of Radical Evil in Aristotle?  148 4.2 Evil beyond the Limits of Vice  152

148

viii  Contents 4.3 Radical Evil in the Politics 159 4.4 Evil and Curability  167

Denouement: Aristotle’s Sailors

178

Bibliography182 Index of Names196 Index of Passages200

Acknowledgments

The writing of this book in its present form began in the idyllic environs of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, where I spent a wonderful sabbatical year as the 2017–2018 W.J. Bouwsma Fellow. My gratitude goes out to the entire NHC staff and to my fellow scholars there. I presented earlier drafts of Chapter 1 at the University of Patras (Fall 2013), the Charles University in Prague (Fall 2014), the conferences “Aristotle Today” in Helsinki (June 2016) and “The Flight of the Owls” in Thessaloniki (October 2016), the Notre Dame Workshop on Ancient Philosophy (October 2017), and Princeton’s Department of Philosophy (April 2018). I am thankful to the participants of the respective venues for their insightful comments and, in particular, to Stasinos Stavrianeas (Patras); Jakub Jirsa, James Mensch, and Štěpán Špinka (Prague); David Charles and Jörn Müller (Helsinki); Michael Forster (Thessaloniki); Sean Kelsey and Chris Shields (Notre Dame); and Hendrik Lorenz, Alexander Nehamas, Wei Liu, and Marcus Gibson (Princeton). I presented earlier drafts of Chapter  2 at the Catholic University of America (Winter 2018), Boston College (Spring 2018), the University of Cyprus (Fall 2018), and the conference “Protreptic Rhetoric” organized by Pierre Destrée and Monte Ransome Johnson in Athens (2019). Special thanks are due to Robert Sokolowski, Jonathan Buttaci, Herbert Hartmann (Washington); John Sallis (Boston); Christos Kyriacou and Vassilis Karasmanis (Cyprus); and Robert Bolton, Monte Ransome Johnson, and Sophia Connell (Athens). I  am particularly grateful to Dimitris Tsarapatsanis (University of York) for his numerous and perspicacious suggestions regarding the relevance of Aristotle’s legislator for the modern philosophy of law. A first version of Section  3.1, “Hoping-Well,” was presented at the conferences “Handeln und Handelnde in antiker Philosophie,” organized by the Gesellschaft für antike Philosophie (2019), and “On Hope,” organized by Stavros Zoumboulakis in Athens (2019); a more elaborated version appeared in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy:

x  Acknowledgments https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2020.1818054. A  version of Section 3.2, “Mind Your Prayers,” is to appear in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. Chapter  4 is an enriched version of my “Radical Evil in Aristotle’s ­Ethics and Politics” in: P. Kontos (ed.), Evil in Aristotle, 75–97 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Special thanks are due to the three anonymous reviewers for their ­comments and recommendations as well as to Laura Larsen for the very careful reading of the manuscript. Last but not least, there are no words to express, once again, my gratitude to David Reeve for all his love, encouragement, and support.

Abbreviations

APo. APr. Ath. Con. DA EE GA GC HA Met. PA Ph. Po. Pol. Rh. VV

Posterior Analytics Prior Analytics Athenian Constitution De Anima (On the Soul) Eudemian Ethics Generation of Animals On Generation and Corruption History of Animals Metaphysics Parts of Animals Physics Poetics Politics Rhetoric On Virtues and Vices

Where there is no indication, the references are to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I  use—with occasional, minimal changes—Reeve’s t­ranslations of the Nicomachean Ethics (2014), the Metaphysics (2016), the Politics (2017), the Physics (2018), and the Rhetoric (2018). Plato’s works are cited according to the OCT edition except for the Laws, which is cited according to the Budé edition (E. des Places and A. Diès, Les Lois, 4 volumes. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2006). The Byzantine Commentaries of the Nicomachean Ethics (by ­Aspasius, Eustratius, Heliodorus, and Michael of Ephesus) are cited according to G. Heylbut’s edition in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (CAG), ­volumes XIX and XX.

Introduction

Anscombe’s influential study “Modern Moral Philosophy” has given rise to a long tradition of Aristotelian scholarship that is eager to embrace the point of view of the philosophy of action: it focuses on the psychological states (feelings and desires) and rational capacities (practical reason and imagination) that are preliminary to and explanatory of deliberation and morally relevant action. The assumption behind this approach is that what actually renders practical reasoning practical is its resulting in our actions. In contrast, any sort of reasoning about practical matters that is not closely tied up with our actual motives and actions is categorized as non-practical, theoretical, or meta-ethical. It should come as no surprise, then, that scholars turn more and more enthusiastically to Aristotle’s De Anima and De Motu Animalium to excavate his views about the capacities of the human soul and their role in rational action. It is unsurprising, too, that the main characters of these accounts are the practically wise person (phronimos) and the person who lacks self-control, while the most discussed issues are those of motivation, deliberation, deliberate choice (prohairesis), the voluntary and the involuntary, ethical virtue, desires, ends, and so on. I mean to distance myself from this tradition, not because I want to deny its philosophical fecundity or its faithfulness to the spirit of Aristotle’s ethics but because, as I  will argue, it has ignored or only paid lip service to crucial aspects of Aristotle’s practical philosophy and hence significantly impoverished its richness and heritage. My worries are about the domain of practical knowledge and, in consequence, the nature of practical intellectual states and practical judgments. To put it in a nutshell, my aim is to demonstrate that Aristotle does not at all restrict practical reason to its action-guiding and motivational role; in positive terms, it is to lay bare practical reason’s scope. To explain why restoring the true scope of practical reason is philosophically important, I will bring into the foreground of Aristotle’s practical philosophy five notions that have previously been either consigned to oblivion or undervalued: the spectator, the legislator, prayer, hope, and radical evil.

2  Introduction Needless to say, the paradigm shift that I propose goes hand in hand with a drastic change of focus as to the philosophical resources to draw on: not so much the De Anima but the Politics and the Rhetoric; not so much Plato and the Stoics but Isocrates; not David Hume but JeanJacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant; and not only philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition (broadly conceived), such as Peter Strawson, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, but also philosophers belonging to the phenomenological tradition (broadly conceived), such as Edmund Husserl, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Hannah Arendt. For similar reasons, the resonances of Aristotle’s views will be traced not so much within, for instance, the philosophy of action, virtue ethics, and moral realism but primarily within the current debates on feelings, law as an artifact, radical evil, hope, and utopia. Let me now introduce my five notions one by one.

Spectators We are spectators (theôros, singular), not only doers (prattôn, singular), of morally relevant actions, and qua spectators—I borrow the term from Aristotle’s Rhetoric—we use reason to judge (krinein) practical matters that do not involve our own actual plans, do not coincide with our present motives for action, or do not issue in actions at all. I will argue that such judgments are genuinely practical, not theoretical. Indeed, a deep ambiguity permeates Aristotle’s practical philosophy, an ambiguity one is prone to minimize or even erase. And this is due to Aristotle’s tendency to look at practical matters from two different perspectives—namely, action-guiding practical reason and a merely judgment-oriented practical reason that is not focused on guiding a spectator’s own actions. Those who are dedicated to investigating Aristotle’s ethics from the point of view of the philosophy of action have shed much light on the former, but at the cost of largely overlooking or downplaying the importance of the latter. My aim is to rehabilitate the merely judgment-oriented perspective and the sort of independence it enjoys by arguing that all rational agents—a beast-like person aside—perform two different sorts of tasks within the practical domain—that of an agent involved in actions and that of a judge or spectator—and, accordingly, make two distinct sorts of genuinely practical judgments: the first being motivational and prescriptive and the second being non-motivational and non-prescriptive. But even if one is favorable to the aforementioned view, one might still want to object that only the practically wise person can perform these tasks in a fully virtuous way: one can be an excellent spectator, so the common argument goes, only if, and inasmuch as, one is also an excellent doer of actions. But Aristotle’s ethics—and this is the counterargument I will unfold—makes room for both people who are at the same time fully virtuous doers of moral actions and fully virtuous spectators of practical

Introduction  3 matters and people who are not fully virtuous doers of actions but are, nonetheless, fully virtuous spectators. The former are the practically wise people. The latter, however, are the ones I  take to be the underestimated heroes of Aristotle’s ethics: namely, the ones who are selfcontrolled (enkratês, singular). In disagreement with the standard view, I  will maintain that, as a judge or spectator, the self-controlled people possess exactly the same intellectual capacity to make good non-motivational judgments as the practically wise person does, although they fail to meet the highest standards of virtue when it comes to action. We function as spectators whose judgments about practical matters do not issue in actions when, for instance, we judge actions done by others (either as an eyewitness or relying on their sayings), when we evaluate our own past actions, or when we praise or blame in general. Notice that these are not practices which one is free to be more or less capriciously engaged in or not but rather are inescapable in practical life. It would be equally counterintuitive to imagine a mature person who has never done any moral or immoral action as to imagine someone who has never made any judgment in praise or blame of other people or their actions, judgments, attitudes, policies, or emotions. We are not volunteers in the game of morality, and this applies both to our being doers of actions and to our being spectators or judges of practical matters. To better understand such spectators, I first expand on the intellectual virtue of comprehension (sunesis), to which scarcely anyone has shown due attention. Comprehension is not prescriptive and action guiding, as practical wisdom is, but merely capable of correct judgment, kritikê (Nicomachean Ethics VI 10). For Aristotle’s notion of comprehension encourages us to distinguish motivational judgments made within the ambit of deliberate choice from non-motivational ones made outside that ambit. The further suggestion I  would like to lay on the table is that we understand spectators and comprehension in the light of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In the context of rhetorical speech, judges (kritês, singular) exercise the intellectual activity of judgment about practical matters that largely fall outside the sphere of their own actions; their judgments are non-motivational, for they are not envisaged as triggering their actions at all. And, in the case of epideictic speech, the judge amounts to a spectator (theôros), and at this point, the gap separating a spectator’s nonmotivational practical judgments from the actual plans of action reaches its maximum (Rhetoric I 3). There are good reasons to choose the spectator as our guiding paradigm. Let me mention only three of them here. First, the Rhetoric focuses on feelings (pathê) as what influences our non-motivational judgments, not our motives for action. Hence, it allows that feelings may not mold our prescriptive and our merely judgmental capacities in the same way. Thus, the feelings of self-controlled people might prove sufficiently well-­ balanced for them to serve as fully reliable spectators of practical matters,

4  Introduction though the same feelings are not sufficient to enable them to serve as fully virtuous agents. Second, epideictic speech is connected by Aristotle with judgments about the noble (kalon). As a result, one is authorized to investigate the hypothesis that the spectators/listeners to an epideictic speech might be fully reliable judges who enjoy a purely unclouded view of the noble, though, as doers of actions, they often lack such a view. Third, epideictic speech as an institutionalized practice of praise and blame allows us to link Rhetoric’s spectators to the whole gamut of practices of praise and blame, practices that occupy quite a prominent place in Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics as well as in our everyday life. We function as spectators by being engaged in practical activities that are an indispensable part of our practical life and require us to make non-motivational judgments about practical matters that do not interact with our actual motives for action and deliberations. These are the very same practical matters we or others are also involved in as doers of moral actions. And the criteria of a spectator’s judgment about the praiseworthiness, advantage, or value of these actions are exactly the same as the ones the practically wise agent relies on. Thus, there is no space here for the Kantian clash between spectators’ quasi-aesthetic evaluation of moral matters and actors’ relevant moral duty. Nor do Aristotle’s spectators in any way resemble Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator.” For every rational human being functions as a spectator of practical matters within the context of everyday activities and practices, and such a function takes place in tandem with his/her being a moral agent, whereas Smith’s spectator, by contrast, should, at the end of the day, merge with the agentive self. I have given a foretaste of some of the ingredients that make Aristotle’s notion of a spectator philosophically appealing. I take them to be continuous with the phenomenology of moral experience and robust enough to contribute to the current debate regarding motivational externalism and internalism. It is at this juncture that I will also address the question about the unity of practical reason—that is, about how its judgmentoriented and action-guiding aspects relate to each other.

Legislators The legislator is my next protagonist. He too has received little commentary, despite the fact that Aristotle’s notion of a legislator has farreaching repercussions (about which I will now only give some hints) for the modern philosophy of law, from Jean Bodin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to nowadays. This time, the difficulty resides in our reluctance to recognize the legislator’s activity for what it really is—namely, genuinely practical. Why? Well, there is no doubt that part of the blame is to be laid on Aristotle himself, for he describes the legislator in an implicit and nebulous manner and, to make things worse, as a scientist, a craftsman (poiêtês), and a doer of political actions. What is more, nowhere

Introduction  5 in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics are the legislators’ actions associated with their desires and motives or with their own happiness. It is only to be expected, then, that those endorsing the point of view of the philosophy of action are unwilling to recognize in the legislators’ practical reason anything genuinely practical. In their eyes, what they do should rather be lumped together with theoretical modes of reasoning. I will try to dispel this misconception and all its ramifications, refute its false presumptions, and rehabilitate legislation as a genuinely practical activity. That it is a borderline case of practical activity, I admit. But precisely because it straddles borders, it is well suited to putting the scope of practical reason before our eyes. True, the term nomothetikê denotes legislative science—a sort of theoretical knowledge that has access to universals. Throughout the Politics, however, Aristotle is adamant in distinguishing those who are preoccupied with a merely theoretical investigation about legislative matters from those who actually perform the political action of legislating (nomothesia). And the activity of legislating is practical to the extent that the legislator’s knowledge encompasses two components: a universalist knowledge of practical starting-points (archai), like the definition of happiness, and a particularist knowledge of how to discern the actual circumstances and parameters needed in order to correctly deliberate about the constitution, the laws, etc. that happen to be best for a particular city at a particular moment of its growth—even a hasty reading of the Politics suffices to confirm this. Correspondingly, constitutions and laws are hybrid entities: they constitute particulars in the sense that they are proper to a specific city at a specific historical moment or stage of its development and they are universals in that they implement rules which are valid or respected in all occasions within that city. A new perplexity, however, shakes up the aforementioned construal. Even if—someone might object—legislative activity is not theoretical, Aristotle all too often models it on production (poiêsis) and its outcome on craft-products, not on action (praxis) in the strict sense of the term. Obviously, constitutions or law systems, like artifacts, are something other than or external to the very action of the legislator; they survive legislators’ actions or even legislators themselves. Aristotle calls the legislator a producer or maker, a dêmiourgos or kataskeuastês. But this cannot be the end of the story. The reason is that the practical aspect of legislative science has a certain normative priority over its productive aspect. For one thing, no craft-knowledge has access to the starting-point of the practical realm, which is happiness, while legislative knowledge does. Constitutions and laws are not mere craft-products, either. For they embody political principles, or a “form” and “a way of life,” conveying a pertinent understanding of happiness. Besides, their political validity and reality are substantiated by the political actions of the citizens; they do not serve as technical means to further ends. I will

6  Introduction suggest that the difficulty of dissociating legislative activity from productions is aggravated by its time-frame. As a matter of fact, legislators are active before any constitution is actually established; once it is established, they are free to leave the city. Besides, it is telling that the Rhetoric and the Politics depict them as people for whom there is no need to confront their eventual personal involvements, interests, and appetites or to dirty their hands with everyday politics. Nicomachean Ethics VI 8 plainly consolidates the notion that the legislator’s activity constitutes a genuinely practical one by identifying legislative knowledge (nomothesia) with a branch of practical wisdom. I will call it “legislative practical wisdom.” The problem is that Aristotle’s condensed and abstruse argument in VI 8 has led interpreters to deep misconceptions of the legislator’s activity and to presuming that legislation is exclusively preoccupied with universals while only everyday politics, or Tagespolitik, is concerned with particulars. Aristotle’s argument needs substantial unpacking, but to spare us the details here, let me point out only that this reading makes Aristotle’s argument sound self-contradictory. For once we accept something like legislative practical wisdom, we should necessarily (i.e. by definition) credit it with both universalist and particularist knowledge. A highly attractive, complex, and comprehensive taxonomy of practical reason emerges from VI 8. Both legislative practical wisdom (i.e. the intellectual virtue of the excellent legislator) and what Aristotle calls “political practical wisdom” (i.e. the intellectual virtue of the ­excellent politician of Tagespolitik) possess two branches: a universalist and a particularist. Their universalist knowledge is common—namely, legislative science, which is also the universalist branch of the practical wisdom exercised in the case of our own private affairs. Hence, legislative practical wisdom and legislative science do not denote the same thing, nor does the political or legislative science explored in Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics coincide with practical wisdom. What distinguishes legislative practical wisdom from political practical wisdom are their particularist components, which are quite distinct, inasmuch as their activities, the particulars they deal with, and the sort of experience (empeiria) grounding the relevant knowledge also diverge. The experience proper to legislative practical wisdom is precisely the topic of X 9. A  fresh, close reading of this final chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics will reveal the vast difference between the experience required in order for someone to become an excellent politician and the experience required in order to become an excellent legislator. X 9, Politics VIII, and Rhetoric I 4 join forces to explain the reason: the experience required for the would-be legislator is quite peculiar due to the fact that the works of legislators are constitutions and laws themselves, which I dubbed “hybrid entities.” Therefore, their pertinent experience necessarily includes a sort of indirect knowledge obtained through consulting

Introduction  7 historical testimonials or political textbooks. No doubt, a textbook exhibiting established truths is useful only to those who already possess experience. But making such a textbook, with a view to categorizing constitutions, cities, etc., is, indeed, the only appropriate way to acquire the experience needed by the would-be legislator who aims to thereby discover legislative truths. Once filled in with the necessary details, the prior pieces of evidence—so I believe—will suffice to strengthen the tenet that legislative activity is genuinely practical. Thus, they shed new light on the scope of practical reason; our ear will begin to attune itself to the idea that the experience, the knowledge, and the objects proper to practical activities are not limited to a uniform sort of low-level particularity, nor does the exercise of practical reason necessarily involve considerations about my own happiness. Practical reason is much more capacious than it is usually taken to be.

Hopes and Prayers Hopes and prayers come next. They, too, do not loom large among the topics that have attracted the attention of Aristotle scholars, since they seem to amount to semi-irrational behaviors of a religious bent at the edge of practical reason. In addition, they concern what one nowadays calls “moral luck,” and, since the work of Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, moral luck is mainly addressed from the retrospective point of view of those who, judging past moral actions and decisions, realize they must inevitably factor in how moral actions suffer luck’s interference with or intrusion into their moral lives. Thus, even though it has been convincingly explained why Aristotle’s framework is alien to such a picture of moral luck as something our core morality allegedly resists, Aristotle’s fascinating phenomenology of our action-directing and anticipative engagement with moral luck remains neglected. I mean, then, to propose a new agenda focused on the following questions: What is a virtuous and what a vicious way to accommodate luck in our actions and plans? Who can really distinguish good luck from bad luck? What kind of (political) vice fuels the aspiration to exile luck from our lives? Are different aspects of our practical life differently associated with moral luck? Aristotle’s appealing answers emerge, so I will argue, from his treatment of hoping-well and praying-well as two substantially distinct ways to correctly engage with moral luck. Elpis, hope, is not a feeling (pathos) and is not exclusively linked with fear, but it is a future-oriented engagement with circumstantial and resultant moral luck, as Aristotle says in Nicomachean Ethics III 6–8 and Rhetoric II. A substantial notion of hope, however, can be gained only from distinguishing between justified or good (epieikês, agathê) hope and its simulacra. For one thing, and despite the misleading dichotomies permeating Nicomachean Ethics III 6–8, only virtuous people—for instance,

8  Introduction the genuinely courageous ones—possess the sort of experience on the basis of which hope can reliably bridge the gap between the evidence provided by their past life and the always open possibility of not living up to the expectations when the odds are extremely low. Likewise, those who hope well do not avert their gaze from the present on the basis of “as-if” assumptions prompted, for instance, by fear. Grounded in the experience of our past actions and the appraisal of present circumstances, justified hope involves the sort of excellent futuredirected sight only practical wisdom is capable of. Thus, although everyone (except for pathological cases) can see the future coming, some people, Aristotle says, are coldly indifferent to it, having altogether lost their faith in the hospitality of the future world. These people still have wishes, desires, and expectations, but they are hope paralyzed. By contrast, the openness to the future as it is disclosed by justified hopes goes hand in hand with their flexible fulfillment: absorbing the effects of partial disappointments, hopes can be fulfilled in many ways and more or less easily restored. Such flexibility is buttressed by hope’s picturing—that is, its capacity to produce an imaginative or clarifying intuitiveness that serves as its present fulfillment (to use Aristotle’s example, anger-relevant hope produces pleasant illustrations of future revenge). Aristotle’s phenomenology of hope allows us to clearly demarcate it from feelings, as-if assumptions, optimism and mere wishes, spontaneous strategies, willful and exhibitionistic zeal for our plans, religious experiences, and so on. More importantly, it allows us to explain its motivational work. For having justified hope is not the same as being firmly committed to a project: some people might be committed to the noble and yet prove prone to hopelessness when their targets appear obscured or highly uncertain. Hope determines commitment’s sustainability by sharpening our lucid sight of a hospitable future and providing encouragement thanks to its picturing, at present, positive courses of future actions. That is why I  insist on maintaining that justified hope occupies the center of our engagement with circumstantial and resultant luck, not some peripheral position at the edge of our practical lives. Prayers (euchê, singular) are substantially different. Their tense is the perfect present (not the future), and they primarily concern constitutive luck (not circumstantial or resultant luck) and the establishment of a constitution of a polis (not our individual lives). Prayers refer to the material conditions of the city—its “matter” (hylê), “political resources” (politikê chorêgia), or “commensurate resources”—which are mainly addressed in Book VII of the Politics. Scholars touch upon them only obliquely in the context of the endless disputes about the status of the ideal city in Aristotle’s Politics and his notion of utopia, if such a notion is there at all. Without entering here into the textual details, I will offer a sketchy idea of why I think Aristotle’s prayers matter.

Introduction  9 To begin with, the political resources that determine the quality of a constitution can be clustered under many headings, the most important of which are the multitude of human beings, the territory, and the neighbors (the latter being, in spite of its importance, all too often overlooked). But it is not enough for legislators to pray for apparently good resources; they should pray well or correctly, and this is anything but an easy task. Only the excellent legislators, whose prayers are shaped by political science, can pray well, for they alone know which prayed-for resources are indeed not impossible. By “impossible” Aristotle understands two things: what is factually impossible (for instance, a city without territory or without neighbors at all) but also, in a heavily normative sense, the requirements that political resources should meet for the sake of the excellent city. More importantly, the excellent legislator only prays for a certain kind of political matter, not for a certain kind of political form. This is precisely why Aristotle opposes prayers to the legislator’s deliberate choices and actions and why both mild and radical criticisms of Aristotle’s utopia are off target. Political resources, no matter how ideal they truly are, offer a sort of resistance to legislators’ wishes, a resistance they can in no way overcome. Only bad legislators labor under the illusion that “in accord with our prayers” equates to “no external impediments to stand in [the] way.” I will further defend Aristotle’s notion of praying as an indispensable function of the legislator’s practical reason by raising two questions: First, which theoretical need or objective obliges Aristotle to resist any marginalization of prayers? And, second, what kind of political mistake or alienation accompanies the marginalization of prayers? I  will show that Aristotle’s theoretical objective is to exculpate legislative science from the charge that it never generates an excellent city without denying that city’s attainability. As to the political mistake or alienation that goes along with the marginalization of prayers, it is nothing but despotism. To substantiate this apparently extreme view, I  will exploit Aristotle’s comments on a city’s neighbors as a political resource and his profound political tenet that it is self-contradictory for one and the same city to be just toward its citizens and unjust toward its neighbors. Thus, on my construal of Aristotle’s prayers, praying-well (like hopingwell) is not some more or less questionable utopian wish but an indispensable core function of (a legislator’s) practical reason.

Radical Evil Radical evil is again a topic quite neglected by scholarship. First things first: Is there even a notion of truly “radical” evil (kakon) in Aristotle? And, if so, how is it connected with the main topic of the book—the scope of practical reason? I  use the expression “radical evil” in line with Aristotle’s own terms eschatos, teleutaios, akratos—“ultimate,”

10  Introduction “radical,” “most extreme,” “unmixed,” or “absolute”—which he uses in the Politics to describe extreme cases of deviant or bad constitutions, so extreme that there is no space left for an even more radical form of political degeneration. For in the Ethics and the Politics alike, Aristotle clearly dissociates ordinary vice from radical evil; he explicates the latter in terms of privation or destruction of practical reason and its effects on the practical domain in terms of (non-)curability and (non-)redemption. So, given that one and the same practical reason is operative throughout the practical domain and that practical reality is mind dependent, it is important to examine whether a total destruction of practical reason itself is possible and, if so, whether the same sort of destruction threatens the practical domain, too. I will show that the answer must be affirmative to the first question and negative to the second. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle employs two complementary notions of kakon—namely, badness as the opposite of virtue and as a privation. The first notion applies to the case of ethical vices where wrongness is a matter of the base person confusing the apparent good with the real good. The practical intellectual state which enables us to recognize something as a rational good of some sort while at the same time making us fail to discern the real good is dubbed by Aristotle as aphrosynê (i.e. lack of practical wisdom). In this case, what happens is that the quality of the virtuous intellectual state is corrupted. However, the very same term also denotes the intellectual condition proper to beastliness (thêriotês) and to extreme intemperance (hyperbal­ lousa akolasia). Here, it refers to a total atrophy of practical reason— that is, of our capacity to grasp practical ends. In Aristotle’s language, beastliness and intemperance of the extreme sort are beyond “the limits of vice” since they amount to a total inability of our capacity to establish ends and recognize practical starting-points in general (though we might still be capable of instrumental reasoning). Who are these people? Most of them look like psychopaths who are chained to the satisfaction of their desires and for whom rational judgments about the worthiness of their conduct and priorities appear nowhere on the horizon of their practical selves. Aristotle’s Politics is even more explicit in dissociating two layers of badness, for within the category of deviant constitutions (i.e. tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy) he draws a new threshold: above it, deviant constitutions, though deviant, remain constitutions; beneath it, the deviation is so extreme that a sort of tyranny, ultimate democracy, and ultimate oligarchy do not constitute genuine forms of constitution at all. This is exactly what I take to be the guiding paradigm of Aristotle’s “radical evil.” The distinction between these two layers emerges out of considerations regarding political justice and the common good. In particular, deviant constitutions are opposed to correct ones on account of their embodying

Introduction  11 a false conception of justice. They are grounded in apparent justice and more or less false laws. Radical political evil, on the contrary, is the state of affairs in which a political community is altogether deprived of laws and hence fails to satisfy the requirements for being a genuine constitution in the first place. Lawlessness is a privation of the very constitutional form of a political regime; therefore, lawless regimes differ from deviant constitutions in kind, not merely in degree. The same contrast emerges in the case of the common good: deviant constitutions are organized according to a false or myopic conception of the common good due to their being anchored to the personal advantage of the rulers. But notice— in contradistinction to the standard view—that in deviant constitutions the common good is not completely neglected, but its value is second to rulers’ personal advantage. By contrast, radically evil regimes display a total blindness to the common advantage and degenerate into brutish despotism. Where do these reflections leave us? The kakon, both as radical evil and as mere badness, concerns our access to the starting-points of the practical domain—that is, the exercise of practical reason itself. In both the Ethics and the Politics, the bifurcation of kakon takes place on a ­single scale with two thresholds: a ground-floor threshold beneath which we encounter radical evil and the total destruction of practical reason (i.e. beastliness, intemperance, and radically deteriorated political regimes) and a higher threshold above which we encounter true goodness and below which we encounter ordinary vice and its false understanding of starting-points. But in both the Ethics and the Politics, there is no such thing as a wish on someone’s part to become evil for the sake of evil, and radical evil does not originate in evil motives. The total atrophy of practical rationality is, for the most part, the price one has to pay for accumulated and escalated ethical or political transgressions. More importantly, the total destruction of practical reason is not a destruction of the practical domain. And for good reasons. Beastliness and intemperance are incurable, but, in the most interesting cases, they do not result in exemption from responsibility, and they are not contagious. By contrast, the radical evil inherent in extremely degenerated political regimes is contagious (for institutions and education are all too often contaminated by it), but, to our great relief, they are not incurable. Consequently, though associated with privation, evil populates the practical domain without compromising its existence.

Aristotle’s Sailors What this project intends to accomplish is to liberate our reading of Aristotle’s practical philosophy from the monopoly which the philosophy of action and a certain moral psychology have on it and thereby bring to light new aspects of Aristotle’s ethics and their contemporary equivalents

12  Introduction or resonances. True, the practical domain has a certain core that involves agents, motives, desires, ethical virtues, and deliberate choices issuing into actions. Nevertheless, it is distorted each time one disregards its scope— that is, its being also populated by spectators and their non-­motivational judgments, legislators establishing constitutions and laws, hopes as an active engagement with moral luck and its impact on our individual lives, prayers as legislators’ way to deal with the moral luck hovering around the birth of constitutions, and even privation and r­adical evil. As the finishing touch, I  will use Aristotle’s numerous nautical metaphors to visualize the scope of the practical domain.

1 Fully Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom

1.1  Non-Motivational Practical Judgments In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle famously claims that practical wisdom (phronêsis) is “the correct reason” about practical matters. This conclusion is established on the basis of the mutual dependence that holds between correct reason and the ethical virtues: full (kuria) ethical virtue involves correct reason and, at the same time, being a practically wise person necessarily implies the possession of the ethical virtues. Practical wisdom is the intellectual state that renders good deliberate choice (prohairesis) possible and reliably triggers and guides morally good actions. Thus “practical truth” and practical thought are conceived exclusively from within the perspective of deliberate choice as the starting-point of action.1 Moreover, in keeping with that perspective, practical wisdom is preoccupied with the agents’ own actions and what is good and advantageous for themselves.2 The rationale seems to be that if practical wisdom does not result in actions, it is not practical at all. Let us call this the action-centered conception of practical matters. It echoes the shared conception of all those who read Aristotle’s ethics almost exclusively through the lens of the philosophy of action and a certain moral psychology and flirt with the assumption that only the reasoning that issues in action is genuinely practical.3 But, for better or worse, Aristotle’s technical terms always bear a narrow and a broad meaning. Indeed, the Nicomachean Ethics draws a broader picture of practical wisdom as knowledge of practical matters in general rather than as an intellectual virtue guiding our deliberate choices. Its very definition is a clear sign of this shift: practical wisdom is “a practical state, concerned with what is good or bad for human beings” (VI 5 1140b5–6; see also VI 5 1140b20–21). One can hardly miss the change in point of view: practical wisdom’s object, albeit still of a practical character, is no longer confined to the agent’s own actions, good, and advantage but extends to what is good for human beings in general. From this perspective, practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables us to know what kind of actions are, for the most part, appropriate for human

14  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom beings or what kind of actions are good or bad for a specific group (specified according to natural capacities, age, gender, political environment, etc.), whether in particular circumstances or in the abstract. Bouleusis is marked by the same ambiguity. At first, the term denotes the “deliberation” involved in deliberate choice. Good deliberation reaches the good, and the good is nothing other than what deliberate choice aims at: namely, the good action itself (VI 9 1142b20–22). Being led by practical wisdom, good deliberation (euboulia) pays attention to our own actions undertaken for the sake of what we correctly understand as our good or advantage, given the alternatives open to us at present (VI 5 1140a25–27, 31–33). The initial sketch of deliberation in Book III is even more resolute at excluding from its sphere everything lying outside the action-centered perspective: no one deliberates “about all human affairs either—for example, no Spartan deliberates about the best form of government for the Scythians, since none of these things come about through our own agency. We do deliberate, though, about things that are up to us and doable in action” (III 3 1112a28–31). However, in Book VI, the broad sense of deliberation echoes the broad sense of practical wisdom: the good deliberator is someone capable “of aiming at and hitting  .  .  . the best for human beings of things doable in action” (VI 7 1141b12–14). Here, no reference is made to our own actions but only to what admits of change thanks to human actions in general. Hence the action-centered perspective cannot be the end of the story. Otherwise, the practical affairs of Scythians or India or what happened in the past—whether in the agent’s own past or not—would remain orphan, so to say. And there is no doubt that we can think about and appraise them in moral terms and in terms of praise or blame. It would be odd to deny the possibility of such a mode of thinking, as if practical reason were incapable of and indifferent to considering practical matters when they do not overlap with the agent’s own deliberate choices and present alternatives of action. Besides, these matters are things that could be otherwise due to human intervention and, more specifically, due to morally relevant actions; they are not unchangeable and eternal things to be investigated by the scientific part of the soul. Before such a narrow and a broad notion of practical reason, one might want to argue that when we look at practical matters from outside the ambit of our deliberate choice, we just exercise a sort of non-practical or theoretical thinking about them. This is indeed what we are doing when, for instance, we are involved in writing or reading a treatise of practical philosophy like the Nicomachean Ethics. On this view, then, there is a dichotomy between two kinds of reasoning about practical matters: the action centered and the theoretical. My aim in this chapter is to disrupt this construal and exhibit a threefold distinction by identifying a kind of practical reasoning that is

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  15 neither action centered and exercised from within the ambit of deliberate choice nor theoretical.4 To name it, I will use Aristotle’s term krinein— which in general means “discern” and, when applied on practical matters, may be rendered as “judge.”5 For reasons that will progressively become clear, I will call the “judge” (kritês) a spectator (theôrôs) and his/her judgments non-motivational practical judgments (henceforth: nmp judgments). The particularity of nmp judgments is corroborated in Nicomachean Ethics VI 10, where we encounter an intellectual virtue— namely, sunesis (comprehension)—that is not prescriptive (epitaktikê) and action guiding, as practical wisdom is, but merely capable of correct judgment, kritikê. Thus, it does not take part in actual deliberate choices but, nevertheless, does deal with those things one might puzzle and deliberate over. Significantly, the judgment-oriented side of practical matters is the subject of an entire Aristotelian treatise: the Rhetoric. In its opening chapter, we read that rhetoric is concerned “with the sorts of things we deliberate about” and that, likewise, the judgment of listeners to speeches is concerned with the things “people deliberate about” (Rh. I 1 1357a1–2, 24–25). Indeed, Rhetoric’s judge (kritês) is quintessentially someone who exercises the intellectual activity of judgment about practical matters that largely fall outside the sphere of his/her own actions. What is important for the moment is that the intellectual capacity to form such a nmp judgment is part of what Aristotle calls the calculative (logistikon) part of the soul—that is, the part also called “deliberative” (bouleutikon), again in the broad sense of the term, which denotes the rational capacity whose objects admit of being otherwise thanks to human activity.6 Now, the question I  want to address is whether Aristotle actually does endorse my threefold distinction and whether a spectator’s nmp ­judgments—in the sense of judgments about practical affairs that do not concern the spectator’s own present motives for and plans of action— matter to him and to us. And if they do, how should we understand them? I start by explaining what exactly, according to the analysis of comprehension (sunesis) in the Nicomachean Ethics, a spectator’s intellectual capacity consists of and how it differs from the action-guiding function of practical wisdom (1.2). Then I draw on the Rhetoric to shed light on Aristotle’s guiding paradigm of such a spectator (1.3). I  return to the Nicomachean Ethics to argue that the enkratês is indeed a fully virtuous judge or spectator of practical matters (1.4). And I close by showing that Aristotle’s responses contribute to a philosophically appealing theory of judgment which clearly distinguishes two kinds of practical judgments and allows us to reshape the externalism-internalism debate (1.5). If I am right, then the scope of genuinely practical reason is, indeed, much broader than what it is often taken to be.

16  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom

1.2 Comprehension No doubt, the first place to search for an answer to the aforementioned set of questions is the Nicomachean Ethics VI 10, which is devoted to comprehension (sunesis),7 since the latter appears to be the virtue of judgment-oriented practical reason. There is no other extensive reference to it in the Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, or Politics.8 Let us, then, trace its main features in the passage that follows: (1) Comprehension, too, that is, good-comprehension . . . is not the same as scientific knowledge . . . , nor is it any one of the sciences dealing with a particular area, as medicine is concerned with healthy things . . . For comprehension is not concerned with what always is and is unchanging, . . . but with those things one might puzzle and deliberate about. (2) That is why it is concerned with the same things as practical wisdom, (3) although comprehension is not the same as practical wisdom. For practical wisdom is a prescriptive virtue, since what should be done or not is its end, whereas comprehension is discerning [kritikê] only. (For comprehension and good-­comprehension are the same . . .) (4) . . . just as learning something is called “comprehension” when one is using scientific knowledge, it is also so called when one is using belief to discern, when someone else speaks, matters with which practical wisdom is concerned—that is, discern correctly. (VI 10 1142b34–43a15) In (1), in reaction to Plato (see, for instance, Cratylus, 411a, 412a) and his neglect of the knowledge of perishable things, Aristotle dissents from identifying comprehension with scientific knowledge. Comprehension is not to be located in the scientific part of the soul, since it is not about eternal and unchangeable things but rather the same things deliberation is about. The intellectual state of comprehension belongs to the calculative part of the soul—i.e. the deliberative part. It should not be included, however, among the crafts since it is concerned with the same things as practical wisdom. Thus, it is strictly practical, not scientific or craftlike. This means that comprehension views practical matters from the perspective of “living well as a whole” (VI 5 1140a27–28) or of “the best for a human being of things doable in action” (VI 7 1141b13–14). But, according to (3), though practical, comprehension also differs from practical wisdom. And this divergence, as we saw, is due to the fact that practical wisdom is prescriptive while comprehension is merely judgment oriented.9 But what does “merely judgment oriented” really mean? Well, it does not involve charging comprehension with a sort of deficiency. For there is no doubt that comprehension is an intellectual virtue of some sort

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  17 (I 13 1108a7–8), since in both (1) and (3) Aristotle equates comprehension with good comprehension.10 Thus, comprehension does not fail to fulfill a function that it supposedly should, by its nature, fulfill. The contrast at issue is rather a matter of cartography. Insofar as it is prescriptive, in the sense of initiating and guiding actions, practical wisdom is active within the ambit of deliberate choice as the starting-point of actions. By contrast, insofar as comprehension is not prescriptive, it functions outside the ambit of deliberate choice, and, by entailment, its practical judgments are non-motivational.11 We already know how to allay the worry that, if practical wisdom is practical in that it is connected with deliberate choice and the realization of actions, comprehension should be relegated to a “non-practical thinking about the good.”12 Comprehension is practical, Aristotle says in (1) and (2), for it is clustered together with practical wisdom and craftknowledge in the calculative part of the rational soul. Comprehension and practical wisdom differ only in their point of view: to have destroyed Troy is not an object appearing within the ambit of our deliberate choice, but obviously we can examine it from the judgment-oriented perspective as an option for those who once had decided to take Troy, and we can judge its moral correctness.13 And here is the dilemma we are facing—a dilemma that, formulated in quite different terms, also pervades the contemporary motivational internalism vs externalism debate. First, which is the common view, one might want to claim that the exercise of one and the same intellectual state admits of a certain ancillary differentiation according to whether it is active inside (by being prescriptive) or outside (by being merely judgmental) the ambit of deliberate choice. From this viewpoint, comprehension represents either (a) a “preliminary step within the process of deliberation” or (b) only “a kind or part of phronêsis” or (c) practical wisdom itself exercised in specific occurrences, or (d) a modification of practical wisdom.14 Second, one might want to argue—as I do—that practical wisdom is not merely capable of correct judgment but also prescriptive; only comprehension is merely capable of correct judgment. And comprehension, as an intellectual virtue on its own, can function independently of practical wisdom because the cognitive and ethical states required for doing correct actions are not identical with those required for correctly judging matters appearing outside the ambit of deliberate choice.15 Hence, some people will be sunetoi without being practically wise: they will be able to correctly discern practical matters from outside the ambit of their deliberate choice, whereas they sometimes fail to make fully correct deliberate choices. Unfortunately, VI 10 does not provide us with the support needed to corroborate one or the other interpretation. Before we quit VI 10, it is important to dispel two misleading ideas regarding comprehension, however one wishes to settle the aforementioned open question. The first idea concerns the object of comprehension.

18  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom Coraes, Stewart, Gauthier and Jolif, Gadamer, and contemporary commentators highlight Aristotle’s thesis, in (4), that sunesis is used “when someone else speaks.”16 Then one draws the conclusion that comprehension only responds to what others have to say and is closely related to giving and receiving advice. It is true that the other-directedness of comprehension is emphasized in Plato’s writings (for instance, in Alcibiades, 132c), which constitute the backdrop of Aristotle’s analysis. In Aristotle’s own framework, this other-directedness is evidenced by the kinship among comprehension, consideration (gnômê), and sympathetic consideration (suggnômê), since the latter two apply in our understanding of others and their situation (VI 11 1143a19–24). That comprehension is paradigmatically applied to our serving as spectators who appraise others’ actions, I concede. And this is so in order for Aristotle to dissociate as clearly as possible spectators’ nmp judgments from their own present interests, deliberate choices, and actions. Nevertheless, it would be quite arbitrary to reason as follows: practical wisdom judges only the agent’s own actions whereas comprehension judges the actions of others. Such a conclusion is unfaithful to the spirit of Aristotle’s ethics and also runs counter to everyday experience. As for Aristotle, it ignores the sensitivity he evinces regarding the demarcation between self-oriented and other-oriented virtues. For each time such a demarcation is relevant (as it really is, for instance, where justice and friendship are concerned), Aristotle hastens to bring it forward. More generally, it fails to capture the political or other-directed aspect of practical wisdom itself, which is active whenever we undertake actions for the sake of others or for the sake of the community (consider the discussion of political practical wisdom in VI 8). More importantly, one should notice that there is no impediment to accepting that comprehension can also consider the agent’s own past actions.17 In their case comprehension is, for the most part, retrospective: should I have done what I did? But obviously, we can also exercise comprehension in evaluating what to do if ordered to capture the citadel, even though we don’t know yet whether we or someone else will be ordered to do so. And agents can certainly store in their memory the results of the present bit of practical thinking exercised by comprehension. The important thing is that no such stored practical understanding per se substitutes for the deliberate choice to be made in the future. For it is always the deliberate choice leading to action that determines whether comprehension’s judgment will be endorsed as such, revised, or rejected in the final prescription. If there are cases of binding myself in the present to no future reevaluating (e.g. when I  make a binding promise), these bindings are objects of deliberate choice, and hence to perform them in a virtuous way requires practical wisdom, not comprehension. To summarize, regardless of whether one wants to relegate comprehension to a simple part of practical wisdom or promote it to a separate

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  19 virtue, one should accept that it is exercised with regard to actions done by others that do not engage with my present deliberate choice (be I an eyewitness or rely on others’ sayings) as well as with regard to past or remote future actions of mine. The second misleading idea is found in the following line of thought: if comprehension is not prescriptive, it is theoretical and so not influenced by human desires and feelings. But this is totally mistaken. Aristotle’s view throughout the Nicomachean Ethics is that the peculiarity of practical matters resides, among other things, in the fact that our ethical states partially determine our intellectual capacity to understand practical truth, no matter whether we occupy the position of the deliberator in a course of action or the position of someone who simply listens to a lecture on political science.18 Yet things are more complicated. On the one hand, it is the very prescriptive character of practical wisdom that makes it require the ethical virtues. On the other hand, for the reasons just mentioned, comprehension as an intellectual virtue appears to be impossible without the virtues of character.19 This is an obstacle, obviously, to the interpretation I wish to defend: if it were correct to presume that the prescriptive and the judgment-oriented virtuous functions of practical reason presuppose exactly the same kind of fully virtuous ethical states, nobody could be a capable comprehender (sunetos) without also being practically wise. To make some progress with this objection, I  will consider whether anyone besides the practically wise person could display the virtue of comprehension. To begin with, it is undeniable that certain people are non-starters: first, the base person (phaulos), who confuses the apparent good for the real good, cannot be a capable comprehender. For base people are unable to discern correct reasons, even though they understand reasons in general. That means that bad ethical states constitute insurmountable impediments to acquiring and activating good reasoning in matters of moral relevance. Thus, it would be vain and misguided to search in Aristotle for desire-free or disinterested spectators of practical affairs who would allegedly discern practical truth no matter what their ethical character might be. It would be vain to take the amoralist for a capable comprehender either. Second, beast-like people (thêriôdês), whose practical thinking is entirely destroyed, cannot be good comprehenders either, since they are not able to understand practical reasons at all and totally fail to recognize the moral relevance of actions.20 Hence, the only controversial issue is whether the cognitive state of comprehension belongs to the practically wise person alone or also to other types of agents who possess the “starting-point” (archê) of practical matters—that is, among other things, a correct grasp of happiness (VII 8 1151a16–26). For their ethical states are not base, although they are not fully virtuous either. As is well-known, two such types are presented by Aristotle: the enkratês and the akratês—the one who displays self-control and the one

20  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom who lacks it. My hypothesis is that, though not practically wise, enkratic people are indeed excellent comprehenders: they share exactly the same intellectual capacity for nmp judgments with the practically wise person, although they fail to meet the high standards of the latter once deliberate choice and the realization of actions come to the fore. If I am right, then fully virtuous spectators are not necessarily fully virtuous agents. Inversely, those who are motivated to fully and reliably accomplish good moral actions are not the only fully virtuous judges of practical matters. In other words, once we recognize the true scope of genuinely practical reason, the practically wise person ceases to constitute the only apex of the practical domain. There is a second apex—namely, the enkratic ­people and their nmp judgments.

1.3  Judgment in the Rhetoric To develop an argument in support of my hypothesis, it is necessary to exploit the Rhetoric’s revelatory, albeit scattered, comments on practical judgment (krisis), judging (krinein), and the judge (kritês). To systematize them, I will slightly modify the focus: while the Rhetoric focuses on the orators who use their speech to “establish” or “construct”21 a state in the listeners so as to make them hold certain beliefs, I mean to focus on the reliable listeners and their virtuous judgment—that is, on the judge who is appropriately disposed to discern practical truth. I will proceed as follows: I will explain, first, the Rhetoric’s notion of a spectator and judge; second, how the noble (kalon) appears to such spectators; and third, how feelings influence their nmp judgments. Finally, I  will clarify the idiosyncrasy of Aristotle’s spectators by juxtaposing them with those we find in Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Rhetoric’s Notion of a Spectator Aristotle claims that “rhetoric is for the sake of judgment” (Rh. II 1 1377b20–21). The same judge appears as the criterion by which Aristotle distinguishes the three kinds of rhetorical speech. In that context, the judges involved in deliberative and judicial speech are grouped together and opposed to the spectator (theôrôs) of the epideictic speech, as if listeners were to be categorized either as a judge or as a spectator (Rh. I  3 1358b2–3). However, as Rh. II 18 further explicates, the contrast is not between the two who judge and the one who doesn’t but rather between two kinds of judges. In all cases, the listener functions as a genuine judge, and epideictic speech is not an exception.22 The peculiarity of the judges involved in epideictic speech resides only in the fact that they do not question—or do so only on exceptional occasions—whether certain actions have actually taken place in the past or not, and they do not tackle controversial and disputed matters; they judge “actions that

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  21 are agreed upon” and things that “should be taken on trust” (Rh. I  9 1368a28, III 17 1417b31–32). Notwithstanding this peculiarity, nothing puts in question their status as genuine judges of practical matters. In this case, nmp judgments are clearly disconnected from a judge’s own actions. Besides, the listeners to deliberative and judicial speeches are also treated by Aristotle as spectators, so that he is constantly using visual vocabulary to describe their function.23 From now on, then, I  take the Rhetoric’s notion of a spectator as my guiding paradigm. Aristotle does not offer an extensive analysis of the judge. A solid point to begin from, however, is that he nowhere treats the judge/spectator as someone who initiates an action: a spectator’s judgments are “mental ‘verdicts,’ ” not actions or deliberate choices.24 It is true that, as a first approximation, deliberative speech seems to constitute an unclear or borderline case to the extent that decisions in the assembly are the outcome of political discussions initiating or triggering future actions of the city and hence look like political deliberations. Yet, from the Rhetoric’s point of view, a listener’s judgment is not the very act of voting in the assembly: the former shows whether someone has been convinced by means of rhetorical speech about a case and led to correct judgment about what is advantageous or not for the city; the further issue of whether the judges/ spectators will finally vote on the basis of their best judgment or in line with their myopic private or class interests (and, a fortiori, whether they will actually undertake, qua citizens, a series of relevant actions) is outside the Rhetoric’s scope. The Politics, not the Rhetoric, confronts questions of that sort, inquiring into the nature of collective decisions, class interests, commitments to the common good, etc. It is important, therefore, not to reduce the judge/spectator to an advisee, at least, not if we consider giving and taking advice to be a process enveloping or directly leading to an advisee’s actions. Yes, deliberative speech aims at giving advice in the assembly about the things “that may possibly come to be or may not” and, more precisely, about those things that “we deliberate about, namely, those things that can naturally be brought back to ourselves, and the starting-point of whose coming to be is up to us” (Rh. I  4 1359a31–39). And, hence, the advice received might actually occupy the place of our own deliberation. Nevertheless, the Rhetoric does not intend to establish any direct relationship between the advice received and the advisee’s future course of action, as if the advice could replace the advisees’ deliberate choice and immediately trigger their actions. Although it actually is sumbouleutikos, deliberative speech is envisaged from within the perspective of nmp judgments, not as the vehicle of political actions. Besides, as we shall see in the following, Rhetoric II is exclusively interested in how feelings mold nmp judgments, not in how they motivate actions. What matters is only whether the listener has been correctly persuaded that a certain practical option regarding a city’s future

22  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom conduct is choiceworthy or not. Thus, the distinction between nmp judgments and motivational/prescriptive ones is left untouched. Even when the listener does not doubt the orators’ goodwill (eunoia) and their willingness “to give the best advice” they know (Rh. II 1 1378a13), deliberative speech does not instill motives for action but only generates judgments.25 Aristotle clearly opposes the advice/logos itself given by the advisor and the action/praxis to be done by the advisee (Rh. I 7 1364a18–23). An advisor’s advice is the efficient cause of an advisee’s action only if we assume that the advisor deliberates in the advisee’s place—for instance, in a case where the advisor treats advice as “plotting” (epibouleuein is the verb used in Rh. I 7 1364a18–23) or in the case that the advisee is a child or a soldier (this is exactly what is assumed in Physics II 3 194b29ff.). Let us keep in mind, then, that there is a gap between having or comprehending the good advice to give and giving it as well as between receiving or comprehending the good advice given and acting upon it. The Rhetoric adopts a merely judgment-oriented point of view and does not purport to bridge this gap. The only question is how wide the gap is. Epideictic speech obviates this difficulty since it excludes any confusion of the judge/spectator with the doer of actions. In epideictic speech—the kind of rhetorical speechmaking Aristotle was the first to identify as such, that is, as a kind restricted to praise and blame—the spectator is invited to make a judgment about the nobility (or the shamefulness) of actions already realized by someone else (encomium) or, better, about the nobility of a certain person (praise). By definition, epideictic speech embodies a practice of praise and blame: “These, then, are the things on which speeches of praise and blame are pretty much all based, as well as the ones to look to when praising or blaming, and the things from which encomia and reproaches are produced” (Rh. I 9 1368a33–36). Epideictic speech makes visible the praiseworthiness of someone who lived in the more or less remote past and whose life is in no way involved in our actual plans of action. Its object is a historical figure invested with a quasi-heroic flavor to the extent that, by means of amplification, he or she is presented, for instance, as the very first one who has done something noble or as someone for whose achievements the city has invented new awards of honor (Rh. I 9 1368a10–29). Qua spectator, the judge of epideictic speech keeps the maximal distance away from himself/herself as a doer of actions. What emerges from Aristotle’s analysis of epideictic speech as an institutionalized practice of praise and blame is that spectators are closely connected with the practices of praise and blame in general.26 And this is highly important because it lets us transpose the Rhetoric’s spectators to the center of the Nicomachean Ethics, where that same practice is omnipresent throughout Aristotle’s treatment of virtue as a mean.27 What matters from my perspective is the question of which person can reliably or

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  23 virtuously praise and blame others for their characters and their actions. The following passage raises that very question: Since virtue is concerned with feelings and actions, then, and it is the voluntary ones that are praised and blamed, while the involuntary ones elicit sympathetic consideration, and are sometimes even pitied, it is perhaps necessary for those who are investigating issues relating to virtue to make some determinations about what is voluntary and what involuntary. This is also useful to legislators regarding honors and punishments. (III 1 1109b30–35) It is important to notice that Aristotle draws a distinction among spectators who correctly understand what is praiseworthy or blameworthy, a theoretical investigation into voluntariness, and the legislator’s giving honors or punishing. The spectator’s practice is neither theoretical nor action centered. Praise and blame are mere logoi or judgments (Rh. I 9 1367b37–68a9). And, as already emphasized, base persons cannot be virtuous spectators, since they confuse the apparent good for the true good, the unjust for the just, etc. The enigma merely is whether there is any other fully virtuous spectator except for the practically wise person.28 The Spectator’s View of the Noble Epideictic speech offers a golden opportunity to see the essential difference between the action-oriented perspective of deliberate choice and the perspective of merely judgment-oriented practical reason. It suffices to recall that the spectator is invited to judge whether a certain person’s actions are noble or shameful (kalon or aischron), praiseworthy or blameworthy.29 Rh. I 9 yields important clues regarding Aristotle’s notion of the noble, and scholars are keen to take them into account. These scholars, however, constantly disregard the frame of Aristotle’s claims: Rh. I 9 is about epideictic speech, the relevant sort of nmp judgments, and spectators who are expected to recognize nobility only qua listeners and judges, not as doers of actions. No doubt, from the perspective of the philosophy of action, the noble and the desire for the noble are elements in good deliberate choice itself. In the Nicomachean Ethics, the noble emerges within the context of the actions we accomplish: nobody is fully virtuous unless he/she enjoys doing noble actions.30 Still more importantly, the noble is the end of action and the target of virtue: the virtuous person acts “for the sake of what is noble [tou kalou heneka], since this is the end characteristic of virtue” (III 7 1115b12–13). The formula “for the sake of the noble” is one of the most persistent mottos of Aristotle’s ethics. I accept that only the practically wise people have full access to the noble as the target of

24  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom their deliberate choice and the main vehicle of their motivation, and I will return to this when discussing self-control. But if the noble were exclusively accessible from within the context of deliberate choice, then the good and reliable judges of epideictic speech would have to be practically wise people, and the access they enjoy— qua spectators and judges—to the noble would be nothing other than a ­by-product of the access to it they enjoy as virtuous agents. Yet no such idea is expressed in Rhetoric I 9, the chapter devoted to epideictic speech. It cannot be a coincidence that the expression “for the sake of the noble” is never used there either! Judges/spectators do not envisage nobility as the end of some actual action they undertake; their job is to accurately judge about the noble or shameful. Nor is it the case that the judges are invited to put themselves, by means of a psychological mechanism of empathy, in the shoes of the person who is the object of praise or blame and navigate, in their imagination, the channel leading to that person’s deliberate choice. What matters in Rh. I 9 are only the conditions under which nobility is accessible once we adopt the spectator’s perspective. Let me put these conditions under two headings: conditions of experience and conditions of visibility. To see the noble, one must have a certain acquaintance with the interconnection among goodness, choiceworthiness, and pleasure (Rh. I 9 1366a33–34). And one cannot have such an acquaintance unless one already has some experience of the noble from within the sphere of one’s own deliberate choice. That is why a base person or an intemperate one is never a good judge of nobility and, likewise, never displays comprehension. Spectators’ capacity to see the noble is partially dependent on their experience as agents. In other words, it is impossible for anyone to ever gain access to the noble in the full sense of the term just by listening to a speech, however dexterous the orator is in setting the issue before their eyes. In reality, the prerequisite is the same we encountered earlier in the case of comprehension: both the capable comprehender and the good listener or judge should display good enough ethical virtues in order to be able to correctly recognize true goodness. And the riddle to solve is, again, whether there is anyone besides the practically wise person who can do so. The conditions of visibility are two—namely, the greatness of actions and the purity of nobility. As to greatness, things are pretty obvious: “praise is speech [logos] that makes the greatness of virtue apparent” (Rh. I 9 1367b28). This is also why amplification is best suited to epideictic speech. The same pattern of greatness is used throughout the corpus each time Aristotle invites us to take the position of the spectator who judges something visible, irrespective of whether the object is a natural thing (e.g. a nose), a human action (e.g. an action of greatness of soul), or an artifact (e.g. a statue). By contrast, the greatness of actions is not a necessary condition for someone to recognize the noble from within

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  25 the ambit of deliberate choice; many actions are genuinely noble and are experienced as such even though they do not display greatness. As to the second, much disputed, point, things prove to be no less clear. Since both the wish and the deliberate choice of the agent are not fully transparent from the perspective of the spectator, the visibility of the noble requires, in addition to greatness, the spectacle to be pure and transparent—i.e. unambiguous. And this requirement is met par excellence when the noble is presented in such a way that there is no risk of confusing it with what is apparently good for the agent without being unconditionally good—that is, with the merely advantageous. As early as in Rhetoric I 3, the example of Achilles’ noble death suggests the need for such a distinction. Rh. I 9 echoes this idea in a passage along the same lines: something noble is also “whatever can belong to a person when he is dead more than when he is alive (for what belongs to a person when he is alive has more the character of being for his own sake)” (Rh. I 9 1367a1–3). The stressed other-directed character of the action as a necessary feature in order for spectators to correctly judge the praiseworthiness of the action should not lead us to the conclusion that, for agents, nobility necessarily originates in other-directed concerns at the cost of our own advantage—though extremely unfortunate circumstances may invite concerns of that sort, too. What is at stake in Rh. I 9 is the purity of a spectacle offered before the eyes of spectators; other-directedness merely serves as a trustworthy sign enabling them to reliably judge the moral worthiness of actions and persons. I propose, therefore, a distinction between two perspectives from which the noble is accessible: the perspective from within the ambit of deliberate choice and the perspective of spectators’ nmp judgments.31 The open question is, again, as it was in the case of comprehension, whether full accessibility to the noble is exclusively possible for the practically wise person who can reliably see the noble from both perspectives or whether certain people, as spectators, can see the noble as accurately and reliably as the practically wise person does while, as agents, they sometimes fail to do so. And, as in the case of comprehension, my answer will be that the enkratês is that person. The Spectator’s Feelings and nmp Judgments To be better prepared to meet the enkratês, we must first exploit a further feature of judgment, one that we can extract from the definition of feelings (pathê) given in Rh. II 1 1378a19–21: “The feelings are those things due to which people, by undergoing a change, differ in their judgments, and that entail pain and pleasure.” Hence, in the context of the rhetoric, judgments are things people differ in, insofar as they undergo a change due to feelings (and feelings entail pain and pleasure). This idea permeates the Rhetoric: it is introduced in Rh. I 1, which warns us

26  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom of the eventual distortions of juror’s judgment; it is solidly established in Rh. I 2, where it is explained that persuasion depends on listeners’ feelings because their judgments differ according to them; it constitutes the main thread of Rhetoric’s Book II and is continually recalled in Book III. The impact feelings may have on a listener’s judgments is of different kinds and degrees and varies from a complete change of the relevant judgment to holding partial or biased views about the matter under discussion. More importantly, feelings should not be viewed as a distorting lens called forth only on condition that the orator means to manipulate the audience. This happens, indeed, each time the orator intentionally or maliciously speaks “outside the things at issue” and therefore employs irrelevant appeals to the feelings of the audience. However, listening to practical truth and coming to correct nmp judgments necessarily requires the listener to be disposed in a certain way.32 What matters is that these feelings or emotions are not conceived of in the Rhetoric as motives for action but merely as sources of influence on nmp judgments.33 And this plainly confirms the previous distinction between a spectator’s nmp judgments and prescriptive judgments made from within the ambit of deliberate choice. There is no doubt, indeed, that the feelings discussed by Aristotle in Rhetoric II are not envisaged as motives for action. The most indisputable proof of this is the fact that a number of them have nothing to do with future actions at all. For instance, hate (misos) is directed against kinds of people (for example, against the sycophant as a type of personality), does not initiate any action toward others, and is located in the sphere of mere wishful thinking, since hate is conveyed in wishes like “I  wish that there were no sycophants on earth” (Rh. II 4 1382a1–15). Pity (oiktos), indignation (nemesan), and envy (phthonos) also produce no action-relevant effects.34 They constitute attitudes we adopt to a state of affairs beyond the reach of our interference, attitudes to what has already happened to others and what, in addition, somehow exceeds the sphere of intentional action in that it involves, by definition, the intervention of luck (which causes things to happen that are in accord or disaccord with someone’s virtue). For instance, pity refers to “the evils that luck is the cause of”; indignation has an eye on the external goods, and envy on “things [that] are the gifts of luck” (Rh. II 8 1386a9, II 10 1388a2). Then there is the critical question of why appetite (epithumia), in the narrow sense of slavish and brutish desires which have to do primarily with eating, drinking, and sex—that is, with nourishment and reproduction— is not discussed at all once the focus is upon the feelings influencing the ­ listener’s judgments. But it is discussed when Aristotle addresses the causes of human action from the perspective of agents’ deliberate choice (Rh. I 10) or from the perspective of kinds of persons (young, old, mature) and their for-the-most-part way to act (Rh. II 12–14).35

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  27 In its opening lines (I 1 1354a16–54b12), the Rhetoric paves the way for the specification of the kind of feelings that are within its focus by giving a long example of how feelings influence judgments in the case of the legislator, the juror, and the citizen participating in the assembly. The analysis shows that the influence at stake has four axes: care for practical truth vs private interest (which is what happens in the case of the juror), things related to a person’s own affairs vs things related to others’ affairs (what distinguishes the juror from the citizen in the assembly), things remote in time vs actual affairs, and, finally, judgments made by one person and in private vs judgments made by many and in public (two traits that distinguish the legislator from the other two kinds of judges).36 Since rhetorical speech is, by definition, public, the feelings influencing the listeners’ judgment (or the feelings the orator tries to produce in them) have only the first three axes: they should establish the listeners in such a condition that they should be able to find an equilibrium between what is private and what is other-directed interest, what is present and what is remote in time, the first-person and the other-person’s perspective. Appetite has nothing to do with such an equilibrium since, by definition, as we are about to see, it is completely blind to others’ interests, to anything remote in time, and to other people’s perspectives. Hence, it does not qualify as relevant to rhetoric’s perspective. Let us look more closely at two arguments that underpin the exclusion of appetite from the feelings influencing listeners’ judgment. First, appetite has no intersubjective orientation but is entangled with those of our own needs that arise within the lowest appetitive part of the soul and are associated with indulgence. Whoever becomes the object of someone’s appetite is so not thanks to an evaluation of, say, his/her beauty or sexual attractiveness but merely insofar as he/she happens to satisfy a desire for sexual intercourse. Appetite involves no evaluative discernment regarding its objects. This is not the case of the Rhetoric’s feelings, for most of them include a belief about the worthiness (or not) of their object. Friendliness, fear, shame, pity, indignation, envy, and jealousy (as well as their opposites) are evident examples of feelings that, by definition, share this trait. In addition, in all these cases, a “care” about others is displayed, accompanied by the opinion we have about them—or, more accurately, the one we form about them by listening to the speech. And, at least in a good number of cases, a certain distance from our own affairs is required (pity, indignation, and envy being the most telling examples). But no distance from our needs is possible with epithumia. Second, appetite is also imprisoned within the confines of the present.37 The time-horizon proper to all the feelings discussed in the Rhetoric is totally different, for judgment (correct or not) about practical matters requires transtemporal comparisons between actions. Thus, all the feelings discussed in Rh. II incorporate a reference to the past and to the future; moreover, the capacity to look at a large time-span is constitutive

28  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom of some of them: for instance, anger, by definition, has a view to the future, since it entails a sort of pleasure originating in “the hope of being revenged”; confidence is also future directed, for it includes “hope of things providing safety,” but it proves to also be past directed to the extent that “experience” of past events is constitutive of being confident; shame is equally associated with the past, the present, and the future; and pity includes, by definition, an “expectation” of future evils to happen to myself and, again, implicates a certain “experience” of past events.38 Is Aristotle right in claiming that the Rhetoric has no reason to include our appetite for eating, drinking, and sex as a feeling influencing judgment-oriented practical reason? Before one answers, one should carefully clarify what Aristotle’s claim actually amounts to: the idea is not that appetites are, on the whole, irrelevant to our nmp judgments. On the contrary, intemperate and base persons alike are unable to make correct nmp judgments; because of their appetites, they confuse the apparent good for the true good. Aristotle frames his view very carefully: First, rhetorical speech cannot make someone an intemperate or base person or a person tempted by base appetites. Second, on condition that the listeners are not already led by their appetites (as, for instance, the base person and even the akratês are), rhetorical speech cannot employ appetites as a vehicle for influencing listeners’ judgments. Third, even as regards the depraved listeners, speech can manipulate their nmp judgments by arousing their appetites much less intensively and effectively than by provoking the feelings analyzed in Rhetoric II. Fourth, in any case, one can hardly arouse listeners’ appetites without also slipping into speaking “outside the things at issue.” I  will return to this qualified picture in the next section. The Idiosyncrasy of Aristotle’s Spectators It is time to take stock of our findings so far: [A] There is a practical intellectual activity—namely, a very specific sort of judging—which takes place outside the ambit of deliberate choice but deals with the very same matters as action-guiding deliberation. This intellectual activity is exercised in everyday social life, both in institutionalized and not-institutionalized practices of praise and blame and of moral evaluation in general. [B] The virtue of a spectator’s intellectual activity is comprehension; it is merely judgment oriented, not prescriptive or motivational, and enables the spectator to correctly appraise practical matters (in terms of justice, advantage, and nobility), both in public and in private. [C] Nobility— and practical truth, in general—is visible both from the perspective of deliberate choice and from spectators’ perspective, as exemplified in the case of epideictic speech. Nothing prevents the conditions of visibility applying in these two cases from not being identical. [D] Comprehension is not possible unless the spectators/judges have already acquired, thanks

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  29 to their actions and deliberate choices, sufficiently virtuous ethical states as well as a certain understanding of practical truth and nobility. Hence, base people as well as intemperate ones cannot be good judges. [E] Comprehension is not possible unless the feelings that influence our nmp judgments are like those belonging to virtuous spectators. [F] Actions and nmp judgments are not influenced by feelings in the same way, the influence of appetite being the most telling case. Some further clarifications of these points. As to [A], our stance as spectators of moral matters from outside the ambit of deliberate choice is qualitatively different from our stance as spectators who follow a myth or plot constructed according to the rules of Aristotle’s Poetics. This qualification might seem redundant, but it has critical consequences and helps us circumscribe the ambit within which spectators’ nmp judgments are exercised. Notwithstanding the many continuities between the subject matter of the Ethics, the Rhetoric, and the Poetics, the dissimilarities are patent. The fully virtuous audience of a tragedy does not need to display the comprehension required by the spectators who are expected to judge actions and persons in real life. Indeed, the setting of the spectacle as well as the conditions of spectator’s activity are quite different. For instance, instead of dealing with everyday life, the “poet’s work is not to tell what has happened but the sort of things that could have happened” (Po. IX 1451a36–38). Likewise, tragedy should portray persons who are “better than present humanity” (Po. II 1448a18) or “better than ourselves” (Po. XV 1454b8–9). Feelings are important, but tragedy requires the feelings of pity and fear to function in tandem and as a reaction to a specific sort of transformation or shift (metabolê) in human lives (Po. XIII 1452b30ff.). And, more importantly, tragic katharsis is inseparable from a spectator’s experience of tragedy but has no place in the practice of rhetoric, while persuasion is inseparable from the interaction between the orator and the spectators/audience but not a desideratum—and much less a constitutive element—of the interaction between the playwright and the drama’s spectators.39 To better clarify [A] and [B], a comparison with Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” is in order. Smith highlights the fact that his impartial spectator is an imagined “man within.” But after the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he becomes more and more suspicious of the accuracy and impartiality of the existent institutionalized practices of praise and blame and more and more eager to only trust an imagined “impartial spectator” who is able to evaluate genuine praiseworthiness. According to his view, everyday practices of praise and blame just represent an “inferior tribunal” because bystanders fall prey to impartiality. Instead, for him, we have to “set up in our minds a judge” (synonymous expressions of which are: “the supposed impartial and well-informed spectator,” “the man within the breast,” “this inmate of the breast,” “the

30  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom great judge and arbiter”) who represents the higher or superior court (Smith 1976: III.2.31–32 and note, respectively from the sixth and second editions). The most radical departure from Aristotle’s model of spectators resides, however, in that the imagined spectator dictates the principles and the motives of the agent himself: “the impartial spectator [should] enter into the principles of [my] conduct” (II.ii.2.2; see also IV.2.10). In the case of the virtuous person, these two distinct persons become united: “He soon identifies himself with the ideal man within the breast, he soon becomes himself the impartial spectator of his own situation” (III.3.29; cf. III.3.26). The impartial spectator matters to Smith to the extent that the agent himself should, at the end of the day, merge with such a spectator and acquire appropriate feelings displaying humanity and self-command. There is no such notion in Aristotle’s framework: spectators do not represent any superior court of morality, and comprehension does not dictate the principles of virtuous conduct.40 In the case of [C], it is evident that what nobility amounts to in Aristotle’s framework remains one and the same, no matter whether the circumstances make us adopt the spectator’s or the agent’s point of view, and, hence, it should be always appraised by the same criteria: correct nmp judgments and correct prescriptive judgments alike are grounded in the grasp of the same starting-points (archai), for instance, of what happiness is. What alone changes is the pertinent phenomenology— that is, the conditions of visibility. Emphasis on this point obviates the danger of confusing Aristotle’s spectator for a Kantian quasi-aesthetic spectator of human affairs who, as a virtuous spectator or judge, might use different criteria of correctness from those that are used by morally virtuous people. One encounters in Kant’s corpus two well-known cases of such a clash between the spectator and the agent. The French Revolution (as a historical event displaying a “character of humanity” that signals humanity’s being in moral progress) is legitimate in the eyes of someone with the “mode of thinking of a spectator [Denkungsart der Zuschauer]” but illegitimate in the eyes of practical reason (The Contest of the Faculties 7: 85). Likewise, “even war has something sublime about it” (Critique of the Power of Judgment 5: 263), while being nonetheless morally illegitimate. Such a discrepancy is unthinkable in Aristotle’s framework. For being a spectator is tantamount to being engaged in genuinely practical activities of judgment, not in quasi-aesthetic judgments about the moral teleology of humanity. Let me now return to my main objective, which is to inquire whether someone can display the virtue of comprehension without being practically wise: in other words, whether someone is capable of discerning, as a spectator/judge, practical matters and practical truth

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  31 (or the noble) from outside the ambit of deliberate choice as reliably and accurately as the practically wise person does, while sometimes failing, as an agent, to make fully correct deliberate choices. And my hypothesis is that the enkratês is the only person who occupies that position.

1.4  The Self-Controlled Person as an Excellent Spectator Who, then, is the enkratês? Self-control is presented as a kind of character-relevant state (êthos), like lack of self-control (akrasia) and beastliness (VII 1 1145a15–16); it represents a compound of mutually reflecting intellectual and ethical states, not just an intellectual or an ethical one. Furthermore, it is a sort of mixed state: in comparison with its opposite, lack of self-control, it is certainly something valuable or even an accomplishment in overcoming base appetites that most people would give in to; in this respect, one is entitled to ascribe to it excellence (spoudaia) and praiseworthiness (epainetê).41 In comparison, however, to temperance (sophrôsunê), it would be misleading to subsume it under the virtues. Nothing that incorporates base components and some sort of unfitting pain can meet the high standards of virtue, and self-control, by definition, implies both these shortcomings.42 The Self-Controlled Person as a Doer of Actions Self-control as well as the lack of it have to do with the way a type of person does morally relevant actions. And it would be impossible to distinguish the enkratic people from the practically wise ones unless one looks at their deliberate choices. This requirement dominates the analysis of self-control for two reasons. First, an enkratês’ actions and the actions done by the practically wise person seem to be alike. If morally relevant actions could ever retain their moral qualities after being separated from the deliberate choice which generated or initiated them, then an enkratês’ actions and those of a practically wise person would actually be the same. But they are not, for such a separation is a mere fiction. Second, if the quality of action-guiding practical knowledge depended only on its object regardless of how this object is intended or possessed, no distinction between an enkratês and a practically wise person would be possible either, for the former somehow knows the true good. What makes all the difference is the how of the pertinent practical knowledge (VII 3 1146b9), and this how is traceable only on condition that, once again, deliberate choice is the center of our attention. What does an enkratês’ failure amount to? Given that self-control is an alloy of intellectual and ethical states and also that it must be examined from within the perspective of deliberate choice (in which reason and desire are united), the failure in question must be grasped as something

32  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom both desires and intellectual capacities show the symptoms of. Here are the most critical passages on the topic: Also, a self-controlled person seems to be the same as one who is also such as to stand by [emmenetikos] his rational calculation . . . knowing that his appetites are base, does not follow them, because of his reason. (VII 2 1145b10–14) If someone cannot be self-controlled unless his appetites are strong and base, a temperate person will not be self-controlled or a selfcontrolled one temperate, since it is not characteristic of a temperate person to have appetites that are too strong or ones that are base. (VII 2 1146a9–12) Both a self-controlled person and a temperate one are the sorts of people to do nothing contrary to their reason because of bodily pleasure. But a self-controlled one has base appetites, whereas a temperate one does not, and a temperate one is the sort not to feel pleasure contrary to his reason, whereas the self-controlled one is the sort to feel such pleasure but not be led by it. (VII 9 1151a34–51b3) The appetite (epithumia) that by its absence has come to our notice in the context of the Rhetoric now makes a remarkable comeback. It emerges within the ambit of deliberate choice and is implicated therein in two ways: first, appetite might lead us to understand the good only in terms of pleasure and hence render us prone to confuse the apparent good for the true good. The enkratês does not run this risk since, in him, the knowledge of the true good is preserved. Second, appetites might make someone eager to satisfy pleasures for things that are not pleasurable to the temperate person. Indeed, enkratic people have appetites of that sort; they are victorious over them but only after a far from noble battle and are answerable for not having stayed away from that battle in the first place. The kind of appetites implicated, however, is in need of further specification. First, not every kind of appetite is relevant to self-control, but only those proper to intemperance (akolasia)—namely, those connected with touch and taste; these are the ones we share with animals—in other words, the most beast-like ones.43 Henceforth, I  will call them fleshly appetites. The moment that sexual intercourse or an amount of food or drink are ready to hand, the enkratês is somewhat tempted by base pleasures that would look unattractive to the temperate person. Such pleasures and appetites, then, are strong in the present moment, once any distance between the subject and the object of appetite has evaporated.

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  33 Touch—and taste counts, in that respect, as a sort of touch—is par excellence dependent on immediate contact, its only medium being the human flesh. Second, the appetites which tempt the enkratic people—at least, the paradigmatic case of them and not those who might stand very close to the akratic people—are not only base but also strong. How strong? It is hard to say exactly, but, for the most part, a feature that distinguishes the enkratês from the intemperate person is that the latter is led to base actions even when fleshly appetites are weak (VII 4 1148a18–19). To follow Aristotle’s examples in Book III, a way to draw a border is by reference to the arousal of fleshly appetites when there is no present object of touch to excite them but the excitement is provoked by some substitute. In the case of the intemperate person, the other senses play such a role: they serve as coincidental vehicles of the arousal or the satisfaction of fleshly appetites either by means of remembrance—for instance, intemperate people enjoy the smells of perfumes, since they are reminded of the object of their fleshly appetites—or by means of announcing the imminent presence of something desired (III 10 1118a12–18). The intemperate person, then, is seduced by any fleshly pleasure or any sign of it, however weak. At any rate, remembrance of past sexual pleasure or anticipated fleshly pleasure through something one hears or smells can hardly be as strong as the appetites aroused in the immediacy of actual touch. Or, take the example given in Eudemian Ethics III 2 1230b31–35: [F]or instance, a person would not be considered intemperate if, when looking at a beautiful statue or horse or person, or listening to someone singing, he did wish neither to eat or drink nor to have sexual intercourse, but only to look at the beautiful things and listen to the songs. For the intemperate people (at least, according to one reading of the passage), merely seeing a nude statue may be enough to make them eager to satisfy their base appetites. There is no evidence that Aristotle has conceived of the enkratês as someone who translates stimulus of that sort into something promising or reminiscent of the satisfaction of fleshly appetites. The life of enkratic people is not touch centered in the way only an akolastos’ life is. What is more, the remembrance of their past base and strong appetites is always accompanied by the remembrance of the pain they experienced in overcoming them and hence cannot appear to them as a promise of pure pleasure. Both in the case of the enkratês and the akratês, the sparking of fleshly appetites does not pervade their whole life but remains restricted in range and duration. In range, it is limited to the extent that fleshly appetites, like being sexually aroused, do not occupy the whole terrain of an

34  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom enkratês’ activities. For enkratic people do not live, as animals or perhaps intemperate persons, in the need to constantly satisfy excessive fleshly appetites. Though these appetites are natural and necessary for human beings, enkratic people like the practically wise ones, are not continuously preoccupied with them. The only problem is that strong appetites, in certain conditions, are inflamed in their soul and attract their attention so that they have to struggle to overcome the seduction. In duration, they are restricted because the arousal is provisional. In the akratês, it has the duration of something like an epileptic fit (VII 8 1150b34–35), and there is no evidence that its duration is more extended in the enkratês. What about the sort of intellectual failure characteristic of the enkratês? The most encompassing and nowadays most common reply may be framed as follows: enkratic people do not properly take pleasure in the nobility of the action they nonetheless do (where “properly” designates the full access to the noble enjoyed by the practically wise and fully virtuous person).44 This answer is felicitous in two respects: first, it adopts a point of view from within the ambit of deliberate choice, where practical reason and desire become united. Second, it is in line with Aristotle’s proviso that the distinctive feature of the enkratês does not lie in the incapacity to recognize the true good but only in a sort of deficiency regarding the modality of this recognition. The enkratês has a view of the noble, but this view is clouded because the prospect of satisfying base appetites is also envisaged as a source of pleasure or not as shameful as it should be. The enkratic people display a somehow malfunctioning deliberative imagination (bouleutikê phantasia)45 in the way they are struck by appearances of the noble—that is, by the sort of appearances that are proper to the calculative part of the soul. Given that this deficiency manifests itself within the ambit of deliberate choice (or deliberative desire), it is quite safe to assume that their deliberation also fails. They fail in that they take into account premises that they shouldn’t—premises that would seem completely irrelevant to the practically wise person. They insert them into their practical syllogism, and their deliberation is thereby entrapped in balancing different options and values, some of which are base. They arrive at the right conclusion, but the syllogistic process was not entirely correct, for the need of such a redundant balancing is a rational failure. And, no doubt, the pattern of balance marks Aristotle’s illustrations of the self-controlled people: they are obedient to reason, stand by their rational calculation, or are victorious after a relatively painful battle against their appetites, a battle that provisionally unbalanced their soul. Throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, they are visualized as those whose efforts swing the balance in favor of correct reason. Something is missing, however, in this explanation of the imperfection that is proper to the enkratic people inasmuch as the range and time limits of their failure have been disregarded. Their deliberative imagination

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  35 and deliberation do not always fail to provide them with an unclouded view of the noble. This happens only when and as long as their base appetites are inflamed. It would be awkward and counterintuitive as well as hardly in keeping with Aristotle’s intentions to assume that, regardless of the actual stakes, self-controlled people always put in balance their base fleshly appetites. For example, when circumstances invite them to prioritize respect for their parents above the nobility of public honor, fleshly appetites are hardly factored into the hierarchy they establish. To assume that they are would risk making the enkratês positively intemperate. It would also weaken Aristotle’s optimism that they can intentionally somehow block or prevent the arousal of fleshly appetites, “just as those who tickle first” in order not to be tickled back (VII 7 1150b22–23). Enkratic people are not totally blind; their intellectual myopia is general but only on occasion constitutes a real problem for their access to the noble. Another way to respect the idiosyncrasy of the intellectual failure of enkratic people is to understand it as a lack of attentiveness that develops only in the presence of strong fleshly appetites: “lovers of flute music are incapable of paying attention to logos [i.e. discussion or argument] if they happen to hear someone playing the flute” (X 5 1175b3–4). If one substitutes base and strong fleshly impulses for flute music, we see that self-control seems to involve a weak or blunted capacity of attention to what reason demands because of a deficiency in its intellectual texture— a sort of proneness to distraction. This shows up, however, only when strong fleshly appetites are at stake and temporarily disorient reason so that considerable effort is required to compensate for the enkratês’ frustrated desires and impaired attention. This intellectual deficiency on the part of the enkratês, albeit confined, is permanent and stable (for selfcontrol is an êthos), and we cannot predict when the lack of attentiveness will show up and for how long it may persist. In consequence, enkratic people are not fully reliable or virtuous agents. But are they nonetheless fully reliable judges/spectators of practical matters? The Self-Controlled Person as a Spectator All the cards are now on the table. In order to show that the enkratês as a spectator or judge displays comprehension as fully and reliably as the practically wise person does, let me proceed—in line with A ­ ristotle’s means of persuasion—by considering two cases: First, may not the s­ ubject matter the enkratic people are invited to judge sometimes inflame their base appetites and thereby influence their nmp judgments? Second, may not the very person who speaks to them, in public or in private, have that kind of direct impact on them? The answer to the first question is no doubt already visible between the lines, but for the sake of clarity, let us consider an example. Let us suppose that the subject matter the enkratic people are expected to

36  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom judge, whether in public or in private, bears on fleshly appetites themselves or that the orator uses sexual innuendo, insinuation, or images to arouse those sorts of appetites in them. Will their judgment not then be impaired? No. Such temptations influence the enkratic people only to the extent that they emerge within the ambit of their deliberate choice, where deliberative desire motivates them toward the realization of actions. But the nmp judgments they make as judges/spectators take place outside that ambit. They know that those low-rank fleshly appetites are base since they possess the knowledge of the true good. The problem is that the arousal of these appetites may blur their view of the noble from within the ambit of their deliberate choice. But, as judges, they are not in jeopardy. Besides, were things otherwise, they would not be easily persuaded (VII 9 1151b10). Further, as we learned in the Rhetoric, appetite for drink, food, and sex does not influence the listener to a speech either in public (in a deliberative, judicial, or epideictic speech) or in private (in any sort of giving and receiving of advice). Certainly, the orator can misuse those appetites and the conception of the good associated with them to manipulate an already vulgar and depraved audience, but it is not the speech itself that makes them acquire that character. And, at any rate, the enkratês is not a depraved person. More importantly, enkratic people are tempted only by strong fleshly appetites, and so we should not count as an enkratês anyone who, in default of such appetites, is tempted by “coincidental” substitutes like the remembrance of past arousals of appetites by, for example, sexual insinuation. Besides, any remembrance of past base and strong appetites as well as any expectation of future ones reminds the enkratic people of the pain they experience each time they have to overcome such appetites. Those who are equally seduced or aroused by images, signs, and allusions as they are by actual and strong fleshly appetites and pleasures themselves are not self-controlled but intemperate— and notwithstanding their important differences, the akratês resembles, as we shall see in a moment, the intemperate. What about the orator? Let us suppose that the orator is the object of our actual fleshly appetites or a seducer, in the erotic sense of the term, who maliciously mobilizes erotic appeals and attractiveness to wield power over the spectator/judge. And, no doubt, Plato and Aristotle shared the belief that the base popular leaders (dêmagôgos, singular) speaking in the assembly personify political depravity, among other things, in behaving as if they were an erotic lover of the people, a dêmerastês.46 To handle this example, one should first recall the portrait of enkratic people as agents: they are victorious over strong temptations, and their action is that of the practically wise person, although their access to the noble is clouded. The reason is that, when fleshly appetites are aroused, they are trapped into balancing the value they attach to alternative courses of action, some of which are quite shameful.

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  37 However, this balancing does not apply at all in the case of nmp judgments because the erotic appeal of the orator, despite the pain that the resistance to it might have caused to the enkratês, never constitutes an argument or logos counterbalancing other arguments in the listener’s judgment. To see why, it suffices to realize that the main feature of enkratic people is their being emmenetikoi, their standing by reason: this is the feature on the basis of which, in VII 2, Aristotle defines them; on the basis of which, in VII 9, he opposes them to the stupidly stubborn; and on the basis of which he also distinguishes them from the akratês,47 who is called ekstatikos—i.e. someone who departs from rational calculation. It can be no coincidence that this pattern is operative within the Rhetoric, too: the very same term, ekstatikos, is used to describe what happens when the orator maliciously speaks “outside the thing at issue [exô tou pragmatos],” trying to misguide the base listeners. As a matter of fact, it permeates the Rhetoric and maps out its project from the opening lines.48 Aristotle makes the interesting remark that, in the ambit of the merely judgment-oriented function of practical reason, the pattern of balance is abandoned and replaced by the pattern of inside-outside, or emmenetikosekstatikos.49 Admittedly, then, enkratic people may have provisionally paid attention to the sexual attractiveness of the orator. But, as always, they do not succumb to the temptation. More importantly, as judges/ spectators, they do not put the sexual appeal of the orator in one pan of their judgment’s scale and the argument (the thing or the logos) in the other, thus clouding their access to practical truth or the noble. They just treat the former as something “outside the thing at issue” or “outside the argument”; the orator’s attractiveness and the arousal of whatever fleshly appetites never enter into the realm of judgment itself but are excluded as logos irrelevant. Hence, the critical difference between the enkratic people as spectators and the same enkratic people as agents resides in the fact that, as spectators, regardless of how much effort they put into overcoming the temptation, the effort and pain of redirecting their attention to the argument are not imprinted on their judgment, precisely because they bring forward nothing in the argument itself, no premise they should refute in counterbalance to other ones. Notwithstanding their fight against temptation, as judges/spectators they keep their view of the noble unclouded.50 Thus, nothing differentiates the enkratês from the practically wise person insofar as they function as spectators making nmp judgments.51 The riddle is solved: the self-controlled person is sunetos without being phronimos, and comprehension is possible without practical wisdom. A Counterexample: The Akratic People To clarify my distinguishing the self-controlled person as the only type of person who is a fully reliable judge without also being a fully reliable

38  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom doer of moral actions, it is important to contrast enkratic people with the akratic, who, though they too possess the starting-point (archê) about practical matters (VII 8 1151a16–26), are not reliable judges. Why not also credit akratic people with good comprehension? Are they not able to correctly judge practical matters outside the ambit of deliberate choice? Well, they are, but far from reliably or unconditionally; hence, they are far from deserving to be endowed with comprehension. Akratic people are indeed correct judges of practical matters insofar as, first, despite their pursuing bodily pleasures and despite the fact that, in certain (not too rare) occasions, fleshly appetites take control in their soul, they possess the starting-points of practical truth, and their view of the noble is not completely clouded. When they are not under the influence or dominance of fleshly appetites, they share with self-controlled people the same kind of accurate judgment about past, present, and future actions that do not intersect with their appetites. The additional complication arising from their not being praktikoi—that is, the fact that their knowledge is not active within the ambit of deliberate choice, so that they are not always doers of good or correct actions (VII 10 1152a9)—is irrelevant from the point of view of their nmp judgments. These failings are symptoms of akratic deliberate choice, and, hence, akratic people may still display comprehension. Second, their akratic conduct is limited in time and range in exactly the same way as the enkratês’ fight against base appetites. As already noticed, it lasts as long as an epileptic fit and is provoked only under certain circumstances. It is meaningful, then, to distinguish between a lack of self-control as a permanent state of character and the actions displaying lack of self-control, the latter being denoted by the verb akrateuomai (for instance, in VII 3 1146b25, 1147a24, and 1147b1). To frame it in Greek words, the akrateis do not akrateuontai in all their actions. Their epileptic fit is not continuous, while their epilepsy as a disease is something permanent in the person suffering from it. By contrast, in the case of intemperance, there is no such a distinction since depravity is a continuous disease in the sense that all the actions of the intemperate person bear its stamp. Third, before that epileptic fit as well after it, the akratic people are not the victims of the ignorance caused by their appetites during it. “Before he is affected,” that sort of ignorance does not appear yet; likewise, after the appetites have stopped to prevail in the soul, the ignorance “is resolved” (see, respectively, VII 2 1145b30–31 and VII 3 1147b6–7). Therefore, in retrospect, they are easily persuaded that their past akratic action was a mistake, and they show remorse (VII 8 1150b29–31, 1151a14). When not under the corrosive influence of appetites, akratic people turn out to be perfect judges. They might not have a clear view of the noble from within the perspective of deliberate choice—the person with self-control does not have it either, and it would be anything but percipient to argue

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  39 that the akratês’ view is more clouded than the enkratês’—but there is no reason to deny them the correct judgment we assigned to the selfcontrolled person. The gap separating them becomes plain only when we examine the function of their judgment capacities during the arousal of fleshly appetites tempting them. Their difference is not due to the fact that akratic people opt for and follow the false course of action; their deficiency as judges is due to the fact that their very capacity for nmp judgments is provisionally paralyzed. Our two previous scenarios will straightforwardly show why this is so. Let us suppose, first, that the orator uses sexual innuendo, insinuation, or images to arouse fleshly appetites in the akratês. May the akratês’ judgment be then impaired? Yes, it may. For, in opposition to the selfcontrolled person, the akratês is overcome by feelings that most people resist (VII 7 1150b1–2) by being highly vulnerable like those, Aristotle says, “who get drunk quickly and on a little wine or on less than ordinary people” (VII 8 1151a4–5). True, in opposition to the intemperate person, akratic people would not commit wrong actions in the absence of appetites or in a state of coolness; nonetheless, weak feelings appear to them to be too strong and irresistible. To see the nature of their defenselessness, it suffices to recall the analogies employed by Aristotle: the akratês behaves like someone who is mad, asleep, tipsy, or passionate (melagcholikoi; VII 3 1147a10–24). The importance of these analogies does not lie in that they allegedly suggest a one-to-one correlation between specific kinds of lack of self-control and each one of the aforementioned conditions. They rather point to a single direction, implying that all these states call for an explanation in terms of the natural sciences. The explanation given by Aristotle himself in his pertinent treatises (namely, among others, in On Memory and Recollection and On Dreams) is that all of them imply similar physical conditions causing the emergence of specific cognitive states and, in particular, the domination of imagination and appearances in the soul. The outcome is that these appearances, by taking the lead from sense perception, which remains inert, produce intense feelings in the very absence of the objects of desire. Hence, any kind of insinuation or appearances in general is enough to paralyze the akratês’ practical reason, allowing feelings to dominate and lead nmp judgments. There is no need here to distinguish between action-guiding and judgment-guiding practical reason and assume that, although the former is paralyzed, the latter might still emerge undamaged. Aristotle’s metaphors do not entitle us to draw any such distinction, for neither such a distinction apply in the case of an actor just reciting some verses on stage or of a sophomore student just stringing the words together without understanding their true meaning (VII 3). But this is precisely the intellectual status of the akratic people as long as appearances prevail in their soul. To build on the metaphor Aristotle evokes in the case of those who

40  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom are asleep, drunk, ill, or passionate (On Dreams, 461a14–25), the akratês’ judgment has a distorted access to practical truth like the water on which, when it is violently disturbed, images appear very different from what they really are, if they appear at all. Notice that, in the case of akratic people, “violently disturbed” does not require really strong appetites; any appearance related to fleshly appetites might prove violent enough to distort their judgment. In the hands of an unscrupulous orator, they are defenseless. When the orator is the object of the akratês’ actual fleshly appetites or a seducer, then, the akratês’ practical reason is again untrustworthy in both its action-guiding and judgment-guiding functions. To see this, let us adopt Aristotle’s distinction between the two kinds of lack of selfcontrol—namely, impetuosity (propeteia) and weakness (astheneia). In the former case, the akratês does not deliberate at all and is led by feelings. Though any kind of lack of self-control amounts to departing from reason (ekstatikos), impetuous people are ekstatikoi in the most telling way, for they do not even give deliberation the chance to reach practical conclusions. They do not “wait for reason” at all (VII 7 1150b27–28). As a matter of fact, their lack of self-control is very similar to the one displayed by the akratês with respect to spirit: they “seem to listen to what reason says but to mishear it, like hasty servants who run off before they hear the whole of what is said and then make an error in carrying out the instructions” (VII 6 1149a26–28). No doubt, mishearing or not hearing the whole prescription are mistakes that undermine prescriptive and nmp judgments alike. As judges/spectators, in particular, impetuous people are prone to issue their political, judicial, or epideictic judgments without waiting for the orator to conclude the speech. Weak akratic people are not reliable either to the extent that they also depart from reason. Like the tipsy, at the moment of their epileptic fit, they are unable to exercise their practical reason, and, as if they were deaf, their whole attention is directed to things outside the issue—that is, to the erotic appeal of the orator; they stop listening, let alone understanding, arguments at all. Hence, they personify the type of depraved listener Aristotle portrays throughout the Rhetoric. Thus, in both cases, at the moment of their epileptic fit, akratic people are deprived of any clear view of the noble both as doers of actions and as spectators. To name their intellectual deficiency, it might be fitting to exploit one of Aristotle’s physical explanations of being asleep, drunk, etc. and say that their judgment capacities suffer from intellectual moisture (hygrotês), which nicely captures the intellectual defects of flabbiness and sloppiness.

1.5  Upending the Internalism vs Externalism Debate I have tried to dissociate two functions of practical reason—namely, the action-guiding and the merely judgment-oriented one—and explain the

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  41 conditions on which the latter is accomplished in a fully virtuous way— that is, on which spectators making nmp judgments prove to be fully virtuous. It should be clear by now that the merely judgment-oriented function is proper to practical reason itself and has nothing to do with an “objective attitude,” to evoke Strawson’s classic dichotomy in “Freedom and Resentment.”52 My spectators/judges adopt the Strawsonian “attitude of involvement” since they genuinely participate in the practice of praise and blame, display the reactive attitudes and feelings exhibited in the Rhetoric, and, most of all, envisage others as being responsible for their actions, not as natural objects or objects of treatment and social policy. Thus, any objection leveled against my spectators that would render them a “moral thermometer” and their judgments a “defective judgment” is off target.53 My claim is that the attitude of involvement allows for two distinct, albeit not entirely independent, stances by making room for two different tasks within the practical field: that of the agent involved in deliberate choice and that of the judge or spectator. To dissociate these tasks, it is necessary to identify a specific type of people—enkratic ones—whose deliberate choice is not fully virtuous, though their nmp judgments are. Within the Aristotelian scheme of things, the reverse is impossible, since there is no type of person who is a fully virtuous agent while falling short of the standards of fully virtuous nmp judgments. This is because practical wisdom as the unique virtue of prescriptive practical reason also instantiates a virtue of making good practical judgments. This asymmetry is anything but gratuitous; it just mirrors the one holding between the two functions of practical reason since the merely judgment-oriented function is partially dependent on the action-guiding one. “Partially dependent” is an intentionally cautious formulation meant to alleviate two worries: First, the concern of internalists about externalists’ false idea that fully correct judgment about practical matters is achievable regardless of the ethical states of the agent. That is why I insist that only the enkratês, who possesses the knowledge of the true good and is also equipped with sufficiently good ethical states and appropriate feelings or emotions, can be a virtuous spectator of practical matters. The enkratês is not an amoralist, which is the externalists’ beloved paradigm. Second, there is the concern of externalists about internalists’ false idea that the dependence in question amounts to a “parasitic” relationship, so that the merely judgment-oriented function is finally absorbed into the prescriptive one.54 This cannot be the case, for not being a practically wise person is compatible with both not being and being a fully virtuous and reliable spectator/judge: the base person is completely unable to make correct judgments about practical matters, and even akratic people turn out to be non-fully reliable judges; only the enkratês is.55 Judging about practical matters and being involved in deliberate choices prove,

42  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom then, to actually correspond to two different practical tasks. Also of note: contemporary neuroscience relates them to two different processes of decision with distinguishable cognitive and emotional components, corresponding to two different ways in which we answer the questions “Is it wrong to do it?” and “Would you do it?”56 The formulation “partially dependent” also sheds light on the unity of practical reason. If practical reason does two different tasks, the actionoriented and the judgment-oriented one, and if the pool of people who can fully virtuously accomplish both tasks proves to be narrower than the pool of people who can fully virtuously accomplish the second one, then what does the unity of practical reason amount to? The unity of practical reason is not in jeopardy at all. The only thing that came to the surface is that the non-fully virtuous function of our practical reason in its actionguiding role does not affect all the functions of practical reason in the same way. It proved that a mild dysfunction of our action-guiding reason is entirely compatible with a fully virtuous function of our judgmentoriented practical reason. This is anything but a case of disunity; rather, we are now in a position to realize that, with the action-guiding function occupying its core, the unity of practical reason is much more flexible than what one usually takes it to be. One of the merits of the distinction between the action-guiding and merely judgment-oriented functions of practical reason is that it allows us to eliminate any odd or gratuitous asymmetry among the practically wise, the self-controlled, and the base. This is the high cost that externalists have to pay in order to accommodate or exploit the case of self-control in distinction to practical wisdom. For they are led to endorse the following account: in the case of the practically wise person, genuine judgments are always motivational, while in the case of the self-controlled, they are not. They are willing even to maintain that the practically wise person and the self-controlled make “different types of judgement.”57 But this is an implausible moral psychology à la carte! By contrast, the distinction I  draw between the ambit of deliberate choice and the ambit occupied by mere spectators implies a distinction between two kinds of practical judgments: prescriptive and nmp ones. Any rational agent is capable of making both these kinds of judgment. The only difference is that, as far as it concerns the practically wise and the base person, these two distinct kinds of judgment are hardly distinguishable to the extent that they do not differ in their truth value: in the case of the practically wise person, both are always correct; in the case of the base one, both are always mistaken. To focus on practically wise people, this means two things: first, in some occurrences, they serve as mere spectators, and hence their judgments are not prescriptive ones; second, their nmp and their prescriptive judgments display exactly the same understanding of practical truth and the noble, thus perfectly mirroring each other.

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  43 Enkratic people do not constitute a strange third genus; what is different is simply that, in their case, the divergence between these two kinds of judgment is tangible. Their practical judgments as spectators are defective in nothing, though they do not go hand in hand with the non-fully virtuous motivational practical judgments which, under very specific circumstances, they make as agents. Their action-guiding judgments made within the ambit of their deliberate choice are motivational (anybody’s are) while their judgments as spectators are not (nobody’s are).58 And certainly the enkratês is neither someone who allegedly uses moral concepts in an “inverted commas” way nor someone who haphazardly displays a rather mysterious “weakness of the will and other forms of practical unreason.”59 The costs of the internalist portrait of the enkratês are no less high. For, in the effort to establish a perfect match between the non-virtuous desires and the non-virtuous intellectual capacities of enkratic people, they emphasize their deficient or clouded view of the noble or their lacking an entirely pleasurable engagement with it. Internalists thereby provide us with an unfair portrait which underestimates enkratês’ positive achievements and denies merely judgment-oriented practical reason any genuine independence from action-guiding ethical and intellectual virtues. At the end of the internalist’s story, enkratic people are deprived of any virtue in the full sense of the term. They win the silver medal of goodness only because the other participants in the race are very bad runners. While upending the internalism vs externalism debate, I submit that, as a judge or spectator of practical matters, the enkratês wins the gold medal—or, more accurately, shares it with the practically wise person. In doing so, I establish the self-controlled person as a paradigm illustrating the two distinct tasks within the practical field we fulfill as agents involved in actions and as spectators of practical matters, the two distinct kinds of genuine practical judgments involved, and the two distinct intellectual virtues that render us capable of accomplishing these tasks. By overlooking or denying these distinctions, one narrows the scope of practical reason.60

Notes 1. For these three claims, see respectively: VI 13 1144b27–28: “The correct reason [orthos logos] about such matters is practical wisdom.” VI 13 1144b30– 32: “It is clear, then,  .  .  . that it is not possible to be fully good without practical wisdom nor practically wise without virtue of character.” VI 2 1139a23–31: “It follows . . . that both the reason must be true and the desire must be correct, if indeed the deliberate choice is to be an excellent one. . . . This, then, is practical thought and truth . . . in the case of the part involving practical thought, it is truth in agreement with correct desire.” 2. See VI 4 1140b5, VI 7 1141b15–16, VII 10 1152a8–9, VI 5 1140a25–28, VI 8 1141b34.

44  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom 3. This is the main direction of anglophone Aristotelian scholarship after Anscombe’s 1958 article, “Modern Moral Philosophy.” There are numerous readings of Aristotle’s practical truth in the light of the philosophy of action, from the landmark Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action by Charles 1984 to the recent Aristotle on Practical Truth by Olfert 2017. There are also numerous studies with the term “moral psychology” in their title; see, for instance, Cooper’s 1988 “Some Remarks on Aristotle’s Moral Psychology” (now in Cooper 1999), McDowell’s 1998 “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology” (now in McDowell 2001), and the collection Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle by Pakaluk and Pearson 2011. 4. Vogt also points out that “practical thinking is not exclusively agential” and that “ethics is also concerned with the sphere in which we act—with, loosly speaking, observations about the way things go in this sphere.” (Vogt 2017a: 166, 175, respectively) She says nothing, however, about our being spectators of practical matters. The reason is that, for her, “the subject matter of ethics . . . is engaged with from the perspective of agency” (189), for “ethics inherits their [i.e. agent’s] project” (186). Thus, though Vogt nicely and convincingly broadens the scope of ethics by introducing the distinction between small-, mid-, and largest-scale practical plans (115–144), her approach is agential through and through. 5. Admittedly, krinein is a broad term; nonetheless, Aristotle constantly employs it to denote what I call judgment-oriented practical reason. This narrow conception should be differentiated, first, from the sort of discerning or judging that is proper to the action-guiding function of practical wisdom, as it is captured, for instance, in the following clause: “the excellent person discerns [good actions] correctly” (I 8 1099a23–24); second, from the sort of discerning that De Anima III 3 connects with understanding, thinking, and perceiving, in opposition to what initiates movement. The narrow conception of krinein that I mean to isolate shares with the former the reference to practical matters and with the latter the trait that it is not involved in action or movement initiation. 6. In the Rhetoric, a kind of rhetorical speech is called sumbouleutikon, deliberative speech. But here, again, the term “deliberative” does not bear the narrow meaning of what happens within the ambit of the agent’s own deliberate choice. Another revelatory use of the term is found in the Politics, where the part of a city called bouleuomenon (deliberating), in distinction to the offices, is described by the conceptual pair “deliberative and capable of judgment” and is taken not to imply prescription or initiation of actions (Pol. III 1 1275b19, VII 9 1329a3–4). The offices, by contrast, encompass not only deliberation but also an action-guiding function pertaining to other people, prescribing (epitattein) what is to be done (Pol. IV 15 1299a26–28, IV 4 1291a27–28). But prescribing is exactly what distinguishes epitaktikê practical wisdom from merely kritikê comprehension. 7. Hans Georg Gadamer is the only philosopher of the western canon to have exploited the notion of comprehension. He did so by reading Aristotle’s ethics not as an ethical theory but as a model for his hermeneutics. A hasty appraisal of Gadamer’s reappropriation of comprehension will be attempted in the last note of the present chapter, a note that serves as an appendix. 8. Comprehension reappears in X 9, the concluding chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics, in connection with legislative science. This, however, requires a separate analysis (see Section 2.3). It also appears in the Magna Moralia (I 34 1197b11–17), but it is analyzed in different terms: namely, according

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  45 to the pair small-big. For an astute attempt to translate these terms into the language of the Nicomachean Ethics, see Reeve 2013: 253. 9. By contrast, in other occurrences, comprehension seems to represent a mere appendage to practical wisdom: “we attribute consideration, comprehension, practical wisdom, and understanding to the same people . . . when they are already [êdê] practically wise and able to comprehend” (VI 11 1143a26–28). No matter whether this claim echoes a Platonic origin or Aristotle’s own view, it is important to take notice of the fact that it describes what happens once one is “already” practically wise. And there is no doubt that someone who is already a practically wise person necessarily possesses good comprehension. And, in this scenario, there is indeed no space to recognize in comprehension anything else but a non-separable constituent or a by-product of practical wisdom itself. 10. I don’t take comprehension to constitute a third intellectual virtue in addition to wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom, as if it corresponded to the virtue of a third part of the rational soul, even though in I 13 1103a5–6 Aristotle juxtaposes comprehension with wisdom and practical wisdom as three different intellectual virtues. But it may not be that these notions have as yet the technical senses they acquire in Book VI. I claim only that it constitutes excellence or virtue as far as it concerns the task of performing practical judgments outside the ambit of deliberate choice. 11. The terms “domain” and “ambit” mimic, but only superficially, Kant’s wellknown spatial metaphors in the Critique of the Power of Judgment 5: 174: field (Feld), territory (Boden), domain (Gebiet), and ambit (Aufenthalt, alternatively rendered as “residence” or “habitat”). 12. Charles 2015a: 78n17. 13. Even the more technical term prakton properly applies to the case of comprehension (VI 11 1143a33–35). For that term also bears a double sense: prakta constitute either the very objects of deliberate choice or already realized actions exposed to view. An uncontroversial case of the latter use of the term is the very passage we are pondering: since comprehension is, by definition, merely judgment-oriented and does not lead to action, prakton could not mean here the object of deliberate choice. For the grave philosophical consequences of this double sense, see Kontos 2011: 9–31. 14. See respectively: (a) Gauthier & Jolif 1970 II: 526, 530; (b) Greenwood 1909: 68–69, 202; (c) Reeve 2013: 225; (d) Gadamer GW1: 328. See also EngbergPedersen 1983: 213; Engberg-Pedersen 1979: 158; Hursthouse 2006: 293. 15. Stewart 1892 II: 84 (followed by Louden 1997) suggests that someone might be sunetos without being phronimos and takes it to be a matter of incomplete moral development in the acquisition of action-guiding practical wisdom (not, as I do, a matter of its ambit). Broadie 1991: 253 has a similar developmental story in mind. For her, comprehension covers “two grades,” both of which presuppose practical wisdom: either the comprehender possesses practical wisdom or comprehends well only on condition that the orator is a practically wise person who has “brought the relevant details to his attention” in a revelatory and instructive way. However, in my view, comprehension is an intellectual virtue and hence cannot cover two grades the second of which is less excellent than the first, and it does not necessarily presuppose practical wisdom. Simon 2017 touches on the idea that comprehension and practical wisdom have different domains of activity, but she misunderstands its consequences as well as the conditions of comprehension’s virtuous function. White 2019: 322–323 comes much closer to my reading by attributing to the good citizen of Aristotle’s Politics (Pol. III 4) sunesis but not phronêsis.

46  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom 16. Coraes 1822: 275; Stewart 1892 II: 84–85; Greenwood 1909: 67, 202; Gauthier  & Jolif 1970 II: 533, Gadamer GW1: 328n, Broadie 1991: 253; Gottlieb 2009: 199. 17. See Eustratius, CAG 20: 368.14–31 Heylbut and Heliodorus, CAG 19: 128.10–13 Heylbut. True, the practically wise person does not exercise comprehension to retrospectively confirm whether practical wisdom had correctly decided which actions should have been done. For it is obvious that, quasiinfallible as they are, the practically wise people need no such retrospective glance on their actions and decisions. But if they have forgotten why they did what they did long ago, they will then exercise comprehension to excavate their reasons, not in order to ground their initial deliberate choice on it. This is my reply to the objection against Eustratius’ interpretation raised by Gauthier & Jolif 1970 II: 526. 18. See I 3 1095a2–13, VI 5 1140b12–20, X 9 1179b20–31. 19. This complication has not been properly understood. For instance, Gauthier and Jolif argue, on the one hand, that only practical wisdom requires “the moral virtues” while, on the other, that comprehension “safeguards the respect that is due to moral values” (Gauthier & Jolif 1970 II: 530–533). 20. See VII 6 1150a1–8. For a detailed analysis of the aforementioned distinctions, see Section 4.1. 21. For the use of these terms, see Rh. II 2 1380b30, II 4 1383a8, II 7 1385a31, II 9 1387b19, II 10 1388a27. The Rhetoric often takes as its starting-point the listener’s vulgarity, depravity, baseness, or weakness; see also Rh. II 21 1395b2, III 1 1404a8, III 14 1415b4–6, III 18 1419a18. A similar disdain for the actual audiences of Athenian theater is evinced in the Poetics (Po. 13 1453a33–35). 22. See Rh. II 18 1391b11–16. For several reasons, epideictic speech seems to be “an anomaly” (Garver 1994: 71). In particular, the status of the judge in epideictic speech is much disputed. In his landmark study, Kraus 1907: 31–32 (followed by Rapp 2002 II: 255–257 and, on this issue, Buchheit 1960: 124–125) has shown that the spectator of the epideictic speech should be considered a true judge, though the difference from the judges in the other two kinds of speech should not be denied or minimized (as Grimaldi I: 80–81 tends to do). Notice also that there are strong affinities between praise and deliberative speech, where the listener is a judge in the strongest and most politically salient sense of the term (Rh. I 9 1367b37–68a9). 23. The most recurrent visual pattern is that the orator should set the issue “before the eyes” (pro ommatôn) of the listeners (Rh. II 8 1386a34, III 2 1405b12, III 10 1411a25–b9); see Cope 1887 II: 80. For the vocabulary of spectatorship in Greek judicial and epideictic oratory, see O’Connell 2017: 83–118 and Spatharas 2019 (in particular, Chapters 1 and 2). 24. See Dow 2015: 131–144; Rapp 2002 II: 221–223 (by contrast, Grimaldi I: 81 does not see the distinction). I do not want to deny that judging (in public or in private) constitutes a sort of intentional activity, as action-directed deliberation also does. The difference is between alethic acts about practical matters “in the endeavor to affirm with apt correctness” and “praxical firstperson affirmations . . . whereby you commit to a certain course of action” (Sosa 2015: 66–68; see also 65–88, 154–167). 25. Compare the way in which the sphere of judgment and the sphere of future actions as the object of deliberative speech are clearly separated in the Rhetoric to Alexander, 1425b36–38, 1438b14–23, 1445a30–34, 1445b13–16. 26. Such a continuinty between the public and private life is also attested in the case of deliberative speech. Aristotle introduces, twice, an important qualification regarding exhortation and dissuasion—namely, the functions proper

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  47 to the most political kind of rhetorical speech, the deliberative one. They remain the same in kind, no matter whether they are actualized in a rhetorical (i.e. political) context or in private. And, most of all, their sameness is due to the fact that the end of persuasion is the judge himself: “And there is judgment even if someone by using a speech (logos) in relation to a single individual exhorts or dissuades him—as, for example, those giving advice or trying to persuade do (for a single person is no less a judge)” (Rh. II 18 1391b8–11; see also Rh. I 3 1358b8–9). 27. For instance: “It is the praiseworthy states that we call virtues” (I 13 1103a9– 10) and “in all cases the medial condition [mesotês] is praiseworthy” (II 7 1108a15). 28. Echeñique 2012: 73–76 equates, as if it were axiomatic, the fully virtuous person (i.e. the phronimos) and the “virtuous or apt spectator” who praises or blames. 29. I am grateful to David Charles, who pressed me for an answer to the question of whether my spectators recognize the noble and, if so, how. 30. See I 8 1099a17–18, III 8 1116a28, IV 2 1123a24–25, IX 8 1169a5–6. 31. To the best of my knowledge, little has been made of the distinction between these two perspectives—see, for instance, Charles 2015b and Crisp 2014. Lear 2006: 126ff. employs the concept of visibility, but she applies it, without any qualification, to both “the agents and to those assessing [fine actions]” and hence takes for granted that the access to nobility is of just one sort. Yet the demarcation of the two perspectives pervades both the Nicomachean Ethics—for example, the spectator perspective is at work in the discussion of greatness of soul (megalopsychia) in IV 3 1123b6–8—and the Rhetoric and resolves a number of important issues about the nature of the noble, or so I think. For instance, the other-directedness of noble actions is thereby emancipated from the action-guiding perspective, and hence the Kantian aspect that Korsgaard 1996 and Irwin 2011 wish to detect in the noble as a motive for action is attenuated. In addition, the aesthetic aspect of the noble, which Kraut 2013 tries to defend and Kosman 2010 and Reeve 2012: 93–129 to qualify, obtains thereby an additional credit. 32. I am aligned on this point with Cooper 1999: 392–393, Grimaldi I: 9–10, and Strauss 1964: 40. I  concede that the orator is not obliged to use all three kinds of rhetorical proofs on every occasion, so the disposition of the listener may sometimes not be a matter of the orator’s preoccupation at all. Nevertheless, the fact that the kinds of proofs used by the orator are contingent on the circumstances (for instance, the listeners might already have the right or the fitting disposition) should not imply that the feelings of good listeners may ever be irrelevant to their capacity to recognize the truth of practical matters and judge them correctly. And it seems that the practices of decision-making in Athenian assemblies and courts were grounded in the very idea that, in opposition to mere facts, practical judgments cannot be separated from the perspective of the decision maker (see Cammack 2020). 33. As far as I know, there is large consensus on this peculiarity of the feelings appearing in Book II; see Leighton 1982; Leighton 1996; Striker 1996: 293; Rapp 2002 II: 576–577 (even though many others do not seem to take this distinction into consideration at all, as, for instance, Nussbaum 1996). Rapp 2018 nicely explains, for instance, why one should not model the emotions of Aristotle’s judge (dikastês) on the emotions that influence the deliberate choice of an agent. In any case, the emotions of Rhetoric II should be categorized, as in the taxonomy proposed by Faucher and Tappolet 2002, as

48  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom “short-lived and occurent” (in distinction to “emotional dispositions”) and as having a more or less “recognizable antecedent event” (in distinction to “moods”). 34. Anger (orgê) probably is the only exception, if we assume that a false negative judgment might substitute for an action of revenge. But would we say that a favorable judgment substitutes for an action of friendliness? Besides, even if anger is an exception, it is still the case that its action relevance is not the reason it is included in the list of Rhetoric II. 35. For different (but not, as far as I can see, incompatible) answers to the aforementioned question, see Garsten 2009: 136–139 and Striker 1996: 289. Please also note that my argument does not rely upon an alleged distinction between appetite and feelings (for the former is usually counted among the feelings) but only upon the critical differences between epithumia and the feelings addressed in Rh. II 2–11. 36. The complexity inherent in judgment is clearly detectable in the following pair: things related to my own affairs vs things related to other’s affairs (contrast with Garsten’s 2009: 135ff. “deliberative partiality”). On the whole, Aristotle endorses the view that we are better judges of things that are not in our personal or immediate interest: “most people are bad judges of their own affairs” (Pol. III 9 1280a15–16; see also III 16 1287a33–41, VII 10 1330a22– 23). But, in the Rhetoric, judgments about other’s affairs risk being overshadowed due to indifference. Thus, the feelings of the listener should also, among other things, exclude any judgment-detrimental indifference and instead create an attitude of “care”: for instance, such care is involved in anger (Rh. II 2 1379b16–17), friendliness (Rh. II 4 1381a11), fear (Rh. I 5 1382a27), and shame (Rh. II 6 1383b18). 37. See VII 3 1146b22 and DA III 10 433b4–14. 38. See, respectively, Rh. II 2 1378b1–2, II 5 1383a18, II 5 1383a25–31, II 6 1383b14, II 8 1385b11–27. 39. No doubt, much more is to be said about the eventual overlapping between the Rhetoric’s and the Poetics’ account of spectators’ feelings. For a wellbalanced analysis, see Halliwell 1998: 168–201 and Walker 2000: 278–290. Things get complicated once we take into account the internal spectators in epic and tragedy. It is here that we very often encounter “the agent-turnedspectaror stance” (Allen-Hornblower 2016): for instance, agents who are relegated to the role of spectators/onlookers and experience this shift as a manifestation of powerlessness in that they are unable to intervene and change the course of events, like Achilles in the Iliad (Allen-Hornblower 2016: Chapter 1), or people who retrospectively appraise their past murderous deeds as if they were mere witnesses and thereby understand them in new light, like Orestes and Electra in Euripides’ Electra (Allen-Hornblower 2016: 224–246). There is no room to address these intriguing aspects of spectators’ experiences in the present study. 40. Despite the aforementioned decisive differences, however, one should not downgrade the importance of the traits shared by Aristotle’s and Smith’s spectators: for instance, their capacity to equally judge themselves and others, their not being devoid of feelings, their concern about the actual circumstances of action, etc. I have learned a lot about Smith’s impartial spectator from Harman 2000: 181–195, Raphael 2007, and Sayre-McCord 2010. 41. See VII 2 1145b8–9, VII 2 1146a15, VII 8 1151a27, VII 9 1151b28, and EE II 11 1227b18–19. 42. See IV 9 1128b33–34, VII 2 1146a7–21, and EE II 8 1224b15–21.

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  49 43. See VII 3 1146b15ff., VII 4 1147b23ff., III 10 1118a25–26. This is the narrow concept of appetite I referred to previously. Please notice two further complications: first, when something given to our senses is pleasant on its own right, and not for the sake of nourishment or reproduction (as is, for instance, the odors of flowers), then the desire to smell a flower is not an appetite, though it is closely associated with our senses (see EE III 2 1231a10–12 and De Sensu 443b38–41). Second, in a broader sense, there are also appetites “involving reason,” such as the appetites for wealth, gain, victory, and honor (see VII 4 1148a25–26 and Rh. I 11 1370a16–27). For a revelatory analysis, see Pearson 2012: 91–110. 44. See McDowell 2001: 47–48, 55–56, 92; Charles 2015a; Coope 2012 (the slight differences between their approaches have no impact on the present argument). For reasons that become evident in the course of my analysis, I disagree with Callard 2017, who tries to identify the enkratês with the practically wise person (though her argument is much more elaborated than Telfer’s 1989–1990). Also of note: there is a long tradition in psychology and psychopathology as well as in the philosophy of emotions connecting emotions, akrasia, and attention; see: Tappolet 2003. 45. The term crops up in DA III 11 434a7–10. For an extensive analysis, see Reeve 2012: 182–184 and Lorenz 2006: 124–137; for its connection with self-control, see Coope 2012: 159. In the same vein, Gibson 2021 offers a very detailed picture of the intellectual failure that is proper to enkratic people by showing how their false or impeding impressions impair their practical reasoning. 46. The term dêmerastês is used by Plato in Alcibiades, 132a3; Aristotle does not employ it, but his pejorative portrait of popular-leaders is drawn in quite similar lines. Indicatively, he ascribes to them “wanton behavior”; the Greek term is aselgeian and has sexual connotations (Pol. V 5 1304b21). For the erotic element in Greek political oratory, see Ludwig 2002: 141–169. 47. See, respectively: VII 2 1145b10–12, 1146a16–17, VII 9 1151a31, a35, 51b3, b 5, VII 2 1145b10–12. 48. See this chapter, n21. 49. Aristotle opposes the argument (logos) to what stands “out of the argument” and calls the latter ekstatikon three times: “The scheme of the style should be neither metrical nor rhythm-less. For the former . . . diverts attention [existêsi], since it makes the listener attend [prosechein] to the similar [cadence] and its next occurrence” (Rh. III 8 1408b21–24). “For it is not always advantageous to make [the listener] attentive [prosektikon]. . . . But one should not overlook the fact that all such things are outside the argument [exô tou logou], since they are addressed to a listener who is base and ready to listen to what is outside the thing at issue [exô tou pragmatos]” (Rh. III 14 1415a36–15b6). “Also, deliberative speaking does not afford many opportunities for leisurely digressions. . . . On the contrary, it least of all does so, unless one wants to divert attention [existê (OCT) or existêtai (Kassel 1976)]” (Rh. III 17 1418a27–29). 50. Some cases demand more refined description in line with my previous clarifications about deliberative speech: when, for example, in the context of exhortation or advice, the advisee is the very object of the advisor’s fleshly appetites, the advisor’s judgment is perfectly and reliably accurate, while the deliberate choice to provide the relevant advice remains clouded. 51. Withdrawing to the safety of a footnote, I propose that the enkratês and the practically wise person also share the same wish (boulêsis), when “wish” is taken to concern things that are not feasible or achievable by ourselves (III 2

50  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom 1111b22–23) and hence triggers no motivation at all (see Reeve 2020). For instance, the non-motivational judgment of both the enkratês and the practically wise person conveying their wish “not to be any sycophant on earth” is a practical judgment about an ideal noble world and its praiseworthiness (by contrast, the base person may, mistakenly, never wish for the same wish). Should that judgment be necessarily translated into an action-guiding or motivating principle, their life would cease to be virtuous, for that translation would incur endless pain (and, hence, compromised pleasure) and raise a false missionary zeal for the noble. Acknowledging the futility of the wish and its inappropriateness as a motive for action does not, however, “entail revocation of the value judgment” (Shafer-Landau 2003: 149; I refer here to one of the examples used by Shafer-Landau against motivational internalism). Mere wish might constitute, then, a sort of nmp judgment. 52. Strawson 2008: 1–28. 53. See, respectively, Mumm 2015: 294; Manne 2015: 263. 54. The term is often used in the internalist-externalist debate; see, for instance, Prinz 2006; Brink 1997. 55. My “middle path” between internalism and externalism is only superficially close to the one drawn by Silverstein 2017: 381. His false construal of Aristotle’s view aside (354), my distinction between action-guiding and merely judgment-oriented practical reason does not mirror his distinction between “practical reasoning” and “ethical judgment,” insofar as the latter is purely theoretical and not judgment oriented, at least not in the sense in which I am using the term. It only concerns ethics itself (364) and theory (368). In Silverstein’s scheme, there is no proper place for the listener to rhetorical speech or for the good comprehender. 56. Borg et al. 2006. 57. Kristjánsson’s 2013: 434. Kristjánsson’s portrait of the self-controlled person is not only unfaithful to Aristotle’s ethics but paradoxical and counterintuitive. (1) To him, self-controlled people do the right action “only via the realisation that if they were virtuous persons, they would feel and act in a certain way” (434). This can hardly be the case. Aristotle’s enkratic people certainly have “intrinsic” motivations for action and even for the sake of the noble; their failure resides in their clouded view of the noble. In general, I doubt that Kristjánsson’s “as if” motivation applies to any sort of agent at all. (2) He is led to the wrong thesis that there is no “failure of deliberation” (438) to attribute to the self-controlled person, for he takes for granted that Aristotle’s ethics stands on a Humean distinction between reason and desires. 58. That is why I also insisted on distinguishing the judgment-oriented and the action-oriented aspects of giving and receiving advice. By contrast, internalists and externalists alike tend to link advice with motives for action (see, for instance, Smith’s 1995 “advice model” of internalism and the critique by Johnson 1997; Wiland 2000). 59. Smith 1994: 61 (in the context of Smith’s defeasibility pattern of moral internalism). 60. Appendix: Gadamer on Sunesis   We are now in a position to fully appraise Gadamer’s understanding of comprehension and its eventual affinity with the internalism vs externalism debate. Gadamer recognizes that Aristotle’s ethics is “the unique solid model for a proper self-understanding of the human sciences” (“Probleme der praktischen Vernunft,” GW2: 319). It is anything but a surprise, then, that the section of his Wahrheit und Methode (GW 1) on Aristotle’s ethics plays a considerable role in his hermeneutical project. And that section culminates

Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom  51 in the analysis of Aristotle’s notion of sunesis. It is because, in the wake of Heidegger’s course on the Nicomachean Ethics (Heidegger 1992: 7–188), Gadamer does not treat the Nicomachean Ethics as an ethical treatise that comprehension as the virtue of judgment (Urteilen) captures his attention.   Let me begin with some words about the role of Aristotle’s ethics in the project of Truth and Method. As already said, Gadamer envisages Aristotle’s ethics as “a kind of model regarding the problems raised by the hermeneutical task” (GW1: 329). This programmatic claim, announced time and again, makes of practical philosophy that which enables us to explicate the sort of independence that “moral sciences” (that is, humanities) should enjoy from both natural sciences and metaphysics (see, for instance, “Hermeneutik als theoretische und praktische Aufgabe” in GW2: 302 and “Vernunft und praktische Philosophie” in GW10: 261). Gadamer maintains that moral experience does not embody an activity one simply decides to undertake (as is the case with particular crafts and sciences) but mirrors an essential facticity of human beings. That is, we are always already involved in the terrain of morality, and hence, in Aristotelian terms, “human beings are always already in the circle of what depends on phronêsis” (“Praktisches Wissen,” GW5: 242). To note: practical wisdom is not always treated by Gadamer as an intellectual excellence that virtuous men alone display; it also denotes practical reason in general (for a brief analysis of Gadamer’s Aristotle reading, see Kontos 2018a: 16–21; Thanassas 2021; DaVia 2020).   It is now time to linger on Gadamer’s appropriation of comprehension. Since he reiterates, almost verbatim, on different occasions the very same claims, it is enough to read what he writes in his Truth and Method. I will follow the thread of the argument and comment on each separate phrase: [1] Beside phronêsis—namely, the virtue of thoughtful deliberation—stands “comprehension” [Verständnis, Verstehen]. Comprehension is introduced as a modification [Modifikation, Abwandlung] of the virtue of ethical knowledge [sittlichen Wissens], [2] to the extent that here it is not I  who is to do the action. [3] Accordingly, comprehension simply means the capacity [Fähigkeit] for ethical judgment. [4] Someone’s comprehension is praised, of course, when in order to judge he transposes himself into the whole concrete situation in which someone is to do the action. [Note in the 2nd edition:] I  have slightly changed my text. The allou legontos, 1143a15, does mean nothing more than “it is not up to me to do the action”. I  can listen to someone with comprehension, someone who narrates something, even when I do not have to give him advice. . . . [5] One has correct comprehension of the person who does the action if one requirement is satisfied: that he too is seeking what is right, that he is united with the other person in this commonality [Gemeinsamkeit] . . . [6] The concrete example of this state of affairs is the phenomenon of advice in “questions of conscience”. Both the person asking for advice and the person giving it make the assumption that they are bound together in friendship. . . . The person who has comprehension does not know and judge as one who stands in a separate and unaffected position but rather he thinks along with the other from the perspective of a specific belonging-together [Zugehörigkeit]. (GW1: 328–329; my translation) (1) We know by now that this initial assumption is not as self-evident as Gadamer takes it to be, for there is room to maintain that comprehension is not absorbed into practical wisdom, as if it were a simple modification of the latter.

52  Virtuous Spectators without Practical Wisdom (2) This is too hasty a conclusion, too, for it is mistaken to oppose the supposed self-directedness of practical wisdom to the other-directededness of comprehension to the extent that the former is also other-directed and the latter also self-directed. Besides, in his book review of the French commentary by Gauthier and Jolif, Gadamer himself accuses them of having committed that sort of mistake as regards practical wisdom (GW6: 303). (3, 5) Faithful to his guiding idea that comprehension constitutes a modification or variation of practical wisdom, and despite the unfortunate identification of comprehension with a mere capacity, Gadamer accepts that comprehension—in opposition, for instance, to mere cleverness—is a virtue and, by ­consequence, is grounded in ethical virtues: we are not sunetoi unless we are also seeking what is right or just—that is, unless we are fully virtuous. But, as has been explained, this is only partially correct since it proves that the selfcontrolled person need not be a fully virtuous agent. (4, 6) To decipher these bold statements, it is prudent to start from the note inserted by Gadamer in the second edition of his Truth and Method. It refers to the following phrase in Aristotle’s Book VI 10: comprehension is exercised “when one is using belief to discern, when someone else speaks, matters with which practical wisdom is concerned.” Gadamer is right in explicating that comprehension is about actions and deeds. Nevertheless, and despite the clarification inserted in the note of the second edition, he cannot help associating comprehension with giving advice, as if the latter were the most “concrete” and canonical example of the former. The shift from comprehension as a virtue of making correct nmp judgments to comprehension as a virtue of giving (and receiving) advice amounts to a shift from mere judgment to action. This same shift pushes Gadamer to hold that friendship and “belonging-together” are necessary elements which the exercise of comprehension lies upon.   And this shift makes all the difference. Indeed, giving and receiving advice are envisaged by Gadamer as a common action undertaken by friends on the grounds of their mutual trust. In the realm of action, true friendship is required, for “thinking along with the other” is a sort of deliberating together for the sake of common practical ends or a common life within the city. Thus, Gadamer recognizes two sorts of stance one may adopt toward others and their actions: one judges (krinein, urteilt) either as “one who stands in a separate and unaffected position” or as one who “thinks along with the other from the perspective of a specific belonging-together.” However, if my previous dichotomies are on the right track, there is a sort of action-independent judgment which, though not reducible to an emotion-free theoretical thinking, is not subject to the requirements that are proper to the sphere of deliberate choice and action either. When the Rhetoric II 4 uses the terms philein and philia, it refers to “friendliness” and “being friendly” as an occurrent feeling, not to the friendship analyzed in the Nicomachean Ethics VIII–IX. This is because, in the context of rhetorical speech and the listener’s nmp judgment, the establishment of (true) friendship—that is, of a relationship cultivated during a long period of sharing words and deeds—would be impossible. Just consider that, in judicial and epideictic speech, we judge the actions and the character of people we have never met in our lives! Not only would it be impossible but redundant, too. Judgments made outside the ambit of deliberate choice just need “friendliness” in order for the spectator/judge to avoid indifference and hatred, not the sort of mutual trust that can only emerge within the context of a common life shared by true friends.

2 Straddling Borders The Legislator’s Enigmatic Activity

Aristotle rarely discusses the legislator as such.1 And when he more or less explicitly does so, he uses, almost interchangeably, three different ways to describe the legislator’s work, without clarifying which one is prevailing in each case or whether they are compatible with one another: the legislator is a scientist (epistêmôn), a doer of political actions (prattôn), and a craftsman (poiêtês). In all three cases, the legislator is identified with the politikos, albeit for different reasons. Commentators also rarely discuss the legislator.2 And when they do, they all too often remain content with shedding light on the first way, ignoring or misunderstanding the second, on the assumption that the legislator is a thinker rather than a doer of genuine actions, while the third way seems to run the risk of transforming legislative science into a productive science, thereby obliterating its political or practical character. I can only guess that commentators’ bewilderment or lack of interest—at least as far as it concerns the commentators who read Aristotle’s practical philosophy through the lens of the philosophy of action and a moral psychology—is due to the fact that Aristotle nowhere refers to the legislators’ desires and motives— or, for that matter, to their happiness. In what follows I  will attempt to offer a comprehensive account of Aristotle’s view that the legislator’s activity is genuinely practical on the basis of what I  call the normative priority of its practical aspect over its productive aspect (2.1). I  will further strengthen my argument by, among other things, giving a fresh analysis of the sub-branches of practical wisdom in Nicomachean Ethics VI 8 (2.2) and identifying the kind of experience the would-be legislator should possess according to X 9 (2.3). I close by showing in which sense the legislator’s activity is, for Aristotle, a borderline one straddling the spheres of our practical, productive, and theoretical life (2.4). To bring to light, however, the intrinsic practical character of such a borderline activity is tantamount to broadening the scope of practical reason.

54  Straddling Borders: The Legislator

2.1  The Triptych: Action, Production, Theory The T-Legislator vs the A-Legislator The term nomothetikê denotes legislative science (epistêmê)—i.e. a “theoretical knowledge” that has access to universals (X 9 1180b20–23). As early as the initial lines of the Nicomachean Ethics, indeed, the control exerted by the architectonic political science over all other human activities is explained by reference to its legislative function (I 1 1094a26 ff.). The theoretical element of legislative science is constantly highlighted in the Politics, too: the excellent legislator exercises the science that gets a “theoretical grasp” on constitutions (Pol. IV 1 1288b21–30), “a theoretical grasp on what is advantageous for each constitution” (Pol. IV 12 1297b38–39), and, most of all, a theoretical grasp “on how a city . . . can come to have a share in good living and in the happiness that is possible for [it]” (Pol. VII 2 1325a7–10). From this perspective, legislators resemble political philosophers or scientists—let us call them T-legislators (theoretical political scientists)— who figure as “the architectonic craftsman” of the end that is happiness, be it achieved on the level of individuals or communities (VII 11 1152b1–3). And this is a sufficient inducement for Aristotle to employ the terms “legislator” and politikos as equivalent in a number of passages in which the latter primarily designates political scientists: “the good legislator and true politician [ton hôs alêthôs politikon]” (Pol. IV 1 1288b27) is one and the very same person3—namely, the political scientist whose theoretical knowledge is as complete as possible. If, in Aristotle’s framework, a sort of scientist possessed merely some kind of universal knowledge, the aforementioned scheme of things would seem to vindicate the common view that Aristotle’s legislators are primarily “political thinkers” or “moral philosophers,”4 in the sense of those who could have written a theoretical treatise about political matters—for instance, the Politics. In addition, however, the legislator is portrayed as a true politician who performs political actions in the most literal sense of the term: “laws would seem to be the works [erga] of politics” (X 9 1181a23).5 Likewise, in the Nicomachean Ethics, the legislator is “truly a politician [hô kat’ alêtheian politikos]” who “wishes to make the citizens good and obedient to the laws” (I 13 1102a8–10). Here, the legislator does not merely work as a political scientist who possesses an abstract theoretical knowledge. Instead, legislators are most of all doers of political actions in that they generate political entities, be they constitutions or laws.6 Let us call them A-legislators (i.e. political actors or agents). Aristotle emphasizes the distinction, indeed, between those preoccupied with a merely theoretical investigation in legislation and those who have actually performed the political action of legislating (by implementing only laws or both laws and a constitution). He does much the same

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  55 in Politics II 12, emphasizing that only the latter should be considered true political actors: Some of those who have had something to say about a constitution took no part whatsoever in political actions [praxeôn politikôn], but always lived a private life.  .  .  . Others became legislators, some in their own cities, others in some foreign ones as well, that is, they were engaged in politics themselves [politeuthentes]. (Pol. II 12 1273b27–34)7 One can hardly miss seeing that the opposite of merely thinking about political matters while not taking part in political actions is here just the political action of legislating. The merits and correctness of this way of seeing things will become plain once we dispel two misunderstandings. First, one may want to consider the action of legislation itself as a mere “act of contemplation and thought,” in the light of the famous passage from the Politics stating that “the ones who above all do actions, even external actions, in a controlling way are their architectonic craftsmen who do them by means of their thoughts” (Pol. VII 3 1325b21–23).8 But this cannot be the whole truth. True, constitutions and laws are something to be obeyed or put into action, like the instructions given to the handicraftsmen by a master craftsman. So they are imperatival thoughts. In addition, however, they are also political entities, political deeds, the outcome of political activity. For the legislator’s activity amounts to nothing less than “constituting” the system of laws for a city or introducing so considerable a “rectification” as might change its form.9 Not to acknowledge the need for such a distinction amounts to blurring the distinction between, for instance, the Politics as a treatise of political philosophy and the function assumed by Solon in Athens. But Aristotle’s Politics itself is adamant about dissociating these two things. Second, it is commonly assumed that there is just one type of political actions—namely, those undertaken in the context of everyday political decisions, so-called Tagespolitik—by the deliberative, the ruling, and the judging parts of the city (Pol. IV 14 1297b35–98a9). These actions generate entities like decrees issued by the assembly or the decisions made at the law courts—in other words, particular political entities. The thought behind this assumption is that only such everyday political decisions qualify as political particulars while laws and constitutions are universals: “all law is universal” (V 10 1137b13).10 Thus, so the thought goes, only the former are political actions, since “action is concerned with particulars” (VI 7 1141b16). But Aristotle does not share this view at all. Book VIII of the Politics, in which he observes the excellent legislator in action, is devoted to exhibiting the double character of legislative knowledge by distinguishing its universalist and particularist components: Sections VII 1–3 discuss

56  Straddling Borders: The Legislator the starting-points about happiness that legislative science must possess while Sections VII 4–17 discuss the particulars legislators should look at in order to accomplish their work (VII 13 straddles both fields). Such particulars concern the size of the best city (VII 4), its territory (VII 5), its access to the sea and its naval power (VII 6), regulations about marriage and procreation (VII 16), etc. These are the sorts of particulars legislators should consider in order to make particular decisions suited to the material they have at their disposal before creating a constitution or legal system. Constitutions and laws are hybrid entities: they are particulars to the extent that they are regarded as constitutions and laws of a specific city at a particular historical moment or stage of its development and universals in that they constitute “reason[s] that derive from a sort of practical wisdom and understanding” (X 9 1180a20–21) and implement rules to be further specified or properly rectified according to the demands of yet unpredictable circumstances within that city. The Politics as a theoretical treatise looks only at the sorts of particulars involved; its theoretical nature obliges it to abstain from investigating them in their particularity and the ever new or unprecedented ways and combinations in which they might emerge. Legislators themselves, however, as doers of political actions, must be capable of discerning these very particulars and deliberating about how best to cope with them.11 Therefore, the Politics cannot, and is not expected to, yield all the details in matters of the appropriate number of citizens or the size and sort of the city’s territory. The pertinent methodological principle is the following: “we should not seek the same exactness in accounts as in what comes through perception” (Pol. VII 7 1328a19–21). Perception is about particulars, and, in the Nicomachean Ethics, the vocabulary of perception is used to emphasize the access which practical wisdom has to them (VI 8 1142a23–30, VI 11 1143a33-b5). Likewise, the A-legislator, not the T-legislator, should have acquired legislative vision—what the proponents of virtue jurisprudence call “legal vision”—to be competent in discerning and appraising the particulars that are relevant in matters of legislation as well as in deliberating about them.12 And the same applies, for instance, to finding the appropriate means needed for the long-lasting preservation of a city (Pol. VI 5 1319b33ff.). In the same vein, the legislator is expected to pinpoint the very particular constitution that is appropriate to this particular city at this particular stage of its development—and Aristotle implies that there is an inexhaustible variety of mixed constitutions, more or less aristocratic, democratic, etc. It is not a coincidence that it is à propos of this question that Aristotle equates the good A-legislator with a true politician (Pol. IV 1 1288b27). The A-legislator’s knowledge has two components, then: a universalist knowledge (about happiness as the starting-point of politics and about the conditions and the level of its attainability within the best constitution

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  57 or within those constitutions that are far from approaching the ideal) and a particularist (perception-like) knowledge. That is why Hippodamus and others were just T-legislators. Thus, it is necessary to overcome the standard dissociation between universality, as what pertains to the law, and particularity, as what pertains to the circumstances of Tagespolitik. For constitutions and laws are hybrid entities: i.e. they are both universals (from a certain point of view) and particulars (from another point of view). Thus: [T1]: The legislator’s knowledge comprises both a universalist and a particularist component, and legislators are doers of political actions proper—i.e. of political particulars. The A-Legislator vs the P-Legislator A deep ambiguity, however, shakes up the prior interpretation of the legislator’s function as a doer of political actions. For, even if one is willing to agree that legislators perform actions and are sensitive to particulars, one might still want to impugn the tenet that their actions are genuine praxeis. This new difficulty is associated with the third pattern which Aristotle models a legislator’s activity on—that of production (poiêsis).13 As is well-known, the Nicomachean Ethics introduces a distinction between action proper (praxis) and production. Actions proper have their end in themselves: “For the end of production is something other than it, while that of action is not something other than it, since doing well in action [eupraxia] is itself action’s end” (VI 5 1140b6–7). Legislative activity seems to constitute a sort of production rather than an action proper, insofar as its end is something other than the very action of the legislator—namely, a constitution or a law system that survives the legislative action or even the legislator. There is no doubt, indeed, that the nouns denoting the function of legislators in the Politics signify a productive activity: they are “producers” or “makers,” a dêmiourgos or kataskeuastês—that is to say, a P-legislator (a producer of legislation). There is much truth in this. Not only is legislative activity constantly associated with craft-knowledge,14 but the Politics affords a sophisticated insight into its production-like texture. From the perspective of its outcome, legislative activity looks like a production, for it is taken to establish (kataskeuazesthai, paraskeuazein) the constitution (Pol. II 5 1262b38), institutions, measures, and laws (Pol. II 7 1267a18, II 8 1268b9–10) or “the order of the laws” (Pol. II 10 1271b30–32). In that sense, legislators are the producers of those laws and constitutions (Pol. II 12 1273b32– 33). From another perspective, legislative activity mimics productions in how it treats the material (hylê) on which it exercises its craft (see Section  3.2). The material of the city is, strictly speaking, the “multitude of human beings” inhabiting it (Pol. VII 4). The legislator is, initially,

58  Straddling Borders: The Legislator not responsible for the quality of that material, for the same reasons for which doctors are not responsible for the health of a patient they treat for the first time. The material is somehow pregiven, as if it were external to the activity itself: the citizens “place themselves in the hands of their legislator, having been already well prepared [proôdopepoiêmenous]” for the sort of constitution that suits them best (Pol. II 9 1270a4–5). Or, people should have in each case a specific “sort of nature . . . if they are going to be easily handled [euxeirêtous] by the legislator” (Pol. VII 13 1332b8–9). The P-legislator should know which sort of nature is suitable for which sort of constitution, as sculptors know the resistance and malleability of the materials they work with. P-legislators’ idiosyncrasy as craftsmen seems to lie only in the width of the space left for their intervention—that is, in that they display a maximal transformative power over the material at their disposal. Though not able to completely transform or recreate it, they can use education—i.e. the transformative power of reason over nature and habits, as described in Pol. VII 13 1332b5–8—to implement great changes and, hence, to “establish” the citizens so they are of a certain sort (Pol. II 7 1267b5–8, II 9 1271a14– 15). Books VII and VIII of the Politics are at pains to figure out how such aspirations can actually be fulfilled. In a word, the legislator is expected to establish (Pol. VII 13 1332a29) whatever necessary prerequisites for the happiness of a particular city have not been already secured by nature or luck. The Normative Priority of Legislation as an Action over Legislation as a Production And then we seem to have been led to a standoff: if a legislator’s activity is so strongly marked by its productive-like or craft-like features, and given that productions and actions are two different kinds of things,15 how is it possible to keep regarding the legislator as a genuine A-legislator—that is, as a political agent proper? In order to show that legislating is a political action in the narrow sense of the term, there is no need to deny that constitutions and laws are, indeed, artifacts. One should only explain that they are artifacts of a very peculiar or “strange” kind: artifacts that are primarily the outcome of political actions and practical reasoning.16 To begin with, the function of the excellent legislator concerns the establishment of a political community that has, as far as possible, “a share in good living and in happiness” (Pol. VII 2 1325a9–10). In other words, excellent legislators need to know what happiness consists in (Pol. VII 13) and their function essentially consists in “determining . . . what the end of the best way of living is” (Pol. VII 14 1333a15–16). Let us call it the normative priority of legislation as an action over legislation as a production.17

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  59 It is not only that the legislator should possess the practical knowledge of what happiness truly consists in; in addition, constitutions and laws must be able to communicate that very knowledge and its principles to legislation’s addressees. And in Aristotle’s framework, these addressees are not only some officials charged with the technical and bureaucratic application of the law but the whole community of citizens, since the constitution embodies the ground of their education and life. What is more, Aristotle stresses that—at least, in the case of good cities—the very function of constitutions and laws remains incomprehensible as long as the citizens cannot directly associate it with a particular understanding of happiness.18 True, all human productive activities and their respective ends are teleologically explained by their being dependent on more architectonic ones and finally on practical science itself. Nevertheless, in order to recognize a good bow, for instance, one only needs to know the criteria of its fulfilling its function, without knowing anything about happiness itself. Constitutions and laws make no space for such a remote relation with happiness, since their function is precisely to establish the city’s and citizens’ happy life. Hence, it would be odd to say that legislating coincides with a certain craft-knowledge since, by definition, the latter lacks any access to happiness—that is, at any rate, why craft-knowledge must be obedient to practical wisdom and to political science (I 2 1094a18ff.).19 A  productive knowledge of happiness is inconceivable; instead, as we shall see in the next section, the activity of the excellent A-legislator is guided by legislative practical wisdom. Furthermore, the productive or craft-like connection between legislative activity and its material does not make the legislator an outlier since it pervades all forms of political activity. That is why, in Politics VII, the legislator and the politikos of Tagespolitik alike rely on nature or luck to provide them with the suitable matter: “For just as other craftsmen . . . must also be supplied with matter [hylê] suitable for the work, . . . so too a politician and a legislator must be supplied with proper matter in a suitable condition” (Pol. VII 4 1325b41–26a5). The same pertains to every branch of political practical wisdom, household management and everyday politics included.20 More importantly, the normative priority of legislating as a practical activity is mirrored in its peculiar imperatival character. For its imperatives are fulfilled by the political actions of the rulers and the ruled while, for instance, the orders of the architectonic builder are fulfilled by the productive activities of workers or other craftsmen. Indeed, constitutions and laws only remain in existence as long as they embody practical principles internalized within and actualized by the political actions of the rulers and the ruled (Pol. IV 1 1289a15–18).21 Although the people in the city serve as both the matter by reference to which the legislator selects the most suitable constitutional form and as the constitution’s addressees,

60  Straddling Borders: The Legislator they primarily serve as agents who, in the eyes of the A-legislator, should be appropriately shaped by the constitution so that they internalize and endorse its imperatives and norms. Citizens are not like the users of a newly constructed house who have been shaped as users independently of the process of that house’s construction. For similar reasons, neither are they just participants in a preexistent social practice which occupies a peripheral sphere of their lives, into which they enter more or less capriciously and which does not account for their understanding of happiness. They actualize constitutions and laws by means of their political activities, they do not use them. A constitution does not serve, then, as a means to further political actions in the city or as an artifact to be later used as some malleable material. It represents the “form” that determines the city’s kind and identity (Pol. III 3 1276b1–11), “a certain ordering” of that city itself (Pol. III 1 1274b38), or its “way of life [bios]” (Pol. IV 11 1295a40–b1). Legislating a constitution and laws are thus political actions, not productions. For they establish or exemplify a way of life, displaying recognition of the starting-points of happiness and ethical virtue that are suitable for this particular city. In other words, legislation contributes to the realization of the potentiality inherent in human beings themselves (in terms of natural virtue and rational nature), not to the production of artifacts that lie outside the human soul. And the political activities of the rulers and the ruled taking place within a certain constitution or under certain laws do not serve further or different ends beyond those built into the constitution and the laws. Constitutions, laws, and decrees are integral to everyday political activities themselves as their form, not external to them; they are primarily something doable in action, not a craft-­product.22 Hence, the normative priority of their practical character consists in that their goodness is immanent in the goodness of citizens’ actions. [T2]: Legislative activity is genuinely practical—that is, its practical aspect enjoys normative priority over its productive aspect. The Peculiar Time-Frame of Legislative Activity To avoid relegating legislative activity to the status of a productive activity (on the false presumption that its outcome instantiates a mere craft-product), but without evading the aforementioned perplexities, we should regard it as a sui generis sort of political action. And this is partially due to its temporality, or time-frame. As a matter of fact, although it is possible to imagine someone exercising both legislative action and actions of everyday politics, Aristotle’s legislator—always a single person in distinction to the deliberative part of the city—is from the beginning to the end of the Politics a shadowy person, not someone participating in Tagespolitik. Let me add some

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  61 further remarks to elaborate on this distinction about which there is a general consensus.23 I  want to stress the fact that, in Aristotle’s framework, the distinction between the legislator and the active political ruler is unavoidable.24 In a nutshell, the distinction is required by the program of Aristotle’s Politics itself, albeit not by the program of the Ethics. The latter is static in that it takes for granted that we are in a good city with an already established constitution: the legislator is a mature and practically wise person who already possesses legislative practical wisdom; to become a legislator is possible thanks to the education obtained within an existent excellent constitution. The former is dynamic: the first legislator is the first founder of a city, the prôtos sustêsas, “the person who first put [a political community] together” (Pol. I 2 1253a30), whose presence is presupposed before the city exists. Likewise, the excellent legislator is or will be the first founder—after many failed attempts that progressively led the practice of legislating to becoming a true science—of an excellent constitution before any such constitution and its educational program is actually established. Aristotle is fully aware of the sort of circularity involved in the action of establishing a city: “justice [dikaiosunê] is something political. For the administration of justice [dikê] is an organization belonging to a political community, and the administration of justice is judgment/discernment of what is just [dikaiou krisis]” (Pol. I  2 1253a37–39; see also Pol. III 2 1275b32–34). The argument goes as follows: (1) to establish a city amounts to establishing a constitution and a legal system, or a sort of order; (2) such an order necessarily implies the implementation of an administration or institution of justice, too; (3) the institution of justice is what makes the citizens just by allowing them to acquire the ethical state of justice and the capacity to correctly judge particular actions and deeds.25 Hence, the great mystery is how the first founder of the city was able to implement true justice without having enjoyed the privilege of being a citizen of a city promoting and teaching such a conception of justice. Be that as it may, the legislator—but not the active political man of Tagespolitik—is in action before the emergence of the city. The legislator is not active within the city and its political life. The example of Solon as presented in the Athenian Constitution is telling in this regard. Initially, Solon is praised for displaying noble ethical states as long as he was in the city of Athens and had to struggle with the different interests of different classes (Ath. Con. VI 3). He is, however, praised far more enthusiastically and extensively for his “leaving the city” (apodêmia), since living abroad seems to be the only possible escape for a legislator who wants to avoid compromising the constitution or becoming an enemy of the citizens (Ath. Con. XI 1–XIII 1).26 The crucial thing is that leaving the city is perfectly compatible with being an excellent legislator, but it is not an option available to the political rulers since, qua rulers, they cannot relinquish their political status as citizens

62  Straddling Borders: The Legislator who undertake the alternate roles of the ruler and the ruled. The city can function perfectly after the legislator abandons it—but not after the active political ruler does. The “death” of the legislator, so to speak, is also presupposed in the Nicomachean Ethics, to the extent that the deliberative life of the city and the very practice of decrees are only meaningful on condition that, to paraphrase Roland Barthes’ final words in “La mort de l’auteur,” “the birth [of decrees] must be ransomed by the death of [the legislator]”: decrees constitute a rectification of the universal law and are genuine and correct only if they “pronounce what the legislator himself would have pronounced had he been present and would have put into his law had he known about the case” (V 10 1137b22–24).27 No doubt, contrary to Barthes, Aristotle’s idea is that the intention of the legislator or the spirit of the constitution are actually preserved and almost transparent—and are so thanks to the legislator’s not meddling with everyday politics. For if the legislators were to stay in the city to translate or interpret their own work, they would be no less vulnerable to the temptations of everyday politics than any political man or judge, even the most excellent ones (Pol. 1287a31–32). The death of the legislator and the time-frame of legislative activity are two sides of the same coin.28 The Rhetoric and the Politics plainly vindicate the prior suggestions. For they represent the legislator as someone who has no need to wield political authority correctly; to confront eventual personal involvements, interests, and appetites; to abstain from one-sided class interests; or to favor friends and disfavor the others. The legislator can be an outsider invited to design or rectify the law system of an actual city or to establish a city in the process of genesis—as the first founder of a city did (Pol. I 2 1253a30). There is no requirement for the legislator to be a citizen of that city or to live or have ever lived in it, to abide by its ingrained ethical beliefs, or to be willing to forge relations of friendship and mutual recognition with its citizens (Pol. II 12 1273b27–34). The legislators might not even wish to live in the constitution they nonetheless think best for these people. By contrast, the difficulty of being a ruler in the city and its actual political life resides in the normative demand that the ruler’s private advantage be subordinated to the common good. In Politics III 7, the correct balance between private and common advantage, and even the sort of choices made by the rulers with regard to their personal life, constitutes the main criteria for the very distinction between correct and deviant constitutions. No such balancing is demanded of the legislators, but not because they are allegedly fully impartial political actors or strange mavericks, as if they were incarnating an ossified law and did not possess any “passionate element [pathêtikon]” or were an “understanding without desire” (respectively: Pol. III 15 1286a18 and III 16 1287a32). Aristotle is rather suggesting that, even though the legislators are not free from personal commitments or immune to desires, the circumstances of their

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  63 activity are such that, for the most part, temptations to satisfy their private advantage do not occur and hence do not undercut their commitment to political truth—I will revisit this issue in Section 2.4.29 Undoubtedly, this is also the rationale of Rhetoric I 1 where the legislator is opposed to the jurors and assemblymen who “are actually judging about present and definite issues, in relation to which they already feel both love and hatred, and with which their own private advantage is already knitted together” (Rh. I 1 1354b6–9). Thus, the political activity of legislating, in contradistinction to the functions of the jurors and the assemblymen, is not about things that risk affecting legislators’ personal advantage—their pleasure or pain—and thereby worsen their capacity to correctly perform their function in line with practical truth. To use the vocabulary introduced in Chapter 1, it comes as no surprise that, in the Rhetoric, a legislator’s political action seems to constitute a sort of judgment. Although legislators are not, in fact, merely judges but doers of political actions, their not dirtying their hands with everyday politics makes them look that way.30 [T3]: The time-frame of legislators’ activity is such that, for the most part, it does not interfere with their personal life in the city; therefore, though it is practical, it looks like a productive activity or a mere judgment.

2.2 The Legislator’s Practical Wisdom (Nicomachean Ethics VI 8) [T1], [T2], and [T3] refute the common misunderstandings of legislators’ function and shed enough light on it to help us realize that their activity, even though they somehow gravitate toward being political theorists or producers, is genuinely practical and action oriented. VI 8 fully confirms these findings, for it shows how sensitive Aristotle is to the corrosive consequences of any restrictive account of legislating that attempts to convert it into a non-practical function of human reason. The only problem is that Aristotle’s condensed and abstruse argument in VI 8 has led interpreters to unending misconceptions of that function! A Close Reading of NE VI 8 Politics [politikê] and practical wisdom are the same state but their being is not the same. Of the practical wisdom31 concerned with the city, the architectonic part is legislative science [nomothetikê], while the part concerned with particulars has the name common to both—“politics.” This part is practical and deliberative, since a decree is doable in action [prakton], as the last thing. That is why only these people are said to take part in politics [politeuontai],

64  Straddling Borders: The Legislator since only they do things in just the way handicraftsmen do. It also seems that the practical wisdom concerned with oneself as an individual is most of all practical wisdom, and it is this that has the name common to all the sorts. Of the other sorts, one is household management, another legislative science [nomothesia], another politics, and, of the latter, one part is deliberative and the other judicial. (VI 8 1141b23–33) The passage needs substantial unpacking. First, it is important to register that its topic is neither the varieties of practical wisdom nor its political aspects. VI 8 aims at further elucidating a crucial statement made some lines before: “Nor is practical wisdom knowledge of universals only. On the contrary, it must also know particulars. For it is practical, and action is concerned with particulars” (VI 7 1141b14–16). Now there are plenty of reasons why one might fail to grasp the full meaning of this statement: one might not clearly understand what sort of universals are implied in practical wisdom or why universals are necessary components of practical knowledge in the first place, since practical wisdom is practical and, hence, strongly and essentially attached to particulars, not to universals. Or one might have a mistaken view about what renders something a particular in the practical sphere; for instance, one might confuse particularity with practical wisdom’s being allegedly confined in the prison of our personal interests or well-being, as if particularity were co-extensive with, or reducible to, individuality. To forestall these sorts of misunderstandings, Aristotle inserts an incisive amendment. We should, he says, broaden the meaning of the term “practical wisdom” so that the notion applies to four different sorts of practical knowledge or practical wisdom: (1) a narrow, so to say, practical wisdom concerned with oneself as an individual (henceforth: N-practical wisdom), (2) household management, (3) legislation, and (4) politics in the narrow sense of Tagespolitik (henceforth: N-politics), which is further bifurcated into (4a) the deliberative and (4b) the judicial part. One can hardly overestimate the significance of this terminological clarification: all these sorts of practical knowledge, instantiating somehow independent branches of practical wisdom itself,32 are expected to meet the critical requirement stated prior: they should—by definition— encompass both knowledge of universals and knowledge of particulars. Otherwise, they would not constitute forms of true practical knowledge at all or they would not constitute practical knowledge. Hence, Stewart’s reconstruction of Aristotle’s argument, as it is illustrated in Figure 2.1, proves to be accurate.33 “Legislation,” or legislative practical wisdom, is the most challenging and, at the same time, revelatory case. The prior passage from VI 8 heightens the perplexity by making the reader assume, at least provisionally or

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  65

practical wisdom as a a true state involving reason, a practical one, concerned with what is good or bad for a human being

N-Practical Wisdom

Household Management

Legislation

N-Politics

Figure 2.1 

frivolously, that legislation deals only with universals, not with particulars. Only N-politics, Aristotle seems to say, is about particulars. This allegedly Aristotelian tenet is what Stewart, Gauthier and Jolif, Greenwood, and many others evoke in order to validate their interpretation of the legislator as a T-legislator—a moral philosopher who is exclusively preoccupied with universals. For if, so the argument goes, legislators are not concerned with particulars, then it would be false to say that their knowledge belongs to them as doers of political actions proper. Ancient commentators have fallen victim to the same trap and have made of legislative knowledge something like a political theory dictating rules intended to guide particular political actions. To them, legislating does not represent a “political action [prattein politikôs],” and legislators are not “active in politics [politeuesthai].”34 At first glimpse, indeed, Aristotle makes three claims. First, legislative science is exclusively about universals while only N-politics is about particulars. Thus, so one commonly says, Aristotle simply alludes to the well-known opposition between the universality of the law and the particularity of decrees. Second, legislative science has nothing to do with actions in the strict sense of the term. Third, legislative science is neither practical nor deliberative. But the meaning of “legislative science” at this juncture (that is, in 1141b25) is highly ambiguous. For these three claims would be, from Aristotle’s own point of view, nothing but untenable if they were to concern legislative practical wisdom (that is, the nomothesia appearing in 1141b32).35 We already know why: [T1] and [T2] have demonstrated that legislative practical wisdom has both a universalist and a particularist aspect and that legislators accomplish particular political actions by establishing, each time, a particular constitution or law system, and, in order to do so, they deliberate as anyone dealing with particulars unavoidably does. By introducing legislative practical wisdom, VI 8 strengthens [T1] in the most unambiguous way. For legislative practical wisdom necessarily possesses two branches, both universalist and particularist knowledge. It denotes the intellectual practical state of the excellent A-legislators that

66  Straddling Borders: The Legislator enables them to correctly and reliably accomplish the political action of legislating. Thus, there can be no doubt that legislative practical wisdom, though not identical with N-politics, is both practical and deliberative.36 Besides, Aristotle’s clause in VI 8 is as utterly dialectical as it can be: “That is why only these people are said to take part in politics, since only they do things in just the way handicraftsmen do.” The proviso “are said to” and the pejorative simile evoking handicraftsmen are suggestive of his not being committed to what he says—what he is really committed to will become plain in a moment. And it would be biased to assume that the dialectical spirit of Aristotle’s sayings affects only the reference to N-politics and to politicians as handicraftsmen while, in the same clause, the notion of legislative science emerges intact and conveys Aristotle’s own view. Ironically, politeuontai, the activity here reserved only for handicraftsmen politicians and allegedly denied to legislators, is attributed in Pol. II 12, as we saw, to legislators themselves! A way out of the problem would be to assume that the legislative science mentioned in 1141b25 is not the legislative practical wisdom appearing seven lines below. This is indeed the correct answer to the conundrum, but its accuracy depends on how exactly we stage things. To start with, we should reveal the dialectical character of the passage and begin our inquiry by identifying the people Aristotle is addressing and the views they are proponents of. In the present case, the addressees are those who believe that political action and political knowledge just consist in a capacity to issue decrees, as if politicians were handicraftsmen—that is, people who may lack any sort of universal knowledge and yet are politically effective and serve the advantage of the city. Obviously, this does not correspond to Aristotle’s conception of political practical wisdom, of N-politics, since, to him, the excellent political ruler should necessarily possess political science and so knowledge of universals. Likewise, the knowledge guiding legislative action also includes, as we saw, both a universalist and a particularist component and, as an independent branch of practical wisdom, needs nothing beyond itself to fulfill its particularist function. More importantly, Aristotle’s addressees are those who endorse a division of political labor, as if the politicians themselves were not required to also possess universal knowledge or as if someone were to function as a good politician just by relying on an already existing constitutional and law order. The very names of the addressees are not unknown to us: they are, on the one hand, the new politicians (like Cleon, Anytus, and Cleophon) and, on the other, Isocrates, the famous Athenian orator. Both also figure as the targets of Aristotle’s polemic in X 9; suggestively, the relevant discussion in X 9 starts with a reference to VI 8 (X 9 1180b30–31).37 I will discuss Isocrates in the next section. For the moment, it is enough just to quote his main tenet: legislating and everyday politics “are not . . . the function of the same thought [dianoias]” (Antidosis 83). Addressing these interlocutors in VI 8, Aristotle makes a modest point, the only one

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  67 he needs for the sake of the present argument: even if “your” politicians, Isocrates, are just dealing with particulars (for instance, decrees), their action is not possible unless it occurs within a certain constitution or law frame, and the latter is what people call legislation. And this is, by nature, something universal and hence the object of a science—i.e. of legislative science (and not of a mere accumulation of laws tested in the past). Without such (correct) universals, no political particular action is correct, good, or advantageous, except by accident. It is crucial, however, to underline that Aristotle does not adopt this false bifurcation of labor. To him, there is, first, nothing that corresponds to politics as a mere compound of two independent functions or kinds of knowledge—namely, established laws and everyday handicraft-like political action—and second, there is also nothing that corresponds to politics as a compound of legislative practical wisdom and N-politics that should allegedly occupy, respectively, the universalist and the particularist positions of this compound, since they themselves constitute independent sub-branches of practical wisdom and hence each of them is endowed, on its own, with a universalist and a particularist aspect. The only compound whose particularist part is everyday politics is nothing other than N-politics itself. Defending Aristotle’s Claims in NE VI 8 Arendt’s comment on VI 8 is typical of the misinterpretations commentators find themselves trapped in: The Greeks did not count legislating among the political activities. . . . To them, legislating and the execution of decisions by vote are the most legitimate political activities because in them men “act like craftsmen”: the result of their action is a tangible product, and its process has a clearly recognizable end. There is no longer or, rather, not yet, action (praxis), properly speaking, but making (poiêsis). And Arendt adds the following footnote: “For [the legislators] alone act like craftsmen [cheirotechnoi]” because their act has a tangible end, an eschaton, which is the decree passed in the assembly (psêphisma) (Nicomachean ethics, 1141b29). (Arendt 1958: 194–195) Arendt’s analysis does not stand up to scrutiny. It represents a clear reversal of almost everything Aristotle actually says. For, in VI 8, legislating is not the same sort of activity as decision-making in the assembly, legislators are differentiated from and not identified with handicraftsmen, and prakton, albeit a last thing, is not identical with the product of crafts. And

68  Straddling Borders: The Legislator the source of all these errors of hers is that she sees in Aristotelian legislative activity something like the construction of (constitutional) walls around the city, walls that determine and circumscribe once and for all the political character of the city. The contingency of constitutions and their perseverance, their dependence on luck, the unpredictable claims raised by different parts of the city, and, even more dramatically, the dependence of the very existence of any constitution on the wish of the citizens, all these elements testifying to the authentically political character of legislative activity, are what Arendt remains blind to. In reality, she attributes to the Romans the notion of legislation that she fails to find in Aristotle.38 The very same deep-seated prejudice may be spotted, or so I believe, underlying Rancière’s sophisticated attack on Aristotle’s political philosophy as “para-politics” in his La Mésentente (1995). In essence, Rancière accuses Aristotle of identifying true “political activity”—the ever new and heterogeneous manifestation of claims by those who are not counted as worthy of being viewed and listened to but who demand to be politically recognized as a part of the city—with “the order of police,” that is to say, the web of processes by which one establishes the organization of powers, the distribution of political functions, etc. (51–57). Thus, for Rancière, only political claims against the established distribution of political functions count as “activity.” By contrast, Aristotelian legislators are nothing other than the ones implanted by Arendt: “the philosopher, as savant and artist, legislator and reformer” (110). Thus, the legislator is again portrayed as the possessor of philosophical knowledge and craft-like skills, not as the possessor of true political practical wisdom. In Rancière’s terms, the legislator is something like a policeman. Rancière’s framework has no place for Aristotle’s legislator at all. For it takes for granted that ancient Greek political thought is grounded in a clear-cut distinction between the “politics of the politicians” and the “politics of philosophers” (11). No matter how well suited this distinction may be to describe, for instance, Socrates’ claims in Plato’s Gorgias, it overlooks the idiosyncrasy of Aristotle’s legislator, who represents, in fact, a third type: the possessor of legislative practical wisdom is neither a merely theoretical philosopher nor a handicraftsman politician but a political actor nevertheless. This amounts to a subversion of Rancière’s initial hypothesis that political philosophy “tries to get rid of politics” or “suppress [the] scandal” of politics (15). The Sub-Branches of Practical Wisdom Some crucial conclusions about the open question (see Chapter 2, n32) of how the four sub-branches of practical wisdom relate to one another come now to the surface. The universalist knowledge possessed by those everyday politicians who exhibit true political knowledge in managing issues of Tagespolitik

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  69 (those who possess N-politics) is not identical to the legislative practical wisdom, or “legislation,” to which Aristotle assigns a stance next to N-politics (see Figure  2.1). What the person who possesses N-politics actually possesses is the universalist knowledge which is common to all the four sub-branches of practical wisdom. This universalist component is again called “legislative science.” But although the same universalist component is shared by the four sub-branches of practical wisdom, their particularist components diverge since their activities, the particulars they deal with, and the sort of experience (empeiria) underlying the relevant knowledge diverge, too.39 Despite the obscurity of the passage from VI 8 and the aporetic stance of the Eudemian Ethics, and despite also the legomena that take it for granted that one and the same person is necessarily competent in both N-politics and household management,40 Aristotle’s considered view throughout the Politics, as it is announced in the very first lines of the treatise, runs as follows: “Now those who think41 that the positions of politician, king, household manager, and master [of slaves] are the same, are not correct” (Pol. I 1 1252a7–9). This programmatic claim draws a distinction between, on the one hand, political knowledge and, on the other, kingship and household management in their mirroring of one another.42 Besides, in several places in the Politics, Aristotle emphasizes that household management taken together with mastership is intrinsically different from political practical wisdom, for “the rule of a master and the rule of a politician are not the same” (Pol. I 7 1255b16–17). The reason is that the kinds of relationships between rulers and ruled in these two cases, as well as the pertinent kind of community, are completely heterogeneous. As a consequence, nothing in the definition of household management imposes that its possessor should also possess N-politics and the other way around, though both of them share the same universalist knowledge. The Nicomachean Ethics advocates the same conception but from another perspective (X 9 1180b3–16): though the excellent particularized education given within the confines of the household and the excellent city-wide education are grounded in the same universalist component (namely, legislative science), the pupils involved in each case and the experience required to achieve familiarity with them are different. More specifically, though there are important analogies (for instance, the strength of paternal reasons and advice within the household parallels the strength of laws and habits in the cities), there are important dissimilarities, too (for instance, only parental education involves kinship, affection, and, by consequence, pupils’ readiness to obey). The particularist experiencebased knowledge in these two spheres of practical life is largely divergent. The same holds true more broadly: to possess one of the sub-branches of practical wisdom does not require possessing them all for the simple reason that it might happen that you do not have experience of the pertinent particulars—for instance, in the city where you are living, there

70  Straddling Borders: The Legislator might be no opportunity for you to undertake political rule or legislating. It is true that, for the most part, there is no way for the Athenian and mature male citizens to escape from having experience in managing both their own affairs and their household, and, hence, if they are to be practically wise at all, they should necessarily also possess N-practical wisdom and the household-relevant practical wisdom. Nothing, however, implies that to have those two, they should also possess, for instance, legislative practical wisdom itself, in that matters of legislation require, as we shall see, a very specific experience far beyond the everyday activities associated with the other sub-branches of practical wisdom. It is also worth pointing out that the kinds of experience (empeiria) proper to these four branches of practical wisdom are structurally disparate, for the distance or gap between particulars and universals is not necessarily of the same width in all of them. For one thing, political science provides us—for instance, in Pol. VII—with a much more precise theoretical account of political particulars than the schematic account offered by the Nicomachean Ethics of the components of morally relevant actions (who, when, why, by what means, etc.).43 Hence, one is entitled to assume that the “moral perception” exercised by the practically wise people regarding their own actions has, for the most part, a tremendously open and ambiguous terrain of particulars to factor in while the “legislative perception” exercised by the legislator can much more substantially rely on the universal knowledge concerning the sort of constitution-relevant particulars. For instance, finding out which is the correct size for a particular city may prove to be a more theory-laden enterprise than finding the mean in questions of courage or everyday justice. Contrariwise, in each one of these sub-branches, we can acquire legislative science by first acquiring a somehow different sort of experience dealing with different sorts of particulars. So let me propose a new reconstuction of Aristotle’s argument as it is illustrated in Figure 2.2:

Variations of Practical Wisdom N-Practical Wisdom

Particularist Components

Universalist Component

Figure 2.2 

My Own Actions

Household Management

Legislation

Matters of Household

Legislative Science

Constitutions and Laws

N-Politics

Everyday Politics

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  71 Figure 2.2 illustrates two principles: first is the multiple-accessibility principle, the idea that “legislative science” as the universalist component of practical wisdom is accessible on the basis of each one of the different particularist or experiential components of the four subbranches. Thus, one can attain legislative science as the universalist component of practical wisdom, all things being equal, thanks to the appropriate education and the appropriate experience, be it experience regarding our own actions, matters of household, everyday political decisions, or legislative activities. Second is the irreducibility principle, the idea that the particularist components of the four sub-branches of practical wisdom are different in kind and hence nobody can acquire one of the sub-branches without also having the specific experience that is proper to it. Two Senses of Legislative Science To take the last step in this exploration, the political or legislative science explored in Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics— ­ granted that, as it is written down in these treatises, it represents only a knowledge of universals and of the kinds of relevant particulars—does not coincide with practical wisdom.44 It only overlaps with, without being identical to, the universalist knowledge—also called “legislative s­cience”—which is common to all the sub-branches of practical ­wisdom. The overlapping is only partial because these two types of knowledge involve, at least, two important divergences which are impossible to eliminate. (1) The universalist knowledge embedded in practical wisdom is a component of a truly practical and twofold knowledge, not an independent body of a universalist knowledge such as the knowledge embodied by the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics themselves. The latter only have a theoretical grasp on the kinds of particulars one should factor in, without having to deal with those particulars themselves. By contrast, legislative practical wisdom and N-politics deal with these very particulars and deliberate about them; their common universalist component serves their very practical and particular-oriented function.45 In other words, to write the Nicomachean Ethics or the Politics, the political scientist hardly needs to exercise the right perception (aisthêsis) or the subtle capacity of decency (epieikeia) to deal with particulars. (2) The Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics exhibit and incorporate their starting-points as starting-points about matters that hold for the most part (hôs epi to polu), and, in that sense, they also hold for the most part or in outline. Nevertheless, they do not take this to mean that their starting-points are unstable and changeable, as if, for instance, another theoretical treatise could yield a new or different definition of happiness or ethical virtue. With practical wisdom things are different: although the good deliberate choices of the practically wise person are steadily

72  Straddling Borders: The Legislator grounded in the same solid starting-points, they incorporate or accommodate them in the major premise of ever new deliberate choices, deliberations, and practical syllogisms, and so on, made by a particular person at the moment of ever new actions in every new circumstance. Thus, though solid in themselves, the starting-points stand, from practical wisdom’s perspective, on a moving vehicle—that is, on the ever new deliberate choices—and hence they are seen as moving, too. In other words, the practically wise people inescapably experience starting-points in a twofold way: (a) each time they—mostly without any effort or deliberation but just by being the kind of person they are—put these starting-points in the major premise directing their new particular actions, (b) the startingpoints are each time specified or filled in with precision according to the demands of the present action. [T4]: Legislative science and legislative practical wisdom are not identical. The former denotes two different, though largely overlapping, things: either the political science exhibited in Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics or the universalist component that is common to the four sub-branches of practical wisdom. Legislative practical wisdom denotes the specific sub-branch of practical wisdom that belongs to the excellent A-legislator, not to the writer of political treatises or handbooks.46

2.3 The Experience of the Would-Be Legislator (Nicomachean Ethics X 9) [T1], [T2], and [T4] consolidate the idea that legislating is neither a productive nor a merely theoretical activity but a political action proper that generates political entities and is guided by both a universalist and a particularist knowledge which, taken together, constitute the two components of legislative practical wisdom. Its particularity is due, [T3], to the idiosyncrasy of the legislator’s activity, whose time-frame is such that the activity is not enmeshed in everyday politics; hence, it is hypothesized that legislators are not concerned with their own private advantage either. The aggregate of the prior theses circumscribes an innovative and comprehensive account of Aristotle’s (excellent) legislator, legislative practical wisdom, and political science. Notwithstanding their coherence, however, [T1], [T2], and [T4] are in a certain tension with [T3]. For the former three, in light of VI 8, are grounded in the idea that legislative activity is excellent when it is guided by legislative practical wisdom while [T3], in line with VI 10 and the analysis of comprehension in Chapter 1, invites us to think of legislating as an activity supposedly taking place outside the ambit of deliberate choice and hence as requiring only comprehension and not necessarily

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  73 practical wisdom. But the comprehension of VI 10 is about judgment, not about actions, while legislating, so I  argued, constitutes a political action proper. In consequence, the notion of comprehension introduced in VI 10 should not be carelessly applied to legislative activity, at least not without some qualifications.47 More importantly, could the excellent legislator be, as excellent spectators proved to be, a merely self-controlled person and not necessarily, as VI 8 submits, a practically wise one? The very last section of the Nicomachean Ethics promises to resolve all these issues by stating, articulating, and answering the question of “from what sources [pothen] and in what way [pôs] someone might become nomothetikos” (X 9 1180b29).48 It is against the lesson of X 9 that we should test the cogency and philosophical depth of all our previous claims. In X 9 Aristotle conjures up the three patterns we teased out prior: a T-legislator possessing universal knowledge (X 9 1180b20–23); a P-legislator, as suggested here by the analogy with doctors and medicine (X 9 1181b2–6); and, primarily, an A-legislator as the political actor who generates political works (erga; X 9 1181a23). The legislator certainly possesses both a universalist and a particularist knowledge. The former is, again, called “legislative science” or “political science” (X 9 1180b29–32) and corresponds to the universalist compound of the legislator’s knowledge. The particularist knowledge of the legislator is, on its part, indisputably testified to by the critical and numerous references to experience (empeiria) and judgment (krisis, krinousin), for experience and judgment are about particulars. Hence, nothing seems to destabilize the portrait of the legislator already sketched. The only unexpected shift—if there is any—lies in that the last section of X 9 makes no reference whatsoever to legislative practical wisdom. Let us follow Aristotle’s argument. Any sort of knowledge proper— political or legislative science itself and practical wisdom included— should be grounded in experience. And the distinctness of any such knowledge is vindicated by its relying on its proper sort of experience (APr. I 30 46a17–22). There is, then, nothing mysterious in the fact that X 9, responding to the programmatic question “from what sources and in what way someone might become nomothetikos,” attempts to specify the sort of experience required in order for someone to become a legislator.49 It turns out, however, that the answer to the question is much more complicated than initially expected. And the main source of these perplexities is the very ambiguity of the term nomothetikos, which, like the term politikos, means two different things: either someone who possesses legislative science or someone who is good at legislating. Thus, for instance, Reeve 2014 (together with Irwin 1999 and Gauthier and Jolif 1970) translates this as “how someone might become competent in legislative science” and Crisp 2001 (together with Dirlmeier 1999) as “how one might acquire a capacity for legislation.” Either translation is

74  Straddling Borders: The Legislator accurate on condition that “capacity” and “legislative science” denote nothing else but legislative practical wisdom itself, neither the merely theoretical enterprise of Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics nor the universalist component belonging to all the four sub-branches of practical wisdom. Politicians and Their Experience Aristotle begins, in a dialectical way, by dismissing forms of experience that might appear to lead to competence in legislating. The first candidate is the experience possessed by the politicians who exercise everyday politics: From what sources and in what way someone might become competent in legislating? Or isn’t it, as in other cases, from politicians? For, as we saw, legislative science seems to be a part of politics . . . although it is the sophists who profess to teach it, it is practiced not by any of them but by politicians, and they seem to do so through some sort of ability and experience [tini empeiria[i]] rather than through thought. For it is evident that they neither write nor speak about such matters (and yet that would be a nobler thing, presumably, than to compose speeches for the law courts and the assembly), and, furthermore, it is evident that they have not made their own sons or any other friends of theirs into politicians either . . . experience does seem to make no small contribution, since otherwise people could not, through intimacy [sunêtheia] with politics, have become politicians. That is why those who seek to know about politics would seem to need experience in addition. (X 9 1180b28–81a9–12) This seemingly straightforward passage is very subtle and commonly misinterpreted. Politicians do really have, in contradistinction to the sophists, experience of practical/political matters. They certainly do not possess, according to the criteria established by Metaphysics I 1, political science itself since they cannot conceptualize, transmit, or teach their knowledge. In consequence, they do not possess N-politics either (i.e. practical wisdom in everyday politics). Aristotle, however, seems to suggest that politicians’ experience is the one required for becoming a legislator. Then, in light of Metaphysics I 1, one is tempted to reconstruct Aristotle’s argument as follows: though politicians do not yet possess political science and N-politics, their experience constitutes the appropriate and indispensable ground to build on in order for someone to become a legislator. Nonetheless, this unanimous interpretation50 is only half correct, for it neutralizes the antithesis between legislators and politicians and brushes off the clear signs pointing in a very different direction. To begin with,

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  75 one cannot fail to notice that Aristotle leverages the multivocality of the term “politicians”: the term can mean (a) the politicians handling everyday political matters without possessing N-politics, (b) politicians possessing N-politics, or (c) both the latter and the legislators as true politicians. Obviously, the prior passage uses the term in its first sense since it deprives the politicians of thought (dianoia) and instead treats them as the handicraftsmen we met in VI 8. Therefore, Aristotle contrasts them with the true legislators who are here presented as those who merely seek to know about politics, as if they were not themselves true politicians or authentic doers of political actions. We know by now that such a demarcation in no way expresses Aristotle’s considered view. It simply serves Aristotle’s present intention to oppose the handicraftsmen politicians to the sophists. Hence, I fully endorse Michael’s of Ephesus pertinent comment: “What Aristotle says he says unwillingly. For he himself says in the Politics that legislating is the work of the politician. What he says he says it out of contempt for the sophists” (CAG 20: 616.187r.6–8 Heylbut). Furthermore, one cannot also fail to notice that Aristotle heavily degrades the experience attributed to everyday politicians: first, the latter just consists of something like experience, for it is downgraded to a mere capacity without thought—that is, a dunamis that hardly approximates the cognitive achievements or the “intelligible objects” (ennoêmata) Aristotle associates with experience, i.e. with the dunamis praised in Met. I 1 for being “pretty much similar” to scientific knowledge. Second, the description of the politicians’ experience has derogatory connotations since it amounts merely to politikê sunêtheia—a certain intimacy with handicraftsmen’s politics.51 Third, it is the experience needed in order for someone to “become a politician”—that is, someone exercising, in the best case, N-politics in coping with everyday political issues, not to become a legislator! The passage ends with proposing a mere analogy: becoming a politician demands experience, which becoming a legislator also does. The analogy is very strong to the extent that the universalist compound of both legislative practical wisdom and N-politics is one and the same: namely, legislative science. Nevertheless, nothing necessitates that these two sub-branches of practical wisdom are grounded in the same sort of experience. Besides, we know that, throughout the Politics, Aristotle dissociates the legislator from the politicians who are active in Tagespolitik. If the time-frame and the stage of their respective activities are different, their experience can hardly be of one and the same sort. In a sense, the politicians’ deficiency is twofold: simply by exercising their intimacybased deliberative politics like handicraftsmen do, first, no politician has ever made the further step leading to legislative science, for none has surmised that such a science is a component of N-politics itself, and, second, no politician has ever become a true legislator, for none has realized that becoming a legislator demands a different sort of experience.

76  Straddling Borders: The Legislator Viewed from the perspective of someone aspiring to become a legislator, the politicians unavoidably remain locked in a stalemate. Isocrates and the Division of Politcal Labor The intimacy with political affairs acquired by everyday politicians shows, nonetheless, an important asset: it concerns political actions themselves. And this is a great advantage in comparison with those who contend that they are capable of teaching politics even though they have no intimacy with political actions at all but only with speeches and words. These are the so-called sophists who, so Aristotle claims, are non-starters from the beginning: Those of the sophists who profess to teach politics, however, are evidently a long way from teaching it, since on the whole they know nothing about what sort of thing it is or what sorts of things it is concerned with. For if they did, they would not have taken it to be the same as rhetoric, or even inferior to it, nor would they have thought legislating an easy matter for anyone who has collected together [sunagagonti] laws that enjoy a good reputation. (X 9 1181a12–17) We know the addressee of this quite acrimonious verdict: Isocrates. Aristotle repeats here, almost verbatim, Isocrates’ words from the Antidosis. There is an earlier reference to Isocrates some lines prior, where Aristotle says that it is better for politicians to write nothing “than to compose speeches for the law courts [dikanikos] and the assembly.” Besides the fact that Isocrates is the only orator who has used the term dikanikos,52 the sentence echoes Isocrates’ own way of voicing his confidence in the worth and particularity of his speeches: he boasts about his never having written speeches for minor private disputes (Ant 2), his being “inexperienced in contests of that kind” (Ant 26), and his having not lived “off the law courts and the assemblies” (OP 130).53 Unlike these orators and the new politicians as well as against those who profess various non-practical kinds of knowledge, Isocrates claims to be the writer of political speeches or discourses—a genuine educator or Nestor-like advisor for the sake of virtue and justice.54 This Isocrates—to whom Aristotle, quite improperly, ascribes the functions of an orator and a sophist, with all the pejorative overtones of those words, the very two functions that Isocrates himself was attributing with the same pejorative overtones to his own opponents, and never to himself—is the main target of the passage quoted earlier.55 Why does Isocrates appear as such a prominent rival at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics? And what exactly is the objection leveled against him? Besides the gossip about Isocrates being the main rival candidate for the position of Alexander’s teacher, and besides the impression that both

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  77 Aristotle and Isocrates were serving as consultants of kings and tyrants (it suffices to read the speech To Nicocles to realize how close it sounds to the sort of counseling service that Aristotle provides the tyrants with in Politics V 10–11), Isocrates shares, or even claims to be the inventor of, numerous ideas that are key notions of Aristotle’s practical philosophy. To focus only on the similarities that are pertinent to the discussion in X 9, let me point out five critical Points of Agreement (PA) between Aristotle and Isocrates, points that could hardly have escaped Aristotle’s own attention: (PA1) The demagogues and the orators in the law courts and the assembly are not entitled to profess “political discourse” (AS 9, 20) and not entitled to legislate either (Ant 315).56 (PA2) Experience (empeiria) is the sine qua non of someone’s acquiring genuine political knowledge. For such knowledge, no matter what sort of science is also required, is intrinsically bound to particulars (kath’hekasta): therefore, we need “experience” or “training in getting experience” (Ant 187–188, 296) to arrive at “combin[ing] the particulars” (Ant 184). Another Isocratic term denoting political particulars is kaina (Ant 83): what is new, resisting any anticipation on the basis of strict scientific rules, demands original discourses and arguments (kainous logous), something like the lead standard used in Lesbian building. It is noteworthy that here, as in Aristotle, the educated person distinguishes himself, among other things, by being competent in judging and evaluating, according to the right moment, the particulars that appear in different ways every single day (Pan 30). (PA3) In practical matters, the knowledge about how to treat particular issues is different from, though dependent on, a certain knowledge of universals: for instance, those who actually live close to the king Nicocles are well positioned to give him advice about “each particular action” (kath’hekastên tên praxin), while Isocrates will only attempt to “set forth in general [kath’holôn] the objectives and pursuits” that are proper to kingship (TNic 6). This amounts to saying that he will “properly encompass the essence of the whole thing [tou holou] in a general statement [en kephalaiois],” exercising a sort of political discourse which, again, is clearly opposed to advice about what is to be done in face of the incidents everyday politics deals with (TNic 9). And given that particulars are constantly associated with the new, Isocrates concludes that the general knowledge he professes is not about novelties: “In these sorts of discourse we need not seek novelties [kainotêtas], for in them it is not possible to say anything that is contrary to the common belief or hardly credible or outside the circle of accepted beliefs. But regard that person as being the most recognized who can collect the greatest number

78  Straddling Borders: The Legislator possible of ideas scattered among the thoughts of other people and present them in the best way” (TNic 41).57 (PA4) Genuine political knowledge about everyday politics, the knowledge of legislating, and the practical knowledge about our own individual life (a division that recalls the one in VI 8), albeit non identical with one another, constitute rational cognitive capacities emanating from a common source (Ant 180, 253–257; Nic 6–9)— that is, from a sort of excellence in exercising practical reason for the sake of virtue and justice (Ant 21, 67). (PA5) Politeia is the “soul of the city,” while the laws and the persons with public functions as well as the citizens “all necessarily resemble the politeia” (Ar 14). Like Aristotle, Isocrates is also ready to accept that the “politeia is the reason of whatever happens in the cities” (Pan 138). He is also very careful to dissociate not only the politeia from the laws but also laws from decrees. Like Aristotle again, he believes that the endless production of ever new decrees is detrimental to the life of the city and a sign of deteriorated governance because it creates incoherence and confusion and cultivates the false idea that the law is not a matter of ethical virtues and their internalization but just an obstacle to the increase of criminality (Pan 144; Ar 40–41; OP 50). It should be easier by now to see the core and the subtleties of the objection Aristotle levels against Isocrates. For we know what cannot count as such an objection in the first place. It would be biased and uncharitable to assume that Aristotle blames Isocrates for having claimed—pace PA1— that political discourse should be assimilated to forensic rhetoric; disregarded—pace PA2—the importance of experience in political matters; remained blind—pace PA3—to the distinction between particulars and universals; ignored—pace PA4—the distinction among politeia, laws, and decrees; or underestimated—pace PA5—the connection among politeia, ethical habits, and education. Isocrates is Aristotle’s target in X 9 precisely because the two somehow share a lot of beliefs, the very beliefs that sustain Aristotle’s own argument in X 9. Then, the rather unfriendly distortion of the meaning of sunagagonti put aside (which, in Isocrates’ text, means “combine” and refers to actual choices of particular laws and, in any case, not to the kind of collections Aristotle has in mind),58 Aristotle raises two objections. First, Isocrates commits a categorial mistake in that he completely ignores the nature of political matters. It is not just that he lacks political scientific knowledge (and, indeed, Isocrates altogether questions the possibility of such knowledge in Ant 263–268, 271 and Pan 28–30), but he also confuses words and advice about political matters with political actions themselves. As a matter of fact, he actually believes that the training in the art of something like an amalgam of deliberative and epideictic

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  79 speech will make people “contemplate” and familiarize themselves with the virtues of great men and that, in consequence, someone’s speaking about great actions will prompt his/her doing actions of the same sort (Ant 276–277). For he also believes that great political leaders (like Solon, Cleisthenes, Themistocles, and Pericles) can make critical political changes only to the extent that “the instrument of their agency is rhetoric.”59 However, as Aristotle points out in II 4 1105b11–18, this is a mere illusion. The Rhetoric, again within the context of political discourse, expresses this chain of thought with clarity: And to the extent that someone tries to establish dialectic or rhetoric not just as capacities but as sciences, to that extent he will—without noticing it—obscure their nature by the change, re-establishing them as sciences of certain underlying things, rather than only of arguments [logos]. Nonetheless, let us now discuss as much as it furthers the work to go through, while still leaving the investigation of the rest to the science of politics. (Rh. I 4 1359b12–18) Hence, Aristotle disagrees neither with Isocrates’ high respect for experience nor with the noble ends of his teaching but only controverts the view that experience in public speech guarantees, by itself, the acquisition of a deep understanding of political matters. The second objection is the most crucial one. Isocrates introduces a false division of political labor in that he presumes that legislative knowledge and everyday politics “are not . . . the function of the same thought [dianoias]” (Ant 83). He certainly does not dispute—see PA4—that both these functions originate in practical reason; his view is rather that they can be exercised independently of one another. And his tenet has the double effect we also encountered in VI 8: even though Isocrates would be willing to concede that N-politics is not restricted to a merely particularist knowledge, he does not see that its universalist component cannot be anything but legislative science itself. And even though he shares Aristotle’s view that the difficulty that is endemic to N-politics resides in the continually changing particulars and the ever new challenges that politicians are faced with, he questions the very existence of something like legislative practical wisdom. Isocrates disconnects, the first legendary founders excluded, the choice of laws from the decision about the kaina—that is, the political particulars.60 But the conflict lies even deeper due to their divergent notions of politeia. To Aristotle, the politeia is the constitution in the sense of the form of the city (Pol. III 3 1276b1–11) that regulates the order of justice and the distribution of power and the kind of life this city has: “the constitution is a sort of life of a city” (Pol. IV 11 1295a40–b1). The constitution itself determines the life of the city like a seed that evolves according to its nature.

80  Straddling Borders: The Legislator That “form” is produced and implemented in the city by the legislators, in a top-down direction, to the extent that they possess legislative practical wisdom. The well-chosen laws are just embodiments of the constitutions’ spirit (Pol. IV 1 1289a13–18; cf. this chapter, n6). Thus, it would be misleading to say that the constitution is the community itself of people whose laws those are; rather, it is the way in which the legislator organizes that community so as to strive for a certain end. Isocrates turns things upside down. When he says that a politeia is “the soul of the city” (Ar 14), he does not refer to something like a constitution established by the legislator. To him, a politeia amounts to the very habits of the citizens, their way of life, and their internalization of justice in a manner that allows cities with the same laws to display a different moral character or politeia: Nothing would impede all of the Hellenes from being of the same kind, since it is easy to take written codes from one another. But . . . achieving virtue does not come about from written codes but from the objectives and pursuits of every single day [kath’ekastên tên hêmeran] . . . for cities are not well governed thanks to decrees but thanks to [ethical] states. This is why the choice of laws is relegated to an inferior and easy task that is independent from N-politics and lacks the dignity of Aristotle’s legislative practical wisdom. (Ar 39–41; cf. Ant 293) To summarize, before Aristotle moves on to his next argument, the one presented in X 9 1181a17ff. regarding comprehension and legislative knowledge, he comes to terms with Isocrates’ notion of political experience in order to argue for the two critical theses we also encountered in the twin passage from VI 8: the irreplaceability of legislative science within N-politics wherein it occupies the position of universalist knowledge and the very existence of legislative practical wisdom itself. Legislative Practical Wisdom and Its Proper Experience Aristotle’s argument next segues into further clarifying legislative practical wisdom and its conditions of possibility: As if the selection [of laws] did not call for comprehension [sunesis], and correct discernment were not, as in matters of music,61 the greatest thing. For those with experience [empeiroi] in a particular area discern the works in it correctly and comprehend [suniasin]62 by what means or in what way they are brought to completion, and what is in tune with what, whereas those who lack experience [apeiroi] must be content not to have it escape them whether the work is well or badly made, as in the case of painting. But laws would seem to be the works [erga] of politics,

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  81 so how could someone become competent in legislative science, or discern which laws are best, from them, since it is evident that we do not become doctors from reading textbooks either? . . . But while these seem to be of benefit to experienced people [empeirois], to those who lack scientific knowledge [anepistêmosin] they seem useless. . . . Presumably, then, collections of laws and constitutions might also be of good use to people who are able to get a theoretical grasp on them and discern what is correctly done or the opposite, and what sorts of things fit with what. In those who go through them without being in this state, however, no correct discernment would be present, unless of course by chance, although they may become better comprehenders [eusunetôteroi] of them . . . and then, on the basis of the collection of constitutions, try to get a theoretical grasp on what sorts of things preserve and destroy cities, and what sorts preserve or destroy each sort of constitution, and what causes some cities to be well governed and others the opposite. (X 9 1181a15–1181b20) At first sight, things look pretty clear. Reading medical textbooks or collections of laws is not the same as acquiring or exercising the true knowledge of medicine and legislation. It might be enough in order to retrospectively evaluate the work done by doctors or legislators but not in order to produce that work by yourself. Such knowledge requires experience and not just a random acquaintance obtained in an indirect and passive way, for example, by reading textbooks.63 And genuine experience is not something easy to get but a cognitive achievement. Nevertheless, once we attempt to look past these general lines, Aristotle’s argument is puzzling. For there is much confusion in the way he uses the terms “experience” and “scientific knowledge,” “works” and “textbooks,” etc. As we shall see in a moment, our passage lets us wonder whether experience and scientific knowledge are one and the same thing, and the same holds true about the other two terms.64 To realize the perplexity, it is instructive to see how divergent the interpretations of the above passage are. A first and reasonable way out is to assume that the terms “experience” and “scientific knowledge” are here employed according to the well-known hierarchy of cognitive capacities exhibited in Met. I 1 and APo. II 19. Experience is a necessary preliminary step in order to attain scientific knowledge; the former cannot substitute for the latter, and the latter cannot be acquired without the former. Michael of Ephesus and Heliodorus emphasize that “even if experience is granted to them,” the would-be legislators need scientific knowledge in addition.65 Then, the true legislator is the one who possesses both experience and scientific knowledge. I  am very sympathetic to this reading for two important reasons: First, I  am skeptical about the attempts at mitigating the difficulty of the passage just by being given the license to assume that the prior terms do not keep their standard meaning. Second, making experience a constituent part of legislative knowledge is faithful

82  Straddling Borders: The Legislator to Aristotle’s intent to represent the “work” of legislative activity itself as nothing besides constitutions and laws. There is, however, a critical difficulty we should come in terms with—namely, that twice within ten lines of X 9, “experience” and “scientific knowledge” are merged, as if they were one and the same cognitive achievement. The first merging takes place when Aristotle asks, “How could someone become nomothetikos, or discern which laws are best . . . ?” He has just explained that discernment is a matter of experience and goes on to say that possessing legislative science—no matter how we translate nomothetikos—and experience-based discerning amount to the same thing. The second merging is even more palpable: “But while these seem to be of benefit to experienced people [empeirois], to those who lack scientific knowledge [anepistêmosin] they seem useless.” Here, again, it is assumed that the opposite of empeirois just is anepistêmosin, as if experienced people themselves were epistêmones—i.e. possessors of scientific knowledge. Thus, an interpretative link is missing to complement and probably enrich the reading of the ancient commentators. Many others have proposed a quite opposite and bold, albeit too costly, solution: if one takes for granted—pace my foregoing counterarguments—that acquiring legislative science presupposes the experience of being active in everyday politics, and if one also accepts that some people possess legislative science without having that experience, then it is only to be expected that one will arrive at the conclusion that they become good legislators despite their not having such an experience. And this may be further explained either by allusion to their unique intellectual grasp of matters of legislation that compensates for the lack of experience or by allusion to their experience as householders and private individuals and even to just their good upbringing, as if these things were enough to substitute for the missing political experience.66 This solution has too high costs: it deprives legislative science of its experiencegrounded practicality, wrongly assumes that the experience required for legislative practical wisdom is the very same one acquired for being active in everyday politics, and lays aside the technical meaning of experience as a sine qua non condition for achieving any scientific knowledge whatsoever. Then, in continuity with [T1] [T2] [T3], and [T4] as well as with the clarifications regarding the inadequacy of the experience of everyday politics for acquiring legislative practical wisdom and Aristotle’s important objections against Isocrates, there is room, or so I  believe, for a fresh interpretation of the aforementioned passage from X 9 along the following lines: it is impossible to become a legislator without also possessing the relevant experience. For legislative practical wisdom is practical in that it encompasses both universal knowledge and particularist knowledge and results in political works. And, notwithstanding the superiority of being experienced in everyday politics over being experienced in public

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  83 speech, the experience required for becoming a legislator is different from the former. Even though both legislative practical wisdom and N-politics regard political actions themselves and share the same universalist ­knowledge—namely, legislative science—their particularist components are different and, in consequence, the required experience, too. X 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, together with Politics VIII and Rhetoric I 4, explain the reason: the experience required for the would-be legislator is quite peculiar due to the fact that the works of legislators are constitutions and laws themselves, what I earlier dubbed hybrid entities. Therefore, the relevant experience should somehow embody a certain cognition of such high-order particular entities, of such hybrid intelligible objects (ennoêmata). Evidently, people possessing the pertinent experience are not legislators yet. But they are able to formulate a unified supposition (hypolêpsis) as follows: in that city, that was the means by which the constitution was brought to completion, and in that other one, similar means. The supposition put forward by the experienced person, provided that experience fulfills the condition of comprehensiveness,67 involves the reference to all the important elements one should factor in to appropriately describe the “that”—that is, the affinity between the particularity of constitutions, the particularity of the preconstitutional material, the particularity of laws, etc. For example, to take inspiration from the concluding lines of the Nicomachean Ethics, in that city (with such a land, such a number of citizens, such neighbors, etc.), that constitution preserved it, in the case of that other city, that similar one, etc. The experience of the would-be legislator also involves suppositions about negativities: in that city, those things destroyed it, in the case of that other city, those similar things did; or, in that city, that constitution led to faction, in that other, a similar one, and so on. The experience proper to legislative practical wisdom is critically ­different from the one involved in everyday politics: the former is of a higher order in comparison with the latter since the things united under one ­single supposition are constitutions and cities, not decrees or other particulars corresponding to particular circumstances within one and the same ­constitution or city. This is what also explains why it is, by nature, anything but easy to dissociate the experience that is the propaideutic to ­legislative science from legislative science itself, to the extent that the ­former is related to high-order particulars. This should not be considered an impediment for using the terms—in line with the ancient commentators— in their standard significance, since the gap between perception and ­science to be bridged by experience is not equally wide in all cases, and it does not always keep the same distance from either side. In some cases, experience is closer to perception, whereas in others it is closer to universal sciences and indirect knowledge. Experience in legislating is the only sort of experience proper to practical knowledge that belongs to the second group.

84  Straddling Borders: The Legislator This is so to the extent that Aristotle takes for granted that the experience of the would-be legislator cannot include only cognition of facts about particular cities and constitutions we have lived in but also cognition of cases far beyond the reach of what we have personally witnessed. Therefore, the pertinent experience cannot be the outcome of our own perception but necessarily includes a sort of indirectly obtained knowledge about cases set forth in historical testimonia or political textbooks: [In matters of legislations we need] a theoretical grasp on the matter not only to get knowledge of what constitution is advantageous on the basis of its past but also to know the constitutions present in others, that is, which ones are fitting for which sorts of people. So it is clear that in relation to legislation reports of world travelers are useful (for there one can get hold of the laws of [foreign] nations), and in relation to military [political?] deliberations, the researches of those writing about actions. (Rh. I 4 1360a30–37) 68 No doubt, a ready textbook, a collection, or a compendium of laws and constitutions is useful only to those who already possess experience. Moreover, it is one thing to regard a collection of laws as a compendium that includes examples of excellent laws ready at hand; it is another thing to regard it as a basis on which you expect to build the scientific knowledge that will allow you to establish excellent laws. Being invested in making such a collection with a view to detecting and categorizing “what sorts of things preserve and destroy cities, and what sorts preserve or destroy each sort of constitution, and what causes some cities to be well governed and others the opposite” is, indeed, the appropriate way to acquire experience in legislative matters. You certainly don’t yet have scientific knowledge of causes, but, nevertheless, you are progressively becoming competent in making suppositions about the connections holding between particular constitutions and particular measures that destroy or preserve them, etc. Aristotle’s main idea is that these past constitutions are the only empirical facts or findings legislative experience can be grounded in, for they are the only works of legislative activity. They are, in the Politics, analogous to “the works and our life” (ek tôn ergôn kai tou biou) in the Ethics (X 8 1179a18–19).69 By contrast, access to an insufficient number and poor variety of facts (for instance, only to facts about past constitutions in your own city) impedes the acquisition of genuine experience exactly as someone who is unobservant of the facts proper to a natural science lacks the relevant experience (GC I 2 316a5–10). Isocrates did not understand why collecting laws is an intellectual achievement that presupposes familiarity with particulars toward a progressive understanding of causes.

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  85 Aristotle professes that his own devotion to dealing with those empirical facts that resulted in his huge collection of constitutions is the indispensable experiential vehicle for acquiring legislative practical wisdom—what makes the relevant experience to be much like the experience proper to biological sciences. And he takes himself to be the first true possessor of legislative knowledge to the extent that he takes himself to also be the first to possess the pertinent experience.70

2.4  Straddling Borders There is a last riddle to resolve. In the section of X 9 addressing the question of how one can become an excellent legislator and arguing against the politicians and the sophists, there is no reference to legislative practical wisdom and no reference to practical wisdom at all. Instead, comprehension (sunesis) as the intellectual state enabling us to make correct judgements or discernments (krisis, krinein) is omnipresent. Why? To answer, one should bear in mind three things: first—recall [T3]— the time-frame of the legislators’ activity is such that legislating does not interfere with their personal advantage or involvement. It is about discernment/judgment (krisis) and selection (eklogê), not about deliberate choices concerning their own life. Hence, it comes as no surprise that it is associated with comprehension. Second, one should recall the special bond between comprehension and what others do or say, an idea we just encountered in the case of the would-be legislator, who, trying to fi ­ gure out and systematize what happened in other cities and constitutions, heavily relies on reports composed by others. Third, the comprehension appearing in X 9 does not just duplicate the comprehension appearing in VI 10, for the simple reason that the former is about political works— i.e. the generation of laws and constitutions—while the latter is only about non-motivational practical judgments (see Section 1.1). To highlight this critical divergence, let us call the former “legislative comprehension.” It constitutes the cognitive state the experienced wouldbe excellent legislators are credited with.71 But, in X 9, legislative comprehension seems also to represent the particularist knowledge included in legislative practical wisdom; it figures as the cognitive state enabling us to correctly select the appropriate constitution or law system for a particular city (for example, to know “by what means or in what way” that constitution in that city was brought to completion or what city is “in tune with” what constitution), to build on the indirect knowledge we got by examining other cities and their constitutions, etc. It is tempting to exploit the analogy with the comprehension of VI 10 in the following way: in Chapter  1, I  argued that comprehension only concerns judgments, not actions, and is exercised outside the ambit of our deliberate choices and that, by consequence, it only requires the ethical states that characterize the self-controlled person, not the more

86  Straddling Borders: The Legislator demanding ones that are exclusively possessed by the practically wise person. Likewise, legislative activity takes place outside the ambit of what involves deliberate choices about a legislator’s own life. Should we infer, by analogy or by extension, that the self-controlled person can be an excellent legislator or that the legislative comprehension of X 9 could substitute for the legislative practical wisdom of VI 8? The blatant absence of any reference to practical wisdom from the pertinent discussion in X 9 is a sign in favor of a positive reply. But it is too weak to counterbalance the signs in favor of a negative reply—namely, the fact that legislation is about the generation of certain works, not about mere judgments. Besides, in several occurrences, Aristotle explicitly stresses that the legislator’s activity incorporates deliberate choice itself: “The city’s being excellent, however, is [not] a function of luck but of scientific knowledge and deliberate choice” (Pol. VII 13 1332a31– 32).72 More importantly, as we saw in NE VI 8, the excellent legislator possesses legislative practical wisdom, and such practical knowledge is accessible only to those who possess the virtues of character (VI 13 1144b30–32). This is also why the excellent legislator cannot be a flagitious craftsman. True, we moderns are ready to suppose that an excellent legislator, hired by a malicious tyrant to establish a solid and oppressive tyranny somehow camouflaged by democratic measures, may consent to the tyrant’s aspirations, despite the fact that the political circumstances may allow for a legislative rectification much closer to the ideal city or to political goodness. And, hence, we tend to presume that legislative science is a craft-knowledge like Aristotle’s medicine, which, when rightly exercised, can produce both health and death (though it produces the latter only coincidentally). Aristotle would not deny the existence of such possessors of some simulacrum of legislative science. But, so I think, he would not call them excellent legislators and would not credit them with legislative practical wisdom either; for him, they would only possess legislative cleverness (deinotêta). At the end of the day, it is enough to recognize that legislative activity does not have only hybrid objects but is itself a borderline activity straddling the spheres of practical activities proper, productions, the spectator’s non-motivational judgments, and theoretical activities. Among political actions, as it has been extensively explained, it is the most akin to production. It is also, and for similar reasons, the most akin to spectators’ judgments (Rh. I 1 1354b5). Thanks to its time-frame, it evades the tensions, temptations, and challenges of everyday politics that make everyday politicians busybodies (polypragmones) struggling with the problems of everyday political life. By consequence, for the most part, the ethical integrity of the self-controlled person might suffice to guarantee a legislator’s excellence. Among political actions, legislating is also the most akin to theoretical activities. For it deals with the establishment of

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  87 constitutions and laws; these are the most universal objects that appear within the practical domain. In addition thereto, by not being busybodies, excellent legislators enjoy the highest degree of leisure (scholê) that is attainable within political life, a sort of leisure that is not very different from the one enjoyed within the theoretical xenikos bios (Pol. VII 2 1324b16). Neither is this portrait of a legislator’s activity a novelty of the Nicomachean Ethics; it rather constitutes a nuanced and reworked version of Protrepticus’ intuition that the good (agathos) legislator is, at the same time, a producer of laws (dêmiourgos), a doer of actions (praxeis), and a virtuous person who “lives on his own terms [kath’heauton].”73 Protrepticus seems to mistake these legislators for philosophers living the contemplative life. We have just realized, however, that in truth they are A-legislators living the best political life possible. From that point of view, Aristotle’s legislator as a knowledgeable collector of constitutions and laws meets, in a strange but highly suggestive way, Walter Benjamin’s collector: “O! Bliss of the collector, Bliss of the man leading a private life.”74

Notes 1. Besides X 9 and V 10, the main texts are Pol. I 2 1253a29–39, II 12 1273b27– 36, III 16 1287a18–b8, IV 1 1288b10ff., VIII 1, and Rh. I 1 1354a16–55a18. 2. Schütrumpf’s 1991–1996 voluminous commentary; Bodéüs 1993; Pellegrin 2017; Karbowski 2019: 151–162; Duke 2020 are notable exceptions. 3. See Pol. III 1 1274b36–38, V 9 1309b35–36, and Plato’s Gorgias 452d 4–6. 4. Stewart II: 65; Gauthier & Jolif 1970 II 2: 499. It is true that Aristotle’s terms are somehow shaky. Usually, speaking of practical or productive sciences, Aristotle means a twofold knowledge which includes both knowledge of universals and the correct seizing upon particulars; for instance, the fact that an excellent doctor possesses the science of medicine denotes the competence in curing particular patients on the basis of a solid universal knowledge. In other occurrences, however, Aristotle refers to people who merely possess the universal knowledge of medicine while they lack the particularist knowledge proper to an experienced doctor (as in Met. I  1 981a12ff.). These inexperienced doctors may be capable, however, of writing a textbook about medicine. Evidently, the textbook itself does not constitute a sort of science (in the technical sense of the term), since it does not constitute a state of the human soul. 5. The text reads tês politikês ergois or, in the majority of manuscripts, tois politikois ergois. 6. Legislators may simply establish a legal system or both a legal system and a constitution (Pol. II 12), the latter being their more meritorious function. Besides, throughout the Politics Aristotle is careful to keep constitutions and laws distinct. He accuses Plato of having understimated the constitutional aspect of political theory (Pol. II 6 1265a1–2), and he accuses others of not having been preoccupied with constitutional questions at all (Pol. II 12). On the whole, one should not lose from view the following principle: “For laws should be set up  .  .  . by looking to the constitutions and not the constitutions by looking to the laws. For a constitution is the way that cities order (taxis) their offices, how they are distributed, what element is in control in the

88  Straddling Borders: The Legislator constitution, and what the end of each community is.” (Pol. IV 1 1289a13– 18; see also III 11 1282b10–11) 7. The text reads enioi de nomothetai gegonasin . . . politeuthentes autoi. I just tried to render more explicit what is captured in the translations offered by Reeve 2017 (“because they were engaged in politics”), Schütrumpf 1991– 1996 III (“Diese waren selber politisch tätig”), and Pellegrin 1993 (“en exerçant eux-mêmes des fonctions politiques”). Saunders 1995 translates: “after personal experience of state affairs.” He probably follows Newman 1887–1902 II: 376, who understands the verb politeuthentes as denoting an active political role different from and previous to legislating and, therefore, complains about Aristotle’s silence regarding the legislators who actually had such a role. But the most natural reading of the text is to take the clause politeuthentes autoi as explanatory of their becoming legislators. At any rate, there can be no doubt that the passage inserts an analogy: merely speaking about constitutions // no participation in political actions vs becoming legislators // being engaged in politics. 8. See, for example, Bodéüs 1993: 65 and my own misleading analysis in Kontos 2017: 238. 9. These two alternative activities of the legislator are presented as a pair in Pol. III 13 1284b17–20 and IV 1 1289a4–5. It would be a mistake to confuse the rectification of the law system with the deliberative political activity which decides on decrees, though the latter also represents something like a rectification of the law (V 10 1137b25–32). But what it is meant to rectify is a deficiency inherent in the very universality of laws, not the law system or the constitution itself. 10. See also Pol. III 15 1286a9–20, IV 4 1292a32–34. 11. Likewise, the Nicomachean Ethics is restricted to naming the constituents of morally relevant actions and does not aspire to analyze the endless possible ways these constituents actually determine what particular actions we should do (the latter being the work of practical wisdom itself). See ΙΙΙ 1 1110b33–1111a7, V 8 1135a25–26, b13–16, and EE II 9 1225b2–7. For a more subtle analysis of the particulars that are proper to legislative activity, see Section 3.2. 12. See Pol. VII 2 1325a11–15, VII 12 1331b21–22, VII 13 1332a28–32. Schütrumpf 2001 nicely makes the point; see also Schütrumpf 1991–1996 IV: 84–85. Pellegrin 2017: 297–311 points out the particularist aspect of the legislator’s “action,” though he does not refer either to particularity or to the sort of action involved. By contrast, the standard interpretation of Aristotle’s legislator is that his commands “tak[e] no account . . . of kath’hekasta or special circumstances” (Greenwood 1909: 62). In contemporary discussions on constitutional law, it is also stressed that constitution-making, far from being mired down in constitutional formalism, concerns particulars of various sorts regarding preconstitutional material or conditions (for instance, the existence or not of an ethnos or the sort of process that led to the establishment of a new constitution) and matters of choice (see, for instance, Elazar 1985 and the telling title: “Constitution-Making: The Pre-Eminently Political Action”). Rosenfeld 2010 analyzes the particularity of constitutions as “singular historical events” by considering the different ways in which the constitutional subject is formed—never ex nihilo, or, in Aristotelian terms, never without some preconstitutional matter available in advance. 13. Hannah Arendt is the most distinguished and radical supporter of this view (see the following). Aquinas’ stance is also telling. He distinguishes the legislator as the creator or founder (instituere, institutio) of a city from its governor,

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  89 prioritizies the former, and understands legislating according to the model of God’s creation/production of the world (De Regno, I 13: 464.10–28). In his Sententiae Sexti Libri Ethicorum, though he constantly speaks about legislation in terms of “architectonic prudence,” he again equates the legislator with the architectonic builder (7: 356.42–43, 357.63–69). Aquinas does not see any difficulty in using craft-relevant terms to describe what he himself takes to be a practical activity (Sententia Libri Politicorum, 70.81–92). Likewise, in Summa Theologica I–II. 95.2, the legislator is again considered to be an architectonic producer imposing a form on matter or a theoretical scientist deducing conclusions from premises. 14. The Politics abounds with similar analogies: Pol. II 8 1268b34–39, III 15 1286a9ff., III 16 1287a32ff., VII 2 1324b29ff. 15. How exactly one should understand the opposition between praxis proper and poiêsis is still an open question; see Kontos 2002: 38–52 and Müller 2018. 16. There is nowadays a similar controversy about laws as artifacts or “a strange kind of artifact” (Tuzet 2018). My arguments are in line with some of the points made by Tuzet 2018, Ehrenberg 2018, and Burazin 2019. It should be noted, however, that Aristotle’s notion of a “craft-product” is much narrower than the contemporary notion of an “artifact” as well as that, for Aristotle, endorsing the craft-like aspect of legislation does not bespeak moral positivism. 17. I am grateful to George Duke for pressing me on this point and for bringing Finnis 2011: 23–45 to my attention. 18. According to Ehrenberg 2018: 188, constitutions and laws are “institutional” artifacts, for they create “desire-independent reasons for action.” By contrast, in Aristotle’s best city, they represent desire-dependent reasons for action. In Section 4.2. I explain why even deviant constitutions cannot function as such unless there is a certain desire on the citizens’ part for the existence of the city. 19. For similar reasons there is an obvious dissimilarity between legislating and crafts as regards voluntary mistakes. In the case of crafts, voluntary errors are meaningful and sometimes welcome, for instance, for educational purposes (VI 5 1140b22–25; EE VIII 1 1246a32–35). In the case of legislation, things are completely different, for what legislators intend to do—that is to say, their wish (boulêsis)—reflects the very correctness or incorrectness of their relevant political decisions: “since legislators make citizens good by habituating them, that is to say, this is the wish of every legislator, and those legislators who do not do it well fail in their purpose” (II 1 1103b3–5). Each time legislators fall short of serving their wish, their legislation has simply failed (Pol. II 9 1269b19–22, III 13 1283b37–42). For the distinction between a legislator’s wishes and prayers, see Section 3.2. 20. See Pol. I 4 1253b23ff., I 10 1258a21–24. 21. See Nichols 1992: 5. To measure the subtleness of Aristotle’s view, it would be instructive to contrast it with modern legal theories—say, with Kelsen’s landmark Reine Rechtslehre. According to him, legal norms or rules are the product of legislative activity but not the activity itself, which is one reason they can survive the legislators who created them (Kelsen 1960: 10–24). Kelsen’s main concern is to negate psychologism—that is, any reduction of legal normativity to the legislator’s “psychic act of will.” But there is no such a problem in Aristotle’s framework, for he does not maintain that the normativity of constitutions and laws is grounded in the soul of the legislator; he is not a legal positivist, either. In both his Ethics and his Politics, practical truth and practical principles are just recognized and brought to light by the

90  Straddling Borders: The Legislator practically wise person or the legislator, not created or invented. For the rest, my previous emphasis on the fact that constitutions and laws only continue to exist on the condition that their principles are actualized by the political actions of the rulers and the ruled nicely echoes Kelsen’s thesis that laws retain their validity (Gültigkeit) only if they are somehow and to a certain degree respected—that is, only if they display a certain effectiveness (Wirksamkeit) (Kelsen 1960: 10–11, 215–221). 22. This is so for the same reasons that, according to VI 8 1141b27–28, everyday political decisions and actions (e.g. decrees decided in the assembly) constitute prakta, too. See Kontos 2011: 10–16. 23. Newman 1887–1902 II 398; see also Schütrumpf 1991–1996 I: 84–85, III: 215–216; Miller 1991: 297–303; Bodéüs 1993: 66; Yack 1993: 191; Kraut 1997: 66, 77; Keyt 1999: 76; Overeem 2017: 37–42. 24. This distinction appears to correspond to the modern one (inaugurated by Jean Bodin) between sovereignty and government. It is noticeworthy (see Tuck 2016: 121–180) that Rousseau revived the prior distinction in order to work out how a modern state, to which the conditions of ancient Sparta or Athens are alien, could establish genuine democracy. It comes as no surprise, then, that there are striking similarities between my portrait of Aristotle’s legislator and Rousseau’s legislator in his Du contrat social (OC 3; in particular: Book II, Chapter VII). 25. Reading, with Reeve and others, dikê for OCT dikaiosunê. See Castoriadis 1978: 404; Miller 1995: 58–59; Reeve 2012: 155–161. 26. On this issue, the Athenian Constitution merely echoes a long Greek tradition, according to which to ensure the validity of the original consitution or law code as something respectful and sacred, legislators should disappear! In some legends legislators commit suicide (Charondas, Zaleukos) while in others they resort to self-exile (Solon, Lycourgos). “Once the code is selfsustaining, the legislator becomes superfluous” (Szegedy-Maszak 1978: 208; see also Thraede 1962). 27. The quotation comes from Barthes 1984: 69. Hurri 2013: 153 speaks about “a fantastic construct of a legislator that is not a real legislator, but only a device of interpretation.” This is not the place to offer an account of the dynamic relationship between the rule of law and decency (epieikeia). It suffices to note that I find Brunschwig’s 1996: 152–153 proposal about Aristotle’s ostensible double appeal to the intention of the legislator unsustained. Vega 2013: 195 sees in Brunschwig’s thesis the influence of legal positivism. 28. Lanni and Vermeule 2012 have nicely analyzed the virtues and vices of Aristotle’s (or, in general, the Greek) notion of a legislator working as a single individual who is not necessarily a citizen of the city in question. For the contemporary variation of this controversy and the reaction to any hyperbolic mistrust of the clarity of the letter of the law, because of the so-called “Mr. Fix-it mentality” of judges, see the reservations raised by (the well-known conservative American judge) Scalia 1997. However, Aristotle’s notion of a shadowy legislator has little to do with the contemporary idea of “originalism”—that is, the idea that we should discover the hidden intent of the legislator behind or before the text of the constitution (see Murynka 2015: 18–21). Michael of Ephesus’ comment is à propos: “political works are the politician himself qua politician” (CAG 20: 618.188r.14 Heylbut). 29. To attempt again a reference to modern times, Aristotle’s legislators closely resemble George Simmel’s “stranger” (Fremd), who, being neither a wanderer nor a foreigner or barbarian, has the “special attitude of the ‘objective’ person” and is therefore often appointed as a judge (Simmel 2009: 602).

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  91 30. Duke 2020: 40–62 draws on my present arguments to think through the much-debated tension between Aristotle’s political naturalism (i.e. the idea that the polis is something natural and human beings are by nature political animals) and the necessity for the legislator to intervene as the founder of a political community (Politics I 2). Though in line with those who take this tension to be only superficial, Duke adds an important interpretative stroke: he emphasizes that it does not suffice just to argue for the existence of two joint causes of the polis (namely, human nature and the legislator’s production of a constitution) on the model of spiders who make webs; rather, legislative activity as the co-cause of a polis’ generation is primarily a practical and not a productive activity. This idea is appropriately grounded in what Duke calls the double “reflexivity” of legislative practical activity: (a) legislative activity and human nature share the same end—that is, human flourishing— and (b) legislative activity as the exercise of the legislator’s practical ­rationality aims to render rulers and the ruled capable of exercising this very same rationality conceived as an actualization of their eudaimonia. See ­Kontos 2020. 31. Scaliger and Susemihl, not without good reason, seclude phronêsis. Then, one should read “Of the [intellectual] state concerned with the city . . .” In both cases, with or without the amendment, the important thing is to decipher the sort of state here mentioned. 32. It is not yet the time to decide this issue. Let me only venture a preliminary comment: though the independence from one another enjoyed by the subbranches of practical wisdom is still hazy, it is quite safe to attribute them some kind of independence. The pertinent passage from the Eudemian Ethics seems to make the same gesture: this good or end “is the good that comes under the science with the most control [tên kurian pasôn], which is political science, household management, and practical wisdom . . . whether they differ at all from one another must be discussed later on [that is, probably, in VI 8]” (EE I 8 1218b13–16). True, Figure 2.1 separating (1), (2), (3), and (4) is not as helpful as one would have wished, but nothing in VI 8 suggests that in order for us to possess one of these sub-branches, we should necessarily possess all of them. Subsequently, Aristotle remarks that nobody can exercise N-practical wisdom “without household management or without a [correct] constitution” (VI 8 1142a9–10). The issue of household management put aside for the moment, the prior clause does not require the possessors of N-practical wisdom themselves to also possess legislative practical wisdom; the only precondition is that they live in a city endowed with a good constitution. 33. Stewart 1892 II: 64. 34. See Eustratius CAG 20: 338.100r.31–33 Heylbut and Heliodorus CAG 20: 123.220.19–20 Heylbut. 35. The interpretation offered by Gadamer 1998: 12–13 is an eloquent example of how often these claims are—mistakenly—attributed to Aristotle himself. Natali 2014: 190; Cooper 1975: 35 also go in the wrong direction. 36. See Yack 1993: 198n58; Greenwood 1909: 191. Keyt, though he nicely explains that “Aristotle does not envisage the good lawgiver . . . living in an ivory tower . . . spinning out utopias” (Keyt 2007: 234), still takes for granted that legislative expertise deals only with universals (234). 37. All commentators concede that Isocrates features as the main target of X 9, but, paradoxically, none of them—at least to my knowledge—has seen an anti-Isocratic argument in VI 8, despite their being twin passages mirroring each other.

92  Straddling Borders: The Legislator 38. The same criticism of Aristotle is also developed in: Arendt 1993: 109–112; Arendt 1990: 82–83; Arendt 1963: 178–180, 192–195. For more details, see Kontos 2017. 39. See White 2019: 320–321. Jagannathan 2019: 407–408 seems to propose, following another path, a quite similar reading, but he misses the details of Aristotle’s argument and the role of legislative science as the common universalist component of the sub-branches of practical wisdom. Karbowski 2019: 151–161, 163–187 nicely separates the scientic and phronetic/practical, so to say, aspects of legislative science and underlines that one should not reduce the latter to the former (187). And, no doubt, his analysis of the scientific part is rich and judicious, but he does not further clarify the nature of the A-legislator’s practical wisdom. 40. “That is why we think Pericles and people of that sort to be practically wise— because they have a theoretical grasp on what is good for themselves and for human beings, and we think household managers and politicians are like that” (VI 5 1140b7–11). Here, N-practical wisdom and household management are assumed to be identical. But this clause rather echoes the things commonly said (legomena) rather than Aristotle’s own view, and it clashes with the distinctions made in VI 8. Similar considerations might have provided the inspiration for Burnet 1900: 263, who recognizes here a practical wisdom kata meros. Greenwood’s 1909: 185 (followed by Gauthier & Jolif 1970 II 1: 472) insistence that N-politics and household management have in view happiness itself is certainly correct and in line with the solution I proposed prior—that is, the idea that one and the same universalist knowledge is common to the four sub-branches of practical wisdom. Schütrumpf 1991– 1996 I: 175–182 points out the apparent disagreement between VI 5 and the way Aristotle treats household management in the Politics. My comments are intended to smooth the disagreement by explaining that the Politics clarify an issue left suspended in the Ethics. 41. For instance, Plato in Politikos 258e–261a. 42. “For just as household management is a sort of kingship of a household, so this kingship is household management of a city” (Pol. III 14 1285b31–33); mastership (despotikê) is just one of the three parts of household management (Pol. I 3 1253b4–23, I 12 1259a37–b17). Household management is here envisaged as a practical activity within a city, not as the way to manage things of the house as the prepolitical community that existed before the emergence of true political communities. 43. See Chapter 3, n25. 44. In the opening clause of VI 8 stating that “Politics [politikê] and practical wisdom are the same state” (1141b23–24), the term politikê can only denote either (a) the pair legislative practical wisdom and N-politics as the two variations (not two components occupying, respectively, the universalist and the particularist position) of the practical wisdom “concerned with the city”— if we read the clause together with the subsequent Aristotelian division of the sub-branches of practical wisdom—or (b) a non-Aristotelian notion of “politics” referring to an alleged compound of legislative science plus, next to it, handicraftsmen’s politics—if we read the clause as part of the passage addressing Isocrates. Thus, pace the standard translation of the term, “politics” can hardly mean political science in any literal or technical sense of the term. Similar perplexities appear in X 9 1180b30–31, where Aristotle provisionally claims that “legislative science seems to be [edokei] a part of politics.” My conjecture is that this ambiguity spurred Reeve to modify his translation of the term politikê in VI 8—though not his interpretation as

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  93 well—from “political science” (in Reeve 2012) to “politics” (in Reeve 2014). Crisp 2001 and Irwin 1999 translate politikê as “political science.” 45. I take these clarifications to be in line with Broadie’s 2019b emphasis on what she calls the “rich-sense of practical truth” but also to complement her analysis of practical truth, which is exclusively carried out from the perspective of deliberate choice. 46. My account paves a new way between those by Gauthier and Jolif 1970 II 2: 495–502; Höffe 1996; Reeve 2012: 223–278; Nielsen 2015: 35–38; Olfert 2017: 45–129; Karbowski 2019: 163–187, and Gadamer’s interpretation of Aristotle’s practical philosophy in Gadamer 1979 as well as in “Praktisches Wissen” (GW5), “Die Idee der praktischen Philosophie” (GW10), “Vernunft und praktische Philosophie” (GW10), and Wahrheit und Methode (see Chapter 1, n60). As far as I know, Berti 1993 has emphasized more clearly than anybody else the fact that legislative practical wisdom is not the same thing as the sort of political science exercised by Aristotle in the Politics. But he has overlooked the dialectical character of VI 8 and, more dramatically, has been led to a number of odd suggestions; for instance, he has located political science in the scientific part of the soul (445), made of legislative or political science and practical wisdom two different sorts of knowledge that include the same number of sub-branches, etc. (He has been followed by Schütrumpf 1991–1996 IV: 85n6.) 47. To the best of my knowledge, it is unanimously taken for granted that the legislator is a practically wise person and possesses the ethical virtues in the completeness of full (kuria) virtue. The only hint pointing in a different direction—though only a hint that is motivated by the wrong belief that legislating is not a practical activity at all—is given by Bodéüs: “the adequate exercise of [the legislator’s] function does not depend upon moral disposition in the same way as the practical activities in general” (Bodéüs 1993: 66). Evidently, those who take comprehension to be just a part of practical wisdom presume that the “comprehension” cropping up in X 9 is identical with the one in NE VI 10 (see, for instance, Gauthier & Jolif 1970 II 2: 909; Dirlmeier 1999: 605). 48. Chapter X 9 can be divided into two parts, the first of which raises the issue of how we are going “to become good” (X 9 1179b3–4). Aristotle’s considered view is that the acquisition of goodness presupposes good ethical states that will permit us to “listen to—or what is more, comprehend [suneiêi]—­ arguments” (X 9 1179b26–27). (In its first appearance in NE X 9, the term bears its loose sense, as is also the case, for instance, in VIII 12 1161b24–26; see also DA I 5, 410b3; HA 588a23, 630b21.) Furthermore, the coming-to-be of a correct or not irremediably bad character finally depends on the constitution and the laws of the city. Or rather, to put things in a neutral way, it depends on the theoretical knowledge (theorêtikô) or craft-knowledge held by the excellent legislator (X 9 1180b20–25; see Burger 2008: 207–211). This formulation spares myself any commitment as to whether, in X 9, Aristotle argues for an educational system supervised by the city or for one counting on private theory-laden education; see Schütrumpf 1991–1996 I: 80–102 vs Bodéüs 1993. 49. The much-disputed topic of experience (see Met. I  1 and APo. B 19; APr. I 30) falls outside the scope of the present chapter. On the whole, I agree with two quite converging generalist interpretations of experience—namely, those by Gregorić and Grgić 2006; Hasper and Yurdin 2014. 50. See Stewart 1892: II 467; Dönt 1972; Bodéüs 1993: 58; Schütrumpf 1991– 1996 I: 91–92 and II 550; Simpson 1998: 7–13; Irwin 1999: 314; Cherry 2012: 105–106; Frede 2013: 18; Pangle 2013: 15–16; Kamtekar 2014: 371.

94  Straddling Borders: The Legislator 51. The term sunêtheia might indeed be taken to allude to the primitive form of experience Aristotle attributes to animals in HA IX 37, 621a29–b2. I owe the reference to Hasper and Yurdin 2014, 146, who highlight, however, the continuity between habit and experience, since in other passages the same term or the expressions sunêtheia[i] and ex ethous do not have disparaging connotations (see notably: Top. I  14 105b27 and MM I  20 1190b28–30). At any rate, I agree with those—for instance, Bronstein 2012: 48–49—who read the term di’ ethos in Metaph. I  1, 981b4–5 as being in line with the non-identification of the handicrafsmen with the experienced craftsmen. The only other passage in the Nicomachean Ethics which equates experience with intimacy (VIII 6 1158a14) also hints at the idea of a closed circle of activities and concerns too closely associated with the individual. 52. See Gauthier and Jolif 1970 II 2: 909–910. 53. For Isocrates’ speeches I will use the following abbreviations (I cite Norlin’s Loeb translation, Isocrates 1921–1954, silently but extensively reworked): AS Against the Sophists (Kata tôn Sophistôn) Ant Antidosis (Peri Antidoseôs) Ar Areopagiticus (Areopagitikos) Nic Nicocles (Nikoklês hê Kyprioi) OP On the Peace (Peri Eirênês) Pan Panathenaicus (Panathênaikos) TNic To Nicocles (Pros Nikoklea) 54. See AS 9, 13, 20–21; Ant 62–69, 77, 260–261; TNic.50–53. 55. For Aristotle’s unfair belittlement of Isocrates’ contribution to the art of rhetoric, see Isocrates’ own reaction in Pan 17–18 and the nice comments by Haskins 1999: 125–126. Notice also that probably (at least, according to all editors, albeit in opposition to all manuscripts), in Rhetoric II 23 1399b10, it is Isocrates, not Socrates, whom Aristotle presents as an example of philosophical education. For the eventual marks that Isocratic ideas might have left on VI 1–2 of the Nicomachean Ethics, see Depew 2004. For an overview of the connection between Isocrates’ and Aristotle’s philosophical views, see Wareh 2013: Chapter 1. 56. By contrast, Isocrates takes himself to be well placed to write genuine “political discourses” displaying his concern for the preservation of the city (Ant 46, 260; TNic 50–53; Helen 9; OP 39–40)—that is, to exert what Too nicely calls “small voice” politics (Too 1995: 75–112). 57. I take this passage—already pointed out, in passing, by Newman 1887–1902 III: 389—to go contrary to the following claim: “One will search Isocrates’ works in vain for even a hint in that direction” (Cooper 2004: 76)—that is, in the direction of an “appeal to some or other of the opinions that have won some acceptance.” 58. Immisch 1935: 58. 59. Ober 1998: 266. 60. Isocrates relegates the choice of laws to a simple “combination” (sunagagein) of existing laws (Ant 83, TNic 40–41); see Too 2008: 134–137. To him, there is no progress in our knowledge of legislating; the best we can wish for is a return to the ancestral laws (Pan 119–121, 124–126; Ar 71–73)—compare with Aristotle’s completely different view in Pol. II 8. To Isocrates, the first true legislators should be viewed as shadowy persons who deserve our full respect, for, to them, legislating has been not just a matter of learning an already established body of knowledge but a question of finding something new, kainon. This is the view which Isocrates presents in Ant 82, some lines before the passage quoted by Aristotle in X 9. Those legendary legislators

Straddling Borders: The Legislator  95 in Athens, Sparta, or Egypt were almost divine, distinguished from all other people (Pan 119–121), and succeeded at the same time in founding the city, creating correct laws, and ruling (Pan 124), and Isocrates praises Nicocles by identifying him with those very first legislators (TNic 17). For Sparta and Egypt, respectively, see OP 102–103 and Busiris 32–33. For an analysis of Isocrates’ notion of politeia, see Bloom 1955: 12–16 and Eucken 2003; for his empiricism, see Balla 2004. 61. Here, sunesis carries its loose sense, since it applies to music, too—that is, to objects that have nothing to do with what is doable in action (prakton). 62. Compare with the following loose use of the term: “human beings think [oiontai] . . . that the things the law pronounces are not difficult to comprehend [sunienai]” (V 9 1137a10–11). As the passage subsequently explains, this is a false belief because it is not enough to understand the letter of the law; we should also know “the way actions must be done . . . if they are to be just.” 63. This is a well-known Aristotelian motto; see VI 8 1142a15–19 and Met. I 1 981a13–17. 64. This emerges in the following argument: “But laws would seem to be the works of politics, so how could someone become competent in legislative science, or discern which laws are best, from them, since it is evident that we do not become doctors from reading textbooks either?” Although the works of legislation are, indeed, the laws themselves, medical textbooks are not the proper products of medicine. To keep the analogy, we should assume, contrary to the letter of the text, that “from them” does refer to “collections of laws,” not to laws themselves. 65. See Michael of Ephesus, CAG 20: 618.188v.14–25 Heylbut and Heliodorus, CAG 19: 232.416.23ff. Heylbut. They are followed, though not mentioned, by Stewart 1892 II: 467, 469. See also Bien 1973: 241n14. 66. For the former line of interpretation, see Reeve 2017: 256–259; Pangle 2013: 84 (they disagree only in that Pangle sees in Aristotle an apologetic stance regarding this somehow mysterious experience-free scientific knowledge); for the latter, see Simpson 1998: 7–9. 67. This condition is stated in APr. I 30 46a25–26 and also traceable in the use of the expression pantos tou katholou in APo. II 19 100a6–7. For further analysis, see Gregorić and Grgić 2006: 17n29 and Butler 2003. 68. The oldest manuscript reads pol**ti kas, but the Arab translators read polemikas. OCT and Cope 1877: politikas; Kassel 1976: polemikas (followed by Rapp). See also Rh. I 4 1359b30–32, 1360a3–4. Also of note: for Aristotle, not only Greek constitutions but also non-Greek ones are worthy of our attention, the Carthaginian constitution being the most prominent example (Pol. II 11). 69. See the resourceful analysis of this passage in Reeve 2017: xxxii–xxxix. 70. The uniqueness of the sort of experience associated with legislative knowledge together with the irreducibility principle, and Aristotle’s tenet that the structure of political communities and the variety of political particulars cannot be straightfowardly deduced from the definition of happiness, show that Aristotle’s political theory is immune to the criticism Williams 2005: 1–17 launches against what he calls “political moralism” and, more precisely, against the “enactment model.” 71. Legislative comprehension as the capacity of discernment resembles the cognitive state of the well-educated person who is the suitable auditor of political science (I 3 1094b37–95a3) and able to correctly discern things in political matters and productive sciences (Pol. III 11 1282a3–23) or “regarding

96  Straddling Borders: The Legislator every branch of theoretical knowledge and every method of inquiry” (PA I 1 639a1–2; see also EE I 6 1217a8). 72. See also Pol. II 9 1269b12–14, II 12 1274a11–12, V 10 1312a39–b3. 73. Iamblichus, Protrepticus X 55.7–56.2 = Düring B 48–50; see also X 54.12– 55.3 = Düring B 46–B47 (in Hutchinson and Johnson 2017: 54). 74. Benjamin 1980: 396 (my translation).

3 Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck

Introduction There is no doubt that deliberate choice provides trustworthy evidence for our possessing the ethical virtues or not and is closely tied up with what is up to us (eph’ hêmin).1 Taken together, these two remarks epitomize the action-centered perspective of moral psychology. But there is no doubt either that Aristotle recognizes the essential role that luck (tuchê) plays in our lives. “Moral luck”—that is, what lies beyond our control and agency and yet continues to be factored in when we judge actions and characters—is ubiquitous; it permeates—or, so the opponents of moral luck say, “erodes”—our lives. It has a tangible impact on our happiness, the acquisition of ethical and intellectual virtues, our enjoying opportunities and the necessary external goods to properly exercise them, and even on the fact that we are born human beings rather than brute animals. One can hardly fail to notice the range of pertinent phenomena taken into account by Aristotle: “constitutive luck” (i.e. the fact that people’s characters are not simply a matter of self-creation but depend on luck’s contribution to their good nature [euphuia], good breeding [eugeneia], or being educated and developed in a certain city, etc.), “circumstantial luck” (i.e. that unchosen circumstances put people in highly unfavorable situations that challenge their virtues by completely blocking or partially impeding their being exercised or that even prove beyond human endurance), “resultant luck” (i.e. how things turn out and the sort of shortcomings and failures that are due to causes external to our own agency).2 Luck is the source of both the external goods we already possess and of our retaining them in the future. Aristotle concludes: What, then, prevents us from calling happy the person who is active in accordance with complete virtue and is adequately supplied with external goods. . . ? Or must we add that he will continue living like that and die accordingly, since the future is not evident to us. . . ? (I 10 1101a14–18)

98  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck Noticeably, the awareness of our relying on luck nurtures in many people the mistaken belief that happiness boils down to good luck (I 8 1099b7–8). The truth is that although things which happen because of luck have an impact on us, they do not originate in us—in our ethical states, deliberations, and deliberate choices—and hence cannot make us happy. Discovering by luck some treasure while walking in the forest may significantly enhance the conditions of our future actions, but it was never something to be taken into account in the deliberation process itself (III 3 1112a26ff.). Thus, it does not reflect the quality of our ethical and intellectual states. Deliberate choice and ethical virtues rather reflect our readiness to accommodate ourselves suitably to the eventual strokes of bad luck or to the eventual distractions caused by strokes of good luck. Their excellence does not reside in our cognitive ability to anticipatively calculate those strokes themselves (I 10 1100b22–33), although precautions, probability assessments, etc. are cognitive strategies available to us so as to appropriately face uncertainty and unforeseen future events. But these strategies only require cleverness (deinotêta), not ethical virtues and practical wisdom. Instead, to focus on bad luck, ethical virtues render us capable of successfully handling more or less uncontrolled misfortunes, enduring pain, turning misfortunes into opportunities and thereby promoting our selfesteem, keeping the integrity of our ethical character intact or at least not alienated (for instance, by means of sincere remorseful apologies toward ourselves or others), and keeping our very happiness well sheltered from misadventures.3 Priam’s sad case—an extreme, tragic, and rare example of a virtuous person suffering the strongest strokes of bad luck—serves as a warning, not as the summation or reflection of our everyday experience. What everyday experience actually testifies to is that a happy life without sufficient external resources and without the assistance of good luck (or, at least, the avoidance of bad luck) is a mere chimera. Moreover, the borders that separate what is up to us from what is beyond our control are neither stable nor determinate; they move in unpredictable ways. I take all that for granted. Besides, scholars have extensively and convincingly argued that Aristotle is up in arms against the opponents of luck.4 He is at odds with a purist conception of morality that would banish luck from the core of our praiseworthiness and proclaim an alleged non-vulnerability of virtue and happiness. Aristotle’s notion of luck has been employed, indeed, as a counterparadigm against Bernard Williams’ and Thomas Nagel’s invention of moral luck. Their concern has been that moral luck is a “fundamental problem . . . to which we possess no satisfactory solution” or an “oxymoron,” for, indeed, the “point of morality is, in part, to provide shelter against luck.”5 In other words, their startingpoint is a Kantian view that, in principle, morality is immune to moral luck or resists it and, hence, luck should be expelled from the moral core of our actions and judgments. Nevertheless, to our “disappointment,” it

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  99 crops up in our world as something we legitimately (that is, not irrationally or gratuitously) build into our retrospective judgments about practical matters (no matter whether we occupy, for instance, the stance of agents who regret their own past actions or the stance of spectators who are sympathetic to others’ misfortunes). This seems to create a certain incoherence in the conceptual schemes that ground our rational moral judgments or, at least, a need to delineate the limits of morality within the vast sphere of ethics—if such a delineation is meaningful at all. The issuing philosophical agenda includes the topics of free will and determinism, responsibility and accountability, retrospective self-assessment, the moral psychology of regret, free will, the practice of praise and blame, etc. Aristotelian scholarship is nowadays eager to address moral luck with the same agenda on hand. The undesired outcome is that one cannot help but consider moral luck either from the retrospective point of view inherent in the various practices of regrets, apologies, compensations, praise and blame, and so on, or from the meta-ethical perspective of philosophers who examine whether recognizing moral luck threatens to dissolve accountability. The famous examples of Gaugin and of the negligent car driver are symptomatic of such a tendency: we are invited to acknowledge the burden of luck’s interference with and impact upon our agency as something that happens to us. In relation to luck, we appear to be passive (or, more dramatically, its victims), and moral luck itself looms on the horizon of our moral lives as an intruder. The only open question is whether we should altogether expel it from considerations about morality or rather give it some rightful place in our rational lives. I want to set a new agenda and put high on it the question of whether Aristotle has explored the ways in which we anticipatively recognize, explore, appraise, and deal with moral luck. Luck is not simply a scandal that calls for retrospective judgments and tests our proneness to feel bad for things we did unwillingly or our readiness to compensate others for the harms we unintentionally caused them. It becomes a vital concern of our active engagement with the world of practical matters. And, hence, Aristotle’s questions are: Who is really capable of discerning bad luck from good luck? What is a virtuous and what a vicious engagement with luck? What has moral luck to do with the temporality of action? What kind of ethical deficiency or impairment is the cause of our incapacity to correctly accommodate luck in our actions and plans? What kind of vice goes hand in hand with the aspiration to exile luck from our lives? Are different sorts of luck (for instance, constitutive and resultant luck) confronted by different intentionalities? Are different aspects of our practical life (as individuals and as members of a political community) differently associated with moral luck? Which are the pertinent paradigmatic virtues and of what type (ethical or intellectual) are they? The agenda is new to the extent that, as far as I know, these questions have never been explicitly raised, let alone investigated or answered.

100  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck True, it has not passed unnoticed that properly coming to grips with the ubiquity of luck in our practical lives requires the agent to be virtuous. However, it is not enough (1) to recognize that “the virtues require a stance of openness toward the world and its possibilities”; instead, we should specify the virtue(s) that renders such an openness possible and correct. It is not enough either (2) to have recourse to some “nameless virtue” that would vaguely consist in understanding our agency and responsibility in “an expansive rather than a narrow way”; instead, we need to identify the virtue(s) that allows us to reliably discern the critical line separating expansiveness from narrowness in the most prominent examples of luck’s interference in our lives. And although I would wholeheartedly endorse (3) the use of the heading “virtues of impure agency,” I am strongly reluctant to cluster under this umbrella the virtues of integrity, grace, and lucidity because they rather constitute meta-virtues that, in covering our whole ethical character, do not possess any special bonds with moral luck itself.6 To meet the demand for clarity and phenomenological accuracy, I will bring to light two distinct paradigmatic intentionalities that involve, according to Aristotle, our engagement with moral luck: hoping (elpizein) and praying (euchesthai). In the remainder of the chapter, I plan to take elpis and euchê seriously (not merely as secondary topics which Aristotle only discusses in passing) and articulate Aristotle’s phenomenology of hoping-well and praying-well as an invaluable source of insight regarding moral luck and its place in our practical lives.7 This will yield new insights into the scope of practical reason, for it will prove that hoping and praying are core functions of our agential selves, not peripheral semiirrational or semi-religious practices that are at the edge of, or external to, practical reason.

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  101

3.1 Hoping-Well Aristotle’s Notion of Elpis Morally relevant action is future oriented. The same holds true for deliberate choices and deliberations: “for nobody deliberates about the past but about the future and what admits of being otherwise, and what is past does not admit of not having happened” (VI 2 1139b7–8). It is also true that, within the ambit of deliberate choice, anticipations of and deliberations about the future primarily concern what is up to us to do or not to do (III 2 1111b25–26, 30, VI 2 1139b5–9).8 Nevertheless, the concern about the circumstances and the outcome of our future agency does not diminish our awareness of the limits that narrow the range of control we exercise on practical matters. And those limits separate, for the most part, what is up to us from future things that are caused by luck, such as “reversals of fortune,” “lucky accidents,” or “strokes of luck” (I 9 1100a1ff.)—things one would today associate with circumstantial and resultant luck. Future-directedness and luck-awareness are largely intertwined: future states of things admit of being otherwise or turning out otherwise so that we can hardly anticipate them with certainty. The ups and downs of moral luck until the moment we grow old or until the moment of our death—and even more the good or bad luck of our descendants after our death—are quite unpredictable. Despite their pervading our practical life, however, future-directedness and luck-awareness most of the time remain latent. In particular, circumstantial luck and resultant luck typically rise to the surface when we retrospectively judge, praise, or blame human actions, but, probabilistic calculations put aside, they rarely catch our attention the moment we are active as agents. In elpis (justification for the English translation, “hope,” will be given in a moment), future-directedness and luck-awareness are brought together in the foreground. Hope, so I will argue, is the excellence of our future-directed practical sight that allows us to reconcile the resilience of our character traits and the hospitality of the world with our undertakings. As such, it is intrinsically valuable because it is indispensable for our practical commitments to be sustained in a world of circumstantial and resultant luck. First, clarification of the pertinent terms is in order. Elpis is a strange Greek word. The object of elpis might be something positive and to be desired or something negative and to be avoided, like “repellant things” (IX 4 1166b15–16), bad things that may happen to myself or to my own people (Rh. II 8 1386a2–3), or pain (ap’elpida; EE II 8 1224b21). Thus, the terms elpis and elpizô (noun and verb, respectively) share the neutral sense that we ascribe to the objects of memory or remembrance since we remember pleasant and painful things alike.9 In this respect, elpis’ futuredirectionality just is the counterpart of memory’s past-directionality, and

102  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck in principle all objects of memory could also be objects of elpis.10 In such contexts, elpis just means anticipation and is morally irrelevant. In a good many passages, however, the elpis that something good or bad will happen is connected with virtues and vices—for instance, with courage and cowardice. Here, to translate elpis as “anticipation” would be inadequate. One should not translate it as “expectation” either (which is the standard English translation of elpis in the context of the Rhetoric as well as the standard German one, Erwartung). The problem is that expectation is all too often opposed to hope not on account of its object neutrality but of its modality.11 One takes it to concern “an anticipated event that is both forecasted and desired,” where “forecasted” denotes the things to which we assign more than 50% probability. By contrast, hope is taken to involve low probability or, rather, mere possibility or non-impossibility; hope does not reach the threshold required by forecast, prediction, and expectation.12 Aristotle’s elpis resembles hope, not expectation. An alternative option is to translate elpis as “optimism.” Gauthier and Jolif use “optimism” to point out that elpis does not denote a feeling or something affective (as the Latin spes does) but a cognitive faculty like perception and memory.13 And there is no doubt that, in plenty of places, Aristotle does juxtapose elpis with them. This proposal too, however, is burdened with difficulties hard to overcome. First, in contemporary philosophy, optimism often amounts to a mere wishful stance that turns our gaze away from reality or constitutes “a spontaneous, perhaps unconscious habit of belief formation.”14 Aristotle’s elpis is diametrically opposed to optimism: by hoping we face reality, we do not escape from it. It is not unconscious either. It may arise in the context of feelings like confidence or anger, and it certainly is not the product of an intended effort or strategy. Whether it be the disposition of justified hopefulness or an occurrent justified hope, it is an accomplishment that goes hand in hand with the formation of our ethical character. Second, within Aristotle’s framework it is misleading to widen the gap between cognitive and affective elements. The good functioning of the practical perception that is involved in our practical life heavily depends on the presence of ethical virtues, and, as we shall see in the following, the same applies in elpis. Hence, Aristotle’s elpis is not meant to designate something cognitive in the sense of something theoretical or emotion independent. Therefore, translating it as “optimism” gives rise to more obscurities than clarifications. For these reasons, I will resort to the term “hope”—but omitting the religious connotations it may have. The paradigmatic case of elpis in both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric concerns something positive (or not bad) that will occur. The pertinent Greek term is the adjective euelpis (hopeful); euelpis is the person who hopes that something good (eu) will emerge. The opposite is duselpis. One might, of course, be

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  103 hopeful in a wishful or wrong way. To identify the correct way of hoping from the incorrect ones, Aristotle once employs the term “epieikês hope” (Rh. II 3 1380b5)—“decent,” “virtuous,” or “good” hope. And in the pseudo-Aristotelian Virtues and Vices (1251b33–34), we actually encounter the formulation “good [agathê] hope.” Good or justified hope corresponds to hoping-well, or to good hope in opposition to both wishful and willful hope. It develops together with ethical virtue. Thus, for instance, “to be confident [that is, to display the ethical virtue of courage] is the mark of a hopeful person” (III 8 1116a3–4). I concede that hope does not hold Aristotle’s attention for long. However, his allusions to hope, both in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric, allow us to articulate a quite detailed and rich phenomenology of hope that will prove to be decisive for our inquiry into, first, how engagement with moral luck belongs to the core of practical life and its temporality and, second, what kind of fulfillment and motivational power is proper to hoping-well. I close by showing in which sense Aristotle’s phenomenology of hope makes an important contribution to the pertinent contemporary discussion. Experience and the Temporality of Hoping-Well Let me now start articulating Aristotle’s phenomenology of hope by showing how good or justified hope is grounded in our awareness of the past, the present, and the future. Experience and the Past Whenever hope does not rely on the past, according to Aristotle, it degenerates into false optimism. Of course, our awareness of the past is not a mere accumulation of memories but is rather the cognitive achievement that Aristotle calls “experience,” empeiria. In a nutshell, there is no hope without experience. Thus, for instance, young people are hopeful (euelpides) only in a derogatory sense: although their hopeful character adequately predisposes them toward becoming courageous one day, they still behave more like a tipsy person than a mature person with justified hopes. And this is due to their lack of experience (apeiria) of human wickedness and failures or of turns of good and bad luck (Rh. II 12 1389a16ff., II 13 1389b15–20).15 “They mostly live by hope [elpidi],” their past being too limited to serve as a reliable cognitive lens or sieve for them to dissociate mere optimism from reasonable hope. Admittedly, mentally healthy people still have a past and things to remember of their own life (Rh. II 12 1389a23–24). However, for many people, regardless of their age, memories hardly rise to the level of reliable experience. Those demonstrating childish comportment is one case; those who just happened, by repeated strokes of good luck

104  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck (kateutuchêkotes pollakis), to be victorious over enemies or other threats in the past is another (EE III 1 1229a17–21). They just live in line with hope (kat’elpida), resembling the young people who live by hope. By contrast, justified hope is inaccessible to anyone lacking reliable experience. In other words, granted that optimism is a sort of unjustified hope, it would be fair to say that young people are optimistically hopeful but not justifiably hopeful.16 Which sort of experience is the appropriate ground of justified or good hope? No doubt it should be experience of the things hope is about—that is, those that appear possible but not probable, where the agent risks losing heart because the desired outcome looks uncertain and distant (resultant luck) or the odds are quite low and the conditions unfavorable (circumstantial luck). And it is here that Aristotle introduces a critical distinction by opposing the experience that is associated with justified hope from the one associated with hoping-badly. As a matter of fact, he says, “seamen remain hopeful [euelpides] in keeping with [para] their experience” (III 6 1115b3–4), and professional soldiers look hopeful “as a result of [ek or dia] their experience,” too (III 8 1116b9–10; EE III 1 1229a14). Referring to the latter example, it is thanks to their experience in fighting and using weapons that professional soldiers and mercenaries are confident. Their experience arms them with confidence and hopefulness “because they think they are the best ones and that nothing will happen to them” (III 8 1117a13–14; see also III 8 1116b12–15). The same kind of confidence and hopefulness is also rekindled, more generally, each time our experience equips us with the appropriate means to get outside help or each time we estimate, correctly or not, that we are superior to our rivals or possess better or imminently accessible external resources such as money, friends, etc. (Rh. II 5 1383a26ff.). Notice, however, that, by itself, this kind of experience does not necessarily nurture hoping-well: Aristotle’s mercenaries cope with future challenges by demoting them to a mere repetition, reflection, or prolongation of the past. When things turn out different, when the odds are lower than initially anticipated, “the danger overstrains . . . and . . . they are the first to flee” (III 8 1116b15–18; see also 1117a15–16). Their hopefulness was grounded in sheer and inflexible certainty: they “were from the very start facing up to danger on the supposition of being better” (III 8 1116b20–21). The problem is that their hope does not allow for meeting challenges that require us to test anew or afresh the limits of our commitment to our objectives, our capacity to endure pain, or our flexibility and resilience in aligning ourselves with our virtues. A  soldier’s confidence is (bad) luck proof, anchored to the safety of the high odds supposedly furnished by the homogeneity of the past. They resemble those who think that the future is absolutely safe because they are “in the midst of great

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  105 prosperity  .  .  .  (and what makes them such is wealth, strength, many friends, and [great] capacity)” (Rh. II 5 1383a1–3). To them all, the future involves no surprises at all. No matter how hopeful they take themselves to be, their hopefulness does not equate to good or justified hope. One might object that, in Nicomachean Ethics III 8, Aristotle reasons as follows: in opposition to courageous citizens, experienced soldiers (mercenaries as masters of the craft of fighting-well) do not acknowledge the nobility inherent in the ethical virtue of courage or the attractiveness and praiseworthiness of noble death. Thus the hopefulness of those who possess experience is opposed to the good hope that is connected with the nobility of a courageous character: “to be confident [that is, to display the ethical virtue of courage] is the mark of a hopeful person” (III 8 1116a3–4). Aristotle seems, then, to oppose the pairs hoping-badly // experience vs hoping-well // ethical virtue. That this is, prima facie, Aristotle’s argument, I accept. But the opposition is quite misleading, and the argument somehow flawed since it jumbles two different things together: on the one hand, the morally relevant comportment of the coward or the courageous person depending on whether he/she acts for the sake of the noble or not and, on the other, the craft-knowledge of the mercenaries aiming at generating the craft-product of victory. Of course, to begin with the mercenaries, nobody would expect them to have a view to the noble, and nothing in their craft-like activity requires it:17 a morally relevant feature cannot be a criterion for the excellence of a non-morally relevant activity. Aristotle himself clearly sees the point: Presumably, there is nothing to prevent the best professional soldiers from being not people like that, but rather the sort who are less courageous but possess no other good, since these are ready to face dangers and trade their lives for small profits. (III 9 1117b17–20) There is room, however, for the argument to be slightly amended and redirected so as to hit its target. For even craft-knowledge entails hopeful confidence as a sort of intellectual virtue that underpins the pursuit of craft-like objectives.18 The doctors who face new challenges and eventually risk their lives in the hope of discovering a new medicine, or the doctors who hope that their intellectual skills will suffice to carry out an unprecedented difficult surgery, are examples. Here, craftrelevant truth is the thing one seeks, and their disrepute as craftsmen the shameful thing one is afraid of.19 Aristotle’s seamen and soldiers not only lack the justified hope proper to the virtuous citizen enduring a noble death, then, but also the hope inherent in practicing the crafts themselves. As regards the ethical virtue of courage and its appropriate component of hope, it would be mistaken to presume that courage and its appropriate

106  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck sense of hope are experience free, as if only seamen, mercenaries, and the like were cases of “courage based on experience.”20 Besides, for Aristotle, ethical virtues go hand in hand with practical wisdom, and the latter is inconceivable and unobtainable in the absence of the relevant experience (VI 12 1143b13–14). Hoping-well presupposes that the agents have proven to themselves that, in the past, their hopes were justified and, for the most part, fulfilled—for instance, that whenever circumstances prompted their justified hope of enduring and overcoming menaces, they did actually act courageously. Correspondingly, with a view to the future, virtuous people live in the hope that their ethical virtues will prove even more solid (enabling them to resist pain and endure terrible things) than they have had the opportunity to test. Of course, there are extreme cases beyond human endurance and, hence, past hope (III 7 1115b7–11). Without contradicting and violating, or being apathetic about, the limits of human nature, then, justified hope makes courageous people believe that they will show a degree of tolerance or endurance of frustration in coping with unpredictable difficulties and risks that there has been, until that point, no need to display. (Notice that courageous and hopeful action is not an exhibitionistic performance one decides to give but rather a reaction whenever circumstantial moral luck merits or calls for it.) The outcome is some sort of increased self-esteem: yes, it is not just the easiness and smoothness of previous circumstances that facilitated my appearing courageous; I actually am courageous. Thus, justified hope is not about assimilating the future to the past but about facing the future as bringing new challenges that both compel and allow an enlargement of the self, a reconfiguration of what one is capable of. But there is no way to predict with certainty either the limits of our endurance and confidence or the kinds of circumstantial and resultant luck we might face in the future. The future itself and our own actions are the only test.21 That is why we all are living under the shadow of pretense: even rash people appear hopeful and courageous in manageable situations and wish “for dangers ahead of time” but prove to be cowards once they face reality (III 7 1115b28ff.). Justified hope bridges the gap between the evidence provided by the past actions of the courageous person and the always open possibility of not living up to expectations when the odds are extremely low and the costs extremely significant or imminent. Thus, in a sense, only circumstances requiring a noble death may indisputably confirm our hopingwell (III 6 1115a32–33). Again, the idea is not to reject the view that hope is composed of a belief in the low probability of the outcome and a desire but to complicate the relationship between these two components.22 And, at this juncture, Aristotle adds two pertinent points: (a) hoping-well of being in a position to overcome the danger of disrepute (adoxia) must be grounded in our ethical character;23 (b) hoping-well entails a rediscovery or reverification of our readiness to endure pain and harm for the sake

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  107 of what we recognize as a good or moral priority. I will return to these points later on. Practical Reality and the Present Hope’s reliance on experience goes hand in hand with not averting our gaze from reality. Aristotle’s phenomenology of justified hope rules out any unrealistic or wishful calculation of the odds, any disconnection from the present. Thus, the hopefulness of ignorant people, who are deceived about the actual stakes, is finally exposed as hoping-badly. The moment they realize the real menace, they lose heart: Ignorant people [agnoountes] also appear courageous, and are not far removed from hopeful ones, but are inferior to them insofar as they have no sense of self-worth, whereas the others do. That is why hopeful people stand their ground for a time, whereas once those who are deceived recognize that the situation is other than they supposed, they flee. (III 8 1117a22–26) Notice that hopefulness looks at the intersection of a certain knowledge of the world and a correlative understanding of ourselves.24 However, to start with, let us think about the connection between hope and the present: the sense of actual stakes, here and now, and the intervention of resultant luck. For Aristotle, the reliable perception of practical reality is a sine qua non of justified hope. Besides, practical wisdom incorporates a sort of perception (aisthêsis) that correctly discerns morally relevant matters in their particularity25—Thucydides would wholeheartedly agree with Aristotle.26 Hence, “optimistic hope” in the sense of mistakenly inflating the odds or prettifying the actual situation is only illusionary; it betrays a lack of practical knowledge and little sensitivity to what is morally salient. But any incorrect account of practical reality due to the agent’s deficient practical perception is a symptom of intellectual failure and is incompatible with the excellence of hopingwell. At any rate, it renders us less sensitive to reality and less alert to the need for backup planning or clever reconsideration of the available options and means. For the same reasons, an “eyes-on-the-prize hope” is alien to Aristotle.27 The idea behind this conception is that practical experience constitutes an aggregation of two different things—namely, the ­unconditional goodness of our objectives and, in addition, the demands of the circumstances. This picture is deeply unfaithful to Aristotle’s scheme of things. For him, goodness is always materialized in specific circumstances, and it does not emerge in the abstract; there is no way to dissociate morally good ends from the particulars involved in our

108  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck end-directed actions.28 For instance, as far as hope is concerned, Aristotle explains as much: On the sea, too, of course, and in facing diseases, a courageous person is unanxious but not in the way that seamen are. For whereas courageous people have despaired of safety and are repelled by a death of this sort, seamen remain hopeful in keeping with their experience. At the same time, people also show courage in circumstances in which a display of prowess is possible or in which it is noble to die, and neither holds when we come to ruin in these two ways. (III 6 1115a35–b6) Noble death does not illustrate the ideal of displaying courage in a somehow exhibitionistic manner, irrespective of the costs or the stakes; rather, in a wealth of everyday circumstances, there is simply nothing noble or choiceworthy in dying. When the only choice is to accept their grim fate, courageous people nurse no wishful hopes and, as a result feel, no fear either.29 More importantly, Aristotle’s hope does not fit in with “as-if hope.” The latter is taken to consist, according to Philip Pettit, in “a cognitive resolve,” a “strategy that consists in acting as if the desired prospect is going to obtain,” in “ensur[ing] stability across the ups and downs of ­evidence” and “free[ing] you from the bleakness of beliefs.” Hope’s ­strategic role is thus to establish a contrast between the perceptual belief from which we get input about the real stakes and a hope-laden assumption— an assumption that is not a revised, more optimistic belief but only meant to counterbalance our actual beliefs.30 A  first objection to this account—despite Pettit’s efforts to repudiate the charge that as-if hope implies self-deception—is ready at hand: as-if hope strongly resembles optimistic hope or may easily and unnoticed degrade into wishful hope. A second objection would be to dispute the idea that hope is the “active adoption” of an attitude, a point I will return to later (see this chapter, note 41). But, now, I  want to raise the objection that this picture of hope is in fact simplistic. For not only does it presume that hope introduces an assumption conflicting with our actual beliefs but also that it is a stance or emotion generated by or grounded in fear and hence posterior to it: “the signal danger of this loss of heart prompts the agent to adopt,” Pettit says, such a strategy—namely, hope (my italics). The two dichotomies (assumption vs belief and hope after fear) are not faithful to the phenomenology of hope.31 For one thing, hope not only appears together with fear but also together with other feelings like anger;32 furthermore, hope is a component of fear or even a precondition of fear’s arising in the first place, not its outcome: “To be afraid there must be some hope [elpis] of being saved from what [we] are anxious about

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  109 [agôniôsin]. A sign of this is that fear makes people inclined to deliberate, whereas no one deliberates about hopeless things [anelpistôn]” (Rh. II 5 1383a5–8). Hope is not a counterbalance of fear or a protection from despondency, circumstantial luck being already considered a deterrent, fear already having been established, our confidence level already too low, and our losing heart already in the air. Fear arises only against the background of hope that gives us access to positive scenarios for the future. Their mutual dependence is possible because hope’s assumptions and fear’s beliefs do not emanate from different sources but from one and the same source—namely, the sort of practical perception and deliberative imagination that are active in our deliberations and deliberate choices. Accounts of hope that embrace these dichotomies cannot accommodate such an interdependence: if hope were to conjure up as-if assumptions that run counter to our current fear-provoking beliefs, it would merely prevent or inhibit fear, not serve as its background. Hope’s Future-Directionality Only hope that is tightly bound to the past and the present can be justified or good. But such bonds, though necessary, are not sufficient conditions of justified hopes and may even blur the difference between hopes and expectations. Hope also requires, as was underlined before, a certain openness to the future which presents challenges beyond what we have experienced up to now, challenges we hope that we can live up to. However, just correlating hope with the future is not too informative. Aristotle stresses such a correlation, but he does much more. The question is: which specific kind of relationship with the future is involved in justified hopes? Well, all people who are not mentally disturbed are in a position to somehow apprehend the future as a temporal horizon extending beyond the present—beyond our present e­ xperience and the present state of things. But this does not mean that all such people have hopes: Nor are people afraid who consider that they have already suffered every terror and have grown coldly indifferent [apepsygmenoi] to the future, like those being flogged to death and already nearly dead . . . there must be some hope [elpida tina]. (Rh. II 5 1383a3–5) “Some hope” is not yet justified hope but a first ground on which people are further distinguished in having more or less hope with more or less confidence.33 A  person who is apepsygmenos to the future is one who has lost any belief or faith in the hospitality of the future as a space

110  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck wherein our activities and aspirations can be somehow realized, at least a few of them and more or less fully. Hope does not create beliefs about the future world; forecasts can do that task. Nor does it merely produce desire-laden beliefs about the future; expectations can do that. Hope is primarily about the continuity between our own agency and the strokes of circumstantial and resultant luck by which our future actions and their outcomes are also in part determined. Privation of such a capacity of hoping is tantamount to despair—that is, to the attitude of those who regard the future as being deeply compromised and inhospitable: the “nearly dead” people we met in the prior passage or those displaying the character usually associated with old people who are chilly, katepsugmenoi (Rh. II 13 1389b31–32). But despair is not a matter of age. Frequent strokes of bad luck, unspeakable sufferings, and consecutive failings in accomplishing projects that were taken to embody the meaning of life, as well as any sense of the future as being fatal, may promote an attitude to circumstantial luck and resultant luck that is like that of an old person. People in despair still have wishes, desires, and expectations, but their hope is paralyzed.34 Hope paralysis is an extreme or pathological case, while most people occupy some place between too much or too little hope. To say something about the scale of hope, however, we need to clarify its modes of fulfillment. Fulfillment and Practical Relevance of Hope Everybody accepts that hope does not posit future events as quasi-actual or probable but merely possible. It does not experience its objects as almost certain (as in the case of forecast and expectation or false optimism and wishful thinking) or as impossible—for people do not nurse hopes for things they take to be impossible. Uncertainty is, in other words, a measure of the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the islands of predictability that are grounded in our past experience and our present perceptual beliefs and, on the other hand, our readiness to meet and cope with future events that are not fully calculable and predictable but largely elusive. The Flexibility of Hope’s Fulfillment Take the example of a battle in which the courageous people hope that they will remain devoted to the noble and stay away from disgrace. They might hope that the opposing army and its armor will prove to vary within certain well-determined limits (for example, be only slightly smaller or bigger than initially expected) and that their homeland army will exceed it in power; or they might only formulate empty anticipations because they cannot do better than describe the enemy’s army as being of a yet unknown strength with a yet unknown sort of

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  111 weapons, and so on, yet nonetheless an army of human beings that, in principle, is not unbeatable; or they might nurse some hope, somehow grounded in reality, “of things providing safety  .  .  . as being close at hand,” and, in any case, not as being contrary to reality (Rh. II 5 1383a17–18)—for instance, an unclear picture about the sort of allies that might show up, the moment or the efficacy of their involvement in the battle, and so on. Hence, anticipations proper to hope manifest an array of open possibilities associated with circumstantial and resultant luck—of factual possibilities, not merely logical ones, that are dependent on experience and reality. Hope’s creative anticipation of alternative courses of future events varies in degree between the certainty that is proper to expectations and the total indifference to certainty that is proper to wishful hope. Hope’s fulfillment hinges on the type of pertinent anticipation.35 Since hope’s anticipations are never as strong as those belonging to expectations, they are fulfilled in many and divergent ways while the fulfillment of expectations has more the form of a clear-cut either/or, confirmation or disappointment. Justified hope is fulfilled in various ways: by confirmations and disappointments of many different degrees between full confirmation and full disappointment, by oversatisfied anticipations, by being retracted or canceled, and so on. Aristotle presents an extraordinary gamut of such variations in his discussion of anger (orgê), where the “hope of being revenged” is envisaged as a constitutive component of the anger itself (Rh. II 2 1378b2). Depending on circumstantial and resultant luck, anger-relevant hopes may be fulfilled in many ways (Rh. II 3 1380b2ff.). They might be: (a) fully satisfied by our actually taking revenge through our own actions; (b) satisfied in a mediated way (for “vengeance previously taken on one person causes a greater anger against another person to cease”); (c) satisfied or even oversatisfied and in certain cases not by means of an action originating in our own agency (when, for instance, the people we hope to take revenge on “have suffered a worse thing than we, when angry, would have done to them (for we think they have, as it were, gotten their revenge)”); (d) retracted, for “people become mild-mannered when they have spent their anger on someone else” or just because “they have spent time with their anger and are not in its first burst (for time causes anger to cease)” or (e) because they happen to realize that “they themselves have done injustice and suffered justly, since anger does not arise at what is just”; (f) disappointed, if things turn out to exclude the prospect of punishment or if we have reasons to believe that “the ones punished will not perceive that the punishment suffered is due to [the offended] themselves.” It is thanks to the uncertainty and the vagueness intrinsic to the experience of angerrelevant hope that its fulfillment is so flexible. By absorbing the effects of certain partial disappointments, justified hope can be more or less easily restored.36

112  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck Picturing Hope’s fulfillment displays an additional trait that merits attention. Hope directs us to our future experience of something that will actually happen and confirm our hopes, and such anticipation is pleasant. But hope also produces an imaginative making-intuitive that serves as a present fulfillment and is also pleasant in itself. Let us call this hope’s picturing:37 All anger must entail some sort of pleasure, namely, the one from the hope of being revenged [in the future]. For it is pleasant to think that he will get what he seeks  .  .  . For a sort of pleasure actually follows along because of this, and also [te  .  .  .  kai] because angry people spend their time in taking revenge through thinking, and so the appearance that occurs at that time produces pleasure, as in the case of dreams. (Rh. II 2 1378b1–10)38 Aristotle distinguishes here two sorts of anger’s fulfillment. First, when the future moment comes when I will have the fulfilling experience of getting revenge, I will feel pleasure, and, because of that, my future experience is also the pleasant object of my hope now: “things that give delight when present are pleasant . . . when we hope of them” (Rh. I 11 1370b9–10). Such a future-directed fulfillment anticipates and echoes a future pleasure.39 When the moment of anger’s fulfillment comes (for instance, when I finally take revenge), anger should cease or evaporate. Second, before that future moment, anger-laden hope produces differently detailed illustrations of revenge, of my rivals being in pain, or of my speaking to them with an ironic tone of voice, etc. This time, the source of fulfillment is not the future event but the present colorful picture or appearance of something for which direct experience is neither available nor necessary. The particularity of this second mode of fulfillment becomes plain once we see how it works. For such picturing is a double-edged sword. It yields something that is pleasant in itself and partially alleviates the pain inherent in anger,40 but it also reveals its own incapacity to substitute for the first sort of confirming fulfillment. The picture that depicts our rival suffering does not restrain us from seeking revenge—instead of making our anger cease, it fuels it.41 Where do these thoughts lead us? First, to a realization that picturing is an indispensable component of hope. You may believe, expect, or forecast that p will happen without any picturing of p. But to hope that p entails “spending your time” picturing p.42 It is also noteworthy that the future event crystalizing the object of my hope, and so my hope itself and the pictures it generates, should be conceived of as aspects of one and the same structure. It is not the case, at least as regards justified hope or hoping-well, that we first form a belief about the possibility of a future

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  113 event, then are involved in picturing, and thereafter begin to hold hopes of that event’s realization. Nor is it the case that hope by itself generates the belief or its ground by a sort of initiative or cognitive resolve. Each description is biased. Instead, justified hope of how future things beyond our control will eventuate and those things themselves are mutually dependent. Hope enables us to get a view of them or notice their likelihood and relevance—and picturing is hope’s most significant tool to keep this view alive. Hope’s Practical Relevance Hope entails both a view open to positive scenarios for the future and picturing (as what fills this view with vivid imaginative content). One of the merits of this account is that it permits us to grasp hope’s practical relevance. To see why, let us return to the distinction between the hope that belongs to professional soldiers and the justified hope that belongs to courageous citizens. The distinction may be elaborated as follows.43 Deliberate choice is, by definition, “desiderative understanding or thought-involving desire,” and, hence, it is not only responsible for the chain of actions we decide to embark on but also a matter of commitment to these actions. Commitment comes in degrees. One may “take a shot at X” (be ready to treat any eventual impediments or low odds as reasons to hastily withdraw one’s projects). Or one may “endeavor X” (be resolute in overcoming a number of unfavorable circumstances, with one’s resilience in the face of difficulties remaining, however, conditional and the threshold of quitting the project being not too high). Or one may “totally invest in X” (consider one’s project as a first priority and, without being blind to the particular circumstances that eventually shed new or different light on the project and its worthiness, be ready to exhaust every possibility). The scale of commitment inherent in deliberate choices means, so the argument goes, that the difference between the reaction of the professional soldiers, once things turn out to be intimidating, and the reaction of the courageous citizens, who act for the sake of the noble, is one of commitment. The former only take a shot at the project of fighting for the sake of victory while the latter are from the start invested in the project of seeking the noble. Hope is redundant in this picture; all the motivational work is done by commitment. The foregoing exposition is misleading. The easy route to showing why would consist in refuting the idea that initial commitments to more or less long-term projects, even the strongest ones, remove the need for reconfirmation and readjustment, as if it were possible to anticipatively draw a net distinction between endeavoring X and totally investing in X or to anticipate the sorts of resilience and flexibility required by future quite unpredictable strokes of bad luck. But what matters is that the dissociation of commitment from hope cuts the revelatory character of

114  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck hope out of the picture altogether. For hope, as I said, brings positive and probable scenarios into view and, thanks to picturing, fleshes them out with vivid imaginative content. Thus, nothing precludes the same level of commitment from being hope laden or not hope laden. For instance, one may invest in X but not have the lucid vision to see something as an outlet in favor of the positive scenario and its materialization or as a promising sign or something one should factor in and exploit in order to recognize the positive scenario as not being refuted by reality. And even if one has a more or less clear view of these promising paths of action or positive signs, nothing excludes the possibility that one may still not possess the excellence of hope-relevant picturing and hence may not be in a position to create the necessary picturing fulfillment that renders this view colorful and vivid enough to sustain its motivational force in the face of unpredicted impediments and setbacks.44 Aristotle’s mercenaries may be more or less fully invested in fighting, excelling in their craft, enhancing their reputation as warriors, or satisfying their employers. Yet they lack justified hope. They are blind to whatever positive scenarios may be on the horizon. So access to the future as containing open possibilities to explore is denied to them, and there appears to be a dysfunction in their picturing capacities. In other words, full commitment and hopeful commitment are different things; hope determines commitment’s sustainability by sharpening the vision of a hospitable future and by picturing, at present, positive courses of actions. The excellence of the relevant sight and picturing varies from justified hope’s lucid sight and picturing to different sorts of deficiency that still count as varieties of more or less hope and from those deficiencies to the complete blindness belonging to pathological despair. It is time to conclude, taking a metaphor and its riddles as our guide: Nonetheless, the end that is in accord with courage would seem to be pleasant but to be obscured45 by the circumstances as also happens in athletic contests, since to boxers the end is pleasant—namely, the end for which they fight, the victory crown and the honors. But being struck by blows makes them suffer, if indeed they are made of flesh and blood, and is painful—as, too, is all their exertion. And because there is a lot of all that, the end for which they fight, because it is small in extent, appears to have nothing pleasant about it. If the same is also true where courage is concerned, then, death and wounds will be painful to a courageous person and he will suffer them unwillingly. But he will endure them because it is noble to do so or shameful not to. (III 9 1117a35–b9)

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  115 True courage involves appropriate feelings of fearlessness and confidence.46 And these two traits go together. Courageous people have the fear of disrepute: “For there are some things we should, in fact, fear, where fearing is noble and not fearing shameful—for example, disrepute” (III 6 1115a12–13). The object of their hope is the same: they live in hope of not being led to disrepute. But what exactly do they hope for? Of course, granted that they are virtuous, their knowledge of the noble and their being attracted and motivated by it should not be in question at all (see Section 1.4). There is no room for oscillation between the truly noble and the apparent noble or the shameful, and there is no risk that their concentration on the noble will begin to waver either. What, then, is the meaning of this metaphor? How is it possible for the noble to “be obscured by the circumstances” and appear “small in extent” or “to have nothing pleasant about it”? If nobility as such could be obscure to the eyes of courageous people, they would not be virtuous in the first place; they would probably be selfcontrolled or even akratic. However, confidence and hope do not concern nobility itself as the end of courageous action or the clarity of the view of the noble as such. Nobility might be obscured or look “small in extent” to the courageous because they fear that moral luck will be so damaging that, despite their being indisputably committed to the noble, they will not prove able to carry their noble action through. It is not the intrinsic worth of their action that becomes obscured, only its feasibility. Feasibility depends both on the agents (on their ethical and intellectual states) and on the circumstantial and resultant luck that are beyond their control. Two critical Aristotelian claims explain the status of feasibility. First, the thesis that practical wisdom “does not exist without this capacity [i.e. cleverness]” (VI 12 1144a29)—that is, without the capacity to find and use the necessary means in order for virtuous people to actually realize their objectives. Second, the thesis that “the more controlling element in virtue”—what confirms it in the most complete way—requires both deliberate choice and actions done (X 8 1178a34–b1). Hope is about the feasibility of goodness or nobility which, in turn, depends on the feasibility of the actions we undertake under the pressure of circumstances. One can now address a last eventual objection: if hopefulness is connected with feasibility, so the argument might go, why not leave room for non-virtuous people endowed with cleverness to also hope well? Cannot such people see the future as being hospitable to their vicious plans and themselves as being capable of achieving those plans despite the unfavorable circumstances and the low odds? The Aristotelian answer to this question is evidently negative, for the same reasons for which it would be false to maintain that cleverness could ever enable vicious people to correctly perceive (aisthêsis) the morally salient circumstances of action. Aristotle’s two examples are pretty telling in this regard. A wrong

116  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck attitude toward fear is perfectly compatible with cleverness (for example, with finding the best means in order to flee when things turn out different from what was expected), but it severely deprives cowardly people of the capacity to see positive future scenarios of action; no matter how clever they are, they hope badly. The same holds true in the case of anger-related hope. Irascible people may indeed be clever enough to see positive scenarios of how to take revenge in the future, but their hopefulness would still not count as hoping-well, for the simple reason that they could not see, for instance, that they themselves had “done injustice and suffered justly” and, hence, that their anger should have ceased (Rh. II 3 1380b16–17). The cleverness of irascible people is the vehicle of their stubbornness rather than of justified hopes. Ethical vices undermine hoping-well; the more the relevant feelings involve future directedness, the stronger the influence of vices on hoping-well. Aristotle’s Phenomenology of Hope To further explain why I  take Aristotle’s phenomenology of hope—at least as I reconstructed it hitherto—not only to be rich and fascinating, but also to issue a real challenge to the contemporary pertinent discussion, let me show how its main tenets help us revise the much-discussed descriptive definition of hope proposed by Adrienne Martin: “Hope is a distinctive way of exercising one’s rational agency. It is a way of making an attractive outcome a part of one’s mental, emotional, and planning activities.”47 (1) Good or justified hope is neither a feeling or emotion (pathos) nor a virtue of character; hence, it does not by itself attest to how attractive the noble is to us or whether we are indeed attracted by the truly good or the apparent good. Being unable to generate or explain by itself our attraction to good practical ends and commitments, it is not “intrinsically motivational.” Rather, it is indirectly motivational in that it can sustain us through the most challenging trials. (2) Evidently, good hope does not emerge out of the blue in our lives, and it is not the product of a decision we reach or a strategy we capriciously adopt; it follows our feelings, especially the futuredirected ones, fear and anger being the most notable examples. It accompanies them in the same way that practical perception does, but perception is present directed while hope is future directed. In particular, Aristotle’s good hope enables us to hold a correct view at the intersection of our own agency and (circumstantial and resultant) moral luck—in other words, at the intersection of the commitments to our noble aspirations and the coordinates or pathways in the world that make it hospitable to our practical objectives. It functions as such an enabler by providing us with a lucid view of paths in

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  117  favor of low-probability positive scenarios and the materialization of our ends, by rendering this view colorful and vivid thanks to spending time on a certain hope-laden picturing, and, finally, by triggering plans and activities grounded in that view of the world. (3) Its motivational strength is due to the fact that both hope’s anticipation of positive scenarios regarding the future and the kind of picturing proper to good hope are experienced by the hopeful person as sources of pleasure—usually labeled by moral psychologists as “a certain positive feeling or emotion”—and are fulfillment oriented— that is, they have “an egoistic function.”48 (4) The correctness of good hope is not dependent on mere cleverness— that is, on a morally neutral intellectual capacity allowing us to successfully estimate the probabilities assigned to our plans and to improvise the most appropriate means to materialize them. It concerns the way we exercise practical reason itself—that is, whether we are practically wise or not. (5) It does not, however, merely amount to a matter “of practical rationality as coherence with and contribution to a rational scheme of ends”—that is, a matter of endorsing and promoting that scheme.49 In light of Aristotle’s notion of hoping-well, there is room for casting doubt on the reliability of such a coherentist approach to good hope, and I submit that its inadequacy is twofold. (5a) First, it would be misleading to conceive of hopefulness only in instrumental terms, as if hope were expected just to promote our practical ends or our scheme of ends. For hopefulness not only serves as a motivational enabler for the sake of already established and endorsed ends; rather, by determining the horizon of feasibility— in terms of our own endurance, perseverance, frustration t­ olerance, etc. and the world’s hospitality to our projects—hopefulness coconstitutes our scheme of ends itself—for instance, by means of dissociating genuine practical ends from the objects of mere wishful thinking. In other words, hope is intrinsically valuable in that the “scheme of ends is often itself partially constituted by some of the hopes of the agent[s],”50 those that form part of their practical identity. This is certainly the case, for instance, of the hopefulness inherent in the scheme of ends endorsed by Aristotle’s truly courageous person. (5b)  Second, coherentism is unable to properly explain Aristotle’s hopingwell. Aristotle’s idea is not simply that hope “derives its value from its contribution to a morally valuable practical identity,”51 as if the same morally neutral sort of hopefulness were to admit—at a ­subsequent time, so to speak—either a positive or a negative moral quality according to whether it contributes to a virtuous or a vicious character. Such an approach runs the risk of relegating hopefulness to a component or aspect of cleverness. In contrast, Aristotle is

118  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck adamant that good hope is exclusively accessible to virtuous people in the first place. For they are the only ones who display correct desires, correct deliberative imagination, correct practical perception and anticipation of what is morally salient, correct readjustment of their plans, etc., the only ones who have a correct view of the present and the future moral reality. Thus, Aristotle meets Euripides: “the wise people must live their life in hopes.”52 Prayers, as we are about to see, are substantially different.

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  119

3.2  Mind Your Prayers In Aristotle’s world there is no god to answer our prayers (euchê, singular), and yet prayers follow the excellent city like a shadow. Although cropping up only a dozen times in the Politics, the notion of prayer has left its mark on the account of the excellent city that Aristotle gives in Book VII as well as on such crucial transitional moments of the treatise as the first lines of Book IV: “What the best constitution is and what it would have to be like to be most of all in accord with our prayers, provided that no external impediments stand in its way [malista eiê kat’euchên mêdenos empodizontos tôn ektos]” (Pol. IV 1 1288b22–24). Nonetheless, as far as I know, people have been content to restrict their focus of investigation to Aristotle’s utopia—its plausibility, structure, and infrastructure—leaving prayers out of the picture. The most prayers themselves seem to deserve is a footnote or so.53 The result is that attention is switched away from the most basic questions. What is the function of the practical reason that prayers are meant to perform? Why could not, or should not, that function be carried out by deliberate choices, wishes, and action plans? Are prayers indispensable in order for practical reason to correctly conceive of the possibility of an excellent political order? Or are prayers a mere luxury of our practical lives—a motivational device or facilitator of our attempts to pursue political ends that we can fully flesh out without them? In other words, what would be the costs for political philosophy and political practice itself if there were no prayers? Prayers matter, and matter a lot, for they mirror our understanding of constitutive moral luck.54 Legislators and rulers who ignore or overlook this truth are, so I will argue, theoretically incompetent and politically perilous. To this end, I  begin with a close look at the object of Aristotle’s prayers—that is, at the material conditions of the city which Aristotle calls “political resources” and at their differences from “external goods.” I further clarify the prayed-for political resources by showing the temporality that is proper to them—namely, their present perfect tense. The findings in these sections lead to my reinterpretation of Aristotle’s prayers: I  first situate my approach vis-à-vis well-known antiutopian objections against Aristotle’s concept of eutopia, and, second, I point out the kind of political mistake that supervenes on legislators’ and theorists’ attempt to marginalize prayers or, worst, make them appear redundant. Correct Prayers and Aristotle’s Eutopia There can be no doubt that prayers have to do with the material conditions of the city, for which Aristotle interchangeably uses the terms

120  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck “matter [hylê],” “political resources [politikê chorêgia],” “commensurate resources,” and simply “resources”: The starting-point for the remainder of our investigation is first to discuss the sorts of hypotheses there should be concerning the city that is going to be set up so as to be in accord with our prayers [mellousês kat’euchên sunestanai poleôs]. For the best constitution cannot come into existence without commensurate resources [summetrou chorêgias]. That is why we should hypothesize many things in advance, just as when we are praying, although none of them should be impossible [mentoi mêthen toutôn adunaton]. I mean, for example, the size of the citizenry [plêthos politôn] and of the territory [chôras]. For just as other craftsmen—for example, a weaver or a shipbuilder—must also be supplied with matter [hylê] suitable for the work, and the better the matter has been prepared, the nobler the product of their craft must be, so too a politician and a legislator must be supplied with proper matter [oikeian hylên] in a suitable condition. (Pol. VII 4 1325b35–1326a5) This programmatic statement mentions two sorts of political “matter” or resources—namely, the size of the citizenry (the multitude of human beings) and the territory. But the next chapters of Book VII multiply the number of political resources the legislator should factor in. To see the ramifications and the vast web of implications that belong to each one of them, let us follow Aristotle’s remarks about the territory. The territory is first examined in terms of the land’s fertility and productivity (Pol. VII 5), but this also affects, for instance, the eventual need for trade (Pol. VII 6) and for farmers charged with the cultivation of the land (Pol. VII 8–9). At the same time, the territory is a space the city has to protect against invaders (Pol. VII 5), which points to the need for a military body (Pol. VII 8–9). From another point of view, the territory occupies space, and, by nature, its extent raises obstacles to its being “easily surveyed” (eusunopton) and easily traversed by its citizens or its enemies (Pol. VII 5). The geographical space of a city or state is also, by nature, determined by its axis (the imaginary line from the center to the borders), and, hence, it is important to take it into account, too—for instance, in distributing the citizens’ allotments (Pol. VII 10). In addition, the city’s territory is an occupied space and unavoidably belongs to someone—be it the city itself, the citizens, or both—and hence involves the institution of property (Pol. VII 10). Of necessity, also, the territory has a certain position with more or less direct access to the sea, with a more or less healthy climate, etc. (Pol. VII 6, 11). In addition to the political resources that appear in the previously mentioned passage from Politics VII 4, another resource is also important,

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  121 despite its absence from the relevant list in Politics VII 4 as well as from the list of the topics to which Politics VII devotes separate sections. It is also often disregarded by commentators. It appears, however, in Politics II 6, where Aristotle criticizes Plato’s political philosophy: The legislator should look to just two things in setting up his laws: the territory and the human beings. But, further, it would be good to add that he should also look to the neighboring territories [geintiôntas topous]. (Pol. II 6 1265a18–21; see also Pol. II 7 1267a19) One can hardly fail to notice the omnipresence of that third political resource throughout Politics VII. Thus, in Sections VII 1–3, which constitute a sort of prelude to the book, with its discussion of what happiness consists in for individuals and cities, Aristotle addresses the well-known dilemma over theoretical and practical life. At this juncture, he wonders whether “the function of a politician involve[s] being able to get a theoretical grasp on how to rule or master his neighbors [tôn plêsiôn], whether they wish it or do not wish it” (Pol. VII 2 1324b24–26). The importance of such a reference to neighbors results from the latent assumption that the external actions of the city are the actions directed outside the city, toward its neighbors. Aristotle makes two claims in relation to this. First, he refutes the false political postulate that one and the same city could ever be simultaneously just within its walls and unjust in its transactions with neighbors (Pol. VII 2 1324b35–36). Second, he attempts to bridge the gap between the self-sufficiency of the contemplative life of individuals and the self-sufficiency of the city. The latter would require that the city be not involved in actions toward its neighbors. Aristotle concludes: Moreover, it is possible for a single city to be happy even by itself (that is, one that is governed in a good way), if indeed it is possible for a city to be settled somewhere by itself and to employ excellent laws, and whose constitution will not be ordered with a view to war or to controlling its enemies—for we are assuming that it has none . . . it belongs to legislative science to see, if there are neighboring peoples, what sorts of things should be practiced in relation to what sorts of people and how the appropriate ones are to be used in relation to each. (Pol. VII 2 1324b41–1325a14) All things considered, there cannot really be a city without neighbors, so neighbors constitute an unavoidable political resource of each and every city. Why? Well, contrary to the provisional overoptimistic presumption that a city with an “all-producing” territory, self-sufficient in terms of food supplies, is something possible (Pol. VII 5 1326b27–29), Aristotle

122  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck concedes that such a city is a chimera. There is no city for which it is entirely inessential to import some goods (Pol. VII 6). Besides, no matter how isolated a city might be—for instance, an island, the beloved fantasy of utopians—one can never rule out the possibility that some other nation will be tempted to invade it or will settle nearby. For no city occupies the whole earth, and no city can ever anticipate and foretell, much less deter or preempt, what other cities or nations will wish to do. To think otherwise would lead to political absurdities like the stance of the Carthaginians as presented in the fanciful story we find in the pseudoAristotelian On Marvelous Things Heard: In the sea outside the Pillars of Hercules they say that an island was discovered by the Carthaginians desolate.  .  .  . The magistrates of the Carthaginians gave notice that they would punish with death those who should sail to it, and destroyed all the inhabitants, lest they should spread a report about it, or a large number might gather together to the island in their time, get possession of the authority, and destroy the prosperity of the Carthaginians. (836b30–837a6) The complexities of neighbors as a political resource now come to full view. A city without any neighbors at all is not, to be sure, something impossible (adunaton) in the normative sense of the term. For a selfsufficient single city, although impossible in reality, is something we may wish for. In addition, one can certainly imagine a self-contained and self-sufficient city, whereas it is impossible even to imagine a human city without a multitude of human beings, not situated somewhere, or not depending on food supplies. Nevertheless, such an imaginary city is refuted by reality. In consequence, not to have any neighbors cannot be the object of our prayers. For, as we shall see in a moment, correct or reasonable prayers are always for something possible. To summarize: neighbors constitute a political resource—a necessity. And good neighbors are something we should pray for and not something we can produce exclusively by our own initiatives. By contrast, political measures and actions come on the scene only afterwards, as Aristotle himself suggests, to cope with the particularity or the eventual deficiencies of the available political material.55 Thus, the quality of the city’s neighbors are among the things included in what a legislator prays for when he prays for suitable political resources. It is not enough, however, for the legislator to pray or know what kinds of things he should pray for. He must also pray well or correctly, and this is anything but an easy task. For only the excellent legislator whose prayers are shaped by political science can pray well. By the same token, we can see that if praying-well primarily relies on possessing political science, then praying-well is a function proper to practical reason.

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  123 Aristotle claims that to pray well we must “assume conditions that answer to our prayers, to be sure, but not ones that are impossible [dei men oun hupotithesthai kat’ euchên, mêden mentoi adunaton]” (Pol. II 6 1265a17–18), a proviso he repeats verbatim in the passage quoted earlier from Politics VII 4. Indeed, the contrast between what is “possible” and what is “impossible” permeates his analysis of political resources (Pol. II 1 1260b27–29, IV 1 1288b24–40). True, “not impossible” might simply designate things that are factually impossible, like Midas’ prayer that ever­ything be turned to gold (Pol. I 9 1257b15–17): not only is his prayer counterfactual, but it is also self-undermining because, were everything to turn to gold, Midas would die from hunger! Likewise, as we saw, a city without any neighbors at all is something factually impossible. But “not impossible” also has in the Politics a heavily normative sense, denoting, for example, what goes against the requirements that political resources should meet for the sake, or from the perspective, of the excellent city. For instance, a city with a large number of inhabitants is not “impossible” in the first sense; Babylon was such a huge city. It is “impossible,” however, in the normative sense of the term. VII 4 nicely frames the issue: The appropriate number of citizens is the one that underpins a city’s being “the best able [dunamenên] to complete” its function (Pol. VII 4 1326a13). A city that can only send a few hoplites to war “cannot possibly [adunaton] be great” (a22–24). “It is difficult, perhaps impossible [adunaton], for a city” to be properly governed when it is overly populous (a25–26). In order for a city to be well governed and just, “each citizen must [anagkaion] know what sorts of people the other citizens are” (b16). Too big a population “cannot [ou dunatai] share in order, for that would be a function for a divine power [dunameôs]” (a31–32). Although all the preceding factors circumscribing the prayed-for size of the citizenry revolve around possibilities and impossibilities, none invokes a factual impossibility. They all rely on the normative notion of the excellent city and the conditions of its materialization and, hence, on the city’s essence in general. That is why an excess in the size of the citizenry destroys the city as a political community: “Likewise also in the case of a city, one that is composed of too few people is not self-sufficient (whereas a city is something self-sufficient), but one that is composed of too many, while it is self-sufficient in the necessities, the way a nation is, is still no city” (b2–5). The same holds true regarding the territory, the position of the city, its access to the sea, and its need for naval forces, as well as the nature of its citizens.56 Political Resources vs External Goods The burden of normativity placed on the shoulders of the legislator who is expected to know the nature of political resources is anything but innocuous. For one thing, it lets us contest the common view that political

124  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck resources are modeled upon the “external goods [exôterika agatha]” we encounter in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics.57 Aristotle himself seems to suggest such a link in the Politics to the extent that each time he addresses the issue of happiness in Book VII, he also reminds us of the fact that nobody can be truly happy or blessed in the absence of external goods. The clearest pertinent suggestion is to be found in a crucial passage from Politics VII 13: That is why people consider the causes of happiness to be external goods. . . . It follows, therefore, from what has been said, that some things must be there to start with, whereas others must be established by the legislator. That is why, concerning the things that luck controls (for we take it that luck does control them), we pray for the composition of the city to possess them in accord with our prayers [kat’euchên euchometha].58 (Pol. VII 13 1332a25–31; see also VII 1 1323 a 25, 1323a40–b8, 1323b21–37) I doubt, however, that it is safe to conclude that political resources and external goods are the same thing. For if one looks closer, essential differences come into plain view or, at least, the emphasis is placed on different aspects of our connection with luck. External goods are necessary in order for the virtuous man to be happy or blessed. Even though happiness does not consist in these goods, a happy life “cannot exist apart from external goods, and they come about as a result of good luck” (MM II 8 1207b16–18). In order to live a happy life, a virtuous human being “needs external goods to be added” (I 8 1099a31–32). Put another way, external goods are situated somewhere on the trajectory leading from virtue to a happy life.59 In the words of the Politics, “An excellent man, of course, would use poverty, disease, and other sorts of bad luck in a noble way, but blessedness involves their contraries” (Pol. VII 13 1332a19–21). The most that external goods can contribute to the intrinsic value of virtue is to offer us opportunities to exercise our virtues or, at least, not impoverish them: “Since it is impossible or not easy to do noble actions without supplies. For just as we perform many actions by means of instruments, we perform many by means of friends, wealth, and political power” (I 8 1099a32–b2). But are external goods not also necessary in order for us to acquire ethical virtues in the first place? Indeed, some of them are—for instance, good nature (euphuia) and good breeding (eugeneia). But this is not the main perspective from which external goods are examined in the Nicomachean Ethics. In fact, to present someone whose ethical virtues are already established in his/her soul, Aristotle abandons the vocabulary of external goods and resorts to the vocabulary of prayers! “We should pray [euchesthai] that unconditionally good things will also be good for us,

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  125 while choosing the ones that are good for us” (V 1 1129b5–6). Here, the emphasis is on the presuppositions holding for our being virtuous, and Aristotle adds the rather pessimistic remark that we all choose what is only apparently good for us while the apparent good happens to coincide with the real good only for those who have the privilege of possessing a good nature and of having enjoyed a prayed-for education supplied by an excellent city promoting genuine virtue. Similarly, in the Politics, prayed-for political resources are primarily necessary in order for the city to become virtuous. Politics VII 4 says as much: “the best constitution cannot come into existence without commensurate resources.” Needless to say, the excellent city will be happy, too (Pol. VII 2 1324a13). True, a virtuous city may experience an unpredictable change in its material resources because of a war initiated by another state, a sudden natural disaster, or a radical mutation of its population due to a plague. It is not immune to catastrophes or calamities, to strokes of bad luck that threaten to undermine or destroy its happiness. Yet Politics VII considers political resources as prerequisites for the establishment of a good constitution or a fully virtuous city and only secondarily or indirectly as what enables that virtuous city to become or remain happy. Thus, unlike external goods, the prayed-for political resources are situated somewhere on the trajectory leading from the raw political matter to the establishment or creation of a virtuous city. In other words, they correspond to what we today call constitutive moral luck. They are, in fact, the most radical case of constitutive luck, since they concern the very existence of an excellent city, not of random virtuous individuals. A further difference leaps out at the reader of the Politics. According to the Nicomachean Ethics, external goods should be just sufficient or not altogether lacking (VII 1 1323b41–1324a2, X 8 1179a1–9), but for the Politics, political resources are quasi-ideal or “according to our prayers.”60 On closer inspection, though, the impression that “according to our prayers” means something absolutely perfect, ideal, and rare evaporates. There is no denying that Aristotle oscillates between abiding by the restriction that political resources be non-impossible and emphasizing the paralogon, or contrary to reasonable expectation, aspect of prayers and luck, the latter being often associated with rarity.61 Commentators also swing back and forth between ideal and “not too ideal” political resources. But, in reality, the details of Aristotle’s account show that his position is much less ambiguous and much more nuanced. First, certain political resources “according to our prayers” are not rare at all, but rather common, “since, even as things stand, we see many territories and cities that have ports or harbors naturally well situated in relation to the city” (Pol. VII 6 1327a32–34). Crete is such an example: “it is naturally well situated and situated to rule the Greek world” (Pol. II 10 1271b32–33). Second, resources with some sort of tiny deficiency still count as being “according to our prayers,” insofar as the excellent

126  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck legislator may subsequently counterbalance their lack of perfection (Pol. VII 13 1331b41–32a1). Third, some deficiencies are easily fixed by laws—for instance, the risk that non-citizens may overpopulate a city with important naval forces (Pol. VII 6 1327a38–40). Fourth, resources are not evaluated against a single wafer-thin ideal but against a gradation of perfection without their prayed-for quality being canceled or compromised—for instance, slaves are the prayed-for solution for farming, but the “second best” choice—namely, non-Greek subject peoples (perioikoi)—is equally good (Pol. VII 10 1330a25–30). Fifth, it is also noteworthy that resources “according to our prayers” are not the exclusive privilege of the excellent city. In many cases, the same resources are the prayed-for background to all the sufficiently good constitutions: Politics VII 6 opens with the “dispute about whether it [the access to the sea] is beneficial or harmful to cities that are in good legislative order” in general (Pol. VII 6 1327a11–13). Aristotle later returns to the issue of resources regarding the fertility and form of the territory and how they affect the practice of feeding the citizens, but, again, the pertinent proposals about communal messes (sussitia) are “useful for well-established cities” (Pol. VII 10 1330a3–4). Likewise, Politics VII 11 discusses the site the city “should pray to get,” but similar prayers apply as well “in all well-thought-out cities” (Pol. VII 11 1330b15).62 Hence, throughout Book VII, prayers do not express idle speculations about imaginary perfect lands. Aristotle simply associates praying-well with the political knowledge of the standards of eutopia, to use the final words in Anemolius’ poem: “eutopia they should call me, for good cause.”63 Eutopia denotes the sort of topos that the excellent legislator possessing political science prays for, being fully aware of the fact that the existence or coming to be of these resources is not his job but depends on luck, entirely. The next section explains the use of the adverb. The Present Perfect Tense of Prayers Prayers matter for Aristotle, and the first piece of evidence to this effect is that he invents an uncommon notion of prayers to fit in with his theoretical objectives. To understand its oddity, recall that both ancient Greeks and we moderns tend to assume that prayers and action plans constitute two different ways of anticipating the realization of our ends in the future. But whereas action plans and decisions imply our commitment to certain undertakings with a view to achieving our ends, prayers envisage the same ends but appeal to the intervention of some other source of activity or some other cause (like luck) beyond our proper reach. They are future directed and destined either to substitute for our actions or complement them. We pray in order for someone or something to guarantee, or assist us with, the materialization of our plans in the future.

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  127 In that sense, Plato’s prayers look like desires (epithumêma) “that events should obey whatever orders one feels like giving” (Laws, 687c1– 6), and Isocrates always relates prayers to actions and ends. Sometimes, he opposes prayers to deliberations (TNic 47), assuming that the latter should set in motion what the former only wish for. In other instances, however, invoking prayers is a device to motivate the audience to embrace ends that are both achievable and worthwhile and engage in deeds that are “as valuable as prayers [axia euchês]” (Pan 181–182; To Philippe 20). Likewise, in the Republic, Plato proposes a series of legislative measures and defends their feasibility and sustainability by distinguishing them from mere prayers (Republic, 450c–d, 456b, 499c, 540d). In all these cases, the rationale is that prayers and political actions share the same object, the only difference residing in that object’s modality. When viewed as the future outcome of political actions, our ends are envisaged as achievable; when viewed from within the practice of prayers, the same ends are envisaged as merely possible or even unattainable. Prayers seem, then, to be associated with resultant luck. Not so Aristotle’s prayers. Three critical passages from the Politics show as much: It follows . . . that some things must be there to start with, whereas others must be established by the legislator. That is why, concerning the things that luck controls (for we take it that luck does control them), we pray for the composition of the city to possess them in accord with our prayers [kat’euchên euchometha . . . hôn hê tuchê kuria]. The city’s being excellent, however, is no longer a function of luck but of scientific knowledge and deliberate choice [epistêmês kai prohaireseôs]. (Pol. VII 13 1332a28–32) It would be pointless, however, to spend time now in giving an exact account and speaking about things of this sort. For they are not difficult to understand, but difficult to do, since speaking about them is a function of prayer [euchês ergon], whereas having them come about is a function of luck [to de sumbênai tuchês]. (Pol. VII 12 1331b19–22) The starting-point for the remainder of our investigation is first to discuss the sorts of hypotheses there should be concerning the city that is going to be set up so as to be in accord with our prayers [mellousês kat’euchên sunestanai poleôs].  .  .  . That is why we should hypothesize many things in advance, just as when we are praying [kathaper euchomenous]. . . . For just as other craftsmen . . . must also be supplied with matter suitable for the work  .  .  . so too a

128  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck politician and a legislator must be supplied with proper matter in a suitable condition. (Pol. VII 4 1325b35–1326a5) There is no lack of clarity here: euchê is employed in a metaphorical sense, as if (kathaper) we were praying to a traditional Greek god who is more or less willing to answer to our prayers. Although both the secular and religious usage of the practice of praying presuppose a context of interchange and conversation within which someone addresses a claim to someone else, no such interchange and no godlike, superhuman, or human entity serving as our prayers’ addressee appears in the Politics. Aristotle’s prayers just require the reality of luck. But what kind of luck? Aristotle’s prayers refer neither to the ends of our actions themselves nor to their uncertain course in the future. For the intentionality of prayers and the intentionality of actions have entirely different objects and temporal modalities. In particular, prayers do not open up a path that runs parallel to or substitutes for our actions or action plans, and their temporality is not future directed (as hope’s temporality is).64 Obviously, they are not past directed or present directed, either. Their tense is the present perfect: by means of prayers, we hypothesize certain things in advance—that is, before we start specifying our practical ends and planning our actions: “some things must be there to start with.” Prayers are for what should lay there before our actions are decided, not their more or less anticipated future course. Significantly, each time Aristotle discusses the expected or unexpected consequences and the future course of a certain constitution, law, or political decision, he attributes them to the legislator’s fulfilled or frustrated wish (boulêsis), not to his prayers.65 This is so because the present perfect is the tense of the matter the legislator must be supplied with in advance. The present perfect of prayers is the tense of constitutive moral luck. The idiosyncrasy of Aristotle’s prayers will be better captured once we juxtapose them with Plato’s notion of a prayer in the Laws. Recall that for Aristotle, prayers expect their object to be provided by luck, whereas “the city’s being excellent . . . is no longer a function of luck but of scientific knowledge and deliberate choice” (Pol. VII 13 1332a28–32). Thus, prayers nowise overlap with the legislator’s deliberate choice and political science—although, as explained, praying-well depends on the possession of political science. Similarly, their fulfillment (i.e. political resources provided by luck) nowise overlaps with the outcome of a legislator’s activity (i.e. constitutions and laws). We pray for a certain kind of political matter, not for a certain kind of political form, notwithstanding the fact that matter and form are intimately related to one another.66 In a nutshell, to say that a constitution or a law system is prayed for is a contradiction in terms.

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  129 To see the difference from Plato, it suffices to quote the latter: Wouldn’t someone possessing the craft . . . also surely be able to pray [euxasthai] for the thing which, if it were available to him by luck [dia tuchês], he would need only the craft in addition? . . . Then [the legislator] will say this: “Give me a city under a tyranny. . .” (Laws, 709d1–e6) Plato begins by contrasting the legislator’s craft-knowledge with the material resources provided by luck. Subsequently, however, he states that what the excellent legislator should pray for is nothing else but a tyrant. This is so to the extent that a young, temperate, courageous, and intelligent tyrant appears to be the most efficient means for the legislator to establish an excellent city as quickly and smoothly as possible (Laws, 710b). Plato concludes that the ideal condition is the one in which good luck brings together such a tyrant and an excellent legislator (Laws, 710c7–9). Aristotle replies that yes, the combination of political resources and an excellent legislator possessing legislative science and knowing what to pray for is all we need. Nonetheless, we should break with Plato, since he does not correctly distinguish what is proper to luck and what is proper to a legislator’s deliberate choice. Constitutive luck only applies to the political or prepolitical matter of the city. These resources themselves are not the object of political decisions or actions, and it is not the legislator’s job to bring them about. Contrariwise, the constitution of the city is a matter of political form and the object of legislative initiatives, not of luck. Nowhere does Aristotle count the rulers and the legislators themselves among the political resources. Let me now introduce two further clarifications. First, there is no tension between maintaining that resources are the object of legislators’ prayers (not of their deliberate choices) and that from within the perspective of the established constitution, political resources call for a legislator’s action and intervention. For after finding themselves before a given material for whose quality and suitability they can only pray, there is still plenty of space for legislators to plunge into struggling with that material’s flaws by implementing curative constitutional measures. Politics VII ends by recalling the well-known Aristotelian motto that “every craft . . . wishes to fill in what nature leaves out” (Pol. VII 17 1337a1–3). And, faithful to it, Aristotle lays on the table numerous constitutional arrangements that echo the city’s willingness to cope efficiently with the shortcomings of its original material conditions. For instance, as far as it concerns access to the sea and the practice of importing and exporting, the multitude of traders that may populate the city is an impediment to its being well governed, but “if there is anything harmful, it can be easily prevented by means of laws” (Pol. VII 6

130  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck 1327a37–38). Likewise, laws about procreation and the rearing of disabled offspring remedy defects regarding the multitude of citizens and their nature (Pol. VII 16). Even more clearly, the educational system designed and implemented by the good legislator aims at enhancing the nature of citizens (Pol. VII 13–17, VIII).67 Besides, our historical experience of cities and constitutions testifies to the fact that certain constitutions fall short of exploiting their resources while others succeed in considerably enhancing them (Pol. VII 13 1332a41–b3). The amplitude and limits of such an enhancement aside, it is again noteworthy that prayers and political actions or measures are diametrically opposed: the former concern what lies there before a legislator’s activity starts, the latter what this very activity may thereafter implement, amend, construct, and supply. Second, it would be misleading to presume that the value of prayers is paradigmatically evidenced in the case of a totally new city whose legislator and the would-be citizens or rulers, acting like “volunteers,” “begin afresh” and “select its site, citizenry, etc.”68 The logic behind this narrative is that the legislator and the political leaders should search for the best or ideal political resources, decide which ones answer their prayers, and act accordingly. This narrative is, however, misleading, for it blurs the distinction between prayers and political decisions. If to “begin afresh” means to be responsible for finding the ideal resources, one would reasonably expect legislators to search endlessly for some prayed-for ideal material conditions somewhere on earth. What would entitle them to withdraw from searching and become complacent, though they have only found just approximately good or second-best resources? Undoubtedly, the possibility of still another territory closer to that which was prayed for would remain always open, if not to say, waiting in the wings. But such a picture is radically un-Aristotelian. Historically speaking, Aristotle’s “land of promise” includes nothing more exotic than some regions around the Mediterranean Sea that, for the most part, share common traits like close access to the sea, a hot and dry climate, etc. From a philosophical point of view, Aristotle’s legislator does not resemble More’s Raphael Hythloday, who, to a large extent, owes the discovery of Utopia to his joining Amerigo Vespucci, the great explorer! This is precisely why Aristotle opposes prayers to deliberate choices and actions. Political resources, prayed for or not, constitute what the legislators are supplied with, not what they are expected to search for. The analogy with craft in Politics VII 4 highlights the same notion of constraint: legislators are no more responsible for the political resources at their disposal than craftsmen are for the materials or tools they are provided with or doctors for the health of the patient who is visiting them for the first time. The terms used by Aristotle to designate legislators’ attitude toward the prayed-for (or not) political resources are also telling: “to hypothesize in advance [proüpotetheisthai]” (Pol. VII 4 1325b38), “to hypothesize [hypotithestai]” (Pol. II 6 1265a17, VII 13 1332a10),

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  131 “in  the underlying [or existing] circumstances [ek tôn hypokeimenôn, hyparchontôn]” (Pol. IV 1 1288b26, 33, VII 1 1323a18–19).69 Furthermore, the suggestion that the paradigmatic analysis of prayers should be contextualized through the vantage point of someone creating a new city nurses the false expectation that by beginning afresh, the legislator is indeed in a position to discover political resources that are “most of all in accord with our prayers, with no external impediments to stand in its way [malista eiê kat’euchên mêdenos empodizontos tôn ektos]” (Pol. IV 1 1288b23–24). But, as already suggested, Aristotle’s main concern is to demonstrate that “in accord with our prayers” does not amount to the requirement there not be “external impediments to stand in its way.” “No external impediment” would mean, in Aristotle’s terms, without matter or in the abstract, and this is the false account he blames others (Plato included) of being entrapped in. By contrast, his tenet is that, in the process of either establishing a new city or reforming an existing constitution, legislators are obliged to face something external or prior to their legislative activity that does not depend on their practical wisdom, political science, action plans, and deliberate choices. Evidently, the excellent legislator invited to establish a new city is expected to be a more or less excellent perceiver or detector of appropriate material resources within the limits of exactness that political matters admit of (Pol. VII 7 1328a19–21). But notice that, first, the same perceptual accuracy is actualized each time the excellent legislators are invited to reform an existing constitution, for they should rightly discern the salient features belonging to the existing resources and the complex ways they interact with one another—which recalls the medical method proposed in the Hippocratic text On Airs, Waters, and Places (Hippocrates 1923). Second, notwithstanding the accuracy of their perceptual capacity to discern the appropriate conditions and the correctness of their decision to establish the new city in that particular area, with citizens of that nature, etc., nothing obviates the need for them to pray for there to be good or sufficiently good alternatives from which to choose. For them, too, political resources represent a sort of resistance that they cannot eschew or sidestep thanks to their practical wisdom. More importantly, there is no political duty enjoining them to wander from place to place, casting around for quasi-ideal political resources somewhere on earth, nor are they more responsible for the alternatives among which they have to choose than the legislator who is appointed to reform the constitution of an existing city. Thus, common though it may be, it is a mistake to forget or ignore that the clause “city according to our prayers” (politeian tên kat’ euchên or kat’euchên sunestanai poleôs), what German scholars eagerly dub Wunschpolis,70 is an abbreviation we should not take à la lettre. For, strictly speaking, constitutions are not something we pray for in the first place, only political resources are. If there were a city “according to our

132  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck prayers,” then it would be the outcome of luck, while the excellent city is generated by excellent legislators. Prayers and the Highest Good It is time to sum up our findings. First, prayers perform a function proper to practical reason, and legislators’ correct prayers presuppose their possessing political science. Second, prayers are sharply distinguished from deliberate choices and action plans; hence, they do not burden the legislator with a duty to act as a missionary or an explorer devoted to creating or finding the most ideal political resources somewhere on earth. Third, the object of correct prayers is a city’s matter, not its form or constitution, and involves political resources (constitutive luck) indispensable for the establishment of a virtuous or excellent city that hence do not just imitate the external goods that assure the transition from virtue to a happy life. Fourth, these resources are evaluated by normative criteria, though they are not always ideal, rare, or difficult to eventuate. Fifth, though they are subsumed under many headings (for instance, the territory, the multitude of citizens, neighbors, etc.), each one of them has many aspects and affects the material condition and the function of the city in different ways. Sixth, the modality of the object of prayers is that of a necessity or a resistance offered by what lies there in advance, before legislators start planning their political actions, so that the tense of prayers is the present perfect tense, not the future. We know now that there is no notion of a future utopia in Aristotle’s Politics but only a sophisticated notion of eutopia. Nevertheless, the project developed in the Politics VII provokes in contemporary commentators an embarrassment they can hardly hide. Those displaying the most “mild” critical attitude take Aristotle’s excellent city with prayedfor resources to act as a regulative principle for political philosophy, on condition that “highly specific descriptions of ideal societies” is avoided. Such a theoretical need to treat blueprints with caution vindicates, so they say, the correctness of Aristotle’s silence in Book VII about particular constitutional arrangements.71 Others are more openly influenced by Berlin’s and Nozick’s anti-utopianism and, under the banner of multiculturalism, stress that “no perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs” and that the “idea that there is  .  .  . one best society for everyone to live in.  .  .  . [is] incredible,” so that utopias should function as “filter devices” that “involve a variable method of generating new candidates [of utopia].”72 In the wake of such skepticism, scholars are eager to attribute to Aristotle the view that no “action-guiding directive” is politically correct since it inevitably implies “an error about the plurality and partial incommensurability of human goods,” or they contend that Aristotle invites us to jump to the conclusion that the city of Book VII “is a model only because it reveals the limits

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  133 of politics”—that is, only because it reveals the fact that each and every political order “requires compromising with despotism” or, in Arendt’s terms, that any political society “is essentially or by nature limited in its openness to the virtues of the life of the mind.”73 The common tenet of these readings, mild and radical ones alike, is that they locate the root of unavoidable political predicaments that are endemic even in the most excellent city within the constitutional or political framework that the legislator’s deliberate choices and action plans can construct or fabricate. That their diagnosis nicely echoes the thread of Aristotle’s line of thought in Politics III–VI, I admit. But they miss Aristotle’s core idea in Book VII, for, here, political predicaments are examined in connection with material resources, not with inevitable political tensions among interests, values, classes, political forces, and claims in general.74 Not surprisingly, in the aforementioned readings, prayers are marginalized.75 No interpretive bias, however, should obscure two truths: Aristotle’s excellent city is, by definition, the city with, among other things, prayed-for political resources, and the excellent city instantiates Aristotle’s highest good. The highest good, Aristotle repeats again and again in the Nicomachean Ethics, cannot be our individual happiness:76 the good of a city “is evidently a greater and, at any rate, a more complete good to acquire and preserve. For while it should content us to acquire and preserve this for an individual alone, it is nobler and more divine to do so for a nation and city” (I 1 1094b8–10). Likewise, Politics I 1–2 unreservedly affirms the priority of the city over the individuals. Besides, an individual’s praying to be virtuous finally amounts to praying to have been educated in an excellent city (V 1 1129b5–6). We need prayers, then, because, were we deprived of them, we could not reach the highest good. Why Prayers Are Ineluctable On the basis of the previous findings, I  mean to answer the following questions: first, which theoretical need or objective obliges Aristotle to resist any marginalization of prayers as well as their reduction to, or their mingling with, deliberate choices and action plans? And, second, what kind of political mistake supervenes on the marginalization of prayers? Aristotle’s theoretical objective, in my view, is to exculpate legislative science from the charge that it never generates an excellent city without at the same time denying that city’s attainability; matter is the scapegoat. And we already know in outline how the argument goes: no constitution is prayed for, only political resources are. The details, however, need some unpacking. Political resources are modeled on the craft paradigm. This means that the legislator should possess a substantial amount of knowledge about political resources, of the sort provided in Politics VII. Indeed, virtuous

134  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck craftsmen or the most refined among them (I 13 1102a21–23), who are akin to physical scientists, “occupy themselves greatly” with the qualities of the matter that is proper to their craft.77 At the very least, they possess as much knowledge about the matter as is necessary for the generation of excellent products, which includes the knowledge of how to select and use the appropriate materials and give orders to and take advice from subordinate craftsmen.78 But craftsmen are not responsible for the matter or tools they are supplied with;79 the craftsmen who produce the tools or provide the material resources are. If such craftsmen and crafts do not intervene at all, then everything depends on nature. Famously, Aristotle stresses again and again that it is entirely reasonable to maintain that the doctor “has treated the patient well,” even if he/she failed to restore the patient to health because the latter’s condition was incurable (Rh. I 1 1355b12–14). The craft paradigm allows Aristotle to explain political resources from two perspectives. The first is based on the model of conditional necessity. Politics VII exhibits which resources are necessary in order for the city to perform as perfectly as possible its essential functions—the ones that make a city be a city in the full sense of the term. Teleological explanations of this kind take as their starting-point the form of the (excellent) city and deduce therefrom criteria about the suitability of political resources. Both in the biological works and in the Politics, they constitute explanations ex hypotheseôs: the form figures as an initial hypothesis or assumption and the matter as being for the sake of it; conditional necessity works in the top-down direction.80 And, no doubt, Aristotle’s Politics does make abundant use of the pattern of conditional necessity. For one thing, political science knows that for a city to be excellent, its citizens should be of such and such a nature, its territory such and such, and so on. As regards imperfect cities, the pattern of conditional necessity is also explanatory. For, granted that the legislator is excellent, the imperfection of a particular city’s resources should be attributed to the matter and its more or less inappropriate nature. And such a deficiency constitutes a sort of resistance to the legislator’s plans. But, second, political resources also offer a stronger kind of resistance to a legislator’s plans. In biology Aristotle acknowledges the presence of material processes that do not eventuate for the sake of an organism’s essential functions; they constitute a “pre-conditional necessity . . . which constrains, and perhaps acts independently of, the actions of its formal nature.”81 The winter rainfall example is pretty telling (Ph. II 8 198b34– 199a8): the growth of crops is not causally connected with winter rainfall in terms of hypothetical necessity, as if there were a natural teleological chain connecting them. Rather, human beings impose the craft of agriculture on what is materially available (i.e. on what the outcome of a materially necessitated process is that does not have agriculture as its natural end) in order to satisfy their own needs: there is no anthropocentric

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  135 teleological plan in the case of winter rains. Not only agriculture but crafts in general function in the same way: they use materials whose natural ends are different from the uses human beings impose upon them.82 Mutatis mutandis, this is also the case with political resources. For instance, nowhere does Aristotle suggest that we should assume an anthropocentric natural teleology pointing toward the generation of some all-producing territory, with appropriate access to the sea, inaccessible to any neighbors, endowed with a good climate, etc. Contrary to what an anthropocentric natural teleology would require, no territory is all producing, no territory can produce anything without farmers cultivating it, at least until the day that “each instrument [will] perform its own function on command or by anticipating instructions” (Pol. I 4 1253b33–35), no territory fully spares the city of having to erect walls, no territory can fully and simultaneously meet the demands to make it difficult “for enemies to invade [it],” to facilitate “citizens themselves to get out of [it],” and to be “easily surveyed as a whole” (Pol. VII 5). The territory is a “necessary nature” that instantiates a resistance not only to the plans of the legislator who reforms an existing city but also to the plans of the political scientist who writes the Politics and of the excellent legislator who establishes a new city. Thus, thanks to prayers, legislators can hit two birds with one stone (and there is no other way to hit either of them): on the one hand, to exculpate legislative science and put the blame for the radical uncertainty over the emergence of an excellent city on luck; on the other, to explain that there is only one correct political attitude toward the non-impossibility of the excellent city—namely, correct prayers, neither deliberate choices, promises, or some missionary zeal to find out the ideal political resources somewhere on earth nor a total indifference for city’s material conditions and for the realization of goodness on earth. What kind of political mistake supervenes on the marginalization of prayers? At any rate, this is a question that a practical science like politics is not allowed to brush aside.83 By “marginalization of prayers,” I mean the view that legislators are able to implement their political objectives no matter what the available resources and their resistance are, as if the political form were omnipotent and the only ground of political reality. The marginalization of prayers is one thing; their incorrectness is another. The latter is a serious political mistake that is due to legislators’ incompetence, to their lack of political science. Recall that mistakes about the prayed-for size of the citizenry can provoke the very annihilation of the city. On the whole, mistakes of that sort lead to false or deviant constitutions and undermine the city’s path toward virtue and happiness. The marginalization of prayers is a political failure of a different order. But does Aristotle recognize it as such in Books VII–VIII? I submit that he does each time he addresses the question of neighbors.84 That is why

136  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck it was so critical to see that they are treated there as a kind of political resource: “It belongs to legislative science to see, if there are neighboring peoples, what sorts of things should be practiced in relation to what sorts of people and how the appropriate ones are to be used in relation to each” (Pol. VII 2 1325a11–14). Given, as we saw, that it is inevitable for there to be neighboring peoples, the legislator has to decide how the city will deal with them. And it is here that the shadow of despotism rears its ugly head. That is why the city’s attitude toward its neighbors and despotism are constantly examined as a pair from Politics VII 2 to 14. Before Politics VII, Aristotle had emphasized repeatedly that the most perilous and incurable political degeneration emanates from identifying political rule with mastership, with the rule of the despotês over the slaves. The attempt to distinguish these two radically different ways of exercising rule has been the thread of the whole treatise of the Politics from its very first lines to the distinction between correct and deviant constitutions (Pol. IV–VI). In Book VII, however, despotism assumes a new form. It no longer applies to the relationship that holds between master and slave or in the tendency of some rulers to behave toward the ruled as if the latter were slaves. Instead, it concerns the relationship between one city and its neighbors as something completely external to it. Hence, it is no longer enough to dismiss the false political view that, within the city, “the mode of constitution that rules as a master or a tyrant is the only happy one” (Pol. VII 2 1324b2–3). Books I–VI already carried that mission through. In addition, one must question the tenability of the political dogma endorsed by those who maintain that mastership must substitute for politics in a city’s relationships with its neighbors: “for they seek just rule among themselves, but toward others they care nothing about justice” (Pol. VII 2 1324b35–36). Thus, so the argument goes, one and the same city can be internally just and externally unjust. The bad news is that this way of looking at things is nothing other than the political expression of the desire for domination (kratein), a desire lurking within the soul and the political aspirations of Scythians, Persians, Thracians, and Celts (Pol. VII 2 1324b9–12). But Greeks are not immune to it either. Its Greek face is visible in Sparta, where the legislator thinks himself praiseworthy for promoting Sparta’s happiness by “train[ing] it to conquer and rule its neighbors” (Pol. VII 14 1333b30– 31). The rationale of the Spartans’ argument is that they should “legislate on all matters with a view to conquest and with a view to war,” on the assumption that by ruling over all their neighbors, they would be in a position to be provided “with a ready supply [chorêgia] of the goods of luck” (Pol. VII 14 1333b14–18). It is rather safe, then, to generalize and conclude that all human laws aim at domination (Pol. VII 2 1324b7). Domination can be crude and without any pretense or excuse, but, in the case of the Greeks and other people habituated to a political form of life, it is usually disguised under

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  137 some pretext. It may appear as the unavoidable consequence of expansion (Pol. IV 4 1291a20–21) or as an allegedly defensive political reflex dictating that “someone who has the capacity should not let rule pass to his neighbor, but rather take it away from him” (Pol. VII 2 1325a36–38). Regardless of the political rhetoric adopted (rhetoric of which Thucydides’ Melian dialogue is a dramatic example), cities tend to comport themselves toward their neighbors according to the rules of mastership or despotism. Notice that, to prove that “ruling as a master over one’s neighbors involves one of the greatest injustices” (Pol. VII 2 1324a35–37), Aristotle does not evoke his well-known arguments about correct political rule within the city. Instead, he argues as follows: The function of a politician involve[s] being able to get a theoretical grasp on how to rule or master his neighbors [tôn plêsiôn], whether they wish it or do not wish it. . . . But many seem to think that mastership is politics, and the very thing they all deny to be either just or advantageous for themselves, they are not ashamed to practice on others. For they seek just rule among themselves, but toward others [allous] they care nothing about justice. It would be strange, though, if by nature one thing were not suited to be ruled by a master and another suited not to be ruled by a master. So if indeed things are that way, one must not try to rule as a master over everyone, but only over those who are suited to be ruled by a master, just as one must not hunt human beings for a feast or sacrifice, but rather animals that are suited to being hunted for this—and any wild animal that is edible is suited to being hunted. (Pol. VII 2 1324b24–41) Legislative science and political rule alike should respond to the challenge of the available political resources by taking into account their particularity. Thus, neighbors also should be treated according to the particular nature they display. Notice that all this is a question of justice: if neighbors were a mere tool or a means to the city’s prosperity, mastership would indeed be the appropriate science, and no question of justice would arise. By contrast, the propensity for domination leads to injustice or despotism each time the legislator or the city fails to acknowledge any resistance to their aspirations, as if political resources should be fully controlled by them. Neighbors—others—stand here for any sort of otherness exemplified by political resources in general. The nature of the would-be citizens is another pertinent example. A  legislator who was ready to implement an excellent constitution—let it be conceded for the sake of the argument that it is indeed the absolutely best one—without regard for the citizens’ nature would be despotic. The same holds true regarding the

138  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck available territory, access to the sea, and other resources. For the issue is not whether human resources are endowed with natural rights while the other resources are not. What matters is legislators’ political attitude, which is despotic when, like that of an omnipotent demiurge, it treats political resources as things that do not and should not offer any resistance to their wishes and choices—an attitude conveying political voluntarism. Aristotle’s guiding idea is that the legislators’ attitude that is conveyed in the city’s constitution or form and their attitude toward the political resources of necessity mirror one another. In both cases, despotism resides in the voluntarism that is inherent in the tendency of legislators, rulers, and citizens not to recognize any constraints to their will. The moral is that, throughout political life, the very same propensity to despotism is each time covered by a different mask, be it the legislator’s marginalization of prayers, the false democratic dogma that “freedom is  .  .  . doing whatever one wishes” (Pol. V 9 1310a2), the arrogance (hubris) of the citizens who happen to have external goods in excess (Pol. IV 11 1295b6–10), or the tyrant’s hubristic treatment of others (Pol. V 11 1314b23–32). Thus, legislators who not only ignore how to pray well but, more radically, take prayers to be otiose—legislating under the illusion that they are in a position to create by themselves perfectly suitable political resources or to completely assimilate the existing ones into their wishes— are politically perilous. Excellent legislators, by contrast, nowise aspire to eradicate prayers, since they are fully aware of the fact that it would be vain and mistaken to banish what is our primary way of dealing with constitutive moral luck in political matters. Indeed, they know how to go the extra mile and pray well.

Notes 1. See II 4 1105a28–33, III 2 1111b5–6, III 2 1111b20–30, III 3 1113a9–10; EE II 11 1228a11–19; Rh. I 4 1359a37–b1. 2. I follow the distinctions proposed by Nagel 1993: 60 and only leave out “antecedent causes” luck, which raises the much disputed and anachronistic question of free will. 3. See I 10 1100b18–33 and EE VII 2 1238a14–20. 4. In recent times, Hannah Arendt was the first who recognized (in Arendt 1958: 175–247), by building on Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, the critical dimension of vulnerability, fragility, and luck in human affairs. But the remedies she proposes (the power to promise as a remedy against unpredictability and the power to forgive as a remedy against irreversibility) do not have Aristotelian or Greek roots. Martha Nussbaum’s inspiring study The Fragility of Goodness is meant to show, amongst other things, why Aristotle’s ethics does not lay itself open to Williams’ attacks about the alleged oxymoron of moral luck. Her analysis, however, ends (as we shall see in a moment) at the very point from which my present investigation wishes to start. Paul Ricoeur draws fruitfully on both of them (Ricoeur 1990: 227–230, 281–287) to describe the “visée éthique,” but, going far beyond Aristotle, he aims at

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  139 reconciliating Aristotle’s practical wisdom with Kant’s morality and Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, not at following the details of Aristotle’s considerations about moral luck. 5. See respectively: Nagel 1993: 58; Williams 1993: 251. I  refer to Williams’ “Postscript,” which clarifies some “misunderstandings” of his “Moral Luck” (Williams 1981: 20–39). Williams himself concedes that Aristotle’s Ethics does not “run the same difficulties” (Williams 1993: 252; see also Andre 1993: 126–127; Athanassoulis 2019: 15–16). 6. Respectively: (1) Nussbaum 1986: 339, (2) Wolf 2001: 13–14, (3) Walker 1993: 241–243. 7. In their accounts of moral luck in Aristotle, Johnson 2015b; Athanassoulis 2019; Broadie 2019a adopt a meta-ethical perspective and do not thematize hopes and prayers at all (except for a brief reference to prayers by Broadie 2019a: 26) or, in general, the intentionalities thanks to which virtuous people face luck in their moral lives. 8. The openness of the future (for instance, that it is necessary for the sea battle to either take place tomorrow or not, although it is not necessary for it to take place tomorrow nor is it necessary not to take place tomorrow, since the things which depend on action and deliberation are future contingents) has been established by Aristotle in On Interpretation IX and will not concern us here. For an overview of the pertinent discussion, see Gaskin 1995. 9. The most telling example of elpis’ ambiguity that has come to my attention is from Libanius in his Greek of the fourth century in Antioch: “tên tôn xalepôn elpida têi parexousêi ti beltion” (Oratio 22: Pros Ellebichon)! A. F. Norman, Loeb’s translator, artfully separates the meaning of elpida into two parts: “expectation of trouble” and “hope of some alleviation.” 10. IX 7 1168a13–14; On Memory and Recollection 449b11–12, 25–27; Rh. I 11 1370a29–34, II 12 1389a21–23, II 13 1390a8–9; see also Cairns 2016: 17–24. 11. Already Aquinas distinguishes the passion/feeling of hope that concerns what it possible to us by our own agency from “expectation” that concerns what is possible to us by another’s help; exspectare consists in “keeping our eyes on another” on whose help we rely, while it is attributed to hope only in a derivative way (see: Summa Theologica I–II 40.2, analyzed by Pinches 2014: 352ff.). 12. See Miceli  & Castelfranchi 2010: 255–257; Steinbock 2006: 274–275. Among others, Martin qualifies the distinction between hope and expectation “as far as there is one” and correctly emphasizes that it cannot be a mere question of probability assignment—which inevitably is arbitrary— but primarily a question about “how one sees a probability” (Martin 2023: 63–65). In contemporary empirical studies inquiring on the expression of hope in uncongenial or even quasi-hopeless situations—for instance, sociological studies of health-care contexts, anthropological studies of displacement, and so on—the two concepts are employed antithetically: people express hope in spite of their expectations (see Cook 2018: 105–115). I take the distinction to echo the commonsense idea that hope is compatible with low certainty.   Likewise, in Aristotle, though prosdokia (expectation) is in one place a synonym of elpis (IX 7 1168a13–18), in many other places, it exclusively concerns imminent things and involves a high degree of certainty (see III 6 1115a9 and Rh. II 5 1382b29–30). Also of note: hope and expectation are made to coincide in Paul’s Epistles and the subsequent Christian tradition to the extent that the salvation of humankind is certain; Paul coins the term apokaradokia to denote the sort of certainty that is inherent in hope (see Romans 8:18–25 and Philippians 1:20—Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece).

140  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck 13. Gauthier & Jolif 1970 II 1: 232–233 (their misleading identification of elpis with a sort of prediction or prognostic aside); Reeve 2014 adopts the same solution. 14. See respectively: Lear 2008: 113ff; Pettit 2004: 159; McGeer 2004: 110. 15. It is worth remembering that hope’s reliance on “experience” and “practical sagacity” is the very target of Søren Kierkegaard’s critique in the name of what he calls “eternal hope.” That is also why his account of youthfulness is very different from Aristotle’s. See Kierkegaard 1995, Works of Love: IX 239–240. 16. III 8 1117a10–14 reads as follows: Hopeful people are not courageous either, then, since it is because they have often been victorious and over many opponents that they are confident in facing dangers. But they are similar to courageous people, because both are confident. Whereas courageous people are confident because of what we just mentioned, however, hopeful ones are confident because they think they are the best [kratistoi] and that nothing will happen to them. (Drunks also behave in this sort of way, since they become hopeful). In line with the taxonomy of modes of courage unfolded in Eudemian Ethics III 1 1229a11–21, we should take this passage to refer to those who have been lucky in their previous battles. Nevertheless, the correlation is not fully clear since, some lines before, the term kratista and many others with similar connotations of power were used to describe the case of professional and experienced soldiers, not just lucky people. Besides, the metaphor of drunk people is used in the Rhetoric to illustrate the hopeful character of young people (Rh. II 12 1389a18; see also Problemata XXX 955a1–6). Gravlee 2000: 464 follows the correlation, while Taylor 2006: 188 does not; neither of them, however, discusses the pertinent ambiguity. 17. EE III 1 1230a8–10 makes the distinction clearer, for soldiers’ confidence is only about the means or resources required, not about the nobility of the end. 18. See Snow 2013. 19. The foregoing account does not run the risk of imposing an anachronistic notion of progress on Aristotle’s productive sciences. For even if we take the example of someone who possesses in the highest degree a completed science, the resistance of the particular matter and the extent of its malleability will present a new challenge each time. 20. Taylor 2006: 187 misses the point. 21. Despite the demand for going beyond what our past and present experiences have made us familiar with, Aristotle’s hope is not the “radical hope” that is tied up with what “lies beyond the horizons of one’s historically situated understanding” or with the idea of “a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is” (Lear 2008: 95, 100). There is no place for such a (Kierkegaardian or rather Blochian?) radicality in Aristotle’s world. More generally, I  am skeptical about Lear’s emphasis on the gap between experiences of transcendence and our historically situated understanding. Things rather go the other way around: transcendence and negativity— so Gadamer claims in his Wahrheit und Methode (GW1: 352–368)—are ­co-constituents of all genuine forms of human experience.   For similar reasons, Aristotle’s justified hope cannot accommodate Callard’s aspirants and their “proleptic reasons,” where “aspiration” denotes a transformative pursuit “directed at the acquisition of [new] values” (Callard 2018: 5). In any case, Callard uses “hope” in its everyday broad meaning (6–7, 104), not as a technical term. Nonetheless, she meets Williams’

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  141 examples of moral luck, but in a reversed direction—that is, anticipatively rather than retrospectively. Though she concedes that proleptic reasons are “amenable to rational critique” (105), she unsurprisingly entrusts that critique to external advisors or mentors, not to the aspirant himself (who, in her framework, is not capable of such a critique yet). By contrast, Aristotle’s virtuous hopers are mentors of themselves. 22. According to Milona 2019, there is no need to abandon the pattern of belief and desire; one must only avoid an oversimplification of desires and their relationship to beliefs. 23. For disrepute as the bad (kakon) or shameful (aischron) object of a virtuous person’s fears, see III 6 1115a9–14 and III 8 1116b19–23 and Pearson 2009: 131–134. 24. The double intentionality that is operative in hope’s concern for both the agent and the world is fully recognized in the recent literature, though without any reference to Aristotle’s legacy. See, for instance, McGeer 2004: 105; Pettit 2004: 159; Steinbock 2006: 277–278; Ratcliffe 2013: 609. 25. See VI 8 1142a23–30 and Kontos 2011: 32–53. In that sense, good hope and correct practical perception occupy the same place within practical wisdom. For the components of practical wisdom, see Kontos 2019. 26. Thucydides takes hope to lead, for the most part, to delusional political ­deliberations—for it is imbued with irrational passions and just provides us with a false assumption about “the full assistance of luck” (Historia 3.45.5– 6), prompts misjudgments about the “actual circumstances [hyparchonta]” because of merely projecting past success into the future (6.31.6), and displays a false reliance on divine intervention rather than on real political and military strength, as it is stressed in the famous Melian dialogue (5.103.2). Nevertheless, he also takes the capacity of hoping-well to be an indispensable component of political intelligence (sunesis). This becomes obvious in his encomium of Themistocles in Historia 1.138.3: Themistocles is capable both of hoping-well about future hidden things (aristos eikastês) and of correctly perceiving the present circumstances (kratistos gnômôn). For Thucydides, the present circumstances and what lies hidden in the future (ta aphanê, mello­ mena, elpizomena) are two distinct spheres of reality, and correctly grasping them requires two pertinent intellectual capacities. Pericles confirms this very same distinction (2.42.4). Wishful or delusional hopes are generated each time people are unable to properly distinguish these two spheres, and, in part, this is the sort of mistake the Athenians reproach the Melians for: “you are the only men . . . who discern the future things more clearly [saphestera] than the present ones, and regard things unseen as already realized because you wish them to happen” (5.113). 27. I have borrowed the labels “optimistic hope” and “eyes-on-the-prize hope” from Calhoun 2018: 79–81. 28. See ΙΙΙ 1 1110b33–11a 7, V 8 1135a25–26, b13–16, and EE II 9 1225b2, b6–7, and, for further analysis, Flannery 2013: 110–138. 29. In cases like these, the virtue of courage precisely consists in forestalling confidence, since any level of confidence that would make us wait for rescue runs counter to evidence and hence counts as a non-medial condition (mesotês). Contrast with Taylor 2006: 177–178. 30. Pettit 2004: 158, 155. 31. Heidegger nicely makes the point in his commentary on the Rhetoric: “the elpis sôtêrias is as constitutive of my being afraid as it is of my believing that I am threatened” (Heidegger 2002: 260 and §21 in general). Seneca’s description is appropriately vivid: “Just as the same chain fastens the prisoner and

142  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck the soldier who guards him, so hope and fear, dissimilar as they are, keep step together; fear follows hope” (Epistulae 5.7–8; I owe the reference to Kazan­ tzidis and Spatharas’ Introduction in 2018: 11). 32. Thus, in Aristotle’s framework, hope is not a feeling or emotion (pathos): it does not figure in the list of feelings we encounter in the Nicomachean Ethics (II 5 1105b20–23), and no chapter of Rhetoric II is devoted to it. Whoever reads, however, Aristotle’s notion of hope through Aquinas fails to recognize its intellectual character. (Cairns 2016: 23 recognizes the ambiguity of the Greek notion of hope between affective and cognitive senses but emphasizes the role of elpis metaphors as emotion metaphors.) For Aristotle, hope is an element of the structure of fear and anger, for they are paradigmatic future-directed feelings. By contrast, for the most part, in the wake of the Stoics, contemporary discussions of hope connect it with fear. For a noteworthy exception, see Stockdale 2017, who analyzes anger and bitterness in terms of loss of hope. 33. See Ratcliffe 2013: 600, 603. Loss of the capacity to hope is not “the loss of a hope or of any number of hopes. It is the loss of a possibility of adopting an attitude of the kind ‘I hope that p’ ”—that is to say, the loss of “a general orientation or sense of how things are with the world, in the context of which intentional actions of the kind ‘I hope that p’ are possible.” Thus, on this level, hopefulness is not oriented toward a specific object. 34. Future’s hospitality is also translatable in terms of goodness: if our activities are for the sake of what we take to be good or worthy, and if the actualization of those activities and their materialization are constitutive components of their goodness (X 8 1178a34–b1), then hoping in a hospitable future coincides with hoping in goodness. And since collaboration with others is, for the most part, a necessary condition for our activities to thrive, such hopefulness entails the belief that “certain people are among the decent ones” (Rh. II 8 1385b34). 35. For anticipation and fulfillment, see Husserl’s classic studies on the consciousness of time in Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (Husserl 1966b: Hua X) and, more importantly, in Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewußtsein (Husserl 2001: Hua XXXIII). A comprehensive analysis of our consciouness of the future, for which Husserl’s technical term is Protention, is given by Ferrer 2015; Soueltzis 2021. 36. For the same reasons, the temporality of hope is not a matter of how long our hopes endure or how short-lived they are, as if they should be measured according to clock or calendar time. It’s a matter of how they are fulfilled. For instance, Aristotle says that anger-relevant hope and fear-relevant hope diverge in that the latter demands imminent satisfaction (eggus) while the former may coexist with long-term plans since, among other things, it may remain inactive and dormant while we are invested in other priorities, etc. Contrast with Gravlee 2000: 467. 37. I allude to Husserl’s notion of ausmalende (picturing) or klärende (clarifying) making-intutive as it is analyzed in his Analysen zur Passiven Synthesis (Husserl 1966a: Hua XI: 78–83). Bovens’ “mental imaging” is very close to Husserl’s “picturing” and nicely applies to the case of hope and the associated pleasures of anticipation (Bovens 1999: 673). 38. The relationship among hope, imagination, and pleasure is explained in Rh. I  11 1370a27–b28. Of course, anger-laden or fear-laden hope is not a pure imaginative activity that we may capriciously start “whenever we wish” (DA III 3 427b16ff.), dependent as it is on and prompted by what is actually at stake. See Plato’s Philebus on hope and pleasure (32C ff.) and Vogt’s 2017b pertinent analysis.

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  143 39. “People enjoy a certain pleasure when they . . . anticipate that they will get it. For example, those in a fever, during their attacks of thirst, enjoy . . . anticipating drinking” (Rh. I 11 1370b16–19). 40. Aristotle’s definition in Rh. II 2 shows that, primarily, anger entails pain, not pleasure: “Let anger be desire, involving pain, for apparent revenge.” For further analysis, see Rapp 2002 II: 586 and contrast with Grimaldi 1980/1988 II: 25. 41. Picturing is the active element of justified hope (and, certainly, when it is excessively productive, it may create wishful hopes). By contrast, the claim that hope itself is an “active adoption” of a strategy mistakenly overemphasizes hope’s spontaneity, no matter whether one wants to raise hope to an independent feeling (which is, in the wake of stoicism, the contemporary tendency) or to make of it a component of certain attitudes (as Aristotle does— correctly, I think). Obviously, it is one thing to question the soundness of the phrase “I decided to hope . . .” and another to claim that hope is something preintentional or unconscious. There is plenty of room to subscribe to the first claim and, at the same time, not to the second. Aristotle adds the following clarification: It seems to be characteristic of a more courageous person to be fearless and calm in the face of frightening things that are unforeseen than of those that are clear beforehand, since doing so was more the result of his state of character, because it was less the result of preparation. For when things are evident beforehand we can deliberately choose what to do in accord with rational calculation and reason as well, whereas when they happen suddenly we must do so in accord with our state of character. (III 8 1117a18–22) 2. Bovens 1999: 673–675. 4 43. Calhoun 2018: 83–84. 44. The present account of hope provides an additional argument against “evidentialism.” It solidifies Marušić’s 2015 claim that “resolution” as an “interpersonal commitment” to a future course of actions against the available evidence or in spite of inadequate evidence is, within the sphere of practical reasoning, fully rational. In particular, although Marušić himself makes no reference to hope, his way of resolving the (second) Sartrean problem of “bad faith”—namely, how to remain realistic about our future actions or how not to disregard our facticity—presupposes an account that distinguishes justified hopes from expectations or predictions (see Marušić 2015: 128–144). 45. Notice that the verb afanizesthai often has much stronger connotations: to completely disappear, do away with, destroy, etc. (Liddell Scott). 46. Confidence (tharros) is one of the two feelings whose medial condition constitutes courage (andreia): the virtue of courage “is a medial condition concerned with feelings of fear and confidence” (III 6 1115a6–7). It is opposed to two pairs of extremes (as has been nicely shown by Schilling 1930): extreme deficiency in fear (nameless) and excess in confidence (thrasus) vs excess in fearfulness (deilos) and deficiency in confidence (deilos). 47. Martin 2013: 131. 48. For the prior quotations, see respectively: Martin 2013: 93, 55, 58. 49. Contrast with Martin 2013: 81. 50. Bloeser & Stahl 2017: 355. 51. Contrast with Bloeser & Stahl 2017: 358. 52. Fr. 408 (“en elpisin chrê tous sophous echein bion”) in R. Kannicht, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta 5.1. See also: Euripides’ Heracles, 105–106

144  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck (OCT): “this is the best man, the one who always puts his trust in hopes; to dispair is the mark of a bad man.” 53. See, for instance, Kraut 2002: 192n1. Many others, instead of investigating for themselves, just rely on this footnote! Even those who devote a much longer analysis to prayers (for instance, Pellegrin 2017: 304–305, 379–417; Schütrumpf 1991–1996 IV: 139–146, 96–108, 288ff; Salkever 2007) are only interested in how Aristotle’s conception of political resources affects the excellent city of Books VII–VIII. For them, prayers, hopes, and wishes are mere synonyms. Simpson’s 2017 interpretation of prayers in connection with the “City of God” is biased toward the secular readings of Aristotle’s Politics, and many of its premises are obviously flawed. Mayhew 2007 nicely explains why this is so. For the allegedly Aristotelian text On Prayer, which was rather titled Peri Eutuchias (De fortuna), see Rist 1985 (against Pepin 1967).   Also of note: The Greek term euchê can mean both a prayer to a god and “a mere wish” (Liddell Scott). One cannot avoid translating it with the English “prayer” just because the term “wish” is kept for Aristotle’s boulêsis. Thus, though the term inevitably carries its religious connotations, it is not the case that Aristotle puts here some exclusively religious terminology to political use. Even those who are eager to emphasize the presence of divine law or the role of traditional religion in Aristotle’s Politics are adamant that Aristotle’s prayers do not have any religious significance at all (see, respectively, Pangle 2013: 240; Segev 2018: 298). Besides, I  haven’t found any ­evidence supporting the hypothesis that Aristotle’s use of euchê is meant as a latent criticism of the traditional practice of prayers, though it is certain that, to him, that practice was meaningless. It is for all these reasons that I submit the idea that Aristotle’s notion of a prayer makes part of his account of luck, not of his political theology. 54. Athanassoulis 2019: 17–19 overlooks the connection between prayers and constitutive luck, for she tries to detect the traces of the latter only in the Eudemian Ethics. 55. The omnipresence of neighbors as a political resource is also testified by the Politics’ account of the other political resources. For neighbors are connected with the form of the territory that should be such as to render enemies’ or neighbors’ invasion as hard as possible (Pol. VII 5), with a city’s access to the sea and its facilitating trade with neighbors (Pol. VII 6), with the naval forces that are needed by any city willing to live “a life of leadership and a political life” toward its neighbors (Pol. VII 6 1327b5), with the citizens’ nature, which should combine spirit and thought in order for the city to live in freedom and be “capable of ruling all,” in case its neighbors do not share the same good nature but are addicted to despotism (Pol. VII 7 1327b32), with political decisions about the walls and the fortification of the city that depend on the sort of neighbors the city happens to enjoy (Pol. VII 11 1330b32ff.), etc. 56. I owe to Schütrumpf 1991–1996 IV: 141–142, 295 the insightful remark that the nature of the citizens as a political resource is less external than the external goods or the resources regarding a city’s territory or its access to the sea. This demarcation is due to the fact that only the would-be citizens constitute the “matter” of the city (Pol. III 3 1276b1–13) in the strict sense of the term (Ph. II 3 194b23ff.). 57. This is the view held by Kraut 1997: 130–131; Schütrumpf 1991–1996 IV: 141–143, 288ff.; Pellegrin 2017: 292–293. Newman 1887–1902 III: 341 points out only their obvious difference of content, not of modality or function.

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  145 58. Alternatively, one can read with Coraes: kateuchometha, that is, “for the composition of the city to be successful” (Reeve 2017) or “nous souhaitons bénéficier . . . de biens dont . . .” (Pellegrin 1993). 59. This is not, however, the case with the good luck (eutuchia) we encounter in Eudemian Ethics VII 2, which seems to have a similar role to the one played by political resources in the Politics. As it concerns the Eudemian notion of good luck, I fully endorse the analysis offered by Buddensiek 2012. 60. In Garver’s nice formulation, “the state might require considerable resources to bring it about that individuals do not need many resources” (Garver 2011: 199). 61. More accurately, luck concerns things that are “beyond reason” or “contrary to expectation” (paralogon)—that is, not “what is by necessity and always or what is for the most part” (Ph. II 5 196b10–15, 197a18–20). 62. Pellegrin 2017: 304–305, 379–398 argues that the prayed-for political resources are “trans-constitutional”—qualifying his careless initial claim that they apply in “each and every city [irrespective of] its constitutional form,” he later correctly restricts their applicability to correct constitutions. 63. More 2002: 117. 64. The term mellousan that often accompanies the excellent city does not point to the future but suggests an open possibility whose materialization is not a question of time. Nothing excludes, in principle, the plausibility of its having eventuated in the past, in the period of a certain golden age. It is not intended to suggest that the future will one day be totally different from the present or the past—that is, so radically different that it will steadily provide us with political resources that, until now, have been unavailable or will relieve us from any dependence on them (against Frank 2005: 139–140; Schütrumpf 1991–1996 IV: 68). Aristotle’s notion of cyclic time and the eternity of his physical kinds leave no room for such a modern conception of futurity. In that sense, there is no utopia in Aristotle, at least, if one endorses Karl Mannheim’s claim that “a conscience is utopian when it is incongruous with the ‘being (Sein)’ surrounding it” (Mannheim 1929: 169), a claim that has recently been reformulated as follows: by utopian spirit one should understand “a sense that the future could transcend the present” (Jacoby 2000: xi). Thus, for instance, Aristotle feels entitled to demonstrate the impossibility of a very popoulous city being in a good legislative order by invoking the historical “facts [erga]” (Pol. VII 4 1326a25–28). To follow, again, Mannheim’s terminology, Aristotle’s eutopia is a Wunschtraum, not a Wunschzeit. 65. See II 1 1103b4; Pol. II 9 1269b20, II 9 1270b1, III 13 1283b37–38, VI 2 1317a34. 66. Pellegrin 2017: 400–402 nicely makes the point. For Plato’s notion of prayers, see Mayhew 2008. 67. The end of moral development is, at any rate, inextricably intertwined with physiology and psychophysical processes; see Leunissen 2017: 81–138. 68. Kraut 2002: 196, 196n6, 238 follows this line of thinking; see the objections raised by Pellegrin 2017: 387–394. To understand why such a view is misleading is all the more important if one assumes, in line with Ober 1998: 310–351 and Samaras 2007: 88–89, that the addressees of Aristotle’s Politics VII–VIII are the founders of new cities or colonies in Asia Minor and postAlexander Persia. 69. In other cases in the Politics, Aristotle employs the term “hypothesis” to denote the constitution itself, not its resources (for instance, in Pol. IV 1).

146  Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck 70. See, for instance, Neschke-Hentschke 2001: 169. The same misleading connection between prayers and constitutional form pervades Terrel 2019; Jaulin 2019. 71. Kraut 2002: 194, 239. 72. Respectivly: Berlin 2013: 50; Nozick 2001: 309ff. 73. Respectively: Salkever 2007: 41; Nichols 1992: 164; Pangle 2013: 267. 74. I take Pellegrin to make the same point when he claims that Books VII–VIII are “in large, non-political [or prepolitical] parts of the Politics” (Pellegrin 2017: 389). 75. People often complain that Politics VII does not linger on the constitutional order, the political institutions, and deliberative functions, such as law courts and magistrates, of the excellent city. This negligence is fully expected, one may respond, to the extent that Books III–VI abound with such considerations, which renders their reiteration in Book VII rather redundant. Or, one may maintain that, far from negligence, Aristotle’s silence is a sign that in Book VII we do not hear his voice at all. Alternatively, it might be the case that Book VII does not intend to portray any ideal constitution or that Aristotle never finished his account of it. Be that as it may, I submit that, most of all, Aristotle aims at bringing to light a material necessity. Therefore, one might reasonably think that he touches on constitutional arrangements only to the extent that they embody reactions to that sort of necessity—I will return to this point later on. To give an example: VII 9 assigns different political functions to young, mature, and old people (that is, respectively, military duties, duties of political deliberation, and priesthood). For many readers, the highlighted presence of priesthood (as the most honorable function of old people) in the excellent city is a political scandal and runs counter to Aristotle’s considered views on religion and gods. They too easily draw the conclusion that the city of Book VII does not represent Aristotle’s own ideal city “according to our prayers” (Salkever 2007: 36–38; Salkever 2009: 237–238; Pangle 2013: 245–246—for the view that the best city is an elaborated version of the “middle regime” of Pol. IV, see Johnson 2015a: Chapter 9). I think one should rather read things the other way around. VII 9 does not praise the value of priesthood because demotic Greek religion is, for Aristotle, a prayedfor and necessary factor in the ideal city. Its stimulus is the recognition of a material necessity—namely, that the time-span of human life is divided into three different periods in which we display different intellectual capacities and different feelings. It thus generates the problem that the same person is divided into three divergent personalities. VII 9 aims at finding the best way the legislator can cope with this necessity. 76. To my great surprise, the editors of and contributors to the collection The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant, edited by Aufderheide and Bader 2015, are silent about the priority of a city’s happiness (with the exception of some brief remarks by Louden 2015: 120 and a footnote by Charles 2015: 67n15). They take for granted that Aristotle’s highest good is centered on the individual, thereby betraying Aristotle’s intentions and losing the opportunity for a fecund comparison with Kant’s rigidly non-individualistic notion of the highest good (at least, after the Groundwork). By contrast, what is anything but unexpected, Castoriadis 1978: 408 has seen that the “highest human happiness” is profoundly political. 77. See Ph. II 2 194a21–25, De Sensu 436a20. 78. Ph. II 2 194a23: “up to a point [mechri tou].” Likewise, legislators and political leaders “must in a way know about what pertains to the human soul” (I 13 1102a18–20). If not, the lessons of Politics VII 7 would be meaningless.

Hopes, Prayers, and Moral Luck  147 For a legislator’s dependence on the advice provided by subordinate craftsmen like experienced generals, see Pol. VII 5 1326b39–40. 79. See I 10 1100b35–1001a6, Pol. VII 13 1332a26–27. 80. Pol. II 9 1269a32–33, II 9 1271a41, II 11 1273a4, III 5 1278a5, IV 1 1288b28, IV 7 1293b4, VI 2 1317a40; see also PA I 1 639b24–25, 642a7–12. 81. Lennox 2000: 187. For instance, the explanation of how hoofs and horns come to be out of the “residual surplus” of earthern material (PA III 2 663b22–35) and the explanation of how eyebrows and eyelashes come to be because of the fact that “the eylids are at the ends of small blood vessels” (PA II 15 658b14–25) are not based on the hypothesis that matter comes to be because it possesses in advance a potential for the form (although the form or a function of an animal may a posteriori explain, in a top-down direction, how a particular animal kind can exploit that available matter to better achieve its goals—for instance, protection). 82. Preconditional necessity is probably what Aristotle calls “necessary nature [anagkaia phusis]” (PA III 2 663b21–22). I  follow Leunissen 2010: 36–40, 81–99. Thus, and Aristotle cites Antiphon’s example, “if someone were to bury a [wooden] bed . . . what came up would not be the bed but wood,” for beds are craft-products we produce by exploiting materials that have their own natural ends (Ph. II 1 193a11–17). 83. Interestingly, Kant has raised a similar question regarding the feasibility of the highest good. His concern is about whether we should be endowed with the capacity to know God, to have him “before our eyes.” Had we that capacity, we would substitute our cognitive uncertainty about the future reality of the highest good with a cognitive certainty about God’s plan to promote and guarantee the eventuation of the highest good in our world. What would be the result of it? “The moral worth of actions . . . would not exist at all” because the source of our motivation would be external—that is, the mere satisfaction of inclinations or heteronomy (Critique of Practical Reason 5: 146–148). 84. Before Book VII, neighbors appear in Aristotle’s critical comments against Plato (II 6), in his critique of Phaleas’ (II 7 1267a20, 24–30) and Sparta’s constitution (II 9 1269a40), and, finally, in IV 4 1299a20–21 and the analysis of a city’s parts. For Aristotle’s middle way between isolationism and regional hegemony, see Lockwood 2019.

4 Radical Evil

The practical domain includes, as we saw, agents and deliberate choices issuing in actions, spectators and non-motivational judgments, legislators establishing constitutions and laws, politicians and citizens doing political actions and reaching decisions, hopes as a prominent way to engage with moral luck and its impact on our individual lives, and prayers as the legislators’ way to deal with the moral luck surrounding the birth of constitutions. The entire practical domain, however, proved to depend on one and the same capacity of practical reason, whether the latter is prescriptive or merely judgment oriented, purely practical or encompassing elements that originate in productive reason, whether turning its attention to what is up to us or to what lies beyond our control. What has been brought to the surface is that by acknowledging the extraordinary scope of practical reason, one also sees the multiplicity of its functions and the variety of entities that populate its domain. It is time now to look at the destruction or disabling of practical reason itself and what its consequences are. As will become progressively evident, the idea of such disablement amounts to the question of whether Aristotle’s practical philosophy includes a theory of radical evil. I will proceed as follows: after alleviating some initial worries about whether there is indeed a notion of radical evil in Aristotle (4.1), I first turn to the Nicomachean Ethics and the analysis of beastliness and the excess of intemperance to shed light on radically evil individuals (4.2) and then to the Politics to shed light on radically degenerated political communities (4.3). I close by addressing the nowadays much-debated issue of evil’s curability (4.4).

4.1  Is There a Notion of Radical Evil in Aristotle? By “radical evil” I  mean the sort of evil that is ultimate (eschaton), in the sense that it is intrinsically different from the badness of ethical vices or deviant political regimes and excludes the possibility of a yet more radical form of badness. The term “radical evil” mimics Aristotle’s own terms, eschatos, teleutaios, and akratês (commonly translated as “ultimate,” “radical,” “most extreme,” “unmixed,” or “absolute”), which he uses in the Politics to describe ultimate democracy, a sort of tyranny, and

Radical Evil  149 ultimate oligarchy as the extreme cases of deviant or bad constitutions.1 They are so extreme, as we shall see, that there is no room for worse ones, since these ultimate or radical forms of political degeneration completely destroy constitutions as such. Radical evil should not be understood, then, as if it were possible to find in Aristotle something that would allegedly be the first among bad things or the cause of badness in all bad things. For Aristotle is explicit that “the bad does not exist beyond the [bad] things” (Met. IX 9 1051a17–18). Thus, radical evil is not a mirror image of good (Met. XII 10 1075a38). For “in the things that there are from the start nor in the eternal things is there anything either bad or in error or corrupted (for corruption is also something bad)” (Met. IX 9 1051a19–22).2 There can be no doubt, therefore, that badness emerges in our world only together with potentiality and matter (Met. XII 10 1075b20–24). Since human actions and characters involve such things, it is hardly surprising that the ethical and political domain is inhabited by evil. The world of natural organisms is inhabited by evil, too.3 There are two initial worries one might voice, a more specific and a more general one, so to speak. (1) Ordinary vice (kakia) is conceived of by Aristotle as an extreme (akron)—in fact, a pair of opposing extremes—and virtue as an intermediate between them (II 6 1106a24–29, II 8–9). The very idea of radical evil might therefore seem to give rise to confusion, since there cannot be a most extreme extreme. This worry, however, is based on the mistaken assumption that such vices do not admit of a hierarchy. But in both the Nicomachean Ethics (V 3 1131b20–23) and the Politics (Pol. IV 2 1289b9–12), Aristotle explicitly endorses an evaluative scale of badness, indicating which ones are less bad than others. Likewise, in the Rhetoric, certain evils are singled out as greater or the greatest (meizô kaka or ta malista kaka) (Rh. I 7 1364a30 and II 4 1382a10).4 It is instructive at this juncture to visit the Rhetoric with the nowadays common categories of perpetrator, victim, and bystander in mind.5 For we will quickly see that not only does Aristotle create a hierarchy of evils, but his grading system is the forerunner of this tripartite scheme. As far as I know, it has passed unnoticed that Aristotle develops such a tripartite distinction in the rather overlooked Rhetoric I 14,6 whose topic is the comparison of wrongdoings—or, more precisely, of unjust actions (adikêma) in the context of judicial rhetoric. For clarity, I will use (1) for the perpetrator’s perspective, (2) for the victim’s, and (3) for the bystander’s: An unjust action is greater: (1a) the greater the (state of) injustice it results from is. . . . Sometimes, then, the greater is judged in this way, (2a) sometimes from the harm [done]. Also, [an unjust action

150  Radical Evil is greater] (3a) where there is no equal penalty but all are lesser. And (3b) where there is no remedy, since that would be difficult, indeed impossible. And (2b) if the sufferer of the injustice cannot get a trial, since then the injustice is not remediable. . . . And (2c) if the sufferer, that is, the person who has been treated unjustly, inflicted some great punishment on himself. . . . Also, (3c) when someone is the only, the first, or among the few, to have done it. And (1b) to commit the same error often [is a great thing]. Also, (3d) when, due to it, prevention policies and punishments have been sought and discovered. . . . And (1c) an unjust action is greater, the more beast-like [thêriodesteron] it is. Also, (1d) the more premediated it is. And (3e) what those who hear about it more fear than pity. (Rh. I 14 1374b24–75a8) The perpetrator’s perspective concerns both aspects of deliberate choice: the ethical states (1a–c) and the premediated or calculative aspect of the action (1d) that Aristotle elsewhere calls “unscrupulousness” (VI 12 1144a27). What primarily matters is the potential inherent in vicious ethical states and unscrupulous cleverness to lead to a repetition of the same or greater unjust actions in the future. Likewise, the victim’s perspective not only involves a static appraisal of the seriousness of the harm already done (2a) but envisages the victim’s future self. In particular, it concerns the capability of the victims to defend themselves by having recourse to the institution of justice in order to demand a remedy for the injustice suffered or the punishment of the doer (2b) or concerns their future behavior as moral persons in the sense that the injustice suffered may result in a series of self-destructive reactions due to shame or self-accusation (2c). Aristotle emphasizes that these self-destructive acts should be morally and legally imputed not to the sufferer but to the doer of the injustice. The most impressive part of Aristotle’s analysis is the way he disentangles the components of the bystander’s perspective, which has a certain priority, in that the beliefs (pistis) of the people who are entitled to appraise the magnitude of injustice committed—namely, the judges—are the focus of rhetorical speech and determine its ends (see Section 1.3). Aristotle’s analysis is the antecedent of those recent theories which tend to explain evil on the basis of the bystanders’ feelings of utter horror and disgust (3e) or their moral shock in front of unprecedented or rare evil acts (3c). The bulk of the analysis, however, concerns the bystander not as a moral person displaying repulsion but as a participant in the judicial system and, more generally, in a well-ordered political community. Though not explicitly stressed, the rationale of the argument implies that here the judges function as the representatives of a correct constitution and that their reaction is morally and judicially the appropriate one to have toward actions deserving our very strongest condemnation. Evil actions are those that erode the capacity of the legal system to find

Radical Evil  151 suitable means of evaluation and prevention or suitable penalties and remedies—that is, those which reveal the impotence or limits of the system (3a–b). Seen from a different angle, extremely evil doings are those that require legal responses going beyond the existing ones and therefore a certain inventiveness on the bystander’s part in order to render the crime comprehensible and compatible with our understanding of what sorts of human actions might take place within our political community (3d). Note that, in contrast to what happens throughout Rhetoric I regarding everyday political and juridical practice, extremely evil actions do not merely invite us to exercise decency (epieikeia)—that is, the intellectual capacity to discern real justice by properly interpreting particular situations in the light of, more or less, correct laws—but instead call for the exercise of architectonic legislative reasoning, in so far as the challenge is to reform the law system itself or even the constitution. Evil is not uniform.7 (2) One may also object that to use the notion of radical evil here is a blatant anachronism. “Radical evil” is, of course, a modern locution, commonly associated with Immanuel Kant. For him it is not a sort of diabolic or extreme evil but rather the source or radix of any sort of moral transgression, be it frailty (fragilitas), impurity (impuritas), or depravity (corruptio). His analysis of evil aims at bringing to light the common character of our ways of deceiving ourselves (Religion 6: 38, 42n) rather than at categorizing different or extreme modalities of badness. This is due, among other things, to the fact that he is adamant about excluding the possibility that a person may become a diabolical being: human beings are never deprived of their rational free will—that is, of their capacity to understand the moral law as a sufficient incentive for action. In a nutshell, “the ground of evil . . . can . . . not be placed in a corruption of the morally legislative reason” (Religion 6: 35). No matter how “diabolical” our vices turn out to be—and envy, ingratitude, and joy in other’s misfortune are indeed evil in an extreme degree (Religion 6: 27)—they do not make us “devils.” Kant’s concern is that were we devils, we would have lost the sort of rationality that makes us free moral agents—namely, personality (Persönlichkeit)—and hence would be exempted from moral responsibility. And this, in Kant’s terms, is a contradiction. Aristotle’s account of radical evil will prove to be totally different. But this does not imply that it is insignificant or unattractive. At least, it was attractive to Rousseau, the philosopher who “created the modern shape of the problem of evil.”8 On the title page of his Second Discourse, we read the following passage from the Politics (Pol. I 5 1254a36–37): “And one must investigate what is natural in things whose condition

152  Radical Evil is in accord with nature, not in the corrupted ones.”9 Thus, Aristotle’s conception of baseness and corruption is somehow in the background of Rousseau’s “hypothetical” history, in which he narrates the predominance of imbecility and misery—of evil. In Rousseau’s Émile, the spirit of Aristotle’s words is still present, though this time Rousseau quotes Seneca (De Ira II.13.1).10 And Kant, whose practical philosophy builds on Rousseau, opens his Religion with Seneca’s words (Religion 6: 18). Aristotle is absent, but the concept of corruption, with its Aristotelian origins, permeates Kant’s analysis. It is noteworthy that one of the rare examples evoked by Kant in his discussion of radical evil is the tyrant Phalaris—the main protagonist, as we will see, of Aristotle’s discussion of beastliness.11

4.2  Evil beyond the Limits of Vice In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle employs two complementary notions of kakon—namely, kakon as the opposite of virtue and as privation.12 The Pattern of Opposites The first notion applies in the case of ethical vices (kakia). Here wrongness lies in the fact that the base person (phaulos) misunderstands the real content of the good: Wish [boulêsis] is for the end, as we have said, but some people think it is for the good, others that is for the apparent good [phainomenou agathou] . . . to the excellent person, [the object of wish is] what is in truth the object of wish, to the base one it is whatever thing it happens to be [to tuchon] . . . deception seems to come about because of pleasure which appears to be a good thing, when it is not. (III 4 1113a15–b1) Aristotle clearly states that both the virtuous and the base person have wish, or a rational desire (DA III 9 432b5), which is possessed by human beings alone insofar as they are rational. Nevertheless, as we saw in Section 1.4, only virtuous, enkratic, or akratic agents somehow grasp and desire the true good; it would be wrong to assume with Socrates in the Gorgias that the apparent good “is not a proper object of wish at all” (III 4 1113a17–18). For the object of wish is not necessarily the true good but merely “what one thinks is good” (Rh. I 10 1369a3–4). Nonetheless, for both the virtuous and the base person, the objects of wish are rational ends, not the goals of desires we might share with non-rational creatures: “wish is for the end.”13

Radical Evil  153 The failure of the base people, indeed, is due to their inability to properly grasp and desire the real good, the correct end. For example, they might wish for the pleasant when it is not good. But one should clearly distinguish between the pleasant as the object of the non-rational appetites of animals and children and the pleasant as the object of wish, the apparent good. It is only the latter that constitutes an object of genuine human concern. It is about the latter that Aristotle says, “wish wishes, in accord with nature, for the good, but, contrary to nature, for . . . to kakon” (EE II 10 1227a30–31).14 It is important to emphasize that the rationality involved in wish is end oriented, not a mere instrumental means-ends rationality, and this holds true for the wish of both the virtuous and the base person.15 Throughout the Politics, “wish” denotes citizens’ commitment to the long-term end of preserving the constitution, no matter whether correct or deviant.16 Likewise, the way in which legislators, whether they are good ones or not, envisage their rational project of establishing a constitution is a matter of their “wish.”17 Hence, the objects of wish may be correctly or mistakenly envisaged as good, but the wish is always rational. Aristotle’s account of friendship is the most telling example of how one should understand the distinction between the real and the apparent good, since “what is lovable is either the true good or the pleasant or the useful” and, granted that the useful is reduced to the pleasant, “the good and the pleasant are lovable as ends” (VIII 2 1155b18–21). But these are also the objects of our wish according to whether our friendship is true friendship or one of the lower varieties. In this context, to wish for the apparent good is, for example, to conceive of the activities involved in friendships as if the advantage were external to the activity itself and, hence, as if they were modeled on production (poiêsis). The very existence of the lower forms of friendship depends on the acquisition of mutual advantage: not only do these friendships remain non-actualized before this occurs, but also, once the pleasure or utility is achieved (or when no further prospect of them is anticipated), they become baseless and may be broken off.18 Thus, wishing for the apparent good reflects a principled and rationally grounded response to the evaluative question of how one understands goodness, not a hazardous and desire-based ­reaction to impulses. The practical intellectual state that renders us able to recognize something as a practical good of some sort while, at the same time, making us fail to discern the real good is called by Aristotle aphrosynê (lack of phronêsis).19 In plenty of places, aphrosynê has nothing to do with mindlessness or madness; it merely denotes the state that makes us “suppos[e] that bad things are good” (VII 2 1146a27–31) or goes hand in hand with injustice and other vices (Pol. III 11 1281b26–28); aphrones are precisely those who are not practically wise persons (Rh. I 10 1369b21–22, I 11

154  Radical Evil 1371a12–13). In On Virtues and Vices, we encounter the most explicit allusion to it: Aphrosynê is a vice of the rationally calculative part, a vice that is a cause of living badly. . . . To aphrosynê belongs bad judgment about things . . . and false beliefs about what is noble and good in life. (VV 1250a16–17, 1250b44–1251a2; see also 1249b29–30) The Pattern of Privation The very same term, however, is also used to denote the intellectual condition which is proper to beastliness (thêriotês) and to (a sort of) akolasia. But it will turn out that the latter cases are modeled on a new paradigm of evil: the privation paradigm. Like akrasia, beastliness is not an ethical state but rather “something having to do with character [tôn peri ta êthê]” (VII 1 1145a16). It involves both ethical and intellectual components. Despite its rarity, it does occur among human beings, not just among monsters, mythical creatures, and uncivilized barbarians (VII 1 1145a29–30). It consists in obedience to desires for things that only certain beasts are naturally inclined to long for, things that are not “naturally pleasant” to human beings. In the case of beast-like people, Aristotle proposes a tripartite taxonomy:20 Some things are naturally pleasant, and, of these, some are unconditionally pleasant, while others are so with reference to particular kinds both of animals and of human beings. Other things are not naturally pleasant, but come to be so—(1) some because of a disability [pêrôseis], (2) some because of habit [di’ethê], (3) some because of depraved natures [mochthêras phuseis]. That is why where each of these is concerned we also see corresponding states. I  mean the beast-like ones. (VII 5 1148b15–19) This triadic division is grounded in a distinction between causes, not between behaviors or different sorts of pertinent intellectual deficiencies— for instance, madness might be the outcome of both (1) and (3), and excessive sexual urges and deviancies are symptoms of both (2) and (3). In addition to solidifying the causal and so scientific character of the analysis, such an etiology is needed because some beast-like people might not be responsible for their state—for instance, those who are beast-like because of their depraved nature. There is much symptomatology, too. But the most important challenge here is not to isolate the different symptoms of each causally different kind of beast-like state

Radical Evil  155 but to inquire whether they share a common feature. And I think that they do. Beast-like states confront us with the same puzzle we met with in the beginning of the present chapter. If vice is conceived of as an extreme, either an excess or a deficiency, defining radical evil as the most extreme extreme sounds absurd. Yet this is how Aristotle introduces beastliness: “We [also]21 use ‘beast-like’ as a term of abuse for those who exceed human beings in their vice” (VII 1 11145a32–33). To see what is going on, one should understand this claim in the light of the following one: “[Beastliness is] outside the limits of vice (kakias)” (VII 5 1148b34– 49a1). I take this to mean that beast-like states resist any explanation in terms of the opposition between the real good and the apparent good. Why? Well, it is uncontroversial that beastliness includes the idea of a total atrophy of practical reasoning so that beastly people “fall away from [human] nature” (VII 6 1149b35).22 Although it is natural to assume that many beast-like people are capable of means-ends reasoning (Phalaris is certainly such a person), they lack practical reason and hence are completely unable to recognize practical ends. The only thing that matters to them is to satisfy their appetites. Their appetite-focused life is not a question of commitments to the value of these appetites or their satisfaction. Nor do these appetites appear to them as reasons against other competitive reasons that they could have adopted had they espoused a different ethical perspective. The critical issue is that the atrophy of practical reasoning brings with it the atrophy of deliberate choice. And once deliberate choice is excluded, no practical intellectual state seems to remain as a substratum. As a name for such a total lack of practical reasoning and deliberate choice, Aristotle again employs the terms aphrosynê and aphrones, but in a highly revelatory way. In order to distinguish the aphrosynê that is proper to beastliness from the one that is proper to ordinary ethical vice, he coins the term “excess of aphrosynê,” and, likewise, he stresses that both natural and acquired beastliness are proper to aphrones, people who are “without rational calculation and so live by perception alone” (VII 5 1149a9–10).23 What I want to stress is that the aphrosynê proper to beastliness does not involve the grasp of false practical ends but rather a total lack of access to practical ends. That means that our practical intellectual state can be damaged in two ways. First, the alteration (alloiôsis) of practical intellectual virtue (practical wisdom) is the corruption of the virtue of the intellectual state. In this case, we fail to recognize true practical ends but remain able to grasp practical ends of some sort. Hence, what is corrupted is the state’s virtue, its quality. Second, the destruction (phthora) of the state represents the beast-like condition of someone altogether deprived of deliberate choice. In this case, we fail to recognize any sort of genuine practical principles, and our state—and with it wish and p ­ ractical ­intellect—is completely destroyed.24 Beast-like people are deprived of the

156  Radical Evil very capacity to distinguish moral goodness from moral badness or to choose goodness instead of badness: Beastliness is less than vice (although it is more frightening), since the better thing has not been corrupted, as in the human case [of vice], but is simply not present. So it is like comparing something soulless to something ensouled, to see which is worse. For the baseness of what does not possess the starting-point is always less harmful, and understanding is the starting-point. (VII 6 1150a1–8; see also Pol. I 2 1253a29–39) The rationale of this cryptic passage, at least according to one interpretation, bolsters the previous claims.25 After having described the thêriôtês proper to beasts and why they lack practical reasoning and deliberate choice by nature, Aristotle concludes that beasts should not be blamed or praised. He then turns to the case of men for which the beast-like condition is not natural but a sort of degeneration. These are the same aphrones people “without rational calculation [who] live by perception alone” we met in VII 5 1149a9–10. What is natural for beasts, in other words, is for humans the outcome of a kind of destruction. Beastliness, however, is not the only condition that implies the destruction of the practical intellectual state involved in deliberate choice. For Aristotle seems to think in terms of destruction each time he describes an extreme case of intemperance (akolasia), whose portrait is to be found, together with the portrait of temperance (sôphrosunê), in Nicomachean Ethics VI 5. There Aristotle assigns to temperance a prominent connection with practical wisdom: “That is also why we call temperance by this name, as being what preserves [sôzousa] practical wisdom” (VI 5 1140b11–12). Assuming that temperance preserves practical wisdom in a distinctive way, one may wonder whether a certain case of intemperance enjoys a similar particularity in that it totally destroys practical wisdom. In fact, if one presumes that the intemperate man simply has no access to the real good, as even Book VII sometimes invites us to assume, one is led to identifying intemperance with mere ethical vice.26 Instead, the particularity of a certain extreme intemperance is owed not to any confusion about the content of the real good but to the fact that certain agents are deprived of any actual use of reasoning about practical ends. This is what Aristotle calls “excess of intemperance [hyperballousa akolasia]” (VII 5 1149a5–6): But as soon as [euthus] someone is diephtharmen[os] by pleasure or pain, no starting-point appears to him [ou phainetai archê], that is, neither that it is for the sake of it nor that it is because of it that he

Radical Evil  157 should make all his choices and accomplish all his actions, since vice is ruinous of any starting-point [phthartikê archês]. (VI 5 1140b17–19)27 Since clearly it is a sign of great aphrosynê not to have one’s life regulated with regard to some end [pros ti telos] [i.e. no matter whether it is really good or not, as Aristotle’s examples clearly show]. (EE I 2 1214b10–11) In fact, when Aristotle introduces intemperance in explicit contrast with temperance, he is concerned with restricting intemperance to the pleasures that are connected with the lower senses, touch and taste (III 10 1118a23–26). Thus, from the beginning, Aristotle treats intemperance as related to appetites we share with beasts—an approach we also come across in I 4 1095b19–20, where he states that the life devoted to mere enjoyment is utterly beast-like. That is why he does not balk at admitting that intemperance exists in us “not as human beings, but as animals” (III 10 1118b2–3), while nonetheless emphasizing that animals should not be regarded as intemperate because they lack practical reasoning by nature. The explanation of this shift is, again, based on the concept of privation: the excess of intemperance is blameworthy because it represents our being deprived of what should constitute our rational human nature. In the same spirit, Aristotle likens intemperate men to children: We also apply the name “intemperance” to children’s errors  .  .  ., since children also [like intemperate men] live in accord with appetite [kat’epithumian]; . . . and if the appetites are large and intense, they even expel rational calculation [kai ton logismon ekkrouousin]. (III 12 1119a33–b10) The errors committed by children appear to mirror intemperance in that they result from the absence of reason from their lives. Children submit to appetites because their reason is still undeveloped whereas intemperate men do so because their corrosive desires hold sway over reasoning and destroy it—the appetites of the beast-like person are also “large and intense” in the sense that they are very far from human nature and hence highly destructive. In contrast to children, however, intemperate men are to blame for their actual condition, for they should be held “responsible” for the progressive development and fixation of their incurable states. This destruction is permanent because intemperance is a continuous condition of character (VII 8 1150b29–35). That is also why intemperate men are equally unfit for political life so that one is justified in “entirely expelling those who are incurable” (X 9 1180a9–10). Such an incurable ethical state, however, puts the excess of intemperance, like beastliness, outside the limits of vice.

158  Radical Evil Why? “For the bad is posterior in nature to the capacity [husteron gar tê phusei to kakon tês dunameôs]” (Met. IX 9 1051a18–19). A way to understand this claim is this. Human beings possess, by nature, certain motivational and cognitive capacities. Capacities are for opposites: through habituation and education, these undergo a change and issue in the establishment of either ethical and practical intellectual virtues or ­ethical and practical intellectual vices.28 Yet virtues have a priority in that the end of natural capacities is something good—that is, a virtuous ­activity and, in consequence, the acquisition of (ethical or intellectual) virtue as the pertinent state. Vices are cases in which the change has gone awry. Virtues and vices themselves are not capacities. Virtue results only in virtuous activities and vice only in vicious ones (anything else just happens by accident). In both cases, virtuous and vicious activities themselves are somehow prior to the states of virtue and vice, for states come to be thanks to pertinent activities. However, the states of virtue and vice are posterior to the capacity to become either virtuous or vicious. In this sense, vice (the bad) is posterior to the capacity (i.e. the capacity to become either virtuous or vicious) and results from its corrupted development. This is the developmental story of what I take to be ordinary vice. However, vice is meta logou; it “involves reason,” and hence—at least in principle—there is always the possibility of some change, whether major or minor, more or less difficult to make (Pol. VII 13 1332b6–8). This open possibility establishes a route between the capacity and vice: in ordinary vice, there is still a seed of our capacity to become either virtuous or vicious, or, in other words, if persuaded by reason and if the circumstances are favorable, one is able to somehow retake the route that leads from that capacity to either virtue or vice. In radical evil, practical reason is destroyed, and this route is altogether destroyed, too. But in the absence of such a route, radical vice has no connection at all with the capacity it developed from and hence no connection with goodness either. Radical evil is, in this sense, for the sake of bad activities or ends (Met. IX 9 1051a15–17).29 To further clarify the distinction between radical evil and mere vice, let me show what happens when it is elided. Terence Irwin’s thoughtprovoking study “Vice and Reason” (2001) is a nice case in point.30 Irwin begins by admitting that intemperance is the privileged terrain of Aristotle’s analysis of vice, but he does not recognize in it any specific sort of badness or any kinship with beastliness. As against my divided account of kakon, he aims at a unitary conception that is parallel to Aristotle’s account of virtue. His analysis starts from the idea that vicious people act, at the same time, on deliberate choice and kata pathos—that is, both according to reason (kata logon) or controlled by their rational part and according to passion or controlled by their non-rational part. The vicious person, so Irwin claims, has “a perfectly rational, coherent plan of his life” (92)31 so that any portrait of him as having a “purely animal existence” would be misleading (88). Vicious people misconceive the real

Radical Evil  159 good in that they take it to be identical to what is advantageous. This is fully in line with my portrait of the vicious person. The Nicomachean Ethics (III 4) unambiguously stresses, as we have already noticed, that the base person is characterized by an erroneous comprehension of the good, not by the alleged domination of irrational forces annihilating the ends-oriented rationality of wish. But Irwin takes no heed of this explicit warning. In his view, to blur the distinction between the real good and the apparent good is to undermine the ends-oriented rationality of wish: the vicious person “conceives himself as nothing more than a sequence of appetites and satisfactions” (91), is unable to make “evaluative judgments” (92), cannot understand questions about “value” (93), and treats inclinations as if they were “beyond rational criticism” (85). These traits, however, are those of the beast-like and akolastos persons, not of the vicious one. In other words, this is how one should illustrate the privation of ends-oriented practical reason, not the falsification of the true good. The reasons for Irwin’s mistaken portrait of vice lie in his looking at Aristotle’s practical reason through a Kantian lens.32 In particular, Irwin’s interpretation is grounded in the dichotomy between goodness (concern for value) and advantage (inclination-based conduct regulated by value-neutral rationality). But this dichotomy does not square with Aristotle’s framework. Aristotle’s notion of vice draws on the idea that wish as rational desire can indeed confuse the apparent good for the real good. Thus, in clear contrast to Irwin’s vicious persons, Aristotle’s phauloi raise the question of ends and values and make evaluative judgments about themselves and their actions. Unhappily, they come up with the wrong answers, since they assume that the advantageous or pleasant is always good. This assumption shapes their wish and guides their judgments. In reality, things are much more complicated. For the advantageous occupies two distinct positions in Aristotle’s ethics. First, it is the nonvalue-laden object of instrumental reason that finds appropriate means for random ends in the realm of morality as well as in that of crafts— objects of mere cleverness (deinotêta). Second, it is a possible way to comprehend goodness in its full evaluative sense as it appears to rational wish and deliberate choice. Irwin, by contrast, employs, mutatis mutandis, a Kantian dichotomy, according to which true goodness is the sole dweller of the realm of morality while the advantageous is banished to the realm of hypothetical imperatives.

4.3  Radical Evil in the Politics My previous attempts to dissociate radical evil from mere vice in Aristotle’s ethics will be consolidated thanks to the testimony of the Politics throughout which radical evil emerges as a key concept.33

160  Radical Evil As is well-known, Aristotle distinguishes between “correct” (orthai) and “deviant” (parekbaseis) constitutions: kingship, aristocracy, and polity belong to the first group; tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy to the second. This initial taxonomy is explained as follows: It is evident, therefore, that those constitutions that aim at the common advantage are—in accordance with what is unconditionally just—correct, whereas those that aim only at the advantage of the rulers are erroneous ones, and deviations from the correct constitutions. (Pol. III 6 1279a17–20) But this explanation is preliminary and sketchy. Books IV–V will flesh it out and, though in line with the above six-fold model, will enrich it in significant ways by exploring the idea that deviant constitutions themselves admit of degrees of badness (Pol. IV 2 1289b9–11).34 The most important contribution of these books is that within the sphere of political badness, Aristotle draws a new threshold: above it, deviant constitutions, though deviant, remain genuine constitutions; beneath it, the deviation is so extreme that a sort of tyranny, ultimate democracy, and ultimate oligarchy do not represent genuine forms of constitution at all [ou politeian einai], or they are “least of all [hêkista] a constitution” or “furthest removed [pleiston apechein] from being a constitution.”35 Notwithstanding the complexity of the matter, two things are fairly clear from the beginning. First, the introduction of a boundary within political badness is Aristotle’s own innovation and is a strategic move to overcome Plato’s taxonomy. The Laws (715b 2–4) denies the status of a constitution to all deviant kinds, and the Politicus (301a–c) equates all of them with lawless (paranoma) and intemperate (akolastos) regimes that violate all legal constraints. Aristotle thus rejects Plato’s leveling account by demarcating different types of political badness and identifying a sort of political evil that alone falls below the border that distinguishes a constitution from what is not really one at all.36 Second, Aristotle’s taxonomy of constitutions is drawn—unexpectedly, one might think—on the same canvas on which he had previously drawn the portrait of beastliness in the Nicomachean Ethics VII 1. This implies that a person is radically evil just in the case that he is a reverse image of the Aristotelian moral hero or saint. Indeed, human virtue and badness shift between an “extreme of virtue”—namely, “a heroic even a divine sort”—and its polar opposite—namely, beastliness (VII 1 1145a19–20). But while in the Ethics the reverse-image thesis remains unexploited, in the Politics it is operative throughout. For it dictates a twofold scheme: an ideal kingship—on the condition that someone happens to be outstanding in virtue and hence deserves to be “a permanent king”—and its polar opposite—namely, an extreme tyranny. “For the deviation from the first and most divine constitution must of necessity be the worst”

Radical Evil  161 (Pol. IV 2 1289a39–41).37 What is more, it takes on a highly elaborate form, since not only is ultimate evil named as such (i.e. eschaton or teleutaion) and meant to occupy a place on the verge of the political spectrum, but it is also the reverse image of perfect kingship. It does so by instantiating a sort of lawlessness that is a distorted image of the fact that for godlike kings, “there is no law, since they themselves are law” (Pol. III 13 1284a13–14). The further fact that the virtue of the ideal king is, by hypothesis, not “comparable” (sumblêtên) to the virtue of common people also functions as a reverse image in that it emphasizes the very radicalness of the political evil involved; radical political evil, like beastliness, is outside the limits of political vice or, in other words, incomparable with it. The Pattern of Opposites To clarify the sort of radicalness inherent in ultimate democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny, one should have recourse to the two patterns of kakon we identified in Aristotle’s Ethics: the pattern of opposites and that of privation. To begin with, the distinction between correct and deviant constitutions echoes the opposition between the true good and the apparent good: Since the best thing is happiness, however. . ., it is clear that this is a cause of their being many kinds and different varieties of city and of constitution. For by pursuing this in different ways and by different means each group of people produces distinct ways of life and distinct constitutions. (Pol. VII 8 1328a37–28b2) Constitutions represent different ways in which political communities are organized with regard to a respective conception of eudaimonia and living-well. And, in translating this conception into political terms, constitutions impose a correlative sense of justice on their laws—not the other way around (Pol. IV 1 1289a13–15). Hence, deviant constitutions are deviant in that they are premised on a mistaken conception of eudaimonia, and this mistake renders them unjust, too: For the laws must necessarily be base or excellent, just or unjust, at the same time and in the same way as the constitutions . . . it is clear that laws that are in accord with correct constitutions must be just, and those in accord with deviant constitutions not just. (Pol. III 11 1282b8–13)38 Thus, the wrong political ends that deviant constitutions pursue (because of some important misconception of happiness) and the injustice

162  Radical Evil ingrained in them instantiate the political apparent good. Unavoidably, such injustice is a source of corruption (V 7 1307a5–7), since bad institutions or bad exercise of political power have, in the long term, corrosive effects that damage constitutional stability: “The cause of this is that it is impossible, when the first thing—namely, the starting-point—is in error, for the result not to be in the end something kakon” (Pol. V 1 1302a5–7). The constitution is the starting-point of a political community since it encapsulates the political grasp of happiness—therefore the constitution is, in a sense, the end each community is striving for (Pol. IV 1 1289a17–18). Deviant constitutions thus have erroneous startingpoints. Nonetheless, albeit mistaken, the political apparent good is still an end that regulates the life of political communities since it sets up a remote objective, thereby saving the community from total destruction. Indeed, Books IV–V of the Politics put forward an exhaustive analysis of remedies by means of which deviant constitutions might gain solidity against the looming danger of ruin. The guiding insight here is that deviant constitutions should and can somehow—thanks, amongst other things, to a progressive approximation to justice—succeed in committing the citizens, or the majority of them at least, to the preservation of the constitution: citizens should “wish the constitution to endure” (Pol. IV 12 1296b15–16). What is important, then, is to jettison a Machiavellian understanding of Aristotle’s praise for constitutional solidity and continuity. For nowhere does Aristotle argue that incorrect constitutions and unjust laws, qua incorrect or unjust, should be valued as a kind of goodness. Instead, he makes the much more sophisticated claim that constitutions and laws, whether just or unjust, operate as a regulative principle that is necessary for the “life” (bios) of a political community. And to understand this state of affairs, one should appeal not to legal positivism but to a theory of radical evil—a theory demonstrating how a total disregard for, or privation of, laws is possible and what exactly it consists in. In other words, to draw on what we learned from the Ethics, we should abandon the paradigm of opposites and build on the privation paradigm. The Pattern of Privation Radical evil is precisely the state of affairs in which a political community is altogether deprived of laws and so fails to satisfy the requirements for being a genuine constitution in the first place. Extreme democracy is such that it “is not a constitution at all, on the grounds that where the laws do not rule there is no constitution” (Pol. IV 4 1292a31–32); extreme tyranny and extreme oligarchy (or dynasty) are entirely lawless, too (respectively: Pol. IV 10 1295a15–24, IV 5 1292b5–10).39 Lawlessness is a privation of the very (constitutional) form of a deviant political

Radical Evil  163 regime. Hence lawless regimes differ from deviant constitutions in kind, not merely in degree.40 In all these extremely evil regimes, the rule of law, or law’s being in control (kurios), totally collapses. Instead, decrees (psêphismata) issued in extreme democracy and edicts (epitagmata) issued in extreme tyranny and dynasty are supposed to substitute for laws (Pol. IV 4 1292a19–21), on the pretext that this puts political control in the hands of the rulers, not of inanimate and immobile laws. Aristotle rejects this argument not by championing a legal positivism that would eagerly defend lawfulness at all costs but by pointing out the necessity for a political constraint of a normative order. For ephemeral decrees—which, in an endless chain of ever new and often divergent decisions of the assembly, only respond to immediate concerns or desires without any faithfulness to long-term objectives—are not merely unjust; they do not constitute genuine decrees at all. (And the same would hold true if laws themselves were the object of endless casual reforms and changes which would risk undermining “the power of law itself,” Pol. II 8 1269a24.) This is because decrees should represent attempts at mitigating the problem of universality that marks the inherent and unavoidable deficiency of laws. And this role is fulfilled correctly when it is an exercise of decency—that is, if and only if decrees are voted as if the legislator were to make them (V 10 1137b22– 23). Decrees are genuine and correct only when they are the products of the same practical rationality that produces constitutions and laws. Lawfulness is an “enabling constraint” or “a limit on our freedom of action” that makes political actions (in the proper sense of the term) possible.41 By contrast, lawlessness means destruction. Radical or ultimate political evil, then, in its dissociation from mere political deviation or badness, amounts to privation: no law and no genuine constitution. Similarly, Aristotle’s crucial notion of the “common good” or “common advantage” (koinon agathon, koine, or koinon sumpheron) can be appropriately grasped only on the grounds of this same difference— that is, only on the grounds of a theory of radical political evil. The dichotomy between correct and deviant constitutions depends, as we have seen, on the opposition between “those constitutions that aim at the common advantage  .  .  . and those that aim only at the advantage of the rulers” (Pol. III 6 1279a17–20). Politics III 7 further exploits this same principle and concludes: “For tyranny is monarchy for the advantage of the monarch, oligarchy for the advantage of the rich, and democracy for the advantage of the poor. But none of them is for the common profit” (Pol. III 7 1279b6–10). At first sight, one might get the false impression—and, indeed, this is the standard interpretation—that deviant constitutions entirely disregard the common advantage as if no concern for it were to figure in their political practice. But this cannot be the case since deviant constitutions are genuine constitutions.

164  Radical Evil This fact involves at least two concomitants: they represent genuine political communities and imply a certain lawfulness and a certain interest in justice. But these two factors unambiguously attest to the fact that deviant constitutions do display a certain solicitude for the common good. First, people create all political communities—deviant constitutions included—for the sake of the common advantage—that is, “to the extent that it contributes some share of noble living to each” (Pol. III 6 1278b21–25). And, second, deviant constitutions are based on some notion of justice (for apparent justice is still justice of some sort) and hence, in their case, too, “the political good is the just, and this is the common advantage” (Pol. III 12 1282b16–18). Thus, it cannot be the case that deviant constitutions completely disregard the common advantage. Their deficiency must lie in the ways they grasp and value it. There is plenty of evidence in the Politics that supports this interpretation. Let us take, to begin with, the point of view of those citizens in deviant constitutions who do not participate in ruling. Deviant constitutions should take care of making them “wish the constitution to endure” (Pol. IV 12 1296b15–16). However, such a long-term commitment to the end of preserving the constitution expresses nothing less than their “common” advantage, since the preservation of the constitution should be wished as being advantageous to all of them. In fact, almost all the passages which refer to the citizens’ wish for the preservation of the constitution also make a reference to a common advantage: it is “advantageous” to the affairs of the city (Pol. II 9 1270b20–22), it is “for the advantage of the constitution” (Pol. II 10 1272a30–3), or it is “advantageous to constitutions” (Pol. V 9 1309b17–18). In deviant constitutions, citizens wish the preservation of the constitution because they take it to serve their own individual advantage in common. Aristotle consistently emphasizes that the citizens cannot attain their proper advantage, which is what they wish, unless they also wish the constitution to endure: For the just is believed to consist in equality  .  .  . and freedom in doing whatever one wishes. So in democracies of this sort everyone lives as he wishes. . . . But this is base. For living with a view to the constitution [pros tên politeian] should not be considered slavery, but preservation [sôtêria]. (V 9 1310a30–36)42 Therefore, even in deviant constitutions, citizens are expected to realize that the preservation of the constitution repays each of them individually and all of them in common. The remedies Aristotle prescribes for the endurance of deviant constitutions also presuppose that the rulers acknowledge two criteria of value and political norms: the common advantage and their own advantage. They fail in that they understand them as if they were competitive,

Radical Evil  165 reverse their order, and prioritize their own advantage. For instance, deviant aristocracies and oligarchies survive when they take into consideration not only the advantage of the rulers but also the advantage of those “outside the constitution” (the non-ruling parts of the city) or by establishing an office “to keep an eye on those whose ways of living are disadvantageous [asumphorôs] to the constitution” (Pol. V 8 1308a5–7 and 1308b21–22, respectively). Similarly, in deviant constitutions and especially in oligarchies, matters should be so organized that “it is not possible for the offices to make a profit” (Pol. V 8 1308b32–33), since they exist for the sake not of private but of common advantage. The counsel addressed to the monarch are equally telling: the tyrant should care about public funds in such a way that he is taken to treat them as koina, not as private ones (Pol. V 11 1314a29–b18). The crucial point is that all these counsel and remedies would be entirely meaningless and vain unless deviant constitutions somehow conformed to the norms and constraints prescribed by a certain conception of common advantage. Aristotle says as much in V 9: deviant constitutions, albeit deviant, can somehow “be adequate” (Pol. V 9 1309b32) by achieving a certain balance between the advantage of the ruling part and the advantage of the other parts of the city, “just as a nose that deviates from the most noble straightness toward being hooked or snub can nevertheless still be noble and please the eye” (Pol. V 9 1309b23–25). And this balance can be brought about on condition that deviant constitutions avoid “excess” and acknowledge that the advantage of the rulers should not be the exclusive criterion of politically relevant value. In particular, Aristotle proposes that rulers in democracy and oligarchy should mitigate their own advantage by avoiding democratic or oligarchic measures favoring the advantage of the rulers. But the call to mitigate their private advantage would be mere words unless they were capable of recognizing that the advantage of the other parts of the city is also politically significant. The idea behind these remedies is that thereby deviant constitutions will respect a minimal principle of common advantage that no one should disregard: the preservation of the constitution (Pol. V 9 1309b33–1310a2). By contrast, the rulers’ total disregard of the common advantage, or the situation in which common advantage has fallen into a state of total neglect, exclusively characterizes extreme democracy, dynasty, and tyranny— that is, radical or ultimate evil.43 This, in any case, is the natural conclusion to draw: once there is no constitution and no lawfulness, there can be no grasp of the common advantage either. Aristotle says as much: [In extreme tyranny, that is, in the counterpart to absolute kingship], the monarch rules in a non-accountable way over people who are his equals or betters, with a view to his own advantage, not that of the

166  Radical Evil ruled. That is precisely why it is rule over involuntary subjects, since no free person voluntarily puts up with such rule. (Pol. IV 10 1295a18–23) But tyranny, as has often been said, looks to no common [advantage] [pros ouden koinon] except for the sake of private benefit.44 (Pol. V 10 1311a2–4) Both passages refer to extreme tyranny, the former explicitly, the latter implicitly. The idea is that all three extreme regimes, not just tyranny, are entirely blind to any sort of common interest or, in other words, have eyes only for the advantage of the rulers. How should we visualize this state of affairs? The first passage provides a clear answer to our queries: total disregard of the common advantage is a symptom of non-political bonds and of affiliations that no free person would ever give his/her consent to. That is why it was so important to differentiate the political sense of common advantage from the sort of advantage that is proper to the despotic bonds between master and slave. True, in the last case, too, there is a sort of advantage at stake, and the same thing—the exercise of despotic rule—proves ­advantageous or d ­ isadvantageous to both the master and the slave. And the fact that the advantage of each of them depends on and is proportionate to the advantage of the other may well produce “mutual advantage” (sumpheron pros allêlous). It does not, however, generate a “common advantage” in the political sense of the term. For “a slave is a sort of part of his master—a sort of l­iving but separate part of his body” (Pol. I 6 1255b11–12), and, hence, the “rule of a master, although in truth the same thing is advantageous for what is by nature a master and what is by nature a slave, is nevertheless rule exercised with a view to the master’s own advantage, coincidentally with a view to that of the slave” (Pol. III 6 1278b32–36).45 Aristotle’s notion of ultimate political evil as the total disregard for the common advantage may be succinctly captured by the modern phrase “L’état, c’est moi.” In Aristotle’s own framework, it goes hand in hand with the assumption that the ruler is the whole city—that is, with a ­perverse variation of Plato’s ideal of oneness. The accuracy of Aristotle’s critique of Plato aside, what is important is that the rulers who understand their advantage as also being that of the community, or themselves as encompassing the whole, destroy the city. For, in reality, “it is evident that the more a city becomes one, the less of a city it will be [oude polis estai]” (Pol. II 2 1261a17–18), or it will “cease to be a city” or “it will come closer to not being a city [mê  polis einai]” (Pol. II 5 1263b32– 34). These early formulations foreshadow the ones Aristotle uses in Books III–V to describe extreme democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny (ou politeian einai, hêkista politeian einai, pleiston apexein politeias). In both

Radical Evil  167 cases, annihilating the political multitude and hence any sort of balance between parts and whole amounts to altogether destroying the political community qua political. Aristotle further emphasizes the proximity of these two patterns of thought—extreme unification and extremely evil regimes—by insisting on the fact that all three extreme regimes share the same ideal of a singular ruler. This is evident in the case of tyranny but also applies in the case of extreme democracy and oligarchy: “for the people become a monarch, one monarch composed of many people” (Pol. IV 4 1292a11–12), and “unmixed or ultimate oligarchies and ultimate democracies . . . are in fact divided tyrannies” (Pol. V 10 1312b35–38). Ultimate political evil implies the annihilation of common advantage because of the hypertrophy of the advantage of the ruler so that it becomes the only source of value. And, on the level of such total destruction and degeneration, there is no true political divergence among extreme democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny.

4.4  Evil and Curability Aristotle’s theory of radical evil draws on two main ideas. First, the idea that kakon, both as radical evil and as mere badness, emerges in our understanding of the starting-points (archê) of the practical domain. In the Ethics, the distinction between true and apparent good amounts to the distinction between true and false starting-points of our wish and deliberate choice, while beastliness and akolasia consist in the total destruction of our capacity to grasp any starting-point whatever. This is not to say that radical evil is a purely intellectual matter, as if desires were irrelevant; it is just to acknowledge that what puts the various nonnatural desires under the umbrella of radical evil is that they go together with the destruction of practical rationality. Likewise, in the Politics, the kakon depends on the constitution as the starting-point of a political community: mere badness is premised on the opposition between real and apparent justice, while ultimate evil lies in the total destruction of constitution-based communities. Again, the correct or reversed hierarchy between common good and a ruler’s advantage explains the distinction between correct and deviant constitutions. By contrast, the three radically evil constitutions are grouped together, for they are all chained to lawlessness and display a complete indifference to the common good. The second idea is consequent on the first. Precisely because radical evil and mere badness have to do with starting-points, the classification or bifurcation of kakon takes place on a single scale with two thresholds:46 a ground-floor threshold beneath which we encounter radical evil—beast-like human lives deprived of rationality and, in the political realm, lawless despotic communities—and a higher threshold above which we encounter true goodness and below which we encounter mere badness—human lives and political communities which, albeit based on

168  Radical Evil false starting-points, still exercise practical rationality. Both thresholds dissociate what is “in accord with nature” (kata phusin) from what is “contrary to nature” (para phusin), but they do so in crucially different ways. For it is the very same functions either of the individual or of the city which, when exercised in an excellent way, constitute goodness; when exercised in a base or deficient way, constitute mere badness; and, when totally destroyed, constitute radical evil. Mere badness is “contrary to nature” to the extent that it inhibits the full flourishing which is, under certain conditions, accessible to human beings and human communities. Radical evil is “contrary to nature” because it causes human nature or the form of political communities to entirely degenerate. Aristotle’s theory of evil precludes any teleological account of evil, be it based on theodicy, history, or diabolical motives. I do not mean thereby that Aristotle does not see any seeds of evil in human nature; lustfulness, greed, and desire for domination—“the base element that exists in every human being” (Pol. VI 3 1318b40–1319a1)—have their proper place in his Ethics and Politics.47 But there is no wish for the evil, no wish to become evil for the sake of evil. When beastliness and akolasia are not due to a morbid nature or to mere madness, they portray the states which individuals are in as a result of seeking to satisfy various kinds of beast-like appetites. The total atrophy of their practical rationality is not an end they wished for—for nobody wishes to abolish his/her human nature and become an animal—but rather the price they have to pay for their accumulated and escalating ethical transgressions. In the same way, rulers in extreme democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny wish for pleasure, domination, profit, and honor, not for radical political evil. The latter is not an object of their wish—for rulers never wish the destruction of the community on which they depend to exercise their power—but a political condition they are trapped in. Aristotle thereby paves the way to a long—and actually living—tradition of practical philosophy dissociating the radicalness of evil from the presence of allegedly diabolical human motives. Despite the unbridgeable differences regarding their conception of nature, history, individuality, and perfectibility, there is a strong—if anachronistic—flavor of Rousseau in Aristotle’s theory of evil inasmuch as radical evil is dramatic, sorrow laden, and tragic (though not in the Aristotelian sense of the term).48 It is dramatic, for the first step to evil is imperceptible: “small [violations] should be especially guarded against. For illegality creeps in unnoticed” (Pol. V 8 1307b32–33).49 It is sorrow laden, for radical evil, as a situation of human degeneration or fall, is above all the sign of a repugnant malfunction, failure, or privation of individual and collective humanness before it becomes an abominable moral or political error. It is probably because Rousseau recognized this affinity that he quoted Aristotle’s own sayings about human corruption on the front page of his Second Discourse. Finally, it is tragic, for

Radical Evil  169 once radical evil occurs, no individual and no community is in a position to master and reverse the overwhelming process that, starting who knows when, finally led to it. At a certain moment, radical evil becomes inescapable. But as concerns the tragedy of radical evil in Aristotle, some more nuanced qualifications need to be made, since Aristotle’s theory of curability is significantly different from those of the moderns—e.g. Rousseau or Kant. For Rousseau and Kant, notwithstanding the important differences in the way they understand degeneration and redemption itself, share the belief that rebirth-like50 redemption is attainable both for evil individuals and evil communities. But Aristotle rejects a unitary conception of redemption: it is denied to evil individuals but granted to evil communities. In particular, on the level of individuals, curability is the distinguishing feature of mere badness as long as people are still able to listen to rational arguments and are amenable to the idea of reshaping their beliefs and starting-points.51 But, as we saw, beastliness and the excess of intemperance are incurable (e.g. VII 8 1150b29–30) since, in their case, practical reason is totally degenerated. Being deprived of practical reason, these persons are “handicapped in relation to virtue [pepêrômenois pros aretên]” (I 9 1099b19) and are susceptible to no improvement in moral matters. Nothing internal or external to depraved persons can counterbalance the privation they suffer. Hence, one should expel them from political communities. This is how nature functions, too: individuals fall victim to incurable degenerative diseases, and their practical selves are no exception. In nature, such degenerations are not the norm but happen rarely; beastliness and akolasia are like that, too. Obviously, there is a crucial difference: only degenerations related to morality are blameworthy. And it is important to notice that, for Aristotle, the destruction of practical reason and the resulting incurability of beast-like people do not bring exemption from responsibility, at least not without restrictions and some ambivalence. Although Aristotle’s examples are odd and hardly translatable into the categories we use nowadays, it is safe to say that he goes pluralistic in understanding the question of responsibility: On the one hand, from the dynamic perspective of etiology, he suggests that the agent’s history matters in terms of whether beast-like people should be held responsible for their state. For instance, when morbid nature or excessive and repeated sexual abuse in childhood is the actual cause of beastliness, the “normative insanity” implied allows no space for blame.52 On the other hand, from the static perspective of phenomenology, he points out that beastliness, whatever its source or form, instantiates a case of the destruction of practical reason. He then describes the beast-like persons as quasi-psychopaths who are unable to understand some moral reasons, “instead of” others, as justifying their conduct or are unable to make pertinent judgments about moral worth (that is, who are not responsible in the sense of

170  Radical Evil answerability). They are also both unable to recognize morally relevant facts as they appear from within others’ normative outlooks and emotionally blind (that is, they are not responsible in the sense of accountability). Nevertheless, they are responsible in the sense of attributability in that their conduct mirrors their true selves, their being unreservedly chained to the satisfaction of their non-natural desires.53 That is why beastliness is built into character and warrants such a severe punishment as expulsion from the city, which may be read as a metaphor for their being outsiders or marginal cases of the responsibility community. Beast-like and intemperate people are incurable, but the destruction of their practical reason is not contagious. With political communities things are quite different—and for good reason.54 True, in the political realm, deviant constitutions and extremely evil regimes are rather the norm while correct constitutions, though in accord with nature, are rare.55 And they are highly corrosive, for they establish more or less long-standing political institutions and educational objectives, thereby fundamentally shaping the would-be citizens. Nevertheless, a cure or redemption is always an open possibility. And the justification of such bold a claim does not invoke historical or messianic optimism, crude empiricism, or transcendental assumptions. It rather rests on a descriptive and normative analysis of the very essence of political communities. Surprisingly, redemption comes from their matter (hylê)! It could not be otherwise, since in extreme democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny, the form (i.e. the constitution) has been totally destroyed. The matter of the city, after all, is primarily “the multitude of human beings” (Pol. VII 4). But the matter of the city functions in sharp contrast to materials which cannot initiate movement by themselves (Met. VII 9 1034a13–14) or to the parts of biological organisms which become functionless once the organism perishes (despite the analogy between city and body in Pol. I 2 1253a20–25). For human beings, after the destruction of the constitution, keep displaying an “impulse” (hormê) toward the establishment of political communities and remain endowed with rational practical capacities to realize that end.56 Even in the imaginary case of universal totalitarianism—an idea, needless to say, Aristotle could never have conceived of—human beings would one day reestablish genuine political communities. Besides, the “first inhabitants or founders,” not yet being citizens of any city, were in the same position (Pol. III 2 1275b33–34). In other words, human beings constitute an inexhaustible source of political redemption. True, the ruling class is sometimes depraved, and many parts of the city might be captured in the vicious circle of radical evil. Nevertheless, by stressing the fact that a political multitude necessarily displays “dissimilarity” (ex anomoiôn) and withstands complete uniformity, Aristotle leaves wide open the possibility that not all citizens in an extremely evil regime need be depraved. One can understand this eventuality in two ways:

Radical Evil  171 individuals may establish new regimes in the same territory or elsewhere or might offer resistance to the rulers.57 In Aristotle’s world, moreover, even mere chance can do the job. For a sudden change in the composition of the multitude—i.e. in the balance between rich and poor, virtuous and depraved, young and old, men and women, natives and foreigners, etc.—may have critical implications for the quality of the constitution. War, plague, invasion, climate changes that increase agricultural production, or even small things like a love affair causing the mutual destruction of two tyrants might provoke a redemptive change of a city’s matter. The rest is only a question of favorable conditions and wise founders. They rarely occur together, but sometimes they do. Individuals and political communities are for the most part base to the extent that they are attracted by pleasure or profit. The good news is that, despite their badness, all of them still inhabit the realm of reason, for they possess a certain understanding of the distinction between goodness and badness. The bad news is that individuals and political communities may also entirely degenerate into a beast-like or despotic condition which equates to a total destruction of any capacity to grasp, establish, or preserve practical principles. They may succumb to radical or ultimate evil. They are entangled in it without wishing for it, but this does not (necessarily) exonerate them from being responsible for what has happened to them. For better or for worse, political radical evil is contagious whereas beastliness and intemperance are not, but while beast-like individuals are incurable, redemption from radical evil is always an open possibility for political communities. Consequently, the domain of practical reason never risks complete degeneration or destruction.

Notes 1. See for instance: dêmos eschatos (IV 11 1296a1–2), oligarchias hustatês kai dêmokratias (V 10 1310b4), dêmokratia teleutaia (V 10 1312b5–6, V 11 1313b33–34, VI 4 1319b1–2, VI 5 1320a17, VI 6 1320b31), oligarchias teleutaias kai tês demokratias tês eschatês (V 10 1312b35–36). 2. For insightful comments on these passages, see Reeve 2018c; Beere 2018; Baghdassarian 2017–2018. 3. For the ways in which natural essences fall short from perfection, see the rich analysis by Stavrianeas 2018. 4. Notice that Aristotle’s notion of extreme evil must not to be confused with the vices which “are named in such a way that they are united [suneilêmmena] with baseness from the start. . . . For all these and things like them . . . are said to be what they are because they are base” (II 6 1107a9–13). Aristotle is not isolating here a sort of extreme wrongdoing. The idea merely is that to characterize something as shamelessness, envy, adultery, theft, etc. already implies that we appraise particular acts done in specific circumstances as being base. This does not exclude the possibility that, for instance, a married man may agree that he has had extramarital sex but not that he has committed adultery (EE II 4 1221b23–25; Rh. I 13 1373b38–a13).

172  Radical Evil 5. See, for instance, the use of this tripartite scheme by Formosa 2008 and its elaboration by Ricoeur 2004: 22–26. 6. Rapp 2002 II: 506–507 and Grimaldi 1980: 307 miss the richness of Aristotle’s account. 7. Curzer 2018 also endorses such a view. In particular, he shows that Aristotle spends a fair amount of time comparing varieties of virtues and lesser character traits with each other. From fifteen of these comparisons, he extracts three ranking principles: Aristotle ranks character traits by the degree to which they benefit others, benefit the agent, and are improvable. Similarly, Aristotle compares different sorts of friendships and other relationships with each other against two principles: their level of justice and the extent to which they benefit their members. Curzer arranges Aristotle’s scattered comparisons into two character trait hierarchies and two relationship hierarchies governed by these five implicit principles. The lowest rungs of these hierarchies constitute the worst Aristotelian character traits and relationships. These are the “Aristotelian demons” (121). 8. Neiman 2002: 55. 9. Rousseau OC 3: 109 (Rousseau’s editor has mistakenly attributed the passage to Pol. I 2). 10. “We are sick with curable diseases, and if we wish to be cured, nature comes to our aid, for we are born to health” (Rousseau OC 4: 1868). 11. Certainly, Kant’s portrait of Phalaris differs from the Aristotelian one (besides, Kant’s source is Seneca’s writings—see, for instance, De Ira II.5.1 and De Clementia 1.251–5, II.4—not the Nicomachean Ethics). In both the Religion and the Second Critique, the question is of whether our respect for moral law is such a sufficient incentive for our actions that, irrespective of the stakes and the strength of our inclinations (Neigung), we still know that duty requires us to resist them and act from duty—that is, to use Kant’s own words, “to raise oneself altogether above the sensible world” by exercising a power “ruling over sensibility.” In this picture, Phalaris represents the inclinations: We are certainly and immediately conscious of a faculty enabling us to overcome, by firm resolve, every incentive to transgression, however great (though Phalaris himself should command you to be false and, having brought up his bull, should dictate perjuries). (Religion 6: 42n; see also Critique of Practical Reason 5: 158–159) One easily recognizes here the pattern of subordination or reversal. Goodness and evil depend on whether we give priority to respect for the law or to inclinations; each time the latter, or even an overdetermination of the will by both respect and our egoistic inclinations, takes the lead over pure respect or duty themselves, we “reverse the ethical order as regards the incentives” (Religion 6: 30) Instead, Aristotle’s Phalaris, at least as I  paint his portrait in Section 4.2, resembles those that Kant calls “morally dead” people: “No human being is entirely without moral feeling, for, were he completely lacking in receptivity to it, he would be morally dead [sittlich tot]” (The Metaphysics of Morals 6: 400). 12. I use the privation paradigm as Aristotle presents it, for instance, in the case of blindness: “blindness is a sort of privation [sterêsis], but a being is not blind at any and every age, but only if it does not have sight when it is natural for it to have it” (Met. IV 22 1022b28–29). 13. See III 4 1113a15, III 5 1113b3, III 2 1111b26; DA III 9 432b5–7; Topics IV 5 126a13–14.

Radical Evil  173 14. It is not impossible to reconcile Aristotle’s claims here, in Nicomachean Ethics III 4, with his claim in the Metaphysics that “the object of appetite is the apparently noble and the primary object of wish is the really noble” (Met. XII 7 1072a26–28). For the primary object of wish, or its object “in accord with nature,” is indeed the really good. But this does not mean that the apparent good is not its object, too, though “contrary to nature.” And the apparent good—that is, pleasure—seems to occupy, in a sense, two places: it is the object of the wish of the base person and the object of appetites, though these two things should be, at the end of the day, distinguished. 15. Though, in its emphasis on the role of reason, the interpretation offered by Müller 2020 is compatible with mine, I find his distinction among the homo faber, the homo prudens, and the homo sapiens quite biased and his explanation of the pivotal case of wealth’s limitlessness too quick. 16. Pol. II 9 1270b21–22, II 10 1272a32–33, IV 9 1294b34–40, IV 12 1296b15– 16, V 9 1309b17–18. 17. See II 1 1103b4 and Pol. II 9 1269b20, 1270b1, III 13 1283b37–38, VI 2 1317a34. All these passages, together with the ones mentioned in the previous note, confirm that the use of the term “wish” is nowhere in line with Pol. VIII 15 1334b22–23 (where Aristotle locates wish in the non-reasoning part of the soul), and it would be illicit (contra Moss 2012: 162) to assume that the latter expresses Aristotle’s considered view. Grönroos 2015 proposes an apparently consensual interpretation: the reasoning part of the soul possesses its own action-motivating desire—namely, wish—but this desire itself is not “the product of an exercise of reasoning.” If Grönroos wants thereby to rupture with some intellectualist view (if such a view there is) that reason produces wish by means of reasoning, I fully comply with his construal. But, for the rest, he ascribes to intellectualists the impossible tenet that practical reasoning begins from scratch—that is, without the agent already possessing any sort of feelings and non-rational desires (Grönroos 2015: 66). Even worse, he splits wish into two parts, the “representation of the good” (which might be erroneous or not) and “the desire for the human good” (74). But this leads to an odd psychology that requires the motivation of the vicious person to be analyzed on the ground of two co-existent wills: the wrong representation of the good is satisfied with false beliefs and wrongdoings while, in the background, the “desire for her own proper good, which is the ultimate source of motivation, is not satisfied” (81). This is a gratuitous hypothesis, for there is no layer of wish that does not already incorporate a certain representation of the good. That the rationality of wish does, indeed, not reside in its being a desire produced by reasoning, I accept. But, pace Grönroos, there can be no representation-less wish. The rationality of wish as a desire resides in the fact that its representation-laden character determines its proper way to be satisfied, dissatisfied, and revised. 18. See Kontos 2002: 96–113. 19. I take aphrosynê to be the answer to Barney’s 2019: 278–279 remark that there is “no obvious cognitive counterpart [of practical wisdom] in vice.” 20. Pearson 2018: 125–128 proposes the most complete and solid taxonomy; see also Thorp 2003. 21. I owe to Pearson 2018: 131–132 the clarification that Aristotle does not point here to a distinct kind of beastliness. 22. See: Cope 1877 I: 265 and Cooper 2009: 18. Pearson 2018: 139–140 argues against the idea that all beast-like people are aphrones. I  am not sure this detail is important for at least two reasons: first, the term aphrones can cover a very broad spectrum of cases, which Pearson’s translation (“mindless”)

174  Radical Evil tends to obscure. Second, according to VII 6 1149b34–35, beasts “do not have deliberate choice or rational calculation.” Although animals do not have deliberate choice, in many other texts, Aristotle attributes rational capacities to them (see: HA VII 1 588a18–31, I 2 488b15, IX 5 611a15–16, I X 10 614b18; PA II 2 648a5–8, 4 650b18–27; GA III 2 753a10–17). Also of note: in the Protrepticus (Iamblichus Protrepticus VIII, 45.6–15 (= Düring B 97–100); in Hutchinson and Johnson 2017: 39), Aristotle identifies aphrosynê, as the opposite (to enantion) of practical wisdom, with mere madness (mainomenos). 23. The passage refers to those who are beast-like people because of their nature (ek phuseôs). But notice that Phalaris, who is initially placed under the same heading, is an efficient tyrant. Aristotle portrays him in VII 5 as someone capable of occasionally restraining his non-natural desires (VII 5 1149a12– 15). It would be odd, then, to suppose that he is completely mindless. 24. Barney 2019: 294–303 draws on my prior distinction to nicely explain the corruption that is proper to vice in terms of “motivated reasoning” and “sustained success at rationalization.” 25. I follow Aspasius’ reading according to which thêriôtês is here ascribed both to animals and to human beings (CAG 19: 129.5–130.21 Heylbut). For the endless controversy surrounding this passage, see Natali 2009b: 121–125. 26. See, for instance, Burnyeat 1980: 83–87; Rorty 1980a: 274–284; Nielsen 2017: 24. 27. I have suggested elsewhere (Kontos 2009) that here, in VI 5, the term (dia)phthora is probably used in its literal sense of destruction, whereas one is commonly content with reading in it a mere alteration from virtue to badness. 28. The role of habituation in moral education—in other words, the “learning by doing” pattern—is puzzling. For recent attempts to systematize and defend Aristotle’s view, see: Jimenez 2016; Müller 2019; Barney 2019: 279–288; Hampson 2020. 29. On the whole, my construal follows Beere 2018, but it is also intended to respond to his final puzzle: “I wish I had a clear view of what conditions are necessary and sufficient for the possibility that a change issues in something bad in the full-blooded sense” (Beere 2018: 47). 30. I do not mean thereby to deny that Irwin’s portrait of the bad person as someone who is a committed slave to inclination may do justice to a specific type of Aristotle’s badness. In any case, my aim is not to propose an analysis of vice but only to highlight the distinction between mere vice and beastliness. As to Irwin’s paper, see also Nielsen 2017: 11–12. On the whole, I agree with Barney 2019: 293–294 that “Aristotle’s account is compatible with a wide range of profiles in badness.” 31. All references are to Irwin 2001. The same objections apply to Müller 2015. 32. Irwin himself admits that his reading is indebted to Aquinas (Irwin 2001: 73n1). 33. Faction (stasis) is a political evil, too, but the topic requires separate analysis (see: Hatzistavrou 2013; Skultety 2009). Faction as a constitutional change— that is, as the movement from the destruction of a certain constitution to the generation of a new one—does not represent a manifestation of radical political evil. In a certain sense, “perhaps the best way to avoid stasis is to ancicipate the changes stasis would introduce”—that is, by recommending a “kind of vaccination” (Pellegrin 2019: 247). Faction instantiates radical evil only to the extent that the transitional period from the previous to the next

Radical Evil  175 constitutional form all too often, not to say inescapably, involves lawlessness and violence. 34. I am in line with those (e.g. Schütrumpf 1976; Riesbeck 2016) who do not see any unbridgeable discontinuity between Book III and Books IV–V. 35. See, respectively: Pol. IV 4 1292a31, II 10 1272b2–3, 10–11, IV 8 1293b29, V 9 1309b34–35, IV 2 1289b2, II 6 1266a3–4. 36. This point was already stressed by Newman 1892; Fortenbaugh 1991: 233 also hints at Aristotle’s departure from Plato but downplays its importance by arguing that “Aristotle is averse to violating everyday language.” 37. Politics III still uses a simplified notion of tyranny that only draws on the arithmetical criterion of who is in rule while Books IV–V will broaden it to make room for ultimate political evil. 38. See Pol. VI 3 1318a11–26, III 10 1281a24–39. 39. See Pol. IV 4 1292a5–6, IV 6 1293a9–10. Such extreme lawlessness might not characterize any existing regime Aristotle was aware of, not even the Athenian democracy of his time. It might simply represent a limiting case that political theory should take into consideration in establishing normative criteria of extreme political degeneration. At any rate, ideal constitutions play the same role. 40. The picture of a threshold I introduced prior (and to which I will return in Section 4.4) helps us understand how gradual corruption (i.e. difference in degree) might lead to degeneration and privation. The example of health in Nicomachean Ethics II 2 1104a10–29 is pretty telling in this regard: damage to health may lead either to illness (alteration of quality) or to death (destruction). Similar differences in kind are also encountered in the realm of nature (see Stavrianeas 2018). 41. The aforementioned interpretation of the “rule of law” follows, on the whole, Yack 1993, with some refinements in line with Frank 2005; Kraut 2002: 454–457. 42. My interpretation of the passage runs counter to that of Simpson 1998: 420 (who sees here an opposition between rationality and desire), Newman 1887–1902 IV: xl, 178 and Schütrumpf 1991–1996 III: 452 (who recognize a reference only to the private life of individuals), and Keyt 1999: 141–142 (who sees here an inconsistent opposition between safety and slavery). 43. To the best of my knowledge the copious literature on the common good maintains that deviant constitutions and extremely evil ones share the same conception of the common good. Cooper’s groundbreaking paper “Political Animals and Civic Friendship” (in Cooper 1999: 356–377) and the insightful typology of individualistic vs holistic interpretations in Miller 1995: 191– 224 are quite representative of this tendency. Interestingly, they do not even refer to the passages from the Politics IV 10 and V 10 quoted in the following. This is also the case in Bradley 1991: 42–47; Schütrumpf 1991–1996 III: 348, 552; Simpson 1998: 163–164; Kraut 2002: 210–214; Samad 2011: 120; Morrison 2013. 44. The phrase “except for the sake of private benefit” means only that a tyrant’s private benefit might coincidentally overlap with what should be, but is not, dictated by concerns about the common interest. 45. Hence Aristotle envisages the extreme degeneration of political community as total destruction of its political character: extreme oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny are not merely bad political communities but rather nonpolitical communities. This is, in any case, what despotism implies: political regimes degenerate into a sort of a non-city like the ones that exist in various

176  Radical Evil barbarian nations (ethnê). Also of note: the fact that, from the perspective of normativity, ultimate political evil resides in the degeneration of political communities into a mere master-slave community is not incompatible with the fact that the naturalness of the polis is rooted in desires that, from a genetic perspective, first appear within the non-yet-political communities of man and woman, master and slave, desires whose telos can be achieved only within correct political communities. Instead, these facts, taken together, nicely explain why, in Aristotle’s teleological framework, political degeneration necessarily amounts to a sort of regression. In this sense, my present argument chimes well with the analysis of the naturalness of the polis in Rapp 2021. 46. The notion of a double threshold has been used in Nussbaum 1992: 221. 47. See Kraut’s 2018 analysis of whether there is an appeal of tyranny residing in human nature. 48. I owe these epithets to Philonenko 1984: 218–221. 49. See Pol. V 8 1308a33–35, VI 4 1319b18–19. 50. This is Kant’s famous expression regarding the possibility of moral “revolution in the disposition of the human being” (Religion 6: 47). Such a rebirth is also implied by the picture on the front page of Rousseau’s Émile which portrays Thetis immersing Achilles in the waters of the Styx (OC 4: 869). 51. I have developed this thesis in Kontos 2014: 234–239, in line with Di Muzio 2000; Brickhouse 2003. 52. I use the term introduced by Wolf 1987. 53. I follow the distinctions in Shoemaker 2017. Aristotle’s beast-like people because of habit resemble the psychopaths as presented by Shoemaker 2017: 176–182. 54. In contemporary philosophy only Hannah Arendt, as far as I know, is adamant in dissociating these two levels. Like Aristotle, she expels evil persons from the human community which now becomes universal: for “no one, that is, no member of the human race  .  .  . can be expected to want to share the earth with you [Eichmann]” (Arendt 1965: 279). She steadily maintains, however, that human communities are always susceptible of renewal insofar as human actions are a kind of “miracle.” 55. For the rarity of correct constitutions see: Pol. IV 11 1295a25–34, 1296a37– 38. The point has been stressed by Keyt 1991a: 258. 56. The distinction between incurable beast-like individuals and curable communities is not always evident. What about the tyrants, can they not be changed for the better? Aristotle presents them as being, in certain conditions, able to become more like a king—namely, “half good [hêmichrêstos]” and “half wicked [hêmiponêros]” (Pol. V 11 1315b10). Nowhere does Aristotle present tyrants as beast-like, though they are prone to bodily pleasures. Only Phalaris is a beast-like person and incurable. But his beastliness is not due to his being a tyrant, and his being a tyrant is not due to his being a beast-like person either. Luraghi’s nice 2018 study on the Greek notion of a tyrant as a “primordial sort of evil” (24) shows the complexity of the matter: true, Greek thought (Aristotle included) focuses on “the personal vices of the tyrant, his sex life,” etc. (13), but there is still place for Pindar to write a song praising a tyrant (namely, Hiero of Syracuse), in which he alludes to Phalaris as a counterexample—that is, in order to dissociate Hiero himself from “the negative elements attached to his social persona” (19–20). That is to say, Phalaris is one of a kind.

Radical Evil  177 57. Even extreme tyranny is susceptible to progressively becoming “more like a kingship” (Pol. V 11 1314a29ff.). Aristotle’s advice in favor of the way of moderation is addressed to the tyrant who is invited to play the king on the basis of mere pretense (hypokrinomenon). But the source of change is not the tyrant himself but the multitude which resists the tyrant’s lawless power and requires its being treated as if the constitution were a kingship, regardless of the tyrant’s true motives. See Bodéüs 1999.

Denouement Aristotle’s Sailors

Suppose that Aristotle’s practical philosophy had also been bequeathed to us in the form of an illustrated album about the life of sailors, one of his beloved metaphors. My aim in this book has been to foreground five illustrations—those of spectators, legislators, hopes, prayers, and radical evil—that have been until now overlooked or undervalued, on the assumption that they do not actually belong to the album. To this end, I invite the reader to regard these five illustrations in a new light so as to realize that they are in fact in tune with the spirit of the album and yield important insights without which the understanding of the whole album can hardly be adequate, let alone complete.1 To retrace the path followed, imagine that we are all sailors—for even “a ship’s captain is always one of the sailors.”2 As such, we primarily function as agents who, depending on our intellectual capacities and our desires, decide to do several jobs (“for one is an oarsman, another a captain, another a lookout, and others have other sorts of titles”)3 in order to reach our destination. No sailor is a lone mariner. During their voyages, sailors understand themselves as “members of [the] community” of the ship.4 Notwithstanding their aiming at what is advantageous for themselves,5 the excellent ones forge close bonds of friendship with their “co-sailors,”6 for “the preservation of the ship, while sailing, is a function of all of [them].”7 For the sake of the common good, sailors work in cooperation with each other—on condition that none of them “greatly exceeds the other sailors” in virtue8—to wrestle with diseases spread on the ship, pirates, storms, or broken rudders and to realize their objectives. Unfavorable circumstances might even oblige them to repair their ship on the open sea. At any rate, a good sailor does not “sail to the Pillars of Hercules” and does not “run frequent risks for the sake of wealth.”9 It may be the case that, within the political life of the city, sailors are usually assimilated into the “seafaring mob” on whose past naval victories certain political parties capitalize in order to strengthen their political power.10 For other sailors, however, sailing has been just a way to finally “moor their ship [i.e. in a harbor of leisure] and live their life on their own terms.”11

Denouement: Aristotle’s Sailors  179 My project, in turn, was to show that these aforementioned nautical metaphors give an incomplete and hence misleading picture of sailors’ lives. For sailors are spectators, too. Sometimes, while on board, the going gets tough, and sailors act as spectators of their own past actions, reappraise their initial decision to go on board, and may eventually regret it; they then “get seasick.”12 At other times, they are asked to judge whether certain sailors should be banished from the ship or denied embarkation in the first place, like “the Argonauts who left Heracles behind.”13 From a different perspective, “a ship anchored near the shore” is the neutral or secure space par excellence in order for people (“who had taken refuge in exile” after a past offense) to “deliver [their] defense” against new charges of, say, homicide—that is, to narrate and reappraise their deeds.14 When they are on dry land and, say, recall old stories or walk around the port with friends, good sailors (though not only the best among them) are the most trustworthy spectators of matters that “give rise to disputes,” for they can judge whether it is too risky for a ship to sail in such bad weather or whether the captain was right to throw the invaluable cargo overboard during last night’s storm.15 Heard or neglected, their judgment is perfectly correct. Ships are not products of nature, for “the craft of shipbuilding” is not “present in the wood”; as a consequence, they require shipbuilders in the same way as constitutions require legislators.16 But shipbuilders themselves are sailors, though not necessarily sailors on the very ship they now construct. And they are not mere producers of some artifact to be used later by others but rather establish a way of life, dictating what it should mean for someone to sail a ship and live as a sailor. Sailors do not simply use the ship, for “the city [holds] human beings and the ship sailors [in the way in which] the whole has its parts.”17 Ships are only “actualized” thanks to sailors,18 and a sailor’s whole life is ship-centric or ship-cratic. Moreover, shipbuilders are not necessarily the best captains. For shipbuilding and navigation are as remote from each other as a “badly built ship” from a “good captain”;19 legislators and active politicians are remote from each other in a like manner. And similarly to legislators, shipbuilders must be supplied with suitable materials in order for the ship they want to materialize.20 Thus, praying for appropriate resources is a constitutive (cognitive) component of the sailors’ world, not a mere ornament or psychological device of relief. Among other things, good shipbuilders know which the ideal, or almost ideal, materials to pray for are. They do not fantasize, however, about an Argos or a ship with wings. More importantly, they do not blur the line between good resources as a gift of (constitutive) luck and their own scientific knowledge.21 Sailors and captains need justified hope to cope with (circumstantial and resultant) luck and envisage the future (the more or less uncharted

180  Denouement: Aristotle’s Sailors waters and the more or less wayward winds) as being hospitable to positive scenarios that render it not impossible for courageous sailors to endure pain, overcome their own limits, and meet their noble ends.22 This presupposes a certain capacity for picturing, of which their own keenness to spin good yarns is a telling example. Hoping-well is a vital component of their practical lives, not a luxury. Both good and bad voyages are impossible without a captain at the helm of the ship. Bad voyages happen all too often but are not always fatal. It is true that sometimes, even “in fine weather,” “ships get swallowed up and disappear, so that no wreckage at all floats to the surface.”23 But, for the most part, if the ship and the sailors are good enough, a skillful captain can successfully overcome difficulties without the ship “being destroyed.”24 Even in the case that the captain, though “strong,” has some minor deficiency like being “a bit deaf,”25 the ship is not in great jeopardy either. By contrast, “the cause of a shipwreck is the absence of the captain whose presence was a cause of its preservation.”26 The captain’s absence parallels radical evil as the privation of practical reason: rudderless ships adrift because of their captain’s death, assassination, expulsion, or madness soon come to be wrecked. I do not at all profess that this social imagery is exhaustive. I am content to have brought to light some neglected illustrations of Aristotle’s album about the scope of a sailor’s life—of our practical lives.

Notes 1. I took the inspiration for exploiting Aristotle’s nautical metaphors from Blumenberg’s 1979 landmark study on the shipwreck simile. 2. Pol. III 6 1279a3–4. 3. Pol. III 4 1276b22–24. 4. Pol. III 4 1276b20–27. 5. VIII 9 1160a15–16. 6. VIII 9 1159b27–29. 7. Pol. III 4 1276b26–27. 8. Pol. III 13 1284a25. 9. Protrepticus VI 39.9–40.11 = Düring B 37–40; in: Hutchinson and Johnson 2017: 22. 10. Pol. V 4 1304a21–24; see also VII 6. 11. Protrepticus X 55.7–56.2  =  Düring B 48–50; in: Hutchinson  and Johnson 2017: 54. 12. Rh. III 4 1407a5–8. 13. Pol. III 13 1284a22–25. 14. Ath. Con. LVII 3–4. 15. III 1 1110a8–11. 16. Ph. II 8 199b27–33, Pol. I 2 1253a30–31. 17. Met. IV 23 1023a16–17. 18. DA II 1 413a8–9. 19. EE VIII 2 1247a25–27. 20. Pol. VII 4 1325b40–26a5. 21. Pol. VII 15 1334a11–40.

Denouement: Aristotle’s Sailors  181 2. III 6 1115a35-b6. 2 23. (Pseudo-Aristotle) Problems XXIII 5. 24. Pol. VI 6 1320b33–40. 25. Rh. III 4 1406b35–36. 26. Met. IV 2 1013b13–16, Ph. II 3 195a13–14.

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Index of Names

Allen-Hornblower, E. 48, 182 Andre, J. 139, 182 Anscombe, E. 1, 44, 182 Aquinas 13 – 14, 139, 142, 174, 182 Arendt, H. 2, 67 – 68, 88, 92, 133, 138, 176, 182, 189 Aspasius xi, 174 Athanassoulis, N. 139, 144, 182 Aufderheide, J. 146, 182 Baghdassarian, F. 171, 182 Balla, C. 95, 182 Barney, R. 173 – 174, 182 Barthes, R. 62, 90, 182 Beere, J. 171, 174, 182 Benjamin, W. 87, 96, 182 Berlin, I. 132, 146, 182 Berti, E. 93, 182 Bien, G. 95, 183 Björnsson, G. 183 Bloeser, C. 143, 183 Bloom, A. D. 95, 184 Blumenberg, H. 180, 183 Bodéüs, R. 87 – 88, 90, 93, 177, 183 Borg, J.S. 50, 183 Bovens, L. 142 – 143, 183 Bradley, A.C. 175, 183 Brickhouse, T.C. 176, 183 Brink, D.O. 50, 183 Broadie, S. 45 – 46, 93, 139, 183 Bronstein, D. 94, 183 Brown, E. 183 Brunschwig, J. 90, 183 Buchheit, V. 46, 183 Buddensiek, F. 145, 183 Burazin, L. 89, 183 Burger, R. 93, 184 Burnet, J. 92, 184

Burnyeat, M. 174, 184 Butler, T. 95, 184 Cairns, D. 139, 184 Calhoun, C. 141, 143, 184 Callard, A. 49, 140, 184 Cammack, D. 47, 184 Castelfranchi, C. 139, 190 Castoriadis, C. 90, 146, 184 Charles, D. ix, 44 – 45, 47, 49, 146, 184 Cherry, K.M. 93, 184 Coelho, N. 187 Cook, J. 139, 184 Coope, Ur. 49, 184 Cooper, J. 44, 47, 91, 94, 173, 175, 184 Cope, E.M. 46, 95, 173, 184 Coraes, Ad. 18, 46, 145, 184 Crisp, R. 47, 73, 93, 185 Curzer, H.J. 172, 185 DaVia, C. 51, 185 Depew, D. 94, 185 Deslauriers, M. 185 Destrée, P. ix, 185 Di Muzio, G. 176, 185 Dirlmeier, F. 73, 93, 185 Dönt, E. 93, 185 Dow, J. 46, 185 Duke, G. 87, 89, 91, 185 Echeñique, J. 47, 185 Ehrenberg, K.M. 89, 185 Elazar, D. 88, 185 Engberg-Pedersen, T. 45, 185 Eucken, Ch. 95, 185 Euripides 48, 118, 185 Eustratius xi, 46, 91, 185

Index of Names  197 Faucher, L. 47, 185 Ferrer, G. 142, 185 Finnis, J. 89, 185 Flannery, K.K.L. 141, 185 Formosa, P. 172, 185 Fortenbaugh, W. 175, 186 Frank, J. 145, 175, 186 Frede, D. 93, 186 Furley, D.J. 186 Gadamer, H.G. iii, 2, 18, 44 – 46, 50 – 52, 91, 93, 140, 185 – 186 Garsten, B. 48, 186 Garver, E. 46, 145, 186 Gaskin, R. 139, 186 Gauthier, A.R. 18, 45 – 46, 52, 65, 73, 87, 92 – 94, 102, 140, 186 Gibson, C.M. ix, 49, 186 Gottlieb, P. 46, 186 Gravlee, G.S. 140, 142, 186 Greenwood, L.H.G. 45 – 46, 65, 88, 91 – 92, 186 Gregorić, P. 93, 95, 186 Grgić, F. 93, 95, 186 Grimaldi, M.A. 46 – 47, 143, 172, 186 Grönroos, G. 173, 186 Halliwell, S. 48, 186 Hampson, M. 174, 187 Harman, G. 48, 187 Haskins, Ek. 94, 187 Hasper, P.S. 93 – 94, 187 Hatzistavrou, A. 174, 187 Heidegger, M. 51, 141, 187 Heliodorus xi, 46, 81, 91, 95 Henry, D. 187 Hippocrates 131, 187 Höffe, O. 93, 187, 189 Huppes-Cluysenaer, L. 187 Hurri, S. 90, 187 Hursthouse, R. 45, 187 Husserl, Ed. 2, 142, 187 Hutchinson, D.S. 96, 174, 180, 187 Immisch, O. 94, 187 Irwin, T. 47, 73, 93, 158 – 159, 174, 187 Isocrates 2, 66 – 67, 76 – 80, 82, 84, 91 – 95, 127, 187 Jacoby, R. 145, 187 Jagannathan, D. 92, 187 Jaulin, A. 146, 188

Jimenez, M. 174, 188 Johnson, C.N. 146, 188 Johnson, M.R. ix, 96, 139, 174, 180 Johnson, R.N. 50, 188 Jolif, J.Y. 18, 45 – 46, 52, 65, 73, 87, 92 – 94, 102, 140, 186 Kamtekar, R. 93, 188 Kant, Im. 2, 4, 20, 30, 45, 47, 98, 139, 146 – 147, 151 – 152, 159, 169, 172, 176, 188 Karbowski, J. 87, 92 – 93, 188 Kassel, R. 49, 95, 188 Kazantzidis, G. 142, 188 Kelsen, H. 89 – 90, 188 Kennedy, G.A. 188 Keyt, D. 90 – 91, 175 – 176, 188 Kierkegaard, S. 140, 188 Korsgaard, Ch. 47, 189 Kosman, A. 47, 189 Kraus, O. 46, 189 Kraut, R. i, 47, 90, 144 – 146, 175 – 176, 189 Kristjánsson, K. 50, 189 Lanni, A. 90, 189 Lear, G. R. 47, 189 Lear, J. 140, 189 Leighton, S. 47, 189 Lennox, J. G. 147, 189 Leunissen, M. 145, 147, 189 Libanius 139 Lockwood, T. 147, 190 Lorenz, H. ix, 49, 190 Louden R. 45, 146, 190 Ludwig, P.W. 49, 190 Luraghi, N. 176, 190 Manne, K. 50, 190 Mannheim, K. 145, 190 Martin, A. 116, 139, 143, 190 Marušić, B. 143, 190 Mayhew, R. 144 – 145, 190 McDowell, J. 44, 49, 190 McGeer, V. 140 – 141, 190 Miceli, M. 139, 190 Miller, F.D. 90, 175, 190 Milona, M. 141, 190 More, T. 130, 145, 190 Morrison, D. 175, 190 Moss J. 173, 190 Müller, Jörn ix, 174, 190 Müller, Jozef 89, 173 – 174, 190

198  Index of Names Mumm, J. 50, 190 Murynka, D. 90, 191

Rousseau, J.J. 2, 4, 90, 151 – 152, 168 – 169, 172, 176, 193

Nagel, T. 2, 7, 98, 138 – 139, 191 Natali, C. 91, 174 Neiman, S. 172, 191 Neschke-Hentschke, A. 146, 191 Newman, W.L. 88, 90, 94, 144, 175, 191 Nichols, M.P. 89, 146, 191 Nielsen, K.M. 93, 174, 191 Nozick, R. 132, 146, 191 Nussbaum, M. 47, 138 – 139, 176, 191

Salkever, St. 144, 146, 193 Samad, J. 175, 193 Samaras, T. 145, 193 Saunders, T. J. 88, 193 Sayre-McCord, G. 48, 193 Scalia, A. 90, 193 Schilling, H. 143, 193 Schütrumpf, E. 87 – 90, 92 – 93, 144 – 145, 175, 193 Segev, M. 144, 193 Seneca 152, 172, 193 Shafer-Landau, R. 50, 193 Shoemaker, D. 176, 193 Silverstein, M. 50, 193 Simmel, G. 90, 194 Simon, A. 45, 194 Simpson, P. 93, 95, 144, 175, 194 Skultety, S.C. 174, 194 Smith, A. 30, 194 Smith, M. 50, 194 Snow, N.E. 140, 194 Sosa, E. 46, 194 Soueltzis, N. 142, 194 Spatharas, D. 46, 142, 188, 194 Statman, D. 194 Stavrianeas, S. ix, 171, 175, 194 Steinbock, A. 139, 141, 194 Stewart, J.A. 18, 45 – 46, 64 – 65, 87, 91, 93, 95, 194 Stockdale, K. 142, 194 Strauss, L. 47, 194 Strawson, P.F. 2, 41, 50, 194 Striker, G. 47 – 48, 194 Szegedy-Maszak, A. 90, 194

Ober, J. 94, 145, 191 O’Connell, P.A. 46, 191 Olfert, C.M.M. 93, 191 Overeem, P. 90, 191 Pakaluk, M. i, 44, 191 Pangle, T. 93, 95, 144, 146, 191 Pearson, G. 44, 49, 141, 174, 191 – 192 Pellegrin, P. 87 – 88, 144 – 146, 174, 192 Pepin, J. 144, 192 Pettit, Ph. 108, 140 – 141, 192 Philonenko, J. 176, 192 Pinches, C. 139, 192 Plato xi, 2, 16 (Cratylus), 18 (Alcibiades), 36, 45, 49 (Alcibiades), 68, 87 (Gorgias), 92 (Politikos), 121, 127 – 129 (Laws), 131, 142 (Philebus), 145, 147, 160, 166, 175 Polansky, R. 192 Prinz, J. 50, 192 Rancière, J. 68, 192 Raphael, D.D. 48, 192 Rapp, Ch. i, 46 – 47, 95, 143, 172, 176, 192 Ratcliffe, M. 141 – 142, 192 Reeve, C.D.C. x, xi, 45, 47, 49 – 50, 73, 88, 90, 92 – 93, 95, 140, 145, 171, 192 Ricoeur, P. 138, 172, 192 Riedweg, C. 193 Riesbeck, D. 175, 193 Rist, J. 53, 193 Rorty, A. O. 174, 193 Rosenfeld, M. 88, 193

Tappolet, C. 47, 49, 185, 194 Taylor, C.C.W. 140 – 141, 194 Telfer, E. 49, 195 Terrel, J. 146, 195 Thanassas, P. 51, 195 Thorp, J. 173, 195 Thraede, K. 90, 195 Thucydides 107, 137, 141, 195 Too, Y.L. 94, 195 Tuck, R. 90, 195 Tuzet, G. 89, 195 Vega, J. 90, 195 Vermeule, A. 90, 189 Vogt, K.M. 44, 142, 195

Index of Names  199 Walker, J. 48, 195 Walker, M.U. 139, 195 Wareh, T. 94, 195 White, S. 45, 92, 195 Wiland, E. 50, 195

Williams, B. 2, 7, 95, 98, 138 – 141, 195 Wolf, S. 139, 176, 195 Yack, B. 90 – 91, 175, 195 Yurdin, J. 93 – 94, 187

Index of Passages

Note: References in boldface are to extensive discussions. Prior Analytics I 30 46a17 – 22 73 I 30 46a25 – 26 95 Posterior Analytics II 19 100a6 – 7 95 Topics I 14 105b27 94 IV 5 126a13 – 14 172 Physics II 1 193a11 – 17 147 II 2 194a21 – 25 146 II 3 194b23 ff. 144 II 3 194b29 22 II 3 195a13 – 14 181 II 5 196b10 – 15 145 II 5 197a18 – 20 145 II 8 198b34 – 199a8 134 II 8 199b27 – 33 180 Generation of Animals I 2 316a5 – 10 84 III 2 753a10 – 17 174 De anima II 1 413a8 – 9 180 III 9 432b5 – 7 152 III 10 433b4 – 14 48 III 11 434a7 – 10 49 De sensu 436a20 146 443b38 – 41 49 On Dreams 461a14 – 25 40

History of Animals I 2 488b15 174 VII 1 588a18 – 31 174 IX 5 611a15 – 16 174 IX 10 614b18 174 IX 37 621a29–b2 94 Parts of Animals I 1 639b24 – 25 96 I 1 642a7 – 12 147 II 2 648a5 – 8 174 II 4 650b18 – 27 174 II 15 658b14 – 25 147 III 2 663b21 – 22 147 Metaphysics I 1 981a13 – 17 95 I 1 981b4 – 5 94 IV 2 1013b13 – 16 181 IV 22 1022b28 – 29 172 IV 23 1023a16 – 17 180 VII 9 1034a13 – 14 170 IX 9 1051a15 – 22 149, 158 XII 7 1072a26 – 28 173 XII 10 1075a38 149 XII 10 1075b20 – 24 149 Nicomachean Ethics I 1 1094a26 54 I 1 1094b8 – 10 133 I 3 105a2 – 13 46 I 4 1095b19 – 20 157 I 8 1099a17 – 18 47 I 8 1099a23 – 24 44 I 8 1099a31 – 32 124 I 8 1099b7 – 8 98 I 9 1099b19 169

Index of Passages  201 I 9 1100a1ff. 101 I 10 1100b18 – 33 98, 138 I 10 1101a14 – 18 97 I 13 1102a8 – 10 54 I 13 1102a18 – 23 134, 146 II 1 1103b3 – 5 89, 145, 173 II 2 1104a10 – 29 175 II 4 1105b11 – 18 79 II 5 1105b20 – 23 142 II 6 1106a24 – 29 149 II 6 1107a9 – 13 171 II 7 1108a15 47 III 1 1109b30 – 35 23 III 1 1110a8 – 11 180 III 1 1110b33ff. 88, 141 III 2 1111b5 – 6 138 III 2 1111b25 – 26 101, 138, 172 III 3 1112a26ff. 14, 98 III 3 1113a9 – 10 138 III 4 1113a15–b1 152, 172 III 5 1113b3 172 III 6 1115a9 – 14 115, 139, 141 III 6 1115a32 – 3 106 III 6 1115a35–b6 104, 108, 181 III 7 1115b7 – 13 23, 106 III 7 1115b28ff. 106 III 8 1116a3 – 4 103, 105 III 8 1116a28 47 III 8 1116b9 – 10 104 III 8 1116b12 – 15 104 III 8 1116b19 – 23 141 III 8 1117a10 – 14 104, 140 III 8 1117a18 – 22 143 III 8 1117a22 – 26 107 III 9 1117a35ff. 114 III 9 1117b17 – 20 105 III 10 1118a12 – 18 33 III 10 1118a23 – 26 49, 157 III 10 1118b2 – 3 157 IV 2 1123a24 – 25 47 IV 3 1123b6 – 8 47 V 1 1129b5 – 6 125, 133 V 3 1131b20 – 23 149 V 8 1135a25 – 26 88, 141 V 9 1137a10 – 11 95 V 10 1137b13 55 V 10 1137b22 – 32 62, 88, 163 VI 2 1139a23 – 31 43 VI 5 1140a25 – 27 14, 16, 43 VI 5 1140b5 – 6 13, 43 VI 5 1140b6 – 7 57

VI 5 1140b7 – 12 92, 101, 156 VI 5 1140b17 – 19 157 VI 5 1140b20 – 21 13 VI 5 1140b22 – 25 89 VI 7 1141b12 – 16 14, 16, 43, 55 VI 8 1141b23 – 33 64 – 67, 90, 92 VI 8 1142a9 – 10 91 VI 8 1142a15 – 19 95 VI 8 1142a23 – 30 56, 141 VI 9 1142b20 – 22 14 VI 10 1142b34ff. 15 – 20 VI 11 1143a19 – 24 18 VI 11 1143a26 – 28 45 VI 11 1143a33 – 35 45, 56 VI 12 1143b13 – 14 106 VI 12 1144a27 – 29 115, 150 VI 13 1144b27 – 28 43 VI 13 1144b30 – 32 43, 86 VII 1 1145a15 – 16 31, 154 VII 1 1145a19 – 20 160 VII 1 1145a29 – 33 154, 155 VII 2 1145b8 – 14 32, 48, 49 VII 2 1145b3 – 31 38 VII 2 1146a9 – 12 32 VII 2 1146a15 48 VII 3 1146b9 31 VII 3 1146b22 48 VII 3 1146b25 38 VII 3 1147a10 – 24 38 – 39 VII 4 1147b6 – 7 38 VII 4 1147b23ff. 49 VII 4 1148a18 – 19 33 VII 4 1148a25 – 26 49 VII 5 1148b15 – 19 154 – 155 VII 5 1148b34ff. 155 VII 5 1149a5 – 6 156 VII 5 1149a9 – 10 155 – 156 VII 6 1149b35 155 VII 6 1150a1 – 8 46, 156 VII 1150b1 – 2 39 VII 7 1150b22 – 23 35 VII 7 1150b27 – 28 40 VII 8 1150b29 – 35 34, 38, 157, 169 VII 8 1151a4 – 5 39 VII 8 1151a16 – 27 19, 38, 48 VII 9 1151a34ff. 32 VII 9 1151b10 36 VII 9 1151b28 48 VII 10 1152a8 – 9 43 VII 10 1152a9 38 VII 11 1152b1 – 3 54 VIII 2 1155b18 – 21 153 VIII 6 1158a14 94

202  Index of Passages VIII 9 1159b27 – 29 180 VIII 9 1160a15 – 16 180 VIII 12 1161b24 – 26 93 IX 4 1166b15 – 16 101 IX 7 1168a13 – 18 139 IX 8 1169a5 – 6 47 X 5 1175b3 – 4 35 X 8 1178a34ff. 115, 142 X 8 1179a18 – 19 84 X 9 1179b2 – 31 46, 93, 125 X 9 1180a9 – 10 157 X 9 1180a20 – 21 56 X 9 1180b3 – 16 69 X 9 1180b20 – 25 54, 93 X 9 1180b28 – 81a12 66, 73, 74 – 76, 92 X 9 1181a12 – 17 76 – 80 X 9 1181a15 – 1181b20 54, 73, 80, 81 – 85 Magna Moralia I 20 1190b28 – 30 94 II 8 1207b16 – 18 124 Eudemian Ethics I 2 1214b10 – 11 157 I 8 1218b13 – 16 91 II 4 1221b23 – 25 171 II 8 1224b15 – 21 48, 101 II 9 1225b2, b6 – 7 88, 141 II 10 1227a30 – 31 153 II 11 1277b18 – 19 48 II 11 1228a11 – 19 138 III 1 1229a11 – 21 104, 140 III 1 1230a8 – 10 140 III 2 1230b31 – 35 33 III 2 1231a10 – 12 49 VIII 1 1246a32 – 35 89 VIII 2 1247a25 – 27 180

II 5 1262b38 57 II 5 1263b32 – 34 166 II 6 1265a1 – 2 87 II 6 1265a17 – 18 123, 130 II 6 1265a18 – 21 121 II 6 1266a3 – 4 175 II 7 1267a18 – 20 57, 121, 147 II 7 1267b5 – 8 58 II 8 1268b9 – 10 57 II 8 1268b34 – 39 89 II 8 1269a24 163 II 9 1269a32 – 33 147 II 9 1269b12 – 14 96 II 9 1269b19 – 22 89, 145, 173 II 9 1270a4 – 5 58 II 9 1270b1 145 II 9 1270b20 – 22 164, 173 II 9 1271a14 – 15 58 II 9 1271a41 147 II 10 1271b30 – 33 57, 125 II 10 1272a30 – 33 164, 173 II 10 1272b2 – 3 175 II 11 1273a4 147 II 12 1273b27 – 34 55, 57, 62, 87 II 12 1274a11 – 12, 96

Politics I 2 1253a20 – 25 170 I 2 1253a29 – 39 61 – 62, 87, 156, 180 I 4 1253b23ff. 89 I 4 1253b33 – 35 135 I 5 1254a36 – 37 151 I 6 1255b11 – 12 166 I 7 1255b16 – 17 69 I 9 1257b15 – 17 123 I 10 1258a21 – 24 89

III 1 1274b38 60, 87 III 1 1275b19 44 III 2 1275b32 – 34 61, 170 III 3 1276b1 – 13 60, 79, 144 III 4 1276b20 – 27 180 III 5 1278a5 147 III 6 1278b21 – 25 164 III 6 1278b32 – 36 166 III 6 1279a3 – 4 180 III 6 1279a17 – 20 160, 163 III 7 1279b6 – 10 163 III 9 1280a15 – 16 48 III 10 1281a24 – 39 175 III 11 1281b26 – 28 153 III 1 1282a3 – 23 95 III 11 1282b8 – 13 88, 161 III 12 1282b16 – 18 164 III 13 1283b37 – 38 89, 145, 173 III 13 1284a13 – 14 161 III 13 1284a22 – 25 180 III 13 1284b17 – 20 88 III 15 1286a9 – 20 62, 88, 89 III 16 1287a32 62, 89 III 16 1287a33 – 41 48

II 1 1260b27 – 29 123 II 2 1261a17 – 18 166

IV 1 1288b21 – 30 54, 56, 87, 119, 123, 131

Index of Passages  203 IV 1 1289a4 – 5 88 IV 1 1289a13 – 18 59, 80, 88, 161, 162 IV 2 1289a39 – 41 161 IV 2 1289b2 175 IV 2 1289b9 – 12 149, 160 IV 4 1291a20 – 21 137 IV 4 1291a27 – 28 44 IV 4 1292a5 – 6 175 IV 4 1292a11 – 12 167 IV 4 1292a31 – 32 162, 175 IV 4 1292a32 – 34 88 IV 5 1292b5 – 10 162 IV 6 1293a9 – 10 175 IV 7 1293b4 147 IV 8 1293b29 175 IV 10 1295a15 – 24 162, 166 IV 11 1295a40–b1 60, 79 IV 11 1295b6 – 10 138 IV 11 1296a1 – 2 171 IV 12 1296b15 – 16 162, 164, 173 IV 12 1297b38 – 39 54 IV 15 1299a26 – 28 44 V 1 1302a5 – 7 162 V 4 1304a21 – 24 180 V 8 1307b32 – 33 168 V 8 1308a5 – 7 165 V 8 1308b32 – 33 165, 176 V 9 1309b17 – 18 164, 173 V 9 1309b23 – 25 165 V 9 1309b32 165 V 9 1309b33 – 1310a2 87, 165, 175 V 9 1310a2 138 V 9 1310a30 – 36 164 V 10 1310b4 171 V 10 1311a2 – 4 166 V 10 1312a39–b3 96 V 10 1312b5 – 6 171 V 10 1312b35 – 38 167, 171 V 11 1313b33 – 34 171 V 11 1314a29–b18 165, 177 V 11 1314b23 – 32 138 V 11 1315b10 176 VI 2 1317a34 145, 173 VI 2 1317a40 147 VI 3 1318a11 – 26 175 VI 3 1318b40 – 1319a1 168 VI 4 1319b1 – 2 171 VI 4 1319b18 – 19 176 VI 5 1319b33ff. 56 VI 5 1320a17 171 VI 6 1320b31 171

VI 6 1320b33 – 40 181 VII 1 1323a18 – 19 124, 131 VII 1 1323a25 124 VII 1 1323a40–b8 124 VII 1 1323b21 – 37 124 VII 1 1323b41 – 1324a2 125 VII 2 1324a13 125 VII 2 1324a35 – 37 137 VII 2 1324b2 – 3 136 VII 2 1324b7 – 16 87, 136 VII 2 1324b24 – 41 89, 121, 136, 137 VII 2 1324b41 – 1325a14 121 VII 2 1325a7 – 10 54, 58 VII 2 1325a11 – 15 88, 136 VII 2 1325a36 – 38 137 VII 3 1325b21 – 23 55 VII 4 1325b35 – 1326a5 127 – 128, 130, 180 VII 4 1326a13 123 VII 5 1326b27 – 29 121 VII 5 1326b39 – 40 147 VII 6 1327a11 – 13 126 VII 6 1327a32 – 34 125 VII 6 1327a38 – 40 126 VII 6 1327b5 144 VII 7 1328a19 – 21 56, 131 VII 8 1328a37 – 28b2 161 VII 9 1329a3 – 4 44, 126 VII 10 1330a3 – 4 126 VII 10 1330a22 – 23 48 VII 10 1330a25 – 30 126 VII 11 1330b15 126 VII 12 1331b19 – 22 88, 127 VII 13 1331b41 – 32a1 126 VII 13 1332a10 130 VII 13 1332a19 – 21 124 VII 13 1332a25 – 32 58, 86, 88, 124, 127 – 128, 147 VII 13 1332a41–b3 130 VII 13 1332b5 – 8 58, 158 VII 13 1332b8 – 9 58 VII 14 1333a14 – 18 58, 136 VII 14 1333b30 – 31 136 VII 15 1334a11 – 40 180 VIII 15 1334b22 – 23 173 VII 17 1337a1 – 3 129 Rhetoric I 1 1354a16 – 54b12 27, 87 I 1 1354b5 – 9 63, 86 I 1 1355b12 – 14 134 I 1 1357a1 – 2 15

204  Index of Passages I 1 1357a24 – 25 15 I 3 1358b2 – 3 20 I 3 1358b8 – 9 47 I 4 1359a31 – 39 21, 95 I 4 1359a37–b1 138 I 4 1359b12 – 18 79 I 4 1360a30 – 37 138 I 7 1364a18 – 23 22 I 7 1364a30 149 I 9 1366a33 – 34 24 I 9 1367a1 – 3 25 I 9 1367b28 24 I 9 1367b37 – 68a9 23, 46 I 9 1368a10 – 29 21, 22 I 9 1368a33 – 36 22 I 10 1369a3 – 4 152 I 10 1369b21 – 22 153 I 11 1370a16 – 27 49 I 11 1370a29 – 34 139 I 11 1370b9 – 10 112 I 11 1370b16 – 19 142 I 11 1371a12 – 13 153 – 154 I 13 1373b38–a13 171 I 14 1374b24 – 75a8 150 – 151 II 1 1377b20 – 21 20, 25 II 1 1378a13 22 II 1 1378a19 – 21 25 II 2 1378b1 – 10 48, 111, 112 II 3 1380b2ff. 103, 111, 116 II 4 1382a1 – 15 26, 149 II 5 1383a1 – 8 104, 105, 109 II 5 1383a17 – 18 48, 111 II 5 1383a25 – 31 48 II 8 1385b11 – 34 48, 142 II 8 1386a2 – 3 101 II 8 1386a9 26 II 8 1386a34 46 II 10 1388a2 – 27 46 II 12 1389a16 – 20 103, 140 II 12 1389a21 – 24 103, 139 II 13 1389b15 – 20 103

II 13 1389b31 – 32 110 II 13 1390a8 – 9 139 II 18 1391b8 – 11 47 II 18 1391b11 – 16 46 III 4 1406b35 – 36 181 III 4 1407a5 – 8 180 III 8 1408b21 – 24 49 III 14 1415a36 – 15b6 46 III 17 1417b31 – 32 21 III 17 1418a27 – 29 49 Poetics II 1448a18 29 IX 1451a36 – 38 29 XIII 1452b30ff. 29 XV 1454b8 – 9 29 Athenian Constitution VI 3 61 XI 1–XIII 1 61 LVII 3 – 4 180 On Marvelous Things Heard 836b30 – 837a6 122 Problems XXIII 5 181 Protrepticus VI 39.9 – 40.11 = Düring B 37 – 40 180 VIII 45.6 – 15 = Düring B 97 – 100 174 X 54.12 – 55.3 = Düring B 46–B47 96 X 55.7 – 56.2 = Düring B 48 – 50 180 Virtues and Vices 1249b29 – 30 154 1250a16 – 17 154 1250b44 – 1251a2 154 1251b33 – 34 154