Greatness of Soul : In Hume, Aristotle and Hobbes, as Shadowed by Milton's Satan [1 ed.] 9781443865555, 9781443843249

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Greatness of Soul

Greatness of Soul: In Hume, Aristotle and Hobbes as Shadowed by Milton’s Satan

By

José A. Benardete

Greatness of Soul: In Hume, Aristotle and Hobbes as Shadowed by Milton’s Satan, by José A. Benardete This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by José A. Benardete All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4324-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4324-9

TO MICHAEL STOCKER WHO LED THE WAY MANY THANKS

Heroism, or military glory, is much admired by the generality of mankind. They consider it as the most sublime kind of merit. Men of cool reflection are not so sanguine in their praises of it. The infinite confusions and disorder, which it has caused in the world, diminish much of its merit in their eyes. When they would oppose the popular notions on this head, they always paint out the evils, which this supposed virtue has produced in human society; the subversion of empires, the devastation of provinces, the sack of cities. As long as these are present to us, we are more inclined to hate than admire the ambition of heroes. But when we fix our view on the person himself, who is the author of all this mischief, there is something so dazzling in his character, the mere contemplation of it so elevates the mind, that we cannot refuse it our admiration. The pain, which we receive from its tendency to the prejudice of society, is over-powered by a stronger and more immediate sympathy. —David Hume

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 5 Milton and Hume Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 11 “LEASHED in LIKE HOUNDS” Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 15 Ingratitude Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 23 PRIDE Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 33 Hume’s About-Face Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 47 A Fresh Start: Hobbes Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 53 Glory and Honor in Hobbes Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 65 Julius Caesar Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 71 The Ring of Gyges Chapter Ten ............................................................................................... 77 Megalo Junior and the Wisdom of Life Section One: Bostock .......................................................................... 77 Section Two: McDowell ..................................................................... 80

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Table of Contents

Chapter Eleven .......................................................................................... 83 Ostracism Chapter Twelve ......................................................................................... 87 Conclusion The Smile of Achilles and Milton’s Eve: An Epilogue ............................. 91 Short Bibliography .................................................................................... 97

INTRODUCTION

If even an admirer of Aristotle’s ethics like Francis Sparshott (1994, p. 151) can characterize his great-souled man as “a prince of pomposity,” itself one of the gentler reactions to him of the last century, more serious is the charge of ingratitude – in N.E. IV, 3 at 1124b 15 - that has been widely circulated about him, by those who, having verifiably come to his assistance in a spot of trouble, find him soon to be affecting amnesia about the episode. Mischievously, however, I am inclined to protest as follows. Graciously accepting the well-meant but often quite otiose help, not to mention that of those currying favor with him, the great-souled man is very much in character when he genuinely forgets, above all, his own graciousness on the occasion. All such casuistry aside, when it comes, dauntingly, to Hume and Hobbes, even specialists preoccupied with either of them can confess, without shame, that greatness-of-soul has never so much as registered with them as a topic of any notable relevance. Hence my fear of the very American ruling, “three strikes, and you’re out”. Not to worry. Surely one can almost see Hume in his ostentatious chapter, toward the end of the Treatise, entitled “Of greatness of mind”, nudging us with a wink and a nod as he tacitly confides, “The one really good thing in Aristotle, his third chapter in book 4 of the Nicomachean Ethics I am herewith recycling in my own not so very different terms.” One such term, shared in common by the two chapters, is supplied by the word “pride”’, at any rate if we follow the premier Oxford translation where Aristotle’s word for greatness of soul, in N.E. IV, 3, namely megalopsychia, is even translated throughout the chapter as simply pride. Take that to be one datum on which I shall be relying as a working assumption in understanding Aristotle. A second datum, in understanding Hume, is supplied by Hume when he proposes to “begin” his chapter “with examining the passions of pride and humility”, thereby recalling us back 300 pages (in Selby-Bigge’s edition) to the outset of the second Book of the Treatise the first Part of which is entitled “Of pride and humility”. I am thus prepared to argue that, far from being the anomaly that one might suppose Hume’s discussion of greatness of mind to be, this theme is strongly grounded in his emphasis on pride in the second Book which in its turn is thematically linked by Hume to his famous doctrine of the self with which the first Book virtually culminates. Self, pride and greatness

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Introduction

of mind in the third Book: this sequence then binds the Treatise together into a proper whole. Comparing the role of greatness of soul in the Nicomachean Ethics (where it is widely taken today to be in effect hardly less anomalous than that played by it in the Treatise), it is by no means a stretch to propose that it is almost as strongly integrated into the latter work as it is in the former, particularly if one has registered the fact that, while pride as such is largely confined by Aristotle to a single chapter of his book, it has a structural role to play in Hume’s. Arguably anomalous when taken separately, these two chapters on being thematically juxtaposed – add Hobbes to the mix – cease to be such, even succeeding in delivering an unexpected research venue to analytical ethics that promises to bridge ancient and modern. So much for establishing at the outset the scholarly bona fides of my enterprise, for my reader who has so much as glanced at Hume’s almost Nietzschean paragraph that supplies a climax to his chapter “Of greatness of mind”, and which I am featuring as the epigraph to this volume, must know that I am after bigger game. For with Hume and Hobbes being found – quite independently of each other – to be engaged in reformulating Aristotle’s greatness of soul for the modern world, my proprietary attachment to all three of them was thus advertised as being primarily systematic and only secondarily of historical import. Hume’s Paragraph aside, it is because I take him to be playing the key role, past or present, in analytical ethics – notably by querying how “ought” might be derived from “is” – that I am giving him pride of place, though sticking narrowly to my eponymous theme it is Hobbes, in my inner circle, who will be found to do the heavy lifting on a technical level in recycling greatness of soul as a viable research venue in ethics, whether taken in purely systematic terms or in largely historical ones, a Nietzschean frisson being seen to infect Hobbes and Aristotle as well. Take Hobbes’ word “magnanimity” to be almost as close a translation into English of Aristotle’s “megalopsychia” as Hume’s “greatness of mind” at any rate for anyone, past or present, with the Latin magnitudo animi ready to hand. Well, there is a little bit more of a back story here. As to Hume, early in the Treatise there are his famous, philosophically tendentious chapters on soul and self that could only prove a distraction were he to rely on “greatness of soul”. Correspondingly, it is already a sea change, crossing the Adriatic, when the Greek psyché (soul) figures in magnitudo animi not as Latin anima (soul) but as animus (spirit), though as to Hobbes himself, he will feel as much at home with megalopsychia as with magnitudo animi.

Greatness of Soul

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Latin and Greek aside, what we today hear above all in “magnanimity”, namely forbearance toward a defeated enemy, I take to be by no means uppermost for either Hume or Hobbes, though the last line of Virgil’s Aeneid, when Aeneas comes extraordinarily close to sparing the life of Turnus, should be enough to dispel any fear that I have embarked on an antiquarian exercise. Fleeing a holocaust in Troy and leading a Trojan remnant in a diaspora, Aeneas is vouchsafed a divine mandate toward a promised land in Italy. Must then his fulfilling that imperative require the death of the local prince as well as the abandonment of Dido? No matter. Although Aristotle presents a neat, little argument as to why a great-souled man – women are not easily factored into this story, even granting that Adam in Paradise Lost (at VIII, 256) credits Eve with “greatness of mind” – must excel in all the moral virtues (sheer pride demands no less), the poet may be wiser than any mere po-faced philosopher. “Virtues and vices aside”, Virgil may be heard to protest, “Is it not enough for Aeneas to renew and even enhance the destiny of Troy by preparing the way for the greatness of Rome? Enough, I mean, to invest him with an unproblematic version of magnitudo animi, featuring his animus if not his anima, that need not rule out serious moral deficits.” Anticipated in N.E. IV, 3, this tension between poet and philosopher is already reflected in how its factual depiction of the great-souled man, warts and all, sits awkwardly with the omnibus virtue that it is officially committed to elucidating. Figuring as a virtue, even an omnibus virtue, for Aristotle, magnanimity figures for Hobbes as only a passion, thereby supplying me with ample doxagraphic warrant, sticking to my coterie of philosophers, for opening up my own program to the extra-curricular wisdom of poets. Extending my already fairly outré lexicon a bit further, the obsolescent if not quite obsolete term “passion” I take to answer, near enough, to our word “emotion”. Defining magnanimity as “contempt of little helps and hindrances”, Hobbes will be construed by me avant la lettre as proposing to take magnanimity as an analysandum of which his definition serves as an analysans, thereby explaining how it is Hobbes and not Hume who features when it comes to the analytical core of my program, “valorfortitude” also surfacing for him in Chapter six of Leviathan as “magnanimity in danger of wounds or death”, while “liberality” will figure as “magnanimity in the use of riches”. Add now that, tucked away, a little surprisingly perhaps in ¶ 12 of Chapter fourteen, “[M]agnanimity is contempt of unjust or dishonest helps”, almost as if, quite as much as Aristotle, Hobbes was prepared – near enough – to take all of the moral

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Introduction

virtues to be entailed by magnanimity. Further complicating my program, Hobbes is aggressively on record as being against pride, as when at the end of Chapter twenty-eight he mentions “the two last verses of the one and fortieth of Job where God, having set forth the great power of Leviathan, called him King of the Proud.” As to how my philosophers may at times be over-shadowed by poets, I am herewith giving fair warning to my analytical colleagues. Finally, indulging readers impatient for me to condense my results into a virtual sound-byte, already in Chapter four where greatness of mind two is distinguished from greatness of mind one, with Hume launching the former, and Aristotle being committed to the latter, the two philosophers are seen to trade vicious insults. For if Hume convicts Aristotle of badbreeding, Aristotle retorts by convicting Hume of small-mindedness. Adjudicating the quarrel, I rule as follows. Better to be convicted of bad breeding than of small-mindedness, quite apart from the purely logical point that small-mindedness is the contrary of greatness of mind. In a neutral vein, however, it may be safe to say that greatness of mind sans subscripts has now been accessed twice over, under at least two distinct Fregean modes of presentation, though Hobbes’ “Contempt of little helps and hindrances” must surely count as a third.

CHAPTER ONE MILTON AND HUME

A poet having been seen in my Introduction to encroach on my official program, if only to help elucidate what the word “magnanimity” means for us today, another poet intervenes soon enough in connection with what “elevates the mind” in Hume’s Nietzschean paragraph. Arguably a je ne sais quoi, this is a certain “something so dazzling in . . . the character” of a “hero” that our “mere contemplation of it . . . elevates the mind”. Precisely how it should be Milton above all who was riveted by this something so dazzling in his gropings over the years, even as a Christian, toward recycling the “heroic poem” of classical antiquity, remains a by no means exhausted theme. To urge now that it is to Milton’s Satan most obviously that Milton and Hume scholars alike are jointly advised to turn for a proper grasp of this Humean/Miltonic elevation of mind, is only to launch another missing, interdisciplinary chapter, as between a great philosopher and an equally great poet, with the latter very nearly anticipating the former. With Milton channeling Hume by surprising us, in a Fishean vein, he can be read as convicting this “something so dazzling”, which Hume credits with [overpowering] our dismay over “the sack of cities”, with being nothing other than the most insidious outcome of our post-lapsarian fallen nature. A superb encounter here of a Christian poet with a famously anti-Christian philosopher where the Christian figures to his greatest advantage. Prepared even to give the devil his due, and more than his due, Milton will not hesitate to vouch in his own name, albeit in indirect style, for Satan’s “merit” in the opening lines of Book Two. High on a Throne of Royal State, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold, Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d To that bad eminence; and from despair Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires

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Chapter One Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue Vain War with Heav’n, and by success untaught His proud imaginations thus displayed.

It is not, however, with Satan’s putative merit that I am principally concerned, but rather with that of his alter-ego. For at III, 307-310 Messiah “hast been found/By merit more than birthright son of God/Found worthiest to be so by being good,” thanks more particularly to having “quitted all to save/A world from utter loss”. Congratulated officially for volunteering to undergo crucifixion in order to save mankind, the son of God is in fact concerned above all at III, 165-66 lest God’s “goodness and [his] greatness both/Be questioned and blasphemed without defense”, with the whole world, and everything in it, falling thus into ruin, averting which catastrophe, brought on by a theological conundrum into which God has fecklessly drifted, Messiah’s supreme merit, trumping that of Satan, will come sacrificially into play. With the Son trumping the merits of God as well, God concedes as much when, abdicating his throne to him, he says at III, 317-19, “[A]ll power/I give thee, reign forever, and assume/Thy merits,” quite as if Satan’s effort to unseat God by force, far from being absurd, has been realized at last, under other, irenic auspices. Especially to be noticed is the fastidious turn of language whereby the triumph of Messiah “by merit more than birthright” has been prefigured by how in II 18-20 Satan explains that if “just right and the fixed laws of heav’n/Did first create” him to be the “leader” of the rebel angels, “next” it was (co-opting God’s pet theme of free will) “free choice,/With what besides, in counsel or in fight,/Hath been achieved of merit” by Satan, that sets a further seal upon Satan’s leadership over them. More crisply still, it is the word “mute”, and how Milton recycles it at III, 217, where “all the heav’nly choir stood mute,” and altogether as pusillanimous as the fallen angels faced with a comparable challenge earlier at II, 420 when “all sat mute,” that signals subtextually a transcendent duel as between these two unexpected volunteers, Satan and the son of God. The word “transcendent” I am plagiarizing from Milton when, by way of what today is called “indirect style”, he says in his own name, playing to the hilt his role as devil’s advocate, that in breaking the silence, “transcendent glory raised [Satan]/Above his fellows” (II, 427-28). Admittedly exaggerating the degree of Satan’s merit on this occasion, Milton will soon rebuke serious scholars at II, 482-3, who will come to suppose that “spirits damned/Lose all their virtue”, as when even Samuel Johnson can join Addison (Elledge 483) in characterizing Satan as “the most exalted and most depraved being.” Maybe so! But only if “most

Milton and Hume

7

depraved” is compatible with a deep commitment to the normative principle (at II, 454-56) that “To him who reigns . . . so much to him [is] due/Of hazard more, as he above the rest/High honored sits”, quite as if it is precisely such hazard from which God, who sits high honored, shrinks in resisting Satan’s rebellion, by handing all the hazard over, first to his angels and later, the battle remaining undecided, to his Son. Redeeming Addison and Johnson in the exegetical light of Hume’s Paragraph, the depravity of Satan will consist in “the evils” which “this supposed virtue” of “heroism or military glory” has “produced in human society”, though when these evils are no longer “present to us”, and we “fix our view on [Satan] himself” he may well figure for us, dazzling, as “most exalted”. If Milton can say of the fallen angel Belial in his own name that “his thoughts were low” (II, 115), precisely because he will be seen (at II, 227) to have “counseled ignoble ease” when he rejected further “open war” against God (II, 119), it cannot be doubted that, for Milton, Satan’s thoughts were high, notably when he protested at (I, 105-06), “What though the field be lost?/All is not lost, the unconquerable will” remains. Morally much worse than Belial, Satan emerges as much better along another dimension of axiological evaluation that we may even come to identify with greatness of soul, and it is precisely this tension between morality and greatness of soul that, already anticipated in Hume’s Paragraph, now surfaces with full force as the central theme of this volume. Returning to the first sentence of my Introduction, the moral standing of Aristotle’s great-souled man may well be felt to be queried by the charge of ingratitude that continues to haunt him. A contested site here in Aristotle studies that may be almost as vexing as that between Satanists and anti-Satanists, these two textual cruxes, centuries apart, I am probably alone in addressing in tandem, prompted by the thought that if either is to be resolved it will only be by way of a package deal that covers the other, a suggestion all the more attractive because each of these research venues has pretty much given up on any further headway in the near future, oblivious of the inter-disciplinary opportunity that Hume’s Paragraph has opened up for both of them. More generally still, though with more particular reference to ingratitude, there is David Ross’s distinction between the Right and the Good, as much as to say Kant versus Aristotle, which serves as an analytical scheme explaining how, by merely focusing on what one might readily take to be a local, parochial worry as to an anomalous chapter in the Nicomachean Ethics – a worry, however, that

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Chapter One

features deontology – I might supply a missing chapter in analytical ethics. But more of that in my next but one chapter. Much more urgent, when it comes to winding down this chapter, is the heavy dollop of Milton’s poetry, emphatically targeting the poetry qua poetry, to which I expect, more especially, my analytical colleagues to submit, in the name, let me hastily add, of Bernard Williams’ famous thesis as to “the limits of philosophy” notably as regards “substantive or thick ethical concepts”, such as “coward, lie, brutality, gratitude” (Williams, 140) that contrast sharply with such thin ethical concepts as the right and the good that provide analytical ethics with its austere diet. Add now magnanimity to Williams’ list as to the very thickness of which Milton supplies a rich treasure-trove filling out Hume’s thin (but only by comparison) schematic Paragraph, though the deeper point lies in the analytical hypothesis that it is the poetic import of magnanimity that explains, to no small extent, its thickness. Despairing as to the prospects of analytical ethics when it comes to the thickness of human life quite generally, Williams has posed a challenge that his admirers will already have found me to be addressing thanks to a serendipitous convergence of Hume and Milton, let it be only in regard to this one thick concept. Twice over then Hume emerges as the seminal source of my larger program, once as regards a missing chapter in the history of analytical ethics, albeit in conjunction with Hobbes, but again, in conjunction with Milton, in regard to a quite technical issue – as to thick and thin concepts in analytical philosophy proper, with Hume’s Paragraph in particular serving as the catalytic agent under both headings. By way of further orientation, the odd couple of Milton and Hume may be easier to assimilate for an American if – reaching much further afield – one calls up the names of Goethe and Kant, and how for Germans they are joined at the hip in presiding jointly over Bildung which might almost be translated as elevation of mind or Geist, thereby even suggesting an Anglo-American Bildung of our own where Milton replaces Goethe and Hume Kant, though Hume and Milton can only cease even for us to be an odd couple if they are slotted into the German paradigm. Thanks to that reactivated paradigm also, epic poetry in the grand style might come to figure pace Williams in an analysis or quasi-analysis of magnanimity = elevation of mind (as it may be), with Williams’ own characterization of certain concepts as thick smacking already of analysis itself, and my own explanation, more narrowly, of the thickness of magnanimity in terms of epic poetry carrying Williams’ proto-analysis of it one step further. Because it is Nietzsche in whom Bildung culminates in Germany, it may not be so easy for me to keep him officially at a distance from my own inner circle.

Milton and Hume

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Closer to home, Dryden says of Milton that he “endeavors everywhere to express Homer,” as much as to say, for us, that his very poetry, notably the first two Books of Paradise Lost, is designed to be expressive above all of a Homeric elevation of mind whereby Satan emulates Achilles, and where, also anachronistically, Milton emulates Hume by allowing that if under one Fregean “mode of presentation” his hero – more precisely Milton’s anti-hero – elicits from us a dazzling pro-attitude, there is another much more somber Fregean mode of presentation, answering in Hume to “men of cool reflection”, that elicits from us a strong con-attitude. As to the different contexts distinguishing philosopher and poet, the con-attitude is “overpowered” by the pro-attitude in the one case, while the reverse occurs in the other. That these pro- and con-attitudes figure even in the opening lines of the Iliad when Homer summons the Muse to “sing the wrath of Achilles”, I am quite prepared to believe, along with the suggestion that the deepest gloss on the poem is to be found, again, in Hume’s Paragraph. If in 1900, Sir Walter Raleigh could find in Milton “a more consistent and unflagging elevation than is to be found elsewhere in literature”, Satan figures as the most compelling vehicle of it in Milton’s oeuvre, quite apart from who is “right”, as between Satanists and anti-Satanists. Put the point this way. Even granting that when it comes to challenging God, the Son trumps Satan by saving God from being “blasphemed without defense” as regards “justify[ing] God’s ways to men” – going at any rate by the hermeneutic slogan “Trust the tale not the teller” in my neo-Satanist gloss on the poem – it is Satan who trumps the Son in proving to be the more expressively adept when it comes to how heroic elevation of mind might be not only convincingly represented but, much more important, how it might be so effectively expressed by way of a heroic poem in the grand style that mere, very unheroic readers of it like ourselves might come also to undergo, albeit only vicariously and thanks to a willing suspension of disbelief, that heroic elevation of mind. How it should be, once again, Hume’s Paragraph to which we are indebted for this secret of Milton’s doubtless serendipitous success, Nelson Goodman and his highly analytical Languages of Art must be credited with facilitating. For it is not, urges Goodman, what a work of art represents but rather what it expresses that we are really after. Take the expressivity of epic poetry to supply the thickness of magnanimity, construed in terms of elevation of mind. Allow also that this result may be credited to analytical philosophy. Although it may now seem, anyway as regards one thick evaluative concept, that Williams’ worry about the limits of philosophy has been allayed, two sorts of

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Chapter One

analysis, only one of which is associated with Russell and Moore, have come into play, the other being rather associated with R.P. Blackmur and Cleanth Brooks, which only goes to show how right Williams was about philosophy pure and simple. Unaided then, analytical philosophy is stumped by thick concepts; aided, however, by an analytical poetics, it acquits itself well enough, always allowing for purists of both parties to resist any such contamination from the other; as when Barbara Lewalski insists that “Satan is seen to be a debased Achilles . . . his claims of equality with his ruler [being] without any basis whatsoever” (Elledge, 576). Trivially, one supposes that Milton wants to show that Christian virtue trumps that of classical antiquity, in particular that of Achilles. Merely then to discredit a debased Achilles could hardly serve his turn. To the contrary, however, I concede to Lewalski that Achilles’ case against his ruler, namely Agamemnon, is much more evident than anything readily available to Satan. Moreover, when it comes to academic scholarship Lewalski has all the big guns on her side. Not so. I have Hume’s Paragraph up my sleeve. As to the familiar jousting, more generally, as between specialist and generalist, conventional wisdom places its bets on the former. I demur when it comes, at any rate, to the generalist relying on a holistic scheme as against the ad-hocery of the specialist, and all the more when – see my next paragraph – the generalist affects to be (in addition) a non-standard specialist in his own right. What it might be like to be a non-standard specialist in combining the kind of literary analysis that is exercised in the analysis of a poem with the very different sort of analysis that analyzes knowledge, it may be, as justified true belief, should be no longer far to seek. Calling it “a doubly analytical poetics” or even, simply, “analytical poetics”, a veritable textbook paradigm of that expertise is found in a paper by me in the Fall 1996 issue of “The Wallace Stevens Journal”, entitled “One Word of the Sea: Metaphysics in Wallace Stevens”, that provides at least a fair approximation of it. Incidentally, the one word of the sea is found to be, in Stevens, “hoo” which, thanks to its very lack of cognitive meaning, succeeds in expressing, in the first instance, “the meaningless plungings of water and the wind” in “The Idea of Order at Key West”, but more profoundly expresses later, in the third poem of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”, a metaphysical nihilism in which Satan himself might be expected to exult, when pursuing this elevation of mind, “an Arabian in my room” – no Christian he – “With his damned hoobla – hoobla – hoobla – how/Inscribes a primitive astronomy” . . . while “still the grossest iridescence of ocean/Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.”

CHAPTER TWO “LEASHED IN LIKE HOUNDS”

How’s this mention of fire in the prologue to the famous play, for an anachronistic reprise of what “elevates the mind” toward the end of Hume’s Paragraph? O for a muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention.

And now, skipping two lines of verse, focus again on the word “fire” as it joins “famine” and “sword” in order to recycle the three-fold mention early in the Paragraph of “the subversion of empires,” “the devastation of provinces” and “the sack of cities.” Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels (Leashed in like hounds) should famine, sword and fire Crouch for employment. Emphasizing fire from below answering to fire from above, the literary critic, fanatically bent on respecting “the words on the page”, will notice how the poet trumps the philosopher. While Hume compartmentalizes his two modes of presentation of his hero, con-attitude being sealed off from pro-attitude, a much more unitary grasp of the hero is supplied by the poet, once in terms of fire figuring from below as well as from above, but again, in propria persona when fire, sword and famine crouch at the heels of one who is at once like a god and “like himself”. Undermining this otherwise attractive unitary scenario is the recognition that it rests on the dubious premise that these three sinister hounds will remain leashed in, when the prologue already alerts us to the early prospect of at least one of them being menacingly unleashed, pursuing the metaphor, whereupon, as we well know, Hume’s compartmentalized con-and pro-attitudes will themselves become radically unleashed, only now in the familiar form of a clash of left-wing and right-

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Chapter Two

wing readings of Shakespeare’s play, with the eminently thematic result that the explanation, in my last chapter, of how the thickness of magnanimity, understood there in terms of its involvement in epic poetry, grows that much thicker when Shakespeare’s version of epic poetry, namely his King Henry V, is found to feature the clash of left-wing and right-wing readings of it. In particular, and focusing on a single left-wing gloss on the word “magnanimous” that I am eager to enshrine in a canonical analysis of its thickness, entertain with me the following exchange between two captains, Fluellen and Gower, in Act four, scene seven. Fluellen asks Gower, “What call you the town’s name where Alexander the Pig is born?” Correcting him, Gower says, “Alexander the Great”, while Fluellen persists, “Why, I pray you, is not pig great? The pig, or the great, or the mighty, or the huge, or the magnanimous, are all one reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations.” A play on the local phonetics of a Welsh captain, this last sentence conflates two propositions, an innocent one intended by Fluellen, and a racy, even subversive one that only the poet can be credited with submitting to our ostensibly farcical attention (the joke being officially only on the captain) by way of a diablerie that I take to infect the poet’s Sentence even more than Hume’s Paragraph, for he does not leave us long in suspense before he reminds us of how the “pig” famously killed his best friend, Cleitus, in a drunken rage. Disregarding this shameful episode that plunged Alexander into a prolonged, almost suicidal state of remorse, Hume himself singles him out in his eponymous chapter for his greatness of mind in shaming his laggard soldiers at the gateway to India, “Go tell your countrymen that you left Alexander completing the conquest of the world.” Ah yes, elevation of mind. And India, for a very little more than a decade after Hume has published his Treatise, Alexander’s baton is passed on, centuries later, to – quoting Macaulay – “the valor and genius of an obscure English youth”, Robert Clive, drawing heavily on Macaulay’s long essay that Robert D. Kaplan reveres as “the sacred text of Clive’s career” (Kaplan, 169). Desperately besieged by the French in a clash over India between two great powers, Clive will finally prevail thanks to the “devotion of [his] little band to its chief” that Macaulay can find to have “surpassed anything that is related of the Tenth Legion of Caesar or of the Old Guard of Napoleon,” as much as to say with warlike Harry, “we band of brothers”. Fast forward now to the end of the nineteenth century (Clive will commit suicide), and we find the young Winston Churchill in A Roving Commission exulting over the English proconsuls of his time: Curzon in

“LEASHED in LIKE HOUNDS”

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India, Milner in South Africa, Cromer in Egypt. And more recently? Well, recalling that the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, I leave it to others to suggest, looking to Churchill again, that it will be in him that greatness of mind in the Second World War will undergo its finest, if not final, hour.

CHAPTER THREE INGRATITUDE

Arguably even deeper than our puzzlement over how Aristotle’s greatsouled man, credited with excelling in his exercise of all the moral virtues, could be charged with ingratitude, lies our auxiliary puzzlement over Aristotle’s own casual mention of this fact, without making any effort to exonerate his moral paragon, quite as if – dare I say this aloud? – the truly great are those who are precisely given a free pass in such matters. Well, we suspected this all along, didn’t we? Anyway, Aristotle does say something, right on the page, that on being massaged a bit might go some way toward exonerating Megalo, now that, engaged in judging him, we feel free to address him on a first name basis. What Aristotle says is this. Taking the dyadic predicate “x is engaged in benefiting y”, with you filling the x slot and me filling the y slot, you emerge, axiologically, as superior to me. No problem here. But when ordinary chaps like us, decidedly inferior to Megalo whose lavish benefits to people at large leave us in the dust, hasten to his aid in an emergency, the axiological order of the universe is disrupted. Think of it: inferior is benefiting superior! If affecting amnesia is the only response available to an otherwise helpless Megalo, in the face of this untoward cognitive dissonance, Aristotle does seem, more resourcefully, to anticipate Dr. Freud by envisaging an interplay of classical factors that mimic ego, super-ego and id that drives this unpleasant experience deep into the subconscious, the amnesia being thus real enough, though in the psychoanalysis of Megalo’s dreams a “return of the repressed” can be expected. Failing in respect to both Freud and Aristotle, 20th century moralistic dismay with Megalo’s “amnesia” might well be dismissed as prissiness on our part. Sticking to the immediate resources of analytical ethics, there is a quite different approach to this “amnesia” that draws heavily on Ross’ famous distinction between the Right and the Good aka deontology vs. consequentialism, or Kant versus Aristotle. Although everyone knows the drill here, freeing me from any need to rehash this quite hackneyed yet very important stuff, it may come as a surprise that, more than even

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accessing “the axiological order of the universe”, as it was understood in antiquity, it will be this really quite over-familiar “deontology contra consequentialism” analytical framework, right here in our own backyard, that will help us “get with” Megalo’s amnesia simply by submerging this ad hoc worry about ingratitude in the much larger framework of Aristotle vs. Kant. Taking each of them to define one of the two major Fregean modes of presentation of ethical reality, under the latter Aristotle and Megalo are alike in a bad way. So what else is new? There is this, indeed, to be said for Kant over Aristotle in this otherwise highly and equally contested site. With Aristotle and Kant being equally committed to folk ethics (unlike, say, Stoicism which can feel free to brush Kant aside) Kant has a decided edge, happiness being by no means as neglected by Kant as obligation is by Aristotle. Redressing the balance, one might argue that Kant’s “the only thing that is unconditionally good is the good will”, thanks to “good” being used twice over, indicates that even for Kant the good trumps the right. But I digress, tempted to stage still another round in the contest between them. Yielding to temptation, suppose that when I bestow on you a free-gift, you reply, conventionally enough, “Much obliged,” affording me thus the long-sought opportunity to clarify our relationship as follows, “Ah, my friend, you misunderstand me, for you are under no obligation, as everyone must know, to return a first-class favor, though alas I was doubtless clumsy enough as to leave you with the impression that mine was merely a second-class favor which – you were quite right about this – does have attached to it the obligation of return.” That a first-class favor is so much more a favor than a second-class one is proved by the fact that the first bestows everything bestowed by the second, even while subtracting from the second-class favor the deontological burden attached to it. It should now be easy to show that in real life today, first-class, megalopsychical favors are almost as frequent, even in humbler venues of our society, as ordinary, quasi-contractual ones, as when, undertaking to return a favor, your gesture is impatiently brushed aside, not without a subtextual innuendo convicting you of a deontological faux pas. As to Harold Prichard’s trust in moral intuitions, my vignette is precisely designed to give him a behavioristic drubbing. Not that Prichard could have failed altogether, exposed, as he must have been, to such familiar brush-offs, to profit from them, at least to the extent of realizing that they might be taken to release him from his obligation to return a favor, a first step indeed toward envisaging a megalopsychical favor, seeing that just such a release is antecedently built into it. Having in hand the distinction between a higher and a lower sort of favor, Prichard will soon see that in

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testing his moral intuitions it could never have been enough to place himself on the receiving end of the “x is dispensing a favor to y” relation, where he could only suppose, in the general case, that he was the recipient of a quasi-contractual favor. Filling the x slot, however, and not least because he flattered himself on being an English gentleman, he would know that many – not all, that would be presumptuous – of his favors were megalopsychical, thereby splitting the difference as to whether one is morally required to return a favor, no in the one case, yes in the other. Hanging, admittedly, over this volume lies the curse of elitism dispelling which, to some extent, might be entrusted the many megalopsychical favors bestowed by the “less advantaged” – advantages being precisely what they lack by the car load – among us. In the same vein Hobbes’ definition of magnanimity as “Contempt of little helps and hindrances” can be nowhere more vividly elucidated, down-scale, as in the following vignette about two beggars one of whom – sticking to little helps – reaches eagerly for a stray dime in the street, spurning any old mere nickel, while another, much less proud = megalopsychical, positively rejoices in the nickel, even as the prospect of scrounging for a mere penny he disdains as being outright infra-dig, or beneath his dignity, from the Latin infra dignitatem. And why should not the innermost truth of greatness of soul, in pursuit of which this volume might be seen as being open-endedly engaged, be revealed at least as much in this vignette of the two beggars, admittedly parasitic on Hobbes’ definition of magnanimity yet given a demotic twist, as it is anywhere else in this book? The same, mutatus mutandis, but by no means redundantly, might hold in regards, a bit earlier, to the megalopsychical favors of the less (not to be confused with the least) advantaged, advanced deontological considerations beyond anything in either Aristotle or Prichard coming into play. Combining these two vignettes to deliver a robust scheme, at once analytically thin (in a good sense) and substantively thick à la Bernard Williams, does succeed, contrary to expectations, in translating greatness of soul out of a very upscale, aristocratic provenance into an equally down-scale democratic outcome. Whether, a little more technically, there is indeed a single, unambiguous thing here that figures now under one Fregean mode of presentation, in the vein of aristocracy but, again, under a quite different mode of presentation, in the vein of democracy, I leave to others to decide. Stumped at the outset of this chapter, twice over, as regards Megalo and his amnesia, Aristotle’s being content to leave his putative ingratitude up in the air being for us still more puzzling, having well in hand now the distinction between a megalopsychical favor and a quasi-contractual one goes a long way toward dispelling both of our puzzles, starting with the

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thought that few favors in real life will be clearly one or the other, M favors or Q favors. Immense savoir faire is thus called upon, even for us, when it comes to coping with so-called free-gift, “free” being a euphemism here. As to Megalo and his amnesia, the relevant free-gift to Megalo by an ordinary chap must – no need really to say so – be an M benefit, Q benefits being readily paid off. Impudent guys aside, our chap will be one already recognized among his peers as rather more free with his M benefits than others. How delicious then this opportunity to confer a megalopsychical free-gift on Megalo himself. Talk about the moral order of the universe being shaken, for it is not merely superior being forced to ask an inferior for help, that is the least of it; inferior is insisting on his help being acknowledged by superior as itself belonging to that superior order from which he will always be excluded, and not least of all by the recipient of his help. That would be enough to curl anyone’s toes, and in the context of the ancient world our plucky chap may even be forced to back down. “Have it your own way then”, Megalo may impatiently concede, vowing henceforth to strike the embarrassing episode from the record. Technically, he is within his rights, a megalopsychical free-gift being one with absolutely no strings attached. But that is surely perverse. No savoire faire here! Yet the “help” might be rationalized as being really very little, as when one, shouting “Watch out!” saves your life, while the grumbling over your “ingratitude” – he did save your life – you might dismiss as but a little “hindrance”. As to the ethics of your feeling free to move on, delaying only to give your benefactor a poignant high five, Hobbes’ profound shift from semantics to pragmatics, with its appeal to a counterfactual, in L, Ch. 15, ¶ 16, should be enjoyed at some length. As justice dependeth on antecedent covenant, so does GRATITUDE depend on antecedent grace, that is to say, antecedent free-gift, and is the fourth law of nature, which may be conceived in this form that a man which receiveth benefit from another of mere grace endeavor that he which giveth it have no reasonable cause to repent him of his good will.

Of course, if you, with your high five, moving on, are a rich man and your benefactor, in rags, is a poor one, there may be hell to pay, for you have given him reasonable cause to repent him of his good will. Faced with any such systematic repentance, Hobbes continues, [T]here will be no beginning of benevolence or trust; nor consequently of mutual help, nor of reconciliation of one man to another; and they are to remain in the condition of war, which is contrary to the first and

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fundamental law of nature, which commandeth men to seek peace. The breach of this law is called ingratitude.

So in this sophisticated analysis – no other word will do – gratitude consists in ensuring that your benefactor refrain from repenting of his good will to you. Assuming now the truth of this theory, it looks as if the two puzzles that launch this chapter, and which we might suppose, a little optimistically, to be now largely resolved, will have to be re-examined altogether anew, in the light of Hobbes’ fourth law of nature. Famously, a great adversary of Aristotle, Hobbes might be then expected to weigh in against him also on this issue, and all the more – ethnological considerations come into play – because the value judgments of received opinion in classical antiquity quite as much as our own more recently, combine to convict Megalo of ingratitude. And yet, looking to Hobbes’ fourth law of nature, and juggling the various parameters that have been put in place in formulating our two puzzles, Megalo has done little – one cannot really say that he has done nothing – to make Ben, as we may name his benefactor, repent of his good will to him. On the other hand, going by the facts available to them – most important has been the failure of Megalo to reward Ben for his great service – the vulgar (ancient and modern alike) have labored under the misapprehension, reasonable in its own way, that Megalo was guilty of ingratitude. Invoking an “error theory” in order to reconcile these parameters, we can even allow that, for most practical purposes, and as a rule of thumb, returning a favor, fairly soon, may be the only reliable way of heading off the very real prospect of one’s benefactors repenting of their good will. Much less cynical, however, Hobbes can say, in Chapter eleven, ¶ 7, that “cheerful acceptation” of a free-gift or, megalopsychical favor, in my idiom, “which men call gratitude” will be often “taken generally for retribution”, as much as to say, near enough, that megalopsychical favors need no requital. Exonerated of the charge of ingratitude, albeit only thanks to a Aristohobbesian rational reconstruction of him, Megalo must yet bear the burden – by no means negligible for one whose middle name is Honor – of being reputed to be an ingrate by people at large, modern as well as ancient. No wonder then his sweeping contempt of us for our terrible benightedness. Any reason why Megalo should not publicly applaud, and thereby reward, Ben’s megalopsychical assistance? And thus undermine Ben’s meglopsychical pretensions? Anyway, I have been dismayed by your obliviousness to an obvious escape-clause, familiar to all Aristotle scholars at 1123b 25 where Megalo “returns a service done to him with interest, since this will put the original benefactor into his debt in turn, and make

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him the party benefited.” Too middle-class himself to appreciate the fine point that underlies the charge of ingratitude, Aristotle must suppose that it is tautologically obvious that only a megalopsychos could bestow a megalopsychical free-gift. Not so, say I, taking great pains to establish this admittedly demotic point. A final secret in the vein of arcana imperii that I was hoping to keep to myself, Megalo in precisely allowing poor Ben to indulge, also, in these megalopsychical airs and graces has succeeded in rewarding him, richly, after all, and thus arguably – professional logicians must resolve the issue – despoiled him of his speciously new-found dignity, quite as if – we’ve known this all along, surely – kleine leute like ourselves will always lose out to formidable authority-figures like Megalo (first name notwithstanding), thereby floating still another hypothesis in order to grasp what Aristotle’s greatness of soul might be all about. Viewed under this most recent Fregean mode of presentation, Megalo’s greatness of soul might now strike us as positively hateful. Witness in particular how this hatefulness comes to feature in a Hobbesian gloss on that authority-figure par excellence, namely Milton’s God, in connection with the heavy burden of gratitude that, in Hobbes’ words, “greater benefits than there is hope to requite” God lay on Satan, thereby disposing him “to counterfeit love but really secret hatred” of God. For, as Hobbes adds, “Benefits oblige, and obligation is thralldom; and unrequitable obligation, perpetual thralldom, which is, to one’s equal, hateful” (my emphasis). Satan the equal of God? Of course not, but there is a back story here. Refusing to be obeyed by his angels from any sort of fear of his power, God has disguised it, leaving Satan to believe that he may be, near enough, his equal in power, and it is precisely at this point that Hobbesian psychology kicks in, seeing that “benefits from one whom we acknowledge for superior incline to love”, while unrequitable benefits from an equal will induce a murderous hate in the grip of which Satan’s rebellion against God, which the vulgar will deplore as the blackest ingratitude, Hobbes will take to be beyond any such insipid moralistic appraisal. Equal in power in the opinion of the angels, at any rate, going by how Satan anticipates a stalemate as the result of his rebellion, Satan and God will then be held by them in equal honor, a conclusion that can be simply read off from Hobbes’ doctrine of honor. By merit then Satan will prove to be the axiological equal of God. With Hobbes and Hume thus seen to be converging, heavily and, above all, independently, on Milton, even releasing conjectures as to what a Humeohobbesian gloss on Paradise Lost might look like, Aristotle might be also invited to weigh in, thanks to Lewalski’s mention of pride when,

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pursuing her anti-Satanist theme, she notices that at one point “Satan himself admits that he was motivated to rebel by pride and ambition” (Danielson, 86). Complicating this approach we are given Satan’s desire to “quit the debt immense of endless gratitude to God, so burdensome still paying, still to owe” (Milton, IV, 51-53).

CHAPTER FOUR PRIDE

Picking up, a little tardily, on this theme of pride with which, linking Hume and Aristotle, I launched this volume in my Introduction, it is to be feared that the following passage in Hume’s Treatise – “explaining why pride, or an over-weaning conceit of ourselves, must be vicious” – suffices quite by itself to rule out my own earlier suggestion that Hume was engaged in formulating for the modern world a version of Aristotle’s greatness of mind. Nothing is more disagreeable than a man’s over-weaning conceit of himself: Everyone almost has a strong propensity to this vice: No one can well distinguish in himself betwixt the vice and virtue, or be certain that his esteem of his own merit is well founded: For these reasons, all direct expressions of this passion are condemned; nor do we make any exception to this rule in favor of men of sense and merit. They are not allowed to do themselves justice openly, in words, no more than other people.

Well, for starters, that uncompromisingly anti-pride screed, plunked down, incongruously enough, in Hume’s chapter “Of greatness of mind”, must be set, in the same chapter, beside the following no less strong propride salute – “[W]hatever we call heroic virtue, and admire under the character of greatness and elevation of mind, is either nothing but a steady and well-established pride and self-esteem, or partakes largely of that passion” – being indeed juxtaposed very nearly cheek by jowl with it. Sticking thus with the pro-pride salute and waiving the anti-pride screed, one can easily associate Hume with Aristotle’s NE IV, 3. Rather too easily, in fact. Focus on Hume’s “heroic virtue” here, with its at least quasi-Homeric provenance. Almost nothing really like this is in NE IV, 3, quite as if what it is for Hume to be recycling Aristotle in his chapter consists, more deeply, in his leap-frogging Aristotle all the way back to Homer, and almost as if – pressing the point – we might, thanks to Hume, bypass classical scholarship when we take Aristotle to be subliminally envisaging Achilles as an avatar of his great-souled man. More than a mere coincidence, surely, is how David Ross’ feeling free to translate

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megalopsychia as pride, running rough-shod over any lingering respect for etymology, echoes Hume’s feeling almost equally free to identify greatness and elevation of mind with pride. How this difference in Hume as between his con-and pro-attitudes toward pride – echoing his con-and pro-attitudes in his Nietzschean Paragraph – might undermine the import that we would otherwise attach to his Homeric pro-attitude in its absence, bears looking into, though we must first get a lot clearer about how his theory of pride can accommodate these opposing attitudes to it. Leaving it to my clever readers to fill in the details, the following passage I take to be all that they will need. I believe no one, who has any practice of the world, and can penetrate into the inward sentiments of man, will assert that the humility, which goodbreeding and decency require of us, goes beyond the outside, or that a thorough sincerity in this particular is esteemed a real part of our duty. On the contrary, we may observe that a genuine and hearty pride, or selfesteem, if well concealed and well founded, is essential to the character of a man of honor, and that there is no quality of the mind, which is more indispensably requisite to procure the esteem and approbation of mankind. (my emphasis)

So Hume’s man of honor just is mutatis mutandis, allowing for a few intervening centuries, Aristotle’s great-souled man? And the ignominy accruing to the latter in the past century can be expected to vex the former, in this? It is thus in no mere general sort of way that my pledge to show how Hume recycles Aristotle has been redeemed. Almost by itself I expect many of my readers to credit this vignette with supplying them with a Eureka! moment whereby they are invited to take NE IV, 3 and “Of greatness of mind” as companion pieces of the most intimate kind. Returning to the former in the light of the latter, there is one feature of it, absent from Hume, that arguably – a keen argument does lie ahead – discredits Hume’s man of honor as an adequate transalpine successor of Megalo. Lending zest to the contest, the exercise may be all the more rewarding in that it tracks a key factor in megalopsychia that prompts Aristotle to posit mikropsychia (small-mindedness) as a foil to it, in connection with his rather odd suggestion that even a small-minded person might succeed in exercising all of his moral virtues, excepting only greatness of soul. Emerging soon enough after greatness of soul has been seen to consist in “thinking oneself to be worthy of great things, being indeed truly worthy of them”, while honor has surfaced in turn as the relevant great, even greatest thing, a key factor – absent until now – proves to lie in one’s by no means hesitating to make a strong, outright claim to

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great honor, this ostentatious claim to honor being almost as lacking in Hume’s man of honor, prompted by his good breeding, as it is lacking in Aristotle’s small-minded yet virtuous man. Sharply distinguishing then Aristotle’s greatness of mind one from Hume’s greatness of mind two where the former flaunts just such selfpromotion while the latter even trashes it as symptomatic of bad-breeding, the evidence for this distinction is not far to seek, with Hume, near at hand, writing that even “men of sense and merit” are “not allowed [in recent times] to do themselves justice openly, in words,” where those words could only consist in Megalo’s flagrant self-promotion. Greatness of mind two is thus positively muzzled, a contradiction in terms. Reformulated in terms of the word “pride”, the ignominy comes out as follows. Humean hearty pride must remain “well-concealed”, even though, simply as a point of meaning, “hearty” could only be truly predicated of someone’s pride if it were guilessly evident to all, which is not quite to deny that “a furtive pride” might not be truly predicated of Iago. In any event, it emerges how, as a point of logic itself, the vulgar expression “self-promotion” really is, untendentiously, predicable of greatness of mind one, going at any rate by Hume’s rules of good breeding. If my indictment of Hume’s greatness of mind two is as severe as any distaste of Aristotle’s greatness of mind one that was expressed in the last century, scholars hitherto ignorant of the former, Humean scenario may now come to have second thoughts over their earlier, much too uncritical, compliance with the trashing of Megalo, for I do not suppose that, entertaining these two versions of magnanimity in tandem, one ancient, the other modern, the former need be viewed by people today as being conspicuously inferior to the latter, particularly if they have been exposed to my critique as to how pride figures, diminished, in Hume. Admittedly, the contest between the two philosophers, as I am depicting it, turns on a single point, having to do with choosing as between two extremes, flaunting one’s pride à la Aristotle or concealing it à la Hume, and where, more perspicuously still perhaps, what it is for Aristotle’s great-souled man to revisit the modern world consists in Hume’s replacing him with his own – dare I say Iagoesque – man of honor”, thanks to the theme of megalopsychia = pride emerging afresh when Hume splits the difference as between his anti-pride screed and his pro-pride salute, with the former infecting the latter, at the precise point when his gesture toward Homeric “heroic virtue” is withdrawn by way of “well-concealed pride”. Intervening between Aristotle and Hume, by way of explaining this transfiguration of one role model into another, lies the formidable figure of Hobbes, already implicit in Hume’s anti-pride screed, and where Hobbes’

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“laws of nature” are at once alluded to and refined upon when Hume writes (Treatise, 597), “In like manner, therefore, as we establish the laws of nature, in order to secure property in society, and prevent the opposition of self-interest; we establish the rules of good-breeding in order to prevent the opposition of men’s pride.” So very upscale as Aristotle’s great-souled man is widely taken to be, it is extraordinarily droll to find Hume implicitly convicting him of flouting the rules of good-breeding, by blowing, loudly, his own horn, and all the more because, bent on clinching his case for the great personal merit of Megalo, Aristotle adds, in a very different context, after saying that “greatness in every [virtue] would seem to be characteristic of the [megalopsychos], that “it would be most unbecoming for a proud [= great-souled] man to fly from danger, swinging his arms by his side”, quite as though his conduct here is over-determined. Yes, he has the virtue of courage, but there is also something else. Flight for someone like him would be distinctly infra-dig. Accordingly, the rules of good-breeding feature in Aristotle as well as in Hume, albeit with somewhat different application. And what about the vexed, emendation-prone “swinging his arms by his sides”? Adding another, comic poet to my first and second teams of philosophers and poets, I dare to envisage an Aristophanic “skit” – call it “SWINGING” – much loved by the groundlings, in which a coward is seen in his flight from battle to discard first his sword, clownishly, and then, a little later, his shield, sheepishly, in order to lighten his escape, finally pumping his arms, increasing just a bit the ever-decreasing distance between him and the enemy in hot pursuit. How far the infra-dig, and “rules of good-breeding”, might replace ethics properly so-called, I take to be a theme that might keep the latter enterprise in business for quite some time. More immediately, however, I take the infra-dig to help in answering the following question. Does Aristotle have any grounds for saying that adding pride, or greatness of soul, to any of his moral virtues cannot fail to enhance it? Connected with this there is another. Can one really suppose that one might have all of Aristotle’s moral virtues (greatness of soul alone excepted) in the absence of Aristotle’s pride? And a third. Does Aristotle’s small-mindedness (mikropsychia) have an important role to play in his scheme? As to the first, SWINGING goes far toward providing an answer, Megalo’s conduct being explained twice over, once in terms of a proattitude grounded in courage but, again in terms of a con-attitude grounded in the infra-dig whereby sheer pride kicks in to prevent one from acting beneath one’s dignity. Thanks thus to the addition of pride, the moral virtue of courage has been enhanced. Ergo, a really surprising result. Call

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this indeed the Oxford result of systematic considerations that identify greatness of soul with pride, the principal merit of which hypothesis is found in the fact that it can rationalize a highly counter-intuitive thesis of Aristotle, namely that someone can have all the ordinary moral virtues, and yet be small-minded. Marginally palatable perhaps if it is only some rare individual who is being posited, the surprising thesis is that all of us who pride . . . wrong word, all of us who flatter ourselves – we are few enough, even so – on at least roughly having all of Aristotle’s ordinary virtues, being modest enough to insist that any pretension of being greatsouled is very far from our minds, all of us, I repeat, are small-minded, being deficient in “pride”. But that cannot be right, and not merely for commonsensical reasons, as my next paragraph will prove. Acting virtuously for Aristotle requires acting for the sake of the kalon (noble, fine), allowing also for the secondary case of shunning the base, lesser instances of which are shunned for being infra-dig. Aristotle’s acting for the sake of the kalon goes into English as “acting meritoriously”, thereby trading on the central role of “personal merit” in Hume’s ethics. Now to complete the argument. No one acting meritoriously could be said to be acting small-mindedly. How then to remedy this “contradiction”? As well as the very rare “gotcha” in Hume where a “hearty pride” is bent on concealing itself? That this missing albeit abbreviated chapter in analytical ethics (Hobbes’ role being truncated) should feature greatness of soul in two competing versions (Aristotle’s and Hume’s) each of which has been convicted of being self-defeating, might be felt by some readers to default on a promise that I made to them, at least implicitly, in my Introduction. Maybe so. Not to worry, however. Much more challenging than these minor worries about consistency in Hume and Aristotle, when it comes to the innermost core of analytical philosophy itself, is the daunting Liar Paradox that, quite on the face of it, does seem to convict the concept of truth itself of being inconsistent. If ranging so far afield to this logico-linguistic puzzle will be widely taken to be a frivolous distraction, I really must take this occasion to hold my ground, even though the Liar lies at the outermost limit of my undertaking. What analytical philosophy is all about, is not a topic that most scholars today in the humanities can be easily brought merely to entertain. Why that should be, is a further topic, still more difficult to explain to anyone at all, an indication of which can be found in the strong resistance even to my Humean “gotcha” as regards his man of honor, sticking now to literary scholars. Doubtless a little paranoid, let me confess that with the death of Bernard Williams I feared that I had lost the one person prepared to relish every page in this volume.

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Take SWINGING, and how it has an important role to play in my larger argument – in which Aristotle’s NE IV, 3, which officially must serve as the urtext of my program, will continue to remain the most recalcitrant text in my highly select canon. Most obviously evident in my gussied-up version of SWINGING, Aristotle’s representation of his greatsouled man in NE IV, 3, is inflected by a comic poet, thereby giving the lie to Aristotle’s claim that it is all one whether (as we might say) he gives an analysis of magnanimity or whether he depicts his designated man in full. Ecce homo, declares the philosopher, putting on stage his clown, to serve as a foil for Megalo, though it should not go unnoticed that, in shifting here from courage to justice, Aristotle refrains from invoking a pickpocket. Trading the most vicious insults, Aristotle and Hume are very much on a par, for if Hume may be taken to berate Aristotle for bad-breeding, Aristotle berates Hume’s man of honor for being the most small-minded of men, going by NE IV, 3, 1123b 7. “He that claims less than he deserves is small-minded” and “the most small-minded of all would seem to be the man who claims less than he deserves [Hume’s man of honor] when his deserts are great.” A clash of Titans here indeed, spanning the gulf between modern and ancient! As to Bildung in particular – setting aside philosophy proper – in gropingly taking one’s personal bearings, as between the selfeffacingness of the modern and the narcissism of the ancient, this clash could hardly be more relevant. And as for analytical ethics itself, at once sniffily patronizing toward the many self-help manuals on the market, and uneasily liable to a sense that it should really have something rather better to fill the vacuum, again this clash comes ready to hand. And without – I can hardly emphasize this too much – skimping on the logico-linguistic core of analytical philosophy that is widely taken, outside our narrow purlieus, to be a fairly arid enterprise. Hence incredulity as to my mention of the Liar. As to “merely” linguistic considerations, my distinction between greatness of mind one and two will not be supposed by my colleagues to commit me to there being two distinct versions or varieties of greatness of mind. They will know that I must be pragmatically open to the suggestion that the subscript-free expression “greatness of mind”, in my regimented use of it, ought to be viewed as ambiguous as between what Hume and Aristotle are up to. Finally, and more officially still, I have shown how Hume, unbeknownst to himself and thanks to his clash with Aristotle, has succeeded in bringing greatness of mind in both versions, very much closer to the center of analytical ethics than anyone hitherto has supposed to be feasible.

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As to this fugitive mention of narcissism, a spinoff of a clash of Titans consists in the suggestion that the recalcitrance of Aristotle’s chapter may be eased by recognizing that we today lie under the auspices of the slogan “We are all Hobbesians now”, which is quite enough to explain why, alienated by the paragon of NE IV, 3, we are repelled by his self-centered, narcissistic pride. Defusing quite a bit of that entrenched con-attitude, however, merely coming to recognize the absurdity of Hume’s arguably no less vulnerable “hearty” pride remaining “well-concealed”, may be allowed to be therapeutically refreshing. Purged, we might even come to give Aristotle’s Megalo, and his narcissistic pride, a very guarded welcome, taking him to be a highly reformulated version of Achilles in a late, post-Homeric world. Anyway, better to be convicted of bad-breeding than small-mindedness, quite apart from the purely logical point that small-mindedness is the contrary of greatness of mind. Putting to one side Hume’s greatness of mind two and sticking with Aristotle’s greatness of mind one, the latter also, quite on its own, bifurcates, owing to an ambiguity in Aristotle’s two-fold use of the expression megalopsychia. Narrowly used, it denotes a je ne sais quoi (arguably pride) that invests each of the ordinary virtues with a certain luster (kosmos) that magnifies it when the virtue is exercised by Megalo. Broadly, however, it denotes the full panoply of the virtues, each of them being magnified by . . . megalopsychia (narrow usage here). With pride itself being narrowly characterized now by Hume himself at one point as a “sublime sensation” which is immensely “agreeable to its possessor”, the narcissism should not be far to seek, however well concealed in Hume’s man of honor, in Aristotle’s great-souled man. Astonishing, even for me, the only one in the universe long buried in this Humeoaristotelian boutique, the suggestion that Aristotle’s Megalo might be titillated by a sublime sensation of pride reopens an issue that looked to me settled in my last chapter. Merely gesturing now to what that issue really was, I must reformulate it as follows. Surely we knew all along that there was something very deep about Aristotle’s greatness of mind access to which would dispel our puzzlement, once as regards Megalo, but again as to Aristotle, over how the charge of ingratitude – no matter whether the charge be veridical or not – could possibly arise here. Demanding as my last chapter was, and even valid going by the parameters in play there, this worry lay out of range, though recoverable, even so, retrospectively. Under the auspices of our clash of Titans, the following hypothesis can seem irresistible. With a single, narrow point, summed up in the word “CLAIM”, distinguishing Aristotle’s greatness of mind one from Hume’s greatness of mind two, it must be this salient

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vulnerability in the former scheme, detected by a hawk-eyed Hume, that will demystify our puzzlement over the charge of ingratitude. Which is not to concede that this “vulnerability” – scare quotes here – will entail that the charge itself will stick. To the contrary, I will refute it, though I take Aristotle to have been content to believe that the great, and Megalo more particularly, must really be given a free pass in these embarrassing circumstances. Leaving it to me to resolve the issue properly? Well, yes but only because I have a great advantage that Aristotle lacked, namely two great philosophers in my pocket. Can we then show how, despite crediting Glaucon and Adeimantus with great service to Athens in the absence of which his own still greater achievement in saving the city in its direst peril would not have been possible, Megalo could be seriously charged with ingratitude to these two brothers of Plato? No failure here, anyway, about reciprocating a benefit. The issue goes deeper, with Megalo committed to claiming for himself great honor, which, says David Keyt, often means for Aristotle, high political office, and (I add) Megalo’s distributing the credits equitably as between himself and Glaucon, looking no further. Aggrieved, Glaucon may feel unfairly done by, and in some cases Glaucon will be right, Megalo proving thus to fail of being Aristotle’s great-souled man. So there is really no problem in principle in understanding how – given the parameters in play – Megalo is often charged with ingratitude, there being so many counterfeit great-souled men at large. Simply as a logical corollary of CLAIM, Aristotle’s greatsouled man must be (say I) superbly equitable in distributing credits and demerits, and not least when he is both judge and judged (by himself of course), being never more stern than when he insists that he prefers to reward himself a little too much rather than a bit too little, if only because everyone knows that when the great-souled man errs in his own case it is more often when he under-rewards himself than when he over-rewards himself. Although everyone knows how very difficult it is to be equitable when one’s own case is on the line, it remains to be acknowledged that anyone passing this test would merit comparably great rewards. Extending Aristotle’s NE IV, 3 along both of these dimensions, might thus be expected to render his great-souledness an attractive option today in normative ethics, going simply by a cost-benefit analysis of the two relevant parameters. Because Hume’s greatness of mind two has proved to be a powerful device in flushing out the importance of CLAIM in greatness of mind one, its further success in helping us dispel the puzzle about ingratitude can only add to its importance in its own right.

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Correction. Really no problem in understanding how Megalo is often charged with ingratitude? Not so, even granting that, quite technically, I have picked out, with breadcrumbs, a narrow path to his exoneration. Pursuing that narrow path, take the paradigmatic case of a team and its leader who on being awarded the Oscar – another, comic poet coming into play here – credits each of his three associates with being every bit as entitled to the trophy as he, for “the greatest movie of all time”. Alas, everyone in the audience is congratulating him for his selflessness in flagrantly exaggerating their merits, though one of them, our Glaucon, is seething in his knowledge that only in his case has the encomium been insanely accurate down to the smallest detail. With the fight over recognition and honor lapsing, soon enough, into a moral swamp, one understands why Megalo is represented at least thrice in a few pages as persuaded, sardonically, that nothing is great, not even honor, quite as if, pursuing the worry, one might feel that the last word about magnanimity lay with Shakespeare when he took its very paragon to be none other than Alexander the Pig.

CHAPTER FIVE HUME’S ABOUT-FACE

Although new ground in “Hume Studies” has been broken in Beam 1996 (310) where he registers in what I have been calling Hume’s Paragraph “an admiration of dazzling and dangerous virtues that is much closer to Nietzsche than to Bentham” with whose utilitarianism Hume comes in the 19th century to be crudely associated as a precursor, Beam will soon write - within three pages - that “Hume values benevolence, sympathy and the tender sentiments more than greatness and heroism”. Two sorts of values here the former of which, at least officially – Beam is quite right about this – will trump the latter early in Hume’s second Enquiry. What it might be like to suppose that Hume’s “admiration” veers off in one direction, toward greatness and heroism, while what he “cherishes” proceeds along very different lines, I am quite prepared to keep in reserve as a by no means negligible option. The unlikelihood is lessened a little when, returning to the Paragraph, one notices that the admiration proves to be something “we cannot refuse”, quite as if it has been wrested from us against our will. Anticipating what follows, Hume will be found to be engaged in what one can only identify as a rhetorical trope of manifest duplicity thanks to which extra-philosophical considerations will contaminate the proceedings. Take then Hume’s discussion of the Latin word virtus in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 7, and focus on its relevance for the science of ethnological lexicography. The martial temper of the Romans, enflamed by continual wars, had raised their esteem of courage so high that in their language it was called virtue by way of excellence and of distinction from all other moral qualities.

Keeping that science well in mind along with “the martial temper of the Romans”, focus now on the following key sentence of this chapter of mine, virtually opening Section 2 of the Enquiry and which Beam enlists as a compelling witness to what Hume values.

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Universally? Even among the Romans with their word virtus designating courage, and which, by way of “distinction from all other moral qualities” trumped for them Hume’s seven humanitarian epithets? But perhaps the Romans are an egregious exception. By no means. Hume goes on to mention the Scythians where “martial bravery, in that nation as well as in many others, destroyed the sentiments of humanity.” How this flagrant lexicographic mendacity on Hume’s part is to be explained will emerge as the principal theme of the chapter, even as it supplies an advance indication of what is closely related to it, namely his manifest duplicity, that will surface very shortly. But perhaps the interval in the Enquiry separating Section 2 from Section 7 explains our forgetful author? Waiving the point, can the Sentence - emphasizing its importance - with its humanitarian account of the highest human merit really be squared with what we learn in Hume’s Paragraph about what the generality of mankind consider to be the most sublime kind, namely “heroism or military glory”? One would not readily suppose so, and there is even a fine point here, having to do with a disparity as between how the word “sympathy” figures, quite technically, as the last word in Hume’s Paragraph and how it is used, colloquially, by Beam in his list of what Hume values. But let us suppose that Hume is making a fresh start in the Enquiry, leaving the Paragraph well behind him, in an effort to remedy his disappointment with the public’s reception of the Treatise. Stick then with the Sentence in the immediate context of Section 2, and notice how “eminent abilities” (looking no further) arguably enhance in the next sentence – call it NEXT to emphasize its proximity – what was just advertised as being the highest human merit. Where these amiable qualities are attended with birth and power and eminent abilities, and display themselves in the good government or useful instruction of mankind, they seem even to raise the possessors of them above the rank of human nature, and make them approach in some measure to the divine.

Smoke and mirrors here as Hume impudently dabbles in the divine, quite as if he is bent on obfuscating the fact that two grades of human merit have emerged, a lower one summed up in his seven epithets and a higher one that, while presupposing the former, adds to it eminent abilities, displayed by some in good government and by others, notably Hume

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himself, in the useful instruction of mankind. Again, two sorts emerge, only now, two sorts of recipient of that instruction, the vulgar or hoi polloi, who are many, and confined to Hume’s Sentence, and the wise or potentially wise who are very few, being self-selected precisely by their ability to absorb NEXT as well. Self-selected no less prove to be the vulgar, who, congratulating themselves on being sociable and good-natured, are positively invited by Hume to credit themselves with having the highest human merit. Everyone thus finds his or her own level in the most benignly equitable mode of the judicial process. Among the vulgar, alas, even some Hume scholars must now blushingly find themselves consigned, having taken Hume’s Sentence quite at face value, a criterion being thus at hand for distinguishing a higher grade from a lower grade of Hume scholar. Dwelling on this crux in Hume scholarship a bit further, Hume’s problematic here features not merely two but three sentences, the last of which proceeds almost but not quite redundantly by ratcheting up his “eminent abilities” to the level of “an exalted capacity”, quite as if – in the incongruous context of Section 2 which is entitled “Of benevolence” – Hume has decided to recycle the elevation of mind activated in his Paragraph. More than a merely rhetorical gesture, the suggestion is soon thematically stiffened when a new – I mean old – factor is added to the mix, namely “an undaunted courage”. Unmotivated in the immediate context of such tame expressions as “good government” and “the useful instruction of mankind”, the unexpected entry of “undaunted courage” looks ahead to Hume’s Romans even as it recalls to me at least his chapter “Of greatness of mind” in the Treatise where “courage, intrepidity, ambition, love of glory, magnanimity and all the other shining virtues of that kind” figure prominently. It can now come as a distinct surprise that in Hume’s chapter in his second Enquiry entitled “Of benevolence” the highest human merit might attach to a synthesis of our humane values with the shining virtues characteristic of greatness of mind. Addressed to the wise, this synthesis will be lost to the vulgar, hence Hume’s doubleness, or duplicity, in a non-moral use of the word. More obviously, however, I use the word in its moral sense in order to flag Hume’s outright mendacity in his Sentence, saliently as regards his lexicographic thesis. A pardonable exaggeration? By no means, seeing that he launches the Enquiry in terms of what we today call “universal moral values”. Did Hume really think that he could get away with his “noble lie”, even sticking with his most contemporaneous readers? As to the vulgar, yes, who were doubtless plentiful enough in the higher reaches of society, and to whom accordingly – in a vein of psychological realism – one might

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envisage Hume administering condign punishment, by way of hoodwinking them, for allowing his Treatise to fall stillborn from the press. Unworthy of his serious stuff, they are now expressly invited to confront him anew in a frankly popularizing, and vulgarizing, mode. And it is precisely at this moment that the ancient world, its last gasp recorded in Hume’s Paragraph, gives way to the modern, albeit under the disingenuous auspices of his seven humanitarian epithets, useful instruction indeed for the future of mankind. Too proud to burn his bridges, Hume will yet leave a message in a bottle for a lone scholar, indicating in the immediate sequel of his Sentence how he can continue to carry aloft a flickering torch from the ancient world that evens recalls the mix of pro-and con-attitudes in his Paragraph. To the contrary, convincing evidence that Hume really does value benevolence, sympathy and the tender sentiments more than greatness and heroism has been famously taken to lie in the following passage at the end of the Enquiry, tucked away in the last of four appendices to it. Give me my choice, and I would rather, for my own happiness and selfenjoyment, have a friendly, humane heart than possess the other virtues of Demosthenes and Philip [of Macedon] united; but I would rather pass with the world for one endowed with extensive genius and intrepid courage, and should thence expect stronger instances of general applause and admiration.

Given this racy, personal testimony from Hume himself, it is to be feared that any response on my part will be dismissed out of hand as special pleading. If plead I must, I can at least make a technical point in the theory of valuation that “what x values” may be hopelessly ambiguous as between what x desires and what x admires, and that this duality can even be shown to deconstruct Hume’s testimony. For while his “choice” is more or less revelatory of what he desires, rather more to the point is how Hume’s axiological criterion of personal merit, namely disinterested approbation, strongly favors a combination of extensive genius and intrepid courage over a friendly, humane heart. Not that personal merit is all that counts in life, for in making Hume’s choice one might reasonably be content with a lower grade of personal merit in exchange for a corresponding enhancement of one’s happiness and self-enjoyment. That at any rate appears to be the upshot of what I am now brought to designate as Hume’s Second Sentence, here in his fourth Appendix to the Enquiry, while what I have been calling his Sentence in Section 2 must now be relabeled as Hume’s First Sentence, and where these two Sentences come finally to serve jointly as the bookends of an extended

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Enquiry. As to the immediate lexical link between them, one notices how the friendly, humane heart of the Second Sentence was already anticipated back in the First by two of its seven epithets, namely ‘humane’ and ‘friendly’. No mere nit-picking, the intrepid courage of the Second Sentence echoes the “undaunted courage” of the two-sentence sequel to the First Sentence, and one might thus suppose the later sentence to be no more than a replay of the earlier. But that is to forget how the very personal, even confessional turn taken at the outset of the Second Sentence revives the strong claim on behalf of humanitarian values that was soon abandoned in Section 2. Revives it, yes, but in quite different terms. For if the claim is at least tacitly made initially in the First Sentence in terms of disinterested approbation serving as the normative warrant for personal merit, the claim is made in the Second Sentence, in a desiderative mode, in terms of self-enjoyment. Arguably breaking new ground, Hume in the later Sentence ceases to make his case for our humanitarian values in terms of what officially continues to be his canonical doctrine of merit. So at the birth of the modern world merit gives way to self-enjoyment? Compare “the choice of Achilles” with that of Hume, ancient vs. modern, and thus quite without exaggerating the rewards that may attach to a friendly, humane heart, it will be enough to notice that the greater applause accorded intrepid courage (sticking to this one point) will be purchased at the price of fearsome danger, and that most of us, ancient as well as modern, will not hesitate to make Hume’s bargain, seeing that even in antiquity the choice of Achilles was reserved to a Homeric hero. Whence then the rhetorical magic of Hume’s choice? Disappointed by the reception of the public to his Treatise, he was seen by me to try his hand at giving them, even shamelessly, what they really want to hear. Hence his daring claim in his First Sentence that the highest human merit is to be found in a friendly, humane heart. Fearing that he will never get away with this, he beats a hasty retreat under cover of smoke and mirrors, only to reopen the issue at the end of the Enquiry on a basis very different from that of merit, thereby only then really launching the modern world. On the level, moreover, of pure theory Hume comes to realize that his theory of value judgments must view them as expressions not only of what we admire, notably in the mode of disinterested approbation, but also what we desire, indicating a research venue that even today remains underdeveloped. Nor, sticking to desire, are we allowed to assume, with the vulgar, that given a choice as between greatness and a friendly, humane heart, Hume in his Second Sentence opts outright for the latter. For we cannot assume that he is prepared in all his considered choices to resolve them solely in terms of his happiness and self-enjoyment. At any rate, we do not suppose

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the man of intrepid courage to be so governed. “But Hume never made any claim to such courage.” Precisely, but now with his testimony reduced to really the most insipidly personal level, its original magic lay in its provenance, with Hume being himself arguably the most sagacious of great men not to mention his more personal renown as le bon David. If the interplay between what we desire and what we admire remains underdeveloped today in our theory of valuation and normativity – always excepting discussions of akrasia – the most obvious, as well as richest, way forward, lies in grounding the interplay of desire and ‘admire’ in Hume’s own, still more fundamental interplay between belief and desire in the explanation of behavior. Very cautiously indeed Hume can argue that at least when all other things are equal one will desire to F rather than to G if, more generally, it is F-ing that one admires over G-ing. Invoking jargon of our own, ‘admire’ and desire both feature pro-and con-attitudes that may be used to support Hume’s ceteris paribus principle. Suppose, however, that le bon David really would make his choice solely in order to promote his self-enjoyment, even though his own purely disinterested approbation should favor extensive genius combined with intrepid courage. Convicted of akrasia by his own more normative light, Hume might then figure as a culture hero for the age to come thanks to his readiness to sacrifice (what might pass muster for being at least a surrogate for) greatness of mind for the modest security of – recalling now “the choice of Odysseus” – a friendly, humane heart. Homeric vistas indeed, as only by summoning Homer, early and late, from afar, can one hope to celebrate this epic turning-point in the history of ethics. Just when one might have supposed, going simply by his silence on the topic, that Hume was engaged in bidding farewell, tacitly enough, to greatness of mind in his Second Sentence, this surrogate of it will be recognized by the assiduous scholar as closely recycling an earlier formulation of it way back in Section 2, namely “an exalted capacity” combined with “undaunted courage”. Although the expression “greatness of mind” fails to be mentioned in either context, hence the suggestion that Hume has decided to retire it, my hypothesis emerges to the effect that, having identified courage as lying at the core of greatness of mind, Hume expects us to join him in analyzing greatness of mind as, well, courage plus. Plus what, you ask. Precisely, hence his featuring his answer twice over, in the two bookends to the Enquiry. “Exalted” as it figures in “exalted capacity” I take, in particular, to recycle the Miltonic elevation of mind that I singled out as pivotal in Hume’s Paragraph. A stretch? Not for those who relish how “High on a throne of royal state . . . Satan exalted sat.” And as for “extensive genius” Hume may be congratulating himself

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for his own role in the Enlightenment, and where my research even enlarges on it. Granted now that the vulgar are invited, serendipitously, to find the values associated with greatness of mind replaced by humanitarian ones, I submit that the wise, who take the two Sentences in tandem, are free to read in them a subtext that dares to identify Hume’s “Give me a choice” with a conspicuous exercise in magnanimity. If back in Section 2 one was inclined to sum up Hume’s higher grade of personal merit in terms of an “exalted capacity” combined with “undaunted courage”, one needs to be reminded that this higher grade was expressly said to include the seven epithets of his First Sentence. Reminiscent perhaps of Scipio Africanus in Roman antiquity, this inclusive version of high-grade personal merit is replaced in Hume’s Second Sentence by an exclusive version of “extensive genius” combined with “intrepid courage” that serves to point up, in the most perspicuous way, how the disinterested approbation conferred on the latter exceeds that received by a friendly humane heart. Taking Hume’s choice then at face value, it is precisely at the moment when le bon David rests content with a lower grade of personal merit, instead of reaching for a higher, that the modern world is launched. As to what the political import of the higher, exclusive grade of personal merit might consist in, with especial reference to the tricky issue as to how it relates to morality proper, which is rather more at home on the lower level, Hume’s History of England provides a veritable portfolio of case studies the grittiness of which moral philosophy might well despair of reducing to a system. One such abbreviated case study in Ch. 13, featuring Edward I after his conquest of Wales, could hardly be more chilling. The year is 1284. The king, sensible that nothing kept alive the ideas of military valor and of ancient glory, so much as the traditional poetry of the people, which assisted by the power of music and the jollity of festivals made deep impression on the minds of the youth, gathered together all the Welsh bards, and from a barbarous, though not absurd policy, ordered them put to death.

This atrocity proves to be even more disturbing when one asks whether it squares or fails to square with the following summing-up of Edward’s reign to which is credited the eventual conquest of Scotland as well. The enterprises, finished by this prince, and the projects which he formed and brought near to a conclusion were more prudent, more regularly conducted, and more advantageous to the solid interests of his kingdom than those which were undertaken in any reign either of his ancestors or his successors.

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In a word, Edward I is the greatest English king, though being Scotch Hume appears to be deterred from saying this outright. Waving my magic wand of Hume’s Paragraph over this discordant data does suggest that a con-attitude regarding death to Welsh poets, prompted by moral considerations, may be “overpowered” by a pro-attitude to the “solid interests” of one’s country. There the resemblance seems to end, for contemplating the putting to death of defenseless poets succeeds in elevating the mind not at all, and anything that smacks of the sublime has been left far behind. While subsuming greatness of mind as it has been explained in the Treatise in terms of the shining virtues, Hume’s higher grade of personal merit which I have read as pursuing that theme subtextually in the second Enquiry, now appears to have rather more general application. The new factor coming into play, with specific reference to the Welsh bards, but less exclusively focused on one’s own country, can only be described, oxymoronically enough, as raison d’état Utilitarianism. For as regards raison d’état in particular, “those who give great indulgence to reasons of state in the measures of princes will not be apt to regard this part of [Edward’s] conduct [in respect to the conquest of Scotland] with much severity,” for though his conduct was “extremely unjust and iniquitous in itself” speaking deontologically, in a more consequentialist vein it was “very advantageous to England” and even “perhaps in the end no less beneficial to Scotland”. Delete the word ‘perhaps’, and you have almost certainly Hume’s own position. Anyway, I propose to expedite the discussion by making that assumption, and it is no great stretch to see this verdict applying mutatis mutandis to Edward’s “policy” involving the Welsh Bards, particularly after one concedes that a strong case can be made vindicating the policy precisely in terms of the classical Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. Because raison d’état is associated above all with the self-interested considerations of Machiavelli, while Utilitarianism is associated especially with the altruistic ones of Mill, I could be seen to be taking the most heterogeneous elements and yoking them by violence together until one realizes that there is a very close possible world if not the actual world itself at which Bentham launches utilitarianism after just such a reading of Hume. And in that world Edward can almost be heard cogitating, “Wales has been conquered, yes, but will she stay conquered? Long adept at inciting border raids, the poetry of their bards will now rise to still greater heights of grievance and revenge. So many Welsh as well as English will die in the years to come unless . . .”, for Edward understood what will elude Auden: poetry does make things happen. When Hume characterizes

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Edward’s policy toward the bards as being barbarous, the evident moral import of the word sits a little uneasily with a later use of it in Ch. 23, after the death of Richard III and the accession of Henry VII. I mean, earlier use of the word ‘barbarous’, seeing that the chapters of the History were written, and published, largely in reverse order, beginning with the Stuart reigns and proceeding forwards to the end, only then backtracking from the Tudors into the past. Hume writes, Thus have we pursued the history of England though a series of many barbarous ages; till we have at last reached the dawn of civility and the sciences, and have the prospect . . . of being able to present to the reader a spectacle more worthy of his attention . . ., and if the aspect in some periods seems horrid and deformed, we may thence learn to cherish with the greater anxiety that science and civility, which has so close a connection with virtue and humanity . . . .

Arguably ‘necessary’ in the barbarous age of Edward I, his policy toward the bards I take Hume to be viewing in his own time, of science and civility, as just the sort of horrid conduct from which the modern world can expect, with ever decreasing anxiety, to be largely exempt. It is for that reason that, when it comes to a spectacle worthy of the reader’s action-guiding attention, Hume’s tacit acquiescence in Edward’s sordid behavior can be safely ignored as being of hardly more than antiquarian interest. Not so. That Hume is complicit, however vicariously, in Edward’s moral transgressions I am quite prepared to believe; and if I now invoke the Fifth Amendment in my own behalf, at one further remove, please be assured that no facetiousness is intended. It is indeed this theme of “virtue and humanity” that Hume features in the second Enquiry, and though I have argued that his chapter in the Treatise “Of greatness of mind” and especially its culminating Paragraph are kept subtextually alive in the later work, a strong case can be made that in the few years separating the Treatise from the Enquiry Hume undergoes a radical re-orientation. Even in the Enquiry he will continue to argue as follows: The utility of courage, both to the public and to the person possessed of it, is an obvious foundation of merit. But to any one who duly considers of the matter, it will appear that this quality has a peculiar luster, which it derives solely from itself, and from that noble elevation inseparable from it (E 254).

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So much for the primacy of utility in Hume! And again the emphasis on elevation of mind which I have harped upon. Notice, however, how quickly he prepares the way for this radical re-orientation when he writes, [A]mong all uncultivated nations, who have not as yet had full experience of the advantages attending beneficence, justice, and the social virtues, courage is the predominant excellence (E 255).

Thereby recalling the barbarous eras of English history that give way to the civility and humanity of modern times. But now for a surprise. On the next page of the Enquiry a different contrast comes into play, not as between a barbarous English past and a civil modern one but as between the courage-oriented values of classical antiquity and the more humane ones of modern times where – and this is the really crucial point – Hume anticipates recent discussions about “incommensurability of conflicting values” by construing this latter contrast precisely in those terms. Thus “the degree of humanity, clemency . . . and other social virtues to which . . . we have attained in modern times” the ancients could only find “incredible”, while “the heroes of philosophy, as well as those in war and patriotism . . . among the ancients . . . have a grandeur and force of sentiment which astonishes our narrow souls.” As to any favoritism between these diverse values, Hume is content to remain silent, observing only that “Such is the compensation . . . in the distribution of excellencies and virtues in those different ages” (E 256-57). But perhaps not altogether silent in his moral pluralism. How else explain his otherwise gratuitous, and uncharacteristic, slur on our narrow souls? To have a narrow soul, recalling Aristotle’s mikropsychia, is of course to be conspicuously lacking in greatness of mind, I mean soul, a lack that must extend to “that noble elevation inseparable from it.” Although Hume’s axiology is in theory committed to a neutral stance as regards an evident incommensurability as between modern and ancient values, on a practical level the door to the past is closed. It is thus “Farewell to the ancients”, with Hume officially weighing in heavily in support of the modern project, indulging himself, however in a final, subtextual dig at the very triumphalism that boasts his name. In the fresh light of this nuanced distinction between ancient and modern, one can no longer acquiesce in Hume’s much starker one as between “the many barbarous ages” of English history and “the virtue and humanity” opening up with “the dawn of civility and the sciences”, particularly if one is engaged in a specialized agenda that focuses on greatness of soul. For, sticking with Ch. 13 of his History of England, there is an almost Plutarchian contrast between two great-souled men, the

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first of whom was unproblematically so, namely William Wallace who was “endowed with gigantic force of body, with heroic courage of mind, with disinterested magnanimity, with incredible patience and ability to bear hunger [and] fatigue.” He is contrasted with Edward I regarding both of whom Hume hesitates almost not at all to predicate magnanimity, looking ahead to Cromwell and Charles I each of whom he will also characterize as “magnanimous”, quite as if my eponymous theme might transcend even such mighty antagonisms pursued to the death. Not that our Scotch philosopher can easily attain this transcendence when it strikes close to home. The king, whose natural bravery and magnanimity, should have induced him to respect like qualities in an enemy, enraged at some acts of violence committed by Wallace during the fury of war, resolved to overawe the Scots by an example of severity. He ordered Wallace . . . to be tried as a rebel and traitor, though he had never made submission or swore fealty to England . . . . This was the unworthy fate of a hero, who . . . had with signal conduct, intrepidity, and perseverance defended against a public, and oppressive, enemy the liberties of his native country.

If the handle by which we can rationalize, axiologically, the conduct of Edward is supplied by raison d’état Utilitarianism, no such device could be expected to explain the very high degree of personal merit with which Wallace is unhesitatingly invested by Hume’s system. Even so, one could try the following mode of accommodation. Invoke the now familiar distinction between rule utilitarianism and act utilitarianism. If Edward can be vindicated according to the latter, there is always the universalizable rule “Fight for your country” that vindicates Wallace. Although this approach does play a role in Hume’s thinking about Wallace, more pressing still is his insistence that an excessive courage and magnanimity, especially when it displays itself under the frowns of fortune, contributes in great measure to the character of a hero, and will render a person the admiration of posterity; at the same time as it ruins his affairs, and leads him into danger and difficulties with which otherwise he would never have been acquainted (T 600).

Immediately continuous with the Paragraph itself which it, moreover, even launches, this passage in the Treatise, while doubtless remaining for Hume non-negotiable as far as mere philosophy is concerned, we found to be overtaken by events that he will characterize twice over, once in terms of ancient and modern, in the Enquiry, but again, though now in his History of England, closer to home, in terms of a radical distinction

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between its barbarous eras of the past and a civility that struggles to be born only with the final end of the War of the Roses. Wallace, the hero and greatness of soul are thus distinctly on the way out, as even on a purely theoretical level Hume’s moral philosophy comes to be infected with a strong infusion of historicism, characterized by two incommensurable value systems that take their turn in occupying the world stage. For the Humean then greatness of soul is very largely a thing of the past, being no longer action-guiding in the relevant present and future, though it will still, in the mode of Bildung, vicariously elicit our disinterested, aesthetic approbation in the pages of poetry as well as in the historical records of the past. If there will, accordingly, be times when a poignant sense of ourselves as “narrow souls” may overtake us, we can always congratulate ourselves on enjoying very substantial advantages that were denied to people of yore. Anticipating Nietzsche’s “last man”, Hume anticipates as well this very theme being replayed a century later in the last three or four pages of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Vol. II. Recalling Hume’s distinction between the vulgar and the wise as distinct recipients of his writings, one must recognize not merely one but at least two choices to which he confesses in those pages. Famously, there is the one about a friendly, humane heart, but there is also, of quite opposite import, another, covert one, having to do with those inconvenient Welsh bards. The wise at any rate will refuse to believe that Hume could be so naive as to fail to register how he implicates himself, transhistorically if not action-guidingly, in their sinister fate. If these considerations are prompted in part by one’s trying to wrap one’s mind around a recent expression, namely “extraordinary rendition”, they answer also to the gallows humor associated with “outsourcing torture”. For, no longer prepared to share Hume’s historic triumphalism, we must reconcile ourselves, at best, with ages of relative civility that yet remain infected with more or less barbarism that invites a normative return to some of the more alarming versions of magnanimity wrapped up in raison d’état utilitarianism. Straddling ancient and modern, Hume could be satisfied late in his Treatise that as to the former, and sticking to “the generality of mankind”, it was “heroism or military glory” that comprises “the most sublime kind of merit.” Under the latter heading, however, only a few years further on, and early in his second Enquiry the epithets “sociable”, “good-natured”, “humane”, “merciful” and others in that vein “universally express the highest merit” available to “human nature”. Responding to this striking about-face in Hume, I have dared to view it as signifying a turning-point in world history. Less dramatic, yet instructive enough is how Hume may be

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taken to be exulting in the one historic instance of greatness of mind in his chapter devoted to it, namely Alexander’s “feel[ing] in himself such a dignity and right of empire that he could not believe”, at the very gateway to India, that he might be “abandoned by his soldiers”. Ah yes, India, just at the point when the English are preparing to take over, where Alexander left off. Looking ahead to a young, and Edwardian, Winston Churchill who will be found in his A Roving Commission to be exulting in turn over these almost Roman proconsuls of empire: Curzon in India, Milner in South Africa and Cromer in Egypt, some of us will feel that Churchill’s role in the Second World War should suffice to show that Hume’s obituary for greatness of mind was decidedly premature. Featuring a retreat from philosophy proper, this chapter does in fact harbor nuggets of it that need to be retrieved, and all the more because – the decisive-point – it might seem that Hume was bidding farewell to greatness of mind. Not quite, two surrogates of greatness of mind, early and late, in Hume’s Section two and the fourth Appendix, being examined by me in tandem on p. 54, the key difference between them lying in the fact that the earlier, “inclusive version” includes the seven humanitarian epithets that launch the Enquiry, while the second, “exclusive version” omits them, morality proving thus to be much more provided for in the earlier version. More loaded up in any case, the early version adds birth, power, eminent abilities and (surprisingly) undaunted courage, though it is this last item that clinches for me the case that a surrogate for greatness of mind has indeed surfaced. With the later version consisting only of an extensive genius and intrepid courage, the two versions – separated over the full length of the Enquiry – attest to greatness of mind emerging as courage plus, leaving it somewhat open as to how the plus is to be filled in, whether, at one extreme by the sinister episode of the Welsh Bards that fails, in Hume’s reckoning, to disqualify Edward I from having “magnanimity” predicated of him or, at the other extreme, by Hume’s very own seven humanitarian epithets. As to the sinister option, one recalls above all how Machiavelli predicates, a little cautiously, “grandezza dello animo” of Agathocles in Chapter six of The Prince. Having in Chapter four distinguished Aristotle’s greatness of mind one from Hume’s greatness of mind two, I might be felt to be equally free, in a taxonomic vein, to distinguish Hume’s benign greatness of mind three from his sinister greatness of mind four. Maybe so. Arguably adequate for a librarian assigned to label shelves of books, the ruling cannot really be expected to escape scot-free by skimping normative considerations. At least as important as how the plus in “courage plus” is to be filled out when it comes to unpacking this putative analysis of magnanimity, the

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luster with which Hume has found courage itself to be invested cannot but smack of the kosmos or embellishment that Aristotle seems to take the very word megalopsychia to denote when he uses it to say that the sheer megalopsychical exercise of each of the ordinary moral virtues by the great-souled man succeeds at once in magnifying and beautifying them, quite as if, obfuscated and even occluded in the main text of The Nicomachean Ethics, the kalon only now comes fully into its own. Looking ahead to when Hobbes comes fully into his own, it would be cruel of me to deny my readers immediate access to the following bit of text in Leviathan, Chapter six, ¶ 39. “Joy arising from imagination of a man’s own power and ability is that exultation of the mind which is called GLORYING.” Advancing then from Hume’s elevation of mind to Hobbes’ exultation of it, and beyond even that to GLORYING, a highly open-ended quest for an analysis of magnanimity might now seem to lie well within our reach. How my A team of philosophers, at this key moment, can be seen to be rivaling my B team of poets, even at their own game of poetry itself, must not be allowed to go unnoticed. Nor unnoticed should be a still more subtle point that Hume himself, I very much fear, failed to register, namely that his Paragraph, ostensibly left far behind in his chapter “Of greatness of mind”, continues – albeit only tacitly – even throughout his Enquiry to be a gift that goes on giving. For if in the context of the Treatise the Paragraph itself carefully describes circumstances in which one’s con-attitude toward the hero is “overpowered” by a pro-attitude toward him, it is easy enough, even in the context of the Treatise, to describe alternative circumstance, already supplied indeed by “men of cool reflection”, when our pro-attitude is overpowered by a con-attitude. And that is precisely what happens in the Enquiry under the auspices of Hume’s seven humanitarian epithets. That, even so, a surrogate for greatness of mind should remain in force, subtextually, throughout the length of the Enquiry, needs also to be factored in the about-face, one might say, of an about-face.

CHAPTER SIX A FRESH START: HOBBES

Well, not altogether fresh, most notably perhaps as regards how, in my clash of titans in Chapter four where Hume’s very own greatness of mind two is set over against Aristotle’s greatness of mind one, Hobbes’ “laws of nature” supply Hume with an important backdrop. Already, moreover, in my Introduction, Hobbes’ magnanimity – defined as “contempt of little helps and hindrances” – in terms of which valor and liberality are defined in turn, justice being rather sneakily slipped in, in L, Ch. 8, ¶ 12 at least shadows Aristotle, for whom greatness of soul presupposes all of the other moral virtues. Taking “justified true belief” to be an enduring paradigm, Gettier notwithstanding, of what an analysis of a concept – in this case knowledge – might look like, viewing Hobbes’ definition of magnanimity (emphasis on magna) in its light, need not be felt to be objectionably anachronistic, as if looking for counter-examples in the latter case could not be as rewarding in the latter case as in the former. Nor should one be surprised to find that the characteristic logico-linguistic emphasis of analytical philosophy is quite at home here, an initial worry about Hobbes’ definition having to do with “little” and “great” (or magna) being contraries, quite as if one were to undertake to define “tall” as the opposite of “short” when the grasp of either concept presupposes grasp of the other. Actually, something of this sort, by no means so crude however, may figure, in my Chapter four, in regard to Aristotle’s “swinging his arms by his side,” taken by me to play the role of an Aristophanic vignette, greatness (magna again) of soul for Aristotle also, Hobbes may be heard to say, precisely consisting in a visceral contempt of the “little help” that swinging his arms by his side, in flight from the enemy, affords the coward. Modeled on this de haut en bas distancing oneself, from the infra-dig, both Aristotle’s greatness of soul and Hobbes’ magnanimity might be convicted, each, of being an analysandum the analysans of which stands to it as “the contrary of ‘little’” stands to “great”.

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Highly suggestive, and not merely when taken in a threatening mode, the charge opens up a profound line of inquiry as to how Hobbes’ ¶ 26 in Chapter 6 with its definition of magnanimity relates to the preceding ¶ 25 and its definition of pusillanimity. Going merely by their Latin counterparts, one would take the two terms as contraries. Despite being, like others, very suspicious of arguments from etymology, contraries I shall indeed take them, tendentiously, to be, appealing, for starters, to Davidsonian charity, with analytical savoir faire lying in the wings. Not that Hobbes’ own “contempt of little helps and hindrances” as his definition of magnanimity, and his “Desire of things that conduce but a little [as helps] to our ends, and fear of things that are of but little hindrance” as his definition of pusillanimity, could encourage anyone, at least initially, to entertain, much less endorse them as contraries, six words being expended in the one definition, and 21 in the other. And yet, putting aside the second clause of Hobbes’ much more verbose definition of pusillanimity, focus on its first clause, namely “Desire of things that conduce but a little to our ends” in order to correlate it with the first clause of Hobbes’ succinct definition of magnanimity, namely “contempt of little helps”, as much as to say – Eureka! – “Contempt of things that conduce but a little [as helps] to our ends” is precisely what magnanimity consists in. And why, more exactly still, is that the case? Well, another, and maybe even double, Eureka! here, it is because magnanimity consists, positively, in “[successful] endeavor toward things that conduce greatly [as helps] toward our ends”, Hobbes having earlier in the chapter defined desire and aversion as, respectively, endeavor toward, in the one case, and endeavor fromward, in the other. As to a worry about defining “great” or magna, in terms of “little”, that arose in connection with Hobbes’ official definition of magnanimity, only to vanish with a shift to his unofficial, and very much subtextual, definition of it, lingering over little helps to one’s ends being hardly what one would expect to find in one who is successfully engaged in endeavor toward things greatly conduce to them. Starting with a weak preference today for taking magnanimity and pusillanimity to be contraries, my hermeneutic argument is seen to have a hypotheticodeductive structure where the initial hypothesis in Hobbes’ day, when no one familiar with the English “magnanimity” could fail to have magnitudo animi, ringing in his ears, was bound to render very puzzling how a mere six words could suffice to define (a mere proprium in Aristotle’s vocabulary of) magnanimity, when 21 were required for pusillanimity. Well, the answer to the puzzle could only be that the six words were just right for a proprium, once one realized why another 21 words would be needed for a full-blown definition of magnanimity, half of which I have

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already supplied. Granting, for Hobbes also, that pusillanimity and magnanimity are contraries, that is just to say that what it is to have a small animus must be the contrary of what it is to have a great animus, where the English word “animus” and the Latin animus are, near enough, synonymous. Actually, it is the second clause of Hobbes’ definition of pusillanimity, much more than its first clause – “fear of things that are of but little hindrance” – that connects directly to how a small animus is to be understood, and all the more when ¶ 16 has been brought on board. “Aversion with opinion of hurt from the object, FEAR”, recalling that aversion itself was defined as endeavor fromward. In a word, cowardice is what pusillanimity comes to in plain English, opinion of hurt from the object prompting endeavor fromward the hurtful object, manifesting itself in flight. A fresh start for sure! Farewell to Hume’s belletristic elegance, all hail to Hobbes’ anticipation of analytical philosophy at its most technical. That pusillanimity, in which we have no interest, should be seen here to be “wearing the trousers”, enabling us to access, indirectly, magnanimity itself in which we are keenly involved, I take to be a stroke of genius. What then will be the contrary of FEAR when it comes to an encounter with a hurtful object? COURAGE. For if fear is endeavor fromward a hurtful object in the absence of hope that by flight we will avoid that hurt, courage is endeavor toward the hurtful object with the hope that one will avoid the hurt by way of resistance to the hurtful object. Magnanimity thus emerges in full as “endeavor toward things that conduce greatly to our ends, and courage manifested in endeavor toward a hurtful object with the hope of avoiding the hurt by resisting the object.” With technicality as such figuring now for the first time in this otherwise largely humanistic research venue of mine, I am quite prepared for most of my readers to tune out, some when it comes to the poetry, others in regard to logico-linguistic niceties, and so forth. Linger now with me over how an Aristotelian contrariety, as between megalopsychical vs. mikropsychical considerations, is trumped by Hobbes’ contrariety as between pusillanimity and magnanimity, although earlier in Chapter four it was Aristotle, with his prideful self-promotion that trumped Hume and his well-concealed pride, systematicity being, again, the relevant rubric only some of my readers can be expected to relish. Focusing, however, on Aristotle’s prideful self-promotion which, even as it shows up well as against Hume, leaves Aristotle himself utterly bewildered as to how there can be people, lacking all pride, who, even so, do seem to succeed in exercising all of his ordinary moral virtues. One might today suppose that these strange people were a genetic mutation who, multiplying over the

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intervening generations, came to supply Hobbes with the raw material of the modern Commonwealth. By attributing mikropsychia, or smallmindedness to these strange people, in default of any better explanation, Aristotle committed the absurdity of taking the kalon to be compatible with small-mindedness, a “gotcha” even worse than Hume’s in his encounter with Aristotle. Enter now Hobbes in his encounter with Aristotle, at any rate going by the following systematic rational reconstruction of the lively interaction among the three philosophers in regard to my eponymous theme. “Something has gone badly wrong with Aristotle’s contrariety of megalopsychia and mikropsychia, the latter term being left to flounder quite as if it need not be taken seriously on its own”, thinks Hobbes. “More seriously still,” he continues, “when it comes to any pair of contraries neither term can be taken seriously on its own, though it might indeed seem, as it did to Aristotle, that ‘megalopsychia’ at least enjoyed that autonomous status, granting that its contrary, ‘mikropsychia’, would be supplied one almost for free”. As adept in Greek as he was in Latin, Hobbes could see at once that the corresponding contrariety in Latin – pusillanimity vs. magnanimity – far from being routinely synonymous with the Greek (if only because no one supposed that Latin animus was synonymous with Greek psyché), was much more robust than its conventional counterpart in Greek. Going then by the Latin, “pusillanimity” by being very close to “cowardice,” wins out over “magnanimity,” there being nothing as demotically close to magnanimity, certainly not courage, as cowardice is to pusillanimity. Once, however, “large animus” is recognized to be an outright contrary of “small animus”, courage can be taken to lie at the core of a great animus aka magnanimity. Taking now Hobbes’ robust pusillanimity = cowardice to answer to, even as it replaces, Aristotle’s insipid mikropsychia, Hobbes’ stroke of genius lies in modeling a robust albeit subtextual definition of magnanimity on a “don’t care” yet antecedently robust pusillanimity, thereby showing up Aristotle’s ineptitude in handling the logic of contrariety. As for me personally, there is a further bonus. With courage emerging as a key ingredient in Hobbesian magnanimity, courage being an altogether unproblematic contrary of cowardice, Hume – hitherto the loser in this three-way discussion – can now redeem himself. Courage plus will be recalled from my previous chapter as how Hume’s “greatness of mind” in his Treatise, having been driven underground in his later Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, comes to be characterized, albeit again subtextually. Taken in tandem alas, I fear that these two chapters of mine cannot but be regarded as impossibly rebarbative, a mere nugget of philosophy so

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encrusted in exegetical detritus that extracting it could not be worth the labor. Platitudinously enough, the nugget might come to no more than that magnanimity, i.e. a great animus, is but courage writ large; alternatively, that courage is incipient magnanimity. To the contrary, the astonishing convergence of how, very differently, Hobbes and Hume come to figure courage in their definitions of magnanimity attests to something deeply robust as regards courage and magnanimity alike, just such “surprising convergence” being what robustness itself is taken to consist in. Catching Aristotle out in regard to how much more deft Hobbes is in coping with contrariety, Hobbes may not be quite so successful in undertaking to convict Aristotle, and his notorious, sweeping contempt of people at large, with transgressing his “eighth law of nature”. Although Megalo’s sweeping contempt of people is positively advertised in NE IV, 3, more precisely it may well principally figure there, disambiguated, as a second-order contempt the express targets of which are the vulgar rich and powerful who are engaged, says Aristotle, in “imitating” the great-souled man at? Smacking of impredicativity, the first order contempt of the rich and powerful for those less well-healed is itself the object of a second order contempt by the great-souled man, even though, paradoxically, the first order contempt is seen by Aristotle to be teleologically oriented toward emulating Megalo’s second order variety. How so? Well, first order contempt is bad while second order contempt is good. Aiming at the good, anyway by nature, the vulgar rich need not be taken to have missed the mark simply because they revel in contempt. Their mistake lies rather in choosing the bad sort of contempt. If this bad sort of contempt succeeds at least in being a more or less deft caricature of the good sort of contempt, the more deft versions of it may reveal something discreditable about Megalo – in particular, that he fails to be a successful role model of moral virtue – that the philosopher had not anticipated. Given that keeping the peace in his Commonwealth must lie uppermost in Hobbes’ mind, it is by no means decided a priori that Megalo and those like him might not be deputized to crack the whip of second order contempt, the first order contempt lavished on us by the rich and powerful being, inevitably, of primary concern for Hobbes. When he writes in ¶ 42 of Chapter 6 that “one of the proper works . . . of great minds . . . is to help and free others from scorn” it is most unlikely that Hobbes knew that two of these great minds, preceding him, were to be found in Megalo, and Aristotle. Envisaging now an aggressively left-wing Megalo and Aristotle, bent on protecting kleineleute = hoi polloi from the contempt of the vulgar rich, trashing them in turn with their own, still more scathing second order contempt, we might congratulate ourselves on

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launching Megalo into the new millennium as a culture hero for the future. Alas, even while prepared to credit Megalo, even anew, under this heading, we are all Hobbesians now, and thus, having internalized his eighth law of nature, we will concede only that second order contempt may be less bad than the first order sort, thank you very much. A raw deal here then for poor Megalo whom, even so, Hobbes invites to join him in freeing others from scorn but not – can this really be the point – by returning scorn with scorn? Actually, Hobbes is very adept at this second order scorn, notably in regard to “those grimaces called LAUGHTER”, there being two sorts of it, one that is good, and much neglected in the literature, and another that is very bad, which while “caused . . . by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another” – so there is a real deficit here – “by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves” for being free of the deficit. “And it is incident most to them that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves, who are forced to keep themselves in their own favor by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much laughter at the defects of others is a sign of pusillanimity.” Priding themselves on their lineage absent “abilities”, and almost as much on their magnanimity, the Caroline courtiers, in the midst of whom Hobbes must have felt a little uneasy, are now convicted of its very opposite namely pusillanimity, the cruelest cut of all, for courtiers, lying in the “fear of things that are but of little hindrance.” Take that, you cur! Adept at dispensing scorn himself, by way of freeing others (more vulnerable) from scorn, Hobbes is in no position to lord it over Aristotle who beat him at this game long before. Very much surprised by how Aristotle has succeeded in beating back Hobbes’ challenge here, I remain impressed by how successfully Hobbes trumps Aristotle when it comes to contrariety.

CHAPTER SEVEN GLORY AND HONOR IN HOBBES

Stitch together the following three bits of Hobbesian text – call them Glorying, Contempt and Endeavor – namely (a) “glorying in one’s own power and ability”, (b) “contempt of little helps and hindrances” and (c) “endeavor toward things that conduce greatly to our ends” in order to produce an ultra-Hobbesian definition of magnanimity that relegates his official definition of it to the margin of an amplified version of his subtextual definition. Glorying in one’s own power and ability both in one’s endeavor toward things greatly conducive (as helps) to our ends, and in one’s courage in greatly resisting hindrances in their way.

Over the top? You bet, but by no means out of sync with Hobbes’ splendid Chapter ten of Leviathan, entitled “Of power, worth, dignity, honor and worthiness”, where the key words are “power” and “honor” and how they connect with each other. “Things that conduce greatly to our ends” so dominate here in this ultra-Hobbesian definition of magnanimity that “merely little helps and hindrances”, and our contempt of them, simply drop out of the picture, thereby (one might hope) dispelling our worry toward the end of our previous chapter as to how our pro-attitude here to contempt might be reconciled with the con-attitude toward it prescribed by Hobbes’ eighth law of nature. Even more remote from us today than Aristotle’s NE IV, 3, I fear that, despite being written, by comparison, almost yesterday, chapter ten can defy one of our best Hobbes scholars, as to “what Hobbes means [in the chapter] when he says something is honorable”. Helping out newcomers to the chapter, he asks, “[I]s he expressing his own valuation, or merely reporting society’s?” Neither, say I, preferring to ask this newcomer – a little awkwardly, as you will see – “When Hobbes says something is (dis)honorable, is he committing the Naturalistic Fallacy?” For I do not assume, with my eminent scholar, who shall remain nameless, that these verdicts of Hobbes should be regarded as valuations in the first place. Nor do I assume, in feeling free to denote by Moore’s “Naturalistic Fallacy” something that is

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very like Hume’s query about deriving “ought” from “is”, that this thing (it is indeed real) is a fallacy. But all this belongs to the familiar back story of analytical ethics beyond which, in my haste to relish Hobbes’ long neglected yet indispensable, problematic chapter on honor, I must first break new ground in acclimatizing my uneasy readers to Aristotle’s antecedent, commonsensible doctrine of honor, by way of its role in rationalizing his greatness of mind in the first place. Granted that no one will be surprised to learn that the prospect of winning the Nobel Prize has provided me with a keen incentive for writing this book, how can such home truths about honor inspire the analytical philosopher to wax loquaciously analytical on this otherwise unpromising topic of honor with which only Aristotle and Hobbes, among the greats, have been deeply engaged? Well, it can’t. Another back story here lies in Richard Hare in his 1950 The Language of Morals reminding us that according to the Oxford English Dictionary “good” is the most general adjective of commendation in the language, thereby upending Aristotle’s doctrine that good is the object of (nonakratic) desire. Distinguish then what is desired, what is admired, and what is required, a jingle helpful in summing up analytical ethics where what is required answers to moral obligation, while – sticking with Aristotle – what is desired answers to good, and what is admired answers to the kalon. Splitting good into the profitable and the noble, Aristotle’s gloss on “Why should I be moral?” comes down to this. “Isn’t the profitable all the good that really matters?” Factoring into this discussion the Oxford definition of “good” as the most general adjective of commendation in the language, supplies Aristotle with an analytical link between good and “admire” that is denied one for whom good is linked not with “admire” but with “desire”. Taking commendation, praise, honor and, by no means least, Hume’s “disinterested approbation” to comprise an analytical package, I suggest that by taking it on board in a neo-Aristotelian, as well as neo-Humean approach to good, Aristotle’s kalon = Hume’s personal merit now emerge as much more closely bound up, even analytically, with good – going by an OED gloss on the word “good” – in this Humeotelian, or Aristohumean context, than one could ever imagine, confined to pristine versions of these philosophers. That a mere linguistic fact about the word “good” – no “analysis” of the word or concept contaminating the proceedings – could have such deep philosophical consequences, can still come as a surprise, even today, to analytical philosophers. But even among those of them who take themselves to have largely recovered from that surprise, and who pride themselves on being adept as

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to questions of meaning, there will be quite a few who will confess to feeling uneasy by the following question. What does Hobbes mean by the word “(dis)honorable” when he says in ¶ 40, in Chapter ten of Leviathan in Edwin Curley’s indispensable edition of Leviathan that “Poverty [is] dishonorable”? A stellar instance of what today is called “politically incorrect”, the quoted sentence poses a stumbling block – moral as well as exegetical – on our taking on board this important chapter in filling out my program, but more generally still, it may be felt to cut rather too close to home to what this volume is all about. How then to finesse the difficulty? Well, there is a sentence of Hume’s that, while also alarming when taken on its own, succeeds at least in sidelining any worry about meaning in the case of Hobbes’. “Nothing has a greater tendency to give us an esteem for any person than his power and riches; or a contempt, than his poverty and meanness”, the first sentence of Section Five, entitled “Of our esteem for the rich and powerful” of Part Two of Book Two “Of the Passions” in Hume’s Treatise. Acquiescing in the truth of Hume’s sentence should go a very long way in reconciling us to the truth of Hobbes’, even granting (I do not grant this) that while Hume’s statement is an outright factual one, be it true or false, Hobbes’ should be classified as a value judgment. Doubtless grist for the analytical mill as to the fact/value distinction, this issue I feel free to bypass in this volume, confident that merely by taking Hume’s sentence as a methodological premise, one has almost all that is needed to profit from this great chapter of Hobbes. Hume’s sentence aside, however, how such diverse items as love and fear might come to be collected under the Hobbesian umbrella of the honorable, as in ¶ 38 where “[to be] loved or feared of man is honorable, as arguments of power”, is explained earlier in ¶ 24 thus. “To show any sign of love or fear of another is to honor, for both to love and to fear is to value. To contemn, or less to love or fear than he expects, is to dishonor, for it is undervaluing.” Ah yes, the script of a Hobbesian murder mystery here, in a woman much loved by her husband, yet feeling undervalued, because that love has always been a little less than she persists in expecting, and a detective, “the name, Madam, is Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes . . . .” Returning, abruptly, to Hume’s sentence, “Nothing has a greater tendency to give us a contempt for any person than his poverty and meanness”, shall we take it to be true today, granting that the proposition Hume used it to express then was true? A moral revolution having taken place in the interim, our familiar rejection of the sentence may only, or largely, have induced in us a false consciousness that obscures a deeper truth access to which may be reserved to Hobbes and Hume. That the “tendency” mentioned by Hume has at least lessened, more or less, over

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the years need not be doubted, and if the difference between then and now should vary in this or that context, the prospects of greatness of mind itself might be expected also to vary. Two such contexts - ¶ 46 and ¶ 48 of Hobbes’ Chapter ten – prompt the question as to “what Hobbes means when he says something is honorable”, for, in any case, no matter what “honorable” means here, it looks as if ¶ 48 contradicts ¶ 46, by in the latter case allowing for an unjust act to be honorable – “so it be great and difficult, and consequently a sign of much power” – while no such exception appears to be allowed in ¶ 46 where “neglect of equity” is “dishonorable”. Although consistency can be restored by engaging in casuistry over the meaning of “equity” and “justice”, Hobbes remains committed to the thesis that an unjust act can be honorable, suggesting that the underlying worry may well be, and this is indeed a point about meaning, whether the predicate “x is honorable”, as it is used here by Hobbes, entails “x is praiseworthy” as it does in standard English, no less in Hobbes’ time than in ours, thereby raising an issue about the Naturalistic Fallacy. But does Hobbes really use the predicate “x is honorable” here? Pragmatically, yes, though outright, no. Far from being a rough-neck philosopher, wielding a hammer, as indeed he often prides himself on being, Hobbes can be, as here, even too squeamish to say outright that an unjust act can be honorable, if only because such an utterance at the Caroline court would be frowned on as being distinctly infra-dig, and not because the courtiers placed a premium on justice. Rather it was their conspicuous commitment to the honorable, construed by Hobbes reflectively precisely as they did, unreflectively, “for” in the words of ¶ 48, “honor consisteth only in the opinion of power.” As to the word “(dis)honorable”, the semantics of sentences of the form “x is (dis)honorable”, being entirely factual (true or false) for Hobbes, and thus free of an evaluative import, needs to be distinguished from their pragmatics, in this Hobbesian regimentation of the word, in the context of free-standing assertion, in which pro-and con-attitudes being freely expressed, the utterance will be drenched in evaluative import. Very truncated in my stripped down version of ¶ 48 (with ¶ 49 being added to it), which goes on a great ways, as augmented, the royal court is subtextually alluded to, briefly, at the far end of it where its commitment to the honorable, even as so defined, is shown to be fairly shallow in connection with dueling. As to the bulk of ¶ 48 – the whole extended paragraph needs to be ready at hand – it is largely devoted to the heroic age of Homer, with an assist from Thucydides, indicating that the royal court merely provides Hobbes with current empirical evidence for what he

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finds in Homer. The basic point is simple. Petty theft is dishonorable, plundering the gold of Fort Knox, honorable, for in the latter case great power must be in play, while in the former, poverty being presumed, it will be lack of power, and here I take Hume’s chapter “Of our esteem for the rich and powerful, [and contempt for poverty]” to come to pretty much the same thing, allowing that the evaluative aspect of these contexts Hobbes is by no means indifferent to, for he can write in ¶ 48 that “nothing is so celebrated in . . . Mercury as his frauds and thefts, of whose praises, in a hymn of Homer the greatest is this: that being born, he had invented music at noon, and before night stolen away the cattle of Apollo from his herdsmen” (my emphasis), this precocious invention of music by a mere babe attesting to the power of the infant god at least as much as his stupendous thievery.” And why indeed should I not be inspired by the poet, to enlarge on my ever expanding portfolio, collected under the rubric “versions of magnanimity”, by adding to it one that features these two exploits of Mercury? What it might be like to envision Hobbesian Man not, or not primarily, in terms of the familiar bourgeois model, textually grounded in “commodious living” at L, Ch. 13, ¶ 14, but at least equally in terms of a moral psychology, characterized as much by a pro-attitude to what Hobbes counts as honorable (and a con-attitude to what he counts as dishonorable) as it is heedful of – what can seem very different – his thirty-five “laws of nature” that elucidate the “moral virtues” at the end of Chapter 15, namely “justice, gratitude, modesty, equity, mercy,” one would wish to have well in hand, in order to answer – merely one question among many – whether this Hobbesian man, taken to be a citizen of a Hobbes-certified Commonwealth, would applaud the exploit of one who succeeds, against all odds, in emptying Fort Knox of all its gold. Because Humean “esteem” = Hobbesian honorableness, going by the relevant texts, a highly nuanced, affirmative answer can be given, going also by Hume’s Nietzschean Paragraph, and even adding to the mix Glorying, on the Hobbes side of the equation, where I take “Glorying” in this context to denote my ultraHobbesian definition of magnanimity, on the first page of this chapter. Taxingly rebarbative as this heavy overload of Humeo-Hobbesian material undoubtedly is, it can be welcomed for delivering more of the missing chapter in the history of ethics promised by me earlier, and all the more because, while advertised as featuring Hume and Hobbes, one could not anticipate this deep overlap between the two philosophers, starting from Hume’s long ignored, fugitive discussion of “esteem” in the Treatise. Clinching the case, there is also Hume’s long neglected and fugitive Paragraph, modeled on which “the Fort Knox mastermind”, as he is

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designated by the vulgar press, will indeed be applauded, albeit only under one Fregean mode of presentation that prompts sophisticates at any rate to recall, more particularly, Hume’s “extensive genius and intrepid courage” late in the second Enquiry. Frowned upon, however, under a distinct mode of presentation of the Fort Knox exploit that highlights its strong “tendency” – the word here is much too weak – “to the prejudice” ditto “of society”, this hero or anti-hero may well be left by Hume’s ethics in an axiological limbo, “incommensurable values” coming into play. But not – the overlap being limited – with Hobbes’ ethics! Taking us thus only part way to Hobbes’ response to the Fort Knox mastermind, it is not to be doubted that his exploit will count for Hobbes, under the auspices of ¶ 48, as a very unjust action that, thanks to being “great and difficult, and consequently a sign of much power”, figures also as being very honorable, even if – though this addition might problematize my verdict slightly – he should be captured after ten years (assume here a fluke) and summarily put to death. How this scenario might bear on the most vexed issue in Hobbes’ studies – the challenge of the Foole – should not be far to seek. Assuming only – what is entirely plausible – that our mastermind comes, too late, to regret his audacious exploit, thereby transgressing an at least prima facie, attractive principle of an admittedly non-standard rational decision theory (“no rational retrospective regrets”), crediting Hobbes with this rationale should be enough to show that (a rational reconstruction of) his case against the Foole is much stronger than received opinion allows. Pursuing the issue just a bit more, let me state, dogmatically, that merely by casting about for counter-examples to NoRRR, a great gulf will open up as between risk-averse people like Hobbes and highly risk-taking people like Julius Caesar where, drifting alas into metaphysics, and assuming, for the nonce, that four-dimensionalism is true, Caesar may be driven to concede, as against Hobbes, that he is speaking only as a temporal part of JC – “Why should I give a damn as to the regrets of that far-off temporal part of so-called me?” And, riding piggy-back on the metaphysical problematic, any even narrowly focused self-interested rational decision theory may thus find itself contaminated by problematic value judgments. With Homer first and Thucydides second supplying Hobbes with deep, classical background, as regards a problematic relation between greatness of mind and morality that lies at the core of this volume, Cicero may be urged to come in, tacitly, third, going by certain verses of Euripides, joining now my auxiliary team of poets, which Julius Caesar “used to have continually on his lips” (p. 355 in Walter Miller’s translation of Cicero’s

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De Officiis). Freely paraphrased by me yet faithful to their jist, as understood, very alarmingly, by Cicero, in the context of Caesar’s imminent threat to the Roman republic, these verses come down to this. “Justice and morality all the way, with but one exception: seizure of supreme power.” Whereupon Cicero protests, “Our tyrant deserved his death for having made an exception of the one thing that was the blackest crime of all”, adding the challenge, “Why do we gather instances of petty crime – legacies criminally obtained and fraudulent buying and selling?”, quite as if showing these petty crimes to be dishonorable would suffice to convict Julius Caesar many times over. But that is just what Hobbes denies, going first by L, Ch. 10, ¶ 46 Actions proceeding from equity, joined with loss, are honorable, as signs of magnanimity; for magnanimity is a sign of power. On the contrary, craft, shifting, neglect of equity is dishonorable [as a sign of lack of power].

and then proceeding to ¶ 48 where an unjust action will also count as honorable “so it be great and difficult, and consequently a sign of much power”. What makes petty crime dishonorable is not the crime as such but its very pettiness, and by parity of reasoning Caesar is thus contrastively vindicated. Combining 46 and 48, a rich platter of actions has been served up, some just, others unjust, all of which count as honorable as a “sign of power”, the latter, more particularly, as a “sign of much power”, where the former, again, I take to consist, paradigmatically, of familiar contractual obligations being discharged, at some cost to oneself. Add now to Aristotle’s greatness of mind one and Hume’s greatness of mind two, a third, Hobbesian honor-oriented, Euripidean greatness of mind three that I envisage Hobbes formulating with his paragraph 46 answering to the first clause (in my free paraphrase) of Julius Caesar’s Euripidean verses, while paragraph 48 answers to its second clause. As to the bona fides of greatness of mind three, as an indispensable parameter in moral philosophy, it should be enough to mention Caesar’s diablerie in twitting the grey beards of the Roman Senate with his Euripidean verses. Clinching the case, I could always fall back on Hobbes, and his provocative juxtaposing of 46 and 48, seeing that his ¶ 47 is interesting in its own right. Start with the platitude of folk psychology that everyone wants to be a millionaire, and notice how Hobbes’ use of “covetousness” in ¶ 47 opens a further window into his deep psychology. With greatness of mind three now well in hand, Cicero’s keen distrust of it can supply anyone, at all sympathetic to the suggestion that one might

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take Hobbesian honor to enshrine a normative truth as well as a flatfootedly factual one, with a powerful argument in its favor. For Cicero takes moral virtue (honestum) to have four sources two of which are salient for us, justice and magnitudo animi the tension between which comes to a head for him precisely in Julius Caesar, for Cicero is very fearful that “the more notable a man is for his magnitudo animi, the more ambitious he is to be the foremost citizen or, I should say, to be the sole ruler” (p. 67). Moreover, “the trouble about this matter is that it is in the greatest souls and the most brilliant geniuses that we usually find ambition for civil and military authority”. Witness in particular “the effrontery of Gaius [Julius] Caesar who to gain that sovereign power which by a depraved imagination he had conceived in his fancy, trod underfoot all laws of gods and men” (p. 27). Impatient with Cicero’s vapid moralizing about a “depraved imagination”, Hobbes explains this “depravity” naturalistically enough by ¶ 47. “Covetousness of great riches and ambition of great honors are honorable, as signs of power to obtain them”, suggesting that the covetousness and ambition supervene at least as much on the power to obtain great riches, and honors, as vice versa. It is thus imperative that no mere citizen of a Hobbesian Commonwealth should find himself, let it be through “no fault of his own”, with the power to overthrow the sovereign, for, even so, that ambition can be expected to “spring up”. Which is not to deny that Hobbes really does “disapprove” of Caesar’s “plain rebellion” in L, ¶ 19, Ch. 29, relying solely on contra-Foole, altogether self-interested risk-averse considerations that focus on future failure and the inevitable self-reproach that must follow, thereby retroactively at least convicting the rebellion of being irrationally undertaken, and thus a fortiori convicting also the unjust yet honorable action of ¶ 48 of being on balance, prudentially unreasonable. Inevitable also then must be the addition to my roster of greatness of mind one, two and three of a canonically fourth such version of magnanimity, namely Hobbes’ very own – pursuing this theme – highly risk-averse, contraFoole greatness of mind four, reverting thus, late in my Introduction, to Hobbes’ fairly throwaway remark, in the context of L, Ch. 14, ¶ 12, that “magnanimity is contempt of unjust or dishonest helps.” Much less glamorous than Hobbes’ Euripidean and Homeric greatness of mind three, Hobbes’ highly moral albeit altogether self-interested greatness of mind four might be felt to look ahead to Hume’s highly humanitarian about-face in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Closer to home, and picking up, belatedly, on the curious, teleological mention of “our ends” and the “things greatly conducive to [them]” in my ultra-Hobbesian

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definition of magnanimity, on the first page of this chapter, I find especially suggestive – with regard to greatness of mind four, and its contra-foole emphasis – “commodious living” (figuring in ¶ 14 of Chapter 13) as what “our ends” might consist in, while as for “things greatly conducive to [them] they are to be supplied above all by our very own “industry”, as herein mentioned, aka “the American dream”. Talk about an about-face! Casting about for much needed help in reconciling the prosaic outcome of “commodious living” obtained by one’s “industry”, with the poetic verve in which “glorying in one’s own power and ability” is clearly invested, some of my readers may suspect me of toying with them, starting in the first instance with my baroque amplification, on the first page of this chapter, of Hobbes’ exiguous “contempt of little helps and hindrances”. Not so, anyway not in the way they think. The key text indeed is L, Ch. 6, ¶ 39. Joy arising from imagination of a man’s own power and ability is that exultation of the mind which is called GLORYING; which, if grounded upon the experience of his own former actions, is the same, with confidence; but if . . . only supposed by himself, for delight in the consequences of it, is called Vainglory, which name is properly given, because a well grounded confidence begeteth attempt, whereas the supposing of power does not, and is therefore rightly called vain.

Especially to be noticed are two sorts of glorying, which might be distinguished non-tendentiously as a “good” sort and a “bad” sort, the former being well-grounded glorying and the latter non-well grounded glorying where – and this is the key point – well grounded glorying proves to be identical (“the same”) with well grounded confidence. Or, as we might say, Hobbes is proposing an analysis of “glorying in one’s power and ability” that takes it to be ambiguous as between an extensional reading according to which the power and ability are real, and a nonextensional one in which they are merely imagined. That’s for starters. Sticking now to the extensional reading, and taking “glorying in our power and ability” to be our analysandum, the referent of this expression will emerge as identical with the referent of “well grounded confidence in our power and ability”, even though – answering Moore’s Paradox – it will be the sense of the latter expression that, while clearly different from the sense of the former, will supply a reductive analysis of the former expression. A rational reconstruction of Hobbes’ “words on the page” in the vein of Davidsonian charity, my discussion is designed to show how any toying with us is to be blamed, in the first instance, on Hobbes himself and, in the second instance, on analytical philosophy, even when it comes

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to how glorying in our power and ability to engage in successful endeavor toward things greatly conducive to our ends, should prove to be identical with well grounded confidence in our power and ability to engage in successful industry promoting commodious living for us. However reductive this approach may be to greatness of soul, and its Homeric provenance – arguably summed up in “Glorying in one’s own power and ability” in both versions, non-extensional as well as extensional – there are words attributed to Achilles himself albeit from beyond the grave, that might be taken to anticipate this about-face. For Homer reports him, famously, to have ruefully confessed, “I would rather be a serf working on the land of another” – his “industry” by no means redounding to his own benefit – “than rule as king over the dead”, quite as if, very risk-averse now, he was repenting of his celebrated choice, namely to die young in a blaze of glory, rather than to profit from “commodious living” to a much deferred old age. Terrifying words that quite by themselves could explain how the greatness of soul of the heroic age was soon to be replaced by the sophrosunƝ (moderation, temperance) of a post-heroic one, with Achilles sponsoring the latter quite as much as the former, thanks to Homer’s Bildungsroman that extends well beyond Achilles’ lifetime. Very much destined to acquire a luster and even a kosmos, of its own (see the fourth book of Plato’s Republic where the word kosmos is associated with sophrosunƝ,) only later to be transferred by Aristotle to greatness of soul. Associated above all with another poet, Sophocles, the word sophrosunƝ must have come to be losing its luster if Aristotle could feel free in the Nicomachean Ethics to trash it, by emptying it of its wide Sophoclean import, and confining it, very narrowly, to food, drink and sex. Not that Aristotle need feel guilty about betraying classic, Sophoclean sophrosunƝ, summed up in the slogan “MƝden agan” or “Nothing too much”, long acclaimed as expressing the very core of post-Homeric virtue. For has not Aristotle vindicated it, across the board of his ethics, with his famous doctrine of a mean between two extremes, as if, quite technically, he might add to this bit of folk wisdom, “Yes, and also, nothing too little”? Undertaking now in NE IV, 3 to strike a mean as between an already watered down post-Homeric greatness of soul and an already – in part perhaps owing to Aristotle himself – watered down Sophoclean sophrosunƝ, veering rather more to reinstating the former than to preserving the latter, Aristotle might well be felt – feeling here is by no means to be disparaged – to have fallen between two stools. More technically, one would want to list in two columns the megalopsychical features of Megalo as against his sophrosunaic features, only then figuring out how they might be woven together more or less harmoniously, residual tension between them

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emerging, it may be, as a decided plus. Disparaged in our time entirely for Megalo’s megalopsychical features, notably his sweeping contempt, Aristotle appears to have anticipated this outcome. How else explain his flagrantly overcompensating for this bias by saddling Megalo, three or four times, with being ultra-blasé, insisting that “nothing is great”, a sentiment even more jarring for anyone who might be sophron than for any megalopsychos. The sort of paradoxical outcome on which analytical philosophy thrives, this result might prepare the way, along with the two lists and Megalos’ second-order variety of contempt that has been mistaken for contempt across the board, for a cautious rehabilitation of old Megalo. Plumping for Hobbes’ “good”, and outright extensional reading of “Glorying in one’s own power and ability” one may be inclined, with Hobbes himself, to downplay the “bad”, non-extensional reading of it, a profound misfortune the full scope of which I have come only recently to grasp, for anyone at all sympathetic to the general drift of this volume, and, more particularly, to my response to the challenge of Bernard Williams, as to thick evaluative concepts only one of which I have undertaken, modestly to rationalize – “greatness of mind” – by way of epic poetry. It is thus my deep commitment to epic poetry, Milton almost as much as Homer, that prompts me to enlarge upon and even enrich with this epic poetry Hobbes’ otherwise deflationary verdict in ¶ 41 as to nonextensional exultation of mind over one’s make-believe power and ability where “the vain-gory which consisteth in the feigning or supposing of abilities in ourselves (which we know are not) is most incident to young men, and nourished by the histories or fictions of gallant persons; and is corrected oftentimes by age and employment.” If this employment will oftentimes be that “industry” which Hobbes envisages as the way to commodious living, anticipating “the American dream” of immigrants to our shores, Achilles and Satan are doubtless very upscale versions of his “fictions of gallant persons” who will figure in my program of Bildung to which some of Hobbes’ more serious “young men”, precisely as described by him, will be attracted. As to his “histories . . . of gallant persons”, one may recall, earlier, Hume’s mention of Sallust in connection with Julius Caesar, and how reading his account of Caesar was likely to induce in us love of this otherwise formidable figure. Shall I then include Sallust in my program of Bildung to which Hobbes’ “young men” are to be invited? As to how Hume’s elevation of mind, which had an important role to play in launching my version of Bildung, might relate to Hobbes’ exultation of mind, in either its extensional or non-extensional form, we recall, from my epigraph to this volume, how our elevation of mind, on

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our being dazzled by Hume’s hero, was to be seen as a secondary, vicarious replay of an antecedent, primary, and very different elevation of mind enjoyed only by him. That this primary elevation of mind on the part of the hero should now turn out to be identical with a Hobbesian exultation of his mind in his very extensional power and ability, only goes to show what a Hobbesiohumean Bildung might look like. As to whether we can resist Hobbes’ proposal that our secondary elevation of mind should now be regarded in turn as our exulting in the hero’s very real power and ability, which we are feigning to be ours as well, I leave as a topic for further research. If following the German model of Bildung, with its two parameters of poetry and philosophy, in that order, I am to be seen as engaged in an Anglo-American replay of it, with the same parameters only now reversed, the suspicion has been growing in me of late that, by grounding the thickness of greatness of mind in epic poetry, I really need to be prepared to find that greatness of mind may always have been as fictional as epic poetry itself. By no means strongly averse to this outcome, Hobbes’ reduction of well grounded glorying to a well grounded confidence in oneself having suggested as much, I resist it even so, a little, if only because I know that an Anglo-American Bildung must be quite a bit less geistig than the German original, inviting me thus to add a third, much more earthy parameter than either of the others, namely the political reality of Julius Caesar. Hence my next chapter.

CHAPTER EIGHT JULIUS CAESAR

Having been led, quite analytically, in the previous chapter to entertain seriously the suggestion that greatness of soul might be as fictional as the epic poetry in which I have taken it to be initially embedded, earlier in that chapter we found Cicero deploring the fact, on the basis of first-hand experience, that “the more notable a man is for his magnitudo animi, (Julius Caesar being uppermost in his mind) the more ambitious he is to be the foremost citizen or, I should say, to be the sole ruler.” As real as could be, there is nothing fictional about Julius Caesar whose Roman magnitudo animi remained unexcelled in classical antiquity. And not only Roman, witness the very unRoman diablerie with which, Greek verses of the poet Euripides being ever on his lips – “Morality is always to be revered, with but one exception, seizure (i.e. Caesar) of supreme power in the state” – he taunted the grey beards of the Roman Senate. No negligible addition to my growing portfolio of “varieties of magnanimity”, this idiosyncratically Julian, or Euripidean, version of it bids fair to trumping all others if only because it dominates a highly contested interface as between politics and ethics. As to the politics, the famed checks and balances, writ into our Constitution, were designed above all to immunize a new republic from undergoing the overthrow of an ancient one administered by Caesar. Wholeheartedly applauding that immunization need not detract one whit, say I, from one’s also applauding wholeheartedly the great-souledness of Caesar, Alexander Hamilton arguably serving as a witness to that compatibility. More of that soon enough, but more immediately, in wholeheartedly applauding Caesar’s great-souledness, one might do this in two, or three, distinct ways, the first, immoral way, being to allow that Caesar may well have, knowingly, heaped glory on himself at the expense of Rome, the second, moral way, involving a commitment to show how the overthrow of the Roman republic redounded to the benefit of Rome itself. And the third way? Also immoral, and even cynical, the third way features, finally, an unashamed indifference as to where the truth lies, be it in the first way or

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the second, though a preference for the second way will be, sincerely, acknowledged. Intrigued by the third way as the most revelatory as to what Julian greatness of mind might truly consist in, I am inclined to attribute to Caesar the following slightly moralized modification of it. Prepared to argue that his overthrow of the Roman republic would indeed redound to the benefit of Rome, Caesar I take to estimate the probability of that outcome as no more than 80 percent, his glory being only somewhat diminished by a less favorable result, his premature death even suggesting that a longer life could hardly have added much to his glory. Even crediting this most recent, Julian, manifestation of magnanimity to be but one of many that I have been encountering along the way, I continue to have the sense that I am grasping ever more deeply what greatness of mind really consists in. As to “what x really consists in” – in this context of grasping what greatness of mind really consists in – might itself really consist in, I am quite resigned to find it to be none other than Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance”. Deterred, very slightly, by the fact that “family resemblance” has failed over the years to be the useful resource that Wittgenstein probably hoped it to prove, I reply, by no means facetiously, “there is always a first time”, it being indeed for me, personally, the first time that “family resemblance” has struck me now as being just the ticket, as regards greatness of mind. Slippery as my own “three ways” of coping with the Julian problematic may be seen to be, Hume and Hobbes were there before me as role models in this dubious practice that may infect, more generally, greatness of soul itself, the immediate, and traditional, context in which they confront the Julian problematic being more problematic still, in that they confront it, juridically, by way of asking, “Is Julius Caesar rightly convicted of treason, for his breach of his allegiance to the Roman republic?” Going by the following passage in a chapter of the Treatise entitled “Of the objects of allegiance”, no one will ever trump Hume when it comes to finesse in coping, pro and con, with the Julian problematic. Princes often seem to acquire a right from their successors, as well as from their ancestors; and a king who during his lifetime might justly be deemed a usurper; will be regarded by posterity as a lawful prince because he had the good fortune to settle his family on the throne, and entirely change the ancient form of government. Julius Caesar is regarded as the first Roman emperor, while Sylla and Marius whose titles were really the same as his, are treated as tyrants and usurpers.

Distinguishing then from now, Hume should probably be taken to be an outright relativist, answering his query as follows. “Yes, as to then (he

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was a usurper), but no, as to now.” On the other hand, precisely as a temporal relativist, and with the relevant time, when the question is asked, being “now”, the answer now can only be no, and all the more because, we may be surprised to learn, “Julius Caesar is regarded as the first Roman emperor”, no historical error presumably coming into play. As to whether the author of this volume should count Julius Caesar to be a great-souled man, extrapolating my answer from Hume’s answer to his question, I fear that the great philosopher has left me, action-guidingly, in the lurch, but only if deeming Caesar to be a certified, or certifiable, usurper precludes his being great-souled. More to the immediate point, however, reverting to the first sentence of this chapter, and how greatness of mind might relate to epic poetry, Hume’s testimony, more particularly “Julius Caesar is regarded as the first Roman emperor”, delivers an unambiguous, and astonishing verve to my program. Given, of course, Hume’s already important role in this volume, this one, quite whimsical (he was not so regarded, say I) sentence of Hume serving to clinch his especially sophisticated role in this volume, already evident early on in Chapter five. Very much a live issue in Hume’s time, only a few years earlier Hobbes could feel free to charge Caesar with “plain rebellion”, even though various royals of the day might pretend to “acquire a right” to their throne from him as “ancestor”. Complicit himself in these shenanigans, Hume I take, with his one sentence, to confirm my intuition that greatness of mind should be seen as analytically or almost analytically – idiolects and even dialects differing a bit – steeped in epic poetry, Hume’s “first emperor” trope being all of a piece with such fiction, in a fairly comic mode, twitting the readers of the Treatise rather as Caesar, with his Euripidean verses, trifled with the grey beards of the Roman Senate. Not unrelated to this “irony” arguably implicit in greatness of mind itself, I take to be the incongruous “nothing is great” of Aristotle’s great-souled man, and earlier still, Achilles’ grim message from beyond the grave, may be credited with prefiguring it all. If “For contemplation he and valor formed” is how a pre-lapsarian Adam, and his greatness of soul, is characterized by Milton at IV, 297, a post-lapsarian Adam is urged by the archangel Michael to “be lowly wise” at VIII 173. As between pre-lapsarian and post-lapsarian lies the catastrophic Fall of man that Milton will not hesitate, early in Book nine, to characterize as “more heroic” than anything in Homer. What Milton might mean by “heroic”, sticking to this one passage, might remain as perplexingly deviant as any proposition that we might take Hume to be expressing when he writes, “Julius Caesar is regarded as the first Roman emperor,” granting only that it cannot be an obviously

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false proposition that he is, at any rate, asserting. Pursuing such linguistic niceties at all, however, does cause me to blush for having asserted at the outset of this chapter that nothing is fictional about Julius Caesar. As to how, more straightforwardly, one hopes, Hobbes addresses the issue of treason, which I allow to be what the Julian problematic comes to when construed most narrowly, he is at any rate more forthright than Hume when, in ¶ 19 of L Ch. 29, he convicts Caesar of “plain rebellion”. Rebellion it doubtless was, at any rate in so far as something is represented in Euripides’ verses as being a seizure of supreme power, but plain rebellion? No, as Hobbes himself explains (reverting to ¶ 4) after alerting us to the fateful significance of “The Senate and People of Rome” being the official name of the Roman republic, for the name indicates – a political catastrophe here for Hobbes equal to original sin itself – that “neither senate nor people pretended to the whole power” and sovereignty, of Rome, “which first caused the seditions of Tiberius Gracchus . . . and others, and afterwards the wars between the senate and people under Marius and Sylla, and again under Pompey and Caesar”, no “rebellions” presumably figuring during these outright civil wars, “to the extinction of their democracy”, the people ruling after they have defeated the senate under the leadership of Caesar, “and the setting up of monarchy.” Under Augustus? Or, looking ahead to Hume, under Julius Caesar? A lacuna here for us at this most iconic moment in all of political history, going by this astonishing Hobbeseohumean Fregean mode of presentation of the Julian problematic. Are we then to fill this lacuna, prosaically enough, with the first Roman emperor figuring for Hobbes as Augustus? Or shall we rather, with Hobbes, take the monarch of this “monarchy” to emerge when “having won to himself the affections of his army”, Julius Caesar “made himself master both of Senate and people” (¶ 20 of Ch. 29), thereby becoming, of course, the single ruler, and etymologically at least, the monarch of Rome? Or does the word “monarch” in Hobbes’ lexicon entail some juridical legitimacy of office that he finds to be absent in this case? In any event, with the sovereignty of Rome having been divided as between senate and people, and with Julius Caesar becoming master of both, the sovereignty of Rome is now united in him, waiving at any rate sacerdotal considerations that he may have failed to live long enough to secure. Deified a few years after his death by the Roman senate, however, the ceremonial trappings that will accrue to Roman emperors will surely accrue to him also, retroactively, even in narrow jurisprudential terms, assuming that anyone could be so pedantic as to press this issue in the face of his divinity.

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Free to choose bits and pieces of this material, with a lot more doubtless at his disposal, Hume might well formulate several crisp and convincing propositions, fairly different from each other, any one of which might allay our worries today about the content of his problematic sentence. Backing off from his claim that early on it was reasonable to dub Caesar a usurper, he might say, “I meant prior to his being deified”, the independent issue of fictionality remaining in play for me. What it is, then, to “regard Julius Caesar as the first Roman emperor” with Hume, may simply be all of a piece, and even identical, with recognizing that he “made himself master both of Senate and people” with Hobbes, thereby cancelling the original sin of the Roman republic that lay in its divided sovereignty. Belatedly, it is only now that sovereignty unqualified will accrue to Rome, and the Roman republic, in the person of Julius Caesar, precisely at the moment that the Roman republic ceases to exist, the greatness of soul of Caesar being nowhere more fully realized than in this fabulous achievement, in more than one sense of “fabulous”. An epic poem in its own Hobbeseohumean way, this narrative rests, above all, on Hobbes’ preoccupation with divided and undivided sovereignty, and more generally then with political authority, and more generally still, with the problematics of authority itself, all too soon to be challenged by an assassination that would seem to make a mockery of this “fabulous achievement”. But for one thing, crudely, the deification of Caesar, and more profoundly, what Hume is really after. Brutus, Cassius and the rest are just annoying distractions, even Augustus, there being an underlying reality that “men of cool reflection”, Hume especially, his authority here being decisive, having accessed, thanks in no small measure to their own “elevation of mind”. With Julius Caesar acquiring his retroactive right to the title of “first Roman emperor” from all subsequent Roman emperors – not to mention still later Tsars of Russia and Kaisers of Germany – grounding their right to the imperial title from him, this brilliant, jurisprudential conceit of Hume, I am herewith co-opting as a further touchstone of magnanimity almost equal in diablerie to Caesar’s proprietary Euripidean verses, the latter having already been bundled by me with Hobbes’ ¶ 46 and ¶ 48 of Chapter ten, Leviathan. With a sophistication of his own almost equal to that of Hume, Hobbes credits – not the right word, of course – Julius Caesar with bewitching the Roman people after he has led them to victory over the senate, only then, by way of this witchcraft (his word), becoming “master of both senate and people”, his “plain rebellion” then against the Roman republic consisting largely of this second phase, of “deceit”, though here again this word of mine may not be quite right. .

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“Having won to himself the affections of his army” and “because an army is of so great force and multitude as it may easily be made believe they are the people” Julius Caesar “made himself master of . . . the people” as well as of the senate. So it is easy to make someone believe that “the army . . . are the people”? No witchcraft required here? Anyway, what would it be relevantly like for someone to believe that the army are the people? A slippery issue! A hundred and fifty pages earlier (in Curley’s edition of Leviathan) we learn in ¶ 19 of Chapter eleven about something relevant to our puzzle, “that men cannot distinguish without study and great understanding”, which Julius Caesar will exploit to his advantage, this thing being the difference “between one action of many men”, for example, the “one action of all the senators of Rome in killing Catiline,” and “many actions of one multitude,” as in the case of “the many actions of a number of senators in killing Caesar”. There are thus two sorts of killing here, the first featuring a one/many relation, the second a many/one relation, the “great understanding’ required for distinguishing these two sorts of killing being supplied, avant la lettre and close to home by our very own analytical philosophy, near enough, and its familiar logico-linguistic devices, ontology being by no means neglected seeing that our “universe of discourse” explicitly features actions, men and multitudes. Lacking this “study and great understanding”, the Roman people have proved to be no match for Julius Caesar, precociously endowed with those resources. Great news here for my megalopsychical program, and how analytical philosophy has only now been found to figure in regard to it twice over. If, most obviously, analytical philosophy was recognized at the very outset to provide a theoretical framework in which greatness of soul would be conjured with, in terms, most notably, of Hume, Aristotle and Hobbes, poets like Milton and Homer figuring in an auxiliary capacity, this role of analytical philosophy in the large, has now been eked out with a further role, in the small. This further role, in the small, has to do with that “great study and understanding” – it is really quite technically tricky – thanks to the absence of which in the Roman people, Julius Caesar is empowered to bewitch them into surrendering to him – his Euripidean verses being now fully realized – supreme power in the state. Credible? Probably not, it being by no means a routine matter, even for professionals today, merely to get clear about Hobbes’ semantic point. That Hobbes, however, and even maybe, at a remove, Caesar himself was at least shadowing, quite closely, our own logico-linguistic witchcraft, I do not doubt.

CHAPTER NINE THE RING OF GYGES

Going by his Euripidean verses – “Morality and justice all the way, with but one exception: seizure of supreme power” – no one can doubt that morality and justice were transgressed by Julius Caesar when he seized supreme power in Rome. Going, however, by Hobbes’ juridical doctrine of justice, with its emphasis on undivided sovereignty, it is at least doubtful that anyone at all could be convicted of rebelling against the Roman republic, during the years when it was wracked by civil war as between people and senate. The case for the defense of Caesar is thus advised to call upon Thomas Hobbes as its principal witness. Entangled in these casuistical distractions, the so-called Julian problematic really only comes fully into its own when it is seen to be a stalking horse for a Gygesian reading of the Euripidean verses, as much as to say, “Morality and justice all the way, with but one exception: hitting it big with the ring of Gyges”, a narrowly Gygesian greatness of soul thus plausibly emerging as follows. First and most obviously, an unswerving commitment to morality in ordinary life. Demanding enough, this initial requirement will only be suspended if, Gyges’ ring in hand, one has the further can-do whereby one undertakes to perform the still more demanding task of conquering the world. Let the chance of success here be 80%, and a third requirement of greatness of soul might be that in the counter-factual event of failure one will not merely say, “No regrets!” but one will really mean it. Taking Hobbes’ risk-averse reply to the Foole to be that any such sprezzatura or blasé resignation as one goes to one’s death, being simply not naturalistically credible, Gygesian greatness of soul proves once again to be – let it be only contingently – mythical. As to whether Gygesian greatness of soul – I take the concept, as broadly defined, to be coherent enough – is in fact merely mythical, I leave as an open question, empirical verification or falsification of Glaucon’s Hypothesis – “given the ring of Gyges, everyone would be seen to be soon on his way, ever increasing success with the ring being conveniently guaranteed by us researchers (no mere 80% chance of success) to be reaching for supreme power in the state” – being feasible at least in

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principle. No need, for all that, even to posit a real ring of Gyges, Boccaccio’s Calindrino having been duped by two rogues into believing that he has the ring. Putting Gygesian greatness of soul, and precisely what requirements are to be laid upon it, a little to one side, there is the more fundamental issue as to what we are to suppose Glaucon’s challenging hypothesis in the second Book of Plato’s Republic might really come to, looking ahead, as we must, to whether that hypothesis is true or false. Closely related to the hypothesis, surely, is Lord Acton’s immensely sophisticated “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (my emphasis), the truth of which appears to be widely acknowledged, even as Acton’s mantra plays a key role in our thinking about “checks and balances” in our government, not to mention, again, Julius Caesar. Take now Glaucon’s ring of Gyges to serve as a stand-in, or proxy, for Acton’s “absolute power”, and what Glaucon’s hypothesis might then be construed to come to, mutatis mutandis, and with its truth value having already emerged back to front, might then be represented, a little metaphorically, as follows. “Power tends to corrupt, and coming upon the ring of Gyges could not fail to lead to one’s being corrupted absolutely.” Arguing, of course, at cross purposes, Glaucon and Acton might even agree, at least nominally, about a process of moral “corruption” here, their difference consisting rather in how they view morality itself. Distinguishing Glaucon from Glaucon plus – allowing that Glaucon might really be Glaucon plus – the latter I take to be arguing that for all practical purposes – neither Acton’s absolute power nor Glaucon’s ring of Gyges ever being possessed (past, present or future) by any human being – the practical best, though not absolutely best (Acton’s “absolutely” coming into play now also for Glaucon) life for a human being is a moral life. Looking to the absolute, as philosophy must, both Glaucons are urging, with the French, that “the (absolutely) best is the enemy of the (practical) good”, where – the good being contrasted with the right – the absolutely best will consist to no small extent in a transgression of the right, while the practical good will consist to no small extent in hewing to it, the right and the good proving thus to be analytically complicit in each other, despite one’s fear that neither is reducible to the other. Fearing also that the extensive ethnographic data used to support cultural relativism as regards both the right and the good undermine Aristotle’s conviction that all of us everywhere aim by nature at a single, verifiable good life, one cannot fail to be intrigued by a Gygeseo-Actonian neo-Aristotelian approach that takes the ring of Gyges = Acton’s absolute power to reveal counter-factually how everyone, supplied with the ring,

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will be seen not merely to aim at supreme power in the state, for starters, but even – a little auxiliary help lying conveniently at hand – securing that power, cultural relativism be damned. As to whether some of us on seizing supreme power – no quite single good life emerging – might be found to rob from the rich in order to give to the poor suggests a refinement in our Gygeseoactonian program such that, even here, altruistically teleological considerations might trump conventionally deontological ones, motivated in no small way by a need to find loyal auxiliaries who are free of all attachments to the former ruling class. Emerging thus as an unproblematic sovereign of a Hobbesian Commonwealth whose brilliant usurpation of previous authority will be recognized as a convincing “sign of much power” this coup d’état counting as superbly honorable, assuming indeed the cogency of Hobbes’ theory of honor and the honorable, I am inevitably impatient to set in motion – a much greater achievement, this – the task of verifying or falsifying the Gygeseoactonian empirical hypothesis that everyone, given the power to flout with impunity the “side constraints” of morality, would act as Gyges did. Actually, Glaucon does not quite say this at 359b, preferring to say, “anyone who was really a man”, both versions of Gygeseoactonianism being of keen interest to my program, for somewhat different reasons. Of the two versions now on display, the latter, “real man” version is the more immediately relevant when it comes to a theory of greatness of soul, for me anyway, who has already in Chapter 5 registered a preference for Hume’s definition of it as “courage plus”, which was only strengthened in Chapter six by Hobbes plumping for courage also. And all the more (the three-way contest over Megalo, as between Hume, Aristotle and Hobbes, being finally resolved, in Chapter six, in favor of the latter), because the plus in Hume’s courage-plus can now be filled in by Hobbes’ unofficial, extended definition of magnanimity, as enhanced by Gygeseoactonian input. Magnanimity then, finally, is endeavor toward things greatly conducive (as helps) to our ends, combined with courage in facing he greater hindrances to those ends, where these ends consist above all in morality all the way, with but on exception, seizure of supreme power thanks to accessing the ring of Gyges. One may then – we might suppose – live out one’s life in a fully moral yet altogether humdrum mode and, even so, satisfy the (necessary and sufficient) conditions of megalopsychical Gygesism, never having accessed (no surprise here) a ring of Gyges. Maybe so, though one may query at the outset a notion of morality that takes it to be satisfied by an altogether humdrum life, quite apart from what it takes to satisfy a megalopsychical one. Amid diversified worries prompted by my neo-

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Hobbesian megalopsychical Gygesism, the current worry (there are now two, actually, the second being piqued by “humdrum morality”) might almost by itself warrant a Journal of Gygesian Studies, that might serve as a clearing-house for the many, highly interdisciplinary, worries prompted, more fundamentally, by Glaucon’s Hypothesis a restricted version of which, confined to “real men”, appears to engage Glaucon still more personally. And no wonder, seeing that Socrates characterizes Glaucon at the outset of Republic, Book two as andreiotatos aka “a real man” = courageous, in Greek. Comparing these two versions of Gygesism, one restricted to real men, the other unrestricted, applying to us all, the former is the more directly oriented to greatness of soul and, more generally, a high-flown elitism with which it is largely associated in this volume, while the latter is much more relevant to ethics as such, the tension between these two versions haunting my agenda from the start. Add now the Homeric provenance of my program, and how Aristotle takes Greek thumos = Latin animus to be both the most natural of his five varieties of courage and (appealing to Homer) hardly to be distinguished from anger. With anger itself being defined by Aristotle early in the De Anima as “an appetite to return pain for pain,” it is quite surprising that the evident “quid pro quo” here, as in “an eye for an eye”, fails to jolt him into recognizing that if in anger is to be found the most visceral, and hence natural, form of courage, in it also is to be found, even more compellingly, the most natural form of (retributive) justice, as, indeed, fused with courage. Greatness of soul then, or more precisely magnitudo animi, that is to say, greatness of animus, consists, most fundamentally, in this convergence of courage and justice, as most famously expressed in the wrath of Achilles, notably as regards Agamemnon. Poets having been long absent from these pages, this brief return of them will not be supposed to be negligible. Most fundamentally, yes, in the vein of a “genealogy of morals”, though in a more logical vein, we should be disappointed by what does appear to be a decided disconnect as between the magnitudo animi, and wrath, of Achilles and the magnanimity of a dyspeptic Megalo, the visceral convergence of courage and justice that is so important to the former, and even very nearly registered by Aristotle, being erased in the latter. Not so, say I, by way of the following rational reconstruction of NE IV, 3, that is designed to show Aristotle to best advantage. Aped by the vulgar rich throwing their weight around, some more successfully than others, Megalo will even be mortified, on occasion, to find himself mistaken for one of them. Horrors! Resentment if not positive anger must follow, as Megalo will be seen, protectively, to stress the more sophrosunaic

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elements in his character that were earlier trumped by megalopsychical ones closer to those of Achilles. Hence also his dyspepsia, no longer registered by us only subliminally. Looking afresh at his second-order scorn of the first-order scorn heaped on us by the vulgar rich and powerful that we may earlier have taken him to instantiate, altogether otherregardingly, the “intolerance of insult” that was seen to motivate Achilles, altogether self-regardingly, we cannot but be non-plussed. Again subliminally, we knew all along that we really ought to be grateful to Megalo for standing up for us, as a scourge of our tormentors, and were even puzzled, if only subliminally, by our failure to warm to him, even in a self-interested mode. With megalopsychical Gygesism being added only now, tardily, to a portfolio overflowing with “varieties of magnanimity”, another, quite as compelling, and even more belated, figures in the megalopsychical irascibility enshrined in the wrath of Achilles. Achilles and Gyges then, emerge, at opposite poles, as the operative touchstones in megalopsychical research, which itself might be seen as an offshoot of a generalizing of morals featuring “quid pro quo”, most importantly, of course, as it figures in the commercial contracts in which Hobbes and Hume are so famously involved, Glaucon being himself no negligible player in the game, preparing the way for Gyges, with his “I won’t harm you if and only if you don’t harm me.” Doubtless much less important in the larger scheme of things, there is also a non-standard quid pro quo manifested in anger and magnitudo animi which succeeds in viscerally combining courage and justice. Not alas justice as such but only an “inferior” version of it, retributive justice as contrasted with, well, contractual justice that will come to figure as the superior twin. With greatness of soul now found to bestride both kinds of justice, once under the direct auspices of Achilles but again as sponsored almost as directly by Gyges, systematic considerations alone suffice to highlight, trickily, how this fateful fissure in justice itself is reflected very differently in how both justice and courage figure in both irascible magnanimity and in Gygesian magnanimity, a different sort of justice in each case, united with courage in the one case, divided from it in the other.

CHAPTER TEN MEGALO JUNIOR AND THE WISDOM OF LIFE

Section One: Bostock Very much a secondary resource is to be found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric where we learn not only that “older men . . . are small-minded (mikropsychoi) because they have been humbled by life” (1389b 25) but also, and more to the immediate point, that as to the young “they are megalopsychoi for they have not been humbled by life . . . , further there is megalopsychia in thinking oneself worthy of great things, a feeling that belongs to one full of hope” (1389a 11). There is thus a junior as well as a senior version of megalopsychia, thereby attesting to Aristotle’s pluralistic approach to it. Stitched together from two bits of Chs. 13 and 12 of Book two, the passage about Megalo Junior assumes still greater importance when, looking ahead to Megalo Senior in N.E. IV, 3, we learn that he is one who also “thinks himself worthy of great things, being [moreover] worthy of them” (1123b 2). Ah, youth! Having been assigned to read the Nicomachean Ethics, we failed to access the wisdom of life and the double humbling that lay in our future. For it was not merely the great things that were left undone. Preferring the noble (kalon) to the profitable, the young who are dubiously fortunate enough as to reach their later years will come to opt for the profitable over the noble. “[H]umbled by life . . . , [the old] know from experience how hard it is to get [property], and how easy [it is] to lose”. Because even in the Nicomachean Ethics what we aim at most of all, namely eudaimonia, must take into account a whole lifetime, thus ceasing to pursue the kalon can look like very bad news indeed, seeing that eudaimonia consists in realizing the kalon. Much more directly challenging, however, to a putative link between the kalon and eudaimonia arises in connection with a “gaping hole right at the heart of Aristotle’s [ethical] theory” (Bostock 2000, p. 100). “Why should I suppose”, protests Bostock, “that my benefiting others will contribute to my own eudaimonia?” Failing to register in Aristotle’s ethics any such sweeping altruism, most

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readers of Aristotle’s ethics, in modern times, have complained rather of too much self-centeredness. Again reaching outside the ethical writings proper to the Rhetoric, Bostock quite rightly draws on Aristotle’s most extended discussion of the kalon, in Book One, Ch. 9, where it is found, very largely, to consist of benefiting others. That the real action of Aristotle’s ethics lies, squirreled away, in the Rhetoric, has now emerged twice over. Ostensibly challenging Aristotle to answer his question, “Why should I suppose that my benefiting others will contribute to my own eudaimonia?” Bostock continues as follows, in effect inviting scholars like myself to address a further thesis of his. It does not appear that Aristotle has any answer to offer, apart from the (evidently correct) claim that those who are well brought up just will accept that I should take others’ interests into account, as well as his own . . . One, of course, hopes that ‘reason’ can be brought to bear . . . But he does not know how to do so himself, and so preserves a discreet silence . . . . This, of course, leaves us with a question: what is the reason why we should help others? Many take this to be the central question of ethics, and certainly more recent theories do not ignore it. But Aristotle, it appears, has nothing to say.

Two different issues, about the right and the good, are conflated here, and two corresponding questions the first of which has to do with eudaimonia and helping others as our good, while the second (taking the interests of others into account) is rather more deontological. Even granting that reason can show why we ought to respect the interests of others, we cannot assume, after Prichard and Ross, that doing so will contribute to our happiness. Sticking then to the first, clearly thematic question, I shall feel free to bypass the second, extra-territorial one. By no means reduced to silence, yet sticking to my own narrow neck of the woods, I propose to show how reason can be brought to bear on the issue before us not once but twice, first from below in terms of Megalo Junior, but again, only now from above, in terms of Megalo Senior. Key to the first line of argument is that what we aim at by nature is found in the young preferring the noble to the profitable, not the reverse, as with the old who have been humbled by life. Fearing that Bostock might even in this teleological, rather than deontological, context protest that this preference of the young is to be explained by their being well brought up, one needs to notice that the dialectical context is overdetermined, being at least as strongly oriented toward the type of audience – young, old or those in their prime – that a rhetorician is undertaking to persuade. Are the old here, and those in their prime, also supposed to be well brought up? No,

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and seeing that over the years Aristotle’s Rhetoric has proved very useful as a hands-on, how-to manual, I take this very success to provide empirical evidence that not least, in his racy account of the young, appeals to the noble can strike a deep chord in their nature. That this nature of theirs may come to be warped by hardships that lie ahead, only goes to help in elucidating what Aristotle means by “what we aim at by nature.” Hardly less problematic is what Bostock must mean by “well brought up”, namely “what is conventionally taken to be well brought up”. Contrast that with what he means by “the good life”, namely “the life that is really good” when he elucidates Aristotle’s use of the Greek expression “eudaimonia”. Simply by acknowledging a distinction between what is good by nature as opposed to what is merely good by convention, one has in play a framework in which Aristotle can feel at ease. How Megalo Senior might supply a line of argument of his own, applying even to the rest of us mutatis mutandis, smacking again of the more informal wisdom of life, may be glimpsed in the following passage at NE 1124b where in helping people one is seen to be displaying his superiority over them. He is fond of conferring benefits, but is ashamed of receiving them because the former is a mark of superiority and the latter of inferiority. He returns a service done to him with interest, since this will put the original benefactor into his debt in turn.

Not a pretty picture? Maybe so. Assume with me, however, that Aristotle has been channeling Bostock. This then is the result, thanks to a new concept coming into play, namely hyperocké or superiority. Poignant evidence that when it comes to the “x is engaged in benefiting y” relation, a palpable inferiority attaches to the one on the receiving end of it is afforded first-hand, at any rate to the great-souled man himself, when – to his bewildered surprise perhaps – he fights hard to conceal blushes of shame overtaking him on the rare occasion when he is forced into the y slot. Fearing that his blushes have been noticed, it should be no surprise that Megalo will henceforth flee the presence of his benefactor. Nor that the latter, having failed to notice the blushes, should complain loudly of his ingratitude. Doubtless too crude to be a satisfactory response to Bostock’s challenge, the thesis that eudaimonia consists in lording it over people who are content to take their subservience to be a relatively small price to pay for lavish benefits – putting the case in its most unattractive terms – does succeed – add a cosmetic nuance here and there – in technically resolving the issue.

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Much more than merely cosmetic, there is a further consideration that will clinch the issue even in broadly psychological terms. But first one must disambiguate the question, “Why should I suppose that benefiting others will contribute to my own eudaimonia?” as between (a) benefiting them in a fairly aretaic mode, and (b) in an outright enkratic one where (again crudely) pleasure is featured in (a), irksome duty in (b), while being well brought up is seen to consist above all in acquiring a relish for helping people, as in mowing the widow’s lawn.

Section Two: McDowell Finding the “complacency” of Aristotle to be “strange” (p. 51) in feeling free simply to ignore the immoralist challenge of Thrasymachus and Callicles, Bostock has opened our eyes to how they have been subtextually selected to serve as a foil for Megalo Senior whom they will not hesitate to greet as being au fond one of their own if only because he can readily be felt to meet them more than half-way. Designed thus as an antidote to them in the way of homoeopathic medicine, Megalo has been subliminally diagnosed by his critics to be infected by their poison. But only subliminally, for recognizing him to be as ferociously altruistic as he is egoistic, they are seen to shrink from posing the question that really bothers them: “How exactly does Megalo Senior stand in regard to what we take to be morality?” Although Bostock has been too sophisticated in formulating his own challenge even to glance at the visceral worry, “But what’s in it for me?”, there is a discussion touching on it by McDowell that unexpectedly bears on Megalo Junior and the kalon, notably as regards the distinction between the noble and the profitable. McDowell (1998 [1980] pp. 10-11) invites us to consider a dispute on the following lines One party (X) says that a human being should exercise certain virtues, say justice and charity. The other party (Y) says, “Nonsense! That’s a wishywashy ideal suitable only for contemptible weaklings. A real man looks out for himself.

Very much a real man or aner as contrasted with a mere “human being” or anthropos on behalf of whom X might be taken to be principally speaking, Megalo Senior is on record as being officially on the side of X rather than Y. Undertaking to split the difference between them in their dispute, Y might now say, “In light of the distinction between anthropos and aner, I have already conceded, a little tactlessly, that your position does define a suitable ideal for most people, while going simply by your

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words, you might concede in turn that I am entitled to see in them a loophole for an aner like myself.” Reminding Y of McDowell’s own words having to do with a “genuine dispute with the recognizable topic ‘How should a human being behave?’”, X will insist that Y’s aner must also count as an anthropos. Entertaining a different worry, McDowell fears that, with “Y’s reasons”, being “reasons of selfish interest,” X and Y may be taken to be arguing past each other, with the one appealing to a moral “should” and the other a prudentially self-interested one. Another, further worry of my own is informed by the life wisdom of a poet. Taunted by his wife, a certified aner protests, “I dare do all that may become a man”, whereupon Lady Macbeth famously rebukes him, “All, my dear lord, all? Not so. When you durst do it, then you were a man.” A test case here as to what becomes a real man, notably as regards this point about daring or what one durst do, I submit that in addition to the two familiar sources of normativity, one moral (the king’s here “in double trust”), the other prudential (“If we should fail”) to both of which Macbeth is keenly responsive, there is a third, largely forgotten source of normativity (“When you durst do it”) enshrined in courage in the absence of which even the lure of the crown would have failed to propel Macbeth to the foul deed. As a self-styled real man, McDowell’s Y might be expected to be answerable also to this third source of normativity, and thus even in the restricted context of his quarrel with X, he can be heard taunting him rather in the vein of Lady Macbeth: “A real man like yourself, prating on about justice and charity, you should be ashamed to sound just like those weaklings who lack the courage to stand up for themselves.” Stung by the reproach and waylaid by considerations quite different from familiar “reasons of selfish interest”, that he was well prepared to confront, X might also, to his bewildered surprise, find himself struggling to conceal blushes of shame that might well impair his ability to stand up for himself in his quarrel with Y. Seen to be an independent source of normativity, courage acquires that axiological status by serving still more directly as a primary source of the kalon than even benefiting others, though one would never guess as much by relying simply on Aristotle’s account of the kalon in Rhetoric, book one, chapter nine. How the blushes of X may be rather different from those of Megalo, could be expected if courage fails to be a strong suit of X, with X being thus only ironically credited with being a real man. Taking Macbeth to be himself a megalopsychos, his shame in the face of his wife’s taunting, in connection with courage, needs to be added to the shame of Megalo Senior in the very different context of being forced to seek the help of others. No longer forbiddingly out of reach as an almost

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alien form of life, megalopsychia will, even so, take quite a bit of getting used to. Looking for a link between these two modes of shame, there is always this in Thucydides, 1, 5-6, “[In the old days] the leading pirates were powerful men, acting both out of self-interest and in order to support the weak among their own people.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN OSTRACISM

Imagine a very close possible world where Aristotle adds the following sentence to N.E. IV, 3. “If my moral paragon in this chapter will feel most at home in a mixed regime, albeit one that veers a bit more in an oligarchical direction than in a democratic one, any serious shift in that regime toward democracy will be liable to render him a contested site for being ostracized.” Admittedly distressing for Aristotle, an outcome in which Megalo is in fact ostracized by a not unreasonable majority is one that he is prepared to countenance as falling at the outer limits of a rough and ready sort of political justice, going by his highly nuanced discussion of it in his Politics, Book three, Chapter 13 where “the argument in favor of ostracism is based upon a kind of political justice” (1284b 17). No longer deplored by our captious scholars in that nearby world, Megalo will be taken by most of them in their stride, hesitating to join in the rising clamor for his outright expulsion, though a few of his most rabid critics of the last century will be seen to join the fray. My hope is that these really quite scholarly remarks, opening the way to a possible worlds hermeneutics for classical texts, will help make our own 21st century one such possible world. In their failure to address Aristotle’s ethics more directly in terms of his political philosophy, our classical scholars might be reminded as to how Hobbes’ Leviathan is designed, to no small degree, to reverse that emphasis. Pursuing Aristotle’s distinction in his Politics as between being a good man and a good citizen, Megalo’s failure to qualify as the latter in a more democratic mixed regime, may even impugn, in those uncomfortable circumstances, his otherwise assured status as a good man – sticking now to Aristotle’s own sophisticated politico-ethical axiology – and it is thus that most of the grumbling associated with his critics might be accommodated within the “reflective equilibrium” so characteristic of Aristotelian phronesis. Most of the grumbling? But for one textually compelling consideration, positively flaunted by Aristotle in his thematic discussion of ostracism.

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Chapter Eleven [L]egislation is necessarily concerned only with those who are equal in birth and capacity; and that for men of pre-eminent virtue there is no law – they are themselves a law. Anyone would be ridiculous who attempted to make laws for them: they would probably retort what, in the fable of Antisthenes, the lions said to the hares, [Where are your claws and teeth?] when in the council of the beasts the latter began haranguing and claiming equality for all (1284a 11-19).

Tweaking the text just a bit in “my very close possible world”, after the mention of Antithesnes, we read, “the lions said to the hares, [Where are your claws and teeth?] baring their own.” Simply bringing this alarming passage, even untweaked, to bear on NE IV, 3, the grumbling over it could only rise to a still keener pitch of vilification. Distinguish then Aristotle’s official doctrine of magnanimity sticking to NE IV, 3, from his outright claws and teeth variant of it, both tweaked and untweaked. “But we suspected this all along,” our grumblers might justifiably protest, even conceding to their critics that only now, with this mention of claws and teeth, and so-called “men of pre-eminent virtue” who are applauded by Aristotle for being beyond the law of the state, are their misgivings over Megalo fully justified, and, all the more, the more Megalo is supposed to be one of these men of pre-eminent virtue who, going by Aristotle’s own words, must either be ostracized or, something quite unlikely, acclaimed by all and sundry as their king. Presumed thus to be, at least, a cut or two axiologically below these men of pre-eminent virtue, at the upper end, Megalo is placed awkwardly, even so, closer to them than to the rest of us ordinary folk, at the lower end. Awkwardly for him but also for Aristotle whom I take to be fairly out of his depth here, witness his failure to grasp the hard to find link – available to me only thanks to Hume’s focusing on self-praise – between Megalo’s self-promotion and the charge of ingratitude, though we all “knew” somehow that explaining this putative ingratitude would take us deep into what Megalo was all about. As to the clash between Aristotle’s Megalo with his self-promotion and Hume’s man of honor with his wellconcealed pride, Megalo came out distinctly ahead, though the emergence now, much more trenchantly, in Aristotle of a claws and teeth version of magnanimity, associated with a man of pre-eminent virtue, who is a law unto himself, strikes a Nietzschean note that I really ought to have sounded, in connection with Aristotle, much earlier in this volume, however suggestive of Nietzsche my mention of Alexander the Pig at the very end of Chapter four may have been. Sounded strongly indeed in Hume’s epigraph to this book, and thus also in my many references to this epigraph, the Nietzschean note really

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only comes fully into its own in Chapter seven with Hobbes’ discussion of unjust acts that he allows to be “honorable”, notably the overthrow of the Roman republic by Julius Caesar, and, closer to home, the recent overthrow of the Caroline monarchy of Oliver Cromwell. As to the former, in whom Hobbes and Hume have been shown alike to be much absorbed, it is his Euripidean verses – “Morality all the way, with but one exception: seizure of supreme power” – always on Julius Caesar’s lips, according to Cicero, that I take to express paradigmatically not merely a narrowly Julian version of magnanimity, but, much more generally, and profoundly, a megalopsychical Gygesism that some of Megalo’s detractors may now, in retrospect, credit themselves with having suspected, albeit only subliminally, all along. In a much less impressionistic vein, and even technically deontological one, deontologists have undertaken to back up a closely related suspicion, most famously, in their critique of Utilitarianism, and though Aristotelians have succeeded in distancing themselves from utilitarianism, anyone interested in pursuing this bread and butter issue in academic ethics further must not expect me to join in. This disparaging note aside, locking my megalopsychical adventure, incongruously, into the familiar routine of academic ethics has only rarely been absent from my mind.

CHAPTER TWELVE CONCLUSION

As to each of my pet philosophers, there has emerged an exegetical novelty that serious readers of this volume will want to cling to through thick and thin. Regarding Aristotle himself, it is my “Claws and Teeth” re-reading of NE IV 3 that surfaced, belatedly, in my previous chapter. Featured in Hume has been less his chapter “Of greatness of mind” in the Treatise and rather more an extended exploration of how that theme is driven underground in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, by no means neglecting its spill-over in the sinister episode of the Welsh Bards in his still later History of England. Finally, on a purely technical level, there is Hobbes’ crisp “philosophical analysis” of greatness of mind, or magnanimity, as “contempt of little helps and hindrances”, though Hobbes’ official definition of magnanimity will soon be subtextually superseded, in my rational reconstruction of his sleight of hand here. For with pusillanimity and magnanimity surfacing as logical contraries of each other, and with the former (simplifying) emerging as “Desire of things that conduce but a little to our ends”, aka akrasia, the latter comes to piggy-back upon it as “desire of things that conduce greatly to our ends”, whereupon – this indeed is a big payoff – an otherwise swashbuckling contempt of little helps and hindrances comes to undergo a deflationary outcome. A veritable cameo of Hobbesian analytical finesse here! The basic point is almost too simple. Anyone engaged in successful endeavor toward things greatly conducive to his ends cannot but be seen from outside as brushing aside not only the little helps that you may be supplying him toward those ends but also the little hindrances that I have impudently placed in his path. Thus the traditional notion of noblesse oblige with which greatness of soul has been construed, Hobbes is bent on exorcising. Much better then to construe it in terms of Yankee can-do! Inescapable now should surely be this subtextual motif in which Hume and Hobbes alike have been found to be keenly engaged, and if it were not for fear of telling tales out of school, I might be heard to confide that the underlying import of magnanimity consists in raison d’état, and that this

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volume might well be viewed as itself subtextually a Book of Secrets. If over the course of many pages I have taxed my readers with a dauntingly rebarbative mix of what has been, on the one hand, demandingly exegetical and, on the other hand, challengingly analytical, not to mention interludes that have been distractingly belletristic, the bait has always been arcana imperii for the very few with the wit to cotton on to this secret. In a populist vein, however, with a respectful acknowledgement of hoi polloi, I really ought to have showcased not merely the battle royale that Aristotle wins over Hume, as advertised by me in my Introduction but also the much deeper battle royale that, in an anachronistic second round, the moderns win over the ancients when Hobbes in turn trumps Aristotle whose own lapse, still more egregious than that of Hume, trifles with logic itself. If Hobbes is seen at his very best in trading on the contrariety of magnanimity with pusillanimity, Aristotle is seen to be floundering with the corresponding contrariety of megalopsychia with micropsychia if only because, with the former entailing all of the moral virtues, the latter by rights ought to entail their total absence. To the contrary, although somewhat grudgingly, Aristotle is vexed by the prospect of someone who roughly qualifies as to ordinary moral virtue who yet appears indifferent to honor. Nor does he have recourse to a verdict according to which this bloke is simply glaringly lacking as to the moral virtue of philotimia – to the point of vice itself – that Aristotle is canvassing in the immediate vicinity of this discussion. Two great servings here of precisely the red meat that sporting fans everywhere always crave. Corresponding to Hume’s absurd hearty pride that is nonetheless well-concealed is Aristotle’s ultimate in the small mindedness of mikropsychia that logic itself appears to him to discern in that odd bloke who, even while one credits him with ordinary moral virtues strangely fails to claim the dollop of honor to which his manifest virtue is obviously entitled, quite as if he were a Christian avant la lettre. No mere fun and games here in either case; there are deep issues in which all three of my designated philosophers are seen to be interactively engaged, and which, by pursuing them a bit, I can claim – a poor thing but my own – to be launching a modest research venue in academic ethics. Thus Hume in Section 8 of his Enquiry recoups as follows. Nobody finds fault with Maurice Prince of Orange for his reply to one who asked him whom he esteemed the first general of the age, “The Marquis of Spinola”, said he, “is the second.” Though it is observable that the self-praise implied is here better implied than if it had been directly expressed without any cover or disguise.

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If Hume can thus converge to this extent with Aristotle, I should expect the latter in turn to be no less resourceful in converging with Hobbes. Return to Hobbes’ don’t-care, almost throw-away definition of pusillanimity as (again simplifying) “Desire of things that conduce but a little to our ends”. If only because nothing is at stake here, Hobbes will be readily allowed a free pass. Add, however, the by no means equally unproblematic thesis that pusillanimity figures for Hobbes as the logical contrary of magnanimity, Hobbes pulls a highly substantive rabbit out of his “don’t care” hat by exploiting the very logic of contrariety that Aristotle so grossly fumbled. So there you have it, in a nut shell, the central analytical thesis of my book, alas entangled with an exegetical commitment that Hobbes scholars will be keen to scout. Sticking to straight philosophy, and focusing on Hobbes’ own, admittedly subtextual rabbit “Desire of things that conduce greatly to our ends”, the last two words sound a Hobbseototelian, teleological alarm that Hobbes was doubtless keen to entrust to a “message in a bottle” that has only now reached our shores. As to verifying “what we aim at by nature” in the teeth of cultural relativism, the ring of Gyges emerges as the inevitable touchstone in the almost certain absence of which morality emerges as the default position of the good (albeit not the best) life, given that the fundamental principle of practical, action-guiding, reason consists in maturely recognizing that the (feasible) good is the enemy of what is (in theory) best. According then to Gygesian magnanimity, what we aim at by nature – seizure of supreme power in the state – is far removed from the moral life which nonetheless we must cling to in resigning ourselves to what Christians have all along, through a glass darkly, acknowledged to be “our fallen natures”. Unexpectedly mounting the strongest argument in support of the moral life precisely by relishing its Gyges-sponsored violation, Glaucon is merely indulging in the privilege of youth when, impatient to “have it all; he chafes at the sober compromise as to that “all” on which morality insists. Most trenchant, however, prove to be the verses of the tragic poet Euripides – paraphrased as “Morality and justice all the way with but one exception, seizure of supreme power” – ceaselessly on the lips of Julius Caesar, according to Cicero, that inject the Gygesian theme into political reality. There being thus no hugger-mugger secrecy in his intent to overthrow the Roman republic in his ultra-Hobbesian “contempt of little helps and hindrances”, an iconic Julian version of magnanimity can hardly fail to also pre-empt center stage in this volume. That Hume can even be found to credit Caesar with being the first Roman emperor, quite as if the

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“little hindrance” of his assassination might be simply glossed over, attests more than anything else to how a fantasy of omnipotence might attach to a mere human being. Leaving Bernard Williams’ thesis almost entirely intact, as to “the limits of philosophy”, when it comes to thick evaluative concepts, I have been discreet enough as to urge merely, over the full length of this book, that an exception can be made for greatness of mind, the specific thickness of which is grounded in “the heroic poem” as most compellingly displayed in Homer and Milton, the latter especially thanks to his very improbable success in idiosyncratically recycling it in the modern world. Quite technically then, my extended argument plumping for Gygesian magnanimity, and addressed very narrowly to a thesis by Williams, can be profitably seen as being idiosyncratically sign-posted by five names, namely Aristotle with his problematic chapter, Hume and Hobbes, and by no means least Julius Caesar and Milton, where one must not suppose that these last two can be treated as mere stand-ins for other notables, the verses of Euripides providing an indispensable dialectical link between Caesar and Gyges who jointly answer to the heroic poem.

THE SMILE OF ACHILLES AND MILTON’S EVE: AN EPILOGUE

Long since acknowledged in this volume as the very avatar of magnanimity, Achilles has alas hitherto figured in it only intermittently. Much too late now to make proper amends, I can at least in these few pages, putting aside his principal role in war, linger a bit over a moment when he is benignly, and even urbanely at ease. In particular, setting the smile of Achilles – prompted by a challenge to him posed by that impudent puppy Antilochus at the Funeral Games, in honor of Patroclus – over against his famous wrath, will inevitably strike one as risible. That is only to be expected when one contrasts the serious, even tragic business of war with a comic counterfeit of it, as displayed in the intense passions aroused by athletic competitions, nowhere more vividly depicted, the latter quite as much as the former, as in the Iliad itself. As to the smile? Well, uncannily replaying the clash of Titans in the first Book of the poem, Antilochus dares to cast Achilles, in the next to last Book, in the role of the “heavy” that was assigned to Agamemnon. But that is the least of it, and by no means disrespectful of Achilles. Impossibly droll, however, and absurdly presumptuous but only if one might take it at all seriously, Antilochus clownishly undertakes to reprise the world-shaking, historic role of Achilles in standing up for the deontological rights of the individual over against the power of the state. Defying Achilles by way of a mock reprise of the latter’s defiance of Agamemnon, Antilochus concedes that there is a fundamental jurisprudential difference in the two cases. In fact his case is the stronger, for he can appeal to the momentous precedent set by Achilles the authority of which alas, while attested to, self-servingly enough, by Achilles and Antilochus, may hardly extend, as yet, farther afield. Often the merest caricature of magnanimity, authority itself might be emerging now, again too late, as what magnanimity, and more especially, as is only to be expected, the magnanimity of Achilles is all about, and where for any x such that x is an authority figure, there is a y such that y is a great-souled person if and only if x is teleologically identical with y. Because the predicate “x is teleologically identical with y” will be allowed to be true even in non-

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extensional contexts, it need be no more problematic than non-extensional contexts elsewhere. Precisely by appealing to his momentous precedent, Antilochus is querying Achilles’ current authority to over-rule his own narrow, deontological claim to the prize (a mare) and award it to Eumelus who, bad luck aside, everyone agrees to be very much the better horseman. Although every sport is teleologically committed to the normative principle, “Let the best man win”, Achilles alone sets about implementing it, and for that reason, quite by itself, attests to his paradigmatic magnanimity. It is thus, finally, only by passing the analytical buck well beyond Hume, Hobbes and even Aristotle, all the way back to Achilles as its designated avatar that the “primal scene” of analytical ethics is seen to consist, in equal measure, of Homeric magnanimity, epitomized by Achilles, and the clash between deontological and teleological normativity, as realized twice over, once in all seriousness in Achilles versus Agamemnon, but again, in a parody of it, in Antilochus versus Achilles. With Achilles opting for deontology in the one case but plumping for teleology in the other, it all depends, of course, on whether he is occupying the x slot or y slot in the “x is subject to the authority of y” relation. Thanks to these two episodes, serving as bookends of the Iliad, the poem can be read as a Bildungsroman, featuring the moral education of Achilles, with Antilochus providing quite a bit more than comic relief. And now for the smile. Assured that Achilles will not wish to sully the memory of Patroclus by squabbling with the son of Nestor, garrulous old man as he may be, Antilochus proposes to split the difference between the two of them. As the official prize, the mare goes to Antilochus, but Achilles is, of course, free – and it is only at this point that sheer cheekiness comes into play – to bestow on Eumelus, out of the ample treasure at his disposal, whatever token of his high regard for him might capture his fancy, thereby slyly pressuring Achilles to reach rather deeper into his own pockets than he would otherwise be inclined to do. In response Achilles can only smile the manifest content of which – “You impudent puppy! It is only your being the son of Nestor that gives you this free pass” – occludes even such sinister, latent content as this. “Beware of flattering yourself on having, let it be only on this one occasion, bested the great Achilles, lest he yield to the strong temptation, with you foremost in mind, of declaring, ‘Henceforth, no more Mr. Nice Guy!’” Finally, there is a third, much more theoretical gloss on the smile than is delivered by either its manifest content or its sinister, latent version of it that we may take to lie soberly, and even applaudingly, midway between

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the two. “Congratulations on your ready wit in recognizing how my world-shaking defiance of Agamemnon provides you with a profound, jurisprudential basis for your own equally deontological protest against my teleological decision to award the mare to Eumelus as the better horseman. Moreover, I salute you for the compromise you have proposed, seeing that my officially awarding you the mare deontologically, will be recognized by all the world as sticking the knife that much deeper into Agamemnon, if only by suggesting that, as I am yielding to you, Agamemnon should have yielded to me.” If even the great Achilles failed to confer, properly, on Eumelus what we can define, quite technically, as the Achilles Award – all merely deontological considerations being trumped by teleological ones confined to pure merit – it is scarcely a wonder that, ever after, sports stadiums have felt the need to register somewhere on their premises, albeit only in very small letters, the following inscription. “Not until another, with the authority of Achilles, should come to preside over a sporting event, can we expect that the Achilles Award – aspirationally revered by sportsmen, and women, everywhere – will have any chance of being actually implemented.” Thwarted in his effort to display a peculiarly high-grade version of magnanimity toward Eumelus, where indeed the teleological best, as expressed by the word Aristeia that classical scholars use to designate this greatest of all sporting events, proves indeed to be the enemy of the deontological good, Achilles succeeds, quite astonishingly, in doubling down on both versions of axiology, and magnanimity, not to mention his hitting a mean between the two of them in precociously anticipating Aristotle’s phronesis. It is thus that, to Achilles above all, even today, one must turn if one merely seeks to envisage what it might be like to reconcile the competing claims of these two pet parameters of analytical ethics – deontology and teleology – the latter of which warms the very cockles of magnanimity, while the former, taken to be the special preserve of modern ethics, drives our hero to a state of sheer fury the merest echo of which, in Antilochus, provides us even today with a democratized role-model that invites us to formulate our own resistance to constituted authority by way of the modest slogan, “Achilles non sum sed Antilochus” (No Achilles, I am only Antilochus). In the name of academic ethics, broadly conceived, I feel confident that my colleagues in this enterprise are prepared to authorize me to announce the funded establishment of an Antilochus Award, details soon to be circulated. That the deontological drive in Antilochus and Achilles alike, should be sponsored by Homeric magnanimity – going at any rate by Aristotle’s early definition of it in Posterior Analytics, 97b 18-19, as

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“intolerance of insult” or “not brooking dishonor” – I take to supply us with a final irony that will require some time to absorb. Admittedly too late, again, my sponsoring of an Antilochus award will be recognized as penance for the almost sweeping elitism that infects this volume. Pursue the point just a bit further. Taken by Aristotle to constitute the magnanimity of a Homeric hero like Ajax, this “intolerance of insult” Hobbes will find in “most men,” who “hazard their life than not be revenged” for “all signs of . . . contempt . . . by deed, word, countenance or gesture.” (Leviathan, Ch. 15, ¶ 20). Nothing could be more anti-elitist than attributing to “most men” the “intolerance of insult” that characterizes the Homeric hero. Elitism being only one source of embarrassment for me in this volume, flagrant sexism lays on me a still heavier burden, only one woman hitherto figuring therein, namely Milton’s Eve, and even then, fleetingly. Trumping Achilles’ superb encounter with the right and the good is found to be, again, Milton’s Eve, and her still more compressed encounter with them, in her indictment of God. What forbids he but to know, Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? Such prohibitions bind not. So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching for the fruit, she plucked, she ate; Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe That all was lost.

So there you have it, all of Paradise Lost squeezed into eight lines of verse (Book 9, 758-760 as eked out by 780-784) than which no greater poetry, say I, can be found anywhere. All now lost, with Adam absent from the scene, his will be a supererogatory role for the rest of the poem. As for the long sought hero of the poem, she emerges now as Milton’s Eve, trumping Satan and Achilles alike. For if the latter defies Agamemnon, Eve defies God, and as for Satan, he has nothing to compare with her serious philosophical argument avant la lettre that anticipates by many centuries recent controversy over the right and the good. But argument also more immediately, as in Milton’s “argument/Not less but more heroic than the wrath/of stern Achilles”, presumably the “Anger and just rebuke and judgment given” by God over “man’s first disobedience”, committed by Eve, itself “more heroic” in her megalopsychical insistence that she could not be disobedient if she tried, since “such prohibitions bind

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not”, words that one would expect somewhere in Milton’s prose addressed to royal decrees. No more radical than familiar Satanism, my own neo-Satanism is free to concede to anti-Satan scholars that he is hardly more than a blowhard if they will only allow in turn that a much deeper version of him is to be found in Milton’s Eve. As to how anti-Satan scholars propose now to justify the ways of God toward Eve, I await with bated breath. More soberly, however, I await the verdict of Milton scholars across the board as to how we might all respond to the fact that if it is Milton’s Eve who upstages Satan in the last chapter of my book, it was the Son of God who upstaged him in the first, three major figures being featured in my neoSatanism, Satan himself most crudely, yet deeper far Milton’s Eve and, again, the Son of God and his warning an Old Testament despot lest he should be “blasphemed without defense”, notably by Eve herself insisting, “Such prohibitions bind not,” the “greatness of mind” of which a prelapsarian Adam by no means failed to anticipate in Book 8 of the poem, line 256. Return finally to Bernard Williams’ worry about thick and thin evaluation concepts that has (also) and in its own way shadowed this volume. Twice over in regard to Achilles first and Milton’s Eve second, the thick, problematic concept greatness of soul has been found to interact with and even dominate the thin staples of analytical ethics today, namely the right and the good, where Kant is seen to sponsor the former and Aristotle the latter. Resigned to a non-negotiable impasse between the two of them, ethicists today may be surprised to find in the reemergence of greatness of soul a felicitous tertium quid that bids fair to break the deadlock. Non-plussed by this counter-intuitive turn of events—a thick evaluative concept coming to the rescue of two analytically thin ones—Williams might even relish the outcome.

SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, with an English translation by H. Rackham, Harvard University Press, 1934. —. The Art of Rhetoric, with an English translation by John Henry Freese, Harvard University Press, 1947. —. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volumes One and Two, The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton University Press, 1991. Beam, Craig, “Hume and Nietzhe: Naturalists, Ethicists, Anti-Christians”, Hume Studies, 1996, Vol. 22. Benardete, José. “Macbeth’s Last Words”, Interpretation, Summer 1970. —. “One Word of the Sea: Metaphysics in Wallace Stevens”, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Fall 1996. Bostock, David, Aristotle’s Ethics, OUP, 2000. Calé, Luisa, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: Turning Readers into Spectators, Oxford University Press, 2006. Churchill, Winston, A Roving Commission, Thornton Butterworth, 1930. Cicero, De Officiis, with an English translation by Walter Miller, Harvard University Press, 1961. Collins, Jeffrey, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, OUP, 2006. Curzer, H.J., “Aristotle’s Much Maligned Megalopsychos”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1991, Vol. 69. Danielson, Dennis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton, WileyBlackwell, 2002. Dryden, John, “A Discourse Concerning Satire”, in The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909. Engberg-Pederson, Troels, Aristotle’s Theory of Moral Insight, OUP, 1983. Fish, Stanley, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, London, 1967. Goodman, Nelson, The Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1968. Hardie, W.F.R., “Magnanimity in Aristotle’s Ethics”, Phronesis 1978, Vol. 23. Held, D.T.D., “Megalopsychia in Nicomachean Ethics IV”, Ancient Philosophy, 1993, Vol. 13.

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Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley, Hackett Publishing Company, 1994. Homer, The Iliad, with an English translation by A.T. Murray, Harvard University Press, 1963. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, OUP, 1958. —. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp, OUP, 1998. —. The History of England, ed. William B. Todd, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983. Kaplan, Robert D., Monsoon, Random House, 2010. Kristjánsson, Kristján, Justifying Emotions: Pride and Jealousy, Routledge, 2002. Macaulay, Babington, Lord Clive, Maynard, Merrill, 1889. Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince, trans. William J. Connell, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005. MacIntyre, Alasdair, A Short History of Ethics, (New York: MacMillan), 1966. McDowell, John, “The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics”, reprinted in McDowell, Mind, Value, & Reality, Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 3-22. Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge, W.W. Norton Company, 1993. Raleigh, Sir Walter Alexander, Milton, Knickerbocker Press, 1900. Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Sparshott, Francis, Taking Life Seriously: A Study of the Argument of the Nicomachean Ethics, University of Toronto Press, 1994. Stocker, Michael, Plural and Conflicting Values, OUP, 1990. —. Valuing Emotions, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America Vol. 2, Aeterna, 2011. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner, Penguin Group, 1954. Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1985.