Episode 147: Aristotle on Wisdom and Incontinence

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 147 is something like, what is self control? And we're continuing our discussion from way back in episode five to now. Read more of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics this time books 6 and 7. You can join the discussion to get the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, incontinent about some things, but not incontinent in general.

0:40 Wes: And where are you?

0:41 Mark: In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:44 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, not a fool, but acting like a fool. In Boston, Massachusetts.

0:50 Seth: This is Dylan Casey, temperate yet intemperate in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:55 Mark: So this is like one of the famous parts of this book. Well, first we were all supposed to listen to the old episode to continue that discussion. And I had in mind criticisms we've got since then and the feeling like, oh, we've gotten so much more responsible now and we talk more about the text. And it's true there are not a lot of quotes thrown around in that old episode. But man, in that old episode we actually all had stuff to get off our chest. We weren't all emptied out like we are now and just have to use the book as the primary springboard. There's a lot of good dialectical back and forth and it seemed.

1:28 Wes: What do you mean? Like personal stuff.

1:30 Mark: It was our first thing about ethics. So we're trying to get out what virtue is and what our whole understanding of a mature way to approach philosophical ethics is. And so I brought in methodological conservatism and things that don't really have anything directly to do with Aristotle. And I liked it. I don't feel like apologizing for it at all.

1:46 Seth: Yeah, I listened to it for the first time while I was driving back from Gen Con and actually my son and Mark's son who were in the car with me, listened to it, the whole thing as well. And, and I was struck by how clearly you guys were at the beginning of the podcast in the sense that you were still thinking about the activity of doing a philosophy podcast. And the anti academic aspect of it was very ripe in a way that is still true, but not as foot forward as we have been. It was endearing, it was nice.

2:20 Mark: It sounds like you're referring to our disdain of the issues of translation, whereas now we've done so much Aristotle that, yeah, we sure as hell better talk about phronesis versus hexis versus.

2:32 Seth: Yeah, I felt like you seem to have embraced that in a way that you certainly were not interested in embracing then.

2:40 Mark: Yeah. Repetition.

2:42 Wes: When did you embrace that? Like, the last time we.

2:46 Mark: Well, when it's a central thing of the text, particularly phronesis.

2:51 Wes: You just don't like the word incontinence.

2:55 Mark: Being able to call this episode Aristotle on incontinence, I think is going to be great. Is that translated in some other way? In some of the other.

3:04 Seth: Well, and Sachs doesn't translate it as incontinence. He translates it as dissipation.

3:11 Mark: Okay, so what's the point of this reading? Why are we talking about incontinence here?

3:16 Wes: Actually, let's just say what translations we're using. Since Dylan just mentioned Sachs, I read

3:22 Seth: the Irwin for the first time. In terms of its vocabulary, it's fairly conventional in that he uses a lot of the standard Latin words that you're used to hearing. One of the things I liked about it is that with his own words, he breaks up the text in a kind of outline in a very unobjectionable way in that. This section does this, and this section says that with five or six words, which helps a lot.

3:47 Wes: So I'm using a translation I found online, F.H. peters. It's from 1893. And I actually looked at every translation I could find out there. I honestly thought this was the most readable. I also looked a lot at the ancient Greek, and I wish I had had a Loeb to do that, you know, with the English on the one side and Greek on the other, because I just found, like, a big text file that had all the Greek, but my English version doesn't have the line numbers.

4:13 Seth: Don't you live in a place that has a college or that you could go to their bookstore? You live in Boston, man.

4:20 Wes: I mean, yeah, I could have bought. Well, I've forsworn buying any books because I'm moving and I had thousands of books.

4:29 Seth: You're a founding member of a philosophy podcast in which we read texts and you forsworn the Loeb.

4:34 Wes: I'm going electronic.

4:36 Seth: Oh, okay.

4:37 Wes: I have found electronic versions of many Loebs, but this is one that's missing. All Loebs are now available online, but there's a very few libraries that you can get to them through the digital versions. Like there's Harvard and then there's a bunch of English universities. And as an individual, you have to pay a subscription of. That's a few hundred dollars a year, which I'm not going to do.

4:57 Seth: Do you find reading electronically tolerable?

5:00 Wes: Yeah, and I'm searching for better ways to do that because the Kindle I like to get PDFs and read them and the Kindle can do that. It's not great. But actually it would be fine if I could actually get the annotated PDF out of Kindle and onto my computer because I like to take switching back and forth with the document on my computer and I just can't do that with the Kindle.

5:19 Seth: I still find it very hard to not want to write in my book with a pen.

5:24 Wes: I just bought something called the Sony Digital Paper System or something. Sorry Mark, I know we're off base here, but it's a 13 inch E reader just for PDFs, but it has a surface that you can write on. It's supposed to be the closest thing that you can get to writing on paper. It's almost like interacting with an actual book, but it's electronic.

5:43 Mark: Well, as much as I think stopping to talk about what translations we're using for 15 minutes is not in line with probably listener priorities, I do remember now listening to our old episode I kind of missed when we used to have a casual introduction where we talk about something irrelevant to the reading at hand about what else we're reading right now or so talking about how we're doing reading I think is a fine way to get going. Earlier this year I was almost getting like I couldn't read regular books at all. But then I realized I just needed reading glasses.

And so now, now I've come to terms. I just never needed any corrective eyewear my entire life prior to this last year. And so I resisted it quite a long time of looking into anything. And now it's fine and I have multiple pairs of them scattered all over the house. But yeah, I've generally I don't mind books then at this point, but I've never been one to write in the books and so I would rather have a screen as long as I can like actually copy and paste from it to my notes, which a lot of the way some PDFs are made, like the version of the WD Ross translation, which is what I'm reading in paper form, but I also just found a version of that online.

So that's what I'm going to post for people, which is a little different. I think the original translation is from. It's either 1925 because that's what the first edition of the front says, or Ross did his translator's preface in 1954. But then apparently it was. The translation was updated. So sometime in the 70s or 80s here, some changes were made to correct it. And I think one of the things they did in this paper version is they added those things you were referring to, Dylan, those descriptions of what happens in each section. Because I see the online version also, the Ross doesn't have any of that.

And I was excited about the Ross this time just because WD Ross is one of the great ethicists, meaning he was somebody who I read a section of On Intuitionist Ethics in a class and went on to teach that in another class. So therefore he's one of the great ones. But at least he's one of the ones I've heard of that I feel like made an original contribution. So whether or not that seeped into the translation, it's nice to have a touch point and feel like it's not a stranger that you're reading the translation of. And I found it plenty readable for some reason.

Neither of these versions have like the line numbers right next to it. In my paper version, it has the line numbers at the top of the page, like in the corner. Oh, yeah. Just so you know, this is a 1149, a 2, and the next page is 1,449, a 24. But, like, that's not actually helpful enough to. For us to say, okay, we're going to read a 19 right now. Here it is. Like, we'd have to count down or. I'm not exactly even sure how they correspond to the line numbers in the margins of this book. But in any case, we can probably go by section because the sections are short enough.

8:31 Wes: Yes, I don't have the line numbers, so we're going to have to.

8:35 Seth: And the sections are all editorial.

8:37 Unknown speaker: Right.

8:37 Seth: And the subsections, I mean, like I said, I have them in here, but those are all editorial. None of that's in the original Aristotle in any way.

8:44 Mark: Okay, so it's not. Right. It's not just the addition of the headings describing the sections, it's the division at all. But I think at least the division is going to be standard across all of the.

8:53 Seth: If you have divisions, I mean, Sachs's translation has it broken into chapters, each book into chapters, which is conventional according to the Bywater Greek text, But it doesn't have the subsections that the Irwin and sounds like yours has.

9:06 Mark: Hmm. Oh, one other thing about reading these PDFs online. So I was earlier using my actual Model 1 Kindle that you still use as the E Ink. And we had some horror stories about it, how it would translate PDFs into it with crazy capitalization and every fourth paragraph being really big or just random images. Like, a whole page would be an image, and then it would make some of it into text. Anyway, it's readable, but it's not good. And it's a whole, like, process of having to download it and run it through this program and convert it and be at my computer and sync it up.

9:38 Wes: Well, you can read PDFs and highlight PDFs on the Kindle without converting them.

9:42 Mark: Not on my old Kindle, you can't do that. And it's a small screen, so even if you could, yes, you can put a whole PDF there and see a whole page at a time, but it's really small. It's too small. So I've been just using the iPad for a lot of stuff, putting things in Dropbox and then opening them in ibooks. And I like that. I like being able to just like, stretch the text bigger. The one thing that bugs me about it is I like when I'm on an E reader or something like this. Like, if I'm just reading something on a webpage, a really long webpage or a PDF that's a webpage on the iPad, then I'll constantly scroll so that what I'm seeing is, like, right at the top of the screen, because it's just less distracting to me that way.

To be actually looking in the middle of a page of text is somehow distracting, whereas to have nothing above it or have a little white piece of paper when I'm using an actual book and hold that so there's nothing below it. I kind of like that little aid. But if you're doing that with a PDF in iBooks, it doesn't let you scroll higher such that it would go on to the next page. Like, the bottom of the page still has to be at the bottom of the screen. And so you could just make it bigger and bigger and bigger until you've only seen one paragraph on the screen.

And then you can pull it up a little more, but as soon as you let go, it'll snap back down. So it becomes its own reading giant text for just this little bit. And. And then you have to shrink it back down to switch pages so it becomes a whole little dance just to get to the bottom of the page.

11:06 Wes: So, Mark, is this a vice or is it just a bad habit, this obsession with.

11:12 Mark: Well, that's a great. It just makes it easier. I know it doesn't sound that way.

11:17 Wes: I use the iPad now and I use a program called PDF Highlighter, which is very, very good. And I really like everything about it except for the eye fatigue. That is really the big problem.

11:28 Mark: Yeah, that's what was better about the E Ink thing.

11:30 Wes: It is a huge problem for me.

11:32 Seth: Yeah, I just find I like holding a pencil I still have.

11:37 Wes: Yeah, that's why I got this Sony thing. I'm hoping to recreate the.

11:40 Mark: I haven't liked holding a pencil for like 30 years.

11:44 Wes: And they say all that physical interaction actually improves your comprehension and it's a big deal.

11:49 Seth: When I went to college in my first writing class, of course, it was anathema in high school to do anything but like crack open your book. They barely wanted you to do that. And my first writing teacher, Ron Doerr, took the time not only to talk about writing, but talk about reading and active reading. And he would show us his own books and talked about ways of annotating while you're reading the kinds of things he did. And also noting that you're just going to develop your own annotation process along the way. I just embrace that wholeheartedly. And in fact, to my great dismay, I found out last week that several boxes of my books were severely water damaged, just molded beyond being kept, including my copy from my undergraduate years of Nietzsche that had all my notes in there and my copy of Aristotle's Politics.

12:45 Mark: Well, now we have some material to give away to lucky winners of our drawings.

12:51 Wes: There's a box of moldy books. Enjoy. But it has Dylan's annotations.

12:56 Mark: Dylan's house wet itself on these books close to greatness. I don't know, I just. I recall being at your house and flipping through one of your books and just seeing your notes on the side and really just how much, how much profanity was in there. I was really just stunned how many times you were telling F U Nietzsche

13:14 Seth: and all the dildo pictures. Right.

13:18 Mark: When you're a bored high schooler, as if I was listening to a lecture. That's how I treat my books.

13:26 Wes: So speaking of annotations, which when I do self control, I just basically underline everything on the page and then put stars next to the truly important stuff so you can be incontinent with respect to annotation as well.

13:41 Mark: I do sometimes get books that other people have done that with. I don't do that to my own books and sometimes it helps. I kind of know what the important sections are of this Dewey text or whatever. I'm looking at in advance.

13:53 Wes: No, I feel like someone else is controlling me. Controlling what I should find interesting.

14:00 Seth: If you reread, do you read the book that had your annotations or do you.

14:05 Wes: I do and it's weird.

14:06 Seth: It's a little weird. I feel a little self judgmental.

14:09 Wes: Like, yeah, this is the mind of someone 10 years ago who didn't understand this as well.

14:14 Seth: One of my colleagues at St John's he insisted on reading a fresh one every time and annotating it. So on his shelf he would have. Because you know, you'll teach the same seminar several times in a row. And so he would have three or four or five copies of the same book, each with different annotations in them.

14:33 Mark: That's like one of those billionaires that like can only wear a pair of socks once. I have no sympathy, but it feels

14:38 Seth: so good the first time you wear those socks, Mark.

14:40 Wes: Like if you're riding it all over your socks, you'd have more sympathy.

14:44 Seth: I feel like that's a very minor vice if you're a billionaire and your vice is that you have a brand new pair of socks every day. Good on to you.

14:53 Wes: Yes, but that's usually the canary in the coal mine for other problems to go from one.

15:00 Seth: Oh, I love it. The canary in the coal mine for truly intemperate vices.

15:05 Wes: Screwed up stuff. But I was actually. Yeah, with that whole incontinent annotation thing. I was trying to segue us back to the.

15:14 Seth: Yes, I know. I was intemperately preventing you from doing so.

15:18 Mark: Book seven is the one on continence and incontinence and pleasure. Book 6 We threw in there kind of as an afterthought. It's about virtues of the intellect and it kind of just lays out a lot of the difference between phronesis, practical wisdom and wisdom, proper philosophic wisdom.

15:36 Wes: I don't think it does. And I think that's the problem with Aristotle is that it looks like he's running through a bunch of terms and definitions and subdivisions, but it is actually very subtle argument.

15:47 Mark: Do you want to start with incontinence or do you want to start with book six?

15:49 Wes: Let's start with book six. He starts out talking about the mean, which is the standard of moderation from previous parts of the Nicomachean ethics. It's sort of the thing that we sort of aim for in virtue is somewhere in the middle between excess and deficiency. What does this have to do specifically with the intellectual virtues?

16:10 Seth: Well, at least in My translation. You're right. He starts that way, thinking about what is correct reason, getting into what the virtues of thought are, and he just recapitulates about the mean. And he says to say that virtues target the mean is admittedly true, but is not at all clear. For in other pursuits directed by a science, it is equally true that we must labor and be idle, neither too much nor too little, but the intermediate amount prescribed by correct reason. But knowing only this, we would be none the wiser about the medicines to be applied to the body if we were told we must apply the ones that medical science prescribes. And in the way that medical scientist applies them.

16:48 Wes: Yeah, he wants to get more specific at that point.

16:50 Seth: Yes. We wouldn't know what to do.

16:52 Wes: The mean is what he says right reason prescribes. So when we're talking about the intellectual virtues and reason, we sort of go to the core of, I think, what we mean by the meaning of. But basically what he ends up saying is that right reason is too vague. Yes. So what are we going to do about that? Well, let's analyze the intellectual virtues specifically. And then that's where he makes the subdivision between the moral virtues and then the intellectual virtues. And then he subdivides the intellectual virtues into the rational and the irrational.

And then we get a subdivision of the rational into the scientific and the calculative or deliberative, where the former is sort of focused on the invariable first principles of things, and the latter is focused on what is variable in the sense of particular things, the empirical or the kinds of things that you could be focused on. If you're worried about action, practical reason. It could be practical, but it doesn't have to be.

17:55 Seth: The beginning of this is similar. He does a similar thing at the beginning of chapter seven where he basically says some kind of summary about where we're at. And in this case, that leads to saying, well, but we don't understand something very well. And so in order to really understand what we were talking about before, we need to understand this other thing in more detail.

18:19 Wes: Well, the other part of this is, you know, when we say right reason is a standard, it's not going to be some external thing for Aristotle. So when you try to define virtue, you have to look to the virtuous person. In other words, we have to pivot right back to specific virtues. We can't remain at the level of right reason or some external standard. We have to look at the functioning of the organism or the human being, in this case, to get at Any standard at all. And he's going to actually reiterate this in various places in book six and book seven. So the way he ends this first section, at least in the way this first chapter of book six is to say. So we need to look at each of these faculties. We need to look at the ergon of them, the work of each of these.

19:03 Seth: The work in the sense of the activity. That's a bad choice of words because it ends up being sort of technical on a lot of translations. But it's the work in the sense.

19:11 Wes: Well, it's often translated function as well. The ergon. The work is in sense, the sense of the function. So it's kind of a hint that the standard will come out of the function of these different faculties.

19:22 Seth: What it does when it's doing what it does.

19:24 Wes: Yeah, and when we say faculties, this is where we ought to get into the Greek a little bit, because we're translating. That's one translation of this word, hexis, which comes from the word to have. So it's literally a having. But it can be translated as state, or it's often translated as disposition. And in fact, Aristotle, in another work, says it's actually a type of disposition, explicitly says that. So disposition is actually not a bad word. Faculty, I don't think is a bad word either, because the kinds of things that will turn out to be hexeis, or all these faculties we're looking at. So, for instance, nous, which is reason, when we think of reason as a faculty, and art and science and phronesis, prudence, all those things actually will be hexeis. They'll be these types of states within the. I'm going to say mind, but within the soul.

20:20 Mark: So where does that show up in your text? I want to see what my translation

20:23 Wes: has for that hexis, so you should see it pretty early on in two.

20:29 Mark: So of these sensations originates. No, the virtue of the thing is relative to its proper work. Now, there are three things in the soul which control action and truth. Sensation, reason, desire. Of these, sensation originates no action. This is plain from the fact that the lower

20:44 Wes: Not yet keep going.

20:45 Mark: Does it come up yet? Where is hexis in here? Okay. The lower animals have sensation, but no share in action. So action is praxis there. What? Affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit and avoidance are in desire. So that since moral virtue is a state of character. Concerns with desire.

21:01 Wes: Yeah, no character. Sometimes it's translated as character as well. Many translators will give you two translations in one go. So he could be just saying state or character as a translation of hexis.

21:12 Mark: Yeah, well, state of character is what he sees. So you're saying that whole thing is hexis.

21:17 Seth: One of the problems with state is that maybe even state of character doesn't really bring out the notion of activity. That's implied with hexis, which is often what the objection is with using the word state for it.

21:30 Wes: Yeah, it sounds too passive.

21:32 Seth: Yeah, too much being oriented rather than becoming or process oriented. Just a little bit earlier, he has the two parts of the soul, one with reason and one's non rational. And then divide the part that is reason that he calls the scientific part and the rational calculating part in my translation, since deliberating is the same as rational calculating and no one deliberates about what cannot be otherwise. I found that division interesting because in some sense what he's calling the scientific part ends up being basically reason about things that cannot be otherwise. And the calculating part, rational calculating part, is reasoning about things that could be otherwise, which ends up being directly related to everything from practical reason to ethics.

22:21 Wes: So for instance, we could demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem, and that is one of these sort of necessary truths, scientific truths

22:31 Seth: in his way of speaking.

22:32 Mark: And what is that a translation of?

22:36 Wes: So it can also be knowledge sometimes.

22:38 Seth: Yep.

22:39 Mark: So it's okay, people don't freak out because he's calling science this thing which is really about metaphysics or something else. It's just that's.

22:46 Wes: And it's. Yeah, it's anything that's demonstrative, which is apodeixis, apodeiktikon, I think. So those two go together. So science is this realm of really strict demonstration and necessary truths. And it's a very limited domain for Aristotle because lots of things, of course, are going to fall outside of it. If you're not dealing with these invariable necessary truths and principles, you've stepped outside of the domain of science. And then the calculative, deliberative, there's two words and this will kind of come up. One of them is logistikon, that's the calculative.

And often logos will also be translated as calculation in this. But logos can also be translated as reason in the sense of abstractly, the reasoning. But reason as a faculty is nous or mind. And then the activity of reasoning is dianoia. Finally, and sorry, Mark, I know just to get this out of the way, the deliberative faculty bouleutikon, I think. So that's more like a planning type of activity.

23:54 Mark: Well, this is all going to be kind of relevant in that, just one of the last episodes, we were talking about how reason doesn't in fact, give you directives by itself. And throughout some Kant or perhaps on some interpretations, not all Twitter users agreed, but Sam Harris and Ayn Rand throughout. All these examples of people that think that reason just tells you what to do. I don't think that's actually accurate for those, but it doesn't matter. Aristotle, however we're directly addressing that question in this section, is in virtue of what you know, Aristotle's kind of known as the father of reason, in that he thinks you can use reasoning to figure out the existence of God.

And just the way he's talking about science and reason, or at least a certain philosophic reason apprehending necessary truths makes it sound like a lot of the hard work of philosophy, including maybe fundamental ethical principles, is going to be determined just by reason. But we're going to see here that that's not quite the case. The fact that he's going to distinguish these four different states of character or something like that is going to tell us that there's more to the story.

24:58 Wes: Yeah. And it'll turn out that action requires desire, right?

25:02 Mark: Yes.

25:02 Seth: So action is thinking infused with desire, and desire is also an activity of a rational activity.

25:10 Mark: Right. That's actually right where I had stopped reading at the beginning of two, because it says therefore. So he's not just making those claims, he's saying therefore what affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit and avoidance are in desire. So that since moral virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, and choice is deliberate desire, therefore, both the reasoning must be true and the desire. Right. If the choice is to be good and the latter must pursue just what the former asserts. There's a lot of latter and former in this text, so that you have to look back.

25:40 Seth: That's very true in Aristotle. When you read him in the Greek, you have to constantly keep track of that.

25:46 Mark: So the desire must be right. So I'm not desiring things that are in fact harmful to me. And the reasoning must be true. Now, does that mean the reasoning means ends, analysis must be true, or just the recognition of what you should be shooting for must be accurate in the

26:00 Wes: first place, it's the means and analysis. The word there that he's using is logos. The word, by the way, for choice is proairesis, and it's also hexis. It's another faculty, the faculty of choice.

26:13 Mark: So that does sound funny, that to say Just in English, choice is deliberate desire. Like, well, really, can I just choose something whimsically based on no desire at all, but no authentic choice? What it is when you're actually doing it in your day to day life is according to this picture desire. But that you think about. You're not just an animal that is pursuing what it desires, you're affirming it rationally.

26:37 Wes: Yeah, we should say that action here, praxis is a very. Like animals can't act for Aristotle, so they can do things, but they can't act. In this strict sense, action is something that comes out of reasoning.

26:51 Seth: I think it's also important we often use words like reason in a way that says that we always mean good reason. Or when we say something is reasonable, we mean that, well, it's properly deliberative and stuff like that. But I think you have to be careful when Aristotle is breaking these things into parts. It's not always the case that there aren't shades of degree even in the broken down subcategories. In fact, there almost always is ways in which things in one version or another overlap with each other. And just because it's reasonable doesn't mean that you use your power of reason well.

So in a case of choice being whimsical, it still doesn't make it desire absent reason. It just means that in the example that Mark gave to me, I think Aristotle would just say, well, you just didn't do a particular deliberative job of it. That's just the diagnosis of the character of choice, because there isn't the same kind of choice making going on in animals, which is the big difference for Aristotle.

27:52 Wes: So practical reasoning is looking for this agreement between truth and right desire. So unlike these other a more theoretical faculty which is just looking for truth, the practical reasoning is always looking for this intersection between truth and right desire. Later on he'll say, you need noose, you need the faculty of reasoning and the activity of reasoning that goes along with it. But you also cannot do without a sort of ethical state of mind which is closely associated with having the right desire. You can have all the reason that you want, but without the right desire you don't get anywhere.

28:27 Seth: In fact, in part, this will lay the foundations for just the possibility of the discussion in book seven. The possibility of incontinence relies on the fact that you can know what you ought to do, but not do it. That's the whole kit and caboodle of incontinence. And that possibility means that you can be thinking about it and be right thinking about it, but unable to, or you don't have the desire aligned with it so that you commit to the activity.

28:57 Mark: And why would this be an issue? Because Plato said that we always pursue that which we think to be good.

29:04 Seth: Yes.

29:04 Mark: In knowledge, it seems like the person who eats the extra three pieces of cake, knowing that it's unhealthy to do so, I say this, having my birthday having just passed, and having faced exactly this issue and failed.

29:19 Seth: Happy birthday.

29:20 Mark: Thank you. It's hard to understand that on Plato's picture, you know, we have this idea that even villains, they don't pursue evil because it's evil, and then cackle like they think they're doing the right thing.

29:31 Seth: In book seven, we'll get the distinction that Aristotle makes that the part of that that he agrees with Plato, but this part, that he flatly disagrees with Plato, is that you eating those three pieces of cake, Plato would say, is you just don't properly understand the good. You don't understand your own good. And because you don't understand it, that's why you fail to act.

29:52 Mark: This section was setting that up. And it's setting it up by giving us the general framework to talk about what produces an action, which, strangely enough, and this is very much in keeping with Aristotle's reputation as kind of the father of reason, is a syllogism. Like, if you know that it is bad to eat lots of fatty things, bad for your health. And then, so that's the major premise, this universal claim about health and fatty things. And then the minor premise would be, this piece of cake in particular is pretty fatty.

30:23 Wes: Fatty things are not to be eaten. This piece of cake is fatty.

30:27 Seth: This piece of cake is not to be eaten.

30:29 Wes: Yes, yes.

30:32 Mark: And actually, the conclusion is not even just recognition of the proposition. It's not a matter of knowledge. It's actually supposed to produce the action of not eating the cake. That's what a practical syllogism is. It produces an action.

30:45 Wes: But there are ways in which our knowledge of the universal premise fails. We can say the universal premise and think we mean it. So that's why someone could go through that syllogism and still beat the cake.

30:55 Seth: The important point there is that Aristotle would say, you fully know that and yet you still fail to act. Whereas on the basic Platonic understanding is you'd say your failure to act means you don't really know because knowing would imbue your activity. So he links knowing directly with activity.

31:16 Mark: All right, so then let's back up to book six here and what failure. Let's keep reading to see. Figure out what failure it is. Which faculty of intellect is missing in the incontinent person? Or what are the options here?

31:31 Wes: Before we move on from section two, I just wanted to reiterate this idea that you can't do anything without desire. So reason doesn't set anything in motion and what we need are goals or ends. Or actually he uses this Greek phrase, hou heneka, which is often translated as final cause, or that, that, that for the sake of which, and we're going to find out later on, that we can't reason our way to those ends either. I mean, except in the sense that we can intuit them with the faculty of nous, of reason, but we can't discursively through demonstration, through calculation. We can't arrive at ends that way, so we have to get them in some other way.

32:11 Seth: We can't be drawn to anything by reason.

32:15 Mark: Well, so those are two different propositions. One is, can I know what the good is just by reason alone? And then the way Dylan was put it, can I be drawn to the good just by reason alone? And it seems like somebody like Kant would be completely comfortable with saying, yes, you can know it, but.

32:30 Wes: So this is why we can know the good. We can know the good through reason in the sense of the faculty nous. But that's an intuition, that's intuitive. That's like. It's analogous to perception, except it's reason. It's sort of like the Platonic contemplation of a form. But you can't calculate, you can't, in the more typical sense of reasoning, the non intuitive calculation sense, you can start with principles and then derive ends. You're never going to get it in that sense. And that's why. So he'll later on he'll say nous is what we use nous to intuit the ends of things. So the telos. So the telos of an organism, when you discover that you do it in a sense empirically, but you're doing it with nous. So that's all I'm trying to point to. It kind of becomes a big deal, I think later on.

33:21 Mark: All right, so are we still on two or are we on?

33:24 Wes: And then the end section too, just by. Because it's such a nice phrase. Choice is a reason that desires or a desire that reasons. And it constitutes us as human beings, this sort of combination between desire and reason. So again, it's a very interesting picture of this sort of intersection between desire and reason.

33:41 Seth: So your translation, this is 1139 B5.

33:45 Wes: Yep. It's at the very end of the section 2.

33:47 Seth: So it's my section 6.13. So my section 2 is associated with where he begins talking about scientific knowledge. But I think this is the line. My translation calls it decision, not choice. Hence decision is either understanding combined with desire or desire combined with thought. And what originates movement in this way is a human being.

34:11 Wes: The actual Greek, again, choice or decision is proairesis. And sometimes it's translated as a purpose as well. Proairesis is an orektikos. nous is a desiring reason or orexis dianoetike or a desiring reasoning. Dianoetike is a reasoning. So the translation that I gave is actually very accurate. I think the combination, this idea that just combining them doesn't get at the kind of radicalness of what he's saying. He's using them as adjectives to each other. So it's a desiring reason or reasoning desire.

34:43 Seth: Yes, but the end of that is also important, in which he says that that is what makes a human being is the source of being a human being.

34:52 Wes: Yeah.

34:53 Seth: Desire fused with reason in both directions.

34:55 Wes: Yeah.

34:56 Mark: So my translation is more accurate but nastier. Hence choice is either desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire.

35:06 Seth: Oh, crap.

35:07 Wes: Yes. 19, 20 something.

35:09 Unknown speaker: Right.

35:09 Seth: Just forget a third one. Sachs says, for this reason, choice is either intellect fused with desire or desire fused with thinking. And such a source is a human being.

35:20 Wes: Yeah. I don't know why they want to do the fusion thing. Such a source, it makes it less radical.

35:27 Seth: I agree. It'd be interesting to talk to them about it because they're clearly, as translators, making that choice where they think just using the adjectives back and forth is. I don't know what they think. I agree with you. I think that it is both more radical and more evocative of what's being said.

35:43 Wes: Yep.

35:43 Mark: For this alone is lacking even to God to make undone things that have once been done. Why is that part of this section? Oh, so he's quoting Agathon. Sorry, I'm just reading something out of context. It is to be noted that nothing that is past is an object of choice. That is part of what he's trying to get at. No one chooses to have sacked Troy. And Agathon is right in saying, for this alone is lacking even to God, to make undone the things that have once been done. It's just trying to illustrate what deliberation is. That you're always deliberating about something that is right that you're going to do. Not about the past. That's not what deliberating means. You don't deliberate about the past. And if you don't agree with that, you're just not translating the Greek. Right.

36:24 Wes: So in this next section we get the different ways of arriving at truth, art, science, prudence, wisdom and reason.

36:33 Seth: In my translation he breaks them into craft. Scientific knowledge, intelligence, wisdom and understanding.

36:38 Wes: Yeah. So the Greek words are techne, episteme, which you can say science. I think yours had a scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge, Phronesis, which is prudence, sophia, wisdom, nous, reason. So those are the five.

36:52 Seth: Yeah. In mine it's intelligence.

36:55 Mark: Phronesis is practical wisdom for me, not prudence.

36:58 Seth: So that's the biggest difference.

36:58 Wes: Oh man. Because my translation translates something else as intelligence.

37:02 Mark: Really? Okay. Wow. Yeah. That everything is intelligence. These are all types of intelligence.

37:08 Seth: So we try to be attentive to that. But in mine he translates phronesis as intelligence. And what's the one after phronesis in your translation?

37:17 Mark: Philosophic wisdom for me.

37:18 Seth: Yeah, wisdom. And what's the last one? That's for understanding.

37:21 Wes: Nous.

37:22 Seth: And mine is understanding.

37:24 Mark: Oh, see, mine is intuitive reason.

37:26 Wes: Yes. Which is completely misleading because it is intuitive. Nous is intuitive reason.

37:31 Mark: And understanding is something else for me later.

37:34 Wes: Yes, understanding is gnome.

37:36 Mark: Alright, so we're going to go through some of this slow enough so that people can just learn it by the Greek words episteme and nous and phronesis, those at least we can get.

37:48 Seth: Well, I think the most important thing is understanding the distinctions of kinds of thought, these virtues of thought that he's making, what he's distinguishing between them. And we can use the Greek words as the shorthand if we want to. That's fine.

38:02 Wes: Well, with the difference in. Yeah. Translations I think it's helpful. But yes. Yeah. So we get a section here on how science is focused on these invariable necessary truths. But he makes this interesting claim to the effect that we don't universal principles, in a sense they don't fall within the province of science because we can't demonstrate them.

38:24 Seth: Yeah. So you can't do metaphysics with episteme.

38:27 Wes: Yeah. So we need induction to get to those universal principles.

38:31 Seth: A good example, and if we ever do Aristotle's metaphysics, I think it'll be even more clear is we couldn't come up with the principles of logic using episteme.

38:41 Wes: Yeah. Or I think for geometry, if we wanted to say the axioms of our geometrical system. So the point is that which has no part, those are sort of intuited or things that come from induction. So these are these starting points. Yeah.

38:57 Seth: So in Euclid's geometry, there are these things that are stipulated at the beginning. And then based upon those, you demonstrate a whole bunch of different theorems. Which is the way everybody does geometry. Right. In mathematical proofs is you have the class of things that you say are stipulated. And then you make your derivations dependent upon them. But those first things aren't part of scientific knowledge according to Aristotle.

39:22 Wes: So in contrast to this domain of the invariable, these necessary truths, we get the domain of the variable, which can be. Techne can be art producing things, or it can be action, which he makes a big deal of saying. That is a completely different thing than art because it doesn't bring anything into being.

39:43 Seth: Production contrasted with action.

39:45 Wes: So production, the word for that is poesis, which is sort of what you do when you're doing techne, when you're doing art, you produce things. And again, these are both faculty. He's using this word hexis constantly. So the faculty of acting from calculation. Calculation is logos is different from the faculty of producing from calculation. So that's really the kind of the way he spells that out. But they're both calculative, they're both in this realm of the variable, the empirical realm, you're dealing with things that change. And so unlike these necessary truths, like a point is that which has no part, we're dealing with the cat is on the mat. To bring up a popular contemporary analytic example, contingent things. And then we make calculations with regard to them.

40:30 Mark: So again, techne as art is referring to things like architecture. It's not necessarily referring to, like, the fine arts or anything like that. It's just anything that is sort of a principled way of making things. And we can remember Plato talking about, is rhetoric an art, or is it just a knack? Like, does it actually have rules? Or is it just something that people are good at? Is it systematic? So art is still somehow systematic, but it is practical. It deals with the particular ultimately.

40:57 Wes: All right, let me get phronesis, which. It's practical wisdom for you, Mark. I think that's better.

41:03 Mark: Regarding practical wisdom, we shall get at the truth by considering who are the persons we credit with it. Now, it is thought to be the mark of a man of practical wisdom to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself. Not in some particular respect. For instance, about what sorts of things conduce to health or strength, but about what sorts of things conduce to the good life in general.

41:23 Wes: He ends up giving a very specific definition of prudence or practical wisdom. And again he makes this point of saying it's not a science because it's the sphere of action is in this world of the alterable. But he calls it a faculty of acting according to correct reasoning. Or maybe a better way to say it is a faculty of reasoning correctly in a practical way. When we use this word practical, we mean something that issues in action, as opposed to theoretical, where it just issues in knowledge of truth and specifically about human good and evil. The faculty of acting according to correct reasoning about human good and evil, which

41:58 Seth: that business of correct reasoning. Towards the end of the section he says that it cannot be misused. Practical wisdom must be a state grasping the truth involving reason and concerned with actions about human goods.

42:13 Wes: Yeah, that's the same as the Moreover,

42:15 Seth: there is virtue of craft, but not of practical wisdom. In craft, someone who makes errors voluntarily is more choice worthy. But with intelligence as with the virtues, the reverse is true. Clearly, practical wisdom is a virtue, not

42:29 Mark: craft knowledge, craft and art being the same thing.

42:32 Seth: Yes.

42:33 Wes: So in art what you're doing is a means to an end that's outside of that doing. And in action the action is its own end. This is a point he's going to make elsewhere. I think he repeats this later on as well. So phronesis does not, like poiesis, have its excellence or its virtue or its completion. That's another way of thinking about excellence and virtue. It's complete development in something other than itself. So with art, or making you complete something, you make it and that's its virtue. And that's the virtue of the thing is whatever you've made and its completeness. And it's maybe other things about it. But in action, in phronesis, the virtue of it is the action itself.

43:14 Mark: So mine says it's not that the action is its own end, but for an action, good action itself is its end. So every action is trying to be just like Plato said, everybody tries to aim at the good. Well, that's kind of actually in the nature of action itself. That's what action is, is that it aims at being good action. And it's just, well, what does that mean? This is the next question.

43:36 Seth: I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure that action by itself is always aimed at the good. Phronesis is action aimed at the truth?

43:44 Mark: I thought Phronesis. It's not that it's aimed at the truth that's part of it, but that it does it effectively. Practical reason is about. So if I think that already I'm aimed at a correct end for me nutritionally, say, and I understand basic physiology, then the phronesis is what allows me to connect my actions with that is through experience knowing about particular foods and whether they're good for you or not, and how to eat.

44:11 Wes: Yeah. The way he uses the word true here is true reasoning, or sometimes translated as correct reasoning. Although some translators go out of the way to make. To make it clear that phronesis is an apprehension of a kind of truth. But I think in the Greek it's really. It's true reasoning about human good and evil. And that's of a practical sort. For the sake of action.

44:32 Mark: Credit men with practical reason in some particular respect when they have calculated well, with a view to some good end, which is one of those that are not the object of any art, it's calculated well. That's the means, end analysis thing, and it has a good end. Those are the two elements for phronesis.

44:48 Wes: Yeah. And then good action, again, the end is the action itself, because I think that's a radical thing and that's worth emphasizing. So when we talk about an action being for the sake of the good, I think it can be misleading.

44:59 Mark: Sure, sure. A good action is for the sake

45:02 Wes: of itself if we think about it as being for the sake of happiness. Because a good action is a manifestation of happiness. It is our flourishing, eudaimonia.

45:11 Mark: Right. So we're going to talk more about happiness next time. I don't want to give away the fact, but yes, this is going to be another two discussion episode A four parter for you non citizens. But yes, we did discuss in the earlier episode 5 quite a bit what this whole difference between happiness as a feeling, the way we might think of the English word, and happiness as eudaimonia, the word that he uses, and how those are different. So we shouldn't spend time on that now.

45:36 Wes: Yeah, as long as we keep in mind this kind of radical idea that the action itself is the end, it's not for the sake of something else.

45:45 Seth: Yes. In some sense the whole book is directed about happiness as the proper end of human life.

45:51 Mark: Which almost knowing what I do about teleology, sounds like it's true by definition. Because when you say anything has a telos has an end, its end is what is good for it. Like so saying happiness eudaimonia Is the telos as human life. Well, isn't that almost just saying, okay, everything has a good built into it? And we're just going to give the name eudaimonia to what we understand the human good to be. It is virtue, it is happiness, it is all that stuff.

46:21 Seth: Well, so the more impact version would be living the flourishing life is living virtuously, which has more baggage and is not quite as much true as.

46:29 Wes: Yeah, so well being. I like the word well being. Well being is instead of happiness. Well being is when our faculties are functioning at their most actualized level. When you're engaged in a good action, you're functioning. That is what well being is. So it's not like I'm saying to myself, yeah, I'm going to do this good thing because I'm going to feel good afterwards. The good thing is the manifestation of well being.

46:57 Seth: And this is why habit becomes so important. Because virtuous actions are ones that you aren't trying to make yourself do. It's the ones that you're just doing because that's what you do.

47:06 Wes: Nicely put.

47:07 Mark: So we're halfway through our discussion now, and I think we've given a good picture of the contrast between how we did things in original episode 5 when we discussed this and where we're at now. Hopefully we've not scared off everyone that they have some interest in these Greek terms of why they're important. Not only is it a way of reconceptualizing, you know, just like Heidegger made up his own terms for these things, but just looking back to the Greek, it gives you a different picture of the breakdown of the human mind and how models of how things work are sort of built into the very language we used. So I think this is all on point. Just merely giving the approximate English terms for these things is not actually going to convey what is philosophically interesting, especially

47:53 Seth: in the context of the categories that Aristotle broke them down into. They really are more clear that way.

48:00 Mark: So we just finished with phronesis, practical wisdom. Even though that is going to have a great effect in the rest of our conversation. That's sort of the most important things, I believe after that, he talks a little about political wisdom, which is less essential to what we're talking about here. What else from book six here do we want to make sure to hit?

48:17 Wes: So we get in section seven of mine this distinction between phronesis and wisdom, or philosophical wisdom, Sophia. So the difference is this sort of practical orientation. And he gives us this idea that with phronesis you have to be able to deliberate well and basically, once you know what your end is, use reasoning to get there. Again, Sophia is more in the domain of unifying science and intuitive reason.

48:49 Mark: Science is about knowing demonstrable things within the realm of the invariable. But we had already said that you can't actually get the first principles though from this demonstrative reason. That, that's just what demonstration means. It means you already have the axioms to start with intuitive reason. Nous.

49:06 Wes: Well, sorry, he goes further here and he says you can't get them from science or art or prudence or wisdom. And that leaves us with one final faculty, nous. And that's where we get our principles.

49:17 Seth: Yep.

49:18 Mark: And there seems to be no argument for like what if you think that just noose doesn't exist, how do we convince somebody that there really are? I mean, of course with any given discussion you can't prove everything. You have to just grant some things, at least as a postulate. I grant that other people exist. I grant that two plus two does in fact equal four, or that A and not A is not a.

49:41 Wes: Well, all we have to do is know that the thing that we do exists. You could just say it's whatever that capacity that we have that allows us to identify these principles which certainly can't be demonstrated. We know that. I mean, I don't think we can have any argument about that. There are principles that we use that are simply non demonstrable. And you can talk about induction if you like.

50:03 Mark: So the law of non contradiction is the main example. If you deny that, then you are just not even a human being.

50:11 Seth: Well, in fact, Aristotle in the Metaphysics, he says that you can't demonstrate it, but he tries to come up with some reasons why it's true. And ultimately he says that we would not be able to speak. The very fact that we can speak is an indication of the law of non contradiction.

50:30 Mark: For Kant, that would be a transcendental argument. Wouldn't that be a, an argument from practical reason? Or is that.

50:36 Seth: Well, he's not deriving it based on that. He says you can't prove it, but here are some reasons why you might agree that it's true, that kind of thing.

50:46 Wes: But even things like physical, scientific, physical laws, you can't demonstrate the conservation of energy, the law of gravitation. Yeah, there's a lot of induction, what we would call induction that goes on. It's not like we can just start with some principles and then suddenly we derive some scientific law. They're basic in some sense.

51:06 Mark: But if they're basic, they're not based on induction, right?

51:09 Wes: No, he uses this. Or at least in my translation, he uses induction. The word induction at some point.

51:14 Seth: Yeah.

51:15 Mark: To ground intuitive wisdom.

51:17 Wes: Universal principles can come from induction. In section three he says this.

51:21 Mark: All right, well, we're making a lot about this and it's one paragraph in the text, so maybe we should just say we've defined what intuitive reason is. And then Wes was saying what wisdom is, is science plus intuitive reason. There you go.

51:35 Wes: Yeah, but phronesis is different again. It's in this realm of the variable and for the sake of some realizable good, we're in the field of action. So you could be wise. Well, can you be wise without being prudent or having phronesis?

51:52 Seth: I think you can.

51:53 Wes: I forget how. Yeah, I think you can, though.

51:56 Seth: Irwin uses, I think an unhelpful word intelligence for translating phronesis. Towards the end of your section 7, he says Phronesis is about human concerns about what is open to deliberation. So things that you can deliberate about. That is the realm of phronesis in contrast to episteme scientific thinking.

52:19 Wes: Yeah, we deliberate about what to do. What am I going to do?

52:22 Seth: Yes. We don't deliberate about the Pythagorean theorem.

52:25 Wes: Yeah. Whether something that we can demonstrate is actually true. That's not an object of deliberation because it just is.

52:33 Mark: Maybe your translator is a role playing gamer. So wisdom. It has to be intelligence. Unless it's charisma, there's just a very few options of what it could be.

52:41 Wes: That's right.

52:42 Seth: Well, that's nice because depending upon your personal variation, you might roll higher or lower.

52:48 Mark: Correspondingly, I think we can really run with this metaphor for.

52:51 Seth: Oh man, we could run really far. Especially since I just got back from Gen Con, so.

52:58 Mark: So why does he say in the next paragraph here, even some of the lower animals can have practical wisdom, namely those which are found to have a power of foresight with regard to their own life. We were saying lower animals can't perform actions at all according to the terminology here, but yet they could have practical wisdom even though there's no choice involved. Whereas it seemed before that practical wisdom was connected to choice. No, I can just read the context section seven for us. He just said wisdom must be intuitive reason combined with scientific knowledge.

Scientific knowledge of the highest object which is received, as it were, its proper completion. That's what philosophic wisdom is. Of the highest objects, we say, for it would be Strange to think that the art of politics or practical wisdom is the best knowledge, since man is not the best thing in the world. Now, if what is healthy or good is different for men and for fishes, but what is white or straight is always the same, anyone would say what is wise is the same, but what is practically wise is different. For it is that to which observes well the various matters concerning itself that ascribes practical wisdom.

And it is to this that one will entrust such matters. So he's trying to say, even though it seems practical wisdom is so useful, philosophic wisdom is only concerned with the invariable. And how many times does that come up? Doesn't it seem like he's trying to say still that philosophic wisdom is better somehow than practical wisdom? But yes, we would entrust practical. They're really just different spheres. So after that, he says, this is why we say that even some of the lower animals have practical wisdom when they're found to have a power of foresight with regard to their own life.

54:28 Wes: Yeah, I think the we say means we, in a kind of metaphorical, anthropomorphizing way.

54:35 Mark: We incorrectly say, all right, so I just made a big deal.

54:38 Wes: Well, and for this reason, we sometimes apply the term. This is my translation. Apply the term prudent even to animals when they show a faculty of foresight and what concerns their own life. The animals can't be prudent. They can be analogous to that. And he uses that word analogous a lot. So, yeah, there's an animal version of

54:56 Seth: prudence, but it's not prudence, it's prudent, like for Aristotle.

55:01 Wes: Prudent, like prudish, prudish gnomes.

55:05 Seth: It would be interesting to, you know, have Aristotle try to process some modern biological understanding and, you know, experimental observations with animals to see how he would process this distinction he makes of human beings as rational animals. Like where he would put that line or how that would feather in between animals and human beings. Because I don't think that he would be insensitive to the kinds of things that have been observed at all.

55:35 Wes: I think the other interesting thing to come out of this and the next section is the sense in which prudence requires knowledge of both general propositions and particular facts. So, for instance, the sweet things are not to be tasted, the sort of general premise of a practical syllogism. And then this thing is sweet, the particular fact. And then in section 8, skipping past the part where he's saying that statesmanship, in a way, is a form of prudence, or they're related. Prudence deals with particular facts and then also with principles that must be derived from experience. And then later on he's going to say, that's why you should pay attention to experienced people, even when they make claims that can't be demonstrated, they're just more experienced than you.

56:23 Seth: Well, this is why you should pay attention to old people and not just young people. And this is also why young people are good at math. In mine it says, a sign of what has been said is the fact that whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics and wise within these limits, intelligent young people, which I don't know if your translation says practically reasoning, young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that prudence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience. But a young person lacks experience since some length of time is needed to produce it.

56:59 Wes: What section is that in?

57:01 Mark: This is in eight. It's a fourth paragraph.

57:03 Wes: Okay.

57:04 Mark: A young man of practical wisdom cannot be found. Yes, sorry, youngins, our younger demographic listeners.

57:11 Wes: Yeah.

57:12 Seth: And then he goes on, he says, indeed we might consider why a boy can become accomplished in mathematics but not in wisdom or natural science. Surely it is because mathematical objects are reached through abstraction, whereas the origins in these other cases are reached through experience. Young people then, lacking experience, have no real conviction in these other sciences, but only say the words, whereas the nature of mathematical objects is clear to them.

57:37 Wes: And the other thing coming out of Section 8 that was important is that when we make errors in our practical deliberations, we can make errors in the universal part or the particular part. So it might not be the case that sweet things are not to be eaten, and it might not be the case that this thing is sweet. I could err on both levels.

57:56 Mark: All right. What about Section 9? Anything interesting in there?

57:59 Seth: What I found was this distinction between deliberating well and deliberating correctly. Tell us correctness and deliberation are several types. Clearly, good deliberation will not be every type. For the incontinent or base person, we use rational calculation to reach what he proposes to see. And we'll have deliberated correctly, but will have got himself a great evil having deliberated well. Seems, on the contrary, to be some sort of good for the sort of correctness and deliberation that makes it good. Deliberation is the sort that reaches a good. So the difference is that you can deliberate your way correctly and end up at a bad end.

58:38 Wes: Yeah. And that ability to do that, I think that's what he's going to call deinotes later on. Right. Or cleverness.

58:46 Seth: Yes. So merely deliberating correctly is cleverness. And cleverness doesn't have any natural orientation with respect to goodness. It could be aligned with good or it could not be aligned with good. That's not its virtue.

58:59 Wes: So yeah, if we're good at figuring out the means to any old particular sort of end, then we're clever. But for that to become practical wisdom, the ends themselves have to be good.

59:11 Seth: And this is why lawyers, or in fact the pejorative version of sophistry is often admonished because it's in Aristotle's language would be mere cleverness. That is, in the classic case, you figure out a way to win the argument regardless of whether what you're arguing for is true or not. In very classically nasty lawyer like fashion is you argue your way to win your case, but you're still the criminal. Right. That is cleverness.

59:44 Wes: Yeah. If you start out with bad first principles or bad assumptions, everything could be top notch as far as the argument itself goes.

59:52 Seth: And that's really the most clever kind of argument. Right. Is because it ends up being that you cannot wedge yourself into any place along the argument at all. It's that the very beginning of it is the problem. But that makes it a very, very strong and clever mode. And I do want to be careful not to make cleverness pejorative. It's just it's not oriented towards goodness, either for goodness or against it. It's just that characteristic of being able to reason to an end via means, regardless of what those ends are.

1:00:25 Mark: Right. So it's just important to pick that out because usually we talk about phronesis as just its means, ends, analysis.

1:00:31 Wes: Exactly.

1:00:32 Mark: And no, that's what cleverness is. Phronesis is means, ends, analysis plus correct ends. And that ends up being to give away something that isn't actually, I think stated until section 12 that ends up being really what virtue is like. This is an essential characteristic of virtue. It's not just that there's virtue out in the world that you could figure out using reason. And then it's a separate art about like, well, how are you going to become virtuous? No, it's just talking about virtue at all involves talking about the means to get to it. It means talking about virtue as people actually have it, which means they have to not only have knowledge of the good, they have to have phronesis, which is the thing that connects what their actions actually are to the good.

1:01:18 Wes: Exactly.

1:01:18 Mark: Means ends analysis. Yep.

1:01:21 Seth: Just because it's such a nice article. We should direct all of you listening to Anna's essay on PEL's site on deinotes, which is the Greek word for cleverness. She talks about it in the context of sophists. But the whole article is really, really good about the roots of the word and cleverness.

1:01:41 Wes: Yes. This is our first regular staff writer, Anna Sandoiu, and she is absolutely fantastic. And Mark, can I announce this?

1:01:51 Mark: Yes.

1:01:52 Wes: Yes. And she will be our guest for our next podcast on the Nicomachean Ethics, where we cover books 8 through 10.

1:02:00 Seth: Sweet. I didn't know that. That's awesome.

1:02:02 Wes: Yes. She is going to sub in for Seth.

1:02:05 Seth: That's great.

1:02:07 Unknown speaker: So

1:02:09 Mark: Dylan had just read about the different ways you could think about correctness or deliberation. And the first one would be compatible with incontinence. You calculate means ends analysis, but you don't actually do the right thing. So that's not really going to get to phronesis. The second possibility is it's possible to attain good even by a false syllogism, to attain what one ought to do, but not by the right means. So that's not what we're shooting for either. If you come up with the correct decision sort of by accident, even though

1:02:39 Seth: you didn't, or simply by reasoning wrong,

1:02:42 Mark: you didn't have good reasoning.

1:02:43 Seth: Yeah, I guess that might end up being an accident. Yeah, I guess you're right.

1:02:46 Mark: And one of the main ways we're going to talk about that when it comes to incontinence is a lot of the talk of continence is just sticking to your principles. So that's going to be part of means ends analysis. Right. If you don't want to get fat, don't eat all the stuff. But if you don't have the right principles in the first place and you're just stubbornly sticking, like I believe in the Atkins diet and that's the only thing. And no matter how many doctors say. Or pick your own diet that you consider a fraud, whatever, no matter how many doctors say that I can't live on Soylent, I'm going to just eat that and I'm just going to stick to that. Well, that is to be incontinent against a false proposition like that might be good. You might end up being more nutritionally sound by violating your resolution. So if you make a stupid New Year's resolution and violate it, then that might be good.

1:03:35 Seth: Yes, but it would not be due to phronesis. Not by good reasoning. It would not be frenetic.

1:03:41 Mark: No.

1:03:43 Seth: Yes.

1:03:44 Mark: It's your inner phronesis. It's the wisdom of the body, whatever it is that's getting at. Oh, never mind.

1:03:50 Wes: All right, so I think we can jump past section 10.

1:03:54 Mark: Sure.

1:03:54 Wes: Which is on my translation has his intelligence. There could be understanding in yours.

1:04:00 Mark: Oh, that's not nous. So Dylan's did Nous's understanding. Right. And this translation is doing synesis. Understanding.

1:04:08 Wes: Okay. So it's literally putting together, synesis, uniting. So sort of the synthetic activity he's distinguishing from prudence in the sense that prudence actually issues commands, whereas intelligence just discerns things. So I think that's really only interesting in what it reveals about prudence there, this idea of the normative element to prudence. Yeah.

1:04:32 Seth: In my translation, he calls it comprehension. Okay, yeah, that actually sounds pretty good.

1:04:37 Mark: Sounds fine.

1:04:38 Wes: And then in the next one is judgment Gnome, in virtue of which men

1:04:44 Mark: are said to be sympathetic judges or to have judgment is the right discrimination of the equitable. So this just seems to be referring to the justice chapter that we didn't read. Right. That's book five or something in here.

1:04:58 Wes: And then he'll say, the judgment, intelligence, prudence, and reason, they all apply to the ultimate and the particular. Ultimate as in. And then particular as in the. According to each. So what I find interesting about that is there's a sense in which first principles are ultimate, but there's a sense in which particulars and experience are ultimate. And he'll go on to say that nous. So we're thinking of nous now as this thing where we get these ultimate truths that are alterable. But he'll go on to say that nous is also good for particulars as well.

And the thing that nous is good for in particular is getting at the telos or the hou heneka for the sake of the. Which often translated as the final cause. So when we sort of detect the functions of things and the final causes of things, when we do teleology and we're immediately intuiting something, something in particulars, we're intuiting this thing about them with nous.

1:05:56 Mark: So all this just shows that Ayn Rand, in her disdain of intuition in favor of just reasoning, did not actually read Aristotle, even though she claimed to love Aristotle so much, because, wow, there's so many different faculties that make up what amounts to intelligence, that makes up these hexeis, these states of character that are knowledge related or wisdom related.

1:06:18 Wes: Well, then the section 12, he's going to ask, what are they good for? Like, how can they possibly be useful? He brings up objections. Just because we know what's good to do doesn't mean that we are going to be more likely to do those things. And then if you say, well, prudence is the conditions for the possibility of like, it's not sufficient, but it's necessary. If you go that route, then he says, well, then it's not even necessary because you could just rely on other people's advice. You could just do what they say. You don't have to have the knowledge on your person, so wouldn't be necessary to doing good things. The final objection is this weird that prudence seems to be sort of the master of wisdom and give it orders, because prudence is the thing we saw that issues commands. So then he's going to go on to respond to these, each by each.

1:07:06 Mark: So this is related to a discussion that we had in episode five about if you approach ethics in this way, talking about virtue instead of talking about moral commands, then it says here, practical wisdom is the quality of mind concerned with things just and noble and good for man. But these are the things which is the mark of a good man to do. And we are none the more able to act for knowing them if the virtues are states of character, just as we are none the better to act for knowing the things that are healthy and sound in the sense of not producing, but of issuing from the state of health.

Of issuing from the state of health. So in other words, just because you know that a healthy person is one that is fit and look strong, that doesn't help you in itself know how to become that thing. Obviously something else must be required for ethics, which it seems pretty obviously that he's already answered the question. Practical wisdom is knowing how to get from the model to the means, how to get from this end to the means. That's what it is.

1:08:02 Wes: And he's going to kind of break that down for us because it'll turn out. Practical wisdom is deinotes, cleverness, plus wisdom plus Sophia. And wisdom is the thing that gives us the ends. Prudence, deinotes, gives us the means, wisdom gives us the ends. You combine that, you get deliberation directed towards the good. But it's a new sort of interesting development here that Sophia gets kind of folded into. Prudence becomes a necessary condition of it, even if it's not sufficient for prudence.

1:08:30 Mark: I'm just going to keep saying phronesis instead of prudence, because I just picture this 1930s woman, Prudence or Something prudence.

1:08:39 Wes: Is that?

1:08:40 Seth: Exactly

1:08:42 Wes: so. And the other thing you'll say here is that even if practical wisdom didn't have any results, even if it weren't good for anything, in a sense, it would still be desirable in itself. So you can't object to it by saying that it doesn't allow you to do anything. It is a good in and of itself, which is an interesting kind of way of approaching this. Ultimately, to do good things is going to require us to have these moral virtues, these ethikai aretai. That's the kind of standard. So we started out this whole chapter asking, well, the standard is right reason.

Well, what does that mean? And at the end of the section you get, well, the standard is actually the good man. What is the good? It's what the good man says it is. What is the requirement? How do we guide ourselves if we're going to have practical wisdom? Well, you guide yourselves according to the moral virtue that you hopefully possess or have been habituated to or can work towards. It's not like there's some external standard where we're going to say, well, how do we know what virtue is? And then we're going to get it by this external standard.

The virtue is that standard.

1:09:46 Seth: In some ways it's frustrating, but in other ways it makes a lot of sense. I think you can see it both in ourselves, but also in looking particularly at other living creatures and to see in which way they're flourishing or being the best that they can be at doing what they do. And it's not so hard to recognize that kind of thing. It's not that you would deny that the oak tree that's been deprived of enough water in crappy soil, full of rocks, constrained in a box, isn't an oak tree. But you would recognize it as not being the most flourishing kind of oak tree, one that has all the things that it needs in the right amount and is free from the constraints other than the ones that it generates for itself.

And that is that oak tree doing what it's supposed to do. That's the same thing for human beings. Aristotle doesn't use this word freedom, but I think that's what we're talking about when we're talking about freedom is that combination of having the lack of constraint such that we can do what we most do given the things that we need to flourish.

1:10:54 Wes: Well, he will say that he will use this word unhindered, which I don't know what it's translating in Section 7, but the unhindered energeia, the unhindered exercise of actualization, exercise of a faculty and that which he will define as pleasure, actually. But I think, yeah, if we even just think about the health.

1:11:11 Seth: Yes, health is a perfect example of

1:11:13 Wes: the tree or the well being of the tree. What defines that? The standard is internal to the tree. And it's going to be different for us just because our biology is different. So the actual workings, it's the functioning and the working and just the way the tree is designed, let's say, speaking loosely, that's where the standard comes from. And it's a noose that allows us to intuit what is good for the tree. But there are boundaries. You know, it really is a standard though, because, you know, when we look at a tree and when we look at another animal, we're going to get two different versions of what's good for it.

1:11:48 Seth: And I like the word fittingness maybe even better than good in the sense that it is the right amount of the things that it needs in the right way at the right time. And that would be towards its good in the sense where we're saying that the good is that which is defined by it flourishing, doing what it does best or doing the things that it does.

1:12:09 Wes: Yeah, doing the work. I mean, your word freedom is actually really apt because it's doing its function, its work, its activity to the highest possible degree because it's not hindered by conflict with other faculties, by all these things that we think of as vice, which are ultimately things that just sort of drag down the engine of those different faculties. It's just the engine going at the best possible rpm.

1:12:31 Seth: Well, yeah. And having all of its own components complete and fully functioning as well.

1:12:37 Wes: Yeah.

1:12:38 Mark: So I do like nous translated as intuition there, as it is in at least my version of the text. Because now we've seen ultimate particulars. Like I'm seeing red now. How do you know that? Well, I experience it. You could call that intuition. There's no way you can derive that from something else. Also, on a universal thing like the law of causality, you'd have to intuit that there's no.

1:13:00 Wes: But that's sensory intuition and that's sensitive.

1:13:02 Seth: Well, but the cause law of causality isn't sensory intuition.

1:13:05 Mark: No, no, no.

1:13:06 Wes: Yeah. If it's the law of causality, that's. Sorry, is that what you're saying, Mark?

1:13:09 Mark: Well, I was saying that and you had said before, sensory particulars are taken on by nous. It's the ultimate things and it's the

1:13:15 Wes: Immediate, not sensory particulars, but the final causes. And the telos is the ends of sensory particular.

1:13:22 Mark: Well, and the reason I was going to say that intuition seems to apply well to that is because, as you were saying before, well, it seems like those are based on induction. If anything, it's just not straightforward. It's not like I see one swan that's white and I intuit that all the swans, you know, and I see enough swans, and it's not that kind of induction, but seeing enough healthy swans versus unhealthy swans, then you could intuit, which again, is not just. You'd have to kind of be able to identify this one is healthy in the first place in order to then count them up and use induction on it.

1:13:57 Wes: You only need to see one swan to know whether it's healthy. Actually, I think that's part of the point because the standard is internal to

1:14:04 Mark: it, but that's clearly false as empirical matter. How do you know? Like, oh, that's starfish. Like, how do I know if it's

1:14:11 Wes: a active structure and you could dig into that structure and see that, oh, look, this is designed to do this, but it's not doing this.

1:14:20 Seth: Yeah, right.

1:14:22 Mark: You'd still need some background knowledge in order to do that. You couldn't just see your first robot. If you don't know anything about machines and tell whether it's working according to its design or not, you have to know that it's the kind of thing that is designed in a certain way.

1:14:36 Wes: Suppose I gave you this little cylinder with two ends resting in a frame where it looks like very obviously the cylinder should be able to turn on its axis and everything is sculpted perfectly. Then there's this piece of unformed metal that's sitting on top of the cylinder and preventing it from turning. The claim is, and I don't, you know, this requires more thought. I don't think we can just dismiss the idea that we couldn't know without any background knowledge that that little structure sets its own internal standards of whether or not it's functioning, or at least gives us a good idea of what it would mean for it to be able to function and that we can see that there's something not working there.

1:15:13 Seth: It does seem like that requires, if not knowledge of that particular. And experience, excuse me, with that particular entity. It does require experience with a lot of other entities that have their own sorts of actions. And then we would make a kind of analogous extrapolation, saying, it doesn't seem to be working right. It seems to be trapped or caged or constrained, and we'd have some idea on how to set it free. But that would be based upon experience with other sorts of things that were similar to it.

1:15:47 Wes: See, to me, yeah, I'm not so sure how much experience. I mean, I think it's an interesting question, but I had started thinking about this a lot, just trying to understand final causes and it might require less experience than we think. And there's also just this concept of there's such a thing as structure and lack of structure. And there's a way in which things are formed and have more form or less form. And I'm not sure those things are as contingent as we might think they are. But for me it requires a lot more thought. But I think that's part of the idea here.

1:16:16 Mark: All right. Well, I think just using his own examples, it seems clear to me that an old person with the experience of lots of different things would be better at that kind of thing than the kind of young person that he thinks would readily grasp geometry. That it does not fall into the young person's skills.

1:16:31 Wes: Well, that's in the realm of prudence and reasoning, as in Dianoia, discursive reasoning and all that stuff. But with Nous, again, we're talking about intuitive reason, like that same sort of intuition that Descartes tells us that we must have of substance with the wax. That's the whole rationalist function here. And I think it's specifically geared towards these final causes and it's supposed to put us immediately in touch with them, non inductively. I may be wrong about that.

1:17:01 Mark: Let's move to book seven, please.

1:17:02 Unknown speaker: Yay.

1:17:04 Mark: Let us now make a fresh beginning and point out, well, we don't have to start reading from the beginning, but that's just how he starts it. We're making a fresh beginning and talks about the difference between vice and incontinence. And the initial way that he sets it up is a little unhelpful. But we've already established that animals don't make decisions, so they can't technically have vice. Right. They can't decide. Wrong, because they're not deciding at all. They're acting according to desire, without deliberation. And then he just contrasts that with people in the middle and gods who have an excess of virtue, that they too somehow action is not applicable to them because they would just act virtuously, automatically.

They wouldn't have to make a decision at all either. So those things out of the way, we're just restating what, what the kind of creatures to whom virtue and vice apply to. And we're going to compare and contrast that with continence and incontinence, that those seem clearly different things. They both result if you are incontinent with regard to the good or you have vice so that you actively will the bad. Well, the bad thing happens either way. But wouldn't you think that the merely weak incontinent person who knows the good is trying to do the good and just fails is still better in some way than somebody who actively wills wickedness?

1:18:22 Seth: Well, he does, yeah.

1:18:23 Wes: By the end of this, incontinence is going to turn out not to be such a bad thing. Actually, it'll be contrasted to vice, to what in my translation is profligacy?

1:18:32 Seth: My translation is intemperance.

1:18:35 Wes: Okay. There are lots of positives to incontinence.

1:18:39 Seth: Well, the positive, it seems, with incontinence is that you are actually thinking rightly. And the big deal with incontinence is that it's curable. In many cases, it's curable because you're basically pointed in the right direction. You can imagine habituating yourself back towards continence. And he makes a link that the incontinent is like the drunk. Right. That they make bad decisions, but not because they don't know what they're supposed to be doing.

1:19:09 Wes: Well, they know and they don't know at the same time. They know their knowledge gets suppressed or, you know, overrun by passion or that's the drunkenness analogy.

1:19:18 Seth: Yeah. Or if we just avoid even requiring that every time you act, you have knowledge, it's that they don't act on that knowledge. But the intemperate person, the profligate person reasons wrongly and they can't be cured from that.

1:19:34 Mark: Well, except that you could argue with the person and perhaps change their mind. And that's kind of simpler than having to rehabituate somebody is to simply change their mind.

1:19:44 Seth: Well, that's an interesting question. Aristotle doesn't think that that's simpler. It's an interesting question of what kinds of degrees of difficulty we're talking about here. Because the intemperate person is utterly convinced

1:19:54 Wes: they have the wrong ends and they're totally convinced that they're the right ones.

1:19:59 Seth: Exactly. And they're able to, you know, reason their way to them with whatever cleverness they have, but they have the wrong ends, whereas the incontinent person doesn't have the wrong ends. And that's what makes it easier.

1:20:11 Mark: Wise, totally convinced. Part of the definition there, you could have any degree of certainty and still act on your principle. And if you're acting wrongly, then that's vice. Maybe your parents had criminal tendencies and they kind of gave you bad examples and so you thought that, you know, stealing's okay, but once you get exposed to people with a different opinion and, and see how screwed up your parents are in other ways, it's not that you've been convinced, you might just not have thought about it critically at all.

1:20:37 Seth: Yeah, and that might be a good point to make to Aristotle. I see where you're going with that, Mark. It seems to me that Aristotle doesn't allow for that or doesn't consider that particular version of that. The good thing or beneficial thing about the intemperate person in this respect is that they might be able to be convinced because they are reasonable and strongly follow their reason. And so if they get put onto goodness, align their ends with good ends, that they might be even more quickly successful than the incontinent person because he doesn't take up that case.

1:21:11 Wes: He will even say at some point that their desires are not that strong. There's something cold blooded about them. So with the incontinent person, they're struggling with strong passions, they know the right thing to do and they're struggling with strong passions and they just can't resist that extra piece of cake. The profligate person, there's no battle like that. And it's not even like the extra piece of cake is this passionately desired thing. It just doesn't matter to them, you know, if it's unhealthy to eat the extra piece of cake. They don't see the unhealthy thing as of any consequence.

1:21:42 Seth: And that's the key, right? Is that the reason why the incontinent person for Aristotle is easier to put on the right path is because they have desire, they have something that can be changed. Whereas the intemperate person, because they don't have desire in this direction, they're like a ship without a rudder. Right. You can't turn them.

1:22:02 Mark: He does raise Some people are incontinent because of just habits they've gotten into. And some are just by nature. And uses women as the example.

1:22:12 Seth: Where's that?

1:22:13 Mark: Right from the beginning he talks about incontinence as effeminacy or softness. Somewhere in here he raises the degree of difficulty in retraining someone. And if their incontinence is just due to habit, habits are always going to be easier to correct than nature. So it could just be that by genetics, by their makeup. They're just going to be the kind of person that is going to be easily victimized or overwhelmed by their passions.

1:22:38 Wes: Yeah, so softness is not effeminacy. It's just the word is malakia.

1:22:42 Seth: My translation uses softness, but never uses the word effeminacy for softness.

1:22:46 Wes: And it's not, as far as I can tell, the ancient Greek. There's no association to effeminate.

1:22:51 Mark: I've got in section seven. I just did a search on effeminate. It's the third paragraph from the end of section seven. The man who is defective in respect to resistance, to the things which most men both resist and resist successfully is soft and effeminate. For effeminacy too is a kind of softness. Such a man trails his cloak to avoid the pain of lifting it and plays the invalid without thinking himself wretched. Though the man he imitates is a wretched man.

1:23:18 Wes: The word that I have there is luxury as a kind of softness, not effeminacy.

1:23:22 Seth: Ah, yes.

1:23:23 Mark: So the context is the incontinent man, as opposed to the continent, to the soft, is opposed to the man of endurance. So it still has soft in your.

1:23:31 Wes: Yeah, okay, yeah.

1:23:33 Seth: So right before that it says the continent person is opposed to the incontinent and the resistant to the soft. The resistance consists in holding out, continence, in overcoming. But holding out is different from overcoming. Just as not being defeated differs from winning, hence continence is more choice worthy than resistance. Someone who is deficient in withstanding what most people withstand and are capable of withstanding is soft and self indulgent. For self indulgence is a kind of softness. This person who trails his cloak to avoid the labor and pain of lifting it and imitates an invalid, though he does not think he is miserable, he is merely similar to a miserable person.

1:24:12 Mark: So David Ross is a dick and thinks that effeminacy is a good word for.

1:24:18 Wes: Or he's just living 100 years ago,

1:24:20 Mark: what was the word that you just said?

1:24:21 Seth: Self indulgence.

1:24:21 Mark: Something is a kind of softness. Self indulgence. There you go. Self indulgence. Wow. See, I've got self indulgence all over this translation. That is why the self indulgent man is worse than the incontinent is just a few.

1:24:36 Wes: So the self indulgent is the profligate is what? My translation is profligate. And Dylan's is intemperance.

1:24:43 Mark: Profligate. Intemperance. Self indulgent. Wow. Okay, so the translation Simply swap the terms around. It's not just different, it's like, oh, I've used that one already for that word. I need to pick something else. Maybe effeminacy was just all that was left on the table.

1:24:59 Seth: Yeah, an unfortunate choice.

1:25:01 Wes: So the word in Greek for profligates. You could also say undisciplined is a. In case that helps.

1:25:09 Mark: Yeah. Undisciplined seems not strong enough because it's really talking about wickedness. It's talking about somebody that intentionally goes to excess. So self indulgence. I kind of like that you allow yourself. That's not just being undisciplined. Incontinence sounds undisciplined. Yeah, but somebody who's actively anti disciplined.

1:25:27 Seth: Yeah. And self indulgent or intemperate. Those all convey the active sense of reaching out.

1:25:35 Mark: I guess intemperate doesn't convey anything to me. That's not a word that I use in my normal speech.

1:25:40 Wes: Yeah, we get habituated to it at the same time.

1:25:43 Seth: We haven't thrown out thumotic yet, so we're safe.

1:25:48 Mark: Do you warn your children against intemperance?

1:25:52 Seth: Do you cultivate and tame their thumotic nature?

1:25:54 Mark: Is that part of the routine? I don't even know what that is. I don't know what your thumotic nature, as you see with your thumos spiritedness. Ah, I can't find the spoon that goes with the thumos. I can't bring my soup to school today. All right, so we're not going to go through this section by section. What are the interesting points that popped out to you in here? Can we at least first of all sum up again the connection between the previous chapter and this chapter is. We've said if you don't have phronesis, then you don't have all the pieces.

You don't have both being able to grasp the universal proposition and the particular proposition and take it all the way to action. So that's the way he's putting these arguments and how the incontinent person fails is that they might grasp the universal proposition, but somehow they don't make it to action. Something goes wrong with there. And merely saying, well, they don't have phronesis. That's not so. What is? You know, we already said that they're kind of like they're drunken.

1:26:54 Wes: So actually that's something we should look at. That's in section three. That whole thing with the sweetness.

1:26:59 Mark: Sure, let's look at that.

1:27:00 Wes: That was actually, for me, one of the most interesting parts of the whole thing, and we could read a little bit, so he'll say so again. One may inquire into the cause of this phenomenon of incontinence by arguments based upon its special nature. You may have a universal judgment and then a judgment about particular facts which fall at once within the province of sense or perception. But when there are two joined together, the conclusion must, in matters of speculation, be ascended to by the mind. And Mark, I know you already mentioned this, but all sweet things are to be tasted.

This thing before me is sweet. And then if you have the power and you're not hindered, you cannot but once put the conclusion this is to be tasted into practice. So then he goes on to describe the case with incontinence. Now, when you have on the one side the universal judgment forbidding you to taste so sweet things are not to be tasted, and on the other side, the universal judgment, all sweet things are pleasant, which is an odd way to put that right, because we would think that the other side is just all sweet things are to be tasted. But anyway, all sweet things are pleasant with the corresponding particular.

This thing before me is sweet.

1:28:06 Seth: Those two things go together.

1:28:07 Wes: Then, though the former training reasoning bids you avoid this. Appetite moves you, for appetite is able to put the several bodily organs in motion, which I take to be appetite is able to make you do things whatever the other syllogism says, like whatever your state of knowledge, I think. And thus it appears that in this way, under the influence of reason, that is to say, that opinion, that people act incontinently, opinion too, that is not in itself, but only accidentally opposed to right reason. And this is really the most important sentence for it is the desire, not the opinion, that is opposed to right reason. And so animals can't be incontinent because they have no universal judgment, but only images and memories of particular facts. So I think we should unpack that, because that's actually kind of confusing all of that.

1:28:55 Mark: And yet we think of animals, when they shit on our rugs, as the most incontinent of all.

1:29:01 Wes: That's the next. You're just reading, right?

1:29:05 Seth: Yeah.

1:29:07 Wes: So the opinion in question is that all sweet things are to be tasted, but it's not this opinion, all sweet things to be tasted, that is opposed to right reason, but the desire itself. So it's not like when I'm incontinent, I have these two conflicting major premises. No sweet things are to be tasted. All sweet things are to be tasted. That's not the way it works. And then there's this clash of the syllogisms. It's. I still kind of know that no sweet things are to be tasted, but I also know legitimately that sweet things are pleasant. So that doesn't contradict the other major premise, but that comes into play. So desire, that's why it's the desire that's opposed. Do you see what I'm saying?

1:29:47 Mark: Sure. It's the thing has multiple properties and if you are thinking clearly, you would prioritize the one that really most should affect your action. But the other one is so sparkly

1:29:58 Seth: and it's like, you know, straight up question of adultery or something like that. Right. The sweet tasting bon bons. That doesn't get across the sense of what you're talking about. You know, you could also say the universal belief or the universal principle is that you are.

1:30:14 Mark: That all sweet things are to be tasted. Oh, yeah.

1:30:20 Seth: No, wouldn't it be that when you're married you are true to your spouse and you don't have sex with other people, but having sex with people is pleasant. Right. So that's where the conflict comes in, right, that you're incontinent with respect to your oath that you made the promise that you made what you know is the right thing to do.

1:30:40 Mark: I was just trying to figure out if that major premise that you just gave there could be stated without using particulars.

1:30:46 Seth: Oh, to make it universal.

1:30:48 Mark: Yeah. So you can. But it's less obviously something just graspable by noose. It seems like it's a custom. Or the way you put it is I made a particular commitment. So that's talking about a particular. You made this commitment to this other person in particular. It's not just that you're assenting to the property, the universal moral law that anyone who gets married, it's bad for them. In the same way that you have to sort of look at the telos of a relationship.

1:31:16 Seth: No, no, you don't have to. You just have to have the universal that oaths are to be kept.

1:31:22 Wes: Right. You could have any number of universals. It could be oaths, it could be marital vows, it would be kept.

1:31:27 Seth: I think you're right. Mark the point too, that the example I gave might involve particulars in a way, but I think that you could make it involve universals. And maybe I'm not being strict enough with Aristotle.

1:31:38 Wes: Well, one of the premises is always going to be particular. Marriage vows are not to be broken. But this particular woman before me is

1:31:44 Mark: sweet or does not fall into what I'm allowed given my marriage vows. That is the particular.

1:31:51 Seth: Yeah, I mean that's the way I was reading it. But I was just trying to come up with something that was more viceful. Right. Maybe that's why Aristotle picks this one because it seems less controversial or less about particulars. Right. So it follows your cake eating example for your birthday.

1:32:07 Mark: Well, maybe it just is a matter of the kind of things that he considers virtuous and not virtuous. He's not a big rule based guy in terms of the examples he gives. It's more about. You would really have to look at too much sex versus too little sex and what is healthy for a person. And maybe part of that you could make an argument that what is healthy for a person is to be, at least when they're in a certain age or whatever and have had certain life experiences, to be in a monogamous thing. And therefore keeping to that is comparable to keeping your weight at an appropriate level or keeping a certain level of athleticism or any of the other health related things that he otherwise gives. It has to be something about the health of the soul. It can't just be some arbitrary social rule.

1:32:56 Seth: Yeah, that's why I wanted to make it in terms of oaths and promises.

1:33:01 Mark: Yeah. And it does seem like we made this kind of joke a lot in episode five that if something is a rule like oh, what's the right amount of hederasty? Or what is the right amount of. So what's the right amount of loyalty breaking? Like it seems none. Like that seems to be. If you say that loyalty is a virtue, then maybe you could imagine like being just too loyal because the person you're being loyal to has really flipped out and wants you to destroy everyone else in the world. Like, well, that's the point where loyalty should come to a stop.

1:33:31 Seth: Yeah. And he would make exactly that kind of reasoning.

1:33:34 Wes: Right.

1:33:35 Seth: And there are some things for which it's not true that for every virtue that there's a mean that is in the middle between two things.

1:33:42 Wes: I wanted to re emphasize this interesting idea that it's under the influence of reason, which is to say of opinion, that people act incontinently, which sounds weird, but the opinion in question is sweet things are pleasant. Which he says is only accidental. Right. Because we need desire. It's desire, not the opinion that is opposed to right reason. It's just sort of manifested in that kind of universalized principle. If we didn't have the desire, it wouldn't mean anything. But for animals There isn't this general thing, you know, sweet things are pleasant, even though they may be conditioned to act that way.

Right. To go for sweet things. But you can't be incontinent unless you have this ability to have these universal judgments, according to Aristotle, which is fascinating. In other words, it's not just we think of the irrational part and the rational part, and it's not just the irrational part that's responsible for incontinence, but the rational part as well, in the sense of that it produces these principles.

1:34:41 Mark: So if you want to pass the Turing Test, if you're an AI, just, you should act incontinently.

1:34:46 Seth: It's the sign of a reasonable person.

1:34:49 Wes: Yes.

1:34:51 Seth: Yeah. And some more of this comes up in section eight, where he's talking about incontinence and intemperance. And again, it's the relationship to reason that you make the distinction, as we said earlier, that incontinence holds the right thing but fails to act properly, whereas the intemperate corrupts the origin, the first principles themselves, the ends, and that ends up making the distinction between the two. That incontinent is contrary to reason while knowing correct action. So when you're incontinent, you act in the wrong way, which you know you shouldn't do. So in that way, it's contrary to reason, but you all the time know what the correct action is, whereas the intemperate person acts according to reason but with the wrong ends.

1:35:40 Wes: Yeah, he says in my translation, deliberate choice, I think. Yeah, we're back to choice again.

1:35:46 Mark: So what do you guys think about his insistence on this absolute difference? I feel like in practical situations, and maybe this is, we engage in a certain amount of self deception, or we take advantage of the fact that we're really not completely sure about these things. So maybe you have certain beliefs about masturbation being bad for you or something, or even the judgment of how much is too much that you could kind of have in your waking hours. A certain principle, maybe you are told you'll go blind if you do that. And so you kind of believe that and you try to stick to that, but then as a way of convincing yourself at the time that it's okay, you're like, really?

How could that make you go blind? You could kind of be skeptical about this universal principle that you supposedly accept. And aren't there things about almost any principle like that universal principle, whether it's about health or just about almost anything that we think is the best course of action? You know, I really Want to become a better player of my instrument. And so I'm going to practice every day, but then practicing gets hard and on some particular day I would rather lie around. And so it's not that I know. No, I objectively do want to become better at my instrument.

I'm just kind of. I'm reprioritizing as I go.

1:36:57 Seth: So you're worrying about the distinction between intemperate and incontinent?

1:37:00 Mark: Yes, and some of that just comes down to a matter that these things he considers. Of course, what goes into phronesis is not only being able to connect your actions to the universal, but having the correct apprehension of a universal in the first place. And we've only used these easy examples about health and eating sweet things or whatever, but even just getting into the. Well, what exactly is wrong about infidelity? Is it that you're breaking your rule, or is it that you're hurting the person? And so maybe, well, if she doesn't know, then it's fine, like so you kind of decide how to formulate.

1:37:34 Wes: No, that's the thing. The wrongness would have to come from the malfunctioning. And that's actually in section eight, he says again to something that he said earlier, which I was just looking at because Dylan was just there, but basically that in matters of conduct, the end that you're aiming toward is not something that can be demonstrated, but it must come from the virtue of temperance. In other words, it's having the virtue of temperance that defines the end. But something like that it's stuff is very hard to explain. Trying to get at the real teleological picture, but being so constituted in a certain way that to exercise your faculties in such and such a way is one way is high functioning and one way is not. And that's the standard.

1:38:18 Seth: He does admit that there is some overlap in ways in which the intemperate and the incontinent overlap with one another. But he does insist on the distinction, one being the orientation with respect to first principles and another being the orientation to goodness. So in section seven, he says one person pursues excesses of pleasant things because they are excesses and because he decides on it for themselves and not for some further result. He is intemperate, for he is bound to have no regrets, and so is incurable, since someone without regrets is incurable. He continues this idea in section 8 saying, the intemperate person, as we said, is not prone to regret, since he abides by his decision when he acts. But every incontinent is prone to regret. Hence the truth is not what we said in raising these questions, but in fact the intemperate person is incurable and the incontinent is curable.

1:39:15 Mark: So let's at least put aside the questions. I know you could put moral quandaries in terms of how much disloyalty is too much, but that's kind of stretching it. The things he's concerned, to be fair to him, we really should need to concern only the things where we're kind of contemplating where is the golden mean? And being wise, having temperance at all is supposed to tell you where the golden mean is. I think in real situations we often don't know. So the question is how much is too much or how much is too little?

1:39:46 Wes: Yeah.

1:39:46 Mark: So let's say you're trying to diet, you want to eat less, but then you end up starving yourself, becoming bulimic, eating too little. In other words, indulging in the diet too much.

1:39:57 Seth: But that seems to me where the process of figuring this out has to do with some sense of practical wisdom and being attuned to what is fitting. Right. And so without knowing that the person who has good practical wisdom and is attuned to that would, regardless of the diet, as they started engaging in it, there would be a fittingness that they were able to discern out of that activity.

1:40:25 Wes: Well, in this case, I think the knowledge actually. So it's non theoretical, it's what we would call procedural or tacit knowledge and it comes from habituation. So to know what to do in any given situation, you just have to have been antecedently habituated in such a way that you have the virtue. That's the weird, I think radical claim about this is that there's nothing independent of that. It's like saying, I would see it if I knew it.

1:40:53 Seth: But it's not so crazy. We do this all the time, right? When you learn how to tune a guitar, or you learn how to.

1:41:00 Wes: Or I think even playing the guitar is a good example, maybe.

1:41:02 Seth: Yes. Or playing it where you're getting feedback, you're listening, even if you don't have something to compare to, you end up picking something that sounds right. And when you first do it, you're constantly moving too far away from that, you're exceeding and receding from that something that sounds good. And as you practice and do that more and more, you get better at staying closer and closer to what sounds good. And in that way it's just like the way he describes habit, right from the very beginning virtue is doing the right thing. And how do you become virtuous is you do the right thing.

1:41:40 Wes: With guitar. It's, you know, what's good is defined by this sort of antecedent historical community of practice, which is not to say it's not related to human nature, but in cases of virtue, you're anchored in the structure of the organism and all that stuff. The nature of the organism.

1:41:54 Seth: Yeah. I mean, another example that I would use is sailing, where you are trimming the sail with respect to the wind. You want to go in a particular direction and you let the sail out too far or pull it in too far, and the boat goes through a range of speed and you just naturally find, based upon the direction and the speed you want, looking to try to optimize that speed, where that is. And you, when you first start doing it, you adjust it too far one way or the other, and you gradually, just by doing it, you get a sense of what you should be doing.

1:42:31 Wes: Yeah. When someone teaches me boating, there's a set of uncontroversial goals involved just being able to move.

1:42:39 Seth: You're always aiming towards something the wind

1:42:41 Wes: push you or speed. And so there's no controversy. When someone is teaching me how to sail, I don't sit there and go, well, what if moving isn't the good of the boat or my good? I don't have to ask that question. I don't have to. It's just there's a clear thing we have to do. And then someone habituates me to that. But with virtue, I can always ask that question. I can always. When someone is habituating me. And of course, this is like a constant cultural problem, right, that we're faced with. We're all habituated into certain ideas of what is good and what is virtuous. But there's always the question of whether it really is. So you see what I'm getting at here.

1:43:19 Seth: It becomes a question of how do you become a attuned to what are the signs of your own flourishing?

1:43:24 Wes: Exactly.

1:43:25 Seth: And then that way you can remain directed towards it and you can get a sense by being attuned to what those signs are, whether you are deviating from there or not. And you see this basically in all kinds of self help. Right. The first thing they try to do is point you towards what the signs are and then point to how you evaluate where you stand with respect to those signs. Oh, you know what? You actually aren't very healthy. Why? Because whenever you walk up the stairs, you get out of breath. And that's actually a bad thing. Now the fact is for some of those things, I think that just by your own being an organism and your own living, you would, for most self reflective people, you feel, you know what, there's something wrong with me not being able to walk up a flight of stairs without being out of breath.

1:44:10 Wes: Yeah. This makes me think of it. In the case of virtue, it's sort of like coming to boating, except that no one's told you what a boat is for. And you have to figure that out on the fly from the way it's structured. And it is structured so that it can do this certain thing and you have to find out what that is. But I think that's actually doable. And I think it's doable in the case of virtue as well.

1:44:32 Mark: But given that we're political animals, given that we are raised with all these norms, we're really never going to be in a position where we're figuring out from scratch in the way you just described.

1:44:42 Seth: Yeah. And in fact, in the worst possible case, you might be inculcated with a culture that is actually cultivating things that are bad for yourself.

1:44:50 Wes: Yeah. So that is the sense in which we do have to figure it out from scratch to some extent. I mean, hopefully we've been given enough.

1:44:57 Mark: Yeah, you'll go blind.

1:44:58 Wes: We've been given enough good things because if it's all bad, right. Then we're screwed because it's not like coming to sailing and we don't know what the boat is. It's being completely damaged before that being suicidal.

1:45:10 Mark: If you take out to learn boating with that, suicide might be one of the goals here.

1:45:15 Wes: No, the analogy is just being given something that hardly even resembles a boat. It's full of holes. So how am I going to figure out if I've been habituated badly? My boat is full of holes. And how do you even get a clue of how to. So you have to have enough good things and then go from there. But certainly we need correction from whatever direction we've been given when we're young, unless we're really, really lucky.

1:45:38 Seth: Well, and that's why at the very beginning of the book, Aristotle thinks that proper education makes a huge difference. It may be that you can over time figure these things out for yourself. It may be hard and it may be rare that you actually completely do that on your own. And it certainly makes a big difference if you're habituated well. And it makes a huge impediment if you are habituated wrongly. If you are raised poorly, it causes you huge problems in trying to flourish.

1:46:08 Mark: So we are circling back now to things that we covered in the previous one. And given the time, I think maybe we should move to closings, though.

1:46:16 Wes: So we haven't really gotten into the pleasure thing, but I think the really interesting part of it we could say very briefly, because you were talking about being out of breath and pleasure is actually, for Aristotle, a really good guide star for figuring out what is good for you. Even though we can have pleasures and excess and so on and so forth. So he's going to re emphasize in this section that an activity or an energeia, which could also translate as the exercise of a faculty, the exercise of a hexis, that that is the end when we're doing something. It's an end in itself. It's not for the sake of something else. But pleasure sort of supervenes on that.

1:47:00 Seth: Well, isn't it indicated by pleasure?

1:47:02 Wes: Well, he even defines pleasure at some point as something like the unimpeded exercise. Okay. Yeah. So he's doing this in the context of arguing that pleasure is not a transition or a becoming, as some people would like to argue when they're trying to say it's a bad thing because it can't be an end in that sense, but it actually it is an end. And he calls it the unimpeded exercise of faculties in their natural state.

1:47:29 Seth: I think it's actually a great way to close off because the next part of this chapter and then going into the friendship books are about pleasure. And then he recapitulates that in the last book. And you're right, I think it's really the right thing to point out is that that is the guide is happiness. And happiness involves the proper understanding of pleasure. And part of that is just the normal way we think of pleasure. It's pleasant, it's nice, it feels good. And that part of happiness is it feels good. And that's part of how we get directed towards virtue, is it makes us happy and it feels pleasant.

1:48:12 Wes: Yeah. So here's another quote from section 13. So since every formed faculty, hexis, admits of unimpeded exercise, it follows that whether happiness be the exercise of all these faculties or of some of them, that exercise must necessarily be most desirable when unimpeded. But unimpeded exercise of faculty is pleasure. And earlier on, just to remind you, he said, pleasure is an energeia and it is an end in itself. So he concludes here a certain kind of pleasure, therefore will be the supreme good, which is not. He's not an epicurean. He's not a hedonist. Here it's something far more subtle than that. And again, before that, in section 12, he's basically said that pleasure is not this passive thing that we feel because something is happening to us. Pleasure is a doing. Pleasure has something to do with this being actualized.

1:49:06 Seth: To me, that's a perfect way to conclude what we're talking about right now, because it segues directly into what we're going to talk about next time.

1:49:13 Mark: All right. Well, I know one of the reasons that the things that I was looking to get out of here once I realized that we were going to be reading about phronesis was so just recently I was on another podcast. I appeared on the Srsly Wrong podcast, that's Srsly. And so I listened to a bunch of their episodes and then listening back to our episodes five. Even though they're less academic and kind of more silly than we are, they're still in their first couple years of doing this. So I feel like especially listening to their early stuff, it reminded me of, you know, when we had so much to say and we're not just reading the book and reacting to it as I think we do more now, as opposed to when we started.

And we just had so much to get off our chests. And so I was a guest on that podcast and I had to kind of sum up a little bit of like the most useful things I'd gotten out of philosophy and why this would be useful, you know, from sort of a self help, general wisdom perspective. And I brought up the word phronesis, which we didn't talk about that in our first Aristotle discussion. Maybe it came up in one of our later ones. I think more likely it was something raised by Patricia Churchland or Owen Flanagan, one of our other guests in Talking around ethics and around Aristotle.

And I immediately latched onto that. And the way that I characterized this on this other podcast was, at least in terms of doing Simone de Beauvoir recently made me think about was, for an existentialist, you're not just figuring out, I know what the good is, and I'm just figuring out how to get there. It's not just means and analysis. It involves some sort of creativity. And the existentialist picture, Beauvoir, building on Nietzsche and stuff, is taken as an update of Aristotle. And so is phronesis just a matter of, you know, what the end is supposed to be.

And phronesis is a matter of the wisdom that you get throughout your life that helps you get to that end, or is it a matter of actually figuring out the end, tweaking the end. So I posited that really a full understanding of what this wisdom amounts to when you transplant it into this existentialist framework, it is a matter of, you know, it makes it sound much less revolutionary that you're not creating values as Nietzsche says. You're using phronesis to tweak what's been presented to you as the good and kind of feel your way around it and make your own life an art.

And if you look at it that way, as opposed to creating values, then you don't run into these misunderstandings that you know you're going to come to the conclusion that rape is actually good or that murder is good, or that these things that dismiss Nietzsche by saying,

1:51:34 Wes: yeah, I think the difference is with Aristotelian phronesis you're attuned to your human nature, right? Whereas with a Nietzsche phronesis I would be more attuned or an existentialist phronesis more attuned to my west nature, let's say. Although an existentialist, of course, wouldn't want to say I have a nature. Exactly. But you get the drift, right?

1:51:53 Mark: It depends who you're talking to. Nietzsche might be more likely to say you have a West nature than de Beauvoir or Sartre. But in any case, if you want to have some guidance and not just be whimsical and it seems like the way Beauvoir was running is oh, you know, look at what is involved in making a choice. Aren't you also then willing the freedom of others that in essence comes down to reflecting on what you really want, you know, that you really do want the other people to flourish and that kind of thing, it's doing some sort of phenomenology, it's doing some sort of looking within, even if it's creative.

Anyway, so I was interested, given this take on this hypothesis. This is about phronesis, you know, it was very timely then that we're going actually back to Aristotle to see what he says about phronesis. And I do find that he is. I think that I can write this a little bit into Aristotle. I mean, with the caveat that you just put on it, Wes, that you're looking at human nature, but that human nature is not necessarily just something that is given that there's so much detail involved. So, like, if you were going to figure out how much is too much sexual promiscuity, or something like that, that there's not just an answer that you can intuit looking at human nature.

Like there really is a matter of the experience of your society and your personal experience and what you read and et cetera, et cetera, to kind of figure out these very practical norms for yourself. It's not just a matter of hooking ends to means, but it's a similar skill that you would use. It's the same kind of wisdom, this phronesis, that you would use to hook ends to means as to direct tweak the ends.

1:53:25 Wes: Interesting.

1:53:25 Mark: Anyway, so I consider all of my leaps justified.

1:53:30 Seth: Mark feels validated by Aristotle come a long way.

1:53:34 Wes: Mark. I thought you. Yeah, you might hate this.

1:53:39 Mark: You know, I can't say it was easy reading. I feel like I, like has happened with a few other readings recently. Like I said, started in like, yeah, okay, this is kind of cool. I'm plowing into it. And then after a few days of getting distracted, then I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to have to read this all. Oh, it's a good thing we're shortening the reading selection because I'm barely going to get through this. And it really was pretty painful for me to just read the last few pages. Like nine more pages to go. I'm just. I'm going to read this aloud to myself just to make myself read it.

And then once it's in my head, then I'll take a few more notes and try to internalize it it more. But this book is. Sails along, I think, better than some of the other Aristotle that we've read. And certainly I was prepared for this style of Aristotle. I was not expecting it to be like the Sophist or like the Phaedrus. I was expecting dry, but it, yeah, it was all right. And it's a good thing that I'm not wanting to escape it because we'd already decided, you know, we picked out the reading selection and then we immediately decided on looking at it, like, and getting into it that this is going to be too much for one podcast.

So sorry if you were waiting for Richard Rorty. That was supposed to be next, but we're going to do more Aristotle next on friendship in particular.

1:54:47 Seth: And I guess probably we'll get to happiness from book 10.

1:54:51 Mark: Yes, friendship and happiness. So everybody should go and debate what you think the coolest Greek word is on our Facebook page, on the blog post associated with this episode@partiallyexaminedlife.com you can also follow us on Twitter. Twitter and LinkedIn and all sorts of other things. And thank you to those that have become Partially Examined Life citizens. We're forever grateful to you or that have otherwise made a donation to us or, you know, if you were just wanting to give a dollar a month, you could jump on Patreon. We have an option like that there. Anything you can do to, you know, really, there's no contribution that's too great. Aristotle be damned. You should be intemperate with regard to your enthusiasm and financial support for the podcast.

1:55:36 Seth: This episode on the Nicomachean Ethics is brought to you with a personal gift in honor of the recent wedding of Matthew Decker and Amanda Schloss. As Aristotle says, for someone who is going to be happy, there will be a need of friends of serious worth.

1:55:50 Mark: The Partially Examined Life Live Show Election special at Brown University will be on October 27th at 5pm Eastern Time. We'll be talking about Alexis de Tocqueville and the problem with democracy. For more information, see partiallyexaminedlife.com we will post a live stream of the event to our Facebook page. All right, good night everybody.

1:56:09 Seth: Good night.

1:56:10 Wes: Good night.

1:56:26 Unknown speaker: Something about you But I have no way to really speak my mind Cause English is a language that I haven't used much lately to say what I need to say. I desire, I see require in need I care, I fall I bear fairly well it's just my mind's in hell die desire I see require in me I care, I fall I ban I want just my mind's in hell Heart on my sleeve Leaving a stain. And I don't know how I'll deal with the strain if the future gets warlike I hope there's a truce but now I'm defending Romania streets I'm chucking a torch down each of the valley

1:57:44 Mark: Following through with that mental drain Getting

1:57:46 Unknown speaker: back on the road that I've never been a follower. Does it sound insane? I die desire I see required I mean I care, I fall I fairly well just My mind's in hell I die desire I sleep require need I I care, I fall I've been fairly well just my mind's in hell I've long lost count of the men so I love you Guess I don't say them too much anymore maybe I'd like to just start it all up again maybe that's what I've been saying this for Dropping a torch down east right now following through with a mental drain Getting back on the road that I've never been off of and the wolves that I gouged in my brain does it sound insane?

I die desire I sleep in choir mean I can I fall like bam and I mean well it's just My mind's in hell I desire I see, require need I care I fall I fairly well just My mind's in hell I desire I see, require I need, I carry Use up my air I hate those who approach my lair I live, I die it's only fair I fare very well.