Let me start with an image. These are the old-fashioned balancers that the blind Justice is often depicted holding. Its very appearance tells us what it means to be accurate. I want you to imagine that part of your visual system is like this balance. When you correctly distinguish colors, it tilts to the right degree; when you distinguish them incorrectly, it leans too much or too little. When he is usually in the first state, so that you see colors correctly, Aristotle says he is in "middle perception."
Imagine that your other feelings are the same. If the corresponding part of each of them were on the average, they would all be good and accurate distinguishers of colors, sounds, tastes, smells and sensations. Now imagine that each of these five small scales registers its slopes, its inputs, with one large central balance (roughly what Aristotle calls "common sense"). He constructs from them a multi-meaningful picture of a three-dimensional world of objects that color, emit sounds, taste and smell, texture and temperature, occupy places, and draw continuous space-time paths as they move, causally interacting with each other. the other and ourselves. This is the world of substances - ousiai, as Aristotle calls them. You, the perceiver, are also one of them.
When we perceive white, and our color perception system is in the middle state, our perception is quite reliable, but when we perceive that a white thing "is this or that, an error is possible." In these cases, "this or something else" is an accidental perceived, as, for example, the son of Cleon, whom we perceive "not because he is the son of Cleon, but because he is white, and white is coincidentally the son of Cleon" . It is a man's perception of chance perceptions that can distort fear, or some other appetite or feeling, so that he "appears, even with a very slight resemblance, to see his enemy" or, if he is in love and not in danger, his beloved.
Thus, the apparatus of perception interacts with the apparatus of motivation, with our appetites, feelings, emotions and desires. And it is this fact that brings to the scene a more familiar remedy, the one we find in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in connection with the virtues of character.
Consider for simplicity one of these virtues: courage. It is associated with a sense of fear and confidence in the face of danger. To be overly afraid of small dangers is to be cowardly, and to be overconfident in the face of great dangers is to be reckless or reckless. Being brave, on the other hand, means having your fears on average so that they correctly measure the dangers, as a result of which our feelings of fear, as well as the actions they evoke and motivate, respond correctly to the dangers we face. Similar considerations apply to other feelings and actions. Temperance, for example, is associated with the pleasures and pains of appetizing desires such as food, drink, and sex. It is the pleasures and pains of various kinds that are really the focuses of the virtues of character, according to Aristotle.
Let's think of the virtues of character, on the one hand, as filters, in that they filter out or counteract the distortions that our desires bring into our perception. On the other hand, we can think of them as lenses that now, cleared of distortion, reveal the world of meaning to us as it really is, just as the perceptual average reveals colors, for example. Hold on to this thought: the virtues of character reveal to us a world of values, a world that disorderly desires make invisible. In the Republic, Plato tells us that the allegory of the cave illustrates the influence of education on us. Education does not blind the sight or the mind, but turns us towards the sun and goodness, breaking the shackles of desire that keep us in darkness, focusing on simple distorted images of goodness, not goodness. myself.
For Aristotle, the virtues of character alone are not enough to bring about the magical illumination that comes with leaving Plato's cave. We also need intellectual virtues: practical wisdom (phronêsis) and theoretical wisdom (sophia) - the love of the latter is philosophy. After all, in order to calibrate our desires, to balance them in the right direction, we must know what is really our good, and this includes knowing what we really are. And not only that, but what kind of world we are a part of. i In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle presents all bodies of knowledge organized as a pyramid, with politics or political science (politikê) at the top, on the grounds that it is the science with the most authority. He simultaneously decides which sciences should be part of the city or policy (part of the curriculum at the state university), who and to what extent should
women to study them (who should be admitted to the university and who should teach there), and how their diverse results should be used to promote the common good. The hallmark of a right, as opposed to a deviant, constitution or political system is that its laws and everything else is organized in such a way as to promote the common good, and not the good of the ruling class.
Of course, a politician (in the sense of one who is familiar with Aristotelian political science) cannot have expert knowledge of all the minor sciences in the pyramid of sciences. Even G. W. Leibniz, the last person who knew everything, did not know this! So how can a politician not become a hostage to experts, real or impostors?
Let us return for a moment to the virtues of character. These virtues ensure that a person is free from subjection to desires that distort his perception of the good (as revealed by various sciences) and cause actions and behavior that do not embody that good. When we add the knowledge of what good really is, man now possesses not only the virtues of character, but also the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom.
However, practical wisdom, Aristotle tells us, is the same state of mind as political science, differing from it only in its orientation: practical wisdom looks at the good of the individual; political science for the benefit of the city. But since humans are political animals—animals that thrive only as part of a political community—these two orientations inevitably overlap.
Focus now not on the fact that we are hostages of desires that can potentially distort our perception of values, but on the fact that we are hostages of scientific experts who can distort our knowledge of what is really useful for us. The virtues of character free us from the former, provided that practical wisdom frees us from the latter. But how practical wisdom to do this?
This is where the well-educated person comes in. This is the one who studies the subject not in order to gain scientific knowledge about it, but in order to become a shrewd judge: “Ignorance is precisely the inability to distinguish in each subject which arguments belong to him and which are alien to him,” says Aristotle. . Thus, for example, a well-educated person in medicine is able to judge whether someone has treated a disease correctly, and an "undoubtedly educated person", well-educated in every subject or area, "seeks accuracy in every question." field to the extent that the nature of its subject allows it.
Philosophy, in fact, is what provided this unified vision of oneself and the world.
The most revealing element of Aristotle's description of the well-educated person is that he (in Aristotle's writings it was always "he") knows the defining marks by which we can evaluate the scientific way of explaining things, apart from the question of what. the truth is, anyway. That is, signs that allow us to determine whether the claimant to the title of the relevant science is a genuine article, without the need to know whether what she tells us is really the truth. After all, the true sciences are our best path to truth. Thus, our best path to the authenticity of the sciences cannot be through our science-independent knowledge of what truth really is. (Some religions, of course, deny this in some cases.)
Partly on the basis of his deep (often first-hand) knowledge of the sciences of his time, Aristotle was confident that all sciences use the same basic explanatory concepts (final, formal, efficient, and material causes and the same logical causes). structure). Thus, in an important sense, they all spoke the same language, a language that a well-educated person could learn. This partly allowed him to see the world as a whole, which each of the particular sciences gives only a partial vision, and to see himself and his place in it. Philosophy, in fact, provided this unified vision of oneself and the world.
Is the idea of such a person—an Aristotelian, well-educated person—a real or achievable possibility? I want to approach this question with the help of the challenge posed by Elijah Milgram in his book The Great Darkening: The Philosophy of the Age of Overspecialization (2015). Milgram's main idea is that the disciplines have become so overspecialized, each with its own technical vocabulary, tools, explanatory strategies, standards of accuracy and success, that no one, however well educated, can hope to fully understand them all. We live in a Tower of Babel in which the epistemological autonomy required for responsible democratic citizenship is and can only be an illusion. We are and can be at the mercy of experts only when, that is,
we are not just at the mercy of some ideology, be it a religion, a corporation, a political party, or some favorite website or whatever. .
Let us return to Aristotle and to the idea of the pyramid of sciences. We must expand the pyramid with bridging skills (if we call them that), the purpose of which is to transfer the knowledge of some science in a usable form to politicians and citizens in general. A good physics journalist (or physics popularizer) does this. This includes the ability to read real physics and talk to physicists, not for the purpose of doing physics oneself, but for the purpose of being able to translate into "ordinary terms" what the physicist has to say in his technical and expert terms. (terms you need to be privy to understand). Bridge physics is a real skill and a very important one. Replace physics with climatology and bridge physics with bridge climatology and you will see why.
Philosophy, though not quite in the form of the science of being in general (or metaphysics) as Aristotle imagined it, must undoubtedly play an important role here. Philosophy helps us form a reasonably sound general idea of reality and our place in it, as well as acquire some of the analytical skills necessary to break down misconceptions. But since academic philosophy, to its shame, has become as fragmented as other sciences, then, continuing the metaphor, we would need a cohesive philosophy based on specialized philosophies and inspiring their respect for rigor and clarity. , but more Catholic in scope and target audience, and therefore written in a language that any reasonably well-educated person can understand and respond to with interest. A pleasure to read, Edith Hall's The Way of Aristotle (2019) achieves something close to this in the case of Aristotle's thought. But, as the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, frustrated by the obscurity of Hegel's writings, put it:
There is nothing easier than to write in such a way that no one understands; as well as vice versa, nothing is more difficult than to express deep things in such a way that everyone must necessarily understand them.
Thus the very philosophy of bridging requires special education and training, a special skill and caste of mind. Aristotle himself seems to have also tried his hand at this kind of philosophy in his so-called exoteric writings (of which only fragments survive) and succeeded greatly, for their prose, as Cicero tells us, "flowed like a river." from gold'.
But bridges, like chains, are no better than their weakest link. And in the case of the pyramid of knowledge that I have described, this link undoubtedly belongs to the citizens and especially to the citizen-politicians, who in democracies are their representatives.
We now come to another Aristotelian view of education. It must, Aristotle tells us, be public and develop with an eye to the constitution (political system), whose citizens it prepares students. This is to prepare students to be free citizens (free from being subject to their own desires, free from being subject to experts, genuine or fake), which will include the study of the constitution as well as its competitors, since in many ways it can be wrong - not contribute to the common good.
It must also be one that allows people to live well, to live a good life in the society to which they belong. And it's a matter of giving them everything they need to access, in a proper way, the good things without which life is impoverished. Music (the ability to read music, play an instrument, listen sensitively and insightfully), literature (the ability to read with understanding and respond appropriately to great poems and novels in one's own language and in the language of others), and painting and cinema, likewise.
The same is true in the sciences. Students need (and now I'm thinking of ourselves, not the ancient Greeks) a knowledge of mathematics that makes its nature and beauty accessible, and that gives the necessary competencies, for example, to read a loan agreement, understand statistics and probability theory, in order to avoid exploitation . And they need an understanding of physics, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, and so on, that will enable them to see how these sciences work, what their sensitivity to facts entails, and how they reveal the wonders and complexities of nature. and the social world for the understanding eye.
Courses in the philosophy of some of these sciences, combined with a deeper acquaintance with some of them, could achieve this. Here is Timothy Williamson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, writing on the subject in the New Statesman earlier this year:
An accurate and effective account of science must be honest about the nature of the scientific arguments without diverting the reader from technical details. To achieve even an elementary understanding of science, it is necessary to distinguish three dimensions: its subject (for example, the past,
present and future climate), data about the subject (such as temperature measurements) and theories about it (such as the hypothetical mechanism of global warming). Confusion of any two of these three dimensions leads to a disturbing confusion in the mind in which no theory is lacking evidence, or nothing goes unnoticed, or changing a theory is tantamount to changing the climate. In other words, in public discussions of science, it is better to avoid basic errors in the philosophy of science, for fear of distorting scientific discoveries and their practical implications.
An education, scientific or otherwise, that aims to give us an understanding of what is relevant to the freedom and richness of our lives as citizens of a complex society and world, will be very different from what we have now.
However, the part of the Aristotelian picture that has not yet been revealed can be somewhat shocking, and is too often ignored by modern virtue ethicists who pay attention only to the Nicomachean ethics, and not to the politics that accompanies it. The fact is that people do not develop practical wisdom until they are 50 or so, by which time their familiarity with "theory" is reinforced by their experience of the so-called "real world". Aristotelian education, like its Platonic predecessor, lasts almost a lifetime.
Part of what made this possible is that constitutions, which, according to Aristotle, best provided their citizens with the leisure they needed for a lifelong education (allow wars and the like - all men served in the military), and also to use this education for the benefit of happiness. in access to truly valuable goods, since all (or most) of the work is done by slaves. From an educational point of view, this meant that there was no need for education to prepare students for the world of work so that they could become "productive", busy members of our society, which we now (somewhat short-sightedly, in my opinion) lay on education is its main function. This is one of the main differences between Aristotelian societies and modern ones.
Another important difference is that the societies considered by Aristotle are also for the most part ethnically, culturally, and religiously homogeneous. This makes invisible to him many of the sources of political division and instability that are now at the center of our political life - along, of course, with the degradation that capitalist consumerism has inflicted on the natural world, the social world and the world. the world of international politics. If we weren't so addicted to consumption (and the climate emergency could cure our addiction), perhaps we could imagine a return to self-governing political organizations that would be more Aristotelian. Like the city-states or city-states favored by Aristotle, small nation-states, large nation-states, and international political communities such as the EU are all “experiments of life,” as John Stuart Mill called them in 1859, and no one really does not know which ones are best for human prosperity. When measuring happiness by income (GDP per capita), healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom to make life choices, trust (no corruption) and generosity, the happiest countries in 2018 were Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and the Netherlands . So perhaps Aristotle understood something.
Aristotle held to the idea that there is a permanent recipe for a better life and that once we find it, all we have to do is stick to it.
The third difference is that Aristotle-favored political communities also - in the sense that this is of great importance for democratic (or aspiring to be democratic) societies - legally quite simply satisfy the need for lawyers and resolve issues not related to equality before by law. but with equal access to law and legal representation, far less pressing than in many of our societies, where gross economic inequality is often cashed in as gross legal inequality.
The fourth difference is that Aristotle sees us as having a limited number of fixed social identities based on our nature: male, female, free, slave, citizen, farmer, artisan, wage laborer. We, on the contrary, are less likely to think that our nature is so fixed, at least in the case of our social or economic class or the kind of work we do. And connected with the problem of identity is the notion of a biographical or narrative life within which this identity (or these identities) is realized. Thinking of free men's lives
yakh as one narrative structure, and political, Aristotle, without realizing it, narrows the set of male virtues or virtues to political ones. Similarly, by thinking of feminine virtues as a domestic narrative structure realized exclusively in the domestic realm, he narrows down the set of feminine virtues to domestic ones.
Of course, we could agree with him that many of these virtues are needed by any person (courage, temperance, justice), but others that he explores, such as magnificence and greatness of the soul, seem to be more specific to a particular society. specific story. Our life narratives are very broadly divided into our public life and private life, work and play. But the virtues required in these two areas are somewhat different and somewhat incompatible. In an outdated popular psychological version of the story, a man (from Mars), having been hardened for the cutthroat world of work, distances himself from his feelings so much that he soon cannot access them, revealing himself when he returns home from work. face to face with a woman (from Venus in the same story) who wants him to share his feelings with her in an intimate conversation.
The last difference (of course, there are others that I do not consider) between Aristotle and us has to do with what I call completion - with the idea that there is a permanent recipe for a better life and that once we find it, whether in heaven or on Earth, all we have to do is stick to it. (By the way, speaking of heaven, I can't help but quote a short entry from Jules Renard's wonderful Journal (1906): "I can believe in anything, but the justice of this world does not give me a very encouraging thought about the justice of the next. I am very I'm afraid that God will continue to make mistakes: he will accept the evil in paradise, and cast the good into hell.
Leaving such worries about heaven aside, the closure of the earth is something we can no longer trust. For the vast collection of sciences and scientific-like bodies of knowledge that are our best guides to the truth about the world are constantly evolving, constantly changing, replacing old pictures with new ones. Closure - the end of science, the final picture, the (ominous) final decision - is inconsistent with what history, sociology, and philosophy of science (which are themselves science-like bodies of knowledge) tell us. One of the vices of ideology (political, religious, or whatever) is that it offers us the supposed comforts of closure in the form of definite and final decisions, the final history of ourselves.