aristotle's anthropocentrism

Philosophical Invesfigatiom 16:l January 1993 ISSN 0190 - 0536 $2.50

Aristotle’s Anthropocentrism

Michael Woods, Brasenose College, Oxford

One pervasive theme of Nussbaum’s treatment of Aristotle in Fragility is the claim that Aristotle, in contrast to Plato particularly, adopts an anthropocentric point of view. It is this theme in Fragility that I wish to explore. It involves a number of different strands, and it is a worthwhile task to try to distinguish them, and see how they are related to one another. What I aim to do is to initiate a further discussion of these elements in Aristotle’s philosophy that Nussbaum has so illuminatingly identified.

We have, first of all, the anthropocentrism that is, Nussbaum holds, implicit in Aristotle’s insistence that we must stick to phainomena; to those phainomena that present themselves to human beings. What overall philosophical position was adopted, or tacitly presup- posed, by Aristotle as a background to his methodological practice of making philosophy answerable to the phainomena? That is the topic of the first part of this paper; it relates particularly to what Nussbaum says in her Chapter Eight, the chapter entitled ‘Saving Aristotle’s appearances’.

This methodological practice was adopted by Aristotle throughout his philosophy, but it is notably applied by him in the area of ethics - and indeed it is in the ethical works that we find some of the most explicit and striking enunciations of the principles of method in question. Thus Aristotle holds that ethical truths, like others, cannot transcend phainomena, but there are various other ways, subtly elaborated by Nussbaum, in which Aristotle’s ethics is anthropocentric, in contrast to Plato’s. This will be my second topic.

Finally, Nussbaum, like a number of others, but with some pow- e&l new arguments, holds that Aristotle’s commitment to an anthropocentric perspective in ethics is quahfied in that E.N. X 6-9 particularly, but also some other passages elsewhere in these writings, advocates a oon-anthropocentric, more Platonic, conception of the good human life, incompatible with the account of eudaimonia that predominates elsewhere in the ethcal works. This will be my

Michael Woods 19

third topic. Nussbaum’s position here is developed in her Appendix to Part 111.

I

As Nussbaum notes, Aristotle takes it to be his task, as a philosopher, to begin and end with the phainomena (or with endoxa).’ (This way of putting it is mine). As she rightly notes, there is no good reason for eschewing the natural translation ‘appearances’: it covers both something like observation, in the sense in which that term has been used in the later tradition of writing on scientific method, though without any presumption that observation can be theory neutral, and also judgements that philosophers and people in general are inclined to make on the matter in hand. The term is not used equivocally, but covers, quite generally, how the subject matter of the relevant philosophcal enquiry presents itself to us.

But we also end with phainomena, because we are entitled to regard our task of enquiry as completed when we have reached a position that wdl accommodate them; they accommodate them in that they allow as many as possible of them to be true, or, if not true, at least partly on the right lines; or, faihng that, the appearance in question can at least be explained. In decidmg whether or not what we arrive at can accommodate the phainomena, we shall give greater weight to those of the wise and reflective, and more to those of our beliefs that are fundamental, in relation to others, and deeply held. As Aristotle says in E.N. VII, 1145 b If.,

As in the other cases, we must set out the appearances, and first of a l l go through the puzzles. In this way we must prove the common beliefs about these ways of being affected - ideally all the common beliefs, but if not all, then most of them, and the most important. For if the objections are solved, and the common beliefs are left, it will be an adequate proof.*

1. It is hardly possible to suppose that Aristotle used the terms endoxon and phainom- enon interchangeably, but it seems reasonable to hold that the phainomena that need to be taken account of include what Aristotle classed as endoxa. The question of the relation between phainomena and endoxa cannot be pursued here. See John Cooper’s review of Fragility in Philosophical Review, Volume XCVII (October 1988) at

2. Here and elsewhere I quote from Irwin’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics. pp. 549-551.

20 Philosophical Investigations

Likewise in E.E. 1216 b 26f,

We must try, by argument, to reach a convincing conclusion on all these questions, using, as testimony and by way of example, what appears to be the case. For it would be best if everyone should turn out to agree with what we are going to say; if not that, that they should all agree in a way and will agree afier a change of mind; for each man has something of his own to contribute to the finding of the truth, and it is from these that we must demonstrate: beginning with things are correctly said, but not clearly, as we proceed we shall come to express them clearly, with what is more perspicuous at each stage superseding what is customarily expressed in a confused fashion.

But the question arises, which Nussbaum discusses, Why is that enough? And what status do the philosophical conclusions that pass the test have?3 Exactly what answer Aristotle might have gwen to the Kantian question ‘How is knowledge of reality possible?’ is, I think, very closely related to the issue of anthropocentrism in Aristotle’s general views about knowledge and reality.

We can begin by asktng why it might be thought sufficient if we can accommodate the phainomena. One answer might be along the following lines: Suppose we have a philosophical theory (about the phenomenon of akrasia, for example) that accommodates all the phainomena that it needs to accommodate, and then the question is raised just what grounds we have for accepting it. That question might be turned round we might respond to our objector 6y ask- ing: What grounds does he have for rejecting it? Any reason that he might have for rejecting it would have to appeal to some further phainomena - either to some intuitions that we have, or to a well- supported general philosophical doctrine that the proposed theory is in conflict with, to some familiar facts of human behaviour or to something else - there are several other possibilities, so various are the things that are comprehended under phainomena as Aristotle uses that term. But then, either the philosophical theory about akrasia that we have developed is able to accommodate these new phainomena, in which case the grounds that we thought we had for rejecting the theory are undermined; or else they are, so to speak, new phainomena, that were not taken account of when the theory was

3. This is very closely related to questions that have recently been explored by T.H. Irwin in his Aristotle’s First Pn’nciples (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988) though it is there discussed as the question how dialectic can reach conclusions that are not (merely) dialectical but can claim to be correct as an account of reality.

Michael Woods 21

developed, in which case the theory does not, after all, fulfil Aristotle’s criteria. Either way, we do not have grounds for rejecting a theory that can accommodate all the phainomena.

This is a very general, abstract, argument. The manner in which I have stated it owes something to the writings of Q ~ i n e . ~ I f Aristotle was influenced by an argument along those lines, it would explain why he regards it as sufficient to accommodate the phainomena. We had better be content with t h s , because nothing better is available; a theory that meets the conditions that Aristotle mentions is the most that we could ever have. It also seems to be suggested by a passage like E.N. X 1172 b 36f

When some object that what everything aims at is not good, there is nothing in what they say. For if things seem [good] to all, we say they are [good]; and if someone tries to undermine confidence in these, what he says will hardly be more persuasive.

I think it is clear that Aristotle is not saying that we say that what seems to be the case to everyone is true.5 For one thing, it is not Aristotle’s view, nor is it a consequence of the method of phainomena, that a universally held view could never in fact be false. If a theory that fits most of the phainomena implies that such a view is false, and, moreover, it can explain why such an opinion appears

4. I have in mind passages in which, Quine refers to Neurath‘s image of the boat that has to be repaired while still at sea (as in the quotation that is used as an epi- graph to Word and Object). For the doctrine, and denial that we can step outside the web of our beliefs, see, for example, Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981) p. 72, and ‘The Nature of Natural Knowledge’ in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973) p. 68. Obviously, the parallel between Quine’s position and the position sketched in the text is only partial, and, in Quine’s case, the view that our beliefs can be criticized and revised only from within is associated with a hghly un-Aristotelian rejection of first philosophy (see Theories and Things, op. cit.). Nonetheless, the similarity between Quine’s views and Aristotle’s is strilung on Nussbaum’s interpretation if I have characterized it correctly. Just as Quine holds that we cannot get outside the web of our beliefs, Aristotle holds that we cannot transcend phainomena. 5. Though this is certainly how it is taken by the majority of translators - for example, Stewart in Notes on the Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford, 1892). Ross in the Oxford Translation, Gauthier and Jolif L’gthique d Nicomaque, (Louvain, 1958), Dirlmeier in Aristoteles: Nikomachische Ethik, (Berlin, 1969). and, most recently, Sarah Broadie in Ethics wi th Aristotle, (Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 347; for the alternative, see Burnet, The Ethics of Aristotle (Methuen, London, 1900) and Terence Irwin, Nicomachean Ethics (Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1985).

22 Philosophical Investgations

to everyone to be true despite its falsehood, Aristotle could happily condemn the opinion as false despite universal assent.6

Aristotle here implies that the view that pleasure is a good is so entrenched and so supported by other entrenched endoxa that no phainomena adduced to support the contrary could possibly provide grounds for rejecting it. We seem to have an indication that Aristotle accepted the general argument. I suggested that it could never be rational for us to reject an opinion that accommodated the phainomena. Any way of doing justice to appearances will have to allow pleasure to be a good. That such a general argument is available is, of course, a consequence of the wide use of the term ‘phainomena’.

In short, we should have no grounds for rejecting a view that accommodates the phainomena in the way I have described. Equally, the question still remains, what grounds we have for accepting it. Even if we have no grounds for rejecting it, might it nonetheless be false? Did Aristotle have philosophical reasons of a general kind for holding that such a view must be true? Did he think that a philosophical theory that satisfied these conditions could not be wrong?

Nussbaum holds that he did have such reasons, and the question whether he did is intimately connected with her attribution to him of an anthropocentric position. The best way to see this is to note that the position tentatively ascribed to Aristotle, that relied on the abstract argument I have outlined, is surely not in any si&icant sense an anthropocentric one. Aristotle can still say that when he arrives at conclusions about the unmoved mover, about the generation of living things, or about the structure of scientific demonstration, or about the character of the human soul, hs conclusions, if true, tell us how things are objectively. The conclusions can claim to be about reahty itself, and not reality tiom a human

6. In Fragility @. 243), Nussbaum glosses that passage as ‘nothing umversally believed is enarely discarded’, and quotes along m t h it 1153 b 27-8, whch occurs in the most nearly parallel passage in E.N. VII. But the thought that no u r n v e d y held view can be completely mde of the mark is much weaker (and much more conso- nant with Anstotle’s docmne) than 1172 b 36 - 1173 a 1 is m t h the most common translaaon. Any defender of that must decide whether taut& r@n doxan in the next sentence refers to the thesis that every urnvenally held behef is true, or to the behef that pleasure is a good. With the former, we have Anstotle regadng it as evldent in advance that no one can argue persuasively agamst a highly contentlous phdosoph- cal thesis. With the latter, what is said in the dlsputed sentence drops out as irrelevant to the argument, whch appeals to the special features of the behef that pleasure is a good rather than the status of umversally held behefs in general.

Michael Woods 23

perspective. The abstract argument that I sketched, and which I suggested there is at least a h n t of in Aristotle’s writings, that we cannot escape the web of our beliefs, does not, in itself; imply that our beliefs concern only things as they are &om the human point of view.

However, as we have seen, if Aristotle’s conclusions are understood in a strongly realistic fashion, he is exposed to sceptical questions, which he could reasonably have been expected to have been aware of, to which he may have no answer. At least, these sceptical questions can certainly be raised (even if there is no answer to them) and not dismissed as unintekgible.

We can see that Aristotle’s commitment to phainomena is not intrinsically anthropocentric if we note that, in speaking of phainomena, he does not mention specifically human beings: were we in a position to know more about how things appear to other species, there would be no reason for not taking into account these further phainomena also. The virtual restriction to human phainomena could be a purely epistemological one: for a large number of reasons, many of which are rather obvious, our access to the beliefs and the manner in which things present themselves to non-humans is very limited.

So far I have offered a rather abstract argument in support of Aristotle’s philosophical method, which holds philosophical conclusions to be answerable to the phainomena, and said that there are hnts’ that Aristotle might have been ready to defend his method and practice by such an argument, and I have argued that acceptance of such an argument does not have any anti-realist implications.

The abstract argument that I have outlined may seem rather far removed &om anything that Nussbaum ascribes to Aristotle in Fragility. My purpose in developing it is to bring out the fact that Aristotle’s methodological practice can be given a defence that does not imply any commitment to the internal realism that Nussbaum ascribes to him. The argument could be taken epistemologically, so to speak, as saying that we could never have better grounds for accepting a philosophical view than that it harmonises the phainomena.

Nussbaum takes Aristotle’s position as resting on a general view about the scope and content of human beliefs: that they cannot ultimately concern anything but how things are for us. She holds that

7. I do not claim that they are more than hints.


Aristotle’s position is anthropocentric, because she thnks that Aristotle, in effect, had a reply to the sceptical objector: according to Nussbaum, if I understand her correctly, Aristotle held that the only truths available to us are truths that do not, ultimately, transcend appearances. She characterizes the view as ‘a kind of realism (p. 257); neither idealism of any sort nor skepticism, but it is an internal realism, of the kind elaborated by Hilary Putnam in Reason, Truth and History.’ ‘The belief in the d~vinity and eternity of heav- enly bodies has weight in philosophy, because it has survived so many changes of social and political belief of a more superficial nature. (Met 1074 a 39). But, by the same token, an ‘internal’ truth is all we are entitled to claim for our beliefi.’ ‘Appearance and truth are not opposed, as Plato believed they were: we can have truth only inside the circle of appearances, because only there can we communicate, even refer, at all.’

On this view, the method of starting with appearances and seek- ing to accommodate them is guaranteed to reach the only truth that is available to us. The sceptic asks how we can know that by pro- ceeding in this fashion, we can attain to objective knowledge of the world. According to Nussbaum, Aristotle’s reply is that the dstinc- tion between how thngs are in themselves and how they are for us makes no sense. She says (p. 256) ‘Even the contrast between the world as it is for us and the world behind or apart fiom thought may not be a contrast that the defender of a human internal truth should allow himself to make, using human language.’

Nussbaum compares Aristotle with Kant, and it seems that she ascribes to Aristotle a form of transcendental idealism: all intelligible discourse and knowledge can only be about things as they present themselves to us; to speak of them as they are in themselves is unin- telligible. She claims that Aristotle is more consistent and thoroughgoing than Kant in not admitting speculation about how things are independently of how they appear to us. Such a position certainly can reasonably be called anthropocentric, since it denies the intelligibility of discourse that tries to describe things otherwise than &om a human perspective. Even when we describe the heav- enly bodes, and the ultimate organization of the cosmos, we speak intelligibly only if our claims are credited only with internal truth - their truth is answerable ultimately to human appearances; we are, fundamentally, saying how things arefor us. ‘Scientific truths are true Of or about the world of nature; they are not (any more than they

Michael Woods 25

were for Kant) all about human beings and their mental states. But the status of the basic truths on which science is based is a status of necessity for discourse only.’

Thus Nussbaum claims that Aristotle secured for the conclusions of the method of appearances a claim to truth by treating their truth anthropocentrically. As I have argued, and perhaps Nussbaum would agree, Aristotle’s method of malung his conclusions answerable to the appearances does not presuppose internal reahsm; but Nussbaum has a number of more specific arguments for ascribing such a position to Aristotle. My difficulty here is that, if Aristotle’s general methodology does not carry with it internal realism, neither do the applications of the method that Nussbaum considers.

She examines Aristotle’s dwussion of the Principle of Non- Contradiction (PNC) in Metaphysics IV. It is worth noting that some of the many arguments that Aristotle deploys to undermine the position of one who hsputes the PNC do not seem to have any close connection with phainomena. When Aristotle argues that in expressing the belief that P, or making an assertion that P, I must exclude P’s negation, if I am to be allowed to be saying anything definite at all, this has force whether P concerns phainomena or not. In particular, acting on beliefs need not, as Nussbaum puts it (p. 254), require someone to be ‘responsive to definite features of the world as it strikes a human being, namely himseif.’

In any case, to offer a transcendental argument (in a broad sense) for the conclusion that the PNC cannot be coherently denied leaves open what its status is: whether acceptance of PNC is constitutive of intelligible discourse in general, or merely of human discourse, as Nussbaum argues, so that the PNC is something that we cannot reject. These questions are left unanswered by Aristotle’s argument in Metaphysics IV.

Likewise, if, like Nussbaum, we dispute the traditional view that the first principles of the sciences, as described in the Analytics are grasped in an a priori fashion by intellectual intuition, we are not required to accept that they are true only of the world as it is for us; it may be that, as Nussbaum says (p. 251), ‘the appearances . . . can go all the way down’; but this, once again, can be understood epistemologically: our grounds for accepting these principles as fundamental may derive &om their power to make sense of appearances; but these may be thought to be the best grounds we could possibly have for regardmg them as true of reality independently of us.


Nussbaum also argues (pp. 255 - 7) fiom Aristotle’s philosophy of language - in particular, the conditions for linguistic indicating, and some of the arguments he uses against the Eleatics and Plato. I con- fess to some uncertainty about the Aristotelian doctrine that is here appealed to. At one point she suggests (p. 256) that the Eleatic does not succeed in singhng out or indcating the One because ‘neither he nor anyone else in the community can have had experience of it’. But the principle implied here, that what can be referred to must be capable of falling within our experience is much stronger than anythmg that Aristotle’s doctrines about the authority of phainomena could support, and indeed it seems to be inconsistent with his position. Aristotle cannot consistently rule out the introduction of expressions signifying what fills outside our experience, provided their postulation can be justified as part of the project of making the best sense of appearances. It seems to me very doubtfbl if either Eleaticism or the Platonic Theory of Forms can be rejected on the basis of Aristotle’s general methodology of saving the phainomena, given the wide extension of that term.

Was the form of anthropocentrism that Nussbaum ascribes to Aristotle adopted by him throughout his phdosophy - in all areas of philosophical enquiry - in every branch of dwourse in which we find him practising or advocating the method of appearances? I think that some doubts may be felt about ths, given the often repeated contrast between things intelligible to us (i.e. to human beings) and thmgs intelligible in themselves (hapf6s). Nowhere, to my knowledge, is there any hint that when he speaks of things intelligible in themselves (gn6rima hapl6s) this is only to be understood in a relative way, so that even what is intelligible hapf6s is really, in a hndamental sense, only intelligible for us. And there is also the fact that, as I have tried to argue earlier, a perfectly good rationale can be given for this method of appearances that does not involve any commitment to transcendental ideahsm, or a denial that any non- anthropocentric truth is available to human beings.

It may be argued that the internal realist can, like anyone else, make the distinction that Aristotle makes between what is so for us and what is so in itself within the range of what is the case for human beings. The distinction can, after all, be made on an empirical basis. The problem is that the language that Aristotle uses to make the contrast is quite inappropriate if he adopted the form of internal realism that Nussbaum ascribes to him. From that perspective, even

Michael Woods 27

what is true haplbs wdl, in the end, be so because it is so for human beings.

But my main reason for challenging Nussbaum’s attribution to Aristotle of a form of transcendental idealism is a negative one: that I do not find in the advocacy of the method of appearances or its applications a sufficient reason for crediting Aristotle with such a view, in the absence of more specific indications, and, in particular, in the absence of signs that Aristotle had raised for himself the Kantian question ‘How is knowledge of reality possible?’

However, even if we doubt whether Aristotle accepted that the truths that philosophical enquiry gives us all have to be construed anthropocentrically, it is much harder to dispute that the conclusions of the ethical works have to be taken as true for human beings; as made true ultimately by what human beings are like, and by the way things appear to them. There are plenty of passages in the ethical works which suggest that what is good for human beings is not to be divorced from what seems good to them; and that the sort of life that is the best for human beings cannot be too far removed from the kind of life that people would actually pursue.

I1

Nussbaum makes it clear that, in part, the anthropocentrism of Aristotle’s view of the good life is a consequence, in her view, of the method of appearances, and the repudiation of the Platonic god’s eye view. We cannot survey lives from a standpoint external to the human (p. 291). But she claims that Aristotle’s position is anthropocentric in a stronger sense as well (ibid.). I want now to examine what this stronger sense is, and how Aristotle’s differences from Plato should be seen - in particular the differences that Aristotle insists on in E.N. I 6 and E.E. I 8.

Nussbaum claims that Aristotle insists that human goodness is species-relative. It follows immediately that his account of the human good in the Ethics, and everything else that derives from that, is anthropocentric in a sense that goes beyond the anthropocentrism in all judgements that Nussbaum ascribes to him. It would be perfectly compatible with that to hold that judgements about the good were comparable to judgements about the unmoved mover, or about the four elements, or about animal species in general.

What about the claim that Aristotle’s account of goodness - or


rather, since he speaks of goodness elsewhere - his account of goodness in the ethical writings is species-relative? Here I think I diverge substantially fiom Nussbaum in what I take to be the area of disagreement between Plato and Aristotle.

The point is not simply that human good is different fiom equine good or the good of a spider, or again the good of some creature superior to a human. Plato would hardly have dissented fiom that. Likewise, Nussbaum insists that a satisfactory account of human good must take into account human needs and the circumstances that human beings find themselves in; it must attend to what human beings are actually like. Plato would not, at least at the most general level, have disagreed with that.’ Where he would have disagreed with Aristotle is in his view of what human beings are like, and of the status to be accorded to human beings’ opinions about the good, and the desires and concerns human beings have as things are. As Plato had a different view about the possible developments available to human beings, he has a different view fiom Aristotle about what humans’ essential nature is. But he would not have dissented from the thought that the human good is species-relative.

Aristotle would have parted company &om Plato in claiming that there is no question of deriving an account of the good of a particular species - human beings, say - fiom a quite general conception of goodness: there is no question of using one’s understanding of what goodness in general is in order, in conjunction with an examination of the distinctive characteristics of a particular species, to derive an account of the good of that species. Just such a derivation of the goodness appropriate to human beings - the good human life, the good state of a human soul, the good ordering of a city - was envis- aged by Plato in the Republic; and this, it seems to me, is Aristotle’s fundamental difference from Plato, as declared in E.N. I 6 and E.E. I 8. In short, Aristotle wished to insist that there is no question of arriving at the species-specific goodness of the ideal human life fiom something more general - from something not species-specific.

It must be admitted, though, that the nature of the disagreement with Plato is presented less than perspicuously in those chapters, as I have argued elsewhere.’ In the first place Aristotle presents (1095 a

8. The view of human good that we find in the Republic depends crucially on the tripartite soul. 9. Aristotle, Eudemian Efhicr, Books One, Two and Eighf, translated with a commentary; (Clarendon Aristotle Series, Oxford 1982), pp. 87-8.

Michael Woods 29

22) the Platonic theory as if it were a rival to the alternative views about what the good human life is that he canvasses. After saying that there is dispute about what eudairnonia is, and dsagreement between the many and philosophers, he says that ‘some think that there is, over and above the many goods, something else by itself, which is the reason for these goods of their being goods’, as if it were a view of the same sort as those mentioned earlier. But of course, Plato’s doctrine of the Form of the good was not, as such, a view of that sort. It was not a theory about what the ideal human life was, but a doctrine about the ultimate source or ground of the goodness of whatever should prove to be the best human life.

Secondly, in E.N. I 6 itself, much of the argument is devoted to issues that are, strictly, not relevant to the main point of difference between Aristotle and Plato. For example, Aristotle argues that goods are categorially diverse; but as, Nussbaum points out, that could be a h t t e d even by one who accepted a Platonic science of the good. Equally, of course, as I have already argued, believers in the Platonic science would have no reason to deny that human good was a species-relative matter.

The same applies to the argument that ‘good’ is not univocal; or, connected with that, that goodness is not a common character - even a common character shared by all things good in themselves. This much could happily be conceded by a believer in the Platonic science of the good: he would need only to add that the various forms of goodness appropriate to different lunds of being can be derived from an adequate conception of what goodness in general is.

What does distinguish Aristotle from Plato is not the view that goodness is species-relative, but the thought that the enquiry into what human good is must start with human beings, and the character of human life and human circumstances. As Nussbaum puts it (p. 293) ‘a search for a good life for any human being 0 must begin with an account of the essential ingredents of 0-ish lives and 0-ish activity - those features without which we will not be willing to count a life as 0-ish at all. And if the essential features of lives are not the same across the species, as it looks evident to Aristotle that they are not, then the search for the good life must be species-relative, rather than a general search’. It is this last inference that Plato would have challenged; and I think that the arguments in E.N. I 6 fall short of a satisfactory justification for Aristotle’s practice against Plato’s.


However, Aristotle’s procedure in his ethical writings is undoubt- edly anthropocentric in a way in which his procedure in metaphysics or biology is not. But there is a hrther disagreement from Plato that Nussbaum discerns, concerning the manner of arriving at a conception of human goodness. She holds that Aristotle thinks that Plato was wrong to recommend a certain form of life as the good for human beings because it would seem so judged fiom a god’s eye point of view.

I think that there is an ambiguity in the use of the term ‘god’s eye standpoint’. It has come to be used in recent philosophy to refer to an alleged perspectiveless position or vantage point from which everything can be surveyed. Taken in that way, a Platonic insistence on judging things &om a god’s eye standpoint would be an insistence on considering goodness in a radically objective way, taking no account of needs, desires, purposes, etc., that reflect our specifically human character.

But Plato also, as Nussbaum recognizes, attempts in the Republic and Phaedo to judge human lives fiom a divine standpoint - fiom a ’god’s eye view’ in a different sense - where, this means, not fiom no point of view at all, but the point of view of beings superior to us. Both those dialogues recommend a concentration on those aspects of human life which are closer to the divine. Thus possible human lives are ranked by appeal to standards that invoke the sort of life available to beings superior to humans.

Now Nussbaum holds that there is no place for judging human lives by some external standard; our judgement of what the best life for humans is must be based on the concrete realities of human life. This leads her to deny that Aristotle can allow any ranking of the lives of different species; equally, and connectedly, it is unacceptable to import into the appraisal of alternative forms of human life anything about the sort of life that may be avadable to superior types of being. There is no room for a species-transcendent ranking of lives, nor may species-transcendent considerations be introduced into the identification of the best human life.

I am far from convinced that Aristotle accepted any such embargo on species-transcendent reflection on forms of life. Moreover, whether he does so or not, such an embargo surely goes well beyond anything that can be derived fiom the view, which I think Aristotle clearly doer accept, that any enquiry into human good must be species-relative, or again the denial of the possibility of a Platonic

Michael Woods 31

science of the good. That one must investigate the good for human beings, or any other species, by attendmg to the particular aspects of the life of members of the species, will not mean that consideration of lives available to other kinds of being may not enter into our enquiry. Nor will it rule out comparison of the merits of the lives appropriate to different species.

Equally, it will not follow from the fact that forms of flourishing may be compared that we are committed to the possibility of a Platonic science of the good, from whch the species-specific forms of flourishing could be derived. To be sure, a ranking presupposes some basis for comparison; and such a basis would clearly involve some species-transcendent standards; but species-transcendent standards of appraisal are one thing, and a species-transcendent conception of goodness that provides a foundation for the goodness of hfferent species is something quite different.

In E.N. I 6 and E.E. I 8, Aristotle argues that there is no general property of goodness that forms the province of a wholly general science; in particular, goods that are categorially diverse do not share a common character. From that rather abstract argument nothing follows about whether the best lives of different species share a common property. But even if we accept, as we no doubt should, that the goodness of the best forms of life of different species is not a common property, t h s will hardly preclude the making of species- transcendent comparative judgements.

We may note that Aristotle seems to have no qualms about making comparative judgements of goodness about items that are in fact categorially diverse, and therefore are not good in virtue of sharing a common character; for example, when he says (E.E. I 1219 a 9) that a thing's function (ergon) is better than the corresponding state (hexis); or (1219 a 30) that the best among (human) goods are in the soul. Equally, Aristotle argues in favour of his own conception of euduimoniu by showing that it satisfies certain desiderata: it is self- sufficient (auturkes), most complete (teleios), more stable and so on. These are features that could provide a basis for inter-species evalua- tion of lives. To put it schematically (and this issue deserves a much more extended discussion)": to recognize that the goodness of x is superior to the goodness of y is not thought by him to require that

10. It would be necessary, among other things, to take proper account of the &s- unction, which figures in the E.N. dxussion, between things good in themselves and those instrumentally good.


one possesses a common character to a greater degree than the other does.

But is Anstotle being consistent here? Should he, if he had fol- lowed out fully the implications of his own arguments in E.N. I 6 and E.E. I 8 have forsworn the rankings of categorially diverse goods that he actually makes, and, more relevant to our present concerns, the species-transcendent comparisons of lives? I think that there is no inconsistency here: what makes a certain sort of human life a good one will be a different complex of features fiom that which makes a god’s life a good one, and so the goodness of an ideal human life is different &om the goodness of the divine life; but we can s t i l l compare these lives and the goodness of each of them in respect of their possession of those features that enable us to recognize them as ideal for the two types of creature-stability, enjoyability and so on.

Given that Nussbaum denies that Aristotle can admit a ranking of different types of good life, it is not surprising that she regards those passages, in the ethical works and elsewhere, where he does attempt such a ranking, as aberrant; and she joins a tradition of commentary on the E.N. which treats X 6 - 9 as inconsistent with the conception of happiness that figures in most of that work. This brings me to the final part of this paper.

111

In fact, if one holds that Aristotle would not countenance species- transcendent reflexions on goodness, quite a lot of what Aristotle says in E.N. has to be treated as aberrant. Any passage which ranks human life against other species’ will be so counted.

The connexion between the issue of species-transcendent judgements of goodness, and the type of life that is advocated explicitly as the ideal one in E.N. X 6 - 9 is explained very clearly by Nussbaum in the Appendix to Part 111. She writes @. 374): ‘Once it is granted that there are some general, species independent criteria for ranking across lives, then it becomes very natural to conclude that a life that maximises the highest elements and activities will also be best for any human being that is capable of it. Once one allows the external perspective, it seems hard to see why it should not affect the assess- ment of the various lives open to members of each species that can be assessed &om that perspective’.

Michael Woods 33

If we are allowed to recognize the lives of divine beings as superior to humans, it is a short step to argue, as Aristotle does in E.N. X 6 - 9, that the best life available to human beings is the one that approximates as much as our human nature allow to the life of divine beings.

But if a species-transcendent ranking of lives is disallowed, a number of other passages besides that in Book X have to be con- demned as aberrant. Nussbaum mentions E.N. VI 1141 a 20-21: ‘It is odd if one thinks that political excellence and practical wisdom are the best things, if the human being is not the best being in the universe’. Later on he says explicitly (1142 a 349, that there are many other beings that are much more divine in nature than humans; and this is surely a doctrine that Aristotle always held. Now strictly, all that Aristotle says here is that these beings are superior to humans, not that their lives are superior to the best life attainable by humans. But this last step is surely an easy one to take.

However, if Aristotle really wishes to disallow species-transcendent ranlungs of lives, yet more passages must be regarded as out of line. For example, E.N. I 5 dismisses the pleasure-loving life as a serious contender for being the best life partly on the grounds that it is a life appropriate for cattle, an argument that Aristotle is not entitled to use if species-transcendent comparisons are ruled out. Similarly, E.E. I 1215 b 30-1216 a 3. If Aristotle wishes to rule out species-transcendent comparisons, his ethical position is anthropocentric in a very strong sense.

Still, whether or not Aristotle rejected the possibility of species- transcendent comparison of lives, the question can still be raised whether E.N. X 6 - 9 is inconsistent with the view of the good human life that predominates elsewhere. I want to argue very briefly that it is not, but the question demands very much more &s- cussion.

Nussbaum quotes the passage in which Aristotle says that ‘We must not follow those who urge us, being human, to reason and choose humanly, and, being mortal, in a mortal way; but insofar as it is possible we must immortalize and do everything in order to live in accordance with the best of ourselves’ (1177 b 31 - 4). Notice that Aristotle does not say that he is recommending that we should try to stop being human; the view that in trying to be immortal we are trying to escape from our status as human beings, so that one who wishes to develop to the full as a human being will not have


such aspirations, is not a view that Aristotle is endorsing. It is how it is put by the person whose view he is rejecting.

This is confirmed a few lines later, when he says that the nous is most of all (i.e., I think, in the primary sense of ‘anthrapos’) the human being. So, in that sense, the outline account of happiness that identifies it with rational activity in accordance with human virtue d imply that it consists in a life devoted to the activity of the divine element in us. But of course this is not the only sense of the term anthrapos, as is abundantly attested from the Metaphysics”; we should thus expect that there will be different senses, and concep- tions of eudaimonia, corresponding to whether the human being is taken to be the reason or to be the whole human being, the composite of form and matter. But that is exactly what we do find: at the beginning of the next chapter, Chapter Eight, Aristotle says: ‘The life in accordance with the other virtue is happiest in a secondary sense, because the activities in accordance with it are human’. Not, evidently, because the activity of contemplation was not human, in one sense of human, but because there is another, more ordinary, sense of ‘human’ in which these activities, that involve the human being as composite of form and matter, are so. But the application of ‘human’ to the divine, reasoning element is the primary one, and, correspondingly, the first meaning of ‘happy’ that Aristotle distinguishes.

There is, admittedly, a sense in which X 6 - 9 introduce something novel into the discussion, since Aristotle, in effect, says that what has been taken to be eudaimonia in the earlier part of the Ethics is, it now appears, eudaimonia in a secondary sense. But, though E.N. X 6 - 9, and, in particular, the beginning of Chapter 8 do spring a surprise on us, there is no actual inconsistency with what has preceded, once we recognize that all the earlier statements about eudaimonia have to be seen to be about eudaimonia 2, distinguished as such at 1178 a 9, rather than eudaimonia 1, which is what the topic of the previous two chapters has turned out to be. There is no conflict with statements elsewhere (for example, at E.N. 1169 b 3F.) that stress the role of fiendship in eudaimonia, provided that that is taken as a remark about eudaimonia 2 , even if the same seems hardly true of the god-like life that possesses eudaimonia 1.

So the question, ‘What is Eudaimonia?’ always suffered from

11. See, for example, Metaphysics VIII, 1043 b 2f.

Michael Woods 35

ambiguity because of the different meanings of anthr6pos. It is hardly surprising that Aristotle dld not allude to this fact at the beginning of this enquiry. But he comes near to allowing that the question has two answers, depending on the way in which it is taken at I 1099 a 30 where he says ‘Happiness is these activities, or one of them, the best one’.

If I am right in my overall interpretation, Chapter Eight of E.N. X is not saying, as Nussbaum suggests, that ‘the life in accordance with the rest of virtue is a second best’. He is saying that a certain life is deuter63 eudaim6n (1178 a 9, cf. the last sentence of c 7). The first sentence of c 8 has to be taken closely with the last sentence of the previous chapter, and indeed is unintelligble without it. What is indicated is that the life of contemplation and the life in accordance with the other virtues are at the top of two dlfferent scales.

Brasenose College, Oxford OX1 4AJ

aristotle's anthropocentrism

Documents