(Previous: Eudemian Ethics I.5.)
We must try to seek assurance through accounts of all these things, using what's evident as witnesses and precedents. It would be a significant thing if people were to agree completely with what we are about to say but, if not, to agree in a certain way after they have been guided in a different direction. For each person has some familiarity with the truth, from which we must show how things stand, driving forward from what is unclear but truly said to what is clear indeed by continually exchanging what is better known for what is customarily said in a confused manner.
In every investigation, there is a difference between accounts stated philosophically and those not stated philosophically. Thus even the statesman need not consider it a waste of effort to give attention not only to making clear what is, but also to why. For in every investigation that is the way of one who loves sagacity. Yet great caution is necessary here. Because it seems that one who loves sagacity never speaks at random but always with an account, some people escape notice when they provide accounts that are meaningless and foreign to the matter at hand. (Sometimes they do this out of ignorance, other times under false pretenses.) In this way it happens that even those with experience and the ability to take action are caught out by people who lack the ability to think things through with regard to planning or the actions themselves. And they suffer this because of a lack of education, that is, the ability to discern which accounts are at home in the matter at hand and which are foreign to it.
It's also a beautiful thing to separately discern both what is to be shown and an account of its grounds. First, because of what we just said, that we shouldn't completely give heed to the results of an account but rather in many cases to what's evident (otherwise, lacking a refutation we are compelled to trust in what's been asserted). Second, because in many cases what seems to have been shown by an account is true but not on the grounds that the account asserts. For, as is clear from the Analytics, a truth can be proved through falsehood.
(Next: Eudemian Ethics I.7.)
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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