Reason and Emotion
John Cooper
Princeton, 1999

"[I]f there *are* multiple works and multiple virtues that human nature encompasses, then the vague formulation ('happiness is activity of human virtue') leaves it open that someone should count as having achieved happiness by exercising only one or some of these virtues over a sufficiently extended period. Anyone who exercises even *one* human virtue will satisfy this 'definition' .... In particular, and particularly outrageously, if the virtues differ in value (if there is a *best* one amont them), someone will count as having achieved the human good just because he has acquired and exercised the lesser virtues, without having the highest and best. That is, he will ... have achieved the human good without having *fully* perfected his nature as a human being." (COOPER-1999, p. 225)

"Aristotle omits to make it explicit here that, in its earlier context, his reference to 'activity of the best and most complete virtue' was intended to make happiness consist in the best activity of all, not singly, but as completion to the activity of the other virtues.... [H]appiness requires the activity of the best virtue, along with the others: happiness requires the perfection of our nature as human, i.e., rational beings, and that in turn requires the exercise of the best virtue." (COOPER-1999, pp. 226-227)

"When Aristotle first refers to the 'life of the intellect' at 1177b26 and 1177b30 ... he is referring to the life that someone leads who has achieved 'complete happiness' in a complete life, i.e., who has engaged in excellent contemplative study regularly in his mature lifetime, with a clear and full understanding of the place and importance of this activity in the best human life. And, as we have seen, the life of such a person is one devoted not solely to the cultivation and exercise of the intellect, but rather to the exercise of *all* the human virtues, with the virtue of the theoretical intellect occupying a special place as the culminating perfection that, when added to the virtues of character and practical thought, completes the full perfection of human nature." (COOPER-1999, pp. 229-230)

"So one ought to choose the life that includes and places proper emphasis on excellent theoretical study, rather than one that omits this, being devoted only to the exercise of the moral virtues.... Accordingly, when Aristotle contrasts with this life a 'life of the other kind of virtue,' and ranks this second life below the other one in happiness (it is happy 'in the second degree,' 1178a9), he is referring to the life someone leads who has recognized the value of the moral virtues and practical, citizenly life they support, and has perfected himself in respect of them, but has not carried his self-perfection further to include the development and exercise of the virtues of contemplative study." (COOPER-1999, p. 232)

"[W]he he says, as he does, e.g., at NE VI - EE V, 1139a35 and again at DA III.10, 433a23 that nous or dianoia by itself does not produce movement (i.e., any psychological movement toward or away from action), one must not assume that this means that reaasoning about what to do does not lead to any movement toward acting *except* when it is coupled with some or other *non*rational desire. There is also the rational orexis, and Aristotle's theory of the three kinds of orexis shows that *one* movement toward action that such reasoning might lead to is precisely a boulesis. In fact this is what he says explicitly at DA 433a22-25: 'nous plainly does not produce movement without orexis, for boulesis is an orexis and whenever a person is moved by reasoning he is in fact (or: also) moved by boulesis. [fn4: This has very important implications ... for what Aristotle means when he says that a prohairesis or decision is a union of deliberative reasoning and desire (i.e., orexis): the desire that is an element of a prohairesis need not be a nonrational desire (an appetite or any other passion), but may, given Aristotle's theory that there are three types of desire, be a form of boulesis. That he intends to adopt the view that it is a boulesis, and not any form of nonrational desire, is not perfectly clear in the NE (either in III or VI - EE V), but it *is* clear in EE II.10, 1226b2-5 and 1227a3-5. The NE texts permit this interpretation, and in view of the exceptionally clear statements in the EE, I have no doubt that it is what Aristotle intended in the NE as well.]" (COOPER-1999, p. 242)

"Aristotle thinks reason can obtain control of the non-reasoning desires, despite the independence from reason that essentially charaacterizes them. Aristotle holds that reason controls them not just by getting them to 'follow' its directions (somehow or other), but by *persuading* them: the ideal is to persuade the nonrational desires to obey. [fn8: Cf. NE I.13 1102b31: nonrational desire is also, in a sense, rational, insofar as it is katekoon autou kai peitharchikon; b33: to alogon peithetai pos hup logou.]" (COOPER-1999, p. 245)

"Practical knowledge necessarily involves bringing the nonrational desires to that extent into conformity with reason's settled judgments about the values of things. But that does not mean at all that the pathe will have to disappear." (COOPER-1999, p. 249)

"[T]he good of any living thing consists in its possessing and exercising unimpedely, in a normal mature life for a member of its species, those natural capacities that are distinctive of that particular life-form among all the others.... [O]ur good, too, is not a matter of having our desires satisfied, but of functioning in some way that expresses our developed natural life-capacities." (COOPER-1999, p. 268) [PSA: the term "way of life" seems more clear and concrete than Cooper's "developed natural life-capacities" for it is the energeiai, not the dunameis, that matter most.]

"[P]leasure is a way in which the goodness of the activity is experienced through its effets on our subjectivity in general, or our sensibility in particular." (COOPER-1999, p. 270)

"In Topics V.5 135a13 he says the kalon and the fitting are the same thing, and this identification is presupposed in EE VIII.3 1249a9, where he develops an argument having as one premise the proposition that kalon [CHECKTHIS] things are fitting things. What, however, is fitting about them? Here the concluding paragraph of Metaphysics XIII.3 (1078a31-36) gives us the help we need.... The highest types of nobility or fineness or beauty, he says, are order, symmetry and determinateness (taxis kai summetria kai to horismenon).... But in what does the order, symmetry, and determinateness of virtuous actions consist? .... First of all there is the question how any given action fits together with other actions past and future.... And secondly there is the question how *in* any given action the agent deals with the various concerns that are or might be affected by her action: are they all given proper attention, are they balanced correctly in relation to one another, so that in the selected action the full complexity of the situation is adequately responded to? As for determinateness .... determinateness in moral action qua kalon consists in the fact that precisely *this* action, done in precisely *this* way, is what is required just now - given what has preceded and is intended to follow." (COOPER-1999, pp. 272-274).

"[I]t should be clear why Aristotle's theory of friendship must be considered a cardinal element of his ethical theory as a whole. For it is only here that he directly expresses himself on the nature, and the importance to a flourishing human life, of taking an interest in other persons, merely as such and for their own sake." (COOPER-1999, p. 314)

"[W]hen exactly does Aristotle recognize a friendship as one involving mutual recognition of moral goodness? He usually refers to this kind of friendship by such phrases as 'the friendship of people who are good and alike in virtue' (1156b7-8) or 'the friendship of good persons' (1157a20, b25; similarly 1158a1, b7). He also calls this friendship perfect (teleia, 1156b7, b34), since it exhibits fully and perfectly all the characteristics that one reasonably expects a friendship to have." (COOPER-1999, p. 316) [PSA: compare this use of teleia to 'a complete life' and 'complete eudaimonia'.]

"The central and basic kind of friendship, then, is friendship of character. Such friendships exist when two persons, having spent enough time together to know one another's character and to trust one another (1156b25-29), come to love one another because of their good human qualities: Aristotle's word for 'love' here is stergein, a word which is used most often to apply to a mother's love for her children and other such close family attachments." (COOPER-1999, p. 320)

"As a consequence of having language, the kind of work that human beings can do together, in which their being political animals will show itself, is of a much higher order of complexity than that which bees or cranes can manage. Because they can conceive of and communicate their thoughts about their own and others' long-term and future good, and the common good which constitutes justice, human beings can form and maintain households and cities, whereas bees can have only hives and cranes only form elaborrate and differentiated migration-schemes." (COOPER-1999, p. 361)

"[W]hen in the History of Animals Aristotle classifies the human being together with the bee and the crane, etc., as political animals .... the criterion being invoked is whether or not an animal species ... is such that is has an essential work that its members all engage in together.... If it does, it counts as 'political'." (COOPER-1999, p. 362) [PSA: on these matters, see especially DEPEW-1995.]

"What we learn from the History of Animals theory and its extension in Politics I.2 1253a7-18 is that active participation in a city's life is that single function (ergon) which all the human beings belonging to that city perform together, and in the performance of which their character as political animals consists. This counts as a *single* function because, as Aristotle's account of the structure and constitution of a city makes clear, a city is a complex entity having as its ultimate elements not individual human beings as such, but human beings *in* families, households, villages, and other associations, koinoniai.... [T]he fundamental aspect of city life that in Aristotle's eye marks it as natural for human beings is its involving the cooperative working together of all those who take part in it in an interlocking, differentiated, mutually supporting, single set of activities.... [W]hatever exactly Aristotle means by saying that cities exist for the sake of a good life, and not just for the sake of life, this will turn out to be a life led in some more or less specific version of this kind of cooperative activity." (COOPER-1999, p. 363)

"[H]uman beings have the natural capacity and tendency to form communities (and, in particular, cities) in which the life of all is organized in pursuit of a *common* good - a good that is common ... in the strong sense that it is achieved in or belongs to the common activity that is the single life they all jointly live by merging their lives with one another's. But this common good is not available to them except on the basis of their all being, and feeling themselves to be, bound together by the bonds of civic friendship." (COOPER-1999, pp. 366-367)

"[T]he emotions as Aristotle represents them in Rhetoric Book II are feelings either of being distressed and upset about something, or of being excited about and relishing something. In both cases they are taken to be intrusive feelings, ones that occupy the mind and direct the attention." (COOPER-1999, p. 416)

"[I]n his discussion of each of these ten emotions, with the exception of the last two, Aristotle is quite firm and explicit that the emotion arises from one's having the impression or appearance (phatasia) that something good or bad has happened, is happening, or is about to happen.... It seems likely that Aristotle is using phantasia here to indicate the sort of nonepistemic appearance to which he draws attention once in DA III.3 (428b2-4), according to which something may appear to, or strike one, in some way (say, as being insulting or belittling) even if one knows there is no good reason for one ot take it so." (COOPER-1999, p. 417)

"Aristotle seems to recognize three central elements as constituting the emotions - they are agitated, *affected* states of mind, arising from the ways events or conditions *strike* the one affected, which are at the same time *desires* for a specific range of reactive behaviors or other changes in the situation as it appears to her or him to be." (COOPER-1999, p. 422)

END