Revaluing Ethics: Aristotle's Dialectical Pedagogy
Thomas W. Smith
SUNY Press, 2001

Smith argues that the Nicomachean Ethics is fundamentally protreptic, designed to convert an audience of aristocratic men away from the competitive pursuit of wealth, status, and power toward the cooperative practice of wisdom through friendship and contemplation. He also argues that the EN is not a formal treatise but a cooperative dialectical conversation: Aristotle values reflection and inquiry over analysis and answers. The goal is to generate an existential "conversion [metanoia] of the whole person to new ways of acting, perceiving, and thinking" (SMITH, p. 9); "the pupil must be initiated into a new way life by engaging a text that points beyond itself to the way of life standing behind it" (ibid.), thus "helping the students acquire what they need to acquire in order to become happy" (SMITH, p. 16), i.e., to flourish and become good.

Aristotle's "dialectical inquiry proceeds by producing the conviction that our usual ways of acting and perceiving are inadequate if our goal is to achieve a deeply satisfying [I would say: fulfilling] way of life" and "more flourishing modes of being" (SMITH, p. 19). He does this by getting his audience to consider the possibility that "the love of shining, superabundant, quasi-divine activity implicit in the desire for honor is best satisfied by another way of life - that of philosophy" (SMITH, p. 61). A crucial step in that direction is suggesting that "the things that most of us take with the utmost seriousness - wealth, reputation, power - are revealed to be fundamentally unserious" and that "the things we ignore or treat with bemused indifference or even contempt may be the most serious of all" (SMITH, p. 112). 

Every society, through its set of customs and system of laws, not only forms people but also deforms them because "law is the product of overgrasping rulers" and thus its "conception of excellence ... is partial or defective" (SMITH, p. 151). "Only by achieving a sense of the way we have been deformed by our surrounding culture can we achieve some measure of thoughtfulness and genuine direction of our character." (SMITH, p. 30) Thus "the struggle for virtue is always a struggle against prevailing social norms" (SMITH, p. 57).

Smith makes a number of valuable points about courage, generosity, magnificence, truthfulness (humility), and other virtues - specifically, that they all point beyond themselves to the higher values of love and wisdom (see Chapter 4 and his index for details). In particular, he argues that Aristotle's discussion of megalopsuche is ironic and leads to a reductio ad absurdam because greatness of soul is utterly inactive and inert (argon) whereas arete and eudaimonia are forms of energeia.

In opposition to "objective list" accounts of the good: "Practical wisdom does not operate by developing an abstract set of goods that are to be pursued in a life plan. Rather, it is the capacity to act aright on particular occasions." (SMITH, p. 168) And: "Virtue is not a means to the human goods that can be skirted to attain them. For Aristotle, virtue is the human good." (ibid.) Thus: "much of what practical wisdom must do is minimize the tendency to be distracted from right action by overgrasping for money, status, and power. Practical wisdom must struggle to create a peaceful detachment from such distractions so that we can get on with flourishing." (SMITH, p. 171)

Smith argues (SMITH, p. 172) that after Book VI of the EN, Aristotle drops his audience's distinction between moral and intellectual virtue and instead pursues a distinction between natural virtue and authoritative (kurios) virtue, which I would say is an attainment of personal maturity. Natural virtue is a capacity, whereas authoritative virtue is an activation that results from the acquisition of phronesis: "our various capacities are integrated and unified by the action of practical wisdom" (SMITH, p. 175). This is because virtue is not only guided by orthos logos but is "united with" orthos logos (SMITH, p. 173), i.e., it consists of activity 'meta logou' (EN 1144b26-28). See also NATALI-2001, pp. 52-53 on the equivalance between natural virtue and foolishness (euetheia / aphrosune); cf. 1144b8-14 and 1144b17. 

Smith's interpretation of akrasia is consistent with mine. Specifically, with regard to phronesis and theoria, Smith states that "phronesis is the acting person's awareness of right action in the process of action itself" (SMITH, p. 159) and "right action is an event in which the virtue of the actor is coextensive with the fullness of actualized awareness of doing the right thing" (SMITH, p. 180). Thus "life in the authoritative sense is a kind of wakefulness and perceiving" (SMITH, p. 204), and "our own awakeness to or perception of human activity, especially the activity of thought, is a kind of abundant quasi-divine activity that constitutes our own flourishing" (ibid.). Smith also recognizes that "practical reason has an aesthetic dimension" because "we must act beautifully in order to act well" (SMITH, p. 227).

Advancing from the discussion of wisdom, Smith tackles Aristotle's inquiry into philia. "Do human beings love what is actually good or only what is good for them? (EN 1155b21-22) Aristotle states that the answers to these questions will become clear only if we know what is worthy to be loved (ton phileton) (EN 1155a33ff)." (SMITH, p. 192) 

Citing EN 1168a5-9 ("the dramatic center of the entire Ethics"), Smith identifies that "Aristotle's is an ethics of being, not having" (SMITH, p. 202) - although I would say "being and doing" (cf. BEERE) - and states that Aristotle emphasizes "the centrality of being and activity for human beings" (ibid.). We flourish when we activate our capacities; our pursuit of what is beautifully right is grounded in a fundamental "love of being" (ibid.). Furthermore: "as we become more active, we become more divine, since the divine seems to be most active" (ibid.); thus the "longing for a quasi-divine fullness of life is satisfied not through a pursuit of honor but rather a pursuit of right action" (ibid.). Therefore we need to seek and find activities that complete or fulfill us. I would note that this completion or fulfillment is not primarily subjective but largely objective.

Smith argues that Aristotle's conception of philia is based on a fundamental recognition of human interdependence (SMITH, p. 195) and a kind of "complementary self-giving" (SMITH, p. 209). "The best kind of friendship involves mutual loving correction that aims at the flourishing of the other" (SMITH, p. 203). Loved ones "mutually contemplate and complete each other's activities" (SMITH, p. 204). These activities provide "opportunities to grow in seriousness, wisdom and goodness" (SMITH, p. 209). It is with those one loves that one can best engage in "serious, thoughtful action which reflects one's own capacity for activity and thus fundamentally completes the individual" (SMITH, p. 223). 

Another source of completion is pleasure: "an act is complete or perfect (teleios) when it is well disposed to the most beautiful thing that falls under sense perception (EN 11174b14-17)" (SMITH, p. 243). "Each sense, each thought, and each beholding (theorian) has its own pleasure and is more pleasant when it is most perfect or complete (teleiotate). Pleasure is the fulfillment or completion (teleioi) of the activity in question (EN 1174b20-33)" (ibid.). Moreover, "those activities are best that are most pleasant to the good person (EN 1176a15-19)" and "the greatest pleasures perfect the activities of the most complete (teleiou) and blessed (makariou) person (EN 1176a26-30)" (SMITH, p. 244). This is why certain "nonrestorative" or completing "pleasures like the pursuit of wisdom integrate us, making us whole within ourselves and with each other" (SMITH, p. 245). There is a connection here to autarkeia.

Smith takes note of three key reversals in the Ethics (SMITH, p. 245): (1) the highest external good is reversed from honor to philia, (2) eudaimonia is reversed from nonshareable external goods to "psychic activities that increase when shared", and (3) the most practical activity is reversed from political action to theoria. The last of these happens because the best activities are undertaken for the sake of to kalon and "nous gives us our notions of what is fair (kalos) and divine" (SMITH, p. 247) (see EN 1168a5-9).

Why doesn't Aristotle spell out in more detail the content, nature, and experience of theoria? Smith argues that "since a protreptic text aims at introducing people to a new way of life" it makes sense that "it must end by pointing to that life and exhorting its audience to search for it themselves" (SMITH, p. 248).

In Politics VII.2-3, Aristotle contrasts the life of political action and the life of quiet withdrawal, concluding that "the life of a free man is better and different from the life of a political man (Pol 1325a19-23)" (SMITH, p. 254).

Smith is at pains to clarify that choosing a life of theoria "does not tell us in a straightforward way which actions are best to pursue in particular circumstances" (SMITH, p. 255) and "saying that contemplation is an intrinsically more satisfying activity to engage in than politics is not the same as saying one should always and everywhere maximize its pursuit whatever the cost to oneself or one's community" (SMITH, p. 256). Indeed, he says that Aristotle "urges those who are politically inclined to infuse their actions with thoughtfulness so as to cultivate the conditions for individual and social flourishing" (SMITH, p. 259), as for instance in Aristotle's brief mention of Pericles as a paragon of theoria. One path to the application of theoria to praxis is that "right action is an extension of the receptivity embodied in contemplation" since "any exercise of genuine practical wisdom is the fruit of contemplation in discrete action" (SMITH, p. 275). This points to the importance of the examined life.

How do we apply Aristotle's insights in the modern world? Smith suggests that today's audience might be amenable to an argument for "wakefulness and attentiveness" that reverses "the kind of frenzied, mindless activity that seems to go along with overgrasping" because it "destroys the conditions for the cultivation of the attentive mindfulness that is practical wisdom": thus "ridding oneself of commonplace, respectable notions of the place and meaning of activity is a necessary step to flourishing" (SMITH, p. 266). Yet for Aristotle "to engage in theoria was not to do the kind of intellectual work that modern academics do" - instead, "his notion of contemplation implies a kind of beholding" and "the kind of joyful viewing that one would do at a festival" (SMITH, p. 268). These states are desirable because "the practice of contemplation transforms one's life" since "contemplative events are moments of intense pleasure and extreme, abundant life" (SMITH, p. 270). Yet people resist these flow-like experiences because "contemplation requires isolation, withdrawal, and specific kinds of abstention" as well as "the cultivation of a kind of inner eye" (SMITH, p. 271).

Aristotle sets a high bar in his exploration of the highest human good. "The question is whether we can become adequate to that mode of being." (SMITH, p. 162) Yet by writing a text that points beyond itself, Aristotle effectively posits that "part of our task in reading a book like the Ethics is to explore our relationship to the way of life Aristotle is presenting to see if we are adequate to it" (SMITH, p. 281). To do so, we must be "critically open to his arguments" (ibid.) and in that way begin to model philosophy as a way of life.

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