Aristotle on the Human Good (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 12 7 puzzled, or discontent? Since content is not an emotion that can be appropriately listed, perhaps that suggests how an enigmatic Plato functions as the efficient cause of our distress. Indeed, if one then recalls the man so frequently mentioned by those questioned by Socrates who complain of the aporia engendered in them by his strange questions, it becomes possible to appreciate why Plato recreates conversations that stop, without ending, forcing us back to his texts, why it may be helpful not to separate Socrates from Plato's aporetic texts. ELINOR J. M. WEST Long Island University Richard Kraut. Aristotle on the Human Good. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Pp. xi + 379. Cloth, $37.5 o. Interpreters of Aristotle's ethical theory disagree about whether he favors an exclusively theoretical life as ideally happy, or thinks instead that the happiness of even the most contemplative person must include some practice of the moral virtues. Proponents of the first view are called "strict intellectualists." Advocates of the second are said to favor an "inclusive ends" analysis of happiness. Given Aristotle's conception of the moral virtues, inclusivism entails that those with capacity and leisure for the0r/a can be fully happy only if they engage in some social and political activity as well, since such activity forms for Aristotle much of the content of morality. The problem then becomes determining how much. Some inclusivists think that unconstrained trade-offs are permissible among the theoretical and moral virtues and the natural goods they use and regulate. Others think that Aristotle denies a merely aggregative ideal and assumes a hierarchical ordering principle, according to which a person whose life is oriented toward contemplation can be fully happy only if he theorizes after the demands of justice and of the other moral virtues have been satisfied and counted as intrinsically good components of his happiness. (Charles Young has wistfully dubbed this the "department chairman view," an apt phrase when one remembers that Aristotle himself was something of a department chairman.) Inclusivism of one stripe or another has become the conventional wisdom. Its advocates include Ackrill, Cooper, Kenny, Keyt, Irwin, Nussbaum, Sherman, Gomez-Lobo, Roche and others--a not inconsiderable roster. In advocating an uncompromising brand of strict intellectualism Richard Kraut goes against this consensus. His book is to be welcomed to the extent that it gives inclusivists a run for their money. One difficulty with inclusivism is that while it apparently pervades the Euclemian Ethics (EE) and much of the Nicomachean Ethics (NE), Aristotle seems to lapse into strict intellectualism in NE X, which asserts categorically that the exclusively theoretical life (bios theoretikos) is better than the "second-rate" happiness available through political activity (biospolitikos), since contemplation better meets a range of criteria for happiness laid down in NE I. Some inclusivists have admitted the conflict, but denied that what appears in NE X is Aristotle's considered view. Kenny, for example, has tried to convince himself that NE X was an earlier work, while Nussbaum takes it to be little 128 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:1 JANUARY 1993 more than a thought experiment. Most inclusivists, however, have tried to meet the difficulty by trying to bring NE X into line with what they take to be Aristotle's considered inclusivism. Kraut attempts to establish not only that NE X cannot be assimilated to inclusivist models, but that the strict intellectualism he sees there is consistent with NE as a whole. (EE is more or less left out of the picture.) Inclusivism began to take hold with the recognition that Aristotle acknowledges the intrinsic worth of natural goods (goods of the body, such as health and beauty, and external goods, such as honor, wealth, and friendship). Kraut suggests that inclusivism follows from combining Aristotle's recognition of the goodness of the natural goods with the assumption that he was a "maximizing egoist," for whom happiness consists in getting as many good things, natural, ethical and intellectual, as one can, consistent with not treating the goods of the soul, the virtues, purely as instruments. Kraut tries to block this conclusion by denying that Aristotle was much of an ethical...