Aristotle’s Ethics as First Philosophy (review)

Aristotle’s writings contain more direct statements about priorities and rankings among the various sciences, degrees of accuracy within them, routes to knowledge from first principles, “first philosophy” and its characteristics, and the relation between sciences and practical concerns than almost any other philosopher we know.

Yet taken together, Aristotle’s statements on these matters belie the apparent systematicity of his philosophical temperament. Almost every devotee of Aristotle is compelled to choose certain texts as authoritative and relegate others to some specific topic-context in which they have limited validity. An only slightly shaky consensus among Aristotle’s readers has emerged through this process over time: on that consensus, Aristotelian first philosophy equals what later came to be called metaphysics, and is characterized by its remoteness from particular human discourses and desires, and from the types of knowledge we connect most directly with perception. First principles are also divorced from perception and are known through an incompletely explained intuitive process, but remain indemonstrable. Theoretical wisdom or contemplation soars above the domain of the human struggle, providing a stabilizing but distanced and abstract mode of considering the highest and most divine matters of which we are capable of thinking.

In this book, Claudia Baracchi offers a fresh way of understanding the relationship between theoretical and practical concerns in Aristotle. She presents what could be called a holistic interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophical project, one that links the loftiest metaphysical passages with the most intimately personal and practical texts. In this beautifully written, densely argued, and thoroughly delightful book, Baracchi does nothing less than present a new way of reading most of the key Aristotelian texts, one that places ethics and politics at the foundation and center, but extends their sway throughout the human philosophical enterprise. Though not all her interpretations will win every reader’s heart, all are meticulously grounded in texts with ample Greek citations bracketed inside translations; this gives her argument a degree of transparency that is literally engaging.

The book is organized into an Introduction that sets out the plan; a “Prelude” taking up issues of knowledge, wisdom, and first principles via discussion of Metaphysics A and Posterior Analytics B.19 (16–52); a “Main Section” interpreting the first seven books of the Nicomachean Ethics (53–219, the bulk of the book); an “Interlude” on Metaphysics G; and a “Concluding Section” on Nicomachean Ethics books 10–12 (260–307).

The main thesis of the book is stated as follows: “The twofold claim put forth in this study, subsequently, is (1) that the science articulated in the Metaphysics remains essentially ‘architectonic’, that is to say, involved in human action and even human construction, and (2) that, conversely, the domain of ethics must be considered in its originary character, that is to say, in its ontological priority as well as systematic comprehensiveness” (39).

Baracchi believes that, for Aristotle, the ethical/political domain of human experience is the true source and driver for all human activities, including those typically considered most remote or even divorced from it, such as the various abstract sciences and metaphysics. Individual acts of knowing spring from specific human minds grounded in social circumstances and driven by individual desires.

Thus, metaphysics is grounded in practical, ethical, and political concerns. But beyond that, ethics is properly metaphysical. Due to the self-determining character of human life, and due also to the intrinsically open or “infinite” nature of human conversation or logos, “it is ethics that presents properly metaphysical traits, although saying this already entails a semantic reconfiguration of the term ‘metaphysics’. It could be suggested that the ethical reflection is ‘beyond physis’ in the sense that it concerns what is not by nature, not simply and automatically determined by nature, although neither separate from nor against it” (51).

Throughout the main section’s commentary on Nicomachean Ethics 1–7, Baracchi shows how Aristotle interweaves and makes interdependent noesis and praxis: “In other words, thought and action appear not to be related according to...