Action and Character According to Aristotle

7. Φρόνησις and the Φρόνιμος

Seven Φρόνησις and the Φρόνιμος o A major impediment to understanding the character type called by Aristotle the φρόνιμος is the sheer difficulty of the first chapter of the eighth book of the Eudemian Ethics.1 The difficulty stems from what has to be called the weirdness of Aristotle’s argument. At one point, for instance, he says that φρόνησις—the quality that characterizes the φρόνιμος—cannot be understood as dancing girls using their hands for feet are understood ; and then he conducts a fairly complicated argument in which he hypothesizes that parts of the human soul might perform similar contortions with one another. Understandably failing to understand what Aristotle is doing by means of these examples and strategies, later scholars and scribes attempted to bring sense to the text of EE viii,1 by supposing corruptions and by making emendations, thereby introducing—or, in some 207 1 As mentioned in the Introduction to the present work, the three chapters of the eighth book of EE are sometimes put at the end of the seventh book (an eighth book not being recognized). Pavlos Kontos has kindly pointed out to me that, since φρόνησις is not a moral but a dianoetic virtue, calling the φρόνιμος a character type might be misleading. Aristotle does maintain that the φρόνιμος is morally virtuous [EN vi,12, 1144a36–37; vii,2, 1146a8–9]; but the issue raised by Kontos is whether the φρόνιμος qua φρόνιμος is a moral character type, and I acknowledge that qua φρόνιμος he is not. The word ‘character,’ however, need not have moral significance (as when we say, “he was a meticulous character”), so I stipulate that the term ‘character’ here does not necessarily imply that the habit characterizing the type is a moral virtue. Nor should the word ‘type’ be understood in a Platonic manner as an immutable, supra-human, fully defined ideal. Aristotle’s φρόνιμος is an ideal, but he is also human and mutable. 208 Φρόνησις and the Φρόνιμος cases, adding to—the textual corruption. The present chapter is, for the most part, an attempt to get back to the original Aristotelian argument. In section I, we examine the little-studied Platonic dialogue Hippias Minor [Hp. Mi.], which, fortunately for us, contains versions of a number of the curious examples Aristotle employs in EE viii,1. This is fortunate because it allows us to say with some level of assurance that this is the particular piece of Aristotle’s philosophical background against which he develops the argument of EE viii,1; this in turn allows us to make more reasoned judgments about which of the various readings of the text ought to be adopted. The argument of Socrates in Hp. Mi. is to the effect that the character type that commits injustices voluntarily is the same as the character type that commits justices voluntarily, since they both, unlike the person who is constrained from so acting due to ignorance, are capable of doing the same things. It is unlikely that Plato actually held this position or even attributed it to the historical Socrates, for the dialogue ends with the standard declarations on the part of Socrates of his own ignorance in these matters; it is interesting for us simply as the argumentative background to Aristotle’s EE viii,1. Section II is an exegesis of the penultimate chapter (chapter 29) of Metaph. v (Aristotle’s dictionary of philosophical terms), that chapter (or entry) being dedicated to “the false.” Metaph. v,29 confirms the link between Hp. Mi. and EE viii,1, for it both cites Hp. Mi. (showing that Aristotle was interested in its argument) and makes mention of the φρόνιμος. Among the senses of “the false” discussed in Metaph. v,29 is that pertaining to the false man, who is the opposite of the φρόνιμος (or truthful man). Aristotle is primarily interested in depicting the character type of the false man as deriving its intelligibility from the false man’s decided propensity to tell lies. This proves to be important in the interpretation of EE viii,1, where Aristotle suggests that the φρόνιμος cannot act in a way incompatible with φρόνησις. His point there has to do not so much with human liberty as with what it means to be φρόνιμος. To be φρόνιμος means to act with φρόνησις, which (contrary to the Hp. Mi. argument) excludes acting in the opposite manner, as the false man acts. Besides shedding light upon EE viii,1, Metaph. v,29 also helps us to understand Aristotle’s much-discussed remarks in EN vi on practical truth (discussed in section VIII of...