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  • Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates
  • Laurence Bloom
Ronna Burger. Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates. On the Nicomachean Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 309. Cloth, $35.00.

Ronna Burger offers a reading of the Ethics that views the text as a dialogue with, and very much in the spirit of, the Platonic Socrates. In reading the text as a dialogue, Burger is not making a claim about Aristotle’s intentions. She is proposing “a tool of interpretation, to be judged by the philosophical result it yields, in particular, the underlying argument it discloses whose movement makes the work a whole” (5). Treating the text this way entails focusing as much on the action, or, as she refers to it, the deed of the text, as on any alleged conclusions or doctrines. This deed turns out to be the very energeia of theoria concerning the best life for a human being that Aristotle, like Socrates, takes to be the activity conducive to living the happiest human life. Consequently, Burger is far more inclined to open issues up than she is to close them off.

The dialogue with Socrates, Burger argues, has two distinct but related phases. Each phase begins by putting forward a view that differs from the Socratic view but which, upon examination, ends up motivating a position much like that of Socrates. The first phase begins with an understanding of ethics that separates the ethical and intellectual virtues (an understanding that, Burger argues, Aristotle is careful to distance himself from) and moves toward one that sees ethical virtue as impossible without, if not indistinguishable from, phronesis.

The second phase arises out of the first. The connection between ethical virtue and phronesis results in a distinction between the intellectual virtues of phronesis and theoria. This motivates a new beginning and brings Aristotle back to the central question of the text: What is the best life for a human being? Is the best life the one that concerns phronesis and the virtues, or is it the life of theoria alone? These options are generally referred to as the inclusive and exclusive views of happiness. Burger sees Aristotle’s conclusion that the life of theoria is happiest as the completion of a movement towards the Socratic position.

Although the view that Aristotle is advocating, that the life of theoria is the happiest life, seems to entail an “exclusive” view of happiness, contradicting Aristotle’s own standards, Burger’s Aristotle avoids this pitfall in a way that is unmistakably Socratic. The energeia of [End Page 94] theoria that is the happy life is not, on Burger’s account, one of disinterested contemplation of the cosmos, but rather a theoretical contemplation of human life itself. Thus the Socratic examined life, which is the deed of the Ethics, makes for the best human life. This life, as Burger sees confirmed in Aristotle’s discussion of friendship, is one that is best lived communally and, therefore, politically. It is an inclusive life.

Over and above her actual account of the dialogue, Burger has written a book brimming with stimulating puzzles and insights covering, almost in the style of a commentary, every part of the Ethics. The argument is loose in certain places, as one might expect given the scope of this relatively short work. Much of this looseness is made up for, however, by the way in which the accounts of different parts of Aristotle’s text reinforce each other.

In the end, though, her book is less about giving an account than engaging in a dialogue. Though she does not say so, her conclusion that the deed of the Ethics is more important than its logos does not, and perhaps should not, admit of a precise linear argument. Rather, if Burger is correct, we should expect impasses and gaps in the logos. It is these impasses and gaps that inspire the deed of examination. In typically Platonic fashion, it is by failing to give a complete logos that Aristotle succeeds in accomplishing his end of arguing for his conclusion: the need for inquiry into this of all logoi. Burger’s book too has less to do with making the Ethics...

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