What do you think?
Rate this book
The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy
Before his death in 2003, Bernard Williams planned to publish a collection of historical essays, focusing primarily on the ancient world. This posthumous volume brings together a much wider selection, written over some forty years. His legacy lives on in this masterful work, the first collection ever published of Williams's essays on the history of philosophy. The subjects range from the sixth century B.C. to the twentieth A.D., from Homer to Wittgenstein by way of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Sidgwick, Collingwood, and Nietzsche. Often one would be hard put to say which part is history, which philosophy. Both are involved throughout, because this is the history of philosophy written philosophically. Historical exposition goes hand in hand with philosophical scrutiny. Insights into the past counteract blind acceptance of present assumptions.
In his touching and illuminating introduction, Myles Burnyeat writes of these essays: "They show a depth of commitment to the history of philosophy seldom to be found nowadays in a thinker so prominent on the contemporary philosophical scene." The result celebrates the interest and importance to philosophy today of its near and distant past.
"The Sense of the Past" is one of three collections of essays by Bernard Williams published by Princeton University Press since his death. "In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument," selected, edited, and with an introduction by Geoffrey Hawthorn, and "Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline," selected, edited, and with an introduction by A. W. Moore, make up the trio.
In his touching and illuminating introduction, Myles Burnyeat writes of these essays: "They show a depth of commitment to the history of philosophy seldom to be found nowadays in a thinker so prominent on the contemporary philosophical scene." The result celebrates the interest and importance to philosophy today of its near and distant past.
"The Sense of the Past" is one of three collections of essays by Bernard Williams published by Princeton University Press since his death. "In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument," selected, edited, and with an introduction by Geoffrey Hawthorn, and "Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline," selected, edited, and with an introduction by A. W. Moore, make up the trio.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
About the author
Bernard Williams
105 books145 followersSir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was an English moral philosopher. His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). He was knighted in 1999.
As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known for his efforts to reorient the study of moral philosophy to psychology, history, and in particular to the Greeks. Described by Colin McGinn as an "analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist," he was sceptical about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy. Martha Nussbaum wrote that he demanded of philosophy that it "come to terms with, and contain, the difficulty and complexity of human life."
Williams was a strong supporter of women in academia; according to Nussbaum, he was "as close to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could be." He was also famously sharp in conversation. Gilbert Ryle, one of Williams's mentors at Oxford, said that he "understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, and all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you've got to the end of your own sentence."
As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known for his efforts to reorient the study of moral philosophy to psychology, history, and in particular to the Greeks. Described by Colin McGinn as an "analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist," he was sceptical about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy. Martha Nussbaum wrote that he demanded of philosophy that it "come to terms with, and contain, the difficulty and complexity of human life."
Williams was a strong supporter of women in academia; according to Nussbaum, he was "as close to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could be." He was also famously sharp in conversation. Gilbert Ryle, one of Williams's mentors at Oxford, said that he "understands what you're going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, and all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you've got to the end of your own sentence."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 15, 2023
The Ground of Meaning: A Philosophical Sketch: Interpolating Bernard Williams' "The Sense of the Past"
In the last few books I've read, I found myself passing from Kant's "Philosophy of Law", which asked What is Right to reading Plato's "Theaetetus", which asked What is Knowledge, to Socrates asking What is Justice in Bernard Williams' "The Sense of the Past"; juxtaposed between these various texts, I was quite unclear how the relations between these different projects are to be conceived. Does their importance lie in the ordinary regime of testimonial faith, or is it the success of the spirit of freedom in this faithless world that these texts are to be measured against?
Bernard Williams tells us that Plato designates Socrates as the discoverer of the universal concept. But this discovery does not take the form of a new kind of knowledge but a new kind of non-knowledge. The question "what is" contains within itself the method of Socratic induction. And so it remains true, even within highly developed knowledge systems that each newly acquired concept is an attempt, a beginning, a problem; its value lies not in its copying of definite objects but in its opening of new logical perspectives, thereby permitting a new penetration and survey of an entire problem complex. While among the basic logical functions the judgment closes and concludes, the concept, by contrast, has essentially the function of opening up. Here again we find that the concept is far less abstract than prospective; it not only fixes what is already known, establishing its general outlines, but also maintains a persistent outlook for new and unknown connections. It not only takes up the similarities or connections which experience offers, but also strikes up new connections; it is a free line stroke that always must be attempted anew if the inner organization of the realm of both empirical intuition and of logical-ideal object is to be brought out clearly. For the progressive thinker, the effect of these directives is one of ecstatic intoxication; we are no longer mistaken, never has life seemed more delicious or more enlightened. In his text Williams reveals that pleasure for the political thinker becomes the pain of the ideological thinker, as structuralism's dangerous truths are put words into the mouth of arguments used to reproach truth for not understanding the attributes of God... In his conception of the binary pair of Plato and Socrates, Williams confronts the inexorable failed limits of academic tragedy which the philosophy of childhood instructs us in all the way from primary school to the heights of a mature affected aestheticism.
Kant's doctrine of right is often understood to explain the authority of law by reference to the way law secures important general interests such as security and welfare. We say that rooting legal obligation in the instrumental benefits conferred by law is a misreading of Kant's argument. Instead, we suggest that at the center of Kant's sophisticated and multifaceted legal philosophy is a moral concept of law, or right, which has interpretative priority. Kant's argument for right demonstrates that the establishment of an omni-lateral will is the only for persons' wills to be aligned consistently with the categorical moral duties they owe to each other. Rights can never be secured unilaterally, but only given effects by a constitution which secures various democratic and substantive (innate) rights. This explains Kant's opposition to despotism, colonialism and revolution. We distinguish this moral concept of law from related juridical (positive) and ethical concepts, and we trace some of the complex relationships which exist between juridical law and the moral concept which, in Kant's world, gives law its brain. While this is impressive on its face, it has the danger of degrading into absurd political sloganeering - a self-delusion that creates a mournful possibility of transforming a philosopher's arguments into that of Hollywood film director's talents for organization and coordination of departments for the purposes of production of serving low-brow audiences, a production process that is necessarily blinded to the dominant structure of traditional aesthetic creation. But what kind of paradox is the contemplation of absence, which regards the universe as the manifestation of God, of taking the edict of thou shalt not kill itself as the essence of a truth worth more than life itself?
Socrates was not in the business of defining such refractory terms. Instead he searched for explanations in conversations with others, pressing them on the outer ranges of their arguments to better understand what they mean. Plato has him grounding values in an Ideal plane of existence where perfect justice exists, with the human variety a pale imitation. Since justice, like other ethical concepts, is a multi-faceted concept involving competing values, it cannot be summarized succinctly. We do know that Socrates refused to give in to political pressure when he himself served on citizen juries, as well as refusing to lie to save his own life when he was put on trial in what probably was a show trial. He believed he owed loyalty to his own city-state by living in it his whole life, as partial as the justice offered there was, so he submitted to the point of death even though his friends wanted to spirit him away. As close as you may get might be to say he believed in being honorable, honest, dispassionate, and fair, which we could all still learn from. By contrast, contemporary fetishized mass culture turns the positive into a negative, a wish-fulfilling binary opposition; no such compromise is possible for Judaism, Christianity, Islam or Marxism. How can we account for these facts without bringing into play our reaction to radical evil's decision of the Jewish question, which is in fact a legitimate part of the religious question on the allegorical level of sense-experience? Only the radical event-like character of being, as it is understood in the light of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of the son of God, does it seem possible for philosophy to think itself as more than a reading of the signs of the times without this being a purely passive record of the lives of the Biblical heroes we were once called on the emulate.
How we define true Socratic justice depends on what we mean by utopianism. The historical Socrates would never offer his own definition of justice or any other moral term, although he did like to question other people about the moral opinions they claimed to hold on such subjects. At the beginning of Plato’s Republic you can see Socrates questioning Cephalos, then Polemarchus and finally Thrasymachus about what they claim justice is. The historical Socrates may well have done something very much like this. But at the beginning of Republic book 2 when others ask Socrates what he thinks justice is and he starts giving a very lengthy definition by comparing the ideal city where justice is “writ large” and easy to see with justice in the soul where it is more difficult to see, we can be sure that this is no longer the historical Socrates speaking but rather Plato speaking through Socrates as a fictional character. If you mean Socrates the fictional character in Plato’s middle and late dialogues then we can say he defines justice by analogy. Just as justice in the ideal city is each of its three social classes minding its own business and doing the one thing for which it is best suited, so justice in the soul is each of its three faculties minding its own business doing the one thing it does best. By the Republic book 4 Plato’s fictional character Socrates turns to defining injustice the same way so he can answer Thrasymachus’ claim that it’s better to be unjust. Again he defines injustice the same way—by analogy! Just as the city is ruined by class warfare, so a soul divided against itself cannot flourish. So despite the popular view about it argued by Thrasymachus, it’s better after all for the good of your soul to be just. Or at least that’s how Plato’s fictional character Socrates defines it. So relentless is Plato's characterization of Socrates in the Theaetetus as to harden every gesture in our sportive competitive society which has no place for love and tolerance, and by extension to the nature of birth and death, are only dying habits of our tranquilizing human nature-world, certainly projects a hierarchical bullying into an exceptional violence rather than an agape which commands us to come to terms with injustice, to love him more dearly on the condition that we sacrifices him.
Plato proved that knowledge is not evaluated by judgment or proper account or correct opinion - maybe it's just playing with the slippery slope of a language-game within the bounds of a terrestrially-grounded consciousness in terms of time, space and causation? According to Bernard Williams, this suggestion should not be interpreted as the “the blankly psychological proposition that one is more disposed to forget what one merely believes than what one knows”. Instead, it should be interpreted as the “point … that knowledge cannot rationally be rendered doubtful” – whereas mere beliefs can be “rationally rendered doubtful”. For a belief to be “rationally rendered doubtful”, I assume, is for the belief to be given up because it is rationally undermined or defeated. Let us also assume that in all the cases that concern us, the belief in question will be given up if and only if (and because) it is rationally undermined. In effect, then, the suggestion is that knowledge (unlike mere belief) cannot be rationally undermined. The appeal to order alone has no claims if it does not prove itself internally and in confrontation with human beings to be fragmentary and entirely volatile to the point that one must expect catastrophes in order for the dangerous philosophy to be validated. William's argument with Plato's style displays an intriguing ambivalence between commentary and critique, that is, of what Western Culture considers sacrificial, industrial, and carno-phallogo-centric, what may eat and what may be eaten, in this global-Latinization of the empirico-philosophical world.
The desires which are served by the institution of justice and the practices of morality are self-interested desires: morality is represented as a device for promoting egoistic satisfactions which are as a matter of fact unlikely to do so because of everyone's weak position in an amoral state of nature. Aristotle does not see the virtue of justice in quite the comprehensive sense Plato does; he treats it as a virtue of character (in the entirety of one of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics, also common to the Eudemian Ethics), and as a virtue of constitutions and political arrangements (in Politics). The question naturally arises as to the relation between these forms of justice. Aristotle seems to think they are closely related, without being synonymous applications of the same concept. As the latter is a conception of political justice, we will focus here on the former. Justice as a personal virtue follows Aristotle’s model for virtues of character, in which the virtue lies as an intermediate or mean between vices of excess and defect (Nicomachean Ethics). While he grants that there is a “general” sense of justice in which justice is coincident with complete virtue, there is a “particular” sense in which it is concerned with not overreaching (pleonexia). It is not clear, however, exactly how Aristotle understands this arrangement, or the nature of the vices of excess and defect which this “particular” justice is to counteract. One very plausible reading has it that justice is opposed to a desire for mal-distribution of “goods of fortune” such as money, fame, or honor. If this is true, not only would this deprive them of the possibility of earning a living, but also would despoil every contact between the work of art and society, something which work of the greatest integrity cannot do without writing properly and thinking properly. America's absorption of Sartre and structuralism coincided with the presence of the emigre Frankfurt school to produce what is now a lively exertion of the collective fantasies of Marxist criticism. When the traditional dichotomies between heaven and hell, humanity and divinity, and male and female collapse at the point of the most deeply affected aestheticism, we shall be able to tell that we have entered into the highest and most fecund discriminations between the differences and affinities among our most ingenious philosophical theorists.
If the essence of virtuous actions lay in rational knowledge exercised by the soul. then there could be no separate motives represented by the various virtues, as conventionally distinguished: justice, self-control, courage, and the rest. Aristotle’s notions of different virtues are much different than that of Plato. Instead of only having four virtues, Aristotle had many moral virtues, also, virtuousness was not merely a universal principle as it was depicted in Plato’s theory, but it was now moderated on more-or-less a sliding scale that is called the “means between the extremes” argument. Aristotle would say that a courageous person is one who is motivated by a sense of honor, not the fear of punishment or the desire for reward, or merely as a sense of duty. The courageous man is afraid, because without fear there would be no courage and the man who feels no fear is in the face of danger and is rather rash. According to Aristotle, a courageous person must have just the right amount of cowardice and just the right amount of rashness. However each situation is different, according to Aristotle, because in some cases a person must be more rash or more cowardly, a virtuous person must be able to gauge an incident with the appropriate amount of virtue. As Marx defines the fetish character of the commodity, the veneration of the thing made by oneself which, as exchange-value, simultaneously alienates itself from producer to consumer, so human beings are the most valuable forms of postmodern subjects which, like much of Derrida's writing, refuse to credit the absurdity that we could have simply jettisoned the metaphysical like a cast off overcoat. Living in a digitized cyberspace fit for art's mechanical reproduction concedes no rights to one's status; it is like the prospect of conjugal love with a priestly celibacy to be immediately transmitted live before thousands in the studio and untold millions around the world, to be followed by so many commercials as to broadcast its radical depth of communication and general universality.
What does our Socratic argument contend? What is the best life? It is not that the pursuit of justice for its own sake has a quite special moral value which vindicates itself. The question of its value, rather, is the question of what makes life worth living, a question to which other non-moral goods might, in principle, provide the answer. Aristotle indicates several times that merely to say that pleasure is a good does not do it enough justice; he also wants to say that the highest good is a pleasure. Here he is influenced by an idea expressed in the opening line of the Ethics: the good is that at which all things aim. He hints at the idea that all living things imitate the contemplative activity of God. Plants and non-human animals seek to reproduce themselves because that is their way of participating in an unending series, and this is the closest they can come to the ceaseless thinking of the unmoved mover. Aristotle makes this point in several of his works, and he gives a full defense of the idea that the happiest human life resembles the life of a divine being. He conceives of God as a being who continually enjoys a “single and simple pleasure”--the pleasure of pure thought—whereas human beings, because of their complexity, grow weary of whatever they do. He appeals to his conception of divine activity only in order to defend the thesis that our highest good consists in a certain kind of pleasure. Human happiness does not consist in every kind of pleasure, but it does consist in one kind of pleasure, the pleasure felt by a human being who engages in theoretical activity and thereby imitates the pleasurable thinking of God. In Aristotle's opinion, a person's happiness relies absolutely on the somewhat authoritarian character of an enforced system of rewards and punishments as well as that which is itself the product of an internalization of the irrational aspects of society. Another prediction revealed to have been strikingly invalidated is that the resurgence of Marxist thinking in the realm of theory did not lead to the reunification of theory and practice in a mass revolutionary movement. Now these differences do not mark insuperable rifts or abysses between regions of discourse but, on the contrary, that night looks like an attempt to overcome or abandon the traditional view of Plato's quasi-Marxist societal consciousness.
Aristotle famously said that if there were a separate and absolute Good, it is obvious that it could not be achieved or possessed by man; but it is to something of that sort our inquiry is directed. What was Aristotle looking for? Looking at it in one light, Aristotle's liberal humanism, his constant trying to give what credit he can to beliefs deeply repugnant to him, involves an ironic provisionality not far from Socrates' criticism of self-agonizing bourgeois liberals. For whomever shall do the will of my father in heaven is the same as my brother and sister and mother; everyone is a disciple of Jesus: everyone who understands his Word and his terminology of desire that is most decisive in human life.
In the last few books I've read, I found myself passing from Kant's "Philosophy of Law", which asked What is Right to reading Plato's "Theaetetus", which asked What is Knowledge, to Socrates asking What is Justice in Bernard Williams' "The Sense of the Past"; juxtaposed between these various texts, I was quite unclear how the relations between these different projects are to be conceived. Does their importance lie in the ordinary regime of testimonial faith, or is it the success of the spirit of freedom in this faithless world that these texts are to be measured against?
Bernard Williams tells us that Plato designates Socrates as the discoverer of the universal concept. But this discovery does not take the form of a new kind of knowledge but a new kind of non-knowledge. The question "what is" contains within itself the method of Socratic induction. And so it remains true, even within highly developed knowledge systems that each newly acquired concept is an attempt, a beginning, a problem; its value lies not in its copying of definite objects but in its opening of new logical perspectives, thereby permitting a new penetration and survey of an entire problem complex. While among the basic logical functions the judgment closes and concludes, the concept, by contrast, has essentially the function of opening up. Here again we find that the concept is far less abstract than prospective; it not only fixes what is already known, establishing its general outlines, but also maintains a persistent outlook for new and unknown connections. It not only takes up the similarities or connections which experience offers, but also strikes up new connections; it is a free line stroke that always must be attempted anew if the inner organization of the realm of both empirical intuition and of logical-ideal object is to be brought out clearly. For the progressive thinker, the effect of these directives is one of ecstatic intoxication; we are no longer mistaken, never has life seemed more delicious or more enlightened. In his text Williams reveals that pleasure for the political thinker becomes the pain of the ideological thinker, as structuralism's dangerous truths are put words into the mouth of arguments used to reproach truth for not understanding the attributes of God... In his conception of the binary pair of Plato and Socrates, Williams confronts the inexorable failed limits of academic tragedy which the philosophy of childhood instructs us in all the way from primary school to the heights of a mature affected aestheticism.
Kant's doctrine of right is often understood to explain the authority of law by reference to the way law secures important general interests such as security and welfare. We say that rooting legal obligation in the instrumental benefits conferred by law is a misreading of Kant's argument. Instead, we suggest that at the center of Kant's sophisticated and multifaceted legal philosophy is a moral concept of law, or right, which has interpretative priority. Kant's argument for right demonstrates that the establishment of an omni-lateral will is the only for persons' wills to be aligned consistently with the categorical moral duties they owe to each other. Rights can never be secured unilaterally, but only given effects by a constitution which secures various democratic and substantive (innate) rights. This explains Kant's opposition to despotism, colonialism and revolution. We distinguish this moral concept of law from related juridical (positive) and ethical concepts, and we trace some of the complex relationships which exist between juridical law and the moral concept which, in Kant's world, gives law its brain. While this is impressive on its face, it has the danger of degrading into absurd political sloganeering - a self-delusion that creates a mournful possibility of transforming a philosopher's arguments into that of Hollywood film director's talents for organization and coordination of departments for the purposes of production of serving low-brow audiences, a production process that is necessarily blinded to the dominant structure of traditional aesthetic creation. But what kind of paradox is the contemplation of absence, which regards the universe as the manifestation of God, of taking the edict of thou shalt not kill itself as the essence of a truth worth more than life itself?
Socrates was not in the business of defining such refractory terms. Instead he searched for explanations in conversations with others, pressing them on the outer ranges of their arguments to better understand what they mean. Plato has him grounding values in an Ideal plane of existence where perfect justice exists, with the human variety a pale imitation. Since justice, like other ethical concepts, is a multi-faceted concept involving competing values, it cannot be summarized succinctly. We do know that Socrates refused to give in to political pressure when he himself served on citizen juries, as well as refusing to lie to save his own life when he was put on trial in what probably was a show trial. He believed he owed loyalty to his own city-state by living in it his whole life, as partial as the justice offered there was, so he submitted to the point of death even though his friends wanted to spirit him away. As close as you may get might be to say he believed in being honorable, honest, dispassionate, and fair, which we could all still learn from. By contrast, contemporary fetishized mass culture turns the positive into a negative, a wish-fulfilling binary opposition; no such compromise is possible for Judaism, Christianity, Islam or Marxism. How can we account for these facts without bringing into play our reaction to radical evil's decision of the Jewish question, which is in fact a legitimate part of the religious question on the allegorical level of sense-experience? Only the radical event-like character of being, as it is understood in the light of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of the son of God, does it seem possible for philosophy to think itself as more than a reading of the signs of the times without this being a purely passive record of the lives of the Biblical heroes we were once called on the emulate.
How we define true Socratic justice depends on what we mean by utopianism. The historical Socrates would never offer his own definition of justice or any other moral term, although he did like to question other people about the moral opinions they claimed to hold on such subjects. At the beginning of Plato’s Republic you can see Socrates questioning Cephalos, then Polemarchus and finally Thrasymachus about what they claim justice is. The historical Socrates may well have done something very much like this. But at the beginning of Republic book 2 when others ask Socrates what he thinks justice is and he starts giving a very lengthy definition by comparing the ideal city where justice is “writ large” and easy to see with justice in the soul where it is more difficult to see, we can be sure that this is no longer the historical Socrates speaking but rather Plato speaking through Socrates as a fictional character. If you mean Socrates the fictional character in Plato’s middle and late dialogues then we can say he defines justice by analogy. Just as justice in the ideal city is each of its three social classes minding its own business and doing the one thing for which it is best suited, so justice in the soul is each of its three faculties minding its own business doing the one thing it does best. By the Republic book 4 Plato’s fictional character Socrates turns to defining injustice the same way so he can answer Thrasymachus’ claim that it’s better to be unjust. Again he defines injustice the same way—by analogy! Just as the city is ruined by class warfare, so a soul divided against itself cannot flourish. So despite the popular view about it argued by Thrasymachus, it’s better after all for the good of your soul to be just. Or at least that’s how Plato’s fictional character Socrates defines it. So relentless is Plato's characterization of Socrates in the Theaetetus as to harden every gesture in our sportive competitive society which has no place for love and tolerance, and by extension to the nature of birth and death, are only dying habits of our tranquilizing human nature-world, certainly projects a hierarchical bullying into an exceptional violence rather than an agape which commands us to come to terms with injustice, to love him more dearly on the condition that we sacrifices him.
Plato proved that knowledge is not evaluated by judgment or proper account or correct opinion - maybe it's just playing with the slippery slope of a language-game within the bounds of a terrestrially-grounded consciousness in terms of time, space and causation? According to Bernard Williams, this suggestion should not be interpreted as the “the blankly psychological proposition that one is more disposed to forget what one merely believes than what one knows”. Instead, it should be interpreted as the “point … that knowledge cannot rationally be rendered doubtful” – whereas mere beliefs can be “rationally rendered doubtful”. For a belief to be “rationally rendered doubtful”, I assume, is for the belief to be given up because it is rationally undermined or defeated. Let us also assume that in all the cases that concern us, the belief in question will be given up if and only if (and because) it is rationally undermined. In effect, then, the suggestion is that knowledge (unlike mere belief) cannot be rationally undermined. The appeal to order alone has no claims if it does not prove itself internally and in confrontation with human beings to be fragmentary and entirely volatile to the point that one must expect catastrophes in order for the dangerous philosophy to be validated. William's argument with Plato's style displays an intriguing ambivalence between commentary and critique, that is, of what Western Culture considers sacrificial, industrial, and carno-phallogo-centric, what may eat and what may be eaten, in this global-Latinization of the empirico-philosophical world.
The desires which are served by the institution of justice and the practices of morality are self-interested desires: morality is represented as a device for promoting egoistic satisfactions which are as a matter of fact unlikely to do so because of everyone's weak position in an amoral state of nature. Aristotle does not see the virtue of justice in quite the comprehensive sense Plato does; he treats it as a virtue of character (in the entirety of one of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics, also common to the Eudemian Ethics), and as a virtue of constitutions and political arrangements (in Politics). The question naturally arises as to the relation between these forms of justice. Aristotle seems to think they are closely related, without being synonymous applications of the same concept. As the latter is a conception of political justice, we will focus here on the former. Justice as a personal virtue follows Aristotle’s model for virtues of character, in which the virtue lies as an intermediate or mean between vices of excess and defect (Nicomachean Ethics). While he grants that there is a “general” sense of justice in which justice is coincident with complete virtue, there is a “particular” sense in which it is concerned with not overreaching (pleonexia). It is not clear, however, exactly how Aristotle understands this arrangement, or the nature of the vices of excess and defect which this “particular” justice is to counteract. One very plausible reading has it that justice is opposed to a desire for mal-distribution of “goods of fortune” such as money, fame, or honor. If this is true, not only would this deprive them of the possibility of earning a living, but also would despoil every contact between the work of art and society, something which work of the greatest integrity cannot do without writing properly and thinking properly. America's absorption of Sartre and structuralism coincided with the presence of the emigre Frankfurt school to produce what is now a lively exertion of the collective fantasies of Marxist criticism. When the traditional dichotomies between heaven and hell, humanity and divinity, and male and female collapse at the point of the most deeply affected aestheticism, we shall be able to tell that we have entered into the highest and most fecund discriminations between the differences and affinities among our most ingenious philosophical theorists.
If the essence of virtuous actions lay in rational knowledge exercised by the soul. then there could be no separate motives represented by the various virtues, as conventionally distinguished: justice, self-control, courage, and the rest. Aristotle’s notions of different virtues are much different than that of Plato. Instead of only having four virtues, Aristotle had many moral virtues, also, virtuousness was not merely a universal principle as it was depicted in Plato’s theory, but it was now moderated on more-or-less a sliding scale that is called the “means between the extremes” argument. Aristotle would say that a courageous person is one who is motivated by a sense of honor, not the fear of punishment or the desire for reward, or merely as a sense of duty. The courageous man is afraid, because without fear there would be no courage and the man who feels no fear is in the face of danger and is rather rash. According to Aristotle, a courageous person must have just the right amount of cowardice and just the right amount of rashness. However each situation is different, according to Aristotle, because in some cases a person must be more rash or more cowardly, a virtuous person must be able to gauge an incident with the appropriate amount of virtue. As Marx defines the fetish character of the commodity, the veneration of the thing made by oneself which, as exchange-value, simultaneously alienates itself from producer to consumer, so human beings are the most valuable forms of postmodern subjects which, like much of Derrida's writing, refuse to credit the absurdity that we could have simply jettisoned the metaphysical like a cast off overcoat. Living in a digitized cyberspace fit for art's mechanical reproduction concedes no rights to one's status; it is like the prospect of conjugal love with a priestly celibacy to be immediately transmitted live before thousands in the studio and untold millions around the world, to be followed by so many commercials as to broadcast its radical depth of communication and general universality.
What does our Socratic argument contend? What is the best life? It is not that the pursuit of justice for its own sake has a quite special moral value which vindicates itself. The question of its value, rather, is the question of what makes life worth living, a question to which other non-moral goods might, in principle, provide the answer. Aristotle indicates several times that merely to say that pleasure is a good does not do it enough justice; he also wants to say that the highest good is a pleasure. Here he is influenced by an idea expressed in the opening line of the Ethics: the good is that at which all things aim. He hints at the idea that all living things imitate the contemplative activity of God. Plants and non-human animals seek to reproduce themselves because that is their way of participating in an unending series, and this is the closest they can come to the ceaseless thinking of the unmoved mover. Aristotle makes this point in several of his works, and he gives a full defense of the idea that the happiest human life resembles the life of a divine being. He conceives of God as a being who continually enjoys a “single and simple pleasure”--the pleasure of pure thought—whereas human beings, because of their complexity, grow weary of whatever they do. He appeals to his conception of divine activity only in order to defend the thesis that our highest good consists in a certain kind of pleasure. Human happiness does not consist in every kind of pleasure, but it does consist in one kind of pleasure, the pleasure felt by a human being who engages in theoretical activity and thereby imitates the pleasurable thinking of God. In Aristotle's opinion, a person's happiness relies absolutely on the somewhat authoritarian character of an enforced system of rewards and punishments as well as that which is itself the product of an internalization of the irrational aspects of society. Another prediction revealed to have been strikingly invalidated is that the resurgence of Marxist thinking in the realm of theory did not lead to the reunification of theory and practice in a mass revolutionary movement. Now these differences do not mark insuperable rifts or abysses between regions of discourse but, on the contrary, that night looks like an attempt to overcome or abandon the traditional view of Plato's quasi-Marxist societal consciousness.
Aristotle famously said that if there were a separate and absolute Good, it is obvious that it could not be achieved or possessed by man; but it is to something of that sort our inquiry is directed. What was Aristotle looking for? Looking at it in one light, Aristotle's liberal humanism, his constant trying to give what credit he can to beliefs deeply repugnant to him, involves an ironic provisionality not far from Socrates' criticism of self-agonizing bourgeois liberals. For whomever shall do the will of my father in heaven is the same as my brother and sister and mother; everyone is a disciple of Jesus: everyone who understands his Word and his terminology of desire that is most decisive in human life.
Displaying 1 of 1 review