aristotle's ethics and the crafts: a critique

185 Pages·2008·0.92 MB·English

ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS
AND THE CRAFTS:
A CRITIQUE

by

Tom Peter Stephen Angier

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of Philosophy

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Tom Peter Stephen Angier 2008
ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS AND THE CRAFTS: A CRITIQUE
by Tom Peter Stephen Angier
Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto
Year of convocation 2008

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the relation between Aristotle’s ethics and the
crafts (or technai). My thesis is that Aristotle’s argument is at key points shaped by
models proper to the crafts, this shaping being deeper than is generally acknowledged,
and philosophically more problematic. Despite this, I conclude that the arguments I
examine can, if revised, be upheld. The plan of the dissertation is as follows – Preface:
The relation of my study to the extant secondary literature; Introduction: The pre-
Platonic concept of technē, as evidenced in Greek philosophical and literary sources, in
particular the early Hippocratic corpus; Chapter one: The Platonic concept of technē,
followed by an investigation of whether Plato affirms a virtue-technē in the Protagoras
and Republic; Chapter two: Aristotle’s concept of technē, followed by scrutiny of his
arguments in NE VI.5 against a virtue-technē, and of his analyses of slavery and
deliberation; Chapter three: An exposition of Aristotle’s function argument, followed
by a dominantist interpretation of it, and an explanation of dominantism as in part a
technē-influenced doctrine; Chapter four: An examination of Aristotle’s ethical mean
and its problems, with a diagnosis of these in terms of influence by the Philebus, and by
paradigms derived from the crafts; Chapter five: Argument that Aristotle’s theory of
habituation suffers from two significant opacities, these being a function of influence
both by the Republic, and by models of craft-learning; Conclusion: Response to key
objection; Aristotle’s ethics revised, defended.
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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Rachel Barney, for all her advice and
encouragement during the writing of this dissertation. It has been invaluable. I would
like to express deep thanks also to Profs Brad Inwood and Tom Hurka, my other
Committee members. During my writing-up year in Oxford, conversation with Prof.
David Charles proved particularly helpful. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the
many useful comments and criticisms offered during graduate seminar presentations of
my work over the past few years.

iii
Contents

Abbreviations v
Preface vii
Introduction The pre-Platonic background x
Chapter one The Platonic background 1
Chapter two Aristotle reacts to his inheritance 31
Chapter three Ergon 59
Chapter four Mesotēs 87
Chapter five Ethismos 119
Conclusion 142
Bibliography 152

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Abbreviations

Platonic dialogues Aristotelian texts
[following Brandwood] [following O.U.P. conventions]

Apology Apol Categories Cat
Charmides Charm Eudemian Ethics EE
Critias Criti Generation of Animals GA
Crito Cri History of Animals HA
Euthydemus Euthd Magna Moralia MM
Gorgias Gorg Metaphysics Meta
Hippias Minor Hipp Min Meteorology Meteor
Ion Ion Nicomachean Ethics NE
Laches Lach On Generation & Corruption GC
Laws Laws On the Heavens Cael
Lysis Lys On Memory Mem
Menexenus Me On the Parts of Animals PA
Meno Men On Sleep and Waking Somn
Phaedo Phdo On the Soul DA
Phaedrus Phdr On Youth and Old Age Juv
Philebus Phil Physics Phys
Protagoras Prot Poetics Poet
Republic Rep Politics Pol
Sophist Soph Posterior Analytics Post
Statesman Stat Prior Analytics Prior
Theaetetus Theaet Rhetoric Rhet
Timaeus Tim Sense and Sensibilia Sens
Topics Top

v
The way human beings understand the world tends to be at all times …
shaped by the know-how of the day, by what people can do and
how they usually go about doing it

(Zygmunt Bauman)

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Preface

‘Every technē and every enquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is
thought to aim at some good; and for this reason, the good has rightly been declared
that at which all things aim’ (NE 1094a1-3). In this way, Aristotle invokes the notion
of technē – viz. ‘skill’, ‘art’, ‘expertise’ or ‘craft’ – at the beginning of the first
sentence of the first chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics. This is a telling opening: for,
as I shall argue, Aristotle’s core concepts and arguments in ethics are crucially
informed by models and structures derived from the technai. By ‘informed’ here, I do
not mean to indicate a merely contingent relation, according to which the crafts serve
Aristotle simply as a convenient source of analogies, ones intended (perhaps) to make
his argument more immediately intelligible. Rather, it will be my contention that
Aristotle’s key moral philosophical claims are, to a significant degree, reliant on and
responsive to how things work specifically in the technai. Subtract this essential
dependence, and the question of whether Aristotle can fully uphold these claims –
through independent, close scrutiny of the moral phenomena themselves – becomes a
real and pressing one.
In at least two respects, I take my critique of Aristotle’s ethics to be a
departure from the approaches usually taken in the secondary literature. First, while a
considerable amount of attention has been paid to the philosophical significance of
technē within ancient Greek philosophy as a whole, most of this work has appeared in
languages other than English, and – if we confine ourselves to studies on the pre-
Hellenistic material – most of it is on Plato.1 Indeed, no less a commentator than
Terence Irwin devotes a good part of Plato’s Moral Theory to investigating the force
of what he calls the ‘craft analogy’ in Plato’s early dialogues. But when it comes to
Aristotle’s ethics, the vast majority of interpreters fail to explore the possibility of
there being systematic and illuminating relations between Aristotle’s arguments on
the one hand, and paradigms that find their proper home in the crafts on the other. In
what follows, I want to rectify this imbalance – and, in a sense, I want to reverse it.
For I will argue that although the idea that virtue is a technē is mooted in the Platonic

1 Salient examples here are René Schaerer’s ΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΗ et ΤΕΧΝΗ: Etude sur les notions de
connaissance et d’art d’Homère à Platon (1930); Jörg Kube’s ΤΕΧΝΗ und ΑΡΕΤΗ: Sophistisches und
Platonisches Tugendwissen (1969); Dirko Thomsen’s «Techne» als Metapher und als Begriff der
sittlichen Einsicht (1990); Giuseppe Cambiano’s Platone e le tecniche (1991). The one extant, book-
length study in English of technē and its relevance to Greek philosophy is David Roochnik’s book on
Plato, Of Art and Wisdom: Plato’s Understanding of Techne (1996).

vi i
dialogues, it is never affirmed therein. By contrast, it is in Aristotle’s work that –
despite his explicit rejection of a virtue-technē – ethical reflection becomes shaped in
a determinate and systematic way by notions derived from the crafts.
Secondly, the one Anglophone study of technē and its relation to Aristotle’s
ethics of which I am aware – viz. Joseph Dunne’s magisterial Back to the Rough
Ground: ‘Phronesis’ and ‘Techne’ in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle (1993) –
mounts an argument that is essentially antithetical to mine.2 Dunne acknowledges that
in ‘the earlier books of the Ethics we must face the embarrassing fact (embarrassing,
that is, for a thesis such as mine, which tries to show that in setting up phronesis as the
paradigm of ethical knowledge Aristotle was setting limits to the applicability of
techne) that Aristotle turns quite unselfconsciously to techne in order to clarify or
illustrate points about the virtues’ (245). But having acknowledged this, and having
listed exactly the same technē-influenced discussions that will concern me,3 Dunne
goes on to exclude the possibility that Aristotle’s ethics is just as, if not more directly
shaped by technē-models than are his biology, physics or metaphysics. Dunne writes:
‘in relation to [ethical] matters [Aristotle] ultimately resisted [techne as a reference
point] … [indeed,] in E.N. 6 he outlines his notion of phronesis as specifically ethical
knowledge in a direct contrast with techne’ (252).
Dunne’s view here is justified, I take it, insofar as Aristotle does rule out
phronēsis as a species of technē – something I will explore in chapter two. But on a
wider front, Dunne seems to me misguided, for he fails to take full account of the
evidence: evidence that points to Aristotle’s ethics being in no way an exception to
the dominance of technē-models within his thought as a whole. Indeed, if my
argument is well-founded, it will turn out that in some ways Aristotle’s ethics is more
determined by those models than is subject-matter dealt with elsewhere in his
writings. For whereas his non-ethical writings rarely make use of craft-models in a
more than merely illustrative or analogising fashion, it is precisely in his ethics that

2 In the German philosophical tradition, the relation between practical wisdom [phronēsis] and technē
has been a topic of interest ever since Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960). Following
Gadamer, both Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt have contributed to debate in this area. But I have
decided not to engage directly with this tradition, and for two main reasons. First, because the German
debate is very complex and involved, so would immensely complicate and lengthen my own argument.
Secondly, and more importantly, because the Anglo-American literature is in general more closely
attentive to Aristotle’s texts, and less interested in carving out autonomous philosophical positions. For
an excellent overview of how Gadamer, Habermas and Arendt each treat Aristotle, see Dunne 1993.
3 Namely, Aristotle’s function argument, his ‘doctrine’ of the mean, and his account of moral
habituation.

vi ii
Aristotle oversteps the limits of this approach, allowing those models to do more of
the argumentative work than he acknowledges (or, for that matter, others
acknowledge). Despite the immensity and unparalleled nature of Aristotle’s
philosophical achievement, I will argue that this constitutes a significant problem for
him.
It amounts to a significant problem, but not an insuperable one. In the
Conclusion, I shall investigate how Aristotle’s central arguments and claims in ethics
could be revised in order to avoid the difficulties I aim to reveal over the course of
this study. Suffice it to say that not all these difficulties carry the same weight, and
none of them appears to me destructive of Aristotle’s moral philosophical enterprise
as a whole, which retains its unique and indisputable value. All I wish to demonstrate
is that there are clear problems to be resolved in that enterprise, and that there is a
more systematic and determinate basis to these than has hitherto been recognised.

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Introduction The pre-Platonic background

The aim of the present study is to examine the relation between ethics and technē
in Aristotle’s ethical works. It will be my contention that Aristotle’s central arguments
and claims in ethics are strongly dependent on models supplied by the technai – variously
translatable as ‘crafts’, ‘skills’, ‘arts’ or ‘forms of expertise’. This dependence is, I hope
to show, not only deeper and more pervasive, but also philosophically more problematic
than has hitherto been recognised. In other words, while Aristotle’s moral philosophy as a
whole constitutes an unsurpassed intellectual synthesis, I want to explore an aspect of that
synthesis that I think is both more salient, and gives rise to more difficulties, than
scholars have previously allowed. In order to do this, I shall first outline the extent to
which Aristotle inherited his reliance on the technai from Plato – this will be the subject
of chapter one. And to make Plato’s interest in the technai fully intelligible, I shall also
look at the pre-Platonic history of the concept of technē – that will be the task of the
following Introduction.
Before embarking on that task, however, it is worth offering two methodological
justifications for it. First, even a brief survey of Greek writings before Plato reveals that
technēhad already developed a rich and relatively coherent semantic content before
becoming a tool in philosophical analysis. As I shall argue in chapter one, it was largely
owing to the relevance of this content to an analysis of human virtue [aretē] that Plato
became drawn to the technai. Admittedly, no less a scholar than Julia Annas judges that
for the ancient philosophers ‘Virtues are like skills in that they have an intellectual
structure’, a structure that allows agents to be ‘critically reflective’ about their ethical
practices – and that this is the only salient feature of the technai vis-à-vis ethics.1 But as I
hope will become clear, this is severely to underestimate the positive, detailed conceptual
content of technē, and the relevance of that content to ethical analysis. In addition, and in
consequence, it is also to underestimate the potential for dispute concerning the influence
of the technai in shaping philosophical argument.
Secondly, a grasp of the pre-Platonic history of technē is essential in avoiding an
anachronistic understanding of the concept. For instance, Robert Brumbaugh writes of

1 See Annas 1995, 240. Cf Annas 1993, 67-8, 71-3.
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