Spring 2010 - Interpretation

3 1 8 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n
repeated qualifications (“it is declared,” “it seems”), Burger leads the reader
into an increasingly dense thicket of uncertainty and perplexities. At the
same time, however, she offers light to help illuminate the way. One such
illumination is the recurring bifurcatory or dyadic structure she notices that
runs throughout, which guides and informs Aristotle‘s dialectical examination.
Perhaps the two most prominent examples of this, which also serve to
divide the entire work itself into two parts, are the division between virtue
of character and virtue of thought (books 2-6), and the division of rationality
into practical and theoretical (books 6-10). Thus, while Aristotle declares
at the beginning of book 2 that virtue is two—of character (ethical) and of
thought (intellectual)—he concludes in book 6 that it is one: character and
thought (desiring mind or intellectual desire). And, though immediately
upon uniting reason and desire and declaring virtue to be one, he divides
thought into two—practical versus theoretical—concerned with different
praxeis and energeiai, his provocative linking of sophia and phronesis in book
6 and knowledge and action at the end of book 10 challenge one to consider
what the truly beautiful action, the best activity for human being, might be.
If we examine these two dyads, we find two common threads,
and in these two, perhaps the deepest dyad of the work. One common thread
is phronesis. In books 2-6, ethical virtue is pursued and examined in opposition
to, or at least independence from phronesis (intellectual virtue). In book
6, when that opposition appears to have been resolved, and the two have been
brought together, with (ethical) virtue supplying the end and phronesis determining
the means (and the mean), a new dyad appears, as Burger points out
(116-20). This time phronesis as the virtue or excellence of practical reason
stands in opposition to sophia as the virtue or excellence of theoretical reason.
Theory stands in contradistinction to action. There is, however, a second common
thread in these two dyads and that is the beautiful (to kalon). For both
ethical virtue and sophia have an eros for and look to the beautiful. Each half
of the Ethics, therefore, posits a division, perhaps even opposition, between
phronesis and eros for the beautiful. “Eros for the beautiful,” however, Burger
reminds us, is Socrates’ characterization of philosophy as he understands it
and practices it, and phronesis is the name Socrates employs when he speaks
of the knowledge that is (or accompanies) virtue, and the human knowledge
of ignorance, which is the knowledge he claims to have. Thus, Burger suggests,
at the heart of Aristotle’s Ethics lies the question of the relation between
Socratic phronesis (human wisdom) and Socratic philosophy (112).