The Life of the Mind (43 page)

In the line of these reflections, we shall begin by asking ourselves how Greek philosophy dealt with phenomena and data of human experience that our post-classical "conventions" have been accustomed to ascribe to the Will as the mainspring of action. For the purpose, we turn to Aristode, and that for two reasons. There is, first, the simple historical fact of the decisive influence that the Aristotelian analyses of the soul exerted on all philosophies of the Will—except in the case of Paul, who, as we shall see, was content with sheer descriptions and refused to "philosophize" about his experiences. There is, second, the no less indubitable fact that no other Greek philosopher came so close to recognizing the strange lacuna we have spoken of in Greek language and thought and therefore can serve as a prime example of how certain psychological problems could be solved before the Will was discovered as a separate faculty of the mind.

 

The starting-point of Aristotle's reflections on the subject is the anti-Platonic insight that reason by itself does not move anything.
³
Hence the question guiding his examinations is: "What is it in the soul that originates movement?"
⁴
Aristotle admits the Platonic notion that reason gives commands
(keleuei)
because it knows what one should pursue and what one should avoid, but he denies that these commands are necessarily obeyed. The incontinent man (his paradigmatic example throughout these inquiries) follows his desires regardless of the commands of reason. On the other hand, at the recommendation of reason, these desires can be resisted. Hence they, too, have no obligatory force inherent in them: by themselves they do not originate movement. Here Aristotle is dealing with a phenomenon that later, after the discovery of the Will, appears as the distinction between will and inclination. The distinction becomes the cornerstone of Kantian ethics, but it makes its first appearance in medieval philosophy—for instance, in Master Eckhart's distinction between "the inclination to sin and the will to sin, the inclination being no sin," which leaves the question of the evil deed itself altogether out of account: "If I never did evil but had only the will to evil . . . it is as great a sin as though I had killed all men even though I had done nothing."
⁵

Still, in Aristotle desire retains a priority in originating movement, which comes about through a playing together of reason and desire. It is desire for an absent object that stimulates reason to step in and calculate the best ways and means to obtain it. This calculating reason he calls "
nous praktikos,
" practical reason, as distinguished from
nous theōrētikos,
speculative or pure reason, the former being concerned only with what depends exclusively on men
(eph' hēmin),
with matters in their power and therefore contingent (they can be or not-be), while pure reason is concerned only with matters that are beyond human power to change.

Practical reason is needed to come to the aid of desire under certain conditions. "Desire is influenced by what is just at hand," thus easily obtainable—a suggestion carried by the very word used for appetite or desire,
orexis,
whose primary meaning, from
orego,
indicates the stretching out of one's hand to reach for something nearby. Only when the fulfillment of a desire lies in the future and has to take the time factor into account is practical reason needed and stimulated by it. In the case of incontinence, it is the force of desire for what is close at hand that leads to incontinence, and here practical reason will intervene out of concern for future consequences. But men do not only desire what is close at hand; they are able to imagine objects of desire to secure which they need to calculate the appropriate means. It is this future imagined object of desire that stimulates practical reason; as far as the resulting motion, the act itself, is concerned, the desired object is the beginning, while for the calculating process the same object is the end of the movement.

It appears that Aristotle himself found this outline of the relation between reason and desire unsatisfactory as an adequate explication of human action. It still relies, though with modifications, on Plato's dichotomy of reason and desire. In his early
Protreptikos,
Aristotle had interpreted it thus: "One part of the soul is Reason. This is the natural ruler and judge of things concerning us. The nature of the other part is to follow it and submit to its rule."
⁶
We shall see later that to issue commands is among the chief characteristics of the Will. In Plato reason could take this function on itself because of the assumption that reason is concerned with truth, and truth indeed is compelling. But reason itself, while it leads to truth, is persuasive, not imperative, in the soundless thinking dialogue between me and myself; only those who are not capable of thinking need to be compelled.

Within man's soul, reason becomes a "ruling" and commanding principle only because of the desires, which are blind and devoid of reason and therefore supposed to obey blindly. This obedience is necessary for the mind's tranquillity, the undisturbed harmony between the Two-in-One that is guaranteed by the axiom of non-contradiction—do not contradict yourself, remain a friend of yourself: "all friendly feelings toward others are an extension of the friendly feelings a person has for himself."
⁷
In the event that the desires do not submit to the commands of reason, the result in Aristotle is the "base man," who contradicts himself and is "at variance with himself' (
diapherein
). Wicked men either "run away from life and do away with themselves," unable to bear their own company, or "seek the company of others with whom to spend their days; but they avoid their own company. For when they are by themselves they remember many events that make them uneasy ... but when they are with others they can forget.... Their relations with themselves are not friendly ... their soul is divided against itself ... one part pulls in one direction and the other in another as if to tear the individual to pieces.... Bad people are full of regrets."
⁸

This description of internal conflict, a conflict between reason and the appetites, may be adequate to explain conduct-in this case the conduct, or, rather, misconduct, of the incontinent man. It does not explain action, the subject matter of Aristotelian ethics, for action is not mere execution of the commands of reason; it is itself a reasonable activity, though an activity not of "theoretical reason" but of what in the treatise
On the Soul
is called "
nous praktikos,
" practical reason. In the ethical treatises it is called
phronēsis,
a kind of insight and understanding of matters that are good or bad for men, a sort of sagacity—neither wisdom nor cleverness—needed for human affairs, which Sophocles, following common usage, ascribed to old age
⁹
and which Aristotle conceptualized.
Phronēsis
is required for any activity involving things within human power to achieve or not to achieve.

Such practical sense also guides production and the arts, but these have "an end other than themselves," whereas "action is itself an end."
¹⁰
(The distinction is the difference between the flute-player, for whom the playing is an end itself, and the flute-maker, whose activity is only a means and has come to an end when the flute is produced.) There is such a thing as
eupraxia,
action well done, and the doing of something well, regardless of its consequences, is then counted among the
aretai,
the Aristotelian excellences (or virtues). Actions of this sort are also moved not by reason but by desire, but the desire is not for an object, a "what" that I can grasp, seize, and use again as a means to another end; the desire is for a "how," a way of performing, excellence of appearance in the community—the proper realm of human affairs. Much later but quite in the Aristotelian spirit, Plotinus had this to say, as paraphrased by a recent interpreter: "What actually is in man's power in the sense that it depends entirely upon him ... is the quality of his conduct,
to kalōs";
man, if compelled to fight, is still free to fight bravely or in a cowardly way."
¹¹

Action in the sense of how men want to appear needs a deliberate planning ahead, for which Aristotle coins a new term,
proairesis,
choice in the sense of preference between alternatives—one rather than another. The
archai,
beginnings and principles, of this choice are desire
and
logos: logos provides us with the purpose for the sake of which we act; choice becomes the starting-point of the actions themselves.
¹²
Choice is a median faculty, inserted, as it were, into the earlier dichotomy of reason and desire, and its main function is to mediate between them.

The opposite of deliberate choice or preference is
pathos,
passion or emotion, as we would say, in the sense that we are motivated by something we suffer. (Thus a man may commit adultery out of passion and not because he has deliberately preferred adultery to chastity; he "may have stolen but not be a thief."
¹³
) The faculty of choice is necessary whenever men act for a puipose (
heneka tinos),
insofar as means have to be chosen, but the purpose itself, the ultimate end of the act for the sake of which it was embarked on in the first place, is not open to choice. The ultimate end of human acts is
eudaimonia,
happiness in the sense of "living well," which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it. (The relationship between means and ends, whether in action or in fabrication, is that all means are equally justifiable by their ends; the specifically moral problem of the means-end relationship—whether all means can be justified by ends—is never even mentioned by Aristotle.) The element of reason in choice is called "deliberation," and we never deliberate about ends but about the means to attain them.
¹⁴
"No one chooses to be happy but to make money or run risks for the purpose of being happy."
¹⁵

 

It is in the
Eudemian Ethics
that Aristotle explains in a more concrete way why he found it necessary to insert a new faculty into the old dichotomy and thus settle the old quarrel between reason and desire. He gives the example of incontinence: all men agree that incontinence is bad and not something to be desired; moderation or
sō-phrosynē
—that which saves (
sōzein
) practical reason
(phronēsis)
—is the naturally given criterion of all acts. If a man follows his desires, which are blind to future consequences, and thus indulges in incontinence, it is as though "the same man were to act at the same time both voluntarily [that is, intentionally] and involuntarily [that is, contrary to his intentions]," and this, Aristotie remarks, "is impossible."
¹⁶

Proairesis
is the way out of the contradiction. If reason and desire remained without mediation, in their crude natural antagonism, we would have to conclude that man, beset by the conflicting urges of both faculties, "forces himself away from his desire" when he remains continent and "forces himself away from his reason" when desire overwhelms him. But no such being-forced occurs in either case; both acts are done intentionally, and "when the principle is from within, there is no force."
¹⁷
What actually happens is that, reason and desire being in conflict, the decision between them is a matter of "preference," of deliberate choice. What intervenes is reason, not
nous,
which is concerned with things that are forever and cannot be otherwise than they are, but
dianoia
or
phronēsis,
which deal with things in our power, as distinguished from desires and imaginations that may stretch out to things we can never achieve, as when we wish to be gods or immortal.

Proairesis,
the faculty of choice, one is tempted to conclude, is the precursor of the Will. It opens up a first, small restricted space for the human mind, which without it was delivered to two opposed compelling forces: the force of self-evident truth, with which we are not free to agree or disagree, on one side; on the other, the force of passions and appetites, in which it is as though nature overwhelms us unless reason "forces" us away. But the space left to freedom is very small. We deliberate only about
means
to an end that we take for granted, that we cannot choose. Nobody deliberates and chooses health or happiness as his aim, though we may think about them; ends are inherent in human nature and the same for all.
¹⁸
As to the means, "sometimes we have to find what [they] are, and sometimes how they are to be used or through whom they can be acquired."
¹⁹
Hence, the means, too, not just the ends, are given, and our free choice concerns only a "rational" selection between them;
proairesis
is the arbiter between several possibilities.

 

In Latin, Aristotle's faculty of choice is
liberum arbitrium.
Whenever we come upon it in medieval discussions of the Will, we are not dealing with a spontaneous power of beginning something new, nor with an autonomous faculty, determined by its own nature and obeying its own laws. The most grotesque example of it is Buridan's ass: the poor beast would have starved to death between two equidistant, equally nice-smelling bundles of hay, as no deliberation would give him a reason for preferring one to the other, and he only survived because he was smart enough to forgo free choice, trust his desire, and grasp what lay within reach.

The
liberum arbitrium
is neither spontaneous nor autonomous; we find the last vestiges of an arbiter between reason and desire still surviving in Kant, whose "good will" finds itself in a strange predicament: it is either "good without qualifications," in which case it enjoys complete autonomy but has no choice, or it receives its law—the categorical imperative—from "practical reason," which tells the will what to do and adds: Don't make an exception of yourself, obey the axiom of non-contradiction, which, since Socrates, has ruled the soundless dialogue of thought. The Will in Kant is in fact "practical reason"
²⁰
much in the sense of Aristode's
nous praktikos;
it borrows its obligatory power from the compulsion exerted on the mind by self-evident truth or logical reasoning. This is why Kant asserted time and again that every "Thou-shalt" that does not come from outside but rises up in the mind itself implies a "Thou-canst." What is at stake is clearly the conviction that whatever depends on us and concerns only ourselves is within our power, and this conviction is what Aristotle and Kant basically have in common, although their estimation of the importance of the realm of human affairs is greatly at variance. Freedom becomes a problem, and the Will as an independent autonomous faculty is discovered, only when men begin to doubt the coincidence of the Thou-shalt and the I-can, when the question arises:
Are things that concern only me within my power?