Natural Law and Aristotle: What is Right by Nature?
In classical philosophy “right by nature” was a symbol, with the help of which the philosopher interpreted his noetic experience of right human action. Through the dogmatization of philosophy, which began with the Stoics and has not been wholly overcome to this day, the symbol of noetic exegesis was gradually separated from its underlying experience and turned, under the title “natural law,” into a topic of the schools of philosophy.
In the modern history of law this topic, as an idea of a body of norms claiming to possess eternal and immutable validity, has exerted a significant influence since the seventeenth century, even though its noetic premises had not been elucidated with sufficient clarity.
Unfortunately even in our day the debate about natural law, having regained renewed momentum, still suffers seriously from the topical character of its object, separated because of this topicality from the experience that lends it meaning.
We shall try to probe the background of the topos of dogmatic philosophizing and to reconstitute the symbol of noetic exegesis. To this end we shall examine the occasion on which the expressions “right” and “nature” have become linked for the first time within a larger theoretical context, namely the Aristotelian physei dikaion (right by nature).
This case obviously merits our attention, not only because it is the first of its kind which warrants hope that we may discover in it the experiential bases of the symbol, but also and especially because Aristotle’s physei dikaion is supposed to be valid everywhere and for all time, but is all the same a kineton, as something everywhere changeable. Thus the content of the original concept differs considerably from that of the later topos.
The question of how the transition of the one to the other has come about certainly calls for a more accurate investigation, especially since it is yet to be undertaken. The question, however, lies beyond the scope of this project. Our purpose will be served adequately by clarifying the meaning of the physei dikaion and by unraveling some of its philosophical implications.
Physei Dikaion: Clarifying an Ambiguous Term
The text in which the term physei dikaion figures lacks clarity to such an extent that many have assumed that this particular page of the Nicomachean Ethics (NE 1134b18 ff.) came from a pen other than Aristotle’s. This may well be so, but I would not go that far.
What we actually have here seems to be a first version, possibly taken down as a dictation. Anybody who has himself struggled with the task of penetrating a large complex of thoughts will recognize upon reading the text a mutual contamination of multiple thought sequences.
The page should have been reworked in order to put the associative sequence in a discursive order.
The text is not clear because (1) the concepts shatter the logical scheme of the general and the specific and because (2) the term physis is given in those few sentences several meanings so that only the expert reader can determine with some certainty which meaning applies to which passage.
Aristotelian Justice is Tied to the Polis
The first reason for the lack of clarity involves the total complex of the philosophia peri ta anthropina (philosophy of human affairs, NE1181b15 f.), as Aristotle defines the work that comprises the Ethics as well as the Politics. To the extent that this is the more pervasive reason, we must address it first. Once the major deficiency of clarity that affects in general the formulation of concepts is removed, the minor equivocations of the term physis may be resolved without further difficulties.
The lack of clarity in the generation of concepts concerning right by nature has its root in the dominant interest of the whole work in the theory of the polis and can be removed only through an interpretation of the text in the light of the larger theoretical context. To this end are of special relevance the definitions in the Politics (1253a38 ff.) as well as the structure of Book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics.
In the above passage from the Politics, Aristotle formulates three fundamental definitions:
Justice (dikaiosyne) is a politikon;
Right (dikaion) is the order (taxis) of the koinonia politike (the political community);
The judicial decision (dike) is the determination of what is right (dikaion).
We infer from these definitions that Aristotle wanted to establish an essential connection between the polis and questions of justice and of what is right. For justice is a politikon; the dikaion in turn relates only to the polis and not to the order of some other kind of association; finally, the judgment of right, whether it is to be understood as a legislative legal maxim or a judge’s decision, refers to what is right within the framework of the community of the polis.
Thus the statements in which these concepts figure must not become a generalized form of an Aristotelian “philosophy of law,” nor may one conversely conclude from this relationship to the polis that this or that statement may not be valid for other types of association. The statements are to be understood as “primarily relating to the polis.”
The “Politically Right” in the Nicomachean Ethics
This rule governing interpretation is corroborated by the curious structure of Book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle begins with a distinction of justice in a general and a narrower sense; he then subdivides the latter into distributive and commutative justice.
Having brought his rather comprehensive investigation to this point, he suddenly recalls (1134a25) that its object is actually the relation of what is generally right to what is politically right (politikon dikaion). Everything that follows after the section on justice in general turns out to be one single extensive digression from which we now return–lest we forget–to the proposed subject matter, the politikon dikaion.
This new beginning brings along new, clearly defined subdivisions:
“The politikon dikaion consists of the physikon (natural) and the nomikon (conventional) right (1134b20); the nomikon is eliminated, since by definition it is concerned with the adiaphoia, the essentially indifferent matters like traffic rules, measures, and weights; finally the investigation concentrates on the physikon dikaion (natural right) as the right that is concerned with essentials.”
Within each of the two parts the formulation of concepts thus clearly proceeds according to the scheme of the general and the specific; the obscurity intervenes at the site of the rupture where justice in the general sense becomes suddenly related to the polis , and the concept of the dikaion politikon (political right) is introduced.
The Right is the Law Among Men who are Equal
What, then, is “this right in a political sense”?
Aristotle defines:
“It is the right that obtains among men who share a common life in order that their association bring them self-sufficiency and who are free and equal. Hence, in a society between those who are neither free nor equal there is nothing just in the political sense, but only something that bears a resemblance (kath’ homoioteta).”
To substantiate this definition, he continues:
“For the just exists only among men whose mutual relationship is regulated by law (nomos), and law exists where injustice (adikia) may occur. This again is possible only among men who are free and equal, for only among them is there a judicial decision about justice (dike) that distinguishes between what is just (dikaion) and what is unjust (adikon).”
These sentences do not present an argument but present a distinctively circular flow of meanings in which what is right is closely linked with the polis and its relations between free and equal citizens, while the relations between men belonging to other associations sink down just as distinctively into a shadowy condition of unreality.
The fluctuating meanings receive some additional determination from the term nomos, introduced in these sentences. Nomos, the law, is to rule, not man. The ruler is to be no more than the guardian of the dikaion, of what is right, that distributively and commutatively obtains between men who are free and equal; if the ruler violates the dikaion, if he acts in his own interest, allotting to himself more than the share due to him as an equal among equals, he thereby becomes a tyrant.
For Aristotle, the rule of nomos thus does not accommodate any arbitrary content of positive law; actually one can speak of the rule of law only when the law has a definite and substantial content. Now we are in a position to dispel the obscurities that were caused by Aristotle’s dominant interest in the polis.
Justice Applies to Associations other than the Polis
Above all, one must pay attention to the multilayered nature of the meanings in question. The concepts refer primarily to the polis as a manifestation of an essentially right order. Consequently it appears on this level as if justice, right, the laws, and so on, could be relevant only in reference to the polis.
However, since Aristotle knows that the problems brought up by these terms also concern men who live in other associations than the polis, a second level of meaning is interpolated, in which resonate corresponding problems that lie beyond the pale of the polis association.
Aristotle recognizes not only a dikaion that is politikon (political), but also a despotikon (master-slave), patrikon (father-son), and oikonomikon (husband-wife) dikaion–only the latter must be distinguished from the substantial right of the polis as a homoion, a “resemblance.”
The right of other associations should by no means be denied a physikon, as long as it, too, is understood in its turn in the modus deficiens (defective mode) of a “resemblance”–but Aristotle has not much to say about these other types of what is right by nature, since they are of no interest to the inquiry into the politikon.
Substantial right thus merges with the right of the historically concrete polis, while the questions of right order for other types of association are regulated to a sketch at the margins of the inquiry.
“Right of the Polis” Not Positive Law
Given the dominance of the politikon, no natural law can be conceived that would confront the changeable positive law as an eternal, immutable norm, universally valid for all men and societies. This is so because the right of the polis, its nomos, insofar as it constitutes the order maintained by the rule of law among men free and equal, is itself physei dikaion, right by nature.
The right of the polis is not positive law in the modern sense, but substantial law within which alone there arises the tension between physei dikaion and a possible derailment into legislation by arbitrary human despotism. To be sure, the nomos of the polis is also legislated right and obligatory in this capacity, but this attribute ranks lower than the question whether the content of the statute is physei or the product of human hybris.
This Aristotelian conception of nomos does not seem to differ in principle from the older one of Heraclitus or Sophocles. In Heraclitus we find the sentence (B 114) that all human laws (anthropeioi nomoi) are nourished by one that is divine (theios nomos), which governs as far as it will and suffices for all things, and more than suffices.
And Sophocles’s Antigone speaks of the unwritten and unalterable commands (nomima) whose emergence is seen by no one; she does not want to “become guilty before the gods” by conforming to ordinances that have sprung from the self-willed thought (phronema) of a man (Ant. 450-470).
In Aristotle the theios nomos (divine law) has been replaced by the physei dikaion; hence nomos is subject no longer to the criterion of the divine but to that of nature. What has changed through this transformation of the criterion or whether in general something has changed can be ascertained only through a more accurate examination of the concept of nature.
“Political Right” Must be Natural or Conventional
The second reason for the lack of clarity is the changing meanings of the term physis. Now, after the primary reason has been removed, we can analyze the text with a view to the different meanings of physis. The political right is either physikon (natural) or nomikon (conventional). While physikon has the same validity (dynamis) everywhere and is independent of what men think, the nomikon refers to things that could be ordered one way or another, since in terms of substance they are obviously indifferent.
After these definitions, Aristotle interrupts his train of thought and quotes a widespread opinion: Many people think that what is right is all nomikon (conventional), for while what is unchangeable by nature is the same always and everywhere–as, for example, fire burns the same way here and in Persia–what is right seems to be indeed subject to changes.
Against this view, he argues that the sentence that what is right is changeable does not apply to the gods at all, while among men, even though there is obviously something that is right by nature, it is still always changeable (kineton). He adds that it is easy to recognize which are dikaia by nature and which are not.
The Three Meanings of “Nature”
The difficulties of this text become resolved if one understands that the word physis (nature) has three meanings: one physical, another divine, and the third, human, without Aristotle indicating which of the three meanings he uses in each specific case.
Furthermore, the hasty language of this passage (1134b20 ff.) does not distinguish accurately between arbitrary legislation on which the nomika are grounded, and the by no means arbitrary but rather strictly delimited legislation concerning the physica.
It might easily occasion misunderstandings, when Aristotle talks of the physikon dikaion (right by nature), at one place as that which is valid everywhere (taking it to be its divine substance), at another place as that which is changeable (conceiving it as its realization through humans in a concrete situation).
When he now even begins to talk of ta me physika all’ anthropina dikaia (what is just not by nature but by human enactment), one is indeed hard-pressed to decide whether by physika he means nature in the physical sense or the divine substance. The only thing that is certain is that the anthropina are, not nomika as opposed to physika, but the physika in the third sense of the human realization of what is by nature.
We may say by way of summary that the physei dikaion is what is right by nature in its tension between the immutable divine substance and the existentially conditioned human mutability.
Adapting Law to the Situation
With the passage that contrasts the physika with the anthropina (NE 1135a3), a sentence begins that has received little attention because of its confusing context, even though it is of fundamental importance for Aristotelean ethics and politics.
Aristotle makes the following comparison (NE 1134b35 ff.): The nomika are based on agreement and utility, as, e.g., various standard measures for wholesale and retail commerce are adopted. What applies to the measures that are adapted to the market situation holds also true for the dikaia, which are not physika but anthropina, for even the constitutions (politeiai) are not everywhere the same, even though there is only one politeia according to nature (kata physin), namely, the best one.
In this passage, as we already mentioned, the anthropina are to be understood as what is natural in its human realization and are thus not equated with the nomika, but only compared with them, the tertium comparationis being the adaptation to a given situation.
The Core Problem of Political Science
First of all, this passage is important because as it concludes the text about the politikon dikaion, it informs the reader that the content of the political right is the best constitution, whose model Aristotle has outlined in Politics 7-8. Quite unlike the later ideas about natural law as the quintessence of eternal, immutable legal maxims, the right by nature here is identical with the paradigm of the ariste politeia (the best constitution).
The investigation about the physei dikaion, therefore, must not be understood as an autonomous body of teachings that could be further developed into a “doctrine of natural law;” instead, it leads directly to the core problem of political science, the question of the right order of society.
Insofar as this passage points in this direction, it is therefore, secondly, of importance for the overall structure of Aristotle’s episteme politike: While the outline of the model only tries to get hold of the right by nature in its immutable aspect, the description of the concrete constitutions in the Politics displays the full range of variations of human attempts to realize the model.
Only both investigations combined, as they mutually interact, make up the whole of political science.
The Fourfold Determination of Right
The tensions between the immutable rights of nature and the changing modes of its realization occur, however, within the polis, whose set of problems we have recognized as the dominant motive of the elaboration of Aristotelian concepts.
Since the polis is the best community (koinonia) by nature, right as a whole is determined as natural in a fourfold way.
First, it is right by nature, because the polis , as a historical type of community, is the best by nature;
Second, it is natural insofar as it relates to human essence, as contrasted with the adiaphora;
Third, it is–within the tension–the preeminently natural that is valid everywhere, akin in this respect to Heraclitus’s theios nomos (divine law);
Fourth, it is the mutably natural, the anthropinon, in the concrete constitutions of the polis; in this sense it is akin to Heraclitus’s anthropeioi nomoi (human laws).
This much as a commentary on the text about the physei dikaion.
Phronesis is the Practical Virtue of Doing Right
What is right by nature is not given as an object that would lend itself, once and for all, to the statement in correct propositions. On the contrary, it has its mode of being in man’s concrete experience of what is right, which is immutable and everywhere the same, and yet, in its realization, again changeable and everywhere different.
What we have here is an existential tension that cannot be resolved theoretically but only in the practice of the man who experiences it. Mediation between its poles is not an easy task. We know Solon’s complaint in respect to his reform: “It is very hard to recognize the unseen measure of right judgment; and yet this measure alone contains the right limits (peirata) of all things.” (Solon 6.2)
It is very easy to lose this invisible, divine measure; once lost, it will be replaced by the arbitrariness of a legislator who is pursuing his special interests. In order to acquit himself of this task with a modicum of success, man needs an existential faculty, a special quality that allows him to mediate between the poles of the tension. This faculty Aristotle calls phronesis.
The problems of phronesis as the faculty of mediation run parallel to those of the tension between the right and the actual order in the polis. In dealing with what is right by nature, Aristotle permitted the politikon to dominate the elaboration of his concepts; similarly, when dealing not only with phronesis but with virtue in general, he subsumes this elaboration under the idea of achieving an equilibrium in the existential tension.
This encompassing conception has not received, as far as I know, much attention; nevertheless it is this conception that lends weight to any undertaking in the field of ethics, not only in Aristotle’s. In order to identify the characteristic features of its philosophical locus, a recourse to an ontology of ethics is indicated.
Why is Truth More Certain in the Particular Case?
Aristotle’s ontological intention manifests itself in his attributing a higher degree of truth to concrete action than to the general principles of ethics. In NE1107a28 ff., he follows up a definition of virtue as the mean between extremes with an observation about the value of general concepts in ethics.
We must not dwell on generalities, says Aristotle, but must look at the hekasta, the concrete facts or cases. In the science of human action, general principles may have a wider range of application (or, are more widely accepted: The word koinoteroi [generalities of a higher degree] allows this meaning too), but the specifics are alethinoteioi, i.e., contain a higher degree of truth.
The reason for this is the fact that when engaging in action we are dealing with concrete things (hekasta) and must philosophically adjust to them. While other sciences endeavor to come up with general principles of the highest generality with the widest possible range of application, in ethics it is the generalities that are relatively uninteresting, possibly because they are already universally known.
It is only on a lower level of abstraction, in the doctrine of particular virtues and in casuistry, that we come into contact with things that are really important; it is to these lower levels that Aristotle attributes a higher degree of truth.
The Truth of Existence is Found in the Reality of Action
Now it is by no means obvious that the lower levels deserve the attribute of a higher degree of truth. Even if concrete action should be deemed more important, why should general principles and definitions be “less true” than decisions involving particular cases?
In this identification of truth with the concrete, there is a breakthrough of the nowadays almost forgotten knowledge of the philosopher, that ethics is neither a catalogue of moral principles, nor a retreat of existence from the complexities of the world and a contraction of existence into a state of tension of preparedness or eschatological expectation as practiced by the existentialist gnostics of our age, but the truth of existence in the reality of action in concrete situations.
What is involved here are not correct principles about what is right by nature in an immutable state, nor an acute consciousness of the tension between an immutable truth and its mutable reality (possibly still with tragic over- and undertones), but the changeability, the kineton itself, and the methods of raising it to the reality of its truth. The truth of existence is attained where it becomes concrete, i.e., in action.
The kineton of action is the locus where man attains his truth. That does not mean that ethics on the higher levels of abstraction would be superfluous for the truth of action, for right action in concrete situations requires deliberation about the pros and cons in the tension toward what is immutably right, and the premise of rational deliberation is ethical knowledge.
Reasoning Runs from God to Human Action
It is, however, when this question is raised that Aristotle is willing, on the basis of his experiences, to allow for other possibilities, insofar as he recognizes right action, which attains its truth without the mediation of ethical knowledge. In the Eudemian Ethics, he introduces the term tyche, the luck of right action.
There would be no end to deliberation, he argues, if reason after reason emerged demanding consideration, while the deliberating reason (nous) were left with no absolute origin and beginning (arche) of its reasoning–this beginning being God.
The reasoning about concrete action is part of a movement within being, which issues from God and ends in human action. Just as God moves (kinei) everything in the universe, the divine also moves all things in us (EE 1248a27). To be sure, the divine in us moves usually through knowledge (episteme), mind (nous), and virtue (arete), but it also can do without these instruments and move us without them, directly through enthousiasmos.
Near to the certainty concerning right action found in wise men there is the certainty of the unwise (alogoi) who hit the mark of right decision by divination (mantike). Such certainty of true action without the instrumentary (organon) of knowledge and experience makes its possessor a fortune-favored one, an eutyches.
These reflections about the fortune-favored man reveal a connection between ethics and ontology, an ontology that still has a decidedly cosmological character. From the unmoved mover as the first cause, the movement of being runs through the cosmos down to the last thing that is moved and, in the realm of humanity, down to human action.
Not Historical Particulars in the Modern Sense
If then what is right by nature is shown to have the characteristics of the kineton, the translation of this term as “changeable” may be correct but must be supplemented by the meaning of “being moved cosmically by the cause of all movement.” The cosmological overtones should also keep us from understanding that which is being represented as different from case to case simply as historical particulars in the modern sense.
The constitutions of the polis, which Aristotle uses to exemplify the changeability of what is right by nature, do indeed belong to the realm that today we call history. Nevertheless, to the Hellenic thinker they appeared as realities of an ahistorical realm of being. Let us not forget Aristotle’s utilitarian comparison with the market situation, to which one or another measure might be adequate.
This question cannot be addressed in greater detail at this time, for we are touching on a theoretical problem of the delimitation of history that has scarcely even been raised today.
The Wise Man’s Deliberations are Ethics
Whatever these limits may be, for Aristotle the historical and the ahistorical changeable merge into a single complex of that which is being moved by the divine. The movement may take a shortcut from the divine arche in man to his action, or it can use the instrumentalities of reason, knowledge, and habitually acquired virtue.
The case of the fortune-favored unwise is not the rule; actually, it is that of the wise man. The wise man, however, deliberates on the basis of his knowledge; and this knowledge may be ordered and expressed in the lasting form of propositions of various degrees of generality, which form is called ethics.
Insofar as this constant state of knowledge is the instrument used by the divine to attain its truth in the reality of action, ethics itself is a phase in the movement of being that ends in the kineton, and its creation is a work of service toward the unmoved mover. The philosophical achievement of ethics has its dignity as a part of the divine movement that leads to the truth of action.
Phronesis as the Basis of Ethics
The ground for an ontology of ethics is laid by the insight that ethical knowledge and deliberation are parts of the movement of being. Between the mover and the moved, however, there is man who either is, or is not, permeable to the movement of being.
By no means are all men either wise or fortunate; on the contrary most of them allow their actions to be determined by pleasure (hedone) (NE 1113a35). The next step, therefore, is the conception of a man in whom knowledge and deliberation concur.
The degree of permeability to the movement of being determines the rank of human beings, the highest of whom is the spoudaios kind. The spoudaios is the mature man who desires what is in truth desirable and who judges everything rightly. All men desire what is good, but their judgment of what is in truth good is obscured by pleasure.
If we tried to find out what is truly good by taking a poll in any given human collective, we would get as many different answers as there are the different characters of those interviewed (NE 1113a32), for each character considers good what he desires.
Hence, we must ask the spoudaios, who differs from other men in that he sees “truth in concrete things” (hekastois), for he is, as it were, their standard and measure (kanon kai metron) (NE 1113a34)–a principle of method to which our “empirical” social scientists should pay heed.
The passages dealing with the spoudaios show very clearly that Aristotle cannot view what is right by nature as a natural law, a set of eternal, immutable propositions, because the truth of a concrete action cannot be determined by its subsumption under a general principle, but only by questioning the spoudaios.
The justification of an action does not appeal to an immutably correct principle, but to the existentially right order of man. The criterion of a rightly ordered human existence, however, is its permeability to the movement of being, i.e., the openness of man to the divine; the openness in turn is not a proposition about a given, but an event. Consequently, ethics is not a body of propositions, but an event of being (Seinsereignis) that allows itself to speak about its appeal to the right order of man.
Phronesis as the Virtue of Right Action
The ontology of ethics is brought to completion by the theory of phronesis, that virtue which is for Aristotle the locus at which the movement of being in man becomes reality and, simultaneously, is given a voice. Phronesis is the virtue of right action and, at the same time, the virtue of the right verbalization of action.
The text does not provide any further clues for a general characterization of phronesis. Several Platonic premises, however, are implied but cannot be made explicit because of the dominance of cosmological thinking. Before we turn to details, a word is in order concerning the doctrine of virtue in the Republic and about the relationship to it of Aristotle’s doctrine of virtue.
Plato distinguishes three virtues–sophia (wisdom), andreia (courage), and Sophrosyne (temperance)–which determine through their respective dominance in the soul three types of characters, while the fourth virtue, dikaiosyne (justice), watches over the right relation of sub- and superordination of the other three; in other words, it also watches over the overall order of the soul.
On the strength of this role, Plato’s dikaiosyne is closely related to, although not identical to, Aristotle’s “justice in the broader sense.” Outside of the closed system of the four cardinal virtues in the Republic, phronesis functions as the virtue that is activated in man when he participates in opsis, the vision of the idea of the good. Resulting from the opening of the soul, it is a virtue thoroughly informing all of existence, which formation alone facilitates the operation of the system of the cardinal virtues.
We call it an existential virtue in order to distinguish it from the virtues with specific functions. Aristotle’s phronesis, too, is an existential virtue, but its existential character does not become sufficiently clear in the climate of cosmological thinking, because its activation through an experience of transcendence does not become explicit.
Ethical vs Dianoetic Virtues
Furthermore, the character of this experience is obscured by the classification of phronesis under the intellectual virtues in Aristotle’s bipartition of virtues into ethical and dianoetic virtues.
The bipartition itself stems in turn from Aristotle’s difference from Plato. For the latter the relationship of action to the polis was still relatively beyond question, and he, therefore, had no interest in such a bipartition. Aristotle, by contrast, assigns to the bios theoretikos (contemplative life) the topmost rank among the forms of human existence. This form of existence oscillates ambiguously among the primary experience of the cosmos, a transcendent orientation, and immanent goal-setting.
That the classification of virtues in their bipartition between ethical and dianoetic virtues does not work is demonstrated by the treatise on philia (NE 8-9), a treatise about a very broadly conceived and many-layered phenomenon, whose core is the love for the divine nous.
The Platonic legacy of the experience of transcendence asserts itself and compels Aristotle to recognize the virtue he calls philia, which as noetic love comprises the love for God as well as the love for what is divine in our self and in our fellowman. This part of the far-reaching investigation is to be seen as the specifically philosophical penetration of the imago Dei issue.
Aristotle’s “Little Politics”
Furthermore, in the treatise on philia Plato’s direct relationship between the experience of transcendence and the order of the community also reemerges. For the noetic philia, as love of the divine nous, which lives in all men and is common to them (an echo of Heraclitus’s nous as the xynon, the common), becomes the philia politike, the central virtue of the political community.
In fact Aristotle even makes the attempt to derive the several types of social organization and particularly types of constitutions, from specific types of philia (the relevant chapters, NE 8.9-11, make up a “little” Politics, whose relationship to the “great” Politics has, unfortunately, gone practically unnoticed).
It is obvious that Aristotle does know existential virtues but fails to identify them clearly as such, nor does he differentiate them from the other virtues. Of the three virtues that can with certainty be recognized as existential, at least to the extent of his description, he deals with “justice in the broader sense” under the heading of the ethical virtues in NE 5, and with phronesis as one of the dianoetic virtues in NE 6, and with philia per se in NE 8-9.
Phronesis as Deliberation
Let us now examine the main points of Aristotle’s investigation of phronesis. They are the following:
“Phronesis is a virtue of deliberation about what is good and useful for man. However, not every deliberation of ends and of means to an end falls under phronesis, but only deliberation concerning the good life (eu zen) (NE 1140a26 ff.). Through the limitation to ‘eu zen as a whole,’ the possessor of the virtue becomes identical with the spoudaios, the mature man; but insofar as he is the possessor of phronesis, he is called uphronimos.”
Deliberation with a view to possible action can neither relate to things that are not capable of being changed, nor to goals that cannot be realized (NE 1140a32 f.). Phronesis is not knowledge about the unchangeable order of the world; it relates only to human affairs (anthropina) and, among them, again only to those which can be objects of meaningful deliberation (NE 1141 b 8 ff.).
The “changeability” in these passages must not be confused with the kineton. What is right by nature is changeable in the sense that in each case its realization is different. In the passages concerning phronesis, however, Aristotle does not speak of a kineton, but strictly in respect to the possibility of action, i.e., of something capable or not capable of being different from what it is. Consequently action can, or can not, have a changing effect on this something.
Phronesis thus is to be distinguished from the dianoetic virtues of science (episteme), which enables us to draw conclusions from principles; of intellect (nous), which enables us to recognize first principles; and of wisdom (sophia), which, as a combination of science and intellect, refers to things divine (NE 6.6-7). Finally, phronesis must be distinguished from artistic and technical skill (techne), which does refer to things that can be changed but which produces artifacts and thus is not action that has its end in itself (NE 6.4).
Phronesis as Knowledge of What is Good
Phronesis possesses the same moral characteristic (hexis) as political science. The two are identical as virtues, even though in general parlance, as Aristotle points out explicitly, there is a tendency to differentiate according to the categories of action, such as between action in private affairs (phronesis in a narrower sense) and political questions (NE 6.8). The identification is important in order to comprehend the following point, in which phronesis is to be understood as always including political science.
Phronesis is not identical to wisdom (sophia), for wisdom is knowledge about the most honorable things (timiotata). It would be absurd to assert that political science, or phronesis, is the highest type of knowledge (spoudaiotate episteme), for man is not the best thing (ariston) in the cosmos (kosmos).
Phronesis is actually knowledge about what is salutary and good for every kind of living being (zoa), and the salutary and good is, respectively, different for men and for various kinds of animals. There could no sooner be one kind of phronesis for all types of animals than there could be one kind of medicine for all of them. Nor could one claim the term sophia for human phronesis on the grounds of man ranking higher than animals, for there are things that by nature are much more divine than man, e.g., the highest visibles (phanerotata), which make up the cosmos (NE 6.7).
Cosmic Limitations
By way of a summary of the positive and negative determinations of the points made above, one might conclude:
Aristotle’s thinking is dominated by the experience of the cosmos, in which there are different kinds of things, among them also men. Man is not the highest being in a world become immanent, in which he might be thought to rank above all worldly things and to be subject only to the transcendent God. He is, on the contrary, a “thing” above which there are higher visible (phanerotata) things in the cosmos, namely, the star divinities (Sterngötter).
Phronesis thus becomes a knowledge with the help of which man realizes his eu zen, the specifically human mode of permeability to the order of the cosmos. Insofar as man optimally realizes this permeability in his existence, he is a uphronimos; he is a spoudaios only insofar as he holds the highest rank among the things of his own kind. A higher rank of being among the zoa is held by the star gods, of whom we know through the virtue of wisdom; for this reason phronesis is not the highest kind of knowledge (spoudaiotate).
Furthermore it is not knowledge at all, in the strict sense of the knowledge of principles and of propositions derived from these; it is episteme only in the sense of a “kind of knowledge.”
Truth in Action
These limitations, stemming from the pressure of the experience of the cosmos, give rise within the Nicomachean Ethics, which stands under the aegis of the Platonic legacy, to certain difficulties.
Phronesis, identical with political science, is supposed for that reason to be the episteme kyriotate, and architektonike, the supreme and master science of man, which alone assigns to all other sciences their due rank in the polis (NE 1094a27 ff.). This science, having just been elevated to the highest rank of the science of the polis, is immediately thereafter identified as a science of an inferior degree of precision (akribeia), through which we cannot achieve more than a rough sketch of truth (NE 1094b12 ff.).
Thus there exists a conflict whose disparaging aspect is determined by Aristotle’s insistence on preserving at any cost the character of phronesis as a knowledge that possesses its truth, not in the general principles, but in action, whenever it becomes concrete.
Action as the Ultimate End of Knowledge
His investigation therefore returns time and again to this question. In NE 1141b14 ff., phronesis is knowledge not only of general principles but of concrete things, of the hekasta. For this reason it is possible that men who are ignorant of general principles are sometimes more effective (praktikoteroi) in action than others who do have such knowledge.
Aristotle insists still more pointedly in NE 1142a24 f., that phronesis relates to the ultimate concrete thing, for the praktikon, the truly effective thing, is the eschaton, the ultimate one. (At this point the range of meaning of the praktikon is worthy of note: What matters here are not the ethical but rather the effective aspects of action, right down to effective magic.)
Aristotle’s insistence on this point elicits the final question whether phronesis can be in fact adequately characterized as knowledge of right action, for this mode of expression interposes between knowledge and action the distance of objectivity that is precisely what Aristotle wanted to eliminate.
For him this knowledge issues into concrete action, and action is the eschaton (the ultimate end) of knowledge; knowledge is action, and action is the truth of knowledge; what separates the two is not the distance of subject and object but a noetic tension in the movement of being.
Intelligent Judgment is not Action
That this has been in fact Aristotle’s philosophical intention is substantiated by his differentiation of phronesis from synesis or eusynesia, the virtue of right understanding and judgment (NE 6.10).
Intelligent judgment has its value, but it is not action. Synesis has the same scope as phronesis, but is not identical to it, for phronesis issues into command (epitaktike), ordering what is to be done and what not, while synesis is the virtue of right judgment and understanding (kritike). The synetos, the man of good judgment, knows how to assess action correctly, but he does not thereby become a uphronimos, who acts correctly and effectively.
Since synesis does indeed place objective distance between knowledge and action, which is precisely what distinguishes it from phronesis, the latter must be understood ontologically. The virtue that Aristotle calls phronesis, or political science, is an existential virtue; it is the movement of being, in which the divine order of the cosmos attains its truth in the human realm.
This excerpt is from Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 6) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999)
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