Arete and the Good
In his discussion of the simile of the sun, Socrates explains that just as the sun causes all that it illumines to come into being as well as into visibility, so the form of the Good causes all that is available to intelligence to come into being as well as into intelligibility.[1] That is, the form of the Good both illumines the other forms and causes their existence.[2] Let me offer one interpretation of this simile with regard to the forms of the virtues. I suggest that the virtues may be considered to come into being as the result of the successful counsel of reason in the face of various sorts of temptation to moral weakness.[3] Consider prudence. The role of prudence is to counsel action for the best possible outcome (ultimately eudaimonia). As such, its job is to discover what is really, and not just apparently, good and to guide decisions accordingly. To the extent that it does this, the person so exercising prudence is virtuous. Generalizing, the idea may be understood this way: acting for what is good is virtuous and the different sorts of virtues are just the different sorts of success of reason against different sorts of countervailing passions or desires. The success of reason in the face of circumstances that would otherwise cause greed or anger is temperance; the success of reason in the face of circumstances that would otherwise cause fear is courage. Thus, the virtues come into being only in relation to the good, the guide star of reason.
The contrary, sophistic approach denies that goodness has any objective being. A pure sophist would hold that what is good is merely a matter of subjective opinion, and so that what is virtuous is also merely a matter of subjective opinion. The ultimate standard of what is good and virtuous is, in this view, personal desire. What is desired is, ipso facto, desirable, and the personal powers that enable you to get what you desire are virtues. On the sophistic approach, desire is the standard of success: its fulfillment is success, its frustration failure. For the Socratics, on the other hand, the standard of success is reason: its fulfillment is personal freedom, its frustration is psychological slavery. Since he denies the objective being of goodness, the sophist has to find some other function for reason. What he suggests is that reason is an instrument to enable you to get what you want. He gives no credence to Aristotle’s distinction between contemplative and instrumental reason. For the sophist, all reason is instrumental.
Comment on Prudence and Reason
Prudence is essentially foresighted; prudence looks to the future and shapes current plans and policy to the prospect. In the ideal state, prudence is exercised by the rulers who have the responsibility for taking care of the future of the state. In the ideal person, prudence is exercised by the rational part of the soul. Prudence, then, is the peculiarly rational virtue. A failure of prudence, then, is most clearly a failure of rationality. (The failure of any virtue is a failure of rationality, but it’s not so obvious in a failure of courage, for example.)
A relevant question: what is rationality?
- A Sophist would say that rationality is only the calculation of, and the practical application of, the means of getting what you want, whatever it may be. Reason is itself neutral about goals. What goals you set depend on what you value, and values are subjective.
- A Socratic would say that rationality is more than this, because if it were only this, you would just be a slave to your goals. Then your fate would be random since some goals, when reached, help to conduce to happiness and some do not.[4] So rationality must also do this other job: evaluate goals. Everyone aims for happiness, and so the job of rationality is then to discover of any goal whether it will yield happiness when achieved. If you use a lot of practical intelligence to achieve goals that will not really make you happy, then you are not really being prudent; there is a failure of rationality here. We all work for goals that we think will make us happy, but the job of prudence is to discover whether they really will.
We have said that a counterfeit of prudence is timidity. The reason for this characterization is that a person who tries to be prudent, but who does not have the rationality necessary to evaluate any prospect for genuine happiness, is likely to be so fearful of making a mistake that he misses genuine opportunities and ends up choosing badly anyway. But in light of the above discussion, we can now see that there is another counterfeit of prudence: that of the person who does not know how to evaluate prospects for happiness, but who doesn’t know that he doesn’t know this, and who confidently and dogmatically believes that he does know. This sort of person will make his plans and pursue them with ingenuity and industry, racing full-speed toward a dubious and unpredictable future, his sense of control an illusion. Ordinary practical intelligence tends to support this sort of vice, which is a counterfeit of prudence. Essentially, it’s the vice of dogmatism and is characteristic of the timocratic and oligarchic world views, which mistakenly identify the good with honor and money.[5]
[1] Republic 506e-509b.
[2] In Platonic metaphysics, Beauty and light have the same mode of being. Beauty is the appearance of the Good, but our first familiarity with it is indirect; we are first aware of beautiful objects before we are aware of Beauty as such. Similarly, we are first aware of illumined things before we are aware of light as such. As light is the shining of the sun, so Beauty is the shining of the Good. All beauty commands its regard, and awakes in human beings an instinctive, primordial yearning. See Diotima’s speech in the Symposium.
[3] I follow David Ross here. See his Plato’s Theory of Ideas, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1953), pp. 39-44.
[4] A Sophist would say: “No, no; happiness is just achieving your goals, whatever they are.” The Socratic replies: “Happiness has to be more than that since you can achieve some goals without ever achieving happiness.” So there is a disagreement here about what human happiness is. The Sophist believes that happiness is getting what you want, whatever it is; the Socratic believes that happiness is getting what you want only if what you want is truly good. The Sophist replies: “Goodness is just a subjective matter. Good is whatever you think is good.” The Socratic: “No, people can make mistakes about what is good. Small mistakes and big, life-time mistakes. Therefore, goodness is not just whatever you think it is.” The Sophist: “You can make mistakes like that only when you have some false beliefs about what you’re getting, as when you work toward something and it turns out not to be what you thought it was. But that doesn’t mean that you were wrong about the goodness of what you thought you would get.” The Socratic: “It does if that conception of goodness is not real, if it’s based on some fantasy of happiness that is not educated by a knowledge of human nature.” The Sophist: “There is no such thing as human nature. People are just animals who are more or less smart at getting what they want. If you want to understand someone, you don’t have to go any deeper than finding out what he wants.” The Socratic: “Desires are only one facet of human nature, and in the best people, they do not govern choice or behavior.” The Sophist: “Desires govern choice and behavior in all people.”
[5] I’m inclined to think that both timidity and this other courterfeit of prudence are usually motivated by the same thing: fear of the future. One person tries to keep the future at bay by holing up and trying not to change; the other tries to force his future into his control by doggedly pursuing his goals. Both of them lose control and, ironically, bring about their own fearsome futures. As I write this, I wonder whether a person who fears the future and so clings to his goals really is very efficient at pursuing them.