Aristotle's great-souled man

Review of Politics

Volumn 64, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 27-56

  Howland, Jacob ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 1442326222     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500031600     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all parenthetical citations refer to book, chapter, and line numbers in theNicomachean Ethics (EN), and all translations are my own.
2. See R. A. Gauthier, Magnanimite (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1951).
3. EN 4.3 is the fourth longest of the book's 116 chapters (as measured by number of lines in the Bekker collation); only 10.9,5.5, and 4.1 are longer.
4. Gauthier, Magnanimite, pp. 104-117
5. and R. A. Gauthier and J. Y. Joit,L'Ethique a Nicomaque (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1970), vol. 2., pt. 1, pp. 272-98.
6. Cf. J. A. Stewart, Notes on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 1: 334-346 Gauthier and Jolif follow an interpretative tradition going back to the Greek philosopher Aspasius (L'tthique a Nicomaque, pp. 272-73).
7. W. F. R. Hardie, "'Magnanimity' in Aristotle's Ethics," Phronesis 23 (1978): 63-79;
8. Nancy Sherman, "Common Sense and Uncommon Virtue," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (1988): 97-114.
9. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Bros., 1948), II-II.129-133
10. and Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C. I. Litzinger (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964), vol.1, lectures 8-11;
11. Steven White, Sovereign Virtue: Aristotle on the Relation Between Happiness and Prosperity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 250-71;
12. John Alvis, "Coriolanus and Aristotle's Magnanimous Man Reconsidered," Interpretation 7.3 (1978): 4-28;
13. Carson Holloway, "Christianity, Magnanimity, and Statesmanship," Review of Politics 61 (1999): 581-604. Holloway follows Thomas in arguing that Aristotelian megalopsuchia is not incompatible with Christianity (cf. Summa Theologica, II-II.129.3 with 161.2).
14. The former group includes Sherman, Hardie, and Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). Sir David Ross, however, states that EN 4.3 "simply betrays somewhat nakedly the self-absorption which is the bad side of Aristotle's ethics" (Aristotle [London: Methuen and Co., 1977], p. 208);
15. cf. the critical remarks by Maclntyre and Russell cited by Hardie, "Magnanimity," p. 65.
16. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism, p. 114.
17. Phronesis, which makes its possessors "able to contemplate the good for themselves and for human beings in general" (1140b9-10), involves the capacity imaginatively to "re-enact the agent's point of view and to consider what it is like for the agent to do that action in that context" (Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle's Theory of Virtue [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989], p. 36).
18. An. Post. 97bl6-25, trans. Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle's Posterior Analytics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), slightly modified.
19. 1328a8-16, translation of Carnes Lord, Aristotle: The Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), slightly modified.
20. The first is from Euripides, and the second from an unknown author (Lord, Politics, p. 267 n. 23).
21. White, Sovereign Virtue, p. 262.
22. This consideration does not deter Neil Cooper, who proposes that Aristotle was engaged in "a vain attempt to produce an impossible unitary account of megalopsuchia" ("Aristotle's Crowning Virtue" Apeiron 22 [1989]: 192).
23. On his love of honor, see Plutarch Lysander 18.1-5, 19.1, 23.5; on his intolerance of insult (hubris), 6.5-7; on his emulous nature, 34.3-5
24. Plutarch Lys. 30.1-2; cf. Plato/lpo/. 23b-c, 31b-c, 36d, with XenophonMem. 1.6.
25. Cf. Plato's Gorgias, where Socrates is criticized by Callicles for his lack of concern with what others think of him (484c-486d). Socrates' tolerance of insult becomes legendary in the later tradition; cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 11.21, 35-36.
26. Ajax's duel with Hector in book 7 of the Iliad suggests that he would have been a match for the Trojan hero after the death of Achilles. At Sophocles' Ajax 1340-1341, Odysseus calls Ajax "the best [ariston] of the Greeks who came to Troy, except Achilles.
27. Plutarch Ale. 36.4-5;
28. Lys. 11.6-7. At Aegospotami, Lysander accomplished "the greatest deed [ergon megiston] with the least labor" (Lys. 11.6).
29. Axioun, "to deem oneself worthy," implies both rating one's deserts high and asserting one's claims. Aristotle: Athenian Constitution, Eudemian Ethics, Virtues and Vices, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 343, note on Eudetnian Ethics 1233a3.
30. Summa Theologica, II-II 129.4.1;
31. White, Sovereign Virtue, p. 256. This observation helps to connect megalopsuchia and mikropsuchia with our ordinary understanding of magnanimity and pusillanimity: the great-souled man unstintingly does what he can for the good of the whole, whereas the small-souled man ungenerously withholds himself in doing less than he can. 22.1 am indebted here to Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism, pp. 116-23.
32. Cf. 4.3.1123b34-1124al: "And he would not be worthy of honor if he were worthless. For honor is the prize of virtue, and it is given as tribute to the good.
33. Gauthier, Magnanimite, pp. 63, 116-17. On this view, Aristotle's megalopsuchos directly anticipates the Stoic sage by achieving equanimity through theoretical perfection (Magnanimite, p. 118). While I shall argue below that Aristotle does regard Socrates as the true megalopsuchos, Gauthier and Jolif are able to identify Socrates with the great-souled man of EN 4.3 only by ignoring the ways in which they differ both from each other and from the sage or wise man.
34. Gauthier, Magnanimite, Ibid., pp. 104-109. Gauthier and Jolif follow Aspasius in assimilating the godlike philosophers of the Republic and Theaetetus to the great-souled man (L'Ethique a Nicomaque, pp. 295-96).
35. For further discussion, see Jacob Howland, The Paradox of Political Philosophy: Socrates' Philosophic Trial (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), pp. 57-64.
36. Additional criticisms of Gauthier are advanced by Hardie, "Magnanimity," pp. 67-69. Jaffa maintains that "there is no suggestion of any philosophic attributes in the description of the magnanimous man" (Thomism and Aristotelianism, p. 121).
37. L'Ethique a Nicomaque, pp. 293-295
38. Aristotle states that reason is "what is most of all [malista] a human being," and that we ought to make ourselves immortal "as far as possible" (10.7.1178a7, 1177b33), thereby implying that theoretical reason "is not exclusively us, nor its activity exclusively our happiness," and that "there are constraints on how contemplative activity must be pursued: not as a god would, but as a human would, within the boundaries of our social and moral lives" (Sherman, Fabric of Character, p. 101).
39. The great-souled man's forgetfulness of his dependence on others argues against Holloway's claim that "both the magnanimous man and the Christian can recognize that their virtues are not simply due to themselves, that in fact their virtues are for the most part due to someone else" ("Christianity, Magnanimity, and Statesmanship," p. 595).
40. Thus Michael Davis writes in Aristotle's Poetics: The Poetry of Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992) that "the formula for a 'tragic error'" is "to mistake a spurious whole for a whole" (p. 60).
41. Davis's development of this idea is echoed in other recent scholarship on the Poetics; see Jacob Howland, "Aristotle on Tragedy: Rediscovering the Poetics," Interpretation 22 (1995): 359-403.
42. The reference to the Spartans is opaque; see Gauthier and Jolif, L'Ethique a Nicomaque, p. 287.
43. That this limitation is the flip side of the great-souled man's frankness is hinted at by Montaigne, who claims to follow the megalopsuchos in "speak[ing] with entire freedom" but subsequently admits that "there may be some touch of pride and self-will in holding oneself so without reserve and candid as I do" (The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. George B. Ives [New York: The Heritage Press, 1946], pp. 876, 878).
44. Translation of Robert Fitzgerald, The Iliad (New York: Anchor Books, 1989).
45. The question of whether one is a member of the first or the third Hesiodic class seems analogous to the question of whether he who is without a polis is a beast or a god (Pol. 1.1.1253a28-29). Cf. EN 7.1.1145al5-27, where Aristotle's observation that virtue and vice exist neither in beasts nor in gods is introduced immediately after he mentions Hector's heroic and godlike virtue.
46. Ernst A. Schmidt, "Ehre und Tugend: Zur Megalopsychia der aristotelischen Ethik," Archivfur Geschichte der Philosophic 49 (1967): 149-68;
47. see esp. pp. 164-168
48. Lord claims that the great-souled man's situation is "not inherently tragic," insofar as "friendship affords the great-souled man the satisfaction of his need for honor and community without compromising his attachment to virtue." "Aristotle," in History of Political Philosophy, 3rd ed., ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 130.
49. The latter qualification is necessary given the implied belief that to adjust one's life to an inferior is slavish, together with Aristotle's suggestion that friend is someone to whom the great-souled man is willing to adjust his life (4.3.1124b31-1125al).
50. Poetics 1448a26-27,1449b9-10. In the definition of tragic drama at 1449b24-28, tragedy is said to be "the imitation of a serious [spoudaias] action"; note also Aristotle's assertion that tragedy is an "imitation of men who are better than us" (1454b8-9).
51. At Iliad 7.302, Ajax and Hector, having dueled, part "in friendship." Hector gives Ajax his sword, and receives a belt in exchange. In Sophocles' Ajax, Ajax kills himself by falling on Hector's sword. This gesture points toward the death he should have died-death at the hands of his only equal, who is paradoxically both friend and enemy.
52. Gauthier, Magnanimite, pp. 99-104.
53. He states explicitly that no friendship is possible between gods and men (8.7.1158b33-36, 1159a5-8). The plain implication of his argument that the sole activity of the gods is contemplation (10.8.1178b8-23) is that there is also no friendship between gods and gods.
54. Aristotle's references in this context to acting and to the sorrows of Niobe (7.3.1147a22-23,7.4.1147b33) suggest that tragedy may be a subtext of this discussion of hamartia. For further reflection on this passage see Howland, "Aristotle on Tragedy" p. 382.
55. David Bolotin notes that "no beings are friends simply because they are good," for "our human friendships [are] a sign of neediness or imperfection as well as of our worth" (Plato's Dialogue on Friendship [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979], pp. 135,134). EN 9.9 obscures Aristotle's agreement with this point because it asks whether fully virtuous human beings need friends, but does not ask how such human beings could have become virtuous in the first place. So, too, Aristotle's silence about the origins of the great-souled man's virtue creates a misleading impression of his self-sufficiency. 45.1 owe these observations to Mary Nichols. Cf. 1124b24, where the greatsouled man is said to be "idle" and "given to delay." His inflexibility is reminiscent of that of Ajax, who chooses suicide to preserve his nobility, and whose anger endures even after his death (cf. Odyssey 11.553-567).
56. Ronna Burger discerns a similar subtext in the Ethics. In "Health of Soul and Psychic Medicine: on the Psychology of Aristotle's Ethics," an unpublished lecture delivered at St. John's College in April of 1997, Burger argues that "the true peak of the argument of the Ethics" is the emergence in book 9 of the Socratic soul as "the dialogic self" (p. 18).
57. This is not the only place in theNicomachean Ethics where Aristotle follows Plato in suggesting that what appears to be second best absolutely is in fact best of all for human beings. Cf. his reference to a "second sailing" at 2.9.1109a34-35 with Plato, Phaedo 99c-e and Statesman 300c.
58. S. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, in Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 10,11.