Ronna Burger - Aristotles Dialogue with Socrates

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book is produced by art; it does not grow by nature. Yet if ones work goes on for long enoughas in the present instancethat clear-cut boundary begins to be blurred. Under those circumstances, too many debts are accumulated to acknowledge individually and some too great to acknowledge in the way they deserve. In such cases, thoughAristotle speaks of gods, parents, and fellow participants in philosophyone must pay back what one can, no matter how far it falls short of what one owes.

Writing, like thinking, is a solitary activity; but my own internal dialogue has been enriched and enlivened by discussion with friends and my expression of it enhanced by their responses, for which I owe special thanks to Michael Davis, Mary Nichols, and Stuart Warner. As my work on Aristotle developed I learned much from presenting it to receptive but challenging audiences at conferences and college campuses, including St. Johns in Annapolis and Santa Fe, the University of Chicago, Boston College, the Catholic University of America, Assumption College, Roosevelt University, Howard University, the University of Dallas, Villanova University, Middlebury College, Boston University, and Fordham University. I am particularly grateful to my graduate students at Tulane, past and present, with whom I have worked out my understanding of Plato and Aristotle in ways that continue to feel like an adventure. In bringing this study to its present public form, it is my good fortune to have had the initial encouragement and ongoing support of my editor, John Tryneski, at the University of Chicago Press. The manuscript in its final stages benefited from comments and questions raised by readers for the Press and from the careful work of my copy editor, Mary Caraway.

The plan for this project began to emerge in the course of several summers of concentrated research and writing, supported by fellowships from Tulane University, the Earhart Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was a distinctive privilege to have a research fellowship at the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation in Munich in 19992000 and, in particular, to share ideas with Heinrich Meier, director of the Foundation, whose interest in this project has helped sustain it over time. The prelude to that year in Munich was a public talk I presented at the Siemens Foundation in 1994. On that occasion, I had the honor of being introduced by my mentor, Seth Benardete, who made this remark: Heidegger found Sophocles tragedies to be a philosophic reflection on ethics superior to Aristotles, but Burger promises to bring Aristotles Ethics back into the fold of philosophy. If I have been able to pursue that promise, it is on the basis of an understanding of philosophy and the experience of its distinctive pleasures that I came to know over my years of study and conversation with Benardete. He is not here to see this project come to fruition, but his influence will be evident throughout.

INTRODUCTION

The Socratic Question of the Ethics

Aristotle sees the perfection of man as Plato sees it and more. However, because mans perfection is not self-evident or easy to explain by a demonstration leading to certainty, he saw fit to start from a position anterior to that from which Plato had started.

And it has become evident that the knowledge that he [Aristotle] investigated at the outset just because he loved to do so... has turned out to be necessary for acquiring the intellect for the sake of which man is made.

Alfarabi, The Philosophy of Aristotle, i and xix1

Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics addresses a question of the utmost importance to us: What is the human good? Or, as the question comes to be elaborated, What is happiness? What is the good life for a human being? Its exploration of this question has made the Ethics one of the most influential works in the philosophical tradition, yet what exactly its teaching is has long puzzled readers and provoked much debate. The very arrangement of the text and the problems posed by it might lead one to wonder whether there is any underlying argument that makes the work a coherent whole. After grappling with its fundamental question about the human good in Book I, the inquiry enters upon what looks like a long, indirect path to its goal, beginning with an investigation of virtue; when, at the end of the tenth and last book, it finally returns to its original question, or something close to it, the answer proposed appears to leave behind much of the rich understanding of human life developed along the way.

Wherever the path of the Ethics finally leads, the question to which it responds sets Aristotle on a course following in the footsteps of Socrates. According to the history of philosophy that Aristotle constructs in Metaphysics A, Socrates took a decisive step when he abandoned the cosmological speculation of his predecessors and turned his attention to the human things.2 Socratic inquiry, whatever its specific starting point on any occasion, is directed ultimately to the question, What is the good life for a human being? In devoting itself to this fundamental question, the Ethics looks like the Socratic work in the Aristotelian corpus; whether it is a Socratic manner in which the Ethics proceeds, or a Socratic conclusion at which it arrives, is far less obvious.