1. Reorientation and new departure

OUR FIRST CHAPTER may have left the reader with an impression of confusion worse confounded. Ethical knowledge, it seems, although it may be something devoutly to be wished for, is at the same time something hardly to be realized, not only in practice, but even in principle. Indeed, for anyone to claim that in the present day men actually do possess an art of living comparable to the arts of war, of medicine, or of metallurgy would be simply preposterous. What’s more, there appears to be no way either in fact or in logic for us ever to get from a scientific knowledge of the facts of human behavior to any sort of moral or ethical knowledge of what might be called the “oughts” of human behavior. The very project of developing such a thing as a scientifically grounded art or skill of living and of being human seems to be hopelessly impossible.

And yet no sooner did we expose the apparent impossibility of ethical knowledge than we appeared suddenly to turn the tables and to argue that any denial of the possibility of ethical knowledge is itself impossible. Or if not exactly impossible logically, such a denial of ethical knowledge was at least seen to lead into what, for want of a better term, we chose to call a practical or existential inconsistency.

Where, then, do we go from here? Well, suppose we try to go in a direction in which almost no other ethical writers of the present day are wont to go. Suppose we take quite seriously this seemingly inescapable human situation in which we human beings find ourselves and according to which we cannot very well deny the possibility of ethical knowledge without thereby involving ourselves in a practical or existential inconsistency. And since we cannot avoid an assumption as to the possibility of ethical knowledge, let us make a virtue of necessity and assume it. Having made the assumption that such knowledge is possible, let us attempt to convert the possibility into an actuality by showing what it actually means to be a human being and what being human does in fact consist in. In this way, we shall perhaps be able to sketch out at least the rudiments of a genuine art of living.

Such a procedure is not popular among contemporary ethical writers. On the contrary, it just isn’t done. It has become commonplace today to consider that the only proper starting point for ethics is not the possibility of ethical knowledge, but, ironically enough, its utter impossibility. If this seems paradoxical, remember what we have already been at pains to point out, that a general attitude of relativism and skepticism in regard to matters of ethics is simply taken for granted as part of the heritage of modern man. Nor is it merely taken for granted; for as we have seen, it rests on the twin foundation stones of: (1) the seemingly obvious relativity, simply as a matter of fact, of all known moral norms and standards of value, and (2) the equally obvious neutrality—this time as a matter of principle—of all actual facts and occurrences within the real world.

Be it noted also that although we have tried to show that such an attitude of ethical relativism and skepticism is untenable, because inconsistent, we have not as yet done anything in the way of directly undermining its two foundation stones: the factual relativity of moral norms and the logical impossibility of grounding such norms on scientifically observable facts. Nor do we even propose to do anything of the sort, at least not just at present. Rather our procedure will be simply to leave these difficulties on one side, in the assurance that there must be some way of meeting them, however much we ourselves may be in the dark as to what this way is. The ground for this assurance lies in what should by now be a perfectly clear awareness that one cannot with consistency be a thoroughgoing relativist or skeptic in regard to matters of ethics.

2. Does not man have a natural end?

Given the assurance that ethical knowledge is at least possible, let’s damn the torpedoes and sail right into the question of what we do and can know in ethics, of what is best for us as men, and of what we ought and need to do in order to be truly human. This enterprise of determining what our human purposes and goals are may well prove to be less difficult than one might at first suppose. Setting aside for a moment all of our contemporary sophistication about the radical separation of facts from values, what more patent fact is there about human beings, perhaps even about living beings generally, than their goal-directed behavior? Indeed, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics quite unblushingly begins with what in many respects is no more than a truism:

Every art and every investigation, and likewise every practical pursuit and undertaking, seems to aim at some good: hence it has been well said that the good is that at which all things aim. . . . As there are numerous pursuits and arts and sciences, it follows that their ends are correspondingly numerous: for instance, the end of the science of medicine is health, that of the art of ship building a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of [domestic economy] wealth.¹

From this, Aristotle moves to the natural conclusion:

If therefore among the ends at which our actions aim there be one which we wish for its own sake, while we wish others only for the sake of this . . . , it is clear that this one ultimate End must be the Good, and indeed the Supreme Good. Will not then a Knowledge of this Supreme Good be also of great practical importance for the conduct of life? Will it not better enable us to attain what is fitting, like archers having a target to aim at? If this be so, we ought to make an attempt to determine at all events in outline what exactly this Supreme Good is, and of which of the theoretical or practical sciences it is the object.²

Now the interesting thing about these passages, for our present purpose, is that in Aristotle’s eyes, apparently, nothing is quite so much a fact of nature as what he here presents as goal-directed behavior or activity that aims at some end. Hence to suppose that such things as values, ends, and goals must needs be extrinsic to or outside of nature, or that values are in no sense facts of nature, does seem rather far-fetched. On the contrary, nothing is more natural, or more a part of the world of nature, than a manifold variety of natural changes and tendencies, all of them ordered to their appropriate ends and values.

Or, so long as we are being deliberately unsophisticated and taking things simply as we find them, suppose we choose a rather different example to illustrate the same point. Take, say, an acorn—at once a homely and a hackneyed example, to be sure, but perhaps a very revealing one. May we not say that there is something about an acorn that leads us to connect or associate it in some way with a future oak tree? Surely, this does not seem to commit us to any very imaginative, to say nothing of any very foolhardy or reckless, reasoning. Nothing is more natural than that an acorn should develop into an oak; this is simply a fact of nature; an oak is the natural end of an acorn. If an acorn were to develop into something else, say a tadpole or a skyscraper, we should doubtless say that this was not merely unnatural, but that we had had too much!

All this is not to say that merely because the acorn is thus naturally oriented or ordered to its own proper and characteristic perfection, it must necessarily and inevitably attain that perfection. On the contrary, the acorn may fall on rocky ground and so not mature and develop properly. It may become diseased, so that the young sprout withers and dies. It may even be eaten by a hog. Nor could any of these somewhat untoward events be said to be unnatural. At the same time, so far as the acorn itself is concerned, there is an entirely proper sense in which such happenings may be said to be bad for it, in that they prevent or impede it from attaining its natural perfection or end. And correspondingly, those circumstances and events may be said to be good for it which further its natural growth and development. Indeed, following Aristotle’s terminology, the good of the acorn is simply the attainment of its natural end or perfection, the good of anything being that at which it naturally aims—or, since the word “aims” in English usually connotes conscious purpose, we might paraphrase the Aristotelian dictum by saying that the good of anything is simply that toward which it naturally tends or to which it is naturally ordered in its development.

Thus from Aristotle’s point of view, it is not necessary to go outside the world of nature in order to discover such things as goods and values. On the contrary, values are simply facts of nature. To find what the good of anything is or what is of value for it, we need not go beyond our ordinary human experience, which suffices to disclose the capabilities and potentialities of things, what their tendencies are, and hence what the ends or goals are toward which they are naturally oriented in their natural growth and development.

Nor is it hard to see how this whole descriptive paraphernalia—potentiality, ends, goals, tendency, natural perfection, natural growth and development, etc.—which might be considered to be originally appropriate to the biological realm, can quite readily and properly be transferred to the human realm. For man is certainly part of the world of nature. Accordingly, just as plants and animals all have natural states of perfection and maturity, toward which their very being is ordered and oriented and in the direction of which they will naturally tend and develop, provided that adverse conditions do not interfere, so also man may be presumed to have his characteristic end or natural perfection, toward which his life naturally tends and at which he aims naturally; this may therefore be called the natural good for man or the human good.

Of course, since a human being is more than just a living organism, it may be presumed that human perfection or the human good will involve something more than mere biological maturity or mere physical health or well-being, as in the case of plants and animals. Rather the human good will involve what might loosely be called the maturity or healthy condition of the whole man, or of man in his total being. Likewise, since man is a being capable of intelligence and understanding, and consequently of planned and deliberate behavior on the basis of such understanding, it may also be presumed that the way in which a human being attains his appropriate good or natural perfection will be rather different from that of a plant or an animal. In the case of the latter, the organism will, as we say, just “naturally” grow and develop to maturity, if unfavorable conditions do not interfere. In contrast, a human being can presumably attain his perfection only by a conscious recognition of what the human end is and by deliberately aiming at this proper end. In this sense, we might say that throughout all the rest of nature, natural perfection is attained “naturally” and through natural processes, whereas in the case of human beings such perfection is attained only by art and design. But in either case the perfection or the good that is so attained is a natural one, being determined by the very nature of the being in question: by the nature of the acorn in the case of the acorn and the oak, and by the nature of man in the case of human beings.

3. What, then, is man’s natural end?

Perhaps we can do no better than to let Aristotle present his own account of what this natural end or natural good for a human being is. In his characteristically terse, but illuminating, fashion, he says:

We may now return to the Good which is the object of our search, and try to find out exactly what it can be. For good appears to be one thing in one pursuit or art and another in another: it is different in medicine from what it is in strategy, and so on with the rest of the arts. What definition of the Good then will hold true in all the arts? Perhaps we may define it as that for the sake of which everything else is done. This applies to something different in each different art—to health in the case of medicine, to victory in that of strategy, to a house in architecture, and to something else in each of the other arts: But in every pursuit or undertaking it describes the end of that pursuit or undertaking, since in all of them it is for the sake of the end that everything else is done. Hence if there be something which is the end of all things done by human action, this will be the practicable Good—or if there be several such ends, the sum of these will be the Good.³

Proceeding further, he then asks more directly just what the Supreme Good for man may be considered to be. And his answer is:

Perhaps then we may arrive at this by ascertaining what is man’s function. For the goodness or efficiency of a flute-player or sculptor or craftsman of any sort, and in general of anybody who has some function or business to perform, is thought to reside in that function; and similarly it may be held that the good of man resides in the function of man, if he has a function.

Are we then to suppose that, while the carpenter and the shoemaker have definite functions or businesses belonging to them, man as such has none, and is not designed by nature to fulfill any function? Must we not rather assume that just as the eye, the hand, the foot and each of the various members of the body manifestly has a certain function of its own, so a human being also has a certain function over and above all the functions of his particular members? What then precisely can this function be? The mere act of living appears to be shared even by plants, whereas we are looking for the function peculiar to man; we must therefore set aside the vital activity of nutrition and growth. Next in the scale will come some form of sentient life; but this too appears to be shared by horses, oxen, and animals generally. There remains therefore what may be called the practical life of man as possessing reason.⁴

In other words, the good of man, according to Aristotle, turns out to be not simply a matter of staying alive and of performing the vegetative functions that are characteristic of plants. It is not even a matter of merely exercising the ordinary animal functions, which man, of course, has, just like any other animal. Instead, man’s natural perfection involves, in addition, the exercise of those powers and capacities that are distinctively human, that is, intelligence and rational understanding. And this brings us right back to Socrates again, for whom the good life for man is simply the examined life, the so-called unexamined life being just not worth living.

4. First objection: this is nothing but a lot of platitudes

Now isn’t all this simple and obvious enough? At the same time, unfortunately, it must seem trite enough too. Indeed, so jaded and platitudinous must expressions such as “reason,” “intelligence,” “natural perfection,” “human understanding,” “the examined life,” appear, that to state one’s case in such terms is to risk losing the case forthwith. And yet the fault may lie not with our language but with ourselves, that man’s rationality should have become such a commonplace as to lose all significance for actual living men.

Suppose we put to ourselves the following hypothetical case. Suppose someone offers to make a deal with us, be it some dictator, or the Great Leviathan, or the devil himself. He reminds us of how precarious our existence is: We are never free from worries, fears, anxieties, dread, insecurity of all kinds—the atom bomb, economic collapse, political revolution, personal failure, family tragedy. What we are offered, therefore, will be freedom from all this, freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from worry. The promise is that we shall be taken care of completely and absolutely—our physical needs, our biological needs, in fact anything that we want. And the price? It will only be that we shan’t know what is going on. Oh, we’ll be conscious all right, conscious enough to be aware of our desires and of the fact that they are being fulfilled. But we must not expect either to know what is really going on, or even to pretend to know. The very pretense or the illusion of “knowing what the score is” will be denied us.

Such is the bargain. Would we accept it? Surely not. It is true that in moods of defeatism, of misery, and of utter hopelessness men have accepted such bargains. Indeed, it might be said that it was in effect just such a bargain that a defeated German people accepted when after the First World War they entrusted their future to Hitler. Still, even though men have entered into such bargains in the past, and even though they will doubtless continue to be tempted by such prospects in the future, by and large no man in his senses would prefer the existence of a contented cow, however well fed and well cared for, to the existence of a human being with at least some understanding of what is going on.

No matter how stupid and ignorant and obtuse a man may be—yes, even if he acknowledges to himself his own intellectual inferiority, taken in the strict and narrow sense—still it is more than likely that what keeps such a person going and makes life bearable for him is his own secret, or perhaps not so secret, conviction that when it comes to his personal decisions and personal choices, he’s not really so dumb, and that, according to his lights, he is after all pretty shrewd in the matters of what Aristotle, in the above-quoted passage, termed “the practical life of man as possessing reason.”

If not the reality, then at least the pretense or illusion, of knowing what it is all about and of what the smart thing to do is—this, we would suggest, means more to a human being than anything else. And this is why, in the hypothetical bargain which we suggested might be offered to a man, we were careful to state the terms in such a way that even the pretense or illusion of knowing would have to be given up in exchange for the promised contentment and security and freedom from want and worry. Indeed, no would-be modern dictator would ever go this far, the technique of dictatorship and demogoguery being rather to make men think they are clever and informed and even wise, while in fact depriving them of the reality of all genuine knowledge and understanding.

In other words, the very exigencies of trying to control people by keeping them in the dark, while making them believe they are in the light, tend to confirm Aristotle’s judgment of the supreme value to man of being enlightened, of knowing what is going on—of an intelligent or an examined life, in other words. For whether we be really fools or not, we human beings want at least to believe that we are wise. It is for this reason that Aristotle can quite legitimately say that the supreme good for man is simply to live intelligently.

5. Second objection: what has intelligence got to do with
being a good man?

Another difficulty with this Aristotelian dictum is likely to suggest itself at this point. For merely to contrast the intelligent life of man with the vegetative existence of plants or the sensate existence of animals is entirely compatible with pointing to any number of human beings who are certainly intelligent enough, but whose lives we should hardly think of as being examples of human perfection, natural or otherwise. For example, what about Joseph Goebbels or perhaps Joseph Stalin? Certainly, there was no denying them intelligence. What’s more, they did not fail to put their intelligence to work in the practical pursuit of their various ends. In this sense, they did not live out their lives on any mere vegetative or sentient level. And yet at the same time, theirs were anything but examined lives in the Socratic sense, for in the case of two such master minds of national and international ill-will, it is all too obvious that their knowledge was not sought as the source of self-understanding, of knowing oneself. Instead, it was wholly instrumental to ends other than knowledge and understanding, ends such as power, greed, vengeance, and self-aggrandizement. In this sense their lives were not intelligent or examined lives at all.

For that matter, one has but to recall the earlier quoted passage, in which Socrates reproaches his fellow Athenians for being so concerned with heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation. The chances are that the attainment of these ends will require not merely luck, but no little wit and intelligence—perhaps more indeed than you or I possess, and maybe even more than Socrates or Aristotle possessed. Nor is it likely that Socrates was any more unaware of this simple fact of life than he was of most others. But even though the man whose goal in life is wealth, and whose intelligence happily suffices for attaining it, is likely to be a very shrewd and intelligent fellow, that still does not mean that his life may properly be said to be an intelligent one. For intelligence in his case is presumably used as a mere instrument in the service of ends other than intelligence itself, and that can only be described as foolish and mistaken.

In justification of this latter statement, one has but to examine and reflect upon such an attitude toward life as would make of wealth the be-all and end-all of human existence. It is only too obvious that wealth by its very nature is but a means to other things—to the things that money can buy. This is not to say that such things may not be exceedingly valuable, and passionately coveted, particularly if one doesn’t have them; and so too are money and wealth as the means of their purchase. But the point is that means are not ends, and to confuse the former with the latter is but folly and stupidity. Indeed, it takes rather more wisdom and understanding to know how to use riches, once one has them, than it does to know how to acquire them in the first place. That’s why there is no fool quite like a rich fool, and also why anyone who uncritically pursues wealth as the principal goal in life, however intelligent he may be, just isn’t very smart after all.

Moreover, the same thing may be said of the man whose consuming passion in life is the lust for power. Whatever brilliance and resourcefulness he may display in the pursuit of his end, the end itself is not an intelligent one, being by the very nature of the case a means to something else: power to do this or that or the other. Little wonder, then, that the life of a Goebbels or a Stalin strikes us as being somehow warped, distorted, misspent, and in this sense unnatural: it is not the kind of life that intelligence and understanding would prescribe.

Similarly, to seek honor or reputation as an end is equally unintelligent, however much it may be necessary to exploit one’s intelligence in their attainment. To be sure, unlike wealth and power, such things as a good name and a respected position in the community are not necessarily mere means to the attainment of still further ends. Hence they can hardly be criticized for involving an obvious confusion of means with ends. At the same time, suppose we ask ourselves just why we are so anxious about our reputations (for most of us certainly are). One man wants to get ahead in the world and “show the folks back home.” Another seeks military glory. Another craves newspaper publicity. Another wants to get to the top of the academic ladder. Another wants to write a book that will head the bestseller lists. Still another wants to be the “man of the year” of the local Rotary Club or Junior Chamber of Commerce. And so on. In fact, in present-day America there seems to be a mania for doing the done thing, whatever profession or walk of life we happen to be in, so that we shall achieve some sort of recognition on the part of our fellows.

But why is this? Why do we seek recognition so avidly? When we think about it a little, we can readily see that we do not, or at least we should not, seek honor and reputation for their own sake, but only because such praise and respect from our fellows somehow serve as reassurance to ourselves that maybe we have accomplished something or amounted to something after all. In other words, honor and reputation are not properly ends at all, but only marks or signs of the end. And what is the end itself? Presumably, it is simply our own worth, our own real achievement and perfection. That is what we are really after; and in so far as we come to think only of our fame and reputation in other men’s eyes and not of our own selves and what we ourselves are, to this same extent we are again being no more than foolish and unintelligent: for such an attitude and way of life will not bear scrutiny.

What, then, must such real worth and achievement consist in, a worth and excellence that are to be sought and cherished for their own sake and regardless of whether or not they bring with them fame and reputation and recognition by our fellows? If the whole of our foregoing argument is to be credited, such excellence may be found to lie in the exercise of our characteristic human function, that is to say in leading an intelligent or examined life. Moreover, it should now be clear that such a life must needs be one in which one’s knowledge and intelligence are employed, not as mere means for the achievement of irrational ends, but rather as prescribing and determining the ends themselves. This and this alone will constitute a truly intelligent and examined life, and as such will involve that very perfection and fulfillment of one’s human nature toward which one is, as we have seen, oriented by nature.

Nevertheless, no sooner do we thus seek to establish the fact that the natural and “healthy,” and hence good, life for a human being is simply the life of knowledge and understanding, than another and still more serious misunderstanding is likely to arise. For one might be inclined rather naïvely to suppose that in the present day those whose lives are devoted to the pursuit of such things as “wisdom and truth,” as contrasted with “money, honor, and reputation,” are none other than the scholar-scientist professors of our great academic institutions. Accordingly, applied to the contemporary scene, it would appear that the good life for man, as Socrates and Aristotle envisage it, would turn out to be none other than the academic life, the life of the professor! With such a denouement, one may well begin to wonder about the wisdom of the Greeks. Such a peripateia might even constitute the reductio ad absurdum of Socratic and Aristotelian ethics alike.

Fortunately, though, it is not so much Aristotle who is here at fault, as the somewhat questionable chain of reasoning that carried us blithely from the Socratic ideal of the examined life to the pathetic reality of present-day academic life. For one thing, it takes but little perceptiveness to see that many of our more distinguished exemplars of the academic life today are not exactly men for whom wisdom and truth mean more than money, honor, and reputation. To be sure, money in such cases is probably coveted not so much in the possession of it as in the lack of it. But as for honor and reputation, these are the things that really spur the young academic hopeful to toil endlessly in laboratory or library, grinding out his research, picking up Guggenheim and Rockefeller grants as he ascends the ladder of academic success, and finally turning out to be an international authority on hormone solutions or the pottery of the Zuni Indians. And as for wisdom and truth, these are not the things that matter academically. No, it’s the national or international reputation that counts!

But even should we be more sparing in our satire, and focus attention upon those among our contemporary scholars and scientists—and there are not a few such—for whom a genuine love of knowledge and learning is the dominant motive of their lives, it would still seem that there was a marked discrepancy between the end and purpose of their lives and the idea of the examined life or the intelligent life as represented by Socrates. Indeed, in the preceding chapter, we had a good deal to say about how, in modern science and scholarship, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is curiously irrelevant to the development of the scientist’s or scholar’s own character and personality. That is why we are all too frequently impressed today only with a scientist’s brilliance or a scholar’s learning, without being the least bit impressed with the man himself as a human being.

Obviously, however, in his praise of the life devoted to wisdom and truth Socrates did not have in mind any such travesty as this. Instead, it is noteworthy that to attain the examined life it is not sufficient that knowledge be sought as an end and not just as a means. In addition, Socrates is always careful to stress that the kind of knowledge and wisdom in which human perfection consists is the knowledge of “Know thyself” and the wisdom that makes for the improvement of the soul.

But imagine a modern economist or medieval historian, to say nothing of a chemist or a nuclear physicist, saying that his whole scientific or scholarly activity was directed simply to the end of a greater self-knowledge and the improvement of his own soul. There is something about nearly all modern science and scholarship that seems to make it not merely impertinent, but actually antithetic, to anything on the order of Socratic wisdom.

To be sure, it may not be uncommon for a learned professor, when a testimonial dinner is given in his honor just before his retirement, or when he is invited to speak informally at a luncheon club, to let himself be so carried away by the flattering spirit of the occasion as to expatiate, if he be a mathematician, on the great value of the study of algebra, say, for developing integrity and efficiency of character, or, if he be a folklorist, on how a familiarity with the structure of the folk tale contributes directly to the production of a wise and benign philosophy of life. Given extremely favorable circumstances, one might even hear that there is nothing quite like the close and painstaking study of fossils for developing in a man a really progressive and forward-looking attitude toward human existence.

Yet clearly, all such academic moralizings as vehicles for professorial self-congratulation are more in the nature of professional lapses than they are integral to the actual academic disciplines themselves. Kierkegaard, in his effort to characterize “an existing individual” in contrast to a mere “abstract thinker,” puts his finger on the very nerve of Socratic wisdom and by implication sets it off strikingly from the characteristic academic wisdom of the present day:

An existing individual . . . certainly thinks, but he thinks everything in relation to himself, being infinitely interested in existing. Socrates was thus a man whose energies were devoted to thinking; but reduced all other knowledge to indifference in that he infinitely accentuated ethical knowledge. This type of knowledge bears a relation to the existing subject who is infinitely interested in existing.⁵

It may have occurred to the reader that in the last few paragraphs it was always to the authority of Socrates that we seemed to be appealing and not to that of Aristotle. Can it truly be said of Aristotle what the foregoing quotation from Kierkegaard so aptly says of Socrates, that it was not knowledge as such that he sought after, so much as self-knowledge; it was not knowledge for its own sake, so much as knowledge for the sake of the enlightenment and direction, which only knowledge can provide, in how to live and how to be human?

The answer to this question is not easy. For in the passage from the Nicomachean Ethics which was quoted earlier,⁶ we found Aristotle insisting that man’s proper function and true end could hardly consist in merely staying alive (even plants can do this) or in performing the characteristic animal functions (horses and oxen can do this). No, the proper life for a human being will be “the practical life of man as possessing reason.” Moreover, one can interpret this as meaning that man’s true end consists in nothing more than simply living intelligently. And to live intelligently is not merely to have a high I.Q., nor is it even to have professorial resources of erudition; rather it is to have such knowledge as is relevant to one’s life as a human being, and to bring such humanly relevant knowledge to bear on the conduct of one’s own life.

So construed, the words of Aristotle do turn out to be equivalent to Socrates’ advocacy of the examined life. But readers of the Ethics will remember that in addition to the passage just cited from Book I, there are also those celebrated seventh and eighth chapters of Book X, where Aristotle unequivocally proclaims that the true end of man and the good life for man must needs consist precisely in thought, in intellectual activity, in contemplation (theōria)—that is to say, in knowledge for its own sake.^* “That happiness consists in contemplation,” he says, “may be accepted as agreeing both with the result already reached and with the truth. For contemplation is at once the highest form of activity (since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and the objects with which the intellect deals are the highest things that can be known). . . .”⁷

A few paragraphs further on there occurs that extraordinary passage in which Aristotle seeks to approximate a human life devoted to contemplation to no less than the divine life:

Such a life as this however will be higher than the human level: not in virtue of his humanity will a man achieve it, but in virtue of something within him that is divine; and by as much as this something is superior to his composite nature, by so much is its activity superior to the other forms of virtue. If then the intellect is something divine in comparison with man, so is the life of the intellect divine in comparison with human life. Nor ought we to obey those who enjoin that a man should have man’s thoughts and a mortal the thoughts of mortality, but we ought so far as possible to achieve immortality and do all that men may to live in accordance with the highest thing in him; for though this be small in bulk, in power and value it far surpasses all the rest.⁸

Aristotle leaves no doubt that he means to distinguish and exalt such a life of contemplation and thought as against a life devoted merely to bringing one’s thought and one’s intelligence to bear on one’s actions. For “the life of moral virtue,” he says, in contrast to the life of mind and of contemplation, “is happy only in a secondary degree. For the moral activities are purely human.”⁹

Now just what are we to make of this—that Aristotle changed his views between Book I and Book X, or that he was simply inconsistent, or that the two views are in some subtle fashion reconcilable and compatible after all? Well, as we have remarked before, our concern is not with historical questions as to just what Aristotle did mean or did not mean in this or that passage. Instead, suppose we simply assume Aristotle’s own teaching in this connection to be in direct conflict with what we are here contending. Suppose that he did not consider man’s true end to consist in living intelligently so much as in the exercise of intelligence for its own sake, in the pursuit of knowledge and in the contemplation of truth.

If this was Aristotle’s position, then we have no alternative but to “lay hands on our father” Aristotle and to come out in flat disagreement with him on this particular matter. The basis of our disagreement is simply our unshakable conviction that living is not for the sake of knowing, but rather that it is toward intelligent living that all of our powers and capacities are ultimately directed, including our powers of knowledge, and that it is the man himself who counts for more than all his knowledge, no matter how great the latter may be.^* In short, knowledge for its own sake can never be the be-all and end-all of human existence, nor can the chief good of man ever consist in the mere possession or even the exercise of knowledge. Not in the exercise of knowledge as such, but in its use in the practical living of our lives under the guidance of such knowledge and understanding as we possess,^* must our characteristic perfection as human beings be thought to consist.

To sum up this rather vexed and crabbed section on the bearing of intelligence on human character, we may say that intelligence as a mere instrument of wealth or power or prestige is not ethically significant. Nor is it intelligence pursued for its own sake that ethics prescribes as the end and goal of our lives. Instead, it is intelligence applied to the problem of living—directed not toward unintelligent ends like wealth or power, but toward making the proper choices in our conduct as men. This is man’s true end, or function, or ergon, as Aristotle called it. The intelligent man, in this sense, is the good man or the man of character, and, vice versa, the good man, in the sense of the man who has attained his full perfection or natural end as a human being, is the intelligent man.

6. The good life as equivalent to the happy life

And so, however strangely it may strike us, the course of our argument thus far seems to point unmistakably to the conclusion that the good life for a human being is simply the intelligent life, and that the good for man consists in nothing more or less than living intelligently. Nor is that all. For just as the good for a human being may be equated with what is natural for man, in the sense of his natural end or natural perfection, and just as this natural human end or perfection may be seen to amount to no more than a man’s living in a characteristically human way—i.e., in his living intelligently—, so also we may now note that all of these, man’s true good, his natural end or goal, and his living intelligently, may, in turn, be equated with happiness. The good life or the intelligent life, in other words, turns out to be none other than the happy life.

Here, surely, we again join forces with Aristotle—supposing that we did in fact momentarily part company with him. For not the least interesting feature of Aristotle’s Ethics is the effort which the philosopher makes to give an account of human happiness which would make it not a mere matter of subjective feeling on the part of the individual, but something objectively determinable. To put it in colloquial language, the relevant consideration seems to run something like this: a man might think he was in excellent health because he felt just fine, yet a medical examination would show that he was far from well; so also a man might think himself to be quite happy and contented, because he would feel quite satisfied and not at all inclined to either complaining or self-reproach, yet it would be only too obvious to an objective observer that this “happy” man was really no better than a fool, his whole way of life being not intelligent, but stupid and unenlightened and perhaps even mean and petty, and so, in a perfectly objective sense, miserable and unhappy.

“But,” you may retort, “if a man feels contented and happy and satisfied, is he not really so?” To which the answer is that being satisfied or contented or happy must always involve being satisfied or contented or happy in something or with something or by something. The question then becomes: in what sort of thing does a given individual find satisfaction? If it is in anything less than what as a human being he is capable of and what, as we have already seen, he is naturally ordered and oriented toward, then we should certainly say that such a person had settled for less than he should have, or that he didn’t know what was good for him, or that his sense of achievement and satisfaction and therefore of happiness had somehow become perverted and corrupted.

In other words, as Aristotle sees it, the examined life is a goal or end toward which any and every human being is naturally oriented, regardless of whether he knows it or not, and regardless of whether he actually attains it or not, much as an acorn is ordered by nature to its own complete development and perfection as a full-grown oak. Of course, a human being, being a creature of understanding and choice, is to be contrasted with the acorn, in that a man cannot possibly attain to his perfection by any mere process of natural development. Instead, his end can be reached only by art and design. Moreover, what this art of living, which is called ethics, is supposed to teach a man is nothing more nor less than how to live in a characteristically human way, i.e., wisely and intelligently, not being guided by whim or passion, not by mere social convention or external authority, but by the light of truth itself as this illumines his understanding and so serves as a beacon to light the way in his every decision. Nor is it any wonder that if and when a human being does succeed in living in this intelligent and enlightened way, he will be fully aware of his life as being an examined life and hence a life that is proper to man. In other words, it is the life that satisfies man’s natural aspirations and strivings and tendencies; and because it is thus satisfying, it is the truly happy life.

Accordingly, whether we call it human perfection or human happiness, human moral goodness or human well-being, it is obvious that, on such a view of ethics, human excellence or virtue will be, in Plato’s words, “a kind of health and beauty and good habit of the soul; and vice will be a disease and sickness and deformity of it.” Commenting on this passage, Lowes Dickinson once aptly observed: “It follows that it is as natural to seek virtue and to avoid vice as to seek health and avoid disease.”¹⁰

7. A third objection: the evidence from modern science fails
to confirm this view of man and of man’s natural end

We can no longer try to divert or dam up a mounting wave of objection which must have suggested itself to many readers from the beginning of the present chapter, and which has no doubt gathered an almost irresistible momentum now that our own argument has risen to its climax. You are no doubt saying to yourself that all the full-blown rhetoric at the conclusion of the last section would not have been possible without one simple, but utterly indefensible, assumption, that is, that there is such a thing as a natural end or goal toward which human life and human existence are naturally ordered and oriented. But this will strike you as being nothing but out-and-out teleology, something which was taken for granted in the Aristotelian science of the Middle Ages, but which has been completely displaced by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and is now as dead as a doornail.

You may in charity concede a certain superficial plausibility to our arguments in support of the idea of a natural end or natural perfection of human life. But this, you will insist, is only because in our uncritical, everyday reasoning we all constantly fall back upon various and sundry usages and assumptions of common sense and common language. Thus we certainly do, as regards plants and animals and human beings, distinguish between healthy specimens and sickly ones, between those that reach a certain maturity and perfection and those that fail to do so. We also assume—quite uncritically perhaps, but none the less quite regularly—that such distinctions between the healthy and the diseased, the full-grown and the stunted, the good and the bad, are not merely arbitrary and conventional, but have a basis and foundation in nature itself. And from this it is but an easy step, and a step that we all unhesitatingly take in ordinary everyday life, to the assumption of such things as natural ends, natural perfections, natural values, and natural goods.

Still, we have only to draw ourselves up sharp with the stern reminder contained in that one magic word “science,” and we shall immediately banish from our minds all unclean thoughts of teleology, of natural goals, and hence of a natural foundation for ethics. No self-respecting modern biologist would ever say any such thing as that the natural good of the acorn is the attainment of its full growth as an oak. He would probably say that so far as the natural order itself is concerned, the full maturity or the healthy condition of a plant is no “better” and no “worse” than for it to be in a dwarfed or diseased condition. In fact, disease is just as natural as health, both alike being the results of equally natural causes. And as for the notion that it can be determined scientifically that it is better and more natural for a man to live intelligently and wisely rather than foolishly and ignorantly—this is so far-fetched as not even to merit a rejoinder.

So once again we are brought face to face with our old and apparently insuperable difficulty: that values can have no possible basis in fact, that no matter how much knowledge we acquire of the facts of nature, we shall never find any evidence there of any distinctions between good and bad, better and worse, right and wrong. Presumably, if ethics is to be justified and established on any sort of a firm basis, it can be only through an appeal to something other than actual facts, or natural happenings and natural processes.

In short, there seems to be no way of defending our basic thesis save by challenging the authority of science itself, and such lese majesty is something for which we would have neither stomach nor wit. Nevertheless, the situation may not be so desperate after all. For without challenging directly the authority of science, it may be possible to show that such authority as science very justly possesses really has no pertinence or bearing in the present instance.

At one time everyone took it for granted that whatever the scientists could find no evidence for didn’t exist. But times are different now. It has come to be generally recognized that while the truths of science are unimpeachable in science’s own sphere, that sphere is a restricted one. Moreover, its restrictions are imposed by a kind of initial fiat or self-denying ordinance on the part of scientific enterprise itself. We have already had occasion to quote from C. P. Snow’s novel The Search,¹¹ where the principal character frankly exposes both the restrictive and the restricted nature of science.

Science was true in its own field; it was perfect within its restrictions. One selected one’s data—set one’s puzzle for oneself, as it were—and in the end solved the puzzle by showing how they fitted other data of the same kind. We know enough of the process now to see the quality of the results it can give us; we know, too, those sides of experience it can never touch. However much longer science is done, since it sets its own limits before it can begin, those limits must remain.

In virtue of the self-imposed limitations and exclusions of science, the scientific universe will be colorless and tasteless, purposeless and valueless, and perhaps even soulless and mindless. Nor will there be any evidence of teleology in such a universe, and certainly no factual basis for value judgments, to say nothing of moral judgments of any kind.

Given the admittedly restrictive nature of the scientific enterprise, one can scarcely infer from the absence of ends and values in the scientific picture of nature the absence of ends and values in nature absolutely. Even if a program of positivism could be worked out with complete philosophical consistency, the adequacy of such an account of things would still be open to question, not merely in practice but also in principle. For even supposing that no one could produce evidence of any phenomena—of free voluntary action, or final causes, or conscious purposes, or aesthetic values, or extrasensory perception, or what not—which the positivist could not account for on his own scientific terms, still the demonstration could be only persuasive and not conclusive, for the reason that the possibility of explanation in scientific terms must involve the exclusion a priori of all such data as do not lend themselves to the particular procedures of scientific testing and verification.

Nor is it merely the limited and restricted character of scientific truth that makes it questionable whether it has any particular pertinence or bearing on matters of ethics. There is also the question of whether the scientific universe is something which one can live with practically, however much one may be convinced of its sufficiency theoretically. Indeed, there is in this connection a practical or existential issue in regard to the relevancy and sufficiency of science not unlike the sort of issue that we met with earlier in connection with relativism. Consider for a moment the scientific universe—whether that of microscopic and subatomic physics, where the principle of indeterminacy comes into play, or that of macroscopic physics, where the theory of relativity is operative; how very different this scientific universe is from the world of every day, the world of colors and sounds, of sunrises and sunsets, of birth and death, of “old forgotten far-off things and battles long ago,” of winter winds and scorching summers, of bitter animosities and petty ills, of ambitions and defeats, of justices and injustices, of trials and tribulations, of victories and triumphs, of drudgery and vacations, of sickness and health.

But given the manifest differences between the scientific universe and the world of every day, in which world is it that we, as human beings, “live and move and have our being”? True, the question is ambiguous, and yet there is certainly a sense in which no human being can live and act, eat and sleep, succeed or fail, marry or give in marriage, buy or sell, vote or refuse to vote, anywhere save in the everyday world, however much the same man, as a physicist or chemist or biologist, may be intellectually convinced that the scientific universe is the only reality there is. This is why, practically and existentially considered, the fact of scientific knowledge and sophistication seems to impose a kind of double truth upon us, making of so many of us, if not actual schizophrenics, then at least men whose right hands don’t always know what their left hands are doing.

In the light of such considerations, making all due allowances for oversimplification and even exaggeration, we can perhaps begin to understand how the mere fact that scientists, in their capacity as scientists, don’t seem to come across any value distinctions in the course of their investigations—all this really isn’t relevant one way or another, to the principles and the foundations of ethics. Whatever may be true of scientists as scientists, as human beings the same scientists are constantly aware of, and constantly acting upon, what they take to be real value distinctions in the world about them. And it is the evidence that we human beings are able to acquire as human beings, and not necessarily the more restricted and highly artificial evidence that we are able to acquire only in our more specialized capacities as physicists or geologists or psychologists, that is requisite for the purposes of ethics and moral philosophy.

Needless to say, to follow such a line of defense in regard to ethics by no means serves to resolve all problems. On the contrary, any appeal to “two truths,” though it may serve to show the irrelevance of the findings of modern science to questions of ethics, still leaves us in the utterly unsatisfactory situation philosophically of having to acknowledge that truth is not one, but many. But this is a problem of general philosophical import and hence not one that need bar the way to an investigation of the particular issues of morals and ethics.

Instead, for the time being and during the course of our present study, may we not adopt as our own a program for ethical research and for the investigation of human nature generally that will parallel in some respects at least the program of phenomenological investigation that the distinguished contemporary French philosopher, M. Merleau-Ponty, has characterized so felicitously:

This first instruction which Husserl gave phenomenology at its beginning—that it be a “descriptive psychology” or a return “to things themselves”—is first of all the disavowal of science. . . .

Everything I know of the world, even through science, I know from a point of view which is mine or through an experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless. The whole universe of science is built upon the lived world [le monde vécu]; and if we wish to conceive science itself with rigour, while exactly appreciating its sense and significance, we must first re-awaken this experience of the world, for science is its second expression. Science does not have and will never have the same kind of being that the perceived world has, for the simple reason that science is a determination or an explanation of that world. . . .

To return to things themselves is to return to this world as it is before knowledge and of which knowledge always speaks, and with regard to which all scientific determination is abstract, referential and dependent, just as is geography with regard to the landscape where we first learned what a forest is, or a prairie or river.¹²

In other words, for purposes of ethics our concern will be to try to return, in some sense at least, to the things themselves. While for us this will not mean exactly a return to this world as it is “before knowledge,” it will at least involve a return to this world as it is before scientific knowledge, and with regard to which we should certainly want to insist that all scientific determination (in the strict modern sense of “scientific”) is “abstract, referential, and dependent.” In any case, it is the everyday world, the concrete world of ordinary human experience, the world that we find ourselves in and that we must continue to live in as human beings, that is of significance for ethics. It is here that ethics must find the evidence for all its principles and the confirmation of all its conclusions.

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* No doubt the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, as this is manifested in modern scientific and scholarly pursuits, is rather different from the Aristotelian goal of theoria or contemplation. But this difference is irrelevant for our present purposes. Suffice it to say that both the modern pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the Aristotelian goal of contemplation are very different from the Socratic goal of self-knowledge and the examined life, or even, in another context, from Aristotle’s own goal of living intelligently.

* Needless to say, such a divergence from Aristotle would appear neither arbitrary nor extraordinary, even within an Aristotelian context, the minute one recognizes that the human intellect is an integral part of the human person, and not (as Aristotle himself seems to imply in that cryptic and puzzling passage in the De Anima, Book III, Ch. 5) an extraneous and divine element that enters into man, as it were, from the outside.

* It is questionable whether going this far need commit one to going quite as far as Kierkegaard represents Socrates as going (cf. the passage cited above, p. 64). For Kierkegaard seems to think that “ethical knowledge” must be such as to involve a kind of thinking in which one thinks “everything in relation to oneself” and that therefore Socrates, while certainly “a man whose energies were devoted to thinking was nevertheless a thinker who reduced all other knowledge to indifference in that he infinitely accentuated ethical knowledge.”

However, the retort which Aristotle once made to considerations of this kind still seems altogether just and relevant. In opposition to those who would insist that we confine ourselves simply to a knowledge of man and of the things useful and important to man, Aristotle replied that while “it may be argued that man is superior to the other animals, that makes no difference: since there exist other things far more divine in their nature than man” (1141 a33-b2).

Nevertheless, one can certainly concede the point which Aristotle here makes without thereby being forced to admit that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is man’s highest activity and ultimate goal. On the contrary, the knowledge of things more important and significant (more “divine”) than ourselves, and hence of things worth knowing for their own sake, may be of the utmost significance and relevance to us precisely in our moral behavior and the conduct of our lives.