I'm moving faster through Book VI than I did through the previous book, but what is being said is quite important. We are talking about how it is possible for a human being to know the truth, and what the practical limits of this are.
Regarding practical wisdom we shall get at the truth by considering who are the persons we credit with it.
That, for example, is an interesting choice. How would we know who is practically wise? (The word in Greek is phronesis; there's a lot of Greek today so I'm going to skip the accent marks) We might look at something empirical, like how well their decisions work out. We can't observe their reasoning process unless they describe it to us, since the mind is not visible; and they could be wrong about it anyway. Many people, asked to justify their decisions, will rationalize what they did. They may not really know why they did what they did, not understand it, or know but be embarrassed by it. We want to know about wisdom, but we have to try to infer what it is like. (This is another place where a good upbringing helps, which meant as you will recall having been raised with good examples and stories. Who was practically wise? Odysseus, for Aristotle; Gandalf was, perhaps for us.)
Now it is thought to be the mark of a man of practical wisdom to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respect, e.g. about what sorts of thing conduce to health or to strength, but about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general.
Practical wisdom is about successfully achieving the good life.
This is shown by the fact that we credit men with practical wisdom in some particular respect when they have calculated well with a view to some good end which is one of those that are not the object of any art.
Art is concerned with making, we learned yesterday, so what this means is that we aren't talking about things like breadmaking, or house-building. This kind of knowledge, again, is techne in the Greek; it was Socrates' favorite candidate for real knowledge because it could be reliably explained, taught, and practiced. For Aristotle it is one of the intellectual virtues, but not phronesis. Techne is concerned with making things; phronesis is concerned with making a good life. Phronesis is the intellectual virtue of applying the moral virtues to craft a complete and honorable life. It is about taking specific actions in individual contexts, but also about placing them in the larger context of a vision of what such a complete life looks like.
It follows that in the general sense also the man who is capable of deliberating has practical wisdom. Now no one deliberates about things that are invariable, nor about things that it is impossible for him to do.
You might say, 'well, fantasy and sci-fi writers do deliberate about how to do (currently) impossible things,' but that isn't what Aristotle means by deliberation. Deliberation is a practical decision-making function; it only treats what you really could do (i.e. not impossible), and yet need to think about how to do (because the process is not invariable, but requires thought to execute successfully).
Therefore, since scientific knowledge involves demonstration, but there is no demonstration of things whose first principles are variable (for all such things might actually be otherwise), and since it is impossible to deliberate about things that are of necessity, practical wisdom cannot be scientific knowledge nor art; not science because that which can be done is capable of being otherwise, not art because action and making are different kinds of thing.
Our understanding of science has changed (that word is episteme, the root of our word "epistemic"). If we take mathematics as a good example of a science for Aristotle, you can see why he would think that the first principles are invariable: if you change one of Euclid's first principles, you're not doing Euclidean geometry any more. Because (I.3 again -- I warned you it would come up a lot) we are in ethical reasoning engaged with probabilistic reasoning, we're just not doing that kind of reasoning from invariable first principles; this is why logical proofs are not admissible or appropriate in ethical discussion. Thus, phronesis is not episteme; we have already seen that it is not techne. Phronesis is another way of knowing.
The remaining alternative, then, is that [phronesis] is a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man. For while making has an end other than itself, action cannot; for good action itself is its end. It is for this reason that we think Pericles and men like him have practical wisdom, viz. because they can see what is good for themselves and what is good for men in general; we consider that those can do this who are good at managing households or states. (This is why we call temperance (sophrosune) by this name; we imply that it preserves one's practical wisdom (sozousa tan phronsin).
Emphasis added to clarify the etymology that Aristotle is helpfully providing us.
Now what it preserves is a judgement of the kind we have described. For it is not any and every judgement that pleasant and painful objects destroy and pervert, e.g. the judgement that the triangle has or has not its angles equal to two right angles, but only judgements about what is to be done.
Another demonstration that scientific knowledge like mathematics is not the same thing as phronesis is that pleasure and pain doesn't affect it. That's also different from our present understanding of science; prestige and access to funding can indeed affect the outcome of our sciences, because they are not as firmly rooted. You can't really distort the math to help yourself gain access to prestige or wealth; it will out, because challenging bad math with actual proofs is available to anyone who can do the math.
For the originating causes of the things that are done consist in the end at which they are aimed; but the man who has been ruined by pleasure or pain forthwith fails to see any such originating cause-to see that for the sake of this or because of this he ought to choose and do whatever he chooses and does; for vice is destructive of the originating cause of action.) Practical wisdom, then, must be a reasoned and true state of capacity to act with regard to human goods.
This is a point that Aquinas will elaborate once he has the additional furniture of Christianity. What is man's last end? Happiness, as we know from Book I of the EN; and indeed the next several questions follow Aristotle's project almost exactly. Can man attain that end? Yes: but here we get a very different account of how and when happiness is to be obtained. "Imperfect happiness that can be had in this life, can be acquired by man by his natural powers, in the same way as virtue, in whose operation it consists: on this point we shall speak further on (I-II:63. But man's perfect Happiness, as stated above (I-II:3:8), consists in the vision of the Divine Essence."
But further, while there is such a thing as excellence in art, there is no such thing as excellence in practical wisdom; and in art he who errs willingly is preferable,* but in practical wisdom, as in the virtues, he is the reverse. Plainly, then, practical wisdom is a virtue and not an art. There being two parts of the soul that can follow a course of reasoning, it must be the virtue of one of the two, i.e. of that part which forms opinions; for opinion is about the variable and so is practical wisdom. But yet it is not only a reasoned state; this is shown by the fact that a state of that sort may forgotten but practical wisdom cannot.
Indeed we forget about our reasoning all the time; the other day I reasoned about things and developed arguments about them, but those things are over and done with and I forget what the arguments even had been. Our wisdom, however, we carry with us.
6
Scientific knowledge is judgement about things that are universal and necessary, and the conclusions of demonstration, and all scientific knowledge, follow from first principles (for scientific knowledge involves apprehension of a rational ground). This being so, the first principle from which what is scientifically known follows cannot be an object of scientific knowledge...
That much was later demonstrated by Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The next part is still surprising.
...of art, or of practical wisdom; for that which can be scientifically known can be demonstrated, and art and practical wisdom deal with things that are variable. Nor are these first principles the objects of philosophic wisdom, for it is a mark of the philosopher to have demonstration about some things.
So the axioms cannot be demonstrated scientifically from within the axiomatic system; that's been proven to be true. But they also can't be known by art, which just isn't the right process: it's about making stuff, not deriving principles. Surprisingly, they also can't be known by phronesis, which does work out first principles -- but variable ones from analogical reasoning, which are not the right kind of principles for scientific thinking.
Philosophical wisdom seems like it would have been a good candidate, and Aristotle's remark here doesn't explain why it is not. The reason will prove to be that it is posterior to scientific knowledge as well as to the apprehension of the right moral principles (which we were to get from our upbringing's exposure to good examples and stories, in part). Therefore, we need an additional intellectual virtue in order to know the first principles that enable scientific knowledge; philosophical wisdom will work later to combine the knowledge of science with the moral principles to seek after the highest forms of knowing that we can do.
If, then, the states of mind by which we have truth and are never deceived about things invariable or even variable are scientific knowlededge, practical wisdom, philosophic wisdom, and intuitive reason, and it cannot be any of the three (i.e. practical wisdom, scientific knowledge, or philosophic wisdom), the remaining alternative is that it is intuitive reason that grasps the first principles.
Given the setup, this makes sense; although one could reject the antecedent of that argument ("If, then, the states of mind... are...") and propose an alternative system. Yet this does seem to be how we come to know these first principles that we obtain by that good upbringing. We hear the stories, and we intuit who is praiseworthy and blameworthy, what was right and wrong; and from this, our reasoning identifies the principles we should be seeking. Likewise, as we saw in the Meno, even someone without formal education can intuit the mathematical first principles when given a proper demonstration on which to reflect.
Thus, intuitive reasoning is the earliest part of the process. It provides our first principles for our use in science as well as phronesis and philosophy.
* This is Aristotle's answer to Plato's Lesser Hippias, in which Socrates wins an argument with Hippias by an analogy to running: the runner who can run well but chooses to run badly is superior to the runner who can't really run well even if he wants to. Thus, 'he who errs willingly is preferable,' but not in virtue; Socrates applied that analogy to honesty to show that Odysseus (who could tell the truth but chooses to lie) was greater than Achilles (who lies to himself and seems incapable of seeing the truth). Aristotle's point is that it isn't better to choose to lie, or to choose to be cowardly rather than courageous; but Socrates still has a point about the ability to apprehend the truth and the willingness not to lie to one's self about it.
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