Happy Independence Day.
Pig in the Smoke
Conan stands watch over the pork
In preparation for the Independence Day feast, I have had a pork butt in the smoker since the early morning. There will also be three kinds of sausages reflecting the America 'melting pot' of cultures: German bratwurst, French/Cajun andouille, and Spanish/Mexican chorizo. The pulled pork is a classic of Southern American cuisine, of course.
American beer will be served, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Dale's American Pale Ale. Prospective guests must get past a German Shepherd dog who doesn't know you.
Comedy & Tragedy
WaPo's Monica Hesse on the subject of Alligator Alcatraz:
[Trump] added: “Snakes are fast but alligators — we’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator. Don’t run in a straight line, run like this,” he said, motioning in a zigzag. “You know what, your chances go up about 1 percent.”...
Oh, right, I have forgotten to tell you about the swag. Earlier this week, the Florida GOP began selling Alligator Alcatraz merch. You can buy Alligator Alcatraz black mesh trucker hats and T-shirts in both charcoal and heather gray. You can buy a set of two beer coozies for $15.... The aesthetics of the merchandise is also important, and so I will mention that the font is one you would normally associate with a slasher film or with the kind of roller coaster for which riders are required to sign waivers....
The point is that serious matters — the most serious matters, the matters of constitutionality, due process, citizenship and who gets to be an American — are, in this administration, being increasingly presented as cheap entertainment. You see it in the U.S. Border Patrol playing the power ballad “Closing Time” over footage of a scared looking young man being placed in handcuffs and shepherded on a plane. You see it in the White House posting a video of detained migrants being processed for deportation, set to a hit from Bananarama.
Is it funny? Is it awful? Is it trolling or real life? The point is that we are not supposed to know. Alligator Alcatraz is a dehumanizing place, but when it is treated as spectacle, it’s not just the prisoners there who lose their humanity. We all do. The effect is to tell Americans not to take any of this too seriously. Families are being ripped apart, but it’s all for the lulz. We are dancing on the edges of constitutionality, but it’s making great television. We have become tonally incoherent, incapable of even determining tone....
But then you see Benny Johnson cheering online for the millions of hungry alligators, and you see the storefront of the Florida GOP, and you realize that it’s almost July 4, the 249th birthday of America, and major officials of our country are spending the holiday week celebrating the fact that migrants from other countries loved the United States so much they risked their lives to come here and our reaction is to hope they are eaten by alligators.
It is, according to a retired professor of rhetoric that I know, the fact that Trump operates in the comedic mode. As such he is able to invert and reject the tragic norms under which the very serious people of the usual elite operate. The SEP explains:
While there is only speculation about how humor developed in early humans, we know that by the late 6th century BCE the Greeks had institutionalized it in the ritual known as comedy, and that it was performed with a contrasting dramatic form known as tragedy. Both were based on the violation of mental patterns and expectations, and in both the world is a tangle of conflicting systems where humans live in the shadow of failure, folly, and death. Like tragedy, comedy represents life as full of tension, danger, and struggle, with success or failure often depending on chance factors. Where they differ is in the responses of the lead characters to life’s incongruities....
Tragedy valorizes serious, emotional engagement with life’s problems, even struggle to the death. Along with epic, it is part of the Western heroic tradition that extols ideals, the willingness to fight for them, and honor. The tragic ethos is linked to patriarchy and militarism—most of its heroes are kings and conquerors—and it valorizes what Conrad Hyers (1996) calls Warrior Virtues—blind obedience, the willingness to kill or die on command, unquestioning loyalty, single-mindedness, resoluteness of purpose, and pride.
Comedy, by contrast, embodies an anti-heroic, pragmatic attitude toward life’s incongruities.... comedy has mocked the irrationality of militarism and blind respect for authority. Its own methods of handling conflict include deal-making, trickery, getting an enemy drunk, and running away.... it extols critical thinking, cleverness, adaptability, and an appreciation of physical pleasures like eating, drinking, and sex.
Along with the idealism of tragedy goes elitism.... In comedy there are more characters and more kinds of characters, women are more prominent, and many protagonists come from lower classes. Everybody counts for one. That shows in the language of comedy, which, unlike the elevated language of tragedy, is common speech....
While tragic heroes are emotionally engaged with their problems, comic protagonists show emotional disengagement.... By presenting such characters as role models, comedy has implicitly valorized the benefits of humor that are now being empirically verified, such as that it is psychologically and physically healthy, it fosters mental flexibility, and it serves as a social lubricant.... With a few exceptions like Aquinas, philosophers have ignored these benefits.
Emphasis added. It would strike a member of Hesse's team as at least partly deniable because it places her, rather than Trump of the recent military parade and Iran strikes, on the side of militarism. Yet it was Joe Biden who gave this speech:
Flanked by Marines, he spoke in the terms of tragedy about ideals like democracy, the duty for all of us to fight against his opponents whom he described as inheritors of the most serious sins of authoritarianism (even of being analogues to Nazis), and called us all to sacrifice ourselves and our interests as necessary to keep his opponents out of power -- for the good of these supposedly common ideals, although they somehow always work in the elite's favor. It was, too, their side that was so committed to fighting rather than to ending wars: eternal war in the Ukraine seems to be their motto even now, eternal war rather than any workable settlement in Israel, in Iraq, in Syria...
Trump, whose rhetoric is from Professional Wrestling, is indeed the comedy version of American politics. His is our comedic mode. This is for good and for ill. Humor is something we all share, but not something we have ever been able to understand completely. It has a touch of madness, of death, or of the divine.
The account of laughter in the Philebus, Heath observes, cannot explain all the instances of humor in Plato's own writings. Over time, the negative view of laughter hardened. Aristotle had observed that among animals, only human beings laugh. For Iamblichus, this was precisely a sign of our mortal nature, whereas we ought to aspire to the divine. What, then, are we to make of the "unquenchable laughter" of the Homeric gods? Answer: it "signifies divine providence towards the phenomenal world" ... It is not so much a guffaw as a sign of play.
It doesn't make Americans worse people to engage these very serious matters in the comedic mode. The comedic mode has always been there, throughout human history, as humanity's alternate mode. The comedic mode is a relief from the tragic mode; perhaps it is the only relief life offers us from the tragic. Sometimes it is the only thing that can solve the problems the tragic mode has found impossible.
A Holiday for the Holiday
I will pause the discussion of the Nicomachean Ethics there for the Independence Day holiday, which I hope will be an extended one for all of you. It is one of the great holidays of the year, much deserving of celebration. We may resume on Monday.
Nicomachean Ethics II.6a
We must, however, not only describe virtue as a state of character, but also say what sort of state it is. We may remark, then, that every virtue or excellence both brings into good condition the thing of which it is the excellence and makes the work of that thing be done well; e.g. the excellence of the eye makes both the eye and its work good; for it is by the excellence of the eye that we see well. Similarly the excellence of the horse makes a horse both good in itself and good at running and at carrying its rider and at awaiting the attack of the enemy. Therefore, if this is true in every case, the virtue of man also will be the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well.
This is a surprising section because the examples Aristotle chooses aren't to states of character, or even any of the elements of the soul he mentioned before: they appear to be not examples, but analogies to organs and animals.
Now as we frequently discuss here, all analogies always break. Because you are making comparisons between two things that are not alike, there will always come a point of difference. This insight is known to Aristotle, so we have to question that apparent use of analogy. When he says, "...if this is true in every case..." we should ask if he is making a claim about something that all three kinds of things have, something that isn't an analogy after all because they are really the same kind of thing.
The claim involves not merely states of character in people, but also the telos of organs and the telos of an animal.* We might assume, then, that this is a claim about teloi in general. The telos is the end of the thing, whatever kind of thing it is; and it is, coincidentally, the telos against which the thing is to be judged. You can tell good eyes from bad ones by how well they see. You can tell a good horse from a bad one by how well it performs.
So this seems to be the right kind of answer: you can tell a good from a bad man by how virtuous he is. Why? Because of the standards established in I.3: the EN is highly pragmatic. A virtuous man will perform better ('always or for the most part' given the existence of chance) when tested against objective reality. That's also how Aristotle closes this paragraph: "the virtue of man will also be the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well."
The next paragraph requires a bit of explanation about Aristotle's math.
How this is to happen we have stated already, but it will be made plain also by the following consideration of the specific nature of virtue. In everything that is continuous and divisible it is possible to take more, less, or an equal amount, and that either in terms of the thing itself or relatively to us; and the equal is an intermediate between excess and defect. By the intermediate in the object I mean that which is equidistant from each of the extremes, which is one and the same for all men; by the intermediate relatively to us that which is neither too much nor too little- and this is not one, nor the same for all. For instance, if ten is many and two is few, six is the intermediate, taken in terms of the object; for it exceeds and is exceeded by an equal amount; this is intermediate according to arithmetical proportion. But the intermediate relatively to us is not to be taken so; if ten pounds are too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds; for this also is perhaps too much for the person who is to take it, or too little- too little for Milo, too much for the beginner in athletic exercises. The same is true of running and wrestling. Thus a master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate and chooses this- the intermediate not in the object but relatively to us.
When talking about 'everything that is continuous and divisible' the contemporary mind probably turns to something like the number line, or the set of Real Numbers. This is not what Aristotle meant. There were no negative numbers in Ancient Greece, nor in fact even zero. Aristotle spends quite a lot of time worrying about the status of the infinite in both the Physics and the Metaphysics (especially the former, where he treats Zeno's problems). His solution is the infinite conceptual divisibility of any unity. If you have one, you can divide it in half; and then the half into halves; etc. Even if you can't physically do this to, say, an apple, you can do it conceptually forever. Thus, his 'real potential infinity' problem is solved; he rejects actually real infinities.
Here we get a clear and unambiguous statement that the 'intermediate' or 'mean between extremes' is not just the middle position. He distinguishes the true middle of a division of a unity from the kind of division that is appropriate to ethics. The true middle of the thing is "the intermediate in the object," which is the same for all (math being objective) and not what he is talking about. The intermediate we should be aiming at is "the intermediate relative to us." He gives some examples to show how that will differ from person to person: Milo of Croton is going to need more food than the novice who is just starting out on building muscle. The 'intermediate' amount of food, which is neither excessive nor insufficient, will therefore not be the same depending on which of them is being considered.**
That should clarify what is meant by 'the mean between extremes' or 'the intermediate' once and for all for students of Aristotle's ethics. If you run into anyone who thinks he's arguing for simply avoiding the extreme in all cases, refer them here: Milo might really need those extra calories.
*We can note that the horse might see its own telos differently from the one Aristotle gives -- it might not think that 'awaiting the attack of the enemy' is any part of its good life, and that even running is only in the service of defending a good long life of peacefully eating grass. Aristotle has an answer to that kind of objection, which is in Physics II.8. That section requires quite a bit of interpretation that might be distracting here, but the upshot is that he accepts that reality admits of different teloi from different perspectives, as the grass might consider the purpose of the rain the good of the corn, but things look different from other perspectives. There is a way of sorting out the priority laid out there for those who are interested in it. There's also in this section Aristotle's rejection of the contemporary scientific assumption that telos isn't required because things just happen due to necessary natural forces.
** This mathematical proof of an ethical concept is, by the way, exactly the sort of thing he warned us to avoid in I.3. We'll skip over that.
Nicomachean Ethics II.5
Next we must consider what virtue is. Since things that are found in the soul are of three kinds- passions, faculties, states of character, virtue must be one of these.
By this point you know which one virtue is going to prove to be, but ask a different question: are these the only things found in the soul? Are there other candidates you can think of? If so, are those candidates explicable as one of these three kinds of things?
By passions I mean appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, friendly feeling, hatred, longing, emulation, pity, and in general the feelings that are accompanied by pleasure or pain;...
An example of the above recommendation: as we recently discussed, empathy is not one of these classical passions. As a concept it dates to the 19th century. We can see that it belongs here, though: it is like envy, where feelings arise from observations about about someone else (whose life might not really be enviable at all, if you truly knew all the facts about it; consider how many rich and famous celebrities prove to be miserable).
The psychology of the soul is going to be unfamiliar to any contemporary reader. The Greek concept of a "passion" is not quite like ours. Many of you might have encountered the ancient concept through the "Passion of the Christ," where what is meant by the word is an externally-imposed suffering. The Greek word is pathos, πάθος, which Terrence Irwin prefers to translate as "feeling" instead to avoid the contemporary connotations of romance. What is important is that it is a passive rather than an active state. It is directly translated as "what happened to him," rather than a thing that one actively creates. That's almost the opposite of what we mean today when we say that something is a "passion project," i.e., something you are trying to create or realize actively because it is important to you. It's a sort of suffering that 'just happened to you' because of external things imposing upon you.
...by faculties [he means] the things in virtue of which we are said to be capable of feeling these, e.g. of becoming angry or being pained or feeling pity;...
The word here is δύναμις, dunamis, which didn't make a similar leap into a clear English cognate as did pathos (Gk) / passio (Lat.) / passion. It's being translated as "capacity," but might also be translated as "strength" or "power." Whereas the feelings/passions happen to you, the faculty is the way in which you have the power to respond to those feelings that are coming in from outside. The feeling of sorrow might befall you when your father dies; the strength you have is to become angry about it.
Anger, though, was also listed as a passion; becoming angry as a capacity. This is a very fine distinction that the Greeks made that we generally do not between what is coming in from outside, versus what our soul is creating on its own.
To stick with the example from above, you might think of our contemporary sense of "outrage" as a parallel. If an artist constructs a work that makes a viewer feel empathy (i.e. a passion is successfully imposed upon the viewer by an artist's work), the response is often for the viewer to "get outraged" about the matter. This is their internal response to the external imposition. This is the point at which they are internally capable of doing something to respond to what is coming in from outside.
...by states of character the things in virtue of which we stand well or badly with reference to the passions, e.g. with reference to anger we stand badly if we feel it violently or too weakly, and well if we feel it moderately; and similarly with reference to the other passions.
EN II.4 makes clear, then, that virtue will be one of these. Aristotle nevertheless restates it plainly.
Now neither the virtues nor the vices are passions, because we are not called good or bad on the ground of our passions, but are so called on the ground of our virtues and our vices, and because we are neither praised nor blamed for our passions (for the man who feels fear or anger is not praised, nor is the man who simply feels anger blamed, but the man who feels it in a certain way), but for our virtues and our vices we are praised or blamed.
Again, we feel anger and fear without choice, but the virtues are modes of choice or involve choice. Further, in respect of the passions we are said to be moved, but in respect of the virtues and the vices we are said not to be moved but to be disposed in a particular way.
Indeed even for us no one would blame you for feeling empathy for a character in a well-constructed movie; if the artist did his or her job well, you ought to do so. The externally imposed thing is not your fault, and thus not the ground of praise or blame.
For these reasons also they are not faculties; for we are neither called good nor bad, nor praised nor blamed, for the simple capacity of feeling the passions; again, we have the faculties by nature, but we are not made good or bad by nature; we have spoken of this before. If, then, the virtues are neither passions nor faculties, all that remains is that they should be states of character.
Thus we have stated what virtue is in respect of its genus.
Sometimes Western culture is said to be divided between those who believe that man is evil by nature, and needs society to make him good (often said to be the Catholic position); versus those who believe man is good by nature, and is warped by the impositions of society (often said to be the 'modern' position, meaning 18th century or so -- Jean Jacques Rousseau being a good example).
Aristotle is in neither camp strictly speaking, but he tends toward the former. Nature does not make us bad or good for him. However, we have seen that he believes that good laws can train us to at least practice virtue, even if they do not themselves create virtuous character. To even be open to that we need to have had a proper upbringing, meaning that we have been exposed to stories of heroes and justice and courage and taught to appreciate them.
The point is spelled out clearly in Politics I:
"But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god... For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with arms, meant to be used by intelligence and virtue, which he may use for the worst ends. Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony."
In pre-Christian pagan Greece, the possibility that a man might be (or become) a god was open, but the tendency towards needing training by law toward virtue is clear.
Nicomachean Ethics II.4
The question might be asked, what we mean by saying that we must become just by doing just acts, and temperate by doing temperate acts; for if men do just and temperate acts, they are already just and temperate, exactly as, if they do what is in accordance with the laws of grammar and of music, they are grammarians and musicians.
Or is this not true even of the arts? It is possible to do something that is in accordance with the laws of grammar, either by chance or at the suggestion of another. A man will be a grammarian, then, only when he has both done something grammatical and done it grammatically; and this means doing it in accordance with the grammatical knowledge in himself.
As I have alluded to twice already in this discussion, Aristotle's account of the virtue of justice is going to look like what he is describing here. Justice has two components, fairness and lawfulness; and 'lawfulness' means not "obedience to any laws that may happen to exist," but specifically that the laws that exist should compel people to behave as a virtuous person would. Thus, it is not necessary to be just yourself in order to behave justly -- which is what he is getting at here. You can be compelled to do so by threat of punishments and shames.
If you behave justly only through fear of punishment and not because you feel inclined to treat others justly, then even though you have behaved justly you are not yourself just. We have now seen enough to distinguish several possible states of character (presented in descending order of virtue):
1) The person who behaves justly because he takes pleasure in being just even when it is costly, as he is habituated to it and would find anything else uncomfortable.
2) The person who behaves justly because he knows it is right intellectually, but still finds it painful to render costly justice to others.
3) The person who behaves justly only because he fears the punishment, but would find it more pleasant to behave unjustly because he is habituated to pursuing his own advantage; he finds the costly, just thing uncomfortable.
4) The person who does not behave justly because his habituated injustice is more powerful than his fear of shame or punishment.
5) The truly vicious person who takes pleasure in being unjust.
The truly vicious and the truly virtuous actually look fairly similar because they are inverse cases. They are both fully formed characters who are no longer struggling with their actions because their ethics are settled. There are cases in the middle where people are struggling with pleasure or pain, fear or a desire to receive honors, or trying to do what they understand is right even though it hurts. There are parallels on each side of that also. We will talk more about this later.
Again, the case of the arts and that of the virtues are not similar; for the products of the arts have their goodness in themselves, so that it is enough that they should have a certain character, but if the acts that are in accordance with the virtues have themselves a certain character it does not follow that they are done justly or temperately.
To rephrase this slightly: someone performing music well is creating a beauty that is good in itself regardless of why they do it. It doesn't really matter if they are talented or just well-instructed. Someone performing a just act is also creating a good that is good regardless of why he does it -- that is exactly why the laws should compel virtuous behavior even from the vicious -- but it matters a great deal what his internal state is in determining whether he is virtuous or not.
The [ethical] agent also must be in a certain condition when he does them [in order to be fully virtuous]; in the first place he must have knowledge, secondly he must choose the acts, and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his action must proceed from a firm and unchangeable character.
Remember that sentence. It lays out the precise conditions Aristotle holds for virtue to be complete. They are each necessary conditions, e.g. it's not complete virtue if you did an action ignorantly, lacking knowledge of virtue; it is not fully virtuous if you didn't choose the act, but were compelled; etc.
These are not reckoned in as conditions of the possession of the arts, except the bare knowledge; but as a condition of the possession of the virtues knowledge has little or no weight, while the other conditions count not for a little but for everything, i.e. the very conditions which result from often doing just and temperate acts.
What is this 'little or no weight'? The knowing of what is right isn't heavy here: even the worst man in the numbered scale above knows what is right, at least knows what the just law requires. Knowledge isn't very heavy in determining how virtuous you are if the very best and the very worst person have that in common.
Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.
As the practice of just acts becomes a habit, it will eventually become pleasurable because it becomes comfortable whereas stealing would then be uncomfortable: you can imagine how uncomfortable most men who are used to paying their own way would be with shoplifting. Perhaps as a child they might have wanted to take a piece of candy they couldn't pay for from the store; but as a man habituated to the justice of paying for his goods, they probably would never think of shoplifting, let alone do it.
But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.
In a way this is a restatement of the 'little or no weight' of knowledge to virtue. Knowing the philosophy about what is right counts for almost nothing in determining if you are virtuous. Your practices count for everything because they shape your internal character until it is fully formed.
Don't Shoot Firefighters
At least two people were killed in Idaho on Sunday afternoon after firefighters were ambushed in a sniper attack as they responded to a fire call in a rugged mountain area, the authorities said.
Officials said that it was unclear how many shooters might be involved but said that firefighters were still being shot at. Sheriff Robert Norris of Kootenai County said at an evening news conference that the number of causalities was unknown and “we are actively taking sniper fire as we speak.”
“We don’t know who the suspects are,” he said. “We don’t know how many there are.” He added: “We don’t know if it’s one, two, three or four.”
“If these individuals are not neutralized quickly, this will likely be a multiday operation,” he added.
Every firefighter I know owns and is competent with firearms, but it will really hamper the business of fighting fires if we also have to hunt snipers. I have heard stories of arsonists who were left to burn up in the fires they started before those fires were extinguished, however. I'm sure those are just folk tales.
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