BEGINNINGS
Desire, Judgment, and Action in Aristotle and the Stoics
If there is a single aspect of modernity that sets it apart from classical and Scholastic thought, it is the supposition that the spheres of human knowledge and human action, theoretical and practical rationality, are fundamentally distinct and possibly altogether unrelated. Such a partitioning of the order of fact from that of value and of cognition from willing, which eventually finds its consummate expression in Hume’s Treatise, is also remarkable because it strips the emotions—that is, those states wherein the will is said to manifest itself—of any cognitive dimension. Beginning with Hobbes and continuing in the work of his empiricist and pessimist heirs, the sources of action are considered purely appetitive, emotive, and (so it is premised) of fundamentally irrational, somatic provenance. How, then, are we to assess modernity’s disjunctive view of will and intellect without finding ourselves constrained by its intellectual legacies—for example, voluntarism, empiricism, radical skepticism, associationism, scientific determinism, behaviorism? Quite possibly the only available safeguard here is to reconstruct the genesis of the modern will by tracing various conceptual shifts, transpositions, and translations as these occur both within a single philosophical tradition and, more typically, between different social and intellectual cultures. Central to the project of critically retrieving, rather than merely inventorying, an intellectual tradition is thus charting its genesis before it understood itself as a tradition.
In this regard, a first question has to be how it came to pass that the will would eventually come to be appraised as the inscrutable and non-cognitive causality that Hobbes bequeathed his successors. Related to that question is the further peculiarity that seventeenth-century rationalism (whose origins we shall find to reach back into the early fourteenth century) locates the source of will and action in an equally non-cognitive and discontinuous emotion, Hobbes’s “last appetite,” Locke’s “uneasiness,” Hume’s “passion”—which is to say, in some mental state allegedly incapable of self-awareness and thus impervious to philosophical conceptualization. Any alternative conception of human agency and personhood—viz., as endowed with the potential for self-awareness and with the ontological fact of its ethical responsibility—will thus have to examine how a highly differentiated vocabulary covering desire, emotion, and those qualia whereby such states attain phenomenological distinctness for consciousness prepared the ground for the formation of the early Christian conception of the will as “free choice.” If, as has often been argued, pre-Christian thought did not have a concept of the will, the reason for that state of affairs has to be sought in the ancient Greeks’ starkly different model of the emotions and their subtle interplay with human cognition. Even so, Aristotle in particular expended much thought and energy on articulating a mental faculty concerned with deliberate choosing (prohairesis) that significantly anticipates the modern idea of the will.1 Still, it was only by attempting to translate and appropriate a uniquely differentiated psychological vocabulary that Roman and early Christian thought was able to articulate a coherent and enduring conception of human agency. So as to understand how the notion of the will, understood as a form of rational commitment, arose out of the confluence of several Aristotelian and Stoic concepts, an archeology of the relationship between emotion, desire, and cognition in Aristotle is in order.
It is in the Rhetoric that Aristotle explores the status of the emotions (ta pathē) most directly, primarily because he understands rhetoric to be principally concerned with “deliberate choice” or “judgment” (prohairesis) and, concurrently, because in targeting the emotions rhetoric shows them to have a direct bearing on judgment. If one leaves aside the question of factual proof, Aristotle notes, “there are three things which inspire confidence in the orator’s own character . . . good sense [phronēsis], excellence [aretē], and goodwill [eunoia]” (Rhetoric, 1378a8–9). Specifically the last of these, “goodwill,” prompts Aristotle to ponder further the relation of the passions to judgment as evinced by both the orator and the audience seeking to appraise his character: “Emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments, and that are also attended [or “followed” = ἕπετα] by pain [λύπη] or pleasure [ἡδονή]. Such are anger, pity, fear, and the like, with their opposites.”2 Of strategic importance for our discussion here is the relation of the emotions to judgment and, specifically, whether pleasure and pain are to be regarded as distinct from the emotions. For by arguing that pain and pleasure “accompany” the emotions themselves, Aristotle implicitly tells us that these affective charges are fundamentally distinct from the emotions (pathē) themselves. Understood as strictly non-cognitive qualia, pleasure and pain instead reveal how a particular emotion is phenomenologically registered in the mind, even as it retains its distinctive character and its underlying, specific propositional content.3
A first and momentous question thus arises: do emotions condition judgment in a determinative sense, or do they merely “color” or influence it in some secondary way? Do they qualitatively alter a particular judgment, or are they themselves properly constitutive of it? Does, say, the emotion of envy determine the propositional content of our judgment, or does it merely (albeit significantly) color a judgment that already has independent standing? In analyzing the contrast between “i) change of judgment as a consequence of emotion, [and] ii) change of judgment as a constituent of emotion,” Stephen Leighton turns to a passage in the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle remarks how “anger [θυμός] seems to listen to reason [τοῦ λόγου] to some extent, but to mishear it, as do hasty servants who run out before they have heard the whole of what one says, and then muddle the order . . . so anger by reason of the warmth and hastiness of its nature, though it hears, does not hear an order, and springs to take revenge.”4 It appears, then, that emotions (here that of anger) compromise judgment by not allowing it to run its course but, instead, drawing precipitous and partial conclusions as to the propositional content presented to the judgment itself. While such distortion of judgment is naturally undesirable and prone to create confusion, Aristotle’s wording here suggests that the emotions are not, strictly speaking, incommensurable with judgment; rather, they account for the latter’s imperfection.5 Were Aristotle to take the opposing view—viz., of emotion as constituting and determining judgment outright—he would hazard a reductionist account of human cognition and, thus, jeopardize the (originally Platonic) conception of human knowledge as a form of participation in divine reason (logos).
At first blush, such a pessimistic view appears to inform Homer’s conception of a person’s “will” (thūmos) as sheer non-cognitive energy.6 In his discussion of Book 1 of the Iliad, Alasdair MacIntyre thus notes how “someone’s thūmos is what carries him forward: it is his self as a kind of energy.” Setting side by side George Chapman’s, Alexander Pope’s, and Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of Iliad, 1.189–192, MacIntyre notes how each version reflects “some contemporary well-articulated account of the determinants of action.” Yet in Homer, he insists, there is no sense of a contest between passion and reason. There can be no antinomy between the somatic and the mental because “all psychology in Homer is physiology.” Even so, Homer’s thūmos is not identical with but, rather, is fueled by contingent passion. Taken as such, thūmos points to an enduring disposition or substratum that, however palpable its physiological scaffolding, anticipates ever so faintly Augustine’s notion of the will in that it is nourished by (but not identical with) the passions. It is a type of internal causation, albeit one overwhelmingly unintelligible to the person in the grip of it. Yet what is unintelligible is, strictly speaking, only the object (lust for Briseis? jealousy of Agamemnon?) toward which the subject experiencing the emotion is oriented. As such, the emotion must be reflected since a “feeling of agitation all by itself will not reveal to me whether what I am feeling is fear or grief or pity. Only an inspection of the thoughts discriminates.”7 That this should be so, MacIntyre argues, shows that the relation of agent to action is always already in place by the time a particular passion intervenes. Action and, consequently, a sense of self as capable agent does not arise from autonomous reflection or discursive practice; even less is action contingent on some fluctuating emotional state. Rather, “the agent already has envisaged the action that he or she is to perform; what he or she reasons to is either a reminder that he must curb his thūmos if he is to perform it or else must suffer baneful consequences.” Thus all conclusions about “what to do next” can be drawn “only because [agents] already know independently of their reasoning what act it is that they are required to perform.”8
If we fast-forward to Aristotle, we find that for him emotions are quasi-cognitive frameworks that color the way in which concrete or “incidental objects of sense” (συμβεβηκὸς αἰσθητὸν, or objects per accidens) are apprehended, known, and judged. Yet as such they already rely on non-contingent perceptions or objects per se—say, a “white thing” subsequently identified as the special case of “the son of Diares.”9 Thus an object of emotion such as fear of violence is not gratuitously superimposed on a contingent perception, such as tanks rumbling into a public square, but instead conditions, albeit in a notably precipitate way, how that particular sensation is apprehended. Emotions are ambient grids of evaluation or, to use a more modern idiom, hermeneutic frames. They constitute a kind of basic interpretive “disposition” or “mood” (a type of Stimmung or Befindlichkeit as Heidegger was to call it) and as such are inseparable from, though never identical with, judgments. As Martha Nussbaum remarks, “emotions are not about their objects merely in the sense of being pointed at them and then let go, the way an arrow is released toward its target. Their aboutness is more internal, and embodies a way of seeing,” as well as “beliefs—often very complex—about the object.”10 As such, emotions reveal that perceptions are rarely, if ever, judged with complete neutrality but, instead, are focal points toward which the mind is oriented in an intrinsically engaged, evaluative, and interested manner. Certainly, any philosophical school of antiquity would have been rather mystified by the post-Cartesian conception of the world as a neutral inventory of medium-sized dry goods awaiting impersonal perception, analysis, and use. On the contrary, the world has to be understood as a dynamic and profoundly interconnected grid of phenomena toward which we relate in prima facie evaluative form, viz., as focal points of interpretive curiosity and, potentially, as sources or means for our continued flourishing.
Before proceeding, some clarification is in order regarding the idea of “flourishing,” which some strands of modern moral philosophy have perhaps employed with the same excessive ease with which other (non-cognitivist or naturalist) thinkers have anathemized it. One may begin by recalling Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe’s observation “that getting one another to do things without the application of physical force is a necessity for human life, and that far beyond what could be secured by . . . other means.” For it reminds us of the strong link between altruism and an “Aristotelian necessity”—viz., something “that is necessary because and insofar as a good hangs on it.”11 Put differently, “flourishing” does not denote a type of mystical good or some New Age version of shiny, happy existence gratuitously superinduced on (human) animals otherwise red in tooth and claw. Rather, it signifies the presence of conditions, and our practical quest for their attainment, such as will “determine what it is for members of a particular species to be as they should be, and to do that which they should do.”12 In other words, flourishing hinges on an understanding of organic beings—plants and animals no less than humans—as entelechies, beings whose form implies and embodies a rational development rather than some seemingly invariant carbon-churning process. Aristotle’s conception of living things as entelechies—while not exhaustive as a descriptor of human beings—thus has to be presupposed if there is to be any meaningful understanding of organic life. Philippa Foot thus argues for the substantive continuity between natural goodness and moral goodness, that is, for the possibility “that the concept of a good human life plays the same part in determining goodness of human characteristics and operations that the concept of flourishing plays in the determination of goodness in plants and animals.”13 Only a teleological being whose form constitutes an intrinsically purposive (rational) trajectory of becoming could ever be credited with the capacity for seeking out optimal conditions for its existence and recognizing them when they are present; to which it needs to be added, as Foot (quoting Aquinas, ST, Ia IIae Q 1 A 2) well recognizes, that “in doing something for an end animals cannot apprehend it as an end.”14
By contrast, it is only in the modern era, where the organic and physiological processes come to be assessed as effects wrought by the mechanical interaction of discrete parts, and where the idea of life as substantial form has effectively been lost, that reason is no longer derived from but unilaterally imposed on embodied existence. As Edmund Husserl was to point out, philosophy thus finds itself stranded between its “naïve faith in reason and the skepticism which negates or repudiates it in empiricist fashion.” Thus, even as it insists “on the validity of the factually experienced world [die tatsächlich erlebte Welt],” modernity’s axiomatically disjunctive and skeptical stance finds in that world “nothing of reason or its ideas. Reason itself and its [object], and ‘that which is,’ become more and more enigmatic.” Consequently, any outright rejection of, or skeptical challenge to, the idea of flourishing takes for granted a quintessentially modern, skeptical point of view that is only ever prepared to ascribe or impose, yet never find, reason in a world said to be composed of strictly equivalent and quantifiable objects bereft of all agency. And yet, reversing course to an astonishing degree late in life, Husserl himself points out how utterly modernity’s axiomatic skepticism begs the crucial question: “Are reason and that-which-is to be disaggregated, given that reason, as knowing, determines what is?”15
The classical conception of reason as embodied vision and purposive action—anathemized in modernity until its conditional recovery by Hegel—takes us to the next concept, that of “desire,” which modern, post-Cartesian thought quite unhelpfully conflates with emotion. “Desire” (orexis) is a word Aristotle may well have invented so as “to indicate the common feature shared by all cases of goal-directed animal movement.”16 Ordinarily, three types of desire are distinguished in Aristotle: “appetite” (epithūmia); “spiritedness” or “non-rational desire” (thūmos); and a rational desire for the good (boulēsis).17 Of fundamental importance here is to understand that for Aristotle all desire (rational and non-rational alike) is fundamentally distinct from emotion. For defining of desire is its intentionality, its relation to an object or objective to be attained. At the same time, desire lacks the epiphenomenal qualia of pleasure and pain that Aristotle regards as integral to emotion—viz., as indices allowing us to understand that we are experiencing a specific emotion when we do. However irrational its aim, all desire is accompanied by a basic consciousness of its presence. Even in the case of a purely appetitive desire (epithūmion) such as hunger, being hungry fundamentally equates with being conscious of one’s hunger. Consequently, desire “does not satisfy the pleasure/pain test as emotion does, but, at most, as perception or thought does.”18 This crucial insight, which in the wake of early fourteenth-century voluntarism begins to slip away, Coleridge would much later recover as the “essential inherence of an intelligential Principle (φῶς νοερόν) in the Will (ἀρχὴ θελητική) or rather the Will itself thus considered, [which] the Greeks expressed by an appropriate word (βουλή)” (AR, 260). The contrast with the emotions is particularly marked in the case of a “rational desire for the good” (boulēsis)—a term in Aristotle’s oeuvre that has an especially significant bearing on the Augustinian notion of the will.19 For here the object of desire has to be cognitively apprehended as good for it to be desired: “it is a desire for the good which one does not have unless one takes something to be good.”20 It is a characteristic of the human being to develop a conscious perspective on his or her hunger, sexual longing, etc. Epithūmia, in other words, is not intelligible as a type of desire exercising compulsive dominion over consciousness but, on the contrary, is reflectively apprehended as a representation.
It might be said that, in contrast to the “emotions” (pathē), desire is at once closer to and farther removed from the qualia of pleasure and pain. It is farther removed in that, say, in a case of extreme hunger, desire is inseparable from a consciousness of the particular “need” or “lack” (δεήσεις) of those goods that promise to remedy the situation. For in being thus aware, consciousness is not so much in the grip of desire (orexis) as it is already reflexively preoccupied with its remediation. At the same time, desire is also closer to the qualia of pleasure or pain in that—again, taking a case of extreme hunger—the “desire” in question is not so much “accompanied by” but positively indistinguishable from the qualia of pain or “uneasiness.” Hunger is not “accompanied by” pain; it is itself painful. Crucially, then, the appetites are cordoned off from the emotions and vice versa, a point on which modern voluntarist thought from Hobbes onward takes a different and, it must be said, notably confused view. With good reason, then, Nussbaum observes that close study of “orexis reveals its intentionality and selectivity; we can also say that the practices of education and exhortation in which we engage would be unintelligible if orexis were, as Plato (and [Terence] Irwin) say, purely mindless.”21 It is furthermore apparent that for Aristotle the emotions do have an intrinsic relation to reason precisely because they belong to the realm of propositions. By contrast, an appetite (rational or otherwise) cannot be a proposition, though its presence certainly can be articulated in speech or be dealt with in rational, remedial action. Yet in that case, the formal coherence and purposive character of a statement identifying oneself as hungry or asking for food confirms the latently propositional nature of the desire that had led up to it.
Aristotle’s distinction between “voluntary” action (hekousion) and deliberate action involving conscious choice (prohairesis) is of particular interest here because it responds to a logical dilemma broached in both the Eudemian Ethics and Magna Moralia. It concerns the apparent asymmetry between wishing and voluntary action, both of which seem at first glance instances of what William James calls “ideo-motor action”—that is, “a movement [that] unhesitatingly and immediately follows upon the idea of it . . . brought about by the pure flux of thought.”22 In true dialectical fashion, Aristotle unfolds a paradox that, as it turns out, will require the introduction of a new mental faculty for its resolution. In the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle takes up the distinction between “what is the voluntary and the involuntary [ἑκούσιον καὶ τί τὸ ἀκούσιον]” so as to get at how “goodness and badness are defined.” As it happens, a paradox looms here in that wishing (βούλομαι) and voluntary action (ἑκούσιον) appear to be convertible terms: “what a man does voluntarily he wishes, and what he wishes to do he does voluntarily.” And yet, there is the phenomenon of a man “acting incontinently” (ἀκρατευόμενος),
through appetite contrary to what [he] thinks best; whence it results that the same man acts at the same time both voluntarily and involuntarily; but this is impossible . . . But if it is impossible for a man voluntarily and involuntarily to do the same thing at the same time in regard to the same part of the act, then what is done from wish [boulēsis] is done more voluntarily than that which is done from appetite or anger; and a proof of this is that we do many things voluntarily without anger or desire.23
The “impossible” scenario here concerns the split of the person into playing simultaneously an active and a passive part, a clear violation of the founding principle of all thought (e.g., the law of contradiction). It is a paradox with a rich history eventually restated by Jean-Paul Sartre, who notes that in what is ordinarily called “self-deception” the self would simultaneously have to know of the deception (as an agent) and not know of it (as a patient).24 This logical impasse prompts us to desynonymize “willing” (as Anthony Kenny renders boulēsis) from the merely voluntary. Some five hundred years later, Plotinus registers the same contradiction when pointing out that a strictly mechanical account of the soul (viz., as enslaved by its own nature) leads to a logical contradiction: for “to speak of being enslaved to one’s own nature is making two things, one which is enslaved and one to which it is enslaved. But how is a simple nature and single active actuality not free, when it does not have one part potential and one actual?”25 Recognizing “that voluntariness cannot be defined in terms of will,” Aristotle confirms that a different type of mental faculty has to be recognized, one capable of deliberation and choice without being passively cued by contingent desire.26 Thus he introduces the concept of prohairesis, which as we shall see proved of great significance for late antiquity’s development of the concept of the will. Just how to translate that term has long puzzled classical scholars, who thus have proposed terms as disparate as choice, purposive choice, judgment, decision, ethical intent, or commitment.27
More about that momentarily; for now, what matters is Aristotle’s insistence on distinguishing between merely voluntary and positively deliberate action, a distinction that hinges on the degree to which the emotions are involved in action. In the case of strictly voluntary action, they are likely to be a significant factor inasmuch as such action is more on the order of an impulse (hormē) and thus prone to lead the individual to act in a “rushed” and non-deliberative fashion. By contrast, Aristotle leaves no doubt that genuinely deliberate action such as terminates in a “choice” is aimed at identifying the means toward a goal that is already in existence:
The origin of action—its efficient, not its final cause—is choice [προαίρεσις], and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end. This is why choice cannot exist either without thought and intellect or without a moral state; for good action and its opposite cannot exist without a combination of intellect and character. Intellect itself, however, moves nothing, but only the intellect which aims at an end and is practical; for this rules the productive intellect as well, since every one who makes makes for an end, and that which is made is not an end in the unqualified sense (but only relative to something, i.e. of something)—only that which is done is that; for good action is an end, and desire aims at this. Hence choice is either desiderative thought or intellectual desire [ὀρεκτικὸς νοῦς ἡ προαίρεσις ἢ ὄρεξις διανοητική]. (Nicomachean Ethics, 1139a32–b5)
In a few sentences, this programmatic passage establishes some of the most salient points that were to define for centuries to come the conception of judgment (prudentia) and choice (electio) in relation to the intellect, as well as that of intellect to desire. As Hannah Arendt notes, “the starting-point of Aristotle’s reflection on the subject [of willing] is the anti-Platonic insight that reason by itself does not move anything.” Indeed, Aristotle’s repeated characterization of prohairesis as “the deliberative desire of things in our power” (ἡ προαίρεσις ἂν εἴη βουλευτικὴ ὄρεξις τῶν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν] (Nicomachean Ethics, 1113a10; see also Eudemian Ethics, 1226b17) confirms that for him “desire retains a priority in originating movement, which comes about through a playing together of reason and desire.”28
Central here is the contention that the goal or “end” (telos) constitutes the ambient and indispensable framework for all rational deliberation since in its absence we would not know wherefore we are deliberating. Our commitment to it, which is to say, our fundamental awareness of what constitutes the nature of our flourishing or the good is never some merely notional product such as can be generated by discursive or material action. It is important, then, not to overstate the distinction between means and ends, and to read this or similar programmatic passages (e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, 1111b1–6; 1113b4–5) as some straightforward division of mental labor to the effect that “boulēsis sets the end and prohairesis determines the means to this end.” In fact, it is by virtue of prohairesis that “our objects of deliberation become also the objects of our desires, and so, finally, the substance of our actions.”29 With reference to Nicomachean Ethics, 1113b4–5, Danielle Allen notes that the phrase “our end is a thing desired, while the means to that end [βουλευτῶν δὲ καὶ προἁιρετῶν τῶν πρὸς τὸ τέλος] are the subjects of deliberation and prohairesis” should not be interpreted as narrowly instrumental; for “the phrase [Aristotle] uses to describe the means we seek is grammatically complicated: tōn pro telos. It is a prepositional phrase made into a substantive by means of an article. We choose ‘things’ that are for the sake of something else. That is, when we choose our means, we necessarily appeal to narratives about our ends . . . Prohairesis is thus the process by which we moralize our actions: when we choose our means, we find ourselves obliged to acknowledge the ends we already desire . . . and also our orientation toward those ends.”30
Aristotle thus takes great care to embed “judgment” within a rational framework of habit, itself honed by a complex intergenerational process of role-specific and praxis-oriented socialization. Thus, while judgment in Aristotle’s ethics involves a volitional element that is in turn consummated in “action,” the commitment in question pivots on the person’s capacity to bear in mind when it most matters that “the principles of the things that are done consist in that for the sake of which they are to be done.” Judgment and choice thus are rational only because they unfold in an ontological framework of things and purposes hierarchically and teleologically ordered. In the Nicomachean Ethics we thus find Aristotle taking pains to desynonymize “judgment” from mere “conjecture” or “opinion” (1142b5), the latter denoting mere guesswork or capricious self-realization. Aristotelian “judgment” and “choice” thus stand in sharp contrast with Hobbes’s or Carl Schmitt’s “decision” (Entscheidung), which by definition pivots on the absence of any good providing guidance for the work of deliberation, thus rendering judgment little more than the imposition of an irrational will—an emphatic toss of the coin designed above all to put an end to any further deliberation. Understood as “the right discrimination of the equitable” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1143a20) and as that which “implies . . . the right reason,” Aristotelian prohairesis (what Aquinas would translate as electio) is bound up with the rational “deliberation”—Aquinas will call it “counsel” (consilium)—of how a proposed action relates to a broader network of practices; and to make that determination means scrutinizing how an action fits into the hierarchy of goods aimed at realizing the highest political and spiritual goods—viz., the flourishing of the polis and wisdom achieved in contemplation (theoria), respectively.31
Put differently, judgment is rarely a discrete, isolated pronouncement but, typically, unfolds as a series of related insights as these eventuate in conversation or in quasi-conversational, internal deliberation. It involves a sustained engagement with a specific problem. By contrast, “if we focus on a single judgment, we lose all the flexibility and nuance that are in play when things are made to show up through speech.”32 Thus prohairesis in the Nicomachean Ethics cannot be located outside of, or construed as indifferent to, the common. Rather, it signals an agent’s heightened responsibility to achieve rational articulacy in those situations where the course of action does not imply itself and, precisely by virtue of that intellectual effort, to strengthen the rational and normative framework of community itself. In ways that eluded all but a handful of nineteenth-century thinkers (Coleridge, John Henry Newman, and George Eliot being notable exceptions), Aristotelian judgment and the Thomistic concept of the will as rational appetite must be understood, not as a formal-epistemological dilemma confronted by the solitary “self” but as a more elemental, hermeneutic realization: viz., that rational personhood can be achieved only within an existing, normative, albeit imperfect moral community.
Here it is essential to remember that for classical thought—Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic—knowledge is inseparable from our commitment to its practical realization. Ancient philosophy has no concept equivalent to the modern idea of “information” as neutral and instrumental knowledge; in fact, the proposition that there might be a type of knowledge that can be agnostically or indifferently appraised by means of some “view from nowhere” would have struck thinkers of that era as bizarre. Instead, for knowledge to have a claim on us as knowledge presupposes that it is perceived to have a bearing on the overall order of life—be it of an individual or a community—which is to say, that it is framed by an ambient, albeit mostly implicit conception of the good and of human flourishing. Only so can knowledge, including its deceptively neutral manifestation as technical competence (epistēmē), be appraised as relevant and meaningful. All knowledge presupposes our implicit awareness of, and practical commitment to, specific goals, as well as a sense (not always fully developed) that in so pursuing these goals or ends the person participates in the larger rational order (cosmos). As Aristotle acknowledges in the Eudemian Ethics, “choice [prohairesis] is neither opinion nor wish singly nor yet both (for no one chooses suddenly, though he thinks he ought to act, and wishes, suddenly).” As he notes on this occasion, “the very name is an indication. For choice is not simply a picking but picking one thing before another; and this is impossible without consideration and deliberation” (1226b4–7).
As has been pointed out, Aristotle’s conception of prohairesis is etymologically linked to hairēsis and the verb hairēo (“to take with the hand”), which suggests that to deliberate is never just to decide on means but to reflect on their conduciveness to and commensurability with an overarching end. It thus stands in vivid complementarity to “desire” (orexis), whose root and primary meaning (orēgo) “indicates a stretching out of one’s hand to reach for something nearby.”33 Consequently, there is a narrative dimension at work, “a notion of trajectory,” as Allen puts it, which markedly differs from the instantaneity of “decision” and the purely efficient causation or instrumental rationality of “choice” as a mere seizing of specific “means.” Consequently, “prohairēseis do not involve sudden choices” but, instead, “entail consistency over time.”34 In what follows, I shall render prohairesis as “judgment” (though Charles Chamberlain’s proposal of “commitment” is just as viable), in part so as to accentuate the difference between Aristotle’s conception and modern utilitarian or pragmatist notions of “rational choice” and “decision.” For Aristotle, that is, all practical reason is appraised, ratified, and integrated into a normative teleological order by means of what he calls “judgment.” Of pivotal importance to Stoic thought, judgment in due course emerges as a complementary term for Aquinas’s theory of the will (voluntas) and “free choice” (electio). Yet before taking up the rather convoluted migration of Greek concepts into classical and, eventually, Scholastic Latin, a closer examination of judgment in Aristotelian and Stoic thought is in order. For the reflective operation of judgment is yet another casualty of modern accounts of the will and also of the person.
By definition, judgment constitutes a hermeneutic and evaluative act. In it, we draw on our powers of discernment regarding what matters and what is peripheral or positively distracting. That is, we seek to respond to and resolve a situation that involves some palpable conflict of goods and thus is initially experienced as a cause of perplexity. Resolution here involves our choosing an action, which implicitly also has us affirm an order of values and ends. All judgment thus is prompted by a tension between what Alasdair MacIntyre terms the “goods of efficiency” and those “of excellence,” between causa efficiens and causa finalis. Beginning in the post-Homeric era, that antagonism leads to a more acute discrimination between actions undertaken “in order to” and those pursued “for the sake of.”35 Since their proper calibration is nothing less than essential to the flourishing of the polis—itself the highest good “for the sake of” which all action is ultimately to be undertaken—the sustained, measured, and cooperative pursuit of communal flourishing can only get underway qua judgment. Confronting the polis’s dramatically weakened cosmological and political framework following Athens’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War, political reasoning undergoes a fundamental shift as regards the sources of authority. Danielle Allen has persuasively argued that with the generation of leaders (Themistocles, Pericles, Solon, Alcibiades, et al.) whose genealogies had extended “back to the mythological period” now giving way to leaders “who were simply wealthy,” and with generals (stratēgoi) being rapidly replaced by professional orators (dēmagōgoi), “much of the political discourse of the first half of the fourth century . . . was an effort to figure out how to justify political leadership without reference to military expertise.”
By the time Aristotle addresses that question head-on in his Rhetoric (lectures first presented around 356 B.C.), the concept of “ethical intent” or “judgment” serves to consolidate this “revolutionary conceptual change” from a command ethic to a culture of deliberative argumentation that seeks to counterbalance the evident risk of outright deception and dissimulation—always present in rhetoric—with a cultivation of judgment.36 Singling out the benefit of “maxims” (gnōmai) for persuading a less intelligent audience, Aristotle is careful to offset their rhetorical effectiveness with an account of “choice” (prohairesis) by remarking on “another advantage [of using maxims] which is more important—[viz., that] it invests a speech with character [ἦθος]. There is character in every speech in which the choice is conspicuous” (Rhetoric, 1395b10–14). To translate prohairesis as “choice” is to exaggerate the term’s pragmatic or instrumental connotations—in the sense of “mere rhetoric”—while obscuring the teleological framework within which alone such choice unfolds as a rational act. For unlike the demagogue or Sophist, Aristotle’s political orator understands rhetoric to be aimed at persuading an audience about more than the choice of specific means. Instead, public oratory unfolds in explicit acknowledgment of (and aims to secure broad-based assent to) a rational end or good. The true orator, unlike the Sophist, not only seeks to persuade 51 percent of his audience but all of them. More than aiming at a favorable decision by a majority, however slim, the Aristotelian orator seeks to achieve recognition of his reasons. Thus it makes sense to translate prohairesis as “ethical intent,” “moral purpose,” or “commitment.” In due course, it is just this teleological, narrative dimension of judgment that shows it to be a pivotal source for the Augustinian notion of the will. As Allen notes, the growing appeal of Aristotle’s conception of “a way of life” (prohairesis tou biou) to fourth-century orators further underscores “this notion of prohairesis as entailing consistency over time” and of choice as “a series of actions all oriented toward the same goal or project.”37
Consistent with his stress on the indelible nexus between “choice” and “character,” Aristotle thus discriminates more sharply than his precursors between “theoretical knowledge” (epistēmē) and “practical wisdom” (phronēsis), and between rational and irrational forms of desire; and it is this heightened concern with understanding the sources of action as the foci of our ethical commitments as persons that culminates in Aristotle’s introducing prohairesis as a central philosophical concept. Whereas the term only surfaces a handful of times before Aristotle—once in Plato (Parmenides, 143c) and a few times in speeches by Isocrates and Demosthenes—the word appears 156 times in Aristotle’s corpus. The Nicomachean Ethics defines knowledge to be “what we suppose . . . is not capable of being otherwise,” the product of deductive processes that “start from what is already known” (1139b20). Precisely because of its strictly deductive etiology, however, knowledge does not constitute a wholly self-sustaining edifice. Rather, each instance of deductive thought necessarily rests on principles and thus “proceeds from universals” that in turn can only be furnished by induction. Noting how “the reasoned capacity to act is different from the reasoned capacity to make” (1140a1), Aristotle discriminates between practical and theoretical reason, albeit without therefore declaring these realms incommensurable or framing them as competitors.
An important challenge, then, is to understand how these two modes of knowledge might be linked. What Aristotle explores under the heading of “practical wisdom” and “deliberation” (prohairesis) in Book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics is, in effect, the first fully articulated account of “judgment” or ethical intent in Western thought, and it already hints at the precariousness of any strictly post-cosmological notion of rationality:
The man who is capable of deliberating has practical wisdom. Now no one deliberates about things that cannot be otherwise nor about things that it is impossible for him to do. Therefore since knowledge involves demonstration, but there is no demonstration of things whose first principles can be otherwise (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 knowledge nor art; not knowledge because that which can be done is capable of being otherwise, not art because action and making are different kinds of thing. It remains, then, that it is a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man. (1140a30)
Deliberation or judgment of the kind here adumbrated by Aristotle involves a distinction that, as Hannah Arendt notes, has since withered: viz., that between the “grounds” that may render a specific action instrumental (“in order to”) or give it teleological legitimation (“for the sake of”). Where that distinction is preserved, as in the case of Pericles, practical wisdom involves “temperance” and only so is able to discriminate between individual interestedness and “man in general” as a proper end. Ultimately, judgment, deliberation, temperance, and practical wisdom all but converge in one’s capacity to bear in mind when it most matters that “the principles of the things that are done consist in that for the sake of which they are to be done.”38
What remains, of course, is the basic dilemma of wisdom’s apparent indemonstrability, which is to say, the fact that “wisdom” by its very nature remains “opposed to comprehension,” a point also acknowledged by Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, 1142a25). It is thus to be achieved only by a sustained inductive process (epagōgē) whereby deliberation moves “from a set of particulars to a universal, to the concept of the form that those particulars to different degrees exemplify . . . This dialectic method, in which a particular thesis or theory justifies itself over against its rivals through its superior ability in withstanding the most cogent objections from different points of view” was in due course to become the focal point of Stoic logic.39 What is at stake is the status of an “object, not of knowledge but of perception” or what Aristotle calls the “ultimate particular”—and to it alone belongs the name of “judgment” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1143a20). Implicit in this inductive, as well as social and discursive, elaboration of Aristotelian phronēsis is another feature of strategic importance: viz., all “judgment” is intricately tied to the idea of praxis, which in turn is at all times circumscribed by the hierarchically ordered sociality of the polis. Rationality, justice, and the discrete acts of judgment required for their continual elaboration—whose goal Aristotle captures under the heading of “excellence” (aretē)—are only achievable within and for the sake of a community. Hence the Nicomachean Ethics takes care to desynonymize “judgment” from mere “conjecture” or “opinion” (1142b5), notions that, like our contemporary expression of “making a judgment call,” strongly suggest the lack of any good guiding the work of deliberation, thus rendering judgment little more than a toss of the coin. By contrast, “the right discrimination of the equitable” (1143a20), which in turn “implies . . . right reason” as the very foundation of Aristotelian judgment, is constitutively tied to a particular practice and to an assessment of how that practice fits into the hierarchy of goods ultimately meant to ensure the greatest good itself—that is, the flourishing of the polis. In its verbal form, prohairēomai, “choosing” comes “very close to our concept of will” and, like so “many words for cognition or thought, inevitably impl[ies] the semantic element of decision or intention which results from intellectual activity.”40 There can be no judgment without an ambient, normative frame relative to which it is to be exercised; which is to say, that there can be no judgment without thought. As Simone Weil was to put it in her famous essay on the Iliad, “where there is no room for thought, there is no room either for justice or prudence.”41
Particularly crucial is a qualification that Aristotle makes just as his discussion of “practical wisdom” and “judgment” in Book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics winds down. As he notes, Socrates was on the right track when defining choosing and doing “in accordance with the right reason” as a particular kind of “excellence,” one that in turn already presupposes an intuitive sense of the “right reason.” Still, Aristotle insists, it is not enough to “divine” the “right reason” or “end” and, having done so, to act “in accordance with it.” Rather, what ultimately defines the ethical status of human praxis is that this “state of excellence . . . impl[y] the presence of the right reason [μετὰ τοῦ ὀρθοῦ λόγου].”42 Aristotle’s stress on the “presence of the right reason” hints that the ultimate criterion of rationality involves not merely its formal-syllogistic correctness but, rather, the explicitness with which that reason is embraced and “realized” (in the strong Hegelian sense of verwirklichen) in practice. What Aristotle terms “right reason” thus has to be understood as a “concrete universal,” rather than an abstraction arrived at by deductive argument and syllogistic predication, and his thinking here rests on a notion of rational qua good, that is, of reason as a perfection and value term rather than an ordinary predicate.43
The most crucial features of Aristotelian prohairesis to be kept in mind are the following: (1) it is oriented not toward “knowledge” (epistēmē) as such but toward its configuration with “practical wisdom” (phronēsis or nous praktikos, as it is called in De Anima); (2) judgment’s rational potential is achievable only within and on behalf of a community; (3) it unfolds as an inductive and dialectical process (epagōgē) whereby knowledge arises from a public confrontation of competing arguments; (4) far more than a merely conceptual (or mentalist) attribute, Aristotle’s pivotal criterion of “explicitness” means that judgment and rationality are never simply epistemic or notional but political and social in their very essence. Underlying all of these criteria is the Aristotelian notion of knowledge as a gradual process; for “wisdom is concerned not only with universals but with particulars, which become familiar from experience, but a young man has no experience, for it is the length of time that gives experience” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1142a10). To judge well we thus begin by reining in our propensity to extend judgment beyond its bounds of competency. MacIntyre’s description of the seemingly circular logic of judgment points us in the right direction here:
We cannot judge and act rightly unless we aim at what is in fact good; we cannot aim at what is good except on the basis of experience of right judgment and action. But the appearance of paradox and circularity are deceptive. In developing both our conception of the good and the habit of right judgment and action—and neither can be adequately developed without the other—we gradually learn to correct each in light of the other, moving dialectically between them.44
Echoing Plato’s model of education into the virtues, Aristotle understands the dialectic of judgment very much as one of progressive socialization and its basic logic as one of continual revision. By contrast, Stoic logic was to approach judgment through a formal analysis of moral and cognitive predicates to be (ideally) pursued and completed by the individual independent of (or prior to) its eventual socialization. Judgment thus is increasingly equated with the prolonged “suspension of judgment” or with what the Stoics call the withholding of subjective “assent” to appearances whose relation to bona fide ends remains as yet elusive. What drops out is the social character of “dialectic” (epagōgē), which in Stoicism has been supplanted by a far more solitary and nominalist conception of individual experience and, consequently, of judgment as a process of skeptical self-scrutiny.
Before exploring how Aristotelian judgment is both appropriated and reoriented by the Stoics, it will be necessary to head off a terminological confusion liable to be wrought by modernity’s misapprehension and mistranslation of “judgment” as “choice” or “decision.” For Aristotle, and indeed for the Stoics, “judgment” (prohairesis) at no point involves any uncertainty about the telos of action but only about the commensurability of means with ends that are at all times hierarchically ordered and accepted as normative. Distinguishing between “(rational) wish” (boulēsis) and judgment (prohairesis)—the latter being rendered as “choice” by the standard Oxford edition of the Complete Works—Aristotle repeatedly notes that “wish relates rather to the end, choice to what contributes to the end” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1120b25). Hence to choose without relating, in an act of explicit judgment, that which is chosen to a specific end is to fail both as a rational and just being: “The origin of action—its efficient, not its final cause—is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1139a30). For a variety of (initially theological) reasons, this notion of “choice” constrained by the intrinsic rationality of forms and the normative authority of a supra-individual tradition came under increasing pressure in late Scholasticism and was rejected outright by the emerging discourse of “rights” in the seventeenth century.45 Whereas “the conception of a single, albeit perhaps complex, supreme good is central to Aristotle’s account of practical rationality, . . . it is just this conception which most, if not all, recent moral philosophers find quite implausible.” For them, “there can be no uniquely rational way of ordering goods within a scheme of life, but rather there are numerous alternative modes of ordering, in the choice between which there are no sufficient good reasons to guide us.” The argumentative fallacy of such objections, as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor have variously argued, lies in the fact that they rest on an unexamined, quasi-naturalistic set of commitments that would have seemed utterly alien, indeed irrational, to citizens of the Aristotelian polis. Above all, they hold that the “individual human being confronts an alternative set of ways of life from a standpoint external to them all. Such an individual has ex hypothesi no commitments.”46
Yet to premise theoretical (and moral) arguments on the axiom of a “punctual self” supposed to be the bearer of inherent rights is methodologically spurious for at least two reasons. First, it presupposes (though evidently cannot demonstrate) the ability of any individual at any given point in time making any variety of choices or new beginnings, and so taking itself to be unconstrained by the genealogy of those concepts through which alone it could ever hope to make the rationale of its eventual choice articulate and meaningful for others. Second, the notion of a completely unconstrained choice also implies that commitments implicit in an individual’s eventual choice cannot be rationally justified by appeal to any normative ends. Rather, in what turns out to be a significant misappropriation of Augustine’s conception of “free choice” (liberum arbitrium), the modern idea of a “free will” remains incoherent, indeed irrational on account of its strictly occasional and preferential nature. Lacking all objective justification, such choice can only be inferred to have been taken “in order to” realize a contingent objective—that is, gratify a subjective impulse or desire whose meaning remains as enigmatic to the one (putatively) choosing as to those witnessing the choice and potentially victimized by its unconditional pursuit as a private “right.”47 Aristotle’s painstaking analysis of judgment in the Nicomachean Ethics already hints at the extent to which competing models of rationality, justice, and excellence had come to divide the self-understanding of the Athenian polis—with older military and aristocratic models of virtue being challenged by the professional dēmagōgoi (the Sophists), and Platonic and Aristotelian models of “character formation” (paideia) soon yielding to the rise of Zeno’s Stoic school. Yet beginning with the shift toward a strictly nominalist concept of reason as it is advanced by the Franciscans of early fourteenth-century Oxford (often in polemical opposition to Aquinas’s alleged Aristotelianism), modernity views judgment increasingly as a dilemma and source of perpetual discomfiture.48
Given the hierarchical order of goods and the overall clarity about ends, “judgment” (prohairesis) in Aristotle does not concern itself with ontological uncertainties but primarily with calibrating the ratio of what MacIntyre calls the goods of excellence and those of efficiency. For Aristotle as for the Stoics, who in significant ways absorb and develop his ethical arguments, “judgment” is nothing like our modern concept of “decision.” If, in the spirit of Coleridge, one were to “desynonymize” the two, Carl Schmitt’s theory of “decision” (Entscheidung) would furnish a particularly apt contrast. For Schmitt, any “decision” is inherently arbitrary because of an unbridgeable gap between the particular and the universal, between the “concrete fact” and the “standard of judgment [Maßstab der Beurteilung].”49 As the sheer “intercession of authority (auctoritatis interpositio),” any “decision” at once recognizes and capitalizes on that very disjunction of fact and value. By projecting arbitrary force into a complex realm of human affairs deemed inherently resistant to the pragmatics of political necessity, Schmitt’s “decision” is also “instantaneously emancipated from any argumentative reason-giving.” Evidently, then, what has disappeared in such a model of “decision” is the (for Aristotle crucial) notion of a gradual inductive transitioning from particular to universal (epagōgē), a process that for Aristotle centers on a maximally explicit giving of reasons to—and their inter-subjective, argumentative testing by—members of the polis. Instead, Schmitt sees all lines of communication between “grounding norms [zugrundeliegende Normen]” and a given “decision” as having been severed, which in turn gives rise to his startling conclusion that “decision, normatively considered, arises ex nihilo [aus dem Nichts geboren].” Clearly, then, there is no longer a shared, normative conception of the good that guides deliberation and legitimates a specific “decision” as rational. Rather, only a practical objective to be realized qua decision “determines what a norm is and what has normative authority.” Schmitt thus sees all “decision” characterized by an “indifference of content [inhaltliche Indifferenz].” Inasmuch as it is the authority that “makes the decision” that is performatively consolidated by that very act, all decision is at least “relatively and, under certain circumstances, even absolutely independent of its proper content [unabhängig von der Richtigkeit ihres Inhaltes].”50 A far cry from Aristotelian prohairesis, Schmitt’s “decision” at once presupposes and responds to “disorientation” as an ontological and thus irreversible condition of modern existence; indeed, far from seeking to remedy that predicament, it positively relishes, much in the spirit of Hobbes, the irrational conclusions and opportunities seemingly licensed by it.
When contrasted with Aristotelian prohairesis, the Stoic view of mental life, and of judgment in particular, proves less affirmative than skeptical. Much of that shift has to do with the fact that both the source and the telos of judgment have at once contracted and expanded in extreme ways; for the source is now the deliberative individual, one who is no longer guided by a normative social framework but, instead, seeks virtue against the backdrop of a political and social reality that appears substantially irrational. The causes that had rendered the Hellenistic world so disorienting bear striking resemblance to the “great disembedding” (as Anthony Giddens and Charles Taylor have called it) of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when previously static and autochthonous communities found themselves dislodged by scientific innovation, speculative finance, social mobility, and the rise of professionalism. Stoicism—which unsurprisingly experiences a major resurgence during the same period—had formerly arisen as a concerted response to the geopolitical transformation of the Mediterranean world once Alexander the Great “stripped the individual of the insulated shelter of his little city-state and forced him to come to terms with and find a place in an enormously expanded polity.”51 As a result, the Aristotelian model of ethical rationality had to be fundamentally rethought so as to account for the simultaneous jurisdictional “contraction” and “expansion” of judgment already mentioned. For when “all human beings are fundamentally not members of families or cities, but kosmopolitai, members of the ‘city-state of the universe,’” the ends “for the sake of” which judgment had defined a course of action now involve the cosmos as a whole.52 For the first time, that is, ethics presents itself as universal in both its conceptual architecture and its social intent. At the same time, however, Stoicism’s moral scrutiny now scrutinizes the self’s inner disposition prior to its potential or actual socialization, a process deemed inherently unstable and full of distractions (so-called indifferents).
Notwithstanding its dramatically altered circumstances, Stoic thought retains and even intensifies some features of Aristotelian prohairesis. First, Stoicism develops Aristotle’s condition regarding the “explicitness” of all judgment into a complex theory of “predication” that anticipates significant features of modern analytic philosophy. In so rendering ethics and logic all but inseparable, Stoicism effectively treats rationality and accountability, the cognitive and the discursive, as convertible notions. “The wise man,” Diogenes Laertius notes, “is always a dialectician.”53 In contrast with the situational dynamic of Aristotelian epagōgē, Stoicism’s grounding of judgment in an epistemological method introduces a significant ascetic and asocial element. Judgment now demands above all the suspension or (potentially indefinite) postponement of what would likely be an individual’s premature “assent” to sensory impressions. A central objective of Stoic mental life thus involves to be perpetually on guard against the deceptive and perilous impact of all kinds of “impulses,” “desires,” and “opinions” on our perceptions. In drawing out a skeptical dimension intrinsic to Stoic thought (and in effect turning it against the Stoics), Sextus Empiricus thus remarks how our externally grounded (cataleptic) sense impressions may at all times yet deceive us “like incompetent messengers.”54 Hence “to withhold assent is no different from suspending judgment. Therefore the wise man will suspend judgment about everything” (HP, 255).
Second, the resulting methodological askēsis and the envisioned state of ataraxia with which Stoicism came to be principally (and often erroneously) identified in later periods could thus be described as an “introjection” of the dialogical principle that had guided the cultivation of rational sociality in the Aristotelian polis.55 Commenting on a diametric reversal of Aristotle’s association of freedom with the public realm and of necessity with the oikos, Louis Dupré remarks on the Stoics’ “distinction between the internal realm of freedom and the external world of compulsion . . . In the huge Hellenistic and Roman empires . . . the Stoa presented a new ideal of freedom that, while not avoiding political or social duties, consisted in an inner attitude, independent of external circumstances,” and which fostered “attitudes of withdrawal rather than of dominance.”56 It does not surprise, then, that the Stoics’ unrelenting stress on identifying and expunging all traces of “opinion” from genuine cognition effectively alters the notion of truth itself. No longer conceived in terms of its social significance but, rather, as a quest for a dispassionate, formal correctness, truth—and by extension the Stoic idea of mental life overall—moves away from Aristotelian “action” as the supreme human achievement and toward a proto-modern idea of “critique.” The goal, of course, is for the individual to extirpate any admixture of opinion or impulsive judgment from the myriad “impressions” that constitute its world. As A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley note, “unlike most previous philosophers . . . no Stoics officially recognize the existence of true opinions” (HP, 258). For the Stoics, mental life achieves legitimacy not by supporting a socially elaborated framework of rationality but by continually scrutinizing the public realm in open-ended, critical contemplation. Theoretical and practical rationality now begin to diverge to the extent that the Aristotelian idea of praxis is being deemed inherently premature on account of its supposed lack of conclusive theoretical legitimation.
Far more explicitly than either Plato or Aristotle, the Stoics’ conception of judgment is anchored in a philosophy of language. As the fifth-century compiler Joannes Stobaeus notes, “all impulses are acts of assent . . . But acts of assent and impulses actually differ in their objects: propositions are the objects of acts of assent, but impulses are directed toward predicates” (HP, 197). As the foundational criterion for rationality, “explicitness” is now being conceived in linguistic form. Thus legitimate “assent” can only be given to a proposition that makes fully transparent the subject’s relation to both the concrete object of which it has received an “impression” and its place within the world as a hierarchy of “ends.” An “impulse,” by contrast, shows our relation toward an impression to be unreflected and inarticulate. As Long and Sedley comment, the Stoics moved beyond Aristotle’s identification of meanings with thoughts “by distinguishing rational impressions from sayables” and so demonstrating “that the meaning of a thought is something which is transferable, through language, across minds. I cannot pass on to you the physical modification of my mind, but I can tell you what I am thinking about” (HP, 201). Stoicism’s philosophical program thus pivots on the gradual disaggregation of mere auto-affections of the mind—so-called non-cataleptic impressions or “figments” (phantasmata) and similar acts of “imagination” (phantastikon)—from genuine, “cataleptic sense impressions” (phantasiai) that are anchored in an external source.57 The latter stand to be converted into articulate “propositions” or “sayables” (lecta), for only they legitimately warrant “assent” and so can bring the individual closer to the Stoic ideal of intellectual autonomy (autarkeia).
Third, and perhaps most decisively, in taking a far more skeptical view of universals, particularly as conceived in Plato’s doctrine of ideas, Stoicism foreshadows fourteenth-century nominalism’s logical prioritizing of the isolated particular and the exclusive causal role that the isolated material phenomenon is assigned by Hobbesian and Lockean empiricism. As Long and Sedley note, Stoicism views universals strictly as “concepts” (ennoēmata) which, lacking any corresponding sense impression, are thus regarded as “figments” (HP, 181–182). A central task in Stoic epistemology thus involves accurately discriminating between a unique sensory impression and a “conception” (ennoēma) that is to be gradually and explicitly distilled from it. Stoicism’s sharply increased stress on epistemological technique at once constrains “judgment” and alters its principal aim. As the expression of a fundamentally critical, rather than (Aristotelian) practical, notion of rationality, judgment for the Stoics has in effect become a technique or method designed to assist the individual in its quest for cognitive autonomy and moral self-legitimation. As Diogenes Laertius notes, “without the study of dialectic the wise man will not be infallible in argument, since dialectic distinguishes the true from the false, and clarifies plausibilities and ambiguous statements” (HP, 184). To the eclectic Cicero, it is just this kind of contraction of the scope of judgment, and its reappraisal as a kind of sustained prevarication, that ultimately exposes the limitations of Stoic thought: “Every thorough account of argument has two parts, one concerned with invention and the other with judgment . . . The Stoics, however, have exerted themselves only in one of these. With that science that they call dialectic they have thoroughly pursued the methods of judgment, but they have completely neglected the art of invention called topics” (HP, 185). Cicero’s critique, in Book 4 of De Finibus, of the younger Cato’s version of Stoicism raises legitimate concerns about Stoicism’s hostility to rhetoric. In flagging the imaginative and creative force of rhetoric, however, Cicero also reveals that to resist this “positional power of language” (as Paul de Man was to put it in our time) is to embrace a strictly defensive and reactive conception of ethics. As I have argued elsewhere, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s imaginative amalgamation of Stoicism’s dialectical concept of judgment with the rhetorical complexity of epistolary form forges a unique way beyond the threatening calcification of judgment into a strictly formalist parsing of propositional language.58
Two related problems opened up (though arguably never solved) by Stoicism turn out to be especially salient for eighteenth-century, neo-Stoic thought. One concerns the apparent role of extreme idealization in Stoic moral psychology, a field ordinarily understood to explore human action descriptively rather than normatively, and hence to adopt a realist rather than ideal mode of representation. The other issue has to do with what the later Stoics regard as cases of false (or precipitous) judgment: strong emotion, or passion (pathē).59 What prompts the Stoic critique of the emotions as de facto failures or lapses of judgment is their strongly evaluative character. Emotion misconstrues as intrinsically good or bad what ought to be regarded as “indifferents” or, at most, as “preferred indifferents” (wealth, fame, health, etc.). It thus constitutes an instance of precipitous “assent” (sunkatathēsis) to an impression, which it validates merely on the strength of its relation to the subject. At the same time, it is hard to see how we could even wish to scrutinize an impression carefully unless we had already judged it to be a priori meaningful for us in some elemental way. As Tad Brennan observes, one may be tempted to regard such “assent” to an impression as “a quasi-deliberative or discursive process, like the investigation of a witness’s bona fides before their testimony is admitted as evidence.” Yet such scrutiny would seem possible only if “the agent has already suspended judgment, at least temporarily. There is no more elevated standpoint from which one can decide whether to assent or suspend; the very fact of scrutiny entails that one has suspended judgment.”60 Inasmuch as for the Stoics judgments occur without the individual being fully aware of his or her assent to an impression or the rejection of it as a mere “figment” (phantasma), their epistemology tends to critique judgment as nearly identical with the “impulse” (hormê) that makes us “assent” to a given impression and that ultimately discharges itself in an action.
There are, however, rare instances when what we judge to be a cataleptic impression undergoes genuine scrutiny, such as when deliberation does not “involve actual intensified scrutiny of the same impression, but rather the deliberate acquisition of a distinct impression (i.e., taking another look).”61 Triggered by the affective and psychosomatic surfeit of emotion, such cases of concerted revaluation throw into relief the basic programmatic intent of Stoic moral psychology. As Brennan puts it, “the most important moment of our ethical progress comes in the replacement of emotions by selections (i.e., the correction of our false beliefs about values).”62 It is precisely this second, counterintuitive reappraisal of emotion as a “product of mistaken judgments, namely assents to impressions that include unwarranted ascriptions of value,”63 that fuels the Stoic quest for neutralizing the emotions altogether. To succeed in this quest is a prerequisite to our achieving virtue, for only in this manner can the individual affirm and consolidate its teleological constitution as a rational being. Central to the objective of apatheia—which in turn serves the ultimate end of rational and tranquil existence—is an explicit and necessarily didactic staging of judgment. In other words, judgment unfolds as a dialectic, narrative drive toward expunging the emotive underpinnings of our epistemological and moral commitments. It constructs truth by methodically disaggregating fact and value, the formal proposition from the affective hold it may have on the individual entertaining it. With regard to this proto-nominalist quality of Stoic virtue, Lawrence Becker has pointed out that “motivated norms are to be found only within the psychological structures of the actual endeavors of individual agents” and that “every norm (as a fact about the world) is internal to some agent’s project.” Yet his immediately following paraphrase also reveals the extent to which such “internalism” is, in fact, already fully enmeshed with the sociality of language: “We simply cannot find any norms—as opposed to sentences about them in writing or speech—that are external to agents.”64
It is this socially constructed aspect of Stoic reason that was to be developed (ultimately against Stoicism’s core axioms) in Augustine’s moral psychology. In his repeated engagement with Stoic thought, which culminates in the critique of Stoic apatheia in Book 19 of De Civitate Dei, Augustine specifically targets the Stoic ideal of self-mastery and the extirpation of all heteronomous affect as both misguided in its intention and unrealistic in its ambition. To begin with, there is the question concerning the sources that generate and sustain Stoicism’s quest for a strictly neutral and self-contained mode of being (apatheia). Such a model of virtue strikes Augustine as incoherent, first and foremost because it is intrinsically reactive, whereas true virtue must unconditionally assent to a vision of the good: “true virtues can exist only in those in whom there is true godliness” (CD, 19.4). Stoic virtue is furthermore contradictory in that it asserts the nullity of external attachments and ills but simultaneously allows for suicide in the event of extreme adversity. The contradiction is not merely logical but, as such, reveals an underlying metaphysical confusion as to whether the ultimate good is to be realized in this world or not. Stoic virtue thus misjudges the nature of its antagonist by perennially mistaking for “external vices” what, in fact, are “internal ones, not the vices of others, but clearly ours and only ours” (CD, 19.4). Once the nature of vice, suffering, and disorder is appropriately identified as internal to the self—indeed, properly constitutive of it—the Stoic program of complete self-possession falls to the ground unless it is situated within a supervening economy of divine grace.65 In brief, Augustine here identifies the central dilemma bedeviling the Stoic idea of “reason as deflecting passion or emotion in the manner of a fortress wall deflecting an outside enemy.” For to the extent that “the passion is itself an expression of some judgment of value, . . . reason is implicated in the experience and the enemy is within the gates. Even should the sage act against the dictates of passion, that very dissent would indicate an opposition within reason itself, not a conflict between rational and blindly irrational sources of motivation.”66
At the heart of Augustine’s moral psychology, then, lies the need for a fully articulated conception of the will—inevitably divided and self-alienated—as the tertium comparationis. For without it we cannot grasp, positively and explicitly, what Stoicism had only ever been able to think disjunctively: sense and intellect, passion and reason. Yet this agency of the will is not simply some psychological term gratuitously added to the existing inventory of desire, intention, impulse, passion, etc. so as to remedy certain impasses within Stoic and Platonist philosophy. Rather, Augustine in De Trinitate and De Civitate Dei takes care to show that the will subtends and coordinates the operation of all other psychological concepts. More crucially yet, the argument will be that the will (a synecdoche for the human person as a spiritual being) is axially linked to the Trinitarian God whose gift it is. Augustine’s model of the human person fundamentally differs from the modern (in origin Stoic or Pelagian) idea of a self committed to the twin ideals of autonomy (autarkeia) and indifference (apatheia) for which method, rather than grace, is to provide the basic resource, and whose realization hinges on the projection of unfettered individual power (libido dominandi) rather than on a participation in, and love for, a supra-personal, transcendent good. Against the latent voluntarism of his Stoic precursors and Pelagian contemporaries, Augustine maintains that willing never constitutes an outright and successful (let alone legitimate) mode of self-possession and self-assertion. The will here is not some “unqualified arbitrium” presaging modern inwardness and its vaunted claims to Cartesian self-scrutiny or Kantian self-legislation. For in that case, Augustine’s self would have to “exercise arbitrium as a power or choice unqualified by other essential divine predicates and without motive beyond power’s exercise.”67 We must now examine why such a reading is implausible, not only as an account of Augustine’s model of human flourishing but, potentially, as a sustainable philosophical argument even for those who, beginning in the early seventeenth century, identified autonomy as both the very foundation and ultimate telos of purposive (human) agency.
1. See Arendt, who argues for prohairesis as “the precursor of the Will” (Life of the Mind, 2:62).
2. Rhetoric, 1378a20–23 (emphasis mine).
3. There is no time to pursue the question as to whether Aristotle means to distinguish between different kinds of pleasure or pain; Leighton certainly does think so, and Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1175a22–28) would appear to prove his point. For our purposes, what matters is that only the “emotions” (pathē) but not the qualia of pleasure or pain (which announce the presence of the emotions in the mind) are propositional and cognitive in nature.
4. Leighton, “Aristotle and the Emotions,” 154; Leighton contends that emotions in Aristotle are “that on account of which judgments change, [but are] not . . . themselves changes of judgments” (ibid., 148). Nicomachean Ethics, 1149a24–31 in Aristotle, Complete Works, hereafter cited parenthetically as NE.
5. See also Aristotle’s discussion of how emotions may distort perception in De Somnis (460b1–16).
6. To render thūmos as “will” is, of course, question-begging and certainly anachronistic. Yet it is a reasonable heuristic device given that the objective for now is to show how Greek thought about human agency relies on several basic concepts—thūmos, boulēsis, prohairesis, hekousion—all of which came to play a significant role in the eventual conception of the will as developed by Augustine.
7. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 29.
8. Ibid., 15–19.
9. Aristotle, De Anima, 418a10–22.
10. Upheavals, 27–28. For a discussion of how the Romantic era rethinks “mood” and “emotion” in an effort to overcome their strictly non-cognitive status in the materialist and reductionist epistemologies of the mid-eighteenth century, see my Romantic Moods, esp. 27–74.
11. Anscombe, “On Promising,” 18.
12. Foot, Natural Goodness, 15; “the way an individual should be is determined by what is needed for development, self-maintenance, and reproduction: in most species involving defence and some rearing of the young” (ibid., 33); the point is also made by Sokolowski (Phenomenology of the Human Person, 186–188).
13. Natural Goodness, 44.
14. Ibid., 54.
15. Crisis, 13, 11. The translation of the last passage has been modified: “Ist Vernunft und Seiendes zu trennen, wo erkennende Vernunft bestimmt, was Seiendes ist?” (Krisis, 11).
16. Nussbaum, Fragility, 273. According to Nussbaum, there is only one mention of orexis to be found prior to Aristotle, viz., in some Democritean fragments whose philological status and reading, moreover, is in dispute.
17. For passages where Aristotle distinguishes between rational desire (boulēsis) and the non-rational desires of thūmos and epithūmia, respectively, see De Anima, 414b1–5, 433a23ff.; Eudemian Ethics, 1223a27; and Magna Moralia, 1187a36–37. On boulēsis, see Rhetoric, 1369a1–7: “All actions that are due to a man himself and caused by himself are due either to habit or to desire; and of the latter, some are due to rational desire, the others irrational. Rational desire is wishing, and wishing is a desire for good [βούλησις ἀγαθοῦ ὄρεξις].” See Frede and Striker, eds., Rationality, 8; Kahn, “Discovering the Will,” esp. 239ff.; and Leighton, “Aristotle and the Emotions,” 160f.
18. Leighton, “Aristotle and the Emotions,” 160.
19. Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will, frequently translates boulēsis as “will.”
20. Frede and Striker, eds., Rationality, 8, here paraphrasing Aristotle’s Rhetoric: “Nobody wishes for anything unless he supposes [οἰηθῇ] it to be good” (Rhetoric, 1369a4). The distinction between contingent desires and an underlying telos—“the pursuit of the good” (τὸ ἀγαθὸν ἄρα διώκοντες)—had first been worked out in Plato, Gorgias, 467–468. Following his long discussion of diseases of the body, Plato in the Timaeus sharply distinguishes volition (boulē) from the physiological realm. Its corruption, always a possibility, is the result of intellectual misapprehension of the good, “for no one is voluntarily wicked” (Timaeus, 86d).
21. Fragility, 286; admittedly, there are slippages in Aristotle’s writings on this topic. As Leighton (“Aristotle and the Emotions,” 166ff.) points out, Aristotle at times will include the non-rational appetites (epithumia) among the emotions; see, for example, Eudemian Ethics, 1220b12; and Nicomachean Ethics, 1105b21.
22. “Psychology: Briefer Course,” in Writings, 1878–1899, 394–395.
23. Eudemian Ethics, 1223a22, 1223b5–10 and 25–30. The programmatic relevance of this passage has long been recognized; see Arendt, Life of the Mind, 61f.; and Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will, 13–26.
24. Sartre’s position is elaborated in Bk. 1, Ch. 2 of Being and Nothingness. For a fuller account of the history of this paradox, see the entry on “Self-Deception” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at www.plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-deception/ (accessed 29 March 2011).
25. Ennead, 6.8.4.
26. Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will, 22.
27. See Chamberlain (“Meaning of Prohairesis”), whose suggested rendering of prohairesis as “commitment” has much to recommend it.
28. Life of the Mind, 2:57–58; the standard discussion of Aristotelian prohairesis is by Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will; see esp. 69–107.
29. Kahn, “Discovering the Will,” 239–240; D. Allen, “Talking about Revolution,” 200.
30. “Talking about Revolution,” 200–201; Kahn (“Discovering the Will”) likewise notes how prohairesis “marks the point of confluence between our desire for a goal and two rational judgments: first, our judgment that the goal is a good one, and, second, our judgment that this action is the best way to pursue it” (241). Arendt (Life of the Mind, 62) fails to notice the extent to which the choice of means also clarifies our awareness of, and deepens our commitment to, ends. O. O’Donovan’s working definition of judgment—“an act of moral discrimination that pronounces upon a preceding act or existing state of affairs to establish a new public context”—recognizes the temporal dimension and, consequently, hermeneutic rather than syllogistic character of judgment. It is simultaneously concerned with a scenario already given and with “a prospective object of action” and, thus, “both pronounces retrospectively on, and clears space prospectively for, actions that are performed within a community.” By nature, then, judgment is “both subject to criteria of truth . . . and to criteria of effectiveness” (Ways of Judgment, 7–9).
31. By contrast, inasmuch as Hobbes’s thinking “is rooted in an individualistic account of the will, oblivious to questions of its providential purpose in the hands of God, it has difficulty in understanding any ‘collective making’, or genuinely social process” (Milbank, Theology, 14).
32. Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person, 118.
33. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 58. The proximity of hairēo to orēgo—the root-verb behind Aristotelian orexis (“extending one’s hand” and in the medio-passive voice, “to reach out for, stretch oneself towards, grasp at, aim at, or hit at”)—emerges in Nussbaum’s discussion of orexis (Fragility, 274–275).
34. “Talking about Revolution,” 199, 201.
35. The distinction first surfaces in MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 32; see also Arendt, HC, esp. 22–78.
36. Allen, “Talking about Revolution,” 197–198, 192. Partially consistent with Allen’s thesis, though not concerned with the important political and social changes that she highlights, is Dihle, Theory of Will, 20–47.
37. Allen (“Talking about Revolution”), 201–202; for a prominent instance of the phrase, see Politics (1280a30): “a state exists for the sake of a good life [ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον τοῦ εὖ ζῆν], and not for the sake of life only.”
38. 1140b15 (italics mine); this convergence is expressly noted by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics, 1143a25, and it suggests why a theory of judgment forever risks succumbing to a tautological method, and why modernity’s strong commitment to neutral “method” as “salvation” (Adorno and Horkheimer) could not succeed given its principled refusal to specify normative “ends” in the strong Aristotelian sense.
39. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 91.
40. Dihle, Theory of Will, 21; as Dihle later notes, this pervasive conjunction of cognition with intention is reflected in the lexical roots of several key concepts; thus “the root ‘gno-’ (as in γνώσις = knowledge and γιγνωσκω = to discern; and γνωμη = maxim; formulated wisdom) always implies an element of intention. Specifically gnomē “includes both intellectual activity and volition” (ibid., 29).
41. “The Iliad, Poem of Might,” in Simone Weil Reader, 163.
42. Nicomachean Ethics, 1144b26. At first glance, Kant’s insistence in his (strikingly neo-Stoic) Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) that an action is to be undertaken not merely in “conformity” with, but positively “for the sake of the moral law” (3) would appear to echo Aristotle’s stress on the “explicitness” of “right reason.” Yet Kant’s moral philosophy no longer sees an essential connection between cognition and praxis; rather, it locates reason exclusively in an inner attitude or intention that has effectively been sealed off from the contingent empirical realm of practical life.
43. On the Stoic theory of “assent,” see Brennan, “Stoic Moral Psychology.” On the question of normativity in relation to the Stoics’ formal-linguistic criterion of explicitness, see Brandom, Making it Explicit, 3–66; following Peter Geach, Foot insists that to speak of something as “good” is to employ it as an “attributive adjective,” which is “logically different” from a “predicative adjective”—as in “the car is red” (Foot, Natural Goodness, 2–3).
44. Whose Justice? 118.
45. This is not the place to take up the relationship between judgment, will, and the emergence of a theory of natural rights. For a discussion of the latter, and for very different accounts of its historical emergence and textual (scriptural) sources, see Tierney, Idea, 43–77, who locates the beginning of a modern rights conception in twelfth-century legal practice; Strauss, Natural Right and History, 165–251, focuses on Hobbes and Locke; whereas Wolterstorff, Justice, 35–131, implicitly rejects MacIntyre’s “right order” or “right reason” conception by dating back the emergence of claim rights (“rights to specific goods”) to certain “inherent rights” in Hebrew and Christian scripture; see also Milbank, “Against Human Rights” and below, 380–392.
46. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 133; for a strong, more detailed version of this argument, see C. Taylor, Sources, 25–52.
47. Perhaps no other writer grasped potentially disastrous implications of a notion of choice reduced to the assertion of absolute dominium over a claim right at the expense of any communal norms better than Heinrich von Kleist; see esp. his Michael Kohlhaas (1808).
48. On this threshold, see Blumenberg, LMA, 125–226; for readings of nominalism as a major catalyst of modernity, see C. Taylor, Secular Age, 90–99; Dupré, Passage, 88–89 and 121–125; Gauchet, Disenchantment, 47–62; Aers, Salvation and Sin, 25–54; and Gillespie, Theological Origins, 19–43.
49. Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 37; all translations are my own. For an alternate translation, see Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab. See also Heidegger’s observation that “every decision . . . bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing, else it would never be a decision [Entscheidung]” (“Of the Origin of the Work of Art,” in Hofstadter, Philosophies, 681).
50. Schmitt, Politsche Theologie, 36–38.
51. Moses Hadas, in Seneca, Stoic Philosophy, 20. As regards the reemergence of Stoic motifs in modernity, particularly salient instances would include Justus Lipsius, beginning with his highly influential Stoic dialogue De Constantia (1569) and culminating in his late Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam (“Guide to Stoic Philosophy”) and Physiologia Stoicorum (“Physical Theory of the Stoics”) of 1602; an early instance of neo-Stoic thought can be found in John Calvin’s early commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia (1532); while less consistently observable in Montaigne’s Essais, Stoic motifs are altogether central to the work of Descartes, the work of Shaftesbury, and also the aesthetics of Nicholas Poussin.
52. Nussbaum, Upheavals, 359.
53. Quoted in Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 184; all references to this edition are to vol. 1 and will henceforth be made parenthetically as HP.
54. HP, 461; on the debate between the Stoics and the Academics concerning the authenticity and reliability of sense impressions, see Hankinson, “Stoic Epistemology.”
55. For a succinct account of popular and persistent misconstruals of Stoic commonplaces, see Rorty, “Two Faces of Stoicism.”
56. Dupré, Passage, 121.
57. See Hankinson, “Stoic Epistemology,” 60f., and Sellars, Stoicism, 64–74.
58. Pfau, “Letter of Judgment.”
59. “The Stoics postulate pandemic error when it comes to matters of evaluation: all of the individuals around us, as well as our cultures, laws, and institutions, are wildly misguided in our assessments of what is good and bad. . . . These false beliefs . . . are known to the Stoics as pathê, or emotions” (Brennan, “Stoic Moral Psychology,” 264). There is tension between Zeno’s (early Stoic) position that emotions are the products of judgments and Chrysippus’s and the later Stoics’ view of emotion as being ipso facto a judgment; on this issue, see Sellars, Stoicism, 114–120; for further discussion of the place of emotion within Stoic thought, see Rorty, “Two Faces of Stoicism,” 343–344; Nussbaum, Upheavals, 358–372 (esp. on “compassion”), and Nussbaum’s earlier study of Stoicism (Therapy, 359–401).
60. Brennan, “Stoic Moral Psychology,” 262. It is just this insight that prompts Newman, in his Grammar of Assent (1870), to distinguish sharply between “notional” and “real” assent. The latter involves “the unconditional acceptance of a proposition” which, as Newman stresses, hinges on our unconditional embrace of “the images in which it lives.” By contrast, notional assent embraces a proposition only “on the condition of an acceptance of its premisses” and thus cannot offer positive “certitude” but only the “certainty” that derives from inferential reasoning (Grammar of Assent, 76, 86).
61. Ibid., 263.
62. Ibid., 272.
63. Sellars, Stoicism, 117.
64. Becker, New Stoicism, 76–77.
65. See Augustine’s claim that “we cannot live rightly unless, while we believe and pray, we are helped by Him Who has given us the faith to believe that we must be helped by Him. The philosophers, however, have supposed that the Final Good and Evil are to be found in this life. They hold that the Supreme Good lies in the body, or in the soul, or in both, . . . in rest, or in virtue, or in both” (CD, 19.4). On the seeming circularity that the very faith and strength of will on which the recognition of divine grace depends is itself a gift bestowed by it, see Stump, “Augustine on Free Will.”
66. Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 53.
67. Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, 93. Arguing that Augustine’s differences with the Pelagians not only involve the interpretation of grace but, by implication, whether human nature—including the capacity for faith and righteous willing—is itself a divine gift (donum), Hanby convincingly views the Augustinian self as constitutively situated vis-à-vis the Trinity and, hence, as incommensurable with “the Pelagian introduction of another kind of self, alien to this economy, into Christian thought and practice” (91).