BMCR 2009.08.33: Lockwood on Burger, Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics (paperback reprint of 2008 edition)

Ronna Burger, Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean
Ethics (paperback reprint of 2008 edition).  Chicago/London:
University of Chicago Press, 2009.  Pp. viii, 309.  ISBN 9780226080529.
$22.50.

Reviewed by Thornton C. Lockwood, Boston University ([email protected])
Word count:  2086 words
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At first glance, one might wonder how a philosopher such as Aristotle,
born in 384 BCE, could--as the title of Burger's book puts it--have a
dialogue with Socrates, who died in 399 BCE.  Not only did Aristotle
never see or hear Socrates in person, but since Socrates--according to
his contemporaries--never wrote anything, Aristotle also never
encountered the thoughts or opinions of Socrates at first hand.  Of
course, Aristotle encountered Plato's depiction of Socrates and it is
Plato's Socrates whom Burger presents as Aristotle's central
"interlocutor" in his Nicomachean Ethics [EN].  Burger presents a rich
and challenging reading of the Ethics based on the interpretative
principle that "Aristotle constructs the figure of Socrates as a
perfect foil against which to develop a different account of virtue of
character" (5). Burger's claim is not an empirical or historical one
about whom Aristotle had in mind when writing the Ethics, but rather a
philosophical claim about how Aristotle's Ethics begins in, wrestles
with, and modifies a set of theses espoused by the Platonic Socrates.

Burger's argument is partially textual, based on analysis of the
specific passages where Aristotle discusses the ideas of Socrates in
the Ethics; but it is primarily philosophical, based on a conceptual
thread which Burger locates primarily in Ethics II-VIII, but ultimately
throughout the work as a whole.  The result is a detailed analysis of
most of the central passages and problems of the Ethics, with
individual chapters devoted to the problem of the human good, the
nature of ethical virtue, the depiction of individual ethical virtues,
the nature of intellectual virtue, the problem of pleasure and akrasia,
the nature of friendship, and the nature of happiness.  Although
undergraduates familiar with Plato's Socrates and Aristotle's Ethics
will find provocative connections in Burger's book, Burger's intended
audience are scholars and philosophers (many of whom are directly
engaged in the over sixty pages of notes which follow the book's four
appendices) who have sought to understand the overriding argument of
the Ethics.  Although inevitably Burger's interpretation of some
passages seems unpersuasive, on the whole I found Burger's volume to be
one of the most philosophically thought-provoking contemporary
treatments of the Ethics.

Burger's central argument is that although the Ethics begins in
apparent opposition to Socrates' claim that virtue is knowledge--for
instance, in its rejection of the idea of the good as relevant for
ethical philosophy, its emphasis upon the place of ethical habituation,
or its presentation of the ethical virtues as individuated--EN VI's
account of phronesis as the necessary condition of ethical virtue which
also unifies the individual virtues (and the desiring and reasoning
parts of the soul of which the ethical and intellectual virtues are
perfections) serves as a "pivot", after which Aristotle endorses a view
closer to that of the Platonic Socrates. Burger writes that "the path
of the argument from Book II through Book VI, then, must be the result
of Aristotle's concerted effort to stave off as long as possible his
acknowledgment of the Socratic position" (49).  Why would Aristotle
avoid such an acknowledgment?  Burger argues that the problem of the
intended audience of the Ethics is the source of his strategy in the
Ethics.   Although Aristotle claims that the young are not suited for
political science, he also claims that ethical speeches are useless for
those motivated only by the threat of punishment; further, they seem
superfluous for those who already love what is noble (1095a2-6,
1197b7-10).  If the lessons of the Ethics are inappropriate for the
young, useless for the unethical and superfluous for the virtuous, then
who is the work's intended audience? Burger resolves this
paradox--which seems to be an "invitation to a prospective audience
which cannot exist" (20)--by suggesting that the participant Aristotle
has in mind is one who "must have experienced enough of life to have
put into question the fixity of the moral education with which he was
brought up" (18). More generally, whereas on the surface the Ethics
appears to be a treatise offering instruction rather than questions,
Burger locates in Aristotle's dialogue with Plato's Socrates a more
aporetic work intended to call into question the very beliefs which the
work presupposes in its audience.

To support her claim that Aristotle develops his own position in
dialogue with that of Plato's Socrates, Burger discerns a pattern in
the way that Aristotle refers to Socrates by name in the Ethics (a
pattern which is documented in the book's first appendix).  Socrates is
cited by name seven times in four different clusters in the Ethics:
first, in the account of courage (EN III.8), secondly, in the account
of irony (EN IV.7), thirdly, in the account of the relationship between
ethical and intellectual virtual (EN VI.13), and, finally, in the
account of akrasia (EN VII.2-3).  Burger argues that the treatment of
the individual ethical virtues in EN III-V presents a sort of
"phenomenology" of ethical virtue, one which brings out the partial
truths and inner contradictions in ordinary experience of the virtues,
much like aporetic Platonic dialogues (72).  Within this framework,
Aristotle's treatment of courage--for instance--introduces for the
first time in the Ethics as a whole a thematized treatment of the
beautiful (kalon), including the claim that the beautiful is the telos
of virtue (1115b11-13).  Aristotle introduces Socrates here, for the
first time, attributing to him, and then criticizing, the claim that
virtue is a kind of knowledge (episteme).  But, although Aristotle
criticizes Socrates' account of courage, Burger suggests that the
invocation of Socrates here should also bring to mind the deeds of
Plato's Socrates, including those at his trial and at his execution
(and, by extension, his deeds after the battle of Arginusae or before
the Thirty Tyrants, which are reported in Apology 32a-e).  Burger
writes that "Aristotle mentioned Socrates only to mock the thesis that
courage is knowledge; but it is hard not to think of Socrates when
Aristotle assigns true courage finally to the person who faces the end
of a life he believes to be the most worth living" (79-80).

If Aristotle's treatment of Socrates in the case of the individual
virtues is meant to initiate questions about the internal coherence of
the ethical virtues, understood individually in abstraction as the
result of habituation and as the perfection of the desiring part of the
soul, the investigation of intellectual virtue in EN VI--especially in
its last two chapters--in Burger's words "transforms ethical virtue,
with the result that it no longer constitutes an independent sphere.
What was originally the duality of virtue of character and virtue of
thought becomes the unity of practical virtue, or excellence of action"
(111).  And of course, EN VI.13, where Aristotle argues not only that
ethical virtue presupposes intellectual virtue but also that it is
impossible to possess a single ethical virtue without possessing all of
them, is Aristotle's explicit concession to the partial correctness of
Socrates' claim that virtue is knowledge.  Aristotle's treatment of
Socrates' account of akrasia in EN VII follows a similar pattern:
Although Aristotle initially appears to criticize Socrates' denial of a
conflict between reason and desire, he concludes--after presenting the
phenomenon of akrasia as a failure of knowing particulars in the case
of action--by again conceding the truth of Socrates' position.  But, as
Burger points out, Aristotle arrives--through his consideration of the
Socratic position--at the conclusion that "what makes one vulnerable to
akrasia is precisely reliance on virtue acquired solely through
habituation" (152; cf. 201-2).  Just as the Myth of Er at the close of
Republic X teaches the perils of "participating in virtue by habit,
without philosophy" (Rep. 619c7-d1), Burger argues that Aristotle's
reflection on the misfire between reason and desire in the case of
akrasia ultimately champions the Socratic claim that virtue is
knowledge.

Although Aristotle's last explicit reference to Socrates takes place in
EN VII.3, Burger locates "Socratic" turns elsewhere in the remainder of
the Ethics, for instance in Aristotle's thematization of thumos in EN
VII (149), the rejection of a natural scientific or cosmological
account of friendship (163), the investigation of eros within the
account of friendship (183), and the rethinking of pleasure in EN X
(191).  More generally, Burger argues that the account of
philosophizing together which concludes the account of friendship (188)
or the elevation of contemplation over the second best way of life are
"Socratic answers" to the Socratic question of what is the good life
for a human being (212).  Indeed, Burger's book closes by arguing that
the dialogue which Aristotle establishes between himself and Socrates
also establishes an "energeia of theoria" in which we too participate.

Although I have chosen to focus on the central motif of Socrates in
Burger's book, it should be noted that her discussion ranges more
broadly throughout the Ethics, for instance, taking up the different
"peaks" of the Ethics (e.g. greatness of soul and justice), the
relationship between friendship and happiness, the connection between
Aristotle's two different accounts of pleasure, and Aristotle's final
transition to politics.  The sixty pages of notes at the end of the
volume engage a welcome diversity of methodological approaches to the
Ethics, discussing the work of scholars like Strauss and Bernadete,
Aquinas and al-Farabi, and Irwin and Kraut. Burger notes in her
acknowledgments that the volume has been in the works for over a decade
and it is clearly the mature reflection of a scholar equally conversant
in philosophy and classics.

As noted at the outset, Burger's interpretation of individual passages
or sections of the Ethics will invite the scrutiny and disagreement of
Aristotle scholars in passing, but I wish to consider at length a more
general methodological presupposition of the book.  In her
introduction, Burger notes that she uses the term "dialogue" in her
book's title "not in the spirit of an empirical claim about what
Aristotle had in mind when writing the Ethics, but as a tool of
interpretation, to be judged by the philosophical results it yields, in
particular, the underlying argument it discloses whose movement makes
the work a whole" (5).  Thus, the "Socrates" of Burger's interpretation
is an heuristic device--one whose worth can be judged by the
philosophical richness of the interpretation.  As I hope my review
makes clear, I find Burger's interpretation quite rich and thought
provoking, and thus her use of Socrates as an heuristic device quite
defensible.  I think she has hit upon a major thread that runs through
the work as a whole--one which explains a good number of the twists and
turns of the Ethics.  And yet Burger presupposes throughout her book
that all invocations of "Socrates" in Aristotle's Ethics refer to the
character of Socrates in Plato's dialogues.  In one note, she
acknowledges that scholars have tried to distinguish Aristotle's
references to the historical and Platonic Socrates, but she then goes
on to dismiss the evidence which calls into question whether there is
only one Socrates in Aristotle's Ethics (249 n. 20). More precisely, in
the case of EN III.8 Burger endorses the validity of Fitzgerald's
canon--which asserts that references to <greek>o( *Swkra/ths</greek>
indicate the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues--but then she
disregards its relevance in the case of the other invocations of
Socrates in the Ethics, all of which, according to Fitzgerald's canon,
refer to the historical Socrates.[[1]]

Although the veracity of Burger's presupposition does not undermine her
use of Socrates as an heuristic device for interpreting the Ethics, it
leaves undecided precisely whom Aristotle himself thought he was
arguing with in the Ethics, and more generally his attitude towards the
historical Socrates and other historical Socratics and members of the
Academy whom Aristotle discusses in the Ethics, such as Plato,
Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Eudoxus.  Although discerning the
doxographic identity of those authors in Aristotle's writings is an
age-old problem, a study oriented to the "dialogue(s)" of Aristotle's
Ethics needs to consider the historical question of Socrates' identity.
If Aristotle distinguishes the historical and Platonic Socrates (which
he appears to do, for instance, in the Metaphysics, the Politics, and
the Magna Moralia), and the Socrates of EN III.8 is the character of a
Platonic dialogue but the Socrates of EN VI.13 the historical Socrates,
then the interpretative claim that EN III-VI presents a trajectory of
thought defined by a dialogue with Socrates is questionable.  Even if
determining a final answer to the "Socrates problem" seems impossible
solely within Aristotle's corpus, there is still ample evidence within
Aristotle's writings to discern when he has the historical or the
Platonic Socrates in mind.  The basis of Burger's interpretative claim
could be strengthened by consideration of such empirical evidence.


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Notes:


1.   Fitzgerald's canon was first articulated in W. Fitzgerald,
Selections from the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (Dublin, 1853).  W.
D. Ross presents a defense of the canon in the introduction to his
edition of Aristotle's Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924),
vol. 1, pp. xxxiii-xlv, in response to A. E. Taylor's criticisms of it
in his "On the Alleged Distinction in Aristotle between
<greek>*Swkra/ths</greek> and <greek>o( *Swkra/ths</greek>," in Varia
Socratica, 1st Series (Oxford: James Parker, 1911), pp. 40-90.