Contrasting the count noun materialism of our own time with the mass
noun materialism of the early Meilesians, one might suppose that just such
straddling of ancient and modern might come to be a familiar feature in “missing
chapters.” At any rate I dare to scout a
peculiarly unpromising venture along that line if only to indicate early on
how, in pursuing my program, I shall not be content with easy pickings. Flaunting indeed bravado, I aim to project a
modern counterpart of Aristotle’s much maligned great souled man who must not
fail of being quite as problematic as him.
At the same time,
the problematic greatness of mind of this modern counterpart is designed to
invite us to rethink our alienation from Aristotle’s original a salient
characteristic of whom lies in his . . . disdain that Aristotle feels free to
liken to how the vulgar rich throw their weight around in contempt of the rest
of us who are so much less well heeled than they.
Excelling in his
exercise of all the moral virtues, Aristotle’s great souled man’s disdain can
only be said at 1124B 1-5 to be grotesquely aped by the vulgar rich, rather in
the mode of a caricature of him in Aristophanes. Alas, caricatures even in their monstrous
exaggerations can be very revealing of the truth, and one may thus even credit
the many classical scholars of the last century, not least those who were
otherwise fans of the Nicomachean Ethics, for deploring NEIV, 3. Flat-footed enough in its valorization of
folk ethics in the absence of this egregious chapter, which can really be felt
to stand out like the proverbial sore thumb, Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean,
as between too much and too little, hardly squares with a disdain that even
invites parody.
How then explain my
own eagerness to project a modern replay of this highly infelicitous material? Well, no such eagerness ever
crossed my mind. One very external
factor, rather, comes into play, namely the following paragraph very late in
Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, from a chapter entitled “Of greatness
of mind”.
Heroism, or military glory, is much admired by the
generality of mankind. They consider it
as the most sublime kind of merit. Men
of cool reflection are not so sanguine in their praises of it. The infinite confusions and disorder, which
it has caused in the world, diminish much of its merit in their eyes. When they would oppose the popular notions on
this head, they always paint out the evils, which this supposed virtue has
produced in human society; the subversion of empires, the devastation of
provinces, the sack of cities. As long
as these are present to us, we are more inclined to hate than admire the
ambition of heroes. But when we fix our
view on the person himself, who is the author of all this mischief, there is
something so dazzling in his character, the mere contemplation of it so
elevates the mind, that we cannot refuse it our admiration. The pain, which we receive from its tendency
to the prejudice of society, is over-powered by a stronger and more immediate
sympathy.
So there you have
it, without any coaching from me, a “missing chapter” in the history of ethics,
credited solely to Hume, whereby greatness of mind is found to straddle ancient
and modern thanks to Hume’s rather more candid Nietzschean trope already
anticipated by Aristotle. Equally
committed to providing a philosophic rationale for folk ethics, they are also
at one by jointly disrupting the scheme with a Nietzschean add-on.
Actually, there are
two “missing chapters” in ethics that come into play here, only one of which
features this add-on in Hume and Aristotle alike, with the other, quite novel
“missing chapter” undertaking to combine Aristotle’s ethics with Hume’s sans
the Nietzschean add-on in each of them.
In projecting this novel Humeo-Aristotelian version of folk ethics, it
may be almost enough for me to fixate on how the Greek word kalon,
commonly translated as “noble” or “fine”, which is what Aristotle’s ethics is
all about, goes much more compellingly into “meritorious”, once one registers
the fact that “personal merit” plays precisely the role for Hume that the kalon
plays for Aristotle. But it is not
merely “meritorious” that enriches our grasp of Aristotle’s kalon. There is in Hume something else, though for
this – “what elevates the mind” – we must not hesitate to plunder Hume’s
Nietzschean add-on.
Finally, Hume
supplies a third factor – “disinterested approbation” – that trades on the
distinction between what we desire and what we admire, where the kalon figures
principally as regards the latter, with Aristotle’s akrasia thus kicking
in at long last. Arguably, there is even
a fourth factor – Hume’s even handed treatment of self-regarding vs. other
regarding considerations in his four-fold scheme of personal merit = the kalon,
namely (a) conduct useful to others, (b) conduct useful to oneself, (c) conduct
immediately agreeable to others and (d) conduct immediately agreeable to
oneself, where (d) figures directly in what elevates the mind of the hero while
(c) characterizes our vicarious participation in that elevation by way of
“sympathy”.
This even-handedness
is all the more striking for those who have accessed in Aristotle’s Rhetoric
his extended account of the kalon strongly emphasizing altruism. Not that any such emphasis is evident to
modern readers of the Nicomachean Ethics. To the contrary, we are apt to fault
Aristotle for contaminating what affects to be a rationale for folk ethics with
an excess of self-regardingness.
That the kalon
comes fully into its own very belatedly, only in Hume, I take to be an
astonishing “missing chapter” in the history of ethics. How’s that for straddling ancient and modern!
