Dear Prudence | Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI

Deliberation, science, wisdom, oh my!

Today, we continue our read-along of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. If you’re just now joining and want to catch up, here is the schedule we are following (with links to previous posts):

• July 1: Introducing the work, Aristotle’s life, etc.

• July 8: Book I

• July 15: Book II

• July 22: Book III

• July 29: Book IV

• August 5: Book V

• August 12: Book VI

• August 19: Book VII

• August 26: Book VIII

• September 2: Book IX

• September 9: Book X

• September 16:

  Retrospective

This read-along of Nicomachean Ethics is free. But if you want to support my work – which really means helping me support my family – and you want access to the monthly Zoom calls, become a paying subscriber. For the rest of August, a yearly subscription to Walking Away is 20% off. To subscribe and support my work on Substack and YouTube, just go to this link.

The next members-only Zoom call will be on August 18 at 8 PM Eastern. That’s right before the post for Book VII will go live, but we might discuss a little bit about VII in the call.

That means we’ll have one more call during the read-along — maybe just after the September 16 retrospective post. Then we’ll take a break for about a month and start on another book together. I have narrowed down the selection for the next read-along to three books! I won’t say what they are yet, but I can say that the final selection will be a novel with heavy philosophical themes.

Allegory of Wisdom

We’ve now read 6 of the 10 books of Nicomachean Ethics. Before we move on to discuss Book VI in any detail, I want to take a step back and think about how far we’ve come.

We started this read-along with a discussion of the highest good. Aristotle threw us into the deep-end when it comes to teleology, human action, the difference between voluntary and involuntary actions, and so on. All of this was in service of the larger project of becoming good — or as I like to put it, becoming better human beings. Eventually, we learned what happiness is; it is an activity of the soul in accord with virtue. We learned about virtues, which are characteristics. We learned about the idea of the mean, where virtues sit between two vices (though this way of looking at the virtue was modified slightly when we discussed justice). So far, however, we have only spoken of the moral virtues. Remember that Aristotle speaks of another sort of virtue as well.

By the way, one reason I recommend the edition of Nicomachean Ethics is that it includes a nice overview of the moral virtues and vices as an appendix. It is nice to have a list, with the Greek terms included, for some review. In total, we covered eleven moral virtues.

If you wanted to think of this in very rough terms, so far what we have done is cover an important part of the ethical life, the moral virtues, but we have not analyzed the moral life exhaustively. Thus, in Book VI, Aristotle takes a turn. We need to move on to virtues of thinking.

Yet, Aristotle begins the book with a stunning admission: everything we’ve done so far has been imprecise, and we need to refine our methodology. We have spoken of the need to avoid excess, to strive for the middle term, and so on, but Aristotle admits that this could be read as a mere truism. All sciences would say this. “Speaking in this way is, while truthful, not at all clear,” Aristotle writes.

The problem is that Aristotle has appealed to correct reason time and again, but without a theory of correct reason we are left without a real definition of any of the virtues. So we will turn to virtues of thinking in Book VI, which brings us to a very important topic: prudence.

Deliberation

Aristotle previously has distinguished between the rational and non-rational parts of the soul. The part possessing reason is further divided in VI.2, where Aristotle asserts that there are scientific and calculative parts of the rational soul. The calculative part of the soul is responsible for deliberation, while the scientific contemplates things which do not admit of being otherwise. In practical matters, we are concerned with the calculative part of the soul. Calculation is deliberation.

These distinctions, of course, feel archaic. I imagine some substantial portion of the readers of Walking Away do not even believe in souls. But think of it this way: whatever it is that is responsible for thought, there is a part that handles our day-to-day deliberations and there is a part that handles our more theoretical and abstract contemplations. Certainly we know of people who are great minds at mathematics, say, but cannot make a grilled cheese sandwich or handle a social situation with any sort of grace; these are very different skills, at the very least.

When we deliberate, we are dealing with choice and longing. Our choices are the source of movement and action, but we do not move for the sake of our choices. Rather, there is an end to our action — there is something for which we are acting. My choice to get up, go to the kitchen, and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich causes me to move and to act, but I do not move for the sake of my choice. My deliberations, like my scientific contemplation, aim at truth.

Five ways to reach the truth

There are five ways to reach the truth: art, science, prudence, wisdom, and intellect.

Science, for Aristotle, only pertains to those things which exist necessarily. Thus there is no science of contingent things — the things which admit of being otherwise. This is very different from what we mean by science now, so let’s reiterate this point: science only pertains to those things which exist necessarily. You investigate science through logical arguments; for that, you may want to look at Aristotle’s Analytics.

Art is more like technical skill; the term in Greek is technē. Shoemaking and shipbuilding – two skills Aristotle uses as examples at the beginning of Nicomachean Ethics – are examples of art. Art concerns making, rather than acting.

This distinguishes art from prudence. Prudence is truly about action. A prudent person, Aristotle writes, can deliberate about living well in general, not in a partial way. ‘Prudence is a true characteristic that is bound up with action, accompanied by reason, and concerned with things good and bad for the human being’ (VI.5, 1140b). ‘Prudence is necessarily accompanied by reason, necessarily in possession of the truth, and bound up with actions pertaining to the human goods’ (VI.5, 1140b). Prudence actually requires knowledge of both universals and particulars, though the latter is more important (see the end of VI.7).

Wisdom is concerned with demonstration (‘it belongs to the wise person to have a demonstration about some things’ [VI.6, 1141a]). This associates wisdom with science. The wise man knows the truth of principles and knows how to proceed from them in the manner of science. ‘The most precise of the sciences would be wisdom’ (VI.7, 1141a). To be wise also includes intellectually grasping honorable things — the term for this intellectual grasp is nous, usually translated as intellect (the term can refer to both the intellect itself and the act of the intellect grasping the truth). (It is very helpful to consult Bartlett & Collins’ glossary for these terms.)

Are all virtues a kind of prudence?

It would seem that prudence is, basically, just the grasping of the truth of the matter and the ability to choose the right course of action once the truth has been grasped. So if one is particularly intellectualist about action, you might think that all it takes to be virtuous is to be prudent. (I personally was drawn to this view for a long time. If this view is correct, then there really is only one virtue: prudence. It just manifests in different ways, and we give these ways names.)

Aristotle rejects the idea that all virtues are a kind of prudence. Instead, he says that Socrates was right when he spoke of prudence being a necessary condition for virtue. Correct reason is prudence, and so prudence is baked-in to the definition of virtue. But prudence is not sufficient for virtue.

To be virtuous, then, one must act in accord with correct reason, but Aristotle also makes a slight modification: virtue must be accompanied by correct reason. You need to think prudently, not just accidentally align with prudence, in order to be virtuous. You have to know what you are doing.