Abstract
Wisdom is to have correct views of the goods and bads of human life, and of their relative worth and standing: to understand how to navigate one’s way through these, in the situations in which one finds oneself, so as always to end in a correct (or forgivably mistaken) judgment of how best to act—successfully, wisely. Lacking it, one is in danger of living a life in some way bad or defective. It may be a really corrupt, wicked life. Or it may be simply a wasted one, where the agent squanders talents and time, without doing anything so terribly bad, certainly not to others. Admittedly, we can perhaps speak of the wicked as in a certain way shallow, although that would need elaboration (one’s immediate reaction to extreme cruelty not being “shallow, shallow!”); less contentiously, we can speak of the unjust life of an unjust person as one wasted (though that too is not the first thing we are likely to say). Our talk of waste, etc., is typically more particular– where the issues are rather with idleness, triviality, and superficiality, with failures to appreciate, pursue, or be moved by, things of real human worth: it points to a more specific range of defects and misjudgements of worth, etc. This paper explores the notions of depth and shallowness as they figure in Foot’s reflections on the good, and then considers the implications of these notions for our understanding of what it is to live well or badly and what it is to have lived happily or unhappily.
What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else
Alberto Giacometti
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Aristotle NE 6.5.1140a24–31. Also on the two parts: NE 6.9.1142b18–33; Pol. 7.13.1331b26–1332a3; cf. EE 1.7.1217a35–40).
- 2.
Foot perhaps has Murdoch’s views in sight here (Murdoch 1970, 34–8, 41).
- 3.
Aristotle does not include in matters of character the intellectual “emotions”—curiosity, wonder, awe, sense of nose and imagination, pertinacity, respect for truth, et al., and their proper objects. If so, it is for wisdom in reaching its judgments to bring in the consideration of goods and bads beyond those at issue in the virtues of character (e.g., for him, contemplation, theoria, a good suspectly humanly transcendent).
- 4.
The lack is a defect. Full human action , Praxis , involves the agent viewing their action as the wise thing to do; for it actually to be so, they need wisdom. It is possible to acknowledge the, perhaps partial, lack, and seek good advice: cf. NE 1.4.1095b10–14, the incisive quote from Hesiod. But without it, one is vulnerable (cf. EE 1.6.1216b35–1217a10).
- 5.
There are other sorts of defect, for example, a failure to grow up and develop properly serious values, and then just drift through life . That would be one form of superficiality.
- 6.
“Meaning is commonly associated with a kind of depth. Often the need for meaning is connected to the sense that one’s life is empty or shallow” (Wolf, 7–8). Wolf sees meaningfulness in a life as a third kind of value besides happiness (prudence ) and morality . Certainly, once happiness and morality are each flattened within some narrow compass—the egoistic versus the impersonal—space opens to require something else (1f.). Frankfurt does something somewhat similar, restricting morality to concerns with others (80–1, vii). These restricted “divisions” perhaps go back to the generation after Aristotle , and are endemic to much Western moral philosophy. I find them unclear, although concerned with their origin and attraction (e.g., roots in the contrast of the utile and the honestum, and in a connection of justice with the theme of the impersonality of law) (Lawrence 1995, 106).
- 7.
John Hacker-Wright notes that this resonates with the Confucian conception of li as an ideal of a social medium, in which socialized patterns of behavior enable us to frame, contour, and express our humanity and mutual respect. Li is helpfully articulated by Fingarette (1972), Chapter 1.
- 8.
As portrayed in Chaplin’s Modern Times. Cf. Braverman (1974). One can be struck also by the almost Sisyphean aspects of modern life , with its bureaucratic demands, its legal labyrinths, its endless forms, and queues: the paler, not so blatantly exploitative, aspects of “die Netzestadt.” “Ridiculous the waste sad time, stretching before and after.” Someone is out there thinking to make their job easier, regardless of using up your life -hours: collateral social damage. The business-ification of life : rampant Taylorization, of labor and correlatively of charges. Not to mention the use of pointless labor precisely to torture—from the punishment of writing lines to things much darker.
- 9.
So too Odysseus in his choice of a new life in the Myth of Er at the end of Republic 10: “By chance the soul of Odysseus was assigned the last lot of all and went out to choose, with the memory of his former toils having relieved him of his ambition for status [philotimia] it wandered around for a long time seeking a life of a private retiring [apragmon] man, and after difficulty found one lying somewhere passed by unconsidered by the others, and, seeing it, said that he would have done the same even if he had had the first lot, and chose it gladly” (Rep. 620c3–d2).
- 10.
I think here of Mayhew’s (2012) London Labour and the London Poor.
- 11.
- 12.
More recently, Rawls’ Aristotelian principle (Sec. 65). Cf. G. Cohen (2000), 13–5.
- 13.
The question of their number and internal structure is left open at this point, although if one turns out more valuable and final, then the optimal life would need at least to realize that (NE 1.7.1098a17–18).
- 14.
This requires more discussion. At one level, any action of an individual of any species is not “private” in that it falls under a species life -description. (This is not to say that an individual’s “behavior” cannot fall apart into disarray and incoherence; nor that special things may not need to be said about the acquisition of mature forms of behavior.) At a second level, if the human is essentially a politikon zoon, then to human is to “politicize” or “socialize.” (We can broaden this from Aristotle ’s own historically informed sense of “polis” to, e.g., “a mature form of rational life -activity in a community of such a size to produce and maintain an enriching cultural life , a properly releasing social medium.”) Our rational activities are social in themselves and in their resonance (their emotional and evaluative surround), something deeply connected with a species consciousness, of being human , one among others of one’s kind, a conscious normativity is thus achieved here (cf. Feuerbach (2008), 1f.; Marx, 1844, “Alienation”): our rationality, our identity, our consciousness, are all social.
- 15.
Our Individuality , as also our Communality, have essential roles in our humanity: that we can sing solo, that we can sing in choir. Getting our Individuality intelligibly placed and characterized within our Sociality is a task. Once we allow all human activity is in a basic sense social, in contrast, say, to God’s, then contrasts between conjoint and lone work can be non-metaphysically re-deployed, as ones of degree, and variety. (a) There is the unique author’s, musician’s, sculptor’s voice, in its delicate, or perhaps iconoclastic, dance within its own tradition; and the intimacies of our personal ruminations. So many forms of working alone—at extremes the strengths to keep going when all around have no confidence, simply “because you must”: the antennae of society; or the isolated prisoner of conscience). (b) Equally there are many forms of our conjointness: drill marching, choirs, orchestras, builders, surgical teams, teaching a class, institutions with cooperative roles, professions with defining traditions.
By contrast, Aristotle ’s god—contemplation—is an entirely private activity, one of which we too are to a degree capable: a metaphysical nonsense. The Berkeleian view of the individual spirit is one in an essentially private relation to its God, prior to any between human spirits, and equally nonsense. Both strands linger on as suspect underpinnings of individualist modern “Liberalism ,” individual consciousness internalizing the role of God, as a metaphysically lone viewpoint on the world. No wonder Hume, and then Nietzsche saw the need to deconstruct the self, so conceived (Basic ontological dualism of soul /mind invites a metaphysical individualism, distorting appreciation of the nature of a social animal with a social identity).
- 16.
Nietzsche (1887) Essay 1, §10, uses the same contrast, but deploys it differently, class-wise, to distinguish between the healthy nobles’ active conception of happiness as Greek eupraxia, and the sick slaves’ passive Christian conception of it as “rest, peace, ‘sabbath,’” etc.
- 17.
See Pol. 1.9.1257b25–31 for the End-Means Limitation principle: the pursuit of an end as such is unlimited, and delimits the pursuit of the means to those required for the end (cf. Pol. 7.1.1323b6–12; NE 7.13.1153b21–25).
- 18.
Notoriously, this was a slogan in many German concentration camps, among them Dachau and Auschwitz. The exact why and who of its instigation is for historians. A dabble in Google makes one suspect its origin in a reference, at once both moralizing and contemptuous, to Lorenz Diefenbach’s Arbeit macht frei: Erzählung von Lorenz Diefenbach, in which “gamblers and fraudsters find the path to virtue through labour” (see Wikipedia) (itself likely referencing Heinrich Beta’s 1845 Geld und Geist). Perhaps it was instigated by Theodor Eicke, chief of the Inspecktion der Konzentrationslager, commander of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, the second commandant of Dachau, succeeding the equally appalling Hilmar Wäckerle, after the latter’s dismissal for excessive cruelty in the early months following Hitler’s election to chancellor in January 1933. (See e.g. https://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/KZDachau/DachauLife2.html.)
- 19.
A theme of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (translated by George Eliot , soi-meme), (2008).
- 20.
Not just the arts. Everything from aviation to dentistry, from the cell phone to the parking meter. See also Marx and Engels (2008), I para 24; cf. para 17.
- 21.
The problem is classic. Versions arise in questions as to why the philosopher-kings in Plato ’s Republic should do their “-king” bit; or as to why Aristotle ’s theoretical contemplator shouldn’t steal or let his children starve if that maximized time for contemplating.
- 22.
The direction adopted in K. Wilkes (1980). This is perhaps Foot’s idea, raised only to be rejected as solution, in the case of Gustav Wagner, that vice may happen to have costs in human psychology (NG 90 f.12). However, if pushed, that too may involve conceptual connections (NG 90 f.12 tends that way).
- 23.
The young, 19-year-old, Alexander Ulyanov said at his execution trial in 1887: “You will always find in the Russian nation a dozen people who are so devoted to their ideals and who feel their country’s misfortune so deeply that for them to die for their cause is not a sacrifice.” Talk of “sacrifice” suggests a weighing model of deliberation. Foot here is in effect picking up an idea of John McDowell ’s (1978) about a different model wherein some considerations, properly appreciated, simply silence—take off the table—others which, had the former not been there, would have been reasons for action .
- 24.
On the importance of special background see, e.g., VV 112–4; 118–20; Anscombe (1958).
- 25.
Initially, it seems plausible that (a) the specification of core objects is an open-ended list—completeness here being odd; and that (b) an agent need not score in each category (indeed some might exclude others), albeit certain ones may be so core as to be necessary components, at least absent some special story. However both points are impacted by the level of abstraction in the description of core items. Thus, if we replace “family” with “some long experience of intimate relationships” we go up a level; if we replace “work” with “commitment to some great or substantial cause” we go down a level. The higher the level, the more likely each is necessary and the “list” aspire to completeness. Is there (room for) disagreement over the central core, indeed paradigm, objects? This would, one supposes, have itself to be rather special, and reflect a deep division in views of basic human nature or of the world we live in (e.g., religion).
- 26.
The relevant ones are not simply the necessities of life (ta anagkaia), such as oxygen and water (although they come in, as the pollution of both quickly indicates). Rather, they have to do with the expression and exploration of our humanity. (A grammatical investigation would advert to other vocabulary.)
- 27.
Wolf (2010) puts a comparable point in terms of the need for both an objective restriction and a subjective one, but more in terms of emotion and behavior than explicitly in terms of thoughts (8—12). (She doesn’t dwell sufficiently on the cognitive and objective commitments of these passions and feelings.) See also Adams’ comments on Wolf, especially 76–9.
- 28.
So in a sense any object could be an object of pride—but that is not the “any” of an empiricist’s combinatorics of independent atoms, it is simply that there is no ban on any object, however initially outré, being brought under the criteria of the concept, given a suitable special story (although there are constraints of intelligibility also on those).
- 29.
Foot moves freely between the notions of “a priori,” “conceptually speaking,” and “grammatical investigation.” I take it she supposes the “a prioricity” in question is grounded in its being a “conceptual” matter , and this in its being a matter of “grammatical investigation.” I follow Foot’s terminology, although, perhaps strangely, it is the latter notion I find clearest, because less Philosophical. By contrast the first two bring more Philosophical baggage, problems of their own, whose pursuit may or may not be illuminating.
- 30.
I was much helped here by conversation with Andrew Flynn.
- 31.
Unclear even if we suppose it is aimed simply at offering an illustration of how there can be a certain use of a concept, related to the human good, that it is grammatically inappropriate to conjoin with wickedness-where combining it would show your lack of grasp of that concept.
- 32.
The akolastic, the fully intemperate, agent similarly takes eating the second slice as what they should do, as expressive of what they take to be true values (“the virtues”), and so for them too their action cannot be isolated from “virtue,” only in their case, their values are false, “vices,” their success illusory.
- 33.
One could reconfigure her argument as one turning in both subparts on the apparent grammar of our talk of what benefits a person. The first, the case of the Wests, illustrates the claim that it counts of no benefit to a person to attain, or be helped to attain, their ends (their heart’s desires), unless those ends are good. The second, the Letter-writers , shows that virtuous agents, with their good core ends, cannot be benefited by the pursuit of these unless the means are good, or unless helping them avoid means that are wicked, or unjust. The argument would then run along these lines outlining conceptual connections (where “X” is a human ):
-
(1)
Benefiting X = Doing something for X’s good [the human good];
-
(2)
Benefiting X → X’s ends are good (Wests), and X’s means are good (Letter-Writers).
-
(3)
The human good = deep happiness
-
(4)
Deep Happiness of X → X’s ends and means are good.
While somewhat indirect, (and not totally clear), it would approach Aristotle ’s NE 6.9’s argument, that for deliberation or reasoning to be successful, it must be of benefit to the agent, and that involves strictures over the end posited and means taken. It allows Foot to claim virtuous activity is not sufficient for happiness. Importantly, it would start further to condition the ends involved in deep happiness .
-
(1)
- 34.
Typical of certain Spanish writings on the Indians, of slave-owners, of colonialists, of attitudes to the working-class, women, etc. Rorty (1998) also notes this move (although I do not share his approach) (167–9, 177). Of course when the oppressor is in extremis the humanity of the “other” is suddenly re-discovered, although, saved, the response may be not gratitude but revenge for the temporary “humiliation.”
- 35.
Our lives at any one point have many strands—of thoughts, feelings and actions: much is going on, and much of it diachronic, though, like a braided rope, the strands do not persists the entire length. These strands constitute a context in which what is going on, and not going on, takes on its valence (reading a mystery novel for relaxation while engaged in medical research; watching TV while failing to visit a friend in hospital). These strands often involve other interpersonal ones, creating a still richer contextual valence; wider still the larger rope of the social medium in which our lives entwine and take on their valence (listening to music while authorities, un-criticized, deport the persecuted to camps; sleeping in and so failing to vote; abandoning geographical studies, to take on political activity to help the exploited and downtrodden).
- 36.
However see NG 90 and esp. note 12 for perhaps some inkling of this.
- 37.
These may be compensated for in the individual case, and weaknesses surprisingly turned into strengths.
- 38.
Cf. Pol. 7.13. 1332a7–18. I tasked Foot about this in connection with “Virtues and Vices,” and a failure there to stress the central positive role of virtues in the enjoyment of the good things of life .
- 39.
This “valuational” or “reflective” condition is, I take it, linked to Socrates ’ demand for life -examination and to Aquinas ’ claim that the agent, to be acting with full rationality, must view their action as the good one, a claim admitting of a certain qualified understanding, say, with a self-deprecating muddling through.
- 40.
Cf. VV 106. There, and in “Moral Beliefs” Foot presciently makes moves both against the “Verticalists” who would distinguish evaluative predicates into thick and thin, conceding criterialism for the thick but not the thin; and against the “Horizontalists” who would distinguish two kinds of meaning within evaluative predicates, “descriptive” and “evaluative.”
- 41.
This comes out in other ways. Aristotle talks of “bebaiotes” in connection with virtues, and we too talk of resoluteness, constancy, firmness in that connection, whereas we talk rather of the wicked being obstinate, unremitting, and perverse or corrupt, all of which have aspects of cognitive faults.
- 42.
To be told or to tell oneself “it doesn’t matter whether it is true, I just have to believe it is true” is a somewhat special scenario.
- 43.
- 44.
- 45.
- 46.
Initially via a division into two major virtues, benevolence and justice—the utile and the honestum—where the one aligns with greatest happiness and the other constrains its pursuit.
- 47.
(i) Part of the importance of treating someone’s pain is to fit them once again to enjoy their life . If so, the optimal good is to be seen as the formal end of the activity. We deliberate about the best in the circumstances in order to move us, where possible, closer to the optimal best, the best haplos (cf. Wildean Progressive Utopianism, in 4.4). Again, this “Utopian” aspect of the form of our rationality connects with our need to develop and posit ideals. (ii) There is, so to speak, a negative silhouette. The wise are in a position to answer the question: “Don’t you take φ’ing to be the optimal thing? So why aren’t you doing that then?” To explain why the (more) ideal , or optimal, activity would not be the best or wisest in the circumstances, and to justify it. (Exactly what they say depends on the puzzle raised; whether it will satisfy or be understood by the interlocutor are further questions, as is the question of just how the wise apprehend what end is to be pursued in the situation.)
- 48.
“A congratulatory first” in Life ! I prefer “felicity” as a token translation to the more traditional “blessedness” given the latter’s religious overtones. Admittedly, Aristotle ’s own view of felicity indeed has something of those because of a third duality: that between the optimal human life haplos, and the optimal life haplos, i.e., the life of the Perfect Substance. The qualified/unqualified game is reiterated: the secret end of practical reasoning, as of theoretical reasoning, is god—conceived of as “success in the category of substance.” Formally god is theoretical reasoning (of a sort), and it is the final end of practical attain this so far as is humanly possible (NE 6.12.1144a3–6, 6.13.1145a608).
- 49.
E.g., Christy Brown (My Left Foot), or the playwright Jaromir Hladik in Borges’ story The Secret Miracle. (I am not thinking primarily here of cases of mental disability, whose complexity demands their own discussion, especially given their enormous range, e.g., from Clive Wearing’s anterograde and retrograde amnesia through to advanced cases of various senilities.)
- 50.
Aristotle ’s distinction here (e.g., Pol. 7.13.1332a7–18) is not easy. There are clear cases either side; but what, e.g., of paying taxes, being chair of one’s department?
- 51.
The excellences in any area of activity just are the criteria of its success: what count as doing it successfully. Along with other qualifications, Aristotle uses “deuterws” and “pollostws.” I avoid talk of “degree” because of its quantitative suggestion; if taken ‘lightly’ that would be all right.
- 52.
That said, I would not myself have gone for McDowell’s identification and the consequent idea of an equation, which then could be read from one direction or the other. Rather, the relation is constitutive (Lawrence 2001). Similarly, I believe “Water = H2O” is misleading, and the relation is constitutive.
- 53.
For this solution to the comprehensive/selective, inclusive/dominant, debates see Lawrence (2006).
- 54.
We may think of these connections between (a) the human good and eudaimonia; (b) eudaimonia and eu—living successfully and acting successfully (eu-zoia and eu-praxia); (c) eu and kat’areten “in accord with virtue or excellence,” as “conceptual.” For doubts see note 29. By contrast, Aristotle argues by the smallest moves, each increment hard to resist, though not necessarily in principle impossible: what I term the method of “formal squeeze.” It is inappropriate to divide NE Bk 1 into an analytic part and a synthetic part.
- 55.
This is not to deny the complexity when we put Z in a simulacrum of the Letter-Writers ’ situation, and find him refusing to “betray” comrades and cause, a kind of almost “tribal” honor displayed in the cause of the bad (cf. honor among thieves, and Rep. 1.350e11–352d2).
- 56.
“Many things happen by chance and differ in their largeness and smallness. Now small pieces of good fortune, and likewise their opposites, clearly do not tip the scale of life , while things that are large and numerous if they turn out well will make the life more felicitous (for they are of a nature themselves to add adornment to life [make it sparkle], and the use of them is fine and seriously good), but if they occur in reverse depress and spoil felicity: for they both bring pains and impede many activities. Nevertheless even in these circumstances fineness shines through whenever someone bears calmly many great misfortunes, not through insensitivity but because he is nobly bred and great-hearted” (NE 1.10.1100b22–33).
- 57.
Aristotle approves of the Gorgianic style of defining the excellences or virtues against Plato (Pol. 1.13. 1260a24–33), a definition that allocates excellences to people under specific social roles or phases (women; slaves, children; young, old). This can endanger the recognition of a basic humanity. Less complex is a sensitivity to the differences, range, and variety of talents and creative power: not everyone is suited to go to music school (cf. Rep. 2.370a7–b3). At more specific levels, such considerations feature in the specification of which activities constitute living successfully for individuals and the realization of their individual potential.
- 58.
The sense in which the Phaedo, Plato ’s “tragedy,” with its theme of philosophy as preparation for death, portrays Socrates , like Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus, as so in command of the situation that he can rebut its tragic nature. The point is not, I think, essentially religious; rather it is the power of virtue to drive the arc of the agent’s life through the assault of fate—to rise above and be wholly in control of one’s life and death: “strong enough to remain upright in the face of mishap or even ‘in the face of fate’…this sovereign human …” (Nietzsche 1887, Essay 2 §2).
- 59.
One should resist the temptation to sub specie aeternitatis thoughts that evacuate human life of all meaning and good. (I suspect we misconstrue the exploratory or challenging nature of these thoughts.)
- 60.
E.g. 1886 §228. Cf. Twilight of the Idols, Arrows and Epigrams 12; Late Notebooks 11[93].
- 61.
Foot can be viewed as, in her own way, retracing the path of Mill’s critique of Bentham’s impoverished conception of happiness—his striving to enrich Benthams’s impoverished “theory of life ”: Mill, 151–8; “On Liberty” passim, especially Chapter 3; “Utilitarianism” Chapter 2.
- 62.
Chapter 6 explicates deep happiness in terms of “the enjoyment of the best things of life ” (NG 95). In Chapter 7, however, Foot talks of those who “find special happiness in working for the relief of suffering” (NG 107). It raises a question of how stable her conception of deep happiness is.
- 63.
I take the point to be that “the felicitous” can never become wretched, although they might become merely “eudaimones” given certain circumstances—but these can’t become wretched (in disagreement with Brown 2009). The remark conflicts with 1.9.1100a5–9, where it is said no one would call Priam eudaimon suffering such great misfortunes in old age, having “ended wretchedly.” The wretchedness there is not that of the corruption of values, as in the 1.10 passage, a different focus. Yet some tension remains.
- 64.
Sophocles’ famous remark that “to live greatly is greatly to suffer” applies here too. It is not clear to me that such lives need be of “benefit” exactly to the agent considered more individually, although it is socially such, and part of the, and their, human good: such creative pioneers enrich our humanity, our vocabulary of thought , sentiment, and vision, often at enormous costs to themselves as individuals. They are our boldness, our antennae.
- 65.
I avoid the scientizing term, “theory,” in our area. Granted that, Frankfurt’s insistence on our need for a theory of ideals is well taken (1998, vii–viii).
- 66.
For Plato this is aligned with the three parts of the human psyche, for Aristotle with a common tropos of three lives (cf. NE 1.5); that underlies Plato ’s psychology too (cf. Rep. 1.345c1–347e2).
- 67.
A deeper discussion would explore levels of basicness, between the more permanent aspects of human life and nature, and those more contextual and sociohistorical.
- 68.
Caution is needed, as Wittgenstein notes in On Certainty. Things apparently constitutive of the frame and lacking sense to challenge at one time (“humans going to the moon!”) can at another be brought into senseful challenge (one thinks, for example, also of Hume on Christian humility as a virtue).
- 69.
Growing up has such a structure (or learning a particular discipline). There are many aspects to it and things to be acquired, but there is considerable variety in their possible order of acquisition and interaction, e.g., learning some things before others makes others easier or harder to acquire, or casts them in a different light. This resonates with Berlin’s view of the difficulties of a scientific history : “…that the facts to be fitted into the scientific grid and subsumed under the adopted laws or model (even if public criteria for selecting what is important, relevant, etc. from what is trivial, peripheral, etc. can be found and employed) are too many, too minute, too fleeting, too blurred at the edges. They criss-cross and penetrate each other at many levels simultaneously, and the attempt to prise them apart, as it were, and pin them down, and classify them, and fit them into their specific compartments turns out to be impracticable” (Berlin 1978).
- 70.
Crudely, if NASA had used slaves for the Apollo project, it would have a different valence. Or the Great Pyramid viewed as built on the now silent shrieks and groans of the un-mummified multitude transposes it from Seven Wonder to Seven Horror. Or Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote.
- 71.
Thus value would neither be intrinsic in Moore’s sense, nor a matter of individual’s happenstance desires.
- 72.
This points the need to discuss the concept of genius, a preoccupying theme in Kant (e.g. 3rd Critique §§46–50), Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (e.g., “The Greek State”).
- 73.
- 74.
A more adequate treatment would move on several fronts, among them: (i) answering Frankfurt’s call for a “theory of ideals” (ii) offering an array of paradigm case studies; (iii) a greater understanding of the notion of work.
- 75.
A paradigm here is that implicitly general investigation and understanding of human nature and psychology and its behavioral susceptibilities that Thucydides saw the need to provide in his particular study of the Peloponnesian War (Bk 1. §22). Now there is not simply personal, or family, experience to draw on, but recorded human history , a sense of one’s geography, of human psychology, the great shift of evolutionary perspective sparking the revolution in the sciences in the 19c.
- 76.
Such self-examination might be taken to acknowledge an imperfection in one’s practical wisdom , and so be in tension with full wisdom and virtue as it appears in Aristotle (John Hacker-Wright referred me to Confucius, Analects 2.4). As regards Aristotle , I address this in “Moral Conscience and Praxis .” As regards Confucius, Analects 2.11 and 4.17 seemingly point in the other direction, as does 1.4., in connection with Master Zeng’s views (who, if “slow,” apparently influenced Mencius).
- 77.
See the depressing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civil_wars.
- 78.
- 79.
And perhaps the slave-boy’s first answer at Meno 82d5–e9.
- 80.
Burke Trend, a distinguished British civil servant (later Lord Trend), explained to me his adherence to the Church of England in just such terms, of the need for a pattern to live one’s life by and give order to its events of moment. It calls up again Confucian li (note 7). Of course a pattern may become progressively harder to adhere to with sincerity, and can enshrine expressions e.g. of class prejudice rather than humanity.
- 81.
Kant (1997); see also the justly famous conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 161–3.
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Acknowledgements
This draws from a larger project. Earlier versions were given at memorial sessions in honor of Professor Foot at Somerville, Oxford in 2011, and at the Western APA in Seattle in 2012. More recently, I should like to acknowledge debts, and thanks, to the editor John Hacker-Wright , and to my colleagues, Barbara Herman, John Carriero, and Andrew Flynn. Philippa was the principal philosophical interlocutor in my life for thirty years. I am delighted to dedicate this piece to her—and, at random, to the memory of a particular evening when she outpaced Michael Thompson and myself around Blenheim Palace, at sunset, past a field of strangely innumerable hares up by the Column of Victory, and then on into the gathering dusk of ambulant companionship.
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Lawrence, G. (2018). The Deep and the Shallow. In: Hacker-Wright, J. (eds) Philippa Foot on Goodness and Virtue. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91256-1_7
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