Taminiaux (HPP:18-21) – arete – phronesis

Book VI of the Aristotelian treatise begins by recalling that the right principle (orthos logos) that governs each of the ethical dispositions examined in the preceding books consists in choosing the mean, at equal distance from excess and defect. It recalls also that the aretai of the psyche are divided into two groups: the ethical aretai and the dianoetical aretai. The latter, which belong to the part of the psyche that has logos, are subdivided into two groups: those where the psyche considers beings whose principles (archai) are unchangeable, and those where it considers the beings that are changeable. The first group is called intellectual, while the other is called deliberative. That being the case, the task defined by Aristotle in Book VI is to determine which is the best disposition (beltiste hexis) for the dianoetic aptitudes of the psyche of either group, which amount to determining, on the one hand, which would be the intellectual arete, and, on the other hand, which would be the deliberative arete. Moreover, each of the dianoetical aptitudes of the psyche has an aletheic function. As a consequence, in order to identify the arete specific to each of the two groups, it is important to determine the aptitude in each that best exercises the aletheic operation.

It is at this point that Heidegger begins his interpretation by emphasizing that Aristotle introduces his research by a programmatic enumeration of the modes of aletheuein, which are techne, episteme, phronesis, sophia, and noûs (Book VI, 3, 1149b 15). And Heidegger leaves no doubt about the way in which he understands these modes. While Aristotle attributes them to psyche, Heidegger does not hesitate to attribute them to the “human Dasein.” He also does not hesitate to translate aletheuei he psyche as “Dasein is uncovering,” or even by the expression that he will use in Sein und Zeit: “Dasein is in truth,” by specifying that unconcealment is a determination of the Being of Dasein (§4). Furthermore, since Dasein is uncovering, an uncovering that determines it in its Being in relationship to beings, Heidegger does not hesitate to introduce in his translation of the Aristotelian enumeration of the diaonetic modes of aletheuein the word “being,” even though Aristotle never mentioned it explicitly.

One already suspects, under these conditions, that the interpretation of the Aristotelian problematic of arete will consist for Heidegger in defining, with respect to Dasein, the ontological capacity to uncover, which is inherent in each of the modes enumerated by Aristotle to better determine their scope. And since Aristotle defines arete in general as the best disposition, it will be a matter of discerning for each of the two fundamental modes of disclosure (intellectual and deliberative) “its most genuine possibility to uncover beings as they are and to preserve them as uncovered” (GA19:21).

Now, Aristotle maintains that the best intellectual disposition is sophia, and he relegates episteme to an inferior rank. As for the deliberative disposition, it is phronesis to which he attributes the dignity of arete, from which techne is excluded.

The question that occupies me is therefore to ascertain if Heidegger subscribes to these two hierarchies and what meaning he attributes to them.

As I indicated above, it is only in these pages devoted to the Aristotelian analysis of phronesis that Heidegger expressly uses—several times—the word arete. This frequent usage itself suggests that it is phronesis to which he attributes the dignity of arete. This permits us to presume, given the hermeneutic context that we have roughly recalled, that the Aristotelian analysis of phronesis to his mind is of paramount importance. But since manifestly sophia is for Aristotle also an arete, and even the highest arete, we can assume that it will also be a matter for Heidegger of questioning this preeminence and to situate it in relation to the arete of phronesis.

For anyone familiar with Sein und Zeit, it is easy to perceive that the capital importance that Heidegger attributes to the Aristotelian analysis of phronesis, two or three years before the publication of his opus magnum, lies in the fact that Heidegger sees in it the central axis of his own analytic of Dasein.

There is no need to follow the detail of the text to be convinced of this. A few indications will suffice.

The Heideggerian interpretation of Aristotelian phronesis in §8 of the course on the Sophist begins by recalling the aletheic character of the two intellectual modes and the two deliberative modes. Heidegger emphasizes that neither episteme for the first mode nor techne for the second is able to assume the rank of arete. And it is at this point that he gives his own definition of the word: arete signifies the authentic and fully developed possibility of unconcealment (GA19:33).

Paragraph 8 asks, then, by what right phronesis can assume the rank of arete, in the sense of authentic (eigentlich) possibility of unconcealment, while techne cannot.

The reason is simple: phronesis is able to assume the rank of arete insofar as it un-covers Dasein itself.

It is this response that we must now consider.

Like techne, recounts Heidegger, phronesis involves a deliberation. As is the case for techne, the deliberation of phronesis is, as such, relative to something that is able to be otherwise. But there the resemblance between the two deliberative modes ends: they are essentially different regarding their goal and principle. The telos of the kind of action revealed by techne – an action that pertains to poiesis, to production or the making of something – is some thing other than Dasein, an entity that is “over and against” Dasein, an ergon or a work that falls outside of Dasein. On the other hand, the action revealed by phronesis, far from being an involvement with exterior entities, is praxis, understood as the conduct of the very life of man, that is, as the very way in which Dasein exists. And the goal that phronesis takes into view is not, moreover, exterior (para), because it is nothing else than the accomplishment of praxis, eu prattein, that is, the accomplishment of the way in which Dasein exists. It is in Dasein itself, and not in the things that fall outside of it, that the houneka of phronesis resides. The difference between techne and phronesis is no less defined if one considers the arche, or principle, of each. On the one hand, the arche that guides techne in the production of a work also is by nature external to Dasein, because it is the eidos, the form or the model of the external product that is being produced. On the other hand, the arche of phronesis is not exterior to Dasein, because it is nothing else than the mode in which Dasein uncovers itself.

As a mode of unconcealment, the function of phronesis is, therefore, according to Heidegger, to render man “transparent to himself’ (GA19:36) and to wrest this transparency from anything capable of covering it. Because, Heidegger insists, “it is not at all a matter of course that Dasein be disclosed to itself in its proper Being” (GA19:36).

What is remarkable in this Heideggerian interpretation of Aristotle, first, is the insistence with which it moves into the sphere of Eigentlichkeit, of the authentic Self. What is also remarkable is the insistence with which it channels the ethical into the ontological, in accordance with this stress on the self over the other. When Aristotle writes that the phronimos is the one who deliberates well with respect to things that contribute to a good life shared by all (poia pros to eu zen olos) (1140 a 28), for example, Pericles, Heidegger does not hesitate to translate: “the one who deliberates in the right way … regarding ‘what is conducive to the right mode of Being of Dasein as such and as a whole’” (GA19:34). When Aristotle writes that phronesis is an “aletheic disposition relative to action and concerning the things that are good for human beings (ta anthropina agatha)” (1140 b 5), Heidegger does not hesitate to translate as: “a disposition of human Dasein such that in it I have at my disposal my own transparency” (GA19:37).

One will no doubt object that Heidegger’s introduction in his interpretation of the Aristotelian phronesis of the notion of Gewissen, commonly translated as “moral conscience,” indicates all the same a sort of resistance to a radical ontologizing that defines his reading, in my view. I believe, on the contrary, that the introduction of Gewissen confirms this ontologizing.

We first note that it is after having pursued the comparison between techne and phronesis that Heidegger suggests a proximity between the latter and Gewissen. It is remarkable, he says, that techne is susceptible to development and improvement as a result of its failures, while phronesis obeys the law of all or nothing. It cannot be “more or less” complete. Either it is or it is not, so that one cannot say, unlike techne, “that it has an arete”; one must rather say that it “is in itself άρετή” (GA19:38). Furthermore, while that which techne has produced is able to fall into oblivion, because the know-how inherent in it can be lost, on the contrary, with respect to phronesis, “there is no possibility of falling into forgetting,” because it “is in each case new” (GA19:39). It is at this point that Heidegger introduces Gewissen. He writes about 1140 b 28: “Certainly the explication which Aristotle gives here is very meager. But it is nevertheless clear from the context that we would not be going too far in our interpretation by saying that Aristotle has here come across the phenomenon of conscience” (GA19:39). And he adds “φρόυησις is nothing other than conscience set into motion, making an action transparent. Conscience cannot be forgotten” (GA19:39). In other words, the Gewissen that is evoked here is not understood as a sense of good in opposition to bad, of justice in relation to injustice, but as the power each time renewed that the singular Dasein has of being revealed to itself as a whole and authentically. It is indeed in these terms that Sein und Zeit will analyze (§54) Gewissen as the attestation in each Dasein in the Augenblick of resoluteness of an “authentic potentiality-of-being-a-Self.” I do not think that there is on my part any retrospective projection here, because the analysis of Gewissen in Sein und Zeit expressly returns in a note ¹ to theses enunciated by Heidegger in the celebrated lecture “The Concept of Time,” pronounced at Marburg in 1924 shortly before the course on the Sophist.² Gewissen does not figure by name among the theses that enumerate some fundamental structures of Dasein, such as Being-in-the-world, Being-with-others, speech as self-interpretation of Dasein, Jemeinigkeit and Jeweiligkeit, the domination of “the They” in everydayness, care, and so on. But even if this lecture does not expressly name Gewissen, it is indeed what it announces when it insists on the Gewissheit with which each Dasein is able to apprehend at any moment “its most extreme possibility of Being,” namely, Being-towards-death. Further, this lecture is evidently in the background of the course on the Sophist, since Heidegger does not fail to clarify that his interpretation of Aristotle is “founded on a phenomenology of Dasein.” Such a phenomenology could not explicitly be exposed in the context of these lectures (§9c), but of course the auditors knew that Heidegger had just exposed its outlines in the lecture on “The Concept of Time.” What of the arete of sophia, and how does Heidegger situate it in relation to the arete of phronesis?

“What is most striking now,” he says, “is that Aristotle designates σοφία as the άρετή of τέχνη (Nic. Eth. VI, 7, 1141 a 12). The highest mode of άληθεύειν, philosophical reflection, which according to Aristotle is the highest mode of human existence, is at the same time the άρετή of τέχνη]. This must seem all the more remarkable in view of the fact that τέχνη has as its theme beings which can also be otherwise, whereas the theme of σοφία is in a preeminent sense what always is” (GA19:39-40).