Chapter Six

The Discernment of Perception: an Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality Martha Nussbaum

What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgements. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them right. Unlike calculating-rules...What is most difficult here is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into words. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophicallnvestigations, Il.xi.

Of these States the poet is the equable man,... He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more nor less... He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a helpless thing,... He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women as dreams or dots. Watt Whitman, from By Blue Ontario's Shore Is practical reasoning scientific?1 If it is not, would it be a good thing if it were?2 Much contemporary writing in ethics, and especially in social choice theory, gives either the first or the second question a vigorously affirmative answer. Aristotle's ethical and political writings present powerful negative argu - ments. "It is obvious," he writes, "that practical wisdom is not scientific understanding (episteme)" (EN, 1142a24). And this is not just an admission of a defect in contemporary theory. For he makes it clear elsewhere that it is in the very nature of truly rational

1. This is an interim report. It develops further some of the ideas sketched in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge 1985), esp. ch. 10, which in turn continue and refine thought from essay 4 of Aristotle's De Motu Animalium (Princeton 1978); and it is itself an excerpt from a draft of a much longer project that will not be complete for some time. The longer draft includes an account of the political. role of the Aristotelian norm of perception (in contemporary life, and also with reference to the Greek historical context); and an exemplification of Aristotelian perception via a long example from Henry James; the example prompts reflection about the relation between the Aristotelian ethical norm and the philosophical importance of works of literature. (For a related treatment of the issues about literature, see my "Flawed Crystals: James' The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy," New Literary History 15 (1983) 25-50, and also "Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature," Journal of Philosophy 32 (1985). Because 'tt has sometimes been suggested (falsely, in my view) that an ethical interest in "perception" is linked with relativism, I intend to unite this study with another piece of work in progress, on Aristotle's ideas of human function and capability as non- relative bases for political distribution, to be delivered at the Oberlin Philosophy Colloquium, April 1986. This paper on perception was de- livered as a Matchette Lecture at Trinity College, San Antonio, Texas, as well as at Boston University. Because this is an interim draft and for reasons of space, I have included only a very brief discussion of many scholarly issues that either will receive more extensive discussion or (in most cases) have already received 'tt in Fragility ch. 10. 2. What I mean by "scientific," and what Aristotle means by it, will emerge from the detail of the contrast between his conception and the ones it opposes. But we can briefly say that he is thinking both of his own conception of episteme, a hierarchical deductive explanatory sys - tem concerned throughout with universals, and of related conceptions developed by Plato. Fragility ch. 4 argues that the words techne and episteme (both) are often used in a much broader sense, according to which Aristotle's ethics could claim to be a techne; this sense is con - tinued in the Hellenistic division of the technai, which prominently includes a group of stochastikai technai (on stochazesthai, see below). This is not a problem for Aristotle's argument here, since he explains his meaning clearly in the context.