THE IDEA OF THE GOOD IN PLATONIC-ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY HANS-GEORG GADAMER TRANSLATED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND ANNOTATION BY P. CHRISTOPHER SMITH YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy The preparation of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the Program for Translations of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agenqr. Copyright © 1986 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Sally Harris and set in Sabon type by Eastern Graphics Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, N.Y. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gadamer, Hans Georg, 1900- The idea of the good in Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy. Translation of: Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles. Includes index. 1. Plato—Contributions in ethics—Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Aristotle—Contributions in ethics— Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Ethics, Ancient— Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title. B398.E8G2913 1986 170 85-22710 ISBN 0-300-03463-6 (alk. paper) The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 43 2 1 CONTENTS Translator's Introduction vii Preface 1 I The Question at Issue 7 II Socratic Knowing and Not-Knowing 33 III The Polis and Knowledge of the Good 63 IV The Dialectic of the Good in the Philebus 104 V Aristotle's Critique of the Idea of the Good 126 VI The Idea of Practical Philosophy 159 Index 179 T R A N S L A T O R 'S I N T R O D U C T I ON Though shorter than Truth and Method} and, as Gadamer read- ily acknowledges, not a completely unified study. The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy^ must be counted nonetheless among Gadamer's most important books. For one thing, it gives us an extended example of the hermeneutical or in- terpretive techniques for which Gadamer has become so well known; for another, it provides us with remarkable new insights 1. Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen, 1965), hence- forth WM. This work has appeared in translation as Truth and Method (New York, 1975). Translations of passages cited here are my own. 2. Gadamer, Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles (Heidelberg, 1978). The zwischen is difficult to render in ordinary English. "Between," natu- rally, will not do, and Gadamer intentionally avoids the more common "von ... zu" (from ... to) and "in." He found the circumlocution I have used here appro- priate for two reasons, which should become clearer in the course of this intro- duction. Briefly, he gives priority not to the individual authors as such, but to the thought we find expressed in their works. Hence he tends to say "the Socratic question" and "Platonic philosophy" rather than Socrates' question and Plato's philosophy. Furthermore, he includes expositions of texts whose authorship may be contested, for example, the Magna Moralia, but whose content is clearly Pla- tonic or Aristotelian "heritage." He also wants to stress that one should not ap- proach these thinkers "developmentally," which is to say, in a way that makes it appear that Aristode broke with Plato. Instead, he contends, it is best to think of a shared, continuous tradition to which both belong. In short, the choice of zwischen is meant, above all, to set off Gadamer's approach from that of Werner Jaeger. See Jaeger, Aristoteles, Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung (Berlin, 1923), translated as Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his Devel- opment (London, 1948). vu xxviii TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION into what Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy was about. But, most significantly, since it is concerned in large part with the relation- ship between theory and practice and with "the good," it intro- duces us to the ethical dimension in Gadamer's thinking. Truth and Method^ of course, had a great deal to say about moral philosophy, and particular attention is given there to Aristotle's idea of phronesis^ or moral reasonableness. But Ga- damer's intent in that book was to point out that interpretation of works of art and historical texts could not proceed according to the method of the natural sciences, and that the truths con- tained in these works and texts were of a different sort from those discovered in science. In Truth and Method he turns to phronesis primarily because Aristotle shows that it, too, must be distinguished from scientific reasoning insofar as it has its own distinct way of relating to the truth {aletheuein). Thus Aristotle's moral understanding serves in Truth and Method as an example of the general theory of nonscientific understanding that Ga- damer wishes to elaborate. Here, in contrast, phronesis is inves- tigated for its own sake, and Gadamer turns expressly to the good in human life, the theme of his first book, Platos dialek- tische Ethik:^ Hence we find in The Idea of the Good in Platonic- Aristotelian Philosophy not only a continuation of the things we 3. Platos dialektische Ethik, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zum 'Philebus', (Hamburg, 1931) and republished in Platos dialektische Ethik (Ham- burg, 1968), henceforth PDE, pp. xiii-178. Other works by Gadamer bearing on the subject matter of this book are: "Zur Vorgeschichte der Metaphysik," in Um die Bergriffswelt der Vorsokrati- ker (Darmstadt, 1968), pp. 364-90. "Antike Atomtheorie," in ibid., pp. 512-33. "Plato und die Dichter," in PDE, pp. 181-204, translated as "Plato and the Poets," in Dialogue and Dialectic (New Haven, 1980), henceforth DD, pp. 39-72. xxviii TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION have come to expect in Gadamer's work, his interpretive artistry and his reliance upon, and extraordinary grasp of, Greek thought, but also an investigation of moral philosophy— its premises, its subject matter, and its applications. With regard to the principles of Gadamer's hermeneutics, we find two especially well displayed here. First, particular attention "Platos Staat der Erziehung," in PDE, pp. 205-20, translated as "Plato's Edu- cational State," in DD, pp. 73-92. "Dialektik und Sophistik im VII. platonischen Brief," in PDE, pp. 221-48, translated as "Dialectic and Sophism in Plato's Seventh Letter,^ in DD, pp. 93-123. "Amicus Plato Magis Arnica Veritas," in ?D£, pp. 249-69, translated with same title in DD, pp. 194-218. "Vorgestalten der Reflexion," in Kleine Schriften, 4 vols. (Tübingen, 1967- 77) henceforth KS, vol. 3, pp. 1-13. "Platon und die Vorsokratiker," in KS, vol. 3, pp. 14-26. ''Logos und Ergon im platonisichen 'Lysis,'" in KS, vol. 3, pp. 50-63, trans- lated as "Logos and Ergon in Plato's Lysis," in DD, pp. 1-20. "Platons ungeschriebene Dialektik," in KS, vol. 3, pp. 27-49, translated as "Plato's Unwritten Dialectic," in DD, pp. 124-55. "Uber das Göttliche im frühen Denken der Griechen," in KS, vol. 3, pp. 64— 79. "Gibt es die Materie? Eine Studie zur Begriffsbildung in Philosophie und Wis- senschaft," in Convivium Cosmologicum (Basel, 1973), pp. 93—109. "Die Unsterblichkeitsbeweise in Platons Thaidon'," in Wirklichkeit und Re- flexion (Pfullingen, 1973), pp. 145-61, translated as "The Proofs of Immortality in Plato's Phaedo,"" in DD, pp. 21-38. "Idee und Wirklichkeit in Piatos Timaios'" in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelber- ger Akademie der Wissenschaften (Heidelberg, 1974), translated as "Idea and Reality in Plato's Timaeus,*' in DD, pp. 156-93. "Vom Anfang bei Heraklit," in Sein und Geschichtlichkeit (Frankfurt, 1974), pp. 166-75. "Philosophie und Religion im griechischen Altertum," in Festschrift paper for Wilhelm Anz, 1975, unpublished. See also numerous references to Plato and Aristotle in Warheit und Methode and in Hegels Dialektik (Tübingen, 1971), translated as Hegel's Dialectic (New Haven, 1976), henceforth HD. xxviii TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION is paid in each case to the kind of text we are interpreting. That attention is especially called for here, since any attempt to under- stand what Plato and Aristorie are saying must confront the problem of the disparate nature of the extant texts, the fact that we have fictional dialogues from Plato and a mixture of treatises and lecture notes from Aristotle. Even the differences among the texts from Aristotle must be carefully taken into account. Ga- damer points out, for instance, that the Magna Moralia^ since it is in the form of lecture notes, or perhaps even class notes by some- one else, cannot be read with the logical and compositional ex- pectations that one brings to the other ethical treatises, for, as notes, they depend on what Aristode would have said in his lec- tures to fill them out. Most important of all textual differences, however, is the distinction between Plato's mythical, metaphor- ical way of putting things and Aristode's "cautious" conceptual- izations—of natural phenomena, on the one hand, and the phe- nomena of our practical life, on the other. It is precisely the failure to observe this distinction that has misled us into taking what Plato says in the dialogues as statements and then compar- ing these to the supposedly equivalent statements made by Aris- totle. As Gadamer points out (WM 444), anyone who has seen what comes back in recorded "statements''—in a court proceed- ing, say—will see at once that taking what someone says as a statement is more likely to obscure what he or she was getting at than to display it. M/sinterpretation will be inevitable. The most unfortunate consequence of comparing Plato and Aristotle in this way has been that the two thinkers have been put at odds not only with each other, but also with themselves. Both are said to have "developed" beyond, and subsequently taken back, their earher positions, and this thesis has been sup- ported by contrasting statements from later works with state- ments from earlier works. As Gadamer sees it, there must be