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Needs and Ethics in Ancient Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2017
Extract
What I propose to do in this short paper is to outline two different approaches to needs in Greek philosophy. The first is the reasonably familiar approach used by Aristotle, and, in some moods, by Plato; the second is a rather less well-known approach which can with some justice be associated with Socrates, and/or Plato when he is not in an Aristotelian mood (if I may so put it)—and also the Stoics, who seem to have picked up some distinctly Socratic ways of thinking. The Aristotelian line, if not necessarily familiar as Aristotle's, will be familiar just insofar as it gives some degree of that recognition to needs that most moderns would suppose the idea should be given. What I am calling the Socratic line, by contrast, appears to leave no room for the idea of needs at all (or at least, that will be my way of putting it for now; I shall need a rather different formulation later on). It is this second, ‘Socratic’, approach that primarily interests me, not least because it is non-standard.
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References
1 Review by Stephen Mulhall of Flanagan, O., The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (London: Basic Books, 2003)Google Scholar, in The London Review of Books 25/17, [11 09 2003], p.29Google Scholar.
2 Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 5, 1015a20–26Google Scholar (quoted by Wiggins, David, Needs, Values, Truth [3rd edn], (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 25Google Scholar.
3 I refer here to the arguments in Book IV that introduce parts of the soul, and specifically irrational parts that can—as it were—trump reason. (The point of ‘intellectualism’ is that it is the state of our intellect, our beliefs, that determines the quality of our actions; for, so the theory claims, we all share the same motivation: the desire for our own good.)
4 The excerpts will be far from fully intelligible as they stand, torn from their dialectical context; but some general tendencies of Socrates’ argument will certainly emerge even from a superficial reading (see below). For a full account of that argument, and theory, of the Lysis, see Penner, Terry and Rowe, Christopher, Plato's Lysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2005)Google Scholar.
5 A Very Short Introduction to Socrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), 62–63)Google Scholar.
6 See especially Nicomachean Ethics 111.4, 1113a 17–19.
7 David Wiggins doubted, in discussion at the conference, whether Socrates could really be a psychological egoist. It is true that Socrates is not recommending selfishness; after all, he is in favour of friendship, wishing and doing good to others, not harming or doing injustice to anyone, and so on (see further below). But somehow or other such attitudes are combined with, and thought of as justified by, a theory which says that each of us always and only desires our own good (see the first of the two passages from the Lysis in the appendix below; the passage gives a flavour of the general approach to ‘friendship’—conceived in an extraordinarily wide sense: see n.ll below—adopted by the Socrates of the dialogue). For a detailed treatment of how the Socratic theory pulls this off, see Penner and Rowe, Plato's Lysis (n.4 above).
8 That is, actions stemming from akrasia—traditionally, and disastrously, translated as ‘weakness of will’ (disastrously, because Aristotle neither has nor has any need for a concept of the ‘will’).
9 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VII.2, 1145b 21–28Google Scholar.
10 For reasons that are spelled out in Plato's Lysis (n.4 above).
11 That is, just insofar as hunger, thirst, and other basic desires (epithumiai) surface in a context in which Socrates is attempting to give an account of all ‘friendship’ (philia)—which, as become unmistakable by this stage of the dialogue, is intended to include all an every kind of love, desire, or want. (‘Good’, ‘bad’, and ‘neither good nor bad’ desires, as the passage calls them, are those that have good, bad, or neither good nor bad outcomes.)
12 Republic IV, 437B-439DGoogle Scholar.
13 For the most recent account of Stoic (and other) theory in this area, see now Algra, Keimpe, ‘The mechanism of social appropriation and its role in Hellenistic ethics’, in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 25 (2003), 265–296Google Scholar.
14 This is the ‘appropriation’ in Algra's title (see preceding note).
15 Cf. the notion of ‘what belongs to us’ (to oikeion) at the end of the second Lysis passage; this notion is in fact fundamental to the argument of the whole dialogue.
16 As with hunger, thirst, etc., in the second Lysis passage in the appendix below (cf. n.ll above).
17 This is not to suggest that Stoic and Socratic theories were identical; for one thing, the Stoics’ approach is much more ascetic, more paradoxical even than Socrates’ (so that they—or at any rate early Stoics—put an absolute ban on calling things other than virtue/knowledge ‘good’, which Socrates did not).
18 As e.g. in the first Lysis passage in the appendix below.
19 See the exchange at the end of the second Lysis passage in the appendix; though this fragment will be especially in need of commentary, to show where Socrates has come from and where he is going. (‘But’, I said, ‘what desires, desires whatever it's lacking. Isn't that so?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And what is lacking, in that case, is friend of whatever it's lacking?’ ‘It seems so to me.’ ‘And what becomes lacking is whatever has something taken away from it.’ ‘Of course.’ ‘It's what belongs to us (to oikeion), then, that's actually the object of passion and friendship and desire, as it appears, Menexenus and Lysis.’)
20 Needs, Values, Truth, 6.
21 Ibid.
22 For a full response, see Penner and Rowe, Plato's Lysis (n.4 above), especially Part II.