The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy

214 Pages·1986·10.3 MB·English

by  Hans-Georg Gadamer

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
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of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
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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