Practical Reason: Aristotelian Innovation

Aristotelian Innovation:

Pure reason is predictable and evidence-based. It introduces notions of truth and falseness into the way we think. Practical reason concerns itself with what is contingent, not necessary (Lecture Notes)—the human decision (phrónesis). In Aristotelian logic

Practical reason is the general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do. Deliberation of this kind is practical in at least two senses. First, it is practical in its subject matter, insofar as it is concerned with action. But it is also practical in its consequence or its issue, insofar as reflection about action itself directly moves people to act. ("Practical Reason," 2008, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, para. 1)

Raphael, The School of Athens (1511), Fresco.

The process of “resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do” is based on the factors that comprise the true or false conditions of premises and conclusions in logical reasoning. Virno, in Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, explains that the rules of practical reasoning do not hold up against their own internal logic in practice becuase a “rule cannot be evaluated with the criteria that we utilize for the individual steps of a game, since those criteria (for instance, ‘correctness’ and ‘incorrectness’) are derived from that game” (155). The determination of whether premises and their conclusions are true or false, or whether an inference is valid or invalid, is predefined in the logic of practical reason, but where does the criteria for defining whether something is true, false, or valid come from? Virno understands logical certainty associatively. He calls concepts of truth and falsehood “part of the grammar of a linguistic game” (155). The authority of a rule in practical reasoning, law, language, institutions, he explains, comes from the implied presence of a governing logic or prior rule that establishes a given rule, when, in fact, there is no such governing logic. The authority of a rule—to the person who might follow or contest it—is largely based on the implication (or aura) of a previous rule or ruling body of logic that substantiates a rule. The logical premise of a rule therefore “enters into an infinite regression” (25), as it will never reach its definitive source:

Why is it necessary to obey? This is the only query that counts in a theory of institutions,  Whoever would answer: because the law commands it, would be condemned to a regression to infinity.  Indeed it is all too easy to ask him, in return: Fine, but why is it necessary to obey a law that imposes obedience?  Perhaps one does so in compliance with yet another law, previous or more fundamental?  But it is obvious, even with regard to the previous question, that the initial question still stands.  Thus, climbing step by step, one never arrives at an end result.  (25)

A rule, therefore, in language, logic, or law, is open at its source and at its end, in its application (phrónesis). The state of the human in society, subject to the rules of law, language, and institutions, outside the state of nature, Virno suggests, is similarly

characterized by negation, by the modality of the possible, by regression to the infinite. It goes without saying that these three linguistic structures constitute the logical base of the entire metaphysical tradition. And that each of them refers to the other two: negation highlights that which, even if being actually false or non-existent, is nonetheless considered possible. Furthermore, since it works upon a preliminary affirmative assertion, the ‘not’ is the original manifestation of that discourse-upon-discourse that triggers the regression of the meta-languages to the infinite. What is most important, however, is that these three structures summarize the emotional situations of a disoriented animal. (18)

The natural state of humankind “shows us the ‘opening to the world,’ a world stripped, however, of any criterion of orientation,” whereas “the civil state offers protective orientation, but it places in parentheses that ‘opening,’ thus carving out a pseudoenvironment in which unequivocal and repetitive behaviors prevail” (29), in a mirror image of the infinite regression of a rule. Both states “are in possession of an articulation between drives and language at their very center. But in both states, this articulation only allows one term at a time to emerge into full view, leaving the other term implicit or irrelevant” (29):

The regression toward the infinite expresses the ‘opening to the world’ as a chronic form of incompleteness, or also—but this is the same thing—as a vain search for that proportionality between drives and behaviors that is, instead the prerogative of the circumscribed environment. The logical base of metaphysics offers, simultaneously, the plot of a theory of passions. Sorrow, sympathy, desire, fear, aggression: these affects , that we share with many other animal species, are reshaped from top to bottom by negation, by the modality of the possible, by the regression toward the infinite. (19)

Richard Kraut (2010) explains that Aristotle “is acutely aware of the fact that reasoning can always be traced back to a starting point that is not itself justified by further reasoning” ("Aristotle's Ethics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, para. 31). Kraut asks, “if practical reasoning is correct only if it begins from a correct premise, what is it that insures the correctness of its starting point?” (para. 31). Aristotle maintains that “'[v]irtue makes the goal right, practical wisdom the things leading up to it’” ([1144a7-8]” (para. 32):

What [Aristotle] must have in mind, when he says that virtue makes the goal right, is that deliberation typically proceeds from a goal that is far more specific than the goal of attaining happiness by acting virtuously. . . . [A] concrete goal presents itself as his starting point—helping a friend in need, or supporting a worthwhile civic project. (para. 32)

Does Aristotle’s logic interrupt what Virno calls the regression to infinite in a rule that has no rule for its application by placing what Virno terms as the application of the rule (concrete action, contingent application, state of exception), which occurs after a rule is in place (at its end), at its source (prior to the rule)? In short, does Aristotle put the human element (phrónesis) first in his reasoning for “the correctness of the starting point” (para. 31), and, if so, is this reasoning synonymous with the outcome of the rule? Is phrónesis already implied as a precondition of a rule? Or is this idea essentially the same as Virno’s, when the application of the rule places the decision-maker in a potential space of exception that only exists in direct relation to the species-specific norms (that guide notions of virtue) which underlie the creation of rules and their application? These questions probably reveal my limited understanding of Aristotle’s Ethics, but they seem important, if not only to document a recognition of logical differences between literacy and electracy that Virno is setting us up for in this project.

Multitude

In modernity, Virno writes, the individual is known as a plurality, as a multitude—the term “defamed by Hobbes, who judged it to be a mere regurgitation of the state of nature within the civil state[. T]his multitude[, however,] constitutes, today, the fundamental form of political existence. It is no longer an incidental parenthesis, but a stable way of being” (Virno 40). The problem for the individual in an electrate society is that we have become “separated from our own experiences” (Lecture Notes). If the Greeks had the experience and practical know-how to bring to the reasoning process (as a type of innovation; if I am interpreting the quote above correctly), contemporary society’s practical know-how comes from a different, disconnected, non-linear space.

Phrónesis in direct translation, means virtue; the virtue of good judgment. Whether enacted before or as a result of a rule, or both, virtue is a matter of disposition; the ancient Greeks said that it could not be taught. It can be trained, however, through habitas (Lecture Notes); through cultural routines that dictate the notion that we routinely obey certain norms. Cultural routines, Professor Ulmer states, “guide the blink,” the instant reaction, in a given situation. In the same vein, they can be said to guide moments of decision and to perpetuate the grooves of collective ways of thinking and acting in the world. Thus guided, the things and ideas that we take to be true and natural are only conditions of habit. Aristotle introduced three rhetorical approaches to address this contingency (Lecture Notes):

1. Forensic/Judicial rhetoric (accusations of wrongdoings to communities or individuals)
2. Epideictic rhetoric (praise and blame in the present)
3. Deliberative rhetoric (decisions made for the future; issues raised in political and community discussions)