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Perception and Evaluation: Aristotle on the Moral Imagination*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

R. J. Hankinson
R. J. Hankinson
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Extract

In recent years, Aristotle's treatment of the imagination has become the subject of renewed interest. A pioneering paper by Malcolm Schofield argued that, far from being the rag-bag of widely separate and more or less unrelated concerns that it had previously been generally taken to be, phantasia was, for Aristotle, a ‘loose-knit family concept’ covering all aspects of what Schofield labelled ‘non-paradigmatic sensory experience’. With that conclusion I am more or less in agreement, although only on the condition that ‘sensory’ be given a suitably broad interpretation. My purpose in this paper is to tease out, in a necessarily limited and circumscribed manner, the implications of a proper understanding of Aristotle's developed concept of deliberative imagination, phantasia bouleutikê, for his moral theory and his account of rational action, and to indicate ways in which this is related to his accounts of mental imaging in the rest of the Parva Naturalia.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 29 , Issue 1: Aristotle , Winter 1990 , pp. 41 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1990

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References

Notes

1 Schofield, Malcolm, “Aristotle on the Imagination,” in Articles on Aristotle, Vol. 4: Aesthetics and Psychology, edited by Barnes, Jonathan et al. (London: Duckworth, 1979), p. 103–132.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 110.

3 Ibid., p. 112: Schofield stresses that phantasia, because of its non-paradigmatic status, is peculiarly liable to be misleading, or at the very least it should always introduce doubts as to its veridicality; and this line is followed by Modrak, Deborah in her recent study Aristotle: The Power of Perception (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar, especially in Chapter 4, which is devoted to this topic. Although it is clearly possible for phantasiai to be false in this way, I am inclined to think that Schofield overestimates the importance of this in his account.

4 De Anima (De An.) 3 11, 434a7; cf. 434a12, 3 10, 434b3.

5 Cf. Diogenes Laertius, 7 49–51 (= SVF 2 52, 55, 61); Aetius 4 12 1–5 (= SVF 2 54) Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos 7 242–246 (= SVF 2 65).

6 I shall return to this issue later on, and suggest reasons why Aristotle might want even bees and ants to participate in imaginative ability, albeit of a basic sort: cf. Met. 1 1, 980b22ff.; Part. An. 2 2, 648a5ff.; 2 4, 650b25.

7 Schofield, “Aristotle on the Imagination,” p. 110ff., discusses this issue: I am not entirely convinced by his arguments to the effect that even in this passage, Aristotle may be using phantasia in his own more restricted sense, ben trovato though they might be for my purposes. However, that does not seem to me to affect the case of De Anima.

8 For the Protagorean arguments, see classically Plato, Theaet. 152aff.

9 Charlton, William, “Aristotle and Harmonia Theory,” in Gotthelf, Allan, ed., Aristotle on Nature and Living Things: Philosophical and Historical Studies Presented to David Balme on His Seventieth Birthday (Pittsburgh, PA: Mathesis, 1985), p. 131–150.Google Scholar

10 See The Concept of Mind, chap. 8.

11 Essay 5, in Nussbaum, M. C., Aristotle's de Motu Animalium (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; cf. also Schofield, “Aristotle on the Imagination,” p. 119: in the sense in which I speak of “mental imaging” here, it is not incompatible with his remarks about the inappropriateness in at least some contexts of translating phantasma as “mental image” without any such riders.

12 D. W. Hamlyn, in his unsatisfactory Clarendon Aristotle version of De An. 2 and 3, savages these arguments, claiming that only the last has any force (Aristotle's “De Anima” Books II, III [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968], p. 131–132). He is over-hasty in his condemnation, as Schofield (“Aristotle on the Imagination,” p. 104–105, 112–113) adequately demonstrates.

13 Ibid., p. 130, with a note on the difficulty of providing an adequate translation of the word into English. Hamlyn remarks that “it functions somewhat as the notion of judgment did in the writings of the Absolute Idealists such as Bradley.”

14 E.g., colour for the sense of sight, and sound for that of hearing: the objects are proper to each sense in that they are only appreciated by the sense with which they are associated.

15 E.g., that that white thing is Callias. As Cashdollar perspicuously puts it in his article “Aristotle's Account of Incidental Perception,” Phronesis, 18 (1973): 156–175CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in the case of perceptual access, the proper metaphysical order of things is reversed: we know first and best the accidents (whiteness, etc.), and only secondly and incidentally the substances that are their bearers. This does not of course entail any sceptical conclusions for Aristotle; but he will stress that we can be wrong about the second sort of perception. This might be usefully compared with his distinction between things that are the more knowable in themselves, and those which are more knowable to us, at An. Post., 1 2, 71b33ff.

16 Those that are perceived by more than one sense, such as magnitude and motion; the distinctions are not logically on the same level, which is something of a blemish: incidental perception can be incidental to either proper or common perception.

17 On these issues see, e.g., Chisholm, R. M., Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), p. 41–53Google Scholar, and Strawson, P. F., “Imagination and Perception,” in Foster, L. and Swanson, J. W., eds., Experience and Theory (London, 1970), p. 44–52.Google Scholar

18 Ross, W. D., Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1923), p. 142–143.Google Scholar

19 I should perhaps emphasize at this point that my talk of faculties is entirely general and non-technical: no commitment to any particular philosophy of mind need or ought to be inferred from it.

20 Schofield, “Aristotle on the Imagination,” p. 118.

21 And should quash any lingering phenomenalist desire to interpret Aristotle's account of the perception of proper sensibles in the light of sense-datum theory. One recent commentator who does not overlook this is Deborah Modrak (The Power of Perception, p. 76ff.), but she does not make a great deal of this issue.

22 As Hamlyn notes (Aristotle's “De Anima,” p. 105–106; cf. De An. 3 3, 427b12, 428a11, 3 6, 430b29; De Sensu 4, 442b8ff.), in the latter passage, Aristotle makes it clear that it as being of colour that sight is infallible, and as being of sound that hearing is as well; cf. also Met. 4 5, 1010b2, where Aristotle explicitly distinguishes between aisthêsis of proper objects, and phantasia in terms of the latter's fallibility.

23 For a suitably broad sense of colour.

24 The claim that jaundice-sufferers see things tinged with yellow is a commonplace in antiquity: indeed, it becomes a sceptical topos: Sextus, PH 1 44 126; cf. Hamlyn, Aristotle's “De Anima,” p. 101. Recently, the fashion has been to regard this as simply false, another example of the woeful lack of hard medical knowledge among the ancients (indeed, among philosophers in general): for this view (expressed, it should be stressed, with an appropriate sceptical caution), see Annas, Julia and Barnes, Jonathan, The Modes of Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, I have been informed, if only anecdotally, that there may in fact be some substance to the claim in the case of sufferers at extremely advanced stages of the disease, stages of course nowadays rarely if ever experienced. I am grateful to my colleague Harry Bracken for challenging me on this modern dogma.

25 Schofield, “Aristotle on the Imagination,” p. 118, n. 4.

26 The 1975 Symposium Aristotelicum, whose proceedings (including the first published version of Schofield's paper) appeared as Lloyd, G. E. R. and Owen, G. E. L., eds., Aristotle on Mind and the Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

27 This is to adopt Ross's emendation of “kai … kai” for the “ê … ê of the manuscripts, which Nussbaum (Aristotle's De Motu Animalium, p. 221) clearly accepts.

28 Thus Aristotle's teleological assumptions enter into the picture: it is worth reflecting, however, that they need not do so. For he might coherently have argued simply that it was a logical impossibility for there to be some general faculty F sufficient other things being equal for some general ability A in properly-constituted individuals that possessed F, and yet for A never as a matter of fact to be realized. That argument too rests on assumptions, about the determination of natural kinds, and the relation of possibility to actuality: those assumptions are, however, paradigmatically Aristotelian. But I cannot follow this suggestion out here in any more detail.

29 See Plato, Sophist 264aff.; Timaeus 52a; and Philebus 39b.

30 Aristotle uses the same example at De Insomnii 1, 458b26ff., 2 460b16ff.

31 Notably by Lycos, K., “Aristotle and Plato on Appearing,” Mind, 43, 292 (1964): 496ff.Google Scholar; see also Hamlyn, Aristotle's “De Anima,” p. 132–134.

32 Although we are of course sometimes deceived, by particularly vivid dreams (De Insomn. 3, 462a2ff.), as sufferers from severe fevers occasionally really do think they see creatures on the walls, deceived by the faint resemblance to the creatures discernible in marks on the plaster; but more frequently, people who less severely afflicted “see” the animals, but without thinking that they are real: De Insomn. 2, 460b12ff. The whole passage from 460b1–27 is highly instructive: the extent to which we are likely to be actually deluded increases in proportion to how badly affected we are, either by illness, or by strong emotion. This latter will become important in what follows.

33 Cf. De Insomn. 3 462a2ff.

34 See De An. 2 2, 413b11ff.: these issues are dealt with well by Jonathan Barnes in his article “Aristotle's Concept of Mind,” in Barnes, Articles on Aristotle, p. 32–41.

35 And the Aristotelian notion of praxis involves purposiveness and directedness as component parts.

36 MA 8, 701b33; EN 7 13, 1153b1ff., 25ff., 10 2, 1172b9ff.

37 MA 6, 700b24ff.; De An. 3 10, 433a27ff.

38 De An. 3 10, 433b6–10. It makes no difference whether one decides, with Plato, that Reason is an independent psychological force, holds with Aristotle that reason nonetheless requires desire for its efficaciousness, or rather sides with Hume and treats reason as merely instrumental, the slave of the passions.

39 See e.g., De Int. 9, 18a33ff., 19a8ff., 19a24ff.

40 Aristotle's de Motu Animalium, p. 222–223, 244, 248, 255, 260: I agree with her general claim that the importance of the decaying sense model has been over-stressed by commentators.

41 On this important distinction, and the tendency of proponents of the argument from illusion to miss it, see Austin, J. L., Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 22–25.Google Scholar