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Aristotle on the Sources of the Ethical Life
OXFORD ARISTOTLE STUDIES
General Editors
Julia Annas and Lindsay Judson
   
Passions and Persuasion in Aristotle’s Rhetoric
Jamie Dow
How Aristotle gets by in Metaphysics Zeta
Frank A. Lewis
The Powers of Aristotle’s Soul
Thomas Kjeller Johansen
Aristotle on the Apparent Good
Perception, Phantasia, Thought, and Desire
Jessica Moss
Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology
Allan Gotthelf
Priority in Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Michail Peramatzis
Doing and Being
An Interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta
Jonathan Beere
Aristotle on the Common Sense
Pavel Gregoric
Space, Time, Matter, and Form
Essays on Aristotle’s Physics
David Bostock
Aristotle on Teleology
Monte Ransome Johnson
Time for Aristotle
Physics IV. 10 14
Ursula Coope
Political Authority and Obligation in Aristotle
Andres Rosler
Aristotle’s Theory of Bodies
Christian Pfeiffer
Aristotle and the Eleatic One
Timothy Clarke
Aristotle on
the Sources
of the Ethical Life

Sylvia Berryman

1
3
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Acknowledgements

I have to confess that, as a sophomoric undergraduate, I acquired a distaste for

ethics—especially Aristotle’s—and nursed that prejudice far too long into my philo-
sophical career. Teachers who tried to enlighten me on the virtues of ethics in
previous years—Tad Brennan, M. M. McCabe, Johanna Seibt, Richard Sorabji, and
Stephen White—are in no way to blame for my obduracy on the topic. It is no
exaggeration that graduate students at the Ohio State University and the University
of British Columbia are responsible for nudging me to teach Aristotle’s ethics, and
thus for coming to appreciate its virtues. Andy Arlig, Suze Berkhout, Ian Brooks, Lee
Franklin, Tian Jie, Josh Johnston, Max Weiss, and Cathal Woods brought me, despite
myself, into the circle of admirers of Aristotelian ethics.
This work was substantially written during two sabbatical leaves from the University
of British Columbia. I am grateful for the patience of many colleagues during the
years of educating myself on the topic of ethics, particularly Alan Thomas, Justin
D’Arms, and Scott Anderson. The friendly and supportive grilling provided by the
Northwest Ancient Philosophy Workshop, instigated by Nick Smith, has been
important to the shape of this work, as several chapters were first read to that
formidable audience. I greatly benefited from comments from audiences at University
of Texas at Austin, Vancouver Island University, APA Western Division panel on
naturalism in Aristotle’s ethics, and Philosophy Desert Workshop. A special thank
you to the organizers, participants, and commentators, including Jonathan Dancy,
Matt Evans, Brad Inwood, Sarah Jansen, Kathryn Lindeman, Joel Martinez, Alex
Mourelatos, David Plunkett, Jean Roberts, and Meg Scharle for advice and encour-
agement. To five anonymous readers and the Series Editor, Lindsay Judson,
a heartfelt thank you for such detailed, thoughtful, and generous comments. I thank
Review of Metaphysics for permission to reproduce material in Chapter 2, and Ancient
Philosophy for permission to use material pertaining to Eudemian Ethics 2.6 in
Chapter 7.
All errors are of course my own.
 1
Introduction

‘Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim
at some good.’¹ So begins Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, one of the most widely read
texts in ethical thought. This arresting opening has received quite a lot of attention,
yet little that illuminates the significance of its place at the beginning of a work of
ethics. Why commence normative inquiry with such a claim?
One reason why that question is seldom asked is that the opening of Nicomachean
Ethics has been understood as a lead-in to an outright logical fallacy. Elizabeth
Anscombe suggested that Aristotle is making a fallacious inference from the claim
that ‘every action aims at some good’ to the idea that there must be a single good at
which all actions ultimately aim.² Scholarly attention has focused on defending
Aristotle from the charge of fallacious reasoning.³ This leaves untouched the assump-
tion that his opening sally is motivated by the attempt to show that there is a single
goal—a common conception of happiness—that we all seek. The search for an
account of the good life is unquestionably Aristotle’s aim. Yet there may still be
independent significance to the fact that he commences ethical inquiry from the
notion that actions are goal-directed.
The claim that all action aims at some good—a thesis Velleman labelled the ‘Guise
of the Good’—has its own history, its own logic, its own implications. Aristotle has
been read as making a statement that is plainly false;⁴ as asserting the existence of
global teleology;⁵ or as offering another of those broad generalizations to which he is
prone.⁶ The opening statement has seldom been given its due as a starting point for
ethical inquiry, even though it also forms the starting point of his metaethical
position.⁷ To do so is the project of this book.

¹ NE 1.1, 1094a1, trans. Ross/Urmson.

² Anscombe (1957), p. 34.
³ e.g. MacIntyre (1966), p. 59; Ackrill (1980); Engberg Pedersen (1983), pp. 30 1; Dahl (1984), p. 102ff.;
Urmson (1988), pp. 10 11; Kraut (1989), pp. 217 20; Broadie (1991), pp. 8 15; Richardson (1992),
pp. 346 7; Broadie and Rowe (2002), p. 264.
⁴ e.g. Irwin (1980c), p. 35; Williams (1985), p. 58.
⁵ Verbeke (1971), p. 150.
⁶ Urmson (1988), p. 9; Karbowski (2015), p. 113.
⁷ Those who acknowledge the importance of the opening question in defining the study of ethics
include Engberg Pedersen (1983), p. 7; Salkever (1991); Kenny (1992). None understand it in the way that
I propose here.

Aristotle on the Sources of the Ethical Life. Sylvia Berryman, Oxford University Press (2019).
© Sylvia Berryman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835004.003.0001
        

But is Aristotle even aware of the kinds of questions that we would describe as
metaethical?⁸ In the opening chapter of her Tanner Lectures, The Sources of Norma-
tivity, Christine Korsgaard suggested that Aristotle did not adequately appreciate the
need to question the status of ethical demands: he saw no need to ask where values
come from, that is, nor why we should treat them as authoritative.⁹ On her account,
the quest for the sources of normativity is a project peculiar to the modern ‘disen-
chanted’ universe, wherein the need to establish the reality or objectivity of moral
claims becomes apparent.¹⁰ On this he differs from us moderns—the story goes—
who no longer see the world as infused with moral order and are thus compelled to
invent new justifications for morality:
at least in ethics, Aristotle doesn’t seem to have made much of the problem. A well brought up
person would not need to have excellence forced upon him he would move naturally towards
the achievement of his perfect form.¹¹

Korsgaard’s is only one of a number of ‘big picture’ narratives about the history of
ethical thought in which Aristotle has played a starring role. In recent years, several
such narratives have been offered by those looking to history to reclaim ethics from
the subjectivist Slough of Despond. Bernard Williams and Philippa Foot are among
those who have assumed, with Korsgaard, that Aristotelian ethical thought—for good
or ill—is characterized by the appeal to human nature to provide the grounding for
substantive ethical claims. Others, however, have cast doubt on the idea that Aristotle
regards human nature as an external standard—an ‘Archimedean Point’¹²—that
could serve as a court of appeal to settle substantive ethical questions. Thus a central
aspect of the way Aristotle is interpreted in these contemporary narratives turns out
to be in dispute.
These modern appropriations of Aristotle highlight important questions for
scholarly interpreters. My aim in this monograph is to show that Aristotle should
not be interpreted as an ethical naturalist, in the ‘Archimedean’ sense that Williams
articulates. That is, Aristotle does not attempt to draw substantive ethical guidance
from impartial study of the natural world. Nature does not, for Aristotle, straight-
forwardly supply answers to the twin questions that—according to Korsgaard—dog
modern ethicists: ‘whence value?’ and ‘why is it authoritative?’ Among the multiple

⁸ I thank David Plunkett for alerting me to a contemporary controversy about the meaning of
‘metaethics’, and especially Korsgaard’s use of the term: cf. McPherson and Plunkett (2017); Hussain
and Shah (2006), (2013). I use the term broadly here, to include second order reflection on justification
for substantive claims, as well as to issues in metaphysics, psychology, and epistemology: cf. Darwall,
Gibbard, and Railton (1992), pp. 125 6.
⁹ On Korsgaard’s use of the notion of the metaethical, see the Coda.
¹⁰ Korsgaard (1996a), p. 7. Annas (1993), p. 135, remarks that ancient Greek theorists did not
distinguish metaethics as a distinct field. This does not preclude them from having asked analogous
questions, however.
¹¹ Korsgaard (1996a), p. 3.
¹² The label is not meant to imply, of course, that Archimedes held any such view.
  

uses of the term ‘naturalism’ in contemporary philosophy, Williams’s notion nicely

captures a position Aristotle is often taken to hold. I will be arguing that Aristotle’s
considered view does not depend on viewing human nature as an external point that
provides substantive ethical guidance.
There are, of course, unmistakable appeals to human nature in Aristotle’s treatises
on ethics and politics. The famous ‘function’ argument of NE 1.7 appeals to the idea
that reasoning is the definitive feature of human nature, in order to determine which
life is best for human beings. The first book of the Politics argues for the naturalness
of the city, and defends the practices of slavery and the subordinate place of women,
by claiming that these practices are natural. I shall argue that, despite such prima
facie evidence, Aristotle intended the appeal to human nature only to delimit the
kinds of normative positions that could guide practical reason.
There are at least three considerations against reading Aristotle as an Archimedean
ethical naturalist.¹³ One is the absence of a sufficiently determinate form of good
living or good community, i.e. the lack of evidence that Aristotle thought any such
blueprint could be found in nature. A second is that such a reading would render the
virtues instrumental, whereas Aristotle insists on their non-instrumental worth.
Virtues are not merely the qualities that serve natural goals, i.e. some distinct end
beyond themselves: rather, Aristotle insists, they have value in their own right and
should be pursued for their own sake. A third concerns the nature of practical
reasoning. If human nature, as discovered by theoretical reason, were intended to
settle substantive ethical questions, practical reasoning would be reduced to an
application of a pre-established system. It would thus function much like theoretical
reasoning, applying general truths to a particular situation. There are indications,
however, that Aristotle thought of practical reasoning in a way that precludes such a
picture. These three considerations—the missing blueprint, the non-instrumental
value of the virtues, and the non-deductive nature of practical reason—together
undermine the supposition that Aristotle’s ethics is primarily grounded in the appeal
to human nature. I also draw on a positive argument in Eudemian Ethics, wherein
Aristotle claims that the practical good has a source that is different from the natural
good. Thus, I conclude, he would not have taken our species nature as the right kind
of standard by which to evaluate human choices.
Undeniably, Aristotle thinks that how we ought to live is a problem that must take
account of the kind of being that we are. Aristotle does make substantive use of the
appeal to human nature on some specific, boundary-setting issues. Nonetheless,
he does not take the constraints of our biological nature to be sufficiently detailed
to settle fine-grained questions about the good life. Theoretical inquiry into the
nature of action and choice and value is an aspect of inquiry into human nature:
the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics set out some theoretical considerations about

¹³ Here I draw on McDowell (1998a).

        

the shape and character of ethics. Facts of human nature are discovered by the
theoretical reflection and classificatory expertise of the natural philosopher. How-
ever, when we turn to using practical reasoning—to contentful ethical deliberation—
we are no longer inquiring into the nature of things. While practical reason and the
ability to choose belong to us by nature, the contents of the choices that we make are
not regarded as constrained or determined by nature, and could not be reached by a
value-neutral process of investigation. Although ethical demands must respect the
kind of being that we are, the account of the ethical life does not end there.
Korsgaard is not alone in denying that Aristotle could have engaged in a quest for
the foundations of ethics, since—it is thought—such a project only makes sense
against the background of a disenchanted picture of the universe produced by
modern science.¹⁴ Attention to Aristotle’s intellectual milieu is enough to cast
doubt on claims that Aristotle was naively naturalist, or that he was unconcerned
with second-order justificatory questions. Presocratics, sophists, Cyrenaics, and
Platonists of the fifth and fourth centuries had raised questions about the source
and justification of ethical demands; many of the kinds of concerns that drove
twentieth-century philosophers to second-order reflection about the status of ethical
claims would have been alive to Aristotle, albeit in somewhat different guise. When
Aristotle claims we are political animals and naturally live in communities, he is
merely resisting a sophistic view that the demands of ethics are illegitimate imposi-
tions. His intent was never to deny the need for human reason to design and evaluate
the best ways to realize our ends, nor to suggest that ethical questions are settled by
value-neutral investigation of our biological heritage.
Aristotle’s intellectual context is not that of twentieth-century positivism, or the
disenchanted universe that produced the fact–value divide. Nonetheless, I suggest
that questions about the origin of ethical values would arise for Aristotle because of
his hierarchical organization of nature and his picture of the relationship between the
axioms of different sciences. Aristotelian natural science begins from the study of
more basic and general principles and proceeds to the understanding of the more
specific; what is learned at each level is cumulative. Certain features are common
to all substances; others to all things with natures; others to all living things. Only
after studying these, we come to animals—which are characterized by the capacity
for self-motion—and finally human beings. Because we have reason, we have the
capacity for deliberation and choice about ends.
Thus for Aristotle, as I interpret him, ethics arises only within the world of human
actions. This hierarchical organization of the sciences, I will argue—a hierarchy that
is taken to reflect the organization of reality—would raise the question whence
practical value arises. The structure of Aristotelian science supports the notion that

¹⁴ I discuss these issues further in chapters 2 and 3 below.

  

practical choice—the search for good in action—has its own principles. It occupies a
different metaphysical location than the goal or end found in the natural world,
entering into inquiry at a different level.
A fundamental statement about the nature of ethics, I suggest, is implicit in the first
line of the Nicomachean Ethics. Ethics is the study of good choices in action: to act is to
aim at something we take to be good. The claim that action aims at some good is an
important statement about the nature of intentional action, and shows his recognition
that the practical good—the ‘good’ in the sphere of action—is quite distinct from the
goals of our biological nature. Just as Aristotle’s notion of the good in the natural
world begins from the observed directionality and normativity of change in the
natural and organic world, so his analysis of the normativity of human action
elaborates on the structure of action and its differentiation from animal pursuit.
At the heart of his implicit position lies a move I call ‘Socratic bootstrapping’,
wherein agents not only value certain goals but take them to be valuable, i.e. to be
reasonably defensible goals for agents like themselves to hold. Taking a goal to
be reasonably defensible commits agents to engage with the views of other practical
reasoners, and so to strive for truth. I argue that, thus understood, Aristotle’s attempt
to ground ethics within an analysis of the nature of action offers a promising
perspective on the origin of normativity.
Although the aim of this work is to reconstruct Aristotle’s own view, this issue is
not one of merely historical interest. Aristotelian virtue ethics is one of the most
active research programmes in contemporary ethics, yet many regard the usefulness
of an Aristotelian framework as limited by his apparent assumption that human
nature is the source and justification for ethical demands. This is viewed as a
limitation, either because the prospects for an Archimedean naturalism are ham-
pered by the direction of contemporary biology (which seems to deny that well-being
or flourishing of individuals is a natural goal) or because our biological nature does
not look very attractive as a basis for ethics. Scientific study of our biological heritage
might reveal us to have oppressive or hierarchical tendencies that we might none-
theless rationally reject or reform. Clarifying the extent to which Aristotle’s view is
hampered by an Archimedean naturalism is important to appreciating its potential
applicability as well as its historical value.
The methodology here is somewhat unorthodox for a work on the history of
philosophy, since it begins by asking how Aristotle would respond to questions from
modern ethics. I extract two research questions from modern readings of the
Aristotelian programme before turning to consider the ancient philosophical evi-
dence, where I believe that it is possible to discern implicit answers. The following
study engages more with readings of Aristotle and with his contemporary appropri-
ators than is customary for ancient scholarship, keeping textual discussion to a
minimum. It also involves more reconstruction than is usual for readings that
begin from questions asked by the texts themselves.
        

The persisting scholarly controversies surrounding Aristotle’s views may be

testimony to the uncertain nature of any reconstruction, since the various layers of
Aristotle’s thought may not arrange themselves neatly into any completely cohesive
picture. It may be foolish to expect that works written in the early days of philo-
sophical inquiry would stand up to the scrutiny of scholarship for two millenia as
completely consistent in their thought. But Aristotle’s ethical writings continue to
prove fertile inspiration for philosophical readings. I argue that this is for a good
reason, and that Aristotle was alive to many of the questions that concern ethicists
today, albeit in somewhat different form.
This work is neither a general introduction nor a thorough survey of all issues and
controversies arising from Aristotle’s ethical treatises; it offers less than a full account
of Aristotle’s ethical theory. It does not attempt to be comprehensive in its treatment
of the secondary literature, merely pointing the reader to relevant controversies. Nor
is it offered in a spirit of adulation or defence. There is much to be regretted in
Aristotle’s normative work, but also ideas that are worth recovering. This work is
written from the perspective of ancient philosophy scholarship, but recognizes that
such scholarship is informed by dialogue with ideas from the history of philosophy
and with our contemporary colleagues. There is much divergence among his modern
readers about the extent to which Aristotle should be regarded as an ethical natur-
alist, and moreover whether he questioned the foundations of his ethical views at all.
It is here that I begin.
 2
Aristotle in the Ethic Wars

La docte Antiquité dans toute sa durée

A l’égal de nos jours ne fut point éclairée.
Charles Perrault, Le siècle de Louis
le Grand

Aristotle’s ethical views have featured prominently in some recent debates. Among
those struggling to unseat the prevailing non-cognitivism of twentieth-century ethics,
some prominent figures have turned to the history of philosophy to reveal and
challenge the metaphysical picture thought to undergird this prevalence. The intel-
lectual dominance and respectability of the modern sciences is sometimes credited
with casting doubt on the status of truth claims in ethics, since the latter seem to lack
comparable truth-makers, methods of verification, or patterns of convergence. Many
ethicists today accept the force of arguments based on the so-called ‘is–ought gap’ or,
following J. L. Mackie, the ‘argument from queerness’.¹ Ethical statements are treated
as fundamentally different in kind from statements about the natural world. Not only
this, but their status as truth-apt is thought to suffer by comparison. Ethical claims
are variously reinterpreted by non-cognitivists as reflecting commitments, desires or
feelings of the participants, rather than as literal truth claims.
Yet in the latter half of the twentieth century, some prominent ethicists have
challenged this picture and urged the strength of Aristotle’s outlook as a potent
alternative. The challenges at issue are those which question the status of the very
worldview that has given rise to non-cognitivism. Korsgaard’s account stands in the
company of a number of major ethical works, all of which can be seen as in some way
responding to Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958). These include
MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981); Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
(1985); Foot’s Natural Goodness (2001),² and McDowell’s ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’
(1998a). These challengers have quite different projects, and—whether or not this
is explicit—can be seen to echo different features of Anscombe’s article.³ But they

¹ Mackie (1977), pp. 38 42.

² Foot’s book is somewhat out of sequence here: McDowell and others were aware of her ideas from
articles published prior to the publication of the book.
³ Iris Murdoch’s 1957 essay ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ voices some of the themes of ‘Modern Moral
Philosophy’, including the role of the disenchanted universe in the rise of metaethics and the contrast
between thick and thin ethical concepts: Murdoch (1957).
Aristotle on the Sources of the Ethical Life. Sylvia Berryman, Oxford University Press (2019).
© Sylvia Berryman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835004.003.0002
        

are alike in that they offer competing historical narratives, aimed at challenging
contemporary non-cognitivism; all of them consider Aristotelian virtue ethics as a
serious contender for an alternative ethical framework.
From one perspective, the Rezeptionsgeschichte or subsequent interpretation of our
subject matters little to scholars: historical exegesis might seem better served by ignoring
modern appropriations of Aristotle and focusing on the questions and topics that arise
directly from the text. But there are two reasons why scholars might need to pay
attention to contemporary readings. One is that those readings are philosophical,
and as such help expose assumptions, categorizations, and lenses that scholarly inter-
preters might be bringing to the text. Since scholarship cannot avoid interpretation,
awareness of our own biases is critical. A second is that larger interpretative framings can
sometimes expose questions that are missed by close textual readings. To regard textual
exegesis as straightforwardly revealing a philosopher’s intent presupposes that the
received texts are a finished product, constructed to be read as complete arguments.
With Aristotle, we cannot assume that. There is more than one surviving ethical treatise,
and reasons that I will explore in Chapter 4 for doubting whether even Nicomachean
Ethics can be read as a finished statement of Aristotle’s position. Understanding
Aristotle’s thought may thus require us to step back from the transmitted texts, and
also to consider the relationship between various works. Moreover, the assessment of the
validity and viability of Aristotle’s ideas plays a role in philosophical scholarship. This
can be enhanced by considering how his ideas look from the vantage point of history.
The modern narratives listed above present very different accounts of Aristotle’s
metaethical position. The very point that Korsgaard treats as his weakness—the cen-
trality of the appeal to human nature—Foot regards as a strength. Williams is ambiva-
lent: he sees a commitment to ethical naturalism as central to the coherence of Aristotle’s
view, but also as an aspect that makes it unavailable to modern audiences.⁴ McDowell,
conversely, denies that Aristotle intended to make any such appeal.⁵ Two questions are
highlighted by considering these interpretations: is Aristotle to be read as a certain kind
of ethical naturalist, and did he engage in second-order reflection on the foundations of
his ethics at all? Accounts of the supposed gap dividing us from the philosophical world
of the ancient Greeks are important to considering whether he could even have asked
the questions that preoccupy philosophers today. It is here that I begin.

The Uses of History

In The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard begins from a supposition that the question
whence normative constraints arise is an exclusively modern one.⁶ The rough picture
is that, in a Platonic or Aristotelian universe, the belief that the world is teleologically

⁴ Williams (1985), p. 53. ⁵ McDowell (1980), p. 371.

⁶ She recognizes that this view may be vaguely formulated, and is not even committed to its truth:
Korsgaard (1996a), p. 18. Her reading of Aristotle’s function argument in Korsgaard (2008a) suggests a
rather different picture.
      

ordered forms the metaphysical underpinning to the notion that ethical demands are
binding on all. She claims that our own natural direction of development towards
virtue seemed sufficient reason—to Aristotle—why we should be moral. On this
view, inquiry into the origin and obligatory power of normative constraints would
not have been considered a serious question, but rather a symptom of some failing in
the person asking it.⁷ Korsgaard claims that it would have seemed credible to the
ancients—as it did not to the moderns, living in a disenchanted universe—that the
natural world was normatively informed. Aristotle ‘came to believe that value is more
real than experienced fact, indeed that the real world is, in a way, value itself ’.⁸
On this account, only the ‘disenchantment’ of the modern world picture brought
metaethical questions to the fore.⁹ In the modern world, by contrast, the idea that
Form is somehow embedded in nature lost credibility. Korsgaard uses ‘Form’ to
stand in for whatever principles were thought to govern the proper direction of
organic development, i.e. the means whereby the directionality to change was
supposedly embedded in the natural world. This account of natural development,
she tells us, could no longer be sustained against the background of modern materi-
alism. The two questions Korsgaard sees as distinctively modern are whence norma-
tive claims originate, and why they should be regarded as authoritative.¹⁰
Korsgaard offers only a very brief outline of pre-modern ethical thought: her
point is to invoke a historical platitude that Plato and Aristotle—sometimes ‘the
ancients’¹¹—did not engage in the kind of metaethical reflection about the sources of
normativity that preoccupies modern philosophy. This opposition of ancient and
modern has a distinguished pedigree, but it is not unproblematic. The claim would be
plainly false if it were that Plato and Aristotle were unaware of challenges to
teleological naturalism. She proposes that it might have seemed credible in antiquity,
as it does not in the modern world, that ethical striving is simply part of our nature
and thus not in need of defence. A modern worldview—wherein the material world
has come to be regarded as ‘reluctant, recalcitrant, resistant’—made it incredible that
nature provides the grounding for moral demands, thus prompting reflection on the
metaethical grounding of ethical demands.¹²
Korsgaard’s point in sketching this narrative is to present a specific response—the
Kantian notion of obligation—as the culmination of a historical process.¹³ She sees
the notion that ethics is grounded in obligation as first formulated in Judeo-Christian
ethics, which posits the imposition of ethical demands by a divine lawgiver. ‘The
ancients’ are considered by Korsgaard only as a precursor to the modern perspective,

⁷ Korsgaard (1996a), p. 3. ⁸ Korsgaard (1996a), p. 2. ⁹ Korsgaard (1996a), pp. 1 10.

¹⁰ Korsgaard (1996a), pp. 7 ff.
¹¹ Korsgaard (1996a), p. 3: ‘the ancients thought of human virtue as a kind of excelling’; ‘[i]n Greek
thought, becoming excellent is as natural as growing up’; cf. p. 66. On the tendency to take Aristotle as
typical of ancient Greek ethics, Annas (1996b), p. 238.
¹² Korsgaard (1996a), p. 4.
¹³ See Williams (1996), p. 217 for a critique of Hegelian aspects of this narrative. In Korsgaard (2008a)
and (2009), she offers a more sympathetic presentation of Aristotle’s thought.
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inasmuch as the appeal to divine legislation is purported to have filled a perceived gap
or failing in earlier ethical thought. As Korsgaard acknowledges, this narrative is
vaguely formulated;¹⁴ it is also problematic as a historical account.¹⁵ Are we to believe
that Judeo-Christian morality flourished because of a loss of faith in the notion that
Form is embedded in nature? This triumphal narrative seems to originate with
seventeenth-century Christian philosophers seeking to demonstrate the superiority
of their own metaphysical picture.¹⁶ Nonetheless, it is striking to witness a contem-
porary ethicist resurrecting this ‘quarrel of the ancients and the moderns’. And
Korsgaard is not alone in this: a common theme in several of the historical narratives
written in response to Anscombe is that changing ideas about the natural world
brought a new problem about the status of ethics to the fore.
It is undoubtedly the case that certain assumptions about the nature of the physical
world were sharpened and clarified at the time of the emergence of the early modern
sciences. In ancient Greek natural philosophy, there was little agreement as to the
properties that could properly be ascribed to matter. A solidifying consensus about a
mind–body distinction was an early modern artefact, one which helped highlight
questions about the status of ethical properties and normative claims. Yet it is not at
all clear that so sharp a divide exists between the reflective abilities of ancients and
moderns merely because of the development of the modern sciences and a sharpened
mind–body distinction. The variety of ethical positions formulated in antiquity belies
the notion that failure of traditional answers in a disenchanted universe was a
necessary trigger for reflection on the source and grounds of ethical claims. There
is more continuity and overlap between ancients and moderns than Korsgaard’s
narrative implies. Her historical account may be offered lightheartedly, but it has
problematic implications, particularly when it reinforces mistaken assumptions
about Aristotle’s naivety.¹⁷
Korsgaard’s history should be read in contrast to that offered by Elizabeth
Anscombe. Written in 1958, Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ juxtaposed
modern and Aristotelian perspectives to make a quite different point.¹⁸ Anscombe
may appear to be the source of the emphasis, among contemporary readers, on

¹⁴ Korsgaard (1996a), p. 18.

¹⁵ Detel (2005) critiques some aspects of the presentation of ancient ethics, including the claim that the
search for normativity is absent.
¹⁶ Although I shall not argue this here, the origins of this narrative may be traceable to works in the vein
of Cudworth’s True Intellectual System: cf. Cudworth (1678/1845).
¹⁷ Korsgaard later considers the possibility that Aristotle might have embraced a version of what she
calls ‘reflective endorsement’: Korsgaard (1996a), p. 51 n. 4. She also notes that he recognizes a distinction
that substantive realists do not allow, between practical and technological reasoning: Korsgaard (1996a),
p. 44 n. 4. These footnotes cast doubt on her initial positioning of Aristotle in the camp of naive naturalism.
¹⁸ Their different readings of the place of Kant in this story is important to Korsgaard’s project: see
Berryman (2018) for a more detailed account.
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Aristotle’s appeal to human nature as a source of ethical norms.¹⁹ Certainly Foot, and
perhaps MacIntyre—both of whom share Anscombe’s concern to resist the prevail-
ing subjectivism of twentieth century ethics—take its teleological naturalism to be the
appeal of Aristotelian virtue ethics. However, I do not believe this is the best reading
of Anscombe’s article, nor of Aristotle.
For Anscombe, the contrast between ancient and modern ethics is not the tri-
umphant development of metaethical reflectivity. Rather, the division hinged on the
modern creation of an artificial need to justify ethics to its audience, because of a
restricted view about the kinds of facts that could legitimately ground knowledge
claims. Anscombe’s account implicitly challenges the assumption that the modern
preoccupation with the authority of morality results from our possession of a more
sophisticated world picture. While Korsgaard saddles Aristotle with a faith in the
naturalness of ethics that is now simply unsustainable, Anscombe rather sought to
undermine the robustness of the fact–value distinction that supports this assessment.
Anscombe’s challenge to the fact–value distinction negates the supposition that
modern ethicists—expelled from the Garden of Eden of naive naturalism—are left
with only subjectivist means to ground ethical claims.
Anscombe notes that many everyday concepts—not just ethical terms—only make
sense against a background of institutional practices that share both descriptive and
normative aspects. The problem is not that the metaphysics of earlier times was too
permissive, but rather that ours is too narrow. The metaphysics Anscombe decries is
not necessarily that of a ‘disenchanted’ universe, but of a particularly positivist
reading of the modern predicament.²⁰ It is perfectly possible to welcome the know-
ledge gained from the modern sciences without supposing that they render other,
non-empirical discourses suspect. The spare landscape of positivism created the
environment in which non-cognitivist metaethics flowered, since it bars us from
knowing much that we might otherwise take ourselves to know. But the positivist
programme imploded. There is no reason, then, for us to accede to its claims about
the status of ethical truths.
This challenge to the significance for ethical discourse of the ‘is–ought’ or ‘fact–
value’ gap may be the farthest-reaching aspect of Anscombe’s complex article. She
resituates ethics among other social practices, implicitly challenging the suggestion
that there is anything ‘queer’ about normative facts.²¹ ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’
also laments the modern classification of the moral, as opposed to a part of the
broader category of ethical evaluation that is found in Aristotle.²² The moral realm is
viewed as an area of life defined by other-directed concern and self-sacrifice, in
conflict with self-interest, so that the question why we should be motivated to accept

¹⁹ For the historical background to Anscombe’s article, see Welchman (2012).

²⁰ Cf. Foot (2001), p. 6. ²¹ Anscombe (1958), pp. 4 5.
²² Anscombe (1958), p. 1. For a critique of the boundary Anscombe draws between a modern notion of
moral and the ancient sphere of the ethical, see Annas (1993), pp. 452 5.
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its demands seems particularly pressing. A related but more subtle claim is that it is
the tendency to think that the language of ‘ought’ has a special moral sense—one not
grounded in human or social facts—that led modern moral philosophers to create an
artificial problem about the sources of normativity. From this perspective, the differ-
ence is not that ancient ethicists failed to recognize a need for justification because
they naively saw the world as normatively laden, but rather that modern schools of
thought created a pseudo-problem by dividing the world of facts from that of norms.
Anscombe’s own historical account of the rise of subjectivism and the shift away
from the notion of ethics as truth-apt is not the aspect of her account that has won
most adherents. Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue offers an important addendum to
Anscombe’s article, in that he traces a more complex and convincing history of ethics.²³
He is particularly concerned to show how the Aristotelian virtue approach persisted
and infused Christian thought, only to be properly supplanted by what he calls ‘the
Enlightenment project’. It was the Enlightenment, with its faith in human reason as a
source of value, that led to the denial of the authority of other sources of ethical
guidance grounded in ways of living, evolving traditions, or the ‘thick’ ethical language
of every day.²⁴ On MacIntyre’s account, the Christian appeal to divine decree did not, in
fact, replace virtue ethics, which continued to inform medieval and early modern ethical
thought. This friendly revision to Anscombe’s historical narrative would preclude the
supposition that the Judeo-Christian ethical view flourished because it filled a perceived
gap in the Aristotelian view, or was necessarily seen as inimical to the latter. This more
complex history weakens any argument for a sharp divide between ancient and
modern, or for one that coincides with the Scientific Revolution.²⁵
MacIntyre challenges the belief that the fact–value distinction is a timeless truth
discovered from within the modern disenchanted worldview, rather than a normative
view in its own right. Charles Taylor elaborates on MacIntyre’s criticism of contem-
porary subjectivism, showing more clearly how it is the heir to the nominalist
rejection of Aristotelianism.²⁶ Just as some advocates of divine will saw more potential
for divine power in a morally neutral picture of the universe, so modern advocates of
human autonomy put over their ‘ethic of disengaged freedom’ as timeless truth.²⁷
Nothing about the modern scientific project—on MacIntyre’s account—requires us to
‘discover’ the groundlessness of ethical language. Rather, he suggests, the ambition to
view human will as the source of value gave rise to non-cognitivism.
We find—in reviewing alternative historical narratives—just how thoroughly
ideological considerations shape the telling of history, and especially the formulation
of an opposition between ancient and modern. The distinctions drawn between the
different historical periods are based on supposed changes in views about the nature
of the natural world and our knowledge of it. But there are various and conflicting

²³ MacIntyre (1984), p. 53; Taylor (1994), p. 16. ²⁴ See Long (1983), for a helpful commentary.
²⁵ Cf. Crisp (2004). ²⁶ Esp. Taylor (1994), pp. 17 21; MacIntyre (1984), pp. 51 9.
²⁷ Taylor (1994), p. 21; cf. MacIntyre (1998), pp. 85 6.
      

explanations on offer of the reasons for the divide. Korsgaard sees the modern
concern with metaethics as a response to the disenchantment of the world: she does
not suppose that the distinction between ancient and modern is based on heightened
awareness of cultural relativity. The concern with cultural variation does feature in
some of the narratives offered in Anscombe’s wake—Williams makes much of it—but
this concern alone would not have sufficed to yield such a supposed divide between
ancient and modern ethical worlds.²⁸ Ancient Greek ethicists were perfectly capable of
recognizing cultural variation. More is needed to explain why moderns are inclined to
lose confidence in their own views in the face of the evidence of variability, rather than
to conclude that their own practices are nonetheless superior. MacIntyre’s account is
different again.
Anscombe suggested that the Aristotelian schema had much to recommend it, as
an alternative to the subjectivism she found so ethically problematic. At least it shows
us a way to do ethics without a divine legislator,²⁹ since Aristotelian ethics focuses on
what came to be called ‘thick’ ethical concepts, like ‘chaste’ and ‘truthful’, rather than
‘thin’ concepts like ‘right’ or ‘good’. Thin concepts have lost their moorings for those
who have abandoned the metaphysical underpinnings of Judeo-Christian morality,
she argued. The practice of contemporary philosophical inquiry reflects that confu-
sion, so we would be better theorizing with thick virtue concepts. We understand
their descriptive content, and thus make fewer fundamental mistakes in using them.
Anscombe’s complex paper had an enormous impact on ethicists: the contempor-
ary revival of virtue ethics is often traced back to it. However, it is seldom noted that
the article offers two quite distinct suggestions as to how an Aristotelian virtue ethics
might help us escape the lures of subjectivism. One is the suggestion that the virtues
are truth-apt because they are linked to an account of human nature; the other is that
they are truth-apt because they are grounded in social practice. The first is the thread
followed by Foot; the second is the line pursued by those like MacIntyre, Williams,
and McDowell who ground the truth claims of ethics in ‘thick’ ethical concepts, social
practices, and the norms embedded in our life world.³⁰ While the roots of both ideas
can be found in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, I shall propose in what follows that the
second is at once more representative of Anscombe’s piece, and a more promising
approach to Aristotle.

Refinements and Responses

Anscombe considers a number of different ways that philosophers might try to
ground the notion of obligation, in the absence of belief in a divine lawgiver. One
of several possibilities she considers is that the virtues can be seen as norms of a

²⁸ Williams (1985); cf. also Lovibond (1995), p. 104; Thomas (2006), pp. 2 3.
²⁹ Anscombe (1958), pp 14 15.
³⁰ Williams (1985) ascribes the former to Aristotle, but in his own voice pursues the latter.
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kind for human beings.³¹ It is one of several different options countenanced, and
receives only a short paragraph: it is not explicitly endorsed, but on the other hand, it
does look like the last man standing. This is the line of inquiry pursued by Philippa
Foot, who takes the appeal to natural norms to offers an escape from non-cognitivist
ethics. Foot—and Rosalind Hursthourse, who follows her lead in many respects³²—
develops a virtue ethics based on the notion that human nature provides a grounding
for the truth of value claims. As I shall show, the robustness of this naturalism turns
out to be either untenable or deeply qualified. Other readers follow what I take to be
the more sophisticated and viable thread in Anscombe’s thought: that of recognizing
the truth-claims of specific features of ethical discourse, i.e. thick concepts and the
internal evaluation of practices. Rather than accepting the fact–value divide and
trying to resolve it by grounding the evaluative in the natural, these readers take up
Anscombe’s challenge to the cogency of that divide.
In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams articulates a naturalistic
reading of Aristotle’s ethics. Although Anscombe only appears in a footnote, Williams
could be read as a sceptical alternative to the Anscombean suggestion that Aristotle’s
ethics constitutes a viable alternative for modern ethicists.³³ Bernard Williams
reads Aristotelian natures as intended to provide an ‘Archimedean Point’ or external
point of leverage.³⁴ Williams introduces the metaphor of the ‘Archimedean Point’
to signify a location outside of the ethical realm, from which we can get leverage
against the sceptical challenge. We need such a point of leverage to justify morality
to doubters such as the character Callicles, who appears in Plato’s Gorgias. Williams
takes Aristotle to be offering a substantive promise of well-being via the appeal to
human nature. This promise—the idea that we have real interests and not just
subjective preferences—is meant to provide the rationale for ethics.³⁵ We have, as he
puts it, an ‘inner nisus’ towards developing civic virtue.³⁶ This vision depends, Williams
believes, on Aristotle’s teleological picture, wherein it is feasible to believe that nature
provides for the well-being of individuals and provides reason to believe that actual-
izing our nature is a desirable and achievable goal.
Williams himself is sceptical of this vision. For one, our psychology may well be
such that evil pays off, at least judging by the naturalist’s standard of the ‘bright eye
and the gleaming coat’.³⁷ For another, many different ethical visions are compatible
with human nature, and could conflict both with one another and with other
legitimate pursuits:

³¹ Anscombe (1958), pp. 14 15. ³² Hursthouse (1999).

³³ A footnote tracing Williams’s interest in ‘thick’ concepts to Foot and Murdoch suggests that Williams
may have been reacting to Foot’s version of the narrative: Williams (1985), p. 218 n. 7; Thomas (2007b), p. 48.
³⁴ Williams (1985), pp. 28 9, 40 53; (1995), p. 195; Thomas (2007). The reference to Archimedes comes
from Hannah Arendt’s description of Galileo. Arendt (1958), pp. 257 68 compared the purely descriptive
stance of the modern sciences to Archimedes’ boast that he could move the earth from some external
location.
³⁵ Williams (1985), pp. 28 9. ³⁶ Williams (1985), p. 44. ³⁷ Williams (1985), p. 46.
      

Aristotle saw a certain kind of ethical, cultural, and indeed political life as the harmonious
culmination of human potentialities, recoverable from an absolute understanding of human
nature. We have no reason to believe in that.³⁸

Williams recognizes that Aristotle is not trying to justify ethics to everyone: those
who are corrupted will not heed the call. However, Aristotle could still view eudai-
monia as justifying morality for every individual:³⁹ we have ‘real interests’ that
validate naturalistic prescriptions for the good life.
Williams distinguishes this Archimedean ethical naturalism from a broader notion
which defines itself merely in opposition to the supernatural, asserting only that
ethical properties must be part of the natural world.⁴⁰ The Archimedean notion,
importantly, allows for the possibility of investigating and establishing substantive
ethical truths from a value-neutral perspective. It moreover allows us to justify the
claims of ethics as ‘good for’ recalcitrant individuals—whatever their subjective
beliefs—on account of its possession of some value-independent facts about what it
takes for human beings to flourish.⁴¹ Williams doubts, however, that such an ethical
theory could be revived. The modern sciences suggest that natural norms are geared
towards reproductive fitness—a very different goal—and leave us no reason for
confidence that nature favours individual flourishing.⁴²
Philippa Foot disagrees that the appeal to human nature is otiose as a philo-
sophical alternative. First in some papers and then a monograph, Foot follows
Anscombe’s lead in looking for an alternative to contemporary non-cognitivism.⁴³
Foot finds considerable appeal in the idea that human nature offers ethics a non-
arbitrary ground. Her notion that virtue ethics can offer a non-subjective basis for the
account of goodness rests on notions she calls ‘Aristotelian necessity’ and ‘Aristotelian
categoricals’:⁴⁴ she seeks to ground virtue ethics on the notion of kinds. Like MacIntyre,⁴⁵
she draws on the notion that, as beings with functions, there are norms built into our
very nature. Foot draws on the work of Michael Thompson, who elaborates on
Anscombe’s notion of an ‘Aristotelian categorical’, a distinctive kind of claim evident
in statements about what was typical or appropriate for members of a species kind.⁴⁶
Statements like ‘cats are four-legged’ articulate natural norms: they may not be true
of every member, and yet they are more than statistical generalizations. A cat failing
to have four legs would be judged defective. Not all abnormalities in species members
would count as defects: Foot contrasts the blue tit that lacks a coloured patch on its

³⁸ Williams (1985), p. 52. ³⁹ Williams (1985), p. 49. ⁴⁰ Williams (1985), p. 121.

⁴¹ For the denial that flourishing is meant to offer an antecedently accepted benefit for ethical living, see
Broadie (2007a), pp. 115 16.
⁴² Williams (1985), p. 44.
⁴³ Hursthouse (1999), McDowell (1998a), and Fitzpatrick (2000) refer to Foot’s articles, including
‘Rationality and Virtue’ and ‘Does Moral Subjectivism Rest On a Mistake?’ More recent critics focus on
Natural Goodness (2001).
⁴⁴ Foot (2001), pp. 15, 17, 27 37, 46. ⁴⁵ MacIntyre (1984), pp. 58 9.
⁴⁶ Thompson (1995); Foot (2001), p. 28.
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head with a peacock that lacks a bright-coloured tail. If the coloured patch plays no
important function, as the tail does in the reproductive life of the peacock, the one
bird counts as defective, the other not.⁴⁷ The notion of species functions is thus
critical to her view.
Foot suggests that these ‘kind’ predications supply norms in the sphere of ethics as
well. The difference is that in human beings, the relevant defects are shortcomings of
practical reason. Virtues are the qualities required by the form of human life. The
sense of ‘good’ we use in ethics, she argued, takes its sense from natural teleology.
‘Good’—following Geach—is to be understood as an attributive adjective: its inter-
pretation depends on what kind of thing it is applied to. Unlike a predicative adjective
like red, which maintains its meaning robustly across different contexts,⁴⁸ attributive
adjectives like ‘small’ mean quite different things depending on the domain of
application. Knowing what makes us good thus requires studying human nature.
More provocatively, Foot announces herself to be ‘quite seriously, likening the basis of
moral evaluation to that of the evaluation of behaviour in animals’.⁴⁹ She takes the
resistance to this idea to come from the hold of emotivist or prescriptivist ways of
thinking.⁵⁰ It is because we have artificially separated moral from natural evaluation
that we are driven to seek some non-natural grounding for the former.
The connection between ethics and the evaluation of species members lies in the
idea that virtues cluster around practices that are essential to furthering the human
good. Foot turns to Anscombe’s paper ‘Promising and its Justice’, in which
Anscombe notes that many human endeavours depend on our being able to bind
one another to future action. Foot takes from this paper the notion that virtues
are grounded in the human good: virtues, that is, are considered part of human
ethology.⁵¹ They facilitate the characteristic behaviours that are required to qualify as
good specimens of a kind.⁵² For Foot, natural norms are meant to be the ultimate
ground: they are not justified on, say, utilitarian grounds.⁵³ In evaluating one another
ethically, then, we are using ‘good’ in much the same way as a judge at a dog-and-
pony show. However, what we assess in one another is the mastery of practical reason
and the working of the will.
Foot is attracted by the notion that vices can be seen as defects. While this term
may have a reassuringly objective appeal to ethicists floundering in the quagmire of
twentieth-century non-cognitivism, it is not clear how consistently Foot takes biological
nature to be a source of norms. As Woodcock notes, it is unclear whether she intends
to apply the language of ‘defect’ to natural disabilities in human beings, or how
she would address the potentially offensive implications of a hierarchical evaluative

⁴⁷ Foot (2001), pp. 30 3.

⁴⁸ There are in fact variations even with colour terms, e.g. ‘red hair’ versus ‘red face’.
⁴⁹ Foot (2001), pp. 2 3. ⁵⁰ Foot (2001), pp. 16, 39. ⁵¹ Foot (2001), pp. 45 6, 52.
⁵² Foot (2001), pp. 44 51. ⁵³ Foot (2001), pp. 48 51.
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schema.⁵⁴ Foot and Hursthouse reject some of the kinds of conclusions that might
seem to fall out from infusing our biological heritage with ethical weight. Although
both view reproduction as a natural norm, neither are willing to deem individuals
who practice celibacy or homosexuality as thereby ethically defective.⁵⁵
While not strictly relevant to assessing Aristotle’s view—Foot is not doing Aristotle
scholarship—the popularity and accessibility of Natural Goodness may have contrib-
uted to the perception that an Aristotelian naturalism could be updated and adapted
to modern biology. The fact that Foot’s view is described as ‘Aristotelian’ or ‘neo-
Aristotelian’ has doubtless contributed to the notion that Aristotle was an naturalist
of Williams’s ‘Archimedean’ variety.⁵⁶ However, readers diverge on whether they
think Foot’s notion of ‘nature’ is meant to be a contemporary scientifically grounded
one, or whether in fact she requires an Aristotelian teleological framework to ground
the notions she proposes to adopt. As FitzPatrick notes, it remains indeterminate
whether her account considers nature to be an external or Archimedean foundation.
What she is explicitly committed to is the existence of a single framework for the
evaluation of animal traits and human virtues.⁵⁷ The insistence on this unitary
evaluative framework, despite the acknowledged differences that come with human
rationality, is critical to considering the norms at issue natural, but leaves
unanswered questions about how the parallel between animal and human traits is
meant to work.
There are difficulties with the notion of substituting contemporary biology into a
neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism. Some who read Foot as doing so accuse her of
ignorance. In evolutionary biology, the current view of the selection pressures is not
that they favour the survival or well-being of the individual, or even the good of the
species, but rather that they promote the survival and reproduction of those indi-
viduals who are genetically most similar.⁵⁸ To more sympathetic readers, however,
Foot’s natural norms are not intended to be based on modern science. John Hacker-
Wright defends Foot from the charge that she is mistaken about contemporary
biology, arguing that her naturalism never intends to appeal to a notion of human
nature that is ‘scientific’ or external to the evaluative perspective. He argues that the
notion of ‘kind’ at work in Thompson’s ‘Aristotelian categoricals’—a notion on
which Foot relies heavily—is not that of biological species, but rather a logical
notion.⁵⁹ Hacker-Wright stresses that the use of nature is one of ‘internal observa-
tions’ and not of ‘scientific detachment’.⁶⁰ Nature is no fulcrum here.

⁵⁴ Woodcock (2006): he suggests that, while Foot only explicitly refers to voluntary shortcomings as
‘defects’, she cannot consistently withhold this evaulation from organic disabilities.
⁵⁵ Foot (2001), p. 109; Hursthouse (1999), pp. 221 ff.; 245 7.
⁵⁶ e.g. FitzPatrick (2000); Gowans (2008); Toner (2008); Brüllmann (2013); Hacker Wright (2013);
Harcourt (2013).
⁵⁷ FitzPatrick (2000), pp. 19 21, esp. n. 23.
⁵⁸ Copp and Sobel (2004), p. 535; FitzPatrick (2000); Gowans (2008).
⁵⁹ Hacker Wright (2009), p. 311; cf. Copp and Sobel (2004), p. 537.
⁶⁰ Hacker Wright (2009), p. 320.
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Hursthouse’s version of Footean virtue ethics also concludes, explicitly, that

evaluation is ‘Neurathian’:⁶¹ human nature does not serve as an external, validating
point, but is rather a matter of reflective endorsement of those aspects of our biological
heritage we choose to affirm. No plank on the boat is immune to revision.⁶² Thus, we
are left with the realization that the most viable Footean version of Aristotelian
virtue ethics—in the eyes of its own advocates—is not one which regards the appeal
to a biological conception of nature as justificatory.
Aristotle did not need to contend with current science, of course: the question is
whether he intended to use human nature as an Archimedean Point to leverage
ethical claims. While Williams recognizes that Aristotle’s view of nature is not
entirely empirical, he takes it to be intended to provide an external grounding for
the demands of ethics.⁶³ This reading of Aristotle has been challenged by other
scholars. Julia Annas trenchantly objected that Williams depends on a mistaken
reading of Aristotle’s teleology, a theme I shall return to in the next chapter.⁶⁴ Martha
Nussbaum also questioned Williams’s naturalist reading of Aristotle, arguing that
Aristotle’s appeal to human nature should be understood as ‘internal’—as one
that depends on reflection from within the evaluative framework—and not as an
external point of leverage. Nussbaum argued that the appeal to nature is meant to
provide reasons that would be apparent to somebody already committed to ethical
practice, but would not convince an amoralist or sceptic who stands outside of the
conversation.⁶⁵ This suggestion that Aristotle approaches ethics as a self-conscious
reflection that can only be conducted from within the ethical perspective certainly
accords with Aristotle’s claim that we need to be properly educated in order to enter
the ethical conversation.⁶⁶
Writing in a Festschrift for Philippa Foot, John McDowell criticized the motivation
for the reading of Aristotle offered by Foot and Williams.⁶⁷ McDowell offers an
alternative reading of the history of philosophy, according to which the supposition
that Aristotle must have sought a foundation for the objectivity of ethics is ‘meta-
physically shallow’.⁶⁸ McDowell argued that the modern preoccupation with seeking
foundations in the natural world resulted from the mistaken assumption that a
globally disenchanted or empiricist perspective is required by those who accept the
truths of the modern sciences. Aristotle, in his view, lacked any such reason for
seeking foundations for his ethical views.⁶⁹

⁶¹ Hursthouse (1999) p. 166. ⁶² Levy (2009); Brüllmann (2013).

⁶³ Nagel (1986), in his review of Williams, endorsed this reading of Aristotle.
⁶⁴ Annas (1988), (1993), p. 139 40. ⁶⁵ Nussbaum (1995).
⁶⁶ Here, she seems to escape the criticisms of her internalist reading of the use of endoxa voiced by
Cooper (1999a).
⁶⁷ McDowell (1998a); cf. Forman (2008); Gill (1990).
⁶⁸ McDowell (1998a), p. 186.
⁶⁹ Cf. Salkever (1990), pp. 4 ff., who argues that it is distinctive of Aristotle practical philosophy not to
seek the kind of justification found in Archimedean Points.
      

McDowell shares in the project of challenging the rise of non-cognitivism, and of

rescuing the truth claims of ethics. He seeks to defend the notion of practical
rationality, arguing that ethical reflection does not collapse into subjectivity and
that ‘practical thought should be allowed its aspiration to objectivity’.⁷⁰ Where he
sees Foot and Williams going astray is in accepting what he sees as a Humean,
disenchanted conception of the world, according to which ‘whatever intelligible
order there is in our world-picture is a product of the operations of the mind’.⁷¹
For many neo-Humeans, the natural corollary is to fall into—as Hume himself
didn’t—a kind of ‘scientistic realism’, according to which ‘reality is exhausted by
the natural world’.⁷² While this perspective may seem like common sense, McDowell
advocates for a revised Kantian perspective, according to which the very fact of
perceiving the world as a world and not a mere lump requires that we accord it
structure.⁷³ Even our understanding of nature involves the operations of thought.
McDowell does not deny the value of taking the perspective required for scientific
investigation; what he objects to is the assumption that this perspective becomes
global, offering exclusive access to objective truth or to reality. Practical reasoning, in
his view, requires no external validation; and Aristotle did not suppose that it did.⁷⁴
McDowell denies that human nature is viewed by Aristotle as either value-neutral
or susceptible to empirical investigation. McDowell particularly rejects Foot’s notion
that Aristotle’s ethics centres on the appeal to natural norms. He takes Foot to be
assuming that a substantive appeal to nature provides an external ground for ethical
norms. McDowell doubts that the appeal to species norms can be authoritative over
individuals, given the role that practical reason plays in our lives: no rational creature
need think itself bound by Aristotelian categoricals. Any conception of rationality
robust enough to allow us to reason practically would also enable us to step back
individually from the traits that are typical of our species, so that an account of the
authority of ethics cannot depend on our ‘first nature’. Claiming that a vicious
individual is defective by species norms would carry little weight with the individual
free-rider.⁷⁵
McDowell stresses—against the naturalist reading of Aristotle—how few substan-
tive appeals to human nature can be found in the Ethics. His own proposal is that
reflection on our commitments from within the ethical perspective—‘Neurathian’
reflection—allows human nature to set certain limits on the shape of ethical life,
without serving as an Archimedean Point to validate any specific mandate. McDowell
denies that Aristotle is self-consciously adopting any such distinction, however.
Elsewhere, McDowell provides more clarity as to why he doubts that Aristotle can
reasonably be taken to have striven for objectivity in ethics. He argues that the loss of

⁷⁰ McDowell (1998a), p. 185. ⁷¹ McDowell (1998a), pp. 174 5.

⁷² McDowell (1998a), p. 175. ⁷³ McDowell (1998a), p. 178.
⁷⁴ McDowell (1998a), pp. 185, 195; Forman (2008).
⁷⁵ McDowell (1998a), p. 171; Toner (2008), p. 226.
        

confidence in rational reflection on the nature of ethics is a modern preoccupation:

that only against the background of this loss of confidence does it make sense to
describe a view as self-consciously Neurathian, i.e. engaged in a project of revision
from within.⁷⁶ Thus McDowell regards Aristotle as philosophically naive with respect
to questions that, he thinks, only arise within the metaphysics of the ‘disenchanted
universe’.⁷⁷ His position implies that Aristotle did not reflect on the justification for
his ethical theory.⁷⁸
The oddity is that McDowell, like Anscombe, draws many resources from Aristotle’s
work. We are left wondering why these Aristotelian resources turn out to prove so
appropriate, if Aristotle was ignorant of the very questions to which his philosophy
now provides such rich answers. McDowell is not alone in this hermeneutic stance.
Korsgaard draws many resources from Aristotle, while denying that he could have
been aware of the reasons why they are so applicable in a modern context;⁷⁹ Mark
LeBar’s recent articulation of an ‘Aristotelian constructivism’ faces the same conun-
drum.⁸⁰ The aptness of Aristotle’s ideas to the modern predicament, I believe, should
puzzle these thinkers more than it does.

Some Take-Home Lessons, and Two

Research Questions
A number of lessons can be learned from this survey. I have been examining several
important attempts, from the second half of the twentieth century, to look back on
the history of ethical thought and to try to understand the nature of the divide
between our own moral outlook and Aristotle’s. These are serious attempts by wise
and thoughtful philosophers, suggesting that Aristotle has resources to offer con-
temporary ethics, even while recognizing that a looming historical chasm remains to
be crossed if those resources are to be meaningfully deployed. They have—
unsurprisingly—different views on how and what can be salvaged from across the
divide. The ‘Anscombean Revival’—if such a term might be used to classify so diverse
a group of thinkers—seeks to resurrect resources borrowed from an Aristotelian
framework, resources that were abandoned by the adherents to a strict fact–value
distinction.

⁷⁶ McDowell (1998c), pp. 37 8.

⁷⁷ The idea that the modern sciences offer such a picture rather than a historically situated form of
knowledge is addressed in McDowell (1998b), pp. 126 9.
⁷⁸ McDowell (1998a), p. 189, writes of Aristotle’s ‘immunity to the metaphysical sources of our modern
diffidence about such things’: ‘diffidence’ seems to be used in its seventeenth century or Hobbesian sense,
to mean distrust.
⁷⁹ Korsgaard (2009).
⁸⁰ LeBar (2008), (2013a): the latter work makes clear that LeBar does not think Aristotle could have
conceived a constructivist position. For more on this, see the Coda.
      

Although turning to human nature as an external grounding may have seemed to

Foot to be the key to Anscombe’s critique, I have argued that Anscombe’s article is
best interpreted as dissolving the fact-value divide, not as using nature to cross it.
Virtues, thick ethical concepts, social practices—perhaps even Korsgaard’s practical
identities—are different versions of the attempt to reclaim the facticity of ethical
language, without seeking an Archimedean Point. Both strands within Anscombe’s
work present alternatives to non-cognitivism, inasmuch as they show how to recover
the notion that ethical facts play a role in our moral discourse. The advocates of each
disagree as to the extent to which Aristotle was self-conscious in his use of these
notions, and the extent to which they are grounded in an empirically validated
notion of human nature or depend on an a priori faith in the teleological structure
of the natural world. They disagree also about the historical reasons why this vision of
the ethical life was rejected, and whether that rejection can be renegotiated.
Ascombe had highlighted the collapse of Judeo-Christian metaphysics—belief in a
divine legislator—as the reason for the rise of subjectivism. Korsgaard and McDowell
focus on the role played by the rise of modern science and the disenchanted world-
view. Williams highlights the role of cultural relativism. MacIntyre rather credits the
modern preoccupation with the autonomous individual to a modification of a kind
of voluntarism: for him, it is the idea that we, rather than God, are the sources of
the moral law through Kantian self-legislation that eventually undermined belief
in the external warrant for ethical norms. Is it the rise of Christianity, the Scientific
Revolution, the Enlightenment, or twentieth-century positivism that supposedly
separates us from the worldview of antiquity?
The recognition that Aristotelian virtue ethics was not supplanted by Christianity
but continued to infuse ethical thought well into the modern world—suitably
transformed, of course, and with some revisions of the canonical list of virtues—is
critical to recognizing the viability of that resuscitation project. ‘Virtue’ has an
old-fashioned ring, but it is the ring of language deeply embedded in modern
literature and thought, not a mistranslation from the ancient Greek.⁸¹ That tradition
is surely what licenses us to modify Aristotle’s list, without abandoning the notion of
cultural continuity. Thus there is good reason to accept MacIntyre’s amplification
and revision of Anscombe’s historical narrative. On MacIntyre’s account, there is
no reason to see the intervention of Judeo-Christian values as having displaced a
virtue ethical framework. What it did contribute—as Anscombe notes—is the notion
that all value in the cosmos comes from a single source. I shall be arguing, however,
that this is not what Aristotle thought.
We have seen, further, considerable disagreement about the extent to which
Aristotle was self-conscious about the position he articulates. Williams reminds us

⁸¹ Which literatures are in question depends on how we delimit the tradition. MacIntyre focuses on
English literature from Britain and North America, but the point could be extended to other European
languages and to other cultures shaped by that tradition.
        

of the background of Plato’s battle with the sophists, evidence that the need to justify
the authority of ethics was indeed felt. McDowell, who disputes this, argues that the
critique Callicles offered was too limited to provide an adequate foil. McDowell
doubts that Aristotle could have been as concerned about this distinction as con-
temporary ethicists: he denies that the ethical challengers of Plato’s day were really
comparable to the criticisms raised in the modern, disenchanted world. I shall
address this question in the next chapter, since I believe it is important to the
argument that Aristotle did reflect on questions about the source and justification
of ethical demands, and that his proposal is worth reconstructing.
In fine, we have arrived at the following questions. The degree to which Aristotle
himself was aware of the philosophical value of his own ideas has been disputed by
those who deny that he could have engaged with second-order reflections on the
source and grounds of ethical claims. We need to consider both whether Aristotle
thought that ethical demands were somehow grounded in a biological notion of
nature, and whether he felt a need to justify or ground the practice of ethics at all. In
the coming chapters I shall leave behind the substance of these modern projects,
focusing only on the questions they raise for our understanding of Aristotle. I shall be
asking whether he is an Archimedean ethical naturalist, in the sense Williams
identified, and whether he was too philosophically naive even to reflect on the
sources and justification of ethical claims. I shall reach a negative conclusion on
both counts throughout the next four chapters, looking first at the background to
Aristotle’s ethical work, then at the ethical and political treatises themselves. Finally,
I shall reconstruct what I take to be Aristotle’s metaethical reasoning, and argue
that—on my reading—he offers us an interesting and underappreciated view on the
grounding of ethical demands.
 3
Nature and the Sources
of Normativity

Nature is drawn like a sponge,

heavy and dripping from the waters of Sentience.
George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense

In the previous chapter, I examined the appeal Aristotle has held for a number of
contemporary ethicists, and noted the associated controversy surrounding his use of
human nature as the ground for ethical claims. I discussed the role Aristotle plays in
some historical narratives offered by twentieth-century ethicists who consider
whether an Aristotelian ethical system could offer a viable way forward for modern
ethics, or at least some resources towards developing an alternative to the prevailing
subjectivism. The discussion revealed the extent to which ideological commitments
enter into the telling of history, particularly of the supposed gap separating ‘ancients’
and ‘moderns’. I noted the variety of assessments made of Aristotle’s use of the appeal
to nature, and the different readings of his awareness of the need for second-order
reflection on the status of ethical claims.
I have not, of course, done justice to the positive proposals offered: my aim is to
focus on the uses made of Aristotle in these analyses of the modern malaise.
I highlighted two research questions that emerged: does Aristotle consider the
metaethical grounding for his ethics, and if so, is he an Archimedean naturalist?
The latter position is sometimes regarded as Aristotle’s response to questions about
the origin of ethical value and the justification for ethical demands.
The view that Aristotle was not reflective on the sources and justification for his
ethical views is important to dispel. It comes in two versions. So far, I have been
examining a historicist claim about the kinds of questions that are available in a given
period. There is another version of this charge, which also seems to have its origins in
Alisdair MacIntyre’s work, and focuses on Aristotle in particular. This is the accus-
ation that he is guilty of some form of complacency. The complacency charge
sometimes adds historicist assumptions to claims about Aristotle’s historical person-
ality. It is rarely scrutinized, however. I shall examine its various manifestations first,
before turning to examination of Aristotle’s intellectual milieu and the kinds of
questions that were conceptually available to ‘the ancients’.

Aristotle on the Sources of the Ethical Life. Sylvia Berryman, Oxford University Press (2019).
© Sylvia Berryman. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835004.003.0003
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The Complacency Charge

The accusation of complacency sometimes concerns Aristotle’s personal philo-
sophical temperament. It is not uncommon to find readers asserting that Aristotle
was in some way too self-satisfied to be reflective about his own values, and thus did
not take seriously the possibility that his views might meet with disagreement.
Sometimes this assessment is used to explain the apparent absence of metaethical
reflection in Aristotle’s work. It is important to notice, nonetheless, that the ‘com-
placency’ charge against Aristotle comes in different varieties, and that these are only
valid—or relevant—to different degrees. Some overlap with concerns about histor-
ical blinkers; others seem more focused on assumptions about Aristotle’s personal
temperament.
Alisdair MacIntyre’s A Short History of Ethics seems to have been the point at which
the notion that Aristotle suffers from a culpable complacency entered the philosoph-
ical lexicon.¹ MacIntyre’s version of the charge is that Aristotle puts too much stock in
the particular values of his own society and does not imagine the possibility that major
substantive commitments—slavery, the subjugation of women—will come to seem
unacceptable. MacIntyre also argues that Aristotle’s list of the virtues echoes the
values of a certain class of Athenian society.² Although MacIntyre offered a more
general indictment of Aristotle’s personality—he also calls him a ‘supercilious prig’³—
the explicit focus of the complacency charge is on Aristotle’s blindness in defence of
social hierarchies that benefit people like himself.⁴
It is not straightforwardly true that Aristotle endorses the social prejudices of those
around him, however. Aristotle was critical of many features of the surrounding
culture, and of Athenian democracy.⁵ A foreigner himself, he often challenges his
contemporaries’ views in the Politics, and is aware that what might seem reasonable
to well-meaning citizens can change over time. Aristotle considers the possibility of
ethical progress, arguing that improvement is possible by pointing to a case where the
customs of former times seem barbaric to us.⁶ This invites us to imaginatively enter
the perspective of those with different views, a space that implicitly allows us to step
back from our current commitments. While he does not explicitly draw the
corollary—that our own customs may seem misguided to future generations—this
seems to be the rhetorical implication of the passage.⁷ Reform is not ruled out but
only slowed, lest law’s authority be undermined. These discussions show his ability to
rescind from the values of his own day.

¹ MacIntyre (1966).
² MacIntyre (1966), p. 68. Curzer (2012) defends Aristotle’s views on particular points.
³ MacIntyre (1966), p. 66. ⁴ MacIntyre (1966), p. 60. ⁵ Schofield (2006).
⁶ Pol. 2.8, 1268b38 1269a4; Lear (1988), p. 192; Nussbaum (1988b). Mulgan (2000) critiques Nuss
baum’s reading of Aristotle as a social democrat.
⁷ I thank Lindsay Judson for noting the possibility that society could encounter another cataclysm
before future generations have time to see our current customs as barbaric.
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Although he is certainly less argumentative in the Nicomachean Ethics than in

other treatises, this could be for a number of reasons, and there is no lack of evidence
of him disagreeing with his contemporaries on particular issues. Troels Engberg-
Pedersen argues that Aristotle views all reasonable men as agreeing on matters of
justice, and thus saw no need to justify or ground his ethical realism.⁸ This reading
does not hold water. In the discussion of justice in Nicomachean Ethics, for example,
we see Aristotle pointing to an ambiguity that escapes notice and causes confusion;⁹
taking issue with those who consider reciprocity always to be just;¹⁰ and rejecting a
common view that all justice is conventional.¹¹ While Aristotle is not seriously
engaging here with radical scepticism or inverted spectrum worries, it would be
wrong to describe his approach as presupposing agreement or assuming the correct-
ness of his contemporaries’ views. He is arguing for a substantive position, and not
one that his hearers already hold. We may not always like the positions Aristotle
takes, but we cannot accuse him of being unaware of the need to justify them.
A second, distinct version of the charge is that Aristotle endorses the stance of a
virtuous person who seems to us too individually self-assured about his own moral
worth, disavowing the need for epistemic modesty.¹² In describing virtuous individ-
uals, Aristotle at several points praises what seems to modern readers an arrogant or
self-assured pose. This may indicate that, on more theoretical questions, Aristotle
himself is similarly blinkered, but that is merely an assumption. Modern readers are
sometimes dismayed or offended by substantive descriptions of the virtues, or by the
sketch of the megalopsuchos or ‘great-souled’ man, a character Aristotle clearly
admires. To modern ears, this exemplar seems unduly arrogant about his own
value or unselfconsciously insular in his views.¹³ We cannot infer from this, however,
that Aristotle was himself philosophically unreflective about the virtues.
Lest the difference seem merely one of taste, it is important to consider why it is
reasonable to abhor this kind of self-satisfaction. Few would find fault with those who
accurately estimate their own driving or golfing abilities: why the recoil from the idea
of recognizing our own moral worth? This does not seem to be a mere matter of taste:
the vehemence of the response to Aristotle’s ‘complacency’ is too strong for this,
suggesting that contemporary readers see it as a character flaw that goes deeper than
a failure of etiquette. The answer is surely that it is psychologically too easy to
overestimate one’s own moral worth, and that a distaste for complacency is needed
to avoid an inherent epistemic bias towards overconfidence. Given this bias, a
cultural preference for epistemic modesty and self-criticism is justified, and would
prevent serious errors of overconfidence in our own moral adequacy. However, it is
not clear that this flaw is linked to theoretical blindness.

⁸ Engberg Pedersen (1995). ⁹ NE 5.1, 1129a27 5.2 1130b8. ¹⁰ NE 5.5, 1132b22 30.
¹¹ NE 5.7, 1134b24 30. ¹² Cf. Crisp (2006), p. 172.
¹³ It would be inconceivable to Aristotle that such an exemplar not be male.
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A third version of the complacency charge is that Aristotle depends too much
upon the assent of his immediate listeners, excluding diverse opinions. McDowell
notes that he is lecturing only to a select cadre of young gentlemen who share given
values, ignoring the real dissenters who were the focus of much of Plato’s argument.¹⁴
Sarah Broadie wonders ‘what he would have said if forced to give a general response
to the fact that there might be rival conceptions of flourishing, each supported by a
good stock of reputable opinions’.¹⁵
The fact that Aristotle thought he should only lecture to those who have achieved a
certain level of ethical competence does not entail that he thought his audience held
correct views on ethical matters. A more charitable reading is that Aristotle supposed
that there is a minimum level of competence acquired in any well-functioning
society, a level that would be sufficient to enable participants to interact meaning-
fully, but would not guarantee the correctness of their moral views. Suppose Aristotle
were approached by well-brought-up Spartans or Carthaginians who had reached
maturity and acquired sufficient practical experience to function in a viable society.
Would they be considered qualified to participate in a philosophical conversation on
ethics? They could be expected to exhibit many of the habits of decent citizens and
the skills required to participate in an ethical conversation, however much their
political views would be considered faulty. The requirement that his audience be
well-brought-up may highlight the competencies required for philosophical reason-
ing, rather than chauvinistically restricting membership to those who already share a
given set of beliefs.
Any functioning society would need to inculcate some minimal level of self-
regulation in its members and some degree of compliance with norms of interaction.
To participate in a philosophical conversation requires a degree of self-control,
discipline, and maturity; a sense of fairness and impartiality; a dispassionate com-
mitment to finding the truth. It does not necessarily require holding a given set of
ethical views.¹⁶ To be sure, the distinction between possessing the necessary skills and
holding the approved views is not hard and fast, and those from communities with
radically different beliefs and practices would likely have somewhat different com-
petencies. Moreover, there are substantive issues on which we can regret that
Aristotle was not more imaginative and able to appreciate the costs of his society’s
practices, especially its oppressive social hierarchies. Yet Aristotle has good reason for
insisting on good habituation, reasons that do not require us to foist on him an
implausible assumption of unanimity of belief.
A fourth version of the charge—the most relevant to the current inquiry—is that
Aristotle had metaphysical grounds for confidence in the reality of the views he
espouses. Dominic Scott recently argued that Aristotle—unlike Plato—did not
believe the politician needed to engage in the kind of metaphysical, epistemological,

¹⁴ McDowell (1998a). ¹⁵ Broadie (2007a), p. 347. ¹⁶ Cf. Cooper (2010), p. 219.

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or psychological study that would have provided much stronger justification for his
ethical claims, because of a confidence that we are naturally equipped to arrive at the
correct answers.¹⁷ I believe that this is accurate as an account of Aristotle’s confidence
in our epistemological access to truth in theoretical matters. His confidence in our
ability to correctly classify the world, and to reach the right concepts by induction,
seems to depend on some such picture. However, to extend such a position into the
practical arena would require Aristotle to have supposed that the truths sought by
ethical deliberation are ‘out there’ to be discovered in the world, much like theoretical
truths. I shall be arguing throughout this work that this is not the case.
I will also suggest in the final chapter that Aristotle may have a different, and
justifiable, reason for confidence in our ability to arrive at truth in ethics, which
centres on the role of the phronimos in his ethics. It is our joint agreement in
identifying particular individuals as practically wise—even where we disagree sub-
stantively about particular actions, qualities, or principles—that provides the ground
for epistemic confidence in our ethical views. It does not justify confidence on
particular claims so much as offer a background assurance that our overall picture
cannot be wildly wrong. We may be able to do better at implementing our values, but
it would not make sense to him to suppose that we have confused good with evil, or
espoused a set of virtues that is radically mistaken.
The various versions of the complacency charge can easily be confused. We
disagree strongly with Aristotle’s approach on some matters, find his tone offensive,
and too easily suppose that ‘smugness’ got in his philosophical way. There may be
justice to the suspicion that Aristotle is too quick to defend the privileges of his own
class; too quick to accept the serious degradation of some to the benefit of others.
This lack of sociological imagination is not the same, however, as the lack of
philosophical depth in questioning or not questioning the grounding of his overall
ethical views. We can convict Aristotle of wilful blindness on some substantive issues,
without supposing that he is methodologically inept.
Related to the ‘complacency’ charge but going beyond the idiosyncrasies of
Aristotle’s own temperament is a broader, historical question about what issues are
alive in a given context. McDowell accuses Williams of ‘historical monstrosity’ in
ascribing to Aristotle ‘a felt need for foundations’ in response to the threat posed by
challengers to the authority of ethics.¹⁸ Williams took the character of Callicles, the
iconoclastic sophist of Plato’s Gorgias, to represent a challenge to the foundations of
ethics.¹⁹ In McDowell’s eyes, however, only the thoroughness of a modern disen-
chanted worldview could provoke the deeper crisis of confidence in ethics that
plagues modern philosophy. He regards the Calliclean threat as less profound than
that faced by modern ethicists: ‘Callicles exemplifies only the standing fragility of
confidence. He does not invite us to realize that first nature cannot ground a

¹⁷ Scott (2015), pp. 212 15. ¹⁸ McDowell (1998a), p. 177. ¹⁹ Williams (1985).
        

conventional ethical outlook.’²⁰ In other words, when Callicles critiques conventional

justice, he is not appealing to a biological conception of nature accessible from a
value-neutral perspective. Callicles is not relying on a modern materialist perspective,
denying that any morality can be justified in a disenchanted world. Rather, McDowell
thinks, his is a more superficial challenge, baiting Socrates to show why this rather
than that moral code is the one to follow. The intellectual resources of the modern
‘disenchanted’ perspective were simply unavailable in antiquity.
Korsgaard and McDowell are not alone in holding this discontinuity thesis.²¹ We
might agree that the term ‘foundation’ has become a technical notion, and may
be better reserved for Descartes’s heirs. Nonetheless, the notion of a sharp historical
break seems overstated.²² While none of Aristotle’s contemporaries live in the disen-
chanted world of modern science, there is evidence that, even in antiquity, deeper
questions about the status of ethics were open to debate. Why suppose that the
modern sciences were required to unsettle confidence in the authority of ethics?
The threat could come from either metaphysics or epistemology: from philosophers
who offer metaphysical pictures in which the grounding for ethical norms is open to
question, or from those who challenge our ability to know the kinds of ethical truths
said by others to be at play. Both these kinds of challenges would prompt metaethical
reflection; both feature prominently in the thought of the philosophers prior to and
contemporary with Aristotle.
I shall review the evidence of ethical debate in Aristotle’s intellectual milieu, with a
view to showing that a philosopher in Aristotle’s position could hardly avoid being
reflective on questions of the status of ethics. The challenges he would have been
aware of include not just the threat of Calliclean immoralism, but also the questions
raised by Presocratics, sophists, Cyrenaics, and even Plato himself. While questions
about the sources of value may have seemed more pressing against the background
of twentieth-century positivism, the ancient Greek world was not as uniformly
enchanted as it might appear to those viewing it from the vantage point of modernity.
Questions about the foundations of ethics were very much under consideration.

Metaethics in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BCE

Intellectual movements of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE had problematized the
status of ethical values in a number of ways. Presocratic philosophy also showed a
growing awareness of the human tendency to assume the generality of what is in fact
a limited perspective. Xenophanes offers the most striking example of this. He

²⁰ McDowell (1998a), p. 176.

²¹ cf. LeBar (2013a); Annas (1993), p. 135, may be implicitly endorsing some aspects of it, when she
notes that no ancient ethical theory tries to ‘reduce’ ethics to another field.
²² For a philosophically sophisticated reading of the rationale for Aristotle’s internalist response to
Callicles, see Lear (1988), pp. 192 6. The implication of Lear’s reading is clearly that he thinks Aristotle is
aware of the demand for a foundationalist justification of ethics, but rejects it as a philosophical dead end.
       

claimed that, if they could draw, horses would depict the gods as horses. His point
was that human cultures show similarly absurd and ethnocentric projections in their
depictions of the divine.²³ While the claim focuses on physical characteristics, it
implicitly offers a broader challenge to anthropomorphic notions of the divine, and
sets a powerful model for the practice of questioning widely held beliefs. Xenophanes
indeed argued more directly that the Homeric portrayal of the Olympian gods was
ethically unworthy of divine beings, and recognized the limitations of our knowledge
in this sphere:
Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among
men, stealing and committing adultery and deceiving each other.
No man knows, or ever will know, the truth about the gods and about everything I speak of; for
even if one chanced to say the complete truth, yet oneself knows it not . . .²⁴

Presocratic natural philosophy has been characterized by its use of explanations that
eschewed traditional mythological answers and questioned their rationale. This kind
of self-conscious reflection—reflection that often unsettled traditional piety, even at
personal peril—came to be seen as one of the marks of a philosopher. Heraclitus
exemplified this iconoclastic tone.²⁵ The accusations of impiety levelled against
Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Protagoras reflect this association.²⁶ A philosopher earned
his stripes by asking what is truly highest, truly divine.²⁷
Challenges to traditional religion were not confined to philosophers, but extended
to sophists, historians, and dramatists.²⁸ This opened various routes to question the
authority of ethics. Most directly, the challenge to Homeric religion raised doubts
about the authority of ethical values and prescriptions that were thought to come
from the gods. Less directly, the atmosphere of irreverence allowed for a critical
attitude in other spheres: even for intellectuals not investigating the nature of the
cosmos, the new freedom from superstition opened up the path to critical inquiry.²⁹
In the wake of the sophistic movement, the use of reason to question accepted truths
became a kind of badge of honour: the old authority of tradition was scrutinized by
the new cult of aggressively iconoclastic reason.³⁰

²³ Fr. 168 9, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield.

²⁴ Frr. 166, 186, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield (1983), pp. 168, 179. Although Aristotle does not quote these
specific passages, he refers to Xenophanes’ theology a number of times: Poetics 25, 1461a1; Rhet. 2.23,
1399b6; Metaph. 1.5, 986b21.
²⁵ Heraclitus Frr. 241 4, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield (1983), p. 209.
²⁶ cf. Kerferd (1981), p. 21; Sedley (2013) offers a thorough survey of evidence concerning ancient
atheism and challenges to traditional religion.
²⁷ The masculine pronoun is used advisedly here: we have evidence of very few women philosophers in
the ancient Greek schools.
²⁸ Sextus Empiricus AM IX 51 6; Kerferd (1981), pp. 163 72; Rankin (1983), pp. 134 7.
²⁹ Rankin (1983), p. 29, 132.
³⁰ Cf. Lloyd (1996), pp. 216 ff.; (2008).
        

Charles Kahn argued that Ionian natural philosophy was an important part of the
background to the sophistic movement.³¹ Contact with other civilizations drew
popular attention to the sheer variety of viable cultural forms and the multiplicity
of morals and customs.³² In a passage reminiscent of Xenophanes’ jab about our
images of the gods, Herodotus remarks that people think the best customs are those
of the place where they live.³³ The litigious atmosphere of Athenian law and politics
has often been credited with spurring intellectual ferment and critical reflection. In a
city where it pays to be able to argue on any question, open debate and iconoclasm
flourished. The subtleties of metaphilosophy may not have been the currency of the
agora, but the preconditions for intellectual reflection could hardly have been better
than in Socrates’ day.³⁴
The sophistic movement echoed the most widespread and influential of challenges
to naivety about the universal claims of ethics. Not only did the teaching of the
techniques of rhetoric implicitly weaken belief in the truth-revealing powers of
reason, by demonstrating how the appearance of truth could be produced by
deliberate manipulation, but sophistic philosophical teachings also more directly
unsettled confidence in traditional ethical beliefs. It became a common trope within
the sophistic movement to contrast nomos and phusis, opposing the variability and
conventionalism of custom or law with the universality and invariability of nature.
The subsequent intellectual ferment, as is well known, formed the background to
Plato’s philosophy. Kahn notes two distinct phases in response to this awareness of
the variability of custom: a ‘conservative relativism’ that validated the custom of the
country as a functioning system; and a more radical scepticism about the reality of
values that became prominent later.³⁵
The well-known prominence of the nomos–phusis distinction in sophistic thought
might lead us to expect that challenges to the authority of ethics would question its
status as natural. The texts suggest otherwise. When Plato has Adeimantus ask
Socrates to address the ethical challenge as it arose in his day, it is the authority of
the gods—and not that of nature—that is being undermined.³⁶ Parents had been
using divine sanction to persuade the young, but now that sanction is under
question:
‘What about the gods? Surely, we can’t hide from them or use violent force against them!’ Well,
if the gods don’t exist or don’t concern themselves with human affairs, why should we worry at
all about hiding from them?³⁷

The grip of traditional authority over rebellious youth was being unsettled by the new
wisdom. The most interesting fifth-century development of this theme is in a satyr
play that survives only in an extended quotation by Sextus Empiricus. Sextus ascribes

³¹ Kahn (1981). ³² Kahn (1998), pp. 37 8.

³³ Herodotus Histories 3.38; Kerferd (1981), p. 105. ³⁴ Kerferd (1981), pp. 15, 20.
³⁵ Kahn (1998), p. 38. ³⁶ Plato Rep. 1, 362E ff. ³⁷ Plato Rep. 1, 365D6 9.
       

the play to Plato’s uncle Critias, although other sources attribute it to Euripides.³⁸
In the play, Sisyphus claims not only that human beings established laws in order to
curb violence, but also that they created religion as a means of enforcement:
Next, as the laws inhibited men from acts
of open violence, but still such acts
were done in secret then, I would maintain,
some clever fellow first, a man in counsel wise,
discovered unto men the fear of gods,
that sinners might be frightened should they sin
e’en secretly in deed, or word, or thought.
Hence it was he introduced the Deity,
telling of a God who enjoys unfailing life . . .³⁹

The innovation is the idea of a monitoring God.⁴⁰ The passage occurs in a play called
Sisyphus, a character from mythology notorious for being punished by Zeus: pre-
sumably the playwright was distancing himself from the impious implications of the
speech. Yet popular belief in the authority of ethics could not be more soundly
denied.
Korsgaard suggested that Plato and Aristotle were unconcerned about the problem
of normativity because they saw norms as built into the natural world, and it was only
with the collapse of this possibility that modern metaethical responses were formu-
lated. In the modern ‘disenchanted’ universe, she lists divine fiat as one such response
to the ousting of normativity from the natural world.⁴¹ However, if we situate fourth-
century philosophy against its intellectual background, the order was rather the
reverse. The appeal to a natural basis was one of the responses to the loss of faith
in divine guidance. Socrates suggests to Euthyphro that some things are deemed
pious not merely because they are divine favourites, but rather that divine favour
attaches to things that are already worthy in the nature of things.⁴² Nature looks more
like a philosopher’s invention, introduced to take the place of the will of Zeus.
While there may have been few outright atheists in the fifth or fourth century BCE,
this motif of the ‘benching’ of the gods from involvement in human affairs was a
common theme.⁴³ Other thinkers—Prodicus, Palaephatus—indulged in naturalizing
explanations of popular belief in the gods.⁴⁴ In Rankin’s study of the sophistic use of
the contrast between nature and convention, he identifies several different under-
standings of the relationship between divine and natural. Those drawing such a

³⁸ Kahn (1981), p. 97; Kerferd (1981), pp. 52 3; Sedley (2013), pp. 335 6.
³⁹ Sextus Empiricus AM IX 54; trans. Dillon and Gergel (2003), pp. 251 2.
⁴⁰ exeurein; eisêgêsato.
⁴¹ Korsgaard (1996a), pp. 18 19.
⁴² Plato Eu. 10A D; I thank Alex Mourelatos for noting the relevance of this passage.
⁴³ See Sedley (2013) for a recent survey of the evidence concerning atheism.
⁴⁴ Plato notes the popularity of such explanations at Phaedr. 229B E.
        

contrast might align the gods on the side of nomos as early lawgivers,⁴⁵ view the
divine as allied to nature,⁴⁶ or elevate nomos to a cosmic law that governs even the
gods.⁴⁷ The options were wide open; innovation was key.
McDowell is right that the sophists’ notion of ‘nature’ should not be understood as
a scientifically grounded notion, nor as shorn of evaluative elements. Rather, it
opposes that which is universal and invariable to the variability of cultural forms.⁴⁸
In the context of sophistic rhetoric, claiming that a practice is ‘natural’ may be little
more than a denial that it is an arbitrary imposition. McDowell calls it a ‘rhetorical
flourish’.⁴⁹ Taylor characterizes this use of ‘natural’ as referring to ‘how things are
independent of human thought or belief ’.⁵⁰ Aristotle uses a very similar character-
ization himself in distinguishing ‘natural’ from conventional notions of justice.⁵¹ This
is a useful philosophical notion, whether or not it was seen as established from a
purely descriptive point of view.
If we believe that there is a biological or first nature to human beings that can be
distinguished from the aspects of ourselves that are shaped by human choice and
rational reflection, we need to consider how such a nature might be accessed and thus
made susceptible to descriptive analysis. It is important to recognize that it is because
we hold an evolutionary theory that it seems reasonable to infer the truth about our
pre-social nature by looking to the behaviour of animals. Aristotle, however, criticizes
the use of the analogy to animals as an absurd method of reasoning to the truth about
human beings.⁵² The Cynics, and most likely also Plato, were deliberately shocking
their listeners by appealing to canine ways.⁵³ Aristotle’s own image of the pre-social
state is the Cyclops of Homer’s Odyssey, a brutish and savage creature.⁵⁴ Callicles’
appeal to the lex talionis need not necessarily have been understood as a kind of social
Darwinism, given Hesiod’s notion that the practice of eating one another is a positive
law imposed on animals by Zeus.⁵⁵
There is little in early Greek literature to suggest that the appeal to nature would
have evoked an Edenic vision of a pre-social epoch, where humankind lived in an
untainted paradise. The idyllic Golden Age in Hesiod was never said to have
belonged to humans, but to a creature different in kind. Thomas Cole indeed argues
that, by the fifth century, notions of a golden age had effectively been replaced by a
different narrative, which supposed that human society developed from a barren and
solitary natural state.⁵⁶ A striking challenge to the authority of ethics comes from the
belief that ethics, like other cultural practices, arrived on the human scene at a

⁴⁵ Rankin (1983), pp. 80, 73. ⁴⁶ Rankin (1983), p. 134. ⁴⁷ Rankin (1983), p. 131.
⁴⁸ See Chapter 5, below. ⁴⁹ McDowell (1980), p. 371. ⁵⁰ Taylor (2007), p. 1.
⁵¹ NE 5.7, 1134b18 19.
⁵² Pol. 2.5, 1264b4 6. Cf. Pellegrin (2015), p. 30, on the romanticization of the natural.
⁵³ Diogenes Laertius Lives 6.40, 61; Plato Rep. 2, 375A; 5, 451D. ⁵⁴ NE 10.9, 1180a27.
⁵⁵ Works and Days 276: Kahn (1981), p. 107.
⁵⁶ Cole (1967), pp. 1 ff. Cf. also Kerferd (1981), p. 125; Kullmann (1991).
       

particular point in time.⁵⁷ Theories of origins of human institutions presented

technologies and political institutions as developing simultaneously, and together
creating the conditions that distinguish us from animals. This kind of genetic
explanation, offered to explain our evolution from animal to fully human capability,
allows us to imagine human life without our current norms, and raises the possi-
bility that the norms imposed or chosen were the wrong ones. The sophists spurred
inquiry into the nature of human being itself and the sources of all that was thought
to distinguish us from animals.⁵⁸
The notion that human culture has a history challenges any temptation to sup-
pose that nature supplies a kind of default prescription for living well.⁵⁹ Plato refers
to a common belief that successive cataclysms or floods periodically wiped out traces
of previous civilizations, leaving human cultures to ‘rediscover’ or reinvent more
complex social forms.⁶⁰ Although Aristotle himself regarded the existence of
human beings as eternal, he recognized that many aspects of culture, especially
those associated with city life, were relatively recent developments, and ones that
were shared unevenly by other societies. Aristotle in the Politics refers to two possible
alternative beginnings: either human beings are autochthonous—sprung from the
earth—or survivors of a catastrophe; he studies the development of culture from
more primitive modes.⁶¹ Elsewhere, he notes the recurrence of ideas and discoveries,
implicitly endorsing the cataclysm view.⁶²
The historicity of culture was a common trope. Ancient Greek literature abounds
with stories about the ‘first discoverer’, prôtos heuretês, perhaps modelled on the
story of Prometheus’ theft of fire from the gods. Specific social forms were widely
touted as inventions; cities and constitutions were often ascribed to a first lawgiver
celebrated for wisdom.⁶³ Herodotus reports an investigation conducted by the
Egyptian king Psammetichus to determine which human culture was the oldest.⁶⁴
The experimental design was simple: two small children were isolated, and the people
caring for them were instructed not to speak to them. The test was designed to
discover which language the children began to speak first. Herodotus reports that
Psammetichus was disappointed to learn that the oldest language was thus found to
be Phrygian, not Egyptian, as he had assumed. The theoretical model behind this

⁵⁷ Pellegrin (2015), pp. 28 9, revives Guthrie’s claim that the appeal to the necessity of developing
human institutions effectively bridges the gap between conventional and natural in this period. Yet, as he
concedes on p. 32, the variety of possible responses to a necessity undermines the case for treating such an
account as ‘naturalistic’.
⁵⁸ On the notion that the rhetoric about nature is really a question about what is original, cf. Plato Laws
10 892C; Mayhew (2010), p. 205.
⁵⁹ On the three different historical narratives available Decline, Progress or Eternal Recurrence see
Kerferd (1981), p. 125.
⁶⁰ Tim. 21E 25D. ⁶¹ Pol. 2.8, 1268b38 1269a4.
⁶² Pol. 7.10, 1329b25 30; Metaph. 12.8, 1074b10 12; Mete. 1.3, 339b28 9; DC, 1.3, 270b19 20; Kraut
(2002), p. 241; Sedley (2007), p. 119; Pellegrin (2015), p. 30.
⁶³ Rankin (1983), p. 26.
⁶⁴ Herodotus Histories 2.2. Psammetichus became king about 660 BCE: Grene (1987), p. 131.
        

charming experiment seems to be that phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny: that the

historical stages of human cultural development are somehow encoded in the pre-
social nature of small children.
At the time of the sophistic movement, by contrast, language was treated as a
human invention, and not as part of our pre-social nature.⁶⁵ Other aspects of culture
were explained as introductions. The sophist Protagoras—in Plato’s dialogue by that
name—offers a semi-mythic account of the origins of the human capacity for justice.
Protagoras posits an innate human capacity for acquiring norms, but also suggests
that they are bestowed by the gods.⁶⁶ Even if this ‘just-so story’ is not intended very
seriously, it raises a question that would be faced by any account of the development
of human institutions without divine authority.
The notion that justice is a contract for mutual advantage was certainly aired by
others at this time.⁶⁷ In the passage from Sisyphus mentioned above, it is not clear
from the surviving text whether the author saw justice itself as mere convention
or whether it is the enforcement of pre-existing standards that is ascribed to the
lawmakers. Thrasymachus’ claim that justice is ‘nothing other than the advantage of
the stronger’⁶⁸ certainly suggests that—to Plato at least—sophists were seen to be
denying that there is any basis for justice outside of human institutions. While
Aristotle may have been less directly involved than Plato in refuting the sophists,
the intellectual challenges they offered would not have been forgotten.
This trope of explaining the origins of justice highlights a question that would be
faced for philosophers who try to explain the origins of everything without the gods.
The atomists viewed the cosmos as arising out of the unplanned interactions of
atomic particles, eschewing permanence or design. Although Epicurean atomism—
for which we have much better remaining evidence—made some significant depar-
tures from the fourth-century version, it is likely that the theories of Epicurus and
Lucretius echo Democritus’ thought on the development of culture.⁶⁹ It is possible to
discern a line of ethical thought consistent both with what we know of Democritus’
physics and with the later atomist tradition.⁷⁰
Because the atomist universe was effective disenchanted, Democritus’ system—
which Aristotle knew well—poses an implicit question about the sources of ethical
norms. The atomists did not so much deny the existence of the gods as deny that they
were involved in human affairs. For Democritus, gods are not the sources of cosmic
order or of values: our very conception of the gods is given a naturalistic reading.

⁶⁵ Rankin (1983), p. 26. ⁶⁶ Taylor (2007). ⁶⁷ Kahn (1981), p. 92.

⁶⁸ Plato Rep. 1, 338C.
⁶⁹ The evidence for Democritus’ ethical views is unfortunately uneven: not only is there a possible
confusion with the thought of a figure with a similar name, Democrates, but the reports even securely
attributed to Democritus are largely gnomic sayings with little context or argument. On the relationship
between Epicurus and Democritus, see Warren (2002); Taylor (1999); O’Keefe (2005); Sedley (2007),
pp. 139 66. I shall ignore the little known figure Leucippus, since our evidence ascribes most texts to
Democritus.
⁷⁰ Taylor (1999), pp. 222 34, (2007); Annas (2002).
       

Democritus apparently regarded divinities as literally films of atoms, perhaps

physical traces of the clusters of atoms that correspond to particular human
thoughts.⁷¹ Whatever their origins, they were not ascribed responsibility for ethics
or the values governing choices in human life.⁷² The view that the only source of
value lies in the experiences of sentient subjects is a common theme amongst
reductionist materialists in the history of philosophy. Rather than a transcendent
source of the human good, the atomists said that the good consists in a kind of
experience. The physical conditions for producing such an experience are the focus of
much of the advice that comes down under his name. Democritus advocated a life
devoted to ‘cheerfulness’, brought about by moderation in pleasures, cultivation of a
calm mind, and avoidance of extreme sensations.⁷³ Enlightened self-interest seems to
have been the principle of social organization.
We know from Lucretius that the later atomist school of Epicurus offered a detailed
account of the development of culture and ethics, along naturalist lines.⁷⁴ The story is
that, at first, early humans did not take thought for the common good, and did not
know how to use custom and law to govern themselves.⁷⁵ The desire for self-protection
led early humans to seek each other’s company, and gradually feelings of affection
developed between them.⁷⁶ They began to communicate, to negotiate with one
another, and to feel pity towards the weak. Agreements were entered into for mutual
advantage, however imperfectly these were respected. With the taming of fire, lan-
guage, and the development of cities, leaders came about, with the associated envy and
strife and political struggles for control.⁷⁷ Law developed to manage strife, enforced by
fear of punishment.⁷⁸ Such a reductivist account of the origins of norms evidences a
need to account for their origins in the sparse ontology of atomism. Epicureans saw
the need to explain not merely the origin of law but also the motivational basis of
ethical ties. In a passage that echoes Socrates’ vision of the simple city,⁷⁹ the origins of
some forms of evil as well as good are topics for explanation.
It is not certain how much of this Epicurean history of culture, reported by
Lucretius, can be ascribed back to Democritus. Cole studied the parallels between a
number of texts from different authors, all of which offer accounts of the formation
of human culture, and concluded that they share a common ancestor in Democritus.⁸⁰
Democritus may not have been the only philosopher engaging in what Cole insight-
fully labelled ‘anthropology’: it is unnecessary to be as minimalist in metaphysics
as the atomists to take seriously a question about cultural origins.⁸¹ Authors not

⁷¹ Taylor (1999), pp. 211 16; cf. Obbink (2002).

⁷² Kahn (1981); Taylor (1999), pp. 228 9. Some reports suggest that Democritus did not eliminate
divine sanction from his ethics as consistently as some of the sophists.
⁷³ Taylor (1999), p. 227; (2007); Annas (2002). ⁷⁴ DRN 5.925 ff.: see Sedley (2003).
⁷⁵ DRN 5.958 9. ⁷⁶ DRN 5.1011 27. ⁷⁷ DRN 5.1108 40. ⁷⁸ DRN 5.1143 60.
⁷⁹ Rep. 2, 372D 374E.
⁸⁰ Cole (1967); cf. Kahn (1981), p. 100; Kerferd (1981), p. 141; Sedley (2003).
⁸¹ Kahn (1981), p. 102, suggests that the oldest version may be Archelaus.
        

committed to atomism also compare the early state of human beings to that of wild
animals:⁸² those who offered these narratives would have confronted a question
about the sources and authority of values, as well as of practices and institutions.
Challenges to the authority of ethics came not only from those whose metaphysics
raised questions about its origins, but also from those whose epistemology precluded
us from having confidence in our access to ethical truths. If we have no way of
knowing about hypothesized sources of value—whether gods, forms, natures, eternal
values—that might exist in some imagined metaphysical space, claims about their
existence or role become moot. Theorists of the appearance–reality divide are
sometimes also ‘negative dogmatists’,⁸³ i.e. denying the existence of such truths.
Even an agnostic or sceptical stance would force a question about the rationale for
ethical demands.
The most famous claim from sophistic thought is Protagoras’ ‘man the measure’
doctrine.⁸⁴ Protagoras could be understood as denying that there are any standards
of truth other than human beings as a species, offering a kind of conventionalism
in opposition to traditional notions that the gods provide an external source of
authority to ethical claims. Alternatively, he may have intended the view Plato
ascribes to him, which is that the perceptions or beliefs of the individual human
being are the only standard of truth:
Now doesn’t it sometimes happen that when the same wind is blowing, one of us feels cold and
the other not? . . . Well then, in that case are we going to say that the wind itself, by itself, is cold
or not cold? Or shall we listen to Protagoras and say it is cold for the one who feels cold, and for
the other, not cold?⁸⁵

The factual nature of claims about the external world are the focus here, based on
doubts about the access of perceptual appearances to reality. The idea that opinions
differ about ethics—and hence that there is no fact about the matter as to what is
really just or unjust—would have been seen as a much softer target. Plato gives ample
evidence of the belief within the sophistic movement that the realm of nomos or
custom is less susceptible to questions of truth than that of nature or phusis.⁸⁶
We also see the application of epistemological reflection to ethics in the Cyrenaic
school. These philosophers claimed that perception is our only access to the world.
Rather than advocating scepticism about ethical truths, however, they claimed that
the only good is present pleasure. Good and evil were identified with pleasure and
pain, interpreted as physical sensations, i.e. smooth and rough movements.⁸⁷ We can
infer that they also embraced the implicit corollary, which is that no other source of

⁸² Kahn (1981), pp. 96, 99; Kerferd (1981), p. 142. ⁸³ Hankinson (1995a).
⁸⁴ Kerferd (1981), pp. 86 91, connects this claim to an even broader point about the impossibility of
contradiction.
⁸⁵ Theaet. 152B (trans. M.J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat). ⁸⁶ Gorg. 482E 484A.
⁸⁷ Cf. Rankin (1983); Tsouna (1998); O’Keefe (2002); O’Keefe (2011); Zilioli (2012).
       

ethical truth is available. The Cyrenaics denied that happiness is the goal:⁸⁸ any
ethicists arguing that there is more to good than present pleasure would need to
engage with the radical suggestion that the present appearance of good is all the good
that there is.
In his account of pleasure, Aristotle discusses the views of Eudoxus,⁸⁹ and not that
of the Cyrenaics. Eudoxus began from what seems to be understood as an empirical
claim: that all animals can be seen to aim at pleasure. The Cyrenaics offered a more
radical argument that effectively eliminated any other candidate for a source of value
than immediate experience, leaving them with only sensation as the criterion of
value. This is not merely an alternative ethical view, but challenges a fundamental
commitment of almost any other school of thought. If we were to look for an ancient
Greek challenge to the truth-aptness of ethics that is comparable in scope to
twentieth-century non-cognitivism, the Cyrenaic school would be a powerful
contender.
There is clearly a difference between this view and the hedonism of the pleasure-
seeker. The latter may ask, rhetorically, ‘why should I be moral?’, but need not be
doubting the status of ethical norms tout court. Plato’s and Aristotle’s impassioned
objections that the hedonistic life is only fit for animals express a conviction that
hedonism gives up on what we find valuable about human beings, i.e. that which
separates us from the animal world.⁹⁰ We are reminded of Aristotle’s objection to
those who abandon the principle of non-contradiction: they are little better than a
vegetable.⁹¹ An ethics worth having—the implication is—allows us to do more than
simply pursue the present appearance of pleasure, in the manner of lesser beings.
Socrates in Protagoras tried to nudge the hedonist into at least enlightened self-
interest.⁹² The Cyrenaics rejected even this.
The Cyrenaics questioned how there could be any goal besides present experience
that we could reasonably aim at. They denied, in effect, the distinction between
appearance and reality when it comes to the practical good. This view would threaten
confidence in any ethical view that sought to transcend the experiences of the
moment. Rather than asking whether Aristotle was complacent about the threat
posed by cultural relativism or ignorant of the challenge from the disenchanted
worldview, we should ask whether he argued that the true good is different from
the apparent good. I shall argue later that this is precisely what Aristotle’s ethics sets
out to do. In the intellectual context in which he worked, the worldview of the
Cyrenaics, and not that of empirical sciences, might present the greater challenge to
confidence in ethical truths.
We should not overlook the historical importance of the Cyrenaic school. While
their ideas have not fared well in the process of transmission, recent scholarship has

⁸⁸ Annas (1993); O’Keefe (2002); Zilioli (2012). ⁸⁹ NE 1.12; 10.2.

⁹⁰ Cf. Nussbaum (1995). ⁹¹ Metaph. 4.4, 1006a15. ⁹² Prot. 356B: cf. Weiss (1990).
        

emphasized their philosophical consistency and acumen.⁹³ We cannot judge their

influence in the fourth century from the absence of explicit mention in the texts of
Plato and Aristotle, since ancient Greek philosophers are notoriously coy when it
comes to mentioning contemporaries by name. The reputation of the school would
surely have been different, and more of their ideas survived, had Plato done so. There
is good reason to believe that they are in dialogue with Plato. Xenophon portrays
Socrates debating with Aristippus.⁹⁴ Socrates’ argument in Protagoras for enlight-
ened hedonism, and the argument for pleasure in Philebus, seem to be directed
against the Cyrenaic insistence that only present pleasure counts;⁹⁵ the Theaetetus
seems to be taking on their epistemology as a serious challenger.⁹⁶ The Cyrenaic
preference for pleasure over happiness has been seen as directed against Aristotle’s
eudaemonism.⁹⁷ It is quite plausible that Aristotle was responding directly to a school
of thought that denied that anything but present appearance should be taken as the
good.
Amongst the debunkers of ethics in Aristotle’s milieu, it seems that the teachings
of the rhetor Isocrates also served as a foil for Aristotle’s ethics.⁹⁸ Hutchinson and
Johnson argue that the emphasis on the final rather than the instrumental value of
philosophy was a reaction to Isocrates’ insistence that motivation was exhausted by a
search for pleasure, honour, or useful ends.⁹⁹ The argument about the futility of
pursuits that are purely instrumental can be traced to this source. The insistence on
the final value of ethical ends can be seen as an attempt to justify the normativity of
ethics on its own terms, against the attempt to reduce it to the pursuit of internal
drives or self-interested motives. Although Isocrates may not have doubted the
claims of ethics, he might have been seen as challenging the possibility of a certain
conception of value, one which Aristotle felt a need to defend.

. . . And Plato, of Course

The best evidence that Aristotle would have recognized a need to justify ethical
demands and to account for the sources of normativity comes not from the challen-
gers, however, but from a fellow defender: his teacher Plato. Throughout his revisions
and reconsiderations of the nature and function of Forms, Plato seems to have held to
a distinction in the nature of things, according to which only certain kinds of
properties could belong to the material world. Against this background, it was
assumed that the source of intelligibility, order, or normativity must come from

⁹³ Rankin (1983); Tsouna (1994) O’Keefe (2002); Zilioli (2012), p. 175.

⁹⁴ Mem. 2.1, 3.8. Tsouna (1994). ⁹⁵ Annas (1993); O’Keefe (2002), p. 397; Zilioli (2012).
⁹⁶ Zilioli (2012). ⁹⁷ O’Keefe (2002), pp. 404 9.
⁹⁸ Fritz and Kapp (1977); Broadie and Rowe (2002), pp. 53 4, 77; Hutchinson and Johnson (2014).
⁹⁹ Hutchinson and Johnson (2010), (2014).
       

some non-material source. The canonical Forms were clearly one attempt to explain
the origin of norms. Other attempts can be seen in Plato’s later work.
We see an argument for a non-material source of norms elaborated in Timaeus
and Book 10 of the Laws. As David Sedley noted, Plato is responding in Laws 10 to an
atheistic view similar to that articulated in the Sisyphus fragment, a view that seems to
have been advanced by more than one materialist.¹⁰⁰ The atheist is presented as
posing a challenge to belief in the authority of morality and law, a challenge that Plato
tries to answer. Laws 10 indicates that the challengers assume a dichotomy between
natural and conventional sources of ideals, and argue that we should take guidance
from nature rather than convention. The reference is evidently to challenges like that
of Callicles: that nature shows the stronger should rule and not be restrained by
conventional law.¹⁰¹ Cleary argues that the entire project of the Laws is to overturn
the sophistic distinction between nomos and phusis, showing how law could have a
metaphysical and cosmological foundation.¹⁰²
McDowell may be right that Callicles does not recognize a deeper, metaphysical
question about the sources of normativity, and is not questioning how the natural
world could give rise to ethical norms. However, Plato evidently does. The Laws does
not merely address the substantive ethical claims of the sophistic challengers, but also
points out that their entire metaphysics is attempting to extract normativity from the
wrong kind of material. Plato objects that the challengers picture an unintelligent,
material nature, and try to explain the origins of everything from this.¹⁰³ By trying to
explain the origins of the current world from ‘nature and chance’, they deny a role to
intelligence in constructing the cosmos.¹⁰⁴ Law in particular is trivialized as a
derivative and artificial introduction.¹⁰⁵ The Athenian Stranger, conversely, asserts
the priority of the intelligible over the material realm.¹⁰⁶ The explicit rationale for
rejecting materialism is focused on the need to explain the origin of motion: the
Athenian Stranger attributes self-motion to soul, as a way to argue that motion could
not have originated in an unensouled universe.¹⁰⁷ He then infers that all concepts
associated with the immaterial realm—including intelligence and norms—must be
metaphysically prior to the material cosmos.¹⁰⁸
At first glance, Plato’s focus is on a tangential issue, the origin of motion. The
argument may seem to be directed merely at the need to establish the existence of the
gods, and not at the need to account for normativity.¹⁰⁹ However, his point goes
much deeper. I suggest that we should see the question about the origin of motion as
a stand-in for a much larger set of properties that cannot be ascribed to inert matter.

¹⁰⁰ Sedley (2013). Laws 10, 895A8 9 seems to suggest Empedocles as a source. See Mayhew (2010) for
analysis of the distinct positions under attack in Laws 10.
¹⁰¹ Laws 10, 889E4 890A10. ¹⁰² Cleary (2001), p. 125. ¹⁰³ Laws 10, 889A6 7.
¹⁰⁴ Laws 10, 889B2; 891C2 5. ¹⁰⁵ Laws 10, 889E1 2: Sedley (2013).
¹⁰⁶ Laws 10, 892A2 B10. ¹⁰⁷ Laws 10, 895A7 C7.
¹⁰⁸ Laws 10, 896D1 3; Mayhew (2010) stresses the role of the question about priority.
¹⁰⁹ I am grateful to Matt Evans for pressing me on this point.
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Merentakaisia
lauluja
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Title: Merentakaisia lauluja

Katsaus virolaiseen laulurunouteen ja valikoima
runokäännöksiä

Compiler: Aino Kallas

Release date: January 29, 2024 [eBook #72809]

Language: Finnish

Original publication: Helsinki: Otava, 1911

Credits: Tuula Temonen

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK

MERENTAKAISIA LAULUJA ***
MERENTAKAISIA LAULUJA

Katsaus virolaiseen laulurunouteen ja valikoima runokäännöksiä

Kirj.

AINO KALLAS

Helsingissä, Kustannusyhtiö Otava, 1911.

SISÄLLYS:

Alkusana
Virolainen laulurunous

VANA KANNEL

Laulun aika
Äidin haudalla
Vanha polvi vainopolvi
Kyllä tiedän orjan kiusat
Miten impyen ihanuus?
Väkivalloin suutelija
Kolme onnetonta
Mistä mulla laajat laulut?

JUHAN LIIV (1864-1913)

Noor-Eestille
Laulu katoovaisuudesta
Ei salli parempaa
Pakkanen
Oi mun kallis kantajani!
Oi tuttavat, älkää tulko!
Niinkuin ääni kirkas, kultainen

GUSTAV SUITS (1883-1956)

Laulu Eestistä
Suosyväreillä
Eräälle lapselle
Meidänaikuinen satu
Kirous
Miks hiukeisin, miks paastoisin!
Nebulosa
Saarenmaan rannalla
Inspiratsio
Elon tuli

WILLEM GRÜNTHAL (1885-1942)

Sydäntalven yö
Kevättunnelma
Sairaana
Kallioilla
Oode ehtoolle
Syystalven ilta
Hietasärkällä
Talvi-ilta
Ajatus
ALKUSANA

Seuraava käännöskokoelma oli alkujaan aiottu kirjallishistorialliseksi

antologiaksi, joka, vaikkakin ahtaissa puittein, olisi antanut
läpileikkauskuvan virolaisesta laulurunoudesta, sen eri aikakausista
ja runoilijoista. Työn kuluessa vahvistui kuitenkin kääntäjässä
vakaumus koneellisen käännöksen kelpaamattomuudesta ja
runokäännöstyön yksilöllisestä luonteesta: kääntää voi ainoastaan
sitä, mikä on kyllin lähellä, että siihen voi eläytyä, omistaa sen, sen
uudelleen uudessa muodossa antaakseen. Kaikki muu on väkinäistä
ja siis hyljättävää. Näitten yksilöllisten näkökohtien voitolle päästyä
supistui sentähden kokoelma nykyisessä muodossaan valikoimaksi
ainoastaan parin kolmen runoilijan teoksista. Toivottavasti on runojen
ankarampi valinta korvaava lukijalle sen, mitä antologian
täydellisyydestä puuttuu.

Saarenmaa, elokuussa 1911.

VIROLAINEN LAULURUNOUS.
Ne ajat ovat ammoin ohitse, jolloin virolaisen paimenen tai
rukkinsa ääressä hyräilevän orjatytön yksinkertaiset laulelmat
lähdesijoiltaan hitaasti itää kohti kulkeutuivat, virtana itseensä
sivupuroja sulkien, melkein huomaamatta asteettaisen kielirajan yli
tulvehtien, vihdoin Vienan Karjalassa Kalevalan laulu-ulapaksi
laajentuakseen. Lyyrillis-eepillisestä laululähteestä oli paisunut
sankarirunojen reitti. Samaan aikaan kulkeutui loitsurunoja samoja
teitä päinvastaista suuntaa Suomen puolelta Viron tasangoille. Se oli
todellista kulttuuritekijäin, kulttuuriarvojen vaihtoa kahden kieleltään
lähiheimoisen kansan välillä, vaihtoa, jossa Viro antoi aloitteen ja
Suomi suoritti taiteellisen tihennyksen tai päinvastoin, — kielen vielä
estäväksi suluksi kohoamatta. Kun nyt vuosisatojen viertyä
virolainen laulu taas yrittää yli lahden, ei siirto voi yhtä välittömästi
tapahtua. Yhteisen kirjakielen mahdollisuus on ohitse. Oli ehkä hetki
olemassa eikä niinkään hämärässä etäisyydessä, jolloin ei olisi
tarvittu muuta kuin kielineron kaukonäköisyyttä yhdistääkseen
kirjakielen alkeissa hapuilevat heimokielet yhdeksi yhteiseksi
sivistyskieleksi, niin että me nyt olisimme saaneet iloita virolais-
suomalaisesta kirjallisuudesta ja kaksinkertaisesta lukijakunnasta.
Kun sensijaan sama ajatus neljä vuosikymmentä takaperin heräsi
parin kielentutkija-idealistin aivoissa, jäi se vain tuulentuvaksi,
paperituumaksi, mahdottomaksi toteuttaa, ja sen ainoaksi
muistomerkiksi pari hymyilyttämään pyrkivää sekakielistä runoa
jossain tieteellisessä julkaisussa. Molempain kielten kehitys oli
käynyt aivan eri suuntiin, niitten sivistyssanasto muodostunut eri
lakien ja vaikutteiden nojalla. Saattaakseen virolaiset
runosaavutukset suomalaisenkin lukijan nautittaviksi, on
suoranainen käännös tarpeen ja päinvastoin.

Virolainen nuori kulttuuri on jo pitkän aikaa käyttänyt Suomea

ikäänkuin henkisenä taimilavana, josta se suuremmalla helppoudella
kuin etäisemmistä kulttuurisilmastoista on voinut omakseen siirtää
kehitykselleen tarpeellisia kulttuuritekijöitä. Että Kalevalan
ilmestyminen avasi tien virolaiselle Kalevipoeg'ille, on tunnettu asia.
Mutta uudempikaan suomalainen kirjallisuus ei ole jättänyt virolaista
henkeä hedelmöittämättä. Juhani Aho ja Eino Leino eivät ole vain
vironnoksissa tuttuja eteläpuolella lahden, heidän vaikutustaan voi
seurata alkuperäisessäkin virolaisessa kirjallisuudessa. Koidulan ja
kansallisen heräämisen ajoista saakka on Viro käyttänyt Suomen
viljelyssaavutuksia hyväkseen.

Sensijaan on Virosta Suomeen tapahtunut kulttuurisiirto ollut aivan

niukka, tuskin mainitsemisen arvoinen. Kalevipoegin suorasanainen
selostus, pari romaania, yksi draama ja joitakuita runokäännöksiä,
siinä kaikki. Syytä lienee niin sysissä kuin sepissäkin. Virolainen
kirjallisuus on näihin asti ollut köyhää omintakeisista
kirjailijapersoonallisuuksista ja edustavista teoksista, se on tarjonnut
enemmän kirjallishistoriallista kuin esteettistä huvia. Missä määrin
suomalaisella välinpitämättömyydellä on tässä vaihdon
yksipuolisuudessa osansa, ei ole tämän kirjoituksen asiana
todentaa. Tosiasiana pysyy, että Viro, huolimatta heimolaisuudesta ja
maantieteellisen aseman läheisyydestä, on suomalaisille ollut terra
incognita, josta käsitykset ja tiedot ovat olleet suuressa määrin
vaillinaisia, jollei suorastaan harhaanviepiä.

Esityöksi siinä viljelysvaihdossa, joka kerran on kahta toivottavasti

silloin tasaväkiseksi ennättänyttä kulttuuria rikastuttava, on seuraava
käännöskokoelma tarkoitettu.

Ei ole ollenkaan sattuma, että juuri laulurunous etusijassa on ollut

omiaan käännöstyöhön viemään. Niin nuorella sivistyskansalla kuin
Viro, on, kuten luonnollista, laulurunous kirjallisuudessaan
toistaiseksi etu-alalla. Maissa, joilla ei ole varaa ylläpitää itselleen
varsinaisia ammattikirjailijoita, on aina rehoittanut lyyrillinen
dilettantismi. On mahdollista olla lyyrillinen runoilija monen muun
proosallisemman toimen ohella. Kehitysasteella, jolloin kieli ei vielä
muuten taivu vivahdusrikkaamman sielunelämän ilmaisijaksi, voi
kuitenkin lyyrillisen inspiratsion spontaani luonne ja hehku sen siihen
pakoittaa. Kansojen heräämis- ja nousuajat ovat aina lyyrillisiä.
Niinpä oli Virollakin kansallisrunoilijansa jo aikana, jolloin draama ja
novellistiikka, mikäli niitä ylipäänsä oli olemassa, olivat ainoastaan
suoranaisia mukaelmia saksalaisista eikä suinkaan laadussaan
parhaimmista esikuvista. Vielä tälläkin hetkellä on laulurunous se
ala, jolla voi viitata toiveikkaimpiin taiteellisiin saavutuksiin. Viron
kaksi kotimaista näyttämöä odottaa yhä vielä omakielistä draamaa,
jonka tähänastista ennätystä edustaa melkein yksinään August
Kitzbergin Suomessakin tunnettu, hyvällä draamallisella vauhdilla
kirjoitettu, vaikka jotensakin teoreettiselta tunnepohjalta kohoava
näytelmä »Tuulte pöörises» (Tuulten pyörteessä) v. 1906. Virolainen
proosarunous on suorittanut välttämättömän retkensä romantismin ja
naturalismin halki kohti uusromantismia ja impressionistista
tekotapaa, sen jättämien tienrastien ehdottomasti taiteelliseen
tasoon kohoamatta. Romantismin peruja on muutamia vanhaan
hyvään pseudohistorialliseen tyyliin kirjoitettuja kuvauksia orjuuden
ajoista ja ihannoituja maalaiselämän kuvauksia. Naturalismi
sensijaan toi kaksi todellista kykyä: Eduard Wilden ja Ernst
Petersonin, joista kuitenkin vielä on joltinenkin taival varsinaiseen
taidekirjallisuuteen. Eduard Wilden laajaa, suurella sujuvuudella
kirjoitettua ja hyvävauhtista tuotantoa haittaa syvällisemmän
näkemyksen ja taiteellisen keskityksen puute. Hänen suuri
teoksensa, romaani Mahtra Sõda (suomeksikin käännetty) ilmituo
selvästi hänen sekä hyveensä että heikkoutensa; sen hyvien
joukkopsykologisten kuvausten vaikutuksen särkee yleinen
hajanaisuus ja epätasaisuus. Ernst Peterson on Viron kirjallisuuden
varsinainen naturalisti, joka räikeihin ja usein kirpeän todellisiin
kyläkuvauksiinsa yhdistää yhteiskunnallisen tendenssin. Vasta Noor-
Eestin kirjallisen suunnan edustajien joukossa tapaamme pari
nimeä, jotka kerran ehkä tulevat olemaan takuuna taiteellisuudesta,
joskin heidänkin lupauskirjansa yhä vielä ovat lunastamatta: A.H.
Tammsaare, jonka tarttolaisen ylioppilaselämän kuvaukset
huolimatta eräänlaisesta ahtaudestaan, ovat mieltäkiinnittäviä
sielulliseen erittelyyn ja sisäisten taidekeinojen käyttöön nähden, ja
ennen muita Friedebert Tuglas, jonka toisinaan romantisesti
väririkas, toisinaan impressionistisesti iskevä proosa jo nyt suuresti
on laajentanut Viron kielen soinnullisia rajoja.

Rikas ei ole suinkaan Viron laulurunouskaan yksilöllisistä

runoilijaprofiileista. Ainoastaan aniharva piirtyy siksi selvänä ajan
taustalle, että hänen erikoissävynsä eroaa ajan yleisestä sävystä.
Useimmat ovat vain ajan ja sen makusuunnan tulkitsijoita, ja heidän
luonteenomaisuutensa vain ajan luonteenomaisuutta. Äsken
ilmestynyt laaja virolainen runoantologia »Eesti Luule», joka käsittää
76 runoilijanimeä ja 327 runoa vahvistaa vain tätä
runoilijapersoonallisuuksien puutteen tunnetta. Taaskin saamme
mennä Noor-Eestin ryhmään saakka, yksilöllisempiä sointuja ja
tietoisempaa taiteellisuutta tavataksemme, jollemme ota lukuun
kansanrunoutta.
 Viron rikas kansanrunous on se laulurunouden ala, joka tutuimmin,
omaisimmin, kuin toisintoina Kantelettaren runoista, koskettaa
suomalaista lukijaa. Näissä lauluissa elää yhä elimellisesti muutoin
jo vain älyllisesti käsitykseemme siirtynyt heimoustunne. Näistä
lauluista se puhuu meille vaiston vääjäämättömällä varmuudella; niin
samansävyistä on veljeskansojen lyriikka. Runomitta ei ole niin
säännöllistä nelipolvista trokeeta kuin suomalaisessa
kansanrunoudessa, se sallii enemmän typistyksiä ja
säännöttömyyksiä, mutta poljento ja alkusoinnun ahkera viljelys
tekevät sen meille tutuksi. Virolainen kansanrunous on suurimmaksi
osaksi naisten laulamaa, siitä ehkä osaksi sen suurempi lyyrillisyys,
aihepiirin ahtaus ja sankarirunojen harvinaisuus. Vasta Suomen
puolella pääsivät lyyrilliset ainekset miesten mielikuvituksessa
kehittymään sankarirunoelmaksi. Kuvaavaa on Aino-runon
kulkeutuminen. Se on alkujaan yksinkertainen lyhyt laulunpätkä,
Järvamaalla laulettu, sormuksensa ja korunsa hukanneesta,
nimettömästä neidestä. Vasta itäänpäin siirtyessä puhkee sen
traagillinen aihe esiin, ja alkuaihe jää vain loppukatastrofin
runolliseksi kaunisteluksi.

Sama herkkä luonnon hellyys ja luonnon elolliseksi elävöittäminen,

sama hellä rakkaus lauluun ja usko laulun mahtiin kohtaavat meitä
niin Kantelettaren kuin Viron »Vana Kandlen» lauluissa. Mutta oman
erikoissävynsä antavat virolaiselle kansanrunoudelle orjuutta ja
vainoa kuvaavat runot, jotka puuttuvat Suomen puolella lahden;
silloin synkistyy idylli veriseksi valitukseksi tai uhmailevaksi
katkeruudeksi:

»Vanha polvi, vainopolvi,

Piinapolvi pitkällinen.»
 Kuten suomalaiset, ovat virolaisetkin kansanrunot luultavasti
syntyisin pakanuuden ja katolisen ajan murrosvaiheelta.
Laulurikkaimpia yksilön kehityksessä ovat sielulliset murrosajat,
miksi ei olisi samoin kansojenkin kehityksessä? Elinehdoissaan,
vapaudessaan, uskossaan järkytetyn kansan energia oli yhtäkkiä
saanut sysäyksen, joka samalla kun pani sen liikkeelle, samalla särki
naivin luonnonkansan rauhan, vuosisadoiksi jättäen sen erilaisten
valloittajain ja mailmankatsomusten tantereeksi. Sotaisen energian
pakollista kytkeisiinpanoa seurasi kai energian uusien alojen etsintä.
Kuka tietää, millaisena ilma-ikkunana tämä runous kerran on ollut
orjakansan joka tavoin tukahdetulle elintarmolle? Näissä sodan ja
veristen vainojen sekä alkavan orjuuden aikana syntyneissä
runoissa valitti orpolapsi osaansa, orja kovaa kohtaloansa, ne
sisälsivät purevana pilkkana muutoin tyystin kätketyt uhman
ajatukset. Ne heltyivät kehtolauluksi lapsen kätkyen ääressä, virisivät
häävirsiksi ja kaikuivat karkelon tahdissa, ne seurasivat yksinäistä
vaeltajaa vainioilla ja luhtamailla ja säestivät rukin hyrräystä ja
paimenen pajupilliä. Ne olivat elinilmauksissaan ehkäistyn kansan
elonmerkkinä.

Elävän, kultaisen runosuonen täten kenenkään huomaamatta

suikerrellessa vuosisatojen halki, supistui käsinkirjoitettu tai painettu
virolainen laulurunous vain kömpelöihin, saksalaisten pappien
toimittamiin virsikäännöksiin tai pariin maalliseen, runollisesti yhtä
arvottomaan tilapäärunoelmaan. Vasta 18:nnen vuosisadan lopulla,
jolloin Herderin aloitteesta kirjoitetaan muistiin joitakuita vanhoja
runoja, ruvetaan yleisemmin kiinnittämään huomiota tähän
halveksittuun, tyhjänpäiväisenä pidettyyn runouteen. Tätä
keräystyötä on jatkunut meidän päiviimme saakka. Viron muuten niin
valottomissa ja mieltä masentavissa aikakirjoissa on
kansanrunouden keräys kirkkaimpia sivuja. Viime vuosisadan
alkupuolella herää Virossa sivistyneen saksan kieltä puhuvan
säädyn keskuudessa Suomen fennofilien liikettä muistuttava
harrastus viron kieltä, runoutta, vanhaa vaatepartta ja kansantaidetta
kohtaan. Nämä estofilit tahtoivat pelastaa jälkimailmalle, niinkuin
silloin arveltiin, perikatoon, se on: hiljaiseen sulautumiskuolemaan
tuomitun kansan muistomerkit. Mutta aiotusta hautapatsaasta
muodostuikin ensimäinen tienviitta kulttuurikehityksen tielle
lähtevälle kansalle. Vuonna 1839 perustettiin Tartossa erityinen
seura »die Gelehrte Esthnische Gesellschaft», vartavasten estofilien
tarkoitusperiä toteuttamaan. Sen toiminnasta, joka keskittyi
etupäässä juuri kansanrunouden keräykseen, ottivat antaumuksella
osaa useat saksalaistuneet virolaisetkin. Kalevalan ilmestyminen
Suomessa tuo lisävirikettä päivän harrastuksille. Virolaissyntyisen
lääkäri Faehlmannin mielikuvituksessa kytee jo kansalliseepoksen
aate, mutta hän kuolee kesken tuumiaan, jättäen sekä aatteensa
että esityönsä virkaveljensä Fr. R. Kreutzwaldin perinnöksi. Vuonna
1861 ilmestyi virolainen sankarirunoelma Kalevipoeg.

Kalevipoegia ovat aikalaiset sekä myöhempikin lukijakunta kauan

aikaa katselleet ikäänkuin keinotekoisessa, kaunistavassa
näyttämövalaistuksessa. Se muodosti koristeellisen taustan sille
näyttämölle, millä virolaisen kansallisen heräämisen näytelmä
vapauslaulujuhlineen, romanttisine värityksineen, suoritettiin. Se on
niin kauan ollut vuonna 1819 tapahtuneen näennäisen
orjainvapautuksen henkiseksi vapautumiseksi muuttumisen
symbolina, että sitä arkailee lähestyä arkiharmaassa valossa.

Yksi on selvää: Kalevipoegin vaikutus on ollut itse Kalevipoegia

suurempi.
 Fr. R. Kreutzwald, (1803—1882) alkujaan Ristmets, orjan poika,
ammatiltaan lääkäri, lahjoiltaan runoilija, mies valistusajan aatteissa
kypsynyt, ennakkoluuloton, laajakatseinen, täynnä kuivan ivan ja
hentomielisen tunteen sekoitusta, — siinä Kalevipoegin luoja.
Eepoksen aineksiin nähden hän oli paljoa epäedullisemmassa
asemassa kuin Lönnrot. Hänellä oli käytettävänään, paitsi joitakuita
sankarirunojen katkelmia ja suurta joukkoa lyyrillisiä runoja,
ainoastaan epälukuinen määrä suoranaisia tarinoita, ilman
läpikäyvää juonta tai edes yhteistä sankarin nimitystä. Tähän
vaillinaiseen ja tukea antamattomaan pohjaan nojaten hän teki
rohkean teon: runoili uudestaan kansan runomitalle sadut, yhdisti eri
sankarityöt samannimisen sankarin tekemiksi, täytti aukot ja
liitekohdat itseluomillaan kronikkaa muistuttavilla säkeillä ja siroitti
sinne tänne lyyrillistä koristelua. Tuuma oli nerokas ja suuren
runoilijan arvoinen; suoritus ei ollut yhtä nerokas.

Tekstikritiikki on tavannut kiitollisen alan säe säkeeltä eritellessään

Kreutzwaldin ja varsinaisen kansanrunouden osaa Kalevipoegissa.
Tieteellisesti perehtymättömäänkin lukijaan vaikuttaa Kalevipoeg
kuin eri tekstikirjaimilla painetulta, yksinkertaista antikvaa seuraa
moni: koukeroinen fraktuura. Romantiikan korukielessä kasvaneen
Kreutzwaldin oli vaikea tavata kansanrunon naivia sävyä ja
kauneutta. Joko hän kompastuu kuivan kronikan kivikkoon tai luo
kukkeata lyriikkaa, itsessään runollisesti arvokasta, mutta
kansanrunon sävylle vierasta. Paremmin kuin varsinaisesti uutta
luodessaan, hän onnistuu satuja uudestaan runoillessaan, vaikka
hän siinäkin vain harvoin osaa asettua täysin runolaulajan kannalle.

Kalevipoeg on 20-lauluinen kuvaus virolaisen yliluonnollisen

väkevän sankarin urotöistä, hänen Suomen-matkastaan,
taistelustaan noitia vastaan, sodankäynnistään, matkastaan
Manalaan ja painistaan Sarvikin — paholaisen — kanssa, retkestään
mailman loppua kohden ja vihdoin hänen tapaturmaisesta
kuolemastaan. Läpi teoksen kulkee traagillinen aate: Kalevipoeg on
syyllinen Saaren neidon kuolemaan ja Suomen sepän-pojan
murhaan; hän sovittaa sen murtumalla jaloistaan omaan vedessä
väijyvään miekkaansa.

Suurta symboliikkaa on Kalevipoegin loppu säkeissä. Kalevipoeg

on kuoltuaan pantu Tuonelan veräjän vahdiksi, käsi kallion raossa,
— kun hän kerran kätensä irti kiskaisee, on Virolle koittava uusi
onnen aika.

Kalevipoeg ei kestä vertausta Kalevalan kanssa. Kalevipojan

urotyöt ovat melkein poikkeuksetta ruumiillisen voiman näytteitä; se
sanan ja laulun mahti, mikä Kalevalassa ihmeitä aikaan saa, puuttuu
Kalevipoegissa. Kalevipoegin kauneimmat kohdat ovat lyyrillisiä,
niihin on Kreutzwald sovittanut kansanrunon herkimmät säveleet.

Kalevipoegin viimeinen ja suurin sankarityö oli kuitenkin se, että se

ilmestyessään auttoi itsetietoisuuteen kokonaisen kansan, onni, mikä
harvoin tulee suurimmankaan taideteoksen osaksi. Sillä on koko
Viron kulttuuri-elämälle perustava merkitys, olkoon se sitten, minä
aikalaiset sitä tervehtivät, Viron kansan luovan kyvyn välitön ilmaus,
tai, miksi myöhempi tutkimus sen on merkinnyt, Kreutzwaldin
kansantarinastoon nojaten enemmän tai vähemmän runollisella
voimalla kokoonpanema ei kansan-eepos vaan kansallinen
kertomarunoelma.

Kansanrunouden keräys saa yhä uutta vauhtia. 70 luvulla ryhtyy

siihen kirkkoherra Jakob Hurt ja myöhemmin Kronstadtin kirkkoherra
M.J. Eisen. Heidän apulaisikseen tarjoutuu kymmeniä ja satoja
nimettömiä kerääjiä kaikilla seuduin maata. Jättiläiskeräys
suoritetaan harvinaisella innolla ja sitkeydellä, ja sen tuloksena on
suurin kansanrunouden kokoelma, mikä milläkään kansalla on
olemassa, noin 45,000 runoa, siihen lisäksi epälukuinen määrä
satuja, loitsu-runoja, sananlaskuja j.n.e. Painettu on niistä Hurtin
toimittama Vana Kannel I ja II v. 1886 ja myöhemmin Suomalaisen
Kirjallisuuden Seuran avustuksella ilmestyneet Setukeste laulud,
(kreikanuskoisten Pihkovan virolaisten laulut) I osa v. 1904, II osa v.
1907, sekä joukko Eisenin toimittamia satuja.

Huolimatta siitä suuresta huomiosta, mikä jo viime vuosisadan

alkupuoliskolla kansanrunoudelle omistettiin, ei sen jälkiä paljonkaan
tapaa silloisissa taiderunouden kokeissa. Vasta ihan viimeisinä
aikoina on kansanrunouden hedelmöittävä voima uloittunut
taiderunouteen ja sen kieliaarteita liikuteltu. Viron ensimäiset
taiderunouden yrittäjät saivat vaikutuksensa muualta.

Jo estofilien aikana esiintyy virolainen Kr. Jaak Peterson

runoilijana. Tämän 21 vuotiaana v. 1822 kuolleen nuoren
kielentutkijan runot nyt ja pieteetillä julkaisuissaan osaksi
painattanut. Ilman kaikupohjaa, kuin eksynyt esitaistelija, liian etäällä
jälkijoukoistaan, tuomittu varhaiseen kuolemaan kesken kehitystään,
on Kr. Jaak Petersonin kohtalo miltei traagillinen. Hänen
päiväkirjansa lehdiltä puhuu ratsionalistinen, kriitillinen henki. Hänen
runonsa ovat korkealentoisia, vähän rhetoorisia, toisinaan täynnä
oikeata, joskus väärääkin paatosta, antiikin runomitoissa liikkuvia,
parhaimmissa eräänlaista kuulakasta kauneutta. Noor-Eestin ryhmä
on hänessä nähnyt hengenheimolaisensa, ensimäisen
»nuorvirolaisen».

Jos Kr. Jaak Petersonin viileän runouden kohtalo oli kaikua kiville,
oli Lydia Jannsenilla, Koidulalla (v. 1843—1886) sitävastoin laajempi
kaikupohja kuin näihin päiviin asti ehkä kellään viron kielen
käyttäjällä.

Koidula, Postimees-lehden perustajan ja heräävän Viron

kansallisessa elämässä suurta populariteettia nauttivan J. W.
Jannsenin tytär, joutui sekä runoudellaan että henkilössään
kuvastamaan Viron lyhyttä kansallisen romantismin aikaa.
Kalevipoegin ilmestyminen ja työorjuuden lopullinen lakkauttaminen
vapautti Viron latentin elinvoiman, joka nyt ilmeni jonkinlaisessa
juhla-isänmaallisuudessa, laulujuhlina ja romanttisena
huumauksena, ja jonka reali-ilmauksena oli Eesti Kirjameeste Seltsin
perustaminen ja rahankeräys omakielistä Aleksandrikool'ia varten.

Yhtä suurena tekijänä kuin ajanhenki oli Koidulan kehityksessä,

yhtä suurena tekijänä oli Koidula puolestaan ajanhenkeä luomassa.
Hän ruumiillistuttaa ajan, siinä hänen persoonallisuutensa. Hän on
voimakkain silloin, kun aika puhuu hänen suunsa kautta, kun hän on
tulkkina ajan aatteille, jotka hänen tulisielunsa ahjossa lopullisen
muotonsa saavat. Hän on siinä määrin aikansa kuvastin, että me
etupäässä näemme hänessä juuri ajan piirteet yksilöllisten sijasta.
Aika puhuu, aika valittaa, aika iloitsee hänen isänmaallisissa
runoissaan, jotka milloin ovat kuin profeetallisia valitusvirsiä, milloin
kaikuvat pääsiäistunnelman täyttämää hosiannaa. Koidula oli
joukkojen runoilija, hänen tunteensa kollektiivia tunnetta. Niin pian
kuin hän harhautuu alaltaan, hän kadottaa runoutensa taika-
avaimen. Hänen persoonallisin elämyksensä oli isänmaallisuus,
muulla alalla hän käyttää vanhoja kliseoita. Ei erotiikka, ei
luonnontunne haltioidu hänellä runoksi. Kokeillessaan toisilla aloilla
hän on usein vain saksalaisen maneerin jäljentäjä, hyvin usein
suoranainen kääntäjä (sen ajan tavan mukaan varsinaista tekijää
nimittämättä). Joukko hänen alkuperäisinä pidettyjä runojaan on
myöhemmin osoittautunut käännöksiksi. Sekä aiheittensa valinnassa
että niitten käyttelyssä hän seuraa aikansa yleistä makusuuntaa; hän
ei ole vailla imelää hentomielisyyttä eikä sanakoreilua. Suuri osa
hänen aikoinaan laajoissa piireissä herättämästään kirjallisesta
innostuksesta on tosin kai pantava hänen voimakkaan
persoonallisuutensa suggestion laskuun, joka niin mieltäkiinnittävänä
ilmenee esim. hänen äsken julkaistuissa kirjeissään Kreutzwaldille.
Mutta hänen isänmaallisilla runoillaan on pysyvä merkitys. Ne ovat
ajan todistuskappaleita, mutta eivät yksin sitä; joskin nyky-aikainen
lukija niistäkin mielellään karsisi yhtä ja toista, ei voi olla antaumatta
alttiiksi niitten välittömälle inspiratsiolle. Ne ovat ja pysyvät heräävän
Viron hymneinä.

Koidulan kohtalo oli työkuntoisimmassa ijässään kuolla kaukana

niin suuresti rakastamastaan Maarjamaasta, virolaisen kansallisen
romantismin osaksi tuli tukehtua alkaviin venäläistyttämisyrityksiin.
Kansallisen kevään aamutunnelmaa ja raikkaita värejä seurasi
harmaa seisahdusaika kaikilla aloilla.

Paljon on Virossa runoiltu tänä aikana. Runoileminen pääsi

ikäänkuin muotiin, muuttui helposti opittavaksi käsityöksi, jota
joutoaskareenaan itsensä ja toisten iloksi harjoittivat mitä
erilaisimmat virkailijat, etupäässä kuitenkin papit ja
kansakoulunopettajat. Sisällöstä ei ollut puutetta; kaiutettiin
kuluneiksi edellisen ajanjakson itsessään jo hiukan onttoja
isänmaallisia lauseparsia, kunnes ne kadottivat viimeisenkin
aitometallisen helähdyksensä, tai tuotiin läntisestä naapurimaasta
Saksasta, — ei koskaan kauempaa — helppohintaisia esikuvia.
Runomittakin oli melkein aina sama

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