Aristotle’s "Nicomachean Ethics": Laying the Foundations for a Pragmatist Consideration of Human Knowing and Acting

Robert Prus

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.3.2.02

Authors

Robert Prus University of Waterloo, Canada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.3.2.02

Keywords:

Aristotle, Ethics, Activity, Knowing, Agency, Politics, Pragmatism, Character, Morality, Virtues, Happiness, Friendship, Symbolic interactionism

Abstract

Whereas a great many academics have presumed to speak knowledgeably about Aristotle's work, comparatively few have actually studied his texts in sustained detail and very few scholars in the social sciences have examined Aristotle's work mindfully of its relevance for the study of human knowing and acting on a more contemporary or enduring plane.

Further, although many people simply do not know Aristotle's works well, even those who are highly familiar with Aristotle's texts (including Nicomachean Ethics) generally have lacked conceptual frames for traversing the corridors of Western social thought in more sustained pragmatist terms. It is here, using symbolic interactionism (a sociological extension of pragmatist philosophy) as an enabling device for developing both transsituational and transhistorical comparisons, that it is possible to establish links of the more enduring and intellectually productive sort between the classical scholarship of the Greeks and the ever emergent contemporary scene.

After (1) overviewing the theoretical emphasis of symbolic interactionism, this paper (2) locates Aristotle's works within a broader historical context, (3) situates Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics within the context of his own work and that of his teacher Plato, and (4) takes readers on an intellectual voyage through Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Not only does his text address a great many aspects of human lived experience, but it also has great instructive value for the more enduring study of human group life. Accordingly, attention is given to matters such as (a) human agency, reflectivity, and culpability; (b) definitions of the situation; (c) character, habits, and situated activities; (d) emotionality and its relationship to activity; (e) morality, order, and deviance; (f) people's senses of self regulation and their considerations of the other; (g) rationality and judgment; (h) friendship and associated relationships; (i) human happiness; and (k) intellectual activity.

In concluding the paper, one line of inquiry that uses contemporary symbolic interaction as resource for engaging Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is suggested. However, as indicated in the broader statement presented here, so much more could be accomplished by employing symbolic interactionism as a contemporary pragmatist device for engaging Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

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Author Biography

Robert Prus, University of Waterloo, Canada

Robert Prus, a professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo, is a symbolic interactionist, pragmatist ethnographer, and social theorist. Stressing the importance of connecting social theory with the study of human action in direct, experientiallyengaged terms, he has written extensively on the ways that people make sense of and deal with the life-worlds in which they find themselves. His publications include Road Hustler with C.R.D. Sharper; Hookers, Rounders, and Desk Clerks with Styllianoss Irini; Making Sales; Pursuing Customers; Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research; Subcultural Mosaics and Intersubjective Realities; Beyond the Power Mystique; and The Deviant Mystique with Scott Grills. Working as an ethnohistorian and theorist, Robert Prus has been tracing the developmental flows of pragmatist thought from the classical Greek era (c700-300BCE) to the present time. This transhistorical venture has taken him into a number of areas of western social thought – including rhetoric, poetics, religious studies, history, education, politics, and philosophy.

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